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“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

Her eyes blazed down. Her face could’ve been carved from stone. Yeah. Paone thought, I’ll bet she’s got a couple kids herself flunking out of school and smoking pot. Bet her car just broke down and her insurance just went up and her hubby’s late for dinner every night because he’s too busy balling his secretary and snorting rails of coke off her tits, and all of a sudden it’s my fault that the world’s a shithouse full of perverts and pedophiles. It’s my fault that a lot of people out there pay righteous cash for kiddie flicks, right, baby? Go ahead, blame me. Why not? Oh, hey, and how about the drug problem? And the recession and the Middle East and the ozone layer? That’s all my fault too, right?

Her voice sounded like she had gravel in her throat when again she asked: “What do you remember?”

The query haunted him. The bits of memory blurred along with the room in his myopic eyes—bullets popping into flesh, the megaphone grating, spent cartridges spewing out of wafts of smoke—and chased him further, stalking him as relentlessly as a wild cat running down a fawn, while Paone fled on, desperate to know yet never daring to look back. …

“Shit, nothing,” he finally said. “I can’t remember anything accept bits and pieces.”

The nurse seemed to talk more to herself than to him. “A transient-global amnesic effect, retrograde and generally nonaphasic, induced by acute traumatic shock. Don’t worry, it’s a short-term symptom and quite commonplace.” The big blue eyes bore back into him. “So I think I’ll refresh your memory. Several hours ago, you murdered two state police officers and a federal agent.”

Paone’s jaw dropped.

At once the chase ended, the wild cat of memory finally falling down on its prey—Paone’s mind. He remembered it all, the pieces falling into place as quickly as pavement to a ledge-jumper.

The master run. Rodz. The loops.

And all the blood.

Another day, another ten K, Paone thought, mounting the three flights of stairs to Rodz’s apartment. He wore jersey gloves—no way he was rockhead enough to leave his prints anywhere near Rodz’s crib. He knocked six times on the door, whistling “Love Me Tender” by the King.

“Who is it?” came the craggy voice.

“Santa Claus,” Paone said. “You really should think about getting a chimney.”

Rodz let him in, then quickly relocked the door. “Anyone tailing you?”

“No, just a busload of DJ agents and a camera crew from 60 Minutes.”

Rodz glowered.

Fuck you if you can’t take a joke, Paone thought. He didn’t much like Rodz—Newark slime, a whack. Nathan Rodz looked like an anorectic Tiny Tim after a bad facelift: long, frizzy black hair on the head of a pudgy medical cadaver, speedlines down his cheeks. Rodz was what parlance dubbed a “snatch-cam"—a subcontractor, so to speak. He abducted the kids, or got them on loan from freelance movers, then shot the tapes himself. “The Circuit” was what the Justice Department called the business: underground pornography. It was a 1.5-billion-dollar-per-year industry that almost no one knew about, a far cry from the Debbie Does Dallas bunk you rented down at Metro Video. Paone muled all kinds of underground: rape loops, “wet” S&M, animal flicks, scat, snuff, and (their biggest number) “kp” and “prepubes.” Paone picked up the masters from guys like Rodz, then muled them to Vinchetti’s mobile “dupe” lab. Vinchetti’s network controlled almost all of the underground pom in the East; Paone was the middleman, part of the family. It all worked through mail drops and coded distro points. Vinchetti paid two grand for a twenty-minute master if the resolution was good; from there each master was duped hundreds of times and sold to clients with a taste for the perverse. “Logboys,” the guys who did the actual rodwork, were hired freelance on the side; that way, nobody could spin on Vinchetti him-self. Paone had seen some shit in his time—part of his job was to sample each master for quality: biker chicks on PCP blowing