The first thing I needed was to make the music stop. I switched the gun to my left hand, reached over with the other, and tried to push the shelf unit over, the one with the stereo, the CDs, and the statues of comic book characters. It was heavy, so I had to slip my knee in for more leverage. I rocked it until I could feel it poised on the brink. A group of statues from one of the higher shelves slipped off and took headers straight into the hardwood floor. I pushed, and the music stopped. In its place was the sound of very expensive electronic equipment crashing about with magnificent force. It went on for a while.

Stewart bolted from his chair and ran for his life. He ended up in the corner with palms pressed against the sides of his head. By the time the last of the CDs had skated across the floor, he had his hands lifted to the heavens as if to plead for intervention. I raised the gun and pointed it at him. He wasn't getting any.

As I lined him up in my sight, I didn't feel anything. He could have been a paper target. He might have sensed that, because he stood frozen, staring at me in the silence, which was resounding after my cacophonous entrance.

"I had another clip, Stewart. Why don't you come back and sit down?"

"You won't kill me."

I walked toward him, stepping around the pieces of equipment but directly on top of as many CD cases as I could. Some of them had sprung open, which left their discs vulnerable to the bottom of my boot. I liked the way they crunched underfoot.

I put the barrel against his right temple. "Look into my eyes, Stewart."

He looked into mine, and I bored into his with every ounce of fury and hatred I could summon. He looked for a long time. I knew what he was staring at. It was ugly. I could feel it. Finally, he moved back to his chair and sat.

"Put your hands on the armrests."

He did. But the armrests were too short, which meant he had to pull his elbows in close to his mushy body, which pushed his shoulders up around his ears.

"Don't hurt me," he pleaded in a small voice. "It was her idea. Please, don't hurt me."

I didn't want him looking at me. I never wanted his eyes on me again. I turned the chair so he faced away, found his keys, and opened his desk drawer. I pulled out the clip he'd taken and stuck it in my pocket.

"What was her idea?"

"She told me you would do anything to get the video of your brother back. She told me what she wanted, and she said I would get a bonus."

"If what?"

"If I could get you to have sex with me."

I looked around at the equipment on the floor. "Did you make a video?"

"She said she didn't need one."

This was where I was supposed to fly into a rage, but I was already beyond rage. "Pull up the index of Angel's archive. Use one hand."

He had a hard time keeping his hand steady enough to maneuver, but eventually, he got to what I wanted to see. He clicked on the file, and a list came up. It looked like a directory list. Politicians-federal, state, and local. Law enforcement-federal, state, and local. Lawyers-civil and criminal. Judges and district attorneys. Media, sports, education, financial-brokers, investment bankers. He clicked on the file labeled "Lawyers," and a list of names fell out. Next to each name was a code.

"What are the codes?"

"It's how the videos are filed. There are no names on the files. Just the codes." Like the ones I had seen on the Margolies video. "You have to have the key to know who everyone is."

"Send the index to this address." I read out Felix's e-mail address to him, and he set it up and sent it.

"What kind of files did you make for Angel?"

"W-w-w-hat do you..."

"Whatformat?"

"CD-Rom."

"Tell me where Angel keeps her copies."

He paused just long enough for a moment of calculation. "I don't know."

I spun him around so I could see his face. He was pale, his skin was clammy and damp, and his jaw was trembling. But he was lying, and I wasn't leaving without the information I needed. I had nowhere else to get it.

"Get out of the chair."

"What?"

"Kneel on the floor, and put your hands on the back of your head." I wasn't sure who was talking. It sounded like me. The words were coming out of my mouth.

"Why?" I thought he'd been panicky before, but now I saw the true state of Stewart's desperation. As he lowered himself, his entire body vibrated. The frizzy ends of his hair sparkled with perspiration. "Why do you want me to get down on the floor?"

"I'm not getting played by you again. I'd rather have you dead."

"At the cabin." The words squeaked out. "They're at her place in New Hampshire in a...in a hole under the floor."

"What room?"

"In front of the fireplace. It's under the rug."

"Is it locked?"

"I don't think so."

"Where are your copies?"

"I don't have copies."

"You're full of shit. There is no way you didn't keep copies for yourself."

"She told me she'd have me buried alive if she ever found out I'd taken anything from her. She knows people...people who are in those archives. They're bad. She knows people like that. I believed her."

"I'm sure you believed her, Stewart. You just didn't think she'd ever catch you, because you're so goddamned smart. How would she ever know that you kept your own copies to get off on because you can't get a date to save your life, and you have to force yourself on a girl to ever get any?"

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean-"

"Yes, you did. You knew exactly what you were doing, and you enjoyed it." I nudged him with the gun. He squeezed his shoulders together and punched his head forward and away from contact with the barrel.

"I kept electronic files. No hard copies. I didn't want her to ever find anything. My copies are all on the C drive. There aren't any more. Please." His head was still forward, his neck distended. He started to cry. "Please don't kill me."

I made him wait a few more seconds before relieving the pressure.

"Move over to the CPU very slowly, and take out the hard drive."

He slipped over, barely raising his head, and went to work. He had become impressively docile, which was why I let him stand up when he was finished and hand the drive to me.

"Get me the other one, too."

He put his hands lightly on his hips and shifted his weight, which gave him a slightly less-docile profile. "I don't have another one."

"You have a D drive. I saw it in your directory when I was here with you last time."

"All my personal stuff is on the D drive-my taxes and my address book and my-"

I raised the gun and smashed the butt down on his keyboard. The tray it was on sheared off its mooring under the desk with a loud crack. Everything tumbled to the ground. Then I shoved one of his monitors over the edge of the desk. It teetered and finally crashed down onto the pile.

"Okay.Okay. Stop!" His arms flailed at nothing. "I'm doing it. Stop it."

He fell to his knees next to the CPU and made all the appropriate disconnections. He handed me the second drive, but when he tried to wobble to his feet, I reached down with the barrel of the Glock and tapped his shoulder.

"Stay down, and put your hands behind your head."

His raised his arms slowly. I couldn't see his face, but his shoulders started pistoning in time with his loud sobs. "I did everything you wanted. Please, don't kill me. I'm sorry for what I did. Please."

I stared at him kneeling in the ruins of his audio equipment, gasping for breath. I hadn't come intending to hurt him. I certainly hadn't planned on killing him. But my focus began to drift as I stared at him trembling and begging on his knees and thought back to the way he'd enjoyed taking his pleasure from me when none had been offered. It didn't help that Stewart scared for his life and Stewart having sex released approximately the same odor. Smelling him again made me think about the way he'd hovered over me, searching my face for reactions I had refused to give him. He had gotten off on the dominance. Now he was completely vulnerable to me, and I thought of all the things I could do to pay him back, right up to and including putting a bullet in his brain, and I wondered if I could do it.

I put my finger on the trigger and lifted the gun to his head to see...just to see what that might feel like.

"Don't." More whimpering. "Please, don't. You lied to me. You said we would fuck, and then you walked out."

It didn't feel real. It felt like TV or the movies. Bo had warned me that it was a light trigger, so I touched it gently, caressing it with my finger. In my mind, I felt the gun kick. I felt his blood and brains blow back on me. I breathed in the smell of cordite and felt it burn my nasal passages. But then the smoke cleared, and it was quiet, and all I felt was the big void that would open up in that room if he were dead and I was the one who had made him that way. If his soul departed, leaving me standing alone with a smoking gun in my hand, there would be too much space around me, probably forever.

I dropped the C drive on the floor, the one with all the dirty movies, and stomped it hard. That felt so good, I stomped it again. And again. I stomped it until Jamie's mistake was pulverized and my mistakes were demolished, until what I had done with Stewart was ground into powder and grit and tiny metal shards embedded in the hardwood floor. I kept stomping until I could barely raise my leg, while Stewart cowered next to me in a classic duck and cover. Then I dropped into the swivel chair to figure out what to do next.

I reached down under the desk, grabbed a handful of the wires and cables, and gave them a vicious yank. All the electronic toys they were supplying jumped and flinched and popped and eventually went dark.

"Put your hands behind your back."

He did so promptly. I put the gun down, wrapped one of the cables around Stewart's left wrist, and tied it off. As I tied his left hand to his right, I gave him his instructions.

"I'm going to call Angel now. When she answers, I'm going to put the phone to your head and you're going to give her a message from me."

"What about my D drive?"

"I'm holding on to it. I don't want you calling her back after I leave. That's how you keep me from stomping it, too. Do you understand?"

"What do you want me to tell her?"

CHAPTER.

44.

ANGEL'S CABIN WAS COMPLETELY DARK. Ilooked through the window, and it reminded me of looking through Monica's apartment window. For a moment, I expected a face, maybe Angel's face, looking ghoulish instead of gorgeous, to pop in front of me.

I listened to the stream flowing nearby and tried to calm down. My heart was barely keeping up with me. I had left Stewart tied up on his floor, then gone out to my car and pointed it toward this place. On the way, I had called and checked on various quarters. Bo and Tristan and Monica were fine. They were playing Trivial Pursuit, guns at the ready. When I told Tristan where I was going, all he said was to be careful. If Stewart had kept his word and not called her back, Angel would be looking for me at the Ritz-Carlton, but we both knew there was no guarantee that Angel had believed him.

I went back to the window, took a deep breath, and rammed my elbow through the glass. It wasn't easy. I had to hit it a few times. Fortunately, the window cracked before my elbow did. I pushed the glass into the house. It fell onto an un-Angel-like yellow quilt that was lying neatly over a single bed below the window. I reached in, found the lock, unhitched it, and scrambled through, careful to crawl around the glass on the bed.

No one was around, but still, I winced when I put my feet to the floor and heard the floorboards creak. Using my flashlight, I found my way to the bedroom door and out into a hallway. With one hand glued to the wall and the other holding the flashlight on the floor in front of me, I made my way to the den.

I probably could have turned on a light but felt more comfortable down on my hands and knees with the flashlight. Every piece of furniture had a rug underneath it. I found one that looked as if it had been moved recently. It had a minor speed bump in it. The chair that sat on it was heavy, but once I got the right leverage, it tipped right over. I grabbed a corner of the rug, flung it completely out of the way, and found what I was looking for. Cut into one of the wide planks of the floor was a small, neatly milled, rectangular trapdoor. I stared at it, breathing hard. I hadn't realized how winded I was. I mopped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my sleeve, but it didn't do any good. I was damp again immediately.

The opening was the width of my shoulders. It had two half-moon crescents carved out of the sides so you could put your fingers in and lift it out. I got down on my knees and tried to pry it out, but it was heavy and wedged tightly into its opening. I got up and framed the opening with one foot on either side. I wormed my fingers in, gave it a quick tug straight up, and it came out.

The hole it covered was about six inches deep and lined with metal. Inside were stacks and stacks of jewel cases. I pulled up the first stack and flipped through it. Using my flashlight, I saw the codes that labeled them. There were about forty per disc. Each code representeda man, each man a life. He had a wife or kids or a girlfriend. A career to be lost. A reputation to be tarnished. Maybe Angel would say that's what they deserved. Any man who had made the choice to cheat on his loved ones deserved to have that choice used against him. I didn't know. I couldn't figure all that out. All I knew was that one of them was Jamie's, and Angel shouldn't have them. I reached down to take them away from her, and the fireplace roared to life.

It was like a grenade going off in the dark room, and I couldn't keep from turning to look at it. When I did, I knew she was behind me. I felt her there. I dropped the boxes and reached for the gun, but it was too late. As I turned back, her arms were already on the way around, driven toward my head, it seemed, by the accelerating force of her guttural scream. I dropped to my knees with both hands to the floor. A vicious tear opened in the space above my head. I could tell by the sound that she was swinging a fireplace poker, an iron sword that was flying toward me again from her backhand side, this time with lower trajectory and better aim. I tried to flatten and roll away, but she caught my elbow with the downward hack, and the gun went flying. The pain from my elbow shot straight up my arm, across both shoulders, and down to my stomach, where it lurched around and threatened to blow straight up the back of my throat. Jesus, it hurt. I cradled it to my side. My body wanted to wrap itself around the injured limb, but she was coming, moving through the field of furniture with the poker over her head.

I scrambled into the nearest cover, a crawl space between the couch and the coffee table. She hacked off the corner of the glass tabletop. It was a clean break and a deafening pop right next to my ear. Her second try was a direct, shattering blow to the heart of the thick glass plane. I turned away. Shards flew. Large sections of glass dropped like heavy rocks straight to the floor. I kept moving. She kept coming, tripping around the furniture, chopping and hacking at me, strangling on her screams. I pulled pillows and cushions from the couch to cover my head as I went. Anything I could put my good hand on-ashtray, statue, magazine, potted plant-I tossed back at her, trying to slow her down. Something finally did. The poker tangled in the table's low legs. I grabbed for it, wrapping my good hand around the tip, the only part I could get to, but she had all the leverage and ripped it away, nearly taking the skin off my palm in the process. I crawled over the field of broken glass and skirted around the end of the couch.

She was loud and noisy and clumsy with rage, wild to get to me. Every frenzied whack came with a roar that started in her throat and ended with the sound of splintering wood or shattering glass or the thudding of objects raining down around me. My only hope was that all the flailing and swinging might be wearing her out.

I had to get to my feet. There was no shot on my hands and knees. My elbow was hot and throbbing and swollen massively, but it seemed to still work as a hinge. When I tried to straighten it, the pain was dizzying, but it responded. I crawled on my belly under a side table. She whacked the Stiffel lamp that was sitting on it, pulverizing the lightbulb and sending the shade flying across the room. The heavy base of the lamp crashed to the floor in front of me, then twitched as it reached the end of its electric cord. I reached out for it, grabbed hold, and tried to reel it in, but she had come around. When she saw what I was trying to do, she stepped on the cord. I barely pulled my hand back in time before the sharp end of the poker came down, spearing the hardwood floor. This time, when I grabbed the tip, I pulled it up and toward me, yanking it with my entire body. She didn't let go. The side table, my shield, tipped back as her countertug yanked me out into the open.

Goddammit, she was strong.

I strangled that poker, knowing what would happen if I let go. I tried to climb the ladder, hand over hand, but she kicked at my head and tried to stomp me. When she hit my elbow, I screamed. She screamed back. I rolled over to protect the arm, still holding onto the poker, still connected to her. She stomped on my back, maybe a kidney, and a bright white light exploded behind my eyes. I couldn't breathe, and it was the hardest thing I ever had to do to keep from closing my eyes and going to sleep.

She would kill me if I did. She would beat me with that poker until I looked the way Robin Sevitch had. I kept my eyes open...and saw my chance. The lamp. It was right there, the base of it staring me in the face. To grab it, I had to let go of the poker. I had to let go with one hand, grab the lamp, and swing it all at once, because she would use the chance to raise the weapon over her head, and bring it down hard enough to crack my skull open.

My brain was telling me to move, to movefast andmove now, but my body wouldn't respond. I felt drugged. She made the choice for me when she twisted the poker hard and jerked it away. I grabbed for the lamp. It rolled away. I lurched after it. The poker came down, hit the arm of a chair and then my shoulder. I couldn't feel anything now. I couldn't hear anything. All I could see was the brass lamp. She saw it, too, and tried to kick it away. I grabbed at it again and got it this time. I swung it at the most vulnerable part of her I could reach-her knees. Nothing ever felt so good as the sickening collision of brass against bone when I made contact. She teetered but didn't fall. I got to my knees and swung again with more leverage. Her shriek punched through the cotton that filled my head, and I could hear again.

She dropped like a bag of stones and rolled over on her side, one hand resting lightly on her devastated knee. Just for good measure, I hit it again and heard it crack. When she saw me moving toward the poker, she made a disturbingly strong grab for it. I got to it first and pulled it away. She didn't go after it.

I tried to get up, staggered against the couch, and didn't make it. I tried again and this time my legs engaged, and I was upright, standing over her with the poker swinging from my good hand.

She was on her side with her upper body twisted facedown on the floor. Her hair had spilled across her face, so I couldn't see whether her eyes were open. Even with one leg cracked and bent beneath her, she looked lethal. I wasn't sure about getting so near, but I wanted to see if she was conscious. I inched close enough to nudge her damaged knee with my foot.

She jerked violently and let loose with a long, loud scream that was raw and disorganized but powerful enough to make me feel that this wasn't over.

"Stoppushing at me, you wicked bitch. It's not enough for you to break my goddamned knee?" She rolled over and stared up at me. "Now you've got to stand over me and poke at me like I'm some kind of a dead dog in a ditch." She tried to leg-whip me with her good leg. I was slow, but she was slower and clearly in agony. I shuffled out of her range and left her lying on her back, face twisted and eyes squeezed tight. She tried to control the pain through her breathing-long, deep breaths sucked through her nose and exhaled steadily through her mouth.

"Surprised to see me, weren't you, doll?" She had to stop for a few breaths. "Old Sluggo, he's not much of a liar."

I stared down at her. I couldn't think. I didn't know what to do. I knew I couldn't get close to her. The gun.Turn on the light, and find the gun. But then I started to feel sick.

"You should see yourself, sugar." She let her head roll from side to side as if she were enjoying the feel of a feather pillow beneath her. She could barely talk, but she could still smile. "The way you're looking at me."