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arms were crossed over his massive chest, his head was bent, his eyes were closed. His mouth worked as he chewed something very slowly and deliberately. Bubble gum, Sam assumed, because of the faint grape smell and the fact that Wynne had bought a six-pack of grape Dubble Bubble along with the doughnuts he’d scarfed down earlier. Since quitting smoking six weeks ago, Wynne rarely went longer than fifteen minutes without putting something in his mouth. As a result, he was gaining weight like a turkey in October, enough so that his baggy shorts were growing less baggy by the day and his shirts—today’s model was vintage Hawaiian, featuring a big-bosomed girl doing the hula on the front—strained at their buttons.
    â€œOkay?” Sam asked, surveying him.
    Wynne gave a single slow nod.
    Despite the nod, Sam continued to eye him skeptically. Sweat beaded Wynne’s forehead, his face was flushed red, and his curly, fair hair had frizzed in the heat until it looked like a brass-colored Brillo pad. To put it mildly, Wynne was not, at the moment, a poster boy for FBI spit and polish. But then, that’s what four weeks on the road chasing a murderous nutjob did to a man, Sam thought. He himself was a case in point. He was sporting a couple of days’—he’d forgotten exactly how many—worth of stubble, faded jeans, and a T-shirt that had once been black but had been washed so often and so haphazardly over the past month that it was now a kind of tie-dyed-looking gray. The jackets and ties that Bureau protocol called for had been left back in their hotel rooms. This particular August, New Orleans was a hundred degrees in the shade with a sticky humidity that never seemed to let up.
    In other words, it was just too damned hot.
    Wynne opened one bleary eye. “I need a cigarette. Bad.”
    â€œChew your gum.”
    â€œAin’t helping.”
    In front of them, a black Firebird pulled over to the curb and stopped. Both doors opened at almost exactly the same moment, and two men got out. Tensing automatically, doing a quick mental check to make sure his Sig Sauer still nestled in the small of his back where he could get to it in a matter of seconds if need be, Sam squinted at them through the shimmer of heat that rose from the sidewalk, watching, narrow-eyed, as the pair headed purposefully toward him and Wynne. Their initially brisk pace slowed as they drew closer.
    â€œYou guys learn anything in there?”
    Sam relaxed as he recognized the speaker as Phil Lewis, an FBI agent from the local field office whom he had first met some six years previously, when Sam had come to town to spearhead an investigation into a hashish-smuggling ring that was using the port of New Orleans as an entry point to the U.S. drug market. Despite the camouflage provided by the inches-high blond pompadour the guy tended like a girlfriend, Lewis was short, maybe five-nine or so beneath the hair, stocky and cocky in the way small men often are. Today he was decked out in a pale yellow sport coat, a gleaming white T-shirt, pressed jeans, and Ray-Bans. The African-American guy with him was taller, thinner, and a little more conservative in a crew cut, navy sport coat, and khakis. And Ray-Bans.
    â€œNah,” Sam replied, leaning a shoulder back against the building and folding his arms over his chest. “Long time no see, Lewis. I see you’re still a fan of Miami Vice .”
    â€œWhat?” Lewis looked bewildered and suspicious at the same time. Beside Sam, Wynne snickered.
    â€œForget it.” Sam jerked a thumb at Wynne. “This is E. P. Wynne. Phil Lewis. And ...?”
    â€œGreg Simon,” Lewis’s partner said. Perfunctory handshakes were exchanged all around, and then Sam looked at Lewis.
    â€œYou got anything?” Sam meant anything he needed to know, which Lewis perfectly understood.
    â€œNothing but a call from Dr. Deland’s office about two suspicious-looking