“Saving your life? Oh, it was nothing.” He turned to look at the remains of Rhonda Harris. “Well, maybe not nothing.”

“But how did you get here?” I said. “How did you follow me, with all the precautions I took?”

“I’m sure your precautions were stunning in their design, though, of course, seeing that you ended with a gun in your face, not quite as effective as you might have hoped. But no, I didn’t follow you, dear Victor.”

“Then how?”

“I followed her,” he said, indicating the mass of bone and blood on the ground. “From the start I sensed she was trouble. I know the type. I am the type. Didn’t I tell you she was a killer?”

“I thought you were speaking metaphorically.”

“I’m a very literal person, Victor. You should know that by now. I followed her to this spot. I realized she was setting up a rendezvous. I slipped my car into a clearing in the woods and waited. Just me, my car, and my long-distance microphone. Quite the clever gadget, but one I would never use out in the open. The headphones make me look like Princess Leia.”

“So you heard about the girl,” I said.

“Yes, I heard. Too sad for words, actually, so why even try to speak of it?” He glanced at his watch. “But the woman with the gun mentioned something about cleaners coming. I assume she means Charles’s friends from the Warrick gang, hurrying this way as we speak to dispose of your bodies. So maybe we should cut our little gabfest short. Charles, are you ready now to sell?”

“No,” he said. “I’m sorry, and I think I owe you, what with you saving our lives and all, but I’m not going to sell it. I just want to give it back.”

“Are you sure? I’ve already made arrangements to dispose of the item without its going to your old friend.”

“I don’t want nothing good to come from what happened, ’cause it’ll only turn out bad, you know what I mean?”

“Not really, no. And what about you, Joseph? Are you willing to let such a payday disappear after all these years?”

“Good riddance, I say,” said Joey.

“Ah, the disappointment, but it seems there is little I can do. A wave of cheap sentimentality has seemed to overcome you both and I wouldn’t dream of crashing the party, though I’m quite shocked that you, Victor, have not endeavored to change their minds. But it would have been a pretty thing to gaze at before I delivered it on, don’t you think? All right, then, take my advice, all of you, and flee, madly. I too need rush off. There is a Fabergé egg available in a trailer park in Toledo. Imagine that. Toledo. The provenance is not quite clear, but with a Fabergé egg it never is, don’t you know. I mean, the last true owner was killed by Lenin in a pit. After that, it’s open season, don’t you think? Ciao, friends.”

We watched as he climbed back into his dented car, flicked his lights as if in farewell, and pulled around the taxi, past the picnic table and the collapsing shed, and onto the narrow two-lane road, heading west, toward Ohio, I assumed. He’d swept into my life, threatened it, saved it, swept out of it again. Funny the kind of people you meet in this business. I’d almost miss him.

“We have to get out of here,” I said.

“Back in the cab,” said Joey.

“There’s no door,” I said.

“I can drive without a door.”

“Maybe you can,” I said, “but how far we’d get before the cops stop us is another thing entirely. And then she probably told the cleaners what kind of car we had. If we pass them on the road, they’ll figure it out and spin around after us.”

“But it’s Hookie’s car. I can’t just leave it here.”

“We’ll retrieve it later, patch it up, I promise.”

“It’s a piece of crap anyway,” he said.

“Then how do we get out of here?” said Monica.

“We’ll take her car,” I said, gesturing toward the pulpy mass on the ground. “Let’s find her bag.”

“Is this a time to be rummaging for spare change?” said Charlie.

“We need the keys,” I said. “And her phone. Joey, check her car and see if the keys are there. The rest of us will comb the area, the bag should be somewhere around.”

The gun was off to the side. I picked it up carefully by the trigger guard and placed if in a jacket pocket. Joey came back, reporting that the car was locked, and we continued our search, moving slowly toward the heap of metal and flesh.

“She had nice hair,” said Monica, as we passed the corpse. “I always wanted red hair.”

Beyond the body, beyond the door, almost to the edge of the gravel lot, where the woods had already encroached, we found the bag. Phone, wallet, but no keys.

“They must have spun out in the crash, flying somewhere into the woods,” I said. It could take us another hour to find them.

“I could just pick the lock of her car,” said Charlie.

“Don’t they have electronic gizmos?”

“I can get around them,” said Joey.

I turned to stare at them.

“Hey, you were the man with the plan,” said Joey. “We was following you.”

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said.

A minute and a half later, we were in Rhonda’s rental car, the engine humming, Joey Pride pulling us out of the lot.

“Go east,” I said.

“Back to the shore?”

“Back to the parkway and then the Atlantic City Expressway,” I said. “It might take a little longer, but I don’t want to pass any goons on this little road on our way back to Philly.”

He did as I said, and then I made my calls.

I didn’t know I was in a race.

I should have known, of course, it was all there in front of my face. But at the time I was a little preoccupied with staying alive. So we took the roundabout route to Philadelphia as I called McDeiss. I gave him the last phone number Rhonda had called, so he could track down her accomplices, and a description of Fred and Louie. He promised to have a squadron of New Jersey state troopers converge on the site of Schmidty’s deserted farmer’s market and pick up whoever showed in response to Rhonda’s call.

“And when the cops finally arrive,” I said, “there will be a little treat waiting for them. A dead body.”

“Damn it, Carl, what the hell is going on?”

“You know the guy who you think killed both Ralph Ciulla and Stanford Quick?”

“The guy from Allentown?”

“Well, you were right about him doing the killings, except he wasn’t a guy.”

“Get the hell out of here.”

“I cleared two of your cases, you should be thrilled. I even have the murder weapon sitting in my pocket. And when you figure out who she really is, pick up her father. He was in the business before her. Now, are you ready for us?”

“We have a cordon around Mrs. Kalakos’s house, and we have a phalanx of black-and-whites ready to pick you up at the mouth of the Tacony-Palmyra Bridge and escort you to her street. You’re still in that green-and-white taxi?”

“Not anymore,” I said.

“What happened?”

“We had a little accident. We’re driving something new.”

“Just picked it up off the street?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Mind telling me what it is?”

“Yes, I do. Last thing I want is a phalanx of police cars pointing out to everyone in the city exactly where we are. How many in a phalanx anyway? Can two be a phalanx if they’re really, really big?”

“Don’t be a hero, Carl,” said McDeiss.

“Little chance of that. But don’t worry, there will be a green-and-white cab meeting your phalanx.”

“Come again?”

“Just have your phalanx meet the cab and flash its lights and escort the cab to the Kalakos house. Have it pause there for a moment, and then lead it back to the Roundhouse. That should be safe enough. But the Kalakos house is not where you and I are going to meet up.”

“Then where?” said McDeiss.

“Someplace else. I want you to show up quietly, no black-and-whites, no commotion or press. Wait until the noisy procession begins and then slip in unnoticed. Just you and Slocum and Hathaway and a team from your CSI unit to process a body. Can you do that?”