“So what are you saying? That he had someone hit the place after hours, shoot his three former pals, then make off with the receipts for the day?”

Cherry frowned. “No, not that. He’d hardly need to hire someone for a job like that. I suspect Merker would have all the requisite skills.”

“You think Merker did it? That he killed three members of his own gang?”

Cherry raised his hands in the air in a gesture of frustration. “Who knows? It’s just one of the things I’ve been kicking around ever since that night. I wouldn’t even be thinking along that line, except there was that other incident, the one I mentioned a moment ago, happened the year before.”

I waited.

“His number two guy.”

“Eldon Swain,” I said.

Michael Cherry made his hand into a gun and shot it at me. “Bingo. Eldon Swain. Got shoved into the path of a train. He’s in the car, truck comes up behind, rams him right into the front of it. Messy.”

“There’d been another, similar incident.”

“Yeah. One of the Comets died that way. Everything about it was the same. Except the first time, it’s a guy from one gang, second time it’s somebody from another.”

“Okay,” I said.

“We thought Pick—that’s the name I always think of first for Merker—looked good for the first one. Then another guy dies, same M.O. Makes you wonder.” He shook his head. “I wonder where that son of a bitch ended up.”

“He’s in the stun gun business,” I said. “With Edgars.”

“No shit?”

“He just tried to get our cops to buy a bunch of them.”

“Whoa, whoa, hold on,” Cherry said, starting to smile. “Pick is flogging stun guns to cops?”

I nodded.

“Man, that guy has got balls. So, he’s working for a stun gun company?”

“I got the impression he was his own boss. They hit police union meetings. Edgars demonstrates for him. Merker shoots him with the gun, gives Edgars fifty thousand volts. Says he’s done it a couple dozen times to him so far.”

“Jesus. That guy wasn’t working with a full deck of neurons back when I knew him. What must he be like after getting fried with a stun gun a few times?” Cherry kept shaking his head at the audacity of it all. “You know, there’s something about this that rings a bell someplace…” He turned to his computer, started tapping away at some keys. “There was this heist, about six months ago, this place that’s making a new line of stun guns, uses like high-intensity vapor or water or something…”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s what he’s selling.”