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minute. As
    the newest member of the clan, he still had to prove himself, and that made him more unpredictable
    than any of the rest.
    Dutch observed, “All these guns around, and it didn‟t help Tagliani for a minute.”
    “Never does if they want you bad enough,” I said.
    I pulled two new photographs out of my briefcase and held them up.
    “These two look familiar to anybody?” I asked.
    There were no takers.
    I held up the clearer of the two photos, that of a round-faced man in his sixties with a pleasant smile,
    his snake eyes hidden behind sunglasses.
    “This is Tuna Chevos,” I said. “We‟ll turn him up.”
    “How would you know that?” Charlie One Ear asked.
    My stomach started to churn just thinking about Chevos and Nance, his personal assassin.
    “I have this little buzzer inside me goes off whenever I‟m within fifty miles of the son of a bitch.”
    “Something personal?” Charlie One Ear asked, raising his eyebrows.
    I stared at him dead-eyed for a full minute before he looked away. Then I held up the other picture, a
    somewhat fuzzy photograph of a lean, hard, ferret-faced man in his mid-thirties, his eyes also
    obscured by sunglasses.
    “You see Chevos, this one is close behind. He‟s the Greek‟s numero uno, your friendly little
    neighbourhood assassin. His name is Turk Nance and he‟s the deadliest one of the lot, a psychopath
    with a temper as thin as a shadow. They‟re both cobras. Chevos married into the family but they‟re
    outsiders. They play by their own rules.”
    “Maybe they did the old bastard in,” Zapata suggested.
    “Maybe, but I don‟t think so.”
    “Why not?” Dutch asked.
    “I don‟t say I‟m ruling them out,” I replied. “I said I don‟t think they did it. It‟s still family. Salvatore,
    you know what I mean?”
    “He‟s right,” Salvatore said. “I mean, what you say, this Chevos was the old man‟s brother-in-law.
    Unless there was real bad blood He let the sentence dangle.
    “So where do these two bombos fit in?” Cowboy Lewis asked.
    “Chevos brings the stuff in, Bronicata gets it to the wholesalers,” I said, “Nance is Chevos‟ personal
    soldato If Chevos says go flush your head in the toilet, Nance‟s head is as good as in the bowl.
    There‟s one other thing—don‟t let Chevos fool you because he‟s got Nance for backup. The story
    goes that Chevos killed his own brother to make his bones for Skeet. I don‟t know if his brother
    needed killing, hut if he was in the same league as Chevos, it was no big loss.
    “Nance started in the streets, got a postgrad course in Vietnam, probably killed at least half of the
    Bannion gang himself. He favours a nine-millimetre Luger with a twelve-inch barrel and hollow
    points soaked in arsenic. A real sweetheart. He‟s also a muscle freak. Sooner or later, when he can
    plant Chevos someplace safe for an hour or two, he‟ll show up at the best fitness centre in town.
    Everybody in the family is scared shitless of both of them.
    “Turk Nance. Remember that name. If you have trouble with him, shoot first.”
    “You keep tellin‟ us what you don‟t want,” Callahan said in a dead monotone. “What the hell do you
    want?”
    I thought about that, about why I was here and what had happened to Dunetown and was going to
    happen to it. I thought about a lot of things in the next few seconds.
    “1 want the whole damn bunch off the street. I don‟t care if you do it or I do it or we do it together.
    They‟re the cockroaches of our society.”
    1 looked at Charlie One Ear. “You ask me is it personal? I got five years invested in this bunch. In the
    whole rat pack only Costello and Cohen are clean. The rest of them have rap sheets that‟ll stretch
    from here to Malibu and back.”
    I started pacing. I had lost my temper for a moment, not because of Charlie One Ear or because Dutch
    Morehead‟s hooligans didn‟t trust me. I was used to that:. It was because of Cincinnati. I stopped and
    looked at