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him.
    Sweets said, “That means go.”
    Quincy went. Devlin’s extravagant buttocks greeted him in the outer office, where the bookkeeper was bent double in his chair putting the bricks of currency into the floor safe under the kneehole of his desk. The view was entirely in keeping with Quincy’s opinion of the man.
    Alone in the office with the bodyguard, Orr made a gesture and Sweets laid aside his book, fished the twin aluminum canes from under his chair, and got up to bring them over. Orr finished securing his leg braces and allowed Sweets to help him to his feet and support him while he clamped the canes to his wrists. The operation was conducted swiftly, with a minimum of efficient-sounding snicks. The small man had not walked without artificial aid since he was four, the year polio struck down four thousand children in Detroit alone. His legs, and in fact his whole body, were little more than bone and withered gristle beneath the padding built expertly into his suits.
    “Want the car?” Sweets asked.
    “No, I’m just going across the street.”
    Sweets, whose brachycephaly didn’t interfere with his intelligence, asked no more questions. Across the street was a public telephone booth where his employer took calls at prearranged times from an exchange in Puerto Rico; the booth contained the only untapped line convenient to the office. The man whose head came to a point left Orr to manage his canes and braces and went ahead to hold the door.
    “How’s things?” Lydell Lafayette asked.
    Seated at the wheel of Quincy’s candy-apple green Sting Ray with the top down, Lafayette had on a charcoal double-breasted that made him look like a colored banker, the brim of a pearl-gray hat snapped low over his eyes. His concession to color—a sizable one—was a lemon silk hatband and necktie to match. He had a hairline moustache like Little
    Richard’s that accentuated the width of his mouth, which threw off the symmetry of his narrow face when he smiled. Which was all the time. His teeth were blue-white, each one the size of a pigeon’s egg.
    Quincy walked around the car and leaped into the passenger’s seat without opening the door. “Fine as pine wine,” he said, “if you like spies.” He told Lafayette what Patsy Orr had told him.
    “Little gimp. What you say?”
    “I said, ‘Feets, do your stuff,’ and shuffled out of there along with what’s left of my balls. What you expect?”
    Lafayette turned the key and let the 327 bubble. “When’s the guinea set to show?”
    “Next week sometime.”
    “Shit, and we run out of olive oil just this morning.”
    Quincy slid his knees up above the dash and rested his head on the back of the Naugahyde seat. He grinned, softening his big-jaw profile. “You never guess in a million years what white folks watch on TV.”
    “I won’t never ’cause I don’t plans to try.”
    “The Beverly Hillbillies.”
    “Shiiit,” said Lafayette, and popped the clutch. The Corvette laid glistening black tracks to the stoplight on Fort Street.

Chapter 4
    “R ICK? R ICK A MERY?”
    Rick had just tossed a tube of Ipana into his cart and was comparing prices between Brylcreem and Lucky Tiger when he heard his name called. Dan Sugar stood at the end of the aisle next to a stack of Post Toasties.
    He had aged in two years, spreading below the equator and losing some of his coppery hair, which made his big, raw-hamburger face look bigger, rougher, and ruddier under the fluorescent lights of the A & P. He had on a stiff double-knit suit the color of surface rust, with wide lapels like the kids wore and a broad Jackson Pollock tie that reminded Rick of the Formica in a cheap diner. The material of the jacket hung poorly over the gun under his left arm.
    A young man’s voice on the PA system interrupted “The Ballad of the Green Berets” to remind shoppers that lamb chops were on sale that week only for seventy-nine cents a pound.
    “How are you, Dan?” Rick did his best to