I saw immediately why Socia had picked this location. A person could be dead ten minutes, lying facedown on the street, before someone paused to wonder what he was stepping on. Crowds are only slightly safer meeting places than abandoned warehouses, and in abandoned warehouses, you sometimes have room to move.

I looked across the street, past The Corner, my eyes bouncing along the heads in the crowd like sheet music, slowing as they reached Barnes and Noble. The crowd thinned somewhat here, a few less teenagers. Guess bookstores aren’t ideal places to pick up babes. I was ten minutes early and I figured Socia and his crew had gotten here twenty minutes before me. I didn’t see him, but then I didn’t expect to. I had the feeling he would suddenly appear an inch away from me, a gun between my shoulder blades.

It didn’t come between my shoulder blades. It came between my left hip and the bottom of my rib cage. It was a big .45 and seemed even bigger because of the nasty-looking silencer on the end. Socia wasn’t the one holding it either. It was a kid, sixteen or seventeen, but hard to tell with the black leather watch cap pulled down low over a pair of red Vuarnets. He had a lollipop in his mouth that he shifted from one side of his tongue to the other. He was smiling around it, like he’d just lost his virginity, and he said, “Bet you feel seriously fucking retarded about now, don’t you?”

I said, “Compared to what?”

Angie stepped out of the crowd with her gun against Lollipop’s crotch. She was wearing a cream-colored fedora on her head, and her long black hair was tied in a bun under it. She wore sunglasses that were bigger than Lollipop’s and ran the gun muzzle over Lollipop’s balls. She said, “Hi.”

Lollipop’s smile faded, so I replaced it with my own. “Having fun yet?”

The crowd all around us kept moving at their escalator pace, oblivious. Urban myopia. Angie said, “So what’s our next move?”

Socia said, “That depends.”

He was standing behind Angie and by the way her body tensed, I knew there was another gun back there with him too. I said, “This is getting ridiculous.”

Four of us stood in a crowd of thousands, all interconnected like blood cells by fat squat pieces of metal. Someone in the crowd jostled my shoulder, and I hoped like hell no one had a hair trigger.

Socia was watching me, a benign expression on his worn face. He said, “Somebody start shooting, I’ll be the one walks away. How ‘bout that?”

He almost had a point he’d shoot Angie, Angie would shoot Lollipop, and Lollipop would definitely shoot me. Almost.

I said, “Well, Marion, seeing how this is already about as crowded as a Japanese camera convention, I don’t figure one more body’ll hurt. Look at Barnes and Noble.”

He turned his head slowly, looked across the street, didn’t see anything that alarmed him. “So?”