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spine. The muted chatter of keyboards, telephones ringing. The precinct?
    “Take him to number three and strap him down,” I heard Hollis say.
    Interrogation room number three. They sat me in the Confessional. Same shape as an old-fashioned gynecologist’s exam chair: my legs split, ankles shackled head-high.
    The door eased shut; the soft outrush of air pebbled my skin. A box cutter’s blade slashed through the blackness a quarter-inch from my eyes. Stark light flooded in.
    Hollis’s rosary beads went clikka clikka clikka . . . .
    “We’ll be needing to get to the bottom of things, you and I. Down to brass tacks.”
    My eyes adjusted. Hollis was the only one in the room. A burlap bag, the same dull grey of the walls, lay at his feet. It was Hollis’s infamous tool bag.
    “I don’t know what you want me to tell you.” My voice was a dead thing. “I don’t know anything.”
    Hollis said, “You know The Prophet’s daughter is dead. You know that what’s left of the poor dear couldn’t fill an ashtray. You know you fled the scene of an investigation—you, an officer, a primary witness and now, it must be said, a suspect. Most of all, you know the procedures of our department so I can’t imagine any of this comes as a shock.”
    He pulled a deck of cigarettes from his vest pocket, shook them at me. I hadn’t smoked in years but it was high time to get reacquainted with bad habits.
    Hollis slashed a new vent in the Sack and poked a cigarette between my lips. I coughed it out on the first inhale: it dropped to my chest, where Hollis let it sizzle through the sheen of sweat before poking it back in my mouth.
    “Go ahead, lad. Tell me what happened. Spare not the slightest detail.”
    “I picked her up after seven,” I said. “It was Eve and two friends. The Manger, she said—some singer she was keen to hear. Jimmy what’s-his-nose.”
    “Saint Kincaid.”
    “It went like any other duty: frisking cocktail waitresses, keeping gawkers at bay. There was no—”
    “The bouncer,” Hollis backtracked. “Involved?”
    “Can’t say. Wouldn’t think so.”
    “He the only one guarding the service entry?”
    “Yes.”
    Hollis cut a look at the one-way glass and nodded. Sometime tonight the bouncer would be roused from his bed, shackled, stripped, and Sacked.
    “When did Acolyte Doe arrive?”
    “Shortly after the girls were seated.”
    “And you were glad she was there,” Hollis said archly.
    “I was glad to have the appropriate backup, if that’s what you mean.”
    I stared at Hollis through the ragged slash of burlap. Hollis pinched the cigarette from between my lips.
    “Filthy things.” He crushed it under his boot. “They’ll kill you, you know.”
    “A lot of filthy things might kill me.”
    Hollis smiled at that.
    “You allowed Eve out into the crowd.”
    I said, “She’s The Prophet’s daughter.”
    “ Was The Prophet’s daughter.”
    “What Eve wants— wanted —Eve got.”
    Hollis said, “Yet you realized how badly that would compromise her security.”
    “I made her aware of that. She wanted to dance, and didn’t want me anywhere near while doing so. I refused to leave her side. She slapped me.”
    Hollis sneered. “And that was enough to melt your mettle? A slap from a nineteen-year-old girl?”
    “It wasn’t the power of the slap. It was the power of the slapper.”
    Hollis nodded with a look of patently fake understanding. Friendly Uncle Hollis. I don’t know why he bothered. Did he want to elicit something approximating the truth before beating a false confession out of me? The honest truth before the official lie?
    “Did you want her up on stage, alone, without protection? To save your own skin against the blast you knew was coming?”
    I said, “Is that how we’re playing this?”
    “This isn’t a game, son. Nobody’s playing.”
    “I was nearly killed myself.”
    “But you aren’t dead.”
    “Not yet.”
    “And your accomplice, Doe—she’s not dead,