“Could he be back here?” Gilsa said.

     “I doubt it. Last time he used his green card to enter the country was over a year ago.”

     “How do you know that?” Gilsa looked at me over his glasses.

     “They log it in, you know, every time a green-card holder comes through a port of entry. I got his number from one of the banks—he used it for I.D. when he opened his first checking account, back in 'eighty-three. INS ran the Soundex on it.”

     “That's pretty good, Jack,” Collins said. “You have friends at Immigration, do you a favor like that?”

     “It only takes one.”

     “So he's over there someplace,” Gilsa said.

     “Probably in his home province.”

     “Sitting in the sun, drinking piñas.”

     “Oh, the ladies over there,” Collins said, “if he has any jizz in him at all, he's not just sitting and drinking.”

     “Can we get to the sister?” Gilsa said.

     “I'd say she's a reluctant accomplice, but I don't think she'll roll over. Family loyalty.”

     “Spare me.”

     “I don't say we stop trying. But I doubt that she'll turn, that's my best guess.”

     “Tits like mangoes,” Collins said. “Like ripe mangoes, only not too ripe. If you're a honeydew man you're out of luck, but you can go crazy with the mangoes they got over there. All it takes is money. I don't mean a whole lot, either.”

     I heard him and thought of the young woman on the stone wall, how she had tugged at her skirt to keep her knees from showing.

     “You know this place, Pat, the province, what's-it-called?” Gilsa said.

     Collins looked at the certificate.