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sweating.
    “Okay.” Thorny folded down the corner of the page and put the book in his raincoat pocket. “First, let’s just ask him for the fuckin’ bookbag. Polite …”
    “Right.” Ozzie opened the door and began the task of levering himself out of the cramped front seat.
    It didn’t go well.
    Right off the bat the kid saw them, recognized them. Ozzie’s rain hat caught on the roof of the car as he struggled upward; it rolled onto the sidewalk. Thorny had gotten around the car and was standing on the sidewalk, between the kid and the front lawn of his parents’ house.
    “Bill Davis?” Thorny inquired politely. “Excuse me, Bill—”
    “You guys!” Bill Davis stood still. “Who the hell are you guys? I’ve been seeing you all day …”
    Ozzie had retrieved his hat, stood up feeling the weight of the pliers in his coat pocket. Pliers weren’t going to be worth a good goddamn tonight. His head ached, he hated the taste of the cherried tobacco. He focused on the boy.
    “Look, son,” Thorny said, taking a step toward the kid. “Listen to me very carefully, son. We’re police officers … we’ve got to have a word with you, Bill.”
    “About what?” Bill backed off warily.
    “About your bookbag,” Ozzie said. He was upright, rain hat jammed down on his large round head. Smartass Harvard kid … fairy …
    “Goddamn it, I knew it!” Bill peered through the gloom at the two men. “But why? What the hell do the police—”
    Thorny moved closer: “We’ve got to have your bookbag, son … we need your cooperation.” He reached for the bookbag, calmly, slowly, anything to keep Ozzie from losing his grip. “Be reasonable, son.”
    “All I’ve got is some magazines, creepo—”
    “Come on, son. Just hand it over—”
    Bill Davis assumed a karate stance: “Don’t fuck with me, asshole! I’ll break your goddamned neck!”
    “You’re not going to give us the bag, right?” Ozzie loomed behind Thorny. “Am I right, Bill?” Ozzie’s deep voice was toneless: he stood quietly, one hand jiggling in his raincoat pocket.
    “You bet your ass. Buy your own goddamn Penthouse …” He began to edge onto the lawn, his hands raised like chopping devices. Lunatics on the streets of Brookline, for God’s sake.
    “Shit,” Thorny said. “Don’t be stupid, there’s no point—”
    Ozzie took an automatic equipped with a screw-on silencer from the quivering pocket and shot Bill Davis in the heart. As the boy fell backward the second bullet caught him in the side of the head, blowing him sideways into the grass. He went down on his face, dead. Ozzie wrenched the bookbag from his limp hand. He scowled at Thorny: “Nothing’s ever easy …” Thorny watched, frozen, too slow to have done anything to stop it. Christ … he needed a drink.
    The street was still deserted, low ground fog appearing like instant shrubbery. They got back into the Pinto and drove slowly away. The street was still. In the car, Thorny couldn’t think of anything to say and Ozzie wore a mask of satisfaction, fingers rhythmically tightening on the pliers in his pocket. Sometimes the pliers took too long …
    “The fact is, Thorny old pal, you fucked up.”
    They sat in the all-night cafeteria. An ancient wino was mopping one corner of the long, narrow, white-tiled floor. Above, the fluorescent lights flickered aggravatingly. The floor was covered with tracked-in slush. In the back behind the counter, the man yelled, “Toast the English!” for the twentieth time in ten minutes. Thorny himself stared at his toasted English muffin.
    “You killed him,” he said disconsolately.
    “Harvard fairy bastard … You weren’t getting anywhere, that’s for damned sure.”
    “Well, I’m still sure it was in the bookbag. I’m positive. So he must have gotten rid of it after we lost him … but where?” He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles.
    “Don’t cry, Thorny,” Ozzie cautioned. “We’ll get it. Just like the old days,