“Who asked you?” said Rosenkrantz to Ballard.
“Just trying to be helpful.”
“Speakin’ of helpful, you hear about the two old maids at the movies? One says, ‘Oh! The man next to me is masturbating! Second one says, ‘Let’s move!’ First one says, ‘We can’t — he’s using my hand!’ ” He added, “I showed Charlie the composite of the Laplander who scragged Petrock, an’ he says the Swede works here is bald with a bull ring through his nose.”
“Guy you talked to the other night,” said Ballard quickly.
“But Charlie says that when he hired him a couple of weeks ago, the guy looked just a hell of a lot like our composite.”
Rosenkrantz said, “Know what I found out through brilliant detective work? Our Mr. Ballard here is a field operative with Daniel Kearny Associates. Now, why is that outfit familiar?”
“Five hundred block of Greenwich Street, five-six years ago. Something to do with an old lady got scragged — yeah, a sort of locked-room kind of mystery, just like Agatha Christie.”
“I’m remembering, I’m remembering,” said Rosenkrantz. “We questioned a sharp young Armenian looked sorta like the guy in our composite...”
Rosenkrantz gave Larry back his wallet with a flourish.
“Guess we don’t have to hold you up any longer, Mr. Ballard, a fine, upstanding, cooperative citizen like yourself.”
Ballard bitterly pocketed the wallet and went out into the Tenderloin night. There was nothing else he could do.
“Christ, there he is!” exclaimed the Vulture.
Larry Ballard had just left Mood Indigo, had turned right and was walking quickly along Eddy Street.
“You sure that’s him?” asked Heslip.
“Follow him with the car,” the Mormon ordered.
“Don’t be fuckin’ stupid,” snapped Heslip before the Vulture could get it into gear. “You wanta blow it for me? He’ll make you in about thirty seconds. He’s going into the Vietnamese store on the corner.” Heslip opened his door and eased out onto the sidewalk. “You want him dumped, he’s dumped — I just don’t need you guys breathing down my neck.”
It was a little ma-and-pa grocery store owned by first-generation immigrants, still open after midnight for whatever meager trade might be gotten from these mean and dirty streets. Larry bought a candy bar, wondering if he could wait there until the cops left Mood Indigo. Probably not. He’d already done that a couple of nights ago. The old folks would think he was casing the joint for sure.
If only he could warn Bart some way — and Bart came through the door, went around the end of the center display shelves and out of sight.
Larry bit the end off his candy bar, followed. Bart was immersed in the scanty selection of laundry powders. Larry stopped two yards away to marvel over the plastic sandwich bags.
“The cops made me from Mood Indigo the other night, they know I work for DKA,” he said, just barely moving his lips. “You’ve got maybe a day to get out of town.”
“I can’t leave,” said Bart. “Things are starting to move. I got a K up front tonight to kick the shit out of some dude been asking questions around the union local.”
“Anybody we know?”
“Yeah. You.”
“Me?” shrilled Ballard. “Oh, please be gentle!”
“You virgins are all alike. Tomorrow you gotta stay out of sight — you’ll supposedly be half-dead in an emergency ward.”
“Tomorrow we’d better bring Mr. K in on this,” said Ballard. “We’re getting in a little bit over our heads.”
“But tonight we got to do it. I’ll be in the alley out back.” He put on his game face. “Waiting.”
Ballard grinned. “Not for long.”
Heslip left first, nodding to the two men in the car.
The tall blond unwitting man walked down deserted Taylor Street through the Tenderloin’s windblown trash, newspapers, cheap wine bottles. He seemed unaware of the long black Chrysler that was waiting at the light on Eddy Street half a block behind him. How goddam dumb did these guys think he was?
As he passed the mouth of the alley, a shorter black man, wide and thick with rubbery muscle, grabbed him by the shoulders and literally threw him into the darkness.
For Larry, it was like sparring with Mike Tyson. For Bart, it was like tangling with a resurrected Bruce Lee. The trick for both of them was to pull punches and chops and throws, grunt and slam stuff against the alley walls, fall over garbage pails so the lids would clash and clang against bricks and blacktop, all without getting more than skinned up and knocked around in the process. It had to look real.
For thirty seconds it probably was reaclass="underline" Ballard got a bloody nose when he ducked into a barely pulled jab, got pissed, dealt Heslip a slashing backhand chop that sent him crashing backward over a fallen garbage pail. Heslip, blood from his scraped forehead running down into his furious eyes, danced in for the knockout when he saw the black sedan inching forward across the end of the alley for a better view.
“Shit, Larry,” he hissed, anger gone, “we gotta end it.”
Ballard nodded, Bart drove a very convincing-looking fist into his groin, stopped it just short, popped an equally harmless but lethal-looking left hook to Larry’s chin, and Ballard folded down on himself like a punctured tire so he could fall behind a garbage pail that shielded him from the guys in the car.
The Vulture slowed the Chrysler to a stop. The only light was a caged low-wattage bulb at the end of the alley, giving them just enough light to see the tall blond guy go down.
The black guy had his left hand braced against the wall as he drove his right foot again and again into the fallen man’s body. Fifteen, twenty kicks. A final kick to the blond guy’s head behind the garbage pail, using a high leg swing as if he were an NFL punter on fourth and long.
Neither man in the car was physically tough, so both involuntarily flinched when Heslip came up the alley to their car. Blood on his forehead, torn shirt, skinned knuckles. A gladiator. He reached in the Mormon’s open window to twitch the envelope out of the man’s jacket pocket. He jerked the rest of the cash from it in a crumpled wad, threw the envelope on the floor of the car.
“G’wan, get out of here before you fuck things up.”
He went limping away down Taylor Street. The Vulture goosed the Chrysler to hell out of there.
“He really did him. One-on-one.”
“Just what we wanted, the dumb boogie,” sneered the Mormon, contemptuous now that the physical threat was past.
He unclipped the cell phone from its place between the seats. “We better tell the man it’s gone down.”
Assemblyman Rick Kiely was in his opulent home office in St. Francis Woods, that had a wall safe behind an original Klee. Morales had scouted it out on Monday night.
Kiely’s wife was long abed; he was studying a bill coming to a vote on the Assembly floor on Monday while waiting to hear whether a suitable thug had been found. The phone was on its second ring when he picked up, spoke his name, and leaned back in his swivel chair and shoved his reading glasses up on his head to rub his eyes with his free hand.
A familiar voice said, “They’ll have to sweep him off the alley floor with a push broom.”
Kiely began in alarm, “He’s not—”
“Damaged only. Our boy was good. Precision bombing — just like in the Gulf War.”
Rick Kiely hung up with a slightly queasy feeling in his gut. A man he’d never seen would spend several days in the hospital on orders he had given. Well, he’d ordered worse things in his long political life, hadn’t he? And by the time the man was out, it would all be over. Now there was only Morales.