Brush your hair. He was going to be civilized, even if he'd slept in the truck. Coffee and sandwich under the front seat. He opened the door and pissed with one hand and ate the sandwich with the other. Nobody could see him. Across the parking lot, guys in business suits stood whacking golf balls into a wall of netting, Jersey rising over the river. The all-night sports complex was the safest place he'd found, yet he'd bought a baseball bat anyway and slid it under the seat. But when you're sleeping, the bat is of no use. The guy could stick a gun in the vent window, pop-pop, and you'd never know. You were dreaming and you never woke up-the sound of the shot muffled inside the truck. He couldn't keep parking there, he was too vulnerable. He needed a twenty-four-hour garage. You could hide forever in a garage.
Now he stood outside the truck in the dead farmer's boots, his back stiff, stretching. He knelt down to the pavement and did fifty decent push-ups. Then twenty-three lousy ones. Getting too old for this shit. He was losing his advantage. Christina had not been in the courthouse downtown when the prison guard said she would be, and then, the next day, the court officer said she'd been released earlier in the morning. Rick had almost strangled the guy. Maybe it was just bureaucratic inefficiency. Maybe Peck had made sure Rick went up to the prison so that they could start to follow him from there. Or maybe they wanted someone else to follow him, one of Tony Verducci's soldiers, some punk twenty-year-old with a flash-roll in his pocket-like Rick had once been. But after the court officer said Christina had been released, there was nothing for Rick to do. Be functional, he warned himself. Don't do something stupid. Don't start going to bars. Don't listen to your dick. Don't go to bars, don't talk to women. You miss women so much that you can't be trusted. You're so good at doing the stupid things, do the smart thing. Sit and think first. She hasn't gone far, he told himself. She's out there. She loves New York City, could never live anywhere else. There are ways of finding her. She'll want to feel the streets around her, the people and buildings and noise. She'll want to dive right back into it. He knew she didn't have any money-how could she? You can never have enough money in the city. And if Tony Verducci had ordered somebody to follow her, then she was already in trouble. So what are you going to do, Rick? Who are you, are you any good? His time out in the cottage next to the ocean had been wasted if he could not make use of it. You have an obligation to become a better person. You have an obligation to use the baseball bat if it comes to that. He was going to find her and save her from Tony Verducci, and maybe she would want to see him again, maybe not. If yes, good. They would see if they still had the old music. Of course, he believed they did. If she didn't want to see him, well, okay. At least he'd have given it a shot, would be clean this time around. You can find her, he thought. You can figure stuff out as you go along. You can find her before they do. They have their ways and you have yours. You know her, for one thing, you know what she likes. She'll call her mother. She doesn't want to, but she will.
His problem was that he was getting low on cash. Down to a hundred bucks. He sat heavily in the truck and took his last tomato from the dashboard. Perfect, not one spot, and he ate it, getting juice in his beard, while he thought about Aunt Eva. If she had not changed her locks, then his chances were good. In and out in a few minutes; no one will know. Civilized, functional, a man with a plan. He started the truck and pulled south on the West Side Highway, then from there around the bottom of Manhattan and over toward Brooklyn, where Aunt Eva had lived on Carroll Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues since his boyhood. But he didn't know anyone there anymore, he didn't want to be seen. The street used to be all Italian families, with a social club on the corner-old guys in permanent-press pants and hair grease, sitting around. Tired, but not too tired to drive new Cadillacs. They knew what was going on. Some remembered Tony Verducci as a young man. Some even knew Paul. Yet most of the old families had died off, or married out, with other people moving into the neighborhood of grand old brownstones, full of money now, full of Manhattan people who worked in law firms and investment banks and computer companies, and they'd trickled down the hill onto Aunt Eva's block, where the buildings were not brownstones but squat three-story brick row homes half the size. She'd never move, though, never sell out. Maybe she hadn't changed her locks, either. Maybe his money was still there.
He turned off Flatbush and headed south on Fourth Avenue. A fat woman in a short yellow dress and yellow boots stood on the corner looking into the cars while slipping two fingers in and out of her mouth. One of the forgettables. He pushed the truck past the bodegas, the closed hubcap shops. The only things moving on the street this early were the taxis and the cops and the newspaper delivery vans. He'd turned down one of those teamster jobs. The guy who had taken the job instead of Rick now owned a sixty-foot, five-chair Chris-Craft that he took out into the Gulf Stream three days at a time. Somebody else's life. He decided to circle Aunt Eva's block, just to see how things stood. At the corner of Carroll and Fifth, the Korean deli had a light on in the back, some poor Mexican fuck sitting on a bench cutting carrots. He could smell the bakery down the street. Nobody would recognize the truck, nobody would recognize him. The last time he'd been around, he'd sported a shaved head, twenty-two-inch arms, and a Fu Manchu mustache. Veins full of growth hormone. Now he looked like a regular guy-some heavy regular Brooklyn guy driving past. But if somebody recognized him, it could get back to Tony Verducci. Everything got back to him. Rick parked in the lumberyard driveway on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Carroll Street. It was too early for the business to be open. The truck would be okay for ten minutes, which was all he needed. He lifted out the gallon tub of chimney cement he'd bought the day before. Nobody would think anything; it looked like a can of paint. Ten minutes; don't fuck with my truck. The question was whether Aunt Eva's block was still respected, whether the neighborhood kids had gotten the message. All you needed was a few young guys in flashy suits and good haircuts standing around now and then, that was it. Or that used to be it. What did Rick know anymore? Not much: how to grow corn, how to tie a boat to a dock, how to talk to dead fish. He could tell from the stores around the corner that there was more Puerto Rican and black action nearby, but here, walking up the rise of the street, he saw no graffiti, no heavy window bars, no broken glass in the gutter, and a preponderance of heavy, American- made cars, none of them with detailing or goofy shit hanging from the mirror, no bead-lights around the license plate. And trash bags already out for the garbage pickup, each tied neatly. Some of the old families still lived on the block.
Which was not good. It was the little widows peeking sleeplessly out their windows who would call the cops or blab it to Aunt Eva and maybe someone else. They all talked to one another, standing out there with a bag of rolls from the baker. He hurried along the street with his head down, carrying the chimney cement. At Aunt Eva's door, he slipped his old key into the lock-it went right in-and entered silently. She slept in the back bedroom upstairs, he knew. The table next to the door was piled with mail. It would be interesting to examine, but he didn't want to waste time. In and out, Rick-o, in and quickly out.
He glanced up the stairs next to the front door-darkness, no sound. He slid his feet along one side of the hallway, where the floorboards were not so loose from people walking on them for a hundred years. Somebody had fixed the basement door at the end of the hallway. He carried the chimney cement down the basement stairs, turning on only one light, enough to see the boxes of rotting letters and photographs, broken patio furniture, piles of Uncle Mike's clothing, mouse-eaten, moldy, and unworn in twenty years, a tangle of rusted bicycles and wagons, some of which Rick had ridden as a kid. The furnace, so old it had been installed back when Aunt Eva was still getting regular action from Uncle Mike, sat at one end of the narrow, rectangular space, its asbestos-wrapped air ducts octopused out to the ceiling above. Rick noticed a new box of air filters for the furnace. Somebody was changing the filters for Aunt Eva. He slipped behind the furnace, next to the party-wall foundation that she shared with the house next door, the Marinaros', and then put his hands around the sheet-metal exhaust tubing that coiled from the furnace into the chimney. The vent was sealed with chimney cement where it went into the brick orifice, to protect against carbon monoxide backdrafting into the basement. He cracked the old seal as he yanked the vent tube from its space. Before him appeared the black circular hole that opened the chimney. Everything looked okay. He reached into the sooty space, ran his hand along the wall. All he had done before was pull a brick out of its mortar, chisel away another crumbly brick behind it, stick in a thick envelope wrapped in waterproof duct tape, and replace the first brick, hammering it with the heel of his hand until it was flush with the others in the chimney. Then he'd jammed in a few pieces of wood to replace the mortar. The next time the furnace fired, he'd figured then, it would belch black soot over his stash, obscuring any changes in the chimney's interior surface. And anyway, the brick was tight in there, not loose at all. Even if Aunt Eva had hired a chimney sweep, highly unlikely given her age and condition, he would have had no reason to poke around. Now Rick found that same brick and pulled hard, sliding it out. Was the envelope back there? Yes. Blackened by the soot forced into all the crevices. He slit it open with his pocketknife, just to be sure. Three inches of one-hundred-dollar bills came to forty-eight thousand six hundred dollars. The old kind of hundreds, with the small portrait of Benjamin Franklin, but still good. This was the last cash from the all-time best Jersey mall job, money that Christina had helped him make. They had dropped three new Cat bulldozers at a sprawling construction site over the river. Keys in the ignition, hauled on three different canopied trailers from a housing development being built in suburban Atlanta. Nighttime drop-off, trailers
