As implausible as that sounded to him, it seemed to work for her. The door closed briefly, the chain was taken off, and Louisa Obregon let w.i.l.l.y in.

"What do you think happened?" she asked. "We were told it was an overdose."

"n.o.body I've talked to seems to think she was back on drugs. I'm not saying it couldn't have been that way, but it does make you wonder."

A little girl in a flowered dress and bunny slippers appeared from around the corner and hugged her mother's knee. Obregon spoke to her quickly in Spanish and the child disappeared. Moments later, they heard the sounds of music leaking in from farther back in the apartment.

"Mrs. Obregon," w.i.l.l.y said. "Could we sit down someplace? I'd like to ask you a few questions about Mary."

But Louisa Obregon stood her ground. "It is Miss Obregon, and there is nothing I can tell you. Mary was fine up to the last time I saw her. She was happy and normal."

"I understand her finances were pretty tight."

Obregon laughed harshly. "Everybody's finances are tight. She wasn't in worse shape than anybody else, and things were going to get better soon."

"How so?" w.i.l.l.y asked, remembering Bob's comment that Mary had been hoping to move soon.

But Obregon wasn't very helpful. "I don't know. Maybe it wasn't true. I say the same thing all the time, too. But she liked her job, and she said she wanted to go back to school to become a drug counselor."

w.i.l.l.y sensed a softness welling up behind her resistant exterior and worked to expand it. "I can see why. It sounds like the Re-Coop saved her life."

It was an educated shot in the dark, but a lucky one. Obregon's eyes glistened suddenly at his words and she nodded vigorously. "Hers and mine both. And by saving mine, Teresa's, too." She pointed to where the music could still be heard in the background. "Mary and I couldn't have made it without Rosalie and the others."

w.i.l.l.y smiled sympathetically. "Rosalie told me everyone calls you Loui. Is that okay? Could you tell me a little about Mary before she turned herself around? What she was up to, who she hung out with? Anything would help."

Louisa Obregon gave in finally and half turned on her heel. "Would you like to sit down in the living room? Sorry I was a little suspicious at first. I don't have a great history with cops, and they don't cut people like me a lot of slack."

w.i.l.l.y followed her into a small, cluttered, but pleasantly decorated room. The childish music they'd been listening to was coming from a next-door bedroom. "I'm an alcoholic, Loui, sober nine years now. I'm not most cops."

She glanced at him over her shoulder, observing the crippled arm. "I noticed that. Have a seat."

They settled down in opposite corners of a sofa, their legs crossed. Loui folded her hands in her lap and looked up at the ceiling briefly. "Okay: Mary before she turned things around..." She stopped, sighed, wiped under one eye, and faced him with a wan smile. "It's tough, you know? I've lost so many friends this way, to drugs, or AIDS, or that whole world. You try to go on, count yourself lucky, think back over that friendship, and make it less than it was. You try to make the hurt go away. But it doesn't really work. It all kind of piles up inside."

w.i.l.l.y nodded, but kept quiet, trusting Loui to get where he'd asked her to go in her own good time.

She did after taking a deep breath. "I don't know too much. We met when we were being treated at the ReCoop. But she told me things, kind of now and then. Maybe that'll help."

"Give it a shot," he encouraged her.

"Well, you know she was from Vermont, of course, somewhere way up north. She didn't talk much about that, but she did tell me her family and her had stopped talking, and that she'd had a s.h.i.tty marriage to some guy who abused her. He was a drunk, too," she added brightly, little knowing the accuracy of the comparison. "It was after she got divorced that she came down here."

"Why?" w.i.l.l.y interjected quickly.

"Why come here? I don't know. Bright city lights? She said she wanted to get away, make something of herself. I don't know too much else."

"There wasn't a guy?"

Loui Obregon smiled sadly. "There's always a guy, right?"

w.i.l.l.y retreated slightly. "Well, I didn't mean-"

But she cut him off with a wave of her hand. "No, no. You're right. I meant it. There always is a guy with women like us. We're like sheep. Rosalie tells us that all the time. Tells us to stand up on our own two feet."

Her eyes lost their focus as she stared off across the room. "But, you know, it's hard. Sleeping alone, sometimes with just a kid in your life. You get lonely. You want someone to put your arms around."

w.i.l.l.y compressed his lips slightly, uncomfortable with where this was heading. Gunther was good with s.h.i.t like this, and w.i.l.l.y could hold his own, but he hated it.

"What was the guy's name?" he asked.

She blinked once and looked at him. "His name? I don't know. I mean, there were a lot of them. I guess there were. She was a pretty lady. And fun, too."

"You met some of them?"

"Oh. Well. I met one...no, two men. I don't know if they were, you know, intimate or anything. After Mary started going to the Re-Coop, her life changed, see? So there was less of that. That's what I meant about Rosalie talking to us. It wasn't encouraged, like they say."

"You catch the names of these two men?"

But she shook her head. "No. It was something like Bill or Dave or Paul or something. Not a name to remember."

"How about Andy Liptak?" he asked, thinking back not only to his talk with Bob, but to how his brother's name fit the short, bland coterie she'd just recited. "He ever come up?"

"Not that I remember."

He tried steering her back on track, disappointed. "Okay. So, she's moved to the city to live her dream. She sees a lot of guys. What else? What does she do for a job?"

"Not much that I know. She said it was like back home, but worse: waitress jobs, counter work, taking s.h.i.t from other people all day and getting paid pennies."

"Where was she living then?"

"Brooklyn, mostly. Beats me where, exactly. She said she liked Brooklyn best, and that's why she lived there, so that's how I know."

"How'd she get into drugs?"

Loui's laugh was short and hard. "How'd you get into booze? Life stinks, you look for some relief. One thing leads to another."

w.i.l.l.y was growing irritated with the vagueness of her answers. Not a patient man by nature, he had to fight the constant urge to hurry things along, as if tarrying over a subject, or with another person, might get him caught out in the open.

"Specifically, though, do you have any names you can give me?"

She shook her head, suddenly angry, sensing his restlessness. "Cops. You don't care about Mary or me or anybody else. It's all about who your contact is. Making a bust. You treat us just like the people selling us junk."

w.i.l.l.y fought back the urge to agree with her. "Loui," he said instead, laying on the sincerity, "I know what it's like to be where you are. That's what drives me nuts. You fought your way back just like I did. I just want to keep going-getting the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds that're feeding off people like us. We all do what we can to hang on to something. You've got Teresa, Mary wanted to be a counselor. I go after the sc.u.mbags."

He paused, judging her reaction, pondering his actual motivations at the same time, as if standing outside himself and watching two strangers.

Loui apparently bought his line, because she confessed, "That's not how it works, at least not in this city. You know your own dealer, but you don't brag about him. They're like a secret you got to keep to yourself or it'll go away. And they do sometimes. If I got busted and they squeezed me for my supplier, if I had somebody else's name, I'd give them that, not my own guy. You protect your source, and you don't risk it by talking about it."

w.i.l.l.y couldn't argue the logic, but he was still getting nowhere. He decided to help himself out by changing subjects slightly, defusing his own tension. "The ReCoop. They find you or you find them?"

"Both, kind of. They have ads around and people refer you to them. I got told about them by my priest."

"Fancy place, though. Doesn't look like the standard city services fare. They charge you anything?"

"No, no. It's privately supported-some foundation."

w.i.l.l.y was surprised. "One foundation? What's it called?"

"Like the place itself: the Re-Coop Foundation."

"You ever met anyone from it?"

"No. You'd have to ask Rosalie. She's the only one who deals with them."

w.i.l.l.y scratched his head. "Aren't they swamped, though? An upscale free clinic in a p.i.s.shole area like this? What's the catch?"

She shrugged. "I only volunteer there a few hours a week, sort of to pay back, you know? I couldn't tell you. There is an interview process. I don't think a ton of people make it through that."

w.i.l.l.y couldn't repress a sneer. "Right, and then they probably brag about how good their numbers are, since they screen their patients from the start. What a scam."

Once again, Louisa Obregon's face darkened. "What do you know? I was real sick when I went there, and so was Mary. They helped us out. Who cares if they don't take everybody? They work real hard on everybody they do take. Would you want to run a place like that and have to deal with all the psychos and slashers just because you let everybody in? Then n.o.body would be saved. They're good people and you don't know what you're talking about."

Perhaps lured by the tone of her mother's voice, young Teresa appeared in the doorway.

"Mama?" she asked.

Loui rose from her seat and comforted the child with a hug and some murmured comments w.i.l.l.y couldn't hear. From where she was squatting, Loui looked over her shoulder. "You should leave now. I told you all I know."

w.i.l.l.y got up also, feeling he'd dropped the ball. "I'm sorry," he admitted. "I lose sight of the good things sometimes. Maybe I've been at this too long."

Louisa straightened, sending her comforted daughter back to her room and escorting w.i.l.l.y back into the hallway. "It's okay. I wouldn't want to do what you do."

w.i.l.l.y tried one last question at the front door. "The reason I asked about the dealer earlier is that there was a bag of heroin next to Mary's body. It had a mark on it, a red devil. I was hoping you might know who sold that brand."

A crease appeared between her eyes. "I don't know about the brand, but you're wrong about it being heroin. Mary shot up speedb.a.l.l.s last."

w.i.l.l.y looked her straight in the eyes. "You're sure of that? No chance she changed or decided to experiment?"

But Louisa Obregon stood her ground. "No, she wouldn't. She used to shoot heroin, back in the old days, but before she kicked everything, she only did speedb.a.l.l.s. It was a thing with her, cutting the heroin with c.o.ke. She said she'd never do straight horse again."

Which made w.i.l.l.y wonder if in fact she had.

Chapter 7.

w.i.l.l.y Kunkle hadn't spoken with or seen Andy Liptak in over a decade. Close friends once, having met fresh off the plane in Vietnam, they'd actually been an unlikely pair from the start. For one thing, unusual in a military friendship, they weren't in the same unit. They'd b.u.mped into one another purely by chance, had immediately discovered their mutual New York backgrounds, and had hit it off before being pipelined to their final a.s.signments: Andy to a supply company, and w.i.l.l.y to the closest thing that bizarre war ever had resembling a front line-or, in his case, beyond it. During their time in country, they kept in touch, spent their off-duty time together, and bonded over the standard fare of overpriced alcohol and underage women. The fact that they endured utterly different experiences in the war both helped keep their connection alive while they served and explained its erosion afterward. What to w.i.l.l.y turned out to be a crucible of cruelty, violence, fear, and loss had amounted to little more than an interesting stint in an overseas warehouse to Andy, even though all this occurred during the war's chaotic waning days. The contrasting aftereffects were predictably undermining to a relationship based primarily on escapism.

And that didn't even factor in Mary.

w.i.l.l.y had brought Mary to the city shortly after their marriage, largely as a gift to her. It had been her first trip outside of Vermont, not counting a few quick illegal border crossings into Canada to get booze during her youth, and she'd been predictably overwhelmed by both New York's vast, flat expanse and the millions of people inhabiting it. Beginning the trip shy and intimidated, she'd ended up loving the twenty-four-hour vitality and diversity of the place.

Meeting Andy Liptak had merely been part of the schedule, and at the time not something of any great significance. Andy had been gregarious as always, but with a newfound man-on-the-make charmer's sheen that had encouraged w.i.l.l.y in his belief that some memories, and most people, were best left in the past. Liptak had hit the ground running back in New York, using his contacts and entrepreneurial savvy to start up a variety of businesses, and he'd developed into the sort of man w.i.l.l.y had come to loathe, all the more so in this case since Andy had survived Vietnam without a scratch, while w.i.l.l.y, as in a psychological dress rehearsal to the eventual loss of his left arm, had been crippled forever.

After Mary and w.i.l.l.y had returned home, therefore, he'd been disappointed by how impressed she'd been by the very man he'd wished they hadn't visited. As he saw it, she'd fallen prey to all the superficial trappings and mannerisms that merely advertise such people as flagrant phonies.

Not that he was qualified to pa.s.s judgment. In the end, drinking hard, increasingly abusive, and hanging on to his job only through Gunther's resented good graces, w.i.l.l.y Kunkle eventually understood that he was functioning as deviously as he'd ever done in the jungle, but with only a fraction of his former skill. His earlier, shortlived pretense in showing an interest in Mary, in what she was doing, and in sharing a life with her, all fell prey to his own toboggan ride straight to the bottom of selfindulgent despair.

Before the final crash, however, he'd acceded to their seeing Andy Liptak again during a couple of the latter's ski vacations to Vermont. It didn't go well. Mary betrayed how taken she was with Andy's world and its trappings, and w.i.l.l.y was all but incapable of hiding his contempt. Traditional jealousy never played a part, and in fact Andy was perfectly behaved throughout, but it didn't matter, given the rift following the last of Andy's visits. Later, after the divorce, w.i.l.l.y had heard that his ex-wife and Andy had linked up in New York, and in a rare moment of lucidity he'd conceded both the logic and the suitability of the match. At the time, he'd thought that Mary might have even found happiness at last.

Which now served to remind him of how wrong he could be.

On the phone, Andy had sounded only surprised and pleased to hear that w.i.l.l.y was in town, and quickly suggested they meet over dinner at Peter Luger's, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. Mary's name didn't come up.

Luger's is tucked away in a typically eccentric Brooklyn corner, close to the looming Erector Set span of the Williamsburg Bridge, and right across the East River from Manhattan's Lower East Side, the Seventh Precinct, and Mary's apartment. w.i.l.l.y knew that Andy lived somewhere near Brooklyn Heights, across the sprawling old Brooklyn Navy Yard from Williamsburg, but the coincidence was curious.

He got off the Marcy Avenue subway stop, having stashed his car earlier in an open-air lot near Bellevue Hospital, and doubled back, heading toward the riverbank and the darker, grittier buildings there.

Despite the buffed, shiny, man-made glory of Manhattan's skyline, poking up above the run-down buildings before him, w.i.l.l.y had always been attracted to New York's older, seamier neighborhoods, many of which lined the rivers that had once functioned as commercial arteries and made of the city a world-cla.s.s port.

New York was still a large port, of course, but not to the standard of its heyday, when every inch of its almost six hundred miles of sh.o.r.eline was lined with a pier, a dock, a warehouse, or some other shipping facility. As he neared the restaurant, he noticed, here as in so many other places, that the streets were often paved over cobblestones, and sported traces of the short rail lines that had once run between the loading docks and the storage houses.

Now most of that muscle was atrophied-empty, soiled, quiet, and awaiting someone or something with enough money to either destroy it, turn it into condos, or revitalize it commercially. Huge deserted lots lay pinned between the water and the metal fencing put up to hide them from view, and grimy, hulking, factory-style buildings, incongruously detailed here and there with quaint architectural flourishes, sat as if in suspended animation, pending the proper financial kiss to bring them back to life.

Or maybe not.

w.i.l.l.y crossed the intersection, noting a cl.u.s.ter of SUVs, limos, and high-priced cars parked like a circling of frightened upper-cla.s.s wagons, and entered Peter Luger's front door, blinking to adjust his eyes as he walked straight into the long, crowded bar. The smell of food and beer commingled with a steady rumble of conversation, adding warmth to a setting that he found surprisingly lacking in decor. Aside from the finely worked pressed-tin ceiling overhead, the rest of the place was almost drab.

A shadow separated itself from the crowd before him, still looking like a wrestler in shape and size, but gone adrift around the middle. "Holy Christ. If it ain't the Sniper."

Andy Liptak shook his hand, both smiling and solicitous. "I heard about the arm. I couldn't believe it, after all you went through in 'Nam. Some raw deal. You want a drink?"

His eyes now focused, w.i.l.l.y looked into the face of his old friend, wondering about the depth-or the truth- of his ignorance. "I'm on the wagon," he answered, reflecting also on the use of his old nickname-the Sniper. Serving as such had been just one of his official functions in Vietnam. But his machinelike technique, his remote demeanor, and the way others treated him had all earned him the t.i.tle. Snipers were outsiders, despised by the enemy and usually shunned as cold killers by their own. At the time, he'd enjoyed the distinction. Now it embarra.s.sed him.

Andy didn't falter, giving w.i.l.l.y's good arm a squeeze. "That's really great. I wish I had the discipline. Come on back. I got a nice table reserved."

He led the way through the back of the bar and around a corner to a large, open dining room sprinkled with a haphazard collection of tables and chairs. He took w.i.l.l.y to a corner near the windows where the noise seemed less and the mood more intimate.

"Here we are," he said, the affable host. "Have a seat."

w.i.l.l.y slid into his chair, thinking back to when the two of them, dressed in sweat-stained tropical khakis, their faces sheening in the heat, would share beer after beer in noisy, hot dives with names they couldn't p.r.o.nounce or remember, hoping to find in each other's company some touchstone of a home far away in time and place.

That necessity now having been removed, w.i.l.l.y wondered what he'd ever seen in this man.

Andy seemed to pick up on his thoughts, cupping his cheek in his hand and staring at w.i.l.l.y with a faint smile on his face. "Asking yourself how we got here?"