Safe House

“Just be yourself,” I told Hercules for the fiftieth time. “Don’t get fancy. Don’t get cute. They’re not gonna ask you about the other guys in your cell. Anyone does that, you just pin him. With your eyes, okay, don’t chest him. Like, why the fuck would he be breaking security with a question like that, understand?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

“Your life, Herk. Whatever it was, that’s what you say. The truth. You went to the kiddie camps, you went to the joint, you went . . . wherever. Don’t change anything.”

“Okay.”

“This guy you took out. You did it because he . . .”

“. . . was a Jew. A secret Jew.”

“You think he was with ZOG?”

“Nah. He was just a wannabe, you know?” the big man said, slipping smoothly into the party line. “He wanted to be with us. But he couldn’t be. None of them ever can. It’s blood. They was born different, they gonna die different. A whole lot of them gonna die soon.”

“Good! Now, look, all we know for sure is that they’re in the area. Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, I don’t know, but close. What you’re doing, you’re breaking camp, all right? They’re gonna find you a new place to hole up. Understand?”

“Yeah.”

“They can’t be keeping that tight a rein—fucking Lothar seems to be able to go out whenever he wants. Besides, you got the big ticket—you’re a certified life-taker, they’re all gonna know that. They’re not geniuses, but they know undercover cops don’t kill people just for front.”

“Just be myself, tell the truth,” Herk muttered, working his mantra.

“You get to a phone, you call Vyra,” I told him. “At the number I gave you. You know where the hotel is. Whatever time you can get away, you meet her there. Don’t ask her, tell her. That’s your bitch, understand?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s where we’ll meet, you and me. No place else.”

“Okay.”

“You got money?”

“I think—”

“Herk, how much cash do you have, exactly?”

It only took him a minute to count it. “Twenty-seven bucks.”

I gave him eight hundred in various bills and a few subway tokens. “That’ll hold you,” I told him. “Take this too.” I handed him a roll of quarters. He squeezed it experimentally, then tested the clenched fist against an open palm, nodded an okay to me.

“Don’t get caught carrying anything heavier,” I said. “You get popped, Pryce is gonna think we did it on purpose. Then the dime goes down the slot. And we don’t have Porkpie yet.”

“I ain’t no shooter,” he said.

“No shanks either,” I warned him.

He nodded again, unhappily this time.

“It’s us and them, brother,” I said, dropping my voice like we were back out on the yard. “They got their plans, we got ours.”

Then I told him ours.

“All we can do now is wait,” I told Crystal Beth.

“How long?”

“I don’t know. That piece is out of my control. But it’s down to weeks, not months.”

“I don’t know if I’m strong enough for this. How do you tell?”

“Tell what?”

“If you’re strong enough.”

“You’re as strong as you act,” I told her.

Wondering if I was.

“He’s in.” Pryce’s voice on the phone. I glanced down at the receiver the Mole had given me. It looked like one of those mini-TV sets. When I thumbed it on, the screen showed a hollow black circle on a gray background. Inside the circle, a blinking dot, like the cursor on a computer. Wherever Pryce was, he was within range.

“You sure?”

“They left together.” Meaning Lothar and Hercules. The meet had been set for the bookstore where Lothar worked, a porno joint in lower Manhattan. “I won’t know any more until I’ve had a chance to debrief.”

“I’ll be here,” I told him.

I didn’t know if I had hours or days to wait. I felt like a convict who just got a parole date. Not the good part, the go-home part. No, the part where you had to walk real soft, stay out of trouble, turn away from challenges. One slip and it’s all gone. And every other guy in the joint knew it.

So I didn’t go back to my old grounds. Even stayed away from Mama’s. Waited at Crystal Beth’s.

That’s when the tour started. I didn’t ask her why she’d wanted me to come along, figuring it was a way to kill some time. And maybe make some money.

The young woman was wearing a tan cashmere sweater under a matching blazer of a slightly darker shade, nervously fingering a string of pearls as if she knew they were too old for her. “It started with letters,” she said, pointing at an expandable wine-colored leather portfolio sitting at her feet.

I pulled one out. It was on heavy stock, pale blue with marbled veining running random throughout. The writer’s name was engraved at the top left, small black lettering, all lowercase. At the bottom right: address, phone, fax and e-mail. The text was typed: justified margins, a heavily serifed font.

You have such beautiful boys. I can’t resist them. They are so seductive, so entrancing, I find myself drawn to them. But I assure you, my pedophilia is purely intellectual, a never-to-be-realized urge of which I am in full control. Please help me understand the objects of my love. Vital statistics would be such treasures to me. Their birthdays, their heights and weights. And I want to know them too. I already know Jonas loves model airplanes and Lance keeps tropical fish, but I want to know more. Please indulge me. Fantasies don’t hurt anyone. But the pain of not knowing more about your perfect boys is real indeed. Thank you for understanding.

It was unsigned.

“Jonas and Lance were heroes,” the woman said to me. “They saved a puppy from drowning. They got their pictures in the local paper. That’s when it started . . . when he started writing to me.”

“Did you ever answer him?” I asked her.

“Oh no. I was . . . terrified. I took his first letter right to the police. But they said he hadn’t committed a crime.”

“And the letters kept coming?”

“Yes. Not just to me. He wrote to the boys’ school and asked for copies of their report cards. The school turned his letter over to me. They never answered him either. He wrote to the newspaper, to the reporter who had interviewed the boys, and asked him for information too. He wrote to everyone.”

“But he never made contact?”

“He . . . Oh, I see what you mean. Not . . . direct contact. I’ve never seen him.”

“You have . . . financial resources?”

“Yes of course,” she said. “I know all about . . . him now. He’s never been arrested. He doesn’t work. Has some sort of private income. This kind of . . . thing.” She shuddered, then gathered herself. “It’s his ‘hobby,’ that’s what he told the investigators we hired. It’s not against the law.”

“So why did you—?”

“Run? He posted a reward. For information about the boys. Especially pictures of them.”

“Posted?”

“On the Internet. To one of those pedophile boards. I don’t know how he did it. I never saw it. But one of the bodyguards we hired for the children caught a man taking a video of them at a soccer game. He told my . . . investigators that there was a reward for the pictures, and he was just trying to make some money. That wasn’t against the law either.”

“And you figured it was just a matter of time before he . . . ?”

“Yes. I’m only here temporarily. We have . . . resources. As you said. But I found out where he got his money, and that . . .”

“The private income?”

“No, not that. He’s done this before. And one of the boys’ fathers . . . one of the other boys, I mean, the ones he . . . watched before . . . I really don’t know all the details . . . but he . . . the boy’s father . . . had this . . . man’s address and everything, and he went to his house and . . . hurt him, I guess. Beat him up or something.”

“I’m still not . . .”

“The man—the boy’s father, not the . . . man. He went to jail. For assault. And the . . . person who writes these filthy letters, he sued the boy’s father. And he got money. A lot of money. I can’t imagine why a jury would ever . . . but . . .”

“And you think that’s what he’s doing? Setting himself up for enraged parents to go after him so he can sue?”

“Yes! He lives in this little town. His whole family does. They’re very prominent. They’ve lived there for over a hundred years. And the police will protect him. They already have. There’s nothing I can do about . . . him. So we’re leaving.”

“You’re going to get new birth certificates for the kids, change everything just so he can’t find you again?”

“The only thing we’re going to change is our address,” the woman said firmly. “I know he could find us again. So we’re leaving . . . America. We’re going to live overseas. My husband already has a job . . . there. And my family will help us too. We’re going where he can never hurt my boys.”

“I—”

“Crystal Beth said you knew . . . these kind of people. About them, I mean. Would you feel safe? If it was your children?”

“No,” I told her honestly.

“My husband just wants to kill him, he’s so angry. But if he beats him up, we already know what’s going to happen. And nobody’s going to actually kill someone for writing letters.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” I told her, lying as calmly as a mouse-watching hawk.

They didn’t all have children. They didn’t all run for the same reason. But they all ran from the same thing.

“I was walking home,” the woman said, her voice crackling like cellophane crumpled in a clenched fist. She had lovely skin, apricot flaring under cream. And long, lustrous light-brown hair, almost beige in the floor-bounced shine from the inverted gooseneck lamp. I couldn’t see her body—she was so wrapped in layers of clothing that it disappeared. But her eyes were pinwheeling with pain as she talked. “I don’t mean home exactly. To the bus. The bus stop. It wasn’t that late. Maybe nine o’clock. It was summer. Last summer. And it wasn’t even dark yet. Not really. I was tired from work—we had this big project to close and everyone had to stay late. The lawyers get to go home in limos—the clients pay for that. So they can discuss the case in the back seat or something, I don’t know. But the secretaries, we have to just . . .”

The thought to get her back on the subject hadn’t reached my lips before Crystal Beth warned me off with her eyes. I went back to waiting. It wasn’t long.

“There were two of them,” the woman said. “One was in a car. A dark car. The other came up right behind me. At the bus stop. The car stopped, the door opened, then the one behind me pointed a gun at me and made me get in.

“I thought they wanted my money. I mean, they took my money. And my watch. And a ring, not my wedding ring, just a costume ring. It wasn’t worth anything. When they found the ATM card in my purse, they drove me to one. Then they went with me and made me empty it out. It was only a few hundred dollars. Then they had some kind of argument. Between them, I mean. I couldn’t really understand it. I was in the back seat with one of them. While we were driving, he made me . . . He held the gun right by my face and he made me . . .”

I didn’t move a muscle this time, feeling Crystal Beth next to me even though we were a couple of feet apart, watching the woman on the couch until she started again.

“When he was . . . finished, he said something to the one in front. Or that one said something to him. I don’t remember. It was all so . . .

“They found a place to park. By the water, that’s all I could tell. Then the one in front got in back. And he raped me.”

I sat quietly, knowing the end to the story before she was into the second paragraph. Predators’ footprints were all over the narrative, as stylized as a religious ritual. No way that was the first time those maggots had done that number. But why was she with Crystal Beth? The rapists weren’t anyone she knew.

I waited for the rest.

“It took me hours to get home,” the woman said. “I was a . . . mess. And petrified they would come back. I walked and I walked. I didn’t have money for a cab. I should have called the police. But all I wanted to do was to get home.

“When I got upstairs, my husband was there, waiting up. It was after midnight, but he wasn’t mad. I work late a lot. And the overtime’s good. But as soon as he saw me, he knew. I wanted to take a shower. A long, hot shower. And a bath. I wanted to boil them right off me, make the dirt go away.

“But he wouldn’t let me. He wanted to know what happened. I told him. I . . . think I told him. But he was so angry, I don’t remember exactly. His face was so red, like the blood was going to break right through. He asked me, were they niggers? I didn’t understand what he meant. They were . . . rapists. I didn’t look at their faces. I didn’t want to. And they told me not to, or they’d hurt me more.

“I told him everything. I didn’t want to, but he kept slapping me and shaking me and screaming. I was so . . . humiliated. I was sure the neighbors could hear him. He made me tell him. Every single thing they did. And what I did. That’s what he said, ‘Tell me what you did.’ ”

“You didn’t—” I started to say, but Crystal Beth cut me short with a chopping motion of her hand.

“He ripped my clothes off. My dirty clothes. From those dirty men. Then he shoved me on the bed. Face down. ‘At least they didn’t get this,’ he said. Then he . . . Oh God, it hurt. Not just the . . . He killed me when he didn’t care. When he blamed me.”

The woman tried to take a deep breath. Failed miserably, soft sobs shuddering.

“After that, it was never the same,” she finally said. “That was the only way he would ever . . . do it. And when I told him I wanted a divorce, he said I couldn’t leave. Because I owed him. For what I did. And I couldn’t go until I paid it off.”

“I’m not ashamed of it,” the auburn-haired woman said, her eyes hidden behind amber-tinted glasses even though the only light in the living room came from a deep-shaded lamp in the far corner. She was sitting on a straight-backed armless wood chair, knees together, hands in her lap. The room was furnished in heavy dark pieces bordered in ornate woodwork. The walls were eggshell, a framed print of a fox hunt over the fireplace, where a trio of small logs burned steadily. One corner of the big room was empty of furniture, waiting. She turned her head in that direction, turned it back to me, a question in her gesture.

I answered it with an affirmative nod.

Crystal Beth wasn’t in the room. She was somewhere on the upper floors of the East Side townhouse, packing the woman’s clothes. Some of them, anyway.

“It’s the way I like to play,” the woman said. “Hanky-spanky. Games, that’s all. Foreplay, if you like.”

I didn’t say anything.

“It wasn’t like you’d expect,” she continued, judging me as I wasn’t judging her. “No progression. No Nine and a Half Weeks scenarios. He did it the way I wanted. My rules. I like to be spanked, all right? Paddled, sometimes. Even the crop, if I feel especially . . . It doesn’t matter. But when it’s done, so am I, understand?”

“Yes.”

“I was done. Not with . . . what I like. With him. That’s all. People break up. They get tired of each other. Bored. Whatever.”

I didn’t say anything, watching the amber lenses watching my eyes, knowing mine were even flatter.

“But he got it confused. He thought, if I went over his knee, if I called him ‘sir’ and stood in the corner when he was finished . . . he thought that I belonged to him. I don’t. I belong to me.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“He took it calmly when I first told him. It isn’t like we were in love or anything. I met him through . . . an ad. In a magazine. After we broke up, there wasn’t any trouble. I never knew where he lived. He always came here for . . . our meetings. But after I told him it was over, I . . .”

She went silent then, bowing her head. It lasted so long I realized I wasn’t being tested. She couldn’t finish the sentence.

So I did. “You put another ad in the same magazine. And he recognized it.”

Her head came up. I could feel her eyes behind the amber lenses. “Yes! That’s when it started. That’s when he said if I ever . . .”

“It’s all right,” I told her. “You’re leaving here today. He won’t know where—”

“He said he owns me. I’m not allowed to . . . or he’ll . . .” She took a deep breath. “I’m not going to . . . He can’t make me give up my . . .”

“I know,” I said. “It’s what we’ll use.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re going to move, okay? He won’t know where. But he will know where to look, right?”

“You mean—?”

“Sure. Another ad. Change it around enough so it’ll look like you’re trying to disguise yourself. He’ll answer it, do the same thing. When it comes to the meeting, it won’t be you he finds.”

“That’ll make him so—”

“No it won’t,” I assured her. “It’ll make him forget about bothering you anymore. The only thing you’ll be giving up is those personal ads. There’s other ways to find people to play with, right?”

“The scene is pretty . . . closed,” she said dubiously. “The same people. The same places. It’s hard to—”

“Get to know them first,” I told her. “Sharing a fetish isn’t a credential. First get close, then tell your secrets.”

“That could take a long time.”

“Safety costs.”

She took off the amber glasses. Her face was heavily made up, dark eyes glinting with intelligence. “Do you know why I need . . . that, sometimes?”

“Guesses,” I told her. “Varies, right? It may turn you on, but it also soothes you. Makes things right. Adds some balance. Pays the debts.”

“What debts?”

“Guilt. Bad guilt. The kind other people give you. The kind you never deserved.”

“How do you know so much?” she asked.

“I was looking for somebody else,” the plump girl with the granny glasses and frizzy hair said softly, her back to me. Her eyes were locked onto a computer screen. A large one, vibrating with the brilliant colors of the advertisements they made you wade through before the Web browser she was using started to work.

“On one of the Survivor boards?” Lorraine asked.

“No,” the plump girl said, still not turning around, Crystal Beth, Lorraine and me all standing in a fan behind her. “I was trying to reach a . . . warrior.”

“You wanted something done?” I asked her, playing her for a battered wife, looking for a hit man on one of those wannabe mercenary boards.

“No! I wanted to . . . talk. About what . . . happened to me. I thought he’d . . . understand. I thought he’d talk to me.”

“And he turned out to be . . . ?” I prompted her gently.

“It wasn’t him,” she said. “It was . . . I don’t know who it was. But it wasn’t him.”

I spread my hands in a “What-the-hell-is-she-talking about?” gesture to the women standing on either side of me.

“He pretended to be someone else?” Crystal Beth asked.

“Not the one I was looking . . . I mean, I don’t . . . He read my posting. And he e-mailed me that he was a fighter. Against . . . them.”

“People like your . . . ?”

“Father. Yes! Okay? My father. He had his own Web site. All kinds of stories about him from different magazines and stuff. How he rescued . . . girls. Little girls. He was a hero.”

I got it then. The real danger of the Internet isn’t just kiddie porn, or Lonely Hearts killers or race-hate filth or wacko conspiracy theories. Ever since the Polaroid camera and the videocam, once criminals saw the commercial possibilities, kiddie porn has flourished. People were lured into fatal meetings with correspondence lovers a hundred years ago. The race-haters would always have their shortwave networks and fax chains. And loonies never needed electronic assistance.

No, the seduction is of a whole generation of young people who affect that oh-so-blasé cynicism about anything that’s in the newspapers or on TV, but lose all skepticism once it comes up on the Sacred Net. They never heard of fact-checking; they don’t even understand the concept of sourcing. Any freak can create a “magazine,” become a “journalist” and write an article about himself. Then he can post the article on some topic-related Web page, provide a link to his site and, bingo—he’s whatever he wants to be. Instant credibility with the latest class of volunteer victim . . . cyber-chumps.

“Leave us alone,” Lorraine said to me, pushing hard against my chest. I stepped back, toward the door to the plump girl’s bedroom. When I had almost reached the threshold, Lorraine made a “Stay there!” gesture. Then she moved close to the plump girl, dropping one hand onto her shoulder. “Did you ever meet him?” Lorraine asked.

“No. First I had to . . .”

“Tell him . . . ?” Lorraine left it open.

“Yes. Tell him. Everything. So he could help me.”

“And then?”

“Exercises.”

“Like a kata?” Crystal Beth asked.

“Huh?” the plump girl replied, clearly confused. Lorraine made a traffic cop’s motion with her hand, telling Crystal Beth to shut up. “A re-enactment?” she asked, voice so low I could barely hear her.

“Yes. He said it was to . . . give him information. So he could understand. He said he was going to . . .”

Nobody said anything. The plump girl stared at the screen, her hand playing with the mouse, moving it around on the desktop, clicking it on and off randomly as the screen jumped in response. We stayed silent, watching her search. I didn’t know what she was looking for, but I knew she’d never find it.

“I did it,” she finally said. “But nothing happened. To my . . . father. I did everything he said. Everything. I did it all again. Even the . . . pictures. But nothing happened.”

I kept waiting for her to crack. To break down, cry, smash her fist against the desk. Anything.

All she did was click the mouse and stare at the screen.

“Anyone can make up stuff on the Net,” Lorraine said. “You have to—”

“I checked him out!” the plump girl said sharply. “I e-mailed other girls . . . that he helped. And I saw this story they did on him and everything.”

“Anyone can have a few different e-mail addresses,” Lorraine told her gently. “Anyone can—”

“I know,” the plump girl interrupted. “Don’t you think I know that? But I know there’s heroes out there. Just waiting for me.”

“You open that modem, you’re spreading your legs,” Lorraine said harshly. “It’s too easy to go in disguise. Cyberspace is full of identity thieves. Web sites can be cloned. They can pretend to be anyone they want—you’ll never know the truth. And ‘e-mail’ ”—Lorraine’s voice now venom-coated—“what the fuck is that? You think it’s so ‘intimate,’ don’t you? But it’s not private. Every keystroke is recorded, don’t you understand? It goes from you to a central bank to the other person. There’s people with keys to that central bank. And people who can intercept even while you’re on-line.”

“I—” the plump girl started to protest.

“There’s people who can help you,” Lorraine said. “We can help you. Just stay off the Net, okay?”

“I can’t,” the plump girl said.

“Battered woman’s syndrome,” the black woman jeered, red square-cut fingernails grasping the front of the bar she was standing behind as though it were a lectern. It was a half-hour after closing time, and the joint was as empty as a senator’s heart. “What a joke.”

“What do you mean?” Crystal Beth asked her. “I thought it was a real . . . I don’t know . . . advance. Something women could use in court to—”

“Why you say that? Because every year some governor cuts the sentence of a couple of women who’re doing life for murder instead of walking around free behind self-defense? Bullshit!”

“But if society starts to under—”

“Society ain’t close to that, girl,” the black woman said. “And society ain’t shit either. Society’s all about control. Male control.”

“It was the women’s movement who got those laws passed,” Crystal Beth said, using her “Let’s-all-be-calm” voice.

“The women’s movement? You mean my sisters?” the black woman replied, sarcasm clogging her throat. “Pack of stupid bitches, chumped off again. Let me tell you something, baby. This whole ‘battered woman’s syndrome,’ that’s just another way of saying we crazy, that’s all. Man kills someone trying to kill him, only question is . . . was it gonna go down like that? Understand what I’m saying? Only thing the jury got to believe is that the other guy was gonna do it, just got beat to the draw, right? What we need some fucking syndrome for?”

“So a jury can understand how—”

“Oh just stop it, okay? Your man beats on you enough times, hurts you enough times, you know when he’s gonna do it again. Could be the way he starts talking, could be as soon as he’s had a few beers, could be a phone call from his goddamned mother . . . could be the way he starts breathing, all right? Point is, you know. Only thing is, that ain’t enough. Not for the cops, not for no DA and damn sure not for no jury. Man says: ‘Motherfucker went for his pocket. I know he always packs a piece, so I drilled him before he could get me.’ Now, that sounds righteous. That one will fly. Woman says: ‘Every time he start talking about how dirty the house is, I know, next thing coming, he’s gonna start beating the shit out of me.’ Now, that one’s worth nothing, see? Nothing at all. Your man tries to kill you that first time, you kill him right then, you might be okay. But if you let him do it a few times, then you stuck. You let him beat on you and beaton you and . . . one day, you know you can’t take another one. You know, soon as he wakes up from that drunken sleep, you’re gonna get hurt so bad, you just . . .”

“I underst—”

“You understand shit, girl. You ever sit in on one of those lame-ass groups? You know, like for battered women? I did that, once. Fucking fool stands up and says, like, he used to beat on his woman, but that was ’cause he used to get drunk. So now he ain’t no alcoholic, and he don’t whale on his wife no more. Everybody applauds, okay? Big fucking insight, right? Let me tell you something, Little Miss Liberal, my old man, he used to beat me half to death and then he’d have himself a few drinks to celebrate, see?”

“I still think people would understand,” Crystal Beth said quietly. “We have good lawyers. We could—”

“Only thing you can do for me is what you promised,” the black woman said, her words just for Crystal Beth, talking past me like I was a piece of furniture, same way she had since we’d walked into the empty bar. “A new set of ID and enough cash to get in the wind,” she said, eyes hard and committed. “I done time before. Short stretches. But some of those girls in there were doing the Book. For what I done last night. Sooner or later, they gonna find him. Right where I left his dead ass. You take your fucking syndrome, honey. Me, I’m taking the Greyhound.”

There were more of them. Some staying in Crystal Beth’s safehouse, some stashed in apartments around the city. Others all around the country, she told me. All races, all ages, all social classes.

“Why did you want me to hear all that?” I asked her later, upstairs in her room.

“So you would know. It’s not just battered women. Stalkers are . . . all kinds. It’s not just a matter of hiding out. Or even fighting back. We have to . . . change.”

“Change how?”

“That’s as individual as the victims. But I know it works. It’s worked for me.”

“When did you—?”

“I change all the time,” she said gently. “But when you showed up in my life, that’s when it really started.”

“I never even met him,” the woman said, striding back and forth before a wall of bookcases, talking like there was a much bigger audience than just me and Crystal Beth, never looking at either of us. Her long pewter-colored skirt was slit to mid-thigh, flesh flashing every time she moved.

I didn’t say anything—I knew the drill by then.

“I wrote a book,” the woman said. “About my life as an actress.”

I knew what kinds of movies she’d made: mid-range Triple-X. Straight-to-video, paid-by-the-day, no-script, fuck-and-suck, basement-studio stuff. But she’d had a following, been a star in that world.

“I appeared on a few talk shows. You know, just to promote the book, right?”

I nodded like all of that made perfect sense.

“First he wrote a fan letter. Not to me—he never had my address—to the publisher. I didn’t even answer it. That happens all the time. They just send autographed pictures back. I never even read the mail.”

She shook her platinum-blond curls. A wig, as top-of-the-line as her dress and shoes. “He kept writing. Angrier and angrier. What did I think, I could just break off with him? I mean, I was never with him. He just got crazier and crazier. Here, take a look. . . .”

The letters were in chronological order, all photocopies. She went from “goddess of perfection” to “filthy fucking cunt” as time went along.

“My shrink said it was ‘erotomania,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

“It means he idealized you,” Crystal Beth said, “and then he constructed a—”

“It doesn’t matter,” the woman said, making it clear this wasn’t going to be about anybody but her. “My lawyer said you had a program. I don’t need a program, I need protection. Is that what he does?” she asked, still not looking at me, just pointing in my direction with a long fingernail as plastic as her chest.

“He’s crazy,” the olive-skinned woman with the prominent nose said, looking up at me from the edge of the bed where she sat. Crystal Beth was next to her, their shoulders touching. The little room in the back of the waterfront restaurant was quiet, the factory-thick walls blocking the noise from up front.

We’d ridden over on Crystal Beth’s motorcycle. “You want to drive?” she’d asked me.

“No way,” I’d told her. I’d ridden bikes as a kid, even had one once, an old Harley 74, but I spent more time on the pavement than the tires had and I’d given it up.

“Come on,” she teased. “It’d be fun for you.”

“I’ll have more fun holding on,” I told her, watching that lovely smile flash in the streetlight’s pitiful attempt at illuminating the murky alley.

But there was no smile on this woman’s face, dread mixed in her voice like water in whiskey. “If he ever finds me . . .”

“Why do you say he’s crazy?” I asked her. Not to know, to hear the rest of the story Crystal Beth wanted me to hear.

“He only wanted a daughter,” she said. “For the son of his best friend.”

“I’m not sure I—”

“His best friend has a son,” the woman said, in that patient tone you use with people who aren’t too bright. “So his daughter was going to be his best friend’s son’s wife.”

“How old was the best friend’s son?”

“Five. Almost five.”

“So this wouldn’t happen until . . .”

“. . . they were grown,” she finished for me, like I’d finally seen the light. “First, he made sure I could get pregnant. I had to have tests. Then he kept me locked in the house for weeks. So nobody could have another shot at me, that’s what he said.

“For months, we didn’t have sex. I mean, not like . . . the way you make babies. Just . . . And when he was sure I wasn’t pregnant, he said we could get started. Then we had sex over and over again. And I got pregnant. He checked the amnio—but it was going to be a boy. He took me for an abortion, and then we had to start over. After he beat me up.”

“When did you run?” I asked her.

“When I got pregnant. I was afraid it would be another boy.”

“Was it?”

She giggled, harsh and nervous—a discordant sound, no juice to it. “It wasn’t anything,” she said. “I wasn’t really pregnant. I just thought I was. One of those home test kits. I . . .”

“So why don’t you—?”

“Oh, he’s going to kill me,” she said. Not a prediction, stating a fact. “When he finds me, he’s going to kill me.”

“How come it’s only women?” I asked Crystal Beth later.

“What do you mean?”

“All these . . . people you wanted me to talk to, they’re all women. That’s all you deal with, right?”

“It is now,” she said. “It wasn’t always that way. Men are victims of stalkers too. It’s even harder for some of them, I think. You tell your pals some jealous woman is haunting you, threatening to kill your new girlfriend, they think it’s cool. Women can be just as obsessive as men, just as vindictive.”

“Just as dangerous too.”

“Sure. We had one woman here, a lesbian. It was her lover, her ex-lover, who was after her. And that woman was scary, believe me. But most of the time, people don’t see it that way. Women stalkers are cute. Or pathetic. Even when they cross the line, the public sees them differently. Remember that Betty Broderick woman? The one who—”

“Blew her husband and his new wife away right in their bedroom?”

“Yes. She had been stalking him for the longest time, but nobody ever stopped her. And even after the murders, the first jury actually hung. . . . They didn’t convict her.”

“Next time they did.”

“I know. But that’s not the point. If she had been a man, if the situation had been reversed, the first jury would have only been out fifteen minutes. And what about that woman judge, right here in the city? She stalked her ex-lover for years, did all kinds of horrible things to him, even got confidential court records on his wife. And what happened to her? Nothing! They didn’t disbar her. Didn’t even suspend her. She got ‘censured,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean. Well, I know what it means—the rules are different.”

“But if you think male stalking victims get even a worse break than women, how come you don’t—?”

“It . . . didn’t work out. The mix wasn’t right. It got too . . . complicated, keeping men and women in the safehouses. There were . . . relationships.”

Like you and Vyra, I thought.

“And when some of those didn’t work,” she continued, “it affected—maybe ‘infected’ is a better word—the whole process. We can’t help everyone. Not even all the women. Or children. So we decided to stay narrow, keep a tight focus. One . . . of us was always saying that. Focus. That’s where power comes from.”

The kenpo guy? I thought. T.B., the bouncer at Rollo’s. Want to tell me about that too, you sweet-voiced little liar?

“And there is one difference,” she continued around my thoughts, “between men and women when it comes to stalkers.”

“Which is?”

“The women always think it was their fault, somehow. They always think that. Even when they didn’t contribute to the . . . ugliness in any way, they blame themselves. ‘What was it about me that made him pick me out? What did I do to set him off?’ That’s one of the hardest things to overcome.”

“Women always blame themselves?”

“I think so. In some way. I never met one who didn’t.”

“I’ll bet Lorraine doesn’t,” I said.

Crystal Beth’s eyes snapped, ready to rumble. “Because she’s gay?”

“No. But she hates men, doesn’t she?”

“She does. But if you think she doesn’t blame herself for that too, you don’t know her.”

“So there’s no role for men in your . . . movement?”

“Of course there is,” she snapped. “If you knew some of the things . . . some of them have done for us . . . But they need their own movement, men. For stalkers. They need to band together too.”

“So why did you show me all this?”

“So you’d like me better,” she said, her voice solemn.

“This is how it went down,” the man said, gesturing toward a chest-high stack of yellowing newspapers in the corner of the L-shaped studio apartment. I measured the place by moving around, casually touching things. A good burglar knows his own measurements better than a fashion model: I can stretch out my arms like I’m reaching for something, take a few strides, spread my fingers on a table, sit in a chair . . . and I’ll be able to come back and do your place in the dark.

“What?” I asked him, not caring, but needing him to talk.

“Nineteen eighty. If Carter rescues the hostages from Iran before the election, he wins in a walk, okay? Now, who’s cutting the defense budget? That’s right . . . Jimmy Carter. And who’s gonna give the military everything they could ever want? Sure, Ronnie RayGun. So what happened? The generals got together and crashed that copter in the desert. What’s a few American lives compared to the military’s greater good?”

“Uh-huh.”

“They never tell you the full story. In the newspapers. How come they always say ‘raped and sodomized’? What does that really mean? Did she have to blow him or did she take it up the ass? You see what I mean?”

“Yeah.”

“So, you said you had a message for me. From Lydia?”

“It looks bad,” Crystal Beth said. She was standing next to the easy chair, one tiny high-arched bare foot on the padded arm, my right hand on a folded towel she’d laid across her knee. “I think there’s some bone showing,” she muttered, looking through a rectangular magnifying glass she held in one hand.

I tightened my fist. The pain shot through all the way to my shoulder.

“Hold still,” she told me. Her voice was calm, but her forehead was beaded with sweat. She swabbed the knuckles of my hand with alcohol. I felt it burn clean. “I think I can . . .” she muttered, delicately picking at my hand with a pair of stainless-steel tweezers. “Yes!”

She held up a tiny white chip.

“I have to look under it now,” she said softly, going back to my hand with the tweezers. “Just hold on.”

The pain wasn’t bad enough to let me go somewhere else. I concentrated on the rise and fall of her breasts under the white T-shirt. On the roundness of her bare arms. On her smell.

“It’s clean,” she pronounced. “And it’s only flesh, not bone. It must have been a piece of tooth you got stuck in there.”

“That makes sense,” I grunted. Thinking about the freak opening the little closet and showing me his invention. An oblong length of wood, maybe a yard square and two inches thick, with U-shaped metal hooks screwed in at the corners. A length of heavy chain was anchored to the front with a massive eyelet screw. “This is for her punishment,” he told me, eyes foamy behind the reading glasses he was wearing, showing me how the collar would fit over Lydia’s neck, how the chain would go all the way down her back to between her legs and loop underneath, where it would be reattached to the eyelet screw. “I can make it as tight as I want,” he hissed, pointing to a ratcheting knob on the front of the board. “After she spends a couple of hours in this every day, she’ll never disobey again.”

The next thing I remember, he was on the floor, strange sounds coming out of the red-and-white mess that had been his mouth.

“This won’t hurt,” Crystal Beth said, holding a clear plastic spray bottle. She squirted some reddish mist all over the raw wounds across my knuckles.

“What is that stuff?” I asked her.

“Fibrin sealant,” she said. “Biologic glue. It’s made from proteins found in blood. Stops the bleeding real quick. It helps heal too.”

“I never heard of it.”

“It’s not available here. They use it in Europe. The FDA is holding back on approval. It’s made with blood. . . . I guess maybe they’re worried about AIDS.”

The spray was turning to a kind of jelly right before my eyes. Damaged tissue. Merging. Coming together. Healing wounds. Protecting. I looked at my damaged hand. And saw my family.

I didn’t say anything.

“You don’t have to worry about it,” she told me. “This isn’t European stuff. It’s made right here. Lorraine makes it.”

“Where does she get the blood?”

“From me,” Crystal Beth said solemnly. “Now you have some of mine.”

“He’s coming,” Vyra whispered into the phone. “Now.”

I got there first. Dressed like a lawyer hurrying to an afternoon cocktail with his mistress before catching the 6:09 out of Grand Central to Westport. Nobody in the hotel lobby looked at me twice. And if the security people had questions, I had the answer in my pocket—a key to a small room on one of the lower floors. That gave me a place to duck into if I needed it. And another way into the hotel, through the underground parking garage.

Vyra was wearing one of those simple black dresses that would cost a workingman a month’s pay. A long thin gold chain around her neck. Plain black patent leather spikes with a tiny row of gold rivets up the back of each heel.

“You going out?” I asked her as I walked through the door.

“Why? You think I look nice?”

“You look great,” I told her. “Like you put on some weight.”

“That’s a compliment?” she wanted to know, hands on her hips.

“Sure.”

“It’s my butt, right?”

“Huh?”

“My butt. It’s . . . flat. You like them when they stick way out. Like . . . hers.”

“Huh?”

“Oh stop it! You know who I’m talking about.”

“I never really . . .” I said lamely.

“Sure. Well, it doesn’t matter. Different men like different things.”

“And women don’t?”

“I don’t think so,” she said seriously. “I mean, not as much, anyway. I never met a woman who only liked blonds, the way some men do.”

“What do you like, Vyra?”

“I like . . . fun. At least, I thought I did. Fun. Whatever that is.” She sounded sad.

“Look, maybe—”

A rap at the door. I motioned for Vyra to answer it, stepping back into the hall.

“Hey, baby!” It was Herk. Two big hands around Vyra’s waist, picking her up in the air, kissing her hard. Vyra bent her legs at the knee, sticking her feet straight back, arms around his neck. If anyone was watching, they’d see what they were supposed to see.

Herk stepped inside, closed the door behind him, still carrying Vyra, walking deep into the room. When he finally put her down, I stepped into sight, held my finger to my lips, pointed to the living-room couch. Herk walked over there, Vyra at his side. They both sat down. I made a “yap-yap” gesture with my fingers. Herk looked puzzled, but Vyra got it and started chattering away, asking Herk where he’d been, anyway. I took a position to the side of the door and waited.

I gave it five minutes. Nothing.

Vyra never stopped talking.

I stepped away from the door and walked to one of the back bedrooms, motioning for them to follow. Vyra said something to Herk about putting on a fashion show for him. Then they both came down the hall. The bedroom had an adjoining bath. I positioned two chairs on either side of the bathroom door, then turned the shower on full-blast. When I turned around, I got my right hand up just in time to stop Herk from putting one of his bear hugs on me.

“Whoa! What happened to the hand, bro?”

“I forgot the rules,” I told him.

“What rules?” Vyra put in, noticing my hand for the first time.

“Hard to soft, soft to hard,” Herk explained. “You clocked someone in the teeth, huh?” he said to me.

“Yeah. Sit down. How much time you got?”

“Got? I dunno. We ain’t got a meeting until tomorrow night.”

“Start at the beginning,” I told him, shooting Vyra a look so she’d leave us alone. She ignored it, perching herself on the bed.

“Lothar and me had a meet. At that place where he works. He’s got a back room. Anyway, nobody was looking at nobody else, you know those kind of places.”

“What kind of places?” Vyra asked.

“Shut up,” I told her softly. “We’re not playing. This isn’t a game.”

“I’m in this too,” she said.

“Yeah, you are. So do your piece.”

“You mean, just sit here?”

“For now.”

“I don’t want—”

“Vyra, you can sit there nice and peaceful. Or I can use this,” I said, taking a Velcro tourniquet out of my pocket.

“What’s that?” she asked, as suspicious as a crackhouse doorman.

“It works just like handcuffs,” I told her. “And I got a nice clean handkerchief for your big mouth too. Is that what you want?”

“You—”

“Yeah, I would,” I promised her.

Her mouth snapped shut so hard flecks of lipstick flew off.

“From the beginning,” I said to Herk again.

“Anyway, I had to stay there until—”

“There?”

“In the back room. Of the porno joint. Lothar gets this message from me, right? At his P.O. box. Then we talk on the pay phone, right? Then we meet, I tell him what I had to do with . . . that guy, okay? The Jew. He had to tell the others, the guys he was with. He couldn’t bring me to them until he cleared it. So I had to stay there. Where he works. Overnight. It was weird, Burke. Being in that place all alone.”

“At least you had plenty to read.”

“That stuff? I tried to. . . . I mean, I looked through it and everything. But it’s all the same, you know what I mean?”

Vyra took an especially deep breath, as if to remind him that it really wasn’t. But she didn’t say a word.

“Yeah, I do,” I told him. “What happened next?”

“In the morning, before the place opens, he comes back. I had to stay for his whole shift, until it got dark. Then I went with him.”

“To . . . ?”

“This place they got. A house. Just the other side of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge.”

“You got the address?”

“Nah. What happens is, you go to this bar, okay? Then you make a call from the pay phone over against the wall. There’s all kinds of clicks on the line, like it’s switching back and forth. You wait there. One of them comes by and picks you up. You get in the back of this van. No windows. Then you ride for a while. When you get out, you’re in this garage, like. There’s a doorway cut right into the house. I can tell from the way it’s set up, the house is supposed to be all closed up. You can’t even see outside.”

“But when you want to leave . . . ?”

“You got to tell them. Then they take you. Through the garage and all.”

“They take you wherever you want?”

“Nah, they ain’t no taxi service. They drop you off near whatever subway you want. Or a cab stand. But I know they gotta drive that van a good half-hour before we get to the house from the bar.”

“So they could have followed you here?”

“I guess . . .” he said, puzzled.

I shrugged it off. If they had, they wouldn’t have learned much. Especially if they had monitored his calls to Vyra. “How many in the crew?” I asked him.

“There was like maybe six of them there. Not counting Lothar. He wasn’t there when they talked to me. What they did, they asked me a bunch of questions. Just like you said.”

“Any problems?”

“Nah. They mostly asked me about . . . the guy. How’d I do it and all. How’d we find out he was a Jew. Everything else, I just told them what was . . . what was true, I mean. About it. They told me about it, so I said I’d do it. Do him, I mean. Like you said.”

“Did one guy ask you all the questions? Was there a leader?”

“I don’t . . . think so. I mean, they was all talking. Most of the stuff they asked me, I didn’t know the answers.”

A warning bell went off in my head. “Like what?”

“Like what they was up to, the guys that was supposed to be with me . . . the guys I was supposed to be with. In my cell, like? Understand?”

“Yeah. What else did they want to know?”

“Like, what Lothar said about them. Stuff like that. I told them the truth . . . nothing.”

“Herk, they never searched you?”

“Oh yeah,” he said brightly. “They did that. Just like in the joint. Finger-wave and everything. Before they started talking. One of them, he asked me where I got the tattoo.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“I told him an old Jewish guy gave it to me.”

“Jesus.”

“They thought that was real funny. They was all laughing at the guy who asked me.”

I took a long, shallow breath, looking deep into Herk’s eyes. They came back innocent, like the big damn kid he was. “Herk, did they say anything about what they were planning?”

“Nah. You know what? I don’t think they gonna tell me either. It’s like, I got to stay there, close anyway, ’cause they don’t know ’xactly what they gonna do with me. But they didn’t say nothing . . . uh, specific-like. Just . . . something’s gonna happen. I mean, everybody knows that. Knew that, I mean. In my crew. The one I was with that told me to—”

“Yeah, okay, I got it.” I took a deep breath, making sure I had the big man’s full attention. “Listen close now, Herk. What’s Lothar’s weight? Can you tell?”

“He ain’t no boss, Burke, I can tell you that. I don’t mean he’s like a flunkey or nothing, but he ain’t the big cheese, that’s for sure.”

“Herk, think for a minute. Close your eyes. Try and put yourself back there. Just . . . listen, okay? We’re not looking for the boss, we’re looking for the brains, understand?”

“Bro, when it comes to the brains in a crew, all I know, it ain’t never gonna be me.”

“They all asked you questions, right?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Were any of them like . . . hostile? You know, on your case hard?”

“Nah. Well, maybe this one guy . . . Kenny. But you could see he’s weak. You know how their voice gets a little . . . I dunno, jittery? No matter how hard they talking?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s Kenny. It ain’t him, that’s for sure.”

“And it’s not Lothar?”

“No way, man.”

“Herk, listen real close now,” I said urgently, lighting a cigarette. “I—”

“Can I have one too?” Vyra asked me.

Herk shot her a disapproving look.

“What did I do?” she asked, innocently, looking out from under her false eyelashes, her hands clasped in her lap . . . but squeezing her elbows to emphasize the cleavage.

“That stuff’ll kill you,” he said. “That’s why you don’t put weight on, all them cigarettes.”

“You too? You think I should—?”

“I think you should shut the fuck up,” I told her, turning back to Hercules, but handing Vyra a cigarette. “Now, listen,” I said again. “You know the difference between feelings and facts?”

“I . . . guess.”

I took a deep nose breath, drawing the oxygen all the way down to my groin, centering. If I couldn’t translate it down for Herk, I was lost. “Listen to these questions, okay?” I said, holding his eyes. “One: when did you go to the joint the last time? Two: was it worse than the time before? Three: what was the charges? Four: was your lawyer any good? All right?”

“Yeah.”

“Now answer them. One at a time. Concentrate.”

“Okay,” the big man said, brow furrowed. “I last went down in ’91. For A and R. That’s assault and robbery,” he said in an aside to Vyra, who was still holding the cigarette I gave her, unlit. “It was worse the last time. ’Cause none a you guys was in there with me. But it wasn’t that bad. I mean . . . you know how it is. I got crewed up quick. And . . . and . . . oh yeah! My lawyer fucking sucked. Miserable-ass weasel they give me in the court. He had me pled out before I could draw a breath.”

“Good. Now: which of those was facts, and which was feelings?”

“They all facts, bro. The stone truth.”

I had a piercing headache.

Vyra got off the bed and stood next to Herk, one hand on his shoulder, the other holding the still-unlit cigarette. She bent her face close to his. “Is true love a fact?” she asked him.

“Huh?”

“If you love someone, a true love, that’s a fact, yes?”

“Sure.”

“But it’s also a feeling, right, Hercules? Love is what you feel, isn’t it?”

The big man sat there pondering, Vyra’s perfectly manicured hand sitting on his hyper-muscled shoulder like a butterfly on a boulder.

I didn’t say a word.

“Yeah,” he finally said. “It is. Sure.”

“Did any of them ask you what it was like in prison?” I asked him quickly, trying to catch the ripple from the rock Vyra had dropped into the pool.

“Oh yeah, bro. Like, they was all interested in that. I figured it was ’cause none of them been—”

“What about the other questions? When you went down, what you went down for?”

“Nah, they was . . . Wait a minute. Yeah! One guy. Scott, that was him. He was the only one asking me about that fact stuff. Yeah! When I went in. Even what joints I was in. And—”

“—and your date of birth?” I cut in, smelling blood. That’s the key to a criminal-records search, the foundation stone that unlocks all the data.

“Sure did, bro! I ask him, what’s he want to do, send me a fucking birthday present? Couple of the guys laughed, but Scott, he still wanted to know.”

“You told him, right?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“He’s the man, Herk.”

Vyra gave him a big wet kiss on the cheek. “You figured it out, honey!” she said.

Herk grinned broadly, Vyra’s lipstick mark clear on his face. I made a grunting noise and his eyes swung back to me. “Whatever you do,” I told him, “don’t ask any questions. Keep your nose out of things, understand? They wanna tell you something, you listen. They don’t, that’s it.”

“I got it, bro.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“Burke?”

“What?”

“It’s gonna be all right, ain’t it?”

“Yeah it is.”

“You just tell me what to do and I’ll—”

“I know. You got your own place yet?”

“I’m staying with Lothar. Right in the porno store. Only upstairs. He got a whole apartment up there. You can’t even tell from the street. Pretty slick, huh?”

“Yeah. Lothar try and make conversation with you?”

“Just bullshit. Not about business. Well, not about . . . I mean, he got business of his own. Burke, did you know there was Nazi porno?”

“Nazi porno?”

“Yeah, like Nazis raping a girl. And torture stuff. Wearing those uniforms with what I . . .” He touched his chest. Where the tattoo was.

“Lothar’s into that?”

“Big-time,” Hercules said. “I think . . . maybe . . . ah, never mind—I’m too fucking dim to be playing Sherlock Holmes and all.”

“What?” I asked him, leaning forward, putting my damaged hand on his thick forearm. “Come on.”

“It’s just a . . . feeling, like,” he said, glancing over at Vyra. “But I think Lothar was doing that stuff first. I mean, the porno. And those other guys . . . one of them, anyway . . . comes in the shop, or he hears about what Lothar’s got, I dunno. I mean, one of the guys from his first cell, not the one he’s in now. The one I was supposed to be . . . Anyway I think he wasn’t like . . . with them first. He’s not a guy with guns or bombs or nothing. He used to write stuff. . . .”

“What stuff?”

“I dunno. About the Jews and niggers and all.”

“You get the impression he’s being cagey? Like maybe they got a bug in his apartment?”

“Man, I never know when someone’s being cagey. That’s what the Prof always says. Me, I’m thick. I mean, I never knew him before, so how’m I gonna know if he changed, right?”

“Right.”

“When this is over, I’m going away,” he said quietly.

“It’s a long way from over,” I warned him.

“And it’s a long way I’m going, bro,” Hercules said. “Either way, I’m gone. Live or die, I’m done with this.”

I left Herk there. Told him to hang around a minimum of a couple of hours. Watch TV or something. Vyra still hadn’t lit the cigarette.

I took the stairway to my room. Ducked inside. The message light wasn’t blinking on the phone.

Good.

I called Mama. Nothing.

Even better.

I know what happens when there’s too many loose threads—somebody weaves them into a noose. Panic was my enemy, but I knew how to deal with it: Aikido. In my head. My spirit against the enemy.

I stripped down to my underwear and closed my eyes, watching the loose threads dance on a tiny 3-D screen.

A movie. Only I wasn’t just a spectator. Or even an actor. I was the director.

Working on the final cut.

No point trying to call Davidson. He doesn’t trust phones and he’d go so elliptical that it’d take him an hour to say hello. I went over to his office, told his receptionist that I had an appointment. She couldn’t find it on her calendar, so I told her to ask him, gambling that he wouldn’t be in with a client first thing in the morning.

“You in trouble?” he asked without preamble as I closed his office door behind me.

“Not me. Maybe not anybody, if you can do something for me.”

“Something in court?”

“If it goes right, it never goes to court. Some . . . negotiations.”

“With . . . ?”

“I don’t know the name of the AUSA. I’m not coming in at that end.”

“And I’m not following you.”

“Here it is,” I told him. “I got a friend. A good friend. He’s about to do something for the federales. Something big. The promise is immunity. For everything.”

“Everything he’s going to do? Everything he’s already done? What?”

“Everything everything. He’s not a rat. This is kind of an . . . undercover thing. All I’ve collected so far is a pack of promises.”

“From the government?”

“From a guy who says he can get that done. A free-lancer.”

“Oh,” Davidson said quietly, a cubic ton of suspicion compressed into that one syllable.

“Yeah, I know. That’s where you come in. My friend needs a lawyer. Somebody to drive the nails home. What I want, I want this guy, this free-lancer, to put up now. I want him to take you to someone—whoever—who can grant the immunity. And I want it. In writing. A cooperation agreement. Rock-solid, no loopholes. And the deal has to include a new ID.”

“And a relocate?”

“Yeah, we can say that. But my friend, he’s gonna walk away, sooner or later. The deal isn’t for protection, it’s for a new everything—name, face, Social Security, work history. And no testimony.”

“No testimony? He’s going to access them to the kind of evidence that stands on its own?”

“That’s the deal,” I said. “You can do it?”

“I can do it if this free-lancer you’re talking about can deliver. If he really has that kind of influence. I understand what you want, but I don’t know what I’ve got to bargain with to get it.”

“How about if I tell you?” I asked, lighting a cigarette.

I left ten grand with Davidson, with the other half to come when the deal was done. He hadn’t said anything about cutting his price once I told him what was going on, but his whole posture shifted behind the big desk. Davidson was a stand-up guy with the best credentials you can have in our business—a track record. And he was a hell of a lawyer. Most of the time, I hold back some of the truth when I talk to him. But he’d lost relatives to the death camps, and I knew what the truth would do this time. I wouldn’t want to be the government lawyer who tried to get in his way.

Back at my place, I tried to think it through.

Mousetrap. Box. Closed-end tunnel. It all came up the same on my screen.

Pryce had me cornered. He had too many pieces on the board.

My mind ached with the strain from trying to slip out of the maze. My face hurt—sharp, spiking pain in the nerve cluster below the cheekbone. I couldn’t figure out what was going on until I realized how tightly my teeth had been clenched. When I finally fell asleep, fever-dreams snapped me wide awake.

I knew what to do then. Stared at the red dot on my mirror until I fell into it. Stayed down there, safe and dissociated.

When I resurfaced I was calmer.

But still trapped.

“Are you afraid?” Crystal Beth asked later, lying next to me in the dark.

And that’s when I knew what was wrong. Why I couldn’t think my way out.

I wasn’t afraid.

The first thing I remember about being a baby is terror so total that fear became my one true friend. Always with me, never leaving my side. Warning me, keeping me vigilant. Distrustful. A layer of protection between the terror and me—the little tiny bit that was me then.

Fear never abandoned me. I took it with me everywhere I went. Everywhere they sent me. The State—my true parent—sending me to surrogates who continued its vicious work. The orphanage. Foster homes. Reform school. Prison looming as inevitable in my future as college was in the lives of the privileged.

Fear came there with me too. A friend I internalized so deep the wolf packs that ran wild through the joint couldn’t smell it. That’s because it wasn’t on me, it was in me. I cherished it, nurtured it, encoded it into my own DNA. My face flattened, my hands stopped shaking. My heart went slow and cold.

I came into prison with a life-taker’s rep. They test reps in there. I kept mine. It cost a lot, but it wasn’t me who paid.

I got to where I never broke a sweat. My voice stayed within a tight, narrow range. I could stare down a cobra. But the fear-bolts always roamed loose in my body, firing off bursts whenever danger was around.

In prison, I lived in danger, adrenaline crackling through my synapses like turbo-boosted cocaine. It kept me alive.

My one goal, then.

Out in the World, I kept the fear. But I played it different. I learned to show the fear when it would do me some good. Trained myself to act, role-playing along the tightrope of survival.

Fear never left me. Until now.

I felt abandoned all over again. Deserted. Without my old friend, I couldn’t plot, couldn’t plan.

So why wasn’t I afraid? I was boxed, all right. Couldn’t see a way out. So why . . . ?

“Burke! Burke, wake up. Are you all right?”

Crystal Beth, shaking my shoulders, gentle but serious. I opened my eyes.

“Are you all right?” she asked again.

“I’m fine,” I told her. “I must have drifted off, that’s all.”

“Drifted off? You were . . . not here. I mean, you weren’t actually sleeping, I could tell. Just . . . zoned out or something.”

“What’s the big deal?” I asked her, wondering why she didn’t recognize the same thing she did herself.

“It’s been hours you’ve been like that,” she said, answering the question she didn’t know I’d asked. “I didn’t want to . . . disturb you. I didn’t know. But then you finally fell asleep. And I got scared.”

“I’m fine,” I told her again. “It happens to me sometimes. When I have to think.”

“My mother said the shamans . . . Oh, I don’t mean you. . . . I mean, you were . . . in a trance, like. Awake, but not here. One minute we were talking, the next you were gone.”

“Can I have a glass of water?” I asked her, more to shut her down than because I was thirsty.

“Sure, baby.”

She came back with a cone-shaped paper cup. The water was cold and clean. “Thanks,” I said.

“You want anything else?”

“A cigarette?”

She lit one of mine, handed it to me, not saying a word. I smoked it all the way down in the darkness, my spinal cord crawling with snake-twisty nerves. Alive now.

Alive with fear.

Where I’d gone, it had come to me. I wasn’t afraid of Pryce. I wasn’t the target. He couldn’t really hurt me. Yeah, he might know some stuff I wouldn’t want shouted around the town, some old ID might be blown, crap like that. But there was nothing in it for him to try for me. If he knew enough to hurt me, he knew enough to know that he wouldn’t live long if he did.

Maybe that was the difference. In prison, it’s not how tough you are that keeps you safe, it’s your capacity for revenge. Prison is icy hell. Feelings are the enemy. Showing them is a crippling illness—sometimes a fatal one. You get raped, you’re a cunt. And every con in the joint is free to use you like one. You kill the rapist, you’re a man. Everything squared. Vengeance is the only true religion in there. And if you have backup, even killing you won’t make the killers safe . . . so they step off.

The first time I went down, it was for a good, high-status beef. Shooting a guy. Attempted murder, they called it, and they were right on the money. I did it because he scared me, but that wasn’t how I profiled it once I was inside. In my version, I did it because he disrespected me.

It helped protect me. I watched plenty of others who couldn’t stay safe. It was ugly, what happened to them. But even before I crewed up, the predators stayed away. Everyone knew—Burke would get even. Next to me, elephants had Alzheimer’s.

If Pryce knew so much about me, he had to know that. He had to know that, whatever I was, I wasn’t alone. I’d die for that, and that would die for me.

So I was safe from him.

But Herk wasn’t. He was hung out to dry. Without the immunity, he was barbecued beef. Without the immunity, he was going back Inside. He’d never be a gardener. Never be a person, like he wanted so bad.

Doc, the prison shrink—I was his inmate clerk, a real sweet spot—told me once that the only thing that really distinguishes a sociopath from the rest of the world is that the sociopath lacks empathy. He feels only his own pain, cares only for his own needs. Selfishness squared. All sexual sadists are sociopaths, but not all sociopaths are sexual sadists. All sociopaths are the same thing, but they don’t all want the same things. Take politicians—the way they breed is to fuck the rest of us.

All sociopaths are encapsulated. Always have every feeling they need right inside themselves. Nobody else counts.

The plague of the Nineties isn’t AIDS, it’s self-absorption. Sociopaths always crank the revs right to the redline. And keep the hammer down.

Amateurs think prisons are full of sociopaths. A pro would tell you the truth—the only sociopaths in prison are the failures. The rest of the population is all the result of the “Just Us” system. Flops and fools, weasels and weaklings. Lazy lames. Most of the convict population today is in there for drugs.

It’s like we learned nothing from Prohibition.

I was safe from Pryce and Herk wasn’t. So what?

I knew the answer to that: Herk would die for me.

That’s an easy thing to say, but I knew it for true. A feeling and a fact. Herk had only been down with our crew for a few weeks when it happened. I was rat-packed in the long corridor between D Block and the commissary. Four black guys, three with shanks, one working lookout. It wasn’t me they wanted. Not me in particular. A race war had been raging inside for almost a week. When that happens, color is the only target.

It wasn’t a heist. They weren’t looking to rough off some commissary goods. No, the next white convict who walked into their trap was going to die. They wanted a body. Any body, so long as it was the right color.

That was me, that day.

If it had been years earlier, when I was still on my first bit, when my image was more important than my life, I would have done it different. But that day, as soon as I spotted the first two, I turned and ran. That’s when I saw the other one, sharpened rat-tail file wrapped in black electrical tape held low against his hip, moving in. He was the hit man—the others were carrying steel too, but they didn’t look as professional, just there to drive the prey onto the killing ground.

I was unarmed. And out of time. I rushed the hit man, charging at his chest. He came up to meet me. I twisted my right shoulder like I was going to try and slide past on his right, exposing my back for a second as I planted my right foot and spun quickly, flattening my chest against the opposite wall away from his knife hand, firing my right elbow at where I thought his face would be as I scrambled crab-style toward safety. I almost made it. I felt the shank punch through my denim jacket and take me just below the shoulder. I went down, rolling away as fast as I could. Heard the pounding footsteps as the other two charged, knives held high.

That’s when Hercules hit them from behind like a runaway train, taking them both into the wall. The lookout shouted something. I kept rolling, covering up as best as I could, kicking out at the hit man every time he got close. Guards piled into the corridor, the riot whistle blowing loud. Sweeter than church bells on a wedding day.

One of the hacks clubbed me right where the hit man’s shank had gone in. When I came to in the prison hospital, my head was bandaged too.

If you can get to the hospital in prison, they can probably save you—the docs there have plenty of practice. Herk took almost seventy stitches, but they were slash wounds, not deep. I got a heavy tetanus shot, then they cleaned the wound out and packed it. Told me how lucky it was that it hadn’t been lower—if he’d gotten a kidney, I was gone.

They did a prison investigation. Which means a body count. This one was zero, so they called it off. Herk and I told the same story. We were walking down the corridor and got jumped. No, we didn’t see who did it. No, we didn’t know if they were black or white—they had masks and gloves on. No, we didn’t know how many of them there were.

The black guys told the same story.

The shanks were somebody else’s. No prints . . . if they even checked.

Herk and I got thirty days’ keep-lock. The black guys got six months in the bing. Except for the lookout. They cut him loose. An innocent bystander.

When the hit man died from eating a rat-poison-laced candy bar in solitary, the Man put it down to the race war. That had been Wesley’s work, although I didn’t know it then.

The other two sent word to me that there had been nothing personal—they’d mistaken me for somebody else. I was okay with them. Sorry about what happened. How about if they send a few crates of smokes over to my wing, make it up to me?

I sent word back: Sure. No hard feelings.

A couple of months later, the race war was over. For then—the only way it’s ever over in there. One of the two guys who’d sent me the smokes was watching a softball game on the yard when someone came up behind him and played a one-swing game of T-ball with his head.

The hacks figured it for debt collection—the black guy was a known gambler. Like always, they got it about half right.

Less than a week later, his partner went off a high tier all the way down to the killing concrete floor.

The investigation was quick. After all, a lot of suicides don’t leave notes.

The lookout was the sole survivor. He smelled the wind, took a voluntary PC. Refused to eat any food that the hacks didn’t taste. Which meant he was starving to death. He became convinced microwaves were being sent to give him cancer. Heard voices telling him he was going to die. They gave him medication—held him down for the needle. It calmed him, let him relax. After a while, he started to trust again, so they switched to oral meds. He always took them, no complaints. It wasn’t so bad in there for him after that. He got tranquil, started to eat again. But he never came out of his cell.

That’s where they found his body, burned to a crisp. If he’d screamed, nobody had heard.

Herk would die for me.

He was my brother.

My brother was in a box, not me.

But my family is me. My brother was in danger, and I was afraid. For him, for me. Same thing.

I had my old partner back. Fear was in me, alive.

And it would keep my brother that way too.

I guess I’ll never qualify as a sociopath. But you don’t have to be a sociopath to act like one.

I started to plot.

“Are you okay?” Crystal Beth asked me again. “You keep . . . going away.”

“I’m back now,” I told her.

In this city, some of the rats have wings. There’s parts of Brooklyn where pigeon-racing is a bigger sport than baseball. And if you’re tired of having your house covered in pigeon shit, professional exterminators will lay a covering on your roof to solve the problem. It’s really a carpet of tiny little face-up nails—pigeons can’t land on it.

But starlings live in this city too, and they need places to roost. For their tribe to survive. So what they do is they carefully gather twigs and paper and other stuff, drop it on the carpet of nails and then stand on that.

I don’t know how they do it in other countries, but in America, people call themselves “friends” and it means about as much as when they sign their letters “Love.” All their letters.

Down here, it’s different. I have no friends. There’s people I know, people I wouldn’t hurt if I could help it. There’s people I like, and maybe they like me. But it really comes down to Us, Them . . . and non-combatants.

Us is the deepest blood of all. And it only takes volunteers.

In your world, you ask a friend to get something for you, he’d probably ask what you wanted it for. And then he might say yes and he might say no.

When I asked Clarence to get something for me, he didn’t ask me what I wanted it for.

And he didn’t just say he’d get it for me—he asked if he could use it himself.

“What’s the point?” Pryce asked.

“I don’t want to say on the phone. Especially without a land-line,” I told him.

“You want to meet, I can do that. But why does . . . my friend have to be there too?”

“I learned something,” I said. “It could change the game, understand? Change everything.”

“I still don’t—”

“Change everything,” I said, letting an organ-stop of pressure into my voice.

He was silent for a minute, but the cellular’s hum told me he was still on the line. “The last time we met, it was all yours,” he finally said. “This time, it has to be mine.”

“Time and place,” I said. “You call it.”

“I can’t just reach out and—”

“When you have it, let me know,” I said. “But there isn’t a lot of time.”

“You trust me?” I asked Hercules in the bedroom of Vyra’s hotel suite.

“All the way, brother,” he said, no hesitation.

“Up to now, they been the players, we been the game, got it?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re gonna change the game,” I told him.

Two days later. Three-thirty in the afternoon. Rain banging against Crystal Beth’s dark window.

“You know where River Street is?” Pryce’s voice, over the cell phone.

“What borough?”

“Brooklyn.”

“I can find it,” I told him. Lying. I know River Street. It only runs for a couple of blocks, parallel to Kent Avenue, right off where the East River flows under the Williamsburg Bridge.

“Go there now,” he said. “You’ll see my car parked.”

“I’m moving,” I promised.

“Are you inside?” I asked Vyra. Meaning: Are you in the suite, not the street?

“Yes.” Her voice over the cell phone was clipped, precise. Not like her.

“You alone?”

“No.”

“Your car is there?”

“Yes.”

“Do this now. You both meet me at the Butcher Block. Now.”

“I don’t know where—”

“Your friend does. Now.”

I cut the connection.

I spotted the burgundy Mercedes 600SL coupe coming down the block, moving slow. I stepped out so they could see me. “Get in my car,” I told Hercules.

“What’s going—?”

“Tell you later,” I cut Vyra off. “Go back to the hotel. Stay there, girl, no matter what. If you don’t hear anything in a couple of hours, call the number you have for me. Tell whoever answers that I went to meet Pryce. And I didn’t come back.”

“Why does Hercules have to—?”

“Not now,” I said, turning my back on her and moving off to the Plymouth.

“It’s gotta be this way, huh?” Herk asked me.

I took the Brooklyn Bridge to the BQE, heading toward Queens. Exited at Metropolitan Avenue and swung back toward Brooklyn.

“Yeah. When you play cards, the ace is boss, right?”

“Sure.”

“We need the king to be boss, Herk.”

He nodded soberly, watching the miserable weather. The sky was turning prison-gray.

“Burke?”

“What?”

“Vyra. Are you . . . like, with her?”

“With her? Like I’m with you? No. She’s not one of—”

“Nah, I don’t mean that. I never say things like I mean them. I mean, I say them straight, but they don’t come out the way I’m thinking. You understand?”

“Yeah, I do. What do you want to know?”

“You and her. She was . . . like your girlfriend, right?”

“No. She was never my girlfriend. We . . . got together once in a while. That’s all.”

“You like her?”

“I don’t know what I think about her. Never thought about it at all, I guess.”

“I like her.”

“You mean you’d like to fuck her,” saying it bluntly to take the edges off.

“Nah. I mean . . . I would. I mean . . . I already . . . Burke, I really like her. She’s real smart. And real sweet. I can talk to her about things.”

“Like what? Shoes?”

“Man, you don’t know her. She’s really a . . . good person.”

“Okay.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means: okay. Whatever you want to do, it’s up to you. But, Herk . . .”

“What?”

“She’s got herself a real good gig where she is, you know what I’m saying?”

“Her husband? He ain’t—”

“He’s rich. Major-league rich. Remember what the Prof told us about women once? ‘Some play, some stay.’ Vyra, she’s a player, all right?”

“You don’t know her,” the big man said, sullen and stubborn.

I shrugged my shoulders, concentrating. It wasn’t time to worry about Herk being such a sap—we were a couple of blocks from River Street.

The white Taurus was parked on the street. No other car was close, but the block wasn’t deserted: People walking around, maybe from the change-of-shift at some of the nearby factories, maybe locals. Cars crawled by too.

I pulled in behind, leaving myself room enough to drive away without backing up first. “Let’s do it,” I said to Hercules.

Pryce must have been watching us in the rearview mirror. The back doors of the sedan popped open as we walked toward it. We climbed in, Herk behind Pryce, me behind Lothar. Pryce put his right arm along the back of the seat, turned to look at me. Lothar stared straight ahead.

“All right, let’s hear it,” Pryce said.

“I want Herk to have his immunity now,” I told him. “Before this goes another step.”

“That wasn’t the—”

“That’s the deal now,” I said. “I got a lawyer in place. You say when, he’ll come downtown, you’ll put the whole thing together.”

“You can’t expect to have that sort of deal in front,” Pryce said in an annoyed tone. “You know better than that. Everybody will get taken care of at the same time.”

“I think Lothar’s already taken care of.”

“That’s different,” Pryce said in the flat officialese they teach you in FBI school. “Lothar is an undercover operative of the United States government.”

“So’s Herk now.”

“But they don’t need him,” Pryce said in a patient voice. “They don’t even know about him yet.”

“But you can do it?” I asked him. “You got that much juice with the feds?”

“Guaranteed,” he said. “But what does this have to do with Lothar?”

“How do I know you’re going to come through for Hercules?” I said, ignoring his question.

“I’ve done what you wanted, haven’t I? You’re just going to have to trust me.”

I sat there quietly as a woman trundled past, pulling one of those little grocery carts behind her. Then I took out the fat tube of steel Clarence had gotten for me, said “Lothar?” and, when he turned sideways to listen, put a nine-millimeter slug in his temple.

It didn’t make much noise, even in the closed car.

“You got it wrong,” I told Pryce. “You’re going to have to trust me.”

Lothar’s head slumped forward, his body held in place by his seatbelt. I grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled him backward so it looked like he was just sitting there. There was no blood, just a round little black dot on his temple—the opposite of a birthmark. Some of the powder had been removed from the cartridge to keep the sound down—the bullet was still somewhere in Lothar’s brain.

“You—”

Pryce cut himself off, out of words.

I wasn’t. “Now we’re gonna find out,” I told him, watching his hands in case we had to do him too. If it came to that, Hercules would have to snap his neck from behind—I didn’t have another bullet. Clarence’s connection made custom pieces—this one was a one-shot derringer with a thick core of silencing baffles. “Look,” I said, my voice as calm as a Zen rock garden, “Lothar was stalking his wife. That’s a fact, well documented. There’s an Order of Protection. You know that too. Well, what happened was that he got spotted breaking into his wife’s house. She isn’t there anymore, but he didn’t know that. He had implements with him—handcuffs, duct tape, like that. He was gonna kill his wife and kidnap the baby. Or both of them. Who knows? The cops came on the scene, and Lothar decided to shoot it out. Gunfire was exchanged. There’s the result, sitting right next to you. That’s the story that needs to getin the papers. So the others will see what happened. It won’t surprise them either—they knew Lothar was a torture-sex freak with a major hate for his wife. Okay, that leaves Herk. He’s your inside man now. And he needs that immunity. Or the faucet gets turned off.”

“You’re insane,” Pryce said, looking through the windshield. The street was quiet.

“People could argue about that,” I told him. “Nobody’s gonna argue about Lothar being dead.”

“You expect me to drive around with a dead body and—”

“I don’t care what you do. I know people can’t see through these windows from outside. You want cover, I’ll drive point until you get clear. To wherever you want—we can stay linked on the cellulars. But I don’t think you want me to see where you’re going.

“It’s time to prove,” I told him. “If you’re the real thing, if you’re down with ZOG, you can do this. If you’re not, it’s all over. You got no more cards to play. You thought you knew me. Now you do. You take down Crystal Beth’s network, you dime out Vyra to her husband, you turn Porkpie loose on Hercules, you’re done, pal. You’ll never find all of us. And one of us will find you.”

“Get out of the car,” he said in a tight, controlled voice. “Get out now. I’ll call you.”

We watched the white Taurus drive away. Smooth and steady.

I crossed the bridge into Manhattan. Pulled up to a deli on Delancey. A Latino in an old army field jacket was leaning against the wall, just out of the rain. He walked over to the Plymouth. Herk rolled down his window. The guy stuck his head inside, nodded at me. He went into the deli, came back with a paper bag full of sandwiches and a couple of bottles of apple juice. I glove-handed him the empty, wiped-down steel tube and five one-hundred-dollar bills. He pocketed both and walked off.

Herk dialed Vyra from a pay phone on the street. Told her he’d be there soon.

Back in the car, he turned to me. “Burke, I’m with you, okay? No matter what. I mean, I don’t gotta understand why—”

“You know what happens when a raccoon gets his leg caught in one of those steel traps, Herk? You know what he’s got to do, he wants to live?”

“Bite the leg off?” the big man said.

“Yeah. There’s two kinds of raccoons get caught in those traps. The ones with balls enough to do what they gotta do. And dead ones. A bitch raccoon gets in heat, she wants a stud that’s gonna give her the strongest babies, understand? You know what she looks for? Not the biggest raccoon. Not the prettiest one either. A smart bitch, she looks for one with three legs.”

“I get it, bro. Okay, we got three legs now. I’m in. But . . . we got a problem. I think, anyway.”

“What?”

“There’s a meeting. Tonight.”

“Damn. Why didn’t you—?”

“I forgot. Until just now.”

“Jesus, Herk. Even if Pryce goes for it, he can’t make it happen right now. He’s gonna need a day or so, minimum. The best we can hope for is the newspaper story. I thought we’d watch—he makes that happen, I believe he can do the immunity thing. And then I was going to have this lawyer I hired go in and tighten that up for you. But if you go to that meeting and Lothar isn’t there . . .”

“He wasn’t supposed to be there, right?”

“Huh?”

“I mean, he’s supposed to be stalking his wife, right? And he gets smoked doing it, okay? No way I know about that. Or any of them either. Unless it’s on the news. Why shouldn’t I just go on? It ain’t like me and him was supposed to be cut-buddies anyway.”

“Herk, that’s if Pryce goes along. That’s if he can do it even if he wants to. That’s if he hasn’t already decided to cut his losses and down the whole fucking crew. If you know about the meeting tonight, Lothar did too. And he probably told Pryce.”

“What else am I supposed to do?”

“You could jet,” I told him.

“I was gonna do that, what’d you take Lothar off the count for? I ain’t that stupid. I know what you was talking about. Lothar was the ace, right? Now I’m the top card. The only one that cocksucker Pryce’s got. I thought we was gonna play this to win.”

“I should have asked you about the next meeting.”

“I’m going in there,” he said. “And if that little motherfucker Porkpie dimes us out, I’ll take the weight. For everything. I did that guy in the alley, I did Lothar, what’s the difference? Life is life.”

“I thought you said you weren’t going back.”

“If it was just me, I wouldn’t,” Hercules said. “But if it goes bad, the only way I can take the heat offa everyone is to stand up, right? So I’ll do it.”

“If that happens, I’ll get you out,” I promised him. “Not through the courts, over the wall. It’ll take some time but—”

“I’ll have the time, brother,” the big man said, down but determined. “Now I gotta go say goodbye to Vyra.”

“Did I do something to make you angry?” Crystal Beth asked meekly. Lying on her stomach, her body picking up bronze highlights from the candle’s flame.

“Why’d you ask me that?”

“Because you . . . hurt me. When we made love. You were so . . . rough. Storming in here. Holding me down. Pinned down. I felt like I was in a steel vise. I couldn’t move. And you didn’t . . . wait for me. You just—”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Not to me, anyway.”

“I said I was sorry, Crystal Beth. I . . . got something on my mind.”

“Pryce?”

“Pryce is a dead man,” I snapped at her.

She gasped.

“I mean, if he doesn’t come through, he’s dead,” I said quickly. “It’s really tense now, little girl. I shouldn’t have . . . done what I did. To you, I mean. I’m sorry. If there’s any way I can make it up to you, I’ll—”

“We could try it again,” she said softly, a little smile playing around her full lips. “From the top.”

“Where are you going?” she asked later.

“Out.”

“Why can’t you just stay here for the night?”

I could have told her I had to get back to take care of Pansy, but it would have been a lie. I have it all set up so Pansy can get food for herself when I’m gone. Not the food she loves—just dry dog food—but if she got hungry enough, she’d eat it. And a fresh water supply too. With the plastic garbage bags I’d laid out for her, she was good for a nice long time, although it wouldn’t smell too great when I got back. And if I didn’t come back, Max knew what to do—there was always room for one more mutt in the Mole’s junkyard. I told Crystal Beth the truth. “I need a TV set. And you don’t have one.”

“Yes we do,” she said. “Right downstairs. The one you had for Hercules. It’s still in the basement. It’s just a little portable, not cable or anything. But we could plug it in and—”

“Go get it,” I told her.

It was the lead story on the eleven o’clock news. The male anchor read the copy as the camera panned over footage of a lower-middle-class house surrounded by yellow POLICE tape, using that ponderous tone they all go to when they think there’s a chance anyone will mistake them for real journalists.

A Queens man long sought by the authorities for violation of a court Order of Protection has taken his own life after a shoot-out with police. Lawrence Bretton, age thirty-six, an unemployed printer, apparently invaded the home of his estranged wife and infant son, unaware that she had been living at another location.

The camera switched to Lothar’s mug shot, probably from when he was first arrested for domestic violence.

Bretton was armed with a nine-millimeter automatic pistol and several clips of ammunition. He also had a pair of handcuffs and a roll of duct tape with him, leading to speculation that he planned some sort of kidnapping or torture. According to police sources, Bretton had threatened his wife with death on numerous occasions and was considered extremely violent.

The camera switched to a copy of the Order of Protection, with Lothar’s true name in the caption.

When ordered to surrender, Bretton fired upon police at the scene and attempted to barricade himself in the house. Reinforcements were called in as well as the Hostage Negotiating Team, but a brief telephone conversation ended with a shot from inside the home. Ironically, Bretton was wearing a bulletproof vest, but he took his own life with a single shot to the head rather than surrender. Details of this astounding case, so emblematic of the domestic violence which has infected this city for so long, are still coming in. Stay tuned to this channel for . . .

“Oh my God,” Crystal Beth said quietly. “That’s him, isn’t it?”

“That’s him all right. But it’s not over.”

“It is for Marla,” she said. “And the baby.”

There was more at eleven-thirty. A beautifully woven web of lies, with such a heavy marbling of truth that digesting the whole meal wouldn’t be a problem for any media-watcher. They threw in a whole lot of lovely professional details . . . including an excerpt from one of the wiretapped calls Lothar had made to Marla. Even with the profanities bleeped out, it was explicit enough to make the hairs on your forearm stand up.

I watched the show with Crystal Beth sitting next to me. Knowing Pryce could get it done now, knowing he had the juice.

And wondering who he really was.

The phone didn’t ring all night long.

In the morning, I went back to my office. Exchanged a half-pound of boiled ham and a plump custard cream puff for the present Pansy had left for me to clean up.

The joint where I’d gotten the ham also sold cooked stuff—mostly chicken and beef, spinning on a rotisserie. I had bought a nice-looking hunk of medium-well steak, planning to split it with Pansy, but it was as tough as a Philadelphia middleweight, so she got all of that too.

I settled for some toasted stale bread and a bottle of ginseng-laced soda, wishing I hadn’t duked the cream puff on her so quickly.

Soon as I was done eating, I tried Mama’s. Drew a blank.

I remembered I’d never gotten Porkpie’s address from Pryce. And realized it didn’t matter anymore.

The day crawled. I went out to get the newspapers. More of the same. Except for the hostage team at the scene, it wasn’t that big a story in New York. Man abuses woman. Woman—finally—leaves man. Man swears if she won’t have him she won’t have anyone. Court issues Order of Protection. Man beats the crap out of her. Back to court. Man is given low bail, if he qualifies . . . which means: woman not hospitalized or media not paying attention. Another Order of Protection issued, this time with a pompous warning that impresses only the autoerotic judge. Sooner or later, woman is found dead, with that useless piece of paper in her purse. Man nearby, dead by his own hand. Happens all the time. Only this time, the intended victim had flown the coop before the fox broke in.

If the papers had gotten hold of the Nazi angle, it would have been front-page for days. But not a word of that slipped out. The usual round of neighborhood interviews, ranging from “I can’t believe it” to “I knew he’d do it.” Pious editorials about “junk justice” and the need to get tough on domestic violence. Somebody who didn’t want to be identified said it was a terrible thing all right, but he could understand a man being driven crazy by not being allowed to see his own child.

And the usual always-good-for-a-quote collection of exhibitionistic “experts”—every TV producer worth his sleazy job has a Rolodex full of them.

The papers ran a bunch of teasers like: “The whereabouts of Bretton’s wife and son are unknown,” but nobody took the bait, even when one of the slime-tabloids offered a hundred grand “reward” for “the whole story.” And without a victim the media could wring their hands over, the whole story would be as dead as Lothar in a couple of days.

I slapped a fresh battery pack into the cellular and hit the streets, looking for the Prof. Left word in a few places for him to call Mama’s.

I rang Vyra from a pay phone down the street from the hotel. She was in.

When I walked in the door to her suite, she was barefoot, wearing a big white fluffy bathrobe, her face scrubbed clean but bloodless and haggard. “Have you—?” she asked.

I shook my head no, sat down in one of the plush chairs, placing the life-line cellular carefully on the arm. She sat on the couch across from me, hugging herself inside the robe. “I’m scared,” she said.

“Me too,” I told her. “But all we can do is wait for word now.”

“Did you have to make him . . . do that?”

“Do what?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she almost wailed. “He wouldn’t tell me. But I know it was very dangerous. I begged him not to, but he just . . .”

“It all had to be done,” I told her. “All of us, whatever we did.”

“He said . . . he said you were all doing it for him.”

“And . . . ?”

“And I know better, don’t I?” she said, eyes snapping at my face. “It’s not for him. Not just for him, anyway.”

“So?”

“So I’m one of them, aren’t I? I’m one of the people he’s . . . doing it for. Me. If anything happens, I’m responsible too.”

“What was the choice?”

“For the . . . for the network, for Crystal, I don’t know. For the women, I don’t know. For me, I know. The rest of them, it was to protect their . . . lives, or their children. Or something important. Me, it was to protect my spoiled little ass. My . . . money.”

“And now you feel guilty?”

“You’re a miserable person to talk to me like that,” she said bitterly.

“I’m not downing you, Vyra. It’s way too late for petty bullshit like that. Herk said I misjudged you. Maybe I did. I never got to know you, and—”

“—now you never will,” she finished for me.

“No, I never will,” I agreed. “And if that’s my loss, I’ll have to carry it.”

“I never got to know you either.”

“That was no loss,” I promised her.

“Oh God, I wish he’d call,” she said softly.

Vyra finally agreed to go take a nap after I swore I’d wake her as soon as her phone rang. But it was my cellular that buzzed first.

“Have your lawyer go to the Southern District tomorrow, first call. Tell him to go to the fourth floor and just wait. Tell him to wear a carnation in his lapel.”

“What color?”

“This time of year? He’ll be the only one wearing a flower, don’t worry. Tell him to just wait. Somebody will come and get him.”

“And make the deal?”

“Yes.”

“You sure there’s anybody to make a deal for?” I asked him.

“No,” he said. And hung up.

The buzzing of the cell phone had woken Vyra, and now she wouldn’t go back to sleep.

“He’s so different,” she said. “I never met a man . . . I never met anyone like him.”

“Yeah, Herk’s one of a kind, all right.”

“You don’t understand a word of what I’m saying, do you?” she said sadly. “He told me about his life. His whole life. From when he was a little boy. You never told me anything like that. I’ve known you for years . . . and you’re a stranger to me. And he asked me about my life too. You never did that. Burke,” she giggled, “you know what he said?”

“How would I—”

“He asked me about growing up. What it was like for me. I told him I was a JAP. You know what he said? He said: ‘I thought you was a Jew.’ Can you believe it?”

“From Herk? Sure.”

“You don’t get it,” she said, peat-moss eyes alive in her made-up face. “Okay, he didn’t know what ‘JAP’ means. So what? Where he was raised, he’d never heard the term. But the thing is, it didn’t make any difference to him. It’s me he likes. Not my money. Not just my . . . tits,” she said, flicking her hand against her breasts like she was dismissing them.

When she started to cry, I told her a shower might make her feel better. Naturally, she argued, but I made the same promise I had when she took her nap, and she finally went along.

When the hotel phone rang, I hit the bathroom on the first ring. I pulled the shower curtain away, held my fist to my ear like it was a telephone. Vyra leaped out of the shower covered in suds, hair wet, a loofah in one hand. She ran to the phone, snatched it up.

“Hello.”

She held the phone slightly away from her ear so I could listen, but I didn’t move . . . just in case.

“Ah, you promised, honey,” she cooed into the receiver. Then she listened for a minute before she said: “All right, baby. Whatever you say. You’re the boss. I’ll wait for you, okay?”

Whatever he said in return was real short. Vyra whispered, “I love you, Hercules,” and hung up.

Then she started to cry, hands over her face. I stepped to her, gently held her shoulders, standing at arm’s length to keep her breasts off my chest. “What?” I asked her.

“He’s all right. He’s all right,” she sobbed.

“So why are you crying?”

“Because I’m happy, you moron!”

“What did he say?”

Vyra walked over to the bed and sat down, oblivious to the instant puddle she created.

“He said he couldn’t keep our date. For tonight. He told me I was his bitch, and he’d come when he could. And to shut up and do what he told me,” she said, a sunburst smile turning her little face lovely like I’d never seen it in all the years I’d known her.

I went down to my own room in the hotel and called Davidson, gave him the word.

“Wear a carnation?” he squawked. “Jesus, are these guys for real?”

“Oh yeah,” I told him. “No question.”

“Then consider it done,” he said. “Give me a call tomorrow night. Anytime after six.”

“You heard from the Prof?” I asked Mama.

“Right here,” she said. “You come now, okay?”

“I’m rolling,” I told her.

It wasn’t just the Prof at the restaurant. Clarence was there too. And Max. And Michelle.

“What’s all this?” I asked them.

“Grab a pew, Schoolboy,” the Prof said. “We need to sound what’s going down.”

“With . . . ?”

“With that fool Hercules. And you.”

I sat down. Had some soup while the others waited, their faces masks of patience. Whatever it was, it wasn’t enough for them to try and take on Mama.

Then I told them. Everything.

“You capped a guy? In front of a fed?” the Prof asked, an angry-puzzled look on his face.

“I don’t think he’s a fed,” I said. “Not like any fed I ever heard of, anyway. Wolfe says he’s an outlaw. Me, I don’t know. He got stuff done. . . . I don’t know how a free-lancer could pull that kind of weight.”

“I fucking knew it,” the little man said. “This was a hoo-doo from the get-go. I thought you was done with guns, son.”

“I am. Or I was. I . . . There was no other way to do it, Prof. Without the immunity, Herk was just a piece of Kleenex to this guy Pryce. Use him and throw him away, right?”

“Why didn’t we get together, figure something out?” he wanted to know.

“This one’s mine,” I told him. “Herk was with us Inside, but it’s me who owes him. Then the whole thing with Crystal Beth’s safehouse. And the women . . . I wasn’t gonna drag everyone else in it with me.”

“I don’t feel a thing for most of them,” Michelle piped up, dismissing all the women under Crystal Beth’s protection in one fell swoop. “They don’t protect their babies, they’re not real women in my book. They’re stupid or they’re cowards, makes no difference to me. Some of them would go on a date with Ted Bundy and leave John Wayne Gacy to babysit the kids.”

She drew a deep breath, steadying herself. “But this isn’t about them. What’s wrong with you, baby? Okay, you made a mess. Got yourself in a jackpot. It’s not the first time. Not the first time for any of us. You know how to work my boy, don’t you? Say ‘Nazi’ to the Mole, and he’s in. And Clarence got you . . . what you needed for that job, right? You’ve kept us all on the edges, and it’s not right.”

“You said it yourself, Prof,” I reminded him, looking for backup. “About Clarence.”

“That was before—”

“It wouldn’t be right to bring Clarence in, that’s what you said. And you,” I said, turning to Michelle, “you’re right. . . . I did look for help, okay? But I never brought anyone right down next to it. This could blow up, honey. And you wouldn’t like prison.”

“Don’t you even think about patronizing me,” she snarled. “I was Inside too. When I was just a girl. Before I had the . . . before I became myself. You try doing time in a men’s prison when you’re a woman. I stood up there, I can stand up now.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I—”

Max reached across and tapped me on the chest. It felt like the wrong end of a crowbar. He pointed at me. Made the sign of fists holding prison bars. Then he pointed at himself. And made one of the signs we use for the Mole, open-circled fists held up to the eyes to mime the Mole’s Coke-bottle glasses. He bowed his head. Reminding me of that time we’d gotten trapped in a subway tunnel trying to sell a load of hijacked heroin back to the mob. We’d been ratted out, and the tunnel was full of police. I’d held them at bay with a pulled-pin grenade while everyone else made it out the other end. Reminding me of his debt.

“If we don’t know, we can’t show,” the Prof told me, eyes locked on mine. “This ain’t the usual choice. It ain’t between bail or jail. We want to do right now, we got to play live-or-die—only a punk plays for the tie.”

“I am with my father,” Clarence said, his hand on the Prof’s shoulder. “Always.”

“It’s a done deal,” Davidson told me on the phone. “Can you come in, let me show it to you?”

And pay you the rest of your money, I thought.

“Sure,” I said.

“They tried to fold some interlocking contingencies into the mix,” Davidson told me in lawyer-speak.

“Meaning?”

“He gets immunity. But in order to get the new ID and everything, he has to come in.”

“So?”

“So now we have two separate instruments,” he said, smiling. “If your . . . friend decides not to come in at all, he won’t have the new ID, he won’t be in the Witness Protection Program, he won’t get the plastic surgery or anything. But he’ll still have the immunity. And even if he’s dropped for anything subsequent—he’s covered for the entire period past.”

“What period?”

“Your friend has been a government agent—not an informant, Burke, a government agent, on the payroll—for almost six months. Well prior to the period when the . . . incident occurred.”

“I never heard of—”

“Happens all the time,” Davidson assured me. “The FBI had a man inside the Klan car that killed one of the Freedom Riders. They had men inside the Panthers too. And just about everyplace else. People like that have to have ongoing immunity, risky as that is, otherwise they’d reveal themselves by refusing to participate in . . . whatever.”

“And there’s no ‘truthful-testimony’ stuff in the deal?”

“No testimony at all. Not even a debriefing.”

“Does he have a control?”

“That’s this Pryce individual.”

“You meet him?”

“I don’t know. The AUSA identified himself. And there was a woman from ATF. A man from the FBI. Big Irish guy, good-looking—I’ve seen him around before. A Treasury guy too. But there were a couple of other people in the room that never spoke. And I couldn’t see their faces—they were back out of the light.”

“Sounds pretty intense,” I said, sliding the rest of Davidson’s money across the desk in a plain white envelope.

“I’ve been in worse,” he replied. “This time, at least, I was representing one of the good guys.”

Three days later . . .

“They said he was a hero,” Hercules told me, sitting in the bedroom of Vyra’s suite. The king-sized bed was wrecked. The room smelled of just-done sex. The shower was running, with Vyra inside it. “He died for the race.”

“When did they find out?”

“It was on the news. Before the meeting, even. The way they figured it, he went after his wife. When the cops showed, he took himself out so’s he wouldn’t crack under torture.”

“Torture?”

“Oh yeah, man. They said ZOG has got these brain things they put on your head. And chemicals they can inject you with, make you give up your own mother. So Lothar, he knew this. And he protected the race.”

“They sound like a crew of real paranoids.”

“Paranoid? You don’t know nothin’ about paranoid, brother. You should hear them. Always talking about black helicopters and shortwave intercepts and remote telemetric surveillance and a whole bunch of other crap I don’t even listen to anymore. Jesus.”

“They didn’t say anything to you about Lothar?”

“To me? Nah. They was too busy talking to themselves. I just went along.”

“You believe they bought the story?”

“I’m here, ain’t I? Besides, Lothar told them he was gonna do somethin’ like that anyway, someday. He had plans for that cunt, that’s what he kept telling ’em. So they wasn’t surprised. Maybe a little at him killing himself and all, but not even that much.”

“Paranoid as they are, they didn’t panic?”

“Well, not really. But we all had to stay together for a couple of days. At least that’s the way it ended up. They said they couldn’t be sure Lothar didn’t have something on him that would trace back to us, so some of them wanted to split up. But the others wanted to stay. I dunno if it was ’cause they was scared to be alone or they wanted to watch everyone or what. But Scott said we had to hang tough. Nobody went out. They got enough stuff in the basement there, you could live for years, man. All kindsa dried food and water in bottles. And guns . . . man, they got boxes of fucking guns.”

“What did you do, all that time?”

“Watched TV. Worked out. Listened to them going on about the race.”

“They say anything about their plans? Or a date?”

“April thirtieth. That’s the one they was gonna use. You know that’s the day Hitler killed himself in his bunker? To keep from being taken alive. Just like Lothar, that’s what they said.”

“April thirtieth. That’s still a long—”

“Not no more,” Hercules interrupted me. “See, everyone don’t have the date. I mean, there is no date, like.”

“I’m not following you.”

“The cells. They ain’t in touch. With each other. Soon as one starts, the others go right behind them. But it’s this one—this cell—that gets to start. And they want to get on with it now.”

“You know when?”

“They ain’t decided yet. But I know the place they’re gonna hit. Twenty-six Federal Plaza.”

“Federal Plaza? On lower Broadway?”

“That’s the one. It’s perfect, bro. You know what’s in there? The FBI. IRS. And Immigration too. Everything they hate. All in one place. And it’s only a block away from the federal court too.”

“That building’s a monster. They’d never get a truck close enough to—”

“Bullshit,” Herk cut in. “It ain’t that tight. They showed me—it was in the papers—this fucking loon got on the goddamn roof there. Said he was going to off himself, take the dive. People standing around on the ground, yelling up at him to jump and all. You can’t get into the underground garage, the way they did at the World Trade Center, but you know what? You can park cars all around the place. On Broadway, on Worth, on Lafayette, and on Duane. They ain’t gonna use no dumbass rental truck, like Oklahoma City. They bought the stuff. A lot of stuff. For years, they been buying the stuff, just waiting. Got legit plates for the rigs and all. There’s seven of us. That’s more than enough.”

“You’re getting to be a real pro at this terrorism stuff, huh?”

“Oh man, it’s just jive-talk. You know, like in the joint—we call things different names than they do out in the World. This Federal Plaza goes up, we don’t need no communications—the media’ll do it for us, that’s what they said. Soon as it’s on the news, the other cells take the word. And it all goes up. You know what else? They said all kindsa stuff is going up just from copycats. Like with the nigger churches.”

“What are you talking about, Herk?”

“Ah, I didn’t mean it, man. I been down with them, I talk like them. You know how I feel about the Prof. I wouldn’t never—”

“Not about words, Herk. The churches. What about them?”

“Oh, yeah. Well, the way they explained it, see, they used to firebomb colored churches. In the South, right? A long time ago. To stop the spooks from voting and all. Okay, so, like, it’s started again, right? You see churches going up all over the place. Only it ain’t just the Klan and all. It’s, like, everyone. Motherfuckers see it on the TV, they want to do it too. You got kids painting swastikas—like I got,” he said, tapping his chest—“all over the place. And they ain’t Nazis or nothing. Some of them, they’re, like, mud people themselves. You know, Pakis and Koreans and all. They don’t know nothin’ about the Jews, they just follow the pack. Go along. That’s what’s happening with the churches, that’s what the guys say. You know what? They even got colored guys burning down colored churches. So when we blow the building, it ain’t just the other cells gonna do it, man. Everybody’s gonna be jumping on.”

“Fuck! And they have everything they need already?”

“Sure. They was pulling jobs. Bank jobs. And armored cars. Before I got there. To raise money for all the stuff they got. That came up, once.”

“Huh?”

“That I was the only one who hadn’t . . . I mean, even Lothar, he went along on a couple of the jobs. I was the only one who didn’t do none of the robberies.”

“So what happened?” I asked him, suppressing my frustration at the big man rambling through a mine field.

“Well, this guy, Kenny, he tried to like get in my face, you know? It’d never happen Inside, a punk motherfucker like that trying to aggress me. But I guess maybe he felt safe, I dunno. Anyway, you not allowed to ask anyone what they did—in their own cells, I mean, that’s the rules—but he asked me if I knew what it felt like to stick a gun in a Jew banker’s face and take his precious money.”

“And . . . ?”

“And I asked him if he knew what it felt like to stab a motherfucking Jew in the heart and stand there and watch him die.” He laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“These guys better not go Inside, bro. At least, not this Kenny punk. I wanted it, he woulda given me his ass right then.”

“Yeah. Okay. But you don’t have the date, right?”

“I’m telling you, Burke. Nobody got the date. I ain’t no genius, but I got this much figured out. Once they got the date, ain’t nobody leaving. We’re all gonna go together. In separate cars. Then we go to the scatter plan.”

“What’s that?”

“This ain’t a real cell, okay? Like, they all come from different ones. The scatter plan is we all go back where we came from. I mean, ZOG’s gonna be down on us like white on rice soon as this thing blows. It’s every man for himself. Every cell’s supposed to have something set for each guy. When he comes back, understand?”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking it through, looking for the hook. “You’re sure it’s Federal Plaza?” I asked him.

“It’s what they say, bro. And they ain’t saying nothing else. They say everyone’s gonna blame the Arabs first. There’s a bunch of them went down for the World Trade Center, right? And they—the Arabs—they supposed to of sworn they was gonna do more. I guess they—the guys in the cell—talked over a lot of spots. Before I came in, I mean. But this is the only one they talk about now. They got maps, big blow-up maps so you can see every little building on the street. They got all the lights timed. They wanted to do it on a Saturday—d’you know that’s like the Jew Sunday, where they go to church and all? Anyway, they can’t do it then, ’cause the area’s too packed.”

“That whole area is empty on Sunday mornings,” I said.

“Yeah. That’s when it’s gonna be. That’s what they said.”

“Damn! Why didn’t you tell me—?”

“I don’t know which Sunday, bro. I thought you meant when they was gonna—”

“Never mind,” I told him. “Herk, did you ever see the cars they’re going to use?”

“Nah. But I know it ain’t just cars. They got one of them private garbage trucks. Not from the city, you know the ones I mean?”

“Sure.” Private carters handled most of the commercial trash collection in Manhattan. Seeing one parked in the early-morning hours wouldn’t make a cop look twice.

“And they got a semi too. From one of the moving companies.”

“Jesus. They’re gonna pack all these with explosives?”

“Yeah. I dunno what kinds, but I tell you this for sure, man—it ain’t no puny dynamite. The stuff they got, they say it’s gonna fucking level that building.”

“It’s Twenty-six Federal Plaza,” I told Pryce.

“It can’t be,” he said. “It has to be a diversion of some kind.” The muscle jumped under his eye. “Or they made Hercules . . . they know he’s a plant.”

“I don’t think so,” I said, maybe more hope than analysis.

“Your friend’s not a genius,” Pryce came back, a trace of something like sadness vibrating at a low register in his thin voice.

“He’s got an education,” I told him quietly. “Not your kind of education. Mine. Maybe he wouldn’t score so high on an IQ test, but he was raised in places where you had to know when they were coming for you if you were gonna survive.”

“Maybe, but—”

“—he’s as smart as that piece of shit Lothar,” I cut him off. “If they didn’t make him, they’re not gonna make Herk. Besides, I think they’re in too deep now. And remember, he’s got that credential. One none of them have. If they bought Lothar, they’ll buy Herk.”

“Sunday morning adds up. It would minimize the loss of life, but that’s not such a bad thing from a public-relations standpoint. Oklahoma City angered even some of the extremists—so many dead children from that day-care center. . . . And any other time, they couldn’t be certain they could get enough vehicles close enough. But . . .”

“What?”

“You know anything about explosives?”

“Not much. But I know people who—”

“They could not significantly damage a building of that size without getting much closer than the street,” Pryce said in a tone of finality. “Unless . . .”

“What?”

“Unless the explosions were linked, somehow. Unless there was one single detonator for all of it. Maybe if they hit it from all sides . . .”

“He said they were gonna—”

“I know. And he said it wasn’t dynamite either. No homemade stuff. But they don’t have the technology to go nuclear. We would have picked that up on the wire way before this.”

“You ever look closely at one of those giant garbage trucks?” I asked him. “You got two, three of them—and a goddamned semi—packed to the rafters with plastique . . .”

“Burke,” he said, leaning forward, putting his webbed hand on my forearm, gripping tightly, “does Herk know who’s going to be holding the detonator?”

“He didn’t say. It’s not gonna be him, that’s for sure.”

He was quiet for a few minutes. I didn’t say anything. You could almost watch him think. Finally, he leaned back against the seat cushions of the Taurus and closed his eyes. “I don’t think Lothar is going to be the last of them to die for the race,” he said.

We sat in silence as I left his mind and tried to go into theirs. Be a race-hating beast. It only came up one way.

Herk was going to die.

After all this, Herk was going to die.

“The leader, the one with the detonator, he’s going to blow them all up,” I said. “That’s the way you see it too, right?”

“What else could it be?” Pryce asked me. He reached in the side pocket of his jacket, pulled out a street map of lower Manhattan. With a yellow highlighter, he drew a box around Federal Plaza. “Let’s say they park the rigs here. And here. And here. All right? Maybe half a dozen drops in all. One man to each vehicle. Each one of them has park-and-run orders. The detonator man is waiting, probably in a van of some kind—maybe the same one they use for transport from that bar—not far away. They each park their individual vehicles, get out and just walk away. When they’re all assembled back at the van, it takes off. Then the detonator man hits the switch.”

“Only he’s not gonna wait,” I said.

“No. Waiting increases the risk. On all counts. And if any of them is captured, he could bring down the whole deal. Leaderless cells only work but so far. Whoever was captured, he’d know something. And the plan is to create anarchy—taking credit for the bombing would work against that. One Nazi in custody blows that whole deal.”

“Then it’s time to take them down?”

“How can we do that? Hercules doesn’t know the address where they’re holed up. Just that bar you told me about. I doubt we could stake it out—it sounds like the whole place belongs to them. Probably some of the surrounding property too. And if they’re really close, I don’t think he’s coming out again anyway.”

“But if we don’t—”

“We couldn’t risk planting a transmitter on Hercules,” he said, intercepting my thoughts. “If they found it, they’d just cut and run.”

After they killed Hercules, I thought.

“But if we could find the place without using a transmitter—”

“Without the explosives, we don’t have a case anyway,” he cut in. “Lothar’s gone,” he reminded me. “So we don’t have any conspiracy testimony either. Hercules wouldn’t be much good to us even if he decided to go on the stand—yes, I know,” he said, holding up his hand in a don’t-interrupt gesture—“the agreement says he doesn’t have to. But even if he did, we have to be able to take them with the goods. And alive, if we can.”

I wondered if he was really that stupid. Or thought I was.

“Oh,” Vyra said when she answered the door to the suite, disappointment clear in her face.

“Has he called?” I asked, no preliminaries.

“No. Have you—?”

“Nothing. Listen, Vyra. If you give a damn about Herk, listen as good as you ever did. I need to talk to him. It’s worth his life, understand? If he calls, if he shows up, you got to let me know right then. No playing around, no grabbing a few minutes for fun . . . right then. That fucking second, you understand me?”

“Is he—?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t know anything. He may not be able to come out again. We’re getting close. This is Thursday. It could be as close as this weekend. But if he does get a call to you . . .” The next thought hit me so hard I had to sit down, think it through. Then I said: “Vyra, did you give him anything when you saw him?”

“Give him anything?” she demanded, an undertone of hysteria slipping in. “I gave him my—”

“Listen to me, you stupid bitch,” I said quietly, grabbing her by the hands and pulling her down next to me. “This isn’t about pussy. It’s about a man’s life. My brother’s life. Now, answer my question. Did you give him anything? A watch? A ring? A shirt? Anything.”

“Why do you—Oh, don’t!” she squealed, holding her hands in front of her face. “He wouldn’t take any . . . I . . . oh my God, I did give him something. A scarf. My pink chiffon scarf. He wanted it. He said it smelled like me. He took it with him when we last . . .”

“Yes!”

“Burke, what’s wrong with you. Why does it—?”

“Vyra, baby, I’m sorry if I scared you. I wasn’t trying to. Just to make you see how important this is, all right? Now listen to me. Are you listening?”

“Yes. I swear.”

“If Herk calls, if he’s on his way to see you here, you call me immediately, got that?”

“Yes.”

“But if he calls and says he can’t get away for a while, or anything like that . . . if he’s not coming for a while, you tell him this, okay? Tell him: Wear your scarf. Tell him you miss him, and he should wear your scarf. For you. So you can be with him. You understand?”

“I . . . do.”

“Vyra, forget everything, okay. Everything. There’s no yesterday now. You have to get this right. I’m counting on you.” Then I bent and kissed her on the cheek.

“I promise,” she said.

How many Nazi bars could there be within thirty minutes of the other side of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge? Astoria, maybe? It was a mixed neighborhood with a lot of small local joints. Long Island City had everything from warehouses to topless bars and artists’ lofts. Maybe they were even over near the waterfront, past the Citibank Tower. But . . . if I asked around, if word got back to them . . . that could do it for Herk too.

So all I had was Vyra’s promise. Vyra, the liar I’d always known her to be.

Herk had to get out, or get to a phone one more time.

And he had to be right about Vyra.

Crystal Beth put her head down and took another experimental lick. I was dead.

“Did I do something?” she asked, tilting her head to look up my body toward my face as I lay on my back, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. Seeing the cellular phone in my mind, willing the goddamned thing to ring.

“No,” I told her, wondering for the hundredth time if the batteries were still good, if I shouldn’t have gotten a backup clone to the same number from the Mole, if I shouldn’t have told Herk the last time to . . .

“Did I not do something?” Crystal Beth wanted to know, still not moving.

“It’s not you,” I said. “It’s me.”

“You’re worried about—?”

“Yeah,” I cut her off, thinking what an inadequate word “worried” was for what I was feeling.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Why not, honey?”

“Because it’s not yours, Crystal Beth. Not anymore.”

“What do you mean?” she asked in a challenging voice, propping herself up on one elbow. “I’ve been in this since—”

“Whatever happens now, it’s not going to be you. Or any of your stuff. Pryce isn’t going to rat you out. You or Vyra or your network. Nothing.”

“But you got yourself into this for—”

“For my brother. For my family. Not for you.”

“But you love—”

“Them.”

“And you love me too,” she said aggressively, her hands on my shoulders, hauling herself up so her nose was right on my forehead. “Me too. Don’t you?”

“Crystal Beth . . .”

“It’s not what you say, it’s what you do, remember?” she whispered against me. “Why can’t you be honest with me?”

“Like you are with me?” I asked, pushing her away so I could sit up. And watch the cellular, sitting there across the room plugged into the portable charging unit, smirking its silence at me.

“What. Do. You. Mean?” she asked, each word a bullet in a cocked revolver.

“You’re so honest,” I said sarcastically. “Such a good hippie, you are. All peace and love and truth, right?”

“I would have told you about Vyra if she hadn’t—”

“And about Rollo’s?” I said quietly.

She got off the bed and walked to the black window, her body glowing in the faint light. She bowed her head, clasped her hands in front of her. Like a child being punished, made to stand in the corner.

I watched her thick, rounded body. That gravity-defying butt. Belle jammed across my mind. Not as a word, or even an image. Just a . . . flitting . . . gone. I felt the flashback coming and put it down. Away from me now. But not gone, I knew. Never gone. That big girl. Going out to die . . .

I . . . stopped. Focused on Crystal Beth’s pigtails standing out stark against her shoulderblades. But it was like watching a hologram—the image shifted, and now it was Herk’s face against her back, framed by the pigtails, trusting.

Crystal Beth turned, breaking the spell, and came back to the bed.

“Do you want me on my knees?” she asked.

“I told you, it’s not you. I can’t—”

“Not for that,” she interrupted, her voice hushed and delicate. “To apologize. I wronged you. I had good reasons, once. But they . . . I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. I want to tell you. Do you want to listen?”

“Yeah.”

She went to her knees, looking up at me sitting on the bed. “I didn’t tell you about Rollo’s because it wouldn’t be right to endanger the others. I had people to protect. We’re all part of the same . . . I don’t know how to explain it to you. The network, that’s one thing. There’s a lot of us in it. But there’s something smaller. Closer. Family. Like yours. Mimi and T.B. And Rusty.”

“Rusty?”

“The big guy, the one who’s always drawing.”

“Oh yeah, him.”

“There’s others too. Cash—you didn’t see him, he wasn’t in that night—he does the . . . marketing for us. Gets the word out so people know where to find us, make the connections. We even have a radio station . . . well, not really a station, but we’ve got people on the air—Bad Boy and Autopsy—they broadcast out of Salt Lake. There’s a code we use. On the Internet too. Mimi’s sister Synefra set it up. . . . Look, we’re . . . one. I wasn’t trying to trick you. Or . . . maybe I was, I don’t know. I’m not good at it. Vyra said you were . . . someone who could help us.”

“Vyra’s in your family?”

“No. The others don’t . . . I love Vyra. She’s really a sweet, wonderful girl. You don’t know her.”

“That’s what Herk said too.”

“He’s right. Sex doesn’t mean you know someone. But once you . . . did what you did—for us, I mean—I could have told you. I should have told you. I apologize for that. I don’t want secrets from you.”

“What difference does it make now?”

“Families can . . . merge,” she said softly. “Families can come together. No matter what you say, no matter what you said, anyway . . . you have a purpose. You have a purpose now.”

“So?”

“My mother and father were from different tribes. But they . . . merged. They were . . . partners. I want to be your partner.”

“Come here,” I said, holding out my hand to her.

When she came to me, I told her what it would cost to be my partner.

When Pryce walked in the front door of Mama’s restaurant, he instinctively held his hands away from his body. Whatever he was, he had a pro’s nose—he knew he was one wrong move away from an unmarked grave.

He walked the gauntlet, past Mama’s register, past Clarence and Michelle sitting in one of the front booths, past Max the Silent wearing a waiter’s apron, past the Prof, although he couldn’t have seen the little man unless he looked under one of the tables. If he had, he would have seen the double-barreled sawed-off that was the Prof’s trademark back in his cowboy days.

They had his face now. Had his walk, his webbed fingers, the skull beneath his skin. Had him all, every piece of him. And soon they’d have his voice. They could pick him out of a crowd even with the best plastic surgeons in the world doing their work.

And he knew it.

But he kept on coming, right to my booth in the back.

Mama kept her position at the register. I’d already had my soup. And she didn’t serve it to outsiders.

He sat down. The muscle under his eye jumped. I knew by now it wasn’t an anxiety tic. Probably the last plastic-surgery job had gone a little wrong, damaged some of the nerves in the area. I wondered why they’d never fixed his hands.

“I know how to do it now,” I told him, no preamble. “But now it’s time to find out who you are.”

“What does that mean?” he asked, even-toned.

“You ever wonder,” I asked him, “if it’s only terrorists who have enough balls to drive a truck loaded with explosive?”

“I don’t get your meaning.”

“I’ve got a plan. But it needs something I don’t have. Six heroes.”

“Heroes?”

“Six men—six people, I guess they don’t need to be men—willing to drive trucks loaded with death.”

“You don’t mean—?”

“It’s the only way it can work,” I said, watching my unsmoked cigarette burn in the glass ashtray. “Lothar ever tell you who was in charge?”

“No. He said it was a collective. Everyone equal.”

“I think it’s this guy Scott. But it doesn’t really matter. It’s got to be the way you figured it. Six of them drive the rigs, plant them around Federal Plaza. The last one, he’s in the van, waiting for the pickup. Only thing is, there isn’t going to be any pickup. Soon as he knows they’re in place, he’s going to hit the switch. There goes the building. And the evidence.”

“So we have to interdict—”

“No. Sure, they’re going to have to convoy it—in case one of the rigs breaks down or something. And they have to all be in place before they detonate too. But what makes you think everything’s parked right near where they’re holed up? Odds are they don’t want to be bringing trucks over the bridges at that hour. Trucks aren’t allowed on the Brooklyn Bridge anyway. They got to have at least some of them stashed in Manhattan. Or just the other side of the Battery Tunnel—there’s plenty of warehouses around there. And the van, it has to be close by, right on top of the action. I don’t know the range of the radio detonator they’ve got, but it can’t be that far, especially with all those tall buildings around. What we need to do is take them down as soon as they park and separate. And we have to do it quiet. If the guy in the van hears shots, he’s gonna hit the switch and book.”

“But if the detonator man doesn’t hear anything, he’s going to wait a little bit and—”

“And blow it up. I know. That’s where your heroes come in. Some people say you’re a bounty hunter. A free-lancer working for cash. Maybe that’s true. I don’t know. But you had enough juice to make the cops and the media play along with the Lothar thing. So I figure you’re something else.”

“Such as?”

“Such as a . . . I don’t know a name for it. But every government needs people who can work outside the law. And I figure, that’s you.”

He didn’t say anything. The muscle jumped in his face a couple of times, then went as quiet as he was.

“There’s only one thing that’ll absorb that much explosive without killing everyone around,” I told him. “Water. You need to clear a path. Right to the river. The Hudson’s the closest. It’s only a few blocks. You need to take out the drivers. No gunshots. No noise. And you need six people to drive the rigs right to the river. Right into the river, it comes to that.”

“Six people to drive trucks loaded with explosive? Knowing that any second they could just vaporize?”

“That’s about it.”

“And what about the man in the van?”

“He’s the only one who we don’t know where he’ll be, right? He’ll be close, but that’s all we can count on. The way I figure it, he’ll probably wait until the first one of them comes back. That’s the only way he’ll know they’re all set up. Or maybe he’ll just have some time limit of his own.”

“It would have to be volunteers. . . .”

“Sure it would. You got that kind of people?”

“Yes,” he said, no inflection in his thin voice. Not saying anything about the hard part. Anyone who’s served in the military knows the U.S. government will let you die. They watch soldiers die all the time . . . for some general’s ego or some country’s oil. But there was only one way to stop all the Nazi drivers without making noise. And if that went wrong, it wouldn’t just be expendable soldiers who lost it all. Whoever gave those orders . . .

“I need something else,” I told him.

“More than . . . ?”

“Yeah.”

“What?”

When I told him, he didn’t say anything.

“It’s time to lay them all out,” I said. “Face up. You got a handkerchief on you?”

He took a clean white one out of the side pocket of his suit jacket, not saying a word.

“Stand up,” I said. “Put your right foot on the chair over there.”

He did it. I took out the key to the ankle cuff and twisted it. The white patch was underneath, undisturbed. “Take the handkerchief,” I told him. “Peel that off. Carefully. Wrap it up tight. Don’t touch it.”

He did that too. At a gesture from me, he sat down again.

“When you get back to wherever you’re going, get that to a lab.”

“What will they find?”

“You know what a Nicoderm patch is?” I asked him.

“Yes, a time-release dose of—”

“That one is too. Only it’s not nicotine it was dispensing. You left that one on for thirty days, you’d be a dead man.”

He didn’t say anything, but the pupils of his eyes deepened.

“We’re all in now,” I said. “No more bargaining. No more threats. We’re a unit now. A hunter-killer team. I don’t know your game, but you know mine—I need Herk out of there. Alive.”

“But we can’t—”

I leaned forward and told him how he could.

And wished I had a god to pray to that I was right.

Fantasy haunts prison. At night, inside the cells, if you could see the pictures playing on the screens inside men’s heads, you’d see everything on this planet. Other planets too.

Some convict fantasies are sweet. Some are freakish. Some are beyond lunacy. But some are so common they’ve become classics. And if my old cellmates could see me . . .

Lying on my back on a king-sized bed in a luxo hotel suite, a beautiful naked woman on either side of me.

But they were holding hands across my chest, giving each other comfort in the presence of a man who had none for either of them.

Late Saturday afternoon.

Hard darkness outside. Soft darkness in the room.

When I tuned out the words, their girl-talk was soothing. My eyes were closed. I tried to drift into their mingled scent. Lose myself.

Time stood there, laughing at its joke.

Like when I was Inside.

Was my brother already gone? I was back in the foster home, waiting for my mother to come and take me away from the terror. Knowing inside me she never would and . . .

The phone rang.

Vyra sprang from the bed like a tigress, grabbing the receiver before the first ring was done.

“Hello?”

A split-second pause, then: “Oh, honey, am I glad to hear from you! When are you—?”

This time she listened a little longer before she said: “I’m sorry, baby. I didn’t mean to—”

He must have told her to shut up, because she went quiet for a long minute. Then she took a deep breath and said softly: “Hercules, will you do something for me? Some little thing, just ’cause I miss you so much?”

He must have said okay, because she came right back with: “My scarf? You know, my pretty pink scarf? The one you said smelled like me? Would you wear it?”

The next words out of her mouth were: “No, I mean, wear it anywhere, darling. Just so I know it’s with you, okay? Then I’ll feel like I’m with you too.”

I don’t know what he said to that. Vyra replied, “Me too. I . . .” and put down the phone. “He hung up,” she said to me and Crystal Beth, her voice cracking around the edges.

“This will be hard for me, mahn,” Clarence said. “It would be better if I did the—”

“Well, you can’t, baby,” Michelle said, honey and steel intertwining in her perfect voice to form an implacable ribbon.

“It is not right,” the islander said, trying to push his will past hers. “It is my job to . . .”

“What?” I asked him, trying for edgeless calm. We were too close to the flashpoint now to play around.

“I am the man,” Clarence said. “And Michelle is—”

“What?” she asked this time, the honey gone from her voice.

“My sister,” he said quietly. “My little sister. Who I love so much.”

Michelle stood up. Walked around the side of the booth and kissed Clarence on his ebony cheek. “Little sister’s gonna be just fine, baby,” she said calmly. “You just show me how to do it, and I’ll make you proud.”

“If I knew the frequency, I could jam it,” the Mole told me, standing next to Terry in his underground bunker.

“But we don’t have—”

“This is a scanner,” the Mole said, holding up a box with a few rows of square LEDs. “I think I know the type of transmitter they must be using. If the range is narrow enough, maybe . . . but he has to have it armed. If he waits to arm it until the last second, there is no chance.”

“We can’t risk it,” I said.

“But Michelle . . .” the Mole said softly, fear driving the science from his voice.

“What is Mom gonna—?” Terry asked, picking up the Mole’s fear like it was forest-fire smoke.

“It’ll be fine,” I told the kid.

He ignored me, looking to the Mole.

“She will,” he promised.

“I have to be there,” the boy said. Only it wasn’t a boy speaking anymore.

I looked at the Mole. We both nodded.

Max was as angry as I’d ever seen him. No matter how many times I explained it, he chopped the air in a violent gesture of rejection.

“You know how it’s got to go,” the Prof said, agreeing with me. “We only get the one toss. We need a natural. And you can’t roll snake eyes with three dice.”

But when I signed that over to Max, his nostrils flared and his face went into a rigid mask of resistance. He wasn’t buying.

We went round and round. The mute Mongolian wouldn’t budge. Finally, he made a complicated series of gestures to Mama. She bowed and went off. When she returned, she had a stalk of green in her hand, some kind of plant I didn’t recognize. Max pulled out a chair, set it in the middle of the restaurant floor, pointed at it for me to sit down.

I did it. Mama licked the back of the green stalk and pasted it to the front of my leather jacket, right over the heart.

I sat there. Max walked up to me. I watched him carefully. Nothing happened.

Max held up the green stalk in his huge hand . . . the hand I’d never seen move. Making his point.

I held out my hand for the stalk. Gave it to Mama. “Put it back on me,” I told her.

She licked the stalk again, slapped it down over my heart.

I motioned for Max to step back. Further. Further still. Until he was at least ten feet distant. Then I made the gesture of rolling up a car window. Sat looking through the imaginary glass. Made a “Now-what?” gesture.

The warrior’s eyes narrowed to dark dots of molten lava, but he couldn’t penetrate the problem. And he knew it. If Max could get close, he was as unstoppable as nerve gas. But if they saw him coming, it was over.

He bowed. Not to me. To the reality we faced.

“We can’t bring no outsiders in on this. Family only,” the Prof said in his on-the-yard voice. “That means we ain’t got but three ways to play. The Mole don’t jam, you got to slam, Schoolboy. Otherwise, Michelle’s gonna—”

“I know that,” I told him.

“You got to be the monster, my brother. Wesley’s gotta be there, you understand?” Telling me there would be no El Cañonero this time—he wasn’t family.

“I won’t miss,” I told him.

“You do, we’re all through,” the little man said, hand on my shoulder.

It was chilly on the roof, but I was colder inside. Sunday morning, three hours past midnight, the sun still a couple of hours short of Show Time. The primitive part of my brain pressured me to check in—howl at the moon just to hear the return cries and assure myself that my pack was close by—but I kept my hands away from the cellular in my coat. No traffic on the street, no traffic over the airwaves—that was the deal.

I made myself relax. Fall into the mission. Slow down. Think of something warm. Last contact with the other world: Crystal Beth, chasing Vyra out of the hotel bedroom with a hard smack to her bottom, giggling at Vyra’s squeal. Then coming over to me.

“It’s time,” she said. “You can do it now. I want you. Before you go, I want you.”

“I—”

“You can do it, darling. Hercules is alive. You know it now. I want . . .”

“What?”

“Your baby. I want your baby. I want your life in me no matter what happens. I swear to you, Burke. Listen to me: This is a holy promise. I will be a wonderful mother. I will protect our baby with my life. Our house will always be safe. Please, honey. Come on. No matter what happens, your child will have your name. You’ll never die.”

“Crystal Beth, you—”

“Two names on the birth certificate. Two. Yours and mine. We are mated. I’m not trying to change your mind. You have your purpose, and I wouldn’t stand in the way. But leave me this, yes? A baby. Your name. And my love.”

“I—”

“Maybe your baby’s already there,” she said softly, patting her slightly rounded belly. “Condoms don’t always—”

“I can’t make babies,” I cut her off. “I had myself fixed. A long time ago.”

A tear dropped from one almond eye down her broad cheek. “But you can still make love,” she whispered. “And that’s where babies are meant to come from, right?”

It was four-forty-five when the cellular throbbed in my chest pocket. I was alone on the roof, but I’d disabled the ring, just in case.

“Got ’em.” The Prof’s voice.

“All of them?”

“Full cylinder,” he said, ringing off.

A full cylinder was six. Where was the detonator man? Where was he? Where was this man who threatened everything sacred to me on this earth? The man who would burn my safe house to the ground? Where was the filthy motherfucking . . . ? Wesley called to me from beyond the grave and I filled in the blank: where was the . . . target?

Dehumanizing the enemy.

Icing up.

It wasn’t a man I had to kill, it was a thing.

A hateful, malignant, evil thing.

Not “him” . . . “it.”

The coyote had spotted the prey—time for the badger to do its part.

In the winter we’d made, food was life.

And only death would harvest it.

Now that he’d called in, the Prof would bail, but he was on foot and he couldn’t get far. Terry was down there someplace too, looking like a teenage boy with spiked hair, stumbling home from one of the clubs. Carrying homicide in the side pocket of his long black coat. No way to stop him from coming. No way to stop him at all if he spotted the creature who would hurt his mother. The Mole had dropped him off a good distance away, but if the kid picked up the scent . . .

Max the Silent was down there too, somewhere in the shadows, raging and lethal. We couldn’t keep him away either. And if he saw the van first . . .

It had to be me. And we only had a few—

“On Hudson, between Jay and Harrison.” The Mole, soft voice throbbing through the phone.

“You sure?”

“Gray Ford Econoline van. Driver only. Says ‘Benny’s Kosher Deli’ in black letters on the sides.”

“Can you jam—?”

But he was already gone.

I hit the speed-dial switch, said “Go!” as soon as it was picked up. I dropped the phone into my pocket and ran across the roof, holding the night-vision scope in both hands, willing Wesley into me.

There it was. Maybe four blocks away. A good spot—Hudson pulled plenty of commercial traffic even that early in the day—nobody would look twice at a van.

The clock high on the steeple corner at Worth and Broadway chimed five times behind me. I swept the area with the scope. No sign of Terry. I knew I’d never see Max even if he was down there. Not much time now . . .

A pearlescent white Bentley coupe came west up Leonard Street, heading for the T-turn on Hudson just north of where the van was parked. The big car moved with slow confidence, a rich rolling ghost. It pulled to the curb and a slim black man climbed out. He was wearing a Zorro hat and a calf-length white fur coat. A woman got out the passenger side. A white woman with long blond hair wearing a transparent plastic raincoat. I could see them talking. Saw the man’s hand flash against the woman’s face. Then he shook her, hard, and wrenched the raincoat off her body. She was standing there in red spike heels and dark stockings, covered only in a tiny white micro-mini and a skimpy black top. She walked a few feet away. A little purse slung over one shoulder banged against her hip. Hooker’s kit: just big enough for a few condoms, some pre-moistened towelettes, a little bottle of cognac, maybe a tiny vial of coke. And the night’s take.

The pimp waited until she looked back over her shoulder, then he pointed his finger warningly and climbed back into his ride, holding the plastic raincoat in one hand. The Bentley took off, making the left onto Hudson and moving right past the van.

The hooker stood on the corner, shivering but hipshot, waiting. A delivery truck passed. She made a “Hi-there!” gesture with one hand. The truck pulled over. She sashayed toward it, waving her hips like a flag. Leaned into the cab of the truck. No Sale. The truck pulled away.

A dark Acura sedan turned the corner. The hooker waved, but the car never slowed.

I snapped the tripod together, positioned the heavy rifle and spun the set-screw to tighten the rig. I nestled my cheek against the dark wood stock, starting to connect. The rifle was bolt-action, unsilenced. It would have to be a one-shot kill or it was all over anyway. I wondered where the target’s hands were. If the detonator wasn’t armed, we had a window of safety. But then the Mole couldn’t find it to jam it and . . .

Dejectedly, the hooker started to walk up Hudson in the same direction the Bentley had gone, arms wrapped around herself for warmth. Cold comfort. I cranked the scope up to full magnification. The van driver was barely visible, just a dark blot in the side window. I prayed for him to be a smoker, but the interior stayed dark.

I had watched Wesley work. That clear-skyed night when he took a mobster off a high bridge, working from a dinky little island in the East River, I was standing right next to him. I knew how to do it.

Breathing was the key. I slowed mine way down, knowing I had to squeeze the trigger between heartbeats. Ignoring the pain in my damaged right hand, my finger on the unpulled trigger, caressing, probing for the sweet spot. So hard to shoot down, calculate the drop. My eye went down the barrel, finding the cartridge. I looked past the primer into the bullet itself. Full metal jacket—I needed penetration, not expansion. It had to be a head shot. Blow his brain apart, snap the neuron-chain to his hand. The hand on the detonator.

I became the bullet. Seeing into his skull. Locking the connection with my spirit before I sent death down the channel.

To keep my house safe.

My heart was a clock, every tick an icepick in a nerve cluster. How much time?

The hooker walked right past the van, not giving it a glance, looking over her shoulder at the wide street, hoping for some traffic. Suddenly, she stopped, turned to stare right at the van, hands on hips. I could see she was saying something. No reaction from the van—it was as dark inside as I was.

Except for that white blob. The target.

The hooker walked over, nice and slow, giving the detonator man a real eyeful. Nothing. She came right up to the van, rapped on the window like it was a door. The window came down. The hooker’s left hand was on the sill, her right hand dropped down to her purse. I saw a whitish face in the scope, wearing a dark baseball cap. Zeroed in until I was one long, thin wire of hate—my mind to my finger to my eye to the slug to the target.

I caught the rhythm of my heart. Started the slow squeeze on the trigger in the dead space until the next beat, the electrical impulse already launched along the wire. The whitish face exploded in fire. A split second later, the sound of the shot echoed up to where I was perched. My finger was still locked on the unpulled trigger, frozen.

The wire snapped.

A motorcycle roared into life. A low-cut racing bike flowed around the back corner like liquid over a rock. The hooker yanked the tiny skirt up to her waist as the bike slid to a stop. The rider was dressed in a set of racing leathers, face hidden under a black helmet and visor. The hooker jumped on the back and the bike rocketed away so fast the front wheel popped off the ground. The blond wig flew off.

I tracked them through the scope in case they needed cover, but they faded from sight long before the bike’s raucous exhaust stopped echoing through the concrete canyon.

I worked the bolt, ejecting the unfired cartridge. It hit the rooftop with a dull thud and I dropped to one knee, pulling an infra-red micro-beam out of my pocket. I found the cartridge, scooped it up and pocketed it.

As I got to my feet I heard a rumble down below and my heart stopped. I looked over the parapet. It was a giant semi with ALCHEMY TRANSPORT SYSTEMS painted on its side, heading right past me. Toward the river. Behind it, a panel truck, a dump truck, the carting-company rig and a pair of station wagons. Convoying together.

Ground Zero, moving.

Past me. Then past a dead crumpled target in a van.

I disassembled the sniper’s outfit in seconds, threw everything into a felt-lined carry-all. I slung the wide padded strap over my shoulder and took the stairs all the way to the ground floor, hoping that Pryce’s fix held and I didn’t run into a security guard, a silenced semi-auto in my right hand in case I did. When I saw the broad back of Max the Silent on the bottom step, I knew that last part was covered no matter what Pryce had done.

We were in the Plymouth, rolling toward the West Side Highway, when Max grabbed my arm a split second before the ground shook and the Hudson River shot straight up into the air, a skyscraper of white foam.

Then the sky behind us lit up with battlefield gunfire, tracers razor-slashing the night.

“It wasn’t the detonator,” Pryce told me thirty-six hours later. “It was armed, all right, but he never got his finger on the button before . . .”

I didn’t say anything. The detonator man had wanted to blow up the world . . . and the last thing he saw was it happening to him.

“We got all of them down the ramp and into the drink but the last one,” Pryce continued. “He must have put a timing device in that one . . . just to be sure.”

“How many—?”

“We lost four,” he said quietly. “The driver, and the three closest on the perimeter.”

“Your people were fantastic,” I told him. Not knowing a better word for heroes. Wishing I did.

The news reports said all six neo-Nazis had resisted. Five had gone down in a blaze of gunfire. No word about the silencer-equipped snipers who had taken out each of the drivers as soon as they were in place. Or how all the gunfire was for show, way after it was really over. The fire-team would have waited until they got the all-clear, counting on their backup to seal off the area. But the explosion on the river had told them they were out of time.

“Seems the van driver took Lothar’s way out,” Pryce replied dryly, telling me that was going to be the story for the press.

“I never thought you’d be able to use tranquilizer darts,” I said. “At that distance . . .”

“It was the only way,” he told me. “Even with that pink flag flying from the antenna to tell us which vehicle had your man inside, we couldn’t risk being wrong.”

So the whole gang had been alive when the river blew. But only one had survived to the end.

One plus Hercules.

“And the one we captured,” Pryce continued, “once we explained the true plan to him, once he realized the detonator man was going to take them all out, he started singing like a canary on crank. We took down almost a hundred of the others all around the country before the media even had the explosion on the air. And there’s more to come.”

Not a word from him about Clarence the pimp. Or Michelle the hooker. Or Crystal Beth the getaway driver. They’d all passed through the sealed cauldron like some vague rumor, leaving it to the whisper-stream to tell the story.

And not a word from me about how Herk and one of the lucky Nazis had gotten tranquilizer darts and nothing else . . . while the rest of them went down in a hail of lead thick enough to shield out X-rays. The others got it easier than the detonator man—they were already asleep, never saw it coming. Pryce had to have been right there—he was the only one who could ID Herk.

“I’m gone,” he told me quietly, holding out his hand for me to shake. “None of the numbers you have for me will be any good after today. And I won’t have this face much longer either.”

I took his hand, wondering if the webbed fingers would disappear too. Watched the muscle jump under his eye. I’d know that one again.

“I’m gone too,” I said.

“You’re really going?” I asked Vyra, unable to keep the surprise out of my voice.

“Yes.” A lilt in her usually waspish voice. “We are.” She was standing next to Hercules, who was vainly trying to cram another pair of shoes into a monster pile of suitcases.

“I’ve got . . . people still in Oregon,” Crystal Beth said. “That’ll be their first stop. Or, if they like it there, they can—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Vyra interrupted her. “We’re going to be together. From now on.”

Hercules stood up. He was bare-chested, sweating with the strain of “helping” Vyra pack. On his chest, the black swastika was now a murky Rorschach blot only a warrior could read. Or could be entitled to carry. His eyes were wet.

“I never fucking doubted you for a minute, man. I knew you was too slick for those lameass motherfuc—”

“It’s done now, Herk,” I told him.

“We never gonna be done, brother,” the big man said.

Crystal Beth and Vyra kept hugging and crying.

I stepped away from it.

“Are you going to stay?” Crystal Beth asked me late that night. “Tonight? Sure.”

“With me? And not just tonight?” she asked.

The time for lies was done. “I don’t know,” I told her.