I shook my head and told him to go, which left me alone with the girl. Her demeanor changed when we were alone but there was still a defiance about her that reminded me of my favorite ex-stripper. This girl was filthy. She smelled bad. She was obviously trying to downplay her gender, and yet she couldn’t help but radiate confidence and her own kind of feminine power. It was the fight that always appealed to me.

“Tell me who the guy really is and I’ll make it worth your while.”

She snorted at me and scooted to the edge of the chair. “Are you kidding? The stuff I jacked from your tattooed friend will feed me and put a roof over my head for a few months. I just want you to leave me alone and forget what I look like and any part I played in Tyler messing with your club.”

I leaned back in my chair and considered her for a moment. “Agreed . . . and you called him Tyler. Is that his real name?”

She threw herself back in the chair and I tried not to wince. I was going to have to hose the thing down when she was gone or maybe even burn it.

“Yeah. He’s a friend of a friend. I know a few squatters and some gutter punks that like to come in and out of town on the trains, and one of them tracked me down saying he had a friend that needed help. I only mess around for people that really seem to need it. Kids on the run from shitty parents. Kids getting bounced from foster home to foster home because the dad had grabby hands. Occasionally I get a rich kid a fake ID, but that’s only if I’m in dire straits. Anyway, my buddy says he knows Tyler from some shows and the kid has it really rough at home.”

She was talking so fast it was almost hard to keep up with her, but I noticed she’d referred to my interloper as a kid, making me wonder how old she was. She looked like she couldn’t be more than sixteen or seventeen.

“The dad’s a bully and the mom’s long gone. My buddy says Tyler has a couple sisters at home and the dad has been creeping on them in a totally unparental way, so he asks me to help the guy out. Says the kid just needs a decent job where he can earn some money and move himself and the sisters out of the house. So he brings the kid around so I can make him an ID. Only when he brings the kid around, I realize real quick that he isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. If I made him documents with a different name, he was gonna get busted in five seconds, so I found someone with a similar name and borrowed their identity for him.”

“Tyler Finch is his real name?” I was a little confused by her story, mostly because she told it like the words couldn’t get out of her mouth fast enough.

She shook her head and the stench of unwashed human and the sour smell that simply was the Point, which permeated anyone that survived on the streets here, hit me right in the nose. I must have made a face or indicated my distaste in some way because she grinned and it was all kinds of twisted and sharp.

“When you sleep under a bridge or behind a Dumpster, people treat you like the rest of the discarded trash that litters the ground. When you look like shit and smell even worse, the probability of anyone grabbing you and trying to make you do things you don’t want to do goes way down.” One of her feathery eyebrows winged up in a haughty look. “And no, his name was close, but I can’t remember it exactly. It sounded like Finch. I can’t tell you where he is because I don’t know. I did my job, took the two hundred he paid me, and forgot about him until I heard you were looking for someone that manipulated an ID to get a job in your club. I knew it had to be Tyler.” She held her hands up and shrugged at me. “I obviously don’t own a computer, so it’s not like I could have scanned his info in a file I can just e-mail to you.”

“Your friend said he had a bad home life. He mention where the kid’s family lived?”

She shook her head. “Just here in the city somewhere. Said the dad had been deep in the gutter for a long time. Apparently he was a user and liked to hit up all Novak’s action.”

I was racking my brain trying to find a link, any kind of connection that could have the kid desperate enough or angry enough to take on the devil in his own playground.

The girl cleared her throat and reached for her hat. “For what it’s worth, he seemed like a nice enough kid. He just came across like he really wanted a job to help his family out. Your name didn’t come up until after the fact because if he had mentioned wanting to get into business with you or any of your crew, I would’ve told him it was a bad idea. Men like you don’t make things better. He didn’t seem malicious or anything. He really didn’t seem smart enough to put one over on you.”

The slight dig was there but I let it go. The kid had messed with me using schoolyard tactics when I was used to outright warfare. We were fighting different kinds of battles, but if I had learned anything from the desert and my life there, it was that the most unassuming person could be the biggest threat. Killers didn’t come stamped with a big letter K in the center of their foreheads. They more often than not came with disarming grins and a friendly handshake right before they put a bullet between your eyes or a bomb under the front seat of your car. I wasn’t going to underestimate the kid no matter how harmless or dumb he came across.

I needed to figure out what his deal was with me and I couldn’t do that unless I tracked him down.

“The friend of yours who brought him to you in the first place, where can I find him?” She balked and started twisting her fingers together. She obviously didn’t want to rat her buddy out to me. “You don’t have to tell me, but then, when I send all my guys to rattle every squat and shake down every hostel they can find, I’ll make sure they let all the street kids know you were the one that sent them.”

Life was hard on the street. It was even harder when you were a woman. If I went and rattled enough cages and dropped her name when I did it, we both knew it would be a veritable death sentence for her unless she took the money she was gonna earn from the stuff she jacked from Stark and hit the road. The understanding of what I was telling her was clear in her gaze.

“His name is Squirrel. And that is seriously all I know him as. When he comes to town he likes to hang out at a bar down by the docks called the Blue Ribbon. They let a lot of metal and punk bands play there on the weekends, so the crust kids like to hang out there and drink cheap beer.”

I had no idea what a crust kid was but it sounded like I was going to find out.

“How does one identify a young man named Squirrel?” I asked the question in complete seriousness, but she seemed to find it hilarious. She started laughing until she bent over and grabbed her stomach. When she looked back up at me, her cheeks had streaks where her tears had washed away the dirt.