“You did a lousy job.”

He lurched forward and threw another right hand and I pushed it past just like the first and drove a spin kick to the right side of his head. It slammed him sideways into the bar and he fell down again. The guys at the other end of the bar and a couple of people in the booths stood up. The bartender said, “Hey, I’m gonna call the cops.”

I said, “Call’m. This won’t take long.”

I reached down and pulled Joey up again and sat him on the stool and dug out his wallet and looked at his driver’s license. Joseph L. Putata. Jackson Heights. I put the wallet back in his pocket. “Okay, Joey. What’s a used rubber like you got to do with Karen Lloyd?”

One of his eyes was looking up and the other was sort of rolling around and he was blinking a lot. He shook his head, like he didn’t know what I was talking about. “I dunno. Who’s Karen Lloyd?” His hands were down at his sides.

“The lady at the bank.” Maybe she hadn’t sent them.

Joey’s eyes started coming together and he looked scared. “Oh, shit, I told him we run you off. I said you were outta here.”

“Who? The guy in the Lincoln?”

The bartender said, “I just called the cops.”

Joey looked from me to the bartender, then back to me. Confused along with the scared.

I said, “Why’d the guy in the Lincoln want me to forget about Karen Lloyd?”

“I dunno. He said you were bothering her. He said she was a friend.” He looked even more scared, like talking about the guy in the Lincoln brought it out in him. “I told him you were gone.”

“Who is he?”

“Who?”

“The guy in the Lincoln.”

Joey looked at me like I’d just beamed down from the Enterprise. “Jesus Christ, you don’t know?”

“No.”

He looked at the other people at the bar and then he lowered his voice. He said, “We’re talking about Charlie DeLuca. Sal DeLuca’s kid.”

“So?”

Joey shook his head and put on a face like he was about to wet his pants. “Sal DeLuca is the godfather, you dumb fuck. The capo de tutti capo. He’s the head of the whole damned mafia.”

Chapter Thirteen

Thirteen

It was twenty minutes before five that afternoon when I turned down the neat, clean blacktop off the county road above Chelam and pulled into Karen Shipley’s drive. The sun was most of the way down in the southwest, and would set in another hour. The LeBaron was parked in the garage.