A minute later, in the echoing silence, the younger guard comes out of his hiding place, brushes himself off, and then nods at his colleague.

  The older guard peers out from behind the Little Mermaid statue. “All clear?”

  “Yes, Melvin, we’re all clear,” the younger guard says with a weary sigh.

  The two guards join each other, shaking their heads and holstering their handguns. They walk over to the breached windows, their boots crunching broken glass. The teenagers join the guards, and the group lingers there for a moment, speechless, as sirens fill the air, a dissonant harmony against the fire alarm.

  Out in the parking lot, about a hundred yards away, a rust-pocked blue pickup truck is screeching to a stop in front of the fleeing pink gorilla and his hostage. The big guy throws the hostage into the cab, and then quickly climbs in as the truck lays another patch and roars off toward the west exit gate.

  Far beyond the gates, out over the black fields of steel mills, a big yellow gibbous moon rises over the western horizon, the significance of its size lost on the gallery of onlookers.

  23.

  Early the next morning, not long after the waxing moon has tucked back under the far gray reaches of Lake Michigan, the head of the Ferri family’s criminal empire, Anthony Michaelangelo Ferri III, also known (but not to his face) as the “Mink,” is summoned in the middle of his first cappuccino of the morning.

  “Boss, I got that lady cop here,” squawks the speaker on his desk phone.

  “Jesus H. Jehosephat, not this puta again,” the old man grumbles, dabbing the foam from his trim little silver ‘stache with a monogrammed cloth napkin. He sits at a side table in a cardinal-red, monogrammed silk robe over his monogrammed silk pajamas. He pokes the intercom button. “Jimmy, whattya mean she’s here?”

  Through the speaker: “She’s out in the dining room.”

  “What the fuck, Jimmy, I’m not even dressed.”

  “Says it’s urgent, says it won’t wait, says you gotta hear something.”

  The old man grunts and stabs the button. “This better not be about that goddamn half-breed fat-boy again.”

  A long pause on the other end. “Boss, you want I should get rid of her?”

  “Ah, fuck it, Jimmy, the morning’s already ruined... go ahead and send her in.”

  The old man rises on creaking joints, closing his robe over his sunken gray chest, tying off the silk sash. He goes around the desk and sinks into his plush, creamy, worn-leather swivel chair.

  “Sorry about the hour,” Lieutenant Anna Marie Rigby says as she enters the don’s office in her scarf and Scotchgarded raincoat, a skinny black gentleman in a velveteen warm-up suit in tow behind her.

  Dalessandro, the mountainous goombah, follows on their heels. He wears another one of his rat-pack get-ups today—a goldenrod Ban-Lon golf shirt buttoned up tight against his massive neck.

  The old man pushes himself away from his desk and stands up. “What the hell is all this? What is this moolie doing in my office?”

  The black man steps forward. “Name is Morrison, sir, I been on your payroll for—”

  “Please, Morrison, if you don’t mind.” Lieutenant Rigby cuts off the Candy Man’s words with a plump raised hand. “Anthony, this is Arthur Ezekial Morrison, aka the Candy Man—aka somebody you need to know right now.”

  Ferri slumps back down in his huge leather swivel, making the chair squeak. “Why do I get the feeling this is about that frigging Indian again?”

  “And you would be right about that, Anthony, but you need to hear the whole story.” Rigby glances over her shoulder at Dalessandro. “In private—if you don’t mind.”

  Ferri cocks his head at her. “Why? What’s the big deal? What do I care about more shenanigans from this half-breed mook?”

  Rigby levels her gaze at him. “Because he’s saving people now.”

  A long beat as Ferri absorbs this. “He’s what?”

  “He’s saving people.”

  “What people?”

  “Your marks now, looks like.”

  The old man purses his lips. “And how do we know this, Lieutenant?”

  “We know this because there’s an asshole name of Elgart still walking around this morning, making calls to his bookie, trying to weasel outta paying his vig.”

  Ferri slumps as Rigby proceeds to tell the old mobster about the fracas at the Riverside Casino last night, the fact that the mark—Elgart—was snatched from certain death by a crazed, overweight Indian in a Baby-on-Board T-shirt. And the shooter, Wachowski, is AWOL as well. The last thing Rigby explains is where the Indian got information on the Elgart hit.

  After hearing the facts, the old man rests the side of his head on his liver-spotted hand with an exasperated sigh. The anger makes his eyes water. “Jimmy, go get the plastic.”

  “The what?” Rigby takes off her scarf and shakes the rain off it.

  Ferri dismissively waves an arthritic hand. “Just a little inside joke.” He nods at his capo. “Go ahead, Jimmy, go get the plastic.”

  The goombah turns and vanishes.

  Anna Marie Rigby folds her scarf and stuffs it neatly in her pocket, then takes a seat in one of the leather armchairs in front of the desk. “Sit down, Morrison, you’re making me nervous.”

  The Candy Man sheepishly takes a seat on a matching armchair adjacent to the desk.

  “Start talking,” the old man says to her with a humorless glint in his yellow eyes.

  “Correct me if wrong, Anthony, but you brought this Indian fellow into the business—when was it?—back in the mid-nineties?”

  The old man shrugs. “With any large organization, employees come and go.”

  Rigby gives the don a look. “Yeah, you folks have one heck of a retirement program.”

  Ferri frowns at her. “What does of any of this have to do with my business?”

  “Tell him, Morrison.” The cop gives the pimp a nod. “Tell him what you told me this morning.”

  The Candy Man takes a deep breath. “Okay, here’s what it is: y’all are familiar with the fact that this fat slob’s been doing odd jobs for me?”

  Anthony Ferri’s expression does not change, other than a tiny twitch at the corner of his pursed lips. “We’re all familiar with your relationship with the half-breed, Morrison. You want to get to the point?”

  “Get to the point, Candy.” Rigby is staring impatiently into her lap.

  “Okay, so, anyhow, here’s the thing.” The Candy Man’s mouth is dry with nervous tension. “Past couple of years, fat boy done some jobs for me. Nothing special. Small shit. Nothing to do with the Outfit. But the dude is gettin’ more and more sloppy—”

  “Is there a point in here somewhere?” The old man behind the desk is glowering now.

  “Yessir, yes, ya see, the point is, I tried to help him, but the dude is nuts. Dude is a problem drinker. Very sad. I tried to help, tried to get the dude into a program, but you know how it is with—”

  A noise in the doorway: The goombah, Dalessandro, is back. He has a four-foot roll of clear plastic tarp under one arm, a cigarette dangling off his lip, and a businesslike expression on his craggy Dean-Martin-on-ludes face.

  The Candy Man tries to concentrate on his speech, which appears to have been rehearsed. “So, anyhow, what I was forced to do is—whattya callit?—cut my losses? So what I do is, I decide to take the motherfucker out, but it don’t work out so good, and what happens next is, this red-skin motherfucker ambushes me and—”

  The pimp pauses, glancing over his shoulder at the goombah, who is kneeling down by the door, unrolling the clear plastic drop cloth as though preparing to paint the walls. The tension ratchets up in the room like a rheostat cranking up.

  “Go on, son,” Ferri says from behind the desk with a coldly encouraging smile.

  The pimp licks his lips. “I swear, y’all, I got myself in a situation. The motherfucker ambushed me! Puts a motherfuckin’ gun to my head! What am I supposed to do?! What would you do?!”

  Across the office, Dalessandro is standing on the edge of the plastic, which now covers half the wall-to-wall shag. Absently puffing away on his cigarette, he calmly screws a silencer onto the muzzle of a silver-plated .357 magnum. He has the bored look of a plumber preparing to climb down into a sewer to root a pipe.

  “Don’t do this, y’all,” the pimp pleads, glancing back and forth from the man on the plastic sheet to the man behind the desk. “I can help y’all with this shit, I can!” The pimp turns to the lieutenant. “Tell ’em how I can help ’em! Tell ’em what you told me this morning!”

  Anna Marie Rigby pulls a Kleenex from her purse and wipes the tip of her nose. “What is it with mob people? Bunch of drama queens.”

  Dalessandro strolls over to the pimp and pushes the muzzle of the .357 against the man’s head. “If you don’t mind, sir, I’d like you to step onto the plastic now.”

  The Candy Man closes his eyes. “C’mon, y’all, you don’t gotta do this, c’mon, c’mon!”

  Anthony Ferri watches impassively behind his gigantic teak desk.

  “Sir,” Dalessandro says, his baritone voice sharpening slightly, “if you don’t move over to the plastic immediately I’m going to have to put you there.”

  The pimp rises on elastic legs and somehow manages to stagger across the room and onto the plastic.

  The tarp crackles as he falls to his knees and begins to pray.

  “Drama queens,” Lieutenant Rigby says with a weary shake of her head. Then she blows her nose. The honking sounds are oddly incongruous as they blend with the pimp’s frantic praying.

  “One second.” Old Man Ferri raises a crooked index finger, as though something is on the tip of his tongue. “One second, please.”

  Dalessandro waits for a signal, the gun barrel pressed against the pimp’s temple.

  Ferri rises behind the desk as though discovering the cure for cancer. “One second, Jimmy. Hold on.” The old man looks at Rigby with a twinkle in his eye. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  Lieutenant Rigby wipes her nose absently, looking a little bored.

  “I see now…” the old mobster says with a yellow, espresso-stained grin. “... how this nigger’s gonna help us with the half-breed problem.”

  24.

  He wakes up in darkness.

  Zero bearings, memory fuzzy, the back of his head throbbing with pain, he tries to move. His lanky body, numb and stiff, presses snug against something hard and rubbery-smelling. His hands are shackled behind his back with something cold and hard like nylon strapping, and he cannot move his mouth under a big swath of duct tape.

  Gentle swaying vibrations—and the occasional bump—tell him he’s in a vehicle, and the vehicle is moving, and the vehicle is taking him somewhere.

  Most ordinary people would panic. Others might get incensed. Not the Russian. The Russian is genetically marked with cobra-like calm. He lies there in that dark coffin and takes deep breaths and relaxes and searches his traumatized brain for the dominoes that led up to this predicament.

  He remembers the job. He remembers slipping into the Riverside Casino through the service entrance and drugging the guard. He remembers observing the asshole Elgart playing the slots for tedious hours. And he remembers seeing the Indian, and going after both of them in the men’s room. But how long ago was that? Hours? Days?

  Eyes adjusting to the darkness, he begins to make out dim shapes around him. The back side of a hinge, a faded label reading RoadCase, and he realizes, with some measure of outrage, that he is cooling off inside a huge cargo trunk. He is stowed in a trunk, in the back of a van or a truck, and he is being hauled somewhere—most likely for disposal.

  Muffled voices.

  They are coming from behind the Russian’s head, through layers of metal and fiberglass. Wachowski gets very still and listens, and he tries to identify the source of the voices. One of them, a high, shrill female voice, rings no bells for Wachowski.

  But the other voice—a low, phlegmy, male drone—sends jolts of recognition up the Russian’s spinal column. He remembers how close he was to pulling the curtain on this fat, incompetent slob of an Indian—another half a foot-pound of pressure on that trigger-pad…

  Wachowski is just starting to saw the edge of his shackles against a sharp metal joint when he feels the truck slowing down.

  The wheels bump over a traffic hump, and then the vehicle slows down to a crawl over a pebbly surface like gravel or dirt. Wachowski tightens up. His anus puckers with alarm. This is it. Unarmed, bound, and gagged, he will surely be zapped and buried and forgotten in some godforsaken landfill. The vehicle stops.

  Doors clanking open. Footsteps approaching. Wachowski closes his eyes, grits his teeth, and waits to die, waits for the sharp bright pop through the front of his skull—lights out forever.

  The sound of a key rattling in a padlock is so loud it makes Wachowski flinch.

  The top of the trunk creaks open and floods the enclosure with blinding daylight.

  Wachowski cringes at the stabbing pain behind his eyeballs from the overcast light. Blinking like a vampire bat, his skull pounding like a kettledrum, he sees nothing at first but a blur of color.

  “Jesus Christ, he’s awake,” the female voice says from somewhere nearby.

  “Okay, let’s go through the thing,” Oswald Means says, his huge silhouette looming over the trunk.

  Blinking fitfully, trying to focus on the figures hovering in that corona of light, Wachowski swallows the sour metallic taste in his mouth and tries to say something, but the tape limits his communication to grunts and moans. “Mmm, hmm, mmmmmmmmmmmmm!”

  “Calm down, Bernie, we’ll have you outta there in a just a sec,” the Indian assures him. “All you gotta do is listen first.”

  “Hhhmmm!”

  The heavy-jowled face of the Indian slowly comes into focus, staring down at Wachowski. “Bernie, I’ll be honest with you—I was tempted to just tag you back there and be done with it.”

  “Ozzy—” The girl gives the big man a little nudge in the ribs.

  “Sorry, sorry.” Oswald raises his hands in surrender. “Go ahead and give him the literature, and let’s get the fuck outta here.”

  “Can you sit him up?”

  “Oh yeah.” Oswald reaches down into the trunk, grabs Wachowski by the lapels of his crumpled Armani jacket, and yanks him out of the container. It feels to Wachowski like he’s being wrenched up by a crane. “Have a seat for a second, Bernie, and listen up.”

  Dizziness courses through the Russian as he is plopped down on the end of the tailgate like a rag doll. He blinks and blinks. He smells manure and clover and fresh-cut grass, and he hears crows rioting in the trees. Through his bleary vision, he sees they are idling on the edge of a parking lot in some rural outpost surrounded by cornfields.

  To his right, a stone path leads up to a massive brick edifice with soot-charred chimneys, barred windows, and moss-eaten turrets.

  “You gonna take the tape off or what?” the girl asks.

  Oswald rips the duct tape off the Russian’s mouth, causing a sudden burning agony across his lower face. Wachowski refuses to succumb. He knows he is about to be put down like a lame horse, but he refuses to surrender to this boob.

  He looks up at the Indian with deadpan sincerity, and speaks in a hoarse voice. “You had better make sure that you shoot straight, Red-Man.”

  Oswald gives him a quizzical look. “Huh?”

  “Vhen you bump me off, you must be certain that you vill complete the task, because I vill hunt you down for the rest of your life.”

  Oswald tries to stifle a smirk. “Cool your pits, Bernie. Nobody’s gonna bump anybody off.” He nods at his skinny accomplice. “Make the call, and let’s give him the stuff and get outta here.”

  The girl is thumbing a number into her cell phone as she talks. “Mr. Wachowski, I would appreciate it if you would try to just listen, and not talk.” She puts the phone to her ear, covering the mouthpiece and adding, “And try to listen with an open mind.”

  Then she speaks into the phone: “Yes, we have a Mr. Wachowski here. Yes, that’s right, a Mr. Bernard Wachowski. We’re out front. Thank you, that would be fantastic.” She snaps the phone shut and turns back to the Russian. “Mr. Wachowski, are you familiar with the word intervention?”

  Wachowski blinks and searches for words. He notices two figures in the distance, coming down the front stone steps of the institution. Both male, middle-aged, burly, and wearing white coats with laminated ID tags around their necks, they look like orderlies.

  “Just give him the stuff, Gerbil. We don’t have time for this shit.”

  She gives the Indian an irritated glance. “Do you mind? There’s a certain way you’re supposed to do this.”

  “How would you know?”

  “They put me through one of these at the coffee shop once.”

  “You’re shitting me. They had an intervention for you? For what?”

  “Pot-smoking—whattya think?

  Oswald sighs. “Just get on with it so we can get the fuck outta here.”

  The orderlies are coming down the walk, approaching with bored expressions.

  Gerbil digs in a crocheted knapsack that hangs off her bony shoulder. She fishes around in it for a second. “Mr. Wachowski, you’ve hurt a lot of people over the years with your anger problems. Do you have somebody that loves you?”

  The Russian stares.

  Oswald grabs him by the nape and shakes him. “Answer the lady!”

  “Yes—I mean no—”

  “Never mind,” Gerbil says, pulling a pamphlet out of her bag, a glossy chapbook with a crucifix on the front next to a Hallmark card photo of a man smiling at a sunset. The words OWNING YOUR ANGER are etched in flowery script across the top. “I’m sure there’s somebody, Mr. Wachowski.” She stuffs the pamphlet into the Russian’s lapel pocket. “Maybe a whore, maybe a drug dealer, an ex-wife—somebody who cares about you.”

  “Let’s go, c’mon,” Oswald says, grabbing the assassin by the bicep and yanking him off the tailgate.