The Hit

CHAPTER 3

They gave Gant a bedroom, and a girl to go with it.

The bedroom was very large, with a gigantic bed and the girl draped across it. Cool stone floors and windows facing the ocean. Evening was coming in. Peach-colored curtains billowed in the light breeze. Wide double doors gave out onto a private balcony. Someone had left him a cart on rollers with a bottle of spirits, as well as a bottle each of red and white wine. Also, there were some finger sandwiches, a pitcher of water and a bucket of ice. He barely glanced at the wines or the sandwiches. The whiskey was Glenfiddich 30-year-old Scotch, so that was good news. He poured three fingers-worth into a glass, without ice or water, and sipped it, enjoying the taste and the feel of the fire entering his belly.

The girl was fair-skinned and young, just old enough to be out of high school. She was dressed in an electric blue sarong and a bikini top, and had a body with so many curves that it was almost an outlandish cartoon of the female form. She spoke English with a strong accent from somewhere. Her eyes were green, and while Gant stared out at the breakers marching toward land far below him, he felt those eyes on his back.

‘Russia?’ he said, still facing away from her.

‘Moldova,’ she answered.

He shrugged. Same difference to him. Commies. They lost, we won. It took a hell of a bite out of some of us, but we did win. He turned now, and took a long look at her. Good Lord, he remembered how they used to make you think Eastern Bloc women were huge, ugly – powerlifters in the Olympics. Of course, after the collapse it turned out nothing could be further from the truth. He thought of maps and how one day the Soviet Union was this big red smear across the top of the world, and the next day there were all these little countries you never heard of there instead, places like Tajikistan, and Belarus, and Moldova. He remembered air raid sirens and how in junior high school, when the sirens sounded, the teachers used to make the kids go out in the hallway, kneel in front of the lockers, and cover their heads with their arms. Each kid had to kneel in front of his or her own locker. Gant figured that if the nukes ever came, whoever was left afterward would know him as the pile of radioactive dust on the floor at the base of locker number 126.

Gant remembered other things as well, things that happened during his time as a soldier for the United States of America, but he pushed them aside for now. He sighed, just a little. This girl was probably too young to know the history, or even care. She didn’t know she was a trophy taken from a defeated people. Well anyway, she was here, and he was here, so he might as well put her to her intended use. To the victor go the spoils, after all.

‘Wine?’ he said.

‘Yes, please. Red, with ice.’

He grimaced at the thought of it, but uncorked the bottle and poured it for her. She drank it fast and he poured her another. She downed it and he poured yet another. If she needed to numb up, so be it. From her perspective, this could hardly be the ideal romantic encounter. She drank about half of her third glass then put it aside on the table. She removed her top and her sarong. Her body coming free reminded Gant of wild horses galloping on a high plateau. He sipped his whiskey.

‘Who are you available to?’ he said.

She stared at him, her head slightly to the side, her pretty mouth open just a bit. She didn’t understand. For a moment, Gant tried to think of another delicate way to put it, then decided he couldn’t be bothered.

‘Do you have to fuck everybody?’

‘Oh. No, only guests. You. The fat politician. People like that.’

‘The gunmen?’

She shook her head. ‘Uh-uh. I stay far away from them. They are animals.’

‘Do you ever see a doctor?’

‘Every month. The old man’s doctor himself sees me.’

He joined her on the bed. She’d been with the fat politician, and recently – Harting, Hartley, whatever his name was – that wasn’t great news, but it could have been worse. She could have been servicing the goon squad every day, too. Gant ran a hand along her leg, and soon forgot about the guards, and the good representative, and even Fielding himself. He took his time, even though he knew it was all about him, and not about her at all. Once, he looked into her face and saw that her mind was elsewhere, maybe running on that high green field with all those beautiful horses. Afterward, they lay on top of the sheets, not tangled, not even touching. Gant picked up his drink where he’d left off.

He looked at the girl and her sad face. An artist could make a painting of her – Tragic Girl. Gant was nothing if not curious – he could attribute his success to several factors, including luck, but certainly one of the factors was that he had a voracious appetite for knowing things.

‘OK Moldova, how did you wind up here?’

She polished off the last of her wine, then stood on unsteady legs and fixed herself another one. ‘I was poor, but men always liked me from the time I am young.’ She shrugged, probably at the self-evident truth of her statement. ‘I was dancer in club. A woman came to my village and told me about good jobs abroad. I could be cleaner in hotel, or work as hostess. I sign up, pay some money, and they bring me here. I owe more money, of course. And so maybe I can never leave.’

Gant thought maybe the whiskey, combined with the travel and his tiredness, had given him a buzz. He wasn’t sure he had the girl’s responsibilities down pat just yet. ‘Do you also clean up around here?’ he said.

She gave him a baleful look. ‘Island women come and clean. They have to be searched every time they come. I don’t know how to clean. I fuck instead.’

‘Do you hate it?’

‘It bores me. I fuck, I eat, and I watch the satellite TV from America. Stupid reality shows, people shouting at each other, and then crying, and giving hugs. We read The Great Gatsby in school in Moldova. It is the best story. I owned a poster of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and I hung this on the wall in my room. The great American writer. But they don’t show these things on the TV. The greatness is over. I think all Americans must be stupid now.’

She was on to something, but Gant didn’t want to get into it. What to do or say about an entire nation of overweight, lazy people so addled by junk television and junk food and prescription drugs that they had only recently begun to notice they were systematically lied to, and robbed blind and left to sink in quicksand? Only now, long after the cheese had been moved, were some of the mice starting to wake up to that fact.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘at least you probably don’t have to fuck all that much. I mean, there can’t be that many guests.’

‘Howe. The assistant. I have to fuck him, too.’

Gant felt a knife twist in his heart. He didn’t even have to examine the feeling – it was a visceral response. ‘I wish you had mentioned that earlier. I don’t like Howe.’

‘I don’t, either.’

‘Is there anything you do like about this place?’

She didn’t hesitate. ‘The view.’

Gant nodded. ‘It’s a great view. Anything else?’

It took her a moment to come up with something more. ‘Howe’s wife and daughter live on the grounds here in guest house, so I never have to spend whole night with him.’

The conversation made Gant sleepy. He lay back with his glass propped on his chest and closed his eyes. He could sip his Scotch with only the slightest movement of his hand and his chin. His mind drifted from its moorings and began to scan through the past, settling here and there on various memories. It was a pleasant sensation. He smiled.

Gant was nobody to mess with.

It was back in Philadelphia where Gant wished he could still be. Young again, cruising the mean streets. Not the Philadelphia of Market and Broad Street, the corporate towers, not the place the rich yuppies had once commuted to from the suburbs, not the weekday morning traffic jam brought to you by BMW and Mercedes and Lexus. Gant’s part of town was North Philadelphia. It was the drug deals going down in the shadows of burnt-out row houses. It was the homeless men sleeping under highway overpasses. It was the emaciated crack whores plying their trade in the alleys and vacant lots. It was chalk outlines on bloody sidewalks. It was booming hip-hop from tricked-out lowriders and the night he caught two carjackers single-handed.

He savored that night like he savored fine whiskey.

1990, or thereabouts – a long time ago now. A couple of gangbangers took a new Toyota at gunpoint near the bombed-out Amtrak station, but they didn’t know there was an infant in the back seat. The daddy lost his car OK, but went hysterical when he realized he lost his baby too. It became a wild all units call. The bad boys broke a hundred miles an hour on the wide lanes of North Broad, hung a turn and disappeared like smoke. Gant in an unmarked car heard it on the radio and made a guess. He was four blocks away. He roared the wrong way down a one-way, headlights off through the low-slung housing projects, engine screaming and here came a car burning up the street toward him. He guessed again – it had to be them. He hit the flashers and jammed the brakes, skidding sideways, blocking the whole street.

They plowed into a parked sedan, heavy metal crunch at high speed. He leaped out ahead of them, a gun in each hand, running crazy on fear and adrenaline. One move, one funny twitch, and he would kill them both.

‘Freeze motherfuckers! Out of the car! Down on the ground!’

He had guessed right both times. Back-up units showed a minute later, and Gant already had both suspects cuffed and in custody. The baby was fine, still strapped into the child restraint, goggling at all the curious onlookers.

Gant felt his heart beating at the memory. It was one of his favorites. He imagined pro athletes had memories like that – moments when, either through luck or experience or a little of both, they did everything right and for a brief time were unbeatable.

He opened his eyes and the girl had climbed on top of him again. He welcomed her there. It went on between them for a long while, and at some point he slept. When he woke, she was on the terrace, nude in the night air, leaning against the stone railing and smoking a cigarette. A bright quarter moon hung low in the dark sky. When she finished her cigarette, she pitched the butt out into the night then came back inside. She saw Gant was awake.

‘You work for him, right?’ she said.

‘I work for myself. He’s a client of mine.’

‘So you work for him.’

Gant nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘I hear things, from the cleaning ladies. They’re going to kill him. The islanders. They think he wants to starve them to death, so they want to kill him first.’

‘He doesn’t want to starve them,’ Gant said. ‘Believe me.’

‘I don’t care. I hope they get him. He’s a terrible, evil man. He can send me away from here anytime he wants. One day, after he’s used me up enough, and my youth is gone, he’ll sell me to somebody worse and they’ll make me a whore on the street.’

‘Who told you that? Howe?’

‘You don’t listen. I said the cleaning ladies.’

Gant reached over and poured himself another sip of whiskey. ‘You know what? It’s a strange world. You never know what’s going to happen next. If I were you, I guess I wouldn’t worry about things so much. And I’d stop listening to the cleaning ladies.’

Waves of pleasure rolled through Katie’s body, one after another after another. She was on her stomach, her face in the pillow, her free hand gripping the bedsheet, pulling it loose from the mattress. She was a rich lady, on a weekend trip to a fancy desert spa. She had gone in for a hot oil massage, but when she was on the table, it turned out that three men, three masseuses, would work on her. They turned down the lights in the room, and she couldn’t see their faces. At first they just rubbed her down, but soon they were saying things to her, things that embarrassed her. Then they were doing… things… to her, things she had never done before. She couldn’t protest. She didn’t want to.

It went on and on, and she went with it, higher and higher. She arched her back, eyes squeezed shut. At long last, one final, intense shudder went through her, and she collapsed onto the bed.

‘Oh my God,’ she said, and no one was there to hear it. She felt her heartbeat slowing down, her breathing coming deeper and slower. She opened her eyes. It was dark. The digital clock on the bedside table told her it was 3:15 in the morning.

The high was fading, and thoughts began to intrude, as they always did. In fact they rushed in, like cascading water. The thoughts were never good.

She was a failure. It was amazing to think of herself this way. An outsider might say that she had many of the things people wanted from life – she was attractive, she was rich, she lived in this big house, and she was still young. But she had wanted, and still wanted, so much more. From her own perspective, her life was empty. She had failed at nearly everything.

She was a failed artist.

That was one of her greatest failures. She had been a working artist in various media, trying different things, for close to ten years. She thought – no, she knew – that she was good at it. Back in Dewey Beach, and since they moved down here to Charleston, she’d taken part in numerous shows. And in all that time, she’d sold only three paintings, for a grand total of less than $2,000. Even worse, she suspected that Tyler had secretly bought the paintings through intermediaries. When she confronted him, he denied it, but that didn’t mean anything. That little conversation had taken place nearly two years ago – she hadn’t sold a painting since then.

She consoled herself. Maybe she wasn’t commercial, but so what? Or maybe she just wasn’t a saleswoman. She knew that selling yourself was a big part of success, but she just wasn’t that person.

She had also failed at love. The man she had finally married, she realized now, was like a more distant version of her father. Capable, supremely confident and in charge, very good-looking in a distinguished, hair-graying-at-the-sides sort of way. A man who, like her father, made a lot of money. A man who people worked for and looked to for leadership. A man who knew what to do.

But he was cold and unemotional. He was distant, and increasingly so. It seemed that he no longer cared what she did. It seemed that all he’d ever really wanted her for was to show her off – a trophy wife – and to make a baby with her. A son. Which was yet another way that she had failed. There wasn’t going to be a baby.

And that led to the final failure, ironically the one thing she had always succeeded at, had always been confident about. She had always prided herself on being great in bed, a wonderful lover. Of being able to make a man feel like a man, while at the same time feeling like a woman, incredibly so, and loving to feel that way. She knew she had a beautiful body. She’d had some amazing sex in her life, and some amazing men. She could have powerful orgasms, over and over again, for as long as her man’s stamina could hold out. She’d read about all the problems women sometimes had in bed, she’d read about them in magazines like Cosmopolitan and Mademoiselle, and yet these were problems she’d never experienced, not until this past year.

After she’d lost the baby for the second time, Tyler had become ever more distant and consumed in his work. He didn’t want to talk about the options available to them – weird science, he called it. He didn’t want to talk about anything anymore. He took no interest in what she did. It was like they were two roommates in this lovely spacious home they shared, nearly strangers. They almost never had sex, and when they did – four months ago was the most recent time – it was perfunctory, a formality, maybe just a physical release for Tyler, but not for Katie. Katie needed more than a twenty minute session every four months to get a release.

In recent months, a funny thing had occurred to her – maybe she could take a lover. Of course she wouldn’t do anything to risk the marriage, but Tyler was away a lot. If it were the right person, someone who was discreet, and who wouldn’t get too attached, it was just possible that she could do it. At first, she pushed the thought away, was almost embarrassed by it, even though no one could possibly know she was thinking it. But after a while, she would return to it, again and again, and it began to fuel her fantasies. Her marriage had turned barren, and she needed physical intimacy. Everybody did, but perhaps her more than most. It was a simple equation after all.

An ever funnier thing was how, now that she had an emotional and physical distance from him, she began to see Tyler clearly for the first time. She realized that when Tyler had given her everything she needed, emotionally and physically, along with all the creature comforts that went with being his wife, she had never really looked at him with a critical eye. She had let him be the sugar daddy. Was she really that self-serving, that immature? It seemed now that she was.

But now that was she was looking at him with a clear eye, it turned out she didn’t like what she saw. It was as if she had suddenly awakened from a long and deep sleep. About the only source of income he had that she knew about for sure was his pension from the Philadelphia Police Department. Other than that, Tyler was secretive. Certainly, he was some kind of a security contractor. His pension wasn’t paying for this house in a gated, secure community, for the two cars they drove, for the black market gasoline, for the swimming pool they had put in, for the big dinner parties they sometimes threw, for his personal trainer, and for all the rest.

But what kind of security did he provide? He was gone a lot, but where did he go? He would disappear in the middle of the night sometimes, a car picking him up outside at the front curb. He would leave only a short note on the kitchen table, and then return a day or two days or a week later. It made her curious.

He had only brief telephone conversations in the house, and not very often. Tyler seemed to have plenty of workers and subcontractors, but the only one he allowed to come to the house was the big, grinning redneck named Vernon. Vernon had a hook nose and a huge jaw and tended to wear a Caterpillar baseball cap and T-shirts with the sleeves cut off, all the better to show off his massive, tattooed shoulders and arms. He had laughing eyes that seemed to size you up and find you wanting. Vernon struck Katie more as hired muscle than as some kind of security operative.

Katie would bite her tongue for long periods of time, but eventually she could remain quiet no longer. ‘How’s work?’ she would say to Tyler, usually after one of his business trips, or after one of Vernon’s appearances at the house.

‘Work is going good. It’s going OK. We’ve got something big we’re cooking up. It could be a step forward for us.’

‘Really? That’s great. What’s it all about?’

‘Katie, it really doesn’t concern you. You shouldn’t worry about it.’

‘Well, I’m not worried. I know you’ll be successful, whatever you decide to do. I’m just interested.’

‘Well, don’t be. OK? Sometimes it’s better if you just aren’t interested. You know a lot of my work concerns national security issues. I’m not free to talk about it, not even with my wife, who I love.’

National security issues? OK, that was one product she wasn’t buying anymore. It just didn’t feel like Tyler worked for the government. Tyler never seemed to look at any paperwork, and if Katie knew anything about the United States government, she knew that government contracts meant gigantic mounds of paperwork – she knew this from being an assistant at a law firm that dealt with government contracts. The paperwork generated could be astonishing. Breathtaking. And Tyler never had anything like that kind of paperwork lying around. In fact, he didn’t seem to have anything at all in writing. He was much more likely to sit in his study – which he kept locked from her when he wasn’t home – poring over maps than to ever read a contract. He had a telephone wired in there, and she didn’t have its number. Maybe ten minutes ago, yes, in the middle of the night, it had started ringing and then had gone to voicemail.

What was it all about? Anyway, would the government really hire an operation where the second in command was big, dumb Vernon? She thought not, and as she thought that, she realized she had reached a breaking point with Tyler. She would stay married to him, of course. It was hard times outside of this house, and she had no intention of being cast out there. But she didn’t believe in him anymore. And she would, within reason, snoop around to see what it was he was up to. She might even consider finding a way into that locked study – not tonight, but soon. He’d probably be back tomorrow, at least that’s what his most recent note said, but it wouldn’t be long before he was gone again.

‘Tyler Gant,’ she said aloud to the empty bedroom, and was just a little startled by her own voice. ‘What do you do for a living?’

Foerster lay awake in bed, in the small room that had been his throughout childhood. His bed was narrow, like a nun would sleep on, and the springs creaked whenever he moved. The mattress was lumpy. It was an uncomfortable goddamned bed. He probably didn’t get a decent night’s sleep the first eighteen years of his life, and it was no wonder why.

His door was open a crack, and down the hall he could hear his mother snoring. Good God, all his life, he had hated it in this house. He had half a mind to march down the hall and stifle those infernal snores for good.

The desklamp next to the bed was on, casting a weak pyramid of yellow light, and Foerster, on his back, held up a business card where he could see it. He’d found the card in the desk – he must have left it behind the last time circumstances forced him to stay in this pit of despair. Foerster had been given this card at least two years ago. Now it was a little crumpled and faded, but you could still make it out fine. On the left side of it was a picture of a chess piece, a white knight. Running down the right side were the words Executive Strategies – Security and Intelligence Solutions. Tyler Gant, President. Then it gave an office address in Charleston, South Carolina, and a phone number. No website or email address listed, but there was another phone number scrawled in ink along the bottom, which Foerster had called only a few minutes ago from the ancient rotary dial phone on the desk.

He wasn’t sure why he had waited until three in the morning to call the number, or why he had hung up without leaving a message, except that he wasn’t sure if he should call it, and at the same time he was curious to see if it still worked. It did work – the same bland ‘leave a message at the tone’ recording that was on the machine two years ago was still on there. Foerster knew that the phone rang in the upstairs den at Gant’s house. Or at least that’s where it used to ring. He also knew he was taking a chance by calling there. Gant had given him that card grudgingly, and had told him to never call the number except in a desperate emergency, and only from a pay phone.

Well, this probably qualified as an emergency – he was hiding out from bounty hunters at his mom’s house! Gant would probably pop a blood vessel if he knew where Foerster was calling from, but hey, pay phones could be hard to come by in this day and age. Anyway, Foerster needed to get a message to Gant that he was no longer where he said he’d be, and that he needed to be picked up quick before he got put away again. The fastest way to do that seemed to be by telephone.

But it was a risk. Phone calls were easy to trace, and Gant had said in no uncertain terms that he didn’t want the cops to have any way to connect them. Well, fuck it. If Gant wanted him to do the job, then he needed to know where Foerster was. If he sent one of his men over to Foerster’s apartment, Foerster wasn’t going to be there. And Foerster couldn’t wait around here forever, wondering when Gant would send somebody – he had fucking people on his trail, man.

Shit. Foerster could not understand why everything always got so fucked up. It seemed like the simplest thing would suddenly take a turn and head off down some trail toward disaster. It was the story of his life. By all accounts, he was a genius. From his earliest days, he had a tested IQ in the 150s. It was at the far right end of the bell curve, where fewer than one percent of the population could be found. He could sleepwalk through school – without even trying, he was done with the sixth grade curriculum before the end of fourth grade.

This wasn’t good enough. His father had wanted an athlete, a football player, not some scrawny kid with a big brain. Foerster’s drunken bum of a father had taken to calling him Nancy Boy, and beating him with a leather strap. When had this started? He wasn’t even sure. It seemed like his first memory was of a huge, red-faced beast standing over him, the smell of mingled beer and whiskey in Foerster’s face, the smack of the leather loud in his ears, the sting of the whip on his skin, and his father saying, ‘I’ll make a fucking man out of you yet.’ If there was a hell, Foerster hoped the old man was roasting there right this minute.

But his father had only been the start of his problems. It seemed that nobody in this entire world wanted a smart kid. Having intelligence made you some kind of a freak. Nobody ever liked Foerster. His school teachers hated him – probably, they knew he was smarter than they were, and were envious of him. The other kids? Forget about it. If they noticed him at all, it was to throw rocks at him, or chase him home, or hold him down and punch his legs until he got painful Charley Horses. He’d show up at the house bruised and battered, and his father would laugh and say, ‘Serves you right for not fighting back.’

If Foerster had been dumb enough to believe in God, he’d say that God was testing him like He’d tested Job. Almost nothing had turned out right as far back as Foerster could remember. That is, until he met Tyler Gant. Although Gant’s personality left something to be desired, and Gant’s tough-guy authority act chafed on Foerster, the time he had worked for Gant had probably been the one thing that had gone well in more than twenty-five wasted years.

Gant had used Foerster’s brains the way they were meant to be used, working him to his highest level. He had shown Foerster at least a dollop of respect, and had paid him what he was worth. Their project had come off without a hitch, and they had made history together. Foerster had watched the news coverage for days, silently bursting with pride, almost unable to contain himself. At the Illinois state house, politicians and their staff members – blood ticks sucking on the near-dead carcass of this diseased country – were dying of anthrax.

Foerster wanted to go a bar and have a few drinks and say to someone, some stranger, ‘See that? See what they did? That was me. I was on that team. I grew that stuff.’ He wanted to call his mother and tell her all about it. He wanted to dig up his old man and rub it in his face. But of course, he could never talk about it with anyone, ever, the rest of his days. About the only person he could possibly talk about it with was Gant himself, but Gant had told him to stay out of communication. One day, Gant said, he would be the one to reinitiate contact.

Foerster never imagined two cruel years would pass before he heard from Gant again. The world had slid further into the abyss during that time, and Foerster had slid with it. He had nearly forgotten about Gant, about the feelings of achievement, of being a winner that had come with working for him. Then a brief note, no return address, had appeared in Foerster’s mailbox. Although Foerster had moved three times since last they spoke, Gant had found him. Got some work for you (maybe). Same terms as before, times 2. Will send someone. Burn this letter. TG.

Same terms, times two – that was awesome. Foerster had made $25,000 on that job, for two weeks of work. He had received ten percent in cash before he ever did anything. That meant he would get $50,000 from this job, and $5,000 as an advance. Foerster had been in and out of jail in the months since that first note had arrived, but other notes had come since then. The time was getting close – Foerster could expect someone to pick him up any day.

Until yesterday, when those two clowns had crashed into the middle of Foerster’s plans like a bulldozer, he hadn’t realized how much he was looking forward to working for Gant again. As he slid the business card onto the table and closed his eyes, Foerster committed himself – he would do whatever was necessary to keep out of jail and get back to working with Gant.

Jonah felt exposed.

It was early the next morning. He and Gordo were parked in St. George, a few blocks from the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. They sat at the corner of Richmond Terrace and a quiet side street of shabby homes. Traffic was busy on Richmond Terrace, a weird parade of bicycles, motor scooters belching exhaust, a few cars and many people, some pushing along carts of various kinds. Diagonally across from Jonah and Gordo was a convenience store. A hand-lettered sign in the window read ‘CASHIER LEGALLY ARMED.’ Jonah wasn’t sure if that sign made life safer or more dangerous for the cashier.

From the passenger seat, Jonah pointed a big parabolic microphone at a house maybe fifty yards down the side street. The house was a ramshackle place, with light-blue aluminum siding that had seen too many winters. The microphone protruded from its base like a long black phallus, and was surrounded by a clear plastic half-dome. Jonah gripped it by its handle, which was rather like that of a gun. The mike was plugged into a tape cassette player sitting between them, which in turn was powered by the car’s cigarette lighter. The whole rig looked somewhat like a satellite dish, or perhaps like a death ray weapon from outer space. Gordo had picked it up at a second-hand sale.

For years, Jonah had noticed men on the sidelines at professional sporting events, holding the ultra-powerful mikes so that the television audience could get the benefit of every grunt, every scream, every high-speed collision between the finely-tuned war machines out on the field. Later, he learned they were also used by nature lovers for listening to songbirds. The mikes were even sensitive enough to listen to those birds through walls, or while the birds carried on boring phone conversations near open windows half a block away. Yeah. Jonah was familiar with parabolic microphones.

Unfortunately, nobody else seemed to be. He was attracting a lot of hostile glances.

‘Man, everybody’s gawking at us.’

In the driver’s seat, Gordo was reading the science pages of the New York Times. For once, he was dressed neatly, in a pressed shirt and slacks. He was clean-shaven. If things went their way, today he would be a man of God.

He glanced up from his newspaper. He gazed up and down the street.

‘I say fuck ‘em. Let them gawk.’

He snatched the binoculars off his lap and scanned the street.

Jonah watched the spy glasses move back and forth. The big man had brains – Jonah had to admit that. Among Foerster’s mail had been a bill from North Bronx Central Hospital. It seemed Foerster had been admitted for a bleeding ulcer some months before and still hadn’t paid. The dunning letter came with a copy of Foerster’s admission form. The form contained the name, address and phone number of an emergency contact.

Foerster’s mother.

‘Nothing yet, huh?’ Gordo said.

‘No.’

‘Don’t worry, he’ll come.’

‘Oh, I won’t worry,’ Jonah said. ‘Why should I worry? Here’s a black man, probably from Mars, pointing a laser gun at somebody’s house during broad daylight. Nothing unusual about that, right? We’re lucky they haven’t called out the National Guard.

And meanwhile, Foerster would have to be an idiot to show up here.’

Gordo raised an eyebrow.

‘Patience, my brother,’ he said, scanning the paper again. ‘He’ll show up. I feel him in my bones, like some people feel the rain. A friendless bastard like that, he’s got to come back to his mother eventually.’

And as if by magic, Foerster appeared.

Jonah stared at him for close to a full minute before he realized who it was. Skinny, unkempt Foerster stood at the bottom of the concrete steps of his mother’s house, talking to a heavyset older guy. Foerster wore a gray wool cap like a sailor, probably to hide the scars on his head. It wasn’t remotely cold enough out for wool. Jonah could hardly believe the state of the man. He looked… dingy, like a ring of soap scum left around the sink after washing the dishes. He appeared to weigh about twenty-seven pounds. It was hard to imagine that this specimen had fought Jonah off yesterday, then had outrun him and given him the slip. He must be highly motivated.

‘Would you look at that,’ Jonah said. ‘He’s right out on the street.’

Gordo held the binoculars to his eyes. ‘Put the mike on them.’

Jonah turned the volume up and aimed the mike at the two men.

‘Yeah, yeah, I may stick around awhile,’ Foerster said. ‘My project in Cleveland just ended. It looks like I have something lined up down south, but after that job ends, I might just settle here in the old neighborhood for a while.’

‘What the hell is he talking about?’ Jonah said. ‘What job? Cleveland? I mean, come on already.’

Gordo shrugged. ‘He lies like other people breathe.’

‘Well, we’re glad to have you back, Davey,’ the oldster said. He clapped Foerster on his scrawny back and the mike picked up the slap. ‘I’m sure your mother will be happy to have a man around the house again.’

‘Sure, sure. I guess she gets lonely sometimes. It’ll be good for her.’

‘It’ll be good for both of you. Nothing like Mom’s home cooking to fatten a man up.’

‘For Christ’s sake,’ Gordo said. ‘They’re gonna need a lot more than Mom to fatten Foerster up. The guy’s a walking hunger crisis.’

They watched as Foerster went in the house.

The oldster crossed the street and walked off down the block.

‘All right,’ Gordo said. He took a deep breath. ‘I guess it’s time to go for it.’

He climbed out of the car and dropped the binoculars on the seat. In his hand he held a pile of religious tracts he hoped to discuss with Mrs. Foerster. The top one, the one Jonah could see, was called THE COMING FIRE.

‘Let’s go over this one more time, OK? Just so we don’t get crossed up out there. When I see an opening and decide I’m going in, what am I gonna say?’

‘God is love,’ Jonah said. ‘I hear that, then I come running to back you up. Fifty yard dash. I’ll be there in about six or seven seconds. When I come through the front door, you’ll be shouting out instructions – upstairs, or back door, or cellar, depending on where he’s going. He’s only been here one night, so he probably hasn’t had a chance to come up with much of an escape route.’

‘Sounds good, right? Workable?’

‘Actually, it sounds about twice as half-assed as yesterday’s plan,’ Jonah said. ‘But given the circumstances, I feel pretty confident about it. At least you’re the one going in first.’

Gordo smiled. ‘OK. As long as you feel good, I’m happy.’

Jonah watched Gordo amble up the block toward the house, tracts in hand. He trained the microphone on Gordo’s wide back. Gordo started muttering under his breath as he walked along.

‘Are you listening, Jonah? Lovely neighborhood they got here. Looks like the tide went out on this place about twenty years ago.’

He arrived at the house. His breathing came a little heavier, a little more labored. He seemed like maybe he was talking to himself now. It was hard to tell. ‘Are you ready kid? This is the test. This is the big test. This is for all the marbles right here.’

He climbed the short steps to the front door.

Inside, Davis Foerster went around in circles with his mother yet again.

She wasn’t happy to see him. Hey, he wasn’t happy to see her either. But when she opened that front door last night and saw him standing there, she might have been auditioning as an extra in a low-grade horror movie. Her jaw dropped, her eyes widened, and overall her face looked as if a creature from the swamp, trailing gore and slime, had appeared at her home. But she had let him in. That she had. What else was she going to do? He was her only son, after all.

She wanted him out as soon as possible, and he wanted to go – more than anything. If it were up to him, he would walk out that door right now and make a beeline for Charleston. Hanging around here gave him the creeps in more ways than one. He kept expecting the angry ghost of his shit-for-brains father to pop out of a closet or from behind the moldy shower curtain in the bathroom. Foerster wanted out before that or something worse happened. But he needed a grubstake to get him going, and she wouldn’t part with the cash.

Oh, she would give him enough for a bus ride maybe as far as Philadelphia and for a Big Mac at a highway rest stop, but that was it. She wouldn’t give him what he needed to get where he was going, to set himself up with a room for a couple of weeks in case the job didn’t come through right away, and to eat like a human being during all that time. His mom was a major disappointment. Then again, he wasn’t surprised at all. Why should he be? This was the way she had always been. You couldn’t pry money out of her with a crowbar.

Now she was sitting across from him at the kitchen table in her goddamn house dress, a hair net on her head, the cordless phone at her elbow like a faithful dog. That was her big hobby, talking on the telephone. Any minute now, she would pick up that phone, dial a number and start her gabbing. She was a world champion talker and not much of anything else. To Foerster, she looked old and tired, like a hag. She didn’t even bother to get dressed anymore. For a moment, he studied the lines of her face. He decided she should have a wart on the end of her nose. That would complete the picture.

‘But Davey, why don’t you just get a job? I’d let you stay here if you were working.’

He reached for the hard pack of Camels he had placed next to her on the table. She didn’t allow smoking in the house. He didn’t care. He slid one out and lit up. ‘No way, Ma.’ He pointed the lit smoke at her. ‘No way, you understand?’ He laughed, and for a moment the depth and breadth of her stupidity, the sheer grandeur of it, delighted him. His mom was the Grand Canyon of dumb, and he could finally see the humor in it.

‘What kind of job am I supposed to get? Everybody’s out of work around here, the whole city’s going out of business, and you tell me to get a job. That’s a big help, Ma. A big, big help. Anyway, I have a job. I told you that already. It’s a good job and it pays good money. OK? It’s just that if I want the job, I have to get to South Carolina, and I need money to do that. What am I gonna do if I stay here, flip burgers for $6.50 an hour, if anybody’s even hiring? How am I gonna live like that? Why would I want to?’

She seemed on the verge of crying. Again, no surprise there. Tears were her favorite weapon. ‘For one thing, you’d be living here, eating my food. That way you could save your money. For another, you wouldn’t be a criminal. I don’t want a criminal in my family, Davey. I can’t stand it anymore.’ She looked up at him, looked into his eyes. ‘Aren’t you tired of dealing with the police? Aren’t you tired of being afraid? I know I am.’

He smiled, a modern Jesse James. ‘I’m not tired, Ma. I’m just getting started.’

With that, he left her. He went down the hall and began climbing the wooden steps to the second floor. He remembered how those steps used to give him splinters when he was a kid. All these years later, and she had never done anything about them. The wood was still raw and rough. Well, at least he wasn’t dumb enough to go around barefoot anymore.

Halfway up the stairs, the doorbell rang. He turned and glanced back down at the door. Doorbells gave him a nervous feeling. They always had, but especially so in the last twenty-four hours.

Below him, his mother shuffled into the foyer, and Foerster continued up the stairs.

His escape set-up here was good – not nearly as good as it had been at his apartment, but good. He had put the whole thing together years ago, and when he looked at it last night, he decided it could still hold water. His room was on the second floor and he had a twenty-foot fire ladder, called the Res-Q Ladder, coiled on the rug by his window. It was a chain link ladder with metal slats. It hooked to the window sill with big iron hooks. If a fire started, you were supposed to throw the ladder out the window. It would uncoil itself on the way to the ground, ready for action in a couple of seconds. He had taken it out of the closet last night as soon as he came upstairs. He had even tested it, and it worked just as it always had.

Fire ladders weren’t just good for fires. As a kid, he used to climb out to go smoke a joint without alerting the parents. Now, if the shit happened to hit the fan again, he would be ready. He hadn’t yet worked out what his escape route on the streets would be, but he still had some time to put that together. He was thinking he would run for the vacant lots down by the waterfront esplanade, maybe even the ferry to Manhattan if a boat was in and the timing was right.

He reached the top of the landing. He listened. His mother was there at the front door now, just chatting away, probably with some crone from down the street.

He started toward his room, relaxing a bit.

Then the old bat screamed. ‘Davey, help! Help me!’

‘God is love!’ a man shouted. ‘God is love!’

Foerster bolted for his window.

Jonah ran toward the house. He went hard and covered the distance in no time, flying across the tiny front yard and vaulting up the three steps.

The door gaped wide and he flew through the opening.

The old woman sat on the floor, her back to the wall. Gordo must have knocked her down. Jonah noticed her thick legs, which had support hose pulled to just above the knees – she had the legs of an elephant. Her hands were splayed out on the floor. Her breath came in sporadic gasps. That worried him. The last thing they needed was a heart attack or a stroke victim on their hands.

‘Ma’am, are you all right?’

‘I’m OK,’ she said, gazing back into the house. ‘There’s a man in here,’ she started, but then turned to Jonah and screamed. He followed her eyes and was surprised to discover the microphone in his hand. He had forgotten about it and torn it loose from the cassette recorder.

‘Don’t kill him,’ she said. ‘Please don’t kill my son.’

‘Jonah!’ Gordo shouted from the top of the stairs. ‘He’s coming out! He’s coming out the window.’

Jonah turned and darted back outside. The blood roared in his ears. He leaped down the stairs and went around to his right, running down the narrow grassy space between houses. The grass was spare and brownish green. He looked up at the windows on the second floor, but saw no sign of Foerster. He stopped and glanced back out at the street – just in time to see Foerster chug past, arms and legs pumping up and down like the pistons of a steam engine.

‘Shit.’

Jonah ran back up the alley to the street.

Foerster’s slight figure dashed ahead toward Richmond Terrace. Jonah wouldn’t underestimate him this time. Foerster had a head start and he knew the neighborhood. All the same, there was nothing to do but chase him.

Gordo came out onto the front steps, but Jonah paid him no mind. He tore off after Foerster instead.

At the corner, Foerster turned right.

Please, Jonah thought, please don’t let him be gone when I reach the corner.

He turned and Foerster was up ahead, bursting across the street through the traffic. Jonah followed, mike still in hand. He cut across the street, eyes pinned on his prey, too much so. A woman in front of Jonah stopped short. She wore a kerchief on her head and a long coat, and she had an old supermarket cart piled high with rags and aluminum cans and chunks of scrap metal. Jonah crashed into it, knocking it over, but stayed on his feet. A car screeched and a scooter zig-zagged around them. People yelled.

Jonah kept running.

Foerster weaved through the milling pedestrians. He turned left and headed along the walkway toward the Staten Island ferry terminal. Jonah saw his head bobbing and weaving through the crowds. Jonah made the turn five seconds behind him.

The ferry was there. Its horn gave a blast, signaling it was ready to leave. The last stragglers were getting on board.

Shit! Could he have the ferries timed too?

Foerster ran past a fat couple and disappeared into the crowd. Jonah kept moving, waiting for Foerster to resurface. A moment later, he passed the fat couple himself and entered the terminal building through a double doorway. He stopped running and walked through the dismal waiting room. Foerster must have come through here, but now he was nowhere in sight. Damn! He had lost him.

He couldn’t have turned right or left, Jonah was sure of that. He must have gotten on the ferry. There was a bottleneck of people up by the ferry entrance. Jonah joined the line. A man did a double-take when he saw Jonah’s microphone. Jonah flowed along behind him and climbed on board.

The ferry was the Samuel I. Newhouse, commissioned in 1982. Jonah shuffled past a plaque commemorating its namesake. Random thoughts flashed. The boat was old, and still plying its trade. Was that good or bad?

He didn’t know whether to go right or left. If he went the wrong way, and Foerster doubled back, they were sunk. No, he had to assume Gordo had followed them to the ferry terminal. If Foerster climbed off the boat, Gordo would get him. Unless Foerster had made himself invisible, which now also seemed possible. The horn blasted again. The boat was leaving. Jonah went right, flowing along with the crowd. He moved slowly through a corridor with padded chairs arrayed along the big windows.

He felt the boat lurch, then begin to move.

He walked slowly to the end of the corridor. The ferry had left the terminal and now he was going to Manhattan. He glanced out the door at the end of the corridor. Another sitting room, filled with people. He turned around.

And spotted Foerster.

Thirty yards back, Foerster slid between people up a flight of stairs. Jonah had gone right by without noticing the stairs or Foerster. Now there was a thick knot of people, a crazy New York stew-pot of races, colors and creeds between Jonah and those stairs, between he and Foerster. The people were all trying to follow Jonah into the next compartment, but Jonah wasn’t going that way anymore. He was swimming against the tide.

He pushed a small Asian man out of his way.

The man pushed Jonah back with both hands, getting his body into it. He shouted something into Jonah’s face. Jonah shoved him hard, knocking him towards the window. The man fell into a woman’s lap. But the two men behind him were also Asians. They were together. All three started yelling now. One of them punched Jonah in the chest.

Jonah had no time for this.

‘Gang way!’ he shouted. ‘Police!’

He blasted through the two remaining Asians, and the rest of the crowd parted in front of him. He burst up the stairs, went through some doors, and came to an outdoor deck. Foerster waited out there. His head swiveled, surveying the whole deck, but there was nowhere left for him to run. He stood and gaped at Jonah.

‘Let’s do this the easy way,’ Jonah said.

But Foerster didn’t do anything the easy way. He moved toward the edge of the deck. Suddenly he vaulted up onto the safety railing. A woman nearby gasped. Foerster squatted on top of the railing like an insect, watching Jonah carefully.

The railing was to Jonah’s left. He looked over it, down to the water. The boat was really moving now. It had to be a three-story jump to the harbor. The water was foaming down there as they motored along. The whole scene gave Jonah vertigo, but it didn’t seem to bother Foerster. When he was young, Foerster should have run away and become a circus freak. It would have saved everybody a lot of trouble.

A breeze had kicked up. Jonah took a couple steps toward his quarry.

Foerster grinned. His face was sweaty and pale.

‘Don’t come any closer. Take one more step and I’m out of here.’

Foerster would jump. Jonah knew he would. And there was no way Jonah was going after him. Not from this height. Not into that water. He glanced down at the microphone in his hand, and an idea struck. Foerster was less than ten feet from him. Jonah brandished the microphone like a gun. He moved into a two-fisted crouch. He hoped Foerster didn’t watch much football.

‘Freeze, Foerster!’

‘Get away from me!’ Foerster shouted.

A crowd had gathered around them.

‘You climb down off there or I’ll let you have it with this.’

‘I’m gonna jump. I swear it, I’m gonna jump if you don’t get the fuck away.’

‘This is a stun gun, motherfucker. I give you a pop, you’ll be useless. You ever get a blast from one of these? This is a new one. It’ll put you in shock. You don’t want to go in the water like that. I promise you’ll drown. You want to drown over this? Is that what you want?’

Foerster gazed down at the water below him, then back at Jonah’s stun gun.

‘Climb down RIGHT NOW. Let’s go. Climb down. On the deck.’

Foerster eyed the stun gun.

He eyed the water.

The light went out of his face. His jaw sagged.

‘That’s not a gun,’ somebody said. It was a man’s voice, coming from just a few feet behind Jonah.

‘What?’ Foerster said. His eyes focused on a point just over Jonah’s left shoulder.

‘It’s not a gun. It’s a microphone. You never seen one of those before?’

Jonah glanced in the direction of the voice. Mr Know-It-All was chubby, maybe thirty years old, with a heavy beard and wearing a Yankees windbreaker jacket. Jonah heard his own voice, coming as if from someplace else. ‘Foerster, you’re gonna die, understand? This guy has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. In another second, I’m going to shoot you and you’re going to die in that water.’

‘Then I’ll see you in hell.’

Foerster dove off the railing. Someone in the crowd – a man or a woman, Jonah couldn’t tell – screamed as Foerster’s skinny body carved a graceless, tumbling arc through the air, then splashed into the water below. Jonah rushed to the railing and saw Foerster disappear beneath the surging foam.

Jonah closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

He looked again.

Foerster’s body appeared, bobbing off to the right and already well behind the boat. Jonah watched it closely, looking for signs of life. An arm moved. Then the other arm moved. A moment later Foerster was swimming, pulling hard, growing smaller and smaller in the distance. Soon he was a speck, then maybe he was there and maybe he wasn’t – a tiny spark on the water, a ray of sunlight reflecting off a discarded beer can.

The S.I. Newhouse motored along, passing the Statue of Liberty.

Up ahead, the tall buildings of lower Manhattan drew nearer. They seemed to launch themselves heavenward, like bamboo shoots springing up out of the ground.

‘Shit,’ Jonah said. ‘That’s twice now.’

He turned and faced the guy who knew what a microphone looked like. Five feet away, the guy stared at him blandly.

‘Was that any of your goddamn business?’ Jonah said.

The guy shrugged. The beard looked like it came from a costume store and was just glued right on there. ‘I made it my business. You have a problem with that?’

Jonah stepped into the punch, landing it solidly across the guy’s chin. The guy’s head swiveled to the right and he took two stumble-steps backward before falling on his ass. His head bounced off the ironwork of the floor. He was down and his eyes said he would stay down. A woman from the crowd kneeled by him and glared up at Jonah, not saying anything. All around them, people murmured.

Jonah could feel it already – the dull ache in his hand and in his wrist that by tonight would travel the length of his arm up to his shoulder. Instant karma – you paid a price for hitting people in this world. Still, punching that loudmouth felt good. It felt right. It felt like something Gordo would do.

‘I don’t know how it happened,’ Foerster’s mother said between heavy gasps for air. She had sobbed for a time and had only stopped a few minutes before.

‘I don’t know how Davey got so bad. I can’t tell you how smart he was as a boy. He was the smartest boy in his whole school. Everybody said so. He won big prizes for science and math.’ She shook her head. ‘And now this. In and out of jail. Beat up by the police. Always on the run.’ A long, world-weary sigh escaped her. ‘You know, his poor father must be rolling over in his grave.’

Gordo put his big hands on top of hers and let them rest there a moment. They sat at her kitchen table. Jonah had come in a few minutes before and shook his head – missed him again. Now he hovered around, not saying anything, and in general making Gordo nervous. Gordo was working here.

He glanced around the kitchen, really noticing it for the first time. The wallpaper was peeling away in several places. The ancient cabinets were half-falling out of the wall. There was almost no counter space. The linoleum on the floor was scuffed and ripped. The plastic tablecloth was sticky with age. Through a doorway he could see into the living room. The furniture was old – old, and not in a good way – and covered in plastic. Hell, back here in the kitchen the refrigerator was five feet tall. Gordo hadn’t seen one of those in ages. If he opened the icebox, he knew what he would find. Caked ice, five inches thick on every side, with a few frozen dinners stuffed into the dim tunnel remaining.

In the aftermath of the raid, he had managed to charm her. Even after bursting into her home, even after accidentally knocking her over – thankfully, she was a sturdy woman and hadn’t broken a hip or some vertebrae when she went down – he had managed to win her over to his way of thinking. With a maniac like Foerster for a son, she must have been halfway there already.

He had helped her up, brought her here to the kitchen table, and told her that he worked for the courts. He deliberately kept it vague, allowing her to believe whatever she wanted to believe about that. It seemed she had come to the conclusion that he was a court officer of some kind, maybe a special detective who reported directly to the judges. That was a fine thing to believe. He had also told her that he was trying to help her son, not hurt him. He had told her that if the police got to Davey first, her son might not get off as easily. You could tell by the bruises and the stitches in his head that the police had very little compunction about the use of force, even deadly force. The court system was a great deal more humane than the police.

He had won her over so thoroughly that she had agreed not to call anyone right away. She had also agreed to let Gordo look around in Davey’s room for a few minutes. There wasn’t much to see. A twin bed that might cramp the style of a ten-year-old. Posters of obscure heavy metal bands still on the walls. An aluminum fire ladder attached to the window sill and hanging down to the alley – quite the escape artist was our little Davey. And one thing that might actually mean something, though at this moment Gordo couldn’t imagine what: the business card of a security consulting firm located in Charleston, South Carolina. Gordo found it on the bedside table, which suggested to him that Foerster had it out for a reason. It was a very curious thing, that card.

‘Well, it happens,’ Gordo said now. ‘People go bad. It’s no reflection on how you raised him.’

Mrs. Foerster looked up, and in her eyes Gordo detected the light of hope. ‘Do you really believe that?’

‘Of course I do. Jonah here can vouch for what I’m saying.’

Jonah nodded his head solemnly. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Of course I can.’ But it sounded empty, like the absent-minded blather of a man who wasn’t listening and had no idea what he was agreeing to.

Gordo soldiered on with the lie. Jonah had already tuned the whole thing out, and Gordo himself was even growing a little bored with it. He wanted to keep Foerster’s mom on the hook by projecting compassion, and he even wanted to feel compassion for her. But in reality some plenty warped shit must have gone on in this house during Foerster’s upbringing, and no amount of hand-wringing was going to unmake that fact. In Gordo’s experience, a career whacko like Foerster didn’t get that way entirely on his own. He had help, and the help started early.

‘In our line of work,’ Gordo said, ‘Jonah and I deal with some very bad men. Some of them – not Davey, mind you, but some others – are the worst men in our society. And we find over and over that many of them were raised in good homes. Maybe they have some kind of defect, a chemical imbalance in their brains, or maybe they get led down the wrong path by people they meet on the street. I don’t know what it is.’

‘I don’t, either,’ she said.

‘Whatever the reason in this case, it’s very important that Davey be taken off the street for a while. It’s important that he get help from professionals. And it’s important that other people… well…’

‘That he doesn’t hurt anyone else,’ she said.

‘That’s right.’

She nodded, as if finally coming to a difficult decision. ‘I should have called someone as soon as he showed up here. But I wanted to protect him. I love my son, Mr. Lamb.’

Gordo nodded. ‘I know you do.’ His hand moved to her shoulder. ‘We can make things right for Davey. Will you help us do that?’

She began to cry again, silently this time. Her body shook all over. ‘I’ll do anything you want.’

Gordo held up the business card. ‘Do you know anything about this? I found it upstairs. It could be a clue.’

She took the card in one hand. ‘He told me he has a job lined up in South Carolina. I don’t know if it’s true or not. He’s lied so much that I have no idea whether I’m coming or going sometimes. He wanted me to give him money so he could go down there, but I didn’t believe that’s what he wanted it for.’

‘Did you give him any money?’

‘I gave him forty dollars. He said it wasn’t enough. I was actually afraid of him, what my son might do, to get more money from me.’ She started crying some more at the thought of it, but not as forcefully as before. Silent tears rolled down her cheeks.

‘Do you have any idea what kind of work he might do with a security firm?’

She shrugged. ‘Something with computers, maybe. Like I said, he’s very smart.’

‘Can you do this for me? Can you call the phone company, right now, and find out if by any chance Davey called that number from this phone? I’d do it myself, but I’d have to go through channels and it might take a couple of days. We’re really working against the clock here.’

‘Well, he was only here one night, and he came quite late. I don’t know when he would have called.’

‘Mrs. Foerster, a man like Davey can be quite resourceful.’

‘Well, OK,’ she said, but she sounded uncertain.

‘Good. That’s good. Here’s the phone.’

Gordo and Jonah waited while she sat on hold. Jonah was pacing a little bit, and if he was going to do that, Gordo wished he would go out on the street where Mrs. Foerster didn’t have to look at him. But she was a good girl, a trooper. When she got someone on the phone, she did just as he told her – she asked them to outline all the calls made from her phone in the past twenty-four hours. As she listened, she jotted something down on a piece of scrap paper. She turned it around so that Gordo could read it.

3:07 AM.

She looked deeply into his eyes. He noticed her eyes were bloodshot, and yellowing. He nodded. She nodded.

Jonah floated closer and looked at the note.

‘OK, thank you,’ Foerster’s mom said into the phone just before hanging up. ‘You know, I have some family visiting, and I just don’t like the way they think my phone is their phone. Calling wherever they please, anytime they want. I have to keep close tabs on them.’

Gordo liked the story. She was clearly a veteran liar. She had flowed into it just as smoothly as he would have.

‘Well, you were right,’ she said. ‘He called there in the middle of the night while I was sleeping. But the call lasted less than a minute.’

‘That’s very interesting,’ Gordo said. ‘I wonder what it means.’

‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Jonah said as they walked back to the car. ‘The guy called some random office in the middle of the night when he knew nobody would be there. He probably did it so he could lie to his mother a little more about some place that was supposed to hire him. I can’t imagine anybody hiring that guy.’

‘Sure, that could be,’ Gordo allowed. ‘Or he might have called there for a hundred other reasons. He’s a crazy person, so he might actually think that some private security firm wants to hire him. For all I know, he’s so delusional he thinks he works for the government, or for some clandestine foreign spy agency.’

‘Or the New World Order,’ Jonah said.

‘Right. He might go to South Carolina and walk in the office there, and they won’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking about. It could be bad for them because it might set him off.’

They were almost to the car. For some reason, it bothered Jonah to think that any firm, especially a security contractor, would want Foerster to work for them. It burned him up. He didn’t want his mind to think it.

‘Or, and I know this is a little hard to swallow,’ Gordo said. ‘Foerster might have some skill or combination of skills that makes this security company want to hire him. Hey, these guys might be people who hire rent-a-cops with tinfoil badges to hang around empty shopping malls and make sure nobody walks off with the sheetrock or the wiring. But we know one thing about Foerster – he thinks about two steps ahead, and he can be pretty fucking hard to catch. These might be enticing traits to somebody. And we know one thing about private security companies in this day and age – it’s not always clear what they’re really up to.’

‘So you’re saying?’

‘I’m saying I’m going to do a little research on this company, see what I can find out. Then I might give them a call and try to talk to this guy Tyler Gant.’

‘Are you going to tell him why you’re calling?’

Gordo unlocked Jonah’s door, then went around to the driver’s side. ‘That’s the tricky thing. I want to find out if Foerster’s headed there, if I can, but I really don’t want to tip my hand and let this guy know we’re looking for Foerster. I mean, fifty grand is fifty grand. Better we get it than he does.’

They slid into the car, and Gordo started it up. ‘So let me get this straight,’ Jonah said. ‘You’re thinking of going down there?’

Gordo gave Jonah a wide-eyed look as if they’d got their signals crossed somehow, as if something so simple a child could understand it had been nonetheless misunderstood. ‘Of course I am. Aren’t you? I mean, if we find out that’s where he’s going. This is the biggest single score we’ve ever seen. We’re not going to give it up that easy.’

Jonah said nothing.

‘Are we?’

Jonah shrugged, hating the tight, petulant sound in his voice that he knew was coming. ‘It’s going to cost money.’

Gordo nosed into the traffic on Richmond Terrace. The new realities – the bikes, the scooters, the pedestrians, and all the rest – meant that if you were still driving a car it wasn’t always clear when you were free to merge. ‘Think of it as an investment,’ he said. ‘I mean, this is the big one. This is the white whale. We can’t just walk away from this, right?’

Jonah wasn’t sure. They had missed the guy twice already, even though the cops had caught him on more than one occasion. Foerster’s slippery moves had Jonah thinking maybe he, and maybe even Gordo, weren’t cut out for bounty hunting after all. Sure, they’d caught a couple of nickel and dime skips. But when they went for the real money, the guy juked them and jived them and faked them out of their shoes. Beyond that, what if the whole South Carolina thing was a decoy or some scam Foerster was playing? What if he headed west, or north, instead of south? They could go down there, spend at least a couple of thousand dollars they didn’t have, go deeper into the hole, and it could all be a washout, a big nothing.

‘Jonah, am I right?’

‘I think we should wait a minute and think about this,’ Jonah said, knowing his words were exactly what Gordo didn’t want to hear. Already Gordo’s face looked pinched, as if a painful cramp had seized his lower abdomen. Jonah plunged on anyway. He had an opinion, so he might as well express it. ‘I think we should be a hundred percent certain he’s headed down there before we make a move that way.’

Gordo followed the flow of congested traffic towards the bridge into Brooklyn. It was amazing to see that on this monster span, one that went so high in the air and had such wicked crosswinds, an entire lane in each direction was now reserved for bicycles. What was next – a lane for oxen?

‘Jonah, don’t kill it, man. We’ll never be one hundred percent sure of anything.’

‘OK, ninety-nine percent. Ninety-eight percent.’

Gordo sighed. ‘I’ll do whatever I can to put together enough evidence so you will know that going to South Carolina is the right move.’

‘Well,’ Jonah said, and again the sound of his voice irritated him. ‘I’ll be waiting to see it.’

Patrick Quinlan

The Hit