but even their faces were overmuscled, and the movement took too much effort. They settled back into the steady frowns and lowered the eyebrows a bit.

"Actually, I was going to carry through with it," FJ continued. "About a month ago. I followed you out to some graveyard in New Jersey. I even sneaked up behind you with my gun out. Funny thing, no?"

Myron nodded. "Like Henny Youngman wrote it."

FJ tilted his head. "Don't you want to know why I didn't kill you?"

"Because of Win."

The sound of his name was like a cold glass of water in the faces of both Bookends. The two giants actually stepped back but recovered quickly with a few flexes. FJ remained unruffled. "Win doesn't scare me," he said.

"Even the dumbest animal," Myron said, "has an innate survival mechanism."

FJ's eyes met Myron's. Myron tried to maintain contact, but it was hard. There was nothing behind FJ's eyes but rot and decay; it was like staring into the broken windows of an abandoned building. "Sticks and stones, Myron. Sticks and stones. I didn't kill you because, well, you already looked so miserable. It was as though-how to put this?-as though killing you would have been an act of mercy. Like I said before, funny, right?"

"You should consider stand-up," Myron agreed.

FJ chuckled and waved a well-manicured hand at nothing in particular. "Anyway, bygones. My father and uncle like you, and yes, we see no reason to antagonize Win unnecessarily. They don't want you dead, so neither do I."

His father and uncle were Frank and Herman Ache, two of New York's legendary leading leg breakers. The elder Aches had grown up on the streets, slaughtered more people than the next guy, moved up the ladder. Herman, the older brother and big cheese, was in his sixties now and liked to pretend he wasn't scum by surrounding himself with the finer things in life: restricted clubs that didn't want him, nouveau-riche art exhibits, well-coiffed charities, midtown French maitre d's who treated anyone who tipped with less than a Jackson like something they couldn't scrape off the soles of their shoes. In other words, a higher-income scum. Herman's younger brother, Frank, the psycho who had produced the equally psycho offspring who now stood in front of Myron, remained what he had always been: an ugly hatchet man who considered K mart velour sweatsuits haute couture. Frank had calmed down over the last few years, but it never quite worked for him. Life, it seemed, had little meaning for Frank Senior without someone to torture or maim.

"What do you want, FJ?"

"I have a business proposition for you."

"Gee, I just know this is really going to interest me."

"I want to buy you out."

The Aches ran TruPro, a rather large sports representation firm. TruPro had always been devoid of any semblance of scruples, recruiting young athletes with as much moral restraint as a politician planning a fund-raiser. But then their owner stacked up debts. Bad debts. The debts that attract the wrong kind of fungus. The appropriately named Ache brothers, the fungi in question, moved in and, like the parasitic entities they were, ate away all signs of life and were now gnawing on the carcass.

Still, being a sports agent was a legit way of making a living, sort of, and Frank Senior, wanting for his son what all fathers wanted, handed young FJ the reins straight out of business school. In theory FJ was supposed to run TruPro as legitimately as possible. His father had killed and maimed so that his son wouldn't have to-yep, the classic American dream with, granted, a rather deranged twist. But FJ seemed incapable of freeing himself from the old familial shackles. Why was a question that fascinated Myron. Was FJ's evil genetic, passed down from his father like a prominent nose, or was he, like so many other children, simply trying to gain his father's acceptance by proving the acorn could be as ferociously psychotic as the oak?

Nature or nurture. The argument rages on.

"MB SportsReps is not for sale," Myron said.

"I think you're being foolish."

Myron nodded. "I'll file that under One Day I Might Even Care.' "

The Bookends sort of grumbled, took a step forward, and cracked their necks in unison. Myron pointed to one, then the other. "Who does your choreography?"

They wanted to be insulted-you could just tell-except neither one of them knew what the word choreography meant.

FJ asked, "Do you know how many clients MB Sports-Reps lost in the last few weeks?"

"A lot?"

"I'd say a