Eileen's red hair was the beacon.
Kling, scanning the street from a vantage point diagonally across from the bar, was the second detective to spot them.
The street was dark where he waited in the shadow of an abandoned tool works, the lamp post globe shattered, but the woman was unmistakably Eileen. Never mind the red hair, he'd have known her if she was wearing a blonde wig. Knew every nuance of her walk, the long stride, the swing of her shoulders, the rhythmic jiggle of her buttocks. He was about to move out, cross the street and fall in behind them, when he saw Annie.
Good, he thought, she's in place.
He stayed on the opposite side of the street, ten feet behind Annie who was working hard to keep up without showing herself. Eileen and the guy were walking very fast, up toward the traffic light on the corner, which changed now, throwing a green wash onto the roadway. The formation could have been a classic tailing triangle mdash;one cop behind the quarry, another cop ahead of them on the same side of the street, a third cop on the opposite side of the street mdash;except that it was lacking the third cop.
Or so Kling thought.
Shanahan was the third cop.
He had been tailing Kling from the moment he'd spotted him peering through the plate-glass window of the bar. Pacing the street impatiently, always circling back to the bar, checking out the front door from across the street, then drifting off again, and back again, behaving very much like a person waiting for somebody to come out of there. When Eileen finally came out of the bar with asecond blond guy, Shanahan's blond took off after them. Annie was up ahead, she had Eileen andher blond covered and in sight. But this other blond guy was still showing too much interest. Shanahan gave him a lead, and then fell in behind him again.
Up ahead, Eileen and her blond turned left at the traffic light, and disappeared around the corner.
Shanahan's blond hesitated only a moment.
Seemed undecided whether to make his move or not.
Then he pulled a gun and started across the street.
Annie recognized Kling at once.
He had a gun in his hand.
She didn't know whether she was more surprised by his presence here or by the gun in his hand. Too many thoughts clicked through her mind in the next three seconds. She thought He's going to blow it, the guy hasn't made his move yet. She thought Does Eileen know he's here? She thought mdash;
But Eileen and her man were already around the corner and out of sight.
"Bert!" she shouted.
And in that instant Shanahan came thundering up yelling, "Stop! Police!"
Kling turned to see a man pointing an arm in a plaster cast at him.
He turned the other way and saw Annie running across the street.
"Mike!" Annie shouted.
Shanahan stopped dead in his tracks. Annie was waving her arms at him like a traffic cop.
"He's on the job!" she shouted.
Shanahan had earlier told Eileen that he and Lou Alvarez were just full of tricks. He hadn't realized, however, that Alvarez had sent another man to the Zone without telling him about it. That tricky, he didn't think Alvarez was. Shanahan's own little trick was a .32 revolver in his right hand, his finger inside the trigger guard, the gun and the hand encased in the plaster cast. He felt like an asshole now, the plaster cast still pointed at a guy Annie had just identified as a cop.
The realization came to all three of them in the same instant.
The traffic light on the corner turned red again as though signaling the coming of their mutual dawn.
Without a word, they looked up the street.
It was empty.
Eileen and her man were gone.
A minute ago, she'd had three backups.
Now she didn't have any.
Dolores Eisenberg was Frank Sebastiani's older sister.
Five-feet ten-inches tall, black hair and blue eyes, thirty-eight, thirty-nine years old. Hugging Marie to her when Brown and Hawes came over from the garage. Tears in the eyes of both women.
Marie introduced her to the cops.
Dolores seemed surprised to see them there.
"How do you do?" she said, and glanced at Marie.
"We're sorry for your trouble," Brown said.
An old Irish expression. Hawes wondered where he'd picked it up.
Dolores said, "Thank you," and then turned to Marie again.
"I'm sorry it took me so long to get here," she said. "Max is in Cincinnati, and I had to find a sitter. God, wait'll he hears this. He's crazy about Frank."
"I know," Marie said.
"I'll have to call him again," Dolores said. "When Mom told me what happened, I tried to reach him at the hotel, but he was out. What time was that, when you called Mom?"