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  “That’s only four people in five months,” I said, “if you count you as well. And you don’t count Tammy—God, Tammy!”

  “Angel’s feeding her,” Luke reassured me. “Still, four people in the space of time I’ve known you…two others since we got together… I think I have a right to ask…”

  I braced myself.

  “Who’s the best?”

  “You’re such a—” I began, but my disgust very quickly evaporated when Luke dropped his head and kissed me.

  Mmm, that kiss. I told you how the world sort of goes away when he kisses me. And there’s only me and Luke left, a universe inside that kiss which I’ve missed so much…

  “Well,” I said breathlessly when he let me go and gave me a quizzical look, “I may need to reconsider. Maybe another example…?”

  Luke rolled his eyes but he didn’t protest. In fact he was showing me all the extras that came with the kissing, throwing my bra on the floor and doing very interesting things in the region of my knickers, when there came a desperate hammering on the door.

  “Whoever it is, they can fuck off,” Luke growled, and I agreed. It was probably only the maid anyway.

  “Can you come back later?” I gasped. “Or maybe not at all…”

  But then a voice was added to the hammering, and my heart sank.

  “Sophie! I’m really sorry but this is really important.”

  Xander.

  “Please go the fuck away,” Luke snapped.

  “I wouldn’t disturb you, only it’s really, absolutely vital. Harvey said I should get you…”

  I looked at Luke. He shook his head at me, but then my phone started to ring, and we both groaned.

  “I’ll get that, you get the door?” I said hopelessly, and Luke, scowling, rolled off me and pulled the top blanket around him as he went over to the door.

  I picked up my phone just as it went to voice mail. Excellent.

  Xander tumbled into the room, looked from Luke to me, then back at Luke again, appreciatively, and said, “God, I am so sorry…”

  “This had better be bloody good,” Luke said, glaring at him, and the effect might have been more menacing if he’d been wearing more than a green fuzzy blanket.

  “It’s really good. Well, really bad,” Xander amended, touching his nose, which was nicely swollen and a pretty shade of purple. “I found Shapiro.”

  Thank God. “Where?”

  “In my apartment. He’s—well, he’s dead.”

  On the subway, Xander told us in quiet tones how he’d stayed up drinking and slunk back to his apartment in the early hours when he got thrown onto the street for being unable to pay his bar tab. Drunk and pissed off, he’d stumbled straight into bed and hadn’t looked around his studio space until he’d got up to get some water about an hour ago. Whereupon he’d found the body of Don Shapiro, arranged into the pose Xander had used for the portrait, which was standing next to him on an easel.

  Xander, panicking, had called Harvey for my number, and had ended up telling him the whole story. Harvey had told him Luke was here with me and that we were his best bet.

  Kind of sweet, but what the hell did he expect us to do?

  As soon as we were in the open air and I could get some signal on my phone, I called Harvey.

  “What are we, waste disposal?”

  “It’s nice to hear from you, too,” Harvey said. “Listen, look after Xander, will you? It can’t be nice finding a body in your apartment—”

  “No,” I said shortly. “I remember what it’s like.”

  “I told him you were with the government,” Harvey said.

  “Cheers.”

  “What else could I say? I’d be there myself, but I’m kinda far away and…”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said resignedly. “I’ll call you back later.”

  “Thanks, Sophie.”

  I ended the call and looked up at Luke on one side of me, and Xander on the other. Boy, they actually made me feel short. Well, maybe average sized.

  “This is it,” Xander fished a key out of his pocket as we approached a huge warehouse door. We weren’t far from the meatpacking district and the smell of dead things hung heavily in the air. I shuddered. I haven’t eaten meat since I was a child, and this kind of reminded me why. Not to mention that the smell might be coming from Shapiro…

  Xander fitted the key in a smaller portal and we stepped in after him. “It’s a total mess,” he said with what I supposed was normally cheerfulness, but now came out rather strained and horribly nervous. “Obviously I don’t usually have all the blood…”

  “That’s okay,” Luke said, slinging an arm around my shoulders. “You should see Sophie’s place.”

  I scowled at him, but Xander managed some sort of smile.

  He unlocked an inner, metal door and we walked into a big warehouse type space. The floors were thin and creaked alarmingly, there was crap all over the place—big easels and blank canvases, huge vats of paint, boxes of materials, things like bits of string and sequins on the floor. There was a curtain pulled across to just by the door; behind it was a big messy bed and a jumble of clothes, with another curtain behind that hardly concealing a little shower room.

  Every wall, the whole ceiling and all over the floor, the bedspread and the curtains, and even part of the windows, were all covered with paintings and scribblings. It was like Xander had run out of canvas and started putting down his ideas on his actual apartment.

  “Wow,” I said. “Pretty cool.”

  Xander disappeared into the bedroom section and lit up a cigarette with shaky hands.

  “Very nice,” Luke agreed distractedly. He and Xander seemed to have come to some sort of détente on the way over, after I stamped on Luke’s foot and made him apologise, and then on Xander’s and made him accept.

  “There is one thing,” Luke went on conversationally. “Where is the body?”

  Xander came out and stared around. He pointed at what might have been a sofa under decades of debris, an easel beside it, pools of sticky drying blood staining the painted floor. To be honest there was so much going on in the room I’d hardly had time to look for a body. Certainly the blood hadn’t seemed out of place on the garish floor.

  “It was right there,” Xander said, going over and cautiously lifting a large sketchbook as if expecting Shapiro’s body to be hiding under it.

  “Well, it ain’t there now,” Luke said. “Are you sure he was dead?”

  “He had a big slit right across his throat,” Xander said. “And he was sort of bluish.”

  “That might give it away,” I said. I walked over to the sofa, where the blood was dried and congealed. But then it could have been paint for all I knew. “Xander, how long since you’ve been back here? Before this morning.”

  He shrugged. “Three days.”

  “Three days without coming home?” Luke said. “Where have you been?”

  “Friends. Your hotel.”

  Luke flashed a glare at me.

  “Later,” I said wearily. “Xander, this body can’t just have vanished. Are you sure you saw it?”

  “I wasn’t that stoned,” he said indignantly, and Luke cast a despairing look in my direction.

  “What were you on last night?”

  “It was good stuff,” Xander protested, “expensive, I’ve been saving it…”

  “How stoned were you?”

  “Not very. Didn’t have much left.”

  “You hallucinated it,” Luke said flatly.

  “Nah, it wasn’t that good. Look, I know I saw it. I know it was there. I could smell it. It was like dead meat…”

  Like dead meat…

  “Xander,” I said, “what did this building used to be?”

  “I dunno, slaughterhouse probably. Some kind of storage. They swung stuff out of the big windows…” He gestured to the glass, currently covered with taped-up sketches, and I went over to look. The sketches were crumpled and torn in one corner, where the window was open on the
catch to let some air in. Or maybe more than air.

  God, even I’m not that stupid, and I’m blonde.

  “Do people still do that? Carry stuff out of windows?”

  “I guess. I don’t know.”

  “So you often see people manoeuvring big bloody things around here? Wrapped in…what, plastic?”

  “Usually,” Xander said cautiously.

  “So no one would have turned a blind eye if someone had walked out of this old slaughterhouse on the edge of the meatpacking district with a bloody bundle wrapped up in polythene?”

  They both stared at me.

  “You’re a scary lady,” Xander said.

  “I don’t like how your mind works,” Luke agreed.

  “At least it does work,” I replied, feeling pleased with myself. “Right. Some time between you calling Harvey and coming over here, someone broke in through the window you left open—”

  “It’s on a closed-in yard!”

  “—and took Shapiro’s body. Why would someone bring him here then take him away?”

  We all looked at each other, nonplussed.

  “Okay,” I sighed, “maybe not.” My grand theories have been known to come to nothing before. At least this one didn’t horribly backfire, as they also have been known to occasionally do. Ahem.

  “Maybe you weren’t supposed to find it,” Luke said to Xander. “Maybe they figured you were out and just didn’t have time to move it or something.”

  “Maybe—” I began, but I never remembered how I was going to go on from there, because the metal door swung open and a man in a shiny suit stood there, looking surprised for a few seconds.

  The same man in the same shiny suit as the guy who’d come after me and Xander yesterday.

  “Shit,” Xander gasped and threw himself to the floor, just as the shiny guy pulled out a gun and fired a shot at him. Luke and I followed Xander’s lead and ducked, and watched in horror as Xander grabbed a gun from under the sofa and aimed at the shiny guy, who was emptying the cartridge from his gun.

  “Xander—” I started.

  “No—” Luke yelled, reaching for his own gun, but Xander had already fired. There was a blast, a flash, then a sharp metal ping and a yelp from Xander.

  The shiny guy ran.

  I shuffled over to Xander, who was bleeding from a cut on his temple. “Ow!” he said indignantly, and I couldn’t meet Luke’s eyes.

  “That wasn’t your own bullet ricocheting back at you, was it?” I asked as sensibly as I could, trying hard not to crack up.

  “Might have been,” Xander said sulkily, touching the blood on his face.

  “Shouldn’t have shot at him then, eh?”

  He scowled at me.

  “Come on, we need to get out of here,” Luke said, pulling me to my feet and leaving Xander to sort himself out.

  “I need, like a Band-Aid or something,” he mumbled, stumbling to a row of units I guessed was his kitchen.

  “I have plenty,” I said. “I really do. Come on.”

  Xander shut all the windows and double-locked both doors and we walked back to the subway station. On the way Xander stopped at a bakery and shakily bought a large box of cupcakes with fat icing on them, handed us one each and ate the rest himself. When we emerged into the sunlight again at Penn Station, Luke’s phone rang with a voice mail and he listened to it with a frown.

  “Bollocks,” he said quietly as he deleted it.

  “What?”

  “That was Karen. She—” he glanced at Xander, who was lost in space with his last cupcake, and lowered his voice, “she said Shapiro’s kid’s booked on the red-eye tonight. Wants one of us to go home and keep an eye on him.”

  “You think he knows his father’s dead?”

  “How would he? Anyway, he’s seventeen, won’t he have school starting?”

  “I suppose,” I said. “So who’s going, you or me? And can’t Maria or Macbeth take care of him?”

  “Maria’s still in Spain,” Luke said, “and Macbeth’s disabling some high-tech security system in Germany. So it’s you or me.”

  I wanted to go home. I really did. But I wanted to go back with Luke, and that wasn’t likely to happen.

  “I think one of us has to keep an eye on Xander,” I said in an undertone.

  “Yes,” Luke said doubtfully, “and I’m really hoping you think it should be you.”

  “Homophobe.”

  “You know him better! And he likes you. You can talk about Harvey.”

  I sighed. I’d been about to suggest the same thing anyway.

  “So you’ll go home and keep tabs on a seventeen-year-old with a rich daddy. Mind you don’t go clubbing too much.”

  “I hate clubbing,” Luke said, and I felt cheered up.

  We took Xander back up to my room, not knowing what else to do with him, and Luke kissed me goodbye in the corridor.

  “Try and persuade him to leave the city,” he said. “I can’t think it’s safe for him to go home now they know where he lives. Mafia connections are not good.”

  I nodded. I didn’t want to let him go. He felt so lovely and solid in my arms.

  “When will I come home?” I asked wistfully.

  “When our Grand High Commander allows it. I don’t know. We’re going to have to try and figure this out. Why does every case we work on have a murder involved?”

  “I wouldn’t mind so much if there was an actual body,” I moaned. “How can you investigate the murder of a man who’s vanished?”

  “Sounds like a DC comic,” Luke said. He kissed my nose. “Be good.”

  “What are you, my mother?”

  “I hope you don’t kiss your mother like that,” Luke said, grinning.

  “Like what? Like this?”

  I kissed him properly, and if we hadn’t been in public it might have gone a lot further. But Luke pulled away from me before it did, and picked up the rucksack which consisted his total luggage, said, “Bye, then,” and walked away.

  I stood watching him until he was out of sight, then I opened the door back into my room and found Xander in the bathroom, dabbing at his temple with wet cotton wool.

  “Here,” I took it from him and sat him down on the toilet lid, “let me.”

  “So is this a girlie thing? Mother hen taking care of bleeding chickie?”

  I have to be the most unmotherly person there ever was. “Don’t push it,” I said. “Your hands were shaking, that’s all.”

  He glanced down at them. “I need a cigarette.”

  “Not in my room. The hotel police will come after you.” I cleaned up most of the blood and looked critically at the cut on his face. The bullet had just grazed him, really it was a miracle it hadn’t gone in. Half an inch to the right and Xander would have been dead.

  “You have one too.” He was touching my face, where a faint line gave away the car crash Ted and I’d been in a couple of months ago. Luke and Harvey had been with me, and I think the one to come off best was actually Ted.

  “Occupational hazard.”

  “People shoot at you a lot?”

  “Every now and then.”

  “You get used to it?”

  I’d liked to have said yes. “No.” I fetched my waterproof tape and cut little strips off it, then used them to hold the wound together, before covering it with a gauze dressing. “Now you look pretty stupid,” I told him.

  “Better than being covered with blood.” He was still touching the scar on my forehead, running his fingers back and discovering the little rip on my ear. “Same bullet?”

  “No. The cut was a car crash. The ear was a bullet.”

  “Close one.”

  “Yep.” I pulled away from him and washed my hands.

  “Got any more?”

  “More what?”

  “Scars.”

  I glanced back at him. He looked fascinated.

  “You think this is cool, don’t you?”

  He shrugged, then he nodded.

  “Xander, s
omeone just shot at you and tried to kill you. There was a dead man in your apartment. You are in big trouble and you have to leave the city.”

  Come to think of it, that did sound pretty cool. But—

  “This isn’t a movie. Next time someone comes after you with a gun they might actually kill you. Or, well, you might kill yourself.”

  He scowled at me, and I realised this was like the conversations I have with Luke. Only reversed.

  Hey, I was the mentor here! Go me.

  “You really think I should leave the city?”

  “Yes.”

  “What, like now?”

  “Well, the sooner the better.”

  He nodded, looking suddenly exhausted.

  “Sophie, I’m really tired. I didn’t exactly sleep a lot last night. Can’t I just stay here—?”

  He did look pathetic. I sighed. “Okay. But tomorrow you have to go.”

  He jumped up and hugged me. “You’re the greatest.”

  “Hmm.”

  We spent the day watching appalling daytime TV, with frequent comments from me along the lines of, “My God, you have a lot of ad breaks,” and “Christ, I thought those parodies on the Simpsons were made up,” and on occasion, “No! No! Turn it off!” It was like a car crash, I was totally unable to look away, addicted to the Weather Channel with its Bart and Homer programmes like When Hurricanes Go Bad.

  BBC, I will never complain again.

  By teatime I was so bored I was nearly crying. I went downstairs for some food and ended up getting a big bag of junk from the shop next door. On my way back past the bar I saw my barman friend and he waved at me.

  “You better now?”

  “Yes,” I said, and hesitated. “Can you give me take-out drinks?”

  He said he wasn’t supposed to, but he would for me. He made up a pitcher of strawberry margarita and I wrapped it up in a carrier bag and took it back upstairs.

  “Look what I have,” I said to Xander, letting myself in. “No cream, but you can’t have everything.”

  Xander perked up a bit with the margarita and we worked our way through some more junk food, watched a couple of really bad made-for-TV movies, and watched the sky get darker.

  “Look,” Xander pointed through the window, “you can see the glow over Times Square.”