“All right, let’s not. But tomorrow night, Hi Barker is going to have Harkness on his TV show, and I mean to see him nailed, right there on television. I want you to be there to bust him.”

Dino thought for a minute. “I gotta cover my ass some way, here, in this place.”

“Do this: seal the place, and put a blue-and-white outside to make sure nobody disturbs the scene.”

“Not until I get the medical examiner in here. We can’t just let Van Fleet’s corpse rot for a couple days, you know.”

“Look, we have no solid evidence against Harkness, and, unless Barker can force some admission out of him on the air, we’ll never get him. If somebody in the ME’s office leaks this to the press, we’re cooked; we’ll never get him.”

“Too bad you pissed off Van Fleet when you were on the table in there. He might have given us Harkness.”

“He might have given us Harkness anyway, if you hadn’t blown him away.”

“What was I supposed to do? Stand there and watch the ritual slaughter? Shout ‘freeze!’? What if he didn’t freeze? You’re pretty fucking ungrateful.”

“Ungrateful? I’ve dragged you kicking and screaming through this whole thing, and now, when you turn up at the last possible minute, like the cavalry, you want gratitude?”

“That’s the second time I’ve taken out somebody who wanted to kill you, and, come to think of it, you didn’t thank me the first time either!” Dino was standing up now.

Stone stood up too. “If you’d been a little quicker the first time, I wouldn’t be hobbling around on this knee, and I’d probably still be on the force!”

“Yeah, instead of a tax-free pension and a big-time law practice! I really did you a fucking disservice, didn’t I? And, now, you got the cabbie killer, you cleared four murders, and you’re going to bring down Barron Harkness—all in one week! It’s a rough life you’re gonna be living, ain’t it, Stone?”

Stone opened his mouth, then shut it. Then he started to laugh. So did Dino. They sat down again and laughed until they were exhausted.

“Okay,” Dino said, “you get out of here.” He handed Stone his car keys. “I know a guy in the ME’s office who can keep his mouth shut. I’ll get him to check Van Fleet into the morgue as a John Doe, then I’ll seal this place until Monday morning.”

“Okay. You meet me tomorrow night at ten forty-five sharp at the Continental Network headquarters building on Seventh Avenue. We’ll go up to the studio control room together. And have a blue-and-white waiting downstairs.”

They both got up and walked toward the door, passing the dining table where the five mute conversationalists still carried on.