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  “He’s not a freak,” she said. “They’re not freaks. They’re human beings, just like you and me.”

  “Human beings,” Valentine muttered, as if he held the entire species in contempt.

  Laura clenched her fist. “Listen,” she said from between her teeth. “They can help you find out who killed that lovely old man. He was always such a gentleman. He never really talked to us, but he was always so nice—”

  Oliphant cleared his throat. He walked to the desk. He gave Laura an ironic sideways glance, but he spoke to Valentine. “They got a make on the victim.”

  “Yeah?” Valentine said. “Well?”

  “Well, hang on to your ass. It’s ‘Saint Frankie’ Zordani.”

  The name meant nothing to Laura, and she was surprised by Valentine’s strong reaction. “The hell you say,” he said, as if in a mixture of shock and awe. It was the first time she had seen the man show an emotion other than suspicion or disapproval.

  Valentine turned his attention back to Laura with a smile that was close to a sneer. “Well, well,” he said with false pleasantness. “This wasn’t your average ‘Let’s drive by and kill somebody’ shooting. This wasn’t random. This has got interesting.”

  “Interesting?” Laura said, doubt in her voice. What she had seen was terrible, shocking; how could he find it interesting?

  Valentine’s superior smirk stayed in place. He nodded. “Your ‘lovely old man’? ‘Such a gentleman’? Who was ‘so nice’?”

  “Yes?” she asked with a frisson of foreboding.

  “A drug lord,” Valentine said with satisfaction. “This wasn’t any random violence you witnessed. This was planned. It was a hit. A major drug war hit.”

  Her scalp prickled, and a cold lump formed in her throat. She couldn’t speak. Planned? A hit? she thought sickly. A drug lord and a drug war?

  “The D.A.’s office wants a statement. Then they want those kids in protective custody. Maybe the woman, too,” Oliphant said. “Immediately.”

  Valentine nodded. He rose and picked up his hat from the desk. He looked Laura up and down.

  “Get your coat,” he ordered. “And the kids’. They’re material witnesses in this—if what they say can hold up in court. Let’s go.”

  “Protective custody?” Laura said, stunned. “Material witnesses? Court? You mean these children might be in danger?”

  “Worry about number one, lady,” Valentine said. “You might be in trouble yourself. You got yourself in the middle of something big. Oh, you’ve done it up right, no mistake.”

  A tide of horror swept her. It had never occurred to her that she had to do anything more than have the boys tell the police about the license number. Now Valentine was talking about courts and witnesses and drug wars and protection—it was incomprehensible. “But—” she protested. “But—”

  Valentine gave a snort of cynical laughter. “The D.A. ain’t gonna believe this. We got witnesses—but they’re eight-year-old idiots.”

  Don’t use that language, Laura wanted to say, but the words stuck in her throat. She could only stare at Valentine’s unsympathetic face.

  “Blue rhubarb, blue rhubarb, blue rhubarb,” said Trace.

  “Cows fly in outer space,” said Rickie.

  TWO

  His name was Montana, but he was from New York.

  He’d been born on a Friday the thirteenth when it was raining. His mother, who was superstitious, had cried, believing he would die young.

  But Montana had been one of those people convinced he was immortal, so he became a cop. They say a cop is washed up the day he learns he isn’t immortal.

  Montana had realized he was merely human one night in a dark alley behind a crack house when he was twenty-seven. It hadn’t washed him up; rather it had baptised him in lightning and fire. He had nearly died. But he had risen, born again, more scrappy than before.

  His injury would keep him off the street, where he had been crazy about the adrenaline rush of pitting himself against the Bad Guys.

  Well, as his Uncle Eddie always said, there was more than one way to skin a cat. Montana hung out now with the Federal Attorney’s office, an assistant. He was still after Bad Guys. He still had a slightly fanatical gleam in his eye.

  Of late he needed fanaticism to fuel him. He’d been assigned to help make a case against an annoying young marijuana czar, Dennis Deeds. Building a case against Deeds was like building a wall out of clouds. The guy had come out of nowhere and kept dodging back into it. He was as elusive and insubstantial as a ghost.

  Montana missed the thrill of a big-time hunt. He wanted a case that was large, sweet, and juicy. The Deeds investigation was small, dry, and plodding. But this afternoon, something had come down in the attorney’s office, something big.

  Montana’s superior had temporarily taken him off Deeds’s ephemeral trail and sent him over to West Fifty-seventh, to the Organized Crime Task Force offices.

  Frankie Zordani had been clipped. The task force wanted to talk to Montana, and he had no damned idea why.

  Now Montana sat cooling his heels in the waiting room of Isaac Conlee, no less, who was the highest-ranking FBI man with the task force. Frankie Zordani had been clipped—Montana couldn’t get over that.

  As Mafiosi went, Zordani was a nice old gentleman. He hardly ever killed anyone unless it was absolutely necessary. The task force had been trying to nail him for years but couldn’t touch him.

  Now he’d been nailed to the sidewalk in his own blood. God, not the task force, would have to sort out his sins. Montana idly wondered if God viewed income tax evasion as seriously as the IRS did.

  Conlee’s secretary, a pale, prissy-looking blonde with a long nose, listened to a low voice on her intercom, then looked at Montana, as if sizing him up. “You may go in now,” she said.

  I may go in, Montana thought. My, my. He rose and crossed the office. The door to Conlee’s office was metal and needed a new coat of paint. He opened it.

  Conlee, behind his desk, rose to greet him, shook hands, and pretended not to notice that Montana shook left-handed.

  “Michael Montana?” Conlee said. “I’m Conlee, FBI liaison.”

  “I go by Mick,” said Montana. Conlee was about forty, short for an FBI man, only five foot seven or so. But he was powerfully built, and he had that FBI look—the conservative haircut, the clear, cold eyes, the three-piece suit, the air that said he voted Republican and would do so unto death.

  Montana was taller, six feet even, and deceptively lean. He looked one-hundred-percent Italian, which he was, and nobody would ever guess he had spent his youth serving as an altar boy, which he had.

  “Have a seat,” said Conlee, and gestured at the institutional-looking chair before the desk.

  Montana sat and remembered not to slump or cross one leg over his knee. He had spent seven years on the vice squad, a division not noted for its etiquette. He still had trouble tolerating wearing a suit every working day.

  Conlee sat again at his desk. His office conveyed the usual FBI spartanness. On the wall behind him, a framed photograph showed the President looking noble and presidential.

  “I’ll get directly to the point,” Conlee said, his cold eyes taking Montana’s measure.

  “Good,” said Montana, measuring Conlee in return.

  Conlee stared at a report on his desk. “This afternoon, at approximately fourteen-oh-eight, Francis Zordani was shot to death in front of the Stephenson Special School. The weapon was an Uzi. The car was a Cadillac de Ville. Two witnesses got the license number. We haven’t found the car yet.”

  Montana’s adrenaline gave a small rush. An Uzi? That probably meant something ominous.

  Conlee nodded, as if he could read Montana’s suspicions. “Colombians, we think,” he said. “We traced the license. The car was stolen, probably two days ago, but not reported.”

  “You’re sure it’s Colombians?” Montana asked. When it came to bloodshed, he’d rather deal with the Mafia any day. The Mafia
had standards, at least. They were incredibly low, but they were standards. The Colombians were wild men, crazy as coots. They’d kill you if they didn’t like the way you tied your shoes.

  “Yeah,” Conlee said with weary disgust. “We found the guy the car belonged to. Their idea of a joke, we suppose, to use his car. He was another Mafioso, Markie Scarlotti. Waterfront enterprises. His body was found this morning. They gave him a necktie.”

  Montana sat up straighter. A necktie was a form of cut throat, a signature of the Colombians. The murderer slashed the victim’s neck so widely he could shove the tongue down through the wound.

  Conlee said, “A neighbor walking a dog saw three Hispanic-looking guys—young, well-dressed—going into Scarlotti’s place two nights ago, late. He said they were speaking a foreign language. It sounded like Spanish to him. He didn’t know what they were saying.”

  Montana narrowed his eyes.

  “Right,” Conlee said, “it could be a drug war. We don’t know if this is a Cartel or just a couple of crazy cowboys. We hope it’s just a few loose cannons.”

  “Both Scarlotti and Zordani hit? Do you have any idea why?”

  “No. None.” He paused and gave Montana another of his chilly stares. “But this is probably gonna get ugly before it’s over.”

  “I’d agree,” Montana said.

  “The reason I called you in is that I’ve got witnesses to protect.”

  Montana was surprised but tried not to show it. If the witnesses were important, the Colombians would try to kill them. It was as certain as the law of gravity. But why drag in an attorney?

  “Why me?” he asked. “You’ve got your own men.”

  Conlee frowned. “The task force wants to make this an interdepartmental effort. More flexibility. Less predictability.”

  More red tape, less control. He doesn’t like it, Montana thought, but said nothing.

  “Officially, it’s still on NYPD turf,” Conlee said. “But it looks like it’ll be our case. We’re stepping in now because this could involve both the Mafia and the Cartels. So we want to be like God. To move in mysterious ways. We don’t want anything we do to be anticipated.”

  Again Montana said nothing, waited for Conlee to go on.

  “We also,” Conlee said, “want the Colombians to know if they move against us, they aren’t fucking around with one of us. They’re by God fucking around with all of us. Maybe even they’ll think twice.”

  “I see,” said Montana.

  The Colombian drug kingpins had so much money they thought they were omnipotent. They didn’t like people who got in their way, and if they couldn’t buy somebody off, they killed him. It was a simple system and highly effective.

  But the central task force wasn’t merely people. It was a monolith composed of other monoliths, the FBI, the IRS, the NYPD, the Federal Attorney’s office. It could tap into the DEA, as well—the whole big alphabet soup bowl of law enforcement.

  The central task force had been formed when South American cocaine began pouring into the States. The coke problem had been too big, the players too many and too rough for any one agency to handle.

  Ah, thought Montana nostalgically, for the good old days when heroin alone was the menace. How simple the heroin trade of yore seemed in comparison, how almost innocent.

  “We’ve got a safe house,” Conlee said. “We’ve got three witnesses, two kids and a woman. We want to put them there—at least temporarily. We need men with them.”

  Montana nodded but thought, Are you going to say you want me? This is odd. This is very odd.

  Conlee picked up a file. “This is on you,” he said. “There’s one on every federal attorney. Yours is—unusual.”

  Montana said nothing. Again he waited.

  Conlee opened the file. “This right? You were with the NYPD vice squad seven years?”

  Montana nodded.

  Conlee studied the pages, nodding. “A good record. Some impressive commendations. You helped uncover the Sicilian connection?”

  Montana nodded. He had, and it had nearly gotten him killed. He’d been playing a bad cop, a bought cop, trying to line up some crack houses for a bust.

  Accidentally he’d stumbled onto information of a turf war within the Mafia, Sicilians rolling into New York territory. NYPD loved that news. So did the District Attorney. Even the FBI was interested.

  Go deeper, he was told. Get more.

  He went deeper, got more; it was working like a charm. Then one night he’d been coming out the back door of the crack house after midnight. And damned if somebody didn’t shoot him.

  His first reaction had been amazement, not pain. His second was a surge of anger so primitive it was like a panther screaming inside him.

  He’d been set up. The Mafia didn’t run the crack house, but they owned and protected it, and somehow they’d found out about Montana. He knew it, even as his midsection was ripped by bullets.

  Somebody had blown his cover. Somebody had betrayed him. He’d felt a wave of hatred both hot and cold. And then he’d felt nothing.

  He’d awakened in a hospital bed, missing part of his lung, part of his spleen, and most of the feeling in his right hand. Part of his little finger was missing, and so many small bones had been shattered and nerves blown apart that the surgeons told him they almost hadn’t saved the hand.

  He was lucky to be alive, they said. By all rights he should have been dead, and whoever popped a cap on him should have put a bullet through his brain to make sure. But they hadn’t—why? Too dumb, too green, too scared?

  Now his hand was a disfigured claw. His ring finger and what was left of his little finger were permanently curled together, like a pretzel made of scar tissue. His middle and index fingers were unbendable, so stiff that they seemed welded together in a permanent accusing point. His thumb alone moved.

  His days on the streets were ended, and he hadn’t wanted to be shuffled into some division office to drive a desk until retirement.

  Instead, he quit, took his disability allowance, and went to law school. Now the U.S. Attorney’s office had him doing legwork, because it was what he knew best.

  But someday Montana would be in the courtroom, prosecuting the Bad Guys. And he would stab those permanently pointing fingers into their faces as if God’s own relentless hand was damning them.

  “You had a reputation for being tough,” Conlee said. “That right?”

  It was right. Montana merely shrugged.

  “And for being incorruptible—you gotta lot of priests and nuns in your family—that why?”

  That was why. But Montana only shrugged again. His uncles Ernest and Bill were priests. He had four cousins who were priests and one a Dominican brother. He had two aunts who were teaching nuns, and a cousin who was a missionary nursing nun. His brother John had just been ordained a Jesuit.

  “You a religious man, Montana?” Conlee asked.

  “So-so,” he said. He didn’t much believe in God or the afterlife. He no longer attended church. But he hadn’t shaken off all of his upbringing, and he didn’t want to.

  There was good, there was evil. There were Bad Guys, there were Good Guys. His aunts and uncles and cousins and brothers waged a holy war in their peaceful way. He waged a secular one and played as rough and dirty as he had to.

  “I see you still shoot,” Conlee said, turning a page in the file.

  Montana kept his bad hand curled in his lap. “I can shoot left-handed. I go to the range three times a week.”

  “Why?” Conlee raised his eyes from the file.

  Montana met them. “I was a good shot. I didn’t want to lose it.”

  “You miss the force?”

  “Sometimes. I like where I am.” It was the truth, although most police officers hated prosecutors. The prosecutor’s office fucked them up. Montana had signed on to fuck it back, make it serve police work, not thwart it. This did not make him popular in his office. He didn’t care.

  “I want somebody with the U.S. Attorn
ey to help guard these witnesses,” Conlee said. “You got the background I’m looking for. Are you up to it?”

  Oh, Oh, Oh, that old adrenaline rock and roll, sang Montana’s blood. But logic had priority over rock and roll.

  “The attorney’s office isn’t law enforcement,” he said. “We’re not enforcement. We’re lawyers and clerks.”

  Conlee pushed back slightly from his desk, adjusted his navy blue tie. “We may have a few legal knots to untie about these witnesses,” he said with something like reluctance. “This is an unusual situation.”

  “Unusual how?”

  Conlee explained about the twins, and when Montana heard the word “autistic,” it was as if somebody poured ice water into his brain stem.

  He knew what autism was. His sister Cindy’s second son was ten years old, autistic, and in the children’s unit at Bellevue. He couldn’t dress himself or speak a coherent sentence, but he could name every kind of dinosaur that ever walked the earth. It was like his mind was a haunted movie house where Jurassic Park and nothing else played forever.

  “Jesus,” Montana said, showing emotion for the first time, “you can’t put kids like that on the stand. Normal kids are dicey enough, unreliable. They’ll be ruled incompetent—”

  Conlee interrupted him, shaking his head. “Not necessarily. In matters of memory, especially numbers, these kids might be ruled plenty competent. Besides, they saw the face of the gunman. A dark man, they said. With three moles on his face. Like this.”

  Conlee held three fingers to his cheek, indicating the pattern of a triangle. “Besides,” he said, “it doesn’t matter if they get to court or not. If the Colombians know there are potentially dangerous witnesses, they’ll come for them. To make an example of them. So the next time there are witnesses, they’ll come down with a case of very bad memory.”

  Montana resisted the desire to swear again. “You can’t let word leak that there are witnesses.”

  “We’ll do everything possible to insure against leaks,” Conlee said. “But I can’t guarantee anything. There are cops on the take out there. You know it. I know it.”

  Montana tried not to glance at his ruined hand. Oh, yeah, there were people who’d sell you out. There always were, always would be.