"Hey," Willy greeted him.
"Hey, yourself," Riley said, barely moving his lips.
Willy glanced down the two aisles, saw a kid studying comic books in a distant rack and two women picking out items from the glass-walled fridge against the back wall.
"I got bad news," he said in an undertone.
Riley's expression didn't so much change as imperceptibly soften, as if its underlying scaffolding had collapsed. "Nate's dead," he said without inflection.
It wasn't a question.
"Yeah. I'm sorry."
Riley watched Willy's face, struck by his tone of voice, and saw that this enigmatic hard-ass was being neither considerate nor compassionate. He was feeling his own loss with Nate's death, putting it in a special category in his brain as a collector might add a priceless addition to a vault.
"You know who?" Riley asked.
Willy paused as one of the women approached the counter, laid her few items down, and paid for them in crumpled dollar bills pulled from her coat pocket.
"Pretty sure it was Ron Cashman," Willy answered after she'd left. "Same guy who took a shot at me last night, uptown."
"You saw him?"
"I shot at him first."
Riley produced a hint of a smile. "Why doesn't that surprise me?"
Willy ignored the comment. "Who do you know in Brooklyn, both sides of the old Navy Yard?"
"A few people," Riley answered vaguely.
This time, it was Willy's turn to smile. "I thought you might. Cashman used to work for an old crook named Lenny Manotti. That ring any bells?"
Riley thought about that for a moment. "He Mobbed up?"
"I didn't know you were so prejudiced. Not that I heard."
"What does 'old' mean?"
"From what I got, semito fully retired."
Riley grunted, straightened, stretched his thick, muscled arms out to both sides of him, and arched his back. "Good," he said. "Then he won't have too many people around him."
Which was exactly what Willy wanted to hear. Several hours later, Willy Kunkle and Riley Cox entered a restaurant/bar on Bedford Avenue in the Northside section of Brooklyn. The Waldorf Astoria it wasn't, but it did have the relaxed, well-used feel of a popular neighborhood dive. Thankfully, it was also not a place so wholly given over to one race, creed, or sex that their sudden appearance caused any notice.
Riley led them to the bar and to two stools either side of a heavyset, bearded man nursing a half-empty beer.
"Hey, Zeke," Riley said softly.
Zeke looked up at the row of bottles against the wall opposite him, as if he'd just heard a distant alarm bell that made him only mildly curious. "Who's your friend?"
His voice was gravelly and low-pitched, somewhere in the suburbs of Louis Armstrong, except that he was white.
"He's shy," Riley answered. "You got what I'm after?"
"Sure." Zeke took a long pull on his beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "What d'you want with an old dog like Manotti? He's barely breathin' anymore."
The bartender approached. Riley ordered a beer, Willy a black coffee. Riley slid two twenties in front of Zeke, who had them enveloped in his fist almost before they touched the bar top.
Zeke, still staring at the bottles before him, said, "He's the one in the corner booth, facing the door like anyone cared about him anymore. Fat guy with the three hairs combed over the top."
Willy glanced at the man as he reached for some pretzels. Manotti was eating alone, and seemed almost done with his meal.
"He in a car or on foot?" he asked.
The bearded man slowly swung his head around to look at him and raised his eyebrows. "Wow. It talks."
"It can also shove that bottle up your ass."
Zeke returned to his earlier, meditative posture. "I liked you better before. He's on foot."
"What's his address?" Riley asked.
"My, my, you boys are demanding," he said, but he gave them an address nearby.
"Now leave," Willy ordered.
From his body language, Zeke looked ready to protest, or at least proffer up some face-saving witticism, but he apparently thought better of it, and muttered, "Next time you're shoppin', don't call me, okay?" as he slid off the stool.
Riley waited until he'd left the bar, and then told Willy, "That was useful. Thanks."
Willy drank from his coffee. "Too goddamned chatty," he said, and as if to set an example, stopped at that.
Riley smiled and shook his head slightly. "You always this much fun?"
Willy didn't answer.
"There was a guy like you in the neighborhood when I was a kid," Riley told him. "Real sour, never had anything good to say. We stayed out of his way or we cranked him up, depending on how many there were of us. My grandmother used to let me have it when she heard me criticizing him, though. They weren't friends or anything, but she said anyone like that had to have had things a lot tougher than we did, 'cause nobody gets born that way."
Willy kept at his coffee. He'd thought about that, of course, blaming his father for abandoning them, his mother for never owning up to it. And, in fact, it had been a little weird-one day the old man had been in the house, the next he wasn't, not a single person anywhere saying a word about it. Not once. The last communication Willy remembered-the night before his father left-was being slapped across the face by him because Willy had dropped his spoon at the table.
But lots of kids lost their fathers, or were turned into punching bags, or who knew what else. Willy hadn't suffered as much as most of them.
What people didn't understand was that it was kind of liberating to speak his mind when he felt like it, to live with his curmudgeon's reputation. It disentangled him from other people, and he'd come to see that as a blessing.
Willy put his cup down and rubbed his eyes with his hand, pushing hard enough to cause stars.
"Looks like he's on the move," Riley said, breaking into Willy's meditations.
Willy turned discreetly to see Lenny Manotti settling his bill.
So much for deep thinking. They let Manotti get halfway down the block before leaving the bar and tailing him. If there ever had been a period when the old man had shoved his weight around and needed protection, it was apparently a long time back. Now he sauntered along nonchalantly, one hand working a toothpick, the other buried in a pocket, occasionally waving to some acquaintance on the street. Another retiree enjoying the twilight years.
They'd discussed what approach to take, the most obvious being the one Willy had used on Carlos Barzun. Riley's information was that despite Manotti's current inoffensiveness, he hadn't been a gentle player when he'd been in the game. But he was toothless now, unlike La Culebra, and capable of striking a time-wasting toughguy pose from pure nostalgia.
As a result, Willy had decided not to give him the option.
Riley hadn't argued the point. Odd as it appeared, he'd discovered in Willy a man whose combat sense he could trust. It had been for him the rediscovery of one Vietnam experience he hadn't expected to ever feel again: a bonding not based on shared backgrounds or cultures, but on the other guy's proven ability to get the job done. Riley had no delusions about Willy's survival skills-the latter seemed devoted to his own self-destruction in a loopy, roundabout way-but Riley did believe that following his lead might well result in avenging Nate's death, while leaving his own skin intact.
Any further sentiment didn't apply, and clearly wasn't asked for.
Manotti lived in a bland apartment building of no architectural merit-merely one of those square brick blocks with dozens of windows, reminiscent of a child's drawing. Willy picked up his pace, leaving Riley behind, and reached the lobby just as Manotti was digging into his pocket for his keys. Willy was holding his dead pager up to his ear as if it were a cell phone.