Lowball

Road Kill

by Walter Jon Williams

Gordon wished he had more time to examine the body. Not just to find out who killed the victim, but to find out how the joker was put together.

It looked as if there were extra attachment points on the biceps brachii, for example-the normal two on the scapula, plus another, stronger attachment to some kind of disk-like rotating bone, equipped with a nasty ten-centimeter spur, which seemed to float somehow off the head of the humerus. When the biceps contracted, not only would the forearm rise but the spur would rotate forward, as if aimed at an enemy. So if the joker raised his fists in a boxing stance, say, the spurs would roll forward, and he could impale an enemy by shouldering him in the clinch. Or he could grab an attacker and pull him close, and the very act would throw the enemy onto the spur.

And if the arms were relaxed, the spur would rotate backward to protect the head from a surprise attack from the sides or rear.

There were spurs on the knees as well, but these looked like an anatomically simple extension of the tibia. There were also some scars to suggest there had also been spurs on the heels, but these had been amputated at some point to allow the subject to walk normally.

Gordon thought that the wild card was sometimes capable of great beauty, even genius, in its adaptation of human anatomy; but it was also capable of forgetting that someone apparently designed as a street fighter might also need to walk.

Gordon would have liked to dissect the shoulder just to understand the mechanism. But that wasn’t part of his job.

His job was ascertaining cause of death, here in his morgue annex in the basement of the Jokertown precinct, a room that smelled of antiseptic and plastic body bags and the bitter-cherry scent of death, where deformed bodies lay on steel tables coated in blue-gray porcelain, and where police officers paced as they drank coffee from paper cups and waited for information.

“So,” said Detective Sergeant Gallo, “it was the hit-and-run did him in?”

Gallo stood a respectful distance from the body, by the door. He wanted to be in the room during the autopsy, but he didn’t have a compulsion to stand right by and watch the pathologist at work. Maybe he didn’t like corpses, Gordon thought, or maybe he’d seen so many that he was no longer interested.

Which was not something that could ever be said of Gordon.

“No,” Gordon said. “He was dead by the time the vehicle hit him.”

“The vehicle hit a corpse,” Gallo said.

“The vehicle was pretty unusual,” Gordon said. “It had slick tires-the prints on the victim’s body and clothing were absolutely featureless, no tread marks at all.” He looked at Gallo and blinked. “What uses slick tires besides a drag racer?”

Gallo shrugged. He was a tall, broad man, dark-haired, blue-eyed. His right arm was in a fluorescent red fiberglass cast and carried in a sling, and he wore a black leather jacket on the left arm and thrown over the shoulder on the right. His pistol was tucked into the sling for ease of access.

“Coulda been a drag racer, I suppose,” he said. “Though it wasn’t going very fast when it hit the victim. But if the vic died from the beating, there’s no point in chasing down the driver.”

“It wasn’t the beating,” Gordon said. “El Monstro didn’t kill him.”

Gallo was startled. “Who?”

“El Monstro.”

Gallo was New Jersey State Police and not from New York, so he wouldn’t have had a chance to meet El Monstro. Certainly the joker was hard to miss-nearly eight feet tall, horned, with chitinous armor plates covering most of his body-and plates on his knuckles as well, plates that left a very distinct imprint.

“His real name’s José Luis Melo da Conceição Neto,” Gordon said. “Brazilian kid, raised in Jokertown. I testified on his behalf about fourteen months ago, in an assault case.” Gordon gestured with one hand at the distinctive bruising on the dead man’s upper arms and torso. “El Monstro pretty clearly left these marks. Nobody else has fists like that.”

Gallo reached for his notebook, juggled it one-handed for a moment, then put it on one of the counters that surrounded the room. “Can you give me that name again?”

Gordon did. “Neto isn’t really part of the name,” he said. “It just means ‘grandson’-grandson of the original José Luis Melo da Conceição.”

Gallo wasn’t used to writing left-handed and it took some time to get the name down.

“He was a nice kid,” Gordon said. “He’d be about nineteen now. Works a couple jobs, trying to support a disabled mother and get through NYU. I was able to show the court that he suffered at least half a dozen defensive injuries before he put his assailant in a coma with a single punch. The assailant had a history of violence and robbery, so El Monstro walked.”

“He walked all the way to Warren County,” Gallo said, “where he killed this other joker.”

Gordon shook his head. “No,” he said. “He didn’t kill this John Doe.”

Gallo’s tone turned aggressive. “If the truck didn’t kill him, and your El Monstro didn’t beat him to death, what the hell did put his lights out?”

Gordon looked up from the body. “SCD,” he said.

Gallo stared at him in disbelief. “Sudden cardiac death? You’re telling me the John Doe had a heart attack?”

“Not a heart attack. Cardiac arrest caused by aortic valve stenosis.” Gordon gestured toward the victim’s heart, which was sitting in a plastic container on the counter. “His aortic valve narrowed to the point where the heart couldn’t pump enough blood into the aorta, which caused the heart to pump faster and faster until it went into ventricular fibrillation, and then…” Gordon made a vague gesture. “Asystole, cardiogenic shock, loss of circulation, death. It happens pretty fast, sometimes within seconds.”

“What caused the, ah, stenosis?”

“At his age, it was most likely congenital. Happens to men more often than women.”

For the first time Gallo approached the body and looked at it thoughtfully. “So he got beat up by this El Monstro guy.”

“The wounds were antemortem, though not very far in advance of death.”

“And then the vic has SCD, and drops dead on the road, apparently, and was then hit by a drag racer?” The fingers of his left hand reached into his cast and scratched the fingers of his right. He looked up. “He can’t have been pushed out of a car or something?”

“No drag marks. No skid marks.” Gordon shrugged. “Lividity hadn’t developed when the vehicle hit him, so he was run over less than twenty minutes after death.”

Gallo shook his head. “This is the worst case of bad luck in all history,” he said. He made a disgusted noise. “What was he doing on Route 519? Rural New Jersey, for cripe’s sake!”

The victim wasn’t, technically speaking, Gordon’s business. New Jersey had its own forensic pathologists. But jokers weren’t very common in northwest New Jersey, and when the body turned up beaten, run over, and naked except for an athletic supporter and a pair of Adidas training pants, it had been taken to Jokertown for an examination by a specialist in joker bodies.

By Otto Gordon, M.D., known to his colleagues as Gordon the Ghoul.

Gordon adjusted his glasses. “You sure there weren’t any prizefights in the vicinity?” he asked. “Cage fights? He’d been through a beating.”

“Nothing in that area but dairy farms. We didn’t see any crowd leaving, any sign of anything unusual.”

“Footprints? Tire tracks?”

“Zilch. And certainly no sign of anyone like El Monstro.”

“Well.” Gordon shrugged. “Let me stitch up the body, and you can take it home. I’ll send you the report when it’s done.”

“And I’ll liaise with NYPD to see if we can pick up this Monstro guy.”

Gallo left to do his liaison work. Gordon closed the Y-shaped autopsy incision, made sure the plastic containers with the victim’s organs were properly sealed and labeled, and then called his diener, Gaida Hanawi, to help shift the victim back into the body bag he’d arrived in.

Gallo returned along with the uniformed trooper who had driven him into the city from Warren County. Gaida and the uniform began wheeling the body out to the loading dock, past a couple local cops who looked at him in surprise. The trooper’s sky-blue jacket with its gaudy yellow patches and the gold-striped black trousers were a considerable contrast to the more severe dark blue uniform of the NYPD.

“How’d you hurt your arm, anyway?” Gordon asked.

“Hit by a vehicle when I was trying to make an arrest,” Gallo said. The uniformed trooper snickered.

“Shut up,” Gallo told him.

“It was a skateboard,” the trooper said. “The detective got hit by a kid on a skateboard, and now I have to drive him everywhere.”

“Fuck you,” Gallo said.

“Kid got away, too.”

“Fuck you twice.”

They went to the loading dock, and loaded John Doe onto the vehicle from the Jersey morgue. “I’ll be glad to get out of here,” the trooper said. “These jokers give me the creeps.”

“Moriarity,” Gallo said, in an exasperated tone. The trooper looked at him.

“What?”

Gallo rolled his eyes toward Gordon. The trooper looked skeptical, then turned to Gordon. “You’re not a joker,” he asked. “Are you, Doc?”

Gordon considered the question, and then gave a deliberate laugh, heh heh heh. “If only you knew,” he said. He went back into the clinic, and as the door sighed closed behind him, he heard Gallo’s growling voice. “Jesus Christ, Moriarity, the guy looks like a praying mantis on stilts, and you don’t think he’s a fucking joker!”

Gordon returned to the morgue and looked at himself in the mirror. Tall, thin, hunched, thick glasses beneath short sandy-brown hair. Praying mantis on stilts. That was a new one.

He returned to the morgue and found Detective Black waiting for him. Franny Black was dark-haired and ordinary-looking and young-too young for his job, or so Gordon had heard it said. He was the son of one of Fort Freak’s legendary officers, and he had so much pull in the department that the NYPD had violated about a dozen of its own rules to jump him to detective way early.

This hadn’t made him popular with his peers.

“Okay,” Franny said. “Now you’re done entertaining the folks from out of state, maybe you can do what you’re actually being paid to do, which is work on stiffs from this side of the Hudson.” He gave a snarl. “What about my Demon Prince body?”

Franny wasn’t naturally this belligerent, or so Gordon thought-he was just talking tough in hopes of acquiring a respect that most of the cops around here weren’t willing to give him. “The Jersey body might be yours, too,” Gordon said. “Have you checked Father Squid’s list of the missing?”

Franny’s eyes flickered. “You have a copy of the list here?”

“No. Father Squid keeps dropping off handbills, Gaida keeps throwing them away. She likes a tidy lab.” He cocked his head. “But,” he said, and flapped a hand, “when a mysterious joker appears in Jersey, he had to have come from somewhere.”

Franny seemed impatient. “Maybe,” he said. “But how about the Demon Prince?”

Gordon indicated a body laid out on a gurney and covered with a sheet. He’d looked at it earlier and seen that its wild card deformities had made the banger uglier, but not necessarily tougher. “I only had a chance to give your victim a preliminary inspection,” he said. “But it looks like the murder weapon was oval in cross-section, tapering to a point from a maximum width of about point seven five centimeters.”

“Like a letter opener?” Franny asked.

“I’d suggest a rat-tail comb.”

Franny frowned to himself. “Okay,” he said.

“Your perpetrator is between five-four and five-six and left-handed. Female. Redhead. Wears Shalimar.”

Franny for his notebook. “Shalimar,” he repeated, and wrote it down.

“Your victim,” Gordon said, “had recently eaten in a Southeast Asian restaurant-Vietnamese, Thai, something like that. Canvass the restaurants in the neighborhood, you’ll probably find someone who’s seen him with the redhead.”

Franny looked puzzled. “I thought you said you’d only done a preliminary,” he said. “You’ve already got stomach contents?”

Gordon shook his head. “No. I just smelled the nuoc mam on him-the fish sauce.”

“Fish sauce.” Scribbling in his notebook.

“High-quality stuff, too,” Gordon said. “Made from squid, not from anchovy paste. I’d check the pricier restaurants first.”

“Check.” Gordon lifted the sheet, revealing the pale corpse with its tattoos and wild card callosities. “You can give it a whiff if you like. Check it out for yourself.”

A spasm crossed Franny’s face. “I’ll trust you on that one, Doc.”

“I’ll let you know if I find anything else.”

The subsequent autopsy revealed little but the bùn chả in the stomach and some gang tattoos, not surprising since the victim was a known member of the Demon Princes. The question for Franny was going to be whether the killing was gang-related, or something else-and since rat-tail combs were not a favored weapon of the Werewolves, Gordon suspected that the homicide was more in the nature of a personal dispute.

Gordon and Gaida zipped the body up into its bag, put the bag in the cooler, and then it was time to quit.

“I’m heading uptown tonight,” Gaida said. She was a Lebanese immigrant, a joker, who wore her hair long to cover the scars where her bat wing-shaped ears had been surgically removed. “Going to take in Don Giovanni at Lincoln Center.”

“Have a good time,” Gordon said.

“You have plans for the weekend?”

“The usual.” Gordon shrugged. “Working on my moon rocket.”

The diener smiled. “Have a good time with that.”

“Oh,” Gordon said, “I will.”

Gordon hadn’t mentioned to Sergeant Gallo that he owned a house in New Jersey, a two-bedroom cabin in Gallo’s own Warren County where Gordon went on weekends to conduct his rocket program. Though Gordon followed all precautions and did nothing illegal, it had to be admitted that he kept a very large store of fuel and explosives on his property, and he figured that the fewer people who knew about it, the better. Especially if the people in question were the authorities.

He took the train to Hackettstown and picked up his Volvo station wagon from the parking lot near the station. On the way to his cabin he found a nice fresh piece of roadkill, a raccoon that probably weighed twelve or fourteen pounds. It was a little lean after the long winter but would make a fine dinner, with cornbread-and-sausage stuffing and a red wine sauce. He picked up the raccoon with a pair of surgical gloves, dumped the body in a plastic bag, and put the bag in his trunk. Once he got to the cabin he put the raccoon in his refrigerator. He’d cook it the next day, when Steely Dan came by to help him make his rocket fuel.

The raccoon was boiling in salt water when Steely Dan arrived at mid-morning. Dan was, so far as Gordon knew, the only joker in Warren County, and he lived there because he had family in the area. Steely Dan was short, squat, ebon, smooth, and shiny, as if he were made of blackened, polished steel. He had no body hair, he was very strong, and his head was literally bullet-shaped. Children tended to think he was some kind of robot.

He’d been on American Hero in its fifth season, but had lasted only two episodes.

Dan worked at auto repair, and he brought useful skills to Gordon’s rocket program. He had built the steel cells used to synthesize sodium perchlorate, and also scavenged lead diodes from an old auto battery, which would have been messy if the job had been left to Gordon. The synthesis of NaClO4 was easy enough; but then any residual chlorides had to be chemically destroyed lest the subsequent addition of ammonium chloride turn the compound into a highly unstable chlorate. The oxidizer itself, ammonium perchlorate, was created through a process of double decomposition, then purified through recrystallization. And because NH4ClO4 could be absorbed through the skin, Gordon and Steely Dan both had to wear protection even though the danger to the thyroid was slight.

Gordon didn’t know if Steely Dan even had a thyroid.

At the end of the long afternoon Gordon had a substantial quantity of ammonium perchlorate, a pure white powder that when mixed with aluminum powder and a few minor additives would form solid rocket fuel, the formula used by the Air Force in the boosters of their Hornet shuttle.

The operation was carried out in the old barn, amid the scent of musty old hay and rodent droppings. By the end of the afternoon, the ammonium perchlorate was safely transferred to steel drums, then pushed on a handcart to Gordon’s storage facility, a prefabricated steel shed in the middle of a meadow, and surrounded by berms of earth pushed into place by a neighbor with a bulldozer. If anything unfortunate should befall the shed, the force of the explosion would go straight up, not out into the countryside.

Which was good, because of what Gordon kept there. The aluminum powder that would turn the ammonium perchlorate into flammable mixture. Kerosene. Tanks of oxygen. Syntin, which had driven the Russians’ Sever boosters into space. Hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, which were not only explosive in combination but also highly toxic.

Gordon hadn’t quite worked out what fuel he wanted to take him to orbit, so he was keeping his options open.

The stuffed raccoon had been sizzling in the oven for two hours. Gordon sautéed new potatoes to serve with it, and he’d made a pesto of ramps, which were the only local vegetable available at this time of year; he served the pesto on linguine, with a sharp parmesan made by one of the local dairy farmers. With the meal Gordon offered a robust Australian shiraz, which Steely Dan preferred in a ten-ounce tumbler, with ice.

“Damn, man,” Dan said, after tasting the raccoon. “That’s amazing. It’s kinda like pork, isn’t it?” He had a half-comic strangled voice that contrasted with his formidable appearance.

“Tastes more like brisket to me,” Gordon said. He lowered his face over the plate and inhaled the rich aroma.

“This is a first for me,” Dan said. “If my family ever ate varmints, that was way before anyone can remember.”

“I hate to let an animal go to waste. The whole license business is ridiculous.” New Jersey required a license to prepare roadkill, which Gordon thought was simply weird. Who thought of these things? he wondered. And who would actually enforce such a law?

“So,” Steely Dan said, counting on his fingers, “I’ve had squirrel here, and possum, and rabbit.”

“Venison,” Gordon pointed out. “There’s a lot of roadkill venison out there.”

Steely Dan jabbed at Gordon with his fork. “Is there anything you won’t eat?”

“Rat. They can transmit Weil’s disease-and believe me, you don’t want that.”

“I never heard of Weil’s disease, but I believe you.” Steely Dan took a generous swig of his shiraz.

Gordon chewed thoughtfully, and then remembered the previous day’s autopsy. He looked at Steely Dan, and saw himself reflected in the joker’s glossy skin. “Do you know any other wild cards living in this area?” he asked.

“Besides yourself?” Steely Dan said. And, at Gordon’s blank expression, said, “You are a wild card, right?”

Gordon ignored the question and explained about the unknown joker found on the road nearby. Steely Dan was surprised.

“Just up 519 from here,” Gordon said.

“That’s weird,” Steely Dan said.

“You haven’t heard of any, say, sporting events involving wild cards?”

“In Warren County?” Steely Dan shook his bullet head. “Man, that’s nuts.”

“Murder isn’t exactly the most rational act.”

Steely Dan’s smooth face contorted into an expression of amusement. “Unlike trying to shoot yourself into space,” he said.

Gordon grinned. He raised his glass. “Ad astra,” he said.

Gordon had been involved with amateur rocketry since he was in his early teens. He had been an Air Force brat, and every air base had a model rocketry club where Gordon could find like-minded peers. He and his friends had built rockets and explosives while consuming vast amounts of science fiction, mostly stuff that had been in the base library for years, if not decades.

Gordon remembered George O. Smith’s Mind Lords of Takis, Leigh Brackett’s Journey to Alpha C, Dick’s Radio Free Skait, “Skait” being the secret, anagrammatical name of Takis, at least according to Philip K. Dick. All books that shared the common assumption that it was only a matter of time before Earth’s scientists succeeded in duplicating Takisian starship technology, leading an unshackled humanity to spread into the galaxy. (Though in the Dick, it turned out that humans were grub-like creatures groping along on a burned-out planet, and all human history an illusion implanted by sinister Takisian telepaths.) All these renderings of smooth, efficient Takisian technology made rocketry seem a little quaint, but Gordon was willing to settle for what he could get, at least until someone handed him a starship.

In fact Gordon still belonged to an amateur rocket club, the American Rocket League, which had a big meeting in the Nevada desert every year to fire off boosters that required the participants to have a Federal explosives license, and which regularly climbed higher than fifty miles, right to the brink of space. Gordon was not alone in wanting to send himself into orbit. He liked to think he was farther along than most of them, however.

The fact was that Earth physicists had failed to decode Takisian technology, despite regular claims of breakthroughs that seemed loudest at every budget cycle. Ever since 1950 scientists had promised whole armadas of starships in ten or twenty years.

In the meantime the Air Force and its Space Command shared Earth orbit with an underfunded Russian program. Each operated as secretly as they could, each spied on the other, each put up thousands of communications and spy satellites, each may or may not have weaponized near-Earth orbit. There was no exploration of the Moon or Mars or any of the bodies that had held the imagination of early-twentieth-century writers. Everyone was waiting for his starship. No one got them.

It was beginning to look like the solar system might be all humanity ever got. And now it was the turn of Takisian starships to seem like a quaint, old-fashioned chimera, while rocket technology was beginning to seem like the most contemporary thing in all the world. With the military program in stagnation, it was civilians who were driving rocket innovation now. There was even a cash reward now, the Koopman X Prize, for the best, cheapest, and most practical design.

Gordon figured he was an underdog in the race, but then so were the Wright Brothers. So was Jetboy. Sometimes an underdog could surprise you.

Sunday was a cool, blustery day, with low clouds that scudded urgently along, dropping lashings of rain. Steely Dan picked Gordon up in his pickup truck for a run into Belvidere, where Gordon had a delivery waiting. This was a scaled-down version of an aerospike hybrid rocket engine, a working prototype of a larger design that had never been built. Gordon had bought the prototype when the subcontractor had gone out of business following the cancellation of the Air Force project.

Gordon was beginning to think that hybrid rockets were maybe the way to go. A hybrid had certain inefficiencies, but the aerospike design would more than make up for that. He’d have to work out a way to perform static tests with the new engine, some way that didn’t involve setting his property on fire or blowing anything up. He’d have to build more berms, or maybe big trenches. And he’d have to get some HTPB, or make some.…

As windshield wipers slapped back and forth, Gordon and Steely Dan discussed the technical details on the ride to Belvidere. Around them the low mountains were green with new spring growth.

One of the nice things about living in rural New Jersey was that the lady who owned the express company was willing to open on a Sunday so that Gordon could collect his delivery. She even fired up her forklift in order to load the rocket engine on the back of Steely Dan’s Dodge Ram. The engine came with a good deal of plumbing and electronics, and these were packaged separately, and Gordon and Steely Dan strapped the containers into place around the engine.

“You’ve got the plans, right?” Steely Dan muttered. “Even with a schematic this is going to be like working a jigsaw puzzle.”

After the cargo was strapped in, Gordon bought Steely Dan lunch in a diner. People stared: they weren’t used to jokers. This reminded Gordon of the dead joker who had been found nearby. “Let’s go look where that victim was dropped,” Gordon said.

He knew the place only approximately, but there wasn’t anything to look at anyway-just as Gallo had said, there wasn’t much around but dairy farms and woods and tree-covered ridges. Holsteins either endured the drizzle or clustered under shelter. Then a different sort of facility loomed into sight around a curve, and Steely Dan slowed without being told.

There were a series of long, low buildings, some of them new, some older and maybe repurposed from another use. There were spotlights on tall metal masts. Surrounding the compound were two forbidding twelve-foot chain-link fences, each topped by dense coils of razor wire.

The place looked more secure than some prisons Gordon had seen. “All it needs is a guard tower in each corner,” Steely Dan said.

There was no sign out front, so the place wasn’t an enterprise that sold to the public. A fifty-yard-long gravel drive stretched from the highway to the gates, and Gordon could see a small metal sign on the gate.

“Turn down here,” Gordon said.

Steely Dan brought the truck to a halt at the driveway entrance. “You sure?” he asked.

“Yeah. What are they going to do, arrest us?”

“They could hit us with fucking baseball bats.”

Gravel crunched under the Ram’s tires as Steely Dan steered it toward the front gate. He brought the vehicle to a halt, and Gordon stepped out and regarded the facility.

Cold wind rustled up the back of his jacket. He heard dogs barking. There was a wet animal scent in the air. Gordon looked at the rusted sign on the front gate.

IDS

CANINE BREEDING

AND TRAINING FACILITY

UNIT #1

Gordon had no idea who or what IDS was. There was a rubber squeeze bulb hanging outside the gate, with a wire that led to the nearest building. Gordon squeezed the bulb, and he heard a metallic clatter from inside the building. A chorus of dog barks rose at the sound.

A door slammed behind him as Steely Dan left the pickup truck. His bullet head was shrunk in his jacket, and his eyes scanned uneasily back and forth.

“What are you gonna do?” he asked.

“I’m going to tell them I want a puppy,” said Gordon.

“Yeah,” Steely Dan said, “they’re for sure gonna believe that.”

A man came out of the building. He was tall and wore a scowl on his face. He seemed fit and wore green-and-brown camouflage fatigues with lace-up military boots. The only piece of apparel that didn’t look government issue was a wide cowboy belt, with a buckle in the shape of a longhorn bull’s head.

“Yeah,” the man said. “You need something?”

Surprise rose in Gordon at the man’s Eastern European accent. “You breed dogs, right?” Gordon said. “I was thinking of getting a dog.”

The man didn’t reply. His eyes moved from Gordon to Steely Dan, and then his expression turned thoughtful.

“You do sell dogs, right?” Gordon prompted.

The man’s eyes didn’t leave Steely Dan as he answered. “We breed and train dogs for the military, police, customs, and border guards,” he said. “We only sell to government agencies.”

“Oh,” Gordon said. “Sorry to bother you.”

The man pointed at Dan. “Wasn’t he on the television? American Hero?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

The man raised a fist and made a muscle. “Very strong, yes?”

Gordon nodded. “Yes. Very strong.”

The man said nothing more. Gordon and Steely Dan returned to the truck, backed out onto the highway, and headed for Gordon’s cabin. The man stood behind the gate, watching them the entire way.

There was only one dead joker in the morgue on Monday morning, a straightforward shooting, and Gordon went upstairs to the squad room to deliver a copy of the autopsy to Harvey Kant, the detective in charge.

Kant was the most senior detective at the precinct and had been there at least forty years. If anyone had told him it was time to retire, he’d ignored the advice. Rumors were that he was holding something, or several somethings, over senior members of the department, and they’d decreed he could stay as long as he liked.

Kant was brown and scaled and looked like a heavily weathered dinosaur. He dressed in a frayed suit of polyester-blend gabardine and smelled strongly of cigars. He ignored the autopsy photos, glanced at the written report, then put both in their jacket and tossed it on his desk. Because he held a detective rank equivalent to lieutenant, most of the cops just called him “Lou.”

“Nine millimeter,” he said. “Fits the Sig found on the scene.” He gave a sound like a cross between a snarl and a hacking cough. “Another goddamn drug shooting,” he said. “I’m gonna be chasing my own ass for days on this one.”

“Hey Doc!” Franny Black crossed the room smiling. He carried a tall clear plastic coffee go-cup from Café Mussolini down the street.

“I wanted to thank you about that description you gave me the other day,” he said. “Redheaded woman, five six?”

“You found her?” Gordon asked.

“Sure did. She was hostess in the third Vietnamese restaurant I visited. And I’m glad you told me she was left-handed, because that was the hand I was watching when she drew the rat-tail comb out of her purse and tried to stab me.”

“Glad you didn’t end up on my slab,” Gordon said.

“Yeah, Franny.” The new speaker was the rail-thin Detective McTate, known as Slim Jim, who had followed Franny into the squad room. “You’re lucky all around. The doc here gives you a perfect description of the perp, and you get credit for the bust.”

Franny flushed. For a cop, Gordon thought, he flushed rather easily.

“How’s the search for El Monstro coming along?” Gordon asked.

“El Monstro? He’s vanished.” Franny shrugged. “I don’t know how a joker eight feet tall can just disappear, but that’s what happened.”

“The family?”

“His mother’s in a wheelchair and doesn’t speak English. The father’s dead.” Franny’s eyes narrowed. “But the sister’s hiding something.”

“But not her brother?”

“Not in that little bitty apartment, no.”

Kant eyed Franny’s coffee. “What’s that you’re drinking, Fran?”

“Iced peppermint macchiato,” Franny said in all innocence.

“Yeah.” Kant nodded. “All us detective he-men like us our peppermint macchiatos.”

Franny flushed a deeper shade, and he turned to Gordon. “Thanks, anyway,” he said, and faded in the direction of the men’s room.

Kant’s lipless mouth stretched into a grin as he watched Franny’s retreat, and then he looked at Gordon. “Sometimes the information you dig up is uncanny,” he said. “Sometimes it’s useless.” He picked up the jacket with the weekend’s homicide. “I mean, yeah, I know the guy was shot, thanks anyway. And sometimes…” He shook his head. “Remember when you told me that the perp was six feet six and armed with a club?”

Slim Jim was grinning. “I ain’t heard this story,” he said.

“I was lookin’ for a fucking Neanderthal,” Kant said.

“I didn’t see the crime scene,” Gordon explained. “Nobody told me about the-”

“About the ladder,” Kant said. “The perp was four foot nine and killed the vic by dropping a bowling ball from a ladder.”

Slim Jim guffawed.

“If I had seen the crime scene photos,” Gordon said, “I would have seen the ladder.”

“I spent ten days looking for the Terminator,” Kant said, “and instead I was looking for a munchkin.”

“If I don’t have all the information,” Gordon said, “I can’t-”

He looked up and saw a group of uniformed officers coming into the squad room to report to Kant on a door-to-door survey of the area around the crime scene. Among them he recognized Dina Quattore, the telepathic ace attached to the K-9 unit.

Oh, he thought. That would work.

“You turned investigator now?” asked Dina Quattore. “Maybe I should buy you a freakin’ Sherlock Holmes hat.”

She was in Gordon’s Volvo station wagon, heading toward the dog-breeding facility. Dina was a New York cop out of Fort Freak, a short, buxom woman with curly black hair. Gordon had talked her into joining him on her free afternoon, and she was out of uniform, dressed in jeans and a baggy nylon jacket that covered the pistol she wore on her hip.

“I just got curious about this place,” Gordon said. “They claim they’re a dog-training facility, but I think there may be other things going on in there.”

“What kind of other things?” Dina asked.

“A joker was found dead near there.”

“Uh-huh,” Dina said. “Doc, it’s the Sherlock Holmes hat for you.”

Gordon was clearly stepping outside his sphere. Despite what might be seen on television, real-life forensic pathologists and profilers and crime scene investigators and other specialists did not actually confront suspects, participate in car chases, or get involved in shootouts. Gordon’s job was to perform autopsies. Sometimes he’d be called to the scene, sometimes he’d testify at a trial, sometimes he’d hear about an arrest, and often he never ever found out about the disposition of a case. His focus was normally confined to the morgue.

But he couldn’t help but notice that there were some unaccounted-for anomalies here in Warren County. The dead John Doe was one, and the IDS facility was another. Maybe the two belonged together.

He’d done research on IDS. They had no web page, no listed telephone number. They had a business license in New Jersey, with the address of the facility.

It wasn’t even clear what IDS stood for.

“Also,” Gordon said, “the man at the facility was a Russian or something.”

Dina snickered. “I hope you give me my share of credit when you crack the spy ring.”

“Just look at the place,” Gordon said. “Tell me it’s legit.”

He slowed the Volvo to a crawl as they approached the compound. Dina looked out the window in silence as the buildings moved past. “Pull off the road once we’re out of sight,” she said, her voice suddenly serious.

“What are you getting?”

Dina shook her head. Her eyes were closed in concentration. Gordon drove on till the compound was hidden behind a stand of silver maple, then pulled onto the shoulder and parked. Dina led Gordon across a roadside ditch partly filled with water after the last rain. The humid, cool air was filled with the scent of spring flowers. Gordon and Dina walked slowly through the trees until they had a view of the IDS facility, and then Dina bent her head, her face set in an expression of fierce concentration.

Dina, Gordon knew, was a telepath. She could read the thoughts of others at a distance.

But not humans. Dina could only read dogs. That’s why she worked with the K-9 unit. NYPD Public Relations called her “K-10.” Everyone else called her Dina.

Water dripped down Gordon’s collar as he waited. Then Dina straightened and shook her head. She tapped her nose. “You know what I’m smelling?” she asked. “Semtex.”

“Plastic explosive.”

Dina nodded toward the compound. “They’re training bomb-sniffer dogs right this minute,” she said. “Other dogs are being trained to find drugs.” She shook her head. “Man, that chronic must be twenty years old, it’s a miracle they’re not training the dogs to find mold.” She began walking back toward the car. “None of the dogs seem unhappy, and none are being mistreated. And if there are explosives and controlled substances used to train the dogs, that explains the high security.” She looked at Gordon and laughed. “Sorry to destroy your detective fantasy.”

Gordon shrugged. “It’s better to know,” he said. He opened the passenger door for her. “Dinner’s on me,” he said.

Dina started to get into the car, then hesitated. “No offense, Doc,” she said, “but does that mean you’re doing the cooking?”

Gordon blinked at her. “Sure.”

Dina gave Gordon an uncomfortable look. “You know,” she said, “my taste in food is pretty conventional, when all’s said and done.”

“Game is organic,” Gordon said, “and it’s lean. Free-range. It’s better for you than anything you’ll find in a supermarket.”

A stubborn expression entered Dina’s eyes. “Doc,” she said, “I’ve eaten your chili.”

Gordon surrendered. “I’ll take you to a restaurant.”

Dina’s smile was brilliant. “Thanks.”

He took her to a place in Belvidere with a view of the Delaware. He didn’t know whether she was on a low-carb diet or whether her tastes in food were more like a dog’s than those of a human; but Gordon watched Dina devour a fourteen-ounce rib eye while taking only a few bites of her salad and baked potato.

The conversation was pleasantly professional, ranging from weird crimes to weird autopsies. An older couple at a nearby table asked to be moved when Dina described a cadaver one of her dogs had found.

Gordon found himself enjoying Dina’s company. She was a very attractive young woman, and he was far from immune to her allure.

Most men, he supposed, would be wondering what Dina looked like naked. Gordon had no such questions, for the simple reason that he already knew the answer. He’d seen more naked women, of every size and age and description, than the most accomplished seducer. There were no mysteries left-not even cause of death, because he always found that out.

That the vast majority of the women he met were dead put him at something of a social disadvantage with living females, but not as much as most people might think.

Beauty did not leave with death. The human body was a marvel of intricate design, the highly crafted product of millions of years of evolution. Contained within its morphology were membranes as delicate as a spider’s web, a muscle as powerful and enduring as the heart, a structure as diffuse and ephemeral as the lymphoid system. The musculoskeletal system was a glory of complexity, the interaction between muscles and bone producing everything from a champion athlete to a shy girl’s smile.

The human body was as varied and wonderful as the surface of a planet.

The wild card added to the wonder: sometimes its improvisations were brilliant, sometimes merely chaotic. It subverted every single cell-or enhanced it. Or both.

Gordon lived a fair percentage of his professional life in a constant state of awe.

After dinner Gordon joined Dina on the train back to New York.

“You know,” she said, “everyone at the precinct thinks you’re a joker.”

He looked at her in surprise. “You think I’m not?”

“You’ve been around some of my dogs,” Dina said. “They can usually smell a wild card-the metabolism’s generally tweaked some way that causes the difference to come out the pores.”

“I’ve noticed that myself,” Gordon said.

“I think you’re just-” She laughed. “Skinny and very tall.”

Gordon nodded. “Good observation, there, Officer.”

“And another thing,” she said, tapping his arm. “You make a terrible Sherlock Holmes.”

I guess, Gordon thought, I’ll have to settle for being Wernher von Braun.

They left the train at Pennsylvania Station and ran into the usual Penn Station crowd: commuters, street people, and pimps waiting for the arrival of runaway teenagers from Minnesota. Gordon saw Dina to a cab. “Dinner again some time?” he said.

She smiled up at him. “I feel like I need a booster seat sitting across the table from you,” she said.

He shrugged. “I’ll have the waitress bring you one.”

Dina nodded. “Okay. Give me a call.”

Well, he thought as he watched her drive away, that went well.

There was a lot of yelling from Interrogation Room Two. A woman kept wailing, “He was a good boy!” and a man’s voice was uttering threats against the city, the department, and probably everybody else.

Gordon looked around for Detective Kant and saw only Detective Van Tranh, the vibrating ace who failed utterly to rejoice in his nickname of “Dr. Dildo.”

“Kant sent for me,” Gordon said.

Tranh waved in the direction of the interrogation room. “Your Jersey John Doe got identified,” he said. “He’s one of the missing on Squid’s list. Franny and the Lou are trying to calm the family down.”

“And I’m supposed to help with that?”

“You’re supposed to explain the medical evidence,” Tranh said. “So far, the family isn’t convinced.”

Gordon stepped toward the door, then hesitated. “I should go back and get my autopsy report.”

“Fran’s got a copy.”

“Okay.” Gordon walked to the door, knocked, and entered the small room where Kant and Franny were being shouted at by the grieving family.

Gordon had met his share of bereaved couples over the years, but he had never encountered quite so much drama stuffed into two people. They were both broad and tall and took up a lot of space, and they made so much noise that they seemed to occupy the whole room. Mrs. Heffer cried, wailed, asked God to punish her, and kept insisting her son was a good boy. Mr. Heffer suspected conspiracy, refused to believe a thing he was told, and banged the table as he uttered threats. “My son did not have a heart attack!” he shouted as he kicked a chair. “He worked out all the time! He studied Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu!”

“It wasn’t a heart attack,” Gordon attempted. “It was sudden cardiac death.”

Mr. Heffer beat himself on the chest with a fleshy fist. “My son did not have a heart attack!” he screamed.

“Aortic valve stenosis is not uncommon in young men-” Gordon began.

“Not uncommon,” Mr. Heffer repeated scornfully. “What the hell does that mean? You’re contradicting yourself already!”

“People were always making trouble for him!” Mrs. Heffer said. “Tommy was a good boy!”

Mr. Heffer waved a fist. “My son was kidnapped!” he said. “Why else would he be way the hell out in Jersey?”

Franny opened his notebook and readied his pen. “Do you know anyone who might want to kidnap Tom Junior?” he asked.

Heffer stared at him in utter scorn. “That’s what you people are supposed to find out!” he said. He beat his chest again. “How the hell would I know who kidnapped him? Do I look like I hang around with kidnappers?”

“Kidnapped!” Mrs. Heffer burst into tears. “He was probably kidnapped by that communist from down the street.”

“Communist?” Confusion swam into Franny’s face. “What communist?”

“He runs the tobacco shop,” Mrs. Heffer said. “He sells poison to the kids!”

“How do you know he’s a communist?” Franny asked, and then they both began shouting at him.

Gordon decided to interrupt with the one fact that might be relevant. “Tom Junior didn’t smoke,” he pointed out. The lungs had been pink and healthy.

“Damn right Tommy didn’t smoke!” Mr. Heffer said.

“He was a good boy!” Mrs. Heffer wailed.

Perhaps it was the mention of tobacco that spurred Harvey Kant’s action. He drew a large cigar out of his gabardine jacket, snapped open his lighter, and brought the flame to the cigar’s tip. He puffed noisily and with great satisfaction, blowing out clouds of smoke. Mrs. Heffer sneezed. “Hey!” said Mr. Heffer. He pointed at the No Smoking sign. “You can’t do that in here!”

“I’m the lieutenant,” Kant said. “I decide who smokes and who doesn’t.”

Within a few minutes Kant had succeeded in gassing the Heffers into silence, after which he gave them the information necessary to claim their son’s body from the New Jersey morgue.

Mr. Heffer managed to summon an echo of his earlier belligerence. “Jersey!” he said. “What’s my boy doing up there?”

“It’s the Jersey cops’ case,” Kant said. “That’s where he was found.”

Heffer sneered. “Why in hell are we talking to you, then?” he said.

After the Heffers left, Gordon stood with Kant and Franny in the squad room. Gordon’s head swam, though he couldn’t tell whether it was from the cigar smoke or the Heffers’ shouting.

Kant took a last draw on his cigar, then crushed the lit end against his scaly palm.

“Right,” he said, and turned to Franny. “Tommy Heffer was kidnapped here and dumped in Jersey, the CO gave you this case, so liaise with the Jersey cops. Now-” He handed Franny the victim’s file. “In spite of what the mom said about his being a good boy, the vic had some scrapes with the law-drunk and disorderly, fighting, vandalism. He was never formally charged with anything, so he doesn’t have a record per se-but you can start by talking to the other kids who were arrested along with him.”

“They’re not kids. One of them is this guy Eel,” Franny argued.

“I know you’re the the big celebrity cop, but I’m the lieutenant.” Kant grinned. “So talk to the kids.”

A muscle in Franny’s jaw moved. “Yes, sir,” he said.

“Good boy.” Another gesture with the cigar. “The vic studied Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu,” Kant said. “And El Monstro was Brazilian. So there’s a connection, maybe, at the Jiu-Jitsu school.”

Franny looked dubious. “El Monstro was working at least two jobs as well as going to college,” he said. “I doubt he had time to train in martial arts-especially as he didn’t need to. Anyone attacking him would just bounce off. And Eddie said some of the guys sounded Russian.”

“Check it anyway,” said Kant.

Kant ambled back to his desk. Franny looked at the file folder in his hand, and his lips tightened. “Fran?” Gordon asked.

Franny jerked out of whatever thoughts were distracting him. “Yeah?”

“When you see the Jersey cops, could you not mention I have a house out in Warren County?”

“I didn’t know you had a place out there. But sure, okay.” Franny frowned. “Why?”

“I go out there to relax and work on my own stuff. I don’t want to be the guy they call on weekends when their own medical examiner is drunk.”

Which was true enough, though the shed full of rocket propellant had a lot more to do with why he preferred to remain invisible to his neighbors.

Franny nodded slowly. “Sure. That makes sense.”

“Thanks. See you later.”

Gordon returned to his basement morgue and finished helping Gaida bag the shooting victim, after which Gaida went to lunch and Gordon signed off on the last of the paperwork while gnawing on a log of homemade pemmican. He heard a knock on the door and looked up to see Dina Quattore. “Come in,” he said.

Dina was in uniform, curly black hair sprouting from beneath her peaked cap. The radio at her hip hissed and squawked.

“Just wanted to let you know another stiff is on its way,” she said. “Elderly street joker, walked in front of a bus while drunk, stoned, or otherwise impaired.”

“Am I needed at the crime scene?”

“No. Plenty of witnesses to what happened.”

“Okay.” Gordon capped his pen and offered his plastic container of pemmican. “Care for some?”

Dina approached and peered at the dark brown pemmican logs. “What is it?”

“Pemmican.”

“And what’s that?”

“Ground venison,” Gordon said, “rendered suet…”

“Wait a minute!” Dina yelped. “You’re offering me a roadkill meat bar?”

“It also has dried fruit, nuts, and honey,” Gordon pointed out. “Very nutritious. Everything your Mohawk warrior needs on the trail-good for quick energy, and you can store it for years.”

“How many years has this-?” Dina began, then shook her head. “Never mind. I’ll stick with the turkey sandwich I got at Mussolini’s.”

“Bring it and we’ll have lunch, if you have the time.”

Dina considered this. “You may not have the time, with the stiff coming.”

Gordon shrugged. “The deceased won’t be in a hurry.”

“True that.” Dina went upstairs to her locker, then returned with the plastic-wrapped sandwich and a can of Diet Pepsi. She parked herself on a plastic chair near the X-ray machine, then began to unwrap her sandwich. She looked at him from under the brim of her cap.

“Is it true what they say about you?” she asked.

“Depends,” Gordon said. “What do they say?”

“That you build rockets?”

He hadn’t realized any of the police officers actually knew that. Gaida, he thought, must have talked. Still, there was no reason to lie. “Yes,” he said.

“How big?”

He preferred evasion. “Different sizes,” he said.

“Gaida says you’re going to shoot yourself to the moon,” Dina said.

“Well,” he said. “I’d need help.” He told her about the Koopman Prize, and how anyone with a decent design was eligible. Dina chewed her turkey sandwich thoughtfully, then took a sip of her Pepsi. “I’m trying to figure you out, Doc,” she said.

Gordon considered this. “I don’t know that I’m particularly mysterious.”

“You’re not hidden,” Dina said, “but I’m not sure how all the parts fit together.”

Gordon had never considered himself as a collection of randomly ordered parts and had no answer to this. He took a bite of his pemmican and chewed.

Dina took off her cap and hung it from the X-ray machine. “You know,” she said, “I think you’re some kind of goofy romantic.”

“Uhh-” Gordon began, uncertain. He had never categorized himself this way.

“Yeah!” Dina said, suddenly enthusiastic. “You cut up bodies as part of your crusade for justice! You want to plant the flag on another world!” She pointed at the pemmican. “And you recycle dead animals!”

Gordon blinked. “I usually autopsy them first.”

She frowned. “Okay,” she said. “That’s disturbing.”

“I learn stuff,” he said.

He was about to object to being called a romantic and say that he was interested in the way jokers were put together in the same way that he was interested in the way rockets were put together-but then it occurred to him that if Dina thought of him as a romantic, that might say good things about her intentions toward him.

“Anyway,” Dina said. “I’d like to see the rockets.”

“Okay.” Pressing his luck seemed a good idea. “This weekend?”

“I’ve got family stuff on Saturday,” she said. “How about Sunday?”

“Sure.”

“I can take the train out, and you can pick me up at the station. I’ll see the rockets, and then you’ll take me out to dinner.”

“Great.”

“At a restaurant,” she added.

“If you like.”

Gordon decided that being a romantic was working for him. Until the weekend, when he found that Steely Dan had gone missing.

“Another joker vanished,” Franny said. He looked around Steely Dan’s living room, his pen paused over his notebook without anything to write. “Another element in the series,” he said. “And this time, the crime happens in New Jersey. And you think that dog-training facility may have something to do with it?”

Gordon followed Franny as he prowled into Dan’s kitchen, where a half-eaten breakfast of eggs and sausage sat on the dinette next to a cold cup of coffee. If there’d been a knock on the door while Dan was eating, he’d have left his breakfast and walked to the door to open it … and then what? A clout on the head, a jab with a Taser? Dan was strong, but his skin only looked like blackened steel. He was as vulnerable to a weapon as any nat.

“That Russian at the facility was very interested in Steely Dan,” Gordon said. “Kept staring at him.”

“Jokers get stared at,” said Franny. “More in the sticks than anywhere, I imagine.” He frowned. “The Jersey cops looked into that place when Tommy Heffer turned up there. But it’s legit-they even sell their dogs to the Jersey state cops.”

“They could have a legitimate business on top of whatever it is they’re really up to,” Gordon said.

“Maybe,” Franny conceded. “But there’s no grounds for a warrant.”

“I suppose not,” Gordon said.

If only Dina had sensed something.

And the weekend started so well, he thought. Normally Friday was one of his busy days, for the simple reason that a lot of people got killed on Thursday night. The reason the homicide rates jumped on Thursday was that Friday was usually payday, and by Thursday people were starting to run short of money.

The usual scenario ran something like this:

1. Mommy wants to use the remaining money to buy Little Timmy’s school lunch on Friday.

2. Daddy wants to use the money to buy beer.

Therefore:

3. Daddy beats Mommy to death, takes the money, and gets drunk.

Unfortunately Daddy is usually unable to reason out the next couple of steps, which are:

4. Daddy ends up in prison, and;

5. Little Timmy gets lost in the foster care system, which mightily increases the odds of Timmy becoming an angry sociopath who perpetuates the cycle of violence into the next generation.

The other high time for homicide was late Saturday night and early Sunday morning, where the motivation might also be money, but was usually sex and/or love.

However, on this particular week in May, the bliss of a beautiful spring seemed to have descended on New York, and all the Daddies had decided they didn’t need the beer after all and taken all the Little Timmys of the city to the park to play catch, and Gordon was finished with his work by one in the afternoon. So he gave himself and Gaida the rest of the day off and took the train to Warren County, where he spent the rest of the afternoon loading model rockets with his homemade APCP and firing them into the mellow May sky.

On Saturday Steely Dan was scheduled to come round in the afternoon to help plot a static test facility for the aerospike engine, but he hadn’t turned up. Gordon called his home and mobile with no result, then called the garage where he worked. His boss said he hadn’t come in for work on Friday, and that he’d called Dan’s cell phone without getting an answer.

Steely Dan lived in an old shiplap farmhouse that came with twenty acres of decaying apple orchard. Gordon drove there, found Dan’s truck and car in the garage, and pounded on the door without result. That’s when he called Franny Black, and Franny called the Jersey police, who still hadn’t turned up.

New Jersey loved its jokers, that was clear.

Franny had found Dan’s spare key under a rock in the garden, and he’d let the two of them inside. “No sign of violence,” Franny said, prowling into Dan’s bedroom. “Nothing obviously stolen. No sign of abduction at all.”

Frustration flared in Gordon’s nerves. “I can tell you one thing,” he said. “Dan didn’t do Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.”

“Christ.” Franny rolled his eyes. “That lead went nowhere,” he said. “Just like I told him it would.”

“Any leads on El Monstro?”

Franny shook his head, and tapped the butt end of his pen against his jaw. “Jokers,” Franny said. “Dogs. Jokers and dogs. Dogs and jokers.” He waved a hand in frustration. “I don’t get it.”

“What I get about the Jersey cops,” Gordon said, “is that they care more about the dogs than the jokers.”

Franny hesitated, then put a hand on Gordon’s arm. “I’ll find your friend.”

“Let’s hope,” Gordon said, “that he’s not found stretched out on a road somewhere.”

The Jersey police did eventually show up, but Gallo had the weekend off and wasn’t among them, and Franny had to explain everything from the beginning. Gordon lacked the patience to hear it, so he went back to his cabin and for lack of anything better to do took one of his rockets out of the barn and put it on the launcher. He pressed the igniter into the solid fuel at the base of the rocket and connected it to the nine-volt battery and remote receiver. He then stepped to a safe distance, flicked the rocker switch on his remote control to ON, and saw the LEDs shift from Safety to Armed. He poised his thumb over the Fire button, looked at the rocket, made sure his binoculars were in his other hand, and pressed the button.

Gordon raised his binoculars to his eyes as the rocket flew straight and true for six or eight hundred meters, then ran out of fuel, popped its parachute, and drifted home to Earth.

He watched the launch without pleasure. After the rocket drifted silently to its meeting with the lush New Jersey meadow, Gordon stared at it for a long while, frustration building in his heart, and then he put the rocket gear back in the barn and carried his binoculars to the car. He drove to the grove of silver maples from which he and Dina had observed the IDS facility, parked, went into the woods, and settled down to observe the compound.

The NYPD would call Gordon’s operation a “plant.” Everyone else in the world called it a “stakeout.”

Observation didn’t reveal much. A trainer exercised half a dozen German shepherds on a dog run inside the compound. Both the dogs and the trainer seemed to be enjoying themselves. Occasionally Gordon saw people walking from one building to another. He was too far away to recognize any of them. He coped with the tedium by planning a more scientific investigation of the compound. He’d visit a spy store in Manhattan, he decided, buy some boom mikes, a video camera with a telephoto lens, a capacious hard drive capable of holding twenty-four hours’ worth of images.

If Steely Dan’s distinctive silhouette appeared on any of the video, or his distinctive strangled-puppet voice on audio, that would suffice for a warrant. Or so he imagined.

Gordon was working out the finer details of this fantasy when he heard a car slowing on the highway behind him. He turned and his heart gave a lurch as he saw a white panel van pulling up onto the highway shoulder behind his Volvo.

Moist earth squelched beneath his feet as he ducked behind a hackberry bush, then raised his binoculars. He could see only the dark silhouette of a driver behind the windscreen. The driver seemed to be peering around, looking for the Volvo’s driver. Gordon huddled into himself on the far side of the hackberry.

After thirty seconds or so the driver gunned his engine, then pulled the van back onto the highway. Gordon watched as he drove past, then turned into the IDS facility.

I believe I have been busted, he thought. If the driver had got his license plate, they could have his ID in short order. He’d been in newspapers with one thing or another, and all they’d have to do to get his picture was Google his name.

Maybe Dina was right, and he really sucked as an investigator.

Sunday afternoon with Dina wasn’t a success. The day was gray and overcast, with scattered showers, and Gordon was too distracted by Dan’s disappearance to play host. Though Dina actually seemed interested in the rockets and the big aerospike engine sitting unassembled in the barn, Gordon himself couldn’t raise his usual enthusiasm. As he loaded one of his bigger rockets with APCP, he told Dina about his plan to stake out the IDS facility, and asked what kind of cameras and detectors would be best.

“I’m not an expert on any of that stuff,” Dina said. “You should ask some of the detectives back at Fort Freak-Kant or somebody. They’re used to running plants.”

“Franny Black is supposed to be in charge of the investigation.”

“Little Mister Golden Drawers. The Spy from the Commissioner’s Office.” Her face gave a little twist of distaste, and then she gave the matter more thought. “It doesn’t have to be you running the plant,” she pointed out. “You don’t need a warrant to surveil a place, or to point a shotgun mic out a window. Franny could do it legally.” She cackled. “And the rest of the precinct would love it if he spent all his time out here.”

Gordon nodded. “I’ll talk to him.”

Dina gave another laugh. “And if Franny weren’t so wet behind the ears,” she said, “he’d know that while he can’t get a warrant to visit IDS to look for a missing joker, there are agencies who have a job inspecting places like IDS. There has to be some Jersey state agency who has the right to walk in and make sure the dogs aren’t being abused.” She thought for a moment, her eyes staring into space, and then she snapped her fingers. “Office of Animal Welfare,” she said. “I’ve worked with them a couple times. I can make some calls for you.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

She looked at the rocket. “How far can that one go up?”

“A couple miles.”

Dina was startled. “Seriously?”

“Sure. Three stages, it’ll go high. I have to make sure there aren’t any aircraft around.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You got rockets bigger than that?”

“Sure. But I’m a lot more careful about firing them off. Some of them, I have to go to Nevada.”

She grinned. “Area 51?”

He gave her a blank look. “Where?”

“Never mind.”

“I go to Black Rock,” Gordon said.

She smiled, shook her head. “That’s great,” she said.

Gordon had the feeling he’d just missed something.

He shouldered the five-foot-long rocket and they walked out into a meadow wet with spring showers and fragrant with the scent of wildflowers. Dina followed, carrying the launch rod that supported the rocket while it was on the ground. Gordon readied the rocket and connected the battery. After they retreated to a safe distance, Gordon listened for any approaching aircraft and heard nothing beyond the sough of the wind. He took the control out of his pocket, pressed the rocker switch to ON, watched the LEDs shift to Armed, and then handed the control to Dina.

“Be my guest,” he said. “Just press the red button.”

A delighted smile flashed across Dina’s face. Gordon decided he liked the smile a lot. “Really?” she asked.

“Sure.” He readied his binoculars.

Dina looked from the control to the rocket and back. “Do I do a countdown or anything?”

“You can do a countdown,” Gordon said, “recite a poem, sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ Whatever you like.”

“Three. Two. One.” She flashed the smile again. “To the Moon!” She pushed the button and the rocket hissed upward.

The staging worked flawlessly, with no tip-off, and the first stage tumbled back to the ground while the second stage pierced the low cloud and disappeared. Even the hiss of rocket exhaust faded. There was a distant pop as the third stage separated and-Gordon trusted-ignited. The scent of burnt propellant tinged the odor of spring flowers. The second stage, trailing streamers, drifted down through the cloud layer and landed fifty feet away. And then the third stage arrowed down, aimed like a spear at the ground.

“Oh dear,” Gordon said, and then the falling stage impaled the turf with the sound of a wet slap.

Gordon and Dina walked to the third stage, which had crumpled beyond repair. “Parachute failure,” Gordon said.

“Maybe we’ll make it to the Moon next time,” said Dina.

“We’ll send up a really big one,” Gordon said. “I’ll get Dan to come out and…” His voice trailed away as he remembered that Dan had gone missing.

Dina touched his arm. “We’ll get him back,” she said.

Gordon wasn’t comforted. Dogs and jokers, he thought. Jokers and dogs.

Gordon decided to take Dina to dinner amid the bustle and excitement of Phillipsburg, the county’s largest town. Because they were taking the train to New York and wouldn’t be coming back, Gordon locked the cabin and closed the gate on the road as they left. Rain drummed down, and Gordon turned on the wipers.

“So there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask,” he said as he pulled from his rural route onto Highway 519. “Do you think you’re a romantic?”

Dina was surprised. “Me?” she said. “I don’t think so.”

A burst of rain clattered on the roof. “With your skills,” Gordon said, “you could be a dog trainer, or a dog whisperer, or whatever they’re called. Or you could have a famous dog act and travel around the world putting on shows. But instead you wear a uniform and work in a dangerous part of town and catch criminals.” He grinned at her. “Isn’t that a romantic thing to do?” At least as romantic, he thought, as cutting up dead bodies.

Dina knit her brows in thought. “Those other jobs you mention,” she said, “they don’t come with pensions.”

Gordon looked at her. “Are pensions romantic?”

She grinned. “I hope so,” she said. “I plan on living happily ever after with mine.” She waved a hand. “With the NYPD, I’ve got a pension, I’ve got a decent paycheck, and what I do isn’t really dangerous-I just follow a dog around. The only problem I have is finding an apartment that’ll let me keep dogs.”

“You’ve got dogs of your own?”

“Yeah. Two rescue dogs. They were abused.”

“Bring them next time you come,” Gordon said. “They’ll like the country.”

She gave an unexpected scowl, and Gordon was startled at this reaction to his invitation; but then he decided she was thinking of the abuse her dogs had suffered. Then her head whipped around, and Gordon realized that they were passing the IDS facility, visible as a floodlit glow in the rain. “Stop!” she said urgently.

“What?”

“Stop. Now.”

His mind whirling, Gordon slowed and pulled to the side of the road. Dina’s eyes remained focused on the IDS compound. Her hand scrabbled for the door release.

“I’ve got to get closer,” she muttered.

“Wait,” Gordon said. “What’s going on?”

But she was already out of the car, her jacket pulled over her head. Gordon set the parking brake, opened the door, and followed. Cold rain needled his scalp and spattered rainbows on his glasses. He blinked and pursued Dina’s dark silhouette outlined by the floodlights.

She slowed and Gordon splashed up to her, his shoes half submerged in a puddle. Dina was hunched over, her jacket still pulled up over her head, both hands pressed to her forehead. Suddenly she straightened.

“They’re in there!” she said. “The captives!”

Gordon’s heart lurched in his chest. “What?” he said. He stared at her through glasses pebbled by rainfall. “How do you know?”

Dina made a frantic gesture, pointed at her head with both forefingers. “I’m seeing through a dog’s eyes!” she said. “I’m looking right at them. Dan’s in there with the others!”

“Others?” Gordon said.

Dina frantically started digging into her jacket pockets for her phone. “Gotta call Franny!” she said. “Get a warrant!”

Her words were buried beneath a torrent of barking. The chain-link fence rattled and bowed under the impact of heavy German shepherd bodies. And then Gordon was dazzled by a battery of floodlights switching on, brilliant halogen beams burning into his eyes …

“STAY WHERE YOU ARE,” said an amplified voice. “YOU ARE TRESPASSING.”

“Fuck this,” Dina muttered. She grabbed Gordon’s arm. “Back to the car!”

She turned as electric motors rolled open the front gate and three dogs raced out, barking. Heart hammering, Gordon readied himself for a doomed sprint to the car. Dina spun again, gestured with the hand that had pulled the phone from her pocket. The dogs slowed, seemingly puzzled. Then two of them stopped and sat down on the wet ground. The third walked timidly up to Dina and sniffed her hand.

She was in telepathic contact with the dogs, Gordon realized.

“Can you control them?” he asked.

“Not control,” she said. “But I can fill their minds with happy thoughts.”

“Um, good,” Gordon said. His limbs twitched, wanted to run. “What do we do now?”

“Go to the car. But slowly. You don’t want to run, because that might activate the pack instinct to chase you down.”

“Okay,” Gordon said. He began easing backwards toward the Volvo. Dina moved with him.

Lightning sizzled overhead. In the sudden searing brilliance, Gordon saw two men walking out of the IDS gate. One of them had a rifle, the other a pistol. They moved forward onto the floodlit driveway. “You stop there!” one of them called. He was the man Gordon had spoken to earlier, and he wore a cowboy hat against the rain. He brandished his rifle. “We’ll shoot!” he warned.

“Uh,” Gordon said, uncertain. “Do we run now?”

He heard steel enter Dina’s voice. “Not … just … yet,” she said.

The dogs’ ears pricked up, and they turned to look at the two advancing men. One of the dogs rose from its sitting position and took a few steps toward the two, and paused in a hunting posture, leaning forward, one forefoot raised.

“Nobody move!” said the man in the cowboy hat. He raised the rifle to his shoulder as he and his comrade advanced. Neither of them seemed to have noticed their dogs’ uncharacteristic behavior. Maybe, Gordon thought, Dina isn’t filling their minds with happy thoughts any longer.

All three dogs were on their feet now, moving low to the ground as they advanced on the two armed men. And then one of them gave a savage growl and hurled itself at the throat of the man with the rifle.

There was a shot that went nowhere and the man went down. The other two dogs were bounding to their prey, and the man with the pistol started shooting.

“Now we run!” Dina said, and she and Gordon both turned and began racing for the car. Dina’s legs were a lot shorter, but she was fast, and pulled ahead.

There were more shots, followed by an agonized canine howl. Dina gasped and pitched forward onto her face.

Gordon’s nerves gave a jolt. He splashed to a stop, turned, bent over Dina, looked for the bullet wound, asked if she was all right. Her eyes were open and staring. Her face was blank. He could hear her breathing heavily but there was no response.

Gordon shuddered as more shots cracked out. He gave a desperate glance in the direction of the gate, and through the rain beading his spectacles saw that both men were on the ground. Two dogs lay stretched out on the driveway, and one of the men wrestled with the third.

Gordon grabbed Dina by the jacket collar and began hauling her toward the car. He was all too aware that he was underweight and not very strong, and was thankful that she was so small. He was dragging her headfirst over the ground, and he realized he could injure her neck, so he tried to support her head with his forearms.

He was gasping for breath by the time he got her to the Volvo. He groped behind him for the door handle, found it, and swung the door open. The dome light flashed on, silhouetting them perfectly for any shooter taking aim.…

Actinic light flashed from the heavens. Thunder roared. Gordon took a deep breath, bent his knees, and heaved Dina’s head and shoulders up onto the passenger seat. Hot pain shot through his back. He grabbed Dina’s hips and tried to shove her center of gravity up into the car.

Normally he had help moving limp bodies around. Normally it was from slab to gurney, or gurney to slab. Normally he didn’t have to wrestle someone into a bucket seat, or avoid slamming her into the stick shift or getting her jammed against the console.

“Give me some help here!” he told Dina. “Just pull yourself into the car!”

Dina’s eyes stared blankly from her lolling head. He seized her feet and tried to shove them up into the Volvo.

A shot jolted Gordon’s nerves, and he heard the bullet hit pavement nearby. Shoving the limp body was clearly not working, and Gordon dropped Dina’s feet and ran around to the driver’s side. He threw himself into the station wagon, grabbed Dina’s collar with both hands, and tried to haul her toward him. Pain lanced through his back again as he heaved her over the central console. Her head hung in his lap in a swirl of wet, curly hair.

Another shot cracked out. There was an urgent bang somewhere in the car as the bullet struck home.

Gordon reached under Dina’s shoulder and shoved the gearshift lever into drive, then stomped on the accelerator as he cranked the wheel hard over. The Volvo made a screaming U-turn on the highway, and Gordon steadied the vehicle as a flash of lightning showed him the way home.

The car’s acceleration had swung the passenger door closed onto Dina’s feet, which were still dangling out of the car. He switched the dome light off to make himself a poorer target, then put his fingers on Dina’s throat. Her pulse was strong, just a little elevated. He could hear her respiration. He hadn’t seen or felt any blood.

But there had been shots, and she’d collapsed. That was pretty good evidence that she’d been hit somewhere. He drove to his cabin, opened the gate on the road, drove through, and locked the gate behind him. He despaired of dragging Dina into the house, so he drove behind the house, unlocked the barn door, and drove into the barn.

At least he’d have a dry place to make an examination.

Gordon took some of the plastic sheeting he’d draped over his rocketry gear and laid it on the ground next to the passenger door. Then he pulled Dina out of the car and laid her on the sheet. He performed a careful examination and could find no wound.

He had a medical bag in the cabin in case there was an accident with rocketry material. He unlocked the cabin’s rear door, fetched the bag, and returned.

Pulse stable. Blood pressure normal. Respiration normal. Pupils responded normally to light. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with Dina other than catatonia. Which, it had to be said, was really, really wrong.

She’d been in mental contact with the dogs, he thought. She’d been getting them to attack their trainers. And then the shooting had started. The dogs, he thought. The dogs had been shot, presumably killed. And Dina had been in their heads when that happened.

Maybe the shock had been too much.

He put the blood pressure cuff back in his bag, then touched her throat. The skin was chill and clammy. He should get some blankets and insulate Dina against hypothermia.

Then call an ambulance. Then call Franny and the state police and get a warrant and go crashing into IDS to free the captives. Officer down. It was one of those calls which would result in immediate action by the authorities. And Dina certainly was down.

He unlocked the rear door of the cabin and went into the hall closet for the scratchy wool trade blankets he kept there. Returning with the blankets under his arm, he saw headlights flash across the front windows.

Gordon walked across the darkened room to the living room window and peered past the drawn curtain. He saw a large panel van parked by his gate, and a man silhouetted against the headlights peering at the house.

Gordon’s heart lurched. He remembered that one of the IDS people had seen his car when he’d surveilled the compound the previous day, that they probably had his license number and ID by now.

They might have recognized his car, even in the rain. They might have just come straight here. Gordon backed away from the curtain and went to the back door. He locked the door behind him and sprinted to the barn.

Dina was as he’d left her. He put a pair of blankets over her, and her head rolled as, for a moment, her eyes fluttered open and seemed to focus. “Doc…?” she said in a hoarse whisper, and then her head fell back and her eyes closed again.

Gordon knelt and opened one eyelid. The pupil narrowed in the light, but it didn’t focus. She’d lapsed into coma again.

Gordon’s nerves leaped as he heard a roaring engine, followed by the crash of his gate going down in front of the panel van. He stood, looked down at Dina, looked at his car. It seemed futile to try to drag her into his car again, especially as all that he could hope for would be a car chase that he could well lose. He bent again, felt under the blanket, and took Dina’s gun and holster from her belt. He looked at it for a moment as the faint scent of gun oil floated to him, and then he put the holster on his own belt, feeling foolish as he did it.

What was he going to do, start a Western gunfight? These were professional bad guys, kidnappers. They’d shoot him down.

He looked again at his car. He had to draw the pursuit away from the barn.

And he knew exactly where to take them.

He went to the steel cabinet where he kept rocketry supplies and opened it. He took a battery, a set of a half-dozen igniters, a wireless receiver, and his controller. Then he turned off the lights in the barn and got in his car. He put the rocketry gear on the passenger seat.

He waited till he heard a crash as the front door of the house went down, and then he started the Volvo, gunned the engine, and backed out of the barn in a storm of power. Gravel rattled against the car as he swung around, snapped on the lights, and put the transmission in drive. Gordon stomped the accelerator again, wove through a line of evergreen, and took off down the two-rut trail that led across the meadows.

He figured there was no way the bad guys could avoid seeing his departure.

He’d gone a quarter mile before he saw the lights of the van coming after him. Lightning illuminated the rolling terrain, helped him chart his course. The Volvo bucketed up and down as it leaped along the trail, brush beating on the grille, rocks cracking against the floorboards.

The station wagon slithered down a slope and hit what seemed to be a shallow pond between it and the next slope. The tail kicked out, and the wheels spun as Gordon tried to correct. Forward motion died in mere seconds. Gravel hammered against the rear panels as the wheels spun uselessly.

Gordon grabbed his rocket gear and bolted from the car. Rain drummed on his skull as he splashed through standing water and began to run up the nearest slope. Brush clawed at his legs.

The van crowned the slope behind him and dove toward his stalled car. Gordon panted for breath. The van splashed into the same lake as the Volvo and came to a halt, wheels spinning. Two men jumped out and charged the Volvo, finding no one inside.

A flash of lightning turned the scene into day as Gordon crowned the slope, and Gordon heard a pair of shouts as he was spotted. But the flash had illuminated something else-the berms that surrounded the shed filled with rocket fuel.

Gordon dragged himself forward. He dragged himself up the nearest berm, then ran down the steep slope and slammed to a tooth-clattering halt against the steel door of the shed. Breath heaved in and out of his lungs. He wasn’t used to running. He wasn’t used to panic, or to fighting, or being soaked to the skin.

Better use his brains then, he decided.

He fumbled at his belt for the key to the padlock on the door, then opened the lock and threw it over his shoulder. He tore open the door, ran inside, and reached for the tank that held the syntin, the Soviet liquid rocket fuel. He opened the valve and the fuel began to drain, filling the shack with a rich hydrocarbon scent. Gordon dropped an igniter into the fuel, put the battery on the concrete floor nearby, twisted wires around the terminals, and ran back into the open. He left the door invitingly ajar, ran around the building, and scrambled up the far berm. At the top he tripped and fell, and as he lay sprawled in the grass at the foot of the berm he heard an accented voice say, “He’s in there!”

Gordon got to his feet and felt pain shoot through his right ankle. He lurched toward the grove of hawthorn at the far end of the meadow.

As he ran he looked at the remote control in his hand and pushed the rocker switch to ON. The LEDs flicked from Safety to Armed. He heard the door to the shed go booming back on its hinges as the intruders stormed inside, and he heaved in a sobbing breath and pressed the Fire button. He was faintly surprised to find that the berms worked exactly as they were supposed to.

“The perps were blown into their constituent atoms,” Gordon told Dina two nights later. “The crime scene guys weren’t able to find a single piece of remains.”

Dina seemed impressed. “I have to say that once you make up your mind to do something,” she said, “you’re damned thorough.”

“You’ll have to speak up,” Gordon said. “I’m still a little deaf.”

The shed had exploded and then kept exploding, going on for several minutes at least. Gordon had watched from the shelter of the hawthorns as one blast after another rocked the peaceful meadow and sent flame reaching toward the low clouds overhead.

It had to be admitted that he’d put a lot of oxidizer in that shed.

For their dinner Gordon had taken her to Au Pied de Cochon, the New York incarnation of a well-known Parisian brasserie. The linen was crisp, the waitstaff efficient, and the tulip-shaped lights cast a fine mellow glow over the dining room with its dark wood paneling. The restaurant offered proteins in substantial quantities, which given Dina’s carnivore instincts seemed appropriate.

“I hope you’ll forgive me for not going with you to the hospital,” Gordon said. “I didn’t know how to fix you, and I wanted to be there when the captives were freed in case they needed a doctor.”

Dina affected thought. “Maybe I’ll forgive you,” she said. “I’ll have to think about it.”

“I was there when you woke up,” Gordon pointed out.

She’d come to herself about noon on Monday, demanding her clothes, meat protein, and her gun. No permanent harm seemed to have been done to her, and she could remember nothing of the time she’d been in a coma. “You were the first person I saw,” said Dina. “You get points for that.”

“At least the sight didn’t send you back into a coma.”

She laughed thinly.

“When the first cops turned up at the facility,” Gordon said, “they saw three dogs shot dead in front of the gate and the corpse of a man who’d had his throat ripped out. It was an obvious crime scene, and they no longer needed a warrant to go in, but they felt a little leery of going in by themselves and called for backup, and while they waited Franny Black showed up with about half the detectives from Fort Freak.” He grinned. “They were toting some serious firepower and a lot of attitude. Harvey Kant even had a tommy gun that must have dated from Lucky Luciano’s day-which, by the way, made me wonder just how old Kant actually is. So our guys just brushed the Jersey cops aside and stormed the place.”

Gordon laughed. “They were serious. For some reason they thought you were being held captive in there.”

Dina’s eyes narrowed. “Who gave them that idea?” she asked.

“They must have misinterpreted my phone call,” Gordon said. His face was deadpan. “Our guys were too late. The compound had been emptied. At least three computers were carried away, but they did manage to pull up a few names off envelopes and bills. But they did find Steely Dan and two kidnapped Jokertown residents held in some kind of steel-lined underground cells in the rearmost building.” He shook his head. “It was like some supervillain’s headquarters from the movies.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t put them in dog cages,” Dina said.

“Dog cages aren’t strong enough for Dan or any other wild card with extra strength,” Gordon said. “He would have ripped his way right out. The perps needed a custom facility.”

“But what was it for?”

“Even the captives didn’t know.” All Steely Dan knew was that he’d gone to answer the door, and there had been a couple of guys there with stun guns. They’d tased him into helplessness, then bound him, thrown him in a van, and driven away.

“They were fed regularly. They weren’t mistreated beyond being held against their will.” He looked down at the gleaming tableware laid out on either side of his fine china plate. “The brass are thinking they were to be used to train dogs to kill people,” he said, “but I’ve been thinking. Maybe they were being held for … medical experiments.”

Dina gave a canine growl that came very close to raising the hairs on Gordon’s neck. “That ain’t right,” she said.

“Maybe if we can ID the body, or if the latent fingerprints tell us anything…”

“That dead guy was Russian or something, right?” Dina said. “If he was a crook, maybe the Russians can tell us who he was.”

“Maybe.” Gordon spread his hands wide. “So now the Jersey cops are involved, and the NYPD, and the FBI because there was a kidnapping. And FBI and ATF are both investigating my shed, because they’re half convinced I’m a terrorist.”

“‘Blown to constituent atoms,’” Dina quoted. “Where’s their evidence?”

“Well,” Gordon said dubiously, “there’s the big rocket engine in the barn. They might make something of that, I suppose.”

She gave a laugh. “At least you’re not a joker. They’d put you with the Twisted Fists.” He looked at her. She looked back at him, then frowned. “You aren’t a joker, right?” she said.

The police at Fort Freak had every reason to think he was a joker, because there it was in his file, the fact he’d tested positive for the wild card. In fact he’d been struck by the virus on the island of Okinawa, where his Air Force father had been stationed. Gordon had been in the hospital, out of his mind with fever, vast tumors growing everywhere on his skin, his heart thundering as his blood pressure crashed into the basement …

American military hospitals come equipped for all sort of contingencies. They’d given him the trump, which in those days had only a thirty percent chance of success. And it had worked, reversing the chaotic wreckage the wild card was making of his body. He’d test positive for the rest of his life, but in fact he was a nat. A nat with his height, his weight, and his olfactory sense on the extreme edge of normal, but a nat nonetheless.

“Am I a joker?” he repeated. “No, I’m not.”

She screwed up her face as she looked at him, as if she wasn’t quite sure whether or not to believe him. Then she picked up the menu. “Maybe we’d better order.” Dina frowned over the menu, which did not include an English translation. “Well,” she said, “I know what porc means.”

“Cochon also means pig,” Gordon added helpfully.

“What’s panés?”

“In breadcrumbs.”

The waiter stepped forward with his smile and his pad. Gordon ordered calf’s face for an appetizer, followed by pig’s knuckle braised in spices. Dina had onion soup for a starter, followed by-her finger traced the words on the menu as she spoke them aloud-queue, oreille, museau et pied de cochon panés, the pork dish coated in breadcrumbs.

Gordon didn’t tell her that she’d just ordered the ear, tail, snout, and foot of a pig. Foreign cookery, he thought, should come with its share of surprises.

If she didn’t like it, he decided, he’d buy her a hot dog from a vendor. Or maybe two.