One

It was the middle ofSeptember, and Conway had let McKenna take him out to a firing range in Bay Ridge to show him how to shoot. McKenna had been a cop for six years until he shot someone in the line of duty and they put him out with three-quarters pension.

‘Can’t believe Ray Boy’s out,’ Conway said. ‘Free. Just walking around.’ He held up the gun and fired at the paper target, missing wide.

‘Dude,’ McKenna said, taking out his earplugs, ‘you really should put these on.’ He offered a set of headphones.

‘I’m gonna go what, deaf?’ Conway did feel a light ringing in his ears, but it was like a far-off music.

McKenna said, ‘When you shoot, you gotta have confidence. You got no confidence now. The way you’re letting the gun pull you around, you’re gonna always miss outside.’

‘Ain’t gonna miss I got the gun right in the guy’s gut,’ Conway said.

‘That’s a situation you’re probably not gonna find yourself in.’

The firing range was in a warehouse next to an abandoned textile company and right across from a Russian supper club. From the outside it looked like the kind of place where snuff movies got made. But gun nuts, cops and otherwise, knew about it and came in and fired down brown-lit rows at cardboard cutouts and paper targets. On some targets there were snaps of ballplayers, Mets gone bad, slumping Yanks. Conway had an old newspaper clipping of Ray Boy, and he’d tacked it onto his target. Thing was he hadn’t even hit it yet and it was big, a fold-out page from theDaily News. Ray Boy, all those years ago, freshly collared, on his way into the Sixty-Second Precinct. Wearing sunglasses, the fuck.

McKenna stood next to Conway now and showed him how to grip the gun. ‘You got fish hands, Con. Close up your fingers.’

Conway tightened up his hold and pulled the trigger again. Wide right. ‘Maybe it’s this type of gun.’

‘You don’t know shit about guns. Trust me. Twenty-two’s good for you.’

‘I need a sawed-off shotgun.’

‘That’s for the movies. This is what I got you.’

Conway fired a few more times, hitting the outer rim of the target once but still missing the picture of Ray Boy, and McKenna seemed to be growing frustrated.

‘Maybe I’ll just come with you,’ McKenna said.

‘I’m not taking you away from Marylou,’ Conway said. ‘Things go wrong, I don’t want you near me.’

‘And what about Pop? What happens to him?’

‘Let me worry about that.’

‘Bunker is supposed to call you when?’

‘This afternoon.’

Bunker was a private investigator out of Monticello who McKenna had hooked him up with via some retired cop who’d settled in Forestburgh. McKenna had used another connection, a State Trooper who knew a guy who knew a prison guard at Sing Sing, to find out that Ray Boy had settled somewhere in the general vicinity of Monticello after getting out. Where exactly, they couldn’t pi