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with her doe eyes. He paid more for aged, sipping tequila and still more for double-shots that weren’t watered down. When Sydny’s routine ended, she took him for a private lap dance that unaccountably did nothing for him.
    â€œWhat’s the matter, honey?” she said in her husky, honey-drip voice. “Bad day at the office?” He had told her he was a skip tracer because with his physique accountant just wouldn’t cut it.
    He lifted her bodily off him, handed her a wad of bills, and set her aside. Outside the club he took a deep gulp of air, wondered what the hell he was doing. By that time, it was hard on midnight. Time to take the bull by its very dangerous horns.
    The last time Whitman had seen Charlie Daou was three years ago, and it wasn’t an evening he often cared to remember. Every once in a while, his third right rib still pained him; Charlie was left-handed.
    Charlie lived in a top-floor apartment on Massachusetts Ave, NW, in Cathedral Heights. The building looked like something out of a horror story, part-Gothic, part–Ottoman Empire, with fancy cement work and faux-medieval flourishes like a bell tower straight out of Vertigo . Charlie’s apartment, to the left of the tower, came complete with a terrace sporting a Moorish-style arch.
    Whitman hadn’t exaggerated: Charlie loved money above almost anything else. He’d never been able to figure that one out. Whitman rang Charlie’s buzzer, but there was no answer. Typical. He followed a tenant in, being as charming and unassuming as he could to allay any latent fears of a mugging. In fact, he asked about Charlie, but the tenant just shrugged.
    Whitman took the elevator up. The tenant exited at the third floor; Whitman continued to ascend to the top. In front of Charlie’s front door, he heard the bell ring hollowly inside. He knocked, just to make sure. Then he retraced his steps to the hallway window, an old-fashioned affair with grimy, wire-laced panes and a frame that had been painted over so many times it had lost its original shape. The half-moon metal lock, however, was easy enough to open. There was a good reason for that. He lifted the window up, reached around beneath the concrete abutment below, ripped the key and its bit of duct tape off the underside.
    Inside, he locked the door behind him. A lamp illuminated a soft oval of the living room—a triangle of a marble-topped side table and a splotch of an expensive handmade Isfahan rug. The apartment seemed virtually unchanged since he had last been here: a dinner of take-out Thai that he had criticized, sparking the fight that ended in his bruised rib and the three-year breach. Now he had returned to try and persuade Charlie to join his team. Surely a fool’s errand, despite how he had made it sound to Flix. That fight had had nothing to do with Thai food or his criticism of it. Its origins lay in a different direction entirely, and, for the most part, were hidden far below the surface. Until that night.
    With no reason to snoop around, he took a seat on the sofa in a spot furthest away from the oval of light. Then he settled down to wait. Any interest he might have had in snooping was mitigated by the fact that Charlie would know, no matter how careful he might be. Charlie’s tradecraft bordered on sorcery.
    The soft sigh of traffic drifted in through the closed windows. He could hear a clock ticking in the kitchen, the slurry of a toilet flushing in the apartment downstairs and then, briefly, water rushing. He tried not to think of what was to come, but his rib started to ache, anyway. Think of something else—anything else, he admonished himself. His breathing slowed, became deeper. He emptied himself of thought, emotion, and intent.
    Silence.
    Until a key ground in the lock and the door opened. A figure came through the doorway, reached around, switched on the overhead light, and stopped dead.
    Whitman rose from the sofa, saw a