Shotgun Opera

Shotgun Opera

Victor Gischler

A DELL BOOK

For Jackie

Acknowledgments

So many people to thank. I’m sure I’ll miss somebody. Apologies. Apologies.

Let’s start with the crew at Bantam Dell. Bill Massey, whose editorial advice keeps me focused. I do listen to you. I promise. The cool folks in publicity who get the word out: Sharon Propson and Susan Corcoran. Keep talking me up! And I can’t forget the captain of the ship, Irwyn Applebaum. Thanks for stopping at that bookstore in Arkansas and buying that first copy of Gun Monkeys.

Continued and heaping thanks to the men at the V&G Writing Lab: Anthony Neil Smith and Sean Doolittle. I appreciate both the pats on the back and the cold splashes of water in my face.

The booksellers and the readers. Without you guys, I might as well stick the pages of these novels to my refrigerator with a magnet.

Prologue

HARLEM, 1965

“When the noise starts, half them spooks are gonna spill out the back.” Dan Foley thumbed buckshot shells into the twelve-gauge. When it was full he checked his revolver. “So I want you ready to splatter ’em real good. Right?”

Dan’s little brother Mike smacked the barrel magazine into the .45 Thompson gun. “Right.” Mike had more guns, .45 automatics under each arm and a.32 revolver strapped to his ankle. “How many in there?”

Dan shrugged, screwed the cap off a flask of whiskey, tilted it back and swallowed, wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “They’re playing cards and sucking reefer. They won’t know what hit ’em. I mean, shit, be careful, sure. But I’d say maybe a dozen guys. Give or take.”

Two against twelve. Mike gripped the tommy gun tight. No problem.

They sat in the Buick a block down. Dan looked at his wristwatch, lit a cigarette. “Five minutes.”

Mike didn’t like waiting. But waiting was what he did. Dan was the man, and Mike waited for Dan to give the word. That’s how it had always been for the five years since Mike was eighteen and Dan had taken him on his first job. Mike had been scared shitless, but when the shooting started, even he’d been surprised at how steady he’d turned out. He’d picked his targets, squeezed the trigger, hadn’t flinched or wavered even when the bullets had whizzed past his ears. He’d killed four men his first night out, and afterward Dan had bought him shots of bourbon until he threw up and passed out.

Dan and Mike made a living solving problems for the guineas. Sometimes the mob needed to lean on the competition but didn’t want the blame. Mike didn’t pretend to understand underworld politics. All he knew was that there was good money in making people go away.

Now he was preparing to punish this Harlem gang for trespassing on the mob’s heroin trade. It didn’t make a damn bit of difference to Mike which gang of scumbags pushed the poison. All he knew was that the friction made enemies, and the situation put cash in his and his brother’s pockets. That was how Dan had explained things. It wasn’t the place of two Irish boys to try to understand the morality. They provided a service and got paid and that was all there was to it.

Dan cranked the Buick and pulled it into the alley behind the club. He pulled a grenade out of his coat pocket, showed it to Mike, and winked. “When you hear this baby go off, get ready.”

Mike frowned at the grenade. “Where the hell did you get that?”

“Jersey.”

Dan got out of the car, gave Mike the thumbs-up. Mike watched his older brother disappear around the corner, the barrel of the twelve-gauge poking out the bottom of his overcoat. Mike got out of the car too, loitered near some trash cans, and kept an eye on the back door. The door was flanked by two dirty windows. He couldn’t see anything but dim light inside.

Quiet. A horn beeped out on the street. A pigeon flapped up on the fire escape.

Then the grenade. Mike felt the explosion in his feet. Shouting from within. The percussion pop of small pistols augmenting Dan’s thundering shotgun.

And even though Mike had been expecting it, he still jumped when the back door flew open. There were six of them in dark suits, ties pulled loose, bloodshot eyes. One held a bleeding shoulder. Only three gripped revolvers.

The tommy gun bucked in Mike’s hands, belching fire and raining lead. His aim went high at first, but he wrestled it down. He rattled the gun from left to right, catching the six men across the midsection. They bent in half, clutching chest and guts. One managed to get off a shot, puncturing the trash can next to Mike with a metal tunk.

He emptied the barrel magazine, shattering the windows with the last few rounds. He dropped the smoking machine gun and drew his automatics, stepped over the dead hoods and entered the building. There were two more corpses just inside the door. The tommy gun had chewed them up good. He turned left, found a kitchen. More bodies. He’d killed another man and a woman when he’d shot out the windows. He approached the bodies, pointed his pistol at the woman’s head. If either one moved, he’d need to finish them.

The woman lay facedown. Something stuck out from beneath her. A leg. A short, thin brown leg with a ruffled pink sock on the foot. Mike went cold. The room tilted. He focused on the pink sock. Somehow Mike couldn’t get his breath. He reached for the woman’s shoulder with a shaking hand, wanted to turn her over, see what he’d done. He had to see, had to know. Images of the child’s bullet-shredded face sprang to mind, and he froze. Could he stand to look?

Someone grabbed him from behind, and Mike jumped.

“What are you doing?” shouted Dan. “Get in that other room and make sure it’s clear. I’ll check across the hall.”

“Right. Right.” Mike shook himself.

Dan crossed the hall. A second later Mike heard two more shots.

He was supposed to check the door on the other side of the kitchen but found his feet rooted to the floor. He kept looking at the leg and the pink sock and willing it to move. He didn’t even notice when the door across the kitchen opened and the man came out and pointed a gun at him.

“Mike, get down!” Dan shoved Mike from behind.

The guy fired, hit Dan in the shoulder, blood sprayed. Dan grunted, lifted his own pistol, and pulled the trigger three times. The guy grabbed his belly and doubled over. But he lifted his pistol again, his hand shaking, aimed at Dan.

Mike snapped out of it. He’d been careless, let himself be distracted. He raised his .45 and put two slugs into the guy’s chest. He took a step back, spit blood, and fell.

Mike went to his brother, who was slumped against the wall, holding his shoulder and clenching his jaw. “Jesus, Dan.”

“Never mind. Get us out of here. White faces in this neighborhood stand out, and cops will be on this place in two minutes.”

Mike put an arm around Dan, half dragged him to the Buick. They drove out of the alley fast, zigzagged, and eased into the flow of traffic. Mike checked all the mirrors but nobody seemed to be following.

Dan looked green but forced a chuckle. “Don’t worry, little brother. I’ve been hit worse than this.” He unscrewed the cap of the whiskey flask, fumbled it with shaking hands. The booze spilled, puddled on the floor at Dan’s feet.

“Hang on,” Mike said. “We’ll get you to somebody. Get you sewn up real good. Don’t even sweat it.”

But Mike wasn’t worried about Dan. Since Mike had gone in with Dan, Dan had been shot four times, stabbed twice, had his ribs cracked with a baseball bat. Dan was a big, meaty, tough guy. The Ruskies could explode an A-bomb up his ass, and Dan would come out of it smiling. So Mike wasn’t thinking too hard about Dan. He was thinking about a little brown leg and a pink sock and about how nothing would ever be the same again.

PART ONE

1

Anthony Minelli, his cousin Vincent, and their pal Andrew Foley played five-card draw on a makeshift table in a nearly empty warehouse on the New York docks.

“Full house, motherfuckers. Queens over sevens.” Vincent drained the rest of his Bud Light, crumpled the can in his fat fist, and tossed it twenty feet. It clanked across the cement floor, echoed off metal walls. Vincent scooped the winnings toward his ample belly. Three dollars and nine cents.

“Nice pot,” Anthony said. “You can buy a fucking Happy Meal. Now shut up and deal.”

“Hey, it’s the skill that counts. I could be on that celebrity poker show on A&E,” Vincent said.

“Fuck you. It’s on Bravo. And you ain’t no celebrity.”

Andrew Foley smiled, reached into the Igloo cooler for one of the few remaining beers. He enjoyed the playful back and forth between the cousins but never joined in. He popped open the beer, sipped. He’d had a few already and was pretty buzzed. He’d also lost nine bucks at poker, not having won a single hand. But that was okay. Like the Minelli cousins, Andrew had been paid a cool grand for his work at the docks today. The money had come just in time.

Andrew was in his junior year at the Manhattan School of Music and he was always short on money. He was a week late on rent when Anthony had called with the offer. Andrew was well aware Anthony and Vincent were wiseguys in training and that a deal with them was sure to be a little shady. Andrew had known the two cousins since they were all in grade school. Andrew’s father and their fathers were pals. He balked at the thought of doing something illegal and maybe getting caught, but Vincent continued to assure him that the whole thing was easy money, a big fat moist piece of cake. Andrew needed cash. Period. Andrew’s landlord wasn’t a forgiving man.

Besides, it really did seem like a pretty easy job. A no-brainer really. Somebody ( Just never you mind who. Don’t ask no fucking questions.) wanted a cargo container from one of the big freighter ships unloaded without going through the usual customs. This was a tall order, and a lot of people had to be bribed or distracted. Andrew, Vincent, and Anthony had a simple job. Shepherd the cargo container from the freighter to the unused warehouse way hell and gone down the other end of the wharf. The guy who’d set up the deal didn’t trust the usual union grunts to handle it, and anyway a lone cargo container getting that kind of attention would cause talk. Andrew was being overpaid enough to keep his trap shut. It was understood silence was part of the deal.

They’d forklifted the container into the warehouse and that was that. The job had seemed so simple and the guys were so giddy about their easy payday that Andrew forgot all about an overdue term paper when Anthony produced a cooler of beer and Vincent had pulled a deck of cards out of his pocket.

“What do you think is in there?” Vincent’s eyes shifted momentarily from his cards to the cargo container.

Anthony picked something out of his teeth, then said, “Drugs.”

Vincent raised an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah? You got some inside information?”

Anthony said, “It’s always drugs. Gimme two cards.”

They played cards, talked quietly, drank beer.

The little explosion rattled the warehouse. They dropped their cards and hit the floor. Andrew covered his head with his arms, his heart thumping like a rabbit’s. One of the metal doors on the cargo container creaked open. A chemical smell from the explosive hung in the air.

“Jesus H. Christ.” Anthony was the first to his feet. “What happened?”

Vincent stood up too, dusted himself off. “How the hell am I supposed to know?”

Andrew stayed on the floor, but he uncovered his head and risked a peek. Smoke in the air. Then they heard something, noise from within the container.

“Somebody’s in there,” Andrew whispered.

Vincent shook his head. “That’s fucking impossible.” He’d whispered too.

The cousins were huddled together. Andrew stood up and huddled with them. They watched the cargo container expectantly. It was like a scene in War of the Worlds, Andrew thought. The guys looking at the spaceship, waiting for the aliens to come out. They whispered at each other from the sides of their mouths.

“How could anyone breathe in there?”

“Maybe there’s more than one.”

“Illegal immigrants?”

“Should we go over there?”

“Fuck that. You go over there.”

A figure emerged from the container, and they froze.

The newcomer had dark olive skin, deep brown eyes. Black hair slicked back and dirty. A thick curly beard. He wore a stained denim shirt, threadbare tan pants. Military boots. A small pistol tucked into his waistband. Over his shoulder he carried a large brown duffel bag.

Vincent took a step forward, raised a hand. “Hey!”

Andrew put his hand on Vincent’s shoulder, held him back. What did the dumb wop think he was doing?

The stowaway jumped at the voice, then fixed Vincent with those hard dark eyes. He put his hand on the pistol in his pants, didn’t say a word. Vincent held up his hands in a “no problem here” gesture. The stowaway backed toward the door, his hand on the gun the whole time. He turned, opened the door, and exited the warehouse quickly and without a backward glance.

Anthony recovered first. “What the fuck?”

Andrew let go of Vincent’s shoulder. “What did you think you were going to do?”

Vincent looked a little pale. “Shit if I know. I just saw the guy and…Shouldn’t we do something?”

Andrew walked toward the container. “Let’s have a look.” The cousins followed.

The three of them stood at the door and peered inside. Dark. An odd tangle of straps and harnesses. It looked like a car seat had been arranged to withstand rough seas.

Andrew examined the container door, which had been latched from the outside. There was a small hole at the level of the latch blown outward from within, leaving the metal jagged and scorched. The guy inside had known exactly what to do to free himself.

Vincent held his nose. “What a fucking stink.”

Andrew nudged him, pointed into the corner of the container at an object that could only be a makeshift toilet. Food wrappers and other debris littered the container’s floor.

Anthony shook his head. “Oh man. We just helped smuggle some kind of Arab terrorist motherfucker. What are we going to do?”

“Not a goddamn thing,” Vincent said. “We were paid to bring the container here and keep our fucking mouths shut. We weren’t supposed to hang around and play cards. We were never meant to see this. I don’t care if that was Osama Bin Laden’s right-hand guy. We’re going to keep our fucking traps shut and not do a thing.”

Fear bloomed in Andrew’s gut, but he agreed. Maybe if he kept quiet about this, never told a soul, it would all go away.

He was known among his fellow terrorists as Jamaal 1-2-3.

He walked from the docks straight inland for five blocks, turned right, walked four blocks, then left for another three blocks. He pretended to examine shoes in a store window but was really watching the street behind him in the reflection.

No one appeared to be following him.

He zigzagged another ten minutes, found a pay phone, dropped his duffel at his feet, and dug a slip of paper out of his shirt pocket. There was a phone number. No name. No identifying markings of any kind. It was a local number, but that meant nothing. The call could be rerouted and transferred to any phone in the world. Jamaal might be calling a barbershop in the Bronx or a noodle hut in Kyoto. He dialed the number.

It rang five times before someone picked up. “Hello?”

“This is Jamaal 1-2-3.”

“One moment.” Shuffling papers. Taps at a keyboard. “What seems to be the problem?” A slight accent. Perhaps Eastern European.

“I was seen.” Jamaal explained what had happened.

“I understand.”

The voice asked Jamaal a few questions. Who were the three men? Jamaal didn’t know. What did they look like? Early twenties. American. Two with dark hair, one with lighter brown hair and pale skin. He described their clothes.

“I wasn’t supposed to be seen. If the authorities learn that—”

“It will be taken care of.”

Jamaal said, “But it’s important that—”

“I said it will be taken care of. You must go about your business. Forget the three men. Proceed as planned. Leave the rest to me.” He hung up.

The conversation’s abrupt end surprised Jamaal. He blinked, shrugged, hung up the phone. He stood there a full minute pondering his situation. His mission depended on his ability to blend into the scenery, where he would slowly go about collecting the materials he needed. And in a month or three or a year, when everything was in place, he would strike at the Great Satan for the glory of Allah. But if the American FBI or CIA knew an Arab had been smuggled into the country, they would scour the city looking for him. The witnesses had to be eliminated and quickly, before they could alert anyone.

All he could do was trust the voice on the phone and get on with his work. He shouldered the duffel and walked casually into the asphalt anonymity of New York City.

* * *

The man with the vaguely Eastern European accent had a name, but it didn’t matter what it was. He sat in a small room filled with filing cabinets and computers and fax machines and telephones. It didn’t matter where the room was. His office was the world.

He contemplated the problem of Jamaal 1-2-3.

It didn’t matter one iota to the man if Jamaal’s mission failed or not. What mattered to him was his own reputation and the fact that upset clients could be potentially dangerous. In this business, reputation was everything. He was a kind of broker. He made connections, put people with other people. Filled in gaps. He’d promised Jamaal’s organization a completely covert insertion. Now he had a mess to clean up. It was the bane of his profession that he had to rely occasionally on local people to execute the details of his operation. Now he had to send someone to make things right. Going local again would likely compound the problem. He needed someone good. He needed the best.

He picked up the phone, the special secure line, and dialed the number for the most dangerous woman in the world.

2

At that moment, in the middle of the night, the most dangerous woman in the world clung to the tiled roof of a villa in Tuscany, where she worked to circumvent the alarm system on a large skylight. If she could do that, she’d open the skylight, drop inside, and kill a Colombian named Pablo Ramirez.

For five years she had called herself Nikki Enders. This wasn’t her real name, of course, but she had a British passport and a ream of other paperwork that said she was Nikki Enders, and no one ever disputed her. She had a Swiss bank account that had millions of dollars of Nikki Enders’s money in it. Nikki Enders enjoyed a staggeringly expensive home in London, and another three-story house in the Garden District of New Orleans. She wished she could spend more time there. She also had a dozen passports in safety-deposit boxes scattered around the world and could stop being Nikki Enders at a moment’s notice.

But tonight, in Tuscany, Pablo Ramirez would run afoul of Nikki Enders.

Ramirez meant nothing to Nikki. Alive. Dead he was worth five million dollars. She didn’t know who wanted him dead or why. She didn’t care. This was simply Nikki’s job. She fumbled with a pair of alligator clips, squinted at the wires that connected the alarm system. She hated working in the dark.

The cell phone clipped to her belt vibrated against her hip. She flinched, reached back, and turned it off. She silently cursed herself. She was getting sloppy. First she’d left the night goggles behind in the hotel. Then she’d forgotten to turn off her phone. A distraction at the wrong moment might cost her in blood. She wiped the sweat off her forehead with the sleeve of her black bodysuit. She needed to calm down, get her ducks in a row.

Okay, go over the scouting report again. Ramirez had five men with him. It was a four-bedroom villa, and naturally Ramirez would claim the master suite for himself. That left the five bodyguards scattered about. They could be anywhere, sleeping, getting a snack in the kitchen. Nikki had staked out the villa earlier and saw no sign of the usual bevy of whores who kept the men entertained, so she wouldn’t catch any of them screwing. The dim illumination coming up from the skylight suggested they’d turned in for the night.

She checked her guns. The twin .380s hung from her shoulder holsters. She’d already screwed the silencers into place. There was a collapsible sniper rifle and a .40 caliber Desert Eagle strapped to the BMW motorcycle parked a block down the hill, just in case she needed something more formidable. The motorcycle was concealed under the low branches of a tree, but close enough for her to reach it quickly.

Just as she’d hoped, recalling the scouting report and rechecking her equipment helped her focus. She returned to the alarm system and the alligator clips. She fidgeted, rolled to her left, trying to readjust herself to a more comfortable position.

Floodlights flared to life, poured harsh light onto the villa’s roof. From within, a shrill alarm pulsed.

Goddammit!

There must have been some kind of roof sensor that hadn’t been in the scouting report. What should have been a stealthy execution was now going to be a gunfight. It couldn’t be helped, and she didn’t have time to hesitate.

She stood, jumped, brought her feet down hard on the skylight. The glass shattered as she fell through, the shards raining. She landed and rolled, the glass still falling, a glittering shower. She leapt up, drew the silenced automatics.

Two of the Colombians were already coming at her from one of the bedrooms. Their hair was disheveled. Boxer shorts. Sleepy eyes. But they each gripped a little Mac-10. Standard goon armament. Not original but very deadly.

The machine pistols spat fire, rattled nine-millimeter slugs six inches over Nikki’s head. The bullets shredded plaster, knocked a painting off the wall, and obliterated a lamp.

Nikki went flat, rolled along the floor, pistols stretched over her head. She squeezed the triggers, and the silencers dulled the shots to a breathy phoot. She shattered anklebone, and both men yelled and fell. When they were on the floor, she shot each of them in the top of the head.

She leapt to her feet and spun just in time to meet two bodyguards storming her from the other direction. Automatic pistols barked at her. The room filled with streaking lead.

Nikki bolted left, ducking under the fire, turning to the side to make herself a small target. She jumped, fired as she flew through the air, emptying both pistols with a rapid-fire series of phoots, and landed behind an overstuffed couch. She ejected the spent magazines, slapped in new ones. She hunched low against the back of the couch as a fresh flurry of gunfire flayed the cushions. The air filled with downy couch stuffing, like a souvenir snow globe gone horribly wrong. Bullets tore through the couch an inch from Nikki’s face. Not much of a hiding place.

Nikki took a miniature flash grenade from one of her belt pouches. About the size of a golf ball. She thumbed the arming mechanism and tossed it over her shoulder. She waited for the telltale whumpf and shut her eyes against the hot stab of light. She immediately rose from behind the couch. She had to strike before the effect of the grenade faded. One of the goons had dropped his automatic, rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. The other had his arm over his eyes, but still waved his pistol, jerking the trigger wildly.

Nikki took him down first. Two quick shots in the chest. She spun on the other one, took three quick steps forward, and leveled her automatic a foot from his forehead. She pulled the trigger. He went stiff, flinched once, and dropped.

The room fell quiet again, the downy furniture stuffing still drifting on the air. A spent shell casing rolled along the hardwood floor.

Then the high rev of a powerful engine, the squeal of tires.

Nikki ran to the window, swept aside the curtains. A red Audi convertible erupted from the garage below her, sped toward the curving road that led down the hill, Ramirez at the wheel.

Son of a bitch!

The villa’s blueprints had been part of the scouting report. Nikki recalled the layout. The door in the kitchen, a narrow staircase that spiraled down to the garage. She ran, found the kitchen and the door. There was only the single road leading down the hill, and it was an obstacle course of switchbacks and hairpin turns. Nikki would likely be able to sprint through the neighboring yards to the motorcycle. Shouldn’t be any problem to catch up to Ramirez.

At the bottom of the staircase she burst into the garage and barely saw the tire iron coming toward her face. She brought up an arm but only partially blocked the blow, the tire iron cracking her wrist and glancing along her forehead. She stumbled back.

The goon came at her with another wild swing. She ducked underneath, kicked his kneecap, heard the fleshy pop. He screamed and went down. She finished him with a punch across the jaw. Nikki didn’t wait to see his eyes roll back. She ran from the garage, flashed across the neighbor’s lawn, and leapt aboard the BMW. She cranked it, accelerated at rocket speed down the hill without turning on the bike’s headlight.

Her wrist flared pain. Perhaps the bone was only bruised. It didn’t seem broken, but it hurt like hell. She’d been careless yet again, forgotten about the fifth bodyguard. Why couldn’t she stay focused? Maybe she was about to start her period. If a man had suggested that, she’d have broken his neck.

Nikki leaned the bike low, took a tight turn fast, and the Audi’s taillights swung into view. She thought about shooting his tires out but didn’t trust herself to handle a pistol and keep the bike steady at the same time. Not on this road at this speed. And not with an injured wrist.

With her headlight off, she didn’t think Ramirez had spotted her. On the next short straightaway, she opened the bike up full throttle, sped toward the Audi until the bike touched the rear bumper.

She leapt up on the seat, hands still tight on the handlebars as she found her balance. She launched herself and kicked the motorcycle away in the same motion. For a terrifying split second, the road flew past beneath her. Nikki landed in the back of the convertible, the motorcycle clattering and crunching along the hardpack in the Audi’s wake.

Ramirez shouted surprise, almost lost control of the Audi, tires squealing on the next turn. She wrapped one arm around his throat, her other hand going to the knife on her belt.

“Puta!” Ramirez grabbed her bad wrist, yanked her arm away from his throat.

Nikki winced, the pain lancing from her wrist up the rest of her arm. She tried to jerk away from Ramirez, but he was too strong. They careened down the road, Ramirez driving with one hand, fighting off Nikki with the other. She punched him in the back of the head. Ramirez shoved her just as he steered the Audi into a sharp turn. She tumbled out of the car, tucked into a ball, landed hard but rolled out of it. She stood, watched the taillights vanish down the road.

Godammit.

She spun, ran back up the road toward her discarded motorcycle. Nikki Enders was in top physical condition and could maintain a sprint uphill without effort. As she ran, she pictured the road, looping and snaking down the mountain. If she hurried, she’d have one more chance at Ramirez.

She arrived at the fallen bike. It was scratched and dented, a rearview mirror ripped off. She bent and pulled the sniper rifle from its sheath— almost without breaking stride. She left the road, ran up the steep hill as she unfolded the stock, and snapped the high-powered scope into place. At the top, she threw herself down in the tall grass, cocked the rifle. She looked through the scope at the road below.

She panted heavily. She forced her heart rate down. She’d need a steady hand for the shot— three hundred fifty, maybe four hundred yards. Her wrist throbbed. She ignored it.

The Audi’s headlights came around the bend. It was too dark to see Ramirez, but she aimed above the driver’s-side headlight, estimated a spot on the windshield. She squeezed the trigger. The shot echoed in the night.

The Audi swerved, went off the road at high speed, and slammed into a tree. The smack and crunch of metal. She climbed down the hill to check the kill. Ramirez leaned against the steering wheel, half his head missing. Blood and brain and gunk were splattered across the backseat.

She left the Audi, continued down the hill. Neither the BMW nor any of the other equipment she left behind could be traced to her. She unclipped the cell phone from her belt and checked her recent calls to see who’d phoned. It had been him. The nameless voice on the other end of the phone who arranged all of her contracts. She hated this man— irrationally, yes, but hated him nonetheless. That she should owe her success to a faceless ghost irritated her in a way she couldn’t quite explain. Nikki Enders didn’t like having such an important aspect of her life out of her control.

She dialed his number.

“Hello.” That slight accent. Czech?

“You called?”

“Are you still on the job?” he asked.

“I just finished.”

“Good. I have something else for you.”

Nikki flexed her injured wrist. “I need some downtime.”

“I’d consider it a personal favor,” he said.

Burn in hell. “Fine. But the details need to wait. In the morning. That soon enough?”

“I’ll be waiting for your call.” He hung up.

Nikki Enders shut off her cell phone, sighed, and began the long walk back to a bland rental car safely parked in the small village at the base of the hill. Then she would drive to a prearranged safe house thirty miles away and try to sleep.

3

Mike Foley chopped wood under the blistering Oklahoma sky. Summer. Hot. The thok of the axe biting into the logs echoed off the low hills within the shallow valley. His sun-freckled skin glistened with sweat, his salt-and-pepper chest hair patchy and matted. Working his twenty acres kept him fit, but Mike was old, and tonight he’d pay for the axe work with a sore back and a handful of over-the-counter pain pills. There was too much white in his hair now. Too many lines around his eyes and mouth. His nose looked like a little apple.

It was 101 degrees outside and Mike chopped firewood and he didn’t know why. There was already enough wood stacked behind the cabin to last a hundred years, and maybe Mike just wanted to prove he could still swing the axe. Later he’d walk the row of grapevines looking for more signs that animals were at the leaves again. Deer and rabbit.

He stacked the wood, put on a short-sleeve denim shirt. The sweat had soaked dark patches at the armpits and around the neck. He grabbed his straw hat, clamped it down over his head. He went to look for Keone, the Creek Indian kid who helped him during the summer. Twelve-year-old smart-ass, but a good kid.

“Keone!”

Down one of the vine rows, the kid stuck his head out. “Boss?”

“Wait until I get on the other side, then hit the water.”

Keone flicked him a two-finger salute. The kid was thin, skin a healthy red-brown in the sun, black hair, sharp cheekbones and nose. Dark eyes but big and alert.

Mike walked down one of the long vine rows. A wooden stake hammered into the ground every thirty feet, two metal lines pulled tight between the stakes, so the vines would have something to cling to. He’d rigged up thin PVC pipe along the rows, little pinholes to let the water spray out. On the other side of the vine rows was the small barn that had come with the property, a sun-bleached wooden structure with flecks of dark green paint flaking off. Mike had poured the concrete floor himself and turned the hay barn into his winery, the big press, which he’d also built himself, and the collection of glass carboys and the hand-bottling machine and a few big vats. A little desk in the corner where he kept his books.

He was two feet from the end of the row when the PVC sputtered to life and sprayed him with water. He yelled surprise, ran ten feet, turned around, and scowled.

“Very funny, asshole.”

Keone’s high-pitched laugh floated across the wide field.

Mike threw the big barn doors open to let in air and light. He sat at the battered little desk, took one of his books from the bottom drawer. He’d bought the book on Amazon.com seven years ago. From Bunch to Bottle by Adam Openheimer was basically the complete moron’s guide to growing grapes, fermenting, and bottling. The book had saved his ass on several occasions.

When Mike had originally settled on the remote twenty acres, his intention had only been to hide from the world. In an effort to live quietly and occupy himself, he investigated what he might do with the land, rocky dry soil surrounded by gnarled oaks. Of the twenty acres, nine were on a gentle, open slope. The rest of the property consisted of thick woods or steep, rocky hillside. The soil was too piss-poor for beans or tomatoes or anything else Mike could think of growing.

So for ten years he’d hidden and sulked and watched the seasons go by, all the time living with himself and sinking into a sort of dark, hermitlike existence. And for ten years he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep, the past always there in his dreams, reminding him he couldn’t really run away from what he’d done or who he was.

An article in the Tulsa World had saved him.

A feature detailing the fledgling Oklahoma wine industry. The article led him to Oklahoma State University’s Department of Agriculture Web site, which listed the varieties of hearty grape most likely to thrive in the Okie soil and climate. The loose, rocky ground, hostile for so many different plants and vegetables, was actually good for grapes. And Mike was willing and desperate for anything to take up his time and occupy his mind.

Typically, it took three years for a vine to reach maturity and bear fruit.

I’d better get my ass in gear, Mike had thought.

And he’d purchased the stakes and the wire and a sledgehammer. He broke his back with labor and sweat that first summer, the July sun scorching him pink, then a darker red, the rocks fighting him every inch. The hobby snowballed into an obsession, and he found himself rolling out of his single bed at dawn, coffee mug in one hand, wire spool in the other. He didn’t quit until sundown. It took a month to put up ten rows. He ordered the vines from a nursery in Upstate New York and killed them because he hadn’t soaked them properly before planting. He ordered more, started over.

He found himself in a war and took it seriously. Oklahoma baked the vines in the dry summer. Winter flayed the land with ice. And slowly, over the days, he forgot to think, forgot to dwell on the past or even to look very far ahead. There were only the sun and water and weeds to pull and leaves to check and vines to prune.

He considered it work. He didn’t think of himself as one with Mother Earth or any kind of other hippie bullshit. It was long, hard work and that was all. And he wanted to do it right. He slept, so bone-weary, hands raw, dirt under his fingernails. He slept and slept and never dreamed.

The first crop of grapes had been feeble. The next crop a little better, enough for a hundred bottles of wine, which he corked and stored for a year, then poured out after tasting a glass and nearly throwing up.

It got better. Slowly, he learned.

Three years ago, he’d sold five hundred bottles of his first batch of drinkable wine. He called it Scorpion Hill Red. A very plain table wine, not too dry. Local stores in Oklahoma and Kansas and a few in north Texas had agreed to stock it on a regular basis. Store owners told him customers liked the label, a simple black silhouette of a scorpion against a parchment-colored background. Simple yet cheeky.

With some luck, Mike would ship ten thousand bottles next year.

He craned his neck, tried to spot Keone through the barn door. Sometimes he felt he really had to keep an eye on the kid. Once, Keone had lost control of the little tractor and flattened an entire row of ripe grapes. In a fury, he’d chased the kid with a thick switch, but Keone was too fast. It was a week before he’d shown his face at the vineyard again.

Mike couldn’t see the kid, but didn’t hear anything being demolished, so he turned his attention back to the book. He’d read it cover to cover ten times, knew what it would say, but always consulted it anyway. Always go by the book. Mike was a stickler. Follow the steps.

The book told him to spread deodorant soap shavings among the vines. The “smell of people” would keep the animals away. He was ready. He slid open the top desk drawer, took out two bars of Dial and a penknife. Later, he’d walk the perimeter. Right now, he just wanted a drink.

He went to the secondhand refrigerator in the corner of the barn, opened it, perused the beer selection. He had a few different brands. He liked beer.

Mike Foley absolutely hated the taste of wine.

On a hot day like this he’d need something light, a dark or even an amber would make him sluggish. He grabbed a Coors Light, popped the top, slurped. What was the old joke about canoes and Coors Light? Fucking close to water.

He’d just finished the first beer and thought about opening another, when Keone walked into the barn. He had something cupped in his hands.

“Freeze,” Mike shouted.

Keone froze.

“What are you bringing in here? It’s another goddamn spider, isn’t it?” One thing Mike had learned his first month in the wilderness. Oklahoma was lousy with giant spiders.

Keone offered his lopsided grin, spread his hands open, and showed Mike a fuzzy tarantula as big around as a coaster.

“Jesus.”

The kid laughed.

“Get that fucking thing out of here,” Mike said. “Giving me the willies.”

Keone bent to set it outside the barn door.

“No, no, no.” Mike pointed out the door. “Out there. Far away. I don’t want to see it.”

Keone took it away.

Mike would have smashed the spider flat with a shovel except he’d been told they kept the scorpion population down. And while he despised the spiders, at least he’d never woken up in the morning to find one scuttling across his kitchen floor. He couldn’t say the same about the scorpions.

When Keone returned, Mike waved him over to one of the wine vats. “Come on, might as well do this now.” He took a clean wineglass off the shelf, blew into it to clear any dust. He thumbed the tap, filled the glass halfway with red wine, and handed the glass to the kid.

Keone sniffed it. Then he took a swig, swirled it in his mouth. He frowned and swallowed. “Yuck.”

“Hell.” Mike took out a notepad and pencil. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Acid.”

Mike wrote acidic. “A lot or a little?”

“A lot.”

Shit. He wondered if it was too late to add oak chips to cover up.

He took the glass away from Keone. When the wine was closer to being ready, Mike would have to taste it himself. But really, he couldn’t tell the difference. The kid was a better judge.

“Tell you what,” Mike said. “Clean out those carboys, and we’ll call it a day.”

“Right, boss.”

The phone rang.

It was only last year, after Mike began missing calls from distributors, that he’d strung a phone line down to the barn. He grabbed the phone on the fifth ring. “Scorpion Hill Vineyard. What? No, I think you have the wrong number.” A long pause. “Oh.” Another long silence. “Yeah. It’s me. You caught me by surprise. It’s been so long I—” He glanced at Keone. The kid rinsed out a carboy, but Mike could tell he was listening with one ear. “Listen, I need to call you back. Give me your number.” He scribbled it into his notebook. “Wait for me.” He hung up.

He stood there a moment, staring at the phone.

Keone said, “Boss, you okay?”

“Huh?”

“Bad news?”

“No. Just—” Mike shook his head, plopped into the chair behind his desk. He stared blankly at the rough desktop. He looked up, saw that Keone was still watching him.

“Go home, kid.”

“I didn’t finish the carboys.”

“Forget it. Finish tomorrow.”

Keone watched Mike a few more moments before leaving.

Mike stood in the barn’s open doorway and surveyed his property. It suddenly seemed like a strange place, like it had nothing to do with who he was or where he’d come from. He took off his hat, wiped sweat off his forehead.

It was so goddamn hot.

4

Andrew Foley had worn a path. Pacing. From the phone to his kitchen window to his bedroom. He’d developed a nice routine. First he’d stare at the phone a few minutes, willing it to ring. Then he’d go to the kitchen window, peer nervously between the blinds at the street below. Then he’d go into the bedroom and either pack or unpack (he’d changed his mind three times) the duffel bag on his bed.

Andrew Foley was scared. It was the call from Vincent that had scared him.

Vincent had sounded out of breath, like he was in a hurry. He’d told Andrew that Marco DeLuca, the wharfmaster, had been found with a bullet hole in the base of his skull. It had been DeLuca who’d told them which container to deliver to what warehouse. More bad news. Leonard “Juice” Luciano, the “union representative” who pulled Marco DeLuca’s strings, was blown to bits when he opened his freezer for an ice cream sandwich.

“It’s that goddamn raghead,” Vincent had said. “I’m telling you, we weren’t supposed to see that shit, and now somebody’s going around putting a lid on the situation. They’re cleaning house. And if Marco DeLuca opened his fat mouth before they killed him…”

Andrew didn’t need it spelled out. He didn’t want to be the next one to get exploded or shot simply because he’d been in the wrong place. But what could he do? He couldn’t go to the cops. If he did, he’d have to confess he’d helped let the stowaway into the country in the first place. Those Homeland Security guys didn’t fool around. They’d probably ship Andrew to Guantanamo or something.

“Come over to my place,” Andrew had told Vincent. “Man, we got to stick together.” And he didn’t want to be alone. He didn’t know what to do.

“Maybe,” Vincent had said. “But right now just lay low. I’m not even sure what’s going on. I wanted to give you a heads-up. Just in case.” Vincent told him he’d be in touch if he heard anything new, then hung up.

Just in case? Vincent calls me up, terrifies the crap out of me, then says to hold on, he’ll be in touch? That’s when Andrew starting throwing clothes into a duffel bag. Wait around for a bullet in his head? Fuck that. But he froze in the middle of stuffing socks into the duffel. Where would he go? How long would he have to stay away? He could crash with friends, hide in a pal’s dorm room, but how long could that last? And he’d used most of his money to pay rent and bills. He only had a few hundred bucks to his name. That’s when it really sank in.

He was fucked.

Andrew Foley knew the kind of men Anthony and Vincent associated with. If they wanted to make you gone, then you’d be gone. Hiding in a pal’s dorm room for the weekend wouldn’t cut it. They would chase him and find him and kill him. These were serious people.

Andrew knew because his father had been one of these men.

In the Foley family it was generally known, and never talked about, that Dad had been a hard man in the old days. All that had been over by the time Andrew was born. Dad had married a woman twelve years younger, but she’d been hit by a taxi when Andrew was seven. Dad had raised Andrew alone while running a bar in Queens. When liver cancer took Dad, Andrew had just turned eighteen. He hadn’t learned a damn thing about running a business. There hadn’t been any life insurance, but selling the bar had provided just enough money to fund music school if Andrew was frugal and smart.

When Dad’s cancer had been particularly savage, when the doctors told Andrew the end was only hours away, a day at most, Dan Foley sent for his son. Andrew hadn’t been far. He spent most of his time either in the waiting room or at Dad’s side. He found his father alert, if a little glassy-eyed from painkillers. His father gave him a picture, a black-and-white photo. Two men. Young. Maybe early twenties. It was an old photo from the fifties or sixties. The Statue of Liberty in the background. One of the men was his father. He looked young. So much hair. The other man had a strong family resemblance and wore the kind of hat people wore in old Frank Sinatra films. A little taller and thinner than Dad.

“That’s your uncle Mike,” Dan Foley told his son. “Turn it over.”

Andrew looked at the back side of the photo. A phone number written in fountain pen.

Dad said, “When you’re really in trouble, I mean really stuck, life-or-death stuff, call Mike. Don’t call to socialize or to borrow money. Don’t even call when you plant me in the ground. He won’t come. But when your ass is on the line”— he tapped the photo with a gnarled finger—“that’s your ace in the hole.”

That night Dan Foley died. He left his boy a dank bar and an old photo as a legacy.

When Vincent had called with warnings of trouble, Andrew remembered the picture, dug in his closet until he found an old suitcase, birth certificates, and family papers. And the photo. He held his breath and dialed the number. Would it still be connected? It had been a few years. Andrew didn’t even know where he was calling, didn’t recognize the area code.

He picked up the phone again and called the operator, read her the area code from the back of the photo and asked her where it was. Eastern Oklahoma. Perfect. Oklahoma. Nowhere.

Would Uncle Mike even want to talk to a nephew he’d never met? The phone rang and rang, and Andrew felt so nervous in his gut he thought he might slam the phone back down on the hook and forget the whole thing.

But then there was an answer. It was Uncle Mike. And Andrew found himself talking so fast, spilling out who he was and that he was in a jam and how Dad had said to call if he was really and truly up to his eyeballs in the shit. He hadn’t been able to get into any of the details. Mike had cut him off, told him to wait by the phone.

And so Andrew waited. He paced and waited and wondered what in the hell he was going to do. He made a sandwich but only ate half. He sat on the toilet for twenty minutes but couldn’t shit. Nervous gut. He was all screwed up.

He looked at the picture of his father and uncle again. There was something in their faces. Smug and carefree and dangerous and sly all rolled together. The phone number on the other side was smudged and faded. He transferred the number from the photo to a small spiral address book. Andrew didn’t want to accidentally wipe the number away with a sweaty thumb.

The phone rang. He grabbed it. “Hello?”

“It’s Vincent.”

“What is it? Did you hear anything? Is it—”

“Go someplace. Get out of town.”

“What’s going on?”

“No time to explain,” Vincent said. “Just get the fuck out of town, Andy.”

“But…wait, I—”

“You got someplace to hide? Far away?” Vincent asked.

“I was thinking Oklahoma, but I don’t even know—”

“Go now. Don’t wait.” Vincent hung up.

Andrew set the phone gently back into the cradle.

Shit. Oh shit oh shit oh shit oh my God and fucking

Oklahoma. The middle of nowhere. Who would be able to find him? Uncle Mike was getting a visitor whether he wanted one or not. He couldn’t afford an airline ticket, but he was pretty sure he could swing a seat on a bus. He’d catch Greyhound, ride the big dog all the way to Tulsa, and hide his ass behind a tumbleweed or whatever the hell they had out there.

He packed his duffel bag one last time. He considered his instruments. The banjo, guitar, mandolin, electronic keyboard. He needed to travel light, but he couldn’t stand the thought of leaving them all.

Dammit, he knew he was forgetting something— toothbrush, underwear, wallet? No time. Every second counted.

He snatched up the mandolin and ran out the door.

* * *

Vincent Minelli hung up the pay phone in Times Square, scanned the crowd for anyone who looked out of place, saw only tourists, and headed for the subway station. His dad’s pal Big Billy Romano had told him what to do. Leave your apartment. Don’t take anything. Go fast. Get over to the Eighty-seventh Street Social Club. Billy Romano said he’d be safe there surrounded by meaty wiseguys in jogging suits. Don’t call anybody. Don’t tell anybody. Don’t look back.

But Vincent couldn’t leave his buddies twisting in the wind. He’d tried to call his cousin Anthony ten times, finally risked leaving a message on his machine. It was better than no warning at all. At least Andrew had been home when he’d called.

So he’d done it. He’d warned his buddies. They were on their own now.

Vincent hopped on the subway, kept glancing over his shoulder. He felt comforted only a little by the weight of the .38 revolver swinging in his coat pocket.

5

Mike Foley returned his nephew’s call, but didn’t get an answer. He waited ten minutes and tried again. Nothing. Mike couldn’t decide if he was worried or relieved.

He grabbed the knife and the bars of deodorant soap and walked the vine rows, leaving a wake of antibacterial shavings. Mountain Fresh scent. He walked and shaved soap slivers and remembered.

He’d heard his brother’s young wife had given birth to a son. Was it really twenty years ago? Had it been that long? For the past few years, Mike had been so keenly involved with the daily routine of his exile that he’d forgotten the reason for it. Dan had tried to understand but couldn’t.

Mike couldn’t find the words to explain himself, but something was definitely wrong. He was too jittery when he and Dan pulled a job. He was slow on the trigger. Tentative.

Afraid.

And eventually he would have gotten Dan killed. Maybe in a month or a year, but it would happen. Dan would need Mike to watch his back, and Mike wouldn’t be there. He’d lost it. Mike Foley wasn’t solid on the trigger anymore, and his brother was concerned but also a little angry. It was the end of an era. That was how it had seemed. That once great team, the Foley Boys, had faded into the glorious sunset.

And so had Mike.

He headed west, kept going, not really sure what he was looking for but certain what he was running from. He just drove and drove until he was too tired to go anymore, and he pulled into a Holiday Inn and flopped on the bed in the middle of the night, didn’t take off his clothes or shoes, just sank into sleep. But there’d been dreams of blood and screaming and he’d tossed and turned and woken up when the orange sun had stabbed him through the blinds and he rolled out of bed and went to the window and took a good long look at Oklahoma.

It had taken Mike years and years to push that haunted feeling deep enough into his gut that he almost believed he didn’t feel it anymore. But now, with memory, came the feeling again, that ache in his chest, the knowledge of what kind of man he was, the kind of man to make a horrible mistake and cowardly enough to run from it. To ditch his brother, the man he hadn’t talked to in forty years.

He finished spreading the soap shavings, then tried to call Andrew again. No answer. How bad could the trouble be for a New York kid to call a long-lost uncle halfway across the country?

Bad.

Mike closed the barn doors and hiked back up to the cabin. It was a single-story, five-room log home. Not real logs. Not as if he’d ventured into the forest with an axe and carved a log cabin from the wilderness. He’d purchased a kit off eBay at half price: pressure-treated, log-shaped lumber. Complete with plumbing stuff and everything. He’d put it up in five weeks, but not before blasting a ten-by-ten hole in the rocky ground. He built the cabin over the hole, then fortified the hole with concrete (so the cabin wouldn’t fall in on his head), then used it as a wine cellar. So far the wine cellar’s shelves were relatively barren. A hundred bottles of “Scorpion Hill Special Reserve,” which might or might not turn into vinegar. The cellar was dry and cool and dusty.

But the house above was warm and inviting. When he’d first bought the property there had been only the barn and a single-wide trailer. When he finally woke up one day and realized he wasn’t going anywhere, he decided to improve his surroundings. So he had a home and a business. He had a reason to live and worked hard every day.

His nephew’s phone call made him see that it was an illusion. The vineyard, the log home, his Lowe’s charge card. A corny red pickup truck with a Sooners bumper sticker. All an act. The normality show. Like he was some kind of regular old duffer going about his business.

It was a lie.

He was a criminal. A thug. A kid killer.

He sat and stared out the window at the valley unfolding below. He thought about that day in Harlem. He took the memory out and dusted it off. Made himself take a good hard look at it. Thinking about it made a hollow ache in his chest. It hurt still after all these years. Guilt. Shame at the thing he was. At what he’d done.

The sinking sun splashed the sky orange at the horizon. Mike watched the sky grow dim, then dark, and the phone didn’t ring.

6

When the phone rang, Anthony Minelli was banging this Long Island chick up the ass, so he was way too busy to answer. He let the machine get it.

Anthony gritted his teeth, thrusting hard back and forth, his balls swinging with the same rhythm as her floppy tits. She grunted with each thrust, high-pitched, her eyes crunched shut. Anthony felt his climax build and he banged harder, groaned hoarse and loud when he emptied himself into her. They both fell forward in the tangle of white satin sheets.

He sat up, pulled out, and slapped her ass. “Nice stuff, Melinda.”

“Melissa.” She pulled the sheet over herself, closed her eyes, and sank into the pillow. “For Christ’s sake, I told you ten times already.”

“Whatever.”

He left her in the bedroom, walked into the kitchen.

“Bring me a glass of water,” she called after him.

He ignored her, grabbed a paper towel and wiped his dick, pressed the PLAY MESSAGE button on his machine.

Vincent’s voice: “Goddammit to hell, where the fuck are you? Okay, look. I gotta go, but listen to me. Somebody whacked DeLuca and Juice Luciano. It’s got something to do with that Arab motherfucker from the container. You got to get low and stay low. This might all be some kind of mistake, but I don’t think so. I got a bad feeling on this one, cousin. I’m going to Billy Romano’s. If you call, they’ll say I’m not there, but I wanted you to know. Later.”

Anthony wasn’t sure if he’d heard right, so he pressed the PLAY MESSAGE button again. Halfway through, he opened a kitchen draw and pulled out a Colt .45. He checked the magazine. Loaded. He’d never used the thing, but what kind of guy would he be if he couldn’t bring the heat when needed.

DeLuca was a pencil-neck bureaucrat on the take. Somebody would have found a reason to whack him sooner or later anyway, just on general principles. But Juice Luciano was a made man. That meant there was some hard-core shit going down. There would be fallout, and Vincent had sounded sort of nervous in his message. Anthony decided he’d better find out the word on the grapevine.

“Melinda, you better get dressed,” he shouted. “You hear me? Shit. I mean Melissa. Something came up. I need to get moving.”

She didn’t say anything.

Anthony went to the bedroom, stood in the doorway. “Look, I mean it, okay?” He chuckled. “I know I fucked you pretty hard, but no time for a nap. Get up. I’ll get you a cab.”

She didn’t budge.

“Dammit.” He went to the bed. She was facedown. He shook her shoulder. Her head flopped loosely. “What the fuck?” He grabbed her, flipped her over.

“Jesus!”

The white pillowcase was bright with blood. A long slit in her throat. Her eyes rolled back, mouth frozen in a grimace.

He turned, realized on some gut level what was happening, and brought the gun up. He glanced toward the closet first, but she came from the bathroom. The surprise that it was a woman flashed through his brain. Willowy, tall, a gleaming automatic in her hand.

Anthony’s instinct to duck was stronger than his instinct to shoot. He dove behind the bed just as she fired. A silencer on the pistol dulled the report to a breathy pop. The bullet meant for his chest tore through his scrotum, shredding his left testicle as it went through.

Anthony howled, dropped his gun to grab his remaining gonad. He curled into the fetal position, whimpered. Blood seeped between his fingers. He realized he’d flung the Colt out of reach. With one hand still cupped over his ball sack, he pulled himself along the shag carpeting with the other, hot tears in his eyes. The pain made him nauseous.

The woman came around the bed, stood over him.

He shook his head, gulping air, tears trailing down his face and salty on his lips. “No. Wait.”

She didn’t wait. The bullet punched a bloody hole in his forehead. He jerked a few seconds before going still.

* * *

Nikki Enders watched Anthony Minelli’s rapidly cooling body for ten seconds, determined he was plenty dead, but put one more bullet into his brain to be safe. She holstered her pistol and rubbed her sprained wrist. It was still sore, and the pain had sent her first shot astray. Not that she felt any remorse about shooting a guy in the jewels, but she was a professional, and it bugged her when she was off her game. If she’d been up against another professional instead of this dumb wiseguy wannabe, the injury might have made the difference between winning and losing.

She mentally crossed Anthony Minelli off her death list, then searched the apartment. She discovered that Anthony was a slob, subscribed to Hustler, and didn’t feel the need to clear the shower drain of his thick black hair very often. Not much else of use.

The last thing Nikki did was push the PLAY MESSAGE button on Anthony Minelli’s answering machine.

7

Nikki Enders walked Fifth Avenue like she owned it, casual strollers parting before her determined stride. She wore a severe black pantsuit, white blouse with flared collar. She carried a slick eelskin briefcase. Her hair today: a shoulder-length Betty Boop, midnight-black bangs.

She looked like a hip young corporate lawyer on her way to crush a delinquent board of directors.

Nikki turned in to an expensive luggage store, suitcases and trunks and garment bags for the chic traveler on the go. A clerk asked if he could help her.

“I need to speak to Mr. Stringfellow,” Nikki said.

“I’m afraid Mr. Stringfellow is quite busy. Perhaps I can help you make a selection.”

“Tell Mr. Stringfellow I need a sturdy bag for a long and dangerous trip.”

The clerk raised an eyebrow. “Are you traveling far or wide?”

“To the four corners of the earth and to the bottom of the deep blue sea.”

The clerk inclined his head and said he would fetch Mr. Stringfellow.

A moment later Stringfellow appeared, a gray-haired little man with thick glasses, an expensive blue pin-striped suit, muted red tie with a subtle pattern. He looked at Nikki over the glasses. “Ah. You again. I’d have remembered you even without the passwords.”

“I should hope so,” Nikki said. “I’ve spent enough of my money here.”

“We always appreciate a good customer. Can I get you something? Coffee? Tea?” He glanced at the Rolex on his wrist. “It’s a bit early, but we have a nice sherry.”

“No, thank you. I’ll probably need your help with a few selections.”

“Of course. Follow me.”

Stringfellow led her into the back room, then down a narrow stairway into the basement. He pulled a large wad of keys from his pocket, picked through them a few moments before finding the right one. He unlocked a heavy wooden door and swung it open. A dimly lit hall. At the end, another door, but this time with an electronic keypad. Nikki noticed Stringfellow kept his body between her and the keypad as he entered the code. She heard a lock click, then a whoosh of air and the door slid to the side.

The large chamber on the other side of the door was brightly lit and operating-room clean. Shelves and cabinets displayed a staggering assortment of small arms, from the smallest pistol to the most daunting assault rifle. Nikki had retrieved a .32 pistol and silencer from a Grand Central Station locker upon returning to New York from Europe. She anticipated needing more.

“Quite a variety,” she said.

“Perhaps if you describe your needs,” Stringfellow suggested, “I might be able to narrow it down.”

“Multiple targets from multiple angles.”

“Range?”

“In close,” Nikki said. “Room-to-room stuff.”

“We can make you a price on a pair of Macs. We have a surplus of tens and elevens.”

Nikki wrinkled her nose at the thought. “A bit too…uh…Chuck Norris.”

Stringfellow smiled slightly, amusement flickering in his eyes. “I think I understand. How about this?” He gestured to what appeared to be an ordinary semiautomatic pistol. “The Glock G18C. Nine-millimeter. Handles light like an ordinary pistol but has full-auto capabilities. I can offer you an extended thirty-round magazine for maximum kill potential.”

Nikki hefted the machine pistol, felt the weight and balance. “Perfect. I’ll take two, and six of the extended magazines. I’ll need a thousand rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition too.”

“Certainly. Anything else?”

“Okay if I browse?”

“Please do. Let me know if you have any questions.”

Nikki took thirty minutes to pick out a collapsible sniper rifle nearly identical to the one she’d left in Italy, a .50-caliber Desert Eagle for stopping power, and another 9mm, a Beretta that was smaller and easier to conceal than the Glocks. She considered a gleaming nickel snub-nose .38 simply because she liked the way it looked, but it was such an impractical, inefficient weapon she couldn’t bring herself to buy it.

At no extra charge, Stringfellow packed her new guns into a set of metal attaché cases with the word Nikon on the sides.

Nikki opened her briefcase and fetched out three thick bundles of cash and handed them to Stringfellow. They shook on the deal, and Stringfellow assured Nikki her business was welcome at any time.

Back out on the street, Nikki whistled for a cab, loaded her cases into the trunk, and told the driver to take her to the Plaza Hotel.

* * *

Nikki waited until room service dropped off the Caesar salad and the pot of French roast coffee before opening the cases and spreading her new weapons across her king-size bed. The guns were spotless and new, but Nikki wanted to be familiar with them. She broke down each firearm, checked each piece, and put them back together again. She packed the guns back into the cases and put the cases in the closet. She kept out only the 9mm Beretta and slid it snuggly into a lightweight nylon shoulder holster.

She picked at the salad, but made half the pot of coffee disappear within ten minutes. Her caffeine addiction was a minor weakness she could easily tolerate in herself. A flaw in her character to prove her humanity.

She changed into red bicycle shorts, Reeboks, a sports bra, and a gray athletic tank top. She went to the Plaza’s gym and ran five miles at 8 mph on the treadmill. She drew admiring looks from some of the other patrons, incredulous looks from others. She worked multiple reps with light weights on several of the Nautilus machines.

On the way back to her room, she stopped at the coffee bar for a double espresso. Twenty-five minutes later she was showered, dressed smartly in a blue pin-striped power suit, the Beretta and holster under her light jacket.

Nikki double-checked the address she’d scribbled on a yellow Post-it. Above the address, she’d written the name Andrew Foley. She hailed a cab, told the driver a different address exactly five blocks from Foley’s residence. She’d walk the rest of the way, keeping an eye peeled for a tail. Probably not necessary, but why risk it?

Her hand drifted into her jacket. She touched the butt of the pistol as if making sure it was still there. She found the touch comforting.

Nikki Enders was armed, fully caffeinated, and ready to do business.

8

The morning sun came in through the bus window and slapped Andrew Foley awake. He was sore as hell from sleeping on the bus all night, and an egg salad sandwich he’d purchased when changing buses in St. Louis ground away at his gut like it hated him. He asked the guy sitting next to him where they were. They’d just passed Claremore, Oklahoma, and Tulsa was twenty minutes away.

The inside of his mouth tasted bad. Very bad.

The fear must be fading, he thought, if he was concerned about things like food and comfort and brushing his teeth. Just yesterday he’d been scared shitless. He chuckled. Riding the goddamn bus had trumped his fear of death.

Maybe he would check into the Motel 6 and sleep a day before calling his uncle. Or maybe he was being dumb. He didn’t want to get complacent. He needed to take this situation seriously, but it was difficult to believe a hired killer was on his ass when New York was hours and miles behind him. He’d feel pretty foolish if all this was some kind of big mistake. It was probably nothing. If he hadn’t been so trouser-shitting paranoid, letting Vincent spook him so easily, he could be in his apartment asleep in his comfy bed right now.

* * *

It was later that afternoon that Nikki Enders sat on Andrew Foley’s comfy bed, wondering if she should wait and shoot him when he came home or if she should come back and kill him later.

Later she would be busy. Very busy. But she didn’t like the idea of waiting in the dingy apartment all afternoon only to come up empty.

She decided to search the place. She didn’t like what she found.

Bare hangers in the closet. Socks and underwear missing from Foley’s dresser drawers. No toothbrush or deodorant in the bathroom. She looked for luggage but didn’t find any. It could be a simple coincidence that Andrew Foley happened to take a trip at the same time Nikki had come to end him. Maybe.

Had someone tipped Foley off? He was a student and prone to keep an irregular schedule. She supposed it was possible his departure had nothing to do with her arrival, but to Nikki it just didn’t feel right.

She continued searching, hoping to find a day planner or an address book. No such luck.

“Son of a bitch.” She stood in the middle of the apartment, turned slowly, fists on hips, scanning the space for anything that stood out or looked informative.

Her gaze landed on a black-and-white photograph. She took two quick steps and snatched it up, frowned at it. Two men, both clearly too old now to be Andrew Foley, who probably wasn’t even born when this shot was taken. The photo was yellowing, frayed at the corners. There was something intriguing about the men’s expressions. She flipped the photo over. A phone number.

The ink was fading, and it seemed unlikely the number was of any importance. But she had found the picture near the phone, so it was possible Foley had dialed the number recently. It was possible Foley had taken a trip out of town to visit a relative, a grandfather perhaps.

She stashed the photo in her pocket.

Nikki Enders took one more quick look around the apartment but found nothing to tell her where Andrew Foley might have gone or when he’d return.

Enough. She was wasting time. Foley would have to wait. In the meantime, Nikki moved to the next name on her kill list.

* * *

Vincent Minelli sat at a small table in a back room at the Eighty-seventh Street Social Club. Two wiseguys in silk shirts sat on either side of him smoking cigarettes. Vincent shoveled pasta into his mouth. Occasionally, he’d pause to jam in a wad of garlic bread or chase it all down with a slurp of Chianti.

The door swung open and Big Billy Romano thundered in. He wore a purple jogging suit and enough gold chains and necklaces to sink a battleship. Big Billy was big. Six-foot-four and 320 pounds.

Billy pointed a finger the size of a bratwurst at Vincent. “You, get up and follow me.”

Vincent blinked, a little sauce dripping down his chin. “What? I didn’t do nothing.”

“Just get the fuck in here.”

Vincent jumped up, his napkin still tucked in his belt, and followed Billy, the two wiseguys trailing behind. They crowded down the hall to the front entrance of the club, where two more of Billy’s men held a terrified pizza delivery boy facefirst against the wall. He wore a green vest that said CARLITO’S FAMOUS PIZZA. A large pizza box sat on the floor. Vincent sniffed. Sausage. Mushrooms.

“You order this pizza?” Billy asked.

Vincent made a What? Me? face at Billy.

“You ever seen this guy before?”

Vincent squinted at the pizza boy. “I dunno. His face is all mashed up against the wall.”

One of the goons pulled the pizza boy off the drywall, turned him to face Vincent. “How about now?”

“Never seen him before.”

Big Billy Romano grabbed the pizza boy by the vest, tossed him out the front door. “Nobody ordered nothing. Get out of here.”

“But that’s twelve-fifty for the pizza,” the kid said.

Billy flung the pizza out the door like a big sausage Frisbee. It landed next to the kid. “Hit the road. We didn’t order it.” He slammed the door.

“What was that all about?” Vincent asked.

“Jesus. Can you believe this guy?” Billy asked his goons.

The goons laughed on cue, shook their heads.

Billy put a giant hand on Vincent’s shoulder. “Look. Your dad’s trusting me to keep you in one piece. You want somebody to sneak in here with a poison pizza? Or maybe there ain’t no pizza in the box at all. Maybe it’s Smith & Wesson, then you come to the door to see about this pizza and this motherfucker blows your goddamn head off.”

Vincent was pretty sure he’d smelled sausage and mushrooms, not Smith & Wesson, but he wisely said nothing.

“Look,” Billy told him, “you go back to your pasta and leave it all to me, okay? I got ten of my best boys in here, so nobody’s going to get at you as long as we stay smart and keep both eyes open. We got our people out there right now getting to the bottom of this shit. We’re going to find that cocksucker that killed Juice Luciano and remind everybody that there are some people in this world you just do not fuck with.”

Vincent nodded. “Okay, Billy. Thanks.”

Billy slapped him lightly on the cheek. “Hey, you’re a good kid. You’ll be fine.”

And Vincent actually did feel better. Big Billy was right. It was this other guy who should be worried. Who the fuck did he think he was, messing with people like Juice Luciano and Big Billy Romano? Vincent almost felt sorry for him, whoever he was. The guy was fucking toast.

Vincent went back to his meal, surrendered himself to the soothing qualities of Chianti, garlic, and marinara.

9

Nikki Enders had seen enough. And she’d heard enough too. She sat in the rented Town Car across the street from Billy Romano’s building, watching the front door through a small but powerful set of binoculars and listening with the handheld “Big Ear” dish she had pointed at the front door. She’d seen most and heard all of Billy’s encounter with the pizza boy.

The rough treatment and frisking the pizza boy got all but announced that Vincent Minelli was holed up at Billy’s place, as Nikki had suspected. Then Romano had stupidly called Vincent to the front door to take a look at the pizza boy. Why not just push Vincent out into the street with a bull’s-eye on his chest?

If Romano really expected to protect the kid, he should have him on the second floor. It was a three-story building. She’d have put men on the first floor, then more men on the third floor and on the roof, keeping Vincent Minelli in a locked room in the middle.

But Nikki wasn’t there to give Romano pointers. She was there to kill Vincent Minelli and anyone else who got in the way. She checked her weapons.

She’d moved the Beretta to a clip-on holster at the small of her back. The Glocks hung from shoulder holsters beneath a light suit jacket, the spare clips fitting snugly into interior jacket pockets she’d sewn herself. She also had a British Commando knife in a sheath on her right calf.

The math bothered her a little. Two men on the door, another eight spread around the building, plus Billy Romano and Vincent Minelli. But she couldn’t wait. After five, the place would fill up with wiseguys stopping in for a quick drink or to play cards or dominos or to do business with Romano. So it had to be now.

She formed and rejected several elaborate schemes to enter the building and find Vincent. She considered rappelling from a taller, adjacent building and dropping onto the roof of Romano’s club. She’d need access to the building next door, rope, grappling equipment, special boots, and—

Oh, fuck it.

She got out of the car and walked straight to the front door and knocked. One of the bruisers opened it halfway, looked down at her. “What do you—”

He never finished the sentence. Nikki’s hand lashed out, her fist flattening the guy’s nose. She felt it pop, blood and snot flowing down over his lips. He screamed, both hands going to his face. She kicked him in the gut, and he fell back. She followed him in, moving like a leopard.

The other goon was already coming out of his chair, a big automatic flashing in his hand. She dropped into a crouch, swept his legs from under him. He upended, landed on his back, the air whuffing out of him. He fired a wild shot into the ceiling, the thunderclap of the .45 shaking the room.

She sprang back to her feet, knocked the guy cold with a bootheel to the head.

The gunshot would bring the rest of them. She drew the Glocks, slapped in the thirty-round magazines.

Showtime.

* * *

Vincent burped, pushed away from the table.

“You want me to call back to the kitchen?” Billy asked. “Get you another plate? There’s a good minestrone.”

“Full.” Vincent rubbed his belly. Tight. Now maybe a little nap.

Billy Romano poured the last few dribbles of Chianti into his glass. He put the glass to his lips, tilted it back. The gunshot made him jump, and he spilled wine down the front of his jogging suit. “What the fuck was that?”

His goons were already on their feet, pistols ready. One looked at Billy Romano and raised his eyebrows. “Boss?”

“Well, go see what it is, for fuck’s sake.”

The goon lumbered to the hall door, threw it open. He was shredded by a hail of gunfire, his belly and chest blossoming in little splashes of blood.

“Shit!” Billy overturned the table, glimpsing a lithe figure in black dart into the room. He ran for the back door, jerked Vincent along with him by the sleeve. He risked a quick glance over his shoulder, saw his other man convulse as bullets tore across his chest. Billy ran through the back door, more bullets splintering the doorframe, biting dusty chunks out of the drywall. He slammed the door closed behind him, yelled at Vincent, “Come on! Haul ass!”

They ran up a back staircase. Vincent felt like he was going to puke, pasta and wine sloshing around in his gut, but he heard the door slam open behind him and ran faster.

They just made it out of the stairwell and onto the second floor, more bullets chewing up the hall behind them. They ran into the closest bedroom, shut the door, twisted the lock. Billy pressed himself flat against the wall just to the side of the door. Vincent backed up all the way across the room until his butt was pressed against the room’s only window. He turned quickly, tried to open it. Maybe they could get down the fire escape. He tried to open the window, grunted until his face turned purple. Painted shut. “Motherfucker!”

Billy whispered, “You got a gun?”

Vincent shook his head. The revolver was still in his jacket pocket, but the jacket was hanging in a closet downstairs. “Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker.”

“I can’t carry a gun in this jogging suit,” Billy said. “It won’t stay in the elastic band.”

Motherfuckermotherfuckermotherfuckermotherfucker.

“I tried a clip-on holster,” Billy whispered, still pressed against the wall and watching the door. “But it kept pulling my pants down. I got this jogging suit on sale. It’s usually like a three-hundred-dollar outfit, but I got it from a guy I know for seventy-five. People think I wear jogging suits because of my belly, but I think they look pretty sharp.”

He’s babbling, Vincent realized. He’s scared shitless and he’s babbling like a fucking idiot. Is this really it? This is the best the mob can do, this fat dumb-ass in a purple jogging suit? This giant, greasy plum? This was the guy who was supposed to protect him?

Vincent looked around the room for something he could use to smash the window. No chairs. No lamps. What stingy son of a bitch furnished this place? He reared back, preparing to punch his fist through the glass, when the doorknob rattled.

They froze. Billy put a finger to his lips in a shhh motion.

Motherfuckermotherfuckermotherfucker.

A pause. Silence stretched. The tension started to leak out of Vincent.

Gunfire erupted on the other side of the door, three quick bursts. Bullets ripped through the door and lock. Vincent yelled, dove onto the floor next to the bed.

She kicked the door in, rushed into the room, a smoking machine pistol in each hand. Her face didn’t seem human, like some kind of killer bitch Terminator robot. A strange sound was coming out of his throat. A whimper. He tried to crawl under the bed.

Billy grabbed her by the wrist, tried to wrestle one of the guns away.

She grunted, dropped the pistol, but brought the other one around, pressed it into Billy’s soft belly and squeezed the trigger. Billy shook and jerked like a thousand volts were coursing through him. He coughed blood. His eyes rolled up, and the Terminator bitch stepped back and the great Billy Romano, feared among wiseguys, dropped into a big purple blob.

Vincent moaned, squeezed hot tears from the corners of his eyes, and tried to slither on his belly under the bed. He’d deluded himself that maybe she hadn’t noticed him yet. His whole body shook. When he felt the hand on his ankle, he pissed himself.

She pulled him out from under the bed, and he curled fetal, hands over his face, waiting for bullets to rip into his body.

“Look at me,” she said. “Stop crying. Pay attention.”

Slowly, he turned his head, looked at her through the fingers still over his face. She didn’t look like the devil. Pretty. Sharp features. Straight back. Really good posture.

She pointed her machine pistol at his face. He flinched, closed his eyes again.

“I’m looking for Andrew Foley. Do you know where he is?”

“Don’t kill me.”

“I asked you a question.”

Vincent was blubbering now, snot and tears rolling down his face, big sobs wracking his body. “P-please. Please…I didn’t see anything…I…”

She adjusted her aim from his face to his leg and shattered his kneecap with a single shot. Vincent screamed, throat raw and voice pitched high. Blood fountained dark and thick. A wave of nausea swept over Vincent. He rolled onto his side, spewed half-digested pasta and red wine. Drool and vomit trailed down his chin.

She pointed the pistol at his other leg. “I did that to focus your attention, Vincent. I hope you won’t make me do it again.”

Vincent shook his head, stifled another moan. “N-no.”

“One more time. Where can I find Andrew Foley?”

It didn’t occur to Vincent for even a moment to lie. “Oklahoma.”

She frowned. “Narrow it down for me.”

“Near Tulsa, maybe. I don’t know for sure.” He winced. His knee throbbed. It felt somehow frozen and on fire at the same time. If he could just get out of this, just telling this fucking bitch what she wanted to know, he could get to a hospital. He didn’t dare let himself wonder if he’d ever walk right again. He just wanted a doctor and morphine.

“He’s got some kind of family there,” Vincent said. “He left last night. Took the bus.”

“He was running? He knew I was coming for him?”

Vincent gulped and nodded. “He heard about Juice Luciano.”

She went quiet a moment, seemed to contemplate what Vincent had told her. She sighed, shook her head. Then she looked at Vincent again as if remembering he was still there.

She put two bullets in his head and walked out, her mind dwelling on her next move.

PART TWO

10

Andrew Foley had limped off the bus in Tulsa, stretched, found the one and only taxi parked in front of the bus station, took it to a Travel Lodge, where he’d taken a hot shower and gone to bed for five hours. He’d woken up, ate BBQ ribs from a place near the hotel, watched TV, strummed a few songs on the mandolin, and slept some more.

He didn’t want to call his uncle. He didn’t even know the guy.

Now it was the next morning, checkout time was in an hour, and he had nowhere to go. He sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the phone.

He checked his wallet, confirmed he was down to forty-three bucks. He couldn’t live in the Travel Lodge the rest of his life. No more stalling. He looked for the old picture of his dad and uncle in his duffel bag, couldn’t find it, and began to search more frantically. He turned over the duffel bag, dumped everything out, searched again.

The picture wasn’t there.

Andrew closed his eyes, pictured the interior of his apartment. He could see the photo on the counter next to his phone. “Son of a bitch.” He remembered, with only a little relief, that he’d transferred his uncle’s number into his address book. Still, he felt like a moron. He’d had the photo for years, and now when it was actually relevant to saving his ass, he’d left it behind.

Andrew picked up the phone, exhaled, dialed.

* * *

Mike Foley pretended he’d forgotten about his nephew and went about the business of the vineyard. Keone had arrived to finish cleaning the carboys. The sun rose, baked the world, the thick black flies buzzing their summer song. Mike would not water the vines today. He’d watered yesterday, and too much moisture was bad for the shallow roots.

He climbed the steep ridge that marked his property line, looked back down over the vine rows. The middle rows were straight, but the rows on either end were crooked. Mike frowned. He’d never noticed that before. He thought he’d like surveying his work from above, but distance and height showed him how sloppy he’d been. The grapes, he supposed, wouldn’t know the difference. It still annoyed him.

He cast about for something else to look at. He looked past the rows to the hill on the other side. The two-story house at the top. Nice house, white, blue shutters, big porch that wrapped around most of the back and side. He saw Linda watering her flower boxes and waved. She didn’t wave back, probably couldn’t see him among the trees at this distance.

Linda Charles was a gentle black woman, forty years old, lived alone. Her husband had been a Chicago cop, shot twice in the chest when he’d chased a purse snatcher onto an elevated train. Linda had buried her husband with full honors, then declared she wanted to move someplace where she could look in every direction and not see pavement. Mike had shared coffee and conversation with her a dozen times since she’d moved to Oklahoma ten months ago.

His knees gave him a little trouble as he climbed back down the ridge, and he reminded himself to lather up with Bengay later. When he got back to the barn, Keone was standing in the open doorway.

“Phone,” he said.

Mike’s stomach lurched. His knees had almost made him forget about his nephew. Who was this kid? What was his trouble and what did Mike owe him? His brother’s only son.

He picked up the phone at his desk. “Hello?” He held his breath.

“Was that you coming down that hill?” Linda said.

“I was surveying my domain,” Mike said. “I waved at you.”

“I missed it, but it looked like you were about to fall on your ass.”

“It’s steep.”

“Can you do that thing with my riding mower again?” Linda asked. “It won’t start.”

“Did you leave it out again after the last time?”

“Yeah.”

“You need to cover it with a tarp or something.”

“Well, I didn’t. Can you fix it? I’ll buy you a cup of coffee.”

Mike said, “I don’t fix things for coffee. A beer.”

“I might have a beer around here someplace.”

“Two beers if it’s really screwed up.”

“Let me see what I have, and I’ll call you right back.” She hung up.

Keone still stood in the barn doorway, looking at Mike.

“Well? What do you want?”

“I finished the carboys,” Keone said.

“Go get my socket set. Linda left her mower in the rain again. And a dry rag.”

Keone took off running.

The phone rang. Mike grabbed it. “I forgot to mention it has to be imported.”

A pause. “Uncle Mike?”

“Shit.” He hadn’t meant to say it out loud.

* * *

Mike drove his pickup truck the hour and a half to Tulsa, pulled into the drop-off zone in front of the Travel Lodge. He leaned across the truck’s bench seat and opened the passenger door, looked at the young man with the duffel slung over his shoulder. The kid’s face was blank, but he shifted from foot to foot like he was nervous or had to piss. He wore faded jeans, Timberlands, a wrinkled Nike T-shirt.

“Andrew?”

The kid opened his mouth, closed it again, nodded.

“I’m…” Mike couldn’t bring himself to say your uncle. “I’m your dad’s brother. Get in.”

Andrew got in.

They drove. Mike took 75 north out of Tulsa, turned west onto Highway 20. They passed through Skiatook and Pawhuska and into an area Mike called “no cell phone reception.” He turned north on a two-lane that went from pavement to gravel after five miles and threaded its way gradually up and into the low hills where Mike lived. He pulled onto the narrow access road and parked the truck in front of the cabin.

They hadn’t said one word to each other the entire drive.

Mike motioned Andrew to follow him into the cabin. Mike threw his keys on the table, checked his answering machine. No messages. He looked back at Andrew. The kid was standing in the doorway, scanning the interior of the cabin, his duffel dangling from his hand.

“Toss your bag next to the coatrack,” Mike said. “We’ll figure out where to put you later. Hungry?”

“I’m good.” Andrew shut the door behind him, dropped the duffel in the corner.

“Have a seat. Take it easy.”

Andrew sat at the table, put his chin in his hands. “Thanks. For coming to get me, I mean.”

“Sure.”

Mike went to the kitchen, grabbed two bottles of beer from the fridge, and joined Andrew at the table. He unscrewed both caps, pushed one bottle toward the kid.

“That’s okay,” Andrew said.

Mike left it there in case he changed his mind, gulped his own halfway down. Beer might not do it, he thought. Somewhere there was a bottle of Wild Turkey. He tried to remember where he’d stashed it. Maybe down in the wine cellar. He drank the rest of his beer.

Andrew cleared his throat, ran a hand through his hair. “I guess it’s about time I explain myself.”

Mike wasn’t going to ask. Let the kid talk when he was ready. “Is this story going to take over five minutes?”

“Probably.”

“Hold on.” Mike went to the kitchen, came back with another beer. “Okay.”

Andrew told it all. He didn’t rush or embellish. He started with Vincent and Anthony in the warehouse and the Arab guy in the container and the warning phone call from Vincent that Juice Luciano had been blown to bits. He’d paused only once to take a swig of beer.

“Dad told me to call you,” Andrew said. “If it was life-and-death, call Uncle Mike. I honestly never thought…Well, anyway, here I am.” He drained the beer, fiddled with the empty bottle.

Mike leaned back in his chair, sighed, drummed his fingers. He pushed back from the table. “I have to piss. Be right back.”

In the bathroom he unzipped, rocked heel to toe, and waited for the flow. Pissing wasn’t as effortless as it used to be. He grunted, passed gas. Then the urine.

He stood there, thought about his brother. The brother who’d taken a bullet for him, who’d always been there. Then Mike had that breakdown, put his guns away, wouldn’t touch or look at them. This hadn’t been a moral decision. Ethics didn’t enter into it, at least not in some conscious political way.

His gut had heaved whenever he went into a firefight. The guns got heavy, cold sweat under his arms and on his neck. He went clammy, nauseous. When Mike Foley picked up a pistol his arms and legs turned to water. He was ashamed, scared he’d get his brother killed. Dan would need him, and Mike wouldn’t be there when things got hot.

So Mike ran. He ran, and he didn’t look back. Ten or twenty or thirty years later, he’d still been too ashamed to look up Dan, to reconnect with the only family he had.

Now he had family again, a nephew sitting lost and scared at his dining room table. But did he want that now? Was it too late? All family did was remind Mike how he’d come up short. He’d started over, started a new life. It wasn’t fair. Mike resented it, resented the kid for needing him.

His piss dribbled down to nothing. He shook, zipped up.

He washed his hands slowly at the sink, still thinking and stalling. Maybe he was blowing this out of proportion. What were the chances anyone back East would think of looking for Andrew here? Most of the guys from his old neighborhood didn’t know Oklahoma from Ohio from the dark side of the moon.

Maybe the kid would sleep on his couch for a month, get bored with the boondocks, go home, and that would be all there was to it.

Mike wiped his hands on his pants, went back to the table. He rubbed the back of his neck, tried to think of something to say to the kid. What could they possibly have in common? The phone rang and saved him.

He grabbed it. “Hello?”

“Where did you go?” Linda asked.

“Sorry, something came up. You called? I didn’t see a message on the machine.”

“I called, didn’t leave a message. You going to fix my mower or are you busy now? I can wait a day or two.”

“No, no,” Mike said. “Give me twenty minutes.” He hung up.

“I have to do a favor for a neighbor,” he told Andrew.

“Okay.”

“Anything you want in the fridge is fine. Bathroom’s over there. Watch TV if you want.”

“Okay.”

“The machine will answer if anybody calls. If you see an Indian kid messing around in the yard, that’s Keone. Leave him alone. He knows what he’s doing.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah, okay. Back soon.” He scooped up his keys and left.

11

Mike drank one of Linda’s beers while he took out her mower’s spark plug, dried it, cleared the water out of the fuel line. He emptied the old, watered-down gas into a bucket and filled the tank again. He drank another beer. He put the mower back together, cranked it up to make sure it started.

Linda came out to her front porch. She was tall, lean bordering on bony, hair pulled back into a tight knot. High cheekbones. Very dark skin. She wore jeans and leather sandals and a pink blouse. “You got it going,” she shouted over the mower noise.

He nodded, gave her the thumbs-up.

“Shut it off.”

Mike looked at his wristwatch. “For another beer I’ll mow it for you.”

She looked at him sideways, like maybe he was joking. “You sure?”

“I got time.”

He climbed into the saddle, began the rhythmic back and forth of mowing Linda’s lawn. He let his mind drift, half-concentrating on the neat rows in the grass, letting the vibrating roar of the mower engine drown out any thoughts that were too complicated or disturbing to deal with at the moment. But soon he’d run out of lawn, and he’d have to park the mower and decide what the hell he was going to do with the kid in his living room.

He finished the lawn and parked the mower on the side of the house next to her wheelbarrow and a loose pile of rakes and shovels. She really needed a shed.

Linda came back out on the porch. “Done?”

“No problem.”

“You didn’t have to do that, but thanks. I’m out of beer.”

Mike looked at his watch again, shuffled his feet. “That’s okay.”

“Something wrong?” She leaned on the porch railing. “You seem distracted. And you drank all my beer. Usually you’re way too polite to even have a second cup of coffee.”

“Sorry. I’ll pick up a six-pack next time I’m in town.”

“Forget it. That polite crap gets old. What’s the matter?”

“My nephew’s down there.” He pointed at his cabin down the hill.

“You don’t like him?”

“I don’t know him.”

“Sounds like a story,” Linda said. “Come inside. No beer, but I can find something.”

Inside, she searched her kitchen cabinets. “I have wine.”

“No wine.”

“Oh, yeah. Forgot. There’s Beefeater.”

“Okay. With ice.”

She dropped two ice cubes into a juice glass and covered them with gin, handed it to Mike.

Mike sipped, winced. He hadn’t touched hard liquor in a long time and never drank gin. But right now he needed something. He forced a gulp. And another. By the third gulp it was easier. Linda topped off his glass.

“How’ve you been up here?” Mike asked. His tongue felt thick. “Getting the hang of it?”

“It’s still strange. I have to drive twenty minutes to get milk or bread. I have to go to Tulsa if I want a fresh bagel. I don’t scream anymore when a scorpion scuttles across the bathroom floor.” She shrugged. “But I like the solitude.”

“Solitude.” Mike said the word like he wanted to see how it felt in his mouth. He finished the gin, held out his glass.

Linda poured more gin over the half-melted ice. “You okay? Your nephew can’t be that bad.”

What could Mike tell her? His nephew was this heavy weight hanging around his neck, this thing he’d been given to look after. His brother’s ghost had sent the boy. He could see Danny’s face, that impish, wicked grin. I’m calling in the old markers, Mikey. Time to put up or shut up. His solitude was gone, his old life broken. No. That wasn’t quite right. The life he’d fabricated for himself, Oklahoma, the vineyard, it had all been a cover. An illusion. It was inevitable that the past would come back and demand penance. Andrew was blood whether Mike knew him or not. His brother’s blood. Kin, they would say in Oklahoma.

He held the glass toward Linda again. The ice had all melted away.

* * *

The vines were all wrong. Mike walked the rows, but the stakes were too tall, the vines towered over him, closed in on him. It was as if he were in a thick grapevine jungle. He grabbed a bunch, and the grapes burst in his hands, blood seeping like juice over his skin, thick and warm. He tried to wipe his hands on the grape leaves, smearing himself in the vines. It would come off, sticky and hot. It grew hotter, scalding, the blood burning his hands. He screamed, tried to wipe off the blood, the grapevines tangling and he couldn’t see or breathe, like the weight of a planet on his chest….

His eyes blinked open to darkness. He sat up, his head pounding, mouth dry. He stood, bumped into something, a table. What was that doing there? He looked around, saw moonlight coming through windows that shouldn’t be there.

This wasn’t his house. Linda’s.

He remembered. The gin. Linda’s couch. He’d had too much. Mike shook his head, pain flaring behind his eyes. Embarrassing. He hadn’t done that in a long time. He felt bad, needed to apologize to Linda. He thumbed the button on the side of his digital wristwatch, and the tiny light showed him it was 5:07 in the morning. Still dark.

He left through the front door, shut it as quietly as he could behind him. Checked his pockets and found his truck keys. He drove back to his place, the cabin dark. He hadn’t meant to leave Andrew for so long.

He went inside, passed the kid on his sofa. Andrew was curled up, still wearing his clothes, but at least he’d taken off his shoes. He went into the kitchen, took four aspirin, and drank two full glasses of water. It was too late to go back to bed. He started a pot of coffee. He didn’t try to be quiet.

Andrew rolled off the sofa, rubbed his eyes. “What time is it?”

“Morning.”

“Time to get up?”

“Only if you want.” He talked to the kid over his shoulder, not looking at him. Mike took plain white coffee mugs out of the cabinet over the coffeemaker, set them on the counter. “Look, I figure you can just stay here while we think what to do. You didn’t tell anyone you were coming here, did you?”

Andrew hesitated.

“Well?”

“No. I didn’t tell anyone.”

“Okay then,” Mike said. “So who would think to look for you here? Nobody. We’re in the middle of nowhere. We’ll just hang out and think things over.”

“What do you do this early?”

“I have a cup of coffee,” Mike said.

“I mean after that. What do you do with your day?”

“Work the vineyard.”

Andrew’s face wrinkled into a question. “Huh. I didn’t know they had them here.”

“They do.”

“You need any help?”

“I don’t know,” Mike said. “You know anything about grapes?”

“No.”

“You ever prune a vine?”

“No.”

“You ever pull weeds?”

“No.”

“Well, brace yourself,” Mike said. “You’re in for a real treat.”

12

After killing Vincent Minelli, Nikki Enders had returned to Andrew Foley’s drab apartment and waited a full twenty-fours hours before admitting to herself that the boy had bolted. She did not relish the tedious work of digging him out of his hiding place.

And her wrist hurt like hell. She’d swallowed three Aleve, and the thing still throbbed a steady rhythm all the way to the hospital. That greasy oaf Romano had given it a tough twist, aggravating the injury she’d received in Italy. The wrist wasn’t broken, but the doctor at the emergency room put it in a brace and declared she had a very severe sprain, the worst, in fact, he’d ever seen. Everything was swollen and inflamed and generally not how a healthy wrist should be. She was not to lift anything or even hold a pen or a pencil. Then wielding a 9mm machine pistol or tossing a handful of throwing stars is probably out of the question, she thought.

Now she sat in a first-class seat aboard an American Airlines jet to New Orleans, sipping (from a glass in her good hand) a rum and Coke. All of her bright and shiny new guns had been dumped back into the train station locker. The man with the voice would not be happy at the delay, but his happiness was of little concern to Nikki and anyway he could just sweat for a bit and goddammit her wrist hurt and she hadn’t slept and she wanted to go home.

But she knew she’d have to call him soon. He’d wanted all this handled quickly. Well, it wouldn’t be. Not now. Someone had warned Andrew Foley, and now it would take a while. There would need to be phone calls and questions and then in a day or a week or a month someone would catch wind of Foley, and she’d be dispatched to finish the job.

But not yet, not at this minute. Right now there was only a rum drink and a comfortable seat and deep, dark sleep.

* * *

The taxi dropped her in front of the old Garden District house, a block removed from the St. Charles streetcar line. She loved coming home to New Orleans, to the old house. Three stories, white columns, impeccable landscaping. There was something old-world about the place. Or maybe it was just like being in an old movie. Old-world charm or just a cheap Gone With the Wind feeling? Either way, she felt vaguely like aristocracy whenever home. Maybe it was the crystal chandelier in the foyer. Somewhere deep in her memory, the little girl in her equated chandelier with aristocracy.

She rang the bell, and a gray-haired black woman answered the door. “Welcome home, miss.” She stepped aside, allowed Nikki to enter. “Do you have anything for the gun cabinet?”

“I’m traveling light, Althea. How’s Mother?”

“Good days and bad days, miss. The GPS chips we sewed into her clothes help a lot. She sneaked out yesterday and we found her in ten minutes, no problem. Any luggage?”

“Just this.” She indicated the bag slung over her shoulder.

Althea took the bag. “I’ll put this in your room. Your mother is in the library.”

“Thank you, Althea.”

Nikki paused under the giant chandelier. It defied gravity up there, looming and glittering like an obscenely expensive sword of Damocles. The sunlight flooded in and danced among the crystal, giving the chandelier the illusion of movement. But it didn’t move. It hung there. It had hung there for years. Probably decades of dust up there. Did anyone even look up at the chandelier anymore?

She snapped her attention back from above, went down the long central hall to the library. She stood in the doorway, peeked inside. Her mother sat in the wash of sunlight from the bay window at the far end of the library, but Nikki’s gaze was drawn immediately to her father’s portrait over the enormous stone fireplace.

Horace Cornwall’s imposing image dominated the library in much the same way the old patriarch had dominated the family when alive. Thick white hair, square jaw, conservative blue suit. Horace had sat for the portrait after he’d lost an eye in Panama locking horns with Noriega’s goons, so there was a patch over the left eye. On the mantel below the portrait sat a row of keepsakes, framed citations, other awards, and even a sheathed cavalry saber.

Tonya Cornwall was a handsome older woman in her sixties. She was still lean, with raven hair. She sat in a rocking chair near the window, knitting a scarf well over sixty feet long. She’d met Horace while still in the Israeli Secret Service. He’d been a journeyman field operative in the CIA. Their passionate affair had lasted three exciting years before he’d knocked her up. Nine months later, she quit the Secret Service, left Israel, moved to Horace’s family home in New Orleans, and given birth to Nikki.

Father had finally met his end teaching Afghan rebels to blow up the Taliban with shoulder-launched rockets. He’d been in his tent, eating lamb on a stick, when someone tossed in a grenade.

But in the years before he’d been exploded, Horace had taught Nikki much in the ways of death and stealth and global politics. So had her mother, Tonya. Nikki was expert in five different martial arts and competent with any ordnance currently in use by any military in the world. While other kids were playing video games, she’d learned to take apart and reassemble an M16 while wearing a blindfold. For her eighth-grade talent show, she’d taken volunteers from the audience and knocked apples from their heads by hurling meat cleavers. This was followed by a frantic call from the school principal, who expressed his concern for the lives and limbs of Nikki’s classmates.

Now Father was dead, and Mother was not altogether well. After surviving the Cold War and years of dangerous, covert missions, an ordinary robber in the French Quarter had lodged a .22-caliber bullet into an extradelicate portion of Tonya Cornwall’s brain. Expensive surgeons had been flown in from Vienna and California, and while Tonya had come out of the surgery alive and in reasonably good physical condition, it was generally understood she would never be quite right again.

Often Nikki’s mother would go for days or weeks without any sign of trouble. Then she might suddenly forget where she was or what year it happened to be, and on extreme occasions she might mistake complete strangers for Palestinians and attack them with astounding stealth and speed not usually found in a geriatric woman.

So that’s why Nikki approached her mother slowly, without making any sudden moves. She didn’t want a knitting needle in the eye.

“Hello, Nikki.” Her mother didn’t look up from her knitting, the needles clicking a steady rhythm. Mother hadn’t knitted before her brain injury, but now there was something soothing about the monotony of it. She could sit in the same chair for hours until she ran out of yarn.

“What are you making?” Nikki asked.

“A scarf.” Her voice sounded fine to Nikki, smooth and level and not at all crazy. “I’m not sure about this dark green. I made one for you. A lovely plum color but I’ve lost track of it.”

Nikki followed the endless scarf with her eyes until she reached a plum stretch about six feet long. “It’ll turn up.”

“Your father called from Cuba,” she said. “He’ll be home this weekend.”

“No he won’t, Mother. The Taliban blew him to bits in Afghanistan. Remember?”

She smiled indulgently at her daughter, returned to the knitting. Nikki bent over, kissed her on top of the head.

Nikki left her mother in the library, climbed the sweeping staircase up to the second floor, and went into her room. She flopped on the bed, took the phone from the nightstand, and dialed the man with the voice.

“Yes?” he answered.

“There’s been a delay.” Nikki explained about Foley.

“Do you have any leads?” the voice asked.

She pulled her bag into her lap, fished around for the photo. “I need you to track down a number.”

“Tell me.”

She read him the phone number from the back of the old photograph. She heard typing. The voice was at his computer. It took him less than ten seconds. “A small town in Oklahoma, north of Pawhuska.”

“What the hell’s a Pawhuska?”

“It’s on the map,” said the voice. “Almost to the Kansas state line.”

“I’m going to need two weeks,” she said.

“Out of the question.”

“I’m injured.”

“That goes with the territory. Handle the situation as we agreed.”

Again, hatred for the voice welled up within Nikki. There was the slightest hint of a threat in his tone. Do the job…or else.

“I’ll do my best,” she said.

“See to it.” He hung up.

She had just gotten home. She would not jump on a plane to Tulsa simply because the man with the voice had snapped his fingers. He did not run Nikki Enders. One day, I’m going to find that son of a bitch, then I’m going to make him squirm and cry.

In the meantime, she needed to figure her next move. She brought up a map of the United States on her laptop computer, zeroed in on the area west of the Mississippi. The man with the voice said the little shithole town was close to Kansas. That had possibilities. It was maybe time to call in a favor. She dialed the phone and held her breath, hoping she was doing the right thing.

13

Meredith Jacqueline Cornwall-Jenkins was just taking a marble cake out of the oven when the phone rang. Her husband the tax attorney would be home soon, and her plan was to ply him with London broil and asparagus and little red potatoes and a nice pinot noir, then marble cake and French roast coffee; and then, when the man she loved was complacent and a little sleepy, she’d again bring up the subject of having a baby. They’d been married two years. It was time.

But if that was him calling to say he’d be late, she’d shred him into mulch and put him on the flower beds.

She set the cake on the stovetop and grabbed the phone. “Hello?”

“Hello, Middle Sister. How’s domesticity?”

“Oh, crap.”

“Glad to talk to you too,” Nikki said.

“What do you want?” Meredith asked.

“I need you to pop over the state line into Oklahoma and kill a man.”

“I don’t do that anymore. I’m out.”

“Nobody’s ever really out,” Nikki said.

“I am. I teach seventh grade. I drive a Volvo, for Christ’s sake.”

Nikki sighed on her end of the phone, and Meredith knew what was coming.

“We’re sisters,” Nikki said. “Sisters need to stick together, and I need your help.”

“No.”

“You owe me.”

“Get bent.”

Nikki sighed, paused. When she started speaking her tone had changed, like she was talking about the weather. “So, how’s John the attorney with the broad shoulders and the square jaw? He was quite a catch, wasn’t he?”

“Shut up.”

“How did you snag such an eligible bachelor? Seems like he’d have the ladies all over him. Oh, wait, what was that pretty little thing’s name? Brenda? His receptionist down at the firm, right?”

“I hate you.”

“She had her little blond sights set on John, didn’t she? Just disappeared one day. Now, that was a lucky stroke. Lucky for you.”

“I get the point. Hold on.” She put her hand over the phone, turned little irritated circles there in the middle of the kitchen. This wasn’t fair. Not fair, and goddamn inconvenient. She’d landed a handsome, socially acceptable husband, and now she had plans to complete the picture with a baby if she could get John to pony up with the sperm. She didn’t need this shit.

But one thing Dad had taught them. When you’re square, you’re square.

“Then we’d be even,” she said into the phone. “No more calling me for favors.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die, Middle Sister.”

“Just one question. Why aren’t you doing this yourself?”

“I’m injured.”

“What?” Genuine concern. “Bad?”

“Nothing terminal, but it’s got me on the sidelines for a while. And I thought I’d visit Mother.”

“How is she?”

“About the same. Last week she thought the gardener was Yassir Arafat.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“Seriously. Thanks for doing this. I’m up against a time thing.”

“So, who is it I’m supposed to make gone?”

Nikki gave her the details, thanked her again, and hung up.

Meredith stood, staring at the phone for long seconds. Where to start? It had been a long time. She went upstairs, pulled out the lockbox she kept covered with dirty towels at the bottom of a clothes hamper in the back of the bedroom closet. There was as much chance of John doing a load of laundry as of Burger King building a drive-thru on Pluto, so she figured the box was safe.

She spun the combination and opened the box. A set of military ID she’d been saving just in case. A couple of passports. A 9mm Beretta with an extra magazine and a silencer. A few other things she thought of as keepsakes. Why had she kept these things? She found what she needed, the little black leather book. She flipped through it until she found the number she wanted.

She sat on the bed, dialed. It rang seven times until someone picked up. “Hello?” A slight Spanish accent.

“It’s me, Ortega.”

“Meredith?”

“I need you for a job.”

“I didn’t know you were still on the inside.”

“Yeah. You’re in Oklahoma City, right?”

“Yes.”

“I need an advance scout. I’ll let you know the details in the morning.”

“Short notice,” Ortega said. “I’ll have to use someone local.”

“Is he okay with a little blood?”

Ortega chuckled. “If you knew this man, you wouldn’t have to ask.”

“Good.”

“I take it this is a trap-and-destroy operation.”

“You take it correctly,” Meredith said.

“We haven’t discussed payment.”

Meredith said, “Satisfaction of a job well done should be payment enough.”

“So you are still on the inside,” Ortega said. “The CIA always were a bunch of cheap bastards.”

14

Ortega hung up, sat in the high-backed chair on his veranda, sipping green tea and digesting his conversation with Major Meredith Cornwall. It had been his understanding that she’d resigned her commission with US Army Intelligence. But her army rank had only been a cover anyway. She’d always done the grunt work for the CIA. Everyone knew it. Still, it had been a long time since Ortega had heard from Meredith. A ridiculous rumor had circulated years ago that she’d retired to the Midwest someplace to squirt out babies and play house. Probably a cover story of some kind.

Ortega was tempted to run a check on her. He didn’t like the idea that Meredith might be using him for some freelance project. Still, one didn’t go looking for trouble with the Company. They came to you. That’s how it worked. It would be simpler and safer to do what Meredith wanted. Then she’d go away, and Ortega could get back to his own business.

And Ortega’s business was extensive, underground networks covering much of Texas and Oklahoma. He’d come up the hard way from El Salvador, doing odd jobs for the Company when they didn’t want to leave tracks. He’d been rewarded by being allowed to set up shop in the United States. The Company had asked favors of him less and less frequently. He’d all but assumed they’d forgotten about him. But then came Meredith’s phone call.

He hit the intercom button on his phone.

A female voice: “Yes, Mr. Ortega.”

“Veronica, I want you to get Enrique Mars on the line. Tell him I have something.”

“Just a moment.”

Ortega considered what he was about to do. Unleashing Mars wasn’t exactly what Meredith had asked of him. But he could perhaps resolve the matter for her quickly and get her out of his life.

He looked at the name he’d scribbled on the Post-it note and almost felt sorry for Andrew Foley, whoever he was. Enrique Mars was about to rock his world.

* * *

Nikki Enders washed down three Aleve with a swig of Bacardi and Coke. If she stayed reasonably medicated, the throb in her wrist remained tolerable. She looked over her cards at Tonya Cornwall. “It’s your turn, Mother.”

“Give me all your sevens.”

“This isn’t Go Fish, Mother. We’re playing gin.”

“Nothing for me, dear. You go ahead.”

Nikki raised an eyebrow. “What?”

“You have some gin if you like.”

Nikki shook her head. “No, I meant…How’s the scarf coming, Mother?”

“Oh, the scarf!” Tonya put her cards down, picked up the knitting needles. She immediately fell into the clicking rhythm. “You’re father’s going with the envoy to Moscow next week, and I want it to be ready for him. It’s below zero this time of year.”

Her father’s trip to the Soviet Union had been in 1985, but Nikki didn’t bother mentioning it. What would be the point? Instead, she marveled at her mother’s nimble fingers, never dropping a stitch. If she were lucid, her mother would still be hell with a knife or a gun. She’d been Jerusalem junior fencing champion at the age of twelve. By age twenty, she was able to kill a fully armed man in a flak jacket using only a potato peeler. Now her deadly, agile hands knitted an endless scarf at light speed.

Nikki leaned back in her seat, let her thoughts drift, partially hypnotized by the click of the knitting needles. She felt vaguely uneasy not handling the Foley situation herself. She did not trust others to tie up loose ends for her. But if she had to trust someone, then Middle Sister was the right choice. She owed Nikki, and family ties were tighter than Meredith liked to pretend. She could almost relax, knowing Middle Sister was on the job, but there would continue to be lingering worries until she got that phone call saying it had been done.

It wasn’t just her wrist injury. Nikki’s mind hadn’t been in the right place. She’d been careless in Italy, careless again with Romano in New York. Maybe her subconscious was telling her to hang it up. Could it be that Middle Sister was right? Maybe she’d cheated herself out of a husband and babies. She sipped the rum and Coke, tried to imagine it but couldn’t. What would she do with herself if she weren’t working?

She shook her head, topped off her drink from the Bacardi bottle. First she’d finish the job for the man with the voice. Then she could take a long trip somewhere sunny and figure out the rest of her life.

* * *

Within an hour of Nikki’s call, Meredith Cornwall-Jenkins sat behind the wheel of her Volvo station wagon. She pointed it south and drove. On her cell phone, she called her husband, John, at the firm to tell him she was joining her sister in New Orleans to visit Mother, who wasn’t feeling well. She’d be gone for a few days. John had made appropriate noises of sympathy and professed that he would miss her, but she suspected he would play a lot of golf and drink too much with his buddies while she was gone.

If all went smoothly she’d be back in two days, when she would revisit the subject of babies with her husband, and God help him if he tried to weasel out of it.

Meredith brought the Beretta, the military ID, and her old army uniform. She allowed herself a modicum of self-satisfaction that it still fit. She was in good shape. She replaced the major’s insignia on the shoulders with lieutenant colonel’s clusters. She might need to throw around a little authority. The Beretta would probably be enough, but she might need more, and the local National Guard unit could probably provide her with anything she needed.

Better than a Wal-Mart.

15

Even through the cloth gloves, Andrew Foley’s fingertips were raw and red from pulling weeds. He hoped he wouldn’t get blisters. Would he still be able to play his mandolin? His knees hurt too. And his back. And what was with the fucking sun out here? Was Oklahoma on the equator or something? It was hot as balls. Andrew was an indoor person. He generally read college textbooks in air-conditioned libraries. Usually within shuffling distance of a Coke machine. He did not, so far, care for the frontier.

Once in a while his cranky uncle would walk by, look down at what Andrew was doing, grunt, then move on. And that Indian kid would jog past him every twenty minutes, shake his head, and giggle. Smart-ass little shit.

What the fuck am I doing here?

Was it really necessary for him to be here, pulling weeds in some backwater inferno? He’d panicked. He realized that now, jumping on a bus and hauling ass to Oklahoma because he thought some hired killer was after him. He’d let his buddy Vincent’s overactive imagination give him the willies. Vincent owned Goodfellas and all the Godfather movies on DVD. He always thought there was something “going down,” and Andrew had fallen for it.

He’d even tried to call Vincent to confirm his suspicions that it had all been a false alarm, but his uncle had forbidden him to use the phone. What with caller ID technology, calling his buddies would only announce where he was. No phone calls. No letters. No e-mail. It was the first time his uncle had given any indication he took Andrew’s situation seriously.

If you were hiding, his uncle said, then for fuck’s sake stay hidden.

And that made Andrew a little nervous. He’d lied when he’d told his uncle that nobody knew where he was. It seemed like a harmless little white lie designed to avoid an awkward confrontation. He’d told Vincent he might go to Oklahoma. But it had been such a casual mention in passing. Certainly Vincent wouldn’t even remember it. It was harmless. Sure. No big deal.

But it bothered him.

He fell into a numb rhythm: pulled weeds, wiped sweat out of his eyes, scooted down the vine row.

Mike walked down the row behind him, paused at his back. “You doing okay?”

Andrew nodded. “No problem.”

“You can stop if you want. It’s hot.”

Andrew smiled weakly. “I’ll keep going until quitting time.”

His uncle returned the smile and squeezed his shoulder before continuing down the row.

He watched his uncle walk into the barn and wondered for the hundredth time what made the salty old curmudgeon tick.

* * *

Mike went into the barn, grabbed a Coors Light from the refrigerator, and plopped himself behind his desk. Shade. Quiet. The beer was cold. Mike didn’t have to pull weeds today. He put his feet up.

He was still making up his mind about his nephew.

The kid was already regretting coming to Oklahoma, certainly didn’t want to be on his hands and knees pulling weeds. But Andrew was hanging in there, didn’t complain. The kid was okay. He was only here because his father had said to come. If something really bad happened, go to Uncle Mike. For years Mike had existed to the kid as a made-up story, like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Dan Foley had invented a myth of safety for his son. A myth that had sent him west into Mike’s life.

Mike wanted to be responsible for this kid like he wanted an anvil hung around his neck. In the old days, he’d killed people. Mike had never saved anybody. Maybe that needed to change. Maybe doing this for the kid would change something important about Mike.

Dan Foley had saved him. He owed his brother in blood. Reason enough to watch out for the kid.

Mike rubbed the back of his neck, squirmed in his chair. He couldn’t get comfortable. How would he go about looking after the kid? When would he pronounce the all clear? Mike didn’t like playing defense, didn’t like waiting for some danger that maybe didn’t even exist to drop on his head. All his contacts from the old days were either dead or faded into legend. He couldn’t even call somebody to check on Andrew’s supposed killer.

The phone rang, and Mike jumped.

He grabbed it. “Scorpion Hill Vineyards.”

“Is that him bent over in the vines?” Linda asked.

“Him who?”

She tsked. “Who do you think? Your nephew.”

“He’s pulling weeds,” Mike said. “Young people need to be kept busy.”

“He’ll get heatstroke.”

“It’s either him or the weeds. I think it’s a fair fight.”

“I’m bringing dinner down for the three of us tonight,” she said.

“Don’t bother. I’m going to do a couple of frozen pizzas.”

“Your awkward domestic situation is the only entertainment in town,” Linda said. “I figured a third party might help facilitate polite conversation.”

“So this is some kind of diplomatic mission?”

“I just hate to eat alone.”

Mike cleared his throat. “I drank too much last night. Sorry about that.”

“You didn’t puke on anything.”

“What’s for dinner?”

“Lasagna.”

“I’ll get out some of the special reserve,” Mike said. “Not for me, but for you and Andrew.”

“See you about seven.”

He hung up, got another beer out of the fridge, and leaned against the barn’s big doorframe. He watched the kid pull weeds. He smelled the vines. The grapes. He felt the slight breeze wash over him like warm breath. He loved it here. It had started as a hiding place, but now it was home, this jagged, beautiful, thorny wilderness. Like some kind of rugged Eden. He’d kept the past at bay. He’d kept the whole world out.

And here was his nephew, come in from the East, dragging the world behind him on a leash.

Mike drank beer, shrugged. He lived in nowhere, Oklahoma. What could possibly find them here?

* * *

Enrique Mars smoked a cigar the size of a canoe and sipped from a flask of Jim Beam between his legs as his lime green 1976 Cadillac convertible roared up Highway 75 into Tulsa.

Ortega had been clear. Get in. Kill. Get out. He wanted it done quickly. Ortega didn’t say why, and Mars didn’t care. Killing was what he did. Pondering why wasn’t.

Enrique Mars was not Mexican. INS thought he was Mexican. He’d said he was Mexican to get his green card. It was easier to be Mexican.

Enrique Mars was Cuban, and had loyally served on one of Castro’s death squads for eight years. One day, without rhyme or reason, Mars decided he wanted to fuck white girls and eat at McDonald’s and drive a giant American car. He wanted to go to the United States. So he’d used his contacts to get phony papers. He jumped the first banana boat out of Havana, bluffed, bullied, and bribed his way to Mexico, and crossed the border at Juarez. It didn’t take Mars long to fall in with Ortega, who recognized Enrique’s blunt but useful talents.

His skin was a light brown. Thick mustache and beard, a gold hoop in each ear. Bald. When he smiled wide, he showed three gold teeth on the left side. At the moment he wore a purple suit and a black shirt. No tie, but a single, thick gold chain around his neck. Snakeskin cowboy boots. It was his opinion that he looked pretty damn good but also badass. A classy badass.

There was a twelve-gauge pump shotgun, two revolvers, a bowie knife, an axe handle, and a machete in the Caddy’s trunk. When Enrique Mars killed somebody, the motherfucker stayed dead.

He glanced at his watch. Approaching dinnertime. Normally, Mars would pull into a nice hotel, have a good meal, sleep, and proceed with his killing bright-eyed the next morning. But Ortega wanted it done fast. He swigged from his flask, puffed the cigar, and drove. The Caddy swallowed the miles. The sun sank dirty orange behind the horizon.

16

Thousands of miles away the man with the voice smoked a harsh Turkish cigarette and sipped a glass of Campari. He contemplated the problem of Nikki Enders.

His station in the cruel, indifferent hierarchy of the universe depended on things happening exactly how he said they would happen and at precisely the time he decreed appropriate. In the man’s opinion, Nikki’s intentional delay in completing her assignment amounted to something like a minor mutiny. He was getting a lot of business out of the Middle East recently, and he could not afford to lose the trust and respect of his associates in that region. Nikki Enders was a valuable commodity. He’d made a small fortune employing her skills. But a broken tool, however valuable, must be discarded and replaced. If he could not control her and rely upon her, then she was no longer of any use.

How to eliminate the problem? One does not send a jackal to destroy the lioness. That would only ensure the waste of a perfectly good jackal. But a pack of jackals, yes, a savage, deadly pack of them, might be able to bring down a single lioness. He picked up the phone to dial one of his minor operatives in the States. The perfect candidate would be somebody who had a reasonable chance of completing the mission, but no one of any great loss should Nikki Enders prove too formidable.

The man with the voice knew just who to call.

* * *

Ortega immediately recognized the odd accent when he answered the phone. “It’s you. It’s been so long I had not expected to hear from you again.”

“I have some business for you.” The man with the voice explained what he wanted.

“I see. Sounds like a gang job.”

“I’ll leave it to you to decide what’s best,” the Voice said. “Just be warned. This target bites back.”

Ortega asked a few pertinent questions, scribbled some notes onto a pad. He proposed a fair amount for payment, and the man with the voice agreed. He hung up. Well, it looked as if Ortega was in for a busy week. Perhaps people were right about the economy coming back.

Ortega considered who to send on the job. A pack of the usual hooligans to be sure. Yes, Ortega was a firm believer in quantity over quality. He’d always found that a violent mob took care of 99.9 percent of all problems. But it might take something more exotic to impress the Voice. Ortega opened a bottom desk drawer and fished out an old Rolodex. The names and addresses he needed most frequently were in an electronic Blackberry, but Ortega was searching for a particular number, a number he hadn’t dialed in a long time. He found the number, picked up the phone, and paused. Hiring these peculiar killers would severely cut into his profits. He might even lose money on the deal. It would be worth it to get on the Voice’s good side. It might mean more business from the Voice in the long run. One occasionally had to throw one’s bread on the waters.

He dialed. It rang.

* * *

He was born Lee Goldberg in Sydney, Australia, but it had been many years since anyone had called him by that name. His stage name was Jack Sprat. He changed it after meeting the Fat Lady during a boardwalk carnival act in Atlantic City. Mavis was big and soft and beautiful, and Goldberg— now Sprat— fell in love.

They were married three months later, and the stage names were a no-brainer. Jack Sprat was five feet five inches tall, all spindly hard muscle and sinew, a bald head and a big nose that gave him the appearance of a vulture. His new bride, Mavis— who indeed could eat no lean— weighed in at 422 pounds.

They made the carnival circuit, state fairs, and sideshows.

Jack Sprat had a good act. He was a contortionist, could fit into little places and cracks and boxes, and could climb and jump like a tree frog. He’d used his skill for burglary back in Australia, had been pinched and served eighteen months in the pen. When they released him, he pulled another string of jobs and ended up back in prison seven months later, this time for a three-year stretch. When he got out this time, he decided he needed a chance and headed to America.

Now he’d been married to Mavis a dozen years, going from show to show, earning a living, sometimes a good one but often not. Sometimes the couple supplemented their income by breaking a few minor laws— robbery, burglary, murder. At first, Jack Sprat had been pleasantly surprised at Mavis’s willingness to go along with these endeavors. What a great gal.

Four years ago, everything changed.

Mavis wasn’t satisfied being the Fat Lady. She started lifting weights, transforming herself. It became an obsession, protein shakes and three tough workouts a day. She dropped to 360 pounds. Jack started to worry about the act. A Jack Sprat with a svelte wife just wouldn’t work. But Mavis didn’t get smaller. She got bigger, her legs like muscular tree trunks, arms like cannons, neck as thick as a Marine’s. And the steriods made her particularly aggressive, which is why Jack didn’t worry too much that his lovely bride was currently waist deep in the alligator tank.

She was going after one of the five-footers. The creatures knew by now to stay clear of her, but she grabbed one by the tail. It thrashed and splashed as she pulled it toward her. She’d been doing five shows a day at Dr. Weird’s Medicine Show, just a mile down the highway from Gatorland in Florida, tourists on their way back from Disney looking to squeeze just a little more out of their vacations. Mavis wrestled alligators. Jack contorted himself and threw knives at moving targets. He used to split apples off the heads of brave volunteers, but the insurance for that sort of thing was outrageous.

For a while, Mavis had put the apple on her head. She’d trusted Jack with the knives but eventually wanted a more active part in the act. Another reason for the muscles. Now she sometimes held Jack upside down by the ankles while he tossed knives at various objects. They’d tried a number of variations on the act, but nothing was as popular as Mavis wrestling the alligators.

Jack’s cell phone rang. He checked Mavis before answering. She had the animal in a headlock, the situation well in hand. He turned his back on the scene and answered the phone. “Hello?”

“Jack. It’s Louis Ortega.”

“Been a while, mate. I thought maybe you’d forgot about old Jack.”

“Never. I just haven’t had anything worthy of your talents.”

“Anything that pays is worthy,” Jack said.

“And how’s your wonderful wife?”

“Mean,” Jack said. “Let’s conclude the small talk.”

“Uh, yes. Can you get free a couple of days?”

“If the price is right.”

Ortega explained the situation. And the price was right. Very right. Jack told Ortega he and Mavis would get on it straightaway. He hung up and turned back to his wife in the alligator tank.

“Who was that?” Mavis now had an alligator under each arm. She swung them around experimentally. She’d been working on some new moves lately.

“Louis Ortega.”

She looked up, interested. “A job? Is the pay good?”

“Pretty good.”

“Enough for us to go to Hollywood?”

“More than enough.” Although Jack had no intention of going to California. Land of fruits and nuts, his old man used to say.

Mavis beamed, tossed the alligators aside, and climbed out of the tank with a squeal. She scooped Jack up, cradled him in her arms like a child. “Let’s go back to the room.”

“Easy, old girl.”

“I’m going to fuck you silly, little man.”

Bloody hell!

17

Linda made Andrew set the table and fill the water glasses. She seemed to enjoy taking over. Keone had still been there when she’d arrived, and he’d lifted his eyebrows upon catching a whiff of the steaming lasagna. Linda had assured him there was plenty and invited the boy to stay.

Under other circumstances Mike might have telephoned the boy’s parents to let them know their son was staying for dinner. But the kid seemed to come and go as he pleased. He’d met Keone’s father only once, and the big Indian had frightened him, a hard man who seemed quick to anger and maybe a little suspicious of the white man who’d taken an interest in his son. His mother was a dour, stone-faced woman of few words. From Keone, Mike had gathered that the boy’s family lived two hills over in a shabby single-wide trailer on a few rugged acres. Keone threaded his way through the forest to show up for work. Mike didn’t pay the kid much, but Keone seemed to think it was a fortune.

Mike told all this to Linda when Andrew and Keone were out of the room. She’d been curious about the boy, had wondered how he’d fallen in with an old crank like Mike.

Mike said, “Keone’s never told me directly, but I infer his father runs a meth lab tucked back into one of these little valleys somewhere. A lot of that in this part of the country.”

Linda sighed, shook her head, and went into the kitchen.

Mike knew what she was thinking. Linda was the kind of woman who’d want to call social services, get Keone into a home or something. Well, it was Mike’s call, and right now he decided to leave well enough alone. The kid seemed healthy, didn’t show any signs of abuse.

Linda tossed salad in the kitchen, called to Mike over her shoulder. “You promised wine.”

“Right.” Mike lifted up the carpet in the living room, threw open the square trapdoor in the wood floor.

“What’s that?” Andrew looked into the hole.

“Wine cellar.” Mike climbed down the ladder, pulled the string for a low-watt bulb hanging on a wire.

Andrew climbed down after him, seemed impressed by the rough stone and clay walls braced by thick beams. “Cool. How long did it take you to dig this out?”

“Too damn long.” Mike scanned the racks for a good bottle. Most of this stuff was ready, but some of the bottles had probably gone to vinegar. His corking skills were still improving, and if air got into any of the bottles, it would ruin them.

Andrew spotted a wooden chest against the wall. “What’s this?” He started to lift the lid.

Mike crossed the small cellar in two steps and slammed the lid back down. “Do you mind? That’s hidden away down here for a reason.”

“I didn’t mean to— I just—” The look on Andrew’s face went from startled to angry. “Jesus, you don’t have to be so hostile. I was just curious.”

Mike exhaled, shook his head. Maybe the kid was right. Mike resented the kid for interrupting his life. It wasn’t Andrew’s fault. He was just doing what his father told him. “Sorry. Here, take a look.”

He opened the chest, dust puffing, hinges creaking. He took a cloth bundle, unwrapped it, and showed the old Thompson gun to Andrew. It had been wrapped tight in oilcloth and still glistened new, no rust.

“Whoa.” Andrew held out his hands. “Can I hold it?”

The barrel magazine wasn’t in it, but Mike checked the breach. Empty. He handed the gun to his nephew.

“Heavy,” Andrew said.

“There are a few pistols in there too, stuff from the old days,” Mike said. “Anyway, you can see why I didn’t want anyone messing around in here. Guns ain’t toys.”

“Sure. No problem.” He ran his hand along the barrel, hesitated, then asked, “Did Dad use one of these?”

“Your father…” Mike bit his lip, didn’t meet Andrew’s eyes. He took the Thompson back, wrapped it up again in the cloth. “He was a good man, Andrew. He believed in family. When you do what we did, you’ve got to have family. You can’t depend on anyone else. We got that from your grandfather. He taught us right. Dan talked about having a son when I used to know him. I’m sure he loved you. Was proud of you. Don’t think about the kind of man he was before you knew him. He was your father. That’s all that’s important.” He put the Thompson in the chest and shut the lid.

“If family’s so important,” Andrew said, “then why did you stay away?”

“That wasn’t about your father,” Mike said quickly. “That was about me, my problems. We never stopped being brothers. No amount of miles or years can change that. That’s why he sent you to me.”

“What happened?”

Mike felt the pang in his chest. How to explain something he didn’t fully understand himself? “Someday I’ll tell you about it. I promise.”

Andrew looked thoughtful, nodded. “Okay.”

Mike gave him a bottle of wine. “Give that to Linda. I’ll be up in a second.”

Andrew took the bottle up the ladder.

Mike paused over the chest, considered the weapons within. Maybe it was time to take out the guns again. If Andrew really was in trouble, maybe he should be ready just in case. But no, not the Thompson. That was overkill. He could take out one of the pistols, keep it in the drawer by his nightstand. But he didn’t want Andrew or Keone to find it. Kids were curious. He was always hearing on the news about some kid that got ahold of his dad’s gun and blew his own head off.

He put the gun back in the chest, closed the lid. He’d think about it, but right now he’d feel better with the guns out of harm’s way. More important, out of sight. He told himself he was concerned about safety, but really he just didn’t want to see or think about the guns.

He pulled the string and the bulb went out. He climbed back up the ladder, to the world of light and kitchen noise, shut the trapdoor on bad wine and history.

* * *

Linda had been right. Another person at the dinner table facilitated the flow of polite conversation. She asked about college. Andrew was glad to talk about it. A degree in music? What were his future plans? To teach? He wanted to form a band, of course. Play some kind of music nobody had heard before. Mike feigned interest by making vague noises and nodding a lot while he stuffed himself with lasagna and garlic bread.

Dinner segued into satisfied moans. Mike sat back in his chair, sipped coffee. Linda had pronounced the Scorpion Hill Special Reserve a success and drank the last of it. Keone ate a chocolate chip cookie.

Andrew took a pack of Parliament cigarettes from his pocket, shook one out, and put it in his mouth.

“You smoke?” Mike asked.

Andrew shrugged. “On and off.”

“Not in here.”

“Oh, come on.”

Mike shook his head. “The smoke gets into everything. Outside.”

Andrew went to the front door, opened it a crack. “It’s really dark out there.”

“It’s night.”

“No, I mean really, really, no streetlights, pit of hell dark.”

Keone giggled, ran past him out into the night.

“So the question is,” Mike said, “are you as brave as a twelve-year-old?”

Andrew rolled his eyes. “Shit.” He took a disposable lighter out of his pocket, flicked the flame, and held it in front of him as he went out the door and shut it behind him.

Linda laughed. “He’s okay. What’s the problem?”

“No problem.” Mike sipped coffee.

“Oh, bullshit. You can’t stand the kid. It’s all over your face.”

“I just wasn’t ready for him.”

“I still don’t understand what he’s doing here,” Linda said. “You didn’t invite him, and it doesn’t seem like he wants to be here.”

Mike shifted in his seat. “It’s complicated.”

“Uh-huh. That’s your way of saying don’t ask.”

“Sorry, didn’t mean it that way.”

“That’s okay.” Linda ran a finger absently around the rim of her wineglass. “You’re cut from the same cloth as Jacob, my husband. You’re both closed off. You don’t talk. I never understood that about him. Such ugliness on the job every day. Why do the men who need to talk most always wall themselves off?” She got a faraway look in her eye. “Purse snatchers don’t carry guns. They don’t turn and shoot you.”

“I’m sorry, Linda.”

She put her chin in her hand, rested her elbow on the table. “How long do you have to live out here in the wilderness before you forget everything?”

“You can forget your troubles,” Mike said in a small voice. “But they don’t forget you.”

A long silence stretched.

Linda drew breath, held it, then exhaled slowly. “I’m a lot of fun at a dinner party, huh?”

Mike forced a smile.

Keone came through the front door, an impish grin wide on his face. He held something cupped in his hands.

Mike came to attention. “What do you got there, boy?”

Keone ran to the table, dropped the object in the middle and ran back out the front door again, screaming laughter.

Hairy legs. The thing Keone had dumped on the table scurried among the dirty dishes.

“Shit.” Mike fell over backward in his chair.

Linda shrieked.

Mike regained his feet, grabbed the salad bowl, dumped out the remaining lettuce and trapped the tarantula under the bowl. The bowl shook for a few seconds, the big spider’s legs flailing against the inside.

Mike flopped back into his chair. His heart beat a mile a minute.

Linda stared openmouthed for a second, then broke into braying laughter.

“Yes, very fucking hilarious,” Mike said.

“You were terrified.” Laughter overcame her again. She started to hiccup.

“You screamed,” Mike said. “You were scared too.”

Linda fluttered her eyelashes. “I’m a girl. I’m allowed.”

A knock at the front door.

“You don’t have to knock,” Mike shouted. “Just come in.”

“He’s afraid you’ll spank him,” Linda said. “You better let him in. He’s the only one brave enough to take the spider out.”

Another knock.

“Hell.”

Mike got up, went to the door, turned the knob, swung it open. “I said you didn’t have to—”

He saw a blur of wood. It hit him in the forehead. Lights exploded behind his eyes. His knees went watery. He was vaguely aware of Linda’s scream. A flash of purple. The axe handle came around again and smashed him in the ribs. The pain stabbed, took his breath away. He went down. The world tilted, and bells rang. Another strike across his back.

Linda screamed again and there was shuffling and a loud smack.

Mike set his jaw, made fists. He had to get up. He grunted, got up on one knee.

Another sharp hit at the base of his skull. Everything went black, his face bounced off the wooden floor. The hot buzzing in his ears, the weight that seemed to push him down and down and down.

18

Mike’s eyes flickered open. He had no sense of time. He saw floor, the chair and table legs. What was he doing down here? Oh, yeah. Somebody had beat the shit out of him with a piece of wood.

Linda. He had to see if she was okay.

He closed his left eye, then opened it and closed his right. He couldn’t get the left eye to focus. Bleary. It must have been knocked out of whack with the hit at the back of his head.

He grunted, struggled to his hands and knees.

“You awake. Bueno.” Deep voice, thick accent.

Mike felt a hand on his collar. He was jerked up, dumped in a chair at the dining room table. Dizzy. He held his head and tried to look at his assailant. He had to close the bad eye to focus.

The man in front of him was short, but wide, powerful chest and arms. Hispanic. He wore a ridiculous purple suit, flashed gold teeth in his wicked smile. An axe handle dangled from one hand, a revolver stuck in the man’s belt.

“Are you okay, Mike?” Linda asked.

“ĄQuiete tu boca! No talking. I ask the questions, okay?”

Mike glanced at Linda. He still had one eye shut. She had a fat bottom lip, a bit of blood at the corner of her mouth, but otherwise seemed okay.

The sinister purple suit brought up the axe handle, wiggled it three inches from Mike’s face. “Andrew Foley. I want him. Where is he?”

“He left,” Mike said. “He was here before, but he’s gone now. What do you want with him?”

“Gone, you say.” The Hispanic put the axe handle under his arm, dug into his jacket and came out with a cigar and matches, struck the match, puffed the cigar hot and glowing.

Now, while he’s lighting the cigar, Mike thought. It was his chance to make a move. But Mike sat frozen. He was still light-headed, and there was a sharp, tight pain in his side. The axe handle had probably taken out a few ribs, bruised them anyway. Mike sat there like a useless lump.

The man looked at Linda, exhaled smoke. “Andrew no esta aqui, eh? Like the old man say, verdad?”

Linda opened her mouth, shook her head, and shrugged.

“He say the boy is gone. That’s true or no?”

“He’s gone,” Linda said.

“Too bad.” He gripped the axe handle tight with both hands, swung it around. “I maybe have to help you remember where he went, yes?”

Mike cleared his throat. He needed to get his second wind, stall for time. “What’s this about? I think there must be some kind of mistake. We didn’t do anything.”

The Hispanic guy ignored him, pulled back the curtains on the front windows, and peered into the night. “Dark as shit out here. You live in butt-fuck, Egypt, man.”

“We told you he ain’t here,” Mike said. “What do you want? Money?”

“What’s in those other rooms?” He pointed with the axe handle. “He in there, maybe?”

“A bedroom and a kitchen,” Mike said. “Over there’s the bathroom. Have a look if you want.”

Mr. Purple Suit circled the table, still swinging the axe handle. He glanced into each room. “Maybe we just wait, eh? And Andrew Foley will be along.” He puffed the cigar, filled the room with a layer of gray-blue smoke.

Mike had to do something. Any minute Andrew or Keone would come blithely through the front door, and that would be the end of them all. Mike understood the situation almost instantly. This was Andrew’s hired killer. Somehow he’d tracked him to Mike’s home. And when he killed Andrew, it was doubtful he’d leave any live witnesses behind him. Mike would have to make a move. Soon.

* * *

Enrique Mars leaned in close to the woman, his cigar two inches from her face. He puffed, and her eyes watered. “Do I make you nervous, chica?”

She flinched away from his hot breath but said nothing.

In his peripheral vision, Mars saw the old man squirm. He spun, swung the axe handle in a wide arc, bringing the end to a stop right under Mike’s chin. “You don’t like me to mess with her, old man? Is this your bitch? You fuck her, eh?”

The old man lifted his chin, met Mars’s gaze. Some tough old shit, eh? Mars recognized the type. Probably the jefe with the big balls back in the day. But this wasn’t back in the day. This was right now, and Mars was the man. And he was tired of fucking with this feeble old motherfucker and his black bitch. He wanted answers, and he wanted them right fucking now.

Mars grabbed a fistful of the woman’s hair, tugged sharply. She yelped. Her hands flew up, grabbed Mars’s wrist. She struggled.

He yanked her hair hard. “Shut up. Be still.”

She froze, her hands still holding Mars’s wrist.

Mars set the axe handle aside, leaned it against the wall. Still holding her hair, he took the cigar from his mouth with his other hand. He grinned, the cigar hovering an inch from her face. He looked at the old man.

“I brand her for you, yes?”

“We told you he isn’t here,” the old man said. “What do you want us to do?”

Ortega had told Mars the old man was a relation of some kind to Andrew. Of course he’d want to protect him. He’d need to get tough. “You tell me where he is or when he comes back. You tell me now, or I make her hurt. We can do this all night if you want.”

“You’re wasting your time.”

Mars raised an eyebrow. “Oh, yes?” He briefly touched the glowing cigar tip to the exposed skin on the woman’s arm.

She yelped, jerked her arm back.

“Stop it!” The old man was halfway out of his chair.

Mars stuck the cigar back in his mouth, used the free hand to draw the pistol from his waistband and point it at the old man’s gut. “No, no. You behave, okay?”

The old man sank back into his chair. Mars would have to watch him. The old guy looked calm, but he was ready to move. Mars could see he’d gotten a rise out of him. He stuck the revolver back in his pants, took the cigar out of his mouth again.

“Maybe this time I stick it in her eye,” Mars said.

The old man tensed. Mars was sure he was gearing up to try something. Ridiculous. Why didn’t he just tell Mars what he wanted to know?

Mars shrugged. Nothing to do but show he meant business. He brought the cigar up to the woman’s eye.

“No!” She tried to twist away, but Mars held her tight by the hair. “Tell him, Mike. Tell him about the thing Andrew left. That’s what he wants.”

Mars froze, looked back at the old man. His face was blank.

“What is this you say?” Mars yanked her hair for emphasis. “Talk.”

“Andrew left something here,” she said. “He told us to keep it for him. That’s why you’re looking for him, isn’t it?”

What’s this? Some kind of trick maybe. Still, Ortega hadn’t told Mars why this Andrew Foley was marked for death. Perhaps he’d taken something valuable, yes? Steal from the wrong people and you get dead pretty fast. So perhaps Mars could pick up a bonus for himself. What Ortega didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

“What is this thing? Talk now.”

“I don’t know what it is,” she said. “He never told us. He just said it was valuable and to take care of it while he was gone.”

“You’re lying.” Mars yanked her hair again, slapped her across the face. “Stop wasting my time.”

She blinked back tears. “Mike knows. Mike, tell him.” She looked at the old man with pleading eyes.

“Well?” Mars demanded. “You have something to tell me, or do I go back to work on her?”

The old man looked only lost and confused.

* * *

Linda was looking right at him, but Mike just didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. Then it hit him. It took a split second for him to understand. Linda was trying to buy time or cause a diversion or something. Mike was momentarily surprised. He hadn’t considered she’d be capable of subterfuge under pressure like this. He’d always thought of her as sassy, but she was evidently much tougher than he’d thought.

But having begun her diversion, she wasn’t sure where to go from here. She was dumping the ball off to Mike, and now he had to run with it.

“We didn’t open it,” Mike said. “It was a small package. It couldn’t be much.” Mike’s eyes shifted to Linda and narrowed. “You shouldn’t have said anything.”

“He’s going to kill us.” She was a good actress. Or maybe the terror was real.

“He’s going to kill us anyway.”

Mars snapped his fingers. “Hey! Remember me? I say who dies or not, okay? Maybe you give me this thing, and if it’s good, I let you live.”

“How do we know you won’t double-cross us?” Mike said.

Mars circled the table, got in Mike’s face, blew smoke in his eyes. “What you think’s going to happen? I hold all the cards here. I should kill you, then I can take my own sweet time ripping this cabin apart and I find the package anyway.”

They held each other’s gaze for long seconds. Mars puffed his cigar.

When Mars spoke next, his voice was low and calm and slow. “Now tell me where this package is. If you’re fucking with me, if this is some kind of trick, it won’t work. I’ll cut off your balls and shove them down your throat. Now where is it?”

Mike hesitated. Then, very deliberately, he shifted his gaze from Mars’s eyes to the overturned bowl on the table. Then he looked back at Mars.

Mars followed Mike’s line of vision to the table, noticed the big upside-down bowl in the center. He reached for the bowl. “What? Under here?”

Mike tensed. This was it.

When Mars flipped over the bowl, the tarantula scuttled directly at him, hairy legs flailing like a nightmare.

Mars’s scream was high-pitched and girlish; he lurched backward, rocked on his feet, unbalanced.

Mike leapt out of his chair, upended the table toward Mars. Dishes flew, clattered on the floor. Mike was already moving, fists flying toward the purple Hispanic. He was appalled at how slow and heavy he felt. He swung for Mars’s chin, had to keep the bad eye closed so he could aim.

Mars had recovered, swatted the punch away and kicked Mike in the balls. Mike sucked air, tried to keep his feet but ended up on his knees. He couldn’t get his breath. He felt like he was going to throw up, the ache from his balls spreading through his whole body.

Mars grabbed the revolver from his waistband, aimed it at Mike’s face. “ĄPuerco!”

The axe handle connected hard with Mars’s wrist. Mars yelled and dropped the pistol. It clattered across the wooden floor.

Linda had swept up the axe handle and was on Mars with a vengeance, eyes wide and wild, grunting with each swing. She landed another blow across Mars’s back. She swung it the other way and caught Mars full in the stomach. His eyes bulged. He made a fish face, sucking for air.

Mars looked panicked now. He glanced around him for an escape route. Linda pressed the attack, swung the handle at Mars’s jaw. His head spun around. Blood and gold teeth flew. Mars’s eyes rolled up and he stumbled, collapsed against a wall.

Mike still gulped for air, tried to regain his feet.

Linda stood over Mars, lifted the axe handle high, her eyes wild.

Mars tried to lift his head, his legs trembling.

She brought the axe handle down and hit the back of Mars’s head with a sharp crack. “Cocksucker! Son of a bitch. Burn me with a cigar, you motherfucker.” The axe handle lifted and fell three more times, bashing the back of Mars’s head until it was bloody. Her hands trembled. She dropped the axe handle, her hands going to her gasping mouth.

“Linda.”

She looked at Mike, went to him, put her arms around his shoulders. “Are you okay?”

“The spider,” he said. “Where’s the damn spider?”

She found it creeping around one of the chair legs, smashed it with her shoe. It oozed guts and goo.

Linda helped Mike into a chair. He still bent over from his aching balls, but he managed to meet her eyes. “What about you? You okay?”

She looked at Mars. He lay in ruin, the back of his bald head sticky with blood. “I did that. Jesus.”

“Forget it. He was going to kill us.” He touched Mars’s throat, looking for a pulse. Mike was surprised that his hand shook. “Dead.”

Linda said, “He wanted Andrew.” A question in her eyes.

“It’s a long story.” Mike was breathing easier now. He sat up straight in the chair, blinked his eyes. The ache in his balls had receded slightly, but he still had one fuzzy eye.

The front door burst open. Andrew stood there, Keone right behind him.

“What’s going on? We heard screams and—” He noticed the squashed spider. “Ew, gross.” Then his head turned. His gaze landed on the dead man in the purple suit. “Oh, hell.”

19

“That’s your killer,” Mike told his nephew.

The kid blinked. Mike interpreted the disbelief on his face. His nephew hadn’t fully believed someone was gunning for him. Sure, somebody had warned him, told him there was danger. But it had been an abstract concept. Now, reality sat slumped against a wall with half its gold teeth knocked out. A dead man in the living room. If things had gone just a little differently, it would have been Andrew who was dead.

Mike had some hard questions for Andrew, but now wasn’t the time. Linda looked like she was about to lose it. Mike took a few deep breaths and stood up. His balls still hurt, but he could move around. He hoped he wouldn’t piss blood later.

“Linda, are you going to be okay?”

She was sitting now, still trembling, sipping a glass of water. “I guess we need to call the police.”

Mike shrugged.

“Don’t we?” Linda looked up from her water glass, eyes misty. “The guy’s dead, isn’t he?”

“It might just cause trouble,” Mike said.

“Yeah,” Andrew jumped in. He’d probably just realized the police would ask a lot of awkward questions. “Maybe it’s a bad idea.”

She looked at Andrew, then back at Mike. “You’re kidding, right? We have to call the police. Don’t we?”

“It looks pretty bad.”

“It was self-defense.”

“Yes, it was. But look what we’ve got here,” Mike said. “The guy’s had the hell beat out of him with a stick. It’s going to seem excessive.”

“I—” Her voice caught. She sipped water. “I was so mad. Rage. I couldn’t believe this guy was going to burn me, then kill us. I was angry, you know?”

“That’s what kept us alive,” Mike said. “Your rage. That was some kind of survival thing kicking in. It saved us all. And a defense attorney would say the same thing. You’d get off, but they might cuff you first, take you in as a matter of routine. You might spend some time in jail until it came to trial. Think about it. Your husband was a cop. How did he do things? Arrest everyone and sort it all out later, right?” Mike was pouring it on a little thick, but he didn’t want the police. He wanted to frighten Linda just enough so she’d let him handle the situation his way.

“I don’t know. I mean— what if…” She shook her head. “What do we do?”

“Let me and Andrew take the body down the hill, bury it, and cover it over with rocks. That will be the end of it.”

She looked down at her water glass a long time. Finally, she nodded. “Okay.” The word slipped out, barely a whisper.

Keone squatted next to the dead body. Poked it with the axe handle.

“Keone!” Mike barked. “Go home. Don’t tell anyone about this.”

“Okay, boss.” He dropped the axe handle, skipped out the front door and into the night.

Worry etched Linda’s face.

“He won’t say anything,” Mike said. “Get your purse. I’ll drive you home.”

“And that’s it?” Linda asked. “I just go home like nothing’s happened? It feels wrong. My husband was a police officer. He’d never believe this.”

“You’d be surprised.” Back in the day, Mike had known several street-tough Irish cops who’d covered for each other almost just like this. They didn’t always trust the system to make the right decisions.

On his way out the door, Mike looked back at his nephew. “We need to have a serious talk when I get back.”

“Right.” Andrew swallowed hard, didn’t appear to be looking forward to it.

* * *

Andrew sat for fifteen minutes watching the cooling corpse, when some good news occurred to him. His would-be assassin was dead. That meant it was over, right?

Andrew scooted in close to the body, took a purple lapel between thumb and forefinger and slowly opened the dead man’s jacket. He kept thinking the guy was going to lurch awake zombie-style and grab him. Andrew reached into the man’s inside pocket and took out his wallet. A Texas driver’s license said he was Enrique Mars from Dallas. Andrew found three hundred and nine dollars in cash and put it in his pocket. He left the Visa card.

Andrew went for the pants pockets but hesitated. He didn’t really feel like reaching into a dead guy’s pants.

“Find his keys,” said a voice behind him.

Andrew jumped, spun to find his uncle standing three feet behind him. “Jesus. Are you a fucking ninja or something?”

“I can move quiet when I want to.”

“What’s the matter with your eyes?” Andrew noticed Mike had one closed tight.

“Nothing. I got something in there during the fight. Forget it. I said get his keys.”

“What for?”

“He left his car about three minutes’ walk up the road. That’s why we didn’t see any headlights.”

“He was a professional, huh?”

Mike scratched his chin, looked down at the dead thing in purple. “Semiprofessional, I’d say. He let a woman and an old man make him dead.”

“And a spider,” Andrew said.

“Midlevel muscle,” Mike said. “That’s what worries me.”

“He’s dead. What’s to worry?”

Mike shook his head, exhaled like his body finally remembered he was an old man. “No. Not that simple. Here’s what I think. Somebody back East found out where you were. They got lazy or cheap or both and picked up the phone to get somebody local to tie up loose ends. He’s probably out of St. Louis or Kansas City.”

Andrew sighed, handed Mike the wallet. “Dallas.”

“Bottom line is they know where you are.” Mike put a hand on Andrew’s shoulder and squeezed. Hard. “Something you want to tell me?”

No. He didn’t want to. But his uncle suddenly seemed scary. Not just cranky and hostile, but formidable. And he found himself spilling the whole story, how he’d mentioned to Vincent he had an uncle in Oklahoma but he didn’t think it was a big deal and Vincent was his pal and certainly wouldn’t tell anybody.

Mike said, “Anyone will talk. Maybe he’s your pal, but when they have a car battery hooked up to his nuts and he’s shit his pants and pissed himself, he’ll beg to talk. Anyone would. They might shove a broomstick up his ass. Break all the bones in his hands one at a time. Anything.”

“I’m not important enough to kill. It’s stupid.”

“That’s got nothing to do with it,” Mike said. “You saw something. Now you have to die. You’re dust that needs to be swept under the rug. You’re just a chore left undone, and somebody someplace can’t rest easy until all the chores are done.”

“I won’t tell anyone anything. I don’t know anything.”

“They don’t know that, and they don’t care. When this purple leg breaker doesn’t report in, they’ll send somebody else.”

Andrew went pale. He’d hoped it was over. “What do we do?”

“I have to think. In the meantime, if there’s anything else you haven’t told me, I need to know. You’re my brother’s boy. I’m going to help you, but if you hold out on me again, I’m going to bury you in the woods right next to this guy. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now get his keys.”

Andrew winced, but went through Mars’s pockets and found the keys. “Are we going to go get his car?”

“Yes, but first things first. Grab his feet. We’re going to bury him.”

“Now? Out there? In the dark?”

“You want to sleep with this dead guy in the house all night?”

Andrew grabbed his legs and lifted. They carried him down past the barn, picking up shovels and flashlights on the way. They went about a quarter mile down the hill, and Mike signaled for them to drop the body. They dug. The ground was full of rocks and it took them over an hour to carve out a shallow two-foot-deep grave. They dumped Mars into it.

By the time they finished covering it up, both of them were breathing hard.

“I’ll come back in the daylight and bury him deeper,” Mike said. “I’m too damn tired now.”

The walk back up the hill was a bitch.

When they got back to the cabin, Andrew wanted only to flop onto the couch.

“We’re not done yet.” Mike jingled Mars’s car keys.

They drove Mike’s truck to where Mars’s Caddy was parked, and Mike handed Andrew the keys. “Follow me back. We’ll search it in the morning, then dump it somewhere.”

Mike looked spectral by the yellow-orange of the dashboard lights. Before he got out of the truck, Andrew said, “Look, I know you didn’t ask for this. I know it was a surprise. But thanks. Thanks for helping me.”

A long pause, then Mike said, “I failed your father, Andrew. We were a team and I couldn’t hack it anymore so I ran. I left him holding the bag. I won’t do the same to you. I couldn’t be there for your old man, but I’m here for you.”

“He never told me that he blamed you for anything,” Andrew said.

A wan smile. “He wouldn’t. But he always thought we had a good thing going. When Mom and Dad died we were everything to each other, the Foley Boys. I let him down. I know I did. He didn’t have to say a thing. I knew what he was thinking.”

“You wanted to go straight.”

“No.” Mike shook his head. “It would be easy to say that. That would make me sound like a good guy, wouldn’t it? Fact is, I just lost my nerve.”

Andrew didn’t know what to say to that.

He got out of the truck and climbed behind the wheel of the Caddy. It was a big car. The top was down. He cranked the ignition. He found the headlights, put the car into gear, and followed his uncle back to the house.

Maybe he could run for it. What if he took this Cadillac, turned around, and just headed west, didn’t tell anyone where he was going? It wasn’t fair to trouble his uncle with this mess. He could just drive and keep on driving. But where? Andrew had nothing and nobody and no place to go. He had no ideas and no prospects and no idea how to live wherever he ended up.

And that was just way too much nothing for Andrew Foley. He parked the Caddy in front of the cabin, went inside, and handed the keys to his uncle.

20

Meredith Cornwall-Jenkins ironed her dress uniform at a Holiday Inn Express three miles from the Tulsa Army National Guard base. She planned to load up on ordnance, depending on what Ortega told her. She needed to know Andrew Foley’s situation. Was he holed up by himself? Was he surrounded by a posse of armed chums? Hopefully Ortega had the information for her.

She dialed the phone.

“Hello?” Ortega’s voice.

“What’s the word?”

A long pause. Ortega cleared his throat. “There’s been a complication.”

“Tell me.”

“I dispatched one of my problem solvers. I thought I could do you a favor. Eliminate the problem for you. But my man is overdue to report in. I can only assume he’s had the tables turned on him.” Ortega sighed. “I freely admit this was an error in judgment, and I stand ready to make it up to you.”

“I see,” Meredith said. “If this job was important enough for me to handle personally, did you think it would be an easy assignment?”

“No.”

“But you thought one of your thugs could handle it as well as I?”

“As I confessed,” Ortega said, “an error in judgment.”

“A costly error for you,” Meredith said.

“I was trying to save you some trouble. The man I sent was very capable.”

“Apparently not,” Meredith said. “Now all you’ve done is warn them we know where they are.”

Ortega didn’t have anything to say to that.

“When this is over, I’m going to pay you a visit and we’ll decide what punitive actions are necessary to soothe my wrath.” She hung up.

Idiot!

Ortega had been a lot more reliable in the old days. Still, she had to admit that Ortega had some tough sons of bitches working for him. If this man had been eliminated by the target, then this might be a little trickier than she’d originally planned. She decided she’d better go in hot with heavy firepower, sweep the whole area clean. She wanted this taken care of, and by God it was going to be quick and decisive.

She looked at her watch, picked up the phone again, and dialed her husband. She reminded him of the frozen dinners in the freezer and apologized for not picking up the dry cleaning before she left town. He was pleasant, but sounded like he’d already built himself a couple of scotch and sodas.

That wouldn’t do after they had the baby. Daddy needed to live clean and set a good example.

* * *

Meredith flashed her identification and rolled past the guardhouse and onto the National Guard base at six-thirty in the morning. She sipped coffee. Bleary eyes. This early in the morning bullshit was one thing she definitely did not miss about the military.

She followed the signs to the armory, then slammed on the brakes as she passed the airfield. The little Cayuse helicopter with the grenade launchers and 20mm cannon looked shiny, like it had just been washed and serviced. She flashed on a memory of her buzzing treetop level in Central America, little huts exploding in fire as brown villagers scrambled for the jungle.

The chopper was a bit obsolete, but that wasn’t a surprise. A lot of regular army units dumped their surplus at reserve posts whenever they upgraded. But she liked the looks of it.

She was probably a little rusty, but did anyone ever really forget how to fly a helicopter?

* * *

Nikki Enders paced the long halls of her family’s Garden District home, her footfalls echoing off the high ceilings and hardwood floors. Mother was somewhere knitting her scarf.

She paused in the library, stood beneath the sway of her father’s one-eyed gaze. The long windows on either side of the portrait made it seem as if Lordly light were pouring down from Heaven. Today his likeness in oil looked puzzled, as if he glared down at a stranger in his domain. Who are you, little girl? What are you about?

And that was the problem. She didn’t have immediate answers to those increasingly pertinent questions. Her prolonged downtime had facilitated the onset of a slow and uneasy revelation.

She did not, in fact, know who she was or what she was about.

Yes, she was a world-class killer, but there was something machinelike in the way she dispatched her targets, and lately that machine was breaking down. She absently rubbed her injured wrist. It was getting better.

Who she was as a person was something of a mystery even to herself. She looked for a book to read in the library but realized she did not know her own taste in literature. She could not remember the last thing she’d read that wasn’t a technical manual. If asked, she would not have been able to tell anyone her favorite film or musical group or even a television show she was fond of.

As a junior at Loyola, she’d had a boyfriend. They’d been sexually active. She strained to remember what it was like.

She gazed up at her father’s portrait, set her jaw. Yes, there would be a change. She would reintroduce herself to life. She could not have done it when her father was alive, but there was no Lord now to cast out upstart angels.

Meredith. Her sister had to come through for her, had to finish it. Nikki drifted back into the house’s dark depths, her ears open for the clicking of her mother’s knitting needles.