"I guess not all that well, Leon," I admitted. After all, I only had her word for it that she was my mother. I never knew my dad, so I couldn't ask him. And my birth certificate had a different name on it as my mother==Mom explained that saying she changed her name when she went into the witness protection program... Jeezus! Of course. She must have had all the connections, probably even the habit--she used to explain all those infections on the insides of her elbows and the backs of her knees as the result of blackberry scratches: She liked to pick "Blackberry Blossom," and she'd get in the mood by picking blackberries. She never did explain why the infections never hit the backs of her elbows or the fronts of her knees...but, shit, she was all the Mom I had and anybody who ain't got loyalty to his mom ain't worth pissin' on. Then something occured to me: Leon hadn't said which of the two Babys was Fongoul's hit-chick.

"Hey, Leon," I said, dragging my mind back to the subject at hand, "just which of the Babys I ran into is the hit-chick, anyway?"

"You mean there were two of them?" Leon looked puzzled.

"Yeah, two--although all I had implied was plural, not an exact number--are you keeping something from me, pal?" He looked at me as if he thought I didn't trust him, kind of pulled back into himself. "Shee-it, Leon," I assured him--I needed all the friends I had. "I was just gamin' you a bit, like old times."

"Always the kidder," he said, opening up a bit. "That's what always pissed me off about you. Always there with a joke, even when it was time to get dead serious about things." He thought a while, then got back to sortin' out Baby's, "The real Baby is a real babe," he said.

"Both of 'em were...one big difference, though, was cup size--the first had a nice pair in the key of C, while the other was triple E, we're talkin' Dolly Parton here."

"Okay, I can help you out here. The one with the EEE cups is--What the fuck?" His hand came from his neck with a dart between his finger and thumb. He looked at it, his mouth open, then tipped off his stool, hard. The place shook when his three hundred forty-five pounds hit the floor. I hit the floor and looked around--everyone was looking our way, but no one had a dart pistol, or even a blowgun. I took a look down at him and could see, even without checking for a pulse, that it hadn't been a tranquilizer in that dart...