"She wanted to take me on as a bodyguard. I asked her how long and she couldn't tell me. Maybe she wouldn't tell me. I asked her what she was scared of. She laughed it off and said I'd found her out, it was just a ruse, she was really hot for my body. That was when I realized how shaky she was. She was trying her damnedest to sound wry and cool and British, like nothing was wrong, but her accent kept slipping. Something had frightened her badly. I want to know what, Jube."

"All I know is what I read in the papers," Jube said. Jay just gave him a look. As long as Chrysalis had been brokering information, the Walrus had been one of her chief snitches. All day long Jube stood in his kiosk, watching and listening, joking and gossiping with everyone who stopped to buy a paper. "C'mon," Jay said impatiently.

Jube glanced nervously up and down the street. No one was near them. "Not here," the fat joker said. "Let me close up. We'll go to my place."

Brennan watched with wry amusement as the armless joker pickpocket worked the gawkers who had gathered around the Crystal Palace. The dipper was dressed in threadbare, but carefully patched clothes. His pants were specially tailored to fit his third, centrally located leg that ended in an oddly configured foot whose toes were more dexterous than most peoples fingers. He was using this limb to pick the pockets of his unsuspecting victims.

A bright yellow crime-scene ribbon roped off the Palace's canopied entrance. The crowd gathered before it was gossipingmostly wildly and inaccurately-about the Crystal Palace and its mysterious proprietress. Newsies and street merchants were working the crowd along with the pickpocket, who suddenly turned with the sixth sense of the often-hunted and looked right at Brennan.'

Brennan nodded back and the three-legged joker cut through the crowd and headed toward him, lurching in a peculiar rocking gait, sometimes placing his third "foot" on the ground to balance himself.