"Within the next couple of weeks would be good. Sooner the better.

The budget will spring for a two-hour call, no frills, and basic transpo."

"Since I doubt the police are overly concerned with this woman's sexual health, I assume this is payment for information or cooperation in some ongoing investigation."

"Assume whatever." Her face, her tone, mirrored his now. "I need the contact. Can you reach out to an associate in that area? One who can handle himself. She's just after a solid bounce, but she has a violent tendency and I don't want to put anybody green in this situation."

"I could, but why don't I just take care of it for you? I'm certainly not green, and I owe you enough favors to cover this." "You don't owe me anything."

"I owe you Louise," he corrected, and everything in his face brightened on her name. "Give me the information I'll need, and I'll work it into my schedule. On the house for you, Lieutenant Sugar."

She hesitated. It felt weird to book him for sex. To think of his developing romance with the dedicated Dr. Louise Dimatto while she arranged to send him off for a conjugal with Maria Sanchez.

This friendship gig was almost as complicated and boggy as the marriage gig.

It was his job, Eve reminded herself. And if it didn't bother Louise, why should it bother her?

"You'll get scale. I want to keep this on the books. Maria Sanchez,"

she began, and gave him the information he'd need. "I appreciate this, Charles." "No, you're embarrassed, and that's very sweet of you. Give my love to Peabody, and I'll give your best to Louise. My lunch and bounce client's just walked in. If there's nothing else, I'd as soon not be talking to a cop when she gets to the table. These are the things that can mar the delicate balance of a romantic afternoon."

His lips curved when he said it, and made Eve shake her head.

"Let me know when you've nailed down the date and time and if you get any hassles with the arrangements at Dockport. Warden there's an asshole."

"I'll keep that in mind. Later, Lieutenant Sugar."

When he ended transmission, she made the next call on her list.

Directing it, purposefully, to Nadine Furst's voice mail, Eve left a terse message. "You got a one-on-one, my office, sixteen hundred.

Sharp. No live feed. If you're late, I'll have something better to do."

She pushed away from the desk, strode out, and swung by Peabody's cube. "With me" was all she said.

"I'm getting nowhere trying to track a supplier for the cyanide through standard sources." Peabody hustled into the elevator behind Eve. "Even considering the number of legal sources for that kind of controlled substance, it's necessary to show authorization with prints. Prints are run through a stringent search and scan.

Dunne's are on file, and would have popped."

"Illegal sources?"

"I've run cyanide poisonings through IRCCA. Stuff's more popular than you might think, but most got their supply through a legal source. The dude in East D.C. where Dunne previously shopped was the major on-planet player, and he's dead. The others on record are mostly small-time, and the majority of them are doing time-primarily illegals distribution, with poisons as a sideline. Research indicates poisons aren't very cost effective, narrow profit margin, and are generally not a specialty."

"Possible she found a way through to a legal source but let's try the other route." Eve strode to her vehicle, paused. "A lot of talk and jive in prison, and she might have followed up on a contact there. Plus, she had her finger on the world through computer access. Plenty of time to search and research. Her source might not be in New York, but people know people who know people. We're going underground."

Peabody, a stalwart soldier, paled. "Oh boy."

Beneath New York was another world, a seamy city of the lost and the vicious. Some went under to toy with that keen edge, the way a child might play with a sharpened knife, just to see how it would slice. Others enjoyed the elemental meanness, the stink of violence that permeated the air as thickly as the stench of garbage and shit.

And some simply got lost there.

Eve left her jacket in the car. She wanted her weapon in full view. Her clutch piece was strapped to her ankle, and she'd shoved a combat knife into her boot.

"Here." She tossed Peabody a small shock bat. "Know how to use it?" She had to gulp once, but nodded. "Yes, sir."

"Hook it to your belt, keep it in plain sight. You kept up with your hand-to-hand?" "Yeah." She blew out a breath. "I can handle myself." "That's right." Eve not only wanted her to say it, she wanted her to believe it. "And when you step down there, you remember you're one bad bitch cop, and you drink blood for breakfast." "I'm one bad bitch cop, and I drink blood for breakfast. Yuck."

"Let's go."

They headed down filthy steps and veered off from the subway entrance into the rat hole of a tunnel that led to the underground.

Lights glowed dull red and dirty blue in a kind of snarling carnival of sex, games, and entertainment suited for the cold and the cruel.

Eve caught the stink of vomit and glanced over to see a man down on his hands and knees, puking horribly. "You okay?"

He didn't look up. "Fuck you."

Feeling other eyes on her, she squeezed into the passageway behind him, then gave him a solid shove with her boot that sent him facedown in his own vomit. "Oh no," she said pleasantly, "fuck you."

Her knife was out of her boot with its honed point at his filthy throat before he could curse her again. "I'm a cop, asshole, but don't think I won't slice your useless throat ear-to-ear just for the fun of it. Where can I find Mook today?"

His eyes were fire-red, his breath amazing. "I don't know no mother- fucking Mook."

She risked all manner of vermin, fisted a hand in his stringy hair, and yanked his head back. "Everybody knows mother-fucking Mook. You want to die here, or live to puke another day?"

"I don't keep tabs on the cocksucker." His lips peeled back as the point of the knife pressed against his jugular. "Maybe VR Hell, fuck do I know?" "Good. Go right on back to what you were doing." She released him with just enough force to send him sliding into the muck again, then made a show of slapping the jagged-edged knife back in her boot for the benefit of the onlookers lurking in the shadows.

"Anybody here wants trouble, I'm happy to oblige." She lifted her voice just enough to have it echo, to have it punch through the mean flood of viper rock pumping out of doorways. "Otherwise my business is with Mook, who's been described by this fine example of humanity as a mother-fucking cocksucker."

There was a slight movement, shadow in shadow, to her left. She laid her hand on her weapon, and the movement stilled. "Anybody hassles me or my uniform, we start busting asses, and we aren't particularly delicate about how many of those busted asses end up in the city morgue, are we, Officer?"

"No, sir, Lieutenant." Peabody prayed her voice wouldn't crack and embarrass both of them. "In fact, we're hoping to win the pool on morgue count this week."

"What's that up to, anyway?"

"Two hundred and thirty-five dollars. And sixty cents."

"Not too shabby." Eve cocked a hip, but her eyes were keen as a blade. "Could use it. When we're finished kicking the shit out of anybody who gives us grief," Eve added pleasantly. "There'll be a squad down here shaking down what's left. Which will really irritate me as I'd have to share the pool with them. Mook," she said again, and waited ten humming seconds.

"VR Hell," someone said in the dark. "Dancing with the S M machines. Asshole."

Eve merely nodded, deciding to attribute the asshole comment to Mook rather than herself. "And where do I find VR Hell in this delightful and intriguing paradise many of you call home?"

There was another movement, and she whirled, braced, felt Peabody go on full alert beside her. At first she took him for a boy, then saw he was a dwarf. He was crooking his finger.

"Back-to-back," Eve ordered, and they started down one of the dripping tunnels, facing out, guarding each other's backs.

The dwarf moved fast, skittering along in the steaming, stinking tunnels like a cockroach on shoes that flapped against the damp stone floor. He zipped past the bars, the clubs, the joints and dives, twisting and turning through the labyrinth of the underworld.

"Morgue pool was a nice touch," Eve said under her breath.

"Thanks." Peabody resisted swiping at the sweat dripping down her face. "I live to improvise."

From somewhere deeper in the dank, Eve heard a woman scream in pain or passion. She saw a huge man crumpled on the ground sucking on a filthy brown bottle of home-brew. Against the wall beside him a man and woman copulated in an ugly parody of lovemaking.

She smelled sex and piss, and worse.

The tunnel widened, opened into an area jammed with video, VR, and hologram dens.

VR Hell was black. Its walls, its windows, its doors all coated with the same unrelieved, and somehow greasy black. Across it, in letters she assumed were supposed to reflect the devil's fire, was its name. A poorly painted image of Satan, complete with horns and tail and pitchfork, danced over the flames.

"Mook's in there." The dwarf spoke for the first time in a voice like a bass drum constructed from sandpaper. "Digs on the Madam Electra machine. Bondage shit. Sick fucker. Got fifty?"