“The DeLuca family.”

“Figured it might be the Gambinos, you being the guy who burned Rudy when he was out on the coast.” Nobody in the rest of the world refers to Los Angeles as “the coast.” Only New Yorkers.

“A woman named Ellen Lang did him. I was just along for the ride.”

“They after you?”

“No. This is something else.”

“Whatever you want, it’s yours, you know that.”

“Sure.”

“Whatever I’ve got, whatever I can get for you or for Joe, it’s yours.”

“I’m coming in tomorrow morning. From Chelam, Connecticut.”

“Come in after the traffic, say about ten. Take you an hour. I’ll meet you downstairs in front of the building at eleven-thirty.”

“All right.”

He gave me the address and we hung up.

The next morning I retraced the route I had driven before, this time turning off the West Side Highway on Twelfth and picking up Bleecker at Abingdon Square and following it down through the Village to Barrow.

Two black men and a very old Boston terrier were standing in front of a redbrick building at the east end of Barrow by Fourth Street. One of the men was younger and tall and muscular in a plain navy suit with a white button-collared shirt. The other was in his early sixties in a dark brown leather trench coat and had maybe looked like the younger guy a couple of lifetimes ago, before twenty-two years with the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau and two 9mm high-velocity parabellums in the liver had taken it away from him. Roland George. The little black and white Boston terrier sat at his feet, rear legs stuck out at odd angles, its pushed-in, once-black face white with gray, staring at nothing through eyes heavy with cataracts. Its tongue was purple and didn’t fit in its mouth. It drooled. Roland’s dog, Maxie.