“I’ll kill you, you bastid.” The fat man huffed, his sweaty gut bouncing over his Jockey shorts.

Neal heard a woman’s voice and looked up to see a naked blond lady screaming out the window: “The film! Get the film!”

Joe Graham didn’t pause a second when he glimpsed Neal Carey. With a quick backhand toss, he flipped the camera down to the boy and kept running. Neal didn’t have to be told what to do. When you are holding an item urgently desired by a furious three-hundred-pound man in his underwear, there is only one thing to do. Neal took off down the alley and into the street, where he soon lost himself in the crowd.

The camera was one of those new small jobs, designed to fit-or more exactly to be concealed-in the palm of the hand. It was clearly not a device Uncle Dave carried to get a shot of Aunt Edna on top of the Empire State Building.

Neal hung around the streets for a while, keeping a wary eye out for angry-looking gargantuans, then he made his way over to Meg’s. Joe Graham was at the bar nursing a whiskey and holding a piece of hamburger over his left eye.

“I’m thinking you have to use a steak,” McKeegan was saying.

“You have one?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll take another whiskey.”

The bar was crowded. Neal squeezed his way over to Graham.

“Did you lose something?” Neal asked him.

“Did you find something?”

Neal handed him the camera. Graham opened it up.

“Where’s the film?”

“I’d like a hamburger. Rare. Not the one you have on your face, either. Some French fries and a beer.”

“I could just take it from you, child.”

“Unless I stashed it somewhere.”

“Get the little bastard what he wants,” Graham said to McKeegan.

Neal reached into his pocket and handed him the film. “Dirty pictures?”