She nodded and considered me for quite a long time, and then she said, "Thank you."

I offered my condolences to the old man, and then to Shalene. Marcus said, "I remember you," loudly, and with a big smile. Shalene shushed him. She still didn't like me much.

Ray Depente led me away from the grave and Joe Pike drifted up behind us. Cool T watched from the crowd. Ray said, "How come that bastard D'Muere is walking around free?"

I told him.

Ray listened, his face tight and contained. When I was done, he said, "You remember what you said?"

"Yes."

"You said we'd have justice. You said that bastard would pay for killing James Edward. Him getting a fourteen-year-old fool to take his place isn't what I call justice."

I didn't know what to say. "The DA's people know what's going on. They'll keep digging for a case against D'Muere, and when they find it, they'll file."

Ray Depente said, "Bullshit."

"Ray."

Ray said, 'That bastard called the Washingtons. He said that if they open their mouths about this, he'll kill that baby." He pointed at Marcus. "He called that poor woman on the day of her son's funeral and said that. What kind of animal does something like that?"

I didn't know what to say.

Ray Depente said, "Fuck him and fuck the DA, too. I know what to do." Then he walked away.

Joe said, "I know what to do, too."

I looked at him. "Jesus Christ. Marines."

Cool T came out of the crowd and met Ray Depente and they spoke for a moment, and then the minister began the service. Maybe five minutes into it, Akeem D'Muere's black Monte Carlo with the heavily smoked windows turned into the graveyard and slowly cruised past the line of parked cars, his tape player booming. The volume was cranked to distortion, and the heavy bass drowned out the minister. The minister stopped trying to speak over the noise and looked at the car, and everyone else looked at the car, too. Ray Depente stepped out from the row of chairs and walked toward the car. The Monte Carlo stopped for a moment, then slowly rolled away. When the car was on the other side of the cemetery, the minister went on with the service, but Ray Depente stayed at the edge of the dark green canopy and followed the car with his eyes until it was gone.

Guard duty. The kind of duty where your orders are to shoot to kill.

When the service was over and the people were breaking up and moving down the slope, Joe and I stood together and watched Ray Depente help Mrs. Washington to the family's limo. Joe said, "He's going to do something."

"I know."

"He's good, but there's only one of him."

I nodded and took a breath and let it out. "I know. That's why we're going to help."

Pike's mouth twitched and we went down to our cars.

At two oh-five that afternoon, Joe Pike and I found Ray Hand Cool T together in Ray's office. Cool T looked angry and sullen, but Ray looked calm and composed, the type of calm I'd seen on good sergeants when I was in Vietnam. Ray saw us enter and followed us with his eyes until we were at his door. "What?"

"Are you going to kill him?"

"I don't know what you're talking about." Innocent.

"Well, there are ways to do it. Get a good scoped hunting rifle, hang back a couple of hundred yards, and drop the hammer. Another way would be to drive around for a while until you see him, then walk up close with a handgun. There are more apt to be witnesses that way, but it's a matter of personal preference, I guess."

Cool T shifted in his chair.

Ray leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head. "Man, do you think I just fell off the watermelon truck?"

"What I think is that you've got a pretty good life doing well by a lot of folks, and you're about to mess it up."

Ray looked at Cool T and Cool T grinned. Ray didn't. He gave me lizard eyes. "That's what it is to you, that it?"

I spread my hands.

"So you come down here to point that out? Maybe set me straight?"

"Nope. We came to help."

"Well, we don't need the white man coming down here to solve the black man's problems. We can manage that just fine, thank you."

Pike's mouth twitched for the second time that day.

Ray gave the eyes to Pike. "What?"

Pike shook his head.

I said, "The DA would file if they thought they could win, and maybe there's a way we can give them that. Maybe not on James Edward, but on something."

Ray Depente waited.

"If you want Akeem, you're going to have to go to him. That means his home, and it used to be a crack house. It's fortified like a bunker. But once we're in, I'm betting we can find something that the DA can use to put D'Muere away."

Cool T said, "Ain't no way we can get in there. Goddamn police use a goddamn batterin' ram to get in a crack house. Where we gonna get that?"

Ray glanced at Cool T. 'There are other ways." He looked back at me. "If it was worth it. If it would lead to that sonofabitch getting what he deserves."

"We won't know until we get there, will we?"

Ray nodded. "Why are you doing this, Cole?"

"Because I liked James Edward, Ray. Hell, I even like you."

Ray Depente laughed and then he stood up and put out his hand. "Okay. You want to help out on this, we'll let you help."

Forty-two minutes later Joe Pike and I cruised past Akeem D'Muere's fortified home in Joe's Jeep. We parked six houses down on the same side of the street in an alley between a row of flowering azalea bushes and a well-kept frame house with an ornate birdbath in the front yard. Ray Depente and Cool T were one block behind us, sitting in Ray's LeBaron. Akeem D'Muere's black Monte Carlo and the maroon Volkswagen Beetle were parked at the front of his house, and a half-dozen Gangster Boys were hanging around on the Beetle. A couple of young women were with them. I wondered if they called themselves Gangster Girls.

Pike said, "Brick house across the street. Clapboard two doors down, this side. Check it out."

I looked at the brick house across the street and then at the clapboard house. A heavy woman with her hair in a tight gray bun was peeking from behind a curtain in the brick house and a younger woman, maybe in her early thirties, was peeking at us from the clapboard. The younger woman was holding a baby. 'They're scared. You live on a street with a gang for your neighbors and I guess peeking out of windows becomes a way of life. Never know when it's safe to venture out."

Joe shifted in his seat. "Helluva way to live."

"Yes," I said. "It is."

A tall kid leaning against the Bug's left front fender looked our way, but then went back to jiving with his buddies. All attitude, no brains.

Pike pulled a pair of Zeiss binoculars from the backseat and examined the front of D'Muere's house. "Windows set close on both sides of the door. Bars on the windows."

"What about the door?"

"Solid core with a couple of peepholes. No glass."

"Does it open outward?"

"Yep." Pike put down the glasses and looked pleased. Dope dealers often rebuild their doors to open outward instead of inward. Harder for the cops to bust in that way. It was something that we'd been counting on.

Fourteen minutes after we parked in the alley, Cool T turned onto the far end of the street in Ray Depente's LeBaron and drove slowly toward D'Muere's as if he were looking at addresses. He stopped in the middle of the street, and said something to the kids on the Volkswagen.

I said, "Now."

Joe and I rolled out of the Jeep and moved through the backyard of the near house and into the next yard toward D'Muere's. We moved quickly and quietly, slipping past bushes and over fences and closing on D'Muere's while Cool T kept the gangbangers' attention. Akeem D'Muere's backyard was overgrown by grass and weeds and thick high hedges that had been allowed to run without care or trimming. A creaky porch jutted off the back of the house, and a narrow cement drive ran back past the house to a clapboard garage. The garage was weathered and crummy and hadn't been used in years. Why use a garage when you can park on the front lawn? Ray Depente appeared from the hedges on the far side of the yard and held up a finger to his mouth. He was wearing a black Marine Corps-issue shoulder sling with a Colt Mark IV.45-caliber service automatic. He pointed to himself, then gestured to the east side of the house, then pointed at us and then at our side of the house, and then he was gone.