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At the end of the gallery there was a staircase leading down to the ground floor. Willy took it three steps at a time as Cashman slammed through a door on the far wall and disappeared from view.

Breathing hard, his feet hurting from running on the grating, Willy didn't even hesitate at the door. Seeing Riley drop amid a nightmarish flashback that commingled with images of Mary and Nate somehow finalized a cycle in his head. As he had so long ago, opening his shirt to the enemy soldier for a clean ending to it all, so now did he go after Ron Cashman with suicidal intensity, exchanging self-protection for a longing to stop the guilt and confusion.

There was a hallway beyond the door, leading down a row of abandoned offices. Ahead of him, visible in the harsh light cutting in through a shattered window from a security lamp outside, Cashman leaped over a pile of debris, dove to the ground to use it as cover, and twisted around to kill Willy Kunkle.

But Willy didn't care. He continued running at full tilt, the bullets singing by his ears as Cashman fired in a panic, methodically squeezing off his own shots, making them count, until he stopped on top of the debris pile and was staring straight down at Cashman's crumpled, bleeding body.

The dying man looked up at Willy, his gun now beyond his reach, his eyes wide and white in the artificial light. "Don't shoot," he said. "Help me."

Given his fatalistic passion of moments earlier, Willy felt suddenly totally remote, Riley's inert body blending with countless other killed and mangled corpses, to be filed in a part of his brain he both cherished and loathed.

He used the trick he had earlier of pretending his dead pager was a cell phone, holding it up, half hidden in his hand, and saying, "I'll call 911 right now if you tell me what I want to know."

Cashman groaned, tried to move, and rolled his eyes. "Oh, Jesus."

"You killed my wife?"

"Yes."

"With dope you bought from La Culebra?"

"Yes."

"You killed Nate Lee?"

"Yes."

"You tortured him first to get the goods on me?"

"Yes. Please call."

Cashman closed his eyes briefly, like a man fighting off sleep. Willy knew he was running out of time.

"Why did you kill Mary?"

Cashman's breathing was becoming erratic, his fingers flitting against the filthy floor as if trying to escape their dying host.

"Why?" Willy repeated.

The eyes half opened. The answer came as a whisper. "She was… greedy."

The last word was an exhalation, and after it had drifted away, Willy felt utterly alone.

Chapter 21

Ward Ogden's voice on the phone was lacking its usual friendliness. "Something's up you better see. A car'll be downstairs in fifteen minutes to pick both of you up."

Gunther groped in the dark to replace the phone in its cradle and peered groggily at the red numbers on the hotel's radio alarm clock. It wasn't quite three in the morning. He swung his legs out of bed, padded over to the double door separating his room from Sammie's, and pounded on it with his fist.

"Sam. Rise and shine. Gotta hit the bricks."

The door was yanked open with surprising speed and Sammie's face hovered before him, looking both haggard and anxious. "Is it Willy?"

"I don't know. Ogden just called. Told us to be downstairs in fifteen minutes."

Her face contorted with anger. "Shit, he's done it again," she burst out, and slammed the door, just missing Gunther's fingers.

They were downstairs in time to greet a patrol car as it pulled up to the curb of their marginally solvent hotel. The two men in the front were polite but claimed ignorance on the reason for the trip, admitting only that they were headed for Red Hook on detective Ogden's orders.

The found Ogden at the back of the empty warehouse, beyond a huge central room rigged with halogen lamps and a team of crime scene investigators. Outlined on the floor was the bloodstained drawing of a man, not far from another stain at least as big, along with a dusting of empty shell casings as thick as sprinkles on a doughnut.

Where Ogden was awaiting them, a second human outline lay sprawled behind a random pile of smashed-up office furniture. A gun rested just beyond the reach of one of the outline's extended arms.

Ogden did not look happy. "Two dead: Ron Cashman with three slugs in him, and a man named Franco Silva, hit once in the heart."

"I noticed a third stain," Gunther commented, keeping his voice neutral. He was very aware of Sammie's tension as she stood beside him, prepared for the worst.

"Man named Riley Cox," Ogden explained. "Badly wounded, but apparently not lethally. He's also refusing to talk. We checked his hands for gunpowder residue. He didn't have a weapon we can find, and right now it doesn't look like he fired at anyone, either."

"Which presumably leaves Willy as the missing party," Gunther filled in the blanks.

Ogden's response was terse. "Right. Not that we have any proof-yet."

"Have you come up with a likely scenario?" Sammie asked, her tone purposefully strong and professional.

"We've come up with a scenario, whether it's likely or not." He jerked his thumb toward the huge room behind them. "Some of it's from Cashman's lookout. We found him gagged and handcuffed to a chain-link fence outside. His boss was supposed to sell a gun to someone, we think Riley, although the gun in question is missing. It was a one-gun deal, with the option of a bigger buy if everybody got along. We think your boy took care of the sentry while Riley played the front man. Then he snuck along the gallery to nail the other two. After that, who knows? Riley was found near the middle of the room. The paramedics were phoned by an anonymous caller, probably Kunkle. As for him"-Ogden nodded his chin in the direction of Cashman's last resting place-"it's anybody's guess how he died."

"You think he might have crawled here after the shootout?" Sammie asked hopefully.

"Not with all these shell casings. He was probably wounded, though. We found him face up and he had one bullet hole in the back. One possibility is that he and Kunkle shot it out western-style. There's a trail of shells all along the hallway."

"What's the other possibility?" Gunther asked, already knowing the answer.

Ogden looked at him grimly. "That Kunkle shot him where he lay. At this point, from what I've seen, I wouldn't put it past him."

Speechless because he knew it could be true, Gunther returned his gaze to the outline, wishing there was some way he could get it to talk.

"It's only fair to tell you," Ogden told him quietly, even gently. "I would seriously like to have a sit-down with Willy." The dawn was just paling when Willy Kunkle drove into the ghostly quiet community of Broad Channel. One of the city's most unusual neighborhoods, Broad Channel was built on an ironing-board-flat island in Jamaica Bay, hemmed in by a few dozen other, uninhabited islands, and located midway between Kennedy Airport and the Rockaway Peninsula, all tucked under the sheltering arm of Brooklyn and Queens combined.

Despite the airport's proximity, it seemed as if Broad Channel should play host to the Fort Lauderdale set. So sliced into by parallel boat slips, it looked like a chunky comb on a map, and with its wildlife refuge neighbors and proximity to Lower New York Bay beyond Rockaway Point, it seemed perfect for those mega-rich who like both their banks and their recreation within arm's reach. In fact, as he glanced west across the water, Willy could just make out Manhattan's prickly skyline beginning to emerge from the night's tendrils.

But Broad Channel was no rich man's retreat. Surprisingly, it better resembled a forgotten Florida backwater for seasonal workers. The buildings were extremely modest, middle-class, mostly one-story wooden structures, packed together like mixed spare parts from a variety of construction sets, and lorded over by a congestion of sagging, heavy utility wires crisscrossing the main road from a forest of light, telephone, and power poles.