“What the hell do you want?” said Vern.

“Mr. Sorrentino. I have something he’ll want to see.” “Oh, yeah, what the hell’s that?”

Kyle thought it through. He could back away like he’d backed away from that lawyer Malcolm at his father’s office. He could keep bantering with these behemoths, hoping somehow he’d pull an open sesame. Or he could force his way in, past the two cement lions and through Vern, into the office to find Tiny Tony Sorrentino, who Kyle had the sneaking suspicion wouldn’t be any tinier than either of the three goons arrayed before him. Leaving was smart, bantering was useless, rushing these three was clearly a foul mistake. But he hadn’t liked the way he’d felt when he let Malcolm push him around. And he was still pissed at the truths Skitch had hurled at him in the car. And the whole scene was getting tiresome enough to engender in Kyle the overwhelming urge to throw a punch.

“What I have here,” said Kyle, taking a step back and waving the file even as he knew with perfect certainty the effect his words would have, “is Anthony Sorrentino’s last will and testament.”

There was a flash of incomprehension on the mugs of these lugs. Then the first man uncrossed his arms. The second man began to stand from his chair. Vern pushed the first man to the left as he moved his right arm to reach for something behind him.

And as Kyle saw them making their moves, the world slowed, and the angles came clear, and he was back on the gridiron with a football in his arm and a goal line in the distance. Quick as that, he raised a straight arm and made his cut.

The first man, briefly off balance from Vern’s shove, took a hard shot to the solar plexus and tripped over the second man’s chair, collapsing two squinty, overweight men and one lawn chair into a scene of horror as flabby arms flailed and nylon snapped.

And Vern, even as he reached behind with his right hand to grapple for something stuck in his belt, was sent reeling backward by a sharp shoulder slamming into his chest. One of Vern’s arms wheeled as he tried to regain his balance, but a forearm shiver to the jaw sent him spinning atop a round table, which shattered under his substantial weight. And before he knew it, his arm, still behind his back, was pinned by a shoe, and a bare knee pressed like an iron bar upon his throat, and Kyle Byrne stared down at him with something dark and empty in his eyes.

“My, my, my,” came a soft, gravelly voice from the edge of the room. “What have we here?”

The sound pulled Kyle off the football field and back to the present, where he was stooped over a red-faced fat man, his knee pushing hard upon the fallen man’s thick neck. In a now-open doorway at the far end of the dusty outer office stood an ancient man, very small with an ashen face and a loose black suit draped over his emaciated frame.

The old man didn’t look near death so much as like death itself. And in his tiny fist was an oversize pistol pointed straight at Kyle’s heart.

CHAPTER 19

WHO THE HELL are you?” rasped the small man with the big gun. His voice seemed to bubble up from a deep well of death. “Kyle Byrne.”

“Byrne, huh? Byrne?”

“Liam Byrne’s son.”

“Of course you are. It’s amazing how his name is suddenly on the

tip of everyone’s tongue. And why are you sitting on Vern?” “He was rude.”

“That’s what I pay him for, though I can see now that I pay him

too much. What do you want, Byrne?”

“To talk to you. I have a file of my father’s I want to give you.” “A file of your father’s? To give to me? How marvelous. With the

untimely death of Laszlo Toth, I was just thinking about such a file.

And now it’s as if his ghost has led you straight to me. Be a good boy,

Liam Byrne’s son, and get the hell off of Vern’s chest before he defecates in his pants and stinks up the office for a week.”

Kyle lifted his knee from Vern’s neck and his foot from Vern’s arm

and then stood. Vern jerked to a sitting position and rubbed his neck

while staring insolently at Kyle.

“Want us to haul him away, boss?” said one of the men from out

side.

“A little late, isn’t it? Since he’s already past the two of you.” “It’s just he was quicker than—”

“It don’t take much. No, leave him be. If this is Liam Byrne’s son,

he is always welcome here. Why don’t you and Frank stuff another

cannoli in your gullets while this boy and I talk about old times. But

first, each of you, you need to apologize to our guest.”

“But, boss, we was just—”

“He is the son of Liam Byrne. He deserves respect.”

“We didn’t know—”

“Apologize,” screamed the little man, his face reddening, the gun

shaking with anger as spittle flew in deranged arcs from his suddenly

foaming mouth. Peeling paint flaked off the walls at the sound. Vern scrambled to his feet, and the three huge men started mumbling apologies like schoolkids caught slipping frogs down the backs

of little girls’ blouses, complete with slouched postures and toes kicking into the ground. We didn’t mean nothing. Sorry about that. We didn’t

know.

“Okay, enough of your sniveling,” said Tiny Tony, shutting off the

embarrassing display. “You three make me sick. Come along, young

Byrne, and we’ll take a look at that file.”

Tiny Tony stuck his gun into one of the side pockets of his jacket

and ushered Kyle into the inner office, before closing the door behind

Kyle and leaving him alone for a moment. While the storefront was

shabby and the outer office a bare, dusty wreck of a space, the inner

office was as lushly overdecorated as the bar of an Italian bordello. An

obscenely red couch, an easy chair covered with a golden throw, velvet

wallpaper, a marble fireplace, above which hung a huge painting of a woman lying on a divan wearing a fortune-teller’s turban, and nothing else. Kyle was still eyeing the painted woman’s fantabulous breasts

when the door opened and Tiny Tony Sorrentino reentered the room. “Nice painting,” said Kyle.

Tiny Tony turned and stared at it for a moment. “My first wife,”