Crow had passed the rest of the afternoon on the rooftop of Cheong Sammy’s Chinese restaurant, across the street from Quality Industrial Cleaners, watching the green van and the office window, waiting for the cops to arrive and go through the place. The van was thoroughly wiped clean, as was the little office space where he had spent the last few days, the bathroom where he had shaved and bathed, and the tiny cooking area where he had brewed his tea and fried his tortillas.
The brutal heat of the afternoon had climbed like a lake of lava, crested, approached a furnacelike blast of heat, and then gradually subsided, declined during the evening. Now, at ten o’clock, it was merely fetid, stale, and damp, and shreds of improbable mist circled the streetlights. He had stayed perfectly still through all of these hours, his little canvas bag full of cash on the tarry roof beside him, the hatchet resting inside it on a pile of fresh bills, wrapped in a deerskin chamois.
Someone in the restaurant was trying to grow herbs up here. There was a large green plastic tub shaped like a turtle, full of black earth. A few pale green shoots had struggled up above the soil, but birds had been at them and most of them were shredded and browning into death. Once, around six, an ancient Chinese man, bent and wrinkled as a troll, wearing a stained white apron over a pair of baggy gray pants, a filthy once-white undershirt barely covering his skeletal chest and spindly arms, had shuffled out onto the roof and stood for a while at the edge, puffing on a limp cigarette and staring out over the massed rooftops and tenements of the city.
Crow, motionless, had watched him from the shadows under the overhang. The old man had urinated as he stood there, spraying a pale golden waterfall down into the street below. Crow watched his thin shoulders shaking as if some ripple of amusement rattled his old bones.
He had turned then, to go back down the stairs, and stopped short when he saw Crow in the shadows. His face was a pinched network of wrinkles and sagging brown flesh, but his eyes were narrow and bright. He grinned at Crow, his mouth a twisted slit showing blackened teeth and wide gaps of gum line. Crow had not moved or registered his presence in any way. The old man shrugged, turned, leaned over, and spat a solid greenish wad out onto the baking tile roof. Crow could feel no fear in the man.
He realized there was nothing he could take from this man that the man would be sorry to lose. He found himself smiling back at the old man. The man cackled then and said something in a high fluid dialect, cackled again, and shuffled his way back to the open door of the fire stairs. He didn’t look back and was gone like a ferret ducking back into a hole.
Crow settled back into stillness.
Joey Rag was now either dead or puking up the contents of his soul for a room filled with federal agents. It had been difficult to see exactly what had happened after Joey Rag had reached Rona. Crow had watched it happen through one of the big side mirrors on the delivery van—Rona’s slender body, and the lumpy waddling form of Joey Rag closing the distance. Then a redheaded woman had begun shouting, more men came from cars and from the green lawn in front of the big white needle, one of them a white-haired man in a baggy brown suit. Joey Rag and Rona were inside the closing circle of shouting men and women, Crow’s vision blocked by the backs of these people, men with guns out. Then shots, as loud as the sound of that black cop banging on the side of the green van. Crow had the van moving the moment they sounded, knowing what was happening. It was time to roll away down the treelined street, roll quietly into the traffic, lose himself in the grids and cross streets of the urban warren to the north. No one tried to stop him, no running men in well-cut suits jumped out of the doorways as he was passing. Therefore he was not part of the plan, he was not inside the trap. Which meant the men had been watching Paolo Rona, not Joey Rag. They had taken the bait when Joey showed that little gun.
That sad little empty gun.
Joey Rag was not a professional, not even a good watcher. Anyone with any craft at all would have felt the weight of that piece and known that it was empty. A brave man would have worked the slide and looked at the chamber, looked up into Crow’s cold eyes, and seen what was planned.
But Joey was none of those things. To be of use in these times called for more than a willingness to stuff bits of toweling down a hooker’s throat. He was only good enough for the part he had played, a part they had agreed to back in Atlanta. Crow had asked them if Joey Rag was expendable, but it had been a formality, a courtesy, because there was no one who was not expendable. Already, someone was on the way from Atlanta to take over the business.
For now, there was nothing to do but wait, watch, and see who arrived at the cleaning plant across the street. All of this had become inevitable when Joey Rag had given that black sergeant—CULLEN was the name in white carved letters on the man’s black plastic name tag—when Joey had given him his card, like any fool citizen, like a simpering subservient clown. From that moment on, Crow had known he would kill him, or use him.
And now he knew that Rona was being watched.
Rona was a very street-smart man. That was his reputation, that was how he had been described in Atlanta, how he had been reported by Guillermo Barra’s representatives. Either he had walked, like a fool, into a police trap—or he knew, and his plan was to lure Crow into that same trap. Crow did not think Paolo Rona was a fool.
Maybe Rona was dead too.
Maybe not.
Crow would wait. To wait, that was why he had been sent here. To wait and find out. To ask questions, yes, when the time came.
But now the waiting was all.
The waiting was enough.