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saying I better get out of here, Josephs saying they couldn’t just let me walk away with all these cops wandering the pier, and me solving the problem by swanning overboard.
    Soon they’d be telling Mota how they’d just tried but couldn’t find me. I must’ve already left the scene. No, they didn’t know where I’d gone. Now what was this tip all about?
    I scanned the ship’s rails. I couldn’t see anybody but Maggie and Josephs. Nobody else had seen me. I quietly breaststroked away, aiming for a set of docks just downriver.
    *   *   *
    Water dripped from my clothes, forming a puddle on the tile floor. I shivered under the blasting aircon. From behind a long row of glass cases, a sharp-eyed woman stared at me with one brow cocked in puzzlement.
    I held out my shades, drops of river water falling onto the glass counter. “Sorry.” I tried to wipe off the water, but wound up smearing it around. Under the glass, rows and rows of earrings and necklaces glinted through the resulting blur.
    I unfolded my sunglasses so she could see how one stem had bent when I hit the water. Through chattering teeth, I asked, “Can you fix this?”
    *   *   *
    I lay on the bed, wearing a brand-new set of cheap whites that I’d bought with some soggy pesos. My good-as-new shades covered my eyes.
    Maria sat in the sex swing, her bare feet on the floor, her toenails painted pink to match her bra, which peeked out from under a tit-hugger top. My wet clothes hung from the cables that supported the sex swing. So did my drying pesos, two dozen bills clipped on like tiny flags, each held in place by a nipple clamp posing as a clothespin.
    We didn’t speak. She seemed to sense I wasn’t in a conversational mood. My mind was grinding and churning, processing and plotting. Mota had overplayed his hand. The guy was a suit, and suits had no business poking around in a murder investigation. Not when they worked in PR. Shoving his weight around with Maggie and Josephs was an overreach. They didn’t report to him.
    I never doubted Maggie and Josephs would let me go. Tense as things were between Maggie and me, we had a history. And Josephs, he was an everyday cop, and everyday cops had a long tradition of anti-suit sentiment. He’d let me go on principle. The SOB didn’t like being told what to do.
    But Mota would keep pushing. He was already trumping up a bullshit tip to turn KOP against me and my boys. KOP was too fractured for his plan to work in full, but he didn’t need complete success. Shit, all he needed was a single kiss-ass. Just one trigger-happy uniform with designs on currying suit favor and I was fucked.
    Whether Mota killed Froelich or not, he had to be corralled. And fast.
    But he hadn’t responded to my threats. Or a pair of broken legs.
    I knew what I had to do. It was the only way to get the mission back on track. There was no other way to be sure my new protection business would succeed.
    The competition had to be eliminated.
    I had to kill him.
    I tried to tell myself I shouldn’t feel guilty. I ran tired, old rationalizations through my head. Things like, It’s his own fault for not backing down . Or, Anybody stupid enough to buck me isn’t worth the air he breathes. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth. You fuck with a monitor, you get an assful of teeth.
    I had a million of them, but none helped, the familiar pit of guilt-tinged self-loathing making my stomach ache.
    I had to kill him.
    There it was.
    “You met my sister yet?” asked Maria, her lashes gunked up with so much mascara that her lids and upper cheeks were dotted with semicircles of mascara tracks. I couldn’t see the bruise I’d given her. Whether it had faded or had just been covered by a few coats of foundation, I couldn’t tell.
    “No.”
    “She works here. She’s got a pretty face. She’s gonna do good at this.”
    “How old is she?”
    “Fifteen, but she looks older. Most people think she’s seventeen or eighteen. I’ve been