In the movies or on TV, a meet between a Tony Donuts Junior and a Charlie Ponte would have taken place in a black stretch limo, or in the back room of an espresso joint n.o.body but mobsters ever went into, or in an abandoned warehouse, or at poolside in Charlie's opulent mansion fortress. Charlie hated cars, coffee, and cobwebs, and n.o.body he didn't own body and soul ever set foot on his personal home turf. His meets, therefore, took place in an anonymous cheesy two-bedroom house on an eighth-acre in a suburban development so vast it had its own ZIP code. It was called Bay Vista Estates, although it was nowhere near a bay and the longest un.o.bstructed sight line anywhere in it was less than fifty yards unless you looked up.

The "estate" itself was the cheapest possible dwelling that white people with all their teeth or brown people who aspired to become citizens would live in. Its house number had six digits in it, and it was on 851st Lane, and there were also an 851st Street, 851st Way, and 851st Road-all identical to each other and to all their hundreds of companion byways-and then there were also West, East, North, South, NE, SE, SW, and NW variants for each of all of them, and none of these ribbons of tar-heavy asphalt ever went even momentarily in a straight line. So although in theory any place can be located by GPS, in practice no SWAT team on earth could have located a given address in that tract in under an hour, much less stormed it. It took me and Double Bill every d.a.m.n minute of the lead we had gained in taking the Flat Rock just to find the right furshlugginer house.

And when we did, there was no good way to surveil it. The whole development had been designed by the same people who do airliner interiors. Everything was not only made of the cheapest possible materials, but shrunk to the absolute minimum possible dimensions, as well. There was nowhere to park that wasn't in front of a hydrant or somebody's house, and most families were already parked in front of their houses because the driveways were precisely long enough to accommodate a single Accord and there were no garages.

The car we'd rented at the marina where we'd left the Flat Rock was convincingly crummy, so once we were sure we had the right place this time-the car sloppily parked in front of it was a Dodge convertible-Bill faked engine trouble and stalled out there. As I fiddled around under the hood, mourning the long-gone days when I recognized anything at all under the hood of a car, I studied the layout of Charlie Ponte's meet place out of the corner of my eye.

It didn't look promising. You almost had to turn sideways to walk between houses. The tallest tree I saw anywhere was shorter and skinnier than me. There seemed to be a brief mocking sketch of a fenced yard around back, mate to the band of lawn that separated the front of the house from the single-file sidewalk, but although I could see only a corner of it, I could tell that "backyard" was barely big enough to contain a few deck chairs, a frosted-gla.s.s-top table, and a gas grill, none of which would provide very effective cover for a ninja bartender or commando realtor. I don't know what they call that kind of roof, but if you took a thousand short pipes made of brick and sawed them all in half lengthwise, you'd have the materials; a.s.suming a man could somehow get up there unnoticed, his every step would sound like a horse on cobblestones. I decided we were screwed.

Then I noticed something about the high backyard fence. Only a short stretch of it was visible, but I could see that it was made of some opaque s.p.a.ce-age composite I didn't know, and that it was about the first thing I'd seen in the whole d.a.m.n Bay Vista development that ran in a straight line.

I closed my eyes and tried to point my ears like a bat. Sure enough, I picked up a distant rhythmic sound, a sort of pulsing hiss, like wind or seash.o.r.e but the wrong tempo. I opened my nostrils, and even over the open-hood smells right in my face, I was able to detect an evocative soupcon of diesel in the breeze.

We were right at the perimeter of the tract, mere yards from the outside world despite all our meandering. Just beyond that backyard fence was a real road, a state road, a road that went in a straight line for miles during which there were no speed b.u.mps at all, and on which it was not only possible but necessary to exceed twenty-five miles per hour.

"Slip me a beer," I murmured to Double Bill, and came round to the side of the engine compartment farthest from the house. He started to pa.s.s a bottle out the window. "No, a can," I said. He shrugged and complied, and I took it around to the front of the car. I poked around in there with my free hand awhile, cursing freely and with increasing volume. Finally I cried, "This stupid thing is f.u.c.ked," spun to my left and flung the beer can as high and far as I could.

As I did, a front window of the house came up two inches and a rifle barrel appeared in the opening. I was expecting it-and even so, it was eerie. But the gunman was a pro: he saw that what I'd thrown was not a Molotov c.o.c.ktail, and that in any case it would easily overshoot the house, and that I was not a hitman but a dork, and he chose not to shoot me. That was good. It would have upset him when the bullet bounced off. And the ricochet might have hurt Double Bill, who is not bulletproof.

Unfired on, I watched a perfectly good beer soar high in the air, cross the property, and come down like a mortar round on the far side of that fence. I listened hard. Several m.u.f.fled horns, faint sounds of shrieking brakes-but no crunch of impact or tinkle of broken gla.s.s. That was a relief. I stuck my head under that hood one more time, touched something that looked like it wouldn't kill me and didn't, emerged with a huge smile of triumph and slammed the hood with a flourish. 'We can go now," I said to Double Bill, and we did.

Locating the spot out in the real world that lay just beyond that particular section of anonymous backyard fence was a nontrivial problem. Simply finding the nearest exit from the tract was a spaghetti-bowl nightmare, and it turned out that six different roads ran past the place at various points, and since they were state roads in a Miami suburb, traffic on all of them sucked. But finally we spotted the skid marks and stains where the can of beer had come down, burst, and been run over one or more times. Bill put his emergency flashers on and slowed to a stop in the right lane just past the spot ... then backed up until we were twenty yards short of it, and put her in park. Horns blared, and two lanes began merging to get past us.

"s.h.i.t," he said, and I didn't disagree.

There was no sidewalk. There wasn't even any shoulder. What lay on this side of the fence was about eight inches of curb, and then the lane we were stopped in. We could balance on that spit of curb, pressed up against the fence, and peer through a hole if we could find or make one-but we were going to be pretty conspicuous doing it. The car wasn't tall enough to provide effective visual cover from oncoming traffic, and the curb was too narrow to squat, crouch, or kneel. In the greater Miami area (and I'd hate to see the lesser), if you stand around, openly committing felonies in plain sight in the middle of a heavily traveled road for too many hours in a row, the theoretical possibility arises that you might just be seen by a cop, on his way off-duty perhaps.

I glanced at the traffic fuming past us. Nearly every driver that went by gave me the finger.

"Got it," Bill said. He studied his sideview mirror carefully, and when a hole in the traffic came along, he was out the door and in front of the car in a jiffy. I squeezed out my side and joined him.

His plan was simple and elegant. We sat on that silly curb, with our backs against the wall. The car now shielded us very effectively from the view of traffic coming along our way, and motorists going in the other direction would see only two hapless chumps waiting for the tow truck. If we could find or make a hole in the wall at the right height, either of us could put an eye or an ear to it simply by turning to speak to the other. The only downside was the constant nagging awareness that it was only a matter of time before some drunk decided our flashers were Christmas lights and plowed into the back of our car; in that case we would either stand up very quickly and carefully or, more likely, lose our legs.

Still, we felt pretty proud of ourselves. We were within pistol-shot of a Mafia caporegime, absolutely unsuspected, and our biggest immediate worry was a hypothetical drunk driver. For parrot-heads without a plan, we weren't doing too shabby. Bill flashed me his pirate's grin and adjusted himself under his sarong for more comfortable sitting. "Cool," he said.

I grinned back at him and nodded. "Now how do we make a small hole in this fence?"

"Tire iron," Bill suggested.

I shook my head. "Rental. Useless, I saw it. The only thing in the world you can do with it is loosen or tighten nuts that happen to be the right size."

"Screwdriver."

"Got one?"

"Uh ... break off the gearshift lever; use it like an awl."

"How do we make our getaway?"

"The turn signal, then."

I was losing my good cheer. Something infinitely more important than a man monster or a Mafia kingpin was on the other side of that f.u.c.king fence: Erin. To be so near her, and screwed by the want of a screwdriver, was- -screwed? I'm a bartender. I keep a corkscrew on my key ring.

I got it out, picked a spot, braced it with my left hand, and put my shoulder into it. In well under a minute it was clear I was wasting my time, but I kept trying.

"Jake, Jake, wait-listen!" said Bill.

I did hear something, which might have been voices raised in anger. Bill and I looked at each other and pressed our ears to the wall, hoping to pick up something by conduction. His face was no more than two feet from mine, so close I was able to notice he'd plucked his nostrils lately. "Hear that?" he whispered.

"What?" I whispered back, and pressed my ear even harder against the wall, and prayed to a G.o.d I didn't believe in to please send a beam out of the sky and punch a hole through this miserable stinking sonofab.i.t.c.hing wall- WHANG! My head exploded, and I fell over into the road, saw Bill land beside me.

I couldn't seem to work out what had happened. Then I glanced up at the wall and it was self-evident.

Picture Double Bill and me pressed up against that wall. Our two heads are so close together there's just enough room between them for a third man's head. If one were there, and he were looking straight at you, the bridge of his nose would be at the exact spot where the bullet came through the wall.

Tony solved the problem of finding the meet in typical Alexandrian fashion. He made one attempt at finding it himself and got it wrong-748317 851st Way NE-but the homeowner there was more than happy to leave a hot dinner on the table, shush his crying children, get behind the wheel of his own Corolla, and personally lead Tony and Ida to the right address. No problem at all. Once they were there and the guide had been dismissed, Tony got out, slung little Ida Alice over one shoulder, and headed for the door. But there was a small kerfluffle over admission.

"No kids," said the guy on the door, a stocky dour-looking thug in a black long-sleeve shirt, black slacks, and black loafers.

"This ain't no kid," Tony said. "This here is the deal."

"No kids," the man in black repeated. "Mr. Ponte hates kids."

Tony started to get p.i.s.sed. "This is ten million bucks walkin'-happens to be short and warm; that don't make it a kid."

The door guy knew as well as Tony that Tony could tear him in half any time he felt like it. But he also knew there were worse fates than being torn in half; he stood his ground, kept one hand under his skirt, and looked adamant.

Tony hated to start a meet by murdering the door guy, but he couldn't see an alternative.

"Now I understand why the Roman Empire fell," Ida said. The thug blinked down at her.

"Listen to me, you road-company butler," she went on, "Mr. Pontevecchio left his extremely comfortable home and came to this G.o.dforsaken rabbit warren to discuss a matter involving ten million dollars. I'm not going to bother asking you your name, because when he asks us who wasted his time and lost him that opportunity, I'll only need to say the guinea Johnny Cash. Vaffanculo. Let's go, Antonio."

The thug opened his mouth to reply- "Let 'em in, Vinnie," said a voice from inside the house. Vinnie closed his mouth, stepped back, and they went inside.

There was another goon to the left, in front of the hallway that led off to the bedrooms, also with a hand near his waist, but Tony paid no attention to him. He knew there would be at least one more guy somewhere, with his gun already out, but didn't bother looking for him.

Charlie Ponte stood in the mini-living-room, his back to his guests, looking out a closed sliding gla.s.s door at the yardlet behind the house. He was balder than Tony remembered, but didn't look at if he'd gained a pound; in fact, he looked surprisingly fit for a man of his years and position. His green silk shirt with pearl b.u.t.tons would have won a respectful nod from Bert the Shirt; his grey beltless slacks looked as if he had only moments ago taken them out of the dry cleaner's plastic and put them on; the species of lizard from which his boots were made was no longer endangered, because there were the last two of them, right there. Even from behind, he looked dangerous, even to Tony Donuts Junior. Tony set the kid down on her feet and put a proprietary hand on her shoulder. "Yo, Chollie," he said. "Thanks fa seein' me."

Charlie turned around like a gun turret. From the front, he radiated menace the way some women radiate s.e.x appeal. Part of it was that you didn't often see a face that ugly that was so absolutely confident you weren't going to laugh at it. Another part was the eyes, doll's eyes, unblinking reptile eyes without a trace of mercy or pity. And some of it was simple knowledge of the awesome invisible power he wielded, as. a senior executive of an organization that killed presidents when it felt like it. Strong men had died for annoying him. "Tony," he said. "Ten mil fa what?"

Tony relaxed slightly. For Charlie that was a respectful welcome. "I got somethin' you're gonna like."

"Yeah?"

Tony groped for a way to express it. "I got somethin' the old men are gonna want more than money."

Charlie did not snort, snicker, smirk, or grimace. He had heard of humor, but didn't see the point. The only thing he said, and that with absolute lack of expression, was, "Uhhuh."

"No s.h.i.t, Charlie. I-"

"Excuse me, gentlemen!"

Both men looked down.

Ida was glaring up at Tony Donuts. "Have you no social graces at all, Mr. Donnazzio?"

"S'cuse me," Tony heard himself say. "Chollie, this is Ida. Ida, Chollie."

Charlie regarded her dubiously. "I hate kids."

"I hate bald ugly gangsters with no manners, so we're even." Charlie looked at Tony.

"What the f.u.c.k izzis?"

Tony spread his hands. "An old lady."

Charlie stared. "Yeah?"

"An old lady I'm gonna give ten mil to."

"Yeah?"

"Once you give itta me. This is why I'm here."

"Uh-huh." Charlie looked down at Ida, then back up to Tony. "I give you ten huge. Then what? You come back the next day with twelve five? The next day with fifteen? The day after that with twenty?"

Tony shook his big head. "I come back in a few hours with somethin' way better."

"Better than ten mil."

"Somethin' that, when you bring it to the old men, and they hear they paid only ten huge for it, they're gonna say, Chollie, this is the bargain a the century."

Charlie studied him and frowned. "Not a atom bomb."

Tony blinked. "Nah."

"Good, we got them. Okay, what?"

Tony couldn't keep himself from smiling. He dropped a ma.s.sive hand back onto Ida's shoulder and answered, "Ute."

Charlie Ponte studied him pokerfaced for more than fifteen seconds. He knew perfectly well that Tony Donuts Junior did not make jokes, any more than he did himself, and he could see that Tony was not under the influence of any drug Charlie had ever sold, or foaming at the mouth, or addressing people who were not present.

Then he took an equally long silent look at Ida. He had bought and sold thousands of females, most of whom had tried to lie about their age. Her face and body were those of a seven-year-old, no question. But everything else about her-behavior, carriage, diction, vocabulary, stance, above all those striking eyes looking fearlessly into his-said that she was much more than seven years old. He found it disturbing.

He looked back to Tony. "Tell me about it."

Tony smiled again. "Two days ago I seen her the first time. She was in her twenties. Since then, every time I see her, she's younger. Today I catch up to her and find out the story. See, the guy-"

Charlie held up a hand. "You tell the story," he said to the little girl. "What's ya name again?"

"Ida Alice Shourds."

Charlie frowned. "Where do I know that name?"

"You're clearly better educated and more widely read in Florida history than Mr. Donnazzio. You have, I take it, studied the life of Henry Morrison Flagler?"

"Sure. Hero a mine, guy stole Florida."

"Well put. I was his second wife."

Charlie's poker face spread to his entire upper body.

"No s.h.i.t, Chollie," Tony put in. "She looks like a little kid, but she's over a hunnert years old, this Ida. Her old man found the Fountain a Ute. He ain't dead, this f.a.gola. On paper, he's dead-really he's out there livin' off the books, havin' a ball. He screwed Ida here, had 'em put her inna hatch and threw away the key, only she got sprung, so naturally she wantsa screw him back. See? So you give me the ten mil like I said, an' I give it to her, an' she takes me ta this Fountain, an then I tell you where it is, an' you tell the Old Men." It had been a long time since Tony had spoken so many words in a row, and he found it tiring thinking of them all. But he knew he needed a big finish, here, and he'd been working on it since he left Key West. "Chollie, lissena me. How'd ya like ta be the guy that can make the Old Men young?"

It was absolutely impossible to guess what was going through Charlie Ponte's head. He might as well have been a statue. All three of his goons became fractionally more alert, and made sure their silencers were affixed. When Mr. Ponte got like this, you had to shoot guys sometimes.

"Why do you come back?" he asked finally.

"Huh?"

"I give you ten mil. You give it to the kid, she brings ya ta the Fountain a Ute. Now you got ten huge in your hand and eternal life. Why do I ever see you again?"

Tony grimaced. "Charlie, come on," he said, and pointed to himself with both hands.

"Looka me. Where the f.u.c.k am I gonna hide? That Russian s.p.a.ceship Mirror?"

"This Flagler's hidin' pretty good, what you're tellin' me." "Cause n.o.body's lookin' for him. After all this shakes out, I might go look him up."

Charlie shook his head. "What's your end a this? You find out where the Fountain is, I gotta pay you another ten huge to find out, maybe?"

Tony shook his head. "Nah. It's my gift ta you an' the Old Men."

"So what's in it fa-? Ah."

"I wanna get made, Chollie. I get a b.u.t.ton, it makes up for all the s.h.i.t happened to my old man. Hey, tell me I don't deserve it. I'm givin each one a the old men a teenager's b.a.l.l.s again. That's gotta be worth a b.u.t.ton."

Charlie thought some more. "Not for nothin', Tony, but what do I need you for?"

"Huh?"

"Ida, you care who hands ya this ten mil?"

"Not in the least," she said.

Charlie looked at Tony and raised an eyebrow. "See?"