'I've still got most of this one.'

'So you do. I don't know who the warning's from, Matt, but from the messenger they used I'd guess it's some very heavy types. And what's interesting is I get absolutely nowhere trying to find anybody who saw Dakkinen on the town with anybody but our friend Chance. Now if she's going with somebody with all this firepower, you'd think he'd show her around, wouldn't you? Why not?'

I nodded. For that matter, why would she need me to ease her out of Chance's string?

'Anyway,' he was saying, 'that's the message. You want the opinion?'

'Sure.'

'The opinion is I think you should heed the message. Either I'm getting old in a hurry or this town's gotten nastier in the past couple of years. People seem to pull the trigger a lot quicker than they used to. They used to need more of a reason to kill. You know what I mean?'

'Yes.'

'Now they'll do it unless they've got a reason not to. They'll sooner kill than not. It's an automatic response. I'll tell you, it scares me.'

'It scares everybody.'

'You had a little scene uptown a few nights back, didn't you? Or was somebody making up stories?'

'What did you hear?'

'Just that a brother jumped you in the alley and wound up with multiple fractures.'

'News travels.'

'It does for a fact. Of course there's more dangerous things in this city than a young punk on angel dust.'

'Is that what he was on?'

'Aren't they all? I don't know. I stick to basics, myself.' He underscored the line with a sip of his vodka. 'About Dakkinen,' he said. 'I could pa.s.s a message back up the line.'

'What kind of message?'

'That you're letting it lay.'

'That might not be true, Danny Boy.'

'Matt - '

'You remember Jack Benny?'

'Do I remember Jack Benny? Of course I remember Jack Benny.'

'Remember that bit with the stickup man? The guy says, 'Your money or your life,' and there's a long pause, a really long pause, and Benny says, 'I'm thinking it over.' '

'That's the answer? You're thinking it over?'

'That's the answer.'

Outside on Seventy-second Street I stood in the shadows in the doorway of a stationery store, waiting to see if anyone would follow me out of Poogan's. I stood there for a full five minutes and thought about what Danny Boy had said. A couple of people left Poogan's while I was standing there but they didn't look like anything I had to worry about.

I went to the curb to hail a cab, then decided I might as well walk half a block to Columbus and get one going in the right direction. By the time I got to the corner I decided it was a nice night and I was in no hurry, and an easy stroll fifteen blocks down Columbus Avenue would probably do me good, make sleep come that much easier. I crossed the street and headed downtown and before I'd covered a block I noticed that my hand was in my coat pocket and I was holding onto the little gun.

Funny. No one had followed me. What the h.e.l.l was I afraid of?

Just something in the air.

I kept walking, displaying all the street smarts I hadn't shown Sat.u.r.day night. I stayed at the edge of the sidewalk near the curb, keeping my distance from buildings and doorways. I looked left and right, and now and then I turned to see if anyone was moving up behind me. And I went on clutching the gun, my finger resting lightly alongside the trigger.

I crossed Broadway, walked on past Lincoln Center and O'Neal's. I was on the dark block between Sixtieth and Sixty-first, across the street from Fordham, when I heard the car behind me and spun around. It was slanting across the wide avenue toward me and had cut off a cab. Maybe it was his brakes I heard, maybe that's what made me turn.

I threw myself down on the pavement, rolled away from the street toward the buildings, came up with the.32 in my hand. The car was even with me now, its wheels straightened out. I'd thought it was going to vault the curb but it wasn't. And the windows were open and someone was leaning out the rear window, looking my way, and he had something in his hand -

I had the gun pointed at him. I was p.r.o.ne, elbows braced in front of me, holding the gun in both hands. I had my finger on the trigger.

The man leaning out the window threw something, tossed it underhand. I thought, Jesus, a bomb, and I aimed at him and felt the trigger beneath my finger, felt it tremble like some little live thing, and I froze, I froze, I couldn't pull the f.u.c.king trigger.

Time froze, too, like a stop-frame sequence in a film. Eight or ten yards from me a bottle struck the brick wall of a building and smashed. There was no explosion beyond the shattering of the gla.s.s. It was just an empty bottle.

And the car was just a car. I watched now as it went on careening south on Ninth Avenue, six kids in it, six drunken kids, and they might well kill somebody, they were drunk enough to do it, but when they did it would be an accident. They weren't professional killers, hitmen dispatched to murder me. They were just a bunch of kids who'd had more to drink than they could handle. Maybe they'd cripple someone, maybe they'd total their car, maybe they'd make it home without bending a fender.

I got up slowly, looked at the gun in my hand. Thank G.o.d I hadn't fired it. I could have shot them, I could have killed them.

G.o.d knows I'd wanted to. I'd tried to, thinking logically enough that they were trying to kill me.

But I'd been unable to do it. And if it had been pros, if the object I'd seen had been not a whiskey bottle but the gun or bomb I'd thought it was, I'd have been no more able to pull the trigger. They'd have killed me and I'd have died with an unfired revolver in my hands.

Jesus.

I dropped the useless gun in my pocket. I held out my hand, surprised that it wasn't shaking. I didn't even feel particularly shaky inside, and I was d.a.m.ned if I could figure out why not.

I went over to examine the broken bottle, if only to make sure it was just that and not a Molotov c.o.c.ktail that had providentially failed to ignite. But there was no puddle, no reek of gasoline. There was a slight whiskey smell, unless I imagined it, and a label attached to one chunk of gla.s.s indicated that the bottle had contained J & B Scotch. Other fragments of green gla.s.s sparkled like jewels in the light of the streetlamp.

I bent over and picked up a little cube of gla.s.s. I placed it in the palm of my hand and stared at it like a gypsy at a crystal. I thought of Donna's poem and Sunny's note and my own slip of the tongue.

I started walking. It was all I could do to keep from running.

TWENTY-SEVEN.

'Jesus, I need a shave,' Durkin said. He'd just dropped what was left of his cigarette into what was left of his coffee, and he was running one hand over his cheek, feeling the stubble. 'I need a shave, I need a shower, I need a drink. Not necessarily in that order. I put out an APB on your little Colombian friend. Octavio Ignacio Caldern y La Barra. Name's longer'n he is. I checked the morgue. They haven't got him down there in a drawer. Not yet, anyway.'

He opened his top desk drawer, withdrew a metal shaving mirror and a cordless electric shaver. He leaned the mirror against his empty coffee cup, positioned his face in front of it and began shaving. Over the whirr of the shaver he said, 'I don't see anything in her file about a ring.'

'Mind if I look?'

'Be my guest.'