The inland blizzards had been blown away when they reached the coastline of the lake. Now a knife-blade wind was slicing in off Lake Erie, shredding the clouds and smearing them across a pallid blue-gray sky. Luke was standing in the window of the U.S. Marshals office in the federal building, watching the snow clouds being torn apart. To his right and left, the stone and red-brick towers and blocks of downtown Buffalo, the venerable Statler, and the concrete municipal buildings, rose above the flat, ragtag, slightly scruffy woodframe neighborhoods to the south and west. Beyond them he could see the broad white-capped sweep of Lake Erie. Far to the west, across the Niagara River and the clunky gunmetal shabbiness of the Peace Bridge, he could make out the gray masses of Fort Erie, Ontario. Across the river lay Canada.
The end of the trail.
This afternoon, the surface of Lake Erie was mud brown with white peaks of waves showing, and winds were sweeping over it, shadowing it, ruffling the water surface, changing the tints. Here and there over the peninsula of western New York State, shafts of sunlight pierced through the clouds, some of them reaching the lake, creating vivid blue-green bruises on the brown back of the lake, with streaks of yellow and green showing where the currents began to tug the lake water down into the narrow gates of the Niagara River.
This was a kind of Hell’s Gate, the southern entrance to a long twisting river channel at times a mile wide, the beginning of a gathering headlong torrent of wind-whipped blue-brown water that boiled and fumed and churned between the banks, that flowed and foamed over rocks and outcrops, gathering force and speed, sweeping in two huge bends around the low grassy delta of Grand Island, joining again beyond Navy Island, where they became a mile-wide force of nature, a millrace rushing northward toward the three-hundred-foot ledge of Niagara Falls.
If he could lean way out, he would have been able to see a column of white steam rising above the gorge, more than twenty miles away. Over the twin falls, Horseshoe and Niagara, the water ran glassy green at the crest, and then lacy and white, roaring and booming, falling into a maelstrom of fumes and white foaming water, a cauldron over a fire.
Luke had been told that the falls were slowly working their way southward toward the city of Buffalo, part of a fifteen-million-year grinding destruction. Beyond the falls the Niagara Gorge, with granite walls a hundred feet on each side, channeled the river into a boiling white-water race that ran all the way to Lewiston and beyond, spilling finally out into the flat shallow expanse of Lake Ontario. Toronto was far up that flat featureless coastline. There were towers and observation decks all around the canyon of Niagara Falls where, if the weather was clear, you could see all the way from Buffalo to the distant yellow-brown smudge of Toronto, see the single spear-point of the CN Tower like a pin in a moth’s spine.
“Hell of a view,” said Rico, leaning back in his chair, puffing on a cheroot. The smell of it was strong and sweet, a little like burning wood and a little like sandalwood incense. He was at ease, alert, but untroubled.
Luke stepped away from the window and sat down at the long wooden table. They were in a kind of meeting room at the Western District headquarters of the Marshals Service. Walt Rich was down the hall in the computer room, talking to the Canadian Customs and Immigration guardpost at Cornwall, Ontario.
Grizzly Dalton was holding down a large leather wing-back at the head of the boardroom table, his boots up on the polished wood, his beefy arms folded across his shirt. Everyone was in somber business suits today. As soon as Walt Rich came back into the room, they would begin.
Until then, there wasn’t much to say.
The chase part of the operation had ended the night before, with the capture of Reo Dysart in a tiny little speakeasy called Busters Bar ’N Grill. Busters was built into what had once been a small woodframed family bungalow in a scrubby low-rent part of South Buffalo, a neglected neighborhood of ragged brown lawns and sagging porches, dead trees, rotting timbers, and peeling paint, rusted cars sitting out front, and deserted warehouse buildings, abandoned schools and pitted playgrounds overgrown with weeds, bound up like toxic waste dumps inside rusted chain-link fencing. Newt Gingrich should have been there, because this was the part of the nation where whatever it was that was supposed to trickle down during the eighties had finally pooled up and spread itself out.
The area had a Dirty Thirties look to it, although it had once, in the fifties, been a happy, prosperous region. Then the steel trade died, and Buffalo sank a long way, taking most of the people with it. Now the area was a rathole maze of gangbangers, drunks, welfare cheats, and a few struggling families trying to get by on food stamps, pickup work, and some low-level drug dealing.
Reo Dysart, wanted for murder and gang-related gun charges, had been snitched out by a local dealer in exchange for some slack from the local DA. He was supposed to be living somewhere nearby, with a young woman and her four kids.
But according to the snitch, he drank every night at Busters.
When they had walked into Busters last night at seven, the little bar had been jumping with young black men playing video games or sitting around at rickety kitchen tables drinking Miller and Schlitz and Genesee beer. When four white men in long gray dusters walked into the place, the bar took on a very Old West atmosphere.
Naturally, Grizzly loved this.
He dropped into his Wyatt Earp number, swaggered across the creaking wooden floor of the bar, slapped his hand down on the sticky countertop, fixed the sullen gray-bearded black man behind the bar with a bright-eyed glare.
“Red Eye, my good man,” he said, “And a sarsaparilla for my boys. Three straws.”
The bartender didn’t smile.
“You the Man, hah?”
Grizzly looked disappointed at the man’s unwillingness to play along. This was, in his opinion, the major drawback with your criminal elements. They had no sense of humor.
He let the weight of his disappointment slowly drag his face down into a stony flat stare. He opened the duster and let the man see his black U.S. Marshals T-shirt. And his sidearm. Then he pulled his gold U.S. Marshals Service star out of his coat pocket and clipped it onto the webbing of his raid-gear belt. It was a very old routine, but Grizzly had the physical presence to make it work. Even without the Stetson.
Nobody was laughing.
Luke and Rico took up a position by the front and rear doors. Walt Rich strolled over to study the banks of video games. The customers sat quietly, staring at their hands. The dim little room smelled of flat beer, and fried food, and sweat. A Genesee beer sign blinked at them from behind the bar, cycling through reds and yellows and greens, changing the tint in the heavy smoke-filled air every twenty-three seconds.
Grizzly nodded.
“Yes, I am. We are the law in these parts. I’m Marshal Dalton, these here are my boys, Luke, Walt, and Mexican Bill.”
He pulled out a picture of Reo Dysart, laid it carefully down on the bar top, spreading it out like a poker hand. The old man didn’t even look at it. He never took his eyes off Grizzly’s face.
“Never seen him.”
Grizzly shook his head sadly.
“Well, that’s a poser, you know? Because one of your sepia-hued brethren here telegraphed us a while back, said Mr. Dysart was known to frequent your establishment, was known to partake of the fellowship, and whatnot, in these here parts. It would … grieve me, sir, it would trouble me deeply, were I to discover that a fine upstanding citizen such as yourself might be misleading the forces of goodness and truth hereabouts—”
Walt Rich called out to Grizzly.
“Ahh, Marshal, got a minute?”
Grizzly turned and looked at Walt. He went to stand next to him in front of a large blinking video game called Mortal Kombat. The screen was shifting through a series of come-on images, urging the customer to drop his quarters and play a few rounds. Walt and Grizzly waited until the screen blinked a few more times. Luke and Rico watched everything and everyone in the room, saying nothing. Finally, the video game reached the screen that showed a list of the Top Ten Fighters of the Day. Each player was supposed to identify himself with three initials. The top ten screen for that day showed a column of white letters down the bright blue screen.
REO
REO
REO
REO
GRG
REO
REO
GRG
REO
REO
Grizzly stared at it for a second. He smiled at Walt, who was beaming back at him. Then he turned around and walked heavily back to the bartender, sorrow and regret in every line of his big body.
“Sir,” he said, reaching for the man’s shirt, gathering it in, “I believe—”
The man’s eyes flicked left. A brown flash burst out of a door marked Ladies, a large young black man in baggy black hip-hop jeans, bare-chested, a Knicks cap backward on his head. He went straight at the front door.
Luke, Grizzly, Rico, and Walt all moved at once. The customers were on their feet, chairs flying. Luke pulled out his Taurus, covered the room, Rico was on the man’s heels, and then Walt stepped into the running man, swinging his black Mag-Lite.
It caught Reo Dysart on the right cheekbone, a full-armed swing, as if the Mag had been a bat and Reo’s head a spitball slider. Luke saw Reo’s head snap back, saw him run literally out from under himself, saw the top of his head as the Knicks cap flew off, saw the bare back connect with the dirty wooden floor, bounce once.
A large butterfly knife flipped out of his slack fist and flew across the room to stop by one of Grizzly Dalton’s boots. Grizzly bent over and picked it up. He turned, jammed it four inches deep into the bar top, in between the bartender’s spread hands. The man jumped back.
Grizzly shook his head.
“You disappoint me, sir.”
That had been it, roughly, for the preplanned section of their fugitive operations for January. They finished up the paperwork over the Sunday evening, sitting together at a Buffalo taproom called the Boar’s Head, a long saloon-style room with glass lanterns and wooden booths, just around the corner from the service HQ. Out in the street a few flakes of snow blew by the stained-glass windows, and the rare pedestrian stumbled past, wrapped tight against the cold winds off the lake.
When they finished, Rico had said, “Now what?”
He was looking at Luke.
“I think you know,” said Luke.
Grizzly held up a big paw, glared them into silence.
“Not tonight. Tomorrow, boys. Right now, I would like to propose a toast. Charge your goblets, my friends.”
They all did, the golden ale foaming up in large frosted-glass mugs. Grizzly lifted his glass, the yellow light shining down on his lined leathery face, his large mustache wet with foam, his cheeks glowing.
“Absent friends,” was all he said.
“Absent friends,” they repeated, each man remembering a different name. Luke was remembering a New Jersey jail cell. They settled down to work their way through a few other toasts—Bill Degan, Hillary Clinton, most of the Earps, Matt Dillon.
Grizzly Dalton’s cell phone rang around midnight that evening.
It was Wendy Ma, and she wanted to talk to Luke Zitto.
“Now?” Grizzly asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Right now.”