Gerrity opened the door. “Do yourself a favor, Devlin, and don’t kill the little son of a bitch. If you come out of this clean on everything else, I’ll go to bat for you.”

Kevin looked at him. “You fuck. You’d sell your mother to save your own ass.”

“If I kill him, it will be for what he’s done to Eileen’s life. Might as well, I can’t dance. Get out and start walking toward Fifth.”

Gerrity did it. When he was a hundred feet away, Devlin prodded Kevin. “Drive. Work us over to the left lane and then make a left turn. Where do you have Eileen?”

“Forget it, she’s downtown. You can’t get near her.”

“Nobody is going to back you up on this. You’re holding her incommunicado, a violation of her constitutional rights.”

“She’s not a citizen!”

Devlin almost laughed at his stupidity. “You’re in very deep shit.”

“No deeper than you, you old turd, for a long time to come.”

“Just drive,” Devlin said. He was making and changing plans with every passing minute. He’d thought he was going to dump Kevin in Manhattan before taking the car over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge to the one place in the city he was sure would be safe for him for the night. Now he was thinking that it would be wiser to hold on to Kevin. Not as a hostage, but in a precautionary move. At First Avenue Devlin told Kevin to turn uptown. “We’re taking the upper deck to Queens.”

“Fuck Queens!”

“As a matter of fact, I want to show you where I got laid when I was in high school.”

On Thompson Avenue, a quarter-mile west of the bridge over the railroad yard, Devlin had Kevin make a right turn, and then, two very long blocks south, another right onto Forty-eighth Avenue. They were in the middle of Long Island City’s factory district, a square mile of bleak, dark buildings, rail spurs, and recessed loading bays. When Devlin had tried to show Eileen the bay where he had come with a girl from Dr. Gall’s American History class, and could not find it, Eileen said, “With so many other places to park, why do you want to fool around lookin’ for a particular one? I’ve been waitin’ a long time to do it the American way, and I’m in America now, so let’s not waste any more time about it.” Now Devlin had another thought about Eileen, and filed it for development later. When he saw a deep and empty loading bay off one of the side streets, he instructed Kevin to turn in, kill the lights, switch off the engine, and remove the ignition key.