Virgin Heat by Laurence Shames

this."
    Michael cinched his brows together, grabbed her gently by the wrists, tried with his gaze to lift her downcast eyes. "Look," he said, "do you want to find your prince, your stallion, your perfect love, or not?"
    "The truth?" said Angelina. "Right at the moment I don't even know."
    Michael frowned. He understood discouragement, recognized the dispiriting cycle of wanting too much and trying too hard, then plummeting down to a numbness where you ceased utterly to understand why you were bothering. Discouragement might yield briefly to serenity, which would be defeated in turn by loneliness and boredom, which would open the heavy creaking door to lust, which might cloak itself in the splendid garb of romance; romance would implode, and then the whole damn draining and befuddling thing would start again.
    As fazed as Angelina by the relentless and exhausting weight of passion, he said, "Listen, hon, why don't we get off this vulgar street, forget about love, and just find someplace quiet and maybe a little seamy for a nightcap?"
    *
    Keith McCullough stepped out of his motel shower, patted dry, and thought about which of his crude moronic T-shirts he would wear that evening. He decided on the one that said free moustache rides.
    For as long as he'd been working underground, he'd felt the simplest disguises were the best. His favorites weren't disguises at all, really—more like diversionary ploys. That was the beauty of these shirts—they made people dismiss him as a pathetic buffoon, embarrassed people to the point where they wouldn't meet his eyes, so that the smallest alterations—a pair of glasses, some fake sideburns— would make them fail to realize they'd seen his face before.
    It helped, too, that his stature was average, his features unremarkable except in their flexibility, with hazel eyes that might appear amiably lax or killingly intent, a chin that could tuck down blandly or jut forth in recklessness. The pliant face was an asset, but more important was pliancy of personality. Disguises only worked if there was some oblique but resonant truth in them, a harmony between the mask and the person being masked. Working underground required, therefore, an unsqueamish knowledge of oneself, of one's alternate selves; and this knowledge was not the least scary thing about pretending not to be a cop while doing the things cops did.
    In any case, Keith McCullough felt confident that his incognito was holding up, but he couldn't claim that his sporadic and routine surveillance of one Sigmund Maxx, a.k.a. Ziggy Maxx, a.k.a. Sal Martucci, had as yet turned up anything of interest. The guy had a job. He drove a crummy car and lived in a crummy bungalow whose upkeep seemed to be within the means provided by the job. If Ziggy kept criminal company, McCullough had not so far discovered it.
    But the agent enjoyed these occasional postings to Key West, and had his reasons for hoping to prolong them by unearthing evidence of Ziggy backsliding. Backsliding, as everyone in the Program knew, was common as most other sins. People got bored with legitimate life, and who could blame them? They got lonely for old habits, old pals—even old pals who now wanted to kill them. Criminals rarely turned once and for all. They oscillated. And oscillating was something Keith McCullough understood.
    Dressed now, he lay down on his bed and called his wife up in Fort Lauderdale. He asked if Keith Jr.'s cold was better, if Jeannie had done well in her soccer game. Then he rose and went to the mirror, where he applied a phony moustache and streaked his temples with gray, and thought with guilty anticipation about the night that would come after the evening's work, when he would slip into a disguise of a different sort and, on his own time, hit a couple bars.
    *
    "Gimme a slice," said Uncle Louie. He thought a moment, then said, "Extra cheese."
    He watched the guy drizzle on the curls of mozzarella.
    "While you're at it, pepperoni. Maybe a few