The sound of the shot had broken something in Rafe, like a high note breaking glass. He became boneless, and dropped backward into his desk chair, still looking at the Beretta. Parker and Arthur watched him for one long second, and then Rafe shook his head, reached out, picked up the phone.
"Redial," Parker said.
Rafe blinked at him, thinking about that, then shrugged, with a bitter sound in his throat. "I'm not clever," he said, as though it were a failing that had long troubled him, and pushed redial.
Parker came around the desk to lean close, so he could hear both sides of the conversation.
The phone rang three times, and then a woman's voice answered, saying some company name that Parker didn't quite catch. Rafe said, "It's Rafe Hargetty again, let me talk to Frank."
"One moment."
Parker was close enough to smell a kind of metallic haze that rose from Rafe, as though he'd just been electrocuted. It was the smell of fear.
"Rafe?" A hard, fast, tough-guy voice. "Keep him there, I got people on the way, use—"
"He left, Frank."
"What? You said he was there."
"Him and another guy. They left before I got outside. I don't know, something spooked them."
"What's the other guy look like?"
"I never saw him, Frank." Rafe's fear came across as the underling's desperate desire to please. He said, 'They were gone before I got out there."
"Shit," said the voice. There's only one reason Arthur's off the reservation. Let me think."
They all let Frank think. Arthur stood glaring at Rafe with heavy anger, while Rafe stared at his desktop, eyes and mouth moving as though he still thought there was some way he could turn this around, even though he knew there was nothing in the world he was ready to try.
"Rafe. Rafe, you there?"
"Yeah, sure!"
"If he comes back— Who've you got there? Anybody could hold them?"
There's always a few drivers downstairs," Rafe said, "but they already left, I don't think they're—"
"If they do," Frank interrupted. "If they do come back, don't call me first, call downstairs first, get your hands on little Arthur and whoever the other guy is, then call me."
"Okay, Frank."
"Which is what you shoulda done this time."
"I didn't think, I just wanted—"
"I know, Rafe. Maybe they'll give you a second chance."
"I'll—I'll take care of it, Frank. If they come back."
"Good," Meany said, and broke the connection.
Rafe hung up, and turned his troubled look on Arthur. "I'm sorry," he said.
"Sorry for what in particular, Rafe?"
"I'm not around violence, Arthur," Rafe said. "You know that, no more than you ever were."
Arthur shook his head. "You're around it now."
Parker said, "What's the link between Cosmopolitan and Paul Brock?"
Rafe had the scared reaction of somebody who's been falsely accused: "Who?"
Arthur said, "You don't know this fella Brock?"
"Never heard the name in my life," Rafe said, blinking at Arthur. "I'm not going to lie to you, Arthur, not now, not like this."
"If you don't know Brock," Arthur said, "what do you know?"
"Frank came to me, a little while ago," Rafe told him. "He knew you and me kept in touch, he wanted to call you, give you a job."
"A job," Arthur said.
Rafe looked at Parker, then down at his hands curled on the desktop. "I'm not proud of this," he told his hands.
"Bullshit, Rafe," Arthur said. "We do what's needed."
Not looking up from his hands, Rafe said, "He wanted me to know, in front, you weren't gonna come out of it. So I wouldn't have a complaint later, he told me the setup."
Arthur waited, looking at Rafe's bowed head. After a minute, Rafe sighed, shook himself, and said, "What it Was, there was a guy worked for Cosmopolitan, I guess a hit man, I don't know, and he did private jobs sometimes, too. He did a private job that got him killed, and Cosmopolitan didn't like it, they had a lot invested in the guy, and it looked bad if their pro got put down by some independent named Parker that nobody knew, so they took it over, the private job, they made it a Cosmopolitan job."
"My job," Arthur said.
"Yeah." Rafe looked up at Parker. "I don't know what you're gonna do to me, right now," he said, "but you got a whole big corporation looking to shut you down."
Parker pointed the Beretta at the memo pad on Rafe's desk. "Write down Frank Meany's addresses and phone numbers. Where he works and where he lives."
"I don't know where he lives," Rafe said, and at Parker's expression he said, "I swear to God!"
Arthur, quietly, said, "I never knew where Frank lived either."
"On the job, then," Parker said.
Rafe looked from one to the other, not saying he was dead no matter what he did now, because they all knew that. Then he made a sour face and said, "He's at Cosmopolitan, over in Bayonne."
Parker looked at Arthur. "You know the place?"
Shaking his head, Arthur said, "I used to know the address. I was never there."
Parker nodded at Rafe. "Write it down."
Obediently, Rafe picked up his pen and wrote the company name and address on the memo pad.
Parker said, "What does he do there?"
"PR," Rafe said.
Parker frowned. "What?"
"Public relations," Rafe explained. "He's head of public relations."
"That's the company's idea of a joke," Arthur said, picking up the whole pad, putting it in his jacket pocket. 'That and bombs." Looking at Parker, he gestured toward Rafe: "Why won't he call Frank as soon as we leave?"
"Because," Parker said, "either I shoot him dead, or he comes with us. It's up to him."
Slowly, Rafe got to his feet.
7
West of the Holland Tunnel, the Turnpike Extension rides high over the Jersey flats, where garbage and construction debris and used Broadway sets and failed mobsters have been buried for a hundred years. Arthur drove, with Parker and Rafe behind him on the backseat. Rafe had nothing to say until Arthur took one of the steep twisty ramps down from the Extension into the industrial wasteland of the flats. Then, not looking at Parker, he said, "I'd like to live through this."
"Everybody would," Parker told him.
The street they took south was flanked by warehouses and vast parking fields full of tractor trailers. There were no pedestrians in this part of the world, and almost no other traffic. Parker said, "Arthur, how far?"
'Ten minutes."
"Pull over at the next cross street."
Rafe blinked, but wouldn't look at Parker.
As the Volvo slowed, Parker said to Rafe, "Take off your shoes and socks."
"I'm not trouble to anybody," Rafe said, still looking straight ahead. Then, when Parker didn't answer, he stooped to take off the shoes and socks, saying, 'Just leave them on the floor?"
'Yes. Empty your pockets. Onto the floor."
Rafe did so, wallet and keys and coins and a penknife dropping down by his shoes.
Arthur had stopped the Volvo. Parker got out, on the curbside, and said, "Come out."
Rafe slid over and climbed out of the car. He looked very scared, and kept his eyes fixed on a point somewhere to Parker's right.
Parker said, "Walk somewhere."
Surprised he was going to stay alive, Rafe looked quickly at Parker's face, then down at his own bare feet, then started walking, stepping carefully, frowning down at the scarred broken concrete of the sidewalk.
Parker got into the front beside Arthur. "We'll be done before he calls anybody."
"Good," Arthur said. "I was afraid you wouldn't have an easy way." He put the car in gear and drove on south, Rafe picking his way slowly through the wasteland behind them.
It's called the Port of New York, but years ago most of the shipping businesses moved across the harbor to New Jersey, where the costs were lower and the regulations lighter. Newark, Elizabeth, Jersey City, and Bayonne are, along their waterfronts, a great sweeping tangle of piers, warehouses, gasoline storage towers, snaking rail lines, cranes, semi-tractor trailers, chain-link fences, guard shacks, and forklift trucks. Day and night, lights glare from the tops of tall poles and the corners of warehouses. Cargo ships ease up the channels and into the piers every hour of every day from every port in the world. The big trucks roll eastward from the Turnpike and the cargo planes lift from Newark International. The thousand thousand businesses here cover every need and every want known to man.