At ten minutes past noon, Mickey walked up the single flight of stairs that led from the Grant Street entrance, in the heart of Chinatown, to the front door of his workplace, a private investigations firm called the Hunt Club.

Although the word firm was a bit of a misnomer, especially lately.

Six months before, the business had been successfully humming along in pretty much the same circumstances it had enjoyed for the first six and a half years of its existence. At that time, the owner-Wyatt Hunt-didn’t seem to have too much trouble keeping himself and his two-and-a-half-person staff busy most of the time, working primarily for several of the city’s well-heeled law firms.

Mickey’s sister, Tamara, had held down the front-desk duties and often did light field- and interrogation work, especially when women witnesses or children were involved. A junior associate-Tamara’s old boyfriend Craig Chiurco-had done the lion’s share of the legwork locating witnesses, serving subpoenas, accompanying clients to depositions, and performing the other standard grunt work that made up the business.

Mickey, in addition to occasional subpoena service to the Hunt Club, had mostly driven a cab for a living, but was pretty much on call full-time to supply transportation to Wyatt or Craig should they need it, as they often did. In a city where parking was always so problematic, access to immediate transportation turned out to be a highly valued and oft-used service.

Wyatt Hunt himself was the computer whiz and the basic brains behind the organization. A natural- born marketer, Hunt also pulled in the actual jobs that kept everyone busy.