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to get to the van, which was parked out behind the pool house, Garza’s Snow Removal emblazoned on its plain white side. Floor it down the delivery driveway, which Tina on the small rent-a-tractor, posing as scheduledmaintenance after a snowfall, would have cleared by now, out through the side gates before the goons could summon the brainpower to lock it down, then onto the expressway and away.
    With one and a half million dollars in untraceable cash. Worth it? Absolutely.
    “Yeah, a favor. Doing ten to twenty beats being shot in the head,” the cop replied, echoing his own guess as to the time he was facing if the legal system got involved. “These guys don’t mess around.”
    “Get in the safe.”
    “You know you’re not going to get away with this.” She stumbled, supposedly on the ruffle of loose papers littering the floor, which, since they hadn’t been there before, had to have spilled from the burst suitcase, and “fell” to her knees maybe a foot shy of the threshold. A delaying tactic, which wasn’t going to work.
    “Get up.” His tone was deliberately brutal. There hadn’t been anything in the advance work that would have indicated something might have been in the suitcases besides cash, but it didn’t really matter: whatever else Marino might be sitting on, Jason, Jelly and Tina had no interest.
    “I don’t believe it.” She was still on her knees, her voice scarcely louder than a whisper.
    “What?” When she didn’t move, but instead started spreading out the papers and really looking at them, he took a proactive role in speeding up the process by bending down and catching her by the elbow, with the intention of hauling her upright. Her arm felt almost fragile, which, when he remembered the fight she had put up, surprised him. She was very slender, her taut physique more that of a ballet dancer than an athlete. Maybe a hundred fifteen pounds soaking wet. Which was embarrassing, when he thought about it.
    “It was a lie,” she said.
    Even as he hauled her upright, she was still looking down.
    “What was?”
    A little unsettled by her attitude, he automatically glanced down, too, just to see what she was looking at so fixedly. The papers on the floor were pictures, he saw, eight- by-ten-inch photographs on ordinary typing paper that looked like they had been printed from a computer. He wouldn’t have spared them another thought if one of the faces hadn’t immediately leaped out at him: Edward Lightfoot, the city councilman who had shot his wife and two teenage daughters in their home just before Christmas, then turned the gun on himself. The story had been all over the news, a grim reminder of the holiday season’s dark side. But these pictures, even in the quick glance he allotted them, they told an entirely different tale. They showed a badly beaten Lightfoot tied to a chair in what looked like a basement. A gun was being held to his head. Jason didn’t recognize the gunman, who had been only partially captured by the camera, but he sure as hell recognized one of the men in the background: Nicco Marino. Another shot showed Lightfoot’s eyes closed and his brains exploding out through the back of his head: it clearly had been taken just as the gunman had pulled the trigger. A third was of Lightfoot after the deed had been done: slumped in the chair, a bullet hole—no, make that two bullet holes—in his forehead.
    Looked like someone on the scene with a cell phone had been busy taking pictures.
    “That’s Edward Lightfoot,” he said before he thought.
    “They killed him.” The cop sounded like she was barely breathing.
    “Marino and his goons do that. So what else is new? Start walking.”
    Her head slewed around and she glared at him. “That’s a lie!”
    Jason recovered his sense of what was important fast. “Don’t care. I said
start walking
. Get in the safe.”
    “Nicco Marino doesn’t murder people.”
    “Oh, yeah? Looks like murder to me.” When she still didn’t