pencil. I'll be right down."

pencil. I'll be right down."

"Terrific," Broom said, hunting around for some paper and a pencil to write a note with. "It's not enough

I work my bristles to the nubs and slave over a hot stove all day, now I'm going to be a burglar! I can see

it now. They'll send me to prison and paint stripes on my pole and I'll spend the next ten years behind

bars, looking like some kind of meshugge candy cane! I should've never left New York!"

I blew it. I, Catseye Gomez, all-around hardcase and troubleshooter, the smartest thaumagene in Santa

Fe, the cat who came up the hard way and learned in the school of hard knocks and smelly dumpsters,

stupidly blew it. I felt almost as dumb as the day I decided to fight it out with a mangy, skinny old dog

over a few choice pieces of steak tossed out by a restaurant because the meat had passed the expiration

date. Only the skinny, mangy old dog who looked as if he couldn't lick his own shadow was actually a

wild coyote, lean and tough and meaner than a junkyard dog.Much meaner. And much more dangerous,

too. I almost had my head torn off. After I got away to lick my wounds, minus the steak, needless to say,

I felt really, really dumb. Well, this time, I felt worse.

I'd always prided myself on having a lot of street smarts, but when it really counted, I hadn't come up

with any more savvy than a common, catnip-addled house cat that finds endless fascination in playing

with a ball of yarn. I've let Paulie down. And despite all my efforts, I wasn't able to save those two young

people from taking the big sleep. Mike Hammer would never have been so stupid. And though Marlowe

had made his share of dumb mistakes, he'd never pulled off any that were quite as dumb as this.

The show was already over by the time I made it to the scene. Most of the police cruisers had already

left. They'd loaded up the bodies in the meat wagon and taken them on that lonely trip down to the

morgue, where the indignity of a sliding slab in a cold storage drawer awaited them, a sad and impersonal

conclusion to two young and happy lives. I sat there, in the shadows, crouched behind a battered old

dumpster in the alley, and watched the boys in blue draw their chalk marks to indicate where the victims

had fallen. I watched them string their tapes, those little ropes with the signs on them that said, "Crime

Scene, Do Not Cross," and I watched the lab team combing the alleyway for evidence, though I knew

they wouldn't discover anything that would be of any help to them. I sat there and felt like a complete

moron for having totally misjudged the situation.

I heard a sound behind me and turned to see Blaize come trotting down the alley from the entrance on

Palace Avenue.

"I heard about what happened," Blaize said, "and I came right down. I figured you'd be here."

"Yeah," I said. "Only I got here much too late."

"Don't blame yourself, Gomez," said Blaize sympathetically. "What could you have done?"

"I'm not sure," I said, furious with myself for being so stupid, furious with the killer for taking two

innocent young lives, furious with the whole damn world for being the kind of place where things like this

could happen. "I could have donesomething, damn it. Maybe I could have leapt at the killer and

distracted him, given those two kids a chance to get away."

"Right," said Blaize laconically. "You would have attacked a necromancer, a demonic entity? That's rich.