Fifty-to-One

“Trixie,” Borden said in a strained little voice, trying hard not to touch the blade hovering below his chin. “You’re a very imaginative girl, but maybe this isn’t the time to be dreaming up the plot for your next book—”

“Quiet, you,” Nicolazzo said. Then to Tricia: “Go on.”

“If these pictures wound up in the hands of the police, it would be bad for you. If they wound up in the hands of your rivals, it might be even worse.”

“Never mind that,” Nicolazzo said. “Where are they?”

“If you let us go—all of us—I’ll find them and I’ll bring them to you.”

“I don’t like that idea,” Nicolazzo said. “I don’t like it at all. If I let you all go, what incentive would you have to come back? No. I think maybe it’s better if I do a little work right now on this young fellow here. Perhaps I should take the skin off him one inch at a time, till you tell me what I want to know.”

“May I say something?” Borden said.

“Hush,” Nicolazzo said. “You’re a little apple, waiting to be peeled. Little apples do not talk.”

“If you touch him,” Tricia said, “I’ll never tell you anything.”

“Do you really think so? Do you really think you will be able to stand there and watch him suffer when it’s entirely in your power to put an end to it? When all you have to do is utter a few words—a location, an address—and the man’s pain stops?”

“How do I know you won’t just kill him then? And me, too, while you’re at it.”

“Because, my dear, I always keep my bargains. I am a man of my word. Ask anyone. Salvatore Nicolazzo has never welshed on any deal in his life. Million dollars on a wager? I pay off. If I lose. And collect if I win. That’s the way it works in my world. If you don’t have your word, you’ve got nothing.”

“And I have your word,” Tricia said.

“You have my word. That I will not harm either of you if you return my stolen property to me. The photos and the money. And that I will if you do not.”

Tricia looked at Borden, straining to keep his head back, away from the knife, and at Nicolazzo, holding it there carelessly, loosely, but with the same avid look on his face that he’d had before using that very blade to end another man’s life. She thought about her sister down in the cellar, and about Erin—and about herself.

“The money I can’t promise,” she said, “but I’m pretty sure the photos are on Cornelia Street. I don’t know exactly where—but I’m confident I can find them, and when I do I’ll bring them to you. That’s the best I can offer.” She stepped forward bravely, hands on her hips. “Now let him go.”

“Go? No, I won’t do that. He and I will wait here for you. We’ll—” He glanced about, bent down, and picked up the deck of cards from the floor. He closed the stiletto and slipped it into his pocket. “We’ll occupy ourselves with a little game. You play cards, do you, Mr. Borden? A bit of rummy, perhaps? Or canasta? You can play it with two, I’ll show you how.” To Tricia he said, “But come back quickly, my dear. Or I’ll grow impatient with canasta and teach him another game I like. It’s called ‘Fifty-to-One.’ Those are the odds, you see. The odds against.”

“Against winning?” Borden said, clearly relieved no longer to have a switchblade quivering at his neck.

“Against surviving,” Nicolazzo said, and all the blood that had returned to Borden’s cheeks drained away again.

Nicolazzo snapped his fingers at Mitch. “You—go with her. Make sure she doesn’t try anything funny. And get rid of the stiff, while you’re at it.”

“Yes, boss,” Mitch said.

A plump finger rose admonishingly.

“Uncle Nick,” Mitch said. “Excuse me.”

Nicolazzo smiled. “Now Mr. Borden,” he said, “would you like the first deal or shall I?”

16.

Night Walker

Mitch pulled the bag off her head as they crossed the 59th Street Bridge into Manhattan. He left it lying on the front seat between them.

“So we were in Queens?” Tricia asked after taking a few deep breaths to clear her head of the burlap smell. She didn’t turn to look at Mitch. She watched the New York skyline rush toward them through the windshield instead.

“Never mind where we were,” Mitch said. “The less you know, the better.”

“How can you work for a man like that?” Tricia said.

Mitch shrugged, held the wheel steady. “He’s not a bad sort. Most of the time.”

“He just killed a man!”

“So?” Mitch honked and swerved around a station wagon that was going too slowly for his taste. “Guy was no prize. Cheated on his wife. Played lousy music.”

Tricia didn’t answer. It wasn’t lousy music. But that hardly seemed like the point most worth arguing about right now.

“I never did anything to him,” Tricia said finally. “Charley and Erin didn’t, and god knows Cor—Colleen didn’t.”

“Yeah?” Mitch said. “That’s not what it sounded like to me.”

“What do you mean?”

Mitch raised his eyebrows, let them fall, kept his eyes on the road. “Sounded to me like she did plenty. Little leather box, and all.”

“Were you listening? At the door?”

“Could be,” Mitch said.

Tricia pinched the bridge of her nose between her fingers. She could feel the beginnings of a bad headache.

“You heard everything?”

“You think your sister really had her baby in a taxi, or she was just pulling your leg?”

“So why didn’t you say anything to your boss? To Uncle Nick?”

He shrugged again. “I would’ve, if I’d had to. I was waiting to see what you’d do.”

“What I’d do.”

“Would you offer to go get the photos. I knew he wouldn’t let you go alone.”

“And you wanted to be with me...why?”

“Think about it,” Mitch said.

“The photos,” Tricia said. “Incriminating photos of his own men. Are some of them photos of you?”

“Could be,” Mitch said.

Something dawned on Tricia. “You’re the one. The one she recognized.”

“Saw it in her eyes as soon as I picked her up in the ring,” Mitch said. “I was saying to myself, how the hell does this twist know me? I never saw her before in my life. Well.”

“And you want, what, when we get the pictures you’ll take yours out before we give them to Nicolazzo? Won’t that be a little obvious?”

“We’ll take a few out. Not just mine.”

“That’s fine for you,” Tricia said. “But what about me and my friends? He’ll say I’m holding out on him, that I welshed on our deal.”

“Just tell him that’s all you found,” Mitch said.

“He’ll kill us!”

“You?” Mitch said. “With how well you dance? He won’t kill you.”

“My sister—”

“Why would he want to lose a good fighter?” Mitch said. “She brings in a decent gate.”

“But Charley and Erin—”

He shrugged once more. “You can’t have everything.”

“I’m not going to let him hurt them,” Tricia said.

“The man lost three million dollars. He’s got to hurt someone.”

“What if I tell him you made me give you the photos of you,” Tricia said.

“I’d say you were lying,” Mitch said, “and that he should beat the truth out of you.”

They were nearing the end of the bridge, slowing as they approached the turn-off for Second Avenue.

“But there’s no reason it needs to come to that,” Mitch said, flipping on his turn signal. “You’ve got nothing to gain by—hey!”

Tricia had been inching her fingers toward the door handle and now had turned and in one swift movement tugged up the door lock, unlatched the door, and dived out onto the macadam. She fell on her shoulder and rolled twice, narrowly missing being run over by the station wagon behind them. The other driver leaned on his horn angrily and a few more cars joined in. She saw the door of Mitch’s car still swinging open. The car came squealing to a halt.

She got up, ran to the concrete barrier at the side of the bridge. A few yards away she would’ve been looking down a hundred feet at the cold and unforgiving surface of the East River, but here it was just a twenty foot drop to the 60th Street underpass. She climbed onto the barrier, turned, and let herself down carefully, dangling by her fingertips before allowing herself to drop. For a second she was falling through the air. Then she hit the sidewalk and sprawled backwards onto her rump. Looking up she saw Mitch’s face appear above the barrier. The honking had become a full-on chorus, drivers angry at this wiseacre who’d left his car standing in the exit lane, blocking their way.

“Get back here,” Mitch shouted, aiming a long arm down at her, finger extended like Uncle Sam. He started to climb over the barrier and she scrambled to her feet, ready to run—then she saw a hand appear at Mitch’s shoulder, a wooden nightstick protruding from it.

“Mister,” came the cop’s voice, shouting to be heard over the cacophony, “what do you think you’re doing?”

“My—my wife, officer, she just—she jumped over—”

Tricia ducked under one of the bridge’s huge concrete stanchions.

“I don’t see anyone,” the cop said a moment later.

“But she just...”

“You been drinking, mister? Let’s see that car of yours.”

Tricia couldn’t hear Mitch’s response as the two of them walked away. But she thought about that car of his. If she had any luck, the cop would ask to look in the trunk. Get rid of the stiff Nicolazzo had said. Robbie hadn’t been in the back seat; he had to be somewhere.

Come on, she said to herself, you’re New York’s finest, look in the goddamn trunk.

She dusted off her palms and started walking, fast as she could, first west to Second Avenue and then south toward her sister’s place downtown. She had no money for a taxi, not even for a subway. And she had four miles to walk. At least with the sun down, the heat wasn’t so powerful. She opened the top button of her dress. Let a little air in.

Much of the city was shutting down for the night, shopkeepers dragging cartons and signs in from the sidewalk, pulling down metal gates over their plate glass windows. The bars on either side of the avenue, conversely, were coming to life, strains of jukebox music pouring out each time one of their doors swung open, neon lights blinking on overhead.

There was life on the street—pedestrians and loafers, men in their undershirts and trousers taking an evening smoke on the stoop of their apartment buildings, cars motoring by at a casual pace. This was a neighborhood of four- and five-story brick buildings inhabited by working men and women, restaurant staff and seamstresses, dock-workers and laundry workers, Irish mostly; and those as were still out of doors gave her the eye as she passed, one or two of the men whistling low, one throwing her a loud kiss. She was used to it, and most nights it wouldn’t have bothered her, but tonight it added to her feeling of straining toward a goal and not making progress, like she was walking through sand or mud or in a dream. Cornelia Street was far away, in the city’s lower reaches, and here she was walking through a darkening forest of hungry-eyed men with bare arms and puckered lips. The El had run here once, she knew, its metal tracks casting the whole of the avenue into darkness; and though it had been demolished nearly twenty years back, as night fell it was almost as if you were still walking under its shadow, listening with half an ear for the clattering roar of ghost cars overhead.

As she passed 49th Street, a man fell into step beside her; she glanced and for a moment was relieved to see the blue of his uniform—but only for a moment.

“You all right, miss?” the flatfoot said.

“Yes, sir,” Tricia said. She tried to keep her voice even, her head down.

“This isn’t a neighborhood for a girl to go walking alone.”

“I’m just a couple of blocks from home,” Tricia said, resisting the urge to walk faster, to try to get away. How many more steps would she get before he took a good look at her face and recognized her from the bulletin O’Malley must have circulated? When would he put out a hand and stop her, leaving her the choice of running for it or heading off to jail?

She felt a trail of perspiration forming along her spine and prayed it didn’t show.

“I’m fine—thank you,” Tricia said. “You don’t need to walk with me.”

He stopped, and against every impulse urging her on, she stopped as well, tried to appear casual, at ease, not twitch under his stare.

Had she gone too far? Should she apologize? She was on the verge of doing so when the policeman tipped his cap to her and said, “All right, miss. Have it your way.” He fell behind as she walked on. She glanced back and saw him peering into a parked car, going on with his rounds.

Thank you, she whispered to herself, for blind policemen, thank you. Only please let the one on the bridge have been more observant.

The streets passed, one by one, and her legs grew sore from exertion, but she didn’t stop, didn’t even slow, didn’t dare. Somewhere down by Washington Square Park, a three-year-old boy was waiting for his mother to come home; and a box of photographs that could send who knew how many men to jail was sitting out on a table or hidden behind the public toilet tank down the hall or waiting in the dust under the bed. If the cops had let Mitch go—and they might have, they easily might have—he’d be heading down there as well, and faster than she could hope to make it. He didn’t have an address, but Cornelia Street was only one block long, maybe a dozen buildings on either side—he didn’t need an address, just time enough to canvass them all. And he surely had money with him; and he had a car; and his gun, he had that, too.

Oh, please, she thought, please let them at least have found his gun. Let them have locked him up tight, and no phone call back to Uncle Nick in Queens, not yet.

But Tricia had limited confidence in the value of prayers. So she walked, fast as she could, through the night.

17.

A Touch of Death

The lights were on in all the second- and third-story windows, and in one or two of the storefronts besides: a pagoda-roofed restaurant on the corner of Cornelia and Bleecker, a 24-hour laundry halfway down the block. Tricia made her way to the grey stone building near West 4th where the taxi from the train station had dropped her off what felt like such a long time ago. The hand-lettered NO VACANCIES sign was still—or again—in the window by the front door. She looked around for Mitch, or Bruno, or anyone of comparable appearance, but there was no one in sight. Except for a collarless dog sniffing at one of the sidewalk’s scrawny trees, the block was empty.

Which either meant she was in time or that she was too late.

Tricia leaned on the buzzer till she could hear footsteps approaching from the other side and didn’t release it until she heard the cover slide away from the peephole. She stepped back so the person looking out could see more than the top of her head.

“I’m Colleen King’s sister,” she said. “Trixie...Trixie King.”

“Not here,” came a woman’s voice, accented as much from cigarette smoke as from what sounded like some sort of Eastern European upbringing.

“I know, I was just with her, she asked me to come by, give something to her son. To Artie.” When there was no response, she added, “Please, I’ve walked a long way.”

Whether that was what did it she’d never know—but the locks turned and the door swung open. Behind it a woman no taller than Tricia but quite a bit older stood in a flower-print wrapper, hairnet over a tangle of grey curls, slippers on her feet. She had the doorknob in one hand, the burning stub of a Marlboro between the knuckles of the other.

“You sister?” She drew deeply on the cigarette, consuming half its remaining length in one pull. “She look nothing like you.”

“She takes after our mother,” Tricia said. “May I go up to her room?”

“You have key?”

Tricia nodded, hoping the woman wouldn’t ask her to produce it.

“Okay,” the woman said. “Is 3D, like Duck. But child is in 3F. Like Fox.”

“Thank you,” Tricia said, wondering what sort of zoo-based primer the woman had used when learning English. She made her way to the staircase in the corner of the room. The woman retreated to a doorway near the foot of the stairs where she smoked the remnant of her cigarette and watched Tricia climb with a look on her face that seemed caught halfway between suspicion and apathy.

When she reached the third floor, Tricia went from door to door, scanning the heavy brass letters screwed into the wood—‘A’ like Alligator, ‘B’ like Bat. She tried the knob at D-like-Duck, but it was locked. ‘F’ was across the hall and she knocked briskly.

“Sh,” a voice came, a husky whisper. “You’ll wake him.” The knob gently turned and the door swung slowly ajar, a soft creak escaping from the hinges despite all the care to avoid it. A scarred face appeared in the opening, the pink and white of old burns on both plump cheeks and across her chin. It was a face Tricia recognized from the Sun, from one of the times she’d visited the club early to scope it out while plotting Chapter 10. Tricia had even put her in the chapter, given her a little cameo to address the lousy treatment she’d seen her bear at the hands of the other girls on the cleaning crew.

“Heaven,” Tricia said. “I didn’t know you lived here.”

“What are you doing here, then?” Heaven LaCroix spoke English with only the faintest hint of a Belgian accent, having come over on a refugee ship at age seven. She stood just half a head taller than Tricia but she was as broad across the shoulders as Coral; she had the arms, too, thick and muscled.

“It’s a long story,” Tricia said, “and it’s probably going to sound crazy to you, but I’m Colleen’s sister—I know, we don’t look anything alike. But it’s true. And she’s in trouble. I need to get into her room, get something she left there. You’ve got a key, right? You must, if you take care of Artie.”

“Now hold on,” Heaven said, stepping out into the hallway and pulling the door shut behind her. She was wearing a heavy robe, something frilly peeking out at the collar, like she’d been in bed when Tricia knocked. “I don’t know you, except that you dance for a living and ask a lot of questions. That time you came by, I almost got in trouble myself, you kept me so long with your questions.”

“I’m sorry, Heaven, I was just new and curious about a lot of things.”

“I’ll say.” Heaven crossed her arms over her chest. “Now you want to get into my friend’s room and you’ve got a story about how you’re her sister, but how am I supposed to know that’s so? You could be anybody. You could be working for Mrs. Barrone, for all I know.”

“I don’t know anyone named Barrone,” Tricia said, though she realized as she said it that it wasn’t true: Nicolazzo’s sister had married a man named Barrone, had raised two daughters also named Barrone: the unfortunate Adelaide, victim of a malarial fever in North Africa, and her older sister...Renata? Tricia thought that’s what she’d read in the News. Something like Renata, anyway.

“I’d show you my birth certificate if I had it,” Tricia said, “but I don’t. I don’t have anything on me other than what you see. All I can tell you is that the man who runs the Sun has Colleen locked up right now because he thinks she stole something from him and he wants it back. He let me out to come here and get it. If I don’t bring it back to him in the next hour or so, he’s going to hurt her real bad, maybe even kill her. You want her son to grow up without a mother?”

“You’re really something,” Heaven said, “you know that? Even if I believed you I still couldn’t let you rummage around Colleen’s room, taking things, without her telling me it’s okay.”

“She can’t tell you,” Tricia said, “she’s locked in a cellar somewhere in Queens.”

“Where?”

Tricia sighed. “I don’t know exactly. Somewhere just the other side of the river.”

“Well, if you don’t know exactly, how’re you going to get whatever it is you want to get from Colleen’s room back to her?”

It was one hell of a good question and it stopped Tricia in her tracks. Without Mitch, she had no way back.

She opened her mouth to answer, not sure what she was going to say—but before she could get a word out, a pounding came at the front door, loud enough that they heard it two stories up. Tricia crept to the staircase, listened over the banister as the woman downstairs opened the door.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” came a man’s voice, “but have you seen a young woman come by tonight, about so tall, blonde hair—”

Tricia stepped back from the staircase. Try to look at the bright side, she said to herself. At least now you have a way back.

“Quick,” she whispered, and tugged Heaven with her toward Coral’s room. “You’ve got to let me in. That’s one of the men who’s holding Colleen.” And when she didn’t budge, “Heaven, he’s got a gun.” They heard heavy steps on the stairs, coming up. “A gun, Heaven. He’ll kill us both.”

“No he won’t,” Heaven said. “You just keep calm.”

Mitch’s head emerged above the top step, then his shoulders and his torso and, held at the level of his waist, his clenched gun hand. The barrel of his revolver was pointing directly at them.

“You think you’re clever, don’t you,” he said to Tricia. Then, to Heaven, who was standing in front of her, “Out of the way, Scarface.”

“You put that gun down, mister,” Heaven said, “and we can talk about this like civilized people.”

Mitch raised his gun till it was aimed directly at her head. She didn’t flinch, just looked sad, dug her hands into the pockets of her robe. “I’m sorry, mister,” she said.

“That’s all right,” Mitch said, “just go back in your room and forget you saw anything.”

“No, I’m sorry for what I have to do,” Heaven said and, pulling a Luger from the pocket of her robe, shot him twice in the chest.

18.

Say It With Bullets

Four or five things happened then, all at once, it seemed: A child’s voice rose behind the door of 3-F, wailing like a police car siren; doors swung open up and down the hall, then shut again when the people behind them saw Mitch tumble forward, his gun striking the floor and discharging, sending a bullet speeding at ankle level into the far wall; Heaven grabbed up Mitch’s gun and stowed it with her own in the pocket of her robe; and more footsteps began pounding up the stairs, two or three people’s worth.

“Here,” Heaven said, and unlocked the door to 3-D. She shoved it open with the heel of one hand and stepped back. “Get him in there, close the door, stay inside. Don’t take anything. I’ve got to see to Artie.”

Slightly dazed, Tricia lugged Mitch’s body into the room, left it lying beside a potted plant and a stack of old magazines. She had to bend his knees to get the door to close. It looked uncomfortable, but the man was past complaining.

Staying in the room wasn’t much of an option. There was a trail of blood outside leading right to this door—she could hardly expect to hide here. But at least while she was here she could look for what she’d come to find.

There was an icebox in one corner of the room and a small chest of drawers in another. She opened each of these in turn and found no leather box and no photos. A vaguely rectangular object in the icebox turned out to be the re-frozen remnants of a Swanson TV dinner. (There was no TV in the room, Tricia noted—but then 98 cents for the dinner was a lot easier to scrape together than the 98 dollars it would cost for a television set to eat it in front of.) The drawers held blouses and skirts and scanties with labels from Orbach’s; they held a necklace and earring set with plastic beads that didn’t look much like pearls but were clearly supposed to; they held a slim bible and a New York City telephone book. But no box, no photos.

Tricia riffled quickly through the pages of the bible and the phone book and then, one by one, the magazines. There were footsteps outside and a babble of voices and some knocking on doors, Coral’s and others. She ignored it all. She got down on her hands and knees and peered under the bed—nothing. She pulled up the coverlet and the sheet under it, stripped the cases off the pillows, lifted the corners of the mattress. What else? What else? There was a tiny, shallow closet that took just a minute to search thoroughly. A night table with some makeup on it. A rug with no suspicious bulges showing. She lifted it anyway, let it drop. Damn it, where would Coral have left the box?

There was one window in the room, shaded by venetian blinds and a curtain, and she pulled the latter and raised the former. Outside, a rusted fire escape led up and down. On the windowsill behind the curtain Tricia spotted a metal key ring with a pair of keys on it, together with a plastic disk embossed with the name and address of a local garage: ROYAL AUTO STORAGE (TUNEUPS — REPAIRS — SUPPLIES — 24 HOURS). Which made no sense—what would a single woman living in Manhattan need with a car? And where would someone who couldn’t afford a TV set find the money to buy one?

The knocking at the door was louder now, and the landlady’s voice called out, “The police has been called, young lady. You better open door.”

What Tricia opened was the window. Pocketing the key ring, she climbed out onto the fire escape, taking a second to draw the curtain, lower the blinds behind her, and pull the window down as far as she could from the outside.

A choice loomed. Up or down? The sound of a police siren coming around the corner decided it for her: Down would put her right in the path of their headlights.

Tricia shot up the metal steps, one hand to her hip to keep the keys from jingling in the pocket of her dress. She thought about Heaven as she went, still trying to digest what had happened. Where had the gun come from? You heard about people bringing trophies back from the war, and a German gun, well, that could certainly have been someone’s trophy. But this one hadn’t just been polished up and left on a shelf, it had been loaded and ready. This was clearly a tool, not a conversation piece, and what’s more, Heaven must’ve had it close at hand, to be able to jam it in her pocket when a knock came out of the blue. What other secrets was she hiding? Hell—had she been working at the Sun the same afternoon Coral nabbed the box out of Nicolazzo’s safe? Somebody had taken the money—and Tricia could certainly see Heaven LaCroix lugging fifty or sixty pounds without breaking a sweat.

But she’d seemed so decent—

Yeah, said a little voice in Tricia’s head, she seemed decent until she shot a man dead in front of you.

But that was self-defense—

Yeah, said the voice. Still.

Tricia reached the top of the fire escape and climbed the narrow metal ladder leading up from there to the roof of the building. She threw one leg over the edge of the cornice. Before she could follow it with the other she heard an amplified voice from the street below.

“You! Freeze!”

She hesitated a moment, half on the ladder, half on the roof, her dress up around her thighs. Glancing back and down, she saw a pair of policemen, hunched behind their open car doors, guns drawn and pointing up toward her. One had a bullhorn in his other hand.

“Come on down, lady, nice and easy, we don’t want to have to shoot you.”

Well, that was all well and good, since Tricia didn’t want to be shot. But she didn’t want to be arrested either, particularly now that the charges against her had presumably escalated from assaulting a police officer to manslaughter. She heaved her other leg up and over and an instant later heard bullets splintering the stone of the wall the ladder was anchored to.

Well, that was one way to send the message that they meant business.

Staying on her hands and knees, she crawled past a huge ventilation fan in a dented tin housing, crossing to the rear of the building. The wall separating this building from the next one over was barely a separation at all, just a few rows of bricks that Tricia went over like a champion high-jumper. She didn’t hear any more gunshots, at least, so she took a chance and rose from her knees, scampering across the next roof in a low crouch, a little like Groucho Marx if Groucho Marx had been running for his life across a tenement roof.

Another low wall, past it another roof—but now Tricia was running out of buildings and pretty soon would have to find some way down. The current roof was covered with tarpaper and stank from the tar, still tacky from a day in the sun. A little shed marked the top of the stairwell and Tricia wrenched the door open, listened for footsteps before starting to descend. She only heard her own until she reached the second floor landing, at which point her steps were joined by the sound of another pair, coming up. She darted out into the second floor corridor and started trying all the apartment doorknobs, one by one. The third one she tried turned, and she stepped inside as the service door to the stairwell sprang open, banging against the far wall.

She looked around desperately. This apartment did have a television set and it was on, showing the tail end of an Ellery Queen episode. All the lamps in the place were burning. Whoever lived here clearly had just stepped out for a minute, perhaps to pick up his laundry in the basement or a pack of cigarettes around the corner. Or maybe he was in the bathroom and would appear any moment—

The knock at the door was brisk and professional, not an assault on the wood the way Mitch’s had been at the rooming house. A peek out the peephole showed a policeman in full regalia—but not, she thought, one of the pair who’d been shooting at her. Tricia took a deep breath. How would Borden do it? she asked herself.

She opened the door.

19.

Witness to Myself

“Oh, officer, I’m so glad to see you, it was terrible,” Tricia said, reaching out to grip the policeman’s hands tightly in her own. “This woman came by, just a minute ago, all wild-eyed and upset. She asked me to let her in, but I said no, I couldn’t, my husband’s not home and I couldn’t let a stranger in. Who is she? What has she done?”

The officer, whose nameplate said LENAHAN, drew his hands back and took the regulation notepad off his belt. He was a young man, maybe two, three years older than Tricia, and she could see in his eyes that he still had the impulse to comfort, to ease suffering. How many cops had that impulse, Tricia wondered. Most of them, probably, the year they joined the force; none of them, probably, a few years later.

“It’s okay, ma’am,” Lenahan said, “we’ve got half a dozen men from the Sixth on the scene and more on their way. She’s not going to escape.”

“Oh, good,” Tricia said. “That’s a relief.”

“Just stay inside and if anyone comes to your door other than a policeman, don’t open it, understand?”

Tricia nodded. She understood.

“Now, what can you tell us about this woman—how tall would you say she was?”

“Oh, taller than me,” Tricia said, “maybe your height.” The cop was nearly six feet.

“What color hair?”

“Brown,” Tricia said. “Light brown, like, um, hazelnut.”

“Hazelnut,” Lenahan said, and wrote it in his book. “Eyes?”

“I didn’t notice, I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay. How much would you say she weighed?”

“I don’t know. More than me. She was quite large in the—in the chest, if you know what I mean.” She dipped her eyes demurely.

“In the chest,” Lenahan said as he wrote.

“Oh, and officer, she had a limp, like maybe one leg was shorter than the other.”

“Or maybe one of our men winged her with one of his shots,” Lenahan speculated.

“Sure. Maybe,” Tricia said, and thought of Mitch. Could be, he’d have said. Could be.

“Anything else you noticed? This is very helpful.”

Tricia tried to think of something else she might have noticed. “Her ears—there was something funny about them. Really long earlobes.”

“Oh, yeah?” Lenahan’s hand hung above his pad, not writing.

What? Was that too much? “Well, I don’t know,” Tricia said. “They looked long to me. But I only got a quick look.”

He wrote it down. “And what was she wearing? I have it here she’s in a blue dress and, um, wide-heeled pumps.”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t say blue, more like grey, actually.”

A new voice emerged behind her: “Would you? Grey? Didn’t you think it was closer to navy?”

She turned, saw a young man in his shirtsleeves, wiping his hands on a paper towel. She smiled at him hopefully, tried to send a signal without being too obvious about it. Please, mister, play along.

He smiled back at her.

“Or teal?” he said, coming forward. He dropped the crumpled paper towel on a side table.

“Sure, teal,” Tricia said.

“I thought you said your husband wasn’t home,” Lenahan said.

“Oh, he’s not. This is my cousin. Jim. Jim, this is Officer Lenahan of the Sixth Precinct.”

Cousin Jim reached out a hand, shook Lenahan’s when he extended it.

“Pleased to meet you, Officer Lenahan,” he said. “I’ve never seen this woman before in my life.”

20.

Bust

Lenahan had her in cuffs before she could even voice a protest, hands behind her back. He patted her down, apologizing for it first, but doing it all the same. She hadn’t imagined that the first time she’d let a man touch her all over would be like this. Even when handcuffs were involved, it somehow seemed so much sexier in the books she’d read.

“Hazelnut,” Lenahan muttered as he swiftly went up her left leg and down her right, pat pat pat. “Large in the chest.” He streaked his fingertips along her shoulder blades and down her spine. “Excuse me,” he said as he felt her backside, her hips, around in front. “It’d be better if I had a matron here to do this, but I don’t, and we’re required to search suspects thoroughly.”

“What do you think I could hide down there, a gun?” Tricia said, and he blushed—for a moment he actually blushed.

“It may sound foolish to you, miss, but they teach us in the academy about women who’ve concealed more than you might think.”

“Doesn’t sound foolish, just painful.”

“Well, there you go. Good thing you didn’t do it, then. Come on.” He guided her by the shoulder toward the stairs and they descended to the ground floor together.

“What are you going to do with me?”

“I’m going to hand you off to a senior officer,” Lenahan said. “He’s going to take you to central booking and get you processed. I’m sure they’ll make it as quick and painless as they can.”

“And then,” Tricia said, “you’ll lock me up?”

“You’re a wanted fugitive, miss. You’ll be a guest of the state till your case is resolved.”

Tricia thought of Charley and Erin and Coral, trapped with Nicolazzo, not to mention with Bruno. How long before Nicolazzo lost his patience and began taking it out on them? How long before he heard about Mitch?

“Officer,” Tricia said, “I need to talk to someone before you lock me up—my sister is in serious danger, she’s being held captive by a fugitive much worse than me—”

“Miss, please,” Lenahan said. “You’ll have your chance to tell your story, I promise.”

“But not in time! Please, he’s going to kill her—”

Lenahan nodded politely, but he wasn’t listening. He’d been snookered by her once; he wasn’t going to fall for it again.

He walked her out through the building’s front door, down a few steps to the sidewalk and over toward a police car parked at an angle to the curb. There was a crowd in the street, cops and ordinary citizens attracted by the sound of gunfire. Down the block she saw Coral’s building, where the biggest mass of people was.

A figure came toward them out of a narrow alleyway between buildings, a policeman with captain’s bars on his jacket and his cap pulled down low. The jacket hung a little loose on him, Tricia thought, like he’d lost weight recently; funny, the things you think about at a time like this.

He strode up to Lenahan, put one hand out to stop him. “Nice going, officer,” he said in a broad Bronx accent. “I’ll take it from here.”

“Captain,” Tricia said, “you’ve got to listen to me, my sister’s life is in danger—”

“Shut up,” the captain said. And when she kept talking he turned to face her, raised his cap for a second and drew a finger along his lips. “Zip it.”

She dropped silent in the middle of her sentence.

“She’s the one we’re looking for,” Lenahan said, “I’m sure of it. I caught her in an apartment she’d broken into—”

“That’s excellent police work,” the captain said. “I’ll make sure you’re recognized for it. Now hand her over. I’ll take full responsibility.”

“Thank you, sir. My name’s Lenahan, sir, Bill Lenahan.”

“All right, Lenahan. You’ll get a commendation for this.” He reached out for Tricia’s arm.

“Is there anything else you need, Captain...” Lenahan leaned forward to look at the captain’s nameplate, but it was half covered by his jacket’s lapel. “Captain...?”

“Um,” the captain said.

Tricia bent to peer under the lapel. “Clohessy,” she read.

“Clohessy,” the captain said.

“Is there anything...?” Lenahan said, looking only slightly more puzzled than he had when Tricia had told him about the long earlobes.

“Yes, there is,” said Captain Clohessy, pulling Tricia out of Lenahan’s grasp. “I want you to go over there,” he pointed toward the big crowd, “find Sergeant Mulvaney, and tell him I’m taking the suspect downtown.”

“Downtown, sir?”

“That’s right, downtown. Oh, and Lenahan, let me use your car.” He held out a hand for the keys.

“My car, sir?”

“Yes. I can’t get mine out, just look at that mob.”

“Yes, sir.” Lenahan found his car keys and handed them over. The captain snatched them and Lenahan turned to go find Sergeant Mulvaney. “Oh, Lenahan,” the captain said, and Lenahan turned back.

“Sir?”

The captain waved at the cars nearest to them. “Which one...?”

“This one, sir,” Lenahan said, patting the nearest on the hood.

“Of course,” the captain said, and unlocked the door. “Thank you. That’s all.” And when Lenahan didn’t depart, “What are you waiting for?”

“Sir!” Lenahan spun on his heel and dived into the throng, looking for a police sergeant Tricia firmly believed existed only in the realm of imagination.

“My god,” she said, but the captain held up a finger in warning.

“In the car.” He opened the rear door of the police cruiser and Tricia slid in. Then he climbed behind the wheel, cranked the ignition, backed out, and made the turn onto West 4th.

Tricia waited to speak till she saw Washington Square Park racing past the windows.

“So where’s Captain Clohessy?” she finally said.

“Never fear. He’s sleeping peacefully, right where I left him.”

“And how did you manage to get away from Uncle Nick?”

“It’s a funny story,” Borden replied.

21.

Straight Cut

Nicolazzo smiled narrowly as he walked Borden to a pair of overstuffed, leather-upholstered armchairs on either side of a glass-topped oval table. He pulled the stiletto, sprang the blade, stepped behind Borden’s back, and for a moment Borden feared the worst. But all Nicolazzo used the blade on was the rope holding his hands together, sawing away until it dropped to the ground. Borden rubbed his wrists and when Nicolazzo gestured for him to do so, sat.

“So you’re the one published the book,” Nicolazzo said.

“What book?” Borden said.

“What book. Very good.” Nicolazzo opened the cardboard box the playing cards were in, set it aside, shuffled. “They warned me you were a rompiculo.” He slid the deck across the table. “Cut.”

Borden split the deck in half, set the top half over to the right of the bottom. Nicolazzo reassembled the deck, shuffled again.

“Why would you publish a book like this, revealing a man’s private concerns?”

“For money,” Borden said.

Nicolazzo nodded. That was reasoning he could understand, could appreciate. “Why not just come to me? I might have paid you not to publish it.”

“It’s not just this book,” Borden said. “I publish one book that’s a hit, it puts the whole line on the map.”

“I might have paid you not to publish the whole line.”

“Or you might have killed me,” Borden said. “Saved yourself some money.”

“I might kill you now,” Nicolazzo said.

“The horse is out of the barn now,” Borden said. “What good would killing me now do?”

“Maybe it would just make me feel better,” Nicolazzo said. “Maybe it would keep some other farabutto from screwing with me next time.”

“What’s a farabutto?”

“You,” Nicolazzo said. “You’re a farabutto. And—” he glanced at his watch “—for the next fifty minutes or so, you’re a live farabutto. After that...” He raised his shoulders expressively, let them fall. “So, canasta? Rummy? Or you like something simpler?”

“Simple is always nice,” Borden said.

Nicolazzo slapped the cards down. “Straight cut. High card wins.”

“How much?” Borden said.

“How much can you afford? Hundred bucks a point?”

Borden, who couldn’t afford one buck a point, said, “Sure.” He divided the deck into two parts, roughly equal.

Nicolazzo pushed the top two cards off the bottom half with a plump index finger. “Choose,” he said.

Borden looked at the backs of the two cards, scrutinized them as though the intricate pattern could reveal something to him about what was on the other side. Finally he flipped one face up. Two of diamonds.

Nicolazzo turned over the other card. Seven of clubs. “You owe me five hundred dollars.”

“I thought you said one hundred,” Borden said.

“One hundred a point. Seven minus two is five points. Five hundred. Do you disagree?”

Borden shook his head. Nicolazzo gathered up the cards, shuffled again, slapped them down. “Cut,” he said.

Borden cut, Nicolazzo slid two cards forward, and Borden turned over the jack of hearts. Nicolazzo turned over the queen of hearts. “One point,” Nicolazzo said. “That’s one hundred dollars. For a total of six hundred. Double or nothing?”

“What the hell,” Borden said. “Double or nothing.”

Half an hour later, Borden was forty thousand dollars in the hole and still plunging, no bottom in sight.

“At this rate,” Borden said, “you’ll have your three million back before the night’s out.”

“That assumes you have three million to lose,” Nicolazzo said, “which I’m betting you don’t.”

“You’re right about that,” Borden said. “But what if I told you I knew who did?”

“My three million?”

“Your three million.”

Nicolazzo pushed the deck toward him. Borden cut it and Nicolazzo fingered off two cards. By this point, they could do it without talking, without even paying much attention. Borden turned over the four of clubs, Nicolazzo the nine of spades. Eighty thousand.

“Quite the losing streak,” Nicolazzo said. “You haven’t gotten one right yet.”

Borden shrugged. “Happens.”

“So,” Nicolazzo said, “where’s my money?”

“You may find this surprising,” Borden said, “but I don’t keep eighty thousand dollars in my wallet.”

“Not that money,” Nicolazzo said. “The three million dollars this Judas took from me.”

“Ah, yes. That money.” Borden fingered the cards thoughtfully. “Well, I may not be winning right now, but I’m sure you’ll agree I don’t owe you that much quite yet.”

Nicolazzo leaned forward across the table, glared at Borden ominously. “Where’s my money? You don’t want to play games with me.”

“I thought you liked games,” Borden said. “Canasta and all.”

“If you don’t tell me right now—”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” Borden said. “Let’s cut for it. Make a little wager. Three million dollars if you win.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Why not?” Borden said.

Nicolazzo thought about it. “And if you win?”

“I walk out of here right now,” Borden said, “and you don’t stop me. You don’t touch me. You don’t get that bruiser of yours to stop me and you don’t send him after me. I win and we’re even. I don’t owe you the eighty thousand, I don’t owe you anything.” Charley leaned in, matched Nicolazzo stare for stare. “Or are you scared to risk that much on a hand of cards?”

Nicolazzo raised a meaty fist, shook it at Borden. “Salvatore Nicolazzo,” he said in a strangled voice, “is not afraid of any bet.”

Borden pushed the cards toward him. “Then shuffle, big man.”

Nicolazzo snatched up the cards, violently riffled them together. It sounded like a string of firecrackers going off. “All right, Borden,” he said. “All right. But we play my game now. No more straight cut. We play Fifty-to-One, eh?”

“You give your word on the stakes?” Borden said.

“Absolutely. If you win, you walk out of here. But you won’t win. And if you don’t win, you’ll tell me where my money is, and you’ll tell me who took it, or I will cut your hands and feet off, I’ll take your eyes out, I’ll feed you your coglioni, and then, when you beg me on your knees to kill you, I will kindly and lovingly slit your throat. Do we understand each other, Mr. Borden?”

Borden swallowed, nodded.

“So.” Nicolazzo set the cards down gently, squared up the edges of the deck. He flipped the top card face up. It was the four of spades. He set it aside. He looked at Borden, waited with a vicious and self-satisfied smile on his face.

“What do I do?” Borden said.

“It’s very simple, Borden,” Nicolazzo said. He tapped his index finger on the back of the topmost card on the deck. “You just tell me what this card is.”

“What do you mean what that card is?” Borden said. “How am I supposed to know? That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s not ridiculous,” Nicolazzo said. “You’ve got fifty chances to be wrong, one chance to be right. Fifty-to-one. Now name your card.”

Borden stared at the deck.

“I’m waiting,” Nicolazzo said.

Borden stared some more.

“Say something, Borden.”

“Six of diamonds,” Borden said.

Nicolazzo shoved the top card forward, dug a thumbnail under it, flipped it over.

Both men stared at it.

Borden smiled weakly.

“Fare un bidone —” Nicolazzo sputtered.

Borden stood, walked quickly to the door.

22.

Lemons Never Lie

“You just left them there?” Tricia said. “Erin and Coral, with Nicolazzo fuming like that—”

Borden glanced at her in the rear-view mirror. “You think it’d be better if I was still locked up with them?”

“Maybe,” Tricia said.

“And who’s this ‘Coral’?”

“My sister.”

“Your sister,” Borden said.

“Yes. And god only knows what he’s doing to her right now, and to Erin, thanks to you.”

“He’d be doing it to me, too, if I were there,” Borden said. “This way we at least have a chance.”

“You took an awful risk,” Tricia said, “using marked cards. That’s what you did, isn’t it?”

“You don’t believe I just got lucky?”

“No, and Nicolazzo shouldn’t either. You went through how many straight cuts with him and didn’t guess right even once? That’s as improbable as if you’d guessed right every time. He should have been tipped off by that alone.”

Borden thought about it. “You’re right,” he said. “I should’ve given myself one or two.”

“How long till he figures it out? You know he’s not going to feel obliged to keep his word once he does. And now he thinks you know where his money is!”

“All true,” Borden said, “but at least I’m here and not there, and he’s there and not here, and I got you out of the bind you were in, so you know, I’d say we’re not doing too bad.”

“I’m handcuffed in the back seat of a stolen police car,” Tricia said, “driving god knows where, you’re wanted for assaulting two policemen now and impersonating one of them, I’m probably wanted for murder—”

“Murder?”

“Mitch,” Tricia said, “got shot. I didn’t do it. But they think I did—that’s what all the cops were there for. And now one of the most bloodthirsty gangsters on the east coast is gunning for us both. That’s your idea of not doing too bad?”

“Could be worse,” Borden said.

The car’s police-band radio, which had been alternating between static and background chatter all the way from Cornelia Street, broke in on them now with a loud announcement: “All cars, all cars, respond immediately; stolen police vehicle V-J-1-3-9, that’s Victor-Jason-1-3-9, spotted going north on First Avenue, use extreme caution, suspects armed and dangerous—”

“That’s us, isn’t it?” Tricia said.

“Unless someone else stole a cop car and is joyriding right behind us.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Borden said.

“Well, you’d better think of something.”

“Me? I got us this far, why don’t you think of something now?”

Tricia was about to spit back a nasty response when she did, in fact, think of something. “Hold on,” she said, and twisted around in the back seat, trying to get her arms around to her side and her dress shifted over so the pocket was within reach. It felt like her shoulders were coming out of their sockets and when the car bumped over a deep pothole the jolt was excruciating. But she kept straining, groping, reaching till her fingers closed on the key ring.

“What are you doing back there?” Borden said, glancing in the mirror again.

“We need to go to...15th Street and Avenue C,” she said, reading off the little disk. “But not in this car. Pull over somewhere and we’ll go the rest of the way on foot.”

“What’s there?”

“Other cars,” Tricia said, “less conspicuous than this one. Maybe even one we won’t have to steal.”

“Oh, yeah? Whose?”

“Coral’s,” Tricia said. “Now just pull over somewhere. And I hope that uniform you grabbed has a pair of handcuff keys on it.”

Borden made a hard right onto a side street, swerved over to the curb, left the car parked in front of a fire hydrant. He came around to the back, opened the door and helped Tricia out. Her dress was twisted and crumpled and the two top buttons were gone, leaving a fair expanse showing of what would have been cleavage on a bigger woman. Borden politely pretended not to notice. He had a pair of stubby metal keys ready in his fist and used one to release her from the cuffs Lenahan had cinched on her. She rotated her wrists to get the blood flowing again while Borden tossed the cuffs and keys and his cap and jacket through the car window and onto the front seat.

He left the engine running. “Maybe someone else will steal it and drive it away,” he said optimistically, and Tricia breathed a silent prayer that someone would. They needed all the help they could get.

They ran. A couple of blocks east, they spotted the sign for Royal’s. It rose, illuminated, above a fenced-in compound filled end-to-end with automobiles. As they got closer, it became increasingly obvious that the garage doubled as a used car lot. The cars were not, for the most part, in good condition—some had visible dents in their hoods or side doors, some were missing hubcaps or headlights, one had a spiderweb of cracks radiating out from a hole in the windshield. But at least the cardboard signs propped on the hoods asked for commensurately modest prices.

And true to the “24 HOURS” claim, the place was open. Tricia waved to catch the eye of the sullen, pear-shaped man stationed by the gate.

“Can you help us find a car?” Tricia asked him, struggling to catch her breath. Glancing back over her shoulder she didn’t see anyone in pursuit. Not yet, anyway.

The man unplugged the earpiece of a little transistor Sony from his ear. “What kind you thinking about?”

“Sorry—we’re not here to buy. It’s my sister’s car. I’m just picking it up.”

The minimal light of interest that had kindled in his eyes went out. “Keys,” he said.

Tricia handed them over. The guy pointed with one pinky at a tiny number impressed into the top rim of each key. “Nineteen H,” he said, and Tricia thought, like Horse. “That’s in the garage.” He stretched an arm toward a long, low bunker at the far end of the lot.

“Thank you,” Tricia said, but he’d already returned to listening to his program on the radio.

The garage door was open. Just inside, a man with a cap of black hair and a pencil moustache sat behind a wooden desk, flipping pages in this week’s issue of Look and listening to Norman Vincent Peale on a little Sony of his own. He flicked it off when he saw them approach.

“Ah, the happy couple,” the man said, springing to his feet. “Sir, madam. Looking for a starter, a budget or economy car, to get you through that tough first year? Then you’re in the right place, let me tell you.”

“We’re not—” Tricia said, but he waved away her objection before she could even finish uttering it, a habit you got the sense he’d formed long ago, as a sort of survival instinct.

“Please, allow me. I won’t try to sell you anything, you needn’t worry. Consider me a friend. I’ll show you some of the options you have and then if you decide to buy elsewhere, well, you’ll have my blessing.” He nudged Charley with a companionable elbow. “I don’t say it will happen—you won’t find a lower price at Schultz’s or Greenpoint Ford or, well, anywhere else—but if you decide you prefer to pay more for less, well, that’s every man’s privilege.”

Somewhere in the distance—but not far enough in the distance—a police siren wailed.

“Friend,” Charley said, “it’s a fine spiel, but save it for the rubes. We’re just picking up. Give him the keys, Trixie.”

Tricia handed them over, pointed at the little 19-H.

The man’s face fell. “Are you quite sure? Even if it’s not why you came, while you’re here, why not give a thought to—”

“No,” Borden said. “Just the car.”

“All right. I can see you’re a serious man who knows what he wants. I’ll bring you the car. But while I’m gone I’ll leave you with this thought: In the modern marriage, one car just isn’t enough. The lady needs her own—”

“I’m sorry,” Borden said, “we’re in a bit of a hurry here.”

“Well, then, why don’t you walk with me? It’ll save you some time, and who knows what might catch the lady’s eye along the way?”

He placed a feather-light hand at the small of Tricia’s back and steered them down a narrow aisle between two tightly packed rows of cars, junkers one and all.

“Now there’s a nice Pontiac Streamliner, only ten years old, fewer miles on her than you might think,” he said as they passed a decrepit hulk with rust stains the size of dinner plates and a crooked rear bumper.

“No,” Borden said.

“Perhaps madam would enjoy the freedom of a fine Ford coupe, like this one with its Flathead V8 engine,” the man said, waving at a ragtop whose top literally was in rags.

“No,” Borden said.

“Madam,” the man said, turning to Tricia, “couldn’t you see yourself behind the wheel of—”

“No,” Borden said. He pointed to a sign on the wall that said ‘D’. “Which way is ‘H’?”

The man heaved a deep sigh. Positive thinking only went so far, apparently. “This way,” he said.

Tricia couldn’t avoid a growing feeling of despair. Seeing all these terrible cars filled her with dread as to what they’d find when they finally got to Coral’s. Of course Coral wouldn’t have been able to afford anything better—no surprise there. But there were limits. Would the thing even run?

“I see a look of concern in your eyes, madam,” the man said, launching one last desperate sally. “Is it perhaps that you fear you’re missing out on a great opportunity?”

“Honestly, mister,” Tricia said, “meaning no offence, I’m just trying to understand why every car here is in such awful condition.”

“Madam,” the man said, pulling himself up to his not-too-impressive full height and smoothing back his hair with one hand. “Anyone can sell you a car that looks clean and new and pristine—there’s nothing to it. But what does the outer surface tell you about how a machine will run, about what’s going on under the hood? Absolutely nothing. Many a fine-looking automobile hides flaws you won’t discover till you get it home, and then, well, it’s too late, isn’t it? We are honest dealers, madam: we put all our cards on the table. Our cars may not look like much and they won’t win races—they’re more lemons than Le Mans, if you will. But at least with us you know what you’re getting, and at a fair price, too.” He shook his head ruefully. “Appearances may deceive, madam. Lemons never lie.”

“That’s...that’s absurd,” Tricia sputtered. “You’re saying your cars are better because they look just as lousy as they run...?”

By this point Borden had gone ahead and they heard a low whistle from the next row over. “Now that’s my kind of lemon,” he called. “Kid, get over here.”

Rounding the corner, Tricia saw him standing next to a sleek, shiny, new Mark III Lincoln Continental. Not a mark on it.

The salesman followed and when he saw the car his face drained of all color. “Let me see those keys.” He read off the number on the keys and grimaced as if making a connection for the first time. “No. No no no. This can’t be. That’s Miss King’s car.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Tricia said brightly, “Colleen King. That’s my sister. I’m picking it up for her.”

“But—but—” the man said. “Royal gave it to her. He’s very particular. He wouldn’t want us to let it out into anyone else’s hands.”

“Royal?” Tricia said.

“The owner here. The boss. It used to be his personal car—he drove it every day.”

“But you’re saying he gave it to her,” Tricia said. “It’s hers now.”

“Yes, but—”

“And she asked me to bring it to her. She gave me the keys,” Tricia said. The man was shaking his head. “Why don’t we ask Royal? I’m sure he’ll understand.”

“We can’t do that,” he said. “He’s not here. Royal’s been away the past month—I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

“Well, how’s he going to feel,” Tricia said, “when he does come back, if he finds out you stopped me from doing what Colleen asked?”

He twitched like an animal caught in a trap.

Finally he threw up his hands, slapped the keys into Tricia’s waiting palm. “It’s your neck, lady,” he said. “You’ve got the keys, you do what you want. But let me tell you something. You do not want to mess with Royal Barrone.”

“Barrone?” Tricia said.

“It’s your neck,” the man repeated and hightailed it out of sight.

23.

The Last Quarry

While Borden drove, first onto the F.D.R. and then north along the rim of Manhattan, Tricia straightened her hair in the lighted fold-down mirror on the passenger side. The ride was smooth and silent, the seats plush and supple. It hardly felt like they were moving, yet outside the windows the world swept past in a blur.

“Where are we going?” she said, touching a fingertip to the corner of her mouth to fix a spot where her rouge had smeared.

“Who cares?” Borden said. “Anywhere’s better than where we were.”

“You know how to get us back to Nicolazzo’s place?”

“Sure, corner of Van Dam and Greenpoint, near the cemetery. But why would we go there?”

“My sister’s there,” Tricia said. “So’s Erin. You want to get them out, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Borden said, with all the conviction of a soldier told to exit the nice, comfortable foxhole he’s been cowering in. “But driving up to the front door with no plan and no resources is not a way to get them out. It’s just a way to get us captured, too.”

“Fine. So where are we going?”

“How about finding this Barrone? He obviously likes your sister, if he gave her this car; and the way that guy acted back there, Barrone must pull some weight. Maybe he’ll help us.”

“Yeah, but, see, that makes no sense,” Tricia said. “If he’s who I think he is, he’d have no reason to like Coral, and every reason to like Nicolazzo.”

“Why’s that? Who is he?”

“Nicolazzo’s brother-in-law.”

Borden drove on in silence for a while.

“His brother-in-law,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Nicolazzo’s—”

“Brother-in-law. His sister married a man named Barrone. Who else could it be?”

“There’s probably more than one Barrone in New York City,” Borden said.

“Probably.”

“But you think this one’s the same one...”

“Don’t you?”

Borden reluctantly nodded. “So what’s Barrone’s connection with...what’s your sister’s name anyway, Coral or Colleen?”

“What’s your name, Carter or Charley?”

“Touché,” Borden said. “Let’s just call her Colleen, then. What’s Colleen’s connection to Barrone?”

“I’d have said there isn’t one,” Tricia said, “except that when I went to her apartment, the neighbor who watches her son accused me of working for Mrs. Barrone. Made it pretty clear that Mrs. Barrone, at least, is no friend of Colleen’s.”

“Aha,” Borden said. “The mister is, the missus isn’t—classic case of hot pants in the Barrone household?”

Tricia considered this. “Wouldn’t be the first one. Robbie Monge was married to the Barrones’ daughter, and he was unfaithful—that’s what Nicolazzo said, anyway. Before he killed him.”

“Runs in the family, then. Like father, like son-in-law.”

“But why my sister? How would Barrone even have known her?”

“You said she worked at Nicolazzo’s clubs,” Borden said. “If Barrone’s part of the family, he’d probably have shown up from time to time—maybe he even has some sort of role in them, owns a piece or something. Not hard to imagine them meeting.”

“And then...”

“Exactly. And then. Like Cole Porter wrote. Birds do it, bees do it.”

Tricia shuddered. “He must be sixty years old!”

“What, you think you won’t want company in bed any more when you’re sixty?” Borden looked over at her, and she hoped that in the darkness he couldn’t see she was blushing. She was grateful when he turned back to the road.

“I see,” he said. “There hasn’t been a Mister Trixie yet, has there.”

“I’ve had plenty of boyfriends,” Tricia said. “Back home.”

“I’m sure—to share malteds with at the soda shoppe, hold hands at the drive-in. It’s okay. I understand. Things don’t move quite as fast in South Dakota.”

“I’ll have you know,” Tricia said, coldly, “things move plenty fast in South Dakota. Boys have more hands there than a wall of clocks. Coral had to—Colleen had to beat ‘em off with a stick.”

“Oh, is that what she used?” Borden said, and Tricia felt herself blushing again.

“There’s no need to be vulgar, Mr. Borden,” Tricia said.

“Charley,” Borden said. “Call me Charley. Everything we’ve been through together, we should be on a first-name basis.”

Tricia looked down at her hands. “Tricia,” she said.

“Tricia,” Charley said, as they tooled along the highway at a whisper. “Pleased to meet you.”

He reached out a hand and patted hers, and for the first time in a long time she felt a bit of relief, a trace—just a trace—of comfort. She wasn’t in this alone.

But the moment passed. Charley took his hand away and said, “So. Barrone. Where are we going to find him?”

“Don’t look at me,” Tricia said. “I don’t know.”

“Well, this is the man’s car. There’s got to be something in here that’ll give us an address. Check the glovebox, why don’t you. Maybe he’s got the papers for the car in there. Or something with his address on it.”

Tricia unlatched the glove compartment, swung it open, and a little light inside flickered on. She started sorting through the contents. “He does have some papers, let’s see...here’s a map...a brochure...two ballpoint pens...a writing tablet...a—”

“What?” Charley said, after she’d been silent for a bit. “What else?”

“Pull over,” Tricia said.

“What? Why? Here?”

“Pull over,” she said again, and when he turned to look she held up a slim leather box filled with photographs.

In the wan light from the dashboard, from the illuminated mirror, and from the glove compartment, the two of them flipped through the photos. There were somewhere between twenty and thirty of them—closer to thirty, Tricia thought. Each was a stark black-and-white image, and each showed a combination of people—some vertical, some horizontal; some living, some dead. Halfway down the stack she found two that included Mitch. In one he was holding a knife, maybe the very stiletto she’d seen him pocket earlier that night; if not, one much like it. The man at his feet had bled copiously, though in black and white you couldn’t quite tell where the blood ended and the dark tile floor began.

In one she saw Robbie, and though he wasn’t holding a weapon himself what he was holding was nearly as bad: He held another man’s arms behind his back, much as Mitch had held his, and the man he was holding was coming to a similar bad end. The circle of life.

Each photo had a date inscribed by hand on the back, along with a location: Umberto’s, Central Park Boathouse, Corner Mulberry & Hester. Each had names: Monge, Mitchell, Paulie Lips. And on each, one of the names was crossed out. On one, two names were crossed out, and turning it over Tricia saw a pair of dead bodies on the front, a man and a woman caught naked in what looked like a basement rec room. She felt her stomach rebel, forced herself to fight her rising gorge.

Several of the photos had the name Barrone written on them, and in those the man holding a gun in the pictures was tall and chiseled, skin pockmarked, close-set eyes cold. In fairness, he didn’t look his age—even in the later-dated photos he looked like he could be forty, not sixty. But he didn’t look like a man you’d want your sister to take to bed all the same.

“Jesus,” Charley said, after Barrone had made his fifth fatal appearance. “This is not your average garage owner.”

“Maybe there’s an explanation—”

“Of course there’s an explanation. Your sister’s boyfriend is a hit man. That’s the explanation.”

They kept turning over the photos, one by one, images of bad men and worse, hunters and their prey.

Then they got to the end.

The last photo—the very last one—dated just a little over a month ago—showed the scene Coral had described: a dead man in a gutter, several live ones standing over him. One of them was Mitch. The tall man with the chiseled features was in this photo, too, and his name was on the back. But it had been the last hunt for him and he’d been the final quarry.

Because he was the man in the gutter, and on the back it said Barrone.

24.

The Guns of Heaven

“I guess we know why he’s been away for the past month,” Charley said.

Tricia put the photos back into the box, put the lid back on, and slid it into the pocket of her dress.

“And I guess that rules out finding him,” Charley said. “He’s not exactly in a position to help us.”

Tricia put her head back against the seat, closed her eyes. She felt like crying. These were killers—real killers, not the fun sort you read about in books. They killed without remorse, without hesitation, over and over; they even killed their own. And took pictures to remember it by. What chance did she and Charley stand against them? What chance did Erin and Coral have?

“What do you want to do?” Charley said. “Now that we’ve got the photos, we’ve got something to trade. We could head out to Queens, try to make a deal. Or, Tricia,” he said, “I could take the photos out to Queens and you could get on a train back to South Dakota. They wouldn’t look for you there. You could go back to your old life, pretend you never met me, pretend none of this ever happened. Maybe that’d be the smartest. What do you say?”

Tricia opened her eyes, pinned him with her stare. “I say we need guns.”

They drove off the highway and back into the heart of the city. At the all-night drugstore in the lobby of the Warwick, Charley went to the counter to coax a sandwich and a coke out of the counterman, while Tricia worked the payphone in the corner. On the way in, Charley had asked her where she proposed to find guns at eleven on a Saturday night in the middle of New York City. “Do you know any gunsmiths that keep night hours on weekends? Because I don’t. I don’t know any gunsmiths, period.”

“I don’t know any gunsmiths either,” Tricia said, “but I know a woman who’s got at least two guns.”

“Who?”

“Just get your sandwich, I’ll be back in a minute.”

She’d gone to the payphone, hunted through the heavy phone book hanging from a wire, found no “Heaven” or “H” on the page for “LaCroix,” struck out again looking for Coral under both “King” and “Heverstadt.” Finally she just rang up the operator and gave her the address of the rooming house itself.

“Oh, is that where all the excitement was?” the operator said with a girlish squeal. “Down on Cornelia Street? I just heard about it on the radio!”

“Yeah, very exciting,” Tricia said. “People getting shot. Nothing more exciting than that.”

“Well, you don’t have to be a grouch about it,” the operator said. The phone on the other end started ringing.

As it rang, Tricia found herself thinking, Can you trust Heaven? Are you sure? But Coral had trusted her; that had to count for something. And what choice did she have anyway?

It took half a dozen rings before a familiar Eastern European voice answered. “Hello?”

“I’m calling for Heaven LaCroix,” Tricia said.

“Not here,” the landlady said. “You call back later. Is madhouse.”

“Please,” Tricia said quickly, before the woman could hang up, “I know she’s there, she’s taking care of a little boy, she wouldn’t have left him alone. Please. Just put her on the phone.”

“Who is this?” the landlady said, and you could almost hear her eyes narrowing.

“A friend of hers. It’s very important—”

The landlady’s voice dropped to a whisper. “You the girl came by earlier, ran out after shooting.”

“I didn’t shoot anyone—”

“No,” the woman whispered, “I know, Heaven tell me. But the police, they say you do, they wait for you. Don’t come back.”

“I won’t,” Tricia said. “But I need to talk to Heaven. Could you please get her on the phone?”

“I get.” Tricia heard her set the receiver down. Then the sound of footsteps departing. There was a murmur of voices in the background. Boarders? Or cops? Both, probably.

Before the footsteps returned, Tricia heard her dime fall into the phone’s innards and she deposited another from the handful of change Charley had given her.

Eventually, the footsteps came back—two pairs of them. “Hello?” It was a different accent this time, very light, almost Dutch-sounding.

“Heaven,” Tricia said. “Don’t say my name, don’t give any sign that it’s me.”

“Okay,” Heaven said.

“I’m safe—but I need your help.”

“Okay,” she said again, though this time it sounded like a question.

“I’m going to get Colleen out from where she’s being held, I have someone with me, but we’re dealing with some very dangerous men and can’t go in barehanded. I need to borrow your guns, Heaven—yours and the one you took from Mitch, the guy in the hallway.”

“Who’s that on the phone?” a voice asked. “Hey—miss, I’m asking you a question.”

“My sister,” Heaven said, “calling from Limbourg. I’ll just be a minute.” Then, to Tricia, “Dear Clara, I’m so glad to hear you’re moving to New York. I do think I can help you find work, yes. You know weekends I work at a club called the Stars, right? After the last match, cleaning up—usually starting one-thirty, two in the morning. I bet they’d have work for you, too.” Her voice rose. “We’ll ask them when you come, Clara. Next month.”

“I hear you,” Tricia said. “I’ll be there tonight. One-thirty.”

“How’s mother, Clara?”

“I’m going to hang up now.”

“Oh, good, good.”

Tricia set the phone back in its cradle, hoped the call hadn’t been traced, hoped the operator hadn’t listened in. But just in case—

She returned to the counter, lifted one of Charley’s arms. “We’d better go.”

“Can’t you sit for a minute to eat,” he said through a mouthful of turkey and lettuce. “I got one for you.”

“We’ll take it with us,” she said.

He grabbed the two sandwiches, one whole and one partly eaten, wrapped them in a paper napkin, dipped for one last pull at his coke.

“Now,” Tricia said.

“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Outside, on the street, he asked, “What’s the rush? Your friend with the guns?”

“No, she won’t be ready for another two hours. I just didn’t like how nosy the operator was getting. She seemed a little too interested in what was happening down on Cornelia Street.”

“You think she called the cops?”

“I don’t want to find out.”

They rounded the corner to the side street where they’d parked the Lincoln, then backed away when they saw a policeman bending over beside it, hands on his knees, trying to see in through the driver’s side window.

“Easy come, easy go,” Charley muttered.

They walked briskly through the combination of pitch-black and bright-as-day that is New York City as midnight approaches. After a couple of blocks, Tricia found herself flagging, falling behind. “Do you know any place we can go for a couple of hours?” she said. “I’m beat.”

“I know some places we can’t go. The office. The Sun, the Stars. Cornelia Street. Queens. This city’s starting to feel awful small.”

She chose not to mention that they’d be going to one of those very places when 1:30 rolled around. “Come on, Charley, you’re a resourceful man. Where would you go if you didn’t want to be found for a few hours?”

He thought for a bit, then took her arm. “I know a place.”

Half a mile downtown and a few blocks west, just off Times Square, Charley led her up a flight of stairs and knocked on a heavy wooden door. A panel slid open speakeasy-style and a pair of eyes looked out at them. “Borden!” a voice called out. “Haven’t see you in dog’s years!”

“Mike,” Charley said when the door swung wide, revealing a man in an undershirt and apron, dishtowel in one hand and a pair of shot glasses in the other. “This is...Trixie, Mike. A friend of mine. We’ve got an appointment in two hours, need to be off the street in the meantime.”

“No problem,” Mike said, and ushered them into a quiet, dark room where a handful of men sat drinking. No one looked up, no one said anything to them. “What’s your thirst?”

“No drinking for us tonight, Mike,” Charley said. “What we really need is a good hour’s sleep. The back room occupied?”

“No,” Mike said, “just some things of mine I can clear out.”

“Leave ‘em,” Charley said. “We’re not particular.”

Mike took them to the room, where Tricia had to step over a man-sized duffel bag and a pile of newspapers and pawnshop tickets to get to the low mattress on the other side. There was an armchair, too, though it looked none too comfortable.

“You’ll tell me what this was all about, right,” Mike said, “when it’s all over?”

“If I’m in talking condition, you’ll be the first I tell.”

“Knock in an hour?”

“Give us ninety minutes,” Borden said.

“You got it.” Mike swung the door shut.

“Go ahead,” Charley said, and waved at the mattress. He lowered himself into the chair. “Lie down.”

Tricia did, pulled up a thin blanket over her. She kicked off her shoes and instantly felt better. She looked at Charley, who was twisting to find a comfortable angle in the chair.

“Hey, Borden,” she said and lifted the blanket. He looked up. “There’s room here for two.”

“You’re not worried I’ll offend your virtue?” Charley said.

“Two hours from now, I’ll have a loaded gun in my hands,” Tricia said. “I’m sure you’ll be a perfect gentleman until then. Now lie down and get some sleep.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Charley said.

25.

The Last Match

She didn’t intend to wind up in his arms, but that’s where she found herself when the knocking at the door awakened them. It felt nice, she had to admit. Secure. Even if it was a false sense of security—and lord knows it was—there was something to be said for having a strong pair of arms around you. Or even a not-so-strong pair like Charley’s.

But it was moot, since she didn’t have it anymore. Charley had leapt up, shooting from a deep sleep to fully awake like toast from a toaster. He’d said nothing about how they’d found themselves, and she’d gone along with his silence. Just as well not to add one more complication to a situation that was already, not to put too fine a point on it, a goddamn mess.

While she splashed some cold water on her face and gargled a mouthful of Listerine in the little bathroom across the hall, Tricia tried to decide whether getting ninety minutes of sleep was a blessing or a curse. She felt less sore but more groggy. Take your pick.

“If anyone asks, Mike,” Charley was saying when she returned from the bathroom, “you haven’t seen us. That’s for your sake, not ours. Well, not just ours, anyway.”

“That’s okay,” Mike said. “You know me. I never see anything. It’s how I stay in business.”

“Good man.”

“How do you know him?” Tricia asked, when they were down on the sidewalk again.

“Who? Mike? He’s an old, old friend. Known him longer than...well, probably longer than anyone. We were in reform school together.”

“Reform school?”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” Charley said. “Bet you never would’ve guessed I was in reform school.”

“No, actually I would have guessed that,” Tricia said. “I just wouldn’t have guessed you had any old friends.”

“Ouch,” Charley said. “You’d think you’d be nicer to me after we spent the night together.”

“We didn’t spend the night, we spent ninety minutes.”

“Still and all,” Charley said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out an apple and something wrapped in a napkin. He held the apple out to her. “A present from Mike.” She took it. He unwrapped the last remaining bites of his sandwich. “So, where are we meeting this friend of yours?”

Through a mouthful of Granny Smith she said, “The Stars Club.”

“That’s funny,” Charley said, “it almost sounded like you said ‘The Stars Club.’ ”

She swallowed. “I did. Heaven will meet us there after the last match ends. She works there nights.”

Charley stopped walking. “Are you out of your mind? Tricia, we can’t go there. Nicolazzo owns the place. He could be there, for all we know. And even if he’s not, he’s certainly got people there, they know what you look like, they’ll recognize you as soon as you walk up to the front door.”

“So we won’t go to the front door,” Tricia said, thinking of Erin saying, There have got to be at least three exits from this building, maybe more. Three ways out meant three ways in.

She walked on for a few steps, saw Charley still standing where she’d left him. “You coming? Or are you leaving me to do it alone? Because I will. Come or don’t, it’s up to you, but I’m going.” She didn’t wait for an answer, just walked off, and it took half a block before Charley caught up with her.

“Damn it, Tricia, I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“You mean you don’t want you to get hurt,” Tricia said.

“That, too.”

“Well, I don’t see that we have a choice, Charley. We need to get Coral and Erin, and we need weapons to do that, and the one person who can give us what we need is at the Stars Club. So that’s where we’re going.”

They walked the rest of the way in silence. Charley threw out the napkin when he’d finished his sandwich and Tricia did the same with the apple core a block later. Empty-handed, they made their way to the rear of the building the Stars Club was located in. They searched along the unlighted brick wall for the outlines of a service entrance and did find one metal door, but it was locked. There were two narrow windows, but both were covered with formidable iron grillwork so that even if opening them had been possible it would have been no use.

Rounding the corner, they saw a side door swing open and ducked back into the shadows as a group of people spilled out. At least two of them looked like fighters, taller and bulkier than the rest and muscular even under their coats. The rest looked like trainers, managers, miscellaneous hangers-on. There was lots of laughter and high-spirited talk about what after-hours bar would still be serving at 2AM, and then some about how it wasn’t really 2AM yet, was it, and how no, it wasn’t, but it would be by the time they made it to the nearest bar. As the last of them exited the building, the door slowly began to swing shut.

“We’ve got to—” Tricia started to say, then realized she wasn’t saying it to anyone, since Charley wasn’t beside her any longer.

She saw him, then, darting out into the midst of the little crowd. “Gents! Gents! Coming through!” He patted one of the big men on the back. “Hey, nice work tonight. Nice work. Give it to him, right?” He caught the closing door with one hand before it could shut. “Is Barney in there? Never mind, I’ll find him.” And before anyone could say anything he was inside and had pulled the door closed behind him.

“Barney?” one of the men asked. “Who’s Barney?” Another shrugged and a third stepped out into the empty street with an arm upraised to hail a cab. When none came, the lot of them shuffled in a group toward the corner where Tricia was standing. She backed up into an alcove, hoping the shadow would cover her.

“Hey, look what we’ve got here,” one of the fighters said and pointed toward her as they passed. “Looking for company, honey?”

“Come on, bruiser,” one of the smaller types said, and Tricia realized with a start that it was the janitor, the one with the squint. “Keep it in your pants.” She pressed her back hard against the wall, her chin against her chest. He looked right at her, tipped his hat in her direction. “Sorry, sister, he didn’t mean nothing.”

Thank god for myopia, she thought.

When the last of them had gone and the sound of their loud conversation had dwindled in the distance, Tricia ducked out of the alcove and sprinted to the side door where Charley had gone in. She knocked. “Open up,” she said, “it’s—”

The door opened and Charley pulled her inside, a finger to his lips. They were at the top of a staircase and Charley led her down to its foot.

From somewhere not too far away, she heard a punch land and the sound of a tired crowd that could barely rouse itself from its torpor to cheer. Another punch landed, and another, and then came a heavier sound, a body hitting the canvas. “Huh-one! Aaa-two! Thuh-ree!” the ref counted, but he got no further than the ‘F’ in “Four” before the felled fighter apparently righted himself. The crowd mumbled a desultory blend of approval and disdain. Then a bell rang and there were scattered groans from people in the audience who wanted the fight to be over, already.

Charley pulled Tricia down the long, T-shaped corridor. Though all but one of the ceiling lights were off now, she recognized it from before: they were behind the arena, near the changing rooms. She had to figure the cleaning crew would be based somewhere around here. But it was a big place. Hell, there were other floors entirely. Maybe they stashed the cleaning crew on one of those.

“So?” Charley whispered in her ear. “Where’s your friend?”

Then he stiffened and stepped away from her slowly, his arms rising, palms out. “Hold on,” he said, “don’t shoot, I’m not armed.”

“Of course you’re not,” Heaven said, stepping out of the shadows. She had a gun pressed between Charley’s shoulderblades and she held it there while she steered him over to face the wall. “That’s why you’re here. Is this the person helping you?” she asked Tricia.

“Yes,” Tricia said.

“You might want to reconsider,” Heaven said, “just how much help he’s likely to be.”

“You think you could put the gun down now?” Charley said, but she didn’t. Tricia saw it was the Luger, the gun that had killed Mitch.

“If I could get the drop on you so easily, the people who have Colleen will, too. They’re professionals. I’m just someone who knows how to take care of myself.” She finally took the gun away from Charley’s spine, lowered it. “You don’t seem to be either.”

“We’ve done okay so far,” Charley said, bristling.

“Heaven,” Tricia said, “thank you for coming. Did you bring both of them?”

Heaven nodded and took the other gun out from the pocket of the windbreaker she was wearing. She handed both guns to Tricia. They were heavier than Tricia expected.

“They’re fully loaded,” Heaven said. “But when they’re done, they’re done. That’s all the bullets I had.”

“Thank you,” Tricia said. “I can’t tell you—”

“Don’t tell me. Just go. I can’t be seen with you.”

“Who’s with Artie now?” Tricia said.

“Malwa. A Ukrainian girl. He’ll be fine. Now, go.”

“No,” said a deep voice from further down the corridor, “you stay right where you are.” A hulking shape moved toward them. The gun held in one of his hands came into view before his face did, but eventually his face followed.

“Bruno,” Tricia said.

“Drop the guns,” Bruno said. “The boss said to bring you in alive if I can, but I can shoot you if I need to.”

“Kill him,” Heaven said. “That’s what they’re for—use them!”

“Quiet,” Bruno said, and his rumbling bass voice made the word sound like a commandment. “Now put the guns down.”

“You, too, son,” said a nasal voice from the other end of the corridor, where (Tricia saw, turning) several men were clattering down the stairs she and Charley had used just minutes before. “Drop it. You too, Borden. You’re all under arrest.”

And as this new figure stepped from darkness into light Tricia saw it was O’Malley, his nose bandaged and his face bruised. He had his police service revolver outstretched and two patrolmen behind him had theirs out, too.

“I don’t even have a gun,” Charley said.

“Well, put down whatever you’ve got, all of you.”

Tricia lowered her hands and bent to put the guns on the floor. Bruno seemed to be weighing his options.

From the other side of the wall, then, the bell sounded and a second later a massive punch connected. The crowd, roused from its stupor, roared; you could hear chairs tip over as people rose to their feet.

And Tricia took the opportunity to raise one of the guns she’d been about to put down and, aiming well over everyone’s heads, fired it.

She’d only meant it as a distraction, a warning shot, a ploy out of sheer desperation; she couldn’t have hit the ceiling light if she’d aimed at it, not in a million years. But she hadn’t aimed at it and now it winked out with a tinkle of shattering glass.

Hearing the gunshot, the audience screamed and stampeded; from the ring came the sound of the bell being rung repeatedly in a futile effort to restore order.

From somewhere in the darkness, O’Malley shouted, “Nobody move!”

Someone grabbed Tricia’s arm and in the chaos she didn’t know if it was friend or foe until Charley said, his breath warm in her ear, “This way.”

She ran beside him down what she guessed was the middle branch of the ‘T’, one gun in each fist, her legs aching and her breath short.

“Do you know where we’re going?” she gasped.

“Nope,” Charley said.

This arm of the corridor dead-ended at a doorway and, barreling through it, they almost toppled down the stairway just inside. They were in the basement, but apparently the place had a sub-basement, since the barely illuminated steps were inviting them further down.

Charley slammed the door behind them and locked it. Instants later, they heard the knob rattle and a fist pound against the door’s surface. Charley held out his hand for one of the guns and Tricia passed him the Luger. He fired a round into the door below the knob, scaring off the person on the other side at least for a moment and maybe—Tricia hoped—jamming the lock mechanism in the bargain.

Of course, while that might keep their pursuers out it also left them only one way to go, since this room was where the stairs began. There was no up—only down. Which struck Tricia as an apt metaphor for their entire situation.

Side by side, guns held tightly in their sweating fists, they started to descend.

26.

Grave Descend

The stairs turned twice at little square landings, but there were no doors at either, no way to go but further down. The only light came from low-wattage bulbs hanging overhead in metal cages, and few enough of them that there were stretches where Tricia couldn’t see a thing. In an act of what she first thought of as unaccountable bravery Charley led the way, walking in front of her into the unknown; but then she thought about the known they were walking away from and his eagerness made more sense.

“Do you see anything?” she said.

“Sh,” he said.

In the faintest whisper she could manage she said, “Well? Do you?”

“No.”

“Be careful,” she said.

“That’s good advice,” he muttered. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

He stopped suddenly and she collided with his back. The gun fortunately didn’t go off.

“Door,” he whispered.

“Can you open it?”

She heard a knob turn. Charley leaned into the door with his shoulder, gently eased it open.

Past it, the light was slightly better, but only slightly. A long tunnel extended perhaps twenty yards before curving out of sight. It looked a little like a subway tunnel except for the absence of rails along the bottom. Instead the ground looked to be dirt—hard-packed earth, uneven and pitted, as though dug by hand.

They stepped inside, closed the door behind them, and Charley swung a metal bar down to latch it shut.

“What is this?” Tricia said. “An old bootlegging tunnel? Some sort of secret escape tunnel?”

“You know something,” Charley said, “you read too many books.”

“Well what do you think it is?”

“Oh, I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying you read too many books.” He started off down the tunnel and she followed.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

He crept cautiously through the tunnel’s curve, gun held high, finger tight on the trigger. They came out into another straight stretch. There was no one in sight, but he didn’t lower the gun. “You say ‘bootlegging tunnel’ like it’s something romantic. It’s not romantic. It’s ugly. It’s people stealing from each other, cutting each other’s throats. There are probably people buried down here, you know—nice romantic bootleggers who fell out of favor with Uncle Nick.” He kicked at the dirt underfoot. “We’re probably walking on their graves.”

“That’s horrible.”

“It’s the real world, kid. It’s not like you read about in paperbacks.”

“You mean like the ones you publish, Charley?”

“I mean like the one you wrote,” he said. “Bang-bang stuff, where the blood all washes off by the final scene and the bad guys all wear black.”

“You liked it well enough when I wrote it,” Tricia said.

“Sure. I just don’t like living the real-world version.”

“You think I do?”

They walked on at as fast a pace as they could manage, the tunnel stretching out more or less endlessly in front of them.

“I’m sorry, Charley,” Tricia said. “Okay? I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have written the book.”

“Ah, hell,” Charley said. “I shouldn’t have asked you to.”

“You didn’t ask me to make things up.”

“No,” Charley said. “But all you did was make them up. I’m the one that published it.”

“You thought it was all true,” Tricia said.

“And that makes it better? Would you tell me what the hell I was thinking, deciding to publish the actual secrets of an actual mobster?”

“That you’d sell a lot of books.”

“Yep. That’s what I was thinking, all right.”

“And you will,” Tricia said.

“Maybe the profits will pay for a nice headstone,” Charley said.

“Only if we get out of this tunnel,” Tricia said. “They bury us down here, we don’t get a headstone.”

They both walked faster after that.

By the time they reached the far end of the tunnel, Tricia figured they must have walked a good quarter of a mile, maybe more. How anyone had been able to dig a tunnel under the streets of Manhattan that ran at least five blocks she couldn’t fathom. Unless this was a much older tunnel even than Prohibition—maybe, she thought, the tunnel came first and the buildings were built around it.

The room at the far end had wooden crates stacked against the walls and a folding card table in the center. It had no chairs and no people, though, and the one door in the room was closed and barred. The question was what they’d find when they opened it.

“They know we’re here,” Charley said. “They must. There’s nowhere else we can be. The only thing we can hope is that we made it faster than they could because they were busy dealing with the cops.”

“And that none of them had the chance to telephone ahead,” Tricia said, “to tell someone to be here when we came out.”

“Yeah,” Charley said. “That, too.”

He hesitated, counted three, two, one with his fingers, and in a rush of movement raised the metal bar, pulled the door open, and stepped through it gun-first. There was no one on the other side.

“Well, that’s a relief,” he said.

“We’re not out yet.”

They raced up the staircase they found, cousin to the one in the basement of the Stars Club. At the top another door waited. When Charley started the bit with his fingers again, Tricia just pushed it open and walked out into the basement of the Sun.

Off to one side she saw the freight elevator and two of the fabric-sided carts the maintenance staff used to wheel supplies in and out—the same sort she’d had her unnamed thief use to escape with the loot in her book. The same sort the real thief had used, too, apparently.

She heard sounds from the loading dock outside: running feet, then hands at the metal gate, trying to raise it. Tricia went to the freight elevator door, banged on it with the flat of her palm. From the loading dock came the rattle of a padlock. “Come on, come on,” came a muffled voice. “Who has a key?”

Tricia rapped on the elevator door again, kept pounding until it slid open. The operator stuck his head out, barking, “What are you doing, banging away—”

She put her gun in his face and he quieted down. When he saw Charley leveling a gun at him too, he meekly put his hands up.

“I were you, I wouldn’t rob this place,” he said. “We got hit just a month ago and the people in charge are out for blood.”

“We’re not here to rob the place,” Tricia said. “Just take us upstairs.”

Out on the loading dock, a gunshot went off like a cherry bomb and what Tricia had to assume were padlock fragments rained against the metal gate.

She stepped into the elevator. “Up.”

The operator pulled the door closed and worked the lever to start the car. Heavy chains clanked overhead and they started to rise.

“How far?” he said.

“All the way,” Tricia said.

“Is that smart?” Charley said. “Why not just go to the lobby?”

“Because it’s almost two AM, Charley,” Tricia said, “and at two AM people from Nicolazzo’s other clubs start showing up in the lobby, delivering the night’s take. Some of them are probably there already. With armed bodyguards. Not to mention the man in the security booth out front.”

“But if we go up to the club,” Charley said, “how are we going to get out...?”

Tricia watched the little metal arrow above the door travel to the end of its arc. “What, you didn’t read my book?”

At the top floor, they left the operator tied hand and foot with his belt and Charley’s necktie; a handkerchief they found in the man’s back pocket served for a gag. They turned the elevator off. Let the boys in the basement holler for it. That’d buy a few minutes at least.

They followed the hallway to a pair of swinging doors and pushed through, finding themselves in the kitchen, where a sloe-eyed saxophonist sat nuzzling a tall glass of something amber. A woman setting dishes in one of the sinks looked up when they entered: Cecilia, still wearing her costume from their dance number, which she’d presumably had to turn into a solo. “Trixie! What happened to you? Where were you?”

“It’s a long story, Cecilia,” Tricia said, hurrying past, “I’m sorry I let you down tonight.”

“Robbie didn’t show up either. Do you know where he is?”

Probably still in the trunk of Mitch’s car, wherever that was. “No,” Tricia said. “Listen, we’ve got to go. If anyone asks, you didn’t see us. It’s for your own good, trust me.” She realized as she said it that it was the same thing Charley had told Mike. Well, it was doubly true for her. Cecilia certainly didn’t need a ‘ZN’ added to her cheek.

“Will you be here tomorrow?” Cecilia asked.

“I don’t think so,” Tricia called over her shoulder.

“That lady’s sure in a hurry,” the saxophonist said to no one in particular.

They burst through the door to the storeroom, rushed down the crowded aisle between two tall metal shelves. The window at the end was closed; the glass was unbroken. Tricia tried to open it but couldn’t. “Charley, you try,” Tricia said.

“I’m not climbing eleven stories down the side of a building,” Charley said.

“Then open the window so I can,” Tricia said. “And when he gets here, say hello to Uncle Nick for me.”

Charley gave her a murderous stare, spat on each of his palms, planted his feet and tried to wrench the window up. When his first try failed, he gave two more heaves, grimacing furiously each time. The third, true to form, was the charm. Tricia, meanwhile, slipped the gun into the pocket of her dress, next to the box of photos. It was a tight fit, even though she’d kept the smaller of the guns for herself.

“Okay.” She stuck her head out the window, looked down, wished she hadn’t. Not that she could see much in the dead of night, but the little she could see didn’t make her want to climb out on the window ledge.

She climbed out on the window ledge.

Charley gripped her legs with both hands. Holding on tight to the window frame with her left hand, she fished for the rain gutter with her right. Her fingertips brushed it twice before she was able to get a good grip.

“Okay,” she said. “Let go.”

“You sure?” Charley said. He sounded dubious.

“Yes.” Stretching out one leg to the side, she found the nearest of the metal brackets that anchored the pipe to the wall and when she felt reasonably secure putting her weight on it, she brought her other hand and leg over.

“Nothing to it,” she said, or tried to, but her teeth were chattering too much and she gave up.

“You think it can hold both of us at once?” Charley said.

She would’ve shrugged but didn’t want to chance it. Instead, she started carefully inching her right leg along the pipe, feeling for the next bracket down. It was too far beneath her, especially with her legs constrained by the way she was dressed. (Slacks, she thought. Why couldn’t I have worn a nice pair of slacks?) But she knew the bracket was there, just inches below her toes. So holding tight to the pipe with both hands and both knees and thinking of all the trees she’d climbed as young girl in Aberdeen, she let herself slide slowly—slowly!—down to the bracket. She rested there for a moment, flexed her fingers slightly, then tightened her grip and let herself down to the next one.

As she went, she kept her eyes focused on the bricks immediately before her. This was about feeling her way, not seeing where she was going. Slide; stop. Slide; stop.

Down had to be easier than up, at least. That’s what she kept telling herself. But her hands had already started to hurt. Her chest, too, from tension and the drumbeat of her racing heart. She chanced a look up, saw Charley’s legs and posterior a few feet above her. He was on the pipe too, now. Once again she found herself with nowhere to go but down.

I’ll never tell another lie as long as I live. I swear it. I’ll never write another book about gangsters. Only friendly, happy subjects, like trips to the beach and picking flowers. I promise. Just let me not die here in this airshaft. Let me make it down. Please.

Slide. Stop. Deep breath. Slide. Stop.

“You know something?” Charley’s voice was weak; she imagined she could hear his teeth chattering too. “It’s not eleven floors.” He let himself down to the next bracket above her head, made sure of his footing. “It’s only ten.”

“What?” Tricia managed to say.

“We only have to make it to the roof of that news peddler’s place,” Charley said. “That’s the second floor. So we’re only going ten floors, not eleven. And,” he added with a hopeful tone, “a fall from just one floor up probably wouldn’t kill us. So it’s really only nine that we have to worry about. And,” he said, “we must be at least halfway there already.”

“Charley,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Shut up and climb.”

Two stories later, Tricia lost her grip. Her left hand, sweaty and tired, slipped off the pipe. She felt herself tilting backwards, her feet losing their purchase on the bracket. Desperately, she tried to wedge her entire right arm between the pipe and the wall, but thin as it was, it wouldn’t fit. She scrabbled with her feet, tried to hold on with just one hand, but found herself falling. She meant to scream, but somehow nothing came out, and as she fell she only had time to think, So, this is it.

Then she hit, and though the breath was badly knocked out of her, she was somewhat astonished to find that the life wasn’t. She lay where she’d landed, flat on her back, just eight or nine feet below where she’d lost hold of the pipe.

“Tricia!” Charley called. “What happened? Are you okay?” When she didn’t answer, he looked down. “Oh, thank god.” He quickly slid the rest of the way to the bottom. “You see? We were more than halfway.”

Looking up at him from where she lay, she nodded very slightly and concentrated on breathing in and out.

“Come on,” Charley said, inching over to the chicken wire-laced window above the toilet. “It looks like there’s a light on.”

27.

The Peddler

Tricia forced herself to get up, brushed off her hands and the seat of her dress, which was smeared now with god only knew what. The smell here was dismal, and though she’d made up the rat for the chapter in the book, she didn’t doubt that there were various sorts of vermin here, biding their time in the darkness.

While Charley pried open the window and let himself down, Tricia checked her pocket. The gun and the photos were still there. The gun hadn’t even gone off and shot her in the thigh, and for that small miracle she was thankful. She limped over to the skylight, where Charley’s arms were sticking out, reaching up for her. She let him lower her down, and they stood together in the tiny bathroom.

There was a light on, not here in this little closet of a room, but outside—you could see it leaking through around the door. Tricia tried to remember, from her many nights at the Sun, whether she’d ever seen this place open at 2AM—she didn’t think so. How many people could possibly want a newspaper or a coffee at 2AM?

There was nothing to do about it, though. They couldn’t stay in here much longer. For one thing, their entrance had probably been heard. And even if it hadn’t, if there were people outside someone would eventually come in to use the toilet, and then what would they say?

Charley grabbed a handful of the coarse brown paper towels the owner had set out and, wiping his hands, pushed the door open.

“Gentlemen,” he said. Tricia followed him out. There were two men in the small space, a heavyset character, gray at the temples, sitting at the counter with a mug in front of him, and a skinny one standing behind it, wearing his usual canvas apron, the pocket in front loaded down with coins. The door to the street was closed, a shade drawn over the glass. Charley seemed to be deciding, for a moment, whether to bolt or stay—were they safer in here or out on the sidewalk? Finally he went to one of the two empty stools, motioned Tricia to the other.

The men stared at them. They both seemed to have been caught in mid-sentence.

“Jerry,” Tricia said to the man in the apron, “this is my friend Charley. Charley, Jerry. Jerry’s always very nice to me any time I come in.”

“How’d you get in there, Trixie?” Jerry said nervously. “You weren’t there ten minutes ago.”

Tricia shrugged. There was no good answer, and why give a bad one?

“You don’t mind,” Charley said, “we’d both do well with a cup of coffee.” He dug a few coins out of his pocket, dropped them on the counter.

“Actually,” Jerry said, his eyes darting toward his other customer.

“Actually,” the customer said, turning on his stool to face them, “we were transacting some private business, and I don’t like being interrupted.” He reached inside his suit jacket as though to pull out a wallet or change purse, but what he came out with was a gun. And here they were, Tricia and Charley, both of them with their hard-won armament tucked away safely in their pockets.

“Now who are you,” the heavyset man said, “and what were you doing spying on us?”

“Spying?” Charley said. “Nothing of the sort. We were just...well, you know. Using the room.” He bent toward Tricia, kissed her lightly on the neck. Startled, she jumped a little. She felt a blush shoot up her cheeks.

“But how did you get in there?” Jerry said, still stuck on the logistics like a kid working out a magic trick.

“I work next door, on the third floor,” Charley said. “At the big theatrical agency, you know the one I mean. And we just...climbed out the window, came down.”

“Why?” Jerry said. “Why would you want to do it in my bathroom? If you like bathrooms, don’t you have one in your office?”

“It’s not as private,” Charley began, but the man with the gun waved him to silence.

“That’s all right, Jerry,” the man said, “they’re just lying to you. There’s only one reason they’d be here, and you know what it is. Sal’s always liked to keep an eye on me, and I guess he’s gotten suspicious of you, too.”

“She does work for him,” Jerry said. “Told me she’s a dancer.”

“I am a dancer,” Tricia said.

“Sure,” the man with the gun said. “And he’s your partner, and you do your best dancing in toilets. Don’t play me for a sap. What’s Sal paying you to be his eyes and ears?”

“Nothing!” Tricia said.

“So you do it for free? Jerry here charges Sal seventy bucks a month, and half the information he sells him you could get for nothing on the street.” And when Tricia registered surprise, he said, “What? You thought Jerry pays his rent peddling candy and papers at a nickel a throw? You can peddle information for a lot more. More than it’s worth, sometimes.”

“Don’t say that, Mr. B,” Jerry said, “I give good value—”

“We don’t work for Nicolazzo,” Charley said. “We never met him before today.”

“Shut up,” Mr. B said. “The lot of you.” To Charley he said, “Of course you never met him before, the man lives on a goddamn boat. Doesn’t mean you don’t work for him. I work for him. Jerry works for him. We all work for Uncle Nick.” He said it with unconcealed disgust—something Tricia feared meant he had no intention of letting them leave the room alive.

She looked more closely at his face. She’d never seen him before—she was certain of that. But there was something familiar about him and she suddenly realized what it was. “Mr. B,” she said. “Does that stand for Barrone?”

The big man looked over at Jerry. “Listen to that. ‘Does it stand for Barrone?’ You do a fine innocent act, sister. You should be an actress, not a dancer.”

“No, really,” Tricia said, “does it?”

“Why? What are you going to tell me if I say yes?”

“That I’ve got something you’re going to want to see. Or maybe you won’t want to see it, but you ought to.”

“And what’s that?”

“Some pictures,” Tricia said. “Out of Mr. Nicolazzo’s safe.”

The bluff, hectoring expression vanished from the big man’s face. He was deadly serious now. “Where are these pictures?”

“In my pocket,” Tricia said. “I’ll give them to you.”

“Slowly,” he said, and she eased the leather box out of her pocket, slid it to him across the counter.

“You can look at all of them,” Tricia said, “but the one you’ll want to see is the last one.”

“Open it,” he told Jerry, and he kept his gun trained on Tricia and Charley while Jerry lifted off the lid of the box and spread its contents out over the counter.

“Aw, jeez,” Jerry said when he got to the last picture. Mr. B looked down at it. He didn’t say anything, but his hand shook and Tricia wondered whether he was going to shoot them all.

“Mr. Barrone,” Tricia said, “I’m so sorry about Royal. Was he your brother?”

“What are you talking about? I’m Royal Barrone. That’s Frankie. That’s my son.”

“You say you got these from Sal’s safe?” Barrone said.

“I didn’t,” Tricia said, “my sister did. I think you know her—Colleen King?” His eyes narrowed and he nodded as though, bit by bit, he was putting things together. “She told me she found them in the safe after someone else broke in and stole all the money. But Nicolazzo thinks she took the money, too, or at least knows who did, and he’s holding her somewhere in Queens, along with a friend of ours. Charley just got away a few hours ago. I barely got away myself.”

“I see,” Barrone said. He turned to Jerry. “And what do you know about all this?”

Jerry was backing away from the counter, although in the narrow space there wasn’t far for him to go. He was shaking his head, the loose skin under his chin quivering. “Nothing, Mr. B, honest.”

“Don’t give me that, Jerry. You hear everything. You must’ve heard something about this.”

“Sure, I hear things, but half of it’s just talk—”

“How about the other half?”

“Like I was saying before—I hear Sal’s rounding up everyone who might’ve had anything to do with the robbery, no matter how remote. He even grabbed the guy published that book, you know, the one talked about the robbery...” He looked over at Charley. “Word is, this guy took him at Fifty-to-One, walked out the front door. This was a couple of hours ago.”

Charley smiled weakly.

“What about Frankie?” Barrone said. “What do you hear about Frankie?”

“Nothing,” Jerry mumbled.

“Jerry, how much do I pay you? Not Sal—me. How much? Now answer my goddamn question.”

Jerry sounded like the words were being pulled out of him with pincers. “Frankie was asking for more,” he said, “that’s what I hear. More money. And when Sal said no, he threatened to walk. Pictures or no pictures. Said he’d take what he knew to the cops. If he went down, he’d take Sal with him.”

“And why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I didn’t want—I didn’t want you to be mad at me,” Jerry said.

“Goddamn Frankie,” Barrone whispered. “Never listened. Never knew how to keep his mouth shut.” He waved the gun at Charley. “You. Take that gun out of your pocket, slide it over here. Yes, I can see it, I’m not blind. You, too, sister. I’m keeping them and we’re going for a little ride.” Tricia and Charley reluctantly handed over the guns they’d gone to such trouble to obtain.

“You,” Barrone said to Jerry, as he packed the photos back into the box one-handed. “If you ever lie to me again—no, listen. If you ever lie to me again, or hold out on me, I’m going to kill you. Do we understand each other? Right through the head, with this gun here, I’m going to shoot you. If you lie to me. Is that okay with you, Jerry? Yeah?” Jerry was nodding wildly. Yes, absolutely, Mr. B, shoot me, that’s fine.

Barrone dropped the box of photos into his jacket pocket.

“You’re lucky that they’re not spies for Sal, because if they were I’d have to kill all three of you. You’re no use to me, Jerry, if Sal knows about you.”

“He doesn’t,” Jerry said. “I’d never tell no one. Only people know are you, me...and now them, I guess.”

“Oh, we’d never tell anyone either,” Charley said, and Tricia shook her head in agreement. “Why would we? You want it in writing, we’ll—”

“Get up,” Barrone said. He grabbed their guns, waved them toward the door.

Charley and Tricia got up. She glanced back at Jerry, who had a half-apologetic look on his face. Sorry, it said, but better you than me.

Outside, there was a long black limo waiting at the curb.

“Open the door.”

Charley complied.

“Now get in.”

They climbed into the car, found seats along what seemed to be a six-foot-long banquette while Barrone climbed in after them, sat on the shorter crosswise seat at the end. He slammed the door shut. “Eddie,” he called, “take us to Fulton Street.” The car started up.

“Now,” Barrone said, “let’s hear what you know about my brother-in-law.”

28.

Lucky At Cards

It didn’t take long, since Charley didn’t know much and Tricia had decided she’d be a better listener than Frankie and keep her mouth shut.

“You’ve seen the book, right?” Charley said. “Well, that’s what I know. Nothing more, nothing less, just what I read in there.”

“You working with the cops?” Barrone said.

“Pfff.” Charley blew a half-hearted raspberry. “Only if by ‘working with’ you mean ‘wanted for assault and battery by.’ There are two cops wearing bandages because of me, and that’s just the past day’s worth. I have a police record going back to 1950.”

“He does,” Tricia said. “I saw the mug shot.”

“Oh, a mug shot,” Barrone said. “You must be some sort of big-time criminal.”

“I wouldn’t say big time,” Charley said. “But then I wouldn’t say criminal either. I’d just say the cops don’t see the merit in everything I do.”

“Well, that’s the cops for you,” Barrone said. He rotated his gun to point at Tricia. “And you’re Colleen’s sister?” She nodded hopefully. “You know your sister’s been squeezing me for months now?”

Tricia’s face fell. “Squeezing?”

“First she wanted the car,” Barrone said. “Then it was money. Then it was introductions to people I know in the fight business. Or else.”

“I’m sure she didn’t mean to—”

“Oh, she knew exactly what she was doing, and she meant every word.”

“I think you’re wrong, Mr. Barrone. My sister’s a good person. She’s not some sort of...blackmailer.”

“Some sort of blackmailer is exactly what she is.” The gun rotated back to Charley. “And you. Did you really take Sal at Fifty-to-One?”

“We played a hand,” Charley said. “I got lucky.”

“I don’t buy that. No one gets lucky at Fifty-to-One.”

“One in fifty people should,” Charley said. “If you think about it.”

“You don’t leave something like that to luck,” Barrone said, “not when your life’s at stake. If you beat him at his game, you had a way to beat him. What’s the trick?”

“No trick,” Charley said.

“What’s the goddamn trick?”

“No trick,” Charley insisted.

“My son,” Barrone said, “hasn’t been seen for a month. Now I find out he’s dead. The man who killed him likes playing an insane little game with his enemies that I’ve never heard of anyone surviving—except you. The way things are going, I may find myself playing that game before too much longer, and if there’s a way to beat it, I want to know what it is.” As he spoke, Barrone dug into a little well in the armrest beside him, dropped one item after another on the seat—a balled-up handkerchief, a couple of cellophane-wrapped hard candies, a corkscrew. Finally he came up with a pack of cards. “Now show me how the hell you did it,” he said.

“I wish I could,” Charley said. “Believe me, nothing would make me happier. But I can’t.”

“How about this,” Barrone said, flicking the top card off the pack with his thumb. It landed on the seat next to him. Four of clubs. “Tell me what the next card is or I’ll blow your girlfriend’s brains out.”

Tricia blanched as Barrone’s gun swung toward her once more. The barrel gaped between her eyes. Such a big opening for such a small fistful of metal. She wanted to run, but where? She couldn’t even make it to the door, never mind through it, before he could pull the trigger.

“Her?” Charley said, affecting a desperate little laugh. “She’s not my girlfriend. She’s just some girl who came to audition today. We’re casting for the new Comden and Green revue—”

“—and you take all the girls who come in for auditions to the toilet for a little fun.”

“Absolutely. Every one I can,” Charley said. “Wouldn’t you? Love ‘em and leave ‘em, that’s me.”

“Nice try,” Barrone said. “But I saw her face when you kissed her. I see your face now. She’s not just ‘some girl’ to you.” He cocked the gun. “So I say again, name the next card, or I’ll ventilate her.”

“Charley!” Tricia said.

“All right,” Charley said. “All right. I’ll tell you. The cards we were playing with were marked—a mechanic’s deck. I had them on me when Nicolazzo grabbed me. I was just lucky he used my cards instead of a deck of his own. That’s the big secret. Now leave her alone. Shoot me if you’ve got to shoot somebody.”

“Okay,” Barrone said, swinging his gun around.

“No, wait, wait—I said ‘if.’ If you have to shoot somebody.” Charley put up his hands as though they might repel bullets. “But why would you have to shoot anybody? Least of all us. You could get life for that, if they didn’t put you in the chair. We’re not worth it.”

“That’s a point,” Barrone said.

“We’re not even worth the stain on the upholstery,” Charley said.

“That’s a point, too,” Barrone said.

“We’re not even worth the bullets it would take,” Charley said.

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Barrone said. “You’re worth the bullets.”

“The point is,” Charley said, “the person you really want is Nicolazzo, right? Well, that’s just fine with us—we don’t have any love for the man ourselves. In fact, we were getting ready to go after him—it’s what we got the guns for, the ones you took away from us. If you want to do something smart, why not let us finish what we started? Give us back the guns and we’ll get rid of him for you.”

Tricia gave him the sort of look you’d give to a relative who’d suddenly proposed skinny-dipping in the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel.

“You?” Barrone said. “With your mug shot and your marked cards and your fumbling around in toilets? Sal would eat you for breakfast.”

“Yeah? Seems to me he had the chance and here we are, still uneaten.”

“You said yourself, you got lucky.”

“So maybe we’ll get lucky again,” Charley said. “Or maybe not, maybe we’ll fail, but if so you’re no worse off—if he kills us we’re just as dead as if you did it, and at least that way it’s one less pair of murders you have to answer for.”

“What if he doesn’t kill you? What if he captures you, makes you talk, and you tell him about me to save your rotten life?”

“You think he’d believe us?” Charley said. “Or do you think he’d believe we were just making things up to save our rotten lives?”

Baronne seemed to be mulling it over. His finger was still on the trigger, though.

“And that’s if we fail,” Charley said. “But maybe we won’t fail. Maybe we’ll succeed. Right? It could happen. And then...”

“And then what?”

“And then whatever you want,” Charley said. “You can move up, take his place. You can stop being a lackey, running a tenth-rate used car lot while he’s hobnobbing with stars at swanky nightclubs. You’re the man’s brother-in-law, aren’t you? You’re married to his sister. When do you get what you’re due? Well, we can help you get it. But only,” Charley said, emphasizing the critical point, “if you don’t shoot us.”

Barrone thought about it for a while, during which time Tricia felt sweat running down her back and sides in rivulets. She’d never been this frightened in her life, not even when she’d been climbing down the rain gutter from twelve stories up. The widening stains on Charley’s shirt suggested he was feeling some anxiety himself.

After letting them stew a while, Barrone lowered his gun, released the hammer. “You’d have made a good salesman, Borden. If you do things half as well as you talk about them, maybe you’ve got a chance.” He shook his head. “Maybe. But never forget you’re one wrong step away from a bullet in the back.”

“Trust me,” Charley said, “that’s not the sort of thing I’m likely to forget.”

In the seat beside him, Tricia started breathing again.

Barrone sat back, slipped his gun inside his jacket. “Marked cards,” he said. “You little sneak.” He waved the deck at Charley. “Want to see how you would’ve done with a straight deck?”

Charley said, “Not really.”

“Come on,” Barrone said. “Just for a lark.”

“Fine,” Charley said, staring at the back of the topmost card. “Six of diamonds.”

Barrone thumbed the card in Charley’s direction. “Let’s see.”

Charley reached out, turned the card over. Two of spades.

“You’re a lucky man,” Barrone said.

“Sometimes,” Charley said. “Just not at cards.”

29.

Robbie’s Wife

The car pulled to a stop at Fulton Street, near where the Fish Market would be opening for business in just a few hours. Already there were trucks pulling in and offloading crates that stank of fresh catches and seawater. The driver came around and opened the door. Barrone gestured for them to get out first. He followed, wincing as he got to his feet. He was not a young man and was carrying a lot of weight on those not-young knees.

“Come upstairs,” he said.

“If it’s all the same to you,” Charley said, “we’d just as soon be on our way—”

“I said come upstairs,” Barrone said.

“Why?”

“You want your guns back, for one thing, and I’m not handing them to you loaded. Apart from that—have you gotten a look at yourself?” He grabbed hold of the back of Charley’s neck, steered him over to one of the limo’s side-view mirrors. Tricia followed. Charley fingered the stubble on his chin as though surprised to discover it there. “You can’t go after Sal looking like a bum and smelling worse—not if you want to have a serious chance to get close to him. You need a bath, you need a shave. And you need some sleep—look at your eyes. I’ve seen smaller bags on a Pullman car.” He snapped his fingers at the driver, a young man who looked like he’d grow up to be Barrone’s shape if he lived long enough. “Eddie, clear out the room on the top floor.” The driver nodded, headed off.

“Mr. Barrone,” Tricia said, “it isn’t that I’m not grateful—I’d dearly love a good night’s sleep. But my sister’s in trouble now. We can’t just leave her in Nicolazzo’s hands while we lie down and take a nap. We’ve lost enough time as it is.”

“All due respect—Trixie, is it?” Barrone said. “If Sal wanted Colleen dead, she’s dead already. If she’s alive now, she’ll still be alive in five, six hours.”

“You sure it’s not that you’d prefer her dead,” Tricia said, “because she’s been squeezing you?”

“What, for a few bucks and a car? I don’t like it, but I don’t want her dead for it.” Barrone waved an arm at her. “Anyway, look at you. You’d be no use to her the way you are now. You can barely stand up.”

It was true enough. She was listing like a tree in loose soil.

“Now for the last time,” Barrone said. “Come upstairs. Or would you rather do it at gunpoint?”

“No, no,” Charley said. “We’ll come.”

Inside, the building was spare, obviously less a home than a headquarters. There was a kitchen on the first floor, but it was full of burly men with empty shoulder holsters, some downing beers as they read the newspaper, some running oil-stained cloths through the pulled-apart mechanisms of their guns. The rooms Tricia and Charley passed as they climbed the stairs were under-furnished—a sectional sofa in one corner, a bare table in another. There was, Tricia thought, no woman’s touch; which made sense, since as far as she could see, there were no women.

Barrone stopped climbing after two floors. He leaned on the banister and watched as they continued without him. “Go ahead,” he said. “There’s a bathroom on the top floor. Eddie should’ve put out a razor for you. We’ll talk strategy in the morning.”

When he’d dropped out of sight at last, Tricia leaned in close to Charley and whispered. “What the hell are we doing? We’re working for him now?”

“We’re breathing,” Charley said. “One thing at a time.”

“But he expects us to kill Nicolazzo for him. We can’t do that!”

“You don’t know what you can do till you try,” Charley said.

Tricia’s feet felt like stones and her head felt even heavier. Just keeping her eyelids open was an effort. “We’re not killers, Charley,” she said. “I’m not, anyway.”

“The police think you are.”

“So I might as well be? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m too tired to think.”

They turned the last corner and made their way up the final half-flight of stairs. The floor they came out on was a little better decorated than downstairs, with floral wallpaper and moldings up by the stamped-tin ceiling. An open door at one end of the short corridor led to a bathroom and Tricia could hear water running into a tub. Through the door at the other end she saw the corner of a bed. Halfway between two bales of hay and unable to choose, the donkey starved to death. That wouldn’t be her fate. Let Charley take the bath; she’d sleep first.

She staggered into the bedroom. Eddie was there, loaded down with an armful of blankets and stripped-off bed linens, and there was a woman in there, too, loading another few pieces onto the pile. She was tall and thin and looked to be in her middle thirties, with the close-set eyes and narrow axe-blade of a nose that stamped her as one of the Barrone clan. She gave Eddie a little shove toward the door and he headed out with a glance back at her; he seemed a little moony-eyed, Tricia thought.

“Go on,” the woman said, and a few seconds later they heard him tromping down the stairs.

Charley came in quietly beside Tricia. The woman, who’d paid Tricia no attention whatsoever, eyed him up and down with considerably more interest.

“Scruffy, aintcha?” She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. “You’re papa’s new pet? Eddie told me he’d picked up some strays.”

“You’re Mr. Barrone’s daughter?” Tricia said.

“Among other things,” she said, not taking her eyes off Charley.

Tricia scoured her memory for the daughter’s name, the surviving daughter—the dead one was Adelaide, she remembered that. “Renata,” she said. “Right?”

“Points to the little lady,” Renata said—to Charley. “She might win herself a kewpie doll yet.”

“And you’re married to—” Tricia caught herself.

“Robbie Monge, that’s right,” Renata said, brightening. “The famous bandleader. Read about us in Hedda’s column, did you?”

“Among other places,” Tricia said. She didn’t like this woman, she decided. Didn’t like her at all, and wouldn’t have liked her even if she hadn’t been sizing Charley up like a dressmaker eyeing a bolt of satin.

“Why no ring?” Charley said, nodding toward her hand.

She lifted the hand, stared at it as though noticing for the first time the absence of a wedding band. “I wore one for a while,” she said. “It made my finger itch.”

And she tilted her face down to give him an up-from-under stare straight off the cover of Real Confessions.

“Awful nice to have met you,” Tricia said, emphasizing the awful more than the nice. “But we’re pretty tired and we’ve got an early day. Maybe you could let us get some sleep?”

Renata didn’t take her eyes off Charley. “What is she,” Renata asked, “your kid sister? Or just your kid?”

Tricia’s mouth dropped open, but Charley put a hand on her arm before she could say anything. “Mrs. Monge, Trixie’s right, we really do need to get some sleep. If you wouldn’t mind...?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t mind,” Renata said. “I wouldn’t mind at all.” On her way out the door she patted Tricia’s forehead. “Pleasant dreams, honey.”

The door clicked shut behind her.

“What a hussy!” Tricia fumed. “She’s a married woman!”

“Didn’t you tell me she’s a widow?” Charley said.

“Yeah, but she doesn’t know that,” Tricia said.

“How do you know she doesn’t?” Charley said.

“If she does, that’s even worse,” Tricia said. “Her husband’s not even buried yet—”

“Robbie didn’t sound like a prize himself,” Charley said. “Anyway, that’s not the point.”

“Oh? What’s the point, then?”

“The point is she’s Barrone’s daughter, and we might need her help. We certainly don’t need to get into a fight with her.”

“I wouldn’t say a fight’s what she wants to get into with you,” Tricia said. “You might want to check the tub before you climb in.”

Charley wearily slid his suspenders off his shoulders, began undoing his cuffs. “Her cozying up to us isn’t the worst thing that could happen, Tricia.”

“Us? She’s not cozying up to us.”

“So?” Charley said. “One of us is better than neither. We need every advantage we can get.”

He was right, of course—she knew he was right. Still. “Go take your bath,” she said. She pulled off her shoes one by one, threw them at the armchair in the corner. She slung herself backwards across the bed, let her eyes close. “And don’t wake me when you come back.”

“Then move over,” Charley said, “so I won’t have to.”

“I think maybe you should take the chair this time,” she said.

“Swell,” Charley muttered and headed toward the sound of pouring water.

30.

The Vengeful Virgin

When the first rays of sunlight through the blinds prodded her awake, Charley wasn’t in the bed; he wasn’t in the chair either. His shoes were on the floor, next to hers—he’d left the four of them lined up, side by side. She saw his pants draped over the arm of the chair. Her dress, which she’d stripped off and left in a heap on the floor with her underwear, was missing, and in its place was a folded robe. It was too large for her, but she put it on and managed to walk down the hall to the bathroom in it without tripping.

The hallway lights were off and the house was silent. She rapped gently on the bathroom door and prepared to whisper his name, but it swung open under the impact of her knuckles. There was no one inside—but there were her dress and her intimates, hanging from the shower rod and almost dry. Charley’s shirt and undershirt were hanging beside them. She looked at the seat of the dress. The stain from where she’d landed on Jerry’s roof hadn’t come out, not completely, but it was faint enough now that you wouldn’t notice if you didn’t know to look for it; and the smell, at least, was gone.

She got washed at the sink like she’d done for years on cold mornings in Aberdeen: a splash of water, a streak of soap, some more water, vigorous toweling. She brushed her hair back, briefly inspecting the dark roots that had started to show at her scalp. Would she dye it again? If she got out of this mess, would she stay blonde? Or would she go back to the old brown of Aberdeen, quiet and unexciting but safe? It was tempting—to not be Trixie any longer, just Patricia Heverstadt once again, attracting glances as she walked down the street but not bullets. Yet she wondered whether this temptation was like the bargains she’d found herself making while climbing down the rain gutter, the sort you might contemplate in a dire moment but that you’d never go through with in the end.

She pushed the question out of her mind. First things first. Finding Charley (maybe he was in the kitchen, grabbing some breakfast?), finding the guns (would Barrone really let them have them back?), and then finding Nicolazzo and Erin and Coral (the corner of Van Dam and Greenpoint, wasn’t that what Charley had said?).

She pulled the dress on over her head, buttoned it up as far as the missing buttons would permit, drew on her stockings, then padded back toward the bedroom for her shoes. There was one other room on the floor—one other door anyway, halfway down the hall—and she went slowly as she passed it, trying to make as little noise as possible.

She needn’t have bothered. She heard a throaty chuckle from within, a creaking of springs. Then a woman’s voice, coaxing: “C’mon, beautiful. Ain’t you slept enough?” More creaking followed. The people inside weren’t listening to anything going on in the hall.

Tricia moved on. Then stopped dead when she heard a voice, muffled by the door, say, “I really need to go.” It was Charley’s voice.

“What’s the hurry?” Renata asked. “It’s early still.”

“We’ve got a long day coming up,” Charley said.

“That’s not all you’ve got coming up,” she said.

“Renata, let go. Please. Stop that.”

“Oh, but you like it,” she said. “I can tell.”

“I like it fine,” Charley said, “but I need to go.”

“I’ll show you what you need,” Renata said, and whatever response Charley had been about to give was stifled under a barrage of laughter and kisses.

There was a keyhole in the door, but Tricia didn’t stoop to looking through it. She continued on to the bedroom, grabbed her shoes, hesitated, then dug a handful of money out of the pocket of Charley’s pants, transferred it to her own.

You need every advantage you can get? Well, Charley, so do I.

Holding her shoes in one hand, she slipped silently down the stairs. She put the shoes on when she reached the ground floor.

Love ‘em and leave ‘em, that’s me. Every one I can. You certainly couldn’t say the man hadn’t been up front; he told you right out what a creep he was. The problem was, even when he made it clear he was lying you couldn’t believe him.

She remembered Barrone denying it, saying, She’s not just ‘some girl’ to you.

Yeah, well.

She entered the kitchen, empty now except for Eddie, who either was the earliest riser in the house or had stayed up all night. He sat at a circular table with a cardboard cereal box and an empty bowl, plus the pair of guns Barrone had taken from them, the Luger and Heaven’s smaller gun, the one Tricia had been carrying. Two piles of bullets were lying on the tabletop between them.

“Miss,” he said.

“It’s Trixie, Eddie. You can call me Trixie. We’re going to be working together, after all.”

“Okay,” he said. “Trixie.”

“Listen,” she said, thinking, all right, I’ve found Charley, I’ve found the guns, now it’s time to get on with it. She had a brief twinge of remorse, but she stifled it. Coral wasn’t going to have to wait till mister love ’em and leave ’em got around to leaving this one.

“Listen,” she said again. “Renata was asking for you just now.”

“Really?” The poor boy’s eyes lit up.

“Mm-hm. She said to ask you to come up. Just go quietly. And,” Tricia said, “don’t knock. Just let yourself in.”

“Really?”

“Mm-hm.”

He was halfway out of his seat before he looked back at the table. “I don’t know...I don’t think Mr. Barrone would want me to leave you here with the guns, Trixie.”

“Well, I don’t think Renata would want me coming up to the room with you. It sounded like she was looking forward to having some privacy with you.”

“Privacy,” he said.

“Look, the guns are empty, right?” He nodded. “Fine. Then here—” Tricia swept the bullets up in her hands and held them out to Eddie, who cupped his palms to receive them. “Now I can’t do anything. And you can go enjoy yourself.”

Eddie jammed the bullets in his pockets and hastened to the door. “Thanks, Trixie. You’re a pal.”

“Have fun, Eddie,” she said.

When she heard his step on the stairs, Tricia picked up the Luger. She tried loading it with the one bullet she’d managed to hold out, clamped between her palm and the base of her thumb. It didn’t fit, so she grabbed the other gun, tried loading it into that one. It clicked neatly into place.

One bullet wasn’t much. But it would have to be enough.

From upstairs she heard a commotion. Someone was shouting. Doors were opening on other floors. It was time to go.

She hustled to the front door and down the five stone steps to the street.

Subway...subway...she looked around hastily to orient herself then headed off to the west.

I’m coming, Cory, she thought.

And Charley? She thought of him, too, as she went, thought with a little regret of what he’d be facing now at Eddie’s hands, and Renata’s, and Mr. Barrone’s, if he wasn’t able to talk his way out of it. But hell, he’d be able to talk his way out of it. Maybe not before picking up a few bruises, but—

You made your bed, Charley, Tricia thought. I hope she was worth it.

31.

The Wounded and the Slain

She rode the train, rattling and shaking and nearly empty, out to Queens Plaza, where she begged a map from the token booth clerk in the station. She unfolded it and took a minute to find Van Dam Street. It looked like half a mile to get there, another mile or so before it crossed Greenpoint Avenue. She thought about splurging and blowing some of Charley’s money on a taxi, but on a Sunday morning in Queens you were as likely to see a circus caravan pass as an empty cab. She didn’t see either and started walking.

She did pass a small grocery store whose owner was letting down the awning with a long metal hand-crank. She stopped inside and picked up a couple of buttered rolls and a coke—not much of a breakfast, but she wolfed it down and kept going.

In the pocket of her dress, the gun—lighter now, with just the one bullet—felt like a brick, weighing her down. She wondered if she’d actually have the guts to use it. To stand in front of a man, the way Heaven had, the way Nicolazzo had, and end his life with a movement of her hand, a flick of a finger.

If her own life depended on it, she supposed she could, or if Coral’s did. But if it didn’t? Or if it wasn’t clear?

She thought with a shiver of the dead men she’d seen since this began—more in one day than she’d seen in her previous 18 years, if you counted the ones in the photos, and a tie even if you just counted the ones slain before her eyes. And there was a big difference between seeing her father or granddad laid out in their best suits, hair carefully brushed and cheeks touched with makeup, a preacher by their side, the church choir singing hymns, and seeing a man’s blood spill out of him onto the floor. Dead was dead—but the polite, quiet death of a funeral ceremony was worlds apart from the loud report of a gunshot, the acrid tang of powder in the air, or the snick of a blade unfolding and the desperate groan when it met flesh.

She wished she could get it out of her mind, but as she made her way toward Nicolazzo’s hideout the images kept coming came back to her, the dead men and their near cousins, the ones who’d survived the recent events but not unscathed: Stella with her branded cheek; O’Malley with his bandaged face; Clohessy in the alley where Charley had left him, bearing who knew what sort of wound. It frightened her to think of the blood that had been shed, the pain suffered, and all because of her—because of the book she’d written, the men she’d spurred into action. And women, too. Her own sister, a thief. Stella told me about this book she’d seen, Coral had said. That gave me the idea.

She had to make things right. She had to. Somehow.

She reached Van Dam, followed it south toward the huge green sward of Calvary Cemetery. It wasn’t the same size as the mammoth burial plots down by where the artists lived in Brooklyn, not quite; but it was plenty large and it loomed in the distance, a wholly unneeded reminder of mortality. Bring me your dead, it seemed to Tricia to be saying. Bring all you want. We’ve got room for more.

She counted blocks, referred to her map, drew near. When she reached the intersection, she didn’t recognize any of the buildings, but why should she? She’d had a bag over her head coming and going. But in this neighborhood of narrow, wedge-shaped blocks, only one corner could properly be called the corner of Van Dam and Greenpoint, and only one building could properly be said to be on that corner. And it looked about right: There was a front way and a back way in, there was gravel in the rear, and there were several stories, enough to require a staircase with 39 steps. The windows were shuttered from the outside and, where she could see between the shutters, curtained on the inside. As you’d expect—a man who had to smuggle himself ashore in a pickle barrel wouldn’t take any chances with his privacy. There were no sounds coming from the building, which might mean anything or nothing. Tricia couldn’t see any lights on inside, but she wasn’t sure she’d be able to in the daytime even if they were on.

She circled the building, trying to divine the best way in. Front door, back door? Neither seemed great. A half-height window into the cellar held more promise. Using a stick she found on the ground for leverage, Tricia forced the shutters open, then squatted and peered inside. There were curtains here, too, but enough space separated them that she could see a sliver of the room. By angling herself this way and that she could make out that there was no one inside. She tried to open the window, straining the way Charley had at the Sun (only without spitting on her hands first—she didn’t see how that would help). When it didn’t budge, she took out the gun and, holding it by the barrel, swung it against the glass.

The pane cracked and pieces tinkled to the floor inside. Tricia ducked out of sight. A few moments later she cautiously crept back, looked in. There was still no one there. She wormed her arm in through the hole, avoiding the jagged edges, and felt around the frame. Sure enough, the window was locked. She unlocked it. It went up smoothly after that and she dropped through it to the cellar floor.

Glass crunching slightly underfoot, she made her way to the door of the room where she and Coral had been held. “Cory,” she whispered. She tried the knob. The door swung open.

“Cory?”

The room was dark. She groped for the cord to the hanging light and switched it on. Coral wasn’t there; no one was. The bunk in the back was empty.

Was she upstairs? Tricia wondered. Were they all upstairs, putting Coral through some horrible ordeal, trying to get out of her some secret she didn’t possess or information she didn’t know? Tricia listened for some sign that this might be going on. She heard nothing, but it gave her little comfort. They might have gagged her. She might be unconscious. She might, as Barrone had said, already be dead.

Tricia knew she had to find out, had to go upstairs, had to face whatever was waiting for her there. But she was glad for any excuse to put it off, even just for a minute. So she went to the far side of the room, to the bunk where Coral had been sitting when Mitch had shoved Tricia in, the bunk where they’d sat together while Coral told her story. She hunted around the foot of the bunk, felt underneath it, looking for she didn’t know what. A message, she supposed. Some sign that Coral had been here. She knew she’d have tried to leave one for Coral if their positions had been reversed.

Conscious of the time slipping away—someone could come downstairs at any moment, and of course Barrone could also show up at any moment, with or without Charley in tow; they must have figured out by now where she’d gone—Tricia pulled the bunk away from the wall. And there, scratched into the brick with a nail or a stone or in any event something with a sharp edge, were a dozen words made up of ragged, angular, hastily formed letters:

GARAGE 15 ST AVE C

19H GLOVE COMPMT

MORE AT MOON, LCKR22

Tricia pushed the bunk back. More at Moon, Locker 22. ‘Moon’ had to mean Nicolazzo’s club, of course, the dimea-dance place Coral had worked at before she took up boxing. But more what? More photographs? Of whom?

Tricia backed out of the room, held the gun firmly before her, took off the safety, and climbed the stairs. At each landing she spun left and right, gun before her, solitary bullet at the ready, but no one appeared. The building really was completely silent, and dark, and by the time she made it to the top she knew there was a good reason for it.

The place was empty—abandoned. Nicolazzo had hared off to another location, one she couldn’t even begin to guess at. And he’d taken Erin and Coral with him, in whatever condition his interrogations had left them.

At least that was the hopeful possibility. The alternative was that he’d buried them here. That was the big question, really: Were they among the wounded or the slain?

Don’t you touch them, you bastard, Tricia thought as she headed down to the street. Don’t you dare touch them.

It felt more like a prayer than a threat and she kept repeating it to herself as she raced back toward the subway station, putting out of her mind the possibility that maybe he already had.

A block away from Queens Plaza she saw a limo heading toward her, pulling off the lower level of the 59th Street Bridge. Startled, she found herself frozen in place, unable even to turn away, but it passed without slowing, without the man on the other side of the open driver’s-side window even giving her a glance.

She glanced at him, though. Eddie. Sporting what looked, as he sped past, like a black eye.

Charley’s handiwork? she wondered. Or Renata’s?

Tricia heard her train pulling in then and ran for it.

Let Eddie and his passenger discover what she already had, that Nicolazzo was nowhere to be found—that he’d flown the coop, probably as soon as Charley had walked out the door without anything to prevent him from seeing where he was. Let them exercise themselves trying to find him. She had a lead to follow, however tenuous.

Like Gleason used to say, she thought. To the moon, Alice. Straight to the Moon.

32.

Blackmailer

Unlike the Sun, which famously crowned a midtown office building, or the Stars, which filled a two-story bunker of its own near the waterfront, the Moon almost invisibly occupied the second story of a squat Garment District tenement, sandwiched between a buttons-and-trimmings wholesaler on the ground floor and a battery of one- and two-man tailoring shops on the third. There was no nightclub banner flapping from a flagpole here, no doorman in livery to usher you inside (or to keep you out, for that matter). There was a front door and a staircase and, in one of the second floor windows, a neon image winking from full moon to crescent and back again, twenty-four hours a day.

On the sidewalk, wiry men heaved wheeled metal racks loaded down with dresses on hangers, one rack in each hand, while others scurried alongside, lettering tags on the run with swipes of a grease pencil. Even on a Sunday morning, the neighborhood was buzzing, in part to make up for the day many houses lost on Saturday (when the Millinery Center Synagogue on 38th was perhaps the busiest building in the neighborhood) and in part to prepare for the onslaught of orders that would roar in Monday morning.

Tricia picked her way through the chaos, stepping up into doorways or down into the gutter as necessary to allow men in an even greater hurry than she was to pass. She knew where the club was—it was no secret. The Times and the News had both written about it. But she’d never had reason to go herself. It was widely known to be a place only men frequented, and mostly a certain type of man: an older man, perhaps, or one burdened with some minor deformity; the halt, the lame; the shy, the scared, the slow of tongue, the foreign accented; those men whose appetite for female company, in short, exceeded their ability to procure any for themselves absent a fistful of tickets and a roster of women whose job it was to not notice the defects in their dancing partners.

It wasn’t prostitution, though of course you heard stories; and many a feel was copped in the name of close dancing. That Coral had passed her first years in New York working here saddened Tricia. She’d pictured her sister headlining in a rooftop revue, or at least enlivening the chorus, not letting herself be tooled around a dance floor by a succession of sweaty-handed romeos with a buck to spare.

But better that than where she was now. Better a lifetime of sweaty embraces under dim lights than the deadly attentions of a man like Nicolazzo.

Tricia climbed to the second floor, where she found the club’s door wedged open with a doorstop. The music playing sounded languorous and soporific, almost as if the record player were set at too slow a speed. Connie Francis’ voice came on, asking who’s sorry now, and the two women working at the moment went round and round with their charges in time to her plaintive query. Two other women seated on chairs against the wall looked up when Tricia walked in, then looked down again when they saw her. No trade here, just competition.

A man in dungarees and a button-down shirt came over, quickly taking Tricia’s measure as he approached. She recognized him from one of Nicolazzo’s photos—this was Paulie Lips, recognizable at a glance from the prominence not just of his lips but the entire lower portion of his face, which culminated in a shovel-shaped jaw with a darkening shadow of stubble just below the skin.

He had the self-confident walk and attitude of a man in charge and gave the impression of being the manager here. Tricia could see his eyes darting about her person, noting her wrinkled dress, the missing buttons, the perspiration on her forehead and under her arms, the circles under her eyes. A job seeker, he must’ve been thinking; and perhaps if there’d been more business to go around he’d have entertained the notion or at least strung her along, but Tricia could see he was getting ready to send her on her way.

She didn’t give him the chance. “Hey, are you Paulie?” she said. He stopped, looked at her more closely. “My sister used to work here, and she left something she asked me to pick up. In her locker.”

“Oh?” he said, taken aback. “Who’s your sister?”

“Colleen King.”

A smile unfolded on his face but it had all the sincerity of a Halloween mask. “Colleen,” he said. “That would make you Patty, right?” He took her hand and squeezed it. “I guess she mentioned me?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “So, what, you just get into town?” His voice dropped and he edged closer. “Do you need anything? Some money? You look a little...”

“I’m fine,” Tricia said. “I just need to get into my sister’s locker.”

“Actually,” Paulie said, “she doesn’t have a locker here anymore. You have to work here to have a locker, and she doesn’t. Hasn’t for a good long time. Think she’s, ah, boxing now. You know.” He playfully threw a few punches in the air. “Though she still comes by now and again to chew the fat with her old friends. Isn’t that right girls?” The two seated women nodded when he directed the question at them, though it wasn’t clear they knew just what they were agreeing with, or much cared.

“Maybe it’s not her locker, then,” Tricia said, “but it’s a locker, and she told me to come here and empty it out for her. Locker 22?”

Paulie’s smile grew more strained. “She told you that?” he said. “Locker 22?”

“She left me a note,” Tricia said.

“Can I see it?”

“I’m afraid not,” Tricia said. “I don’t have it with me.”

Paulie shook his head in an unconvincing pantomime of helplessness. His palms turned up and his eyebrows rose along with them. “Sorry to say, you got some wires crossed somewhere. The lockers here only go up to 20. Maybe ask your sister to come by, she and I can figure it out—”

“I can’t,” Tricia said. “She’s...not available.”

“Well, when she’s available again, have her call me. We’ll work it out. Maybe the three of us can get together for a drink sometime—”

He must’ve felt the barrel of the gun poking into his gut then, through the fabric of her dress pocket, because his face fell. He looked confused first and then fear crept into his expression. “Are you serious?” he said, his voice low. “You think you can pull a gun on me in my own place?”

“I don’t think anything,” Tricia said. “I’ve done it. Now take me to locker 22, Paulie, or I swear to god you won’t live to hear the end of this song.”

Connie Francis’ voice drawled on in the sudden silence between them.

Could she really do it? Could she pull the trigger in cold blood, leave this man sprawled and dying on his well-worn parquet? She doubted it—not least of all because it would mean using up her only bullet. But she made an effort to keep this from showing on her face. To look at her, you’d have thought her a hardened jailbird.

Paulie bristled with hostility. He was bigger than she was—but the gun more than evened up the sides. “Follow me,” he said and led her through the long, narrow room to a curtained-off section in the back. The walls were lined with lockers and the numbers on them, Tricia saw, went up to 28.

“Are you even her sister?” Paulie asked.

“I don’t see why you’d believe me,” Tricia said, “but I am.”

“And she really told you to come here.”

“She left word I could find something in locker 22.”

“She didn’t tell you what?”

“She didn’t have the time to go into much detail,” Tricia said.

He stopped in front of 22 with one hand on the lock. “Why didn’t she have the time?”

“Just open the locker.”

“What if I told you I don’t have the key?”

“I’d shoot you,” Tricia said, “and take the key out of your pocket.”

“Just asking,” Paulie said. He pulled out a ring of keys, opened the padlock, and stepped aside.

Tricia drew the gun out of her pocket, leveled it at him, used it to shoo him back a few more steps. She opened the locker door without taking her eyes off him, then swiftly shot a glance inside. There were several stacks of papers—mainly letters, it looked like, along with a pile of photographs and a telegram or two.

“What is all this stuff?” Tricia said. “And don’t say you don’t know.”

“Colleen called it her nest egg,” Paulie said.

Tricia reached in, grabbed the first batch of photos off the top, thumbed through them one by one. A couple slipped onto the floor. She didn’t pick them up.

Coral was in most of the pictures, though not all. She was younger in them—these dated back a few years, clearly, maybe to when she’d first come to New York or a little after. She’d been even prettier then and her figure had looked terrific, even in candid shots like these with their bad lighting and blurred portions where one of the subjects had moved as the shutter closed. There was a man in each of the photos, not the same one every time. By and large their figures didn’t look as fine as Coral’s, but like her they seemed not at all bashful about showing them off, at least in what they’d clearly thought was the privacy of a bedroom. They were the sort of photos you could be arrested for taking, or selling, or sending through the mails, and she felt her cheeks reddening as she looked at them. She stuffed them in her pocket, waved the gun at Paulie. “What are you looking at?” she snarled. “You just stay there and don’t move.”

“Calm down, lady,” he said. “I’m not doing anything.”

She reached into the locker again, grabbed a handful of the letters. They were on onionskin, carbon copies of letters whose originals had been written in ballpoint pen.

The handwriting was Coral’s.

She glanced down at the first letter and up again at Paulie, reading it in snatches so she could keep an eye on him.

Dearest Royal—Artie is growing up so quickly! You’d be proud of him. He’ll be a real Barrone man someday—commanding and virile, like his father. But Royal, he needs so much, and money’s so very tight. Even a small amount would help...

She peeled back the top sheet with her thumb, crumpling it slightly.

Robbie, the next one down began. Artie’s growing up so quickly! You’d be proud of him. He’s going to be a real Monge man someday—strong and talented, like his father. He’s a growing boy, though, and needs so much. I hate to ask you to help, but money’s tight...

She waved the letters at Paulie, who looked more miserable than terrified now, like a magician caught with his hand up his sleeve.

“Just how many fathers did this kid have?” Tricia said.

“One,” Paulie said, with a measure of defensiveness in his voice. “And you’re looking at him.”

33.

Songs of Innocence

“You...?”

“Me,” Paulie Lips said. “He’s my kid.” He patted himself on the side of the face and this time the smile that emerged seemed genuine. “If you’d ever seen him, you’d know. He’s got his poppa’s chin. The poor boy.”

“And what was your part in all...this?”

“Someone had to take the pictures,” Paulie said.

“You watched her go to bed with all these other men? With Monge and Barrone?” Tricia said. “The mother of your child?”

“She wasn’t the mother of my child yet. Not in most of them, anyway.”

“How can you live with yourself?” Tricia said. “That’s disgusting.”

His face darkened into a scowl. “Put down the gun and say that.”

“So you’re bigger than me, so what. Doesn’t make it less disgusting.”

“What do you want?” Paulie said. “To stand there and insult me? Well, the gun gives you that privilege. But don’t push me too far. I could take it away from you, you know.”

“You could try,” Tricia said.

They faced each other down. It felt to Tricia like a scene from the circus, the lion tamer in the cage with a tiger on one barrel and a lion on the next and nothing in his hand but a little wooden chair and a whip.

“I’m taking all this stuff with me,” Tricia said. “Colleen wanted me to have it. She’s in bad trouble and must’ve figured it could help. If you care about her at all, you won’t try to stop me.”

“What sort of trouble?”

“Your boss, Nicolazzo,” she said. “You probably heard he was robbed. Hell, maybe you were in on the robbery. Maybe you both were.”

“Uh-uh,” he said. “No way. We’re not thieves.”

“Just blackmailers.”

“That’s right,” Paulie said. “There’s a difference. Being guilty of the one doesn’t mean you’re guilty of the other.”

“Sure,” Tricia said. “You’re the picture of innocence.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Well, someone took three million dollars from Nicolazzo’s safe and he’s decided Colleen knows something about it. Maybe he doesn’t think the distinction between blackmailer and thief is so crystal clear.”

“He wouldn’t know about the blackmail,” Paulie said. “We never tried tapping him.”

“Well, that’s something, anyway. But he’s still holding Colleen.”

“And how will having this stuff help get her out?”

“I don’t know,” Tricia admitted. “But if Colleen thought it would, there must be a reason. Maybe there’s something in here that could be used against Nicolazzo, or something she thinks might point to the real thief. Or at least something that points to where Nicolazzo might have taken her.”

“You don’t even know where she is?”

“Not right this moment, no,” Tricia said. “But I’ll find her.”

Paulie’s stare could’ve cut glass. “You’d better,” he said.

“Does that mean you’re going to help me?”

“It means I’m going to forget you pulled a gun on me,” Paulie said.

“You’ll do more than that,” Tricia said. “Get a bag.”

She left with an old Gladstone bag in one hand, packed with the contents of the locker. The bag shielded the gun in her other hand from view as she walked out, Paulie walking before her. She wasn’t taking any chances.

As soon as she’d reached the sidewalk and sent Paulie back up, she flagged down a cab. Paulie might let her go, as he’d promised—but he might also sneak back down and try to follow her, or think he was being cute by staying put himself but sending someone else after her, maybe one of his dancers; they certainly had time on their hands. Or he might telephone any of a number of people to tell them where she was. There were too many bad possibilities and she was determined to be far away before any of them materialized.

The press of people running back and forth in the street made progress slow for a few blocks, but before long things cleared up and they had a clear run up Sixth Avenue to 44th Street.

She paid the cabbie at the corner, walked the rest of the way only after he’d driven off. She climbed the stairs and knocked on the door and didn’t wait for the panel to slide open before saying, “It’s Trixie, Mike. Are you in there?”

The door opened. Mike stood behind it, apron smeared and stained, looking much as he had the night before. The bar behind him looked much the same as well, except that instead of several solitary drinkers with their backs to her, hunched over their glasses, Tricia only saw one. She wondered if he was a holdover from last night or the sort that liked to get an early start on his drinking Sunday mornings.

“I’m sorry to bother you, Mike, but I need a place to go through some things in private.” She dropped the Gladstone and it landed heavily on the floor, raising a puff of dust. “Any chance I could use the back room? Twenty, thirty minutes should be plenty.”

“In private?” said a familiar voice. “I wouldn’t think you knew the meaning.”

And turning on his barstool, Charley favored her with a baleful stare out of the one of his eyes that wasn’t swollen shut.

“My god, Charley,” Tricia said, her hand leaping to her mouth.

He took a swallow from the tumbler of whiskey in his hand. “You should see the other guy,” he said.

“I think I did,” she said, “if you mean Eddie. But you look a lot worse.”

“Thanks,” Charley said, getting down off his stool and limping toward her. His voice was thick with drink. “That’s what I needed to hear.”

“I didn’t mean for them to—”

“What did you think was going to happen? Eddie’d barge in and we’d have ourselves a merry little ménage a trois?”

“Charley!”

“If that’s what gets your motor turning, honey, you could’ve just walked in and joined us yourself. Ah, but I forget, you’re a sweet young thing and cannot leave your mother.”

“Charley,” Tricia said, “I didn’t want you to get hurt”—but of course this wasn’t true and she knew it. Part of her had badly wanted him to get hurt. But she hadn’t envisioned it...like this. “What did you think you were doing, going to that, that...creature’s bed—”

“Rather than the chair you so kindly left me,” Charley said. “Oh, come off it, Tricia. You know what I was doing, and you know I was right to do it. I wasn’t enjoying myself, I was trying to find a way to get us out of there.”

Sure. And Paulie Lips was no thief, oh no, not him—just a blackmailer. Men! Singing their little songs of innocence. Could they possibly think they were convincing anyone?

“Charley,” Tricia said frostily, “the way out of there was not hidden inside Renata Barrone’s panties. I found a way out, and it didn’t involve sleeping with anyone.”

“Lucky you,” he said. He handed the tumbler to Mike, then unbuttoned several buttons on his shirt, reached inside, and pulled out the leather box of photographs. “But you didn’t get these, did you?”

“How...?”

He spread his arms and made a little unsteady bow. He really was quite drunk.

“A gentleman never kisses and tells,” he said.

“Renata got them for you?”

“No,” he admitted, “I grabbed them on my way out, saw them sitting on Barrone’s dresser—but still. The point is I have them. Now, where’s my thank you? Where’s my ‘I’m sorry, Charley, I’ll never do it again?’ Huh? Tricia?”

“I think you ought to get some sleep,” Tricia said. Taking him by the arm, she tugged him toward the back room. “We can talk about it when you’ve sobered up.”

“Ah, sleep and sobriety,” Charley mumbled. “You see, Mike, she does care about me. You were wrong when you said all those scurrilous things about her.”

Mike said, “I didn’t—”

“No, I guess you didn’t, it must’ve been me.” Charley leaned heavily on Tricia, his boozy breath just inches from her nose, his bruised flesh a rainbow of purple and yellow. “You do care,” he said, “don’t you?”

She brushed something out of her eye—a reaction to the whiskey fumes he was breathing on her, she told herself, nothing more. “Go to sleep, Charley,” she said. “You’ll feel better when you wake up.”

“I’ll feel like hell when I wake up,” he mumbled.

“Well, I’ll feel better,” she said. “Do it for me.”

She deposited him heavily on the mattress and went back for the bag. By the time she returned, he was snoring.

While he was out cold, she went through all the material in the bag. There was a great deal of it. Coral had been putting the pinch on five men in all, some of them for years; six if you counted Paulie. He really seemed to believe he was the father of her child—but who’s to say the others didn’t? And Tricia had a feeling Coral had been hitting him up for more than just locker room space.

Thinking of Paulie as another of Coral’s marks helped answer a question that had been nagging Tricia: If Coral kept all her other incriminating materials in the locker at the Moon, why had she kept Nicolazzo’s box of photos in the glove compartment of the car she’d extorted from Barrone? The only answer that made sense was that Coral had wanted to make sure Paulie didn’t find them, couldn’t destroy them—especially the one he’d have been most likely to destroy, the photo of himself. Which suggested that Coral had wanted to have something on him.

Of course, maybe she just liked having something on everyone she knew.

Barrone, meanwhile, was a bit of a puzzle himself. If it was his son who had died a month ago, not him, where had Royal been for the past month? On an assignment for Nicolazzo? Or lying low somewhere, to keep away from Nicolazzo?

And Renata—what was she doing holed up in the old man’s headquarters downtown instead of living at home with her husband? Or, if she and Robbie had been on the outs (made her finger itch, indeed), why wasn’t she living at her parents’ house, or some place of her own...somewhere, anywhere, that wasn’t a Lower East Side boy’s club filled with gunmen and criminals?

But the big question wasn’t Paulie or Barrone or Renata—it was Nicolazzo. One question, of course, was who had broken into his safe and taken the money out, and Tricia had a feeling she’d need to answer it before this was all over. But more urgently, where would the man have gone with his hostages when his location on Van Dam Street was blown?

Tricia scoured every letter, every photograph, looking for a clue and finally she found one, near the bottom of the pile. It was in a note Barrone had sent to Coral, dated a year earlier:

Can’t meet you in the city, it said, that’s final. N wants us all out at his place at the track while he’s waiting out the investigation. O’Malley’s getting too damn close to play games. I’ll call you with a location and you’ll come out there if you want your goddam money.

And penciled in the margin, in Coral’s handwriting, was the information she’d presumably copied down when he’d called: AQUEDUCT, STABLE 8, STALL 3.

Charley stirred, turned over on his side. He didn’t wake.

Tricia took the leather box from the corner of the mattress and slipped it into her pocket beneath the gun. One way or the other she’d be prepared.

She stepped out into the hallway.

“How’s he doing?” Mike asked.

“Sleeping,” Tricia said. “Probably the best thing for him.” She made her way to the front of the bar.

“What should I tell him when he wakes up?”

“Tell him I said to stay here. That I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“And if he asks where you went?”

“Tell him you don’t know. It’ll be the truth.”

“Are you sure it’s smart to go off on your own like this?” Mike said.

“No,” Tricia said, and went.

34.

Fright

If you want to get your money’s worth from a New York City subway ride, you’ll do as the song says and take the A train, whether it’s to Sugar Hill way up in Harlem or to Rockaway Beach way down in Queens. It’s a thirty mile ride from one end to the other, the longest you can take, and it’ll occupy the better part of two hours if you let it. If you get tired before it’s over or don’t want to spring for the extra fifteen-cent fare that kicks in right before you hit the beach, you can trade the promise of sun and sand for a day of playing the ponies at the Aqueduct Race Track in lovely South Ozone Park. Or at least you could before the State Racing Commission turned over control of the track to the newly formed “New York Racing Association” in 1955. One of the first things the new association did was to shut down the Big A and launch a renovation project that promised to deliver to gamblers the most modern racetrack of the Atomic Age. Almost three years and thirty million dollars later, the project wasn’t finished and the track was still shuttered, though plenty of pockets had gotten handsome new linings along the way. Mostly in nearby Ozone Park, which was South Ozone Park with redwood instead of aluminum siding on the walls but just as much garlic in the marinara sauce.

Tricia watched the construction site loom as she climbed toward it from the subway station.

One problem with a 200-acre racetrack, of course, is that even when you’ve shut it down you can’t shut it down—you can stop racing horses there, but just try to keep people out. Even if you fenced the thing in, curious neighborhood kids would find a pair of diagonal cutters and make their way inside on a dare. And the construction crew at the Aqueduct hadn’t bothered with a fence, relying instead on the low walls and shrubbery already in place to keep people out.

Which made it pretty easy for Tricia to enter. The track was surrounded on three sides by huge empty parking lots, all converging on an entry gate to the main building, which looked like it was destined to be a combination clubhouse for high rollers and grandstand for the rank-and-file. The first two stories had been constructed and girders poking out the top showed it was due to keep climbing for at least a few stories more. There was a giant crane standing immobile by the side of the building, its steel cable dangling with a weighted ball at the end to keep it from swinging free. As you’d expect on a Sunday, no one was sitting in the cab of the crane or walking along the girders. At first glance, no one seemed to be on the grounds at all, though Tricia had to assume there was at least some security staff around, maybe making their rounds on the other side of the lot.

Past the torn-up dirt of the racetrack itself, Tricia saw the dozen wooden buildings of the stable area and she headed over with what she feared was an excessive sense of purpose. Knowing where Barrone had met Coral once a year earlier wasn’t the same as knowing where Nicolazzo was holding her today. But what she did know was that there was a precedent for Nicolazzo going to ground here, and like the proverbial drunk with his missing keys, Tricia figured she had to start searching where the light was best.

Tricia had to squeeze past a turnstile to get into the main area. She hiked around mounds of dirt and piles of cinderblocks, large spools with thick metal wire coiled around them, pallets filled with sacks of cement baking in the sun. The old, wooden stable buildings stood at the Belt Parkway end of the property and she headed toward them. These would be demolished sometime soon, presumably, but they hadn’t been yet, suggesting that some, at least, were still in use. Perhaps to store tools and supplies, perhaps to stall the horses that would have been housed on premises had the track still been in operation—even if they were doing all their racing at other tracks now, they had to live somewhere, and it wasn’t as though there were a lot of farms in the middle of New York.

She took the gun out of her pocket, found a comfortable position for it in her palm, and crept up to the nearest of the long, barn-like buildings. Listening at the door, she heard snuffling and neighing inside, then a man’s voice saying something she couldn’t make out. So she wasn’t alone. Just as well to know for sure.

Staying close to the walls, keeping to the shadows as much as possible and walking softly, she went on to the next building. This time she heard nothing at the door. She continued to a third, lower building, where she heard the ring of metal against metal, and she imagined a burly smith hammering a horseshoe, the sort you might find in an illustrated Longfellow. She peeked inside through a space between two boards, but couldn’t see anything. It was too dark within, too bright outside.

The taller buildings resumed and she scurried past several of them, scanning the numbers painted beside each door as she went: 4, 5, 6. At the door to Stable 8, she paused to listen, heard no sign of people inside, and carefully slid the door open on its rollers, just wide enough to admit her if she squeezed through sideways. She slipped in through the opening, dragged the door shut behind her.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. There were stalls along both sides of an open central passage. The roof was high enough overhead that she couldn’t make it out. The only light came through cracks and crevices in the walls, plus one small, high window on the far end that threw a single spot of daylight on the straw-strewn floor. Two long banks of electric lights were turned off, and Tricia wasn’t about to turn them on.

She passed along the row of stalls on one side, most of them empty. Halfway down she saw a silver horse, a filly two heads taller than her, with fine white hair crisscrossing over her forehead like a lace veil. The filly nickered as Tricia went by. In a wooden rack beside the stall a cardboard placard said Spiderweb and beneath this, on a chalkboard hanging from a nail, were supplied a dozen lines of information in a crabbed cursive handwriting: the horse’s feeding schedule, her training history, her ownership. Tricia peered close to make out this last. Spiderweb was owned by an outfit called the Nickels Group. Nickels—Nicolazzo? Maybe. Tricia moved on.

The only other horse on this side was a red roan stallion named Make A Wish, also credited to the Nickels Group. She moved to the opposite side and found two more: Braddock’s Bane and Shooting Star. Four Nickels. One more, she thought, and you’d have a quarter. Or a quarterhorse.

Come on, Tricia. Don’t get loopy.

She made her way back to the entrance and was about to slide the door open again when she heard a sound outside: footsteps, heavy tramping ones, two men at least, and they were approaching quickly, almost at a run. She glanced around, looking for a place to conceal herself if they came in, but there was nothing—not so much as a bale of hay she could crouch behind, just the stalls themselves, and the nearest one was occupied.

The footsteps stopped directly outside the door and she heard a voice bark, “Where is she? Where did you say you saw her?”

Tricia’s heart stopped. She felt the weight of the gun in her hand, the pressure of the trigger against her finger. At least two men—and she had just the one bullet.

“She was right here, goin’ from building to building,” came a voice Tricia recognized with dread as Bruno’s. “Right here,” he said again.

Tricia heard the door’s rollers creak and shift in their track, saw the crack of daylight at the door’s edge begin widening. There was no time to think. She turned, ran to the chest-high door of the stall behind her and, climbing on the groom’s stool beside it, pushed herself over the top. She toppled onto the ground beside Shooting Star, a tall black horse with a deep chest and white markings on his lower legs. The horse shifted nervously and neighed as she gathered herself and brushed urine-scented straw off her knees. At the risk of being seen, she stood up, held one hand to the horse’s cheek and the other to his neck, and stroked gently, whispering, “Sh...sh...” She thought back to childhood and the first stable she’d ever been in, just outside Aberdeen, one Coral had taken her to when she’d been little. The horses had frightened her then. It wasn’t the horses that frightened her now.

Shooting Star whinnied and Tricia redoubled her efforts to calm him. The door, meanwhile, had slid open to its full width, letting in a wide slash of sunlight that fell across the floor like a guillotine blade. Through the open top portion of the stall door, Tricia could see a long shadow step forward, one arm bent at the elbow and holding a pistol before it. She dropped back to a crouch. She heard the man go by, followed a moment later by a second.

Tricia inched over to the corner of the stall beside the door and then, with her back pressed against the wall, stood once more. There was a wide wooden post here at the border between this stall and the next that topped out around seven feet, and standing behind it she was fairly sure they couldn’t see her. She’d stopped whispering to the horse once the men came in and now she was too far away to stroke him, but from her hiding place in the corner she held him with her eyes, and though it felt foolish she raised one index finger to her lips. Would it help? Who could say? But Shooting Star stared back and stayed quiet. All Tricia could hear were the steps of the men as they walked to the far end of the barn and came back—that, and the thudding of her pulse in her ears.

“Hey,” one of the men called, the one who wasn’t Bruno. His back was to her at the moment—both men’s were. “We know you’re in here. We won’t hurt you if you come out.” The false friendliness in his voice was chilling. He made almost no effort at all to sound as though he meant it.

Tricia tried to breathe as shallowly as possible, making no sound. She raised the gun, shrank into the shadow.

“Come on,” the man said, “don’t make us do this the hard way. You’re just going to make us mad.”

When they got no response, Bruno said, “Maybe it was the next stable over.”

“You said this one.”

“I thought it was this one,” Bruno said, “but maybe it was the next.”

“Well, why don’t you go look there then.” The other man sounded annoyed. “If she’s here, I’ll flush her out. If you see her, yell.”

“Okay,” Bruno said. Then: “Remember, she’s got a gun now.”

“You really think I’d forget that?” the other man said. “Now get over there.”

“Okay,” Bruno said again, and Tricia heard him leaving.

Remember, she’s got a gun—well, of course Bruno would know that. But now the other guy did, too, which was a shame. On the positive side, the odds had just improved: There was now only one man here, which lined up better with the one bullet. Except that the sound of a gunshot would surely bring Bruno running right back in...

“I’ll count to three,” the remaining man said, his voice fading as he paced further away and then growing louder as he returned. “If you’re not out here by the time I reach three...” He stopped pacing and his voice grew darker, nastier. “Let’s just say you’ll be sorry. We understand each other, right? Uncle Nick wants you alive—but that leaves me plenty of options. Plenty. You’ve only gotten a little taste so far.”

Tricia stood in the darkness, shaking. There was a part of her that wanted to step out, gun blazing, take this man down before he knew what hit him. But could she hit him? It was far from certain. She’d fired guns before, every kid in South Dakota did, but not for a while now, and not in a darkened barn, and never at a target that was armed and ready to shoot back.

Meanwhile, there was another part of her that wanted to surrender—drop the gun, step out with her hands up, tell the guy she had Nicolazzo’s photos and demand that he take her to him unharmed, untouched. It might work. It might. But it might not. And even if it did, then what? Nicolazzo would have his pictures back and she’d have no gun and no way out, nor any way to help Coral get out.

“If you’re in here,” the man bellowed, “I’m going to find you. You can’t get away.”

Tricia heard the door to one of the stalls—it sounded far enough away to be the one on the other end—swing open and slam against the stable wall. A few footsteps, then another door swung and slammed, this one a little nearer. “There’s nowhere you can hide. Don’t you understand that?”

She understood. She understood it fine.

At the rate he was going, he’d reach her end of the row in seconds—thirty seconds? Forty-five? And then she’d be forced to make a decision. A terrible decision with terrible consequences, whichever way she decided it.

Another door slammed and she heard the man leap into the newly opened stall with a loud “Hah!” A moment later he stepped out again.

“You are making me very angry,” he said, and he certainly sounded it. Almost to himself, he added, “I’m gonna make you hurt real bad.” Less a threat than a promise.

He was just two stalls away now.

Tricia tried to will her right hand to stop shaking. She steadied it with her left, held the gun between both, fit both index fingers inside the trigger guard. Her breath was coming fast now, and she could hardly believe he couldn’t hear it, that and the pounding of her heart. It was a cacophony to her. Shooting Star whinnied beside her—he probably smells the fear on me, Tricia thought, and why not? I must stink of it.

“Shut up, you nag,” the man said. He stopped at the stall beside Tricia’s, put his hand on the door latch.

He yanked it open, let the door swing free, and began another exclamation—Hah! or Huh! or something of that sort—but just what it was Tricia would never find out since from inside the stall came the explosion of a gunshot and the man fell backwards clutching his chest.

35.

Kill Now, Pay Later

Shooting Star reared up and bucked wildly; the other three horses sounded like they were doing the same. Dodging the horse’s flailing hooves, Tricia flung herself at the door to the stall, scrabbled up and over and landed in a heap on the ground. She saw the man lying there, blood pooling around him, just a few feet away. From the open stall a figure came forward, gun in hand—

“Don’t shoot!” Tricia screamed and swung her hands up, thinking too late that maybe she should have dropped her gun first. That would’ve made for a more convincing surrender. But instead of blasting her, the figure lowered its own gun.

“Trixie?” Erin said. “Is that you?”

“Erin?” Tricia said. “How did you—never mind, you’ll tell me later. We’ve got to get out of here before Bruno comes back.”

“Hold on,” Erin said, and bending over the fallen man, calmly put another pair of bullets into him. Judging by his lack of any reaction, they were superfluous; but judging by the clicking of Erin’s gun she would gladly have given him more if she hadn’t run out of bullets. “There,” she said, to the corpse. “How’s that for a little taste?”

“Jesus, Erin!” Tricia stood up, pulled at Erin’s arm. “Come—”