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I saw the punk consider getting off at the bulkhead on my side of the canal, but he looked back at me and decided against it.

He hopped off the far side of the barge into the canal, feet first.

I tried not to gag.

I couldn’t see him again until he had splashed almost to the far-side bulkhead, where he grabbed onto some orange construction fencing that dangled into the water. There was a telephone company yard there, and the fence was being replaced. The orange plastic fence covered a gap between the new and old fence. He began to try to climb out. It was either climb out there or he’d have to swim a good distance up or down the canal to find another place out.

The telephone company maintenance yard had an entrance next to the Union Street bridge over the canal, two blocks north.

I began running to Union Street, but much of my wind had left me. Stopping like that had got me out of the flow, and made my muscles harden up. I reached the telephone truck yard entrance a couple minutes later.

There was a security shack at the telephone yard entrance at the corner of Nevins Street, and I jogged past it into the lot.

Someone with an accent shouted “Hey!” behind me, but I ignored it, making for the line of white telephone trucks at the bulkhead.

I found wet footprints at the bulkhead and followed them across the blacktop until they petered out at a back entrance to the maintenance building. A middle-aged Polish rent-a-cop stepped into my path. He couldn’t have looked more scared if he had stood in the path of a rampaging grizzly bear. I guess I must have looked pretty ferocious, what with all the sweat and that hat pulled down to my ears, huffing and puffing. He was shaking, but he was determined to do what he was paid to do.

How did I know he was Polish? They mostly have these bushy mustaches that come all the way down to their chins. Mostly just the men.

I kid.

He says, “I need see eye-dee badge!” He seemed to be waiting for me to kill him.

You’re expecting me to roar at the guy, right? For whatever reason I felt sorry for this guy, because this was probably the only time in his career as a rent-a-cop that he ever had to confront anybody, and it turned out to be a giant sweaty man in an overcoat, a stupid sweater, and a fedora squeezed on my head like a bottle cap.

“You see a guy climb out of the water?”

“Oh yes. No eye-dee. He go. Now you no eye-dee, you must go. What a day.”

“Where did he go?”

“To bus.”

“What bus?”

“He ask bus, I send to Third Avenue. What a day!”

I patted him on the shoulder, and he practically jumped out of his skin. “Thanks.”

I went back out to Union Street and jogged to Third Avenue. This is where the neighborhood starts to get more residential again, and where until recently the biggest employer was the South Brooklyn Casket Company. That’s right. Coffins.

At the corner, I could see the bus in the distance, down around Second Street. I’d never catch the bus four blocks down.

At the same time, and even taking into account that I was winded, sagging, and soggy from sweat, it seemed a shame to lose the punk when I still had him in my sights.

I waved a twenty-dollar bill at passing town cars. If you wave cash they know you’re not with the Taxi and Limousine Commission, and you can hail one faster. If you were a TLC agent, getting them to stop by waving cash would be entrapment. That’s what they tell me.

The second town car stopped, and I got in. The bus was pretty far gone, but we caught up to it just after Ninth Street, and I had the driver zoom around it and drop me one stop ahead of the bus.

I hailed the bus and got on. I fished out my fare card and paid.

The kid wasn’t on the bus. So I went back to the driver, an older black guy with baggy eyes that told me he had seen it all several times over.

“A kid get on the bus around Union Street? He was all wet, soaking wet.”

“Smelled bad, too. You a cop?”

“Something like that.”

He snorted like he’d heard that response a thousand times since noon. “I kicked him out around Seventh Street. Had no fare.”

While I was in the town car I had been so fixated on the bus that we may have driven right past the murdering punk and I didn’t catch a glimpse of him. That sucked.

“I see. Thanks. You can let me out next stop.”

“Of course.”

I hailed another town car and asked him to take me home by way of Bond Street. I had a feeling Smith Street would be taped off by the police as they tried to figure out what happened to Huey’s head and what happened to the guy in the fedora who chased a kid who dropped a gun on Sackett Street.

No way did I want the cops snooping into my business with Huey.

The car dropped me at Degraw and Bond. As I neared Hoyt I could see that Smith Street was blocked off by cop cars. I slid out of my damp overcoat and took off my hat, which was soaked through with sweat around the band. I kept my head down and my hat behind my back. They might be looking for a big guy in a fedora.

I walked to my place and tromped heavily up the stairs. My legs felt like they were full of sand.

In the vestibule I was reminded of the phone call I’d made first thing that morning.

My front door looked like a bank vault. That’s a slight exaggeration, but the wood door frame now had brushed steel reinforcements at the hinges and locks. Yeah, that’s
locks
. There were now two, the old one and a new one in a fancy brushed steel plate. That meshed with more brushed steel in the doorjamb where the dead bolt latched. So my front door, which previously was all wood and delicately Victorian, was now part Frankenstein. Let the werewolf do his worst, he wouldn’t get past this monster.

However, it hadn’t kept werewolf Gustav from tucking another love note under the door. He must have been there recently, after they installed the door, maybe even while I was chasing that punk. It said yvetteon the front, just like before.

I found the key, which was also made of gleaming brushed steel and had four edges, not just one. I slid it in the lock and felt five bolts unclick and snap out of the latch. There was a clean mechanical
ka-chunk
with the turn of the key. A reassuring
ka-chunk
.

I tossed the second love letter on top of the one from the day before and closed the door behind me. The inside of the door wasn’t quite as ironclad; I guess it didn’t need to be. There was a bill on the bar for five hundred, even. Not sure where I’d come up with that money, but needless to say the pink monkey had dibs.

I stripped out of my clothes and took a shower, one that used up everything the hot water heater had.

Still in my towel, I fell heavily on my bed and groaned.

The squares in the tin ceiling had a complicated but repetitive pattern that was soothing to stare at, almost therapeutic. My feet hurt. I hoped I didn’t get blisters.

Would have been nice to catch that punk.

MY EYES OPENED. IT WAS
dark. I’d slept.

Someone was knocking on my new Godzilla-proof door. I kept the lights off and put my eye to the peephole.

It was Frank and Kootie. You know, Huey’s boys, the ugly one and the muscle.

I was all quiet like, just looking, when Frank says, “Tommy, we’re here to make peace.”

I let a beat go by—basically still trying to wake up and get a handle on all that had gone down, that it wasn’t some screwy dream. What the hell time was it anyway?

“OK, you boys go around the corner to the tiki bar. I’ll meet you in the back room there by the fireplace in fifteen or so.”

I watched them exchange a dark glance and exit the foyer to the street.

Yeah, there’s a tiki bar around the corner from me on Smith Street. Back in the day, when I was a kid, my parents would take the family out to a restaurant near Times Square called Hawaii Kai. They had hula dancers, the crazy bamboo decor, wild drinks, and a doorman that was a midget. Naturally, me and my kid sister, Kate, loved the place. It was like Disneyland to us. Then suddenly in the eighties it seemed all the Polynesian restaurants became passé, which means out of fashion. Now they seemed to be coming back, because there was one right around the corner from me and it was pretty popular with the hipsters. Not so popular with me, though. The crowd was too young, the music too loud. Which suited my purposes that night. If I was going to meet Frank and Kootie, it had to be in a public place where nobody could hear our conversation but us.

I had to be careful. I didn’t know exactly what they wanted. Two days, two guys, two less heads. Then again, the kid had lost his gun; it might take him a while to find another. New York isn’t exactly Texas. Guns and ammo are hard to come by in the five boroughs.

A pair of jeans from ten years back, a sweatshirt, and a long raincoat was the new casual outfit. There was no rain, but I’d sweat out the sweater and the top coat. They were still damp.

The police still had Smith Street north of Degraw taped off. Bright work lights lit up the block in front of the bistro. Still searching the crime scene for the bullet maybe, I didn’t know.

Frank and Kootie were in back of the tiki bar at a low table, across from two couples at the fireplace. I kid you not: a tiki bar with a fireplace. This was Brooklyn, after all, not Waikiki, and October. Frank had a glass of brown liquid I assumed to be whiskey of some kind, while Kootie sipped an ultralight beer.

They were like a pair of meatballs at an Italian wake: nervous and gloomy. I stood over them.

“What’s what, fellas?”

So Frank says, “We admit we took the paintings for ourselves. That was Huey’s idea, it was his gig, we played along, what were we supposed to do? But as God is my witness, Tommy, we don’t have those fucking paintings, and we didn’t get our cut.”

Kootie flexed his jaw.

“Why you telling me this?” See, Huey wasn’t supposed to tell these idiots who he was working for, or about me. Ever hear of how in California, when it’s on fire, they cut down a bunch of trees so the fire won’t jump place to place? In our business, you try to leave gaps in who knows what so if one person gets hooked bythe fuzz the damage doesn’t spread. As we’ve seen, though, Huey thought he could make deviled eggs in the shell.

The two goofballs exchanged a glance.

Kootie says, “We figure you tweaked Huey for the double-cross. That’s the word on the street.”

Then Frank says, “And maybe had Jo-Ball tweaked, I dunno. We’re just saying there’s no need to be crisp with us. We’ll do what we can to make right, but tweaking us won’t get you anything. We don’t have the paintings or our cut. I wish we did.” He looked kind of upset about that last part in particular.

They thought I killed Jo-Ball and Huey because I was double-crossed. These idiots didn’t think that maybe it was the other buyer ripping them off. I was thinking Ms. French ordered the hits, hired Huey, and then tweaked him so she could pocket the whole take. That didn’t mean I should ease Frank and Kootie’s anxieties. I could use their fragile emotional state to my advantage.

Slowly, I sat down across from them. I looked at one, then the other. With a shake of my big head I sighed and said, “I wish I could believe what it is you just said, Frank.”

So Frank starts in again with his Catholic guilt. “Honest to God, Tommy…”

Kootie kicks in. “The thing is, we’ll help get the paintings if we can and give them to you. Whatever.”

I looked all squinty at Kootie. I sensed he lacked sincerity, like they were mostly calling me out to apologize so I wouldn’t tweak them. “You say that now. But Huey said he was going to give me the goodies, and he was obviously lying. Instead, he decided that you guys would clip me. Now here you are telling me you’ll deliver the goodies, again. Why should I believe you?”

“For Christ sake, Tommy, you think we want our heads exploded, too? Had no idea you were such a hard case … that shit is fucked up, man … fuck!” Frank spilled his drink in his excitement. “I mean, I understand why you’re crisp…”

“The thing is, Tommy, whatever.” Kootie stared at his beer. “You did what you had to do, fair enough. We’re just saying that we’re here to help you get the money he got for the gig. And if you want to give us a little something for our trouble, you know … whatever.”

You had to laugh. These goofballs weren’t as concerned about getting killed as not getting their share.

I waved a hand at Frank. “Get yourself set up with another drink. I’ll have a brandy.”

Kootie and I didn’t talk until Frank was back at the table. Anxious eyes were on me.

I says, “Who is the one Huey sold the paintings to?”

Frank makes a face like his gut hurts and says, “Wish we knew, Tommy. All Huey told us is the scam would double up our end.”

Kootie cleared his throat. “Thing is, he didn’t say much about the upper end.”

“Much? What is much? He told you about me, didn’t he? I was the upper end until this woman. And he doesn’t mention who she was?”

“Sweet Jesus, Tommy, he told us he was protecting us, that it was better we didn’t know who she was.” Frank took a big gulp of his drink. “What he did say … Kootie, tell him, it don’t make any sense, for the love of God.”