strategies. He lays out the evil in the target for his killers so they can stoke that rage. A hit man has to connect with the evil so he can sever the connection, and a good fence knows this, knows the importance of this. He does the plotting without the bloodshed. It’s a different power the fence holds, but I’m sure the good ones share in it.”
“When we finish this, I want to be your fence.”
She says it in such a matter-of-fact way that I can tell she’s been thinking about it for a while. “Even if we get Archie out alive?”
“Even then.”
“But we could run again. Hide out. Find a new spot, somewhere even more remote.”
“No. You know we would just wait for the next man to come. There will always be a next man who comes.”
“I wanted to believe in a future without this.”
“You can’t have it, any more than a tiger can lie in a cage and forget his instincts.”
She’s right. She has a way of getting inside my head and saying things I won’t let myself think.
“But why would you want to do this with me?”
“Because we are good together. Because I think I was born to do this work. Because I would like to know that you have every piece of information at your disposal to be successful. Because I can provide that, make the file come to life. Live, breathe. It’s research, it’s writing, but it has to have heart. For you to be the person you are, it has to have heart. I read all those files in Archie’s office and it was like discovering a new library that no one knew existed. It was life and death and love and pain and beauty and horror in one place, in those pages, and it was riveting. Biblical. I can do that. I can put it all together for you. Only for you. And better than Archie. I need time to learn, but yes, better than Archie.”
“You sound certain.”
“I am.”
“Where would we live?”
“The place you and I both know best. Boston.”
“And how would you establish us there?”
“You still know a few people. Word will spread quickly that Columbus is back in the business.”
“And how will you protect yourself?”
“We’ll protect each other. A pair of tigers, burning bright.”
She grins, pleased with her idea. Maybe it can work, if we survive the day.
I tell Spilatro an address near the Potomac just outside the District in an industrial area. Canneries rise out of the landscape, monstrous, noisy and bleak. It’s as though men couldn’t stand to look at the beauty of a river cutting through a fertile countryside and so did all in their power to poison the land.
I demanded the exchange take place at seven-thirty, when the sun hangs low and the commercial district will be primarily unpopulated. We might have to deal with security guards and cameras pointed at the street, but I don’t care. I’m finishing it now.
I want to drop Risina off at a coffee shop and pick her up when it’s over, but she refuses. I tell her that fences don’t participate in kills, and she tells me she isn’t my fence until this is over. The thought of not knowing what is happening while she sips on a decaf latte is more than she can bear. She’s been in this one since the beginning and she’ll be in it until the end, and if she sees the dark side of me again standing over Spilatro’s dead body, then she welcomes it.
I told Spilatro the address and he tried to keep me on the line, but I didn’t give him the opportunity. He’s learned all he’s going to learn about me, and now the preparation is over and the two killers have to take the field until one is dead.
A black Toyota Tercel with tinted windows slowly rolls to a nearby intersection, the address I gave him, and then turns right and speeds away. I expect to see the same car again soon… he came fifteen minutes early to get the lay of the land, do some reconnaissance. I haven’t given him time to set up a mousetrap. He’s in my world, the world of improvisation, a world he can’t control, a world where he has to take advantage of the opportunities as they develop or die face-down in the street.
“This is it. I’m moving out. When you see the muzzle flash, race in and pick me up. Don’t hesitate.”
She nods and I kiss her and I think she says “be careful,” but it’s lost in the wind as I duck low out of the passenger side and move to a row of shrubs. I didn’t anticipate how quickly the wind could pick up this close to the river and there’s an industrial smell to the air, that combination of gas and oil and chemicals that seems to linger around factories like a trip wire: “Don’t cross here or you’ll cough up blood.”
The shrubs line a concrete barrier demarking the property of a sardine cannery, and I slip between the greenery and the wall to make my way down to the intersection.
The sky turns that deep sea green as the sun hides in the horizon, and the traffic on the street is minimal, a few trucks rolling out of factories and lumbering up the streets. I find a spot where the intersection is visible through a break in the branches, and here comes that Tercel. I’m going to show myself just long enough for him to step out of the car and ask about the exchange so I can pop him in the head.
Two hundred yards away and it’s impossible to see if he has Archie in the car with him, and if he does, I’ll do my best to save my old fence, but only once the job is done and Spilatro is down and I can get away clean. Only then.
One hundred yards now and my Glock is out and in my hand. The wind howls, whistling a dirge as it crests the concrete barrier and zips through the shrubbery. Fifty yards.
Out of nowhere, a taxi smashes into the side of the Tercel and drives it across the width of the street, up on to the opposite sidewalk. The section of the Tercel from the driver’s side tire to the door is bent concave from the force of the taxi’s bumper and the engine has caught fire and whatever play this is… I have no idea what he’s up to, but it has to be a play.
I can feel the advantage shifting between us, or is that adrenaline in my system? I have to decide how to make a move and what move to make, goddam him.
The taxi driver gets out of the car, a middle-easterner with a tight turban and a full beard, and he’s yelling at the driver of the Tercel, and what the hell play can this be in the small amount of time I’ve given him? What am I walking into?
The door to the Tercel somehow swings open and a man climbs out but he isn’t Spilatro, at least he doesn’t look like Spilatro, not exactly, he looks too young from this angle, but can I be sure? He’s dangling a gun at his side, and as the taxi driver registers this and starts to wave his hands and turn around saying “no, no, no, no, no,” the driver shoots him in the back, BAM, dropping him in the road, just another piece of debris from the accident. Through the open door of the Tercel, I can see a figure slumped in the backseat, a dark figure, maybe it’s Archie, fuck, this is not what I was expecting. The fire from the hood starts to vomit clouds of black smoke, whipped into a frenzy by the wind and someone nearby, some security guard or late-leaving lunch-bucket union douchebag must’ve heard the collision or is going to spot the smoke and dial 9-1-1 and then everything I’ve put into this moment is going to spoil like weeks-old bread. I’m going to have to bite, now.
When I kill, I don’t like dropping anyone collaterally, anyone besides my target, because things get messy, but this isn’t a target, not really, they targeted me, and if he enlisted some of these dark men, some other hitters the way he did Deckman with his wife’s gambit, then they’re going to join him lying on the pavement. What’s real and what’s not is what has had me on my heels this whole time but I have to move in and shift the advantage back to my favor.
I walk quickly from the shrubs and make my way toward the accident, toward the shooter who might be Spilatro but doesn’t look like the man I saw two times, and he spots me coming.
“Where’s Decker?” he says in a voice I don’t recognize-he’s not Spilatro-this only takes a moment to register, but he raises his weapon like a Western gunslinger and I already have mine up and fire from thirty yards away, catch him in the forehead and spin him like a top.
I step past the dead cab driver and the dead Tercel driver and head to the sedan, and the guy in the backseat, the one I thought was Archie blows a hole out the window. A bullet whizzes close enough to my ear to make my lobe flap like laundry drying in the wind, and I duck behind the car, lucky the bullet didn’t rip my head off.
The man squirms in his seat as he tries to find me and when he turns to the back windshield, I’m already
