Chapter One

Mickey McCord was past giving a good goddam. His old lady was messing around on him again, and he was going to fuck somebody up this time, no two ways about it. He knew who, and he knew where. The when was up to them.

Sandy worked a second job three nights a week at a posh little Italian place in Palm Beach. The restaurant closed at twelve, and there was always an hour afterwards for clean-up before anyone could leave. Mickey and their daughter were usually asleep by the time Sandy got home. Of late, she’d been slipping in an hour and sometimes two later than usual. Three in the morning, give or take. Before, she’d be home at one-twenty, one-thirty at the latest.

Mickey waited until two on one of those nights, Tuesday going to Wednesday. When she wasn’t home by then, he called the all-night coffee shop where she sometimes stopped with the other girls. They were there. Sandy wasn’t.

He locked the house and walked the two blocks over to Linus Davidson’s office, a shabby stand-alone building on an empty half acre of pavement that had once been a used car lot. All it had left was the old sales office looking pretty neglected, and weeds growing through cracks in the pavement. Strings of burned out lights hung in long arcs around the edges, and it was very quiet.

Around behind the building, Davidson’s red Caddy was parked next to the pre-cast concrete steps by the back door. Sandy’s green Volkswagen nestled up under its wing like a puppy at the tit. Both cars were in deep shadow, but enough light came through a shaded window to show the colors well enough. Mickey settled into a shadowed corner by the trash cans to wait.

He had a lightweight aluminum baseball bat with him, a DeMarini Voodoo youth model with a minus thirteen length-to-weight ratio and perfect balance. He set it on the ground to one side and thought about the line Rowdy Roddy Piper used in that cheesy sci-fi movie when he carried a shotgun into a bank full of aliens and said he was there to chew gum and kick ass, and that he was all out of bubble gum. That was Mickey, too. He was all out of bubble gum.

Let’s see. What was that woman’s name in the movie? The co-star with red hair and those fabulous ice blue eyes. Meg something. Ford? Forrester? Shit. What was her name? Foster! That was it, Meg Foster. Gorgeous woman, and Christ, those eyes.

Traffic was thin on Broadway, which Davidson’s building fronted on. In the silence between cars going by, Mickey could hear the low sounds of voices inside through the cheap glass in the office windows. It wasn’t clear enough to tell what they were saying, but there was tension evident, a minor argument of some kind. Maybe Sandy was trying to back out at the last minute and Linus was pressing her. That’s what it sounded like. Then there was a quiet period, and then a single cry.

Mickey cringed, hearing that. It was the sound that Sandy always made in the moment of penetration. He hated hearing that, knowing it was someone else driving that little wail out of her. And then he could hear the more urgent sounds and