The other one pushed the bad tooth away and kicked hard at the partition. “Go! Get out of here!” He pushed the button that raised the window. The driver stepped on the gas. When the window sealed, the other man snarled to the bad tooth, “You’ll get us all killed!”

Damn straight, Amy thought as she pushed her way into the corner. She might kill them herself if she had the chance, even the one who was trying to be nice to her. She had a lot to think about – she had to figure out what was going on. Why had bad tooth looked into the weeds? Just do it the way you were told, the man had said. Yes, but what was that? Why was it so important?

Merrill had been two blocks away when the big Mercedes stopped and the window whirred down, the vanishing of the reflection of the fire in the glass making him hunker down below the top of the weeds. If these were the same men he and O’Malley had just chased across the Caribbean, Amy had been in the car, close enough for him to call her. What would have happened if he had? In fact, Merrill actually had been thinking about calling her when the car suddenly pulled away again.

He was going to have to get himself together. Too much adrenalin today. At least the bleeding if his palm had stopped. And in this poor light it did not appear that he had bled on the topcoat.

He kept moving across the dark, stinking scrub, watching for signs that people were looking for him. They knew exactly where he was. Why weren’t they coming after him? Not having answers, or the right answers, to questions like that had cost O’Malley his life. Too much adrenalin for O’Malley, too. O’Malley had said that the group who had grabbed Amy would have shot him. That had not stopped O’Malley. He had said Merrill would want to kill Chino, then had equipped him to do the job. But in the end, Chino had easily – - and audaciously – - outsmarted O’Malley.

A genius, O’Malley had said.

And now Chino wasn’t pursuing Merrill?

Merrill was approaching a broad, well-lit boulevard, with little cars or trucks scooting along it quickly in both directions. Sooner or later he was going to have to get out with people. Without identification and a hundred one-hundred dollar bills in the shoulder bag, Merrill was a sitting duck for anyone who was willing to take him on, if he wanted to be stupid enough to flash the money in front of a stranger.

Before he stepped out of the weeds onto the sidewalk, Merrill moved three of the hundreds from the shoulder bag into his topcoat pocket.