Rusty was a law-abiding sort but had no love for its mortal representatives: sheriffs and deputies back home, cops and detectives up here. When the Klan burned down his father’s grocery store—the store drew a mixed clientele, and thus white business from Myrtle’s on Main Street—the sheriff said they might want to think twice about reopening. The sheriff spat tobacco juice into the ashes and looked bored. Probably his hand that splashed the gasoline. Rusty’s parents and sister relocated to Decatur, and Rusty picked up stakes to New York City. His mother had nicknamed him “Big Time” when he was a baby and when he stepped on the northbound Greyhound bus she said, “See, I told you.” The police ’round here were the same breed, but Harlem was so big and hectic Rusty figured they didn’t have time to hassle folks as much as they liked. Had to spread their hassle around, which suited Rusty fine. The detective who stopped in the furniture store that afternoon didn’t even have time for a proper bullying. He beat it for the door when Rusty informed him Carney was out.

“What did he want?” Carney asked. He’d returned to the office after dropping Pepper off and his mood was curdled.

Rusty gave Carney the detective’s card. Detective William Munson, 28th Precinct. Arthur had warned Carney that someone on Chink’s payroll would pay him a visit. To probe about the Theresa, but this also could have concerned certain merchandise for sale. He had pushed his luck and now luck’s opposite pushed back.

“Did Freddie call?”

“No.”

Rusty added that he’d made a big sale that afternoon, but Carney didn’t hear. Carney closed the door to the office and brooded over his afternoon with Pepper, and other troubles, until closing time.

The apartment door caught on the chain—only Alma latched it when he was out—and he had to knock to be let into his own home. A crook in the morning and this lady at night. He waited. The strange couple next door had left a bag of something foul outside their door and the marks and grime in the hallways stood out more than usual. Sometimes the train rumble moved through steel struts and concrete and into the building and he felt it in his feet, like now. How had he subjected his wife and child to this place for all this time?

Alma regarded him through the crack for longer than he thought necessary, and that was the first thing.

“May fell asleep in your bed,” Alma said. Elizabeth bided her time until it was safe to sneak out, or else she’d fallen asleep, too. “I was just cleaning up.”

Carney tried to shake off his mood. He joined her in the kitchen and pitched in. Pot roast and peas for dinner. Carney and his mother-in-law stuck to their quadrants in the small kitchen, squeezing past each other and apologizing too much when they got too close. From her silence, Alma had something on her mind and was being uncharacteristically reticent about making it known. That was the second thing. Carney said, “It’s cooled off.”

“It’s so hot,” Alma said. She rubbed the big white serving dish with the red-and-white-checkered cloth. The dish was one of her wedding gifts to them. It was notched and chipped now, with black splinter lines.

Carney waited, like he did when a customer acted squirrelly. Everything in the store too expensive, or they’d walked in on a whim and were searching for an excuse to split.

“Elizabeth fainting the other day,” Alma said. “That was a scare.” It had just been the day before. Why not say yesterday?

“Only a few more weeks,” Carney said. He slid the silverware into the sink so it didn’t clatter.

“Leland and I were thinking,” his mother-in-law said, “what if Elizabeth stayed with us until the baby came? With the doctor’s orders to stay off her feet, it’s been so difficult. The heat.” That kind and gentle register in her voice. She’d never tried to sell him something before and was unsure how to go about it. “It’s comfortable there, and with you working in your store. I can look after her all the time and take her off your hands.”

“That’s nice of you to offer, but we’re doing okay right now.”

“It’d be easier for May, too,” she said, “with the spare room. That’s how they built them, for cross ventilation.”

“May, too? That’s the deal here?”

“She wouldn’t want to be apart, obviously. At that age. With you at that store all day. It makes sense.”

“Sense.”

“We think it’s reasonable. My mother always said—”

“Did your mother ever tell you to mind your own fucking business?”

“Raymond!”

“ ‘With me in the store all day.’ Did your mother ever tell you to mind your own fucking business?”

“You’ll wake May,” Alma said.

“She sleeps like a rock. With that train all night? She sleeps like a rock.” He had never talked to her like this, but he had been waiting.

She had been waiting as well. Alma dried her hands on the dish towel. Draped it over the sink faucet, perfectly even. She said, “Talk to me like that—who the fuck do you think you are, nigger? I’ve seen street niggers like you my whole life, hands in your pockets.” She slouched in imitation and her voice went low and colored. “I’m-a just out here trying to make a dollar. You think I don’t know what game you’re running? With your whole jive?”

On the one hand, her honesty. On the other hand.

The phone rang in the living room. And once more. Alma straightened her dress and went to answer it. Carney put his hands on the sink. Outside the window, he caught four floors’ worth of kitchen windows in the building next door: one dark; another lit up but empty; the next featuring two hands deep in suds; and in the last a thin brown hand tapped cigarette ashes outside. People trying to make it through the day. The 1 train pulled into the 125th Street station, he felt it in his toes. He couldn’t see the line of windows in the train cars, the people pour out onto the platform, head down the stairs, but he pictured them scatter to their private dramas. Regular as sunsets and arguments, this movement. People heading home to their private cars, light spilling from the square windows of kitchens. As if they lived in trains stacked on top of one another.

A fence, and also a thief. He had stolen her daughter, after all.

She wasn’t getting her back.

Alma’s passionate account met a friendly ear and he gathered it was Leland on the phone. If their words hadn’t wakened Elizabeth, then she was asleep for the night, arms reaching out for May, with that new baby in between. Carney split.

Out on the street, the first Saturday-night shift was busy. They were loud: jeers, rhythm and blues, disputes on the cusp of fistfights. Carney walked among the couples heading out for a special dinner, or for one at their usual haunts, where they knew what to avoid on the menu. He dodged the dirty kids who should have been in bed, running and screaming themselves sick, and the teenagers wringing out the last bit of the day before they had to return home to pant by the open window next to their beds. In tenements and split-up townhouses, the second shift made preparations for their entrance. Loitering in the bathtub, ironing their best duds, rehearsing alibis, and confirming orders of business: We’ll meet at Knights and take it from there. Plus the second-shift men and women meeting no one at all, taking one last confirmation in the mirror before they gave themselves to Saturday-night destiny.

And then there were the crooks, who tied their shoes and hummed jumpy songs, for soon the midnight whistle would call them to the factory.

There was no question where he was headed: Riverside Drive. He crossed the street to avoid the street preacher, then crossed the street again to go around the mission church on 128th and its night congregation filing inside. He’d had enough of sales pitches today. Don’t hurt me, I’ll talk. Tell me what I want to know or else. Then Alma with, Let the girls stay with us. Give Elizabeth enough time and she’ll come around, Alma and Leland must have told each other. Wake up to the poverty of her choices. He was the rat that crept out of the gutter and squeezed under the door.

Alma’s proposal made sense, though not for the reasons she gave. Carney had put his family in danger, and that’s why he had cursed at her. Left a trail to his door for bad men to follow. One of the crew dead, two others missing…but that was wrong. Pepper was right. It was Miami Joe, no doubt. Miami Joe was not missing. He had killed Arthur and taken the money and stones from the Theresa job. Perhaps brought harm to his cousin. And if Miami Joe hadn’t split for the South yet, he needed to eliminate the rest of the crew to cut off Chink’s payback. Or to prevent them—well, Pepper—from avenging the double-cross. Carney didn’t know how this particular region of the crooked world worked. Maybe Miami Joe was in Florida, or maybe he wouldn’t leave town until he was sure no one was coming after him.

There was a breeze off the river. Rank but cool. The buzz of the afternoon hunt and his fight with Alma had dissipated. A little dizzy—he hadn’t eaten since breakfast. Carney crossed to the west side of the street and looked north, tracing the wall of Riverside Drive, that jagged line of majestic red brick and white limestone. The perimeter of a fort, to protect the good citizens of Harlem. Wrong again—a cage to keep the mad crowd who called those streets home from escaping to the rest of the world. Who knew the havoc and ruin they’d perpetrate if allowed to run free among decent people. Best to keep them all in here, on this island, bought for twenty-seven bucks from the Indians, the story went. Twenty-seven bucks went a lot further in those days.

He’d wandered across from 528 Riverside Drive, his latest prospect. This is what he was working toward. Who wouldn’t want to live on Riverside Drive? Come home from the store, open the front door and the smell of Caw Caw chicken drifts from the kitchen. Radio on, big band, and May hugs one of his legs and the new addition—he was a boy in this reverie—hugs the other. Sunset light from the west, even if you had to look at New Jersey, too. A nice place, like no other he’d lived in his whole life. Street nigger, she’d said.

A tall woman in a green dress ducked out of the front door, high heels clicking on the concrete. She checked her purse for keys or lipstick or cigarettes and kept walking. Carney stood in a spot diagonal to one of the gargoyles on a cornice of 528—their eyes met. No hint of the beast’s stone appraisal. What would his father do? Big Mike Carney. He wouldn’t go to his office, not that he had one, wouldn’t go home, that’s for sure. He would not lay his head down until he hunted down the man who’d double-crossed him. Like Pepper, he’d turn uptown upside down until he shook out his quarry.

Who wouldn’t want to live on Riverside Drive? A few blocks north was the Burbank. Where the finger—Miami Joe’s source inside the Theresa—kept a room. It was a short walk.

The SRO’s lobby was Saturday-night busy—residents striking out to their drinking spots, running home after work to gussy themselves up for their evening machinations. The disheveled manager perched behind a scratched-up desk, guarding the array of mail slots. A tiny fan blew into his miserable face, two streamers flapping from the grille like tentacles. Carney said he was looking for his friend Betty, couldn’t remember the room number.

“Betty who?”

“I work with her at the Theresa. She forgot her purse.”

The manager looked down at his paper. “She ain’t been around.”

“Maybe I could give it to Joe?”

The manager pushed his glasses up on his nose. He waited for his visitor to notice the hole in his scheme. “Where’s the purse?”

Carney jerked his hand toward the street. “My truck.”

The elevator opened and two ladies with bouffant hairdos levitated into the lobby like queens, gowns shimmering. “I don’t know any Joe,” the manager said.

Carney rounded the corner and stopped to think. Freddie had mentioned Baby’s Best in his account of the robbery. That was on 136th or 137th, off Eighth. He wasn’t going to confront the man—Pepper could handle that. But to help the hunt before calling in the roughneck, it was better than pacing around his living room. Alma rarely stayed past ten o’clock. The apartment would be quiet soon. He chose his route to Baby’s Best.

Miami Joe was not a law-abiding sort and had no love for its earthly muscle: sheriffs and deputies back home, cops and detectives up here. Had they the misfortune to stop him when he had his pistol in his pocket, he’d cut them down. His disdain for those he robbed was of a different variety, akin to that of a child grinding his shoe on a cockroach. They were insignificant, they were helpless, and they passed from his mind after the job was done, whether the task at hand was a rip-off or a rubout. There was, for example, an empty place in his mind formerly occupied by Arthur. Eventually the next job would fill that vacancy. Until he finished that one, too. Miami Joe vaulted down the fire stairwell after Gibbs, the night manager, rang Betty’s room. Clasping his pistol to his leg. If he were quick enough. Miami Joe was surprised to make out the furniture salesman down 140th Street. Pepper would have sensed his approach. Chink would have sent two men. He lucked out. Miami Joe got as close as he could, dropped to his knee, rested the barrel on his forearm to aim, and pulled the trigger.