Act of Revenge

Chapter 19

“You don’t have to do this now,” Karp said. “You don’t have to do it at all. I can get a Vietnamese translator tomorrow-”

“No,” said Lucy firmly. “You said the faster we can get this done, the faster the cops can start looking for Leung. And I want to do it. He was my friend. It’s my fault he’s dead.”

“Lucy, now stop it! It’s not your fault.” She shriveled and started to weep again, a slow snuffling drip, almost soundless, that had been going on almost without break from the time the dying boy had grasped her hand. They were in the Karps’ bedroom at Aunt Sophie’s house, where they had returned late, after endless exhausting interviews with the local cops and then the homicide cops from county and state police, and a couple of well-dressed gents from the FBI. In fairness, it was a complex story and the telling took some time, how a Chinatown double murder and a Mafia assassination had led to a machine-gun shoot-out in a beachside shopping center, and how Lucy Karp fit into all of it. Karp had been by his daughter’s side throughout, and thought she had handled herself well. Leung was the man she and Mary and Janet had seen at the murder-there was no point in hiding that any longer, and Mary confirmed it. But the locals and the staties were interested in the four corpses on their patch. Miraculously, no one else had been killed, although there were numerous injuries among the bystanders, some grave. Of the dead, two were simply explained: Leung had killed Nguyen Van Minh, aka Cowboy, and an NYPD police officer had killed Vo Van Hai, aka Kenny Vo. There were two other Asian corpses outside the Beach Bazaar, Cai Wenshi and Yang Wo-ming from their ID, and no one knew who had shot them, or whom Kenny Vo had been shooting at, or why.

Lucy professed ignorance of these details. Karp was not so sure. The list of people who could both mount a disciplined assault with automatic weapons and who were pals with his daughter was a very short one; perhaps it had only one member. Despite this, he did not press her on it. The other great mystery of the day was what had become of Mr. Leung. By four that afternoon several hundred officers from a half dozen police agencies had searched the area of the shopping strip and beyond, stopping cars, peering into crannies under the boardwalk, and questioning people, but with no success. Leung had vanished, and Karp believed that Cowboy’s last words might hold a clue to his plans. He prepared pad and pencil and pushed the recorder switch. The sound of coughing and then the boy’s voice.

Lucy said, “He says, ‘I am sorry. He is a bad person, my cousin, he. . does not know how to live as a human being. I am bad, too, although I did not want it to. . listen, it was Leung’s plan, all of it. First, we captured the Italian man, Catalano. .’ ”

Karp heard his own voice saying, “Did you kill Catalano?” and then Lucy’s translation and Cowboy, again. Lucy translated: “No, I drove one of the cars. Kenny killed Catalano. Leung was there. He looked at the clock and said when to fire. They fired through the man’s head. I was sick. Kenny laughed and he said, ‘Next time, you will do it yourself, it’s about time,’ and other things. They all laughed at me. I wanted them to stop laughing, so I did it. I came in through the back door and I shot them both, as Leung had ordered, in the body and in the head. I went on home invasions, too. In one place we raped a woman, and I pretended to also, but I was too ashamed. I did not want this kind of life in America. He knew you were the one, that day, you saw everything. He found out from the Chen. You called, they got the address where you were. She asked you. I should have shouted out or warned, but I was afraid. We came out here. I didn’t want to, but. . Lucy, do you think. . Lucy, do you think. . Lucy. .” And the sound of crying. Karp flicked off the machine.

She was sobbing now, and she brought forth from the pocket of her cutoffs a wad of tissues the size of a softball, bits flying everywhere, and dabbed her eyes with it and blew her nose. Karp tossed his pad away and hugged Lucy to him, making comforting sounds without meaning, until the whooping sobs stopped and she relaxed against him, snuffling and exhausted.

“You should get some rest,” he said.

“Everybody thinks it’s my fault, don’t they?”

“Nobody thinks that, Lucy.”

She pulled away and faced him. “No, don’t be a daddy, tell me the truth! None of this would’ve happened if I just came to you and told what I saw in the Asia Mall.”

“You want the truth? Okay, yeah, it would’ve been better if you came forward with it-for you. For you, Lucy, not necessarily for the other people.”

“I thought I was doing the right thing. For Mary, I mean, and Janice. Dad, how could she have? I don’t understand. I thought she was, they are-were, like my family. I loved her. Wen jing zhi jiao.”

“What’s that?”

“Friends who would die for each other. I thought. . oh, God, what a mess.” She stood and gave her face another wipe. “I want to go see Mary now, all right?”

“Sure, baby, go ahead. I’ll see you later.”

He checked over his transcription and put it away, and bent to pick up the scraps Lucy had scattered on the floor, placing them in a large tin ashtray on the bedside table. He did a good job, glad, actually, of one mess that was easy to clean up.

Marlene made a big batch of Spanish omelettes and buttered toast for the house, but the table was far from the merry assembly it had been on previous nights. Two people were missing: Posie had been kept by the hospital for a day of observation, and Detective Bryan, placed on routine administrative leave after the shooting, had gone back to the city. The rest ate with poor appetite, in relative silence. Even the twins were subdued. The girls left for their attic as soon as they could, and Sophie left early, too, complaining of pains in her hip. Karp took the boys for a walk on the beach before bedtime, accompanied by Ed Morris, while Marlene washed up. As she stood at the sink, Jake Gurvitz came in, picked up a dish towel and started to dry.

“Don’t bother, thanks,” she said. “They’ll drip on the rack.”

Jake smiled. “That’s what Sophie says.” He took a seat at the kitchen table. Outside, it was drifting into deep blue, and moths were beginning their totentanz against the back-door lightbulb.

“How is she?”

“Not bad for an old lady who just had a goddamn thing the size of a pipe wrench stuck in her body. Amazing what they can do nowadays.”

“Yeah, amazing.” She turned off the hot water, racked the egg pan, and faced him, leaning against the sink. “Was she upset about this afternoon?”

“Upset? Sophie’s hard to upset. Something don’t go right, she puts it out of her mind. You think of what she’s been through, it’s probably the best thing.”

Marlene pulled out her pack and stuck a sandy, crumpled filter tip in her mouth. Jake lit it and lit a panatela for himself. “Yeah, no point in carrying all that stuff around with you, except if you plan on doing something with it. And, speaking of the past, does she know about you?”

“She knows I wasn’t teaching in a girls’ school,” he said after a brief pause. He was watching her closely.

“But not that you were Jake the Baker.”

“Huh. You’re some detective. Where’d you hear that?”

“Around. Does she?”

“That? No. Why, you going to tell her?”

“No, of course not. You did a good thing for me and my kids today. I owe you. But as a matter of curiosity, and because I got a stake in it, what kind of paper would it be that Salvatore Bollano wouldn’t like to see on the TV?”

Jake released a long stream of cigar smoke and studied a large gray moth battering against the kitchen window. He took a deep breath and let it out. “You know I worked for Sally back then?”

“Uh-huh. What as, exactly?”

“I kept the union in line, made sure Sally got his cut of the dues, took care of the pension funds for him. Moved money from here to there and back. Like that.”

“And put guys in ovens?”

Jake chuckled. “You don’t want to believe everything you hear, Marlene. Anyway, a lot of cash moved around, and there were markers, little pieces of paper that said who got paid what-like receipts, you know? The guy’s initials, the amount, and who cleared the payoff. That was usually Sally himself, but me, too. We called them tags. Like a guy would say, ‘Tag so-and-so for fifty G.’ ”

“A guy like Heshy Panofsky?”

Jake raised his eyebrow and smiled. “Oh-ho! Now I see why Sally sent that kid around to see you. No, as a matter of fact, Panofsky was at the other end. He was a cutout, if you know what that means. The politicians didn’t want to know from where the dough really came. But they get it from Panofsky, they could tell themselves it was clean.”

“So Panofsky collected money from the Mob and paid it out. I figured that out already.”

“Uh-huh. He would keep track of it in a book he kept locked up in his office. The tag book, they called it, like a ledger. Initials, dates, amounts, the whole megillah.”

“That’d be an interesting book to read.”

“Interesting, yeah, but not healthy,” said Jake, and Marlene asked the inevitable next question: “This has something to do with why Jerry Fein got killed, doesn’t it?”

Jake’s face darkened, and he looked again at the window. The moth was stationary now, exhausted, longing for the light. “That’s a whole different story. You don’t need to know about that.”

“Oh, Christ! Jake, tell me you didn’t do him!”

Jake looked at her, meeting her eyes. She thought, What is it about me that attracts the bad boys of the world? What do they want from me? Why do I like them? Thinking thus, it seemed like a long while before he answered.

“No, I didn’t do him. Little Sal and Charlie Tuna did him. I knew about it, though. I found that scumbag Nobile for them.”

“For the key.”

“Yeah. The key.”

“Was Panofsky involved?”

“Nah. They wouldn’t involve Heshy, a thing like that. He was their gate into legit stuff. They wouldn’t want him to get his hands dirty. Did he know about it? Hell, yeah, he knew about it. Had to.”

“So, why, Jake? Why did they kill their own lawyer?”

“Why? Because he found out who framed him on the jury tamper. Thing about Jerry, see, he played it straight up. He gave you his best shot, and he was good. But Sally, on that Gravalotti thing, his own ass on the line, he wasn’t gonna take no chances. So he tells Heshy, put the fix in, Heshy, get to a juror, a couple of jurors. So Heshy does it. But he works it so that when it comes out, Jerry looks like the one done it. And he, I mean Heshy, makes sure it comes out.”

“Why would he do that?” asked Marlene.

“Hey, what do I know? But Panofsky had this hard-on for Jerry Fein. It was a known thing. Everybody but Jerry knew it, but Jerry, he couldn’t take it in. He brought the guy into the firm, covered his ass, he’s making a good living. . what’s that thing about punishment, something about a good deed?”

“No good deed goes unpunished.”

“Yeah! That was them.”

Marlene thought for a moment about what she’d learned from Abe Lapidus. Heshy’d done the frame, Fein had taken the fall to protect Bernie Kusher, but then found out that Heshy had screwed him. He’d be mad as hell, but. . She turned a puzzled face to Jake. “But. . okay, say Jerry found out about the frame. He threatens to expose Panofsky. What’s that got to do with the killing? Bollano killed Jerry as a favor to Panofsky?”

“Nah. No way. No, that’s something I could never figure out. Sally was really mad at Jerry, really mad, and Sally, you know he was usually a bucket of ice about business. No, this was something else, something personal. Because it looks bad, guys in that business don’t usually knock off their lawyers. Lawyer’s no danger to them, because of that rule-they can’t rat them out.”

“Right, client privilege. So, tell me, what was the paper you’re going to scare Big Sally with?”

Jake shrugged, raised his eyebrows. “Oh, that. Hell, that was mostly bluff. I handled a lot of paper for Sally, he don’t know what stuck to my fingers. Tags and stuff. I got some stuff with my lawyers, anything happens to me. . you know. But the tags ain’t worth much without the tag book.”

“And I presume that’s gone by now.”

“Hell, yeah! I mean, they’re not stupid. After Jerry went, Panofsky cleaned out the office, dumped Jerry’s secretary, got rid of Bernie Kusher-”

“I thought Kusher embezzled some money and took off.”

“The way I heard it, Heshy was about to rat him out, but Bernie beat him to the punch. He cleaned out the safe, all of Sally’s payoffs for the month, had to be seven, eight hundred large. Heshy had to loot the trusts to pay it back, which he stuck on Bernie. Neat trick, when you think about it. Always a joker, Bernie.”

Not a million, though, thought Marlene. Some of the trust money had stuck to Heshy’s fingers. She said, “Yeah. Speaking of funny, aren’t you worried about Vinnie Fresh? He doesn’t strike me as the kind of guy who you blow his ear off he’s going to laugh and forget about it.”

Jake ground out his cigar and laced his hands behind his head. “Well, I tell you, Marlene: one, I’m seventy-two. If not this, it’ll be the prostate or some other damn thing. I never figured to last this long in the first place. Practically everybody I came up with is dead. All this with Sophie-it’s a bonus I never expected. And two-these guys they got today, they ain’t the same as guys like me. They ain’t tough the same way. I’d’ve pulled a stunt like that on the beach, in the old days, I wouldn’t be here talking to you now. I’d be feeding the crabs. We used to get any shit, boom! Come right back at you, none of this fucking around. So, I ain’t worried. I can take care of myself. Believe me, Salvatore knows that better’n anybody alive.”

There was a commotion at the door, and Karp came in with the two boys. They came rushing up to their mother, and each dumped a large, stinking marine rock on the clean table.

“We collected rocks, Mommy,” cried Zik. “Look, mine has seaweeds and a little crab. But he’s hiding now, and a clam stuck on it.”

“A barnacle. It’s beautiful, darling!”

“My rock is bigger,” said Zak. “Mine has red worms on it.”

The rocks were admired, placed in plastic bags, were banned from the bathwater, despite strenuous objections, and the Karps soon afterward put their boys to bed. The two girls had meanwhile taken over the front bedroom vacated by the departure of Bryan and Posie. In their own bedroom, the Karps flung themselves full-length on their high bed, hooting and giggling with exhaustion.

“Good thing this is a vacation, or I’d be tired,” said Karp.

“Yeah, any more relaxation and we’d start to get stale.”

“Right. Say, Zak kept going on about going on a boat ride, and Zik said something about the kidnap man coming in a boat. What was that all about, or were they making stuff up?”

“No, just some asshole in a rubber boat trying to mess with my head. They see a woman alone on the beach, it goes right to their gonads. It was nothing.”

“Really?”

Marlene ignored this, for she did not have the energy to deal with Karp’s worry. They had, she thought, enough to worry about. She moved closer to him and nestled her head into the hollow of his shoulder. “You’re so good,” she said. “You uphold the law. You don’t kill people. You don’t even want to kill people.”

“Well, George Steinbrenner. . if I could get close enough. .”

“No, seriously, Butch. I keep feeling it’s all my fault, the violence, that there’s some, I don’t know, lust, I have for it. I was just thinking, just now, who are my friends, who do I attract, who am I attracted to: Mattie Duran, a killer; Tran, a stone killer; my best friend on the cops? Jim Raney, who’s killed more people in line of duty than any other serving officer. Jake Gurvitz-”

“Our Jake?”

She told him who Jake was. He said, “Jesus!”

“Jesus, indeed. So I’m in this life, I chose it, for whatever reason, and I have to say, Lucy’s in it, too. Bad genes. I don’t worry about Lucy; I mean, I worry about her hating me, and not being happy, but I don’t worry about her safety the way you do. Irrational? Maybe, but that’s how I feel. But, Butch, when that guy went after Zik, I fell apart. Complete paralyzed jelly. They’re not like Lucy, they’re just little tiny boys. And I can’t protect them, not twenty-four hours a day, not and do anything else. Does this make sense?”

“Honestly? No, but I know that’s the way you feel. The question is, what are you going to do about it?”

“Well, first I’m going to have a ciggie.” She got her pack out, opened the window wide to the sea breeze, went over to the nightstand, and picked up the ashtray. She looked at it in distaste.

“What is all this crap?”

“Lucy’s crying debris. Kleenex from her pocket.”

“Butch, this is blood.”

“Where?” Together, they examined the crumpled, brown-stained piece of paper together.

Karp said, “This must have come from the murder scene. It’s got Chinese writing on it. It looks like a betting slip. See, the number 4,500 and the characters around it.”

“Could it be evidence?”

“Sure, but I don’t know of what or what it’s worth. In any case, we have more than enough to nail Leung.”

“If you can catch him,” Marlene observed. She placed the slip in the drawer of the nightstand. “There’s no point in bothering her any more today. Show it to her in the morning, and we’ll see if it’s worth keeping.”

“It’s a deposit slip from a Chinese named Kuen,” said Lucy the next morning as they all gathered for breakfast. “He’s kind of a banker. You give him money and he gives you these slips, with your name and his name and the amount, or you give him a slip and he gives you money. It could be his own slip or a slip from someone he knows, in China or Hong Kong or wherever.”

Karp recalled his brief conversation with V.T. Clearly this was how Leung had moved money in and out of the country. He experienced another brief moment of irritation as he thought of the man-hours wasted searching for Leung’s financial trail, when all the time his darling daughter. . but there was no point in getting into that now. He said, “Interesting. And this slip-Leung dropped it?”

“No. When Nguyen fell he grabbed and ripped Leung’s pocket out. He had a bunch of them.”

“Okay, I’ll call it in. Maybe he’ll show up at this Kuen’s place, providing we can find it.”

“It’s on Doyers Street,” said Lucy. “It’s where I bank.”

“Where you bank?” asked Marlene, who was cracking eggs at the kitchen counter. Karp was beyond being stunned.

Lucy calmly sliced another bagel, holding the circle against her chest and plunging the knife in the direction of her heart as she cut. “The lab pays me. I went to Kuen because I’m underage to get an account at a regular bank and I didn’t want you guys to know about the money.”

“Lucy!” Marlene exclaimed. “But why not?”

The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. It seemed important at the time. Everything’s changed now.” She sniffled, seemed close to tears, swallowed hard and gained control of herself. “I hope you get him,” she said.

“We’ll get him, if we have to put a cop on every corner in Chinatown,” said Karp grimly. “One thing in our favor-the guy has to stay in the community. An illegal from Hong Kong, on his own. He wouldn’t know where to start on the outside.”

“You know, Dad, that might not be true. He can talk English with a New York accent when he wants to. He might be a lot slicker than we think. And he’s from Macao, not Hong Kong. He knew an American there who taught him all kinds of stuff. He said.” She resumed her slicing. Karp and Marlene exchanged an eye-rolling look, and then Karp went to the phone to call in these revelations to Clay Fulton in the city.

After breakfast Marlene set the girls to washing up and dialed her number at Osborne. She punched in her voice-mail code and listened to the messages from Tran, then pushed the numbers to erase it. Tran’s involvement in the Beach Bazaar affair vanished into electronic chaos. The next three message were from Mattie Duran. She ignored these. Maybe she was out of the business, maybe not, but the ladies would have to get along without her for a while. The next message was from Tran.

“Marie-Helene, I am in Bridgeport, in Connecticut state. I thought it wise to continue east, rather than heading west to the city, in case there should be inquisitive policemen along the way back. We took the ferry from Port Jefferson. Do you know, there is a considerable Vietnamese community in Bridgeport? Perhaps I shall stay here awhile. I am splitting the town, as you say. Perhaps I shall once again enter the noodle business. Accept my tender regards, dear friend, and offer them as well to your daughter. Tell her she can keep the book for the time being. Until next time.”

Marlene punched the buttons and erased this message, too.

Leung spent nearly ten hours at the bottom of a Dumpster outside the Grand Union less than a hundred yards from the Beach Bazaar, covered by layers of rotting vegetables, meat, and fish, surrounded by dozens of searching cops. The dumpster was opened several times, and sticks were pushed down into it, but he was not discovered. Leung thought that American policemen would not wish to burrow through rotting garbage on a scorching day, or even imagine that anyone would be able to stand being buried in such a place, and he was correct. It was far from pleasant, but he had been in worse places. He kept a carton wrapped around his head, and enough air filtered down through the stinking mass to keep him alive. In the early morning hours of the next day, when the search had moved far away, he dug himself out, walked down to the empty beach, and bathed in the sea. He threw his clothes in a trash basket, except for his undershirt and trousers, which he cut down into shorts with a pocketknife. Barefoot, he walked west on the beach under the shadow of the boardwalk. When he judged he had gone far enough, he crossed the boardwalk and entered the town. This would be the most difficult part. There was always a chance that a police car would blunder down the street he was on, but he counted on a beach town patrol not looking twice at what looked like a man in swim shorts and T-shirt without shoes-a citizen walking back from a party, perhaps. It was unlikely that they would come close enough to find that he was an Asian. He crossed the narrow sand spit on which Long Beach lay, following the signs he had noted earlier to the New York Avenue marina. Up to the age of twelve, Leung had lived on the estuary of the Pearl River, outside Guangdong, and later, in Macao he had worked as a smuggler. There was little about boats he did not understand, and so found it easy to steal a twenty-four-foot Bayliner from the marina. The boat was well supplied with charts. He moved at low speed out of the marina into Reynolds Channel and East Rockaway Inlet.

Navigation was easy, with the surf beating at Rockaway on his right and the lights of the great city behind it. He ate a box of Oreos and drank some warm beer he found in a cooler. He entertained the idea of sailing back to China, and it made him laugh. By dawn he was rounding Breezy Point, and then it was just a few more hours to cross Rockaway Inlet and reach Sheepshead Bay. He tied the boat up at a vacant slip where the charter boats docked, and walked east on Shore Boulevard. When he found an open store, he bought a pair of zoris, a pair of khaki pants, a white shirt, sunglasses, and a white terry-cloth hat. Shore Boulevard merged into Neptune Avenue. He was in Coney Island. He had heard a great deal about Coney Island; the American had painted it as a boy’s paradise. It did not look like much in the light of day and without the scrim of happy memory. But there was a subway here, Leung recalled, and he found it without difficulty. He took the F train to Grand Street. By noon he was in Chinatown.

The Karps spent another day at the beach, but by Sunday they (or at least the adults) had had enough, and they decided to drive back to the city and deal with the unfinished pieces occasioned by the recent drama. Karp wanted badly to be in on the kill when they finally got Leung, and to ensure that the legalities were strictly observed. He also wanted to be the one to inform Tommy Colombo of what had been discovered. Karp was not much of a gloater, but he felt that a situation so flamboyantly gloatable should not be allowed to pass unobserved.

In the afternoon Posie returned, a walking advertisement for why you should not, if you have lard white Appalachian-person skin, spend eight hours in the sun of a New York scorcher wearing only a string bikini. They’d given her a lot of codeine at the hospital, and Marlene thought that Posie considered this access to legal downers a fair exchange for having most of her skin fried off. For her own part, things were starting to work again in her brain, slowly, like the first groaning movements of a locomotive setting out from the station, but in a direction she could now see clearly. She knew pretty much why everything that had happened since early June had happened. Two people had the remainder of the answer, of whom only one was available, but Marlene was determined to see her, brace her, and extract the truth.

The ride home was uneventful, punctuated only by an occasional scream from Posie as the dog licked her lobster-colored neck with his rough tongue. The twins slept, the girls talked earnestly in whispers, the radio stayed silent, as did Karp and Marlene. Traffic rather than ethnic gangs barred their way on the Belt Parkway. They dropped Mary off and pulled up in front of the loft just after six. Ed Morris got out of the follow car.

“You want me to stick around, Butch?”

“I don’t think so. Just go up with Lucy and check out the loft. I think we can survive the night.”

Morris, Lucy, and Posie rode up on the elevator, with the dog and the first load of bags. Karp leaned deeply into the Volvo’s backseat to unbuckle the sleeping boys from their car seats. Zik, he saw, had taken his beach rock out of its bag.

Marlene had the rear hatch of the Volvo up. She was gathering all the bits of travel debris into a sailcloth beach bag when she heard the sound of a car stopping suddenly and looked up. A black Trans-Am had parked in the middle of the street. The driver’s-side door was flung open, and out stepped Brenda Nero, dressed in pink bermudas, a sleeveless top, and Mattie Duran’s Colt Peacemaker.44. She walked around the front of her car, staggering slightly. Marlene saw that she was drunk, or high.

“I’m gonna kill you, bitch!” she shouted, and raised the pistol.

Marlene put down her beach bag. “Brenda, give me that damn gun before you hurt yourself!” she said.

Karp had been leaning into the car, fumbling with Zik’s car seat strap, but when he heard the woman yell, he came out and stood up and stared at the scene on the street. The woman was pointing a huge shiny gun at his wife’s head. At the same time he saw an old red pickup truck with a green fender draw up and stop behind the black Trans Am. Its driver, a burly man wearing a baseball hat, reached behind him and took a shotgun down from the gun rack and came out of the car. He jacked a shell into it and started walking toward Marlene.

Brenda Nero pointed the Colt at Marlene’s head and pulled the trigger. A confused look came over her pretty, stupid face. She squeezed harder.

Marlene took two steps forward, grabbed the barrel of the pistol, yanked it out of Brenda’s grasp, and socked her in the jaw. Brenda staggered back, tripped on the curb, and fell down. She started to cry.

“It wasn’t loaded!” she wailed.

“It is loaded, Brenda,” Marlene said. “It’s a single-action gun. You have to cock it first.” She demonstrated the cocking action.

“Marlene!” shouted Karp. Marlene looked up and into the muzzle of a twelve-gauge shotgun. She had no idea who the man pointing it was.

Karp’s arm whipped around almost without volition, and Zik’s smooth round stone, with its tiny passengers aboard, flew through the intervening space and struck the man on his right forearm. The shotgun roared, sending nine 00 pellets winging over Marlene’s head and into the side of the building.

Marlene pointed the big pistol and shot the man from the red pickup, the bullet entering about three inches above the left nipple. The man dropped the shotgun and sat down in the street. In a Western movie, guys shot with a Colt.44 often ride long distances on horseback, punch out the bad guy, and save the girl from the burning ranch house, but in real life they usually want to lie very still in a quiet place, and this man was no exception. Marlene walked over to him and kicked the shotgun away.

“Sir,” she said, “would you mind telling me who the fuck you are?”

“Reginald P. Burford,” the man said.

“Reginald P. Burford, the right-to-life vigilante?”

“Yes, ma’am. Could you please call me an ambulance?”

“I’d be happy to,” said Marlene. “Why were you trying to kill me?”

“It’s the Lord, ma’am. Because of the baby killing. I saw you on the TV protecting those baby killers, and I opened the Bible to see what I should do and it opened up to Jeremiah 16:4. ‘They shall die of grievous deaths; they shall not be lamented; neither shall they be buried’. . And, you know, I fought it back, but the Lord, He kept after me, like unto Jonah, and made me stretch out my hand against. It ain’t nothing personal, ma’am.”

“Oh, I’m sure, I’m sure,” she said. “It never is.” Then she stood in the middle of the street and howled to the sky, “Anybody else? Let’s go, people! Step right up! Take your shot! Here I am, Marlene the walking fucking death wish! Come on, you fucking crazy bastards! Come on!”

Karp ran to her and wrapped his arms around her. She collapsed against him, sobbing. “It’s over, Marlene,” he said. “It’s all right.”

“It’s not over,” she sobbed. “It’s not all right.”

Later, after Morris had organized the police necessities and Karp the domestic ones, Marlene paced her kitchen floor, smoking as she had not for many years, one after another. Karp sat on a kitchen chair and watched her with growing apprehension, glad that there was for once no gun in the house. There was on her face a look he had not seen for some time, her Medea look, made even more horrible by the absence of a softening coiffure. This was not the same woman who had lately built sand castles with her little boys and sung them gently to sleep.

At last he said, “Marlene, for crying out loud, sit down! Relax!”

She stopped short and stared at him, her eye glittering. “Relax. Good idea, but not quite yet, no. What just happened, Butch, out on the street? A woman I tried to help just tried to kill me. No good deed goes unpunished. And a guy gets a message from God, and what does it say? The envelope, please. Shoot Marlene Ciampi. I don’t get messages from God. God only talks to assholes from Buttzville, New Jersey. Tell me, is this my fate?”

“What can I say, Marlene? You know how I feel about what you do.”

“Yes. Yes, I do know. And you know what? I feel the same way.

I know that I shall meet my fate,

Somewhere among the clouds above.

Those I fight I do not hate,

Those I guard I do not love.

“Yeats. I have to go out.”

“Marlene, don’t be crazy.”

She came up to him and touched his cheek and kissed him. “You poor man. I’ll be fine. I’ll walk between the bullets.”

Before he could say another word, she ran into the bedroom and came out carrying her purse. She stalked up to him, grabbed his head, and kissed him again, this time solidly on the mouth.

“I’ll be right back,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

Then she was out the door. He heard her running down the stairs, and began to worry.