“You want a share? You want your own big share?” Andre said through gritted teeth. “Fuck you!”

The gun blast was deafening in the small space and it even got Dani’s attention.

“Wow,” she said.

Russo was on his side, rabbit-kicking away at the carpet as if his feet could take him away. But the blood coursing from a dark hole just in front of his ear began to slow to a dribble and his kicking became nothing more than a dying tremble.

“Fuck,” Andre said.

He stuffed the gun back in his pants and cracked open the door, peering slowly outside until he was sure no one was around. He waited there for several minutes. Not even a light went on. He went back inside and began to look around. From the bathroom he grabbed a towel and began rubbing the surfaces of everything he or Dani had touched. Doorknobs. The spoon. The needle. The chair. The faucet in the bathroom.

He loaded their bags back into the old truck, then heaved Dani over his shoulder and slumped her down in the front seat. He made one last check, leaving the bag of heroin, before tossing the towel down in the pouring rain and jumping back into the truck. He turned north onto Route 12 and checked his rearview mirror.

His mind started gnawing over all the things he could have done differently, starting with the shooting and going all the way back to when Russo showed up in the first place. He should have gone to Seth then. He had a good thing going and now he had fucked it up just like everything else. He wondered if it was the curse his old man had put on him when Andre beat the hell out of him with a tire iron. He thought about that bloody mess and his old man’s words: I’ll fuck you over from the grave, I swear.

But in a funny way, beating his old man’s head in was what got him on the road to independence. From that time on, people respected him. He was nobody’s fool, not even Bonaparte’s. He was the one who got the women and the drugs and the kicks, and that’s what money was for anyway. He’d beat this trap same as he had the others. How could he be down when he had the drugs and the girl, and hadn’t it been a kick to see the look on Russo’s face right before he shot him? Not a lot of people got to see that.

He smiled at Dani and flicked his finger against her ass. She groaned, eyes fluttering, and smiled at him.

Andre sighed deeply and smiled back.

His heart rate had started to even out and he was thinking about where he’d dump the gun when he saw the flashing lights in the rearview mirror.

“Fuck!” he said, punching his foot to the floor.

Dani looked back and slowly said, “Wow. This is so fucked.”

There was more than one car now, and even as he accelerated up that dark wet highway, they seemed to be closing in. His mind raced to think of a place where he could turn off. Turn off the highway and run. He could survive in these woods if he had to. He’d done it before.

After the bridge over the Big Moose River, there was a bend at the top of the hill and an old logging road right after it. He was almost there and he would briefly be out of sight of the police cars. He thought about the duffel bag full of cash. He could carry that and Seth Cole’s suitcase full of drugs and be gone without a trace in this rain. Dani would have to stay behind, and he indulged himself in a small hit of pity.

Andre saw the bridge and he felt a fresh surge of adrenaline firing up the nerves behind his eyeballs. The road ran down and he was just to the bridge when a cop car pulled up off the side road on the other side with its lights flashing.

“Fuck!” he screamed, slamming the wheel, but not letting up on the gas.

The cop car came straight at him, driving right down the middle of the bridge.

“Die, motherfucker!” Andre screamed, heading dead at him, picking up speed.

At the last second, the cop car tried to swerve, but fishtailed instead. Andre smashed into the rear quarter and the big truck spun, rocked, and plunged through the guardrail. The truck seemed to hang in the air, suspended in space. Silent. Peaceful.

Then it dropped. Andre braced himself, outscreaming Dani as the heavy truck plummeted a hundred feet to the rocky riverbed.

BERT IS DRESSED in a new gray pinstriped Zegna suit with four buttons on the jacket. His burgundy tie is in a Windsor knot. Miraculously, we found a pair of Ferragamo fifteen double E wingtips. On his wrist is a big silver-and-gold Rolex Submariner.

Chuck Lawrence is fidgeting with the pin in the tie that is really a camera. He lets go and gets on his tiptoes to peer up into Bert’s ear.

“Comfortable?” he asks.

“You can’t see it, can you?” Bert asks, fingering his ear.

“Don’t touch it,” Chuck says, and disappears out the front door.

“I don’t know about these stripes,” Bert says, looking down.

“They make you look less like a refrigerator,” I say. “Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. You’re everything you’re saying you are, and I’ll be right there in your ear.”

“Yeah,” he says, putting a breath strip into his mouth and replacing the package in his coat pocket, “I’m an Indian from upstate. But I don’t own any casinos or know anything about big business. How’s it going to come off when I’m just repeating the stuff you say in my ear? My grandmother used to say that a skunk in a possum’s coat still smells like a skunk.”

“When they see your bank records,” I say, handing him the portfolio, “all they’ll smell is money.”

“Did you have to call it the Iroquois Group and be so fucking obvious?” he asks.

“It’s a sentimental thing with me,” I say. We are standing in the foyer of the mansion on Fifth Avenue. I open the front door and follow Chuck down the steps toward the white utility van with a boomerang antenna. In front of it is my limousine. “Let’s get going, will you? If you’re late, that’ll piss them off.”

Bert looks down at his watch and shuffles after me. He gets into the limo. In the back of the van are two captain’s chairs and a metal desk beneath a bank of electronics with four different TV monitors. I get in the back, sit down next to Chuck, and put on my headset.

I push a red button in front of me on the desk and say, “Bert, do you hear me?”

“Jesus, not so fucking loud,” Bert says.

The camera gives me a fish-eye view of the inside of the limo, and now Bert’s scowling face dips down into the top of the picture. Chuck Lawrence adjusts some knobs and says, “How’s that.”

“Better,” Bert says, but his tone is surly.

“You’ll be fine,” I say.

Chuck climbs hunchbacked into the front of the van and gets behind the wheel. We follow the limo across the 59th Street Bridge and down into Long Island City.

I watch and listen. When Bert picks up the Post off the seat and begins to go through it, I realize that I’m holding my breath. After I read the papers this morning, they went right in the trash so he wouldn’t see. I try to make some small talk, but he keeps on turning the pages, even when I start blabbing about the Jets’ upcoming game.

I already know the item on Dani Rangle is on page eleven. Two inches. No picture. The small headline reads, FINANCIER’S DAUGHTER DIES. I think maybe Bert will miss it, but he doesn’t. The paper rattles and he pulls the lower corner of the page closer to his face.

After a few seconds he puts the small story right up to the camera lens in his tie, rattles the paper loudly, and says, “Did you know this?”

I sigh and press the red button. “Let’s not worry about that now, okay?”

“You knew,” he says. “Jesus.”

I stab the red button and ask, “What’s Jesus got to do with it?”

“She was just nineteen, that’s what,” he says, looking down into the camera, his nostrils like two dark caves. “First Villay’s wife and now this.”