Fifty-to-One

But Bruno was filling the doorway now, silhouetted in the light from outside. They ducked to either side as a twin-barreled shotgun gun swung up and spat flame at them. The hammering of the horses’ hooves against the stall doors echoed like a further fusillade.

Bruno ran between them to where his fellow gunman lay. “What did you do?” he shouted, swinging his shotgun back around, trying to find them in the shadows. With his other hand he pulled a second gun from his belt, a handgun. “If you...if you killed him, you’ll pay for it!”

“Probably,” Tricia heard Erin say, “but not today.” Then came the sound of a door being unlatched and swinging open, followed by a half-ton of angry horse erupting from the stall.

Tricia felt a hand on her arm, pulling her toward the entrance, saw Bruno, illuminated by brief flashes of gunfire, shooting point-blank into the horse’s pale brown torso but making not the slightest dent in his momentum. She saw Bruno go down, still firing, saw Braddock’s Bane tumble onto him; then Erin pulled her out into daylight and they both began running at full speed, arms and legs pumping hard, toward the front gate in the distance.

‘There!” someone behind them shouted, and a pair of gunshots chased them across the gravel walk and onto the track. Tricia expected a bullet to catch her at any instant.

“You! Stop!”

More shots whizzed by, one tearing up the dirt by their feet and spattering clods against their shins.

The turnstile seemed very far off. And past it was the largest of the parking lots—nothing but blank concrete there, nothing to hide behind: not trees, not cars, nothing. If they could make it through the lot to the sidewalk they’d have a better chance, but even there...

And that was assuming they made it to and through the turnstile. Doing so would require them to get past this no man’s land in the center of the track, half planted with trees and shrubs, half empty soil. On the barren side, Tricia saw an earth grader standing silent and unhelpful; on the other, a paddock where a track walker with remarkably bad timing was trying to keep the bay stallion he’d brought out for a trot from running each time a gunshot split the air.

Erin, meanwhile, was falling behind—she didn’t have the benefit of dancing two shows a night to build up her stamina and endurance, not to mention the lingering effects of whatever mistreatment she’d suffered at the hands of Nicolazzo and the gunman she’d put down back in the stable.

“Can you make it?” Tricia said.

“Do I have a choice?” Erin said. She stumbled and almost fell, but she caught and righted herself, kept going.

Behind them, Tricia heard the pounding of feet, the heavy breathing and cursing of their pursuers. There were at least three of them, maybe four, and no more than forty yards away.

“Is there a car somewhere?” Tricia said. “Something we could use...?”

“Just that thing,” Erin said, jerking her head toward the grader. “If you know how to jumpstart it.”

She didn’t—but glancing over the opposite way, Tricia had another thought. She angled off to the left, running along a line of low bushes.

“Trixie! It’s—it’s longer that way—”

It was. But it also intersected the paddock where the walker was working, with some success, to calm his horse. He looked up as they burst in on him.

“We need that horse,” Tricia said, gesturing with her gun. His mouth opened, but before he could say anything she grabbed the reins out of his hands and hoisted herself up onto the horse’s back, bunching her dress around her waist, modesty be damned. She kept the gun trained on the man with her other hand.

Erin tried to follow but slipped off the horse’s side on her first attempt. The men chasing after them were shouting now, just twenty yards away and closing. One of them sent a bullet at them through the trees. Tricia heard a branch crack and fall. The horse squealed and jerked to one side; it was all Tricia could do to keep him from bolting.

“Erin, quick!” She reached down one arm and Erin caught it, almost pulled Tricia off, but grabbing hold of the horse’s mane with her other hand and kicking wildly with her feet she finally managed to sling herself belly-first across the horse’s back. She snaked one arm around Tricia’s waist, held on tight. Tricia kneed the horse in the sides, cracked the reins, shouted—“Yah!”—and the horse burst forward, delighted to be doing what it did best and to be doing it in a direction that took it away from the men with guns.

The horse pounded across the dirt, over the track, his sides heaving and hooves thundering. When he came to the low concrete wall separating the track area from the parking lot, he leapt it smoothly, landing with a jarring jolt that almost unseated them both. But Tricia held onto the reins and Erin, now upright at last, held onto Tricia, and the horse went clopclopclop across the asphalt and onto Rockaway Boulevard.

36.

Slide

Cars swerved, honking, out of their path. Pedestrians, too, made way as the horse loudly approached, its metal shoes echoing against the pavement. This was one of the main shopping thoroughfares in this part of Queens and Sunday afternoon was prime shopping time. There was no shortage of people to goggle at Tricia and Erin as they galloped past.

Several ran for street-corner phone booths, leaving Tricia wondering how long they had before more than just the attention of passersby was directed their way. They’d left the men at the track far behind, but it wasn’t as though Nicolazzo’s men were the only ones interested in getting their hands on her. And riding a racehorse down Rockaway Boulevard was as fine a way to attract the attention of the others as any Tricia could imagine.

They sped along the avenue, attracting stares and gasps. One little girl on the sidewalk raised her arm and pointed, only to have her mother slap her hand down and yank her protectively out of the way. The girl started bawling, but at the pace they were going Tricia could only hear it for a few seconds.

The police sirens, when they came, were louder and lasted longer. One cruiser slid in behind them as they crossed 103rd Avenue, but they lost him by taking a sharp left against the traffic onto 102nd Road and then racing through a gas station parking lot and the scruffy back yards of three low brick homes. Another cop car picked up the chase when they hit Eldert Lane, the driver shouting at them through his bullhorn to pull over. “We’ll shoot if you don’t stop,” came the amplified voice.

Tricia could feel the horse tiring under her, felt its ragged breaths, its slowing pace. They wouldn’t be able to go a whole lot farther even if the cops didn’t shoot. But Erin urged her on. “Don’t,” Erin said. “We’ve got to shake them.”

“Where?” Tricia shouted back, her voice getting lost in the wind. But she tugged on the reins, turning the horse off the main road, and they vanished once more into the maze of yards and passages behind and between buildings.

“We’ll have to stop soon,” Tricia shouted and she felt Erin nodding against her back.

“You know where Jamaica Avenue is?” Erin said.

“No,” Tricia said.

“Up by all those cemeteries? Mount Cypress, Mount Lebanon, you know.”

She didn’t know. But somehow Tricia wasn’t surprised to find herself racing toward yet another cemetery. There seemed to be no getting away from them. New York was peppered with good places to lie down and have a final rest, to go with all the reasons you might need to.

“Just keep going, you’ll hit it,” Erin said.

“Why there?” Tricia shouted.

“We can ride into the cemetery,” Erin said. “The cops can’t drive in. They’d smash up all the graves. They’d never do it.”

“How far is it?”

“Not much farther.”

“How much?”

“I don’t know, eight blocks? Nine?”

“Great,” Tricia said and urged the horse on.

It turned out to be twelve blocks. By the time they reached the elevated tracks marking the end of the road, Tricia could feel the horse trembling from exertion and the unaccustomed weight they’d made him carry, like running a race with two jockeys. They sped under the high metal beams as a row of subway cars clattered by overhead, then through the wide-open front gate of a place identified by a large but tasteful sign as Mount Hope. Tricia was willing to take the name as a good omen. Better, at least, as death-related gateways went, than Abandon Hope.

A steep hill just inside the gate led to a cluster of mausoleum buildings at the top. The horse strained to climb it at a decent canter.

As they neared the top, Erin said, “We should get off here, quick. Let him keep going. Just slide off.”

“What do you mean ‘slide off’? You can’t just slide off a moving horse.”

“We don’t want him to stop,” Erin said. “We need them to keep chasing him.”

“They’ll see we aren’t on him,” Tricia said.

“Not right away. Now slide off. Slide!”

Tricia felt Erin tilting behind her, felt gravity take hold. The sweat on the horse’s sides contributed its part and she felt herself accelerating toward the ground—which was still going by at a considerable clip. She hadn’t been able to scream when she fell from the rain gutter, but she screamed now, and Erin joined her. It didn’t last: Colliding with the ground knocked the wind out of them. For an instant, all Tricia could see were the horse’s hooves raising and lowering like angled pistons just inches away from her head—but then they were a foot away, and then a yard, and then the horse was off in the distance, galloping to freedom among the tombstones.

The police sirens, meanwhile, had grown louder as the hoofbeats faded. A pair of cars squealed to a halt at the bottom of the hill. Tricia glanced around, saw Erin beside her doing the same. There wasn’t much here: the stone mausoleums, whose doors presumably were locked; a narrow footpath, winding off into the heart of the cemetery; another path, leading down the hill; a plot of graves, mostly old and overgrown, though one was freshly dug and covered with a tarpaulin, presumably for a burial later today.

Tricia and Erin looked at each other, gave each other a chance to object or to propose a better idea. Instead, they nodded simultaneously, then scampered on hands and knees toward the grave, lifted the side of the tarp, and slid under it. Carefully, they let themselves down into the hole. The tarp settled back into place.

Moments later, they heard the police arrive. They saw shadows through the tarp, heard sounds of men arguing, walking this way and that overhead, complaining. A radio crackled with static followed by the voice of someone back in the stationhouse issuing orders. Tricia couldn’t quite hear what they were but made out a few incredulous-sounding words, “horse” chief among them.

The cops departed a moment later, no doubt following the horse’s tracks. Tricia reached above her to push the tarp back, but Erin raised one palm in a gesture that meant Wait. The caution did make a certain amount of sense—what if the cops had left a man or two behind to search the area?

So they waited. It was cool and damp standing in the grave. Surprisingly, it wasn’t unpleasant. A bit of light filtered in through the tarp, the fabric tinting it a lush shade of green. Being off the horse gave Tricia the opportunity to flex her legs, strained from straddling the animal’s shoulders. She hadn’t ridden like that in years and her thighs had taken a pounding. She saw Erin doing the same, bending her knees in the limited space the grave afforded and massaging her lower back with one hand.

When a few minutes had passed without any further voices or tumult overhead (it felt like more than a few minutes, but Tricia figured everything felt longer when you were standing in a grave), Erin knelt and put her hands out in a cupped position. Tricia set one foot into them and Erin hefted her toward the tarp.

Tricia yanked the fabric to one side and popped her head out of the grave. Behind her, she heard a sharp intake of breath.

She pulled herself out of the hole and scrambled to her feet. A small man in a surplice stood at graveside, a prayer book open in his hands; beside him, an old woman in black, a veil lowered over her face, dipped a gloved hand below the veil to bring a handkerchief to her eyes. Beside her was a slightly younger woman. Her eyes, prominent to begin with, looked positively ready to leave their sockets.

Tricia bent down, extended an arm, and helped Erin out of the hole.

“Inspection,” Tricia said, by way of explanation, and Erin nodded. They both wiped their palms off on their sides.

“Everything’s in order,” Erin said.

“Good drainage,” Tricia said.

“Solid foundation,” Erin said.

“Up to code,” Tricia said.

“Carry on,” Erin said, nodding to the priest.

“Thank you so much,” the old woman said, “for taking the trouble. Calvin would be so grateful.”

Feeling like a heel, Tricia led the way past a wheeled gurney holding a coffin and off into the graveyard’s crowded interior.

37.

Dead Street

As soon as they were out of sight of the hilltop, Tricia said, “We have to go back.”

“Back? What are you talking about? Back where?”

“Wherever they were holding you,” Tricia said. “And Coral. Colleen. My sister—the fighter?” Erin’s face showed no sign of recognition. “The Colorado Kid, remember?”

“That’s your sister?”

“It’s a long story,” Tricia said. “But yes, she’s my sister. And we’ve got to—”

“All we’ve got to do is get out of here. There’s no point in going back. I’m sure they’re not there anymore. They hustled us out of the other place as soon as Charley got out—now that I’ve escaped, you can bet they’re gone from this one.”

She was right, of course. But Tricia’s heart fell at the prospect of having to figure out where Nicolazzo might hole up next. Would Coral have been able to leave her another message, scratched on another wall in another basement cell? It was too much to hope for.

“How did you escape?” Tricia asked.

“That’s kind of a long story, too,” Erin said. She kept walking swiftly, picking a path between gravestones and along the edges of the tree-lined lawns.

“You got a gun somehow,” Tricia said.

“That’s right. I got a gun somehow.”

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

“No,” Erin said, “and you don’t want to hear about it. It’d turn your hair white, Wyoming. Better than that bleach we used.”

“That bad?”

Erin nodded. Looking her over, Tricia couldn’t see any particular signs—no marks on her face, for instance. But what did that mean? Tricia let the subject drop, tried not to think about what Nicolazzo’s men might be doing to Coral right now. At least there were two fewer of them now. That was something.

“Is Charley okay?” Erin asked.

“So-so,” Tricia said. And when Erin looked alarmed, “Oh, he’s safe. He just had a...run-in, with someone who works for this mobster we met.”

“For Nicolazzo?”

“No, Barrone.”

“Barrone?”

“Long story.”

They were making their way now through a rough, untamed bit of wilderness, the border between two abutting cemeteries. It felt a little like one of those black-and-white spy movies, crossing from Hungary into Austria under cover of darkness, only without the darkness, and without the zither music.

“Where are we going?” Tricia said.

“Best chance of catching a ride around here’s on Dead Street,” Erin said, and Tricia gave her a blank look. “Never heard it called that?” Tricia shook her head. “The Inter-borough Parkway—between Cypress and Forest Parkway it runs right through the cemetery. Blame Robert Moses. Twenty-some years ago he came along and said, ‘What we need here’s a highway, a nice four-lane highway.’ ”

“In the middle of a cemetery?”

“This is Robert Moses we’re talking about. Where he wants a highway, he gets a highway,” Erin said. “They had to dig up hundreds of graves, move the bodies...you really never heard about this? What do they teach you in Wyoming, anyway?”

“South Dakota.”

“South Dakota,” Erin conceded. She looked around. “Not too much farther.”

“Good,” Tricia said.

“When we were kids,” Erin said, “the story was they didn’t move all the bodies, just paved over some of them. If your parents drove along Dead Street, you wouldn’t roll down your window. You ever walked it or rode a bike, you held your breath.”

“You grew up in this area?”

“Oh, yeah,” Erin said. “Woodhaven born and bred. Me and George Gershwin.”

“Is he buried here?”

Erin sneered. “This place is for the working classes, honey. I’m sure he’s got a fine plot upstate somewhere, or maybe in Hollywood, with a lovely view, and not of a highway, either.”

Up ahead, a steep embankment led to a low concrete wall. The sound of cars rushing by came through from the other side.

“What if the cops are waiting for us?” Tricia asked in a low voice.

“Then we find another grave to go stand in till they go away.”

They crept up to the wall, keeping their heads down as they went. Erin peeked over the top and Tricia felt a sudden wave of anxiety. She reached toward her pocket, where the gun lay. But before she could get to it, Erin stood, waved Tricia up. “We’re alone.”

Tricia let her hand drop. Her fingers, she noticed, were trembling.

They made their way onto the shoulder of the highway. Traffic was light, just a car every thirty seconds or so, drivers zooming from west to east at top speed. Maybe trying to cover the length of Dead Street without taking a breath.

In one of the lulls, they crossed to the other side.

“Now what?” Tricia said.

“You never hitchhiked, Trixie? Back in that small town of yours?”

“Sure, but it’s different in a small town—”

“It’s no different,” Erin said. “Just show a little leg.” She gave Tricia a nudge toward the traffic. “You showed plenty when we were on that horse.”

Tricia felt foolish standing on the side of the road, one hip cocked, thumb extended in imitation of countless stranded movie heroines; but she did it. After the third car passed them by, Erin joined her, unbuttoning a few buttons on the front of her dress and throwing back her shoulders.

The next car that passed slowed down and tootled its horn as it went by, but it didn’t stop.

“Thanks a lot,” Erin shouted. She opened a few more buttons, bent forward so more of her bosom spilled out.

“Erin!” Tricia said.

“No time to be a shrinking violet,” Erin said. “I’d take it off if it would get us a ride.”

But that proved unnecessary. A white Pontiac convertible with a chrome dart running along the side drew to a stop, throwing up a little cloud of dust. The driver was a man in his middle forties, corpulent and sunburned, driving with one hand on the wheel and the other arm extended over the back of the empty passenger seat beside him.

“Car broke down, girls?” he said, eyeing the two of them over the top of his black-framed sunglasses.

“That’s right,” Erin said, leaning on the side of the car. “We need to get back to Manhattan.”

“Ah,” the man said. “That’s a shame. A real shame.” He tore his gaze away from her cleavage with some difficulty. “I’m headed to Bensonhurst. Much as I’d enjoy your company...” He made a movement toward the steering wheel and Tricia saw his foot inch toward the gas. He gestured with his chin at Erin, who was still leaning on the door. “If you don’t mind...?”

“Lucy,” Erin said, and it took Tricia a moment to realize Erin meant her, “why don’t you show the man what you’ve got in your pocket?”

“The pict—” Tricia said, and then: “Oh.” She took out the gun, aimed it at the driver, whose face fell. He looked ten years older suddenly.

“We need to get back to Manhattan,” Erin said. “You want to drive us, or would you rather get out here so we can drive ourselves? Or would you prefer the third option?”

“What’s that?” the man said nervously.

“They call it Dead Street for a reason,” Erin said, and smiled.

For a moment it looked like the man might stomp the gas and peel away, but he must’ve figured his chances of outrunning a bullet weren’t good enough to risk it.

Grudgingly he said, “Get in.” And to Tricia, “Please, just be careful with that thing.”

“Don’t worry about Lucy,” Erin said. “She’s a crack shot. Steadiest hands in the east.”

“That right,” the man said.

“Oh, yeah,” Erin said. “Took home three medals for marksmanship. Isn’t that right, Lucy?” Tricia didn’t say anything, just concentrated on keeping the steadiest hands in the east from shaking while she climbed into the car.

“She’s modest,” Erin said. “But deadly. So drive carefully.”

He drove very carefully.

Half a mile down the road, they saw a bay stallion grazing at the side of the highway. Two cops were beside it, one talking into a radio.

Erin and Tricia both turned slightly in their seats to face away from the policemen.

“Keep your hands on the wheel,” Erin said, “and your mouth shut.”

“What are you,” the driver muttered, “car thieves or horse thieves?”

“Now, now,” Erin said. “No reason a girl can’t be both.”

38.

Deadly Beloved

They pulled to a stop in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. “Don’t look back,” Tricia said, the first words yet that she’d spoken to the driver, and she said them in the most menacing tone she could muster. She kept one hand in her pocket as she climbed out of the car, then hastened with Erin to the subway the instant the Pontiac sped out of sight.

Would the driver stop at the nearest police station and report them or just count himself lucky and hurry off to whatever he was late for in Bensonhurst? No way to know, and it was best not to take any chances.

The Times Square station was crowded when they arrived there and Tricia briefly lost sight of Erin on the way out. They found each other on the street.

“I left Charley in a bar near here,” Tricia said, “a sort of after-hours place run by a guy named—”

“Mike?” Erin said. Tricia nodded. “I know Mike. He’s okay.”

“He was very decent to us,” Tricia said. “Let us use his back room.”

Erin gave her a funny look. “You and Charley? You used Mike’s back room?”

“Yes. We needed some sleep. Only managed to get an hour or so, but...”

“I bet you did,” Erin said. “I didn’t think you had it in you, kid. Or that he had it in you. I guess I shouldn’t underestimate Charley.”

Tricia found herself blushing furiously. “We just slept there,” she said. “Nothing else.”

“Save it for the folks back home,” Erin said. “I know better. Charley took me to Mike’s back room once, too.”

“I’m telling you, nothing happened!”

“Well, if that’s true,” Erin said, making the turn onto 44th Street, “I’m sorry for you. You missed something fine.”

Tricia found herself wondering, from the look on Erin’s face, whether maybe she had.

They climbed the stairs to Mike’s place, knocked on the door, knocked again when no answer came. After another minute, footsteps approached, the panel slid open, and then Mike opened the door. “Did Charley find you?” Mike said breathlessly.

“What do you mean did he find me?” Tricia said.

“When he woke up and saw that you were gone, he was pretty sore. Mostly with me. Wanted to know why I let you go off by yourself.”

“What were you supposed to do, physically restrain me?”

“That’s exactly what I asked him. He said yes, physically restrain you. If that’s what it took.”

“So where is he?”

“He went through all those papers you left here—the photos and letters and so on, and he found this.” Mike picked up Royal Barrone’s note from the bar. There was Coral’s handwriting, in the margin: AQUEDUCT, STABLE 8, STALL 3. “He asked if that’s where you’d gone. I said I didn’t know. He went anyway.”

“When was this?”

“Maybe an hour after you left? Hour and a half?”

“And you haven’t heard from him since?” Erin said.

Mike shook his head. He led them over to the bar, walked behind it, took out two glasses unasked and filled them with beer from a tap. “I’m sorry, Erin. I shouldn’t have let him go.”

“That’s right,” Erin said. “You should’ve physically restrained him.”

“You think he’s in trouble?”

“Yes,” Erin said.

“But he’ll get out of it,” Mike said. “He always does.”

“You just keep telling yourself that,” Erin said. “If it makes you feel better.”

Tricia, meanwhile, was trying to think who would have been waiting for Charley at the track when he arrived—Nicolazzo’s men? Or the police?

“We’ve got to go back, Erin,” Tricia said. “Now we really do.”

“No way,” Erin said. “You think Charley would want us to put ourselves in danger?”

“I think he’d want us to get him out of there,” Tricia said, “just like he came for me when the police tried to arrest me downtown.”

“Get him out of where?” Erin said. “We don’t even know where he is.”

“I’ve been calling around,” Mike said. “That’s why I couldn’t come right away when you knocked—I was on the phone. He hasn’t been arrested. I’ve got friends on the force who’d know it if he had.”

“You might think that’s good news, Mike,” Tricia said, “but arrested’s probably the better of the alternatives right now.”

“I’m just saying, he’s not in police custody. That’s all I know.”

“Well, he’s in someone’s custody,” Tricia said. “Or he’d be back here already. Or at least he’d have called.”

The phone on the wall behind the bar chose that moment to ring.

They all looked at each other. Mike reached out an arm, lifted the receiver the way a ranger might pick up a snake.

“Mike? Mike?” came a tiny voice. “Say something, Mike, I can’t talk for long.”

“Charley?” Mike said, bringing the receiver to one ear but keeping it tilted away from his head so they could all hear.

“Listen, if you see Tricia or Erin, tell them I’m fine, don’t let them know—”

“We’re right here,” Erin shouted.

“Oh,” came the voice. “Well. I’m fine.”

“Stop it,” Tricia said. “We’re going to come get you.”

“Don’t,” Charley said. “You’ll just get yourself killed. Let Mike. He’s got experience.”

“Where are you?” Mike said.

“On the waterfront,” Charley said, “somewhere near the Gowanus. They’re putting me on a diet of treacle this evening.”

“On what?”

“A diet of treacle,” Charley said. “It’s a boat. That’s its name: A Diet of Treacle. Mike, are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“Nicolazzo’s here, too. I think we’re going to meet his yacht off the coast.”

“Is Coral there?” Tricia said.

“I don’t know, I haven’t seen her. I’m sorry. Mike? Listen, you’ve got to come get me before the third race at Belmont. They’re just staying long enough to pick up the purse from that race and then they’re gone. It’s at—ah, jeez, I’ve got to go, he’s coming to.” And the phone went click.

Mike replaced the handset on its hooks, reached beneath the bar for a telephone book. He flipped to the back where the maps were printed. He didn’t say anything, and neither did Tricia or Erin. It didn’t feel like there was anything to say, or any time to say it.

Mike ran his finger along the coastline of Brooklyn till he found the piers by the Gowanus Expressway, jutting provocatively at New Jersey across the water. He flipped back through the business listings, looking for something. It took a while for him to find it. When he finally did, he reached for the phone—but before he could lift it, it rang again.

“Hello?” he answered.

A different voice this time, deeper and bearing a familiar accent.

“Put the girl on,” said Uncle Nick.

“What girl?”

“Hold on,” he said, and then they heard the unmistakable sound of a punch landing, someone going oof. Then Nicolazzo returned. “Now: Put the girl on.”

“Which—” Mike started to ask, but Tricia shouted, “I’m here!”

“Good. Thank you. It isn’t so much to ask, a little courtesy, is it?”

“How’d you get this number?” Mike said.

“Your friend here was kind enough to supply it,” Nicolazzo said. “We only had to break one of his fingers.”

Erin erupted, tears suddenly in her eyes, “If you hurt him again—”

“Yes? If I hurt him, then what? You’ll hurt me? Please. Don’t be foolish. Now, put the other girl back on.”

“I’m here,” Tricia said.

“Get closer to the phone or speak up, young lady. I can barely hear you.”

“I’m here,” Tricia said.

“All right. So.” Nicolazzo cleared his throat. “I know you have my pictures. I also know who took my money and then bragged to you about how he did so.”

“You do?” Tricia said.

“Oh, yes. I received a visit earlier today from my beloved niece, and she brought the voltagabanna with her.”

“Who?”

“As if you don’t know. I have to say, young Edward denied it most convincingly, right up to the end. But he did finally confess. At the very end.”

Tricia could barely speak. She thought of Eddie with his black eye, racing past her in Queens. When they found the building empty, he must have driven on to the shuttered racetrack, Renata surely having known about that hideout from when her father had used it the year before. Tricia pictured it, Eddie driving furiously and unknowingly to his own death, Renata urging him on from the back seat.

“You killed him?” Tricia said. She said it quietly, but Nicolazzo heard her.

“No, of course not,” Nicolazzo said, and Tricia let out a relieved breath. But then he continued: “My beloved niece did. She really wanted to do it herself. Seemed to bear the boy some ill will.”

At this, Tricia felt herself start to shake. She remembered the look on Eddie’s face just before he headed upstairs. Thanks, Trixie, he’d said. You’re a pal.

If I’d been a pal, Eddie, I’d have put a bullet in you right then and there. Would’ve been kinder.

“What do you want?” Tricia said, in a dead voice.

“What do you think? I want my pictures and I want my money. And according to Eddie, he left both with you.”

“With me?”

“That’s what he said. With his dying breath. A man’s not going to lie with his dying breath, now is he?”

“This one did,” Tricia said.

“Please. I’m not a fool. You have what I want. If you give it to me, I’ll let your friend here go. You, too. I know you’re not the one who took it from me, you’re not the thief. You just let this man use you. There’s no reason you need to suffer.”

No, no reason. But you’ll make me suffer anyway if you get your hands on me, won’t you? Your promises notwithstanding.

But playing along seemed to be the only thing to do. Playing along and playing for time.

“Fine,” Tricia said. “I’ll do it. But I need some time.”

“How much time?”

Tricia looked over at Mike, who held up six fingers. “Till six,” she said, but Mike shook his head furiously, mouthed Six hours. “...in the morning,” she finished. Mike thought about it, shrugged, nodded.

“That’s too late,” Nicolazzo said. “It has to be today.”

“It’s Sunday afternoon,” Tricia said. “The banks aren’t open.”

“You put my money in a bank?”

“Safe deposit box,” Tricia said.

“And this bank opens before six in the morning?”

“Yes,” Tricia said. “It does.”

“What kind of bank opens before six in the morning?”

“Mine,” Tricia said, coldly.

Nicolazzo was silent for a bit, then she heard the muffled sounds of a conversation in the background. He came back on the line. “Fine. Six. You’ll be picked up by two men and brought to me. You’ll get a call at this number telling you where. Be there, with my money and my photographs, and no police, or your friend here will suffer more than a broken finger.” Nicolazzo paused to punch Charley again. It sounded like a boxer socking a heavy bag. “Your sister, too. Oh, yes, I know that’s who she is. I know a good deal, Miss Heverstadt. Of Aberdeen, South Dakota. That’s right, isn’t it? Hmm?” He paused, but Tricia couldn’t have answered him if she wanted to, her throat having constricted to the width of a pencil. “Don’t cross me, young lady. I’m not such a nice man when I’m crossed.”

Nicolazzo broke the connection.

“What are we going to do?” Erin said.

“I’m going to find where they’re holding him,” Mike said. “You’re going to stay here and wait for that phone call.”

“That’s right, Erin,” Tricia said. “We need you here.”

“Both of you are going to stay here,” Mike said. “You heard what Charley said. You can’t come with me.”

“Who said anything about coming with you?” Tricia asked. “I’ve got to go get that money.”

“You know where it is?” Erin said.

“I have an idea,” Tricia said.

39.

A Diet of Treacle

Mike telephoned Volker’s from the street and was relieved to find them open. They were the only business he knew in the neighborhood, an importer of German beers that had somehow kept plying its trade all through Prohibition and two wars against the Fatherland. Damned if he knew how they’d pulled that off, what palms they’d had to grease, what lies they’d had to tell, what business they’d had to pretend to be in. But there they were, celebrating their fiftieth year in the same location, according to the brass plaque by the entryway.

This stretch of the Gowanus area of Brooklyn stank, not just of industry and trash and too many people in too close a space, but of fermentation and hops, since in addition to whatever spills and leaks Volker’s produced on a daily basis there was, right next door, a one-time leather-work factory that had more recently been turned into a brewery. The painted brick wall still said JAS. PORTER — SADDLES, RIDING GEAR, &C. — FOUNDED 1870, but the smell said something else altogether.

Volker’s eldest son, Adolphe—and speaking of saddles, could his father possibly have saddled the poor boy with a more unfortunate name?—greeted Mike at the door, pinning his hand in the iron grip of one who spent all day every day lifting barrels off ships and onto trucks. “Marie tells me you were coming. Is there anything the matter with our shippings?” He’d been born here; there was no reason for his English to be less than perfect. But it was, and slightly accented, too, as if he’d taken over more than just his father’s business when the old man died.

“Not at all,” Mike said. “You’re on time every time. I just need a favor.”

“What is it, Michael? Anything, for one customer of ours.”

“I’m looking for a boat that’s down here somewhere. Its name’s A Diet of Treacle. Does that ring any bells?”

“Diet of tree-kill?” Adolphe scrunched up his forehead in thought. “Not a bell,” he said. “Not a one. But someone here might know.” He walked down onto the floor and called out something in German to the brawny workers moving crates stacked five-high on metal hand-trucks. Mike saw a few shrugs, some heads shaken from side to side. One man said something, though, and Mike looked to Adolphe for a translation.

“He says he does not know this boat himself but suggests you ask at Biro’s down the block. Many shipping folk can be found there.”

“Thank you,” Mike said. And to the man who’d made the suggestion: “Danke.” It was all the German he remembered from his time on the front.

Outside in the sun again, Mike scanned the block for a sign that would point him in the right direction. He spotted one swaying in the wind, a wooden shingle with the word “Biro” painted on it in faded letters over a sketch of a bull standing in what looked like a pool of blood. He approached a little cautiously, half expecting to walk into an abattoir, but Biro’s turned out to be a saloon. The walls were lined with wine bottles, the labels incoherent to any but one of Mr. Biro’s fellow Magyars.

“That one’s called ‘Bull’s Blood,’ ” said a voice behind Mike’s left shoulder. “Specialty of the house. It’s from a town called Eger. You have heard of Eger?”

“No,” Mike said, “but I’ll try a glass.” He laid a ten dollar bill on the bar. “You can keep the change if you answer a question for me.”

“That must be some question,” said the man, a compact fellow with a broad face and a florid mustache. Mr. Biro, presumably.

“We’ll see,” Mike said. “You ever hear of a boat called A Diet of Treacle?”

Biro snatched the bill, made it vanish into the pocket of his vest quick as a dog swallowing a scrap of meat. “Mr. Kraus got a telephone call about it just a few minutes ago. You can talk to him over there.” He pointed to a table in a shadowy corner where a white-haired man sat alone. “I bring your wine.”

“Mr. Kraus?” Mike said, extending one hand as he approached. The old man looked up from where he sat, stooped, over a half-empty glass. There was a telephone beside the glass, its cord dangling beneath the table.

The man straightened as much as he could, which wasn’t very much. “Yes?”

“My name’s Mike Hanlon. I’m trying to find a boat called A Diet of Treacle. I was told to see you.”

“You were told right,” Mr. Kraus said. His voice was soft and he had a wet sort of lisp, as if his dentures hadn’t been fitted quite right. “It’s my boat. I imagine you’re curious why I gave it that name.”

Mike wasn’t, particularly, and more importantly felt the urgency of Charley’s situation weighing on him—but he figured saying he wasn’t interested was no way to gain the man’s confidence. “Of course,” he said, sitting down. A hand appeared over his shoulder and set a glass of red wine before him. He sipped it. It was nothing special.

Mr. Kraus said, “My first name is Dorman. Dorman Kraus. In school, the other boys called me Dormouse. Like in Alice In Wonderland.”

“And...?”

“Are you not a reader, Mr. Hanlon?” Kraus said. “The Mad Hatter’s tea party. The Dormouse tells a story about three girls who live on a diet of treacle.”

“Sure,” Mike said unconvincingly, “that makes perfect sense.”

“What did you want to know about my boat, Mr. Hanlon?”

“Do you ever rent it out?”

“Certainly not.”

“That’s odd,” Mike said, “because I understand someone is making a trip in it this evening.”

“Nonsense,” said Mr. Kraus.

“What was the phone call you got about it?”

“Who says I got a phone call about it?”

“Biro.”

“He’s wrong.”

Mike dug a ten dollar bill out of his pocket and slid it across the table. Mr. Kraus stared at it.

“I don’t need to know much,” Mike said. “Just where you dock the boat. That’ll be plenty.”

“It might be too much.”

“How so?” Mike said.

“I may be an old man,” Kraus said, “but I look forward to living a few years still. Why should I risk that for ten lousy dollars?”

“Another man’s life is at stake, too. A friend of mine. A young man, who should have more than a few years ahead of him. He won’t if you don’t help me.”

“This is not my concern,” Kraus said.

Mike set a second ten dollar bill on top of the first.

Kraus took out a pocket watch, stared at its face, wound its stem, returned it to his pocket. “It is starting to concern me somewhat more,” he said.

“But not enough?”

“Not quite.”

A third sawbuck joined the other two. Krauss neatened up their edges, folded the bills in two and then in two again, set his palm down over them. “Come with me,” he said and slowly, painfully stood. He took two teetering steps away from the table with the aid of a cane. “Will you take my arm? I don’t walk very well anymore.”

“You don’t have to walk,” Mike said. “Just tell me where it is and I’ll go there myself.”

“No,” Kraus said. “I’ll take you there. Or you can have your money back.” When Mike hesitated, Kraus said, “Those are my terms.”

Mike reluctantly took his arm, walked with him to the door. On the sidewalk outside, Kraus looked at his watch again, then set off at a snail’s pace in the direction of the water.

They walked up First Avenue, pausing repeatedly to let Kraus rest and catch what little remained of his breath. In this fashion, they passed warehouses and slips and a cavernous import-export arcade where traders of various sorts maintained one-man booths and fanned themselves to combat the stifling heat. At the pier off 57th Street, a tugboat labored valiantly to pull an overladen barge out of its dock. At 53rd, the pier was walled off and Mike could only see the upper decks of the two ships tied up there.

When Kraus halted for the third or fourth time in one block, Mike considered abandoning him and continuing his search by brute force, hunting down every boat one by one. But there were too many—too many boats, too many buildings, too many blocks. He could spend the next three hours at it and not see them all. And what if the Treacle was docked behind one of the waterfront’s locked gates?

Between 50th Street and 47th, the piers were overgrown with grass and weeds, but a profusion of boats still stood at them, bobbing gently, while others rode at anchor just off some the longer outcroppings of the shore. Mike scanned the hulls, looking for any names longer than a word or two. “How much farther?” he asked. And, each time they came to a pier, “Is this the one?” But Kraus just shook his head, kept his gaze trained on the ground, and concentrated on putting one frail leg in front of the other.

Only when they reached the far end of the avenue did Kraus take one last look at his watch and say, “All right.”

“Where’s the boat?” Mike said, staring at the empty pier they were approaching.

“There,” Kraus said, and pointed out toward the horizon. There was a ship in the middle distance, chugging swiftly toward the open water. It wasn’t so far that Mike couldn’t make out figures on her deck. One of them looked like it might be Charley.

Mike rounded on the old man, had to restrain himself from picking him up bodily by the lapels and shaking him. “You knew,” he said accusingly. “You—that’s why all the time with the watch. Jesus Christ. I bet you can probably walk just fine.”

“Sadly, no,” Kraus said.

“But you can do better than creeping along like this, can’t you? You were making sure they had time to get away!”

“You said all you wanted to know was where I dock the boat,” Kraus said. “Well, now you know. I dock it here. You got what you paid for.”

“But why...why would they leave now? I thought they weren’t going to leave till tonight—” Mike closed his eyes. “They changed their plans, didn’t they. That’s what the phone call was—telling you they were leaving early. As long as they’re collecting the money from Tricia tomorrow morning, they can pick up the purse from the race then, too.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kraus said. “And I don’t want to know. I’m going back now. You don’t have to walk with me.”

“Walk with you?” Mike growled. “I ought to throw you in the goddamn bay.”

“Don’t you dare,” Kraus said. “I’ll scream if you touch me. You’ll have the police on you so fast, young man, you won’t know what hit you.”

“You know something,” Mike said, “it’d almost—

40.

Money Shot

—be worth it,’ I told him.” Mike shook his head. “But of course it wouldn’t have been. It would’ve been a disaster. So I left him there and grabbed the first train back.” He swallowed the shot of whiskey he’d poured himself from the row of bottles on his back bar. “I hope you had better luck.”

“Not exactly,” Tricia said.

“So you didn’t find the money?” Erin said.

“Do you see three million dollars on me?”

“What happened?” Mike said. “Where did you go?”

“To Fulton Street,” Tricia said.

The brownstone was where she’d left it, looking much the way it had at dawn. She watched from across the street as men entered and departed, one by one or in pairs. She didn’t recognize any of them. The limousine wasn’t parked out front or, the one time she circled the block to peek at the building from the rear, out back either. There were some cars along the curb, but no way to know whether they belonged to Barrone and his men or to the neighbors.

The curtains were drawn in the windows all the way up, except for one room at the top where the window was open. It was too high up for Tricia to see in, though.

She thought about walking up the stone steps and ringing the doorbell, trying to talk her way in, but it wasn’t hard to imagine more ways that could turn out badly than well. So she waited, and she watched.

Renata came out twenty minutes later. She was by herself, Tricia was happy to see, wearing a patterned sundress in red and white and cat’s eye sunglasses with her hair pinned up. She looked a bit like an actress trying to go incognito. Tricia fell into step behind her. She kept half a block back, kept other pedestrians between them, but at the same time kept an eye on Renata, watched to see where she’d go. And when she stopped outside a dressmaker’s window to light a cigarette, Tricia took the opportunity to come up behind her and plant the nose of her gun in the small of Renata’s back.

“Don’t turn around,” Tricia said.

“Ah, Tricia,” Renata said, flipping her lighter closed and replacing it in the clutch purse she was carrying. “You think I didn’t know you were there?” She didn’t turn, didn’t look back over her shoulder, but they could each see the other’s face reflected in the darkened store window beside them. “I spotted you the moment I stepped outside.”

“I don’t believe you,” Tricia said. “If you had, you’d never have let me get the drop on you.”

“Drop? What drop?” Renata laughed. “You dumb cluck. There are three men watching us right now who’ll shoot you the moment I give the signal.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s the signal?”

She wagged the cigarette between her fingers. “I drop this on the sidewalk. Grind it out under my toe. It’ll be the last thing you see. Unless you walk away right now.”

“I can pull this trigger before they get me.”

“I doubt it,” Renata said. She didn’t seem nervous at all. She took a long pull on the cigarette, exhaled a mouthful of smoke. “Not going? All right. Have it your way. What do you want?” She raised the cigarette. “You don’t have much time left.”

“The money,” Tricia said. “Where is it?”

“What money?”

“The money you took from your uncle’s safe. The three million dollars.”

Now Renata began to laugh in earnest, really laugh, so hard her shoulders shook from it. “Oh, god. That’s rich. You think I took it.”

“Yes, I do,” Tricia said. “You took your uncle’s money, and then spent the past month holed up in your father’s headquarters for protection. I don’t know if you planned it together or you did it on your own, but he must know about it now because he’s been keeping out of sight too—lying low with you for the past month, trying to keep you safe. That went on until this morning, when poor Eddie barged in on you and you decided you had a sacrificial lamb you could turn over to Uncle Nick to get the heat off you once and for all.”

“What an imagination,” Renata said. “A headshrinker would probably say it’s because of all the loving you’re not getting—oh, yes, Charley told me about you, Miss Knees Together.”

Tricia pressed the gun against the base of Renata’s spine. “Keep talking. You’ll spend the rest of your life in a chair.”

“Touchy, aren’t we?” Renata burned off some more of the cigarette with another drag, then held it up to show off its rapidly diminishing length. “Sure you don’t want to go now? I would if I were you.”

It wasn’t that Tricia wasn’t tempted—what if there really were three gunmen drawing a bead on her right now?—but she shook her head. “Are you telling me,” she said, “that you didn’t take Eddie to your uncle’s earlier today? That you didn’t kill him? Because your uncle told me otherwise.”

“No, Tricia, I’m not telling you that. I’m telling you I didn’t take his money.”

“And I’m saying you’re a liar,” Tricia said. “You lied to your uncle about Eddie, certainly. And why would you have lied about who stole the money if you didn’t do it yourself?”

“How do you know Eddie didn’t do it?” Renata said. “The man confessed.”

“Yeah, he confessed—to stealing both your uncle’s money and his photographs,” Tricia said. “But I know who stole the photos, and it wasn’t him.”

“But then—then you must know who stole the money, too,” Renata said, “and that it wasn’t me.”

“Uh-uh,” Tricia said. “Not so fast.”

Renata fell silent. She was taking no more drags on her cigarette now, Tricia noticed, though it continued to burn slowly toward the filter.

“And,” Tricia said, emboldened, “I think you’re lying about the three men watching us, too. I don’t think there’s anybody watching us. I think nothing will happen when you finish that cigarette.”

“You prepared to bet your life on that?” Renata said.

“Are you?” Tricia said.

They watched each other in the window. Tricia held the gun without wavering. Steadiest hands in the east.

“No,” Renata said briskly. “I’m not.” She dropped the cigarette butt on the ground, where it continued to smolder. Nothing else happened. “Let’s you and I sit down, why don’t we.”

They sat across from one another at a cafeteria on the corner of Dutch Street. The nearest other patron was five tables away and engrossed in a paperback novel, so Tricia was able to keep her gun aimed at Renata behind a menu without anyone noticing or complaining. Except Renata herself, and her complaints fell on deaf ears.

“Why don’t you put that thing away?”

“Why don’t you start talking,” Tricia said, “so I don’t have to use it?”

“As if you’d really shoot me in a public place,” Renata said.

“It’s been a long couple of days, Renata,” Tricia said. “Don’t bet on me making good decisions.”

Renata poured some sugar in her coffee, stirred it. “You know my uncle thinks you have his money. That’s what Eddie told him.”

“Yes, I know. It’s not true—but I don’t expect to be able to convince him of that unless I can find out who does have it.”

“Well, don’t look at me,” Renata said.

Tricia pulled back the hammer of her gun.

“I didn’t take his money,” Renata insisted. “I wish I knew who did.”

“If you didn’t, why do you care who did?”

Renata seemed to make a decision. “I’m going to tell you something that could make my life a lot more difficult if you repeated it. I’m not just doing it because you’ve got a gun on me. I’m doing it because if you’re serious about finding out who took the money, you might be in a position to make my life a lot easier than it’s been for the past month.”

“How’s that?”

“I didn’t steal my uncle’s money,” Renata said, “but not for lack of trying.”

“Go on.”

“I took a shot at it,” Renata said. “I arranged to get into the Sun after hours, went in all set to open the safe and clean it out. Had an escape route planned and everything. But there was no money for me to get. By the time I got there, the safe was already empty.”

Tricia had a powerful feeling of déjà vu. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about an empty safe. Nothing in it. Someone else had already been there, broken in, and emptied the thing out.”

“You expect me to believe that? That you tried to rob the Sun but some other thief got there first?”

“You see why I’ve been lying low?” Renata said. “You see? It’s the truth, but you don’t believe it. Why would Uncle Nick?”

“Why, indeed.”

“I’m not worried that he could have found my fingerprints—I wore gloves, I’m not a complete idiot. But who knows what else he might have found that could lead back to me? And someone might have seen me going in or coming out of the building—I can’t swear no one did.” Renata gulped some coffee. “So ever since, I’ve been cooped up in that place on Fulton Street, waiting for the old bastard to catch whoever robbed him and put an end to it. But a month’s gone by, he hasn’t caught anybody, and according to my father he’s been getting crazier and angrier about it by the day, rounding everyone up with the slightest possible connection—”

“Tell me about it,” Tricia said.

“Eventually, one way or another, he’d get to me. I had to feed him someone. And then Eddie walked through my door.”

“It wasn’t Eddie’s fault. He thought you’d asked him to come,” Tricia said. “You know that, right?”

“Yeah, that’s what he said. That you told him I’d sent for him. As he stood there gawping at us. It was awful.”

“Well, you certainly paid him back for it.”

“That’s right,” Renata said. “I did.”

“Let’s get back to the robbery,” Tricia said, trying hard to push aside her feelings of guilt over her own role in Eddie’s death. “You’re saying you just happened to decide to rob your uncle on the same day someone else happened to do the same thing?”

“Not exactly,” Renata said. “I didn’t choose that day out of thin air.”

“Oh?” Tricia said.

“Look, I’ve been thinking about Sal’s safe for years now. I grew up thinking about it—about all the money he kept in there, about what the combination might be. I’d made up lists of possible combinations—I know something about how the man thinks, so I was pretty sure one of my guesses would be right. And I knew I could get into the room, I’d just copy my father’s keys. But I’d never gotten myself over the hump and actually decided to do it. Because what if I did and something went wrong? If I got caught? He’d kill me. I mean, he loves me, I’m his niece, but if I stole from him? He’d kill me without thinking twice. That’s the kind of man he is.”

Seeing how he’d treated her husband for a lesser offense, Tricia was not inclined to disagree.

“Then about a month ago I’m sitting in one of the bars my father runs—you know he runs all sorts of businesses for my uncle, right? Bars, a garage downtown, couple of motels in Jersey. Anyway, I’m sitting there, middle of the day, having some lunch and a couple of drinks, minding my own business, and I hear these two guys in the booth behind me talking. And what they’re talking about is this robbery they’re planning. I mean, they were being quiet, but I was sitting right on the other side of the divider, I could hear every word. And after I’d listened for a few minutes I realized it was Sal’s place they were talking about robbing. There was this whole complicated scheme—up a wall, through a window, I mean crazy stuff. But I started thinking: This is my chance. All I have to do is go in first, clean the place out, then let these two clowns take their stab at it. They’re the ones who’d get caught—no one would ever look twice at me.

“So I waited to hear when they were planning to do it. And they said it very clearly: the eighteenth at 3:30. They said it twice.

“So, fine—I got everything ready for the eighteenth, only I went in at 2:00. Plenty of time, right? Figured it shouldn’t take me more than 45 minutes, and I allowed myself twice that.” Renata shook her head sadly. “They must have changed the plan. When I got to the counting room, they’d already been. The safe was cleaned out. And I was the one left holding the bag.”

“You’ll pardon me for saying so,” Tricia said, “but what a load of crap.”

“I swear to god,” Renata said, “it’s true. May I be struck dead if I’m lying.”

“You overheard two guys in a bar. Talking about robbing Sal Nicolazzo.”

“Yes.”

“A bar run by one of Nicolazzo’s main deputies. By his brother-in-law.”

“Yes.”

“And you decided you’d beat them to the punch, take your shot at the money, only they beat you instead.”

“Yes!”

“Christ, Renata,” Tricia said. “Do you see any hay stuck in my hair? Do I look like some hick you can bamboozle with a crazy yarn about two mysterious crooks who are stupid enough to discuss their cockamamie plot in a place owned by the man they plan to rob, but slick enough to pull it off and vanish without a trace?”

“All I can tell you is what happened,” Renata said. “Whether you believe it or not, that’s your business.”

“So what did these two men look like?”

“I didn’t get a good look at them.”

“Of course not,” Tricia said.

“They were sitting behind me!”

“Naturally,” Tricia said. “So what bar was it?”

“Why does that matter?”

“Because we can go there and see if we can find anyone else who remembers these guys.”

“It was a month ago!”

“What bar was it, Renata?”

“I don’t remember,” she said. “It was a month ago. I had a couple of drinks in me. Maybe more than a couple.” Tricia kept staring at her and so did the gun. “One of the ones on the west side, maybe Royal’s Brew or the Rusty Bucket. Probably the Bucket. I’m not sure.”

“You’re not sure.”

She shook her head. “They pretty much all look alike. My father used the same crew to build them all.”

“You know what I think?” Tricia said. “I think these two men in this mysterious bar are like the three men you said were watching us just now on the street, the ones who were supposed to kill me when you dropped your cigarette. You’re a liar, Renata, and not even a good one.”

Tricia stood.

“Are you going to shoot me?” Renata said.

Tricia put the gun in her pocket, but kept her hand in there.

“Let’s see this bar of yours,” she said. “Then I’ll decide.”

41.

Zero Cool

The Rusty Bucket was a wood-paneled bar, inside and out, and at first glance it did look a lot like every other dark, nondescript bar in the city: high stools, low lights, assorted pictures and gewgaws hanging from the walls. But when you walked through the door you realized the place had a certain atmosphere of its own, less the result of its décor than of the people clustered around its tables and in the booths against the back wall. They were young, for one thing, many just a year or two older than Tricia and some of the girls not even that. The men wore striped t-shirts and worn dungarees and tennis shoes or moccasins with no socks; one had kicked his off and was barefoot. Only a few were entirely clean-shaven, the rest sporting combinations of sideburns and goatees and unkempt half beards. The girls wore their hair in horsetails or just hanging straight to their shoulders, with no makeup on and hand-rolled cigarettes burning between their fingers.

There was no jukebox; instead, a small stage had been constructed out of low wooden blocks, and a combo—two men and a woman—sat on chairs there, sluggishly stroking their instruments. The woman pulled a low, slow melody out of her guitar while the men accompanied her on bongos and bass.

“What kind of place is this?” Tricia whispered, feeling self conscious.

“It’s where the far out crowd gathers,” Renata said, her voice rich with contempt. “Especially on weekends, when they’re not in the fancy schools mommy and daddy are shelling out for.”

“It’s different during the week?”

“During the day it is. Then it’s just a bar. The rest of the time, it’s—well, you can see.” She folded her sunglasses and put them away in her purse.

The girl stopped strumming and the crowd gave her performance a light spray of applause, some murmurs of approval. In the silence that followed, glasses were emptied and filled, voices raised and lowered. Tricia heard a match flare and then smelled the cloying odor she remembered from the artists’ house in Brooklyn.

“So this is the place,” Tricia said, “where you heard your two master criminals plotting?”

“I told you, I’m not sure. You remember every place you’ve ever been?”

“The important ones I do.” She prodded Renata in the back. “Let’s see if the bartender remembers anything.”

“He’s probably not even here during the week.”

“We’ll see.”

The bartender was a slope-shouldered, narrow-faced character with long arms and long skinny fingers and black Buddy Holly glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. Behind them, his eyes were red.

“Can I ask you something?” Tricia said.

“Lay it on me,” the bartender said.

“You work here during the week, or only weekends?”

“Only when I need bread,” the man said with a grin, “which means I slave all seven, sister.”

“Well, my friend here,” Tricia said, “tells me she was in a couple of weeks back, saw two guys here, sitting in one of those booths, talking about something pretty important. We’re trying to track them down.”

“All right,” the bartender said. “I dig. What’d they look like?”

Through her pocket, Tricia nudged Renata with the gun.

“I don’t know...one was about your height,” Renata said, “but a little bigger around, huskier. He had a beard, or the start of one, anyway.”

“You just described half the people here,” the bartender said. “And the other?”

“A few years older, a little smaller, a little thinner. Less hair—like maybe he was starting to lose it. No beard.”

“You’re putting me on, right? You want to know if I’ve seen a couple of guys, one’s taller, one’s shorter, one’s heavier, one’s skinnier. Well, sure I have, and so’s everyone else who’s ever been to an Abbott and Costello picture.”

“Thanks, mister,” Tricia said. “That’s a lot of help.”

“Cool down, mama, don’t you blow your top,” the bartender said. “I didn’t say I couldn’t help, you just got to give me more than that to chew on. You remember anything else?” he asked Renata. “What those cats were wearing? What they sounded like?”

“They sounded like New Yorkers. The older one might have been from Brooklyn, it sounded like. The other one, the bigger one with the beard...I don’t know, could’ve been from upstate somewhere. Sort of a flat voice, like Warren Spahn—you know what he sounds like? The ballplayer?” The bartender shook his head. “You ever hear Harold Arlen, when he sings his own stuff?”

The bartender nodded this time. “Strictly dullsville—not my scene at all. But yeah, I’ve heard his sides.”

“Well, like that.”

He mulled it over.

“You remember what they were having?”

“No.”

“What day it was?”

“About a month ago.”

“But what day of the week?”

“No.”

“What time of day?”

“Lunchtime. A little after noon.”

“Two guys a month ago at lunchtime? That’s all you’ve got?”

“That’s all.”

He mulled some more.

“Strikeout,” he said finally. “Sorry, baby. I come up dry.”

“Well,” Tricia said, “there you go.”

“I told you—” Renata said.

“You told me lots of things,” Tricia said.

The bartender waved at the selection of liquor behind him. “Can I get you wrens anything else? Something to drink?”

“Thanks, but no. We’ve got another bar to try. My friend’s got one more shot to get this right.” Tricia started to pull Renata away. But Renata yanked her arm out of Tricia’s grip, and sat down firmly on one of the stools.

“Actually,” she said, smiling up at the bartender, “I’d love a drink.”

He looked from one of them to the other. “Fine,” he said, a little uneasily. “What’s your kick?”

“Nothing,” Tricia said. “We’ve got somewhere to be.”

“I’m staying,” Renata said. “You run along. I’ll see you later.”

“No, Renata, we’re leaving.”

“Or what?” Renata said. She turned to the bartender: “You won’t believe what this one’s been telling me she’d do to me if I don’t do what she says.”

“What’s that?”

“See how she’s got her hand in her pocket there?” Renata said. “She says—”

“Renata,” Tricia said.

“She says,” Renata said, “that she’s got a gun in there.”

“Renata—”

“A gun?” the bartender said and laughed. Then he saw Renata wasn’t laughing. “Man, that’s not cool.”

“She’s joking,” Tricia said.

“I’m not joking,” Renata said. “She said she’d shoot me if I didn’t do what she says.”

“You said that to her? That you’d plug her? That’s not cool at all.”

“Of course I didn’t say that,” Tricia said.

“You got a rod in there?”

Tricia smiled weakly. She pulled her hand out of her pocket, empty.

“No rod,” Tricia said.

“I’ve got eyes,” the bartender said. “I see it there in your pocket.”

Sure enough, the outline was showing, plain as day.

Some of the other people sitting at the bar were looking at her now.

“It’s not a real gun,” Tricia said. “It’s just a prop, from this show we’re doing.”

“We’re not in any show,” Renata said. “That’s a lie.”

“Listen,” the bartender said, “I don’t know what’s going on here—but when you start bringing firepower into it, that’s a matter for the Man.” He lifted a black telephone onto the bar from underneath.

She didn’t know which ‘Man’ he meant—the police or his employer. Either way, though—

“That’s not necessary,” Tricia said. “I’m leaving.”

“Better believe you are,” the bartender said as she backed away, keeping her hands in the air. He kept his on the telephone receiver. “Bringing a piece into the Rusty Bucket. That’s way uncool. That’s zero cool. That’s negative cool.”

He patted Renata’s hand and she put on a hurt-and-frightened face to suit.

“Okay, Renata,” Tricia said, “you win. But what exactly do you expect me to tell your uncle?”

“Anything you want, long as it’s not about me.”

“And why shouldn’t I tell him about you?”

“I didn’t take his money,” Renata said. “That’s the truth. I didn’t take it and I don’t have it. You tell him otherwise and you’ll get a second innocent person killed.”

“Innocent!” Tricia barked. “You’re about as innocent as Mamie Van Doren.”

The bartender lifted the telephone receiver. They could all hear the dial tone.

He said, “If you’re not gone in five—”

She was gone in two.

42.

Shooting Star and Spiderweb

“Great,” Mike said. “Just great.” He turned to Erin. “And you—did you get the call?”

“Like Billy Sunday on a Saturday night.” Erin lifted a cocktail napkin from the bar. She’d scrawled an address on it. Mike took one look at it and said, “That’s the pier. Where the boat was tied up.”

“Well, it’s where they want you to bring the money,” Erin said, to Tricia. “And the pictures.”

“The pictures are easy.” She patted her pocket. “The money—that’s another story.”

“It sure is,” Erin said. “But I haven’t exactly been sitting on my rump while the two of you went all over town chasing wild geese. I’ve made arrangements.”

“What arrangements?”

“We need three million dollars, right? Or anyway a box that looks like it’s got three million dollars in it. You’d think the box would be the easy part, but actually that wasn’t so. Hope you don’t mind that I emptied this.” She dragged a footlocker out from behind the bar.

“Fine with me,” Mike said.

“Now for the three million dollars part.” She swung the lid open.

No one would have mistaken the contents for money—the hand-cut slips of paper were the right size and shape but they’d clearly been cut out of newsprint or, in some cases, what looked like pages of the phone book. “That’s not going to fool anyone,” Tricia said.

“Not the way it is now, it won’t,” Erin said. “But with enough layers of actual bills on top it’ll pass inspection.”

“You want to tell me where these layers of actual bills are going to come from?” Tricia said.

“By all means,” Erin said. “They’re going to come from a Mister Reynaldo Bruges.”

“And who is mister...?”

“Bruges,” she said, pronouncing it like she was clearing her throat. “He’s a fine Argentine gentleman who sometimes calls Madame Helga to book a model or two for a party he’s throwing. For some high roller.”

“ ‘High roller’ meaning—”

“The man’s a bookie,” Erin said. “Takes bets, makes book. Hands over layers of actual bills when one of your bets comes in.”

“That’s your plan? Place some bets and hope one of them comes in?”

“Who said anything about hoping? I’m talking about a sure thing.”

Tricia saw Mike nodding out of the corner of her eye. “What? What am I missing here? What’s this sure thing you’re so...sure about?”

“The third race at Belmont,” Erin said, handing over a copy of the Racing Form. There were a batch of bill-sized holes in the front page, but the “Races of the Week” listings on the next page were intact. There were a dozen horses listed for the third race. Ten of the names she didn’t recognize. Two she did. She’d briefly shared a stall with one of them.

“Uncle Nick’s not going to leave anything to chance,” Erin said. “If he’s got people sticking around to pick up the purse, he knows there’s going to be a purse for them to pick up.”

“You’re devious,” Mike said.

“Why, thank you,” Erin said. “I try.”

“How much money did you put down?” Mike asked.

“All that Reynaldo was willing to float me, or more precisely all he was willing to float Charley. I told him I was putting the bet on for him.”

Tricia said, “And you put it on...”

“Shooting Star and Spiderweb, each to win and then the two of them to win and place, either combination. We’ll clear more than eleven thousand dollars if they do. That’ll fill the box nicely.”

“And if they don’t win?”

“Then Charley owes some money he can’t afford to pay,” Erin said. “It won’t be the first time. I’d say he’s got bigger worries right now than that.” She took Tricia by the shoulder. “But they will win. Nicolazzo’s not a gambling man, not with his own horses on his own track.”

“You think Belmont’s his track?” Mike said.

“His and his friends.” She turned the knob on the old RCA Mike kept beside the cash register. With a soft crackle the sound faded in. She tuned it, stations passing in a blur till she got to the far end of the dial. “...and it’s Curtain Call and Rented A Tent, Curtain Call coming up on the outside, Curtain Call taking the lead—no, it’s Rented A Tent, Curtain Call and Rented A Tent, they’re neck-and-neck, I’m telling you, this one’s gonna be close, it’s—it’s—It’s Curtain Call, folks. Followed by Rented A Tent, and Brassy Lady coming in to show. Those are your results, folks, coming to you live from the Belmont Race Track, where every race is a winner.” A trumpeter played a few notes of “Off to the Races” and the program went to commercial.

“How many more to go?” Tricia asked.

Erin looked at the paper. “Two. That was the first.”

They sat impatiently through the second race, which took a while to get started and another while in the post-race analysis afterwards. Then came some more words from the sponsor. But eventually the horses were at the starting gate for the third race. The tension couldn’t have been any worse at the track than it was in Mike’s bar.

“And...” came the announcer’s voice, “they’re off!”

Tricia found her palms sweating, her nails biting into the flesh as the horses rounded the first turn. You could barely hear the hoofbeats in the background behind the sound of the announcer’s yammering, but they were there, like her own thundering heartbeat. The horses’ names became part of the general din, a swarm of unfamiliar sounds among which she desperately tried to catch the ones she knew.

“It’s Will She Shine in the lead, well ahead of the pack, Shooting Star behind her, two lengths back, King’s Ransom and Sun Tomorrow and Spiderweb tussling for the number three spot...it’s Will She Shine and will she ever, this race is hers to lose, gentlemen, Shooting Star’s coming up but they’ve passed the halfway mark, there’s no way he’ll catch her—”

Tricia had never been to a horse race in her life, had never listened to one on the radio before, never watched one on television; she’d ridden, like every other kid in South Dakota, but this was new to her, and she didn’t care for it. It was too frenzied, too loud, too desperate—and there was too much at stake.

“...the race to place is opening up as Spiderweb pulls out in front, she’s coming up from behind...Shooting Star’s falling back, it’s Spiderweb and Shooting Star, Will She Shine out in front, then Spiderweb and Shooting Star, no, no, Shooting Star and Spiderweb—wait—” A sudden roar rose from the crowd. “Will She Shine is down, folks, she’s fallen, it’s a bad one—” The announcer was shouting now. “And Shooting Star takes the lead—it’s Shooting Star and Spiderweb, now Sun Tomorrow’s making a move, it’s Shooting Star and Spiderweb and Sun Tomorrow, Sun Tomorrow’s coming up, it’s Shooting Star and Sun Tomorrow, no, no, now Spiderweb—” He fell silent for a moment and you could hear the clatter as the horses hit the finish line. “My gosh, what a race. It’s Shooting Star, Spiderweb by a nose, and Sun Tomorrow, followed by King’s Ransom in fourth, and poor, poor Will She Shine out of the action, still lying in the track, the medics are coming over—call her Will She Race now, folks, or Will She Even Walk. The jury’s out on what this means for this golden, golden horse. It’s a sad day at the Belmont Race Track, listeners, a tremendous upset. Your final results: Shooting Star, Spiderweb, Sun Tomorrow. More in a moment.”

The trumpets blared, and then a Pall Mall jingle began.

Tricia felt her breath coming fast. Her face felt flushed. “That poor horse,” she said. “You think Nicolazzo could possibly have known she’d fall...?”

“Possibly known?” Erin said. “I’m sure he paid the jockey to do it.”

“That’s sickening,” Tricia said.

“Add it to his tab,” Erin said, picking up the phone. “Now let’s get our money.”

43.

The Murderer Vine

The taxi let them out at the foot of the Flatiron Building, just a mile or so south of Mike’s place.

“I don’t understand,” Tricia said. “What are we doing here? Why couldn’t we go to his office?”

“I’m sure Reynaldo will explain,” Erin said. And indeed, a large man came toward them on the sidewalk, explaining as he neared.

“My dear, my dear, I’m so sorry,” he said, gesturing with the walking stick he carried. He wore a heavy, woolen suit—too heavy, given the weather—and a sisal hat whose long brim cast half his face into shadow. “I congratulate you on your victory and look forward to giving you what you’re due, but—this much money, I can’t pay it off on my own say-so. You understand.”

“I don’t, actually,” Erin said. “You must pay off more than this all the time. We’re talking, what, eleven, twelve thousand? Not a million bucks.”

“No, not a million, it’s true. But still—this much money, on a bet placed so close to post time, in a race where the favorite fell...they won’t let me do it. We all answer to someone, my dear, and the man I answer to has said he wants to attend to any noteworthy payoffs on this race personally.” He took his first look at Tricia then. “And who is this? A friend of yours? I haven’t met her before, have I?”

“No. Trixie, this is Reynaldo; Reynaldo, Trixie.”

They shook hands and Reynaldo favored her with a smile. “Do you like parties, my dear?”

“No,” Tricia said. “I like bookies who pay off when you win, like they’re supposed to.”

Reynaldo’s expression hardened. “Rather a sharp tongue on this one.”

“Who is it we’re going to be meeting?” Erin said.

“A man named Guercio. His first name is not important. If he is satisfied that there was nothing untoward about your bet, he’ll pay what you’re due.”

“And if he’s not satisfied?” Erin said.

“Why think of such things? Come. He is waiting for us.” Reynaldo let them into the Flatiron Building through one of the doors on the side. They took a swift elevator to the sixth floor, where a guard in a rust-colored sport coat gave all three of them a cursory pat-down. He didn’t find the gun or the photos in Tricia’s pocket, since they were back at Mike’s where she had left them lying on the bar. He did confiscate a small derringer from Reynaldo.

“You’ll get this back when—”

“—I leave, I know,” Reynaldo said. “I’ve been here many times.”

“I’m sorry Mr. Bruges,” the guard said, pronouncing it to rhyme with “budges,” and Reynaldo winced.

“You’re new, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Mr. Bruges.”

He winced again.

“Follow me.” The guard led them down the hall and into an office built into the prow of the wedge-shaped building. Past a sturdy oak coat closet on one side and a pair of filing cabinets on the other, the walls angled toward one another, converging at the far end in a rounded-off point just wide enough for one man to stand; and just one man was standing there, hands in his pockets, staring out at Madison Square Park across the way.

“This was once a lovely park,” the man said without turning to face them. “An important park. Did you know, the Statue of Liberty was displayed here, in pieces, while she was being constructed? Her arm and her torch. They stood here for years. Now—”

He turned, walked away from the window.

“Now, it’s a place I wouldn’t let my sister walk alone.” He looked at Erin, at Tricia. He ignored Reynaldo.

“This bet of yours, on the horses that won,” he said, speaking slowly, as though he wanted to consider each word carefully before letting it out. “This bet, on horses that would not have won had this unfortunate accident not occurred. This bet...what prompted your Mr. Borden to make it?”

“What do you mean?” Erin said. “Charley thought the horses might win. That’s why he made the bet. Why does anyone make any bet?”

“Forgive me,” Guercio said. “I understand why bets are made. But this particular bet—it is unusually large for Mr. Borden, is it not?”

“Reynaldo accepted it,” Erin said. “If it was too large he should have said something.”

“Mr. Borden has an admirable record of losing his bets,” Guercio said. “For him to win such a large bet on such an unlikely outcome—it stretches credulity, does it not?”

“You know what they say,” Erin said. “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.”

“Ha! This is so. And still.”

“Mr. Guercio,” Erin said, and Tricia marveled at the straight face she was able to keep as she said it, “I can tell you absolutely for sure that Charley had no inside knowledge about that race. He picked those horses because he liked the sound of their names.”

“Will She Shine, that’s a fine-sounding name, too.”

“What can I tell you,” Erin said. “He didn’t like it as much.”

“Your Mr. Borden,” Guercio said. “I have...heard things. On the grapevine, you understand. That he is, forgive me, not long for this world.”

Tricia, who’d made a great effort to hold her tongue so far, couldn’t contain herself at this. “What are you talking about? What have you heard?”

“Whisperings, here and there. That he has made a powerful man angry. That this man now holds him captive and has no intention of letting him go. The details do not matter.”

“What sort of grapevine is this?” Tricia said. “They just got him a few hours ago!”

“I assume you know the business I’m in. Mr. Borden certainly does. In this business, people talk. Thieves talk to thieves, second-story men to other second-story men. Killers talk to killers. They each have their own grapevine, and there are few secrets that can be kept from it for long.”

“And which one’s talking about Charley?” Tricia said.

“The worst,” Guercio said. “He is in the hands of murderers, madam. And the word traveling along the murderer vine is that tomorrow’s sunrise will be his last. What’s more,” he said emphatically, “the particular murderer into whose hands he has fallen is not only a savage fellow indeed but the very man whose horses won this race.” He spread his palms as if to illustrate how plain and clear it all was. “So you see, I have to consider the possibility that Mr. Borden somehow gained improper knowledge of the outcome of that race prior to its being run, and that this is why he is now facing the punishment he faces.”

“It’s not,” Tricia said. “That has nothing to do with any horse race.”

“That would be most reassuring to hear,” Guercio said, “if only I believed it.”

“What are you saying?” Erin said. “That you won’t pay off on the bet? Because none of the rest of this matters. You accepted Charley’s wager, he won, now you have to pay off. That’s the way it works.”

“Don’t lecture me on how my business works,” Guercio snapped. He got control of himself again and when he spoke next his voice was measured and careful once more. “A bookmaker is an honorable man and has certain obligations, it’s true—but only insofar as he is himself dealing with other honorable men. There is no obligation to pay a man who cheats. There is also, I might add, no obligation to pay a dead man.”

“He isn’t dead yet,” Erin said. “Maybe he will be tomorrow or maybe not—but tomorrow’s not today, and today’s when you owe him his money. You want word to get out that you welsh on your bets?”

“No,” Guercio said, “that would be both unfortunate and false—and doubly unfortunate for being false. Perhaps I can suggest an accommodation.”

“Such as?”

“We will hold Mr. Borden’s money for now—in escrow, if you will. Safe under lock and key. Should he return, alive and well, from his captors tomorrow, that will be evidence enough for us that he didn’t cheat and we will release the money. With a day’s interest, of course. We are looking to harm no one.”

“That’s not good enough,” Erin said.

“I’m afraid it’s the best I can do. These decisions go even higher up in our organization than I.”

Tricia thought of Reynaldo’s words: We all answer to someone. “How much higher?”

“Enough,” Guercio said.

“Then we want to talk to whoever’s higher,” Erin said. “Whoever’s got the power to hand over the money we’re owed.”

“I don’t think that’s a very good idea,” Guercio said. “All you’ll do is make him angry.”

“Look,” Erin said—and as she said it she reached one arm up under her dress and Tricia heard the sound of tape ripping off skin. When her hand emerged, Tricia’s gun was in it. “Somebody owes me money,” she said, “and somebody’s going to pay.”

44.

Somebody Owes Me Money

Reynaldo’s mouth fell open and Tricia felt her own drop as well. When—? How—?

Erin must have taken the gun after Tricia put it down on the bar at Mike’s, she figured. Erin had gone to the bathroom before they left. That must have been when she’d taped it to...what, the inside of her leg?

In any event, she had it in her hand now.

Behind them, Tricia heard the guard grunt and, turning, she saw the man drawing a gun of his own out of a holster beneath his sport coat.

Erin sighted quickly and pulled the trigger, and the man’s hand shot back, his gun flying out of his fist. With an expression of pain on his face, he jammed his hand under his other arm. Tricia saw blood slowly soak into his sleeve, turning it an even darker shade of rust.

“Toss the other gun,” Erin commanded, and when the guard failed to respond, she repeated it. “Otherwise my next shot goes between your eyes,” she said.

Her next shot—

There would be no next shot, Tricia knew; Erin had just used up the only bullet in the gun.

“Erin,” she said.

“Not now,” Erin said. As the guard threw Reynaldo’s derringer away from him and, following Erin’s gestures, moved over to the narrow end of the room, Erin swung the gun to cover Guercio, whose hands dutifully rose.

“Erin,” Tricia said.

“Not now!”

“It’s important,” Tricia said.

But Erin ignored her. “Mr. Guercio, we need this money—without it, Charley is going to die. What’s more, it’s ours. You owe it to us. So let’s skip to the finish here. Who do I need to see to make this happen?”

“You’re making a mistake.”

“Maybe so,” Erin said. “It won’t be my first or my last.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Guercio said.

“The money...?” Erin said.

Guercio took the top slip of paper from a stack on his desk, uncapped a fountain pen, and scratched out a few words, paused for a moment, then scratched out a few more. He screwed the cap back on the pen, laid it down, folded the note in half. Held it out to her. “You can take this to the Satellite Club on Union Square, ask for Mr. Magliocco. If he wants to give you the money, it’s up to him.”

Erin snatched the paper from his hand.

While she was doing this, Reynaldo stepped forward. He gave the knob at the end of his walking stick a counterclockwise twist and drew out a slim foot-long blade. He dropped the stick itself and swung the blade up to within an inch of Erin’s neck. “Not so fast, my dear.”

“Put that thing down,” Guercio said. “You’re going to get yourself shot.”

“Oh, she wouldn’t shoot me,” Reynaldo said. “We’ve known each other a long time. Isn’t that right, my dear? I’m sorry to do this—but you can’t walk in here with a gun and start threatening people. You are my guest, and I’ll have to answer for your behavior.”

“I’m sorry, too, Reynaldo,” Erin said. “I liked you.” She turned the gun to face him and pulled the trigger.

He flinched as the hammer clicked on an empty chamber.

She pulled the trigger twice more with the same result. After a moment of confusion, a smile spread across Reynaldo’s face. Another appeared on Guercio’s, tinged less with relief and more with malice. The guard had no smile on his face at all—just the malice.

“Ah,” Reynaldo said. “My dear.”

The derringer bucked in Tricia’s hand then as she fired it from just two feet away. The blade spun from Reynaldo’s grip to clatter against the wall.

Reynaldo howled in pain, wincing and clutching his hand.

Tricia dropped the little single-barreled gun on the carpet. It, too, only held one shot—but at least she knew it. And fortunately, she’d picked up the guard’s gun from the floor as well.

She transferred the bigger gun from her left hand to her right, brandished it aggressively.

Erin backed up without crossing Tricia’s line of fire. “Only one bullet,” she said. “That what you were trying to tell me?”

“Just go call the elevator,” Tricia said.

“What did you do with them?” Erin asked as they rode their second cab of the evening to the north end of Union Square. “Tie them up?”

“There wasn’t time,” Tricia said. “Or anything to tie them up with.”

“So, what, you knocked them out?”

“Do I look strong enough to knock out three men, all of them bigger than me?”

“So what did you do?” Erin said. “You didn’t shoot them, did you?”

“Of course not,” Tricia said. “What do you think I am?”

“Then what did you do?”

“I apologized to them for what we’d done,” Tricia said.

“You...apologized.”

“I explained to them that with their help we might be able not only to free Charley but also do some harm to Nicolazzo—Guercio didn’t seem to have much love for him. And I asked them please to not interfere with our getting the money we’re owed from Mr. Magliocco.”

“You asked them please...? They’re probably on the phone with Magliocco right now!”

“I don’t think so,” Tricia said.

“Why not?”

“Because I also ripped the phone out of the wall,” Tricia said. “And made them take off all their clothes.”

“All their clothes,” Erin said.

“And get in the closet,” Tricia said. “I locked them in. Then I locked their clothes in the filing cabinet. The phone, too.” She opened her palm, where two keys lay, one longer, one shorter.

Erin smiled.

“That’s more like it,” she said.

“I try,” Tricia said.

They showed Guercio’s note to the bruiser at the door, who patted them down at length before letting them pass, and then to a crew-cut maitre d’ who handed the note back with an expression of surprise. Maybe he was used to the women who came bearing notes from Guercio looking more impressive, less run-down. Or perhaps it was the note’s second sentence that surprised him.

The note said, These women wish to collect Charley Borden’s winnings—show them every courtesy. But frisk them carefully first. It was signed just with initials, V.G.

The maitre d’ bent to his appointed task, giving Tricia her fourth frisking in 24 hours, and her most thorough yet. Uncomfortable as it was, Tricia submitted to the search with good grace. The guard’s pistol was sitting comfortably in a garbage can down the block, so she knew there was nothing for the maitre d’ to find.

He didn’t find anything on Erin, either, though he worked his way up her body slowly and with obvious relish.

“Touch ‘em again and I’ll have to charge you five bucks,” Erin said.

“I’ve got my orders,” he said.

When he was satisfied they had nothing dangerous on them, he led them through a dark and empty lounge to a leather-upholstered door, where he pulled a braided cord dangling from the ceiling. Somewhere behind the door, Tricia heard a bell chime. Footsteps approached, and the maitre d’ said, “It’s me—Joey,” when they’d stopped.

“Yeah?” came a voice. “What kind of wine we serving tonight?”

“Montepulciano.”

The door swung open.

Behind it, a roulette wheel spun at a table surrounded by bettors in wrinkled suits and young women in backless gowns. A croupier stood at a craps table, sweeping the dice along the felt to a waiting shooter’s hand. The maitre d’ threaded a path between the tables and Tricia and Erin followed close on his heels. A few men looked up as they passed but most remained focused on the money they were losing.

There were tables set up for poker and blackjack, but with no players at them so far—it was still early, Tricia supposed. Up on one wall she saw a blackboard listing the start times of upcoming horse races.

They kept going, past a small stage with a red velvet curtain and rows of plush seats empty before it, then down a hallway decorated with framed paintings of naked women. The door at the far end had no upholstery on it and no braided cord to pull. The maitre d’ knocked.

A voice said, “What’s the—”

“Montepulciano.”

Tricia watched the doorknob turn and the door swing to. The room inside was brightly lit and well appointed, with thick curtains hanging before a wide window and dark cherrywood furniture buffed to a high gloss. On one side of the room a low sofa supported the bulk of a black-haired man of at least three hundred pounds and a slender blonde coiled up on the seat beside him with a resentful look on her face. She looked to be about Tricia’s age; the man looked at least two decades older.

“What is it, Joey?” the man said in a voice as husky as a just-wakened drunk’s. “Who are these women?”

The maitre d’ passed the note to him. “They had this note from Vincent, Mr. Magliocco.”

He read it, passed it back. “You frisk them?”

“Absolutely.”

Magliocco sat forward with his hands on his knees. “I know you,” he said to Tricia. “Why do I know her?”

The man who had opened the door—a little pepperpot with a tangle of curly hair and a nose you could use to split logs—came over to them for a closer look. “She’s that dancer you liked, boss,” he said. “You remember, at the Sun. You had me give her your number. She never called,” he added accusingly.

“Oh, yes,” Magliocco rasped. “The dancer. I remember. ‘Begin the Beguine,’ right?”

Tricia nodded.

“And what are you here for now? Borden’s money? The man’s a cheat, and he’s about to become a dead cheat. Why should I pay anything?”

“Because you accepted his bet and it came in,” Erin said. “You owe—”

“Don’t tell me what I owe.”

“You’ve taken his money every time he’s lost, haven’t you?”

“A man wants to give me money, I’ll take it.”

“Well, then you’ve got to pay out when he wins!”

“Ah, get her out of here,” Magliocco said.

“Both of them?” the pepperpot asked.

“No, just the loud one,” Magliocco said. He licked his lips. “Maybe the dancer and I can work something out.”

45.

No House Limit

Magliocco sprang to his feet with more alacrity than his size had led Tricia to expect. He kicked the door shut behind the two men. They’d walked Erin out with a hand on each elbow, and at the last moment she’d looked back at Tricia with more than a little concern in her eyes. Tricia had said, “It’s okay, I’ll be fine,” but it had been a reflex. She wasn’t at all sure she was going to be fine.

“So,” Magliocco said. “What would you like to drink?”

“I’m okay, thanks. I don’t need a drink.”

“Who ever needs a drink? A glass of water, maybe, if you’re in the Sahara Desert. Other than that, it’s for pleasure. So what’s your pleasure?”

“A glass of water sounds fine,” Tricia said.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, you’re gonna be a pain in my ass, aren’t you?” He said it with some amusement, though. “You’re cute, you know. Not what I’d call gorgeous, and maybe you don’t got knockers like your friend or like Reenie here, but you’ve got something, kid.”

Reenie was staring daggers at her. Tricia wanted to say to her, Don’t worry, he’s all yours, I don’t want him. But she kept her mouth shut.

“Make us a couple gin tonics, will you?” he said, and since he didn’t turn his head when he said it, Tricia briefly thought he was asking her to do it. But Reenie must have been used to this and got up and made her way to a little bar set up in the corner.

“That okay with you?” Magliocco said, and this time he was talking to Tricia, so she nodded.

“Good. Good. So listen, here’s the pitch: I want you to come work for me. Dance for me. Ditch that bastard Nicolazzo, forget the Sun, come work here. I’ll double your salary and you’ll make the same again in tips. More, maybe. Depends what you’re willing to do.”

“He means will you lay for it,” Reenie said. She had a queer high-pitched voice, like a boy who’d swallowed the helium from a toy balloon.

“Tschah,” Magliocco said, or something to that effect. “Just make the drinks.” And to Tricia: “It’s up to each girl what she’s willing to do. There’s no house limit here, each girl sets her own limits. So, you know, whatever you’re comfortable doing, where you draw the line, that says how much money you can make. We got rooms in the back, you want to use them—but a good dancer like you, you could make decent dough without even taking none of your clothes off, probably.”

“Mr. Magliocco,” Tricia said, straining to keep her tone civil, “I appreciate the offer, and I’ll seriously consider it—I mean that. Truth is, I can’t go back to work at the Sun and I’ve got to work somewhere. But right now I just can’t think about myself. Charley Borden’s in deep, deep trouble and I’m the one that landed him there. I’ve got to get him out, and we have a plan, but for the plan to work we need money, and the money Charley won on that horse race is the money we need. Can’t you just pay what he won and then we can talk about the job later?”

“No,” Magliocco said. “But I’ll tell you what I will do. You sign a contract saying you’ll come to work for me and I’ll pay off that bet the next minute. It’s what they call a quid pro quo—you know what that means? It’s French for you scratch my back, I scratch yours.”

Reenie had come over with the drinks—just two of them, one for Tricia and one for Magliocco—and she said, “That ain’t French, dummy, it’s Latin.”

He took one of the glasses from her hand, dashed its contents in her face. “And that ain’t a drink no more, now it’s war paint. Make me another and keep your yap shut.”

Tricia could see the slow burn the poor girl was doing as the liquor ran down her cheeks and dripped onto her décolletage. She waited with dread for the second glass to go flying. But Reenie turned to her politely and held it out for her to take. What could she do? Tricia took it.

“Excuse me,” Reenie said, with great dignity. “I’ll be back in a moment.” Then she was gone, through a side door.

“You shouldn’t have done that, Mr. Magliocco,” Tricia said. “It was cruel.”

“She shouldn’t have mouthed off.”

“Still.”

“Don’t feel bad for her,” Magliocco said. “She’s a spoiled little brat. I’d have tossed her out on her can a year ago if she wasn’t so damn good in the rack.” He made a drinking motion with one hand and Tricia reluctantly took a sip. It tasted like licking paperclips. “So, what’s it gonna be—you want to come work for me?”

There were probably things Tricia would have wanted to do less, but they weren’t coming to mind.

What she said, though, was, “I’ll do it—but only if you pay that money out to Erin right now. And I mean now.”

“Eager,” Magliocco said, “I like that.” He snatched up the receiver of a telephone by the sofa. “Joey?” he said. “Yah, it’s me. The redhead still there? Good, good. Hold on.” He waved Tricia over to a desk on the far side of the room, beneath the window. “There’s paper and pens there.” There were. “Sit down. Write. ‘I—,’ whatever your name is, ‘—being of sound mind and body, do hereby solemnly swear to come work for Alessandro Magliocco starting tomorrow and continuing for as long as Mr. Magliocco says I should. Yours truly, et setra, et setra. You got that? Read it back.”

“I didn’t get it all,” Tricia said.

“That’s all right, just sign the bottom, I’ll fill it in later.”

She signed. It wasn’t her name that she signed—not even her fake name—but ink went on the paper, and that seemed to be good enough for Magliocco. As far as he was concerned, a deal had been made. He returned to his phone call. “All right,” he said, “give her the money. What? Yes, the money. Borden’s money. Yes, all of it. What? I don’t care, hundreds, fifties, whatever you’ve got. What’s that? Yeah. Yeah, she did.” He hung up.

“You won’t regret this,” he said. “It’s much better here than at the Sun. A much better class of customer.”

“I can see that,” Tricia said.

The side door opened then and Reenie came through it, pulled it shut quietly behind her. She’d changed out of the dress and was wearing slacks and a blouse under a blue raincoat. In one hand she held a cardboard suitcase.

“What the hell’s that?” Magliocco said.

“I’m leavin’,” she said. “I’ve had enough of you.”

“Like hell,” Magliocco said. “You don’t leave till I say you leave. You signed a contract.”

She came over, buttoning her raincoat as she came. “Here’s your contract,” she said, reaching into the pocket of the coat. At first Tricia couldn’t see what she pulled out. Then it went thump into his massive chest and she could see half of it, the half that was sticking out. It looked like the wooden handle of a chef’s knife.

Magliocco staggered forward, groping for the knife, spraying blood. Most of it went on the raincoat, which Tricia realized she’d probably worn for that very reason.

“It’s like you said, Al,” Reenie said. “Every girl’s got to draw the line somewhere. Well, this is where I’m drawing it.”

The big man went down on his knees. He was gasping for breath, trying to say something. Whatever it was, it didn’t come out. The only sound he made was the impact when he hit the floor, driving the knife in deeper.

“Everything okay in there?” came a voice from outside.

With one fist, Magliocco was pounding against the floor. But after the first couple of blows, his fist fell slower, then slower still, and then stopped altogether.

Reenie unbuttoned the raincoat, stripped it off, and held it by the collar, careful not to get any blood on her clothes.

“Hey, you,” she said. “Here. Catch.”

She flung the bloody raincoat at Tricia and, while it was flying toward her, screamed.

46.

Baby Moll

“She killed him!” Reenie wailed. “She’s killed Al!”

While a scrambling began on the other side of the door, Tricia watched the raincoat loft toward her. If she caught it, she’d have Magliocco’s blood all over her—her hands, her clothes. Of course, it wasn’t her raincoat and she could prove it; they’d all seen her come in without it on, and it’s not as though she could’ve been hiding it somewhere while being frisked to within an inch of her life. But seeing the big man’s blood on her might be enough to set them off without thinking—his lieutenants might not pause before whipping out their guns and blasting away.

So Tricia hurled herself to one side and let the coat land in a ruinous heap on the rug. She regained her feet as the door banged open, slamming against the wall, and two men rushed in, the pepperpot and another she hadn’t seen before. “My god!” Reenie screamed. “He’s dead!”

“I didn’t do it,” Tricia said, her hands going up as they trained their guns on her. “She did. Look at her, she’s got some in her hair, it’s all over her coat. Look—see her suitcase, she said she was leaving him and he tried to stop her. Honest to god, it wasn’t me. Take her fingerprints—they’ll be all over the knife. I mean, assuming wood takes fingerprints, I don’t know if it does—”

“Quiet,” the new man said. He unclipped a radio from his belt and spoke into it: “Joey, Joey, you there? Lock the place down, don’t let anyone leave. You hear me? No one in or out.”

After a second’s delay, Joey’s voice crackled out of the radio: “You’re too late, that woman just left, with Borden’s money. Should I go after her?”

“No, stay here, I need you to lock the place down.”

“Roger,” Joey said, sounding for the first time like his military haircut might once have suited him.

“Roman,” the new man said, “go get the doc.”

“But if he’s dead—” the pepperpot said.

“If he’s dead it won’t matter, but if he’s not it will. Go.”

Roman darted off.

“Now, you.” He went up to Reenie, shook her by the shoulders till she stopped wailing. “What happened?”

“That little bitch,” she said, her chest heaving, “she pulled out a knife and stabbed him right in the chest.”

“Where’d she get the knife?”

“I don’t know, ask her.”

“I did ask her. She said you did it.”

“Who’re you gonna believe, her or me?” The guy didn’t answer quickly enough. “Tony! I loved him!”

“Sure—the true love of a woman for a pile of dough.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why not? You pocketed plenty.”

“Of course he took care of me, Tony. I was his woman.”

“You were his moll, baby—not even, you were just some teenage tail he kept on hand for when there were no grown-up women around.”

She slapped him, hard, the crack ringing in the air. “Don’t you ever say that,” she said.

“That one’s going to cost you,” Tony said. “Later. First we’ve got to—hold on, where’d...?”

Tricia, who could only hear his voice faintly at this point, figured he must have noticed now that she was gone and begun searching the room for her. She hastened along the passageway on the other side of the door Reenie had used for her earlier exit and entrance. She’d snuck through it while Tony was occupied with Reenie, and she heard it swing open behind her now.

“Hey!” he shouted.

Fortunately she was already at the end of the corridor and was able to make a turn before the pair of gunshots he fired reached the spot where she’d been standing.

He ran; she ran faster. Pulling open a heavy door, she found herself in the wings of the stage, behind the velvet curtain. On the other side of the curtain, she heard people milling about, a confused murmur of voices, Joey’s rising above them: “People! People! Calm down, I’m telling you, this is a routine security matter...” She didn’t stick around to hear the rest of his explanation, though she’d have been curious to. Did the maitre d’ even know his boss was dead?

Tricia dashed through the cluttered backstage area to a service exit, but Joey had gotten there first and the door was locked and barred. She rattled the bar briefly out of sheer frustration and moved on.

But to where? The front door was out, obviously; and she didn’t know enough about the layout of the place to guess where the other exits might be, never mind which one Joey’s lockdown would reach last.

She shot blindly past several doors, all of them internal ones, not ones that would lead to the outside. Then, struck by a momentary inspiration, she doubled back.

Where would Joey’s lockdown reach last? Probably this room. She pushed through a door marked LADIES.

A window, she told herself on the way in—that’s what she needed. She said a little prayer: Let there be a window. Please, any window. Even a small one.

And there was—a very small one. It was high enough up on the wall that she had to drag over a trash can to reach it, and then, once she had, it took all her strength to force it open even half a foot. Wriggling through a half-foot opening was a painful process and twice she thought she’d gotten irretrievably stuck. But a combination of inhaling deeply, straining like a woman in labor, and kicking like mad eventually deposited her headfirst in a litter-strewn alleyway behind the club. She didn’t bother dusting herself off, just hobbled to the mouth of the alley, looked this way and that, and ran out onto Park Avenue South. A taxi screeched to a halt inches from her shins. Apologizing profusely for nearly getting run over, she tumbled into its back seat.

“Where you going, lady?” the driver said, glancing in the rearview.

She gave him Mike’s address.

“You look like you left that place in a hurry,” the driver said. “Anything the matter?”

“Just some men trying to kill me,” she said. “It’s been like that a lot lately.”

“You want me to take you to the police?” he asked.

“God, no,” Tricia said. Then, seeing his expression in the mirror, she said, “They’re so busy. I wouldn’t want to bother them.”

Ten minutes saw them to the door of Mike’s building. Tricia had just enough money to pay the fare with a few pennies left over for a tip.

“You sure you’re okay?” the driver said.

“I’m fine now,” Tricia said. “Just as long as no one followed us here.”

“Followed us?” the driver said. “The way I was going? Not a chance.”

It was true—he’d gone at top speed, weaving between cars and taking corners recklessly enough that more than one pedestrian had jumped back cursing. She’d certainly seen no sign of pursuit out the back window, despite checking repeatedly, and she saw none now. As the cab drove off, Tricia finally found herself breathing a little easier. With any luck, Erin and the money would already be upstairs, and Mike, too; they’d get everything ready for the morning and even have time to grab some sleep.

She climbed the stairs, knocked on the door, entered when it swung open.

And there was Mike, behind the bar, and Erin in front of it, a bulging paper grocery sack by her feet. There was the little leather box of photos sitting on the bar, where Tricia had left it. There was the footlocker, standing open, with its stacks of cut-up newspaper inside. There was only one thing wrong. If Mike and Erin were at the bar, who’d opened the door?

She turned to see. What she saw was the barrel of a revolver.

“Don’t even think of running,” O’Malley said. “You’re under arrest.”

47.

The Max

There they sat on the scarred wooden table in the drab little interrogation room: the bulging paper grocery sack, the leather box of photos, and the footlocker filled with stacks of cut-up newspaper. They looked lost there, and a little embarrassed. The tabletop was covered with random gouges and scratches, with cigarette burns, and with faintly shiny rings left by countless cups of coffee. A few hardy souls had tried scratching their initials into it. They mostly seemed to have been interrupted before they could finish. Beneath Tricia’s wrist was another vague cloud of scratches. She knew how these had gotten there: from the sharp edges of handcuffs like the ones she was wearing. Her mouth still seemed full of the paperclip taste of Magliocco’s gin. There seemed to be some kind of fine grit under her eyelids. It seemed to cover her skin. She touched her face lightly with her manacled hands; it was abnormally sensitive, as if she were sunburned. She wondered what time it was. She wanted another glass of water, but it seemed too much trouble to ask. She was very, very tired.

There were two men across the table from her, O’Malley and a very fit-looking young man in a pale gray suit. The man in the suit was looking at her attentively. O’Malley was ignoring her, riffling a stack of bills from the grocery sack with an abstracted air.

“My, my, my,” he said. He dropped the stack of bills into the bag and looked at Tricia. He still wore a thick cap of bandages on his head, and his nose and one eye were a few shades purpler than when she’d seen him last. “Let’s talk about your situation, Miss Heverstadt.”

“Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?” she said.

“I’d love to talk about pleasant things, Miss Heverstadt. But I’m afraid I’m out of practice. Now. Just to get it out of the way, I’m not going to charge you with assaulting a police officer in the execution of his duty.”

“Good. That wasn’t me.”

“I’m not charging anyone. I don’t need it. Or with attempted murder, reckless endangerment, kidnapping—”

“Kidnapping?”

“You tied me up, didn’t you? But forget it.” He waved a hand airily. “What do I need with chicken feed like that, when I’ve got two, maybe three actual, honest-to-God charges of murder? A Mister Roberto Monge, with a knife. A Mister Mitchell Depuis, gunshot. And we understand Al Magliocco got himself done earlier this evening, and that you were in attendance.”

“I wasn’t the one who—”

“No, of course not. What else’ve we got? Illegal possession of a firearm. Four counts of resisting arrest. That was somebody else, too? Breaking and entering, I forget how many counts. Grand larceny—let’s not forget that little item. Three million smackers, which you wrote a whole book about stealing. And of course these very interesting photos. Can I add blackmail to the list?”

“Do I look stupid enough to try and blackmail Salvatore Nicolazzo?”

“You’d be surprised, Miss Heverstadt. I don’t look stupid myself, and just look how stupid I’ve been over the past few days.” He leaned across the table, brought his face close to hers. “Listen, girlie. You’re looking at the max.”

“The hell I am,” Tricia said. “You’re bluffing.”

The man in the suit looked pained when Tricia said hell. “Miss Heverstadt,” he said, in a smooth, authoritative voice, “I’m afraid your attitude is not helpful. I can assure you that what Captain O’Malley says is correct.” He had a glistening crew cut, a wide, squarish jaw, and a short and very straight nose. He would have been handsome as a movie star if his eyes hadn’t been so close together.

“You sound like a radio announcer. Who is this guy?” Tricia asked O’Malley.

“Now that is a question I was asking myself not so very long ago. Miss Heverstadt, may I present Special Agent Houghton Brooks...” He turned to Brooks. “I’m afraid I keep forgetting. Are you Houghton Brooks the Third, or the Fourth?”

“Just Junior, Captain,” Brooks said with a strained smile.

“Agent Houghton Brooks, Jr. of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. The federal authorities have been kind enough to interest themselves in our little case, Miss Heverstadt. They are very interested in you. And you still don’t think you’re looking at the max?”

“I don’t know,” Tricia admitted. “What’s the max?”

“The maximum penalty permitted under New York State sentencing guidelines, Miss Heverstadt. In your case, several consecutive sentences that’ll add up to life without parole.” O’Malley stood, leaned forward on both hands and looked down at her. “How old are you, Miss Heverstadt? Eighteen, nineteen? You haven’t done much living yet, have you? How’d you like to do the rest of the living you’ll ever do, spend the rest of the years you’ve got to spend, in the slam? How’d you like to grow old in a cage?”

“Right now, Captain, growing old anyplace at all sounds pretty inviting.”

“And how about your friends? Your bartender friend we don’t have much on except operating illegally after hours—but Miss Erin Galloway, now there’s a piece of work. Of course you’ll probably tell me she didn’t try and fracture my skull, either.” Tricia shrugged. “Well, never mind that. We’re charging her with Murder Two—an employee of Uncle Nick’s named Celestino Manzoni, by means of another firearm she wasn’t legally entitled to possess. Grand larceny again—a racehorse this time. And as an employee in good standing of Madame Helga’s organization, I’m sure she’s been up to a few things that might interest the boys in vice.

“And your friend Borden, now, where do I begin? He likes to assault cops and impersonate officers and steal cop cars. That’s when he isn’t publishing smut or running Madame Helga’s himself. Some breaking and entering for Mister Borden, too, as well as—”

“All right,” Tricia said. “All right.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Heverstadt. Am I boring you?”

“I’m tired. I’m very tired, and it’s—late. And I would like you to get to the point.”

O’Malley turned to Agent Brooks. “You see? She’s a pain in my thigh, and she’s rotten straight through, and she lies like a hundred-dollar Persian rug, and she’s keeping company with big piles of newspaper cut up the same size as money, God knows why. But like she says, she’s not stupid. She knows there’s a point.” He turned back to her and his eyes, shadowed by bandages, were suddenly savage. Very softly he said, “I don’t care about any of this crap, girlie, and I don’t care about you. I don’t care about you or your whore friends or your piss-ant smut-peddler boyfriends. You’re not even annoyances to me. You’re gnats. You’re something I’ve got to brush away from time to time so I can go about my business. And my business is Sal Nicolazzo. And you are going to bring him to me.”

Tricia stared at him.

“Permit me,” Agent Brooks said. “Captain O’Malley expresses himself a bit—”

“That’s right,” O’Malley said. “I expressed myself. You’ve got a way about you, sister. You seem to wiggle your little butt into and out of Uncle Nick’s place easier than anybody I’ve ever seen. He’s interested in you.”

“He’s interested in his three million dollars, Captain O’Malley. He thinks I’ve got it. He’s wrong—but that’s what he thinks. He’s also interested in those photos. And he’s given me until six AM tomorrow—six AM this morning—to get them to him, on that boat of his. That’s why the piles of newspaper. They’re going to pick me up at six at a pier in Brooklyn and I’ve got to have it all with me, or Charley and my sister...he’s got them out there, and he’s said he’ll kill them. They’ll die.”

“Well then,” O’Malley said. “That gives us something to work with.”

“To work with?”

“Yeah. You’re going to go out there to Uncle Nick’s boat. You’re going to bring—” He shouted toward the door. “Nevins!” A balding head appeared. O’Malley pointed to the leather case of photos. “Get Levitas out of bed. Now. Get him to copy these photographs. I want negatives by three this morning, and I want a set of dry prints on my desk at nine, and whatever fingerprints are on these photos and this case better still be on them and nobody else’s. Clear?” Nevins nodded and disappeared, and O’Malley turned back to Tricia. “You’re going to bring these photos, and your case of funny money, to that boat, and you’re going to bring a story with you, and that story, when you tell it, is going to bring Uncle Nick back to dry land where Agent Brooks and I can get at him. That’s what you’ll do, and that’s all you’ll do. And when you’re done, you and your whore friend and your smut-peddler sweetheart and your sister can all walk. The bartender, too. Understand? I’ll wipe the slate. You give me Nicolazzo, and we’re quits.”

“And what’s this story I’m going to tell him?”

“That’s up to you,” O’Malley said. “Just as long as it works.”

There was a moment of silence.

“Jesus,” Tricia said. “You must be desperate.”

Agent Brooks said, “It may sound to you like a desperate idea, Miss Heverstadt—”

“No. The idea sounds loony. You two sound desperate.”

“Captain O’Malley and I have been reviewing your case, and as he says, you seem an exceptionally resourceful and ingenious young woman. We have a good deal of confidence in your ability.”

“You may have a good deal of confidence in my ability, Agent Brooks. Captain O’Malley just thinks I’m worth a try. If I succeed, he wins big. If I don’t, I save the City of New York the expense of a trial and a jail term. Hell,” she said, and Agent Brooks winced again, “the city probably won’t even have to pay for a burial since if anything goes wrong Nicolazzo will do the honors himself with a good old-fashioned burial at sea. Do I understand you correctly, Captain?”

O’Malley smiled beatifically. “You see, Agent Brooks? Not a bit stupid. Yes, Miss Heverstadt. You understand me correctly. I wouldn’t gamble a nickel on you succeeding, but as it happens, a nickel’s about five cents more than you mean to me. So what the hell? Sometimes a long shot comes in. And Agent Brooks here thinks it’s a dandy idea, don’t you, Agent Brooks?”

“I understand your skepticism, Captain, but in fact I do think so. Miss Heverstadt, I think I’m a pretty good judge of men—and, ah, women, in this case. And I think you’ve got that certain something it takes to see a highly sensitive and perilous mission through. You also appear to be quite well connected in the underworld, something the Bureau finds most valuable. In fact, if you do well enough with this assignment—with your first quarry, if you will—the Agency might like to talk to you about other assignments.”

O’Malley was mouthing the word quarry.

Brooks opened a briefcase and removed a small box covered in pink satin with a brass clasp, crudely embroidered with the initials TH. “Here’s what you’ll use to communicate with us once you’ve brought Nicolazzo back to land. Now, this may look like an ordinary makeup case...”

“It looks,” Tricia said, “like nothing on earth. Have you ever seen a woman’s makeup case?”

“I believe Agent Brooks Junior is a bachelor,” O’Malley said to the ceiling.

Agent Brooks’ eyes seemed to be getting closer together. “But inside,” he said doggedly, “under this hidden panel containing the little pots of powder and so on, there is a Regency TR-1, the most advanced miniature transistor radio on the market today, which my colleagues have modified to send a homing signal with a radius of twenty-five miles. When you’ve succeeded in luring Mr. Nicolazzo to a convenient location, all you need do is switch this beacon on, and our men will be there within minutes.”

“That’s all I need do, huh?”

“You don’t need to do a damn thing, girlie,” O’Malley said. “You can call your lawyer, or have us call one for you. We’ve already got a nice cell waiting for you. And at six thirty or so, your sister and your friend get the chop, like you said. But you don’t have to do a damn thing but sit in a nice warm cell, if you don’t want to.”

Tricia looked at him meditatively for a minute. Then she held out her shackled wrists.

She said, “Take these damn things off of me.”

48.

The First Quarry

Dawn wouldn’t break for half an hour still, but the piers were already busy with dockworkers walking to and from the ships, deckhands loading supplies and unloading cargo. The few birds that were awake were circling overhead, cawing lustily and diving when they spotted a bit of breakfast swimming near the water’s surface.

Tricia sat on the footlocker, legs crossed at the ankles, and waited. She’d lugged the thing this far, dragging it from where the taxi had left her, and that was far enough. Nicolazzo had promised that two men would pick her up—well, they could pick up the footlocker while they were at it.

She rubbed her wrists where O’Malley’s cuffs had chafed them, or anyway where she imagined they had. You couldn’t see any marks, but it felt to her like she still had them on.

Her first quarry. Jesus Christ. Brooks had made it sound like he was making her a Junior G-Man or some sort of secret double agent out of the movies. When what he really was doing, most likely, was sending her off to get herself killed. What were the odds that she’d be able to bring Nicolazzo back to shore and into their hands? Bad enough when all she’d had to worry about was getting Coral and Charley off his boat alive.

O’Malley had ridden with her back to Mike’s, had turned the leather box of photos back over to her, and had directed the junior cop who was driving them to unload the footlocker from the trunk. The cops had helpfully prepared the money inside, even adding paper bands just like the ones you’d get from a bank to hold the individual stacks closed, and making sure the stacks on the first two layers all had at least two real bills on top and one on the bottom. The driver had proudly described the process, like a hobbyist talking about painting lead soldiers. They’d stayed up all night working on it, he’d said.

When they were out on the street, O’Malley had handed her the radio-cum-makeup case, tucked into a blue, beaded purse that matched her dress only a little better than a feather headdress would have. She’d accepted it. It wasn’t like she had a variety of purses to choose from or any place to get a better one at five in the morning.

She’d made them wait on the sidewalk while she went upstairs. Her stated purpose was to use the bathroom and she did that, but she also stopped by the back room and fished through the pile of old newspapers and pawnshop tickets till she found one of the latter on which the merchandise being pawned wasn’t a set of flatware or a watch but “one (1) valise—large—brown leather.” Taking the ticket into the bathroom, she opened Mike’s safety razor, slid out the blade, and used it to scrape the date and the name and address of the pawnshop off the ticket. She slipped the ticket into her pocket; the razor blade, too, for good measure.

Downstairs again, O’Malley had put her into a cab, loaded the trunk into the trunk, and patted the car’s side the way you would a horse’s when you wanted it to go. The driver had sped off toward Brooklyn and arrived at the Gowanus piers a few minutes before the deadline. There’d been no traffic. Tricia hoped that hadn’t used up her quota of good luck for the day.

She waited, wishing she had worn a watch. It had to be after six, but just how much after, she couldn’t be sure. She felt a little nervous, sitting by herself on a box of money—true, it wasn’t the three million dollars it was pretending to be, but eleven thousand was still more money than she’d ever found herself sitting on before. And if someone wanted to take it, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to prevent—

“Hey,” a voice called. “You Tricia?”

Looking up, she saw two men walking toward her. They ran to type, as if Nicolazzo went to the same casting office Hollywood used when picking heavies. One could’ve been Bruno’s twin brother: same build, same pink dome, same glowering expression. The other—the one that had spoken—was smaller, though not by a lot, and looked very much like pictures she’d seen of the current resident of Gracie Manor, Mayor Wagner: jowly, big ears, receding hairline. But she suspected the resemblance ended there. For one thing, she doubted this one had gone to Yale.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m Tricia.”

“We’ve been waiting for you,” Mayor Wagner said. “Over there.” He pointed at a little launch bobbing at the end of the pier.

“Well, I’ve been waiting for you, right here.”

“Why?”

“Because this thing weighs almost as much as I do,” Tricia said. “Your boss wants it, you can carry it.”

“All right,” he said, “no need to get huffy.” He snapped his fingers at his cohort. “Now, howsabout you get up and put your hands out to the side?”

She stood, lifted her arms, and suffered through her first frisking of the morning. She was getting to be quite an old hand at it, no longer even flinching as a stranger’s hand brushed over her backside.

While the smaller man took care of patting her down, the larger one bent, gripped one of the footlocker’s handles in each hand, and lifted the thing effortlessly into the air.

The smaller one plucked the box of photos out of her pocket. “What’s this?” he said.

“Those are Nicolazzo’s photos,” she said. “Feel free to take a look if you don’t believe me.” But an expression of horror crossed his face and he handed the box back to her.

“No, thanks,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Kagan and me, we’re not allowed to see them,” he said. “Uncle Nick made that very clear. His eyes only.”

Kagan nodded forcefully. He’d given the impression of paying only cursory attention to what was going on around him, but this point he clearly felt was important.

“Okay,” Tricia said. “Suit yourself. How about the money, you want to take a look at that?”

He laughed. “What, to make sure it’s not just a lot of cut-up newspaper? Come on. Nobody’d be that stupid.”

“No, I guess not,” Tricia said.

“Let’s get a move on. We’re already running late.” He gestured for her to walk ahead of them down the pier.

She walked. “What should I call you?” she said as they neared the boat.

“Mr. P,” he said. “It’s short for Pantazonis.”

“Greek?” Tricia said.

“No, Zulu,” he said.

They boarded the boat, Tricia first, then the two men. There wasn’t a huge amount of room, and Tricia found herself sitting on the footlocker again. What the hell, she figured. Maybe it’ll hatch.

Kagan fired up the engine and they cruised out of the dock, heading for open water. As they hooked around toward the mouth of the bay, they passed a large wooden billboard proudly proclaiming this the future home of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, courtesy of a list of public servants that started with City Construction Coordinator Robert Moses.

Where Moses wants a bridge, Tricia thought, he gets a bridge.

Apart from the spray flying in her face and a bit of seasickness that kicked in when the waves got choppy, the ride wasn’t too unpleasant. Neither man spoke to her, nor did they talk much to each other. Pantazonis spent most of the time hunched over, trying to stay dry, while Kagan stood straight and tall in the front like a bald Viking and steered with his eyes on the horizon.

It felt like it had been at least half an hour before Tricia got her first glimpse of Nicolazzo’s yacht. It looked deceptively small until they drew closer, and then suddenly revealed itself to be many times the size of the boat they were in, more like a small cruise ship than like anything one man should have for his own use. Kagan cut the power and they coasted in gently, bumping hulls as they arrived. Several heads appeared at the railing above them and a rope ladder was thrown over the side.

“Go on up,” Pantazonis said. “We’ve got a winch for the box.” And sure enough, while Tricia carefully climbed the ladder, trying hard not to lose either the purse looped around her wrist or her shoes along the way, she saw a cable being lowered beside her toward the launch. As she stepped off the ladder onto the deck of the ship, she saw the cable begin retracting, hauling the footlocker on board.

She looked around. There were five men there, all of them unfamiliar. “Where’s Uncle Nick?” she said.

“Right here,” Nicolazzo said. She turned around. He was standing at the midpoint of the deck, one hand on an open door. “Won’t you join me?” he said. “I’ve got some people downstairs who are dying to see you again.”

Two of the men pushed her forward, gripping her tightly by the arms. A third pulled her purse out of her hands, and turning she saw it was Pantazonis.

“Wait, I need that—” she said, but it was already gone, and he with it.

So much for the plan, she thought. Now what?

At Nicolazzo’s insistence, she preceded him down a narrow staircase and along a low-ceilinged hall to an open doorway. She ran inside when she saw Coral, her arms tied behind her around the back of a wooden chair. Her face was bruised, but that could have been a remnant of her fight with Stella; she didn’t seem to have any new monograms on her cheeks. But her hair was tangled and there were pouches under her eyes and even when she saw Tricia she was slow to respond. The last few days clearly hadn’t been good ones for her.

“Cory,” Tricia said, hugging her tightly, “are you okay?”

Coral didn’t say anything, just nodded as Tricia stepped back.

“I’m going to get you out of here,” Tricia said.

“You shouldn’t have come,” Coral said softly. “You should’ve taken Artie back home.”

“Don’t talk like that. The only one going home is you.”

“I hope you don’t mean that,” Charley said from behind her.

She turned. His black eye was as richly colored as it had been the last time she’d seen it, though the swelling had gone down a bit. Otherwise he seemed not too much the worse for wear—except, of course, for the tape wrapped around his right index finger. It looked like they’d splinted it with a Popsicle stick.

“Oh, Charley, I’m so sorry. I wish I’d never—”

“Sure,” Charley said. “We both do. But you can still make it up to me by giving this guy what he wants.”

“That is excellent advice, Mr. Borden,” Nicolazzo said. “I am glad you’ve come around to my way of thinking. You, too, Miss Heverstadt.”

At a gesture from Nicolazzo, Kagan carried the foot-locker in and deposited it heavily on a fold-down counter bolted to the wall.

“You want me to open it?” Kagan said.

“One thing at a time,” Nicolazzo said. “My pictures...?”

Tricia handed over the leather box. He slid the cover off and flipped through the photographs one by one. He nodded when he reached the last one. “Very good.” The box vanished inside his jacket pocket.

“Now the money.” Nicolazzo shooed Kagan away and lifted the two spring latches holding the footlocker closed. He eyed the money inside with a combination of satisfaction and wariness. Choosing a stack of bills from the middle, he riffled through it. His expression didn’t change, but even from where she was standing Tricia could see at a glance when the real bills ended and the newspaper began. Without saying anything, he picked up another stack and riffled through that one, then a third. He put them back in place.

“Kill the sister,” he said.

“Wait!” Tricia shouted. She yanked the pawnshop ticket out of her pocket, waved it overhead.

“What’s that supposed to be, Miss Heverstadt?”

“The rest of your money,” Tricia said. “You didn’t really think I’d bring it all here, did you?”

“I did expect that, yes. It’s what I told you to do.”

“If I had, what would have prevented you from killing all three of us and just dumping our bodies over the side?” She walked up to Nicolazzo, handed the ticket over. “I needed a way to ensure you’d let us go. You’ll get your money, every penny of it—but only once we’re safe on land.”

“You left my money at...a pawnshop?”

“Some of it,” Tricia said. “Some is in that footlocker. I’m afraid most of it is at the pawnshop, though.”

“And how am I supposed to find this pawnshop? The name’s been scratched off.”

“Oh, has it?” Tricia said. “It’s a good thing I remember which one it is, then. Or I suppose you could try going to every pawnshop in New York one at a time asking to see every brown valise they’ve got—that shouldn’t take more than a month or two, if you work hard at it.”

She could see him struggling with conflicting emotions, the hunger to lash out warring with his own self-interest. Before he could settle the matter, Pantazonis rushed in, knocking on the doorframe as he entered. He had the beaded purse in one hand, the pink satin makeup case in the other.

“Sorry to interrupt, boss—”

“Uncle Nick,” Nicolazzo growled.

“I’m sorry, Uncle Nick.” Pantazonis started over again. “I thought you’d want to see this.”

“Why would I want to see a purse?”

“Not the purse,” Pantazonis said. “This thing. Look what I found in it.” He swung open the hinged top of the makeup kit and lifted the false panel, revealing the transistor radio inside. “It’s a radio,” he said unnecessarily. “Only when I turn it on, it doesn’t play any music. It doesn’t play anything—but the little light goes on.”

Nicolazzo snatched it out of his hands, turned it over to look at the back, then waved it in Tricia’s face. “You think I don’t know what this is? After I’ve had the federal boys on my back for seven years?” His eyes blazed. “Pawnshop, my eye. This is a set-up. They want you to lure me back to land, don’t they? And when you get me there you’re supposed to flip the switch on this thing and it’ll send out a signal: Here’s Nicolazzo, here’s Nicolazzo. Come and get him. Well. Here’s what I think of that.” He strode to a porthole in the wall, opened it, and pitched the radio out. They could all hear the splash a moment later.

He slammed the porthole cover shut.

“Now, Miss Heverstadt, you are going to tell me where my money really is. And then you’re going to take me to it, or I swear I will kill all three of you. For now, one will do.” He turned back to Kagan. “Like I said. Kill the sister.”

“No, don’t—” Tricia said.

“You’re not taking me seriously, young lady, and you won’t unless I give you a reason to.”

Kagan pulled out a gun.

“Please,” Tricia said to Kagan, “don’t do it.”

“Oh? You’d rather he kill your boyfriend here?” Nicolazzo grabbed Charley’s chin in one hand, shook it roughly. “That’s fine with me. Your choice. Which one?”

“Neither,” Tricia said.

“That sounds good to me,” Charley said.

“You shut up,” Nicolazzo said, wheeling on him. “You, you imbroglione, with your goddamn cheating cards—you know what, I think maybe you should choose, how about that? Huh?”

“I’d rather not,” Charley said.

“Ah, but you will,” Nicolazzo said. He snapped his fingers at Pantazonis. “Get me a deck of cards. Now!” Pantazonis scurried out of the room.

“I’ve wanted to do this ever since you walked out my door,” Nicolazzo said. “A little rematch. A hand of Fifty-to-One—only with my deck this time, not yours. You want to know what the stakes are?”

“I doubt it,” Charley said.

“If I win, my man here shoots you—in the head eventually, but not right away, he’ll take his time. He’s got plenty of bullets and you’ve got plenty of other places to get shot in first. Painful places.”

“And if I win?”

“If you win, I spare your life—for now,” Nicolazzo said. “And kill her instead.” He jabbed a finger in Coral’s direction.

“You’re insane,” Charley said, and it earned him a punch in the head.

Pantazonis came back through the door, a deck of cards in his hand. Nicolazzo peeled the top card off, threw it in Charley’s face. It bounced off and landed on the floor. Eight of hearts.

“What’s the next one, Borden?” Nicolazzo said. “Think hard. There’s a lot riding on it.” He waved Kagan over. The big man positioned himself at Charley’s side and pressed the barrel of his gun against Charley’s neck.

Charley looked over at Tricia, past the gun. There was something in his eyes—sadness? Regret? Resignation? Maybe a little of all three.

“Name a card,” Nicolazzo said. “Or I tell him to start pulling the trigger right now.”

Charley closed his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “Queen of spades.”

“There you go,” Nicolazzo said. “Was that so difficult? La donna nero. Well, let’s see if this fickle lady, she comes to your rescue.”

With a nasty flourish, Nicolazzo turned over the top card. His face paled, and he looked from the card to Charley and back again. It was the queen of spades.

“What did you...?” Nicolazzo threw the cards down, scattering them everywhere. He grabbed Charley’s throat in both hands and started throttling him. “How did you do that? I demand that you tell me!”

“I didn’t do anything,” Charley croaked. “It was just a guess—”

Tricia ran to Nicolazzo, started battering his back with her fists, but it had no effect.

“You lie!” Nicolazzo roared. With one arm he swatted Tricia away from him and she went sprawling among the cards. “You,” he said to Kagan, “kill the sister—now! How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Yes, sir,” Kagan said. He crossed to the other side of the room, pointed his gun at Coral.

What happened next Tricia didn’t see clearly. There was a blur of motion as Coral stood up from the chair and slapped Kagan’s arm aside; his gunshot went wide, punching a hole in the wall. The rope that had bound her hands and legs fell to the ground, neatly sliced through.

Coral swung at the big man’s chin, a bare-knuckled uppercut that cracked, bone against bone, like a second gunshot. Kagan staggered back. Coral closed again and gave him another brutal right, then slashed at his arm with her left hand. A spray of blood shot into the air and his gun tumbled to the floor, just inches from Tricia’s face. A moment later a razor blade landed beside it—the one Tricia had passed Coral when she’d hugged her, the one Coral had just used to draw blood.

Tricia grabbed the gun and got to her feet. She also—carefully—picked up the blade. Above her, Coral was raining jabs and body blows on Kagan. He had his hands up protectively, but she kept sneaking punches in below his guard and to either side, vicious kidney punches and below-the-belt combinations.

Nicolazzo looked on, furious, shouting something in Italian to Pantazonis, who looked like he only understood every third word.

But he understood enough to whip out a gun of his own.

He leveled his at Coral and Tricia leveled Kagan’s at him. They both pulled the trigger at the same time.

49.

Gun Work

The dual explosion in the small room deafened everyone and the choking cloud of gunsmoke added to the confusion. Pantazonis lay at Charley’s feet, leaking blood like a punctured water bottle. Kagan and Coral were both upright; Pantazonis’ bullet had missed them.

Nicolazzo released Charley’s neck as Tricia swept her gun up toward him. He jumped over Pantazonis’ body and shoved her aside, continuing on through the door. Tricia heard him running down the hallway, shouting for his men.

She raced to Charley’s side. Her hands were shaking; her breath was coming rapidly. She fought the nauseous feeling rising in her gut. Had she just killed a man? She pushed the question from her mind. She could think about that later. If there was a later.

She started working on the ropes around Charley’s hands with the razor blade, trying not to slit his wrists in the process. At the other end of the room, Kagan and Coral were still standing toe to toe, fists raised like contenders in a boxing match. They looked at each other, smiled. He shrugged his shoulders; she stretched her neck, bending it this way and that; he cracked the knuckles on both his fists. Then she drove a right cross into his face. He swayed for a moment and fell like a tree. He didn’t get up.

“My goodness,” Tricia said.

“I don’t mean to be selfish here,” Charley said after a moment, “but do you think you could...?”

“Oh, yes—sorry.” Tricia finished slicing through the rope.

Coral, meanwhile, bent to grab Pantazonis’ gun.

“Is there any other way out?” Tricia said.

“Not unless you can fit through that porthole.”

Tricia thought she might—it wasn’t that much smaller than the bathroom window at the Satellite Club. But there was no way Coral or Charley could, and anyway none of them could swim to safety from wherever they were, somewhere outside U.S. coastal waters. The nearest land was probably miles away.

“Then let’s get out of here,” she said, just as a pair of Nicolazzo’s men burst through the door with guns in hand.

Before Tricia could react, Coral had dropped them both, one with a bullet to the gut, the other with a pair in his leg, the second shot blowing out his kneecap. Both fell to the ground moaning. Coral threw away the gun she’d used and pried theirs out of their hands. “Here,” she said, handing one to Tricia. “These’ll be fully loaded.” Tricia had only used one bullet from Kagan’s gun; she held onto both.

They went cautiously out into the hall. There was no one there at the moment, but halfway to the stairs they saw a pair of legs coming down. Coral didn’t wait, just took aim and fired, and the possessor of the legs slid to the bottom in a heap.

“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” Tricia said.

“You pick things up,” Coral said.

“Sure,” Tricia said, following her up the steps to the deck, “but not things like that.”

“You do if you have to,” Coral said.

A bullet caromed off a metal railing beside them and they dropped to their hands and knees, crawled behind the nearest bulkhead. Coral poked one arm around the side to blindly squeeze off a shot, then fell back.

“How many of these guys are there?” Tricia said.

“I’m not sure. Fewer than ten, I think. Maybe it’s ten with the ones that brought you.”

“Then we’ve already gotten rid of half of them,” Tricia said.

“You always were an optimist,” Coral said, and rose from her crouch to take another shot.

Behind them, Tricia heard Charley crawling away. “Where are you going?” Tricia said.

“I have an idea.”

“How about not getting shot? I’d think you’d like that idea.”

“I love that idea,” Charley said, “but I’m not convinced sitting here waiting to run out of bullets is the best way to accomplish it.”

“We should stick together,” Tricia said.

“With Annie Oakley there on your side? You don’t need me.”

“At least take a gun,” Tricia said, and tried to hand him one.

He held up his taped hand. “Broken trigger finger. Thanks, anyway.”

“Be careful, Charley,” she said.

“Always.” He hesitated a moment, then leaned in and kissed her. “In case I don’t get another chance,” he said. Then he scurried away, around the corner, chased by gunfire.

Someone patted her roughly on the shoulder.

“Hey,” Coral said, “are you listening? I said give me that gun.”

“Sorry,” Tricia said, and passed Kagan’s gun to her.

Coral pointed across the way, the opposite direction from the one Charley had gone. “When I say go—”

Tricia nodded.

“Go!”

Tricia scuttered through a wide open No Man’s Land while Coral laid down protective fire and followed her. Return fire plowed up the wooden deck at their feet and one splinter caught Tricia in the calf. She could feel the bite and the blood running down her leg.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, grimacing. She hunched behind a broad wooden bitt with a hawser coiled around it. Coral crammed in beside her.

“Ladies,” came a booming voice, Nicolazzo’s, “if you put your guns down right now, I won’t kill you.”

“You think we’d fall for that?” Coral shouted back.

“Your sister’s got a lot of money that belongs to me,” Nicolazzo said. “Much as I would enjoy killing you both, I wouldn’t pay millions of dollars for the pleasure.”

“ ‘Kill the sister,’ ” Coral said. “I heard you three times.”

“Clearly the situation has changed.”

“Yeah,” Coral said, “it’s changed because I’ve got a gun. How about you put your guns—”

The boat lurched before she could get the rest of her thought out. Tricia felt the engines turn on belowdeck and over the side she saw the water churning as they got underway.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” Coral said.

The men on the other side of the deck seemed confused as well, judging by the argument being carried out in yelled Italian. Tricia glanced up, over the side, toward the horizon. “Look!”

She pointed.

There was another boat in sight, headed their way, bouncing in the spray as it chewed up the distance between them. Nicolazzo’s boat was trying to get away, it seemed, powering in the same direction but more ponderously, a wildebeest being chased down by a cheetah.

A red light mounted on the other boat’s fly bridge went on and began spinning. A harsh voice amplified through a bullhorn said, “Cut your engines. This boat is operating under the authority of the Federal Bureau of—” The voice went silent for a second. “—under the joint authority,” it resumed, “of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the New York Police Department. Prepare to be boarded.”

Nicolazzo’s yacht was gaining speed, grinding angrily through the waves. Off in the distance, through the early morning haze, Tricia thought she could just make out the outline of the coast. They were making headway. But the police boat was making more, growing larger and louder—a siren went on, to go with the flashing light—and pulling up alongside them.

Nicolazzo’s men ran to the railing, Tricia and Coral forgotten, and began shooting down over the side. More sounds of gunfire came up from below, and one of Nicolazzo’s men fell backwards, clutching his throat.

“You are firing on agents of the United States government, a federal offense punishable by life in prison. Drop your weapons and allow us to board.”

The ships kept racing, jostling each other for position, the big yacht pulling away in one direction, then the other, only to find itself headed off by the more nimble boat. Finally, Tricia felt the engines cut out and they slowed to a dead stop with the police boat out of sight on the far side of the pilot house. Nicolazzo and his men ran down that way; once they were past, Tricia and Coral followed.

By the time they arrived, O’Malley and two uniformed cops were standing on the deck alongside a half dozen federal agents, thick flak jackets protecting their torsos, steel helmets covering their heads. The feds had machine guns cradled at the ready in their arms and Nicolazzo’s men had their hands up, guns littering the deck at their feet.

Tricia dropped her gun. When one of the feds looked Coral’s way, Tricia nudged her with an elbow and Coral reluctantly released hers as well.

Two of the feds cleared an opening at the rail and Special Agent Houghton Brooks, Jr. climbed up through it. He wasn’t wearing any armor or protective gear, just the gray suit he’d had on in the interrogation room. But he walked blithely into the middle of this deadly crowd as if he’d been taking a stroll down Fifth Avenue.

He located Nicolazzo and marched up to him.

“Salvatore Nicolazzo,” he said, “you are under arrest.”

Nicolazzo chuckled, looked at the men on either side of him. “You can’t arrest me here. You can’t even be on board my ship. We are in international waters. You have no jurisdiction here.”

“You were,” Brooks said, “in international waters. Until about five minutes ago. You’re in U.S. waters now, mister.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Nicolazzo said calmly. “Check the instruments. I assure you my captain knows perfectly well where international waters begin and end.”

Tricia tried to see through the window of the pilot house, but the glare from the morning sun prevented it.

“Very well, let’s check the instruments,” Brooks said. He strode up to the door to the pilot house and swung it open. A man trussed hand and foot rolled out. He’d apparently been leaned up against the door. This was the captain, Tricia presumed, judging by the nautical cap on his head. A gag of some sort prevented him from making more than soft mewling sounds as he squirmed about.

Past him, inside the pilot house, Charley stood at the ship’s wheel, his hands gripping it tightly at the two and ten o’clock positions. His taped finger stuck out accusingly.

“What have you done?” Nicolazzo said. “What have you done?” He would have leapt at Charley but one of the feds, coming up behind him, restrained him.

Brooks checked the instruments, nodded. “U.S. waters. I assure you, Mr. Nicolazzo, we wouldn’t have come after you otherwise. The Bureau always operates by the rules.” And to Charley: “It’s just as well that it took us a little while to pinpoint Miss Heverstadt’s signal underwater. That gave you enough time to steer the ship here. Your government is grateful to you, mister...?”

Charley looked at Tricia.

“Stephenson,” she said.

“Borden,” he said.

50.

Fifty-to-One

The man the glazier had sent over was kneeling in the corridor, fine brush in hand, carefully painting gold letters onto the new pane in the door:

HARD CASE CRIME CHARLES BORDEN, PROP.

“I might ask him to change that,” Charley said. “Borden, I mean.”

“Why?” Tricia asked.

“Now that the feds are keeping an eye on me, it feels like maybe it’s time for a fresh start,” Charley said. “Anyway, too many people who know me by that name would like to do me harm.”

“Or you owe them money,” Erin said.

“That, too.”

“So what’ll you change it to?” Tricia said.

“Why?” Charley said. “You think you might have a personal stake in the matter some day?”

She found herself blushing again, damn it. “Anything’s possible,” she said.

He kissed the side of her head. “Don’t worry, I’ll pick something that sounds similar to Borden. Keep it easy to remember.”

“Gordon?” Erin said. “Arden?”

“Something like that.”

He opened the door to the chateau. Four faces turned their way. “That’s okay, don’t get up, girls. I just wanted to let you know I’m back.”

“You ever hear of knocking?” Annabelle said. She had nothing on but a towel—wrapped turban-style around her head.

“What, and miss seeing you like that? Never.” He pulled the door shut and they went on to Madame Helga’s at the end of the hall.

“What happened to you?” Billy Hoffman said as they entered, gesturing toward Charley’s black eye and taped-up finger.

“Long story,” Charley said. “Let us use your office, will you?”

“Of course.”

They went inside.

Charley handed the phone over to Tricia, who sat behind Billy’s desk. How long had it been since she’d walked through that door for the first time? Since she’d seen Hoffman sitting right here and Robbie Monge staring at her as she danced. Poor, unfaithful Robbie Monge.

She picked up the receiver and placed a call to Aberdeen. The phone rang and rang and she let it—mama might easily have been at the other end of the house when the ringing started, and she wasn’t as young as she used to be.

“Hello...?”

Tricia’s face lit up. “Mama! It’s me, Patricia.”

“Patricia? Are you coming home?”

“No, mama, I’m not. But guess what? Coral is.”

There was silence on the other end. Then: “Coral?”

Tricia thought about the scene down on Cornelia Street earlier that morning, when she’d accompanied Coral to her room. She’d finally gotten to see Artie. Damned if he didn’t have his father’s chin after all, and no doubt at all who the father was.

What are you going to do? she’d asked Coral, who’d had to think about it.

I’m going to go home, she’d said finally. Not for good—but for now.

“Yes, mama,” Tricia said. “Coral. And she’s bringing someone with her.”

“A man?” her mother said coldly.

“After a fashion,” Tricia said.

Charley got up then, waved at Erin to do the same. “We’ll be outside,” he said. “Take your time.”

When her call with her mother was finished, Tricia didn’t hang up the phone, just depressed the hooks with her forefinger and then released them. She placed another call, to a number written in a neat, straight hand on the back of a business card whose front only contained a man’s name, not the name of his employer.

“Brooks here,” the man answered. Over the phone he sounded, if anything, even more stiff and formal than in person.

“This is Tricia Heverstadt.”

“Oh, Miss Heverstadt,” he said, warming up just a little. “I want to express our thanks once more. You did an outstanding job this morning. And now with Royal Barrone turning state’s evidence against Nicolazzo—”

“I can’t take credit for that.”

“You put us in touch with him,” Brooks said.

“I made one phone call,” Tricia said.

“You did an outstanding job,” he repeated. “And that is the reason I asked you to call me. So that we might discuss in private the matter I alluded to in our first conversation.”

“What matter is that?”

“Your skills, Miss Heverstadt, could be of considerable service to your government. Salvatore Nicolazzo is not the only criminal who has eluded us for years. If you were able to get close to him and his confidants, perhaps you could do the same with others.”

“I don’t think—”

“Simply by way of example,” Brooks said, and she heard some pages flipping on his end of the phone, “there is a mister Jorge Famosa, living in New York now but a native of Cuba originally. He peddles narcotics in the northeast, smuggled in from his homeland. His operations have been disrupted recently by the fighting down there—you have heard of this rebel, Castro, and his guerilla forces?”

“I think I’ve seen the name,” Tricia said, “but—”

“Well, Miss Heverstadt, we have word that Famosa is recruiting criminals from New York’s Cuban community to travel to Cuba and kill Fidel Castro. And once they’ve done that, they intend to back a bid for power by the dead man’s brother, Raul Castro, whom they believe will be more sympathetic to their operations.”

“What does this have to do with me, Agent Brooks?”

“We thought you could infiltrate Famosa’s organization and help us bring these men to justice before they create an international incident.”

“Do I look to you like I could pass for Cuban?”

“No, ma’am,” Brooks said, “but then you don’t look Italian, either.”

“I’m sorry,” Tricia said, “I’m just not comfortable—”

“That’s all right,” Brooks said, and she heard some more pages flipping. “If you’re more comfortable with our Sicilian friends, we have no shortage of assignments there, especially now, with Nicolazzo and Barrone out of commission. That creates a power vacuum and we have already heard this morning—on the QT, you understand—that certain men at the next level down are trying to fill it. There’s one fellow, for instance, who has been operating a brothel out of the Statler Hotel—he’s employed there as their house detective, if you can believe that.”

“Agent Brooks—”

“Then there’s another gentleman, Paulie Cusumano, a.k.a. ‘Paulie Lips.’ He runs a club called the Moon and word is he intends to turn it into a casino—”

“Agent Brooks!” Tricia had to shout to get his attention. “Agent Brooks. I appreciate what you’ve done for me, you and Captain O’Malley. You’ve given me a second chance and I won’t forget it. But I’ve had my fill of this sort of thing. I just want to lead a simple, quiet life from here on in. No criminals, no gunfights, no undercover assignments. Just working in the book publishing business with Charley—where at least in principle all the danger stays on the page.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Brooks said. “You have the makings of an excellent field asset.”

“Thank you,” Tricia said, “I think. But I assure you, my mind’s made up.”

“Very well. The government does not pressure its citizens. I’d like to think you might reconsider someday—but that’s entirely up to you. In the meantime,” Brooks said, “there are just a few loose ends I’d be grateful if you could help us tie up. For example, the matter of the stolen three million dollars. Are you quite certain, Miss Heverstadt, that you don’t have any idea who took it?”

“Quite certain,” Tricia said. And before he could say anything else she added, “Would you look at that? I’m so sorry, Agent Brooks, I just realized it’s almost noon and I have to be somewhere.”

“But Miss Heverstadt—” Brooks said.

“Goodbye, Agent Brooks.” She hung up.

Outside, Erin was seated at her desk, going through the mail that had piled up. She said, “Everything okay?”

“Fine,” Tricia said.

“Want to get some lunch?”

“Actually,” Tricia said, “all I want to get right now is some sleep. Could you let Charley know I’ll see him a little later?”

“Sure,” Erin said.

And Tricia headed out. But instead of going across the hall to her cot, she took the elevator downstairs.

Down the block, where it had once said “Red Baron” in Gothic letters, the sign now said “O.J.’s Bar and Grill.” Inside, the propellers and framed aviation pictures had been removed from the walls. The place looked unchanged otherwise, though, and was every bit as barren of customers at noon as it had been any of the previous times she’d come here. She ordered a coke from the bartender, who served it to her unenthusiastically. She carried it to one of the dark, anonymous booths against the back wall. Renata was right, she thought. These places did all look pretty much the same.

She didn’t have to wait long—maybe ten minutes. Don was the first to show up, coming in through a doorway labeled EMPLOYEES ONLY behind the bar. Larry appeared a few minutes later, walking in off the street. Larry’s beard had come in a bit more in the months since she’d seen him last. Otherwise, the two looked much the way they had, though she thought maybe their clothing seemed a little improved.

“Boys,” Tricia said, raising her glass and waving at them with it. “Want to come over here for a minute?”

“Why, it’s our authoress,” Larry said. “Our mystery writrix. What brings you here? Are you working on another book?”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you,” Tricia said, and there was something in her voice that stopped them dead.

Larry exchanged a glance with Don, who shrugged expressively. Without another word they came over to her table, Don drawing two glasses of beer along the way.

“You want another drink?” Don said, pointing at the finger of coke left in her glass.

“I still have some,” Tricia said.

“You know what they say, Don,” Larry said, “some people look at a glass as ninety percent empty, while others prefer to see it as ten percent full.”

“How did you know you’d find us here?” Don said.

“I didn’t,” Tricia said, “but I figured it was worth a try. This is the time we always used to meet when we were working on the book. Remember? Ten past noon.”

Larry took a long swallow of his beer. “Some people see it as ten past noon,” he said, “while others prefer to see it as fifty to one.”

She gave him a funny look.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing,” Tricia said. She turned back to Don. “You seem very much at home there behind the bar. You get a job here?”

“Not exactly a job,” Don said.

“What my friend is too modest to say,” Larry said, “is that he owns this place now. Bought it fair and square from the previous owner. Tore down that wretched bric-a-brac from the walls, turned it into a proper establishment one isn’t embarrassed to be seen in.”

“Really,” Tricia said. “And where, might I ask, did you get the money to buy a bar? You’d have to write a lot of travel guides to make that kind of dough.”

“My beloved aunt,” Don said, “passed away.”

“Ah,” Tricia said. “I’m sorry to hear it. And you, Larry? What are you doing these days? Still writing?”

“Of course—we both are,” Larry said. “We’re writers through and through. We will never stop.”

“That’s so,” Don said. “But what he’s too modest to tell you is that he has also opened a bookstore. Down in the Village. Sells used books. Some rare, some not so rare. A real addition to the neighborhood.”

“And where’d you get the money to do that?” Tricia asked.

“My beloved uncle,” Larry said.

“Dead?”

“The poor man.”

They all took a drink in silence.

“One of you want to tell me about it?” Tricia said.

“Not particularly,” Larry said.

“You know,” Tricia said, “all along we kept asking ourselves, who could possibly have read the book before it was published? It never occurred to me to ask, what about the guys who helped come up with the plot in the first place.”

“What finally made you think of it?” Larry said.

“You were overheard,” Tricia said. “Making your plans. This woman said she’d seen two men, one with a beard, one without, both New Yorkers by their voices, around noon in a back booth in one of her father’s bars. At first I thought she was just making it up to save her skin. But then it dawned on me about the names of the bars.”

“The names?” Don said.

“Her father’s name is Royal Barrone, and he’s in the habit of naming all his bars after himself: Royal’s Brew, the Rusty Bucket. The same initials. And then I thought about where we’d met to do all our plotting. The Red Baron.”

“I see,” Larry said.

“Why did you do it?” Tricia said, and she couldn’t keep her voice from quavering as she did. “Do you have any idea what sort of trouble you caused me? I almost got killed. My sister, too. Quite a few people did get killed. And for what? So you could run a bar?”

“And a bookstore,” Larry said.

“You risked your own lives, too,” Tricia said, “and on the basis of what, a crazy plot cooked up for a crime novel?”

“Not a crazy plot,” Larry said. “A brilliant plot. You remember I asked you at the time, why should we come up with a perfectly good plot and hand it over to you, when we could use it ourselves?”

“For a book! Not in real life!”

“And why not? After you left that day, when we finally put the last pieces in place, Don and I sat here a while longer, talking, and it dawned on us that this was much too good a premise to waste on mere fiction.”

“But the combination to the safe—that was just a guess on my part! Didn’t you realize that? It could’ve been completely wrong!”

Larry shrugged. “But it wasn’t. And I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be. It just made too much sense.”

“You climbed up the side of a building, broke in through a window, sawed and chiseled through a door, and braved angry mobsters on the way out, all on the basis of a guess, just because you thought it made sense?”

“Well, when you put it that way, it sounds foolish,” Larry admitted. “But here we are, owners of a bar.”

“And a bookstore,” Don said.

“Aren’t you afraid the man you robbed will figure it out?”

“Why? He hasn’t yet.”

“Well, for one thing, directly or indirectly, he’s the man you bought the bar from. Royal Barrone works for Salvatore Nicolazzo. He used to until today, anyway.”

“You’re kidding,” Don said.

Tricia shook her head.

“You mean I used the man’s own money to buy his bar from him?”

“That’s what it looks like.”

The smile that broke out on Don’s face was a thing of beauty. “That’s just perfect. You couldn’t make something like that up. You put that in a book, no one would believe it.”

“Not in a million years,” Larry agreed.

“Just be glad that Nicolazzo got arrested today,” Tricia said, “and that the people under him are going to be too busy fighting for control of his empire to bother paying attention to the two of you.”

“That does sound good,” Larry said.

“I’m sure it does,” Tricia said. “But remember, there’s one person who does know what you did.”

“Oh?” Don said. “Who’s that?”

“Me.”

They all took another swallow. It was the last one for Tricia. She pushed her empty glass aside.

The two men eyed her balefully.

“You wouldn’t turn us in, would you?” Larry said.

“You mean to the cops? Or to the gangsters?”

“Either.”

“Of course I wouldn’t,” Tricia said, and instantly the atmosphere around the table lightened noticeably. “But,” she continued, “there’s something I want in return.”

“What’s that?” Don said.

“I’m going to be working for Charley now,” she said. “I’ll be working with him on his books.”

“Presumably not the pornography,” Larry said.

“No, Hard Case Crime,” Tricia said. “And it occurs to me that the day may come when Hard Case Crime might need to ask one of you for a favor. Maybe it’ll happen tomorrow, maybe it won’t be for a year. Maybe ten years. Maybe fifty years. But when that time comes, and we ask for your help in some way—maybe we’ll want to publish one of your books, or maybe we’ll ask you to make a personal appearance somewhere to help us out—I want you to do it, no questions asked.”

“No questions?” Larry said.

“No questions.”

“And if we agree to this, you won’t tell anyone about...?”

“About anything. Hell,” Tricia said, “I’d rather see the money in your hands than the bad guys’.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Larry said.

“So,” Tricia said, “do we have a deal?”

The two men nodded and they shook hands three ways.

With that behind them, Don said, “But Trixie, tell me honestly—it’s great that you’re going to be working there, but what do you think the odds are that Hard Case Crime will be around in fifty years? Seriously. A hundred to one?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Tricia said, and she reached over, picked up Don’s glass and downed the rest of his beer. Then she did the same with Larry’s, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and spread a companionable arm over each man’s shoulders. “I bet it’s no worse than half that.”

Author’s Note

When we set out to celebrate the publication of Hard Case Crime’s 50th book—quite a milestone for a series Max Phillips and I originally thought might never make it past its fifth—a variety of ideas got bandied about. Maybe we’d do a collection of short stories, with each of our living authors contributing a yarn. Maybe we’d uncover some important lost novel from a true giant of the field, something along the lines of a never-before-published Sam Spade novel by Hammett, or perhaps the long-rumored “black McGee” novel by John D. MacDonald. (Alas, neither exists.) Maybe this, maybe that. None of the ideas seemed quite right.

Then I hit on the notion for Fifty-to-One.

Not the title, that came later—and my thanks to author Amy Vincent for suggesting it. Just the concept. But the concept was enough to get my blood pumping.

Of course, in retrospect the concept was insane: to write a 50th book that would commemorate the (fictitious) 50th anniversary of the founding of Hard Case Crime, set 50 years ago, and to tell the story in 50 chapters, with each chapter bearing the title of one of our 50 books, in their order of publication. Our books’ titles hadn’t been chosen along the way with this sort of project in mind—if they had, I’d never have agreed to let Lawrence Block re-title his fourth book for us A Diet of Treacle, or published both The Last Quarry and The First Quarry (especially not in that order), or published books with titles as unyielding to the repurposer’s art as Zero Cool or Lemons Never Lie or The Murderer Vine.

But these things take on a life of their own, and as soon as I’d had the idea I couldn’t resist the challenge. In fact, the trickier the challenge appeared, the keener I became. (Keep in mind that I’m someone who loves books like Nabokov’s Pale Fire and Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler and Perec’s A Void. If you have a taste for trickery on a grand scale and haven’t read those books, you must. Stop reading now, put this book down, go to your local bookseller, buy all three, and read them. When you’re done, come back and we’ll continue.

[Taps fingers. Whistles a bit. Checks his watch.]

Done? Very good. Onward.)

The project began taking shape in the second half of 2007 and I began writing seriously at the start of 2008, with a mid-year deadline to hit a year-end publication date. The time pressure was part of the fun, of course: No better way to write a pulp novel than to have a deadline hanging over your head. (I kept picturing myself hammering out pages on a manual typewriter, then yanking them out and passing them to a copy boy to get them set in hot lead. Sort of like Stephen J. Cannell at the end of all those old TV shows he wrote.)

Along the way, several things occurred that heightened my excitement even further. First, Glen Orbik painted his gorgeous cover painting. All of Glen’s covers for us have been spectacular, but he really outdid himself with this one. The original is now hanging in my living room at home, and it fills me with delight every time I see it.

Then Max Phillips, who not only founded Hard Case Crime with me but also wrote one of the series’ most celebrated titles, the Shamus Award-winning Fade to Blonde, agreed to pen one of the book’s 50 chapters. (I’ll leave it to you to figure out which chapter was the one Max wrote.)

Then Dorchester Publishing, the publisher that has done such an extraordinary job of producing and distributing our books and getting them into the hands of hundreds of thousands of readers, agreed to let us include in the book a full-color insert section showcasing our first 50 covers, something I knew long-time readers would relish.

And finally I had the idea for putting Don and Larry (or at least heavily fictionalized versions of them) in the book, and when I ran it by them, they didn’t put the kibosh on it. Far from it, actually. Larry riffed on it a bit, suggesting one of my favorite jokes in the whole novel. (Again, I’ll leave it to you to guess which one. You can just pick your favorite and assume that one’s Larry’s. He’s much funnier than I am.)

Plotting the book out was, as you can imagine, a bear, and I want to thank my wonderful wife, novelist Naomi Novik, for putting up with many a dinner conversation in which I bent her ear about one knotty plot problem or other. Like Max and Larry (the other people whose ears I bent), she made a number of suggestions that wound up in the finished book and improved it greatly.

A few other thanks:

Tim DeYoung of Dorchester was the person who originally decided to take a chance on Hard Case Crime back when it was no more than an idea; without him, the series might never have launched, much less lasted as long as it has. I can’t thank him enough—and if you like our books, you can’t either.

I also want to thank our very talented art director, Steve Cooley, and typesetter, Leigh Grossman, for work above and beyond the call, not just on this book but on all the books in our line. There wouldn’t be any Hard Case Crime books without the work they do, month in and month out.

I want to thank Sarah Nicolazzo for supplying a surname for my gangster. (I hope she doesn’t mind.)

I want to thank our forthcoming 51st book, Killing Castro, for not being one of our first 50, since (Agent Brooks’ desperate final sally notwithstanding) that title would just have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

And I want to thank all of you, our readers, especially those who’ve been with us from the start, for supporting this crazy labor of love. Hard Case Crime has always struck me as close kin to the coyote in those old cartoons, who could only keep running on air as long as he didn’t look down and spot that he was doing something impossible. You’ve kept us looking up, and airborne, all this time, and with our feet pedaling madly in space we’ve somehow managed to make it this far.

Fifty books. Dear god.

It was the winter of 2001 when, over drinks on a blustery day (at a Japanese restaurant called Azusa, no matter how many times I’ve told the story wrong and said it was the Algonquin), I said these fateful words to Max: “Why doesn’t anyone publish books like that anymore?”

Thank you, all of you, for making it possible for us to publish books like that again.

—Charles Ardai

New York City, July 2008

Nominated for the Edgar® Award and the Shamus Award!