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lapels of his jacket and pulled Leon toward him.
    “You spit on my cashmere, man!”
    “All right, Ron,” said Strange. Lattimer released Leon.
    “Everything all right over there?” said an elderly man from the backyard of the house to the left. An evergreen tree grew beside the porch, blocking their view of the man behind the voice.
    “Everything’s fine,” said Strange, speaking loudly in the direction of the man. “We’re officers of the law.”
    “No,
they ain’t!” yelled Leon.
    “Go on inside now,” said Strange. “We got this under control.”
    Strange squared his body so that he was standing close to Leon. Leon backed up a step and scratched at the bridge of his dented nose.
    “Well,” said Leon haughtily.
    “Well
water,
” said Lattimer.
    “Look here,” said Strange. “What me and my partner are going to do now, we’re going to go back inside and talk to your grandmother. Explain to her about this misunderstanding you got yourself into. I think your grandmother will see that she has to give us what we need. I’m sure this house is paid for, and from the looks of things around here, it won’t be too great a burden for her to write the check. I know she doesn’t want to see you go to jail. Shame she has to settle up the debt for your mistakes, but there it is.”
    “Won’t be the first time, I bet,” said Lattimer.
    “What ya’ll are doin’, it’s a shakedown. It’s not even legal!” Leon looked from Strange to Lattimer and drew his small frame straight. “Not only that. First you go and insult my vines. And now you’re fixin’ to shame me to my granmoms!”
    “Sooner or later,” said Strange, “everybody’s got to pay.”
    S TRANGE split up with Lattimer, drove down to the MLK Jr. library on 9th Street, and went up to the Washingtoniana Room on the third floor. He retrieved a couple of microfiche spools from a steel drawer where the newspaper morgue material was chronologically arranged. He threaded the film and scanned newspaper articles on a lighted screen, occasionally dropping change into a slot to make photostatic copies when he found what he thought he might need. After an hour and a half he turned off the machine, as his eyes had begun to burn, and when he left the library the city had turned to night.
    Outside MLK, Strange phoned Janine’s voice mail and left a message: He needed a current address on a man. He gave her the subject’s name.
    “Hey, what’s goin’ on, Strange?” said a guy who was walking by the bank of phones.
    “Hey, how you
doin?
”
    “Ain’t seen you around much lately.”
    “I been here,” said Strange.
    Strange headed uptown and stopped at the Raven, a neighborhood bar on Mount Pleasant Street, for a beer. Afterward he walked up to Sportsman’s Liquors on the same street and bought a six—pack, then drove to his Buchanan Street row house off Georgia.
    He drank another beer and got his second wind. He phoned a woman he knew, but she wasn’t home.
    Strange went up to his office, a converted bedroom next to his own bedroom on the second floor, and read the newspaper material, a series in the
Washington Post
and a
Washington City Paper
story, that he had copied from the library. As he looked them over, his dog, a tan boxer named Greco, slept with his snout resting on the toe of Strange’s boot.
    When he was done, he logged on to his computer and checked his stock portfolio to see how he had done for the day. The case for
Ennio Morricone: A Fistful of Film Music
was sitting on his desk. He removed disc one from the case and loaded it into the CPU of his computer. The first few strains of
“Per Qualche Dollaro in Piu”
drifted through the room. He turned the volume up just a hair on his Yamaha speakers, sat back in his reclining chair with his hands folded across his middle, closed his eyes, and smiled.
    Strange loved westerns. He’d loved them since he was a kid.

Chapter
3
    H E locked the front door of the shop and checked it, then