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when they kicked in the door was shooting Jerry Cappadocia, they must have known who he was, right? They had to know what would happen to them if Mr. Cappadocia found out who it was that killed his son."
    "Are you sure they’d know about Jerry’s father?" she asked.
    "I know you’re not from Chicago, but trust me," Harry said. "Not knowing about Mr. Cappadocia is like saying, ’You mean Nancy Sinatra has a father?’ "
    "So they’re probably looking for you too."
    "As soon as they reload."
    "What do you want to do?"
    "I want to disappear for a little while," he said. "I don’t know who these two guys are, so I can’t get the police off my back by telling them, and I certainly can’t get Mr. C. off my back. And if I’m right, these two guys were not working on their own. Somebody hired them to kill Jerry C. In fact, this is the only bright spot."
    "This is a bright spot?" she asked.
    "For me it is. These days my standards are lower than other people’s. I figure the reason to hit Jerry is somebody wants to take over the Cappadocia operations. If that somebody now makes a move on Jerry’s father or goes around trying to slide Cappadocia businesses onto their own inventory, the somebody gets a name. Then I got nothing to tell anybody that they don’t know already. There’s no reason to put my feet in a meat grinder to ask me questions, and no reason to cut my head off to keep me from answering them."
    As Jane brought it all back, this was the part that came back to her most vividly. Harry was only going to have to disappear for a little while. She could see him saying it, his face haggard and hopeful, like the face of a flood victim saying the rain had to stop soon. It was Harry at his most basic.
    Harry had shown up at her door with nothing to offer except the story about Alfred Strongbear. The two robbers had left no money for him, not even the table stakes for the final poker game. He had tried to make up for it with expert advice. He once asked if she liked horses, and she had answered, "Yes," before she realized that he had said "the horses." "Never bet on anything less than a twenty-to-one shot," he advised. "It’s not worth your time. You can’t make anything. The secret is, the numbers fool people into thinking that handicapping is an exact science. No expert can figure it that close. When a horse opens at twenty-to-one, all they’re saying is that it’s a long shot. Fact is, it’s probably ten-to -one, or even eight-to-one unless it’s got three legs. One race in ten or fifteen, the others all go out and trip over their shoelaces." Harry had spent his life convincing himself that the long shots were going to come in. After she had studied him for a time, she understood that this was because he identified with them. If people had been assigned odds the way racehorses were, Harry would have been a twenty-to-one shot. She had an intuition that Harry was going to have to stay under longer than a little while, so she had given him a cover that would hold up. That had been five years ago.
    Felker had gotten the essential parts of the story right, the ones Harry would have told a cop to get him to help. There was an account of the murder vague enough to reassure the cop that Harry didn’t know the kinds of details that would make it worth the cop’s while to put him in a cell, but vivid enough to convince him of what would happen to Harry if he did.
    She was feeling a very strong impulse to believe Felker. It was just like Harry to have said Alfred Strongbear had given him forty thousand dollars instead of five thousand, and where would any of the story have come from if Harry hadn’t told him? And then there was the way he told it. He had listened to Harry’s voice, and she could tell that he liked Harry, thought he was funny. Maybe Harry was safe. Maybe this one was another like Harry, a man nobody was willing to take in and protect because he wasn’t exactly an innocent but who wasn’t a monster,