Tuesday morning, Goodman makes Kelly bundle up, and they walk to Central Park. They enter at Ninetieth Street and circle the reservoir. It looks full from all the rain they’ve had lately. There’s ice at the very edges.

“Do people really drink this water?” Kelly asks him.

“I think so,” he says, though he’s not really sure. He remembers hearing that the city gets its water from upstate somewhere.

“It looks so yucky,” she says. “All those leaves and allergy.”

“Algae.”

“I like to call it allergy,” she says. “How come Carmen couldn’t come with us?”

“She’s got something she has to do.”

The thing Carmen has to do is to call her brother. Last night, after Goodman had broken his promise to himself and asked her about him, she’d naturally wanted to know why. So he’d started at the beginning: He’d told her about his discovery of the blue plastic bags in the spare tire down in Fort Lauderdale. He’d described his efforts to turn the drugs in, his decision to bring them to New York, his encounter with Russell, and the disaster in Carl Schurz Park. He’d also included the burglary of his apartment, and the search of it by the police later on. But he’d stopped short of telling her precisely how much heroin there is or just where he’d hidden it, and she hadn’t pressed him for details there. He was grateful for that - he figured the less she knew about those things, the better for her.

Yes, she’d said, her brother Vincent - Vinnie to everybody but her - had boasted to her more than once that he’d been involved in big drug deals involving both cocaine and heroin. She had no idea if he was being truthful or not, but she’d learned over time not to put anything past him.

“But Michael,” she’d said, “do you have any idea how dangerous this is? Do you know what could happen to us if we get caught?”

“Not we, paleface,” he’d said. “I just want you to introduce me to your brother. Then I’ll take care of the rest. I want you to stay completely out of it.”

“Right. You’ll take care of it like you did when they left you in your undershorts.”

“I’ll be more careful,” he’d told her. “And if I screw up again, so be it. That way, if I go down, I go down alone. I don’t have to destroy your life, too.”

She’d looked at him hard at that point and said, “You saved my life, Michael. If this is what you decide you’re going to do, I want to help you.”

“No,” he’d said. “Besides, all I did was bring you in out of the rain.”

“No,” she’d insisted, before repeating her words slowly and emphatically. “You saved my life.”

They’d gone to bed shortly after, she on the bed with Kelly and Larus and Pop-Tart, he on the floor, fortified by her promise to call her brother in the morning. But, explaining that she was now more concerned than ever that his phone might be tapped, she’d told him that she’d do it from a payphone. Just to be on the safe side.

“Are there fish in reservoirs?” Kelly asks him now.

“I suppose so,” he says.

“How come they don’t freeze?”

“They’re New York City fish,” he explains. “They’re tough.”

“How come they don’t get sucked into the pipes that take the water to our faucets?”

“They’re too big.”

“How about baby ones?”

“I imagine there are screens to keep them out,” he says.

“How about their poops? Can’t they get through the screens?”

“Maybe,” he has to admit. “But then they treat the water with chlorine and stuff before it goes into our faucets.”

“It still sounds yucky to me,” she says.

That evening, after Kelly’s asleep, Carmen informs Goodman that she’s succeeded in reaching her brother. As he waits for whatever she’s going to tell him next, Goodman finds himself half-hoping that it’ll be that Vinnie’s interested in the idea, and half-hoping to hear that he wants nothing whatsoever to do with it.

In fact, the news turns out to be a combination of the two.

“He’s interested all right,” she says, “but he’s afraid to meet you. Thinks you might be a narc. Are you a narc, Michael?”

“I think I can safely say that I am not a narc,” he says.

“I actually took the liberty of telling him that. But you’ve got to understand Vincent’s pretty paranoid. When he heard what I was talking about, he made me give him the number of the pay phone I was at, so that he could go to a pay phone and call me back at my pay phone. I swear, I felt like I was in the CIA or something. Next he started asking me if I was angry at him for anything. He finally admitted he’s afraid I might be trying to set him up.”

“So-”

“So, after all that, he said he wants in, but only if he can send someone else to deal with you.”

Goodman digests the news for a moment. “So what do you think?” he asks her.

“I don’t know, Michael. You asked me to call him; I called him. He said he’s interested. It’s up to you now.”

“Who’s this guy he wants to send me?”

“They call him T.M.,” she says. “I met him once or twice years ago. He went to school with Vincent, taught him how to steal cars.”

“Hey,” Goodman says. “What are friends for, anyway?”

She laughs, but it’s not one of her best. It’s clear to him that she has reservations about this business. He wishes he had a choice, wishes he could come up with some other way to raise the money.

“So,” he says. “Let’s say I want to get together with Vincent’s guy, T-”

“T.M.”

“T.M. How do I arrange that?”

“Vincent’s pay phone is going to call my pay phone at exactly noon tomorrow,” she says. “If you want to do it, you go there with me. If not, you pass. Only, one thing?”

“What’s that?”

“Call him Vinnie, okay? Anybody but me calls him Vincent, he’s liable to freak out. Somebody once told him it’s a fag name.”

“Fair enough,” Goodman says. “Vinnie it is.”

Abbruzzo and Riley are off duty that evening, and the plant is being manned by the two OCCB detectives, Weems and Sheridan. They’ve been on for almost seven hours, with hardly a single phone call to log in.

“I’m telling you, it’s too quiet in there,” Sheridan says. “Something’s going down.”

“Nah, they’re probably in the sack, playing Hide the Salami.”

“That little fucker?” Sheridan laughs. “He don’t look like he can even get it up.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Weems says. “Those little guys can surprise you sometimes.”

But at that moment, the only person Michael Goodman is surprising is himself. He lies on his now-familiar spot on the floor, wondering how it is that he’s so quickly yielded to temptation all over again, barely a week after getting so badly burned the first time.

For already he knows that he’ll be with Carmen when she goes to the pay phone at noon tomorrow. He doesn’t even allow himself the luxury of pretending that he may yet decide to pass. No, he’ll go, and he’ll take his chances again, even if that means taking his lumps again.

His hope, as he lies there in the dark of his apartment, staring up at the ceiling, is that this time he’ll manage to be just a little bit smarter about it.