“You’re out of your goddamn mind. You need to go.”

“Where you really went wrong was not taking a harder look at Carl Hall. He was another of your ex-cons, right? But he was a big talker, a dreamer who lived on a diet of booze and dope, with a blowsy girlfriend who hooked out of her house and was as big a boozer as her boyfriend. They wound up taking the young boy, not the almost-teenage girl, and the part of his plan Carl hadn’t shared with you was that he would shoot that child in the head, rather than have to deal with him. And then go after the ransom.”

“You…should…go.”

“But at least Carl did stick with the rest of the plan. He drove to St. Louis. Rented a room for his dipso sweetie and himself. And connected, as prearranged, with your cabbie, Johnny Hagan. The Coral Court was a good place to hide out for a while because Jack Carr was pliable for this kind of thing. You were not in a position to alert any cops about all this money rolling into town, except the crooked likes of Lou Shoulders. It was a pity, a goddamn shame, that boy had been killed. But that money…so much money.…”

He was trembling; you could barely see it. “It…it was a pity. Killing that child. Horrible. I still picture my own son being driven into that field.…”

“Don’t cry! Everybody’s been crying and it’s starting to piss me off.”

Shaking now. “I…I don’t sleep…I take pills…every night, Nate, I take pills. You’re no saint! You know how things can get out of hand. It got away from me, is all. It just.…got away from me.”

They came in the door all at once, four cabbies still in their fucking caps and bow ties, like I was a car getting full service at a top-notch gas station, We are the men of Texaco, We work from Maine to Mexico. Only what was happening was they were yanking me off the chair and dragging me by the arms out through the dispatcher’s area and into the double garage. Howie was leading the way, walking backward, grinning as his buddies shoved me onto the cement floor and started working me over, the smell of oil and grease in my nostrils. Costello’s nephew-in-law was holding a bloody hand towel to the side of his face where I’d whacked him. He had a monkey grin going.

The saving grace was they were idiots. The place was filled with tools and implements designed for fixing but that could break you; only these were cabbies, ex-cons with scarred faces and cauliflower ears and assorted missing teeth, and all they knew to do right now was hit me with their fists, and bending down like that did not give them their full power, making for mostly glancing blows and the occasional bread-basket punches I could tense my muscles against. My nine mil was back there on Joe’s desk but at least, apparently, none of them had grabbed it. I protected my face and took as much of it on my arms as I could.