"I want to give them two feet of pipe across the head."

"Let me work on it," O'Boyle said. "I'll talk to a guy I know in the prosecutor's office and find out the procedure."

"Not like drawing up a contract, is it?"

"I'll admit it's been a while since I've done any criminal work."

"Just suppose," Mitchell said, "what if I pay them and forget about it?"

"You know better than that. If you pay they won't let you forget about it. You'll pay forever."

"But if I don't, then people find out." Mitchell saw his wife on the patio in her housecoat. She always looked good. In the cold morning light she looked good.

"Let's wait and see what happens."

"I guess I ought to tell Barbara."

O'Boyle, getting fifty dollars an hour for his advice, thought about it a moment. "Mitch, I wouldn't say anything that you don't have to. Not yet, anyway. These guys could chicken out for some reason, get scared, change their mind. The whole thing could blow over like it never happened."

"The clouds break and the blue sky appears."

"Mitch, no one ever got in trouble keeping his mouth shut."

That was all the advice he could buy for one day. Some encouragement, but not much. Maybe there was something he could do about it himself. He wasn't going to sit here thinking about it.

4

It had been a sporting goods store at one time-Mitchell remembered it because he had stolen a baseball glove from the place when he was in the seventh grade and his dad was working at the Ford Highland Park plant. It was on Woodward six miles from downtown in a block of dirty sixty-year-old storefronts. The showcase windows of the sporting goods store were painted black now and whitewash lettering four feet high read, nude models.

The girls sat around the lobby in aluminum porch furniture with green-and-yellow-plaid cushions.