"Joe," said Rigby. She scooted closer, grabbed his upper arm and squeezed it painfully.

Kurtz looked at her.

"Listen to me, Joe. Please."

Kurtz removed her fingers from his arm. "What?"

"I don't give a shit about SEATCO or this Major or any of the rest of this. I care about you."

Kurtz looked at her. He was still holding her wrist. He let it go.

"You're lost, Joe." Rigby's large brown eyes seemed darker than usual.

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about you. You're lost. Maybe you lost yourself in Attica. Maybe before—but I doubt that, not with Sam in your life. It's probably when she was killed that you…"

"Rigby," Kurtz said coldly, "maybe you'd better shut up."

She shook her head. "I know why you're here, Joe." She jerked her head toward the Ferris wheel, weeds, woods, and shifting clouds. The sunlight still fell on them, but the shadows were moving faster up, around and over the hill. "You think that the parole officer—O'Toole—was your client. She showed you the photographs of this place. She asked if you knew where this place was. You're acting like she hired you, Joe. You're not only trying to solve her shooting—and yours—but solve everything."

"You don't know what you're talking about." Kurtz shifted another couple of feet away from her on the soft grass. The wind was banging some broken piece of plywood on the funhouse up the hill behind them.

"You know I do, Joe. That's all you have left anymore. The work. The cases you make up for yourself to solve, even if you hire yourself out to some Mafia vermin to get the work. Or to that Farino bitch. It's better than nothing, because that's your only alternative right now… work or nothing. No feelings. No past No love. No hope. Nothing."

Kurtz stood. "Do you bill by the hour?"

Rigby grabbed his wrist and looked up at him. "Lie down here with me, Joe. Make love with me in the sunlight."

Kurtz said nothing, but he remembered the seventeen-year-old Rigby naked above him, straddling him in the dim light of the choir loft, Bach echoing from the huge pipe organ in the darkened basilica. He remembered the exquisite pain in his chest that night and how—only years later—wondering if that strong emotion had been love as well as lust.

"Joe…" She tugged. He went to one knee in the grass.

Rigby used her free hand to begin to unbutton her shirt as she lay back. Her short, dark hair was lifted into spikes by the soft grass. "Make love to me," she whispered, "and let it all back in. Me. The world. Your daughter…"

Kurtz stood abruptly, jerking his wrist free.

"There's a train track around here somewhere," he said. "I'm going to find it." He stepped past Rigby and began walking up the slope.

She caught up Co him before he reached the top of the mountain. Neither said anything. Rigby's cheeks were flushed and there was grass on the back of her corduroy jacket.

The miniature train tracks, no more than a yard across, were just below the summit. The trees had been cut back for twenty feet on either side and had never grown back. The gravel under the ties looked fresh.

Kurtz turned north and began following the tracks along the hill.

"The rails aren't rusted," he said. "They're almost polished. Missing spikes have been replaced and the bed built back up. This little line's been used. And recently."

Rigby said nothing. She plodded along ten ties behind him.

They crossed a small trestle that had been built over a stream, then followed the tracks up to the crown of the hill, where they emerged from the woods and continued north-northeast.

A quarter of a mile from where they started, they emerged from the woods. The grasses were high and tan and brittle here, rustling in the stronger breeze as the clouds covered the sun again. The miniature railway's tracks ran down across a ridge and then rose over another treeless hill toward a huge house just visible about a mile away to the northeast.

Kurtz started down the grade.

"Joe, I don't think…" began Rigby.

Her voice was drowned out by a deafening THWAP THWAP THWAP and a huge Huey helicopter, Vietnam War-vintage, came swooping just over the trees from which they'd just emerged. Men were visible in both doorways as the big machine side-slipped, its forty-foot-wide rotors filling the mountaintop with their bats-wing beat.

Kurtz began to run toward the trees, saw that he would never make it and dropped to one knee, pulling the small.38 from its holster.

A machinegun opened up from the side of the Huey and slugs stitched a row between Kurtz and Rigby King.

"DROP YOUR WEAPONS… NOW!" boomed an amplified voice from the helicopter.

It swooped low and fast over them, banked hard, and swooped back. A machine gun from the other open door scythed grass not ten feet from Rigby. She threw down her gun.

Kurtz tossed his into the grass.

"ON YOUR KNEES. HANDS BEHIND YOUR HEAD. DO NOT MOVE A MUSCLE."

Kurtz and Rigby complied as the huge, black machine hovered over them and then settled heavily onto the grass near the tracks, the wind blowing up straw and dust and dead grass around them in a blinding blast.

CHAPTER THIRTY

The Dodger stopped at the edge of the woods and then stepped back under the trees when he heard the familiar sound of the Huey's engine and rotors. The goddamned perimeter sensors again.

He'd stalked the man and the woman through the woods, watched as they entered Cloud Nine, attached the suppressor to his Beretta, and begun moving in on them as they sat on the grass talking. Something was weird between the two; it looked as if the woman with the big tits and the short hair wanted to fuck and the man called Kurtz did not. That was new in the Dodger's book, unless Kurtz was all worn out from his night with the Farino woman the night before.

They'd been to the hut. This irritated the Dodger to the point that he planned to take real pleasure in shooting both of them. He would use more bullets than was necessary. It would disturb the aesthetics of his use for them, but that wasn't as important as getting rid of this unaccustomed anger he felt.

I'll put them at the top, he'd thought as he moved stealthily behind the funhouse, into the Beretta's killing range. He carried the weapon with both hands, his palm under the grip as he'd been taught, ready to lift it and aim down his rigid arm—first the man, then the woman. First the body mass to drop them, but not in the heart. Then the arms and legs. It was nice of them to come here.

Then the wind had blown some damned bit of plywood, making a noise near him, and the Dodger had been forced to freeze, bending low, not even breathing. By the time he was ready to move again, so were they, climbing the hill toward his train tracks.

He'd cut over the hilltop, hurrying ahead to the big oak near the edge of the forest. The bulk of it bid him and when they followed the tracks out into the open, he'd have a clear shot of no more than fifteen meters. As his anger faded, he considered a head shot for the man, saving the multiple slugs for the woman. Not because she was a woman or beautiful—the Dodger was indifferent to that—but because he sensed that the man was the more dangerous of the two. Always eliminate the primary danger first, the Boss had taught him. Always. Don't hesitate.

But he'd hesitated, and now it was too late.

The goddamned helicopter. That same, goddamned old Huey the Major had used for more than thirty years.

The Dodger watched the four Vietnamese men flexcuff Kurtz and the woman and load them into the helicopter. Then he faded back into the woods as the Huey lifted off and flew north, its passing flattening the grass for sixty feet around.