Safe House

“Brooklyn.”

“I can find it,” I told him. Lying. I know River Street. It only runs for a couple of blocks, parallel to Kent Avenue, right off where the East River flows under the Williamsburg Bridge.

“Go there now,” he said. “You’ll see my car parked.”

“I’m moving,” I promised.

“Are you inside?” I asked Vyra. Meaning: Are you in the suite, not the street?

“Yes.” Her voice over the cell phone was clipped, precise. Not like her.

“You alone?”

“No.”

“Your car is there?”

“Yes.”

“Do this now. You both meet me at the Butcher Block. Now.”

“I don’t know where—”

“Your friend does. Now.”

I cut the connection.

I spotted the burgundy Mercedes 600SL coupe coming down the block, moving slow. I stepped out so they could see me. “Get in my car,” I told Hercules.

“What’s going—?”

“Tell you later,” I cut Vyra off. “Go back to the hotel. Stay there, girl, no matter what. If you don’t hear anything in a couple of hours, call the number you have for me. Tell whoever answers that I went to meet Pryce. And I didn’t come back.”

“Why does Hercules have to—?”

“Not now,” I said, turning my back on her and moving off to the Plymouth.

“It’s gotta be this way, huh?” Herk asked me.

I took the Brooklyn Bridge to the BQE, heading toward Queens. Exited at Metropolitan Avenue and swung back toward Brooklyn.

“Yeah. When you play cards, the ace is boss, right?”

“Sure.”

“We need the king to be boss, Herk.”

He nodded soberly, watching the miserable weather. The sky was turning prison-gray.

“Burke?”

“What?”

“Vyra. Are you . . . like, with her?”

“With her? Like I’m with you? No. She’s not one of—”

“Nah, I don’t mean that. I never say things like I mean them. I mean, I say them straight, but they don’t come out the way I’m thinking. You understand?”

“Yeah, I do. What do you want to know?”

“You and her. She was . . . like your girlfriend, right?”

“No. She was never my girlfriend. We . . . got together once in a while. That’s all.”

“You like her?”

“I don’t know what I think about her. Never thought about it at all, I guess.”

“I like her.”

“You mean you’d like to fuck her,” saying it bluntly to take the edges off.

“Nah. I mean . . . I would. I mean . . . I already . . . Burke, I really like her. She’s real smart. And real sweet. I can talk to her about things.”

“Like what? Shoes?”

“Man, you don’t know her. She’s really a . . . good person.”

“Okay.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means: okay. Whatever you want to do, it’s up to you. But, Herk . . .”

“What?”

“She’s got herself a real good gig where she is, you know what I’m saying?”

“Her husband? He ain’t—”

“He’s rich. Major-league rich. Remember what the Prof told us about women once? ‘Some play, some stay.’ Vyra, she’s a player, all right?”

“You don’t know her,” the big man said, sullen and stubborn.

I shrugged my shoulders, concentrating. It wasn’t time to worry about Herk being such a sap—we were a couple of blocks from River Street.

The white Taurus was parked on the street. No other car was close, but the block wasn’t deserted: People walking around, maybe from the change-of-shift at some of the nearby factories, maybe locals. Cars crawled by too.

I pulled in behind, leaving myself room enough to drive away without backing up first. “Let’s do it,” I said to Hercules.

Pryce must have been watching us in the rearview mirror. The back doors of the sedan popped open as we walked toward it. We climbed in, Herk behind Pryce, me behind Lothar. Pryce put his right arm along the back of the seat, turned to look at me. Lothar stared straight ahead.

“All right, let’s hear it,” Pryce said.

“I want Herk to have his immunity now,” I told him. “Before this goes another step.”

“That wasn’t the—”

“That’s the deal now,” I said. “I got a lawyer in place. You say when, he’ll come downtown, you’ll put the whole thing together.”

“You can’t expect to have that sort of deal in front,” Pryce said in an annoyed tone. “You know better than that. Everybody will get taken care of at the same time.”

“I think Lothar’s already taken care of.”

“That’s different,” Pryce said in the flat officialese they teach you in FBI school. “Lothar is an undercover operative of the United States government.”

“So’s Herk now.”

“But they don’t need him,” Pryce said in a patient voice. “They don’t even know about him yet.”

“But you can do it?” I asked him. “You got that much juice with the feds?”

“Guaranteed,” he said. “But what does this have to do with Lothar?”

“How do I know you’re going to come through for Hercules?” I said, ignoring his question.

“I’ve done what you wanted, haven’t I? You’re just going to have to trust me.”

I sat there quietly as a woman trundled past, pulling one of those little grocery carts behind her. Then I took out the fat tube of steel Clarence had gotten for me, said “Lothar?” and, when he turned sideways to listen, put a nine-millimeter slug in his temple.

It didn’t make much noise, even in the closed car.

“You got it wrong,” I told Pryce. “You’re going to have to trust me.”

Lothar’s head slumped forward, his body held in place by his seatbelt. I grabbed a handful