Manhattan Is My Beat

Kelly in a day or two. Or slip it to him the next time he stopped in.
    Would Tony find it? Would he fire her?
    And if he did?
Well, them’s the breaks
. Which is what she usually said, or at least
thought
, when she found herself back in line at the New York State Department of Labor, a place where she was a regular and where she’d made some of her best friends in the city.
    Them’s the Breaks
. Her mantra of unemployment. Of fate in general too, she supposed.
    Except that today, trying to be cavalier about it, she decided she didn’t want to get fired. For her, this was a curious sensation—one that went beyond the usual pain-in-the-butt inconvenience of job searching that began to loom when a boss would motion her over and say, “Rune, let’s you and me talk.” Or “This isn’t going to be easy …”
    Though it usually was
very
easy.
    Rune took the firings better than most employees. She had the routine down. So why was she worried about getting canned now?
    She couldn’t figure. Something in the air maybe … As good an explanation as any.
    Rune continued east, through the area that NYU and the real estate developers were decimating for dorms and boring cinder-block apartments. A large woman thrust a petition toward her. “Save our Neighborhood” it said. Rune passed the woman by. That was one thing about New York. It always changed, like a snake shedding skins. If your favorite area vanished or turned into something you didn’t like, there was always another one that’d suit you. All it took was a subway token to find it.
    She glanced again at Mr. Kelly’s address. 380 East Tenth. Apartment 2B.
    She crossed the street and continued past Avenue A, Avenue B. Alphabet soup, alphabet city. The neighborhood growing darker, shabbier, more sullen.
    Scarier.
    Save our neighborhood
…

CHAPTER THREE
     
    Haarte didn’t like the East Village.
    When it came to the coin-toss to see who was going to stake out the target’s apartment three weeks ago, after they’d gotten back from the Gittleman hit in St. Louis, he was glad Zane’d won.
    He paused on East Tenth and looked for surveillance in front of the tenement. Zane’d been there for a half hour and had said the block looked clean. They’d learned that a while ago the target had vanished from his apartment on the Upper West Side—the apartment the U.S. Marshals Service had provided for him—and he’d given the slip to his minders. But that info was old. The feds might’ve tracked him down again—those pricks could find anybody if they wanted to—and be checking this building out. So this morning Haarte paused, scanned the street carefully, looking for any signs of baby-sitters. He saw none.
    Haarte continued along the sidewalk. The streets were piled with garbage, moldy books and magazines, old furniture. Cars doubled-parked on the narrow streets. Several moving vans too. People in the Village always seemed to be moving out. Haarte was surprised anybody moved
in
. He’d get the fuck out of this neighborhood as fast as he could.
    Today Haarte was wearing an exterminator’s uniform, pale blue. He carried a plastic toolbox which contained not the tools of the bug-killers’ trade but his Walther automatic on which was mounted his Lansing Arms suppressor. Also inside the box was the Polaroid camera. This uniform wouldn’t work everywhere but whenever he had a job in New York—which wasn’t often because he lived there—he knew the one thing that people would never be suspicious about was an exterminator.
    “I’m almost there,” he said into his lapel mike. The other thing about New York was that you could seem to be talking to yourself and nobody thought it was weird.
    As Haarte approached the building, 380 East Tenth Street, Zane—parked a block away in a green Pontiac— said, “Street’s clear. Saw a shadow in his apartment. Asshole’s in there. Or somebody is.”
    For this hit, the way they’d worked it out, Haarte was going to be the shooter, Zane was getaway.
    He said, “Three minutes till I’m inside. Drive around back. Into the alley. Anything goes wrong we split up. Meet me back at my place.”
    “Okay.”
    He walked into the foyer of the building. Stinks in here, he thought. Dog pee. Maybe human pee. He shivered slightly. Haarte made over a hundred thousand dollars a year and lived in a very nice town house several miles from here, overlooking the Hudson River and New Jersey. So nice he didn’t even
need
an