“You sound surprised. You don’t toss them to the multitudes?”

“Just to passing ambulances and old ladies who fall and can’t get up.” I took a deep breath to steady my nerves, smelt the coppery tang of spilt blood, suppressed a gag.

“You all right there, Carl?”

I wasn’t, not at all, but I turned away from the covered thing on the ground and tried not to show it. “So let me get this right, Detective. You have a dead man, you don’t know who he is, but he had my card, and you took a flyer on seeing if I could identify him.”

“If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Can I stand back a bit when I do it?”

“Please. These are new shoes.”

McDeiss laid a gloved hand on my shoulder and squeezed before stepping toward the lump of something covered by a blue tarp twenty yards away. The crowd surrounding it stepped back. At McDeiss’s instruction a sharp white beam was focused on the tarp and the puddle. McDeiss leaned down, grasped the edge of the blue sheet of plastic with his gloved hand, looked at me.

I swallowed and nodded and stepped back still farther as McDeiss lifted the corner of the tarp.

I caught a glimpse, that was all it took, even bleached by the bright white light it took only a glimpse of the face rising out of a thick puddle of dark blood, only a glimpse, and I knew without a doubt. A single bat swooped low, aiming for my head. I flinched and turned away.

Joey Cheaps.

Chapter 2

JOEY CHEAPS.

I was sitting in my office, hoping something lucrative would come along and save me from bankruptcy court, when Joseph Parma, Joey Cheaps as he was known in South Philly, phoned. This was that very morning, about ten-thirty, and I wanted to tell my secretary to take a message, but I didn’t. What we needed just then was something lucrative and Joey Cheaps was not something lucrative. Joey Cheaps was the opposite of something lucrative.