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Fear. Someone gets word he’s on the list, his head is on the block. He has nowhere to run but to the cops. But he can’t come empty-handed, the law doesn’t give protection from the goodness of its heart. He has to come with information, he has to be willing to go back and wear a wire. Then there’s the fear of going to prison for a long stretch—one of the biggest motivations for ratting out. The feds used that particular fear to rip the guts out of the Mafia—most guys can’t deal with the fear of dying in the joint. There are the few who could—Johnny Boy Cozzo, Rafael Caro—but they’re few and far between.

Drugs. It used to be axiomatic in organized crime that if you do dope, you die. It makes guys too unpredictable, too talkative, too vulnerable. People do crazy, fucked-up things when they’re high or drunk. They gamble stupidly, they get into fights, they crash cars. And an addict? All you have to do to get information from an addict is to withhold the drug. The addict will talk.

And then there’s sex. Carnal misdeeds are not such a big deal in the drug world—unless you screw someone’s wife, girlfriend, daughter, or sister, or unless you’re gay—but out in the civilian world, sex is the undefeated champion of vulnerabilities.

Men who will confess to their wives that they cheated on their taxes, embezzled millions, hell, killed somebody, won’t cop to something on the side. Guys who make sure their buddies know that they’re players—that they have girlfriends, mistresses, hookers, high-priced call girls—would practically die before letting those same buddies find out that they don the girlfriends’ lingerie, the mistresses’ makeup; that the hookers and the call girls get a bonus for spanking them or pissing on them.

The weirder the sex, the more vulnerable the target is.

Money, anger, fear, drugs and sex.

What you’re really looking for is a combo plate. Mix any of the five and you have a guy who is on the fast track to being your victim.

Hugo Hidalgo takes a cab from Penn Station to the Four Seasons Hotel.

He spends most of his time in New York now, because that’s the new heroin hub and because, in the words often attributed to bank robber Willie Sutton, “That’s where the money is.”

Mullen is waiting for Hugo in the sitting room of a penthouse suite.

A guy in his early thirties, Hidalgo guesses, sits on one of the upholstered chairs. His sandy hair is slicked straight back, although a little disheveled as if he’s run his hands through it. He’s wearing an expensive white shirt and black suit pants, but he’s barefoot.

His elbows are on his knees, his face in his hands.

Hidalgo is familiar with the posture.

It’s someone who’s been caught.

He looks at Mullen.

“Chandler Claiborne,” Mullen says. “Meet Agent Hidalgo from DEA.”

Claiborne doesn’t look up, but mumbles, “Hello.”

“How are you?” Hidalgo says.

“He’s had better days,” Mullen says. “Mr. Claiborne rented a suite here, brought up a thousand-dollar escort, an ounce of coke, got shall we say ‘overexcited,’ and beat the hell out of the woman. She, in turn, called a detective she knows, who came up to the room, saw the coke and had the good career sense to call me.”

Claiborne finally looks up. Sees Hidalgo and says, “Do you know who I am? I’m a syndication broker with the Berkeley Group.”

“Okay …”

Claiborne sighs, like a twenty-year-old trying to teach his parents how to use an iPhone app. “A hedge fund. We have controlling interest in some of the largest office and residential building projects in the world, over twenty million square feet of prime property.”

He goes on to name buildings that Hidalgo knows, and a bunch he doesn’t.

“What I think Mr. Claiborne is trying to indicate,” Mullen says, “is that he’s an important person who has powerful business connections. Am I representing that correctly, Mr. Claiborne?”

“I mean, if I didn’t,” Claiborne says, “I’d be in jail right now, wouldn’t I?”

He’s a cocky prick, Hidalgo thinks, used to getting away with shit. “What’s a ‘syndication broker’ do?”

Claiborne is getting comfortable now. “As you can imagine, these properties cost hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars to finance. No single bank or lending institution is going to take that entire risk. It takes sometimes as many as fifty lenders to put together a project. That’s called a syndicate. I put syndicates together.”

“How do you get paid?” Hidalgo asks.

“I have a salary,” Claiborne says, “mid–seven figures, but the real money comes from bonuses. Last year it was north of twenty-eight mil.”

“Mil would be millions?”

Hidalgo’s DEA salary is $57,000.

“Yeah,” Claiborne says. “Look, I’m sorry, I did get carried away. I’ll pay her whatever she wants, within reason. And if I can make some sort of contribution to a policemen’s fund, or …”

“I think he’s offering us a bribe,” Mullen says.

“I think he is,” says Hidalgo.

Mullen says, “See, Chandler … may I call you Chandler?”

“Sure.”

“See, Chandler,” Mullen says, “money isn’t going to do it this time. Cash isn’t the coin of my realm.”

“What is the ‘coin of your realm’?” Claiborne says. Because he’s confident that there’s some kind of coin—there always is.

“This idiot’s getting snarky with us,” Mullen says. “I don’t think he’s used to taking crap from a mick or a Mexican. That isn’t the way you want to go here, Chandler.”

Claiborne says, “If I call certain people … I can get John Dennison on his private cell right now.”

Mullen looks at Hidalgo. “He can get John Dennison on his private cell.”

“Right now,” Hidalgo says.

Mullen offers him his phone. “Call him. And then here’s what’s going to happen: We take you right down to Central Booking, charge you with felony possession of a Class One drug, soliciting, aggravated assault, and attempted bribery. Your lawyer will probably bail you before we can get you to Rikers, but you never know. In any case, you can read all about it in the Post and the Daily News. The Times will take another day but they’ll get to it. So call.”

Claiborne doesn’t take the phone. “What are my other options?”

Because Claiborne is basically right, Hidalgo thinks. If he was your basic Johnny Jerkoff, he’d be downtown already. He knows he has options—rich people always have options, that’s how it works.

“Agent Hidalgo is up from Washington,” Mullen explains. “He’s very interested in how drug money makes its way through the banking system. So am I. If you could help us with that, we might be willing to forestall arrest and prosecution.”

Hidalgo thinks that Claiborne is already about as white as white gets, but now he turns whiter.

Like ghost white.

Pay dirt.

“I think I’ll take my chances,” Claiborne says.

Hidalgo hears what Claiborne didn’t say. He didn’t say, I don’t know anything about drug money. He didn’t say, We don’t do that. What he did say was that he would take his chances, meaning that he does know people who deal in dope money, and he’s more scared of them than he is of the cops.

“Really?” Mullen asks. “Okay. Maybe your money people get to the hooker and she drops the assault charges. Then you hire a seven-figure lawyer and maybe, maybe he keeps you out of jail on the coke charge. But by then it’s too late, because by that time your career is fucked, your marriage is fucked and you are fucked.”

“I’ll sue you for malicious prosecution,” Claiborne says. “I’ll destroy your career.”

“Here’s the bad news for you,” Mullen says. “I don’t care about my career. I’ve got kids dying on my watch. I only care about stopping the drugs. So sue me. I have a house in Long Island City, you can have it—the roof leaks, by the way, full disclosure.

“Now, here’s what’s going to happen—I’m going to have a DA up here in about thirty minutes. She can take your statement, which will be composed of a full and forthright confession, and write a memorandum of agreement for your cooperation, the details of which you will work out with Agent Hidalgo here. Or she can charge you with the full monty and we’ll all go to the precinct together and get this war started. But, son? I’m telling you this right now, and I beg you to believe me, I am not the guy you want to go to war with. Because I will fly the last kamikaze mission right into your ship. So you have a half hour to think about it.”

Hidalgo and Mullen step out into the hallway.

“I’m impressed,” Hidalgo says.

“Ahhhh,” Mullen says. “It’s an old routine. I have it down.”

“Do you know what we’re taking on here?”

Because Claiborne’s not entirely wrong. You start fucking with people who control billions of dollars, they fuck back. And a John Dennison could do a lot of fucking back.

“Your boss said he was willing to go the whole way,” Mullen says. “If that was bullshit, I need to know now, so I can kick this asshole.”

“I’ll call him.”

Mullen goes back in to babysit.

Hidalgo gets on the phone to Keller and fills him in. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Oh, yeah.

Keller is sure.

It’s time to start agitating.

Keller testifies in front of Ben O’Brien’s committee to brief them on his strategy for combatting the heroin epidemic. He started by dismissing the so-called kingpin strategy.

“As you know,” Keller says, “I was one of the chief supporters of the kingpin strategy—the focus on arresting or otherwise disposing of the cartel leaders. It roughly parallels our strategy in the war on terror. In coordination with the Mexican marines, we did an extraordinary job of it, lopping off the heads of the Gulf, Zeta, and Sinaloa cartels along with dozens of other plaza bosses and other high-ranking members. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked.”

He tells them that marijuana exports from Mexico are down by almost 40 percent, but satellite photos and other intelligence show that the Sinaloans are converting thousands of acres from marijuana to poppy cultivation.

“You just said that you decapitated the major cartels,” one of the senators says.

“Exactly,” Keller says. “And what was the result? An increase in drug exports into the United States. In modeling the war against terrorists, we’ve been following the wrong model. Terrorists are reluctant to take over the top spots of their dead comrades—but the profits from drug trafficking are so great that there is always someone willing to step up. So all we’ve really done is to create job vacancies worth killing for.”

The other major strategy of interdiction—the effort to prevent drugs from coming across the border—also hasn’t worked, he explains to them. The agency estimates that, at best, they seize about 15 percent of the illicit drugs coming across the border, even though, in their business plans, the cartels plan for a 30 percent loss.

“Why can’t we do better than that?” a senator asks.

“Because your predecessors passed NAFTA,” Keller says. “Three-quarters of the drugs come in on tractor-trailer trucks through legal crossings—San Diego, Laredo, El Paso—the busiest commercial crossings in the world. Thousands of trucks every day, and if we thoroughly searched every truck and car, we’d shut down commerce.”

“You’ve told us what doesn’t work,” O’Brien says. “So what will work?”

“For fifty years our primary effort has been stopping the flow of drugs from south to north,” Keller says. “My idea is to reverse that priority and focus on shutting down the flow of money from north to south. If money stops flowing south, the motivation to send drugs north will diminish. We can’t destroy the cartels in Mexico, but maybe we can starve them from the United States.”

“It sounds to me like you’re surrendering,” one says.

“No one is surrendering,” Keller says.

It’s a closed hearing but he wants to keep this on the broadest possible terms. He sure as hell doesn’t tell them about Agitator, because if you sneeze in DC someone on Wall Street says gesundheit. It’s not that he doesn’t trust the senators, but he doesn’t trust the senators. A campaign year is coming up, two of the guys sitting in front of him have set up “exploratory committees” and PACs, and they’re going to be looking for campaign contributions. And like me, Keller thinks, they’re going to go where the money is.

New York.

Blair has already tipped him that Denton Howard is crawling into bed with John Dennison.

“They had dinner together at one of Dennison’s golf clubs down in Florida,” Blair said.

Keller guesses he was on the menu.

Dennison, still flirting with running, tweeted, DEA boss wants to let drug dealers out of prison! A disgrace!

Well, Keller thinks, I do want to let some drug dealers out of prison. But he doesn’t need Howard talking out of school. After the hearing, he collars O’Brien in the hallway and tells him he wants Howard out.

“You can’t fire him,” O’Brien says.

“You can.”

“No, I can’t,” O’Brien says. “He’s a Tea Party favorite and I’m facing a revolt from the right in the next election. I can’t win the general if I lose in the primary. You’re stuck with him.”

“He’s stabbing me in the back.”

“No shit,” O’Brien says. “That’s what we do in this town. The best way for you to deal with it is to get results.”

The man is right, Keller thinks.

He goes back to the office and calls Hidalgo in.

“How are we doing with Claiborne?”

“He’s given us shit,” Hidalgo says. “‘This broker does coke, this hedge fund manager is heavy into tree …’”

“Not good enough,” Keller says. “Lean on him.”

“Will do.”

The “bottom-up” half of Agitator is going well—Cirello is climbing the ladder. But the “top-down” half is stalled—this cute piece of shit Claiborne thinks he can play them by giving them bits and pieces.

They need to bring him up short, make him produce.

No more free ride.

He pays the fare or he’s off the bus.

They meet on the Acela.

“What do you think we are, Chandler, assholes?” Hidalgo asks. “You think you can just blow us off and go on with your life?”

“I’m trying.”

“Not hard enough.”

“What do you want me to do?” Chandler asks.

“Bring us something we can use,” Hidalgo says. “New York’s fed up with your act. They’re going to prosecute.”

“They can’t do that,” Claiborne says. “We have a deal.”

“Which you haven’t lived up to.”

“I’ve been doing my best.”

“Bullshit, you have,” Hidalgo says. “You’ve been playing us. You think you’re so much smarter than a bunch of dumb cops who buy their suits off the rack, and you probably are. You’re so smart you’re going to smart your way right into a cell. You’re going to love the room service in Attica, motherfucker.”

“No, give me a chance.”

“You had your chance. We’re done.”

“Please.”

Hidalgo pretends to think about it. Then he says, “All right, let me get on the phone, see what I can do. But no promises.”

He gets up, walks out of the car and stands in the next one for a couple of minutes. Then he walks back in and says, “I bought you a little more time. But not, like, infinity. You give us something we can use, or I let New York hump you.”

Keller takes a call from Admiral Orduña.

“That kid you’re looking for,” Orduña says, “we might have a sighting.”

“Where?”

“Guerrero,” Orduña says. “Does that make any sense?”

“No,” Keller says. But when has anything to do with Chuy Barajos made any sense?

They’re not sure it’s him, Orduña says, but one of his people in Guerrero was surveilling a group of student radicals at a local college and spotted a young man hanging around the fringes who meets the description, and he heard one of the students call him Jesús.

Could be anybody, Keller thinks. “What college?”

Chuy never finished high school.

“Hold on,” Orduña says, checking his notes. “Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College.”

“Never heard of it.”

“That makes two of us.”

“I don’t suppose your guy—”

“It’s on its way, cuate.”

Keller stares at his computer screen.

Christ, the odds are …

The photo comes across.

Keller sees a short, scrawny kid in torn jeans, sneakers and a black ball cap. His hair is long and unkempt.

The photo is a little blurry, but there’s no question.

It’s Chuy.

2
Heroin Island

Let me have a dram of poison, such soon-speeding gear

As will dispense itself through all the veins …

—Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet, act V, scene 1

Staten Island, New York
2014

Bobby Cirello is thirty-four.

Young for a detective.

Chief Mullen is his hook and he’s worked for the man for a long time, first as a UC out in Brooklyn when the boss was running the Seven Six. Cirello made a shitload of cases for him. When Mullen got the big job at One Police, he brought Cirello with him, and a gold shield came with the ride across the bridge.

Cirello’s glad to be out from under UC. It’s no way to live, hanging out with skels, junkies and dealers all the time.

You can’t have your own life.

He likes his new job, his little efficiency apartment in Brooklyn Heights, just big enough for him to be able to keep clean and trim, and at least semiregular hours, although there are a lot of them.

Now he sits in Mullen’s office on the eleventh floor of One Police Plaza.

Mullen has the remote control in his hand and clicks from news channel to news channel on the television mounted to the wall. Every one of them is running the story of a famous actor’s overdose, and every one of them refers to the “flood of heroin” and the “heroin epidemic” rampant in the city. And they each maintain that NYPD “seems powerless to stop it.”

Cirello knows Mullen isn’t one to take the description “powerless” passively. Nor the phone calls from the chief of D’s, the commissioner, and Hizzoner the Mayor. Shit, about the only big shot who hasn’t piled weight on Mullen is the president of the United States, and that’s probably only because he doesn’t have his phone number.

“So now we have a heroin epidemic,” Mullen says. “You know how I know? The New York Times, the Post, the Daily News, the Voice, CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, and, let us not forget, Entertainment Tonight. That’s right, people, we’re getting ass-fucked by ET.

“All that aside, people are dying out there. Black people, white people, young people, poor people, rich people—this shit is an equal opportunity killer. Last year we had 335 homicides and 420 heroin overdoses. I don’t care about the media, I can deal with the media. What I do care about is these people dying.”

Cirello doesn’t speak the obvious. ET wasn’t there when it was blacks dying out in Brooklyn. He keeps his mouth shut, though. He has too much respect for Mullen and, anyway, the man is right.

There are too many people dying.

And we’re a few brooms trying to sweep back an ocean of H.

“The paradigm has shifted,” Mullen says, “and we have to shift with it. ‘Buy and bust’ works up to a point, but that point is far short of what we need. We’ve had some success busting the heroin mills—we’ve seized a lot of horse and a lot of cash—but the Mexicans can always make more heroin and therefore more cash. They figure these losses into their business plans. We’re in a numbers game we can never win.”

Cirello’s done some of the mill busts.

The Mexicans bring the heroin up through Texas to New York and store it in apartments and houses, mostly in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. At these “mills” they cut the H up into dime bags and sell it to the retailers, mostly gangbangers, who put it out in the boroughs or take it to smaller towns upstate and in New England.

NYPD has made some big hits on the mills—twenty-million-, fifty-million-dollar pops—but it’s a revolving door. Mullen’s right, the Mexican cartels can replace any dope and any money they lose.

They can also replace the people, because most of the personnel at the mills are local women who cut the heroin and low-level managers who work for cash. The cartel wholesalers themselves are rarely, if ever, present at the mills except for the few minutes it takes to bring the drugs in.

And the drugs are coming in.

Mullen is in daily touch with DEA liaisons who tell him the same thing is happening all over the country—the new Mexican heroin is coming up through San Diego, El Paso and Laredo into Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Washington, DC, and New York—all the major markets.

And the minor ones.

Street gangs are migrating from the cities into small towns, setting up and doing business from motels. It’s not just urban dwellers hooked on opiates now—it’s suburban housewives and rural farmers.

They aren’t Mullen’s responsibility, though.

New York City is.

Mullen cuts right to it. “If we’re going to beat the Mexicans at their game, we have to start playing like the Mexicans.”

“I’m not following you.”

“What do the narcos have in Mexico they don’t have here?” Mullen asks.

Primo tequila, Cirello thinks, but he doesn’t say it. He doesn’t say anything—Bobby Cirello recognizes a rhetorical question when he hears one.

“Cops,” Mullen says. “Sure, we have some dirty cops. Guys who’ll look the other way for cash, a few who do rips, a rare few who sell dope themselves, even serve as bodyguards for the narcos, but they’re the exception. In Mexico, they’re the rule.”

“I don’t get where you’re going with this.”

“I want you to go back undercover,” Mullen says.

Cirello shakes his head. His UC days are over—even if he wants to go back under, he can’t. He’s too well known as a cop now. He’d get made in thirty seconds, it would be a fuckin’ joke.

He tells Mullen this. “They all know I’m a cop.”

“Right. I want you to go undercover as a cop,” Mullen says. “A dirty cop.”

Now Cirello doesn’t say anything because he doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t want this job. Assignments like this are career killers—you get the rep for being dirty, the stink stays on you. The suspicion lingers, and when the promotion lists are posted, your name isn’t on them.

“I want you to put it out there that you’re for sale,” Mullen says.

“I’m a thirty-year man,” Cirello says. “I want to pull the pin from this job. This is my life, Chief. What you’re asking will only jam me up.”

“I know what I’m asking.”

Cirello grabs at straws. “Besides, I’m a gold shield. That’s too high up the chain. The last gold chains who went dirty were all the way back in the eighties.”

“Also true.”

“And everyone knows I’m your guy.”

“That’s the point,” Mullen says. “When you get a high-enough buyer, you’re going to put it out that you represent me.”

Jesus Christ, Cirello thinks, Mullen wants me to put it out that the whole Narcotics Division is up for sale?

“That’s how it works in Mexico,” Mullen says. “They don’t buy cops, they buy departments. They want to deal with the top guys. It’s the only way we get in the same room with the Sinaloans.”

Cirello’s brain is spinning.

It’s so goddamn dangerous, what Mullen’s suggesting. There’s so much that can go wrong. Other cops get word he’s dirty and run an op against him. Or the feds do.

“How are you going to paper this?” he asks. Document the operation so that if it goes south, their asses are covered.

“I’m not,” Mullen says. “No one is going to know about this. Just you and me.”

“And that guy Keller?” Cirello asks.

“But you don’t know about that.”

“If we get popped, we can’t prove we’re clean.”

“That’s right.”

“We could end up in jail.”

“I’m relying on my reputation,” Mullen says. “And yours.”

Yeah, Cirello thinks, that’s going to do a lot of good if I run into other cops who are dirty, who are taking drug money, doing rips. What the hell do I do then? I’m not a goddamn rat.

Mullen reads his mind. “I only want the narcos. Anything else you might come across, you don’t see.”

“That’s in direct violation of every reg—”

“I know.” Mullen gets up from behind his desk and looks out the window. “What the hell do you want me to do? Keep playing it by the book while kids are dying like flies? You’re too young, you don’t really remember the AIDS epidemic, but I watched this city become a graveyard. I’m not watching it again.”

“I get it.”

“I don’t have anyone else to go to, Bobby,” Mullen says. “You have the brains and the experience to do this and I don’t know who else I could trust. You have my word, I’ll do everything I can to protect your career.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, you’ll do it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you.”

Riding down in the elevator, Cirello wonders if he’s not completely, utterly and totally fucked.

Libby looks at him and says, “So you’re a nice Italian boy.”

“Actually, I’m a nice Greek boy,” Cirello says.

They’re sitting at a table at Joe Allen, near the theater where she’s working, bolting down cheeseburgers.

“‘Cirello’?” she asks.

“It doesn’t hurt to have an Italian-sounding name on the job,” Cirello says. “If you can’t be Irish, it’s the next best thing. But, yeah, I’m a Greek boy from Astoria.”

Almost a stereotype. His grandparents came over after World War II, worked their asses off and opened the restaurant on Twenty-Third Street that his father still runs. The neighborhood isn’t so Greek anymore, but a lot of them still live there and you can still hear “Ellenika” spoken on the streets.

Cirello didn’t want to go into the restaurant business, and it’s a good thing he has a younger brother who did so his parents weren’t heartbroken when Bobby went first to John Jay and then to the police academy. They came to his graduation and were proud of him, although they always worry, and never really understood when he was undercover and would show up with shaggy hair and a beard, looking thin and haggard.

His grandmother looked him straight in the eyes and asked, “Bobby, are you on drugs?”

“No, Ya-Ya.”

I just buy them, he thought. It was impossible to explain his life to them. Another reason undercover is such a tough gig—nobody understands what you really do except other undercovers, and you never see them anyway.

“And you’re a detective,” Libby says now.

“Let’s talk about you.”

Libby is freaking beautiful. Rich red hair Cirello thinks they usually describe as “lustrous.” A long nose, wide lips and a body that won’t quit. Legs longer than a country road, although Cirello wouldn’t know much about country roads. He saw her at a Starbucks in the Village, turned around and said, “I have you for a low-fat macchiato type.”

“How did you know?”

“I’m a detective.”

“Not a very good one,” Libby said. “I’m a low-fat latte.”

“But your phone number,” Cirello said, “is 212-555-6708. Am I right?”

“No, you’re wrong.”

“Prove it.”

“Let me see your badge,” Libby said.

“Oh, you’re not going to turn me in for sexual harassment, are you?” Cirello asked.

But he showed her his badge.

She gave him her phone number.

He had her down as a cop groupie, except it took him about eighteen phone calls to get her to this table.

“There’s not much to tell,” she says. “I’m from a little town in Ohio, I went to Ohio State and studied dance. Six years ago I came to the big city to make it.”

“How’s that going?”

“Well,” she says, shrugging, “I’m on Broadway.”

Libby’s in the chorus of Chicago, which Cirello figures is probably the dancer equivalent of a gold shield. And she’s looking at him with those green eyes, letting him know that she’s his equal.

Cool, Cirello thinks.

Very cool.

“You live in the city?” he asks.

“Upper West Side,” she says. “Eighty-Ninth between Broadway and Amsterdam. You?”

“Brooklyn Heights.”

“I guess we’re not geographically compatible,” Libby says.

“You know, I’ve always thought geography was overrated,” Cirello says. “I don’t think they even teach it in school anymore. Anyway, I work in Manhattan, down at One Police.”

“What’s that?”

“NYPD headquarters,” he says. “I work in the Narcotics Division.”

“So I shouldn’t smoke weed around you.”

“I don’t care,” Cirello says. “I’d do it with you, except they test us from time to time. Let me ask you something, you have roommates?”

“Bobby,” she says, “I’m not sleeping with you tonight.”

“I didn’t ask you to,” Cirello says. “Frankly, I’m offended. What do I look like, some cheap whore, you can let him buy you a burger and you think it means you can have your way with him?”

Libby laughs.

It’s deep and throaty and he likes it a lot.

“Do you have roommates?” Libby asks.

“No,” Cirello says. “I have an efficiency, you have to step outside to change your mind, but I like it. I’m not there a lot.”

“You work all the time.”

“Pretty much.”

“What are you working on now?” she asks. “Or can you tell me?”

“We were going to talk about you,” Cirello says. “For instance, I didn’t think dancers ate cheeseburgers.”

“I’ll have to take an extra class tomorrow, but it’s worth it.”

“Class?” Cirello asks. “I thought you already went to college for this.”

“You have to keep working,” Libby says, “to stay in shape. Especially if you’re going to indulge in late-night meat binges, and I realized how gross that sounded the second it came out of my mouth. How about you? Do you eat healthy?”