t's not just the immediate prospect of being hanged that concentrates the mind wonderfully. Staring down the barrel of a gun does the trick just as well. For a long minute, nobody moved or said a word. Then Twee¬dledum gestured with his pistol toward Delia. "You, bitch. Over here."

At first, she didn't move. I knew what she was thinking. The more spread out we were, the harder it would be to keep us all covered. "I said, over here," the gunman screamed, dropping the nose of his pistol and firing. A chunk of wood from the dance floor leapt into the air inches from Delia's feet and frisbeed away across the room. "Fucking do it," he shrieked. I've never understood why it is that the guys with the guns always sound more scared than those of us without them.

Slowly, cautiously, Delia moved toward him. As soon as she came within reach, he pulled her to him by the hair, back against his chest, gun muzzle jammed into her neck. I knew then that these guys were the real thing. The neck is the professional's option. Much more sensible than holding it to the temple. The muzzle buries itself in the flesh of the neck rather than sliding on bone covered by sweating skin. Guns to temples are amateur city, a mark of someone who's watched more movies than they've committed crimes.

The man holding Delia turned so that he and his companion were almost back to back. "Nobody fucking move," the other one screamed.

"Get this fucker off me," Lovell yelled.

"I said nobody fucking move, and that means you."

"You fucking work for me, shithead," Lovell screeched, his face purpling now with sheer rage.

"We just handed in our notice, okay?" the gunman shouted, his gun pointing at Lovell and the cop still sprawled on top of him. "Okay, let's go." He took a step backward as his buddy moved forward. Awkwardly they made their way over to the fire exit. Given that only two cops had burst in the main door, I guessed that the remaining two men were outside the fire door. I sincerely hoped neither of them was the heroic type.

The gunmen had nearly made it to the fire door when Tony Tambo suddenly erupted into action. I don't know if he was playing at knights in shining armor or if it was just sheer rage at seeing his club abused like this, but he jumped up on the seat and ran straight across the table, leaping to the floor and going for the heavies. The one facing us didn't even pause for breath. He just let off two shots. The first caught Tony in the thigh, his leg bursting into shattered fragments of flesh and bone in a spray of blood. The second caught him in the abdomen as he fell, the exit wound bursting out of his back like someone had used a morphing program on his suit. His scream was like every nightmare you hope you'll never have. The groans that followed it weren't a whole lot better.

"I fucking warned you," the gunman shrieked, sound¬ing as if he was about to burst into tears. "Let's get the fuck out," he added.

His companion kicked the bar on the fire exit, which sprang open. I could just see the corner of the basement stairs that led up to the street. Then he shouted, "Get the fuck down here now, or the bitch gets it, you hear?" He stepped back, yanking Delia with him. Nothing hap¬pened, so he sidestepped her, still holding her hair, leaned into the doorway, and fired. I heard the singing whine of a ricochet against the stone walls of the stairway. Then he hauled Delia in close again. "Get them down here," he snarled.

"Come down quietly," Delia shouted. "That's an order."

By now, Tony had stopped groaning, so I was able to hear the sound of heavy feet on the steps. Two men edged through the door into the club. They followed the ges¬tures of the man with Delia and the gun and moved around the walls until they were almost parallel to Lovell and Delia's sergeant. "Okay. Nobody follow, you hear? Or the bitch dies," he screamed, rushing the door, fol¬lowed by his companion.

As they disappeared, Lovell made a superhuman effort that caught the sergeant unawares. Suddenly he was wrig¬gling free. I jumped onto the table and launched myself in a flying kick that would have got me suspended for life in any legitimate Thai boxing club. I hit Lovell in the side, and as we crashed to the ground together, I heard the sat-isfying crunch of snapping ribs and his simultaneous squeal of pain before the wind was completely knocked out of him. I rolled free and left him to Delia's sergeant. I ran for the fire exit, along with one of the cops. The oth¬ers were already out of the main door and heading for the street in a desperate bid to cut off the gunmen.

We reached the door at about the same moment the gunmen, slowed by an uncooperative Delia, reached the street. With a roar that King Kong wouldn't have been ashamed of, the one trying to control her picked her up bodily and threw her down the flight of narrow stairs.

No amount of training in how to fall drills you for that sort of experience. Delia tumbled down the steps in a loose ball, head defended by her forearms, bouncing off the walls. The cop and I stepped forward to break her fall. It was probably the worst thing we could have done. As she hit us, her leg shot out and snagged the wall. I heard the crack as bone snapped. Then we were a tumble of limbs. We settled with her face a couple of inches from mine. "What a fuck-up," she breathed. Then she fainted. I managed to free one arm from under her in spite of excruciating pain that ran like a flame up to the shoulder. When I saw the tattered sleeve of my jacket drenched in blood, I fainted too.

It had been a quiet night in casualty until we hit the infir¬mary. Tony Tambo was on the critical list, having blood pumped into him and hanging on to life by sheer willpower, according to the nurse strapping up the wrist I'd merely sprained in the crush at the foot of the fire stairs. The blood had been Tony's. I'd landed in it when I'd rolled free of Lovell. Mr. Big Promo was under arrest with four broken ribs and a collapsed lung, and I was half-expecting one of Delia's zealots to charge me with assault.

Delia herself had been sent down to the plaster room to have her ankle set and immobilized. The cop we'd both landed on was being kept in for observation with a double concussion, two unlovely black eyes, and a missing front tooth. You couldn't get near the coffee machine in recep¬tion for uniformed cops.

When the nurse had finished with the bandages, I walked down to the plaster room, taking it slowly to avoid jolting any part of my protesting body. I'd only just pushed the swing doors open when I heard a familiar Scouse accent. Alexis's cheerful raucousness was to my headache what Agent Orange is to houseplants. Delia's head swung around with all the belligerence of a punch-drunk boxer who's gone one round too many and we cho¬rused, "Go away."

"Well, that's a charming way to greet your friends. Soon as the news desk hears there's a bit of a fracas involving DCI Prentice and a private eye called Brannigan, I say to them, I'll take care of this, the girls need to see a friendly face,' " Alexis said self-righteously.

"If you're here as a journalist, go away, Alexis," I said wearily. "If I said this has not been a good night, it would be the understatement of my life. Things have gone so wrong in the last hour that I'm desperate to hit some¬body. Now, we might be in the right place for the after¬math of that sort of thing, but I really don't want it to happen to you."

"Me, I'd just settle for somebody to arrest," Delia said, her voice sounding as emotionally exhausted as she had every right to feel. "So as Kate said, Alexis the journalist can take a hike. Alexis the friend, however, is welcome to stay provided she has a set of wheels that can take us all home after this little fiasco has run its course."

"I'm sorry," I said.

Delia shook her head. "It really wasn't your fault. I should have had the sense to realize he'd be walking around with armed minders. We should have let them all walk out of there then picked Lovell up in the middle of the night when he was on his own. I misjudged it."

That should have made me feel better. Instead, I felt infinitely worse. Delia's on the point of being promoted to superintendent and an operation like this that can be painted as a screw-up wasn't going to help. Add to that the pariah status automatically granted to any police offi¬cer who puts other cops away, and it looked like my bright idea might have put Delia's next promotion into cold storage. "You'd better come back and stay with me," I offered as the first stage in what was going to be a long apology. "You won't be able to manage the stairs at your place for a few days."

She nodded. "You're probably right. Won't Richard mind?"

"Only if you try to arrest him for possession."

Delia managed a tired smile. "I think I can manage to restrain myself."

"So what actually happened?" Alexis chipped in, unable to rein herself in indefinitely.

"Gun battle in Manchester's clubland," I said. "Police officer held hostage. Man helping police with inquiries, two gunmen sought. Club owner seriously injured, two police officers with minor injuries. One private investiga¬tor who wasn't there."

Alexis grinned. "I hate it when you come home with half a tale."

Later, a lot later, when Delia was asleep in my bed and Richard in his, I sat in the dark in the conservatory with a strong mixture of Smirnoff Black Label and freshly squeezed grapefruit juice and contemplated the capital D of the moon. Tony Tambo hadn't made it; one of Delia's colleagues had rung to tell her not ten minutes after we got home. I sipped my drink and thought about how far reality had diverged from the simple little sting I'd envis¬aged. I'd gone in all gung-ho and full of myself, and now a man was dead. He'd had a girlfriend and an ex-wife and a little daughter who was the apple of his eye, according to Richard. He wasn't supposed to behave like a hero, but then, I hadn't imagined there was going to be any need for heroics.

If my life was like the movies, my character would be plan¬ning vengeance, putting the word out in the underworld that she wanted those guys so bad she could taste it. And they would be delivered to her in such a way that she could decide their fate. But my life isn't like the movies. I knew I'd be doing nothing to discover the identities of the gunmen, where they hung out or who they ran with. That was the police's job, and I couldn't do it without placing more lives in danger. After what had happened to Tony Tambo, I was through with setting myself up against the major players.

I took a long cool swallow and tried not to think about Tony's daughter. Tried not to despise myself too much. Tried desperately to remember why I'd been working so hard to find a way to stay in this destructive game.

I woke around half past sever, just as the sun climbed over my back fence and hit the end of the wicker settee where I'd finally lost consciousness. I was still wearing the tee shirt and jogging pants I'd put on after the shower I'd needed to get the last of Tony Tambo's blood off me. If there's a female equivalent of unshaven, I felt it. I rubbed the grit out of my eyes, wincing at the arrow of pain in my left wrist, and stumbled through to the kitchen. I was just filling the coffeemaker with water when I heard Delia call me. "Be right there," I said, finishing the job.

Delia was propped up on my pillows looking ten years older than she had done the day before. According to my wardrobe mirror, that still gave her a few on me. "How are you feeling?" I asked.

"You see it all."

"That bad? Shit, I better take your shoelaces and belt then."

Delia reached out and limply patted my hand. "Do I smell coffee?"

"You do. Life support systems will be available shortly."

Ten minutes later, we were sharing the first pot of cof¬fee of the day. I even relaxed the house rules enough to let her smoke in my bed. "What have you got on today?" she asked.

I shrugged. "I thought I might go down to the univer¬sity and see if I can sign up to finish my law degree this autumn."

Delia was suddenly alert. "Part-time?" she said suspi¬ciously.

"Full-time."

"Tony Tambo's death was not your fault," she said firmly.

"I know that. I just don't know if I want to do this job anymore. I didn't think it was going to be like this. Come to that, it didn't use to be like this. I don't know if it's the

world that's turning nastier or if it's just that I've had a run of cheesy luck, but some days I feel like there should be a task force of counselors, undertakers, and paramedics in the car behind me."

Delia shook her head, exasperated. "My God, you are feeling sorry for yourself this morning, aren't you? Lis¬ten, I'm the one who screwed up royally last night. A man died, and other people could have. The only way I could feel worse than I do now is if it had been you lying there on the mortuary slab. I've also probably kissed good-bye to my next promotion. But I'm not about to hand in my resignation. Even though I make mistakes, the police ser¬vice needs people like me more than I need to gratify my guilt. I don't have to tell you about the dozens of sleazy, creepy exploitative PIs there are out there. Your business needs you, just like the police needs me. What about all the times when you change people's lives for the better? You got Richard out of jail, didn't you?"

"Yeah, but if it hadn't been for me, he wouldn't have been there in the first place," I reminded her.

"You've saved businesses from going down the tube because you've identified the people who were stealing their money and their ideas. You've done work that has helped to clear up major drug syndicates."

"Oh yeah? And that's really made a difference to the amount of drugs rattling around the streets of Manchester."

"What about that case you were working when I first met you? The land fraud? If it hadn't been for your work, Alexis and Chris would have been comprehensively ripped off and they wouldn't be living in their dream home now. You've made a real difference in their lives," Delia insisted.

Her mention of Alexis and Chris reminded me forcibly of one job I still had to finish. Even if I was going to throw the towel in and sell my share of the business along with Bill, I couldn't walk away from Sarah Blackstone's murder.

When I failed to respond to Delia, she gave my arm a gentle punch. "You see? It breaks my little police heart to say it, but this city needs people who don't carry a warrant card."

I swallowed my coffee. "You sound like Commissioner Gordon," I said acidly. "Delia, I'm not Batman and this isn't Gotham City. Maybe I could make just as much dif¬ference as a lawyer. Maybe Ruth would take me on."

Delia snorted. "Listen to yourself. You want to go from cutting the feet from under the villains to defending them? You couldn't be a criminal lawyer. It's not possible only to defend the innocent, and you know it."

"I sure as hell couldn't be a crown prosecutor either," I growled.

"I know you couldn't. It's just as impossible only to prosecute the guilty. The trouble with you, Kate, is you understand the moral ambiguity of real life. And you're lucky, because the job you do lets you exercise that. You decide who your clients will be. You decide to defend the innocent and nail the guilty. You're too moral to be a lawyer. You're a natural maverick. Exploit it, don't ignore it."

I sighed. Now I knew why Philip Marlowe didn't bother with buddies.