But Lil didn’t care any longer. Both hands on the wheel, she was just trying to keep Peggy’s car in sight.
Whatever else could be said about Peggy DeAngelis, she was a fast and sure driver, weaving in and out of traffic as if it were standing still. Surely, inexorably, Lil began losing ground.
“How ’bout calling in extra units?” Joe suggested. “You know she’s going to meet him.”
“Movie stuff,” she said shortly. “Besides, we don’t know any such thing. For all we can tell, she’s pulling us off so he can leave the house and go someplace else.” Lil made an abrupt evasive move, almost hitting a car that was easing out of a parking space. “Damn, she’s fast. Push comes to shove, I’ll get her for speeding.”
“You think he was hiding in the house?” Joe asked.
“Don’t be dumb, boss,” Willy suggested, trying not to fall over in the back. “It was a hypothetical.”
“Like what he said,” Lil confirmed, gunning through a gap between two cars ahead of her and then stamping on the brakes to avoid hitting a pedestrian.
They were near Newark’s center, where the courthouse on its slight rise lorded over a commingling of major streets. As the light ahead turned red and traffic bunched up before them, they lost all sight of the Mini.
“She at the light?” Lil asked.
“I don’t know,” Joe answered, craning to see.
“Hang on,” Willy ordered, and before either one of them could speak, he was out of the car and trotting up ahead on foot.
He didn’t bother cutting over to the sidewalk, but stayed among the cars, hoping to use them for cover. The effort was in vain. Her vehicle was so small that by the time he discovered it at the very front of the pack, he was close enough that he had to stop dead in his tracks. But his movement drew her attention. Through her back window, he could see her eyes lock onto his via her rearview mirror, and he knew he’d been burned.
Without hesitation, as if responding to an electrical jolt, Peggy’s car sprang from its place in line and shot straight into the busy intersection, the epitome of its driver’s pure adrenaline.
But that’s where her luck ran out. Her skill perhaps hampered by seeing the one cop who’d really scared her earlier, she collided first with one car, then with another, like a pinball running free, and finally, spinning and spraying bits of glass and debris, she was catapulted into the space between the front and rear tires of a tanker truck carrying gasoline, which was immediately hit by a bus.
Willy watched, stunned and stationary, surrounded by an audience of cars filled with transfixed onlookers as caught by this sudden chaos as if a volcano had suddenly erupted right before them.
The sounds of metal and glass and rubber subsided briefly, enough that for an instant, Willy distinctly heard the cheerful chirping of a distant bird, before the first shouts began rising from all around.
But Willy stayed rooted in place, still watching what was left of Peggy’s tiny red car. He could see her moving slightly through a twisted side window, her long hair shifting in a shaft of sunlight. But by the same light, he could see a sparkle of liquid freely flowing from above her-from the body of the punctured gas tanker.
“Stand back,” he yelled at the people approaching the crash site. “It’s going to blow.”
But, of course, nobody listened. He probably looked like a deranged cripple, standing in the middle of the street, surrounded by cars, waving his one arm.
The explosion, ignited by Peggy’s overheated engine, began as an air-sucking whoosh, but then blew out with full force, picking up people and tossing them through the air, and sending Willy staggering back, covering his face against the heat blast, until he collided with Joe, who’d come running up behind him.
“Jesus Christ,” Joe said, catching his colleague by the shoulders. “What the hell happened?”
The initial fireball quickly faded back to a roaring column of white-hot intensity, looking as if the earth’s molten core had burst through the crust in a single shaft, heading right for the sky.
“She saw me,” Willy said simply, sounding as small and abashed as he’d been irascible back at her town house.
Joe was startled by his subdued tone of voice. “What? Are you okay?”
“She saw me,” he repeated in a stunned monotone. “Tried to run.”
Joe stared at him as Willy continued looking at the fiery tangle of cars and trucks and people. Around them, sirens began closing in from afar, offset by a few horn blasts from motorists who didn’t know what had happened. In that sudden, vulnerable moment, Joe realized that Willy had been as struck by Peggy DeAngelis as Joe had been-by her beauty, her youth, her clear, almost breathtaking innocence. But where Joe had engaged her by talking, Willy had done just the opposite, as if she represented a threat to him personally.
Joe squeezed Willy’s shoulders, at one with his friend’s sense of loss, the memory of this vibrant young woman so clear in his mind.
He wanted to say something useful, far beyond soothing, but he was hard put to speak at all. Transfixed by the white-hot flames, knowing who lay in their embrace, having spoken with her and yearned for her safety mere minutes ago, he was trapped by a paralyzing stupor of futility, waste, and guilt.
For he and the man beside him, as they’d done before to uncountable others over the years, had brought confusion and fear to Peggy DeAngelis. Who knew why she’d run just now and placed herself finally in the middle of this inferno? Where there was no doubt whatsoever was that Joe’s appearance in her life had marked the beginning of the end.
He glanced at Willy’s pale, suddenly vulnerable profile. If but a few of those same thoughts were presently going through his head-especially commingling with his earlier harsh words to her-it was no surprise why this should hit him so hard.
“Come on,” he urged. “We better get back to the car. Find a way out of here.”
Tito’s voice came through the closed door. “Gino. You up?”
Gino was using one of the Outfit’s houses they were sure the cops knew nothing about, in an upstairs apartment he borrowed whenever he needed to lie low.
He was stretched out on his bed, reading a magazine, wishing to hell he could be someplace else, preferably with Peggy.
“What d’you want?”
“Got a phone call.”
Gino sat up slowly. Only a couple of people knew where he was-trusted people he’d assigned to watch both his home and Peggy’s place.
“Who from?”
“Fredo.”
That meant Peggy’s. He slid his feet off the bed, got up, and crossed over to the door. When he opened it, Tito towered over him, a cordless phone clutched in one meaty hand.
Gino took the phone. “Thanks.”
Tito faded from view like a ghost, always amazingly quiet.
“What?” Gino asked the phone.
“I got bad news,” said a disembodied voice.
Gino scowled. “And I’m supposed to guess what it is?”
“It’s Peggy,” Fredo conceded, abandoning his plan to be subtle. “She’s dead.”
Gino felt his heart lurch. His body tingling and numb, he reached out for the nearest wall.
“What do you mean?”
“She was killed in a car crash. I’m real sorry.”
“A car crash? What the fuck are you saying?” Gino slapped the wall with his hand. “What the fuck was she doing in a car? I told her to stay put, where I could find her. You stupid son of a bitch, talk to me.”
“That cop came to visit her-the one you told me about-and right after, she drove off, real fast. I don’t know why. Maybe to lead them off, maybe ’cause she was scared. But that’s how it happened. She peeled outta there, they took off after her, and bam. She got hit by a gas truck.”
“A gas truck? What kind of gas truck?”
There was a confused pause at the other end. “Like what brand?”
What should have infuriated Gino merely sent him slowly sliding down the wall until he was sitting on the floor. There was a loud humming inside his head.