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stogie, Vitteli looked at the two men around the table. “So when’s it supposed to happen now?” he asked around the edges of the cigar.
    Barros shrugged. “Lvov was going to talk to the guy tonight,” he said. “Maybe he should do it away from the house.”
    Vitteli blew a cloud of smoke up toward the ceiling, his dark eyes following the forms that swirled and dissipated like gray ghosts, before nodding. “I got an idea. Listen up,” he said as the other men drew closer. “This yahoo Russian hit man knows who he’s looking for, right? I mean, he’s not going to shoot Jackie here by mistake?”
    Barros laughed. “We’d have to pay him extra,” he said. “Nah, he’s got that photo of the four of us from the convention in Atlantic City, the one where you circled Vince’s head. And now he’s seen him face-to-face, too. What are you getting at?”
    Vitteli smiled. “A dead man and the perfect alibi.”
    Two hours and several more beers apiece later, the men swaggered out of Marlon’s laughing loudly, except for Jackie, who looked pensive and hung behind the others. He quickly hailed a taxi and was gone, while Vitteli and Barros, along with Vitteli’s bodyguard, Sal Amaya, continued around the corner to find Vitteli’s black Cadillac.
    “Started off nice today but, man, it’s frickin’ cold out now. Always fair and foul, eh?” Barros said, pulling his coat tighter as they approached three forlorn figures huddled around a fire they had going in a fifty-five-gallon drum at the entrance of an alley. “Well, what have we got here?”
    As they drew closer, the three men realized that the creatures were women dressed in many layers of tattered clothing and threadbare coats. The women saw them, too, and two of them detached themselves from the fire and walked toward them, holding out their rag-covered hands.
    “Good evening, gents, spare a dollar or two so three old women can get a bite to eat?” said one of the women as she brushed strands of frizzy gray hair away from her dirt-encrusted face.
    “Beat it, you old hag,” Barros snarled. “You’d just spend it on a bottle of booze.”
    “I’d tell you to go to hell,” the woman spat back. She waved at a large black woman, walking behind her. “But my friend says you’ll be there soon enough.”
    As Vitteli and the gray-haired woman exchanged glares, the third woman, pale-skinned, said nothing but stood squinting at him. Then she pointed a finger at him.
    “Well, what do you know? If it ain’t Charlie Vitteli,” she said and did a little curtsy. “It took a moment for my brain to clear, but all hail the king of the docks!” Her skinny lips pulled back in a grin, but the effect was horrifying, as she had only a few teeth left in her mouth. “Oh, and high executioner, I might add.”
    Before Vitteli could respond, the black woman suddenly shouted, “ ’Tis time! ’Tis time!” She threw something on the fire that caused the flames to leap and hiss but then went back to mumbling to the flames and no one else.
    The gray-haired woman who’d asked for money cackled and nodded toward her friend at the fire. “She’s from Jamaica and thinks she’s a witch. She’s casting a charm of powerful trouble.”
    “Eye of newt, toe of frog . . . that sort of thing,” added the pale-skinned woman who’d addressed him as the king of the docks. “Nothing to worry your pretty head about, Charlie.”
    Vitteli scowled. “Do I know you?” he asked.
    “Know me?” the woman asked. “No more than you would know the cockroaches on the sidewalks or the rats in the alley. But youshould, you should. My name’s Anne Devulder. That ring a bell, King Vitteli?”
    “No, never heard of you,” Vitteli answered. “Now get the hell out of my way. . . .”
    “So kind he is, so just,” Devulder replied unflinching and unmoving. “Maybe it’s my first name that threw you. I’m Sean Devulder’s widow.”
    Vitteli’s eyes narrowed. Sean Devulder was one