Bloody River Blues

wonderful.
    She was beautiful.
    Nina Sassower believed that although men came on to her—and did so quite frequently—they did so only because of the size of her breasts and her thin legs. She believed they tolerated her face, which she saw as pointed and narrow and pinched.
    But in the dream, something had happened. Perhaps she had had an operation, maybe she had just been mistaken all her life. She did not know what had changed. But the person she was in the dream was tall and willowy and had sharp, intelligent, beautiful eyes.
    The image didn’t last long. It shifted into something else, a street she couldn’t identify. Then other people began milling around and the dream ended.
    She woke up.
    For perhaps two seconds she felt the afterglow of the dream.
    She sat up straight, looked at the clock, and spat out, “Oh, no! Son of a bitch!”
    It was nine-thirty.
    She pulled off her nightgown and yanked open the drawer to her dresser. Panties, bra—no bra. She couldn’t find one. She kept looking. Forget it! She slipped a sweater on, thinking that it was the first time since the age of thirteen that she would leave the house without a bra. Slacks, anklet stockings . . . They don’t match, where’s the mate, where? Hell with it! Go! Beige pumps.
    Go, go, go! . . .
    Nina pulled on her blue jean jacket. She hadn’t washed her face and she felt a rim of sweat on her forehead. She paused in the mirror to brush her hair and she did that only because she didn’t want to look conspicuous.
    For what she was about to do, conspicuous would not be good.
    She left the house and hurried to her car. After she started the engine, she looked into her purse to make certain that it contained what she had put there the night before.
    A military-issue .45 semiautomatic pistol, the classic 1911 Colt, sat heavily between an Estée Lauder compact and a pink plastic Tampax container.
    Nina knew the gun about as well as she knew her Singer sewing machine. Although she could not field-strip it blindfolded she could dismantle it sufficiently to clean and oil the bore and the parts and did so every time she fired it. This gun happened to be identical to the ones Ross’s gangsters carried in Missouri River Blues, although Nina’s was loaded with ten rounds of live ammunition and was not registered with the federal government or with anybody else.
    Nina now started the car’s engine and, not even slowing at a single stop sign or red light, sped through the quaint, quiet burg of Cranston, Missouri, then skidded onto the expressway, hurrying south toward where she believed John Pellam would be.

Chapter 23
    BEING A LAWYER , he was used to rewriting.
    Ronald Peterson never signed off on a letter, interrogatory, complaint, motion, or brief without hours of revision. But the two-page press release describing Peter Crimmins’s indictment for the murder of Vince Gaudia had taken more time, per word, than anything that Peterson had written in years.
    He had just learned, however, that this was one press release that was not going to be released to anyone.
    “He changed his mind?” Peterson whispered, barely controlling his fury.
    “That’s what the message said,” Nelson explained cautiously, looking away from his boss’s enraged eyes. “And there’s no answer at his phone, the phone in his camper. I sent an agent to Maddox. The camper’s not in the trailer park. Somebody in one of the vans said Pellam’d been fired and they don’t know where he is.”
    “Think Crimmins got him?”
    “Well, according to the receptionist, he didn’t sound coerced.”
    “Why the fuck didn’t she put through the call? She’s fired. She’s out of here.”
    Nelson said delicately, “He didn’t want to speak to you. He wanted to just leave a message.”
    “What exactly did it say again?”
    “Just that he’d changed his mind. That was it.”
    Peterson clicked a fingernail and thumbnail together seven times. “Any hint from the taps on Crimmins?”
    “Nothing useful. Business as usual. We can take that one of two ways. Either he’s using a safe phone to talk to his muscle. Or he heard the press conference and for some reason he’s not concerned about the guy testifying.”
    Why wouldn’t he be concerned?
    One reason: He wasn’t the man in the Lincoln after all.
    “Why,” Nelson pondered, “would Pellam be jerking our leash like this?”
    Peterson had told no one about the free-lancer, a former FBI agent, who had gone after