What Sergei Knows

“When are they coming here?” I say.

“They are here. Tore apart the Lincoln,” Sergei says.

“Have they gotten to your place?”

“No,” he says. “Frank Carr have your address. My phone.”

But it won’t be long, if they’re asking around the Lincoln, until they add up some easy math and come to Sergei. We need to get Maggot Arm Joe, who’s back at Sergei’s working on names, and we need the computers and we need to leave.

One day. If we’d just been able to get a list to Harry Fudge yesterday, just yesterday, Mr. Frank Carr would be dead in Harry Fudge’s pool and the FBI would be doing whatever they do. We fucked up.

The street is swimming in people headed down to the beach. People carrying chairs and families with kids and nothing but noise and motion going that one way down to the beach and down to the marina. You can lose your footing, get carried by other people’s bodies, and it becomes frighteningly obvious how those people die in soccer crowds, how those eleven people were crushed under human feet at the gates at that Who concert in Cincinnati.

I shake my head.

Sergei says, “Bad.”

I nod.

“We go away. They not find us.”

I look at the mob tromping by outside and wonder if we can get there in time, but then I remember that this is my town and I might know a shortcut or two that the FBI might not know.