I walked all the way home, pondering the intricacies of the strange roadie, the Iranian with the big shades, and Condolezza Shwartz. Who was she? What was the damn connection? The two-step in my cerebellum had slowed to a modest fox-trot by the time I came to my corner at Wallow and Eleventh. I was thinking so hard I almost turned the corner. Fortunately, I had stopped instinctively when the traffic light post starated cheeping in the dawn light. Good thing, too.

I looked up to get my bearings and stepped back around the corner, hugging the grimy bricks of the frowsy Woolworth building that anchors my block in the world. The stretch limo was parked across the street from my pad, idling smokily in the cool air, leaking power like Three Mile Island and looking about as out of place as a tree hugger at a NAFTA convention.

The three-hundred-pound driver was snoozing at the wheel, and the back section was hidden by tinted glass.

I had had enough of being pushed around, running, and watching these jerks lay rope-burns on my heart-throbs. I pulled the Belgian automatic out of my pocket and sloped through a couple of alleys that the locals use. Pretty soon I was behind the limo, coming up bent over low and seeing red. I drew up behind the fenders on the streetside and reached slowly for the rear door handle.

Before the slick dude in the shades could drop his Espresso Grande I had slid the door open and was sitting beside him with nine millimeters of P-35 attention locked firmly behind his right temple and my left hand locked onto his neck in a judo hold.

"Move and die, asshole" I whispered. The Muslim sumo wrestler in the front seat didn't stir, and I wondered fleetingly if he was dreaming of paradise or Nirvana, or some impossible relationship.

"Open that door real quiet like, Ayatollah. You and me are going for a little walk, if you want to stay whole....".

He gave me a look that his mother would have used to fry couscous and looked toward the snoozing driver. I prodded his temple with Belgian steel and he opened the door, and I moved him out onto the street and across to my walk-up doorway before he had finished grinding his teeth at me.

Upstairs, I grabbed a coil of 10-base-T wire I had left on the floor a couple of months earlier and wrapped the turkey nto a hard wooden kitchen chair. Hard. Lucky's wrists floated through my mind.

"Okay, Sidhi. Tell me the story, nice and plain. Start with who the hell are you?"