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“I couldn’t even imagine.”

“She said that she shouldn’t have abandoned you all those years ago when that policewoman showed her the tapes of you with another woman.”

“She told you about that?”

“Just about that she saw you with somebody. But she said that you were a good man and she knew it, but she was just so mad that it was like somebody else was there making her turn her back on you. She said that she was still mad, but now she knows that that shouldn’t have mattered and she should have had your back. She said that you guys should have worked it out and maybe you wouldn’t be in so much trouble today. I told her she should tell you all that when we got back, but she said that she never could, that it would be wrong for a married woman to say something like that to another man.”

“Whoa. Then why are you telling me?”

“Because usually when Mom doesn’t want you to know something she says not to tell. That’s how I knew she wanted you to know how she felt.”

The waitress brought our pizzas and salads, giving me a respite in which to think.

“So?” Aja asked when our server, whose chipped blue name tag read MARYANNE, had gone again.

“So what?”

“Are you gonna ask Mom to get back together?”

That was the perfect moment for me to do what I had come there for. I reached into my inside jacket pocket and came out with a small brown envelope made from tough plastic. The letter was sealed, and I handed it over to the person I loved the most in the world.

“What’s this?”

“If I am ever hurt or in big trouble I want you to open this and do what it says. Put it away somewhere safe, somewhere where neither your mother nor Coleman will find it.”

“I know a place,” Aja said with convincing certainty. “But what does it say?”

“You will probably never have to find out.”

I didn’t want her worrying, but three hundred thousand dollars of my bribe money would be in a safe-deposit box where only she and I were signatories.

“What about you and Mom?” she asked, putting the envelope in her purse.

“Aja-Denise, do you really want me and your mother under the same roof after all these years of fighting?”

I could see her imagining what that union would be like. After a moment her eyes opened wide and then she smiled.

“Never mind.”

38.

I met Mel at a diner called Clown’s Carnival four blocks away from the semisecret clinic. It was a few minutes past eight. I had on my fake facial hair just in case there was some errant CCTV feed lurking above.

Mel was all in black. I was too, under my bulky umber overcoat.

“Your layout of the place is a little out of date,” he told me after we’d greeted and I ordered coffee.

“Yeah? How’d you find that out?”

“Building permits. City has a website for all construction work. They weren’t hiding because the cops keep it on the down low like you said. They installed all kinds of security to keep people out up front, but the back of the building is the same as it always was.”

“There is no back of the building,” I said. “Treacher’s shares a back wall with Kershaw and Associates.”

“Au contraire,” the sophisticated demon argued. “There’s a two-foot space between the clinic and Kershaw, after the sixth floor. And most of the fancy security updates are on the ninth floor. There’s only one hospital bed up on that level. All we have to do is make it up there now, break into the floor, and then wait nearby until they bring our guy in. Once that happens, and we see how the guards are placed, we decide on how to get him out. Only thing I wanna know is if you’re willing to use deadly force.”

“You mean kill a cop?”

Mel didn’t even nod.