Worst Fears Realized

said.
    “All right enough to answer an important question?”
    “Sure, I’m okay; what do you want to know?”
    “What I want to know is,where the hell did you get a gun? ” Dino demanded, his voice rising.
    Mary Ann looked away petulantly. “Daddy gave it to me.”
    “You took a gun from yourfather ?”
    Stone knew that Mary Ann’s father was an extremely well connected Italian gentleman of the old school with many business interests, licit and otherwise, and a wide acquaintance among people who owned guns.
    “Yes, I did,” she said, rounding on him. “I knewyou wouldn’t let me have one.”
    “Oh, swell,” Dino said. “And, knowing your father, I don’t suppose he bothered with the permitting process.”
    “As a matter of fact, he did bother,” Mary Ann replied. “The permit is in my purse, if you don’t believe me.”
    “Jesus, you’re lucky you didn’t shoot yourself. You’ve got no business with a gun.”
    “Listen, Dino, I go with Charlton Heston on this one, okay? And need I remind you that, if I hadn’t had the gun, I’d be lying down there in the street with a very big knife in me?”

    “All right, all right,” Dino said, seeing that he was not going to win this one. “Can you describe the man?”
    “Late thirties, early forties, small; I’d say five-seven. Wiry, and he had an Afro.”
    “He was black?”
    “No, but he had an Afro, kind of. Kind of a Jewish Afro.”
    “He was Jewish? How do you know that?”
    “No; I mean, that’s what we used to call it in high school, when a Jewish kid had that kind of kinky hair, you know?”
    “Did the guy look Jewish?”
    “Not particularly. His hair was dark, though, almost black.”
    “How was he dressed?”
    “He was wearing a raincoat, kind of new-looking, you know? Freshly pressed, no wrinkles.”
    “Anything else?”
    “No, the raincoat covered everything. It was single-breasted, not a trench coat; I remember that.”
    Detectives Anderson and Kelly arrived, then, and Dino brought them up-to-date. “Andy, you get on the phone and get out an APB for this guy. Get a bulletin out to all the hospitals in Manhattan to expect a guy answering the description to come in with a gunshot wound to the head, possibly to the left ear. Be sure and tell them he’s armed with a knife and to exercise extreme caution. I don’t want this guy cutting up a nurse.”
    Anderson went to the phone, while Kelly leaned against a wall, saying nothing.

    “Thank God the kid was in school,” Dino said. He wrote something on a pad, ripped it off, and handed it to the idle Kelly. “Get over there and pick up my kid at his school. That’s the address.” Kelly left. “Mary Ann, neither of you goes anywhere without a cop for a while.”
    “Oh, come on, Dino,” she replied. “The guy’s not coming back. No mugger is that stupid.”
    Dino looked at the floor. “You do like I tell you about this, you hear me?”
    Stone went and sat on the sofa next to her. “Mary Ann,” he said, “it’s not a mugger.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    He turned to Dino. “It’s our guy,” he said.
    “Yeah, I know,” Dino replied. “Worst fears realized.”

9
    KELLY RETURNED WITH DINO’S SON,Benedetto, a black-eyed six-year-old who looked like a tiny Sicilian prince, taking after his mother’s line. Dino dismissed Kelly, then gathered up the boy, sat him on his lap, and explained what had happened that afternoon.
    “Why don’t you just have the guy capped?” the child asked.
    Dino sighed and looked at Stone. “He spent the weekend with his grandfather.” He turned back to the boy. “Because, Ben, I am a police officer, and we don’t have guys capped. We arrest them and put them in jail, remember? Now you go and get washed up for dinner. Uncle Stone is going to join us.” The boy got down from his father’s lap and ran toward his room.
    “Thanks, I’d love to,” Stone said.
    Mary Ann excused herself and headed for the kitchen.

    “Come on into my study,” Dino said. “Let’s have a drink.”
    Stone followed Dino into the handsome little walnut-paneled room, where Dino produced Stone’s favorite bourbon and a scotch for himself. It was not the study or the apartment of a New York City police lieutenant, and the books on the shelves, mostly art history, history, and biography, revealed a broader Dino than most people knew.
    Stone knew that Dino’s father-in-law had acquired the apartment for his daughter in circumstances that were