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Edgar was in charge, back in the days when FBI agents did not go anywhere without a tie, a suitcoat, shined shoes, and a hat. Wearing a tie was a habit Gibbons had never gotten out of. It was a habit that a lot of the younger agents, particularly the undercover jockeys, had a hard time getting into. Gibbons glanced over the roof at the assistant director in charge in his crewneck sweater and wondered what his excuse was.
    Ivers was standing with the two New Jersey state troopers who had been the first ones on the scene. He looked real cute taking down notes on a clipboard in his tan suede jacket, bottle-green Shetland sweater, pressed jeans, and oxblood tassel loafers. If he didn’t have that big square head of his and that phony-looking dye job with the artfully graying temples, he’d look like a Ralph Lauren ad. What an asshole.
    Ivers was just wasting those troopers’ time with that stupid clipboard because Gibbons had already gotten all the particulars when he first got there. A trucker from South Carolina named Nelson had been asleep in his rig when he heard somebody leaning on his horn. He ran out with an aluminum baseball bat intent on bashing some Yankee head in when he found Gary Petersen slumped against his steering wheel, bleeding all over the place. The trucker ran back to his rig and called for an ambulance on his CB. Petersen was semiconscious when the trucker got back to the car. He said he opened the door and hunkered down next to the wounded man, held his hand, andkept him talking until the rescue squad got there. The trucker also said he didn’t see a soul in the parking lot when he first came out with the bat.
    Gibbons had gotten all this directly from the trucker, and he’d already told Ivers, but Ivers was the big cheese here, and he had to look like he was in charge. The clipboard was a good prop for a big cheese.
    Gibbons winced as another wave of screaming pain carved its way through his jaw. It was the kind of pain that made him think of power tools—lathes and routers and crap like that. He tilted his head back and looked straight up at the sky, holding the icebag to his face and blinking at the glare from the pole lights until it finally subsided. The damn tooth hurt like a bastard, but he had no right to complain. Not when Gary Petersen was in an emergency room, fighting for his life.
    Gibbons’s face was clenched again, but not because of his tooth. He was steamed. Petersen shouldn’t have been shot. This should not have happened. Petersen wasn’t supposed to have been in any danger at this stage in his undercover. Ivers had already speculated that this could’ve been a simple armed robbery, a plain case of bad luck, Petersen being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Well, the asshole could theorize and postulate all he wanted with that goddamn clipboard of his, but as far as Gibbons was concerned, there was only one plausible reason for Petersen being shot. His cover had been blown. Period.
    But even if Petersen’s cover had been blown, this still shouldn’t have happened. Gibbons had worked organized crime for over twenty-five years, and he knew better than anyone that there were unwritten rules between the Mafia and the law, and Rule Number One was that wiseguys do not kill cops, not even undercover cops. They could beat a cop silly if they ever caught one trying to infiltrate their ranks, but that was the extent of it.No mob boss anywhere would ever sanction a hit on a cop or a fed. It just wasn’t done. None of them want the kind of heat something like this creates. But shooting Petersen was a severe breach in that unwritten contract, and whoever was responsible was gonna suffer.
    Gibbons had seen things like this before. Every few years some cowboy comes along who thinks he’s invincible, that he can get away with killing a cop. But it always ends up ugly. Whoever shot Petersen may not realize it, but he’d be better off if he