By Blood We Live

Shophie, I mangled her name the first time I ever said it. "You're a doll. A real doll."

"What are you going to do?" She had never asked me that before. Plenty of questions, like,

where did you put that file and do you want coffee and what should I tell Boyleston when he calls about the rent? But that particular one she'd never asked.

"I'm going to finish the Kendall job." I slid out of the car and closed the door softly, headed down the street. She waited, just like I'd told her, for me to reach the corner. Then the Ford's engine woke and she pulled away. I could hear the car, but the biggest relief came when I couldn't hear her pulse anymore.

Instead, I heard everyone else's. The drumbeats were a jungle, and here I was, the thirst burning a hole in me and the rain smacking at the top of my unprotected head. I flipped up the collar of my coat, wished like hell a bottle of Scotch could take the edge off the burning, and headed for Chinatown.

You can find anything in Chinatown. They eat anything down there, and I have a few friends. Still, it's amazing how a man who won't balk when you ask him to hide a dead body or a stack of bloodstained clothes might get funny ideas when you ask him to help you find…blood.

That's what butchers are for. And after a while I found what I was looking for. I had my nineteen dollars and the thirty in pin money from Miss Dale's-

Sophie's-kitchen jar. She said I was good for it, and she would take it on her next paycheck.

I would worry about getting her another paycheck as soon as I finished this out. It might take a little doing.

After two bouts of heaving as my body rebelled, the thirst took over and I drank nearly a bucket of steaming copper, and then I fell down and moaned like a doper on the floor of a filthy Chinatown slaughterhouse. It felt good, slamming into the thirst in my gut and spreading in waves of warmth until I almost cried.

I paid for another bucket. Then I got the hell out of there, because even yellow men will stop looking the other way for

some things.

It's amazing what you can do once a dame in a green dress kills you and pins you for murder.

The next thing I needed was a car. On the edge of Chinatown sits Benny's Garage, and I rousted Benny by the simple expedient of jimmying his lock and dragging him out of bed. He didn't know why I wanted the busted-down pickup and twelve jerrycans of kerosene. "I don't want to know," he whined at me. "Why'd'ja have to bust the door down? Jeez, Becker, you-"

"Shut up." I peeled a ten-spot off my diminishing bankroll and held it in front of him, made it disappear when he snatched at it. "You never saw me, Benny."

He grabbed the ten once I made it reappear. "I

never goddamn see you, Jack. I never wanta see you again, neither." He rubbed at his stubble, the rasp of every hair audible to me, and the sound of his pulse was a whack-whack instead of the sweet music of Sophie's. How long would his heart work through all the blubber he had piled on?

I didn't care. I drove away and hoped like hell Benny wouldn't call the cops. With a yard full of stolen cars and up to his ass in hock to Papa Ginette, it would be a bad move for him.

But still, I worried. I worried all the way up into Garden Heights and the quiet manicured mansions of the rich, where I found the house I wanted and had to figure out how to get twelve jerrycans over a nine-foot stone wall.

The house was beautiful. I almost felt bad, splishing and splashing over parquet floors, priceless antiques, and a bed that smelled faintly of copper and talcum powder. There was a whole closetful of green dresses. I soaked every goddamn one of them. Rain pounded the roof, gurgled through the gutters, hissed against the walls.

I carried two jerrycans downstairs to the foyer-a massive expanse of checkered black and white soon swimming in the nose-cleaning sting of kerosene-and settled myself to wait by the door to a study that probably had been Arthur Kendall's favorite place. I could smell him in there, cigars and fatheaded, expensive cologne. I ran my hands down the shaft of the shovel while I waited, swung it a few experimental times, and tapped it on the floor. It was a flathead shovel, handily available in any garden shed-and every immaculate lawn needs a garden shed, even if you get brown or yellow people out to clean it up for you.