If he lasted. He was coming back again and again to the thought that something was in motion, he was a little cog in a very big machine. Never mind why. He was the connection to three men, two of them dead. If Devlin were dead, too, the connection could be twisted into anything. But so what? The important thing was not to die.

After he had cleaned himself up in the locker room in Manhattan South, Devlin had been able to grab fifteen minutes at a telephone. Still too early for Liz Becker—she had skidded far down Devlin’s priority list, anyway.

No Sal, either. According to Sal’s resident illegal alien, a kid from Bolivia, Sal was up at Bronxville Radiator—“Bronkvil Rayiayor” to the kid. Devlin was able to get the kid to write down his name, the location of the car, and a telephone number where Sal could get more information if he wanted it. Eileen’s number. It was possible that the kid didn’t understand Devlin and was only saying he did. Devlin was thinking of the Seville in an unattended lot in deserted downtown: the Midnight Raiders could have it stripped down to its body shell by dawn. Then he told the whole story all over again to Eileen’s answering machine.

And now Devlin was suddenly asking himself if he could be sure she would be safe even in her own place. Did he know what was going on? No. Did he know which of the sitting ducks—Brennan, Lopez, Antonucci, himself—was the next target?

And now, coming down Seventh Avenue, behind a guy in an eye patch walking a dog the size of a golf cart, Devlin saw a face he recognized, a man he had watched change and age for the past twenty-five years. Clarence “Bingo” Malone. From Harlem, lean and good-looking in his youth back in the early sixties. A pimp, rolling in dough, he loved to thump his girls, white girls, who worked the midtown hotels day and night. The smack he used to keep his girls’ brains on hold finally rose up and grabbed him. By the middle seventies Malone was a heavy-duty dealer and looked it, haggard and thin. The girls were gone—with heroin, a lot of guys don’t need girls, and Malone was one of them. In and out of Lexington after that, years up the chimney, finding his way downtown and back into Devlin’s life. Devlin remembered. 1980, one of Devlin’s unhappy years, when he was looking after his father. And wasting time with Liz Becker.