“Will he wake up, Pea?” Tamara asks.
“In a few hours. He probably needs a doctor.”
Walter sighs. “You should have either killed the bastard or left him healthy enough to talk.”
“He was shooting at Dev.”
Tamara shakes her head in a vigorous denial of reality. “Sugar, this is terrible. Thank goodness we came, Walter! I told you something was wrong, and look, it’s hotter here than the Village in July.”
Walter looks between the two of us. He is, as ever, calm and impassive in judgment. I haven’t been afraid of Walter for years, but his focused attention unsettles. All too often what follows is his violence, merciless and precise. After nearly a minute he inclines his head.
“Something to drink, Dev?” he says. “Let’s keep an eye on the mayor’s boy and see what we can work out.”
So an hour before dawn Walter, Pea, Tamara, and I build up the fire again and share the last bottle from my last liquor run. Junior rests in state between us. He scowls even in unconsciousness. Pea and I take turns with the story of recent events in Little Easton.
“The strange thing is,” I say, “that Junior tried to kill Pea. Alvin told me he was convinced Junior wanted to kill him.”
“Walter, Phyllis—don’t you get a funny feeling about that boy?” Tamara asks. She has slid down the couch until she is nearly recumbent. One hand rests on my thigh, her head lists against my shoulder. She sniffs the dregs of her third glass of cognac. It could break my heart to see her like this—still afraid of violence, but determined to get drunk enough to hide it.
“Alvin’s afraid of something. But I wouldn’t trust…” Pea trails off. Junior has begun to snuffle like a warming engine. His eyes roll frantically beneath closed lids.
I lean forward. “Pea?”
“Do you—” Walter says, at the same time that Pea and I stand.
“Someone’s coming,” she says.
We all go outside. It’s a patrol car, shining white and blue in the limpid light of a new sun. I register the insignia of the state troopers instead of the Hudson patrol that occasionally passes through.
“I think, I’m afraid—Phyllis, baby, I’m going to vomit.”
Pea grabs Tamara around the waist and holds her hair back while she gets sick. The state trooper climbs from the car. White, about the same age as Walter, balding though he thinks the comb-over hides it. I haven’t spoken to Finn since I told him I’d consider calling Valentine.
I never called Valentine.
My old handler nods to me. His lips twist when he sees Walter, and he shakes his head. His disappointment is clear as his headlights. He won’t say anything in front of Walter, he won’t sign my death warrant this morning. But he won’t trust me again.
“Mr. Patil, Mr. Finch.”
There’s no way to describe my loyalties that would make sense to him. Finn’s cleaner than most, dirtier than some. But he still believes that fundamental lie—that the worst of us are better than the best of them.
“You all had better come with me.” Something in his voice makes me look back at Pea. She’s taken Tamara a few feet away, so she can finish her business in the azaleas. If I’m no longer an officer in Finn’s eyes, I might have lost all of my leverage to protect her. His manner is cold and professional to Lower Manhattan’s most powerful mob boss. The same boss that Valentine and Dewey are supposedly itching to bring down. Could they be close? My gaze meets Pea’s over Tamara’s back. She shakes her head. She smiles.
“What’s this about?” Walter is careful, bland, his most frightening.
Finn judges his words. He shifts his weight forward, then back. “Ben Craver is in the hospital, shot and left for dead, nearly bled to death. Looks like the same someone killed Mayor Bell an hour before. That’s when they called us in. No one can find his son. Our prime suspect is missing and you two were the last ones seen with him.”
It sharpens the cold of the morning. I take a step back and sink into a muddy puddle. Walter lifts a hand and settles it by his side.
But Pea is at her most essential. She hauls Tamara upright and points at the house with her free hand.
“If you’re looking for Bobby Junior, he’s in there,” says the woman I was once ashamed to love. “Along with the gun he shot at us with.”
Robert Bell, the fifth of his family to serve as mayor of Little Easton on Hudson, has lost the back of his head. The gun was fired at close range. There are scorch marks around the dimpled hole on his forehead and splintered bone edging the bullet’s exit. The eggshell color of his skin is mottled blue and gray around his left arm, where they say he fell.
No one imagines that any of us held the gun. But we are who we are, and we were among the last to see him alive. They assume that we must have been involved.
A reasonable assumption, in their circumstances.
“You were all in that house?” Finn repeats. He hasn’t looked at me once since we arrived. “All night?”
“Until the dead man’s son tried to kill us, yes.” Walter’s tone is particularly dry. If Finn had any sense he’d stop pushing. But he just nods thoughtfully and licks his lips. It’s become personal for him. We’ve been here for an hour. Long enough to see the body and refuse the watery coffee. To wait on officers conversing in low voices in the hallway.
Pea straightens suddenly. “This is ridiculous,” she says. “You know we couldn’t have done this. Arrest us or let us go.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Finn says. He looks at her as he would a cockroach. As if it’s faintly offensive she can even speak. I clench my fists at my sides.
“As Bobby Bell Junior has yet to wake up,” he says, “we only have your side of the story for what
