Smoked

CHAPTER THREE

Cruz slumped in the back of the black Mercedes S-500, sunk deep into the plush leather, his eyes closed behind reflector sunglasses. The earphones of his Sony Discman hung slightly askew, just enough that he could hear everything being said up front, but not so much as to arouse suspicion. At the same time, he could listen to his music. The compact disc was DANCE PARTY HITS OF THE 70’S, the soundtrack of his youth.

The song was Le Freak, by something called Chic.

He remembered it. He saw himself at a Manhattan dance club, brooding, holding up the bar, watching the young girls flaunt themselves out on the dance floor as the lights strobed crazily, streaks of technicolor electricity flying through the air. Again, he felt the rage, the yearning and the frustration. Nearly 30 years had passed since those days, and in all that time he had only managed to slap a few thin coats of whitewash over the real Cruz. His personality was like a slice of linoleum pasted over a dark abyss – if you dropped through, there was no bottom.

He had done this kind of work since the age of eighteen. That year, he had been cut loose from the youth home with two hundred dollars, plus cab fare to his aunt’s house in Corona, Queens, and an appointment to see a job counselor out there a week later. They had let him go with a kiss on the cheek and a kick in the ass.

He never made it to Queens.

His aunt didn’t want him, and why should she? He had lived with her at the age of ten, then again at fourteen. He was bad news, the product of her sister the drug addict’s wasted life. His face carried a deep knife scar from one of her sister’s many boyfriends, a maniac who one night decided to cut the little boy’s eyes out. Luckily, the maniac had been too drunk to see what he was doing or hold onto the boy for long – Cruz – who ran screaming out of the squalid apartment. But the scar on his face was only an emblem of the deeper scars he carried. Cruz was trouble, and he knew it. No, his aunt would not have him, and on some level, he didn’t blame her. She wasn’t yet thirty years old herself, struggling with three young kids of her own. Cruz was enough to sink them all.

She had called him the day before he was set to leave the home. He stood at the pay phone in the concrete stairwell. A couple of younger kids were talking and laughing down at the other end of the narrow hall.

He looked at them. Gradually, they sensed his stare. Then they left.

“Chuco, do me a favor, ah?” his aunt said.

“Yeah,” he said, already knowing what was coming.

“Don’t come over here. I got enough to worry about with the kids and the rent and all the rest. You know? I like you, Chuco. You was good when you was a kid. But now… you know? It’ll be bad having you here. I don’t got the room. I don’t want the cops coming here. You understand, right?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“You’ll do good, Chuco. You’ll figure it out.”

“Yeah.”

“Just don’t come here. You come here, I can’t let you in. I’ll call the cops myself, okay? I’ll tell ‘em you stole my money.”

Cruz hung up.

He rode the cab into Manhattan, stopped at a check-cashing place, cashed the two hundred, stuffed most of it in his sock, and checked into a twenty dollar a week room at a Single Room Occupancy hotel on the west side, not far from the river. He paid for a week up front. Then he sat upstairs and cried for an hour. Cried for everything. He gave himself one hour to get the cry in, no more. He even timed it on the Timex watch one of the teachers at the youth home had given him. At the end of an hour, he stopped and looked around. The room was about twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide. There was a narrow bed and a sink. There was a cheap wooden dresser with a sticky blotter pasted on top of it. There was a closet with a couple of coat hangers. The old white paint was peeling crazily, showing a nasty green behind it – the walls, the ceiling, everywhere. A window looked out onto the fire escape. The street was three stories below. The bathroom was down the hall.

He’d never been here before, but instinctively he knew the game. There would be predators in the bathroom. They’d be looking for an easy mark on the shitter, an easy mark in the shower. People would break into his room while he wasn’t home, looking for money. Junkies would drop dead from ODs. He’d be lucky if some junkie didn’t burn the place down in the middle of the night with a cigarette or a hot plate left on. The management wouldn’t do shit about any of it.

Anyway, it was a start.

He went out. If there was an answer to his problems, he wasn’t going to find it staring at the four walls of his room. The answer was out there, on the streets. He resolved that he would find that answer, whether that meant he had to go to prison, or whether he died with his blood running in the gutter. The thought appealed to him. He would live, and thrive, and make it big, or he would die. No compromise.

He went to Times Square.

1976. The Bicentennial. 200 years of flag waving and good times. Rocky. Jaws. And in a lighter vein, 18 amp; Horny and Guess Who’s Coming. Just outside the Theatre District, the Broadway of A Chorus Line and The Wiz, Times Square lay spread like the blighted whore she was. The lights dazzled Cruz. The pimps and hookers and drug dealers hanging out with beer cans in paper bags, the streams of runaway kids, the junkies, the scumbags, the pickpockets, the johns, the freaks who wanted to fuck children – a circle of lost souls. The blood banks, the liquor stores, the X-rated movie houses, the massage parlors, the greasy spoon diners with deals going down in every booth – there was barely a legitimate business in the whole neighborhood. Times Square was an open sewer. In 1976, for someone with the right kind of eyes, it was also a glittering promise.

Cruz loved it.

He went to a live peep show and watched a big black guy tool a tiny oriental girl on a table. He bought a dollar in booth tokens, and every time the screen went down on this little act, he pumped in another token.

Then he went and bought himself two hot dogs, fries and a Coke at Nedick’s. He stayed there a long time, watching the action out on the street. The sex, the freedom, the crazy sparkling madness of the place – it was a revelation.

“Hey kid,” a fat little bald man said one night a week later. “I seen you hanging around here a lot. Wanna make some money?”

“What do I have to do?”

“You look like a sharp kid. Ever hurt anybody before?”

Cruz smiled. “Sure.”

Now, a much older man, he smiled again at the memory.

He opened his eyes and glanced around. He liked this Mercedes. It was a comfortable car, damn near the top of the line, and probably three years old. Cruz hated new cars. The new car smell made him sick to his stomach. This car was perfect. It didn’t smell like anything and had that kind of smooth ride where the bumps in the road were like a rumor you had heard years ago. You couldn’t hear the outside at all.

Quiet as a tomb.

The car was cruising the highways somewhere in New England. It didn’t matter where right now. They had passed Hartford a little while back. The kids up front were supposed to wake him up when they entered Maine. From behind his shades, he noticed the color on the trees along the highway – reds, yellows, orange.

Cruz was tired. He had flown in from New Orleans on about two hours sleep. At La Guardia, he bought a small tin of Vivarin caffeine pills, crushed two up, and snorted them for breakfast. The limo – a big Lincoln Town Car – snatched him at the airport and whisked him straight into the city. The driver – an old Polack or Russian – gave him his next gun, his next Glock. It came in a handsome padded traveling case that Cruz threw into a garbage can before they even left the airport. Cruz didn’t care about presentation – he planned to carry the gun, loaded, ready to pop.

The driver also gave him the dossier for this job, sealed for Cruz’s eyes only. The same dossier was now at Cruz’s feet. He read it while the limo took him across the Tri-Borough Bridge into Manhattan, then down the FDR Drive. He would read it again before they got to Portland. Gave him everything he needed to know about this guy Smoke Dugan, as well as the two young guys he would ride along with on this trip.

The meeting in Manhattan had been short and sweet. It was at a coffee shop on Fifth Avenue in Greenwich Village, just up from the park. They moved around all the time, staying one step ahead of the bugs. Big Vito and Mr. C.

Mr. C never spoke. Just in case the bugs were already in place. After a lifetime on the outside, he was not going to die in prison. He sat there wrapped in a long wool coat, his thin hair slicked back, his face old and lined and unshaven, his eyes bright, sharp and aware. At all times, he held an unlit Havana in his liver-spotted and palsied hand. The world had changed and now cigars were bad for you. Mr. C would regard that cigar at the end of his fingers and sigh. Sometimes he nodded at something that was said. Sometimes he managed a ghost of a smile.

“You gonna eat?” Big Vito said. In person, his voice sounded like gravel pouring from the back of a dump truck. His nose was wide and flat. It had been broken so many times, it looked like a lump of mashed potatoes. Above it, his eyes were like twin lasers. His eyebrows were gray. His hair was gray shot through with white.

Fantastic Four, getting old himself. Cruz imagined those big stone hands choking the life out of someone. The legend was that’s how Big Vito used to do it to you. Strangle you with his bare hands.

“I don’t know. How’s the food?”

“Would we be here if it was bad? Come on, Cruz. You gotta eat. Keep up your strength.” He looked to Mr. C for confirmation. Mr. C nodded his agreement.

“All right, I’ll eat.”

Vito waved over the skirt.

Cruz looked at the menu. He spoke in a quiet voice. “Three eggs, scrambled. With Swiss cheese. Sausage. Corned beef hash. Black coffee.”

“That’s what you’re gonna eat?”

“What’d you think, a fruit cup?”

“Nah, it’s just, you know. They got healthier items. Look. Egg whites. Turkey bacon. Anything you want.”

Cruz put the menu down. “I think I’ll stick with what I said.”

The girl went away.

“We read the paper today,” Vito went on without preamble. “You know, got the box scores. Checked everything out.”

“Yeah? What do you think?”

“Good. We’re happy the home team won.”

Mr. C. nodded, licked his lips, gave his cigar a long look.

“Very pleased,” Vito said.

“Good,” Cruz said. “I want everybody to be happy.”

“Everybody is.”

There was a pause. “You looked at what we left you? The driver gave it to you?”

“Yeah. Not sure I get it, but… ”

“What’s to get? It’s in plain English, right?”

“Oh yeah, that’s not it. It just seems like, maybe a little lightweight. Retrieval isn’t my thing. I’m usually in, how do you want to call it, disposal.”

“It ain’t lightweight. You let us worry about the thinking end of it. You just make it happen.” Vito wrote something on a napkin and passed it across to Cruz. 63 and Lex. Black Mercedes. Massachusetts plates.

“I’ll make it happen,” Cruz said.

The girl was coming with the food. The two men got up to leave. “Enjoy your breakfast.”

“You guys ain’t gonna stay?”

“You know, we got business. Never ends.”

Cruz looked at the breakfast. It made his stomach turn.

Mr. C eyed him closely.

“Hey Cruz,” Vito said. “How ya feeling?”

“All right.”

“You know, because you look like shit. We worry about you. Maybe you need some time away, like down in the islands. Maybe when things slow down a little.”

“Yeah,” Cruz said. “That sounds good.” He dug into the food.

Now, in the Mercedes, he watched the two young men up front with some interest.

The dossier at his feet included information about both these two kids. The driver was a big muscle guy, wore a leather cap and black sunglasses. The other one was skinny and missing three fingers on his right hand. Jesus, who were they hiring nowadays? Cruz was wary of the whole thing. He had worked on his own for years, and now they gave him this babysitting job, with these kids to drive him. He didn’t like it.

The one in the passenger seat was Ray “Fingers” Pachonka. He had lost those fingers playing with explosives. Lucky to be alive after a fuck-up like that.

The driver was Roland Moss. Late twentysomething. Former bouncer, former legbreaker. Barely two years in the murder business, and he had been in on a dozen hits.

Roland is strong as an ox. He likes to hurt people. Likes to make them talk.

That’s what the dossier said.

Cruz watched them carefully, mostly because he didn’t trust them. Cruz had learned early on that it was best not to trust anybody, especially young men who believed themselves to be on the rise. He had learned this from himself.

He listened in to their conversation for a moment.

“So they sent us to do this jigaboo one time,” the skinny one, Fingers, said. He spoke rapid fire, like a machine gun, or the heartbeat of a rabbit. Bippity, bippity, bippity. “The guy had ripped somebody off. I don’t remember the details. Different job, same bullshit. Right?”

“Yeah,” said the big one, Roland Moss. The guy could be a pro wrestler, Cruz thought. His broad shoulders extended past the edges of his bucket seat. His neck was a trunk line, his head sitting perched on top like a pomegranate. The muscles in his neck stood out and flexed like cables.

“They sent us to Gary fucking Indiana, just outside Chicago.” Fingers paused, seemingly for effect. “I mean we fucking drove out there. Me and Sticks. You know Sticks? Little guy, smokes a lot. Pissed off, always wants to cut somebody. Somebody doesn’t signal in the car ahead of him, he wants to cut the guy. You know him, right?”

Moss nodded. He spoke slowly, like syrup pouring from a bottle. “Yeah, I know him. Did a couple jobs with him. Saw him cut a man’s eyes out once.” He sounded like he was giving it a taste of the South. The dossier said he was from New Jersey.

Fingers nodded. “Yeah, that’s him. Sticks. Crazy as a fucking loon. So we drive out there, me and him. And Gary Indiana is like, nothing you ever seen before. Everybody is gone, except some jigs that couldn’t make it in Shy-town. All the buildings are empty. Or just plain gone. A wasteland. So we find the jig, drive him around for a while. He’s all acting cool, like his life is worth something. Like he thinks we drove all this way just to, I don’t know, shoot the shit or something. He has this gym bag with him? He has a fucking Tec-9 in there.”

“Piece of shit,” Moss drawled.

“All right, a Tec-9. It’s a piece of shit. But I mean this jig has it in the gym bag, and he has a forty round clip in it, and then he has this custom twelve dozen round drum magazine, you should’ve seen the fucking thing. Like something out of the movies. He says he has the thing modified for full auto, and this big drum to attach to it. Can you imagine this guy running around, spraying bullets everywhere? No wonder all these little kids get shot in these jig neighborhoods. You got these guys running around, think they’re fucking Rambo. Am I right?”

“I never saw a gun like that,” Moss said.

“You wouldn’t see one. Only a crazy person would have one. So anyway, we bring him to this abandoned building, right? We take him upstairs. Now he’s not as cool, he’s starting to get the message. We bust him up a little. Then, you know Sticks, he starts to cut the guy up. It’s all right, but it’s a lot of blood and shit now. The jig is crying and all this, half his face coming off. Sticks cut the jig’s lips off, you know what I mean? The guy’s teeth are like out to here.”

Fingers held his hand out about a foot in front of his face. He laughed, an uncertain sound. “I don’t know about Sticks, man. He should’ve been a butcher or some shit. He gives me the fucking creeps, to be honest.”

“And the guy never pulled the gun?” Moss said.

“Yeah. He never pulled it. He never got anywhere near it. A hundred and forty four rounds. A lot of good it did him, right? So finally, I take over from Sticks and I’m just like let’s do this shit and get out of here. So I take the jig and I tell him, you know, that’s it, man. You’re done. He’s grateful by then. He just wants the whole thing over with. They got these floor to ceiling windows and they’re all busted out. So I send him out the window. We’re about six stories up, right? By now, it’s full on dark. And I send him down into a vacant lot down there. I mean, the whole city’s a vacant lot. The guy didn’t scream or anything. He just sailed down there in total silence.

“So here’s my point. We go downstairs to the street, and it’s like, let’s check it out, let’s make sure this guy is dead. We go around back and here’s the jig. He’s laying there and the whole top of his head is broken off. You know what I mean? I mean, he hit the pavement and the top of his head broke off – right above the eyes. He was like a stewpot with the lid off. His eyes were open and I thought for a second he was looking right at me – I thought he was gonna say something. And his brain had come out and was sitting there on the ground. So I’m just standing there looking at this brain, and the jig with his eyes open is laying there like he’s awake. And the brain – it was like a bowl of Jello. You know, when you turn the Jello upside down and it comes out all in one piece? It was like that. Like a toy. It was fucking perfect.

“So what does Sticks say? He’s like, let’s take the brain.”

“He wants to take the brain,” Moss said. He laughed, a short, deep bark. “That sounds about right for Sticks.”

Fingers nodded. “Yeah, he wants the brain. I’m like, you got to be fucking kidding me. Is this a joke? He wants to take it for a souvenir. Thinks he’ll put it in his refrigerator or maybe pickle it. And he starts getting adamant about it. I’m like, man, I am not driving twelve fucking hours to New York with a brain in the car. You want the brain, call a cab.”

Cruz had had enough of their conversation.

He slipped the music back on his ears and picked the dossier off the floor. He started to read about Smoke Dugan again, but then changed his mind. Instead, he gazed out the window and watched the passing trees.

Pamela jogged the Back Cove trail.

It was three and a half miles of dirt track around the Cove. On a cool fall day like today, the trail was packed with joggers, walkers – some with baby strollers, and bicyclists. It was high tide and the Cove shimmered blue with the skyline of the city in the distance. Out on the water, two wind surfers raced back and forth.

Pamela was an avid jogger. She jogged here often, stealing glances at the men who passed. The Back Cove trail was a veritable smorgasbord of fit people out getting their exercise. She noticed the women, too. The women in their tight spandex shorts and halter tops. The sexy women with whom she could never compete.

She in her sweat pants and layered t-shirts.

God, what was wrong with her? As long as could remember, she had always been this way. Shy, retiring, tongue-tied with people she did not know. But she was good looking. At least she thought she was and Lola always told her she was. But she was twenty-nine years old, and more than three years had passed since she had been alone. She thought of her last boyfriend – Thomas – bookish, thin, with glasses. He was smart and had an off-beat, self-deprecating sense of humor. He was a student at the University of Maine law school, and when he graduated, he asked her to marry him.

She said no.

Things were good with Thomas, and she thought long and hard about becoming his wife. But in the end, he wasn’t her type. At least, he wasn’t the type she imagined was hers. And she was not the quiet suburban wife of Thomas the corporate lawyer. She recalled the last time they had made love, right before he left town for Providence, Rhode Island. He had cried, and so had she, and they had stopped halfway through. It made her think of the old joke – if I’d known the last time was really going to be the last time…

Why could she never seem to find a man?

She was bookish, certainly, just like Thomas. From the earliest age, she had been more interested in reading books and watching movies than in dealing with people. Life seemed so boring sometimes, and the lives lived in books, well, they seemed so exciting. She had grown up in Newmarket, New Hampshire, a town where the big excitement was the freight trains passing through town – so close to her family’s backyard that Pamela often thought of jumping aboard as the open cars passed – and summers on the nearby Seacoast beaches. In the evenings, she and her brother would often play Scrabble or Monopoly with her mom and dad. It was a normal, stable life. And for Pamela, from the time she was a little girl, the real excitement – and maybe the only deep enjoyment – came from escaping into the stories. The Nancy Drew mysteries. Encyclopedia Brown. A little later, The Lord of the Rings. And of course, the movies: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and The Never Ending Story.

She envied Lola. She loved her like a sister, but there was also the sting of envy. Could you imagine? Lola had grown up in a Chicago housing project – a slum where drug deals went down on street corners, where gunfire sounded at night, where men murdered each other in the hallways. Just last week, two men tried to rape her, she beat them both at once, and now she acted like it never happened. Pamela could never do that, would never want something similar to happen to her, and yet, there was something about it that enticed her.

She remembered how as a girl, she would imagine herself as a pirate. Not as a woman who hung around with pirates, but as an actual pirate herself, sailing the high seas, attacking and plundering other ships, making people walk the plank.

She would give anything to live a life of swashbuckling adventure. She should have become a cop, or a spy, or an ambulance driver – not a librarian who half the time felt afraid to meet the eyes of library patrons.

Face it, her life was boring. It was an endless string of days, each fading into the next, her youth passing away fruitlessly. The lives of the library patrons were boring, too. She watched them. She saw the emptiness in their eyes, the longing for escape, the unfulfilled wishing for something, anything, to happen. Even the homeless people – she had once held a romantic notion that the life of a homeless person might be exciting. But they came into the library by the dozens during the cold weather. They slumped in chairs and dozed. They leafed through magazines for hours on end. Some of them simply sat and stared into space. The homeless people led boring lives.

Adventure. That’s what she longed for, what she had always longed for. To be in danger. To survive on the edge. And to take a lover, a dark and handsome stranger – yes, just like in the books – a desperate man with rippling muscles, yes and long hair and a fire in his belly. A savage, passionate man. Yes.

She finished her run at the parking lot. She was sweaty, out of breath, and felt exhilarated as always. It was a nice day, and it was good to get these negative thoughts out of her system. She consoled herself as she stretched on the grass near her peppy little car, a Volkswagen Golf.

Someday, she thought, it will happen. I will be like Lola. And I’ll lead a life of adventure just like the one she has lead.

Empty hand, empty mind.

Lola sat cross-legged on a wool blanket. She had placed the blanket on the gently sloping hill of the city’s Eastern Promenade. Eastern Prom was the extremity of the peninsula that made up downtown Portland. A long avenue of stately Victorian mansions giving way to early 20^th century tenement buildings on one side of the street, and a grassy park and pedestrian walkway overlooking the islands of Casco Bay on the other side, the Prom was just around the corner from her apartment. Indeed, Lola could see this same bay from her back deck, if she chose. As on any Sunday in the fall, the bay was dotted with white sails driven by the wind – there was a sailboat rental concession on the waterfront not a half mile away from where she sat.

Lola came here to meditate.

Empty hand was karate. She learned to fight with no weapon but herself – and she believed now, for the first time, that she needed no other. Empty mind was Zen, a path that had been married to karate almost since the beginning. It was a term one of her teachers had given her. The karate practitioner – the karateka – sought to train herself to develop a clear conscience, an empty mind. This would enable her to face the world truthfully. An empty mind was tranquil – because to see the truth meant no fear of death, no fear of pain, no fear of anything. An empty mind lived in the present, the essential time, the only time that was available. The past was irretrievably lost and the future was forever unattainable. There was no time but now.

She sat, eyes closed, facing the water. Her hands were upturned and resting lightly, one on each folded knee. She wore jeans and a light jacket. Her feet were bare, her sandals kicked off in front of her. The cold breeze blew across her, each gust with the bite of the coming winter embedded deep within it. She took deep breaths, each one coming from the belly, and with each breath she tried – she tried too hard – to let go. It was no use. The memories flooded back. They always did.

She thought of the time when the bad thing happened.

She was living with her grandmother, an old woman who had seen more than her share of heartbreak. They lived together in a two-bedroom unit at the Robert Taylor Houses, the largest public housing complex in the world. Lola hated it there. She hated the grim towers that dominated the landscape, and she hated the fenced in outdoor walkway that made their apartment seem like some kind of motel room. She hated the drug dealers who plied their trade, bottle by bottle, in broad daylight. She hated the police who circled like vultures. She hated the pimps and the crack whores and the crack heads. She hated the couples who fucked – there was no other word for it – in the stairwells, and the muggers and the molesters who lurked in the shadows, and the thieves and the murderers and the corpses that sometimes turned up on the sidewalks in the very early mornings.

She hated them all.

She kept her hate inside herself, clutched it tightly to her like she clutched her schoolbooks. She didn’t show her hate to them. Instead, she went about her business and dreamed of the day when she would be away from here. She knew from the television that there was another life outside of this one, a life where people weren’t afraid all the time, where you could go outside after dark, where it was okay to show weakness, where people smiled and said “thank you” and “please.”

But for now, this was where they lived, and since Lola’s mother had died, there was nowhere else for her to go. And Lola’s relationship with her grandmother was great. They talked and laughed together easily, as though there weren’t fifty years between them. Her grandmother had even scraped the money together to send Lola for modern dance instruction. By sixteen, it was clear that Lola wasn’t going to Broadway, but she still enjoyed it and it kept her fit.

But dancing for fun ended that early spring afternoon.

Months before, she had discovered a shortcut, a path that cut across a vacant lot about a quarter of a mile down from where the project started. She would walk home from the bus station, and spy that path cut through the weeds, and think that it would probably save her five minutes walking time. At first, she wouldn’t walk that path. But then one day, she got up the guts to do it. It was a weedy jungle back there, ripped clothes hanging from the bushes, broken glass littering the packed down earth. Her heart was beating something terrible, but she made it through.

Afterward, she realized that if she stuck to the path, there was only a moment, perhaps thirty seconds of walking, perhaps a full minute, where she lost sight of both the street behind her and the one ahead of her. Surely nothing could happen during those short seconds. She started taking the path regularly, and nothing happened except she reached home five minutes earlier.

But there was a boy named Kendrick who said he liked her and kept nagging her when she walked the streets. She didn’t like him. He had been tall, a big dumb boy, always playing basketball in junior high school and early on in high school. He was gonna go pro one day, right? He was still tall, but now he was selling drugs and he didn’t go to school anymore. With his vacant stare, and his bloodshot eyes, he looked like he was high most of the time.

Kendrick was a loser.

He was never going to get out of the neighborhood, and by that age, Lola realized that the only hope a person had was to get out of the neighborhood. In any event, she could tell the look in his eyes. He only wanted her for sex. She wanted no part of that – no part of a boy who thought of himself as a desperado, and would soon go the same way as the rest of the desperadoes. Jail. Addiction. Death. One of those, and maybe all three.

But Kendrick the loser was insistent.

“Oh, you’re gonna be with me,” he told her with a smile. “You think you’re too good for everybody. I tell you little sister, you ain’t gonna be uppity like that for long.”

On the fateful day, she debated with herself as she always did. Should I take the shortcut? Should I go the long way around? Once again, she took the shortcut. As soon as she reached that point where neither street was visible, a voice spoke behind her.

“Little Miss Uppity Nigger. Girl, why you always cutting through this back way? You looking for somebody back in here?”

There was laughter. She turned.

Maybe twenty feet behind her was Kendrick, and he wasn’t alone. He was accompanied by two other boys, Tyrone and Abel. Lola knew all three of them. Tyrone and Abel were a year behind her at school. They were following Kendrick down the sewer. They grinned at her.

The facts came to her in one second flat – pierced her awareness like a bullet to the brain. The boys were here for a reason, and it was all business. They had been watching her, and they knew she took this shortcut.

She dropped her books, turned and ran.

Just ahead on the path were two more boys. They were brothers. Michael and Ishmael. Coming this way. For a moment she thought she was saved. Two people on the path. Witnesses. Then she saw the grins – the boys hadn’t come to rescue her. They had looped around the block on Kendrick’s orders.

They went for her. She tried to bolt past them with her big legs and her speed. But then their strong young hands were on her. One hand grabbed her by the hair and yanked her head backwards.

“Bitch, where you think you going?”

Bitch. The word stung like a slap. It was a strong word, a hateful word, and she felt paralyzed against its force.

They took her deeper into the lot, behind some bushes. There was an old mattress back there, and some old and tattered pornographic magazines. She could hear the traffic out on Dan Ryan Freeway, but she didn’t cry out. Then they stuffed a dirty sweat sock in her mouth and she couldn’t cry out.

They did their dirty business, one at a time, while the others looked on and critiqued the action. She didn’t remember much except the sharp and terrible pain in the beginning, and then the sun in her eyes as it sank behind the buildings, bringing an end to another gray day in Chicago. That and the sound of their whispering voices as they talked about her as if she weren’t human, as if except for her body, she wasn’t even there.

“Damn. I didn’t know she was a virgin.”

“Nigger, how you gonna know something like that?”

“Learn something new every day.”

“She ain’t one no more.”

They giggled like the children they had been only recently.

Then she was alone. No, there was one person left. It was Kendrick, more than six feet tall, towering over her as she lay on the mattress. He spit on her, and the saliva landed on her breasts and stomach.

“You ain’t so uppity now. Am I right?”

Then he too was gone.

It was almost dark. There were sounds of rustling in the weeds, the rats that lived at the edge of human society. Thousands of them were all around the Robert Taylor Houses, maybe millions of them, feeding off the garbage of more than twenty thousand people. She didn’t want to stay there a moment longer. She didn’t want to see the rats, of course. But at night, back in that horrible lot, there were worse things than rats. Anybody might come along. Somebody worse than those boys, even.

Her clothes were all around her, on the mattress and on the ground. They at least had the decency to leave her something to wear home. She got dressed, went back to the trail, gathered up her books, and went on home.

Smoke lay in bed, enjoying the bright play of light, and the cool breeze coming through the open window. Both Lola and Pamela were out somewhere.

Sunday was the day Smoke most loved to sleep in. It had little or nothing to do with it being a day of rest after a week of labor. Smoke’s schedule was his own. No, it was a sense of nostalgia, of romance.

And football.

It was already noon. In an hour, the Patriots would come on TV. Smoke had adopted them since he had been here in Maine. He would spend the day with them, sipping his wine, and perhaps enjoying a cigar on the deck during half-time. He might watch the second game, he might not – but for three hours, the New England Patriots would command his complete attention.

He lay there and relished this thought.

Then he remembered sitting in the darkened living room.

It was a sunken living room in another life, when he wasn’t yet Smoke. It was the kind of living room in the kind of house that middle class housewives looked at and salivated over in glossy magazines. Black leather furniture converged in the center of the room. At the far end, there was a fireplace that was as clean as a hospital floor – split logs were piled inside it, but it probably hadn’t been lit in years. Floor to ceiling windows looked out across the patio and the sloping lawn to the Long Island Sound. To the left of the patio, blue and red lights beamed up from the floor of the in-ground swimming pool. Behind the sofa Smoke sat on, there was a huge canvas – a giant orange dot on a white background.

Modern art. The fat man was a collector.

Presently the fat man came out of the nearby bedroom wrapped in a thick terrycloth robe. He wore slippers and walked through the shadows of the living room, headed toward the kitchen. Must’ve heard something in his sleep, Smoke mused. Decided to eat something. Smoke noted that his hair was greased, even now.

Smoke reached inside his jacket and fingered the Taser pistol strapped there. Before he came he had popped eight new Energizer AA batteries in it. It was ready to fry.

The fat man waddled along like he wasn’t going to stop.

“Roselli,” Smoke said.

The fat man stopped, did a double take, looked again at Smoke sitting there on his couch, legs folded, cane in hand.

Give Roselli credit. He was half-asleep, no reason to expect anyone, no way anyone could get in, the whole house alarmed, yet he didn’t look frightened or even all that surprised. The fat fuck never lost his composure – if he had, Smoke had never seen it. Roselli was like all the rest. When it came right down to it, it was hard to scare these guys. The only emotion you could get from them was anger.

“O’Malley? What the fuck are you doing in my living room? At…” he looked at the clock on the opposite wall. “Three-thirty in the morning?”

“I came to talk. Why don’t you sit down?”

Smoke gestured at one of the leather chairs.

“Sit down, shit. How the fuck did you get in here?”

Smoke offered the chair again.

Something in Smoke’s eyes registered with Roselli. The fat man walked over and eased his weight down into the chair. He pulled the robe tight around his belly. He ran a beefy hand through his hair, making sure it was slicked back. He stared at Smoke across the short distance between them. He squinted.

“O’Malley? I wanna say something to you right now. I known you a good long time. You were always a good kid. This ain’t right, you being in my house like this. People eat shit for this kind of thing. Less than this. What if my wife was here? My kids? It don’t look right.”

“Your wife and kids live in Florida, Roselli.”

Roselli stabbed the air with a finger. His face turned red. “Don’t fuck with me, O’Malley. You know that’s not my point. You want me to come over there and wring your neck? Is that why you’re here? You’re in my fucking house, you fuck. And you got exactly three seconds to explain what you’re doing here.”

Smoke took a deep breath. “Flight 1311,” he said. “New York to Helsinki with ninety-seven people on board.”

Roselli stopped. He shrugged. His hands floated upward in the air, palms toward the ceiling. They lingered there, and a long moment passed.

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” Roselli said. “You wanna talk about that, I got no problem. But now ain’t the time. And this ain’t the place. You got a work related problem, you need to call me and set up a meet. Go home, O’Malley. Call Angela on Monday, she’ll set you up with a time. Then we can talk.”

Smoke didn’t move. “In 1978, I torched twenty-one buildings up in the Bronx. Remember? That was 1978 alone. We did buildings starting in ’74, and I did my last one in ’80. It was a brisk business there for a while. You know how many people died in all those buildings I did? You know how many?”

Roselli waved his meaty hand. “O’Malley,” he said. “I’m telling you. You go on out the way you came in. If you disappear right now, I’m gonna forget this ever happened. You call Angela on Monday, and we’ll set up a time and place. We’ll talk all you want.”

“None,” Smoke said. “That’s how many. We spread the word, cleared everybody out, and nobody died. We even cleared the bums and the junkies out of the real shit-holes, didn’t we? Even gave them a chance to live, right?”

Roselli cleared his throat. “That’s right, we did.”

Smoke reached inside his jacket again. “So what changed? What changed so much that you’re willing to blow planes out of the sky, with women and children and goddamn fucking exchange school students on board? What happened, you fat piece of shit?”

Roselli was silent for a time.

“Times changed, O’Malley. And money changes things. You know that. It was the Russians. You know how those motherfuckers are. There was a guy on that plane, a Moscow guy on his way home. They couldn’t get near him on the ground, so… Listen, O’Malley. Somebody tells you the biggest score out there is you bring down a plane. They’re gonna pay you, maybe you owe them a favor and this is a way to get out of it. Maybe there’s even more to it than that. I don’t give a shit who you are. You do it.”

“You told me it was a bank job. You told me you needed some C-4, a timer, and a blasting cap, something to detonate with. Did I have the stuff? Could I put it together? You said you had some guys who needed to bring down a cinderblock wall.”

Roselli stood from his chair. He sighed, and then managed a small smile. He seemed to like the smile, so he tried on a bigger one. It worked for him. He showed his teeth.

“I didn’t think you’d do it if you knew what it was for.”

Despite the grin, his eyes flashed malice. They said he would never forget this intrusion, that as far as he was concerned, O’Malley had signed his own death warrant.

Smoke stood, rising on his cane. “I wouldn’t have.”

They faced each other. Abruptly, Roselli’s grin disappeared. “Is that what you came to tell me? That you’re better than I am? Got more principles? If so, it could’ve waited. It can wait forever, actually.” He pursed his lips. “You want more money? That I’ll consider. Call the office, like I said.”

Roselli turned to go.

“Now get the fuck out.”

Smoke pulled the Taser out of his jacket.

“Roselli, one thing before I leave.”

The fat man spun around. His robe flapped open again, exposing the hairy expanse of his chest. “Yeah?”

Smoke stepped forward and let Roselli have it. The twin probes of the Taser flew out and caught Roselli just below the neck. Fifty thousand volts of electricity coursed into Roselli’s body. His nervous system overwhelmed, Roselli jittered and jived, the rolls of fat on his neck jiggling, his teeth clicking together. Five seconds was a long time. He danced a bit more then went down, all three hundred pounds dropping like a lead weight. His eyes rolled back in his head. Drool formed at the corners of his mouth.

Smoke looked down at him.

“Roselli?”

The fat man’s eyes fluttered, then opened. After a moment, they focused on Smoke again. When Roselli spoke, his voice was a rasp. “You know Ice Pick Tony? Maybe you never had the pleasure. Well, now you’re gonna. I give you my word. Tony’s gonna take you to his place in Queens, hang you upside down in the shower, and bleed you like the fucking pig that you are.”

The probes spent, Smoke used the Taser’s touch stun feature to give him another jolt.

Roselli blanked out. He woke up one more time before the end.

“You ain’t shit, O’Malley. You never were more than hired help. Ask anybody.”

Then he rode the juice again.

Smoke was three miles away when the place blew. He parked on a hillside, looking back west toward the city. Over the far horizon, he could see the glow from millions of lights against the darkened sky. New York City, where the lights never went out.

Much closer, a fireball went up suddenly, literally a ball of fire, on a straight vertical line like a rocket ship headed for orbit. A long rolling boom came across the land a few seconds later. An after-burst went up, a smaller one, and then another boom.

Moments of silence passed, orange and red flames flickering in the night. It was so quiet that Smoke could hear them licking and crackling across the miles.

Then the sirens began.

Smoke got back in the car and started it up. Roselli was dead. Soon, O’Malley would join him, going down with his boat in heavy seas off Orient Point.

And somewhere out there, a new life was waiting for James Dugan.

The children were all the same.

Big Roland Moss was going to fuck with him now, test him a little.

“Hey Cruz,” he said from behind the wheel. “How come me and Fingers here can’t stay in your hotel?” His eyes met Cruz’s in the rearview mirror. A razor-sharp, predator confidence showed there. Cruz knew from that look that Moss was one of those guys who never felt fear. Unlike Cruz, Moss had been born without the capacity. No fear. No empathy. Moss was the ice-cold center of his own barren universe.

He had probably tortured kittens as a little boy.

“You know, it makes us feel a little left out. You get to live it up in some swank place, and we get the Holiday Inn. It don’t seem right somehow.”

His comments elicited an embarrassed giggle from Fingers.

Cruz glanced out the window. The sleek Mercedes nosed its way through Portland’s end of season throngs. The narrow streets of the Old Port – the newly glittering waterfront district – teemed with well-heeled tourists peeking in shop windows or laughing as they stumbled out of the public houses.

“Hey Cruz, I’m talking to you, son.”

Cruz regarded Moss again. Thick neck. Wide brow.

“You ever kill a man by mistake?” Cruz said. He spoke just above a whisper. They could hear him all right up front.

Moss smirked. “Me? I don’t make mistakes.”

Cruz smiled. “I do. Sometimes I get a big guy around me, kind of a pushy type, you know? And I end up misreading his intentions. Maybe he startles me. Better he goes down than I do, right? Can’t be too careful these days. So they put me somewhere by myself. It cuts down on the mistakes I make.”

Moss pulled the car into the cobblestone circular driveway of the Portland Arms Hotel. A man in top hat and tails, white gloves, the whole silly get up, hovered by the door. He eyed the car, ready to pounce.

“I guess I’ll need to remember that,” Moss said.

Cruz stepped out, dossier in hand. He hadn’t been out of the car in nearly six hours. The first thing he noticed was the temperature change – it was colder here than in New York. And New Orleans? Forget about it. He had only just left there this morning, but already it seemed like weeks ago.

Hopefully, they’d be out of here in two days or less. Maybe even by tomorrow night. Otherwise, Cruz was going to have to buy some new clothes.

“Call me if you get anywhere,” he said to Moss and Fingers. He waved off the doorman, and carried his own bag up the steps. The Mercedes pulled out just as he entered the hotel.

Inside, the lobby was all carpeting and polished chrome. The help tip-toed around and spoke in hushed tones. Aging yuppies in lime green cardigan sweaters and sunflower yellow pullovers lounged in overstuffed chairs by the fire. Their cheeks were rosy with the brisk chill of the Old Port, not to mention the flames of the fireplace, and the sherry and port wine in their glasses.

Check-in was effortless and Cruz went straight to his suite.

Once in his suite, Cruz double locked the door. He was on the third floor, so there was no chance of them coming in that way. The only way in was through that thick, solid door. That pleased him. The kids weren’t staying in the same hotel as Cruz for one reason: Cruz had no intention of letting his guard down so some young stud could move up the ladder by putting him in a box.

Cruz poured himself a seltzer from the mini-bar and took off his light jacket. Jesus. It had been a long day. He went in the bathroom and was pleasantly surprised by the two-person Jacuzzi tub built right into the floor. He took the Glock out of his waistband, and laid it on the sink. He removed the rest of his clothes, checked the windows and doors again, then went out to his kit bag. He brought the bag into the bathroom. He locked the bathroom door. He turned on the jets of the tub, as well as the underwater lights. He brought the bathroom phone within reach of the tub. He killed the overhead lights, moved the Glock to the edge of the tub, then settled into the hot bubbling water.

He picked up the gun and chambered a round. He grunted to himself and laid the gun, ready to fire, along the tub basin just above his head and well within his reach. Nine shots if trouble found him here relaxing with his pants down.

He went back into his kit bag. Inside was a six-inch straight razor. He opened the blade, gazed at it for a moment, then brought it into the tub and under the water. He placed it on the bottom next to him.

A gun, and if that somehow failed, a blade. Anybody who tried him while he was in the tub was in for a nasty surprise.

Now he could relax. Facing the locked door, he reached back and put his hands behind him, forming a cradle for his head. The Jacuzzi jets pounded water against his back and his legs, working out on the stiff muscles in his body. He closed his eyes.

Fucking kids.

They weren’t going to get him. Not like he had gotten Oskar.

How many had Cruz killed?

He wasn’t sure. He had done quite a few in his time. Beginning with those first messy jobs in and around Times Square – the blitzkrieg knife attacks, the shoot ‘em ups in welfare hotels, the guy he had gut-shot six times but who had still managed to run screaming into the street – Cruz had moved onward and upward.

And being apprenticed to Oskar? Well, that was part of what had made Cruz a pro. Oskar was the very definition of the professional – smooth, calm, utterly devastating. Oskar’s was the first death that rattled Cruz, and made him wonder about this life. All these years later, and he was still wondering.

They were doing a job out in Short Hills, New Jersey and they both knew that the time of Cruz’s apprenticeship was coming to an end. For one, Oskar had asked for, and received, permission to retire. For another, Cruz had become a polished and effective killer in their four years of working together. He had always been ruthless. But now he had verve and style. Now he could kill without emotion. He could appear, disappear, and cover his tracks with the best.

Oskar was sixty-three years old. Cruz was twenty-four. Cruz had never counted his own kills. Oskar had his own kills memorized. One hundred and ninety-nine. They had two to do in New Jersey. Oskar had suggested they each take one, and then he would finish with an even two hundred. Cruz thought that a fine idea.

They cruised along a narrow road of estate homes set back in the woods. They were driving a nearly new 1980 Alpha-Romeo Spider. It was small, fireapple red, with a black convertible roof and classic sports car looks. Although it was a sunny day, they had the roof up. The car had been a gift to a girlfriend by one of the men in the house, Mr. Eli Sharon. Eli was an Israeli who had come to the United States to enlarge his fortunes. He was fifty-eight years old and ran penny stock scams. His business partner was an American, forty-four year old Howard Brennan.

The girlfriend was young and beautiful. She was from India. That morning, she had left the house in Short Hills to go shopping. In a parking lot, she had been abducted and taken by van to a house in Brooklyn. The transfer had gone without a hitch. When the girl, shaken and tearful but not hurt, had climbed into the van, Cruz and Oskar had climbed out with her car keys.

The way Cruz understood it, she would not be harmed. Indeed, one of Cruz’s jobs today was to retrieve her passport from the top drawer of her armoire. Very soon, she would book a Tower Air flight from JFK to Delhi. She would settle in back home, maybe find a nice boyfriend her own age. That was the plan, and when they explained it to her, she agreed that it was time for a change.

They pulled up to the gate of the sprawling mansion. It was a wrought-iron gate with electric cattle wire strung along the top, which would issue a non-lethal charge to anyone who tried to climb it. It was a low-level type of security installed by a man who either felt he had few dangerous enemies, or who was confident in his ability to deal with them.

The Alpha-Romeo had an electronic device on the dashboard that sent a signal to an electronic lock box on the gate. Once the lock box recognized the device on the dashboard, the gate slid slowly open. There was no guard around of any kind.

So much for security.

Cruz was driving. It was nice car, a little tight with Oskar’s big shoulders there next to him, but nice nonetheless. He was thinking about buying one. Just from driving it around that day.

“What do you think of this car?” he said.

Oskar sat upright and alert in the passenger seat. He wore thick, round glasses. As always, he wore a suit and tie – today, a suit of light summer linen. His face was lined like that of an old, old man. Oskar wore black gloves, and had a MAC-10 submachine gun cradled on his knees. It had a huge Sionics specialty silencer installed at the end of the barrel. Oskar used to laugh about the MAC. People would get a load of it and all the fight would go out of them. They’d become like jellyfish, ready to do anything and everything he said. Oskar carried the MAC for show – he did his actual kills with the Ruger he kept strapped inside his jacket.

Cruz smiled. Oskar was a man ready for action. Even on his last assignment. Cruz respected that and always would.

“This car?” Oskar mused. “It’ll break down all the time.”

“How do you figure that?”

“It’s Italian. That’s a bad sign. Italians don’t make good cars. You want a good car, then spend the extra money and get a German car. The Germans, God help us, do everything well.”

“Even if you say so yourself.”

Oskar shrugged. “I don’t say it because my parents were from Germany. I say it because it’s true.” He laughed, and Cruz laughed with him.

They drove up along the tree-lined and curving avenue that passed for a driveway. If all was correct, the servants had been given the day off today. All was correct, Cruz knew. All was always correct.

He drove the car up the driveway, which ended at a circle in front of the grand entrance to the house. Next to, and attached to the house, was a four car garage. Eli was rich – there must have been good money in manipulating stock prices – but he was no Rockefeller. Cruz felt a stab of pity for him. An Italian sports car, a nice-looking exotic girlfriend, a four-car garage and a big house in Short Hills. The guy probably saw himself as a new-age sultan. Untouchable.

He was about to find out how wrong he was.

Their garage door was the second from left. The smoked windows of the car, combined with the glare of the sun, would probably thwart anyone from inside the house seeing into the car and alarming themselves. The device on the dashboard opened the garage door as well, much as the girl said it would.

Everything was normal. The girl had arrived home from shopping and had just slid into her normal position in the garage. The power garage door slid shut behind them. As it did so, the automatic overhead light came on in the garage.

Cruz checked his guns one last time. Beside him, Oskar did the same. Cruz favored a big. 44 Magnum in those days. Its silencer was huge as well. Howard was to die first, with a blast from the Magnum. This would intimidate Eli and get him to open the safe. There was a diamond in the safe that was on its way to Los Angeles tomorrow. Besides that, any easy cash lying around, Cruz could have it. This was a loot for cash job. Nothing else was to be touched except for the passport. And after all was said and done, Oskar could end his career with a bullet to Eli’s head.

“Ready?” Cruz said to Oskar.

Oskar had checked and rechecked the MAC and the Ruger. “Of course.”

They exited the car. The door to the house was locked, but of course there was a key on the girl’s ring. Cruz opened the door and it gave upon a large kitchen with an island in the middle and several workstations. Huge pots hung down from the overhead rack.

They passed through the kitchen, walking quickly.

“There you are my dear, we’re in the sitting room,” a voice called. “We have some wine for you.”

They turned a corner and here was the sitting room. Two men sat in easy chairs. Eli was the one on the left, the one with a large mole on his cheek. Cruz knew both of them from the dossier. They were fat men, and Cruz felt another pang of embarrassment for Eli. He was the fatter of the two, a corrupt middle-aged man with a lot of money. He thought he had the love of a beautiful young woman. Maybe he thought he had swept her away with his abilities as a lover, yes? Cruz wouldn’t put it past him. Rich men on the verge of violent death were prone to making such miscalculations. The girl had given them everything they needed to reach this man. She had done it in a heartbeat, to save her own life.

Eli and Howard gazed at Cruz and Oskar. Oskar held up the MAC as if it needed amplification, and Eli nodded.

“I have money,” Eli said.

“So do we,” said Oskar.

Cruz couldn’t resist. “The girl was with you for your money,” he said. “There was nothing else.”

“No, it was love,” Eli said.

Oskar said nothing.

Cruz paced into the room. “She went home to India today,” he lied. “Next week she’ll have a new lover. Probably a young man with a hard body who drives a Porsche and will inherit his father’s fortune.”

“Still, I know her. It was love.”

Cruz shrugged. Leave it at that, then. It was love. He took a step forward and shot Howard in the forehead with the Magnum. In the second before Cruz pulled the trigger, Howard squinted and cringed, but made no other move. The shot made very little sound, but the man’s head came apart with an audible crack. Brains and bone flew. A mirror against the wall twenty feet behind him smashed into a dozen large pieces.

Eli’s eyes went very wide.

“It’s in your interest to tell us some things,” Oskar said.

Eli talked a lot. It seemed he had a lot to say. One thing he described was the safe’s location and the combination. Then he opened it for them. At the end of it all, Oskar finished him with a gently laid bullet to the forehead. It was almost a blessed relief, by the look on Eli’s face.

Oskar went about pulling some things from the safe. First, he laid his gun down. He opened a pouch and placed the diamond inside it. It was quite a thing to behold, that diamond. Then it disappeared into the bag.

Cruz stood behind and about ten feet away from his teacher.

They had each gotten their own dossiers for this operation. Oskar’s had included descriptions of Eli, Howard, the girlfriend, and the diamond, as well as the layout of the house. Cruz’s dossier had included all these things and one more: a description of Oskar and his upcoming retirement.

“Oskar,” Cruz called.

“Yes, yes, one moment.”

“Oskar, you need to turn around.”

Something in Cruz’s voice made Oskar stop what he was doing. He stood very still for a moment, no longer looking at whatever paperwork he held in his gloved hand. Then his back slumped. It had to be a disappointment for things to end in this way.

“It’s like that then, is it?”

“It is.” Cruz felt something well up in his eye. He brushed it away, whatever it was or might be.

Oskar turned around slowly. He gazed wistfully at his Ruger, just out of reach on the table. He made no move toward it.

“You got your two hundred,” Cruz said.

“Yes, I did. Somehow, it no longer tastes very sweet.”

“You were the best,” Cruz said.

“A cold comfort, I’m afraid.”

The two friends stared at each other for a long moment. “A final lesson, if you haven’t moved beyond learning,” Oskar said.

Cruz shook his head. Of course there was time for one last word from the teacher. If only time could stop in this moment. “I haven’t.”

“Avoid the mistakes I’ve made. For one, never try to retire. I gather now that it cannot be done. For two, never flatter yourself into believing you are not expendable. You are. And three, never turn your back on a young man in your charge. Especially one with great potential. Especially one that you loved like a son.”

Cruz nodded.

“End of lesson,” Oskar said.

Cruz shot him four times. The first bullet entered his brain and killed him. Without pain, Cruz hoped. The next three were insurance.

Years before, the first lesson, delivered in Oskar’s clipped no nonsense tone, had gone as follows: when you kill a man, make sure he is dead.

They didn’t call him Fingers just because he was missing some.

One of the things he prided himself on was being able to steal just about any American-made, late model sedan in less than two minutes.

They were in a small seafood restaurant along the waterfront. Nets and lobster traps hung from the ceiling. A huge old steering wheel was mounted on one wall. An ancient anchor stood upright, mounted on a pedestal when you walked in. Fingers had already finished a platter of fried fish, French fries and cole slaw, and Moss was still demolishing the bread bowl that some New England clam chowder had come in.

In a little while, they would head out to the airport and Fingers would pick up a work car out of the long-term parking lot. The Mercedes wasn’t for work – it was for maximum comfort while driving up here. For work, they needed something nondescript, with local plates, maybe five years old but with a good solid engine. Something with a little bit of go power. The body had to be good, no rust, but the paint a little faded, a real middle-class blubber boat. Left there by some hard-working citizen who had parked his car and flown out to see his sister in Ohio for two weeks.

Fingers looked forward to it. In fact, he could hardly sit still. He loved these missions, and no doubt he liked to whack people. But one of his favorite things, although he would never tell a guy like Moss, was stealing cars. Moss would probably relegate grabbing a car to the scrap heap of STUFF THAT HAD TO GET DONE, like reading your dossier, like ditching evidence, like getting to the fucking airport on time. Not Fingers. He loved it when he had to take a car – it was what he had come up doing as a kid – and he liked to show his stuff. At one time, he had practically lived for it. That feeling of moving low and fast, his sneakers barely touching the concrete, his eyes darting, sizing up the cars on the fly. This one? A blue 1995 Oldsmobile Achieva?

Nah.

This one? Yeah, that’s the one. A green 1999 Chevy Impala.

Yeah.

After he snatched them a car, he and Moss would see about this wetback who cleaned Dugan’s apartment. Put her through her paces. For now, however, it was dinner time. And dinner time was downtime.

“I tell you what,” Roland Moss said in a long, lazy drawl.

Fingers sat across the table from Moss and waited for the rest of his statement. It could be a while before the big man decided to finish it. If there was one thing Fingers knew about Moss after the last couple of jobs he had pulled with him, it was that Moss always talked slow.

He did everything slow. It wasn’t that he couldn’t move fast – he could. Fingers had seen him move with sudden lightning speed. It was almost as if Moss did everything slow on purpose, to allow people to let down their guard.

Fingers watched him destroy the bread bowl, slowly, deliberately tearing its remains apart, and putting them in his mouth. Here was a big lumbering creature of a man. Everything about him said SLOW. He even talked slow – sometimes pausing for what seemed like a very long time between words and even syllables. He claimed that he talked slow so that everyone – even the simplest of simpletons – would understand.

And his sheer size and the crazy mayhem in his eyes meant that his patience was rarely tested. Clerks were terrified of him. His two monstrous hands on the counter, the epic bulk of his shoulders and upper body leaning forward, his body relaxed but the brow of his forehead creased with mild annoyance…

“Son,” he might drawl, letting that word linger, the time stretching out between himself and the startled mouse of a desk clerk below him, “I hope you’re gonna go on and do what I ask.”

This was enough. This was more than enough.

Fingers had seen it happen. Times when he, Fingers, would practically have to throw a tantrum to get what he wanted – and he was a hired killer, for Christ’s sake – Moss merely had to clench his jaw in disapproval.

Six months ago, Fingers had watched Moss break a man’s neck with the same bland expression on his face that he wore right now while eating his dinner. It was a mixture of boredom and detached concentration.

Moss chewed the bread with near infinite care. “The thing is,” he said, his impassive eyes roaming the restaurant, soaking in the other early dinner patrons. “I’m not sure I like that boy.” He nodded, as if in agreement with himself. “It’s his attitude. Rubs me the wrong way.”

“Cruz?” Fingers said, to make sure they were on the same page.

Moss raised his eyebrows, as if to say, “Who else?”

“That’s probably why he works alone, right?” Fingers said.

Moss motioned to the waitress. “Well, he ain’t working alone on this job. If he’s gonna act this way, he might need a talking to.” He cracked his mighty knuckles for emphasis. The waitress, a blond with a young, firm body, and a face and voice that were middle aged from years of smoking, came over.

“Darling,” Moss said, “may I have a cup of coffee and a dessert menu? Any time you get a moment.”

Over his apple pie with whipped cream on top, and two cups of coffee, Moss half-listened as the little monkey chattered away. Hell, let the boy talk. He was just working out his nerves before the job.

“You know what it is?” Fingers said, talking low and fast, glancing around between every statement to see who was looking. “It’s this: I like killing people. That’s why I feel like I got the best job in the world, you know? I go out on a mission, and I know we’re gonna do somebody, I’m like right there, man. I’m ready. I look forward to it.”

That’s how the monkey sometimes talked. He called them “missions.”

“Look at this fucking hand,” Fingers said. He held up the hand with the three missing fingers. He touched his pinky to his thumb, rapidly, three times, like a crab with its pincers. The hand was permanently discolored, an angry lobster red.

“I like this hand. You know why? Because it’s a war wound. I ever tell you how I fucked up this hand?”

Of course he had. Probably three times. But here it came again.

“I blew it up, see? I had a fucking bomb in my hand. And it blew up.” He pointed at Moss with the angry red pinky. “But that’s the kind of life I lead. Action. Everybody should lead such a life. I like to go out on missions where I know there’s gonna be some action.”

“What do you think of this job?” Moss said.

Fingers shrugged. “Retrieval duty. Whatever. I don’t really like it, but I don’t criticize. It looks like a boring one. But you know, maybe we’ll see some action. Who knows? You know, I do what I’m told – I steal a car, whatever – and I shut up about it.”

The fingers of his good hand drummed on the table.

Moss sipped his coffee. Retrieval duty. He didn’t mind it. Money was money. No fuss, no muss. Pick up the old man, find out what he did with the money, and get it back if possible. Then bring the old boy down to New York, with the money or not.

The money.

The money, the money, the money.

The dossier said the old boy had killed Roselli and made off with $2.5 mil from the fat man’s safe. Moss mused on this for a moment. He had met Roselli a few times when Moss was bouncing at the club on Bell Boulevard in Queens, knocking around the college boys when they got out of hand. The fat man used to come in there, sometimes alone, sometimes with a couple of guys from his crew, sometimes with a fake tit platinum blonde on each arm.

He had wagged a fat finger at Moss one time. “When I talk, you listen. Understand? When I say jump, you jump.”

He had said this to Moss. To Moss! Didn’t he realize Moss could snap his neck with one hand?

Moss snorted. Roselli was a fat, bossy fuck with a big mouth. Sooner or later, he might have killed the man himself.

In any case, this trip wasn’t about Roselli. Nobody missed Roselli. This trip was about don’t fuck around, and give us back the money you took. The money was the reason there were three of them on this job. One man, on his own, might stumble upon all that money – it was just too tempting.

Moss waved it away. He made plenty of money. The way he saw it, he exchanged his time and his peculiar talents for a high standard of living. He lived alone in a big three bedroom condo in Long Beach, a place he hadn’t been back to in the past month. He had ten suits and fifteen pairs of shoes. He owned a big damn Hummer H2 which he almost never had the opportunity to drive. He had silk shirts and silk sheets. He was busy and that suited him fine. On rare days when there was no work, all he did was he sat on the beach and watched the waves crash. At night, he went to the clubs, sucked down the booze, and threw money away on the whores. He spent big money, and you know what? He could live this life forever.

He wasn’t about to risk all for a one-time grab at the brass ring. Not even thirty yet, and he had already put too many dumb fuckers out of their misery for trying exactly that. He knew, he knew: it was a dumb play. You don’t get away with it. It was a lesson the old boy was about to learn in spades.

And Cruz?

Moss didn’t like that fucker. He didn’t like that pocked up face or those beady little eyes. He didn’t like the way he talked down to you, like he was above it all somehow. Cruz was getting old himself. To Moss, he seemed like a guy about to take a fall.

And that was good.

“What do you think, slim?” Moss said to Fingers. “Is it time to get ourselves some wheels or what?”

“Travis, you get down off that goddamn tree!”

From his perch on a white plastic chair on the back porch of Darren’s single-wide three bedroom trailer, Hal had an ample view of the wreckage of his friend’s life. The trailer sat on cinderblocks, surrounded by thirty similar trailers in a house park optimistically named Metro Gardens.

Hal mused on the name. There was nothing metropolitan about this place, and there were no gardens in evidence. The lot was hard-packed earth, with thick bushes along the edges of the property, and the Androscoggin River just past them, close enough to bring the mosquitoes in the spring and summer. The bushes served to obscure the river and the ancient, decaying factory on the other side.

The property was fenced along the river, so the kids from the trailer park wouldn’t be tempted to ford their way across and break into the abandoned factory. Nothing but trouble over there. Nine year-olds smoking pot. Thirteen year-olds having sex. Rejects, maniacs and predators of all kinds would haunt a spot like that. Nobody in this trailer park would want their kids going over there. But it did no good. Hal could see two gaping holes in the fence right from here.

He took a slug of beer and chased it with a sip of Jack Daniel’s. He shrugged his big shoulders. In any case, on a cool October day like today, the skeeters were all gone, and it was still just warm enough to sit out and barbecue back here. Darren had gone back inside to replenish the little six-pack cooler from whence they took their beers.

While Hal waited, the sun went down across the open trailer park from him. In the fading light, he watched Darren’s three kids, ages nine, eight and four, and Darren’s wife Lynn. Lynn, never particularly attractive, had reached her mid-thirties, and was becoming fatter, more sallow, and ever more disagreeable by the day. Come to think of it, that last child, the four year old, was probably a trap set by Lynn – she hadn’t worked since the first one was born, and one more child had put the final nail in the coffin of Darren’s dream that she might ever get another job.

The kids raced around the lot with all the other trailer trash children, shouting and screaming. Travis, the eldest, was the offending tree climber. Lynn stood by a circular clothes hanger, smoking cigarettes and talking with two other mommies going to seed. Now and then, she would turn her attention to the kids and unleash instructions or abuse, depending on what the situation warranted.

Living in a trailer with three kids and Lynn. Man. Not for the first time, Hal reflected that his friend Darren was like a flashlight without a battery. He had worked low-paying, back-breaking shit jobs his entire life. This is where he had ended up. Without Hal’s influence, Lynn would probably be the extent of Darren’s sex life, and he wouldn’t have an extra dime to put in his pocket.

Darren was being sucked under. Lynn spent what she could, and Hal knew, was constantly critical – where they lived, what the kids wore, where they shopped, what they drove. None of it was ever good enough. In Hal’s estimation, Darren needed to leave this bitch and get out of this rat’s nest of a living arrangement. It seemed strange that a big boy like Darren allowed himself to get pushed around and used up like this.

It wasn’t right.

Darren came back on the porch. He smiled with that big jaw of his. Atta boy. His eyes were still blacked, his nose plugged and taped, and that bruise on the side of his neck was coming along good. They had skated by on the damage by telling Lynn they’d been down to Old Orchard Beach drinking in a bar, and got in a scrape with some black boys. Lynn hated those blackies in Old Orchard.

“Only got four beers left,” Darren said. “Guess we’ll need to head out for some.”

Hal smiled, too. The sun was just about gone. Twilight was coming in, and with it, the night’s chill. “Wanna show you something before we do.”

“Yeah, what’s that?”

Hal’s grin grew even broader. He was feeling good. Despite everything, or maybe because of it, he was feeling real good. He looked forward to a challenge, after all. And getting even? Boy, was there anything quite like it? Even being around Lynn today couldn’t bring him down.

“Out in the car,” he said.

The two men sauntered, beers in hand, the flask of Jack in Hal’s back pocket, through the gathering gloom and over to the parking lot. They reached Hal’s big Caddy Eldorado. He pressed a button on his key chain and the trunk popped open a few inches, the light coming on inside.

There was no one around.

Back over by the bushes – the woods is what they called them – the kids were still running and screaming. They had flashlights now.

Lynn’s voice floated across the lot. “Okay, come on you kids. Get in the house. Now, I said.”

“Whatcha got?” Darren said.

Hal opened the trunk. Lying there, amidst the jack, the tire iron, some recyclable beer bottles, and a few assorted sundries, was the gun case.

“Oooooh,” Darren said.

“You know that Mossberg 20-gauge I had my eye on down to Kittery Trading Post? The single barrel with the pump action?”

“I guess I do.”

Hal unzipped the case and yanked out the shotgun. “Went down and bought her last week. I forgot to mention it in all the recent excitement.”

Darren giggled like a boy. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Just like Darren to be a step behind. Why else would it be in the car? “Sure am, kid. Thought I’d bring it with us down to Portland tomorrow night, see what Little Miss Lola does with her prize pussy when she gets a look-see at that big barrel.”

Hal took another slug of his beer. His smile was wider than ever.

After Lorena finished in the garden, she lingered for some time in Smoke’s apartment itself. It was a tiny place, a bachelor’s home in every way, with a double bed in one supposed room, then through a wide open double doorway to the kitchen and dining area, then out the door to the back. The cats had a little doorway they could squeeze through in the lower panel of the back door itself. Oddly, Smoke kept triple locks on both doors, and sometimes at night he placed a t-bar against the bottom, secured with a bolt which he had mounted into the floor.

She teased him sometimes about this. “Who are you afraid of, Smoke? Will the secret police come to get you?” “I am like the janitor – I have so many keys on my chain. They are all to get into your home.”

Smoke didn’t keep the place very clean, and sometimes Lorena cleaned up after him. She didn’t clean too often, though, because Smoke had a woman who should take care of that for him. Lorena was well past the age of competing for a man.

She sighed, not realizing she had done so, then stood and left Smoke Dugan’s apartment. Once outside, she walked the half-mile to the Shaw’s Supermarket near the bridge and purchased some milk and eggs, and a very few other items she needed at her own small apartment.

She walked along the darkened street toward her own home, not far from that of Smoke Dugan. It was quiet and chilly, and dead leaves rustled as they blew along the ground in the breeze. Lorena could just see her own breath.

A man came toward her. He was a tall man, a young man who looked strong. She imagined that if she were not a mixed race old woman from Central America, this young man would offer to carry her bags home to her apartment. Instead, because things were as they were, he would ignore her. She did not believe he would do this out of spite, but out of fear. People were afraid of one another, of reaching out and being together. This she knew about people. The boy would probably fear that if he offered assistance, she would answer him in Spanish and he would not be able to respond.

The young man passed her without so much as a glance in her direction.

There was something unusual about him, but she wasn’t sure what it was. Only after he passed did she realize that his right hand was missing nearly all of its fingers. He seemed to have a pinkie and a thumb, and that was it.

She continued to walk, allowing the weight in her hands to settle deeper, pulling down harder on her shoulders. La Mula, she called herself. The Mule. She was a strong as one, and could be just as stubborn. She was a fool for engaging in these fantasies about people and their nature. The boy hadn’t given her a thought.

Here came another man up this same deserted street. Also a young man. What is he thinking, Mula? Will he help you with your bags?

The man approached slowly, but this man was very definitely looking right at her. She thought she didn’t like the look in his eyes. He was a big man. She stopped and studied him carefully. He was very big. Violent crime was almost unheard of in this city, but this one had the dark, hard and wild light in his eyes – that light she remembered from so many murderers in her homeland. There was hard laughter in his eyes, but no real mirth or warmth. Nothing was funny.

She thought of the man who had just passed. Perhaps she could run to him. She turned, and he was right behind her.

A hand clamped on her hair from behind and pulled her backwards. She dropped her groceries. She felt, rather than heard the eggs smash. She tried to turn, to struggle, but to no avail. The big man had her in a powerful grip and was dragging her along by her hair, keeping her off-balance.

The smaller man approached her quickly. He smiled and punched her in the eye. It hurt, it was horrible, it was shocking. Then he hit her again. Things were moving too quickly. Her heart beat rapidly.

She fell to the ground.

They pulled at her, yanking her along the sidewalk. Dios mio! What did they want? Her bag, she realized. They were pulling her along the ground by her hand bag. She felt her dress, then her skin tearing as she bumped along the gravel. They wanted her money, her little bit of money.

Well, they could have it.

She let go of the bag. At last, she thought. They would be gone.

But no. Now one stood over her and kicked her. It was the small one. He delivered swift, sharp punishing kicks to every part of her body. He kicked her in the head. She grew dizzy. The world went dark, then swam back into focus. Then went dark again. She saw the big one, standing nearby watching the little one kick her to her death.

As she faded from consciousness, she realized the madman was still kicking her.

Sirens howled somewhere close by.

Cruz heard them approaching as he sat slumped and bleeding to death in the front passenger seat of a black car. He was shot, he didn’t know how many times. He looked over at Carmine the Nose, who had just crawled into the driver’s seat. The Nose was a bloody mess. His intestines hung out into his lap where Cruz had gutted him. His big hands caressed the steering wheel.

“Where to, old buddy?” the Nose said.

Cruz opened his eyes.

He stared up at the ceiling of the bathroom in his suite at the Portland Arms. His head rested on the marble apron of the tub. The water was hot. The jets were still going. Steam rose all around him.

The bathroom phone was ringing near his head. It echoed against the tiled walls and the marble floor. He reached back, brushed the gun to make sure it was still there, and picked up the phone.

“Yeah?” he said.

“Cruz.”

“Yeah.”

“You awake? It’s Moss.” Moss, the clown who didn’t like staying at the Holiday Inn. He wasn’t supposed to disturb Cruz tonight, not unless he got to the Guatemalan.

“Yeah, Moss.”

“Listen son, we got the wetback.”

Cruz stifled a yawn and sat up in the tub. “Tell me.”

There was a long pause over the line. “We got her.”

“What else did you get?”

Cruz could practically hear Moss’s lazy grin cracking ear to ear over the phone.

“We got all the keys to Dugan’s place.”