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should do with the basket of fruit."

"Shit, I didn't think about that," Rosselli said. There was a long pause. "Ask him if he could take it home, and we'll arrange to pick it up there."

Ricco covered the microphone with his hand.

"Mr. Rosselli says you should take it home, and he'll arrange to have it picked up. You got any problem with that?"

"No," Vito said, after thinking it over for a moment. "That'd be all right."

"He says that's fine," Ricco said.

"Okay. And everything else is fine too, right?"

"Everything else is fine too."

Mr. Rosselli hung up on Mr. Baltazari.

"Okay," Ricco said. "Everything's fine. I'll get out of your hair."

Vito Lanza nodded.

Ricco turned and walked to the door and opened it. Then he turned.

"I got to make the point," he said. "You know what happens to people who do foolish things, right?"

"Yeah, I know," Vito said. "And I already told you I'm not foolish."

"Good," Ricco said and went through the door.

****

When, a few minutes before one A.M., Matt Payne drove into the underground garage at his apartment at the wheel of the unmarked Special Operations Division car he had been given for the business tomorrow morning, he was surprised to find that the space where he normally parked the Bug was empty.

As if I need another reminder that my ass is dragging, I have no idea where the Bug is. It's almost certainly at the Schoolhouse-where else would it be?-but I'll be damned if I remember leaving it there.

He parked the Ford, and rode the elevator to the third floor, and then walked up the stairs to his apartment.

The red light on the answering machine, which he had come to hate with an amazing passion toward an inanimate object, was blinking.

I don't want to hear what messages are waiting for me. They will be, for one thing, probably not messages at all, but the buzz, hummm, click indication that my callers had not elected to leave a message, in other words, that Evelyn was back dialing my number. Or it might actually be a message from Evelyn, which would be even worse.

On the other hand, it might be a bulletin from the Schoolhouse; Wohl might have thought of some other way in which I can be useful before I meet O'Dowd at half past six, which is 5.5 hours from now.

He was still debating whether to push the PLAY button when the phone rang.

It has to be either Wohl or O'Dowd. And if it's not, if it's Evelyn, I'll just hang up.

"Payne."

"Christ, where the hell have you been?" Charley McFadden's voice demanded.

"What the hell do you want?"

"Have you been at the sauce?"

"No, as a matter of fact, I haven't. But it seems like a splendid idea. You running a survey, or what?"

"Matt, you better get your ass out here, right now," Charley said.