The storm had kept most people off the street.
He stumbled out of the alleyway, fell, got to his feet again.
He turned to look behind him, fell again, and began crawling toward the streetlamp on the corner. He was lying there under the lamp for perhaps two or three minutes when a tall hatless man came running around the corner. Tigo did not know whether the shots had attracted him or whether there’d been some other disturbance in the hood. He only knew he was glad to see him. The man knelt beside him. Tigo recognized him at once.
“You know who did this to you?” Carella asked.
Tigo nodded.
“Who, Tigo? Can you tell me?”
Carella’s lion had just followed Tigo’s trail of blood up the alleyway.
“Mother,” Tigo said.
“Yourmother shot …?”
“Nettie,” Tigo said.
“Is that your mother’s name?”
Carella’s lion was just running out of the alleyway behind them.
“Diana,” Tigo said.
“I don’t under …”
But Tito Gomez was already dead.
And Carella’s lion was almost upon him.
He turned just in time to see someone dressed entirely in black, carrying what was unmistakably an AK- 47.
If you meet another lion, just look him in the eye. Stare him down.
This lion wasn’t a male.
There was merely a surprised instant that robbed Carella’s eye of steely intent and lessened the speed of his gun hand, but that was all it took to give the blonde the advantage she needed. He registered three things in the tick of a heart beat. A car pulling into the street. The blonde angling the weapon toward his head. A man getting out of the car.
The blonde was about to squeeze the trigger when Fat Ollie Weeks shot her in the back, dropping her in her tracks.
“That’s two, Steve,” he told Carella, and grinned into the flying snow.
11 .
WILL GUESSED this was why he’d never been to bed with a hooker.
You went to bed with somebody who you had to pay, she put on her clothes directly afterward, said, “Thanks, I had a nice time,” and went home. He guessed. But with a woman like Antonia Belandres, you sat here on a Saturday morning, drinking orange juice and coffee, and eating the chocolate croissants he’d gone down to the bakery to get, and it was … well … intimate. You could have sex with a hooker, but he didn’t guess you could get intimate with one.
Antonia was wearing nothing but a little silky peignoir she’d taken from her bedroom closet. Will was wearing the slacks and shirt he’d put on when he went downstairs for the croissants. It was a little past ten-thirty. The snow had stopped and the sun was shining. In the street outside, everything looked clean and white and sparkling. He told Antonia that maybe they should go for a walk later on, if she thought she might like that. She told him she might like that a lot. He smiled and nodded. She smiled and nodded back.
He didn’t tell her his plan until they were in her bed together again, and then only after they’d made love yet another time. She was cuddled in his arms, the blanket pulled up over their shoulders, frost still limning the window across the room, sunlight striking the glass.
“I know how we can both become millionaires,” he said.
“Yes, how?” she said.
Black hair fanned out on the pillow. Brown eyes opened wide. Wearing no makeup. Her face looking as expectant as a child’s on Christmas Day.
“We use the bills.”
“What bills?” she asked.
“The super-bills.”
“Use them?” she asked. “How do you mean?”
“You said you send any suspect bills to the Federal Reserve.”
“Yes?”
“That’s what you told the detectives.”
“That’s right. That’s what we do.”
“Somebody brings in a bill that looks phony …”
“Right, we send it to the Fed.”
