Afterburn

Staten Island Ferry, New York Harber September 14, 1999

Civilization, like a fishing boat, needed maintenance. You had to keep protecting against the natural advance of decay, and he had decided to maintain himself, too, returning to the truck now with the tools and signifiers of civilization-clean laundry, a desk calendar, the Daily News, a new toothbrush, and a two-pound powder mix of creatine monohydrate, glutamine peptides, and whey protein isolate that he sprinkled on his food. He was going to get beefed and buffed, he was going to get a routine together, not just take showers at the gym with the homos staring at him, not just eat in cheap restaurants, including the Jim-Jack three times already looking for Christina-with no luck yet. Yes, he was going to open a bank account, he was going to set himself up right, maybe find a decent place to sleep. Church, Rick said to himself as he returned to the parking garage, at this rate I might even go to church.

He stepped out of the midday sun into the cool incline of the garage's shadow and noticed that breathless Horace was not in his booth and that the big elevator was in use, which meant Horace was parking a vehicle in the basement, where the truck sat. Rick now always used the fire stairs, because the rumbling elevator, which ran on hydraulics, not counterweights, took too long. He headed toward the stairs with his packages, pulling out his keys, but he noticed that Horace had left a car, a white Crown Victoria, parked in no-man's-land just around the corner from the booth. Horace, though a wheezing deadbeat, was dependably obsessive about where his cars rested at all times, and a Crown Victoria sitting there askew not only violated Horace's system but meant that Horace was not parking a car in the garage, and yes, Ricky-with-the-dickey, a white Crown Victoria was, often as not, an unmarked police car.

He wanted to know what they were doing down there. Maybe fucking with the truck. Could he beat the elevator to the basement? He skipped down the stairs, peeked around the corner, and saw the floor of the elevator sinking past the ceiling, three pairs of legs appearing, and he huffed stiffly along the basement's dark back wall, sliding to a stop beneath a new Lexus twenty cars away from the truck. Unless they searched the entire garage, they wouldn't find him.

Now the open elevator stopped, and the men stepped out. With his ear pressed to the oily cement floor, he could just see their feet.

"I'm looking, just let me remember," came Horace's ruined voice. They walked toward the truck. Six shoes. A pair of ratty basketball shoes, followed by two pairs of men's brogans.

"That's it, my man. That truck."

"Give me the key. You stand over there and wait for us."

The four leather shoes continued toward the truck. Police? Somebody who worked for Tony Verducci?

"He's out eating lunch or something."

One of the truck doors opened. Then the next. "Look at this."

"Living like an animal."

"Definitely sleeping in there."

"Got a baseball bat."

"Not against the law."

"No. Horace?"

"Yes, my brother?" came the reply.

"When was the last time you saw him?"

"Yesterday."

"The night guy?"

"He don't remember."

"You're sure?"

"Sure."

"You weren't watching the ball game and didn't see him?"

"Maybe. I ain't making any promises about where he be."

"The night guy sleep at night?"

"That's what I do, I sleep at night."

In a quieter voice: "So our guy is generally in and out." Louder: "Give us a couple of minutes here, Horace."

"Right."

"I mean walk away, Horace. Just get your ass fifty steps back."

"Right on that."

The basketball shoes walked away.

"Fucking jig."

"Looks like he has AIDS. Half the fucking spooks got AIDS, you know."

The money, Rick thought, don't let them find the money.

"Thing I don't understand is why white guys aren't getting it."

"You mean straight white guys?"

"Right."

That voice, thought Rick, I might know that voice. Hard to tell lying on the cement floor. Detective Peck. If he doesn't look at the engine, he won't find the money.

"I heard you can't really get it from fucking a woman. Guys just aren't getting it from having sex with women."

"Whores or regular women?"

"I mean your totally regular girl-she has a regular job, apartment, and so on. Doesn't shoot drugs. Look at the numbers and you see that the guys she's sleeping with are not getting it."

Rick heard the sound of the hood opening. The money was hidden in a large plastic Baggie that he'd twisted a wire around and slipped through the wide mouth of the antifreeze reservoir. To get at it you had to put your fingers into the bluish antifreeze and find the wire. "The doctors don't want anyone to know."

"'Course not."

"You'd have guys fucking around all over the place, if they knew they weren't going to get AIDS."

Had they found his money? He risked a peek around the tire of the Lexus, but the angle wasn't right.

"You ever go gooming on the missus?"

The hood went down. "That's classified information."

"You're a weasel."

"Nah. I see this girl every couple of weeks. Nice, you know, very respectable. Has some kinda job at Macy's, in the personnel department. Apartment's way over by First Avenue. Last time I see her, we get in bed and fuck, you know, then she likes to make me lunch afterward, see, and I eat that and then she brings out this blueberry pie stuff, sort of sweet custard, and it's really good. Better than anything my wife ever made me. Not even close. My wife gives me the same fucking macaroni she gives the kids. Dog food. So I'm eating that custard blueberry pie and really enjoying it, it's better than anything I ever got in a restaurant, and then while I'm still eating it, she slides down and undoes my pants. Starts sucking on me."

"No."

"Yeah, I'm not bullshitting you. I don't even think I can get hard again, we just had sex maybe an hour ago. I'm a fucking old man, right? But here she is, she's gotten turned on by the fact I'm eating her pie. She's doing it to me and I stop eating the pie, just to concentrate, you know, and she says, No, keep eating the pie, don't stop. So I do. It is fucking great pie. I got the pie in my mouth and sitting there looking down watching my wet dick go in and out. Fucking sexiest thing I ever saw. I've seen everything, too, but this is something new. It had to do with the pie."

"I get it."

The basketball shoes were coming back.

"I know it sounds-"

"No, I get it, I-Yo, Horace! Hey, fuckhead! Hey, Horace."

"What?" came a voice.

"This is a po-lice investigation. You don't come back until I tell you."

The basketball shoes walked away.

"Stuff like that happens, it ruins you," said the other man.

"What do you mean?"

"I can hardly screw my wife anymore. I have to go into a trance."

A male exhalation. "Hey, my wife actually fell asleep on me."

"No. C'mon."

"Swear. I knew she was tired, but she got up and put in the thing and said, Okay, honey, and then I get on her-I mean, it's not like I didn't work the whole day, either-and I'm doing it and then I see she's asleep."

"Sort of killed it for you."

"I pulled out, she didn't even know."

The truck door slammed.

"How much you paying Horace these days?"

"He gets thirty a week, twenty extra anytime his stuff is decent."

"He knew this guy was no good?"

"The guy wanted to hide the truck-that's interesting enough. Horace'll try to sell anything he's got."

"Bocca coming in and out once a day, maybe."

"He doesn't know what he's doing," Peck said disgustedly. The other truck door slammed. "He's fucking around, he's getting close to finding that girl. He's making contact with Verducci's people, making them mad. That's all I care about. He'll get mixed up in it. He'll call me again, say he doesn't know where she is. But he's going to find her. It's just a matter of time."

"You think they know where she is?"

"Don't know exactly what they know. I'm not on the exact inside here. My job is to keep an eye on this guy."

"They want to get them together first."

"They want something, yeah."

He lay motionless on the oily floor for ten minutes after they left. He'd have to call Paul now. He hadn't wanted to do it, but now there was no choice; Paul would figure it out. He rose and moved through the shadows to his truck, the doors of which Peck had left unlocked. Nothing seemed to be missing, including the money in the antifreeze reservoir, and the truck started right up. What did Peck want from him? Get out of the city, Rick. He summoned the elevator, opened the gate, and backed in the truck. Horace had sold him out for thirty bucks when Rick was paying him seventy-five a week. Unwise, my brother. He felt his breathing quicken, his hands getting nervous, just like in grade school before something bad happened.

A minute later, he had the truck idling in front of the cement-block booth. Seeing him through the booth window, Horace turned off the television.

"Good afternoon, my brother. I didn't see you come in."

Rick put the truck in park and got out with the baseball bat.

"Wait, I said, 'Good afternoon, my brother.'"

Red, the world was red. "Hey, fuck you, my brother."

It was no use pretending anything. "They know where I live, man, they-"

Rick swung the bat and shattered the booth window. With the next swing he destroyed the door. Horace leapt under the desk, holding the phone. The phone wire came right out of the cement block, and Rick swung the bat down on that, snapping it loose, yanking the phone set off the wall.

"Yo, man!" cried Horace, his breath raspy. "Don't fucking do it."

Rick hit the door again. It broke in two. He took a step inside the booth. Almost no room to swing. The cash register was full, but if he touched it, the police would care what happened. Up to now, it was a personal incident, of no official interest.

"Don't hit the television."

He hit the television, shutting his eyes as the bat met the screen. Wrecked. But he was not satisfied, not nearly. With one swing he could break Horace's knee, then drag him out from under the desk.

"You fucking sold me out!"

"I had no choice!"

"Get up."

"You going kill me," Horace croaked.

"Get up!"

"I said you going kill me."

Think, he told himself. Don't do the stupid thing. You already did one stupid thing. He saw the key box on the wall and pushed it open. Row upon row of keys, each on a hook, corresponding with spaces in the garage. The lowest three rows of ten were marked basemint and included many sets with Lexus and Mercedes emblems.

"Where's my key?"

Horace was gulping breath. "Bottom left."

He retrieved his spare set, then unhooked a handful of other keys, seven or eight sets.

"You can't do that!"

"The fuck I can't. I'll be taking these keys. You can explain to the owners."

"Oh, man, my brother, that puts me in a world of shit. That gets me fired. They hear their keys are gone, they going get me fired, at the least."

"You should have thought of that."

Horace's eyes were full of terror. "I can't move no cars around without them keys!"

"You should have thought of that, too." He noticed a framed photo of a Little League baseball team in blue-and-white uniforms. "What's this?"

"What? What?" Horace looked around, glass in his hair.

"This."

"That? That's my two boys, their team!" wheezed Horace despairingly, keeping his head covered.

Rick picked up the photo: twenty little black boys in neat baseball uniforms kneeling on a scuffed infield; in the background, smiling, stood Horace, an assistant coach of sorts. The guy was just trying to make a living-you could see it that way, too; the man had a shitty job eating exhaust and was working whatever extra angles he could to make a little money for his sons. Contributing to civilization. Rick put down the photo, threw the other keys to the floor, and left.

It was past 3:00 P.M. when he stepped into the Jim-Jack, and he could see that the lunch crowd had ebbed, only one waitress working the tables, the Mexican busboys idle. Behind the bar stood the bartender, an older blond woman with too many rings garbaging up her ears. The pay phone hung on the wall next to the first stool of the bar, placed rather cleverly so that you could sit at the bar and talk on the phone. This, he figured, was where Christina had called her mother. He sat down next to the window and the busboy came over. He nodded. "I'm looking for a friend of mine, name's Christina."

The busboy did not commit to an expression. A lot of Indian in his face, the eyes almond-shaped. Mexicans hated whites, the conquistadors. Were into butt-fucking white girls as revenge, he'd heard. But that wasn't his problem. "I think she's been around here, man. Pretty tall, dark hair. On the slim side."

The busboy wiped the table, looked over his shoulder. "Let me check." He retreated to the back of the restaurant, whispered something to the bartender, who lifted the bridge of the bar and walked forward.

"You ready to order?" she asked.

Rick nodded. "Let me have the bean burrito plate. A tomato juice, orange juice-and Coke-no-ice."

"Thirsty guy."

He nodded.

"Right." But she wasn't quite done with him. "You were asking about somebody?"

"Yeah-a friend. A woman, long dark hair. Kind of tough-looking. Maybe she used this phone a few times. I heard she was around, so I thought I'd just stop in."

"Pretty?"

"Yes."

"A friend?"

"Old friend, yeah."

"How old could she be?"

"Not as old as me."

She looked at him. "You don't look that old."

"I'm old, believe me. Very old."

The woman smiled. "I think I've seen a girl using the phone. You want to leave a message?"

"No. But maybe you can tell me when she comes in, her usual time."

She shook her head softly. "I can't."

"No?"

She smiled again. "It's a policy. We make policy here in this restaurant."

"Then just tell her a friend came by."

She pretended to write on her order pad. "I'll just put down 'Nameless Old Guy.' Something like that?"

"Sounds good."

While he was waiting for his food, he called Paul. After the secretary put him through, he could hear his half brother switch from speakerphone to the regular line. "Been a long time, Rick." A weight of sadness passed through him; he missed his brother terribly, felt ashamed for falling out of contact. He'd never told Paul exactly where he lived out on Long Island. "I know," Rick said. "It's my fault." He'd always admired Paul. He was the successful one. Trained as an accountant, he owned the family heating-oil-delivery business, two policemen's bars that didn't make much money but kept him sewn in with the cops, a boatyard out on Long Island. He knew everybody, and everybody knew him, asked his advice. Nobody had a hook into him. Paul owed exactly no dollars and no cents to the world. His specialty was setting up legitimate operations that actually made money. If you wanted to wash some money through them, that was your business. The old men trusted him because he made his rules clear and had never been in trouble. The younger men trusted him because the older men did. If you asked him what stocks to buy, he didn't tell you; he gave you the name of a legitimate brokerage. If you wanted to buy a gasoline station on Long Island, he told you whom to call and ran the numbers for you. Of course, then you placed the accounting with his firm.

"Where are you?" Paul asked.

"Back in the city. I need to talk, get some thoughts on something."

In the past, this had always meant that Rick was in trouble. Paul's reaction depended on the load of headaches he already carried, what his wife would say, what the actual trouble was, and, finally, whether Rick was asking for money.

"Lay it on me."

Rick briefly explained the situation with Christina and Peck, including the conversation out on the dock in Greenport.

"Some of what he told you is probably horseshit," Paul said. "Some."

"You know Peck?" asked Rick.

"I know people who know him. The usual setup."

Rick watched the waitress bring his food to his table. She noticed that he was at the pay phone. "This thing is moving pretty fast on me, Paulie."

"Come over for dinner. I'm out of the office later in the afternoon, but I can pick you up."

The ferry to Staten Island thrilled him, still. Once, as a boy, he rode it holding his father's hand. In the windy darkness the lighted castles of Manhattan receded rapidly, the water behind the tremoring deck oiled with shavings of light. He found a damp bench on the Jersey side. A containership with only three running lights glided past, then a buoy blinking green, then the Statue of Liberty, then another ship. He noticed a young woman with bobbed hair and beautiful eyes. She sat a few benches away, legs crossed, bouncing her black boot. She smiled mysteriously and he nodded. Every girl has a story, he thought, but you can ride only one at a time. Inside the ferry exhausted office workers sat traveling home, jackets over their shoulders, hunched sweating beneath the fluorescent lights, reading newspapers, eating hot dogs. Dependable people, bills paid, law-abiding. He would never be one.

The ferry bumped to a stop. Outside the terminal Paul stood waiting in a good sports coat and talking into a cell phone-never wasting a minute, always the man with unfinished business, rushing toward the next conversation, the next deal. Getting quite a bit of gray hair now, Rick could see. Paul looked up and gunned his finger at Rick in recognition. A classy guy, his brother. They both had their height from their father, but Paul had never gotten big, weight always steady. Refined in appearance and habit and temperament. Bought a new Town Car every three years and gave money to charities. Read The Wall Street Journal and played golf. Ten handicap, just right. He kept a finger in a lot of different pies, Paul did. Advised the Archdiocese. Jews liked him because he was as smart as they were. He had a lot of money and nobody but Paul knew how much. Wife happy. Kids doing fine in school. The big house in Todt Hill. Christmas lights on the bushes each December. Everything done the right way.

Paul grasped Rick's arm. "You look good. What's your weight now?"

"Maybe two-thirty."

"You look solid."

"All that work on the boat."

In the car, Paul flicked on the air conditioning. "So you're really back in the city?"

"Just got in."

Paul nodded. A certain tone in his silence. "You staying long?" he said.

"I can't tell."

"You have time to see Dad?"

"I don't know."

"I can drive you out there."

"It's not the right time, this week. Maybe in a little while." Not a good start, Rick knew. "How's he doing, anyway?"

Paul lifted his hands off the steering wheel in a gesture of resignation. "The problem, at this stage, is bedsores. They keep moving him around in the bed. There are certain places-the heels, the buttocks. Places where the weight of the body rubs against the bed."

"Okay." He didn't want to hear it. It distracted him. Paul, eleven years older, had grown up in a different house, their father a happy man then-so Rick had been told. Paul's mother had been killed in a traffic accident, the middle of the day, a station wagon full of groceries. Another Staten Island housewife had been driving a car full of noisy kids. One of them had died. A tragedy, and nobody's fault, really-mothers just doing their jobs. Somehow Paul had been okay, but his father, later Rick's father, had been staved in by the death of his wife. In his grief, he quickly remarried. And maybe things had been all right for a few years. Rick remembered loving his mother like the sky itself, clung to her against his father's lack of interest. She'd taught him to catch and throw a baseball. Maybe things would have been different if she had not died. You could never say what would have happened. Paul was in his last year of high school when Rick's mother got sick. The breast cancer raced through her with no resistance. Also, she was late getting treatment, had hidden her condition from his father; why, Rick never did learn. Some problem in the marriage, something he would never understand, except that he blamed his father for not saving his mother. Perhaps she had feared he would withdraw further if he knew she was sick. That could be it. But there was no one to ask and never had been. After Rick's mother died, his father worked on the family business, never home much. Paul was away at college, in business school, in a big accounting firm in Manhattan. Everyone gone. By the time Rick was seventeen, he was running around pretty hard. By nineteen he was fucking four women on a regular basis, two of them local girls who didn't know which way the wind was blowing, the third the angry wife of a cop, and the last a woman who sold real estate in Manhattan. At thirty-three, she had already been divorced twice; her big trick was that she could touch the soles of her feet to the headboard while he was pounding her.

"Mary made a big dinner," Paul said. "I'll run you back afterward."

"Great. So let's talk now, you mean?"

"Once we get inside, the boys are going to be all over me."

He told Paul, this time in detail, about the visit from Peck out on Orient Point, Christina's release from prison. Paul nodded as he listened, a man accustomed to tortured narratives. The pinlights from the dash illuminated the surface of his glasses, the underside of his chin and nose. He seemed to recall the story even as Rick explained it-which was not so farfetched. People knew they were brothers. Tony Verducci was well acquainted with Paul. They knew the same people, they'd done business together.

"You have any idea why they want Christina?"

Paul gave him a long look, then shrugged. "They know she can do the job."

"But there are all kinds of smart-"

"You're forgetting something."

"What?"

"She didn't talk to the D.A.'s people."

"So she's getting a reward from Tony?" asked Rick.

"No, I don't think it's that."

"What?"

"If she gets caught again, he knows she'll be quiet. Or can be quiet."

"That's not a good enough reason to want her to do it."

"I know. I'm talking about factors. The other reason is that her system worked."

"Somebody else could think of another system. You could think of a system, for God's sake."

"I could, I suppose, but I wouldn't," Paul said. "It wouldn't be as good as hers, either. She has a gift for this kind of thing. I actually wish she had not had such a gift, because you exploited it, but it's true she has the ability. Anyway, you're forgetting about how Tony's mind works. He likes something, he stays with it. I heard he's got ten pairs of the same shoes, never wears anything else."

"Those slip-on things, loafers, with a heel. Sort of a Cuban look."

"Tony is not Cuban."

"So he wants to stick with Christina?" Rick continued. "That makes me think he's got some kind of thing coming up."

"Possible."

"You know what?"

"No."

"Bullshit."

"All I know is, he's sending stuff into JFK, not taking it out," said Paul. "They're all messed up over there. They're putting in a new terminal. Trucks everywhere."

"He's not doing the air freight?"

"No."

"What?" Rick had been out of the game too long.

"He's shipping stuff out, like I said."

"So he's not setting up pickup points?"

"Nah."

"What's he need Christina for, then?"

"When you do a big deal like this, the money goes into a numbered account."

"So?"

Paul took a breath. "The money gets put in by one party and another party takes it out. Simple. But there's one problem with that. You need a password or a key code number to take the money out. Both parties have to have it."

"All right."

"Tony is careful. You know he needs to get the key code number without being told it. And vice versa. The other guy, too. They don't want to meet or see each other. Nothing on paper."

He understood now. Christina's old random number generator system could be applied to a new task. Originally the numbers corresponded to places and times. Now they were just numbers that became a sequence. "But the problem is that both parties still need a piece of paper that tells them where to go at what time. How are you going to know to show up?"

"That's true," Paul agreed. "But it's one link farther away. It's not the number of the account, it's some other number. Plus, it's also destroyable."

"I'm lost here."

Paul adjusted the air-conditioner vent. "Let's say we've got a system to make a long number, maybe a number with eight or nine digits. It's a system that can be used anytime. We have it ready. We don't need to make a new number yet. In fact, we don't want a new number yet. That's no good. You're sitting somewhere with the piece of paper and so am I. On that piece of paper are a bunch of numerals, each one corresponding to a time and a place. Next Tuesday at 6:00 p.m.-something like that. So I call and say, 'Five.' You start with number five and maybe you do the next five places on the list. Whatever, you can change it around."

"Then you start?" said Rick. "You start getting the digits for the new number from each place?"

"Yeah, but you pick situations that change pretty often. Like every fifteen seconds. So that eighteen months from now, if the feds are investigating, they can't say that at 10:00 a.m. on October 5 the elevator was on the sixth floor, or whatever. You pick something that changes almost constantly, that's the key, almost constantly, and leaves no record."

"Then you destroy the original piece of paper, since it was needed only once."

"Right," said Paul. "Maybe you even had the two people memorize it and destroy it beforehand."

"So that at this point, when the two people are done getting their number sequence, they each have the same number, but they have never met, never talked about the number, and do not have any piece of paper that came from the other party that tells them what the number was. In fact, if you went back to the same places again at the same time of day, you'd get a different number."

Paul nodded.

"Tony thinks he's going to get Christina to do this?"

"Maybe."

"She won't do it."

"He just got her out of prison."

"Somebody else could do this."

"I agree," Paul said. "It's just what I heard."

"She won't do it."

"Yes, she will."

"Why?"

"Because if she doesn't, then they will injure her friend."

"Who?" asked Rick.

"You."

"Me?" Rick laughed. "They don't have me."

"Of course they have you."

"They don't know where I am now."

"Are you sure?"

He thought about it. "No."

"They put you into play," said Paul. "Or Peck put you into play. Who does Peck work for?"

"Himself? Or at least not Tony."

"Is Peck your friend? Your old pal? You know him?"

"No."

"Fact, he never liked you."

"But Peck told me the D.A.'s Office did this against his will. He was all pissed off about it. He said his work was being ruined."

"You can forget that. Bunch of bird food."

"He's pretending?"

"Yes, because he wants you to jump in."

"Why?"

"I'll get to that," Paul said. "I got some stuff on that."

"So you're saying that if I get involved he doesn't mind."

"Peck comes to you, says she's getting out, so go do the right thing. Go be a hero. And you can't resist."

He nodded. "Okay, that's true."

"They fucking put you into play, Rick. It's a game with a lot of different balls-some move fast, some slow, some you can barely even see. They tell you enough so that you got to go find Christina. They don't shove you together, they make it appear natural, they make you work a little for it. That gets you involved with her. Then they grab you and tell her. Then she will do what they say."

"Only if she cares what they do to me."

"She cares."

"You can't be sure. I hope she cares, but you never know."

"She cares. They'll find a way to be sure she cares."

"There's a problem with this plan. They don't know where she is."

"Are you sure?" asked Paul.

"I don't know where she is and I'm looking for her."

"That part I don't know about. Maybe they expect you to be the hound dog, to find her. Maybe they have been following her and nobody knows. Maybe they were following her when she got out of prison but lost her. I'm just trying out possibilities here. Maybe they expect Peck to find her."

"If I walked out right now, then she wouldn't have to cooperate," Rick suggested.

"Who is she going to go to, the police?"

"No."

"There's another problem. You walk out of the game, they'll come and find you."

"I could go to South America, I could go-"

"You have a current passport?"

"No."

"You think you could really abandon her at this point?"

"No," Rick said. "I can't do that."

"Right." Paul tapped his head. "These guys are smart, you got to understand that."

"If I can tell Christina, and we both disappear, then I've made it."

Paul nodded. "That might be true. If the two of you leave at the same time, and then Tony's deal still goes through, gets done some other way, maybe it's better after. The problem, of course, is that she may not want to see you. Be with you."

"She needs me."

"She doesn't know that. She might not agree with that. You need her, actually." Paul raised his eyebrows. "The only way you get out of this thing is if you take her with you or if she just gives them what they want."

Paul pulled the car into the driveway, past high spruce trees that hid the house completely. Five fat men in Santa Claus suits could get out of a fire engine and walk into the house and someone watching from the street would never know. Paul had these things worked out in advance.

"You got the drive refinished?"

"The oil stains bugged Mary."

"What do you think?" Rick asked.

"About how it will go? Not good."

"Bad?"

"Probably."

"Why?"

"You were an asshole, Rick. A complete asshole. You walked and she went to prison. I don't think it was much fun. I heard there was some incident with a guard up there, some kind of forced-sex thing."

Anger kicked at his chest. "With Christina?"

Paul nodded. They sat in the car outside the garage.

"You're doing everything they expect of you. Everything is a pattern."

"What do you mean?"

"The money in Aunt Eva's place."

He hadn't mentioned this to Paul. "That was only-"

"The bar situation the other night."

"You knew before I called you?" Rick asked.

Paul nodded. "I hear things. People tell me, you know, and I can see a pattern. I got a brother living in a shack out near the fishing boats, goes to the city, gets his old money back, starts drinking and fucking around in Tony Verducci's bar, that's easy. That's a pattern. The pattern is, he's going to keep thrashing around. He's looking for action."

Rick felt a sick sense of truth in these words.

"All right," Paul said.

"That's it?"

"Yes, for now."

"You got any more?"

"Not now, the meal is going to be ready. I'll tell you Mary's point, though. Just a little common sense. I was talking with her about your situation and she pointed some things out."

"Like what?"

"Christina is a pretty girl."

"Sexy. Not pretty exactly. Not a cheerleader."

"Hey," argued Paul, "I don't remember you complaining about how she looked. We still have those shots of you guys on our boat that first time."

"I was catching tuna, right." But what he remembered best was the way Christina showed Paul how she could play with numbers in her head. Perched on one of the boat's fishing chairs in a tiny black bikini, and oblivious to the Long Island shoreline whipping past, Christina had asked Paul about the speed, size, and shape of the school of tuna the boat was intersecting. Hard to say, he'd answered. Give me estimates, she'd said, and after he did, she told him that if he shifted the angle at which he cut across the school's path by twenty degrees, the bait would be in front of the fish "about one third longer in time." Paul, trained as an accountant, stared at Christina for a moment, then told Rick to take the wheel. After sitting with a paper and pencil for a few minutes below the deck, he'd come up with a grin on his face. I was off a little, Christina said. Not by much, Paul had answered, eyes thoughtful, not by much.

Now Paul pulled the car up against the garage and touched a button on the dash, and the wide door slowly opened, revealing a well-lit space, rakes and shovels and lawn tools hung neatly along the walls, sports equipment for the boys on another, the tractor-mower parked to one side.

"So what's the commonsense part?"

"Oh, I was saying she's good-looking."

"Right."

"So other guys will think that, too."

"I guess."

"Then there's one more question. I think I know the answer, but for the purposes of the argument I have to ask it."

"All right."

"Christina like to, whatever, spend time in bed?" Paul opened his hands. "This is just my wife, another woman thinking out loud. So just answer the question."

"Yeah, she likes to fuck," Rick said. "She likes it a lot and she's good at it, and she's picky about who it is, but she gets a lot of guys to pick from."

Paul nodded at this, too. All his nodding was starting to bug Rick. "This means someone else."

"Another guy?"

"Just a matter of time before she finds a guy. Or a guy finds her. They'll hook up somehow, somewhere. It's human nature. You don't know who. You have no idea. He could be a nobody or he could be a problem. But he definitely complicates your situation, Rick, he fucking complicates your situation. I mean, he could have money, he could be a cop, he could be somebody with big friends, he could be anybody. Soon as she's involved with him, it's harder for her to care about you, it's harder for her to do things for Tony so easily, lot of things get messed up there."

His brother opened his car door. Inside the house was a meal, a wife, two boys with their hair brushed. Civilization. The conversation had stayed outside the house. "So," Rick summarized, hoping for an indication of compassion from Paul, "I'm racing against Tony and I'm racing against Christina finding a guy she likes."

"In a sense."

"That's bad, I think."

Paul's hand was on the door to the kitchen. He turned back and faced Rick, his eyes remote, all-seeing of patterns and numbers and what happened to people-other people, including his brother.

A house of smells: laundry detergent, the pink soap in the bathroom, the roast of lamb in the kitchen, Paul's two boys panting and sweaty and eager, the wet football cleats on the counter, the modest perfumery of Mary's neck and arms as she bent close to serve Rick his dinner, the pencil shavings and cigars in Paul's study-which, Rick noticed, had no fewer than five phone lines and what appeared to be a substantial recording device on the desk, as well as a small personal safe behind the woodwork, tucked between the duck decoys, hunting in Mexico having become Paul's newest pastime, which, when you thought of it, was a pretty good way to meet drug dealers, if that was your inclination, which with Paul was not necessarily the case. Not necessarily. You didn't know, almost no one knew, and that was the way he wanted it. Paul was masked and hedged and operating at a double-blind level, not to mention the Cayman Island account and untraceable and no return address and calling number blocked and encrypted private mail drop and forget you heard this and attorney-client privilege and high-speed shredder-yes, right there under the desk, Rick noticed, the spaghetti of paper not carried away in the house trash and entrusted to the New York City Department of Sanitation but, if he knew Paul, which he did, burned in the fireplace three steps away, where a yellow can of starter fluid and a large box of wooden matches sat on the mantel ready to smoke numbers and words into invisibility.

After dinner, Paul drove Rick back to the ferry.

"We've got fifteen minutes," he said, switching off the headlights but keeping the car running. "My boys loved seeing you. So did Mary."

Rick nodded. Paul's sons had climbed all over him, wrestling, pummeling him.

"All right," Paul said. "I found out some other things I wanted to save for after dinner so you wouldn't be too upset. After you called me, I was on the phone for two hours. In fact, that's what I was working on when your ferry came in. I had to talk to some people I usually don't like to talk with." Paul paused, looked at Rick, then back out the window. "When Peck put Christina away, he was still trying to catch up with his father, who was a captain, too. Used to come into my bar. Okay, so the little Peck got his gold shield maybe a year ago and somehow got in with the D.A.'s squad in Manhattan."

"They're good."

"Yes, they are. They certainly are that. Fellows you would prefer to have avoided. I mean, it's amazing for this guy to make the Manhattan squad in his late twenties. There's a little respect for his old man in that. But that can create a problem, too. The other guys don't impress very easily. And nobody's cutting him any slack. He's not making good cases as often as he should. He's not desperate, he's just on the ropes. He's a frustrated guy. We know that. I know people who know that. He's working hard, too. Extra hours. But there's something funny about him, Rick. They don't know what it is. Something is edgewise about him. It's not that he's not smart. He is. Now, how do I know this? I know this because Tony has, in fact, approached Peck. They have an arrangement."

The food felt heavy in Rick's stomach. "What kind of arrangement?"

"Tony goes to Peck and says, I can give you a couple of great cases, no problem, I'll get Mickey Simms to sing his song. But you got to get me Christina. This is what he says to Peck."

"A young detective is not going to go for that."

"Not at first."

"But then he thinks about it."

Paul nodded. "He thinks and thinks and thinks about it, and Tony can tell he is thinking about it because he has a few guys watching Peck's house, just for the hell of it, just to get a vibe off of the situation. Check out the drinking, the wife, whatever. So Peck and Tony meet again. Tony already knows how it can be done. The detective has to figure out a way to change his original testimony against Christina, without being a liar in the first place."

"But wait," said Rick. "He was the one who ID'd her in the truck. He sat up there and said she's the one."

"Correct. That is correct. Now he has to say it was someone else. He has to say he was wrong. That he saw someone else, another woman on a current case who was the real one."

"That's just a lot of bullshit."

"Of course, but identity is a mysterious fucking thing," Paul agreed softly. "How do I know you are you? I mean, I haven't seen you in almost like four years. Here you are, older, with a beard, with a little gray, you weigh thirty pounds less, hair different, glasses, the whole nine yards, and I know it's you. Right? I know it because I just know it. People've put their faith in this for all of recorded time. So Peck has to think this thing through very carefully. He can't just go to the prosecutor who handled the case and say, I woke up this morning and realized it wasn't her. No, that won't do. He has to pin it on somebody. That's the only way to convince the D.A.'s Office. So, as you remember, your whole crew had what, twelve, thirteen people?"

"At the top, sixteen."

"How many women?"

"Two or three, depending."

"Christina was the only one who went down?" asked Paul.

"Yeah."

"But there were a couple of other women around."

"They didn't do as much. They just helped with the little stuff."

"No, but apparently they're still active. Anyway, according to the original complaint, they had about eleven of your crew under surveillance and only made ID on five or six. The rest are what they call 'lost subjects.' They never got names on them. Two were women. Peck decided he could switch Christina for one of them. Just say it wasn't Christina who was in the truck but one of the female lost subjects. Somebody who he'd subsequently come across."

Rick didn't even remember the names of the other women. Patty someone. Girlfriends of the guys. He'd always tried not to know too much.

"The beauty of it is that he is sure the lost subject was around," Paul went on, shaking his head in the dark of the car. "No. That's not the real beauty of it. The real beauty of it is that it makes Peck look like a good guy! So honest that he's willing to lose an old collar that no one would have hassled him about. Also, it helps if the old lost subject has been maybe arrested since then, been hanging out with fuck-ups, whatever. See, the original prosecutors go back and say to themselves, The undercover cop says the real suspect is one slummy chick who's still being watched by Narcotics, somebody who is not exactly an upstanding citizen of the City of New York, and then you've got Christina, never been in prison before, never arrested, was a good student at Columbia before she got mixed up with the bad people, especially that fucking mope Rick Bocca, who they never nailed, and she had a perfect prison record, and that gets into the head of the prosecutor. It eats at him. He has to do something about it. He thinks about it all the time, he talks to his wife about it. He feels guilty, he thinks maybe they were trying to get at you by putting her away. See, these guys have a lot of power. If they really think somebody is innocent, they can get them out in a few days."

"I didn't know that."

"It's true. I checked that out with two different people downtown. All the prosecutors have to do is get the motion before the judge. It happens so rarely that the judge is always going to say yes. The judge knows these guys work their asses off to get convictions and aren't going to switch one unless they are really sure the person is innocent."

"So, boom, Christina is out, Tony gets to find her, and then he serves up some people to Peck. Pays him back?"

"That's the way it was explained to me."

"Who are these people?" Rick asked anxiously.

"I don't know. I couldn't get that."

"Why did Peck come visit me, then?"

"I don't know. I have theories."

"He wanted me to come back into the city, do something stupid, and then he could get me."

"Maybe," Paul agreed. "If that's true, then he would feel much better about letting Christina out. He gets her out, throws you in, then he's basically traded up."

"Or," Rick worried aloud, "he plans to fuck over Tony by getting me on something and then getting me to say everything I know about Tony. Give him all kinds of stuff."

"Maybe he thinks you'll be so grateful to him for giving you a chance to help Christina that you'll give up Tony."

Rick rubbed his eyes. A web of maybes. Most of them too complicated. He'd learned that if a plan had too many twists and turns it usually broke down.

"Or maybe you were one of the people that Tony promised to Peck," whispered Paul. "Ever think of that?"

"You're saying that Tony is going to give him old stuff on me? He's trading me into prison to get Christina out?"

"I think it's possible."

"Fuck that."

"But if he said that, then he was lying to Peck. He might tell Peck that he could arrest you and everything, but no way Tony is really going to let that happen, not if he's smart. If he's smart, then he gets ahold of Christina before Peck gets ahold of you, and then, once he has her helping him, he grabs you and sends you somewhere."

"Somewhere I won't come back from."

"It's just a theory. Maybe Tony has promised Peck other people. But I don't know why else you would have been pulled in."

"How did you get all of this?"

"I talked to some people who had different pieces, little bits of information. I hasten to add that I could be wrong, Rick, in part or in whole."

"No, I think you got it nailed down."

Paul was silent. "I've done all I can do here, I think."

"Yeah. I mean, hey."

Paul wasn't looking at him now. "Rick, I'm trying to say I don't have sufficient influence in this situation."

"I understand that, Paulie, I do. You did a hell of a lot."

Paul pulled an envelope out of his coat.

"No, no, Paulie, I got plenty of money."

"Open it."

Rick took the envelope. Inside was a new passport-his passport, with an old photo, a plane ticket to Vancouver, a reservation at a hotel there, an American Express gold card in Rick's name, and five thousand in blank traveler's checks.

"The card bills to me. Use it for anything you need."

"Oh, Paul, man."

His older brother turned to him. "I did everything I could, Rick. I had to be sure I did everything I could." His voice broke. "I can't go see Dad on Sunday and be thinking I didn't do enough."

Rick opened his door. The ferry would soon leave.

"Take the plane," said Paul. "I'm not just asking you."

"What do you know?"

"I told you everything."

Rick looked at his brother. "You know something that makes you scared."

"Yes! Of course I do, you asshole!" Paul pounded the steering wheel. "You!" he whispered savagely. "I know you, Rick."