The Chalk Girl

THIRTY-NINE

It’s a war of whispers now, no more bruises or bite marks. When I talk about the death threats at the dinner table, it makes me sound like the crazy one. Mom chugalugs her wine tonight. I’ve never seen her do that before. And Dad says, ‘Kid stuff. Words can’t hurt you.’

‘They killed the wino in the Ramble,’ I say, ‘and they will kill me.’

Disgusted, my father folds his napkin and drops it on the table. Then he leaves the room – leaves me.

—Ernest Nadler

The whole squad was manning phones and fielding tips from cops in every precinct where a Willy Fallon look-alike had been spotted.

‘Did she try to neuter you?’ Riker asked of one officer on the phone. ‘No? Then it’s probably not our girl.’ He listened more closely when another cop read him a report that included the screams of a teenager who had been caught with his hand in a woman’s purse. According to witnesses, the boy had clutched his crotch as he fled the subway.

The subway was the only snag in this story. Riker saw Willy as a taxi-and-limo type. But the ball-buster MO could not be ignored.

Detective Janos consulted the latest numbers pulled from the cell-phone company and then bent down to watch Mallory run a trace for pings off cell-phone towers to triangulate a location. ‘Nothing? You think she might’ve gone underground – like the subway?’

‘Yeah!’ Riker returned to his conversation on the subway neutering – Willy’s trademark.

Mallory looked up from her computer. ‘The phone’s out in the open again. It’s on the move near a subway line in the Bronx.’

Janos called the station house closest to the location on Mallory’s screen and fed the coordinates to a sergeant in that borough. He cuffed the mouthpiece and said, ‘It’s a schoolyard. There’s a patrol car thirty seconds away.’

Mallory shook her head. ‘I’m not sure Willy could even find the Bronx. I say she lost her phone or ditched it.’

Riker yelled, ‘No, it’s her! A skinny brunette got robbed on the subway!’ Riker held up his phone, still connected. ‘And this cop tells me the robber will never have children. That’s Willy.’

‘We’re screwed.’ Janos hung up on his connection to the Bronx precinct. ‘They just collared a teenager on the playground. He’s got Willy’s phone. He stole it.’

Toby Wilder was flagging again at the top of the subway stairs, but this place was too public for a helping shove to get him all the way down any faster.

Willy danced up to him, just out of reach. She held the lighter in one outstretched hand. ‘Aggy bit him everywhere. She took a chunk of flesh from his face and spit it out. I couldn’t believe she did that. Your daddy smelled so bad – like booze and piss and turds. How he screamed when Aggy bit off pieces of him.’

Toby lurched forward and grabbed the rail to stop himself from falling down stone stairs. He needed more encouragement.

Willy complied. ‘It took him so long to die. Humphrey punches like a little girl. He didn’t do that much damage with his fists. So he used the rock again – and again. And your daddy just scre-e-e-eamed. His mouth was full of blood, and there was more blood from Aggy’s bites. It just went on and on.’

He was moving faster now, down the stairs, unbalanced in his mind and blind with tears.

Gonzales hollered out, ‘Arty Chu redeemed himself!’ The detective shrugged into the sleeves of his blazer, and the others followed suit even before he sang out, ‘Road trip!’

While men pulled guns from desk drawers and holstered them, Gonzales shouted the rest of his report to the lieutenant on the other side of the squad room. ‘Arty backtracked his steps to a restaurant in Greenwich Village. A waitress ID’d Toby Wilder as the guy who chased Willy outta there. So Arty finds the kid’s apartment, and the door’s wide open. Nobody home. Then he talks to the neighbors, shows them pictures on his cell phone. Willy’s been there and gone. They left together, her and Toby, moving east. Our boy Arty’s heading that way now.’

The rest of the squad was moving in tandem, through the door and down, feet slapping stairs. Riker was on the phone to Arthur Chu before he landed on the ground floor of the station house. ‘Did you ask the neighbors if they looked cozy? . . . Yeah, like a couple.’ He covered the phone and said to the running woman beside him, ‘A neighbor said Willy was leading the way. Toby was moving real slow and weaving. She thinks the kid was falling-down drunk or stoned.’

Willy Fallon wondered how he kept his balance. They still had a ways to go before they reached the edge of the train platform. She walked backwards, facing him, talking to him in a tone of normal conversation, saying hideous things so he would not lose momentum. ‘We saw you leave your daddy in the Ramble. You think he wondered why you didn’t come back to help him? You were long gone when we brought him down – but do you think he knew that? Your daddy’s brains were really scrambled. He kept screaming for help through his broken teeth and the blood. And Aggy kept biting him. He must’ve thought he was being eaten alive.’

Riker was in the lead car, one of the perks of riding with a vehicular maniac at the wheel. Mallory killed the engine at West Eighth, where Officer Chu was doing a canvas of the sidewalk, showing people pictures on his camera phone. And now they had a lead, a pedestrian pointing toward the entrance of the subway.

Mallory issued orders to Chu on the fly. ‘Run down to Fourth Street and cover that entrance. The rest of the squad is on the way.’

Riker yelled at the running shadow cop’s back. ‘Call ’em, Arty! Bring ’em all up to speed!’ And down underground he went with his partner. He took the upper level, and she plunged down the stairs to the lower one.

Willy had given this subway station some thought. There were trains running here on single tracks that offered a fallen rider no way to escape – no room between a train and the platform. Anyone pressed up against the tiled wall on the other side would be electrocuted by the third rail. This was more certain than death by bus – if the timing was right.

Toby teetered on the edge of the platform. Riders were sparse at this time of day, spread out all the way down the track, standing between thick metal support girders painted green. Here and there, one straphanger nudged another, pointing into the dark tunnel. And there was the tiny burning light of an oncoming train. No one was watching the boy balancing near the edge, weaving in and out of the flimsy cover offered by widely spaced pillars of steel. But someone might notice Willy walking backwards just out of Toby’s reach. Well, so what? Walking backwards wasn’t a crime.

‘Don’t fall,’ she said to him, and she meant it. ‘Steady now.’ Not yet – not quite yet.

The light in the tunnel was still too small, too far away. If he fell right now, there would be time enough for some do-gooder to pull him back up from the tracks below.

Toby stopped to slump against a support post, his eyes rolling up to stare at the low ceiling, not stoned enough to die, not sober enough to stay alive. She had no fear of him fighting back or doing her any damage, not anymore. He was that wasted. Willy walked up to him and took him by the arm. She leaned out over the lip of the platform to see into the tunnel. The light was brighter now, and she could make out the form of the train, huge and streaming toward them. Toby was only two steps away from falling onto the tracks.

She pushed him and backed off. ‘Don’t miss your train.’

He was falling forward, one foot on the platform and one foot over the rails. Any second now. A blown kiss would send him over the side.

What the hell? The boy flew backwards! What the mother-fucking hell?

Far down the platform, the train was filling out the mouth of the tunnel.

And only steps away, Mallory held the limp junkie by the arms and dragged him back from the edge. The detective dropped her heavy load – and not gently. Willy was in her sights. Mallory was coming for her, and more cops were pouring down the stairs. No way to run, nowhere to hide. Across the platform, another train was pulling in.

What were the odds of—

Fortuitously, a mommy with a baby in a stroller wheeled up to the edge of the platform. Willy bent down and snatched up the sleeping child.

Riker hit the floor of the lower level in time to see Mallory jump off the platform. Christ! The train was almost on top of her.

The brakes were screaming, but the tons of metal kept rolling, no time to stop, sparks flying, people yelling. And now he saw a baby flying through the air and out of harm’s way to be caught by the outstretched hands of civilians. There was no time for a second rescue. And there was no room between the train and the wall to keep her alive.

‘Mallory!’ Riker’s legs would not hold him. He sank to the ground. Before the train stopped, two cars had passed over the place where she had gone down. Farther along the track, he heard Detective Janos, a gentle soul by nature, screaming at the window of the lead car, his voice so loud and in such pain. ‘Back up this train or I’ll shoot you fucking dead!’ A conductor exited the car to tell him it was not that easy, but help was underway.

Gonzales squatted down beside Riker. ‘I saw it from the stairs. Willy tossed a kid on the tracks to get away from Mallory, but she didn’t get past any of us. The detective glanced at the empty track on the other side of the platform. ‘Maybe Willy caught a getaway train.’ His attention turned back to his friend on the ground. Riker’s face went slack, his eyes were blanks, and he made no response to shaking by Gonzales. ‘Hey! Can you hear me, buddy? You okay?’

No, he was far from okay; his partner was dead, and he was sliding into shock. How could any of this be real? How could she be ripped out of her life this way? Impossible. And the situation was so unreal, for a moment there, he thought he heard Mallory screaming, ‘Get me out of here!’

A cheer went up, and all around him cops and civilians embraced. And that never happened in real life, either. Riker lowered his head – a bow to the absurd. He wept and he laughed, and his hands raised up in clenched fists of victory and a prayer for booze. God, how he needed a drink.

When technicians had cut the power to the high-voltage third rail, the tracks were flooded with uniforms and detectives, Riker among them. His partner had survived by laying her body down in the path of the oncoming train. The whole squad buzzed with questions. How could she do that when every human instinct screamed run? And how she could just lie there while a damn train ran over her? The general consensus was that she might not be human, but she was alive, so what the hell.

Mallory was pulled from the trough between the rails, her clothes smoked and scorched by sparks from brake shoes and wheels. Her hair and face were coated with dust and smeared with oil from the undercarriage, and the back of her was covered with caked dirt and debris from the ground. Oh, how the neat freak must hate that. She was lifted high in the air by a whistling, hollering, real happy crowd and handed up to the waiting arms of more brother and sister cops.

When at last she stood on solid ground, Riker grabbed her and held on tight. He was probably crushing the life out of her, but he could not stop himself. He hugged her and cried and yelled, ‘My God, you’re filthy!’

And Mallory said, ‘So . . . you lost Willy.’

‘Hey, get outta the way! We got an OD here!’ Two paramedics made their way through the welcome-back-from-the-dead party, and an unconscious Toby Wilder lay on the stretcher they carried between them. Mallory left her tight family of cops to walk alongside the stretcher as Toby’s personal escort to the world up the stairs and the light of day.