“And what’s this story I’m going to tell him?”
“That’s up to you,” O’Malley said. “Just as long as it works.”
There was a moment of silence.
“Jesus,” Tricia said. “You must be desperate.”
Agent Brooks said, “It may sound to you like a desperate idea, Miss Heverstadt—”
“No. The idea sounds loony. You two sound desperate.”
“Captain O’Malley and I have been reviewing your case, and as he says, you seem an exceptionally resourceful and ingenious young woman. We have a good deal of confidence in your ability.”
“You may have a good deal of confidence in my ability, Agent Brooks. Captain O’Malley just thinks I’m worth a try. If I succeed, he wins big. If I don’t, I save the City of New York the expense of a trial and a jail term. Hell,” she said, and Agent Brooks winced again, “the city probably won’t even have to pay for a burial since if anything goes wrong Nicolazzo will do the honors himself with a good old-fashioned burial at sea. Do I understand you correctly, Captain?”
O’Malley smiled beatifically. “You see, Agent Brooks? Not a bit stupid. Yes, Miss Heverstadt. You understand me correctly. I wouldn’t gamble a nickel on you succeeding, but as it happens, a nickel’s about five cents more than you mean to me. So what the hell? Sometimes a long shot comes in. And Agent Brooks here thinks it’s a dandy idea, don’t you, Agent Brooks?”
“I understand your skepticism, Captain, but in fact I do think so. Miss Heverstadt, I think I’m a pretty good judge of men—and, ah, women, in this case. And I think you’ve got that certain something it takes to see a highly sensitive and perilous mission through. You also appear to be quite well connected in the underworld, something the Bureau finds most valuable. In fact, if you do well enough with this assignment—with your first quarry, if you will—the Agency might like to talk to you about other assignments.”
O’Malley was mouthing the word quarry.
Brooks opened a briefcase and removed a small box covered in pink satin with a brass clasp, crudely embroidered with the initials TH. “Here’s what you’ll use to communicate with us once you’ve brought Nicolazzo back to land. Now, this may look like an ordinary makeup case...”
“It looks,” Tricia said, “like nothing on earth. Have you ever seen a woman’s makeup case?”
“I believe Agent Brooks Junior is a bachelor,” O’Malley said to the ceiling.
Agent Brooks’ eyes seemed to be getting closer together. “But inside,” he said doggedly, “under this hidden panel containing the little pots of powder and so on, there is a Regency TR-1, the most advanced miniature transistor radio on the market today, which my colleagues have modified to send a homing signal with a radius of twenty-five miles. When you’ve succeeded in luring Mr. Nicolazzo to a convenient location, all you need do is switch this beacon on, and our men will be there within minutes.”
“That’s all I need do, huh?”
“You don’t need to do a damn thing, girlie,” O’Malley said. “You can call your lawyer, or have us call one for you. We’ve already got a nice cell waiting for you. And at six thirty or so, your sister and your friend get the chop, like you said. But you don’t have to do a damn thing but sit in a nice warm cell, if you don’t want to.”
Tricia looked at him meditatively for a minute. Then she held out her shackled wrists.
She said, “Take these damn things off of me.”
48.
The First Quarry
Dawn wouldn’t break for half an hour still, but the piers were already busy with dockworkers walking to and from the ships, deckhands loading supplies and unloading cargo. The few birds that were awake were circling overhead, cawing lustily and diving when they spotted a bit of breakfast swimming near the water’s surface.
Tricia sat on the footlocker, legs crossed at the ankles, and waited. She’d lugged the thing this far, dragging it from where the taxi had left her, and that was far enough. Nicolazzo had promised that two men would pick her up—well, they could pick up the footlocker while they were at it.
She rubbed her wrists where O’Malley’s cuffs had chafed them, or anyway where she imagined they had. You couldn’t see any marks, but it felt to her like she still had them on.
Her first quarry. Jesus Christ. Brooks had made it sound like he was making her a Junior G-Man or some sort of secret double agent out of the movies. When what he really was doing, most likely, was sending her off to get herself killed. What were the odds that she’d be able to bring Nicolazzo back to shore and into their hands? Bad enough when all she’d had to worry about was getting Coral and Charley off his boat alive.
O’Malley had ridden with her back to Mike’s, had turned the leather box of photos back over to her, and had directed the junior cop who was driving them to unload the footlocker from the trunk. The cops had helpfully prepared the money inside, even adding paper bands just like the ones you’d get from a bank to hold the individual stacks closed, and making sure the stacks on the first two layers all had at least two real bills on top and one on the bottom. The driver had proudly described the process, like a hobbyist talking about painting lead soldiers. They’d stayed up all night working on it, he’d said.
When they were out on the street, O’Malley had handed her the radio-cum-makeup case, tucked into a blue, beaded purse that matched her dress only a little better than a feather headdress would have. She’d accepted it. It wasn’t like she had a variety of purses to choose from or any place to get a better one at five in the morning.
She’d made them wait on the sidewalk while she went upstairs. Her stated purpose was to use the bathroom and she did that, but she also stopped by the back room and fished through the pile of old newspapers and pawnshop tickets till she found one of the latter on which the merchandise being pawned wasn’t a set of flatware or a watch but “one (1) valise—large—brown leather.” Taking the ticket into the bathroom, she opened Mike’s safety razor, slid out the blade, and used it to scrape the date and the name and address of the pawnshop off the ticket. She slipped the ticket into her pocket; the razor blade, too, for good measure.
Downstairs again, O’Malley had put her into a cab, loaded the trunk into the trunk, and patted the car’s side the way you would a horse’s when you wanted it to go. The driver had sped off toward Brooklyn and arrived at the Gowanus piers a few minutes before the deadline. There’d been no traffic. Tricia hoped that hadn’t used up her quota of good luck for the day.
She waited, wishing she had worn a watch. It had to be after six, but just how much after, she couldn’t be sure. She felt a little nervous, sitting by herself on a box of money—true, it wasn’t the three million dollars it was pretending to be, but eleven thousand was still more money than she’d ever found herself sitting on before. And if someone wanted to take it, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to prevent—
“Hey,” a voice called. “You Tricia?”
Looking up, she saw two men walking toward her. They ran to type, as if Nicolazzo went to the same casting office Hollywood used when picking heavies. One could’ve been Bruno’s twin brother: same build, same pink dome, same glowering expression. The other—the one that had spoken—was smaller, though not by a lot, and looked very much like pictures she’d seen of the current resident of Gracie Manor, Mayor Wagner: jowly, big ears, receding hairline. But she suspected the resemblance ended there. For one thing, she doubted this one had gone to Yale.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m Tricia.”