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had played good citizen and turned it over to the cops. But it wasn’t long before another station decided it couldn’t pass up the chance for a ratings score. Once it went out over the airwaves, the dam was breached. The flood followed.
    A short time after I met Crystal Beth, we got into a war. A war to keep our house safe. It took all of us. And all we had. Just before I left for the showdown, Crystal Beth said she wanted to have my baby. That last time, as we parted before I went out to do my work, she asked me. Of all the women in my life, she was the only one who’d ever asked. Flood had told me she’d thought about it, had been thinking about it, but she went back to Japan and I never saw her again. Belle loved me. Died for me. But she knew her blood was bad—she was her sister’s daughter, and she’d never pass that along. I’ve had sex with so many women. I liked some of them; some of them had liked me. But it was only Crystal Beth who’d wanted my child.
    I’d told her the truth then. I can’t make babies. Had myself fixed a long time ago. Not because my blood was bad, like Belle’s. I don’t know my blood. “Baby Boy Burke” is all it says on my birth certificate. It’s not my blood that stopped me—it’s that I know blood doesn’t mean anything.
    But the cops had this much right: when Crystal Beth was taken from me, I needed to spill some.
    Only I couldn’t find the shooters.
    And while I was looking, this other guy kept killing the tribe they came from.
    T rolling for freaks in this city is no different from poling a skiff through a swamp, hunting for gators. They don’t have to be smart to be dangerous. And you better not fall in the water.
    The gay community already had one of the usual arrest-and-conviction bounties out on the drive-by killers. There was government money too. The lame Mayor caught so much heat the last time he opened the public coffers for reward money—for that “gay serial killer” who’d never even crossed our borders—that he was an easy mark. But even a total of more than a hundred grand didn’t turn up a trace. Oh yeah, the pay phones were clogged with quarters from informants, but not a single tip proved out.
    Then a skinhead clubhouse in Queens blew up. The whole thing. Maybe a half-dozen of them inside. Impossible to tell—too many body parts to match into complete sets. The radio stations played his tape right away this time. Short and sweet:
Skinheads all hate fags. This was always stupid. Always a mistake. Now it’s a mistake to
be
a skinhead. A
fatal
mistake. See you soon, boys.
    They should have known what would happen at the gay-pride parade. The cops, I mean. It takes them longer because they act as a herd.
    Or maybe they thought he’d only react to actual violence. When the first two drunks jeering at the queers dropped like they’d suffered heart attacks, the cops started running toward them. But by the time they figured it was him—
had
to be him, firing from a rooftop, scoped and suppressed—he was gone.
    So were the two drunks—heavy-caliber hollowpoints tend to do that to you.
    A pervert who ran something called
Homo-Haters Gazette
—a website featuring news of “successful actions” against gays around the world—must have thought the letter he got was fan mail. The cops couldn’t determine from the few fragments that they found. And they couldn’t interview a guy with a severed brainstem.
    “ T hey want you for it.” Morales, on the phone, voice like a bulldozer in a garden.
    “Get real,” I told him.
     “Just did,” he said. “Straight up. They don’t know where you are, but they’re looking.”
     “So. . .?”
     “You should come in. I know this one ain’t yours.”
     “Thanks.”
     “For what? You not slick enough to be sending no letter bombs, pal.”
    “ I can find out,” Davidson said, puffing on his cigar. “But if I make the inquiry, that alone will. . .”
    “I