Middleton shook his head. “That’s appealing, but not smart. No, we need to talk to this guy, and at length. So backup it is.” Harry opened his phone again and clicked through his list of contacts. He stopped on an entry marked E.K. and hit dial.

The phone rang once.

The voice in Middleton’s ear said, “It’s about time you called, Harry. But then I guess you’ve had your hands full lately.”

“I need a team, Emmett,” Middleton said. “In Baltimore.”

“Sure you do, Harry. And what about what I need?”

“We can talk about that too, after we settle Baltimore.”

“We can fuckin’ talk about it now.”

“It’s been real bad luck for people to run into you lately, Harry. We’ve got bodies at Dulles, downtown on Sixteenth Street and two assholes with fake Bureau IDs in a bar nearby. Okay, sure, self-defense. But you still have to answer questions. And we can’t stop the local boys from bringing you in if they find out. Jesus, you should’ve told us from the beginning what was going on.

“Guess what, Emmett. Somebody forgot to send me an agenda. I didn’t know what was going on. And I still don’t.”

“Be that as it may, we need to talk.”

“No time, Emmett. My battery’s running low.”

“Not to worry, Harry, we can talk about it over coffee. Say in five minutes, in the hospital cafeteria.” Middleton looked left, right, overhead. On the phone Kalmbach laughed nastily. “On your left,” he said. “Across the street.”

Middleton peered into the darkness and a pair of headlights of a Bureau-issued car winked once, twice at him. Emmett Kalmbach was still laughing. “Cream and two sugars for me, Harry.”

In his suite at the Harbor Court Hotel, the man known as Faust answered the muted beep of a cell phone. The voice on the other end was faraway and old. Faust listened intently, and a small, satisfied smile played on his lips. “Well done, Signor Abe,” he said.

Faust put his phone down and looked across the sitting room, into the smaller of the suite’s two bedrooms. A splash of light fell across the king-sized bed, and in it he could see Kaminski’s pale face on the pillow, and a spray of blond hair.

“Charming,” he said again, to no one in particular.

12 - RALPH PEZZULLO

12

RALPH PEZZULLO

There was something about Fells Point that put Harold Middleton in a foul mood. Maybe it had to do with the fight at The Horse You Came In Saloon that got him booted out of West Point. Maybe it related to the scar on his left temple left by a bar stool—the one that still throbbed whenever the thermometer dipped below 40.

This dank place changed my life, he thought, entering the fog that clung like bad luck to Baltimore’s Thames Street.