“Angie!”

I turned as she sat up amid a pile of overturned chairs. “I’m fine.”

Ryerson shouted, “Call an ambulance! Call an ambulance!”

I looked down at Lionel. He rolled on the floor, moaning, his head in his hands, blood pouring through the fingers.

I looked at the bartender. “The ambulance!”

He picked up the phone and dialed.

Ryerson leaned back against the wall, most of his shoulder gone, and screamed up at the ceiling, his body convulsing wildly.

“He’s going into shock,” I said to Angie.

“I got him.” She crawled toward Ryerson. “I need all the towels from the bar, and I need ’em now!”

One of the secretaries hopped over the bar.

“Beatrice,” Lionel moaned. “Beatrice.”

The rubber band holding Popeye’s mask to his head had snapped when he dropped down the bar, Ryerson’s bullets popping through his sternum. I looked down at the face of John Pasquale. He was dead, and he’d been right yesterday, after the football game: Luck always ran out.

I met Angie’s eyes as she caught a towel the secretary tossed across the room to her. “Get Broussard, Patrick. Get him.”

I nodded as the secretary rushed past me and dropped down by Lionel, placed a towel to the side of his head.

I checked my pocket for a second clip, found it, and left the bar.

33

I followed Broussard’s trail across Broadway and up C Street, where it wound into the trucking and warehouse district along East Second. It wasn’t a hard trail to follow. He’d discarded the Casper mask as soon as he left the bar, and it lay looking up at me as I stepped out, holes for eyes, a toothless smile. Drops of blood, so fresh they shone under street lamps, pointed out their owner’s path in a jagged line. They grew thicker and wider in diameter the farther they led into the scantily lit, cracked-cobblestone blocks of dark depots, empty loading docks, and cubbyhole teamster bars with curtains drawn and small neon signs missing half the bulbs. Semis headed for Buffalo or Trenton rolled and heaved and bumped down the cracked streets, and their headlights flashed across the end of the trail, the place where Broussard had stopped long enough to jimmy a door. The blood dropping from a hole in his body had formed a puddle, splattered the door in thin streaks. I hadn’t thought a leg could bleed like that, but maybe my bullet had blown apart the femur or savaged crucial arteries.

I looked up at the building. It was seven stories tall and built of the chocolate-brown brick they’d used at the turn of the century. Weeds rose to the windowsills on the first level, and the boards over the windows themselves were cracked and defaced by graffiti. It was wide enough to have served as storage for large objects or the manufacture and assembly of machines.

Assembly, I decided as I entered. The first thing I noticed was the silhouette of an assembly belt, pulleys and chains dropping from the rafters twenty feet above it. The belt itself and the rollers that had once been beneath it were gone, but the main frame remained, bolted to the floor, and hooks curled out from the ends of the chains like beckoning fingers. The rest of the floor was empty, everything of value either stolen by vagrants and kids or stripped by the final owners and sold.

To the right, a cast-iron staircase led to the next floor, and I climbed it slowly, unable to follow the trail of blood anymore in the darkness, peering through the black for holes rusted through the steps, gingerly reaching out for the rail before each step, hoping to press against metal and not the body of some angry, hungry rat.

My eyes adjusted somewhat to the dark as I reached the second floor, saw nothing but an empty loft space, the shapes of a few overturned pallets, the glow from dim streetlights pressing through lead windows shattered by rocks. The staircases were stacked one on top of each other at identical points on each floor, so that to reach the next, I had to turn left at the wall and follow it back about fifteen feet until I found the opening, looked up the stack of thick iron risers until I saw the rectangular hole up top.

As I stood there, I heard a heavy metallic groan from several levels up, the thump of a thick steel door as it fell back on its hinges and banged into cement.

I took the steps two at a time, stumbling a few times, turned the corner on the third floor, and jogged around to the next staircase. I went up a little faster, my feet beginning to pick up a rhythm, a sense where each riser rose through the dark.

The floors were all empty, and with each level the harbor and downtown skyline cast more light under the arches of the floor-to-ceiling windows. The staircases remained dark save for the rectangular openings at their tops, and as I reached the last one, bathed in moonlight and stretching to an open sky, Broussard called down to me from the roof.

“Hey, Patrick, I’d stay down there.”

I called back up. “Why’s that?”

He coughed. “Because I got a gun pointed at the opening. Stick your head through, I’ll take a chunk out of it.”

“Oh.” I leaned against the banister, smelled the harbor channel and the fresh cool night wafting through the opening. “What’re you planning to do up there, call for helicopter evac?”

He chuckled. “Once in a lifetime’s enough of that. No, I just thought I’d sit here for a bit, look at the stars. Fuck, man, you’re a shitty shot,” he hissed.

I looked through the square of moonlight. From the sound of his voice, I was pretty sure he was to the left of the opening.

“Good enough to shoot you,” I said.

“It was a friggin’ ricochet,” he said. “I’m pulling tile out of my ankle.”

“You’re saying I hit the floor and the floor hit you?”

“That’s what I’m saying. Who was that guy?”

“Which?”

“The guy in the bar with you.”

“The one you shot?”

“That guy, yeah.”

“Justice Department.”

“No shit? I figured him for some sort of spook. He was way too fucking calm. Put three shots in Pasquale like it was target practice. Like it was nothing. I saw him sitting at that table, I knew the shit was going to turn bad.”

He coughed again, and I listened. I closed my eyes as he hacked uncontrollably for about twenty seconds, and I was certain by the time he finished that he was left of the opening by about ten yards.

“Remy?”

“Yo.”

“I’m coming up.”

“I’ll put a bullet in your head.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

His pistol snapped at the night air, and the bullet hit the steel staircase support clamped to the wall. The metal sparked like someone had struck a kitchen match off it, and I dropped flat against the stairs as the bullet clanged overhead, ricocheted off another piece of metal, and embedded itself with a soft hiss into the wall on my left.

I lay there for a bit, my heart squeezed into my esophagus and not too happy about the relocation, banging against the walls, scrambling to get back out.

“Patrick?”

“Yeah?”

“You hit?”

I pushed off the steps, straightened to my knees. “No.”

“I told you I’d shoot.”

“Thanks for the warning. You’re swell.”

Another round of hacking coughs, then a loud gurgle as he sucked it back into his lungs and spit.

“That didn’t sound real healthy,” I said.

He gave a hoarse laugh. “Didn’t look too healthy, either. Your partner, man, she’s the shooter in the family.”

“She tagged you?”

“Oh, yeah. Quick cure for smoking, what she did.”

I placed my back against the banister, pointed my gun up at the roof, and inched up the staircase.

“Personally,” Broussard said, “I don’t think I could have shot her. You, maybe. But her? I don’t know. Shooting women, you know, it’s just not something you want in your obit. ‘Twice decorated officer of the Boston Police Department, loving husband and father, carried a two-fifty-two bowling average, and could shoot the hell out of women.’ You know? Sounds…bad, really.”