Silent Prey

"Christ, Lily… Lily, if you told me anything about O'Dell or Petty… it was by-product. I wasn't sleeping with you to get information. Jesus, Lily…"

"Shut up," Lily said. She reached overhead and pulled the chain on the backstay light and they were plunged into the dark again. "I want to know some shit. We've got Jeese and Clemson, Davenport got them, and we know about Copland…"

"I knew Davenport was dangerous," Ke

"Is that why your guys tried to beat him up, instead of just whacking him?"

Ke

"They were lucky," Lily said. "Why didn't you try again?"

Ke

"Not completely. It was Davenport who found Bekker, 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," Ke

"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?"

Ke

"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," Ke

"That's what happens when you lose," Lily said, her voice like ice.

"We were doing right," Ke

"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."

Ke

"I'm the cunt," Lily said. "I'm the one you rolled for information."

"Fuck you, then," Ke

"I've got another question before I go."

"What?"

"Why Walt?"

Ke

"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 Manhattan glittering 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 can't make that decision."

"Sure I can. And somebody has to," Ke

"How many were there?"

He shook his head. "You don't need to know. But that's why."

"That's why you shot Petty? So we'd have a garden spot?"

Ke

"I know."

His eyebrows went up. "You know?"

"Davenport found the kid who supposedly saw you. Found him in Charleston and broke him down. He knows it was phony."

Ke

"How about the others? Waites was a loudmouth, but…"

"They nurtured it, the festering. My God, look over there, look at that city, think what it could be…"

She looked across the water at the twinkling lights, like the lights of the Milky Way, seen large. "And you sold it out. And used me like a fucking Kleenex."

"Bullshit," he said. His face was getting red.

"When Walt was killed, I came over here and cried on your shoulder, and you took care of all the arrangements and patted me on the head and took me down below and made love to me, comforting me. I can't believe I did it."

"Yeah, well…"

"Well, what?"

"That's life." His teeth were clenched. "Now, go on, Lily, get the hell out of here."

Lily stood, took a step toward the dock. Then another step, toward Ke

"What…" Ke

She hit him, open-handed, hard: a slap that almost knocked him down. He took a step toward her, hand on his face, and caught her arm. "Lily, dammit!"

"Let go of me," she said. She tried to pull away, but he held on, and for a moment, they struggled together, his face getting redder; then suddenly, he pinched his shoulders and let his hand drop away.

He turned, seeming to crouch, then went to his knees. "Oh, Jesus," he gasped. "Lily… in my bag, down below…"