“Who is it?” I called.

  “Katherine Hollinger.”

  Oh, God. The good detective sergeant at my door. I was giddy enough around her with just Percocet in my system. Now there was half a bottle of Barolo in me too, not to mention the wild-card stool softeners. “Just a minute,” I said.

  Ryan looked at me inquisitively. I nodded at the balcony door. He put his gun away and padded quietly to the door and slipped outside. I opened the front door and there Hollinger was, in jeans and a T-shirt under a coral linen jacket. Her black hair was out of its clip and framed her face like a pair of loving hands.

  “Hello, Jonah.”

  “Hi.”

  She looked at me as though expecting to be invited in, but I stayed parked in the threshold.

  “Got a minute?” she asked.

  “Sure.”

  “You going to ask me in?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  She looked past me at the coffee table and saw the pizza, the wine, the two glasses. “Oh,” she said. “Company?”

  “You’re good,” I said.

  “You still have no idea.”

  She was starting to acquire a tan. By midsummer there’d be dusky skin to go with her jet-black hair and lioness eyes. Eyes I couldn’t stop looking at. I hadn’t come up with the right colour yet, having pondered hazel, honey and caramel. I was determined to keep trying.

  “What’s up, Detective?” was the best I could say.

  “That’s Detective Sergeant to you. Just wondering if you’d given any more thought to who tried to kill you.”

  “I’m not convinced that’s what happened.”

  “I am,” she said.

  I was feeling giddier as we spoke. It was either the Percocet and Barolo or the eyes. Whatever their true colour was, looking into them was still painless. “Kate,” I said. “Katie. Were you worried about me?”

  “Geller, please.”

  “I think you were, a little.”

  “I’m a police officer. It’s my job to worry about persons who might be the target of a violent offence.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  She said, “You’re welcome. And on that note, I’ll leave you to your date.” She looked out at the balcony again. “I’m surprised.”

  “What?”

  “That he’s a smoker.”

  “Who?”

  “Your… companion?”

  “What makes you think it’s a he?”

  Hollinger nodded at the picture window behind me. Broken rings of smoke were drifting into the night. “I’ve seen a thousand women smoke in my life. I’ve never seen one blow smoke rings like that.”

  “You are good.”

  “I told you. Enjoy the rest of your evening, Geller.”

  “You too, Kate. Or can I call you Katie?”

  “Not when I’m working,” she said.

  “Please tell me, please, you’re not fucking her.”

  “Not that it’s your business, but why not?”

  “She’s a cop, isn’t she?”

  “You could tell that from the balcony?”

  His shrug was both immodest and condescending. “From across the street, I could. I got an extremely developed nose for the law.”

  “Well, just to make you feel better, she’s not just a cop. She’s a sergeant in Homicide.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Or what is it you people say? Oy?”

  “If I was sleeping with Katherine Hollinger,” I said, “oy wouldn’t even begin to cover it.”

  “So why else was she here at this hour? Last I heard, they were clamping down on overtime.”

  “She’s worried about me,” I said.

  “You should consider wiping that idiot grin off your face.”

  “You grin like that when you talk about Carlo.”

  “As I should. He’s so quick, so smart. He’s at that age where they learn something new every second of every day. You should see him do a puzzle. I know he’s done them before, but he finishes them so fast, his little brain whirring along, so proud ’cause Daddy’s watching. I tell you, this kid… I was watching cartoons with him when you called, me on the couch and him lying on my chest. I could feel him breathe, smell his hair. He’d had his bath and he was all clean in his PJs, this sweet little package. And I couldn’t help wondering, how do people get so fucked up? How does someone like Marco start out smelling like shampoo and toothpaste and turn into a rabid fucking wolf?”

  Rabid. The perfect word for Marco. And you can’t let rabid animals live among you. They have to be killed. Shot down as they cross the town line.

  “So Cara would take you back if you could quit.”

  “She still loves me. I could tell today, the way we sat and talked. For the first time in a long time, we stopped talking at each other and both listened a bit. We actually communicated, like she was Oprah and I was fucking Dr. Phil.”

  I almost made a crack about him fucking Dr. Phil but decided to go on living instead. “What did you decide?”

  “That I need to get out. Retire undefeated. Do whatever it takes to keep my little unit together. I never had that with my mother. I want Carlo to have it with us.”

  “Anything else you can do to make a living?”

  “I don’t know. Run a restaurant maybe. Hey, don’t you smirk,” he said. “My day job, you want to call it that, I run the restaurant in the plaza we went to today.”

  “Where you sent the guy?”

  “It’s mostly a paper arrangement. I need a legitimate-looking income on my tax return. A manager runs it day-to-day but I hang around. I pick up things. Tell you something else might surprise you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m not a half-bad cook. My mother was fantastic and I learned a lot from her.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me at all,” I said.

  “No?”

  “Nope. The OPP warned me you were good with a knife.”

  “You’re not as cute as you think, Geller.”

  “Katie Hollinger thinks I’m cute.”

  “Katie? Oh, Christ, the sergeant.”

  “She does, I can tell.”

  “Great. My partner wants to dick a homicide dick.”

  “We’re partners?”

  “On this particular venture.”

  “The killing of Marco Di Pietra.”

  “It’s either that or wait to see if Vito tries,” Ryan said.

  “You think he will?”

  “If Vinnie Nickels doesn’t get off the fence soon and make a pronouncement, there’s a war coming for sure. Vito associates me with Marco so he might decide I’m worth killing once it starts.”

  “Or before.”

  “True. If, on the other hand, we get rid of Marco, Vito would have less incentive to mess with me. He might let me go. He fucking has to.” He tried and failed to keep his emotion out of his voice. “This life I made for myself… ever since this thing with the Silver boy… fuck, getting out is all I can think of. I can’t keep waking up in a cruddy hotel, living out of my car. Not that I blame Cara for kicking me out. Who wants to live with me and my ghosts?”

  I’d been asking myself the same thing since the day I flew home from Israel.

  CHAPTER 33

  Toronto: Friday, June 30

  Roni and I walk through a narrow alley between cinder-block buildings. The sun is directly above us, blazing hot, making me squint so hard my head starts to hurt. There are more soldiers patrolling ahead of us and behind us, part of a sweep through the camp to clear it of militants before Passover, when their attacks usually surge.

  There are no adults in the alley. None we can see. Just Palestinian children lined up against the walls on both sides, calling out to us first in Arabic, then Hebrew, asking for money, chocolate, cigarettes. Many have bandages around their heads, their hands, their ears. Some have a crutch or a stick to lean on.

  “Chuparim,” they cry, using the Hebrew word for goodies or treats. “Tan lanu chuparim.” Give us treats.

  Roni has a cigarette going and one boy, bolder than the others, steps in his path and holds out his hand. “Come on,” the boy says in perfect Hebrew. “One cigarette. A fair price to let a Jew devil pass.”

  Roni can’t help but smile at him. The boy looks twelve or thirteen, not a whisker on his cheeks, a young Sal Mineo with full, soft lips and unspoiled skin. Roni cradles his M-16 in his arms and reaches into his pocket for his Royals. As he does, the largest of the beggar kids, a stocky kid about sixteen with his arm in a sling, jumps on Roni’s back. He pulls a long thin blade out of the sling and stabs Roni in the neck. A second assailant, no more than eighteen, swings a stout walking stick at my head. I sidestep his lunge and club him to the ground with the stock of my gun. This is madness, they’re nothing but kids. But there Roni is on the ground, blood streaming from his neck as he fights to keep control of his gun. Children swarm him, clawing at his rifle and his sidearm, tearing at his helmet, trying to pull it off, swinging sticks and crutches at his body. Half a dozen rush at me too. I try to call for help-other soldiers from our unit are no more than a hundred yards away-but saliva pools at the back of my throat and I have to keep swallowing. Words won’t form. I kick at the children to back them off and raise my M-16, fire a burst of three. Hebrew voices crackle over my radio. Other patrols converge from both ends of the alley, their boots thudding on ancient stone. I yell at the children to get away from Roni. The boy who looks like Sal Mineo swings a crutch at my gun barrel, trying to knock it from my hands. I kick him in the stomach and send him crashing to the ground. Suddenly men come spilling out of adjacent doorways. Hard men, unshaven, holding knives, machetes and hatchets. They don’t seem to care that I have an M-gun levelled at them. I shout “Halt” in Arabic. The young Mineo gets up and throws himself at me again, grabbing my gun barrel. I head-butt him with my helmet, shattering his nose, and he falls to the ground choking on blood. As the first assailant raises his hatchet I fire a three-shot burst into his midsection and he goes down. The others pause and I back away fast, breathing hard, my finger depressing the trigger halfway. I hear running footsteps behind me, and I turn to see four soldiers coming up fast behind me. As I turn back I see a man hack at Roni’s body with a machete. Trying to sever his head. I don’t even shout a warning. I point my Mikutzrar and pull the trigger. The first burst slams him against the wall of the alley; the second keeps him dancing herky-jerky. I hold the trigger and keep firing. I can’t kill him any more than I already have but I can’t stop. He falls to the ground and the last few bursts tear into the wall behind him, blasting chips of stone into the air. One child screams and clutches her face and blood pours out over her knuckles and down the backs of her hands. A woman runs out from a doorway and gathers up the child, wailing as loudly as the child herself. Roni Galil lies on the ground, a dark blood stain spreading over his shoulder and chest. His neck is cut completely open. His vest didn’t protect him there. There’s pink froth on his lips. I hear a voice, moaning and crying as if in terrible pain.

  I can’t tell if it’s him or me.

  “You okay?”

  “Wha-?”

  “Are you okay?” Dante Ryan asked. I blinked and focused on the image before me: Ryan with a tea towel draped over one shoulder, offering me a cup of coffee.

  I sat up, got a sharp pain in my side for my trouble, and looked at my bedside clock: 5:54 a.m.

  “I been up a while,” he said. “Tidying a little.”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  Ryan left the coffee with me and went down the hall to the kitchen. I shuddered, trying to shake off the last vestiges of the dream. It was the closest I had ever come to reliving what really happened in that brutally hot alley, how we had almost been overwhelmed by children sent to fight us. Like Ryan, I felt the threat against the Silvers was dredging up feelings and images faster than I could tamp them back down: Roni’s savage death; young Mineo with the broken nose; the girl hit by debris or a ricochet from my gun; Dalia’s naked body glistening in a moonlit orchard after making love; Dalia’s leg-bloody, dusty, bones exposed-nearly sheared off by a concrete missile.

  I made it into the bathroom before the crying started. Grieving for Roni and Dalia. Raging at men who used children to fight their war without end. I ran water to drown out the sound as I leaned sobbing against the cool tile wall. Tears spilled down my face into the sink, where they mixed with water and swirled down the drain.

  When the crying was done, I blew my nose and washed my face. If Ryan made one smart remark, he was going off the balcony, guns and all.

  CHAPTER 34

  Believing one should never commit one’s first premeditated murder without a nutritious breakfast, I took Ryan to the Family Restaurant. He had bacon and eggs and I had the same heart-stopping ham-and-eggs special I’d had the day before.

  At a quarter to eight, I dropped him at the long-term parking lot at Pearson International Airport, then parked his Volvo in the short-term lot and waited. Eighteen minutes later he pulled up in a black late-model Altima. He got out and handed me a pair of thin leather driving gloves. “Don’t touch anything in or on the car without these on,” he said. “Case we have to ditch it unexpectedly.”

  He transferred his metal photographer’s case from the trunk of the Volvo to the Altima, along with a brown canvas sports bag.

  “A long gun,” I said.

  “Not just a long gun. A Remington 700 PSS. The weapon of choice of better police services everywhere. If it’s good enough for an FBI sniper, it’s good enough for me. Accurate, reliable, comes with a scope and takes a suppressor if you need one. Plus the recoil is manageable if you stay away from magnum rounds.”

  “And we need this because…?”

  “In your haste to rid yourself of Marco Di Pietra, and the burden he has become, you fail to consider one important factor.”

  “Yes, Professor?”

  “Call it the carnage factor. Unless we can find Marco alone, we have to take out whoever we find him with, be it a bodyguard, a hooker or anyone else. How many people you prepared to kill?”

  He was right. Shit. My focus had been on eliminating the threat Marco posed to me and everyone around me. I had to start seeing the bigger picture.

  “You want to keep casualties to a minimum?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  “The closer we have to get, the messier it’s going to be. The long gun gives us a chance, understand?”

  God help me, I did.

  We left the airport via a narrow road where a work crew was regrading a roadbed in the fierce heat, images of the men rippling above the hot asphalt like waves in a mirage.

  “Where are we likely to find Marco?” I asked.

  “He’s no nine-to-fiver but he has a few regular stops.”

  “Where’s his house?”

  “The new part of Woodbridge. A big pile his father-in-law built him, all floodlit pink brick inside a ten-foot fence.”

  “I thought he lived in Hamilton.”

  “His father does, him and the other old-timers,” Ryan said. “The guys who wanted to run Toronto without actually having to live in it. But our generation prefers Woodbridge or maybe Guelph if you want something more rural. Cara’s-my house-is in Woodbridge, and I got to your place last night in under thirty minutes, Highway 7 to 404 and down the DVP. It’s the best of both worlds. Close to downtown but the houses are new and you get space for your money. Anyway, hitting Marco in his house is out of the question. There’s always people around, including his wife and kids and his mother-in-law, plus the usual armed entourage.”

  “Marco has children?”

  “Unfortunately.”

  “And he could still have Lucas Silver killed? How many children?”

  “Three with the wife, two boys and a girl. Couple more outside the friendly confines.”

  “Five kids. The bastard doesn’t deserve a single one.”

  “Hey, for all I know he likes dogs too.”

  “Where else does he go?”

  “There’s places he eats, drinks, goes to get laid, watch people get beat up. Again, you’re always going to have too many witnesses.”

  “So what’s left?”

  “One of his so-called businesses is a trucking company just off Highway 7, a few minutes from here.”

  “The one where the Ensign smokes were headed?”

  “That’s right. It’s mostly for show-gives him a way to launder money coming in. But he keeps a few trucks on hand, half-tons and cube vans, to haul slot machines, cigarettes, booze, whatever. He runs a sports book out of the place and hosts high-stakes Hold’em tourneys. Sucks in fools who think they can play ’cause they’ve seen it on TV. It’s as close as anything he has to an office. He turns up most days at some point or another. Let’s start there and see what’s what.”

  “Would he be there this early?”

  “No, he’s a night owl. But there’s a guy, Tommy Vetere, kind of runs the place: answers the phones, takes bets, hands out gas money to the truck drivers, like that. He’s usually there by nine. And he might know when Marco’s coming.”

  “He would tell us?”

  “He would tell me. Remember how nice I can ask?”

  “What if he’s not there?”

  “We’ll scout it out. See if there’s some way to use the long gun. Can you shoot?”

  “Me?”

  “It’s your gig, man. Also, I can distract Marco. Show myself. Chat him up. Lead him outside. You can’t do any of that without him taking a body part as a souvenir.”

  I pictured Roni Galil standing over me as I lay on my belly, sighting down the barrel of an Israeli sniper rifle called a Tessler during training. “If you have to shoot someone, Yoni, I hope he’s big like a house because that’s all you going to hit. Should 1get you a slingshot like our King David used against Goliath?” But that was early on in my training. By the end I had become a decent marksman.

  “I can shoot,” I told Ryan.

  “There’s a fence around the property. Bushes along most of the sides and trees at the back. Trucks parked here and there. Maybe we can set up a blind where you can take him out as he’s getting out of his car. With his arm in that cast, moving like he is, he’ll present a beautiful target, don’t you think?”