At the same time, she suddenly wants nothing to do with Zack. Zack who has brought this to her. Zack whose fault this is. Inadvertent, unintended though it was. An accidental by-product of his charm, his curiosity, his incredible smarts, his natural affinity for people—that he earned the enmity of an assassin.

Where will she go? Will she need to leave the apartment? Really leave it? Start over in a new place? She doesn’t know yet. She’s not thinking clearly yet. It’s too new. Too strange, too incomprehensible right now.

And then her heart plunges again. She turns to Zack and finally speaks.

“Steve,” she says. “Oh God. Poor Steve.”

Who had been shot, barely survived, lucky to be alive at all. Physically recovered by now but still traumatized by the events.

Zack pulls on his shoes and throws on his jacket. “We have to get over to Steve before he hears on his own,” he says.

“So we’re going to tell him?” Emily asks.

Zack shrugs. “Someone will. Better if it’s us.”

And it’s something for them to do. Some purpose, some distraction, some activity, while they try to adjust. Emily pulls on her boots, grabs her coat, and they’re out the door.

28.

28.

Will Shale drives through the streets of lower Manhattan and crosses the Brooklyn Bridge. He weaves circuitously through Brooklyn, then Queens, as Joey looks out silently from the passenger seat.

Joey watches Will check the rearview and side mirrors carefully. The police may be following already, afraid of what crazy Joey Richter might do the first moment he is released. But Joey also knows it’s just as likely that they’d made no official plan for this outcome, had no surveillance in place, were caught pretty much off-guard by the verdict. That they saw the prosecution’s case as a slam dunk. Certainly, Joey did.

Somewhere in the factory district where Brooklyn becomes Queens, they pull into a garage next to another nondescript sedan. Will gestures to Joey to quickly switch into it with him. Will grabs a small blinking electronic device off the first car’s dashboard and puts it on the dash in the new car.

Will sees Joey looking at it and smiles. “Watch it. You’ll see how it marks the movement of all vehicles around us, and it’ll signal if the same vehicle is continually near us, in which case it beeps. Actually pretty simple technology.”

They are back on the street in a moment.

“You’re taking me to Karloff.”

“I am,” says Will.

“You’ve always worked for him, haven’t you?”

“Almost as long as you.”

“So you were, what, put there in my jail cell to babysit me, keep an eye on me? Make sure I didn’t squeal or get turned?”

“Something like that.”

“For what?” says Joey “For some reason that I’m about to find out, I guess.”

“I guess.”