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invisible.
    But he wasn’t. “Nigger!” Ponytail screamed. Bone surveyed the scene, moving his eyes without lifting his head. Yep, the white trash killer meant him, all right. There were no other black people around. “Get your little black ass over here before I count to three or…”
    He didn’t need to finish the statement. Bone hustled.
    “Yes, sir?”
    “I need some help here. Get yourself over there in the middle of those Japs and relieve them of their valuables.”
    “Yes, sir.” Bone hated to do it, but he didn’t see that he had any option other than dying real young.
    “Japs!” Ponytail screamed. “Do you hear me? Just hand this little black boy your stuff, and there won’t be any problems. Keep anything back, and you’re dead. Do you understand?”
    The tourists seemed to read him loud and clear. As Bone tiptoed among them, they handed him diamonds and pearls and cash and camcorders and gold chains and watches and cameras and one tiny lady even gave him her alligator loafers. For one brief moment Bone was tempted to slip them on, for she was about his size and he’d seen the same pair at Ralph Lauren for $550, but it just wouldn’t be right, and besides, Ponytail was stone crazy.
    “Throw it all in the car!” Ponytail waved his silver pistol at a green Oldsmobile.
    Bone hustled over to it, opened the passenger door, and had started tossing merchandise in when Blam! Ponytail blasted another Japanese tourist as a warning for them all to lie low and let him make his getaway. At the blast, Bone jumped and his body pitched forward into the Olds. He tried to back out, but it was too late. Ponytail had leaped in through the driver’s side, cranked up the engine, and they were flying down Prytania.
    *
    The man with the short haircut and the shoulder holster under his navy blue wool suit was named Special Agent Tom McGuire, and he was very pissed off. It wasn’t so much that he minded having to come in from Washington to consult with the local agent on a case that should have been closed weeks ago. He was always glad to visit the Big Easy. Except nobody told him the temperature in New Orleans was 85, and he was sweating like a pig in his navy serge. But what had really gotten his wind up was his early morning meeting in the office of Kendall Arthur Stanley, the president and CEO of New Orleans Cookin’, who was the subject of the case on which McGuire had been called in to consult.
    “Sit down, McGuire,” Stanley had said, not so much issuing an invitation as an order when he pointed at one of the two red leather chairs on the other side of his antique mahogany desk. Stanley’s expensively appointed, book-lined office reminded you that he’d been a rich lawyer before he’d become an even richer packager of imitation Creole frozen TV dinners. “Now listen, McGuire, I know you’ve been sent down here to clean up the local agents’ mess, but I have to tell you that I am singularly unimpressed with y’all so far.”
    “Well, Mr. Stanley, that’s—” McGuire had started, but Stanley, a tall, meaty, good-looking man with wings of wavy silver hair, McGuire’d put him at about fifty-five, went right on.
    “It’s a simple matter, really. Some damned fool son-of-a-bitch gets it in his mind to mail me one of my frozen crawfish étouffée dinners that he’s sprinkled with razor blades and broken glass, and then writes me a semi-illiterate note demanding a half-million bucks or he says he’s going to randomly doctor my product the same way in grocery stores. You all tell me to make a down payment of a hundred grand in these two numbered accounts the blackmailer’s set up at the First National and the Whitney banks.”
    “Mr. Stanley, I know—”
    “You don’t know shit! None of you know the first goddamn thing! What I know is that I deposited the hundred grand, and the son-of-a-bitch has managed to withdraw $35,000 from automatic cash machines all over Orleans and Jefferson Parishes. He’s