“Not only cops. Everybody. We’re all scared, Steve. If you meet another lion, just look him in the eye. Stare him down.”
Carella’s hands were trembling.
“Come on,” Meyer said. He slid out of the booth, came around the table, sat beside his friend, and put his arm around his shoulder. “Come on, Steve.”
Tito Gomez walked in just then.
“How tender,” he said.
“Go fuck yourself,” Meyer explained.
“Nice talk. I can’t find Wiggy. I don’t know where he is. What now?”
WIGGY WAS STILL AT Halloway’s computer.
There was a folder named MOTHER, which he couldn’t open because whenever he double-clicked on it, he was told to enter a password. But when he double-clicked on a folder called WITCHES AND DRAGONS—which he thought at first might be some kind of a game—it opened to his touch, and he found a whole list of files with names like ADA and NETTIE and DIANA and EM and TESSIE and RONI and BELA and GINA. Was W&D in the business of tracking hurricanes, or had he lucked into Halloway’s personal little black book of cuties, oh you sly old dog, you! Or were these the names of writers the company published? But then why use first names? And even some nicknames?
Intrigued now, Wiggy double-clicked on the file labeled TESSIE because that was the name of the first girl he’d ever talked into licking Frick and Frack, a thirteen-year-old high yaller beauty fresh up from the South with her grandma. There wasn’t nothing in that file about girls, mellow or otherwise. What was in there was information about the West Side Limousine Corporation, which it would appear was a subsidiary of Wadsworth and Dodds here, and which made all kinds of trips to and from the city’s two airports and the one across the river in the next state, not to mention a trip to Diamondback on Christmas night.
He began wondering why a file about a limousine company would be called TESSIE, and then he realized that there were two S’s in the words WEST SIDE, and also a T, and—lo and behold—an I and an E! So what you had here was little old TESSIE all curled up in the back seat of a WEST SIDE limo!
He double-clicked on the file labeled EM.
What was in there was an itemized list of drug deals that made Wiggy’s little operation in Diamondback look like somebody selling lemonade by the side of the road. Dates, places, number of kilos purchased, dollars paid for them. He wasn’t surprised that the list existed; everybody kept recordssomeplace, man. In fact, his own transactions uptown were recorded on a computer disc called HAPPY DAYS that could only be opened with the password WW2, which stood not for World War II, but instead for his initials and the month of his—it suddenly occurred to him that WITCHES AND DRAGONS stood for Wadsworth and Dodds.
What he was looking at here was a record of drug buys the book publishers had made in Mexico over the past two years. And suddenly he realized that the name EM was buried in the word MEXICO, same as TESSIE was buried in WEST SIDE, was in fact the first two letters of that word, reversed, and he began wondering how many of theother girls’ names in the WITCHES AND DRAGONS folder were buried in larger words, hiding there, so to speak, lurking there in the dark for somebody smart like Wiggy to find.
He kept opening file after file.
When finally he double-clicked on the file named DIANA, his eyes opened wide.
He was reading all about Diamondback, which was where he conducted business, the uptown ghetto where Jerry Hoskins alias Frank Holt had come calling with a hundred keys of prime cocaine purchased in Mexico.
DIAMONDBACK.
Little ole white girl DIANA hiding up there in the blackest of black holes.
The magnitude of his discovery made him suddenly want to pee.
Grabbing the Cobray from where it was resting on the floor at his feet, he went down the hall to the men’s room at the rear of the office complex.
At that very moment, The Weird Sisters and two very tall, very broad black men were entering the Headley Building through the back door in an alley that was posted with no parking—fire lane signs. This time around, Sheryl and Toni—whose real names were Anna and Mary Jo—wereeach carrying guns with silencers affixed to the muzzles.
So were the black men.
WIGGY DIDN’T HEAR any shooting because the weapons were wearing silencers.
All he heard was screaming.
The screaming wasn’t coming from the two Mexicans, who were dead within minutes after the assassins entered the conference room. Instead, they were coming from Charmaine the receptionist, and Betty Alweiss from the Art Department. Karen Andersen wasn’t screaming. She was learning how to be as cold-bloodedly unemotional as her boss and sometime lover.
“There’s a third one,” Halloway said.
By that time, Wiggy was down the fire stairs and out of the building.
THE WEIRD SISTERS unashamedly stripped the Mexicans naked and wrapped them in tarpaulin. Their two black associates carried the bodies down the fire stairs, hoisted them into the back of a white ML320 Mercedes-Benz, and transported them to a garbage dump on Sands Spit, not far from the airport. It was Halloway’s surmise that the Mexicans would never be identified and therefore would never be missed.
At about four-thirty that afternoon—just as Carella was leaving the squadroom—Anna and Mary Jo went up to Diamondback to look for Walter Wiggins. This time, their orders were to kill him.
CARELLA GOT TO his mother’s house in Riverhead at a little past six that evening. He recognized his sister’s car in the driveway outside the house, and parked just behind it. His mother’s Christmas tree glowed behind the windows fronting the house. At least a foot of snow covered the walk to the front door, and it was still coming down. He climbed the low flat steps, pressed the button set in the door jamb, and heard familiar chimes sounding inside the house. He waited. Falling flakes covered his hair and the shoulders of his overcoat. He was about to ring again when the door opened.
“Hey,” his mother said, and hugged him. “You should wear a hat.”
“I know,” he said. “You told me.”
“From when you were six,” she said.
“Three,” he corrected.
“Come in. Angela’s already here.”
“I saw her car.”
“Come in.”
He followed his mother into the house. This was where he’d grown up. This was what he’d called home during his childhood, his adolescence, and his early manhood. Home. It seemed strange to him now, smaller, somehow cheerless. He wondered if that was because his father no longer lived here. Angela was sitting at the big dining room table, drinking a glass of red wine. Another glass of wine was on the table, just opposite her. He remembered when they were kids and used to hide together under this very table. He remembered Sunday afternoons here in his parents’ house, the pennyante poker games, he and Angela hiding under the dining room table. He remembered his sister once breaking his head with the clasp on a pocketbook she’d swung at him in anger. He couldn’t remember now what had so enraged her. Something he’d said jokingly. He’d loved her to death when they were kids. He still did. She kissed him on the cheek in greeting.