"When you bite me."

"Yeah."

"Did you..."

"Yes."

"Are you sure?"

"Are you?"

"No, I faked." Tommy grinned.

"Really?" Jody looked at the wet spot (on her side, of course).

"Why do you think I'm so winded? It's not easy to fake the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n part."

"I, for one, was fooled."

"See."

He reached down and unwrapped the sheet from his foot, then he lay back and stared at the ceiling. Jody began to twist the sweaty locks of his hair into horns.

"Jody," Tommy said tentatively.

"Hmmm?"

"When I get old, I mean, if we're still together..."

She yanked on his hair.

"Ouch. Okay, we'll still be together. Have you ever heard of satyriasis?"

"No."

"Well, it happens to real old guys. They run around with a perpetual hard-on, chasing teenage girls and humping anything that moves until they have to be put in restraints."

"Wow, interesting disease."

"Yeah, well, when I get old, if I start to show the symptoms..."

"Yeah?"

"Just let it run its course, okay?"

"I'll look forward to it."

Rivera held a plastic cup of orange juice for the ma.s.s of plaster and tubes that was LaOtis Small. LaOtis sipped from the straw, then pushed it away with his tongue. The body cast ran from below his knees to the top of his head, with holes for his face and outgoing tubes. Cavuto stood by the hospital bed taking notes.

"So you and your friends were doing laundry when an unarmed, redheaded woman attacked you and put all three of you in the hospital? Right?"

"She was a ninja, man. I know. I get the kick-boxing channel on cable."

Cavuto chomped an unlit cigar. "Your friend James says that she was six-four and weighed two hundred pounds."

"No, man, she was five-five, five-six."

"Your other buddy" Cavuto checked his notepad for the name "Kid Jay, said that it was a gang of Mexicans."

"No, man, he dreamin'; it was one ninja b.i.t.c.h."

"A five-and-a-half-foot woman put the three of you big strong guys in the hospital?"

"Yeah. We was just mindin' our own bidness. She come in and axed for some change. James tell her no, he got to put a load in the dryer, and she go fifty-one-fifty on him. She a ninja."

"Thank you, LaOtis, you've been very helpful." Cavuto shot Rivera a look and they left the hospital room.

In the hallway Rivera said, "So we're looking for a gang of redheaded, ninja Mexicans."

Cavuto said, "You think there's a molecule of truth in any of that?"

"They were all unconscious when they were brought in, and obviously they haven't tried to match up their stories. So if you throw out everything that doesn't match, you end up with a woman with long red hair."

"You think a woman could do that to them and manage to snap the neck of two other people without a struggle?"

"Not a chance," Rivera said. His beeper went off and he checked the number. "I'll call in."

Cavuto pulled up. "Go ahead, I'm going back in to talk to LaOtis. Meet me outside emergency."

"Take it easy, Nick, the guy's in a body cast."

Cavuto grinned. "Kind'a erotic, ain't it?" He turned and lumbered back toward LaOtis Small's room.

Jody walked Tommy up to Market Street, watched him eat a burger and fries, and put him on the 42 bus to work. Killing the time while Tommy worked was becoming tedious. She tried to stay in the loft, watched the late-night talk shows and old movies on cable, read magazines, and did a little cleaning, but by two in the morning the caged-cat feeling came over her and she went out to wander the streets.

Sometimes she walked Market among the street people and the convention crowds, other times she took a bus to North Beach and hung out on Broadway watching the sailors and the punks stagger, drunk and stoned, or the hookers and the hustlers running their games. It was on these crowded streets that she felt most lonely. Time and again she wanted to turn to someone and point out a unique heat pattern or the dark aura she sensed around the sick; like a child sharing the cloud animals flying through a summer sky. But no one else could see what she saw, no one heard the whispered propositions, the pointed refusals, or the rustle of money exchanging hands in alleys and doorways.

Other times she crept through the back streets and listened to the symphony of noises that no one else heard, smelled the spectrum of odors that had long ago exhausted her vocabulary. Each night there were more nameless sights and smells and sounds, and they came so fast and subtle that she eventually gave up trying to name them.

She thought, This is what it is to be an animal. Just experience direct, instant, and wordless; memory and recognition, but no words. A poet with my senses could spend a lifetime trying to describe what it is to hear a building breathe and smell the aging of concrete. And for what? Why write a song when no one can play the notes or understand the lyrics? I'm alone.

Cavuto came through the double doors of the emergency room and joined Rivera, who was standing by the brown, City-issue Ford smoking a cigarette.

"What was the call?" Cavuto asked.

"We got another one. Broken neck. South of Market. Elderly male."

"f.u.c.k," Cavuto said, yanking open the car door. "What about blood loss?"

"They don't know yet. This one's still warm." Rivera flipped his cigarette b.u.t.t into the parking lot and climbed into the car. "You get anything more out of LaOtis?"

"Nothing important. They weren't doing their laundry, they went in looking for the girl, but he's sticking with the ninja story."

River started the car and looked at Cavuto. "You didn't rough him up?"

Cavuto pulled a Cross pen out of his shirt pocket and held it up. "Mightier than the sword."

Rivera cringed at the thought of what Cavuto might have done to LaOtis with the pen. "You didn't leave any marks, did you?"

"Lots," Cavuto grinned.

"Nick, you can't do that kind of -"

"Relax," Cavuto interrupted. "I just wrote, 'Thanks for all the information; I'm sure we'll get some convictions out of this,' on his cast. Then I signed it and told him that I wouldn't scratch it out until he told me the truth."

"Did you scratch it out?"

"Nope."

"If his friends see it, they'll kill him."

"f.u.c.k him," Cavuto said. "Ninja redheads, my a.s.s."

Four in the morning. Jody watched neon beer signs buzzing color across the dew-damp sidewalks of Polk Street. The street was deserted, so she played sensory games to amuse herself closing her eyes and listening to the soft scratch of her sneakers echoing off the buildings as she walked. If she concentrated, she could walk several blocks without looking, listening for the streetlight switches at the corners and feeling the subtle changes in wind currents at the cross streets. When she felt she was going to run into something, she could shuffle her feet and the sound would form a rough image in her mind of the walls and poles and wires around her. If she stood quietly, she could reach out and form a map of the whole City in her head sounds drew the lines, and smells filled in the colors.

She was listening to the fishing boats idling at the wharf a mile away when she heard footsteps and opened her eyes. A single figure had rounded the corner a couple of blocks ahead of her and was walking, head down, up Polk. She stepped into the doorway of a closed Russian restaurant and watched him. Sadness came off him in black waves.

His name was Philip. His friends called him Philly. He was twenty-three. He had grown up in Georgia and had run away to the City when he was sixteen so he wouldn't have to pretend to be something he was not. He had run away to the City to find love. After the one-night stands with rich older men, after the bars and the bathhouses, after finding out that he wasn't a freak, that there were other people just like him, after the last of the confusion and shame had settled like red Georgia dust, he'd found love.

He'd lived with his lover in a studio in the Castro district. And in that studio, sitting on the edge of a rented hospital bed, he had filled a syringe with morphine and injected it into his lover and held his hand while he died. Later, he cleared away the bed pans and the IV stand and the machine that he used to suck the fluid out of his lover's lungs and he threw them in the trash. The doctor said to hold on to them that he would need them.

They buried Philly's lover in the morning and they took the embroidered square of fabric that was draped on the casket and folded it and handed it to him like the flag to a war widow. He got to keep it for a while before it was added to the quilt. He had it in his pocket now.

His hair was gone from the chemotherapy. His lungs hurt, and his feet hurt; the sarcomas that spotted his body were worst on his feet and his face. His joints ached and he couldn't keep his food down, but he could still walk. So he walked.

He walked up Polk Street, head down, at four in the morning, because he could. He could still walk.

When he reached the doorway of a Russian restaurant, Jody stepped out in front of him and he stopped and looked at her.

Somewhere, way down deep, he found that there was a smile left. "Are you the Angel of Death?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

"It's good to see you," Philly said.

She held her arms out to him.

Chapter 21 Angel Dust.

The bed of Simon's pickup was full of beer-sodden Animals enjoying the morning fog and speculating on the marital status of the new cashier. She had smiled at Tommy when she arrived, driving the Animals into a psychos.e.xual frenzy.

"She looked like she was being towed through the store by two submarines," said Simon.

"Major hooters," said Troy Lee. "Major-league hooters."

Tommy said, "Can't you guys see more in a woman than T and A?"

"Nope," said Troy.

"No way," said Simon.

"Spoken like a guy who has a live-in girlfriend," said Lash.

"Yeah," Simon said. "How come we never see you with the little woman?"

"Seagull! "shouted Barry.

Simon pulled a pump shotgun from under a tarp in the truck bed, tracked on a seagull that was pa.s.sing over, and fired.

"Missed again!" shouted Barry.

"You can't kill them all, Simon," Tommy said, his ears ringing from the blast. "Why don't you just cover your truck at night?"

Simon said. "You don't pay for twenty coats of hand-rubbed lacquer to cover it up."

The shotgun went under the tarp and the manager came through the front doors of the store. "What was that? What was that?" He was scanning the parking lot frantically as if he expected to see someone with a shotgun.

"Backfire," Simon said.

The manager looked for the offending car.

"They were heading toward the Marina," Tommy said.

"Well, you tell me if they come back," the manager said. "There's a noise ordinance in this city, you know." He turned to go back into the store.

"Hey, boss," Simon called. "The new girl, what's her name?"

"Mara," the manager said. "And you guys leave her alone. She's had a rough time of it lately."

"She single?" Troy asked.

"Off limits," the manager said. "I mean it. She lost a child a few months ago."