When he looked out the windshield again, there was a dog on the road. Mr. Dolbare, although he did not have one himself, liked dogs, and did not wish to run over one. He applied his brakes as hard as he could, and simultaneously attempted to steer around the dog.

The Cadillac went out of control and skidded into the post-andcable fence that separates Highway 611 from the Delaware Canal.

The fence functioned as designed. The Cadillac did not go into the Delaware Canal. The cables held it from doing so. Only the front wheels left the road. Mr. Dolbare was able to back onto the road, but when he did so, one of the cables, which had become entangled with the grill of the car, did not become unentangled, and held. This caused the grill of the Cadillac, and the sheet metal that held the grill and the radiator in place, to pull loose from the Cadillac.

There was a scream of tortured metal as the fan blades struck something where the radiator had been, and then antifreeze erupted from the displaced radiator hose against the engine block.

"Oh, shit!" Mr. Dolbare said.

He got out of the car. He looked in both directions down the highway. He could see nothing but the narrow road in either direction. He did not recall what lay in the direction of Philadelphia, but he estimated that it was not more than a couple of miles back toward Easton where he had seen a gas station and a bar, which would have a telephone.

He slammed the door of Mr. Clark's Cadillac as hard as he could, and started walking back up Highway 611 toward Easton, his heart heavy with the knowledge that he had really fucked up, and that he was now in deep shit.

Mr. Dolbare had just passed a sign announcing that the Riegelsville Kiwanis met every Tuesday at the Riegelsville Inn and had just learned that the Riegelsville American Legion welcomed him to Riegelsville when he saw a familiar vehicle coming down Highway 611.

He stepped into the road and flagged it down.

"What the fuck are you doing walking down the highway?" the driver inquired of him.

"We have to find a phone," Mr. Dolbare said. "You see one back there?"

"What the hell happened?"

"Some asshole forced me off the road; I had an accident."

"You wrecked Clark's car?" the Oaks and Pines van driver replied, adding unnecessarily, "Boy, is your ass in deep shit."

"No shit? Get me to a fucking phone."

Fifteen minutes later, Mr. Anthony Clark telephoned to Mr. Ricco Baltazari, at the Ristorante Alfredo, to inform him that there had been an accident, some asshole had forced his guy off the road in the sticks, but that the van had caught up with him, and those financial documents they had been talking about were at this very minute on their way to him.

Mr. Baltazari told Mr. Clark, unnecessarily, that he would pass the progress report along to their mutual friend, who wasn't going to like it one fucking bit.

"He's going to want to know, Anthony, if you didn't have somebody reliable to do this favor for him, why you didn't do it yourself."

"Accidents happen, Ricco, for Christ's sake!"

"Yeah," Mr. Baltazari said, and hung up.

He looked at his watch. It was quarter to twelve. He thought that although it wasn't his fault, Mr. S. was going to be pissed to hear that the goddamned markers were still somewhere the other side of Doylestown.

Somewhat reluctantly, he dialed Mr. S.'s number.

TWENTY-ONE

Chief Marchessi had ordered surveillance of Corporal Vito Lanza " starting right now." Captain Swede Olsen had done his best to comply with his orders, but Internal Affairs does not have a room full of investigators just sitting around with nothing else to do until summoned to duty, so it was twenty minutes after eleven before a nondescript four-year-old Pontiac turned down the 400 block of Ritner Street in South Philadelphia.

"There it is," Officer Howard Hansen said, pointing to Corporal Lanza's residence. "With the plumber's truck in front."

"Where the hell am I going to park?" Sergeant Bill Sanders responded. "Jesus, South Philly is unbelievable."

Officer Hansen and Sergeant Sanders were in civilian clothing. Hansen, who had been handling complaints from the public about police misbehavior, was wearing a suit and tie, and Sanders, who had been investigating a no-harm-done discharge of firearms involving two police officers and a married lady who had promised absolute fidelity to both of them, was wearing a cotton jacket and a plaid, tieless shirt.

"Go around the block, maybe something'll open up," Hansen said.

"I don't see a new Cadillac, either."

"If you had a new Cadillac, would you want to park it around here?"

"We don't even know if he's here," Sanders said as he drove slowly and carefully down Ritner Street, where cars were parked, half on the sidewalk, along both sides.

Suddenly he stopped.

"Go in the bar," he ordered, pointing. "See if you can get a seat where you can see his house. I'll find someplace to park."

Hansen got quickly out of the car and walked in the bar. He saw that if he sat at the end of the bar by the entrance, he could see over the curtain on the plate-glass window, and would have a view of most of the block, including the doorway to Lanza's house.

He ordered a beer and a piece of pickled sausage.

Sergeant Sanders walked in ten minutes later.

"Well, I'll be damned," he said. "Long time no see!"

They shook hands.

"Let me buy you a beer," Hansen said.

"I accept. Schaefers," he said to the bartender, and then to Hansen: "I got to make a call."

The bartender pointed to a phone, and then drew his beer.

Sanders consulted the inside of a matchbook, then dropped a coin in the slot and dialed a number.

On the fourth ring, a somewhat snappy female voice picked up.

"Hello?"

"Is Vito there, Mrs. Lanza?"

"Who's this?"

"Jerry, Mrs. Lanza. Can I talk to Vito?"

"If you can find him, you can talk to him. I don't know where he is. Nobody is here but me and the plumbers."

"I'll try him later, Mrs. Lanza, thank you."

"You see him, you tell him he's got to come home and talk to these plumbers."

"I'll do that, Mrs. Lanza," Sanders said, and hung up.

He walked back to the bar.

"His mother doesn't know where he is. She's all alone with the plumbers."

Hansen nodded, and took a small sip of his beer.

"Is there anything on the TV?" he called to the bartender.

"What do you want?"

"Anything but the soap opera. I have enough trouble with my own love life; I don't have to watch somebody else's trouble."

The bartender started flipping through the channels.

At five minutes to twelve, Marion Claude Wheatley left his office in the First Pennsylvania Bank amp; Trust Company, rode down in the elevator, and walked north on South Broad Street to the City Hall, and then east on Market Street toward the Delaware River.

He returned to the Super Drugstore on the corner of 1lth Street where he had previously purchased theSouvenir of Asbury Park, N.J. AWOL bag, and bought two more of them, anotherSouvenir of Asbury Park, N.J. and one with the same fish jumping out of the waves, but markedSouvenir of Panama City Beach, Fla. He thought it would be interesting to know just how many different places were stamped on AWOL bags the Super Drugstore had in the back room.

And then he thought that Super Drugstore was really a misnomer. There was a place where one presumably could have a prescription filled, way in the back of the place, and there were rows of patent medicines, but he would have guessed that at least eighty percent of the available space in the Super Drugstore was given over to nonpharmaceutical items.