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said, “Want
the dope on the Speigh hit?”
    “You telling me you have it?”
    “No. But I know the guy who does. If you
want it, meet me out back of Smiley’s Bar in half an hour.”
    I’d never heard of it so I took the
address. He left. It was a short walk so I killed time in the neighborhood and
tried not to get mugged. The wind was tearing holes in the clouds, and letting
golden sun pour down like the rain had. I enjoyed the dazzle of it over the
East River. It hid the muck.
    If ever there was a likely place to get
mugged it was out back of Smiley’s Bar in Eastside.
    The opinion was retrospective by about one
second.
    My contact was waiting in the alley, and I
didn’t see the other man standing in a shallow portico. He sapped me and the
lights went out on my epiphany.
    It was a while after consciousness stirred
before they came back on, but didn’t avail me much. I was trussed by my arms to
a girder with my feet on the floor, in darkness that felt spacious. I could
smell rotting wood and accelerant. My headache had a friend, and I groaned just
to check I was awake.
    I saw a little light fall past me. It left
a comet tail on my retina that burned green. The light bounced on the floor and
lay still. As it sat it waned, but by then I’d woken up enough to see it was a
cigarette butt.
    Then a voice from above spoke to me. It
spoke the most profound things: “Half a pound of tuppeny rice, half a pound of
treacle...” A pause. Another red light fell and bounced away in the darkness.
Silence.
    There was another round of that, and this
time I saw something else on the floor. The burning cigarette bounced behind an
object. Even in the weak light, I could see the object’s silhouette. It was a
can. My guess was it was filled with accelerant. A chill rode my spine like a
helter skelter.
    My headaches, already joined in a duet,
swelled to a forte.
    I summoned up the spit to talk.
    “How much?” I said.
    There was a pause, then, “What price a
brother?”
    That voice was tickling my brain.
    “Make sense,” I said. “What brother?”
    “The brother you killed.”
    Now I had it fixed.
    “The psycho in the scrapyard? He was
breathing when I left him.”
    (I didn’t mention the dog. Some people get
emotional about dogs.)
    Another meteorite sailed down from above.
It landed by the can and bounced clean across its mouth.
    “But you’re alive,” said the voice. “So he’s
dead.”
    I stopped talking. In my experience psychos
sometimes came in pairs, and there wasn’t much to be gained from conversing
with them. Besides he was doing enough talking for both of us.
    More burning butts fell around the can.
They looked like the eyes of possessed rats waiting for dinner.
    “Was it so much to ask?” he went on. “A
simple answer to a simple question?”
    Another butt fell. His aim seemed to be
improving.
    “But you didn’t even let him ask the
question. And that was a failure, according to his boss...”
    There was such a glow around the can now I
could see it clearly. A piece of wire looped from one side to the other made it
a makeshift bucket.
    “...his boss, the Strawman.”
    The Strawman ?
    May as well have said the Bogeyman.
    “Strawman, huh?” I said, and began sinking
onto my shoulder joints. I dropped lower than a guy of my size should be able
to, courtesy of abused tendons, and reached a foot toward the can. “You sure he
wasn’t working for Vlad the Impaler? Or Ronald McDonald? How ‘bout Mary
Poppins?”―those burning lights must have pushed me off my game; I was spraying
anachronisms.
    The guy upstairs spat. I heard it strike
the floor wetly. He muttered something unintelligible, and when I heard the
repeated sounds of a lighter flint biting, I knew I had only seconds.
    My foot nudged the can, and for a moment I
thought it would tip its fuel over the embers. Then I maneuvered my foot under
the loop of wire, and swung my leg. I swung it upward in an arc, my shoe
holding the wire till the weight of