That's right. Now she'd snapped to attention. He'd never match up to the late George Anderson, his mother's second husband, plumber fucking extraordinaire. Carlos changed the subject. Last thing he needed right now was more anger he didn't have an outlet for.

Things were about to get complicated.

"Mum," he said. "This may seem like a strange question, but you haven't annoyed anybody recently, have you?"

She grinned, lips quivering, exposing dull yellow teeth. "Me? Always annoying people."

"But annoyed somebody very badly."

"I usually annoy people very well. Ask Maggie."

"You know what I mean."

"What a strange question." Her eyes shone, twin beams of pencil torches. He watched her eyelids come down, the left slightly quicker than the right. Then they rose again. "I really have no idea what you mean."

The tanning salon was a front. Carlos had bought it many years ago from Florida Al, a fat Geordie who liked to wear Hawaiian shirts. Carlos wasn't sure why the fat lad wasn't called Hawaiian Al, but nicknames don't always make sense. Al had been using the salon as a base for a gun-running operation. All Carlos did, he just took his concept up a league. Gave it the balls that fat verga never had.

Carlos didn't kill people. He made the arrangements for someone else to do the killing. He was a broker, a go-between, an intermediary, an agent. At various times, he'd called himself by all these names.

But he wasn't a killer.

Plenty of people knew how to contact him directly. Receiving the package hadn't been that much of a surprise. The fact that someone knew that Valerie Anderson was Carlos Morales's mother worried him. He was careful to hide that, never spoke to anyone about his private life. But what was deeply troubling was the fact that the letter had arrived addressed to Charlie. There were only two people who called him Charlie: Maggie, and his mother.