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“Why?”

“Because I might want to ask you for something and you’re named after Satan.”

Melquarth Frost grinned.

“I saw a red bird in Prospect Park two days before you busted me,” he said.

“A red bird.”

“Pure scarlet,” he assented with a vigorous nod. “At first it was just a flash up in the trees, in between the leaves. But then it landed on a branch maybe forty feet away. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. I found myself hoping that it would get closer so I could get a better look. I was sitting on a park bench getting my head together for the job. The thing took wing and landed on the lawn in front’a me. It was big, almost the size of a crow, and there was a single black feather on the crown of its head.”

There was what I can only call a beatific look on the ex–heist man’s face.

“And?” I said.

“He looked at me and I knew that that meant something. Here some completely wild animal comes right up to you and looks you in the eye. That means something.”

He had me.

“What?” I asked.

“I wasn’t sure about the exact message, but a bird means freedom and the color red means pay attention. And I thought that a bird like that, a bird that stood out like a flare in the night, was something like me.

“And then, when the prosecutor asked you to say something about me that would throw me under the bus, you refused. You were the better man when I was running and again when I was helpless.

“Don’t get me wrong. I could have done my time. I wasn’t afraid, but you weren’t either. You were like that red bird in the tree and then you came down. That was the sign—as clear as the nose on Ork’s ugly face.

“I was committed to one more job and, like I told you, my partner shot me in the back. That right there was the final straw—the business was finished with me.”

I was convinced that Mel was crazy. But his psychopath’s vision of the world seemed cohesive and certain; something I could trust to be what it was.

“I’m involved in a couple of cases,” I said after an appreciative pause. “I’m gonna need some help and I thought maybe I could hire you. I got a small budget and could hire a man. It’s not heist money, but you’re not a heist man anymore.”

“You got it.”

“Don’t you wanna hear what it is?”

“Sure. You got to tell me, but, Mr. Oliver, if that red bird asked me to follow him I would have said yes too.”

“How much will you charge?”

“A dollar now and a dollar when it’s through.”

I took a dollar bill from my wallet and handed it to him.

“You want to take a walk with me?” I asked Melquarth Frost.

He put the dollar in his breast pocket and stood.

I followed him up the stairs and out into a fate filled with madmen and red birds, nameless cops and women who fooled you again and again.

14.

Walking across from the East Village to the West was a pivotal, even a transitional journey in my life.

My father was a criminal and therefore I had become a cop. I was framed and threatened and so stopped being official and did the work as a private dick. Every step I had taken was an equal and opposite reaction to my father—you might say that it had nothing to do with free will at all.

But me walking down those chilly autumn streets with a man so evil that no crime deterred him meant that I had taken the first steps on a different path, a path that was mine and mine alone.