“Before your time. How do you know of it?”

“People talk.” Collins clearly didn’t like the idea of being gossiped about, so Gabe quickly added, “Everyone thinks you got a raw deal.”

“It turned out okay. The lawsuits were dismissed. You can’t sue a federal agent doing his job-even when he botches it and shoots a citizen.”

“But it ended your time undercover after the newspaper ran your photo, and I heard you were one of the best. That sucks. It was an honest mistake, under the circumstances.”

Collins, back in his usual taciturn mode, said nothing, but Gabe thought he caught a wisp of a smile on his face, a moment of understanding. Finally, with Jenkins out of the way, they were bonding.

“Another round?” he asked. “My treat.”

“Sure,” Collins said. “Night’s young. Night’s so young that R. Kelly would date it.”

It was almost midnight when Gabe and Collins finally left the bar. Gabe was a little lit-not so much that he couldn’t drive, given that it was basically a series of straight shots and left turns until he coasted into his parking pad off Hanover. He just felt fuzzy around the edges. The air was soft, the first true spring evening so far. The season got here a little faster here than it did in Jersey, not even two hundred miles to the north. Just twenty-four hours ago, the Yankees had almost been sleeted out on Opening Day in the Bronx, but here you could see buds on the trees.

“Where you parked?” Collins asked.

He had to think about it. “I’m on Fait, like four blocks from here.”

“I’m around the corner from there,” Collins said. “I remember when this neighborhood was nothing but toothless old Polacks, the kind who would call the police if a black kid so much as rode his bike down the sidewalk.”

It was the longest sentence Collins had ever uttered in Gabe’s presence. It was so cool, them becoming friends. He could ask Collins about being a star on the Poets, or whatever that local basketball team was called. Hadn’t Juan Dixon played for them? Steve Francis? Somebody good in the NBA.

“This your ride?” Collins asked when Gabe stopped by his Acura. “Nice.”

He laughed, getting that Collins was still busting his balls, but in a friendly way. “Not particularly.”

“Nicer than a Malibu. Nice enough to get carjacked for.”

“Yeah, right. Not in this neighborhood.”

“I’m dead serious.”

Gabe hiccuped, but only because he had been laughing too much, sucking in air much of the evening. Collins could be pretty funny when he made an effort. He did an imitation of Jenkins that was to die for-the super concerned manner, the fatherly sighs.

Collins’s fist shot out, hitting Gabe so quickly and violently in the midsection that he just crumpled into the street as if his spine had been removed. What the-The last sensations he knew in this life were all metal-the scrape of the keys being dragged from his fingers, the barrel of a gun at the back of his head. He didn’t piss himself, but only because Collins was moving even faster than Gabe’s instincts could. He was going to die, and the only thing he managed to figure out before it happened was that it had absolutely nothing to do with his car. Did I-

Gone.

TUESDAY

29

Tess and Wilma had agreed to meet at the bank when it opened, which meant Tess had to leave Baltimore at 8:00 A.M. and fight rush-hour traffic every inch of the trip. Even without all the frazzled commuters, it would have been a charmless journey. The bank, a branch of a multinational that was relatively new in the state, was on a strip clogged with chain restaurants and stores catering to every part of one’s automobile-fast-lube places, tire joints, brake jobs, windshield glass.

“Why here?” Tess asked Wilma. “It’s quite a haul from where you live and where he worked. It’s not like he could get here on his lunch hour.”

“Probably because it’s one place I’d never come. I don’t think I’ve ever been here before in my life.” Wilma’s face was grayish, as if the suburb of Laurel were a disease she was worried about catching.

The bank manager studied the court order in a way that made Tess fear complications. A chubby Latina packed into a bright yellow suit, the manager had the air of someone who would make things difficult just because it would make her day more interesting. But perhaps she was simply a slow reader, for she handed the paper back to Wilma and led them into the small area the bank kept for safe-deposit boxes.

“She can’t come in,” the woman said, pointing at Tess. “And I gotta watch.”

“I’m an officer of the court,” said Tess, who had prepared the lie ahead of time, along with a reasonably official-looking ID, created on her computer and then laminated at a twenty-four-hour hardware store last night. She had also talked to Tyner, who’d assured her that there was no law requiring a bank employee to observe, but some insisted on it, if only out of sheer nosiness. “The order specifies that this has to be done under supervision because the estate is still in probate. She’s allowed to inventory the contents but not to remove them.”

The woman looked skeptical-as well she should, because nothing Tess had said was remotely true-but fate decided to throw Tess a bone. Another bank employee arrived at that moment with a pink, orange, and white Dunkin’ Donuts box. Saved by the cruller. Anxious to make her selection, the woman waved them in.

Wilma’s hands shook as she fitted her key into the lock. She then took the box, a medium-size one, to the semiprivate area set aside. She lifted the lid and revealed a black-and-white photocopy of a bearded man in a straw hat, a man who looked strangely familiar to Tess. There was a layer of pink tissue paper beneath it. When Tess pushed it aside, the overwhelming impression was a landscape of green, a veritable Emerald City in a box.

“I thought you were the earner and Greg was the one who was bound for glory,” she said.

Wilma was silent for a moment. “That-that-asshole,” she said at last. Tess regularly heard-and said-far worse words, but it was a shock to see the prim and self-righteous Wilma let loose this way. “If you knew how tight things were for us at times-college loans, the baby, the mortgage on the new house. Although now I understand where he got some of the cash to buy the new house. He said that he had borrowed money from his mother.”

“I hope you reported it as a loan on your mortgage application,” Tess said.

“What?”

“Nothing. Should we count it?”

“Not really. If I know how much it is, I think I might get angrier. Whatever Greg was doing, there wasn’t…It couldn’t be…It had to be…” Illegal, Tess wanted to say, but Wilma still wasn’t ready to concede that. “He got himself killed, and for what? We would have been okay, in the long run. I would have made partner. He could have gone into private practice if it came to that. What was the rush?”

Tess had extracted one bundle of cash, counted it, and done some quick multiplication in her head. Sixteen packs, $10,000 per pack-$160,000, give or take. “He was shaking someone down. Who?”

“I don’t know,” Wilma said. “Honestly.”

Tess pulled up each pack of bills, to make sure there was nothing left in the box.

“What are you looking for?” Wilma asked, her voice at once bitter and teary. It was clear that this secret cache, if not exactly what she had feared all along, was also anything but an innocuous discovery. “Waiting for hope to fly out? I don’t think she’s here.”

“A note. But I guess that would be too easy, right? A nice and neat confession about what he was into.”

“To write something like that, he would have to believe he was in imminent danger. And the one thing I’m sure about the last time I saw Greg alive is that he was buoyant, happy. In fact, he was happier in the weeks before his death than he’d been in a long time. He went into a horrible mope around the time I got pregnant. At the time I thought it was money woes-”