Manhattan Is My Beat (Rune 1)

He pulled up beside a maroon Lincoln Continental.

Overhead a jet, making its approach to Lambert Field, roared past.

Haarte got out of the car and walked to the Lincoln. He got in the backseat, checking out the driver, kept his hand in his pocket around the grip of the now-unsilenced pistol. The man sitting in the rear of the car, a heavy, jowly man of about 60, gave a faint nod, his eyes aimed toward the front seat, meaning: The driver's okay; you don't have to worry.

Haarte didn't care what the man's eyes said. Haarte worried all the time. He'd worried when he'd been a cop in the toughest precinct of Newark, New Jersey. He'd worried as a soldier in

the Dominican Republic. He'd worried as a mercenary in Zaire and Burma. He'd come to believe that worry was a kind of drug. One that kept you alive.

Once he finished his own appraisal of the driver he released his grip on the pistol and took his hand out of his pocket.

The man said in a flat midwestern accent, "There's nothing on the news yet."

"There will be," Haarte reassured him. He flashed the Polaroid.

The man shook his head. "All for money. Death of an innocent. And it's all for money." He sounded genuinely troubled as he said this. He looked up from the picture. Haarte had learned that Polaroids never show blood the right color; it always looks darker.

"That bother you?" the man asked Haarte. "Death of an innocent?"

Haarte said nothing. Innocence or guilt, just like fault and mercy, were concepts that had no meaning to him.

But the man didn't seem to want an answer.

"Here." The man handed him an envelope. Haarte had received a lot of envelopes like this. He always thought they felt like blocks of wood. Which in a way they were. Money was paper, paper was wood. He didn't look inside. He put the envelope in his pocket. No one had ever tried to cheat him.

"What about the other guy you wanted done?" Haarte asked.

The man shook his head. "Gone to ground. Somewhere in Manhattan. We aren't sure where yet. We should find out soon. You interested in the job?"

"New York?" Haarte considered. "It'll cost more. There's more heat, it's more complicated. We'd need backup and we probably should make it look accidental. Or at least set up a fall guy."

"Whatever," the man said lackadaisically, not much interest in the details of Haarte's craft. "What'll it cost?"

"Double." Haarte touched his breast pocket, where the money now rested.

A lifted gray eyebrow. "You pick up all expenses? The cost of backup? Equipment?"

Haarte waited a moment and said, "Add ten points for the backup?"

"I can go there," the man said.

They shook hands and Haarte returned to his own car.

He called Zane on the radio once more. "We're on again. This time in our own backyard."

CHAPTER TWO

Rune got elected to pick up the videotape and her life was never the same after that.

She argued with her boss about picking up the tape--Tony, the manager of Washington Square Video on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, where she was a clerk. Oh, she argued with him.

Rewinding a tape, playing with the VCR, snapping the controls, she stared at the fat, bearded man. "Forget it. No way." She reminded him how he'd agreed she didn't have to do pickups or deliveries and that was the deal when he'd hired her.

"So," she said. "There."

Tony peered at her from under flecked, bushy eyebrows and, for some reason, decided to be reasonable. He explained how Frankie Greek and Eddie were busy fixing monitors or something--though she guessed they were probably just figuring out how to get comped into the Palladium for a concert that night--and so she had to do the pickups.

"I don't see why I have to at all, Tony. I mean, I just don't see where the have-to part comes in."