Karen crossed her arms and looked out the window, and then she walked over to Peter Alan Nelsen and put her hand on his back. Peter gulped air and made a deep, racking sob and hugged her around the hips and cried into her skirt. Karen Lloyd stared at the ceiling and patted his back.

I walked out of the house and climbed into the Taurus and drove hard through the falling darkness all the way down to Manhattan and Sal DeLuca’s.

Chapter Thirty-four

Thirty-four

Sal “The Rock” DeLuca had three adjoining brownstones just east of Central Park on 62nd Street. One block in from the park a homeless woman with two children was building a little hut out of cardboard against somebody’s front gate while a wino staggered by and offered her a drink. The wino didn’t look where he was going, tripped over something, stumbled around in a wide orbit with a lot of hand waving, then fell onto the cardboard and threw up. The homeless woman kicked him in the balls. Anywhere else in America, East 62nd Street was a place you’d avoid after the sun went down, but not in New York. In New York, people paid millions to live on East 62nd Street. There were trees on East 62nd. The French Embassy was around the corner.

Charlie DeLuca’s black Lincoln Town Car wasn’t around, but a couple of guys in a maroon Mercedes were. If Sal knew what Charlie was up to with the Jamaicans, I figured that Charlie would come to Sal first for damage control. If Sal didn’t know, then Charlie would charge straight out to Chelam and try to end it before Sal found out. The black Town Car not being around was a good sign, but maybe Charlie had come with somebody else. He even might’ve taken a cab.

I made the block twice, then parked on Fifth and walked back, trying to figure a way to see Sal without getting killed. The two guys in the Mercedes watched me as I walked past.

The homeless woman and her children were huddled in their little cardboard house and the wino was sitting with his back against the building, holding his crotch with one hand and his bottle with the other. I made a big deal out of weaving as I walked and stopped a couple of times as if I had to steady myself and then I sat down next to the wino and studied the block. There were no fire escapes to creep up and no alleys to slip within and no second-story landings to leap to in a single bound. There were only the two guys in the Mercedes and another guy hanging around on Sal the Rock’s top step. Phoning for an appointment probably wouldn’t work.

The wino burped softly and gingerly fingered his crotch.

I said, “Pretty nasty shot she gave you.”