Hells Kitchen

you’ll hear anybody’s real secrets. They won’t tell ’em to somebody like you.”
    “And what are you telling me?” Pellam asked.
    The lawyer’s shrewdness became caution. There was a pause. “I’m telling you it’s dangerous here. Very dangerous. And getting more dangerous. There’ve been a lot of fires lately, more than normal. Gangs . . . shootings.”
    The Times Metro section was full of shooting stories. Kids smuggling guns into grade school. Innocent people were gunned down in cross fires or by crazed snipers. Pellam had stopped reading the papers his second week in town.
    “This is a rough time in the Kitchen.”
    As opposed to when? Pellam wondered.
    Bailey asked him, “Are you really sure you want to get involved?” As Pellam started to speak the lawyer held up a hand. “Are you sure you want to go where this might take you?”
    Pellam answered the question with one of his own. “How much?” He tapped his wallet.
    Bailey dipped again back into his alcohol haze. “For everything?” Shrugged. “I’ll have to find a cop to sneak me the arson report, the name of the insurance agent, anything else they have on her. The landlord and deed’re public records but it takes weeks if you don’t, you know—”
    “Grease the gears,” Pellam muttered.
    “I’d say a thousand.”
    Pellam wondered what the real object of the bargaining was: abstract morality or his own gullibility.
    “Five hundred.”
    Bailey hesitated. “I don’t know if I can do it for that.”
    “She’s innocent, Louis,” Pellam said. “That means we have God on our side. Doesn’t that buy us a discount?”
    “In Hell’s Kitchen?” Bailey roared with laughter. “This is the neighborhood that God forgot. Give me six and I’ll do the best I can.”

FIVE
    He had the map spread out on the beautiful butcher-block table.
    Smoothing the paper under his long, thin fingers. Sonny took pleasure in paper, knew it was the reincarnated skin of trees. He liked the sound of paper when it moved, he liked the feel. He knew that it burned best of anything.
    Sonny looked up and surveyed the cavernous loft.
    Back to the map. It was of Manhattan and he traced his finger along the colored lines of streets to find the building in which he now sat. With an expensive ballpoint pen he marked an X on that spot. He sipped ginger ale from a wine glass.
    He heard a shuffle and a sound like a cat mewing. He glanced to his right—at the witness who’d been flirting with Joe Buck. Poor redheaded Agent Scullery from Ernst & Young; must have been paid a shitload of money at work because this was a very nice loft indeed. He looked her up and down, deciding again that she would look a lot better if she had long hair like his. She lay on her side, feet and hands bound with duct tape. She was gagged too.
    Matter-of-factly he said to her, “Your show? On TV? I don’t really believe the FBI does all that stuff. Do you think federal agents give a shit if there are really aliens up there?” He spoke in a soothing voice, though absently. He touched the colorful squares of the map—they reminded him of blocks his mother’d bought him as a child.
    Here.
    He marked another building.
    Here.
    Another.
    He touched several others and marked them with X’s. It’d be a lot of work. But one thing that Sonny didn’t mind was work. Virtue is its own reward.
    Agent Scullery peeked over the gray metallic tape and drummed a loud, panicked dance with her feet.
    “Dear, dear, dear.” Folding the map carefully, he replaced it in his back pocket. The pen went in his breast pocket, diligently retracted. He hated ink on his clothing. Then he walked in a circle around Agent Scullery, who kicked and rolled and mewed.
    In the kitchen he examined the gas oven and stove. It was a top-of-the-line model but Sonny knew about appliances only from his profession. He used his own stove just to heat water for herbal tea. He ate only vegetables and never cooked them; he found the whole idea of heating food abhorrent. He dropped to the immaculate tile floor and pulled open the stove. He had the bimetal gas cutoff valve disabled in five seconds and the gooseneck hose off in ten. The sour scent of the natural gas odorant (the gas itself has no scent) poured into the room. Sweet and bitter and curiously appealing—like tonic water.
    He walked to the front door of the loft and flicked the light switch on then off to see which bulb went on—an overhead one not far away. Sonny