"So," Angie said, "his car next?"

"Uh..."

"I know, Patrick, it's a cla.s.sic. I understand."

"It's the the cla.s.sic," I said. "Possibly the single coolest car ever manufactured in America." cla.s.sic," I said. "Possibly the single coolest car ever manufactured in America."

She put her hand on my leg. "You said we'd be mean."

I sighed, stared through the windshield at the cars on Storrow Drive. Not one of them, even the obscenely expensive ones, could hold a candle to the '68 Shelby.

"Okay," I said, "let's be mean."

He kept it parked in a garage on A Street in Southie, about a quarter mile from his loft. Nelson had seen him take it out one night, not for any particular purpose, just to open it up along the waterfront, take a spin around the harbor, and then return it to its roost. I know a lot of guys like that, ones who visit their cars in the storage garage like they're pets in a boarding kennel, and then illogically feel pity for the lonely beast, strip off the car cover, and drive it around the block a few times.

Actually, I'm one of those guys. Angie used to say I'd grow out of it. More recently, she's said she's given up hope on that score.

We took a ticket at the booth, drove up two levels, and parked beside the Shelby, which, even under a thick car cover, was instantly identifiable. Angie gave me a pat on the back to buck me up and then took the stairs down to ground level to keep the attendant occupied with a city map, a tourist's confusion, and a black mesh T-shirt that didn't completely reach the waistband of her jeans.

I pulled the cover off the car and almost gasped. The 1968 Shelby Mustang GT-500 is to American automobiles what Shakespeare is to literature and the Marx Brothers are to comedy-that is to say, everything that came before was, in retrospect, a teaser, and everything that came after could never live up to the standard of perfection achieved in one brief blink of time.

I rolled under the car before my knees buckled from the wanting, ran my hand up under the cha.s.sis between the engine block and the fire wall, and felt around for a good three minutes before I found the alarm receiver. I yanked it free, rolled back out, and used a slim jim to open the driver's door. I reached in and popped the hood, came around the front of the car, and stared in a near-trance at the word COBRA COBRA stamped in steel atop the filter cover and again along the oil tank, the sheer sense of compressed but certain power that emanated from the gleaming 428 engine. stamped in steel atop the filter cover and again along the oil tank, the sheer sense of compressed but certain power that emanated from the gleaming 428 engine.

It smelled clean under the hood, as if the engine and radiator and drive shaft and manifold had just been lifted off the a.s.sembly line. It smelled like a car that had been slaved over. Scott Pea.r.s.e, whatever his feelings for the human race, had loved this car.

"I'm sorry," I told the engine.

Then I went around to Angie's trunk for the sugar, the chocolate syrup, and the rice.

After we dumped the contents of Pea.r.s.e's mailbag in a box on our side of the city, we returned to the office. I called Devin and asked for any data he could find on Timothy McGoldrick and he wrangled two tickets to October's Patriots-Jets game out of me as a service fee.

"Come on," I said. "I've been a season-ticket holder for thirteen years while they camped in the bas.e.m.e.nt. Don't take that game from me."

"How do you spell that last name?"

"Dev, it's a Monday night game."

"Is it M-A-C or just M-C?"

"The latter," I said. "You suck."

"Hey, I noticed on the sheets this morning that someone shot the ever-living s.h.i.t out of some guy's loft on Sleeper Street. The vic's name struck me as familiar. Know anything about that?"

"Pats versus Jets," I said slowly.

"Tuna Bowl," Devin cried. "Tuna Bowl! Seats still on the fifty?"

"Yup."

"Rocking. Talk to you soon." He hung up.

I leaned back in my seat, propped my heels on the belfry window.

Angie smiled at me from her desk. Behind her, an old black-and-white TV on the file cabinet broadcast a game show. A lot of people clapped and a few jumped up and down, but it had no effect on us. The volume on the thing had kicked the bucket years ago, but somehow we both find it comforting to leave it on when we're up in the belfry.

"We're making no money on this case," she said.

"Nope."

"You just destroyed a car you've waited your whole life to touch."

"Uh-huh."

"And then gave away tickets to the biggest football game of the year."

"That's about the size of it." I nodded.

"You going to cry soon?"

"Trying hard not to."

"Because real men don't cry?"

I shook my head. "I'm afraid if I start, I might not be able to stop."

We had lunch as Angie printed up her case overview thus far, and the silent TV behind her aired a soap opera in which everyone dressed really well and seemed to shout a lot. Angie has always had a narrative talent I've never possessed, probably because she reads in her off-time while I just watch old movies and play a lot of video golf.

She'd charted the case from my notes regarding my first meeting with Karen Nichols, through Scott Pea.r.s.e's charade as Wesley Dawe, the maiming of Miles Lovell, the disappearance of Diane Bourne, the baby switch fourteen years ago that had given the Dawes a child who would fall through ice and ultimately bring Pea.r.s.e into their lives, all the way up to the beginnings of our current frontal a.s.sault on Scott Pea.r.s.e's life, shaded, of course, in vague terminology such as "commenced exploitation of subject's weaknesses as we perceived them."

"Here's my problem." Angie handed me the last page.

Under the heading Prognosis Prognosis, she'd written: "Subject seems to have no viable options left to pursue the Dawes or their money. Subject's leverage was lost when C. Dawe realized his false ident.i.ty as T. McGoldrick. Exploitation of subject's weaknesses, while emotionally gratifying, seems to yield no finite result."

"Finite," I said.

"You like that?"

"And Bubba accuses me of showing off my college."

"Seriously," she said, placing her turkey sub down on the wax paper beside her desk blotter, "what possible reason could he have for pursuing the Dawes anymore? We blew him out of the water." She looked at the clock behind her head. "By now, he's been suspended or fired for losing both his truck and a lot of mail. His car's f.u.c.ked. His apartment's blown to s.h.i.t. He's got nothing."

"He's got a trump card," I said.

"Which is?"

"I don't know. But he's former military. He loves games. He'd have a fallback position, an ace in the hole. I know it."