The Hardest Thing

stick. You’ll be popular in jail, Ferrari.” Rotherstein slapped his forehead, as if something obvious had just occurred to him. “Of course! That’s what you want, isn’t it? I guess you’d like nothing more than to be locked up with half a dozen giant psychopaths who haven’t seen a pussy for years.”
    That took the wind out of Ferrari’s sails. “I was with Marshall, okay? Friday. We had a…meeting.”
    “Ah.” Rotherstein sat on the bed, the concerned father once more. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Why don’t you tell us what that meeting was about?”
    “I can’t remember.”

    “Don’t waste my time, Ferrari. You play ball, we’ll see what we can do. But I’m losing my patience. Do you understand me?”
    Ferrari understood. “Marshall was planning to leave the country.”
    “Lynskey, take notes.”
    “That was never in the plan. I was supposed to get Stirling out of town while the cops were trying to talk to him, that’s all.”
    “And what then? He was going to have a little accident on the road?”
    “No!” shouted Ferrari, then clutched his jaw in pain. “No. He was going to be paid off, sent away. I swear to god.”
    Rotherstein caught my eye; he knew all about our late-night visitor in the Starlight Motel. “So what happened? Why did the plans change?”
    “Marshall panicked. He knew that the investigation was closing in on him. Even without Stirling’s evidence, he was fucked.”
    “So he decided to run.”
    “Yeah. Suddenly he had this meeting that was going to take him out of town for a couple of days. I didn’t trust him. That’s why I didn’t pick up the phone. I was in his office. I told him that I was nervous about him leaving town because if he wasn’t around, I was going to face the music for…you know.”
    “Trey Peters?”
    “I didn’t kill him.”
    “No one’s suggesting you did. Go on.”
    “I told Marshall he had better make sure I didn’t start talking to the cops, know what I mean?”

    “You blackmailed him.”
    “Severance pay, that’s what it was. He owed me. I’d done stuff for him that… Well, extra stuff.”
    “But he didn’t pay up?”
    “He told me I’d have it by three o’clock.”
    “Let me guess…”
    “I don’t like to be kept waiting.”
    “Tough guy.”
    “So if Marshall was going to screw me, I was going to screw him. That’s when I decided to bring Stirling back to New York City.”
    “You… What?” Even Rotherstein didn’t see that one coming.
    “I made a few calls. Found a guy I could trust up in New Hampshire. And when Stagg phoned in with the details of where they were staying, I sent him in to collect the goods.”
    “Bullshit, Ferrari,” I said. “He had a gun pointed at my head.”
    “I warned him that you might be trouble. He wasn’t taking any chances.”
    “So what was the plan?” continued Rotherstein. “You were going to ask Mr. Cooper…sorry, Stirling to accompany this friend of yours back to New York City so that he could apply pressure to Julian Marshall?”
    “I was going to deliver him to you guys if Marshall didn’t pay up.”
    “That’s crap,” I said. “It was a hit.”
    Rotherstein silenced me with a look. “You took control of the mission at this point, Mr. Ferrari?”
    “Yeah.”
    “And what happened?”

    “You know what happened. Stagg nearly killed my guy.”
    “Indeed.”
    “And we lost them somewhere in the mountains.”
    “You expect us to believe that you managed to track Major Stagg to Buffalo?”
    Ferrari laughed. “Hey—that was the easy part. You were careless, Stagg.”
    I went over the journey in my mind—Kenny and Pete the Cop in the woods, Bill and Hank in the gas station bathroom, our final stop in Buffalo. Who had betrayed us?
    “You picked Stirling up in Buffalo and took him directly to the warehouse in Trenton, New Jersey?”
    “Marshall had disappeared. Nobody knew where he was. I had to keep Stirling safe.”
    “I wouldn’t say he was safe with you, Mr. Ferrari. Not judging by the condition in which Major Stagg found him.”
    “We were going to hide up there until we knew where Marshall was. The warehouse…”
    “Belongs to your cousin. We know.”
    “No one at Marshall Land knew where he was. The offices were closed. Time was running out.”
    “So why didn’t you put the whole matter into the hands of the police?”
    “Don’t be stupid, man.”
    Rotherstein raised his eyebrows by an eighth of an inch. He obviously didn’t