'Take it easy. You break that, I can't even charge you for it, 'cause it's priceless, hear?'

'I'm sorry, Derek.' A tear sprang loose from Simmons's right eye and ran down one of his plump cheeks. 'Shit.'

'Here you go, man.' Strange ripped a Kleenex from the box atop his desk and handed it to Simmons, who dabbed tenderly at his cheek. It was a delicate gesture for a man whose last day under three hundred pounds was a faded memory.

'I need to know what the man looked like,' said Simmons. 'I need to know his name.'

'It's all in the report,' Strange repeated, pushing a manila envelope across the desk. 'But you don't want to be doing nothin' about it, hear?'

Simmons opened the envelope and inched out its contents slowly and warily, the way a child approaches an open casket for the first time. Strange watched Simmons's eyes as they moved across the photographs and the written report.

It hadn't taken Strange all that long to get the goods on Denice Simmons. It was a tail-and-surveillance job, straight up, the simplest, dullest, and most common type of work he did. He had followed Denice to her boyfriend's place over in Springfield, Virginia, on two occasions and waited on the street until she came out and drove back into D.C. The third time Strange had tailed her, on a Sunday night when Jimmy Simmons was up in Atlantic City at an electronics show, he had waited the same way, but Denice did not emerge from the man's apartment. The lights went out in the third-story window where the man lived, and this was all Strange needed. He filled out the paperwork in the morning, picked up the photographs he had taken to a one-hour shop, and called Jimmy Simmons to his office the same day.

'How long?' said Simmons, not looking up from the documents.

'Three months, I'd say.'

'How you know that?'

'Denice got no other kind of business being over in Virginia, does she?'