My stomach started to churn just thinking about Chevos and Nance, his personal assassin.
“I have this little buzzer inside me goes off whenever I?m within fifty miles of the son of a bitch.”
“Something personal?” Charlie One Ear asked, raising his eyebrows.
I stared at him dead-eyed for a full minute before he looked away. Then I held up the other picture, a
somewhat fuzzy photograph of a lean, hard, ferret-faced man in his mid-thirties, his eyes also
obscured by sunglasses.
“You see Chevos, this one is close behind. He?s the Greek?s numero uno, your friendly little
neighbourhood assassin. His name is Turk Nance and he?s the deadliest one of the lot, a psychopath
with a temper as thin as a shadow. They?re both cobras. Chevos married into the family but they?re
outsiders. They play by their own rules.”
“Maybe they did the old bastard in,” Zapata suggested.
“Maybe, but I don?t think so.”
“Why not?” Dutch asked.
“I don?t say I?m ruling them out,” I replied. “I said I don?t think they did it. It?s still family. Salvatore,
you know what I mean?”
“He?s right,” Salvatore said. “I mean, what you say, this Chevos was the old man?s brother-in-law.
Unless there was real bad blood He let the sentence dangle.
“So where do these two bombos fit in?” Cowboy Lewis asked.
“Chevos brings the stuff in, Bronicata gets it to the wholesalers,” I said, “Nance is Chevos? personal
soldato If Chevos says go flush your head in the toilet, Nance?s head is as good as in the bowl.
There?s one other thing—don?t let Chevos fool you because he?s got Nance for backup. The story
goes that Chevos killed his own brother to make his bones for Skeet. I don?t know if his brother
needed killing, hut if he was in the same league as Chevos, it was no big loss.
“Nance started in the streets, got a postgrad course in Vietnam, probably killed at least half of the
Bannion gang himself. He favours a nine-millimetre Luger with a twelve-inch barrel and hollow
points soaked in arsenic. A real sweetheart. He?s also a muscle freak. Sooner or later, when he can
plant Chevos someplace safe for an hour or two, he?ll show up at the best fitness centre in town.
Everybody in the family is scared shitless of both of them.
“Turk Nance. Remember that name. If you have trouble with him, shoot first.”
“You keep tellin? us what you don?t want,” Callahan said in a dead monotone. “What the hell do you
want?”
I thought about that, about why I was here and what had happened to Dunetown and was going to
happen to it. I thought about a lot of things in the next few seconds.
