“No, thank you.” The gunslinger walked out with a look back. Mort’s wallet was deep under the counter. Roland had set out his own honeypot.

7

Officers Carl Delevan and George O’Mearah had finished their coffee and were about to move on when the man in the blue suit came out of Clements’—which both cops believed to be a powderhorn (police slang for a legal gunshop which sometimes sells guns to independent stick-up men with proven credentials and which does business, sometimes in bulk, to the Mafia), and approached their squad car.

He leaned down and looked in the passenger side window at O’Mearah. O’Mearah expected the guy to sound like a fruit—probably as fruity as his routine about the lavender handcuffths had suggested, but a pouf all the same. Guns aside, Clements’ did a lively trade in handcuffs. These were legal in Manhattan, and most of the people buying them weren’t amateur Houdinis (the cops didn’t like it, but when had what the cops thought on any given subject ever changed things?). The buyers were homos with a little taste for s & m. But the man didn’t sound like a fag at all. His voice was flat and expressionless, polite but somehow dead.

“The tradesman in there took my wallet,” he said.

“Who?” O’Mearah straightened up fast. They had been itching to bust Justin Clements for a year and a half. If it could be done, maybe the two of them could finally swap these bluesuits for detectives’ badges. Probably just a pipe-dream—this was too good to be true—but just the same . . .

“The tradesman. The—” A brief pause. “The clerk.”

O’Mearah and Carl Delevan exchanged a glance.

“Black hair?” Delevan asked. “On the stocky side?”

Again there was the briefest pause. “Yes. His eyes were brown. Small scar under one of them.”

There was something about the guy . . . O’Mearah couldn’t put his finger on it then, but remembered later on, when there weren’t so many other things to think about. The chief of which, of course, was the simple fact that the gold detective’s badge didn’t matter; it turned out that just holding onto the jobs they had would be a pure brassy-ass miracle.

But years later there was a brief moment of epiphany when O’Mearah took his two sons to the Museum of Science in Boston. They had a machine there—a computer—that played tic-tac-toe, and unless you put your X in the middle square on your first move, the machine fucked you over every time. But there was always a pause as it checked its memory for all possible gambits. He and his boys had been fascinated. But there was something spooky about it . . . and then he remembered Blue-Suit. He remembered because Blue-Suit had had that same fucking habit. Talking to him had been like talking to a robot.

Delevan had no such feeling, but nine years later, when he took his own son (then eighteen and about to start college) to the movies one night, Delevan would rise unexpectedly to his feet about thirty minutes into the feature and scream, “It’s him! That’s HIM! That’s the guy in the fucking blue suit! The guy who was at Cle—”