When Rigby awoke a few minutes later, they were flying a thousand feet or so over the dark hills, the air rushing in the open rear door. Dr. Tafer had covered her with a blanket, and now Kurtz tucked it in. She was shaking.

"Joe?"

"Yeah." He put a hand on her shoulder.

"I knew you'd come for me."

He had nothing to say to that. "Rigby," he shouted over the wind and turbine roar, "you need some morphine?"

The woman's teeth were chattering, but not from the cold, Kurtz guessed. He suspected that she was on the verge of going into shock because of the pain and blood loss. "Oh, yeah, that'd be good," she said. "They didn't give me anything for the pain all day. Just that goddamned IV. And they couldn't get the bleeding to stop."

"Did they do anything else to you?"

She shook her head. "Just asked stupid questions. About you. About who we were working for. If I'd known the answers, I would've told 'em, Joe. But I didn't know anything, so I couldn't."

He squeezed her shoulder again. Dr. Tafer leaned closer, but Kurtz pushed him back. "Rigby, the doc's going to give you a shot, but you have to listen to me a minute. Can you hear me?"

"Yeah." Her teeth were chattering wildly now.

"You're going to be out of it," said Kurtz. "Probably wake up in the hospital. But it's important you don't tell them who shot you. Don't tell anyone—not even Kemper. Do you understand that?"

She shook her head 'no' but said, "Yeah."

"It's important, Rigby. Don't tell anyone about coming down to Neola, the Major… none of that. You don't remember what happened. You don't remember where you were or who shot you or why. Tell them that. Can you do that?"

"I don't… remember," gasped Rigby, gritting her teeth against the waves of pain.

"Good," said Kurtz. "I'll see you later." He nodded to the doctor, who scooted forward on his knees and gave the woman a shot of morphine.

The helicopter bucked and pitched. "We're too heavy!" called Baby Doc. "The Ranger's supposed to haul no more than seven people. We've got nine in here. At least come up front again, Kurtz. Help trim it."

"In a minute," shouted Kurtz. He crawled farther back, to where Gonzaga and Angelina were grilling Colonel Trinh near the open door.

The older Vietnamese man's visibly broken arm was twisted behind him, his wrists still flexcuffed. Gonzaga had also cuffed the man's ankles and he was propped precariously against the frame of the open door. The air roared past at over a hundred and thirty miles an hour.

"Tell us what we want to know," shouted Toma Gonzaga, "or out you go."

Trinh looked out at the darkness rushing by and smiled. "Yes," he said so softly that his voice was barely audible over the noise. "It is very familiar."

"I bet," said Angelina. Her face and hair were a mask of blood. "Why did you kill our junkies and dealers?"

Trinh shrugged and then winced from his arm and wounds. "It was a war."

"It's no goddamned war," shouted Gonzaga. "We didn't even know you existed until today. We never touched you. Why kill our people?"

The old colonel looked Gonzaga in the eye and shook his head.

"What's the connection?" shouted Kurtz. He was on his knees, straddling Campbell's sprawled legs. Blood sloshed back and forth on the plastic that covered the floor as the overladen chopper banked and rose and fell. "Who's been protecting your operation all these years, Trinh? CIA? FBI? Why?"

"There were three of us in Vietnam," said the old man. "We worked together very well. We have worked together very well since."

"Three?" said Gonzaga. He looked at Kurtz.

"The Major for the army," shouted Kurtz over the wind roar. "Trinh for the Vietnamese. And somebody in U.S. intelligence. Probably CIA. Right, Colonel?"

Trinh shrugged again.

"But why cover for you?" shouted Angelina. "Why would some federal agency keep your heroin ring a secret?"

"We brought in much more than heroin," said Trinh. He leaned back against the pitching door frame almost casually, as if he were in his own living room. "Our people in Syria, the Bekkah Valley, Afghanistan, Turkey… all very useful."

"To who?" shouted Gonzaga.

"What are you going to do with me?" asked the Colonel. He had to repeat the question because of the noise. His voice was calm.

"We're going to throw you out the goddamned door if you don't answer our questions better," shouted Gonzaga.

"We'll take you to a hospital with Rigby," said Kurtz. "Just tell us who the federal connections were and why they…"

"Do you know the irony?" interrupted Colonel Trinh, smiling suddenly. "The irony was that Major O'Toole and I are retired… we only came back to New York because of the SEATCO stockholders' meeting and because Michael wanted to see his niece."

The colonel shook his head, still smiling, and then deliberately pitched over to his left.

Gonzaga and Angelina grabbed at the man's legs and boots, but before they could get a grip, he was gone, out the black door, whipped away and down by wind and gravity.

"Oh, fuck," said Angelina Farino Ferrara.

"That's better!" shouted Baby Doc from the front. "Now someone get up here in the copilot's seat and help me trim this pig."

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

Angelina drove Kurtz and Rigby to the hospital.

They took the extra SUV that Campbell had driven to Gonzaga's compound and tossed his body in the back. Dr. Tafer and Kurtz carried Rigby to it on a litter, sliding her onto the flat floor left after all the seats were folded away. Then Tafer drove off with Baby Doc's men, Gonzaga had driven away with Bobby and his crew, and Baby Doc himself had lifted the Long Ranger off with a roar of turbines amidst a hurricane of Utter.

Kurtz had grabbed the keys and gone around to the SUV's driver's door, but Angelina had swung up first. "I'll drive," she said. "You stay in the back with Ms. Cellulite. I'll send somebody for the other vehicle."

He had jumped in the back, propping Rigby's head on his leg. Tafer had put her on a second unit of plasma and she was unconscious from the morphine. The Yemeni doctor had warned that she was in shock and in bad shape from loss of blood.

They were only a couple of miles from the Erie County Medical Center. For once, Kurtz thought, he'd planned ahead.

"We can't carry her in, you know," called Angelina from the front. She was driving carefully, staying under the speed limit and stopping for lights even when the intersection was dark and empty. Kurtz smiled to himself when he thought of what a haul it would be for the policeman who pulled them over for speeding—a wounded cop, a dead thug, a cache of stolen night-vision gear and automatic weapons, with a bloody, female Mafia don driving.

"I know," said Kurtz. "We'll drop her at emergency. I trust this truck isn't registered and the plates are bogus."

"Totally," said Angelina. "This thing will be in a chop shop before sunrise."

They drove in silence for a block or two. It was about two-forty-five in the morning. The time, Kurtz knew from experience, when human beings held their least firm grip on life. Rigby was cold to the touch and she looked dead. Kurtz used three fingers to find the pulse in her neck—it was hard to find.

"Well," said Angelina, "you sure provided Toma and me with a bonding experience, just like you promised."

Kurtz had nothing to say to that. He looked out at the dark buildings going by—they'd just crossed Delavan and were within a couple of blocks of the hospital.

"This third party that Trinh was talking about before he took a header," said Angelina. "Did you ever consider that it might be Baby Doc? That he's been working both sides against the middle?"

"Yeah."

"If it is, we just paid the son of a bitch three quarters of a million dollars to help him take over a drug ring he's been trying to take over for years."