If she was as anal as I thought, Ms. Carmen would be out of work in two more hours. I would follow her home. I’d check around back to make sure there wasn’t an alley or a maintenance lane behind her townhouse. I’d sit in my truck and watch until dark, and then sit for an hour longer. Then I’d talk myself into leaving, figuring that if the shooters in the metallic green Monte Carlo were only trying to scare her, they, or whoever paid them to do their little gunplay act, would wait until tomorrow to see if she’d cower.

At 7:30 P.M., I called Billy.

“I’m going home,” I said. “She seems to be safe inside.”

“Good,” he said.

“Find anything on the brother?”

“Lots of minor drug arrests. Delivery and so forth-minor stuff if you’re a teenager living along Tamarind Avenue in West Palm.”

“But enough to make connections with a variety of buyers and sellers,” I said.

“True enough. Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” Billy said. “No doubt you’re due at Sherry’s.”

“Yeah,” I said, but then worried about the lack of enthusiasm in my voice.

“Go see your girl, Max,” Billy said.

“Good night, Billy.”

It was late when I got to Sherry’s. Light from a half-moon was filtering down through the big oak trees spread throughout her neighborhood. Years before the residential boom in downtown Fort Lauderdale, this had been a quiet collection of 1950s bungalows called Victoria Park. When she bought the house, Sherry used her status as a deputy for the Broward Sheriff’s Office and worked the real estate agent until she got him below eighty thousand dollars.

“The last house east of Federal Highway that’s ever going to go for under a hundred,” she liked to quote the guy as saying. That was in the late 1980s. The going price went to six times that in the crazy postmillennial years. Now it was sinking back to where it always should have been, and marketing mouths were going back to pass the area off as “historical.”