almost everything beyond himself. Boys were different in other parts of the world; they became men sooner, were accelerated toward their fates. Example? Sure: Once, in Mogadishu, Somalia, he'd had a fifteen-year-old stick a Chinese-made AK-47 into his face while a crew of younger boys swarmed over his supply truck, stealing water, medicine, foodstuffs, motor oil, water purification tablets, children's clothing, and three dozen crank-powered radios. Ray had spent two days loading the truck, and in a matter of minutes, it was plundered. The boy made Ray lie on the ground, and when his crew was done he had fired a bullet into the desert sand next to Ray's head. Then left. Ray had taken his sweet time getting up and, before doing so, it occurred to him that he could dig up the bullet, which he did, about a foot deep in the sand. It was still warm and he touched it to his lip religiously, why he didn't know. The next day, after he had returned to camp with the empty relief truck, he heard that the boy who'd held him at gunpoint had, that same evening, had both arms macheted off by a rival group stealing the supplies from his crew.
Here and now, Ray told himself, be here and now. Don't be haunted. He made the turn for the Rockaways, the Atlantic to his right. He reminded himself that all he knew about Richie was that he'd probably been the man who'd pumped out the household waste in Queens that had found its way into a parking lot drain in Brooklyn. Not much to go on. But not nothing, either.
The Rockaways-the name suggested a faraway place where you might rock a chair by the ocean. Which was correct. On 123rd Street big houses sat on narrow lots, the kinds of places families could stay in all summer, kids going to the beach every day, dad out back with the barbecue. He spotted the big green sewage truck pulled up on the curb, passed by, found a parking spot, and walked back. A large man in coveralls with a blond crew cut stood next to the truck, letting a fat rubber hose run through his gloved hands as it mechanically spooled itself onto the truck. He was just finishing.
'Hey,' called Ray, walking up. 'You got a minute? Let me tell you my problem. I live couple streets away. Kinda embarrassing. My wedding ring went down the toilet. Barely flushed, though.'
The man nodded warily, inspecting Ray up and down, no doubt wondering if Ray's presence was related to the earlier call about the 'cousin.'
'Happens all the time,' he said. 'Earrings, watches, dentures. All kinds of stuff.'
Ray felt jumpy, a little strange. 'How do I get it back?'
'Could still be there. Turn off all your water. Give us a call, we'll pump you out, see if it's there.'
Ray pretended to watch the hose. 'You got any kind of screen on that, find things caught in it?'
'Yes. But we only use it if we're looking for something. It'd get jammed every three minutes, shit people put in there. I mean the stuff that ain't shit, if you see what I mean.'
Ray nodded. 'How fast these trucks fill up?'
'Day or two. Lot of shit in the world.'
'Holds what-?'
'On the side of the truck it says eight thousand gallons but we try not to fill it quite that much. Gets too heavy. Hard to go uphill. You can crack a guy's driveway.'
Ray pointed at the name on the door: RICHIE.
'They give every guy his own truck?'
'No, only us top guys.'
'What if the truck breaks down?'
A pause, the mood shifting. 'What if I don't feel like answering any more questions?'
'Hey, just being friendly,' Ray said.
Richie grunted. Then he looked at Ray, mouth tight. 'I don't know who you are, buddy, but you're fucking with me. I can feel it. So get the fuck away from me and my truck and just take your bullshit elsewhere. Either that or we got a problem, and if we got a problem, then I got a lot of ways to fix it.'
The two men held each other's gaze. Indeed, Ray thought, we've got a problem.
But he played it cool. 'No sweat,' he said, 'not a problem.' He put up his hands meekly, backed away.
But now that I know what you look like, Richie-boy, he thought, I'll be watching you.
12
'Sir, we are honored. But before we begin I just want to say that we know a man like yourself has many options, of course, so I have personally supervised this research, not only for the confidentiality issue-one can never be too careful-but also because I want you to know that we are dedicated to providing you excellent service.'
The man, who was named Phelps, got no response, and his voice seemed to echo around the large room full of antiques and paintings thirty stories above Central Park and then get lost up near the high ceiling of concentric ornamental plaster medallions. The kind of ceiling no one built anymore, not unless they had a few extra hundred thousand to spend. Probably not the kind of room where Phelps usually presented his findings. Dressed in a gray wool suit, he had a salesman's fastidious grooming and eagerness to please. With a whiff of a military background, or perhaps law enforcement. His partner, a younger man named Sims, also in a gray suit, blinked constantly, like a timekeeping device. Martz, dressed in a yellow bathrobe and fleece booties, didn't like either man. Literalists, detail men. Pin pokers who found existential reassurance in confirmation of the obvious. Incapable of seeing the big picture. Then again, the world ran on such people. He himself employed dozens of them. These two came highly recommended and after canceling his trip to Germany he had ordered them to come to his home so that no one would see any 'security consultants' arriving in his office.
'Go on,' he said, irritated by the man's lip-licking obsequiousness.
'We have tracked the trading of Good Pharma back through the various brokerages using our contacts and friendships,' Phelps began, opening an electronic display monitor, 'and we would like to present what we feel is a thorough analysis of what has happened.' A computer graphic appeared on the large screen. 'What you are seeing is a time-lapse flowchart of the trades made in Good Pharma from January first of this year through May eighth, the day the stock took its first big hit. We have taken as our baseline the one-hundred-day trailing average trading volume in order to then factor out the typical trade volume originating in the large institutional accounts, whose management is known to us, as well as the retail level trades originating in storefront discount brokerage operations, Charles Schwab and so on, that mostly cater to those few older investors who don't use the Internet. We have also done our level best to filter out the automatic dividend reinvestment buying and scheduled buying by firms for their retirement accounts-in short, anything and everything that creates normal trading volume in Good Pharma. Only by knowing the normal does one quantify the deviant.'
'Sounds kinky,' Sims suddenly interjected, seemingly to his own surprise.
Phelps shot him a look of amazed hatred, then went on. 'Anyway, this still leaves some eleven million shares of Good Pharma stock traded here — on May eighth, which is nine times the trailing average daily volume.' The screen jumped to a multicolored chart detailing the eleven million shares. 'We have traced these trades backward through the floor traders and clearinghouses and found that most of the trades were made on Internet accounts flowing through Asia. Now then, you see here'-the screen's time-flow graphic showed a rising mountain of sell orders superimposed with a jagged downward red line tracking the drop in price of Good Pharma-'that the trading volume shows nine thousand sell orders made in a four-hour time period. The first sells hit the New York Stock Exchange as strike price orders and the price dropped immediately, and yet one can see a few institutional traders came in thinking they had a quick chance to pick up a bargain, but these buyers were soon overwhelmed, about eight or nine minutes later, with another wave of sell orders, these again smaller than before but greater in number, as presumably news of the sell worked its way through private networks. A lot of sophisticated day traders in Taiwan run proprietary computerized trading models, some of them quite good. One can see here that the sell orders mostly came through Hong Kong, Beijing, Taipei, and even Ho Chi Minh City brokerages. A few through Tokyo. The wave of selling was completed in about nineteen minutes. At this point, news of the enormous price drop had flowed through the financial news networks, and the major institutional customers froze, not knowing whether to buy and pick up a bargain, or sell along with everyone else. The hedge fund guys froze, too. The problem was that the analysis on the stock was generally positive, of course, with buy recommendations running about five to one over sell recommendations.'
'For Christ's sake, I know all that,' Martz muttered.
