Bloody River Blues

exactly are you going to do?”
    “Okay, I think you’ve gotta agree we don’t have much choice.”
    Lombro sighed deeply. He did not agree with anything that Ralph Bales said or thought. But the whole matter had moved beyond him now. He realized he was being asked a question and said, “What?”
    “I said, you haven’t by any chance heard from a guy named Stevie Flom, have you?”
    “Who?”
    “A guy working with me.”
    “No. I don’t even know him. Why would I?”
    “No reason. I haven’t heard from him.”
    “Why would he call me? ”
    “I mentioned I worked for you once. It’s not important. Anyway, about our situation—”
    “Just finish this thing,” Lombro said desperately. “Finish it.”
    “You want me to . . .”
    “Do what you have to” were Lombro’s closing words but they had hardly the energy to carry forty miles to the other end of the phone line.
    THE HOUR WAS not late; it was not his normal bedtime, but Philip Lombro, hoping that tomorrow would appear and then vanish with invisible speed,took two sleeping pills and, in his silk pajamas, slipped into his bed.
    He lay awake for a long time, tormented by thoughts of what he had done, thoughts about the witness’s betrayal, thoughts about how he was soon going to have another man’s blood on his hands. But under the sedation of the Valium, he calmed, and eventually the man who was going to die tomorrow did not occupy his thoughts. Nor did Vincent Gaudia nor Ralph Bales. Philip Lombro was in that netherworld between sleep and waking. Bits of dreams floated past like the papers caught in the fickle currents around the Maddox Omnibus Building. He saw faces, most of them grotesque. Melting into other shapes. They were real to him, intense, three-dimensional. They reminded him of the images seen through those plastic three-dimensional viewers he used to buy his nieces and nephews thirty years ago, the ones that held cardboard disks of fairy tales and cartoons.
    One of these faces, though, was not grotesque. It was a girl’s face, a young girl’s. She was beautiful. Her features did not melt. Her eyes simply looked toward him. Lombro was powerless to touch her or speak. He was merely observing; you don’t participate in dreams like this.
    Then the girl’s face suddenly grew so terribly sad that Lombro became completely awake, pierced by an urge to cry, and he sat up abruptly.
    This was the hardest part of living alone, Philip Lombro knew. Waking from dreams by yourself.
    PELLAM WAS UP at seven-thirty. He had slept in a location van—one of the big Winnebagos used formakeup. He rose silently and walked into the bathroom, where he took a tepid-water shower. Then he brushed his teeth with his fingers and a spoonful of Arm & Hammer. He felt groggy and hoped he would find something energizing in the medicine cabinet—diet pills, NoDoz. But there was nothing other than a prescription drug he had never heard of. The label warned against operating machinery or driving a car while taking the medicine.
    It would be coffee or nothing.
    Pellam dressed in the bathroom, the cloth of his shirt and jeans darkened by the water he had failed to towel off. He brushed his damp hair and forwent the noisy blow dryer. He was here as a spy or, at best, refugee, and wanted his presence kept secret. Slipping outside, he hurried down the front steps and shivered in the cool fall air. There was a rich, loamy scent of water, which he knew would be the river though he could not see it from here.
    At the curb he paused to let pass a powder blue car, slowing as it passed the trailer. On the side was a sign. Out of Work 117 days. The number 17 was on a separate piece of cardboard, freshly taped over the previous day’s record. “I do odd jobs,” the man called but he drove on before Pellam could say a word.
    RALPH BALES FOUND his heart was beating like the wings of a panicked sparrow.
    He looked at his wrists, focusing on the veins, surprised that they were not vibrating with blood. His hands returned to the steering wheel. Ralph Bales was waiting downtown—in a stolen Chevy—outsidethe Federal Building on Mission, waiting for John Pellam to arrive. And the reason his heart was beating so fast was that this was a terrible site for a hit.
    On the way here, he had passed a car wash whose name was World O’ Wash. The phrase kept going through his mind, and all he could think of was World O’ Cops. FBI, Treasury agents, federal marshals and city cops and