Manhattan Is My Beat

crashed down. Closer, testing. Trying to find him. The gunman upstairs, watching a TV screen of his own, just like Gittleman had been watching Charlton Heston a few minutes ago.
    Do something
, Gittleman raged to himself.
Come on!
    He eased forward again and shoved the TV set, on a roller stand, toward the window. It slammed into the pane, cracked it, and blocked the view the video camera had of the room.
    There were several more shots but the gunman was blind now.
    “Please,” Gittleman prayed quietly. “Please. Someone help me.”
    Hugging the walls, he moved to the doorway. He fumbled the chain and dead bolt, shivering in panic, certain the man was right above him, aiming down. About to pull the trigger.
    But there were no more shots and he swung the door open fast and leapt into the hallway. Calling to the marshal at the elevator—not one of the Sons, an officer named Gibson. “He’s shooting—there’s a man upstairs with a gun! You—”
    But Gittleman stopped speaking. At the end of the hallway Gibson lay facedown. Blood pooled around his head. Another puppet—this one with cut strings.
    “Oh, no,” he gasped. Turned around to run.
    He stopped. Looking at what he now realized was the inevitable.
    A handsome man, dark-complected, wearing a well-cut suit, standing in the hallway. He carried a Polaroid camera in one hand and, in the other, a black pistol mounted with a silencer.
    “You’re Gittleman, aren’t you?” the man asked. He sounded polite, as if he were merely curious.
    Gittleman couldn’t respond. But the man squinted and then nodded. “Yeah, sure you are.”
    “But …” Gittleman looked back into his hotel room.
    “Oh, my partner wasn’t trying to hit you in there. Just to flush you. We need to get you outside and confirm the kill.” The man gave a little shrug, nodding at the camera. “‘Causa what we’re getting paid they want proof. You know.”
    And he shot Gittleman three times in the chest.

     
    In the hotel corridor, which used to smell of Lysol and now smelled of Lysol and cordite from the gunshots, Haarte unscrewed the suppressor and dropped it and the Walther into his pocket. He glanced at the Polaroid picture of the dead man as it developed. Then put it in the same pocket as the gun.
    From his belt he took his own walkie-talkie—more expensive than the Marshals’ and, unlike theirs, sensibly equipped with a three-level-encryption scrambler—and spoke to Zane, his partner, upstairs, the one so proficient with automatic weapons. “He’s dead. I’ve got the snap. Get out.”
    “On my way,” Zane replied.
    Haarte glanced at his watch. If the other marshal had gone to get food—which he probably had, since it was dinnertime—he could be back in six or seven minutes. That’s how much time it took to walk to the restaurant closest to the hotel, order take-out, and return. He obviously hadn’t gone to the restaurant
in
the hotel because they would just have ordered room service.
    Haarte walked slowly down the four flights of stairs and outside into the warm spring evening. He checked the streets. Nearly deserted. No sirens. No flashing lights of silent roll-ups.
    His earphone crackled. Haarte’s partner said, “I’m in the car. Back at the Hilton in thirty.”
    “See you then.”
    Haarte got into their second rental car and drove out of downtown to a park in University City, a pleasant suburb west of the city.
    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