ONE

Late one Tuesday afternoon, Joe Kurtz rapped on Eddie Falco’s apartment door.

“Who’s there?” Eddie called from just the other side of the door.

Kurtz stood away from the door and said something in an agitated but unintelligible mumble.

“What?” called Eddie. “I said who the fuck’s there?”

Kurtz made the same urgent mumbling noises.

“Shit,” said Eddie and undid the police lock, a pistol in his right hand, opening the door a crack but keeping it chained.

Kurtz kicked the door in, ripping the chain lock out of the wood, and kept moving, shoving Eddie Falco deeper into the room. Eddie was several inches taller and at least thirty pounds heavier than Kurtz, but Kurtz had momentum on his side.

Eddie swung down the 9mm Browning. Still shoving the taller man across the floor and into the wooden blinds on the window side of the apartment, Kurtz had his arm blocked across Eddie’s chest, his right hand squeezing the base of the man’s upper bicep. He quickly slid his left hand across the top of the Browning.

Eddie squeezed the trigger. Just as Kurtz had planned, the hammer fell on the webbing between the thumb and forefinger of Kurtz’s hand.

Kurtz took the weapon away from Eddie and backhanded him into the wall.

“Fucking sonofabitch!” yelled Eddie, rubbing blood off his face. “You broke my goddamn—” Eddie made a lunge for the pistol.

Kurtz tossed the Browning out the open sixth-floor window, held Eddie off with his left arm, and kicked the other man’s legs out from under him. Eddie’s head hit the hardwood floor with a bang. Kurtz knelt on his chest.

“Tell me about Sam,” said Kurtz.

“Who the fuck is…” gasped Eddie Falco.

“Samantha Fielding,” said Kurtz. “The redhead that you killed.”

“Redhead?” said Eddie, spitting blood. “I didn’t know the bitch’s name, I just—”

Kurtz put all of his weight on one knee and Eddie’s eyes bugged out. Then Kurtz held his left hand palm out, jabbed hard, and flattened Eddie’s broken nose against the screaming man’s cheek. “Talk nice,” he said. “She worked with me.”

Eddie’s face was alternating chalk white and dark red under the blood. “Can’t breathe,” he gasped. “Get…off…please.”

Kurtz stood.

Eddie gasped some more, spat blood, got to one knee slowly, and then threw himself through the kitchen door.

Kurtz followed him into the tiny kitchen.

Eddie swung around with a butcher knife. He crouched, feinted, lunged, and then seemed to levitate up and back as Kurtz place-kicked him in the balls. Eddie came down hard on a counter filled with unwashed dishes. He was gasping and retching while he rolled, smashing soiled dishes under him.

Kurtz took the knife and threw it at the far wall, where it stuck and vibrated like a tuning fork.

“Sam,” said Kurtz. “Tell me about what happened the night you killed her.”

Eddie lifted his head and squinted at Kurtz. “Fuck you!” He grabbed another, shorter kitchen knife from the countertop.

Kurtz sighed, forearmed the thug in the throat, bent him back over the sink, and jammed Eddie’s right hand down deep into the garbage disposal. Eddie Falco was screaming even before Kurtz reached over and turned on the switch.

Kurtz gave it thirty seconds and then shut off the disposal, ripped Eddie’s bloody undershirt down the front, and wrapped the rag around the stumps of the man’s fingers. Eddie’s face was now pure white under a spattering of blood. His mouth was open and his eyes were protruding as he stared at what was left of his hand. Someone began pounding on the wall from the apartment next door.

“Help! Murder!” screamed Eddie. “Somebody call the cops! Help!”

Kurtz let him scream for a few seconds and then dragged him back into the main room and dropped him into a chair next to the table. The pounding on the wall had stopped, but Kurtz could hear shouts from the neighbors.

“The cops are coming,” gasped Eddie Falco. “The cops’ll be here in a minute.”

“Tell me about Sam,” Kurtz said softly.

Eddie clutched the bloody rag around his hand, glanced toward the open window as if expecting sirens, and licked his lips. He mumbled something.

Kurtz gave him a hearty handshake. This time, the screaming was so loud that even the neighbors fell silent.

“Sam,” said Kurtz.

“She found out about the coke deal when she was looking for that runaway brat.” Eddie’s voice was a gagging monotone. “I didn’t even know her fucking name.” He looked up at Kurtz. “It wasn’t me, you know. It was Levine.”

“Levine said it was you.”

Eddie’s eyes flickered back and forth. “He’s lying. Get him in here and ask him. He killed her. I just waited in the car.”

“Levine isn’t around anymore,” said Kurtz, his tone conversational. “Did you rape her before you cut her throat?”

“I tell you it wasn’t me. It was that goddamn Le—” Eddie started screaming again.

Kurtz released the shapeless pulp that had been Eddie Falco’s nose. “Did you rape her first?”

“Yeah.” Something like defiance flickered in Eddie’s eyes. “Fucking cunt put up a fight, tried to—”

“Okay,” said Kurtz, patting Eddie on his bloody shoulder. “We’re about done.”

“Whaddaya mean?” The defiance turned to terror.

“I mean the cops will be here in a minute. Anything else you want to tell me?”

Sirens wailed. Eddie lunged to his feet and staggered toward the open window as if to scream at the cops to hurry, but Kurtz slammed him against the wall and held him in place with a forearm hard against his chest. Eddie squirmed and struck at Kurtz with his left hand and the ruins of his right fist. Kurtz ignored him.

“I swear I didn’t—”

“Shut up,” explained Kurtz. He grabbed the bigger man by what was left of his shirtfront and dragged him closer to the window.

“You’re not going to kill me,” said Eddie.

“No?”

“No,” Eddie twitched his head in the direction of the window just inches away. Six stories below, two police cruisers had slid to a stop. Neighbors were broiling out of the apartment building, pointing toward the window. One of the cops drew his gun as he saw Kurtz and Eddie. “They’d send you away forever!” gasped Eddie, his breath hot and rank in Kurtz’s face.

“I’m not that old,” said Kurtz. “I have some years to spare.”

Eddie lunged away, ripping what was left of the rags of his shirt, stood in the open window and waved and screamed at the cops below. “Hurry! For fuck’s sake, hurry!”

“You in a hurry?” said Kurtz. “Here.” He grabbed Eddie Falco by his hair and the seat of his pants and threw him out the open window.

Neighbors and cops scattered. Eddie screamed all the way down to the roof of the closest police cruiser. Pieces of chrome and glass and Plexiglas from the gumball-flasher array on the top of the cruiser flew in all directions after Eddie hit.

Three of the cops ran into the building with their weapons raised.

Kurtz stood silent for a second and then went over to open the door wider. He was on his knees in the center of the room with his fingers linked behind his head when the cops burst in a moment later.

CHAPTER

TWO

In the old days, they would have opened the front man-door for Kurtz and let him leave wearing a cheap new suit, with his possessions in a brown paper bag. These days they provided him a cheap vinyl bag for his possessions and gave him chinos, a blue button-down shirt, an Eddie Bauer windbreaker, and a bus ride into nearby Batavia.

Arlene Demarco picked him up at the bus station. They drove north to the Thruway and then west in silence.

“Well,” Arlene said at last, “you look older, Joe.”

“I am older.”

About twelve miles farther west, Arlene said abruptly, “Hey…welcome to the Twenty-first Century.”

“It arrived inside, too,” said Kurtz.

“How could you tell?”

“Good point,” said Kurtz and they were silent for another ten miles or so.

Arlene ran her window down and lit a cigarette, batting the ashes out into the brisk autumn air.

“I thought your husband doesn’t like it when you smoke.”

“Alan died six years ago.”

Kurtz nodded and watched the fields go by.

“I guess I could have come to visit you once or twice in eleven years,” said Arlene. “Keep you up to speed on things.”

Kurtz turned to look at her. “Why? No percentage in that.”

Arlene shrugged. “Obviously, I found your message on the machine. But why you thought I’d pick you up after all these years…”

“No problem if you didn’t,” said Kurtz. “The buses still run between Batavia and Buffalo.”

Arlene smoked the rest of her cigarette, then tossed it out the window. “Rachel, Sam’s little girl—”

“I know.”

“Well, her ex-husband got custody, and he still lives in Lockport. I thought you’d want to—”

“I know where he lives,” said Kurtz. “Attica has computers and phone books.”

Arlene nodded and concentrated on driving.

“You’re working with some legal outfit in Cheektowaga?”

“Yeah. Actually, it’s three law offices in what used to be a Kwik-Mart in a shopping center. Two of the firms are ambulance chasers, and the third one is just a capper mill.”

“Does that make you a full-fledged legal secretary?”

Arlene shrugged again. “Mostly I do word processing, spend a lot of time on the phone tracking down the claimants, and look up the occasional legal crapola on the Net. The so-called lawyers are too cheap to buy any law books or DVDs.”

“You enjoy it?” asked Kurtz.

She ignored the question.

“They pay you what?” said Kurtz. “Two thousand or so a month?”

“More than that,” said Arlene.

“Well, I’ll add five hundred to whatever they’re paying you.”

She snorted a laugh. “To do what?”

“Same thing you used to do. Just more of it on computers.”

“There some miracle going to happen to get you your P.I. license back, Joe? You have three thousand bucks a month set aside to pay me?”

“You don’t have to be a licensed P.I. to do investigations. Let me worry about paying you. You know that if I say I will, I will. You think we can get an office near the old place on East Chippewa?”

Arlene laughed again. “East Chippewa’s gotten all gentrified. You wouldn’t recognize the place. Uptight little boutiques, delis with outside seating, wine and cheese shops. Rent has gone ballistic there.”

“Jesus,” said Kurtz. “Well, office space near the downtown will do. Hell, a basement would do as long as it has several phone lines and electricity.”

Arlene exited the Thruway, paid the toll, and headed south. “Where do you want to go today?”

“A Motel 6 or someplace cheap in Cheektowaga would work.”

“Why Cheektowaga?”

“I’m going to have to borrow your car tomorrow morning, and I thought it might be more convenient for you to pick me up on the way to your job. You can give them notice tomorrow morning and pack your stuff, I’ll pick you up in the early afternoon, and we can look for the new office.”

Arlene lit another cigarette. “You’re so considerate, Joe.”

Kurtz nodded.

CHAPTER

THREE

Orchard Park was an upscale area out near the Bills’ Stadium. Arlene’s car—although just a basic Buick—had one of those GPS navigational LCD-screen doohickies set in the dash, but Kurtz never turned it on. He had memorized the route and had an old road map if he needed it. He wondered just what in the hell had happened to people’s sense of direction in the last decade if they needed all this electronic shit just to find their way around.

Most of the homes in Orchard Park were upper-middle-class or better, but a few were real mansions, set behind stone walls and iron gates. Kurtz turned into one of these, gave his name to a speaker grille, and was told to wait. A video camera mounted on a pillar by the gate had ceased its slow arcs and now stared down at him. Kurtz ignored it.

The gate opened and three bodybuilder types in blue blazers and gray slacks came out.

“You can leave the car here,” said the smoothest-looking of the three. He gestured for Kurtz to get out of the car.

They frisked him well—even checking his groin area carefully—and then had him unbutton his shirt so that they could see that he wasn’t wearing a wire. Then they gestured him onto the back bench of a golf cart and drove him up the long, curving driveway to the house.

Kurtz did not pay much attention to the house. It was your basic brick mansion, a little heavier on security than usual. There was a four-car garage set back to one side, but a Jaguar, a Mercedes, a Honda S2000, and a Cadillac were lined up along the drive. The blue-blazered driver stopped the cart, and the other two men led Kurtz around back to the pool area.

Even though it was October, the pool was still filled and free of leaves. An older man in a paisley robe sat at a poolside table along with a balding middle-aged man in a gray suit. They were drinking coffee from fragile china cups. The bald man refilled the cups from a silver pot as Kurtz and his minders walked up. A fourth bodyguard, this one wearing tight slacks and a polo shirt under his blue blazer, stood with his hands folded over his crotch a few paces behind the old man.

“Sit down, Mr. Kurtz,” said the old man. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t get up. An old injury.”

Kurtz sat.

“Coffee?” said the old man.

“Sure.”

The bald man poured, but it was obvious that he was no lackey. An expensive metal briefcase lay on the table near him.

“I am Byron Tatrick Farino,” said the old man.

“I know who you are,” said Kurtz.

The old man smiled slightly. “Do you have a first name, Mr. Kurtz?”

“Are we going to be on a first-name basis, Byron?”

The smile faded.

“Watch your mouth, Kurtz,” said the bald man.

“Shut up, consigliere.” Kurtz’s eyes never left the old man. “This meeting’s between Mr. Farino and me.”

“Quite right,” said Farino. “But you understand that the meeting is a courtesy and that it would not be taking place at all if you had not…ah…provided a service to us with regard to my son.”

“By keeping Little Skag from being raped up the ass in the showers by Ali and his gang,” said Kurtz. “Yeah. You’re welcome. But this meeting is business.”

“You want compensation for helping young Stephen?” said the lawyer. He clicked open the briefcase.

Kurtz shook his head. He was still looking at Farino. “Maybe Skag told you what I had to offer.”

Farino sipped his coffee. The old man’s hands were almost as translucent as the expensive china. “Yes, Stephen sent word via his lawyer that you wanted to offer your services. But what services can you possibly provide us that we do not already have, Mr. Kurtz?”

“Investigations.”

Farino nodded but the lawyer showed an unpleasant smile. “You were a private investigator once, Kurtz, but you’ll never have a license again. You’re on parole, for chrissakes. Why on earth would you think that we need a killer ex-con washed-up P.I. on our payroll?”

Kurtz turned his gaze on the lawyer. “You’re Miles,” he said. “Skag talked about you. He said you like young boys and that the older and limper you get, the younger they get.”

The lawyer blinked. His left cheek blazed with blood, as if Kurtz had slapped him. “Carl,” he said. The goon in the straining polo shirt opened his hands and took a step forward.

“If you want Carl around, you’d better jerk his leash,” said Kurtz.

Mr. Farino held up one hand. Carl stopped. Farino put his other veined hand on the lawyer’s forearm. “Leonard,” he said. “Patience. Why do you provoke us, Mr. Kurtz?”

Kurtz shrugged. “I haven’t had my morning coffee yet.” He drank some.

“We are willing to reimburse you for your help with Stephen,” said Farino. “Please accept it as a…”

“I don’t want to be paid for that,” said Kurtz. “But I’m willing to help you with your real problem.”

“What problem?” said Attorney Miles.

Kurtz looked at him again. “Your accountant, a guy named Buell Richardson, is missing. That’s not good news at the best of times for a family like yours; but since Mr. Farino’s been forced out…retired…you don’t know what the fuck is going on. The FBI could have turned Richardson and have him stashed in a safe house somewhere, singing his guts out. Or the Gonzagas, the other Western New York family, could have whacked him. Or maybe Richardson is going freelance and will be sending you a note and demands any day now. It might be nice to know ahead of time.”

“What makes you think—” Miles began.

“Plus, the only part of the action they left you was the contraband being brought in from La Guardia, up from Florida, and down from Canada,” Kurtz said to Farino. “And even before Richardson disappeared, someone had been knocking over your trucks.”

“What makes you think that we can’t deal with this?” Miles’s voice was strained, but under control.

Kurtz turned his gaze back on the old man. “You used to,” he said. “But who do you trust now?”

Farino’s hand was shaking as he set his cup down in its saucer. “What is your proposal, Mr. Kurtz?”

“I investigate for you. I find Richardson. I bring him back to you if possible. I find out if the truck hijacking is linked with his disappearance.”

“And your fees?” said Farino.

“Four hundred dollars a day plus my expenses.”

Attorney Miles made a rude sound.

“I don’t have too many expenses,” continued Kurtz. “A thousand up front for a stake. A bonus if I drag your CPA back in good time.”

“How large a bonus?” said Farino.

Kurtz drank the last of the coffee. It was black and rich. He stood up. “I’ll leave that to you, Mr. Farino. Now I’ve got to get going. What do you say?”

Farino rubbed his liver-colored lower lip. “Write the check, Leonard.”

“Sir, I don’t think—”

“Write the check, Leonard. A thousand dollars advance, you said, Mr. Kurtz?”

“In cash.”

Miles counted out the money, all in crisp fifties, and put it in a white envelope.

“You realize, Mr. Kurtz,” said the old man, his voice suddenly flat and cold, “that the penalties for failure in situations such as this are rarely restricted to simple loss of payment.”

Kurtz nodded.

The old man took a pen from the lawyer’s briefcase and jotted on a blank business card. “Contact these numbers if you have information or questions,” said Farino. “You are never to come back to this house. You are never again to call me or contact me directly in any way.”

Kurtz took the card.

“David, Charles, and Carl will run you down the drive to your car,” said Farino.

Kurtz looked Carl in the eye and smiled for the first time that morning. “Your bitches can follow me if they want,” he said. “But I’ll walk. And they’ll stay at least ten paces behind me.”

CHAPTER

FOUR

There was a Ted’s in Orchard Park now and another one in Cheektowaga, but Kurtz drove downtown to the old Ted’s Hot Dogs on Porter, near the Peace Bridge. He ordered three of the Jumbos with everything on them, including hot sauce, an order of onion rings, and coffee, and took the cardboard carton to a picnic table near the fence overlooking the river. A few families, some business types and a couple of street people were also having lunch. Leaves fell silently from the big old maple tree. The traffic on the Peace Bridge hummed softly.

There hadn’t been many things that you couldn’t get in Attica. A Ted’s Hot Dog had been one of them. Kurtz remembered Buffalo winter nights in the years before the Ted’s on Sheridan had put on its inside dining room: midnight, ten below, three feet of snow, and thirty people lined up outside for dogs.

Finished, he drove north on the Scajaquada Expressway to the Youngman, east to Millersport Highway, and then northeast the fifteen miles or so to Lockport. It did not take him long to find the little house on Lilly Street. Kurtz parked across the street for a few minutes. The house was fairly common for Lockport: a basic white-brick house in a nice old neighborhood. Trees overarched the street; yellow leaves fell. Kurtz looked at the dormer windows on the second floor and wondered which one was her room.

He drove to the nearest middle school. He did not park there, but drove by slowly. Cops were edgy around public schools and wouldn’t be especially generous with a recently paroled killer who hadn’t even checked in with his P.O. yet.

It was just a building. Kurtz didn’t know what he had expected. Middle-school kids didn’t go outside for recess. He glanced at his watch and drove back to town, taking the 990 back to save some time.

Arlene led the way into the X-rated video store. The place was half a block from the bus station. Glass from countless broken crack bottles crunched underfoot. A used hypodermic syringe lay in the corner of the doorway vestibule. Most of the storefront window had been painted over, but the unpainted part above eye level was so filthy that no one could have seen into the store even if there had been no paint.

Inside it was every X-rated video store Kurtz had ever seen: a bored, acne-scarred man reading a racing form behind the counter, three or four furtive men pouring over the magazines and videos on the shelves, one junkie female in black leather eyeing the customers, and an assortment of dildos, vibrators, and other sex toys in the glass display case. The only difference was that a lot of the videos were now on DVD.

“Hey, Tommy,” Arlene said to the man behind the counter.

“Hey, Arlene,” said Tommy.

Kurtz looked around. “Nice,” he said. “We doing our Christmas shopping early?”

Arlene led the way down a narrow hall past the peep-show booths, past a toilet with a hand-lettered sign reading DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT DOING IT IN HERE, ASSHOLES, through a bead curtain, through an unmarked door, and down a steep flight of stairs.

The basement was long and musty and smelled of rat droppings, but the place had been partitioned into two areas with a low railing separating them. Empty bookcases still lined three of the walls. There were long, nicked tables in the outer area and a metal desk in the far space.

“Exits?” said Kurtz.

“That’s the good part,” said Arlene.

She showed him a rear entrance, separate from the video store, steep stone steps, a steel-reinforced door opening onto the alley. Back in the basement, she went over and swung a bookcase out, revealing another door. She took a key out of her purse and unlocked the padlock on the door. It opened onto an empty underground parking garage.

“When this place was a real bookstore, they sold heroin out of the sci-fi section down here. They liked to have several exits.”

Kurtz looked around and nodded. “Phone lines?”

“Five of them. I guess they had a lot of queries about their sci-fi.”

“We won’t need five,” said Kurtz. “But three would be nice.” He checked the electrical outlets in the floor and walls. “Yeah, tell Tommy this will do nicely.”

“No view.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Kurtz.

“Not to you,” said Arlene. “You won’t be here much if it’s like the old days. But I’ll be looking at these basement walls nine hours a day. I won’t even know what season it is.”

“This is Buffalo,” said Kurtz. “Assume it’s winter.”

He drove her to her townhouse and helped carry in the cardboard boxes with all of her personal stuff from the Kwik-Mart law offices. There wasn’t much. A framed photo of her and Alan. Another photo of their dead son. A hairbrush and some other junk.

“Tomorrow we lease the computers and buy some phones,” said Kurtz.

“Oh? With what money?”

Kurtz removed the white envelope from his jacket pocket and gave her $300 in fifties.

“Wow,” said Arlene. “That’ll buy the handset part of the phone. Maybe.”

“You must have some money saved up,” said Kurtz.

“You making me a partner?”

“No,” said Kurtz. “But I’ll pay the usual vig on the loan.”

Arlene sighed and nodded.

“And I need to use your car tonight.”

Arlene got a beer out of the refrigerator. She did not offer him one. She poured some beer into a clean glass and lit a cigarette. “Joe, you know what all this car borrowing is going to do to my social life?”

“No,” said Kurtz, pausing by the door. “What?”

“Not one damned thing.”

CHAPTER

FIVE

As lawyer Leonard Miles watched the millions of tons of water flowing hypnotically over the blue-green edge of infinity, he thought of what Oscar Wilde had said about Niagara Falls: “For most people, it’s the second biggest disappointment of their honeymoon.” Or something like that. Miles was no expert on Wilde.

Miles was watching the falls from the American side—decidedly inferior viewing to the Canadian side—but necessary, since the two men Miles was meeting here probably could not cross into Canada legally. As with most native Buffalonians, Miles rarely paid attention to Niagara Falls, but this was the kind of public place where a lawyer might run into one of his clients—Malcolm Kibunte had been his client—and it was not too far from Miles’s home on Grand Island. And Miles had little worry about running into any of the Farino Family or, more important to Miles, into any of his professional or social peers at the Falls on a workday afternoon.

“Thinking about jumping, Counselor?” came a deep voice from behind him as a heavy hand fell on his shoulder.

Miles started. He turned slowly to look at the grinning face and gleaming diamond tooth of Malcolm Kibunte. Malcolm still had a firm grip on Miles’s shoulder, as if considering whether or not to lift the lawyer and throw him over the railing.

He would have, too, Miles knew. Malcolm Kibunte gave him the creeps, and his buddy Cutter actively scared him. Since Leonard Miles had spent much of the last three decades of his life around made men, professional killers, and psychotic drug dealers, he paid some attention to these anxieties. Looking at them both now, Miles did not know which man was stranger looking—Malcolm, the athletic six-foot-three black man with his shaved head, wrestler’s body, eight gold rings, six diamond earrings, one diamond-studded front tooth, and ubiquitous black leather outfit, or Cutter, the silent, anorectic-looking near-albino, with his junkie eyes looking like holes melted through white plastic and long, greasy hair hanging down over his grubby sweatshirt.

“What the fuck you want, Miles, calling our asses all the way out here to this fucking place?” said Malcolm, releasing the lawyer.

Miles grinned affably, thinking, Jesus Christ, I defend the scum of the earth. In truth, he had never really represented Cutter. He had no idea if Cutter had ever been arrested. He had no idea what Cutter’s real name was. Malcolm Kibunte was obviously an acquired name, but Miles had represented the big man—successfully, thank God—in two murder raps (one involving Malcolm’s strangling of his wife), a cop shooting, a drug-ring bust, a statutory-rape case, a regular rape case, four aggravated-assault cases, two grand-larceny trials, and some parking violations. The lawyer knew that this did not make them good buddies. In fact, he thought again that Malcolm was precisely the type who would have tossed him over the falls on a whim if it weren’t for two factors: (1) Miles worked for the Farino Family, and although the family was a pale shadow of its former self, they still commanded some respect on the street, and (2) Malcolm Kibunte knew that he would need Miles’s legal skills again.

Miles led the way apart from the other tourists, motioned the other two to a park bench. Miles and Malcolm sat. Cutter remained standing, staring at nothing. Miles clicked open his briefcase and handed Malcolm a file folder.

Malcolm opened the folder and looked at the mug shots clipped to the top sheet.

“Recognize him?” said Miles.

“Uh-uh,” said Malcolm. “But the fucking name sounds sort of familiar.”

“Cutter?” said Miles.

“Cutter don’t recognize him neither,” said Malcolm. Cutter had not even looked in the general direction of the photographs. He hadn’t yet looked at Miles. He wasn’t even looking at the roaring falls. “You bring us out here so early in the fucking day to look at a picture of some motherfucking honky?” said Malcolm.

“He just got out of—”

“Kurtz,” interrupted Malcolm. “That German for ‘short,’ Miles, my man. This fucker short?”

“Not especially,” said Miles. “How’d you know that ‘kurtz’ was German for ‘short’?”

Malcolm gave him a look that would have made a lesser man wet his pants. “I drive me a fucking Mercedes SLK, man. That’s what the fucking ‘K’ in fucking ‘SLK’ stand for, asshole…‘short.’ You think I’m a fucking illiterate, you bald college-boy asshole guinea-ass-licking piece-a-shit mouthpiece?” All of this was said without heat or emphasis.

“No, no,” said Miles, waving his hands in the air as if shooing away insects. He glanced at Cutter. Cutter did not appear to be listening! “No, I was just impressed,” Miles said to Malcolm. “SLK is a great car. Wish I had one.”

“No wonder,” Malcolm said conversationally. “Drivin’ around that fucking piece of American pig-iron Cadillac shit you got.”

Miles nodded and shrugged at the same time. “Yes, well, anyway, this Kurtz showed up at Mr. Farino’s place with an introduction from Little Skag—”

“Yeah, that’s where I hear the fucking name,” said Malcolm. “Attica. Motherfucker named Kurtz wasted Ali, leader of the Death Mosque brothers up in Cellblock D, ’bout a year ago. Mosque brothers put ten thousand out for whoever kill the white motherfucker, every nigger motherfucker in Attica sharpening shanks out of fucking spoons and angle irons. Even some of the fucking guards hot for the payoff, but somehow nobody get to this Kurtz motherfucker. If that the same Kurtz. You think it the same, Cutter?”

Cutter turned his grub white face in Malcolm’s general direction, but said nothing. Miles looked at Cutter’s pale gray eyes in that dead face and shuddered.

“Yeah, I think so, too,” said Malcolm. “Why you showin’ us this shit, Miles?”

“Kurtz is going to work for Mr. Farino.”

“Mr. Farino,” parroted Malcolm in a mincing falsetto. He flashed his diamond tooth at Cutter as if he had made a profound witticism. Malcolm’s laugh was deep, low, and unnerving. “Mr. Farino be a dried-up piece of wop shit with shriveled-up balls. Don’t deserve no ‘Mister’ no more, Miles, my man.”

“Be that as it may,” said Miles, “this Kurtz—”

“Tell me where Kurtz lives, and Cutter and me will collect the Death Mosque ten thousand.”

The lawyer shook his head. “I don’t know where he lives. He’s only been out of Attica for about forty-eight hours. But he wants to investigate some things for Mr…for the Farino family.”

“’Vestigate?” said Malcolm. “What the fucker think he is, Sherlock Motherfucking Holmes?”

“He used to be a private investigator,” said Miles, nodding toward the folder as if urging Malcolm to read the few pages in it. When Malcolm didn’t, Miles went on, “Anyway, he’s looking into Buell Richardson’s disappearance and also into some of the truck hijackings.”

Malcolm flashed his diamond tooth again. “Whoa! Now I see why you want us way up here in Honky Tourist World so early in the day. Miles, my man, you must’ve shit your three-pleats when you heard that.”

This was the second time that Malcolm had mentioned how early in the day it was, Miles noted. He did not point out that it was after 3:00 P.M. He said, “We don’t want this Kurtz to be messing with these things, do we, Malcolm?”

Malcolm Kibunte pursed his lips in mock solemnity and slowly shook his gleaming, hairless head. “Aww, no, Miles, my man. We don’t want nobody messing around in what we could get our fucking lawyer head blown off for, do we, Counselor?”

“No,” Cutter added in a voice lacking all human tone, “we don’t, do we?”

Miles literally jumped at the sound of Cutter’s voice. He turned and looked at Cutter, who was still staring at nothing. It was as if the words had come from his belly or chest.

“How much?” said Malcolm, no longer playful.

“Ten thousand,” said Miles.

“Fuck that. Even with the Death Mosque ten, that ain’t enough.”

Miles shook his head. “This can’t get out. No word to the Mosque brothers. We have to make Kurtz disappear.”

“Dis-a-pear,” said Malcolm, stretching out the syllables. “Disappearing some motherfucker harder than just capping him. We talking fifty bills.”

Miles showed his most disdainful lawyer smile. “Mr. Farino could call in his best professional talent for less than that.”

“Mr. Farino,” minced Malcolm, “ain’t calling in nobody for nothing, is he, Miles, my man? This Kurtz your problem—am I right or am I right?”

Miles made a gesture.

“And besides, Mr. Farino’s best professional talent can kiss my serene black ass and eat wop shit and die wop slow, they get in my way,” Malcolm continued.

Miles said nothing.

“What Cutter wants to know,” said Malcolm, “is do you or don’t you have nothing on Kurtz? Not where he live? Not where he work? Friends? Nothing…am I right or am I right? Me and Cutter supposed to play P.I. as well as cap this fucker for you?”

“The folder”—began Miles, nodding toward it—“has some information. Where Kurtz used to have an office on Chippewa. The name of a former associate, dead, a woman…the name and current address of his former secretary and a few other people he spent time with. Mr. Fi…the family had me check on him when Little Skag sent word that Kurtz wanted a meeting. There’s not much there, but it could help.”

“Forty,” said Malcolm. It was not a proposal, merely a final statement. “That only twenty each for C and me. And it’s hard to disappoint the Mosque that way, Miles, my man.”

“All right,” said the lawyer. “A fourth up front. As usual.” He looked around, saw only tourists, and handed across his second envelope of cash in two days.

Malcolm smiled broadly and counted the $10,000, showing it to Cutter, who seemed to be absorbed in looking at a squirrel near the trash bin.

“You want pictures, as always?” said Malcolm as he slid the envelope into his black leather jacket.

Miles nodded.

“What you do with those Polaroids, Miles, my man? Jack off to them?”

Miles ignored that. “You sure you can do this, Malcolm?”

For a second, Miles thought that he had gone too far. Various emotions rippled across Malcolm’s face, like wind rippling an ebony flag, but the final reaction seemed to be humor.

“Oh, yesss,” said Malcolm, looking up at Cutter to share his good humor. “Mistah Kurtz, he dead.”

CHAPTER

SIX

South Buffalo’s Lackawanna had gone belly up as a steel town years before Kurtz had been sent away, but driving south on the elevated expressway now made him think of some sci-fi movie about a dead industrial planet. Below the expressway stretched mile after mile of dark and empty steel mills, factories, black brick warehouses, parking lots, train tracks, rusting rolling stock, smokeless chimneys, and abandoned worker housing. At least Kurtz hoped that those shitty tarpaper shacks on darkened streets under shot-out streetlights were abandoned.

He exited, drove several blocks past hovels and high-fenced yards, and pulled into one of the darkened mills. The gate padlock was unlocked. He drove through, closed the huge gate behind him, and drove to the far end of a parking lot that had been built to hold six or seven thousand cars. There was one vehicle there now: a rusted-out old Ford pickup with a camper shell on the back. Kurtz parked Arlene’s Buick next to it and made the long, dark walk into the main factory building.

The main doors were open wide. Kurtz’s footfalls echoed in the huge space as he passed slag heaps, cold open hearths, hanging crucibles the size of houses, gantries and cranes stripped of everything worth anything, and many huge, rusted shapes he couldn’t begin to identify. The only lighting was from the occasional yellow trouble light.

Kurtz stopped beneath what had once been a control room thirty feet above the factory floor. A dim light illuminated the dirty glass on three sides of the box. An old man came out onto the metal balcony and shouted down, “Come on up.”

Kurtz climbed the steel ladder.

“Hey, Doc,” said Kurtz as the two men walked into the soft light of the control room.

“Howdy, Kurtz,” said Doc. The old man had disappeared into that never-never land of indeterminate age that some men occupy for decades—somewhere over sixty-five but definitely under eighty-five.

“It seemed weird to see your pawnshop turned into an ice-cream parlor,” said Kurtz. “I never thought you’d sell the shop.”

Doc nodded. “Fucking economy just stayed too good in the nineties. I like the watchman job better. Don’t have to worry about doped-up shitheads trying to knock me over. What can I do you for, Kurtz?”

Kurtz liked this about Doc. It had been more than eleven years since he had seen the old man, but Doc had just used up his entire inventory of small talk.

“Two pieces,” said Kurtz. “One semiauto and the other a concealed-carry revolver.”

“Cold?”

“As cold as you can make them.”

“That’s very cold.” Doc went into the padlocked back room. He came back out in a minute and set several metal cases and small boxes on his cluttered desk. “I remember that nine-millimeter Beretta you used to love so much. What ever happened to that weapon?”

“I buried it with honors,” Kurtz said truthfully. “What do you have for me?”

“Well, look at this first,” said Doc and opened one of the gray carrying cases. He lifted out a black semiautomatic pistol. “Heckler & Koch USP .45 Tactical,” he said. “New. Beautiful piece. Grooved dust cover for lasers or lights. Threaded extended barrel for silencer or suppressor.”

Kurtz shook his head. “I don’t like plastic guns.”

“Polymer,” corrected Doc.

“Plastic. You and I are made mostly of polymers, Doc. The gun is plastic and glass fiber. It looks like something Luke Sky walker would use.”

Doc shrugged.

“Besides,” said Kurtz, “I don’t use lasers, lights, silencers, or suppressors, and I don’t like German guns.”

Doc put away the H&K. He opened another case.

“Nice,” said Kurtz, lifting out the semiautomatic pistol. It was dark gray—almost black—and constructed primarily of forged steel.

“Kimber Custom .45 ACP,” said Doc. “Owned briefly by a little old lady from Tonawanda who just hauled it down to the firing range once or twice a month.”

Kurtz racked the slide, checked that the chamber was empty, dropped out the seven-round magazine, made sure that it was empty, slapped the magazine back in, and sighted down the barrel. “Good balance,” he said. “But it has a full-length spring guide rod.”

“Best kind,” said Doc.

“Raises the risk of a loading malfunction,” said Kurtz.

“Not on the Kimber. Like I said, custom-made.”

“I’ve never owned a custom weapon,” said Kurtz, putting the 1911-style pistol in his waistband and drawing it a few times.

“McCormick low-profile combat sights,” said Doc.

“Catches cloth or leather,” said Kurtz. “They should use ramp sights on all these fighting guns.”

Doc shrugged. “You won’t find many of those.”

“I prefer double-actions.”

“Yeah,” said Doc. “I remember that you used to carry cocked and locked. But the Kimber has a sweet trigger pull.”

Kurtz dry-fired the weapon several times and nodded. “How much?”

“It cost $675 new just a couple of years ago.”

“That’s what the little old lady from Tonawanda would’ve paid,” said Kurtz. “How much?”

“Four hundred.”

Kurtz nodded. “I’ll need to fire some rounds.”

“That’s what the slag heap down there is for,” said Doc. “I got some paper targets in back. I’ll throw in a few boxes of Black Hills 185-grain.”

Kurtz shook his head. “I’ll be using 230-grain.”

“Got those, too,” said Doc.

“I’ll need some leather.”

“I got a CYA small-of-the-back. Used, but just nicely broken in. Clean. Twenty bucks.”

“Okay,” said Kurtz.

“Good. So you’ve got your home-defense weapon. What do you want to see in the concealed-carry revolver line? Interested in an AirLite Ti?”

“Titanium?” said Kurtz. “Hell, no. I didn’t get so old and weak on vacation that I can’t lift a pound or two of blue steel.”

“Don’t look like you did,” Doc said and opened a cardboard box. “Can’t get much more basic than this, Kurtz. S&W Model 36 Special.”

Kurtz checked the heft, inspected the five empty chambers, held the barrel to the light, flipped shut the cylinder and dry-fired it. “How much?”

“Two hundred and fifty.”

“Throw the semiauto holster in that.”

Doc nodded.

“If I can put five into a three-inch circle at fifty feet with this, it’s a deal,” said Kurtz.

“Going deer hunting?” Doc said dryly. “You’ll need a sandbag rest at that distance. Barrel under two inches, generally the best plan is to sneak up on the deer and shove the Special against its belly before pulling the trigger.”

“I noticed a few sandbags down there.”

“Speaking of deer hunting,” said Doc. “You hear that Manny Levine is looking for you?”

“Who’s Manny Levine?”

“A psycho. Brother of Sammy Levine.”

“Who’s Sammy Levine?”

“Was,” said Doc. “Sammy disappeared about eleven-and-a-half years ago. Word on the street was that you helped him get started in the energy business.”

“Energy business?”

“Methane production,” said Doc.

“Don’t know either of them,” said Kurtz. “But in case this Manny comes calling, what does he look like?”

“Sort of like Danny DeVito on a bad day. But a much shittier disposition. Carries a .44 Magnum Ruger Redhawk and likes to use it.”

“That’s a lot of gun for a short fat man,” said Kurtz. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

Doc shrugged again. “Need anything else tonight?”

“Sap,” said Kurtz.

“Regular, ballistic cloth, or leather?”

It was after midnight when Kurtz drove back to Cheektowaga with the .45 holstered in the small of his back, the .38 in his left jacket pocket, and the two-pound sap in his right jacket pocket. He stayed at or under the speed limit all the way back. It would be embarrassing to be stopped by a cop and his license was eight years out of date.

He had just pulled into the Motel 6 when he noticed the sports car parked far from the light, its cloth top up. A red Honda S2000. It could be Coincidence, except Kurtz did not believe in coincidence. He made a quick U-turn and drove back out onto the boulevard.

The S2000 switched on its lights and accelerated hard to follow.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

Kurtz drove about three miles before deciding that whoever was behind the wheel of the Honda was a fucking idiot. The driver hung so far back that several times Kurtz had to slow down after stoplights or turns to let him catch up.

Kurtz drove away from the lights, down a county road he remembered from the old days. The urban sprawl hadn’t stretched this far and the road was empty of traffic. Kurtz accelerated until the sports car had to rush to keep up and was only forty or fifty feet behind him, and then he swerved off on a paved turnout, braking hard, swinging the protesting Buick into a clean 180-degree skidding turn. His headlights illuminated the S2000 as it came to a stop twenty feet away. Only the driver’s head was visible.

Kurtz scrambled out, crouched behind the driver’s-side door of the Buick, and pulled out the .45 Kimber.

A huge man stepped out of the sports car. His hands were empty.

“Kurtz, you asshole. Come out of there, goddamn you.”

Kurtz sighed, slid the .45 into its holster, and stepped out into the headlights’ glare. “You don’t want to do this, Carl.”

“The fuck I don’t,” said the big Farino-family bodyguard.

“Who sent you?”

“Nobody sent me, asshole.”

“Then you’re dumber than you look,” said Kurtz. “If that’s possible.”

Carl stepped closer. He was wearing the same tight pants and polo shirt as before, without the blazer, showing his pecs despite the chilly night air. “I’m not packing heat, cocksucker,” he said.

“Okay,” said Kurtz.

“Let’s settle this—” said the bodybuilder.

“Settle what?”

“—man to man,” said Carl, finishing his thought.

“We’re one man short,” said Kurtz. He glanced at his watch. The road remained empty.

“Huh?” Carl frowned.

“One thing before going mano a mano,” said Kurtz. “How’d you find me?”

“Followed you when you left Mr. Farino’s.”

Christ, I’m slipping! thought Kurtz with the first alarm he had felt since identifying the hulking bodyguard in the sports car.

Carl took another step closer. “No one calls me a bitch,” he said, extending the muscles in his powerful forearms and flexing his huge hands.

“Really?” said Kurtz. “I thought you’d be used to it.”

Carl lunged.

Kurtz sidestepped him and sapped him over his left ear. Carl went face first onto the Buick bumper and then again onto the asphalt. Kurtz heard teeth snapping off on both impacts. Kurtz walked over and kicked him in the ass. Carl did not stir.

Kurtz went back to the Buick to switch off its lights, then did the same with the sports car, shutting off its engine, locking the doors, and tossing the keys into the woods. Grunting slightly, he dragged Carl around to the left rear of the Buick and kicked his legs into line just in front of the left rear wheel.

Then Kurtz got back in Arlene’s car, made sure no one was coming, tuned the radio to an all-night blues station, and drove away, switching on the lights once he was on the highway, heading back to the Motel 6 to check out.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

Of all the unbelievable nerve,” said Attorney Leonard Miles. “Of all the unmitigated gall.”

“Incredible balls, you mean,” said Don Farino.

“Whatever,” said Miles.

There were three of them in the huge solarium, not counting the mynah bird who was carrying on his own raucous conversation in his cage amidst the riot of green plants. Farino was in his wheelchair, but as was his custom when in the wheelchair, he was dressed in a suit and tie. His twenty-eight-year-old daughter Sophia sat on the green, silk-upholstered settee under the palm fronds. Miles was pacing back and forth.

“Which part do you think took the nerve,” asked Sophia, “crippling Carl or calling us last night to tell us about it?”

“Both,” said Miles. He stopped pacing and crossed his arms. “But especially the call. Absolute arrogance.”

“I heard the tape of the call,” said Sophia. “He didn’t sound arrogant. He sounded like someone phoning to let you know that your dry cleaning is ready for pickup.”

Miles glanced at Farino’s daughter but looked at her father when he spoke next. He hated dealing with the woman. Farino’s oldest son, David, had been capable enough, but had wrapped his Dodge Viper around a telephone pole at 145 miles per hour. The second son, Little Skag, was hopeless. The Don’s older daughter, Angelina, had run away to Europe years before. That left this…girl.

“Either way, sir,” Miles said to the former don, “I think that we should call in the Dane.”

“Really?” said Byron Farino. “You think it’s that serious, Leonard?”

“Yes, sir. He crippled one of your people and then called to brag about it.”

“Or perhaps he just called to save us the embarrassment of finding out about Carl’s injuries in the newspaper,” said Sophia. “This way we were able to get out to the accident scene first.”

“Accident scene,” repeated Miles, not hiding his derision.

Sophia shrugged. “Our people made it look like an accident. It saved us a lot of questions and legal expenses.”

Miles shook his head. “Carl was a brave and loyal employee.”

“Carl was an absolute idiot,” said Sophia Farino. “All those steroids obviously burned out what little brain he had left.”

Miles turned to say something sharp to the bitch and instantly thought better of it. He stood in silence, listening to the mynah bird berate an invisible opponent.

“Leonard,” said Don Farino, “what was the first thing Carl said to our people when he regained consciousness this morning?”

“He couldn’t say anything. His jaw is wired shut, and he’ll need extensive oral surgery before—”

“What did he write to Buddy and Frank, then?” asked Don Farino.

The attorney hesitated. “He wrote that five of Gonzaga’s people followed him and jumped him,” Miles said after a moment.

Don Farino nodded slowly. “And if we had believed Carl…if Kurtz had not called last night…if I had not called Thomas Gonzaga this morning, we could be at war, could we not, Leonard?”

Miles showed his hands and shrugged. “Carl was embarrassed. He was in pain—medicated—and afraid we’d blame him.”

“He followed this Kurtz and tried to settle his private scores on family time,” said Sophia Farino. “Then he screwed that up. Why shouldn’t we blame him?”

Miles only shook his head and gave Don Farino a look that said, Women can’t understand these things.

Byron Farino shifted slightly in his wheelchair. It was obvious that he was in pain from the eight-year-old gunshot wound and the bullet still embedded near his spine. “Write a check for $5,000 for Carl’s family,” said the Don. “Is it just his mother?”

“Yes, sir,” said Miles, not seeing any reason to mention that Carl lived with a twenty-year-old male model of Miles’s acquaintance.

“Would you see to that, Leonard?” said Farino.

“Of course.” Miles hesitated and then decided to be bold. “And the Dane?”

Farino was quiet for a moment. The mynah bird deep in the green fronds chattered away to itself. Finally the older don said, “Yes, I think perhaps a call to the Dane would be in order.”

Miles blinked. He was pleasantly surprised. This would save him $30,000 with Malcolm and Cutter. Miles had no intention of demanding the advance money back. “I’ll contact the Dane—” he began.

Farino shook his head. “No, no, I’ll take care of it, Leonard. You go make out the check for Carl’s family and make sure that it’s delivered. Oh, and Miles…what was the rest of Mr. Kurtz’s message last night?”

“Just where we could find Carl. Kurtz had the gall—I mean, he said that it hadn’t been personal—and then he said that he wouldn’t be starting his $400-a-day retainer until today. That he would be interviewing Buell Richardson’s wife this morning.”

“Thank you, Leonard.” Farino dismissed the lawyer.

When Miles was gone, Farino turned to his daughter. As was true of his older daughter, he saw much of their late mother there: the full lips, the olive complexion, the mass of black hair curling around her oval face, the long, sensuous fingers, and the lush body. But he had to admit that Sophia’s eyes showed more intelligence and depth than his wife’s ever had.

Farino sat lost in thought for a long minute. The mynah stirred in its cage but respected the silence. Eventually Farino said, “Do you feel comfortable taking care of this, Sophia?”

“Of course, Papa.”

“Dealing with the Dane can be…disturbing,” said her father.

Sophia smiled. “I was the one who wanted to be involved in the family business, Papa,” she said. “All of the family business.”

Farino nodded unhappily. “But with the Dane…be very, very careful, my dear. Even on the secure telephone line, be very professional.”

“Of course, Papa.”

Out on the lawn of the mansion, Leonard Miles had to work to keep from smiling. The Dane. But the more he thought about it, the more sense it made that this mess be cleaned up before the Dane became involved. And Miles certainly did not want to do anything that would irritate Malcolm and his partner. Even the thought of the Dane, Malcolm, and Cutter crossing paths made Miles a bit dizzy. And although Mrs. Richardson knew nothing, Miles realized now that she might be considered a loose end.

You keep tying up all of these loose ends, scolded the parsimonious part of Miles’s mind, and you’ll end up in the poorhouse.

Miles paused to think about that. Finally he shook his head. He was caviling about a few thousand more dollars when millions—millions were involved. He flipped open his phone and called Malcolm Kibunte’s number. Malcolm never answered the phone in person.

“Our K package will be arriving at the accountant’s wife’s home sometime this morning,” he said to the answering machine. “It would be a good place to pick up that package.” He hesitated only a second. “And her package should probably be picked up at the same time. I’ll pay for delivery of both items when we meet again. Please bring along the receipts.”

Miles flipped the phone shut and walked down to his Cadillac to write the check for Carl’s mother. Miles was not worried about using the cell phone because he would throw the phone into the river on the drive back into town. He owned many such phones, none of them traceable to Counselor Leonard Miles.

Driving toward the main gate, he decided that he would break the news to Carl’s roommate himself.

CHAPTER

NINE

It was raining hard when Kurtz walked up to the sprawling brick home just a few blocks from Delaware Park. Malcolm and Cutter watched from Malcolm’s yellow SLK, its top up, half a block back from where Kurtz had just parked his Buick. Malcolm had noticed how careful Kurtz had been, driving by once to case the place, checking several times that he had not been followed before parking. But Malcolm and Cutter had arrived first and had hunkered down when Kurtz drove past. The driving rain helped conceal them in the car, but Malcolm had turned the engine off anyway. He knew that nothing gave away the presence of a watcher faster than the exhaust from an idling engine.

Cutter made a soft noise from the passenger seat.

“In a minute, C, my man,” said Malcolm. “In a minute.”

Kurtz had not known many accountants over the years—he’d had a couple as divorce-case clients and had seen a few more adventurous types serving time in Attica for whatever white-collar crimes accountants commit—but Mrs. Richardson hardly seemed like an accountant’s wife to him. She seemed more like one of the expensive call girls who plied their trade near the fancier Niagara Falls resort hotels. Kurtz had seen pictures of Buell Richardson and heard descriptions from Little Skag. The accountant had been short, bald, in his fifties, peering out at the world through thick glasses like a myopic, arrogant chipmunk. His wife was in her late twenties, very blond, very built, and—it seemed to Kurtz—very chipper for a probable widow.

“Please sit down, Mr. Kurtz. Just don’t move that chair out of its place, please. The furniture placement is part of the general ambience.”

“Sure,” said Kurtz, having not the slightest clue as to what she was talking about. Buell Richardson had been rich enough to own a Frank Lloyd Wright home near Delaware Park. “Not the Frank Lloyd Wright house near Delaware Park,” Arlene had said after making the interview appointment for him. “Not the Dewey D. Martin house. The other one.”

“Right,” Kurtz had said. Kurtz didn’t know the Dewey D. Martin house from a housing project, but he had found the address easily enough. Thought the home was nice enough looking if you liked all that brick and the overhanging eaves, but the straight-backed chairs near the fireplace were a literal pain in the butt. He had no idea if Frank Lloyd Wright had designed the chairs and he certainly did not care, but he was certain that the chair had not been built with any regard for the human body. The chair back was as stiff and upright as an ironing board and the seat was too small for a midget’s ass. If they had designed an electric chair this way, Kurtz thought, the condemned man would bitch about it in his last seconds before they threw the switch.

“It’s nice of you to agree to talk to me, Mrs. Richardson.”

“Anything to help in the investigation, Mr…”

“Kurtz.”

“Yes. But you’re not with the police, you say. A private investigator?”

“An investigator, yes, ma’am,” said Kurtz. When he had been a real P.I., he had owned one good suit and two decent ties for such interviews, and now he felt foolish in his Eddie Bauer windbreaker and chinos. Arlene had given him one of Alan’s old ties, but Kurtz was two inches taller and forty pounds heavier than his secretary’s dead husband, so there would be no suit from that source. Kurtz looked forward to earning some money. After purchasing the two pistols, giving Arlene $300 toward equipment, and paying for his food and lodging, Kurtz was down to about $35.

“Who else is interested in finding Buell?” asked the accountant’s wife.

“I’m not at liberty to reveal my client’s identity, ma’am. But I can assure you that it’s someone who wishes your husband well and wants to help find him.”

Mrs. Richardson nodded. Her hair was tied up in an elaborate bun and Kurtz found himself noticing the artfully loose wisps of blond hair touching her perfect neck. “Is there anything that you might tell me about the circumstances of Mr. Richardson’s disappearance?”

She shook her head slowly. “I’ve reported everything to the police, of course. But there’s honestly nothing out of the ordinary that I can recall. It was just a month ago this Thursday. Buell left at his usual time that morning…eight-fifteen…and said that he was going straight to his office.”

“His secretary told us that he didn’t have any meetings scheduled for that day,” said Kurtz. “Isn’t that unusual for an accountant?”

“Not at all,” said Mrs. Richardson. “Buell had a very few private clients and much of his business with them was conducted over the telephone.”

“You know the names of those clients?”

Mrs. Richardson pursed her perfect pink lips. “I’m sure that’s confidential, Mr…”

“Kurtz.”

“…but I can assure you that all of his clients were important people…serious people…and all above reproach.”

“Of course,” said Kurtz. “And he was driving the Mercedes E300 on the day of his disappearance?”

Mrs. Richardson cocked her head. “Yes. Haven’t you read the police report, Mr…”

“Kurtz. Yes, ma’am, I have. Just double-checking.”

“Well, he was. Driving the smaller Mercedes, I mean. I had some shopping to do that day so I had the larger one. The police found the little one the next day. The little Mercedes, I mean.”

Kurtz nodded. Little Skag had said that the accountant’s E300 had been left in Lackawanna, where it had been stripped within hours. There had been hundreds of fingerprints on the shell of the vehicle, all those identified so far belonging to the gangbangers and civilians who had helped themselves to parts.

“Can you think of any reason for Mr. Richardson to want to drop out of sight?” said Kurtz.

The statuesque blonde snapped her head back as if Kurtz had slapped her. “Do you mean, for instance, another woman, Mr…”

“Kurtz,” said Kurtz and waited.

“I resent that question and its implications.”

I don’t blame you, Kurtz wanted to say aloud. If your husband was stalking poon on the side, he was a moron. He waited.

“No, there was no reason for Buell to want to…how did you put it, Mr. Katz? To drop out of sight. He was happy. We were happy. We have a good life. Buell was considering retiring in a year or so, we have the place in Maui where we were going to spend time, and we recently bought a boat…a little sixty-foot catamaran…” Mrs. Richardson paused. “We planned to spend the next few years sailing around the world.”

Kurtz nodded. ‘A little sixty-foot catamaran.’ What the hell would a big boat be like? He tried to imagine a year on a sixty-foot yacht with this woman, tropical ports, long nights at sea. It wasn’t too difficult. “Well, you’ve been very helpful, Mrs. Richardson,” Kurtz said, rose, and headed for the door.

Mrs. Richardson hurried to keep up. “I don’t see how my answering these few questions can help find my husband, Mr…”

Kurtz had given up on the name thing. He’d known Sterno sniffers with better short-term memories than this woman.

“Actually, you’ve been very helpful,” he said again. And she had been. Kurtz’s only real reason for interviewing her was to see if she might have been involved in the accountant’s disappearance. She hadn’t been. Mrs. Richardson was beautiful—striking, even—but she obviously wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Her ignorance had not been feigned. Kurtz doubted if she was even aware that her husband was almost certainly decomposing in a shallow grave or being nibbled on by bottom feeders in Lake Erie as they spoke.

“Thanks again,” he said and walked out to Arlene’s Buick.

Shit,” said Malcolm. He and Cutter were just getting out of the SLK. Malcolm put his hand out as if to grab Cutter, but stopped with his fingers an inch short of the man’s arm. He would never touch Cutter without permission, and Cutter would never give such permission. “Wait,” said Malcolm, and both men slid back into the car.

Kurtz was coming out of the house. Now that Malcolm could see him more clearly, he realized that Kurtz still looked pretty much like his mug shot: a little older, a little leaner, a little meaner.

“I thought he be in there a while,” Malcolm said. “What kind of fucking ’vestigator is he, five minutes with the widow?”

Cutter had taken his gravity knife out of his sweatshirt pocket and now seemed absorbed in the knobby contours of its handle.

“We wait a minute, maybe he’ll go back in,” said Malcolm.

Kurtz did not go back in. He got in the Buick and drove off.

“Shit,” Malcolm said again. Then, “Okay, Miles the mouthpiece say pick up both packages. Which package you think we should pick up first, Cutter, my man?”

Cutter looked at the mansion. His hand twitched and both blades flicked out. The knife was made by a famous rifle-maker, and it had two blades. Now Cutter folded one of the blades away and kept the other open and locked. It was a curved blade—razor sharp for four inches, and then sharp but fully hooked at the end. This was known as a gut hook.

Cutter’s eyes gleamed.

“Yeah, you right as always,” agreed Malcolm. “I know a way we can find Mr. Kurtz again later when we want him. Now we got business here.”

The two men got out of the SLK. Malcolm beeped it locked, paused, and then beeped it open again.

“Almost forgot,” he said. He pulled out the Polaroid camera and both men walked across the empty street in the rain.

CHAPTER

TEN

The Erie County Medical Center was a gigantic complex close enough to the Kensington Expressway for the patients to hear the hum of traffic if they wanted. Few did. Most of them were too preoccupied with living and dying and trying to sleep to notice the distant sound of traffic over the whisper of heating or air conditioning, the chimes and announcements, and the chatter in the hallways and rooms. Visiting hours ended officially at 9:00 P.M., but the last of the visitors were usually filtering out around 10:00 P.M.

At 10:15 on this October night, a tall, thin gentleman in a simple tan raincoat and a Bavarian-style hat with a red feather in it stepped off the elevator into the West Wing Intensive Care area. The man was carrying a small bouquet of flowers. He looked to be in his mid-fifties, with sad eyes, a slightly distracted expression, and a faint smile under a well-groomed ginger mustache. He wore expensive black gloves.

“I’m sorry, sir, visiting hours are over,” said the station nurse, intercepting him with her gaze before he took three steps from the elevator.

The tall man paused and looked even more lost. “Yes… I am sorry.” He had a slight European accent. “I just arrived from Stuttgart. My mother…”

“You can visit her in the morning, sir. Visiting hours begin at 10:00 A.M.”

The man nodded, began to turn away, then turned back with the flowers extended. “Mrs. Haupt. She is on your chart, yes? I just arrived from Stuttgart, and my brother says that Mumi is in very serious condition.”

At the mention of the name, the nurse glanced at her computer screen. Whatever she saw there made her bite her lip. “Mrs. Haupt is your mother, sir?”

“Yes.” The tall man in the raincoat shuffled his feet and looked at the flowers. “It has been too many years since I saw her last. I should have come sooner, but work…and I must fly home tomorrow.”

The station nurse hesitated. Nurses and orderlies were bustling back and forth, bringing the bedtime meds to the patients. “You understand, Mr… Haupt?”

“Yes.”

“You understand, Mr. Haupt, that your mother has been in a coma for several weeks now. She won’t know you’re here.”

The sad-eyed man nodded. “But I would know that I had been there with her.”

The nurse’s eyes actually glistened. “Down the hall there, sir. Mrs. Haupt is in one of the private rooms, eleven-oh-eight. I’ll have one of the nurses come down and check on you in a few minutes.”

“Thank you very much,” said the man in the raincoat and shuffled through the whirlwind of purposeful movement and all of its attendant chaos.

Mrs. Haupt was in a coma. Various tubes flowed in and out of her. On the nightstand next to her, her dentures grinned out from a glass of water. The man in the raincoat and the feathered hat took the paper off the stems of the flowers and set them in the glass with the old woman’s teeth. Then he glanced out into the corridor, saw no one, and walked quietly down to Room 1123.

There were no guards. Carl was asleep, medicated, when the man entered the room. Carl’s head was bandaged, his face was a mass of bruises coalescing into a raccoon mask, and his jaw was wired shut. Both legs were in casts and connected to an elaborate structure of guy wires, counterweights, and a metal frame. Carl’s right arm was restrained with a thick strap, and his left arm was taped down to a board so that an IV drip could do its work. He had numerous tubes connected to him.

The tall man quietly unlooped the nurse’s call button from the headboard and moved it out of Carl’s reach. Then he took a capped syringe from his raincoat pocket and held it in his right hand while he used his other hand to squeeze Carl’s heavily wired jaw.

“Carl? Carl?” The man’s voice was soft and solicitous.

Carl moaned, groaned, tried to turn over, was restrained by all of the straps and wires, and opened his one good eye. It was obvious that he did not recognize the man in the raincoat.

The man in the raincoat removed the cover from the needle with his teeth and drew the plunger back, filling the empty syringe with air. He softly spat the plastic cover from his mouth and caught it in the same hand as the syringe. “Are you awake, Carl?”

Carl’s one eye showed groggy confusion fading into horror as he watched the strange man remove his IV drip from the monitor, click off the alarm, and slip the tip of the needle into the drip. Carl tried to roll over toward the call button. The stranger grasped his IV-attached arm and held him fast.

“The Farinos wanted to thank you for all of your faithful service, Carl, and to say that they are sorry that you were such an idiot.” The tall man’s voice was soft. He fitted the syringe needle deeper into the needle port on the IV-drip attachment. Carl made terrible noises through his wired-shut jaw and thrashed around on the bed like some huge fish.

“Shhh,” the man said soothingly and pushed the plunger all the way down. The air bubble was actually visible in the clear IV tube as it flowed down toward Carl’s forearm.

The tall man expertly recapped the syringe with one hand and set it back in his raincoat pocket. Holding Carl’s left wrist as he was, studying the watch on his own right wrist, someone passing by would assume that this was a doctor on late rounds, taking a patient’s pulse.

Carl’s broken jaw cracked audibly and wire actually snapped. The sound he made was not quite human.

“Another four or five seconds,” the man in the raincoat said softly. “Ahhh, there we are.”

The air bubble had hit Carl’s heart, essentially exploding it. Carl arched so wildly that two of the metal guy wires strummed like high-tension wires in a high wind. The bodyguard’s eyes grew so wide that they seemed ready to burst, but then they glazed over into sightlessness. Blood poured from both of Carl’s nostrils.

The man released Carl’s wrist, left the room, walked down the short hall in the opposite direction from the nurse’s central station, and took the back stairway down to the basement and the ambulance ramp up and out of the hospital.

Sophia Farino was waiting outside in her black Porsche Boxster. The hardtop was up against the rain that continued to fall. The tall man slid into the seat next to her. She did not ask him how things had gone.

“The airport?” she said.

“Yes, please,” said the man in the same soft, pleasant tones he had used with Carl.

They drove east on the Kensington for several minutes. “The weather in Buffalo always pleases me,” the man said, breaking the silence. “It reminds me of Copenhagen.”

Sophia smiled and then said, “Oh, I almost forgot.” She unlocked the small center console and brought out a thick white envelope.

The man smiled slightly and put the envelope in his raincoat pocket without counting the money. “Please give my warmest regards to your father,” he said.

“I will.”

“And if there is any other service I could possibly perform for your family…”

Sophia looked away from the tak-tak of the windshield wipers. It was just a few more miles to the airport. “Well, actually,” she said, “there is something else…”

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

Kurtz sat in the tiny Civic Center office, looked across the cluttered desk at his parole officer, and realized that she was cute as a bug.

The P.O.’s name was Peg O’Toole. P.O. for P.O., thought Kurtz. He rarely thought in terms such as “cute as a bug,” but that’s what Ms. O’Toole was. In her early thirties, probably, but with a fresh, freckled face and clear blue eyes. Red hair—not the astounding, pure red like Sam’s, but a complex auburn-red—that fell down to her shoulders in natural waves. A bit overweight by modern standards, which pleased Kurtz to no end. One of the best phrases he had ever encountered was the writer Tom Wolfe’s description of New York anorectic socialites as “social X-rays.” Kurtz idly wondered what P.O. Peg O’Toole would think of him if he mentioned that he had read Tom Wolfe. Then Kurtz wondered what was wrong with himself for wondering that.

“So where are you living, Mr. Kurtz?”

“Here and there.” Kurtz noticed that she had not condescended to him by calling him by his first name.

“You’ll need a fixed address.” Her tone was neither familiar nor cold, merely professional. “I have to visit your place of residence in the next month and make sure that it’s acceptable under terms of parole.”

Kurtz nodded. “I’ve been staying in a Motel 6, but I’m looking for something more permanent.” He didn’t think it would be wise to tell her about the abandoned icehouse and the borrowed sleeping bag he currently called home.

Ms. O’Toole made a note. “Have you begun looking for employment yet?”

“Found a job,” said Kurtz.

She raised her eyebrows slightly. Kurtz noticed that they were thick and the same color as her hair.

“Self-employed,” he said.

“That won’t do,” said Peg O’Toole. “We’ll need to know the details.”

Kurtz nodded. “I’ve set up an investigatory agency.”

The P.O. tapped her lower lip with her pen. “You realize, Mr. Kurtz, that you won’t be licensed as a private investigator in the state of New York again, and that it’s illegal for you to own or carry a firearm or to associate with known felons?”

“Yes,” said Kurtz. When the P.O. said nothing, he went on, “It’s a legally registered business—‘Sweetheart Search.’”

Ms. O’Toole did not quite smile. “‘Sweetheart Search’? Is it some sort of skip-trace service?”

“In a way,” said Kurtz. “It’s a Web-based locator service. My secretary and I do ninety-nine percent of the work on computers.”

The P.O. tapped her white teeth with the capped pen. “There are about a hundred services like that on the Net,” she said.

“That’s what Arlene, my secretary, said.”

“And why do you think yours will make money?”

“First, it’s my feeling that there are about a hundred million baby boomers out there approaching retirement who are ready to dump their current spouses and probably still have the hots for old boyfriends or girlfriends from high school.” said Kurtz. “You know, memories of first lust in the backseat of the ’66 Mustang, that sort of thing.”

Ms. O’Toole smiled. “Not much of a backseat in the ’66 Mustang,” she said. She was not being coy, Kurtz thought, merely observant.

Kurtz nodded. “You like old Mustangs?”

“We’re not here to discuss my preference in muscle cars,” she said. “Why are these aging baby boomers going to turn to your service? Since there are all these other cheap classmate-tracing sites on the Web?”

“Yes,” said Kurtz, “but Arlene and I are being more proactive.” He paused. “Did I say ‘proactive’? Christ, I hate that word. Arlene and I are being more…imaginative.”

Ms. O’Toole looked mildly surprised for the second time.

“Anyway, we go through old high-school yearbooks,” said Kurtz, “find someone who might have been popular in his or her class way back when—we’re starting in the sixties—and then send the information to former classmates. You know—‘Have you ever wondered what happened to Billy Benderbix? Find out through Sweetheart Search’—that sort of garbage.”

“You’re aware of privacy laws?”

“Yep,” said Kurtz. “There aren’t enough of them for the Net. But we just look up these former classmates via the usual people finders and send them this bulk E-mail query.”

“Is it working?”

Kurtz shrugged. “It’s only been a few days, but we’ve had several hundred hits.” He paused. He knew that the P.O. didn’t want to make small talk any more than he did; but he wanted to share a story with someone, and there certainly was no one else in his life. “Want to hear about our first try?”

“Sure,” said the P.O.

“Well, Arlene has been gathering yearbooks for the past few days. We’ve accessed back issues from all over the country and ordered more through the mail, but we’re starting with the Buffalo area—real yearbooks—until we get a database started.”

“Makes sense.”

“So yesterday we’re ready to start. I say, ‘Let’s pick someone at random here to be our first Mr. or Miss Lonely Heart…sorry, Ms. Lonely Heart.’”

“That sounds stupid,” said O’Toole. “Miss Lonely Heart is right.”

Kurtz nodded. “So Arlene takes this high-school yearbook from the stack—Kenmore West, 1966—and flips it open. I poke my finger down and choose someone at random. He had a weird name, but I figure, what the hell. Arlene starts laughing…”

O’Toole’s expression was neutral, but she was listening.

“Wolf Blitzer,” said Kurtz. “‘I think maybe his classmates will know about him,’ says Arlene. ‘Why?’ I say. So Arlene starts laughing at me…”

“You don’t know Wolf Blitzer?” said P.O. O’Toole.

Kurtz shrugged again. “I guess he became well known way back when my trial was going on, and I haven’t watched much CNN since.”

O’Toole was smiling.

“Anyway,” continued Kurtz, “Arlene quits laughing, explains who Wolf Blitzer is and why he wouldn’t be our best choice, and then pulls down a West Seneca High School yearbook. Flips it open. Stabs at a picture. Another guy. Tim Russert.”

O’Toole laughed softly. “NBC,” she said.

“Yeah. I’d never heard of him, either. By this point, Arlene’s busting a gut.”

“Quite a coincidence.”

Kurtz shook his head. “I don’t believe in coincidence. It was Arlene setting me up. She has a weird sense of humor. Anyway, finally we find someone from a Buffalo-area high school who’s not a well-known correspondent, and—”

The phone rang. As O’Toole answered it, Kurtz felt some relief at the interruption. He’d been deliberately babbling.

“Yeah…yeah…okay,” O’Toole was saying. “I understand. All right. Good.” When she hung up, her gaze seemed cooler to Kurtz.

The door burst open. A homicide cop named Jimmy Hathaway and a younger cop whom Kurtz had never seen before came in with 9mm Glocks aimed, badges visible on their belts. Kurtz looked back to see that Peg O’Toole had pulled a Sig Pro from her purse on the floor and was aiming it at his face.

“Hands behind your head, asshole,” shouted Hathaway.

They cuffed Kurtz, frisked him—he was clean, of course, since it hadn’t seemed a good idea to pack heat to the first meeting with his P.O.—and then shoved him up against the wall while the younger cop emptied his pockets of change, car keys, and mints.

“You won’t be seeing this fucking loser again,” Hathaway said to O’Toole as he shoved Kurtz out the door. “He’s going back to Attica, and this time he’s never coming out.”

Kurtz glanced back once at Peg O’Toole before another shove sent him down the hallway. She had set her gun away. Her expression was unreadable.

CHAPTER

TWELVE

Kurtz knew that it was not going to be an easy interrogation when Hathaway, the homicide cop, lowered some louvered blinds over the one-way mirror lining one wall of the interrogation room and then ripped the recording-microphone wire out of its jack on the floor. A second bad omen was that Kurtz was handcuffed behind his back to a straight-back metal chair which was, in turn, bolted to the floor. The third clue came from some dark stains on the battered wooden table and more stains spattered on the linoleum floor near the bolted chair, although Kurtz told himself that these could have been from spilled coffee. But perhaps the strongest hint was the fact that Hathaway was pulling on a pair of those latex gloves paramedics use to keep from getting AIDS.

“Welcome back, Kurtz, you fuck,” Hathaway said when the blinds were down. He took three quick steps closer and backhanded Kurtz across the face.

Kurtz shook his head and spat blood onto the linoleum. The good news was that Hathaway wasn’t wearing the heavy gold ring that he used to wear on his right hand, possibly because it would tear the latex gloves. Kurtz’s cheek still bore a faint scar from his ear to the corner of his mouth resulting from a similar chat with Hathaway almost twelve years earlier.

“Nice to see you, too, Lieutenant,” said Kurtz.

“It’s Detective,” said Hathaway.

Kurtz shrugged as much as he could while handcuffed. “More than eleven years,” he said and spat blood again, “I figured maybe you’d finally been able to pass the lieutenant’s exam. Or at least the sergeant’s.”

Hathaway came forward and hit Kurtz again, this time with his fist closed.

Kurtz faded a bit and came back as the younger cop was saying, “…for chrissakes, Jimmy.”

“Shut up,” said Detective Hathaway. He paced around the table, glancing at his watch. Kurtz guessed that the detective had only so much time for the private part of this interrogation. That’s good, thought Kurtz, his head still ringing.

“Where were you yesterday morning, Kurtz?” barked Hathaway.

Kurtz shook his head. Mistake. The room pitched and yawed. Only the handcuffs kept him upright in the chair.

“I said, Where were you yesterday?” said Hathaway, walking closer.

“Lawyer,” said Kurtz. He still had blood in his mouth, but all of his teeth seemed solid.

“What?”

“I want a lawyer.”

“Your lawyer’s dead, scumbag,” said Hathaway. “That ambulance-chasing pimp Murrell had a coronary four years ago.”

Kurtz knew that. “Lawyer,” he said again.

Hathaway’s response was to remove his Glock 9mm from a shoulder holster and a tiny Smith and Wesson .32 from his suit pocket. He tossed the .32 onto the table near Kurtz. A classic plant-it-on-the-perp throwdown.

“Jimmy, for God’s sake!” said the younger, shorter cop. Kurtz could not tell if it was part of their choreography or if the younger homicide detective was actually concerned. If it was the standard good-cop, bad-cop farce, then the kid was a pretty good actor.

“Maybe we didn’t frisk you well enough coming in,” said Hathaway, staring into Kurtz with his pale blue eyes. Kurtz had always thought that Hathaway had flies in his eyes, and a decade later, the cop was crazier than ever.

Hathaway racked a round into the chamber of his Glock. “Where were you yesterday morning, Joey-boy?”

Kurtz was getting bored with this. Over the past decade, he’d had a few conversations with other cons about the Prime Directive of “never kill a cop.” Kurtz’s point of view, for conversation’s sake, had been “Why not?” He had often had Hathaway in mind during these talks.

Kurtz looked away from the red-faced homicide cop and thought about other things.

“You miserable asshole,” said Hathaway. He holstered the Glock, disappeared the .32 with a sweep of his hand, and hit Kurtz on the collarbone with a blackjack quite similar to the one that Kurtz had used on Carl. Immediately, Kurtz’s entire shoulder and left arm went numb, then raged with pain.

The other detective plugged in the microphone and opened the blinds. Hathaway had peeled off the paramedic gloves. The throwdown and blackjack were out of sight. The Glock was holstered.

Well, thought Kurtz, that went all right.

“You acknowledge, Joe Kurtz, that you’ve been advised of your rights?” said Detective Hathaway.

Kurtz grunted. He didn’t think his collarbone was broken, but it would be a few hours before he could use his left arm.

“Where were you yesterday morning between the hours of 9:00 and 11:00 A.M.?” said Hathaway.

“I’d like to speak to an attorney,” said Kurtz, enunciating as carefully as he could.

“A public defender is being notified as we speak,” Hathaway said to the microphone. “It should be noted that this conversation is being held with the agreement and at the request of Mr. Kurtz.”

Kurtz leaned closer to the mike. “Your mother used to suck dick on South Delaware, Detective Hathaway. I was a regular customer.”

Hathaway forgot that he was not wearing gloves and backhanded Kurtz so hard that the bloody spray from his nose splattered the wall six feet away. That was smart of me, he thought. They edit these tapes, anyway. He shook his head. He had flicked his head away from the blow fast enough to avoid a broken nose.

“Do you recognize this woman?” said the other detective, sliding a white folder across the table. He opened the folder.

“Don’t drip on the pictures, Kurtz!” warned Hathaway.

Kurtz tried to comply, although there was so much blood visible in the black-and-white photos that a little of the real stuff shouldn’t be a problem.

“Do you recognize this woman?” repeated the other detective.

Kurtz said nothing. From the photographs, it was just possible to tell that it had been a woman. Kurtz knew who it was, of course. He recognized the straight-backed chairs around the Frank Lloyd Wright table.

“Do you deny that you were in this woman’s home yesterday morning?” demanded the younger detective. And then, to the microphone, he added, “Let the record show that Mr. Kurtz refuses to identify the photograph of Mary Anne Richardson, a woman with whom he met yesterday.”

She had a nose, eyes, breasts, and all of her skin yesterday, Kurtz was tempted to say aloud. He did study the photos spread out on the tabletop. The murderer had been an edged-weapons freak, powerful, a full-blown psycho, but good with the blade. For all the slaughterhouse aspect of the vivisection, it had been administered efficiently. Kurtz doubted if Mrs. Richardson would have appreciated that distinction, since it looked as if the cutter had kept her alive for quite a while during the proceedings. Kurtz studied the background, trying to guess the time of the murder from the arrangement of the furniture. The furniture was exactly as he and the lady had left it. There had been no real struggle—or the knife man had been big enough that the struggle had been localized to that small patch of soaked carpet just outside the dining room. Or, most likely, there had been more than one man—one to hold and one to carve.

“Is that semen on her dress?” asked Kurtz.

“Shut up,” said Detective Hathaway. He stepped closer, put one hand over the microphone, and gripped Kurtz’s shoulder with his other hand. Kurtz’s moan was brief, but the detective kept his hand over the mike. “You’re going to go all the way down for this, Kurtz. We have your name in her appointment book. We have a caller who ID’d you at the scene.”

Kurtz sighed. “You know I didn’t do this, Hathaway. Not my style. When I want to butcher housewives, I always use a Mac 10.”

Hathaway showed his big teeth and squeezed harder. This time, Kurtz knew that it was coming and did not moan aloud, even when it seemed that his collarbones were clicking like castanets.

“Take this piece of shit out of here,” said Hathaway.

On cue, two huge uniformed officers entered the room, unlocked Kurtz’s cuffs, recuffed him with his hands behind his back, and led him out of the room. One of the uniformed cops had brought a wad of paper towels to dab at the blood dripping from Kurtz’s cheek and chin.

Kurtz looked down at his blue oxford-cloth shirt—his only shirt. Damn.

The uniforms led him down the hall, through various green corridors, through security checkpoints, downstairs to the basement area where he was fingerprinted, searched again, and digitally photographed.

Kurtz knew the drill. With the backlog, it would probably be late the next day before they got around to arraigning him. Kurtz shook his head—Hathaway couldn’t be serious about going for Murder One. At the arraignment, for whatever the hell he was actually going to be charged with, Kurtz could post bail and go free until his preliminary hearing.

“What are you smiling at, scumbag?” asked the cop busy trying hard to throw away the huge wad of bloody paper towels without getting any blood on his bare hands.

Kurtz assumed his normal expression. The thought of bail had amused him. Everything he had in the world was in his billfold—a little less than $20. Arlene had been stretched pretty thin, what with fronting the money for the computers and office junk. No, he’d have to sit this one out—first here at the courthouse holding pen, and then down out at the Erie County Jail—until someone in the district attorney’s office noticed that there was no case here, that Hathaway was just blowing smoke.

Well, Kurtz judged, he had gotten pretty good at sitting and waiting.

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

You understand, my man?” said Malcolm Kibunte to Doo-Rag for the fourth time. “He go up to ’raignment tomorrow sometime, they probably transfer him tomorrow late or next day morning, and he go into general population out at County.”

“I unnerstand,” said Doo-Rag, beginning to nod a bit, his heavy-lidded gaze becoming a bit more unfocused, but still there enough for Malcolm’s purposes.

“Good,” said Malcolm and patted the banger on the back.

“What I don’t understand, you know, what I need to axe you,” said Doo-Rag, squinting through his nod, “is how come, you know, you be getting so fucking generous in your ol’ age, Malcolm? You know what I mean? How come you turn over the whole D-Mosque ten bills to me and mine when we do this, you know, this pasty honky fucker for you? You hear what I’m saying?”

Malcolm opened his palms. “It’s not for me, Doo. It the Block D-Mosque brothers who want him shanked. No way I can get in there after the dude, so I just pass the word to you, my man. You want to give me some of the reward, that’s cool, but no way I can get myself in there after the fucker, hear me? So if your people do the job—” Malcolm shrugged—“fucker’s dead, Mosque brothers happy, everything cool.”

Doo-Rag was still frowning, working the thing through his drugged mind, but he obviously could not find a catch. “Tomorrow visiting day at County,” he said. “Get in early, like ten, pass the word to Lloyd and Small Pee and Daryll, your whiteboy be dead meat before lockdown.”

“He may not be transferred until day after tomorrow,” Malcolm reminded him. “But probably tomorrow. Arraigned tomorrow, probably bussed tomorrow.”

“Whenever,” said Doo-Rag.

“You got his mug shot, my man?”

Doo-Rag patted the chest pocket of his filthy Desert Storm camouflage jacket.

“You remember his name, my man?”

“Curtis.”

“Kurtz,” said Malcolm, tapping Doo-Rag’s nodding head right on the red do-rag. “Kurtz.”

“Whatever,” said Doo-Rag, shaking his head and climbing out of the SLK. He sauntered down the avenue, several of his fellow gangbangers falling into the same ambling pace with him. Doo-Rag reached into his baggy trousers, pulled out some of the crack bottles Malcolm had given him, and distributed them to his pals like candy.

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

Kurtz had almost forgotten how chaotically insane the city holding pens were compared to the regimented insanity of real cellblock life. The lights were on all night and new prisoners were being dragged through in greater numbers as the night grew later; there were already a dozen men in his cell by midnight, and the noise and stink were enough to drive a Buddhist monk bugfuck. One of the junkies was shouting and crying and vomiting and shouting some more until Kurtz went over and helped him relax with two fingers to the nerve that ran along his carotid artery. None of the guards came by to clean up the vomit.

There were three whites in the cell, counting the now-unconscious junkie, and the blacks were doing their usual territorial filings and shooting cutting stares and glances Kurtz’s way. If any of them recognized him, he knew, they would also know about the D-Mosque fatwah and it could mean a long night. There was nothing that Kurtz could use as a weapon—no spring, paper clip, ballpoint—nothing sharp at all, so he decided to just set up an early-warning system and try to get some sleep. Kurtz tossed the slumped junkie off one of the four small benches and used the side of his palm to convince the other white prisoner to sleep on the floor as well. Then Kurtz stacked up their slumped forms as a sort of fence about a yard from the bench. It wouldn’t take much effort for the blacks to get over his little roadblock, but it would certainly slow them down a bit. Of course, Kurtz was not discriminating against the African-American prisoners, it was just that there were more of them, and they were more likely to have heard of the bounty.

Cockroaches skittered across the floor, feasted on the pool of vomit in no-man’s-land, and then explored the folds of the junkie’s clothes and crawled across the other white guy’s exposed ankle.

Kurtz curled up on the unpadded bench and went into a half doze, eyes closed, but his face toward the mass of other men. After a while, their murmuring died down, and most of them dozed or sat cursing. Cops dragged whores and junkies past the cell toward the next corridor of pens. Evidently, this inn had not yet put out its No Vacancy sign for the night.

Sometime around 2:00 A.M., Kurtz snapped fully awake and pulled his fist far back in a killing mode. Movement. It was only a uniformed cop unlocking the cell door.

“Joe Kurtz.”

Kurtz went out warily, not turning his back on either the other prisoners or the cop. This might be Hathaway’s plan—the throwdown was certainly still around somewhere. Or maybe one of the cops had seen the paperwork on his arrest and connected him with the Death Mosque bounty.

The uniformed cop was fat and sleepy looking and—like all of the cops in the cell corridor—had left his weapon on the other side of the main sliding grate. The cop carried a baton in his hand and a can of Mace on his belt. Video cameras followed their movement. Kurtz decided that if Hathaway or anyone else was waiting around the bend in the corridor, about all he could do was take the baton away from the fat cop, use him as a shield during any shooting, and try to get in close. It was a shitty plan, but the best he could improvise without access to another weapon.

No one was waiting around the corridor. They passed through the doors and grates without incident. In the booking room another sleepy sergeant returned his wallet, keys, and change in a brown envelope and then led him up the back stairs to the main hall. There they unlocked the cage and let him walk.

A beautiful brunette—full-breasted, long-haired, with lovely skin and alluring eyes—was sitting on a long bench in the filthy waiting area. She got up when he came out. Kurtz wondered idly how anyone could look so fresh and put together at two in the morning.

“Mr. Kurtz, you look like shit,” said the brunette.

Kurtz nodded.

“Mr. Kurtz, my name is—”

“Sophia Farino,” said Kurtz. “Little Skag showed me a picture of you.”

She smiled slightly. “The family calls him ‘Stephen.’”

“Everyone else who’s met him calls him ‘Little Skag’ or just ‘Skag,’” said Kurtz.

Sophia Farino nodded. “Shall we go?”

Kurtz stood where he was. “You’re telling me that you made bail for me?”

She nodded.

“Why you?” said Kurtz. “If the family wanted it done, why not send Miles the lawyer down? And why in the middle of the night? Why not wait for the arraignment?”

“There never was going to be any arraignment,” said Sophia. “You were going to be charged with parole violations—carrying a firearm—and sent over to County in the morning.”

Kurtz rubbed his chin and heard the stubble rasp. “Parole violation?”

Sophia smiled and began walking. Kurtz followed her down the echoing stairway and out into the night. He was very alert, his nerves pulled very tight. Without being obvious about it, he was checking every shadow, responding to every movement.

“The Richardson murder has lots of clues,” said Sophia, “but none of them lead to you. They already have a blood type from the semen they found on the woman. Not yours.”

“How do you know?”

Instead of answering, she said, “Someone made an anonymous call that you were at the Richardson place yesterday. If they told you that the woman had your name in her DayTimer, they lied. She’d scribbled something about meeting a Mr. Quotes.”

“The lady was never very good with names,” said Kurtz.

Sophia led the way out into the cold but brilliantly lighted parking lot and beeped a black Porsche Boxster open. “Want a ride?” she said.

“I’ll walk,” said Kurtz.

“Not wise,” said the woman. “You know why someone went to all this work to get you to County?”

Kurtz did, of course. At least now he did. A yard hit. A shank job. He was lucky that it hadn’t happened in interrogation or the holding pen. Hathaway almost certainly had been part of the setup. What had kept the homicide cop from going ahead with it, using the throwdown and the Glock, and collecting the ten grand? His young partner? Kurtz would probably never know. But he was sure that someone else would have been waiting downstream and that Hathaway would still have gotten his cut.

“You’d better ride with me,” said Sophia.

“How do I know you’re not the one?” said Kurtz.

Don Farino’s daughter laughed. It was a rich, unselfconscious laugh, her head thrown back, a totally sincere laugh from a grown-up woman. “You flatter me,” she said. “I have something to talk to you about, Kurtz, and this would be a good time. I think I can help you figure out who’s setting you up for this hit and why. Last offer. Want a ride?”

Kurtz went around and got in the passenger side of the low, muscular Boxster.

CHAPTER

FIFTEEN

Kurtz had expected either just a ride and a talk or a trip out to the Farino family manse in Orchard Park, but Sophia drove him to her loft in the old section of downtown Buffalo.

He knew that she’d had to pass through a metal detector even to get into the waiting area of the city jail, so there was no weapon in the purse she tossed on the floor of the Boxster’s passenger side. That meant the center console. If the woman had unclicked that console during the short drive, it would have been an interesting few seconds of activity for Kurtz, but she went nowhere near it.

Her loft was in an old warehouse that had been gentrified, given huge windows and metal terraces that looked out toward the downtown or the harbor, had a secure parking lot dug out under the building, and sported security guards in the lobby and basement entrance. Sort of like my current place, thought Kurtz with a hint of irony.

Sophia used a security card to get into the parking basement, exchanged pleasantries with the uniformed guard at the door to the elevators, and took Kurtz up to the sixth—and top—floor.

“I’ll get us drinks,” she said after entering the loft, locking the door behind her, and tossing her keys into an enameled vase on a red-lacquer side table. “Scotch do?”

“Sure,” said Kurtz. He had not eaten since a slice of toast that morning—yesterday morning now—about twenty hours earlier.

The don’s daughter had a nice place: exposed brick, modern furniture that still looked comfortable, a wide-screen HDTV in one corner with the usual gaggle of stereo equipment—DVD players, VCR, surround-sound receivers, pre-amps. There were tall, framed French minimalist posters that looked original—and which were probably as expensive as hell—a mezzanine under skylights with hundreds of books set in black lacquer shelves, and a huge, semicircular window dominating the west wall with a view of the river, the harbor, and the bridge lights.

She handed him the Scotch. He sipped some. Chivas.

“Aren’t you going to compliment me on my place?” she said.

Kurtz shrugged. It would be a great place to hit if he were into robbery, but he doubted if she would take that as a compliment. “You were going to tell me your theories,” he said.

Sophia sipped her Scotch and sighed. “Come here, Kurtz,” she said, not actually touching him on the arm, but leading him over to a full-length mirror near the door. “What do you see?” she asked after she stepped back.

“Me,” said Kurtz. In truth, he saw a hollow-eyed man with matted hair, a torn, bloodied shirt, a fresh scratch along one cheek, and rivulets of dried blood on his face and neck.

“You stink, Kurtz.”

He nodded, taking the comment in the spirit it was meant—a statement of fact.

“You need to take a shower,” she said. “Get into some clean clothes.”

“Later,” he said. There was no warm water and no clean clothes at his warehouse flop.

“Now,” said Sophia and took his Scotch glass and set it on the counter. She went into a bathroom in the short hall between the living room and what looked like a bedroom. Kurtz heard water running. She poked her head out into the hall. “Coming?”

“No,” said Kurtz.

“Jesus, you’re paranoid.”

Yeah, thought Kurtz, but am I paranoid enough?

Sophia had kicked off her shoes and now was pulling off her blouse and skirt. She wore only white underpants and a white bra. With a motion that Kurtz had not seen in person in more than eleven years, she unhooked the bra and tossed it out of sight. She stood there in her white, lacy but not trampy underpants, cut high on the sides. “Well?” she said.

Kurtz checked the door. Bolted and police locked. He checked the small kitchen. Another door, bolted and chained. He slid open the door to the terrace and walked out onto the metal structure. It was cold and beginning to rain. There was no way to gain access to the terrace short of rappelling from the rooftop. He went back in, walked past Sophia—who had her arms crossed in front of her full breasts but who was still goose-bumpy from the sudden blast of cold air—and checked the bedroom, looking into the closets and under the bed.

Then he came back to the bathroom.

Sophia was naked now, standing under the warm water, her long, curly hair already wet. “My God,” she said through the open shower door, “you are paranoid.”

Kurtz took off his bloody clothes.

Kurtz was excited, but not crazy excited. After the first couple of years without sex, he had realized, the need for it stayed the same but the obsession for it either drove men crazy—he had seen plenty of that in Attica—or leveled off to a sort of metaphysical hunger. Kurtz had read Epictetus and the other Stoics while serving his time and found their philosophy admirable but boring. The trick, he thought, was to enjoy the hard-on but not be led around by it.

Sophia soaped him all over, not neglecting his erection. She was very gentle when cleaning his face, making sure not to get soap into the cuts there.

“I don’t think you’ll need stitches,” she said and then her eyes widened a bit as he began soaping her—not just her breasts and pubic hair, but her neck, face, back, shoulders, arms, and legs. Evidently, she had expected a bit more straightforward approach.

She reached up to what looked like a covered soap dish on the tile ledge, removed a condom packet, tore it open with her teeth, and slid the rubber onto Kurtz’s stiffened penis. He smiled at her efficiency but wasn’t in need of the protection quite yet. Kurtz pulled the shampoo off the same ledge and lathered it into the woman’s long hair, rubbing her skull and temples with strong fingers. Sophia closed her eyes a minute and then found the shampoo bottle, rubbing the liquid into his short hair. The top of her head came just about to nose level on Kurtz and she raised her face to kiss him after they rinsed the shampoo off and let it flow down their bodies. His penis rubbed against the soft curve of her belly and she held the back of his neck with her left hand while her right hand went lower to grip and massage him.

She pushed against him, raising one leg high as she leaned back against the tile. Kurtz rinsed the soap and shampoo from her breasts and tasted her nipples. His right hand was set against the small of her back while his left hand gently massaged her vulva. He felt her thighs tremble and then open wider and then the heat from her poured into his cupped palm. His fingers probed gently. It was still amazing to Kurtz that they could be in a pounding shower and that a woman could be palpably wetter there than anywhere else.

“Please, now,” she whispered, her mouth wet and open against his cheek. “Now.”

They moved together hard. Kurtz made his right hand a saddle and lifted her higher against the tiles while she wrapped her legs around his hips and leaned back, her hands cusped behind his neck, her arm and thigh muscles straining.

When she came it was with a low moan and a fluttering of eyelids, but also with a spasm that he could feel through the head of his cock, his thighs, and splayed fingers of his supporting hand.

“Jesus Christ,” she whispered in a moment, still being held against the tile in the warm spray. Kurtz wondered just how capacious this loft’s hot water tank was. After another moment, she kissed him, began moving again, and said, “I didn’t feel you come. Don’t you want to come?”

“Later,” said Kurtz and lifted her slightly. She moaned again when he slid out of her and she cupped his balls while his erection throbbed against her pubic hair.

“My God,” she said, smiling now, “you’d think it was me who’d been in jail for a dozen years.”

“Eleven and a half,” said Kurtz. He turned off the shower and they toweled each other off. The towels were thick and fluffy.

As she rubbed between his legs, she said, “You’re still hard as ever. How can you stand it?”

In answer, Kurtz lifted her and carried her into her bedroom.

CHAPTER

SIXTEEN

It was after 5:00 A.M. when they finally separated and lay next to each other on the bed that Kurtz had decided was exactly the size of his former cell.

Sophia lit a cigarette and offered him one. Kurtz shook his head.

“A con who doesn’t smoke,” she said. “Unheard of.”

“Watching TV from the inside,” he said, “you get the impression that everyone on the outside has given up smoking and is busy suing the tobacco companies. Guess it ain’t so.”

“Say it ain’t so, Joe,” said Sophia. She set a small enamel ashtray on her sheeted belly and flicked ashes. “So, Joe Kurtz,” she said, “why did you come to my father with this private-investigation bullshit?”

“It wasn’t bullshit. It’s what I do.”

Sophia exhaled smoke and shook her head. “I mean the offer to find Buell Richardson. You must know as well as I do that he’s in Lake Erie or under four feet of loam somewhere.”

“Yeah.”

“Then why offer to find him and haul him back for a bonus?”

Kurtz rubbed his eyes. He was feeling a bit sleepy. “Seemed like a way to get work.”

“A lot of effort you’ve spent on the job so far. Went to visit Buell’s widow—who got herself killed as soon as you left, it sounds like—and crippled our poor, late Carl.”

“Late?” Kurtz was surprised. “He’s dead?”

“Some complications in the hospital,” said Sophia. “What did Skag tell you about the truck hijackings and Richardson’s disappearance?”

“Enough to let me know that it’s more complicated than it looks,” said Kurtz. “Someone’s either moving in on your father, or there’s something else in play here.”

“Any suspects?” asked Sophia, stubbing out her cigarette and looking directly at Kurtz. The sheet had slipped from her breasts and she made no effort to pull it back in place.

“Sure,” said Kurtz. “Miles the lawyer, of course. Any of your father’s top guys who are getting ambitious.”

“All the ambitious ones left since Papa retired.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Kurtz.

“So that leaves Miles.”

“And you.”

Sophia did not feign outrage. “Sure. But why would I be pulling this crap when I inherit Papa’s money, anyway?”

“Good question,” said Kurtz. “Now it’s my turn. You said that you could tell me who’s setting me up for a hit.”

Sophia shook her head. “I don’t know for sure, but if Miles is involved, you might watch out for a guy named Malcolm Kibunte and a scary white friend of his.”

“Malcolm Kibunte,” Kurtz repeated. “Don’t know him. Description?”

“Former Crip from Philadelphia. Big, black, mean as a snake-bit Mormon. Early thirties. Shaves his head, but wears one of those little major-league-pitcher goatees. Wears black leather and lots of jewelry. Has a diamond stud in his front tooth. I’ve seen him only once. I don’t think Leonard Miles knows that I know about their contacts.”

“I won’t ask how you know,” said Kurtz.

Sophia lit another cigarette, took a long drag and exhaled smoke and said nothing.

“What’s our Malcolm friend into?” said Kurtz.

“He left Philly one step ahead of a murder rap,” said Sophia. “Not for the Crips, though. Popped a cap on a fellow Crip for one of the Colombian rings down there. Malcolm was into moving coke big time. Then he began specializing on eliminating competitors.”

“Served time?” said Kurtz.

“Nothing serious. Aggravated assault. Illegal possession of a weapon. Killed his first wife—strangled her.”

“That must have cost him some time.”

“Not much. Miles represented him and got him two years on a psychiatric thing. I think that’s why Miles thinks that Kibunte is on a leash. I wouldn’t bet my life on it if I were Miles.”

“And what about this white friend of his?”

Sophia shook her head. Her curly hair was dry and curlier than ever. “Haven’t seen him. Don’t have a name. Supposed to be real white—almost albino—and good with a blade.”

“Ahh,” said Kurtz.

“Ah, indeed.” Sophia sighed. “If Papa were still in charge of things in Buffalo, these two would have been swatted like flies as soon as they showed up in town. But I doubt if Papa has even heard of them.”

“Why exactly did your father get squeezed out of the local action?”

Sophia sighed. “Did Skag tell you about the shooting?”

“Just the fact of it, not the details.”

“Well, it’s simple enough,” said Sophia. “About eight years ago, Papa and two of his bodyguards were driving back from a restaurant down in Boston Hills when a couple of cars tried to block them in. Papa’s driver was well trained, of course, and the glass was bulletproof, but when the driver was backing out of the trap they’d set, one of the shooters used a shotgun on the driver’s-side window, shattered it, and then sprayed the inside with automatic weapons’ fire. Papa was just scratched, but both his men were killed.”

She paused and flicked ashes into the enamel ashtray.

“So Papa crawled over the seat, took the wheel, and drove that Caddy out of there himself,” she continued, “returning fire with Lester’s—the driver’s—nine-millimeter. He got at least one of the shooters.”

“Were they white or black?” asked Kurtz.

“White,” said Sophia. “Anyway, Papa would have gotten away all right, but someone used a .357 Magnum to fire through the trunk of the Caddy. The damned slug went through the rear end, the spare tire, both seats, and ended up in Papa’s back, a quarter of an inch from his spine. And that trunk was armored.”

“Did Don Farino figure out who’d put the hit on him?”

Sophia shrugged. Her nipples were a delicate brown. “A lot of inquiries, a few suspects, but no confirmation. It was probably the Gonzagas.”

“They’re the only other Italian mob with action in western New York, right?” said Kurtz.

Sophia frowned. “We don’t call them ‘Italian mob.’”

“Okay,” said Kurtz. “The Gonzagas are the only other guinea gangsters licensed to do business in this end of the state, right?”

“Right.”

“And it’s been about six years since what’s left of the Farinos had any real clout?”

“Yes,” she said. “Things went downhill after Papa was crippled.”

Kurtz nodded. “Your oldest brother, David, tried to keep the family in the action until the mid-90’s. Then he killed himself in a car accident while coked to the eyes, and your older sister took off for a nunnery in Italy.”

Sophia nodded.

“And then Little Skag fucked things up for a while until the other families decided it was time for your father to retire,” said Kurtz. “Little Skag gets high and attacks his Brazilian girlfriend with a shovel, and here you are, alone in that big house with Papa.”

Sophia said nothing.

“What’s being hijacked?” asked Kurtz. “On the trucks they hit?”

“VCRs, DVD players, cigarettes,” said Sophia. “The usual penny-ante crap. The New York families are big into bootleg videos and DVDs, and that means they’ve got thousands of machines to unload. They toss Papa that crumb. The cigarettes are just for old times’ sake.”

“Untaxed cigarettes can bring in nice money,” said Kurtz.

“Not in the quantities that they let our family have,” said Sophia. She slid out of bed and walked to the closet. There was a thick robe on one of the leather chairs by the window, but she ignored it, obviously feeling comfortable naked. “You’re going to have to get out of here,” she said. “It’s almost sunrise.”

Kurtz nodded and got out of bed.

“My God, you’ve got a lot of scars,” said Sophia Farino.

“Accident prone,” said Kurtz. “Where are my clothes?”

“Down the disposal chute,” she said. She slid back one of the mirrored doors and took a man’s denim shirt, some packaged Jockey shorts, and a pair of corduroy trousers out of a drawer. “Take these,” she said. “They should fit you. I’ll get some new sneakers and socks for you.”

Kurtz tossed the shirt back. “Don’t wear these,” he said.

“Don’t wear what?” she said. “Shirts? Denim shirts?”

“Polo ponies.”

“You’re shitting me. That’s a brand-new two-hundred-dollar shirt.”

Kurtz shrugged. “I don’t wear company logos. If they want me to advertise for them, they can pay me.”

Sophia Farino laughed again and once again Kurtz enjoyed the sound of it. “A man of principle,” she said. “Butchered Eddie Falco, crippled ol’ Carl, and shot God knows how many others in cold blood, but a man of principle. I love it.” She tossed him a cheaper-looking denim shirt. “No ponies, alligators, sheep, Nike swooshes, or anything else on it. Satisfied?”

Kurtz pulled it on. It fit fine. So did the underpants, corduroy slacks, socks, and boat shoes. He didn’t think that Sophia had gone shopping ahead of time for him, so he wondered how many men’s sizes she kept in stock. Maybe it was like the package of condoms in the shower: Be prepared was evidently this woman’s motto. He headed for the front door.

“Hey,” she said, finally pulling on the robe and padding along beside him. “It’s cold out there.”

“Did you throw away my jacket as well?”

“Damned right I did.” She opened the foyer closet door and handed him an expensive, insulated leather bomber jacket. “This should fit you.”

It did. He unbolted the door.

“Kurtz,” she said. “You’re still naked.” She took a 9mm Sig Sauer from the closet and offered it to him.

Kurtz checked it—the magazine was fully loaded—and then handed it back. “Don’t know where it’s been,” he said.

Sophia smiled. “It’s not traceable. Don’t you trust me?”

Kurtz twitched a smile and let her keep the pistol. He went out the door, down a private hallway, took the elevator to the ground floor, and went out into the dark past a sleepy but curious front-lobby security guard. When he’d walked a block west, he looked back at the loft building. Her lights were still on, but they flicked out as he watched.

CHAPTER

SEVENTEEN

Kurtz’s current bolthole was in an old icehouse being renovated into lofts, but it was a mile or so from the already-gentrified area where Sophia Farino had her pied-à-terre. It was not really light yet, but there was a certain brighter grayness to the low clouds that were drizzling on him.

He felt naked without a weapon, and a little woozy. He put that down to not having eaten or drunk anything except the glass of Chivas for the past twenty-four hours rather than because of great sex. Kurtz admitted to himself that he’d had images of sitting around in those soft terry-cloth robes, enjoying a huge breakfast of bacon and eggs and steaming hot coffee with Ms. Farino before he headed out into the storm. Getting soft, Joe, he thought. At least the expensive bomber jacket was warm against the icy drizzle.

Kurtz was walking under the I-90 overpass when a memory struck him. He left the sidewalk, climbed the steep concrete gradient, and peered into the low, dark niches where the concrete supports met iron girders. The first two cubbies were empty except for pigeon crap and human shit, but the third held a small skeletal figure that pulled back to the far end of the cluttered hole. As Kurtz’s eyes adapted to the dark, he could make out wide white eyes, trembling shoulders, and long, bare, quaking arms emerging from a torn T-shirt. Even in the dim light, he could see the bruises and track marks on those arms. The thin man tried to pull himself farther back from the opening.

“Hey, it’s okay, Pruno,” said Kurtz. He reached out and patted the arm. It was almost fleshless and colder than some corpses Kurtz had handled. “It’s me, Joe Kurtz.”

“Joseph?” said the quaking figure. “Really you, Joseph?”

“Yeah.”

“When’d you get out?”

“Just a while ago.”

Pruno came farther out and tried to smooth out the flattened cardboard box and stinking blanket he was sitting on. The rest of the niche was filled with bottles and newspapers that the man obviously had been using for insulation.

“Where the hell’s your sleeping bag, Pruno?”

“Somebody stole it, Joseph. Just a couple nights ago. I think…it wasn’t long ago. Just when it was turning cold.”

“You should go to the shelter, man.”

Pruno lifted one of the bottles of wine and offered it. Kurtz shook his head. “Shelter’s getting meaner every year,” said the wino and junkie. “Work for sleep’s the motto now.”

“Working’s better than freezing to death,” said Kurtz.

Pruno shrugged. “I’ll find a better blanket when one of the old street guys dies. ’Round about first snow, probably. So how are the guys in C Block, Joseph?”

“Last year they moved me to D Block,” said Kurtz. “But I heard that Billy the C went to L.A. when he got out and is working in the movies out there.”

“Acting?”

“Providing set security.”

Pruno made a sound that started as a laugh and soon turned into a cough. “Usual protection racket. Those movie guys eat it up. What about you, Joseph? Heard that the Mosque brothers were pronouncing fatwah on you, as if they knew what that meant.”

Kurtz shrugged. “Most people know that the D-bros don’t have the money for that. I’m not worried. Hey, Pruno—you know anything about some Farino trucks being knocked over?”

The haggard, bearded figure looked up from his bottle. “You working for the Farinos these days, Joseph?”

“Not really. Just doing what I used to do.”

“What do you want to know about the trucks?”

“Who’s hitting them. When is the next job due?”

Pruno closed his eyes. The light was coming up gray beyond the overpass, and illuminated the filthy, haggard face enough to remind Kurtz of carved wooden statues of Jesus he had seen in Mexico. “I think I heard something about a low-rent type named Doo-Rag and his boys fencing some cigarettes and DVD players after the last truck thing,” said Pruno. “No one tells me about crimes in the planning stage.”

“Doo-Rag the Blood?” said Kurtz.

“Yes. You know him?”

Kurtz shook his head. “There was a punk in D Block got shanked in the showers supposedly because he owed money to a young Blood named Doo-Rag. Supposedly this Doo-Rag played a season for the NBA.”

“Nonsense,” said Pruno, emphasizing both syllables. “Closest Doo-Rag got to the NBA was the public courts up at Delaware Park.”

“Those are pretty good,” said Kurtz. “Would a Blood like Doo-Rag take marching orders from an ex-Crip?”

Pruno coughed again. “Everyone is doing business with everyone these days, Joseph. It’s the global economy. You ever see a brochure from any of those top Ivy League—type colleges the last ten years or so?”

“No,” said Kurtz. “I haven’t received too many of those.” He knew that Pruno had been a college professor at one time.

“Diversity and tolerance,” said Pruno and drank the last of his wine. “Tolerance and diversity. No mention of the canon, of the classics, of knowledge or learning. Just tolerance and diversity and diversity and tolerance. It paves the way for global e-commerce and personal empowerment.” His rheumy eyes focused on Kurtz in the dim light. “Yes, Joseph, Doo-Rag and his street associates would take orders from an ex-Crip if it meant money. Then they’d try to kill the motherfucker. Which ex-Crip are we talking about?”

“Malcolm Kibunte.”

Pruno shrugged and then began shivering again. “Didn’t know Malcolm Kibunte was ever a Crip.”

“You know of any arrangements between this Malcolm or Doo-Rag and the Farinos?”

Pruno coughed again. “Doesn’t seem likely, since the Farinos are as racist as all the rest of the wiseguy families. To be more succinct, Joseph—no.”

“Know where I can find Kibunte?”

“I don’t. But I’ll ask around.”

“Don’t be too obvious about it, Pruno.”

“Never, Joseph.”

“One more question. Do you know anything about a white guy that this Malcolm hangs around with?”

“Cutter?” Pruno’s voice was quaking from the cold or withdrawal.

“That’s his name?”

“That is what people know him as, Joseph. I know nothing else. I wish to know nothing else. A very disturbed individual, Joseph. Please stay clear of him.”

Kurtz nodded. “You need to get to a shelter and at least get a decent blanket, Pruno. Some food. Spend some time with people. Don’t you get lonely out here?”

“Numquam se minus otiosum esse, quam cum otiosus, nee minus solum, quam cum solus esset,” said the junkie. “Are you familiar with Seneca, Joseph? I had him on your reading list.”

“Haven’t got that far yet, I guess,” said Kurtz. “Seneca the Indian chief?”

“No, Joseph, although he was quite eloquent as well. Especially after we whites gave his people a ‘gift’ of blankets riddled with smallpox. No, Seneca the philosopher…” Pruno’s eyes grew vague and lost.

“You want to translate for me?” said Kurtz. “Like old times?”

Pruno smiled. “That he was never less idle than when he was idle, and never less alone than when he was alone. Seneca attributed it to Scipio Africanus, Joseph.”

Kurtz took his leather jacket off and set it on Pruno’s lap.

“I can’t accept this, Joseph.”

“It was a freebie,” said Kurtz. “Got it less than an hour ago. I’ve got a closet full of those things at home.”

“Bullshit, Joseph. Absolute bullshit.”

Kurtz tapped the old man on his bony shoulder and slid down the embankment. He wanted to get back to his warehouse before it was truly light.

CHAPTER

EIGHTEEN

The old, seven-story brick building had been built as an icehouse, then served as a warehouse through most of the twentieth century, then made money as a U-Store-It warehouse for a couple of decades with its grand old spaces broken up into a warren of cages and windowless cells. Most recently, it had been bought by a consortium of lawyers who were going to make a killing by converting it to expensive condo-lofts opening onto city views on the outside with interior mezzanines looking down into a fancy center atrium. The architect’s prospectus had used Los Angeles’s Bradbury Building, that favorite location interior for TV shows and films, as a template: clean brick, fancy ironwork, interior iron stairways and cage elevators, dozens of offices with frosted glass doors. Developers had begun the conversion: fencing off the entire structure, leaving the central section open as the atrium, adding rough mezzanines on the upper floors, adding an expensive skylight, knocking down some walls, cutting out some windows. But the loft market had slowed down, the gentrification had crept in the opposite direction, the lawyers’ money had dried up, and now the warehouse sat alone except for the dozen other abandoned brick warehouses around it. The lawyers, ever optimistic, had left some of the construction materials at the fenced-off site in anticipation of getting back to work on it as soon as the consortium came into new funds.

Doc, the gun salesman/nightwatchman in Lackawanna, had mentioned the place to Kurtz. Doc had actually guarded the site for a while a year before, when hopes for the return of money and work were higher. Kurtz liked what he heard about it: electrical power had been restored for the upper two floors and the elevator, although the bottom floors were still a lightless, windowless maze of narrow corridors and metal cages walled off from the atrium. A private security service dropped by the place two or three times a week, but only to make sure that the fence was intact and the padlocks and chains secure.

Kurtz had cut through the fence at the least convenient part of the perimeter—back where the property ran along the rail lines—and had used the combination Doc had provided for the five-number padlock on the rear door. The window on that door had been conveniently broken before Kurtz first arrived, so it was no problem leaning out to click the padlock shut and scramble the combination.

Kurtz had approved of the place immediately. It wasn’t heated—which would be a problem when the Buffalo winter arrived in earnest—but there was running water on the seventh floor for some of the construction sinks there. One of the three huge service elevators still worked, although Kurtz never took it. The sound it made reminded him of the monster’s roar in the old Godzilla movies. There was a wide staircase off the front hallway that let light through thick glass blocks, a windowless interior stairway in the back, and two sets of rusting fire escapes. A few windows had been carved out on the top two floors, but no glass had been put in.

The bottom three floors were a lightless, littered mess except for the echoing atrium, which was a skylighted, littered mess. The atrium offered an avenue of retreat if one were bold enough to trust the scaffolding that ran up the interior all the way to the skylight. The consortium had just got to the sandblasting-interior-brick stage when the money ran out.

This morning, Kurtz shivered a bit in the cold rain as he walked down the rusted tracks, slipped through the cut in the fence and rearranged the wire so that the hole was invisible, let himself in the back way, checked telltales he had left in the lobby hallway, and then jogged up the five flights of the front stairway.

He had made a nest for himself on the sixth floor. The room was small and windowless—all of the storage rooms had been set up between the outer hall and the atrium wall—but Kurtz had run an extension cord through the crumbling ceiling and rigged a trouble light. He’d set up a cot with a decent sleeping bag—borrowed from Arlene—and had his leaving-Attica gym bag, a flashlight, and a few books on the floor. He kept both weapons oiled and ready and wrapped in oil rags in the gym bag, along with a cheap sweatsuit he’d picked up for pajamas. This particular cubby actually had a bathroom—or at least a toilet added sometime in the 1920s when the place was still an icehouse with offices—and Kurtz sometimes hauled water down from the seventh floor. The plumbing worked, but there was no bam or shower.

It was a pain in the ass climbing the five flights of stairs day and night, but what Kurtz liked about the place was the acoustics—the hallways amplified sound so that footsteps could be heard two flights above, the elevator—which he had tried—could wake the dead, and the atrium was like a giant echo chamber. It would be very hard for someone new to the space to sneak up on anyone familiar with it.

Also, Kurtz had discovered, between the century and a half of use and the recent renovations, there were a multitude of nooks, crannies, niches, ladders, walled-off rooms, and other hiding places. He had spent time exploring these with a good flashlight. And—best of all—there was an old tunnel which ran from the basement several hundred yards east to another old warehouse.

Kurtz looked in the carton he thought of as his refrigerator. Two bottles of water and a few Oreos were left. He ate the Oreos and drank an entire bottle of water. He crawled into his sleeping bag and glanced at his watch: 6:52 A.M. He had planned to go into the office this morning to work with Arlene, but he could be a little late.

Kurtz clicked off the trouble light, curled up in the near-absolute darkness, waited a bit for his shivering to abate as the bag warmed up, and drifted off to sleep.

Got him,” said Malcolm Kibunte. He and Cutter were in an AstroVan parked almost two blocks away.

It had been a long night. When The courthouse cop on the arm informed Miles that someone had made bail for Kurtz, Malcolm let Doo-Rag know that the yard shank was off, gathered Cutter, his Tek-9, and some surveillance gear, stole a van, and staked out the jail. The revised plan was to take out Kurtz in a rock-and-roll drive-by the minute he got out of ricochet range of the city jail, killing him and whoever had made the bail for him. Then Malcolm saw who it was who had posted bail, and went to Plan Three.

They waited down the street from Sophia Farino’s condo through the early-morning hours and were almost ready to bag it when Kurtz finally emerged and began strolling the opposite way. There were so few vehicles on the street that Malcolm had to let Kurtz disappear from sight and then drive in long loops to get ahead of him, always parked with other grimy vans and vehicles, always a good two blocks away. It was dark. Only the expensive military night scopes and goggles allowed Cutter and Malcolm to keep tabs on Kurtz.

For a while they thought they had run him to ground when Kurtz had clambered up under the expressway overpass, but just as Malcolm and Cutter were getting ready to go after him, Kurtz climbed down the embankment and was on the move again. For some reason, the fool had ditched his jacket. Cutter wanted to stop under the overpass and check on that, but Malcolm was too busy driving down toward the river and finding a place to park before Kurtz wandered into sight again. It was getting light. Surveillance would be impossible in half an hour or so: Kurtz would notice the same scabrous green van if it kept reappearing, even a couple of blocks away.

But luck was with them. From where they had parked in an old railroad salvage-yard, Malcolm watched through the night-vision scope, and Cutter lifted the huge binoculars as Kurtz went through his slice in the wire and let himself into the old icehouse building.

They waited another hour. Kurtz did not come out.

“I think we found his hidey-hole,” said Malcolm. He rubbed his beard and lifted the Tek-9 onto his lap. Cutter grunted and clicked open his knife. “I don’t know, C, my man,” said Malcolm. “Big place in there. Probably dark. He know it, we don’t.”

The two sat in silence for another few minutes. Suddenly Malcolm grinned broadly. “You know what we need for this job, C?”

Cutter looked at him, his pale eyes empty.

“That’s right,” said Malcolm. “We gonna need extreme white trash, stupid enough not to know about the Death Mosque bounty, but still be willin’ to go in there to kill Mr. Kurtz for next to nothing.”

Cutter nodded.

“Correct,” agreed Malcolm. “We know where Mr. Kurtz live. All we need to do now is bring in the Alabama Beagle Boys.” Malcolm laughed heartily.

Cutter breathed through his mouth and turned to look at the old icehouse through the rain.

CHAPTER

NINETEEN

Nice couch,” said Kurtz as Arlene came down the back steps and into their basement office. He was half-asleep, sprawled on the sprang, faded floral sofa. “Is it from your house?”

“Nice of you to drop by and notice,” said Arlene, hanging her coat on a spike driven into the wall. “Of course it’s from the house. Alan slept through many an NFL game on it. I had Will and Bobby help me haul it down here. What is this on my desk?”

“A video monitor,” said Kurtz.

“A TV?”

“Go ahead, turn it on.”

Arlene flicked it on and looked at the picture for a minute. It was fuzzy and in black and white and cycled through four scenes: counter, stacks, booms, and hallway. “That’s it? I get to watch the perverts in the porn shop upstairs?”

“That’s it,” agreed Kurtz. “The owners revamped the closed-circuit surveillance system upstairs, and I got Jimmy to run a line down here and sell us one of the old monitors.”

“Sell it to us?” Arlene tapped the mouse to bring her computer screen to life. “How much did it cost?”

“Fifty bucks, wiring thrown in free. I told him I’d pay when I got the money this month…or next…or whenever.”

“Just so I can watch the dirty old men buying their dirty old magazines and videos.”

“You’re welcome,” said Kurtz. He swung himself off the sprung couch and walked over to his own desk at the rear of the long room. His desk was empty, except for some files and memos left there by Arlene.

“Do you really think we need the video security?” she asked. “Both doors stay locked and we’re not exactly advertising that we’re here.”

Kurtz shrugged. “The outer door’s pretty well jimmy-proof,” he said. “But the door from the porn shop is just a door. And I seem to have a few people hunting for me.” He poured coffee for both of them, even though Arlene had just come in from her lunch break, carried the mugs over, and sat on the edge of her desk. He gave her Pruno’s description of Malcolm Kibunte, Cutter, and Doo-Rag, then remembered Sammy Levine’s brother Manny and described him as well.

“You made an enemy out of Danny DeVito?” said Arlene.

“Sounds like it,” said Kurtz. “Anyway, if you see anyone on the monitor who looks like any of these four guys upstairs, you leave by one of the other doors.”

“Those descriptions apply to about half of the losers who patronize the shop upstairs,” said Arlene.

“All right,” said Kurtz. “Amend it to—if you see anyone trying to bust through the front door up there, you head out the back. If any of them look like one of the guys I described, move even faster.”

Arlene nodded. “Any other gifts for me?”

Kurtz pulled the Kimber Custom .45 ACP from the holster at the small of his back. He set it on her desk. “Couldn’t afford a Doberman,” he said.

Arlene shook her head and reached under her desk, pulling out a hammerless, short-barreled .32 Magnum Ruger revolver.

“Hey,” said Kurtz, “an old friend!”

“I thought that if it was going to be like the old days, I’d better act as if it was the old days.” She hefted the weapon. “The last few years, the only reason I’ve had to go out is my weekly mah-jongg at Bernice’s and the twice-weekly evenings at the shooting range.” She slid the Ruger back into the holstered box screwed to the underside of her desk drawer.

“They didn’t let us practice much target shooting inside,” said Kurtz. “You’re probably a better shot than I am these days.”

“I always was,” said Arlene.

Hiding his relief at not having to give up the Kimber .45, Kurtz set the semiautomatic back in its concealed carry holster, removed the holster, and flopped back on the couch.

“Are you interested in how Sweetheart Search, Inc., is doing?” said Arlene. “It is your business, after all. And all the skip-trace sites and services you told me about are working out fine. We pay them, charge the sweetheart wannabe twenty percent more, and everyone’s happy. Want to see it in action?”

“Yeah, sure,” said Kurtz. “But right now I’m thinking about something I’m working on. You could use it to look up Malcolm Kibunte for me, though. Usual sources—court appearances, warrants, back taxes due, whatever. I know he won’t have a real home address, but I’ll take whatever you find.”

Arlene tapped away at her computer keys for a while, checking that day’s hits, processing encrypted credit-card orders for searches, transferring the money to the new account, filing data into her search engines, and then beginning the search for Malcolm Kibunte. Finally she said, “I know you never talk about your cases, but do you want to tell me about what’s going on now? There’s some scary stuff in here about your Mr. Kibunte.”

When Kurtz did not reply, she glanced his way. Sprawled on the couch, the holstered .45 clutched to his chest like a teddy bear, he was beginning to snore.

CHAPTER

TWENTY

Blue Franklin was an old blues bar that had only gotten better with age. Young up-and-coming blues stars had played in the smoke haze and platter rattle of the little place on Franklin Street for six decades, gone on to national prominence, and then come back to play to packed houses in their prime and old age. The two playing this night were in their prime: Pearl Wilson, a vocalist in her late thirties who combined a Billie Holiday-like poignancy with a growing Koko Taylor rough edge, and Big Beau Turner, one of the best tenor-sax men since Warne Marsh.

Kurtz came for the late set, nursed a beer, and enjoyed Pearl’s interpretation of “Hell Hound on My Trail,” “Sweet Home Chicago,” “Come in My Kitchen,” “Willow, Weep for Me,” “Big-Legged Mamas Are Back in Style,” and “Run the Voodoo Down,” followed by Big Beau doing solo riffs on a series of Billy Strayhorn pieces: “Blood Count,” “Lush Life,” “Drawing-Room Blues,” and “U.M.M.G.”

Kurtz could not remember a time, even as a boy, when he had not loved jazz and blues. It was the closest thing to religion he knew. In jail, even when he’d been allowed access to a Discman or cassette player, which wasn’t that much of the time, even a perfect recorded performance such as Miles Davis’s remastered “Kind of Blue” had been no substitute for a live performance with its ebb and flow of tidal forces, like a well-played baseball game gone deep into extra innings, now all lethargy and distance, transformed in an instant into a blur of motion and purposefulness, and with its cocaine glow of unlimited, interlocked, immortal energy. Kurtz loved jazz and the blues.

After the last set, Pearl, Beau, and the pianist—a white kid named Coe Pierce—came over to join him for a drink before closing. Kurtz had known Beau and Pearl years ago. He wanted to buy them a drink, but he barely had enough money to pay for his beer. They chatted about old music, new jobs, and old times—tactfully ignoring the past decade or so of Kurtz’s absence, since even the piano kid seemed cued in on that—and eventually Blue Franklin’s owner, Daddy Bruce Woles, a hearty, heavyset man so black that his skin glowed almost eggplant in the smoke-hazy spotlights, came over to join them. Kurtz had never seen Woles without the stub of a cigar in his mouth, and had never seen the cigar lighted.

“Joe, you got an admirer,” said Daddy Bruce. He waved over more drinks for everyone, on the house.

Kurtz sipped his fresh beer and waited.

“Little runty guy in a grubby raincoat came in here three nights ago and again last night. Didn’t pay any attention to the music. First time, Ruby was tending bar, and this dwarf lugs this big, like legal briefcase over and props it on the bar, asks about you. Ruby, she knows you’re out, of course, and doesn’t say anything. Says she never heard of you. The dwarf leaves. Ruby tells me. Last night, same dwarf in a dirty raincoat, same battered briefcase, only I’m at the bar. I never heard of you, either. I tried to get the dwarfs name, but he just left his beer and went out. Haven’t seen him tonight. Friend of yours?”

Kurtz shrugged. “Does he look something like Danny DeVito?”

“Yeah,” said Daddy Bruce. “Only not cute and cuddly like that, you know? Just turd-ugly all the way down.”

“Someone told me that Sammy Levine’s brother Manny’s looking for me,” said Kurtz. “Probably him.”

“Oh, God,” said Pearl. “Sammy Levine was a mean little dwarf, too.”

“Used to use wood blocks on the pedals to drive that damn giant Pontiac he and Eddie Falco bombed around in,” said Big Beau. Then, “Sorry, Joe, didn’t mean to bring up sad times.”

“That’s okay,” said Kurtz. “Anything sad, I got out of my system a long time ago.”

“Doesn’t sound like this Manny Levine dwarf has,” said Daddy Bruce.

Kurtz nodded.

Pearl took his hand. “It seems like just yesterday that you and Sam were in here every night, all of us catching a late dinner and drinks after the last set, and then Sam not drinking because…”

“Because she was pregnant,” finished Kurtz. “Yeah. Only I guess it seems like a while ago to me.”

The vocalist and the tenor sax player glanced at each other and nodded.

“Rachel?” Beau said.

“With Sam’s ex-husband,” said Kurtz.

“She must be…what—eleven, twelve now?”

“Almost fourteen,” said Kurtz.

“To good times again,” said Pearl in that wonderful smoke-and-whiskey voice of hers. She lifted her glass.

They all lifted their glasses.

It was getting cold at night. As Kurtz walked back through alleys and parking lots to his warehouse, wearing the corduroy trousers and denim shirt Sophia Farino had given him—the shirt worn untucked to conceal the little .38 in his waistband—he briefly considered heading back to the office to sleep. At least the basement of the porno shop was heated. But he decided not to. What was the old maxim? Don’t shit where you eat? Something like that. He wanted to keep business and business separate.

He was taking a shortcut down a long alley between warehouses, less than six blocks from his own warehouse, when a car pulled in at the end of the alley behind him. Headlights threw his shadow ahead of him on the potholed lane.

Kurtz glanced around. No doorways deep enough to hide in. A loading dock, but solid concrete—he could roll up onto it if the car accelerated toward him, but he could not slip under it. No fire escapes. Too far to run to me next street if the car came at him.

Not looking back, staggering slightly as if drunk, Kurtz pulled the .38 from his belt and palmed it.

The car moved slowly down the long alley behind him. From the sound of the V-8 engine, the thing was big—at least a Lincoln Town Car, possibly a real limo—and it was in no hurry. It stopped about fifty feet behind him.

Kurtz stepped into the corner where the loading dock met brick wall and let the pistol drop into his fingers. He cocked the hammer.

It was a limo. The headlights went out and in the dimmer glow of the parking lights, Kurtz could see the huge mass of the black car silhouetted against distant streetlights, its exhaust swirling around it like fog. A big man got out of the front passenger side and another big man stepped out of the rear left door. Both men reached under their blazer jackets to touch guns.

Kurtz set the hammer back in place, slid the small pistol back up into his palm, and walked toward the limousine. Neither of the bodyguards drew weapons or moved to frisk him.

Kurtz walked past the man holding the rear door open, glanced into the rear seat—illuminated by several halogen spots—and got into the car.

“Mr. Kurtz,” said the old man seated there. He was wearing a tuxedo and had a Stewart-plaid lap robe over his legs.

Kurtz dropped into the jump seat opposite him. “Mr. Farino.” He uncocked the pistol and slipped it back in his waistband.

The bodyguards closed the doors and remained outside in the cold.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-ONE

How is your investigation proceeding, Mr. Kurtz?”

Kurtz made a rude noise. “Some investigation. I interviewed your former accountant’s wife for about five minutes and she ended up dead within the hour. That’s all I’ve done.”

“Investigating was never your real purpose, Mr. Kurtz.”

“Tell me about it. It was my idea, remember? And my real purpose seems to be working fine. They’ve made the first move on me.”

“You don’t mean Carl?”

“No,” said Kurtz, “I mean whoever called the cops and set me up after they murdered—butchered—Mrs. Richardson. They’d arranged a yard-shank job on me as soon as I got in general population.”

Don Farino rubbed his cheek. It was a particularly rosy cheek for such a sick old man. Kurtz wondered idly if the don used makeup.

“And have you determined who set you up for this?” asked Farino.

“It’s been suggested that it was a mook named Malcolm Kibunte who sometimes works for your lawyer, Miles. Do you know this Kibunte or the knife-man he hangs with? Cutter?”

Farino shook his head. “One is not able to keep track of all the black trash that comes through town these days. I presume these two are black.”

“Malcolm is,” said Kurtz. “Cutter’s described as albino-like.”

“And who told you about the shank job and suggested these names to you, Mr. Kurtz?” Farino’s eyes were rapt.

“Your daughter.”

Farino blinked. “My daughter? You’ve spoken to Sophia?”

“I’ve more than spoken to her,” said Kurtz. “She bailed me out of jail before I went to County, and then took me home with her and tried to fuck me to death.”

Don Farino’s thin lips pulled back from his teeth and his fingers clenched on his knees under the robe. “Be careful, Mr. Kurtz. You speak too candidly.”

Kurtz shrugged. “You’re paying me for the facts. That was the setup we agreed to through Little Skag before I got out—I’d be point man and Judas goat for you and flush out whoever’s betraying you. It was your daughter who acted—both in the bailing and fucking departments—I’m just reporting.”

“Sophia has always been strong-willed and…of questionable judgment in her sexual choices,” said Farino.

Kurtz shrugged again. He didn’t give a damn about the fact or the insult behind it.

“Sophia told you about the connection between Miles and these two killers?” Farino said softly. “Suggesting that she believes Miles is behind everything?”

“Yep. But that doesn’t mean she’s telling the truth. She could be running both Miles and Malcolm and his knife-freak buddy.”

“But you said that she was the one who bailed you out and warned you about the yard contract on you, Mr. Kurtz.”

“She bailed me out. I have to take her word for the yard shank at County.”

“And why would she go to all that trouble and lie?” asked Farino.

“To check me out,” suggested Kurtz. “To find out what I’m really up to and how much I know. To put herself above suspicion.” Kurtz looked out the tinted windows. The alley was very dark. “Mr. Farino, Sophia met bail, took me home, and almost threw me into the sack. Maybe she’s just a tramp, like you say, but I don’t believe it was my magnetic personality that made her go out of her way to seduce me.”

“I doubt that you required much seducing, Mr. Kurtz.”

“That’s not the point,” said Kurtz. “The point is that you know how intelligent she is—hell, that’s why you’re afraid she might be behind Richardson’s disappearance and the truck hijackings—so you see why it makes more sense that there’s a motive behind her actions.”

“But Sophia is in line to inherit my wealth and much of the legitimate family business,” said the don, looking at his clenched hands.

“That’s what she said,” said Kurtz. “Do you know any reasons why she would want to hurry the process along?”

Don Farino turned his face away. “Sophia has always been…impatient. And she would like to be Don.”

Kurtz laughed. “Women can’t be dons.”

“Perhaps Sophia does not accept that,” said Farino with a thin smile.

“You’re not quite as busy circling the drain or as out of the loop as everyone thinks, are you?” said Kurtz.

Farino looked back at Kurtz, and there was something almost demonic in the old man’s gaze. “No, Mr. Kurtz. I am paralyzed from the waist down and temporarily—how did you put it? Out of the loop. But I am nowhere near circling the drain. And I have no intention of staying out of the loop.”

Kurtz nodded. “Maybe your daughter just doesn’t want to wait around like Prince Charles for five or six decades and is ready to help the succession along a little bit. What’s the fancy name for whacking the Old Man—patricide?”

“You are a crude man, Mr. Kurtz.” Farino smiled again. “But there has been no discussion of whacking to this point. I hired you to find out what is going on with Richardson’s disappearance and the truck hijackings.”

Kurtz shook his head. “You hired me to be a target so you could find out who the shooter is so as to protect your own ass, Farino. Why did you kill Carl?”

“Pardon me?”

“You heard me. Sophia said Carl ‘died of complications.’ Why did you put a hit on him?”

“Carl was a fool, Mr. Kurtz.”

“No argument there, but why whack him? Why not just cut him loose?”

“He knew too much about the family.”

“Bullshit,” said Kurtz. “The average cub reporter at the Buffalo Evening News knows more about the workings of your mob family than dear, departed, dipshit Carl could’ve ever figured out. Why did you have him whacked?”

Farino was silent for several moments. Kurtz listened to the heavy engine idle. One of the bodyguards lit a cigarette, and the match flare was a small circle of diffused light in the black alley.

“I wanted to put her in touch with a certain…technician,” Farino said at last.

“A hit man,” said Kurtz. “Someone from outside the family.”

“Yes.”

“Someone outside the Mafia?”

Farino showed an expression of distaste, as if Kurtz had farted in his expensive limousine. “Someone from outside the organizational structure, yes.”

Kurtz chuckled. “You sonofabitch. You wanted Sophia to spend time with this hit man just to see if she’d hire him to kill me. Ol’ Carl died just so you’d have a reason for this operator and your little girl to chat.”

Farino said nothing.

“Did she?” said Kurtz. “Hire him to kill me?”

“No.”

“What’s this technician’s name?”

“Since he was not hired, his name is of no concern.”

“It is to me,” said Kurtz, and there was an undertone to his voice. “I want to know all the players.” He touched the .38 in his belt.

Farino smiled, as if the idea of Kurtz’s shooting him and getting away alive were amusing. Then the smile faded as the don considered the fact that Kurtz might do the former without worrying about the latter. “No one knows this man’s name,” he said.

Kurtz waited.

“He’s known as the Dane,” Farino said after another long silence.

“Holy shit,” breathed Kurtz.

“You’ve heard of him?” Farino’s smile was back.

“Who hasn’t? The Kennedy mob connections in the seventies. Jimmy Hoffa. There are rumors that the Dane was behind that lovely underpass hit in Paris, where he used just the little car, no weapon.”

“There are always rumors,” agreed Farino. “Aren’t you going to ask for a description of the Dane?”

It was Kurtz’s turn to smile. “From what I hear, it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good. This guy is supposed to be better at disguises than the Jackal at the height of his powers. The only good news is that if Sophia had hired him, I’d know it because I’d be dead already.”

“Yes,” said Farino. “So what is our next step, Mr. Kurtz?”

“Well, tonight’s your truck delivery from the Vancouver source. If it’s hit, we’ll go from there. I’ll make myself obvious in investigating it. If Kibunte is involved—whoever’s involved—it makes sense for them to come after me next.”

“Good luck, Mr. Kurtz.”

Kurtz opened the door and the bodyguard held it for him. “Why wish me that?” Kurtz said to Farino. “Whether I have luck or not, you get the information you need. And if I’m dead, you keep the fifty thousand we agreed to.”

“Quite true,” said the don. “But I may have a future use for you, and the fifty thousand is a small amount to pay for peace of mind.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Kurtz and stepped out into the alley.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-TWO

Old mob guys who never quite became made men don’t die, they just end up as truck drivers for the mob.

Charlie Scruggs and Oliver Battaglia had both been low-level button men back during the Genovese era, but now, in their golden retirement years, were driving this goddamn truck all the way from Vancouver to Buffalo. Charlie was sixty-nine years old and stout and leathery, with a face full of burst blood vessels; he still wore his Teamsters cap everywhere and proudly told everyone of the week he spent as personal driver and bodyguard to Jimmy Hoffa. He had the constitution of a healthy pit bull. Oliver was tall, thin, saturnine, a chain-smoker, only sixty-two but sick much of the time, and—Charlie Scruggs now knew after eight of these damned Vancouver-Buffalo runs—an absolute pain in the ass.

The truck was no eighteen-wheeler, just a basic six-ton carryall: what Charlie had called a deuce-and-a-half back in Korea. Because it was a smaller truck, it could go on backroads and even on streets without much notice. Charlie did all the driving; Oliver rode shotgun—literally, since there was a sawed-off shotgun in the concealed compartment at the top rear of the cab—but Oliver was so slow that Charlie put his faith in the Colt .45 semiautomatic that he kept in a quick-draw holster under his seat.

In eighteen years of driving trucks for the Organization, neither Charlie nor Oliver had ever had to draw his weapons. That was the benefit of working for the Organization.

The drawback was that they had to take the goddamned long way to Buffalo. Not only driving two-thirds the way across Canada—a country Charlie hated with a passion—but not even taking the direct route down through Michigan, back into Canada at Detroit, and up along the north side of Lake Erie. The problem was Customs. More specifically, the problem was that the Canadian and American Customs guys on the arm for the Farino family worked only the night shift at the same time a certain Thursday of the month at the same place: the Queenston Toll Bridge at Lewiston, about six miles north of the Falls. They were getting close. After more than seventy-two hours on the road, Charlie was creeping the truck north out of the Canadian city of Niagara Falls, on the scenic road that ran along the river and gorge. Of course, it wasn’t very scenic now—a little after 2:00 A.M.—and neither Charlie nor Oliver would have given a shit about the view in the daylight, but Charlie had orders to stay off the QEW that ran along the shore of Lake Ontario—too many eager Mounties—so he’d had to take Highway 20 down from Hamilton and then head north again from the Falls.

The truck was filled with stolen VCRs and DVD players. Even crammed full, the deuce-and-a-half couldn’t hold all that many machines, so Charlie wondered where the profit was. He knew, of course, that the decks were being dumped after being used to copy pirate tapes and discs, but it was still a mystery why the Organization thought it was worth their while to ship a few score of the units all the way from Vancouver to a has-been family in Buffalo.

Ah, well, thought Charlie, ours is not to wonder why, ours is but to do and die.

A few miles below the big park at Canada’s Queenston Heights, Charlie pulled the truck into an empty rest area. He shook Oliver awake. “Watch the truck. I gotta go take a piss.”

Oliver grunted but rubbed his eyes. Charlie shook his head, went into the empty visitors’ center perched right on the edge of the Niagara Gorge just north of the whirlpool, and took his piss. When he came out and crawled back up into the cab, Oliver was sleeping again with his bony chin on his bony chest.

“Goddamn you,” said Charlie and shook the shotgun man.

Oliver went face forward into the metal dash. Blood trickled out of his left ear.

Charlie stared for a fatal minute and then went for his .45. Too late. Both doors were flung open and an array of grinning black faces and aimed pistol muzzles pointed his way.

“Hey, Charles, my man,” said the tallest jig, who had a goddamned diamond in his front tooth and was waving a huge gun. “It’s cool, my man. Forget the piece, Charles.” The jig held up Charlie’s pistol and then dropped it back in his jacket pocket. He pointed the huge revolver. “Just be cool a minute, and then you be on your way again.”

Charlie Scruggs had had guns pointed at him before, and was still around to tell about it. He didn’t like the fact that they knew his name, but Oliver may have told them that. He was not about to be intimidated by this pissant. “Nigger,” he said, “you have no idea the shit you just stepped in. Do you know who this truck belongs to?”

Several of the blacks, especially the one near Oliver wearing a red do-rag, began glowering hate/kill looks, but the tall bald black just looked surprised. “Who it belong to, Charles?” he said, his eyes widening like Stepin Fetchit’s.

“The Farino Family,” said Charlie Scruggs.

The black’s eyes got wider. “Oh, my goodness gracious, heavens to Betsy,” he said in a fag voice. “Do you mean the Mafia Farino family?”

“I mean this truck and everything in it—including Oliver and me—are Organization property you coon sonofabitch,” said Charlie. “You touch anything in it, and there won’t be a shithole in Central America where you can hide your black ass.”

The bald man nodded thoughtfully. “You probably right, Charles, my man. But I guess it be too late.” He glanced mournfully at Oliver. “We done already touch Ollie there.”

Charlie glanced at his dead companion and tried to phrase his next sentence carefully.

The jig did not give him the chance to speak. “Plus, Charlie, my man, you already use the N-word.”

Malcolm shot Charlie Scruggs through the left eye.

“Hey!” screamed Doo-Rag from the opposite side, ducking low behind Oliver’s body. “Tell me when you about to do that, motherfucker.”

“Shut the fuck up,” said Malcolm. “’Jectory be up. See Charles’s brains on the roof there? You in no danger, nigger.”

Doo-Rag glowered.

“Get the machines,” said Malcolm.

Doo-Rag flashed a last look but went around behind the truck, cut the padlock with bolt cutters, and crawled in. A couple of minutes later he came around the driver’s side carrying a stack of DVD players.

“You sure they the right ones?” said Malcolm.

“Yeah, I sure I’m sure,” said Doo-Rag. He pointed to the decal with the serial number on top of each of the players.

Malcolm nodded and Cutter came around the front of the truck. The others made way for him. Cutter removed a small knife from his pocket, pulled open a screwdriver blade, and opened the back of the top DVD.

“You right for a change, Doo.” Malcolm nodded again, Cutter took the DVD players, and everyone except for Doo-Rag and Malcolm headed for the Astro Van. “Start the engine,” said Malcolm. “Set the block.”

“Fuck that,” said Doo-Rag. “All that blood and brains and shit. Top of the fucker’s head gone, man. Dude could be HIV positive or something.”

Malcolm grinned and set the barrel of his huge Smith & Wesson Model 686 Powerport .357 Magnum up alongside Doo-Rag’s head. “Get the keys. Start the truck. Set the block.”

Doo-Rag crawled in and did all those things. The engine roared as the wooden block was jammed against the accelerator.

“Now,” said Malcolm, stepping back, “trick be to pop that brake off, put it in gear, and get the fuck off the running board before truck get there, my man.” Malcolm pointed to the edge of the gorge less than fifty feet in front of the truck. There was a light fence there, but no guardrails. Some traffic passed on the road, but no cars pulled into the empty rest area.

Doo-Rag smirked, kicked the brake off, leaned delicately over Charlie’s slumped, bleeding corpse, kicked in the clutch, and hit the gearshift lever.

The truck bounced over the concrete parking chock and tore up frozen turf as it roared for the fence.

Doo-Rag rode along for a minute, swinging on the running board, stepping off nonchalantly at the last possible second before the truck tore through the fence and plummeted out of sight, ripping trees and branches off the side of the cliff as it went.

Malcolm set the .357 back in its long shoulder holster under his topcoat and applauded. Doo-Rag ignored him and watched the truck fall.

It was a little over two hundred feet to the river below. This gave the truck time to do a half gainer, Charlie’s corpse flying out the open door in the dark, before the vehicle slammed, upside down, into the huge rocks right at the edge of the swirling water. Dozens of VCRs and DVD players went flying out over the river, each one making its own splash. One of them almost made it as far upriver as the whirlpool. Everyone in the van cheered at the noise that came up out of the deep gorge.

There was no explosion. No fire.

Charlie had been planning to gas up on the American side, where the fuel was cheaper.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-THREE

I didn’t really expect to see you again, Mr. Kurtz,” said Peg O’Toole.

“The feeling was mutual,” said Kurtz. He had left the office phone as his contact number, and Parole Officer Peg O’Toole had called saying that he was required to come in to finish his first appointment. Arlene had said that O’Toole had sounded a bit surprised that Kurtz had a real, live secretary.

“Shall we pick up where we left off?” said O’Toole. “We were discussing the fact that you needed a permanent address within the next week or so.”

“Sure,” said Kurtz, “but can I ask a question?”

The parole officer removed her tortoiseshell glasses and waited. Her eyes were green and cool.

“When they dragged me out of here,” said Kurtz, “they wanted to pin a murder rap on me when they knew I wasn’t involved. During the arraignment, the charge was changed to illegal possession of a firearm and violating parole. Now that’s been dropped.”

“What is your question, Mr. Kurtz?”

“I’d like to know what you had to do with the charge being dropped.”

O’Toole tapped her lower lip with the stem of her glasses. “Why do you think I had something to do with the charges being dropped?”

“Because I think Hathaway…the homicide cop who dragged me out of here…”

“I know Detective Hathaway,” said O’Toole. There was the slightest hint of revulsion in her tone.

“…I think he would have gone ahead with the illegal-carry parole-violation charge,” finished Kurtz. “During the interrogation at the city jail, he showed me a throwdown he was ready to plant on me, and I know that he wants me in County for his own reasons.”

“I don’t know about any of that,” O’Toole said curtly. “But I did check into your arraignment”—she hesitated a few seconds—“and I did let the district attorney know that I was present during your arrest and watched the detectives frisk you. You weren’t armed when they arrested you.”

“You told the D.A. that?” said Kurtz, amazed. When O’Toole said nothing more, he said, “What if Hathaway testified that I had an ankle holster or something?”

“I watched them frisk you,” she said coolly. “There was no ankle holster.”

Kurtz shook his head, truly surprised. He had never heard of a cop going out of his or her way to keep another cop from railroading someone.

“Can we get back to your interview?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“Someone answered the phone number you gave me and identified herself as your secretary…”

“Arlene,” said Kurtz.

“…but anyone can claim to be anyone on the phone,” finished O’Toole. “I’d like to visit your business office. Did I say something amusing, Mr. Kurtz?”

“Not at all, Officer O’Toole.” He gave her the address. “If you call ahead, Arlene will let you in the back way. It might be preferable to coming in the front.”

“And why is that?” Her tone was suspicious.

Kurtz told her.

This time it was the P.O. who smiled. “I worked Vice for three years, Mr. Kurtz. I can probably take a transit through a porno shop.”

Kurtz was surprised for the second time. He didn’t know of many parole officers who had been real cops.

“I saw you on the Channel Seven WKBW Eyewitness News yesterday evening,” she said and waited.

Kurtz also waited.

“Is there any special reason,” she said at last, “that you happened to be at the site where a truck had gone into the gorge the night before?”

“Just rubbernecking,” said Kurtz. “I was driving along the expressway up there, saw the TV trucks, and pulled into the turnout to see what all the commotion was.”

O’Toole made a note on her pad. “Were you on the American side or the Canadian side?” Her tone was casual.

Kurtz actually grinned. “If it had been the Canadian side, Parole Officer O’Toole, I would have been in violation of my parole, and you’d be sending me to County within the hour. No, I think you could tell from the angle that they were shooting video from the American side. I guess they couldn’t get a clear shot from where the truck actually went over.”

O’Toole made another note. “You seemed almost eager to be seen in the cutaway shots to the crowd,” she said.

Kurtz shrugged. “Isn’t everyone eager to get on TV?”

“I don’t think you are, Mr. Kurtz. At least, not unless you had a specific reason to be seen there.”

Kurtz looked blandly at her and thought, Christ, I’m glad Hathaway isn’t as smart as she is.

She checked something else off her list. “All right, about your place of residence. Are you settled yet?”

“Not really,” said Kurtz, “but I’m getting closer to finding a permanent place to live.”

“What are your plans?”

“Eventually,” said Kurtz, “I’d like one of those big houses on the bluffs up toward Youngstown, not far from Fort Niagara.”

O’Toole glanced at her watch and waited.

“In the immediate future,” said Kurtz, “I’m hoping to find an apartment.”

“Week after next,” said O’Toole, putting down her pen and removing her glasses to let him know that the interview was over. “That’s when I’ll make the official visit.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FOUR

The Alabama Beagle Boys—back when there were five of them, there were only four living now—came by their name via an unfortunate photograph picked up by the wire services in the mid-1990s when an Alabama Department of Corrections official, exhilarated by his popular press after bringing back chain gangs, issued horizontally striped prison uniforms to all state inmates. The photographer from the Dothan, Alabama, newspaper had gone out to one of the prison-striped chain gangs working along State Highway 84 not far from the Boll Weevil Monument and photographed five men pulled from the work detail apparently at random.

It had not been random. It had amused the gang bull to line up five dim-witted brothers for the shot, the five overweight young men all serving three years for a completely botched Wal-Mart robbery in Dothan during which thirty-five legally armed Wal-Mart shoppers—the majority of them senior citizens—and the seventy-four-year-old “Wal-Mart Greeter,” who had been carrying a .357 Magnum, all had drawn down on the boys, putting four of them in the hospital for gunshot wounds and sending all of them to the Babbie State Prison just outside of Opp. The five were known then just as the Beugel brothers—Warren, Darren, Douglas, Andrew, and Oliver—but a combination of a Dothan Journal misprint that went out to UPI and the comic image of the five in their striped coveralls changed their name forever to the Alabama Beagle Boys.

Six months after the photograph was taken, four of them escaped—Oliver, the youngest, had crawled back through the wire to rescue his pet crayfish and had been shot twenty-four times by guards. The first thing the Beagle Boys did after eluding the “Largest Manhunt in Southern Alabama History” was to visit the Department of Corrections’ Chiefs farm outside of Montgomery, where they killed the man, burned down his house, raped his wife into a coma, and nailed the family’s dog to the barn door (although those still in prison in the South maintain that it was the dog who was raped and the wife who was nailed to the barn door).

Warren, Darren, Douglas, and Andrew then headed for Canada but, stymied by the difficulty of crossing the border under the delusion that they needed passports, went to ground in Buffalo, where they became lay ministers and soldiers in the White Aryan Army of the Lord, headquartered in the suburb of West Seneca.

This night, at a warehouse near the State University of New York campus, they were shopping.

“Full auto with laser shit is what we want,” said Warren, the oldest.

“Of course, of course,” said Malcolm Kibunte, bowing the huge rednecks into the rear room of the cinder-block warehouse. “Full auto with laser shit it will be, then.”

The Boys had been carefully and repeatedly frisked before being driven, blindfolded, to the warehouse site, where Doo-Rag and a dozen of his men watched carefully and a bit reproachfully. The Alabama Beagle Boys ignored the gangbangers.

“Holy shit,” breathed Douglas, who, after Oliver, had always been the least brilliant of the five, “lookit here. Woowhee! Everythang we wanted, rat heah.”

“Shut up, Douglas,” Andrew said automatically.

Douglas was right, however. The long warehouse room was stacked with boxes of weapons and ammo. Laid out for inspection were AR-15s, M590A1 Pistol Grip mil-spec combat shotguns, Colt M4 full-auto carbines, combat-ready M-16s, compact machine guns such as HK UMP 45s and Israeli Bullpups, and sniper rifles such as Remington’s model 700 Police DM Light Tactical.

All four of the Boys wanted to drool. Three of them resisted the impulse, but their small eyes were all alight. If the Boys saw any irony in buying weapons for the coming Race War Heralding Armageddon from black gang members, they did not show it. Of course, the Boys were not deeply into irony.

Darren was ogling a table filled with detachable sights: Aimpoint Red Dots, Bausch & Lomb 10×42 Police Tactical Scopes, U.S. Optics SN4 SpecOps Battle Sights, Comp ML red dots, and others.

“Careful, Darren, my man,” said Malcolm. “Your hard-on showing. Weaken your bargaining position, you cum on the hardware.” Malcolm grinned broadly to show that it was all good humor between guys.

Darren blushed and turned his back.

Warren was mixing and matching elements into a perfect weapon: the Colt M4 carbine with a compact laser sight, topped off with a Suppressed Tactical Weapons suppressor made out of gold-colored titanium.

“Good choice,” said Malcolm. “A handsome combination to take to Armageddon, that be God’s truth.”

Warren glared but said only, “How much?”

“For how many of which?” said Malcolm.

The Boys licked their lips, looking around in a palpable heat wave of greed, while Warren took a wrinkled sheet of yellow legal-pad paper from his hip pocket—the Boys were all wearing old army fatigue jackets, jump boots, and jeans now rather than their trademark stripes—and consulted his shopping list. He read from the list slowly, obviously adding a few things from the displays.

Malcolm raised his eyebrows and named a price.

The Boys looked at each other in near despair. With the money the White Aryan Army of the Lord had raised so far, they could not quite afford Warren’s single carbine-scope-suppressor combination.

“Let us go outsad an’ fahr a few of these-here guns,” Andrew said craftily.

Malcolm just grinned while Doo-Rag clicked his Tek-9 to full-auto. “Not quite time for test fahring yet, my man,” said Malcolm.

“Maybe it’d be time for the police to hear that some Buffalo niggers were the ones who knocked over the Dunkirk army arsenal this past August,” said Warren.

“Maybe,” Malcolm agreed with a grin. “But if there come even a rumor like that—and we’d hear it because the police wouldn’t know where to find these niggers or their guns—then the poor old Chapel of the Good Ol’ Boy Aryan Nation Crackers for Jesus gets itself visited by fifty-sixty of Doo-Rag’s friends, and the Aryan Nation faithful get themselves shot into little greasy mini-Aryan chickenbits.”

“White Aryan Army of the Lord,” corrected Douglas.

“Shut up, Douglas,” said Andrew.

There were a few moments of silence.

“There is a way that you can get a thirty percent discount on some of the things you want here,” Malcolm said at last.

“How?” said Warren.

Malcolm wandered over, picked up a Carbon AR-15 .223, sighted through the Colt C-More red-dot sight, dry-fired the black weapon, and set it back. “There a dude that’s going to die,” he said. “He hiding out in a warehouse in the city. Not armed with nothing more than a pistol. Maybe not that. You take care of it for us, thirty percent off on whatever you carry in to do the job.”

Warren squinted at Malcolm. “That don’t make no sense.” He looked around at the boxes upon boxes of weapons and then at Doo-Rag and his heavily armed friends.

Malcolm shrugged. “This dude a white boy. You know how sensitive we are these days about offing white boys.”

“Bullshit,” said Andrew.

“Shut up, Andrew,” said Warren. To Malcolm, he said, “You want this guy wasted, why don’t you just take him out on the street with one of those?” He nodded toward one of the scoped sniper rifles on display.

Malcolm made a gesture with his hands. “Agreed, be easy to do,” he said. “But sometimes the Buffalo police take notice when you gun down citizens on their streets—you understand what I’m saying? Better let this white boy die and rot away in this old abandoned warehouse.”

“Then why don’t you go in after him yourselves?” said Warren.

Malcolm shrugged. “Doo-Rag and the others want to, but there always a chance that something might go wrong—we drop a weapon or something—and then the federal ’thorities got an idea who borrowed their army toys.”

Warren grinned, showing southern Alabama’s Department of Corrections’ lack of investment in dental care. “But if we leave prints behind…or one of us left behind…it don’t bother you-all.”

“Not so much,” Malcolm agreed.

“When do you want this done?” Darren asked.

“Real soon would be fine,” said Malcolm. “You choose the pieces you want with the toys to go with them, we take you to where this dude is sleeping. Thirty percent off, you each get a piece for the price of that one you wanted. Plus all the laser shit you want. Plus some other good stuff…” Malcolm held up a heavy double-optic apparatus with nylon straps.

“What the shit is that?” said Darren.

“Shut up, Darren,” said Warren. “What the shit is it?” he asked Malcolm.

Malcolm raised an eyebrow. “Ain’t you never seen one of those movies where the terrorists or Navy SEALS or such wear this night-vision shit?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Darren. “They just look different when they’re not on someone’s head is all.”

“Shut up, Darren,” said Warren. “Night-vision goggles?” he said to Malcolm.

“Correct, my man,” said Malcolm. “These take the tiniest little bit of light—not even to notice, dark as a cave to the naked eyeball—and let you see like it was high noon. These goggles here probably led to a shitload of Iraqis going to Allah early.”

Douglas whistled.

“Shut up, Douglas,” Andrew said automatically.

“You said do this real soon,” said Warren. “How soon is real soon?”

Malcolm checked his watch. It was almost 1:00 A.M. “Now be good,” he said.

“And we just get to walk away from this place with the guns?” Warren asked.

Malcolm nodded.

“And you gonna give us bullets?” Darren asked.

Warren glared at his brother, but said nothing.

“Yes, Darren, my man, bullets thrown in for free before you go into the warehouse. We got clips of .223s, .45s, subsonic 5.56 millimeters for the Bullpup, .22s, 9 millimeters for some of the carbines, banana clips, 12-gauge shells for the shotguns, even some .308 Match for the sniper shit.”

Malcolm lifted some brightly colored hand radios, gesturing like a salesman ready to close a deal. “And we even throw in these personal, multi-frequency portable radios with a two-mile range for free.”

“Shit,” said Darren. “Those are just kiddie toys.”

Malcolm smiled and shrugged. “True, my man. But you understand why once we drop you off—with ammo clips and Kevlar vests as well as the guns—we don’t want to wait around.”

Warren screwed up his face, thinking about this. His silence suggested that he could find no fault in the logic.

“You can use the radios to talk to each other going in,” said Malcolm. “Then call us when it all over.”

Warren grunted. “How do we know when it’s the right dude?”

Malcolm grinned. “Well, since this white boy the only person in the warehouse, just kill everybody in there, you probably be safe to assume,” he said. “But this might help.” He tossed Kurtz’s mug shot onto the table covered with laser sights and night-vision goggles.

The Alabama Beagle Boys huddled around the table, staring down at the photograph, none of men touching it.

“Shall we do it?” said Malcolm, gesturing to the displays of weapons.

“We didn’t bring cash,” said Warren.

Malcolm smiled. “Your credit good with us. Besides, we know where your church is.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FIVE

The stupid shits came in the front door and now they’re using the elevator. Probably trying to flush me—scare me into running downstairs.

Kurtz did not know who the stupid shits were, but he had rigged the front and rear doors of the warehouse with monofilament thread that ran up to his sixth-floor sleeping cubby, each thread ending in a soup can full of rocks, and his front-door can had rattled. Kurtz had been out of his sleeping bag in two seconds, had slipped into his shoes and leather gloves, had pulled his .45 and the short-barreled .38 from his duffel, and was out into the pitch-black hallway in ten seconds, crouching and waiting. The terrible noise of the freight elevator spoke for itself.

Kurtz had no night-vision goggles, but his eyes had long since adapted to the tiny bit of cloud-reflected city light filtering down through holes in the ceiling and down the elevator shaft itself. Moving carefully around heaps of junk and puddles of water, he moved quickly to the open elevator shaft.

Usually, he knew, elevator doors were designed not to open if the elevator was not stopped on that level, but the construction boys had ripped off the wide doors to the freight elevator for reasons known only to God and themselves, marking the elevator shaft with only a ribbon of orange plastic tape stretched across the dark opening. Kurtz crouched by the tape and waited. The elevator could be a diversion. They could be coming up the stairways. From where he crouched, Kurtz could see the opening to the north stairwell.

Someone was talking in loud whispers in the elevator.

As the top of the freight elevator reached the level of his floor, Kurtz stepped out onto its roof and went to one knee, a pistol in each hand. He made no noise, but the grinding and growl of cables and the ancient motor would have shielded the sound of his move even if he had been wearing metal boots.

The elevator did not stop on his floor, but ground its way up to the top floor, seven. The huge elevator door cranked open and three men inside stepped out, still whispering to one another.

Kurtz had ridden on the elevator roof before and knew there was a hole in the plaster through which he could look out onto the seventh-floor mezzanine. He knew where it was because he had made the hole himself some days ago, using a crowbar to tear through the plaster. To his right was a piece of cardboard nailed over another hole he had made, this one in the west wall of the elevator shaft; he knew from practice that he could crawl out that hole and roll onto some repositioned construction scaffolding in five seconds.

The seventh floor received more light than the lower six floors: as dirty as the ancient skylight above was, it still allowed some starlight and city light in. The walls here had been removed to make this a mezzanine-apartment level. The interior opening to the atrium seven floors below was sealed off only by stapled floor-to-ceiling construction plastic. Kurtz could easily see the three men, even while it was obvious that they were having problems seeing anything.

What the hell? thought Kurtz. He had expected Malcolm and his men. He had no idea who these clumsy-looking white idiots were. Kurtz knew at once that these weren’t Don Farino’s bodyguards: the old don would never hire help with such bad haircuts and six-day beards. And, despite their arsenal, they didn’t look like cops.

The three men were all large and overweight, their bulk increased by what looked to be Kevlar vests under army jackets. They were heavily armed with automatic weapons, all three of which were sighted with projecting lasers, the beams quite visible in the dripping water and floating plaster dust. All three men were wearing bulky night-vision goggles.

A radio squawked. The tallest of the three answered it while the other two kept sweeping the mezzanine with their laser beams. Within seconds, Kurtz had to wonder whether he was being attacked by the Confederate Army.

“Warren?”

“Yeah, Andrew, what is it? I told you not to radio unless it was important.” Ah tole you nat to radio ’less it was imporant.

“You all okay up there, Warren?” Y’all okay…

“Goddamn it, Andrew, we just got here. Now shut the hell up unless we call you or unless you see him. We’re going to chase him your way.”

Kurtz slid his .45 into his back holster and took the heavy sap out of his pocket.

The tallest of the three men clicked off the hand radio and gestured for the other two to split up, one going around the west mezzanine and the other around the east side. Kurtz watched them go, the big men moving in what looked like a parody of military efficiency, stumbling over heaps of construction debris, cursing when they stepped in puddles, all the time fiddling with their night-vision apparatus.

Warren stayed behind, head moving, aiming a Colt M4 carbine burdened with a huge suppressor. The big man swiveled constantly, the laser beam flickering left, right, up, down. Warren glanced behind him, made sure that no one was between him and the wall near the elevator, and backed up cautiously.

The radio squawked again.

“What?” Warren said angrily.

“Nothing up here. Me and Douglas are at the stairway at the other end.”

“You look in all the goddamn rooms?”

“Yeah. They ain’t got doors on this level.”

“Okay,” said Warren. “Start on down. Sweep the sixth floor.”

“You comin’ down, Warren?”

“I’m staying right here until you got the sixth floor swept. We don’t wanna be comin’ at each other in the dark, now, do we?”

“No.”

“So call me when you got the whole floor searched, then I’ll come down, then you do the next one down, until we find the sonofabitch or flush him down to where Andrew is waiting. Y’all understand, Darren?”

“Yeah.”

Another voice. “Darren, Douglas, Warren? Y’all all right?”

Three voices at once. “Shut up, Andrew.”

While all this chatting was going on, Warren had been backing up until he was almost to the scaffolding. Kurtz silently lifted the cardboard panel and moved out of the elevator shaft.

The wooden plank creaked under him. Warren started to turn. Kurtz leaned forward and sapped him with the two-pound blackjack.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SIX

Andrew didn’t like being alone on the first floor. It was dark and dank and creepy down here. Looking through his night-vision goggles made everything go all greenish white, so that every doorway or heap of sand looked like a ghost. But when he took the goggles off—which Warren had told him not to do—he couldn’t see anything at all. The Israeli Bullpup full-auto assault rifle that he’d chosen was cool, slick, and black and curved as a snake, but he couldn’t really see it in the dark. At least it wasn’t heavy. Even the laser-sight’s red beam, which had seemed so cool at the niggers’ warehouse, was just a greenish beam of light through his goggles. Andrew amused himself by playing Star Wars with it, making light-saber noises as he swung the Bullpup and swooshed the beam back and forth down the long hallway.

Suddenly the radio crackled again. It was Darren.

“Warren? Warren? We found this Kurtz’s guy’s hidey-hole on six! He ain’t here, but we found a cot and sleeping bag and shit. Warren?”

Warren did not answer.

“Warren?” came Douglas’s voice.

“Warren?” said Andrew from his place near the front hall on the first floor.

“Shut up, Andrew!” said Darren and Douglas together. Then, also together, they said, “Warren? Warren?”

Warren didn’t answer.

“Y’all better get back up there,” said Andrew.

This time his two older brothers did not tell him to shut up. There was a silence broken only by static-crackle and then Douglas said, “Yeah. You stay where you are, Andrew. If you see somethin’ move, don’t shoot until you’re sure it ain’t us comin’ down. If it ain’t us, kill it.”

“Okay,” said Andrew.

“An’ stay the hell off the radio,” said Darren.

“Okay,” said Andrew. He could hear the clicks as they turned their radios off.

Andrew stood silent for what seemed a very long time. He was still turning slowly, trying to get used to the glowing greenish world of the night-vision goggles, but even the light-saber game wasn’t any fun anymore. Nothing moved from the east stairwell. The elevator remained silent. Water dripped. Finally Andrew couldn’t stand it any longer. He pressed the transmit button on the small sports walkie-talkie. “Warren?”

Silence.

“Douglas? Darren?”

No answer. Andrew repeated the call and then shut his own radio off. He was getting nervous.

It was lighter in the big middle part of the warehouse—the part that Warren had called the atrium—and Andrew moved into the huge, echoing space, looking up more than seven stories to the glowing skylight almost one hundred feet above him. It was only reflected city light bouncing off clouds coming through the skylight, but it flared up so much in Andrew’s goggles that he was blinded for a second. He raised his free hand to wipe the tears from his eyes, but the stupid night-vision goggles were in the way.

Andrew looked up at the top floor, where floor-to-ceiling plastic reflected the light differently than did the cold brick of the first six floors, but nothing was visible through the thick plastic. He lifted the radio again.

“Warren, Douglas, Darren? Y’all all right?”

As if in answer there came seven shots—very rapid, very loud, not silenced at all—and suddenly a terrible ripping and screaming from high up near the skylight.

Andrew swung the Bullpup assault rifle up.

There was a hole in the plastic way up there on the seventh floor. Worse than that, something huge and loud was screaming and flapping its way down toward him. Through his goggles, the thing looked like some gigantic, misshapen, greenish white bat-thing with one blazing eye. Its wings must have been twenty feet long, and they were flapping wildly, now streaming behind the body of the bat like rippling ribbons of white fire. The bat was screeching as it fell toward him.

Andrew emptied the generous clip of the Bullpup at the apparition. He had time to see that the burning eye of the thing was actually the dot of his laser beam and also to see several of his slugs hit home, tearing into the spinning, flapping bat-thing, but the screaming continued—grew worse, if anything.

Andrew jumped back into the atrium doorway, but kept shooting—phut! phut! phut! phut!—he had never heard a silenced weapon on full-auto before and the ripping sound mixed with the screaming and flapping noises weirded him out.

The giant bat hit the concrete floor about thirty feet from Andrew. Now it sounded and looked more like a giant Hefty bag full of vegetable soup hitting the ground than any sort of bat that Andrew had ever seen. Green-white liquid spilled and spurted in every direction and it took only a few seconds for Andrew to realize that it was blood and that it would be quite red in real light.

Andrew ripped off his night-vision goggles, threw them down, and ran for the front door.

Kurtz had sapped the big man lightly: enough to knock him out, but not hard enough to kill him or keep him out for long. Kurtz jumped from the scaffold and worked quickly, moving the moaning man’s Colt M4 carbine out of reach, patting him down for other weapons—he carried none—confiscating his radio and night-vision goggles, and finally pulling off his filthy army jacket and donning it himself. Kurtz was cold.

The radio crackled again. Kurtz listened to the one on the first floor talking to the two on the sixth floor who’d found his cot and sleeping bag.

“Y’all better get back up there,” came the brain-damaged drawl from the cracker downstairs.

Kurtz heard either Darren or Douglas say, “Yeah” and then he got busy retrieving the Colt M4, checking that the magazine was full and the safety off, and then lying prone behind the moaning—but still unstirring—facedown figure of Warren. Kurtz did not prefer to use long guns, but he knew how to use them. Lying there, the barrel of the M4 propped on the big man’s back, Kurtz felt like a figure in an old cowboy painting—the cavalryman who’s had to shoot his horse to use as cover when the Indians are attacking.

If these particular Indians used the nearest stairway, they’d be coming up the north stairwell next to the elevators just ten yards away. If they came up the south stairwell, they could approach from either the east or west mezzanine, but Kurtz would hear them either way.

They came up the north stairwell and made enough noise to make the groaning Warren almost wake.

Kurtz sighed just before the two came into sight. If they paused at the doorway to the stairwell, he might be in trouble lying there behind Warren. But he did not think they would pause and come onto the seventh floor one at a time. Everything they’d done so far had been stupid or stupider. Kurtz sighed because he had no anger toward these idiots, even though they’d obviously come to kill him.

They exploded onto the landing, rifles seeking a target, laser beams whipping left and right, shouting at each other, both men obviously half-blinded by the glare of the ambient light in their goggles. Kurtz took a breath, sighted on the pale faces above the black Kevlar, and shot twice. He noticed how efficient the titanium silencer was on the M4. Both men went down heavily and did not rise again.

“Warren?” crackled the radio in Kurtz’s army jacket pocket. “Douglas? Darren?”

Kurtz gave it another minute, made sure that the two men’s rifles had fallen far from their hands, and then rose and moved quickly to the fallen figures. Both were dead. He dropped the M4 and walked quickly back to Warren, who was beginning to stir.

Kurtz set his boot on the big man’s neck and jaw and forced the face back down against the concrete. Warren’s eyes flickered open and Kurtz pressed the muzzle of the .45 pistol forcefully into his left eye-socket. “Don’t move,” he whispered.

Warren groaned but ceased trying to rise to his knees.

“Names,” Kurtz whispered.

“Huh?”

Kurtz pressed harder with the pistol. “Do you know my name?”

“Kurtz.” Warren’s breath kicked up concrete dust.

“Who sent you?”

Warren’s breathing slowed. Kurtz was certain that he had not been conscious during the shooting. The big man was obviously thinking things over now and trying to come up with a plan. Kurtz didn’t want him to have that luxury. He thumbed the hammer back on the .45 with an audible click and pressed the muzzle deeper into Warren’s eye socket. “Who sent you?”

“Nigger…” said Warren.

Kurtz pressed harder. “Names.”

Warren tried to shake his head, but the pressure from Kurtz’s boot and pistol made that impossible. “Don’t know his name. Guy who runs drugs to the Bloods. Has a diamond in his tooth.”

“Where?” said Kurtz. “How’d you contact him? Where do I find him?”

Warren blew concrete dust. “Seneca Social Club. Nigger place. Sent Darren out to make contact. They have a warehouse full of guns, but they took us there blindfolded. Don’t know where the fuck it is. But we knew the Bloods’d knocked over the arsenal and—”

Kurtz did not give a shit about the history of Malcolm’s weapons heist. He moved the muzzle to Warren’s temple and pressed harder. “What did—”

At that instant, the radio squawked in Andrew’s voice. “Warren? Douglas? Darren? Y’all all right?” Kurtz turned his head slightly and Warren lunged upward, throwing Kurtz off balance, clambering to his hands and knees.

Kurtz staggered backward but had enough balance to go to one knee six feet from Warren and to aim the .45.

The huge man was on his feet, staring over Kurtz’s shoulder at the bodies just visible in the rising light.

“Don’t,” Kurtz whispered, but Warren opened his hands and came on like a grizzly bear.

Kurtz could have gone for a head shot, but he had more questions. He aimed at the center of the man’s Kevlar-covered chest and pulled the trigger.

The impact drove the huge man six feet back, staggering, but—amazingly—Warren did not go down. At that range, with this pistol, the impact must have been incredible—the equivalent of Mark McGwire swinging a bat full-force into an unprotected chest—certainly there were broken ribs, but Warren stayed on his feet, arms still swinging. In the brightening light, Kurtz could see the man’s eyes wide and enraged. Warren came on again.

Kurtz fired twice. The big man threw his head back and growled like a bear, but he was driven another seven or eight feet back toward the plastic-covered atrium opening.

“Stop,” said Kurtz.

Warren came on.

Kurtz fired. Warren staggered back, then came on again as if leaning into a hurricane-force wind.

Kurtz fired again. Another several steps back. The giant was five steps from the edge of the mezzanine, his huge form silhouetted against the brighter plastic tarp of a wall. Saliva and blood sprayed from his open mouth. Warren actually roared.

“Fuck it,” said Kurtz and fired twice more, putting both shots high on the Kevlar vest.

Warren was driven backward like a hammered railroad spike. The huge man hit the plastic, staples ripped out, he teetered, fingernails grabbing the sagging tarp, and then he went back and over the ledge, pulling one hundred and twenty square feet of tarp out of its frame and down with him.

Kurtz walked to the edge of the mezzanine to watch the shrouded figure hurtle downward into the darkened atrium, but had to step back as the man far below opened fire with an automatic rifle. Kurtz had time to realize that Andrew was shooting at Warren before the big man hit the concrete.

Andrew screamed and ran out of the atrium.

Kurtz swept up the Colt M4 carbine and jogged down the short access hall to the east wall. He had pried blocks and bricks out of their moorings there, and the result was a sort of gun slit that let him look down on the east entrance to the building and the streets beyond.

The predawn glimmer gave enough light for Kurtz to see Andrew running heft-bent-for-leather toward the wire fence along the east side of the lot. Sighing again, Kurtz lifted the M4 into the open gap in the wall and used the optic sight to pick up the running figure. He took a breath, but before he could squeeze the trigger, there came the pop and rip of automatic-weapons fire, and Andrew was batted down as if a huge, invisible hand had smashed him away.

Kurtz swung the sight toward the line of cars across the street. Movement. Several dark figures behind the vehicles there.

Kurtz could feel his heart pounding. If Malcolm’s men came after him now, he was in a bad place. Kurtz never liked Alamo scenarios.

One of the men jogged forward, crawled through a cut in the wire, and came out onto the lot as far as Andrew’s sprawled body. The shooter raised a radio, but it wasn’t tuned to the frequency Warren and his pals had been using. The man went back to the line of cars and several men got into the back of an AstroVan parked at the curb.

Kurtz used the telescopic sight to read the license tag.

The van pulled away and drove out of sight.

Kurtz waited at the gun slit for another thirty minutes, until it was light enough to see easily. He listened very carefully, but the icehouse was silent, except for water dripping and the occasional rustle of torn plastic on the mezzanine.

Finally Kurtz dropped the M4, stepped over the bodies of Douglas and Darren on his way to the stairwell, and went down to the sixth floor. He’d left nothing in his little cubby except an old cot—found in a Dumpster—and an untraceable sleeping bag. But he’d been in here without gloves, so there was always the risk of fingerprints and DNA sampling if the cops got too earnest about solving this multiple murder.

Kurtz had been keeping a five-gallon jerrican of gasoline in a closet. Now he poured gas over his sleeping area and the bathroom, dropped the Kimber .45 onto the cot, and lit a match. He hated to give up the .45—he trusted that Doc was telling the truth in saying the weapons were absolutely cold—but there were at least seven depleted slugs in or around Warren’s Kevlar vest that Kurtz did not have the time to retrieve.

The heat and flames were intense, but he had little worry that the whole icehouse would burn down. Too much concrete and brick for that. Kurtz also doubted that the bodies would be burned.

Backing away from the flames, Kurtz turned and jogged down the north stairwell to the basement. The tunnel there was closed off by an ancient steel door that was secured by a new chain and Yale padlock. Kurtz had the key.

He came out in another abandoned warehouse half a block away. Kurtz watched the streets for another ten minutes before stepping out onto the sidewalk and walking away quickly from the icehouse.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SEVEN

Joe, you look terrible.”

Kurtz opened one eye as he lay on the sprung couch in their office. Arlene was hanging her coat and setting a stack of folders on her desk. “Where’d you get that terrible army coat? It’s about three sizes too big…” She paused and looked at the bundle of straps and optics on her desk. “What on earth is this?”

“Night-vision goggles,” said Kurtz. “I forgot that I had them in my pocket until I tried to lie down here.”

“And what am I supposed to do with night-vision goggles?”

“Put them in a drawer for now,” said Kurtz. “I need to borrow your car.”

Arlene sighed. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance that you’ll get it back by lunchtime.”

“Not much,” said Kurtz.

Arlene tossed him the keys. “If I’d known, I would have packed a lunch.”

“There are places in this neighborhood where they serve lunch,” said Kurtz. “Why don’t you eat around here?”

As if in answer, Arlene turned on the surveillance monitor. It was 8:30 A.M., and already there were half a dozen men in raincoats looking at racks of XXX-rated videos and magazines upstairs.

Kurtz shrugged and went out the back door, making sure that it locked behind him.

While driving on the state road toward Darien Center and Attica, Kurtz listened to the morning news on WNY radio tell of a fire in an old Buffalo icehouse and four bodies found by firefighters, all four men killed in what authorities described as “a gangland-style slaying.” Kurtz was never sure what constituted a “gangland-style slaying,” but he suspected it did not involve plummeting seven stories with seven .45 slugs embedded in one’s Kevlar vest. He turned up the radio.

Authorities had not revealed the identities of the four dead men, but police had announced that all of the military-type weapons recovered had been stolen in the previous summer’s Dunkirk arsenal raid and that the Erie County District Attorney’s office was now looking into the involvement of several local white-supremicist groups.

Kurtz turned off the radio, stopped at a roadside rest stop, and left the army jacket draped on a bench at a picnic table. If he’d owned a cell phone, he would have called Arlene and told her to get rid of the night-vision goggles. Kurtz had considered using the goggles as a calling card for Malcolm, but now he just wanted to lose them. He made a mental note to take care of that later.

He drove on to Attica. The little town did not seem familiar to him, and the outside of the State Correctional Facility did not make him feel he was coming home; he had almost never seen the town and exterior of the prison during his years there.

It was Wednesday—visiting day. Kurtz knew that it expedited things to have prearranged the visit, but he filled out the forms, waited more than an hour, and then walked down familiar monkey-puke-green echoing corridors through metal detectors and sliding doors, and then was waved to an empty seat on the visitor side of the thick Plexiglas partition. This made his skin prickle a bit, since he had been in this room a few times.

Little Skag came in on the opposite side, saw Kurtz, and almost walked back out. Reluctantly, sullenly, the short, skinny inmate dropped onto his stool and lifted the phone off the hook. The orange jumpsuit made Little Skag’s blemished skin seem almost orange in the sick light.

“Kurtz, what the fuck do you want?”

“Hello to you, too, Skag.”

“Steve,” said Little Skag. His long white fingers were chewed red and raw around the nails. His hands were trembling. He leaned closer and whispered fiercely into the phone. “What the fuck do you want?”

Kurtz smiled as if he were a friend or family member on his monthly visit. “One million dollars in a numbered Cayman account,” he said softly.

Little Skag began blinking uncontrollably. He held the phone in both hands. “Have you gone fucking crazy on the outside? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

Kurtz waited.

“Anything else you want, Kurtz? Want to fuck my baby sister?”

“Been there, done that,” said Kurtz. “But after you agree to set up the Cayman account through your private lawyer, I do need a phone number.”

Little Skag’s lips were almost as white as his fingers. Eventually he was able to whisper, “Whose?”

Kurtz told him.

Little Skag dropped the phone and ran his spidery fingers through his greasy hair, squeezing his skull as if trying to drive out demons.

Kurtz waited. Eventually, Little Skag picked up the phone. The two looked at each other in silence for a long moment. Kurtz glanced at his watch. Five more minutes of his visiting time.

“If I gave you that fucking number,” whispered Little Skag, “I’d be dead in a month. I couldn’t even hide in solitary confinement.”

Kurtz nodded. “If you don’t give me the number now and make arrangements to set up that account, you’ll spend the rest of your life in here. You still Billy Joe Krepp’s punk?”

Little Skag winced and his hands trembled more fiercely, but he tried to bluster. “There’s no way in fucking hell, man, that I’m going to transfer that kind of money to you—”

“I didn’t say it was for me,” said Kurtz. He explained, speaking softly but quickly. When he was finished, he said, “And you’ll need to use your lawyer’s back channels to get in touch with the heads of the other New York families. If they don’t understand what’s going down, this won’t work.”

Little Skag stared at him. “Why should I trust you, Kurtz?”

“Skag, I’m the only person in the world right now with a vested interest in you surviving and getting out of here,” Kurtz said softly. “If you don’t believe me, you could call your father or sister or your consigliere for help.”

Driving back to Buffalo, Kurtz took a detour north to Lockport. The house on Lilly Street looked quiet and locked up, but it was about the time that schools let out, so Kurtz parked across the street and waited. It was trying to snow.

About 4:00 P.M., just as daylight was beginning to ebb, Rachel walked down the street alone. Kurtz had not seen a picture of the girl in years, but he could not mistake her. Rachel had her mother’s fair skin and red hair and thin, graceful build. She even walked like her mother. She was alone.

Kurtz watched as the girl went through the gate of the picket fence, fetched the mail from the box, and then reached into her school backpack for a key. A minute after she had entered the house, a light went on in the kitchen on the north side. Kurtz could not see Rachel through the shutters, but he could feel her presence in there.

After another moment, he shifted Arlene’s car into gear and drove slowly away.

Kurtz had been very careful to make sure that he had not been followed on his trip out to Attica and back, but he had not been paying attention here in Lockport. He did not notice the black Lincoln Town Car with the tinted windows parked half a block south. He did not see the man behind the tinted glass or notice that the man was watching him through binoculars. The black Lincoln did not follow Kurtz when he drove away, but the man watched through the binoculars until he was out of sight.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-EIGHT

Do I get my car back now?” asked Arlene.

“Not quite yet,” said Kurtz. “But I’ll drive you home and return it later tonight.”

Arlene mumbled something. Then she said, “Pearl Wilson returned your call. She said that she’ll meet you at the Blue Franklin parking lot at 6:00.”

“Damn,” said Kurtz. “I didn’t want to meet with her, just talk to her.”

Arlene shrugged, shut off her computer, and walked to the coat hook on the wall. Kurtz noticed a second topcoat there. “What’s that?” he said.

Arlene tossed it to him. Kurtz tried it on. It was long, wool, a charcoal gray, with large pockets inside and out. He liked it. The smell told him that its previous owner had been a smoker.

“Since I had to eat lunch around here, I dropped into the Thrift Store down the block,” said Arlene. “That army jacket—wherever it went—just wasn’t you.”

“Thanks,” said Kurtz. “Which reminds me, we have to stop by an ATM on the way to your place. Get about five hundred in cash.”

“Oh, you opened an account, Joe?”

“Nope.” Before they shut off the lights and went out to the car, Kurtz dialed Doc’s number. He wasn’t sure how he was going to get to Malcolm Kibunte yet, but he knew that once he did, he’d need more than the short-barreled .38.

Doc’s answering machine came on the line with the inevitable “I’m sleeping, leave a message,” and the beep.

“Doc, this is Joe. Thought I might drop by later to talk about the Bills.” Kurtz hung up. That was enough to let Doc know to leave the steel-mill gate open for him.

Pearl Wilson drove a beautiful dove-gray Infiniti Q45. Kurtz got out of the Buick, blinked against the blowing snow, and got in the passenger side of the Infiniti. The new vehicle smelled of leather and long-chain polymer molecules and of Pearl’s subtle perfume. She was wearing a soft, expensive dress of the same dove-gray as the car.

“Seneca Social Club,” she said, shifting sideways in the driver’s seat. “Joe, honey, what on earth are you thinking about?”

“I just knew that you used to sing there years ago,” said Kurtz. “I was just curious about the place. We didn’t have to meet in person.”

“Uh-uh.” Pearl shook her head. “You’re never just curious, Joe, honey. And you really don’t want to be messing with the Seneca Social Club these days.”

Kurtz waited.

“So after you called,” she continued, her voice that husky mix of smoke and whiskey and cat purr which never ceased to amaze Kurtz, “I went back down to the Seneca Social Club to look around.”

“Goddamn it, Pearl,” said Kurtz. “All I wanted from you was an idea about—”

“Don’t you dare curse at me,” said Pearl, her rich, soft voice shifting to ice and edges.

“Sorry.”

“I know what you wanted, Joe, honey, but it’s been years and years since I was in that place. Used to sing there for King Nathan when he owned the place. It was a little bar then—a real social club. The layout hasn’t changed, but those gangbangers have changed everything else.”

Kurtz shook his head. The thought of Pearl Wilson walking among those miserable Bloods made him slightly ill.

“Oh, they’d heard of me,” said Pearl. “Treated me all right. Of course, that might have been because I had Lark and D. J. along.” Lark and D. J., Kurtz knew, were Pearl’s two huge bodyguards. “Gave me a tour and everything.”

Kurtz had just driven by the place. No windows on the first floor. Barred windows on the second floor. Alley in back. A yellow Mercedes SLK parked back there. Steel doors. Peepholes. The Bloods inside would have automatic weapons.

“They’ve turned it into a pool parlor,” said Pearl. “A bar and some tables downstairs. A locked door behind the bar that opens to stairs to the second floor. More tables up there and some ratty furniture. Two rooms up there—the big front room with the four tables, and Malcolm Kibunte’s office in back. Another heavy door to his office.”

“Did you see this Malcolm Kibunte?” Kurtz asked.

Pearl shook her head. “They said he wasn’t there. Didn’t see that albino psychopath who hangs with him either.”

“Cutter?” said Kurtz.

“Yes, that’s his name. Rumor is that Cutter is a black-man albino. Otherwise, the Bloods wouldn’t put up with him.”

Kurtz smiled at that. “Any back way upstairs?” he said.

Pearl nodded. “Little hall to the back door. Three doors. First one is the back stairway. That door locks from the inside as well. Next two doors for ‘Studs’ and ‘Mares.’”

“Cute.”

“That’s what I said,” said Pearl.

“What reason did you use to get in?”

“I said that I used to sing for King Nathan there, Joe, honey, and that I was feeling nostalgic about seeing the place again. The younger Blood didn’t know what I was talking about, but one of the older men did, and escorted me through the place. Everything but Kibunte’s office.” She smiled slightly. “I don’t think that you’ll get in by saying the same thing, Joe, honey.”

“No, I guess not,” said Kurtz. “Many people there? Guns?”

Pearl nodded yes to both.

“Women?”

“A few of their ‘bitches,’” said Pearl. Her voice showed distaste at the last word. “Not many. Mostly younger bangers. Crackheads.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know where Malcolm lives?”

Pearl patted his knee. “No one does, Joe, honey. The man just comes into the community, sells crack and heroin and other drugs to the kids there, and the Bloods make him a demi-god. He drives a yellow Mercedes convertible, but somehow no one ever sees where it goes when Malcolm leaves.”

Kurtz nodded, thinking about that.

“It’s a bad place, Joe, honey,” said Pearl. She took his fingers in her soft hand and squeezed. “I would feel much better if you’d promise me that you’re not going to have anything to do with the Seneca Social Club.”

Kurtz held her hand in both of his, but all he said was, “Thank you, Pearl.” He stepped out of the sweet smells of the new Infiniti and walked through blowing snow to his borrowed Buick.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-NINE

Doc didn’t come on guard duty at the steel mill until 11:00 P.M., so Kurtz had some time to kill. He felt tired. The last few days and nights had begun to blend together in his mind.

Using some of the $500 in cash that Arlene had retrieved from the ATM—Kurtz had promised to pay her back by the end of the month—he filled the Buick’s gas tank for her. He then went into the Texaco convenience store and bought a Bic cigarette lighter, twenty-five feet of clothesline, and four half-liter Cokes—the only drinks which came in glass bottles. Kurtz emptied the Coke and filled the bottles with gasoline, keeping out of sight of the attendant as he did so. He had gone into the restroom, removed his boxer shorts, and torn them into rags. Now he stuffed those rags into the mouths of the gasoline-filled bottles and carefully set the four bottles into the spare-tire niche in the Buick’s trunk. He did not have a real plan yet, but he thought that these things might come in handy when and if he visited the Seneca Social Club.

It was definitely colder without underpants.

The snow was trying to become Buffalo’s first November snowstorm, but little was sticking to the streets. Kurtz drove down to the Expressway overpass, parked on a side street, and climbed the concrete grade to Pruno’s niche. The cold concrete cubicle was empty. Kurtz remembered another place where the old man used to hang out, so he drove to the main switching yard. It was on his way.

Here part of the highway was elevated over twenty rails, and in the slight shelter of the bridge rose a ramshackle city of packing crates, tin roofs, open fires, and a few lanterns. Diesel locomotives growled and clanked in the wide yards a quarter of a mile beyond the squatters’ city. What little skyline Buffalo offered rose beyond the railyards. Kurtz walked down the concrete incline and went from shack to shack.

Pruno was playing chess with Soul Dad. Pruno’s gaze was unfocused—he was very high on something—but it did not seem to hurt his game. Soul Dad gestured him in. Kurtz had to duck low to get under the two-by-four-girded construction-plastic threshold.

“Joseph,” said Soul Dad extending his hand. “It is good to see you again.” Kurtz shook the bald black man’s strong hand. Soul Dad was about Pruno’s age, but in much better physical shape—he was one of the few homeless whom Kurtz had met who was not an addict or a schizophrenic. Solid, bald, bearded, given to wearing castoff tweed jackets with a sweater vest over two or three shirts during the winter, Soul Dad had a mellifluous voice, a scholar’s wisdom, and—Kurtz had always thought—the saddest eyes on earth.

Pruno looked at him as if Kurtz were an alien life-form that had just teleported into their midst. “Joseph?” The scrawny man looked warmer in the insulated bomber jacket Kurtz had given him. Sophia Farino’s gift to the homeless, thought Kurtz, and then smiled when he realized that it had been a gift to the homeless when she’d given it to him.

“Pull up a crate, Joseph,” rumbled Soul Dad. “We were just approaching the endgame.”

“I’ll just watch for a while,” said Kurtz.

“Nonsense,” said Soul Dad. “This game will go on for another day or so. Would you like some coffee?”

As the older man hunkered over a battered hot-plate in the rear of the shack, Kurtz noticed how powerful Soul Dad’s back and shoulders and upper arms were under his thin jacket. Kurtz had no idea where they pirated the electricity for the shack, but the hot-plate worked, and Soul Dad had a refurbished laptop computer in the corner near his sleeping bag. Some form of chaos-driven fractal imagery—almost certainly home-programmed—was acting as a screen saver, adding to the glow of the lantern light in the little space.

Soul Dad and Kurtz sipped coffee while Pruno rocked, closing his eyes occasionally, the better to appreciate some interior light show. Soul Dad asked polite questions about Kurtz’s last eleven and a half years, and Kurtz tried to answer with some humor. There must have been some wit in his answers, since Soul Dad’s deep laugh was loud enough to bring Pruno out of his reveries.

“Well, to what do we owe the pleasure of this nocturnal visit, Joseph?” Soul Dad asked at last.

Pruno answered for him. “Joseph is tilting against windmills…a windmill named Malcolm Kibunte, to be precise.”

Soul Dad’s thick eyebrows rose. “Malcolm Kibunte is no windmill,” he said softly.

“More a murderous sonofabitch,” said Kurtz.

Soul Dad nodded. “That and more.”

“Satan,” said Pruno. “Kibunte is Satan incarnate.” Pruno’s rheumy eyes tried to focus on Soul Dad. “You’re the theologian here. What’s the origin of the name ‘Satan’? I’ve forgotten.”

“From the Hebrew,” said Soul Dad, rooting around in a crate, taking out some bread and fruit. “It means one who opposes, obstructs, or acts as adversary. Thus, ‘the Adversary.’” He moved the chessboard and set some of the food in front of Kurtz. “Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof,” he intoned in his resonant growl. “Ezekiel 4:9.” He broke the bread in a ceremonial manner and handed a piece to Kurtz.

Kurtz knew that twice a week the nearby Buffalo Bakery left an abandoned pickup truck in its park lot filled with three-day-old bread. The homeless knew the schedule. Kurtz’s belly rumbled. He had not eaten all day. He held the battered, steaming tin coffee cup in one hand and accepted the bread.

“Song of Solomon 2:5,” continued Soul Dad, setting two overripe apples on the crate in front of Kurtz. “Comfort me with apples.”

Kurtz had to smile. “The Bible actually has recipes and recommends apples?”

“Absolutely,” said Soul Dad. “Leviticus 7:23 is even so modern as to advise, Eat no manner of fat—although if I had some bacon, I’d fry it up for us.”

Kurtz ate the bread, took a bite of apple, and sipped his scalding coffee. It was one of the best meals he’d ever tasted.

Pruno blinked and said, “Leviticus also advises, Ye shall eat no manner of blood. But I think that is what Joseph has in mind when it comes to this Satan, Malcolm.”

Soul Dad shook his head. “Malcolm Kibunte is no Satan…the white man who provides him with the poison is Satan. Kibunte is Mastema from the lost book, Jubilees…”

Kurtz looked blank.

Pruno cleared his phlegmy throat. “Mastema was the demon who commanded Abraham to kill his own son,” he said to Kurtz.

“I thought God did that,” said Kurtz.

Soul Dad slowly, sadly shook his head. “No God worth worshiping would do that, Joseph.”

“Jubilees is apocryphal,” Pruno said to Soul Dad. And then, as if remembering something obvious. “Diabolos. Greek for one who throws something across one’s path. Malcolm Kibunte is diabolical, but not Satanic.”

Kurtz sipped his coffee. “Pruno sent me a reading list before I went into Attica. I didn’t think it was that long a list, but I spent the better part of ten years working on it and didn’t finish it.”

“‘Sapientia prima est stultitia caruisee,’” said Pruno. “Horace. ‘To have shed stupidity is the beginning of wisdom.’”

“Frederick was always good for self-improvement lists,” said Soul Dad, chuckling.

“Who’s Frederick?” said Kurtz.

“I used to be,” said Pruno and closed his eyes again.

Soul Dad was looking at Kurtz. “Joseph, do you know why Malcolm Kibunte is an agent of Satan and why the white man behind Kibunte is Satan himself?”

Kurtz shook his head and took another bite of apple.

“Yaba,” said Soul Dad.

The word rang a faint bell for Kurtz, but only a very faint bell. “Is that Hebrew?” he asked.

“No,” said Soul Dad, “it’s a form of methamphetamine, like speed, only with the punch and addictiveness of heroin. Yaba can be smoked, ingested, or injected. Every orifice becomes a portal to heaven.”

“Portal to heaven,” repeated Pruno, but it was obvious that he was no longer a part of the conversation.

“A devil drug,” said Soul Dad. “A true generation killer.”

Yaba. Shooting yaba. That’s where Kurtz had heard the name. Some of the younger cons used it. Kurtz had never had much interest in other people’s addictions. And there were so many drugs available in prison.

“So Kibunte is dealing yaba?” said Kurtz.

Soul Dad nodded slowly. “He came first with the usual—crack, speed, heroin. The Bloods were the victors in the gang wars of the early nineties, and to the victors belong the spoils. Malcolm Kibunte supplied the spoils. The usual mindkillers at first—crack, meth, speed, angel dust. But within the past eight or nine months, yaba has flowed from the Seneca Social Club to every street corner. The bangers buy it cheap, but then need it soon and often. The price goes up quickly until within a year—or less—the price is death.”

“Where does yaba come from?” said Kurtz.

“That’s the fascinating part,” said Soul Dad. “It flows in from Asia—from the Golden Triangle—but its use has been limited in the United States. Suddenly here it is in great quantities in Buffalo, of all places.”

“The New York Families?” said Kurtz.

Soul Dad opened his large hands. “I think not. The Colombians controlled the drug trade here for decades, but in recent years, the Families have come back onto the scene, working with the Colombians to regulate much of the flow of opium products. The sudden introduction of yaba, although terribly profitable, does not appear to be part of the plan of organized crime.”

Kurtz finished the last of his coffee and set the tin cup down. “The Farino family,” he said. “Someone in the family is supplying Malcolm. Could it be coming from Vancouver? What source is in Vancouver—” Kurtz stopped in mid-sentence.

Soul Dad nodded.

“Jesus!” whispered Kurtz. “The Triads? They control the flow of junk into North America on the West Coast, and they have plenty of meth labs in Vancouver, but why supply a mob family here? The Triads are at war with the West Coast Families…”

Kurtz was silent for several minutes, thinking. Somewhere in the shack city, an old man began coughing uncontrollably and then fell silent. Finally Kurtz said, “Christ. The Dunkirk Arsenal thing.”

“I think you are right, Joseph,” Soul Dad rumbled. Closing his eyes, he intoned, “Our contest is not against flesh and blood, but against powers, against principalities, against the world-rulers of this present darkness, against spiritual forces of evil in heavenly places.” He opened his eyes and showed strong white teeth in a grin. “Ephesians 6:12.”

Kurtz was still distracted. “I’m afraid my contest is going to be against flesh and blood, as well as against powers and principalities.”

“Ahhh,” said Soul Dad. “You’re going up against the shit-eating Seneca Social Club.”

“And I don’t have a clue as to how to get to Malcolm Kibunte,” said Kurtz.

Pruno opened his eyes. “Which book on my list did you like the most and understand the least, Joseph?”

Kurtz thought a moment. “The first one, I think. The Iliad.”

“Perhaps your solution lies in that tale,” said Pruno.

Kurtz had to smile. “So if I build a big horse for Malcolm and his boys and seal myself in, they’ll wheel me into the Social Club?”

“‘O seculum insipiens et inficetum,’” said Pruno and did not translate.

Soul Dad sighed. “He’s quoting Catullus now. ‘O stupid and tasteless age.’ When Frederick gets like this, I am reminded of Terence’s comment: ‘Ille solus nescit omnia.’ ‘Only he is ignorant of everything.’”

“Oh, yes?” said Pruno, his rheumy eyes snapping open and his wild gaze fixing on Soul Dad. “Nullum scelus rationem habet—” He pointed at Kurtz. “Has meus ad metas sudet oportet equus—”

“Bullshit,” responded Soul Dad. “‘Dum abast quod avemus, id exsuperare videtur. Caetera, post aliud, quum contigit, illud, avemus, Et sitis aequa tenet!’”

Pruno shifted to what sounded like Greek and began shouting.

Soul Dad answered in what had to be Hebrew. Spittle flew.

“Thanks for the dinner and conversation, gentlemen,” said Kurtz, standing and moving to the low doorway.

The two men were arguing in what sounded like a totally unknown language now. They had forgotten that Kurtz was there.

Kurtz let himself out.

CHAPTER

THIRTY

Kurtz parked next to Doc’s old rusted-out pickup with the camper shell on its back. It was starting to snow harder, and the black sky seemed to blend with the looming black buildings. Kurtz put the little .38 in his coat pocket, made sure he had extra boxes of shells in the other outside pocket, and walked across the dark and slippery parking lot into the open maw of the abandoned steel mill.

As soon as Kurtz stepped through the open doors, he felt that something was wrong. Everything looked and smelled the same—cold metal, cold open hearths, huge crucibles hanging like looming soup ladles high above, towering heaps of slag and limerock, a few pools of light from hanging lamps, and the distant glow of Doc’s control room thirty feet above everything—but something was definitely wrong. Kurtz’s neck prickled and cold currents rippled across his skin.

Instead of walking across the open area between heaps of coal black rock, Kurtz ducked and ran toward a maze of rusted machinery to his right. He slid to a stop behind a low wall of iron, the .38 in his hand.

Nothing. No movement. No sound. Not even a flicker of motion.

Kurtz stayed where he was for a minute, making sure that he was concealed from all sides, catching his breath. He had no idea what had spooked him—but paying attention to such nothings had kept him alive for more than eleven years of prison life, much of that time with a price on his head.

Staying to the shadows, Kurtz began working his way toward the control room. He had briefly considered making a break for the door and then sprinting back to the Buick, but it involved too much open space. If everything was all right and Doc was up there waiting for him, Kurtz might be slightly embarrassed by this melodramatic approach, but he always preferred embarrassment to a bullet in the brain.

Kurtz moved around the edge of the huge space, advancing toward the control room in short sprints of five yards or less, always keeping to cover behind pipes or mazes of I-beams or half-removed machines. He stayed to the ink-black shadows and never exposed himself to fire from darker areas. He made very little noise. This worked for two-thirds of the distance, but when he came to the end of the machinery, he still had sixty or seventy feet of open space between himself and the steel ladder to Doc’s control tower.

Kurtz considered shouting for Doc, but quickly decided against it. Even if someone had watched him enter, they probably did not know precisely where he was at the moment. Unless they have long guns and night-vision goggles like the good old boys in the icehouse. Kurtz shook that thought out of his head. If they had rifles and scopes, they almost certainly would have taken him when he came through the main doors, still a couple of hundred feet from the control tower.

Who the hell is “they?” thought Kurtz, and then tabled that question for later.

He moved backward, crawling under a latticework of pipes that were each at least a yard across. The metal was inert and empty. Cold seeped up from the concrete floor and made his feet and legs ache. Kurtz ignored it.

Here. Doc’s control room was connected to every corner of the huge space by catwalks and here against this brick wall, far from any light, a man ladder ran up to the maze of catwalks.

Kurtz crouched next to the ladder and hesitated. This part of the ladder was cloaked in darkness and shielded from the main space by vertical beams and pipes, but what if the intruders were up on the catwalks, hiding in that very darkness? Or even if they were on the main floor, Kurtz would have to move through relatively lighted areas up there to get to the control room. Despite all the James Bond movies where the secret agent ran across endless catwalks with automatic weapons just kicking up sparks around him, Kurtz knew that there was very little cover on any exposed steel. One aimed slug would probably do the job.

No guts, no glory, said part of his mind.

Where the fuck did that thought come from? replied the sensible majority of his brain. He would do a commonsense audit later.

Kurtz glided up the ladder, his long, dark coat billowing behind him. When he was level with the distant control room, Kurtz threw himself flat on the catwalk, wishing that the steel were solid instead of a grille.

No shots. No movement.

Kurtz moved out from the wall, crawling, his knees and elbows being abraded by the rusty metal, pistol aimed. At the moment, he wished to Christ that he had kept the Kimber .45, incriminating bullet-matches or no. Another reason to get to Doc’s control room and supply closet.

At the first juncture of catwalks, Kurtz paused. There was enough metal beneath him and around him here to act as a partial shield for a shot from below, but there were also two tiers of catwalks higher up. Kurtz did not like that. Up near the ceiling, sixty feet above the mill floor, the shadows were almost impenetrable. Anyone already up there would see him silhouetted against the few lights on the floor below, and it was always easier to fire downward with accuracy than up.

Kurtz rolled on his side and studied the approach to the control room.

Three catwalks on this level connected to Doc’s glass and steel box, but all three were illuminated from trouble lights below and the glow from Doc’s lighted shack. One catwalk ran east and west a dozen or so feet above the control room and connected to this level with a ladder. Twenty feet above that second catwalk, three higher catwalks—and very thin ones at that, as far as Kurtz could tell peering up at the shadows—ran out from the walls to various old crane beams and girders. The highest catwalks crisscrossed above the control tower. This would be the most concealed avenue of approach, and the height—at least sixty feet—might hinder a shot from a handgun. The only problem was that no ladder or stairway ran down from these highest crane-maintenance catwalks to the second level above the control tower. There were a few steel support cables running down, but these looked very thin from this distance.

Fuck it, thought Kurtz and began climbing again.

The high catwalk was half the width of the one he had climbed from. Kurtz’s elbows almost slipped over the side as he began crawling out toward the center of the open space. He could feel the narrow catwalk sway to his movement, so he kept his motion as fluid as possible.

It was so damned dark up here that someone could be sitting on the same catwalk ten feet in front of him, and he wouldn’t see him. Kurtz thumbed the hammer of the .38 back as he crawled, pistol extended.

Don’t be an asshole, came the condescending thought. Nobody else would be stupid enough to come up this high.

It was high. Kurtz tried not to look down, but it was impossible not to see through the open metal grate of the catwalk. He could see the filthy, littered tops of the floor-level office roofs to his right, the mounds of dark rock heaped like sandbox piles littering the main floor, and the black spiderweb of catwalks and cables below. Kurtz felt a pang of sympathy for the mill workers who would have to crawl out on this exposed, wobbly catwalk to work on the high cranes.

Fuck them. They were probably paid hazardous-duty pay. Halfway out, Kurtz noticed that the catwalk was so unstable primarily because the company had ripped out the crane itself, obviously selling it and its motors and primary support equipment. The catwalks ended thirty feet above and twenty feet beyond the control tower in…nothing.

How much support did the crane and its superstructure provide? Kurtz paused and tilted his neck, looking up at where the pitifully few and thin steel cables ended in the ceiling just ten feet or so above him. It was too dark to see cracks or missing bolts, but it was obvious that the cables alone had not been designed to support this catwalk system.

He kept crawling.

Just above the control tower and—despite the shadows—Kurtz began doubting just how invisible he was < here. Everything felt exposed and tenuous.

The roof of Doc’s control shack was flat and black. The catwalk below looked thin and shaky, and the three catwalks below that were obviously impossibly distant. The only good thing Kurtz could find to think about his present position was that it provided a good vantage point. Nothing moved in the cold, empty space, but much of his field of vision—and fire, if he had been carrying a better pistol or a rifle—was blocked by limerock heaps and hidden by shadows.

Kurtz lay on his side to give his elbows a rest and found that he could feel his heart pounding. Close up, the steel cables he had seen from far away looked even thinner and less substantial man they had from a distance. Each cable was thinner man his little finger, almost certainly was saw-toothed with steel burrs and razor-sharp loose strands, and was attached to the outside of the lower catwalk, making it difficult for him to see how he could even swing over the handrail down there without exposing himself for lethal lengths of time.

I’m wearing gloves, he thought. He flexed his fingers in the thin leather and almost laughed out loud at the thought of the cheap gloves protecting him from steel burrs.

Well, it was either start crawling back toward the wall or do something.

Kurtz thumbed the hammer down, secured the pistol tight in his waistband, swung over the catwalk, grabbed the cable, felt his heart leap into his throat, and then started down as quickly as he could, swaying, using his shoes and hands as brakes, going down hand over hand rather than running the risk of sliding. The control room was thirty feet below and ten feet to his right. There was nothing beneath him except for empty air and cold stone sixty feet down.

Kurtz reached the lower layer of catwalks, swung, missed his first try, and then swung again. He dropped onto the wider catwalk. It swayed, but not as violently as the higher one had.

Not resting for a second, Kurtz loped to the intersection of the three walkways, swung over the side to the man ladder, ignored the rungs, and slid down the outside rails in pure U.S. Navy fashion.

He hit the lowest catwalk hard, illuminated now by the glow through the dirty control-room windows just fifteen feet away. Kurtz rolled, crouched, and moved in a fast duckwalk to the wall of the control room.

Panting, he moved fast, kicking the unlocked door open and throwing himself into the room.

Doc’s going to laugh his ass off, was his final thought before hitting and rolling.

Doc was beyond laughing. The old man was lying in front of the padlocked supply closet. There were at least four large-caliber entry wounds visible: three on his chest and one in his throat. Doc had bled out, and the pool of blood had covered a third of the floor space. Kurtz swung his little .38 left, right, and left again, but other than the corpse and him, the control room was empty.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-ONE

Kurtz duckwalked closer to Doc’s body, keeping his head below the level of the windows, ignoring the blood on his shoes and knees. The padlock to the back room was still secure.

Pistol still covering the doorway, Kurtz patted down Doc’s old leather jacket and his bloody trousers.

No keys. Doc kept the padlock keys on a large ring with his other security-guard keys. The key ring was gone.

Kurtz crawled over and checked the desk drawers and even the low filing cabinets, but the keys were gone.

He considered shooting off the padlock, but even as he weighed the pros and cons, he heard footsteps on the floor below. One man. Running.

Shit! Kurtz reached up and turned off the single desk lamp. His eyes adapted quickly, and soon the rectangles of windows and doors seemed very bright. There was no more sound.

Kurtz grabbed Doc by his jacket collar and dragged the old man across the smeared floor. His old acquaintance felt very, very light, and Kurtz wondered idly if it was a result of having bled out.

I’m sorry, Doc, he thought and wrestled the old man to his knees and then upright in the open doorway, using his left arm around the body while he kept to the side of the door, peering around the door frame.

The first bullet hit Doc high in the chest again. The second took off the top of the old man’s skull just at the hairline.

Kurtz let the body drop, raised the .38, and squeezed off three shots toward the point of muzzle flash at a bank of machinery about fifty feet away. Bullets whined off steel. Kurtz threw himself back just as four more shots blew out the window on his right and slammed against the open door to his left.

One gun firing, thought Kurtz. Probably 9mm semiauto.

He knew that did not mean that there was only one shooter down there. He doubted if he could be so lucky.

Three more shots, very close together. One came in the open door, ricocheted off the steel ceiling, and struck sparks on the floor and two walls before embedding itself in the desk.

A couple of seconds of silence as the shooter slapped in a new magazine. Kurtz used the intermission to reload the three bullets he’d fired. His spent brass rolled into the black pool of blood behind him and stopped rolling.

Five more shots from below in immediate succession, the loud 9mm blast echoing. Four of the slugs ricocheted around Kurtz’s small place. One of the ricochets slammed into Doc’s upturned face with the sound of a hammer striking a melon. Another ripped the shoulder padding on Kurtz’s topcoat.

This is not a good place, he thought. The shots were still coming from the heap of girders and dismantled machinery to the right of the control tower. It was quite possible—even probable—that a second and third shooter were waiting somewhere to his left, like duck hunters in a blind. But Kurtz had little choice.

Swinging into the doorway, he fired all five shots toward the darkness to his right. The shooter returned fire—four more shots—the last two ripping the air where Kurtz had stood only a second earlier.

He ran in the opposite direction along the catwalk, shaking the spent brass out of the .38’s cylinder and trying to reload as he ran. He dropped a bullet, fumbled out another. Five in. He snapped the cylinder shut even as he ran full tilt.

Footsteps pounding below him. The shooter had run from cover and was running under the control room, firing as he went. A flashlight beam played along the catwalk. Sparks leaped and bullets whined ahead of and behind Kurtz. Could it be just the one shooter?

I couldn’t be that lucky.

Kurtz knew that he could never make the extra hundred feet or so to the wall without being hit. Even if he could, he would be an easy target as he crawled down the ladder.

Kurtz had no intention of running all the way to the wall. Grabbing a suspension cable with his left hand, clinging tight to the .38 with his right, Kurtz swung up and over the handrail and dropped.

It was still a bone-smashing thirty feet to the mill floor, but Kurtz had jumped above the first pile of limerock he had reached, and the heap was at least fifteen feet high. Kurtz hit on the side away from the shooter—smashing into the sharp rock and rolling in a cascade of cinders and stones—but the slope helped break his fall without breaking his neck.

Kurtz rolled out in a landslide of black stone and was on his feet running again before the shooter came around the heap.

Two shots from behind, but Kurtz was already running full speed around the third pile. He slid to a stop and dropped prone, bracing the short-barreled revolver with his left hand clamping his right wrist.

The shooter wasn’t coming.

Kurtz opened his mouth wide, trying to calm his panting, listening hard.

Limerock slid and scraped behind him and to the right. Either the shooter or an accomplice was flanking him, climbing over the limerock heap or climbing around it.

Kurtz shifted the .38 to his left hand and rolled right, sweeping black pebbles over him like a man attending to his own burial. He dug his feet into the heap, letting the small, smooth stones slide over him. He butted his head into a depression in the heap and let the black rock cover everything but his eyes. As the stones settled, Kurtz shifted the pistol to his shooting hand, but buried the hand in rock.

He knew that he was only partially covered, quite visible in all but the dimmest light. But the light here was very dim indeed. Kurtz aimed the .38 in the direction of the earlier sound and waited.

Another sliding sound. There was just enough light for Kurtz’s eyes to see the silhouette of his attacker’s gun arm as it came around the edge of the mound of limerock twenty feet or so away. Kurtz waited.

A man’s head and shoulder appeared and then jerked back out of sight.

Kurtz waited.

The light was stronger behind Kurtz. That meant that the shooter could see silhouettes on the floor or rock pile better than Kurtz could. Kurtz could only wait and hope that he was not presenting a silhouette to view.

The man moved with real speed, coming around the side of the pile and sliding to floor level, weapon raised and braced in the approved style. There was a bulk to the upper body which suggested body armor.

Knowing that any movement would draw fire, but also knowing that he had to change his aim or miss, and thus die in a very few seconds, Kurtz shifted the snub-nosed .38 a bit to the left.

Stones slid.

The man wheeled at the first sound and fired three times. One of the slugs hit a foot or so above Kurtz’s right hand and threw stone chips into his face. The second bullet slammed into rock between Kurtz’s buried right arm and his body. The third nicked Kurtz’s left ear.

Kurtz fired twice, aiming for the man’s groin and left leg.

The shooter went down.

Kurtz was up and running toward him, shaking off stones, sliding and almost falling in the resulting rock slide, reaching the shooter just as the groaning man started to raise his weapon again.

Kurtz kicked the 9mm Glock out of Detective Hathaway’s right hand, and it went skittering away on cold stone. The cop was fumbling for something with his left hand, and Kurtz almost shot him in the head before he realized that Hathaway was holding up a leather wallet section with his badge catching the dim light A shield, the cops called it.

Hathaway moaned again and clutched at his left leg with his empty hand. Even in the darkness, Kurtz could see blood pumping from the wound. Must have nicked the femoral artery. If he’d hit it full on, Hathaway would be dead by now.

“A tourniquet…my belt…make a tourniquet,” Hathaway was moaning.

Kurtz kept the .38 steady, set his foot on Hathaway’s chest—knocking the wind out of him—and held the muzzle a foot from the cop’s face. “Shut up!” Kurtz hissed. He was looking over his shoulder, listening.

No footsteps. No noise at all except for the two men’s labored breathing.

“Tourniquet…” moaned Detective Hathaway, his gold shield still raised like a talisman. He was wearing heavy Kevlar body armor with porcelain plates, military style. It would have stopped an M-16 round, much less Kurtz’s .38 slug. But Kurtz’s bullet had gone into the cop’s leg about four inches below the hem of the vest. “You can’t…kill…a cop, Kurtz,” gasped the homicide detective. “Even you aren’t…that fucking…stupid. Tie off…my leg.”

“All right,” said Kurtz, putting more weight on his right foot on Hathaway’s chest, but not enough to shut off all breathing. “Just tell me if you’re alone.”

“Tourniquet…” gasped the cop and then gasped again as Kurtz dug his heel in. “Yeah, fuck…fuck…yeah…alone. Let me tie this off. I’m fucking bleeding to death, you miserable fuck.”

Kurtz nodded agreement. “I’ll help you tie it off. As soon as you tell me why you’re doing this. Who are you working for, and how did you know I’d be here?”

Hathaway shook his head. “The precinct knows… I’m here. This place will be crawling…with cops…five minutes. Give me your belt.” He held his detective shield higher, his hand shaking.

Kurtz realized that he wasn’t going to get an explanation from the wounded man. He took his foot off Hathaway’s chest and took a step to the side, aiming the .38 at the detective’s forehead.

Hathaway’s mouth dropped open—he was breathing raggedly and loudly—and he swung the shield up in front of his face again, holding it in both hands the way someone would hold a crucifix to drive off a vampire. He was gasping, but his voice was very loud in the empty mill, as was the sound of Kurtz clicking the hammer back on the .38.

“Kurtz…you fucking don’t kill a cop!”

“I’ve already had this discussion,” said Kurtz.

In the end, the detective’s gold shield was no shield at all.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-TWO

Where the fuck is that detective motherfucker?” said Doo-Rag, sitting on the edge of Malcolm’s huge desk. “It almost one A.M. Motherfucker should’ve called by now.”

“Get the fuck off my desk,” said Malcolm.

Doo-Rag got off, slowly, sullenly, and moved to the leather couch against the wall. He played with the Mac-10 in his hands, clicking the safety on and off repeatedly.

“You click that one more time, motherfucker, and I will have to ask Cutter to remonstrate with you, Doo,” said Malcolm.

Doo-Rag glared but set the Mac-10 on the couch beside him. “So where is the honky cop motherfucker?”

Malcolm shrugged and put his Bally loafers up on the desk. “Maybe Kurtz killed his ass.”

“Hathaway that much of a fuckup?” said Doo-Rag.

Malcolm shrugged again.

“How come the cop didn’t tell us where this Kurtz motherfucker was going?”

Malcolm smiled. “He probably knew that I’d send you and Cutter and a dozen of the boys to make sure the job was done right and then Hathaway would be out the D-mosque ten Gs.”

“But he told us where Kurtz work,” said Doo Rag. “That basement under the porn shop. We should be there.”

“Nobody there, middle of the night,” said Malcolm. “Hold your water, Doo. The cop don’t kill Kurtz tonight for some reason, you and your crew can go visit the porn-shop basement tomorrow.”

Cutter quit looking out the window and sat on the corner of Malcolm’s desk. Malcolm said nothing. Doo-Rag glared at Cutter, then at Malcolm, then at Cutter again. Both men ignored him.

“You really gonna let the honky cop collect the D-mosque’s ten grand?” Doo-Rag said after a minute.

Malcolm shrugged. “That’s why Hathaway ran the tap on some gun dealer we don’t know and didn’t tell his cop pals. That’s why he went to bust a cap on Kurtz by himself tonight. Nothing I can do if he wants all the money.”

Doo-Rag smirked. “You could pop a cap up Hathaway’s ass.”

Malcolm looked at Cutter and then frowned. “You don’t kill a cop, Doo. Only a crazy man would do that.”

The three of them were in Malcolm’s rear second-floor office. Outside the closed door, in the upstairs pool hall, eight more Bloods were shooting pool or sleeping on couches. Downstairs, there were about twenty more, half of them awake. Everyone was armed.

Malcolm dropped his feet off the desk and walked over to the window. Doo-Rag left his Mac-10 on the couch and came over to stand near him. They were a study in contrasts: Malcolm elegantly dressed and preternaturally still, long fingers quiet, and Doo-Rag quivering and jiving and snapping his twitchy fingers silently. There was not much to see out back: Doo-Rag’s red Camaro, Malcolm’s Mercedes, a few other cars belonging to the senior Bloods, and a Dumpster. Malcolm had installed a high-output crime light on a pole since his SLK was out there most of the time, but that was a wasted expense. No one was going to steal Malcolm Kibunte’s car from the Seneca Social Club.

At that second, Doo-Rag’s Camaro burst into flame.

“What the fuck!??!” Doo-Rag screamed, achieving an amazing falsetto.

Cutter walked slowly to the window.

Doo-Rag’s Camaro was burning steadily, flames leaping from the roof, hood, and trunk. It was obvious that the gas tank had been ignited; but rather than a gigantic, action-movie explosion, it just burned steadily.

“That my car, man. I mean, what the fuck is going on?” screamed Doo-Rag, hopping around. He ran to the couch and came back with his Mac-10, although no one was in sight in the parking area or alley beyond. “I mean, what the fuck?”

“Shut up,” said Malcolm. He was poking at his molars with a silver toothpick. He checked out his Mercedes, but it was far from the flames at the opposite end of the lot from the burning Camaro—almost right at the back door—and no one was near it.

Cutter made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a growl. He pointed at the fire and made the sound again.

Malcolm thought a minute and shook his head. “Naww. We won’t call nine-one-one yet. Let’s see what happen next.”

Malcolm’s Mercedes exploded in a ball of flame. This time there was a movie-style explosion, rattling the caged windows on the second floor with a bone-shaking whuump.

“What the fuck?” shouted Malcolm Kibunte. “Some bastard fucking with my car?” Some of the first-floor Bloods were already out back, milling around with automatic weapons ready, but they were being driven back inside by the heat from the two burning automobiles. Malcolm wheeled on Cutter. “Call nine-one-one. Get the fucking fire trucks here.” He pulled his Smith & Wesson Powerport .357 Magnum and ran down the back stairs.

Two fire engines and a fire chiefs car arrived less than two minutes later. The big pumper filled the alley, hoses were played out, and more men and hoses appeared down the walkway from the front of the Social Club. Firefighters shouted instructions at one another. The Bloods were also shouting, their weapons visible. The firefighters backed off. The flames roared.

Malcolm gathered Cutter and a few others around him at the back door. The fire chief, a short, powerfully built man with the name badge HAYJYK on his bulky coat, came up to glare at Malcolm.

“You the asshole in charge here?” demanded Hayjyk.

Malcolm only glared back.

“We’ve already called the cops, but if you don’t get those fucking guns out of here, you’re all going to jail and we’re going to let that fucking fire burn. And it’s about ready to ignite these other four vehicles.”

“I’m Malcolm Kibu—” began Malcolm.

“I don’t give a fuck who you are. You’re just another gang punk to me. But get those guns out of sight now.” Hayjyk was leaning so close to Malcolm that the top of his fire helmet was brushing the taller man’s chin.

Malcolm turned and waved his men back into the building. Three police cars pulled up behind the pumper in the alley, their red and white whirling lights adding to the pattern of lights already flickering on all the surrounding buildings.

“Wait a minute,” yelled Malcolm, pointing to the four firefighters going in the back door after the Bloods. “They can’t go in there.”

Hayjyk just grinned without humor, stepped back, and gestured for Malcolm to join him. Malcolm did so, his hand on his .357 Magnum.

Hayjyk pointed up at the roof of the Seneca Social Club. “You’re on fire, asshole!”

Malcolm began shoving his way past firefighters, trying to get to the rear staircase. It was locked from the inside. He pushed his way down the hall, Cutter and Doo-Rag shoving aside Bloods and firemen alike.

“You can’t go back in there!” shouted Hayjyk.

“Gotta get some papers and shit,” said Malcolm, loping up the stairs. The second-floor poolroom was already half-filled with smoke. Firefighters were standing on two of the green felt tables, smashing at the ceiling with their huge axes. The sight made Malcolm sick. Someone had smashed the glass of the rear window in his office, so the space was free of smoke. Malcolm gestured for Doo-Rag to close and lock the door. Then he began pawing papers, guns, and drugs out of the desk and throwing them into a black duffel bag. Luckily, the heroin, crack, yaba, dope, and other drugs were at the arms warehouse out near SUNY. Malcolm had never risked keeping the most incriminating shit anywhere near him. But he had to save his papers and records.

A fireman stepped out of the darkness of the rear stairway. He was carrying an ax backward in his right hand, his left hand was in his coat pocket, and he had a respirator with goggles over most of his face. “You’d be safer outside,” said the fireman through his mask.

“Fuck you, man,” said Doo-Rag.

The fireman shrugged, took a step forward and clubbed Malcolm over the head with the dull end of the ax. The big man went down heavily. There came two soft ph-uut sounds, and Doo-Rag slammed back against the closed office door and fell to the floor. He left a smear of blood on the door.

“Told you it was safer outside,” said the firefighter.

Cutter began to move and then froze. A black polymer H&K USP .45 Tactical with a silencer was now visible in the firefighter’s left hand.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-THREE

Suddenly someone began pounding on the locked door. A section of ceiling actually collapsed above Malcolm’s desk.

Kurtz’s gaze shifted for only a second, but the distraction gave Cutter time to flick open a switchblade and lunge for Kurtz’s heart. Kurtz had to swing the pistol out of line of fire as he jumped back. Cutter leaped closer. Kurtz brought down the ax while he jumped away, but the ax was heavy and it was clumsy handling it with just one hand. It only deflected the blow. Cutter had the blade swinging again, and he came in fast.

Kurtz dropped the ax, tossed the pistol into his right hand, and tried to bring the H&K to bear, but Cutter had grabbed his right wrist. Kurtz kneed the stocky man in the balls—it didn’t seem to have any effect—and then Cutter’s blade was ripping through the left side of Kurtz’s heavy coat.

Asbestos and metal fibers sewed into the coat slowed the blade and gave Kurtz a chance to bat away Cutter’s right wrist before the knife cut through anything but shirt and skin. Cutter slashed again. Kurtz and Cutter staggered around the room in a clumsy dance, both men breathing hard, Kurtz’s plastic mask fogging up. The blade rose and came up fast enough to slash Kurtz’s face, but the heavy respirator plastic took the cut. Kurtz tried desperately to free his right hand and the pistol, but the simple truth was that Cutter was stronger than he was.

Cutter’s feet came down on Doo-Rag’s face; he just dug his boots in for traction. Kurtz slammed into the edge of Malcolm’s desk, numbing his thigh. He couldn’t see well through the respirator mask, and he didn’t have any way to get it off with both hands engaged. Cutter was forcing him back over the desk.

Cutter lunged, trying to gain more leverage for the blade. Instead of fighting the attack, Kurtz went with it. Both men went sprawling, the heavy oxygen tank on Kurtz’s back ringing hollowly. The H&K .45 went bouncing across the floor, ending up against Malcolm’s arm. Malcolm groaned but did not stir. Smoke was beginning to fill the room and firefighters were shouting in the room next door. The pounding had stopped but someone was chopping at the reinforced door with an ax.

Cutter pivoted the switchblade and slashed the blade across Kurtz’s left wrist through the jacket, sending blood spraying.

Kurtz gritted his teeth and threw himself on his back, the oxygen tank ripping at his spine. Cutter lunged, blade swinging.

Kurtz let his heavy firefighter boots take the blows. Cutter pulled the blade back just as Kurtz kicked out once—hard—catching Cutter on the chest and sending him tumbling down the rear stairway and slamming into the door at the bottom. Kurtz had locked the door behind him as he came up the stairs.

Kurtz ripped the mask off. Instead of lunging after the gun and turning his back on the stairway, he pulled the half-liter bottle of gasoline from his coat pocket and lit the short fuse with the cheap Bic lighter. Cutter was already pounding back up the steps.

The Molotov cocktail exploded against Cutter’s chest, filling me enclosed stairway with flame and driving Kurtz back from the heat. The office door splintered and gave way. A firefighter’s arm appeared, the hand releasing the bolt and turning the knob.

Cutter screamed and tumbled down the steps again, battering at the closed door, trying to get out, but men began climbing the steps again, slowly, inexorably. When the flaming human figure reached the top of the stairs, Kurtz tugged the heavy oxygen tank off his back, handed it to Cutter, and kicked him back down the stairs. Kurtz stepped aside a second before the explosion.

Kurtz picked up the .45, stuck it in his pocket, set his old .38 snub-nose into Doo-Rag’s dead hand—it wouldn’t pass a paraffin test, but fuck it—swung Malcolm up over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and got to the doorway just as a real firefighter came into the smoke and confusion. Kurtz pulled the useless respirator back up over his face as more firefighters and cops rushed into the little room.

“Two men down!” Kurtz shouted, pointing to Doo-Rag’s corpse and to the flaming rear stairway. The firefighters rushed toward the flame while the two cops knelt next to Doo-Rag.

Kurtz carried Malcolm through the smoky outer room, down the stairs against a tide of shouting firefighters coming up, through the poolroom, out the front door, and past the fire engines and gawking crowd. He avoided the ambulance and the clumps of Bloods being corralled by cops and went down the alley on the opposite side of the street. When he got to the Buick—its trunk already open and waiting—he dropped Malcolm in, took the man’s Magnum, and frisked him quickly.

Kurtz slammed the trunk shut and looked around. The Seneca Social Club was in full blaze now, and all attention was focused on it. Kurtz found his .45 and tossed it onto the front seat and then threw the respirator, coat, boots, .357 Magnum, and coveralls into the bushes. Then he got into Arlene’s car and drove the opposite way down the alley, coming out on the next boulevard and swinging north.

They had probably already discovered that Doo-Rag had been shot. They would eventually discover one of the responding firefighters tied up and unconscious in the shrubbery near the back alley. It had been Kurtz, of course, who had called 911 a few minutes before he lit the gas-doused rags running into the two cars’ fuel tanks.

Kurtz noted that despite his dislike of German guns, polymer guns, and silencers, the H&K .45 had worked just fine. It had taken Kurtz just a few minutes after dealing with Hathaway to return to Doc’s back room, shoot the lock off, and help himself to the weapons he knew were untraceable.

Kurtz had not gotten the idea for the diversion from The Iliad. But Pruno’s suggestion of referring to books had reminded Kurtz of a trashy espionage paperback that had made the cellblock rounds at Attica. Something about Ernest Hemingway running around playing spy in Cuba during World War II. There had been a false-alarm fire ploy in that book. Kurtz wasn’t proud. He’d steal from the classics some other day.

Wrapping a rag around the bloody but shallow cut on the back of his left wrist, Kurtz drove north.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-FOUR

Niagara Falls is most beautiful in the winter, at night, in a snowstorm. All of these criteria were met as Kurtz parked the Buick—on a side street a few hundred feet away from the American Falls parking lot—retrieved the twenty-five-foot length of clothesline and Malcolm from the trunk, and carried him through a forest of ice-limned trees and snowy fields.

After midnight—it was almost 2:00 A.M.—the powerful searchlights were turned off and both the American and Canadian Falls seemed to roar louder in the darkness. Mist from various cascades drifted across the American-side parks, garnered as ice on the waterfall side of the trees, and occasionally snapped off branches.

Goat Island divided the American Falls from the Canadian, and someone had long since run bridges out to this island and the smaller islands on the Niagara River. The tourist bridges were closed to traffic this night, but Kurtz knew his way through the trees to the bridge and walked out along it, staying near the concrete rail so that his footsteps in the snow would be less visible. At least the heavier snow now would hide his footprints in a few minutes.

Kurtz paused to rest several times. Malcolm was a big man, and nothing is as cumbersome as dead weight. The night was dark, except for reflected light from the low clouds, but the white ripples on the rapids and the blue-white glow at the edge of the American Falls just a hundred yards downstream were quite visible. Malcolm began to stir and moan, but the roar of water masked any noise. Kurtz slogged on, adjusting Malcolm on his shoulder as he got onto the icy walkways of Goat Island and turned toward the observation point near the brink of the smaller Luna Island. The small bridge here rose just a few feet above the raging waters, and Kurtz had to watch his step on the ice. Wooden barriers were set out to keep people away from this point in winter, but Kurtz went around these barriers, coming out from the trees onto the small, icy promontory that separated the broad sweep of the American Falls from the even wider curve of the Horseshoe or Canadian Falls.

Malcolm stirred as Kurtz dumped him at the end of the promontory—less than fifteen feet from the precipice of the Falls on both sides. Kurtz removed Malcolm’s billfold. About $6,000 in cash. Kurtz took the money and tossed the wallet in the river. Kurtz was no thief, but he also had no doubt that Malcolm had been paid more than this up front to kill him, so he had little compunction about keeping the money. He tied the end of the clothesline around Malcolm’s torso just under the big man’s arms and made sure that the knots were firm, even if the rope was cheap. He ran a loop of rope around the icy railing to help act as a brake.

Malcolm began to struggle just as Kurtz manhandled him over the icy railing and dumped him into the Niagara River.

The water revived him and Malcolm began screaming and cursing at the top of his lungs. Kurtz let that go on for a short while—the roar of the Falls drowned out the screams—but, not wanting the man to freeze to death or go over the Falls before they talked, he finally said, “Shut up, Kibunte.”

“Kurtz, fuckyouasshole, fuckyouKurtzyouhonkymotherfuckergoddamn—HEY!!!”

Kurtz had released the rope for an instant, allowing ten more feet to play out, clothesline humming around the railing, stopping it only when Malcolm’s feet were five feet from the roaring white foam at the edge of the Falls.

“You going to shut up except when I say talk?” shouted Kurtz.

Malcolm was looking over his shoulder at his legs being tossed out of the water by the violence of the Falls. He nodded wildly. Kurtz hauled him ten feet closer. The two men were only about eight feet apart now—Malcolm’s long fingers clawed and grabbed at the icy shore, but slid back into the raging water each time—and they had to shout over the waterfall noise.

“Sorry, they only had cheap clothesline at the Texaco mini-mart,” called Kurtz. “Don’t know how long it will last. We’d better talk fast.”

“Kurtz, goddamn, man. I’ll pay money. I’ve got a couple of million. Money, Kurtz!”

Kurtz shook his head. “Don’t need that right now, Kibunte. I’m just curious about who hired you.”

“The fucking faggot lawyer. Miles! Miles hired me!”

Kurtz nodded. “But who was behind Miles? Who authorized it?”

Malcolm began shaking his head wildly again. “I don’t know, Kurtz. I swear to Christ I don’t know. Jesus, it’s cold. Pull me in! Money! Cash. I’ll take you to it, Kurtz!”

“How much did they pay you for taking me out?”

“Forty K!” screamed Malcolm. “Goddamn, it’s cold. Pull me in, Kurtz. Swear to Christ…money’s yours. All of it.”

Kurtz leaned back, holding the terrible weight of the man and the rushing water. The clothesline creaked and stretched. Malcolm shot glances over his shoulder at the blue-white precipice at his heels. Downriver, impossibly far away, car headlights glowed on the arch of the Rainbow Bridge.

“Yaba,” Kurtz shouted. “Why yaba?”

“Triad sends it,” Malcolm screamed. “Sell on the side. I get ten percent. JesusChristAlmightyKurtz!”

“Ninety percent to the Farinos through the lawyer?” Kurtz shouted over the roar of water.

“Yeah. Please, my man. Jesus Christ! Please. I can’t feel my legs. So fucking cold, man. I’ll give you all the money…”

“And you give the Triad guns from the arsenal raid?” Kurtz called.

“What? Huh? Please, man…”

“The guns,” Kurtz shouted again. “Triad sends you yaba. You send guns back to Vancouver?”

“Yeah, yeah… Jesusfuck!” Malcolm clawed at ice. The current flipped him over and drove him underwater. Kurtz pulled hard and Malcolm’s bald head broke through the water again. His collar and chin were crusted with ice.

“How did you kill the accountant?” Kurtz yelled. “Buell Richardson?”

“Who?” Malcolm was screaming now, teeth chattering.

Kurtz let the rope slip three feet. Malcolm clawed at the steep icy shore. His face went under again, and he came up spluttering.

“Cutter! Slit his throat.”

“Why?”

“Miles said do it.”

“Why?”

“Richardson found the Farino money Miles was laundering—ohSHIIIT!” The current had tugged him another three feet toward the edge.

“Richardson wanted a cut?” Kurtz shouted.

Malcolm was too busy looking at the roaring edge of nothing behind him to answer. The big man’s teeth were chattering wildly. He looked back at Kurtz. “Fuck it! You going to let me die anyway,” he shouted.

Kurtz shrugged. The rope was cutting into his hands and wrist. “There’s always the long shot I’ll let you live. Tell me what you know about—”

Suddenly there was a short switchblade in Malcolm’s hands. He began cutting through the rope.

“No!” Kurtz shouted. He began pulling.

Malcolm cut the rope, dropped the blade, and began swimming hard. He was a strong, powerful man filled with adrenaline, and for ten seconds or so, it seemed that he was making headway against the wild current—aiming for a point fifteen or twenty feet upriver from Kurtz where he might make a grab for the icy railing.

Then the river reasserted itself, and Malcolm was swept backward as if slapped by the invisible hand of God. He reached the blue-white rim and was swept back and over in an instant—shark-attack fast. It was as if the Falls had swallowed him. The last image Kurtz had of Malcolm was of the man trying to swim into the air, grinning insanely, the diamond stud in his front tooth gleaming in the blue-white glow.

And then there was no one there.

Kurtz pulled the loop of rope free from his bloodless hand and wrist and tossed the remaining length of clothesline into the river. He stood there for only a second longer, listening to the roar of water in the night.

“Should have gone with the long shot,” he said softly and turned to leave.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-FIVE

Arlene woke at her usual time—shortly before the gray Buffalo night brightened into gray Buffalo dawn—and was halfway through her morning paper and cup of coffee before she looked out her kitchen window and noticed that her Buick was in the driveway.

She went outside in her bathrobe. The car was locked and the keys were in the mailbox. There was no sign of Joe.

Later, after parking her car and going in through the alley entrance to their basement office, she noticed the white envelope on her tidy desk. Three thousand dollars in cash. November’s pay.

Joe came in the back door around noon. His hair had been stylishly razor-cut. He had shaved closely and smelled slightly of an outdoorsy cologne. He was wearing a gray Perry Ellis suit—double-breasted—a white shirt, a conservative green-and-gold patterned tie, and soft, highly polished new brown dress shoes. Joe had always liked the Prince of Wales combination of gray suit and brown shoes, Arlene knew.

“Someone die and leave you money?” she said.

Kurtz smiled. “You might say that.”

“How did you get into town from my place this morning?”

“They have these things called taxicabs,” said Kurtz.

“You don’t see them much in Cheektowaga,” said Arlene. “It’s more a bus kind of town.”

“There are a lot of things one doesn’t see much of in Cheektowaga, but I drove to the office just now.”

Arlene raised one penciled eyebrow. “Drove? You’re driving your own vehicle now?”

“It’s a beater,” said Kurtz. “An ’88 Volvo sedan from Cheaper Charlie’s out in Amherst. But it runs.”

Arlene had to smile. “I’ll never understand your affection for Volvos.”

“They’re safe,” said Kurtz.

“Unlike everything else in your life.”

He made a face. “They’re boring. And ubiquitous. No one ever paid attention to a Volvo that was following them. They’re like Chinamen; they all look alike.”

Arlene could not argue with that. She stayed silent while Kurtz carefully removed his jacket and trousers, hung them on hangers on the wall rack, loosened his tie, and lay down on the sprung sofa against the wall. “Wake me about three, would you?” he said. “I’ve got an important business meeting at four.” Kurtz folded his hands on his chest and was snoring softly within a minute.

Arlene tapped the keys and opened file drawers softly, careful not to wake Joe, but he slept on. She knew that he would not need the wake-up call—he always awakened exactly when he wanted to—and, sure enough, a few minutes before 3:00, his eyes snapped open and he looked around with that instant comprehension upon awakening, which had always amazed and mystified Arlene.

He dressed quickly, adjusting the suit jacket just so, buttoning his collar button, and making sure that his tie was knotted perfectly and that his cuffs shot properly.

“You need a snap-brim fedora,” said Arlene as Joe headed for the back door, his car keys in his hand. She did not ask him about the meeting, and he did not offer any information before he left. Arlene knew from experience that it might be something as mundane as a request for a bank loan or something else altogether—something that Joe might not return from. She never asked. He almost never told.

Arlene finished a few e-mails to clients and wondered if she should tell Joe that their sweetheart-search business looked as if it was going to show a profit of eight or ten thousand dollars by the end of the first month. She decided to wait.

It was almost 5:00, she was finished with the day’s Web searches and notices, and she was about ready to call it a day when unusual movement on the small security monitor caught her eye.

A monster had come in the front door of the porn store. The man’s face was half burned away, one eye was swollen shut under inflamed tissue, and only a few white clumps of hair remained on a skull that had been cracked and cooked. The man wore a raincoat open and even through the black-and-white monitor, Arlene could see that his chest was covered with makeshift bandages and raw burns.

The clerk, Tommy, went for the shotgun he kept on the lowest shelf behind the counter.

The monster grabbed Tommy by his ponytail, pulled his head back, and cut his throat from ear to ear with one vicious sweep of his arm.

There were only two customers in the store. One ran for the front door, trying to squeeze past the monster, but the burned man spun quickly and ripped the man from his pubic bone to his throat. The man went down in the entrance and collapsed against the glass counter.

The other customer clutched his dirty magazines to his chest and ran between shelves to hide. The monster followed in three huge steps. The camera showed the mirror in the corner reflecting the monster stabbing downward—three, four, five times.

Arlene’s breath had frozen in her chest. Now she lifted the telephone and dialed 911. A voice answered, but Arlene could not speak. She could not tear her eyes from the security-camera monitor.

The monster, raincoat open and bandages flying like a mummy’s wrappings, burned face distorted into a snarl, was rushing down the short corridor toward the door to the basement…toward her.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-SIX

Don Farino assembled everyone in the mansion’s drawing room. Kurtz had never been in a drawing room—he’d always been amused when he encountered the phrase in books—and was curious about exactly what a drawing room was. After being seated in it, he still didn’t know. The room was huge and dark, heavy drapes drawn over deep-set bay windows so that it could have been night for all one could tell from inside, and there were some bookshelves, two large fireplaces—no fires burning—and multiple seating areas scattered around like those in an old hotel lobby. There were six of them in the room, counting the two bodyguards in blazers: Don Farino in his wheelchair next to the black-shaded lamp, Sophia sitting in a plush chair to the don’s right, Kurtz on a deep-tufted but uncomfortable leather sofa, and the lawyer, Leonard Miles, sitting opposite everyone in a straight-backed chair. The two bodyguards stood with their meaty hands clasped over their crotches immediately behind Miles.

Kurtz had been met at the gate and ordered to leave his Volvo parked outside the compound. He wondered if they were afraid of car bombs. The two security goons frisked him very carefully—he’d left the polymer H&K pistol under the front seat—and then drove him up to the big house in a golf cart. The day was cold and gray, and it was getting dark by 4:00 P.M.

The old don greeted Kurtz with a curt nod and waved him to his place on the sofa. Sophia was lovely, wearing a soft blue dress and a smile that was almost—not quite—a smirk. The lawyer Miles seemed nervous.

The four sat in silence for what seemed like a long moment. Kurtz brushed a speck of lint from the crease in his gray trousers. No one offered drinks.

“Have you seen or heard the news today, Mr. Kurtz?” the old man said at last.

Kurtz shook his head.

“It seems that the city’s black street gangs and some religious white-supremacist group are at war,” Don Farino continued.

Kurtz waited.

“Some anonymous caller informed the white supremacists that four of their members had been killed by some Bloods,” continued the old man, his voice sounding raspy but amused. “Someone—perhaps the same caller—informed the Bloods that a rival street gang had started a fire at one of their gathering places. Also this morning, it seems that the police received an anonymous call connecting the death of one of their homicide detectives with the same group of Bloods. So, as the day ends, we have blacks shooting blacks, cops rousting gangbangers, and idiot white supremacists fighting everyone.”

After a spell of silence, Kurtz said, “It sounds as if Anonymous has been busy.”

“Indeed,” said Don Farino.

“Do you give a rat’s ass about blacks killing blacks, or the Aryan Nation Types live or die?” asked Kurtz.

“No,” said Don Farino.

Kurtz nodded and waited.

The Mafia patriarch reached down beside his wheelchair and lifted a small leather valise. When he opened it, Kurtz could see stacks of hundred-dollar bills.

“Fifty thousand dollars,” said Don Farino. “As we agreed.”

“Plus expenses,” said Kurtz.

“Expenses as well.” The don closed the bag and set it down. “If you have brought us any useful information.”

Kurtz gestured with his hand. “What would you like to know?”

The old man’s rheumy gray eyes seemed very cold as he squinted at Kurtz. “Who killed our accountant, Buell Richardson, Mr. Kurtz?”

Kurtz smiled and pointed one finger at Leonard Miles. “He did. The lawyer did it.”

Miles shot to his feet. “That’s a goddamned lie. I’ve never killed anyone. Why are we listening to this crap when—”

“Sit down, Leonard,” Don Farino said in flat tones.

The two goons in blazers stepped forward and laid heavy hands on Leonard Miles’s shoulders.

The lawyer sat down.

“What evidence do you have, Mr. Kurtz?” asked Don Farino.

Kurtz shrugged. “Malcolm Kibunte, the drug dealer who was hired to kill Richardson, said that Miles had hired him.”

Miles was on his feet again. “I’ve never seen Malcolm Kibunte out of a courtroom where I was defending him. I resent this absurd—”

Farino nodded and the goons stepped forward again. Miles sat down.

“Why would Leonard do this?” Sophia asked in her soft purr.

Kurtz shifted his gaze to her. “Maybe you know.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” she said.

“It means that Malcolm and his pal Cutter were the hit men and Miles here was the go-between, but maybe someone else in the family gave Miles the orders.”

Sophia smiled pleasantly and shifted so that she was looking at her father. “Mr. Kurtz is crazy, Papa.”

Farino said nothing. The old man was rubbing his jaw with one mottled hand. “Why did Miles have Buell Richardson killed, Mr. Kurtz?”

“Your accountant stumbled across quite a few million dollars being laundered through family sources,” said Kurtz. “He knew it wasn’t from the usual family revenue. He wanted some of it.”

Don Farino leaned forward in his chair. “How many million dollars?”

Sophia was still smiling. “Yes, Joe, how many million dollars?” At the use of Kurtz’s first name, Don Farino shot a glance at his daughter, but then turned his gaze back in Kurtz’s direction.

Kurtz shrugged. “How the hell should I know? Little Skag knew that something weird was going on. That’s why he suggested I get in touch with you, Don Farino. He doesn’t give a shit about a missing accountant.”

Farino blinked. “What are you saying? Why is Stephen interested?”

Kurtz sighed. He wished he was carrying a weapon, but it was too late for that. “Skag started screwing around in the drug business, started sampling his product, and was sent to jail. You and the other families let that happen.”

Farino glared. “Mr. Kurtz, it took almost twenty years for the New York State families to come to some accommodation with the Colombians, the Mexicans, the Vietnamese, and all of the other—”

“Yeah, yeah,” interrupted Kurtz, “I know all about your little treaties and arrangements and quotas. Who gives a shit? Skag rocked the boat, trying to get more heroin on the streets and money in his pocket, and you let him be sent up for it. But someone using the family contacts opened those floodgates again just a few months ago. Little Skag thinks it’s an end run around you, Don Farino.”

“He’s crazy!” shouted Miles and got to his feet again.

Kurtz looked at the lawyer. “Malcolm Kibunte’s gangbangers knocked over the Dunkirk military arsenal last August…”

“What has that got to do with anything?” Sophia snapped.

“…and Miles…and whoever’s sponsoring Miles…has been trading the weapons for yaba and China White and advanced methamphetamine recipes with Vancouver…”

“Vancouver?” Don Farino repeated, his tone sincerely puzzled. “Who’s in Vancouver?”

“The Triads,” said Kurtz. “Malcolm was shipping the guns overland. The drugs came in through the Niagara border checkpoints along with the electronic hand-me-downs from the Vancouver families. Malcolm and his boys knocked over some of the other truck shipments from Florida and New York just to hide what they were really doing. They were just using your family contacts to get the heroin and yaba here, then dumping the junk on the street market, creating a new generation of addicts.”

There was a silence. Finally Don Farino stared hard at Leonard Miles. “You traded weapons for drugs with our deadliest enemies?”

“It’s a lie.” Miles’s tone was no longer frightened.

“William.” Don Farino, addressed one of the guards. “Charles.” To the other man.

The two bodyguards stepped forward and pulled long-barreled .38 revolvers from their shoulder holsters.

“Take Mr. Miles outside and make him talk.” The old man sounded very tired. “Then take him somewhere and kill him.”

William and Charles stood there, but they did not aim their guns at Leonard Miles. One of the muzzles was pointed at Don Farino and the other at Kurtz.

Leonard Miles had now dropped all of his act of fear and desperation. He showed a particularly nasty grin as he stood between the two guards. “More than one hundred and twenty million dollars,” he said in conversational tones. “Right under your nose, old man. Do you think I wouldn’t use some of it to buy off everyone on your family payroll?”

Don Farino’s head jerked up. Sophia seemed to be meditating. Kurtz sat very still, his palms flat on his thighs.

“William, Charles,” said Miles. “Kill the old man and that bastard Kurtz. Here. Now.”

Four gunshots roared and the room filled with the stink of cordite and blood.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-SEVEN

Please state the nature of your emergency,” said the bored 911 voice.

“There’s a madman killing people,” said Arlene. She gave the porn shop’s address and hung up.

The burned monster was battering the locked door. While the rear door was reinforced by metal, this inner door was just wood. It began to splinter and tear from the hinges as Arlene watched on the small TV monitor.

Arlene grabbed her purse and prepared to run. Which way? Out the back door and she could probably get the Buick unlocked and started before the burned man caught her. Probably.

Through the hidden door into the old parking garage. He wouldn’t find the hidden door. Unless he knew about it. Then she would be wandering through an empty parking garage with this creature behind her.

The door shook on its hinges. The cheap lock rattled and gave.

He might be after Joe, thought Arlene. Which means he might come back.

She had only a few seconds before the madman would be in the basement with her. Arlene grabbed her umbrella from beneath the wall rack and smashed both overhead lightbulbs. Now, with the computer monitor off, the only light came from the small lamp at her desk and the flickering black-and-white security monitor.

Arlene ran back to the desk, switched off the lamp, pushed back her chair, and crouched on one knee. The security monitor showed a static-lashed image of the burned and bandaged monster kicking the door off its hinges.

Arlene turned the monitor off. The long room was suddenly a cave, in near absolute darkness.

Oh God, oh God, I should have put the thing on first. Arlene fumbled in the lower right drawer. She found the heavy goggles, but the straps were too complicated to fit in the dark.

The madman was lurching down the steps. She could hear him—heavy breathing, gasping—she could smell him—but she could not see him.

Arlene held the night-vision goggles up to her face and fumbled the switch on. Luckily, she had played a bit with the strange thing during her free time. The motor inside the apparatus hummed slightly—and suddenly she could see the basement glowing in green fire.

The madman swung his head in her direction. In this greenish goggle light, his burns and swollen face and hands and sopping bandages were even more terrible He held a long knife in his right hand. The blade seemed to flicker like a beacon in the amplified night-vision goggles.

The creature was sniffing the air as if searching for her. He began lurching in her direction.

Arlene slid her right hand under the desk drawer, found the hammerless .32 Magnum Ruger revolver there, and lifted the weapon. The goggles slipped in her trembling left hand. Suddenly she was blind.

The burned man ran into the low partition running down the middle of the room. He kicked it to splinters and came on.

My perfume. He smells my perfume.

The creature was ten feet away when Arlene squeezed the Ruger’s trigger.

Nothing.

Oh, dear God. I forgot to load it!

The burned man crashed into the far side of Arlene’s desk. He swung the knife in a wild arc, hitting the computer monitor and sweeping it and stacks of files off the desk with a crash.

Arlene dropped the night-vision goggles and held the useless Ruger up with both hands. Saliva splattered her as the monster began crawling over the desk. It was screaming obscenities. She could hear him, but not see him.

No, I loaded it. The safety! Once a week a mah-jongg at Bernice’s and twice a week to the shooting range since Alan had died.

Arlene clicked off the safety with her forefinger, found the trigger guard, found the trigger, and fired upward into darkness, toward the heat and stench less than a foot above her. She kept firing until the hammer clicked on empty chambers.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-EIGHT

The Dane stepped out of the darkness of the draped alcove. The bodyguards, William and Charles, were both down from the double taps. William was still, but Charles was still twitching. Leonard Miles stood in the middle of the emptiness where the two armed men had been. The lawyer was blinking.

The Dane walked over, looked at the twitching Charles, and fired another bullet into the fallen man’s head.

Leonard Miles flinched. The Dane pointed one gloved finger at Miles’s empty chair. “Sit, please.”

Miles sat.

Kurtz was sitting exactly as he had been—feet flat on the floor, palms down on his thighs. Don Farino was holding his chest, but smiling. Sophia Farino had pulled her legs up onto the chair and folded them under her as if a mouse were in the room.

The Dane was wearing a tan-checked wool topcoat, a Bavarian-style hat, dark-rimmed glasses, but no mustache. He walked around and stood behind and to one side of Don Farino. The semiautomatic 9mm Beretta was not precisely aimed at anyone, but the muzzle pointed in the general direction of Leonard Miles.

“Thank you, my friend,” said Don Farino.

The Dane nodded.

The don turned his heavy gaze on Miles. “Is my daughter involved in this? Was she the one who gave you the orders?”

Miles’s lips were white and trembling. Kurtz saw the yellow silk upholstery on the seat of the upright chair darken as the lawyer urinated in his trousers.

“Speak!” exploded Don Farino. The bark was so loud and fierce that even Kurtz jumped a bit.

“She made me do it, Don Farino,” babbled Miles. “She threatened me, threatened to kill me, threatened to kill my lover. She—” He fell into silence the instant that Don Farino made an impatient gesture with his fingers.

The don looked at his daughter. “You traded weapons to the Triads, brought these new drugs into the community?”

Sophia looked at him calmly.

“Answer me you miserable putana!” screamed the don. His face was mottled red and white.

Sophia said nothing.

“I swear to you, Don Farino,” Miles babbled, “I didn’t want to be involved with this. Sophia was the one who dropped the dime on Stephen. She was the one who ordered Richardson killed. She was—”

Don Farino’s gaze never moved from his daughter. “You are the one who turned Stephen in?”

“Sure,” Sophia said. “Stevie’s a fag and a junkie, Papa. He would have dragged the family down with him.”

Don Farino gripped the arms of his wheelchair until his fingers went white. “Sophia…you would have had everything. You would have been my heir.”

Sophia threw her head back and laughed easily. “Had everything, Papa? What is everything? The family is a joke. Its power gone. Its people spread to the wind. I would have had nothing. I was only a woman. But I want to be don.”

Don Farino shook his head sadly.

Leonard Miles took the moment to jump to his feet and run for the door, leaping over the body of William as he ran.

Without raising the Beretta, the Dane shot Miles in the back of the head.

Don Farino had not even looked up. Without raising his head, he said, “You know the price for such betrayal, Sophia.”

“I went to Wellesley, Papa,” she said. Her legs were still pulled up under her like a little girl’s. “I read Machiavelli. If you try to kill the prince, do not miss.”

Don Farino sighed heavily. The Dane looked to the old man for instructions. Don Farino nodded.

The Dane lifted the Beretta, swung it slightly, and blew the back of Don Farino’s head off.

The old man pitched forward out of the wheelchair. What remained of his face banged into the glass coffee table. Then his body slid sideways onto the carpet.

Sophia looked away with an expression of mild distaste.

Kurtz did not move. The Dane was aiming the Beretta at him now. Kurtz knew that it was a Model 8000 with ten rounds in the magazine. Three were left. The Dane kept a good, professional distance between them. Kurtz, could try to rush him, of course, but the Dane could put all three slugs into him before Kurtz could get off the couch.

“Joe, Joe, Joe,” said Sophia. “Why did you have to go and fuck everything up?”

Kurtz had no answer to that.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-NINE

The basement office was overflowing with police and paramedics. Half a dozen of the police were plainclothes detectives and one of them was a woman with auburn hair. She pulled Arlene aside as the others stood around Cutter’s body and talked.

“Mrs. Demarco? I’m Officer O’Toole. I’m Joseph Kurtz’s parole officer.”

“I thought you were…homicide,” said Arlene. She was still shaking, even though one of the paramedics had draped a thermal blanket over her after they had checked her out.

Peg O’Toole shook her head. “They just called me because someone knew I’m Mr. Kurtz’s P.O. If he was involved with this in any way—”

“He wasn’t,” Arlene said quickly. “Joe wasn’t here. He doesn’t even know about this.”

Officer O’Toole nodded. “Still, if he was involved, it would go better for him if you and he told us up front.”

Arlene had to steady her hand to drink from the Styrofoam cup of water one of the homicide detectives had given her. “No,” she said firmly. “Joe wasn’t here. Joe had nothing to do with this. I looked on the monitor and saw this…this person…come in and stab Tommy. Then the man went for the two customers. Then he came down here.”

“How did he know there was a basement, Mrs. Demarco?”

“How should I know?” Arlene said. She met the parole officer’s gaze.

“Does the name James Walter Heron mean anything to you?”

Arlene shook her head. “Is that…his name?”

“Yes,” said Officer O’Toole. “Although everyone in town knew him as ‘Cutter.’ Does that ring a bell?”

Arlene shook her head again.

“And you’ve never seen him before?”

Arlene put the cup of water down. “I’ve told about six of the police officers that. I don’t know the man. If I’ve seen him on the street or somewhere…well, I don’t know him, but how could anyone recognize him with all those terrible burns?”

O’Toole folded her arms. “Do you have any idea where he received those burns?”

Arlene shook her head and looked away.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Demarco. You do understand that one of those tests the officers performed will tell us if you actually fired the gun.”

Arlene looked at her hand and then at the parole officer. “Good,” she said. “Then you’ll know that Joe wasn’t involved.”

“Do you have any idea where we can find Mr. Kurtz?” said Officer O’Toole. “Since this is also his office, we’ll have some questions for him.”

“No. He said that he had a meeting this afternoon, but I don’t know where or with whom.”

“But you’ll tell him to call us as soon as he checks in with you?”

Arlene nodded.

One of the plainclothes detectives walked over with the night-vision goggles in a plastic bag. “Mrs. Demarco? Could you answer another question, please?”

Arlene waited.

“You say that the assailant was wearing these when he came into the basement?”

“No.” Arlene took a breath. “I didn’t say that. I told the other officers that the…the man…took those out of his raincoat pocket and held them up to his eyes.”

“Before or after he knocked the lightbulbs out with that umbrella?” asked the officer.

Arlene managed a smile. “There was no other light, Officer. I couldn’t very well have seen him take those goggle things out of his pocket if he’d done so after he smashed the lights, could I?”

“No, I guess not,” said the detective. “But if it was so pitch-dark, how is it that you could see the assailant to fire at him?”

“I couldn’t see him,” Arlene said truthfully. “But I could smell him and hear him…and feel him as he towered over me.” She began shaking again, and Officer O’Toole touched her arm.

The homicide detective handed the night-vision goggles back to an assistant and stood there rubbing his chin.

“I’m sure he wasn’t wearing them when I saw him upstairs on the security monitor,” Arlene said.

“Yeah,” said the male cop. “We’ve looked at the tape.” He looked at Officer O’Toole. “It’s part of the Dunkirk arsenal inventory. They just raided a place out by SUNY where Kibunte had a hundred other weapons stored. The Bloods were dipping into them in this war they’re having with the white-supremacist assholes. If we hadn’t been tipped about this warehouse before the Bloods got there in force, Buffalo would have looked like Beirut on a bad day.”

O’Toole nodded, obviously ill at ease speaking in front of Arlene.

“Are you ready to go down to the station with us, Mrs. Demarco?” said the male cop.

Arlene bit her lip. “Am I under arrest?”

The male cop chuckled. “For stopping a piece of shit like this Cutter after he killed at least three people this afternoon? I’ll be surprised if the mayor doesn’t give you a medal—” He stopped when O’Toole caught his eye. “No, Mrs. Demarco,” he said formally, “you’re not under arrest at this time. There’ll be an investigation, of course; and you’ll have to answer a lot of questions tonight and make yourself available to the investigating officers in the coming days, but I’d bet you’d be home by”—he looked at his watch—“oh, eleven at the latest.”

“Good,” said Arlene. “I want to watch the local news. Maybe they’ll explain what happened here.”

CHAPTER

FORTY

The Dane held the Beretta steady, its muzzle zeroed on Kurtz’s chest and never wavering for an instant. Sophia sucked at her thumbnail and seemed to pout. “Joe,” she said, “do you have any idea where you are right now?”

Kurtz looked around him. “It looks like the last scene of fucking Hamlet,” he said.

The Dane’s mouth twitched ever so slightly in what might have been a smile.

Sophia dropped her hand from her mouth. “Don’t tell me that you’ve seen Hamlet, Joe.”

“I see all of Mel Gibson’s movies,” said Kurtz.

Sophia sighed. “Where you are, Joe, is about half a minute away from being dead.”

Kurtz had no comment on that.

“And there’s no reason that this had to be the way things went,” she continued. “Why didn’t you just let me keep fucking you and leave the rest of this mess alone?”

Kurtz considered not commenting on that either, but finally he said, “Your dad hired me. I had a job to do.”

Sophia glanced at her father’s corpse and shook her head again. “Some job. Some outcome.” She looked at the Dane. “Well, Nils, as I told you on our way to the airport, I hoped it wouldn’t come to this—but it has.”

Kurtz moved his gaze to the Dane. The man had never relaxed his attention—or the Beretta’s aim—for a microsecond. “Nils?” said Kurtz.

“It amuses her to call me that,” said the Dane.

“She must be paying you a lot,” Kurtz said.

The Dane nodded almost imperceptibly.

Kurtz looked back at Sophia. “One question before the party ends,” he said. “Did you hire the homicide cop—Hathaway—to kill me?”

“Sure,” Sophia said. She reached into her handbag. Kurtz expected her to pull out a pistol and his stomach tensed, but she raised only a small cassette tape. “Hathaway even brought me the tape of you calling the gun salesperson…what was his name? Doc. Hathaway thought I might use it to blackmail you or get your parole revoked, but we decided that a more permanent solution would be better.”

“Makes sense,” said Kurtz.

“I’m getting bored, Joe,” Sophia said. “Your conversation was never very interesting, and today it’s deadly dull. Also, we have to call the police and report this terrible attack by the late Mr. Kurtz at least before rigor mortis sets in. May I have the Beretta, Nils? I want to take care of this detail myself.”

Kurtz continued sitting the way he had been, but he was very observant. If there was to be a moment in which he could act, it would come here.

There was no such moment. The Dane was the consummate professional, the muzzle of the Beretta never wavering even as the Dane moved sideways and moved the pistol to where Sophia could grasp it with both hands. When she had it, still aimed at Kurtz’s chest, her finger on the trigger, the Dane took a step back out of the lamplight and out of any line of fire.

“Any last words, Joe?” said Sophia.

Joe thought for a second. “You weren’t all that great in the sack, baby. I’ve had sexier encounters with a Hustler magazine and some hand lotion.”

The sound of the unsilenced pistol was very loud. Two shots.

Sophia smirked. Then she dropped the Beretta and fell forward onto her father’s body on the floor.

The Dane pocketed the .22-caliber Beretta Model 21 Bobcat and stepped forward to retrieve the 9mm Beretta from Sophia’s limp hand. Kurtz allowed himself to breathe again when the Dane slipped the larger Beretta into his pocket as well. Kurtz stood up.

The Dane lifted the valise of cash from its place by Don Farino’s wheelchair and then picked up the small audiocassette from Sophia’s empty chair. “These are both yours, I believe,” said the Dane.

“Are they?” Kurtz asked.

The Dane dropped the cassette into the valise and handed the valise to Kurtz. “Yes. I am a hired assassin, not a thief.”

Kurtz took the bag and the two men walked out of the drawing room, Kurtz pausing at the door a second to look back at the five bodies on the floor.

“The last scene of Hamlet,” said the Dane. “I rather liked that.”

The two talked shop as they walked out of the quiet mansion and down the driveway to Kurtz’s car.

“You like Berettas?” asked Kurtz.

“They have never disappointed me,” said the Dane.

Kurtz nodded. Probably the silliest and most sentimental thing he’d ever done had involved his old Beretta many years earlier.

They had passed the bodies of two guards in the foyer and another—dressed in black tactical gear—was lying outside near the drive.

“Extra work for you?” asked Kurtz.

“I thought it wiser on my way in to see to any possible problems that might hinder our way out,” said the Dane. They passed a bush from which two dark legs and a polished pair of loafers protruded.

“Three,” Kurtz said.

“Seven counting the night maid and the butler.”

“Paid for by someone?”

The Dane shook his head. “I count it as part of overhead. Although the Gonzaga contribution could be prorated toward them.”

“I’m glad the Gonzagas came through,” said Kurtz.

“I am sure you are.” They came to the gate. It had been left open. The Dane put his hand in his topcoat pocket, and Kurtz tensed.

The Dane removed his gloved hand and shook his head. “You have nothing to worry about from me, Mr. Kurtz. Our arrangement was explicit. Despite rumors to the contrary, one million dollars is quite generous, even in this profession. And even this profession has its code of ethics.”

“You know the money came from Little Skag,” said Kurtz.

“Of course I do. It makes no difference. You were the one who contacted me on the telephone. The contract is between us.”

Kurtz looked around. “I was a little worried that one of the Farinos might have outbid me.”

The Dane shook his head again. “They were notoriously cheap.” He lifted his face to the evening air. It was quite dark now and raining very softly. “I know what you’re thinking, Mr. Kurtz,” said the Dane. “I’ve seen his face. You haven’t. This face is no more mine than Nils is my name.”

“Actually,” said Kurtz, hefting the valise higher, “I was thinking about this money and what I was going to do with it.”

The Dane smiled very slightly. “Fifty thousand dollars. Was it worth all of your aggravation, Mr. Kurtz?”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. “It was.” They walked out through the gate and Kurtz hesitated by the Volvo, jingling the keys in his free hand. He would feel better when he had the H&K in his hand. “One question,” he said. “Or maybe it isn’t a question.”

The Dane waited.

“Little Skag… Stevie Farino…he’s going to get out and take over this mess.”

“It was my understanding,” said the Dane, “that this was what the one million dollars was all about.”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. “Little Skag is as penny-pinching as the rest of the family, but this was his one shot at getting back in the driver’s seat. But what I meant was that Skag will probably want to tidy up all the loose ends.”

The Dane nodded.

“Hell,” said Kurtz. “Never mind. If we meet again, we meet again.” He got into the Volvo. The Dane remained standing near the car. No bomb. Kurtz started the engine, backed into the empty road, and glanced into his rearview mirror.

The Dane was gone.

Kurtz pulled his pistol out from under the seat and set it on his lap anyway. He put the car in gear and drove away with one hand touching the valise on the passenger seat. Kurtz drove at or under the speed limit. He had no driver’s license, and this would be a bad time to be stopped by the Orchard Park sheriff.

He’d driven less than two miles when a cell phone rang in his backseat.

CHAPTER

FORTY-ONE

Kurtz slid the Volvo to a stop on a grassy berm and was out the door, rolling in the grass. He didn’t own a cell phone.

The phone kept ringing.

Semtex, thought Kurtz. C4. The Israelis and Palestinians had specialized in telephone bombs.

Fuck, thought Kurtz. The money. He went back to the car, removed the valise, and set it a safe distance from the vehicle.

The phone kept ringing. Kurtz realized that he was pointing his H&K .45 at a cell phone.

What the hell is wrong with me? He retrieved the valise, slid the pistol into his suit pocket, picked up the phone, and hit the answer button.

“Kurtz?”

A man’s voice. He didn’t recognize it.

“Kurtz?”

He listened.

“Kurtz, I’m sitting outside a little house in Lockport. I can see the little girl through the window. In about ten seconds, I’m going to knock on the door, kill that fucker who’s pretending to be her father, and take the teenaged bitch out and have a little fun with her. Goodbye, Kurtz.” The man hung up.

Normally it would have been a thirty-minute drive from Orchard Park to Lockport. Kurtz made it in ten minutes, doing well over a hundred on I-90 and almost that speed on the Lockport streets.

He slid the Volvo to a screeching stop in front of Rachel’s house.

The gate to the picket fence was open.

Kurtz jumped the fence, .45 raised and ready. The front door was closed. The lights were out on the first floor. Kurtz decided to go in the back way. He moved around the side of the house—not quite running, paying attention but still in a hurry, his heart pounding wildly.

One of the goddamned bushes rose up as he passed.

Kurtz swung the .45 to bear, but too late—a man’s arm from the bushes, some sort of camouflage suit, something black and stubby in the man’s right hand.

A great, hot force exploded against Kurtz’s chest and God’s flashbulbs went off in his skull.

CHAPTER

FORTY-TWO

Pain.

Good. He was alive.

Kurtz came back to consciousness slowly, very painfully, muscle by muscle. His eyes were open and there was no blindfold, but he could see nothing. He was in great pain. His body did not respond to commands. He was having problems breathing.

It’s all right. I may be hurt bad but I’m alive. I’ll kill the fucker and get Rachel free before I die. Kurtz concentrated on forcing breath into his lungs and calming his pounding heart and screaming muscles.

Minutes passed. More minutes. Kurtz slowly became oriented in his body and around it.

He was in the trunk of a car. Big trunk, big car. Lincoln or Cadillac. The car was moving. Kurtz’s body wasn’t moving. His muscles were alternating between cramps and involuntary spasms. His chest was on fire, he was nauseated, and his skull rang like a Buddhist gong. He’d been shot, but not with bullets. Stun gun, thought Kurtz. Taser. Probably rated about 250,000 volts. Even as his muscles and nerves came back on line, he found he could barely move. His wrists were manacled or handcuffed behind him, cruelly, and somehow attached to manacles around his ankles.

He was naked. The floor of the trunk was covered with crinkled plastic, like a shower curtain.

Whoever it is had it all planned. Followed me to Farino’s. Put the phone in the Volvo. Wanted me, not Rachel. At least Kurtz prayed to whatever dark god that the last was true.

He was not quite blind. Brake lights glowed red every now and then, illuminating the carpeted interior, the plastic, and Kurtz’s bare flesh. The car was moving, not just idling, leaning around turns, going somewhere. Not much traffic. The road was wet beneath the radial tires, and the sibilant hum made Kurtz want to go back to sleep.

He hasn’t killed me yet. Why? Kurtz could come up with a few possible reasons, none very probable. It occurred to him that he had not seen Cutter die.

The car stopped. Footsteps crunched on gravel. Kurtz closed his eyes.

Fresh air and a light drizzle when the trunk was opened.

“Don’t give me that shit,” said a man’s voice with a slight Brooklyn accent. The man set the Taser against Kurtz’s heel. Even with the voltage lowered, it was like having a long, hot wire inserted directly under the flesh. Kurtz spasmed, kicked, lost consciousness for a second or two, and then opened his eyes.

In the red light, looming over Kurtz, a Taser in his left hand and a huge .44 Magnum Ruger Redhawk in his right hand, stood a meaner-looking version of Danny DeVito. “You fake being out again,” said Manny Levine, “and I’ll shove this stun gun up your hairy ass.”

Kurtz kept his eyes open.

“You know why you’re still alive, fuckhead?”

Kurtz hated rhetorical questions at the best of times. This wasn’t the best of times.

“You’re alive because my people value burial,” said Levine. “And you’re going to lead me to my brother for a real burial before I blow your motherfucking head off.” He cocked the heavy .44 Magnum and aimed the long barrel at Kurtz’s exposed testicles. “But I don’t have any reason to keep you in one piece, fucker. We’ll start with these.”

“Letchworth,” gasped Kurtz. Even if he’d been unmanacled, he couldn’t have grabbed for Levine at that moment. His arms and legs were still spasming. He needed time.

“What?”

“Letchworth Park,” panted Kurtz. “I buried Sammy near Letchworth.”

“Where, cocksucker?” Manny Levine was so enraged that his entire dwarf body was shaking. The long steel barrel shook but the muzzle never moved off target…targets.

Kurtz shook his head. Before Manny pulled the trigger, he managed to gasp, “Outside the park…off Alternate twenty…south of Perry Center…in the woods…have to show you.”

Letchworth was more than sixty-five miles from Lockport. It would give Kurtz time to recover control of his body, clear his head.

Manny Levine’s teeth were grinding audibly. He shook with fury while his finger tightened on the trigger. Finally he lowered the hammer on the big Ruger and hit Kurtz on the side of the head with the long barrel, once, twice, three times.

Kurtz felt his scalp rip loose. Blood ran salty into his eyes and pattered on the plastic liner. Good. Nothing serious. Probably looks worse than it is. Maybe it’ll satisfy him for now.

Levine slammed the trunk shut, made a U-turn, and drove away with Kurtz rocking and bleeding heavily in back.

CHAPTER

FORTY-THREE

Kurtz had little sense of time other than the slight ebbing of pain and the even slighter return of muscle control, but it might have been about an hour later when the big car pulled over. The trunk opened and Kurtz breathed deeply of the cold night air, even though he had been shivering almost uncontrollably during the ride.

“All right,” said Manny Levine, “we’re south of Perry Center. It’s all county roads and gravel roads around here. Where the fuck do we go next?”

“I’ll have to sit up front and guide you,” said Kurtz.

The dwarf laughed. He had small yellow teeth. “No fucking way, Houdini.”

“You want to give your brother a decent burial.”

“Yeah,” said Levine. “But that’s Job Two. Job One is killing your ass, and I’m not going to let sentiment get in the way of that. Where do we go next?”

Kurtz took a second to think and try to flex his arms. He’d found during the ride that his handcuffs and ankle manacles were chained to each other and to something solid behind him.

“Time’s up,” said Manny Levine. He leaned forward with the Taser. The ugly little stun gun had electrodes about three inches apart. He set those metal studs on either side of Kurtz’s right ear and pressed the trigger for an instant.

Kurtz screamed. He had no choice. His vision, already impeded by the loose scalp and dried blood, popped orange, bled red, and faded for a while. When he could see and think again, Levine was grinning down at him.

“Half a mile past County Road 93,” gasped Kurtz. “Gravel road. Take it west toward the woods until it stops.”

Levine reached down, set the electrodes against Kurtz’s testicles, and zapped him again. Kurtz’s scream lasted long after Levine had slammed the trunk shut and begun driving again.

Levine slammed the trunk up. Snow fell past him in the red glow of the brake lights. “Ready to show me?” said the dwarf.

Kurtz nodded carefully. Even the slightest movement hurt, but he wanted to look more injured than he was. “Help me out,” he croaked. This was Plan A. If he was going to lead, Levine would have to unchain him from whatever bolt held him in and undo his ankle manacles. Perhaps he would have to uncuff him while the miserable midget was close enough to grab. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the best he’d come up with so far.

“Sure, sure.” Levine’s voice was amiable. He reached over with the Taser and pressed it into Kurtz’s arm.

Flashbulbs. Blackness.

Kurtz came to lying on his side on the frozen earth. He blinked his one good eye, trying to figure out how much time had passed. Not much, he felt.

After Levine had zapped him, he’d obviously dragged Kurtz out of the trunk—not carefully, Kurtz thought, feeling a new broken tooth in the side of his mouth—and reworked the bondage arrangements. Kurtz’s hands were cuffed in front of him now. Normally this would be good news, but the cuffs were attached by a chain to ankle manacles in state-prison manner, and a longer, fine-link steel chain—perhaps fifteen feet long—ran to a leather loop in Levine’s hand.

Levine was wearing a wool cap with earflaps, a bulky goosedown vest, a small candy-orange rucksack, and one of those night-hiking headsets with a battery-powered miner’s lamp attached to colorful straps around his forehead. On a normal person, this would have looked absurd: on this dwarf, it looked strangely obscene. Perhaps it was the Taser in his left hand, the dog chain in his right hand, or the huge Ruger tucked in his belt that dulled the humor of it.

“Get up,” said Levine. He touched the Taser to the steel dog chain. Kurtz spasmed, twitched, and almost wet himself.

Levine put the Taser in his down-vest pocket and aimed the Ruger while Kurtz slowly, painfully, got to his knees and then to his feet. He stood swaying. Kurtz could rush Levine, but “rush” would mean shuffling and staggering the ten feet while the dwarf emptied the Ruger into him. Meanwhile, although the frozen ground was free of snow this far from the lake, flakes were beginning to fall through bare branches above. Kurtz began shivering violently and could not stop. He wondered idly if hypothermia was going to kill him before Levine did.

“Let’s go.” Levine rattled Kurtz’s chain.

Kurtz looked around to get his bearings and began shuffling into the dark woods.

CHAPTER

FORTY-FOUR

You know that Sammy raped and murdered the woman who was my partner,” said Kurtz about fifteen minutes later. They had come into a wide, dark clearing, illuminated only by the beam of the lamp on Manny Levine’s head.

“Shut the fuck up.” Levine was very careful, never coming closer than ten feet from Kurtz, never letting the chain go taut, and never dropping the aim of the big-bore Magnum.

Kurtz shuffled across the clearing, looked at the huge elm tree at the far side, looked at another tree, crossed to a stump, and looked around again.

“What if I can’t find the place?” said Kurtz. “It’s been twelve years.”

“Then you die here,” said Levine.

“What if I remember it was another place?”

“You die here anyway,” said Levine.

“What if this is the place?”

“You die here anyway, asshole.” Levine sounded bored. “You know that. The only question now, Kurtz, is how you’re going to die. I’ve got six rounds in the cylinder and a whole box of cartridges in my pocket. I can use one or I can use a dozen. Your choice.”

Kurtz nodded and crossed to a big tree, looking up at a twisted branch for orientation. “Where’s the little girl… Rachel?” he said.

Levine showed his teeth. “She’s upstairs in her house, all tucked in,” said the little man. “She’s warm enough, but her legal daddy’s pretty cold, lying facedown drunk in that fancy-schmancy kitchen of theirs. But not nearly as cold as her real daddy’s going to be in about ten seconds if he doesn’t shut the fuck up.”

Kurtz shuffled ten paces out from the tree. “Here,” he said.

Keeping the Ruger Redhawk leveled, Levine took off his backpack, unzipped it, and tossed Kurtz a stubby but heavy metal object.

Kurtz’s frozen fingers fumbled unfolding the dung. A folding shovel—an “entrenching tool,” the army called it. It was the closest Kurtz would come to having a weapon in his hand, but it couldn’t be used as a weapon in Kurtz’s condition unless Manny Levine decided to walk five steps closer and offer his head as a target. Even then, Kurtz knew, he might not have the strength to hurt Levine. And chained and manacled as he was, there was absolutely no chance of throwing the shovel at the dwarf.

“Dig,” said Levine.

The ground was frozen and for a few desperate moments, Kurtz was sure that he would not be able to break through the icy crust of old leaves and tight soil. He got on his knees and tried to put his weight behind the small shovel. Then he got the first few divots up and managed to start a small hole.

Levine had tied the end of the chain around a sapling. This allowed his left hand to hold the Taser and tap it on the steel chain from time to time. Kurtz would gasp and fall on his side while his muscles spasmed. Then, without a word, he would get to his knees and continue digging. He was shaking so badly from the cold now that he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to hold the shovel much longer. At least the physical labor offered a simulacrum of warmth.

Thirty minutes later, Kurtz had excavated a trench about three feet long and two and a half feet deep. He’d encountered roots and stones, but nothing else.

“Enough of this shit,” said Manny Levine. “I’m freezing my balls off out here. Drop the shovel.” He raised the Magnum.

“B-b-burial,” Kurtz managed through chattering teeth.

“Fuck it,” said Levine. “Sammy’ll understand. Drop the fucking shovel out of reach.” He cocked the huge double-action revolver.

Kurtz dropped the little shovel at the side of the trench. “Wait,” he said. “S-s-something.”

Levine stepped closer so the headlight beam illuminated the trench, but he took no chances—standing at least six feet from where Kurtz crouched. The shovel was out of Kurtz’s reach. The snow was falling heavily enough to stick on the leaves and black soil in the circle of light.

A bump of black plastic protruded from the black soil.

“Wait, wait,” gasped Kurtz, crawling down into the trench and scraping away soil and roots with his shaking hands.

Even in the cold night, after almost twelve years, a faint, loamy whiff of decomposition rose from the trench. Manny Levine took a half step back. His face was contorted with anger. The hammer was still back on the Ruger, the muzzle aimed at Kurtz’s head.

Kurtz uncovered the head, shoulders, and chest of a vaguely human shape wrapped in black construction plastic.

“Okay,” said Levine, speaking through clenched teem. “Your job’s done, asshole.”

Kurtz looked up. He was caked with mud and his own blood and was shaking so hard from the cold that he had to force himself to speak clearly. “It m-m-may not b-be Sammy.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? How many stiffs did you bury out here?”

“M-m-maybe it is,” Kurtz said through chattering teeth. Without asking permission, he crouched lower and began peeling away the plastic over the shape’s face.

The twelve years had been hard on Sammy—his eyes were gone, skin and muscle turned into a blackened leather, lips pulled back far over the teeth, and frozen maggots filled the mouth where his tongue had been—but Kurtz recognized him, so he assumed Manny could. Kurtz’s left hand continued peeling away black plastic around the skull while his right hand went lower, tearing rotted plastic around the chest.

“Fucking enough,” said Manny Levine. He took one step closer and aimed the Ruger. “What the fuck is that?”

“Money,” said Kurtz.

Levine’s finger stayed taut on the trigger, but he lowered the Ruger ever so slightly and peered down into the grave.

Kurtz’s right hand had already found and opened the blue steel hardcase where he had left it on Sammy’s chest, and now he pulled the bundle out still wrapped in oily rags, clicked off the butterfly safety with his thumb, and squeezed the trigger of his old Beretta five times.

The weapon fired five times.

Manny Levine spun, the Magnum and Taser flew off into the darkness, and the dwarf went down. The headlight illuminated frozen leaves on the forest floor. Goose feathers floated in the cold air.

Still holding the rag-wrapped Beretta, Kurtz grabbed the shovel and crawled over to Levine.

He’d missed once, but two of the nine millimeter slugs had punched into the dwarf’s chest, one had caught him in the throat, and one had gone in just under Levine’s left cheekbone and taken his ear off on the way out.

The little man’s eyes were wide and staring in shock, and he was trying to talk, spitting blood.

“Yeah, I’m surprised, too,” said Kurtz. Strengthened by the adrenaline rush he had counted on, Kurtz used the entrenching tool to finish him off and then went through the dwarf’s shirt pockets. Good. The cell phone was in his shirt pocket and hadn’t been hit.

Shaking wildly now, he concentrated on punching out the phone number he’d memorized in Attica.

“Hello? Hello?” Rachel’s voice was soft, clear, untroubled, and beautiful.

Kurtz disconnected and dialed Arlene’s number.

“Joe,” she said, “where are you? The most amazing thing happened at the office today…”

“You all r-r-right?” managed Kurtz.

“Yes, but—”

“Then shut up and listen. M-m-meet me in Warsaw, the Texaco at the intersection, as soon as you can.”

“Warsaw? The little town on Alternate Route Twenty? Why—”

“Bring a blanket, a first-aid kit, and a sewing kit. And hurry.” Kurtz disconnected.

It took a minute of pawing around the corpse to find the handcuff and manacle keys and the car keys. Even the goddamned, perforated, bloody goosedown vest was too small for Kurtz—he could barely pull it on and there was no chance of buttoning it—but he wore it as he dumped Levine, the Magnum, the phone, the backpack, the Taser, and his own Beretta—back in its blue-steel hardcase—back into Sammy’s shallow grave and began the cold job of filling in the frozen dirt.

He kept the miner’s lamp to see by.

CHAPTER

FORTY-FIVE

Arlene pulled into the closed and empty Texaco station forty minutes after she’d gotten the phone call. Warsaw was literally a crossroads community, and it was dark this night. Arlene had expected to see Joe’s Volvo, but there was only a large, dark Lincoln Town Car parked in the side lot of the Texaco.

Joe Kurtz got out of the Lincoln carrying a dashboard cigarette lighter, fooled around by the big car’s gas tank for a few seconds, and began walking toward her in the beams of her Buick’s headlights. He was naked, bloody, limping, and smeared with mud. The right side of his scalp hung down in a bloody flap, and one eye was swollen and crusted shut.

Arlene started to get out of the Buick, but at that second the Lincoln Town Car exploded behind Kurtz and began burning wildly. Kurtz did not look back.

He opened the passenger-side door and said, “Blanket.”

“What?” said Arlene, staring. He looked even worse with the overhead light of the Buick on him.

Kurtz gestured at the passenger seat. “Spread the blanket. Don’t want to get blood on everything.”

She unfolded the red plaid blanket she’d grabbed from her window seat, and Kurtz collapsed onto the seat. “Drive,” he said. He turned the car’s heater on high.

They were a mile or so outside of Warsaw, the burning car still an orange glow in the mirror, when Arlene said, “We’ve got to get you to a hospital.”

Kurtz shook his head. The bloody flap of skin and hair on the side of his head bobbled. “It looks worse than it is. We’ll sew it up when we get back to your place.”

“We’ll sew it up?”

“All right,” said Kurtz and actually grinned at her through the streaks of blood and mud. “You’ll sew it up, and I’ll drink some of Alan’s whiskey.”

Arlene drove for a moment in silence. “So we’re going to my place?” she said, knowing that Joe would never tell her what had happened this night.

“No,” he said. “First we go up to Lockport. My car’s there and—I hope—my clothes and a certain leather bag.”

“Lockport,” Arlene repeated, glancing at him. He was a mess, but seemed calm.

Kurtz nodded, pulled the red plaid blanket around his shoulders, and held the flap of scalp in place with one hand while he turned the car radio on with his other hand. He tuned it to an all-night blues station. “So all right,” he said when he had Muddy Waters playing, “tell me about this amazing thing that happened at the office today.”

Arlene glanced at him again. “It doesn’t seem that important right now, Joe.”

“Tell me anyway,” said Kurtz. “We’ve got a long drive ahead of us.”

Arlene shook her head, but then began telling him about her afternoon as they drove west toward Buffalo, the blues playing hard and sad on the radio and the snow falling softly in their headlight beams.

HARD FREEZE. Copyright © 2002 by Dan Simmons. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Book design by Michael Collica

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Simmons, Dan.

Hard freeze: a Joe Kurtz novel / Dan Simmons.-1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-27854-3

1. Private investigators—New York (State)—Buffalo—Fiction.

2. Organized crime-Fiction. 3. Buffalo (N.Y.)-Fiction.

4. Ex-convicts-Fiction. I. Title.

PS3569.I47292 H36 2002

813’.54—dc21

2002023706

First Edition: August 2002

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER

ONE

Joe Kurtz knew that someday he would lose focus, that his attention would wander at a crucial minute, that instincts honed in almost twelve years of cellblock survival would fail him, and on that day he would die a violent death.

Not today.

He noticed the old Pontiac Firebird turning behind him and parking at the far side of the lot when he pulled into Ted’s Hot Dogs on Sheridan, and when he stepped out, he noticed three men staying in their car as the Pontiac’s engine idled. The Firebird’s windshield wipers moved the falling snow aside in two black arcs, but Kurtz could see the three men’s heads outlined by the lights behind them. It was not yet 6:00 P.M., but full night had fallen in that dark, cold, claustrophobic way that only Buffalo, New York, in February could offer.

Kurtz scooped three rolls of quarters out of the console of his old Volvo, slipped them into the pocket of his peacoat and went into Ted’s Hot Dogs. He ordered two dogs with everything except hot sauce, an order of onion rings, and a black coffee, all the while standing where he could watch the Firebird from the corner of his eye. Three men got out, talked for a minute in the falling snow and then dispersed, none of them coming into the brightly lighted restaurant.

Kurtz carried his tray of food to the seating area around behind the long counter of charcoal burners and drink machines and found a booth away from the windows where he could still see out and was in line of sight of all the doors.

It was the Three Stooges.

Kurtz had glimpsed them long enough to make a positive identification. He knew the Stooges’ real names but it didn’t matter—during the years he had been in Attica with them, everyone had known them only as the Three Stooges. White men, in their thirties, not related except via some sexual ménage à trois that Kurtz didn’t want to think about, the Stooges were dirt stupid but crafty in their mean and lethal way. The Stooges had made a career of exercise-yard shank jobs, taking orders from those who couldn’t get at their targets for whatever reason and contracting their hits out for pay as low as a few dozen cartons of cigarettes. They were equal-opportunity killers: shanking a black for the Aryan Brotherhood one week, killing a white boy for a black gang the next.

So now Kurtz was out of stir and the Stooges were out of stir and it was his turn to die.

Kurtz ate his hot dogs and considered the problem. First, he had to find out who had ordered the contract on him.

No, scratch that. First he had to deal with the Three Stooges, but in a way that allowed him to find out who had put the contract out. He ate slowly and looked at the logistics of the matter. They weren’t promising. Either through blind luck or good intelligence—and Kurtz did not believe in luck—the Stooges had made their move at the only time when Kurtz was not armed. He was on his way home from a visit to his parole officer, and he’d decided that even the Volvo wasn’t a good place to hide a weapon. His PO was a tough-assed lady.

So the Stooges had him without a firearm and their specialty was execution in a public place. Kurtz looked around. There were only half a dozen other people sitting in the booths—two old-timers sitting silent and apart, and an exhausted-looking mother with three loud, preschool-age boys. One of the boys looked over at Kurtz and gave him the finger. The mother ate her french fries and pretended not to notice.

Kurtz looked around again. The two front doors opened onto the Sheridan Drive side of the restaurant to the south. Doors on the east and west sides of the brightly lighted dining area opened onto the parking lots. The north wall was empty except for the entrance to the two rest rooms.

If the Stooges came in and started blazing away, Kurtz did not have much recourse except to grab one or more of the civilians to use as a shield and try to get out one of the doors. The drifts were deep out there and it was dark away from the restaurant lights.

Not much of a plan, Joe. Kurtz ate his second hot dog and sipped his Coke. The odds were that the Stooges would wait outside for him to emerge—not sure if he had seen them—and gun him down in the parking lot. The Stooges weren’t afraid of spectators, but this wasn’t the exercise yard at Attica; if they came inside to kill him, they’d have to shoot all the witnesses—diners and workers behind the counter included. It seemed excessive even for the Attica Three Stooges.

The oldest of the three boys two booths over tossed a ketchup-covered french fry at Kurtz. Kurtz smiled and looked at the happy family, wondering whether two of those kids, held high, would offer enough bone and body mass to stop whatever caliber slugs the Stooges would be firing. Probably not.

Too bad. Kurtz lifted one foot at a time onto the seat of the booth, removed his shoes and slid off his socks, balling one inside the other. One of the boys in the nearby boom pointed at Kurtz and started babbling excitedly to his mother, but by the time the sallow-faced woman looked his way, he’d tied the second shoe and was finishing his onion rings. The air felt chilly without socks on.

Keeping his eye on the pale Stooge faces just visible through the falling snow outside, Kurtz brought out each roll of quarters and emptied them into the double-thick sock. When he was finished, he set the ad hoc sap into the pocket of his peacoat. Assuming that the Stooges were carrying handguns and/or automatic weapons, it wasn’t quite a fair fight yet.

A Buffalo police officer came into the dining area carrying his tray of hot dogs. The cop was uniformed, overweight, armed and alone, probably on his way home from a day shift He looked tired and depressed.

Saved, thought Kurtz with only a little irony.

The cop set his food on a table and went into the rest room. Kurtz waited thirty seconds and then pulled on his gloves and followed.

The officer was at the only urinal and did not turn around as Kurtz entered. Kurtz passed him as if heading for the stall, pulled the homemade blackjack out of his pocket and sapped the cop hard over the head. The officer groaned but went down on both knees. Kurtz sapped him again.

Bending over the cop, he took the long-barreled .38 service revolver, the handcuffs, and the heavy baton from his belt He removed the cop’s hand radio and smashed it underfoot. Then he tugged off the cop’s jacket.

The rear window was high up on the wall in the stall, was reinforced with metal mesh and was not designed to be opened. Holding the cop’s jacket up to deflect the glass and muffle the sound, Kurtz smashed the glass and pulled the metal grid out of its rusted hinges. Stepping up on the toilet, he squeezed through the small window and dropped into the snow outside, getting to his feet behind the Dumpster.

East side first. Sliding the cop’s revolver in his belt, Kurtz went around the back of the restaurant and peered out into the east parking lot. The Stooge called Curly was pacing back and forth behind the few parked cars, flapping his arms to stay warm. He was carrying a Colt .45 semiauto in one hand. Kurtz waited for Curly to make his turn and men walked silently out behind the short man and clubbed him over the head with the lead-weighted baton. He cuffed Curly with his hands behind his back, left him lying in the snow and walked around the front of the restaurant.

Moe looked up, recognized Kurtz, and started fumbling a weapon out from under his thick goosedown jacket even as he began to run. Kurtz caught up to him and clubbed him down into the snow. He kicked the pistol out of Moe’s hand and looked through the glass doors of Ted’s Hot Dogs. None of the workers at the empty service counter had noticed anything and the avenue was free of traffic at the moment.

Throwing Moe over his shoulder and pulling the .38 from his belt the baton dangling from his wrist by its leather strap, Kurtz walked around to the west side of the building.

Larry must have sensed something. He was standing by Kurtz’s Volvo and peering anxiously through the windows. He had a Mac-10 in his hands. According to other people Kurtz had known inside, Larry had always sung the praises of serious firepower.

With Moe still on his shoulder, Kurtz raised the .38 and shot Larry three times—body mass, head, and body mass again. The third Stooge went down quickly, the Mac-10 skittering away on ice and ending up under a parked SUV. The shots had been somewhat muffled by the falling snow. No one came to the door or window to check.

Still carrying Moe and dragging Larry’s body, Kurtz tossed both men into the back seat of his Volvo, started the car, and drove around to the east side of the parking lot. Curly was moaning and beginning to come to, flopping around listlessly with his hands cuffed behind his back. No one had seen him.

Kurtz stopped the car, got out, lifted Curly, and tossed the moaning Stooge into the back seat with his dead and unconscious pals. He closed Curly’s door, went around and unlatched the door behind the driver’s position, got in, and drove away down Sheridan to the Youngman Expressway.

The Expressway was slick and icy, but Kurtz got the Volvo up to sixty-five miles per hour before glancing around. Larry’s body was slumped up against the cracked-open door, Moe was still unconscious and leaning against Curly, and Curly was playing possum.

Kurtz cocked the service revolver with an audible click. “Open your eyes or I’ll shoot you now,” he said softly.

Curly’s eyes flew open. He opened his mouth to say something.

“Shut up.” Kurtz nodded toward Larry. “Kick him out.”

The pale ex-con’s face paled even further. “JesusfuckingChrist. I can’t just—”

“Kick him out,” said Kurtz, glancing back at the road and then turning around to aim the .38 at Curly’s face.

His wrists handcuffed behind him, Curly shoved Moe aside with his shoulder, lifted his legs, and kicked Larry out the door. He had to kick twice to get him out. Cold air whirled inside the car. Possibly because of the storm, traffic on the Youngman was light.

“Who hired you to kill me?” asked Kurtz. “Be careful…you don’t get many chances at the right answer.”

“Jesus Christ,” moaned Curly. “No one hired us. I don’t even fucking know who you are. I don’t even—”

“Wrong answer,” said Kurtz. He nodded at Moe and then at the open door. Icy pavement was roaring by.

“Jesus Christ, I can’t…he’s still alive…listen to me, please…”

The Volvo tried to slide a bit as they came around a curve on the ice. Keeping one eye on the rearview mirror, Kurtz corrected the slide, turned back, and aimed the pistol at Curly’s crotch. “Now,” he said.

Moe started to gain consciousness as Curly kicked him across the seat to the open door. The icy air revived Moe enough that the bigger man reached up and grabbed the seat back and held on for dear life. Curly glanced at Kurtz’s pistol and kicked Moe in the belly and face with both feet. Moe flew out into the night, striking the pavement with an audible wet noise.

Curly was panting, almost hyperventilating, as he looked up at Kurtz’s weapon. His legs were up on the back seat, but he was obviously concocting a way to kick at Kurtz.

“Move those feet without permission and I put two into your belly,” Kurtz said softly. “Let’s try again. Who hired you? Remember, you don’t have any wrong answers left.”

“You’re going to shoot me anyway,” said Curly. His teeth were chattering in the blast of cold air from the open door.

“No,” said Kurtz. “I won’t. Not if you tell me the truth. Last chance.”

Curly said, “A woman.”

Kurtz glanced at the road and then back. That made no sense. The D-Block Mosque still had a $10,000 fatwa out on Kurtz as far as he knew. Little Skag Farino, still in the pen, had several reasons to see Kurtz dead, and Little Skag had always been a cheap son of a bitch, likely to hire skanks like the Stooges. An inner-city Crips gang called the Seneca Social Club had put out the word that Joe Kurtz should die. He had a few other enemies who might hire someone. But a woman?

“Not good enough,” said Kurtz. He raised the aim toward Curly’s belly.

“No, Jesus Christ, I’m telling the truth! Brunette. Drives a Lexus. Paid five thousand in cash up front—we get another five when she reads about you in the paper. She was the one who told us about you probably not carrying today because of your PO visit. Jesus Christ, Kurtz, you can’t just—”

“What’s her name?”

Curly shook his head wildly. Curly was bald. “Farino. She didn’t say…but I’m sure of it…she’s Little Skag’s sister.”

“Maria Farino is dead,” said Kurtz. He had reason to know.

Curly began shouting, talking so fast that spittle flew. “Not Maria Farino. The other one. The older sister. I seen a family picture once that Skag had in stir. Whatshername, the fucking nun, Agelica, Angela, some fucking wop name—”

“Angelina,” said Kurtz.

Curly’s mouth twisted. “You’re going to shoot me now. I told you the fucking truth, but you’re going to—”

“Not necessarily,” said Kurtz. It was snowing harder and this part of the Youngman was notorious for black ice, but he got the car up to seventy-five. Kurtz nodded toward the open car door.

Curly’s eyes grew wide. “You’re fucking joking… I can’t—”

“You can take one in the head,” said Kurtz. “Then I dump you. You can make your move, take a couple in the belly, maybe we crash. Or you can take a chance and tuck and roll. Plus, there’s some snow out there. Probably as soft as a goosedown pillow.”

Curly’s wild eyes went to the door.

“It’s your call,” said Kurtz. “But you only have five seconds to decide. One. Two—”

Curly screamed something indecipherable, scooched over on the seat, and threw himself out the door.

Kurtz glanced at the mirror. Headlights swerved and spun as cars tried to take evasive action, tangled, bounced over the bundle in the road, and piled up behind Kurtz’s Volvo.

He lowered his speed to a more sane forty-five miles per hour and exited at the Kensington Expressway, heading back west toward Buffalo’s downtown. Passing Mt. Calvary Cemetery in the dark, Kurtz tossed the cop’s pistol and baton out the window.

The snow was getting thicker and falling faster. Kurtz liked Buffalo in the winter. He always had. But this was shaping up to be an especially tough winter.

CHAPTER

TWO

The offices of High School Sweetheart Search, Inc. were in the basement of a former X-rated video and magazine store close to the Buffalo bus station. The XXX store had never looked too classy and looked even less so now after it had been closed for three months and the entire block condemned by the city for demolition. A little before 7:30 A.M., Arlene parked in the alley behind the store, used her key to let herself in the back door, and was surprised to find Joe working at his computer. The long room was unfurnished except for the two desks, a coatrack, a clutter of servers and cables, and a sagging couch set against one wall.

Arlene hung up her coat, set her purse on her desk, removed a pack of Marlboros from the purse and lit one, then turned on her computer and the video monitor connected to the two cameras upstairs. The abandoned interior of the adult bookstore on the monitors looked as littered and empty as always. No one had ever bothered to clean the bloodstains off the linoleum floor up there. “You sleep here again last night, Joe?”

Kurtz shook his head. He called up the court file on Donald Lee Rafferty, age 42, 1016 Locus Lane, Lockport, NY. The file showed another DWI on Rafferty’s record—the third this year. Rafferty’s driver’s license was one point away from being pulled.

“Goddamn it to hell,” said Kurtz.

Arlene looked up. Joe rarely cursed. “What?”

“Nothing.”

Kurtz’s e-mail announcer chirped. It was a note from Pruno, replying to Kurtz’s e-mail query sent at 4:00 that morning. Pruno was a homeless wino and heroin addict who just happened to have a laptop computer in the cardboard shack he sometimes shared with another homeless man named Soul Dad. Kurtz had wondered from time to time how it was that Pruno was able to keep his laptop when the very clothes the old man wore were constantly being stolen off his back. Kurtz opened the e-mail.

Joseph: Received your e-mail and I do indeed have some information on the surviving Ms. Farino and the three gentlemen in question. I would prefer to discuss this in private since I have a request to make of you in return. Could you stop by my winter residence at your earliest convenience? Cordially—P.

“Goddamn it,” Kurtz said again.

Arlene squinted at him through a haze of smoke. Her own computer monitor was filled with the day’s requests for searches for former high-school boyfriends and girlfriends. She batted ashes into her ashtray but said nothing.

Kurtz sighed. It was inconvenient to go see the old man for this information, but Pruno rarely asked Kurtz for anything. Come to think of it, Pruno had never asked for anything.

The Rafferty thing, though…

“Goddamn it,” whispered Kurtz.

“Anything I can help with?” asked Arlene.

“No.”

“All right, Joe. But since you’re here today, there are a few things you can help me with.”

Kurtz turned off his computer.

“We need to find new office space,” said Arlene. “This place gets demolished in a month and we get thrown out in two weeks, no matter what.”

Kurtz nodded.

Arlene batted cigarette ashes again. “So are you going to have time to help me look for a new office today or tomorrow?”

“Probably not,” said Kurtz.

“Then are you going to let me choose a place on my own?”

“No.”

Arlene nodded. “Shall I scout some places? Let you look at them later?”

“Okay,” said Kurtz.

“And you don’t mind me looking during office hours?”

Kurtz just stared at his once and present secretary. She had come back to work for him the day be had gotten out of prison the previous autumn. After twelve years of hiatus. “Have I ever said anything to you about office hours or how you should spend your day?” he said at last. “You can come in and handle the on-line Sweetheart Search stuff in ten minutes for all I care. Take the rest of the day off.”

“Uh-huh,” said Arlene. Her look finished the sentence. Recently, the Sweetheart Search business had run to ten-and twelve-hour weekdays, most Saturdays, and the occasional Sunday. She stubbed out the cigarette and pulled out another but did not light it.

“What else do we need?” asked Kurtz.

“Thirty-five thousand dollars,” said Arlene.

Kurtz reacted as he always did to surprise—with a poker face.

“It’s for another server and some data-mining service,” added Arlene.

“I thought this server and the data-mining we’ve already done would handle Sweetheart Search for the next couple of years,” said Kurtz.

“They will,” said Arlene. “This is for Wedding Bells.”

“Wedding Bells?”

Arlene lit the next cigarette and took a long, slow drag. After exhaling, she said, “This high-school-sweetheart search was a great idea of yours, Joe, and it’s making money, but we’re reaching the point of diminishing returns with it.”

“After four months?” said Kurtz.

Arlene moved her lacquered fingernails in a complex gesture. “What separates it from the other on-line school-sweetheart services is you tracking some of these people down on foot, delivering some of the love letters in person.”

“Yeah?” said Kurtz. “So?” But he understood then. “You mean that there’s only so much market share in this part of Western New York and Northern Pennsylvania and Ohio within range of my driving. Only so many old high-school yearbooks we can look through in the region. After that, we’re just another on-line search agency. Yeah, I thought of that when I came up with this idea in prison, but I thought it would last longer than four months.”

Arlene smiled. “Don’t worry, Joe. I didn’t mean that we’re going to run out of yearbook sources or clients for the next couple of years. I just mean we’re reaching the point of diminishing returns—or at least for your door-to-door part of it.”

“So… Wedding Bells,” said Kurtz.

“Wedding Bells,” agreed Arlene.

“I assume that’s some sort of on-line wedding-planning service. Unless you’re just going to offer it as a bonus package for our successful Sweetheart Search clients.”

“Oh, we can do that,” said Arlene, “but I see it as a full-service on-line wedding-planning dot com. Nationwide. Beyond nationwide.”

“So I won’t be delivering corsages to Erie, Pennsylvania, the way I’m doing now with the love letters?”

Arlene flicked ashes. “You don’t have to be involved at all if you don’t want to be, Joe. Besides putting up the seed money and owning the company…and finding us an office.”

Kurtz ignored this last part. “Why thirty-five thousand? That’s a lot of data-mining.”

Arlene carried over a folder of spreadsheet pages and notes. She stood by Kurtz’s desk as he looked through it. “See, Joe, I was just grabbing bits and pieces of data from the Internet and tossing it all into an Excel spreadsheet—more or less what the present on-line wedding services do—but then I used some of our income to build a new data warehouse on Oracle81 and paid Ergos Business Intelligence to begin mining the database of all these weddings that other individuals or services had planned.”

She pointed to some columns on the spreadsheet “And voila!”

Kurtz looked for patterns in the charts and columns. Finally he saw one. “Planning a fancy wedding takes two hundred and seventy to three hundred days,” said Kurtz. “Almost all of them fall in that range. So does everyone know this?”

Arlene shook her head. “Some individual wedding planners do, but not the few on-line wedding-service companies. The pattern really shows up when you look at a huge mass of data.”

“So how does your…our… Wedding Bells dot com cash in on this?” asked Kurtz.

Arlene pulled out other pages. “We continue using the Ergos tool to analyze this two-hundred-seventy-to three-hundred-day period and nail down exactly when each step of the operation takes place.”

“What operation?” asked Kurtz. Arlene was beginning to talk like some bank robbers he’d known. “Isn’t a wedding just a wedding? Rent a place, dress up, get it over with?”

Arlene rolled her eyes. Exhaling smoke, she brought her ashtray over to Kurtz’s desk and flicked ashes into it. “See, here, at this point early on? Here’s the bride’s search for a dress. Every bride has to search for a dress. We offer links to designers, seamstresses, even knock-off designer dress suppliers.”

“But Wedding Bells wouldn’t be just a bunch of hyperlinks, would it?” asked Kurtz, frowning slightly.

Arlene shook her head and stubbed out her cigarette. “Not at all. The clients give us a profile at the beginning and we offer everything from full service down. We can handle everything—absolutely everything. From sending out invitations to tipping the minister. Or the clients can have us plan some of it and just have us connect them to the right people for other decision points along the way—either way, we make money.”

Arlene lit another cigarette and ruffled through the stack of papers. She pointed to a highlighted line on a 285-day chart. “See this point, Joe? Within the first month, they have to decide on locations for the wedding and the reception. We have the biggest database anywhere and provide links to restaurants, inns, picturesque parks, Hawaiian resorts, even churches. They give us their profile and we make suggestions, then connect them to the appropriate sites.”

Kurtz had to grin. “And get a kickback from every one of those places…except maybe the churches.”

“Hah!” said Arlene. “Weddings are important revenue sources for churches and synagogues. They want in Wedding Bells dot com, they give us a piece of the action. No negotiation there.”

Kurtz nodded and looked at the rest of the spreadsheets. “Wedding consultants referred. Honeymoon locations recommended and discounts offered. Limos lined up. Even airline tickets reserved for relatives and the wedding couple. Flowers. Catering. You provide local sources and Web links to everything, and everyone pays Wedding Bells dot com. Nice.” He closed the folder and handed it back to her. “When do you need the seed money?”

“This is Thursday,” said Arlene. “Monday would be nice.”

“All right Thirty-five thousand on Monday.” He grabbed his peacoat from the coatrack and slipped a semiauto pistol in his belt The weapon was the relatively small and light .40 SW99—a licensed Smith & Wesson version of the Walther P99 double-action service pistol. Kurtz had ten rounds in the magazine and a second magazine in his coat pocket Considering the fact that the SW99 fired formidable .40 S&W loads rather than the more common 9mms, Kurtz trusted that twenty cartridges would do the trick.

“Will you be back in the office before the weekend?” asked Arlene as Kurtz opened the rear door.

“Probably not.”

“Anywhere I can reach you?”

“You can try Pruno’s e-mail in the next hour or so,” said Kurtz. “After that, probably not. I’ll give you a call here at the office before the weekend.”

“Oh, you can call here Saturday or Sunday, too,” said Arlene. “I’ll be here.”

But Kurtz was out the door and gone and the sarcasm was wasted.

CHAPTER

THREE

Kurtz liked Buffalo winters because the Buffalonians knew how to deal with winter. A few inches of snow—snow that would paralyze some wussy city such as Washington or Nashville—went all but unnoticed by Buffalo residents. Plows plowed, sidewalks got shoveled early, and people went on about their business. A foot of snow got people’s attention in Buffalo, but only for as long as it took to push and plow it into the ten-foot-high heap of earlier-plowed snow.

But this winter had been a bitch. By January first, more snow had fallen than in the previous two winters combined, and by February, even stoic Buffalo had to shut down some schools and businesses when snow and consistently low temperatures kept blowing in off Lake Erie almost daily.

Kurtz had no idea how Pruno and some of the other winos who refused to stay in shelters more than a few of the worst nights managed to survive such winters.

But surviving the winter was Pruno’s problem. Surviving the next few days and weeks was Kurtz’s problem.

Pruno’s “winter residence” was the packing-crate hovel he and Soul Dad had cobbled together under the highway overpass near the rail yards. In the summer, Kurtz knew, fifty or sixty of the homeless congregated here in a sort of Bonus Army Village that was not totally without appeal. But most of the fair-weather bums had long since headed for shelters or Southern cities—Soul Dad favored Denver, for reasons known only to himself. Now only Pruno’s shack remained, and snow had almost covered it.

Kurtz slid down the steep hill from the road above and post-holed his way through the drifts to the shack. There was no real door—a section of corrugated, rusted tin slid into place across the opening of the nailed-together crates—so Kurtz knocked on the metal panel and waited. The freezing wind from Lake Erie cut right through the wool of his peacoat. After two or three more knocks, Kurtz heard a racking cough from the interior and took it as his permission to enter.

Pruno—Soul Dad had once mentioned that the old man’s name was Frederick—sat against the concrete abutment that made up the far wall. Snow had drifted in through cracks and fissures. The long extension cord to the laptop still ran in from God knows where and a stack of Sterno cans provided both heat and cooking facilities. Pruno himself was almost lost in a cocoon of rags and filthy newspapers.

“Jesus,” Kurtz said softly. “Why don’t you go to a shelter, old man?”

Pruno coughed what might have been a laugh. “I refuse to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.”

“Money?” said Kurtz. “The shelters don’t ask for money. Not even for work in trade for a bed at this time of year. So what would you be rendering unto Caesar—except maybe some frostbite?”

“Obeisance,” said Pruno. He coughed and cleared his throat. “Shall we get on with business, Joseph? What is it you would like to know about the redoubtable Ms. Farino?”

“First of all,” said Kurtz, “what do you want in exchange for the information? Your e-mail mentioned getting something in return.”

“Not really, Joseph. I said that I had a request to make of you in return. I assure you that I will be happy to give you the Farino information with no strings attached.”

“Whatever,” said Kurtz. “What’s your request?”

Pruno coughed for a minute and pulled the newspapers and rags closer around him. The cold air coming in through the chinks and cracks in the packing-crate hovel was making Kurtz shiver and he was wearing a thick peacoat. “I wondered if you would be so kind as to meet with a friend of mine,” said Pruno. “In your professional capacity.”

“What professional capacity?”

“Investigator.”

Kurtz shook his head. “You know I’m not a P.I. anymore.”

“You investigated for the Farino family last year,” said Pruno. The old man’s wheezy, drug-addict’s voice still carried more than a hint of a Bostonian accent.

“That was a scam I was part of,” said Kurtz, “not an investigation.”

“Nonetheless, Joseph, it would please me greatly if you would just meet with my friend. You can tell him yourself that you are no longer in the private investigation business.”

Kurtz hesitated. “What’s his name?”

“John Wellington Frears.”

“And what’s his problem?”

“I don’t know precisely, Joseph. It is a private issue.”

“All right,” said Kurtz, imagining himself consulting with another wino. “Where should I find this John Wellington Frears?”

“Perhaps he could come to your office today? It would probably be better for my friend to come see you.”

Kurtz thought of Arlene and the last time they’d had visitors at the office. “No,” he said. “I’ll be at Blues Franklin tonight until midnight. Tell him to meet me there. How will I know him?”

“He likes to wear vests,” said Pruno. “Now, about this Angelina Farino query. What would you like to know?”

“Everything,” said Kurtz.

Donald Rafferty worked at the main post office down on William Street and liked to eat lunch at a little bar near Broadway Market. As a supervisor, Rafferty managed to take ninety-minute lunch hours. Sometimes he would forget to eat lunch.

This afternoon he came out of the bar and found a man leaning against his 1998 Honda Accord. The man was white—that’s the first thing Rafferty checked—and was wearing a peacoat and a wool cap. He looked vaguely familiar, but Rafferty couldn’t quite place the face. Actually, this had been an extra-long lunch hour and Donald Rafferty was having a little trouble finding his car keys in his pocket. He stopped twenty feet from the man and considered going back in the bar until the stranger left.

“Hey, Donnie,” said the man. Rafferty had always hated the name Donnie.

“Kurtz,” Rafferty said at last. “Kurtz.”

Kurtz nodded.

“I thought you were in jail, asshole,” said Rafferty.

“Not right now,” said Kurtz.

Rafferty blinked to clear his vision. “Another state, you would have got the chair…or lethal injection,” he said. “For murder.”

Kurtz smiled. “Manslaughter.” He had been leaning against the Accord’s hood, but now he straightened and took a step closer.

Donald Rafferty took a step back on the slippery parking lot. It was snowing again. “What the fuck do you want, Kurtz?”

“I want you to stop drinking on days that you drive Rachel anywhere,” Kurtz said. His voice was very soft but very firm.

Rafferty actually laughed, despite his nervousness. “Rachel? Don’t tell me that you give a flying fuck about Rachel. Fourteen years and you never so much as sent the kid a fucking card.”

“Twelve years,” said Kurtz.

“She’s mine,” slurred Rafferty. “Courts said so. It’s legal. I was Samantha’s husband, ex-husband, and Samantha meant for me to have her.”

“Sam didn’t mean for anyone except Sam to take care of Rachel,” said Kurtz, taking another step toward Rafferty.

Rafferty took three steps back toward the bar.

“Sam didn’t plan on dying,” said Kurtz.

Rafferty had to sneer at that. “She died because of you, Kurtz. You and that fucking job.” He found his keys and threaded them through his fingers, making a fist. Anger was mixing with fear now. He could take this sonofabitch. “You here to cause trouble, Kurtz?”

Kurtz’s gaze never left Rafferty’s.

“Because if you are,” continued Rafferty, his voice getting stronger and louder now, “I’ll tell your parole officer that you’re harassing me, threatening me, threatening Rachel…twelve years in Attica, who knows what filthy tastes you’ve acquired.”

Something flickered in Joe Kurtz’s eyes then, and Rafferty took four quick steps backward until he could almost touch the door to the bar. “You give me any shit, Kurtz, and I’ll have you back in jail so fast that—”

“If you drive Rachel again when you’re drunk,” Kurtz interrupted softly, “I’ll hurt you, Donnie.” He took another step and Rafferty opened the bar’s door in a hurry, ready to rush inside where the bartender—Carl—could pull the sawed-off shotgun out from under the counter.

Kurtz did not look at Donald Rafferty again. He brushed past him and walked down Broadway, disappearing in the heavily falling snow.

CHAPTER

FOUR

Kurtz sat in the smoky gloom of Blues Franklin and thought about Pruno’s information on Angelina Farino and what it might mean. And he thought about the fact that he had been followed to the Blues Franklin by two homicide detectives in an unmarked car. It wasn’t the first time they’d tailed him in recent weeks.

Blues Franklin, on Franklin Street just down from the Rue Franklin Coffeehouse, was the second-oldest blues/jazz dive in Buffalo. Promising talent tended to appear there on their way up and then reappear without much fanfare when they were serious headliners. This evening, a local jazz pianist named Coe Pierce and his quartet were playing, the place was half-filled and sleepy, and Kurtz had his usual small table, in the corner as far from the door as possible, his back to the wall. The nearby tables were empty. Occasionally the proprietor and chief bartender, Daddy Bruce Woles, or his granddaughter Ruby would come over to chat and see if Kurtz wanted another beer. He didn’t. Kurtz came for the music, not for the booze.

Kurtz did not really expect Pruno’s friend, Mr. John Wellington Frears, to show. Pruno seemed to know everyone in Buffalo—of the dozen or so street informants Kurtz had used back when he was a P.I., Pruno had been the gem of the lot—but Kurtz doubted if any friend of Pruno’s would be sober enough and presentable enough to make it to Blues Franklin.

Angelina Farino. Other than Little Skag—Stephen or Stevie to family members—she was the only surviving child of the late Don Farino. Her older sister, the late Maria Farino, had been a casualty of her own ambition. Everyone Kurtz knew believed that older sister Angelina had been so disgusted by the Family business that she had removed herself to Italy more than five years earlier, presumably to enter a convent. According to Pruno, this was not quite accurate. It seems that the surviving Ms. Farino was more ambitious than her brothers or sister and had gone back to study crime with the family in Sicily even while getting a master’s degree in business administration from a university in Rome. She also got married twice while there, according to Pruno—first to a young Sicilian from a prominent La Cosa Nostra family who managed to get himself killed, then to an elderly Italian nobleman, Count Pietro Adolfo Ferrara. The information about Count Ferrara was sketchy—he may have died, he may have retired, he may still be in seclusion. He and Angelina may have divorced before she returned here, but perhaps they had not.

“So our local mobster’s kid is really Countess Angelina Farino Ferrara?” Kurtz had asked.

Pruno shook his head. “It appears that whatever her marital status might be, she did not acquire that title.”

“Too bad,” said Kurtz. “It sounds funny.”

Upon returning to the United States a few months earlier, Angelina had worked as a liaison for Little Skag in Attica, paying off politicians to ensure his parole in the coming summer, selling the white elephant of the family house in Orchard Park and buying new digs near the river, and—this was the part that floored Kurtz—opening negotiations with Emilio Gonzaga.

The Gonzagas were the other second-tier, has-been, wiseguy family in Western New York, and the relationship between the Gonzagas and the Farinos made Shakespeare’s Capulets and Montagues look like kissing cousins.

Pruno had already known about the Three Stooges’ contract on Kurtz. “I would have warned you, Joseph, but word hit the street late yesterday and it seems she met with the unlucky trio only the day before.”

“Do you think she was acting on Little Skag’s instructions?” asked Kurtz.

“That is the speculation I hear,” said Pruno. “Rumor is that she was reluctant to pay for the contract…or at least reluctant to hire such inept workmen.”

“Lucky for me she did,” said Kurtz. “Skag was always cheap.” Kurtz had sat in the windy packing crate, observing the ice crystals in the air for a silent minute. “Any word on who they’ll send next?” he asked.

Pruno had shaken his oversized head on that grimy chicken neck of his. The old man’s hands were shaking in a way that was obviously due more to need for an overdue injection of heroin than to the cold air. For the thousandth time, Kurtz wondered where Pruno found the money to support his habit.

“I suspect that the next time, they will invest more money,” Pruno said glumly. “Angelina Farino is rebuilding the Farino Family’s muscle base, bringing in talent from New Jersey and Brooklyn, but evidently they don’t want to have the reemerging Family tied to this particular hit.”

Kurtz said nothing. He was thinking about a European hit man known only as the Dane.

“Sooner or later, however, they will remember the old axiom,” said Pruno.

“Which one’s that?” Kurtz expected a torrent of Latin or Greek. On more than one occasion, he’d left the old man and his friend Soul Dad alone to hash out their arguments in classical languages.

“‘If you want a thing done right, do it yourself,’” said Pruno. He was glancing at the door of the shack, obviously eager for Kurtz to leave.

“One last question,” said Kurtz. “I’m being followed off and on by two homicide cops—Brubaker and Myers. Know anything about them?”

“Detective Fred Brubaker has—in the argot of our time—a major hard-on for you, Joseph. He remains convinced that you were responsible for the demise of his friend and fellow shakedown artist, the late and totally unlamented Sergeant James Hathaway from Homicide.”

“I know that,” said Kurtz. “What I meant was, have you heard anything about Brubaker tying up with one of the families?”

“No, Joseph, but it should be just a matter of time. Such an association was a major source of income for Detective Hathaway, and Brubaker was always sort of a dull-witted understudy to Hathaway. I wish that I had more optimistic news for you.”

Kurtz had said nothing to this. He’d patted the old man’s quaking arm and left the shack.

Sitting in the Blues Franklin, waiting for the mysterious Mr. Frears, Kurtz wondered if it was coincidence that the two homicide cops were tailing him again this evening.

Coe Pierce’s quartet was just wrapping up a fifteen-minute version of Miles Davis’s “All Blues,” filled with Oscar Peterson-like solo riffs for Pierce to fool around with on the piano, when Kurtz saw the well-dressed, middle-aged black man coming toward him from across the room. Kurtz was still wearing his peacoat and now he slipped his hand into the right-side pocket and slid the safety off the .40-caliber S&W semiauto there.

The dignified-looking man came up to the opposite side of Kurtz’s table. “Mr. Kurtz?”

Kurtz nodded. If the man made a move for a weapon, Kurtz would have to fire through his own coat, and he was not crazy about putting a hole in his only jacket.

“I am John Wellington Frears,” said the man. “I believe that our mutual acquaintance, Dr. Frederick, told you that I would be meeting you tonight.”

Dr. Frederick? thought Kurtz. He had once heard Soul Dad refer to Pruno as Frederick, but he’d thought it was the old wino’s first name. “Sit down,” said Kurtz. He kept his hand on the S&W and the pistol aimed under the table as the man took a chair across the table, his back to the quartet that had just taken a break. “What do you want Mr. Frears?”

Frears sighed and rubbed his eyes as if weary. Kurtz noticed that the man was wearing a vest—as Pruno had said—but that it was part of a three-piece gray suit that must have cost several thousand dollars. Frears was a short man, with short curly hair and a perfectly trimmed short curly beard, all going gracefully to gray. His nails were manicured and his horn-rimmed glasses were classic Armani. His watch was subtle, classic and understated, but expensive. He wore no jewelry. He had the kind of intelligent gaze Kurtz had seen in photographs of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois, and in person only with Pruno’s friend Soul Dad.

“I want you to find the man who murdered my little girl,” said John Wellington Frears.

“Why talk to me?” asked Kurtz.

“You’re an investigator.”

“I’m not. I’m a convicted felon, on parole. I have no private investigator’s license, nor will I ever have one again.”

“But you’re a trained investigator, Mr. Kurtz.”

“Not anymore.”

“Dr. Frederick says—”

“Pruno has a hard time telling what day it is,” said Kurtz.

“He assures me that you and your partner, Ms. Fielding, were the finest—”

“That was more than twelve years ago,” Kurtz said. “I can’t help you.”

Frears rubbed his eyes again and reached into his inside jacket pocket. Kurtz’s right hand had never left his pistol. His finger remained on the trigger.

Frears pulled out a small color photograph and slid it across the table toward Kurtz: a black girl, thirteen or fourteen, wearing a black sweater and silver necklace. The girl was attractive and sweet looking, her eyes alive with a more vital version of John Wellington Frears’s intelligence. “My daughter Crystal,” said Frears. “She was murdered twenty years ago next month. May I tell you the story?”

Kurtz said nothing.

“She was our darling,” said Frears. “Marcia’s and mine. Crystal was smart and talented. She played the viola… I’m a concert violinist, Mr. Kurtz, and I know that Crystal was gifted enough to become a professional musician, but that was not even her primary interest. She was a poet—not an adolescent poet, Mr. Kurtz, but a true poet. Dr. Frederick confirmed that, and as you know, Dr. Frederick was not only a philosopher, but a gifted literary critic…”

Kurtz remained silent.

“Twenty years ago next month, Crystal was killed by a man we all knew and trusted, a fellow faculty member—I was teaching at the University of Chicago then, we lived in Evanston. The man was a professor of psychology. His name was James B. Hansen, and he had a family—a wife, and a daughter Rachel’s age. The two girls rode horses together. We had bought Crystal a gelding—Dusty was its name—and we boarded it at a stable outside of town where Crystal and Denise, that was Hansen’s daughter’s name, would ride every Saturday during clement weather. Hansen and I took turns driving Crystal and Denise to the stable and we would wait while they took lessons and rode, Hansen one weekend, me the next.”

Frears stopped and took a bream. There was a noise behind him and he glanced over his shoulder. Coe and the quartet were returning to the stage. They began a slow, Patricia-Barberish rendition of “Inchworm.”

Frears looked back at Kurtz, who had clicked on the safety of the .40 Smith & Wesson, left it in his pocket and brought both hands up onto the table. He did not lift the photograph of the girl or look at it.

“One weekend,” continued Frears, “James B. Hansen picked up Crystal saying that Denise was sick with a cold but that it was his turn to drive and he wanted to do so. But instead of driving her to the stable, he took her to a forest preserve on the outskirts of Chicago, raped our daughter, tortured her, killed her, and left her naked body to be found by hikers.”

Frears’s tone had remained cool and level, as if reciting a story that meant nothing to him, but now he paused for a minute. When he resumed, there was an undercurrent if not a quaver, in his voice. “You may wonder, Mr. Kurtz, how we know for sure that James B. Hansen was the perpetrator of this crime. Well, he called me, Mr. Kurtz. After killing Crystal, he called me from a pay phone—this was before cell phones were common—and told me what he had done. And he told me that he was going home to kill his wife and daughter.”

The Coe Pierce Quartet shifted from the wandering “Inchworm” to a stylized “Flamenco Sketches” that would feature the young black trumpeter, Billy Eversol.

“I called the police, of course,” said Frears. “They rushed to Hansen’s home in Oak Park. He had arrived there first. His Range Rover was parked outside. The house was on fire. When the flames were extinguished, they found the bodies of Mrs. Hansen and Denise—they had each been shot in the back of the head by a large-caliber pistol—and the charred body of James. B. Hansen. They identified his body via dental records. The police determined that he had used the same pistol on himself.”

Kurtz sipped his beer, set the glass down and said, “Twenty years ago.”

“Next month.”

“But your James B. Hansen isn’t really dead.”

John Wellington Frears blinked behind his round Armanis. “How did you know that?”

“Why would you need an investigator if he was?”

“Ah, precisely,” said Frears. He licked his lips and took another bream. Kurtz realized that the man was in pain—not just existential or emotional pain, but serious physical pain, as if from a disease that made it hard for him to breathe. “He is not dead. I saw him ten days ago.”

“Where?”

“Here in Buffalo.”

“Where?”

“At the airport, Concourse Two to be precise. I was leaving Buffalo—I had performed twice at Kleinhan’s Music Hall—and was catching a flight to LaGuardia. I live in Manhattan. I had just passed through that metal-detector device when I saw him on the other side of the security area. He was carrying an expensive tan-leather satchel and heading for the doors. I cried out—I called his name—I tried to give chase, but the security people stopped me. I could not go through the metal detectors in the direction I had to in order to catch him. By the time the security people allowed me to go on, he was long gone.”

“And you’re sure it was Hansen?” said Kurtz. “He looked the same?”

“Not at all the same,” said Frears. “He was twenty years older and thirty pounds heavier. Hansen was always a big man, he had played football back in Nebraska when he was in college, but now he seemed even larger, stronger. His hair had been long and he had worn a beard in Chicago—it was the early eighties, after all—and now he had short gray hair, a military sort of crew cut, and was clean-shaven. No, he looked nothing like the James B. Hansen of Chicago twenty years ago.”

“But you’re sure it was him?”

“Absolutely,” said Frears.

“You contacted the Buffalo police?”

“Of course. I spent days talking with different people here. I think that one of the detectives actually believed me. But there is no James Hansen in any Buffalo-area directory. No Hansen or anyone fitting his description on the faculty of any of the local universities. No psychologists with that name in Buffalo. And my daughter’s case file is officially closed. There was nothing they could do.”

“And what did you want me to do?” said Kurtz, his voice low.

“Well, I want you to…”

“Kill him,” said Kurtz.

John Wellington Frears blinked and his head snapped back as if he had been slapped. “Kill him? Good God, no. Why would you say that, Mr. Kurtz?”

“He raped and killed your daughter. You’re a professional violinist, obviously well off. You could afford to hire any legitimate private investigator—hire an entire agency if you want. Why else would you come to me unless you wanted the man killed?”

Frears’s mouth opened and then closed again. “No, Mr. Kurtz, you misunderstand. Dr. Frederick is the one person I know well in Buffalo—obviously he has fallen on hard times, but his sagacity abides beneath the sad circumstances—and he recommended you highly as an investigator who could find Hansen for me. And you are correct about my financial status. I will reward you very generously, Mr. Kurtz. Very generously indeed.”

“And if I found him? What would you do, Mr. Frears?”

“Inform the police, of course. I’m staying at the Airport Sheraton until this nightmare is over.”

Kurtz drank the last of his beer. Coe was playing a bluesy version of “Summertime.”

“Mr. Frears,” Kurtz said, “you’re a very civilized man.”

Frears adjusted his glasses. “So you’ll take the case, Mr. Kurtz?”

“No.”

Frears blinked again. “No?”

“No.”

Frears sat in silence a moment and then stood. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Kurtz. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

Frears turned to go and had taken several steps when Kurtz called his name. The man stopped and turned, his handsome, pained face showing something like hope. “Yes, Mr. Kurtz?”

“You forgot your photograph,” Kurtz said. He held up the photo of the dead girl.

“You keep it, Mr. Kurtz. I no longer have Crystal and my wife left me three years after Crystal’s death, but I have many photographs. You keep it, Mr. Kurtz.” Frears crossed the room and went out the door of the Blues Franklin.

Big Daddy Brace’s granddaughter Ruby came over. “Daddy told me to tell you that those two cops parked down the street left.”

“Thanks, Ruby.”

“You want another beer, Joe?”

“Scotch.”

“Any particular kind?”

“The cheapest kind,” said Kurtz. When Ruby went back to the bar, Kurtz lifted the photograph, tore it into small pieces, and dropped the pieces into the ashtray.

CHAPTER

FIVE

Angelina Farino Ferrara jogged every morning at 6:00 A.M., even though 6:00 A.M. at this time of the winter in Buffalo meant she jogged in the dark. Most of her jogging route was lighted with streetlights or pedestrian-walkway streetlamps, but for the dark patches near the river she wore a backpacking headlamp held in place by elastic straps. It did not look all that elegant, Angelina supposed, but she didn’t give a flying fuck how she looked when she ran.

Upon her return from Sicily in December, Angelina had sold the old Farino estate in Orchard Park and moved what was left of the Family operation to a penthouse condo overlooking the Buffalo Marina. Ribbons of expressways and an expanse of park separated the marina area from the city, but at night she could look east and north to what little skyline Buffalo offered, while the river and lake guarded her eastern flank. Since she had bought the place, the view westward was mostly of the ice and gray clouds above the river, although there was a glimpse of Canada, that Promised Land to her grandfather during Prohibition days and the earliest source of the family revenue. Staring at the ice and the dreary Buffalo skyline day after day, Angelina Farino Ferrara looked forward to spring, although she knew that summer would bring her brother Stephen’s parole and the end of her days of being acting don.

Her jogging route took her a mile and a half north along the pathway following the marina parkway, down through a pedestrian tunnel to the frozen riverside—one could not call it a beach—for another half mile before looping around and returning along the Riverside Drive walkway. Even from behind bars in Attica, her brother Stevie—Angelina knew that everyone else thought of him as little Skag—refused to allow her to go out alone, but although she was importing good talent from New Jersey and Brooklyn to replace the idiots her father had kept on retainer, none of these lasagna-fed mama’s boys were in good enough shape to keep up with her when she ran. Angelina envied the new President of the United States; even though he didn’t jog much, when he did, he had Secret Service men who could run with him.

For a few days, she had suffered the indignities of having Marco and Leo—the Boys, as she thought of them—follow along behind her on bicycles. Marco and Leo weren’t very happy with that situation either, since neither had ridden a bike even when he was a kid and their fat asses hung over the saddles like so much unleavened dough. But in recent weeks, they had compromised: Angelina jogging along the plowed walking path while Leo and Marco trolled alongside on the usually empty Riverside Drive in their Lincoln Town Car. Of course, after jogging through the pedestrian underpass, there were three or four minutes when she was technically out of sight of the Boys—who waited at a turnout eating their doughnuts until she reappeared through the trees, now heading south—but Angelina figured she had those few minutes of privacy covered with the little Italian-made .45-caliber Compact Witness semiauto she carried in a quick-release holster clipped to the waist of her jogging suit, under her loose sweatshirt. She also carried a tiny cell phone with the Boys’ mobile number on speed-dial, but she knew she would reach for the Compact Witness before the phone.

This morning she was thinking about the ongoing discussions with the Gonzagas and did not even flick a see-you-later wave at the Boys when she followed the footpath west, away from the street, and jogged down through the underpass, careful as always not to slip on any ice there.

A man with a pistol was waiting for her at the far end of the underpass. It was a serious-caliber semiauto and he had it aimed right at her chest. He held the gun in one hand, the way her father and uncles used to do before an entire generation was trained to carry handguns two-handed, as if they weighed thirty pounds.

Angelina slid to a stop and raised her hands. She could always hope that it was just a robbery. If it was, she’d blow the motherfucker’s head off as soon as he turned to go.

“Good morning, Signorita Farino,” said the man in the peacoat. “Or is it Signora Ferrara?”

All right, she thought So much for the robbery hope. But if it was a hit, it was the slowest goddamned hit in Mafia memory. This guy could have popped her and been gone by now. He must know about the Boys waiting just a few hundred meters away. Angelina caught her breath and looked at the man’s face.

“Kurtz,” she said. They’d never met, but she had studied the photograph Stevie had sent her to give to the Stooges.

The man neither smiled nor nodded. Nor did he lower s aim. “I know you’re carrying,” he said. “Keep your hands there and nothing dramatic’s going to happen. Yet.”

“You cannot imagine what a mistake you’re making,” Angelina Farino Ferrara said slowly and carefully.

“What are you going to do?” said Kurtz. “Put a contract out on me?”

Angelina had never met this man, but she knew enough about his history not to be coy with him. “That was Stevie’s call,” she said. “I was just the messenger.”

“Why the Stooges?” asked Kurtz.

Angelina was surprised by the question, but only for a second. “Consider them an entrance exam,” she said. She debated lowering her hands, looked at Kurtz’s eyes, and kept them where they were.

“An exam for what?” asked Kurtz.

Keep talking, thought Angelina. Another two or three minutes and the Boys would come looking for her when she didn’t appear on the return leg of the jog. Or will they? It’s cold this morning. The Lincoln is warm. Perhaps four minutes. She kept herself from checking her big digital watch. “I thought you might be useful to us,” she said. “Useful to me. Stevie ordered the contract, but I chose the idiots to see if you were any good.”

“Why does Little Skag want me dead?” asked Kurtz. Angelina realized that the man must be very strong, since the .40-caliber pistol he was aiming was not light but his extended arm never wavered for a second.

“Stevie thinks you had something to do with my father and sister’s deaths,” she said.

“No he doesn’t.” Kurtz’s voice was absolutely flat.

Knowing that if she argued witch him, she might gain more time—or might just get shot in the heart more quickly—she decided to tell the truth. “He thinks you’re dangerous, Kurtz. You know too much.” Such as the fact that he hired you to hire the Dane to kill Maria and Pop, she thought, but did not say aloud.

“What’s your angle?”

“My arms are getting tired. Can I just—”

“No,” said Kurtz. The pistol’s muzzle still did not waver.

“I want some leverage when Stevie gets out,” she said, amazed to hear herself telling this ex-con what she would tell no one else in the world. “I thought you would be useful to me.”

“How?”

“By killing Emilio Gonzaga and his top people.”

“Why the hell would I do that?” asked Kurtz. His voice did not even sound curious to Angelina, just mildly bemused.

She took a breath. Now it was all or nothing. She hadn’t planned it this way. Actually, she’d planned to have Kurtz on his knees in a few weeks, his hands restraint-taped behind his back, and perhaps missing a few teeth when she got to this part. Now all she could do was go ahead and watch his face, his eyes, the muscles around his mouth, and his swallowing reflex—those parts of a person that could not not react.

“Emilio Gonzaga ordered your little pal Samantha killed twelve years ago,” she said.

For a second, Angelina felt exactly like a duelist whose only pistol shot has misfired. Nothing about Joe Kurtz’s hard face changed one iota—nothing. Looking into his eyes was like looking at some Hieronymus Bosch painting of a medieval executioner—if such a painting existed, which she knew it did not. For a wild instant, she considered throwing herself to the ground, rolling, and pulling the .45 Compact Witness from her belt, but the unwavering black muzzle aborted that thought.

Another minute and the Boys will—She knew she did not have another minute. Angelina Farino Ferrara did not go in for self-delusion.

“No,” Kurtz said at last.

“Yes,” said Angelina. “I know you took care of Eddie Falco and Manny Levine twelve years ago, but they were on Gonzaga’s leash at the time. He gave the word.”

“I would have known that.”

“No one knew that.”

“Falco and Levine were small-time drug pushers,” said Kurtz. “They were too stupid to…” He stopped, as if thinking of something.

“Yeah,” said Angelina. “The little girl. The missing teenage girl—Elizabeth Connors—that your partner Samantha was hunting for. The high-school girl who later turned up dead. The trail led through Falco and Levine because the kidnapping was a Gonzaga gig; Connors owed him almost a quarter of a million dollars and the girl was leverage—just leverage—and those two idiots had been Elizabeth’s friendly schoolyard pushers. After your partner stumbled across the connection, Emilio gave the word to Eddie and Manny to get rid of her and then he got rid of the kid. And then you got rid of Falco and Levine for him.”

Kurtz shook his head slightly, but his gaze never left Angelina. The gun was still aimed at her chest. Angelina knew that the .40-caliber slug would smash her heart to a pulp before blasting it out through her spine.

“You were stupid, Kurtz,” she said. “You even did time to help throw investigators off Gonzaga’s track. It must amuse the shit out of him.”

“I would have heard,” said Kurtz.

“You didn’t,” said Angelina, knowing that time was up now—his and hers. It had to go one way or the other. “No one heard. But I can prove it. Give me a chance. Call me and we’ll set up a meeting. I’ll show you the proof and tell you how I can buy you indemnity from Stevie. And more important, how you can get to the Gonzagas.”

There was a long pause of silence, broken only by the wind blowing in from the lake. It was very cold. Angelina felt her legs threatening to quiver—from the cold, she hoped—and forced them not to. Finally, Joe Kurtz said, “Take that top off.”

She had to raise her eyebrows at that. “Not getting enough, Joe? Been hard to score since you screwed my sister?”

Kurtz said nothing, but gestured with the muzzle of the pistol.

Keeping her hands in sight, she tugged off the straps of the tiny headlamp and pulled the loose sweatshirt over her head, dropping it on the black pavement. She stood there only in her jogging bra, knowing that her nipples were more than visible as they pressed through the thin cotton. She hoped it distracted the hell out of Kurtz.

It didn’t. With his free hand, Kurtz pointed to the wall of the underpass. “Assume the position.” When she spreadeagled against the wall with her hands on the cold concrete, he approached warily and kicked her feet farmer apart. He tugged her Compact Witness .45 out of its holster and ran his hands quickly, professionally, down her front and thighs, pulling the cell phone from her pocket. He smashed the phone and put the Compact Witness in his peacoat pocket.

“I want that forty-five back,” she said, speaking to the cold breath of the wall. “It has sentimental value. I shot my first husband in Sicily with it.”

For the first time, there came something that might have been a human sound—a dry chuckle?—from Kurtz. Or maybe he was just clearing his throat. He handed her a cell phone over her shoulder. “Keep this. If I want to talk to you, I’ll call you.”

“Can I turn around?” said Angelina.

“No.”

She heard him backing away and then there came the sound of a car starting. Angelina rushed to the opening of the tunnel in time to see an old Volvo disappearing along the footpath into the trees to the north.

She had time to put on her sweatshirt, tug on her headlamp, and slip the cell phone under her shirt before Marco and Leo came panting down the path, pistols drawn.

“What? What? Why’d you stop?” wheezed Leo while Marco swept the area with his pistol.

I should fire these shitheads, thought Angelina. She said, “Charley horse.”

“We heard a car,” panted Leo.

“Yeah, me too,” said Angelina. “Big help you two would’ve been if it had been an assassin.”

Leo blanched. Marco shot her a pissed look. Maybe I’ll just fire Leo, she thought.

“You want a ride back?” asked Leo. “Or you gonna keep running?”

“With a charley horse?” said Angelina. “I’ll be lucky to hobble to the car.”

CHAPTER

SIX

It was just getting light—predawn Buffalo grayness bleeding into even dimmer Buffalo morning gray—when Kurtz got back to his flophouse hotel, only to find that Detectives Brubaker and Myers had come to roust him.

Kurtz had various telltales in his hotel to tell him if visitors were waiting, but these weren’t called for this morning. The hotel was in a rough neighborhood and the local kids had already spray-painted Brubaker’s unmarked Plymouth with the tag UNMRACKED CAR on the driver’s side—spelling was not the local hoodlums’ strong suit—and PIGMOBILE—they had not planned their spacing well—on the passenger side. Something about the sound of “pigmobi” amused Kurtz.

The rest of the situation did not amuse him all that much. Brubaker and Myers rousted him about once every three weeks and, so far, they’d not caught him with a weapon, but when they did—and the law of averages suggested they would have to—he’d be back in prison within twenty-four hours. Paroled felons in New York State were exempt from the God-given, Constitution-guaranteed, and redneck-worshiped right of every American to carry as much firepower as he wanted.

With his .40 S&W in one pocket and Angelina Farino Ferrara’s cute but heavy little Compact Witness in the other, Kurtz went into the alley in back of his hotel and stashed both weapons behind some masonry he’d loosened himself two weeks earlier. The alley’s resident winos and druggies were at the shelter or protecting their benches at this time of day, so Kurtz guessed that he might have a few hours before some scavenger would find his stash. If this roust took more than a few hours, he was screwed anyway and probably would not need the weapons.

Kurtz’s residence hotel, the Royal Delaware Arms, had been a fancy place about the time President McKinley had been shot in Buffalo two turns of the century ago. McKinley may have stayed here the night before he was shot as far as Kurtz knew. The hotel had been going downhill for the past ninety years and seemed to have reached a balance point somewhere between total decay and imminent collapse. The Royal Delaware Arms was ten stories tall and boasted a sixty-foot radio-transmission tower on its roof, pouring out microwave radiation day and night, lethal doses according to many of the hotel’s more paranoid inhabitants. The tower was about the only thing on the premises that worked. Over the preceding decades, the hotel part of the building, the lower five floors, had gone from a workingman’s hotel to flophouse to low-income housing center, and then back to residential flophouse. Most of the residents were on welfare, lithium, and/or Thorazine. Kurtz had convinced the manager to let him live on the eighth floor, even though the top three floors had been effectively abandoned since the 1970s. A loophole in the fire and building codes had not specifically prohibited the rooms from being rented or some idiot from renting one—living up there amidst the peeling wallpaper, exposed lathing, and dripping pipes—and that is exactly what Kurtz was doing. The room still had a door and a refrigerator and running water, and that was all Kurtz really needed.

His room—two large, connected rooms, actually—was on the alley-side corner and served not by one but by two rusting fire escapes. The elevator doors above the fifth floor had been sealed off, so Kurtz had to walk the last three floors every time he came or went. That was a small trade-off for the security of knowing when anyone had visited him and for the warning he would get when someone tried to visit him. Both Petie, the manager and day man on the counter, and Gloria, the night man on the counter, were paid enough each month to be trustworthy about ringing Kurtz on his cell phone if anyone unknown to them headed toward the elevator or stairs.

Now Kurtz let himself in the alley entrance in case Brubaker had left his sidekick Myers in the lobby—unlikely, since plainclothes cops were like snakes or nuns and always traveled in pairs. He took the back stairs up to the third floor from the abandoned kitchen in back and then walked up the smelly main staircase to the eighth floor. At the sixth-floor level, Kurtz could see the two sets of footprints in the plaster dust he’d left covering the center of the stairs. Brubaker, who had the larger feet—Kurtz had noticed before—had a hole in his sole. That sounded about right to Kurtz.

The footprints led down the center of the dusty and dark corridor—Kurtz kept to the walls when he came and went—and ended at the open door to his room. The two detectives had kicked his door in, splintering the lock and knocking the door off the hinges. Kurtz braced himself, made his stomach muscles rigid, and walked into his home.

Myers came out from behind the door and hit him in the belly with what felt like brass knuckles. Kurtz went down and tried to roll against the wall, but Brubaker had time to step in from the opposite side of the door and give Kurtz a kick to the head that landed on his shoulder as he tucked and rolled again.

Myers kicked him in the back of his left leg, paralyzing the calf muscle, while Brubaker—the taller, uglier, smarter one of the pair—pulled his Glock-9mm and pressed it to the soft spot behind Kurtz’s left ear.

“Give us a reason,” hissed Detective Brubaker.

Kurtz did not move. He could not breathe yet, but he knew from experience that his stunned belly muscles and diaphragm would relax from the blow before he passed out from lack of oxygen.

“Give me a fucking reason” shouted Brubaker, cocking the piece. It didn’t need cocking of course, since it was a single-action, but it looked and sounded dramatic.

“Hey, hey, Fred,” said Myers, sounding sincerely alarmed.

“Fuck hey, hey, Tommy,” said Brubaker, spraying Kurtz’s cheek with saliva. “This miserable fuck—” He slapped Kurtz hard on the neck with the cocked pistol and then kicked him in the small of the back.

Kurtz grunted and did not move.

“Pat him down,” snapped Brubaker.

With Brubaker’s Glock against his temple now, Kurtz lay still while Myers frisked him roughly, ripping buttons off his peacoat as he pulled it open, turning his pockets inside out.

“He’s clean, Fred.”

“Fuck!” The muzzle quit pressing into the flesh next to Kurtz’s left eye. “Sit up, asshole, hands behind your back, back against the wall.”

Kurtz did as he was told. Myers was lounging on the arm of the sprung sofa Kurtz had dragged up to serve as both furniture and bed. Brubaker was standing five feet away with the 9mm still aimed at Kurtz’s head.

“I ought to kill you right now, you miserable cocksucker,” Brubaker said conversationally. He patted the pocket of his cheap suit. “I’ve got a throwdown right here. Leave you here. The rats would have you three-fourths eaten before anyone fucking found you.”

They’d have all of me eaten before anyone found me up here, thought Kurtz. He did not share the opinion aloud.

“Jimmy Hathaway’s ghost would rest easy,” said Brubaker, voice tense again, finger also tense on the trigger.

“Fred, Fred,” said Myers, playing the good cop. Or at least the semi-sane cop. The non-rogue killer cop.

“Fuck it,” said Brubaker, lowering the weapon. “You’re not worth it, you piece of ratshit. Not when we’ll get to do you legally soon enough. You’re not worth the fucking paperwork this way.” He stepped forward and kicked Kurtz in the belly.

Kurtz sagged against the wall and began the countdown to a point where he could breathe again.

Brubaker walked out. Myers paused for a moment looking down at the gasping Kurtz. “You shouldn’t have killed Hathaway,” the fat man said softly. “Fred knows you did it and someday he’s going to prove it. Then there won’t be any warnings.”

Myers walked out too, and Kurtz listened to their footfalls and cursing about the elevator as they descended the echoing staircase. He made a mental note to sprinkle more plaster dust on the steps. He hoped they wouldn’t tear his Volvo apart when they searched it.

It could have been much worse. Brubaker and Hathaway had been friends, of sorts, and both were crooked cops, but Hathaway had been on the Farino pad and on the personal payroll of Maria Farino during her short-lived bid to take over her father’s business. Hathaway had seen a chance to take out Kurtz and curry favor with Maria Farino, and it had almost worked for him. Almost. If Brubaker and Myers had been working directly for the Farinos or Gonzagas now, it could have been a short, bad morning for Joe Kurtz. At least now he knew for sure that the cops weren’t totally in Ms. Angelina Farino Ferrara’s pocket.

When Kurtz could finally stand, he staggered a few steps, opened the window, and vomited out into the alley. No reason to get his bathroom all messy. He’d cleaned it just a week or two before.

When he could breathe a little better and his stomach muscles had quit their spasms, Kurtz went to the refrigerator to get breakfast carrying the Miller Lite with him as he sprawled on the couch. He knew he had to get down to the alley to retrieve the two pistols, but he thought he’d rest a bit before doing that.

Ten minutes later, he flipped open his phone and called Arlene at the office.

“What’s new, Joe? You’re up early.”

“I want you to do a deep data search for me,” said Kurtz. “James B. Hansen.” He spelled the last name. “He was a psychologist in Chicago in the early eighties. You’ll find some newspaper articles and police reports from that period. I want everything you can get—everything—and a search of all James Hansens since then.”

“All?”

“All,” said Kurtz. “Cross-referenced to psychology journals, university faculties, crime database, marriage licenses, drivers’ licenses, property transactions, the whole smash. And there’s a triple murder and suicide involved in Chicago. Cross-check against all similar murder-suicides since then, using the crime database. Have the software search for common names, anagrams, factors, whatever.”

“Do you know how much time and money this is going to cost us, Joe?”

“No.”

“Do you care?”

“No.”

“Should I use all of our computer resources?” Arlene’s son and husband had been expert computer hackers and she had most of their tools at her disposal, including unauthorized e-mail drops and authority from her previous jobs as legal secretary—including one stint working for the Erie County district attorney. She was asking Kurtz whether she should break the law in requesting files.

“Yes,” said Kurtz.

He could hear Arlene sigh and then exhale cigarette smoke. “All right. Is this urgent? Should I push it ahead of today’s Sweetheart Search?”

“No,” said Kurtz. “It’ll keep. Get to it when you can.”

“I presume this isn’t a Sweetheart Search client we’re talking about, is it, Joe?”

Kurtz sipped the last of his beer.

“Is this James B. Hansen in Buffalo now?” asked Arlene.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Also, I need another check.”

“Listening,” said Arlene. He could imagine her with her pen and pad poised.

“John Wellington Frears,” said Kurtz. “Concert violinist. He lives in New York, probably Manhattan, probably the Upper East Side. He probably doesn’t have a criminal record, but I want everything you can get on his medical records.”

“Shall I use all possible—”

“Yes,” said Kurtz. Medical records were among the most closely guarded secrets in America, but Arlene’s last job while Kurtz was in prison had been with a nest of ambulance chasers. She could ferret out medical records that the patient’s doctor did not know existed.

“Okay. Are you coming in today? We could look at some office space I marked in the paper.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be in,” said Kurtz. “How’s Wedding Bells coming?”

“Data-mining services are all lined up,” said Arlene. “Kevin’s waiting to get us incorporated. I’ve got the Website designed and ready to go. All I need is the money in the bank so I can write the check.”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz and clicked off. He lay on the couch for a while and gazed at the twelve-foot-wide waterstain on the ceiling. Sometimes it looked like some fractal imagery or a medieval tapestry design to Kurtz. Other times it just looked like a fucking waterstain. Today it was a stain.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

Angelina Farino Ferrara hated eating shit for the Gonzagas. The “negotiations” all took place at the creepy old Gonzaga compound on Grand Island in the center of the Niagara River. This meant that Angelina and the Boys were picked up in one of Emilio Gonzaga’s tacky white stretch limousines—the Gonzagas controlled most of the limousine services in Western New York—and driven across the bridge and through various checkpoints into the Grand Island fortress under the careful watch of Mickey Kee, Gonzaga’s toughest killer. Once at the compound, more of Emilio’s goons would pat them down and check them for wires before sitting the Boys down in a windowless vestibule and marching Angelina into one of the manse’s many rooms as if she were a prisoner of war, which, in a real sense, she was.

The war hadn’t been her doing, of course—nothing in the family business had been her doing for the past six years—but was a result of her brother Stephen’s bizarre machinations to seize control of his own family business from behind bars in Attica. The housecleaning that Stevie had instigated—involving, Angelina knew, the murder of her conniving sister and useless father, although Stevie did not know that she knew—had also brought the Gonzagas into the Farino family business to the tune of a half-million dollars, most of it going to a hit man known only as the Dane, who had carried out the Hamlet-like last act for the don, Maria, and their double-dealing family consigliere at the time. The Gonzaga money had bought a sort of peace between the families—or at least a cease-fire with Stevie and the surviving members of the Farino family—but it also meant that tacit control of the Farino family was currently in the hands of their traditional enemies. When Angelina thought of the fat, fish-faced, blubbery-lipped, sweating pig-hemorrhoid that was Emilio Gonzaga determining the Farinos’ destiny, she wanted to rip both his and her brother’s heads off and piss down their necks.

“A pleasure to see you again, Angelina,” said Emilio Gonzaga, showing his cigar-stained pig’s teeth in what he undoubtedly thought was a seductive, debonair smile.

“So nice to see you, Emilio,” said Angelina with a shy, self-effacing half-smile she had borrowed. from a Carmelite nun she used to drink with in Rome. If she and Emilio had been alone at that moment, with none of Gonzaga’s bodyguards around, especially the dangerous Mickey Kee, she would have happily shot the fat don in the testicles. One at a time.

“I hope it is not too early for lunch,” said Emilio, leading her into a dark-beamed, dark-paneled, windowless dining room. The interior furnishings looked as if they had been designed by Lucretia Borgia on a down day. “Something light,” said Emilio, gesturing grandly to a table and a dark-wood sideboard groaning under the weight of large bowls of pasta, haunches of beef, fish whose eyes stared up plaintively, a stack of lobster glowing pink, three types of potatoes, entire loaves of Italian bread, and half a dozen bottles of heavy wine.

“Wonderful,” said Angelina. Emilio Gonzaga held the black, high-backed chair for her while she took her place. As always, the fat man smelled of sweat, cigars, halitosis, and something faintly Cloroxy, like stale semen. She gave him her coyest smile again while one of his pigboy bodyguards pulled out his chair as he took his place at the head of the table, to her left.

They talked business while they ate. Emilio was one of those men—like former President Clinton—who liked to grin and talk and laugh with his mouth full. Another reason Angelina had fled to Europe for six years. But now she ignored the display, nodded attentively, and tried to sound smart but not too smart, agreeable but not a total pushover, and—when Emilio flirted—appropriately slutty but not a complete roundheels.

“So,” he said, segueing smoothly from the business side of the new merger and acquisition he was arranging, in which the Farino family would merge into oblivion and the Gonzagas would acquire everything, “this power-sharing thing, this idea of the three of us running things—” Emilio’s veneer of education slipped as he pronounced the word tings “—it’s what the old guys, the Romans, our ancestors, used to call a troika.”

“Triumvirate,” said Angelina. She immediately wished she’d kept her mouth shut. Suffer fools. Count Ferrara had taught her. Then make them suffer.

“What’s that?” Emilio Gonzaga was picking at something in his side teeth.

“Triumvirate,” repeated Angelina. “That’s what the Romans used to call it when they had three leaders at one time. A troika is the Russian phrase for three leaders…or three anything. It was what they called three horses hitched to a sleigh.”

Emilio grunted and glanced over his shoulder. The two white-jacketed goons he had left in the room to act as waiters stood with their hands over their crotches and their stares focused on nothing. Mickey Kee and the other bodyguard stared at the ceiling. No one wanted to be paying attention when the don was corrected.

“Whatever,” said Emilio. “The point is that you benefit, I benefit, and Little Ska… Stephen…he benefits the most. Like old times, only without the rancor.” Gonzaga pronounced the last word rain-core.

It’s like old times, only this time with you elected God, me elected your whore, and Stevie elected to die within a few months after he gets out, thought Angelina. She lifted the glass of bilious cabernet. “To new beginnings,” she said brightly.

The cell phone Kurtz had given her rang. Emilio stopped his chewing and frowned at her breach of etiquette.

“I’m sorry, Emilio,” she said. “Only Stevie, his lawyer, and a few other people use this private line. I should take it.” She rose from the table and turned her back to the pig on his throne. “Yes?”

“The Sabres are playing tonight,” came Joe Kurtz’s voice. “Go to the game.”

“All right.”

“After the first serious injury, go to the women’s rest room near the main doors.” He disconnected.

Angelina put the phone back in her tiny purse and sat down again. Emilio was sloshing after-dinner liqueur around in his cheeks as if it were mouthwash.

“That was short,” he said.

“But sweet,” said Angelina.

The goons brought coffee in a silver urn and five types of pastry.

It was late afternoon, snowing harder and almost dark when Kurtz drove thirty minutes north to the suburban village of Lockport. The house on Locust Street looked comfortable, middle-class, and safe—lights burning on both floors—when Kurtz drove past, turned left, and parked halfway down the next street in front of a ranch house for sale. Donald Rafferty didn’t know Kurtz’s Volvo, but this wasn’t the kind of neighborhood that wouldn’t notice if a car with someone in it kept parking along a residential street for long periods of time.

Kurtz had an electronic device the size of a compact boom box on the passenger seat, and now he plugged in earphones. To anyone passing by, he would look like someone waiting for a realtor late on a Friday afternoon, someone enjoying his Discman.

The boom box was a short-range radio receiver tuned to the five bugs he had planted in Rafferty and Rachel’s home three months earlier. The electronic gear had cost him what savings he’d had at the time, and Kurtz had not chosen to get a stronger transmitter or tape equipment—he didn’t have the time or personnel to pour through tapes anyway—but this way, he could eavesdrop when he was in the neighborhood, which was often. The evening sampling told him quite a bit.

Rachel, Sam’s fourteen-year-old daughter, was an intelligent, quiet, sensitive and lonely child. She made daughterly overtures to Rafferty, her adoptive father, but the man was either too busy, too distracted by his gambling, or too drunk to pay any attention. He wasn’t abusive to Rachel, unless one counted absolute indifference as abuse.

Sam had been married to Rafferty for only ten months—and that four years previous to Rachel’s birth, which owed nothing to Donnie Rafferty—but Sam had left no other family behind when she was murdered twelve years ago, so his appointment as the girl’s guardian had seemed to make sense at the time. Her insurance and family inheritance must have been attractive to Rafferty when he petitioned to adopt Rachel; the money had paid for his house and car and settled more than a few of his gambling debts. But now Rafferty had started losing heavily again, which meant that he was drinking heavily again as well. Rafferty had three regular girlfriends, two of whom spent nights with him in Lockport on a well-scheduled basis, so that each of the two would not find evidence of the other. The third girlfriend was a coke-pushing whore on Seneca Street who didn’t know or care where Rafferty lived.

Kurtz tuned in the bugs. Donald Rafferty had just hung up after promising his bookie, a sleazo that Kurtz had known professionally, that he would have the next payment to him by Monday. Now Rafferty called DeeDee, his Number Two girlfriend, and started making plans for the weekend. This time, they were going away together, up to Toronto, which meant that Rachel was being left home alone again.

Kurtz had not bugged Rachel’s bedroom, but he quickly checked the family room and kitchen taps. There came the soft sounds of plates being rinsed and set in the dishwasher.

Rafferty finished his phone conversation after telling DeeDee to “bring the little leather thing along this weekend” and walked into the kitchen—Kurtz could hear the footsteps. A cupboard was opened and closed; Kurtz knew that Rafferty kept his booze in the kitchen and his cocaine in the top drawer of his dresser. Another cupboard. The sensitive microphone picked up the sound of the drink—Rafferty stocked more bourbon than anything else—being poured.

“Goddamn snow. Walk’ll need shoveling again in the morning.” His voice was slurred.

“Okay, Dad.”

“I’ve got a business trip again this weekend. I’ll be back Sunday or Monday.”

During the interval of silence, Kurtz tried to imagine what kind of weekend business trip a U.S. Postal Service clerk would have to take.

Rachel’s voice. “Could Melissa come over tomorrow night to watch a video with me?”

“No.”

“Could I go over to their house to watch one if I was back by nine?”

“No.” The cupboard was opened and closed again.

The dishwasher began running.

“Rache?” Kurtz knew from his sampling of her phone conversations with Melissa—her only real friend—that Rachel hated that nickname.

“Yes, Daddy?”

“That’s really a pretty thing you’re wearing.”

For a time, the only noise was the dishwasher.

“This sweatshirt?”

“Yeah. It looks…different.”

“It’s not. It’s the one I got at the Falls last summer.”

“Yeah, well…you look pretty is all.”

The dishwasher kicked into the rinse cycle.

“I’m going to take the garbage out,” said Rachel.

It was full dark now. Kurtz left his earphones on as he drove around the block, slowing as he passed the house. He saw the girl at the side of the house. Her hair was longer now, and even in the dim glow from the porch light, he could see that it looked more the color of Sam’s red hair than it had when it was shorter in the fall. Rachel pressed the garbage bag down in the trash can and stood for a minute in the side yard, turned mostly away from Kurtz and the street, holding her face up to the falling snow.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

At the same time, in the suburb of Tonawanda, a thirty-minute drive from Lockport, James B. Hansen—aka Robert Millworth aka Howard G. Lane aka Stanley Steiner aka half a dozen other names, none of which shared the same initials—was celebrating his fiftieth birthday.

Hansen—his current name was Robert Gaines Millworth—was surrounded by friends and loving family, including his wife of three years, Donna, his stepson Jason, and his eight-year-old Irish setter, Dickson. The long driveway to his modernist home facing Elicott Creek was filled with moderately expensive sedans and SUVs belonging to his friends and colleagues, who had braved yet another snowstorm to join him at his well-planned surprise party.

Hansen was relaxed and jovial. He’d returned from an extended business trip to Miami only a week and a half earlier and his tan was the envy of everyone. Hansen had indeed put on almost thirty pounds since his University of Chicago psychologist days, but he was six-feet-four, much of the extra weight was muscle, and even the fat was toned up and useful when push came to shove.

Now Hansen moved among his guests, stopping to chat with clusters of friends, grinning at the inevitable fiftieth-birthday-over-the-hill jokes, and generally patting everyone on the shoulder or shaking their hands. Occasionally Hansen would think about that hand of his, where it had been, about what he’d buried in an Everglades hummock twelve days earlier, and what that hand had touched, and he had to smile. Stepping out onto the modern concrete-and-industrial-wire terrace above the front door, James Hansen breathed in the cold night air, blinked snowflakes off his eyelashes, and sniffed his hand. After two weeks, he knew the smell of lime and blood could not still be there, but the memory of it made something hard stir in him.

When James B. Hansen had been twelve years old—living under his real name, which he had all but forgotten by now—and growing up in Kearney, Nebraska, he had seen the Tony Curtis movie The Great Imposter. Based on a true story, the film was about a man who went from job to job and identity to identity—at one point impersonating a doctor and actually carrying out lifesaving surgery. Since then, almost forty years ago, the idea had been used countless times in films and television and so-called “reality programming,” but to young James B. Hansen, the movie was an epiphany comparable to Saul’s being-knocked-off-his-ass revelation on the road to Damascus.

Hansen had immediately begun re-creating himself, first by lying to friends, teachers, and his mother—his father had died in a car accident when Hansen was six. Hansen’s mother then died when he was a freshman at the University of Nebraska; within days he dropped out of the university, moved to Indianapolis, and changed his name and history. It was so easy. Identity in the United States was essentially a matter of choice and acquiring the proper birth certificates, driver’s licenses, credit cards, college and graduate-school transcripts, and so forth was child’s play.

Child’s play for James B. Hansen as a child had been pulling the wings off flies and vivisecting kittens. Hansen knew that this was a sure early sign of a sociopathic and dangerous psychotic personality—he had earned his living for two years as a professor of psychology and taught these things in his abnormal-psych courses—but this did not bother him. What the conformity-strait-jacketed mediocrities labeled as sociopathology, he knew to be liberation—liberation from social constraints that the weak millions never thought to challenge. And Hansen had unsentimentally known of his own superiority for decades: the only good thing his Nebraska high school had ever done for him was to administer a full battery of intelligence tests to him—he was being staffed for possible emotional and learning problems at the time—and the amazed school psychologist had told his mother that Jimmy (not his name at the time) had an IQ of 168, effectively in the genius category and as high as that battery of tests could measure intelligence. This was no news to Jimmy, who had always known that he was far more intelligent than his classmates and teachers (he had no real friends or playmates). This was not arrogance, merely astute observation. The school psychologist had said that a gifted/talented program or special school for the gifted would have been appropriate for young Hansen, but of course no such thing existed in 1960s Kearney, Nebraska. Besides, by that time, Hansen’s teacher had become aware—through Jimmy’s creative-writing essays—of the sixteen-year-old student’s penchant for torturing dogs and cats, and Jimmy came close to being expelled. Only his ailing mother’s intervention and his own stonewalling had kept him in school.

Those creative-writing papers had been the last time Hansen had told the truth about anything important.

At an early age, James B. Hansen had learned a profound truth: namely, that almost all experts and specialists and professionals are absolutely full of shit. The great bulk of each of their so-called professions is language, jargon, specialized babble. Given that, and some deep reading in the field, and the proper attire, anyone smart enough could do damned near anything. In his last thirty-two years of liberation from truth and imposed identity, Hansen had never impersonated an airline pilot or a neurosurgeon, but he suspected that he could if he put his mind to it. During those years, however, he had made his living as an English professor, a senior editor at a major publishing house, a handler of heavy construction equipment, a NASCAR driver, a Park Avenue psychiatrist, a professor of psychology, a herpetologist specializing in extracting venom, an MRI specialist, a computer designer, an award-winning realtor, a political consultant, an air traffic controller, a firefighter, and half a dozen other specialties. He had never studied for any of these fields beyond visits to the library.

Money did not run the world, James B. Hansen knew. Bullshit and gullibility did.

Hansen had lived in more than two dozen major American cities and spent two years in France. He did not like Europe. The adults were arrogant and the little girls there were too worldly. Handguns were too hard to find. But the fliks were as stupid there as cops were in America, and God knows, the food was better.

His career as serial killer did not begin until he was twenty-three years old, although he had murdered before that. Hansen’s father had left no insurance, no savings, nothing but debts and his illegally obtained, Korean-era M1 carbine and three clips of ammunition. The day after his ninth-grade English teacher, Mrs. Berkstrom, ran to the principal with Hansen’s animal-torturing essays, Hansen had loaded the carbine, put it in his father’s old golf bag with the clubs, and dragged the whole thing to school. There were no metal detectors in those days. Hansen’s plan had been elegant—to kill Mrs. Berkstrom, the principal, the school psychologist who had turned traitor—going from recommending him for a gifted school to recommending intensive counseling—and then every classmate he could track down until he ran out of ammunition. James B. Hansen could have started the Columbine mass-murder fad thirty-five years before it finally caught on. But Hansen would never have committed suicide during or after the act. His plan had been to kill as many people as possible—including his coughing, wheezing, useless mother—and then, like Huck Finn, light out for the territory.

But a combination of his genius-level IQ and the fact that first period had been gym—Hansen did not want to go on his killing rampage wearing silly gym trunks—made him think twice. He hauled the stowed golf bag home during his lunch break and put the M1 back in its basement storage spot. He would have time to settle scores later, he knew, when it would not require going on the run for the rest of his life, with the cops chasing what he already thought of as his “larval identity.”

So two months after his mother’s funeral and the sale of their Kearney house, and one month after he had dropped out of the university with no forwarding address, Hansen had returned to his hometown in the middle of the night, waited for Mrs. Berkstrom to come out to her station wagon in the dim light of the Nebraska winter morning, and shot her twice in the head with the M1, dumping the carbine in the Platte River on his way east.

He had discovered his taste for raping and killing young girls when he was twenty-three, after the failure—through no fault of his own—of his first marriage. Since then, James B. Hansen had been married seven times, although he saved real sexual satisfaction for his episodes with the young, teenage girls. Wives were good cover and part of whatever identity he was inhabiting at any given time, but their middle-aged flab and used, tired bodies held no excitement for Hansen. He considered himself a connoisseur of virgins. And terrorized virginity was precisely the bouquet and aroma of the fine wine he most enjoyed. James B. Hansen knew that the cultural revulsion from pedophilia was just another example of people pulling away furthest from what they wanted most. From time immemorial, men had wanted the youngest and freshest girls in which to plant their seed—although Hansen never planted his seed anywhere, being careful to wear condoms and latex gloves since DNA typing had become so prevalent. But where other men fantasized and masturbated, James B. Hansen acted and enjoyed.

More than once, Hansen could have found it convenient to add “gay” to his repertoire of chameleon identities, but he drew the line at that. He was no pervert.

Knowing the psychopathology of his own preferences, Hansen avoided stereotypical—and criminal “typable”—behaviors. He was now out of the age range of the average serial killer. He resisted the urge to harvest more than one kill a year. He could afford to fly whenever he wanted and took great care in spreading the victims around the country, with no geographical connection to his home location at any given time. He took no souvenirs except for photographs, and these were sealed away in his locked titanium case inside an expensive safe in his locked gun room in the basement of this house. Only he was allowed to go there. If the police found his souvenir case, then his current identity was long since blown. If his current wife or son somehow got into the room and got into the safe and found the case and somehow opened it…well, they were always expendable.

But that would not happen.

Hansen knew now that John Wellington Frears, the African-American violinist from his Chicago days two decades ago and father of Number Nine, was in Buffalo. He knew now that Frears had thought he’d seen him at the airport—which at first amazed and disturbed Hansen since he had undergone five plastic-surgery operations since Chicago and would not have recognized himself from those days—but he also knew that no one at police headquarters had given any credence at all to Frears’s flutterings and sputterings. James B. Hansen was officially as dead as little Crystal Frears, and the Chicago P.D. had the dental records and photos of the charred corpse—complete with a partially identifiable Marine Corps tattoo James B. Hansen had sported—to prove it. And there was no question in his mind that others could not see any physical resemblance between the current iteration of James B. Hansen and that of his old Chicago-era persona.

Hansen had not heard the hullabaloo behind him at the airport—his hearing had been damaged slightly by too many years of practice shooting without ear protection—and did not learn about it right away at work because he had taken two days of vacation after his Florida business trip. It was always Hansen’s practice to spend a day or two away from work and family after his annual Special Visit.

When Hansen did hear about Frears, his first impulse was to drive to the Airport Sheraton and blow the overrated fiddler away. He had driven to the Sheraton, but once again the cool, analytical part of his genius-level intellect prevailed. Any murder of Frears in Buffalo would lead to a homicide investigation, which would bring up the man’s crank report of his airport spotting, which might involve the Chicago P.D. and some reopening of the Crystal Frears case.

Hansen considered waiting for the old black man to go back to his lonely life in New York and to his upcoming concert tour. Hansen had already downloaded the full itinerary of that tour and he thought that Denver would be a good place for a botched mugging to occur. A fatal shooting. A modest obituary in The New York Times. But that plan had problems: Hansen would have to travel to follow Frears on tour, and travel always left records; a murder in another town would mean that Hansen could have no connection with the homicide investigation. Finally, Hansen simply did not want to wait. He wanted Frears dead. Soon. But he needed someone else to be the obvious suspect—someone else not only to take the fall, but to take a bullet while resisting arrest.

Now Hansen went back into the house and moved from guest to guest laughing, telling easy stories, chuckling at his own mortality looming at the age of fifty—in truth, he had never felt stronger or smarter or more alive—all the while moving toward the kitchen and Donna.

His pager vibrated.

Hansen looked at the number. “Shit.” He didn’t need these clowns screwing up his birthday. He went up to his bedroom to retrieve his cell phone—his son was on the computer and tying up the house line—and punched in the number.

“Where are you?” he asked. “What’s up?”

“We’re right outside your house, sir. We were in the area and have some news but didn’t want to interrupt your birthday party.”

“Good thinking,” said Hansen. “Stay where you are.” He pulled on a cashmere blazer and went down and out through a gauntlet of backslappings and well wishes. The two were waiting by their car at the end of the drive, hunkered against the falling snow and stamping their feet to stay warm.

“What happened to your vehicle?” asked Hansen. Even with only the glow from his distant porch lights, Hansen could make out the vandalism.

“Fucking homeboys tagged us when we—” began Detective Brubaker.

“Hey,” said Hansen. “Watch the language.” He detested obscenity and vulgarity.

“Sorry, Captain,” said Brubaker. “Myers and me were following down a lead this morning when the locals spray-painted the car. We—”

“What is this important news that couldn’t wait until Monday?” interrupted Hansen. Brubaker and Myers were dishonest, venial cops, associates of that murdered, crooked cop Hathaway, whom the entire department shed crocodile tears for the previous fall. Hansen detested crooked cops even more than he detested obscene language.

“Curly died,” said Myers.

Hansen had to think for a second. “Henry Pruitt,” he said. One of the three Attica ex-cons found on the I-90. “Did he ever regain consciousness?”

“No, sir,” said Brubaker.

“Then what are you bothering me for?” There had been no real evidence on the triple killing, and none of the witnesses’ descriptions from the restaurant had matched any of the other’s. The uniformed cop who had been sapped remembered nothing and had become the laughingstock of his division.

“We had a thought,” said Detective Myers.

Hansen restrained himself from making the obvious comment. He waited.

“A guy we had a run-in with today is an Attica ex-con,” said Brubaker.

“A fourth of the population of our fair city has either been in Attica or is related to someone in Attica,” said Hansen.

“Yeah, but this perp probably knew the Stooges,” said Myers. “And he had a motive for offing them.”

Hansen stood in the snow and waited. Some of his guests were beginning to drive off. The cocktail party had been a casual buffet affair, and only a few of his closest friends were staying for dinner.

“The Cell Block-D Mosque gang had put a fatwa out on our guy,” said Brubaker. “Ten thousand dollars. A fatwa is—”

“I know what a fatwa is,” said Hansen. “I’m probably the only officer in the division who’s read Salman Rushdie.”

“Yes, sir,” said Myers, apologizing for his partner. Click and Clack.

“What’s your point?” said Hansen. “That Pruitt, Tyler and Banes—” he never used nicknames or disrespectful terms for the dead “—were trying to cash in on the D-Block Mosque’s bounty and your perp got them first?”

“Yes, sir,” said Detective Brubaker.

“What’s his name?”

“Kurtz,” said Myers. “Joe Kurtz. He’s an ex-con himself. Served eleven years on an eighteen-year sentence for—”

“Yes, yes,” Hansen said impatiently. “I’ve seen his sheet. He was on the list of suspects for the Farino massacre last November. But there was no evidence to tie him to the scene.”

“There never is with this Kurtz,” Brubaker said bitterly. Hansen knew Brubaker was talking about the death of his pal Jimmy Hathaway. Hansen had not been in Buffalo long when Hathaway was killed, but Hansen had met the man and thought he was possibly the dumbest cop he’d ever encountered, which was saying a lot. It had been Hansen’s professional opinion—shared by most of the senior officers, including those who had been in the division for years—that Hathaway’s ties to the Farino mob had gotten him killed.

“Word on the street has it that Kurtz tossed that drug dealer, Malcolm Kibunte, over Niagara Falls right after he got out of Attica,” offered Myers. “Just threw him right over the fucking…sorry, Captain.”

“I’m getting cold,” said Hansen. “What do you want?”

“We been following this Kurtz some on our own time,” said Brubaker. “We’d like to make the surveillance official. Three teams can do it. Woltz and Farrell aren’t assigned to anything right now and—”

Hansen shook his head. “You’re it. You want surveillance on this guy, do it on department time for a few days. But don’t put in for overtime.”

“Aw, Chri…cripes, Captain,” said Myers. “We’ve put in twelve hours today already and—”

Hansen cut him off with a glance. “Anything else?”

“No, sir,” said Brubaker.

“Then please move this piece of junk out of my driveway,” said Hansen, turning back toward his lighted house.

CHAPTER

NINE

Angelina Farino Ferrara sat in her expensive rink-side seat at the Sabres game and waited impatiently for someone to get hurt. She did not have to wait long. Eleven minutes and nine seconds into the first period, Sabres defenseman Rhett Warrener got Vancouver Canucks captain Markus Naslund against the boards in the corner, threw him down and fractured his tibia. The crowd went wild.

Angelina hated ice hockey. Of course, she hated all organized sports, but hockey bored her the most. The potential of watching these toothless apes skate for an hour with the possibility of no score—no score at all!—made her want to scream. But then again, she had been dragged to Sabres games for almost fourteen years by her late hockey-loving father. The new arena was called HSBC, which stood for some banking thing, but everyone in Buffalo knew that it meant either “Hot Sauce, Blue Cheese” or “Holy Shit, Buffalo’s Cold!”

Angelina did remember one game she had enjoyed immensely, many years ago when she was young. It was a Stanley Cup play-off game in the old Coliseum, and the season had run later than usual, deep into May. The temperature was in the low nineties when the game began, the ice was melting and setting off a thick fog, and the fog awakened scores of bats that had been hanging amidst the wooden rafters of the ancient Coliseum for years. Angelina remembered her father cursing as the fog grew so thick that even the expensive-seat holders could see almost nothing of the action, merely hear the grunts and shouts and curses from the rink as the players collided and battled in the fog, all the while the bats darted in and out of the mist, swooping among the stands, making women shriek and men curse all the louder.

Angelina had enjoyed that particular game.

Now, as trainers and medics and hulking teammates on skates huddled around the fallen Naslund, Angelina headed for the ladies’ rest room.

The Boys, Marco and Leo, knuckled along beside her, squinting suspiciously at the crowd. Angelina knew that these two were decent bodyguards and button men—at least Marco seemed to be—but she also knew that they had been chosen by Stevie and that their first job was to report her actions and behavior to her brother-behind-bars. Angelina Farino Ferrara was all too familiar with public figures—Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, for one—who had been gunned down by their own turncoat security detail. She did not plan to check out that way.

At the entrance to the women’s rest room, Marco and Leo continued to hulk. “Oh, for God’s sake,” said Angelina. “No one’s lurking in the John. Go get us some beer and Cracker Jack and a hot dog. Three hot dogs.” Marco nodded at Leo to go but seemed intent on staying around the women’s rest room. “Go help Leo carry,” she ordered.

Marco frowned but followed the other huge man around the corner toward the refreshment stand. Angelina stepped into the crowded rest room, did not see Joe Kurtz standing around in drag, and quickly stepped back out into the corridor.

Kurtz was leaning against the wall at the opening to a side hallway across the way. Angelina walked over to join him.

Kurtz kept his right hand in his peacoat pocket and nodded for her to walk down the narrow service corridor.

“Is that a pistol in your pocket,” said Angelina, “or are you just happy to—”

“It’s a pistol.” Kurtz nodded for her to open the door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY at the end of the hall.

Angelina took a breath and went through the door, noticing that the latch had been taped Watergate-style. A metal stairway led down to a wildly cluttered underground filled with boilers and countless pipes and valves running to the rink above. Kurtz pointed down one of the narrow walkways through the machinery, and Angelina led the way. Halfway across the space, a black man looked through the window of his office, nodded at Kurtz, and went back to his business.

“A friend of yours?” asked Angelina.

“A friend of Ben Franklin’s,” said Kurtz. “Up that way.” Another long, metal staircase led to a side door.

They emerged at the dark end of the parking lot behind the huge heating and air-conditioning blowers.

“Spread against the wall,” said Kurtz. He had removed his .40-caliber semiauto and held it steady.

“Oh, for God’s sake—” began Angelina.

Kurtz moved very, very quickly, spinning her around and shoving her toward the wall so fast that she had to raise her hands or plant her face in the brick. He kicked her legs farther apart, and she thanked the gods that she had changed out of her dress into wool slacks after visiting Gonzaga earlier in the day.

Once again, Kurtz’s frisk was fast and effective and impersonal, if you can call having someone’s hands moving across your breasts, buttocks, thighs, and crotch impersonal. He pulled the little .45 from its holster in the small of her back and slid it into his pocket while he pawed through her purse.

“I want that pistol back as well,” she said.

“Why? Did you shoot your second husband with it?”

Angelina let out a breath. Comedians. They all thought they were comedians. “I know its maker,” she said. “Fratelli Tanfoglio of the Gardone Tanfoglios.” He ignored her and tossed her purse back to her as she turned toward him. “In Italy,” she added uselessly.

“Let’s go,” said Kurtz.

“Go where?” asked Angelina, feeling a surge of alarm for the first time. “I was just supposed to tell you how to find the evidence that Emilio Gonzaga whacked your old partner. I don’t have to go anywhere to—” She looked at Joe Kurtz’s face and fell silent.

“Let’s go,” repeated Kurtz.

They walked through the dark and icy parking lot. “My Jaguar’s parked on the other side,” said Angelina. “In the VIP lot near—”

“We’re not taking your car,” said Kurtz.

“When Marco and Leo find me gone—with my car still there—they’re going to go so totally apeshit that—”

“Shut up,” said Kurtz.

Kurtz had the woman drive his Volvo. He sat with his back to the passenger door and the pistol propped on his left forearm. They were taking back streets through the snowy night, driving slowly because he had told her that if she drove over forty miles per hour, he would kill her. Kurtz had been in the driver’s seat when someone was holding a gun on him, and he’d discovered that getting the car up to eighty-five or ninety miles per hour was a serious disincentive to the shooter.

“Tell me about Gonzaga and this guy,” he said.

Angelina glanced at him. The yellow light from the sodium-vapor anticrime lamps was painting both their faces dead yellow. “You were in love with her, weren’t you, Kurtz? Your partner. The woman Emilio ordered murdered. I’d thought it was just a Maltese Falcon sort of thing…you know, you can’t let your partner get killed. That sort of macho shit.”

“Tell me about Gonzaga and the guy we’re going to see,” said Kurtz.

“Gonzaga’s man who brought the order down to the two punks you wasted—Falco and Levine—is named Johnny Norse. I was going to give you his name and address tonight. But there’s no reason for me to go along. It’s just going to cause a world of trouble when Marco and Leo—”

“Tell me about Johnny Norse,” said Kurtz.

Angelina Farino Ferrara took a breath. She did not look nervous to Kurtz. He had considered settling this whole thing back in the darkened parking lot. But he needed information and right now she was the only conduit.

“Norse was Emilio Gonzaga’s favorite button man back in the late eighties and early nineties,” Angelina said. “A real Dapper Dan type. Always wore Armani. Thought he was Richard Gere. Ladies’ man. Man’s man. Swung both ways. Now he’s dying of AIDS. He’s dead, really, he just doesn’t know it yet—”

“For your sake,” said Kurtz, “he’d better not be dead.”

Angelina shook her head. “He’s in this hospice in Williamsville.” She glanced at Kurtz in the yellow light. “Look, we can avoid the shitstorm that’ll blow in if I’m out of the Boys’ sight any longer. Let me go back to the game. I’ll make up some bullshit story about where I was. Check out Norse on your own. He’ll confirm what I told you about Gonzaga ordering the hit.”

Kurtz smiled ever so slightly. “It sounds like a good plan,” he said. “Except for the part where I go off to some address you give me and find ten of your boys—or Gonzaga’s—waiting there. No, I think we’ll do this together. Tonight Now.”

“What’s to insure that you don’t kill me anyway?” asked Angelina. “After I bring you to Norse. Even if he tells the truth?”

Kurtz’s silence answered that question.

The hospice was in a tasteful, Georgian-style building at the end of a cul-de-sac in the expensive part of Williamsville. It might have been a private home had it not been for the “Exit” signs at the doors, the white-clothed aides pushing wheelchairs in the halls, and the receptionist behind the tiger-maple desk in the foyer. Kurtz wondered for a bemused second or so whether this was a home for aged and dying button men, whether the mob ran a chain of these places across the country—Wiseguy Manors. He suspected not The receptionist told them quietly that visiting hours were over, but when Angelina said that they had come to see Mr. Norse, the receptionist was obviously surprised.

“No one has come to see Mr. Norse while he has been under our care,” she said. “Are you family?”

“Gonzaga family,” Kurtz said, but the woman showed no reaction. So much for the mob-franchise theory.

“Well…” The woman hesitated. “You are aware that Mr. Norse is very near the end?”

“That’s why we’ve come,” said Angelina Farino Ferrara.

The receptionist nodded and summoned a woman in white to take them to Mr. Norse.

The dying thing in the bed was no Dapper Dan. The remnants of Johnny Norse now weighed ninety pounds at the most, showed emaciated arms that reminded Kurtz of a baby bird’s bended wings tipped with yellowed nails, and had flesh mottled with sores and the lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma. Most of the mobster’s hair had fallen out. Oxygen tubes ran up under the man’s gaping nostrils. Norse’s lips were cracked and already pulled back over his teeth like a corpse’s and his eyes had sunken, the corners radiating small white webs as if spiders had already laid claim there.

Pruno had given Kurtz a reading list before he left for prison, and the first book Kurtz had read was Madame Bovary. He was reminded now of how Emma Bovary’s corpse had looked after the arsenic had killed her.

Norse stirred in his bed and turned unblinking eyes in their direction. Kurtz stepped closer to the bed.

“Who are you?” whispered Norse. There was a pathetic eagerness in that whisper. “Did Emilio send you?”

“Sort of,” said Kurtz. “Do you remember Emilio Gonzaga having you pass down an order twelve years ago to kill a woman named Samantha Fielding?”

Norse frowned up at Kurtz and reached for the call button on a beige wire. Kurtz moved the button out of the man’s trembling grasp. “Samantha Fielding,” repeated Kurtz. “A private investigator. It was during the Elizabeth Connors kidnapping. You were the go-between with Eddie Falco and Manny Levine.”

“Who the fuck are you?” whispered Johnny Norse. The lusterless eyes flicked toward Angelina and then came back to Kurtz. “Fuck you.”

“Wrong answer,” said Kurtz. He leaned over with both arms extended as if to hug Norse, but instead, he closed his thumbs over the two oxygen lines and squeezed them shut.

Norse began gasping and rasping. Angelina closed the door and set her back against it.

Kurtz released the hoses. “Samantha Fielding?”

Johnny Norse’s eyes were flicking back and forth like cornered rodents. He shook his head and Kurtz kinked the oxygen lines again, holding them kinked this time until Norse’s gasps were as loud as Cheyne-Stokes death rattles.

“Samantha Fielding?” repeated Kurtz. “About twelve years ago.”

The corpse in the bed nodded wildly. “The Connors kid… Emilio was…squeezing Connors…just wanted…the money.”

Kurtz waited.

“Some…cunt…of a P.I…found the connection…between Falco and Levine…and us snatching the kid. Emilio—” He stopped and looked up at Kurtz, his corpse mouth twitching in what might have been an attempt at an ingratiating Johnny Norse smile. “I didn’t have…nothing to do with it. I didn’t even know who they were talking about. I didn’t—”

Kurtz reached for the oxygen hose.

“Jesus…fuck…all right Emilio put the word out I…delivered it…to the drug dealers… Falco and… Levine. You got what you want asshole?”

“Yes,” said Kurtz. He took the .40 S&W semiautomatic from his belt, thumbed back the hammer, and set the muzzle in Johnny Norse’s mouth. The man’s teeth chattered against the cold steel. Something like wild relief flickered behind the clouded eyes.

Kurtz removed the muzzle and lowered the hammer. There was a bottle of medical disinfectant on the expensive nightstand, and Kurtz sprayed the barrel of the S&W with it before wiping it with the hem of Norse’s hospital gown and sliding it back in his belt. He nodded at the woman and they left.

CHAPTER

TEN

Kurtz had her drive farther east to an industrial park along the Thruway behind Erie Community College. They followed empty lanes and crossed empty parking lots to a silent loading-dock area. “Here,” said Kurtz. The .40 S&W was steady, propped on his forearm.

Angelina Farino Ferrara set the emergency brake, left the engine running, and put her hands on top of the steering wheel. “Is this the end of the line?”

“Could be.”

“What are my options?”

“Truth.”

She nodded. Her lips were white but her eyes were defiant and Kurtz could see that her pulse, visible at the base of her throat, was slow and regular.

“Word on the street today,” said Kurtz, “is that you put out another contract on me.”

“Same contract Different contractor.”

“Who?”

“Big Bore Redhawk. He’s—”

“An Indian,” said Kurtz. “What is this? Hire the Attica Handicapped Month?”

Angelina shrugged slightly. “Stevie likes to deal with people he knows.”

“Little Skag is a cheap fuck,” said Kurtz. “When is Big Bore supposed to do this?”

“Any time in the next week.”

“And if he fails?”

“Stevie has the look for real talent. And raises the price from ten thousand to twenty-five.”

Kurtz sat in silence for a minute. The headlights were off. Snow fell steadily past the yellow lamps beyond the loading dock. The only sounds were the rough idle of the old Volvo engine and the distant hiss of traffic on the I-90 Thruway behind them.

“You don’t want to kill me tonight,” said Angelina.

“No?”

“No. We need each other.”

Kurtz sat in silence for another short spell. Finally, he said, “Turn off the engine. Get out.”

She did. Kurtz gestured toward the far end of the loading dock, near the Dumpsters. He had her walk ahead of him to the end of the asphalt there. Her Bally shoes made small tracks in the snow.

“Stop here.”

Angelina turned to face him. “I said the wrong thing. You know it’s bullshit. We don’t need each other. I just need you—need to use you. And Joe Kurtz isn’t a man who likes to be used.”

Kurtz bent his arm, keeping it close to his body, aiming the pistol from his waist.

“Not in the face, please,” said Angelina Farino Farrera.

Traffic passed on the Thruway, out of sight to their right.

“Why?” said Kurtz. “Why goad me and set me up this way and then meet me without backup? What did you expect?”

“I expected you to be more stupid.”

“Sorry to disappoint you.”

“You haven’t so far, Kurtz. It’s all been very amusing up to this point. Perhaps Big Bore Redhawk will avenge me.”

“I doubt it.”

“You’re probably right. But my brother will.”

“Maybe.”

Two semis roared by on the Thruway, throwing slush into the cones of yellow light there. Kurtz did not glance that way. “I have most of it figured,” he said. “How you were going to use me against both Little Skag and Gonzaga. But why me? You’re planning to become don in reality if not in name—you’ve had all this time to plan—why not bring people you trust to do your work?”

“I’m getting cold,” said Angelina. “Can we go back to your car now?”

“No.”

“I’m going to raise my hands just to rub my arms, all right?”

Kurtz said nothing.

Angelina briskly massaged her arms through the thin jacket she was wearing. “I had more than six years to plan what I had to do, but the little bloodbath you were part of last November ruined those plans. If I was going to act, I had to act now, but all of a sudden my father’s dead, my whore-sister Maria is dead, even Leonard Miles, the crooked consigliere, is dead. Stevie explains how you set it all up, hired the Dane. Revenge for something my father had done to you.”

Kurtz said nothing.

“I know that’s not true,” said Angelina, speaking slowly and clearly. “Stevie set up the hit, borrowing money from the Gonzagas to do it. But you helped get Stevie’s deal to the Dane, Kurtz. You were part of it.”

“I just passed it along,” said Kurtz.

“Just like Johnny Norse,” said Angelina with an audible sneer. “Innocent. Just a messenger. I hope you end up in the ninth circle of hell, just like Norse.”

Kurtz waited.

“Six years, Kurtz. You know what that sort of time is like—waiting, planning? I married two men to get in the right position, acquire the right sort of power and knowledge. All for nothing. I come back to chaos and the whole plan is shot to shit.”

Red and blue police flashers reflected from the Thruway, but the cop car was out of sight, rushing somewhere else. Neither of them turned to look.

“Stevie sold what was left of the Family to Emilio Gonzaga,” said Angelina. “He had to.”

“Gonzaga controls the judges and the swing vote on the parole board,” said Kurtz. “But why don’t you just wait for Skag to get out? Rewrite the script. Run your game later, when he trusts you?”

“Stevie will be dead before autumn,” Angelina said with a sharp little laugh. “Do you think that Emilio Gonzaga is going to keep the Farino heir apparent around? Emilio will be running both families then. He doesn’t need Stephen Farino.”

“Or you?”

“He needs me as his whore.”

“Not a bad position to plot from,” said Kurtz.

Angelina Farino Ferrara took half a step forward, as if she was going to slap Kurtz’s face. She caught herself and stopped. “Want to know why I went to Sicily and the Boot?”

“A sudden interest in Renaissance art?” said Kurtz.

“Emilio Gonzaga raped me seven years ago,” she said, voice flat and hard. “My father knew about it Stevie knew about it. Instead of castrating that Gonzaga fuck with bolt cutters, they decided to send me away. I was pregnant. Twenty-five years old and pregnant with Emilio Gonzaga’s love child. Daddy wanted me to have the baby. He wanted leverage for a merger. So I went to Sicily. Married an idiot don-in-waiting our family knew there.”

“But you didn’t have the baby,” said Kurtz.

“Oh, but I did,” said Angelina and laughed that hard, short laugh again. “I did. A boy. A beautiful baby boy with Emilio’s fat, rubbery lips, lovely brown eyes, and the Gonzaga chin and forehead. I drowned him in the Belice River in Sicily.”

Kurtz said nothing.

“You’ll have a hard time killing Emilio Gonzaga, Kurtz. His compound on Grand Island isn’t like a fortress, it is a fortress. The older Emilio gets, the more paranoid he becomes. And he was born paranoid. He rarely goes out anymore. Lets no one near him. Keeps twenty-five of the best killers in New York State on his payroll, rotting away out there on the island.”

“How did you plan to kill him?” asked Kurtz.

Angelina smiled. “Well, I sort of hoped you’d take care of that detail for me, now that you know what you know.”

“How did you find out about that? About Gonzaga authorizing the hit on Sam?”

“Stevie told me when he told me about you.”

Kurtz nodded. His hair was wet with the falling snow. Three years in the same cell block with Little Skag, saving his ass—literally—from a black rapist named Ali. And all the while, Little Skag knew who had really been behind Sam’s death. It must have amused Skag. Kurtz almost had to smile at the irony. Almost.

“Can we get out of this fucking snow now?” asked Angelina.

They walked back to the car. Kurtz nodded her to the driver’s seat She was shaking from the cold when she turned the ignition and lights on.

“Are you in this with me, Kurtz?”

“No.”

She let out a breath. “Are we going back to the HSBC arena?”

“No,” said Kurtz. “But we’ll stop somewhere you can find a cab.”

“My absence is going to be hard to explain to the Boys and Stevie,” said Angelina, driving across the parking lot and back onto the empty industrial service road.

“Tell them you were fucking Emilio,” said Kurtz.

She looked at him then and it was good for Kurtz that he had the gun at that moment. “Yes,” she said at last. “I might say just that.”

They drove in silence for a few minutes. Finally Angelina Farino Ferrara said, “You really loved her, didn’t you? Your ex-partner Sam, I mean.”

Kurtz gestured with the pistol, explaining that she should shut up and drive.

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

Kurtz let himself into the office about ten the next morning, only to find Arlene taking a coffee-and-cigarette break at her desk while reading a detective novel. Kurtz tossed his peacoat onto the coatrack and settled into the old chair behind his desk. Three new files on his desktop were labeled “Frears,” “Hansen,” and “Other Murder-Suicides/Common Factors.”

“How’s the book?” asked Kurtz. He squinted at the title. “Isn’t that the same guy you were reading twelve years ago, before I got sent away?”

“Yeah. His detective fought in the Korean War, which makes the old fart in his late sixties at least, but he still kicks ass. A new book comes out every year, if not sooner.”

“Good, huh?”

“Not anymore,” said Arlene. “The P.I.’s got a girlfriend who’s a real bitch. An arrogant piece of work. And she’s got a dog.”

“So?”

“A dog who eats on the table and sleeps in their bed. And the P.I. loves them both to bits.”

“Then why do you keep reading him?”

“I keep hoping the P.I. will wake up and cap both the girlfriend and that ratty dog,” said Arlene. She put the book down. “To what do I owe this Saturday-morning pleasure, Joe?”

He patted the three files on the desk. He started thumbing through the Frears folder. It was quite a biography—born to upper-class parents in 1945, John Wellington Frears was one of those rarest of anomalies—an African-American in mid-twentieth-century America who had been a child of privilege. Something of a musical prodigy, Frears had gone to Princeton as an undergraduate but had transferred to Juilliard for his junior year. Then something truly strange: after graduation from Juilliard, with offers from several prestigious city symphonic groups, John Wellington Frears had volunteered for the U.S. Army and had gone to Vietnam in 1967. The note said that he had been with the Army Engineers, a sergeant in charge of demolition and disarming booby traps. He’d served two tours in Vietnam and one year in the States before returning to civilian life and beginning his professional music career.

“Now that is truly weird,” Kurtz said aloud. “Him joining the army. And demolitions, no less.”

“I thought that violinists wouldn’t even play catch, they were so protective of their hands,” said Arlene.

“What’s this thick stack of medical stuff?”

“Mr. Frears is dying of cancer,” said Arlene, stubbing out her cigarette and lighting another. “Colon cancer.”

Kurtz was looking at the information from Sloan-Kettering Hospital.

“He’s undergone every form of treatment, chemotherapy literally up the wazoo,” continued Arlene, “but it’s terminal. But look at the concert schedule he’s been keeping during all of this.”

Kurtz flipped to a separate printout. “Two hundred and ten days a year on the road,” he said. “And except for the last couple of weeks, he’s honored almost all of them.”

“Tough guy,” said Arlene.

Kurtz nodded and opened the James B. Hansen file.

“Dead guy there,” said Arlene.

“So they say.”

“A long time ago,” said Arlene.

Kurtz nodded, reading the police report of young Crystal Frears’s murder and the subsequent murder-suicide of Hansen and his family. The details matched what John Wellington Frears had told him.

“I couldn’t help but notice the connection there,” said Arlene. “Does Mr. Frears think that this Hansen is still alive?”

Kurtz looked up. Even when he was a practicing P.I., he’d shared only the necessary details of cases with Arlene, not seeing a need to dump such facts on her. But her husband and son had been alive then, and she’d probably had more important things on her mind. “Yeah,” said Kurtz, “that’s exactly what Frears thinks. He was leaving Buffalo a couple of weeks ago…”

“I saw the concert booking on his itinerary,” said Arlene, motioning with her coffee cup for Kurtz to go on.

“He thought he saw Hansen at the airport.”

“Our airport?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think he did, Joe? See Hansen, I mean.”

Kurtz shrugged.

“Where is Mr. Frears now?”

“Still out at the Airport Sheraton. Waiting.”

“For what?”

“I’m not sure,” said Kurtz. “It sounds like Buffalo Homicide isn’t looking into anything for him. Maybe Frears can’t leave town while there’s a chance he could find Hansen here, but he’s too sick to look.”

“So he’s waiting here to die at the Airport Sheraton.”

“I think it’s more than that,” said Kurtz. “Mr. Frears has made a big stink with the police, got a little sidebar in the Buffalo News about seeing his daughter’s murderer at the airport, even got an interview on a local talk-radio station. And he always mentions that he’s staying at the Sheraton.”

“He wants Hansen—if Hansen exists—to find him,” Arlene said softly. “He wants Hansen to come out of hiding to kill him. Make the police take it all seriously.”

Kurtz closed the Hansen file and picked up the “Other Murder-Suicides/Common Factors” folder. In the last twenty years there had been 5,638 murders of children and wives followed by the suicide of the male killer. There had been 1,220 male suicides before the police could arrest the suspect after child molestation and/or murder of a female child or teenager.

“Oy,” said Kurtz.

“Yeah,” agreed Arlene. She had finished her coffee break, lit another cigarette, and was working at her computer again. Now she lifted another, thinner, folder and carried it over to Kurtz’s desk. “So I narrowed the parameters to include just perps who raped and murdered a teenage girl about Crystal Frears’s age and who then went home and killed either themselves or their own family, after burning the house down around themselves.”

“There can’t be too many of those,” said Kurtz. There were 235 cases resembling that scenario, but only thirty-one of them involved men about the age of James B. Hansen at that time. It took only a minute for Kurtz to go through the photographs and compare them to the photo in the Hansen file from the Chicago P.D.

“Bingo,” said Kurtz. Atlanta, Georgia, five years after the murder of Crystal Frears. A white man who looked very little like psychologist James B. Hansen—bald rather than long-haired, clean-shaven rather than bearded, brown eyes rather than blue, thick glasses where Hansen had worn none—but who was the same man. Lawrence Greenberg, age thirty-five, a certified public accountant, married three years, three children by his wife’s former marriage, had kidnapped a neighbor girl, white, age thirteen, named Charlotte Hays, raped her repeatedly in a deserted farmhouse outside of Atlanta, and had then driven home, had dinner with his family, shot all four of them, and reportedly shot himself in the head after setting fire to his home. Police had identified him according to dental records and a charred Rolex that Mr. Greenberg had always worn.

“Dental records,” said Kurtz.

“Yeah, but to look at those details, we’ll need the printouts of the full reports,” said Arlene. “The Chicago P.D. file hadn’t been fully digitized—just the overview you have there—so we’d have to make an official request.”

“Erie County District Attorney’s Office at our third P.O. box,” said Kurtz.

“Mail fraud as well as everything else,” said Arlene. “At least three federal laws broken if we do it.”

“Do it,” said Kurtz.

“I called yesterday,” said Arlene. “Requested the files from both Chicago and Atlanta. I had them Express Mailed since FedEx won’t deliver to P.O. boxes. We’ll get the reports on Monday.”

“How did you pay?”

“Charged it to the D.A.’s office,” said Arlene. “I still have their billing code.”

“Won’t they notice it?”

Arlene laughed and went back to her computer. “We could charge a fleet of Lexuses to that office, Joe. No one would notice. Do you have time to look at some possible office space with me today?”

“No, I’ve got things to do. But I do need your help on something.”

Kurtz drove alone to the bar near Broadway Market, where he’d braced Donnie Rafferty. Detectives Brubaker and Myers had been driving a different unmarked car that morning when they had followed him from the Royal Delaware Arms to his office, and they had stayed several cars back and attempted a serious tail rather than just harassing him, but Kurtz had made them immediately. If they stopped him now with the two guns he was carrying, it would be bad news, but he suspected that they were actually on surveillance. He pulled into the parking lot, grabbed the camera bag he’d brought from the office, and went into the bar. He noticed that Brubaker and Myers parked across the street to watch the parking lot and the bar’s only entrance. When he’d been waiting for Donald Rafferty here, Kurtz had noticed the alley running behind the row of buildings and the high board fence concealing the alley from the parking lot.

“Back door?” Kurtz said to the bartender in the dark, hops-smelling space within. Only three or four committed regulars were celebrating Saturday morning there.

“It’s for emergency use only,” said the bartender. “Hey!”

Kurtz stepped into the alley, Arlene guided her blue Buick to a stop, and he got in. They drove a block, turned north, then turned west on a street parallel to where the detectives were parked.

“Where to?” asked Arlene.

“Back to the office for you,” said Kurtz. “I have to borrow your car for a few hours.”

Arlene sighed. “We’re not that far from Chippewa Street. We could check out an office space there.”

“I bet it’s over a Starbucks,” said Kurtz.

“How did you know?”

“Every third store on Chippewa is a Starbucks these days,” said Kurtz. “I don’t have time today. And we don’t want to pay yuppie leases. Let’s find an office somewhere less gentrified.”

Arlene sighed again. “It would be nice to have windows.”

Kurtz said nothing on the ride back to the office.

The Tuscarora Indian Reservation was northeast of the city of Niagara Falls, curled around half of the big Power Reservoir that stored water to run through the Power Project’s giant turbines. Big Bore Redhawk was not a Tuscarora, and quite possibly wasn’t an Indian—word was that Big Bore had discovered his Native American ancestry when he was trying to fence stolen jewelry and learned that he would be tax-exempt as an Indian jewelry salesperson—but his trailer was on the reservation property. Kurtz knew so much about Redhawk’s personal life because the big man had been one of the most talkative morons in C-Block.

Kurtz took Walmore Road into the reservation and turned left onto the third gravel road. Big Bore’s rusted-out trailer squatted in the deep snow just short of where Garlow Road ran along the reservoir. A clapped-out Dodge Powerwagon with a blade sat in the Indian’s driveway and snow was heaped eight feet high on either side. Big Bore earned his drinking money from plowing the reservation’s private roads during the winter. Kurtz pulled the Buick back behind one of these snowpiles so he could see the door to Redhawk’s trailer. Snow was falling, stopping, then falling harder.

Twenty-five minutes later, all six-feet-five-inches of Big Bore came stumbling out the door wearing only jeans and a loose plaid shirt—he did not seem aware of Kurtz’s car—climbed one of the higher drifts, and urinated toward the line of trees.

Kurtz drove the Buick up, slid to a stop, and got out quickly with the .40 Smith & Wesson in his hand. “Good morning, B.B.”

Redhawk turned with mouth and fly agape. His bloodshot eyes flickered toward the trailer, and Kurtz guessed that the halfbreed’s gun was still inside. Big Bore had always been a shank man.

“Kurtz? Hey, man, fucking good to see you, man. You out on parole too?”

Kurtz smiled. “You drinking the advance on my hit, B.B.?”

Big Bore worked his face into a puzzled frown, glanced down, and zipped up his fly. “Huh?” he said. “What’s the piece for? We were friends, man.”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz.

“Fuck, man,” said Big Bore. “I don’t know what you heard, but we can talk it out, man. Come on inside.” He took a half step toward his trailer.

Kurtz raised the semiauto’s aim slightly and shook his head.

Big Bore raised his hands and squinted. “You’re a big man with that gun, aren’t you, Kurtz?”

Kurtz said nothing.

“You put that fucking piece down and fight me like a fucking man, we’ll see who’s hot shit,” slurred Big Bore.

“I beat you in a fair fight, you tell me who hired you?” said Kurtz.

The Indian jumped down from the drift, landing lightly for three hundred pounds of muscled fat, and raised his huge arms, flexing his fingers. “Whatever,” he said, showing prison dentistry.

Kurtz thought about it, nodded, and tossed his pistol onto the hood of the Buick, out of reach. He turned back to Redhawk.

“Fucking moron,” said Big Bore, pulling an eight-inch hunting knife from a scabbard under his shirt. “Easiest fucking ten grand I ever earned.” He grinned more broadly and took two crouched steps forward, flicking the fingers of his huge left hand in an invitation. “Let’s see what you got, Kurtz.”

“I’ve got a forty-five,” said Kurtz. He pulled Angelina’s Compact Witness from his coat pocket and shot Big Bore in the left knee.

The hunting knife went flying over the drift, blood and cartilage doing a Jackson Pollock on the snow, and Big Bore went down heavily.

Kurtz retrieved his S&W and walked over to the moaning, cursing Indian.

“I’m going to fucking kill your fucking ass, Kurtz, you fucking…” began Big Bore, then trailed away into a groan.

Kurtz waited for the monologue to continue.

“And fucking call the cops and fucking send you away until I’m motherfucking ready to kill your fucking ass,” gasped the big man, wanting to hold his shattered knee together but unwilling to touch the mess.

“No,” said Kurtz. “Remember telling everyone in the exercise yard how you killed your first two wives and where they’re buried?”

“Aww, fuck, man,” moaned Big Bore.

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. He went into the trailer and rummaged through the mess there a bit, finding $1,410 in small bills hidden under a hardcase holding a shiny new .45 Colt. Kurtz was no thief, but this was a down payment on his own death, so he took the money and went back to the Buick. Big Bore had begun the crawl to the trailer and was leaving an unpleasant trail in the snow.

CHAPTER

TWELVE

Chief of Detectives Captain Robert Gaines Millworth, aka James B. Hansen, went into his office on Saturday morning at the main precinct station on Elmwood, just across from the courthouse. It was snowing.

The sergeant at the desk and a few duty officers were surprised to see Captain Millworth, since he had the rest of his weekend off for the last of his vacation. “Paperwork,” said the captain, and went into his office.

Hansen called up the file on the ex-con that Brubaker and Myers were tailing. He’d run across Joe Kurtz’s name before, but had never paid much attention to it. Rereading the previous arrest file and the man’s thin dossier, Hansen realized that this lowlife Kurtz represented everything Hansen despised—a thug who had parlayed a short stint as a military policeman into a private detective’s license in civilian life, had been tried for aggravated assault fifteen years earlier—dismissed on a technicality—and then plea-bargained out of a Murder Two charge into a Man One twelve years ago because of the laziness and sloppiness of the district attorney’s office. The penultimate entry in the file was an interrogation by the late Detective James Hathaway the previous autumn, relating to an illegal weapons charge that was dropped when Kurtz’s parole officer, Margaret O’Toole, had intervened to report to the watch commander that despite Hathaway’s report, the perp had not been armed when arrested by the detective in her office. Hansen made a mental note to make life miserable for Miss O’Toole when he got the chance…and he would make sure that he got the chance.

There were several pages in the file speculating on Mr. Joe Kurtz’s connections with the Farino crime family, specifically with his prison connections with Stephen “Little Skag” Farino in Attica, and the brief report of an interview with Kurtz the previous November after the gangland killings of Don Farino, Maria Farino, their lawyer, and several bodyguards. Kurtz had an alibi for the evening of the murders, and no forensic evidence had connected him to what the New York City TV stations and papers had called “The Buffalo Massacre.”

Kurtz was perfect for a role that Hansen had in mind: a loner, no family or friends, an ex-con, a suspected cop-killer, probable mob connections, a history of violence. There would be no problem convincing a jury that Kurtz was also a thief, someone who would murder a visiting violinist just for his wallet. Of course it should never come before a jury. Send the right detectives to arrest this Kurtz—say, those clowns Brubaker and Myers—and the state would be saved the cost of an execution.

But there would have to be evidence—preferably DNA evidence at the scene of the crime.

Hansen shut off the computer, swiveled his chair, and looked out through the blinds at the gray heap that was the courthouse. As he often did when events seemed confusing, Hansen closed his eyes and gave a brief prayer to his Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. James B. Hansen had been saved and born again in Christ at the age of eight—the one thing his miserable excuse for a mother had ever done for him was to connect him to the Evangelical Church of Repentance in Kearney. He never took that for granted. And although he knew that his special needs might be looked upon by others as an abomination in the eyes of the Lord, Hansen’s own special relationship with Jesus reassured him that the Lord God Christ used James Hansen as His instrument, Culling only those souls whom Jesus Christ Almighty wished Culled. It was why Hansen prayed almost ceaselessly in the weeks leading up to his Special Visits. So far, he had been a true and faithful servant to the will of Jesus.

Finished with his prayer, the captain turned back to his desk and dialed a private number, choosing not to make a radio call.

“Brubaker here.”

“This is Captain Millworth. Are you on the Kurtz surveillance now?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where is he?”

“The Red Door Tavern on Broadway, Captain. He’s been in there about an hour.”

“Good. There may be something to your idea that Kurtz murdered those three Attica ex-cons, and something may turn up that might connect him to the death of Detective Hathaway. I’m authorizing your continued surveillance until further notice.”

“Yes, sir,” came Brubaker’s voice. “Do we get at least one more team?”

“Negative on that,” said Hansen. “We’re short on people right now. But I can okay overtime pay for you and Myers.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And Brubaker,” said James B. Hansen, “you report directly to me on this matter, understand? If this Kurtz is really the cop-killer you think he is, we’re not going to leave a paper trail for Internal Affairs, or for the bleeding-heart Public Defenders’ Office, or for anyone else to follow, even if we have to bend the rules with this punk.”

There was a silence on the line. Neither Brubaker nor Myers nor anyone else in the division had ever heard Captain Robert Gaines Millworth talk about bending rules. “Yes, sir,” Brubaker said at last.

Hansen broke the connection. As long as John Wellington Frears was sitting out at the Airport Sheraton, James B. Hansen did not feel comfortable or in total control of events. And James B. Hansen did not like feeling uncomfortable or out of control. This unimportant loose end called Joe Kurtz might prove to be very, very useful.

It was snowing harder when Kurtz took the toll bridge from the city of Niagara Falls onto Grand Island. The Niagara Section of the New York Thruway was a shortcut that ran north and south across the island from Buffalo to Niagara Falls. Grand Island itself was larger in size than metro Buffalo, but was mostly empty. Buckhorn Island State Park sat at its northern tip and Beaver Island State Park filled its southern end. Kurtz exited to West River Parkway and followed it along the Niagara River West, turning east again along Ferry Road, near the southern end of the island.

Kurtz pulled Arlene’s Buick to the side of the road and lifted the Nikon with the 300-mm lens attached. The Gonzaga compound was set back a quarter of a mile from the road, recognizable only by distant tile roofs just visible above a high wall that ran completely around the complex. The long access road was private and monitored by video cameras. Kurtz could see razor wire along Ferry Road and more lines of fence between the outer perimeter and the actual wall. The entrance to the compound was gated; there was a Mediterranean-style guardhouse at the gate, and with the long lens, Kurtz could see the silhouettes of three men inside. One of the men was lifting a pair of binoculars.

Kurtz put the Buick in gear and drove east, getting back on the highway and turning north toward Niagara Falls.

The helicopter tour usually cost $125 and included a swoop over Niagara Falls and the Whirlpool downriver.

“I’ve seen the Falls and the Whirlpool,” Kurtz told the pilot. “Today I want to see this property I’m considering on Grand Island.”

The pilot—an older, redheaded man who reminded Kurtz of the actor Ken Toby—said, “That would be charter. This is just tourist. Different rates. Plus the weather’s pretty shitty with these snow squalls. FAA doesn’t want us flying tourists if the visibility isn’t great or if there’s a real chance of icing.”

Kurtz handed him the two hundred dollars he had borrowed from Arlene.

“Ready to go?” asked the pilot.

Kurtz grabbed his camera bag and nodded.

From a thousand feet up, the layout of the Gonzaga compound was pretty obvious. Kurtz shot two rolls of black-and-white film.

Driving back to Buffalo, he called Angelina Farino Ferrara on the private line.

“We need to talk privately,” he said. “At length. In person.”

“How do we do that?” said the woman. “I’ve got two extra assholes these days.”

“Me too,” said Kurtz without elaborating. “What do you do when you want to meet some guy to screw him?”

There was a silence on the line. Eventually she said, “I presume this is relevant.”

Kurtz waited.

“I bring them here,” she said at last. “To the marina penthouse.”

“Where do you pick them up?”

“A bar I go to or the health club,” she said.

“Which health club?”

She named it.

“Expensive,” said Kurtz. “Use the phone I gave you to call and leave a guest pass for me tomorrow at one. Your goons haven’t seen photos of me, have they?”

“No one has except me,” said Angelina.

“You and the guys you hire to kill me.”

“Yes,” she said.

“When do your bodyguards report to Little Skag?” asked Kurtz.

“I’m pretty sure it’s Wednesday and Saturday if nothing really unusual happens,” she said.

“We have a few days then,” said Kurtz. “Unless screwing a stranger would be considered unusual for you.”

Angelina Farino Ferrara said nothing.

“Do Tweedledee and Tweedledum actually work out with you?” asked Kurtz.

“They stay in the weight room where they can see me through the glass,” said Angelina. “But I don’t allow them to get close.” She was silent for a minute. “I take it that you and I are going to discover an instant attraction, Kurtz.”

“We’ll see. At least we’ll be able to talk at the health club.”

“I want my two pieces of property back.”

“Well, one of them you might not want to keep,” said Kurtz. “I donated part of it to a Native American today.”

“Shit,” said Angelina. “But I still want it back.”

“Sentimental value,” said Kurtz.

“Yes. So are we going to discover an immediate attraction when we meet at the health club?”

“Who knows?” said Kurtz, although he had no plans to return to the Farino headquarters at the marina tomorrow. But if she didn’t have him killed at the health club, he might need to spend more time with her if his Gonzaga plan was going to work.

“Assuming we do hit it off in this alternate universe, when the time comes are you going to ride to the penthouse with the Boys and me or will you be driving yourself?”

“Driving,” said Kurtz.

“You’re going to need a better car and a much nicer wardrobe.”

“Tell them you’re slumming,” said Kurtz, and broke the connection.

Late that evening, Arlene drove Kurtz back to the Red Door Tavern—he had to pound on the alley door of the place to get the bartender to let him in so he could walk through—only to find Brubaker and Myers gone from their surveillance and his Volvo scratched down the length of its driver’s side. Evidently one or the other of the detectives had looked inside the bar, found Kurtz gone, and then vented his frustration in true professional form.

“To protect and serve,” muttered Kurtz.

He drove out to Lockport carefully, checking for tails. No one was following him. These cops have the stick-to-it quality of an old Post-it Note was Kurtz’s uncharitable thought.

Down the street and around the corner from Rachel’s home, he used the electronic gear he’d brought and checked on the various bugs. Donnie was out of town, as promised. Rachel was home alone, and except for the sound of the TV—she was watching Parent Trap, the Hayley Mills version—and some humming to herself, and one call from her friend Melissa in which Rachel confirmed Rafferty’s absence, there was nothing to hear. Kurtz took the humming as a good sign, shut down his equipment, dropped the electronic gear by the office, and drove back to the Royal Delaware Arms.

The plaster dust was undisturbed since that morning. The repairs to his door allowed him to get the police bar in place. Kurtz cooked a dinner of stir-fry on the hot plate and ate it with some cheap wine he’d bought on the way home. The apartment had no TV, but he owned an old grille-front FM radio that he tuned to Buffalo’s best jazz/blues station and listened to that while he read a novel called Ada. The wind was cold and seemed to blow in through the plaster cracks and seep up through the floor. By 10:00 P.M., Kurtz was cold enough to check his locks and police bar, flip the big couch into a fold-out bed, brush his teeth, make sure his .40 S&W and Farino Ferrara’s two .45s were in reach, and turn in for the night.

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

Come here often?” asked Kurtz.

“Fuck you.”

He and Angelina Farino Ferrara were pacing on parallel treadmills in the mirrored and teak-floored sixth-story main room of the Buffalo Athletic Club. Her bodyguards were in the adjoining weight room, clearly visible through the glass wall as they pressed heavy weights and admired each other’s sweat-oiled muscles, but out of earshot. No one was exercising near Kurtz and Angelina.

“Did you bring my property?” she asked. Kurtz was wearing a bulky sweat suit, seriously out of fashion based on what the few other patrons were wearing, but Angelina’s fashionable skintight leotard showed that she was not armed.

Kurtz shrugged and set the treadmill for a faster pace. Angelina set hers to match. “I want those two items back.” She was breathing and speaking easily, but she had broken a sweat.

“Noted.” Kurtz glanced over at the bodyguards. “Are they any good?”

“The Boys? Marco’s all right. Leo’s a waste of Stevie’s money.”

“Is Leo the one with the cupid lips and con torso?”

“Right.”

“Are these your main men?”

“The Boys? They’re the only ones with me full time, but Stevie’s brought in eight other new guys. They’re all competent at what they do, but they don’t hang out at the marina. Shouldn’t you be asking about Gonzaga’s protection rather than mine?”

“All right. What about Gonzaga’s people? How many? Any good? And who else is usually in his compound? And how often does he come out of that compound?”

“These day’s, he almost never comes out. And it’s never predictable when he does.” Angelina cranked up the speed and angle of her machine. Kurtz matched it. They had to speak a bit more loudly to hear one another over the whir. “Emilio keeps twenty-eight people on his payroll at that fortress,” she said. “Nineteen of them are muscle. Pretty good, although they must be getting rusty just sitting there guarding his fat ass. The rest are cooks, maids, butlers, sometimes his business manager, technicians…”

“How many with guns in the main house when you visit?”

“I usually see eight. Two baby-sit the Boys in the outer foyer. Emilio usually has four bodyguards playing servant during the lunch. A couple of others roam the house.”

“And the rest of the guards?”

“Two in the guardhouse at the gate. About four in the outbuilding security center, where they keep the video monitors. Three more always roaming the grounds with guard dogs. And two with radios driving the perimeter in Jeeps.”

“Other people there?”

“Just the servants I mentioned and occasional visits from his lawyer and other people. They’ve never been there when I go for lunch. No other family there. His wife died nine years ago. Emilio has a thirty-year-old son, Toma, who lives in Florida. The kid was supposed to take over the business, but got disinherited six years ago and knows that he’ll be whacked if he ever shows up in New York State again. He’s a fag. Emilio doesn’t like fags.”

“How do you know all this? I mean about the security setup.”

“Emilio took me on a tour the first time I visited.”

“Not very smart.”

“I think he wanted to impress me with his impregnability.” Angelina set the treadmill to its fastest pace. She began running in earnest.

Kurtz clicked in matching settings. For a few minutes they ran in silence.

“What’s your plan?” she asked at last.

“Am I supposed to have a plan?”

She gave him a look that seemed Sicilian in its intensity. “Yes, you’re supposed to have a fucking plan.”

“I’m not an assassin,” said Kurtz. “I hire out for other things.”

“But you are planning to kill Gonzaga.”

“Probably.”

“But you’re not seriously planning to try to get to him in his compound.”

Kurtz concentrated on breathing and ran in silence.

“How could you get to him there?” Angelina flicked sweat out of her left eye.

“Hypothetically?” said Kurtz.

“Whatever.”

“Have you noticed that roadwork being done about half a mile south of the compound?”

“Yeah.”

“Those bulldozers and huge graders and haulers that are parked there half the time?”

“Yeah.”

“If someone stole one of the biggest of those machines, he could drive over the guardhouse, smash his way into the main house, shoot all the guards there, and whack Gonzaga in the process.”

Angelina hit the stop button and trotted to a halt as the treadmill slowed. “Are you really that stupid?”

Kurtz kept running.

She raised the towel from her shoulders and mopped her face. “Do you know how to drive one of those big Caterpillar things?”

“No.”

“Do you know how to start one?”

“No.”

“Do you know anyone who does?”

“Probably not.”

“You got this from a fucking Jackie Chan movie,” Angelina said, and stepped off her treadmill.

“I didn’t know they had Jackie Chan movies in Sicily and Italy,” said Kurtz, killing his machine.

“They have Jackie Chan movies everywhere.” She was toweling the bare skin where the leotard cut across her cleavage. “You’re not going to tell me your plan, are you?”

“No,” said Kurtz. He looked over at the Boys, who had finished bench-pressing and were admiring each other as they curled dumbbells with each hand. “This has been real fun. And I can feel this attraction building to the point where you’re going to invite me home soon. Shall we meet again tomorrow, same time, same place?”

“Fuck you.”

On Sunday mornings, James B. Hansen attended early morning worship service with his wife Donna and stepson Jason, went out with them for a late breakfast at a favorite pancake house on Sheridan Drive, and stayed home in the afternoon while his wife took their son to her parents’ place in Cheektowaga. It was his weekly time for private reflection and he rarely missed it.

No one was allowed in the basement except Hansen. He was the only one who had the key to his private gun room. Donna had never seen the inside of the room, not even when it was being renovated when they had first moved in almost a year earlier, and Jason knew that any attempt to trespass in his stepfather’s private gun room would incur serious physical punishment. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was a Biblical injunction that was taken seriously in the home of Homicide Captain Robert G. Millworth.

The gun room was guarded by a keypad working on a separate code from the rest of the house security system, a steel door, and a physical combination lock. The room itself was spartan, with a metal desk, a wall of bookshelves holding a law-enforcement officer’s assortment of reference books, and a case behind locked, shatterproof Plexiglas doors in which Hansen’s expensive gun collection hung under halogen lights. A large safe was built into the north wall.

Hansen disarmed the third security system, entered the proper combination, and took his titanium case out from where it was nestled with stocks, bonds, and his collection of silver Krugerrands. Returning to his desk, he opened the case and reviewed the contents in the soft glow of the gun-case lights.

The thirteen-year-old girl in Miami two weeks earlier—a Cuban whose name he’d never learned, picking her up at random in the neighborhood where little Elian Gonzalez had stayed a few years earlier—had been Number Twenty-eight. Hansen looked at the Polaroid photos he had taken of her while she was still alive—and later. He paused only briefly at the single photograph he had taken with himself in the frame with her—he always took only one such photo—and then went on to study the rest of his collection. In recent years, he noticed, the twelve-to fourteen-year-olds had developed earlier than the girls of his own childhood. Nutrition, the experts said, although James B. Hansen knew it to be the Devil’s work, turning these children into sexual objects sooner than in previous decades and centuries in order to entice men.

But there were no children in his collection of the twenty-eight Culled, Hansen knew, only demonettes who were not the Children of God, but the Spawn of the Enemy. This realization when Hansen was in his twenties—that God had given him this special ability, this second sight to differentiate the human girls from the young demons in human form—was what allowed him to carry out his ordained task.

This last girl’s eyes stared up toward the camera after strangulation with that same look of total surprise and terror—surprise at being found out and terror at knowing she had been chosen to be Culled, Hansen knew—as had the other twenty-seven.

He always allowed himself precisely one hour to review the photographs. Showing the self-discipline that separated him from the mindless psychopaths that stalked the world, Hansen never took any souvenirs other than the Polaroid photos. Nor did he masturbate or otherwise attempt to relive the excitement of the actual Culling. This hour of reflection and review every Sunday was to remind him of the seriousness of his mission on earth, nothing more.

At the end of the hour, Hansen locked away the titanium case, looked lovingly at his collection of firearms reflecting the halogen spotlights, and left his gun room, scrambling the combination and activating the special alarm system as he did so. It would be another two or three hours before Donna and Jason returned from her parents’ place; Hansen planned to use the time reading his Bible.

Donald Rafferty returned to his Lockport home on Sunday evening, obviously tired from his weekend trip with DeeDee, his Number Two girlfriend. Kurtz was parked down the street and monitoring the bugs in the Rafferty house.

“Did that kid—whatshername, Melissa?—come over this weekend while I was gone?” Rafferty’s voice sounded slurred and tired.

“No, Dad.”

“You lying to me?”

“No.” Kurtz could hear the alarm in Rachel’s voice.

“What about boys?”

“Boys?”

“Which boys were here while I was gone, goddammit?”

Kurtz knew from his phone taps that Rachel really didn’t talk to any boys, other than Clarence Kleigman, who was in orchestra with her. She would never invite a boy to the house.

“Which boys did you have over here? Tell me the goddamn truth or I’ll get the yardstick out.”

“No boys, Dad.” Rachel’s voice was quavering slightly. “Did you have a good business trip?”

“Don’t change the fucking subject.” Rafferty was still quite drunk.

A minute of ambient noise and hiss. From the crashing around in the kitchen, it sounded like Rafferty was hunting for one of his bottles.

“I have homework to finish,” Rachel said. Kurtz knew that she had finished all of her homework by Saturday night. “I’ll be upstairs.” From the bug in the hall, Kurtz could hear the sound of Rachel slipping the lock shut on her door as Rafferty stamped upstairs and began throwing his clothes around the bathroom.

It was snowing hard. Kurtz let the snow blanket the windshield as he sat listening to random noises through his earphones.

It had not been a promising week. Kurtz followed few rules in life, but not leaving enemies behind him came close to a rule for him, and this week he had left two people around who wished to do him harm—Big Bore Redhawk and the dying man, Johnny Norse. In each case it had simply been more trouble to deal with them than to let them live; Big Bore had more reasons to stay silent in the hospital than to rat Kurtz out, and Johnny Norse had no idea who Kurtz and Angelina were or what Kurtz’s relationship to Emilio Gonzaga might be. Kurtz remembered Norse’s almost obscene eagerness to hang onto the last dregs of life and felt secure that the dying man would not be contacting Gonzaga about the visit. But Kurtz’s motto had always been “Why play the odds when you can fix the race?” In these cases, though, it would be riskier to deal with bodies than with odds.

Still, it was a bad habit to leave loose ends behind him and Kurtz could not afford bad habits at the moment.

Joe Kurtz knew that his one strength over the past dozen years—besides patience—was his ability to survive. Beyond the minimal survival skills necessary for spending more than a decade in a maximum security prison without getting raped or shanked or both, Kurtz had avoided the fatwa of the D-Block Mosque gangs when they had come to believe that he had killed a black enforcer named Ali a year before Kurtz’s parole. Once back in Buffalo last autumn, Kurtz had gained the enmity of another black gang—the Seneca Street Social Club—who actually believed that he had thrown their leader, a drug-dealing psychopath named Malcolm Kibunte, over Niagara Falls.

The cops who were tailing him—Brubaker and Myers—believed that Joe Kurtz had shot a crooked homicide detective named Hathaway, even though there was absolutely no evidence for that Kurtz knew that Brubaker’s suspicion had been fueled from Attica by Little Skag Farino, whose gratitude for Kurtz having literally saved his ass from Ali was now being shown by the third-rate hit men that Skag was hiring to kill him.

Kurtz doubted that Brubaker and Myers would try to kill him, but sooner or later they would roust him while he was carrying, which meant jail again, which meant all the current death sentences on Kurtz converging.

Then there were the Farino and Gonzaga families. You don’t strike—much less kill—a made guy without paying for it; it was one of the last enforceable tenets of the weakening Mafia structure. And while Kurtz had not been involved—directly—in the shootings of Don Farino, his daughter, his lawyer, or his bodyguards the previous autumn, that fact would do him little good. Little Skag knew that Kurtz had not killed his family members, since Little Skag had ordered the hits on them himself, but he was also aware that Kurtz had been there during the denouement at the Farino compound. Joe Kurtz knew too much to stay alive.

Now Angelina Farino Ferrara was trying to use Kurtz to kill Gonzaga. Kurtz hated being used more than almost anything in the world, but in this situation, the woman had leverage over him. He had done his eleven and a half years in Attica for the killing of Sam’s murderers with some patience because it had been worth it—Samantha Fielding had been his partner in every way—but now those years were shown to be worthless. If it had been Emilio Gonzaga who put the hit on Sam, then Gonzaga had to die. And die soon, since Gonzaga would be taking over the Farino Family by the end of summer, which would make him all but invulnerable.

If Angelina really wanted Kurtz dead now, all she had to do was tell Gonzaga. There would be fifty button men on the street in an hour.

But she had her own agenda and timeline. That’s why Kurtz was allowing himself to be used by her. Gonzaga’s death would suit both their purposes—but then what? A woman could not become don. Little Skag would still be the heir apparent of what was left of the once-formidable Farino family, although without the Gonzaga judge and parole-board connections, Little Skag might be cooling his heels in maximum security for more years to come.

Was that Angelina’s plan? Just to keep Little Skag in prison while she eliminated her rapist, Emilio Gonzaga, and tried to consolidate some power? If so, it was a dangerous plan, not just because Gonzaga’s wrath would be terrible if an assassination failed, but because the other families would intervene eventually—almost certainly at Angelina’s expense—and Little Skag had already shown a willingness, actually an eagerness, to whack a sister.

But if she could blame Gonzaga’s murder on this loose cannon, this non-made-guy, this madman Joe Kurtz—This scenario seemed especially workable if Joe Kurtz was dead before Little Skag’s killers or the Gonzaga Family or the New York families’ people caught up to him.

Joe Kurtz’s strength might be survival, but he was having increasing difficulty in seeing how he could do everything he had to do and still survive this mess.

And then there was this Frears and James B. Hansen thing. And Donald Rafferty. And Arlene’s need for another $35,000 to expand their on-line business.

Suddenly, Kurtz had a headache.

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

Did you bring the thirty-five thousand for Wedding Bells dot com?” asked Arlene when Kurtz came in the door.

It was late morning. Brubaker and Myers had followed him from the Royal Delaware Arms and were out there now—Brubaker in the unmarked car at the end of the alley, watching the back door, Myers on the street in front, watching the entrance to the abandoned video store upstairs.

“Not yet,” Kurtz said. “Did you have Greg bring Alan’s old Harley down this morning?”

Arlene nodded and gestured with her right hand. Cigarette smoke spiraled. “I’m more interested in finding a new office anyway. Do you have time today?”

“We’ll see.” Kurtz looked at the stack of files and empty Express Mail packages on his desk.

“I got them about an hour ago,” said Arlene. “The Hansen file from the Frears murder in Chicago, the Atlanta thing that had exactly the same M.O., and the ones from Houston, Jacksonville, Albany, and Columbus, Ohio. The other four haven’t arrived yet.”

“You read them?”

“Looked through.”

“Find anything?”

“Yes,” said Arlene. She batted ashes. “I bet we’re the only ones ever to look at all these family murders together. Or any two of them together, for that matter.”

Kurtz shrugged. “Sure. The local cops all saw it as a local nut-case family murder—and they had the killer’s corpse in the burned house. Each case open and shut. Why compare it to other cases they don’t even know about?”

Arlene smiled. Kurtz hung up his coat, shifted the holstered .40 S&W on his waistband, and settled in to read.

Five minutes later he had it.

“The dentist,” he said. Arlene nodded.

In each of the murder-suicides, identification of the killer’s burned body was made through tattoos, jewelry, an old scar in the Atlanta case—but primarily through dental records. In three of the cases—the Chicago Frears/Hansen case, the Atlanta Murchison/Cable murders, and the Albany Whittaker/Sessions killings—the killer’s dentist was from Cleveland.

“Howard K. Conway,” said Kurtz.

Arlene’s eyes were bright. “Did you see the dentists’ signatures in the other cases?”

It was Kurtz’s turn to nod. Different names. But all from Cleveland. And the handwriting was the same. “Maybe our Dr. Conway is just the dentist to psychopaths around the country. Probably was Ted Bundy’s dentist.”

“Uh-huh.” Arlene stubbed her cigarette out and came over to Kurtz’s desk. “What about the other I.D. factors? The tattoo in the Hansen killings? The scar in the Whittaker case?”

“My guess is that Hansen finds his replacement for the fire first—some street person or male hooker or something—kills him, stores the body, and then decorates himself accordingly. If they have a tattoo, he sports a fake one. Whatever. It’s just a few months.”

“Jesus.”

“I’ll need his current—” began Kurtz.

She handed him a three-by-five card with Dr. Howard K. Conway’s business address on it. “I called this morning and tried to make an appointment, but Dr. Conway is semiretired and isn’t accepting new patients. A younger man answered the phone and shooed me away. I found listings for Dr. Conway going back to the early fifties, so the guy must be ancient.”

Kurtz was looking at the photographs of the murdered girls. “Why would Hansen leave Conway alive all these years?”

“I guess it’s easier than getting a new dentist all the time. Plus, the dental records are probably all older than whatever identity Hansen—whatever his name is—is using at the time. It’d be weird, something even local cops would notice, if their killer only had dental records a few months old.”

“And it’s not weird that someone living in Houston or Albany or Atlanta goes to a Cleveland dentist?”

Arlene shrugged. “The nut cases all moved from Cleveland in the past year or two. No reason for local homicide cops to red-flag that.”

“No.”

“What are you going to do, Joe?” There was an edge to Arlene’s voice that he had rarely heard when he had been a P.I.

He looked at her.

Come here often?” said Kurtz.

Angelina Farino Ferrara just sighed. They were working in the weight room today, and the Boys were outside on the treadmills.

Kurtz and Arlene had chosen the video-store basement for their office because it was cheap and because it had several exits: back door to the alley, stairway door to the now-defunct video store upstairs, and side door to the condemned parking garage next door. The drug dealers who had owned the place when it was a real bookstore had liked all those exits. So did Kurtz. It had come in handy when he’d left half an hour ago.

Arlene’s late husband’s Harley had been parked on the dark lower level, just beyond the metal door. Greg had left a helmet on the handlebars and the keys in the ignition. Kurtz had straddled the machine, fired it up, and weaved his way up ramps and out of the basement of the empty parking garage, snaking by the permanent barricade on Market Street that kept cars out. Detective Brubaker presumably still had been on watch on the alley side, and Detective Myers on the street side, but no one was watching the Market Street garage exit. Taking care on the snowy and icy streets, reminding himself that he’d not been on a bike for fifteen years or more, Kurtz had ridden to the health club.

Now he was doing repetitions on the chest-press machine with two hundred pounds. He had done twenty-three reps when Angelina said, “You’re showing off.”

“Absolutely.”

“You can stop now.”

“Thank you.” He lowered the bar and left it lowered. Angelina was doing curls with fifteen-pound weights. Her biceps were feminine but well-defined. No one was within earshot. “When do you have lunch with Gonzaga this week?”

“Tomorrow, Tuesday. Then again on Thursday. Did you bring my property?”

“No. Tell me the drill when you and the Boys go for lunch.” There was a heavy bag and a speed bag in the room, and he put on gloves and began working on the heavy bag.

Angelina set down the dumbbells and went to a bench to do some pull-ups. “The car takes us to Grand Island—”

“Your car or Gonzaga’s?”

“His.”

“How many people other than the driver?”

“One. The Asian stone-killer called Mickey Kee. But the driver’s carrying as well.”

“What can, you tell me about Kee?”

“He’s from South Korea. He was trained in their Special Forces—sort of Green Berets by way of SMERSH. I think he got a lot of on-the-job experience assassinating North Korean infiltrators, people the regime didn’t like, that sort of thing. He’s probably the most efficient killer in New York State right now.”

“When you go to lunch, they pick you up at the Marina Tower?”

“Yeah.”

“Frisk you there?”

“No. They take the Boys’ guns at the guardhouse. Then they drive us the rest of the way. There’s a metal-detector at the entrance to the main house—it’s subtle, but it’s there—and then I get frisked again by a woman in a private room off the foyer before being allowed into Emilio’s presence. I guess they’re afraid I’ll go at him with a hat pin or something.”

“A hat pin,” repeated Kurtz. “You’re older than you look.”

Angelina ignored him. “The Boys sit on a couch in the foyer while the Gonzaga goons watch them. The Boys get their guns back when we drive out.”

“Okay,” said Kurtz. He concentrated on hitting the big bag for a few minutes. When he looked up, Angelina handed him a towel and a water bottle.

“You looked like you meant it with the bag,” she said.

Kurtz drank and wiped the sweat from his eyes. “I’m going with you to Gonzaga’s place tomorrow.”

Angelina Farino Ferrara’s lips went pale. “Tomorrow? You’re going to try to kill Emilio tomorrow? With me along? You’re fucking crazy.”

Kurtz shook his head. “I just want to go along as one of your bodyguards.”

“Uh-uh.” She was shaking her head hard enough to cause sweat to fly. “They only allow two guys to come with me. Marco and Leo, that’s been the drill.”

“I know. I’ll take the place of one of them.”

Angelina looked over her shoulder to where the Boys were sitting watching television. “Which one?”

“I don’t know. We’ll decide later.”

“They’ll be suspicious, new guard.”

“That’s why I want to go tomorrow. So they’ll know me on Thursday.”

“I—” She stopped. “Do you have a plan?”

“Maybe.”

“Does it involve bulldozers and earthmovers?”

“Probably not.”

She rubbed her lower lip with her fist. “We need to talk about this. You should come out to the penthouse this evening.”

“Tomorrow morning,” Kurtz said. “I’ll be out of town this evening.”

Where the hell is he going?” asked Detective Myers. He and Brubaker had spent a cold and boring and useless afternoon watching Joe Kurtz’s car and office, and when the son of a bitch finally emerged and started driving his scratched-up Volvo, the bastard had taken the 190 out to 90-South and seemed headed for the toll booths and the Thruway to Erie, Pennsylvania.

“How the fuck should I know where he’s going?” said Brubaker. “But if he leaves the fucking state, he’s in violation of his parole and we’ve got him.” Five minutes later, Brubaker said, “Shit.”

Kurtz had exited onto Highway 219, the last turnoff before the I-90 West Thruway toll booths. It was snowing and getting dark.

“What’s out here?” whined Myers as they followed Kurtz toward the town of Orchard Park. “The Farino Family used to have their headquarters out here, but they moved it to town after that nun sister showed up, didn’t they?”

Brubaker shrugged, although, he knew exactly where the new Farino Family digs were at Marina Towers since he took his weekly payoff from Little Skag via Skag’s lawyer, Albert Bell, near there every Tuesday. Brubaker knew that Myers suspected him of being on the Farino payroll but wasn’t sure. If Myers was certain, he’d want in himself, and Brubaker didn’t like sharing.

“Why don’t we just roust Kurtz tonight?” said Myers. “I got the throwdown if he’s not armed.”

Brubaker shook his head. Kurtz had turned right near Chestnut Ridge Park, and it was hard to follow the Volvo in the gloom and snow along these two-lane roads amidst all the construction cones and commuter traffic. “We’re out of our jurisdiction here,” he said. “His lawyer could call it harassment if we get him out here.”

“Fuck that. We got probable cause.”

Brubaker shook his head again.

“Then let’s just forget this shit,” Myers said. “It’s a fucking waste of time.”

“Tell that to Jimmy Hathaway,” Brubaker said, invoking the name of the cop killed under mysterious circumstances four months earlier. The only link to Kurtz, Brubaker knew, was Little Skag Farino’s comment to him that Hathaway—who had been the Farinos’ bitch for years—had tapped a phone call and followed Kurtz somewhere on the night of the detective’s murder. Hathaway had been eager to earn a bounty on Joe Kurtz’s head at the time.

“Fuck Jimmy Hathaway,” said Myers. “I never liked the asshole.”

Brubaker shot a glance at his partner. “Look, if Kurtz leaves the state, we’ve got him on parole violation.”

Myers pointed two cars ahead of him. “Leave the state? The fucker’s not even leaving the county. Look—he just turned back toward Hamburg.”

Brubaker lit a cigarette. It was hard to follow Kurtz now that it was really dark.

“You want him,” said Myers, “let’s roust him tomorrow in the city. Use the throwdown. Beat the shit out of him and turn him over to County.”

“Yeah,” said Brubaker. “Yeah.” He turned back to Highway 219 and the Thruway to Buffalo.

CHAPTER

FIFTEEN

When Kurtz was sure that the unmarked car had turned back, he took the back road from Hamburg to the Thruway, accepted a ticket at the toll booth, and drove the two hundred miles to Cleveland.

Dr. Howard K. Conway’s office and home were in an old section not far from the downtown. It was a neighborhood of big old Victorian homes broken into apartments and large Catholic churches, either closed or locked tight against the night. As the Italian and Polish residents had been replaced by blacks in the old neighborhoods, the parishes had died or moved to the suburbs. Despite its new stadium and rock-and-roll museum, Cleveland was still, like Buffalo, an old industrial city with rot at its heart.

If Emilio Gonzaga’s compound was a fortress, Conway’s home was fortress-lite, circled by a black iron fence, its first-floor windows caged, the old house dark except for a single lighted window on the second floor. The sign outside read DR. H.K. CONWAY, DDS. Kurtz unlatched the iron gate—assuming that an alarm was being tripped in the house—and walked to the front door. There was a buzzer and an intercom, and he leaned on the former and moaned in the direction of the latter.

“What is it?” The voice was young—too young for Conway—and harsh.

“I ’ave a ’oothache,” moaned Kurtz. “I ’eed a ’entis’.”

“What?”

“I ’ave a ’errible ’oothache.”

“Fuck off.” The intercom went dead.

Kurtz leaned on the buzzer.

“What?”

“I ’ave a ’errible ’oothache,” moaned Kurtz, louder now, audibly whining.

“Dr. Conway doesn’t see patients.” The intercom clicked off.

Kurtz hit the buzzer button eight times and then leaned his weight on it.

There came a thudding on bare stairs and the door jerked open to the length of a chain. The man standing there was so large that he blocked the light coming down the stairway—three hundred pounds at least, young, perhaps in his twenties, with cupid lips and curly hair. “Are you fucking deaf? I said Dr. Conway doesn’t see patients. He’s retired. Fuck off.”

Kurtz held his jaw, keeping his head lowered so that his face was in shadow. “I ’eed to see a dentist. It ’urts.”

The big man started to close the door. Kurtz got his boot in the opening. “P’ease.”

“You fucking asked for this, pal,” said the big man, jerking the chain off, flinging the door open, and reaching for Kurtz’s collar.

Kurtz kicked him in the balls, took the big man’s offered right hand, swung it around behind him, and broke his little finger. When the man screamed, Kurtz transferred his grip to his index finger and bent it far back, keeping the hand and arm pinned somewhere around where the big man’s shoulder blades were buried under fat. “Let’s go upstairs,” Kurtz whispered, stepping into a foyer that smelled of cabbage. He kicked the door shut behind them and wheeled the man around, helping him up the first stairs by applying leverage to his finger.

“Timmy?” called a quavery voice from the second floor. “Is everything all right? Timmy?”

Kurtz looked at the blubbering, weeping mass of stumbling flesh ascending the stairs ahead of him. Timmy?

The second-floor landing opened onto a lighted parlor where an old man sat in a wheelchair. The man was bald and liver-spotted, his wasted legs were covered by a lap robe, and he was holding some sort of blue steel .32-caliber revolver.

“Timmy?” quavered the old man. He squinted at them through pop-bottle-thick lenses set in old-fashioned black frames.

Kurtz kept Timmy’s mass between him and the muzzle of the .32.

“I’m sorry, Howard,” Timmy gasped. “He surprised me. He…ahhhhh!” The last syllable erupted as Kurtz bent Timmy’s finger back beyond design tolerances.

“Dr. Conway,” said Kurtz, “we need to talk.”

The old man thumbed the hammer back. “You’re police?”

Kurtz thought that question was too stupid to dignify with an answer. Timmy was trying to lean far forward to reduce the pain in his arm and finger, so Kurtz had to knee him in his fat buttocks to get him upright in shield position again.

“You’re from him?” said the old man, voice shaking almost as much as the gun’s muzzle.

“Yes,” said Kurtz. “James B. Hansen.”

As if these were the magic words, Dr. Howard K. Conway squeezed the trigger of the .32 once, twice, three, four times. The reports sounded loud and flat in the wood-floored room. Suddenly the air smelled of cordite. The dentist stared at the pistol as if it had fired of its own volition.

“Aww, shit,” Timmy said in a disappointed voice and pitched forward, his forehead hitting the hardwood floor with a hollow sound.

Kurtz moved fast, diving around Timmy, rolling once, and coming up fast to knock the pistol from Conway’s hand before the crippled dentist could empty chambers five and six. He grabbed the old man by his flannel shirtfront and lifted him out of the chair, shaking him twice to make sure there were no more weapons hidden under the slipping lap robe.

French doors opened onto a narrow balcony at the far end of the room. Booting the wheelchair aside, Kurtz carried the struggling scarecrow across the room, kicked those doors open, and dangled the old man over the icy iron railing. Dr. Conway’s glasses went flying into the night.

“Don’t…don’t…don’t…don’t.” The dentist’s mantra had lost its quaver.

“Tell me about Hansen.”

“What… I don’t know any…good Christ, don’t. Please don’t!”

With one hand, Kurtz had literally tossed the old man backward and caught him by the shirtfront. Flannel ripped.

Dr. Howard K. Conway’s dentures had come loose and were clacking around in his mouth. If the old piece of shit hadn’t been a silent accomplice to a dozen or more children’s murders, Joe Kurtz might have felt a little bit sorry for him. Maybe.

“My hands are cold,” whispered Kurtz. “I might miss my grip next time.” He shoved the dentist back over the railing.

“Anything…anything! I have money. I have lots of money!”

“James B. Hansen.”

Conway nodded wildly.

“Other names,” hissed Kurtz. “Records. Files.”

“In my study. In the safe.”

“Combination.”

“Left thirty-two, right nineteen, left eleven, right forty-six. Please let me go. No! Not over the drop!”

Kurtz slammed the old man’s bony and presumably unfeeling ass down hard on the railing. “Why didn’t you tell someone, Conway? All these years. All those dead women and kids. Why didn’t you tell someone?”

“He would have killed me.” The old man’s breath smelled of ether.

“Yeah,” said Kurtz and had to stifle the immediate urge to throw the old man down onto the concrete terrace fifteen feet below. First the files.

“What will I do now?” Dr. Conway was sobbing, hiccuping. “Where will I go?”

“You can go to—” began Kurtz and saw the old man’s rheumy eyes focus wildly, hopefully, on something low behind Kurtz.

He grabbed the dentist by his shirtfront and swung him around just as Timmy, who had left a bloody trail across the parquet floor, fired the last two bullets from the pistol he’d retrieved.

Conway’s body was too thin and hollow to stop a .32 slug, but the first bullet missed and the second hit Conway in the center of his forehead. Kurtz ducked, but the spray of blood and brain matter was all from the entry wound; the bullet had not exited.

Kurtz dropped the dentist’s body on the icy balcony and walked over to Timmy, who was clicking away on empty chambers. Not wanting to touch the weapon even with his gloves on, he stepped on the man’s hand until he dropped it and then rolled Timmy over with his boot. Two of the original .32 slugs had hit the big man in the chest, but one had caught him in the throat and another had entered below the left cheekbone. Timmy would bleed out in another minute or two unless he received immediate medical assistance.

Kurtz walked into what had to be Dr. Conway’s study, ignored the row of locked filing cabinets, found the big wall safe behind a painting of a naked man, and tried the combination. He thought that Conway had rat tied it off too quickly, under too much stress, to be lying. and he was right. The safe opened on the first try.

Lying in the safe were metal boxes holding $63,000 in cash, stacks of bonds, gold coins, a sheaf of stock certificates, and a thick file folder filled with dental X-rays, insurance forms, and newspaper clippings. Kurtz ignored the money and took the folder out into the light slamming the safe door and scrambling the lock as he did so.

Timmy was no longer twitching and the viscous flow of blood ran out onto the cement balcony where it had pooled around Dr. Conway’s ruined skull and was coagulating in the process of freezing. Kurtz set the folder on the round table next to the empty wheelchair and flipped through it. He didn’t think that this was a neighborhood where people would dial 911 at the first sound of what could be a gunshot.

Twenty-three news clippings. Fifteen photocopies of letters to various urban police headquarters, dental X-rays attached. Fifteen different identities.

“Come on, come on,” whispered Kurtz. If Hansen’s current Buffalo identity wasn’t here, this whole mess had been for nothing. But why would it be here? Why would Conway know Hansen’s current alias before it was necessary to identify him to the next round of homicide detectives?

Because Hansen has to have the cover story ready in case the old dentist dies. Timmy would do the honors then. But there has to be a dentist of record.

The next-to-last paper in the folder had the record of an office visit the previous November—a cleaning and partial crown. No X-rays. There was no bill, but a handwritten note in the margin read “$50,000.” No wonder Dr. Howard K. Conroy accepted no new patients. Beneath it was an address in the Buffalo suburb of Tonawanda, and a name.

“Holy shit,” whispered Kurtz.

CHAPTER

SIXTEEN

Where the hell is he?” Detective Myers asked Detective Brubaker. The two had requisitioned a much better surveillance vehicle—a gray floral-delivery van—and were parked on station near the Royal Delaware Arms at 7:30 A.M., just in case Kurtz took it in his head to go to his office early. They’d discussed where and how to interdict him—an observed traffic violation on Elicott Street would be the pretext—and then the fast roust, the discovery of a weapon—the throwdown, if Kurtz wasn’t armed in violation of parole, which they guessed he would be—the attempted resisting arrest, the subduing, and the arrest.

Brubaker and Myers were ready. Besides wearing body armor, each man was carrying a telescoping, weighted baton in addition to his 9mm dock, and Myers had a 10,000-volt Taser stun gun in his pocket.

“Where the fuck is he?” repeated Myers. Kurtz’s Volvo was nowhere in sight.

“Maybe he left early for that shithole office of his,” said Brubaker.

“Maybe he never came back from Orchard Park last night.”

“Maybe he was kidnapped by fucking UFOs,” snarled Brubaker. “Maybe we should quit speculating and go find him and get this over with.”

“Maybe we should just skip it.” Myers was not eager to do this thing. But then, Myers was not being paid $5,000 by Little Skag Farino to bust Kurtz and get him back into prison so he could be shanked. Brubaker had considered telling his partner about the payment and sharing the money. Considered it for about two milliseconds.

“Maybe you should shut up,” said Brubaker, shifting the van into gear and driving away from the Royal Delaware Arms.

James B. Hansen had to wait for the two other homicide detectives to drive off before he could park his Cadillac SUV where their van had been, and then go in the back entrance of the fleabag hotel. He took the back stairs up all seven flights to the room number Brubaker and Myers had listed in their report. Hansen could have used his badge to get the passkey for Joe Kurtz’s room, but that would have been terminally stupid. However legitimate his excuse for checking on Kurtz might sound later, Hansen wanted no connection between the ex-con and himself until the investigation of the murder of one John Wellington Frears.

Hansen noticed the plaster dust in the center of the stairs and hall leading to the eighth-floor room. Knowing that Kurtz had come and gone over the past few days, it had to be some sort of paranoid alarm system. Hansen kept to the walls, leaving no trace. The door to Kurtz’s room was locked, but it was a cheap lock, and bringing out the small leather-bound kit of burglary tools he’d used for fifteen years, Hansen had the door open in ten seconds.

The suite of rooms was cold and drafty but strangely neat for such a loser. Wearing gloves but still touching nothing, Hansen peered into the adjoining room—weights, a heavy bag, no furniture—and looked around the big room where Kurtz appeared to spend his time. Books—a surprise. Serious titles, a bigger surprise. Hansen made a mental note not to underestimate the intelligence of this shabby ex-con. The rest of the room was predictable—a half-sized refrigerator, a hot plate for cooking, a toaster, no TV, no computer, no luxuries. Also no notes or diaries or loose papers. Hansen checked in the closet—a few well-worn dress shirts, some ties, a decent suit, one pair of well-polished black shoes. There was no dresser, but a box in the corner held folded jeans, clean underwear, more shirts, and some sweaters. Hansen looked in all the obvious hiding places but could find no guns or illegal knives. He went back to the box of sweaters and raveled a long thread from the top sweater on the pile, dropping it into a clean evidence bag.

In the sink was a rinsed coffee cup, a small plate, and a sharp kitchen knife. It looked as if Kurtz had used the knife to cut a slice of French bread and spread butter on it, then rinsed the blade. Lifting the knife gingerly, Hansen dropped it into a second evidence bag.

The bathroom was as neat as the main room, with nothing beyond basics in the medicine cabinet—not even prescription pills. Kurtz’s hairbrush and shaving kit were lined up neatly on the old pedestal sink. Hansen had to stop himself from grinning. Lifting the brush, he found five hairs and transferred them to a third evidence bag.

Checking to make sure that he had left no trace, Hansen let himself out of the hotel room, locked the door behind him, and kept to the walls while descending the stairs.

Kurtz had returned late from Cleveland, driven to the office, used his computer to double-check Captain Robert Millworth’s address in Tonawanda, and then, around 6:00 A.M., had driven to Arlene’s small home in Cheektowaga. She was awake and dressed, drinking coffee in the kitchen and watching a network early morning show on a small TV on her counter.

“Don’t come into the office today,” Kurtz told her as he stepped past her into the kitchen.

“Why, Joe? I have more than fifty Sweetheart Searches to process today—”

He quickly explained about Dr. Conway’s demise and the information he’d found in the dentist’s safe. This was information Arlene had to know if she was going to be a help over the next few days. Kurtz glanced at the manila folder on the table. “Are those the photos I asked you to process?” Their old office on Chippewa Street years ago had been big enough to hold a darkroom in which Arlene had developed all the photos he and Sam had shot on the job. After her husband’s death, Arlene had converted an extra bathroom into a darkroom at home.

She slid the folder across the table. “Shopping for property?”

Kurtz glanced through the blowups of the Gonzaga compound he’d taken from the helicopter. They’d all turned out.

“So what do I do from home today, Joe?”

“I’ll be back in a while and someone may be with me. You have any problem entertaining a visitor?”

“Who?” said Arlene. “And for how long? And why?”

Kurtz let that go. “I’ll be back in a while.”

“Since we aren’t going into the office, is there any chance we can look at new office space today after your visitor leaves?”

“Not today.” He paused by the door, tapping the folder of photos against his free hand. “Keep your doors locked.”

“The Hansen thing, you mean.”

Kurtz shrugged. “I don’t think it will be a problem. But if the cops get in touch, call me right away on the cell phone.”

“The cops?” Arlene lit a cigarette. “I love it when you talk like that, Joe.”

“Like what?”

“Like a private eye.”

So he’s not at his fucking flophouse and he’s not at his fucking office. Where the fuck is he?” said Detective Myers.

“Did anyone ever tell you that you use the F word too much, Tommy?”

Brubaker had given up smoking seven months earlier, but now he took a last drag on his cigarette and flipped the butt out the window of their surveillance van. It was almost 9:00 A.M., and not only was Kurtz’s Volvo not parked in the alley behind his office, but the secretary’s Buick wasn’t there either.

“So now what?”

“How the fuck do I know?” said Brubaker.

“So we just sit on our asses and wait?”

“I sit on my ass,” said Brubaker. “You sit on your fat ass.”

CHAPTER

SEVENTEEN

It was just 8:00 A.M. when Kurtz knocked on the hotel-room door, but when it opened, John Wellington Frears was dressed in a three-piece suit, tie knotted perfectly. Although Frears’s expression did not change when he saw Kurtz, he took a surprised half step back into the room. “Mr. Kurtz.”

Kurtz stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. “You were expecting someone else.” It was not a question.

“No. Please sit down.” Frears gestured to a chair by the window, but Kurtz remained standing.

“You were expecting James B. Hansen,” continued Kurtz. “With a gun.”

Frears said nothing. His brown eyes, so expressive in the publicity photos Kurtz had seen, now suppressed even more pain than Kurtz had seen the previous week at Blues Franklin. The man was dying.

“That’s one way to flush him out,” said Kurtz. “But you’ll never know if he’s brought to justice for his crimes. You’ll be dead.”

Frears sat on the hard chair by the desk. “What do you want, Mr. Kurtz?”

“I’m here to tell you that your plan won’t work, Mr. Frears. Hansen’s in Buffalo, all right. He’s lived here for about eight months, moving here from Miami with his new family. But he can kill you today and he’ll never be accused of the crime.”

Frears’s eyes literally came alive. “You know where he is? What his name is here?”

Kurtz handed the man the dental bill.

“Captain Robert G. Millworth,” read the violinist. “A police officer?”

“Homicide. I checked.”

Frears’s hands were shaking as he set the bill on the desktop. “How do you know this man is James Hansen? What does the bill—however high—from a Cleveland dentist prove?”

“It proves nothing,” said Kurtz. “But this is the dentist who’s provided dental records to police around the country after a dozen murder-suicides identical to the one in your daughter’s case. Always different names. Always different records. But always involved in murders that Hansen committed.” He handed across the folder.

Frears went through the pages, slowly, tears forming. “So many children.” Looking up at Kurtz, he said, “And you can tie this Captain Millworth to these other names? You have dental records for him?”

“No. I don’t think Conway kept any other records or X-rays on file for this office visit. I think he was going to use the standard X-rays when Millworth’s corpse—whatever corpse Millworth provided—would need identification.”

Frears blinked. “But we can make the dentist testify?”

“The dentist is dead. As of yesterday.”

Frears started to speak, stopped. Perhaps he wondered if Kurtz had killed Conway, but perhaps it was not important to him to know right now. “I can present this folder to the FBI. The bill ties Millworth to the dentist. The payment is obviously extortion. Conway was blackmailing James Hansen.”

“Sure. You can try to make that case. But there’s no official record of Millworth’s payment, just of an office visit.”

“But I don’t understand how the dental X-rays matched the teeth of the bodies Mr. Hansen left behind in these various murder-suicides.”

“It looks as if Dr. Conway, DDS, had a clientele mostly of corpses.”

Frears looked at the forms again. “Conway’s office was in Cleveland. Many of these murder-suicides occurred in cities far away from there. Even if Hansen somehow harvested these other men to be future burned bodies for him, how did he get them to go to Cleveland to have dental X-rays taken?”

Kurtz shrugged. “Hansen is one smart son of a bitch. Maybe he offered these poor bastards dental care as part of an employment package. My guess is that he had Conway fly to whatever city he was living in at the time, X-ray the fall guys’ teeth—maybe when they were already dead—and then have the dentist send the X-rays from Cleveland. It doesn’t really matter, does it? What matters right now is getting you out of here.”

Frears blinked again and a stubborn look appeared on his pain-ravaged face. “Out of Buffalo? I won’t go. I have to—”

“Not out of Buffalo, just out of this hotel. I have a better way for you to nail our Captain Millworth than becoming just another unsolved homicide in the good captain’s case file.”

“I don’t have anyplace to—”

“I’ve got somewhere for you to stay for a couple of days,” said Kurtz. “It’s not one-hundred-percent safe, but then, nowhere in Buffalo is really safe for you right now.” Or for me either, he could have added. “Get packed,” said Kurtz. “You’re checking out.”

Brubaker and Myers trolled the downtown streets, watching for a glimpse of Kurtz’s blue Volvo, checking the sidewalks for a glimpse of him, and driving by the Royal Delaware Arms every orbit.

“Hey,” said Myers, “what about his secretary’s house? Whatshername? Arlene DeMarco.”

“What about it?” said Brubaker. He was on his fifth cigarette.

Myers flipped through his grubby little notebook. “She lives out in Cheektowaga. We’ve got the address here. Her car’s not there today. If she didn’t come in, maybe Kurtz went out to her.”

Brubaker shrugged, but then turned the car and headed for the Expressway. “What the fuck,” he said. “Worth a try.”

Mr. Frears,” said Kurtz, “this is my secretary, Mrs. DeMarco. She won’t mind if you stay here for a day or two.”

Arlene glanced at Kurtz but extended her hand. “A pleasure, Mr. Frears. I’m Arlene.”

“John,” said Frears, taking her hand in his, putting his feet together and bowing slightly in a way that made him look as if he was going to kiss her hand. He did not, but Arlene blushed with pleasure as if he had.

They were in Arlene’s kitchen. When Frears’s back was turned, Kurtz said, “Arlene, you still have your…” He opened his peacoat slightly to expose the pistol on his belt.

She shook her head. “It’s at work, Joe. I don’t keep one here.”

Kurtz said to Frears, “Excuse us a moment,” and led Arlene into her living room. He handed her Angelina Farino’s gun—not the Compact Witness she had a sentimental thing for, but the little .45 he’d taken away from her at the hockey arena. Arlene slid the magazine out of the grip, made sure it was loaded, slapped the magazine back in, checked to make sure the safety was on, and slipped the small but heavy pistol into the pocket of her cardigan sweater. She nodded, and the two of them went back to the kitchen.

“I’m afraid this is going to be a terrible imposition,” began Frears. “I’m perfectly capable of finding—”

“We may find you another place after a day or two,” said Kurtz. “But you saw the situation with Hansen/Millworth. Right now I think you’d be safer here.”

Frears looked at Arlene. “Mrs. DeMarco… Arlene…this will bring danger into your home.”

Arlene lit a cigarette. “Actually, John, it will bring a little much-needed excitement into my life.”

“Call me if anything comes up,” said Kurtz. He went out to his Volvo.

Got him!” said Detective Myers. They had been headed down Union Road in Cheektowaga when they saw Kurtz’s Volvo pull out of a side street and head north toward the Kensington Expressway.

Brubaker made a U-turn through a Dunkin’ Donuts’ parking lot and pulled the floral-delivery van into northbound traffic.

“Keep way back,” said Myers.

“Don’t fucking tell me how to tail someone, Tommy.”

“Well, just don’t fucking get made,” whined Myers. “Kurtz doesn’t know this van. We stay back, we got him.”

Brubaker stayed back. Kurtz got onto the Kensington headed into town and the van followed six vehicles back.

“We should wait until he’s into the city to take him,” said Myers.

Brubaker nodded.

“Maybe near that flophouse hotel of his, if he’s headed there. It would make sense that we’d have probable cause to roust him near there.”

“Yeah,” said Brubaker. “If he’s headed to the hotel.”

Kurtz was headed to the hotel. He parked in the crappy neighborhood nearby, and Brubaker drove the van a block farther and doubled back along side streets in time to see Kurtz locking his car and walking toward the Royal Delaware Arms. Brubaker parked the van in front of a hydrant. They could intercept Kurtz on foot before he got to the hotel. “We’ve fucking got him. You got your club and the throwdown?”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Myers, anxiously patting his pockets. “Let’s do this.”

Kurtz had just turned the corner a block from the hotel. The two detectives jumped out of the van and began quick-walking to catch up. Brubaker pulled his Glock from its holster and carried it in his right hand. He clicked the safety off.

Myers’s phone rang.

“Ignore it,” said Brubaker.

“It might be important.”

“Ignore it.”

Myers ignored Brubaker instead. Answering the phone even as he ran, he said, “Yeah. Yeah? Yes, sir. Yes, but we’re just going to…no…yeah…no…right.” He folded the phone and stopped.

Brubaker whirled at him. “What?”

“It was Captain Mill worth. We’re to drop the surveillance on Kurtz.”

“Too fucking late!”

Myers shook his head. “Uh-uh. The captain says that we’re to drop the surveillance and get the hell over to Elmwood Avenue to help Prdzywsky with a fresh street killing. We’re finished with Kurtz…his words.”

“Fuck!” shouted Brubaker. An old woman in a black coat stopped to stare. Brubaker took three strides, rounded the corner, and looked at Kurtz approaching the hotel across the street. “We have the fucker.”

“We go after him now, Millworth will have our balls for breakfast. He said not to mess with Kurtz. What’s your hard-on for, Fred?”

Tell him about the money from Little Skag Farino? thought Brubaker. No. “That perp killed Jimmy Hathaway. And those Three Stooges from Attica, too.”

“Bullshit,” said Myers. He turned toward the van. “There’s no proof for that and you know it.”

Brubaker looked back toward the hotel and actually lifted his Glock as if he was going to shoot at Kurtz’s retreating back a block away. “Fuck!” he said again.

Someone had been in Kurtz’s room. Two of the tiny telltales on the door had been knocked free. Kurtz pulled his gun, unlocked the door, kicked it open, and went in fast Nothing. He kept the S&W in his hand as he checked both rooms and the fire escape. He didn’t see anything out of place at first inspection, but someone had been in here.

A knife was gone. Just a sharp kitchen knife. Kurtz went over everything else, but except for the fact that his shaving kit and brush had been moved slightly in the bathroom and some books set back on the shelf not quite as he had left them, nothing else was missing or out of place.

Kurtz showered, shaved, combed his hair, and dressed in his best white shirt, conservative tie and dark suit. The black Bally dress shoes in the back of his closet needed only a buffing to be brought up to full shine. His trench coat hanging in the closet was old but well-made and clean. Slipping the .40 S&W into his belt and dropping Angelina’s Compact Witness .45 into his coat pocket, he went out to the Volvo and drove to the Buffalo Athletic Club. On the way, he stopped at a Sees Candy, bought a medium-sized box of chocolates in a heart-shaped box, and tossed away most of the chocolates.

“You’re late,” said Angelina Farino Ferrara as he came into the exercise area. “And out of uniform.” He was still wearing his suit and trench coat.

“No exercise for me today.” He handed her the box of chocolates. The Boys looked over curiously from where they had just finished their work in the weight room.

Angelina untied the ribbon, opened the heart-shaped box, and looked at the Compact Witness nestled under the few loose chocolates. “My favorite,” she said, eating a pecan cluster and closing the lid. “Did you still want to do lunch?”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure that today’s the right day?”

“Yes.”

“But nothing dramatic is going to happen there, right?”

Kurtz remained silent.

“We’ll talk about this out at my penthouse,” said Angelina. “I have to change before lunch. You can ride out with me. I’ll have to introduce you to the Boys and anyone else who’s interested. So far, you’ve just been the Man Hitting on Me at the Athletic Club. What did you say your name was?”

“Dr. Howard Conway.”

Angelina raised an eyebrow and mopped her sweaty face. “Dr. Conway. How nice for you. Surgeon?”

“Dentist.”

“Oh, too bad. I understand that dentists suffer from depression and suicide at an alarming rate. Are you armed today, Dr. Conway?”

“Yes.”

“You know the Boys are going to relieve you of it as soon as we get in the car?”

“Yes.”

Angelina Farino Ferrara’s smile was predatory.

CHAPTER

EIGHTEEN

They rode out to the marina in silence. Marco and Leo had shaken his hand in the parking garage and then searched him well.

“Why does a dentist need a gun?” asked Leo, slipping the S&W into his cashmere coat.

“I’m paranoid,” said Kurtz.

“Aren’t we all?” said Angelina.

Marina Towers rose twelve stories above an expanse of snowy lawn that overlooked the Buffalo Marina and the frozen Niagara River. From the parking garage beneath the complex, the four of them rode a private elevator to the eleventh floor, where the Boys lived—Kurtz caught a glimpse of desks, computers, teletypes, a few accountant types, and knew that this was where the Farino offices had been moved—and then Angelina took him up the final flight on a separate elevator. They stepped out into a marble-lined foyer, where she produced a key and let them into her penthouse.

The series of open rooms ran the full length of the building and filled the entire floor so that Kurtz could look northeast to downtown Buffalo and southwest toward the marina and the river. Even with low clouds on a gray day, the view was impressive.

“Very nice—” began Kurtz and stopped as he turned. Angelina was aiming the Compact Witness .45 at him and had pulled a second, larger automatic from a drawer.

“Can you think of any reason I shouldn’t gut-shoot you right now, Joe Kurtz?”

Kurtz did not move his hands. “It might ruin your plan to surprise Mr. Gonzaga.”

The woman’s lips looked very thin and bloodless. “I can make other plans.”

Kurtz had no argument for that.

“You humiliated me twice,” said Angelina. “Threatened to kill me.”

Kurtz could have mentioned the four men she had hired to kill him, but he didn’t think that would be the best argument to make in these circumstances. If she shot him now, she’d earn points with her brother.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t get rid of you and get someone else to go after Gonzaga,” said Angelina Farino Ferrara. “Give me one good reason.”

“I’m thinking… I’m thinking,” said Kurtz in his best Jack Benny voice.

Maybe Angelina was too young to get the joke. Her finger curled on the trigger. “Time’s up.”

“Can I reach slowly into my suit pocket?”

Angelina nodded. She was holding the larger .45 aimed steadily at his midsection and had set the Compact Witness on the maple table under a painting.

Kurtz took the cassette tape out of his pocket and tossed it to her.

“What is it?”

“Play it.”

“I hate games,” said Angelina, but she walked five paces to a stack of stereo components built into a bookcase, slipped the cassette in, and punched “Play.”

Her voice came from the speakers. “Oh, but I did. I did. A boy. A beautiful baby boy with Emilio’s fat, rubbery lips, lovely brown eyes, and the Gonzaga chin and forehead. I drowned him in the Belice River in Sicily.” Her voice went on for a minute, explaining how hard it would be to get to Emilio Gonzaga in his compound, and men came Kurtz’s voice: “How did you plan to kill him?”

“Well, I sort of hoped you’d take care of that detail for me now that you know what you know,” came Angelina’s voice.

Angelina shut off the player and pocketed the cassette. She was actually smiling. “You miserable son of a bitch. You were wired that night out in Williamsville.”

Kurtz said nothing.

“So,” said Angelina, “in the event of your disappearance here, who gets copies of me tape? Emilio, of course.”

“And your brother,” said Kurtz.

“Not the cops?”

Kurtz shrugged.

“I should shoot you just on general principles,” said Angelina. But she put the .45 back in its drawer. Then she hefted the smaller Compact Witness. “You gave it back to me loaded?”

“Yeah.”

“You take chances, Joe Kurtz. Stay here. There’s fruit juice in the refrigerator over there, liquor at the bar. I’m going to shower again and get dressed. Emilio’s car will be here to pick me up in thirty minutes. I hope to God you have a plan.”

Kurtz looked at his watch.

Fifteen minutes later, Angelina phoned down for the Boys to come up. She met them in the foyer and led them into the penthouse, where Kurtz was waiting with his S&W, now sporting a silencer she had loaned him. Angelina closed the door behind the Boys.

“What the fuck…” began Leo. Marco, the bigger man, simply raised his hands and watched both Kurtz and Angelina.

“Quiet,” said Kurtz. “Unload the hardware. Carefully. Tips of fingers only. Good. Now kick the guns this way. Gently. Good.” He sat on the edge of a couch, the pistol covering both of them.

“Ms. Farino?” said Leo. “You part of this bullshit?”

Kurtz shook his head and tapped one finger against his lips. “Gentlemen, we have a proposition for you. Do the smart thing and you live and make quite a bit of money. Do the stupid thing and…well, you don’t want to do the stupid thing.”

Marco and Leo stood with their hands half-raised, Marco vigilant, Leo twitchy, his eyes flicking back and forth as if gauging his chances for leaping at his revolver on the floor before Kurtz could fire.

“Are you listening, fellows?” said Kurtz.

“We’re listening,” said Marco. The big man sounded calm.

“I want to visit the Gonzagas today with Miss Ferrara,” said Kurtz. “Since they only allow two bodyguards with her, one of you will have to stay behind. We thought the big bathroom up here would be a good place for the volunteer to stay until we get back. Miss Ferrara had a pair of handcuffs in her bedroom, I didn’t ask why, and one of you will wear those, probably connected to the washbasin pedestal in there with your arms behind you, until we return. Then we’ll find a more comfortable arrangement for the next couple of days.”

“Next couple of days!” shouted Leo. “Are you fucking out of your fucking mind? You know what Little Skag Farino is going to do with your sorry ass, cocksucker?”

Kurtz said nothing.

Marco said, “Where does the money come in?”

Angelina answered. “When our negotiations with Emilio Gonzaga are completed, there’s going to be more money coming in than the Farino Family has seen for decades. Anyone who helps me with this will get a lion’s share.”

“Helps you?” sneered Leo. “Who the fuck do you think you are, cunt? When Little Skag gets out, you’re going to be—”

“My brother Stephen is not a part of this,” said Angelina. Kurtz thought that she had spoken very politely for someone who had just been called the C word.

Marco nodded. Leo looked at him with a dumbfounded expression. He glanced at the weapons on the floor again.

“So which one of you volunteers is going to stay behind?” said Kurtz.

Neither man spoke for a minute. Kurtz could see Marco mulling it over. Leo’s fingers were twitching.

“No volunteers?” said Kurtz. “I guess I’ll just have to pick.” He shot Leo through his left eye.

Marco did not move as Leo’s body fell back onto the parquet floor, blood streaming from the back of his skull. Leo’s legs twitched once and were still. Angelina gave Kurtz a startled look.

“You understand the drill?” Kurtz asked Marco.

“Yeah.”

“My name’s Howard Conway and I’m filling in for Leo, who has the flu.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ll have your gun back, minus the bullets. Of course, when we’re at the Gonzagas’, you can blow the whistle on us any time.”

“What would that get me?”

Kurtz shrugged. “Probably the eternal appreciation of Emilio Gonzaga.”

“I’d rather have the clap,” said Marco. Angelina had picked up the bodyguards’ guns and was thumbing the slugs out of the magazine in Marco’s semiauto. “Can I ask a question of Ms. Farino?” said the bodyguard.

It was Angelina who nodded.

“Ma’am, is this your show or this…dentist’s?”

“It’s my show.”

Marco nodded, accepted the now-empty pistol, and slid it back in his shoulder holster. “Can I move?”

Kurtz nodded.

Marco glanced at his watch. “The Gonzaga limo’s going to be here in about three minutes. You want me to do something with this?” He inclined his head toward Leo.

“There are a couple of blankets in that first closet,” said Angelina. “Store him in the back of the big walk-in freezer for now. I’ll get the mop.”

CHAPTER

NINETEEN

James B. Hansen left his office at police headquarters in late morning and drove to the Airport Sheraton. He had an absolutely untraceable .38-caliber pistol in his briefcase, right next to the clear evidence bags containing the knife, thread, and hairs he had picked up in Joe Kurtz’s hotel room.

It might have been a slight problem finding John Frears’s room number—Hansen was certainly not going to show his badge and ask at the desk—but the old violinist had left his phone number, complete with room extension, when he had spoken to a bored lieutenant in Homicide the week before about the unlikely sighting at the airport. Frears was making it almost too easy.

Hansen knew what the old man was up to, speaking to the Buffalo News, going on a radio talk show and all the rest. He was offering himself up like a staked-out goat, trying to flush the man he’d known as James B. Hansen out of hiding so the police would put two and two together and track down the killer. Hansen had to smile at that. Homicide detectives, under Hansen’s supervision—after all, John Wellington Frears was an important man in his own little musical circles, and his murder would demand the A-team’s presence—would put two and two together all right. And then the fingerprints on the knife and the DNA in the hair would lead them straight to an ex-con killer named Joe Kurtz.

Hansen entered by a side door, went up an empty staircase to the fifth floor, paused outside Frears’s room, and readied the card key—programmed by Hansen himself to open any door in the Sheraton—in his left hand and the .38 in his right. The pistol, of course, would later be found in Kurtz’s flophouse room. The knife—which would not be the murder weapon, but which would draw blood as if the two men were fighting over it—would be found in the hotel room. Hansen had taken care to wait until the maids would be done with their housekeeping and the long hallway was empty as he keyed the door open. The chain lock was not on. Hansen had planned to hold his badge up to the peephole if it had been.

As soon as Hansen saw the sterile, empty room and neatly made bed, he knew that Frears had fled.

Damn it. Hansen immediately asked forgiveness from the Lord for his curse.

He closed the door, went out to his SUV, and used a disposable cell phone to call the Sheraton’s front desk. “This is Detective Hathaway of the Buffalo Police Department, badge number…” He rattled off the retired number he’d looked up in the dead detective’s file. “We’re returning a call from one of your guests, ah…” He paused a few seconds as if looking up the name. “Mr. John Frears. Could you ring him for me, please?”

“I’m sorry, Detective Hathaway, Mr. Frears checked out this morning. About three hours ago.”

“Really? He wanted to talk to us. Did he leave a forwarding address or number?”

“No, sir. I was the one who checked Mr. Frears out and he just paid his bill and left.”

Hansen took a breath. “I’m sorry to bother you with all this, Mr.—”

“Paul Sirsika, Detective. I’m the day manager here.”

“Sorry to bother you with all this detail, Mr. Sirsika, but it might be important. Was there someone with him when he checked out? Mr. Frears had some concerns for his safety, and I need to ascertain that he didn’t leave under duress.”

“Under duress? Good heavens,” said the clerk. “No, I don’t remember anyone at the counter with him or seeing him speak with anyone else, but there were other people in the lobby at the time.”

“Did he leave alone?”

“I don’t recall anyone going out with Mr. Frears, but I was busy with other guests checking out.”

“Sure. Do you know if he called a cab or caught one outside? Or perhaps he mentioned something about the airport or catching a flight?”

“He didn’t mention a flight to me or ask me to call a cab, Detective Hathaway. He might have hailed one outside. I could ask our bell captain.”

“Would you do that, please? I’d appreciate it.”

The clerk was back in a minute. “Detective Hathaway? Clark, our bell captain, remembers Mr. Frears leaving but noticed that he did not take a cab. Clark said that he was walking to the parking lot, carrying his suitcase in one hand and his violin case in the other when Clark last saw him.”

“So Mr. Frears had a rental car?” asked Hansen. “The license number would be on your registration card and in the computer.”

“Just a second, please, Detective.” The clerk was sounding a bit peevish now. “Yes, sir. It says that the vehicle was a white Ford Contour. Mr. Frears did give us a tag number when he checked in. I have it here if you’d like it.”

“Go ahead,” said Hansen. He memorized the number rather than write it down.

“I wish I could help you more, Detective.”

“You’ve been a big help, Mr. Sirsika. One last question. Did you or any of the other clerks or bellhops—or perhaps someone working in the restaurant or gift shop—notice anyone visiting Mr. Frears, dining with him, calling for him?”

“I would have to ask everyone,” said Clerk Sirsika, sounding very put-upon now.

“Would you do that, please? And call and leave a message at this number?” said Hansen. He gave them his private line at work.

Hansen used his phone to have “Detective Hathaway” call all of the rental-car agencies at the airport. The white Contour was a Hertz vehicle, rented by Mr. Frears eight days ago upon his arrival in Buffalo, rental extended six days ago. It had not been returned. It was an open-ended rental. Hansen thanked the clerk and drove around the hotel parking lot, checking to make sure that the car was not there. His next step would be to check airlines to see if Frears had flown out without returning the car, but Hansen did not want Detective Hathaway to do more phoning than he had to.

The white Contour was parked near the far end of the lot. Hansen made sure no one was watching, slim-jimmed the driver’s door open, checked the interior—nothing—and popped the trunk. No luggage. Frears had left with someone.

Driving his Cadillac SUV back toward police headquarters on the Kensington, Hansen mentally reviewed everything Frears had told Detective Pierceson when the violinist had made out his airport-sighting report. Frears had said that he knew no one in Buffalo other than some of the booking people at Kleinhan’s Music Hall, where he had played his two concerts. Them and someone he had known years ago at Princeton.

Hansen couldn’t close his eyes while driving, but he mentally did so in a trick he had used since he was a kid to recall entire pages of text with perfect recall. Even as he drove on the Kensington, he could see Pierceson’s report on the interview with Frears the week before.

Dr. Paul Frederick. A former philosophy and ethics professor at Princeton. Frears thought he lived in Buffalo and was searching for him.

Well, that’s an obvious place to start this investigation, thought Hansen. Find this old Professor Frederick. Perhaps your old pal came to pick you up at the Sheraton and told you to leave your car.

Hansen would join in the search for one Professor Paul Frederick. It shouldn’t be hard to find him. Academics tended to hang around academia until they died.

But if Frears wasn’t with his old friend?

Then where are you, Johnny boy? Whom did you leave with this morning?

Hansen was not happy with this development, but it was just a puzzle. He was very, very good at solving puzzles.

Angelina Farino Ferrara realized halfway through her meal with Emilio that Joe Kurtz was going to get himself killed, her killed, and everyone else in the house killed.

The drive over from Marina Towers had been uneventful enough. Mickey Kee, the killer who always rode shotgun with Gonzaga’s driver, had stared at Kurtz standing next to Marco and asked where Leo was. “Leo’s doing other things,” Angelina said. “Howard here is with Marco and me today.”

“Howard?” Mickey Kee said dubiously. Gonzaga’s button man had tiny eyes that missed nothing, short, black hair cropped to a widow’s peak, and skin so smooth that he could be any age between twenty-five and sixty. “Where are you from, Howard?”

Kurtz, the perfect lackey, had glanced at Angelica for permission before answering. She nodded.

“Florida,” said Kurtz.

“Which part of Florida?”

“Raiford, mostly,” said Kurtz.

The driver had snorted at this, but Mickey Kee showed no amusement. “I know some guys serving time in Raiford. You know Tommy Lee Peters?”

“Nope.”

“Sig Bender?”

“Nope.”

“Alan Wu?”

“Nope.”

“You don’t know many people, do you, Howard?”

“When I was there,” said Kurtz, “Raiford had five thousand-some guys doing time. Maybe your friends weren’t in the general population. I seem to remember that Raiford had a special ward for kept bitches.”

Mickey Kee squinted at that. The driver, Al, had tugged at the gunman’s arm and held the limo door open for Angelina, Marco, and Kurtz to get in the back. The window was up between the front section and the passenger area, but Angelina assumed that the intercom was kept on, so the drive to Grand Island was made in silence.

Angelina’s choice of Joe Kurtz to carry out the elimination of Emilio Gonzaga had been one of the most dangerous decisions she had ever made, but up to now she had not considered it totally reckless. She could have Kurtz eliminated at any time, she thought, and erase the record of her contacts with him at the same time. But now there was the problem of those tapes he’d made. For the first time since her return to the States, Angelina felt the way she had in her first chess games with the bedridden Count Ferrara, when she would be trading a few pawns, working on her attack, only to realize that the dying old man had set her up—that his apparently defensive and random movements had been part of an attack so subtle that she had no place to flee, no pieces to move in defense, the only response to tip over her king and smile graciously.

Well, thought Angelina, fuck that.

She’d known that Joe Kurtz was a stone-killer. Her brother Stevie…fuck it, Little Skag…had told her about Kurtz’s past: the former detective’s love for his dead partner, Samantha Fielding, that resulted in one of the probable killers disappearing and the other being thrown out of a six-story window onto the roof of an arriving squad car. Kurtz had done more than eleven years of hard time for that vengeance, and according to Little Skag, had never whined once about it. The day after Kurtz got out of Attica, he’d made a business proposition to Don Farino. That had been a bloody business and before it was over, Angelina’s father and sister were dead. Kurtz hadn’t killed them—Little Skag, Angelina’s darling little brother, had arranged that—but Kurtz had left his own wake of bodies.

Angelina had been sure that she could control Kurtz or, if not control him exactly, aim him. Johnny Norse, the breathing corpse in the Williamsville hospice, had supplied Angelina and her sister with drugs from junior high on—Don Farino would have disowned his girls if he’d found them buying drugs from his own people—and it had been from Norse that she had heard about Emilio’s order to kill Samantha Fielding twelve years earlier. It had meant nothing to Angelica when she heard it, but using that information to aim Joe Kurtz at Emilio seemed like a good idea when her other plans had failed.

But Angelina was constantly being surprised by Joe Kurtz. Like other sociopaths she had known, Kurtz seemed contained, quiet, almost sleepy at times, but unlike the other stone-killers she’d been around, including her first husband in Sicily, Kurtz sometimes revealed a sense of humor bordering on real wit. And then, just as she began thinking that he would be too weak for this job…well, she remembered the way Kurtz had put a bullet through Leo’s left eye without changing expression.

Kurtz seemed sleepy as they stopped at the gate to the Gonzaga compound. He gave up his pistol and submitted to a careful frisk without expression. He still seemed half-asleep as they drove up the long drive, but Angelina knew that Kurtz was looking at everything in the compound, making mental notes. Marco was his usual silent self and Angelina had no clue to what he was thinking.

Inside, they were frisked again. When Angelina was led in for lunch with Emilio, Mickey Kee took the unusual step of staying out in the foyer with the two guards watching Marco and “Howard.” Kee seemed to see or sense something in Kurtz that focused his attention.

It was after the soup course with Emilio and after listening to the fat bastard sweet-talk her and explain the new split on drugs and prostitution after the two families “merged,” and after the fish had been served, that Angelina suddenly realized what Joe Kurtz was going to do.

Kurtz wasn’t here today to case the place or to let Emilio’s guards get used to him so he could return with her later, when the plans were made. Today was the day. She knew that Kurtz didn’t have so much as a penknife with him but that he planned somehow to get a weapon out in the foyer—take a gun away from Mickey Kee?—kill Kee and the other two guards, shoot Marco, and come into the dining room with guns blazing.

Kurtz didn’t care that there was no way out for him or Angelina. Kurtz’s plan was simple—kill Emilio and everyone else in the room before he got gunned down himself. Maybe he’d grab Angelina and use her as a human shield while he was killing Emilio. Elegant.

“Whatsamatta?” said Emilio. “Fish bad or something?”

Angelina realized that she had quit eating with her fork still raised. “No. No, it’s fine. I just remembered something I have to do.” Run. Get the hell out of here. Survive.

But how? Tell Emilio Gonzaga that the new bodyguard she’d brought into the paranoid don’s compound was here to shoot him? And that she knew about it because she’d set it up? Not a good plan.

Fake menstrual cramps? These Sicilian macho shits were so squeamish about a woman’s period that they wouldn’t ask questions if she requested a police escort in her retreat. Did she have time for this playacting?

Suddenly there was a commotion in the hallway and Joe Kurtz came into the dining room, his eyes looking wild.

CHAPTER

TWENTY

James B. Hansen parked his Cadillac Escalade beyond the overpass and followed a trodden path through the snow down toward the railroad yards. It was Captain Millworth’s lunch hour.

Calls to the university showed no Dr. Paul Frederick on the staff. The Buffalo area phone directories did not list a Paul Frederick. The precinct showed only one record of a Paul Frederick being detained—no photographs, no fingerprints, no rap sheet, just a detention 326-B form mentioning a vagrant named Pruno, aka the Prof, aka P. Frederick, being picked up during a sweep to interrogate homeless people after a murder of a vagrant some two summers ago. Hansen had talked to the uniformed officer who handled the downtown homeless beat and was told that this Pruno wandered the streets, almost never went to shelters, but had favorite niches under the overpass and a shack near the tracks.

Hansen had no trouble finding the shack. The path through the snow led to it, and there were no other structures here in what must be a hobo jungle in the summer. Why would this vagrant stay out here in weather like this? wondered Hansen. It had stopped snowing but the temperature had dropped to the single digits and a cold wind came in off the river and Lake Erie.

“Hello?” Hansen did not expect a response from the shack, and he didn’t get one. Actually, he thought, “shack” was too fancy a title for this miserable heap of corrugated steel and plywood and cardboard. He took out the .38 that was going to become the property of Mr. Joe Kurtz after the murder of John Wellington Frears, stooped low, and went into the shack, expecting to find it empty.

It was not empty. An old wino in an overcoat stinking of urine sat close to a small burner. The floor was plastic-tarp material, the walls whistled cold wind through, and the wino was so high on crack or heroin that he hardly noticed Hansen’s entrance. Keeping the gun aimed at the man’s chest, Hansen worked to make out the wino’s features in the dim light. Gray stubble, grime-rimmed wrinkles, reddened eyes, wisps of gray hair left on his mottled skull, a chapped-looking chicken neck disappearing into the oversized raincoat—he matched the description of Pruno aka the Prof aka one P. Frederick that the uniformed officer had given Hansen. But then, what wino didn’t?

“Hey!” shouted Hansen to get the nodding addict’s attention. “Hey, old man!”

The homeless man’s red, watery eyes turned in the police captain’s direction. The grubby fingers were in plain sight, red and white from the cold, and shaking. Hansen watched the internal struggle as the old addict reluctantly tried to focus his attention.

“You Paul Frederick?” shouted Hansen. “Pruno? Paul Frederick?”

The wino blinked repeatedly and then nodded dubiously. Hansen felt physically sick. Nothing repulsed him more than one of these useless derelicts.

“Mr. Frederick,” said Hansen, “have you seen John Wellington Frears? Has Frears been in touch with you?” The thought of this old heroin addict being a friend of the urbane Frears, much less the idea of Frears visiting him in this shack, was absurd. But Hansen waited for an answer.

The wino licked his cracked lips and tried to concentrate. He was looking at the .38. Hansen lowered the muzzle slightly.

As if seeing his chance, the old man’s right hand shot into his raincoat, reaching for something.

Without thinking, Hansen lifted his aim and fired twice, hitting the wino once in the chest and once in the neck. The old man flopped backward like an empty bundle of rags. For a minute he continued to breathe, the laborious rasp sounding high and cracked and obscene in the cold dark of the shack, but then the breathing stopped and Hansen lowered the hammer on the .38. Then he stuck his head out the door of the shack and took a quick look around—there was no one to hear the shot, and trains were crashing and roaring in the yards just out of sight—and Hansen crouched by the body. He needed to search the corpse, but he wasn’t going to touch those filthy, lice-ridden rags.

Hansen found a stick the old man had used for lifting his cooking pot and stirring soup, and pushing open the filthy raincoat, Hansen saw that the wino’s hands had been reaching not for a weapon, but for a stubby pencil. The dead fingers were just touching it. A small yellow pad—empty of writing—had also tumbled out of the wino’s vest pocket.

“Damn,” whispered Hansen, saying a fast prayer asking forgiveness for his use of the obscenity. He’d not planned on killing the old man, and the fact that he’d asked the patrolman about him might raise suspicions.

Not at all, thought Hansen. When Frears ends up dead, this will be just another killing connected to Joe Kurtz. We won’t know why Kurtz killed both of them, but the .38 found in Kurtz’s apartment will provide the connection. Hansen slid the revolver into his coat pocket. He had never kept a murder weapon with him after the act—it was amateurish—but in this case, he would have to, at least until he found and killed Frears. Then he could plant the weapon in Kurtz’s hotel room…or on Kurtz’s body if the perp tried to resist arrest, which James B. Hansen fully anticipated.

Sitting in the little room thirty feet from Emilio Gonzaga’s dining room, feeling the stares from Mickey Kee, Marco, and the two Gonzaga bodyguards, Joe Kurtz felt himself beginning to prepare for what was to come.

He would be leaving a lot of loose ends behind—the thing with Frears and Hansen, for instance, but that wasn’t Kurtz’s business. Arlene would take care of Frears, perhaps try to get the Conway-connection information to the police. It wasn’t Kurtz’s problem. Then there was Donald Rafferty and Rachel—that was Kurtz’s business—but there was nothing for Kurtz to do there. Right now, Kurtz’s business was Emilio Gonzaga, Samantha’s real killer, and Emilio Gonzaga was only thirty feet away, down a short hallway and through an unlocked door.

When it happened, it would have to happen fast. And soon. Kurtz guessed that Gonzaga and the Farino woman were on their main course now, the three bodyguard-servants in there, standing by the wall.

Mickey Kee was very vigilant, but—like all bodyguards—he was also bored. Familiarity bred laxness. Even the past twenty minutes, when Marco did nothing but read a racing form and Kurtz did nothing but sit with his eyes half-closed, had lowered Mickey Kee’s guard. The other two bodyguards were chimps—sloppy—their attention had already wandered to the small TV set on a buffet near the wall. Some soap opera rattled away and both of the guards were fascinated with it. They probably watched every day.

Mickey Kee was obviously troubled by Kurtz’s presence. Like all good bodyguards, he was suspicious of anything out of the ordinary. But Kee was also thirsty and kept crossing to the inlaid-mahogany bar near Kurtz—walking within three feet of Kurtz—to refill his glass of club soda. And while he held the glass in his left hand—Kurtz had noticed that he was right-handed—it still occupied too much of his attention. It was almost time for Kee to refill his glass.

When it happens, it will have to happen fast. Kurtz had also noticed that Kee carried his primary weapon, a 9mm Beretta, in a quick-draw shoulder holster. All the better for Kurtz, who would use his left forearm to slam into Kee’s windpipe, his right hand pulling the Beretta and firing into the two armed bodyguards at a distance of only six feet.

It would have to happen fast, but there was no way to do this without warning Gonzaga and his goons inside. Kurtz would need more weapons, more bullets, so he’d have to take another ten seconds to retrieve the bodyguards’ guns after he shot them. Marco would have to be neutralized, although if he fled, Kurtz was prepared to let him go. He would not be a factor.

Then another twenty seconds to get down the hall and go through the dining-room door, low, firing both weapons, the third one in his belt. Kurtz had only one target in that dining room, although he was prepared to kill everyone else there to get to that one target.

He thought he had a decent chance of getting into the dining room and getting to that target before it fled or called for reinforcements, but Kurtz didn’t think he had much chance of surviving that exchange. The guards there would have gone for their guns at the first sound of gunfire. Still, they would be confused. Unlike expertly trained Secret Service operatives, they were cheap hoods, killers, and their first instinct would be self-preservation, not throwing themselves between Emilio Gonzaga and a fusillade of bullets.

Still, Kurtz would have to move fast, shoot fast. If he somehow survived the dining-room exchange, he would make sure that Gonzaga was dead—an extra bullet through the head should do that—and only then would Kurtz worry about getting out of the compound. His best bet would be the limo they’d arrived in, although even it couldn’t crash that metal security gate out front. But Kurtz had studied the aerial photos, knew the service roads and back exits to the compound. There would be more than a dozen guards still loose on the grounds, TV monitors, the Jeep that patrolled the place, but they would be confused, reluctant to shoot at Gonzaga’s personal limo, not ready for someone trying to break out of the compound. Kurtz might have a slim chance of survival, even if wounded.

No, I don’t, he told himself. Emilio Gonzaga was one of the few made men in Western New York, head of his own sub-family. However unimportant Buffalo mob business might be, the real New York families weren’t going to sit by and let a nobody kill one of their franchise boys without stepping in to reset the balance of pain in the universe. Even if Joe Kurtz killed everyone in the Gonzaga compound today and got away unscathed, the Mafia would find out who had done it and track him down if it took twenty years. Joe Kurtz was dead as soon as he raised a hand against Emilio Gonzaga.

C’est la vie, thought Kurtz and had to fight the impulse to smile. He didn’t want to do anything right now that would make Mickey Kee pay more attention to him. Kurtz felt all other thought fade as he became an organ of watchfulness and preparation, an adrenaline engine with one purpose.

Mickey Kee sipped the last of his club soda. For a second, Kurtz was afraid that the man had drunk enough, but Kee was still thirsty. Vigilant, carrying the glass in his left hand—but not vigilant enough, Kurtz knew—Kee began crossing the room toward the bar again.

Kurtz had mentally rehearsed his next moves until they would require no further thought or preparation. Kee would be dead in five seconds, but it was necessary that Kurtz come away with the Beretta as the killer fell, Kurtz clicking the safety off even as he swung the pistol toward the startled bodyguards in front of their soap opera…

Mickey Kee came within range.

Joe Kurtz’s cell phone rang.

Kee paused and stepped back, his hand moving toward his shoulder holster. Kurtz let out the breath he’d been holding, held up one finger to remind Kee that he was unarmed, and answered his phone. There was nothing else to do at the moment.

“Joe?” Arlene’s voice was more alarmed than he had ever heard it.

“What is it?”

“It’s Rachel.”

“What?” Kurtz had to come back from wherever he had gone in his preparation—most of his mind and body were still involved in shooting the bodyguards, breaking into the dining room, bringing the bead of the Beretta’s gunsight in line with Emilio Gonzaga’s fat, fish face. “What?” he said again.

“It’s Rachel. She’s in the hospital. She’s hurt bad.”

“What are you talking about? How do you know—”

“Alan’s sister, remember? Gail. She’s a nurse at Erie County. She knows about Rachel. She knew Sam, remember? She called me just now. Gail just came on-shift. Rachel was admitted this morning, about nine A.M.”

“Rafferty hit her?” said Kurtz. Mickey Kee and the others were watching him with interest. Marco licked his lips, obviously wondering if this new wrinkle would affect his chances for surviving the next hour.

“No. They were in a car crash on the Kensington. Donald Rafferty was drunk. Gail says that he’s got a broken arm and a possible concussion, but he’ll be okay. Rachel’s in really bad shape.”

“How bad?” Kurtz heard his own voice as if it were miles away.

“They don’t know yet. Rachel’s been in surgery all morning. Gail said they’ve removed her spleen and one kidney. They’ll know more in the next hour or so.”

Kurtz said nothing. A red film descended over his vision, and he heard a noise that sounded like an elevated train rushing by.

“Joe?”

“Yeah,” he said. He realized that if he did not relax his hand, he was going to snap the little phone in half.

“There’s more,” said Arlene. “Something worse.”

Kurtz waited.

“Rachel was conscious when they cut her out of the car. The paramedics were talking to her to keep her conscious. She told them that she’d run away the night before and that her stepfather had come after her and found her near the bus station, made her get in the car, and that she’d run away because he’d been drinking and tried to rape her.”

Kurtz clicked off the connection, folded the phone, and set it carefully in his suit’s chest pocket.

“Whatsamatter?” said Mickey Kee. “Lose a big bet or something, Mr. Howard from Raiford? Somebody named Rafferty slapping around one of your bitches?”

Ignoring Kee and the other bodyguards, shaking off their restraining hands, Kurtz stood and walked down the hall and went into the dining room to get Angelina Farino Ferrara so they could get the hell out of there.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-ONE

You wanted to see us, Captain?”

“Sit down,” said Hansen.

Detectives Brubaker and Myers glanced at each other before taking their seats. Captain Millworth had called them into his office on occasion, but he’d never asked them to sit before.

Hansen came around his desk, sat on the edge of it, and handed Brubaker a photograph of John Wellington Frears. “You know this man?”

Brubaker took the photo and shook his head. Hansen hadn’t expected them to have heard about Frears’s appearance at the station when he made his report. He was going to tell them that Frears was missing and put them on special assignment—undercover—to track him down. Hansen planned on dealing later with the complications this would cause.

“Hey, I saw this guy,” said Myers.

Hansen was surprised. “At the station?”

“At the station? No, uh-uh. Fred, we saw this guy go into Blues Franklin last week when we were tailing Kurtz, remember?”

Brubaker took the photo back. “Yeah, could be the same guy.”

“Could be? Shit, it is. Remember, he drove up in a white… Ford, I think, maybe a Contour…and parked right near us when we were staking out the Franklin when Kurtz was in there.”

“Yeah.”

If Hansen had not been sitting on the edge of his desk, he might have collapsed onto the floor. This was too perfect. “You’re saying that this man was in the Blues Franklin at the same time as Joe Kurtz?”

“Absolutely, Captain,” said Myers. Brubaker nodded.

Hansen felt his universe click back into focus. What had seemed chaos a moment before became a perfectly clear mosaic how. This coincidence was a gift from God, pure and simple. “I want you to find this man,” he said. “His name is Mr. John Wellington Frears and we’re concerned about his safety.” He went through the whole report-to-me-only routine with the two idiots.

“Jesus,” said Myers. “Sorry, Captain. But you think this guy’s disappearance this morning has anything to do with Joe Kurtz?”

“You were on surveillance then,” said Hansen. “Where was Kurtz?”

“He slipped out of sight last night and this morning,” said Brubaker. “We picked up his tail out in Cheektowaga this morning. We were going to check out Kurtz’s secretary’s house there, but we saw Kurtz driving down Union…” He paused.

“Near the Airport Sheraton,” said Hansen.

Myers nodded. “Not that far away.”

“It looks like we’re back on Kurtz surveillance,” said Brubaker.

Hansen shook his head. “This is more important than that This concert violinist, Frears, is a very important man. This could be a potential kidnapping situation.”

Myers frowned. “You mean SWAT, FBI, all that shit? Sorry, Captain, but you know what I mean.”

Hansen went around his desk and sat in his leather executive chair. “Right now it’s just you two, me, and a hunch. Just because you saw Frears go into the Blues Franklin at the same time Joe Kurtz was there doesn’t mean there was a connection. Did either of you ever see Kurtz and Frears together during your surveillance?”

The two detectives shook their heads.

“So I want some careful surveillance done. Starting this afternoon. Round the clock.”

“How can we do that?” said Brubaker, adding a “sir.”

“Solo work,” said Hansen.

“Twelve-hour shifts?” whined Myers. “Alone? This Kurtz bastard is dangerous.”

“I’ll pitch in,” said Hansen. “We’ll work out a schedule. And we’re not talking weeks here, just a day or two. If Kurtz has something to do with Frears’s disappearance, we’ll know soon enough. Fred, you take the first shift. Check out that secretary’s house in Cheektowaga. Tommy, you’ll spend the next few hours looking for Kurtz at his home, office, and so forth. Fred, you stay here a minute. I want to talk to you.”

Myers and Brubaker glanced at each other before Myers went out, closing the door behind him. Captain Millworth had never called either of them by his first name before.

Brubaker stood by the desk and waited.

“Internal Affairs was checking in with me about you last week,” said Hansen.

Brubaker lifted a toothpick to his mouth, but said nothing.

“Granger and his boys think you have some connections with the Farinos,” said Hansen, staring the other man in the eye. “They think you’re on Little Skag’s payroll, picking up where your pal Hathaway left off last November.”

Brubaker’s eyes showed nothing. He shifted the toothpick back and forth with his tongue.

Hansen moved some paperwork on his desk. “I’m mentioning this because I think you’ll need someone to cover your back, Fred. Someone to let you know who’s sniffing around and when. I could do that.”

Brubaker removed the toothpick, looked at it, and set it in his pocket. “Why would you do that, Captain?”

“Because I need your best work and discretion for this project, Brubaker. You scratch my back and I’ll protect yours.”

Brubaker stood there, staring, obviously trying to understand this deal.

“That’s all,” said Hansen. “Go hunt for Kurtz. Relieve Tommy on stakeout in eight hours. Call me on my cell if anything comes up. But tell Myers…you two do nothing but observe without my permission. Understand? Nothing. You see Kurtz buggering the Mayor’s son on Main Street at high noon, call me before you do anything. Capische?”

“Yeah.”

Hansen nodded toward the door and Brubaker went out.

The homicide captain swiveled his chair and spent several minutes looking out at the gray pile of the old courthouse across the street. This was all going too far, too fast. It had to be resolved, but even if something happened to Detectives Brubaker and Myers—and anything could happen to a plainclothes officer when dealing with someone like Kurtz—there would still be too many loose ends around afterward.

Hansen sighed. He had enjoyed being a homicide detective. Heck, he was good at it. And he liked his wife Donna and stepson Jason. This persona had only lasted fourteen months and James B. Hansen had thought it might go another year or two, perhaps longer.

He closed his eyes for a moment. Thy will be done. Lord. Thy will be done. Hansen opened his eyes and used his private line to dial the number of a certain dentist in Cleveland. It was time for Robert Gaines Millworth’s dental records to be made ready.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-TWO

Are you a member of the immediate family?” asked the nurse.

“I’m Donald Rafferty’s brother,” said Kurtz. He’d met Arlene’s sister-in-law Gail and knew that she was a surgical nurse on the ninth floor, but he didn’t want her to see him here.

The reception nurse grunted and glanced at one of the computer screens at her station. “Mr. Rafferty’s in six-twenty-three. He was treated for a mild concussion and a broken wrist and is sleeping right now. The doctor who treated him, Dr. Singh, will be available in about twenty minutes if you want to talk to him.”

“What about the girl?” said Kurtz.

“Girl?”

“Rachel… Rafferty. She was in the car with Donald. I understand she suffered more serious injuries.”

The nurse frowned and tapped the keys again. “Yes. She’s out of surgery.”

“Can I see her?”

“Oh, no…the surgery went on for almost five hours. The girl will be in the ICU recovery for several hours.”

“But the surgery went all right? She’ll be all right?”

“You’d have to speak to the doctor.”

“Dr. Singh?”

“No, no.” The nurse frowned more deeply, her important time at the desk obviously being eaten up here on inconsequentials, and tapped more keys. “Dr. Fremont and Dr. Wiley were the primary surgeons.”

“Two surgeons?”

“I just said that.”

“Can I talk to them?”

The nurse rolled her eyes and played with the keyboard again. “Dr. Fremont has left the hospital and Dr. Wiley will be in surgery until after five o’clock.”

“Where’s the ICU?”

“You won’t be allowed in there, Mr…ah… Rafferty.”

Kurtz leaned over close enough that the nurse had to turn away from the computer screen and look into his eyes. “Where is it?”

She told him.

Kurtz, Angelina, and Marco had left the Gonzaga compound in a hurry, Angelina explaining to an obviously irritated Emilio that something important had come up for her and that they would reschedule the luncheon. Arnie and Mickey Kee had driven the silent trio back to Marina Towers in the armored limo. They had taken the elevator straight to the penthouse before talking.

“What the hell is going on, Kurtz?” Angelina was pale with anger and fighting a backwash of adrenaline.

“I need a car.”

“I’ll take you back to the health club where you parked your—”

Kurtz shook his head. “I need a car now.”

Angelina hesitated for a second. Acquiescing to Kurtz now would change their relationship—whatever that was at the moment—forever. She looked at his face and then reached into her purse and tossed him a set of keys. “My silver Porsche Boxster, parked closest to the elevator in the garage.”

Kurtz nodded and turned toward the elevator.

“What about him?” Angelina had brought out her .45 Compact Witness and was aiming it at Marco.

“He’s not stupid,” said Kurtz. “You can still use him. Offer him handcuffs in the John the way you offered Leo.”

Angelina looked at Marco. “Sure. Why not?” said the big bodyguard. “Beats the alternative.”

“All right,” said Angelina. “What about…” She flicked her head toward the big walk-in freezer in the utility room off the kitchen.

“Tonight,” said Kurtz. “I’ll be back.”

“This is not good,” said Angelina, but Kurtz had already stepped into the elevator and closed the door.

Kurtz stepped out of the elevator and saw immediately how the Intensive Care Unit was set up with a nurses’ station at the locus of a circle of single rooms with clear glass walls. The three nurses at the central station watched their own readouts but could look into any of the rooms and see the patients and their computer screens. An older nurse with a kind face looked up as Kurtz approached. “Can I help you, sir?”

“I’m Bob Rafferty, Rachel Rafferty’s uncle. The nurse downstairs said she was in recovery here.”

The nurse nodded and pointed toward one of the glass-walled rooms. Kurtz could see only Rachel’s auburn hair, so much like Sam’s. The rest was blankets, tubes, monitors, and a ventilating unit.

“I’m afraid you won’t be able to visit her for a few days,” said the nurse. “After such extensive surgery, the doctors are very concerned about infection and—”

“But she came out of surgery all right? She’s going to live?”

The kind-faced nurse took a breath. “You really should talk to Dr. Fremont or Dr. Wiley.”

“I was told they’d be unavailable all day.”

“Yes. Well…” She looked at Kurtz. “Rachel had a very close thing this morning, Mr. Rafferty. Very close. But Dr. Wiley told me that the prognosis is good. We’ve given her eight units of blood—”

“Is that a lot?”

The woman nodded. “Essentially, we’ve replaced all the blood in her system, Mr. Rafferty. The Flight for Life helicopter saved her life.”

“And they removed her spleen and a kidney?”

“Yes. Her left kidney. The damage was too extensive.”

“That means that even if she recovers from this, she’ll always be at risk, right?”

“It makes future illnesses or accidents more problematic, yes. And there will be a long recovery period. But your niece should be able to lead a normal life.” She looked at where Kurtz was gripping the edge of the counter and lifted one hand as if she was going to touch him. She pulled back her hand. “Dr. Singh should be free very soon if you want to talk to him about your brother’s injuries—”

“No,” said Kurtz.

He took the elevator to the sixth floor and started down the corridor to Room 623. Kurtz had removed the .40 S&W in the elevator and now carried it in his right palm, letting the long sleeve of his open raincoat hang down over that hand. He paused three doors away from Rafferty’s room.

A woman cop in plainclothes, probably a rape-contact officer, and a bored uniformed cop were sitting on folding chairs just outside the room. Kurtz stood there a minute, but when the woman plainclothes cop looked up at him, he stepped into the closest room. An ancient man lay asleep or in a coma on the only occupied bed. The old guy’s eyes had sunken into his head in the way that Kurtz had seen in week-old corpses. Kurtz put his Smith & Wesson back in his belt holster and stood by the old man’s bed for a minute. The geezer’s gnarled hand was liver-spotted and bruised from IV punctures. The fingers were curled and the nails were long and yellow. Kurtz touched the hand once before going out the door and taking the elevator down to the parking garage.

The Boxster was a beautiful sports car, but it handled like shit on snow and ice. He had just headed south on the Kensington toward the downtown and Marina Towers when his cell phone rang again.

“Have you seen Rachel, Joe? How is she?”

Kurtz told Arlene what the nurse had said.

“And what about Donald Rafferty?”

“He’s not going to survive the accident,” said Kurtz.

Arlene was silent a minute. “I was heading down to the hospital, Mr. Frears said that he’d be all right here, but Mrs. Campbell, one of my older neighbors, called me and said that a suspicious-looking man in a gray Ford was parked in front of her house, half a block down the street.”

“Shit,” said Kurtz.

“Mrs. Campbell called the police.”

“And?”

“And I was watching through the blinds. The squad car stopped, one of the uniformed officers got out, the man in the parked car showed him something, and the squad car left in a hurry.”

“It’s probably either Brubaker or Myers, one of the two homicide detectives who’ve been tailing me,” said Kurtz. “But it could be Hansen… Captain Millworth. I don’t know how he could’ve made the connection with Frears, but…”

“I used Alan’s binoculars. It’s a fat man, almost bald. Not very tall. Brown suit.”

“That’s Myers,” said Kurtz. He pulled the Boxster off at the East Ferry exit and did a fast loop, getting back on the Expressway headed out toward Cheektowaga. “Arlene, we don’t know that Brubaker and Myers aren’t working directly for Hansen. Stay put. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“And do what, Joe? Why don’t I take Mr. Frears and leave here for Gail’s house?”

“Can you get out without being seen?”

“Sure. Through the carport and across the alley to the Dzwrjskys’. Mona will loan me her ex-husband’s station wagon. Gail’s at work, but I know where the extra key is. We’ll leave Detective Myers sitting down the street all day.”

Kurtz slowed the Boxster to below seventy. “I don’t know…”

“Joe, there’s something else. I checked our business e-mail from here and there’s a message to you that was copied to my e-mail address. It was dated at one P.M., and it’s signed just ‘P.’”

Pruno, thought Kurtz. Likely checking up on whether he’d met with Frears. “It’s probably not important,” said Kurtz.

“The message says that it’s urgent, Joe. Let me read it to you—‘Joseph, absolutely imperative that you meet me as soon as possible at that place where the thing occurred on midsummer night’s eve. This is urgent. P.’”

“Oh, man,” said Kurtz. “All right. Call me as soon as you get to Gail’s place.” He folded the phone away, took a high-speed exit onto Delavan Avenue, drove east a block, and accelerated south on Fillmore.

The main Buffalo train station was a dignified and imposing structure in its time; now, after being abandoned for a decade, it was a sad mess. The sprawling structure was dominated by a twenty-story tower built along the lines of one of the brooding, stepped-back skyscrapers in Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis. On the twelfth-story level of each corner of the tower, oversized clocks had stopped at different times. Some shards of glass remained in the hundreds of broken windows, which made the battered facade look all the more dismal. Besides the two main entrances on the tower building, four large, awninged and arched doorways that looked like entrances to blimp hangars had been situated along the five-story main structure to allow the thousands of passengers to enter and leave the huge complex without undue jostling.

There were no crowds jostling today. Even the hilly driveway to the expanse of the abandoned parking lot was drifted over with snow. Kurtz parked the Porsche Boxster on a side street and walked past the boulders placed in the drive to keep cars out of the lot. Trespassers and winos and kids intent on breaking the last of the windows had left a myriad of old and new footprints in the snow on the lot, so there was no way for Kurtz to tell who had passed here when. He followed some tracks across to the hurricane fence around the station itself and found a three-foot height of wire cut just under one of the yellow KEEP OUT. No Trespassing signs. He passed under the massive overhang with its NEW YORK & BUFFALO RAILROAD legend just visible in the rusting metal and dimming light. The huge doors were firmly sealed with sheet metal and plywood, but the corner of one of the window coverings had been jimmied loose, and Kurtz squeezed his way in there.

It was much colder inside than out. And darker. The tall, high windows that had once sent down shafts of sunlight onto soldiers traveling off to World War II and onto the weeping families left behind were all dark and boarded up now. A few frightened pigeons took flight in the great, dim space as Kurtz crunched his way across the littered tile.

The old waiting areas and the ramps to the train platforms were empty. Kurtz climbed a short staircase to the tower building that had once housed the railroad offices, pried open a plywood barrier, and walked slowly through narrow corridors into the main hall. Rats scurried. Pigeons fluttered.

Kurtz slid his pistol out, racked a round into the chamber, and carried the gun by his side as he moved into the wide, dark space.

“Joseph.” The whisper seemed to come from the far corner, forty feet from Kurtz, but there were only shadows and a tumble of old benches there.

He half-raised the gun.

“Up here, Joseph.”

Kurtz stepped farther out into the hall and peered up at the mezzanines in the darkness. A shadow beckoned.

Kurtz found the staircase and climbed, leaving a trail through fallen plaster. The old man was waiting for him by the railing on the second mezzanine. He was carrying what looked to be a lumpy garment bag.

“Rather interesting acoustics,” said Pruno. The old man’s stubbled face seemed even more pale than usual in the dim light. “They accidentally constructed a whispering gallery when they built this hall. All sounds uttered up here seem to converge in that corner down there.”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. “What’s up, Pruno? You interested in Frears?”

“John?” said the old heroin addict. “Well, of course I’m interested in that, since I put you two in contact, but I assumed that you did not decide to help him. It’s been almost a week. To be truthful, Joseph, I’d almost forgotten.”

“What is it, then?” said Kurtz. “And why here?” He gestured at the dark hall and the darker mezzanines. “This is a long way from your usual haunts.”

Pruno nodded. “It seems that there is a literal dead man in my usual haunt.”

“A dead man. Who?”

“You wouldn’t know him, Joseph. A homeless contemporary of mine. I believe his name was Clark Povitch, a former accountant, but the other addicts and street persons have known him as Typee for the last fifteen years or so.”

“What did he die of?”

“A bullet,” said Pruno. “Or two bullets, I believe, although I am no forensic expert.”

“Someone shot your friend in your shack?”

“Not my friend, precisely, but in this inclement weather, Typee sometimes availed himself of my hospitality—specifically of my Sterno heater—when I was elsewhere.”

“Do you know who killed him?”

“I do have a clue. But it does not seem to make any sense, Joseph.”

“Tell me.”

“An acquaintance of mine, a lady named Mrs. Tuella Dean—I believe you would refer to her as a bag lady—was on a grate today, under some newspapers and inadvertently concealed, on the corner of Elmwood and Market when she heard a patrolman outside his parked squad car speaking on either his radio telephone or a cell phone. The patrolman was giving directions to my domicile and mentioned my name…names, actually…and actually gave a description of me to his interlocutor. According to Mrs. Dean, the patrolman’s tone was almost obsequious, as if speaking to a superior. She happened to mention this to me when I saw her near the HSBC arena just before I returned home and discovered Typee’s body.”

Kurtz took in a long, cold breath of air. “Did this Mrs. Dean catch the other guy’s name?”

“She did, actually. A Captain Millworth. I would presume that this would mean a captain of police.”

Kurtz let out the breath.

“There would seem to be no connection,” said Pruno, “as police captains are not known for murdering the homeless, but it would be too much of a coincidence to think the events are unrelated. Also, there is another mild coincidence here that worries me.”

“What’s that?”

“To a stranger,” said Pruno, “to someone who knew me only from another person’s description, Typee might look a little bit like me. Quite a lot like me, actually.”

Kurtz reached out and took his old friend’s sharp elbow through the overcoat and other rags. “Come on,” he said softly, hearing his whisper repeated in the darkness below. “We’re getting out of here.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-THREE

Hansen could not get in touch with Dr. Howard Conway by phone and this bothered him. It bothered him a lot. He considered driving to Cleveland to check on Conway—make sure that the old fart hadn’t died or finally run out on him—but there simply wasn’t time. Too much was happening too fast, and too much had to happen even faster in the next twenty-four hours.

He canceled his meetings for the rest of the afternoon, called Donna to say that he’d be home soon, called Brubaker to make sure that he hadn’t found Kurtz at his office or home, called Myers to make sure he was on surveillance at the secretary’s house, and then he drove to a rotting industrial cold-storage facility near the Buffalo River. Behind an abandoned mill, a line of walk-in freezers—each with its own backup generator—had been rented to restaurateurs, meat wholesalers, and others needing overflow freezer storage. Hansen had kept a locker there since he’d driven a freezer truck up from Miami nine months ago.

Hansen unlocked the two expensive padlocks he kept on the unit and stepped into the frigid interior. Five halves of beef hung on hooks. Hansen had planned to use one of these during the July cookout he was going to throw at his Tonawanda home for his detectives and their wives, but it looked as if he would not be around Buffalo in July. Against the back wall were tall wire racks, and on these were four long, opaque plastic bags holding more frozen meat.

He unzipped the bag on the middle shelf. Mr. Gabriel Kendall, fifty years old, the same height, weight, and general build as James B. Hansen, stared up through a rim of frost covering his open eyes. The cadaver’s lips were blue and pulled back, frozen into the position where Dr. Conway had X-rayed the teeth in Cleveland the previous summer. All four of the men’s bodies stored here had a similar rictus. Kendall was the one Hansen had chosen for Captain Robert Gaines Millworth’s suicide and the dental records should be on file, ready for the blanks to be filled in.

If he could get in touch with that miserable wretch Conway.

Satisfied that no one had been in the freezer or tampered with its contents, Hansen zipped the body bag shut, locked the freezer behind him, and drove back home in his Cadillac SUV. The sight of the hanging sides of beef had made him hungry. He used his cell phone to call Donna and tell her to set aside whatever else she had planned for dinner; they would grill steaks on the GrillAire Range tonight.

Arlene’s sister-in-law Gail’s home was the second floor of an old duplex on Colvin Avenue north of the park. Gail was divorced and was working a double shift at the Medical Center; Arlene had explained that Gail was sleeping at the hospital and wouldn’t be home until late the following afternoon. Good thing, thought Kurtz as Arlene unlocked the door and led Pruno and him up the side stairway. Upstairs, Kurtz looked at the herd of refugees he was collecting—Frears hugging Pruno affectionately as if the old addict didn’t smell like a urinal—Arlene with the .45 still in her sweater pocket. For all the years that he had used Pruno as a street source when he was a P.I., Arlene had never met the old wino, and now the two were busy with their introductions and conversation. Kurtz, a loner all his life, was beginning to feel like Noah, and he suspected that he might need a bigger ark if this refugee crap kept up.

The four of them sat in the tiny living room. Cooking smells came from the adjoining kitchen, and occasionally she would stand and go in to check on something and the conversation would pause until she returned.

“What is going on, Mr. Kurtz?” asked John Wellington Frears when they were all gathered around like a happy chipmunk family again.

Kurtz slipped his peacoat off—it was hot in the little apartment—and explained what he could about James B. Hansen being the esteemed Homicide Captain Robert Millworth.

“This dentist… Conway…admitted this to you?” asked Pruno.

“Not in so many words,” said Kurtz. “But let’s say that I confirmed it with him.”

“I would guess that this Dr. Conway’s life wouldn’t be worth much right now,” said Frears.

Kurtz had to agree with that.

“So how do you think this Millworth… Hansen…made the connection between Mr. Frears and you, Joe?” asked Arlene.

“We’re not certain that he has.”

“But it would be dangerous to assume anything else,” said Frears.

“It is folly,” said Pruno, “to form policy based on assumptions of the enemy’s intentions…judge his capabilities and prepare accordingly.”

“Well,” said Arlene, “a captain in Homicide is capable of using the entire police department to track down Mr. Frears and the rest of us.”

Kurtz shook his head. “Not without blowing his cover. We have to remember that this Hansen isn’t a real cop.”

“No,” Frears said evenly, “he is a serial rapist and child killer.”

That stopped conversation for a while. Finally Arlene said, “Can he trace us here, Joe?”

“I doubt it. Not if Myers didn’t follow you.”

“No,” said Arlene. “I made sure that we weren’t followed. But they’ll get suspicious when Mr. Frears and I don’t leave my house tomorrow.”

“Or when the lights don’t come on tonight,” said Pruno. It was getting dark outside.

“I left the lamps in the front room on a timer I use when on vacation,” said Arlene. “They’re on now and will go off at eleven.”

Kurtz, who was suddenly feeling exhausted, looked up at that. “When have you ever taken a vacation?”

Arlene gave him a look. Kurtz took it as his cue to leave. “I have to return a car,” he said, standing and tugging on his peacoat.

“Not until you eat,” said Arlene.

“I’m not hungry.”

“No? When was the last time you ate, Joe? Did you have lunch?”

Kurtz paused to think. His last meal had been a sweet roll he’d grabbed with coffee at a Thruway stop during his midnight drive back from Cleveland. He hadn’t eaten all this Wednesday and hadn’t slept since Tuesday night.

“We’re all going to have a good meal,” Arlene said in a tone that brooked no argument. “I’ve made lots of spaghetti, fresh bread, some roast beef. You all have about twenty minutes to wash up.”

“I may need all of that time,” said Pruno. Kurtz laughed but the old man shot him a glance, lifted the bundle of his garment bag, and disappeared into the bathroom with dignity.

The family of Robert Gaines Millworth—his wife Donna and fourteen-year-old stepson Jason—ate as a family every night because James Hansen knew it was important that a family eat together. This night they had steak and salad and rice. Donna had wine. Hansen did not drink alcohol, but he allowed his wives to, in moderation.

While they ate. Donna talked about her work at the library. Jason talked about basketball and about ice hockey. Hansen listened and thought about his next move in this rather interesting chess game he had become involved in. At one point, Hansen found himself looking around the dining room—the art, the glimpse of bookcases from the family room beyond, the expensive furniture and Delft china. It would be a shame, all this lost to the fire. But James B. Hansen had never been one to confuse material possessions with the more important things of the soul.

After dinner, he would go down to his office, keeping his cell phone with him in case Brubaker or Myers called, and contemplate what he had to do tomorrow and in the days to come.

It was a strange dinner for Kurtz—a good dinner, lots of spaghetti and roast beef and gravy and real bread and a good salad and coffee—but strange. It had been a while since his last home-cooked dinner eaten with other people. How long? Twelve years. Twelve years and a month. A dinner with Sam at her place, also spaghetti that night, with the baby, the toddler, in a tall chair—not a high chair, it didn’t have a tray—what had Sam called it? A youth chair. With little Rachel in the youth chair at the table, chattering away, reaching over to tug at Kurtz’s napkin, the child babbling even as Sam told him about this interesting case she was pursuing—a teenage runaway missing, drugs involved.

Kurtz stopped eating. Only Arlene noticed and she looked away after a second.

Pruno had come out of the bathroom showered, shaven, skin pink and scalded-looking, his fingernails still yellowed and cracked but no longer grimy, his thinning gray hair—which Kurtz had never seen except as a sort of nimbus floating around the old wino’s head—slicked back. He was wearing a suit that might have been two decades out of style and no longer fit. Pruno’s frail form was lost in it, but it also looked clean. How? wondered Kurtz. How could this old heroin addict keep a suit clean when he lived in a packing crate and in cubbies under the Thruway?

Pruno—or “Dr. Frederick,” as Frears kept addressing him—looked older and frailer and more fragile without his protective crusts of grime and rags. But the old man sat very upright as he ate and drank and nodded his head to accept more food and addressed John Wellington Frears in measured tones. Frears had been his student at Princeton. One old man dying of cancer and his ancient teacher sitting there in his double-breasted, pinstripe suit—making conversation about Mozart as a prodigy and about the Palestinian situation and about global warming.

Kurtz shook his head. He’d not had any wine because he was so damned tired already and because he might have to keep his head clear for several hours more on this endless day, but enough was enough. This scene was not just unreal, it was surreal. He needed a drink.

Arlene followed him out to the kitchen.

“Doesn’t your sister-in-law keep any booze in the house?” asked Kurtz.

“That top cupboard. Johnnie Walker Red.”

“That’ll do,” said Kurtz. He poured himself three fingers’ worth.

“What’s the matter, Joe?”

“Nothing’s the matter. Other than this serial-killer police captain after all of us, I mean. Everything’s great.”

“You’re thinking about Rachel.”

Kurtz shook his head and took a drink. The two old men in the dining room laughed at something.

“What are you going to do about that, Joe?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. You can’t let her go back to Donald Rafferty.”

Kurtz shrugged. He remembered tearing up the photograph of Frears’s dead daughter—Crystal. He remembered leaving the torn bits of the photograph on the scarred table at Blues Franklin.

Arlene lit a cigarette and pulled down a small bowl for an ashtray. “Gail won’t let me smoke in her house. She’ll be furious when she gets home tomorrow.”

Kurtz studied the amber liquid in his glass.

“What if the police don’t arrest Rafferty, Joe?”

He shrugged again.

“Or if they do?” said Arlene. “Either way, Rachel is going to be at risk. A foster home? Samantha had no other family. Just her ex-husband. Unless he has family who can take care of her.”

Kurtz poured another finger of scotch. Rafferty’s only living family was an alcoholic bitch of a mother who lived in Las Vegas and a younger brother who was doing time in an Indiana state prison for armed robbery. He’d listened to the phone conversations.

“But if she goes into some sort of temporary foster home…” began Arlene.

“Look,” said Kurtz, slamming the empty glass down on the counter, “what the hell do you want me to do about it?”

Arlene blinked. Joe Kurtz had never yelled at her in all their years of working together. She exhaled smoke and batted ashes into the dainty little ceramic bowl. “DNA,” she said.

“What?”

“DNA testing would show paternity, Joe. You could—”

“Are you fucking nuts? An ex-con who served time for manslaughter? A former P.I. who will never get his license back? Somebody with at least three death sentences out on him?” Kurtz laughed. “Yeah, I don’t see why the courts wouldn’t place the kid with someone like that. Besides, I don’t know for sure that I’m the—”

“Don’t,” said Arlene, her finger raised and pointed. “Don’t say that. Don’t even pretend to me that you think it.”

Kurtz went out into the tiny living room, retrieved his peacoat and the S&W .40 from where he’d left them and went down the stairs and out of the house. It was dark out and it had begun to snow again.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FOUR

I was just about to call and report a stolen Porsche,” said Angelina Farino Ferrara.

“That little electronic-card thing is handy,” said Kurtz. “It lets you into both the parking garage and the elevator. Useful.”

“I hope you put the Boxster back in the same slot. And there had better not be any scratches.”

Kurtz ignored her and walked over to the center of the penthouse’s living room. Beyond the floor-to-ceiling window on the east side, the lights of downtown Buffalo glowed through the falling snow. To the west was the darkness of the river and lake, with only a few distant ship lights blinking against blackness.

“We have to get rid of Leo,” said Angelina.

“I know. Any problems with Marco?”

“Not a peep. He’s handcuffed in the bathroom. Seems to be mildly amused by all this. Marco may be smarter than I thought.”

“Maybe so. You have anyone on the floor below us?”

“Five people work there—no muscle, just bookkeeper types—but they went home at six. Marco and Leo were the only ones using the living quarters there.”

“I thought Little Skag brought in new muscle from the east.”

“He did. Eight other new guys besides Marco and Leo. But they’re all out doing what they do—running what’s left of Stevie’s crews, handling the whores and gambling. Day-to-day stuff. They don’t come by here that much.”

“Who does?”

“Albert Bell is the lawyer who acts as liaison between Little Stevie and me. I usually see Mr. Bell on Saturdays.”

“But Marco and Leo check in with Little Skag by phone every Wednesday?”

“Right. Stevie calls his lawyer. The call is forwarded. I don’t know where the Boys take the call.”

“Marco will tell us,” said Kurtz. He felt very tired. “You ready to transport the frozen goods?”

“I’ll go down and back the Town Car right up to the elevator.”

“I’ll need a big garment bag, sheet, something.”

“Shower curtain,” said Angelina. “Little blue fish on it. I took care of it.”

Angelina drove. They took the Buffalo Skyway south along the lake. It was snowing very hard now, visibility was limited to the two cones of headlights filled with flurries, and the elevated highway was treacherous with black ice. Only the Lincoln Town Car’s massive weight kept them moving as the rear-wheel drive slipped and then gripped for pavement. Kurtz had the clear image of them getting stuck and a friendly patrolman stopping to help them out, a need to look in the trunk for the chains or somesuch…

“We going far?” he asked.

“Not far. Near Hamburg.”

“What’s near Hamburg?”

“My father and older brother used to keep an ice-fishing shack just offshore in February. Sometimes they’d drag Little Stevie along, whining and pouting. I went a few times. If there’s anything more stupid than sitting in a freezing shack staring at a hole in the ice, I don’t what it might be. But some of the old capos still set up the shack even though there are no Farinos around to use it.”

“I didn’t know that people ice-fished on Lake Erie. Is the ice thick enough to walk on?”

“We’re going to drive this car out onto it.”

“But aren’t there big ships still moving out there?”

“Yeah.”

That was all Kurtz wanted to know about that subject. He concentrated on staying awake while the big car crept along through blowing snow. Once off the Skyway and moving along Highway 5 through little shoreline communities like Locksley Park and Mount Vernon, the black ice was less frequent but the snow was worse.

“Are you still with me on this, Kurtz?”

The woman’s voice made him blink awake. “With you on what?”

“You know. Gonzaga.”

“I don’t know.”

Angelina drove in silence for a few minutes.

“Why don’t you tell me what your real plan is,” Kurtz said. “What your objectives are, long term goals. So far you’ve just tried to use me like some damned Hamas suicide bomber.”

“And you used me,” she said. “You were ready to get me killed today just so you could get to Emilio.”

Kurtz shrugged at that. He waited.

“If Little Skag gets out of Attica this spring, it’s too late,” Angelina said at last. “I’m screwed. The Farino Family is finished. Stevie thinks he can ride this tiger, but Emilio will gobble him up in six weeks. Less.”

“So? You can always go back to Italy or something. Can’t you?”

“No,” said Angelina, throwing the word like a javelin. “Fuck that. The Gonzagas have been planning this…this extermination…of the Farinos for a long, long time. It was Emilio’s father who had my father ambushed and crippled sixteen years ago. Emilio raped me seven years ago as much out of Gonzaga contempt as anything else. There’s no way on earth that I’m going to let them destroy the family without a fight.” She slowed, hunted for a street sign in the blizzard, and turned right toward the lake.

“So say I’d killed Gonzaga for you,” said Kurtz. “Either you or one of the New York families would have had me killed, but then where are you? Little Skag is still running things from Attica.”

“But he can’t get out without the judges and parole-board people on the Gonzaga payroll,” said Angelina. “It buys me time to try to consolidate things. If the rebuilt Farino Family is earning money for them, the New York bosses won’t care who’s actually running the action here in Buffalo.”

“But Little Skag still has the leverage and control of the money,” said Kurtz. “In a vacuum, he’ll just find a way to buy the Gonzaga judges and parole-board people.”

“Yes.” The asphalt road ended at a snowy boat ramp dropping down onto the lake. Two rows of red flares were dimly visible stretching across the snowy ice, marking a makeshift road onto Lake Erie. A few truck and snowmobile tracks were gradually being erased by the wind. “The goddamned Gonzagas,” muttered Angelina as she slowly descended the boat ramp. She was talking without thinking about it, just to relieve the tension of the driving. “While Papa and my family were consolidating gambling and prostitution and paying off just a few tame judges, the Gonzagas spent their money to buy top officials. Hell, most of the top cops in the Buffalo P.D. are on their pad.”

“Stop!” said Kurtz.

The big Lincoln slewed to a stop with only its front wheels on the ice. “What?” snapped Angelina. “Goddammit, Kurtz. I told you, the ice is thick enough now to hold ten, Town Cars. Quit being so fucking nervous.”

“No,” said Kurtz. The windshield wipers pounded wildly, trying to knock away the blowing snow. “Say that again…about the cops.”

“Say what? The Gonzagas have been paying the top cops for years. It’s how Emilio’s family gets away with moving the huge volume of drugs it does.”

“Do you have a list of those cops?”

“Sure. So what?”

Kurtz was too busy thinking to answer.

The Farino ice-fishing shack was only a few hundred yards out on the ice, but in the dark and the snow and the howling wind, it seemed like miles from shore. A few other shacks were visible in the headlights, but there were no vehicles. Even idiots who thought ice fishing was a sport weren’t out tonight.

Kurtz and Angelina Farino Ferrara wrestled the stiffened bundle out of the trunk and carried it into the shack. There was a large hole centered where men could sit on plywood seats on either side and watch their lines—the whole building reminded Kurtz of an oversized outhouse—but a film of new ice had grown over the hole. Angelina took a long-handled shovel from the corner and bashed away the scrim of ice. The wind literally howled, and icy pellets pounded the north wall of the shack.

Angelina had added some chains to the package so there was no need to hunt for additional weights. They lowered Leo through the hole, his shoulders barely squeezing through and bunching up the plastic shower curtain, and watched the last bubbles rise in the middle of the black circle.

“Let’s get out of here,” said Kurtz.

Back on Highway 5, Angelina said, “It’s a good thing you chose Leo.”

“Why?”

“Marco wouldn’t have fit through that hole. We would’ve had to chop a new one.”

Kurtz let that go.

Angelina glanced at him in the light of the instrument console. There was almost no traffic going through Lackawanna and back into town. “Did it occur to you that Leo might have had a family, Kurtz? A loving wife? Couple of kids?”

“No. Did he?”

“Of course not. As far as I could find out, he left New Jersey because he’d beaten his stripper girlfriend to death. He’d killed his brother the year before over some gambling debt. But my point was, he might’ve had a family. You didn’t know.”

Kurtz wasn’t listening. He was trying to fight away fatigue long enough to work through this thing.

“Okay,” Angelina said. “Tell me. What was this about the cops?”

“I don’t know.”

She waited. As they drove into the Marina Towers basement garage, Kurtz said, “I may have a way. For us to get to Gonzaga and survive. Maybe even put you in the position you want to be in and take Little Skag out of the equation.”

“Kill Stevie?” She did not sound shocked at the idea.

“Not necessarily. Just get rid of his leverage.”

“Tell me.”

Kurtz shook his head. He looked around the garage and realized that his Volvo was still parked at the Buffalo Athletic Club. That cute little Boxster would never get through this snow. And where am I going? Hansen probably had his room at the Royal Delaware Arms and the office staked out. Kurtz thought of how crowded Gail’s tiny apartment was tonight—violinist on the sofa, wino on the floor, whatever—and it made him more tired than ever.

“You have to drive me back to the Athletic Club,” he said dully. Maybe he could sleep in the car there.

“Fuck that,” Angelina said in conversational tones. “You’re staying in the penthouse tonight.”

Kurtz looked at her.

“Relax. I’m not after your body, Kurtz. And you look too wasted to make a pass. I just need to hear about this plan. You’re not leaving until you tell me.”

“I need a B-and-E expert tomorrow,” said Kurtz. “Your family has to know someone really good at defeating security systems. Maybe cracking safes as well.”

Angelina laughed.

“What’s so funny?” said Kurtz.

“I’ll tell you upstairs. You can sleep on the sectional in the living room. We’ll build a fire, you can pour us a couple of brandies, and I’ll tell you what’s so funny. It’ll be your bedtime story.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FIVE

James B. Hansen awoke on Wednesday morning refreshed, renewed, and determined to go on the offensive. He made love to his very surprised wife—only Hansen knew that it would almost certainly be for the last time, since he planned to move on before the approaching weekend was past—and even while he made her moan, he was thinking that he had been passive in this Frears/Kurtz thing far too long, that it was time for him to reassert his dominance. James B. Hansen was a Master chess player, but he much preferred offense to defense. He had been reacting to events rather than being proactive. It was time for him to take charge. People were going to die today.

His wife moaned her weak little orgasm, Hansen dutifully had his—offering a prayer to his Lord and Savior as he did so—and then it was time to shower, strap on his Glock-9, and get to work.

Hansen went to the office long enough to have “Captain Millworth” clear his schedule except for a mandatory meeting with Boy Scout Troop 23 at 11:30 and a lunch with the Chief and the Mayor an hour after that. He called the two detectives: Myers was on the stakeout at Kurtz’s secretary’s house in Cheektowaga after a few hours’ sleep; Brubaker had checked the Royal Delaware Arms and Kurtz’s office downtown—no joy there. Hansen told Brubaker to join Myers in Cheektowaga, he would meet them there.

He went down to the precinct basement to requisition tactical gear.

“Wow, Captain,” said the sergeant behind the cage wire, “you starting a war?”

“Just running a tactical exercise for a few of my boys,” said Hansen. “Can’t let the detectives get fat and lazy while ESU and SWAT are having all the fun, can we?”

“No, sir,” said the sergeant.

“I’m going to back my Cadillac sport ute around,” said Hansen. “Would you pack all this stuff in two ballistic-cloth bags and get it up to the rear door?”

“Yes, sir,” said the sergeant in an unhappy tone. It wasn’t his job to hump gear bags up the back stairs. But Captain Robert Gaines Millworth had a reputation as a humorless, unforgiving officer.

Hansen drove out through heavy snow to Cheektowaga, thinking about how easy this apprehension would be if he could just call a dozen of his detectives into the ready room and send them searching for Frears and Kurtz: checking every hotel and motel in the Buffalo area, running credit-card searches, going door to door. He had to smile at this. After years of being the ultimate loner, James B. Hansen was being contaminated by the group-effort persona of Captain Millworth. Well. I’ll just have to get by with Brubaker and Myers. It was too bad that he had to rely on a venial, corrupt cop and a fat slacker, but he’d use them and then discard them within the next couple of days.

The venial, corrupt cop and the fat slacker were eating doughnuts in Myers’s Pontiac, across the street from Arlene DeMarco’s house.

“Nothing, Captain,” reported Brubaker. “She hasn’t even come out for her paper.”

“Her car’s still in the garage,” said Myers, belaboring the obvious. The driveway showed six inches of fresh snow and no tire tracks.

Hansen glanced at his watch; it was not quite 8:30 A.M. “Why don’t we go in and say hello?”

The two detectives stared at him over their gnawed doughnuts and steaming coffee. “We got a warrant, Captain?” asked Myers.

“I’ve got something better,” said Hansen. The three men got out in the falling snow. Hansen opened his trunk and handed the pneumatic battering ram to Myers. “Brubaker, you ready your weapon,” said Hansen. He took his own Glock-9 out, chambered a round, and crossed the street to the DeMarco house.

He knocked three times, waited a second, stood to one side, and nodded to Myers. The fat man looked at Brubaker as if questioning the order, but then swung the ram. The door burst inward, ripping its bolt chain off as it fell.

Hansen and Brubaker went in with pistols held high in both hands, swinging their weapons as they moved their heads. Living room—clear. Dining room—clear. Kitchen—clear. Bedrooms and bathrooms—clear. Basement and utility room—clear. They returned to the kitchen and holstered their weapons.

“That bugger packs a wallop,” said Myers, setting the battering ram on the table and shaking his fingers.

Hansen ignored him. “You’re sure someone was home when you started the stakeout?”

“Yeah,” said Myers. “I could see a woman moving around in the living room yesterday afternoon before she pulled the drapes. Then the lights went off about eleven.”

“The lights could have been on a timer,” said Hansen. “When was the last time you saw someone move?”

Myers shrugged. “I dunno. It wasn’t dark yet. Maybe, I dunno, four. Four-thirty.”

Hansen opened the back door. Even with the new snow, faint tracks were visible crossing the backyard. “Stay a few paces back,” he said. Not bothering to pull his Glock from its holster, he followed the faint depressions in the snow across the backyard, through a gate, across the alley, and through another backyard.

“We got another warrant for this house?” asked Brubaker from the yard as Hansen went to the back door.

“Shut up.” Hansen knocked.

A woman in her seventies peered fearfully through the kitchen curtains. Hansen held his gold badge to the window. “Police. Please open the door.” The three detectives waited while a seemingly endless number of bolts and locks and chains were released.

Hansen led the other two into the woman’s kitchen. He nodded at Brubaker, who beckoned to Myers, and the two began searching the other rooms of the house while the old lady wrung her hands.

“Ma’am, I’m Captain Millworth of the Buffalo Police Department. Sorry to bother you this morning, but we’re looking for one of your neighbors.”

“Arlene?” said the woman.

“Mrs. DeMarco, yes. Have you seen her? It’s very important.”

“Is she in some kind of trouble, Officer? I mean, she asked me not to mention to anyone…”

“Yes, ma’am. I mean no, Mrs. DeMarco’s not in any trouble with us, but we have reason to believe that she may be in danger. We’re trying to find her. What is your name, ma’am?”

“Mrs. Dzwrjsky.”

“When did you see her last night, Mrs. Dzwrjsky?”

“Yesterday afternoon. Right after Wheel of Fortune.”

“About four-thirty?”

“Yes.”

“And was she alone?”

“No. She had a Negro man with her. I thought that was very strange. Was she his hostage, Officer? I mean, I thought it very strange. Arlene didn’t act frightened, but the man… I mean, he seemed very nice…but I thought it was very strange. Was he kidnapping her?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out, Mrs. Dzwrjsky. Is this the man?” Hansen showed her the photo of John Wellington Frears.

“Oh, my, yes. Is he dangerous?”

“Do you know where they went?”

“No. Not really. I loaned Arlene Mr. Dzwrjsky’s car. I mean, I almost never drive it anymore. Little Charles from down the street drives me when I have to—”

“What kind of car is it, Mrs. Dzwrjsky?”

“Oh…a station wagon. A Ford. Curtis always bought Fords at the dealership out on Union, even when—”

“Do you remember the make and year of the station wagon, ma’am?”

“Make? You mean the name? Other than Ford, you mean? My heavens, no. It’s big, old, you know, and has that fake wood trim on the side.”

“A Country Squire?” said Hansen. Brubaker and Myers came back into the kitchen, their weapons out of sight. Brubaker shook his head. No one else in the house.

“Yes, perhaps. That sounds right.”

“Old?” said Hansen. “From the seventies perhaps?”

“Oh, no, Officer. Not that old. Curtis bought it the year Janice’s first daughter was born. Nineteen eighty-three.”

“And do you know the license number on the Ford Country Squire, ma’am?”

“No, no…but it would be in that drawer there, with the registration forms and the car-insurance stuff. I always…” She paused and watched as Brubaker rifled through the drawer, coming up with a current license-registration form. He said the tag number aloud and put the form in his coat pocket.

“You’re being very helpful, Mrs. Dzwrjsky. Very helpful.” Hansen patted the old woman’s mottled hands. “Now, can you tell us where Arlene and this man were going?”

Mona Dzwrjsky shook her head. “She did not say. I’m sure she did not say. Arlene just said that something very important had come up and asked if she could borrow the station wagon. They seemed in a hurry.”

“Do you have any idea where they might have been going, Mrs. Dzwrjsky? Anyone that Arlene might try to contact if there were trouble?”

The old woman pursed her lips as she thought. “Well, her late husband’s sister, of course. But I imagine you’ve spoken with Gail already.”

“Gail,” repeated Hansen. “What’s her last name, ma’am?”

“The same as Alan’s and Arlene’s. I mean, Gail was married, twice, but never had children, and she took back her maiden name after the second divorce. I used to tell Arlene, you can never trust an Irish boy, but Gail was always…”

“Gail DeMarco,” said Hansen.

“Yes.”

“Do you know where she lives? Where she works?”

Mrs. Dzwrjsky looked as if she might cry. “Gail lives near where Colvin Avenue becomes Colvin Boulevard, I think. Arlene took me to visit her once. Yes, right near Hertel Plaza, north of the park.”

“And where does she work?” asked Hansen, his voice more impatient than he meant it to be.

The old woman looked afraid. “Oh, Gail has always worked at the Erie County Medical Center. She’s a surgical nurse there.”

Hansen patted her hands again. “Thank you, Mrs. Dzwrjsky. You’ve been a huge help.” He nodded for Brubaker and Myers to head back to the DeMarco house.

“I hope that Arlene is all right,” said the old woman from the back door. She was weeping now. “I just hope Arlene is all right.”

Back in Arlene DeMarco’s kitchen, Brubaker used his cell phone to call Dispatch. They got Ms. Gail DeMarco’s address on Colvin and the phone number, and Hansen called. There was no answer. He called the Erie County Medical Center, identified himself as a police officer, and was informed that Nurse DeMarco was assisting in surgery right now but would be available in about thirty minutes.

“Okay,” said Hansen. “You two get over to the house on Colvin Avenue.”

“You want us to go in?” asked Myers, lifting the battering ram off the table.

“No. Just stake it out. Check the driveway and call me if the Ford wagon is there. You can ask neighbors if they’ve seen the car or Arlene DeMarco or Frears or Kurtz, but don’t go in until I get there.”

“Where will you be, Captain?” Brubaker seemed half-amused by all this urgency.

“I’m going to stop at the Medical Center on the way. Get going.”

Hansen watched from the front window as the two drove off in their unmarked cars. Then he walked back across the yard, through the carport, across the alley, and knocked on Mrs. Dzwrjsky’s back door again.

When the old woman opened the door, she was holding the phone but it appeared that she hadn’t dialed a number yet. She set the phone back in its cradle as Hansen stepped into the kitchen. “Yes, Officer?”

Hansen pulled the Glock-9 and shot her three times in the upper chest. Any other time, he would take the chance that the woman would call someone rather than take the chance of leaving a body behind, much less leave two detectives as witnesses, but this was an unusual situation. All he needed was a day or two and none of this would matter for Captain Robert Gaines Millworth. Probably just one day.

Hansen stepped over the body, making sure not to step in the widening pool of blood, picked up his ejected brass, and took time to reload the three cartridges in the dock’s magazine before walking back through the yards to his waiting Cadillac Escalade.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SIX

Earlier that morning, Kurtz and Angelina Farino Ferrara sat in the front seat of her Lincoln and watched Captain Robert Millworth drive away from his home. It was 7:15 A.M.

“There was another car in the garage,” said Angelina. “A BMW wagon.”

Kurtz nodded and they waited. At 7:45, a woman, a teenage boy, and an Irish setter backed out in the station wagon. The woman beeped the garage door shut and drove off. “Wife, kid, and dog,” said Angelina. “Any more in there?”

Kurtz shrugged.

“We’ll find out,” said Angelina. She drove the Town Car right up the long Millworth driveway and they both got out, Angelina carrying a heavy nylon bag. Kurtz stood back while she knocked several times. No answer.

“Around back,” she said. He followed her through the side yard and across a snowy patio. The nearest neighbor was about a hundred yards away behind a privacy fence.

They paused by the sliding doors to the patio as Angelina crouched and studied something through the glass. “It’s a SecureMax system,” she said. “Expensive but not the best. Would you give me that glass cutter and the suction cup? Thanks.”

Yesterday evening, in front of the fire over brandies, with Kurtz almost too tired to concentrate, she had told him her story…or at least the part of it that had made her laugh when he’d told her that he would need a B&E man.

Angelina Farino had always wanted to be a thief. Her father, Don Byron Farino, had worked to keep her sheltered from the facts of his life and would never have considered allowing her to take part in the family business. But Angelina did not want to be involved in every aspect of the business—not then. She just wanted to be the best thief in New York State.

Her brother David introduced her to some of the legendary old second-story men and in high school Angelina would visit them, bringing wine, just to hear their stories. David also introduced her to some of the rising young thugs in their father’s organization, but she didn’t care much for them; they bragged about using guns, violence, and frontal assaults. Angelina wanted to know about the smart men, the subtle men, the quiet men, the patient men. Angelina did not want to be another mobster; she wanted to be a cat burglar; she wanted to be The Cat; she wanted to be Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief.

She had put herself in harm’s way with Emilio Gonzaga when she was in her early twenties because she thought that Gonzaga was going to introduce her to a safecracker she’d always wanted to meet. Instead, as she put it, Emilio introduced her to his dick.

Exiled to Sicily to have the baby, she had married a local mini-don, an idiot exactly her age but with half her IQ, “to keep up appearances.” After appearances were kept up and after the baby died and after the young don had his unfortunate hunting accident—or accident cleaning his pistol, Angelina let them choose the story they wanted—she flew to Rome to meet the famous Count Pietro Adolfo Ferrara. Eighty-two years old and suffering the effects of two strokes, the count was still the most famous thief in Europe. Trained by his legendary thief of a father between the wars, active in the Italian resistance, and credited with stealing the communiqués from Gestapo headquarters that led to the interdiction and assassination of Mussolini and his mistress, it was often said that the handsome, daring Count Ferrara had been the model for that Cary Grant character in To Catch a Thief.

Angelina had married the bedridden old man four days after they met. The next four years were, in her words, a training camp for becoming a world-class thief.

What are you doing?” said Kurtz. He was moving from foot to foot on Hansen’s patio. It was damned cold and his hair was wet with snow.

Angelina had cut a circular hole from the lower part of the patio door, had removed the glass carefully, and was reaching inside with a long instrument. She ignored Kurtz.

“Isn’t that security system set for motion or messing with the glass?” asked Kurtz. “Haven’t you tripped it already?”

“Would you shut up, please?” She reached in to clip on red and black wires and connected them to a module that connected with a Visor digital organizer. She studied the readout for a second, shut off the Visor, and unclipped the wires. “Okay,” she said, standing and throwing her heavy black bag over her shoulder.

“Okay what?”

“Okay we open the door the usual way and have eight seconds to tap in the six-digit code on the keypad.”

“And you know the code now?”

“Let’s see.” She studied the back door a minute, removed a short crowbar from her bag, broke the glass, and reached in to slip the chain lock and undo the main lock. It seemed to Kurtz that she had used the full eight seconds just to do that.

Angelina walked into the rear hallway, found the keypad on the wall, and tapped in the six-character alphanumeric code. An indicator on the security keypad went from red to green to amber. “Clear,” she said.

Kurtz let out his breath. He pulled his pistol out from under his coat.

“You expecting someone else to be home?” said Angelina.

Kurtz shrugged.

“You going to tell me now whose house this is and how it relates to Gonzaga?”

“Not yet,” said Kurtz. They went from room to room together, first the large downstairs, then all the bedrooms and guest rooms upstairs.

“Jesus,” said Angelina as they came back downstairs. “This place is the definition of retro anal retentive. It’s like we broke into Mike and Carol Brady’s house.”

“Who the hell are Mike and Carol Brady?”

Angelina paused at the top of the basement stairs. “You don’t know the Brady Bunch?”

Kurtz gave her a blank look.

“Christ, Kurtz, you’ve been locked away longer than twelve years.”

The basement had a laundry room, a bare rec room with a dusty Ping-Pong table, and a room locked away behind a steel door with a complicated security keypad.

“Wowzuh,” said Angelina and whistled.

“Same code as upstairs?”

“No way. This is a serious piece of circuitry.” She started pulling instruments and wires from her bag.

Kurtz glanced at his watch. “We don’t have all day.”

“Why not?” said Angelina. “You have things to see and people to do today?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, don’t get your jockey briefs in a bunch. In two minutes, we’ll either be in or we’ll have armed private-security people all over our ass here.”

“Private security,” said Kurtz. “This guy’s alarms don’t go to the cop house?”

“Get serious.” She focused her attention on removing the keypad from the wall and connecting her wires to its wires without setting off the silent alarm.

Kurtz wandered back upstairs and looked out the front window. Their black Town Car was parked in plain sight, although the increasing snowfall made visibility more problematic. Kurtz was thankful that Hansen had bought a relatively isolated house with such a long driveway.

“Holy shit!” Angelina’s voice sounded far away.

Kurtz trotted down the stairs and went through the open door. It was quite a private office—mahogany-paneled walls, a lighted gun case running from floor to ceiling, a heavy, expensive-looking wooden desk. On the wall above and behind that desk were photographs of James B. Hansen posing with various Buffalo worthies, plus a scad of certificates—Florida Police Academy diplomas, shooting awards, and commendations for Lieutenant and Captain Robert G. Millworth, Homicide Detective.

Angelina’s eyes were narrow when she wheeled on Kurtz. “You had me break into a fucking cop’s home?”

“No.” He walked over to the large wall safe. “Can you get into this?”

She quit staring daggers at Kurtz and looked at the safe. “Maybe.”

He looked at his watch again.

“If this were a small, round safe, we’d have to pry the fucker out of the wall and take it with us,” said Angelina. “You just can’t get any blast leverage on a round safe. But our boy went in for the heavier, more expensive type.”

“So?”

“So anything with corners, I can get into.” She set her bag down near the safe door and began removing timers, primers, thermite sticks, and wads of plastique.

“You’re going to blow it?” Kurtz was wishing that he’d gone to check on Arlene, Frears, and Pruno before doing this errand.

“I’m going to burn our way into the lock mechanism and get at the tumblers that way,” said Angelina. “Why don’t you make yourself useful and go make us some coffee?” She worked for a few seconds and then looked up at Kurtz standing there. “I’m serious. I didn’t get my full three cups this morning.”

Kurtz went up to the kitchen, found the coffeemaker, and made the coffee. He found some cannoli in the refrigerator. By the time he started down the stairs with two mugs and a dish with the cannoli, there came a loud hiss, a muffled whump, and an acrid odor filled the air. The safe looked intact to Kurtz’s eye, but then he saw a fissure around the combination lock. Angelina Farino Ferrara had attached a slim fiberoptic cable to the Visor organizer and was watching a monochrome display as she clicked the combination.

The heavy safe door swung open. She accepted the cup of coffee and drank deeply. “Blue Mountain roast. Good stuff. Cannoli’s just okay.”

Kurtz began removing things from the safe. A heavy nylon bag contained more than a dozen carefully wrapped cubes of what looked to be gray clay nestled in with foam-wrapped detonators, delicate-looking timers, and coils of primer cord.

“Military C-Four,” said Angelina. “What the hell does your homicide captain want with C-Four in his home?”

“He likes to burn down and blow up his homes,” said Kurtz. Shelves in the safe held more than $200,000 in cash and bearer’s bonds, a bunch of certificates and policies, and a titanium case. Kurtz ignored the money and carried the case to the desk.

“Excuse me,” Angelina said. “You forgetting something?”

“I’m not a thief.”

“I am,” she said and began transferring the money and bonds to her bag.

“Shit,” said Kurtz. The locks on the case were also titanium and did not give when he went at them with the small crowbar.

“That little case may take longer to crack than the safe,” said Angelina.

“Uh-uh,” said Kurtz. He took out his .40-caliber Smith & Wesson and blew the locks off. The gap allowed the crowbar to get a grip and he popped the briefcase open.

Angelina finished loading the contents of the safe, lifted her heavy bag, and came over to the desk where Kurtz had laid out some of the photographs. “So what exactly are you… Holy Mother of God!”

Kurtz nodded.

“Who is this motherfucking pervert?” whispered Angelina.

Kurtz shrugged. “We’ll never know his real name. But I was sure that he’d keep trophies. And he did.”

It was Angelina’s turn to look at her watch. “This is taking too long.”

Kurtz nodded and hefted the bag of C-4 over his shoulder.

Angelina was sipping her coffee and heading for the door. She gestured. “Bring the other bag with the money and my burglar’s stuff. Leave the cannoli.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SEVEN

Hansen showed his badge to three nurses and two interns before being told where Nurse Gail DeMarco was.

“She’s out of the O.R. and is…ah…right now, she’s in the Intensive Care Unit on nine.” The fat, black nurse was checking her computer monitor. Evidently all the hospital personnel were tracked by electronic sensors.

Hansen went up to the ICU and found the nurse speaking on a cell phone while looking down at a sleeping or comatose teenage girl. The girl had bruises and bandages and at least three tubes running in and out of her.

“Mrs. DeMarco?” Hansen showed his badge.

“I have to go,” the nurse said into the phone and punched the disconnect button, but kept the phone in her hand. “What is it, Captain?”

Hansen showed his most engaging smile. “You know that I’m a captain of detectives?”

“It said so right on the ID you just showed me, Captain. Let’s step out of this room.”

“No, we’re all right here,” said Hansen. “I’ll just be a minute.” He liked the glass doors and walls separating them from the nurses’ station. He went closer to the bed and leaned over the sleeping girl. “Car accident?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the kid’s name?”

“Rachel.”

“How old?”

“Fourteen.”

Hansen gave his winning smile again. “I have a fourteen-year-old son. Jason. He wants to be a professional hockey player.”

The nurse did not respond. She checked one of the monitors and adjusted the IV drip. She was still carrying the stupid cell phone in her left hand.

“She going to make it?” asked Hansen, not giving the slightest damn if the kid survived or went into cardiac arrest right then and there, but still wanting to get on Gail DeMarco’s good side. Most women were blown away by his smile and affable persona.

“We hope so,” said the nurse. “Can I help you, Captain?”

“Have you heard from your sister-in-law Arlene, Mrs. DeMarco?”

“Not for the last week or so. Is she in some sort of trouble?”

“We don’t know.” He showed the Frears photo. “Have you ever seen this man?”

“No.”

No hesitation. No questions. No sign of alarm. Gail DeMarco wasn’t responding according to the script. “We think perhaps this man abducted your sister-in-law.”

The nurse didn’t even blink. “Why would he do that?”

Hansen rubbed his chin. In other circumstances, he would take great pleasure in using a knife on this uncooperative woman. To calm himself, he looked down at the sleeping girl. She was just at the high end of the age group he liked. He raised her wrist and looked at the sea-green hospital bracelet there.

“Please don’t touch her, Captain. We’re worried about infection. Thank you. We shouldn’t be in here.”

“Just one more minute, Mrs. DeMarco. Your sister-in-law works for a man named Joe Kurtz. What can you tell me about Mr. Kurtz?”

The nurse had moved between Hansen and the sleeping girl. “Joe Kurtz? Nothing, really. I’ve never met him.”

“So you haven’t heard from Arlene in the last few days?”

“No.”

Hansen graced the woman with a last glimpse of his most charming smile. “You’ve been very helpful, Mrs. DeMarco. We are concerned about your sister-in-law’s whereabouts and well-being. If she gets in touch, please call me immediately. Here’s my card.”

Gail DeMarco took the card but immediately slipped it into her smock pocket as if it was contaminated.

Hansen took the elevator down to the reception level, spoke briefly with the nurse there, and took the elevator the rest of the way to the parking garage. He had learned several things. First, Kurtz’s secretary had been in touch with her sister-in-law, but Arlene probably had not told her any details concerning Frears or what was going on. The nurse had known just enough not to be concerned about her sister’s safety. Second, Gail almost certainly knew where Arlene was hiding. And probably Kurtz as well. Third, odds were good that Arlene and her boss, probably with Frears, were hiding at Nurse DeMarco’s borne on Colvin Avenue. Finally, and perhaps most important, Hansen had recognized the girl’s name on the ID bracelet—Rachel Rafferty. Most people would not have made the connection, but James B. Hansen’s memory was near photographically perfect. He recalled the notes in Joe Kurtz’s file: former partner in their private investigation firm, Samantha Fielding, one daughter—Rachel—two years old when Ms. Fielding had been murdered; Rachel later adopted by Fielding’s ex-husband, Donald Rafferty. And the nurse at reception, after being prodded by his badge, gave the details of the Raffertys’ auto accident—black ice on the Kensington Expressway, Donald Rafferty recovering well but under suspicion of sexually abusing his daughter, the investigation currently on hold until the girl either recovered consciousness or died.

Hansen smiled. He loved subtle connections. Even more, he loved leverage over other people, and this injured child might make wonderful leverage.

Kurtz and Angelina had just driven away from the Hansen house in Tonawanda when Kurtz’s cell phone rang. It was Arlene. “Gail just called from the hospital.”

“You told her that you were all staying at her place?” said Kurtz.

“I called her earlier this morning,” Arlene said. “She called a minute ago because she was in Rachel’s ICU room and her friend at reception called up from downstairs to tell her that a plainclothes detective was there at the hospital looking for her. Gail was on the phone with me when the cop came in and she left the line open while they talked…it was Millworth. Hansen. He even sounded crazy, Joe. And scary.”

“What did Gail tell him?”

“Nothing. Not a thing.”

Kurtz doubted that. Even with the titanium briefcase full of incriminating evidence in the car with him, it was no time to start underestimating the creature Kurtz thought of as James B. Hansen.

“You and Pruno and Frears have to get out of there,” he said.

“We’ll go now,” said Arlene. “I’ll take the station wagon.”

“No,” said Kurtz. He checked where they were. Angelina had chosen the Youngman Highway to get them back to the city, and the Lincoln was approaching the Colvin Boulevard exit. “Get off here,” he snapped at Angelina.

She gave him an angry look but glanced at the titanium case and roared down the off-ramp onto Colvin Boulevard South.

“We’ll be there in ten minutes,” Kurtz said to Arlene. “Less.”

Hansen had just left the Medical Center when his private cell phone rang.

“We just got to the DeMarco place on Colvin,” came Brubaker’s voice. “A black Lincoln Town Car just pulled into the driveway—either the DeMarco drive or the one belonging to the duplex next door, we can’t tell from down the block. Wait a minute, it’s pulling out again…the Lincoln’s coming by us… I see a woman driving, not Kurtz’s secretary. There was someone in the passenger seat, but Myers and me couldn’t see because of the reflection and I can’t see in the back because of the goddamned tinted windows…sorry for the language, Captain. You want us to stake out the duplex or follow the Lincoln?”

“Did you see anyone get into the car from the DeMarco house?”

“No, sir. But we can’t see that side door from where we’re parked. Someone might have had time to jump in. But the Lincoln wasn’t in the driveway for more than ten seconds. It was more like a car turning around than anything else.”

“Is the Country Squire station wagon in the driveway?”

“Yeah. I can see it.”

“Did you get the tag numbers on the Lincoln?”

There was a short silence that sounded to Hansen like Brubaker sulking at being asked if they’d carried out such an elementary bit of detective work. Hansen wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d neglected to get the tag numbers.

“Yeah,” Brubaker said at last. He read the numbers. “There’s no parking on the street here, Captain. We pulled into a driveway a couple of houses down. You want us to go after the Lincoln? We can catch up to it if we hurry.”

“Brubaker,” said Hansen, “tell Myers to follow the Lincoln. Tell him to run a DMV check while he’s tailing it. You stay there and keep watch on the house. Try to be inconspicuous.”

“How do I look inconspicuous while I’m standing out on the sidewalk in the snow?” said Brubaker.

“Shut up and tell Myers to catch that Lincoln,” said Hansen. “I’ll be at the duplex in five minutes.” He broke the connection.

Where’s Pruno?” said Kurtz, turned in the passenger seat to look at the two in the rear. When they had swept into the driveway, only Arlene and John Wellington Frears had run to the Lincoln and jumped in.

“He left early this morning,” said Arlene. “About dawn. All dressed up in his pinstripe suit. He said something about hiding in plain sight. I think he’s going to check into a hotel or something until all this blows over.”

“Pruno in a hotel?” said Kurtz. It was hard to picture. “Did he have any money?”

“Yes,” said Frears.

“There’s a Pontiac following us,” said Angelina.

Kurtz swiveled back and looked in the rearview mirror. “Where’d it come from?”

“It was parked a couple of houses down from the place we picked these two up. It’s been moving fast in traffic to catch up.”

“It could be coincidence,” said the violinist in back, looking out the rear window of the Lincoln.

Kurtz and Angelina exchanged glances. Obviously neither of them believed in coincidences.

“The car across the street from my house yesterday was a Pontiac,” Arlene said.

Kurtz nodded and looked at Angelina. “Can we lose them?”

“Tell me who we’re losing. I’m beginning to feel like the hired help today.”

Kurtz thought of her black bag with the $200,000 next to Hansen’s bag of C-4 in the trunk. “You have to admit, the pay’s pretty good,” he said.

Angelina shrugged. “Who’s behind us? Mr.—?” She tapped the titanium briefcase Kurtz was holding on his lap.

“One or more of the detectives who are working for him,” said Kurtz.

“You mean working for him or working for him?”

“For him personally,” said Kurtz. “Can we lose them? I don’t think you want this guy visiting you.” He tapped the case.

Angelina Farino Ferrara checked the mirror again. “He’s only one car behind. They probably made the license plate.”

“Still…” said Kurtz.

“Everyone buckle up,” said Angelina.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-EIGHT

The light was red by Nichols School at the intersection of Colvin and Amherst where the street ended at the park. The Lincoln was second in line. Kurtz glanced back and could see the silhouette of only one head in the Pontiac two cars back.

Without warning, Angelina swung the Lincoln around the old car ahead of them, almost hit a Honda turning left from Amherst, and accelerated through the red light—cutting off two other cars that had to brake wildly. She headed east on Amherst for a hundred yards and then swung south again on Nottingham Terrace along the edge of the park.

“The car’s following,” called Arlene from the back seat.

Angelina nodded. They were doing seventy miles per hour on the residential street. She braked hard and swung the big vehicle up a ramp onto the Scajaquada Expressway. A hundred yards back, almost lost in the snowfall, the Pontiac bounced and roared its way up the same ramp.

Cutting more cars off as she made the exchange from the Scajaquada to 190, she accelerated to one hundred miles per hour as they roared south over snow and black ice along the elevated sections paralleling the river.

For a minute, the Pontiac was lost in traffic, and Angelina braked hard enough to send the Lincoln into a slide. Going lock to lock with the steering wheel, tapping the brake and hitting the gas again to bring the rear end around, Angelina cut off a rusty Jetta and zoomed down another ramp, drove through a red light in front of an eighteen-wheeler to drive east on Porter and then swung around behind the old pumping-station building in La Salle Park.

The street here—old AmVets Drive—had not been plowed for hours, and Angelina slowed as the black Lincoln kicked up rooster tails of snow. To their right, the Niagara River widened toward Lake Erie, but it was all ice, all snow, as featureless gray-white as the frozen fields in the empty park to their left. The back street connected to the maze of local loops and streets around the Erie Basin Marina and the Marina Towers. The Pontiac did not reappear.

Hansen did not use the battering ram. He and Brubaker kicked in the side door of Gail DeMarco’s duplex and went up the stairs width their guns drawn.

The tiny little apartment up there was empty. Photographs on the bedroom dresser showed the nurse Hansen had interviewed, Gail DeMarco, Kurtz’s secretary Arlene, and a man who was probably Arlene DeMarco’s dead husband. Hansen and Brubaker searched the rooms, but there was no sign that the secretary or Frears or Kurtz had been there.

“Shit,” said Brubaker, holstering his weapon and ignoring the frown at the use of such language. Brubaker gave Hansen a shrewd, ferret look. “Captain, what the hell is going on?”

Hansen stared at the detective.

“You know what I mean, Captain. You couldn’t care less about this Kurtz, and now you’ve got Myers and me running all over town and back trying to find him and his secretary and this violinist. We’ve violated about three dozen department procedures. What’s going on?”

“What do you mean, Fred?”

“Don’t Fred me, Millworth.” Brubaker was showing his smoker’s teeth in a leer. “You say you’re going to cover my back in an Internal-Affairs investigation, but why? You’re the original straight-arrow, aren’t you? What the fuck is going on here?”

Hansen lifted the Glock-9 and laid the muzzle against Detective Brubaker’s temple. Thumbing the hammer back for effect, Hansen said, “Are you listening?”

Brubaker nodded very slightly.

“How much did Little Skag Farino pay you to get Kurtz, Detective Brubaker?”

“Five thousand in advance to arrest him and get him into the system. Another five when someone whacked him at County.”

“And?” said Hansen.

“Fifteen K promised if I killed him myself.”

“How long have you been on the Farino payroll, Detective Brubaker?”

“December. Just after Jimmy died.”

Hansen leaned closer. “You sold your gold badge for five thousand dollars, Detective. This situation—with Frears, with Kurtz—is worth a hundred times that. To you, Myers, me.”

Brubaker rolled his eyes toward Hansen. “Half a million dollars? Total?”

“Apiece,” said Hansen.

Brubaker licked his lips. “Drugs then? The Gonzagas?”

Hansen denied nothing. “Are you going to help me, Detective? Or are you going to continue asking insulting questions?”

“I’m going to help you, Captain.”

Hansen lowered the Glock-9. “What about Tommy Myers?”

“What about him…sir?”

“Can he be trusted to do as he’s told?”

Brubaker looked calculating. “Tommy’s not on anybody’s payroll except the department’s, Captain. But he does what I tell him to. He’ll keep his mouth shut.”

Hansen saw the shrewd glint in Brubaker’s eyes and realized that the detective was already planning on how to eliminate Tommy Myers from the payoff once the work was done. Half of a million and a half dollars was seven hundred and fifty thousand for Detective Frederick Brubaker. Hansen didn’t care—there was no drug money, no money of any sort involved—as long as Brubaker did what he was told.

Hansen’s phone rang.

“I lost them on the downtown section of the Thruway,” said Myers. He sounded a little breathless. “But I got a make on the license plates. Byron Farino of Orchard Park.”

Hansen had to smile. The old don was dead and the Orchard Park estate closed up, but evidently someone in the family business was still using the vehicle. A woman had been driving, Myers had said. The daughter back from Italy? Angelina?

“Good,” said Hansen. “Where are you?”

“Downtown, near the HSBC arena.”

“Go over to the Marina Tower building and find a place to watch the garage exit.”

“The Farino bitch’s penthouse?” said Myers. “Sorry, Captain. You think this Frears and the others are there?”

“I think so. Just keep a good watch, Detective. I’ll be down to talk to you in a bit.” He disconnected and told the other detective what Myers had said.

Brubaker was standing at the front window of the duplex, watching the snow pile up on the small rooftop terrace there. He seemed to have no hard feelings after having a 9mm pistol pressed against his head. “What next, Captain?”

“I’m going to drop you at the main precinct garage to get another car. Take the battering ram with you. I want you to knock in the door at Joe Kurtz’s office. Make sure that no one’s there and then join Myers at the stakeout at Marina Towers.”

“Where will you be, sir?”

Hansen holstered his Glock and adjusted his suit jacket. “I’ve got a meeting with the Boy Scouts.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-NINE

According to the radio,” said Angelina, “the real storm’s going to hit this evening.”

“Lake Effect,” said Arlene.

John Wellington Frears looked up from the book he was perusing. “Lake Effect? What is that?”

Like true Buffalonians, both Arlene and Angelina were eager to explain the meteorological wonder that was a cold arctic air mass sweeping across Lake Erie, depositing incredible amounts of snow on the Buffalo area, especially in the “snow belt” south of the city along the lake.

Frears looked out the twelfth-story window at the blowing snow and blue-black clouds moving toward them across the frozen river and lake. “This isn’t the snow belt?”

The penthouse was a pleasant enough place of refuge during the long winter day. Kurtz knew that it was literally the lull before the storm.

A little before noon, Angelina brought the bodyguard Marco into the corner kitchen, where Kurtz stood with binoculars, looking down at the Pontiac and the old Chevy parked back-to-back along Marina Drive. Seeing Marco, Kurtz touched the pistol on his belt.

“It’s all right,” said Angelina. “Marco and I have had several long talks and he’s in this with us.”

Kurtz studied the big man. Marco had a good poker face, but there was no denying the intelligence behind those gray eyes. Obviously Angelina had appealed to the bodyguard’s loyalty and good nature—and then promised him shitloads of money when this dustup with the Gonzagas was over. With the $200,000 she’d taken from James B. Hansen’s safe that morning, she could afford a few payoffs.

Kurtz nodded and went back to watching the watchers.

James B. Hansen’s audience with the Boy Scouts and their troop leaders went well. Captain Millworth gave a short speech in the briefing room and then the scouts and their leaders came up to have their photographs taken with the homicide detective. There was a photographer there from the Buffalo News, but no reporter.

Later, Hansen walked across the street to the courthouse for a private lunch with the Mayor and the Chief. The topic was the bad press the city and Department were getting because of the increased drug trade flowing through Buffalo to and from Canada and the resulting increase in murders, especially in the African-American community. The Mayor also had concerns about Buffalo being the first stop for Islamic terrorists carrying explosives in from Canada, although one glance exchanged between the Chief and Hansen communicated their skepticism about someone wanting to bomb Buffalo.

All during these activities, Hansen was considering the complicated mess that had blotched out like an ink stain on felt over the past few days. If possible, he would like to continue in his Captain Millworth persona for another year or so, although the events of the past twenty-four hours made that very problematic. A lot of people would have to be buried, and soon, in order for him to maintain this identity.

Well, thought Hansen, I’ve already buried a lot of people. A few more won’t matter.

Hansen had always been excellent at multitasking, so he easily made comments and handled the occasional question from the Chief or Mayor while pondering strategies for the resolution of this Kurtz-Frears problem. It bothered him that he still could not get in touch with Dr. Howard Conway in Cleveland. Perhaps the old fairy had taken his muscled pretty-boy and gone on vacation.

When Hansen’s cell phone first rang, he ignored it. But it rang again. And then again.

“Excuse me, Chief, Mr. Mayor,” he said, “I have to take this.” He stepped into the small sitting room next to the courthouse dining room and answered the phone.

“Honey, Robert, you’ve got to come home. Someone’s broken in and—”

“Whoa, whoa, slow down, sugar. Where are you?” Donna should have been at the library until three.

“They closed the library because of the storm, Robert. The schools are shutting down early as well. I picked Jason up during his usual lunch hour and we came home and…someone’s broken in, Robert! Shall I call the police? I mean, I did, you are, but you know what I mean—”

“Calm down,” said Millworth. “What did they steal?”

“Nothing, I think. I mean, Jason and I can’t find anything missing from the house. But they left the door to your basement office open, Robert. I peeked in… I’m sorry, but I thought they might still be in there…but the door was open and the door to a big safe is open in there, Robert. I didn’t go in, but they obviously did, the thieves, I mean. I didn’t know you had a safe down there, Robert. Robert? Robert?”

Hansen had gone cold all over. Spots danced in front of his eyes for a minute. He sat down on the small couch in the sitting room. “Donna? Don’t call the police. I’m coming home. Stay upstairs. Don’t go in the office. You and Jason stay where you are.”

“Robert, why do you think—”

Hansen broke the connection and went in to tell the Chief and the Mayor that something important had come up.

Marco showed them the marina pay phone where Little Skag would be calling for his weekly information update. Marco said that Leo usually did the talking. Kurtz, Angelina, and the bodyguard had left the apartment tower by its south door, out of sight of Brubaker and Myers, parked on the street to the north. Angelina told Marco to return to the penthouse, and Kurtz rigged the small cassette recorder and microphone wire the don’s daughter had supplied.

The call came precisely at noon. Angelina answered it. With the additional earphone, Kurtz could eavesdrop on the conversation.

“Angie…what the fuck are you doing there?”

Angelina winced. She had always hated the nickname.

“Stevie, I wanted to talk to you…privately.”

“Where the fuck are Leo and Marco?”

“Busy.”

“Miserable incompetent motherfuckers. I’m going to fire their asses.”

“Stevie, we need to talk about something.”

“What?” To Kurtz’s ear, his former fellow convict sounded not only irritated but alarmed.

“You’ve been hiring cops to whack people. Detective Brubaker, for instance. I know you’ve put him on the payroll that used to go to Hathaway.”

Silence. Little Skag obviously didn’t know what his sister was up to, but he wasn’t about to encourage his own entrapment. Finally, “What the fuck are you talking about, Angie?”

“I don’t care about Brubaker,” said Angelina, her breath fogging in the cold air, “but I’ve gone over the family notes and I see that Gonzaga’s got a captain of detectives on the arm. A guy named Millworth.”

Silence.

“Millworth’s not really Millworth,” said Angelina. “He’s a serial killer named James B. Hansen…and a bunch of other aliases. He’s a child-killer, Stevie. A rapist and a killer.”

Kurtz heard Little Skag let out a breath. If this dealt with Gonzaga, it was not his sister trying to entrap him. “So?” said Little Skag.

“So do you really want me doing this deal with Emilio when he has a child-killer on his payroll?”

Little Skag laughed. It was an unpleasant laugh and every time Kurtz had heard it in Attica, it had been at someone else’s expense.

“Do I give a flying fuck who Emilio hires?” said Little Skag. “If this cop is a killer like you say, it just means that the Gonzagas own him. They got him by the balls. Now put Leo on.”

“I wouldn’t expect you to do anything about someone who rapes kids,” said Angelina.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“You know what it means, Stevie. You and that high-school Connors girl who disappeared twelve years ago. Emilio kidnapped her, but you were in on it—you raped her, didn’t you?”

“What the fuck are you talking about? Have you gone out of your mind? Who gives a shit about something that happened twelve years ago?”

“I do, Stevie. I don’t want to do business with a man who pays a serial child-killer.”

“Fuck what you want!” screamed Little Skag. “Who the fuck asked you what you want, you stupid cunt? Your job is to finish these dealings with Gonzaga so his people can get me the fuck out of here. Do you understand? If I want to fuck kindergarten kids up the ass, you’re going to shut the fuck up about it. You’re my sister, Angie, but that won’t stop me from—”

The line hissed and crackled.

“Stop you from what, Stevie?” Angelina said after a minute. “From having me whacked the way you did Maria?”

The cold wind blew in off the lake during the next silence. Then Little Skag said, “You’re my sister, Angelina, but you’re a stupid bitch. You meddle in my business again…in Family business…and I’ll do worse than have you whacked. Understand me? I’m gonna get my lawyer to set up another call at noon tomorrow and you’d goddamn better have Leo and Marco there.”

The line went dead.

Kurtz disconnected the small microphone, rewound, and hit “Play” on the micro-cassette recorder long enough to hear the voices loud and clear. He clicked off the machine.

“How the hell is that going to help with anything?” said Angelina.

“We’ll see.”

“Are you going to tell me your plan about how to get to Gonzaga now, Kurtz? It’s time, unless you want me to toss you and your friends out in the snow.”

“All right,” said Kurtz. He told her the plan as they walked back to Marina Towers.

“Jesus fuck,” whispered Angelina when he was finished. They were silent riding up in the elevator.

Arlene was standing in the foyer. “Gail just called me,” she said to Kurtz. “They’re going to discharge Donald Rafferty from the hospital in about thirty minutes.”

CHAPTER

THIRTY

Donna and Jason were waiting when James B. Hansen arrived home. He calmed them, spoke soothingly, told them to put the dog outside and that nothing important could have been stolen from his basement gun room, inspected the point of breaking and entering, and went downstairs to look in his room.

They had stolen everything important. Hansen saw black dots dancing in his vision and had to sit down at his desk or faint. His photographs. The $200,000 in cash. They had even stolen his C-4 explosive. Why would thieves take that?

He had more money hidden away, of course—$150,000 tucked away with the cadavers in the rental freezer unit. Another $300,000 in various banks under different names in various cities. But this was not a small setback. Hansen would love to believe that this robbery was just a coincidence, but there was no chance of that. He would have to find out if Joe Kurtz was a skilled thief—whoever had bypassed those two expensive alarm systems and blown the safe knew his business—but it had to be someone working for or with John Wellington Frears. All of the recent events suggested a conspiracy afoot to destroy James B. Hansen. The theft of the souvenir photos left Hansen no choice as to his next actions. And Hansen despised being left without choices.

He looked up to find Donna and Jason peering into his basement sanctum sanctorum.

“Wow, I didn’t know you had so many guns,” said Jason, staring at the display case. “Why didn’t they steal your guns?”

“Let’s go upstairs,” said Hansen.

He led them up to the second floor.

“Nothing was stolen or disturbed very much up here as far as I can tell,” said Donna. “I’m glad Dickson was at the vet’s…”

Hansen nodded and led them into the guest bedroom with its two twin beds. He gestured for his wife and stepson to sit on one of the beds. Hansen was still wearing his topcoat and now he reached into the pocket. “I’m sorry this happened,” he said, his voice smooth, reassuring, controlled. “But it’s nothing to be alarmed about. I know who did it.”

“You do?” said Jason, who never seemed to quite trust his stepfather’s pronouncements. “Who? Why?”

“A felon named Joe Kurtz,” said Hansen with a smile. “We’re arresting him today. In fact, we’ve already found the weapon he’s used in similar robberies.” Hansen brought out the .38 that he had reloaded.

“How did you get his gun?” asked Jason. The boy did not sound convinced.

“Robert,” said Donna in her bovine way, “is there anything wrong?”

“Not a thing, dear,” said Hansen and fired from the hip, hitting Donna between the eyes. She flopped backward on the bed and lay still. Hansen swiveled the muzzle toward Jason.

The boy did not wait to be shot. He was off the bed in a single leap, reacting faster than Hansen would have ever guessed the boy could move. He hit his stepfather in a full body check—an against-the-boards hockey crash—before Hansen could aim or pull the trigger again. They both went backward off the bed, Jason struggling to get his hands on the weapon, Hansen fighting to keep it away from the tall boy. Jason’s reach was actually longer than Hansen’s, but he was sixty pounds lighter. Hansen used his body mass to shove the boy off him and against the dresser. Then both of them were on their feet, still struggling for the weapon, Jason sobbing and cursing at the same time, Hansen fighting hard but smiling now, smiling without knowing it, amused by this sudden and unexpected opposition. Who would have expected this surly teenage slacker to put up such a fight?

Jason still had Hansen’s right wrist in a death grip, but the boy freed his right arm, made a fist, and tried to slug his stepfather in the best Hollywood tradition. A mistake. Hansen kneed the teenager in the balls and backhanded him in the face with his left hand.

Jason cried out and folded over but kept his grip on Hansen’s wrist, trying to foil his stepfather’s aim.

Hansen kicked the boy’s feet out from under him and Jason flew backward onto the empty bed, pulling Hansen with him. But Hansen was succeeding in swiveling the muzzle lower, even as Jason clung to his right arm with both hands, panting and swearing. Now the boy was sobbing entreaties. “Please, no, no. Mom, help. No, no, no. God damn you—”

Hansen got the angle and shot the kid in the chest.

Jason gasped, his mouth flopping open like a landed fish’s, but still clung to Hansen’s wrist, trying to deflect a second shot. Hansen put his knee on the boy’s bloody chest, forcing the last of the air out of his lungs, and wrenched his right arm free of the boy’s weakening grip.

“Dad…” gasped the wounded teenager.

Hansen shook his head…no…set the muzzle against the boy’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.

Gasping, out of breath and almost shaking from the exertion, Hansen went into the guest bathroom. Somehow he had avoided getting blood or brain matter on his topcoat and trousers. His black shoes were spattered, however. He used one of the pink guest towels to clean his shoes and then he splashed water on his face and hands, drying them with the other towel.

The guest room was a mess—dresser knocked askew, mirror broken, the green coverlet on one of the beds crumpled under Jason’s sprawled body. The boy’s mouth was still open wide as if in a silent scream. Hansen went to the window and looked out for a minute, but he had no real concern that the neighbors had heard the shots. The houses were too far away and sealed for winter.

The snow was falling more heavily and the sky was very dark to the west. Dickson, their Irish setter, ran back and forth in the dog run.

Hansen felt light, his mind clear, energy flowing much as it did after a good workout at the gym. The worst had happened—someone taking his souvenir briefcase—but he still had options. James B. Hansen was too intelligent not to have backup plans beneath his backup plans. This was a setback, one of the most bizarre he’d ever encountered, but he had long anticipated someone discovering not only the falsehood of one of his identities, but the full chain of his lives and crimes. There was a plastic surgeon waiting in Toronto, a new life in Vancouver.

But first, details. It was too bad that the thief—Kurtz or whoever it was—had taken his C-4 explosive. That would have reduced this part of the house to such shambles that it would take an explosives forensic team weeks or months to figure out what had happened here. But even a basic fire would give him time. Especially if there was the usual third body in the house.

Sighing, aggrieved that he had to spend the time, Hansen went out, locked the door behind him, and drove the big Cadillac SUV to the rental freezer. There he retrieved all of the cash from the body bags, chose Cadaver Number 4 from the shelves, tossed the frozen corpse into the back of the Escalade, and drove home, taking care not to speed in the heavy snow. He passed several snowplows working but almost no traffic. Donna must have been correct about schools closing early.

The house was just as he’d left it Hansen put the Cadillac Escalade in the garage, brought his dog, Dickson, inside, and closed the garage door before hauling the cadaver up the stairs, removing it from its plastic wrapping and laying it on the bed next to Donna. The corpse was in street clothes from two years ago when he had killed the man, but Hansen went into his own closet and pulled out a tweed jacket he had never liked very much. The body’s arms were frozen at its sides, but Hansen draped the jacket over its shoulders. He also removed his Rolex from his wrist and set it on the cadaver’s wrist. Thinking he would need a watch of his own, he undid Jason’s and slid it in his trouser pocket.

He carried in the five jerricans of gasoline stored in the garage. Burn the place now and leave forever? Caution said that he should, but there were still elements left to be resolved. Hansen might need something from the house—some of the guns, perhaps—and he had no time to pack now.

Leaving the cans of gas with Dickson in the living room. Hansen carefully locked the house, pulled the Cadillac SUV out of the garage, beeped the garage door shut, and drove back downtown to plant the .38 in Kurtz’s room.

Donald Rafferty was glad to get out of the hospital.

He had a broken wrist, bruises on his ribs and abdomen, and bandages on his head. The mild concussion still hurt like a sonofabitch, but Rafferty knew that he’d hurt a lot worse than that if he didn’t get the hell out of the hospital and the hell out of town.

He’d been lucky with the child-abuse/molestation rap. Rafferty had indignantly denied everything to the cops when they interviewed him, pointed out that his adopted daughter Rachel was a typical teenager—hard to handle, given to lying and blaming others for her problems—and that he’d done nothing but go down to the bus station late that night to retrieve her after she’d run away. He was afraid, he told the cops, that she was doing drugs. They’d had a fight—Rachel hated the idea of Rafferty remarrying, even though her real mother had been dead for more than twelve years—and she was still angry at him in the car when he’d hit the black ice and the car had spun off the Kensington.

Yes, Rafferty admitted to the cops, since they had the blood-alcohol test results anyway, he’d been drinking that evening at home—hell, he was worried sick about Rachel, why wouldn’t he have a few drinks at home—but what was he supposed to do when she called from the bus station at 2:30 A.M., leave her there? No, the drinking didn’t cause the accident—the goddamned snowstorm and black ice had.

Luckily, when Rachel regained consciousness in the ICU, the cops had interviewed her and she’d retracted the story about Rafferty trying to rape her. She seemed confused to the police, probably because of the anesthesia and pain from the surgery. But she’d taken back the accusations she’d made to the paramedics as the firemen were cutting her out of the wreckage of the Honda.

Rafferty felt vindicated. Shit, he’d not come anywhere close to raping her. It was just that the girl was wearing pajamas two sizes too small when she came down to the kitchen to get some cake, Rafferty had been drinking all evening and was frustrated that DeeDee couldn’t see him for the next couple of weekends, and he’d made the slight mistake of coming up behind Rachel as she stood at the counter and running his hands over her budding breasts, down her stomach and thighs.

Waiting in the hospital lounge for his taxi to arrive, Rafferty felt himself stir at that memory, even through the pain and the painkillers. He was sorry the brat had screamed and rushed to her room, locking the door and then going out the window and down the garage trellis while he stood like a dork in the hallway, threatening to kick the door down if she didn’t come to her senses. She’d taken the last bus from Lockport into the city station, but then realized she didn’t have the money to get out of Buffalo. Sobbing, cold—she’d only had time to grab a sweatshirt—she’d finally called Rafferty. This also made him smile. The girl had no one else to go to, which was probably why she’d recanted on her accusations. If she was going to go home at all, she’d have to go home to Donald Rafferty.

Normally, Rafferty would face the driving-under-the-influence charges and take his lumps, but when one of the nurses—not that bitch Gail Whatever, who kept looking in on Rachel and staring at Rafferty like he was some sort of amphibian, but that pretty nurse—had said that Rafferty’s brother had stopped in to see him the morning after the accident, his blood had literally run cold. Donald Rafferty’s brother was serving time in an Indiana prison. From the nurse’s description, this man sounded like Joe Kurtz.

It was time to leave town for a while.

He’d called DeeDee in Hamilton, Ontario, telling her to get her cellulite ass down here to pick him up, but she couldn’t get off work until after five and she griped about the storm coming in off the lake, so there was no way that Rafferty was going to wait for her. He’d had the nurse call him a cab and he was going to get to Lockport, pack the things he needed—including the .357 Magnum he’d bought after that asshole Kurtz threatened him—and then he was going to take a little vacation. Rafferty was sorry that Rachel had gotten hurt—he didn’t mean the kid harm—but if she did have a setback and failed to pull through, well, hell, that was one way to be sure that she wouldn’t change her mind and rat him out to the authorities again. All he’d wanted was a little feel, a touch, maybe a blow job from the kid; it wasn’t like he was going to take her virginity from her or anything. She had to grow up sooner or later. Or maybe not.

An orderly came into the lounge and said, “Your cab is here, Mr. Rafferty.”

He tried to stand but the nurse he didn’t like shook her head and he settled back into the wheelchair. “Hospital policy,” she said, wheeling him out under the overhang. Big deal, hospital policy, thought Rafferty. They make sure you stay in the wheelchair until you’re out of the building and then you’re on your own. You can go home and die that day as far as they’re concerned. Tough titty.

The cabdriver didn’t even get out to open the door or to help Rafferty into the back seat. Typical. The ugly nurse steadied him with one hand while Rafferty struggled out of the wheelchair, his injured wrist hurting like hell and his head spinning. The concussion was worse than he’d thought. He collapsed into the seat and took some deep breaths. When he turned around to tell the nurse that he was okay, she’d already turned away and pushed the chair back into the hospital. Bitch.

For a second, Rafferty considered telling the driver to drop him off at one of his favorite bars, maybe the one on Broadway. A few drinks would probably help more than these wimpy Tylenol Threes they’d grudgingly given him. But then Rafferty thought better of it. First, it was snowing like a bastard, and if he waited too long, the goddamn roads would be closed. Second, he wanted to get his stuff and be ready when DeeDee got there. No time to waste.

“Lockport,” he told the driver. “Locust Street. I’ll tell you which house to stop at.”

The driver nodded, hit the meter, and pulled away into the falling snow.

Rafferty rubbed his temples and closed his eyes for a minute. When he opened them, the taxi had pulled onto the Kensington but was going in the wrong damned direction, toward the downtown instead of east and then north. Fucking idiot, Rafferty thought through his headache. He rapped on the bulletproof glass and slid the open partition wider.

The driver turned. “Hello, Donnie,” said Kurtz.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-ONE

Hansen was driving to the Royal Delaware Arms to plant the .38 in Kurtz’s room when his cell phone rang. He considered not answering it—the life of Captain Robert Millworth was effectively at an end—but decided that he’d better respond; he didn’t want people at the precinct to notice his absence for at least twenty-four hours.

“Hansen?” said a man’s voice. “James B. Hansen?”

Hansen was silent but he had to pull the Escalade to the side of the road. It was Joe Kurtz’s voice. It had to be.

“Millworth then?” said the voice. The man went on to name a half dozen of Hansen’s other former personae.

“Kurtz?” Hansen said at last. “What do you want?”

“It’s not what I want, it’s what you might want.”

The shakedown, thought Hansen. All this has been leading up to the shakedown. “I’m listening.”

“I thought you might. I have your briefcase. Interesting stuff. I thought you might like it back.”

“How much?”

“Half a million dollars,” said Kurtz. “Cash, of course.”

“Why do you think I have that much cash around?”

“I think the two hundred K I liberated from your safe today was just the tip of the iceberg, Mr. Hansen,” said Kurtz. “A lot of the people you’ve been posing as earned a lot of money—a stockbroker, a Miami realtor, a plastic surgeon, for Christ’s sake. You have it.”

Hansen had to smile. He’d hated the thought of leaving Kurtz and Frears behind him, alive. “Let’s meet. I have a hundred thousand in cash with me right now.”

“So long, Mr. Hansen.”

“Wait!” said Hansen. The silence on the line showed that Kurtz was still there. “I want Frears,” said Hansen.

The silence stretched. “That would cost another two hundred thousand,” Kurtz said at last.

“All I can get in cash is three hundred thousand.”

Kurtz chuckled. It was not a pleasant sound. “What the hell. Why not? All right, Hansen. Meet me at the abandoned Buffalo train station at midnight.”

“Midnight’s too late—” started Hansen, but Kurtz had disconnected.

Hansen sat for a minute by the curb, watching the Escalade’s wipers bat away the falling snow, trying to think of nothing, allowing the neutral Zen state to fill his mind. It was impossible to clear this noise, these events—they kept falling on him like the snow. Hansen had not played tournament chess for years, but that part of his mind was fully engaged. Frears and Kurtz—he had to think of them as a unit, partners, a single opponent with two faces—had made this chess game interesting, and now Hansen had the option of walking away and always remembering the pieces frozen in mid-play, or the option of clearing the chessboard with his forearm, or of beating them at their own game.

So far, the Frears-Kurtz team had been on the attack even when Hansen had thought he was playing offense. Somehow, they had stumbled upon his current identity—probably John Wellington Frears’s contribution to the game—and their moves after that had been predictable enough. The robbery of his home to obtain the evidence had been shocking, though obvious enough in retrospect. But they had not yet gone to the police. This meant one of three endgames had to be in play—A) Frears-Kurtz wanted to kill him; B) Kurtz was actually double-crossing his partner to carry out the blackmail and might actually tell Hansen of Frears’s whereabouts if he was paid; or C) Frears-Kurtz wanted him dead and wanted the blackmail money.

From what Hansen remembered of John Wellington Frears, the black man was too civilized for his own good. Even twenty years of stewing about his daughter’s death probably had not prepared Frears for murder; he would always opt for turning Hansen in to the proper authorities. Hansen also remembered that the violinist had used the phrase “proper authorities” frequently back during their political discussions at the University of Chicago.

So that left Kurtz. The ex-convict must be running the show now, overriding Frears’s protests. Perhaps Kurtz had made contact with the Farinos for help. But James B. Hansen knew how limited the Farino Family clout was in this new century—almost nonexistent with the old don dead, the core of the Family scattered, and the drug addict Little Skag locked up in Attica. There were intelligence reports of a few new people being recruited for the Farinos, but they were middle-management people: numbers runners, a few bodyguards, accountants—no real muscle to speak of. Which left only the Gonzagas as a power in Buffalo.

Kurtz had demanded half a million dollars, with a bonus for Frears, which was certainly enough to get the Farinos involved on spec, but Hansen suspected that Kurtz was too greedy to spread the money out. Perhaps this Farino daughter, Angelina, was giving Kurtz some logistical support without knowing the whole situation. That seemed probable.

I could leave now, thought Hansen, his thoughts tuned to the metronomic pulse of the windshield wipers. Plant this .38, make an anonymous 911 call fingering the murderer of the old lady in Cheektowaga, and leave now. This would be the forearm-clearing-the-chess-pieces answer to the dilemma and it had a certain elegance to it. But who does this Kurtz think he is? was the immediate follow-on thought. By attempting blackmail, Kurtz had raised the game to a new and more personal level. If Hansen did not play out the rest of the game, he would be tipping his own king in defeat. That weakling Frears and this sociopath of an ex-convict would have beaten James B. Hansen at his own game.

Not fucking likely, thought Hansen, immediately offering a prayer of apology to his Savior.

Hansen turned the Cadillac SUV west and got on the expressway, heading north along the river.

Kurtz had driven to the empty alley near Allen Street, parked the taxi next to the Lincoln, transferred Rafferty to the trunk of the Town Car and the bound, gagged and blindfolded cabdriver from the Lincoln to the taxi, then called Hansen while driving back to the Farino penthouse. Something about actually hearing James B. Hansen’s smooth, oily voice had made Kurtz’s head pulse with migraine pain.

Back at Marina Towers, he left Rafferty in the trunk and took the elevator up. Everyone was chowing down on lunch and Kurtz joined them. Angelina Farino Ferrara had told her cook, servants, and the eleventh-floor accountants to take the day off—don’t try to get in through the storm, she’d said—so the motley crew in the penthouse had thrown together a big meal of chili, John Frears’s recipe, and various types of cheese, good French bread and taco chips and hot coffee. Angelina offered wine, but no one was in the mood for it. Kurtz was in the mood for several glasses of scotch, but he decided to forgo it until the day’s errands were all run.

After the lunch, he stepped onto the icy and windblown west balcony to clear his head. A few minutes later, Arlene joined him, lighting one of her Marlboros.

“Can you believe it, Joe? She’s a Mafia don’s daughter but she doesn’t allow smoking in her apartment. What’s La Cosa Nostra coming to?”

Kurtz didn’t answer. The sky to the northwest was as black as a curtain of night sliding toward the city. The lights along the marina and the walkways below had already come on.

“Rafferty?” said Arlene.

Kurtz nodded.

“Can we talk about Rachel for a minute, Joe?”

Kurtz neither answered nor looked at her.

“Gail says that she’s showing some improvement today. They’re keeping her sedated much of the time and watching for infection in her remaining kidney. Even if there is drastic improvement, it will be several weeks—maybe a month and a half—before she can leave the hospital. And she’ll need special care at home.”

Kurtz looked at her now. “Yeah? And?”

“I know you won’t let Rachel become a ward of the state, Joe.”

He didn’t have to say anything to show his agreement with that.

“And I know how you go straight at things. Like this Hansen situation. You’ve always gone straight at things. But maybe in this case you should consider taking the long way.”

“How?” Tiny pellets of ice were pelting his face.

“I shouldn’t be Rachel’s guardian… I’ve had my child, raised him as best I could, mourned his death. But Gail has always wanted a child. It’s one of the main reasons she and Charlie broke up…that and the fact that Charlie was a total asshole.”

“Gail…adopt Rachel?” Kurtz’s voice was edged.

“It wouldn’t have to be a full-scale adoption,” said Arlene. “Rachel is fourteen. She’ll just need a court-appointed guardian until she turns eighteen. That would be perfect for Gail.”

“Gail is single.”

“That’s not so important for a guardian. Plus, Gail has friends in social services and Niagara Frontier Adoption Option, and she knows several of the child-care legal people. She’s been an excellent nurse—remember, her specialty is pediatric surgery—and she has tons of time off coming to her.”

Kurtz looked back at the approaching storm.

“You could spend time with her, Joe. With Rachel. Get to know her. Let her get to know you. Someday you could tell her—”

Kurtz looked at her. Arlene stopped, took a drag on her cigarette, and looked up to meet his gaze. “Tell me you’ll think about it, Joe.”

He went back through the sliding doors into the penthouse.

Hansen crossed the bridge to Grand Island and drove to Emilio Gonzaga’s compound. The guards at the gatehouse looked astonished when he showed his badge and said that he was there to see Mr. Gonzaga, but they conferred with the main house via portable radios, searched him carefully to make sure he was not wearing a wire, appropriated his service Glock-9—Hansen had stowed the .38 under the passenger seat—transferred him to a black Chevy Suburban, and drove him up to the main house, where he was searched again and left to wait in a huge library in which the hundreds of leather-bound books looked as if they had never been opened. Two bodyguards, one an Asian man with absolutely no expression on his smooth face, stood against the far wall with their hands at their sides.

When Gonzaga came in, smoking a Cuban cigar, Hansen was struck by how truly ugly the middle-aged don was. The man looked like a toad that had been molded into human form, with an Edward G. Robinson mouth minus the touch of humor.

“Captain Millworth.”

“Mr. Gonzaga.”

Neither man offered to shake hands. Gonzaga remained standing; Hansen remained sitting. They looked at one another.

“You want something, Detective?”

“I need to talk to you, Don Gonzaga.”

The tall, ugly man made a gesture with his cigar.

“You paid my predecessor,” said Hansen. “You sent me a check last December. I sent it to charity. I don’t need your money.”

Gonzaga lifted one heavy black eyebrow. “You come out here in a fucking blizzard to tell me that?”

“I came out here in a blizzard to tell you that I need something more important and that I can give you something very important.”

Gonzaga waited. Hansen glanced at the bodyguards. Gonzaga shrugged and did not tell them to leave.

James B. Hansen removed a photograph of Joe Kurtz that he’d pulled from the felon’s file. “I need to have this man killed. Or to be more specific, I need help in killing him.”

Gonzaga smiled. “Millworth, if you are wearing a wire which somehow my boys did not discover, I shall kill you myself.”

Hansen shrugged. “They searched me twice. I’m not wearing a wire. And if I were, what I said is a felony by itself—suborning you to be an accomplice to murder.”

“And entrapment also in addition,” said Gonzaga. The way the man spoke made Hansen think that human language was not the don’s native tongue.

“Yes,” said Hansen.

“And what is it that I would receive in exchange for this hypothetical quid-pro-quo service, Detective Millworth?”

“It’s Captain Millworth,” said Hansen. “Of Homicide. And what you will receive is years of a service that you could not otherwise buy.”

“Which would be?” said Gonzaga, implying that he’d already bought every service the Buffalo Police Department had to offer.

“Impunity,” said Hansen.

“Im—what?” Emilio Gonzaga removing a long cigar from his mouth made Hansen think of a frog wrestling with a turd.

“Impunity, Don Gonzaga. Freedom not only of prosecution when murders are required of you, but freedom even from serious investigation. A get-out-of-jail card with no jail attached. Not only as far as Homicide is concerned, but Vice, Narcotics…all of the departments.”

Gonzaga relit the cigar and furrowed his brow. He was an ostentatious thinker, Hansen could see. Finally Hansen saw the lightbulb over the toad’s head as Gonzaga realized what he was being offered.

“One-stop shopping,” said the don.

“I will be a veritable Wal-Mart,” agreed Hansen.

“So you’re so fucking sure that you’re going to be chief of police?”

“Indubitably,” said Hansen and then, as the toad-man’s brow furrowed again, “Without doubt, sir. In the meantime, I can make sure that no homicide investigation even turns in your direction.”

“In exchange for whacking one guy?”

“In exchange for simply helping me whack one guy.”

“When?”

“I’m supposed to meet him at the old train station at midnight That means he’ll probably be there by ten o’clock.”

“This guy,” said Gonzaga, looking at the photograph again. “He looks fucking familiar but I can’t place him. Mickey.”

The Asian glided over from the wall.

“You know this guy, Mickey?”

“That’s Howard Conway.” The man’s voice was smooth as his gait, very quiet, but the words made Hansen’s head spin, and for the second time that day he saw black spots dancing in his vision.

Kurtz has been playing with me. If he knows Howard’s name, then Howard is dead. But why tell Gonzaga? Have they foreseen this move as well?

“Yeah,” said Gonzaga, “Angie Farino’s new fucking bodyguard.” He flapped the photo at Hansen. “What’s going on here? Why are you after this Raiford jailbird?”

“He’s not a Raiford ex-con,” Hansen said smoothly, blinking away the dancing spots while trying not to look distressed. “He’s an Attica ex-con named Kurtz.”

The don looked at the Asian. “Kurtz. Kurtz. Where’ve we heard that name, Mickey?”

“Before Leo, our guy in their camp, disappeared, he said that Little Skag was putting out some nickels and dimes to whack an ex-P.I. named Kurtz,” said Mickey Kee, showing no special deference to Gonzaga.

Gonzaga’s brow furrowed more deeply. “Why would Angie hire some guy that her brother’s trying to whack?”

“She has her own agenda,” said Hansen. “And my bet is that it doesn’t include you in the picture, Mr. Gonzaga.”

“How many men you want?” grunted Gonzaga.

“I don’t care how many,” said Hansen. “The fewer the better. I just want them to be the best. I need a guarantee that Kurtz—and anyone he brings with him—won’t leave that train station alive. Are any of your men so good that you can give me that guarantee?”

Emilio Gonzaga smiled broadly, showing great horses’ teeth like yellowed ivory. “Mickey?” he said.

Mickey Kee did not smile. But he nodded.

“Kurtz said midnight but he’ll get there early,” Hansen said to Mickey Kee. “I’m going to be there at eight with two men. It’ll be dark in that old station. Make sure you don’t mistake us for Kurtz. Can you get there through this storm?”

Emilio Gonzaga removed his cigar and gave a phlegmy laugh. “Mickey owns a fucking Hummer.”

CHAPTER

THIRTY-TWO

The afternoon and early evening in Marina Towers had a strangely sweet, almost elegiac calm to it.

Pruno had taught Joe Kurtz the word “elegiac” during their long correspondence while Kurtz was in Attica. Before Kurtz had gone behind bars, Pruno had given him a list of two hundred books he should read to begin his education. Kurtz had read them all, beginning with The Iliad and ending with Das Kapital. He had to admit that he’d enjoyed Shakespeare the most, spending weeks on each play. Kurtz had a hunch that before the night was over, the Buffalo train station might look like the last act of Titus Andronicus.

After the chili lunch, Frears had gone to one end of the big penthouse living room to tune his violin and it was Arlene who asked him to play. Frears had only smiled and shaken his head, but Angelina had joined in the request. Then—surprisingly—so had Marco, and even Kurtz had looked up from his brooding by the window.

While everyone sat around on sectionals and bar stools, John Wellington Frears had walked to the center of the room, removed a linen handkerchief from his suit pocket and draped it on the chin rest of the impossibly expensive violin, stood almost on his tiptoes with bow poised, and had begun playing.

To Kurtz’s surprise, it was not classical. Frears played the main theme from Schindler’s List, the long, plaintive passages holding notes that seemed to die with a sigh, the dying-away parts echoing against the cold glass windows like the half-heard cries of children in the trains being pulled to Auschwitz. When he was done, no one applauded, no one moved. The only sound was the snow pelting against the glass and Arlene’s soft snuffling.

Frears took Hansen’s titanium briefcase with its photographs and went into the library. Angelina poured herself a tall scotch. Kurtz went back to the window to watch the storm and the growing darkness.

He met with Angelina in her private office at the northwest corner of the penthouse.

“What’s happening tonight, Kurtz?”

He held up one hand. “I’ve given Hansen blackmail demands. We’re supposed to meet at midnight. I suspect he’ll be there early.”

“You going to take the money if he brings it?”

“He won’t bring it.”

“So you’re going to kill him.”

“I don’t know yet.”

Angelina raised a dark eyebrow at that. Kurtz came over and sat on the edge of her modern rosewood desk. “I’ll ask you again, what are your goals? What have you been trying to get out of all this bullshit?”

She studied him for a minute. “You know what I wanted.”

“Gonzaga dead,” said Kurtz. “Your brother…neutralized. But what else?”

“I’d like to rebuild the family someday, but along different lines. In the meantime, I’d like to be the best thief in the state of New York.”

“And you have to be left alone to do both those things.”

“Yes.”

“And if I help you get those things, are you going to leave me the fuck alone?”

Angelina Farino Ferrara hesitated only a second. “Yes.”

“Did you print out that list I asked for?” said Kurtz.

Angelina opened a drawer and produced three sheets of paper stapled together. Each page held columns of names and dollar amounts. “We can’t use this for anything,” she said. “If I were to release it, the Five Families would have me killed within the week. If you release it, you’ll be dead within a day.”

“You’re not going to release it and neither am I,” said Kurtz. He told her the last version of his plans.

“Jesus,” whispered Angelina. “What do you need tonight?”

“Transportation. And do you have two walkie-talkie-type radios? The kind with earphones? They’re not necessary, but could be useful.”

“Sure,” said Angelina. “But they’re only good within a range of a mile or so.”

“That’ll work.”

“Anything else?”

“That pair of handcuffs you used on Marco.”

“Anything else?”

“Marco. I have some heavy lifting to do.”

“Are you going to arm him?”

Kurtz shook his head. “He can bring a knife if he wants to. I’m not asking him to get mixed up in a gun-fight, so he doesn’t need to come heavy. There’ll probably be enough guns there in the dark anyway.”

“What else?”

“Long underwear,” said Kurtz. “Thermal long Johns if you’ve got them.”

“You’re kidding.”

Kurtz shook his head. “It may be a long wait and it’s going to be cold as a witch’s teat in there.”

He went into the library, where John Wellington Frears was sitting in an Eames chair, the briefcase open on the ottoman, photographs of dead children reflecting light from the soft halogen spotlight above. Kurtz assumed that Frears’s daughter Crystal was one of the corpses on display, but he did not look and he did not ask.

“Can I talk to you a minute?” said Kurtz.

Frears nodded. Kurtz took a seat in a second leather Eames chair across from the violinist.

“I need to talk to you about what’s going to happen next with Hansen,” said Kurtz, “but first I have a personal question.”

“Go ahead, Mr. Kurtz.”

“I’ve seen your files. All of your files. Arlene pulled information off the Net that’s usually kept confidential.”

“Ah,” said Frears, “the cancer. You want to know about the cancer.”

“No. I’m curious about the two tours in Vietnam back in nineteen sixty-eight.”

Frears blinked at this and then smiled. “Why on earth are you curious about that, Mr. Kurtz? There was a war on. I was a young man. Hundreds of thousands of young men served.”

“Hundreds of thousands of guys were drafted. You volunteered for the army, were trained as an engineer, specialized in disarming booby traps over there. Why for Christ’s sake?”

Frears was still smiling slightly. “Why did I specialize in that area?”

“No. Why volunteer at all? You’d already gone to Princeton for a couple of years, graduated from Juilliard. You had a high draft number, I checked. You didn’t have to go at all. And you volunteered. You risked your life.”

“And my hands,” said Frears, holding those hands in the beam of light from the halogen spot. “Which were much more important to me than my life in those days.”

“Why did you go?”

Frears scratched his short, curly beard. “If I try to explain, Mr. Kurtz, I do so at the real risk of boring you.”

“I’ve got some time.”

“All right I entered Princeton with the idea of studying philosophy and ethics. One of my teachers there was Dr. Frederick.”

“Pruno.”

Frears made a pained face. “Yes. During my junior year at Princeton, Dr. Frederick shared some early research he was doing with a Harvard professor named Lawrence Kohlberg. Have you heard of him?”

“No.”

“Most people haven’t Professors Kohlberg and Frederick were just beginning their research to test Kohlberg’s theory that human beings pass through stages of moral development just as they have to pass through the Piagetian stages of development. Have you heard of Jean Piaget?”

“No.”

“It doesn’t matter. Piaget had proved that all children pass through various stages of development—being able to cooperate with others, say, which happens for most children around the age of kindergarten—and Lawrence Kohlberg reasoned that people—not just children, but all people—pass through discrete stages of moral development as well. Since Professor Frederick taught both philosophy and ethics, he was very interested in Kohlberg’s early research, and that was what our class was about.”

“All right.”

Frears took a breath, glanced at the obscene photographs lying on the ottoman, scooped them into the briefcase, and closed the briefcase. “Kohlberg had classified six stages of moral development. Level One was simple avoidance of punishment Moral boundaries are set only to avoid pain. Essentially the moral development of an earthworm. We’ve all known adults who stop at Level One.”

“Yes,” said Kurtz.

“Level Two was a crude form of moral judgment motivated by the need to satisfy one’s own desires,” said Frears. “Level Three was sometimes called the ‘Good Boy/Good Girl’ orientation—a need to avoid rejection or the disapproval of others.”

Kurtz nodded and shifted his weight slightly. The .40 Smith & Wesson was cutting into his hip.

“Stage Four was the Law and Order level,” said Frears. “People had evolved to the moral degree that they had an absolute imperative not to be criticized by a duly recognized authority figure. Sometimes entire national populations appear to be made up of Stage Four and lower citizens.”

“Nazi Germany,” said Kurtz.

“Exactly. Stage Five individuals seem motivated by an overwhelming need to respect the social order and to uphold legally determined laws. The law becomes a touchstone, a moral imperative unto itself.”

“ACLU types who allow the Nazis to march in Skokie,” said Kurtz.

John Wellington Frears rubbed his chin through his beard and looked at Kurtz for a long minute, as if reappraising him. “Yes.”

“Is Stage Five the top floor?” asked Kurtz.

Frears shook his head. “Not according to the research that Professors Kohlberg and Frederick were carrying out. A Level Six individual makes his moral decisions based on his own conscience in attempts to resonate with certain universal ethical considerations…even when those decisions fly in the face of existing laws. Say, Henry David Thoreau’s opposition to the war with Mexico, or the civil-rights marchers in the South in the nineteen sixties.”

Kurtz nodded.

“Professor Frederick used to say that the United States was founded by Level Six minds,” said Frears, “protected and preserved by Level Fives, and populated by Level Fours and below. Does this make any sense, Mr. Kurtz?”

“Sure. But it hasn’t done a damned thing toward telling me why you left Juilliard and went to the Vietnam War.”

Frears smiled. “At the time, this idea of moral development was very important to me, Mr. Kurtz. Lawrence Kohlberg’s dream was to find a Level Seven personality.”

“Who would that be?” said Kurtz. “Jesus Christ?”

“Precisely,” Frears said with no hint of irony. “Or Gandhi. Or Socrates. Or Buddha. Someone who can only respond to universal ethical imperatives. They have no choice in the matter. Usually the rest of us respond by putting them to death.”

“Hemlock,” said Kurtz. Pruno had made Plato’s dialogues required reading for him in Attica.

“Yes.” Frears set his long, elegant fingers on the metal briefcase. “Lawrence Kohlberg never found a Stage Seven personality.”

Surprise, thought Kurtz.

“But he did find something else, Mr. Kurtz. His testing showed that there were many people walking the street who can only be classified as Level Zeroes. Their moral development has not even evolved to the point where they will avoid pain and punishment if their whim dictates otherwise. Other human beings’ suffering means absolutely nothing to them. The clinical term is ‘sociopath,’ but the real word is ‘monster.’”

Kurtz looked at Frears’s fingers tensed against the lid of the briefcase as if trying to keep it closed. “This Kohlberg and Pruno had to do university research to find this out? I could have told them that when I was five years old.”

Frears nodded. “Kohlberg committed suicide in nineteen eighty-seven—walked into a marsh and drowned. Some of his disciples say that he couldn’t reconcile himself to the knowledge that such creatures walk among us.”

“So you went to Vietnam to find out what rung of Kohlberg’s ladder you were on,” said Kurtz.

John Wellington Frears looked him in the eye. “Yes.”

“And what did you find out?”

Frears smiled. “I discovered that a young violinist’s fingers were very good at disarming bombs and booby traps.” He leaned forward. “What else did you want to talk to me about, Mr. Kurtz?”

“Hansen.”

“Yes?” The violinist was completely attentive.

“I don’t think Hansen has cut and run yet, but he’s close to doing that. Very close. Right now I think he’s waiting a few hours just because I’ve been a factor he doesn’t understand. The miserable son of a bitch is so smart that he’s stupid…he thinks he understands everything. As long as we appear to be one step ahead of him, he hangs around to see what the fuck is going to happen—but not much longer. A few hours maybe.”

“Yes.”

“So, Mr. Frears, the way I see it, we can play this endgame one of three ways. I think you should decide.”

Frears nodded silently at this.

“First,” said Kurtz, “we hand over this briefcase to the authorities and let them chase down Mr. James B. Hansen. His modus operandi is shot to hell, so he won’t be repeating his imposter kill-the-kids routine in the same way. He’ll be on the run, pure and simple.”

“Yes,” said Frears.

“But he might stay on the run and ahead of the cops for months, even years,” said Kurtz. “And after he’s arrested, the trial will take months, or years. And after the trial, the appeals can take more years. And you don’t have those months and years. It doesn’t sound like the cancer’s going to give you very many weeks.”

“No,” agreed Frears. “What is your second suggestion, Mr. Kurtz?”

“I kill Hansen. Tonight.”

Frears nodded. “And your third suggestion, Mr. Kurtz?”

Kurtz told him. When Kurtz finished talking, John Wellington Frears sat back in the Eames chair and closed his eyes as if he was very, very tired.

Frears opened his eyes. Kurtz knew immediately what the man’s decision was going to be.

Kurtz wanted to leave by six-thirty so he could get to the train station no later than seven. The storm had come in with nightfall, and there was a foot of new snow on the balcony when he stepped out for a final look at the night.

Arlene was smoking a cigarette there.

“Today was Wednesday, Joe.”

“So?”

“You forgot your weekly visit to your parole officer.”

“Yeah.”

“I called her,” said Arlene. “Told her you were sick.” She flicked ashes. “Joe, if you manage to kill this Hansen and they still think he’s a detective, every cop in the United States is going to be after you. You’re going to have to hide so far up in Canada that your neighbors’ll be polar bears. And you hate the out-of-doors.”

Kurtz had nothing to say to that.

“We get kicked out of our basement in a week,” said Arlene. “And we never got around to looking for new office space.”

CHAPTER

THIRTY-THREE

The meeting with Kurtz was set for midnight Hansen arrived at ten minutes after eight. Both Brubaker’s and Myers’s cars had trouble getting through the snow near the courthouse, so they’d had dinner downtown and waited for their captain to pick them up in his expensive sport utility vehicle. Brubaker was half-drunk and decided to confront Millworth on the ride to wherever the hell they were going.

“Whatever’s going on,” Brubaker said from the front passenger seat, “it sure and hell isn’t department procedure. You said there was going to be something in this for us, Captain. It’s time we saw what it was.”

“You’re right,” said Hansen. He was driving carefully—he always drove carefully—following a snowplow east on Broadway. The plow’s flashing orange lights reflected off the silent buildings and low clouds.

Hansen took two thick envelopes out of the Cadillac Escalade’s center console and tossed one to Brubaker and the other back to Myers.

“Holy shit,” said Detective Myers. Each envelope contained $20,000.

“That’s just a down payment,” said Hansen.

“For what?” asked Brubaker.

Hansen ignored him and concentrated on driving the last two miles along Broadway and side streets. Except for snowplows and the occasional emergency vehicle, there was almost no traffic. Broadway had six inches of new snow but was being plowed regularly; the side streets were wastelands of drifting snow and snow-covered vehicles. The Escalade powered its way along on permanent all-wheel drive, but Hansen had to switch into four-wheel drive and then into four-wheel-low to make the final mile to the abandoned train station.

The driveway rising up the hill to the station was empty. There was no sign that another vehicle bad been there. It was the first time Hansen had seen the station in real life, but he had studied floor plans of the complex all afternoon. He knew it by heart now. He parked by the boulders that sealed off the huge parking lot and nodded to the detectives. “I have tactical gear in the back.”

He issued each man a bulletproof vest—not the thin Kevlar type that cops could wear under a shirt, but bulky SWAT flak vests with porcelain panels. Hansen pulled out three AR-15 assault rifles, rigged for rapid-fire, and handed one to Brubaker and one to Myers. Each man got five magazines, the extra going into the Velcroed pockets on the flak vests.

“We going into combat, Captain?” asked Myers. “I’m not trained for this shit.”

“My guess is that there’ll be one man in there,” said Hansen.

Brubaker locked and loaded his AR-15. “That man named Kurtz?”

“Yes.”

Myers was having trouble Velcroing shut the flak vest. He was too fat. He tugged at a nylon cord, found the fit, and patted the vest into place. “We supposed to arrest him?”

“No,” said Hansen. “You’re supposed to kill him.” He handed each man a black SWAT helmet with bulky goggles on a swing-down visor.

“Night-vision goggles?” said Brubaker, swinging his down and peering around like a bug-eyed alien. “Wild. Everything’s greenish and as bright as day.”

“That’s the idea, Detective.” Hansen pulled on his helmet and powered up the goggles. “It’s going to be dark as a coal mine in there for a civilian, but there’s enough ambient light for us to see fine.”

“What about civilians?” asked Myers. He was swinging his assault rifle around while peering through his goggles.

“No civilians in there. If it moves, shoot it,” said Hansen. If this Mickey Kee gets in the way, too bad.

“No tactical radios?” said Brubaker.

“We won’t need them,” said Hansen. He pulled a pair of long-handled wire cutters from his bag. “We’re going to stay together. Brubaker, when we’re inside, you and I will be at SWAT-ready, covering forward fields of fire, you on the left, me on the right. Myers, when we’re moving together inside, you face rear, keeping your back against Brubaker’s back. Questions?”

There weren’t any.

Hansen used his key remote to lock the Cadillac, and the three men crossed the parking lot toward the looming station. The blowing snow covered their tracks in minutes.

Kurtz had arrived only half an hour earlier.

He’d planned to get to the station by seven, but the blizzard slowed them down. The drive that normally would have taken ten minutes, even in traffic, took almost an hour; they almost got stuck once and Marco had to get out and push to get them moving again. It was seven-thirty before the Lincoln came to a stop at the base of the drive leading up to the station. Kurtz and Marco got out. Kurtz leaned into the open passenger door.

“You know where to park this down the side street so you can see this whole driveway area?”

John Wellington Frears nodded from his place behind the wheel.

“I know it’s cold, but don’t leave the engine on. Someone could see the exhaust from the street here. Just hunker down and wait.”

Frears nodded again and touched a button to pop the trunk.

Kurtz went around back, tossed a heavy black bag to Marco, who set it on the passenger seat and closed the door. Kurtz lifted the other bundle from the trunk. It was wiggling slightly, but the duct tape held.

“I thought you wanted me to do the heavy lifting,” said Marco.

“It’s a hundred yards to the train station,” said Kurtz. “By the time we get there, you can have it.”

They walked up the hill and kept near the high cement railing as they approached the tower. Kurtz heard the Lincoln shoosh away but he did not look back. Marco used the wire cutters on the fence and they slipped through, keeping close to the station as they went around to the north side, where Kurtz knew how to get in through a boarded-up window. It was dark up here near the hilltop complex of the abandoned station, and the tower loomed over them like a skyscraper from hell, but the light from the sodium-vapor streetlights in the ghetto nearby reflected off the low clouds and lit everything in a sick, yellow glow.

The blowing snow stung Kurtz eyes and soaked his hair. Before going through the window, he shifted the taped and gagged man from his shoulder to Marco’s and took a flashlight out of his peacoat pocket.

Holding the flashlight in his left hand and the S&W semiautomatic in his right, Kurtz led the way into the echoing space.

It was too cold for pigeons to be stirring. Marco came in, and their two flashlight beams stabbed back and forth across the huge waiting room.

If Hansen got here first, we’re dead, thought Kurtz. We’re perfect targets.

Their shoes crunched on the cold stone floor. Wind howled beyond the tall, boarded-up windows. At the far end of the waiting room, Kurtz pocketed his pistol and pointed upward with the flashlight.

“That balcony should be a good vantage point for you,” whispered Kurtz. “The stairway’s mostly closed off and you could hear anyone climbing up it toward you. There’s no reason for them to go up there—it’s a dead end. If they come in the tower way, I’ll see them. If they come in the way we did, they’ll have to pass you here.”

Kurtz fumbled in his left coat pocket, felt the Compact Witness .45 that Angelina had insisted he take—“It’s served me well,” she’d said as they stood in the penthouse foyer—and then found the extra two-way radio. They’d tested it in the penthouse but he wanted to make sure it worked here.

Marco dumped the groaning man and set his own earphones and radio in place.

“You don’t have to actually speak into it,” whispered Kurtz. “Just leave it on and thumb the transmit button if anyone passes you here. I’ll hear it when you break squelch. Once if he’s alone, twice if there are two guys, and so on. Give it a try.”

Marco thumbed the button twice. Kurtz clearly heard the two interruptions of static. “Good.”

“What if nobody shows?” whispered Marco. They’d shut off the flashlights while they huddled under the balcony, and Kurtz could barely see the big man three feet away.

“We wait until one and go home,” whispered Kurtz. The cold in the waiting room was worse than outside. It made Kurtz’s forehead ache.

“If I see anybody, I’m going to beep you and that’s it. Soon as they’re past me, I’m out of here. No one’s paying me enough for this shit.”

Kurtz nodded. Switching on his flashlight, he bent down, inspected the duct tape and cords, and lifted the heavy bundle. Marco climbed the littered and barricaded staircase carefully, but still made noise. Kurtz waited until the bodyguard was in place, out of sight but able to peer through the railings, and then he continued the next hundred feet or so up the main walkway into the tower rotunda.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-FOUR

Jesus God, it’s cold,” whispered Myers.

“Shut up,” hissed Brubaker.

James B. Hansen said nothing, but he made a fist and pounded both men on the chest plates of their flak vests, demanding silence.

They’d come in from the south side, through the acres of empty service buildings, across the rusted and snow-buried tracks, across the windswept boarding platforms, through the fenced-over south portal, up the boarding ramps, and now were crossing the vast main waiting room. The view was uncanny through the night-vision goggles: brilliant, glowing green-white outside, a dimmer, static-speckled greenish gloom here in the deeper darkness. But enough reflected light filtered through the boarded-up skylights and windows to allow them to see a hundred feet across the waiting room. Abandoned benches glowed like tombstones; smashed kiosks were a tumble of shadows; stopped clocks looked like skulls on the wall.

Hansen felt a strange exhilaration. Whatever happened, he knew there would have to be a sea change in his behavior. The shifting personae and the self-indulgent Special Visits would have to stop—at least for a few years. If a dullard like this ex-con Kurtz could find the pattern there, then it was no longer safe. Hansen would have to settle into the deep-cover identity he’d prepared in Vancouver and practice self-restraint for years as far as the teenage girls were concerned. In the meantime, this unaccustomed public action was exciting.

The three detectives crossed the wide space in respectable SWAT search-and-clear form: Brubaker and Hansen holding their weapons cocked and ready, swinging the muzzles as they turned their heads; Tommy Myers, his shoulder touching Brubaker, walking backward with his weapon and goggles in constant motion, covering their backs.

The loading platforms had been clear. The ramps had been clear. This waiting room and the rooms on either side—clear. That left the main rotunda and the tower.

If Kurtz had not arrived four hours early—and Hansen would be amazed if the man showed that much discipline and foresight—then the plan was for the three detectives to take up a shooting position in a front room of the tower, preferably on one of the mezzanine levels surrounding the entry rotunda. If Kurtz approached across the parking lot on the north side, or from the driveway to the west, they could ambush him from the front windows. If he came in from the east or south, they would hear him approaching up the staircase now in front of them and have a free field of fire down into the rotunda.

That was the plan.

Right now, Hansen was busy using his goggles to sweep the small balcony on the south wall to the left of the main staircase. There was enough ambient light to show no one standing there, but the darkness between the rungs of the old railings was a jumble of green static. He checked the narrow staircase to the balcony—barricaded and Uttered. Still, it was probably worth clearing before going on to the rotunda, so—

“Listen!” whispered Brubaker.

A sound from the rotunda beyond the main staircase. A rattling. The scrape of shoes on marble or wood.

Hansen held the AR-15 steady with his left hand and used his right hand to shake the collar of each man’s flak vest, enforcing silence and continued discipline. But he was thinking—Got you, Kurtz! Got you!

Marco stayed flat against the floor of the small balcony, raising his head just high enough to peer through the thick marble slats of the railing. He couldn’t see who was down there—it was too fucking dark—but he could hear footsteps and once he heard urgent whispers. Whoever it was, they were moving through the blackness without flashlights. Maybe they were using those night-vision lenses or something, like the ones he’d seen in the movies.

As the soft shuffling came closer and paused ten yards below his balcony, Marco pressed his face against the floor. No use exposing himself when he couldn’t see the fuckers anyway.

Marco clearly heard a man hiss “Listen!” and then the shuffling became footsteps hurrying up the main staircase toward the rotunda and tower where Kurtz had gone. Marco was alone in the huge waiting room. He took a breath and got to his feet, straining to see in the blackness. Even after twenty minutes here, his eyes had not completely adapted to such darkness.

He lifted the two-way radio, but paused before thumbing the transmit button. How many men had there been? Marco didn’t know. But just beeping Kurtz twice wouldn’t warn him that the opposition was moving around easily in the dark, using some high-tech shit or something. He could whisper into the radio, warn Kurtz.

Fuck him. Marco had decided that his best bet after the scary cocksucker had wasted Leo was to stick with Ms. Farino, at least until the shit quit flying, but he didn’t owe anything to Kurtz. Still, if Kurtz got out of this alive, Marco didn’t want him pissed at him. But that didn’t warrant Marco risking even a whisper with hostiles in the building.

Marco silently thumbed the transmit button twice, heard the clicks on his earphone and then turned off the radio, pulled the earphone free, and crammed it all into his pocket. Time to get the fuck out of here.

When the long blade swept across Marco’s throat from behind, slicing his jugular and windpipe and almost severing his spinal cord, he didn’t even know what it was, it happened so fast and cut so deep. Then there was the sound sort of like a fountain, but Marco’s brain did not associate it with the geyser of his own blood flowing out onto the cold marble floor.

Then his knees buckled and the big man fell, hitting his face on the stone railing but feeling nothing, seeing nothing. The midnight blackness of the train station filled his brain like black fog and that was that.

Mickey Kee wiped his eight-inch blade on the dead man’s shirt, folded it back with his gloved hand, and glided back down the dark staircase as silently as he had ascended.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-FIVE

The dim green glow of the corridor above the main staircase brightened considerably as Hansen, Brubaker, and Myers stepped out under the rotunda ceiling. Ambient light from the windowed tower rooms above filled the junk-cluttered space with green-white static and ghostly, glowing shapes.

Suddenly Joe Kurtz’s voice—completely identifiable as Kurtz’s voice—called from across the rotunda. “Hansen. Is that you? I can’t see you.”

“There!” Brubaker said aloud.

Directly across the rotunda floor, perhaps sixty-five feet away, against the west wall—a human form, standing, moving behind a bench, turning as if searching out the source of the shout Hansen could see the bright glow of a titanium briefcase in the man’s left hand.

“Don’t fire!” Hansen called, but too late. Brubaker had opened up on full auto with his assault rifle. Myers swiveled and fired a second later.

God’s will be done, thought Hansen. He thumbed the AR-15 to full auto and squeezed the trigger. The muzzle flare blinded him through the night-vision goggles. Hansen closed his eyes to shake away the retinal afterimages and listened while the rotunda echoed from the rifle blasts and the last ricochets whined away.

“We got him,” yelled Brubaker. The detective ran across the open rotunda floor toward the man slumped over the bench. Myers followed.

Hansen went to one knee, waiting for the inevitable gunfire from one or more of the mezzanines above. Kurtz was too smart to be cut down like this. Wasn’t he? This had to be an ambush.

No gunfire.

Hansen used his goggles to check out the darkest shadows under the mezzanine overhang as he moved carefully around the rotunda, staying back against the wall, keeping his rifle trained on any bench or tumbled kiosk that might give a man cover for an ambush.

Nothing.

“He’s dead!” called Myers, the fat man’s voice echoing.

“Yeah, but who the fuck is it?” said Brubaker. “I can’t see his face through these fucking things.”

Hansen was fifteen feet from the two detectives and the corpse when Brubaker’s flashlight beam bloomed like a phosphorous bomb in his goggles.

Hansen sought cover behind a fallen bench and waited for the gunfire from above.

Nothing.

He flipped up his own goggles and looked over to where Brubaker’s flashlight was swinging back and forth.

The man in the dark jacket was dead—at least three shots to the chest and one in the throat. It wasn’t Kurtz. The man had been handcuffed to a wall pipe and still half hung from it, his upper torso draped across a bench. Hansen could see the face; the corpse’s eyes were wide and staring in terror. Tape covered the mouth and ran all the way around the head. James B. Hansen’s titanium briefcase had been taped to the man’s left hand with twist after twist of the same silver duct tape.

Myers was tugging a billfold out of the corpse’s pocket. Hansen ducked low, expecting an explosion.

“Donald Lee Rafferty,” read Myers. “Ten-sixteen Locus Lane, Lockport. He’s an organ donor.”

Brubaker laughed.

“Who the fuck is Donald Lee Rafferty?” whispered Myers. The two detectives were beginning to realize how exposed they were.

Brubaker shut off the flashlight. Hansen could hear their goggles being swung down on the helmets’ visor hinges.

In the green glow, Hansen duckwalked over to the trio, pulled the dead man’s left hand back over the bench, and pried the taped briefcase open. It was empty.

What kind of stupid joke is this? Hansen remembered exactly who Donald Rafferty was, remembered the man’s adopted daughter lying in the hospital, remembered the connection to Joe Kurtz and Kurtz’s dead partner from twelve years ago. But none of this added up. If Kurtz really wanted the blackmail money, why this idiocy? If Kurtz’s goal was to kill him, again why this complication? Even if Kurtz had his own night-vision goggles, there could have been no way he could distinguish one of the detectives from the other here in the rotunda. Kurtz should have fired when he had a clear field of fire.

If he was still here.

Hansen suddenly felt the deep cold of the place creep into him. It took him a few seconds to recognize the phenomenon—fear.

Fear of the inexplicable. Fear of the absolutely unreasonable action. Fear that came from not understanding what in hell your opponent was up to or what he might do next.

Quit trying to turn him into Moriarty, thought Hansen. He’s just an ex-con screw-up. He probably doesn’t know why he’s doing what he’s doing. Maybe it just amused him to have us kill Rafferty for him. He’ll probably call me tomorrow with another time and place for the handover of the money and photographs.

Well, thought Hansen, fornicate that. No more games. Let Frears and Kurtz have the photographs. Let them do their worst. Time to leave. Time to leave the train station. Time to leave Buffalo. Time to leave all of this behind.

Myers and Brubaker were crouched behind the bench with him.

“Time to leave,” Hansen whispered to them.

“We get to keep the money?” Myers whispered back, his breath hot and fetid on Hansen’s face. “Even though it wasn’t Kurtz?”

“Yes, yes,” whispered Hansen. “Brubaker. Five yards to your left is the stairway to the front door. Wide stairs. Just twelve of them. The doors and windows down there are boarded over. Clear the staircase while we give you cover. Kick the boards off the door or window. Shoot an opening if you have to. We’re getting out of here.”

Brubaker hesitated a second but then nodded and scuffed to his right and down the staircase.

Hansen and Myers stayed behind the bench, muzzles swinging to cover the mezzanine levels across the rotunda, then the opposite main-staircase doorway. Nothing moved. No shots from the front staircase. Hansen heard Brubaker kicking the hell out of the boarded door and then the shout “Clear!”

Hansen had Myers cover him while he shuffled to the staircase and then covered the fat man while he wheezed and panted past him and down the stairs.

Outside, the night-vision goggles were almost too bright. It was still snowing hard, but the drifted expanse of the parking lot glowed like a green desert in bright sunlight. The three detectives abandoned all pretext of proper SWAT procedure and just loped away from the station, running flat-out across the parking lot. Each man ran hunched, obviously half-expecting a bullet between the shoulder blades. But as they reached a hundred feet from the tower, then two hundred, then a hundred yards and better, they began to relax slightly under their heavy flak vests. It would take a master marksman with a high-velocity rifle, night-scope, and much luck to get off a good shot at this distance, in this snow.

No shot came.

Panting and wheezing loudly now, they passed the low boulders blocking access to the lot and came down the slippery driveway. The goggles gave them a view of everything for sixty yards in each direction. Nothing moved. No other cars were visible. The only tire tracks in the driveway, mostly drifted over now, were those of the Cadillac Escalade, which had accumulated two inches of new snow in the forty-five minutes or so they had been in the station.

“Wait,” panted Hansen. He used the remote to beep the Cadillac unlocked and they checked the lighted interior before approaching. Empty.

“Myers,” said Hansen between gasps. “Keep your goggles and vest on and keep watch while Brubaker and I get out of this gear.”

Myers grumbled but did as he was told as the other two detectives tossed their heavy vests, rifles, and helmets into the back of the SUV.

“All right,” said Hansen, pulling the .38 from his coat pocket and standing guard while Myers divested himself of his tactical gear. There was enough light out here to allow Hansen to see the fat man’s grin when he was free of the heavy equipment. Despite the cold and snow, Myers wiped sweat from his face.

“That was fucking weird,” said the heavyset detective.

“How many times have I asked you not to use profanity?” Hansen said, and shot Myers in the forehead.

Brubaker began groping in his jacket for his gun, but Hansen had plenty of time to fire twice—hitting the man first in the throat and then in the bridge of the nose.

He dragged the bodies out of the way so he could back the Escalade down to the street and then went through their jackets, pulling out the two envelopes of cash.

Breathing more easily now, Hansen looked back at the distant tower and train station. Nothing moved across the wide expanse of snow. If Mickey Kee had ever shown up, he was on his own in there now. Settling into the big SUV, Hansen felt a twinge of regret—he’d probably never know what game Joe Kurtz and John Wellington Frears had been playing. But he no longer cared. It was time to leave it all behind.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-SIX

Suddenly Kurtz knew that he was not alone on the mezzanine.

It had been a long, cold wait for Hansen and his pals, first waiting at the broken window of the front mezzanine office. The parking lot had been dark, but Kurtz was sure he could see any moving figure against the snow, even though his view from the third-floor window was partially obscured by the large steel-and-plaster ornamental awning directly beneath his perch.

When Marco had broken squelch twice on the radio, Kurtz had slipped the earpiece into his pocket and moved as quietly as he could—the floor was littered with broken plaster and glass—to the rotunda mezzanine outside the office. From there he didn’t have long to wait until Hansen and the other two detectives showed up and blasted Rafferty to bits.

Kurtz never had a clear shot with his pistol. The rotunda got more light than most of the rest of the train station’s interior, but it was still too dark for Kurtz to see anything clearly, even with his eyes adapted to the dark. One of the men had turned a flashlight on briefly when they were inspecting their kill, but Kurtz had only a brief glimpse of SWAT-garbed men more than eighty feet across the circle of the rotunda. Too far for a shot from the .40-caliber SW99 semiauto in his hand or the .45 Compact Witness in his coat pocket Besides, even that brief glimpse of the men—he couldn’t tell them apart in their black helmets and SWAT vests—showed that their body armor would stop a pistol shot.

Then the three had gone down the front stairway and battered their way out the front door and Kurtz had scuttled back to his place by the shattered window.

The entrance canopy below blocked his view until the three running men were again out of range, then lost to the darkness and falling snow of the parking lot.

Kurtz didn’t even try following their retreat He sat with his back against the wall and slowed his breathing.

There was the slightest hint of noise from either the mezzanine outside the office or the rotunda below. The whispering-gallery effect worked both ways.

Marco? He didn’t think the unarmed bodyguard would be stupid enough to come toward the sound of automatic weapons fire. Could Rafferty still be alive and stirring? No. Kurtz had seen the wounds in the few seconds of the flashlight’s inspection.

Getting silently to his feet Kurtz raised the pistol and crossed the littered floor as quietly as he could. Glass still crunched underfoot.

Pausing at the doorway, he stepped out onto the mezzanine, pistol ready.

A shadow against the wall to his right moved with impossible speed. The .40 S&W went flying out across the railing and Kurtz felt his right wrist and hand go numb from the kick.

He leaped back, pawing with his left hand for the .45 in his peacoat pocket but the shadow leaped and a two-footed Jack caught him in the chest, breaking ribs and throwing Kurtz backward into the office.

Rolling, Kurtz got to his feet and lifted both arms in defense even as the shadow hurtled at him and three more fast kicks numbed his right forearm, smashed another rib, and kicked Kurtz’s feet out from under him. He landed hard and felt broken glass rip at his back even as the wind rushed out of him.

Hansen? No. Who?

Kurtz staggered to his knees and grabbed for the extra gun again but his peacoat had been torn open and twisted around by the fall and he couldn’t find the pocket. Maybe the gun had been knocked free but Kurtz couldn’t see it in the dim light through the broken window.

His assailant came up behind him silently, grabbed Kurtz by the hair and pulled him to his feet.

Instinctively, Kurtz threw his left hand up tight to his chin—the right hand was useless—and felt a long blade cutting his forearm to the bone rather than severing his neck. Kurtz gasped and kicked backward as hard as he could.

The man danced away.

Kurtz was reeling, barely able to stand, feeling the shattered rib where it had cut into his right lung. He was bleeding badly, right hand dangling useless, legs shaky. He had only a few seconds he could stay standing, maybe thirty seconds before he lost consciousness.

His attacker moved to his left, a shadow in shadows.

Kurtz backed toward the window. A tall shard of sharp glass stuck upward from the windowsill. If he could maneuver the man toward the…

The man-shaped darkness leaped from the shadows. Kurtz abandoned the window-glass strategy, tugged his coat around with his bloody left hand, and reached for his pocket just as there came a blinding flash of light.

The figure, who had kicked him in the chest again, was not distracted by the light. The man body-blocked Kurtz with a sharp shoulder, lifted him, and threw him backward through the window even as Kurtz’s left hand became entangled in his own coat pocket.

Kurtz was dimly aware that he was somersaulting through the cold air, looking up at the dark rectangle of window fifteen feet above, his assailant’s face white against the blackness there. Then Kurtz hit the solid canopy with his back, smashed through the rotten plaster and lathing and rebar, and fell another fifteen feet to the snowy pavement below.

A hundred yards away through blowing snow, snug in the driver’s seat of the Cadillac SUV, Hansen heard none of this. He turned the ignition, heard the V-8 roar to life, set the heater to maximum, and flipped on the halogen headlights.

He had just raised his hand to the gearshift when there came a soft tik-tik and thirty-two pounds of C-4 explosive rigged under the floorboards, in the engine compartment, behind the dash, and especially carefully around the 40-gallon fuel tank, exploded in tight sequence.

The first wad of explosive blew off Hansen’s feet just above the ankles. The second batch of C-4 blew the hood a hundred feet into the air and sent the windshield flying. The main packet ignited the fuel tank and lifted the two-and-a-half-ton vehicle five feet into the air before the SUV dropped back onto burning tires. The interior of the Cadillac immediately filled with a fuel-air mixture of burning gasoline.

Hansen was alive. Even as he breathed flames, he thought, I’m alive!

He tried the door but it was buckled and jammed. The passenger seat was twisted forward and on fire. Hansen himself was on fire. The wood-and-polymer steering wheel was melting in his hands.

Not knowing yet that his feet were gone, Hansen lurched forward and clawed at the dashboard, pulling himself through the jagged hole where the windshield had been.

The hood was gone; the engine compartment was a well of flames.

Hansen did not stop. Reaching up and over with hands of molten flesh, he grabbed the optional roof rack of the Cadillac and pulled his charred and burning legs out of the wreck, twisting free of the interior, dropping himself away from the flaming mass of metal.

His hair was on fire. His face was on fire. Hansen rolled in the deep snow, smothering the flames, screaming in agony.

He crawled on his smoking elbows farther from the wreck, rolling on his back, trying to breathe through the pain in his lungs. He could see everything clearly, not knowing that his eyelids had fused with his brow and could not be closed. Hansen held his hands in front of his face. They hurt. He saw in a surge of disbelief bordering on a weird joy that his fingers had bloated like hot dogs left too long on the charcoal grill and then burst and melted. He saw white bone against the black sky. The flames illuminated everything in a sixty-yard radius.

Hansen tried to scream for help but his lungs were two sacks of carbon.

A silhouette walked between him and the burning vehicle. A man. The dark shape knelt, leaned closer, showed a face to the flames.

“Hansen,” said John Wellington Frears. “Do you hear me? Do you know who I am?”

I am not James B. Hansen, Hansen thought and tried to say, but neither his jaws nor tongue would work.

Frears looked down at the burned man. Hansen’s clothes had peeled off and his skin hung in greasy folds, smoking like charred rags. The man’s face showed exposed and burned muscles like cords of slick red-and-yellow rope. Hansen’s scorched lips had peeled back from his teeth, so he seemed to be caught in the middle of a wild grin. The staring gray eyes could not blink. Only the thin column of Hansen’s breath rising into the frigid air from the open mouth showed that he still lived.

“Can you hear me, Hansen?” said Frears. “Can you see who I am? I did this. You killed my daughter, Hansen. And I did this. Stay alive and suffer, you son of a bitch.”

Frears knelt next to the charred man for several minutes. Long enough to see the pupils in the monster’s eyes widen in recognition and then become fixed and dilated. Long enough to see that the only vapor rising into the cold air from Hansen now was no longer breath, but steam and smoke from the cooked flesh.

Distant sirens rose from the direction of the lighted city—the habitat, John Wellington Frears thought, of the other men, the civilized men. He rose and was ready to walk back to the Lincoln parked a block away when he saw something that looked like an animal crawling toward him through the snow of the parking lot.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-SEVEN

Mickey Kee stood at the open window for a minute, staring down at Kurtz’s body through the hole in the metal canopy and then glancing up at the vehicle burning in the distance. He was curious about the explosion, but he hadn’t let it deter him from his work.

His charge from Mr. Gonzaga had been—kill Kurtz, then kill Millworth. In Mr. Gonzaga’s words, “Any fucking cop crazy enough to hire me to kill somebody is too fucking crazy to be left alive.” Mickey Kee had not disagreed. Mr. Gonzaga had added that he wanted Kurtz’s head—literally—and Kee had brought a gunny sack on his belt to transport the trophy. Mr. G planned to give Ms. Angelina Farino a surprise present.

Kee had been mildly disappointed twenty minutes earlier when Millworth and his two sidekicks had come into the station like the Keystone Kops shuffling along in body armor. He’d followed them to Kurtz, knowing that the time was not right to take care of Millworth, that it was too risky with all of that firepower in the hands of clowns. Now this explosion. With any luck, Millworth was no longer a factor. If it hadn’t been the homicide detective’s pyre, then Mickey Kee would drive to Millworth’s house and take care of things there. The evening was young.

Moving silently even over broken glass, Kee circled the mezzanine and went down the stairs, across the rotunda, and out the front door. Kurtz’s body had not moved.

Kee slipped his Beretta out of its holster and approached carefully. Kurtz had made a mess coming through the overhang. Rebar hung down like spaghetti. Plaster and rotted wood were scattered around the body. Kurtz’s right arm was visibly broken, the bone visible, and his left leg looked all twisted out of position. His left arm was pinned under his body just as he had fallen on it. There was blood soaking the snow around Kurtz’s head and his eyes were wide and staring fixedly at the sky through the hole he’d made in the overhang. Snowflakes settled on the open eyes.

Mickey Kee straddled the body and counted to twenty. No breath rising in the cold air. Kee spat down onto Kurtz’s open mouth. No movement. The eyes stared past Kee into intergalactic space.

Kee grunted, slipped away the Beretta, pulled the gunny sack from his belt, and clicked open the eight-inch blade on his combat knife.

Kurtz blinked and brought his left hand up and around, squeezing the trigger of the Compact Witness .45 he’d pulled out during his fall. The bullet hit Mickey Kee under the chin, passed through his soft palate and brain, and blew the top of his skull off.

The .45 suddenly grew too heavy to hold so Kurtz dropped it. He would have liked to have closed his eyes to go away from the pain, but Kee’s body was too heavy on his damaged chest to let him breathe, so he pulled the body off him with his left hand, rolled over painfully, and began crawling on his belly toward the distant flames.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-EIGHT

John Wellington Frears drove Kurtz to the Erie County Medical Center that night. It wasn’t the hospital closest to the train station, but it was the only one he knew about since he’d driven past it several times on the way to and from the Airport Sheraton. Despite the storm, or perhaps because of it, the emergency room was almost empty, so Kurtz had no fewer than eight people working on him when he was brought in. The two real doctors in the group didn’t understand the injuries—severe cuts, lacerations, concussion, broken ribs, broken wrist, damage to both legs—but the well-dressed African-American gentleman who’d brought the patient in said that it had been an accident at a construction site, that his friend had fallen three stories through a skylight, and the shards of glass in Kurtz seemed to bear that story out.

Frears waited around long enough to hear that Kurtz would live, and then he and the black Lincoln disappeared back into the storm.

Arlene made it through the weather to the hospital that night, stayed until the next afternoon, and came back every day. When Kurtz regained consciousness late the next morning, she was reading the Buffalo News, and she insisted on reading parts of it aloud to him every day after that.

On that first day after the murders, Thursday, the carnage at the train station almost crowded out the news about the blizzard. “The Train Station Massacre,” the papers and TV news immediately christened it. Three homicide detectives were dead, a civilian named Donald Rafferty, a petty criminal from Newark named Marco Dirazzio, and an Asian-American not yet identified. It was obvious to the press that some sort of straight-from-the-movies shoot-out between the crooks and the cops had taken place that night, probably while Captain Robert Gaines Millworth and his men were working undercover.

By that afternoon, the chief of police and the mayor of Buffalo had both vowed that this cold-blooded murder of Buffalo’s finest would not go unavenged—that every resource, including the FBI, would be used to track down the killers and bring them to justice. It would, they said, be the largest manhunt in the history of Western New York. The vows were made in time to be picked up by the prime-time local and network news. Tom Brokaw said during the lead-in to the report, “A real—and deadly—game of cops-and-robbers took place in Buffalo, New York, last night, and the body count may not be finished yet.” That odd prediction came true when the authorities announced late Thursday that the dead bodies of Captain Millworth’s wife and son, as well as another unidentified body, had been discovered that morning at the captain’s home in Tonawanda. One city alderman was quoted during the late news saying that it was inappropriate for a captain of Homicide on the Buffalo Police Department to live in Tonawanda, that city law and department policy required residence within the city limits of Buffalo for all city employees. The alderman was largely ignored.

On Friday, the second day after the murders, the dead Asian-American was identified as Mickey Kee, one of alleged Mafia Don Emilio Gonzaga’s enforcers, and rumors were circulating that Detective Brubaker, one of the fallen hero cops, had been on the payroll of the Farino crime family. Chief Podeski’s sound bite that night was: “Whatever the complicated circumstances of this heinous crime, we must not let it blind us to the incredible bravery of one man—Captain Robert Gaines Millworth—who gave his life and the lives of his beloved family for the people of Erie County and the Niagara Frontier.” A hero’s funeral was being planned for Captain Millworth. It was rumored that the President of the United States might attend.

Kurtz had surgery for his left leg, right lung, and both arms that day. He slept all that evening.

On Saturday, the third day, Arlene attended the funeral of her neighbor, Mrs. Dzwrjsky, and brought a tuna casserole to the family afterward. That same day, the Buffalo News ran a copyrighted story that canceled the President’s visit: a world-famous violinist named John Wellington Frears had come forward with documents, photographs, and audio tapes showing that Captain Robert Gaines Millworth was an imposter, that the city had hired a serial child-killer with no history of law enforcement in his background, and that this imposter had once been James B. Hansen, the man who had murdered Frears’s daughter twenty years earlier. Furthermore, Frears had evidence to show that Millworth/Hansen had been in the pay of crime boss Emilio Gonzaga and that the Train Station Massacre had not been a cops-versus-robbers fight at all, but a complicated gangland killing gone terribly wrong.

The Mayor and the chief of police announced on Saturday afternoon that there would be an immediate grand jury investigation into both the Gonzaga and Farino alleged crime families.

On that third evening, the CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, and CNN news all led with the story.

On the fourth morning, Sunday, it was revealed by the Buffalo News and two local TV stations that Mr. John Wellington Frears had produced an audio tape of a telephone conversation between Angelina Farino Ferrara—a young woman recently returned from Europe, a widow, and someone never connected to the Farino family’s business of crime—and Stephen “Little Skag” Farino, calling from Attica over his lawyer’s secure phone. The transcript ran in that morning’s edition of the Buffalo News, but copies of the tape were played on radio and TV stations everywhere.

Ms. Farino:

You’ve been hiring cops to whack people. Detective Brubaker, for instance. I know you’ve put him on the payroll that used to go to Hathaway.

Stephen Farino:

What the [expletive deleted] are you talking about, Angie?

Ms. Farino:

I don’t care about Brubaker, but I’ve gone over the family notes and I see that Gonzaga’s got a captain of detectives on the arm. A guy named Millworth.

Stephen Farino:

[no response]

Ms. Farino:

Millworth’s not really Millworth. He’s a serial killer named James B. Hansen…and a bunch of other aliases. He’s a child-killer, Stevie. A rapist and a killer.

Stephen Farino:

So?

And so on. Along with the transcript, the Buffalo News released a list of forty-five names that included cops, judges, politicians, parole-board members, and other Buffalo-area officials shown to be on the Gonzaga family payroll, along with the amount they were paid each year by Gonzaga. There was a shorter list—eight names—of lesser cops and minor politicians who were in the pay of the Farino Family. Detective Fred Brubaker’s name was on the second list.

On the fifth day, Monday, three of the most expensive lawyers in the United States, including one famous lawyer who had been successful in the O.J. Simpson defense years ago, all now in the hire of Emilio Gonzaga, held a press conference to announce that John Wellington Frears was a liar and a scoundrel, as well as someone intent upon slandering Italian-Americans everywhere, and they were prepared to prove it in a court of law. Their client, Emilio Gonzaga, was suing John Wellington Frears for slander to the tune of one hundred million dollars.

That evening, Frears appeared on Larry King Live. The violinist was sad, dignified, but unwavering. He showed photographs of his murdered daughter. He produced documents showing that Gonzaga had hired Millworth/Hansen. He showed carefully edited photographs of Millworth/Hansen posing with other murdered children—and with Frears’s own daughter. When Larry King pressed Frears to tell how he had come by all this material, Frears said only, “I hired a skilled private investigator.” When confronted with the news of the hundred-million-dollar lawsuit, Frears talked about his battle with colon cancer and said simply that he would not live long enough to defend his name in such a lawsuit. Emilio Gonzaga and Stephen Farino, said Frears, were murderers and child molesters. They would have to live with that knowledge, Frears said. He would not.

“Shut that damned thing off,” Kurtz said from his hospital bed. He hated Larry King.

Arlene shut it off but lit a cigarette in defiance of all hospital rules.

On the sixth day after the massacre, Arlene came into the hospital to find Kurtz out of his bed and room. When he returned, pale, shaking, trailing his IV stand, he would not say where he had been, but Arlene knew that he had gone one floor up to look in on Rachel, who was in a private room now. The doctors had saved the girl’s remaining kidney and she was on the road to recovery. Gail had put in the necessary papers to become Rachel’s legal guardian, and the two spent hours together in Rachel’s room each evening when Gail got off work.

On the seventh day, Wednesday, Arlene came in with a copy of USA Today: Emilio Gonzaga had been found in New York City that morning, stuffed in the trunk of a Chevrolet Monte Carlo parked near the fish market, two .22 bullets in the back of his head. “A double tap, obviously a professional hit,” said the experts in such things. The same experts speculated that the Five Families had acted to end the bad publicity. “They’re sentimentalists when it comes to kids,” said one source.

But Kurtz was gone on that seventh morning. He’d checked himself out during the night. The previous evening, an inquiring mind from one of the newspapers had come by the hospital to ask Kurtz if he was the “skilled private investigator” mentioned by John Wellington Frears.

Arlene checked the office and the Royal Delaware Arms, but Kurtz had taken some essentials from both places and disappeared.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-NINE

The week Joe disappeared, she’d had to move everything out of their basement office so the city could tear down the building. Gail and some friends helped her with the move. Arlene stored the computers and files and miscellaneous stuff in her garage out in Cheektowaga.

The week after that, Angelina Farino Ferrara phoned her. “Did you hear the news?” asked Ms. Ferrara.

“I’m sort of avoiding the news,” admitted Arlene.

“They got Little Skag. Shanked him eleven times in the Attica exercise yard last night. I guess it’s true that cons don’t like Short Eyes any more than the Five Family bosses do.”

“Is he dead?” asked Arlene.

“Not quite. He’s in some sort of high-security secret infirmary somewhere. They won’t even let me—his only surviving family member—visit him. If he lives, they’ll move him out of Attica to some undisclosed location.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“I just thought Joe would like to know if you happen to talk to him. Do you talk to him?”

“No. I have no idea where he is.”

“Well, if he gets in touch, tell him that I’d like to talk to him sometime. We don’t exactly have any unfinished business between us, but I might have some business opportunities for him.”

“I’ll tell Mr. Kurtz that you called.”

That same afternoon, Arlene received a check for $35,000 from John Wellington Frears. The note on the check said only: “Wedding Bells.com.” Arlene vaguely remembered discussing her idea with him the day they were together at her house. The news that evening reported that the violinist had checked himself into a hospital—not Erie County, but an expensive private hospital in the suburbs. A few days later, the newspaper said that Frears was on a respirator and in a coma.

Three and a half weeks after the Train Station Massacre, there was hardly anything about it in the papers except for the continuing string of city resignations and ongoing investigations and commissions. On that Wednesday in early March, Rachel came home to Gail’s duplex on Colvin Avenue. Arlene visited them the next day and brought some homemade cake.

The next morning, early, Arlene’s doorbell rang. She’d been sitting at the kitchen table, smoking her first cigarette of the day and sipping coffee, staring at the unopened paper, and the sound of the doorbell made her jump. She left her coffee but took her cigarette and the .357 Magnum she kept in the cupboard and peered out the side window before opening the door.

It was Kurtz. He looked like shit. His hair was rumpled, he hadn’t shaved for days, his left arm was still in a sling, his right wrist was in a bulky cast, and he stood stiffly as if his taped ribs were still hurting him.

Arlene set the big pistol on her curio cabinet and opened the door. “How’re they hanging, Joe?”

“Still low, wrinkled, and to the left.”

She batted ashes out onto the stoop. “You came all the way over from whatever Dumpster you’ve been sleeping in to tell me that?”

“No.” Kurtz peered up at the strange, glowing orb that had appeared in the sky over Buffalo that morning. “What the hell is that?”

“The sun,” said Arlene.

“I just wondered,” said Kurtz, “if you’d like to go out today to look for some office space.”

HARD AS NAILS. Copyright © 2003 by Dan Simmons. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Book design by Michael Collica

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Simmons, Dan.

Hard as nails / Dan Simmons.-1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-30528-1

1. Ex-convicts—Fiction. 2. Narcotic addicts—Crimes against-Fiction.

3. Amusement parks-Fiction. 4. Organized crime-Fiction. 5. Buffalo

(N.Y.)-Fiction. I. Title.

PS3569.I47292 H35 2003

813’.54—dc21

2003047076

First Edition: October 2003

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

“Hard,” replied the Dodger. “As nails,” added Charley Bates.

—Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

FORTY-ONE

FORTY-TWO

FORTY-THREE

FORTY-FOUR

FORTY-FIVE

FORTY-SIX

FORTY-SEVEN

FORTY-EIGHT

FORTY-NINE

FIFTY

FIFTY-ONE

FIFTY-TWO

FIFTY-THREE

CHAPTER

ONE

On the day he was shot in the head, things were going strangely well for Joe Kurtz. In fact, things had been going strangely well for weeks. Later, he told himself that he should have known that the universe was getting ready to readjust its balance of pain at his expense.

And at much greater expense to the woman who was standing next to him when the shots were fired.

He had a two P.M. appointment with his parole officer and he was there at the Civic Center on time. Because curb parking around the courthouse was almost impossible at that time of day, Kurtz used the parking garage under the combined civic, justice, and family court complex. The best thing about his parole officer was that she validated.

Actually, Kurtz realized, that wasn’t the best thing about her at all. Probation Officer Margaret “Peg” O’Toole, formerly of the Buffalo P.D. narcotics and vice squad, had treated him decently, knew and liked his secretary—Arlene DeMarco—and had once helped Kurtz out of a deep hole when an overzealous detective had tried to send him back to County lock-up on a trumped-up weapons charge. Joe Kurtz had made more than a few enemies during his eleven and a half years serving time for manslaughter in Attica, and odds were poor that he’d last long in general population, even in County. In addition to validating his parking stubs, Peg O’Toole had probably saved his life.

She was waiting for him when he knocked on the door and entered her second-floor office. Come to think of it, O’Toole had never kept him waiting. While many parole officers worked out of cubicles, O’Toole had earned herself a real office with windows overlooking the Erie County Holding Center on Church Street. Kurtz figured that on a clear day she could watch the winos being dragged into the drunk tank.

“Mr. Kurtz.” She gestured him to his usual chair.

“Agent O’Toole.” He took his usual chair.

“We have an important date coming up, Mr. Kurtz,” said O’Toole, looking at him and then down at his folder.

Kurtz nodded. In a few weeks it would be one year since he left Attica and reported to his parole officer. Since there had been no real problems—or at least none she or the cops had heard about—he should be visiting her once a month soon, rather than weekly. Now she asked her usual questions and Kurtz gave his usual answers.

Peg O’Toole was an attractive woman in her late thirties—overweight by current standards of perfection but all the more attractive in Kurtz’s eyes for that, with long, auburn hair, green eyes, a taste for expensive but conservative clothing, and a Sig Pro 9mm semiautomatic pistol in her purse. Kurtz knew the make because he’d seen the weapon.

He liked O’Toole—and not just for helping him out of the frame-up a year ago this coming November—but also because she was as no-nonsense and non-condescending as a parole officer can be with a “client.” He’d never had an erotic thought about her, but that wasn’t her fault. There was just something about the act of imagining an ex-police officer with her clothes off that worked on Kurtz like a 1,000-cc dose of anti-Viagra.

“Are you still working with Mrs. DeMarco on the Sweetheart Search dot com business?” asked O’Toole. As a felon, Kurtz couldn’t be licensed by the state of New York for his former job—P.I.—but he could operate this business of finding old high school flames, first via the Internet—that was his secretary Arlene’s part of it—then by a bit of elementary skip-tracing. That was Kurtz’s part of it.

“I tracked down a former high school football captain this morning in North Tonawanda,” said Kurtz, “to hand him a handwritten letter from his former cheerleader girlfriend.”

O’Toole looked up from her notes and removed her tortoiseshell glasses. “Did the football hero still look like a football hero?” she asked, showing only the faintest trace of a smile.

“They were both from Kenmore West’s Class of ’61,” said Kurtz. “The guy was fat, bald, and lived in a trailer that’s seen better days. It had a Confederate flag hung on the side of it and a clapped-out ’72 Camaro parked outside.”

O’Toole winced. “How about the cheerleader?”

Kurtz shrugged. “If there was a photo, it was in the sealed letter. But I can guess.”

“Let’s not,” said O’Toole. She put her glasses back on and glanced back at her form. “How is the WeddingBells-dot-com business going?”

“Slowly,” said Kurtz. “Arlene has the whole Internet thing set up—all the contacts and contracts with dressmakers, cardmakers, cakemakers, musicians, churches and reception halls set in place—and money’s coming in, but I’m not sure how much. I really don’t have much to do with that side of the business.”

“But you’re an investor and co-owner?” said the parole officer. There was no hint of sarcasm in her voice.

“Sort of,” said Kurtz. He knew that O’Toole had seen the articles of incorporation during a visit the parole officer had made to their new office in June. “I roll over some of my income from SweetheartSearch back into WeddingBells and get a cut in return.” Kurtz paused. He wondered how the felons and shankmeisters and Aryan Brotherhood boys in the exercise yard at Attica would react if they heard him say that. The D-Block Mosque guys would probably drop the price on his head from $15,000 to $10,000 out of sheer contempt.

O’Toole took off her glasses again. “I’ve been thinking of using Mrs. DeMarco’s services.”

Kurtz had to blink at that. “For WeddingBells? To set up all the details of a wedding online?”

“Yes.”

“Ten percent discount to personal acquaintances,” said Kurtz. “I mean, you’ve met Arlene.”

“I know what you meant, Mr. Kurtz.” O’Toole put her glasses back on. “You still have a room at…what is the hotel’s name? Harbor Inn?”

“Yes.” Kurtz’s old flophouse hotel, the Royal Delaware Arms near downtown, had been shut down in July by the city inspectors. Only the bar of the huge old building remained open and the word was that the only customers there were the rats. Kurtz needed an address for the parole board, and the Harbor Inn served as one. He hadn’t gotten around to telling O’Toole that the little hotel on the south side was actually boarded up and abandoned or that he’d leased the entire building for less than the price of his room at the old Delaware Arms.

“It’s at the intersection of Ohio and Chicago Streets?”

“Right.”

“I’d like to drop by and just look at it next week if you don’t mind,” said the parole officer. “Just to verify your address.”

Shit, he thought. “Sure,” he said.

O’Toole sat back and Kurtz thought that the short interview was over. The meetings had been getting more and more pro forma in recent months. He wondered if Officer O’Toole was becoming more laid back after the hot summer just past and with the pleasant autumn just winding down—the leaves on the only tree visible outside her window were a brilliant orange but ready to blow off.

“You seem to have recovered completely from your automobile accident last winter,” said the parole officer. “I haven’t seen even a hint of a limp the last few visits.”

“Yeah, pretty much full recovery,” said Kurtz. His “automobile accident” the previous February had included being knifed, thrown out of a third story window, and crashing through a plaster portico at the old Buffalo train station, but he hadn’t seen any pressing need for the probation office to know the details. The cover story had been a pain for Kurtz, since he’d had to sell his perfectly good twelve-year-old Volvo—he could hardly be seen driving around in the car he was supposed to have wrecked up on a lonely stretch of winter highway—and now he was driving a much older red Pinto. He missed the Volvo.

“You grew up around Buffalo, didn’t you, Mr. Kurtz?”

He didn’t react, but he felt the skin tighten on his face. O’Toole knew his personal history from the dossier on her desktop, and she’d never ventured into his pre-Attica history before. What’d I do?

He nodded.

“I’m not asking professionally,” said Peg O’Toole. “I just have a minor mystery—very minor—that I need solved, and I think I need someone who grew up here.”

“You didn’t grow up here?” asked Kurtz. Most people who still lived in Buffalo had.

“I was born here, but we moved away when I was three,” she said, opening the bottom right drawer of her desk and moving some things aside. “I moved back eleven years ago when I joined the Buffalo P.D.” She brought out a white envelope. “Now I need the advice of a native and a private investigator.”

Kurtz stared flatly at her. “I’m not a private investigator,” he said, his voice flatter than his gaze.

“Not licensed,” agreed O’Toole, evidently not intimidated by his cold stare or tone. “Not after serving time for manslaughter. But everything I’ve read or been told suggests you were an excellent P.I.”

Kurtz almost reacted to this. What the hell is she after?

She removed three photographs from the envelope and slid them across the desk. “I wondered if you might know where this is—or was?”

Kurtz looked at the photos. They were color, standard snapshot size, no borders, no date on the back, so they’d been taken sometime in the last couple of decades. The first photograph showed a broken and battered Ferris wheel, some cars missing, rising above bare trees on a wooded hilltop. Beyond the abandoned Ferris wheel was a distant valley and the hint of what might be a river. The sky was low and gray. The second photo showed a dilapidated bumper-car pavilion in an overgrown meadow. The pavilion’s roof had partially collapsed and there were overturned and rusted bumper cars on the pavilion floor and scattered outside among the brittle winter or late-autumn weeds. One of the cars—Number 9 emblazoned on its side in fading gold script—lay upside down in an icy puddle. The final photograph was a close-up of a merry-go-round or carousel horse’s head, paint faded, its muzzle and mouth smashed away and showing rotted wood.

Kurtz looked at each of the photographs again and said, “No idea.”

O’Toole nodded as if she expected that answer. “Did you used to go to any amusement parks around here when you were a kid?”

Kurtz had to smile at that His childhood hadn’t included any amusement park visits.

O’Toole actually blushed. “I mean, where did people go to amusement parks in Western New York in those days, Mr. Kurtz? I know that Six Flags at Darien Lake wasn’t here then.”

“How do you know this place is from way back then?” asked Kurtz. “It could have been abandoned a year ago. Vandals work fast.”

O’Toole nodded. “But the rust and…it just seems old. From the seventies at least Maybe the sixties.”

Kurtz shrugged and handed the photos back. “People used to go up to Crystal Beach, on the Canadian side.”

O’Toole nodded again. “But that was right on the lake, right? No hills, no woods?”

“Right,” said Kurtz. “And it wasn’t abandoned like that. When the time came, they tore it down and sold the rides and concessions.”

The parole officer took off her glasses and stood. “Thank you, Mr. Kurtz. I appreciate your help.” She held out her hand as she always did. It had startled Kurtz the first time she’d done it. They shook hands as they always did at the end of their weekly interviews. She had a good, strong grip. Then she validated his parking ticket. That was the other half of the weekly ritual.

He was opening the door to leave when she said, “And I may really give Mrs. DeMarco a call about the other thing.”

Kurtz assumed that “the other thing” was the parole officer’s wedding. “Yeah,” he said. “You’ve got our office number and website address.”

Later, he would think that if he hadn’t stopped to take a leak in the first-floor restroom, everything would have been different But what the hell—he had to take a leak, so he did. It didn’t take reading Marcus Aurelius to know that everything you did made everything different, and if you dwelt on it, you’d go nuts.

He came down the stairway into the parking garage corridor and there was Peg O’Toole, green dress, high heels, purse and all, just out of the elevator and opening the heavy door to the garage. She paused when she saw Kurtz. He paused. There was no way that a probation officer wanted to walk into an underground parking garage with one of her clients, and Kurtz wasn’t keen on the idea either. But there was also no way out of it unless he went back up the stairs or—even more absurdly—stepped into the elevator. Damn.

O’Toole broke the frozen minute by smiling and holding the door open for him.

Kurtz nodded and walked past her into the cool semidarkness. She could let him get a dozen paces in front of her if she wanted. He wouldn’t look back. Hell, he’d been in for manslaughter, not rape.

She didn’t wait long. He heard the clack of her heels a few paces behind him, heading to his right.

“Wait!” cried Kurtz, turning toward her and raising his right hand.

O’Toole froze, looked startled, and lifted her purse where, he knew, she usually carried the Sig Pro.

The goddamned lights had been broken. When he’d come in less than half an hour earlier, there had been fluorescent lights every twenty-five feet or so, but half of those were out The pools of darkness between the remaining lights were wide and black.

“Back!” shouted Kurtz, pointing toward the door from which they’d just emerged.

Looking at him as if he were crazy, but not visibly afraid, Peg O’Toole put her hand in her purse and started to pull the Sig Pro.

The shooting started.

CHAPTER

TWO

When Kurtz awoke in the hospital, he knew at once that he’d been shot, but he couldn’t remember when or where it happened, or who did it He had the feeling that someone had been with him but he couldn’t bring back any details and any attempt to do so hammered barbed spikes through his brain.

Kurtz knew the varieties and vintages of pain the way some men knew wines, but this pain in his head was already beyond the judging stage and well into the realm where screaming was the only sane response. But he didn’t scream. It would hurt too much.

The hospital room was mostly dark but even the dim light from the bedside table hurt his eyes. Everything had a nimbus around it and when he attempted to focus his eyes, nausea rose up through the pain like a shark fin cutting through oily water. He solved that by closing his eyes. Now there were only the inevitable, ambient hospital sounds from beyond the closed door—intercom announcements, the squeak of rubber soles on tile, inaudible conversations in that muffled tone heard only in hospitals and betting parlors—but each and every one of these sounds, including the rasp of his own breathing, was too loud for Joe Kurtz.

He started to raise his hand to rub the right side of his head—the epicenter of this universe of pain—but his hand jarred to a halt next to the metal bedrail.

It took Kurtz two more tries and several groggy seconds of mental effort and the pain of opening his eyes again before he realized why his right arm wouldn’t work; he was handcuffed to the metal frame of the hospital bed.

It took him another minute or two before he realized that his left hand and arm were free. Slowly, laboriously, Kurtz reached that hand across his face—eyes squinted to keep the nausea at bay—and touched the right side of his head, just above his ear, where the pain was broadcasting like the concentric radio-wave ripples in the beginning of one of those old RKO films.

He could feel that the right side of his head was a mass of bandages and tape. But when he saw that there were only two IVs visible punched into his body and only one monitoring machine beeping a few feet away, and no doctors or nurses huddled around with their resuscitation crash cart, he figured he wasn’t on the verge of checking out yet. Either that, or they’d already given up on him, issued a Do Not Resuscitate order, and gone off for coffee to leave him to die here in the dark.

“Fuck it,” said Kurtz and winced as the pain went from 7.8 to 8.6 on his own private Agony Richter Scale. He was used to pain, but this was…silly.

He dropped his hand on his chest, closed his eyes, and allowed himself to float out of the line of fire.

Mr. Kurtz? Mr. Kurtz?”

Kurtz awoke with the same blurred vision, same nausea, but different pain. It was worse. Some fool was pulling his eyelids back and shining a light in his eyes.

“Mr. Kurtz?” The face making the sound was brown, male, middle-aged and mild-looking behind black-rimmed glasses. He was wearing a white coat. “I’m Dr. Singh, Mr. Kurtz. I dealt with your injuries in the ER and just came from surgery on your friend.”

Kurtz got the face into focus. He wanted to say “What friend?” but it wasn’t worth trying to speak yet. Not yet.

“You were struck in the right side of your head by a bullet, Mr. Kurtz, but it did not penetrate your skull,” said Singh in his mild, singsong voice that sounded like three chainsaws roaring to Kurtz.

Superman, thought Kurtz. Fucking bullets bounce right off.

“Why?” he said.

“What, Mr. Kurtz?”

Kurtz had to close his eyes at the thought of speaking again. Forcing himself to articulate, he said, “Why…didn’t…bullet…penetrate?”

Singh nodded his understanding. “It was a small caliber bullet, Mr. Kurtz. A twenty-two. Before it struck you, it had passed through the upper arm of…of the person with you…and ricocheted off the concrete pillar behind you. It was considerably flattened and much of its kinetic energy had been expended. Still, if you had been turning your head to the right rather than to the left when it struck you, we would be extracting it from your brain as we speak—probably during an autopsy.”

All in all, thought Kurtz, more information than he had needed at the moment.

“As it is,” continued Singh, the soft singsong voice sawing away through Kurtz’s skull, “you have a moderate-to-severe concussion and a subcranial hematoma that does not require trepanning at this time, your left eye will not dilate, blood has drained down beneath your eyes and the whites of your eyes are very bloodshot—but that is not important. We’ll assess motor skills and secondary effects in the morning.”

“Who…” began Kurtz. He wasn’t even sure what he was going to ask. Who shot me? Who was with me? Who’s going to pay for this?

“The police are here, Mr. Kurtz,” interrupted Dr. Singh. “It’s the reason we haven’t administered any painkiller since you regained consciousness. They need to talk to you.”

Kurtz didn’t turn his head to look, but when the doctor moved aside he could see the two detectives, plainclothes, one male, one female, one black, one white. Kurtz didn’t know the black male. He had once been in love with the white female.

The black detective, dressed nattily in tweed, vest, and school tie, stepped closer. “Joseph Kurtz, I’m Detective Paul Kemper. My partner and I are investigating the shooting of you and Parole Officer Margaret O’Toole…” began the man in an almost avuncular resonant voice.

On, shit, thought Kurtz. He closed his eyes and remembered O’Toole opening a door for him.

“…can be used against you in a court of law,” the man was saying. “If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand your rights as I’ve just explained them to you?”

Kurtz said something through the pain.

“What?” said Detective Kemper. Kurtz changed his mind. The man’s voice wasn’t nearly as friendly or avuncular-sounding now.

“Didn’t shoot her,” repeated Kurtz.

“Did you understand your rights as I explained them to you?”

“Yeah.”

“And do you wish an attorney at this time?”

I wish some Darvocet or morphine at this time, thought Kurtz. “Yeah… I mean, no. No attorney.”

“You’ll talk to us now?”

How many fucking times are you going to ask me? thought Kurtz. He realized that he’d spoken this aloud only when the male detective got a stern don’t-fuck-with-me cop look on his face and the female detective still standing against the far wall chuckled. Kurtz knew that chuckle.

“Why were you in the garage with Officer O’Toole?” asked Kemper. The detective’s voice sounded totally un-avuncular this time.

“Coincidence.” Kurtz had never noticed how many syllables were in that word before today. All four of them hit him like hot spikes behind the eyes. He needed shorter words.

“Did you fire her weapon?”

“I don’t remember,” said Kurtz, sounding like every perp he’d ever questioned.

Kemper sighed and shot a glance at his partner. Kurtz also looked at her and watched her look back at him. She obviously recognized him. She must have recognized his name before they started this interview. Is that why she wasn’t speaking? She was, Kurtz was startled to realize through the pain in his head, as beautiful as ever. More beautiful.

“Did you see the assailant or assailants?” asked Kemper.

“I don’t remember.”

“Did you enter the garage as part of a conspiracy to shoot and kill Officer O’Toole?”

Kurtz just looked at him. He knew that he was stupid with pain and concussion at the moment, but nobody was that stupid.

Dr. Singh filled the silence. “Detectives, a concussion of this severity is often accompanied by memory loss of the accident that created it.”

“Uh-huh,” said Kemper, closing his notebook. “This was no accident. Doctor. And this guy remembers everything he wants to remember.”

“Paul,” said the female detective, “leave him alone. We have the tapes. Let Kurtz get some painkiller and sleep and we’ll talk to him in the morning.”

“He’ll be all lawyered up in the morning,” said Kemper.

The woman shook her head. “No he won’t.”

It’d been twenty years since Kurtz had last seen Rigby King—what was her married name? Something Arabic, he thought—but she still looked like the Rigby he’d known at Father Baker’s and again in Thailand. Brown eyes, full figure, short dark hair, and a smile as quick and radiant as the gymnast she’d been named for.

Kemper left the room and Rigby came to the side of the bed and raised a hand as if she was going to squeeze Kurtz’s shoulder. Instead she gripped the metal railing of the hospital bed and shook it slightly, making Kurtz’s handcuffed wrist and arm sway.

“Get some sleep, Joe.”

“Yeah.”

When they were both gone, Singh called in a nurse and they injected something into the IV port.

“Something for the pain and a mild sedative,” said the doctor. “We’ve kept you semi-conscious and under observation long enough to let you sleep now without worrying unduly about the concussion’s effects.”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz.

As soon as the two left, Kurtz reached down, ripped away gauze and tape, and pulled the IV out of his left arm.

Joe Kurtz had seen what could happen to a man doped up and helpless in a hospital bed. Besides, he had a lot of thinking to do through the pain before morning came.

CHAPTER

THREE

The two men came in the night, entering his room sometime after three A.M.

Kurtz had nothing to defend himself with—he would have stolen a knife and hidden it under his pillows if the hospital had provided him with a dinner, but they hadn’t fed him, so he was still handcuffed and defenseless. He readied himself the only way be could think of—sliding the long intravenous needle on its flexible tube down into his left hand and focusing his energy to swing it into an attacker’s eye if he got close enough. But if one or both of these men pulled a gun, Kurtz’s only hope was to throw himself to his left and try to tip the entire hospital bed onto himself while screaming bloody murder.

Squinting through his headache pain at the two shadows in the doorway, Kurtz wasn’t sure he’d have the strength to tip the bed over. Besides, mattresses, even hospital mattresses, were notoriously poor armor against bullets.

There was a nurse-call button clipped to his pillow above Kurtz’s head, but his right hand couldn’t reach it because of the handcuffs and he wasn’t about to release or reveal the IV needle in his left hand.

Kurtz could see the two men silhouetted in the doorway in the minute before they entered the room, and then the dim glow from medical monitors illuminated them. One man was tall, very thin, and Asian; his black hair was combed straight back and he was wearing an expensive dark suit. His hands were empty. The closer man was in a wheelchair, wheeling himself toward Kurtz’s bed with thrusts of his powerful arms.

Kurtz didn’t pretend he was asleep. He watched the man in the wheelchair come in. Any hopes that it was an errant hospital patient out of his bed at three A.M. disappeared as Kurtz saw that this man was also wearing a suit and tie. He was old—Kurtz saw the thinning gray hair cut in a buzz cut and the lines and scars on the man’s tanned face, but his eyebrows were jet black, his chin strong, and his expression fierce. The old man’s upper body looked large and powerful, his hands huge, but even in the dim light, Kurtz could see that his trousers were covering wasted sticks.

The Asian man’s expression was neutral and he stayed two feet behind the big man in the chair.

The wheels of the chair squeeked on tile until the wasted legs bumped into Kurtz’s bed. Working to focus, Kurtz stared past his own handcuffed wrist and into the old man’s cold, blue eyes. All Kurtz could do now was hope that the visit was a friendly one.

“You miserable lowlife useless scumbag piece of shit,” hissed the old man. “It should’ve been you who got the bullet in the brain.”

So much for the friendly visit theory.

The big man in the wheelchair raised his huge hand and slapped Kurtz in the side of the head, right where the bandages and tape were massed above the wound.

Riding the pain for the next few seconds was probably a lot like riding the old roller coaster at Crystal Beach while standing up. Kurtz wanted to throw up and pass out, in that order, but he forced himself to do neither. He opened his eyes and slipped the long IV needle between the third and fourth fingers of his left hand the way he’d learned how to grip a handleless shank-blade in Attica.

“You worthless fuck,” said the man in the chair, his voice loud now. “If she dies, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.” He slapped Kurtz again, a powerful, open-handed smash across the mouth, but this wasn’t nearly so painful. Kurtz turned his head back and watched the old man’s eyes and the Asian’s hands.

“Major,” the Asian said softly. The tall man gently put his hands on the grips of the wheelchair and pulled the old man three feet back. “We have to go.”

The Major’s mad, blue-eyed stare never left Kurtz’s face. Kurtz didn’t mind this. He’d been hate-stared at by experts. But he had to admit that this old man was a finalist in that contest.

“Major,” whispered the tall man and the man in the chair finally broke the gaze, but not before lifting his huge, blunt forefinger and shaking it at Kurtz as if to make a promise. Kurtz saw that the finger was bloody a second before he felt the blood flowing down his right temple.

The Asian wheeled the old man around and pushed him out the door into the dimly lighted hallway. Neither man looked back.

Kurtz didn’t think he’d go to sleep after that—or, rather, lose consciousness, since real sleep wasn’t an option above this baseline of pain—but he must have, because he woke up with James Bond looking down at him in the early morning light.

This wasn’t the real James Bond—Sean Connery—but that newest guy: dark hair blowdried and combed back, sardonic smile, impeccable suit from Saville Row or somewhere—Kurtz had no idea what a Saville Row suit looked like—plus a gleaming white shirt with spread collar, tasteful paisley tie sporting a Windsor knot, pocket square ruffled perfectly and not so gauche as to match the tie, tasteful Rolex just visible beneath the perfectly shot starched cuff.

“Mr. Kurtz?” said James Bond, “My name is Kennedy. Brian Kennedy.”

Kurtz thought that he did also look a bit like that Kennedy scion who’d flown his plane and passengers upside-down into the sea.

Brian Kennedy started to offer Kurtz a heavy cream business card, noticed the handcuffs, and without interrupting his motion, set the card on the bedside table.

“How are you feeling, Mr. Kurtz?” asked Kennedy.

“Who are you?” managed Kurtz. He thought he must be feeling better. These three syllables had made his vision dance with pain, but hadn’t made him want to puke.

The handsome man touched his card. “I own and run Empire State Security and Executive Protection. Our Buffalo branch provided security cameras for the parking garage in which yesterday’s shooting took place.”

Every other light had been knocked out when we came into the garage, thought Kurtz. That tipped me. The memory of the shooting was seeping back into his bruised brain like sludge under a closed door.

He said nothing to Kennedy-Bond. Was the man here because of some lawsuit potential to his company? Kurtz was having trouble working this out through the pain so he stared and let Kennedy keep talking.

“We’ve given the police the original surveillance tape from the garage,” continued Kennedy. “The footage doesn’t show the shooters, but it’s obvious that your actions—and Officer O’Toole’s—are visible and clearly above suspicion.”

Then why am I still cuffed? thought Kurtz. Instead, he managed to say, “How is she? O’Toole?”

Brian Kennedy’s face was James-Bond cool as he said, “She was hit three times. All twenty-two slugs. One broke a left rib. Another passed through her upper arm, ricocheted, and hit you. But one caught her in the temple and lodged in her brain, left frontal lobe. They got it out after five hours of surgery and had to take some of the damaged brain tissue out as well. She’s in a partially induced coma—whatever that means—but it looks as if she has a chance for survival, none for total recovery.”

“I want to see the tape,” said Kurtz. “You said you gave the cops the original, which means you made a copy.”

Kennedy cocked his head. “Why do you…oh, you don’t remember the attack, do you? You were telling the detectives the truth.”

Kurtz waited.

“All right,” said Kennedy. “Give me a call at the Buffalo number on the card whenever you’re ready to…”

“Today,” said Kurtz. “This afternoon.”

Kennedy paused at the door and smiled that cynical, bemused James Bond smile. “I don’t think you’ll be…” he began and then paused to look at Kurtz. “All right, Mr. Kurtz,” he said, “it certainly won’t please the investigating officers if they ever discover I’ve done this, but we’ll have the tape ready to show you when you stop by our offices this afternoon. I guess you’ve earned the right to see it.”

Kennedy started through the door but then stopped and turned back again. “Peg and I are engaged,” he said softly. “We’d planned to get married in April.”

Then he was gone and a nurse was bustling in with a bedpan jug and something that might be breakfast.

It’s bloody Grand Central Station here, thought Kurtz. Dr. Singh came in—after Kurtz had ignored everything on the breakfast tray except the knife—to shine a penlight in his eyes, check under the bandages, tut-tut at all the bleeding visible—Kurtz didn’t mention the cuff in the head from Mr. Wheelchair—to direct the nurse in replacing the gauze and tape, to tell Kurtz that they’d be keeping him another twenty-four hours for observation, and to order more X rays of his skull. And finally Singh said that the officer who had been guarding this end of the hall was gone.

“When did he leave?” asked Kurtz. Sitting propped up against the pillows, he found it was easier to focus his eyes this morning. The pain in his head continued like a heavy sleet-storm against a metal roof, but that was better than the steel spikes being driven into his skull the night before. Red and yellow circles of pain from the penlight exercise still danced in his vision.

“I wasn’t on duty,” said Singh, “but I believe around midnight.”

Before Wheelchair and Bruce Lee showed up, thought Kurtz. He said, “Any chance of getting these cuffs off? I wasn’t able to eat my breakfast left-handed.”

Singh looked physically pained, his brown eyes sad behind the glasses. “I’m truly sorry, Mr. Kurtz. I believe that one of the detectives is already downstairs. I’m sure they will release you.”

She was and she did.

Ten minutes after Singh bustled out into the now-busy hospital corridor, Rigby King showed up. She was wearing a blue linen blazer, white t-shirt, new jeans, and running shoes. She carried a 9-mm dock on her belt on the right side, concealed under the blazer until she leaned forward. She said nothing while she unlocked his cuffs, snapping them onto the back of her belt like the veteran cop she was. Kurtz didn’t want to speak first, but he needed information.

“I had visitors during the night,” he said. “After you pulled your uniform off hallway guard.”

Rigby folded her arms and frowned slightly. “Who?”

“You tell me,” said Kurtz. “Old guy in a wheelchair and a tall Asian.”

Rigby nodded but said nothing.

“You going to tell me who they are?” asked Kurtz. “The old man in the wheelchair slapped me up the side of the head. Considering the circumstances, I should know who’s mad at me.”

“The man in the wheelchair must have been Major O’Toole, retired,” said Rigby King. “The Vietnamese man is probably his business colleague, Vinh or Trinh or something.”

“Major O’Toole,” said Kurtz. “The parole officer’s father?”

“Uncle. The famous Big John O’Toole’s older brother, Michael.”

“Big John?” said Kurtz.

“Peg O’Toole’s old man was a hero cop in this city, Joe. He died in the line of duty about four years ago, not long before he would’ve retired. I guess you didn’t hear about it up in Attica.”

“I guess not.”

“You say he hit you?”

“Slapped,” said Kurtz.

“He must think you had something to do with his niece getting shot in the head.”

“I didn’t.”

“So you remember things now?”

Her voice still did strange things to him—that mixture of softness and rasp. Or maybe it was the concussion acting on him.

“No,” said Kurtz. “I don’t remember anything clearly after leaving the P.O.’s office after the interview. But I know that whatever happened to O’Toole in the garage, I didn’t make it happen.”

“How do you know that?”

Kurtz held up his freed right hand.

Rigby smiled ever so slightly at that and he remembered why they’d nicknamed her Rigby. Her smile was like sunlight.

“Did you have any problems with Agent Peg O’Toole?” she asked.

Kurtz shook his head and then had to hold it with both hands.

“You in a lot of pain, Joe?” Her tone was neutral enough, but seemed to carry a slight subtext of concern.

“Remember that guy you had to use your baton on in Patpong in the alley behind Pussies Galore?” he said.

“Bangkok?” said Rigby. “You mean the guy who stole the sex performer’s razor blades and tried to use them on me?”

“Yeah.”

He could see her remembering. “I got written up for that by that REMF loot…whatshisname, the asshole…”

“Sheridan.”

“Yeah,” said Rigby. “Excessive force. Just because the guy I brought in had a little tiny bit of brains leaking out his ear.”

“Well, that guy had nothing on how I feel today,” said Kurtz.

“Tough situation,” said Rigby. There was no undercurrent of concern audible now. Kurtz knew that the words could be abbreviated ‘T.S.’ She walked to the door. “If you can remember Lieutenant Sheridan, you can remember yesterday, Joe.”

He shrugged.

“When you do, you call us. Kemper or me. Got it?”

“I want to go home and take an aspirin,” said Kurtz. Trying to put just a bit of whine in his voice.

“Sorry. The docs want to keep you here another day. Your clothes and wallet have been…stored…until you’re ready to travel.” She started to leave.

“Rig?” he said.

She paused, but frowned, as if not pleased to hear him use the diminutive of her old nickname.

“I didn’t shoot O’Toole and I don’t know who did.”

“All right, Joe,” she said. “But you know, don’t you, that Kemper and I are going on the assumption that she wasn’t the target That someone was trying to kill you in that garage and poor O’Toole just got in the way.”

“Yeah,” Kurtz said wearily. “I know.”

She left without another word. Kurtz waited a few minutes, got laboriously out of bed—hanging onto the metal railing a minute to get his balance—and then padded around the room and bathroom looking for his clothes, even though he knew they wouldn’t be there. Since he’d ignored Nurse Ratchet’s bedpan jar, he paused in the toilet long enough to take a leak. Even that hurt his head.

Then Kurtz got the IV stand on wheels and pushed it out ahead of him into the hallway. Nothing in the universe looked so pathetic and harmless as a man in a hospital gown, ass showing through the opening in the back, shuffling along shoving an IV stand. One nurse, not his, stopped to ask him where he was going.

“X ray,” said Kurtz. “They said to take the elevator.”

“Heavens, you shouldn’t be walking,” said the nurse, a young blonde. “I’ll get an orderly and a gurney. You go back to your room and lie down.”

“Sure,” said Kurtz.

The first room he looked in had two old ladies in the two beds. The second had a young boy. The father, sitting in a chair next to the bed, obviously awaiting the doctor’s early rounds, looked up at Kurtz with the gaze of a deer in a hunter’s flashlight beam—alarmed, hopeful, resigned, waiting for the shot.

“Sorry,” said Kurtz and shuffled off to the next room.

The old man in the third room was obviously dying. The curtain was pulled as far out as it could be, he was the only occupant of the double room, and the chart on the foot of his bed had a small blue slip of paper with the letters DNR on it. The old man’s breathing, even on a respirator, was very close to a Cheyne-Stokes death rattle.

Kurtz found the clothes folded and stored neatly on the bottom shelf of the small closet—an old man’s outfit—corded trousers that were only a little too small, plaid shirt, socks, scuffed Florsheims that were slightly too large for Kurtz, and a raincoat that looked like a castoff from Peter Falk’s closet. Luckily, the old guy had also brought a hat—a Bogey fedora with authentic sweat stains and the brim already snapped down in a perfect crease. Kurtz wondered what relative would be cleaning this closet out in a day or so and if they’d miss the hat.

He walked to the elevators with much more spring in his stride than he was really capable of, glancing neither left nor right. Rather than stopping at the lobby, he took the elevator all the way to the parking garage and then followed the open ramp up and out into brisk air and sunlight.

There was a cab near the emergency entrance and Kurtz got the door opened before the cabbie saw him coming and then collapsed into the back seat He gave the driver his home address.

The cabbie turned, squinted, and said around his toothpick. “I was supposed to pick up Mr. Goldstein and his daughter.”

“I’m Goldstein,” said Kurtz. “My daughter’s visiting someone else in the hospital for a while. Go on.”

“Mr. Goldstein’s supposed to be an old man in his eighties. Only one leg.”

“The miracles of modern medicine,” said Kurtz. He looked the cabbie in the eye. “Drive.”

CHAPTER

FOUR

Kurtz’s new home, the Harbor Inn, was an abandoned, triangular three-story old bar and bargeman’s hotel standing alone amidst weed-filled fields south of downtown Buffalo. To get to it, you had to cross the Buffalo River on a one-lane metal bridge between abandoned grain elevators. The bridge rose vertically as a single unit for barge traffic—almost nonexistent now—and a sign on the superstructure informed snowplows: “Raise Plow Before Crossing.” Once onto what locals called “the Island,” although it wasn’t technically an island, the air smelled of burned Cheerios because the only remaining operating structure amidst the abandoned warehouses and silos was the big General Mills plant between the river and Lake Erie.

The main entrance to the Harbor Inn—still boarded over but boarded now with a lock and hinge—was at the apex of the building’s triangle where Ohio and Chicago Streets came together. There was a ten-foot-tall metal lighthouse hanging out over that entrance, its blue and white paint and the Harbor Inn logo beneath it so rust-flaked that it looked like someone had machine-gunned it. A fading wooden sign on the boarded door read—FOR LEASE, ELICOTT DEVELOPMENT COMPANY and gave a 716 phone number. Beneath that sign was older, even more faded lettering announcing

Chicken Wings—Chili, Sandwiches—Daily Specials.

Kurtz got the extra key from its hiding place, unpadlocked the front door, pulled the board out of his way, stepped in, and locked it all behind him. Only a few glimmers of sunlight came over and under the boards into this triangular main space—the old lobby and restaurant of the inn. Dust, plaster, and broken boards were scattered everywhere except on the path he’d cleared. The air smelled of mold and rot.

To the left of the hallway behind this space was the narrow staircase leading upstairs. Kurtz checked some small telltales and went up, walking slowly and grabbing the railing when the pain in his head made him dizzy.

He’d fixed up three rooms and one bathroom on the second floor, although there were hidey holes and escape routes out of all nine rooms up here. He’d replaced the windows and cleaned up the big triangular room in front—not as his bedroom, that was a smaller room next to it, but as an exercise room, fitted out with a speed bag, heavy bag, a treadmill he’d scavenged from the junk heap behind the Buffalo Athletic Club and repaired, a padded bench, and various weights. Kurtz had never fallen into the bodybuilding fetish so endemic in Attica during his eleven and a half years there—he’d found that strength was fine, but speed and the ability to react fast were more important—but during the last six months he’d been doing a lot of physical therapy. Two of the windows in here looked out on Chicago and Ohio Streets and the abandoned grain silos and factory complex to the west; the center window looked right into the pockmarked lighthouse sign.

His bedroom was nothing special—a mattress, an old wardrobe that now held his suits and clothes—and wooden blinds over the window. The third room had brick and board bookcases against two walls, shelves filled with paperbacks, a faded red carpet, a single floor lamp that Arlene had planned to throw away, and—amazingly—an Eames chair and ottoman that some idiot out in Williamsville had put out for junk pickup. It looked like some eighty-pound cat had gone at the black leather upholstery with its claws, but Kurtz had fixed that with electrical tape.

Kurtz went to the end of the dark hall, stripped out of the old man’s clothes, and took a fast but very hot shower, making sure to keep the spray off his bandages.

After drying off, Kurtz took out his razor, squeezed lather into his palm, and looked at the mirror for the first time.

“Jesus Christ,” he said disgustedly.

The face looking back at him was unshaven and not quite human. The bandages looked bloody again and he could see the shaved patch around them. Blood had drained beneath the skin of his temple and forehead down under his eyes until he had a bright purple raccoon mask. The eyes themselves were almost as bright a red as the soaked-through bandages and he had scrapes and road rash on his left cheek and chin where he must have done a face-plant onto the concrete garage floor. His left eye didn’t look right—as if it weren’t dilating properly.

“Christ,” he muttered again. He wouldn’t be delivering any love letters for SweetheartSearch-dot-com again anytime soon.

Shaved and showered now, somehow feeling lousier and more exhausted for it, he dressed in clean jeans, a black t-shirt, new running shoes, and a leather A-2 jacket he’d once given to his old wino-addict informant and acquaintance, Pruno, but which Pruno had given back, saying that it wasn’t really his style. The jacket was still in pristine condition, obviously never worn by the homeless man.

Kurtz gingerly pulled on the fedora and went into the unfurnished bedroom that adjoined his own. The plaster hadn’t been repaired here and part of the ceiling was falling down. Kurtz reached above the woodwork of the adjoining door, clicked open a panel covered with the same mildewed wallpaper as the rest of the wall, and pulled a .38 S&W from the metal box set in the hole there. The gun was wrapped in a clean rag and smelled of oil. There was a wad of cash in the metal box and Kurtz counted out five hundred dollars from it and set the rest back, pulling the weapon free of the oily rag.

Kurtz checked that all six chambers were loaded, spun the cylinder, tucked the revolver in his waistband, grabbed a handful of cartridges from the box, stuck them in his jacket pocket, and put away the metal container and oily rag, carefully clicking the panel back into place.

He walked back to the triangular front room on the second floor and looked in all directions. It was still a beautiful blue-sky autumn day; Ohio and Chicago Streets were empty of traffic. Nothing but weeds stood in the hundreds of yards of fields between him and the abandoned silos and mills to the southwest.

Kurtz flipped on a video monitor that was part of a surveillance system he and Arlene had used in their former office in the basement of an X-rated-video store. The two cameras mounted at the rear of the Harbor Inn building showed the overgrown yards and streets and cracked sidewalks there empty.

Kurtz grabbed his spare cell phone from a shelf by the speed bag and punched in a private number. He talked briefly, said “Fifteen minutes,” broke the connection, and then redialed for a cab.

The public basketball courts in Delaware Park showcased some of the finest athletic talent in Western New York, and even though this was a Thursday morning, a school day, the courts were busy with black men and boys playing impressive basketball.

Kurtz saw Angelina Farino Ferrara as soon as he stepped out of the cab. She was wearing a tailored sweatsuit, but not so tailored that he could make out the .45 Compact Witness that he guessed she still carried in a quick-release holster under her sweatshirt. The woman looked fit enough to be on the courts herself—but she was too short and too white, even with her dark hair and olive complexion, to be invited by those playing there now.

Kurtz immediately picked out her bodyguards and could have even if they hadn’t been the only other white guys in this part of the park. One of the men was ten yards to her left, studiously studying squirrel activity, and the other was strolling fifteen yards to her right, almost to the courts. Her bodyguards from the previous winter had been lumpish and proletarian, from Jersey, but these two were as thin, well-dressed, and blowdried as California male models. One of them started crossing toward Kurtz as if to intercept and frisk him, but Angelina Farino Ferrara waved the man off.

As he got closer, Kurtz opened his arms as if to hug her, but really to show that his hands and jacket pockets were free of weapons.

“Holy fuck, Kurtz,” she said when he got to within four feet and stopped.

“Nice to see you, too.”

“You look sort of like The Spirit.”

“Who?”

“A comic strip character from the forties. He wore a fedora and a blue mask, too. He used to have his own comics page in the Herald Tribune. My father used to collect them in a big leather scrapbook during the war.”

“Uh-huh,” said Kurtz. “Interesting.” Meaning—can we cut the crap?

Angelina Farino Ferrara shook her head, chuckled, and began walking east toward the zoo. White mothers were herding their preschoolers toward the zoo gates, casting nervous glances toward the oblivious blacks playing basketball. Most of the males on the courts were stripped to shorts even on this chilly autumn day and their flesh looked oiled with sweat.

“So I heard that you and your parole officer were shot yesterday,” said Angelina. “Somehow you just took it on your thick skull while she took it in the brain. Congratulations, Kurtz. You always were nine-tenths luck to one-tenth skill or common sense.”

Kurtz couldn’t argue with that. “How’d you hear about it so fast?”

“Cops on the arm.”

Of course, thought Kurtz. The concussion must be making him stupid.

“So who did it?” asked the woman. She had an oval face out of a Donatello sculpture, intelligent brown eyes, shoulder-length black hair cut straight and tied back this morning, and a runner’s physique. She was also the first female acting don in the history of the American mafia—a group that hadn’t evolved high enough on the political-correctness ladder even to recognize terms like “female acting don.” Whenever Kurtz found himself thinking that she was especially attractive, he would remember her telling him that she’d drowned her newborn baby boy—the product of a rape by Emilio Gonzaga, the head of the rival Buffalo mob family—in the Belice River in Sicily. Her voice had sounded calm when she’d told him, almost satisfied.

“I was hoping you could tell me who shot me,” said Kurtz.

“You didn’t see them?” She’d stopped walking. Leaves swirled around her legs. Her two bodyguards kept their distance but they also kept their eyes on Kurtz.

“No.”

“Well, let’s see,” said Angelina. “Do you have any enemies who might want to do you harm?”

Kurtz waited while she had her little laugh.

“D-Block Mosque still has its fatwa out on you,” she said. “And the Seneca Street Social Club still thinks you had something to do with their fearless leader, whatshisname, Malcolm Kibunte, going over the Falls last winter.”

Kurtz waited.

“Plus there’s some oversized Indian with a serious limp who’s telling everyone who’ll listen that he’s going to kill you. Big Bore Redhawk. Is that a real name?”

“You should know,” said Kurtz. “You hired the idiot.”

“Actually, Stevie did.” She was referring to her brother.

“How is Little Skag?” said Kurtz.

Angelina shrugged. “He was never returned to general population after that shank job in Attica last spring. Cons don’t like Short Eyes. Even scum has to have its scum to look down on. Best bet is that Little Stevie’s under federal protection in a country club somewhere.”

“His lawyer would know,” said Kurtz.

“His lawyer had an unfortunate accident in his home in June. He didn’t survive.”

Kurtz looked at her carefully but Angelina Farino Ferrara’s expression revealed nothing. Her brother had been her only rival to the control of the Farino crime family, and the loss of his lawyer would have cramped Little Skag’s ability to operate at least as much as the shanking and beatings had, which had come about because of a pedophile story that Angelina had leaked to the media.

“Who else might want some of me?” said Kurtz. “Anyone I haven’t heard about?”

“What would I be getting in return?”

Kurtz shrugged. “What would you want?”

“That jacket,” said Angelina Farino Ferrara.

Kurtz looked down. “You want my jacket in exchange for information?”

“No, dipshit. That was one of Sophia’s post-fuck presents. She bought them by the gross from Avirex.”

Shit, thought Kurtz. He’d forgotten that Angelina’s now-dead younger sister had given him this bomber jacket. It was one of the reasons he’d given it to Pruno. And, indeed, it had been a post-fuck going-away present He wondered now if this concussion had made him too stupid to go out in public. Right, said the more cynical part of his bruised brain, blame it on the concussion.

“I’ll give you the jacket right now if you tell me who else might have been in that parking garage with me yesterday,” he said.

“I don’t want the jacket,” Angelina said. “Nor the sex that made Sophia give you the damn thing. I just want to hire you the way she did. The way Papa did.”

Kurtz blinked at this. When he’d gotten out of Attica a year ago, he’d tried out the theory that since he couldn’t work as a licensed private investigator any longer, he might find dishonest but steady work doing investigations for shady characters like Don Farino and then the don’s daughter, Sophia. It hadn’t worked out so well for Kurtz, but even less well for the dead don and his dead daughter.

“Are you nuts?” said Kurtz.

Angelina Farino Ferrara shrugged. “Those are my terms for information.”

“Then you are nuts. You want to hire me in what capacity? Hairdresser to your boys?” He nodded in the direction of the pretty bodyguards.

“You weren’t listening, Kurtz. I want to hire you as an investigator.”

“At my daily rates?”

“Flat fee for services rendered,” said Angelina.

“How flat?”

“Fifteen thousand dollars for a single name and address. Ten thousand for just the name.”

Kurtz breathed out and waited. His head felt like someone had displaced it about two feet to the left. Even the color of the leaves blowing around them hurt his eyes. The basketball players shouted at some great rebound under the boards. Somewhere in the zoo, an old lion coughed. The silence stretched.

“You thinking, Kurtz, or just having a Senior Moment?”

“Tell me what I’m supposed to investigate and I’ll tell you if I’m in.”

The woman folded her arms and watched the basketball game for a minute. One of the younger men playing caught her eye and whistled. The bodyguards glowered. Angelina grinned at the kid with the basketball. She turned back to Kurtz.

“Someone’s been killing some of our people. Five, to be exact.”

“Someone you don’t know.”

“Yeah.”

“You want me to find out who’s doing it?”

“Yeah.”

“And whack him?”

Angelina Farino Ferrara rolled her eyes. “No, Kurtz, I have people for that. Just identify him beyond any reasonable doubt and give us the name. Five thousand more if you come up with a current location as well.”

“Can’t your people find him as well as whack him?”

“They’re specialists,” said Angelina.

Kurtz nodded. “These people close to you getting hit? Button men, that sort of thing?”

“No. Contacts. Connections. Customers. I’ll explain later.”

Kurtz thought about it. The wad of cash in his pocket was getting close to the last money he had. But what were the ethics of finding someone so these mobsters could kill them? He certainly had an ethical dilemma on his hands.

“Fifteen thousand guaranteed, half now, and I’ll find him and locate him,” he said. So much for wrestling with ethics.

“A third now,” said Angelina Farino Ferraro. She turned around, blocking the view from the basketball court with her body, and slipped him five-g’s already bundled into a tight roll.

Kurtz loved being predictable. “I could tell you right now who’s doing it,” he said.

Angelina stepped back and looked at him. Her eyes were very brown.

“The new Gonzaga,” said Kurtz. “Emilio’s boy up from Florida.”

“No,” said Angelina. “It’s not Toma.”

Kurtz raised his eyebrows at her use of the dead don’s son’s first name. She’d never been fond of the Gonzagas. Kurtz’s well-honed private investigator instincts told him that that might have had something to do with old Emilio raping her and crippling her father years before.

“All right,” he said, “I’ll start looking into it as soon as I get my own little matter settled. You going to give me the details about the hits?”

“I’ll send Colin around to your office on Chippewa this afternoon with the notes.” She nodded toward the taller of the two bodyguards.

“Colin?” Kurtz raised his eyebrows again and decided he wouldn’t do that anymore. It hurt. “All right My turn. Who shot me?”

“I don’t know who shot you,” said Angelina, “but I know who’s been looking for you the last few days.”

Kurtz had been out of town delivering SweetheartSearch-dot-com letters most of that time. “Who?”

“Toma Gonzaga.”

Kurtz felt the air cool around him. “Why?”

“I don’t know for sure,” said the woman. “But he’s had a dozen of his new guys looking—some hanging around that dump you live in by the Cheerios factory. Others staking out your office on Chippewa. A couple hanging around Blues Franklin.”

“All right,” said Kurtz. “It’s not much, but thanks.”

Angelina zipped up her sweatshirt. “There’s another thing, Kurtz.”

“Yeah?”

“There’s a rumor…just a street rumor so far…that Toma’s sent for the Dane.”

Through the pounding in his skull, Kurtz felt a slight lurch of nausea. The Dane was a legendary assassin from Europe who rarely came to Buffalo on business. Kurtz had seen him in action the last time he’d been here—the day that Don Byron Farino and his daughter, Sophia, and several others, had been shot in the presumed safety of the Farino compound.

“Well…” began Kurtz. He couldn’t think of anything else to say. He knew, and he presumed that Angelina Farino Ferrara knew, that even if Toma Gonzaga wanted Joe Kurtz dead for some reason, he wouldn’t have to bring in the Dane for that It was far more likely that Gonzaga would hire someone of the Dane’s caliber and expense to eliminate his one real rival in Western New York—Angelina Farino Ferrara. “Well,” he said again, “I’ll look into it when I figure out who did this to me.”

The acting female don of the Farino family nodded, zipped her sweatshirt up the rest of the way, and began jogging, first across the grass with its blowing yellow leaves, then onto the winding inner park road toward the rear of the zoo. The two bodyguards ran to their parked Lincoln Town Car and hurried to catch up.

Kurtz shifted the old man’s fedora slightly trying to get the pressure off the bandages and his split skull. It didn’t work. He looked around for a park bench, but luckily there was none in sight—he probably would have curled up in a fetal position on it and gone to sleep if there’d been one there.

The basketball players were letting new guys come into the game while the sweaty players leaving the court traded high-fives and clever insults. Kurtz brought his cell phone out of his jacket pocket and called for a cab.

CHAPTER

FIVE

Kurtz knew that Arlene was happy to finally have their office back on Chippewa Street. Their P.I. office before he’d gone to Attica had been on Chippewa, back when it was a rough area. Last year, after he’d been released from Attica, they’d found a cheap space in the basement of the last X-rated-video store in downtown Buffalo. Last spring, after that whole block had been condemned and demolished, Kurtz had considered an office in the Harbor Inn or one of the nearby abandoned grain elevators, but Arlene had come up with the money for Chippewa Street, so Chippewa Street it was.

Their P.I. business here thirteen years ago had consisted of just him, his partner Samantha Fielding, and Arlene as their secretary. The street had been run-down but recovering then—a lot of local coffeeshops, used bookstores, one gunshop—which was handy for Kurtz—and no fewer than four tattoo parlors. In the seventies, when Kurtz was growing up, Chippewa Street had been all X-rated bookstores, prostitutes and drug dealers. Kurtz had spent a lot of time there then.

Now Chippewa Street was the only happening place in the entire rotting corpus that was the greater Buffalo metropolitan area. If one never left this stretch of Chippewa Street one might be able to imagine that Buffalo, New York, was still a viable entity. For three entire, short city blocks, between Elmwood and Main, there was a heartbeat: lights, wine bars, nightclubs, limousines sliding to the curb, trendy restaurants, and pedestrians on the street after six P.M. After two A.M. as well, when the clubs let out. And a Starbucks. Kurtz thought that the locals were inordinately proud of their Starbucks.

When Arlene had found the money for this office, Kurtz had stipulated only that it not be above a Starbucks. He hated Starbucks. The coffee was all right—Kurtz didn’t really pay attention to his coffee as long as it didn’t have cockroaches or something worse floating in it—but whenever the Starbucks shops showed up, it meant that the neighborhood had gone to shit—admittedly, upscale to shit—until the area was just a Disney parody of itself.

Arlene had agreed to avoid that particular coffee haven, so here they were a block and a half east of and two stories higher than the Starbucks. But there were rumors that another one was coming in just across the street.

Now, as Kurtz went up the two flights of stairs to the third-floor office and in the door, he saw why Arlene had wanted to locate here. His secretary had first lost her teenage son to a traffic accident and then her husband to a heart attack while Kurtz had been in jail. Both of those males had been computer whizzes and Arlene was the best hacker—or whatever the hell you called them—in the family. She was still using access codes to files and funds for the Erie County District Attorney’s office, and she hadn’t worked there for five years.

But she worked too hard and smoked too much. Her only hobby was reading detective thrillers. This SweetheartSearch and WeddingBells-dot-com gig brought her into her office—even though she could just as easily access the servers from her suburban Cheektowaga home—at all hours of the day, night, and weekends. Even at two A.M., Kurtz realized, the view out the big south-facing window just beyond her desk was full of life—lights and people below and traffic sounds—just as if they lived in a real city.

He paused in the doorway. He wasn’t sure how she’d react to his head wound, bandages, raccoon blood-mask, road rash, and devil’s eyes.

“Hey,” he said, walking past his cluttered desk to her immaculate one.

“Hey, yourself,” said Arlene, tapping the keyboard, her eyes intent on the screen even while a Marlboro dangled from her lip. Smoke curled around her head and then drifted through the small screened window next to the big glass window.

Kurtz perched on the edge of the desk and cleared his throat.

She paused in the typing, flicked ashes, and looked at him from less than three feet away. “You’re looking good, Joe. Lose some weight?”

Kurtz sighed. “Gail called you?”

Gail DeMarco, Arlene’s sister-in-law and good friend, was a nurse in the pediatric ward of Erie County Medical Center where Kurtz had been handcuffed mere hours earlier.

“Of course she did,” said Arlene. “She’s only working mornings now because of Rachel and saw your name on the admissions list when she came in at eight. But by the time she got up to see you, you’d flown the coop.”

Kurtz nodded.

“Besides,” said Arlene, typing again, “the cops have already been here this morning hunting for you.”

Kurtz took off the fedora and scratched his head above the bandages. “Kemper?”

“And a female detective named King.”

Kurtz looked at her. He and Rigby had been over before he started up the agency with Sam and hired Arlene. And Sam hadn’t known about Rigby. So Arlene couldn’t know about her. Could she?

Suddenly the floor and desk rose like a small boat on a broad swell. Kurtz took a breath and walked to his own desk, dropping into the swivel chair more heavily than he’d planned. He dropped the fedora—blood on the sweatband—onto his desk.

Arlene stubbed out her cigarette and came over to stand next to him. Her fingers began pulling back the tape and bandages. He started to push her away, but his arm felt as if it were handcuffed again.

“Sit still, Joe.”

She peeled away the crusted dressings. Kurtz bit his lip but said nothing.

“Oh, Joe,” she said. Her fingers hurt him as they probed, but everything hurt him. It was just more noise amidst the jet roar.

“I think I can see the skull itself between these wide stitches,” Arlene said calmly. “Looks like somebody took a chunk out of it. No—don’t touch. And don’t move—just hold this tape here.”

She tossed the bandage into his wastepaper basket. Kurtz noticed that the gauze was furred with hair as well as dried blood. She rooted in her lower left drawer and came out with the big first-aid kit that she’d always kept there, just as she’d always kept a .357 Ruger in the top right drawer.

Kurtz closed his eyes for moment while she painted the wound with something that burned like kerosene and then set fresh dressings in place, cutting strips of adhesive off the roll with her teeth.

“So what are we going to do, Joe? Do you know who shot you?”

“I can’t remember the shooting.”

“You think they were after you or O’Toole? Gail said that the probation officer was in bad shape.”

“I don’t know which of us they wanted to kill,” said Kurtz. “I don’t think they came after both of us—we just don’t have any common enemies. Odds are it’s me they wanted.”

“Yeah,” said Arlene. She was finished with the re-bandaging. “Don’t mess with it for a few minutes.” She went back to her desk, brought out a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and two glasses, poured for both of them, and handed him his glass.

“To luck,” she said and drank hers.

It tasted like medicine to Kurtz, but the warmth helped the headache for a minute.

“I need to get some stuff off a computer,” he said, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his desk. SweetheartSearch manilla file folders crinkled under his arms. He stared into the empty glass.

“How much stuff?” Arlene lit another Marlboro.

“Everything that’s on it.”

“Whose computer?”

“Parole Officer O’Toole’s,” said Kurtz. He gingerly set the fedora back on, tugging the brim down gently.

Arlene squinted through the smoke. “The cops probably took it already. Searched the hard drive for clues.”

“Yeah, I thought of that,” said Kurtz. “But the machine’s right there in the County offices. It’s already County property. There’s a chance they just…did whatever you have to do to copy the files. Would that leave information still on the hard disk?”

“Sure,” said Arlene. “But it’s still possible they lifted the hard disk out and took it to some forensic lab to do the searching.”

Kurtz shrugged. “But if they looked at it there…or haven’t got around to it yet…”

“We can copy everything in it,” said Arlene. “But how do you expect to get into O’Toole’s office in the middle of the day? In the same building where they shot you? There are bound to be forensic guys and cops still milling around and her office will be yellow-taped and sealed.”

“Tonight,” said Kurtz. “Can you give me the stuff I need to copy her files?”

“Sure,” said Arlene, “but you’ll screw it up. You can barely get online or download a file.”

“That’s not true.”

“Well, you’d screw up copying to a backup drive, even though it’s simple. I’ll go with you tonight.”

“The hell you will.”

“I’ll go with you tonight,” said Arlene. “Was there anything else we have to do now?”

“I’d like you to pull up everything you can on Peg O’Toole’s old man. Big John O’Toole. He was a…”

“Cop,” said Arlene. She flicked ashes. “Killed in the line of duty about four years ago. I remember all the fuss in the papers and on TV.”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. He told her about his two middle-of-the-night visitors. “Dig up what you can about Big John’s brother, Major O’Toole, the guy in the wheelchair. And an Asian man, probably also in his sixties, maybe Vietnamese, Vinh or Trinh. There’s a connection between the two. Vinh might work for the Major.”

“Vinh or Trinh and a major,” said Arlene. “Any first names?”

“You tell me.”

“All right. I’ll have what I can find by tonight. Anything else you want now?”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz.

The list took only a few minutes for Arlene to Google-search and print and a few more minutes for Kurtz to look over. It included one hundred and twenty-three amusement and theme parks in New York’s 716 area code and adjacent regions. It began with Aladdins Castle (with no apostrophe) on Alberta Drive in Buffalo and ended with Wackey World for Kidz (with no “s”) on Market Street in the town of Niagara Falls, NY.

“So what’d you get out of it?” asked Arlene.

“That these people can’t spell for shit.”

“Other than that?”

“The abandoned amusement park O’Toole was interested in isn’t on this list,” said Kurtz. “These are mostly shopping center arcades and water slides.”

“And Six Flags out in Darien.”

“Yeah.”

“Fantasy Island on Grand Island is a real amusement park,” said Arlene. She flicked ashes into her glass ashtray and looked outside as an autumn wind buffeted the big window.

“It’s still up and running,” said Kurtz. “The photos I saw showed a very deserted place. Probably deserted for years, maybe decades.”

“So you want me to do a serious search—zoning, county building permissions, titles, news articles—going back how far?”

“Nineteen sixties?” said Kurtz.

Arlene nodded, set her cigarette down and made a note on her steno pad. “Just the Buffalo area?”

Kurtz rubbed his temples. The pain throbbed and pulsed now, sometimes worse than others, but never giving him even a few seconds of relief. “I don’t even know if the place she was looking for was in New York State. Let’s look in Western New York—say from the Finger Lakes to the state lines.”

Arlene made a note. “I presume you’re going to look again at the photos she showed you tonight when we go in to copy the hard drive.”

“I’m going to steal them,” said Kurtz.

“But you have no idea if they’re important?”

“Not a clue,” said Kurtz. “Odds are that they mean nothing at all. But it was weird that she showed them to me.”

“Why, Joe? You are…were…a good P.I.”

Kurtz frowned and stood to go.

“You’re not driving are you?” asked Arlene.

“Can’t. The cops have my Pinto—either impounded or wrapped up in crime-scene tape in the garage.”

“Probably improves its looks,” said Arlene. She stubbed out her cigarette. “Want a ride?”

“Not yet I’ll grab a cab. I have some people to talk to.”

“Pruno’s on his October sabbatical, remember?”

“I remember,” said Kurtz. One of his best street informants, the old wino, disappeared every October for three weeks. No one knew where he went.

“You should talk to that Ferrara woman,” said Arlene. “Anything dirty goes on in this town, she usually knows about it. She’s usually part of it.”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. “Which reminds me, some mobster in Armani is going to drop by here with a folder full of paperwork. Don’t shoot him with that cannon you keep under your desk.”

“A mob guy in Armani?”

“Colin.”

“A mob guy named Colin,” said Arlene. “That head injury made you delusional, Joe.”

“Pick me up at nine-thirty at the Harbor Inn,” said Kurtz. “We’ll go to the Civic Center together.”

“Nine-thirty. You going to last that long?”

Kurtz touched his hat brim in farewell and went out and down the long stairway. There were thirty-nine steps and every one of them hurt.

CHAPTER

SIX

The Dodger knew their names and where they lived. The Dodger had a picture. The Dodger had a 9mm Beretta Elite II threaded with a silencer in the cargo pocket of his fatigue pants and he could smell the oil. The Dodger had a hard-on.

The guy’s address was in the old suburb called Lackawanna and the guy’s place was a shithole—a tall, narrow house with gray siding in a long row of tall, narrow houses with gray siding. The guy had a driveway but no garage. Nobody had a garage. The guy had a front stoop four steps up rather than a porch. The whole neighborhood was dreary and gray, even on this sunny day, as if the coal dust from the old mills had painted everything with a coating of dullness.

The Dodger parked his AstroVan, beeped it locked, and strolled jauntily to the front door. His fatigue jacket hid his erection, but the jacket was open so that he could get to the pocket of his pants.

A little girl answered on his third knock. She looked to be five or six or seven… Dodger had no idea. He didn’t really pay attention to kids.

“Hi,” he said happily. “Is Terrence Williams home?”

“Daddy’s upstairs in the shower,” said the little one. She didn’t comment on the Dodger’s unusual face, but turned on her heel and walked away from him, back into the house, obviously expecting him to follow.

The Dodger came in, smiling, and closed the door behind him.

A woman came out of the kitchen at the end of the hallway. She was wiping her hands on a dishtowel and her face was slightly flushed, as if she’d been cooking over a hot stove. Unlike the little girl, she did react to the sight of his face, although she tried to hide it.

“Can I help you?” she asked She was a big woman, broad in the hips. Not the Dodger’s type. He liked spinners—the kind of little woman you could sit down, place on your cock, and spin like a top.

“Yes, ma’am,” said the Dodger. He was always polite. He’d been taught to be polite as a boy. “I’ve got a package for Terrence.”

The big woman’s frown grew deeper. She didn’t really have friendly eyes, the Dodger decided. He liked women with friendly eyes. The little girl was running from the dining room through the little living room, past them both in the hallway, and then back around again. The house was tiny. The Dodger decided that the place smelled of mildew and cabbage and that the big woman with the unfriendly eyes probably did, too. But there was a good smell in the air as well, as if she’d been baking.

“Did Bolo send you?” she asked suspiciously.

“Yes, ma’am,” said the Dodger. The kid ran past them both again, flapping her arms and making airplane noises. “Bolo sent me.”

“Where’s the package?”

The Dodger patted the lower right pocket on his fatigue jacket, feeling the steel in the cargo pocket of his pants.

“You’ll have to wait,” said the woman. She nodded toward the crappy little living room with its sprung couch and uncomfortable La-Z-Boy recliner. “You can sit in there.” She frowned at the Dodger’s baseball cap as if he should take it off in the house. The Dodger never took off his Dodger cap.

“No problem,” he said, smiling and bobbing his head slightly.

He walked into the little living room, removed the Beretta with the supressor, shot the kid when she came buzzing in from the dining room again, shot the wide-hipped woman on the stairway, stepped over her body, and went up to the sound of the water.

The fat man pulled the shower curtain aside and stared at the Dodger as he came in with the gun. The fat man’s white, hairy skin and bulges were really repulsive to the Dodger. He hated looking at naked men.

“Hi, Terry,” the Dodger said and raised the pistol.

The fat man jerked the shower curtain closed as if that would protect him. The Dodger laughed—that was really funny—and fired five times through the curtain. It had blue, red, and yellow fish on it, and they were swimming in clusters. The Dodger didn’t think that blue, red, and yellow fish swam together like that.

The fat man pulled the curtain off its rod as he fell heavily outward. It wasn’t even a real shower, just a tub with a rod and curtain and a jerry-rigged sprayer. Now the fat man was sprawled over the edge of the tub. The Dodger didn’t understand how people could live this way.

Terry was humped over the edge of the tub, his fat, hairy ass sticking up, his arms and head and upper torso all tangled up in the stupid fish-curtain. Blood was swirling around his toes and running down the drain. The Dodger didn’t want to touch that wet, clammy flesh—at least two exit wounds were visible and bubbling in Terry’s back—so he patted the curtain until he found the fat man’s head, grabbed his hair through the cheap plastic, lifted the head, set the silencer against the man’s forehead—the Dodger could see wide, staring eyes through the plastic—and pulled the trigger.

The Dodger picked up his brass, went downstairs again, stepping over the woman, and searched every room, starting from the cellar and working his way back up to the second floor, policing the last two ejected cartridges as be went. He’d fired eight rounds but there were still two live ones left in case there was another kid or invalid aunt or somebody in the house. And he had his survival knife.

There was nobody else. The only sound was the water still running in the shower and the sudden scream of a tea kettle in the kitchen.

The Dodger went to the kitchen and turned off the heat under the kettle. It was an old-fashioned gas-type stove. There were fresh-baked chocolate-chip cookies on the counter. The Dodger ate three of the cookies and then drank from a milk bottle in the fridge. The milk bottle was glass, but he still had his gloves on.

He unscrewed the silencer, slipped the Berretta and silencer back into his trouser cargo pocket, unlocked the kitchen door, then walked to the front of the house and checked the street through the little slivers of window glass in the front door, the street was as empty and gray-looking as when he’d arrived. He went out the front, pulling it locked behind him.

The Dodger went out to his AstroVan and backed it up the narrow driveway. The van filled the drive. Neighbors wouldn’t see a damned thing with his van blocking the view like that The Dodger chose three big mail sacks the right size and went into the house again. He made three trips, dropping each sacked body into the back of the van with an oddly hollow thump from the metal floor. He saved the kid for last, savoring the ease of effort after hauling Mr. and Mrs. Lard-Ass.

Fifteen minutes later, on I-90 headed out of town, he punched in WBFO, 88.7 on his radio. It was Buffalo’s coolest jazz station and the Dodger liked jazz. He whistled and patted the steering wheel as he drove.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

Kurtz was listening to jazz at Blues Franklin. He hadn’t come to listen to jazz—the place wouldn’t be open for another five hours—but when he’d come through the door, one of Daddy Bruce’s granddaughters—not Ruby, the waitress, but a little one, perhaps Laticia—had taken one look at Kurtz’s face under the hat brim and had run out through the back to fetch Daddy. A young black man was on the low performance platform, noodling at the Steinway that Daddy Bruce kept for the visiting top jazz pianists, so Kurtz found his favorite table against the back wall and tipped his chair back while he listened.

Daddy Bruce came out of the back, wiping his hands off on a white apron. The old man never sat with customers, but he gripped the back of the chair next to Kurtz and shook his head several times, tut-tutting.

“I hope the other guy looks even worse.”

“I don’t know who the other guy is,” said Kurtz. “That’s why I came by. Anyone been in here asking for me over the last few days?”

“This very morning,” said Daddy Bruce. He scratched his short, white beard. “They so many white people in here this morning asking for you, I considered hanging out a sign saying ‘Joe Kurtz ain’t here—go away.’”

Kurtz waited for the details.

“First was this woman cop. I remember you in here with her a long, long time ago, Joe, when you was both kids. She identified herself today as Detective King, but you used to call her Rigby. I should’ve thrown both your asses out back then, being underage and all, but you always loved the music so much and I saw that you were teaching her all about it, plus trying to get in her pants.”

“Who else?”

“Three guineas this morning. Button men maybe. Very polite. Said they had some money for you. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Gotta find Joe Kurtz to give him a big bag of money. Lot of that goin’ round.”

Kurtz didn’t have to ask if Daddy Bruce had told them anything. “Were they well-dressed? Blowdried hair?”

The old man laughed a rich, phlegmy laugh. “Maybe in a guinea idea of well-dressed. You know the type—those long, pointy, white collars that don’t match their shirts. Off-the-back-of-the-truck suits that they never had tailored. And blowdried? Those three comb their hair with buttered toast.”

Gonzaga’s people, thought Kurtz. Not Farino Ferrara’s.

“Anyone else?”

Daddy Bruce laughed again. “How many people you need after your ass before you feel popular? You want an aspirin?”

“No, thanks. So you haven’t heard anything about anyone wanting to cap me?”

“Well, you didn’t ask that. Sure I do. Last one I heard was about three weeks ago—big halfbreed Indian with a limp. He got real drunk and was telling a couple of A.B. types he was going to do you.”

“How’d you know the others were A.B.?”

Daddy Bruce sighed. “You think I don’t know Aryan Brotherhood when I smell them?”

“What were they doing in here?” Blues Franklin had never made the mistake of going upscale—despite the Steinway and the occasional headliners—and it still had a largely black clientele.

“How the fuck am I supposed to know why they came in? I just know why and how they went out.”

“Lester?”

“And Raphael, his Samoan friend. Your Indian and his pals got real ’noxious about one A.M. We helped them leave through the alley.”

“Did Big Bore—the Indian—put up a fight?”

“No one really puts up a fight against Lester. You want me to give you a call if and when Mr. Big Bore come back?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Daddy.”

Kurtz stood to leave, swaying only slightly, but the old man said, “You can’t go out there lookin’ like that, eyes all bloody and with them big bruises under them. You scare the little ones. Stand there. Don’t move.”

Kurtz stood there while Daddy Bruce hustled into the back room and returned with a pair of oversized sunglasses. Kurtz put them on gingerly. The right stem rubbed against his bandages, but by fiddling, he got them to stay on without hurting.

“Thanks, Daddy. I feel like Ray Charles.”

“You should feel like Ray Charles,” said the old man with a throaty chuckle. “Those be his glasses.”

“You stole Ray Charles’s sunglasses?”

“Hell, no,” said Daddy Bruce. “I don’t steal any more than you do. You remember when he come through here about two years ago last December with…no, you wouldn’t, Joe. You was still up in Attica then. It was a good show. We didn’t announce nothing, no warning he was coming, and we had six hundred folks trying to get in.”

“And he gave you his sunglasses?”

Daddy shrugged. “Lester and me done him a favor and he give me his pair as a sort of ’mento is all. He travels with extra pairs. But those are the only Ray Charles sunglasses I got, so I’d appreciate them back when you’re done with them. Thought I’d use ’em myself when my eyes go bad.”

Pruno was on sabbatical, but his homeless roommate, Soul Dad, was at his usual daytime spot—playing chess on the Mil above the old switching yards. Soul Dad said that he hadn’t heard anything, but promised Kurtz he’d get in touch if he heard anything—the two old men shared a laptop computer in their shack down by the rails and Soul Dad would e-mail in his tip. Kurtz had to smile at that; even the snitches and street informants had gone high-tech.

A cab driver named Enselmo, whom Kurtz had helped with a couple of things, said that he hadn’t heard anyone in the back of his cab talking about whacking Kurtz or a parole officer. He had heard rumors though that Toma Gonzaga was looking for Kurtz the last few days. Kurtz thanked Enselmo and paid him two hundred dollars to drive him around the rest of the afternoon.

Mrs. Tuella Dean, a bag lady who favored a grate on the corner of Elmwood and Market—even in the summer—said that she’d heard rumors that some crazy Arab down in Lackawanna had been bragging about planning to shoot someone, but had never heard Kurtz’s name mentioned. She didn’t know the crazy Arab’s name. She couldn’t remember where she’d heard the rumor. She thought maybe she was mixing it up with all this al-Qaida news that kept coming over her portable radio.

It wasn’t noon yet, but Kurtz began trolling the bars, looking for old contacts and talkative people. He had a couple of hours to kill before heading for Brian Kennedy’s security service offices. He welcomed the wait because he wanted his vision to clear a bit before he watched the garage tape.

First he hit the strip bars that catered to the businessman’s lunch special—Rick’s Tally-Ho on Genessee with its tattered row of recliners, Club Chit Chat on Hertel where, Kurtz had heard, the ass-bruise factor was high and the woody potential was low. His source had been correct, although Kurtz privately judged his current woody potential as negative-five-hundred. On top of that, the music and smell in these places made his head hurt worse.

Kurtz would have liked to check out the higher-class Canadian strip clubs like Pure Platinum just across the river, but cons on probation don’t have the option of leaving the country, no matter how close the Peace Bridge might be. So he concentrated on that oxymoron of oxymorons—the greater Buffalo area.

He hit some of the sports bars like Mac’s City Bar and Papa Joe’s, but the noise was louder there and it just made his headache pound, so he decided to save sports bars for another day. Besides, the kind of snitches or street contacts he was looking for weren’t usually the sports-bar types—they preferred dark bars with dubious clientele.

Enselmo was giving him a discount—not charging him for the waiting time—so Kurtz hit some clubs like the Queen City Lounge and the Bradford, just down the street from his office, and the reopened Cobblestones near the HSBC arena. It was the wrong time of day and the wrong clientele. He was almost certainly wasting his time.

But since he was in the neighborhood, he figured that he might as well check out some of the gay bars. Enselmo obviously didn’t approve, based on the number of frowns and glowers he was shooting in the rearview mirror, but Joe Kurtz could care less what Enselmo approved or disapproved of. Buddies on Johnson Park was full of old men who smiled at Kurtz’s sunglasses, inspected his bomber jacket, and offered to buy him a drink. None of them seemed to know anything. A sign in the urinal at Cabaret on Allen Street read, “Men who pee on electric fences receive shocking news,” and an ad on the wall of the bar offered, “Don’t stay home with the same old dildo.” But the place was dead.

Kurtz collapsed in the back seat of the cab and said, “KG’s. Then we’ll call it a day.”

“No, no, boss, you don’t wanna go to Knob Gobbler’s.”

“KG’s,” said Kurtz.

His reaction coming through the door was that he should have followed Enselmo’s advice. KG’s wasn’t all that enthusiastic about straight patrons at the best of times, and they obviously didn’t want a bandaged, bruised straight guy in sunglasses there in mid-day during what they advertised as their Wrinkle Club Hour. Kurtz didn’t even want to know what a Wrinkle Club was.

The bartender called for the huge bouncer—unimaginatively called “Tiny”—and Tiny flicked a finger the size of a bull pizzle at Kurtz to show him out.

Kurtz nodded passively, pulled the .38, and pressed it into Tiny’s face, hammer back, until Tiny’s nose mushed flat under the muzzle. It may not have been the best thing to do in the circumstances, but Kurtz wasn’t in the best of moods.

The bartender didn’t call the cops—Wrinkle Hour was in full wrinkle and he probably didn’t want the patrons disturbed by a gunshot—and the man just shifted the toothpick in his mouth, jerked his head, and sent Tiny knuckling back to his grotto.

Kurtz considered this a pretty useless victory since there was nobody to talk to here anyway, unless Kurtz wanted to interrupt something he didn’t want to see, much less interrupt. At least in the strip clubs he’d known some of the girls. He was headed out, .38 back in his belt, when a man half again larger than Tiny filled the door. The monster wore a baggy suit and blue shirt with a pointy white collar. It looked like he combed his hair with buttered toast.

“You Kurtz?” grunted the big man.

“Ah, shit,” said Kurtz. Gonzaga’s people had found him.

The big man jerked his thumb toward the door behind him.

Kurtz stepped backward into the bar. The monster shook his head once, almost sadly, and followed Kurtz into the dark, open space. The Wrinkle Club activities were flailing away in a side room. The goon didn’t even glance that way.

“You coming the easy way or the hard way?” asked the big man.

“Hard way’s fine,” said Kurtz. He took off the sunglasses and set them in his coat pocket.

Gonzaga’s man smiled. He obviously preferred the hard way as well. He slipped brass knuckles on and began moving toward Kurtz, arms spread like a gorilla’s, eyes on Kurtz’s bandages. His strategy was fairly apparent.

“Hey, hey!” shouted the bartender. “Take it outside!”

The ape’s gaze shifted for just a fraction of a second at the sound, but it gave Kurtz time to pull the .38 and swing it around full force into the side of the man’s head.

Gonzaga’s man looked surprised but stayed standing. The bartender was pulling a sawed-off shotgun from under the bar.

“Drop it!” snapped Kurtz, aiming the .38 at the bartender. The bartender dropped it.

“Kick it,” said Kurtz. The bartender kicked the weapon away.

The huge man was still standing there, smiling slightly, a quizzical, almost introspective expression on his face. Kurtz kicked him in the balls, waited a minute for the slow neurons to pass the message to the monster’s brain, and then kneed him in the face when the mass of flesh slowly bent at the waist.

The man stood straight up, shook his bead once, and hit the floor with the sound of a jukebox falling over.

Probably because his head hurt and he was tired, Kurtz kicked the Gonzaga goon in the side of the head and then again in the ribs. It was like kicking a bowling ball and then trying to punt a three-hundred-pound sack of suet.

Kurtz went out the back door, limping slightly, the .38 still in his right hand.

The alley smelled of hops and urine and, without the glasses, the sunlight was way too bright for Kurtz’s eyes. He had to blink to clear his vision and by the time he had, it was too late to do anything else. A huge limousine idled fifty feet away on Delaware Street, its black bulk blocking the alley entrance on that side, while a Lincoln Town Car blocked the opposite end.

Two men in dark topcoats totally inappropriate for such a beautiful October afternoon were aiming semiautomatic pistols at Kurtz’s chest.

“Drop it,” said the shorter of the two. “Two fingers only. Slow.”

Kurtz did what he was told.

“In the car, asshole.”

Silently agreeing that he was, indeed, an asshole, Kurtz again did what he was told.

CHAPTER

EIGHT

You’re a hard man to track down, Mr. Kurtz.”

The limousine, followed by the Lincoln filled with the other bodyguards, had headed west and was within sight of the lake and river now, moving north along the expressway. They had Kurtz in the jump seat near the liquor cabinet, opposite Toma Gonzaga and one of his smarter-looking bodyguards. The bodyguard held Kurtz’s .38 loosely in his left hand and kept his own semiauto braced on his knee and aimed at Kurtz’s heart A second bodyguard sat along the upholstered bench to Kurtz’s right, his arms folded.

When Kurtz said nothing, Gonzaga said, “And odd to find you in a place like Knob Gobbler’s.”

Kurtz shrugged. “I heard that you were hunting for me. I figured I’d find you there.”

The bodyguard next to the don thumbed back the hammer on his gun. Toma Gonzaga shook his head, smiled slightly, and set his left hand lightly on the pistol. Eyes never leaving Kurtz, the glowering bodyguard lowered the hammer.

“You’re trying to provoke me, Mr. Kurtz,” said Gonzaga. “Although in the current circumstances, I have no idea why. I presume you heard that my father exiled me to Florida eight years ago when he found out I was a homosexual.”

“I thought all you guys preferred the term ‘gay’ these days,” said Kurtz.

“No, I prefer ‘homosexual,’ or even ‘queer,’” said Gonzaga. “‘Fag’ will do in a pinch.”

“Truth in advertising?”

“Something like that. Most of my homosexual acquaintances over the years have been anything but gay people, Mr. Kurtz. In the old meaning of the term, I mean.”

Kurtz shrugged. There must be some subject that would interest him less—football, perhaps—but he’d be hard-pressed to find it.

Gonzaga’s cell phone buzzed and the man answered it without speaking. While he was listening, Kurtz studied his face. His father—Emilio—had been an outstandingly ugly man, looking like some mad scientist had transplanted the head of a carp onto the body of a bull. Toma, who looked to be in his early forties, had the same barrel chest and short legs, but he was rather handsome in an older-Tony-Curtis sort of way. His lips were full and sensuous like his father’s, but looked to be curled more from habits of laughter than the way his father’s fat lips had curled with cruelty. Gonzaga’s eyes were a light blue and his gray hair was cut short. He wore a stylish and expensive gray suit, with brown shoes so leathery soft that it looked as if you could fold them into your pocket after wearing them.

Gonzaga folded the phone instead and slipped it into his pocket. “You’ll be relieved to know that Bernard has regained consciousness, more or less, although you may have broken two or three of his ribs.”

“Bernard?” said Kurtz, putting the emphasis on the second syllable the way Gonzaga had. First ‘Colin’ and now ‘Bernard,’ he thought. What’s the underworld coming to? He’d seen them carry the huge bodyguard out of KG’s and fold him into the backseat of the accompanying Lincoln.

“Yes,” said Gonzaga. “If I were in Bernard’s line of work, I’d change my name as well.”

“Isn’t Toma a girl’s name?” said Kurtz. He wasn’t sure why he was provoking a man who might already be planning to kill him. Maybe it was the headache.

“A nickname for Tomas.”

Just before they reached the International Bridge, the driver swept them right onto the Scajaquada and the limo headed east toward the Kensington, followed by the Lincoln.

“Did you know my father, Mr. Kurtz?”

This is it, thought Kurtz.

“No.”

“Did you ever meet him, Mr. Kurtz?”

“No.”

Gonzaga brushed invisible lint off the sharp crease of his gray slacks. “When my father went back to New York for a meeting last winter and was murdered, most of his closest associates here disappeared. It’s difficult to discover what really went on during my father’s last days here.”

Kurtz looked at the bodyguard aiming the Glock-nine at him. The cops had Glocks. Now all the hoods wanted them. They’d turned south on the Kensington and beaded back toward downtown. Whatever was going to happen, it wasn’t going to happen in Toma Gonzaga’s limo.

“Did you ever happen to meet a man named Mickey Kee?” asked Gonzaga.

“No.”

“I wouldn’t think so. Mr. Kee was my father’s toughest…associate. They found him dead at the old, abandoned Buffalo train station two days after the big blizzard you people had here in February. It was eighty-two degrees in Miami that week.”

“Did you drag me in here at gunpoint to give me a weather report?” asked Kurtz.

Toma squinted at him and Kurtz realized that he was skating now on very thin ice indeed. This man may look like Tony Curtis, he thought, but his genes were all from the murderous Gonzaga line.

“I invited you here to make you an offer you won’t want to refuse,” said Gonzaga.

Did he really say that? thought Kurtz. These mafia idiots were tiresome enough without having them get self-referential and ironic on you. Kurtz put on an expression that was supposed to look both receptive and neutral.

“Angelina talked to you today about the problem with some people of hers in the drug supply and consumer side of things disappearing,” said Toma Gonzaga.

Angelina? thought Kurtz. He wasn’t surprised that the gay don knew that Angelina Farino Ferrara had offered him the job—Gonzaga could have people following her, or maybe the two just talked after the offer—but Kurtz couldn’t believe the two Buffalo dons were on a first-name basis. Angelina? And she had called him “Toma.” Very hard to believe—seven months earlier, Angelina Farino Ferrara was doing everything within her power—including the hiring of Joe Kurtz—to get Toma Gonzaga’s father whacked.

“Didn’t she offer you the job of tracking down the killer?” pressed Gonzaga. “She and I had discussed the idea of her talking to you about this situation.”

Kurtz blinked. The concussion was making him fuzz out. “She didn’t say anything about drugs,” he said, trying to stay noncommittal.

“She told you that the Farino group has lost five people to some crazy person killing them?” said Toma Gonzaga, raising the inflection on the last word just enough to suggest a question.

“She said something about that,” said Kurtz. “She didn’t give me any details.” Yet. He wondered if her blowdried bodyguard had dropped off the information with Arlene yet. And you’d be my first suspect if I take this job, thought Kurtz, staring Gonzaga in the eye.

“Well, we’ve lost seventeen people in the last three weeks,” said the don.

Kurtz blinked at this. Even blinking hurt. “Seventeen of your people killed in three weeks?” he said skeptically.

“Not my people,” said Gonzaga. “And the people Angelina lost aren’t really her people. Not employees. Not directly.”

Kurtz didn’t understand any of this, so he waited.

“They’re the street dealers and users we associate with to move the heavy drugs,” said Gonzaga. “Heroin, to be precise.”

Kurtz was surprised to hear that the Farinos were moving skag now. It had been the one source of profit that the old don, Byron Farino, had forbidden for his family. His oldest son, David, had wrapped his Ferrari around a tree and killed himself while on coke, and the don had shut down what little drug trade the Farinos had cornered. It had always been Emilio Gonzaga who’d controlled serious drugs in Western New York.

“I’ve been out of town the last few days,” said Kurtz, not believing any of this, “but I would have heard on the national news about twenty-two drug-related murders.”

“The cops and press haven’t heard about any of them.”

“How can that be?” said Kurtz.

“Because the nut-job who whacks them calls us—mostly me, but Angelina twice—to tell us where the murders have taken place. We’ve been cleaning up after this guy for almost a month.”

“I don’t get it,” said Kurtz. “Why would you help him hide the murders? You’re telling me that you didn’t kill them.”

“Of course we didn’t kill them, you idiot,” snarled Gonzaga. “They’re our customers and street-level dealers.”

“Which is why you’re doing cleanup,” said Kurtz. “So the other heroin addicts still able to drive or hold a job don’t get wind of this and run down to Cleveland or somewhere to score.”

“Yes. The fact that all our street middlemen and dealers are getting murdered wouldn’t make these junkies drop their habit—they can’t—but it might put them off buying from us. Especially when this psychopath leaves signs behind saying things like ‘Score from Gonzaga and die.’”

“He calls you?” mused Kurtz.

“Yes, but we can’t tell much about him through that. Voice is all distorted through one of those phone clip-on devices. Probably a white man—he doesn’t say ‘axe’ instead of ‘ask’ or any of that, or use ‘motherfucker’ or ‘you know’ every third word—but we can’t identify the voice, or even his age.”

“Have you tried tracing…”

“Of course we’ve tried tracing his calls. I had the Buffalo P.D. do it for me—the Family’s still got men and women on the arm down there—but this psycho has some way of routing calls through the phone system. My people never get to the pay phone in time.”

“Then you go…what do you do with the bodies of his victims?” asked Kurtz. He tried not to laugh. “I guess you have your favorite out of the way places for such things. Whole Forest Lawns out there in the woods.”

Gonzaga was not amused. “There aren’t any bodies.”

“What?”

“You heard me. We go and mop up the blood and brains and we plaster over the bullet holes when we have to, but this killer doesn’t leave any bodies. He takes them with him.”

Kurtz thought about that a minute. It made his head hurt worse. He rubbed his temples. “I already have a client who hired me related to this mess,” said Kurtz. “I can’t take a second one.”

“You’re talking like a P.I.,” said Gonzaga. “You’re not an investigator anymore, Mr. Kurtz. I’m just offering you a private deal, one civilian to another.”

The limo came down off the expressway and rolled into the downtown again.

“Angelina’s going to pay you ten g’s for finding this guy…”

“Fifteen,” said Kurtz. He didn’t usually volunteer information, but his head hurt and he was tired of this conversation. He closed his eyes for a second.

“All right,” said Gonzaga. “My offer’s better. Today’s Thursday. Next Monday’s Halloween. You tell us who this asshole is by midnight next Monday, I’ll pay you one hundred thousand dollars and I’ll let you live.”

Kurtz opened his eyes. It took only one look into Toma Gonzaga’s eyes to know that the gay don was completely serious. Kurtz realized that whether this man knew that he had been involved in the events that led to Gonzaga’s father’s death or not, didn’t matter. History meant nothing now. Kurtz had just heard his death sentence.

Unless he found the man who was murdering heroin users and dealers.

“One thing,” said Gonzaga, smiling slightly as if remembering some amusing detail. “I should tell you that this psychopath hasn’t just been whacking the dealers and users—he goes to their homes and shoots their entire families. Kids. Mothers-in-law. Visiting aunts.”

“Twenty-two murdered and missing people,” said Kurtz.

“Murdered people, bodies missing, but the people aren’t really missed,” said Toma Gonzaga. “These are all junkies or dealers. Heroin addicts and their families. No one’s been reported missing yet.”

“But they will be soon,” said Kurtz. “You can’t keep the lid on twenty-two murdered people.”

“Of course,” said Gonzaga. “Bobby.” He nodded toward the bodyguard on the side bench.

Bobby handed Kurtz a slim leather portfolio.

“Here’s what we know, the names of those who’ve been murdered, dates, addresses, everything we have,” said Gonzaga.

“I don’t want this job,” said Kurtz. “This crap has nothing to do with me.” He tried to hand the portfolio back, but the bodyguard folded his arms.

“It has a lot to do with you now,” said Gonzaga. “Or it will at midnight on Monday—that’s Halloween, I believe—especially if you don’t find this man.”

Kurtz said nothing.

Gonzaga handed him a cell phone. “This is how you get in touch with us. Hit the only stored number. Somebody’ll answer night or day and I’ll call you back within twenty minutes.”

Kurtz slipped the phone in his pocket and pointed toward the bodyguard who was holding his .38. The bodyguard looked to Gonzaga, who nodded. The man dumped the cartridges out onto his palm and handed the empty weapon to Kurtz.

“Can we drop you somewhere?” asked Toma Gonzaga.

Kurtz peered out through the tinted windows. They were near the Hyatt and the Convention Center, within a block of the office building where Brian Kennedy had his security company’s Buffalo headquarters.

“Here,” said Kurtz.

When he was standing on the curb by the open door, Toma Gonzaga said, “One more thing, Mr. Kurtz.”

Kurtz waited. The cold air felt good after the stuffy interior of the limousine, filled with the bodyguards’ cologne.

“There’s word that Angelina has hired a professional killer called the Dane,” said Gonzaga. “And paid him one million dollars in advance to settle old scores.”

Cute, thought Kurtz. Angelina Farino Ferrara had warned him that Gonzaga was bringing in the Dane. Gonzaga warned him that she had. But why would either one of them warn me?

He said, “What’s that got to do with me?”

“You might want to work extra hard to earn the hundred thousand dollars I mentioned,” said Gonzaga. “Especially since all indications are that you’re one of the old scores she wants to settle.”

CHAPTER

NINE

Empire State Security and Executive Protection had its offices on the twenty-first floor of one of the few high, modern buildings in downtown Buffalo. The receptionist was an attractive, bright Eurasian woman, impeccably dressed, who politely ignored Kurtz’s bandages and bruised eyes; she smiled and buzzed Mr. Kennedy as soon as Kurtz told her his name. She asked if he’d like any coffee, orange juice or bottled water. Kurtz said no, but a light-headedness on top of the pain in his skull reminded him that he hadn’t had anything to eat or drink for more than twenty-four hours.

Kennedy came down a carpeted hallway, shook Kurtz’s hand as if he was a business client, and led him back through a short maze of corridors and glass-walled rooms in which men and women worked at computer terminals with large flat-display screens.

“Security business seems to be booming,” said Kurtz.

“It is,” said Brian Kennedy. “Despite the economic hard times. Or perhaps because of them. Those who don’t have, are thinking of illegal ways to get it Those that still have, are willing to pay more to keep what they have.”

Kennedy’s corner office had solid partitions separating it from the rest of the communal maze, but the two outside walls looking down on Buffalo were floor-to-ceiling glass. His office had a modern but not silly desk, three computer terminals, a comfortable leather couch, and a small oval conference table near the juncture of the glass walls. A professional quality three-quarter-inch tape video machine and monitor were on a cart near the table. Rigby King was already seated across the table.

“Joe.”

“Detective King,” said Kurtz.

Kennedy smoothly gestured Kurtz to a seat on Rigby’s right. He took the opposite end of the oval. “Detective King asked if she could sit in on our meeting, Mr. Kurtz. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

Kurtz shrugged and took a chair, setting Gonzaga’s leather portfolio on the floor next to his chair.

“Can I get you something, Mr. Kurtz? Coffee, bottled water, a beer?” Kennedy looked at Kurtz’s eyes when he took off the Ray Charles glasses. “No, a beer probably wouldn’t be good now. You must be on a serious amount of pain medication.”

“I’m good,” said Kurtz.

“You left the hospital rather abruptly this morning, Joe,” said Rigby King. Her brown eyes were as attractive, deep, intelligent and guarded as he remembered. “You left your clothes behind.”

“I found some others,” said Kurtz. “Am I under arrest?”

Rigby shook her head. Her short, slightly spiked hair made her seem younger than she should look; she was, after all, three years older than Kurtz. “Let’s watch the tape,” she said.

“Peg is still on life-support and unconscious,” said Kennedy, as if either one of them had asked. “But the doctors are hoping to upgrade from critical to guarded condition in a couple of days.”

“Good,” said Rigby. “I called an hour ago to check on her condition.”

Kurtz looked at the blank monitor.

“This is the surveillance camera for the door you and Peg came out,” said Kennedy.

The video was black and white, or color in such low lighting that there was no color, and it showed only the area of about twenty-five feet by twenty-five feet in front of the doors opening out into the Civic Center garage.

“No cameras aimed at the parked cars area?” asked Kurtz as the tape began to roll, yesterday’s date, hour, minute and second in white in the lower right of the frame.

“There is,” said Kennedy, “but the city chose the least expensive camera layout, so the next camera is looking the opposite direction, set about seventy-five feet from this coverage area. The shooter or shooters were in a dead area between camera views. No overlap.”

On the screen, the door opened and Kurtz watched himself emerge nodding toward the shadow that was Peg O’Toole holding the door. Kurtz watched himself walk in front of the woman, who was staying back.

They had separated ten feet or so and started to go opposite directions when something happened. Kurtz watched himself crouch, fling his arm out, point at the door, and shout something. O’Toole froze, looked at Kurtz as if he was mad, reached for the weapon in her purse, and then her head swung around and looked into the darkness behind the overhead camera. Everything was silent.

He saw sparks as a bullet struck a concrete pillar eight feet behind them. O’Toole drew her 9-mm Sig Pro and swung it in the direction the shooting was coming from. Kurtz watched himself swing around as if he was going to run for the shelter of the pillar, but then O’Toole was struck. Her head snapped back.

Kurtz remembered now. Remembered bits of it. The phut, phut, phut and muzzle flare coming from the sixth or seventh dark car down the ramp. Not a silenced weapon, Kurtz realized at the time and remembered now, but almost certainly a .22-caliber pistol, just one, sounding even softer than most .22s, as if the shooter had reduced the powder load.

O’Toole dropped, a black corsage blooming on her pale white forehead in the video. The gun skidded across concrete.

Kurtz dove for the Sig Sauer, came up with it, went to one knee in front of the parole officer, braced the pistol with both hands, and returned fire, the muzzle flare making the video bloom.

There were two figures, remembered Kurtz. Shadows. The shooter near the trunk of the car, and another man, taller, behind the bulk of the vehicle, just glimpsed through the car’s glass. Only the shorter man was shooting.

Kurtz was firing on the screen. Suddenly he stopped, dragged O’Toole by the arm across the floor, lifted her suddenly, and began carrying her back toward the doors.

I Hit the shooter, remembered Kurtz. He spun and sagged against the car. That’s when I tried to get O’Toole out. Then the other man grabbed the gun and kept shooting at us.

Officer O’Toole’s arm seemed to twitch—a slug going through her upper arm, Kurtz thought, remembering the doctor’s explanation—Kurtz’s upper body twisted and his head jerked around to the left as he brought the Sig Pro to bear again, and then he went down bard, dropping the woman. The two sprawled onto the concrete. Black-looking blood pooled on the floor.

A full minute went by with just the two bodies lying entangled there.

“There was no coverage of the exit ramp,” said Rigby. “We didn’t see the car leave…at least until it got to the ticket station.”

“Why didn’t he come out to finish us?” said Kurtz. He was looking at his own body sprawled next to O’Toole’s and thinking about the second shooter.

“We don’t know,” said Kennedy. “But a court stenographer comes out through those doors in a minute…ah, there she is…and she may have spooked the shooter.”

Shooters, thought Kurtz. Remembering the adrenaline of those few minutes made his head hurt worse.

On the screen, a woman steps out, claps her hands to her cheeks, screams silently, and runs back in through the doors.

Kennedy stopped the tape. “Another three and a half minutes before she gets someone down there—a security guard. He didn’t see anyone else, just you and Peg on the ground. He radioed for the ambulance. Then another ten minutes of people milling until the paramedics arrive. It’s lucky Peg survived all that loss of blood.”

Why didn’t the second shooter finish us? wondered Kurtz. Whichever one of us he was trying to kill.

Kennedy pulled the tape and popped another one in. Kurtz looked at Rigby King. “Why was I handcuffed?” His voice wasn’t pleasant.

“We hadn’t seen this yet,” she said.

“Why not?”

“The tapes weren’t marked,” said Brian Kennedy, answering for her. “There was some confusion. We didn’t have this to show Officers Kemper and King until after they visited you yesterday evening.”

I was handcuffed the entire fucking night, thought Kurtz, glaring at Rigby King. You left me helpless and handcuffed in that fucking hospital all night. She was obviously receiving his unspoken message, but she just returned his stare.

“This is the security camera at the Market Street exit,” said Kennedy, thumbing the remote control.

A young black woman was reading the National Enquirer in her glass cashier’s cubicle. Suddenly an older-make car roared up the ramp and out of the parking garage, snapping the wooden gate off in pieces and skidding a right turn into the empty street before disappearing.

“Freeze frame?” said Kurtz.

Kennedy nodded and backed the video up until the car was frozen in the act of hitting the gate. Only the driver was visible, a man, long hair wild, but his face turned away and his body only a silhouette. The camera was angled to see license tags, but this car’s rear tag looked like it had been daubed with mud. Most of the numerals and letters were unreadable.

“Attendant get a good look?” asked Kurtz.

“No,” said Kennedy. “She was too startled. Male. Maybe Caucasian. Maybe Hispanic or even black. Very long, dark hair. Light shirt.”

“Uh huh,” said Kurtz. “There could have been another man on the floor in the backseat.”

“Do you remember a second man?” asked Rigby.

Kurtz looked at her. “I don’t know,” he said. “I was just saying there could have been a second man in the back.”

“Yeah,” said Rigby. “And the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in the trunk.”

“Detective Kemper thinks it’s a Pontiac, dark color, maybe late eighties, rust patches in the right rear fender and trunk,” said Brian Kennedy.

“That narrows it down,” said Kurtz. “Only about thirty thousand of those in Buffalo.”

Kennedy gestured toward the frozen image and the license plate. “We’ve augmented this frame and think that there may be a two there on that tag, perhaps a seven as the last digit.”

Kurtz shrugged. “You check Officer O’Toole’s computer files? See if she has any pissed-off parolees?”

“Yes, the detectives copied the computer files and went through her filing cabinets, but…” began Kennedy.

“We’re pursuing the investigation with all diligence,” said Rigby, cutting off Kennedy’s info-dump.

Kennedy looked at Kurtz and smiled as if to say, man to man, Women and cops, whattayagonna do?

“I’m going home,” said Kurtz. Everyone stood. Kennedy offered his hand again and said, “Thanks for coming, Mr. Kurtz. I thank you for trying to protect Peg the way you did. As soon as I saw the video, I knew you weren’t involved in her shooting. You were a hero.”

“Uh huh,” said Kurtz, looking at Rigby King. You left me there handcuffed all night so that an old man in a wheelchair could slap me around. Anybody could’ve killed me.

“You want a ride home?” asked Rigby.

“I want my Pinto back.”

“We’re finished with it. It’s still in the Civic Center garage. And I have your clothes and billfold down in my car. Come on, I’ll give you a ride to the garage.”

Kurtz walked to the elevators with Rigby King, but before the elevator car arrived, Kennedy hustled out. “You forgot your portfolio, Mr. Kurtz.”

Kurtz nodded and took the leather folder holding Gonzaga’s paperwork listing seventeen murders unknown to the police or media.

CHAPTER

TEN

It wasn’t a long ride. Kurtz pulled the little brown-paper package of his clothes and shoes out of the backseat, checked his wallet—everything was there—and settled back, feeling the reloaded .38 against the small of his back.

“You know, Joe,” said Rigby King, “if I searched you right now and found a weapon, you’d go in for parole violation.”

Kurtz had nothing to say about that. The unmarked detective’s car was like every other unmarked police car in the world—ugly paint, rumbling cop engine, radio half hidden below the dashboard, a portable bubble light on the floor ready to be clamped onto the roof, and city-bought blackwall tires that no civilian anywhere would put on his vehicle. Any inner-city kid over the age of three could spot this as a cop car five blocks away on a rainy night.

“But I’m not going to search you,” said Rigby. “You wouldn’t last a week back in Attica.”

“I lasted more than eleven years there.”

“I’ll never understand how,” she said. “Between the Aryan Nation and the black power types, loners aren’t supposed to be able to make it a month inside. You never were a joiner, Joe.”

Kurtz watched the pedestrians cross in front of them as they stopped at a red light They were only a few blocks from the civic center. He could have walked it if he wasn’t feeling so damned dizzy. Leaving the portfolio on the floor back at Kennedy’s office showed Kurtz how much he needed some sleep. And maybe some pain medication. The pedestrians and the street beyond them seemed to shimmer from heat waves, even though it was only about sixty degrees outside today.

“When my husband left me,” said Rigby, “I moved back to Buffalo and joined the force. That was about four years ago.”

“I heard you had a little boy,” said Kurtz.

“I guess you heard wrong,” said Rigby, her voice fierce.

Kurtz held up both hands. “Sorry. I heard wrong.”

“I never knew my father, did you?” said Rigby.

“You know I didn’t,” said Kurtz.

“But you told me once that your mother told you that your father was a professional thief or something.”

Kurtz shrugged. “My mother was a whore. I didn’t see much of her even before the orphanage. Once when she was drunk, she told me that she thought my old man was a thief, some guy with just one name and that not even his own. Not a second-story guy, but a real hardcase who would set up serious jobs with a bunch of other pros and then blow town forever. She said he and she were together for just a week in the late sixties.”

“Must have been preparing for some heist,” said Rigby.

Kurtz smiled. “She said that he never wanted sex except right after a successful job.”

“Your old man may have been a professional thief but you never steal anything, Joe,” said Rigby King. “At least you never used to. Every other kid at Father Baker’s, including me, would lift whatever we could, but you never stole a damned thing.”

Kurtz said nothing to that. When he’d first known Rigby—when they’d had sex in the choir loft of the Basilica of Our Lady of Victory—he was fourteen, she was seventeen, and they were both part of the Father Baker Orphanage system. They didn’t know their fathers, and Kurtz didn’t think either one of them gave a shit.

“You never met your old man either, did you?” he asked now.

“I didn’t then,” said Rigby, pulling up to the curb by the Civic Center parking lot entrance. “I tracked him down after Thailand. He was already dead. Coronary. But I think he might have been an all right guy. I don’t think he ever knew I existed. My mother was a heroin addict.”

Kurtz, never the best at social niceties, guessed that there was probably a sensitive and proper response to this bit of news as well, but he had no interest in spending the effort to find it. “Thanks for the ride,” he said. “You have my Pinto keys?”

Rigby nodded and took them out of her jeans pocket. But she held onto them. “Do you ever think about those days, Joe?”

“Which days?”

“Father Baker days. The catacombs? That first night in the choir loft? Blues Franklin? Or even the ten months in Thailand?”

“Not much,” said Kurtz.

She handed him the keys. “When I came back to Buffalo, I tried to look you up. Found out my second day on the job that you were in Attica.”

“Modern place,” said Kurtz. “They have visiting hours, mail, everything.”

“That same day,” continued Rigby, “I found out that you murdered that guy—tossed him onto the roof of a black and white from the sixth floor—the guy who killed your agency partner and girlfriend, Samantha something.”

“Fielding,” said Kurtz, stepping out of the vehicle.

The passenger window was down halfway, and Rigby leaned over and said, “We’ll have to talk again about this shooting. Kemper wanted to brace you today, but I said let the poor bastard get some sleep.”

“Kemper has a hard-on for me,” said Kurtz. “You could have come and uncuffed me last night You both knew I didn’t shoot O’Toole.”

“Kemper’s a good cop,” said Rigby.

Kurtz let that go. He felt stupid standing there holding his little brown-wrapped bundle of clothes like a con getting sent back out into the world.

But Rigby wasn’t done. “He’s a good cop and he feels—he knows—that you’re on the wrong side of the law these days, Joe.”

Kurtz should have just walked away—he even turned to do so—but then he turned back. “Do you know that, Rigby?”

“I don’t know anything, Joe.” She set the unmarked car in gear and drove off, leaving him standing there holding is brown-wrapped bundle.

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

Arlene arrived right at nine-thirty. Kurtz was waiting outside the Harbor Inn. The wind blowing in from the lake to the west was cold and smelted like October. Weeds, newspapers, and small debris blew across the empty industrial fields and skittered by Kurtz’s feet.

When he got in the blue Buick, Arlene said, “I see you got the Pinto back.” It was parked behind the triangular building in its usual spot.

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. He’d had some problems with the local project youth the first weeks he’d lived here, until he’d beaten up the biggest of the car-stripper gang and offered to pay the smartest one a hundred bucks a week to protect the vehicle. Since then, there’d been no problem, except that he’d already paid several times what the Pinto was worth.

Making a U-turn and heading back to the lights of the city center, Arlene tapped a sealed manilla envelope on the console between them. “That blowdried mob guy showed up with the package you said was coming.”

“Did you open it?”

“Of course not,” said Arlene. She lit a Marlboro and frowned at him.

He opened the envelope. A list of five names and dates and addresses. One guy and two of his family members. A woman. Another guy.

“Angelina Farino Ferrara hired me to look into who’s been hitting some of their skag dealers and clients,” said Kurtz. “Toma Gonzaga bumped into me this afternoon and offered me the same job, only to see who’s been hitting his family’s clients.”

“Someone’s been killing both Gonzaga and Farino heroin dealers?” Arlene sounded surprised.

“Evidently.”

“I haven’t heard about this on the Channel Seven Action News.” Kurtz knew that Arlene was old enough to remember and miss Irv Weinstein and his if-it-bleeds-it-leads TV newsreels from long ago. All the day’s carnage and corpses wrapped up in forty-five seconds of fast footage. Kurtz missed it, too.

“They’ve kept it quiet,” said Kurtz.

“The families have kept it quiet?”

“Yeah.”

“How the hell do you keep five murders quiet?”

“It’s worse than that,” said Kurtz. “Twenty-two murders counting Gonzaga’s dealers and addicts.”

“Twenty-two murders? In what time period? Ten years? Fifteen?”

“The last month, I think,” said Kurtz. He tapped the envelope. “I haven’t read their publicity handout here yet.”

“Christ,” said Arlene. She flicked ashes out the window.

“Yep.”

“And you’ve agreed to dig around for them? As if you have nothing better to do?”

“They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse,” said Kurtz. “Both Gonzaga and the don’s daughter are offering cash and other incentives.”

Arlene squinted at him through the cigarette smoke. She knew Kurtz almost never made movie jokes or references, and never Godfather jokes. “Joe,” she said softly, “I don’t mean to meddle, but I don’t think that Angelina Farino has ever had your best interests at heart.”

Kurtz had to smile at that. “There’s the Civic Center garage,” he said. “Do you have an idea how we’re going to get in?”

“Did you get any sleep this afternoon?” She pulled up to the curb and parked.

“Some.” He’d dozed for about an hour before his headache woke him.

“I brought some Percocet.” She rattled the prescription bottle.

Kurtz didn’t ask or want to know why she was carrying Percocet. “I took a couple of aspirin,” he said, waving away the bottle. “I’m still curious about how we’re going to get in. The place is closed up pretty tight at night. Even the parking garage has that metal-mesh screen that has to be raised from the inside.”

Arlene held up her big, briefcase-sized purse as if that explained everything. “We’re going in through the front door and the metal detectors. If you’re carrying a gun, leave it out here.”

Help you?” grunted the guard by the metal detectors. One of the front doors had been unlocked, but it led only into this large foyer.

Arlene stepped closer and removed official ID and an official-looking letter on city stationery and handed them to the guard. Kurtz stood back from the overhead lights, keeping his face in shadow and the bandaged side of his head turned away.

“D.A.’s office?” said the guard after he’d read the paper with his lips moving only slightly. “What do you want tonight? Everything’s closed. Everyone’s gone home.”

“You read it,” said Arlene. “The D.A. himself has a nine A.M. hearing in front of Judge Garman, of all people, and half the paperwork on this parolee hasn’t been sent over.”

“Well, Miz…uh… Johnson… I shouldn’t really…”

“This has to be done quickly, Officer Jefferson. The D.A.’s tired of the incompetence here. If he’s embarrassed tomorrow by not getting these files tonight…” Arlene had taken out her cell phone and flipped it open.

“Okay, okay,” said Officer Jefferson. “Give me your bag and go through the detectors.”

Kurtz went through first and stepped back into the relative shadows. Jefferson was holding a heavy portable disk-drive with dongles hanging out and looking dubious.

“That’s a portable hard drive,” said Arlene, barely restraining a sigh and eye roll. “You don’t think we’re going to copy these files by hand, do you?”

Jefferson shook his head, set the memory drive back, and lifted out a black rectangular box about twelve inches long with slots in it and an attached cord.

“That’s my portable copier for files that do have to be copied by hand,” said Arlene, glancing at her watch. “The District Attorney needs these files no later than ten-thirty, Mr. Jefferson. He hates staying up late.”

Jefferson zipped up her giant purse and handed it back to her. “I didn’t get a call about this, Miz Johnson.”

Arlene smiled. “Officer, this is the D.A.’s office. Have you dealt with us before? The District Attorney is a wonderful man, but he’s lucky to remember to zip up his fly.”

“Ms. Feldman’s on bereavement leave this week,” said the officer.

“We know,” said Arlene. “But the district attorney still needs her files.”

Jefferson smiled. “Yeah.” He glanced at Kurtz. “I should show you the way up to Ms. Feldman’s parole office, but it’ll be a couple of minutes. Leroy’s still making his rounds.”

Arlene held up a silver key. “Carol’s sister gave us her key. This will just take a few minutes.” She handed the heavy bag to Kurtz. “Here, Thomas, carry this.”

Kurtz followed dutifully as she clacked her way across the lobby and summoned an elevator. Jefferson gave a half-salute as they stepped in.

“This will be on security video,” said Kurtz as the doors closed.

Arlene shrugged. “No crime, no need to check the security videos.”

“I presume that Ms. Feldman’s office is near O’Toole’s.”

“A few doors away.”

“Someday the D.A. will trace all this fun back to his predecessor’s former executive secretary,” said Kurtz.

“Not in this lifetime,” said Arlene.

In another, less obvious pocket of Arlene’s bag was the breaking and entering tool kit that Kurtz had always used for black bag jobs. He opened Feldman’s office door first, turned on the lights, and then locked it behind them. There were three strands of yellow crime scene tape across O’Toole’s doorway, but the door opened inward and they could step through. Kurtz took fifteen seconds to jimmy this lock as well.

They lowered the Venetian blinds, took out a pocket-sized low-light, no-flash infrared digital camera and took four photos so they could set everything back exactly the way it was. Then they clicked on halogen penlights. Both had pulled on gloves. Peg O’Toole’s computer was still there on the desk extension. Arlene found a power outlet for the backup drive, ran a USB cord to O’Toole’s computer, fired up the parole officer’s machine and her own, and whispered that they were set to go.

“How long will this take?” whispered Kurtz.

“Depends on how many files she has,” whispered Arlene, tapping her gloved fingers on O’Toole’s keyboard. “It took me forty-eight minutes to back up the WeddingBells-dot-com files.”

“We don’t have forty-eight minutes!” hissed Kurtz.

“That’s all right,” said Arlene. “WeddingBells has three thousand, three hundred and eighty files. Ms. O’Toole has one hundred and six.” The backup disk drive blinked a green light and began to whir. “Eight minutes and we’re out of here.”

“What if they’re encrypted or password protected or whatever?” whispered Kurtz.

“I don’t think they will be,” said Arlene. “But we’ll deal with that when we get the drive back to the office. Go do your file thing.” She handed him the travel scanner.

The files were locked. He had them open in twenty seconds. He used the penlight to look over several years worth of parolees’ thick files. What he needed was a recent list…here it was. Peg O’Toole currently had thirty-nine active “clients,” including one Joe Kurtz. He made a space, plugged in the digital copier/scanner, and began running pages through the small device. There were smaller scanners—some pen-sized—but this one was reliable and gobbled entire documents quickly, eliminating the need to run the scanner tip over lines of type. Kurtz fed in lists of current clients, addresses, phone numbers.

Arlene looked around the office and found a cassette tape recorder and racked stacks of cassettes. “She must record her notes, Joe,” whispered Arlene. “Then transcribe them. And the last three weeks of cassettes are missing.”

“Cops,” whispered Kurtz. He was digitizing O’Toole’s DayMinder, using the slower wand, playing the light over O’Toole’s handwritten entries. “We’ll just have to hope she had time to type her notes into the computer files.” He finished copying the top three pages in each of the active thirty-nine cons’ files, including his own, set the originals back, locked the file cabinets and came over to the desk.

The disk drive had already blinked that it was finished. Arlene left it attached and set a CD into the tray on O’Toole’s computer. “I want her e-mail,” whispered Arlene.

Kurtz shook his head. “That’ll be password protected for sure.”

Arlene nodded. “The program that I just loaded…ah…there it is. Will lie hidden in there and if anyone else knows her password and uses this computer, the program will quietly e-mail us a record of all the keystrokes.”

“Is that possible?” whispered Kurtz. The idea appalled him and made his headache worse.

“I just did it,” whispered Arlene. She unloaded the CD and put it in her bag.

“So all the hard-drive stuff is on the CD now?”

“No. Officer O’Toole didn’t have a writable CD drive on this old machine. I just sent the data to the hard drive backup.”

“Won’t the cops find your keystroke program if they look again?”

Arlene smiled. “It would eat itself first. God, I wish I could smoke in here.”

“Don’t even think about it,” whispered Kurtz. “Now move, I need to get into that desk.”

“It’s locked,” whispered Arlene.

“Uh huh,” said Kurtz. He used two bent pieces of metal and had the drawers open before Arlene got completely out of his way. The usual desk bric-a-brac in the center drawer—pens, paper clips, a ruler, pencils. Stationery and official stamps in the top right drawer. Old appointment journals in the right center drawer.

O’Toole had pulled the amusement park photographs out of the lower right drawer yesterday.

There were a few personal things there—tampons modestly pushed to the back, toothpaste, a toothbrush in a travel tube, some cosmetics, a small mirror. No photos. No envelope of the kind she’d taken the photos from. Kurtz checked everything again to make sure and then closed the drawers. The photos hadn’t been among the loose paperwork or in the recent files he’d checked.

“Police?” whispered Arlene. She knew what he was looking for.

Kurtz shrugged. She could have had the photos in her purse when she was shot. “We done here?”

When Arlene nodded, he relocked everything and checked the infrared digital photos on the LCD screen to make sure everything looked the same. He went back to the desk and adjusted a pencil. They opened the door a crack, made sure the hallway was empty, and stepped out.

Seven minutes twelve seconds.

Kurtz unlocked Ms. Feldman’s office and clicked off the lights. Locked the door.

They passed the other guard, Leroy, coming out of the elevator. “Phil told me you folks were here. Done already?”

Arlene held up the thick file of old SweetheartSearch-dot-com papers she’d taken from her briefcase. “We have what the D.A. needs,” she said.

Leroy nodded and moved down the hall to check the doors.

Outside, Arlene didn’t wait until they got to her Buick. She handed Kurtz the bag and lit a Marlboro. When they got in the car, Kurtz said, “You enjoy that?”

“You bet I did. It’s been more than a dozen years since I helped in the fieldwork.”

Kurtz thought about that. He didn’t remember ever using Arlene in the field.

“Sam,” said Arlene. Kurtz was surprised that Samantha had taken Arlene out for fieldwork and never told him. Evidently, a lot had gone on at the agency that he’d been oblivious to.

“Back to the office?” asked Arlene.

“Back to the office,” said Kurtz. “But go through a Burger King or something on the way.” It had been more than thirty hours since he’d eaten anything.

CHAPTER

TWELVE

They kept the lights low in their office—just two shielded old metal desk lamps—but the neon blaze from the Chippewa Street clubs and restaurants filled the big window and spilled onto Arlene’s desk.

Arlene loaded O’Toole’s hard drive data into her computer, and then added the digitized scanned material. Kurtz understood just enough to know that essentially she was creating a virtual computer—O’Toole’s—inside her own machine, but separated from Arlene’s own programs and files by various partitions. The parole officer’s computer memory didn’t even know it had been hijacked.

“Oh,” said Arlene, “I finished the research into Big John O’Toole, his brother the Major, and the amusement park search. I think you’ll be pleased with some of the connections. You can read it while I open this stuff.”

Kurtz looked on his desk for new files, but there weren’t any.

“I e-mailed it to your computer. The files are waiting there,” said Arlene. Her cigarette glowed.

“My desk is five feet from yours, and you e-mailed it to me?” Kurtz was finishing the big burger they’d picked up during the drive over.

“It’s a new century, Joe,” said Arlene.

Kurtz’s head hurt too much for him to start expressing his opinion on that happy revelation. He fired up his computer, downloaded the files, and opened them while he ate and sipped a Coke.

Big John O’Toole had been a street cop in Buffalo for almost twenty years and had remained a uniformed cop the entire time. He was a sergeant and three months away from retirement when he’d been shot and killed four years ago, during a drug-bust gone wrong according to the Buffalo News. O’Toole had been acting alone—strange for a sergeant with that seniority—investigating a series of car burnings over on Hertel, in a neighborhood famous for torching their cars for insurance, when he’d seen a heroin deal going down and tried to make the arrest by himself. One of the three suspects—all had escaped despite a huge manhunt—had got the drop on O’Toole and shot him in the head.

Weird, thought Kurtz. An experienced cop, even a uniform, trying to bust several drug dealers without calling for backup? It didn’t make sense.

There were several related stories, including one covering Sergeant John O’Toole’s huge funeral—every cop in Western New York seems to have turned out for it—and Kurtz recognized a slightly younger and somewhat thinner Officer Margaret O’Toole standing in the rain by the crowded graveside. He remembered learning once that she had been a real cop, working Vice at that time.

Kurtz skimmed through the rest of the Big John O’Toole stuff—mostly citations, occasional community related stuff going back more than a decade, and follow-up stories on the fruitless search for his shooters—and then went on to the hero-cop’s older brother, Major Michael Francis O’Toole.

Separate photos—the two didn’t seem to have been photographed together—showed that the brothers looked vaguely alike in that blunt Irish way, but the Major’s face was broader, tougher, and meaner than the cop’s. Arlene had somehow gotten into military records—Kurtz never asked her how she did such things—and he printed these pages so as to read them more easily.

Michael Francis O’Toole, born 1936, enlisted in the Army in 1956, a series of American and European base assignments, then his first tour in Vietnam in 1966. This O’Toole had worked his way up through the ranks, been sent to OCS in the early sixties, and was a captain during his first combat tour. There were various citations, medals, and details of heroism under fire—one time running from a landed command helicopter, under fire, to rescue one of his wounded men who had been left behind during a confused evacuation. His specialty had been working with ARVN—Army of the Republic of Vietnam—Kit Carson Scouts, the high-morale, American-trained Vietnamese troops who did scouting, interrogation, and translation for the army and CIA in-country. O’Toole had been shipped Stateside after a minor injury, promoted to Major, promptly volunteered to return to Vietnam, landed at a forward area in the Dan Lat Valley, stepped on an anti-personnel mine, and had lost the use of his legs.

That was the end of Major O’Toole’s active military career. After a stint in a Virginia V.A. hospital, O’Toole retired from the Army and returned to his family’s hometown of Chappaqua, New York. Then there were some 1972 virtual newspaper clippings about Major O’Toole in Neola, New York, a little town of about twenty thousand people about seventy miles south of Buffalo, along the Pennsylvania border. The Major had opened a major southeast Asian import-export business there along with his Vietnamese partner, Colonel Vin Trinh. They called the little business the SouthEast Asia Trading Company, SEATCO, which sounded like just another stupid military acronym to Kurtz, who’d had his share of them during his stint as an M.P.

All right, thought Kurtz. The headache was worse and he rubbed his temples. What the hell does all this mean other than poor, dying Peg O’Toole had had a hero (if not too bright) cop for a father and a Vietnam-hero for an uncle?

As if reading Kurtz’s mind, Arlene stubbed out her cigarette and said, “Read that last file before you go any further with the O’Toole brothers.”

“The file marked ‘Cloud Nine’?”

“Yeah.”

Kurtz dropped the other stuff offscreen and opened ‘Cloud Nine.’ It was a puff article from The Neola Sentinel, dated August 10, 1974, about the wonderful amusement park being opened in the mountains above Neola. It was expected that this new, state-of-the-art amusement park would attract patrons from all over Western New York, Northern Pennsylvania, and North-Central Ohio. The park included a one-third-scale train that would hold up to sixty youngsters and which would follow tracks almost a mile and a half across and around the mountaintop. The park also boasted a huge Ferris wheel, a roller coaster “second only to the Comet at Canada’s Crystal Beach,” bumper cars, and a host of other amusements.

The park had been built “as a gift to the youth of Neola” by Major Michael Francis O’Toole, president of SouthEast Asia Trading Company of Neola, New York.

“Ahah,” said Kurtz.

Arlene stopped her typing. “I haven’t heard you say ‘ahah’ since the old days, Joe.”

“It’s a specialized term known only to professional private investigators,” said Kurtz.

Arlene smiled.

“Only this time, you’re the investigator. I didn’t do a damned thing to dig up this information. It’s all you and that computer.”

Arlene shrugged. “Have you read the file labeled Neola H.S. yet?”

“Not yet,” said Kurtz. He opened it.

Dateline The Neola Sentinel, The Buffalo News, and The New York Times, October 27, 1977. A high-school senior, Sean Michael O’Toole, 18, entered Neola High School armed with a .30-.06 rifle yesterday and shot two of his classmates, a gym teacher, and the assistant principal, before being wrestled to the ground by four members of the Neola football team. All four of the shooting victims were pronounced dead at the scene. It stated that Sean Michael O’Toole is the son of prominent Neola businessman and owner of the Cloud Nine amusement park, Major Michael O’Toole and the late Eleanor Rains O’Toole. No motive for the shooting has been given.

Wow, pre-Columbine,” said Kurtz.

“Do you remember when that happened?” asked Arlene.

“I was just a kid,” said Kurtz. Although it would have been the kind of news item he’d have taken an interest in even then.

“You were already in Father Baker’s then,” Arlene reminded him. The court sent kids to Father Baker’s Orphanage.

Kurtz shrugged. The last thing in that file was the January 27, 1978, court hearing for the Major’s kid. Sean O’Toole had been judged by a battery of psychiatrists to be competent to stand trial. He was remanded to a psychiatric institution for the criminally insane in Rochester, New York, for further testing and “continuing evaluation and therapy in secure surroundings.” Kurtz knew about the Rochester nuthouse—it was a dungeon for some of New York State’s craziest killers.

“Did you read the last bit of the Cloud Nine file?” asked Arlene.

“Not yet.”

“It’s just a Neola Sentinel clipping from May of nineteen seventy-eight,” said Arlene, “announcing that the Cloud Nine Amusement Park, already beset by financial difficulties and low attendance, was closing its gates forever.”

“So much for the youth of Neola,” said Kurtz.

“Evidently.”

“But if her uncle was running this business and park in Neola, why wouldn’t Peg O’Toole know about it?” Kurtz mused aloud. “Why would she show me those photos of the abandoned park—assuming it’s Cloud Nine—and not know it’s her uncle’s old place?”

Arlene shrugged. “Maybe she knew the photos weren’t from her uncle’s abandoned park. Or maybe she didn’t even know that Cloud Nine existed. Her father, Big John, didn’t move to Buffalo and start his cop job here until nineteen eighty-two. Maybe the Major and his cop brother were estranged. I didn’t see the Major and his wheelchair in the photos from Big John’s funeral four years ago. You’d think the uncle would be right there next to Ms. O’Toole since Peg’s mother was dead.”

“Still…” said Kurtz.

“Remember you telling me that one of the overturned bumper cars in the photo you saw yesterday had the number nine on it?”

“Cloud Nine,” said Kurtz. “It’s all there. It just doesn’t make sense. I’ll be right back.”

Kurtz got up quickly, hurried to the tiny bathroom back by the purring computer server room, knelt next to the toilet, and vomited several times. When he was done, he rinsed his mouth out and washed his face. His hands were shaking violently. Evidently, the concussion didn’t want him to eat yet.

When he came back into the main room, Arlene said, “You okay, Joe?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you need any other searches related to this?”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. “I want to find out what happened to this kid, the shooter. Did he stay caged up in Rochester? Is he out now? And I need some details of the Major’s specific history in Vietnam—not just his medals, but names, locations, who he worked with, what he was doing when.”

“Medical records and military records can be two of the hardest things to hack into,” said Arlene. “I’m not sure I can get any of this.”

“Do your best,” said Kurtz. His cell phone rang. He turned to answer it.

Daddy Bruce’s voice said, “You wanted to know when that Big Bore Indian came back to the Blues hunting for you again, Joe.”

“Yeah.”

“He’s here.”

CHAPTER

THIRTEEN

Big Bore Redhawk was a born-again Indian. That is, he’d been born Dickie-Bob Tingsley and hadn’t really paid attention to the little bit of Native American ancestry his mother had told him he had until he was arrested for fencing jewelry at age twenty-six and discovered—through a sarcastic comment made by the judge at his hearing—that he could have been selling jewelry legally without being taxed because of his reputed Indian blood.

Big Bore Redhawk had chosen his Tuscarora name with care—even though he wasn’t a member of the Tuscarora tribe. Always a fan of huge firearms, Dickie-Bob had admired the Ruger Big Bore Redhawk .357 Magnum pistol more than any other heavy-caliber weapon he’d ever owned. He’d killed each of his first two wives with a Big Bore Redhawk—having to toss each weapon away and knock over some liquor stores to earn enough money to replace it each time—and it was while trying to rob a liquor store (with a totally inadequate .22 Beretta) to replace that second beloved weapon, rusting in the Reservation soil not far from his second wife, that he was arrested and sent to Attica.

Big Bore’s one legal request before being sent up was to change his name. The judge, amused, had allowed it.

Big Bore had known who Joe Kurtz was in the years they were both in Attica, but he’d stayed away from the smaller man. (Most men were smaller than Big Bore Redhawk.) Big Bore had considered Kurtz a crazy fuck—any man who would kill that Black Muslim mofo Ali in a shower shiv fight and get away with it, fooling the guards but drawing a fifteen-thousand-dollar death price on his head from the D-Block Mosque was a crazy fuck. Big Bore didn’t want any part of him. Big Bore hung out with his A.B. buds and let his lawyer work to get him out early based on the premise that he, Big Bore Redhawk, was a victim of anti-Native American discrimination.

Then, last winter, Little Skag Farino, still serving time for murder in Attica, had sent word to Big Bore through Skag’s sister, Angelina Whatsis Whosis, that he’d pay Big Bore ten thousand dollars for whacking Kurtz.

It had sounded good. Little Skag’s sexy sister had paid him two thousand dollars in advance and Big Bore had done a week of serious drinking while making his plans. It shouldn’t have been too hard to kill Kurtz, since Big Bore had his new Big Bore Redhawk .357, an eight-inch Bowie knife, and Kurtz didn’t know he was coming for him.

But somehow Kurtz had found out, driven up to the Tuscarora Reservation just north of Buffalo in a fucking blizzard, surprised Big Bore and challenged him to a fair fight. Kurtz had even tossed his gun aside for the fight Big Bore had grinned, pulled his giant knife, and said something like, “Okay, let’s see what you got, Kurtz.” And Kurtz had said something like, “I’ve got a forty-five,” and pulled a second pistol out from under his jacket and shot Big Bore in the knee.

It really hurt.

Because Kurtz had threatened to reveal the bit about where his two wives were buried—Big Bore had done a lot of bragging in stir—the Indian had told the cops he’d blown his own knee off while cleaning a friend’s pistol. The cops hadn’t been impressed with this story, but they also hadn’t really given a damn about Big Bore’s ruined knee, so they’d left it alone.

At first, Big Bore had considered leaving it alone as well—Kurtz was a mean little fuck—and the wounded man had planned to just move out west somewhere, Arizona or Nevada or Indiana or one of those states where real Indians lived—and maybe he’d grow his own peyote and live in an air-conditioned tipi somewhere and sell tourists fake rugs or something.

But after several weeks in and out of the hospital while the medics kept futzing with what little cartilage and bone was left in his knee and upper leg, they gave Big Bore a prosthetic hinge—he couldn’t call it a knee—of plastic and steel and consigned him to four months of sheer hell called physical therapy. Every time Big Bore whined or cursed from the pain, which was a hundred times a day, he thought of Joe Kurtz. And what he was going to do to Joe Kurtz.

And then, just last month in September, two of Big Bore’s good A.B. buds from Attica got out on parole, and together the three of them began looking for Kurtz. But his two Aryan Brotherhood pals—Moses and Pharaoh—were unreliable, shot up on skag half the time, and now Big Bore was looking for Kurtz on his own. He had his beloved double-action, seven and a half-inch barreled Big Bore Redhawk .357 Magnum. The huge pistol was made even larger by the addition of a big 2X Burris LER pistol scope hooked to the barrel scallops by scope rings.

The assembled weapon with scope was huge. Neither of his two ex-wives could have lifted the thing with one hand, nor could they have pulled the trigger, what with its 6.25-lb. trigger pull. Big Bore couldn’t fit the scoped weapon in his custom-made Ruger shoulder holster, so he carried around a little gym bag with the scoped Redhawk and a hundred rounds of Buffalo Bore ammo.

He was carrying the bag when he went back to Blues Franklin this night to apologize to the old nigger who owned the place—Daddy Bruce—and explain that he’d been drunk the last time he’d been in and that the A.B. types with him were no friends of his—and to ask, casually, if Daddy had seen Joe Kurtz recently. Daddy had accepted Big Bore’s apology, bought him a drink, and said that if Joe Kurtz didn’t show by eleven P.M., he wasn’t coming.

Big Bore waited alertly until eleven-thirty and had three more drinks while he waited. Some group was playing music, jazz probably, although all music sounded the same to Big Bore. He sorted through various plans but then decided on the simplest one—when Kurtz came through the door, Big Bore would lift the .357 Magnum, blow a hole in Kurtz wide enough to drop Daddy Brace’s little granddaughter through, and then Big Bore would hop in his Dodge Power Wagon and drive straight out to Arizona or wherever, maybe stop in Ohio to visit his cousin Tami.

Quarter to midnight and Big Bore realized that Kurtz wasn’t coming. Just as he was leaving Blues Franklin, Big Bore got the uneasy feeling that he was being set up. What was to keep Daddy Bruce from calling Kurtz. Maybe Kurtz was paying the nigger to be on the lookout.

Franklin Street was dark, everything shut down but the blues club and the coffeehouse three doors down. Big Bore slipped the huge double-action out of the gym bag and carried it muzzle down, pressed against his leg, the massive hammer thumbed back. He moved from shadow to shadow, watching out of the corners of his eyes like they’d taught him in the army before they kicked him out.

No one on the street. No one in the alley. A single other car—a dark and silent Lincoln—was parked half a block up from where his ancient Dodge Power Wagon pickup truck sat high on oversized wheels just across the street. Had he locked it?

Big Bore slipped a flashlight out of the gym bag and shifted the bag under his left arm. Then he moved forward quickly, stabbing the flashlight beam ahead of him toward the cab, the Ruger half-raised.

Both doors were locked. The high cab was empty. Big Bore set the bag down, fished around for his keys, opened the driver’s side door, flashed the beam around once more to be sure, looked over his shoulder to check that no one was getting out of the Lincoln, looked up and down the street, and then jumped into the cab, tossing the bag on the seat to his right and laying the huge scoped pistol on top of it.

He felt the breeze on his neck a second before the muzzle of a gun pressed against the back of his head. Some sonofabitch took the window out of the back of the cab and was hiding in the truck bed.

“Keep your hands on the top of the wheel, Big Bore,” whispered Joe Kurtz. “Don’t turn around.”

“Joe, I been wanting to talk to you…” began the Indian.

“Shut up.” Keeping the cocked .38’s muzzle deep in the flab at the back of Big Bore’s neck, Kurtz reached in, grabbed the Ruger, and dropped it into the bed of the truck.

“Joe, you gotta understand…”

“I understand that the next word you say will be your last,” hissed Kurtz in Big Bore’s ear. “One bullet for each additional word from here on in.”

Big Bore managed to keep quiet His left leg began shaking, but then he remembered. I got the knife on my belt under the vest and he knew that Kurtz would want to talk, want to threaten him, and that’s when Big Bore’d gut him like a fish. He almost smiled.

“Listen,” whispered Kurtz. “Start the engine but then put your right hand back on the top of the wheel next to the left one. That’s good. Steer with both hands up there.”

“I gotta shift…” began Big Bore and then winced, shut his eyes, and waited for the bullet Kurtz pressed the muzzle so deep into his neck that it felt like a bullet coming up into his skull.

“No shifting,” said Kurtz. “This thing’s in second gear, it’ll start in second gear—keep it there. Both hands on the wheel. That car in front of you is going to start up and pull out now. Follow it, but not too close. Get within twenty feet of its bumper and I’ll blow your head off. Fall more than fifty feet behind it and I’ll blow your head off. Go over thirty miles an hour and I’ll blow your head off. Nod if all this is clear.”

Big Bore nodded.

The Lincoln Town Car ahead of them started up, turned on its headlights, and pulled away from the curb, heading slowly south on Franklin Street.

“Turn left here,” said Kurtz. The truck followed the Lincoln as it turned east.

Maybe someone’ll see Kurtz in the truck bed behind me reachin’ in, thought Big Bore, but the stab of hope faded quickly. It was too dark. The sides of the Power Wagon were too high. Kurtz had the old tarp pulled up over him. The Lincoln was moving slowly, crossing Main into the black ghetto where there were fewer and fewer streetlights.

“You just couldn’t leave it alone, could you, Big Bore?” said Kurtz.

The Indian opened his mouth to say something, anything, then remembered Kurtz’s threat.

“You can answer this,” said Kurtz. “Do you know anything about the parking garage?”

“Parking garage?” repeated Big Bore.

Kurtz could tell from the tone of the man’s quavering voice that Big Bore Redhawk had nothing to do with yesterday’s shooting.

The Lincoln pulled up in front of an abandoned line of shops in the darkest section of the old black neighborhoods.

“Stop ten feet behind it, put it in neutral, and set the brake,” whispered Kurtz. “Do anything else and I kill you here.”

Big Bore considered going for the knife then, but the circle of the muzzle pressed into the back of his head was more persuasive than his desperation.

Three men got out of the Lincoln and walked back to the Dodge wagon. Two of them aimed guns at Big Bore, ordered him to step out of the cab, frisked him, took his giant knife, and led him to the Lincoln, where they had him lie down in the trunk. The Town Car’s trunk was very well insulated and Big Bore’s sobs and entreaties were cut off as soon as the lid came down.

“I understand this is supposed to happen tomorrow, way the hell down by Erie, at ten A.M. exactly,” said Colin, Angelina Farino Ferrara’s personal bodyguard.

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. He held the huge, scoped Ruger up in his gloved hand. “You have any use for this?”

“Are you kidding?” said Colin. “That thing’s almost as big as my dick. I like smaller weapons.” He hoisted the little .32 he was holding.

Kurtz nodded and dropped the Ruger through the missing window into the driver’s seat. He had no doubt that truck and gun would be gone by three A.M.

“Miz Ferrara said I should be getting an envelope,” said Colin.

“Tell her I’ll send the money to her this weekend,” said Kurtz.

The bodyguard gave Kurtz a look but then shrugged. “Why ten A.M.?”

“What?” Kurtz’s head was buzzing.

“Why ten A.M. exactly? For the Indian tomorrow.”

“It’s a sentimental thing,” said Kurtz. He hopped down from the Power Wagon bed and began walking toward where his Pinto was parked in front of an abandoned drugstore with broken windows.

When he’d called Angelina on her private line after getting Daddy Brace’s call, the female don had thought he was kidding.

“I’m not,” Kurtz had said. “I’ll still find this skag basher for you, and you keep your fifteen thousand dollars…”

“Ten thousand for finding him,” Angelina said. “I already gave you five as an advance.”

“Whatever. I send the advance back and you keep the rest in exchange for this little favor now.”

“Little favor,” repeated Angelina, her voice amused. “We do this…little thing for you now in exchange for your promise to do this other thing for us someday?”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. After a minute’s silence, he’d said, “You started this Big Bore thing last winter, lady. Look at this as a way to clean it up and save some money at the same time.”

There was a brief additional silence on the line and then she’d said, “All right. When tonight? Where?”

Kurtz had told her.

“This isn’t your style, Kurtz,” she’d said then. “I always thought you took care of your own messes.”

“Yeah,” Kurtz had said tiredly. “I’m just a little busy right now.”

“But no more favors like this,” said Angelina Farino Ferrara.

Now Kurtz sat in his Pinto and watched the Lincoln Town Car drive away slowly. The huge Dodge Power Wagon was alone at the dark curb, its heavy brackets for a snowplow blade looking like mandibles, the rest of its hulk looking rusted and desolate and sort of sad so far out of its element here in the inner city.

Kurtz shook his head, wondered if he was getting soft, and drove back to the Harbor Inn to get some sleep. He and Arlene were going to go over the rest of the O’Toole computer stuff in the office at eight the next morning. He’d made another call on the way over to Blues Franklin and had an appointment set for ten A.M.

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

So why’d you want to meet me here?” asked Detective Rigby King.

“I like the food here,” said Kurtz. He glanced at his watch. It was just ten A.M.

They were in the small restaurant area—a long counter and a long, narrow dining area just across the aisle from the counter—set amidst the sprawling, indoor Broadway Market. The market was a tradition in Buffalo, and like most traditions in America, it had seen better days. Once a thriving indoor fresh meat, fruit, flowers, and tchotchke covered market in the old Polish and German section of town, Broadway Market was now surrounded by a black ghetto and really came alive only during Easter time, when the many Polish families who’d fled to Cheektowaga and other suburbs came in to buy their Easter hams. Today, half the market space was empty and there was a halfhearted attempt at some Halloween exhibits and festivities, but only a few black mothers with their costumed kids wandered the aisles.

Kurtz and Rigby sat along the mostly empty counter at the aisle-side restaurant. For some promotional reason, all the waitresses behind the long counter were wearing flannel pajamas. One of them had a sort of sleeping bonnet on. They didn’t look all that happy, and Kurtz couldn’t blame them.

Kurtz and Rigby were drinking coffee. Kurtz also had ordered a donut, although he nibbled without enthusiasm. Little kids in drugstore Star Wars and Spiderman costumes would glance at him, then look again, and then cringe against their mothers’ legs. Kurtz was still wearing the Ray Charles glasses, but evidently the raccoon bruises were turning orange today and creeping out farther from beneath the glasses. He was wearing a black baseball cap to cover most of the small bandage he’d left in place.

“Do you remember coming here as a kid?” asked Kurtz, sipping his coffee and watching what little movement there was in the cavernous space. Many of the mothers seemed morose and sullen, their kids hyperactive.

“I remember stealing stuff here as a kid,” said Rigby. “The old women would scream at me in Polish.”

Kurtz nodded. He knew other kids from Father Baker’s who’d come up here to grab and run. He never had.

“Joe,” said Rigby, setting down her coffee mug, “you didn’t ask to meet to ramble on about old times. Did you have something you wanted to talk about?”

“Do I have to have an agenda to have coffee with an old friend?”

Rigby snorted slightly. “Speaking of old friends and agendas—you know another ex-con named Big Bore Redhawk?”

Kurtz shrugged. “Not really. There was some guy in Attica with that absurd name, but I never had anything to do with him.”

“He seems to want to have something to do with you,” said Rigby.

Kurtz drank his coffee.

“Word on the street is that this Indian’s been hunting for you, telling people in bars that he has a grudge to settle with you. Know anything about this, Joe?”

“No.”

Rigby leaned closer. “We’re hunting for him. Maybe the grudge he had with you got itself worked out in that parking garage and Peg O’Toole. You think we should question him?”

“Sure,” said Kurtz. “But the Indian I remember in Attica didn’t look like the twenty-two caliber type. But that’s no reason not to talk to him.”

Rigby sat back. “Why’d you invite me here, Joe?”

“I’m remembering some of the details of the shooting.”

Rigby looked skeptical but kept listening.

“There were two men,” said Kurtz.

The detective folded her arms across her chest. She was wearing a blue oxford shirt today and a soft, camel-colored jacket with the usual jeans. Her gun was out of sight on her belt on the right. “Two men,” she said at last. “You saw their faces?”

“No. Just shapes, silhouettes, about forty feet away. One guy did the shooting until I hit him. Then the other grabbed the twenty-two and started firing.”

“How do you know it was a twenty-two?” asked Rigby.

Kurtz frowned. “That’s what you and the surgeon told me. That’s the slug they pulled out of O’Toole’s brain and found next to my skull. What are you talking about, Rigby?”

“But you weren’t close enough to make out the type of twenty-two?”

“No. Aren’t you listening? But I could tell from the sound—phut, phut, phut.”

“Silenced?”

“No. But softer than most twenty-twos would sound in an enclosed, echoing space like that. Sort of like they’d dumped some of the powder in each cartridge. It wouldn’t make much difference in muzzle velocity, but it sure cuts down on the noise.”

“Says who?” asked Rigby.

“Israel’s Mossad for one,” said Kurtz. “The assassins they sent out to get payback for the Munich Massacre used reduced loads in twenty-twos.”

“You an expert on Mossad assassins now, Joe?”

“No,” said Kurtz. He set the remaining half of the donut aside. “I saw it in some movie.”

“Some movie,” said Rigby and rubbed her cheek. “All right, tell me about the two men.”

Kurtz shrugged. “Just like I said—two silhouettes. No details. The guy I hit was shorter than the guy who picked up the pistol and kept firing.”

“You’re sure you hit one of them?”

“Yeah.”

“We didn’t find any blood on the garage floor—except yours and O’Toole’s.”

Kurtz shrugged again. “My guess is that the second shooter crammed the wounded man in the backseat of their car and took off after I went down.”

“So they were shooting from behind their own car?”

“How the hell should I know?” said Kurtz. “But wouldn’t you?”

Rigby leaned closer, her right elbow on the counter. “I sure as hell wouldn’t use a twenty-two to try to kill two people from more than forty feet away.”

“No, but I don’t think they planned to shoot so soon,” said Kurtz. “They were waiting for O’Toole to go to her car just past where they were waiting. Then the shooter would have stepped out and popped her from a couple of yards away.”

Rigby’s dark eyebrows went up. “So now you know they were after the parole officer, not you. You’re conveniently remembering a lot today, Joe.”

Kurtz sighed. “My car was down the ramp to the right. The shooters were on the ramp where O’Toole’s car was parked.”

“How do you know that?”

“She was walking in that direction,” said Kurtz. “We both saw it on the tape.” He braved another nibble of donut.

“Why two men but only one shooter?” hissed Rigby. They’d been whispering, but they were speaking loudly enough now that one of the waitresses in red polka-dot flannel pajamas looked over at them.

“How the fuck should I know?” Kurtz said in a conversational tone.

Rigby plunked down a five dollar bill for the two coffees and donut. “Do you remember anything else?”

“No. I mean, I remember pretty much what we saw on the security video—trying to drag and carry O’Toole back to the door, or at least behind that pillar, and then getting hit.”

Rigby King studied his eyes. “That bit about rescuing O’Toole, risking your life to carry her to safety, didn’t strike me as the Joe Kurtz I used to know. You were always the living embodiment of the theory of sociobiology to me, Joe.”

Kurtz knew what she was talking about—his wino mentor, Pruno, had given him a long reading list for his years in Attica and Edward O. Wilson had been on the list for year six—but he wasn’t going to show her he understood the comment. He gave Rigby the flattest gaze he was capable of and said, “I draped O’Toole over my back like a shield. She’s a hefty woman. She would have stopped a twenty-two slug at that range.”

“Well, she did,” said Rigby. She stood. “If you regain any more memory, Joe, phone it in.”

She walked out through the southwest door of Broadway Market.

His phone rang as he was driving the Pinto back to Chippewa Street.

“Errand is all done,” came Angelina Farino Ferrara’s voice.

“Thanks.”

“Fuck thanks,” said the female acting-don. “You owe me, Kurtz.”

“No. Consider us even when I give you the down payment back, and spend the fifteen wisely. Go buy a new bra for your Boxster.”

“I sold the Boxster this spring,” said Angelina. “Too slow.” She disconnected.

The office smelled of coffee and cigarettes. Kurtz had never picked up the habit for the second and felt too queasy to enjoy more of the first.

O’Toole’s computer memory had divulged everything under questioning—password-protected files on her thirty-nine clients, her notes, everything except the password-protected e-mail. Most of what they got was garbage. O’Toole obviously didn’t use the company computer for personal stuff—the files were all business.

The files on all the ex-cons, including on Kurtz himself, piled up the usual heap of sad facts and parolee bullshit. Only twenty-one of the thirty-nine were “active clients”—i.e., cons who had to drop in weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly to visit their parole officer. None of O’Toole’s notes for the last few weeks’ visits started with—“Client so-and-so threatened to kill me today…” In fact the level of banality was stunning. All of these guys were losers, many of them were addicts of one or many things, none of them—despite the veil of O’Toole’s cool, professional summaries—seemed to show any real signs of wanting to go straight.

And none of them seemed to have a motive for killing his parole officer. (All of O’Toole’s clients were male. Perhaps, Kurtz thought, she didn’t like ex-cons of the female persuasion.)

Kurtz sighed and rubbed his chin, hearing the stubble there rasp. He’d showered this morning—moving slowly through the haze of pain and queasiness—but he’d decided that the stubble went with the purple and orange raccoon mask and dissolute visage. Besides, it hurt his head to shave.

Arlene had left the office after their meeting this morning—on Fridays she usually went to have coffee with her sister-in-law, Gail, often to discuss Sam’s daughter, Rachel, for whom Gail now acted as guardian. So Kurtz had the office to himself. He paced back and forth, feeling the heat from the back room filled with humming servers at one end of his pace and the chill from the long bank of windows at the other end. Yesterday had been brisk and beautiful; today was cold and rainy. Tires hissed on Chippewa Street, but there wasn’t much traffic before noon.

He kept shuffling the five pages with their thirty-nine names and capsule summaries and considered ruling himself out as a suspect. The honed instincts of a trained professional investigator. No other strategies or conclusions came to mind. Even if he just cut the list to the twenty “active” clients she was seeing weekly or bi-weekly—and there was no logical reason to do that, nor any logical reason to think it was just one of her current clients who did the shooting since it could have been any of the hundreds or thousands who had come before—it would take Kurtz a week or two to get a door-to-door investigation under way.

But something was gnawing like a rodent at Joe Kurtz’s bruised brain. One of the names…

He shuffled the pages. There it was. Page three. Yasein Goba, 26, naturalized American citizen of Yemeni descent, lives in a part of Lackawanna called “back the Bridge,” meaning south of the first all-steel bridge in America, in what was now one of the toughest neighborhoods in America. Goba was on parole after serving eighteen months on an armed robbery conviction.

Kurtz tried to remember what his bag lady informer, Mrs. Tuella Dean, had said—rumors about “some crazy Arab down in Lackawanna talking about wanting to shoot someone.”

Pretty thin. Actually, Kurtz realized, thin was too grandiloquent a word for this connection. Invisible, maybe.

Kurtz knew that his search for this Yemeni, if he did it, went straight to the heart of the most pressing question in his world right now—If the odds are that someone was after Peg O’Toole rather than me, why the hell am I looking into that shooting rather than the heroin killer thing? After all, Toma Gonzaga was going to kill a guy named Joe Kurtz in—Kurtz glanced at his watch—seventy-eight hours, unless Kurtz solved the mobster’s little serial killer problem. Kurtz had only met Toma this one time, but he had the strong feeling that the man meant what he said. Also, Kurtz could use one hundred thousand dollars.

So why am I fucking around investigating my shooting if O’Toole was the probable target? Get to work on the heroin shooter, Joe.

Kurtz walked over to the four-foot by five-foot framed map of the Buffalo area set on the north wall of the office. Sam had used the map in their old office, and Arlene had put it up here despite Kurtz’s protests that they didn’t need the damned thing. This morning, though, he and Arlene had gone through the list of murder sites from both Angelina Farino Ferrara’s and Toma Gonzaga’s lists and stuck red thumbtacks at each site—fourteen sites for twenty-two missing and presumed murdered people.

The hits had been literally all over the map: three in Lackawanna, four in the black ghetto east of Main, but others in Tonawanda, Cheektowaga, four more in Buffalo proper, and more in relatively upscale—or at least middle-class—suburbs such as Amherst and Kenmore.

Kurtz knew that no investigator in the world, even with police forensic resources behind him or her, could solve these murders in three days if the perpetrator didn’t want to be caught. Too many hundreds of square miles to cover, too many hundreds of possible witnesses and potential suspects to interview, too many scores of fingerprints to check out—although Kurtz didn’t even own a Boy Detective fingerprint kit—and too many possible local, state, and national killers who’d benefit from putting a crimp in the Gonzaga drug empire in Western New York.

If Kurtz were to make a list of suspects in the heroin killings right now, the name Angelina Farino Ferrara would fill the first five places on the list. The woman had everything to gain by destroying the Gonzagas’ historical claim on the drug scene in the Buffalo area. She was ambitious. My God, was she ambitious. Her life’s ambition had been to kill Emilio Gonzaga—which she had done last winter using Joe Kurtz as one of her many pawns—while weakening the Gonzaga crime family’s grip on the city and strengthening what was left of the Farino Family power here.

All this “Toma” and “Angelina” first-name crap made sense to Kurtz only if the woman was playing the old game of being friends with her adversary even while plotting his destruction.

But there were the five blue pins on the map—all Farino Family dealers or users who had disappeared with only bloody stains left behind!

Who said they’d been killed?

Angelina Farino Ferrara. Her family, in the first year of her rebuilding, had grabbed just enough peripheral drug action that it would be too suspicious if only Gonzaga people were being murdered. What was the loss of a few dealers and users if it meant gaining Toma Gonzaga’s trust? Maybe they’d all been relocated to Miami or Atlantic City while Ms. Farino Ferrara continued to murder Gonzaga junkies.

But Kurtz was sure that Gonzaga didn’t trust Angelina. Anyone would be a fool to trust this woman who shot her first husband and kept the pistol out of what she called sentimentality, this woman who married her second elderly husband to be trained in the strategies and tactics of thievery, and who calmly admitted to drowning her only baby because it carried Gonzaga genes.

Kurtz stood at the window and watched the cold rain fall on Chippewa Street It made sense that Gonzaga “hired” him to find the heroin-connection killer in four days. At the very least, Kurtz’s failure would give Gonzaga another reason for whacking him—as if possible collusion in the death of the mobster’s father wasn’t enough. And Angelina wasn’t going to throw a fit when she learned that he’d been whacked—she’d accept Toma’s explanation without rancor. The life of one Joe Kurtz wasn’t that important in the grander scheme of things for her—especially when that grander scheme included revenge and ambition, which seemed to be the alpha and omega of Angelina Farino Ferrara’s emotional spectrum.

Kurtz had to smile. His options were few. At least he’d neutralized the loose cannon that had been Big Bore Redhawk, recording the cell phone conversation with Angelina setting up the hit as he’d done so. Of course, the recording incriminated Joe Kurtz even more than the female don. In truth, they’d both been so circumspect over the phone that the tape was all but useless.

So it came down to the five thousand dollars advance money in an envelope that Kurtz was still carrying around. He’d use that on Tuesday morning—Halloween—when he drove away from Buffalo, New York, forever, buying a different used car before crossing the state line (and violating his parole). Kurtz knew a few people around the country, perhaps the most important right now being a plastic surgeon in Oklahoma City who gave people like Joe Kurtz new faces and identities in exchange for hard cash.

But he’d need quite a bit more hard cash. Kurtz could get fifty thousand dollars in a minute by asking Arlene to buy his theoretical share of WeddingBells-dot-com and SweetheartSearch-dot-com, but he’d never do that. She’d waited for years to start an online business like this, even if the high school sweetheart thing had been his idea in Attica.

Well, he could always get more cash.

Kurtz pulled on his baseball cap, slipped the .38 into his belt, and headed down to the Pinto. He had someone in Lackawanna he wanted to see.

CHAPTER

FIFTEEN

Lackawanna had been one of the great steel centers of the world for almost a century. Raw materials flowed in by ocean freighter coming up the St. Lawrence Seaway and across the Great Lakes, by canal barge, and by locomotive; steel flowed out. Tens of thousands of workers in Lackawanna and Buffalo owed their livelihood to Lackawanna steel for more than fifty years, and it was a good life, with higher wages than those earned at the Chrysler plant or American Standard or any of the other large employers of the blue-collar city called Buffalo. The steel business’s medical and pension plans were among the most generous to be found anywhere.

As the market for American steel declined, the heaps of slag near the Lackawanna mills grew higher, the skies grew darker and filthier, the worker housing grew more grim, and the pension plans ate up more and more of the companies’ profits, but the idea of steel still flourished in Lackawanna. By the late 1960s, the unions had grown too strong, the technologies had lagged behind, corporate accounting practices had become mossbacked and lazy, and the mills themselves were obsolete. The unions still received huge packages. The managers gave themselves raises and bonuses. The companies diverted profits to shareholders rather than reinvest in new technology or pay for managerial changes. Meanwhile, Japanese steel and cheap European steel and Russian steel and Thai steel were running their industries with cheaper labor, newer technologies, and slimmer profit margins. The steel companies in Lackawanna cried foul, cried dumping, diverted money to politicians to get protectionist legislation, and continued with the same pay scales and pension plans and obsolete machinery. They made steel the way their granddaddies had made steel. And they sold it the same way.

By the 1970s, the Lackawanna steel industry was on a gurney and hemorrhaging badly. By the mid-nineties, it was on a cold, stone slab with no mourners waiting around for the wake. Today there were more than a dozen miles of abandoned mills along Lake Erie, a hundred square miles of ghetto where workers’ neighborhoods had once been, scores upon scores of empty parking lots that had once been filled with thousands of vehicles, as well as black mountains of slag heaps running back east from the lake for block after block—a cheaper alternative for the defunct mills than cleaning them up—thus insuring that the city of Buffalo, with a third of its population fled seeking work elsewhere, would never spend the money to develop these lakefront properties.

The neighborhoods in the shadow of the huge mills, neighborhoods that once housed German and Italian and some black skilled laborers, now boasted crack houses and abortion clinics and storefront mosques as even poorer blacks and Hispanics and Middle Eastern immigrants flowed into the vacuum created by the fleeing steel workers.

Kurtz knew Lackawanna well. He’d lost his virginity there, lost any illusions about life there, and killed his first man there, not necessarily in that order.

Ridge Road was the main east-west street through the heart of Lackawanna, past Our Lady of Victory Basilica, past Father Baker’s Orphanage, past the Holy Cross Cemetery, past the Botanical Gardens and Lackawanna City Hall, then over the narrow steel bridge built more than a century ago, then “back the Bridge,” south, into the warren of narrow streets that dead-ended against the walls and moats and barriers bordering the mile-wide no-man’s land of railroad tracks that ran south to everywhere and north into the grain-mill industrial area near Kurtz’s Harbor Inn.

Parolee Yasein Goba’s address was south of the old Carnegie Library and the nearby Lackawanna Islamic Mosque. The house was a leaning, filthy gray-shingle affair at the end of a littered cul-de-sac. To the right of and behind the house was the high fence of a salvage yard; to its left was the rusted iron wall and barbed wire fences marking railroad property. Freight trains heaved and clashed in the rainy air.

Kurtz backed the Pinto out of the cul-de-sac, swung it around, drove east a block, and parked it near Odell Playground, the only bit of grass and open space within miles. He made sure the Pinto couldn’t be seen from the main north-south street, Wilmuth Avenue, or from Yasein Goba’s house. Black and Middle Eastern faces peered at him from passing cars and from between sooty curtains as he tucked the .38 in his belt, took a long-bladed screwdriver from the glove box, locked the Pinto and walked the two blocks toward Goba’s gray house.

Kurtz cut right a block and came at the house along the salvage yard fence, approaching from the north. The smoke and noise from the rail yards were almost melodramatic: steel couplers crashing, machines grunting as they hauled heavy loads, men shouting in the distance. More crashes and bangs came from the huge salvage yard beyond the fence.

Kurtz paused when there was nothing but open field between him and the house. Except for one small window on the north side here, all the house’s windows looked east up the empty street or west over the railyards. There was no car parked next to the house and no garage, although several abandoned cars, wheels missing, littered the street.

Kurtz pulled the .38, held it loosely against his right leg, and walked behind the house.

The back door wasn’t locked. There was dried blood on the steps, the stoop, and the door itself. Standing to one side of the glass, Kurtz opened the door and went in crouched, .38 extended.

The blood trail went up some stairs. A perfect red handprint was in the middle of the half-open door at the top of the inside stairway. Kurtz used the pistol to swing the door open wider. A kitchen. Dirty dishes. Garbage stinking. More blood on the cheap table and chipped tile floor. One of the chairs had been knocked over.

Breathing through his mouth, Kurtz followed the blood trail through a living room—filthy shag carpet with blobs of dried blood, sprung couch covered by a filthy sheet, big color television. The blood trail went up a narrow flight of stairs in the narrow central hall, but Kurtz checked the other two downstairs rooms first. Clear.

Yasein Goba was sprawled half across the grimy tub in the little bathroom at the head of the stairs. The blood trail led there and ended there. Goba had been hit high in the right ribcage—the wound looked consistent with the nine-millimeter slugs O’Toole had loaded in her Sig Pro that Kurtz had been firing—and the man had poured his life’s blood half into the tub and half onto the bathroom floor. The bottom of the tub was solid brown with dried blood. There was blood all over the sink and blood on the mirrored door of the medicine chest. Bottles of pills, rubbing alcohol, and Mercurachrome were scattered on the floor and broken in the bloody sink. It looked as if Goba had tried to find something to stop the bleeding, or at least something to dull the pain, before he fainted onto the tub rim and bled out.

O’Toole’s file said that Yasein Goba was twenty-six years old and from Yemen. Making sure not to step in the dried pools and rivulets on the floor, Kurtz crouched next to the corpse. The young man may have been an Arab, but the loss of blood added a paleness under the brown skin and tiny black mustache. His lips were white, his mouth and eyes open. Kurtz was no medical examiner, but he’d seen enough corpses to know that rigor mortis had come and gone and that this guy had probably been dead about forty-eight hours—since a few hours after Kurtz and O’Toole had been shot.

Lying in the tub was a Ruger Mark II Standard .22-caliber long-barreled target pistol. The checkered grip was mottled with blood. Kurtz lifted it carefully, letting his gloves touch only the end of the barrel where there was no blood. He held it up into the light, but the serial number had been burned off with acid. He knew it had a ten-shot magazine and he imagined that the mag would be empty, or near so. Kurtz set the gun back in the tub where the grip had been outlined in dried blood.

He stood and walked into Yasein Goba’s bedroom. On a high bureau was a sort of altar—black candles, worry beads, and a blown-up photograph of Parole Officer Margaret O’Toole with the words DIE, BITCH written across it in red magic marker.

On a cheap desk by the front window was a spiral notebook. Kurtz flipped the pages, noted the dated entries and the Arabic writing, but some passages were in scrawled English—“…she contenus to prossecute me!!” and “purhsed fine pistol today” and “the Zionist bitch must die if I am to live!” The last page had been torn out of the notebook.

Some sense made Kurtz look up, pull open the filthy curtain a bit with the barrel of his .38.

Kemper’s and King’s unmarked car had stopped half a block away on the next street over. They were approaching Goba’s house the same way Kurtz had, and if it hadn’t been for the bare trees and the angle on the alley, Kurtz couldn’t have seen them even from this high up. Stopping behind the unmarked detectives’ car were two black Chevy Suburbans. Eight black-garbed and helmeted SWAT team members carrying automatic weapons boiled out of the Suburbans.

Detectives Kemper and King deployed the SWAT teams, sending them toward the house through alleys, backyards, and along the salvage yard fence. King talked into a hand radio, and Kurtz assumed that there would be more SWAT squads coming from the next block over to the south.

Kurtz folded up the spiral notebook and slipped it into the cargo pocket of his jacket. Then he left the bedroom, went down the stairs, through the kitchen, down more stairs, and out the back door. Because of the slight angle of the backyard and the heavy rain falling, the first of the SWAT guys weren’t visible yet.

There was a rusted and abandoned Mercury at the back of this weedy strip, abutting the salvage yard fence and Kurtz ran at it full tilt through the rain and mud. He leaped to the hood, jumped to the roof, heaved himself up and over the fence, and dropped into the salvage yard about five seconds before the first SWAT team loped into sight, the black-vested gunmen covering each other as they ran, automatic weapons trained on the windows of the late Yasein Goba’s house.

CHAPTER

SIXTEEN

Kurtz stopped by the Harbor Inn to change out of his muddy, wet clothes and to oil his .38, and then he drove back to the office. It was almost dark now, and colder, and the October rain was coming down hard. The clubs, restaurants, and wine bars along Chippewa Street were beginning to attract patrons and every color of neon reflected on the slick streets.

Arlene was at work, arranging weddings, receptions, wedding dress fittings, and wedding cake designs with happy brides all over the eastern and central United States, but she wiped all that from the screen, lit another Marlboro, and looked at Kurtz when he came in, hung up his leather jacket, and leaned back in his swivel chair. He pulled the pistol out of his belt in the back to keep it from digging into him, and set it in the lower right drawer next to the bottle of Sheep Dip scotch.

“Well?” said Arlene.

Kurtz hesitated. Usually he told Arlene almost nothing of his activities outside the office—much of it was illegal, just as this afternoon’s breaking and entering of the dead Arab’s house had been, and as far as he knew Arlene had never had so much as a traffic ticket—but she’d already broken the law last night for him, passing herself off as a County D.A.’s assistant, not to mention breaking and entering O’Toole’s office and stealing her riles. So what the hell, thought Kurtz.

He told her about finding Yasein Goba and the Yemeni’s little revenge altar, about taking his diary, and about the pistol.

“Jesus, Joe,” whispered Arlene. “So do you mink it was one of your shots in the parking garage that got him?”

Kurtz nodded. “We won’t know for sure until the coroner digs the slug out and they run a ballistics test, but I know that I hit the first shooter.”

“So that’s the motive,” said Arlene. “He was mad at O’Toole for some reason.”

“I read just enough of his diary—the parts in bad English—to see that he blamed her for ruining his life, something about not being able to marry his childhood sweetheart because he was treated as a felon by the ‘Zionist bitch.’”

“‘Zionist bitch?’” said Arlene. “Didn’t this idiot know that O’Toole was Irish?”

Kurtz shrugged.

“Well, that ties it all up in a knot, doesn’t it, Joe?”

Kurtz rubbed his cheeks and then his temples. The headache felt like someone tapping, not very gently, on the back of his head with a two-pound hammer wrapped in a thin sock.

“They weren’t after you,” continued Arlene. “You were just unlucky to get in the way when one of Peg O’Toole’s crazy clients came after her.”

“Yeah.”

“There was nothing in O’Toole’s file on Goba that suggests that he was hostile or angry at her—the last several meetings she had with him sound easy, even upbeat. But if he was crazy, I guess it makes sense. Maybe it even ties in to that old Lackawanna Six terrorist thing. There are some crazy people down there in Lackawanna.”

“Yeah.”

“Now you’re free to investigate this other thing.” Arlene waved her cigarette toward the map on the north wall with its twenty-two pins, seventeen red, five blue.

“Yeah.”

“But you don’t buy the Goba thing for a minute, do you, Joe?”

Kurtz closed his eyes. He tried to remember if he’d eaten anything since the half donut with Rigby King at Broadway Market that morning. Evidently not. “No,” he said at last. “I don’t buy it.”

“Because you remember two shooters,” said Arlene.

“Yeah. I told Rigby King about the second guy when I saw her this morning.”

“If someone other than Goba was driving the car when it busted out of the parking garage, they’ll probably find the bloodstains in the backseat,” said Arlene.

“The car wasn’t there at Goba’s,” said Kurtz.

“You said it was a rough neighborhood. And Goba had been dead two days. Car thieves were probably just waiting to pounce on a vehicle left unattended for two days.”

“Yeah.”

“You don’t buy that either?”

“I don’t know,” said Kurtz. “But I know there was a second man in the parking garage Wednesday. And odds are that the second man was driving the car when it crashed out Goba didn’t get home by himself. I don’t think he could even have got into the house and up the stairs by himself.”

“You said you saw bloodstains and trails everywhere. His handprint on the kitchen door.”

“Yeah.”

“And you said it looked like he’d rummaged through his medicine chest hunting for bandages or painkillers?” Arlene exhaled smoke and tapped at one fingernail with another.

“Yeah,” said Kurtz.

“Any strange footprints in the blood or extra handprints anywhere?”

“No,” said Kurtz. “Not that I could see. Whoever dragged him in the house made it look like Goba crawled in under his own power.”

“A friend maybe?”

“Maybe,” said Kurtz. “But why wouldn’t a friend haul Goba to the hospital? He was hurt bad.”

“GSW report?” said Arlene.

Kurtz knew that she was right Doctors and hospitals had to report gunshot wounds to the authorities.

“I bet there are Yemeni doctors in Lackawanna who might’ve kept it quiet,” said Kurtz. “I know for a fact there are medics down there that’ll patch you up without reporting it. For a price.”

“Goba was poor.”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz.

“Joe,” said Arlene, looking at the map with all the pins, “there’s something you’re not telling me about this heroin-addict killer situation. About why you agreed to work for Gonzaga and that woman, but why you don’t want to do it.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s something.”

Kurtz shook his head. The action made him dizzy. “Arlene, you want to order from that Chinese place down the street? Get takeout?”

She stubbed out her cigarette. “Have you eaten anything today?”

“Sort of.”

She made her snorting noise again. “You stay here, Joe. Catch a couple of minutes rest. I’ll go down and order in person, bring something back.”

Arlene patted him on the shoulder as she left. The contact made Kurtz jump.

He was half-dozing when the phone rang.

“Joe Kurtz? This is Detective Kemper. I just wanted to let you know that it looks like we’ve found the man who shot you and Officer O’Toole on Wednesday.”

“Who is it?” asked Kurtz.

“You can read about it in the papers tomorrow,” said the black cop. “But it looks like the guy was just after Officer O’Toole. If we find any connection between the shooter and you, I’ll be the first to let you know.”

“I bet you will,” said Kurtz.

Kemper disconnected.

Kurtz took Goba’s diary out of his jacket pocket and flipped through the pages. The scrawled entries were all dated, although Goba put the day first, then the month, and then the year, in the European manner. Much of it was in Arabic, but the English entries screamed out Goba’s hatred of Parole Office “Zionist Bitch” O’Toole, how she was stealing Goba’s future, keeping him from getting married, forcing him to return to a life of crime, discriminating against Arabs, part of the Zionist conspiracy, blah, blah.

The entries were made in a hard-tipped ballpoint pen, which was good. Kurtz flipped to the missing page. Only a ragged fringe remained. He found a pencil in his desk and began gently shading the next, empty page. The impressions from the heavily pressed ballpoint came up immediately.

Kurtz was asleep sitting at his desk when Arlene returned with the food, but she woke him gently and made him eat something. She’d brought two cold bottles of iced tea with the Chinese food.

They used chopsticks, sat at Arlene’s desk, and ate in silence for a minute. Kurtz slid Goba’s spiral notebook across to her. It was opened to the pencil-shaded page. “How does that read to you?” he asked.

Still holding her chopsticks, Arlene putted the notebook under her desk lamp and squinted for a minute, moving her glasses forward and back. “Letters missing,” she said at last. “Lots of misspellings. But it looks like the final sentence reads—‘I can’t…live with…’ something, maybe ‘the guilt,’ although he spelled it without a ‘u,’ and then, I must also die.” Arlene looked at Kurtz. “Goba wrote a suicide note.”

“Yeah. Convenient isn’t it?”

“It doesn’t make sense…” began Arlene. “Wait a minute. These numbers above the scrawl.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s dated Thursday,” said Arlene.

“Uh-huh.”

“Didn’t you say that there was no sign that he’d crawled into the bedroom, Joe? No blood trail there?”

“That’s what I said.”

“So his diary ends with the announcement that he can’t live with the guilt of shooting O’Toole, and presumably you, too, and that he’s going to kill himself. On the day after he bled to death.”

“A little peculiar, isn’t it?” said Kurtz.

“But that page was missing,” said Arlene. She pushed the notebook aside and began spearing at her beef and broccoli. “Maybe you shouldn’t have taken this notebook, Joe. The cops might have noticed the missing page and shaded in this last entry’s imprint just the way you did.”

“Maybe,” said Kurtz.

“And they’d know that Goba’s confession was a fake.” She looked at him over the desk lamp and adjusted her glasses. “But you don’t want them to know.”

“Not yet,” said Kurtz. “So far, it’s the only advantage I have in this whole mess.”

They ate the rest of the meal in silence.

When he was finished and the white cartons were wrapped in plastic and tossed away, Kurtz stood, walked to his own desk, swayed slightly, shook his head, took the .38 out of the Sheep Dip drawer, and lifted his leather jacket off the back of the chair.

“Uh-uh,” said Arlene, coming around her desk and taking the pistol out of his hands. “You’re not going anywhere tonight, Joe.”

“Need to talk to a man in Lackawanna,” mumbled Kurtz. “Baby Doc. Have to find…”

“Not tonight Your scalp is bleeding again—sutures are all screwed up. I’m changing the bandages and you can sleep on the couch. You’ve done it enough times before.”

Kurtz shook his head but allowed himself to be led into the little bathroom.

The bandages were blood-encrusted and they pulled scab and scalp when Arlene jerked them off, but Kurtz was too exhausted to react. If the headache was a noise, it was reaching jackhammer and jet-engine levels now. He sat dully on the edge of the sink while she brought out the serious first-aid kit cleaned and daubed the scalp wound, and set clean bandages in place.

“I have to see a guy,” said Kurtz, still sitting, trying to visualize standing and retrieving his .38 and jacket. “Baby Doc will probably be at Curly’s. It’s Friday night.”

“He’ll be there tomorrow,” said Arlene, leading him into the office and pressing against his shoulders until he sat down and then flopped back on the old couch. “Baby Doc always holds court at Curry’s on Saturday mornings.”

She turned to grab the old blanket they kept on the arm of the couch. When she turned back, Kurtz was asleep.

CHAPTER

SEVENTEEN

The Dodger liked Saturday mornings. Always had. As a kid, he’d hated school, loved weekends, loved playing hooky. Saturdays were the best, even though none of the other kids in the area would play with him. Still, he’d had his Saturday-morning cartoons and then he’d go out alone into the woods adjoining the town. Sometimes he’d take a pet with him into the woods—a neighbor’s cat, say, or Tom Herenson’s old Labrador that time, or even that pale girl’s, Shelley’s, green and yellow parakeet. He’d always enjoyed taking the animals into the woods. Although the parakeet hadn’t been that much fun.

Now the Dodger was driving slowly through rural residential roads in Orchard Park, the upscale suburb where the Buffalo Bills played their games out at that huge stadium. The Dodger didn’t give the slightest damn about football, but sometimes he pretended he did when befriending some guy in a sports bar. Even the women in Buffalo were gaga over football and hockey and assumed everyone else was, too. It was a place to start with people when you were pretending that you were one of them.

Orchard Park was mostly like this street—rural roads masquerading as streets, homes both large and small set back on an acre or less of woods. The house he was looking for was…right here. Just as described in the Boss’s briefing to him. This rural street ran along a wooded ridgeline and this house, strangely octagonal, was set thirty or forty yards from the road, all but obscured by the trees.

The Dodger drove his van right up the driveway, not hesitating. There was no car parked outside, but the house had a garage so the car might be in there and she might be home. On the lawn, just as described in the briefing, was a stone Buddha.

He parked the van in the driveway turnaround just outside the garage and jumped out, whistling, carrying a clipboard. The van was painted with a common pest control logo and graphic, and the Dodger was wearing coveralls and an orange vest, had a white hard hat over his Dodger cap, and he was carrying a clipboard. The old joke that you could go almost anywhere unchallenged with work coveralls, a hard hat, and a clipboard wasn’t really a joke; those cheap props could get you past most people’s radar. The Dodger’s 9mm Beretta was on his belt, under the orange highway vest, holstered next to a folding seven-inch combat knife.

Still whistling, the Dodger knocked on the front door, taking a half-step back on the stoop as he’d been taught. He’d take another half step back when the door opened, showing how polite he was, how non-aggressive. It was an old door-to-door salesman’s trick.

The woman didn’t come to the door. The briefing suggested that she’d be home alone on Saturday, unless her boyfriend had slept over. The Dodger was ready for either contingency. He knocked again, pausing in the whistling to look around at the wooded lot and the view from the ridge as if appreciating both even on such a cold and cloudy October day. The air smelted of wet leaves.

When she didn’t answer a third knock, he strolled around the house, pretending to inspect the foundation. In the back, there was a cheap deck and sliding glass doors. He knocked loudly on the glass, taking a step back again and arranging a sincere smile on his face, but again there was no answer. The house had that empty feel that he knew well from experience.

The Dodger pulled a multiple-use tool from his coverall pocket and jimmied the door’s lock in ten seconds. He let himself in, called “Hello?” a couple of times into the silence, and then strolled through the octagonally shaped ranch house.

The woman—Randi Ginetta—was in her early forties, a high-school English teacher, divorced, living alone since her only child, a son, had gone to college in Ohio the year before. Still getting alimony payments from her former husband, she was now dating another teacher, a nice Italian man. Randi was also a heroin addict For years Randi—the Dodger wondered what kind of name that was, “Randi,” it sounded more like a cocktail waitress’s name to him than a teacher’s—for years Randi had been into cocaine, explaining her constant runny nose as allergy problems to her co-workers and students, but in the past three years she’d discovered skag and liked it a lot. She always bought from the same source, a black junkie on Gonzaga’s payroll in the Allentown section of Buffalo. Randi had gotten to know the junkie-dealer during time she volunteered in an inner-city homeless program. The Dodger hadn’t visited the junkie yet, but he was on the list.

He walked from room to room, the combat knife in his hand now, blade still closed. This teacher and skag-addict liked bright colors. All the walls were different colors—blue, red, bright green—and the furniture was heavy oak. There was a giant crystal on the floor near the front door. New Age-type, thought the Dodger. Trips to Sedona to tap into energy sources, commune with Indian spirits, that kind of crap. The Dodger wasn’t guessing. It had all been in the Boss’s briefing.

There were a lot of books, a work desk, a Mac computer, stacks of papers to be graded. But Ms. Randi wasn’t all that neat—there were jeans and sweaters and bras and other underwear lying around her bedroom and on the bathroom floor. The Dodger knew a lot of perverts who would have lifted that silk, sniffed it maybe, but he wasn’t a pervert. He was here to do a job. The Dodger went back across the octagonal living room and into the narrow kitchen.

There was a photo of Randi and her son—he recognized her from the photo he’d been shown—on the fridge, as well as a photo of the teacher and her boyfriend. She was a babe, no doubt about it. He hoped she’d come home soon, and alone, but looking at the photo of the boyfriend—all serious and squinty-eyed—the Dodger changed his mind and hoped the two would come back together. He had plans for both of them.

Pulling on latex gloves, the Dodger turned on the coffeemaker, rooted around in the cupboard until he found the coffee—Starbucks—and made himself a cup. She—or they—would smell the coffee brewing when they came in the door, but that didn’t matter. They wouldn’t have time to react. He tucked away the knife and laid the Beretta Elite II on the round wooden table as he drank his coffee. He’d rinse the cup well to get rid of any DNA when he was done.

The Dodger decided he’d wait thirty minutes. The neighbors couldn’t see his van because of the trees and the size of the lot, but a neighbor driving by might see it and call the cops if he stayed here too long. He rose, found the sugar bowl in the cupboard, and stirred some into his coffee.

The phone rang.

The Dodger let the machine pick it up. He thought Randi’s voice was sexy, sort of hoarse and sleepy in a sexy junkie way, as it filled the kitchen silence—“Hi, this is Randi. It’s Friday and I’ll be gone for the weekend, but leave a message and I’ll call you back on Sunday night or Monday. Thanks!” The last word was punched with girlish enthusiasm or a heroin-induced high.

Not very smart, Ms. Ginetta, thought the Dodger, telling every Tom, Dick and Harry who calls that you’re out of town and your house is empty. Good way to get robbed, ma’am.

The caller hung up without leaving a message. It might be a neighbor calling to see what the pest control van was doing there while Randi was gone. But probably not.

The Dodger sighed, rinsed out the coffee cup and coffeemaker, set the sugar and everything else back the way it had been—putting the mug on its proper hook—and then he let himself out the back door, locked it behind him, slipped off the latex gloves, hefted the clipboard, and whistled his way back to the van.

CHAPTER

EIGHTEEN

The restaurant called Curly’s was just a few blocks from the Basilica in Lackawanna. Kurtz was at Curly’s by nine-thirty on Saturday morning, having slept a fitful nine hours and feeling more surly than ever.

He’d awakened in the office sore and disoriented, looked over the printouts of O’Toole’s case notes for Goba to make sure they hadn’t missed anything, left a note for Arlene—who usually came in late on Saturday—and headed back to the Harbor Inn to shower, shave, and change clothes. The headache still buzzed in his skull and if it had let up any, he couldn’t notice the change. But his raccoon eyes had improved. If one didn’t look carefully, Kurtz thought while he stood in front of the steamy mirror, the dark circles under his eyes only made him look like someone who hadn’t slept in a few weeks. The whites of his eyes were pink rather than blood red now, and his vision had cleared.

Kurtz dressed in a denim workshirt and jeans, tugged on faded Red Wing boots and an old peacoat, and pulled a dark navy watchcap low enough over his hair to hide the scalp wound. The .38 went in a small holster on his belt on the left side.

Driving down to Lackawanna, he had to smile at the fact that he’d managed to avoid most of Lackawanna for years, but now he found himself heading that way almost every day.

Curly’s was a few blocks east of the Basilica, where Ridge Road became Franklin Street for a few blocks, just west of the old steel bridge. The restaurant—surfaced by brick on the first floor, siding above—had been popular with locals for decades. There were already cars in the small parking lot, although it wasn’t officially open for breakfast on Saturdays. On Saturdays, it was court to Baby Doc.

Baby Doc—legally Norv Skrzypczyk—was not officially mobbed up, but he ran most of the action in Lackawanna. His grandfather. Papa Doc, had taken a leave from medical school to help patch up striking steelworkers whose heads were being bashed in by Pinkerton operatives. Papa Doc had given up medicine in favor of smuggling guns in to the workers. By the end of the 1920s, Papa Doc’s people were selling guns and liquor to civilians as well, keeping the Mafia from muscling in on their territory through the simple strategy of out-violencing them. By the time Papa Doc was gunned down in 1942, his son—Doc—had taken over the family business, negotiated a peace with the mobsters, and retained control of most illegal items moving in Lackawanna. Doc retired in 1992, turning the reins over to Baby Doc and taking an old man’s job as a night watchman in various abandoned steel mills, where he kept his hand in by selling the occasional illegal gun. Joe Kurtz had used Doc as an information source—but not a snitch—before Attica, and had bought weapons from him afterward. Kurtz had never met the son.

Now Kurtz left his holstered .38 under the driver’s seat of the Pinto, made sure the car was locked, and went in, ignoring the CLOSED sign on the door.

Baby Doc sat in his regular semicircular booth at the right rear of the restaurant. The booth was raised slightly, unlike the other tables, and gave the sense of a modest throne. There were only half a dozen other men in the room, not counting Baby Doc’s three bodyguards and the waiter behind the counter. Kurtz noticed that these bodyguards didn’t use blow driers or wear mafia collars and suits—the two big guys in the booth next to Baby Doc and the other one lounging at the counter could have been stevedores or millworkers except for their watchful eyes and the just-detectable bulges under their union windbreakers.

There was an older man talking to Baby Doc in the rear booth, speaking earnestly, moving his scarred hands as he spoke. Baby Doc would nod in the intervals when the old man stopped talking. This is the first time Kurtz had seen Baby Doc in person and he was surprised how large he was; the older Doc had been a small man.

A waiter came over, poured coffee without being asked, and said, “You here to see the Man?”

“Yeah.”

The waiter went back to the counter and whispered to the older bodyguard, who approached Baby Doc when the old man had finished his supplication, received some answer that had made him smile, and left the restaurant.

Baby Doc looked at Kurtz a minute and then raised a finger, beckoning Kurtz, and then gesturing to the two guards in the booth next to him.

The huge men intercepted Kurtz in the middle of the room. “Let’s visit the restroom,” said the one with scar tissue around his eyes.

Kurtz nodded and followed them to the back of Curly’s. The men’s restroom was big enough to hold all three of them, but one man stood watching out the door while the other gestured for Kurtz to remove his shirt and to lift his undershirt Then he gestured for Kurtz to drop his pants. Kurtz did all this without protest.

“Okay,” said the ex-boxer and stepped out. Kurtz zipped and buttoned, up and went out to sit in the booth.

Baby Doc wore horn-rimmed glasses that looked incongruous on such a sharply chiseled face. He was in his late forties, and Kurtz saw that the man wasn’t so much bald as he was hairless. His eyes were a startling cold blue. His neck, shoulders, and forearms were heavily muscled. There was a flag and army tattoo on Baby Doc’s massive left forearm, and Kurtz remembered that Baby Doc had left Lackawanna and joined the army—over his father’s objections—a few years before the first Gulf War and had flown some sort of attack helicopter during the liberation of Kuwait. Doc, his father, had been forced to hold off his own retirement for a few years until Baby Doc returned from the service with a chest covered with combat ribbons which—according to sources available to Kurtz—had been folded away in a trunk with the uniform and never taken out again. Rumor persisted that Baby Doc’s chopper had destroyed more than a dozen Iraqi tanks on a single hot day.

“You’re Joe Kurtz, aren’t you?”

Kurtz nodded.

“I remember you sent flowers to my father’s funeral last year,” said Baby Doc. “Thank you for that.”

Kurtz nodded again.

“I considered having you killed,” said Baby Doc.

Kurtz didn’t nod this time, but he looked the bigger man in the eye.

Baby Doc put down his fork, took off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. When he set the glasses back on, he said tiredly, “My father was killed by a rogue homicide detective named Hathaway.”

“Yes.”

“My sources in the B.P.D. tell me that Hathaway had a hard-on for you and had tapped a call between you and my father. You were meeting him at the old steel mill, a year ago next week, to buy a piece. Hathaway killed my father before you got there.”

“That’s true,” said Kurtz.

“Hathaway didn’t have anything against Doc. He just wanted to wait for you in the mill without my father being in the way. If it hadn’t been for you, the Old Man might still be alive.”

“That’s true, too,” said Kurtz. He glanced at the two closest bodyguards. They were looking the other way but were close enough to hear everything. Kurtz knew he couldn’t take them both even if they weren’t armed—he’d seen the bigger man fight professionally years ago—so his only chance might be to crash through the window behind Baby Doc. But he’d never get around front to his car before they did. He’d have to head east through the backyards, into the railyards. Kurtz had known every tunnel and shack and switch tower in those yards when he was young, but he doubted if he could outrun or hide from these guys there now.

Baby Doc folded his hands. “But they found Hathaway there in the mill, too. Shot in the head.”

“I’ve heard that,” Kurtz said quietly.

“My people in the department tell me that the bullet went through his gold detective shield,” said Baby Doc. “Like he held it up to stop his assailant from shooting. Maybe while shouting that he was a cop—the slug that went through the shield went into Hathaway’s open mouth. Or maybe the stupid shit believed it’d really act like a shield and stop a slug.”

Kurtz waited.

“But I guess it didn’t work,” said Baby Doc. He started eating his scrambled eggs again.

“I guess not,” said Kurtz.

“So what do you want, Joe Kurtz?” He gestured for the waiter to bring Kurtz coffee, and the man at the counter hurried to comply, providing a fresh mug.

Kurtz didn’t let out his breath, but he was tempted to. He said, “Yasein Goba.”

“That crazy Yemeni who shot the parole officer Wednesday? Today’s paper says they found him dead from a gunshot here in Lackawanna. They didn’t say whether it was self-inflicted or not.” He quit stabbing at his eggs to squint at Kurtz. “The paper said that an unnamed parolee was shot the same time as the female probation officer, but wasn’t hurt as bad. You?”

“Yeah.”

“That explains the blood that’s drained down under your eyes. You’re one lucky son of a bitch, Kurtz.”

Kurtz had no comment on that. Somewhere outside a generator was chug-chugging and his headache throbbed along with it.

“What about Goba?” said Baby Doc.

“What can you tell me about him?”

“Nothing right now. These Yemenis stick pretty much to themselves. I have some people who can talk to them—them and the other Middle Easterners who’ve moved into neighborhoods here—but I never heard of this Goba until I read about it in the papers.”

“Could you check with your people—see if they had any contact with this guy?”

“I could,” said Baby Doc. “And I understand why you’re interested in this Goba if he shot you. But it doesn’t seem worth my effort to dig into this. All reports—including my people inside the B.P.D.—say that this little guy was mad at his parole officer, shot her, and then killed himself. You just got in the way, Kurtz.”

Kurtz sipped his coffee. It wasn’t bad. Evidently they brewed fresh for Saturday mornings when Baby Doc was holding court. “Goba didn’t kill himself,” he said. “He bled out from a wound he received at the Civic Center.”

“Did you shoot him?” asked Baby Doc. “Or was it the P.O. who got him before she caught one in the head?”

Kurtz shrugged slightly. “Does it matter?” When Baby Doc said nothing, Kurtz said, “Goba was shooting a twenty-two-caliber target pistol. The serial number had been taken off by acid—not sloppy, the way so many punks do it, but neatly, carefully, the way Doc used to do it on his used stock.”

“You think Doc might have sold this Goba the gun sometime last year before…you know?”

“No,” said Kurtz. “Goba got out of jail after your father was killed. But it’s possible that one of your people sold him the weapon in the last couple of months.”

About a year and a half earlier, some local black gang members had knocked over an overflow National Guard arsenal near Erie, Pennsylvania, liberating quite a few exotic military weapons. The previous November, bad things had happened to the gang members and the FBI and ATF had recovered some of the proscribed M-16s and other stolen weapons. Some—not all. Word on the street had been that Baby Doc Skrzypczyk had ended up with the bulk of the arms shipment and had been reselling them for a fortune—especially to the Middle Easterners currently moving into Lackawanna in droves.

Baby Doc sipped coffee and looked past Kurtz. The other five civilians in the restaurant were still waiting for their time with him. “I won’t ask how you know what Goba was shooting or how you know the serial number had been burned off. Maybe your eyes were real good in that parking garage Wednesday. You happen to notice the make and model?”

“Ruger Mark II Standard,” said Kurtz. “Long barrel. I think Goba was shooting diminished loads.”

“Why?”

Kurtz shrugged again. “Makes less noise that way.”

“Was noise a factor in the parking garage?”

“It could have been.”

Baby Doc smiled. “You know why the professional double-tap guys tend to use twenty-twos?”

“Common knowledge says that it’s because the point twenty-two slugs rattle around in the skull, causing more damage,” said Kurtz. “I never thought that explanation was too convincing.”

“Nah, me either. Bigger caliber slugs do just fine in the skull. I heard from an old-timer once it was because the mustaches didn’t want to lose their hearing. Most of those old button men were half-deaf anyway.”

“Can you find out if some of your men sold Goba the gun?” asked Kurtz. “And see if they have any other information on him?”

Baby Doc glanced at his watch. The Rolex on his wrist was gold and massive, the only thing about him that seemed ostentatious. “Lot of guns in this town that have nothing to do with me,” he said. “But if I check, what’s in it for me?”

“Gratitude,” said Kurtz. “I remember favors. Try to repay them.”

Baby Doc’s cold blue eyes stared into Kurtz’s bloodshot eyes for a minute. “All right, I’ll check and get back to you today. Where can I reach you?”

Kurtz handed him a card. He took out a pen and circled his cell phone number.

“What’s this SweetheartSearch and WeddingBells stuff?” asked Baby Doc.

“My skip-trace business. We look up old high-school sweethearts for lonely people then help some of them get married using online resources.”

Baby Doc laughed loudly. “You’re not what I expected, Joe Kurtz.”

Kurtz stood to go.

“Just a second,” said the man in the booth. He lowered his voice so that even the bodyguards wouldn’t hear. “When I saw you here, I thought you’d be asking me about the other thing.”

“What other thing?”

“The junkies and skag dealers doing their disappearing act,” said Baby Doc. He was watching Kurtz very carefully.

Kurtz shrugged again. “Don’t know anything about it.”

“Well, I thought since you were so tight with the Farinos and Gonzagas…” began Baby Doc and let his voice trail off until it was a question.

Kurtz shook his head.

“Well,” said Baby Doc, “word on the street is that one of those guineas brought in a pro called the Dane to settle some old scores.”

“Does word on the street say which one of the guineas brought him in?”

“Nope.” Baby Doc sipped his coffee. His eyes were colder than blue steel. “It might pay to watch your ass, Joe Kurtz.”

He called Arlene while he was driving north on the Skyway toward the downtown. “You get O’Toole’s home address?”

“Yes,” said Arlene and gave it to him.

Using the same pen he’d used to write on his business card for Baby Doc, Kurtz scribbled the address on the back of his hand. “Anything else?”

“I called the hospital and asked about Peg O’Toole’s condition,” said Arlene. He could hear her exhale smoke. “I’m not a family member, so they wouldn’t give it to me. So I called Gail. She checked on the intensive-care unit’s computer. O’Toole’s taken a turn for the worse and is on life support.”

Kurtz resisted telling her that he hadn’t asked about the parole officer’s condition. “I’ll be there soon,” he said and disconnected.

The phone rang almost immediately.

“I want to meet with you,” said Angelina Farino Ferrara.

“I’m pretty busy today,” said Kurtz.

“Where are you? Can you come over to the penthouse?”

Kurtz glanced to his left as he approached the downtown. Her tall marina apartment building was visible less than a mile away. She owned the top two floors—one for business, the top one for herself. “I’m on the road,” said Kurtz. “I’ll call you back later.”

“Look, Kurtz, it’s important we…”

He cut her off, dropped the phone in his peacoat pocket, and took the exit for downtown Buffalo.

He’d gone less man a mile up Delaware Avenue toward Chippewa Street when the red light began flashing in his mirror. An unmarked car pulled up behind him.

Shit, thought Kurtz. He hadn’t been speeding. The holstered .38 was under his driver’s seat. That parole violation would send him back to Attica where the long knives were waiting for him. Shit.

He pulled to the curb and watched in the mirror as Detective Kemper stayed behind the wheel of the unmarked car. Rigby King got out the passenger door and walked up to Kurtz’s driver’s side. She was wearing sunglasses. “License and registration, please.”

“Fuck you,” said Kurtz.

“Maybe later,” said Rigby. “If you’re a good boy.”

She walked around the front of his car and got in the passenger side. Kemper drove off.

“Jesus Christ,” Kurtz said to Rigby King, “you smell like Death.”

“You say the sweetest things,” said Rigby. “You always did know how to chat up a girl, Joe.” She motioned him to drive north on Delaware.

“Am I under arrest?”

“Not yet,” said Rigby King. She slipped handcuffs off her belt and held them up to catch the October light. “But the day is young. Drive.”

CHAPTER

NINETEEN

I got called to a crime scene at three A.M. and I’ve been there ever since,” said Rigby. “Two gay lovers killed each other in a pretty little house in Allentown a week ago—looks like a mutual suicide pact—and nobody found the bodies until last night. Let’s go get a drink.” She motioned him to keep driving north along Delaware.

“You’re kidding,” said Kurtz. “It’s not even eleven A.M.”

“I never kid about drinking,” said the cop. “I’m off duty now.”

“I don’t know where…” began Kurtz.

“You know where, Joe.”

Blues Franklin wasn’t open, but Kurtz parked the Pinto behind the building and Rigby jumped out to knock on the back door. Daddy Brace’s grown granddaughter, Ruby, opened the door and let them in.

Rigby led the way to Kurtz’s favorite table at the back of the room. A white piano player named Coe Pierce was noodling on the dark stage and he flicked a salute to Kurtz while his left hand kept the rhythm going.

Daddy Brace came up from the basement in a plaid shirt and old chinos. “Rigby, don’t you know what the hell time this establishment opens yet? And no offense, babe, but you smell like carrion.”

Kurtz looked at the woman next to him. During the year he’d been coming to Blues Franklin again since he’d gotten out of Attica, he’d never thought about meeting Rigby King here. At least not after his first few times back at the jazz place. But then, he hadn’t known that Rigby was within a thousand miles of Buffalo.

“I know what time it opens,” Rigby said to Daddy Bruce. “And I know you’ve never refused to sell me a drink, even when I was seventeen.”

The old black man sighed. “What’ll you have?”

“Shot of tequila with a beer back,” said Rigby. She looked at Kurtz. “Joe?”

“Coffee,” said Kurtz. “You don’t have any food back there, do you?”

“I may have me an old moldy biscuit I could slap a sausage or egg into if I had to.”

“Both,” said Kurtz.

Daddy Bruce started to leave, turned back, and said, “Ray Charles’s glasses safe somewhere?”

Kurtz patted his jacket pocket.

When they were alone, Rigby said, “No drink? Coffee and sausage? You getting old, Joe?”

Kurtz resisted the impulse to remind her that she was a couple of years older than he was. “What do you want, Rigby?”

“I have an offer you’ll be interested in,” she said. “Maybe an offer you won’t be able to refuse.”

Kurtz didn’t roll his eyes, but he was tempted. He thought, not for the first time, that the movie The Godfather had a lot to answer for. He didn’t think Rigby’s offer, whatever it was, would top Toma Gonzaga’s “do-my-bidding-or-die” proposal. He focused his attention on Coe Pierce playing a piano-only version of “Autumn Leaves.”

“What’s the offer?” said Kurtz.

“Just a minute,” she said. Big Daddy Bruce had brought her drinks and Kurtz’s mug of black coffee. Rigby tossed back the gold tequila, drank some beer, and gestured for another shot.

Daddy sighed and went back behind the bar, returning in a minute to refill her tequila, fill an extra shot glass for her, and top off her glass of beer. He also set a plate brimming over with eggs over easy, patty sausages, toast, and hash browns in front of Kurtz. The old man laid down a napkin and silverware next to it. “Don’t expect this service every Saturday,” said Daddy. “I’m only doing this ’cause you always tip Ruby and drink the cheapest Scotch.”

“Thanks,” said Kurtz and laid into the food with a will. Suddenly, even with the continuing throb of the headache, he was starving.

Rigby tossed back the second shot glass of tequila, drank some beer, and said, “What the hell happened to you, Joe?”

“What do you mean?” he said around a mouthful of eggs. “I’m hungry is all.”

“No, you dipshit I mean, what happened to you?”

Kurtz ate some hash browns and waited for her to go on. He had no doubt she would.

“I mean,” continued Rigby, playing with her tequila glass, “you used to give a shit.”

“I still give a shit,” said Kurtz, chewing on his toast.

She ignored him. “You were always rough, inside and out, but you used to care about something other than saving your own ass. Even when you were a punk at Father Baker’s, you used to get worked up when you thought something wasn’t fair or when you saw someone treated like shit.”

“Everyone was treated like shit at Father Baker’s,” said Kurtz. The eggs were good, done just the way he liked them.

She didn’t even look at him as she tossed back the third tequila and called to Daddy for another one.

“No more, Rigby,” called Daddy from the back room. “You’re shitfaced already.”

“The fuck I am,” said the police detective. “One more or I’ll bring the state license people down on your ass. Come on, Daddy—I’ve had a hard night.”

“You look it and smell it,” said Daddy Bruce, but he poured the final shot glass of tequila, policing up the empty beer mug and extra shot glass as he left.

“She’s going to get you killed,” said Rigby, enunciating every word with the care taken by someone who’s drunk too much booze in too short a time.

“Who?” said Kurtz, although he knew who she meant.

“Little Angeleyes Fuckarino Ferwhoosis is who,” said Rigby. “That Mafia bitch.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Kurtz.

Rigby King snorted. It wasn’t a feminine sound, but she didn’t smell all that feminine at the moment. “You fucking her, Joe?”

Kurtz felt his jaw set with anger. Normally he’d say nothing to a question like that—or say something with his fists—but this was Rigby King and she was drunk and tired. “I’ve never touched her,” he said, realizing as he spoke that he had touched Angelina, but only to frisk her a couple of times last winter.

Rigby snorted again, but not so explosively this time. She drank the last of the tequila. “Her sister Sophia was a cunt and so is this one,” she said. “Word around the precinct house is that you’ve had both of them.”

“Fuck word around the precinct house,” said Kurtz. He finished his eggs and went at the last piece of toast.

“Yeah,” said Rigby and the syllable sounded tired. “Word around the house this week is that Interpol says a certain Danish guy might be crossing into the States through Canada. Or maybe he already has.”

Kurtz looked up. Had he missed something? Were there billboards up with this news? Had it been on the Channel 7 Action News or something? This assassin must have an advance team doing publicity for him.

“Got your attention, huh, Joe? Yeah, why do you think your pal Angelina would call for the Dane?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Kurtz. He sipped the last of his coffee. Big Daddy came by, refilled the coffee mug, set down another mug in front of Rigby, filled it with coffee, and went into the back room again.

“Why do you think, Joe?” repeated Rigby. She sounded suddenly sober.

He looked at her. His eyes gave up nothing.

“What if it isn’t your female pal or her new friend Gonzaga who called for this particular European, Joe? Ever think of that?”

He was tempted to ask her what she was talking about, but didn’t. Not yet.

“You have any enemies out there who want your scalp, Joe Kurtz? I mean, other than Big Bore Redhawk, of course.” She sipped coffee, made a face, and put the mug down. “Funny about Big Bore, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

She looked surprised. “Oh, that’s right, we haven’t told you yet. The Pennsylvania Highway Patrol called us last night with the news that your Indian friend had been found in the woods behind a Howard Johnson’s just off I-90 at the Erie exit. One bullet—nine millimeter—through his left temple. The Erie M.E. says that the shooting took place around ten A.M. yesterday. Ten A.M., Joe.”

“What about it?”

“By great good coincidence, that’s exactly when you had me meet you for that bullshit meeting at Broadway Market,” said Rigby, her face flushing. Her brown eyes were angry.

“You saying that I used you for an alibi, Rigby?”

“I’m saying that you’ve always been mean, but you didn’t used to be so fucking cute,” snapped the cop. “I really hate cute felons. They really burn my tits.”

“And lovely…” began Kurtz and stopped when he noted the look in her eyes and the hot coffee in her hand. “What were you going to say about the Danish guy?”

“I was going to ask who has the money and the motive to bring one of Europe’s hired assassins into little old Western New York,” said Rigby, her voice slurring only slightly from the booze and fatigue. “You want to answer that Joe?”

“I give up,” said Kurtz.

“You should. You should.” Rigby held the coffee mug as if for warmth, lowering her face over it and letting the steam touch her cheeks. “They say the Dane’s assassinated more than a hundred prime targets, including that politician in Holland not long ago. Never been caught. Hell, never been identified.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” said Kurtz.

Rigby smiled at him. She had a beautiful smile, thought Kurtz, even when it was a mocking one. “Word at the precinct house has you at the Farino estate a year ago when the same Danish guy wasted sister Sophia, Papa Farino, their lawyer—whatever the fuck his name was—and half the old Farino bodyguards. Twenty goombahs protecting Old Man Farino, and the only ones still standing when it was over were the ones the Dane didn’t want dead.”

Kurtz said nothing. He had a sudden tactile memory of sitting very still, his palms on his thighs, while the tall man in the raincoat and Bavarian-style hat with the feather in it turned the muzzle of his semiautomatic pistol from one target in the room to another, killing each person with a single shot. Kurtz’s name hadn’t been on the list that day. It had been an oversight of sorts. Little Skag Farino, still in Attica, hadn’t thought that Kurtz would be there when the assassin he’d hired came to deal with Little Skag’s sister, father, and the others, and he’d been too cheap to pay for Kurtz on spec.

“Little Skag’s still a player,” whispered Rigby. “He survived the shanking in Attica after you and the Ferrara bitch leaked the word that Skag had raped a minor. Your pal Angelina had his lawyer whacked a few months ago, but Little Skag’s still alive—wearing a colostomy bag these days, or so I hear—and safe in a federal country club where no one can get at him. But he has a new lawyer. And I think he has some unsettled business—with his little sister Angelina, the new, improved, gay Gonzaga, and some mook named Joe Kurtz.”

“You’re making this up as you go along,” said Kurtz. “Bullshitting.”

Rigby shrugged. “Can you take the chance to ignore me? Have you become that crazy a gambler, Joe?”

Kurtz rubbed the side of his head. The pain seemed to pulse through his skull, through his hand, and down his arm into his chest. “What do you want?”

“I said that I had an offer for you,” she said. “My offer’s this…” she sipped her coffee and took a breath. “Joe, you’re fucking around trying to solve this O’Toole shooting. I know you know about Goba.”

“Goba?” said Kurtz in the most innocent voice he could summon through the pain. Kemper hadn’t given him the Yemeni’s name over the phone last night.

“Fuck you, Joe.” She drank her coffee but never took her luminous eyes off his face. “I don’t know how you knew about Goba, but I think you were in his house yesterday before we were. I think you probably took some evidence with you. I think you’re still acting under the delusion that you’re a private detective, Joe Kurtz, ex-con, felon, parolee, and too-cute shithead.”

“It was my shooting, too,” Kurtz said softly.

“What?”

“You called it the O’Toole shooting,” he said. “It was my shooting, too.” He raised fingers to his torn scalp. The scab was tender. The wound felt hot and it pulsed under his fingertips.

Rigby shrugged. “She’s on life support You’re hanging out with Baby Doc and snarfing eggs. You want to hear my offer?”

“Sure.” He conveyed his lack of enthusiasm through flat tone, but he wasn’t happy to hear that they knew he’d met with Baby Doc. His parole could be revoked for just speaking to a known felon.

“You keep playing private cop,” she said softly, glancing around to make sure that no one could hear. Ruby and Daddy were in the kitchen; Coe Pierce was noodling Miles Davis’s little-known “Peace, Peace.” “If you insist on playing private cop,” she repeated, “I’ll give you the information you need to stay one step ahead of the Dane, solve your little shooting case, and maybe survive the Ferrara bitch’s attentions.”

“Why?” said Kurtz.

“I’ll tell you later,” said Rigby. “You agree now to help me on something later, and we have a deal. I’ll risk my gold shield to feed you information.”

Kurtz laughed softly. “Uh-huh. Sure. I sign a blank check to help you later on some unspecified crap and you risk your badge to help me now. This is bullshit, Rigby.” He stood.

“It’s the best deal you’ll ever get, Joe.” For a second, astoundingly, unbelievably, Rigby King looked as if she was going to cry. She looked away, mopped her nose with the back of her hand, and looked back at Kurtz. The only emotion visible in her eyes now was the anger he’d seen earlier.

“Tell me what I’d have to do,” said Kurtz.

She looked up at him across the table. “I help you now,” she said so softly that he had to lean forward to hear. “I help you stay alive now, and sometime… I don’t know when, not soon…maybe next summer, maybe later, you help me find Farouz and Kevin Eftakar.”

“Who the fuck are Farouz and Kevin Eftakar?” said Kurtz, still standing and leaning his weight on his arms.

“My ex-husband and my son,” whispered Rigby.

“Your son?”

“My baby,” said the cop. “He was one year old when Farouz stole him.”

“Stole him?” said Kurtz. “You’re talking about a custody case? If the judge said…”

“The judge didn’t say a fucking thing,” snapped Rigby. “There were no custody hearings. Farouz just took him.”

Kurtz sat down. “Look, you’ve got the law on your side, Rigby. The FBI will work the case if your asshole of an ex-husband crossed state lines. You’re a good detective yourself and all the other departments will give you a hand…”

“He stole my baby from me nine years ago and took him to Iran,” said Rigby. “I want Kevin back.”

“Ah,” said Kurtz. He rubbed his face. “I’d be the wrong person to help you. The last person who could.” Kurtz laughed softly. “As you said, Rig, I’m a felon, an ex-con, a parolee. I can’t walk across the damned Peace Bridge without ten types of permission I wouldn’t get, much less get a passport and go to Iran. You’ll just have to…”

“I can get the forged documents for you,” said Rigby. “I have enough money set aside to get us to Iran.”

“I wouldn’t know how to find…” began Kurtz.

“You don’t have to. I’ll have located Farouz and Kevin before we leave.”

Kurtz looked at her. “If you can find them, you don’t need me…”

“I need you,” said Rigby. She actually reached across and took his hand. “I’ll find Farouz. I need you to kill the fucker for me.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY

Kurtz insisted on driving Rigby home. They had more to talk about, but Kurtz didn’t want to discuss murder in a public place, even in the Blues Franklin, which undoubtedly had been the site for more than one murder being planned.

“Is it a deal, Joe?”

“You’re drunk, Rigby.”

“Maybe so, but tomorrow I’ll be sober and you’ll still need my help if you want to find out who shot you and…whatshername…the parole officer.”

“O’Toole.”

“Yeah, so is it a deal?”

“I’m not a hired gun.”

Rigby barked a laugh that ended in a snort. She rubbed her nose.

“Hire the Dane if you’re so hot to take a killer to Iran with you,” said Kurtz.

“I can’t afford the Dane. Word is that he asks a hundred thousand bucks a pop. Who the hell can afford that? Other than Little Skag and these other Mafia assholes like your girlfriend and the faggot, I mean.”

“So you want to hire me because I come cheap.”

“Yeah.”

Kurtz turned up Delaware Avenue. Rigby had told him she lived in a townhouse up there toward Sheridan. “The problem,” said Kurtz, “is that I’m not a killer.”

“I know you’re not, Joe,” said Rigby, tone lower now. “But you can kill a man. I’ve seen you do it.”

“Bangkok,” said Kurtz. “Bangkok doesn’t count.”

“No,” agreed Rigby, “Bangkok doesn’t count. But I know you’ve killed men here as well. Hell, you went to jail for throwing a mook out a sixth-story window. And every black in the projects knows that you took that drug dealer, Malcolm Kibunte, out of the Seneca Street Social Club one night last winter and tossed him over the Falls.”

It was Kurtz’s turn to snort. He’d never thrown anyone over the Falls. Kibunte had been tied to a rope and dangled over the edge in the icy water while he was asked a few simple questions. The stupid shit had decided to slip out of the rope and swim for it instead of answering. No one can swim upstream at the brink of Niagara Fails in the dark, in winter, at night. It was unusual that the body was found by the Maid of the Mist the next morning—usually the Falls hold the bodies underneath the incredible weight of falling water for years or decades.

Kurtz said, “Nine years is a hell of a long time to wait to get your kid back. He won’t remember you. He’s probably sporting a mustache and got a harem of his own by now.”

“Of course he won’t remember me,” said Rigby, not reacting with the fury Kurtz had expected. She just sounded tired. “And I haven’t waited nine years. I followed them over there the month after Farouz kidnapped Kevin.”

“What happened?”

“First, I couldn’t get a visa from our own State Department Senator Moynihan—he was our senator then, not this dim-blonde cuckolded bitch we have now—”

“I don’t think that a woman can be a cuckold,” said Kurtz.

“Do you want to fucking hear this or not?” snapped Rigby. “Moynihan tried to help, but there was nothing he could do, not even get me a visa. So I went through Canada and flew to Iran and found out where Farouz was living with his family in Tehran and went to the police there and made my case—when I found out he’d been cheating on me, Eftakar just stole my one-year-old baby—and the cops called some mullah and I was kicked out of the country within twenty-four hours.”

“Still…” began Kurtz.

“That was the first time,” said Rigby.

“You tried again?”

“In nine years?” said the cop. She sounded sober. “Of course I’ve tried again. When I came back after the first attempt, I moved back to Buffalo, joined the B.P.D., and tried to get legal and political help. Nothing. Two years later, I took a short leave of absence and went back to Iran under a false name. That time I actually saw Farouz—confronted him in some sort of coffee and smoking club with his brothers and pals.”

“They kick you out of the country again?”

“After three weeks in a Tehran jail this time.”

“But you went back again?”

“The next time, I went in overland through Turkey and northern Iraq. It cost me ten thousand bucks to get smuggled through Turkey, another eight thousand to the fucking Kurds to get me across the border, and five grand to smugglers in Iran.”

“Where’d you get money like that?” said Kurtz. What he was thinking was You’re lucky they didn’t rape and kill you. But she must have known that.

“This was the nineties,” said Rigby. “I’d put everything I had into the stock market and did all right Then blew it all going back to Iran.”

“But you didn’t find Kevin?”

“This time I didn’t get within four hundred kilometers of Tehran. Some religious-police fanatics had my smugglers arrested—and probably shot—and I got questioned for ten days in some provincial cop station before they just drove me to the Iraq border in a Land Cruiser and kicked me out again.”

“Did they hurt you?” Kurtz was imagining burns from lighted cigarettes, jolts from car batteries.

“Never touched me,” said Rigby. “I think the local chief of police liked Americans.”

“So that was it?”

“Not by a long shot. In 1998 I hired a mercenary soldier named Tucker to go get Kevin. I didn’t care if he killed Farouz, I just wanted Kevin back. Tucker told me that he used to be Special Forces and had been in Iran dozens of times—had been inserted into Tehran as part of the plan to get the hostages out as part of that fucked-up Jimmy Carter raid in April 1980…”

“Not the best thing to list on a resume,” said Kurtz. He’d reached Sheridan Road and turned left according to Rigby’s instructions, then right again into a maze of streets with townhouses and apartments built in the sixties. Rigby didn’t live far from Peg O’Toole’s apartment and he wanted to go there next.

“No,” said Rigby. “As it turned out it wasn’t a good recommendation for old Tucker.”

“He didn’t succeed.”

“He disappeared,” said Rigby King. “I got a cable from him in Cyprus, saying he was ready for ‘the last stage of the operation,’ whatever the hell that meant, and then he disappeared. Two months later I got a package from Tehran—from Farouz, although there was no return address.”

“Let me guess,” said Kurtz. “Ears?”

“Eight fingers and a big toe,” said Rigby. “I recognized the ring on one of the fingers, big ruby in a sort of class ring that Tucker seemed proud of.”

“Why a big toe?” said Kurtz.

“Beats the shit out of me,” said Rigby and laughed. She didn’t really sound amused.

“So now you’re ready to go back again, taking me with you.”

“Not quite ready,” said the cop. “Next summer maybe.”

“Oh boy,” said Kurtz. He stopped at the curb in front of the dreary townhouse that Rigby had indicated.

“And I’ll help you as much as I can until then,” said Rigby, turning to look at him. The smell of death still wafted from her clothes.

“Just trust me to hold up my end of the bargain when the time comes, huh?” said Kurtz.

“Yeah.”

“What can you tell me that would help me with this shooting thing?” said Kurtz. He’d made his decision. He wanted her help.

“Kemper thinks that you’re right,” said Rigby. “That Yasein Goba didn’t act alone.”

“Why?”

“Several reasons. Kemper doesn’t think that Goba had the strength to drag himself up those stairs in his house. The M.E. says that despite all the blood trail and the blood in the bathroom, Goba’d lost two-thirds of his blood supply before he got to the house.”

“So someone helped him up the stairs,” said Kurtz. “Anything else?”

“The missing car,” said Rigby. “Sure, it’d be stolen in that neighborhood, but if Goba’d driven himself from the parking garage, the seat and floor and wheel and everything must’ve been saturated with blood. Blood everywhere. That might give even the back-the-Bridge Lackawanna thieves pause.”

“Unless the blood was all in the backseat,” said Kurtz. “Or trunk.”

“Yeah.”

“Do you trust Kemper’s judgment, Rig?”

“I do,” said the woman. “He’s a good detective. Better than I’ll ever be.” She rubbed her temples. “Jesus, I’m going to have a headache tomorrow.”

“Join the club,” said Kurtz. He made a decision. “Anything else on Goba?”

“We’re talking to everyone who knew him,” said Rigby King. “And the Yemenis are really clannish and close-mouthed—especially after that terrorist thing last year. But they’ve told us enough to convince us that Goba was a real loner. No friends. No family here. It appears that he’s been waiting for his fiancée to be smuggled into the country. We’re looking into that. But a couple of neighbors tell us that they’d caught glimpses of Goba being dropped off once or twice by a white guy.”

“A white guy dropped him off once or twice,” repeated Kurtz. “That’s it?”

“So far. We’re still questioning neighbors and people who worked with Goba at the car wash.”

“Any description on the white guy?”

“Just white,” said Rigby. “Oh, yeah—one crackhead said that Goba’s pal had long hair—‘like a woman’s.’”

Like the driver of the car that broke out through the garage barrier, thought Kurtz. “Can you get me some information on Peg O’Toole’s uncle?”

“The old man in the wheelchair who slapped you? The Major?” said Rigby. “Yeah, why? We called him and asked how he and his associate, the Vietnamese ex-colonel…”

“Trinh.”

“Yeah. We asked the Major how they’d heard about Officer O’Toole’s shooting. The Major lives in Florida, you know. Trinh in California.”

Kurtz waited. He knew where the two lived thanks to Arlene, but he wasn’t going to reveal anything to Rigby unless he had to.

“The Major told Kemper that he’d been back in Neola for a shareholders’ meeting of a company called SEATCO that he and Trinh had started way back in the seventies. Import-export stuff. The Major and Trinh are retired, but they still hold honorary positions on the board of directors.”

“Which explains why they were in the state,” said Kurtz. “Not how he heard about the shooting.”

Rigby shrugged. “The Major said that he called Peg O’Toole’s house and office Wednesday evening after the shareholders’ meeting. He said he likes to get together with his niece when he’s back in the state. Someone at the parole office told him there’d been a shooting—they didn’t have any family member to contact for O’Toole, just the Brian Kennedy guy in Manhattan.”

“Was Kennedy in Manhattan when they contacted him?”

“He was in transit,” said Rigby. “Flying to Buffalo to see his fiancée.” She smiled crookedly. “You suspect the boyfriend? They were engaged, for Christ’s sake.”

“Gee,” said Kurtz, “you’re right. He couldn’t have been involved if he was engaged to the victim. That’s never happened before.”

Rigby shook her head. “What motive, Joe? Kennedy’s rich, successful, handsome…his security agency is one of the top three in the state, you know. Plus, we checked—his Lear was in transit.”

Kurtz wanted to say are you sure? but stopped himself. The headache throbbed and muted flashbulbs were going off behind his eyes. He set his hands firmly on the top of the steering wheel. “The Major had a son who killed some people down in the Neola high school back in the seventies…” he began.

“Sean Michael O’Toole,” said Rigby. “Kemper ran that down. The crazy kid was sent to the big hospital for the criminally insane in Rochester and he died there in 1989…”

“Died?” said Kurtz. Arlene hadn’t been able to get into the hospital records. “He would have been young.”

“Just turned thirty,” said Rigby. For a woman who’d just downed four tequilas and two beers, she was articulating her sentences well enough, but her beautiful brown eyes looked tired. Very tired.

“What happened to him? Suicide?”

“Yeah. Messy, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Young Sean didn’t just hang himself or asphyxiate himself with a plastic bag or something…uh-uh. He doused himself and several other inmates with gasoline and set fire to his wing of the high-security ward during visiting hours. Three others died as well as Sean and half the wing burned down. The current director says that he still doesn’t know where the boy got the gasoline.”

Kurtz thought about this. “The Major must have been proud.”

“Who knows?” said Rigby. “He wouldn’t talk to Kemper or me about his son. He said, and I quote—‘Let the dead bury the dead.’ Army officers—you gotta love ’em.” She opened the door and stepped out onto the grassy curb. Clouds were scuttling and the wind from the northwest was cold. It felt like late October in Buffalo to Kurtz.

“You have tomorrow off?” said Kurtz.

“Yeah,” said Rigby King. “I’ve worked the last five weekends, and now that your and O’Toole’s case is officially closed and the dead gay guys have been turned over to the coroner, I get tomorrow off. Why?”

“You want to ride down to Neola with me tomorrow?” Even as he spoke the words, Kurtz was surprised he’d actually suggested this.

Rigby looked equally surprised. “Neola? That little town down near the Pennsylvania border? Why would you…” Her expression changed. “Oh, that’s where Major O’Toole and the Vietnamese colonel had their homes and business before they retired and moved to warmer climes. What’s the deal, Joe? You looking for a little payback for the late-night slap and want some backup while you brace the sixty-something-year-old in his wheelchair?”

“Not quite,” said Kurtz. “There’s something else I want to check on down there and I thought it might be a pretty ride. We’d be back by nightfall.”

“A pretty ride,” repeated Rigby, her tone suggesting that Kurtz had begun speaking in a foreign language. “Sure, what the fuck. Why not? What time?”

“Eight A.M.?”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll drink some more and pass out early so I’ll be in good spirits for our picnic tomorrow.” She shook her head as if bemused by her own idiocy, slammed the passenger door, and walked toward her townhouse.

Feeling some of the same bemusement about himself, Kurtz put the Pinto in gear and drove away.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-ONE

Kurtz had just headed east on Sheridan when his phone rang. He fished it out of his peacoat pocket, thumbed it on while trying to avoid an old woman in a Pontiac swerving from lane to lane, and heard only dial tone. A phone rang again in his other pocket.

“Shit.” He’d answered the Gonzaga cell phone by mistake. He found his own phone.

“I’ve got some of the information you wanted,” said Baby Doc.

“It didn’t take you long,” said Kurtz.

“I didn’t know you wanted me to take a long time,” said Baby Doc. “That would have cost you more. You want to hear this or not?”

“Yeah.”

“The guys I chatted with didn’t sell Mr. G. the metallic article you were asking about,” said Baby Doc.

Kurtz turned left off Sheridan and translated—Baby Doc’s people hadn’t sold Yasein Goba the .22 he used in the shooting.

“But these guys I mentioned have had some contact with our friend.”

“Tell me,” said Kurtz. He was looking at house numbers in the more upscale neighborhood here south of Sheridan Road. The trees were larger here than in Rigby’s neighborhood, the street quieter. The wind was blowing hard and skittering yellow and red leaves across the pavement ahead of his slowly moving Pinto.

“The guys were asked to do some special paperwork for a friend of his,” said Baby Doc.

Forged visa? thought Kurtz. Passport?

“What friend?” he asked.

“A lovely girl named Aysha,” said Baby Doc. “Our late friend’s fiancée. She’s coming from the north to visit Sunday night, as it turns out. Evidently her people don’t keep abreast of the news up there. Probably because they live on a farm.”

Goba’s fiancée, Aysha, was being smuggled across the Canadian border tomorrow night. Neither she nor the smugglers had heard of Goba’s death in Canada where they’d been hiding out and waiting to cross.

“What time tonight? Which place?” said Kurtz.

“You want to know a lot for not much in return,” said Baby Doc.

“Add it to my bill.” Kurtz knew that his offer to return a favor would be called in sooner or later. He was going into a lot of debt this day. He just hoped that Baby Doc’s favor didn’t include him having to fly to Iran to shoot someone.

“Midnight Sunday night,” said Baby Doc. “Blue 1999 Dodge Intrepid with Ontario plates. The span of many colors. She’ll be dropped off just beyond the toll booths at the entrance to the mall.”

It took Kurtz only a second to translate this last. They were smuggling her across the Rainbow Bridge, just below the Falls, in two days. The Rainbow Centre Mall was near the first exit after the Customs booths.

“Who’s meeting her?” said Kurtz.

“No one’s meeting her,” said Baby Doc. “All of her friends on this side went on to other things.” Translation—Goba’s dead. Any deal we had with him died when he did. We keep the money he paid us and she fends for herself.

“Why not cancel the delivery?” said Kurtz.

“Too late.” Baby Doc didn’t elaborate on that, but Kurtz assumed it just meant that no one cared.

“How much did our pal pay for this generosity?” asked Kurtz. Goba worked at a car wash and hadn’t been out of jail long enough to save much money.

He heard Baby Doc hesitate. This was a lot of potentially damaging information Kurtz wanted in exchange for nothing more than a promise of future friendship. But then, he knew what Kurtz had done for his father.

“Fifteen bucks,” said Baby Doc. “For each side.”

Thirty thousand dollars for the paperwork and smuggling, split between Baby Doc’s people and the Canadian smugglers.

“Okay, thanks,” said Kurtz. “I owe you.”

“Yes,” said Baby Doc, “you do.” He broke the connection.

Peg O’Toole’s townhouse was much more handsome than Rigby King’s—brick, two-story, large windows with fake six-over-six panes; her unit shared its building with only three other townhouses, a four-door garage was set tucked away in back and mature trees shaded the small yard in front. The clouds were moving grayer and lower now, the wind blew colder, and the last of the leaves were being torn from the trees like the last survivors dropping off the upended Titanic.

Kurtz found a parking place and crossed the street to look at the townhouse. He had his breaking-and-entering kit in the backseat of the Pinto, but he wanted to think about this first. His concussion headache had grown worse, as it tended to do in the afternoon, and he had to squint to think.

While he was standing there squinting, a man’s voice said, “Hey, Mr. Kurtz.”

Kurtz whirled, one hand ready to move toward the .38 in its holster under his peacoat.

“The security and personal protection guy, Officer O’Toole’s fiancé,” Brian Kennedy, stepped out of an orangish-red SUV, crossed the street, and held out his hand. Kurtz shook it, wondering what the fuck was up. Had Kennedy tailed him here?

“How do you like it?” said Kennedy, turning slightly with a flourish.

It took Kurtz a second to realize that the handsome young man was talking about his sport utility vehicle. “Yeah,” Kurtz said stupidly, following Kennedy back across the residential street toward the big SUV. He’d been wondering if his defensive alertness and powers of observation were suffering because of this stupid concussion, and now he knew. If someone could sneak up on him and park an orange two-and-a-half-ton SUV behind him while he was gathering wool, then perhaps he wasn’t quite as alert as he should be.

As if reading his mind, Kennedy said, “I was parked here listening to the end of something interesting on NPR before going in to Peg’s apartment when I saw you drive up. Like it?”

Kurtz realized that he was still talking about the truck. “Yeah. What is it?” He wasn’t familiar with the badge on the high grill. Kurtz didn’t give the slightest goddamn about what make it was, but he wanted to keep Kennedy talking a minute while his aching brain came up with some excuse for him to be standing out in front of the dying Peg O’Toole’s townhouse.

“Laforza,” said Kennedy. “Limited production out of Escondido. It’s not an SUV, it’s a PSV.”

Pretentious Shithead’s Vehicle? thought Kurtz. Aloud, he said, “PSV?”

“Personal Security Vehicle.” Kennedy pounded the driver’s side door with his knuckles. “Kevlar door inserts. Thirty-two millimeter Spectra Shield bulletproof glass on the windshield, side windows, and sunroof. Hands-free communication and a transponder inside. Supercharged GM Vortec six-oh liter V-8 under the hood that produces four hundred twenty-five horsepower.”

“Cool,” said Kurtz, trying to make his voice sound like a fourteen-year-old’s.

“My personal vehicle is a Porsche 911 Turbo,” said Kennedy, “but I drive the Laforza sometimes when I’m around clients. Our agency gets a small kickback from the people in Escondido if we help place an order.”

“How much would one of these set me back?” asked Kurtz. He kicked the front left tire. It hurt his foot. He’d just expended his entire cache of car-buying expertise.

“This is a PSV-L4,” said Kennedy. “Top of the line. If I get you a discount, oh…one hundred and thirty-nine thousand dollars.”

Kurtz nodded judiciously. “I’ll think about it. I’d have to talk to the missus first.”

“So you’re married, Mr. Kurtz?” Kennedy was walking back toward the townhouse and Kurtz followed as far as the sidewalk.

“Not really,” said Kurtz.

Kennedy blinked and folded his arms. He may look like the current James Bond, thought Kurtz, but he doesn’t seem quite as fast on his intellectual feet as the superspy.

As if responding in delayed reaction, Kennedy laughed twice. He had the kind of loud, easy, unselfconscious laugh that people loved. Kurtz could have happily used a shovel on the man’s head at that moment.

“So what brings you to Peg’s neighborhood, Mr. Kurtz?” The security man’s tone wasn’t aggressive, just pleasantly curious.

“I bet you can tell me,” said Kurtz. This guy drives a Porsche 911 Turbo. He’s a member of that club that Tom Wolfe called “Masters of the Universe.”

Kennedy nodded, thought a minute, and said, “You still think like a private investigator. You’ve been working through some things about the shooting and wonder if there’s a clue in Peg’s house.”

Kurtz widened his eyes slightly as if in awe of Kennedy’s ratiocination.

“But you weren’t thinking about breaking in, were you, Mr. Kurtz?” Kennedy’s white smile took the edge off the question. It was a smile, Kurtz thought, that could honestly be called “infectious.” Kurtz hated things that infected other things.

Kurtz smiled back, with no fear of his chagrined smirk being thought of as infectious. “Naw. I had enough prison time in Attica. I was just in the neighborhood and was…as you say…thinking about the shooting.”

I always used to stand outside victims’ homes and try to pick up on psychic vibes when I was a licensed P.I., thought Kurtz but didn’t articulate this coda. It might be gilding the lily a bit, even for someone as self-satisfiedly obtuse as Brian Kennedy.

“Want to come in?” said Kennedy, tossing a ring of keys in the air. “I was just picking up some insurance stuff and legal papers that the hospital wanted. I don’t think Peg would have minded if you just step in a minute while I’m here.”

Kurtz picked up on the past-tense in that last sentence. Had O’Toole died? The last he’d heard, she was on life support.

“Sure,” he said and followed Kennedy into the building.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-TWO

So what did O’Toole’s apartment look like?” said Arlene when Kurtz was back in the office later that waning Saturday afternoon. “Any clues lying around?”

“Just clues to her personality,” said Kurtz.

“Such as?” said Arlene. She flicked ashes into her ashtray.

Kurtz walked to the window. It had grown colder and darker and begun to rain again. Even though it was an hour from official sunset, the streetlights had come on along Chippewa and the headlights and taillights of passing cars reflected on the wet asphalt.

“Such as the place was neat and clean and tilled with art,” said Kurtz. “Not a lot of original art—she couldn’t have afforded that on her probation officer salary—but tasteful stuff, and more small original oil paintings and sculptures than most people would collect. And books. Lots of books. Mostly paperbacks but all of them looked like they’d been read, not just leather-bound crap to look good on the shelves, but real books. Fiction, nonfiction, classics.”

“No real clues then,” said Arlene.

Kurtz shook his head, turned back to the room, and sipped some Starbucks coffee he’d picked up. He’d brought a cup for Arlene, and she was drinking hers between puffs on her Marlboro. “She had a laptop on her desk,” said Kurtz. “And two low filing cabinets. But obviously I couldn’t look through them with Kennedy there.”

“Weird that he let you come in with him,” said Arlene. “He must be the most guileless security expert in the world…”

“Or too crafty for his own good,” said Kurtz. “He made tea for us.”

“How nicely domestic,” said Arlene. “Made himself right at home in Ms. O’Toole’s townhouse, huh?”

Kurtz shrugged. “He told me that he’d been staying there with her when he was in Buffalo every few weeks. I saw some of his suits and blazers in a closet.”

“He let you wander into her bedroom?”

“He was grabbing some stuff,” said Kurtz. “I just stood in the doorway.”

“Fiancés,” said Arlene, using the tone that other people did when they said “Kids.Whaddyagonnado?” She nodded toward her computer screen where the names of WeddingBells-dot-com clients were stacked like cordwood.

“The question remains, why’d he invite me up?” said Kurtz, turning back to watch the traffic move through the cold October rain. “He asked me what I was doing there, but then he gave the answer—as if he didn’t really want to press me on it. Why would he do that? Why wasn’t he pissed—or at least suspicious—when he found me hanging around outside O’Toole’s townhouse?”

“Good question,” said Arlene.

He turned away from the window. “Do you know any Yemeni?”

Arlene stared at him. “Do you mean any Yemeni people?”

“No, I mean the language,” said Kurtz.

Arlene smiled and stubbed out her cigarette. “I think Arabic is the language spoken in Yemen. Some of them speak Farsi, I think, but Arabic is the dominant language.”

Kurtz rubbed his aching head. “Yeah. All right. Do you speak any Arabic that a Yemeni would understand?”

“Al-Ghasla,” said Arlene. “Thowb Al-Zfag, Al-Subhia.”

“You made that up,” said Kurtz.

Arlene shook her head. “Three kinds of wedding dresses—the dress of the eve of the wedding, Al-Ghasla, the bridal gown, Thwob-Al-Zfag, and the gown of the day following the wedding, Al-Subhia. I just helped a client from Utica order all three from a Yemeni dressmaker in Manhattan.”

“Well, I guess that’ll do,” said Kurtz. “I’ll bring little Aysha here on Monday night and you two can discuss wedding dresses. She doesn’t know she’s a widow even before she’s married.”

Arlene stared at him until he explained about Baby Doc’s phone call.

“That’s really sad,” said Arlene, lighting another Marlboro. “Do you really think that she can tell you anything about what Yasein Goba was doing? She’s been in Canada.”

Kurtz shrugged. “Maybe we won’t even be able to understand each other, but if I don’t meet her up in Niagara Falls tomorrow night, no one else is going to. Baby Doc’s people have washed their hands of her. She’s just going to get picked up by the cops sooner or later and shipped back to Yemen by the INS.”

“So you pick her up tomorrow night and try to talk to her,” said Arlene. “And can’t. What then? Sign language?”

“Any ideas?”

“Yes,” said Arlene. “I know some people through my church who take part in a sort of underground railroad helping illegal immigrants get into the States.”

“Goba’s already had that part arranged,” said Kurtz.

Arlene shook her head. “No, I mean I’ll get in touch with the guy who helps the immigrants—Nicky—at church tomorrow, he’ll call one of the Yemeni people they use to translate, and they can help us talk to the girl.”

“All right,” said Kurtz. “Get your friend’s translator here early Monday morning.”

“Can’t it wait until later?” asked Arlene. “This woman—Aysha?—can sleep at my place Sunday and we can meet with the translator on Monday.”

“Monday’s Halloween,” said Kurtz, as if that explained anything.

“So?”

He considered telling her about Toma Gonzaga’s promise to murder him at midnight on Halloween if he hadn’t solved the don’s junkie-killer problem. He considered it for about five microseconds. “I have things to do on Halloween,” he said.

“All right, early Monday morning,” said Arlene. She came over to the window and joined him in looking out at the rain. It was getting dark in earnest now. “Some people just don’t get a break, do they, Joe?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean this Aysha will wake up tomorrow morning thinking she’ll be meeting her fiancé in a new country that night, that she’ll be a wife and maybe a U.S. citizen, and that everything is working out for her. Instead, she’ll hear that her fiancé is dead and that she’s a stranger in a strange land.”

“Yeah, well…” said Kurtz.

“Are you going to tell her that you killed him? Goba?”

Kurtz looked at his secretary. Her eyes were dry—she wasn’t going soppy on him—but her gaze was focused on something far away.

“I don’t know,” Kurtz said irritably. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“Just that life sucks sometimes,” said Arlene. “I’m going home.” She stubbed out her cigarette, turned off her computer, tugged her purse out of a drawer, pulled on her coat, and left the office.

Kurtz sat by the window a few minutes, watching the gray twilight and rain and almost wishing that he smoked. During his years in Attica, his non-habit had served him well—the cigarettes he was allowed all went toward barter and bribes. But on days like this, he wondered if smoking would soothe his nerves—or lessen his headache.

His cell phone rang.

“Kurtz? Where are you? What happened to our meeting?”

It was Angelina Farino Ferrara.

“I’m still traveling,” said Kurtz.

“You lying sack of shit,” said the don’s daughter. “You’re in your office, looking out the window.”

Kurtz looked across Chippewa. There was the ubiquitous black Lincoln Town Car, parked on the other side of the wet street. Kurtz hadn’t seen it arrive and park.

“I’m coming up,” said Angelina. “I know you have a lock on that outside door, so don’t keep me waiting. Buzz me in.”

“Come up alone,” said Kurtz. He looked at the video monitor next to Arlene’s desk. He had no illusions about the lock down there holding out her bodyguards if they really wanted to come up with her. There was a small window in the computer-server room at the back that opened to a seven-foot drop to a lower rooftop, then a ladder back there to not one but two alleys. Kurtz never wanted to be anywhere with just one way out.

“I’ll be alone,” said Angelina and broke the connection.

Kurt watched the woman cross Chippewa toward him in the rain.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-THREE

The Dodger was frustrated by his morning’s failure to take care of the teacher out in Orchard Park, so he was pleased in the early afternoon when a wireless PDA/cell phone connection to the Boss gave him a new and more interesting task.

He knew the target from earlier briefings. In one sense, it didn’t make any difference to the Dodger who the targets were or why they had become his targets—they were all means to the ends of the Resurrection to him. But in another sense, it made everything more interesting when the targets were more difficult. And this one should be more difficult.

He knew the address. It was raining off and on when he drove the extermination van out to the Marina Towers address near the Harbor marina. There was a large public parking lot near the high rise and, as the Boss had promised, a new Mazda sedan was parked there, keys in the tailpipe. A bug van wasn’t the best vehicle in which to tail someone.

The Dodger settled in the front seat of the Mazda, tuned some jazz on the radio, and watched the front of Marina Tower through small binoculars. He’d been well briefed on the current struggle over the heroin trade in Buffalo and knew that this apartment building was the headquarters for the Farino daughter; she owned the top two floors and kept the penthouse as her personal address while accountants and others worked and sometimes lived on the floor below. Her personal vehicles were kept in the basement garage and that could only be accessed by internal elevators, locked staircases, or through the underground ramp closed by a steel-mesh gate controlled by the residents’ magnetic-strip cards.

The Dodger waited. The cold drizzle fell harder, which was good; passersby in the parking lot or on the nearby Marina Park Road couldn’t see him through the rain-mottled windshield. The Dodger turned off the radio to conserve the Mazda’s battery and he waited.

Around four P.M., the garage mesh door went up and a black Lincoln slowly emerged. The Dodger watched as the Lincoln came around to the semicircular entrance drive of Marina Towers. The Lincoln’s driver got out and walked around the car and a second bodyguard stood watching the street as Angelina Farino Ferrara came out the front door, said something to the liveried doorman, and walked over to the Lincoln.

She didn’t get in. She spoke briefly to the two men and then began jogging along the pedestrian path that led out along the shore where Lake Erie narrowed into the Niagara River. The Lincoln pulled around the entrance drive and followed slowly, heading north. The Dodger turned on his wipers and followed several hundred meters behind.

He knew from his briefings that the Farino woman liked to jog early in the morning and again in the afternoon, although usually later than this. Maybe it was the coming storm or increasing drizzle that had brought her out early.

The Dodger also recognized the two men in the Lincoln. The driver was Corso “the Hammer” Figini, serious muscle the female don had brought in from New Jersey the previous spring. The thinner, infinitely more handsome and WASPY-looking man riding shotgun today was Colin Sheffield, a well-dressed, thirties-something London criminal who’d specialized in high-class extortion, drug deals and security. Sheffield had worked for the second-most-powerful mob boss in England until the day he’d gotten a little too ambitious for his own good—not trying to whack his employer, the story went, just trying to corner some of the action for himself—and ended up leaving the country a few hours ahead of the hit team his own boss had sent.

The Dodger’s earlier briefing hadn’t included how the Farino woman had ended up hiring Colin Sheffield, but that wasn’t all that important.

The Lincoln was moving slowly, essentially keeping pace with the Farino woman’s jogging, and the Dodger had to pass it or look suspicious. Drivers were turning on their headlights now, and the view to the west and north was all dark gray clouds coming in with the October twilight. The Dodger didn’t turn his head as he passed the Lincoln and the running woman.

He made a large loop, and returned to the parking lot where he’d started, parking next to the exterminator’s van. He didn’t think that a mob guy’s daughter was very smart keeping to a routine like that, and running along the river path every morning and evening. There were several places along the path where the bodyguards couldn’t see her if they stayed in their car—which they did—and the Dodger thought the jogging would be a good time and place to take her out.

The briefing had said that Farino ran for forty-five minutes in her river path circuit, and sure enough, she and the Lincoln were back in front of Marina Towers forty-six minutes after they’d left The Dodger watched through his small binoculars as she spoke to Sheffield and Figini, leaning against the car and lifting her legs as she cooled down, and then went in the front door. The Lincoln idled at the curb. Figini, the driver, was reading a racing form.

Fifteen minutes later, she came out and got in the back seat and the Lincoln pulled away.

It was dark enough and raining hard enough now that the Dodger didn’t worry about being spotted as he followed the big, black car over to Elmwood and then north to Chippewa Street. He’d be just another pair of headlights to them in Saturday traffic headed for the one lively spot in Buffalo.

The Lincoln parked on Chippewa and the Dodger paused in a loading zone until he saw the Farino woman cross the street and go in a door. It wasn’t a club or a restaurant, so he took note of the address on the PDA, uplinked it through his cell phone, and waited. When a police car trolled by and paused near the loading zone, the Dodger drove around the block, returned, and found a space only three cars behind the idling Lincoln. The patrol car had gone.

He was lucky. In another hour, there wouldn’t be public parking within five blocks.

The two bodyguards were watching a lighted third-story window. Sure that he was still unnoticed by the bodyguards in the dark and rain behind them, the Dodger used his binoculars to watch the same window for a second. Angelina Farino Ferrara stepped in front of the window for a second, looking down toward her bodyguards. Then she turned and spoke to someone in the room. The Dodger had learned how to read lips when he was away, but the woman’s head was turned just enough that he couldn’t make out what she was saying. Then she stepped away, out of sight, and the lights went out in the office up there.

His cell phone chimed softly and the Dodger put away the binoculars. The two men in the Lincoln Town car were just silhouettes now, the big driver reading and the other staring straight ahead, and the Dodger guessed that the woman’s coming to the window was a prearranged sign telling Figini and Sheffield to relax.

Text appeared on the PDA screen—Address confirmed, Execute.

The Dodger wiped the message, removed his 9mm Beretta, and carefully attached the thin suppressor. Then, after pulling on a cheap raincoat that was two sizes too large for him, he switched off the Mazda sedan’s overhead light, scooted past the shifter to the passenger side, and stepped out into the rain.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FOUR

What do you want?” said Kurtz. “Your money?”

“That will do for a start,” said Angelina. She moved into the office and watched as Kurtz locked the door behind her. Then she dropped her cashmere coat onto the old leather couch. She was wearing a tight, black dress cut low on top and high on the thighs, expensive leather boots, a single gold necklace, and some subtle gold bracelets. He’d never seen Angelina Farino Ferrara in clothes like that. Come to think of it, thought Kurtz, most of the time he’d seen her, she’d been in gym togs or jogging attire. Her dark hair was swept up and back on the sides, but secured so that it still hung free in back. It looked wet, but he couldn’t tell if that was from walking through the rain or some mousse thing.

Kurtz picked an envelope off his desk and handed it to her. The entire five thousand dollars advance was in it. He’d use other money to manage his getaway on Tuesday if he had to run for it. He dropped into his swivel chair and looked up at her. The .38 was in its holster taped to the underside of his desk drawer, inches from his hand.

She took the envelope without comment or counting it, slipped it into the pocket of the coat she’d draped over the arm of the sofa, and walked to the window. The rain was pelting the glass now and the air through the open screen was chill, taking the edge off the heat and stuffiness caused by the servers and other machinery in the back room.

Still looking out at the neon-busy street, she said, “I need your advice, Joe.”

“Joe?” said Kurtz. She’d never used anything but his last name. The idea of her needing his advice was also bullshit.

She turned, smiled, and sat on the edge of Arlene’s desk, switching off the desk light there so that only Kurtz’s low lamp and the glow of the two computers and video monitor illuminated her long legs, strong thighs, and shiny boots.

“We’ve known each other long enough to be on a first-name basis, haven’t we, Joe? Remember the ice fishing shack?”

Kurtz did indeed remember the fishing shack out on the ice of Lake Erie the previous February. The body of the man he’d shot barely fit through the ice fishing hole because of the shower curtain and chains wrapped around it. Angelina had been the one to prod it through the round hole with her boot on the corpse’s shoulder—less expensive and more practical boots that night than this. So what?

“Call me Angelina,” she said now. She casually lifted her left foot and set it on Arlene’s chair. There were a lot of shadows, but it seemed almost certain that Angelina Farino Ferrara was wearing no underpants above the high shadowed line of her stockings.

“Sure,” said Kurtz. “You wearing a wire, Angelina?”

The female don laughed softly. “Me, wearing a wire? Get serious, Joe. Can’t you tell I’m not?”

“Informants usually wear their wire microphones externally,” said Kurtz, speaking softly but never breaking his unblinking stare with the woman.

She blinked first. The flush that rose to her high cheekbones was not unbecoming. She lowered her foot to the floor. “You shithead,” she said.

Kurtz nodded. “What do you want?” His head hurt.

“I told you, I need your advice.”

“I’m not your consiglieri.”

“No, but you’re the only intermediary I have right now with Toma Gonzaga.”

“I’m not your intermediary either,” said Kurtz.

“He and I both tried to hire you to find this junkie killer. What did Gonzaga offer you?”

Not to kill me on Tuesday, thought Kurtz. He said, “A hundred thousand dollars.”

The angry flush left the woman’s cheeks. “Holy fucking Christ,” she whispered.

“Amen,” said Kurtz.

“He can’t be serious,” she said. “Why would Gonzaga pay you that much?”

“I thought you two were on a first-name basis,” said Kurtz. “Don’t you mean! ‘Toma?’”

“Fuck you, Kurtz. Answer the question.”

Kurtz shrugged. “His family’s lost seventeen customers and middlemen. You’ve only lost five. Maybe it’s worth a hundred grand to him to find the people doing this.”

“Or maybe he has no intention of ever paying you,” said Angelina.

“That’s a possibility.”

“And why you? It’s not like you’re Sam Fucking Spade.” She looked around the office. “What is this bullshit company you set up? Wedding Bells?”

“Dot com,” said Kurtz.

“Is it a front of some sort?”

“Nope.” Was it? Is it who I am now? Kurtz’s head hurt too much to answer epistemological questions like that at the moment.

Angelina stood, hitched her skirt down, and paced around the office. “I need help, Kurtz.”

Demoted back to last names so soon, thought Kurtz. He waited.

She paused her pacing next to the couch. Kurtz let his hand slide forward a bit. If she had brought her Compact Witness .45, it would be in the pocket of her coat.

“You know people,” Angelina said. “You know the scum of this city, its winos and addicts and street people and thugs.”

“Thanks,” said Kurtz. “Present company excluded, of course.”

She looked at him and reached into the pocket of the draped coat.

Kurtz slid the .38 half out of its holster under the desk.

Angelina removed a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She lit her cigarette, set the pack and lighter back in the coat pocket, and paced to the window again. She didn’t look out but stood exhaling smoke and staring at her own reflection in the glass.

“It’s all right,” said Kurtz. “You can smoke in here.”

“Thank you,” she said, voice dripping sarcasm, and tapped ashes into Arlene’s ashtray.

“Actually, I’m surprised you smoke,” said Kurtz, “what with all the running and jogging and such.”

“I don’t usually,” she said, left hand cradling her right elbow as she stood staring at nothing. “Nasty habit I picked up in all those years in Europe. I just do it now when I’m especially stressed.”

“What do you want?” Kurtz asked for the third time.

She turned. “I think maybe Toma Gonzaga and Little Skag are working together to squeeze me out. I need a free agent in my corner.”

Kurtz had been called many things in his life, but never a free agent. “Gonzaga being behind this doesn’t make any sense,” said Kurtz. “He’s lost seventeen people.”

“Have you seen any of these corpses?” said Angelina.

Kurtz shook his head. “But you told me the killer is hauling off the bodies of your connections as well.”

“But I know my dealers and customers were whacked,” she said. “My people went to the addresses, saw the blood and brains, cleaned up after the killer.”

“And you think Gonzaga is faking his casualty list just to take out your people?”

Angelina made an expressive, Italian movement with her hands and batted more ashes. “It would be a nice cover, wouldn’t it? My family needs to get into the serious drug business, Kurtz, or the Gonzagas will have all the real drug money in Western New York wrapped up.”

“Gambling and shakedowns and prostitution aren’t enough anymore?” asked Kurtz. “What’s the world coming to?”

She ignored him and sprawled in Arlene’s chair. “Or maybe somebody is hitting Gonzaga’s people,” she said. “There’s always been a phantom heroin ring we think is working out of Western Pennsylvania—from Pittsburgh up to the Southern Tier of our state. Some sort of independent group that goes way back—twenty, thirty years. They specialized in heroin and since our family wasn’t into that, they never interfered enough with our business to justify a confrontation.”

“The Gonzaga Family must have wanted to deal with them,” said Kurtz. “Gonzagas have been peddling heroin here since World War II. I’m surprised old Emilio never dealt with these Pennsylvania people.”

“The Gonzagas never identified the Pennsylvania people,” said Angelina. “Old Emilio actually asked my father for help once in finding them, if you can believe that. But the Five Families don’t know anything about this rogue operation either.”

“This phantom skag gang isn’t mobbed up?” said Kurtz. “No vowels at the ends of their names?”

She glared at him as if he’d insulted her proud ethnic heritage. Come to think of it, thought Kurtz, he had.

The anger-blush was back in her cheeks when Angelina said, “Can you tell me what you’ve found out about the murder of Gonzaga’s people? Did they really happen?”

“I have no idea,” Kurtz slid the .38 all the way back in the holster and rubbed his temples.

“What do you mean? You think Gonzaga may have staged them?”

“I mean I haven’t spent five minutes looking into those murders,” said Kurtz. “I have my own case to solve.”

“You mean finding who shot the probation officer? O’Toole?”

“I mean finding who shot me,” said Kurtz. He unzipped the leather portfolio on his desk, removed a file, and handed it across to her. “This might help you decide.”

Angelina Farino Ferrara studied Gonzaga’s list of seventeen names, addresses, messages left by the killer in each case, and details of cleanup, bulletholes, blood spatters, and other forensic garbage that Kurtz had glanced over and forgotten. She looked at the map on the wall with its pins—all barely visible in the dark there—and then back at the file. Then she looked at the big Ricoh copy machine next to the couch.

“Can I copy this stuff?”

“Sure,” said Kurtz. “Ten cents a page.”

“You dumb shit,” said Angelina, moving quickly to warm up the machine and set out the file pages. “I would have paid you a thousand bucks a page. I’ve been asking Toma for these details for the last week, and he’s been stonewalling. What do you think he’s up to, Kurtz?”

His cell phone rang. He dug it out of his jacket pocket, realized it was the other cell phone ringing, and answered it.

“Toma Gonzaga here,” said the familiar, slow voice. “What have you found out, Mr. Kurtz?”

“I thought I was supposed to call you,” said Kurtz.

“I was worried that something might have happened to you,” said the don. “It’s two days to Halloween and you know how crazy the streets can get this time of year. What have you discovered so far? Does any of it lead to Ms. Ferrara?”

“Why don’t you ask her?” said Kurtz. He handed the phone to the surprised Angelina and listened to her side of the conversation.

“No… I’m here collecting the advance I gave him since he seems to be working for you now…no, I don’t…he hasn’t… I don’t think he’s even looked into it…no, Toma, believe me, if I thought it was you, I would have acted already… How sweet, fuck you, too… No, I agree. We should meet… Yes, I can do that.”

She clicked off, folded the phone, and tossed it back to Kurtz.

Tossing the original file back on his desk, she bundled up the copies, shut off the machine, and slipped into her coat.

“You said something about a thousand bucks a page?” said Kurtz.

“Too late, Kurtz.” She went out the door and he heard her high heels tripping down the steps, then watched her on the closed-circuit video monitor as she let herself out the lower door. He leaned closer to the monitor to make sure that the outer door had clicked shut and was locked. It would be embarrassing to relax only to find Angelina’s bodyguards kicking down his office door.

When his cell phone rang again, he seriously considered not answering it. Then he did.

“Kurtz,” came Angelina’s voice. “I think I’m in trouble.”

“What happened?”

“Come to the window.”

Shutting off his desk lamp and approaching the wide window from the side, Kurtz warily peered out. Angelina was standing on the curb where the Lincoln Town Car had been parked. The spot was empty, but a red Jeep Liberty with five college-age kids in it was trying to park there.

“What’s going on?” said Kurtz on the phone.

“My bodyguards and the car are gone.”

“I can see that.”

“They don’t answer their phones or my pages.”

Kurtz walked back to his desk, pulled the .38 and holster from beneath the drawer, dumped the used duct tape in the wastebasket, went back to the window, and lifted his cell phone. “What are you going to do?”

“I called for help, but it’ll be thirty minutes before they get here.”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“Open the door. Let me back in.”

He thought about that. “No,” he said, “I’ll come down there.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FIVE

In the morning, Kurtz dropped Angelina Farino Ferrara near her Marina Towers and headed toward the expressway to drive to Neola, New York, in search of Major O’Toole’s fabled Cloud Nine amusement park. He was sure that Detective Rigby King would be busy today despite her theoretical day off, but every call from his cell phone to hers received only a busy signal. At first he was going to ignore it and drive on to Neola alone, but the thought of standing up an armed Rigby King made him go out of his way to swing by her townhouse. At least he could tell her later that he’d tried.

She was waiting for him at the curb, still talking on her phone. She folded it away when he pulled up and opened the Pinto’s battered door to slip into the passenger seat.

“You’re coming?” said Kurtz.

“Why so surprised?” said Rigby. She was wearing a tan corduroy blazer, pink Oxford shirt, jeans, and very white running shoes today. Her holster and 9mm were secure on her right hip, only visible if you knew to look. She was carrying a Thermos.

Kurtz shrugged. “Homicide cops, you know,” he said. “I thought you might be working after all.”

Rigby raised her heavy eyebrows. “Oh, you mean you thought maybe I’d be called in to investigate the murder of your girlfriend, Ms. Purina Ferrari?”

Kurtz gave her nothing but a blank look. He got the Pinto in gear and heading back toward the expressway.

“Not curious, Joe?” said Rigby. She unscrewed the Thermos and poured herself some steaming coffee, taking care not to spill it as the Pinto bounced over expansion joints.

“About what? Are you saying that Farino Ferrara was murdered?”

“We were pretty sure of it,” said Rigby, sipping carefully and cradling the plastic Thermos cup in both hands as Kurtz headed up the ramp onto the Youngman Expressway. “Last night we got an anonymous call about an abandoned Lincoln Town Car that the caller said looked like it was filled with blood and gore—which, it turned out, it was—and when the uniformed officers arrived at Hemingway’s—you know that café don’t you, Joe? It’s only a few blocks from your office isn’t it?—they found a locked Town Car registered to your Ms. Farino Ferrara. It was filled with blood and brains, all right, but no bodies. The cops tried to contact the Farino woman at her penthouse out near the lake, but some goombah answering there said she was gone and no one knew where she was.”

Kurtz had followed the 290 Youngman around to where it merged into 90 South near the airport. The Pinto rattled and wheezed but managed to keep up with the lighter Sunday morning traffic. It had rained much of the night and the morning was chilly, but the clouds were breaking up now and he could see blue sky to the south. Rigby’s coffee smelled good. Kurtz wished he’d had time to grab some this morning. Maybe he’d go through a drive-thru on their way out past East Aurora.

“So is she dead?” said Kurtz at last.

Rigby looked at him. “It looked that way until about thirty minutes ago. We left a black and white at Marina Towers—her lawyer wouldn’t let us up in the penthouse and we hadn’t found a judge to issue paper yet—and Kemper called me a minute ago to tell me that the Farino woman just walked in. No car, just walked in from that asphalt path that runs along the marina opposite Chinaman’s Lighthouse.”

“She jogs,” said Kurtz.

“Uh-huh,” said Rigby. “All night? In some sort of miniskirt and clingy, silk top thing?”

“Sounds like Kemper got lots of detail.”

“Part of being a cop,” said Rigby.

They rode in silence for a few minutes. Kurtz took the Aurora Expressway exit before 90 became a toll road and they followed the four-lane 400 out east toward East Aurora and Orchard Park.

“Well, aren’t you going to ask whose blood and brains it was in her Town Car?” demanded Rigby. She refilled her plastic mug, poured sugar out of a McDonald’s packet, and stirred it with her little finger.

“Whose blood and brains was it in her Town Car?” said Kurtz.

“You tell me,” said Rigby.

He looked at her. The expressway was almost empty and the sunlight lit hillsides of autumn orange and yellow on either side. “What are you talking about?” he said.

“I just thought maybe you could tell me, Joe.” Rigby smiled sweetly at him. “You want some coffee?”

“Sure.”

“Maybe there’s a fast food drive-thru place out by the East Aurora exit,” she said, “but I don’t remember one.”

He’d gone downstairs and out the door into the rain the previous night with the .38 in his palm and his eye full of business. If this was some bullshit set-up from Angelina Farino Ferrara, then let it happen.

No ambush came. The woman was really upset, standing there in the rain with her not-so-tiny Compact Witness .45 in her hand while cars were parking and nosing along Chippewa Street and pedestrians ran for the trendy restaurants and coffeehouses and wine bars. So far, no one seemed to have noticed the weapon.

“Where’d they go? Where’s the car?” said Angelina, almost gasping the words. It was the first time Kurtz had ever seen the woman at the edge of control.

“How the hell should I know?” said Kurtz. He touched her elbow, guiding her hand into her coat pocket so the Compact Witness was out of sight. “Are these guys reliable?”

She stared at him and it looked as if she was about to laugh, but her eyes were wild. “Is anyone in this fucking business reliable, Kurtz? I pay Figini and Sheffield enough, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

Not if Gonzaga or your brother Little Skag paid them more, thought Kurtz.

She was squinting at Kurtz and he could read her mind—What if Gonzaga paid Joe Kurtz more?

“If I wanted you dead, lady, I would have done it upstairs,” he said.

She shook her head. Her hair was black and slick with rain. “I have to…we have to…” She seemed to be mentally running through her options and rejecting all of them.

“We need to get off the street,” said Kurtz. Part of his mind was shouting—What is this we shit, Kemo Sabe?

He led her across the street and into the alley alongside his building. Neither would go ahead of the other, so they walked side by side, him carrying the .38 in his palm, her with her hand on the Compact Witness in her pocket. If a cat had jumped out at that moment, all three of them would have probably ended up shot full of lead.

The small parking area off the alley where Kurtz and Arlene had reserved spaces held only his Pinto. “Get in,” said Kurtz. “I’ll take you back to Marina Towers.”

“No.” She stared at him across the wet, rusted roof of the Pinto. “Not there. Let’s look for the Lincoln.”

“All right, get in.”

They found it within ten minutes, parked in a dark lot near Hemingway’s Café. The doors were unlocked and the keys were in the ignition. The overhead light didn’t come on when they opened the doors. Both Kurtz and Angelina were wearing gloves. He’d brought his flashlight from the Pinto and now they leaned in from opposite sides as he played the beam over the bloody seats and carpets. Gray matter and tiny, hard white shards glistened in the folds of the dark upholstery.

“Jesus,” whispered Angelina. “It looks like a massacre. Even the backseats are bloody.”

“I think the shooter just opened the back door, stepped in, and shot both of them in the head,” said Kurtz. “Then he dragged the bodies into the backseat, walked around, got behind the wheel, and drove off.”

“On Chippewa Street?” whispered the female don. She was blinking rapidly. “It was busy there tonight.”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. “So far, this guy’s been hitting junkies and dealers. Either of your bodyguards fit that description?”

Angelina hesitated a second. “Not really,” she said at last. “Well, Sheffield has been coordinating deliveries.”

“Sheffield is Colin?” said Kurtz. “The fop I dealt with the night we said good-bye to Big Bore?”

“Yes.”

Kurtz ran the flashlight around the interior a final time, let the beam move across the driver’s seat where the blood had been smeared, let it dwell on a starred fracture on the blood-spattered windshield for a second, and then flicked off the light. Traffic passed on Pearl Street. They walked away from the Lincoln and paused on the sidewalk. Angelina pulled out her cell phone.

“What are you doing?” said Kurtz.

“Getting in touch with the guys I called, telling them to bring cleanup stuff.”

Kurtz reached over and closed the phone. “Why not leave the Lincoln as it is for the cops?”

She wheeled on him. “Are you crazy? It’s my car. It’s registered to me. I’ll have every cop in Western New York on my ass.”

Kurtz shrugged. “Look, you and Gonzaga—if you believe Gonzaga—have been doing it the other way for weeks now. This killer whacks your people, you rush out with buckets and mops and clean up after him. You’re sitting on twenty-four murders, if Gonzaga is to be believed. Maybe that’s just what the killer and whoever’s sending the killer wants you to do.”

Angelina bit her lip but said nothing.

“I mean, you’re so crazy to find him that you’re both trying to hire me, for Christ’s sake,” continued Kurtz. “Why not let the Buffalo P.D. deal with this?”

“But the attention…” began Angelina.

“Is going to be intense,” said Kurtz. “But you won’t be a suspect. They’re your people who were hit. Let the cops do their fingerprint and ballistics stuff and put out an A.P.B. on someone walking around with blood on the seat of their pants.”

“The media will go apeshit,” said Angelina. “It’ll be national news about a gang war.”

Kurtz shrugged again. “You keep wondering if Gonzaga is behind this. Maybe the attention will smoke him out. Or rule him out.”

Angelina turned and looked at the Lincoln in the back of the lot. A Saab pulled off Pearl and parked only two spaces away from it. Three college-age kids got out, laughing, and walked to Hemingway’s. When the Saab’s headlight beams had moved across the Lincoln, both Kurtz and Angelina had seen the bullet-fractured windshield. It was only a matter of time before someone noticed the gore.

She hesitated another few seconds. Then she brushed strands of wet hair away from her forehead and said, “I think you’re right. For once the cops could be some help. At the very least, we won’t be playing the murderer’s game.”

They got back in the Pinto and Kurtz drove down Pearl and cut over to Main. “Where do you want to go if not back to your penthouse?” asked Kurtz.

“Your place.”

“Back to the office? Why?”

“Not back to the office,” said Angelina Farino Ferrara. “Your place. That Harbor Inn hovel that nobody’s supposed to know about.”

“That’s nuts,” said Kurtz, shaking his head. “When the cops call, you have to be home with someone there as an alibi so…” He turned his head and froze.

Angelina was holding the .45 caliber Compact Witness in her right hand, bracing it on her left forearm, the black circle of the muzzle steady on Kurtz’s heart. “Your place,” she said. “Not mine.”

A penny for your thoughts, Joe,” said Rigby King.

“What?” The Rigby King he’d known didn’t say things like A penny for your thoughts. Not unless she was being really sarcastic.

“You’ve been driving for twenty minutes without saying a word,” said Rigby. “And you didn’t stop in East Aurora for coffee. You want some from the Thermos? It’s still hot.”

“No thanks,” said Kurtz. He thought. What are you up to, woman?

“I didn’t mean what I said yesterday,” said the cop.

“What’s that?”

“About you…you know…going to Iran with me and killing my ex-husband.”

Does she think I’m wearing a wire?

“I’d like the son of a bitch dead,” continued Rigby, “but all I really want is my son back.”

“Uh-huh,” said Kurtz. She’s not going to give me any department information. This ride with her is for nothing.

They rode in silence again for a few minutes. The sunlight ignited the color in the hills, where about half the trees still showed bright foliage. The grass was still green, the woods very thick. The four-lane highway had ended not far past East Aurora, and now they were headed south on Highway 16, a winding old two-lane road that slowed for such ten-house towns as Holland and Yorkshire and Lime Lake. The hills on either side were getting steeper and clouds covered the southern horizon. A constant wind was blowing from the west, and Kurtz had to concentrate on keeping the Pinto from wandering.

“Do you remember the night in the choir loft?” said Rigby. She wasn’t looking at him, but was staring out her window at the passing, empty fruit stands and dilapidated old farms with their broad yards and big satellite dishes.

Kurtz said nothing.

“You were the only boy at Father Baker’s who didn’t tease me about my big tits when I was seventeen,” continued Rigby, still looking away. “So that night I brought the flashlights and walked through the Catacombs over from the Girl’s Hall—it was almost two blocks away, you remember?—I knew it was you I was coming to find in the Boy’s Hall.”

Shadows of clouds were moving across the hills and valley now. Leaves skittered across the road. There was little traffic except for a pest control truck that had been behind them for quite a while.

“You weren’t sure you wanted to follow me into the Catacombs,” continued Rigby. “You were tough as nails, even when you were…what?…fifteen that year? But you were nervous that night. They would have beat the hell out of you if you’d been found AWOL from bunk check again.”

“Fourteen,” said Kurtz.

“Jesus, that makes me even more of a pedophile. But you were a big fourteen.” She turned and smiled at that, but Kurtz kept his eyes on the road. It was more shadow than sunlight ahead.

“You liked the Catacombs,” said Rigby. “You wanted to keep exploring them, even with the rats and everything. I just wanted to get up into the Basilica. Remember that sort of secret passage in the wall and the narrow, winding staircase that went right up into the sacristy?”

Kurtz nodded and wondered what she was up to with this story.

“We found those other stairs and I took your hand and kept leading you up that other winding staircase, up past the organ loft where Father Majda was practicing on the organ for Saturday’s High Mass. Remember how dark it was? It must have been about ten o’clock at night and there was only the light of the votive candles down below, and Father Majda’s little lamp above the keyboard as we tiptoed past his loft and kept climbing—I don’t know why we were so frightened of being heard, he was playing Toccata in Fugue in D-minor and wouldn’t have heard us if we’d fired a gun at him.”

Kurtz remembered the smells—the heavy incense and the oiled wood scent of the pews and the scent of young Rigby’s clean sweat and skin as she pushed him down on the hard pew in the upper choir loft, knelt straddling him, unbuttoned her white blouse, and pulled it off. She’d worn a simple white bra and he’d watched with as much technical interest as teenaged lust as she reached behind her and easily undid the hooks and eyes. He remembered thinking I have to learn how to do that without looking.

“Do you know what the odds were against us having a simultaneous orgasm like that on our first try, Joe?”

Kurtz didn’t think she really wanted an answer to that, so he concentrated on driving.

“I think that was my first and last time,” Rigby said softly.

Kurtz looked over at her.

“For a simultaneous orgasm, I mean,” she said hurriedly. “Not for a fuck. I’ve had a few of those since. Though none in a choir loft since that night.”

Kurtz sighed. The pest control truck was falling farther behind, although Kurtz was driving under the speed limit. It was cloudy enough now that cars coming the other way had their headlights on.

“Want some music?” said Rigby.

“Sure.”

She turned the radio on. Scratchy jazz matched the buffeting wind and low-hurrying clouds. She poured the last of the Thermos coffee into the red mug and handed him the mug.

Kurtz looked at her, nodded, and sipped.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SIX

Following the pathetic Pinto south on Highway 16, the Dodger ran through all the reasons he hated this playing-spy bullshit. He wasn’t a spy. He wasn’t some fucking dork private eye like this idiot he had watched all night and was tailing now. The Dodger knew very well what he was and what he was good at doing and what his goal was in life right now—the Resurrection—and it had nothing to do with following the clapped-out Pinto with this clapped-out man and the big-tit brunette south toward Neola and the bruised sky down there.

The two goombahs the night before had been no problem at all. Since they were bodyguards, they were arrogant and unobservant, sitting there in their Lincoln Town Car with all the doors unlocked. The Dodger had opened the back door and slipped into the backseat with his 9mm Beretta already raised, the suppressor attached. The Dodger had known that the man named Sheffield in the passenger seat up front would react the fastest—and he had, ducking and reaching for his gun the second the door opened—but the Dodger had put three slugs through the thick seat into the man and, when he reared up in pain, a fourth one through his forehead. The driver had just sat there, mouth open, staring, and the Dodger could have taken time to reload if he’d had to. He didn’t have to. The fifth shot caught the driver in the right eye, exited the back of the big man’s head, and punched a hole through the windshield. No one on Chippewa Street noticed.

The Dodger had removed the suppressor and slipped the Beretta back in its holster before grabbing first Sheffield and then the driver by their hair and pulling them up and back over the seats. Leaving the bodies sprawled on the floor and upholstery in the back, limbs intertwined, the Dodger had gone around front and driven the Lincoln a block, turning into a dark alley. He walked back, brought up the Mazda, dumped the bodies in the trunk, and then drove the Town Car a few more blocks to park it near a popular restaurant. He’d walked back to the Mazda whistling, gloved hands in his pockets.

The Boss always called Gonzaga or the Farino woman to tell them about the hit and where to find the bodies—using one of his military-intelligence electronic voice distorters and location scramblers—so the Dodger e-mailed him that the job was done. But this night, the Boss had another job for him. He ordered the Dodger to go wait for the private eye whose office the Farino woman was in right then—not at the man’s office, but at someplace called The Harbor Inn way over in the mill area on the Island. The Boss e-mailed the address as the intersection of Ohio and Chicago Streets.

The Dodger was not pleased with this assignment. He was tired. It had been a long day, starting with that teacher he’d missed out in Orchard Park. He should be free now to go back to his hidey hole and get a good night’s sleep, transporting the corpses to the Resurrection Site the next morning. Now he had to go down past the black projects and spend the night…watching. That’s what the Boss had said. Just watch. Not even harvest this stupid private eye.

So the Dodger had driven south across the narrow steel bridge onto the Island, past the mills and half-empty projects, had driven by the dark Harbor Inn, checking it out, and then parked a block and a half southeast of the place, walking back to keep vigil in the shadows of an abandoned gas station half a block from the old hotel. The man—the Boss had said his name was Kurtz, as if the Dodger gave the slightest shit—showed up in a rusted-out Pinto about an hour later. There was a woman with him—the Farino woman, the Dodger realized as he stared through the binoculars. She seemed to be holding a .45 semiauto on Kurtz.

The Dodger almost laughed out loud in the shadows. He kills the female don’s two bodyguards and steals her car, and what does she do? It looks as if she hijacks the felon ex-private-eye she was visiting on Chippewa Street.

The two went in through the boarded-up front entrance of the abandoned hotel, and the Dodger watched lights come on on the second floor. Driving by twice, he’d cased the place—even noticed the subtle surveillance video cameras on the north and west sides—but he was sure that he could climb one of the rusting fire escapes or a drainpipe and get in one of the darkened windows without being heard or seen. He could even get up to the dark third story—probably empty was the Dodger’s guess, this Kurtz seemed like the only resident of the old Harbor Inn—and he could climb down to the second floor where three lights now burned behind shades. Whatever the female don and Kurtz were up to in there—and the Dodger could imagine what it was—he could be on them and finished with them and hauling the bodies out to the Mazda before they had a chance to look up.

The Dodger had gone back down the dark, rainy street to the Mazda only to find one black teenager jimmying open the car door and another one using a crowbar on the trunk. The trunk popped up first, the boy stared at the two bodies in it, had time to say, “Motherfuck,” and the Dodger shot him in the back of the head, not even bothering to use the silencer.

The second boy dropped his tool and ran like hell. Like a lot of these ghetto kids, he was fast. The Dodger—who had always liked to run—was faster. He caught up with the kid on an eyeless side street less than two blocks away.

The boy turned and flicked open a knife. “Jesus fuck man,” the kid said, crouching and dodging, “your face…”

The Dodger supped the pistol in its holster, took the knife away from the kid with three moves, kicked his legs out from under him, and crushed the boy’s larynx with his boot He left the body where it was, walked back to the Mazda—no one had responded to the shot—and loaded the first boy’s body in the backseat. There was no more room in the trunk.

The Dodger drove the two blocks, found that the second boy was still breathing in a rattling, rasping, twitching sort of way, so he cut his throat with the knife the boy had dropped. He tossed that corpse in the back as well—all the blood would make the Mazda unsalvageable for future use, but the Boss paid for these vehicles and he could afford it—and he drove back to the parking lot near Marina Towers, where he dumped the four bodies in the back, of the pest control truck and drove it back to the Harbor Inn area.

The Dodger kept Handi Wipes in the truck, and he had to use eight of them to clean himself up. He had a change of clothes in the truck as well.

Back on surveillance at the empty gas station, the Dodger e-mailed the Boss, described the situation at the Harbor Inn, and asked if he could knock off for the night. There was no need to tell the Boss about the two car thieves; they’d just be extra material for the Resurrection.

The Boss e-mailed back ordering the Dodger to phone on a secure line. It took the Dodger fifteen minutes to find a pay phone that was working. The Boss was curt, pulling rank, and told the Dodger to sleep in the bug van and to keep his eye on the Harbor Inn and to follow Kurtz whenever he left.

“What about the Farino woman?”

“Ignore her. Stay with Kurtz. Call me when he moves and I’ll tell you what to do next.”

So here he was, the Dodger, exhausted from sleeping in the front seat of the pest control truck, red-eyed from trying to keep watch between naps, still smelling of blood, with four rigor-mortised corpses under tarps in the back, driving south toward Neola, New York.

The Dodger had grown accustomed to taking orders from the Boss, but that was because the Boss had been giving him orders he enjoyed carrying out. He wasn’t enjoying this playing-spy shit. If the Boss didn’t call him off this joke of an assignment soon, he’d kill Kurtz and this new woman with him and add them to the Resurrection. It was better to apologize to the Boss later, the Dodger had learned decades ago, than to ask permission before doing something you really wanted to do.

And the Dodger really wanted to kill this man who’d kept him awake in the rainy ghetto all night.

But as they approached Neola, he dutifully used his cell phone to call the Boss.

“Sir, I’m not going into Neola with them for Chrissakes,” he told him. “Either let me deal with this Kurtz now or let me go about my business.”

“Go do what you have to do,” said the Boss.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SEVEN

Neola is about sixty miles south-southeast of Buffalo, but the narrow, two-lane road slowed them enough that they’d been driving almost an hour and a half before they saw signs saying they were close to the little city. The clouds had moved in now, the hills had gotten steeper and the valleys deeper, the October wind had come up stronger and the trees were mostly bare. The few cars that passed going the opposite direction did so with their headlights on and sometimes with their windshield wipers flicking.

Kurtz pulled the Pinto to the side of the road on a cinder apron in front of an abandoned fruit stand and got out of the car.

“What is it, Joe?” said Rigby. “You want me to drive?”

Kurtz shook his head. He watched the traffic going south pass for several silent minutes. Finally, Rigby said, “What is it? You think we’re being followed?”

“No,” said Kurtz. The pest control truck had fallen back in the gloom and rain some miles ago, and must have turned off somewhere.

Rigby got out of the car and came around, lighting a cigarette. She offered one to Kurtz. He shook his head.

“That’s right, you gave up smoking in Bangkok, didn’t you? I always thought it was because of that girl’s act at Pussies Galore.”

Kurtz said nothing. It wasn’t raining, but the highway was wet and a passing truck sent up a hiss and spray.

“What are you going to do about the little girl, Joe?”

He turned a blank stare on her. “What little girl?”

“Your little girl,” said Rigby. “Yours and Samantha’s. The fourteen-year-old who’s living with your secretary’s sister-in-law. What’s your daughter’s name? Rachel.”

Kurtz stared a second and then took a step toward her. Rigby King’s cop instincts reacted to the look in his eyes and her hand came up halfway toward the 9mm dock on her hip before she froze. She had to lean back over the Pinto’s hood to avoid physical contact with Kurtz.

“Get in the car,” he said. And turned away from her.

Fifteen miles before they reached the Pennsylvania line, Highway 16 passed under Interstate 86—the Southern Tier Expressway they called it down here—and ran another seven miles into Neola. The town had absurdly wide streets—more like some small place out west where land had been cheap at its settling than in a village in New York State—and it was nestled amid high hills just north of the Allegheny River. Kurtz noticed the variations in spelling—Allegany State Park was a few miles to the west of them, the town of Allegany was just down the road to the west, but the river that marked the southern boundary of Neola was the Allegheny. He didn’t think it was worth investigating.

They drove the twelve-block length of Main Street, crossed the broad but shallow river, turned around before the road ran into the hills south into Pennsylvania, and drove back up the length of town again, making two detours to explore the side streets where Highway 305 ran into Highway 16 near the downtown. When he reached the north edge of town again, Kurtz made a U-turn through a gas station and said, “Notice anything?”

“Yeah,” said Rigby, still watching Kurtz carefully as if he might get violent at any moment. “There was a Lexus and a Mercedes dealership along the main drag. Not bad for a town of…what did the sign say?”

“Twenty-one thousand four hundred and twelve,” said Kurtz.

“Yeah. And there’s something else about the old downtown…” She paused.

“No empty stores,” said Kurtz. “No boarded-up buildings. No ‘for lease’ signs. No state employment and unemployment offices in empty buildings.” The economy in Buffalo and around Western New York had been hurting long before the recent recession, and residents just got used to defunct businesses, empty buildings, and the omnipresent state unemployment outlets. Downtown Neola had looked prosperous and scrubbed.

“What the hell is the economy here?” said Rigby.

“As far as I know, the Major’s SouthEast Asia Trading Company is the biggest employer with about two thousand people working for them,” said Kurtz. “But not only the old Victorian homes off Main here were all spruced up and painted, fresh trim colors, but that trailer park down by the river had new F-150 pickups and Silverados parked by the mobile homes. Even the poor people in Neola seem to be doing all right.”

“You don’t miss much,” said Rigby.

He glanced at her. “You don’t either. Did you notice a place we could grab an early lunch or late breakfast?”

“There was that fancy Victorian house called The Library on the hill before the river,” said Rigby. “Families in church clothes and ladies in hats going in.”

“I was thinking a greasy spoon where people might talk to us,” said Kurtz. “Or a bar.”

Rigby sighed. “It’s Sunday, so the bars are closed. But there was a diner next to the train tracks back there.”

The locals didn’t rush over to talk to them, or even seem to take notice of them, during their late-breakfast, early-lunch diner meal—except for some kids in a nearby booth who kept staring at Kurtz’s bruised eyes and bandaged head and giggling—but the coffee and food helped his headache and Rigby quit looking at him as if worried he was about to strangle her.

“Why did you really want to come to Neola?” the detective said at last. She was eating lunch; Kurtz was eating a big breakfast. “Are you planning to visit Major O’Toole at his home here? You want me along to make sure it doesn’t get out of control? He used to be Special Forces in Vietnam, you know. He may be almost seventy and in a wheelchair, but he probably could still kick your ass.”

“I don’t even know where he lives,” said Kurtz. It was true. He hadn’t taken time to look it up.

“I do,” said Rigby. “But I’m not going to tell you, and I doubt if any of these good people would either.” She nodded toward the people eating in the loud diner and others hurrying by outside. The wind was blowing light rain. “Most of them probably get their paychecks from the Major’s and Colonel’s SEATCO in one way or the other.”

Kurtz shrugged. “The Major isn’t why I’m here. At least not directly.” He told her about Peg O’Toole’s question about amusement parks, described the photographs of the abandoned park on a hilltop, and shared Arlene’s information about Cloud Nine, and about the Major’s kid shooting up the local high school thirty years earlier.

“Yeah, when I learned about the kid dying in the Rochester asylum fire, I had some people look into it,” said Rigby. “I thought that might be why you’re down here. Do you seriously think the Major might have had someone shoot his own niece?”

Kurtz shrugged again.

“What would the motive be?” asked Rigby. Her brown eyes held a steady gaze on him over her coffee cup. “Drugs? Heroin?”

Kurtz worked hard not to react, even by so much as a blink. “Why do you say that? What do drugs have to do with anything here?”

It was Rigby King’s turn to shrug. “Parole Officer O’Toole’s old man, the cop, was killed in a drug bust a few years ago, you know.”

“Yeah. So?”

“And Major O’Toole’s company, SEATCO, has been under suspicion from the Feds for several years as being a Southern New York, western Pennsylvania heroin supplier. The DEA and FBI think that he and his old Vietnamese buddies have been shipping more than Buddha statues and objects of art from Vietnam and Thailand and Cambodia the last twenty-five years or so.”

Bingo, thought Kurtz. He couldn’t believe he’d found the connection this easily. And he couldn’t believe that Gonzaga and Farino Ferrara didn’t know about this. He squinted at Rigby. “Why are you telling me this?”

She smiled her Cathy Rigby smile at him. “It’s classified information, Joe. Only a handful of us at the department knows anything about it. Kemper and I were briefed by the Feds only last week, because of the O’Toole shooting.”

“All the more reason to ask you why you’re telling me this,” said Kurtz. “You suddenly on my side here, Rigby?”

“Fuck your side,” she said and set down the coffee cup. “I’m a cop, remember? Believe it or not, I want to solve Peg O’Toole’s shooting as much as you do. Especially if it ties in with rumors we’re hearing of junkies and heroin users disappearing in Lackawanna and elsewhere.”

Again, Kurtz didn’t blink or allow a facial muscle to twitch. He said, “Well, for now, I just want to find whether this Cloud Nine is real or not. Any suggestions?”

“We could drive through the hills around town,” said Rigby. “Look for roller coasters or Ferris wheels or something sticking up above the bare trees.”

“I have to be back in Buffalo tonight,” said Kurtz. To meet a woman coming across the Canadian border and ask her why her fiancé shot me. “Have any smarter suggestions?”

“We could go to the library,” said Rigby. “Small town librarians know everything.”

“It’s Sunday,” said Kurtz. “Library’s closed.”

“Well, I could wander into the Neola police department or sheriff’s office, flash my badge, and say I was following up on a tip and ask them about Cloud Nine,” said Rigby.

Kurtz was getting more and more suspicious about all this helpful assistance. He said, “Who will I be? Your partner?”

“You’ll be absent,” said Rigby. She dug out money for the check. “You go into the local sheriff’s office with those raccoon eyes or wearing those sunglasses, with your scalp all carved up like that, they’ll throw us both in jail on general principles.”

“All right. Shall I meet you back at the car in an hour?”

“Give me ninety minutes,” said Rigby. “I have to go find a doughnut place open. You don’t go ask local cops for help, even on directions, without bearing gifts.”

They’d noticed the green signs for the police station, only a block east of Main, and Rigby decided to walk. She said that she didn’t want to lose all credibility by having someone see her being dropped off in that rusted piece of Ford crap Kurtz was driving. Kurtz watched her disappear around the corner, her short hair still being stirred by the strong wind from the west and her corduroy jacket blowing, and then he opened the Pinto’s trunk. The .38 was there, hidden under the spare tire, but that wasn’t what he wanted. He pulled the still-sealed pint of Jack Daniel’s out of its hiding place and slipped it in the pocket of his leather jacket. Then, pulling his collar up against the gusting wind, he headed off down Main Street in search of a park.

Even in an absurdly prosperous town like Neola, there had to be a place where the winos hung out, and Kurtz found it after about fifteen minutes of walking. The two old men and the stoned boy with long, greasy hair were sitting down by the river on a stretch of dirt and grass out of sight of the park’s jogging path. The men were working on a bottle of Thunderbird and they squinted suspiciously as Kurtz settled himself on a nearby stump. Their eyes grew a film of greediness over the suspicion when he took out the sealed pint. Only the greediness disappeared when Kurtz said that he wanted to talk and passed the pint over.

The oldest man—and the only one who talked—was named Adam. The other old man, according to Adam, was Jake. The stoned boy—who was focusing on something just below the treetops—evidently didn’t deserve an introduction. And although Jake did not speak, at every question and before every answer, old Adam looked to Jake—who made no visible sign but who seemed to pass along permission or denial telepathically—before Adam spoke.

Kurtz shot the shit for fifteen minutes or so. He confirmed Rigby’s assumption that everyone in Neola either worked for the Major’s SouthEast Asia Trading Company or benefitted from the money from it or was afraid of someone who did work for it. He also confirmed the details of the 1977 shooting at the high school that had put eighteen-year-old Sean Michael O’Toole in the state asylum.

“That fucking Sean was a crazy fucking kid,” said Adam. He wiped the mouth of the bottle and handed the pint to Kurtz, who took a small sip, wiped the mouth, and handed it to Jake.

“Did you know him?”

“Everybody in the fucking town fucking knew him,” said Adam, taking the bottle back from Jake. “Fucking Major’s fucking kid—like a fucking prince. Little fucking bastard shot and killed my Ellen.”

“Ellen?” said Kurtz. Arlene’s research had reported that the O’Toole kid had gone to the high school with a .30-.06 one morning and killed two fellow students—both male—a gym teacher, and an assistant principal.

“Fucking Ellen Stevens,” slurred the old man. “My fucking girlfriend. She was the fucking girl’s gym teacher. Best fucking lay I ever had.”

Kurtz nodded, sipped some of the disappearing whiskey, wiped the mouth, and handed it on to Jake. The stoned boy’s eyes were glazed and fixed.

“Anybody ever say why he did it? This Sean Michael O’Toole?”

“Because he fucking wanted to,” said Adam. “Because he fucking knew that he was the fucking Major’s fucking son. Because he’d fucking got away with everything—until Ellen gave him fucking detention that fucking week because the little fuck had drilled a hole in the wall of the girl’s locker room and was fucking peeping at Ellen’s fucking girls. That fucking old bastard the Major has run Neola since fuck knows when, and his fucking kid didn’t know that he couldn’t shoot and kill four fucking people and fucking get away with it You got another fucking pint, Joe?”

“No, sorry.”

“That’s all right. We got another fucking bottle.” Adam showed a smile consisting of three teeth on top and two on the bottom and pulled the Thunderbird wine out from behind his stump.

“Whatever happened to the kid?” said Kurtz. “Sean Michael?”

Adam hesitated and looked to Jake. Jake did not so much as blink. Adam evidently got the message. “Fucking psycho went up to that big fucking nuthouse in Rochester. They say he got fucking burned up a few years later, but we don’t fucking believe it.”

“No?”

“Fuck no,” grinned Adam, checking with Jake before going on. “Little kids in the town’ve seen him—seen him wandering the woods and backyards at night, all scarred up from his burns, wearing a fucking baseball cap. And Jake here seen him, too.”

“No shit?” Kurtz said conversationally. He turned expectantly to Jake, but the other old man just stared unblinkingly, took the Thunderbird from Adam, and helped himself to a swig.

Adam turned his head as if he was listening to Jake, but Jake’s expression was as gray and expressionless as the October sky.

“Oh, yeah,” added Adam, “Jake reminds me that the kids in town used to see the Artful Dodger’s ghost mostly around Halloween. That’s when the Dodger would bring Cloud Nine alive again—at least for one night—All Hallow’s Eve. I ain’t never seen it myself, but kids I knew over the years used to say that the Dodger come back with a bunch of other ghosts from the other side and would ride all them dead rides up Cloud Nine one last time.”

“The Dodger?” said Kurtz. “Cloud Nine?”

“When they was all kids, according to my dead Ellen, they used to fucking call that fucking O’Toole kid ‘the Artful Dodger.’” replied Adam. “You know, from that fucking Charles Dickens book. Fucking Oliver Twist.”

“The Artful Dodger,” repeated Kurtz.

“Fucking aye,” said Adam. “Or sometimes just ‘Dodger,’ you know, ’cause he was all the time wearing that fucking Dodger cap…not the L.A. cap, but the old fucking Brooklyn one.”

Kurtz nodded. “What was that you were saying about something called Cloud Nine?”

Adam lowered the bottle and looked at Jake for a long minute. Finally Adam said, not to Kurtz but to the silent old man, “Why the fuck not? Why should we do that fucking Major a favor?”

Jake said nothing, showed nothing.

Adam turned and shrugged. “Jake don’t want me to tell you, Joe. Sorry.”

“Why not?”

“’Cause Jake knows that everyone who fucking goes up there in the last twenty fucking years or so to fucking find Cloud Nine gets their ass shot off, and Jake fucking likes you.”

“I’ll take my chances,” said Kurtz. He took two twenties out of his billfold.

“Fucking liquor stores ain’t open today,” Adam said mournfully.

“But I bet you know somewhere else you could get some good stuff,” said Kurtz.

Adam looked at Jake. “Yeah,” be said at last.

He told Kurtz about the Major building an amusement park in the hills and gave Kurtz the directions. He warned him to stay away until after Halloween, after the ghost of the Artful Dodger and his pals had their last rides on the abandoned Ferris wheel and little train and dodge-em cars up there. “Wait ’til mid-November,” said old Adam. “The Dodger ghost don’t come around much in November according to the kids. And the other ghosts only join him on Halloween.”

Kurtz stood to go, but then asked. “Do you know why just on Halloween?”

“Fuck yes I know,” said old Adam. “Back when the Major was still running fucking Cloud Nine, Halloween was the last night it was open before shutting down all fucking winter. The last night was fucking free. It was the one time when everyone in the fucking town went up to that fucking amusement park—sometimes it was almost too fucking cold to ride the fucking rides—and the Major always had a big fucking parade with his fucking son on a fucking float—that little weasel, the Artful Dodger, riding up there and waving like the fucking queen of fucking England. Halloween. It was the fucking brat’s birthday.”

Kurtz looked over to see if the stoned kid was paying any attention, and noticed for the first time that the boy had gone, slipped away into the trees along the river. It was as if he’d never been there.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-EIGHT

Kurtz’s plan was to take the Pinto, check out Cloud Nine, and get back to downtown Neola before Rigby King finished her schmoozing with the local sheriff’s department. But she was sitting in the car when he walked back to the downtown block where he’d left it.

Shit, he thought. “Hey, Boo,” he said. It was an old joke and he’d almost—not quite—forgotten the origin of it back at Father Baker’s Friday Movie Night.

“Hey, Boo,” she said back. She didn’t sound happy. “You find your talkative drunks?”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. “I thought you needed at least ninety minutes to break the ice with your local cops.”

“I could’ve spent ninety days here and they weren’t going to tell me anything,” said Rigby. “They wouldn’t even acknowledge that your goddamned amusement park ever existed. To listen to the Sheriff and his deputies, they never heard of Major O’Toole and barely’ve heard about his company that seems to rule the roost here.”

“Which means that they’re all on the Major’s payroll,” said Kurtz.

Rigby shrugged. “That’s hard to believe, but that’s what it sounds like. Unless they’re all just cretinous small-town cowturds too stupid and too suspicious of an outside police officer to tell the truth.”

“Why would they be suspicious of a B.P.D. detective?”

“Well, no peace officer likes some wiseass coming in from the outside—but I’m not some FBI puke trying to take over some local investigation. I just told them the truth—that we’re investigating the shooting of Major O’Toole’s niece up in Buffalo and I came down here on my day off to pick up any loose information.”

“But they didn’t have any loose information,” said Kurtz.

“They were tight as a proctologist’s dog’s asshole.”

Kurtz thought about that for a second.

“So,” said Rigby, “you find out where your Cloud Nine is?”

“Yeah,” Kurtz said. He was trying to figure out some way he could convince her to stay behind while he went up there. He couldn’t. He put the Pinto in gear and headed out of town.

They’d just crossed the Allegheny River marking the south edge of town when Kurtz’s phone rang.

“Yeah?”

“Joe,” said Arlene, “someone just signed on to Peg O’Toole’s account using her computer.”

“Just a second,” said Kurtz. He pulled the car into a turnout and got out. “Go ahead.”

“Someone signed on from her computer at the Justice Center.”

“Are you at the office?”

“No, home. But I’d set the software to copy me at both machines.”

“Did you get O’Toole’s password?”

“Sure. But whoever signed on using her machine did so to delete all of her e-mail.”

“Did he have time to do it?”

“No. I copied it all to my hard drive before he deleted it. I think he took time to check what was there first.”

“Good,” said Kurtz. “Why would whoever this is use her machine to sign on for her e-mail if he had the password? Why not do it and erase her mail from his own computer?”

“I don’t think whoever it was had the password, Joe. I think he—I don’t think it’s a woman, do you?—I think he used some software to hack it on her machine and signed on immediately.”

“It’s Sunday,” said Kurtz. “The offices would be closed there. It makes sense. What about the e-mails?”

“She only saved a week’s worth at a time,” said Arlene, “and they’re all parole business stuff, except for one letter to her boyfriend.”

“Brian Kennedy?”

“Yes. It was e-mailed to his security company e-mail address in New York, and was time-stamped about ten minutes before your appointment with her.”

“What do they say? His and hers?”

“She only saved her own mail to file, Joe. Do you want me to fax you a copy?”

“I’m busy now.” He had taken several paces away from the Pinto, and now he looked back to where Rigby was frowning at him from the passenger seat. “Just tell me.”

“Her e-mail just said, and I quote—‘Brian, I understand your reasons for asking me to wait, but I’m going to look into this lead this afternoon. If you come on Friday as usual, I’ll tell you all about it then. Love, Peg.’”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“And she sent it just before I met with her?”

“Ten minutes before, according to the time stamp.”

“Then she must have been leaving work early that afternoon for a reason. Nothing else in the mail that we can use?”

“Nothing.” There was the hiss and crackle of cell static. Then Arlene said, “Anything else you want me to do today, Joe?”

“Yeah. Track down the home address and phone number of the former director of the Rochester nuthouse. I want to call him or talk to him in person.”

“All right Are you in town now? The connection’s lousy.”

“No, I’m on the road for a few more hours. I’ll call you when I get back to the office. Good work.”

He folded the phone and got back in behind the wheel.

“Your stockbroker?” said Rigby.

“Yeah. He thinks I should sell when the market opens tomorrow. Dump everything.”

“Always a good idea,” said the cop.

They drove a mile beyond the river, turned left on a county road for three-fourths of a mile, turned right onto an unmarked gravel road, and then turned left again onto two strips of dirt that ran steeply uphill.

“Are you sure you know where you’re going, Joe?”

Kurtz concentrated on keeping the Pinto moving uphill through the trees, around occasional bends that gave them glimpses of the valley, river, and distant town, and then south around the mountain until the dirt track ended at an old wooden roadblock.

“End of the line,” said Rigby.

“This is how old Adam described it,” said Kurtz.

“Old Adam?”

“Never mind.” Kurtz got out of the car, looked uphill toward where the overgrown remnants of the two-rut road continued, and began walking slowly uphill. Various faded signs on the barricade announced private land and warned against trespassing. He went around behind the Pinto, pulled a lumpy old nylon backpack from the trunk, and walked past the barricade.

“You’re shitting me,” called Rigby from beside the car. “Joe Kurtz is going for a hike?”

“Stay in the car if you want,” called Kurtz. “I’m just going to walk up here a bit and see if I can see anything.”

“Stay here and miss seeing Joe Kurtz go for a hike?” said Rigby, jogging uphill to catch up. “No way in hell.”

Shit, thought Kurtz, and not for the first time that day.

They followed the dirt track two hundred yards or so up the hill through the bare and blowing trees until they were stopped by a fence. No old and rotting wood barricade here—the fence was nine feet tall, made of mesh-link steel, and had rows of unrusted concertina razor-wire atop it. Here the yellow no-trespassing signs were new and plastic and warned that the owners were authorized to use deadly force to repel trespassers.

“Authorized by who?” said Rigby, panting slightly.

Kurtz took a short-handled pair of wire cutters from the pack.

“Whoa!” said Rigby. “You’re not going to do this.”

Kurtz answered by testing to make sure the fence wasn’t electrified and then snipping a three-foot-high line of links. He began working horizontally.

“God damn it, Joe. You’re going to get us both arrested. Hell, I should arrest you. You’re probably packing, too.”

He was. He still had the .38 in his belt at the back, under his leather jacket.

“Go on back to the car, Rigby. I’ll just be a few minutes. I just want to look at this place. You said yourself that I’m not a thief.”

“No,” said Rigby. “You’re a damned idiot. You didn’t meet with the sheriff and his boys back there. This is not a friendly town, Joe. We don’t want to go to their jail.”

“They won’t arrest a cop,” said Kurtz. He finished with the horizontal cut and bent the little door of heavy wire inward. It didn’t want to bend, but eventually it opened wide enough that he could squeeze through if he tossed the pack in first and went in on his knees.

“Arrest me?” said Rigby, crouching behind him as he went through. “I’m worried that they’ll shoot me.” She took the 9mm Sig Sauer from her belt, worked the action, made sure a round was in the chamber, checked that the safety was on, and set the weapon back in its holster. She crouched, duckwalked through the opening as Kurtz held the wire back from the inside, and rose next to him.

“Promise me we’ll make it fast.”

“I promise,” said Kurtz.

Above the fence they headed north along the edge of the woods for fifty yards or so, found the original access road—now overgrown and blocked here and there by fallen trees—and followed it higher into the forest.

Kurtz’s headache pounded with every step and even when he paused to rest, the pulse of pain crashed with every heartbeat. The hurt in his skull clouded his vision and literally pressed against the back of his eyes.

“Joe, you okay?”

“What?” He turned and looked at Rigby through the pounding.

“You all right? You look sort of pale.”

“I’m fine.” He looked around This damned hill was turning into a mountain. The trees here were some sort of pine that grew too close together, trunks as branchless as telephone poles for their first fifty vertical feet or so, and the mass of them shut out the sky. The clouds were low and dark and seemed to be scuttling by just above the tops of those trees. It couldn’t be much later than noon, but it felt like evening.

“There!” cried Rigby.

He had to follow her pointing hand before he saw it.

Above the bare trunks of the deciduous trees up the hill and just visible through the wind-tossed branches, rose the semicircle of a Ferris wheel minus most of its upper cars.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-NINE

The amusement park was much larger than Kurtz had imagined, covering four or five acres of level land—a sort of shelf notched into the steep slope a couple of hundred yards below the brow of the wooded hill. The actual amusement park land had probably been leveled or extended out from the original slope by bulldozers and other heavy equipment, but it was impossible to tell exactly where now that tall trees had grown up over the decades of abandonment.

Kurtz and Rigby approached cautiously, right hands ready to go for their respective weapons, but the place was empty enough; bird and insect sounds—waning but still present on this late October day—suggested that there was no lurking human threat.

From their vantage point at the center of what had once been a sort of midway, Kurtz could see the huge Ferris wheel fifty yards away—rusted, paint missing, lightbulbs mostly gone on the struts and crossmembers, only four cars left on its flimsy wheel—as well as the overgrown bumper car pavilion, some tumbled ticket booths with bushes and small trees grown up inside, a Tilt-a-Whirl with all of its hooded cars ripped off their tracks and scattered in the surrounding weeds, and a line of empty, broken booths that could have housed shooting galleries and other suckers’ games.

“Is this it?” asked Rigby. “The place you saw in Peg O’Toole’s snapshots?”

Kurtz nodded.

They walked along the overgrown shelf of land between the taller trees, pausing here and there—in front of a tumbledown funhouse with its plywood facade broken, its garish paint faded like some ancient Italian fresco—then next to a beautiful merry-go-round or carousel Kurtz could never remember which went in which direction, although these shattered horses and camels and giraffes had once rotated counter-clockwise.

“What a shame,” said Rigby, touching the shattered face of one of the painted horses. They had actually been carved by hand from wood, although the heads were hollow. Vandals had shattered all of the animals’ faces, broken their legs, ripped most of them from their poles, and tossed them into the weeds, which had then grown up and around and through them.

They walked past the bumper car pavilion. The flat roof had fallen in and the once-white floor was covered with puddles and plaster. Most of the heavy bumper cars had been dragged out and thrown here and there, some pushed down the hillside, one even wedged in the lower branches of a tree. Kurtz could see the ‘9’ of the Cloud Nine insignia in fading gold paint on some of the rusted cars. He matched up one tumbled car with the memory of the photo Parole Officer O’Toole had shown him. The weeds and trees seemed taller than he remembered from the photograph.

“Well,” said Kurtz when they paused by the Ferris wheel, “the old news articles said that the Major had built this place to keep the youth of Neola busy. It looks as if they’ve been busy enough over the last few decades, although I don’t think it was vandalism that the Major had in mind.”

Rigby wasn’t listening. “Look,” she said. “Someone’s replaced most of the gas engine that powers the Ferris wheel. And those chains and pulleys are new.”

“I noticed that,” said Kurtz. “The motor in the center of the carousel has been worked on as well. And did you notice the new bulbs on the wheel?”

Rigby walked around the base of the Ferris wheel. “Weird. Most of them are broken or missing, but it looks like someone is replacing…what?…one out of ten of the lights?”

“And there are newer electrical cables in the weeds as well,” said Kurtz. He pointed to a flat area of battered buildings about a hundred feet up the midway road. “I think they all head that way.”

They followed the heavy electrical cable from the Ferris wheel toward the tumbledown funhouse complex. Rigby pointed out several places where the new cable had been covered over with humus or dirt as if for concealment.

To the rear of the rotting funhouse, all but hidden by the peeling facades and trees behind it, someone had fashioned a shack out of new lumber. The sides were still unfinished, but the roof was shingled and plastic kept the weather out. The top of the funhouse facade had bent backwards here, and a huge, inverted clown face hung over the shack and almost touched the small porch. On that porch, covered with plastic wrapped tightly by bungee cords, was an oversized new gasoline-powered electrical generator. Jerry cans of gasoline were lined up nearby.

Rigby checked out the shack and pointed to several covered toolboxes. She lifted a large, yellow power naildriver—the completely portable kind with its massive magazine of nails.

“You think it works?” she asked, holding the heavy thing in both of her pale hands.

“One way to find out,” said Kurtz.

Rigby aimed back into the shack and squeezed the trigger.

BWAP. The five-inch nail ripped through the plastic sheeting and embedded itself in the plywood wall ten feet farther in.

“It works,” said Rigby.

They spent some time in the shack—found nothing more personal than a moldy cot in the back minus any bedding—and then strolled down the hill to the center of the overgrown midway.

“The newspaper articles Arlene found said that there was a kiddie-locomotive up here somewhere,” said Kurtz.

“We’ll find it later,” said Rigby. She dropped onto a lush patch of grass near the carousel, just where the hill began to rise again, and patted the grass next to her. “Sit down a minute, Joe.”

He sat four feet from her and looked out through the trees at the view of the Allegheny River and the town of Neola a mile or so below them to the north. With the remaining fall foliage in the hills surrounding the community and a couple of white church spires visible, Neola looked more like some quaint New England village than a raw, Western New York industrial town.

“Let’s talk a minute,” said Rigby.

“All right,” said Kurtz. “Tell me how it is that the DEA, FBI, AFT and other agencies have suspected the Major and SEATCO of being part of a heroin ring for years and yet the Major’s still a free man and Neola still seems to be getting money from the heroin trade? Why haven’t the alphabets been all over this place like hair on a gorilla?”

“I didn’t mean talk about that.”

“Answer the question, Rig.”

She looked out and down at the town. “I don’t know, Joe. Paul didn’t tell me everything about the DEA briefing.”

“But you think Kemper knows.”

“Maybe.”

Kurtz shook his head. “What the hell keeps law enforcement off a heroin ring, for fuck’s sake?” He looked back at Rigby King. “Some sort of national security thing?”

The sun had peeked out and was illuminating their part of the hillside now, making the still-green grass leap out from the dull, autumn background in vibrant color. Rigby took off her corduroy jacket, despite the cold breeze blowing in. The press of her nipples was visible even through the thick, pink material of the Oxford cloth shirt. “I don’t know, Joe. I think the feds and feebies have been wise to the Major since long before nine-eleven. Can we talk about what I want to talk about?”

Kurtz looked away from her again, squinting through his Ray Charles sunglasses at Neola now glowing white in the moving shafts of October sunlight. “CIA?” he said. “Some sort of quid pro quo bullshit between them and the Major’s network? Arlene’s clipped articles said that this SEATCO also traded with Syria and places like that, as well as with Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand…”

“Joe,” said Rigby. She scooted closer, grabbed his upper arm and squeezed it painfully.

Kurtz looked at her.

“Listen to me, Joe. Please.”

Kurtz removed her fingers from his arm. “What?”

“I don’t give a shit about SEATCO or this Major or any of the rest of this. I care about you.”

Kurtz looked at her. He was still holding her wrist. He let it go.

“You’re lost, Joe.” Rigby’s large brown eyes seemed darker than usual.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about you. You’re lost. Maybe you lost yourself in Attica. Maybe before—but I doubt that, not with Sam in your life. It’s probably when she was killed that you…”

“Rigby,” Kurtz said coldly, “maybe you’d better shut up.”

She shook her head. “I know why you’re here, Joe.” She jerked her head toward the Ferris wheel, weeds, woods, and shifting clouds. The sunlight still fell on them, but the shadows were moving faster up, around and over the hill. “You think that the parole officer—O’Toole—was your client. She showed you the photographs of this place. She asked if you knew where this place was. You’re acting like she hired you, Joe. You’re not only trying to solve her shooting—and yours—but solve everything.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Kurtz shifted another couple of feet away from her on the soft grass. The wind was banging some broken piece of plywood on the funhouse up the hill behind them.

“You know I do, Joe. That’s all you have left anymore. The work. The cases you make up for yourself to solve, even if you hire yourself out to some Mafia vermin to get the work. Or to that Farino bitch. It’s better than nothing, because that’s your only alternative right now…work or nothing. No feelings. No past No love. No hope. Nothing.”

Kurtz stood. “Do you bill by the hour?”

Rigby grabbed his wrist and looked up at him. “Lie down here with me, Joe. Make love with me in the sunlight.”

Kurtz said nothing, but he remembered the seventeen-year-old Rigby naked above him, straddling him in the dim light of the choir loft, Bach echoing from the huge pipe organ in the darkened basilica. He remembered the exquisite pain in his chest that night and how—only years later—wondering if that strong emotion had been love as well as lust.

“Joe…” She tugged. He went to one knee in the grass.

Rigby used her free hand to begin to unbutton her shirt as she lay back. Her short, dark hair was lifted into spikes by the soft grass. “Make love to me,” she whispered, “and let it all back in. Me. The world. Your daughter…”

Kurtz stood abruptly, jerking his wrist free.

“There’s a train track around here somewhere,” he said. “I’m going to find it.” He stepped past Rigby and began walking up the slope.

She caught up Co him before he reached the top of the mountain. Neither said anything. Rigby’s cheeks were flushed and there was grass on the back of her corduroy jacket.

The miniature train tracks, no more than a yard across, were just below the summit. The trees had been cut back for twenty feet on either side and had never grown back. The gravel under the ties looked fresh.

Kurtz turned north and began following the tracks along the hill.

“The rails aren’t rusted,” he said. “They’re almost polished. Missing spikes have been replaced and the bed built back up. This little line’s been used. And recently.”

Rigby said nothing. She plodded along ten ties behind him.

They crossed a small trestle that had been built over a stream, then followed the tracks up to the crown of the hill, where they emerged from the woods and continued north-northeast.

A quarter of a mile from where they started, they emerged from the woods. The grasses were high and tan and brittle here, rustling in the stronger breeze as the clouds covered the sun again. The miniature railway’s tracks ran down across a ridge and then rose over another treeless hill toward a huge house just visible about a mile away to the northeast.

Kurtz started down the grade.

“Joe, I don’t think…” began Rigby.

Her voice was drowned out by a deafening THWAP THWAP THWAP and a huge Huey helicopter, Vietnam War-vintage, came swooping just over the trees from which they’d just emerged. Men were visible in both doorways as the big machine side-slipped, its forty-foot-wide rotors filling the mountaintop with their bats-wing beat.

Kurtz began to run toward the trees, saw that he would never make it and dropped to one knee, pulling the small .38 from its holster.

A machinegun opened up from the side of the Huey and slugs stitched a row between Kurtz and Rigby King.

“DROP YOUR WEAPONS… NOW!” boomed an amplified voice from the helicopter.

It swooped low and fast over them, banked hard, and swooped back. A machine gun from the other open door scythed grass not ten feet from Rigby. She threw down her gun.

Kurtz tossed his into the grass.

“ON YOUR KNEES. HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD. DO NOT MOVE A MUSCLE.”

Kurtz and Rigby complied as the huge, black machine hovered over them and then settled heavily onto the grass near the tracks, the wind blowing up straw and dust and dead grass around them in a blinding blast.

CHAPTER

THIRTY

The Dodger stopped at the edge of the woods and then stepped back under the trees when he heard the familiar sound of the Huey’s engine and rotors. The goddamned perimeter sensors again.

He’d stalked the man and the woman through the woods, watched as they entered Cloud Nine, attached the suppressor to his Beretta, and begun moving in on them as they sat on the grass talking. Something was weird between the two; it looked as if the woman with the big tits and the short hair wanted to fuck and the man called Kurtz did not. That was new in the Dodger’s book, unless Kurtz was all worn out from his night with the Farino woman the night before.

They’d been to the hut. This irritated the Dodger to the point that he planned to take real pleasure in shooting both of them. He would use more bullets than was necessary. It would disturb the aesthetics of his use for them, but that wasn’t as important as getting rid of this unaccustomed anger he felt.

I’ll put them at the top, he’d thought as he moved stealthily behind the funhouse, into the Beretta’s killing range. He carried the weapon with both hands, his palm under the grip as he’d been taught, ready to lift it and aim down his rigid arm—first the man, then the woman. First the body mass to drop them, but not in the heart. Then the arms and legs. It was nice of them to come here.

Then the wind had blown some damned bit of plywood, making a noise near him, and the Dodger had been forced to freeze, bending low, not even breathing. By the time he was ready to move again, so were they, climbing the hill toward his train tracks.

He’d cut over the hilltop, hurrying ahead to the big oak near the edge of the forest. The bulk of it bid him and when they followed the tracks out into the open, he’d have a clear shot of no more than fifteen meters. As his anger faded, he considered a head shot for the man, saving the multiple slugs for the woman. Not because she was a woman or beautiful—the Dodger was indifferent to that—but because he sensed that the man was the more dangerous of the two. Always eliminate the primary danger first, the Boss had taught him. Always. Don’t hesitate.

But he’d hesitated, and now it was too late.

The goddamned helicopter. That same, goddamned old Huey the Major had used for more than thirty years.

The Dodger watched the four Vietnamese men flexcuff Kurtz and the woman and load them into the helicopter. Then he faded back into the woods as the Huey lifted off and flew north, its passing flattening the grass for sixty feet around.

He was glad that he’d hidden the bug truck in the thicket where it couldn’t be seen from the air. Removing the silencer, the Dodger slipped the Beretta back in its holster, paused only briefly at the hut, and then walked quickly back to the truck.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-ONE

Kurtz watched and noted everything as the Huey hauled them the short mile to the mansion. He and Rigby were unhurt—except for the cutting pressure of the flexcuffs—and surrounded by the four men whom he believed to be Vietnamese or Vietnamese-Americans. There was only one pilot—a Texan judging from his accent when he told everyone to hang on for take-off—and he said nothing for the rest of the flight.

The train tracks came to within a hundred yards of the mansion and then looped in a turnaround. The Cloud Nine kid-sized locomotive and cars were just visible in a long storage shed that straddled the tracks. Evidently the Major had kept the train and tracks maintained all these years.

The Huey landed and the four men half-pushed, half-dragged Rigby and Kurtz out of the open doors. All four were dressed in jeans and field jackets. Two of them carried M-16s that Kurtz was certain were illegally rigged for full auto; the other two carried even more formidable military firepower—M-60 machine guns.

Where are the Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms pukes in their windbreakers when you need them? thought Kurtz. The man behind him shoved him through doors that a fifth Vietnamese man, this one from inside the house and dressed in a blue blazer, opened for them.

This butler or whatever he was led them through a foyer, down a hallway, through a library, and out onto the rear terrace on the cliff’s edge. Kurtz had noted every side room and everything else he could see during their short transit through the house, and he knew that Rigby was doing the same. The fact that they hadn’t been blindfolded bothered him a bit, since the simplest explanation for that was that they planned to kill both him and Rigby.

The house was large—three stories tall, comprising at least five thousand square feet inside—and it looked as if it had been built in the 1970s, around the time of the Major’s retirement to Neola. It was built to fight off Indians. The first story and a half were stone—not only faced with stone, but built of stone. The windows to the rear of the house, nearest the helipad, were all leaded glass, but the leaded parts were actually bars. Thinner, taller windows to either side of the main ones were too narrow to scramble through but would offer perfect firing positions. A five-car garage ran to the north of the house along the same circular driveway, but all five of the wooden doors were down. The house doors they’d come through—the house was situated so that its fancier front was facing the bluff rather than the heliport and driveway—were a thick hardwood reinforced by steel. Enough to stop a Kiowa war lance, that was for sure.

This side of the house facing the cliff was less defensible. The library opened onto the terrace through wide French doors that let in the view and afternoon light to the west. Off the library had been an adjoining bedroom—Kurtz only caught a glimpse but thought it was probably the Major’s bedroom, adapted from a huge parlor on the first floor, because of pill bottles and military photos on the burgundy wallpapered walls—and that bedroom also had wide doors opening onto the terrace. Kurtz guessed from oversized drape boxes above the doors that there were steel shutters that could drop down if necessary.

The Major, Colonel Vin Trinh, and three other men were waiting on the terrace. One man wore sheriff’s gray, a Colt .45 in a western holster, and a name tag that said “Gerey”—the name of the sheriff that Rigby had talked to little more man an hour earlier; the other two men were younger, white, muscled, and also armed.

That’s seven bodyguards so far, counting the servant in the blazer and not counting the chopper pilot and the sheriff, thought Kurtz as he and Rigby were shoved into the sunlight in front of the man in the wheelchair, which was in the shade of a striped canvas awning. And Truth, the Major, and this other old guy.

“Mr. Kurtz, Miss King,” said the Major. “How nice of you to drop in.”

Ah, Jesus, thought Kurtz. This old fart gets his material from villains in B movies.

“I’m a police officer,” said Rigby. It was the first full sentence she’d completed since Kurtz had been sitting on the grass with her.

“Yes, Miss King…Detective King,” said the Major. “We know who you are.”

“Then you know what a bad idea this is,” said Rigby, her voice low but solid. “Get these cuffs off us this minute and we’ll let it slide for now. We were trespassing.”

The Major smiled again, shook his head almost sadly, and turned toward Kurtz. “I think it was very clever of your masters to send the policewoman along, Mr. Kurtz. If circumstances were different, it might…might…have been a disincentive to what has to happen next.”

Aw, shit, thought Kurtz. He said, “What masters?”

The Major’s smile disappeared. “Don’t insult my intelligence, Mr. Kurtz. It makes perfect sense that they sent you—with your policewoman chippie here as an escort From what we can glean, you’re one of the few people that both the Gonzaga and Farino families do business with.”

“Chippie?” said Rigby. She sounded more amused than insulted.

Colonel Vin Trinh stepped forward and slapped Rigby hard across the mouth. He wiped the blood from his knuckles with a silk handkerchief, took Kurtz’s holstered .38 from one of the Vietnamese men, and held his arm at full length, the muzzle inches from Rigby’s temple. Kurtz was reminded of a famous photo from the Vietnam era, taken during the Tet Offensive he thought, where a Saigon chief of police had summarily executed a Viet Cong suspect in the street.

Trinh cocked the pistol. “If you say one more word without being told to,” he said in almost unaccented English, “I will kill you now.”

Rigby looked at the tall man.

“What do you want?” Kurtz said to the Major.

The old man in the wheelchair sighed. The bodyguard in the blazer had moved behind the chair, hands on its grips, obviously ready to move the crippled man back deeper into the shade should the sun encroach or Kurtz or Rigby make any sudden move. Or to get him out of the path of any arterial sprays, thought Kurtz.

“We want the obvious, Mr. Kurtz,” said the Major. “We want an end to this war. Isn’t that what your masters sent you down here to discuss?”

War? thought Kurtz. According to both Toma Gonzaga and Angelina Farino Ferrara, they didn’t have a clue as to who was killing their junkies. They certainly had never talked about fighting back—about any war. Was all that ignorance a ruse to get Kurtz involved? It didn’t make much sense.

He said nothing.

“Did they send you with terms?” asked the Major. “Or shall we propose our own?”

Colonel Vin Trinh’s arm was still rigid, the hammer on Kurtz’s .38 was still cocked. The muzzle ten inches from Rigby’s head did not waver by so much as a millimeter.

Kurtz said nothing.

“For instance, what would it be worth to you for us to spare Miss King’s life?” said the old man.

Kurtz remained silent.

“She means nothing to you?” said the Major. “But you were fellow orphans together as children. You were in the army together. Surely that must have created some bond, Mr. Kurtz.”

Kurtz smiled. “If you’ve got my military records,” he said, “look at them more carefully. This bitch is one of the reasons I was court-martialed.”

Major Michael O’Toole nodded. “Yes, that fact is in your records. But you were not, as it turned out, dishonorably discharged, Sergeant Kurtz. The charges appeared to have been dropped. Perhaps you and she have…made up?” He showed hard white teeth.

“This isn’t about her or me,” said Kurtz. “What do you want?”

O’Toole nodded at Trinh, who lowered the hammer, stepped back, and slid Kurtz’s pistol into his belt The man had a stomach flatter than most fences.

“We need to meet, your masters and I,” said the Major, speaking in a rapid, clear clip that must have been perfected in a thousand briefings. “This war has become too expensive for both sides.”

Rigby glanced over at Kurtz as if seeking to find out if any of this made any sense to him. Kurtz’s face revealed nothing.

“When?” said Kurtz.

“Tomorrow. Noon. Both Gonzaga and the Farino daughter must come. They can each bring one bodyguard, but everyone will be disarmed before the meeting.”

“Where?”

“This town,” said the old man, sweeping his powerful-looking right arm toward Neola visible in the valley to the northwest. With the sunlight gone, all color had faded from the trees and the steeples visible were more a dismal, chimney gray than a New England white. “It has to be in Neola. Sheriff Gerey here…” The Major nodded toward the sheriff who never changed his bassett-hound expression or blinked. “Sheriff Gerey will provide security for all of us and offer the meeting space. You still have that secure conference room in the back of the station, Sheriff?”

“Yeah.”

“There you have it,” said the Major. “Any questions?”

“You’re letting both of us go back, right?” said Kurtz.

The Major looked at Colonel Vin Trinh, then at Rigby, then at Kurtz, and smiled. “Wrong, Mr. Kurtz. Detective King stays as our guest until after this conference.”

“Why?”

“To insure that you do your absolute best at convincing your principals to be at the Neola sheriff’s office at noon tomorrow, Mr. Kurtz.”

“Or what?”

The old man’s black eyebrows rose toward his steel-colored crewcut. “Or what? Colonel Trinh? Would you like to demonstrate the ‘Or what?’ to Mr. Kurtz?”

Without blinking, Trinh pulled the .38 from his belt and shot Rigby in the upper leg. She fell heavily, arms still cuffed behind her, and struck her head on the flagstone. One of the Vietnamese bodyguards dropped to one knee, pulled his belt off, and rigged a makeshift tourniquet.

Kurtz had not moved and he did not move now. He made sure that his face showed no concern.

“Does that explain the ‘Or what?’ Mr. Kurtz?” said the Major.

“It seems like more trouble for you than it’s worth,” Kurtz said calmly. “Kill me, nobody much notices. Kill her…” He nodded toward Rigby where she lay, face sweaty, eyes wider, but not speaking. “Kill her and you’ll have the entire Buffalo Police Department on your ass.”

“Oh, no, Mr. Kurtz,” said the Major. “We’re not going to kill Detective King if you fail in your mission by tomorrow noon. You’re going to kill her. In Buffalo. Probably in that abandoned flophouse you call a home. A lover’s quarrel, perhaps.”

Kurtz looked at the .38 still in Trinh’s hand. “No GSR with me,” he said.

“Gun shot residue?” said the Major. “On your hands and clothing? There will be, Mr. Kurtz. There will be.” The old man in the wheelchair nodded again and two of the young men grabbed Rigby, lifted her—she moaned once—and carried her into the house.

The Major glanced at his heavy and expensive digital watch. “It’s after two P.M. You’ll be wanting to go. It’s a long drive back to Buffalo and it looks as if it might rain.”

Colonel Trinh slipped the .38 into his belt but pulled a Glock-nine from a holster behind his back. Two other bodyguards lifted their M-16s.

Kurtz looked toward the driveway to the north of the house.

“No, Mr. Kurtz, the easiest way out for you is down this way.” The Major nodded his head toward the almost vertical staircase down the cliff face.

Kurtz took a step closer to the edge, very aware of the two men behind him, who could push him over with a shove, and peered down.

It was not so much a staircase as a descending concrete ziggurat. The steps were oversized—each at least twenty-four inches high, maybe thirty inches—and cut into the almost sheer rock cliff face. Far below—two or three hundred feet at least and half as many sheer steps almost straight down—the stairway ended in the black asphalt of the curving driveway.

“You’re joking,” said Kurtz.

“I never joke,” said Major Michael O’Toole.

Kurtz sighed and held his arms up for someone to cut the flexcuffs.

“Perhaps later,” said the Major. “Sheriff Gerey will meet you at the bottom.” The old man in the chair nodded again and someone behind Kurtz gave him a hard shove.

He almost went over headfirst, staggered, and kept from falling only by jumping from the terrace to the narrow first step. The impact shocked up his spine and almost made him pitch forward again. He teetered there, raising his cuffed arms behind him for balance.

“Tell Mr. Gonzaga and Ms. Ferrara to be there tomorrow at Sheriff Gerey’s office precisely at noon,” said the Major. “One minute late, and there will be several dire consequences—the demise of Detective King being the least of them.”

The man in the blazer pushed the Major’s wheelchair through the doors and into the house. Colonel Trinh and four of the other Vietnamese with their rifles at port arms stood at the edge of the terrace and watched Kurtz descend.

At first, Kurtz thought it was going to be easy. That is, if the men above didn’t shoot him—which still seemed very possible. Or if he didn’t trip and fall with his hands cuffed behind his back—which seemed more probable on every step.

But at first it did seem easy. It was two or three hundred feet—it was hard to tell at this horrible angle—of almost vertical ziggurat slabs, each at least two feet above the other—although it rose to Kurtz’s knees, so he guessed more like twenty-eight or thirty inches—with just eight or ten inches of horizontal concrete on each “step”—but if he just balanced easily on the edge of each and sort of hopped down to the next, his hands behind his back but extended for balance—it shouldn’t be a problem. Easy as cake, as the Russians might say. A piece of pie.

Except that after nine or ten drops, with only a hundred and fifty or so to go, the impact had jarred his spine, hurt his knees, and pounded red-hot railroad spikes of pain into his aching skull.

Kurtz was glad that they’d pulled everything out of his pockets when they’d cuffed him, and tugged his Ray Charles glasses off his face and taken them as well, because all that junk would be flying out into space right now. It’d be a bitch, Kurtz thought, to have to stop and pick up all that stuff with your teeth. And Daddy Bruce would be mad as hell if he came back without Ray Charles’s sunglasses. He stepped to the edge of the tenth or eleventh step and dropped.

The shock, ran up through his spine and exploded in fireworks in his head. His vision blurred.

Not yet. Not yet. He’d do a deal with this fucking headache; it could make him throw up, or even faint, once he was all the way down—or even on any of the bottom three steps. But not here. Not here.

Another three steps down. He tried just stepping down the mere twenty-eight inches or so. That was better. But the pain still jagged up his back to his skull and exited through the crack in his skull on the right side every time he dropped the other leg and foot. And it was harder to keep his balance that way with his arms behind him. The overly tight flexcuffs had long since cut off circulation to his wrists and hands, and now his forearms were going numb, with a line of pain moving up above the pins and needles of numbness advancing like little forest creatures running from a forest fire.

What? Stay focused, Joe. He paused on the narrow concrete shelf, his toes hanging over, panting, sweat in his eyes—sweat he couldn’t blink or rub away—and looked up the near-vertical ziggurat steps at the dark forms looking down at him. The Major wasn’t there, but Colonel Trinh was. He wasn’t smiling. The other Vietnamese men were. They were enjoying this, probably betting on when he’d fall. Trinh looked like he was enjoying it as well, just too much so to smile.

Stay focused. The cliffside here on either side of the steps was slippery limestone with some granite mixed in—a steep mish-mash of slabs and dirt, with some lichen and low plants and the occasional scrub oak. But getting off the steps would be suicide here; even if his hands were free and circulation flowing, it would take a mountain climber to deal with that slippery slope.

Kurtz hopped down another step, waited for the fireworks to quit going off behind his eyes, and dropped another.

I don’t think Dr. Singh would recommend this as therapy for the concussion.

Who was Dr. Singh? Kurtz wondered dully. It was interesting how the headache pain flowed in like breakers along the surf, never stopping, never pausing, just rising and falling and then crashing down.

He dropped to another step, teetered, caught himself, stepped to the edge, and dropped to the next. Was it his imagination or were the horizontal parts of each step getting narrower? The backs of his heels scraped when he tried to put his feet down solidly, even with his toes hanging out over space. Kurtz had started down being glad that he’d worn his sneakers today, but now he wished he had his old combat boots on. His ankles felt splintered. His heels were already bloody.

He dropped again. Again. The sweat stung his eyes and burned in counterpoint to the real pain.

It can’t get no worse…ran a line from some old army song. Kurtz didn’t believe that, of course. If life had taught him one thing, it was that things could always get worse.

It started to rain. Hard.

Kurtz’s hair immediately matted to his head. He tasted the rain and realized that blood from his scalp wound was mixing in. He couldn’t blink away the water in his eyes and on his lashes, so he paused on a step. He didn’t know if he was halfway down, two-thirds the way down, or a fourth the way down. His head and neck hurt far too much for him to crane his neck to look up again. And he didn’t want to look down anymore.

It can always get worse.

Lightning flashed so close he was blinded. The thunder almost knocked him down. The world was filled with the stink of ozone. Kurtz’s wet and bloody hair tried to rise off his head as the hillside around him glowed white from the blast.

Kurtz sat down heavily, his legs flying up. He was panting, disoriented, and so dizzy that he doubted if he could stand again without falling.

The rain pelted him like fists pounding his shoulders and neck. It was cold as hail fell and hurt his head. Cold as hail, he thought again, trying it out with a Texas accent Everything hurt his head. Why the fuck didn’t that Yemeni kid aim better? Get it over with? Only it hadn’t been the Yemeni kid, had it? He’d already shot the Yemeni kid by then. Then someone else shot him, Kurtz knew. The someone else who had brought the Yemeni kid there to kill…who? Peg O’Toole, he thought. Pretty Peg O’Toole, who just one year earlier had risked her job as PO to stand up for him, hell, to save his life, when a detective on the Farino’s payroll had ramrodded him into county lockup on a bogus charge in preparation to send him back to prison where the D-block Mosque and a hundred other guys were waiting to get the bounty on him…

Focus, Joe.

Can’t get no worse…

The rain was coming down in a torrent and the hillside was turning into a thousand rivulets, but the main flood was pouring down this ziggurat stairway. The water struck Kurtz’s shoulder blades and butt and threatened to wash him right off the step.

If I stand up, I’m screwed. If I keep sitting here, I’m screwed.

Kurtz stood up. The water flowed around and through his legs, geysering out in an almost comical jet Kurtz resisted the impulse to laugh.

He stepped down another step. His arms were completely dead to sensation now, just long sticks he was hauling down the hill with him like so much firewood on his back.

He dropped another step. Then another. He resisted the temptation to sit down again and let the waterfall carry him away. Maybe he’d just ride down on it like all the people in all the movies who leap a thousand feet off a cliff and then ride the rapids out of sight of the enemy, who shoot uselessly at them…

Focus, Joe.

They’re going to kill her anyway. Rigby. No matter what I do or don’t do, they’re going to kill her with my gun and blame it on me. She may be dead already if that bullet even nicked an artery. Leg wounds that high hurt like hell until you go all cold and numb at the end.

He blinked away water and blood. It was hard to see the edge of each step now. Every step was a mini-Niagara, the concrete invisible under swirling water.

Malcolm Kibunte was the name of the drug dealer and killer he’d dangled over the edge of Niagara Palls one wintry night just under a year ago. He was just asking the gang leader a few questions. Kurtz had a rope on the man—it was Kibunte who’d thought that his best chance was to drop the rope and swim for it right at the brink of North America’s mightiest waterfall.

Joke him if he can’t take a fuck, thought Kurtz. He stepped over the edge of this waterfall, dropped, fought the pain to stay conscious, teetered on the ever narrower step, found his balance against the flood, and stepped down again.

Again.

Again.

Again.

He finally fell. The step seemed to shift under him and Kurtz fell forward, unable to find the next step or throw himself backward.

So he leaped instead. He leaped out into space, legs as high as he could get them. Leaped away from the waterfall and into the rain. Mouth contorted in a silent scream, Joe Kurtz leaped.

And hit solid ground and crumpled forward, just twisting in time to keep from smashing his face on the wet asphalt. His shoulder struck instead, sending a blinding bolt of pain up the right side of his head.

He blinked, twisted around as he lay prone on the drive, and looked behind him. He’d been on the third or fourth step from the bottom when he’d fallen. The ziggurat stairway was invisible under the waterfall of water. The rain kept coming down hard and the flood washed around his torn sneakers, trying to push his body out along the asphalt.

“Get up,” said Sheriff Gerey.

Kurtz tried.

“Grab an arm, Smitty,” said the sheriff.

They grabbed Kurtz’s unfeeling arms, hauled him to his feet, and half-dragged him to the sheriff’s car parked there. The deputy held the rear door open.

“Watch your head,” said the sheriff and then pressed Kurtz’s head down with that move they’d all learned in cop school but also had seen in too many movies and TV shows. The man’s fingers on Kurtz’s bloody, battered skull hurt like hell and made him want to vomit, but he resisted the urge. He knew from experience that few things prompted cops to use their batons on your kidneys faster than puking in the backseats of their cars.

“Watch your head,” the deputy repeated, and Kurtz finally had to laugh as they shoved him into the backseat of the cruiser.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-TWO

It was still raining hard as Kurtz drove the Pinto north on Highway 16. Only one of his windshield wipers was working, but it was on the driver’s side, so he didn’t bother worrying about it. He had a lot of phone calls to make and they weren’t the kind you wanted to make on a cell phone, but the pay phones were twenty-five miles apart along this two-lane stretch of road, the nearest gas station was forty minutes ahead, he hadn’t stopped in Neola to get change, and, basically, to hell with it.

They’d given everything back—except his .38—when Sheriff Gerey had dumped him out at the Pinto where he and Rigby had left it down the hill from Cloud Nine. He even had the Ray Charles sunglasses back in his jacket pocket, which was good. If Kurtz was lucky enough to survive all this other shit, he didn’t want Daddy Bruce killing him for losing the Man’s sunglasses.

He fumbled, found the cell phone Gonzaga had given him, and keyed the only preset number.

“Yes?” It was Toma Gonzaga himself.

“We need to meet,” said Kurtz. “Today.”

“Have you finished the task?” asked Gonzaga. Not “job,” but “task.” This wasn’t your average hoodlum.

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. “More or less.”

“More or less?” Kurtz could imagine the handsome mob boss’s eyebrow rising.

“I have the information you need,” said Kurtz, “but it won’t do you any good unless we meet in the next couple of hours.”

There was a pause. “I’m busy this afternoon. But later tonight…”

“This afternoon or nothing,” interrupted Kurtz. “You wait, you lose everything.”

A shorter pause. “All right Come by my estate on Grand Island at…”

“No. My office.” Kurtz raised his wrist He’d strapped his watch back on as soon as his fingers had begun working again, but now his head hurt so much that he was having some trouble focusing his eyes. “It’s just about three P.M. Be in my office at five.”

“Who else will be there?”

“Just me and Angelina Farino Ferrara.”

“I want some of my associates…”

“Bring an army if you want,” said Kurtz. “Just park them outside the door. The meeting will be just the three of us.”

There was a long minute of silence, during which Kurtz concentrated on navigating the winding road. The few cars that passed going the opposite way had their headlights on and wipers pumping. Kurtz was driving faster than the rest of the traffic going north.

Kurtz used his phone hand to wipe the moisture out of his eyes again. His fingers and arms still hurt like hell—it had been almost five minutes after they’d dumped him at the Pinto before he regained enough sensation in his hands to be able to drive. The pain of his reawakening arms and hands and fingers had finally been enough to make him throw up in the weeds near the Pinto. Sheriff Gerey and his deputy had been standing by their car, waiting to escort him out of town, and Gerey had said something that had made the deputy chuckle as Kurtz was on his knees in the weeds. Kurtz had put it on the sheriff’s bill.

“All right, I’ll be there,” said Toma Gonzaga and disconnected.

Kurtz threw the phone onto the passenger seat. His hands were still more like gnarled hooks than real hands.

He got his own phone out, managed to punch out Angelina’s number, and listened to her voice on an answering machine.

“Pick up, goddammit Pick up.” It was as close to a prayer as Joe Kurtz had come this long day.

She did. “Kurtz, where are you? What’s…”

“Listen carefully,” he said. He explained quickly about the meeting, but told her to get there at 4:45, fifteen minutes before Gonzaga. “It’s important you get there on time.”

“Kurtz, if this is about last night…”

He hung up on her, started to punch in another number, but then set the phone aside for a minute.

The highway had straightened here, but it still seemed to be bobbing up and down slightly, threatening to shift directions at any moment. Kurtz realized that his inner ear had become screwed up again in the last hour or so, probably on the steps. He shook his head—sending water and blood flying—and concentrated on keeping the Pinto on the undulating, quivering highway. Kurtz’s shoes were a tattered mess, his jacket was dripping, his pants and shirt and socks and underwear were sodden.

A pickup truck was ahead of him, kicking up spray, but Kurtz passed it without slowing. The pickup had been doing about fifty m.p.h. on the narrow road; Kurtz’s whining, vibrating, protesting Pinto was doing at least eighty.

It had taken Rigby and him more than ninety minutes to drive down to Neola from Buffalo that morning. Kurtz wanted to get back to Buffalo in less than an hour. He’d noted the time when the sheriff’s car had turned around at the Neola city limits sign—if he kept up this pace, he should make it.

Kurtz punched another phone number in. A bodyguard answered. Kurtz insisted that he talk to Baby Doc himself, and was finally handed over. Kurtz explained to the Lackawanna boss that it was important that they meet today, soon, in the next hour.

“Important to you, maybe,” said Baby Doc, “but maybe not to me. You’re not on a cell phone, are you, Kurtz?”

“Yeah. I’m coming into Lackawanna from the south in about thirty minutes. Are you at Curly’s?”

“It doesn’t matter where the fuck I am. What do you want?”

“You know that payment I promised you in return for the favors?”

“Yeah.”

“You meet with me in the next hour, and you get a serious payment I mean, serious. Put me off—nothing.”

The silence lasted long enough that Kurtz was sure that the cell phone had lost service here in the hills approaching East Aurora.

“I’m at Curly’s,” said Baby Doc. “But get here fast They want to open up for Sunday night dinner in ninety minutes.”

Highway 16 became four-lanes wide and renamed itself Highway 400 as it turned east toward Buffalo. Kurtz took the East Aurora exit and drove the six miles to and through Orchard Park at high speed, swinging north again on 219 past the Thruway into Lackawanna.

He called Arlene’s home number. No answer. He called her cell phone. No answer. He called the office. She picked up on the second ring.

“What are you doing there this late on a Sunday afternoon?” said Kurtz.

“Following up some things,” said his secretary. “I finally got the home phone number of the former director of the Rochester Psychiatric Institute. He’s retired now and lives in Ontario on the Lake. And I’ve been trying other ways to get into the military records so…”

“Get out of the office,” said Kurtz. “I’m going to need it for a few hours and I don’t want you anywhere near it. Go home. Now.”

“All right, Joe.” A pause and he could hear Arlene stubbing out a cigarette. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. I just want you out of there. And if there are any files or anything on the desks, shove them out of sight somewhere.”

“Do you want O’Toole’s e-mail printouts in your main drawer?”

“O’Toole’s…” began Kurtz. Then he remembered the call that morning about someone using Peg O’Toole’s computer to log on to her e-mail account. Arlene had been able to download the PO’s filing cabinet before whoever it was had time to delete it all. “Yeah, fine,” said Kurtz. “In the top center drawer is fine.”

“And what about Aysha?”

Kurtz had to pause again. Aysha. Yasein Goba’s fiancée who was being smuggled across the Canadian border tonight at midnight. Shit. “Can you pick her up, Arlene? Keep her at your house until tomorrow and…no, wait.”

Would it be dangerous to pick the girl up? Who knew about her? Would the Major or whoever was killing people for the Major know about Goba fiancée and go after her? Kurtz didn’t know.

“No, never mind,” he said. “Never mind. Let her get picked up by the Niagara Falls police. They’ll take care of her.”

“But she may have some important information,” said Arlene. “And I got the translator from church, Nicky, all set up to…”

“Just fucking forget about it,” snapped Kurtz. He took a bream. He never shouted at Arlene. He almost never shouted, period. “Sorry,” he said. He was into the industrial wasteland of Lackawanna now, coming at the Basilica and Ridge Road and Curly’s Restaurant from the south.

“All right, Joe. But you know I’m going to go pick up that girl tonight.”

“Yeah.” He thumbed the phone off.

It was the same drill of being taken into the men’s room at Curly’s and searched head to foot One of the bodyguards shifted a toothpick in his mouth and said, “Jesus, fuck, man—you’re so wet your skin is wrinkly. You been swimming with your clothes on?”

Kurtz ignored him.

When he was seated across from Baby Doc in the same rear booth, he said, “This is private.”

Baby Doc looked at his three bodyguards and at the waiters bustling around getting the place ready for the heavy Sunday evening dinner traffic. “They all have my confidence,” said the big man with the flag tattoo on his massive forearm.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Kurtz. “This is private.”

Baby Doc snapped his fingers and the bodyguards left, herding the waiters and bartender ahead of them into the backroom.

“For your sake,” said Baby Doc, “this had better not be a waste of my time.”

“It won’t be,” said Kurtz.

Speaking as economically as he could, he told Baby Doc about the Major, about the heroin ring, about the “war” that seemed to be claiming only casualties in the Farino and Gonzaga camps, about Rigby being shot and her role in this mess.

“Weird story,” said Baby Doc, his hands folded in front of him and his flag tattoo visible under the rolled-back sleeves of his white shirt. “What the hell does it have to do with me?”

Kurtz told him.

Baby Doc sat back in the boom. “You have to be kidding.” He looked at Kurtz’s face. “No, you’re not kidding, are you? What on earth could compel me to take part in this?”

Kurtz told him.

Baby Doc didn’t so much as blink for almost a full minute. Finally, he said, “You speak for Gonzaga and the Farino woman?”

“Yes.”

“Do they know you speak for them?”

“Not yet.”

“What arc you going to need from me?”

“A helicopter,” said Kurtz. “Big enough to haul six or eight people. And you to pilot it.”

Baby Doc started to laugh and then stopped. “You’re serious.”

“As a heart attack,” said Kurtz.

“You look like you’ve had a heart attack,” said Baby Doc. “You’re a fucking mess, Kurtz.”

Kurtz waited.

“I don’t own a goddamned helicopter,” Baby Doc said at last. “And I haven’t flown one for more than a dozen years. I’d get us all killed even if there was a reason for me to try this stupid stunt.”

“But you know where to get one,” said Kurtz.

Baby Doc thought a minute. “There’s that big heliport up near the Falls. Hauls tourists around. I know the guy who does charter work up there. They might lease one to me for a day.”

Kurtz nodded. He’d hired one of the smaller sightseeing choppers there to fly him over Emilio Gonzaga’s Grand Island compound about a year ago. His plan then had been to chart the place before killing Emilio. Kurtz didn’t see any compelling reason to share that factoid with Baby Doc.

“They have a Bell Long Ranger there that doesn’t get a lot of duty this time of year,” continued Baby Doc, speaking more to himself than to Kurtz.

“How many does that carry?” said Kurtz.

Baby Doc shrugged. “Usually seven. You can get eight people in it if you rip out the center jump seats and put a couple on the floor. Nine if you don’t bother with a copilot.”

“We don’t need a copilot,” said Kurtz.

Baby Doc barked a laugh. “I have about twenty minutes logged on a Long Ranger. I don’t even qualify to sit in the copilot seat.”

“Good,” said Kurtz, “because we don’t need a copilot.”

“What else will you be needing?”

“Weapons,” said Kurtz.

Baby Doc shook his head. “I’m sure the Gonzagas and Farinos have a few weapons between them.”

“I’m talking military-spec here.”

The other man looked around. The restaurant was still empty. “What kind?”

Kurtz shrugged. “I don’t know. Firepower. Some full-auto weapons, probably.”

“M-16s.”

“Maybe smaller. Uzis or Mac-10s. We don’t want anyone getting an eye poked out in the slick.”

“You don’t find Uzis and Mac-10s in a National Guard arsenal,” whispered Baby Doc.

Kurtz shrugged again. Truth be told, he’d seen some examples of the old Seneca Street Social Club’s little private arsenal—the weapons had been aimed at him—so he knew what was probably available.

“Anything else?” said Baby Doc, sounding bemused now.

“Body armor.”

“Cop style or military grade?”

“Kevlar should work.”

“Anything else?”

“Night vision goggles,” said Kurtz. “I suspect the Major’s men have them.”

“Would Russian surplus do?” said Baby Doc. “I can get them discount.”

“No,” said Kurtz. “The good stuff.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. “We’ll need some light anti-armor stuff. Shoulder launched.”

Baby Doc Skrzpczyk leaned back against the back of the booth. “You’re not really amusing me any longer, Kurtz.”

“I’m not trying to. You didn’t see the Major’s freehold down there today. I did. The sheriff drove slow to give me a good look at it all. They wanted me to bring the word back to Gonzaga and Farino in case they considered a preemptive strike. The house itself is on top of that damned mountain. They have maybe nine, ten men there, and I saw the automatic weapons. But down the hill, they have at least three reinforced gates along the drive—each one of them with steel posts sunk deep into concrete. There are two guardhouses, each with four or five ‘security guards,’ and each guardhouse has a perfect field of fire down the hill. There are armored SUVs—those Panoz things—parked in defilade sites up and down the hill, and two sheriff’s cars that seem to be parked outside the lowest gate on a permanent basis.”

“You don’t need a shoulder-launched missile,” said Baby Doc. “You need a fucking tank.”

“If we were trying to fight our way up the drive or along the cliff, yeah,” said Kurtz. “But we’re not We just need one or two deterrents to block the drive if anyone tries to drive up it.”

Baby Doc leaned forward, folded his hands on the tabletop, and whispered, “Do you have any idea how much a shoulder-launched antiaircraft missile costs?”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. “About a hundred grand for cheap shit sold-in-the-bazaar piece of Russian crap. Four or five times that for a Stinger.”

Baby Doc stared at him.

“But I’m not talking about buying an antiaircraft missile,” said Kurtz. “Just something to stop an SUV if we have to. A cheap RPG should do it.”

“Who’s paying for this?”

“Guess,” said Kurtz.

“But they don’t know it yet?”

“Not yet.”

“You know you’re talking about upwards of three-quarters of a million dollars here, not counting the lease of the Long Ranger.”

Kurtz nodded.

“And how soon do you want all this—including me and the Long Ranger, if my terms are agreed upon?” said Baby Doc. “A week? Ten days?”

“Tonight,” said Kurtz. “Midnight if we can do it. But departing here no later than two A.M.”

Baby Doc opened his mouth as if to laugh but then did not. He closed his mouth and just stared at Joe Kurtz. “You’re serious,” he said at last.

“As a heart attack.”

CHAPTER

THIRTY-THREE

It was only a little after four P.M. and the Dodger didn’t have any task assigned to him until midnight, when he was supposed to meet and kill that Aysha woman who was coming across the border from Canada, and he was feeling a little frustrated and at loose ends. Tomorrow was his birthday and the Boss, as he always did, had given him the day off—well, technically, he realized, his birthday began at midnight, and he’d still be working then, killing this foreigner, but that shouldn’t take long.

But the day’s events had frustrated the Dodger. He didn’t like going back to Neola—except on Halloween, of course—and he didn’t like being thwarted while stalking someone. It was twice now that he’d decided to kill this ex-P.I., twice that he’d prepared himself to kill a woman with the P.I. as well, and twice he’d been thwarted. The Artful Dodger didn’t like to be thwarted—especially when it was by the Major or his men. Even seeing and hearing the old Huey helicopter again had given the Dodger an acid stomach.

So now he had to hang around Buffalo for a full eight hours before he could do his job and get out. And it was raining and cold. It always seemed to be rainy and cold in this damned town—when it wasn’t snowy and cold. The Dodger’s joints ached—he was getting older, would officially be a year older in a few hours—and his many burn scars always itched when it rained for a long time.

Essentially, he was in a lousy mood. He considered going to a titty bar, but it was the night before his birthday night and he wanted to save the excitement, let it build.

So as the evening began to darken in the rain and the streetlights were coming on and the light Sunday traffic had all but disappeared, the Dodger drove south of downtown, under the elevated interstate, across the narrow bridge onto the island, through the empty area of grain elevators where the air smelled of burned Cheerios, then south to where the triangular intersection of Ohio and Chicago Streets ended with the abandoned Harbor Inn—the P.I.’s hideaway, the little love nest where the Dodger had watched and waited all of last night for Kurtz and the Farino woman.

Odds were that the Major had terminated this minor irritation this afternoon, but if not, if the P.I. and his big-boobed girlfriend were back here, then the Dodger was going to do a little freelancing, and if the Boss didn’t like it, well…the Boss didn’t have to know about it.

The Harbor Inn was dark. The Dodger drove by slowly three times, noting again the almost-but-not-quite-hidden video cameras—one on the rear wall of the triangular building overlooking where Kurtz had parked his Pinto before (the space was empty now), another high above the front door, one under a rain gutter on the Chicago Street side, the last one above the fire escapes on the Ohio Street approach. A lot of security for an abandoned flophouse.

The Dodger parked his truck a block or so from where he’d had to deal with the two black kids. Then he took a small backpack from between the seats, locked the vehicle, and walked back through the rain.

There was a blind spot for the camera covering the front of the Harbor Inn. If he crossed the street from the abandoned gas station just so, and didn’t walk more than six feet to either side of a certain line, then the front camera would be blocked by the old metal lighthouse on the sign itself.

Once under the overhang—and presumably not yet on any monitor or videotape—the Dodger ignored the front door since the P.I. would certainly have telltales there. Securing the backpack, the Dodger crouched low, jumped straight up, caught the sharp edge of the old hotel sign over him, swung twice back and forth, his legs kicking higher each time—continuing to keep the metal lighthouse between him and the surveillance camera a floor above—and then swung all the way up, doing a complete flip and coming to rest on top of the sign, with his back to the metal lighthouse.

The old sign structure creaked and groaned, but did not collapse. The rusted lighthouse with “Harbor Inn” painted on it was about seven feet tall, was hollow and was made of cheap metal. The Dodger kept his hands on it while he worked his way around it, under the camera’s field of view now, and crouched outside one of the three big windows looking out on the intersection of Chicago and Ohio.

It was dark inside, but the glow of monitors in there showed the Dodger that the room was empty.

He propped the backpack by his knee, removed a suction cup and glass cutter on a compass, cut a six-centimeter hole in the glass, carefully laid the circle of glass on the sign base, returned the equipment to his pack, and listened—no audible alarm sounded—and then reached in, unlatched the old window, and shoved it up. The ancient sash groaned and protested, but the window slowly rose.

The Dodger—as agile as Spiderman—swung in and pulled the backpack in after him. He hoisted the pack to his back again, carefully lowered the window, held the silenced 9-millimeter Beretta in his hand, and moved into the darkness to find or wait for Mr. Kurtz, the elusive P.I.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-FOUR

Kurtz wanted nothing so much as to stop by his place, get out of his wet and ruined clothes, take a hot shower, change the bandage on his head, find some clean clothes, pull his only other handgun from its hiding place in the rearmost room of the Harbor Inn, and show up at the meeting with Farino and Gonzaga looking and feeling more like a human being, albeit an armed one.

He had time for none of that.

Traffic was light since it was Sunday evening, but he’d left Curly’s Restaurant late and had to head straight for his office on Chippewa if he was going to get there before the others. As it was, he came out of the alley where he’d parked the Pinto and reached the outside door just as Angelina and two new bodyguards pulled up in a black SUV and parked across the street. All three came over at once. The two new personal bodyguards were bigger, heavier, and more the comb-your-hair-with-buttered-toast Sicilian type.

Kurtz paused before unlocking the street door. “Just you,” he said.

“We’re going to look at the place first,” said Angelina.

“You don’t trust me?” said Kurtz. “After last night and…”

“Just open the fucking door.”

They followed him up the steep stairway and waited below him while be unlocked the office door and turned on the lights. The two goombahs brushed past him.

“Be my guest,” said Kurtz.

The two quickly searched the office, looking through the warm back room with the servers and checking out the small bathroom. They were efficient, Kurtz had to give them that. On the second quick sweep, one of them looked under Arlene’s desk and said, “Mounted holster set-up here, Ms. Ferrara. No gun.”

Angelina looked at Kurtz. “My secretary’s,” he said. “She works here late at night.” He thought, Shit, I was counting on that Magnum being there.

The don’s daughter waved the two bodyguards out and Kurtz closed the door behind them. When he turned around, Angelina had her Compact Witness .45 in her hand. “We going to my place again?” he said.

“Shut up.”

“Can I sit down?” He pointed to his chair and desk. Suddenly it was either a case of sit down or fall down.

Angelina nodded and gestured him over to his chair. She sat on Arlene’s desk and set the pistol next to her. “What is all this mystery crap, Joe?”

Well, at least I’m back to Joe, thought Kurtz. He glanced at his watch. Gonzaga would be here in a minute or two.

“I’ll tell you the whole story when your pal Gonzaga gets here. But I needed to ask you something first.”

“Ask.”

“Word on the street—hell, word everywhere—is that either you or Gonzaga have brought in the Dane and he’s already here. I think it’s you that brought him in for a job.”

Angelina Farino Ferrara said nothing. Outside, the light was waning. Neon signs glowed through the not-quite-closed blinds. Traffic hissed.

“I want to make a deal…” began Kurtz.

“If you’re worried that you’re on some list,” said Angelina, “don’t. You’re not worth a hundred-thousand-dollars for a hit.”

Kurtz shook his head and had to blink at the pain. “Who is?” he said. “No, I had a different deal in mind.” He told her quickly.

It was Angelina Farino Ferrara’s turn to blink. “You expecting to die suddenly, Joe?”

Kurtz shrugged.

“And you won’t tell me the name?” she said.

“I’m not sure yet.”

She set the Compact Witness in her purse. The downstairs door buzzed on Arlene’s intercom and Kurtz could see Gonzaga and three of his men on the video monitor.

“You’re talking a hundred-thousand-dollar gift,” said Angelina. “Maybe more.”

“No, I’m not,” said Kurtz. The doorbell buzzed twice more and then stayed on as Gonzaga’s man leaned on it. “I’m talking a simple request Either he’ll do it—probably as a gift to you—or he won’t. I’m just asking you to ask him.”

“And you trust me to?”

“I have to,” said Kurtz. The buzzing was hurting his head.

“And you really aren’t going to tell Toma and me what this is about tonight unless I agree?”

Kurtz shrugged again.

“All right,” said Angelina. “I won’t pay for it, but I’ll ask him. If this big news of yours is worth it to me.”

Kurtz walked over and buzzed Gonzaga and his men up.

After the obligatory search of the office—Gonzaga’s boys also turned up Arlene’s empty Magnum holster—the bodyguards were shown out, the door was locked, the lights were turned low except for Kurtz’s desklamp, and he told his story. Angelina remained sitting on Arlene’s desk. Toma Gonzaga paced near the windows, occasionally pulling down a blind to peer out as Kurtz spoke. At first they each asked some questions, but then they just listened. Kurtz started with him and Rigby arriving in Neola, and wrapped it up with Sheriff Gerey showing him to the city limits.

When Kurtz was done, Gonzaga stepped away from the window. “This Major said that it was a war?”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. “As if you’ve been exchanging casualties for months or years.”

Gonzaga scowled at Angelina Farino Ferrara. “You know anything about that?”

“You know I don’t. If I’d known that asshole existed, he’d need more than a wheelchair now. He’d be in a coffin.”

Gonzaga turned back to Kurtz. “What was he talking about? Is he nuts?”

“I don’t mink so,” said Kurtz. “I think someone’s playing two ends against the middle here.”

“Who?” said Gonzaga and the woman at the same time.

Kurtz held up his empty hands. “Who the hell knows? If it’s not one of you—and I don’t see how it would benefit either one of you to play that game—then it’s probably someone in the Major’s camp.”

“Trinh,” said Angelina.

“Or the sheriff,” said Gonzaga. “Gerey.”

“The sheriffs already on the payroll,” said Kurtz. “Hell, half the town is. I told you the little burg has a Mercedes and a Lexus dealership.”

“Maybe the sheriff got greedy,” said Angelina. “Or the Colonel.”

Kurtz shrugged. “Either way, the Major’s making his move tomorrow. You’re supposed to be in the sheriff’s office in Neola at high noon.”

Gonzaga laughed softly and sat on the arm of the old sofa. “Does the Major think this is a fucking Western?”

Kurtz said nothing.

“They’re going to kill us,” Angelina said softly. “Us and anyone we bring down there with us.”

“Well, sure,” said Kurtz. “That goes without saying.”

Gonzaga stood again. “Are you two nuts? Knock off the heads of two Families? Would this Major be so crazy to think that he could get away with that? Hell, you can’t even hit a made man without the wrath of the Five Families coming down on you. How could he hope to hit…”

“Weren’t you listening to Kurtz?” interrupted Angelina. “This Major and Colonel and the rest of them have some sort of juice. Federal.” She looked at Kurtz. “You think it’s FBI? Homeland Security?”

“It’s been there for too long for Homeland Security,” said Kurtz. “Goes back almost thirty years.”

“CIA,” said Gonzaga.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Angelina. “Why would the CIA run interference for a heroin ring? Even a pissant operation like this one.”

“We don’t know how pissant it is,” said Gonzaga. “Western New York, North and Western Pennsylvania. Hell, maybe they’re that network we keep hearing about in Ohio.”

“Still…”

“Does it matter right now why the CIA or some other secret government agency’s been keeping the Feds off them?” asked Kurtz. “Major O’Toole’s and Colonel Trinh’s network is spread all over the Mideast and Southeast Asia according to what Rigby King told me. During the Vietnam War, the Major set up a Triad to run drugs out of the Golden Triangle. Him for the U.S. connection… Colonel Trinh for the Vietnamese end…and some unknown Third Man, probably CIA, to provide transport and political cover. Who the hell knows what favors the Major’s doing for who? Who cares? What you two have to decide…and soon…is what to do before tomorrow.”

Gonzaga paced to the window, looked through the blind, and returned to sit on the sofa arm. Angelina ran a lacquered nail over her full lower lip, but didn’t bite it.

“We can do nothing,” said Gonzaga. “Wait Offer to negotiate—not in Neola. Hit them at a time of our choosing.”

Angelina shook her head. “If we don’t go tomorrow, the Major suggested, the war’s on, Toma. You know that. They know that.”

Gonzaga shrugged. “All right. Then the war’s on. We fight it. We win it.”

“And lose how many more dealers and junkies and button men?” said Kurtz. “You prepared for a long war? The Major is. And don’t forget that new term we’ve all learned—decapitation strike.”

“What are you talking about?” said Angelina.

“I’m talking about that hit that took place right out there less man twenty-four hours ago.” Kurtz jerked his thumb toward the windows, the street beyond. “I don’t think whoever took out your two top bodyguards was after them. I think he was after you.”

“You’re guessing.”

“Sure,” said Kurtz. “But I think I’m right. You want to bet your life that I’m wrong?”

“We’ll bring in more people from New York and New Jersey,” Gonzaga said softly, as if speaking to himself. He stood suddenly and looked at Angelina. “Why are we discussing tactics in front of him?”

Angelina smiled. “Because ‘him’ is the one who found out what’s going on after we’ve been fucking around in the dark for months. And I think ‘him’ has a plan, don’t you, Joe?”

Kurtz nodded.

“Who pays for this ‘plan’?” said Toma Gonzaga.

“You do,” said Kurtz. “And the price is seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

Gonzaga laughed, but the noise carried no hint of amusement. “To you, naturally.”

“Not a cent to me,” said Kurtz. “Not even the hundred thousand you offered me if I found this perp—which I have, by the way. It just happens to be a small army of perps.”

“Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars is insane,” said Gonzaga. “Out of the question.”

“Is it, Toma?” Angelina crossed her arms. “You’re talking about a long war. You’re talking about disrupting all our business for weeks or months. You’re talking about having to buy off cops and maybe media to keep it quiet, and about bringing in more manpower from New York and New Jersey—that’ll certainly make the Five Families happy. And do we want Carmine and the others thinking we can’t run our own shop out here?”

Gonzaga put his palms flat on Arlene’s desk and leaned toward Angelina Farino Ferrara. “Three quarters of a million dollars?” he whispered.

“We haven’t heard Joe’s plan yet. Maybe it’s brilliant.”

“Maybe it’s fucked,” said Gonzaga.

“We won’t know if we don’t hear it. Joe?”

Speaking slowly and calmly, checking his watch only once, Kurtz told them the plan. When he was finished he stood, walked to the small refrigerator next to the sofa, and took out a bottle of water. “Anyone want one?” he said.

Gonzaga and Angelina only stared at him.

The male don spoke first. “You can’t fucking be serious.”

Kurtz said nothing.

“He is fucking serious,” Angelina said softly. “Christ.”

“Tonight?” said Gonzaga, pronouncing each syllable as if he’d never beard the word before.

“It would have to be, wouldn’t it?” said Angelina. “Kurtz is right And we don’t have much time to decide.”

Kurtz looked at his watch again. “You have less than a minute to decide.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” snarled Toma Gonzaga.

The downstairs buzzer made its raucous noise.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-FIVE

The conference with Baby Doc Skrzypczyk—whose two men searched longer, harder, and more thoroughly than either Gonzaga’s or Angelina’s had—lasted longer than Kurtz had imagined it would. There were a lot of details. Evidently Gonzaga and Farino Ferrara wanted their money’s worth in exchange for a mere three-quarters of a million dollars.

No one shook hands when Baby Doc’s bodyguards left. No one spoke. Kurtz made no introductions. He doubted if the three had ever met, but they knew enough about each other. The powerfully built Lackawanna boss simply took off his expensive, camel-hair topcoat, hung it on the coatrack, sat on the sprung couch, looked at Toma Gonzaga and Angelina Farino Ferrara, and said, “Have you decided that it’s worth the money to you? Time’s wasting here either way.”

Angelina looked at Baby Doc, then at Gonzaga, and chewed her lip for a second. “I’m in,” she said at last.

“Yeah,” said Toma Gonzaga.

“Yeah?” said Baby Doc, sounding like a schoolteacher prompting a student. “What does that mean?”

“That means I’m in for my half. If you can provide all that stuff tonight. And if you don’t have any more demands.”

“I do, actually,” said Baby Doc. “I want to be able to take over and run the Major’s empire if I can.”

Well, thought Kurtz, there goes the old ballgame.

Angelina shot a glance at Gonzaga where he sat on the far edge of Arlene’s desk. “What do you mean?” asked Toma Gonzaga, obviously understanding but stalling for a moment to think.

“I mean what I said. I want you to acknowledge my right to take over the Major’s business operations down there. I don’t need help… I just need your word that if I can do it, you won’t try to come in and take it away from me.”

Angelina and Gonzaga looked at each other again. “You’re going into sale of…the product?” said Angelina.

“I will if I can take over the Major’s and Colonel’s business,” said Baby Doc. “It doesn’t have to compete with yours. You and I both know that it’s small potatoes…rural stuff.”

“Several million dollars a year worth of small potatoes,” said Gonzaga. The don was rubbing his cheek while he thought.

“Yeah,” said Baby Doc. And waited.

Angelina shot Gonzaga a final glance, they born nodded as if they were using some sort of special Mafia telepathy, and she said, “All right You have our word. You manage to take over that network, you can have it. Just don’t bring it north of Kissing Bridge.”

Kurtz knew that Kissing Bridge was a ski area about halfway between Buffalo and Neola.

“Done,” said Baby Doc. “Let’s talk about how this gets done.”

Kurtz had been working on a sketch of the Major’s house and grounds, and now he moved to the photocopier behind Arlene’s desk, got the machine warmed up, and made three copies. They all studied the sketch.

“How do you know the guard will be out here in this cupola near the little train tracks?” asked Gonzaga.

“I noticed when they were taking me into the house from the heliport that the cupola had a porta-potty next to it and one of those heavy-duty, gas-powered heaters inside it. It’s the logical place for a sentry.”

“Where else?” asked Angelina. “Here at this little gatehouse at the top of the driveway before it curls around the back of the house?”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. “One guy there. That little gatehouse doesn’t have a gate or barrier. All that stuff is down the hill.”

“Anyone on the terrace?” asked Baby Doc.

Kurtz shrugged. “I doubt it. No one’s going to be coming up that stairway. Most of their people are down the hill.”

They talked for another hour. Finally Baby Doc rose. “Any other details left, speak now… I’ve only got about five hours to fill this order, you know.”

“A medic,” said Kurtz.

“What?” said Angelina.

“I need someone along who knows how to give some medical treatment,” said Kurtz. “If Rigby King is alive down there—and if we can keep her alive during the gun-fight at the OK Corral—I want to get her back to Erie County Medical Center. I don’t want her to bleed to death on the ride back.”

“Why?” said Angelina.

Kurtz looked at her. “Why what?”

“Why do you think she might still be alive? What reason would Major O’Toole and Colonel Trinh have for keeping her alive?”

Kurtz sighed and rubbed his head. He was very tired. Every part of him ached and he realized that he’d managed to screw up his back during his butt-first descent down the ziggurat. “They want me to kill Rigby,” he said at last.

“What do you mean?” asked Baby Doc.

“They don’t mind taking on the Five Families after they waste Gonzaga and Farino tomorrow in Neola,” said Kurtz, “but I don’t think their juice necessarily extends to Buffalo P.D. Homicide. Plus, they don’t expect me there tomorrow at the sheriff’s office, so they’ll need to kill me as well. It’s tidier if they rig it so it looks like I killed Detective King—probably in my own place up here. Maybe she’ll get a shot off to kill me before she dies. They have both of our guns and they used mine to shoot her in the leg.”

“M.E.,” enunciated Gonzaga—meaning that the Medical Examiner would determine the times of death to within an hour or two, so the Major didn’t want King dead days before the hypothetical shoot-out with Kurtz. They had to die at the same time.

“Yeah,” said Kurtz.

“How romantic,” said Angelina. “A regular Romeo and Juliet.”

Kurtz ignored her. “Can you get a medic and some medical supplies on the list?” he asked Baby Doc. “A stretcher, bandages, an IV drip, some morphine? And a doctor?”

The standing man coughed into his fist.

“Is that a yes?” said Kurtz.

“It’s a yes,” said Baby Doc Skrzypczyk. “But a yes with some irony in it. The only doctor I can get who’s guaranteed to take the risk and to keep his mouth shut is a Yemeni, like our mutual friend Yasein Goba. Is that acceptable, Mr. Kurtz?”

“Yeah, that’s acceptable.” What the fuck.

“Midnight then, at Mr. Gonzaga’s place,” said Baby Doc and barely nodded to Gonzaga and Angelina. He went out the door and down the stairs.

“Who’s Yasein Goba?” asked Angelina.

Kurtz shook his head and winced at the motion. He’d never learn. “It doesn’t matter,” he said through the pain.

A minute later, Toma Gonzaga said, “Midnight then,” and went down the long stairs to join his bodyguards. Angelina lingered as Kurtz shut off the lights.

“What?” he said. “You waiting for refreshments?”

“Come home with me,” she said softly. “You look like shit.”

“What are you talking about, ‘Come home with me?’ You kidnapping me at gunpoint again?”

“Knock that off, Joe. You really look awful. When’s the last time you ate?”

“Lunch,” he said. He didn’t really remember what he ate with Rigby earlier this endless day, but he clearly remembered throwing up by the Pinto while the sheriff and deputy watched and laughed.

“Do you have food at home?” she said.

“Of course I have some food at home.” He realized that he’d better stop at Ted’s Hot Dogs or somewhere to grab something on the way back to the Harbor Inn.

“Liar. Come on to the Towers. I’ll fix us steak. I have one of those good indoor grills, so we can actually grill it.”

Kurtz’s stomach cramped. It had been cramping, he realized, but he hadn’t really paid attention to it because of all the more urgent aches and pains.

“I gotta change clothes,” he said dully.

“I have clothes your size at the penthouse. You can shower and shave and brush your teeth while I get the steaks on.”

He looked at the don’s daughter—the acting don now. He wasn’t going to ask why she had men’s clothes his size in her closets at Marina Towers. It wasn’t his business. “No thanks,” he said. “I’ve got other stuff to do…”

“You’ve got to eat something and get a couple of hours sleep before we go tonight,” said Angelina. “In the shape you’re in right now, you’re going to be more a liability than an asset. Eat, sleep, and I’ve got some pills that will pep you up for a few hours like you’ve never been pepped up before.”

“I bet you do,” said Kurtz.

He followed her out the door and down the stairs. It was still raining out, but the wind had died down and the rain was just a light drizzle. Kurtz looked up to check the cloud cover—Baby Doc had said that would be important—but the neon along Chippewa Street made it impossible to tell what was going on up there.

“Come on, Joe, I’ll drive you.”

Kurtz shook his head slowly. “I’ll drive myself. But I’ll follow you.” He turned toward the alley but Angelina Farino Ferrara’s voice stopped him.

“Kurtz,” she said. “This whole thing tonight isn’t about saving that female cop, is it? Damsel in distress and all that crap?”

“You have to be kidding,” said Kurtz.

“She looks like she might be worth saving,” said Angelina. “That cute smile, big eyes, big tits. But that would mean that while you have a hard-on for her, you’re going soft on us, and we don’t need that right now.”

“When did you ever see Rigby King?” asked Kurtz.

“I see lots of things you don’t think I see,” said Angelina.

“Whatever,” said Kurtz and walked down the dark alley to his car.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-SIX

The Dodger didn’t mind waiting. He was good at it. He’d done it for years in the bughouse in Rochester—just sitting, reptile-like, not even staring, waiting for nothing and knowing that nothing was coming. It had served him well in the years since, running chores for the Boss, waiting for targets to finish whatever they were doing and to come to him. He didn’t mind waiting here for the P.I. who might or might not come, who might or might not still be alive.

He left the lights off, of course. After making sure that his entrance hadn’t triggered any alarms, the Dodger took thick, clear tape from his pack and covered the small circle he’d cut from the window. It was already chilly in the abandoned inn, but this Kurtz might feel a draft when he came in downstairs. Ex-cons were always sensitive to changes in their cages.

Using the small, shielded penlight from his pack, the Dodger had gone through the entire three stories and seventeen rooms of the moldering old hotel. He’d found Kurtz’s sleeping area and odd little library room, of course, but he’d also found the subtle tripwires and telltales in the triangular room on the first floor, and the two hiding places for weapons on the second—the empty niche over the door molding in the room next to Kurtz’s sleeping room, and an even more clever nook under the floor of the coldest, most broken-down back room. Kurtz had hidden a 9mm Colt and ammunition in plastic wrap and oily rags there. The Dodger took the gun and went back to the front upstairs room—staying out of the light of the flickering black-and-white monitors—to wait.

And Kurtz did not come. And Kurtz still did not come. The Dodger began imagining all the ways the Major might have killed the P.I. and his top-heavy cop girlfriend. But he hoped he hadn’t The Dodger wanted Kurtz to come home. But still he did not come.

It was sometime after ten-thirty that the Dodger’s phone vibrated against his leg. He answered it with a whispered, “Yeah,” his eyes still on the video monitors showing the rainslicked streets and walls outside.

“Where are you?” It was the Boss.

“At the P.I.’s.” The Dodger tried not to lie to the Boss. The Boss had ways of knowing when the Dodger lied.

“Kurtz’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Is he there?”

“Not yet.”

The Dodger heard the Boss expell a breath. He hated it when the Boss grew angry at him. “Never mind the P.I.,” said the Boss. “You need to get up to the shopping mall in Niagara Falls. We don’t want you to miss our foreign friend.”

It took a second for the Dodger to remember that the Boss was talking about the woman coining across the border tonight. “Plenty of time,” whispered the Dodger. He didn’t need to meet her until midnight And he didn’t want her body lying in his pest control van longer than it had to.

“No, go now,” said the Boss. “You can wait up there. Then you’re off duty for a whole day and night.”

“Yeah,” said the Dodger, smiling as he thought about tomorrow.

“Happy Birthday,” said the Boss. “I’ll have something special for you when I see you on Tuesday.”

“Thanks, Boss,” said the Dodger. He was always touched by the Boss’s gifts. Every year it was something special, something the Dodger would never have thought to get for himself.

“Go on now,” said the Boss. “Get going.”

“Okay, Boss.” The Dodger broke the connection, lifted his pack, slipped the Beretta and its silencer into his specially rigged holster, and left the Harbor Inn by the window and fire escape on the north, where he had dismantled Kurtz’s simple alarms.

Twelve miles away, in the mostly Polish and Italian section of the suburb of Cheektowaga, Arlene DeMarco was preparing to head for the closed Niagara Falls shopping mall to pick up the girl named Aysha. It was only ten minutes after ten P.M., but Arlene believed in arriving early for important things.

She took 190 up and around, over Grand Island, across the toll bridge, and hooked left onto the Moses Expressway past the tower of mist declaring the American Falls and right into the city of Niagara Falls. There was almost no traffic this next-to-last night of October. The rain had stopped but Arlene had to use her Buick’s wipers to clear her windshield of the spray from the Falls.

Having grown up in Buffalo, Arlene had seen Niagara Falls, New York, go from being a comfortable, kitschy old place reflecting the roadhouses and dowdy tourist hotels of mid-century America to being a heap of rubble resembling Berlin after WWII—almost everything leveled for urban restoration—before finally becoming the convention-center wasteland it was today. If you wanted to see a pretty and classy and up-to-date city of Niagara Falls, you had to cross the Rainbow Bridge to the Canadian side.

But Arlene didn’t care about urban planning this night. She drove down Niagara Street to the Rainbow Centre Mall just a block from the double-wasteland of the Information Center and Convention Center, surrounded by their moats of empty parking lots. The Rainbow Centre Mall had a smaller parking area, with just a sprinkling of vehicles in it this Sunday night—cars belonging to the custodial crews and security people, no doubt. But a retaining wall blocked this part of the lot from the view of the street—from the view of any passing police vehicles late on a Sunday night, she realized—and Joe’s instructions had been to wait for the girl, Aysha, to be dropped off near the main, north doors of the mall here.

Arlene patted her large purse, checking for the fifth or sixth time that the big Magnum revolver was in there. It was. She’d felt foolish taking it from the office, but Joe had rarely sent her out on tasks like this, and although she vaguely understood this Yemeni girl’s connection to recent events, she wasn’t at all clear as to what the other factors might be. Arlene just knew that Joe was doing something important tonight if he was sending her to pick up Aysha. So while Arlene wasn’t alarmed or unduly nervous, she did have the loaded pistol in her purse, along with a can of Mace, her cell phone, her former and illegally but convincingly updated ID showing her to be a member of the Erie County District Attorney’s office—as well as the carry permit for the Magnum. She also had some fresh fruit, two water bottles, a pack of Marlboros, her trusty Bic lighter, a small Yemeni-English dictionary she’d picked up yesterday with some difficulty, a Thermos of coffee, and the better and smaller of the two pairs of binoculars from the office.

Arlene took her time choosing where to wait—she didn’t want to be spotted by a mall security patrol and picked up—and finally decided on a spot far back near the Dumpsters, between two old cars that had obviously been parked there all night She settled in, lowered the window, and lit a Marlboro.

It was about twenty minutes later, just about eleven P.M., when the van entered the parking lot, circled once—Arlene slid low in her seat, out of sight—and then parked near the four workers’ cars closer to the front door of the silent mall. Because the vehicle was at right angles to Arlene’s Buick, she was able to use the binoculars to check it out.

It was a pest control van. On its side was a cartoon of a long-nosed insect gasping and falling in a cartoon cloud of pesticide. The driver had not emerged. His face was in shadow, but Arlene kept the binoculars trained on his silhouette until he leaned forward over the steering wheel to peer at the shopping mall, and for a moment the tall, mall lights illuminated him clearly.

For an instant, Arlene thought that the man’s face was wildly tattooed or covered with white streaks and swirls. Then she realized that it was covered with burn scars. He was wearing a baseball cap, but his eyes caught the sodium vapor lamps and seemed to glow orangely, like a cat’s.

As Arlene sat there, transfixed, the binoculars steady, the burned man’s head suddenly turned her way—swiveling as smoothly as an owl’s—and he stared directly at her.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-SEVEN

Kurtz didn’t know why he agreed to follow Angelina Farino Ferrara to her home atop Marina Towers.

He told himself that it was because he knew that Detective Paul Kemper might be hunting for him in the next few hours, almost certainly knowing that Rigby King had started her day with Kurtz and wondering now where the hell she was.

He told himself that it was because he really needed Angelina to agree to do what he’d asked for earlier, and it was not time to offend her. His life might depend on her decision.

He told himself that it was because he was hungry.

In the end, he told himself that he was full of shit.

The dinner—perfectly grilled steak, just rare enough, fresh salad with some sort of mustardy dressing, baked potatoes, fresh and crisply prepared green beans, fresh bread, tall glasses of ice water—was fantastic. It didn’t even make Kurtz want to throw up again, which was more than he could say about any food he’d had since the previous Wednesday.

Angelina had insisted, and he hadn’t resisted, on Kurtz showering, shaving, brushing his teeth, and getting into clean clothes before dinner. The punishingly hot shower—Angelina had installed no fewer than three pounding nozzles in this huge, glass-enclosed guest room shower—made Kurtz ache all the worse, but he almost fell asleep standing there. When he came out of the bathroom naked, he found his old rags gone and the fresh clothes laid out on the bed: an expensive silk, black turtleneck that seemed to weigh nothing, a butter-soft pair of black tweed pants that fit as if someone had tailored them for him, a new belt, clean socks, and black Mephisto boots in his size. There was also a black, uninsulated windshell-parka on the bed; Kurtz tried it on and found that it was made of some soft fabric that didn’t crinkle or make any nylon noise when he moved—a factor that might be important in the next few hours.

Kurtz had tossed the windshell back onto the guest bed and gone out to the main room of the penthouse to eat dinner.

“Normally we’d have wine,” said Angelina, lighting a candle, “but we’re not going to mix that with the pills I’m going to give you when you wake up.”

“Wake up?” said Kurtz, glancing at his watch—the only thing other than his wallet that he’d kept.

“You need to sleep a couple of hours before we leave tonight.”

“You’re going?” said Kurtz. It had been agreed that the Gonzagas and the Farinos would “each contribute two people” to the night’s foray, but Kurtz hadn’t heard Angelina or the other don specify that they were going.

Now Angelina just raised an eyebrow at Kurtz. Finally, as she was passing the steak, she said, “It wouldn’t be much of that promised bonding experience if Toma and I didn’t both go, now would it?”

They ate in silence at the polished rosewood table near the freestanding fireplace. Angelina’s penthouse filled the entire top story of Marina Towers and there were few view-blocking walls in the central living and dining areas. Over the woman’s shoulder, Kurtz could see the lights of ships out in Lake Erie and entering the Niagara River, and behind him, the electric skyline of Buffalo became brighter as the drizzle ended and the clouds lifted. By the time they were finished with dessert—a flaky apple cobbler—Kurtz could see the stars and crescent moon between the scudding clouds.

She led him to a corner on the Lake side where another gas fireplace burned. The chairs and a broad couch here were in a conversation cluster, but Angelina tossed the couch cushions onto the thick carpet behind the couch, pulled a pillow and two blankets from a cupboard, lay one blanket on the broad couch and set the other on the back. “It’s only a little after eight,” she said. “You need to get some sleep.”

“I don’t…” began Kurtz.

“Shut up, Kurtz,” she said. Then, more softly, “You don’t know what a fucking wreck you are. My life may depend on you tonight, and I can’t trust a zombie.”

Kurtz looked at the couch doubtfully.

“I’ll wake you in plenty of time,” said Angelina Farino Ferrara. “Right now I have to take the elevator down one floor and decide which of my merry men gets to go with me on our half-assed expedition tonight.”

“What are your criteria?” asked Kurtz. A long, lighted ship moved slowly toward the southwest out on the Lake.

“Smart but not too smart,” said Angelina. “Able to kill when he has to, but also able to know when not to. Most of all, expendable.” She gestured toward the couch as she walked away. “In other words, I’m looking for another Joe Kurtz.”

When she was gone, Kurtz thought for a minute, then took off his new Mephisto boots, set the alarm on his watch, and lay down on the couch for a minute. He wouldn’t sleep—a couple of hours would just make him more tired—but it felt good just to lie here for a few minutes and let the pounding in his head back off a bit.

Kurtz woke to Angelina shaking his shoulder. His watch was buzzing but he’d slept through it. He looked at the glowing dial—11:10. Kurtz wasn’t sure he’d ever felt so groggy. He tried to focus on the woman, but she was now also wearing all black, and all he could see in the dim firelight was her glowing face.

“Here,” she said, offering him a glass of water and two blue pills.

“What are they?”

“Don’t worry about it. Just take them. I was serious about you needing to be conscious enough to be worth hauling along tonight.”

He swallowed the pills, put on his boots, and went into the guest room bathroom to use the facilities and splash water on his face. When he came out, wearing the windbreaker shell with his cell phone in the pocket—he’d left Gonzaga’s at the office—Angelina was holding a 9mm Browning semiauto.

“Here,” she said, handing it to him. “Ten in the magazine, one already up the spout.” She handed him two extra clips and an expensive belt holster, its leather the smoothest Kurtz had ever felt.

Kurtz slipped the extra magazines into the windbreaker’s pocket and attached the holster on the left side of his belt under the unbuttoned windshell, the Browning’s grip backward where he could reach across his body for it. It was his fastest pull.

They drove to the rendezvous site in two SUVs—Angelina driving one and the goomba she’d chosen, a lean, serious-looking bodyguard named Campbell, following in the other. Kurtz had asked for one van or SUV to use as an ambulance if he got Rigby back alive. Or as a hearse if he didn’t.

“Shit,” said Kurtz. He’d forgotten to call Arlene to tell her to forget the Aysha pickup. Something didn’t feel right about that rendezvous, although Kurtz couldn’t think what. Whatever it was, it wasn’t worth risking Arlene for. He’d figure out this little puzzle without the Yemeni girl.

It was 11:23 when he rang Arlene’s cell phone, and he got a busy signal. That wasn’t like her. He kept hitting redial until they reached their destination, a large industrial and storage complex near the tracks less than two miles from Brie County Medical Center. Gonzaga owned the complex and Kurtz had asked for the proximity to the hospital. They’d humored him.

Waiting Gonzaga guards opened no fewer than three gates before the two SUVs drove into the center of the complex—a rain-slickened loading area a hundred yards across, flanked on three sides by the dark factory buildings.

Arlene’s line was still busy. “Shit,” said Kurtz and put the phone away.

“That’s why I like traveling with you, Kurtz,” said Angelina. “The conversation.”

Toma Gonzaga rolled in next in a black Suburban. He had three of his men with him, but only one—the heavy-lidded but obviously alert bodyguard Kurtz had seen in the limo with Gonzaga—was going on tonight’s raid with the don. Kurtz reached through his headache to find the man’s name… Bobby. Everyone was wearing black trousers and turtlenecks. It was like some formal event for mafiosa. People began unloading things from the various SUVs when yet another pair of the big vehicles showed up. These were Baby Doc’s men and they had the largest number of crates and metal boxes to unload. Everyone was armed, most with automatic weapons, and the boxes being unloaded from Baby Doc’s vehicles were mostly army-stenciled ammunition and weapons containers.

It’s beginning to look like some sport-utility commercial from hell here, thought Kurtz. He almost chuckled out loud before he realized that his headache had faded about as far as it was going to, most of his early aches and pains were gone, and he felt great—alive, alert, eager, ready to fly to Neola under his own power and take on the Major and his men with his bare hands if he had to.

I’ve got to ask Angelina for the recipe for those blue pills, thought Kurtz.

Then, a few minutes before midnight. Baby Doc himself arrived in a Long Ranger helicopter. The thing buzzed in from the north, circled the enclosed compound twice, and set down next to the gaggle of SUVs. Kurtz was astounded at how large the helicopter was—and at how much noise it made. We’re supposed to sneak up on the Major and his men in this fucking thing? was his first thought.

Well, this had all been Kurtz’s idea. He stepped back with the others as the dark-green Bell Long Ranger settled onto its skids amidst a cyclone of dust and whirling debris. It looked like Baby Doc, in the front right pilot’s seat, was the only one aboard. He killed the jet turbines, the howl lowered itself to a whine and became a whisper, the big rotors slowed, and Baby Doc pulled off headphones and a mike, disappeared for a second, and then slid the big side cargo door back and to the side. He gestured impatiently for his men to begin loading some of the boxes.

The interior of the Long Ranger had its six seats pushed aside against the outside bulkheads or fuselage or whatever. The central floor was empty and had been covered with a plastic tarp taped down all around.

I wonder why… Kurtz’s thoughts began and then ended with an Oh, yeah. This chopper was a rental, and Baby Doc certainly didn’t want to return it with blood and gore everywhere. He’ll probably lose his damage deposit, thought Kurtz and had to hold back another snicker.

Baby Doc stood in the doorway and looked at Angelina and Gonzaga. “You folks have anything for me?”

Campbell went back to his SUV and carried a flight bag to the chopper. One of Gonzaga’s men did the same thing with a nylon backpack. Baby Doc nodded to one of his men, who opened the bag, counted the three-quarters of a million dollars, nodded to his boss, and carried the bags back to their vehicle. Kurtz wondered idly where even mafia dons found three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in cash lying around on a Sunday evening.

“Listen up,” said Baby Doc. “Here’s what you’re getting for your money tonight.” The Lackawanna longshoreman and mob boss was wearing his old green Army flight suit—the velcroed-on name badge read Lt. Skrzypczyk—and it still fit him after twelve years. He wore a regulation-issue pilot’s tan shoulder holster and what looked to be a service .45 tucked in it. Baby Doc began opening the olive green boxes and handing out gear, beginning with canvas shoulder bags to stow the loose crap in.

One of his men pulled automatic weapons from the longest carton—Mp5s Kurtz saw, guessing from the tubular stocks, although his familiarity with Army weaponry started and ended with being qualified on M-16s and sidearms. His weapon of choice as an MP so many years ago was the baton. Baby Doc’s man offered one short rifle to each person going on the raid.

“Keep your army toys,” said Toma Gonzaga. He and his man, Bobby, held up sawed-off 12-gauge shotguns.

Angelina’s bodyguard, Campbell, took an Mp5 for himself and one for his boss, slinging both of them over his shoulder.

“The smaller clips hold thirty rounds, the larger ones a hundred and twenty rounds each,” said Baby Doc. “Carry as many as you can stuff into the ditty bag I gave you…”

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” whispered Angelina as the larger banana clips were handed out and stowed. “We’re really going to war.”

“It seems that way,” muttered Toma Gonzaga. The handsome don appeared to be amused.

Kurtz waved off the automatic rifle. If the 9mm Browning and two extra magazines didn’t prove adequate for the evening, he was in deeper shit than he could imagine.

Baby Doc’s men carried the extra Mp5s back to their SUV and opened another olive-green box and began handing out what appeared to be thick, cylindrical grenades.

“Flash bangs,” said Baby Doc, still standing in the chopper’s doorway. “They’re not going to blow anything up, but they’ll blind and deafen anyone in a room for a few seconds. Just remember to roll them in before you go through the door.” He gave quick instructions on how to activate and throw the things.

Kurtz stowed three of the flash-bang grenades in his new little ditty bag.

They opened another container and offered flexcuffs.

“Hey,” said Toma Gonzaga. “I’m not going down there to arrest these people.” Angelina had Campbell grab several. “We’ll want someone to talk to us,” she said.

Kurtz took several. Baby Doc’s men opened another large crate and began handing out black Kevlar vests. Everyone going took one of these.

It’s like Christmas morning in downtown Baghdad, thought Kurtz. He set his ditty bag and other gear down, pulled off the windbreaker, and began tugging and velcro-ing the thin but heavy vest in place around him.

“Here, I’ll help,” said Angelina’s bodyguard, Campbell. The man securely adjusted and fastened the side straps for Kurtz.

“Thanks.”

“These aren’t military spec,” Baby Doc was saying. “But they’re up to SWAT specifications. In fact, they were stolen from a SWAT supply house.”

When everyone was a little bulkier and warmer and less comfortable, Baby Doc himself unlatched the last metal box. He held up a bulky fistful of optics and straps. “State-of-the-art military night vision. Each pair weighs two-point-two pounds, has digital controls and an infrared mode that you won’t want to fuck with. They also have five-times magnification that you also won’t want to fuck with.”

“What will we want to fuck with?” asked Gonzaga’s man, Bobby.

Baby Doc told them how to get the straps adjusted and to power the things up. The bodyguards tried them on. Gonzaga, Angelina, and Kurtz slipped theirs into their already bulging ditty bags.

“Better be careful,” said Baby Doc. “You break ’em, you’ve bought ’em.”

“I thought we’d already bought them,” said Gonzaga.

Baby Doc laughed softly. “You’re renting this stuff, Mr. Gonzaga. For one night So you don’t want to lose it or bruise it.”

The men loaded several boxes aboard the Long Ranger and secured them with bungee cords and tie-downs. “Medical stuff,” said Baby Doc. He pointed to a small, dark man standing with his bodyguards. The gentleman was wearing a sweater and tie and thick glasses. “This is Dr. Tafer,” he said. “He’s going with us but he won’t get out of the Long Ranger. If you get wounded, you’ve got to haul your own ass back to the chopper or find someone who will.” The little doctor smiled hesitantly and nodded at the cluster of men and Angelina. Everyone just stared back at him.

Baby Doc looked at his oversized wristwatch. “Any questions or second thoughts before we take off?”

“Let’s shut up and do it,” said Angelina. “I’m beginning to feel like I’m in a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.”

Gonzaga’s bodyguard, Bobby, barked a laugh at that but shut up quickly when no one else laughed.

“Kurtz,” said Baby Doc, “you come sit up front with me.”

“Why?” said Kurtz. He hated helicopters—he’d always hated helicopters—and he’d just as soon not sit where he could see better.

“Because,” said Baby Doc, “you’re the only one who really knows where we’re going.”

People climbed aboard and the powerful jet turbines fired up again.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-EIGHT

The man with the terribly burned face was staring across the dark parking lot at her.

Arlene didn’t know how he could see her without binoculars—and she could see through her own binoculars that he had none—but she was sure that he saw her. She leaned her head back against the Buick’s headrest, deeper into the shadows, making sure that there was no glint of the sodium-vapor lamps reflecting off her binocular lenses.

The burned man kept staring at her from the pest control truck. His rapt but blind attention reminded Arlene of something but she couldn’t think of what for a moment. When she did remember, it wasn’t reassuring.

Like an animal—a predator—that can’t see its prey but smells it.

She thumbed her cell phone on and held that thumb over the fifth pre-set fast-dial button. Earlier in the evening she’d looked up the number for the Niagara Falls precinct house closest to the Rainbow Centre Mall…sometimes direct dial brought help faster than 911.

The burned man stared her way for another minute but then pulled his scarred face back into the shadows of the van. Arlene couldn’t see even a silhouette.

Is he back in the van? Did he get out the other side? The overhead cab light hadn’t gone on in his vehicle, but Arlene was sure that this man had long since broken or removed that bulb. Whatever else he was, he was a stalker. He loved the night.

Arlene licked her lips and considered her options. She assumed that the burned man was also waiting for Aysha, although there was no evidence for that yet. But like her boss, Arlene DeMarco very rarely believed in coincidence.

If the man started across the parking lot on foot toward her—and she was still about eighty yards away from his truck and parked in the shadows here by the Dumpsters—she’d simply start the Buick and drive like hell.

If he pulls a weapon?

She’d get her head down, steer by instinct, and try to run over him.

If he starts that obscene pest control van and drives it my way?

Outrun him. Alan had always kept their Buicks well maintained and Arlene had continued the practice after her husband’s death.

But what if he just sits there and waits until Aysha’s dropped off?

This was the contingency she didn’t have an answer for. The burned man was much closer to the mall doors than Arlene was. The Yemeni girl, Aysha, had been told she’d be picked up by her fiancé—the man Joe had killed—or by someone who’d take her to her fiancé. She’d get in the first vehicle that drove up.

What then?

Let her go. Let them both go. That was the obvious answer. Could this be so important, Arlene thought, that she should risk her life to pick up this strange girl?

Joe asked me to. We don’t know how important it might be.

The burned man was still invisible in the darkness of the van’s shadowed interior. Arlene had the image of the man pulling a rifle from the back of the van—of him sitting in the darker shadows of the passenger seat, invisible to her binoculars, and sighting through a scope at her this very second.

Stop it. Arlene resisted the urge to sink down out of sight or to start the Buick and drive off at high speed. He’s probably here to pick up his girlfriend who works on the janitorial crew

“Uh huh,” Arlene whispered aloud. “And if you believe that, dearie, I have a bridge in Brooklyn you might want to buy.”

She desperately wanted a cigarette, but there was no way that she could light one without showing the burned man that someone was in the dark, silent car out here in the shadows by the Dumpsters.

It might be worth it. Light the Marlboro. Enjoy it. Make him tip his hand.

But Arlene didn’t think she wanted to tip the burned man’s hand. Not right now. Not yet. Arlene looked at her watch—almost 11:20.

She was peering through the binoculars again, trying to decide if that darkness within the darkness there might be the shapeless silhouette of the man behind the wheel of the van, when her phone rang.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-NINE

They lifted off and flew southeast out of Buffalo, past the few tall downtown buildings, past the twin goddesses atop twin buildings holding their twin shining lamps high toward the last low clouds, south along Highway 90—the Thruway toward Erie, Pennsylvania—then banking east and swooping south again along the four-laned Highway 219. Baby Doc was keeping the Long Ranger at an altitude of about five thousand feet for this first part of the flight to Neola. The remaining clouds were fewer and higher now and the view of the city, the great dark mass of Lake Erie to the west, the hills and villages to the east, was beautiful.

Kurtz hated it. He hated being in a helicopter—even the helicopter pilots he’d known in Thailand and at army bases in the States years ago had admitted, almost gleefully, how treacherous and deadly the stupid machines were. He hated flying at night. He hated being up front in the left seat where he could see more easily—even through bubble windows under his feet in this infernal machine modified for tourists. He hated the bulk of the Kevlar vest under his windshell and the fact that he hadn’t shifted the Browning enough on his hip to keep it from digging into his side. Most of all, he hated the sure knowledge that they were going to be shot at in a few minutes.

Other than that, he was in a good mood. The little blue pills were keeping him awake, alert, and happy, even while he was busy hating the hell out of a lot of things. But the problem with pills for Joe Kurtz was that he was always Joe Kurtz there behind whatever curtain of pharmaceutical emotion or relief that was being granted by random molecules, and the Joe Kurtz behind the curtain usually couldn’t stand the blue-pill condition of Kurtzness in front of the curtain.

Or at least this was his analysis as the seven of them flew south toward Neola five thousand feet above Highway 219.

Baby Doc had been making cryptic but pilot-sounding comments into his microphone, and now Kurtz shouted at him over the roar of the rotors and turbines—“Are we flying legally?”

Baby Doc looked at him and made arcane motions.

Kurtz repeated the shout.

Baby Doc shook his head, tapped his earphones, covered the microphone in front of mouth with his large fist, and shouted back, “Put on your cans.”

It took Kurtz only a blue-pill second to realize that the pilot was talking about the bulky earphones and attached microphone on the console between them. He looked back to where four people sat on the side seats, the little Yemeni doctor sitting alone on the cushioned rear bend that could hold three more, and he realized that Gonzaga and Angelina were already wearing their earphones and mikes.

Kurtz tugged his on. He asked the question again, into the microphone this time.

“You have to click that if you want to be heard on the intercom,” came Baby Doc’s voice in his earphones. The pilot pointed to a button on the control stick that he’d referred to as the cyclic.

Kurtz clicked the button, touching it only gingerly, and shouted the question again.

“God damn it, Joe,” cried Angelina over the intercom.

“Hey!” shouted Gonzaga. “Easy!”

“You don’t have to shout now,” said Baby Doc, his voice crackly but clear and soft on the intercom. “You’re asking if I filed a flight plan? If we’re flying legally?”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz…softly.

“The answer is…sort of,” said the pilot. “Up until thirty seconds ago, we were a legal Flight for Life charter carrying two kidneys from Buffalo to a hospital in Cincinnati.”

“What changed thirty seconds ago?” asked Kurtz, not sure if he wanted the answer.

Baby Doc grinned, pulled his clumsy night-vision goggles down over his eyes, and pushed the cyclic-thing forward, even as he twisted the throttle.

The Long Ranger swooped from an altitude of five thousand feet to an altitude of about two hundred feet in fewer seconds than it would take for a roller coaster car to drop the steepest descent of its biggest hill.

Kurtz had always hated roller coasters.

Beneath them, the mostly empty four-lane highway had narrowed to an even emptier two-lane road that wound between ever higher hills. Kurtz knew that they must be south of Boston Hills now, deep into the woods. He couldn’t see where they were going—the hills and horizon and sky all blended together into a rushing black on black—but he could feel how they were following the ground below. The big chopper banked left and right, then left again, following the valley terrain in a motion that made Kurtz want to roll down the window and throw up. He was fairly certain, however, that these windows didn’t roll down with a crank, and he wasn’t going to take his hands away from their deathgrips on the side of the copilot’s seat long enough to hunt for a handle or slide or switch.

Baby Doc said something to him.

“What?” shouted Kurtz, realizing that he’d shouted again only after the volley of epithets from the back seats.

“I said, do you know what IFR stands for?” Baby Doc said.

“Instrument Flight Rules?” said Kurtz.

“Not tonight,” said Baby Doc with another grin. “Tonight it stands for I Follow Roads.”

Kurtz didn’t really see how, even with those dumb goggles, the big man could see the coming twists and turns and dark hills soon enough and react quickly enough to keep up this swooping, banking game of dodgeball. They passed some lights to the left and Kurtz realized that they must be near the empty Kissing Bridge ski area that Gonzaga had stipulated as Baby Doc’s DMZ should he manage to take over the Neola drug trade. More than halfway to Neola. Kurtz decided that he might walk to Buffalo if he survived the next half hour.

Suddenly Angelina’s voice in his earphones said, “Skrzypczyk…” pronouncing it correctly as Scrip-zik, “…what happens if there are high tension wires across the valley up ahead?”

“We die,” said Baby Doc.

Kurtz closed his eyes and hoped there would be no more questions.

“Do we have our plans clear once we’re inside?” said Gonzaga. The mafiosa in the back all had their night vision equipment strapped onto their foreheads. Kurtz hadn’t taken his out of the ditty bag yet and he’d be damned if he’d remove his hands from the seat to do so now.

“Campbell and I clear the upstairs,” said Angelina. “You and Bobby search the first floor and basement. Kurtz is Rover.”

“The doctor…whatshisname…isn’t coming in with us?” asked Kurtz over the intercom.

Baby Doc shook his head. “Dr. Tafer. And no, the deal is that he stays in the chopper. But the folding litter is back there. Take that in with you in case the cop…whatshername…”

“King,” said Kurtz.

“Is still alive,” finished Baby Doc. “There’s Neola.”

They’d come at the town from the west as well as north. There was no highway beneath them now at all, just dark hills. Even without night vision goggles, the little town looked like a blazing metropolis of lights after the blackness south of Boston Hills.

Baby Doc gained more altitude—thank the Lord—so that he flew north to south above the main street at a height that wouldn’t wake people from the noise.

“You have to help me find this house,” said Baby Doc. “You’d better put your night vision on.”

“Maybe I won’t need it,” said Kurtz. “Just follow Main Street south over the river and bank left…there it is.”

They’d passed over the starlight-rippled ribbon of the Allegheny River on the south end of Neola—Baby Doc having them gain altitude all the time so they couldn’t be heard—and now the county road running east from Highway 16 became visible. Powerful sodium vapor lamps illuminated the base of the ziggurat cliff and there were security lights all along the mile-and-a-half twisting driveway rising through checkpoints to the large house at the summit of the hill. There were no lights visible in the house itself, but more exterior lights illuminated the top of the driveway, the rear of the house, and the terrace.

“Come at it from the south,” said Kurtz. He was wondering if Cloud Nine would be visible in the dark.

Baby Doc nodded and made a wide circle, swinging a mile or two to the east, and came at the estate from the south and east, away from the road. Even without night vision goggles, Kurtz could see the starlight gleaming on the rails of the little railroad far below. But rather than land, Baby Doc hovered about a thousand feet off the ground and two-thirds of a mile from the house. He rotated the nose of the Long Ranger until it pointed ninety degrees to the left of its alignment with the estate.

Gonzaga undid his seat belt, lifted a long, bolt-action rifle with a heavy scope from beneath his seat, and went to the side door. His man, Bobby, undogged that door and slid it on interior rails to the left. Gonzaga went to one knee and braced himself against the rear bulkhead, moving the rifle in slow circles as he looked through the scope.

“I see one man at the barrier at the top of the drive,” Gonzaga said, still hooked to the intercom circuit, “and another closer, in that little open cupola Kurtz said was heated.”

“Do you have a shot?” asked Baby Doc.

“Not on the far guy. But I’ll take out the one in the cupola.”

Kurtz raised his hands to his ears before he remembered that he was wearing the headphones.

The sniper rifle had some sort of suppressor on it. It spat once, twice…a lull…then a third time.

“He’s down,” said Gonzaga. He slipped onto the rear bench next to the doctor and fastened his seat belt. He was still holding the long gun.

“Did the other guard notice?” asked Angelina.

“No.”

“All right everyone,” said Baby Doc. “Hang on. I’m going to put it down on that flat, grassy area about forty feet south of where the Huey is tied down. That wind sock is going to help.”

“Wait,” said Kurtz. “How you going to land this thing without the noise waking everybody.”

“I’m going to use a technique called autorotation,” said Baby Doc. He was throwing switches.

Kurtz turned to look at him. “Isn’t that just sort of a controlled crash, just using the turning rotors without the motor on?”

“Yeah.” Baby Doc killed the twin turbines. The night grew silent except for the slowing rush of rotors and the rising sound of the wind.

CHAPTER

FORTY

Arlene? Are you there? Arlene?”

It was her sister-in-law, Gail DeMarco, calling. Arlene answered in a whisper, although it was doubtful that the burned man could hear from this distance.

“Is everything all right?” asked Gail. “We were going to talk after the weather…”

The two women spoke almost every night after the Channel 4 weather, before the sports, before going to bed. Arlene had been looking forward to tonight’s conversation because they were going to talk about Rachel’s fifteenth birthday later in the week—although Arlene was dreading being asked if Joe was going to attend. Rachel looked up to and adored the occasional dinner visitor, Joe Kurtz—the girl’s real father, Arlene was absolutely sure—and Joe seemed oblivious to it all. It had reached the point where Gail almost couldn’t stand Joe—“a jerk” Gail had called him during a recent conversation with Arlene—but Gail understood the situation, and wanted Rachel to know the man who was probably her father.

“I’m sorry,” said Arlene, still keeping her eye on the dark pest control truck near the mall. “I’m out running an errand for Joe and just forgot the time.”

“An errand for Joe?” said Gail. “At this hour?” Arlene could hear the disapproval in her friend’s voice. Arlene had been close to her husband’s sister when Alan and her son were alive, but they’d grown even closer in the years since those deaths.

“Something that had to be done,” said Arlene. I’d kill for a cigarette, she thought, and then realized that was an option. Just walk up to Mr. Burned Face in his bug truck and put two .44 slugs into him. As he waits for his girlfriend on the night custodial shift to come out for a midnight lunch. Arlene decided that if she went that way, she’d use the nicotine-withdrawal defense in court. Maybe the jury would be composed mostly of ex-smokers. Hell, it would only take one.

She and Gail chatted for a few minutes, Arlene keeping her voice down and the Buick’s window up. If the Burned Man was still in the cab of the van, he wasn’t showing any movement.

“Well,” said Gail, her voice changing slightly, “will Joe Kurtz be coming to dinner on Friday night?”

Arlene chewed her lip. “I haven’t asked him yet. He’s been…busy.”

“Yes. Dr. Singh asks me about Joe Kurtz almost every day. I imagine Joe’s been in bed a lot, recovering. It must mean extra work for you at the office.”

“Not that much,” said Arlene, commenting on the first part of Gail’s sentence but letting her think she was answering the second part.

“But do you think he’ll be up to coming to Rachel’s birthday party? It would mean the world to her.”

Arlene knew that although Rachel was a sensitive and lovable girl, she had few friends at school. Besides Gail and Arlene—and maybe Joe—there would be only one other teenager besides Rachel at the party, a skinny, bookish girl named Constance.

“I’ll ask him tomorrow,” said Arlene.

“I mean, he does remember it’s Rachel’s birthday, doesn’t he?” asked Gail, voice rising a bit.

“I’ll ask him tomorrow whether he feels up to coming,” said Arlene. “I’m sure he will if he can. Gail, by any chance do you have Rachel’s phone around? The one I gave you in the spring?”

“Rachel’s cell phone?” said her sister-in-law. “Yes. She never carries it I think it’s in her room. Why? You want it back?”

“No, but could you go get it right now? And check the battery.”

“Now?” said Gail.

“Yes, please,” said Arlene. There was movement in the cab of the pest control van. The Burned Man was shifting positions, perhaps getting ready to step out.

Gail sighed, said she’d just be a minute, and set her phone down.

Arlene looked at her options here. They were awkward. She wanted the Burned Man out of the way so that she could pick up this Aysha person in…she looked at her watch…twenty-one minutes. Even if the Burned Man wasn’t also waiting for the Yemeni girl—although Arlene’s instincts told her that he was—it would be better if there were no witnesses. The girl was illegal in more ways than one. What if she didn’t want to get into the car with Arlene? Well, to be truthful, that was one reason Arlene had brought the .44 Magnum.

So how to get this guy out of the way? And what to do if he suddenly drove toward her Buick or began walking her way? Arlene had no idea why this scarred man in the bug truck might want to grab Aysha, but she felt that this was precisely what he was going to do in…nineteen minutes…unless Arlene intervened.

How? She had the Niagara police on speed dial, but even if she got through to someone who actually called a patrol cruiser who actually got here in time, they’d almost certainly still be here when the Canadians dropped Aysha off at the mall door. And if the people-smugglers from the north caught one glimpse of red and blue lights flashing or police cars here in the parking lot, they’d keep going and drop Aysha somewhere else, far from here.

Maybe I could fallow their car and…

Arlene shook her head. After getting even a glimpse of the police, the already paranoid smugglers would probably be more paranoid. The streets were empty in this wet, botched caricature of a city, and there was little to no chance that Arlene would be able to tail the smugglers without them seeing her. And if she spooked them enough, they might even kill the girl and just dump her out somewhere. Arlene just didn’t know the stakes here—for Aysha, for the people smuggling her in, for the Burned Man in that bug truck straight ahead, or even for Joe.

I could just go home. That was certainly the option that made the most sense. In the morning, Joe would probably say, “Oh, that’s all right—I just wanted to chat with the girl if possible. No biggee.”

Uh-huh, thought Arlene.

“All right, I’m back with the phone,” came Gail’s voice in her ear. “What next?”

“Ahh…just hold onto it for a second,” said Arlene, knowing how foolish she sounded. It was like those old practical jokes in high school where some boy would call up pretending to be a telephone repairman and get you to take the cover off the phone—back when phones looked alike and had covers—and then made you do one thing after the other to help “fix” it, until you were swinging a bag of parts over your head and clucking like a chicken.

Joe had talked Arlene into purchasing a cell phone for Rachel a few months earlier. He was always worried that the girl might be in danger, that someone might go after her the way her late stepfather had, and he liked the idea of Rachel carrying around a phone with Arlene’s numbers set to speed dial.

Gail had been a little nonplussed at the gift—“If Rachel wanted a phone, I’d buy one for her,” she’d said logically enough—but Arlene had convinced her that this was Joe’s awkward way of establishing some contact with the girl, of watching over her from afar. “He can establish contact just by coming to dinner and seeing her more frequently,” Gail had said sternly. Arlene couldn’t argue with that.

She’d thought of the phone right now because although its bills were paid by WeddingBells-dot-com, if someone tried to use reverse-911 on it, the records would show just the WeddingBells PO box number.

Fourteen minutes before midnight. It was quite possible the smugglers could get here a few minutes early with Aysha—any second—and Arlene didn’t have a clue what to do. If the Burned Man nabbed Aysha, she could try following the bug truck so at least she could tell Joe where the girl was taken, but the same empty, wet streets in the same empty, wet town here made that no more feasible than following the smugglers themselves.

Arlene didn’t like to use obscenities, but she had to admit that her goose was well and truly cooked here.

“Arlene? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. Is the phone charged?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Dial nine-one-one.”

“What? Is there an emergency?”

“Not yet. But dial nine-one-one. But don’t hit the ‘call’ button yet.”

“All right. What do I tell them the emergency is?”

“Tell them that there’s a man having a heart attack—in cardiac arrest—just outside the Rainbow Centre Mall.”

“Rainbow Centre? That place up in Niagara Falls?”

“Yes.”

“Are you there? Is there someone in cardiac arrest? I can talk you through the CPR until the paramedics get there.”

“This is just private-eye stuff, Gail. Just tell them that a man’s having a heart attack outside the Rainbow Centre Mall… And tell them he’s in a van near the south main mall doors and the van has Total Pest Control written on the side.”

“Wait…wait…let me write that down. What was the…”

“Total Pest Control. Like in the cereal.”

“There’s a cereal called Pest Control?”

“Just write it down.” Arlene usually enjoyed Gail’s odd sense of humor, but there wasn’t time tonight.

“Won’t they arrest me for false reporting?”

“They won’t find you. Trust me. After you make the call…if you make the call…just take a hammer and smash that cell phone and throw the pieces away. I’ll provide a new one.”

“It looks like a pretty expensive phone. I’m not sure…”

“Gail.”

“All right. A man undergoing cardiac arrest at the south entrance to the Rainbow Centre Mall—that one near the convention center in Niagara Falls…and he’s having this heart attack in a van with Total Pest Control written on the side of it.”

“Yes.” Arlene looked at her watch. Eleven minutes before midnight. It was almost too late to…

The van had started up. Arlene could see the oil-rich exhaust in the humid air. She could hear the engine even with her window up.

Oh, thank God. I don’t have to…

The van made a fast left turn and headed in Arlene’s direction. For a second the headlights pinned her like a deer.

She immediately dropped sideways onto the passenger seat and fumbled in her purse for the .44 Magnum. The cell phone fell off her lap and bounced and for a second Arlene was sure that she’d disconnected with Gail.

“Hello? Hello?” Gail and Arlene were both shouting.

The van stopped fifty or sixty feet in front of Arlene’s Buick, the headlights turning her windshield a thick milky white.

“Call nine-one-one,” Arlene whispered urgently. “Call nine-one-one. On the cell phone. Keep this line open.”

“Oh, my God. Arlene, are you all right? What’s…”

“Call nine-one-one!” shouted Arlene. “Tell them what I said.”

Arlene lowered herself to the floor, her back against the passenger-side door. She set the cell phone on the seat, pulled her legs over the console and set her feet on the carpeted floor. She set the heavy Magnum on her knee and cocked it, keeping the muzzle pointing at the ceiling. If the Burned Man came to the passenger side, she might not be visible in the shadow of the footwell here, especially with the headlights making everything else so bright She aimed the gun at the driver’s door.

The van’s headlights went off and the van’s engine fell silent.

“Arlene!” It was a screech, but not a panicked one. Gail had been a nurse for a long time. The more tense things got, the more calm Gail became, Arlene knew. On the job.

“Husssshhhh,” whispered Arlene, leaning left to hiss into the phone. “Don’t talk. Don’t talk.”

There was no further noise. No footsteps. But the van’s engine stayed off and the van’s headlights stayed dark. Arlene looked across at the driver’s door window, aiming the muzzle of her weapon. What seemed like hours passed in the silence, but she knew it must have been just a minute or two.

Oh, dear Lord. Did I lock the doors?

It was too late to lunge across for the locking controls on the far door now. She considered reaching above her head and locking the door on her side—If he swings it open, I’ll fall out backwards like a bag of laundry—but knew that the power lock driving home would sound like a gunshot. She left it alone.

The van door slammed. Arlene set her finger in the trigger guard. She’d practice-fired this weapon enough to know that it required quite a bit of pressure on the trigger to fire. And the recoil was serious. She propped her head more firmly on the door behind her so that the recoil wouldn’t catch her on the chin, cradled the big gun on her knee with her left hand under her right hand to steady it and thumbed the hammer back until it clicked.

She could bear the footsteps on the concrete now. He was walking toward the driver’s side.

CHAPTER

FORTY-ONE

As the big helicopter plummeted, Kurtz banished the blue-pill haze from his mind and body.

He willed away the false good-feeling and tinge of good humor that overlay everything. He willed away the cloud of painlessness and let both his headache and his resolve flow back in like black ink. He willed away the soft pharmaceutical fog and summoned the hard-edged core of Joe Kurtz back to duty.

The big Bell Long Ranger hit hard, jarring Kurtz’s spine and sending the old familiar spikes through his skull, slid a few yards across slick grass, and came to a stop. Immediately Gonzaga and his man Bobby were out the side door and running. Angelina and her bodyguard, Campbell, followed a minute later, carrying Mp5s, the ditty bags filled with ammunition rattling at their hips.

Kurtz struggled with the four point straps for a few seconds, slapped them away, grabbed up his bag, set the folded aluminum and web litter over his shoulder on a sling, and went out through the side door just as Baby Doc stepped out his pilot-side door and pulled two long tubes from behind his seat. The pilot hung one of the tubes over his shoulder with a sling and carried the other. They looked like RPGs, the old Russian and Eastern European rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

“What’re those?” whispered Kurtz. The two were jogging toward the house now in the dark, passing the dark shape of the Major’s Huey.

“RPGs,” said Baby Doc and turned in the direction of the driveway.

“Wait!” called Kurtz.

Baby Doc turned but did not stop jogging.

“I thought you were staying with the chopper,” whispered Kurtz.

Baby Doc grinned. “I never said I would.”

“What if you get killed?”

The grin stayed in place. “You guys will either have to take flying lessons or start walking.” He turned his back and ran toward the head of the driveway.

There was a dead man lying in the guardhouse gazebo. Nothing stirred except the six of them jogging toward the house. The external security lights were on in the back, but the house remained dark.

Angelina Farino Ferrara set the C-4 charge on the door, triggered the tuned detonator, and stepped back with the other three just as Kurtz came jogging up. The blast wasn’t as loud as Kurtz expected, but it was pretty sure to wake everyone in the house. The door flew inward, showing steel reinforcements blown off at the hinges.

Gonzaga went in first. His bodyguard followed a second later. Angelina and her man lunged in a second after that.

This is nuts, thought Kurtz, not for the first time that night. One did not assault a house without knowing the houseplans intimately. He raised the Browning and threw himself through the door.

The foyer and hall lights had come on, which was not good. The layout was as he remembered—the foyer opening on the center hall straight ahead, staircase to the right—Angelina and her man were already pounding up it—a dark, formal living room was visible to his left, closed doors along the hallway to the left and right.

Gonzaga kicked open the first door to the right of the foyer and tossed in a flash-bang. The explosion was very loud. Bobby, the bodyguard, kicked in the second door to the right and dodged back as a hail of automatic weapons fire slashed across the foyer, shattering the chandelier and tearing apart vases and furniture in the living room across the way. Bobby fired his shotgun into the room, pumped it, fired again, pumped it, fired again. The machine gun fire stopped abruptly.

Upstairs, two explosions poured smoke down the stairway.

Kurtz ran across the foyer, scattering crystal as he ran. Plaster was falling from the high ceiling. He could see the glass library doors fifty feet or so straight ahead and anyone in that dark room could see him. There were too many lights in this broad hallway, and they were too recessed to shoot out, so he felt like the target he was as he dodged from one side to the other and paused where the hallway began.

Gonzaga came out of the room behind him and fired up the staircase to Kurtz’s right. A black-garbed figure tumbled down the steps and an M-16 fell onto the foyer tiles. Not one of ours, thought Kurtz.

“You take the left, Bobby and I’ll take the right,” shouted Toma Gonzaga.

Kurtz nodded and dodged left just as the library doors exploded shards of glass outward. Toma, Bobby, and Kurtz jumped against doorways. Two shotguns and Kurtz’s Browning fired at the same time, smashing the last shards of the glass doors. Kurtz wanted to get to the Major’s room, which opened off the left side of the library at the end of the hall, but right now he wasn’t going anywhere as someone fired an M-16 again from the darkness of the library.

The second door on the left along that hallway opened and one of the Vietnamese bodyguards peered out, ducked back behind the door, held out an M-16, and sprayed the hallway. Gonzaga and Bobby were out of sight behind Kurtz, in the rooms along the opposite side of the hallway. Shotgun blasts roared and filled the air with cordite stink.

Kurtz pressed into the first doorway on the left—the door was locked—and waited until the spray of plaster and ricochets from the M-16 blast let up. Then he aimed the Browning at the center of the open wooden doorway and fired five slugs into it, about chest high. There was a cry and the sound of a body tumbling down the stairs.

Basement. Kurtz wanted to go down there—it was his job to—but he had to secure the library first. He ran, firing, to the basement doorway. There was no return fire from beyond the shattered glass of the library.

There was a light on downstairs and Kurtz could see the bodyguard’s body crumpled at the base of the steps. Kurtz pulled a flash-bang grenade from his bag, flipped the primer, and tossed it down the stairs, stepping back behind the door while it exploded. When he peered around, the basement was full of smoke and the bodyguard’s clothing was burning. He hadn’t moved.

More explosions from the second floor. The gunfire up there was horrendous. Kurtz wondered if Angelina had survived the Battle of the North Bedroom or whatever the hell it was.

As Kurtz lunged around and crouched on the top step of the basement stairs, still focused on the library doors, Gonzaga and Bobby poked their heads out of their doorways.

“These rooms are clear,” shouted Gonzaga. “At least two down here. What about the library?”

Automatic weapons fire exploded from the dark library again, stitching the walls along the wide hallway and making all three men duck back. Kurtz had caught a glimpse of two splaying muzzle flashes.

“It’s not clear,” he called from the top step. “Two machine guns at least.”

“Throw a flash-bang,” called Bobby.

I can do better than that, thought Kurtz. He took a wad of C-4 from his ditty bag, wadded it into a rough sphere, stuck in a primer detonator, and set it for four seconds. He lunged into the hall and threw it like a fastball through the shattered doors, jumping back onto the top step just as both M-16s opened up.

The blast blew the wide doors off their hinges and rolled a cloud of acrid smoke down the hallway.

Kurtz, Gonzaga and Bobby ran into the smoke, firing as they ran.

The last door on the right opened. An Asian woman looked out and screamed. Her hands were empty.

“No!” shouted Kurtz over his shoulder, but too late. Gonzaga fired at her with his shotgun at a range of twenty feet and the woman’s upper body flew back into the room as if jerked away on a cable.

Kurtz kicked the hanging library doors open and rolled in among broken glass and splintered doorframe. The carpet was on fire. Smoke rose to the cathedral ceiling and a smoke alarm was screaming, hitting almost the same note the Asian woman had.

Trinh and another Vietnamese had been firing from behind a long, heavy library table they’d turned on its side. The C-4 blast had shattered the table into several chunks and a thousand splinters and thrown it all back over them. The bodyguard had been blown out through the glass terrace doors—a burglar alarm raised its whoop in chorus to the smoke alarm—and that man was obviously dead. Colonel Trinh was lying unconscious on the smoking carpet. His face was bloody and his left arm was visibly broken, but he was breathing. His red slippers had been blown off and one of them sat in a bookshelf ten feet up the high wall of shelves. The colonel’s shattered M-16 lay nearby.

Kurtz rolled the colonel on his belly, pulled flexcuffs from his bag, and cuffed the man’s wrists behind him. Tightly.

“Take him out to the chopper,” he told Bobby, who was swinging his shotgun in short arcs, covering every opening, including the broken doors onto the lighted terrace.

“I don’t take orders from you.”

“Do it,” said Gonzaga, stepping through the broken doors from the hallway.

Bobby grabbed the old Vietnamese man by his hair, pulled him halfway up, tucked a shoulder under him, hoisted him onto his shoulder without releasing his shotgun, and jogged down the hallway with him.

“Strong fucker,” said Kurtz.

“Yeah.”

The two men had each taken a knee and were covering different doorways. Upstairs, the rock ’n’ roll gunfire had resolved itself into the occasional short bursts of full auto.

“That’s the Major’s bedroom,” said Kurtz, jabbing a finger at the closed door on the south wall of the library. “You get him. I’m going to check the basement.”

Gonzaga nodded and ran to the right of the bedroom doorway, jamming more shells into his 12-gauge as he did so.

Good idea, thought Kurtz as he went back out into the hallway. He pulled another clip from his pocket. He’d kept count of his shots out of old habit—nine fired so far. There should be two bullets left in the Browning, one in the chamber and one in the clip.

The bodyguard’s body at the bottom of the steps was still on fire, but the smoke in the basement had dissipated some. Besides the burning carpet and books in the library on the first floor, something on the second floor was also burning—smoke poured down into the foyer. The shooting up there had stopped.

Suddenly there was a double explosion from outside, north of the house, where the driveway came up from the valley.

Well, Baby Doc got to use at least one of his RPGs.

Kurtz went down the steps, pistol extended. A glance at the heaped body at the bottom showed him that he’d managed to put three slugs into the Asian man’s chest through the door. Kurtz moved into the basement.

Surprisingly for such a fancy house, the basement wasn’t finished. The central part was open and carpeted, there was a big screen TV and some cheap couches near the far wall a small kitchen and bar area showed a refrigerator and booze, but part of the floor was bare concrete and the place smelted of sweat and cigarettes. It looked to Kurtz like a place where the bodyguards might hang out. More smoke was roiling down the stairway.

There were three small rooms and a bathroom off the open room, and Kurtz kicked all the doors open.

He found Rigby in the last room.

She was lying half-naked on a bloody mattress set on the concrete floor and she looked dead. Then he saw the crude IV-drip and wad of bandages on her left leg and he went to one knee next to her. She was unconscious and very pale, her skin felt cold and clammy, but when he put fingers to her throat, he could feel the faint pulse. They’d been trying to keep her alive until tomorrow when they could finish the job in Buffalo with Kurtz’s gun. Rigby’s eyes fluttered but did not open.

He unslung the litter from his back, unfolded it, and then wondered what the hell he was doing. He wasn’t going to get anyone else down here to help him carry the stretcher.

“Sorry, Rig,” he said, and tucked the Browning in its holster, folded her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, grabbed the slung IV bottle, and carried her up the sleep stairs. She moaned when he moved her but did not regain consciousness.

The house was definitely on fire. There were shots from the library, but Kurtz didn’t turn that way. He went down the hall and into the smoky foyer.

Movement on the stairs made him shift the small IV bottle and draw his pistol.

Angelina Farino Ferrara came down the stairs through toe smoke, staggering under the load of a man’s body on her shoulder. Her face, arms, hands, and sweater were drenched in blood, and she still carried the Mp5 in her right hand.

“Jesus,” said Kurtz as they both went out the front door with their burdens. “Your man?”

“Yeah,” panted Angelina. “Campbell.”

“Alive?”

“I don’t know. He took one in the throat.” She paused under the porte cochere and nodded toward Rigby’s pale, bare legs and white underwear. “Your girlfriend? She’d have a nice ass if it wasn’t for the cellulite.”

Kurtz said nothing. He drank in the fresh air. Flames crackled from the upper stories. A figure moved in the driveway and both he and Angelina swung, weapons coming up.

“Don’t shoot,” said Baby Doc. He had his own Mp5 slung over his shoulder and was carrying one of the RPGs with its grenade still on the muzzle.

Kurtz looked to where the driveway came up to the last guard barrier and saw an SUV and a sheriff’s vehicle burning in a single conflagration. “All that with one RPG?” he said as the three turned and began moving quickly toward the helicopter.

“Yep,” said Baby Doc. His face was smudged with soot and there was a burn or cut on his right cheek. He looked at Angelina staggering under the weight of her bodyguard but didn’t offer to help. “You two go on,” he said as they passed the dark Huey. “I’ll be right there.”

Halfway to the Long Ranger, Angelina had to pause to shift Campbell’s weight on her back, but Kurtz didn’t pause with her. Rigby was moaning. Blood poured down her leg and sopped through his sweater and ran down his left arm.

A loud blast made him turn. Baby Doc had fired the remaining RPG into the Huey and the black machine was burning strongly. The Lackawanna boss jogged past him, carrying only his rifle now. “Old Israeli commando rule—don’t leave their air force behind,” he said as he ran past. “Or something like that.”

Baby Doc had already clambered into the chopper and fired up the turbines when Kurtz reached the open door and laid Rigby on the plastic-sheeted floor next to where the Yemeni doctor was working on Colonel Trinh where he lay, still flexcuffed and bleeding. Dr. Tafer moved away from the colonel, leaned over Rigby and shined a flashlight into her eyes and then on her wound.

“How is she?” asked Kurtz, leaning against the open door of the helicopter to catch his breath.

“Barely alive,” said Dr. Tafer. “Much blood loss.” He pulled the IV needle out and tossed the almost empty bottle out into the grass. “This is saline solution. She needs plasma.” He pulled a plastic bag of plasma from his box and slid the needle into Rigby’s terribly bruised arm.

Angelina staggered up with her man and dumped him onto the floor next to Rigby. The floor of the Long Ranger was filled with bodies. “Triage,” she gasped and sat down on the grass.

Dr. Tafer shone his flashlight into Campbell’s open, unblinking eyes and inspected the neck wound. “Dead,” said the doctor. “Get him out of way, please.”

“We’re taking him home,” said Angelina from the grass.

Kurtz leaned and shoved the bodyguard’s body against the rear bulkhead, tucking him half beneath the bench there.

“It sounds like Napoleon’s goddamned retreat from Moscow back there,” called Baby Doc from the pilot’s seat.

“Shut up,” said Angelina over the rotor and turbine roar. She got to her feet, dropped the empty banana cup out of her rifle, and slapped in a new one from her ditty bag. She and Kurtz both began walking back toward the burning house.

CHAPTER

FORTY-TWO

Arlene caught just a glimpse of the Burned Man’s ballcap—an old Brooklyn Dodgers’ cap, she noticed—before the flashing lights arrived.

It was five minutes before midnight, she noticed, and the man from the pest control van had spent a few minutes looking at her car and another couple of minutes walking around out there, checking it out, before approaching her driver’s side door—still unlocked, she feared—on foot. Then the top of his cap rose above the driver’s side doorsill of the Buick. Arlene aimed the Magnum and prepared for the recoil and flying glass.

The red lights flashed first, and then she heard the sirens.

The ball cap disappeared from the window and a few seconds later an engine started up and the van’s headlights splayed across her windshield again.

When the headlights turned away, Arlene sat up and peeked over the dashboard.

The ambulance was accompanied by a police cruiser and both vehicles were sweeping around in a turn, away from the mall entrance, toward the pest control van with its hypothetical cardiac arrest victim.

The van drove away toward the north exit at high speed.

Both the ambulance and police cruiser stopped—as if nonplussed—and then gave chase to what appeared to be the fleeing heart-attack victim. Within a few seconds, the flashing lights had disappeared out onto Niagara Street and the parking lot was quiet again. Arlene bad known that Niagara Falls’s Memorial Medical Center was only a few blocks north on Walnut Avenue, but this was good time even for that proximity. Evidently midnight on a drizzly Sunday in late October was a slow time for them.

The old Dodge with Ontario plates turned into the mall lot slowly, hesitantly, braking twice, as if the driver and occupants—Arlene could see several heads silhouetted against the streetlights along Niagara—were suspicious, ready to bolt at any sign of movement. Arlene shifted to the driver’s seat but kept her head low, peering through the Buick’s steering wheel.

“Arlene?”

It was a good thing, she realized later, that she’d just lowered the hammer on the big Magnum and set it back in her purse, or she probably would have soot herself when Gail’s voice erupted from the cell phone. Arlene had forgotten about the phone. Heck, she’d forgotten about Gail.

“Are you all right!?”

“Shhh, shhh,” Arlene hissed into the phone. “I’m fine.”

“Well, damn it!” cried her sister-in-law and friend. “You’re scaring me to death.”

The Dodge with the Ontario plates had stopped by the mall doors. Now a small woman carrying an old suitcase was shoved out onto the sidewalk in front of the doors and the Dodge accelerated away toward the Third Street exits.

“Gail, it’s quite possible that you just saved my life,” Arlene said calmly. “I’ll call you tomorrow with the details.”

“Tomorrow!” squawked the phone. “Don’t you dare wait until…”

Arlene broke the connection and turned her phone off. She waited only a few seconds, half expecting the bug control van or the police cruiser to reappear at high speed.

Nothing. Just the small woman and the old suitcase and the empty lot.

Arlene started the Buick, turned on the headlights, and drove up to the woman in a wide arc so as not to spook her.

More girl than woman, thought Arlene as she hit the button to roll down the passenger side window. The doors had, as she’d feared, not been locked. “Aysha?” she said.

The young woman did not flinch back. She looked to be a teenager, with a pale face and large eyes above her cheap raincoat. The suitcase she clutched looked like something Arlene’s parents might have owned.

“Yes, I am Aysha,” said the girl in accented but smooth English. “Who sent you, please?”

Arlene hesitated only a second before saying, “Yasein. Please get in.”

The girl got in the front seat She still clutched her bulky suitcase.

“Toss that in the back,” said Arlene and helped her lift it between the seats and drop it on the rear seat. The young woman was smaller than fourteen-year-old Rachel.

Checking her mirrors again, Arlene drove quickly out of the Rainbow Centre’s parking lot took Third up to Perry, and Ferry to 62. Within minutes they were on the northern extension of Niagara Palls Boulevard, headed toward Buffalo. It was drizzling again and Arlene turned on the Buick’s wipers.

“My name is Arlene DeMarco,” she said slowly. And then, without planning it she said, “Welcome to the United States.”

“Thank you very much,” said the young woman, looking calmly at Arlene. “I am Miss Aysha Mosed, fiancée of Mister Yasein Goba of Lackawanna, New York, United States of America.”

Arlene nodded and smiled, while inside she was hurting and thinking, How am I going to tell her? And how am I going to tell her in a way that will still allow her to talk to Joe tomorrow?

“Yasein is dead, is be not?” said Aysha.

Arlene looked at her. Lie to her, was her thought Aloud, she said, “Yes, Aysha. Yasein is dead.”

CHAPTER

FORTY-THREE

The Artful Dodger lost the ambulance and the cop car in the rainslicked streets of Niagara Falls—all he had to do was get out of sight of them and then duck down an alley between Haeberle Plaza and Oakwood Cemetery—and then he headed back to the Rainbow Centre.

Once there, he parked near the mall doors, watching the street and the Niagara Street entrance for the returning police cruiser.

What the fuck was all that about? He was sure it had something to do with the Buick parked out there. It was gone now, of course. He’d known for half an hour that something had been wrong with that blue Buick—that someone was out there. He should have driven straight out there and shot the shit out of that car as soon as he’d arrived.

But what kind of tough guy drives a blue Buick? That’s a granny-lady’s car.

Now the Dodger waited fifteen minutes, watching over his shoulder the whole time, before deciding that the package had been dropped off and picked up already. He called the Boss and told him the situation.

“Did you get the tag number on the Buick?”

“Sure I did,” said the Dodger, and recited it from memory.

There was a brief pause while the Boss fed it into whatever computer or data bank he had—the Boss had access to everything and anything—before the man on the phone said, “Mrs. Arlene DeMarco,” and gave an address out in Cheektowaga.

The name meant nothing to the Dodger.

“The P.I.’s secretary,” said the Boss. “Kurtz’s secretary.”

The Dodger had left the mall and was driving toward the expressway, but he had to blink away red in his vision when the Boss said Kurtz’s name. That motherfucker has to die. “You want me to go out to Cheektowaga now?” said the Dodger. “Get the package back and settle things with Mrs. Arlene DeMarco?” Maybe Kurtz will be there and we’ll get everything settled.

The Boss was silent for a minute, obviously weighing options.

“No, that’s all right,” said the Boss at last. “It’s your birthday and you’ve got a long drive ahead of you. You go on and take the day off. We’ll deal with all of this on Tuesday.”

“You sure?” said the Dodger. The Beretta with its silencer was on his lap as he drove. It felt like a blue-steel erection. “Cheektowaga’s on my way out of town,” he added.

The Boss was silent another few seconds. “No, you go on,” said the calm voice. “It might work out better all around if we wait a day.”

“All right,” said the Dodger, realizing how tired he was. And he did have a long drive ahead of him. And much to do when he arrived. “I’ll call you Tuesday morning. Want me to go straight to Cheektowaga then?”

“Yes, that would be good,” said the Boss. “Phone me when you get near the airport. No later than seven A.M., all right? We want to meet these ladies before Mrs. DeMarco goes in to work.”

“Okay,” said the Dodger. “Anything else?”

“Just have a good birthday, Sean,” said the Boss.

CHAPTER

FORTY-FOUR

I’ll go in through the door I blew,” said Angelina. “You go around by the terrace. I think we’d better wrap this up fast Baby Doc looks like he’s ready to take off without us, and it might be to his advantage to do it. Get Toma and his guy and we’ll get the fuck out of here.”

Kurtz nodded and they split up.

Kurtz was still carrying his ditty bag, but there was no need for night-vision goggles now. The house was fully engaged, the second floor pouring flames out of its high windows, the roof cedar-shake shingles smoking and more smoke billowing out the first-floor windows on the east and west sides. The flickering light from the flames illuminated everything out to the Bell Long Ranger.

Kurtz paused at the corner of the house and then swung around onto the terrace overlooking the cliff.

Gonzaga’s guy, Bobby, swung a shotgun his way.

“Hey!” said Kurtz, holding his hands and the Browning high. “It’s me.”

Bobby lowered the shotgun. He was watching the open doors to the library and the Major’s room, which lay behind two closed, heavy, windowless doors.

“What’s the situation?” asked Kurtz. He popped one cartridge out of the Browning’s chamber and dropped it in his pocket. Then he racked the next cartridge in, dropped the empty magazine to the terrace, and slapped in another ten-round clip.

“The boss is still in there, gathering up papers and shit and keeping the Major in his room. The whole fucking place is beginning to burn in there, so the boss won’t be staying much longer.”

This last information was redundant The flames were pouring out of the second floor windows above the terrace and the heat was significant.

“I think the Major’s room connects to Trinh’s next to it,” said Kurtz over the crackling of the flames. “The old man could get out that way.”

Bobby shook his head. “The boss had me shove what was left of that library table up against Trinh’s bedroom door and pile up a bunch of shit on it The Major ain’t getting out that way. Not in a wheelchair.”

“Anyone else in there with the Major?”

“We don’t know. The boss don’t think so. We got some handgun fire from the bedroom door right when you left. Then the Major closed and bolted it. The boss thinks he’s in there alone.”

“C-4?” said Kurtz.

Bobby shrugged. “I guess. Me, I’d let the old fuck burn.” He said it loud enough to carry through the outside doors.

“Go help Gonzaga,” said Kurtz. “I’ll watch out here.”

When Bobby had run into the smoking library, Kurtz backed away, then peered over the edge of the cliff to the valley floor far below. There were emergency vehicles down there—he could see a fire truck and at least three sheriff’s cars, as well as a gaggle of big SUVs—but no one was coming up the winding drive or climbing the ziggurat staircase.

Kurtz walked off the terrace and stepped around the south corner of the burning house. Inside, something heavy collapsed. There was movement at the opposite end of the house, and Kurtz turned with the Browning before he saw that it was Angelina, Gonzaga, and Bobby, carrying bags of stuff and heading for the helicopter.

“Kurtz!” called the female don. “Come on. We’re leaving.”

Kurtz nodded and waved. And waited where he was.

It was about three minutes later when the barred doors were flung open and the Major came wheeling his chair out onto the terrace. The old man was in pajamas and a robe, a huge service .45 on his lap, both hands busy pushing the manually powered wheelchair away from the smoking doors and the burning house.

The Major got to the edge of the terrace and stopped, coughing heavily and spitting.

“Freeze,” said Kurtz, stepping out onto the terrace, Browning aimed and braced with both hands. He walked toward the wheelchair, taking time to glance into the Major’s bedroom. It was roiling with heavy smoke. If anyone was left in there, they were out of the game unless they were wearing a respirator. “Keep your hands on the wheels,” Kurtz said, stepping to within six feet of the old man.

The Major turned his head and shoulders, keeping his hands on the metal grab-ring of the chair’s wheels as instructed. The military man who’d looked so powerful here on this terrace eleven hours earlier looked old and haggard and worn out now. His white crewcut was sweaty and matted, showing an old man’s pink scalp. The pajama tops were open, showing the muscled chest but also gray hairs and old scars. Major O’Toole’s eyes looked tired and watery. A line of soot under each nostril showed that even old military men couldn’t breathe pure smoke for long.

“Turn around,” said Kurtz.

The Major swung the chair around. Both men were obviously aware of the .45 on the old man’s lap, but there was no way to get rid of it unless Kurtz allowed the Major to lift his hands or Kurtz stepped closer to grab it. The old cripple couldn’t kick it away from him.

Kurtz decided to leave it alone for now.

“Mr. Kurtz,” said the Major and then began coughing again. He started to lift a fist to his mouth, saw Kurtz thumb the hammer back on the Browning, and finished the coughing fit with his big hands firmly clamped on the wheels. When he was finished, he raised his soot-streaked face and said, “You win, Mr. Kurtz. What do you want?”

“Did you order Peg O’Toole killed?”

The old gray eyes widened. “Order my niece killed? Are you crazy?”

“Who did?”

“I have no idea. I presume it was one of your Mafia friends.”

Kurtz shook his head. “You killed your brother, John. Why not his daughter, too?”

The Major flinched as if Kurtz had slapped him in the face. His powerful arms and huge hands flexed.

“Why’d you kill your brother?” said Kurtz. “He was a cop, but close to retirement No, wait…it was because he found out you were trying to move your heroin ring into Lackawanna and Buffalo, wasn’t it?”

The Major snarled—he literally snarled.

“So did you sic your crazy son on Peg O’Toole as well?” pressed Kurtz.

“My son…” said the Major. The old man’s chiseled face seemed to shift, like some morphing special effect in a movie. The strong bones seemed to sag. “My son is dead. Sean Michael is dead. He died fifteen years ago in a fire.”

“Your fucking son, the Artful Dodger, dodged that fire, too, didn’t he, Major? Who’d you send to be a corpse in his place? One of your Vietnamese lackeys? No, it’d have to be someone who looked more like a crazy Irish bastard, even after he was burned up, wouldn’t it? And then you supplied the dental records, didn’t you?”

“My son is dead!” snarled the Major. He grabbed for the .45.

Instead of firing, Kurtz lunged closer and kicked the wheelchair, wedging his boot between the old man’s withered knees and pushing hard.

The Major let out a cry and dropped the .45, grabbing the steel rims of the wheels with both of his powerful hands, leaning forward to brake the sliding chair just as it slid back to the edge of the rainslicked terrace. The gun bounced on the flagstones.

“I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you,” panted the Major. He obviously wanted to grab Kurtz’s leg, get both hands on Kurtz’s throat, to choke the life out of him. But to do that, the Major would have to release the wheels.

Kurtz hopped on one leg, Browning still aimed, and kicked again, pushing hard with all of his weight The wheelchair, wheels locked, slid and screeched another yard, until it teetered right on the edge of the near-vertical ziggurat staircase.

“Who shot me?” gasped Kurtz, leaning closer. “Who shot Peg O’Toole? Who did you send?”

“I’ll fucking kill you,” panted the old man. Sweat flew from his straining forehead and pelted Kurtz’s face. The Major’s breath smelled of smoke and death. “Fucking kill you. Kill you.” His upper body strength was tremendous. Kurtz was being pushed back, his right leg folding back as the wheelchair moved forward six inches…then another six inches.

“Send your crazy, fucked-up son to do it,” panted Kurtz. His right leg was cramping wildly, but his boot remained firmly planted on the chair between the Major’s knees.

“Aarrrrgggghhh!” screamed the Major and lifted both of his huge hands to grab Kurtz’s throat, to choke the life out of him, to drag him over the edge with him.

Kurtz threw his upper body back, avoiding the lurching hands as he’d avoid a cobra strike, throwing himself almost horizontally backward. He landed heavily on one elbow, the Major’s huge hands still grasping air above him. Kurtz gathered his legs like springs and kicked the wheelchair and the Major’s withered knees with both boots.

The wheelchair and the flailing old man flew backwards off the terrace and over the cliff.

By the time Kurtz stood and stepped to the edge, the broken chair and flying, screaming figure had already pin-wheeled off thirty steps and were picking up speed as they tumbled into darkness.

CHAPTER

FORTY-FIVE

Rigby came to when they were somewhere near Kissing Bridge.

The take-off had been interesting. Coming down from Buffalo, the interior of the Long Ranger had been neat enough, even with all the ordnance. Everyone had been strapped in. Taking off, it was pure confusion—most of the people crouching on the floor, the little Yemeni doctor jumping back and forth as he worked on Rigby King and Colonel Trinh, the interior of the chopper smelling of smoke and sweat and blood and cordite and shit—Kurtz guessed that Campbell had voided his bowels when he died.

“We’re too fucking heavy,” Baby Doc cried from the pilot’s seat. “Throw someone out.”

“Campbell goes home with us,” yelled Angelina. She was mopping blood off her face with her sleeve, but the sleeve was so bloody that it just moved the gore around in swirls.

“Don’t blame me if we end up in the side of some goddamned hill,” shouted Baby Doc Skrzypczyk. But the turbines screamed, the rotors blurred, they bounced once on skids, and the overladen chopper lifted off.

No one closed the side door. Kurtz hung on and looked below as they rose, banked left away from the burning house, and flew down the valley toward Neola.

The road below was still filled with vehicles and lights, but except for the two burning vehicles at the top of the hill, the driveway was empty. No one had tried to assault the guardpost from where Baby Doc had fired his first RPG and then rained automatic rifle fire on the fleeing rescuers. Just as they banked and dropped over the edge, the Huey’s gas tank exploded behind them, sending a second ball of flame into the air. The whole top of the hill seemed to be on fire.

No one from the valley shot at them. Or at least Kurtz saw no muzzle flashes. Maybe, he thought, they believed the Long Ranger was the Major’s private Huey.

When Rigby awoke a few minutes later, they were flying a thousand feet or so over the dark hills, the air rushing in the open rear door. Dr. Tafer had covered her with a blanket, and now Kurtz tucked it in. She was shaking.

“Joe?”

“Yeah.” He put a hand on her shoulder.

“I knew you’d come for me.”

He had nothing to say to that. “Rigby,” he shouted over the wind and turbine roar, “you need some morphine?”

The woman’s teeth were chattering, but not from the cold, Kurtz guessed. He suspected that she was on the verge of going into shock because of the pain and blood loss. “Oh, yeah, that’d be good,” she said. “They didn’t give me anything for the pain all day. Just that goddamned IV. And they couldn’t get the bleeding to stop.”

“Did they do anything else to you?”

She shook her head. “Just asked stupid questions. About you. About who we were working for. If I’d known the answers, I would’ve told ’em, Joe. But I didn’t know anything, so I couldn’t.”

He squeezed her shoulder again. Dr. Tafer leaned closer, but Kurtz pushed him back. “Rigby, the doc’s going to give you a shot, but you have to listen to me a minute. Can you hear me?”

“Yeah.” Her teeth were chattering wildly now.

“You’re going to be out of it,” said Kurtz. “Probably wake up in the hospital. But it’s important you don’t tell them who shot you. Don’t tell anyone—not even Kemper. Do you understand that?”

She shook her head ‘no’ but said, “Yeah.”

“It’s important, Rigby. Don’t tell anyone about coming down to Neola, the Major…none of that. You don’t remember what happened. You don’t remember where you were or who shot you or why. Tell them that. Can you do that?”

“I don’t…remember,” gasped Rigby, gritting her teeth against the waves of pain.

“Good,” said Kurtz. “I’ll see you later.” He nodded to the doctor, who scooted forward on his knees and gave the woman a shot of morphine.

The helicopter bucked and pitched. “We’re too heavy!” called Baby Doc. “The Ranger’s supposed to haul no more than seven people. We’ve got nine in here. At least come up front again, Kurtz. Help trim it.”

“In a minute,” shouted Kurtz. He crawled farther back, to where Gonzaga and Angelina were grilling Colonel Trinh near the open door.

The older Vietnamese man’s visibly broken arm was twisted behind him, his wrists still flexcuffed. Gonzaga had also cuffed the man’s ankles and he was propped precariously against the frame of the open door. The air roared past at over a hundred and thirty miles an hour.

“Tell us what we want to know,” shouted Toma Gonzaga, “or out you go.”

Trinh looked out at the darkness rushing by and smiled. “Yes,” he said so softly that his voice was barely audible over the noise. “It is very familiar.”

“I bet,” said Angelina. Her face and hair were a mask of blood. “Why did you kill our junkies and dealers?”

Trinh shrugged and then winced from his arm and wounds. “It was a war.”

“It’s no goddamned war,” shouted Gonzaga. “We didn’t even know you existed until today. We never touched you. Why kill our people?”

The old colonel looked Gonzaga in the eye and shook his head.

“What’s the connection?” shouted Kurtz. He was on his knees, straddling Campbell’s sprawled legs. Blood sloshed back and forth on the plastic that covered the floor as the overladen chopper banked and rose and fell. “Who’s been protecting your operation all these years, Trinh? CIA? FBI? Why?”

“There were three of us in Vietnam,” said the old man. “We worked together very well. We have worked together very well since.”

“Three?” said Gonzaga. He looked at Kurtz.

“The Major for the army,” shouted Kurtz over the wind roar. “Trinh for the Vietnamese. And somebody in U.S. intelligence. Probably CIA. Right, Colonel?”

Trinh shrugged again.

“But why cover for you?” shouted Angelina. “Why would some federal agency keep your heroin ring a secret?”

“We brought in much more than heroin,” said Trinh. He leaned back against the pitching door frame almost casually, as if he were in his own living room. “Our people in Syria, the Bekkah Valley, Afghanistan, Turkey…all very useful.”

“To who?” shouted Gonzaga.

“What are you going to do with me?” asked the Colonel. He had to repeat the question because of the noise. His voice was calm.

“We’re going to throw you out the goddamned door if you don’t answer our questions better,” shouted Gonzaga.

“We’ll take you to a hospital with Rigby,” said Kurtz. “Just tell us who the federal connections were and why they…”

“Do you know the irony?” interrupted Colonel Trinh, smiling suddenly. “The irony was that Major O’Toole and I are retired…we only came back to New York because of the SEATCO stockholders’ meeting and because Michael wanted to see his niece.”

The colonel shook his head, still smiling, and then deliberately pitched over to his left.

Gonzaga and Angelina grabbed at the man’s legs and boots, but before they could get a grip, he was gone, out the black door, whipped away and down by wind and gravity.

“Oh, fuck,” said Angelina Farino Ferrara.

“That’s better!” shouted Baby Doc from the front. “Now someone get up here in the copilot’s seat and help me trim this pig.”

CHAPTER

FORTY-SIX

Angelina drove Kurtz and Rigby to the hospital.

They took the extra SUV that Campbell had driven to Gonzaga’s compound and tossed his body in the back. Dr. Tafer and Kurtz carried Rigby to it on a litter, sliding her onto the flat floor left after all the seats were folded away. Then Tafer drove off with Baby Doc’s men, Gonzaga had driven away with Bobby and his crew, and Baby Doc himself had lifted the Long Ranger off with a roar of turbines amidst a hurricane of litter.

Kurtz had grabbed the keys and gone around to the SUV’s driver’s door, but Angelina had swung up first. “I’ll drive,” she said. “You stay in the back with Ms. Cellulite. I’ll send somebody for the other vehicle.”

He had jumped in the back, propping Rigby’s head on his leg. Tafer had put her on a second unit of plasma and she was unconscious from the morphine. The Yemeni doctor had warned that she was in shock and in bad shape from loss of blood.

They were only a couple of miles from the Erie County Medical Center. For once, Kurtz thought, he’d planned ahead.

“We can’t carry her in, you know,” called Angelina from the front. She was driving carefully, staying under the speed limit and stopping for lights even when the intersection was dark and empty. Kurtz smiled to himself when he thought of what a haul it would be for the policeman who pulled them over for speeding—a wounded cop, a dead thug, a cache of stolen night-vision gear and automatic weapons, with a bloody, female Mafia don driving.

“I know,” said Kurtz. “We’ll drop her at emergency. I trust this truck isn’t registered and the plates are bogus.”

“Totally,” said Angelina. “This thing will be in a chop shop before sunrise.”

They drove in silence for a block or two. It was about two-forty-five in the morning. The time, Kurtz knew from experience, when human beings held their least firm grip on life. Rigby was cold to the touch and she looked dead. Kurtz used three fingers to find the pulse in her neck—it was hard to find.

“Well,” said Angelina, “you sure provided Toma and me with a bonding experience, just like you promised.”

Kurtz had nothing to say to that. He looked out at the dark buildings going by—they’d just crossed Delavan and were within a couple of blocks of the hospital.

“This third party that Trinh was talking about before he took a header,” said Angelina. “Did you ever consider that it might be Baby Doc? That he’s been working both sides against the middle?”

“Yeah.”

“If it is, we just paid the son of a bitch three quarters of a million dollars to help him take over a drug ring he’s been trying to take over for years.”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. “But it’s not Baby Doc.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know,” said Kurtz.

They pulled up the emergency room drive. Kurtz kicked the back doors of the SUV open, pulled the IV needle, lifted Rigby out, and laid her on the wet concrete. Angelina laid on the truck’s horn. Kurtz was inside and they were driving off at high speed just as the first nurses and orderlies came out the automatic doors.

“Think she’ll make it?” asked Angelina. She swung the truck up onto the Kensington Expressway. No one was giving chase.

“How the fuck do I know?”

The bodyguard’s body rolled against Kurtz as the SUV took the turn toward downtown. Kurtz crawled up into the passenger seat. “Where does Campbell go? Another chop shop?”

“More or less.”

“Then why bring him back?”

“Leave no man behind or somesuch macho shit, right?” Angelina looked at him. “You in love with the cop, Joe?”

Kurtz rubbed his temples. “You going back to the Towers?”

“Where else?”

“Good. My Pinto’s there.”

“You’re not going back to your Harbor Inn dump, are you?”

“Where else?”

“Do you have any idea what’s going to happen when they ID your girlfriend back there?”

“Yeah,” Kurtz said tiredly. “Buffalo P.D.’s going to go apeshit. And Rigby’s partner, a hard-on named Kemper, is going to go more apeshit than the rest. I’m pretty sure Rigby told him that she was going to be with me yesterday, so he’ll send black-and-whites out to pick me up as soon as he hears.”

“And you’re still going back to your place?”

Kurtz shrugged. “I think we’ve got a few hours. There was no ID on Rigby and she’ll either be unconscious for hours or…”

“Dead,” said Angelina.

“…or she’ll wake but keep her mouth shut for a while.”

“But it’s a gunshot wound,” said Angelina, meaning that the police would be informed straight from the emergency room and that a cop would be sent over to check it out.

“Yeah.”

“Come spend the night in the penthouse,” said Angelina. “I won’t rape you.”

“Another time,” said Kurtz. He looked at the don’s daughter. “Although I have to say, you do look ravishing.”

Angelina Farino Ferrara laughed unselfconsciously and pushed her sweaty and gore-matted hair off her bloody forehead.

Kurtz knew as soon as he went through the front door of the Harbor Inn that someone had been there—perhaps was still there. He pulled the Browning. Then he went to one knee, laid the ditty bag on the floor, tugged on the night-vision goggles that he’d conveniently forgotten to give back to Baby Doc in the confusion, and clicked on the power. The glasses whined up and the dark foyer-restaurant glowed bright green and white in his vision.

The telltales were in place by the stairs and in the center of the main room, but that meant nothing. Kurtz could sense a movement of air that shouldn’t be there—air that smelled of piss.

He searched all the ground floor rooms before going up the stairs with the Browning extended.

He found the taped circle of missing glass in the front window. Someone had destroyed all three of his video monitors, firing a slug into each of the CRTs. In his bedroom, someone had urinated on his mattress and pillows and thrown his clothing around the room. In his reading room, the same someone had used a knife on his repaired Eames chair, slashing the cushions beyond salvage. Most of the books had been thrown off the shelves and the bookcases had been tumbled over. His visitor had defecated on the Persian carpet.

Kurtz didn’t have to wonder who it’d been—this wasn’t quite the style of the local kids. He searched the rest of the building and discovered his backup pistol missing. The window to the fire escape was still partially open. He pushed it shut and reset the lock.

“Hope you had a good time, Artful Dodger,” muttered Kurtz. He found some clean, dark clothes that hadn’t been peed on, went in and took a shower—checking carefully for booby traps before turning on the water. He threw the borrowed clothes into a laundry bag along with the stuff his night visitor had urinated on. Then he cleaned up the poop in the library—feeling like one of those idiots whom he saw walking their big dogs in the park along the river, pooper scooper at the ready—dropped the whole mess—filthy clothes, baggy of feces, mattress, bed clothes, pillows, and Eames chair—into the Dumpster below the rear window. Then Kurtz washed his hands again and, fully dressed except for the Mephisto boots he’d decided to keep, curled up on his weight-press bench in the front second-floor room, set his mental alarm clock for seven A.M., and went instantly to sleep.

CHAPTER

FORTY-SEVEN

My Yasein was working for the CIA.”

Kurtz was at the breakfast table in Arlene’s kitchen. The girl named Aysha was speaking. Arlene had explained in a whisper when she’d come to the door that she told the girl the truth—mostly—explaining to her that her fiancé had been killed in a Shootout at the Civic Center, probably while trying to assassinate a parole officer. But Arlene had let Aysha think that it had been Peg O’Toole who had returned fire with deadly effect.

“How do you know he was working for the CIA?” said Kurtz.

“He wrote to me about it. Yasein wrote to me every day.”

“While you were in Canada?”

“Yes. I have been in Toronto for more than two months, waiting until Yasein could bring me into the United States of America.”

“What did he tell you about working for the CIA?”

The girl sipped her tea. She seemed very calm, her large, brown eyes dry, her voice steady. “What do you want to know, Mr. Kurtz?”

“Did he give you any names? Tell you who approached him about working for the CIA?”

“Yes. His controller was code-named Jericho.”

“Did he give Jericho’s real name?”

“No. I am sure that Yasein did not know it. He wrote me that everyone in the CIA used code names only. Yasein’s code name was ‘Sparrow.’”

Kurtz looked at Arlene, who was on her third Marlboro. “How did Jericho first contact Yasein?”

“He came into an…how do you say the word? Room in police headquarters where people are questioned?”

“Interrogation room?”

“Yes,” said Aysha in her pleasant accent. “Interrogation room. Mr. Jericho came to see Yasein in the interrogation room when Yasein was arrested as an illegal immigrant and possible terrorist.” She sipped her tea and looked at Arlene. “My Yasein was not a terrorist, Mrs. DeMarco.”

“I know,” said Arlene and patted the girl’s arm.

Kurtz rubbed his aching head and raised his coffee cup, letting the steam from the coffee touch his face. He’d wakened at five with the mother of all headaches and gotten out of the Harbor Inn before the cops showed up. An anonymous call to Erie Medical Center hadn’t even told him if Rigby was alive—they’d asked him repeatedly if he was family and tried to keep him on the line; Kurtz had left the pay phone quickly.

“So Yasein was taken into the Buffalo police headquarters?” asked Kurtz. “Or the federal building?”

“It was, as you say, federal,” Aysha said carefully. “He wrote that it was Homeland Security people who detained him.”

“FBI?”

The pretty young woman frowned. “I think not. But my Yasein was not proud of being detained, and he did not share all details.”

“But this Jericho CIA guy first talked to him while he was in detention either at the Justice Center or FBI headquarters here in Buffalo?”

“I believe, yes. Yasein did write to say that he had been terrified—they arrested him on his way home from work, four men, put a black bag over his head, and drove him to the center where he was interrogated. He wrote that it had smelled like a large building—parking garage in the basement, a…what do you call a very quick and direct lift?”

“Express elevator?” said Arlene.

“Yes, thank you. They took an express elevator from basement. My Yasein’s hands were handcuffed behind him and he had black bag over his head, but he could hear. And smell. It was a tall building, at least twenty stories tall, with many offices and computers. Several men from Homeland Security questioned him for two days and two nights.”

“Was Yasein kept in a holding cell?” asked Kurtz. “With other detainees or prisoners?”

“No. He wrote me that they kept him in a small room with a cot. It had a sink but no toilet He was very embarrassed that he had to…how do you say it? Urinate?”

“Yes,” said Arlene.

“That he had to urinate in a sink when they came for him late on the third morning. That is when he met the CIA man. Mr. Jericho.”

“But no description of this Jericho?” said Kurtz.

“No.” The girl ventured a small smile. “Are CIA spies allowed then to send descriptions of their fellow agents in letters?”

Kurtz had to smile back. “I don’t think CIA agents are allowed to write letters to their fiancées about any of this stuff. But who knows?”

“Indeed,” said Aysha. “If your CIA is like our State Security Service in Yemen. Who does know?”

Kurtz rubbed his head again. “But it was this Mr. Jericho and the CIA who provided Yasein with the money to bring you in?”

“Yes.”

“But you had to wait almost ten weeks in Canada after they flew you from Yemen to Toronto.”

“Yes. I wait while Yasein earn the rest of the money to pay men to bring me across the border.”

“If it was the CIA, why didn’t they just bring you straight into the States?”

“That would be illegal, Yasein tell me in letter.”

Kurtz looked at Arlene and resisted the urge to sigh. “But they were training Yasein to kill a parole officer,” he said.

“So you tell me. Yasein never wrote about the name or nature of the…is ‘operation’ the right word, Mrs. DeMarco? For secret CIA plan to assassinate someone?”

“Yes,” said Arlene.

“My Yasein was no killer, Mr. Kurtz. He was trained as a mechanic. Does that wound hurt you?”

“What?” said Kurtz. He’d been thinking.

“The head wound. It was not stitched correctly and has not healed properly and the bandage is all bad. May I look at it?”

“Aysha was trained as a nurse,” said Arlene, rising to get more coffee and tea for them all.

Kurtz shook his head. “No, thanks. It’s fine. Did Yasein say anything else about the CIA or about Jericho?”

“Just that two weeks after he agreed to work for them, they brought him to CIA headquarters, where they trained him.”

“In Langley, Virginia?” said Kurtz, surprised.

“I do not know. My Yasein said it was on a…what do you call a farm for horses? Expensive horses, such as the kind they race in Derby of Kentucky?”

“Thoroughbreds? A sort of ranch?”

“Not ranch,” said Aysha, frowning as she hunted for the right word. “Where they do the breeding of expensive horses?”

Kurtz had no idea what she was talking about. He drank more coffee and closed his eyes against the headache.

“Stud farm,” said Arlene.

“Yes. They trained my Yasein how to fire guns and do other CIA things at stud farm in the country. Several men, all with code names, taught him over three-day Labor Day weekend. He had to pass test before being allowed to return to Buffalo and go back to work.”

“How’d he get to this stud farm?” asked Kurtz. “Did he tell you in his letters?”

“Oh, yes. He said that they flew in a private CIA jet. Yasein was very impressed.”

“So am I,” said Kurtz.

Aysha had gone to her room while Kurtz and Arlene spoke in the small, neat living room.

“I want you to take the girl and go to Gail’s place this afternoon when I leave,” Kurtz said.

“Is someone after us, Joe?”

“Maybe.”

“Is it the Burned Man?”

“Probably,” said Kurtz. “But I have a hunch he won’t show up today. But stay at Gail’s tomorrow until I call or show up.”

Arlene nodded. “What do you think of Aysha’s whole CIA story?”

“Well, it’s absurd,” said Kurtz. “But it fits, in a weird sort of way.”

“How so?”

He shook his head. He didn’t want to tell Arlene about last night. Not yet. With luck, never. He’d read her copy of the Buffalo News, even turned on the local TV news when he’d arrived, but there was no mention of the bloodletting, fire, and mayhem in Neola the night before.

Incredible, he’d thought if they can keep that covered up. It must be the CIA or Homeland Security or some serious federal agency involved. Either that or the local authorities kept it all hushed up.

But why train an illegal Yemeni immigrant trained as a mechanic, to kill a parole officer? If the feds were covering up for the Major’s drug-and-spy operation down there, why draw attention by shooting Peg O’Toole? None of it made any sense.

“None of this makes any sense,” said Arlene. She batted ashes into an old beanbag ashtray.

Kurtz just sighed. He expected the front door to be kicked in with a hydraulic ram any moment and for Paul Kemper to lead a SWAT team in.

As if reading his mind again, Arlene said, “Gail will call from the hospital as soon as she hears about Detective King.”

Kurtz had told her about Rigby. Arlene’s sister-in-law was a pediatric nurse at Erie County, and it was the only way he was going to find out whether Rigby King was dead or alive.

“Were you going to call the ex-director today?” asked Arlene.

“Who?” Kurtz had no idea what she was talking about. His head seemed to be full of bees. I don’t know why. I got a full two hours sleep.

“The ex-director of the Rochester Psychiatric Hospital,” Arlene said patiently. “You asked me to get his home phone, remember? He’s living in Ontario on the Lake.” She handed him a slip of paper with the number on it.

“All right,” said Kurtz. “Can I use your kitchen phone?”

CHAPTER

FORTY-EIGHT

It was cold and windy again when Kurtz headed south out of Buffalo just after dark. Driving through residential neighborhoods near the park from Gail’s home, he saw kids in costumes carrying plastic pumpkins going from door to door.

It’s Halloween. As if he had to be reminded. It was raining off and on and the air smelled like the rain wanted to turn to snow. It was almost cold enough.

Kurtz was wearing another dark outfit, black jeans, the Mephistos, and dark sweater, all under his peacoat He’d tugged a navy watch cap down gingerly over his aching scalp. He’d borrowed Arlene’s Buick, leaving her and Aysha the Pinto. But they wouldn’t be using it tonight. Gail DeMarco’s second-floor apartment on Colvin north of the park was small—one small bedroom for Gail and a tinier one for Rachel, but they didn’t seem to mind sharing tonight. Arlene said that she was going to bunk with Gail, Aysha was going to get the fold-out couch, and they were all going to make some popcorn tonight and watch videos of “The Thing from Another World” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still” in honor of Halloween. Rachel would love the company, Gail had said.

Kurtz’s mind wanted to linger on Rachel, but he skittered away from that topic, recalling his conversation with Dr. Charles from the psychiatric hospital instead.

“Yes, of course I remember the fire,” the old gentleman had said. “A terrible thing. We never did find out how it started. Several people died.”

“Including Sean Michael O’Toole?” said Kurtz.

“Yes.” A pause. “Did you say you worked for the Buffalo Evening News, Mr. Kurtz?”

“No, I’m a freelancer. Doing a magazine article. School shootings are hot these days and Sean Michael O’Toole was an early school-shooter.”

“Yes,” Dr. Charles said sadly. “Columbine still seems fresh, even after all these years.”

“Did you ever hear your patient—Sean—referred to as the Dodger?” asked Kurtz. “Or the Artful Dodger?”

“The Artful Dodger?” said the old man with a chuckle. “As in Dickens? No. I’m sure I would have remembered that.”

“You say he had visitors the day of the fire,” prompted Kurtz. “In fact, the fire broke out in the visitor’s wing while they were there.”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember who the visitors were?”

“Well, one I certainly remember,” said Dr. Charles. “It was Sean Michael’s younger brother.”

“His younger brother,” repeated Kurtz, pausing as if he was writing this down. Arlene’s kitchen looked out onto a tiny backyard. Sean Michael O’Toole had no siblings. “A year or two younger than Sean?” said Kurtz. “Redheaded?”

“Oh, no,” said Dr. Charles. “I met him and his friend when they signed in to see Sean. Michael Junior was much younger than our patient—he was only about twenty. Sean had just turned thirty that week. And Sean’s younger brother didn’t look at all like Sean—much darker, much more handsome.”

“I see,” said Kurtz, although he didn’t see at all. “And who was the other man visiting?”

“I don’t remember. He didn’t speak at all during the time I was chatting with Sean’s younger brother. He seemed—distracted. Almost drugged.”

“Was he, by any chance, about Sean’s height and age and weight?” said Kurtz.

The doctor was silent for a moment while he tried to recall. “Yes, I believe he was. It’s been fifteen years, you know, and—as I said—the other visitor didn’t speak when I was talking to Sean’s brother.”

“But both the brother and other man got out of the burning building all right?”

“Oh, yes.” Dr. Charles sounded distressed by memories of the fire even after all these years. “There was much confusion, of course—fire engines arriving, patients and attendants screaming and running to and fro, but we made sure that all our visitors were safe.”

“Did you see Sean’s brother—Michael Junior—and this other man after the fire?”

“Very briefly. Sean’s brother was fine and the other man was receiving oxygen.”

“Did he go to the hospital?” asked Kurtz.

“I don’t believe so, no. What are you driving at, Mr. Kurtz?”

“Absolutely nothing, Dr. Charles. Just curious about the details. You say that no visitors were seriously hurt in the fire. Nor attendants. Just the three inmates?”

“We preferred to call them patients,” Dr. Charles had said coolly.

“Of course. Just the three patients died. Including Sean Michael O’Toole.”

“That is correct.”

“And did you carry out the identification, Dr. Charles?”

“Of two of them I did, Mr. Kurtz. With Sean Michael, we had to resort to remnants of clothing, a class ring he was wearing, and dental records.”

“Provided by his father?” said Kurtz. “By Major O’Toole of Neola?”

“I believe so, yes.” The ex-director’s friendly voice was no longer friendly. “What are you getting at, Mr. Kurtz? This is no idle curiosity.”

“One never knows what one’s readers will find interesting, Dr. Charles,” Kurtz had said in his most pedantic voice. “Thank you for your help, sir.” And he had hung up.

Kurtz drove the Buick east and then south on the four-lane 400, following it into the dark hills when it became Highway 16. The little towns passed one after the other. There was almost no traffic. In the tiny town of Chaffee, Kurtz could see late-night trick-or-treaters going from one large, white house to the other down a tree-lined street. Dead leaves skittered across the highway. Clouds ran ahead of the wind across a cold, quarter moon. It looked, felt, and smelled like Halloween.

Kurtz had watched the evening and late-night local news at Gail’s place—he sensed that Gail didn’t like him and was nervous when he was around, but he didn’t know why—and there had been no mention of the Neola massacre. There had been a fifteen-second piece about a Buffalo police detective being shot—the officer had been in surgery that day and there were no details or leads at this time. She was expected to recover.

Gail had kept Arlene posted during the day on Rigby’s condition—which had been upgraded from critical to serious by the end of the day. The ICU nurses had told Gail only that Detective King had a twenty-four-hour police guard outside the unit and that a black police detective had been there much of the day waiting for the patient to regain consciousness.

Kurtz listened to his favorite Buffalo jazz station until the signal faded as he got into the deeper valleys near Neola. He realized that he was half-dozing at the wheel when he passed under the Interstate and found himself on the four-lane road for the last seven miles into Neola.

The city was asleep, the over-wide Main Street empty and mostly dark. It had rained hard here from the looks of it and the orange-and-black crepe paper decorations on some of the shop fronts were wilted and wind-torn.

Kurtz drove through town slowly, confident that the Neola Sheriff’s Department wouldn’t be on the lookout for a late-model blue Buick. Although one person here has seen this car—up at the Rainbow Centre Mall.

He crossed the bridge over the Allegheny, turned left on the county road, and killed the headlights as soon as he turned off the paved road. Kurtz tugged down the military-spec night vision goggles and powered them up, easily following the gravel road and then dirt ruts up the hill the way he had come before.

Parking at the barricade, he got the gear he needed out of the backseat, tugging some on, then pulling on the peacoat again and filling the pockets with extra clips for the Browning and two flash-bangs, then tossing the empty ditty bag onto the backseat.

He went up the hill, crawled through the same cut in the fence he’d made the day before, but then made a wide loop around the forested hill, planning to come over the top and then down into Cloud Nine. The night vision goggles made the weak moonlight and occasional starlight as bright as daylight.

He was following the rails of the kiddie railroad near the top of the hill, Browning still in its holster, when he heard the noises and saw the moving lights.

Music. Organ-grinder, calliope-type music. Coming from where the midway had once been. And lights moving there. A partially illuminated Ferris wheel turning.

But another light and a louder noise loomed closer, higher up the hill, here where Kurtz lay waiting.

The train was coming.

CHAPTER

FORTY-NINE

The train’s single headlight blinded him from fifty yards away as it turned around the curve of the hill and chugged toward him down the gleaming green-white tracks.

Kurtz tugged off his night-vision goggles and let them dangle around his neck as he climbed fifteen yards up the hill and hid in some thick shrubs. He racked a slug into the Browning’s chamber and propped his elbow on his knee, holding his aim steady as the train racketed closer. Avoiding looking into the single, bobbing headlight, Kurtz pulled the goggles up and into place.

Then the amusement-park mini-train was chugging past him, filling the air with its two-stroke lawnmower engine chug and exhaust stink. And then it was past, rattling and rocking around the curve of the hill and into the woods to the south.

“Jesus,” whispered Kurtz.

There had been no driver, the engine car was empty. But the following three cars, each styled like a passenger or freight car in miniature, but each also open to the air and just big enough for two children to sit in comfort or a single adult in discomfort, butt on a low cushion and knees high, had been carrying passengers. Kurtz had counted eight corpses propped up in the passenger cars—four dead men, two dead women, and two dead children.

“Jesus,” Kurtz whispered again. The train was audible on the other side of the hill through the bare trees and rustling leaves now, heading back toward the burned mansion and then around again in its closed loop. There must have been a line switch thrown somewhere to keep the train looping around this hill, its metal throttle lever taped in the open position.

No dead man lever, thought Kurtz and resisted the urge to laugh.

He crossed the tracks and headed downhill toward the lighted midway, pistol at his side, trying not to break branches or step on more leaves than he had to. But any sound that he made was lost under the tinny carnival music that grew louder as he grew nearer. Right now, speakers were blaring with an organ version of “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

The sight of the midway when he arrived was too surreal through the night vision goggles, so he took them off again. The images remained surreal in moonlight and midway glow.

Somewhere nearby a generator popped and sputtered. The broken, rusted Ferris wheel moved creakingly, in spurts and fits, but it turned. There were a dozen or so working lights on its frame, where scores had once burned when Cloud Nine was new. But those few were enough to illuminate the half dozen adult corpses riding in the four remaining passenger benches on the creaking wheel. Two had slumped forward against the rusted restraining bars.

The merry-go-round was turning ponderously. The music came from there, from a boom box set up in the center of the creaking, groaning circle. The broken horses and shattered zebras and headless lions were not going up and down, but five of them had riders—a dead woman with a bullet hole in her blue forehead slumped forward against the vertical pole rising out of the golden palomino; a male corpse with three black holes in his Eddie Izzard T-shirt lay sprawled stiffly across the lion with the missing lower jaw; a little girl no older than five, part of her skull missing between braids, slumped against a giraffe’s long, splintered neck.

The merry-go-round turned round and round to the musk in the rustling woods.

Kurtz tried to move from shadow to shadow, his finger clammy against the trigger. He could smell popcorn. Popcorn and something sticky-smelling—either fresh blood or cotton candy. The lawnmower exhaust stink of the train wafted down as the locomotive rumbled by just up the hill again.

The bumper car pavilion was still shattered and flooded, dead leaves blowing across the rubber-streaked floor, but a single floodlight illuminated the pavilion, showing where a man and a woman—long dead from the looks of the sunken eyes and gums pulled back from the teeth—sat in one of the upright cars. The male corpse had his arm around the female corpse and the brittle bone-fingers seemed to be pawing at her shrunken breast under the tattered rags of what had been a pink sweater.

“Holy Christ,” Kurtz whispered to himself, mouthing the words but making no noise. He raised the Browning in both hands and proceeded stealthily uphill, past the patch of grass where he had almost made love to Rigby King less than thirty-six hours earlier, past the fallen plywood front facade of the funhouse where a faded clown’s face looked up from the grass, past the funhouse ticket booth where a male corpse had been propped up behind the wiremesh of the ticket cage. This corpse had had a clown’s face painted on it and was wearing a red rubber nose. Its white shirt had a row of bloody holes across the chest.

Kurtz approached the shack he and Rigby had peered into. This new building was the epicenter of the night’s madness. The big gasoline generator was running just beyond the shack, somehow powering the various lights and motors turning the Ferris wheel and merry-go-round.

Kurtz moved from tree to tree approaching the shack, his gun extended. He tried to breathe shallowly through his mouth, tried to listen. The porch of the little shack creaked slightly as he stepped onto it He moved to one side of the doorway and peered in. There was a lantern glowing in there and a figure lying on the cot in the corner. Kurtz pulled the goggles down out of the way, the better to use his peripheral vision. His mouth was dry.

The wind came up then, blowing leaves across the moldy midway, rattling branches in the bare trees. Because of that noise—as well as the repetitive, tinny carousel music from the boom box, as well as the creaking and groaning of the Ferris wheel and the putt-putt of the train making yet another round uphill—Kurtz didn’t hear or see the dead clown in the ticket booth sit up, turn its white face, and step outside.

Because of the glow of the lantern light inside the shack and because of his own rapt attention on the corpse under the blanket, because he was watching and waiting for anything to move in or around the shack, Kurtz didn’t see or hear the clown with the bloody white shirt step lightly and carefully around the edge of the funhouse twenty-five paces behind him.

Kurtz’s instincts had served him well through almost twelve years in Attica’s prison yards and showers and halls, but they failed him now in this strange place as the clown raised its silenced 9mm Beretta and fired three times from less than fifteen yards away, all three slugs striking Kurtz high up in the back, two between his shoulder blades and the third just beside his neck.

Kurtz pitched face forward into the shack, landing hard and lifelessly on his face, the dropped Browning bouncing away across the plywood floor.

The dead clown that was the Dodger approached cautiously, Beretta raised and unwavering. He never blinked, but he was grinning so widely that his great, horse’s teeth glowed yellow against the flat, white makeup of his face.

He stepped up onto the small porch and paused at the doorway, Beretta aimed at the back of Kurtz’s head.

Kurtz had fallen with one arm flung out and one pinned under his body. The detective’s pistol was six feet away on the floor. Three holes in the back of the peacoat showed where all three bullets had struck and a small pool of blood was beginning to pool near the fallen man’s face.

The Dodger lowered his gun and laughed. “I’ve saved the last car of the Ferris wheel for you, Kurtz, you…”

Kurtz rolled onto his back and fired the big, yellow nail gun with a pneumatic whoomp. The nail drove into the Dodger’s belly and knocked him back into the door frame, but the Beretta still came up.

Dazed, working more from instinct than cognition, still holding the heavy cordless nail gun he’d fallen on, Kurtz lurched up and crashed into the Dodger, shoulder-slamming him against the door frame again and then pushing him out across the porch. Kurtz used his free left hand to grab the Dodger’s right wrist as the two plunged off the porch and rolled across the grass and down the hill, through the leaves, onto the scattered plywood of the fallen funhouse facade.

“Goddamn you, goddamn you,” grunted the Dodger, flailing and biting at Kurtz’s right wrist even as he tried to wrench his own gun hand free.

Kurtz hit the clown face with the wide barrel of the heavy nail gun. White makeup turned to a bloody streak and the rubber nose flew off. The Beretta fired twice, the second slug burning past Kurtz’s left ear and ripping through the collar of his peacoat.

The Dodger was very strong, but Kurtz was heavier and came out on top as they rolled onto the fallen plywood clown face. He smashed the screaming man’s face with the heavy butt-magazine of the industrial nail gun and tried to knock the Beretta free again. Even with a four-inch galvanized nail in his belly, the Dodger wouldn’t let go of the gun. He flailed his left hand free and grabbed his own wrist, trying to force the muzzle of the Beretta upward toward Kurtz’s face.

On his knees now, straddling the bloody-shirted figure, Kurtz drove the big yellow nail gun down against the Dodger’s right wrist and fired again. Twice.

The nails slammed through the burned man’s wrist between the radius and ulna, pinning it to plywood. The Dodger screamed at the top of his lungs.

Kurtz stood and kicked the Beretta and silencer into the woods.

The Dodger kicked and writhed and flopped on the wooden clown-face board. Kurtz pinned down the flailing left arm with his boot, aimed, and fired a nail through the man’s left hand.

The Dodger ripped his palm free with a scream and a gout of blood that splattered Kurtz’s black vest.

Kurtz stepped on his hand again and fired the nail gun three more times, two of the nails hammering home through the palm and wrist.

Panting, weaving back and forth, only half conscious himself because of the terrible impact through his Kevlar armor, Kurtz stood astride the frenzied figure. “Lie still, goddamn you,” he gasped.

The Dodger kicked upward, kneeing at Kurtz’s legs, boots clattering on the rotted wood.

Kurtz shook his head, laid the wide muzzle of the yellow nail gun against the Dodger’s crotch, and said, “Lie still, you crazy fuck.”

The Dodger laughed and screamed and writhed, trying to rip his wrists and palm free.

Kurtz fired twice through the twisting man’s testicles, nailing his center deep to the wood.

Now the Dodger lay still, his clown mouth open wide, red lips gaping, teeth very yellow and eyes very white as he stared up at Kurtz. Much of the white paint had come off, showing the old burns that covered Sean Michael O’Toole’s ravaged face and ran up into the hairline like cords of white rope.

“I want…to know…” panted Kurtz. “Did you…shoot… Peg O’Toole? Were you part of that?”

The Dodger’s mouth stayed open and silent as he strained up against the nails. It seemed like he was trying to breathe.

“Who do you take your orders from?” said Kurtz. “I know it wasn’t the Major.”

The Dodger’s clown mouth opened and closed like a fish’s. He was trying to speak.

Kurtz leaned over, listening.

“I…learned…something,” gasped the Dodger, voice almost inaudible, tone almost conversational. The merry-go-round music switched from “Farmer in the Dell” to “Three Blind Mice.”

Kurtz leaned and listened. Blood and sweat from his chin and torn neck dripped onto the white face.

“Always…go…for…the…head…shot,” said the Dodger and started laughing and screaming. The noise came up out of the open, straining mouth like a black stink from hell. And it kept coming. The Dodger was laughing hysterically, his screams and laughs echoing back from the hillside and funhouse.

Kurtz was suddenly very, very tired.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “You’re right.” He leaned forward again, into the geyser of screams and laughter and stench, lifted the heavy nail gun, aimed the muzzle into that dark, braying maw, and fired three times.

CHAPTER

FIFTY

When Kurtz knocked softly on Gail DeMarco’s outside door a little after three A.M., he expected the wait and then the slowly opening door, Gail’s concerned face over the security chain, but the .44 Magnum aimed at his face was a surprise.

“Joe!” said Arlene and lowered the gun. She and Gail opened the door and Kurtz staggered inside. He tried to remove his shredded peacoat, but it took the women’s help to get it off.

“Oh, Joe,” said Arlene.

“I couldn’t get the damned vest off,” said Kurtz, sagging against the counter.

Arlene and Gail undid the straps and Velcro connections. The thick SWAT vest that had saved his life fell heavily to the tile floor.

“Come near the sink light,” said Gail. “Lift your head.”

Kurtz did the best he could. The girl, Aysha, came into the kitchen. She was wearing one of Arlene’s old bathrobes. It was much too large for her and made her look even more like a child.

“Please stand to one side,” said Aysha. It was a nurse’s tone of command.

“I’ll get a first aid kit,” said Gail. She hurried out of the kitchen and Kurtz could hear her telling Rachel to go back to bed and to keep the door to her room closed.

“I think I’d better sit down,” said Kurtz. He collapsed into one of the chairs at the Formica table.

The next few minutes were a blur—Gail and Aysha both doing nurse things to him, swabbing the cut on his upper shoulder and neck, cutting off his sweater. I’m going through sweaters like Kleenex, he thought dully as they poked and prodded him.

The ride back from Neola had seemed longer than usual. Three times he’d bad to pull over to the side of the road to throw up. His back had hurt so much that he couldn’t put his weight back against the plush seat of the Buick, so he’d driven like an old man, hunched forward over the wheel. His throat and shoulder had kept dripping blood, but never so violently that he was worried.

“The bullet must have hit the upper edge of your vest and careened upward, nicking your neck and catching the skin of your cheek,” said Gail. “Another millimeter to the right and it would have taken out your jugular. You would have bled out in seconds.”

“Huh,” said Kurtz. He kept hearing the goddamned carnival music echoing in his skull. That and the chug-chug of the train. And the laughter. He’d shut off the generator near the shack, which had stopped the Ferris wheel and merry-go-round and shut off the lights. But he hadn’t had the energy to climb the hill, jump aboard the train, and untape the throttle lever.

Leave that to the Neola cleanup crew, he thought. They’ll be busy the next few days.

“Joe, did you hear me?” said Arlene.

“What?”

“We need to get you in the shower to get the caked blood off so we can see the bruises and cuts better.”

“All right.”

The next few minutes were as surreal as the rest of his week—three women pushing him, undressing him, half holding him up, turning him as he stood naked in the shower spray. And this Aysha was pretty cute. No erections allowed, thought Kurtz. Not now. Everyone was in the little bathroom except Rachel.

There was no fear of an erection when the hot shower spray hit the bruises on his back.

“Oh,” said Kurtz, coming fully awake. “Ouch.”

He caught sight of his back in the steamy mirror—a solid line of bruises connecting both shoulder blades and a bloody slash up near his collarbone. New scar.

“We need to sew this shoulder up,” said Gail DeMarco. “Actually, we should drive you to the hospital.”

“No hospital,” he said firmly, but he thought, I don’t know why not. Everyone I know is in the hospital.

They had him sit on the closed toilet while Aysha sewed him up. There’d been a quick consultation, and evidently they decided she had the most experience. Kurtz felt the needle slide in and out, but it was no big deal. He looked at the fuzzy pink toilet cover and tried to concentrate.

“Did the police call tonight?” he asked. “Kemper?”

“No,” said Arlene. “Not yet.”

“They will. They’ll hunt for me, then for you…then somebody’ll find out that Gail’s your sister and call here.”

“Not tonight,” said Gail as Aysha finished the sewing. The two nurses applied a bandage and taped it in place.

“No,” agreed Kurtz. “Not tonight.” He realized that he was still naked. The fuzzy toilet cover felt soft under his butt.

Gail came in with a pair of men’s pajamas, still in a wrapper. “These should fit,” she said. “It was a Christmas present I never got to give Alan, and he was about your size.”

The three women wandered off to the living room while Kurtz struggled into the pajamas. He knew he had more he had to do tonight, but he couldn’t quite remember what it was. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the Dodger’s face and open mouth. The trick, he discovered, was to button the pajamas without letting the cotton touch his back or neck. He couldn’t quite master it.

He felt better by the time he joined the three in the hole living room. Aysha gestured toward the opened sleeper sofa and its tangle of pillows and blankets. “You sleep here, Mr. Kurtz. I sleep with your daughter.”

Kurtz could only stare at the woman.

“Gail leaves around seven-thirty,” said Arlene. “What time do you want to get going, Joe?”

Kurtz looked at his watch. He couldn’t quite focus on the dial.

“Seven?” he said. That would give him a full three and a half hours.

“Go to sleep, Joe,” said Arlene, leading him to the opened bed.

For the second time that night, Kurtz fell face forward. This time he did not rise.

Kurtz drove the Pinto behind Gail DeMarco’s little Toyota in the morning and, thanks to her intercession, was in the ICU when Rigby King woke up.

“Joe. What’s up?”

“Not much,” said Kurtz. “What’s new with you?”

“Can’t think of anything,” said Rigby. “Except I love this Darvocet morphiney stuff they put in the IV drip. And I don’t think that I can pretend to be asleep much longer today—Paul Kemper won’t buy it And he wants your ass.”

“Why?” said Kurtz. “Didn’t you tell them you couldn’t remember who shot you?”

“Yeah,” sighed Rigby. “But the problem with saying that you don’t remember who did something is that you can’t say that you do remember who didn’t do something. If you follow my drift.”

“More or less,” said Kurtz. He had to sit forward on the upright hospital chair next to her bed, making sure the back of it didn’t touch his back. He’d slept on his stomach during the time he did sleep. “Feeling the drugs. Rig?”

“Yeah. Li’l bit I’m going to doze for just a few minutes if you don’t mind. You going to be here when I wake up, Joe?”

“Yeah.”

Her eyes fluttered and then opened. “The doctor told me that another hour, they would’ve had to amp…ampa…cut off my leg.”

“It’s okay,” said Kurtz, touching her arm. “We’ll talk when you wake up.”

With her eyes closed, Rigby said, “You don’t know who shot me yet, Joe?”

“Not yet.”

“’Kay. Tell me when you do.” She started snoring softly.

The blue steel muzzle touched the back of Kurtz’s scarred neck. He jerked awake. He’d fallen asleep in the chair, still leaning forward so his back didn’t touch.

“Don’t move a muscle,” said Paul Kemper. “Put your hands behind your head. Slowly.”

Kurtz did so slowly because it hurt too much to do it quickly.

“Stand up.”

Kurtz did that slowly as well. Kemper patted him down expertly, not noticing when Kurtz drew in his breath sharply when his back and shoulders were touched. He wasn’t armed.

Kurtz had run out of luck this morning as far as his streak of being around women who happened to have fresh clothes ready for him; he couldn’t wear the sweater and peacoat, but none of the ladies had happened to stock a supply of shirts. In the end, he’d pulled on an oversized sweatshirt of Gail’s that said HAMILTON COLLEGE on the front. Since he didn’t think it would be a good idea to wear the peacoat with three bullet holes in it, Kurtz had just gone without a jacket this brisk but sunny first-of-November morning. He’d left the Browning with Arlene at Gail’s apartment. When Arlene had said, “Can I go home yet, Joe?” he’d answered, “Not yet.”

“Sit down,” said Kemper. “Keep your hands clasped behind the chair.”

Kurtz did as he was told. Kemper walked over to the hospital table by Rigby’s bed and set a steaming, Styrofoam cup of coffee on it. He held his Glock on Kurtz as he opened the coffee one-handed and took a careful sip from it.

“You didn’t cuff me,” said Kurtz. “You haven’t read me my rights. You’re not arresting me. Yet.”

“Shut the fuck up,” said Kemper. He lowered the Glock when the nurse bustled in and changed one of Rigby’s IV bags, but he kept it in his hand when she left.

They sat there for a while. Kurtz wished he had some coffee.

“I know you’re involved in this, Kurtz. I just haven’t figured out how.”

“I’m just visiting a sick friend, Detective.”

“My ass,” said Kemper. “Where did you and Detective King go Sunday? She says she can’t remember.”

“We just took a ride in the country. Talked over old times.”

“Uh huh,” said Kemper. The black cop looked as if he was trying to decide whether to pistol-whip Kurtz or not. “Where’d you go?”

“Just out in the country,” said Kurtz. “Just riding and talking. You know how it is.”

“When’d you get back?”

Kurtz shrugged and barely succeeded in not wincing. His shoulders didn’t like this posture with his hands clasped behind his back. “Late morning,” he said. “I don’t know.”

“Where’d you drop her off?”

“At her townhouse.”

“You want to make this easy, Kurtz? And come down to the station to make a statement?”

“I don’t have any statement to make,” said Kurtz. He met the cop’s glare watt for watt.

“Paul,” said Rigby. It was a very weak syllable. She’d just opened one eye.

Kemper slid his dock back into its holster. “Yeah, babe.”

“Leave Joe alone. He didn’t do anything.”

“You sure of that, Rig?”

“He didn’t do anything.” She closed her eye. “Paul, can you get the nurse. My leg really hurts.”

“Yeah, babe,” said Kemper. He motioned Kurtz out of the room ahead of him.

Outside the glass wall, Kemper told the nurse on duty at the central station that Detective King needed her eight A.M. pain medication. The nurse said she’d get to it soon. Kemper grabbed Kurtz by the shoulder and pulled him into the short hallway to the lavatories. “I’m going to find out what happened Sunday, Kurtz. You can count on it.”

“Good,” said Kurtz. “Let me know when you do.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Kemper. “You can count on that, too.”

Kurtz let him have the last word. He turned and walked slowly and stiffly to the elevator.

The goddamned Pinto wouldn’t start. Kurtz tried four times—didn’t get as much as a click—and then got out of the car and flipped the hood up. It was a simple little engine and a simple little battery, but after checking the leads to the battery and trying the starter again to no avail, Kurtz had used up his complete stock of automotive know-how.

He looked around. The Medical Center parking lot was busy this time of the morning, but no one was paying attention to his little problem. Kurtz fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone, but remembered that he’d left it at Gail DeMarco’s place.

“Need some help?”

Kurtz turned and blinked. A huge, orange, and strangely familiar SUV bad stopped. Kurtz didn’t recognize the driver or the man in the front passenger seat, nor the one in the far rear seat, but the smiling man leaning out the near window was familiar enough. Brian Kennedy. Peg O’Toole’s handsome fiancée. The security service man got out of the…what had he called the armored SUV? Lalapalooza? Laforza…and so did the well-dressed young man in the back with him. Kurtz looked at the two fine suits and realized that he’d have to sell his grandmother to the Arabs to afford clothes like that…and he didn’t even have a grandmother.

“Get in,” said Brian Kennedy. “Turn it over again, old sport Tom here will fiddle with it.”

Tom fiddled, obviously trying to keep his white, starched cuffs from getting greasy. Kurtz turned the key. Nothing happened. Both Kennedy and Tom fiddled some more. People walked by briskly, hardly glancing at the men in the three-thousand-dollar suits fiddling with a clapped-out Pinto.

“There,” said Kennedy, brushing off his hands the way manly men did after fixing something.

Kurtz tried again. It didn’t even click.

He got out of the car. “To hell with it. I’ll go in the hospital and call someone to come get me.”

“Can we give you a lift, Mr. Kurtz?” said Brian Kennedy.

“No, that’s okay. I’ll call.”

“At least use my phone to call, old sport,” said Kennedy, handing Kurtz a phone so modern that it looked like it could beam a person up to the Enterprise if you wanted it to. “I came to see Peg. Is that why you’re here?”

“No,” said Kurtz. He flipped the phone open and tried to decide who to call. Arlene, he guessed. He always called Arlene.

“Oh,” said Brian Kennedy. “Tom here has a tool that might help.”

Kurtz looked at Tom just as the big man smiled, pulled something metallic from his suit pocket, and stuck the ten thousand-volt taser against Kurtz’s chest and pressed the button.

Kurtz’s last sight was Kennedy catching his expensive cell phone as Kurtz fell backwards into blackness.

CHAPTER

FIFTY-ONE

Kurtz became aware of two things as he regained consciousness in the moving war wagon of an SUV. The first was the residual chest pain and overall reaction to the taser blast—his entire body was twitching and tingling, hurting the way a leg or foot hurts after it falls asleep and has to come back to circulatory life. The second thing he noticed was that his headache was gone. Completely gone. For the first time since he’d been shot almost a week earlier.

I should call Dr. Singh at the hospital and tell him about this new therapy for concussion.

“Ah, Mr. Kurtz, I see you’re joining us,” said Brian Kennedy. “A brief nap for you, old sport, but a restful one, I trust.”

Kurtz opened his eyes. He was in the backseat of the Laforza, wedged between Kennedy and the bodyguard who’d tasered him. His hands were handcuffed behind him—real, honest-to-God metal handcuffs this time—and the bodyguard had a semiautomatic pistol wedged in Kurtz’s left ribs. One glance told him that they were on the Skyway, Highway 5, headed south past the Tifft Farm Preserve.

“Pierce Brosnan,” managed Kurtz.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You look like that James Bond actor—Brosnan,” said Kurtz. “I haven’t been able to think of his name until now.” The headache was gone.

Brian Kennedy showed his wry, curled little smile. “I hear that a lot.”

“And you said you were Sean Michael O’Toole’s younger brother, too,” said Kurtz. “You were only, what? Twenty years old when you sprung him?”

“Just turned twenty-one, actually,” said Kennedy with that artificial British accent of his.

“And who did you douse with gasoline and leave behind?”

“No one of any importance, old sport,” said Kennedy. “Why don’t you rest, Mr. Kurtz? We’ll be at our destination in a few minutes. You can chat then if you like.”

They exited the Skyway at Ridge Road and took it into downtown Lackawanna. If Kennedy’s working with Baby Doc, I could be in a spot of trouble, thought Kurtz.

They continued east on Franklin Street past Curly’s Restaurant, past the hole downtown, and parked in an empty lot behind Our Lady of Victory Basilica, just across the street from Father Baker’s former orphanage.

“What do you…” began Kurtz.

“Hush,” said Kennedy. “We’ll chat in a minute. Right now, Edward is going to drape my trench coat over your shoulders and the four of us are going to get out and walk into the basilica together. If you make an untoward move or speak a single word, Edward will put a bullet in your heart right here, on the sidewalk, and you’ll miss out on the last five to ten precious minutes of your life. Walk normally and keep silent. Is that understood?”

Kurtz nodded.

They got out of the SUV and walked the fifty paces or so along the main avenue here, up the west side of the huge church. Kurtz remembered the hundreds of times his class from Father Baker’s had walked from the orphanage school behind them to the basilica for eleven A.M. mass.

The man who’d been driving opened a side door. They came into the basilica under the west staircase where Kurtz and Rigby had climbed to the choir loft that night so many years ago. The small supply room under the staircase where they’d exited the catacombs that night was now chained and padlocked.

Brian Kennedy removed a key from his trouser pocket and unlocked the padlock. “You stay here,” he whispered to the driver, who nodded. Someone was practicing the organ in the nave of the basilica.

The supply room’s shelves were empty. It looked as if no one used this small space any longer. The stairway to the underground tunnels was behind some white paneling—Kennedy knew exactly where to press to let the wall open—and the old door here was also padlocked. Kennedy used a second key to open this padlock. The other bodyguard turned on a bare light and led the way down the spiral metal stairs. The man named Edward prodded Kurtz in the ribs with the pistol and followed him closely as they descended. Brian Kennedy came last.

There was a final door and a final padlock in the dank space at the bottom of the stairs. Kennedy had a key for this lock as well. All three of them went through into the musty, damp darkness beyond. The bodyguard pulled the heavy door shut behind them.

Kennedy and the first bodyguard pulled out small but powerful halogen flashlights. Concrete steps led several directions down into old tunnels and conduits.

“No one knows why Father Baker put these catacombs under his basilica, old sport,” Brian Kennedy said in a conversational tone, words echoing back from the concrete walls and into the darkness. “Rumor was at the time that he wanted some secret passages between what was then the convent and his offices in the orphanage. I, of course, don’t believe such scurrilous gossip.” He nodded at the bodyguard with the flashlight and they took the left corridor into the darkness.

Kurtz tried to remember the way he and Rigby had come when they were kids. He couldn’t.

“You may speak now, Mr. Kurtz,” said Kennedy. “I guarantee no one will bear us. No one above could hear even a gunshot from these old tunnels.”

“What next?” said Kurtz. There was a half-inch or so of water in this tunnel and the flashlight beams skittered crazily off it Something scurried and squeaked ahead of the light.

“Oh, I mink you know what comes next.”

“Why here?”

Kennedy smiled. The smile looked more like a demonic grimace in the harsh glare of the reflected flashlight beam. “Shall we say sentiment? Or it will be perceived that way when they find Detective King’s body in the ICU along with your farewell note. I rather enjoyed the discussion you and the detective had about your days at Father Baker’s. Very erotic.”

“You had the Pinto bugged,” said Kurtz.

“Of course.”

“And my office, too?” His heart was pounding.

“Ah, well, not quite, old sport,” said Brian Kennedy. They came to some steps, went down them, and paused where the wide tunnel branched into two smaller ones. Kennedy pulled a streamlined Palm-type PDA from his suitcoat pocket, activated it, studied a map of blue and red lines, and gestured to the left. The bodyguard went that way and the three others followed.

“Not quite,” continued Kennedy. “We knew that if the Gonzagas and your friend Ms. Ferrara joined you there, that they would sweep it for bugs. So we used a dish from a rooftop across Chippewa, bouncing microwaves off your office window, to pick up bits and pieces of conversation. We came late to your war planning session, I’m afraid, but we heard enough.”

They came to another junction where steps went up to a small tunnel and down to a broader one. Kennedy studied his glowing PDA. “Down,” he said.

Small things squealed and scurried ahead and behind them in the darkness. Their footsteps did not echo because of the water underfoot.

“Rats, don’t you know,” said Kennedy. “I’m afraid the old catacombs aren’t up to the high standards of your youth, old sport. After Father Baker died, those in charge bricked up all entrances and exits in the girls’ building, the school, and the main orphanage. I’m afraid that the way we came in is the only access and egress these days—just in case you’re considering running.”

“I’m not,” said Kurtz.

They came into a wider area of the tunnel. “This should do nicely,” said Kennedy. The bodyguard turned his flashlight back and pulled a pistol from his pocket. Edward stepped away a safe distance and leveled his Glock at Kurtz’s chest.

Kennedy pulled his trench coat from Kurtz’s shoulders and stepped back, draping it over his own shoulders. “It’s very chilly down here,” he said.

“Will you tell me why?” said Kurtz. He’d been fiddling with the handcuffs, but they were expensive and well made and very tight.

“Why what, old sport?”

“Why everything? Why save the Dodger from the asylum and sic him on the Gonzagas and Farinos so many years later? Why use me as an instrument to kill your friends the Major and Colonel Trinh? Why everything?”

Kennedy shook his head. “I’m afraid we don’t have time. We have a busy day ahead of us. I have to visit your secretary at her sister-in-law’s, and say hello to the girl—Aysha—as well. Edward and Theodore have to stop by the hospital to say hello to Detective King. Busy, busy, busy.”

“At least tell me about Yasein Goba before you go,” said Kurtz.

Kennedy shrugged. “What’s to tell? He was very cooperative, but—as it turned out—a lousy shot. I had to finish the work there in the parking garage. I hated that wig I wore—I never looked good in long hair.”

“The police records show you in the air in your private jet at the time O’Toole and I were shot,” said Kurtz. “O’Toole’s e-mail records show you responding to her e-mail just forty-five minutes before…” He stopped.

Kennedy smiled. “It’s a poor corporation that doesn’t own or lease more than one executive jet these days.”

“You flew in on a second one, earlier,” said Kurtz. “You even received and answered O’Toole’s e-mail from the other Lear.”

“Gulfstream V, actually,” said Brian Kennedy. “But, yes. It’s amazing how few formalities one has to go through at the private executive terminal out at Buffalo International.”

“You shot us and drove out there to sign in as if you’d just arrived. Where did your real jet—Gulfstream—land?”

Kennedy shook his head. “Can it possibly matter now, Mr. Kurtz? You’re simply stalling for time.”

Kurtz shrugged. “Sure. Just one last question then.”

“We searched you for a wire when you were unconscious, Mr. Kurtz. We know you’re not broadcasting or recording. You’re simply wasting your time and ours right now.”

“The stud farm,” said Kurtz. “Is that yours?”

“Bequeathed from my father,” Brian Kennedy said softly. Rats scurried just around the bend in the tunnel. “In Virginia, actually.”

“Poor Yasein Goba thought he was in the hands of Homeland Security and then the CIA, but it was just your Empire State Security and Executive Protection building in downtown Buffalo and then the farm, wasn’t it?”

Kennedy said nothing. He was obviously tired of the conversation.

“You never worked for the CIA,” said Kurtz. “But your old man did, didn’t he? He was the third part of the triad back in Vietnam—with the Major and Trinh. They kept the drugs moving after the war ended.”

“Of course,” said Kennedy. “Are you just now figuring these things out, Mr. Kurtz? I must say, you’re a very poor detective. But you’re wrong—I did work for the CIA. For just under a year. It was incredibly boring, so I took my inheritance and started the security agency. Much more interesting. And lucrative.”

“And you continued to shake down the Major and SEATCO after your old man died,” said Kurtz. “Did they think you were still CIA? Still providing protection the way your daddy had in the seventies and eighties? And now you want it all? Is that it?”

“I’m afraid you’ve committed the cardinal sin, Mr. Kurtz. You’ve bored me.” Kennedy took three steps back to the edge of the circle of light. “Edward. Theodore.”

The two bodyguards made sure their field of fire was safe and raised their pistols, aiming at Kurtz’s chest and head, bracing their weapons with born hands as if they could miss from eight feet away.

“You look like James Bond,” Kurtz said to Kennedy, feeling his heart pounding wildly. “But you’re making Dr. No’s mistake.”

Kennedy was no longer listening. “Time to feed the rats, old sport.”

The tunnel echoed to the blast of six loud shots.

CHAPTER

FIFTY-TWO

Both flashlights dropped and rolled in the shallow water, both ended up with their beams shining opposite directions. The dank air smelled of cordite. Two of the bodies lay still, polished shoes pointing upward. The third body did not move but a strange, terrible whistling came from it.

Kurtz did not move.

The man came silently out of the darkness. He was a tall man, very thin, dressed in a wool suit and a tan raincoat that looked too short and slightly dated. He wore a small Bavarian-style hat with a small red feather in its band. The man had a narrow, strangely kind-looking face, framed by thick, black-rimmed glasses, and had a thin ginger mustache and a slightly prominent lower lip. His eyes looked sad but very alert. He was carrying an unsilenced Llama semiautomatic pistol.

He walked to the first bodyguard, Theodore, stared down at him a few seconds, and then checked the second one, Edward. Both were dead. The man picked up one of the flashlights.

“Three,” Kurtz said shakily, mostly to see if he could still speak. “I’ll be paying this off in installments for twenty years.”

“Not three,” said the Dane, turning the flashlight and pistol in Kurtz’s direction. “Four.”

Kurtz’s head jerked up. He braced his feet. “All right,” he said. “Four.”

The Dane shook his head. “Oh, no, my no. I don’t mean you, Mr. Kurtz. I’m speaking of the man Kennedy left at the first door.”

Kurtz felt a sensation that would be hard to describe to someone who hadn’t experienced it. Mostly it had to do with the bowels.

The Dane knelt by the first bodyguard, retrieved a small key from the man’s coat pocket, and unlocked Kurtz’s handcuffs. Kurtz let them drop in the water.

“I didn’t hear anything behind us,” said Kurtz, rubbing his wrists. “I was beginning to worry a little.”

“It is best not to be heard,” the Dane said in his very slight Northern European accent. He took some keys from Brian Kennedy’s trouser pocket. The fallen man stirred very slightly.

Kurtz went to one knee next to Kennedy. The man’s carefully blowdried hair was tousled and soaked. His eyes were open and his mouth was moving. It was the two bullet wounds in his chest that were causing the whistling noise. The two bodyguards had been shot in the heart, but the Dane had placed one bullet in each of Kennedy’s lungs.

“That’s called a sucking chest wound,” Kurtz said softly. “Old sport.”

Kurtz pulled the glowing Palm device from Kennedy’s pocket and held it up. “Do we need this to find our way back?” he asked the Dane.

The man in the short raincoat shook his head.

Kurtz set the PDA on Kennedy’s bloody chest. No air seemed to be coming from the handsome man’s straining mouth, just from the two ragged holes in his chest. “Here you go,” said Kurtz. “In case you’re considering crawling, use this as your guide on the way back. But try to crawl fast—rats, don’t you know.”

Kurtz grabbed the second flashlight and he and the Dane began walking back through the catacombs.

“I didn’t know if you’d get my message,” said Kurtz when they’d taken the first turn and left the bodies behind.

The Dane made a motion with his shoulders. He’d tucked the pistol away under his raincoat. “My other work was done. I had the day off.”

“Will I hear about your…other work?”

“Quite possibly,” said the Dane. “At any rate, today’s work will cost you and Countess Ferrara nothing. It is…what is the legal phrase…pro bono.”

“Countess Ferrara?” said Kurtz. They moved into the taller tunnel with the Dane a step ahead.

“You didn’t know that the lovely, former Angelina Farino is married to one of the most famous thieves in Europe and a member of royalty?” said the Dane. “I accepted her request in order to honor the Count. He is not a man one wishes to insult.”

“I thought the old Count was dead,” said Kurtz.

The Dane smiled his wry smile. “Many people have thought that over the decades. I always work on the premise that it is safer to assume otherwise.”

“So she’s not a widow?” murmured Kurtz. “Well, dress me up and call me Sally.”

They arrived at the last junction and the Dane paused a minute to catch his breath. Kurtz guessed that the man was in his late fifties or early sixties. “You interest me, Mr. Kurtz.”

“Oh?”

“This is twice our paths have crossed. That is an unusual circumstance for me.”

Kurtz had nothing to say to that.

“Are you old enough to remember the old American television commercials for Timex watches, Mr. Kurtz? Done by the newscaster John Cameron Swayze, if I remember correctly.”

“No,” said Kurtz.

“Pity,” said the Dane. “You remind me sometimes of the product Mr. Swayze was advertising—‘Takes a licking but keeps on ticking.’ Catchy phrase.” He led the way up steps and down the left tunnel. In a few minutes they came out in the first basement area. The bodyguard who’d been left outside the door upstairs was sitting on the damp floor against the far wall, his legs extended and his stare riveted on the dark tunnel opening. There was a bullet hole in the center of his forehead.

“I know now why you’re called the Dane,” said Kurtz.

“Oh?” The thin man paused again. He looked vaguely amused.

“I used to think it was because you were from Denmark, but I don’t think that’s right,” said Kurtz. “Now I think it’s because every time you’re around, it looks like the last act of Hamlet.”

“Very droll,” said the Dane. “Tell me, what is Dr. No’s mistake? I saw the film many years ago, but I do not really recall it.”

“Dr. No’s mistake?” said Kurtz. “In all the Bond films—in all those stupid movies—the bad guy gets Bond or whoever in his clutches and then just keeps talking at him. Yadda, yadda, yadda.”

“As opposed to…” said the Dane with his small smile.

“As opposed to putting two in his head and getting it over with,” said Kurtz. He led the way up the final stairs.

The Dane used the keys to lock both padlocks. Up in the basilica proper, the Dane stopped to look at the central nave under the huge dome. Only a few old women were in the huge space, kneeling and praying, one lighting a votive candle to the right of the altar. Someone was still practicing the organ. The air smelled of incense.

The Dane handed Kurtz Kennedy’s keys, including the keys to the Laforza SUV. “Be careful of fingerprints…no, I do not have to tell you that.”

“Can I drop you somewhere?” said Kurtz.

The Dane shook his head. He’d removed his natty hat and Kurtz noticed that his blond hair was very thin on top. “I believe I’ll step in here and pray for a minute or two.”

Kurtz nodded and watched him step away, but then called softly, “Wait, please.”

“Yes?”

“Do you ever take assignments in the Mideast? Say, Iran?”

The Dane smiled. “I’ve not been to Iran since the Shah’s downfall. It would be interesting to see how it has changed. You can reach me through the Countess if you need to. Good luck, Mr. Kurtz.”

Kurtz waited until the Dane had found a pew, genuflected, and knelt to pray. Then Kurtz went outside into the surprisingly bright morning light.

CHAPTER

FIFTY-THREE

Kurtz took the afternoon off. He cleaned up his apartment area as best he could, stopped by Gail’s place later to tell Arlene that she could go home and take Aysha with her if she wanted. He picked up his Browning and cell phone while he was there. He stopped by Blues Franklin and returned the Ray Charles sunglasses to Daddy Bruce. He turned in early that night.

The headache did not return. Kurtz wondered idly if he should have taken the taser off the bodyguard in the catacombs in case he needed more shock therapy to get rid of the headache if it ever did come back. Maybe he could write some sort of paper about it for the AMA Journal or something.

The next morning, be was driving the repaired Pinto to the hospital when he saw that he was being tailed by a Lincoln Town Car. Kurtz pulled to the curb on north Main, reached under the seat to get the Browning, and racked the slide. It had taken him an hour to find the bug in the Pinto the previous evening, and he was tired of all this surveillance crap.

Gonzaga’s man, Bobby, got out of the Lincoln and walked up to the Pinto. Kurtz thought that the bodyguard didn’t look his best in a dark suit—actually, he looked like a fireplug that had been poured into a suit. The black ninja outfit had been more becoming on him.

Bobby handed Kurtz a sealed envelope, said, “From Mr. Gonzaga,” and walked back to his Town Car and drove off.

Kurtz waited until the black car was out of sight before tucking away the Browning and ripping open the envelope. Inside was a cashier’s check for one hundred thousand dollars. Kurtz set the check and envelope under the seat next to the gun and drove the rest of the way to Erie County Medical Center.

Rigby King was alone and conscious when Kurtz came in. They’d moved her overnight from the ICU to a private room. There was a uniformed officer on guard, but Kurtz had waited for him to step down the hall to the men’s room.

“Joe,” said Rigby. There was an untouched breakfast on the swing tray near her. “Want some coffee? I don’t want it.”

“Sure,” said Kurtz. He took the cup off the tray and sipped. It was almost as bad as the stuff he made for himself.

“I just got a call from Paul Kemper,” said Rigby. “With some very surprising news that you might be interested in.”

Kurtz waited.

“Someone wasted your mafia girlfriend’s brother in a maximum security federal prison yesterday afternoon,” said Rigby.

“Little Skag.” said Kurtz.

Rigby raised an eyebrow. “How many mafia girlfriends with brothers in maximum security prisons do you have, Joe?”

Kurtz let that go and tried the coffee again. It was as bad as the first sip, only colder. “Some sort of yard shank job?” he said, knowing it hadn’t been.

Rigby shook her head. “I told you—Little Skag’s been kept on ice at a maximum security federal hidey-hole. Up in the Adirondacks. No general population. He didn’t see anyone except the guards and feebies, and even they got searched. But someone managed to get in there and put a bullet between his beady little eyes. Incredible.”

“Wonders never cease,” said Kurtz.

“Why do I think you’re not totally surprised?” She struggled for a minute with the gizmo on a cable that raised the angle of her bed. Kurtz watched her struggle. When she had it the way she wanted it, she looked exhausted to Kurtz.

“Do I know who shot me yet, Joe?”

“Yeah,” said Kurtz. “It was Brian Kennedy and some of his guys.”

“Kennedy? The security snot? O’Toole’s fiancé?”

“Right. You got suspicious on Sunday—realizing that Kennedy’s alibi didn’t really hold up…”

“It didn’t?” said Rigby. Someone had brushed her short, dark hair and it looked nice against the pillow. “I thought Kennedy was on his private Lear when you and O’Toole were shot.”

“Gulfstream,” said Kurtz. “He had two planes.”

“Ahh,” said Rigby. And then, “Had?”

“I think Kennedy took off after shooting you. He may be found. Maybe not.”

“Where did he shoot me?”

“In the leg?” suggested Kurtz. The coffee was not only bad, it was now totally cold.

“You know what the fuck I mean.”

“Oh. Your call. I think they’re going to find his fancy SUV in Delaware Park.”

“Or what’s left of it if he was stupid enough to leave it there,” said Rigby.

“Or what’s left of it,” agreed Kurtz. He set the coffee cup back on her tray. “I’ve got to go. Your guard cop is probably finished pissing by now.”

“Joe?” said Rigby.

He turned back.

“Why did I suspect Kennedy of shooting his own fiancée? And if he shot me in Delaware Park, how’d I get to the hospital in the middle of the night? Inquiring minds will want to know.”

“Jesus,” said Kurtz. “Do I have to do all your thinking for you? Show some initiative. You’re the goddamned detective here.”

“Joe?” she called again just as he was about to shut her door.

He stuck his head back in.

“Thank you,” said Rigby.

Kurtz went down the hall, around a corridor, and down another hall. No one was guarding Peg O’Toole’s room and the nurse had just stepped out.

Kurtz went in and pulled the only visitor’s chair closer to her bed.

Machines were keeping her alive. One breathed up and down for her. At least four visible tubes ran in and out of her body, which already looked pale and emaciated. The parole officer’s auburn hair was stiff and pulled back off her face where it hadn’t been shaved off near the bandage over her forehead and temples. She was unconscious, with a snorkel-like ventilator tube taped in her mouth. Her posture in coma, wrists cocked at a painful angle, knees drawn up, reminded Kurtz of a broken baby bird he’d found in his backyard one summer day when he was a kid.

“Ah, goddamn it,” breathed Kurtz.

He walked over to the machines that were breathing for her and acting as her kidneys. There were various switches and dials and plugs and sensors. None of the readouts made any sense to him.

Kurtz looked at his parole officer’s unconscious face for a long moment and then laid his hand on the top of the nearest machine. It had been one week exactly since the two of them had been shot together in the parking garage.

His cell phone vibrated in his sport coat pocket Kurtz answered in a whisper. “Yeah?”

“Joe?” It was Arlene.

“Yeah.”

“Joe, I didn’t want to bother you, and I’ve hesitated to ask, but Gail needs to know about Friday…”

“Friday,” said Kurtz.

“Yes… Friday evening,” said Arlene. “It’s…”

“It’s Rachel’s birthday party,” said Kurtz. “She’ll be fifteen. Yeah, I’ll be there. Tell Gail that I wouldn’t miss it.”

He disconnected, not interested in hearing whatever Arlene was going to say next. Then he touched Peg O’Toole’s shoulder under the thin hospital gown and went back to the uncomfortable chair, leaning forward so it didn’t press against his bruised back.

Sitting that way, leaning forward, hands loosely clasped, speaking softly only to the nurse when she came in from time to time to check on her patient, Kurtz waited there with O’Toole the rest of the day.

About the Author

Since his first-published short story won the Rod Serling Memorial Award in the 1982 Twilight Zone Magazine short fiction contest, DAN SIMMONS has won some of the top awards in the science fiction, horror, fantasy, and thriller genres, as well as honors for his mainstream fiction. His books include the Joe Kurtz novels Hardcase and Hard Freeze, as well as the science fiction epic Ilium. He lives along the Front Range of Colorado, where he is currently at work on a new Joe Kurtz novel.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

HARDCASE

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

HARD FREEZE

Copyright

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

HARD AS NAILS

Copyright

Epigraph

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

CHAPTER FIFTY

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

About the Author