"Never got specific. You know how people are. They're dying to have you know something, and they know they shouldn't tell you."
"He's a northerner," said Paul Amaro.
It was not a question and Salazar just nodded.
"Go back," Amaro said. "Go back to where the camera's on his face."
The goon stepped forward from the shadows, rewound the tape. Again appeared a sour, harried Ziggy, shying from the lens.
"Stop it," Paul Amaro said. "Stop it right there."
The frame froze in the instant before the camera abandoned the bartender's face, caught him in a look of scowling sorrow. Stopped, the image was grainy and distorted, swaths of it moved out of register like strata on a hillside. Paul Amaro studied it less with his eyes than his belly, took the measure of this stranger's face by the way it tugged his innards, mocking and insistent as a half-remembered dream.
There was a long silence.
Rose broke it, her voice as sharp and sudden as a tooted horn from the back of a resting orchestra. "Angelina," she said. "The way she hugged Louie when she said good night. I just remembered how she hugged him. The way she thanked him, like he'd done something so terrific for her."
Paul Amaro sat there, hunched forward in his chair, fists clamping down on nothing. Foul stuff was rising in his throat and he was not sure he could speak. He stalled a moment, pointed a thick finger at the tortured image on the screen. "I wanna find that guy," he said.
Salazar, for the moment blind to the direness of the request, said lightly, "That's easy as a phone call."
"No phone call," Paul Amaro said. "I wanna go to his house. And you're lending me a gun."
* * *
"Now do you believe that something's going on?" said Keith McCullough, not even trying to keep the note of gloating triumph out of his voice.
His boss's answer was circumspect and bland. Manny Links cradled the phone against his ear, tapped his unlit pipe against his palm, said, "Might be something. Might be nothing much."
"Nothing much?" said the undercover man. He was back in his motel room, looking out the window at the parking lot where spaces were marked off by opposite diagonals, like the skeletons of fishes. "Manny, Ziggy Maxx, okay, Ziggy Maxx is nothing much. But Paul Amaro's here on business. That's not nothing much."
"So what's the business?" asked the supervisor. Exasperated, McCullough said, "I don't know what the business is."
"Exactly."
"That's what Ziggy Maxx is gonna tell us."
In Manny Links's cubicle in North Miami, there was a thoughtful pause. "You know," he said, "I've been in this business nineteen years. I'm trying to think, in all that time, has there ever been a case where an informant ratted out the same guy twice?"
"Manny, he's desperate. He's terrified. He's holed up in a gay guest house and he can't come out."
"He's gay?" said Manny Links.
"He isn't gay. That's part of why he's desperate."
Links put his pipe in his mouth, yearned briefly for the halcyon days when he used to burn tobacco in it. "Keith," he said, "if this guy turns again, that means he has to change identities again. How many times can we cut and paste this one poor bastard's face?"
"I'd say that's his problem," said McCullough.
"And I'd say that's why he isn't gonna turn. The pain, the craziness—I don't see a person going through all of that a second time."
"He'd rather get rubbed out?"
"I would," said Links.
"Manny, this guy, I don't think he's as deep a thinker as you. I think he wants to live no matter what name we give him or how many times we relocate his nose."
The supervisor sighed. "So you're saying you want more time."
"I want time and I want backup."
"Backup?"
"Manny, this guy's gonna give us the goods to get Paul Amaro right back off the street. I want two agents for a week."
Links leaned back in his office chair, the squeak came through the phone. "I don't have two agents. I'll send you Sykes."
"Sykes? Oh Christ, not Sykes."
"Only guy available," said Links.
"I wonder why," McCullough said.
"And Keith, about your source, all this terrific information—you still haven't told me who you got it from or what you gave away to get it."
"It's none of your business, Manny. Terry Sykes. Jesus, some backup."
34
"And the worst of it," Michael was saying—"well, maybe not the worst, but part of it that's bad—is how I told him all this stuff about you and Ziggy, and your family—"
"It's okay," said Angelina. "I know you meant no harm."