I said, “Who’s the target?”

“What do you mean?”

“This is going to go very slow if you keep asking me that.”

“Well, I don’t know what the fuck you mean.”

I slapped him with the nine millimeter. Not hard enough to cut the flesh, just to get his attention, and to give me time to take the noise suppressor from my right-hand windbreaker pocket and affix it to the nine millimeter’s snout.

Seeing the silencer bothered him more than the love pat.

“I don’t dig roughing guys up,” I told him, meaning it. “But I can shoot a kneecap off and live with it. Assuming you don’t pass out, you’ll get talkative. You won’t annoy me with dumb questions.”

“It’s a guy named Cornell. Richard Cornell.”

“What does he do?”

I thought, Runs the Paddlewheel.

“He runs that club across the way-the Paddle-wheel.”

“Who hired you?”

“Doesn’t work that way.”

“You work through a middleman?”

He swallowed again and nodded. “Are you one of us or something?”

“How’s it going down?”

“Parking lot.”

“After closing?”

He nodded.

“How late does the Paddlewheel stay open?”

“Late. Five a.m. That’s the point.”

“The point?”

“The point of Haydee’s Port. The point of the Paddle-wheel. Across the river, they have to close at one a.m. People drive over to keep partying.”

“Is it dawn by five a.m.?”

“Why don’t you get a fucking almanac? Jesus.”

I shot him twice, thup thup, once for each eye of the skull on his Poison t-shirt. It was a smart-ass thing to do, but then I was responding to a smart-ass remark. The blood that spattered on the old fridge behind him gave the old kitchen a dash of color, even in the near dark.

It could use it.