Manhattan Is My Beat

vests and loading the guns back into their car trunks or the compartments of the trucks.
    “Who was he?”
    “Samuel Haarte,” Sal replied. “Professional hit man.”
    “I’m so confused.”
    She watched Sal’s face. She decided there was something a little crazy about him. Indoctrinated. Like with the Moonies. She had this love/hate thing with Detective Manelli but she liked him. Sal scared her.
    “She killed Victor Symington,” Rune told him. “Emily did.”
    “So she was going by the name Emily. Any last name?”
    “Richter.”
    “Haarte usually worked with somebody named Zane. I always thought it was a guy. But it must be her. One fucking tough woman.”
    Sal dug around in the back of the car, found a thermos, and sat back. He poured some coffee into the lid and offered it to her. “Black. Sweet.” She took it and sipped the coffee. It was so strong it made her shiver.
    Sal drank directly from the thermos. “Symington—I mean Spinello—he’d be alive if he hadn’t panicked. He shouldn’t’ve took off.”
    “What happened?” Rune asked.
    He explained. “I’m with the Witness Protection Program. You know, giving federal witnesses new identities. Spinello and another witness—”
    “That guy in St. Louis I read about?”
    “Right. Arnold Gittleman. Spinello and Gittleman testified against some syndicate guys in the Midwest.”
    “But if they already testified, why kill them?”
    Sal laughed coldly at her naiveté. “It’s called revenge, sweetheart. To send the message that nobody else better talk. Anyway, Spinello took off—he didn’t trust us to keep his ass safe and moved down to the Village on his own. Never told his handler about it. I was part of the team in the hotel in St. Louis guarding Gittleman.” His cold eyes grew sad for a splinter of a second. Not an emotion he was used to, it seemed. “I went out to get some sandwiches and beer and those assholes got Gittleman and my partners.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    He shrugged off the sympathy. “So I went undercover to nail the pricks.” Sal looked at the house. “And we sure as shit did. Looks like they were the only ones too. We waited as long as we could here in case somebody else showed up. But nobody did.”
    “What do you mean, you waited as long as you could?”
    He shrugged. “We’ve been cooling our heels outside here for five fucking hours.”
    “Five hours!” she shouted. Then it became clear. “I
led
you here! I was bait.”
    Sal considered this. “Basically. Yeah.”
    “You son of a bitch! How long’ve you been following me?”
    “You know that old blue van in front of your loft? With all the tickets?”
    “That was yours?” she asked, dumbfounded.
    “Sure.”
    “What’d you come up in my loft for? Earlier today?”
    He frowned. “Actually, at that point, we figured you were dead. I was checking it out to see if your body was up there.”
    “Jesus Maria …” She nodded to the door. Ripped into him with a sarcastic “I hope when I escaped just now I didn’t totally screw up your plans.”
    “Naw,” Sal said, sipping more coffee. “It was good it worked out the way it did. They
might’ve
used you as a hostage. It was—whatta you say?—convenient you got away when you did.”
    “Convenient?” Rune spat. “You used me. Just like Emily did. You followed me to Brooklyn to find out where Symington was. And you followed me here to catch them!”
    Now Sal grew angry too. “Listen. For a week, I thought you
might’ve
been one of the hit team. Think about it. We have a city police report that you were on the scene just after the Kelly killing. Then, when I’m staking out the site of the hit—that tenement on Tenth Street—you go in. Then Spinello runs outside and vanishes, like you scared the crap out of him. And then we had more reports that somebody who fits your description,—except is about nine months pregnant—has broken into Kelly’s apartment and ransacked the hell out of it.”
    “That wasn’t me,” Rune protested. “It was them.”
    “But you
did
break in.”
    “The door was practically open.”
    “Hey, I’m not after any B and E count. I’m just telling you why I didn’t walk up to you and introduce myself. Shit. And when we figured out you were an innocent and I tried talking to you, your friend the redhead just about breaks my nose and some fucking bodybuilder closes my throat up.”
    “How were we supposed to know?”
    “Anyway, yeah, they found your prints all