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stepped backward, to String’s left, while Mel took the right side.
    â€œOne … two … three …” David felt a fin slip, and String emitted a sharp whistle and slid sideways.
    â€œDignified this cannot be,” String said.
    Mel groaned. “My back don’t like it either, but we don’t got all night while you skitter back and forth in the hallway there, and it ain’t safe to leave you alone.”
    â€œI do not do this ‘scatter.’”
    â€œThe hell you don’t.”
    â€œThe hell, then.”
    â€œDavid, did you hear that? This Elaki’s learning to cuss.”
    David felt sweat trickle down his back, and he wished he had a hand free to wipe his forehead. He thought about showers and icy beer.
    A child wailed as they turned the corner. David and Mel set String down gently. A welcoming committee awaited, outside in the hallway at the top of the stairs.

EIGHT
    The man who sat on the top steps blocking their way was in his thirties or forties, hair dark blond with red highlights. His eyebrows were startling—thick white crescents. He had a big nose and the sun-wrinkled face of a man who earns his living outdoors. His forearms, bare and hairy, were muscular. He reminded David of Popeye.
    David looked into his eyes and saw a child.
    He wore cheap blue workpants, heavy brown work shoes, a short-sleeved mustard-yellow shirt that made David wonder who dressed him every morning. But he was smiling in that open, friendly way David associated with the mentally handicapped, and he laughed when he caught sight of String.
    â€œSee that, Val? That’s an Elaki, isn’t he?”
    â€œYeah, Eddie, that’s an Elaki.” A woman stood at the top of the stairs beside a very old man—making a committee of three. She did not look friendly. The old man looked worried. Somewhere behind them, behind closed doors, a child sobbed, weary and choked.
    â€œWho might you be?” the woman said, in a low, steady voice that caught David’s attention.
    â€œWho’s asking,” Mel said. He wiped sweat from the back of his neck.
    The woman tilted her head sideways and considered him. She had beautiful skin, David thought, blue-black and glowing with sweat in the impossible heat of the building. She was barefooted, wearing a white cotton dress that was shaped by the curve of her small breasts, narrow hips, and the sweet, gentle swell of her belly. Her hair was up off her neck, casually pinned up in the way some women have of twisting their hair this way and that to get it out of their way, achieving a casual sexiness in seconds that other women cannot achieve in hours of primping. Her eyes were dark brown, almost black, her face somehow missing pretty but achieving handsome.
    It was a serious face, and she wasn’t smiling. She was looking at Mel with her long neck arched. “ I’m asking. And I know who I am. Who I am is not the issue. I’m wanting to know who you are, and you got one minute to tell me before I call the police.”
    â€œThey’ll come, too.” This from the old man, a brittle ancient whose tone of voice was querulous and unconvincing. “I have friends on the force, and a nephew in the IRS.”
    David looked at the old man, knowing there would be no friends on the force, no nephew in the IRS.
    â€œWe are the police,” Mel said.
    David offered his ID.
    It took the sass out of them, if not the wariness. David did not know whether to laugh or cry, watching them deflate, exchange looks, regroup.
    Still the enemy, he thought, just a different flavor.
    â€œWe don’t know nuthin about nuthin.” Eddie’s wide smile belied the challenge of his words. The old man patted him on the shoulder with a hand that trembled.
    â€œI’m Detective David Silver,” David said. None of them had given his ID a second glance. They were the kind of people who knew cops when they saw them. “And you