“He will. This guy is no citizen. You think he’s going to take some factory job when he gets back here? No. He’s going to go back to making a living the only way he knows how.”

  “And someone else gets hurt in the meantime.”

  “We can’t protect everybody in the state of New Jersey—or Florida. We’re protecting our client. She’s writing the checks. Our job is to keep him away from her. Anything else is a little out of our realm of responsibility, don’t you think?”

  “So how do we deal with this guy?”

  Ray leaned back in his chair.

  “You know, you constantly amaze me,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “A couple days ago, you didn’t want anything to do with this situation, or this client. What happened?”

  “I guess I’m looking at things a little differently. Anyway, we’re in it now, right? You took her money.”

  “I did.”

  “So we look forward, not back. Think it through, check out the angles, the best way to handle the situation. Assess and eliminate the threat.”

  “That’s what I like about you, Har. Just when I think I know where you’re coming from, you switch directions. And somehow, in your mind, it all fits together. You don’t see the conflict at all.”

  Harry shrugged.

  “We work with what’s in front of us. When the situation changes, it changes.”

  “Lieutenant Rane, the philosopher king of the MCU. Reborn. Good to have you back.”

  “You know what I used to say back then.”

  “You used to say a lot.”

  “The only way to do it …”

  “ … is through it. Yes, I remember.”

  “And some things,” Harry said, “don’t change.”

  Harry laid the sheets of paper on the table in front of her. He’d made copies of the printouts, the fax.

  “I want you,” he said, “to fill in the blanks.”

  They were in a coffee shop in Ocean Grove, fashioned from the shell of an old drugstore. The decor was small-town 1930s, a half dozen tables, a lunch counter with stools along one wall, an ice cream and soda fountain with a walk-up window that opened onto the street. Christmas music played softly from ceiling speakers.

  She moved her cup of coffee to the side, looked at the pages one by one, read through them, expressionless. She wore a sleeveless black sweater despite the cold, jeans. He could see the vaccination mark high on her left shoulder, the fine blonde hairs on her arms.

  “There’s more than what’s here,” she said.

  “I figured.”

  “I’m not sure what you want.”

  “All we really know about him is what’s on those. I want you to tell me the rest. When did you meet him?”

  She put the papers down, stirred more sugar into her coffee.

  “I used to dance at the Heartbreak Lounge. Do you know where that is?”

  “In Asbury? Yeah.”

  “That’s where I met him.”

  She lifted the cup, sipped. He waited.

  “I’d just turned twenty. A kid still. A friend of mine was dancing already, told me how much she was making—four, five hundred a night. So I gave it a shot. Went in for an audition and they hired me.”

  “Tough way to make a living.”

  “Not if you know how to draw boundaries. I would get on that stage and my brain would leave the building. It was like I was watching somebody else in the mirror, dancing. I’d count my money at the end of the night, but the rest of it would be a blur. It beat waiting tables, though, I can tell you that.”

  “You ever wait tables?”

  “Like I said, I’ve done a lot of things.”

  She put the cup down.

  “I worked the whole circuit, up and down Jersey, like everyone does. But the Heartbreak was where I danced most of the time. One night he came in, alone. He just sat at the bar, watched me. Never gave me a dime. He told me later it was because I was different, that giving me money would have been an insult. I was young and stupid. I believed him.”

  “So he swept you off your feet?”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “No,” he said. “Just curious.”

  She sat back, ran a fingertip around the rim of her coffee cup, not looking at him. He could smell the faintest trace of her perfume.

  “I got into some trouble there,” she said. “He helped me out.”

  He drank coffee, let her take her time.

  “One of the girls there,” she said finally, “convinced me to do a bachelor party. Said it was easy money, a guaranteed twelve-hundred-dollar take, just to do the same things I was doing at the Heartbreak. Like I said, I was young then, stupid.”

  “What happened?”

  She looked at him.

  “You really want to hear it?”

  “If it’ll help.”

  “I don’t know that it will.”

  “We’ll find out.”

  She tilted the cup, looked into it, swirled its contents.

  “It went bad quick,” she said. “It started out in the basement of this firehouse. I was scared. I found out later that none of the girls ever do those gigs—for anybody—without bringing somebody along. So I guess I learned the hard way. I woke up the next morning in a motel room, naked, alone and sick, the cleaning lady banging on the door.”

  “You don’t remember what happened?”

  “Not past a certain point. It occurred to me later that somebody must have put something in my drink. I remember wanting to get out of there. Then I just blacked out. I had only myself to blame, though, for getting into that situation.”

  “Like you said, you were young, you didn’t know any better.”

  “I should have.”

  “Did you tell anyone? Afterward?”

  “Like the police? No. The definition of rape gets a little cloudy, don’t you think, when it’s a woman dancing half-naked in front of a bunch of drunk men?”

  “No, it doesn’t,” he said. “Not really.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. Luckily I was on the Pill. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d gotten pregnant. I never knew how many of them took their turn.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The waitress came over, filled their cups without being asked. He waited until she moved away.

  “So you were on your own with it,” he said.

  She nodded.

  “I was young, but I was smart enough to know that making an issue out of it would only make things worse. My word against theirs, and I took their money. The last thing they needed at the Heartbreak was a prostitution beef. They would have fired me in a second.”

  “So what’s all this got to do with Harrow?”

  “Two of the men from the party—the ones who hired me—started coming around the Heartbreak. I guess they were looking for a repeat performance. I was terrified of them. I’d get onstage, see them at the bar watching me and I’d just freeze up. And the way they looked at me … I’d see them talking to other men at the bar, laughing, and I knew they were talking about me.”

  “What happened?”

  “They kept showing up. It got to the point where I didn’t even want to go into work, because I was terrified they’d be there. They’d say things to me, offer me money to go out to the parking lot with them.”

  “You told Harrow all this?”

  “Eventually. He cared, you know? And who else was I gonna tell?”

  “What happened?”

  “One night, closing time, I went out and they were waiting for me, drunk, waving cash. They wanted me to go to a motel with them. I got away, but I was shaking so bad I could hardly drive. I almost wrecked on the way home. The next time Johnny came by, I told him everything.”

  “And?”

  “At first, I was worried, you know, that he would get angry, angry at me. Some men are like that. But he just listened. And he told me the next time they came into the bar, I should call him.”

  “And did you?”

  “Yes.” She met his eyes. “I couldn’t live like that anymore.”

  He sat back, waiting for her to tell the rest.

  “He came in, sat across the bar from them, didn’t say a word. They were drinking a lot. After a while they got bored, left. He followed them to another bar, caught them in the parking lot. He knew if anything happened at the Heartbreak it would cause trouble for me.”

  “Considerate of him. What happened?”

  “He only told me part of it afterward. But I read it in the Asbury Park Press the next day. He left one of them in a coma.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  “You sound like my shrink. Is this going to cost me one-fifty an hour?”

  “Like I said, just curious.”

  “It made me feel a lot of things. It scared me, and maybe made me feel a little sorry for those two men. But I didn’t have to be frightened of them anymore either. I was terrified of them and then one day they were gone and they never came back. How do you think it made me feel?”

  “Nothing came of it?”

  She shook her head.

  “He said they wouldn’t go to the police. That they knew better. And he was right.”

  “Because if they did …”

  “He’d kill them.”

  He let that hang in the air.

  “And had he?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Killed anyone? That you know of?”

  “I never asked him. But there were times …” She looked away, then back at him.

  “So he did?”

  “Do I think he did? Yes. Did I want to know about it? No.”

  “Did you know he’d been in prison?”

  “I suspected. Later, he told me. I can’t say I was surprised.”

  “Is that where he got the tattoo?” He touched his chest.

  She shook her head.

  “Johnny would never let one of those prison artists touch him. He got that done in Asbury. I got one myself that same night. It felt like a bond, you know? A promise. Like I said, I was just a kid.”

  “Why did he go to Florida?”

  “I don’t know all of it. I only know what he was convicted of.”

  “He was working for someone, wasn’t he? He wasn’t down there on his own.”

  The waitress came back with the coffeepot, saw they hadn’t touched their cups, went away again.

  “Have you ever heard of Joey Alea?” she said.

  He shook his head.

  “He’s from North Jersey. His uncle was some big mob boss up there back in the day. Joey owned a bunch of places. Had a piece of the Heartbreak. That’s how Johnny got to know him. Then he started doing some work for him, here and there.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “What do you think?”

  He sipped coffee, waited.

  “All I knew, there was some guy down there owed Joey money. He’d been up here a couple times, at the Heartbreak. A loudmouth, couldn’t keep his hands off the girls. I think he owned a club down in West Palm. One night, he and Joey had a screaming fight in the back room at the Heartbreak. Then he left.”

  “And Harrow went after him.”

  “Not until a month or so afterward. I’d just found out I was pregnant. I was still dancing, counting the days until I stopped. We were living together by that point. Then one morning Johnny told me he had to go down to Florida for a couple days, nothing big. But I had a bad feeling about it. I asked him not to go, for me, for the baby. He went anyway. I never saw him again.”

  “So you don’t know what happened down there?”

  “Only what I read. The club owner was involved with the FBI, some sting or something down there. A drug thing. They had agents working undercover at his club. Nothing to do with Johnny or Joey or anyone up here. It was just bad luck. Three days after he left, I got a call that he’d been arrested, charged with attempted murder, assault. On the day he was sentenced, I went into labor.”

  “How well did you know this Joey Alea?”

  “Well enough, I guess. I worked for him. He’s the one that hooked me up with some people in L.A., to get me started out there. He said he was doing me a favor. That’s not the way it turned out.”

  He let that sit.

  “He know you’re back?”

  “Not as far as I know. But I’ve had no contact with him—or that world—since I’ve been here, thank God. I’d like to think that part of my life is over.”

  He sat back, pulled an earlobe, trying to put it all together in his mind.

  “You have friends?” he said. “Back then?”

  “One or two. Why?”

  “Any of them still around?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I was thinking what we need is an early warning system. If Harrow was back in this area, asking around, he’d start with people you knew. We can talk to them, see if they’ve heard from him. Chances are he would have gone back to the Heartbreak at some point too.”

  “There’s only one person from those days I kept in touch with after I left,” she said. “And I haven’t even done that in a couple years. She was in Jersey at least until then. I know that. She danced at the Heartbreak too. She might still be around.”

  “Can you give me her name, the last address you had for her?”

  “I can do that.”

  He gathered up the papers. The waitress saw them, came back and left the check at his elbow. He got his wallet out.

  “You’re different,” she said.

  He took a five out, looked at her.

  “Than what?”

  “Than the way I thought you were when we met.”

  “We didn’t quite get off on the right foot.”

  “No, we didn’t. And it was my fault as much as yours. I’m sorry.”

  “Forget about it. There’s one thing I agree with Simmons on, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Even if Harrow’s looking for the boy, the chances he could find him—that he could navigate that system and come up with a name and address—are pretty slim. He doesn’t have those types of resources.”

  “But Simmons does. And if Johnny got ahold of Simmons, it wouldn’t take him long to find out everything he wanted to know, to get him to look up whatever he wants him to look up.”

  “Maybe you’re giving him too much credit.”

  “Maybe I am. But you don’t know him.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. He have any family up here?”

  “A brother, half brother, really. Mitchell. He might still be around, I don’t know. He had a younger sister too, Belinda. But she died in a car accident while he was in Rahway. They wouldn’t let him go to the funeral.”

  “Parents?”

  “His mother’s been dead a long time. He had a stepfather, but I don’t know if he’s still alive.”

  “That would be Mitchell’s real father?”

  “No. Mitchell and Johnny grew up together, but their mother remarried when they were kids. Johnny never spoke much about it, so I don’t think I ever got the whole story. But I don’t think Johnny or Mitchell ever knew their real fathers.”

  “Mitchell older or younger?”

  “Younger. I didn’t know him well.”

  “They get along?”

  “As far as I could tell. I think Mitchell always looked up to him.”

  “I guess what I’m wondering is, even if he did find out where the boy was, what would be the purpose? What’s he going to do, kidnap him? Go on the lam with a seven-year-old in tow? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t want to just wait around to find out either. Giving my baby away was the most painful thing I’ve ever done in my life. But it was the best thing too, and the only thing I’ve done in the last twenty years that I’m even slightly proud of. I gave him a chance to grow up and live a life without people like his father around him. And I won’t have that threatened. I won’t let anyone take that chance away from him.”

  He looked into her eyes. She didn’t look away.

  “Come on,” he said. “I’ll give you a lift home.”

  “No, I can walk from here. It’s only a couple blocks.”

  “It’s cold.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  He paid at the register and they pulled on their coats and went out into the darkening afternoon. The trees on Main Avenue were strung with Christmas lights, already glowing. The Mustang was parked up the street, outside another restaurant, in front of which a white-haired man, bundled against the cold, was playing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” on a saxophone. A handful of people stood around listening to him. The open instrument case at his feet was half-full of bills.

  Harry stood on the sidewalk, people moving around him, and watched her walk away. Then she turned at the corner and was gone.

  He got the Mustang keys out, dropped a five into the saxophone case. The man nodded at him, never stopped playing. As he pulled away, the street lamps started to go on, one by one, as if lighting his way.

  14

  When the phone rang in the motel room, Johnny was cleaning the Sig on the bureau top. He had a sheet of newspaper spread out, the gun’s disassembled parts gleaming with oil. He’d bought a cleaning kit and a can of gun oil at a sporting goods shop that afternoon, along with a Buck knife with a five-inch blade.

  He wiped his hands on a rag, picked up the phone. It was Lindell.

  “Yo, Johnny Boy. We need to talk, man.”

  He pinned the phone between shoulder and chin, wiped oil from his fingers.

  “Who’s we?” he said.

  “You, me and the J Man.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight. Soon as possible. Some shit went down today needs to be discussed.”

  Johnny looked at his watch. It was four-thirty.

  “Where?”

  “Find a pay phone, ring my cell. I’ll let you know.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Phone’s not cool, bro. We’ll talk later, fill you in.” He hung up.

  Johnny replaced the receiver, went back to the Sig. He finished cleaning the barrel with the push brush, then began to fit the pieces back together, snick them into place. When he was done, he shook the box of cartridges onto the newspaper, felt each individual shell for imperfections. He loaded one of the clips, thirteen rounds, slid it into the grip of the weapon until it locked in place. He racked the slide, felt the shell chamber, the mechanism working smoothly. He lowered the hammer.