Silent Prey

they’d been a half-inch slower, he’d of blown them up, he’d of had his .45 out . . . .”
    “They were lucky,” Lily said. “Why didn’t you try again?”
    Kennett shrugged. “At that point, we figured it was either kill him or forget him. He didn’t seem . . . close enough . . . to kill. And I don’t know if the guys would’ve done it anyway. Petty was already hard to stomach. Davenport’s message to O’Dell, the one Copland picked up. That was fake?”
    “Not completely. It was Davenport who foundBekker, all right. He was feeding the message to O’Dell to see if any hitters showed up. They did, but I was with O’Dell the whole time. He didn’t make any calls. So I started thinking about it.”
    “God damn it. I thought about skipping Bekker.”
    “You should have.”
    “Couldn’t. Didn’t know what he’d say about . . .” He stopped, remembering.
    “About the guys he saw hit Walt. Jeese and Clemson. Thick and Thin.”
    “No,” Kennett said evenly. “It wasn’t them.”
    “Bullshit,” she flared. “They fit.”
    “No. It wasn’t.”
    “Who, then?”
    “I won’t tell you, but Jeese and Clemson, no.” He pulled at his lip. “Old Copland. A good guy. What happens to him?”
    “O’Dell will think of something . . . . How many of you are there? And how many people have you done?”
    Kennett shook his head. “There are . . . several. Some singles, some two-man teams. None of them knows the others, and I won’t tell you who they are.”
    “We can put Jeese and Clemson in Attica if we want—assault on a police officer with a firearm. And if O’Dell wants to fix it, I’m sure we can find a problem with Copland’s pension. He’ll spend his last twenty years sitting on a park bench. Or rolled in an army blanket on a sidewalk.”
    “Don’t fuckin’ do that,” Kennett whispered.
    “That’s what happens when you lose,” Lily said, her voice like ice.
    “We were doing right,” Kennett said. “I’ll call it off. Walk away, and I’ll call it off. I’ll quit the force, if you want.”
    “What, so you can write for the Times ? You’d be a bigger danger there than where you are now,” Lily said.
    “So what do you want from me?”
    “I want the goddamned names.”
    Kennett shook his head. “No. Never happen. If I gave you the names, only two things could happen: a lot of good guys would get ripped off, or O’Dell would set up his own little force of stormtroopers. I’m not going to let any fat, puling, alcoholic fixer do that, I won’t . . . .” His voice grew cold as he said it. He bared his teeth and added, “I really like you. But the worst thing you do is, the worst thing about you, is that you associate with that . . . that . . . cunt O’Dell.”
    “I’m the cunt,” Lily said. “I’m the one you rolled for information.”
    “Fuck you, then,” Kennett said, and turned away. “You want to make something out of it, make it in court. I’ll tear you up. Now take your ass off my boat.”
    “I’ve got another question before I go.”
    “What?”
    “Why Walt?”
    Kennett stared at her a moment, then dug in his shirt, found a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, lit it with a match. Tossed the match overboard: they heard it hit, the hiss hanging in the damp air.
    “Had to,” he said. “Him and his fucking computers. When I started this, nobody really knew about computers and what they could do. They were like electric filing cabinets. Looking in a computer was like snooping through papers on somebody’s desk. We didn’t know that every time we went into a file, we left tracks. Petty nailed us down. We had to have time to get into the machines, to fix things. We did that. The information’s gone now.” He looked downriver, at the Manhattanglittering along the river, the arcs of the bridges. “Listen, Lily. If you could take five hundred or a thousand people out of Manhattan, you could make it eighty percent safer. You could make it a paradise.”
    “Not a thousand,” she said. “Maybe ten thousand.”
    “No. No, not really. A thousand would do it. We couldn’t take down a thousand people, probably, but we could make a difference. Arvin Davies. You look at him? Was he one of the people . . .”
    “Yes.”
    “We think . . . intelligence estimates . . . that he committed up to a hundred crimes, all sorts: assaults, burglaries, rapes, murder. He could have done a hundred more. Now he won’t.”
    “You