Lace walked alongside, looking back over his shoulder toward Louis Baker’s place. Waiting for the door to open and Louis Baker to come charging out.

A few cars passed on the street, but they didn’t look to be more customers. None had stopped by the time they got to Jumpup, who was sitting on the curb, waiting.

“Let’s take it in,” Dido said, and handed Jumpup his couple of bills. The three of them started walking back where they had been, making one more pass at the cut, seeing it was secure.

As they passed the first building someone called out Dido’s name. They all stopped, staring into the blackness. “You keep walking,” Dido said to the two boys. He took a step or two toward the shadows, figuring it might be someone from another cut seeing them going in, wanting to buy the last of his stash.

The first booming shot took Dido in the stomach and Lace saw him back up a step. He grunted and said, “Hey!” The second shot knocked him over onto his back on the ground. He didn’t say anything after that.

“Mama. Mama, get up.”

There was one light on in the front room, maybe sixty watts under a yellow shade on a pitted end table next to the couch. But with the blinds pulled it shouldn’t draw any attention outside. Mama was dressed but she wasn’t moving. A bottle of sherry lay on its side on the floor beside the couch.

Something hurt on Louis Baker’s hand and he realized that in shaking her he had picked up a piece of glass from the shards that had rained down on her. And if she hadn’t even stirred when the window broke right over where she was passed out, it wasn’t likely he was going to have much luck getting her up now.

But he had to get out of here, and she had a car with keys. First the breaking window, then the shots, had awakened the whole project. Now, Baker could hear people gathering outside, a few calling out, trying to do something about Dido. Nothing anybody was going to be able to do for Dido ever again.

Mama groaned and shifted on the couch. He tried shaking her, hard, one more time, but she was out. “Mama!” Pieces of glass fell from the back of the couch onto her. Louis Baker sat back on his heels and his face relaxed. He had not even glanced at the end table, and there the keys were, where they had been dropped.

Outside, he took a last look at the crowd that had now formed around where Dido lay. In the distance he heard a siren. He walked up the street, looking straight ahead. He found Mama’s tiny old Dodge Colt and squeezed himself into the seat behind the wheel.

The radio came on with the motor and he heard James Brown singing ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.’ He left it playing, turning up past the park where he’d been working out, leaving all of this behind for good.

Chapter Ten

Okay, you’ve given me your phone number, now how about your address?”

“What time is it?” Hardy asked into the phone.

“Must be the crack of six-thirty, thereabouts.”

Frannie came and stood, rubbing her eyes like a little kid, in the kitchen doorway. “Who is it?” she asked.

“It’s Glitsky.” Then into the phone, “No, I know it’s you. What?”

“I need your address,” Glitsky said. “I thought I’d stop by, pick you up, we go for a drive over to Holly Park where somebody who had a fight last night with Louis Baker got himself shot a little later. You interested?”

Hardy gave him the address.

Glitsky had shamed Hardy into leaving his gun back at Frannie’s, saying that between him and Marcel Lanier and whatever other police personnel were on the scene they would probably have enough firepower to stop Louis Baker if he jumped out from behind some tree or crawled from under some rock and tried to blow Hardy away.

They pulled in and parked behind an ambulance. The cut was populated by a few men in uniform and a small knot of official-looking people who seemed to be just getting around to moving the body. Glitsky and Hardy walked up, and Glitsky nodded to the men pushing the gurney and lifted the covering.

A man in jeans and a Giants jacket appeared beside them.

“Hey, Abe.”

Glitsky nodded, introducing Hardy to Marcel Lanier. “Something hang up the techs?” He looked at his watch. “Six hours and the body’s still here?”

Lanier shrugged. “Lightning response this part of town.”

“How’d you get the call? You’re days.”

Lanier hunched his shoulders. “Guilt got to me. All that golf last week. I just got so far behind on stuff I thought I’d hang in and pull some paper. This came in, and I remembered you’d been coming out here yesterday. Hey, did you hear about this rooster, huge fucking rooster with-”

“Not now, Marcel. What went down here?”

“Bad long night,” Lanier said. “Talking to these people is like pulling teeth.”

Glitsky nodded at the gurney. “Looks like this guy’s night was worse.”

Marcel took in Hardy. “So why are we having visiting day?”

Glitsky explained the connection.

“See, that’s why I called him,” Lanier said to Hardy. “I knew he’d been out here, figured it might be connected.”

“I didn’t think you’d talked to Baker,” Hardy said to Glitsky.

“I can be a surprising guy. Following up, that’s all.”

“You should have brought him in, Baker I mean,” Lanier said.

Glitsky pulled at where the scar ran through his bottom lip. “I would have, except there was the technicality of charging him with something.”

“The word ‘murder’ comes to mind,” Hardy said.

Glitsky just looked at Hardy, then spoke to Lanier. “How do you know Baker killed this guy? What’s his name, anyway?”

Lanier consulted a little white pad with a spiral on the top. “Jackson Jefferson Grant, street name of Dido. Wonder why his mother left out Lincoln?” He furrowed his brow. “Probably his brother,” he said. “Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt Grant.”

Glitsky sighed with feeling. “Can we get back to why you think Baker did Grant?”

Lanier put his hands in his pockets and said to Hardy that Glitsky wasn’t much fun lately. Then he went into it. “Baker comes back to the project two days ago, right away gets in a beef over painting his place”-he pointed-“over there. The beef continues over the next day, and last night Baker and Dido duke it out right here in the cut, witnessed by about fifty citizens, three of whom volunteered the information. Then last night, maybe five minutes before he gets it, Dido breaks Baker’s side window. I figure what happened is it woke up Baker, he said that’s enough, came out, blew him away, then ran for it.”

“Did anybody see him?”

“When?”

“During the shooting. Did anybody see Baker shoot this guy?”

Lanier looked at the sky. “The shots came from off the cut in the dark. People saw him a minute or two later. That’s close enough for me.”

“I guess that is close enough,” Glitsky said. Sarcastic.

“This is one bad dude, Abe. He’s out of prison three days and he’s already killed two folks.”

“Three,” Hardy said. “This guy, Maxine, and Rusty.”

Glitsky felt his patience going again. “We don’t know about Rusty. We don’t even know if Rusty’s dead or not. And we don’t know he killed Maxine either. And we don’t know for sure whether he killed Grant here, and we still don’t know he’s trying to kill you, Diz-”

“He killed Dido,” Lanier said. “You can take that to the bank.”

Hardy shook his head. “It’s funny, Abe, how I know all that stuff and you don’t.”

“Abe’s in a bad mood lately,” Lanier said. “It colors his judgment.”

They were walking down the cut toward Baker’s place. “You find the gun?” Glitsky asked.

“Nope. What’s the problem there?”

“Just that it’s traditional to try and find something tying a murderer to the crime.”

Lanier and Hardy exchanged glances. “Look, Abe, if you want to take this thing in another direction, I’ll give you the case. But for no overtime and no support, they get what they pay for. This guy Baker is a righteous bad-ass. He stole his own Mama’s car after killing Dido and I’ve got plenty to bring him in on. Am I right or not?”