At this point, we shall once again draw the curtain of privacy over the proceedings we have been following, if for no other reason than the fact that Rhyme is far less interesting when she has been gagged and restrained, and Dr. Clevenger’s efforts to extract immortality from her blood is unlikely to be of any immediate entertainment value. We will let those events percolate while we turn our eyes back towards our heroes on the eastern coast of the United States, in the city of Star Harbor, and our clock back to the morning hours.

Though his nightly patrol had long since ended, the sun had been in the sky for hours when Ray Vallenzio returned to his loft in the Twistville. There were two situations wherein he was in the habit of taking the to the roofs, pounding his feet across the blacktop and leaping across the gaps between buildings. One was when he needed to think. The other was when he needed to stop.

In this instance, he had been trying not to think and failing, which was why he ended up staying out all night. When he got back to his apartment building, he said hello to the superintendent, Daisy, who was painting a railing in the stairwell. He realized he’d been seeing less of her lately… normally, she’d have at least two of her bodies on a job like that.

Well, maybe she was spreading herself thinner. Money was tight all around, after all.

Up on the top floor, Ray passed a stoned-looking guy in the hall, with a surfer’s tan and frosted tips. He didn’t look much like a Twister, but then, neither did Daisy if you only saw one of her. The guy looked vaguely familiar to Ray, but he couldn’t place him. He was pretty sure he’d never seen him in the building before, but people… especially those who could pass in other neighborhoods… tended to come and go in Twistville.

He got a case in point when he opened the door to his own tiny apartment: Diana Peacock… mutant, martial artist, and his former partner… was sitting on the futon. She was dressed subtly as ever in an electric blue catsuit with a blue-white jacket over it. On her lap was a fat, fluffy black cat whose eyes were half-lidded as the vigilante scratched the top of its head.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Ray asked, looking at the cat.

“Your door was open,” Diana said.

“No, it wasn’t, and I wasn’t talking to you,” Ray said, his eyes still fixed on the feline.

“This isn’t your cat?”

“I don’t have a cat,” Ray said. “Diana Peacock, say hello to Willow Binder.”

Diana raised one eyebrow.

“Willow Binder?” she said. “Like the musician?”

“Yes, like the musician,” Ray said. He lifted the hefty black cat out of Diana’s arms and lobbed the indignant feline through the open window.

“What the hell?” Diana said, leaping to her feet. “You just killed a cat, you shit!”

“Look at me,” Ray said, putting his hands on her shoulders. “Listen to me, Diana… that was Pussywillow Binder, and she’ll be just fine. Am I lying? Tell me, am I?”

“No,” Diana said after a moment. “No, you’re not… but, why is she in Star Harbor? And why is she a cat? And what the hell was she doing in your apartment?”

“Don’t know, it’s something that she does, and no idea,” Ray said. “But one crazy ex is more than enough to come home to.”

“Oh, you didn’t…”

“Not while she was a cat.”

“I’d say she didn’t seem like your type, but you don’t seem to have one,” Diana said. “You’ll just hop into bed with anybody who’s willing, won’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess you’d know about…”

Diana held up a hand to cut him off as the phone began to vibrate in her left pocket. She pulled it out and flipped it over to see the caller ID: 000-000-0000.

“Hold on, I have to take this,” she said.

“Oh, of course,” Ray said, folding his arms.

“This is Seven,” Diana said into the phone. “What? Are you… um, okay.”

She snapped it shut, then went over and stuck her head out the window.

“Pick up your damned phone when it rings!” she yelled, and was answered by a distinctly bitchy sounding yowl from somewhere out of sight. Diana pulled her head in and slammed the windowpane down.

“It doesn’t bother you that your mysterious Mr. Zero knew that both of you were here?” Ray asked.

“Not as much as it bothers me that she’s apparently part of his little circle,” Diana said. “I guess you aren’t the only one with no standards… why would somebody who took the time to recruit such an accomplished martial artist as myself bother with an overweight keyboardist who can turn into a housecat?”

“I think we can rule out an attempt to corner the market on modesty,” Ray said. “Now that Will’s been dealt with… what the hell are you doing here, Diana? I thought I made it clear I don’t want anything more from you.”

“Believe it or not, I didn’t come here expecting to run into you at all. I just needed somewhere to lie low for a few hours,” she said. “As I recalled, you never spent much time in your apartment… unless you were bringing me back to it.”

“And there wasn’t anywhere else you could have gone to ground that would have had even less chance of running into me?”

“I could hide almost anywhere, Ray,” she said. “But given the choice, I’d rather be someplace comfortable, which means someplace I won’t have to cling to anything or shift around to stay out of sight, or worry about the rightful owners showing up and objecting to my presence.”

“Yeah, about that last part…”

“Oh, come on,” Diana said. “You’ve gone days without coming back here… you have to admit the odds were pretty good I would have been gone before you got back. But it’s like I told you last time, circumstances will keep contriving to throw us together…”

“Circumstances didn’t contrive anything,” Ray said. “You came here, and I know you would have heard me coming down the hallway. If you didn’t want to bump into me, you could have been out the window in the time it took me to unlock the door.”

“Yeah, well, I had a cat on my lap,” she said. “Few restraints are as hard to extricate yourself from quickly and quietly than a contented kitty. Anyway, since you are here…”

“Oh, here it comes,” Ray said, rolling his eyes.

“I was going to give you a tip,” she said. “But if you don’t want it…”

“What kind of tip do you have, Diana?”

“Vittorio Palozzo,” Diana said. “You’re looking for him.”

“That’s not a tip,” Ray said. “I already know that. The question is, how do you? Your friend the disembodied voice tell you?”

“I do have resources of my own,” she said. “I’m investigating the underworld myself, remember?”

“On behalf of the Dock Shadow,” Ray said. “Ah… yeah.”

“Yeah, what?”

“Yeah, nothing,” Ray said. “Just a random, agreeable exclamation.”

“I can hurt you, you know.”

“That’s why I’m not saying anything more,” he said.

“Okay, I heard it from the Dock Shadow,” she admitted. “But the tip is mine.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“He was in contact with a guy calling himself ‘The Bishop’,” Diana said. “He told some of his associates that ‘The Bishop’ was going to take care of everything, before he clammed up and then disappeared. I don’t know if it’s a supervillain, or a new crime boss…”

“Maybe an actual bishop?” Ray suggested.

“Doubt it,” Diana said.

“Yeah, me too.”

“Anyway, that’s what I heard when I was out busting heads.”

“Is that all you were doing?” Ray said. “I don’t want information if it’s tainted…”

“Oh, right, taking the law into my own hands one way is morally superior to taking it into my own hands the other way,” Diana said.

“There’s no comparison, Diana.”

“You know, contrary to what you think, I don’t go around ripping people’s hearts out of their chests or making their spleens explode or whatever,” Diana said. “But even when I’m ‘just’ stalking somebody, breaking into their home or business, destroying their property, and then incapacitating them, I’m still putting myself above the law and above them. That isn’t something you should be doing lightly, Ray… but that’s exactly what you do. You never think about the enormity of what you’re doing. Because you have a bullshit rule about the one line you won’t cross, you just leap right the fuck over every other line like they aren’t there.”

“Maybe I am a little flippant about breaking the law sometimes, but no amount of thinking real hard about it is going to make killing people okay, Diana,” Ray said.

“And how much refusing to think about the people you killed will make it okay?” Diana said.

“That’s enough,” Ray said. “You can either walk out the door right now, or you can leave the way Willow did.”

“Actually, I was planning on leaving that way, anyway,” Diana said, going over to the window and lifting it up. She threw a leg over the sill and ducked under the overhanging pane, leaning out into the space. “Thanks for the UST, lover… I’ll be seeing you.”

“The what?” Ray asked as she disappeared from sight. He stood there shaking his head for a few seconds before going over and closing the window again. This time he latched it shut, though he had little expectation that this would impede the stream of unwanted visitors. “Why is it that the least crazy woman in my life is the one who talks to rabbits?” he wondered aloud, and then added an almost obligatory, “And why am I talking to myself?”

He headed over to the futon and noticed an envelope sitting on it. He hadn’t checked the mail recently, so his first thought was that Diana had left it. He picked it up and turned it over.

“Galerie Awesome?” he said, reading the gilt lettering. “What the hell is that?”