The first man hadn’t been talking to Amy. She sat up, wrapping the towel around her shoulders. She blinked. She was in the center of the jet’s cabin, surrounded by blond goons staring down at her from four seats facing each other as if in a Pullman car. The plane quieted and leveled to cruise climb, causing her to lose balance. One of the men reached toward the towel and Amy shrank back. Another man batted his hand away. “I told you not to do that,” he said in a voice she recognized as the first voice she’d heard. He gave her her shirt. “If you want to have real trouble with Chino, just give him the idea that you had your hands on her so soon after you made her a widow.”

“Widow?” Her voice was a squeak.

The second man smiled and stroked her cheek, laughing at her. “Get used to it.”

She pulled away, trying not to black out. She didn’t want to believe him. She buttoned her shirt. The first man said, “It’s true. I saw him go down.”

The second man pointed out the window. “His body is down there, lying in what’s left of a taxicab.”

Amy shrieked and lunged for the man’s arm with both hands and dug her teeth into his wrist. He yelled and pulled her hair, but she had a good grip with her hands and was able to sink her teeth in deeper. She tasted blood – -she started to gag. He hit her on the head with his fist. She bit harder, deeper still, his blood pouring from her mouth, a sound still coming from her chest, a growling against his flesh, and then something hard and heavy came down on the side of her head and hurt terribly for the moment she lasted before she fell to the floor, unconscious.

“Watch where you’re pointing that gun, Merrill, you’re liable to put somebody’s eye out.”

The man came into focus, lean, baldish, in his forties, in jeans and a white t-shirt, unshaved, two inches shorter than Merrill. He stepped out from behind the wing of a Lear, his hands raised in a gesture of surrender, or at least friendship. He gave Merrill a crooked little smile. Merrill kept the gun up, if not exactly pointed at the man. “Do I know you?”

“No, not really.” He waggled the fingers of one hand. “Jeremiah O’Malley, pal. Say hi.”

Merrill blinked. “Hi. What do you mean, not really?”

“Relax. We never met, but I used to be one of those guys.” He jerked a thumb toward the disappearing speck in the sky – - “That is, until I got too rich to take those chances. Anyway, I know who those guys are. And they know me. About me. But they didn’t see me. If they had, they would have shot me.”

“Why are you telling me this?”