THE SKY HAD NEVER seemed so low and the Atlantic Ocean had never looked so cold. I was standing next to Rosemary on the Boardwalk, watching the parade before the Miss America Pageant.

“This is it,” I said. “My life is over. They’re going to cut my heart out and throw it in the ocean.”

“Can’t you get your money back?”

“It’s already spent.”

With Frank Diamond kicking us out of the fight, I now owed Teddy over a hundred thousand dollars and had no way to pay it back.

“Maybe you could sue the promoter,” Rosemary said. “Breach of contract.”

“By the time the lawyers got through, my corpse would be rotting.”

Miss Virginia rode by in a red convertible, kicking a leg out of her blue satin gown, so the crowd could see the whole of her thigh. Rosemary’s daughter Kimmy ran up and down in front of the spectator seats on the other side of the Boardwalk. I half wished the police would ride up and arrest me for killing Nicky, to spare me the agony of what would happen next.

“You know, Terry Mulvehill came by the club again me other night,” Rosemary said.

I found myself wincing. “Yeah? What’d he want?”

“The usual. Go back to his hotel, screw our brains out, get high on cocaine.”

Just the words made my stomach hurt. “So what’d you tell him?”

“I told him I didn’t want to do that. I’m with you.”

The back of my neck was burning. “You know, I oughtto tell those boxing commission people he gets high. They’d probably take the title away from him.”

“So why don’t you?” She looked through her handbag for her daughter’s sunblock.

“Who’d believe me?”

A dozen men dressed as turkeys walked by strumming “You’re a Grand Old Flag” on banjos.

“It just makes me so mad.” Rosemary rubbed her hands together and pulled on her fingers. “Maybe if I went up there and got high with him, they’d believe me,” she said casually, as if she was talking about renting a car. “They have those tests to prove it, you know.”

I just looked at her. “I couldn’t ask you to do that. That’d be like making you a whore again.”

She took a deep breath and put on a pair of sunglasses. “Look, there’s something I have to tell you.”

“What?”

“I want to have everything straight between us.” She peered around, looking for her daughter, and then turned back to me. “That ship has already sailed. I’ve been with him before.”

She might as well have cracked me across the face with a baseball bat.

“When was this? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want you to get the wrong idea.” She tried waving Kimmy over, but the little girl was having too much fun dancing up and down in front of the grandstand. “It was a long time ago. Before I met you. Back when I was turning tricks.”

“So you’d go back up there now?”

The corners of her mouth turned down as she began to think about it seriously. “I don’t know ... I was just talking before ... I really just wanted to get it off my chest about Terry and me, because we’re starting to get close ...”

“You know, it’s not a bad idea,” I interrupted.

Now she was frowning. She hadn’t really thought I’d take her up on her offer, but she didn’t understand how truly desperate I was. I’d been lied to, betrayed, and hustled by everyone I knew, including her, it seemed. I was in a corner and I needed to get out.

Miss Iowa drove by in a red Ford, followed by a man dressed as a frankfurter.

“I know somewhere I could score some coke,” I said.

Her sunglasses hid her eyes, but her hands were still torturing each other. “Oh, I don’t know, Anthony,” she said in a squeamish voice. “The more I think about it, the more it doesn’t seem right. We’re talking about blackmail here.”

“No, we’re talking about people who broke an agreement with me three weeks before a fight and put my neck on the chopping block. Literally.”

“So you want me to sleep with him again?”

The old guy wearing a Budweiser hat in the deck chair next to us looked up, realizing this was getting to be a pretty unusual conversation.

“Keep your voice down. I’m not saying you have to sleep with him. I’m just saying you could drop by and see what he’s up to. That doesn’t require you going to bed with him, does it?”

She rolled her eyes, as if to say, “Oh Anthony, how could you be so naive?” But I wasn’t being naive. I knew what I was asking. I was just trying to sugarcoat it.

With each thing I’d done in the last few weeks, I was taking another step away from the person I wanted to be. It was as if by breaking faith with Carla, I’d broken through my own skin. Killing Nicky, borrowing money from Danny Klein, and pimping my girlfriend were the secondary infections. Now I was sick and I didn’t know how to get better.

“You know what it would require,” she said with her mouth drawn tight. “Is that what you’re about, Anthony?”

“What?”

“Being a shakedown artist. Like your father. You want me to go by there and get him to do some blow with me, so you can blackmail him with a drug test and get your fighter back in the ring. It stinks, Anthony. And you know what really stinks about it? You always say you’re not going to be like the people in your family, and here you are, pulling the exact same kind of scam.”

“I didn’t make the world the way it is,” I said. “I take it the way I find it. All I want is for them to keep to their agreement to fight Elijah. This is the only way I know tomake them do it. If my father had been a used car salesman, maybe I’d know how to sell cars.”

“And that is bullshit!” Rosemary said vehemently, kicking the railing. “You are responsible for everything you say and do in this life. You can try to make all the excuses in the world, but the truth is no one else can make you live in the gutter if you don’t want to.”

“Well, maybe that’s where I belong.”

She clamped her mouth shut and steam seemed to rise from the top of her head. Miss Nevada drove by in a Cadillac, coyly flashing a giant set of playing cards.

“At least think about it,” I said.

ROSEMARY STOOD AT the Boardwalk railing, watching Anthony play with her daughter in the wash and drain of the surf.

She felt nothing.

The Miss America Parade had been over for an hour or so, but there was still a beautiful day going on, probably the last one like it for the summer. With the sun casting a bright, clarifying light on everything below.

But Rosemary didn’t care about that either.

Anthony picked up Kimmy and held her over his head so their faces were just a foot apart. She laughed like a little homicidal maniac and Anthony kissed her on the nose.

How could he be so good with her kid one minute and ask her to do this terrible thing the next? What kind of man was he? After all the time they’d spent together, she still couldn’t quite get a handle on him.

And then there was the matter of that guy Nicky who’d turned up dead under the Boardwalk. But she’d made