Free Everything but the Squeal by Timothy Hallinan Page A

a sinking sensation in my stomach. “When did this arrive?”
    “Here? Today. It got to Kansas City yesterday. The maid sends my mail out every day, Federal Express.”
    “Has he seen it?”
    “He went home yesterday. I made him. I was worried about his heart.”
    “You're going to have to tell him now.”
    She looked up at me. “The hell I am,” she said.
    “But the money.”
    She lifted one hand from her lap and waved it away. “I've got money of my own,” she said. “I'm richer than Daddy will ever be.”
    “You'll get the money, of course.”
    “Certainly I will. She's my little girl.” She blinked twice, very quickly, and then drew both hands into fists. “The question,” she said, after a moment, “is what you'll be doing.”
    “I've got two places to go today,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “One of them, I'm not so sure about. I'll get something at the other one.”
    She looked back down at her lap, at the two sharp little fists and the expanse of navy-blue cloth drawn tight over her childbearing hips. “Please,” she said in a very small voice, “see that you do.”

6 - Jack's Redux
    T  he place I wasn't sure about was Jack's Triple-Burgers, but I had to go there anyway. Even if the note hadn't arrived to speed things up, I'd realized when I was looking at the little girl on the slab that I was finally too old to pass as anything but an undercover cop. It was time to come out from whatever meager cover I'd managed to establish, and the place to do it was the place where I was less likely to find anyone who knew Aimee. That way, if the approach failed, at least I wouldn't have locked myself out of the Oki-Burger.
    It was pretty early for Jack's. Even after I'd killed a couple of hours in the B. Dalton bookshop on Hollywood Boulevard, ignoring the pointed stares of the clerks while I read Philippe Aries' Centuries of Childhood and Gesell and Ilg's Child Development , it was only five-thirty. Most of the clientele at Jack's didn't even get up until five-thirty. I was feeling the muzzy aftereffects of Aurora's whiskey. I was also very tired, and once or twice I noticed that the book in my hands was shaking slightly. The morning at the morgue and the fact of the note had taken even more out of me than I thought it had. I felt like I needed a soul transplant.
    Figuring it couldn't get any worse, I headed for the sidewalk.
    As I emerged, blinking in the late sunlight, onto the Walk of Fame, the first thing I saw was a woman walking two little girls, aged ten or eleven. They might have been twins.
    Although it was cold, the girls wore white T-shirts, knotted above their navels, identical green-and-white running shorts that ended several inches above the bottoms of their buttocks, and identical black patent-leather collars around their necks. Hooked into each of the collars was a short black leash, the end of which the woman held in her hand. She scanned the faces of the passersby, looking for takers. Well, I thought, at least now Jack's can't get to me.
    I was wrong, as I had been so often since my first conversation with the Sorrells. The ice-cream pimp and his girl were there, and so was a Korean or Japanese teenager whom I'd seen several times before. The Oriental girl was tiny, impossibly fragile-looking, capable of ingesting vast amounts of drugs if her behavior on previous occasions was any indication, and heartbreakingly beautiful except for a ravaged coarseness in her skin that advertised bad acne in the past. She had her keeper with her, a skinny hardcase in his middle twenties whose mouth curved raggedly upward, courtesy of an old knife scar. He was sitting now, but on the move he walked like he was trying to slice his way through solid ice, elbows held away from his body, feet taking big stiff strides. His feet were encased in heavy scuffed black engineer boots, and his shirt, as always, was open to reveal his overdeveloped stomach muscles. He was smoking with jerky gestures and