“So yeah, we’re gonna meet back at that GreenGirl. And you’re gonna give back my phone. And after that? We’ll see…” Joey says threateningly.

Oh my God. Joey has Emily.

But Zack has the client.

He feels the nausea rising again.

“Fifteen minutes, Zack.”

My terms. My schedule.

“Fifteen minutes,” says Zack.

He looks across the table at the client. They mirror each other’s terror.

The woman is shaking.

“I don’t know what you did or what your victim did,” says Zack, “but we’re both in a world of trouble. And you’re going to help get us out. I’m assuming you’re paying him in cash, no bank deposits or transfers, and I’m guessing you brought the cash you owe him for the hit. Am I right?”

She nods.

“How’d you find him?”

“I was put in touch with him.”

“Too bad we don’t have his last name.”

The client looks at him. “Joey Richter,” she says.

Zack looks back at her.

She shifts uncomfortably. “Someone said it by mistake once.”

Zack looks at her, puzzled. “Who would make a mistake like that?”

She looks at Zack. “He did.”

Zack stares at her, waiting.

“‘Joey Richter doesn’t fuck up,’ he said.” She looks at Zack. “He wanted me to know.”

Zack feels her bitterness rising for a moment above her fear. ’Cause Joey Richter did fuck up and put her in this mess. A foolish moment of pride, thinks Zack. Joey reassuring himself, as well as his client. Joey Richter doesn’t fuck up. The assertion indicating to Zack that, indeed, Joey sometimes does.

Joey Richter.

Zack had made the mistake of saying Joey’s first name aloud to him. He knew it was a terrible mistake the moment he’d said it. The moment before the earsplitting sound of gunshots came cracking back at him through the diePhone.

Before the spinning, the vomiting at the curb.

Now Joey had made the mistake of saying his own last name. Could that somehow save Zack and Emily?

But how? Giving the police the name to investigate? Staking out Joey Richter’s apartment? That was hardly going to save himself or Emily in time.

He thinks back to the original moment at the GreenGirl. When Joey entered his code, dialed and turned away to talk.

“Wait. Did Joey call you this morning?” The hit man looking for one last confirmation of the contract? One last chance to change her mind?

She shakes her head no.

Zack has learned by now that there are virtually no personal calls on Joey’s phone. Chances are, with Joey’s profession, Joey erases any evidence of personal calls once he makes them. But that last call, of course, Joey didn’t have a chance to erase because he left his phone in the GreenGirl. And it wasn’t made to her.

Zack brings up the number. He dials it. Waits.