Mischief

7.

THE LETTER FROM THE DEAF MAN had been delivered to the squadroom the day before, but Carella didn’t get to see it till eightA .M. that Sunday morning, when a uniformed cop from downstairs dropped it on his desk together with a lot of other stuff, including an announcement for the Detectives’ Benevolent Association’s Easter Ball. Carella wished that all he had on his mind was Easter, with spring just here and the streets covered with slush.

The letter was addressed to him.

Plain white envelope, no return address front or back.Detective Stephen Louis Carella typed on the front of the envelope, and then 87th Detective Squad and the Grover Avenue address. It was postmarked Friday, March 27. He knew who had sent the letter even before he tore open the envelope flap.

There was a typewritten note attached to a single sheet of paper. The note read:

The sheet of paper clipped to the note had obviously been photocopied from the book the Deaf Man had earlier recommended. It read:

“I fEAR ANexplosion” Tikona said. “I fear the jostling of the feet will awaken the earth too soon. I fear the voices of the multitude will anger the sleeping rain god and cause him to unleash his watery fury before the fear has been vanquished. I fear the fury of the multitude may not be contained.”

“I, too, share this terrible fear, my son,” Okino said. “But The Plain is vast, and though the multitude multiplies, it can know no boundaries here, it cannot be restrained by walls. Such was the reason The Plain was chosen by the elders for these yearly rites of spring.”

“I know you haven’t read the book,” Carella told Brown, “well, the first chapter, actually, is all he recommended…”

“Our local friendly librarian,” Brown said.

“It’s all about these rites of spring, the first chapter. And what he says is that there are…”

“Who’s this you’re talking about?” Brown asked. “The Deaf Man or the author?”

His shoes were wet from having trudged through the slush from the subway station to the precinct. His mother had told him that when your feet got wet and cold you felt cold all over. He didn’t feel cold all over, he just felt wet in the feet , and that made him irritated. When he was irritated, he scowled like a bear. He was not scowling at Carella, he was merely scowling at his wet shoes and his wet feet and this dumb weather for the end of March. Hadn’t come in like any damn lamb, either.

“The author,” Carella said. “Arturo Rivera.”

“And he says?”

“He says that this multitude gathers on this big open plain ringed by mountains….”

“We don’t have any mountains, this city,” Brown said.

“I know. This is another planet.”

“Another planet, huh? Sometimes I think this city is another planet.”

“What I think is he may be calling our attention to a crowd , you know?” Carella said. “A multitude?”

“The Deaf Man, you mean?”

“Yeah. Using Rivera as his spokesman.”

“So you think he’s planning something that has to do with a crowd.”

“Yeah, in an open space,” Carella said. “This vast plain , you know?”

“No plains in this city, either,” Brown said. His wet feet were beginning to irritate him more and more. He wondered if he had a pair of clean socks in his locker.

“What was that business about an explosion?”

“He fears an explosion.”

“Who, the Deaf Man?”

“No, no…”

“Then who? Rivera?”

“No, this guy Tikona.”

“Read that part out loud, will you?” Brown said.

Carella cleared his throat and began reading.

“ ‘I fear an explosion,’ Tikona said. ‘I fear the jostling of the feet will awaken the earth too soon. I fear the voices of the multitude will anger the sleeping rain god and cause him to unleash his watery fury before the fear has been vanquished. I fear the fury of the multitude may not be contained.’ ”

“He fears an explosion ’cause the crowd’s getting too big, right?”

“The multitude, right.”

“So all we got to do is find this multitude.”

“This whole damn city is a multitude,” Carella said.

“Find the multitude,” Brown said, “and then stop him from doing whatever it is he plans to do with the multitude.”

“Yeah,” Carella said glumly.

“Nobody said he’d make it easy,” Brown said.

“He himself said so.”

“No, Steve. He only said easier. Not easy. With him, nothing’s ever easy. What size socks do you wear?”

“I RECOGNIZE your obvious qualifications,” the Deaf Man was saying, “but the problem is you’re a woman.”

“Some people might consider that a sexist attitude,” Gloria said.

“It’s just that I’ve never seen a female garbage man.”

“What’s garbage got to do with a good wheel man? I’m either a good wheel man, or I’m not a good wheel man. You knew I was a woman when you asked me to come for the interview. So I come here at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning, when most people are in church, for Christ’s sake, and you tell me…”

“I was expecting a different sort of woman,” he said.

He had not been expecting a thirty-two-year-old blonde with eyes the color of seaweed, some five feet nine inches tall and looking tall and slender and firm in a jump suit and high-heeled pumps. Sitting on the couch in his living room, facing Grover Park and a gunmetal sky. Oh to be in England, he thought, now that spring is here.

“What sort of woman were you expecting?” Gloria asked, raising one eyebrow and hitting the word hard.

“Someone more masculine,” he said. “Someone who might possibly pass for a man. I suppose I should have asked for a description on the phone, but fair employment practices seemed to preclude that,” he said, and smiled charmingly.

He’s so full of shit, Gloria thought.

But she wanted the job.

“Someone more masculine, huh?” she said.

“Someone who could pass for a truck driver,” he said. “Someone…beefier. With less refined features…”

“Thank you,” she said.

“Shorter hair…”

“I can cut my hair.”

“Yes, but you can’t gain forty pounds in the next six days.”

“Is that when it’s going down?”

“The fourth of April, yes.”

“A Saturday,” she said, and nodded.

“How do you happen to know that?”

“I have this trick I do,” she said.

“What trick?” he asked, his interest immediately captured.

“You give me any date, and I can tell you what day of the week it falls on.”

“How can you do that?”

“Secret,” she said, and smiled. “Have you got a calendar?”

“Yes?”

“Go get it.”

“Sure,” he said, and walked over to his desk and opened the drawer over the kneehole, and took from it a leather-bound appointment calendar. Without opening it, he said, “Christmas. December twenty-fifth.”

“Oh, come on,” she said, “give me a hard one.”

“Do Christmas first.”

“This year?”

“Sure.”

“It’ll fall on a Friday. Check it.”

He checked it.

“Friday is right,” he said. “How about May seventeenth?Next year.”

“Easy,” she said. “A Monday.”

He checked it. She was right.

“Have you got an almanac?” she asked.

“No.”

“Too bad. I could give you the day of the week for any date since we went on the Gregorian calendar.”

“How do you do it?” he asked.

“Do I get the job?”

“Gloria,” he said, “believe me, everything you’ve told me about yourself…”

“Damn right,” she said. “I’ve been driving since I was twelve, did my first wheel job when I was only sixteen. I’ve got the surest pair of hands in the business and the calmest nerves. I can drive through the eye of a needle with one eye shut. I can drive a racing car or a ten-wheeler, and I can outdrive any man in the business. You want me to cut my hair, I’ll cut my hair. You want me to gain a hundred pounds, I’ll gain a hundred pounds. You want me to be a garbage man, I’ll be a garbage man. I need this job. I’ll do anything to get this job.”

“Anything?” the Deaf Man asked.

“Anything,” she said, and looked him dead in the eye.

“Tell me how you do the date trick,” he said.

“Tell me I have the job.”

“Don’t you want to know what it pays?”

“I have a house on the Spit that’s about ready to fall into the Atlantic Ocean,” she said. “It’s gonna cost me a coupla grand at least to have them shore up the pilings or whatever it is they have to do. I usually work for a percentage of the take….”

“That’s out of the question here,” he said.

“That’s the usual wheel-man fee.”

“Yes, but…”

“A good wheel man always gets a piece of the action. You know that.”

“Sometimes.”

“Any job I ever worked. The beach house cost me half a million. That was my end on a bank job we did in Boston. What I’m saying is I don’t know how much this job is expected to gross, but let’s say the wheel man is worth at least ten percent of that. So if this is a two-million-dollar job, I’d expect, say, two hundred grand. Which will keep my house from floating off to Europe. If it’s bigger than that, I’d expect more. That’s my fee. That’s what any good wheel man would expect.”

“Too bad you’re not a wheel man ,” he said, and smiled again.

“Right, I’m a wheel woman . What do you want me to do? Suck your cock?”

“I don’t pay women for sex,” he said.

“Good. Cause I don’t suck cocks for money.”

But she was the one who’d first raised it. He would remind her of that later. When she was tied to the bed and begging for it.

“Cut your hair and put on at least twenty pounds,” he said.

“Okay,” she said.

“A flat hundred grand for all the run-throughs and the actual job.”

“Make it a hundred and fifty. In case they find cockroaches or dry rot when they open up my house.”

“A hundred is all I can pay.”

“Why? Because I’m a woman?”

“No. Because a hundred is what I’m paying everyone else.”

“When do we start?” she said.

“How do you do that trick?” he asked.

AFTER FIVE HOURS of working the door, Eileen now knew that the girl inside there—she couldn’t bring herself to call a seventeen-year-old girl a woman, even if she was married, and even if it meant agreeing with Brady’s terminology—the girl was named Lisa. She also knew that Jimmy had handcuffed her to the bed in his room, the one adjacent to the one where Lisa slept with his brother, Tom. Jimmy, Lisa, and Tom, nice little family triangle here that had erupted in the middle of the night and that could, if she wasn’t careful, end with somebody getting hurt. She didn’t want the girl to get hurt, and she didn’t want Jimmy to get hurt, either, but most of all she didn’t want herself to get hurt. She’d been hurt once on the job, hurt very badly, and she didn’t want that to happen ever again.

“Where’d you get the handcuffs?” she asked casually.

“Bought them,” Jimmy said.

The door was open some three inches, held by a safety chain. She was standing to the left of the door, unwilling to afford him a clear shot until she knew which way he might go. She couldn’t see him and he couldn’t see her. So far, they were still two disembodied voices, but dialogue was what negotiation was all about. Nobody gets hurt. We talk.

“You’re not a cop or anything, are you?” she asked.

“Shit, no,” he said.

“I didn’t know anybody but cops could buy handcuffs,” she said.

Just talking. Just keeping him engaged. They’d worked up a profile from what the brother had told them, and she knew damn well Jimmy wasn’t a cop. She also knew you could buy handcuffs in any one of a hundred sex shops in the city, and in any number of antiques shops selling junk from your grandmother’s attic. She was just talking. Just trying to get him to talk back. Trying to get his mind off hurting anybody. Raping the girl. Or shooting her. He had threatened to shoot the girl if they didn’t leave him alone here.

“Where can you buy handcuffs?” she asked.

“I don’t remember where I bought them,” he said. “Where are your handcuffs?”

“I don’t have any with me,” she said.

The truth.

“I told you I’m not armed…”

Also true.

“…and I’m not carrying handcuffs, either. You’re the only one has handcuffs and a gun.”

Not quite true.

All the E.S. cops in the hallway were wearing ceramic vests and they were armed with riot guns. One shot from that apartment and they’d storm the door. You played the game only so far. Then you sent in the bombers. Basic contradiction there, but she figured she could live with it if it worked more often than not—which it did.

“Still snowing outside,” she said. “Do you like snow?”

“Listen,” he said. Edge to his voice. “What are you tryin’a do here, huh? I told you I’ll kill Lisa if you fuckin guys don’t leave me alone! So leave me alone ! Get the fuck outta here!”

But he didn’t close the door.

“Well, you don’t really want to kill her, do you?” Eileen said.

“Never mind what i want to do. You’re the ones are forcing me to do it.”

“All we’re interested in is making sure nobody gets hurt.”

“Sure, you give a shit I get hurt or not.”

“We do.”

“Then whyn’t you come in here take Lisa’s place? I han’cuff you to the bed, I let her come out, how’s that?”

“No, I can’t make that kind of deal.”

“Why not? You’re so inner’ested in nobody gettin hurt, you come on in here, take her place.”

“I’d have to be crazy to do that,” Eileen said.

“How come? Big brave cop, you come on in.”

“I promised you nobody gets hurt,” she said. “That includes me. All we want to do is help you, Jimmy. Why don’t you take that chain off the door so we can talk a little more easily?”

“We can talk fine just the way we are,” he said. “Anyway, there’s nothin to talk about. You get the fuck outta here, Lisa’s got nothin to worry about. You hang around, she gets hurt. You think you can unner’stan that?”

“How do I know you haven’t hurt her already? I told my boss she’s okay, but he’s…”

“She is okay, I told you that.

“That’s just what I reported to him. But he’s going to lose patience with me if he thinks I’m lying to him.”

“Who’s your boss, anyway? The bald-headed guy was talking to me before?”

“Yes. Deputy Inspector Brady. He’s in charge of the unit.”

“So go tell him to get everybody the fuck outta here.”

“Well, I can’t give him orders, he’s my boss. You know how bosses are. Don’t you have a boss?”

“Tommy’s my boss.”

Something there. Something in his voice. She let it sit for a minute.

“Your brother, do you mean?”

“Yeah. He owns a plumbing-supply store. I work for him.”

Older brother working for the younger brother. Younger brother married to a seventeen-year-old girl. Older brother living in the same apartment with them.

“Do you like your job?” she asked.

“I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“What would you like to talk about, Jimmy?”

“Nothing. I want you to leave me the fuck alone, is what I…”

“Have you had anything to eat this morning?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“How about Lisa? She might be hungry.”

There was silence beyond the crack in the door.

“Jimmy? How about Lisa? Do you think she might like something to eat?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you go ask her?”

“I leave the door, you’ll try to break it down.”

“I promise I won’t.”

“There are guys out there in the hallway with you, they’ll break down the door.”

“No, I’ll ask my boss to make sure they won’t. You go find out if Lisa wants something to eat, okay? Maybe we can get her something to eat. If she’s hungry. You must be hungry, too, you’ve been up half the night. Maybe I can…”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Then go see if Lisa is, okay?”

“You promise me nobody’s gonna break down this door?”

“Jimmy, if that’s what we wanted to do, we’d’ve done it already.”

“Not with me standin here with this gun in my hand.”

“The men out here are wearing bulletproof vests. They could break down the door if they wanted to, Jimmy. That’s not what we want to do. What we want is to make sure nobody gets hurt. Not us, not you, not Lisa. I’m sure you don’t want Lisa to get hurt….”

“I don’t.”

“I know that.”

“You better know it. Why the fuck you think I’m doin this?”

“I don’t know why, Jimmy. Can you tell me why?”

“To keep her from gettin hurt, why do you think?”

“How do you…?”

“Why do you think I chased him outta the fuckin apartment?”

“Your brother, do you mean?”

“Tommy, Tommy, who do you think I mean? He was beatin the shit out of her last night, I told him to leave her alone or I’d blow his fuckin brains out. I told him to get outta here and never come back. That’s why I got her handcuffed to the bed. For her own good. She lets him beat her black and blue and then they fuck all night long, I’m tryin’ a protect her, for Christ’s sake!”

“Is that what woke you up last night? Him beating her?”

“Everynight, the son of a bitch.”

“We’ll make sure that doesn’t happen anymore, Jimmy.”

“Sure, how you gonna do that?”

“There are city agencies your sister-in-law can talk to. There are ways to restrain your brother from…”

“I just can’t stand it no more. She’s no bigger than a nickel, he’s always beatin the shit out of her.”

“We’ll put a stop to that, Jimmy. Meanwhile, go ask her if she wants something to eat, okay?”

“I’ll go ask her,” he said, and hesitated. “But I’m gonna close the door and lock it.”

“I’d rather you didn’t, Jimmy.”

“Who the fuck cares what you want? I’m the one has the gun.”

“That’s why I’d rather you left the door unlocked. I don’t want anyone to get hurt, Jimmy. I don’t want any accidents to happen here.”

“Fuck you and what you want,” he said, and slammed the door shut.

In the silence of the hallway, she heard the deafening click of the lock tumblers turning.

“WHAT I THOUGHT was we do something new and startlin for the gig,” Silver said.

New and startlin like what ?” Jeeb said.

He never liked it when Sil came up with these new and startlin ideas of his. Like the time he come up with the notion just the two girls rappin in falsetto , their voices weren’t high enough already, right? Sil goes Nobody ever done this before, man, two girls singin falsetto, gonna send chills up ever’body’s spine. Jeeb told him never mind the chills, people don’t like to hear things that’ll startle ’em, they want to hear the same stuff every time out, man, the same beat, the same voices doin the rappin, they don’t want to be no kind of startled , man. Only things enjoy gettin startled is pigeons , man, they get a kick out of being startled. You go whoooooo to a bunch of pigeons in the park, they like to wet their pants with joy being startled like that and making them flap up in the air. But people don’t like to be startled, Jeeb told him. People hear a coupla chicks rappin in falsetto, they’ll think it’s a police siren or somethin, an air -raid siren, they’ll run for cover, man.

Turned out Sil was right, though, son of a bitch was always right. Next gig they done—this was in Philadelphia—Grass and Sophie done this song in falsetto, like the song was called “China Doll” and it was about dope comin in from the Orient and pollutin the black youth of our cities, and they rapped it in these high falsetto voices like supposed to be comin from Chinese chicks, you know, these high singsongy voices comin from these two gorgeous black chicks, the crowd went wild. Sil didn’t say I tole you so, though he could’ve. Was Grass did all the I tole yous, cause she was the one sided with Sil from the beginning. More he thought about it, Jeeb figured there was somethin goin on between her and Sil. That was gratitude for you. He’s the one taught the girl everythin she knew about any thin, and she ends up beamin at every word Sil utters. Sheer gratitude.

“What’s this new and startlin idea?” Sophie asked.

“Tell us, Sil.”

This from Grass. Beamin at him fore he even opened his mouth. He was prolly gonna ask the girls to sing bass this time. Drop they voices down in they shoes, bust all the woofers. Tell us all about it, Sil. Grass lookin at him adoringly. Tell us your new startlin and brilliant idea so we can all fall down dead at your feet.

“Before we go into that,” Jeeb said, “I want to tell you ’bout this conversation I had with Ackerman. I tole him there’s been three ads in the papers so far, an none of them mentioned Spit Shine as prominent as the other headliners. This thing’s gonna run for two straight days, he’s booked an even dozen groups, all kinds of rap and all kinds of rock, some of them nobody ever heard of but they mothers. He’s the fuckin puh-motor, how come we gettin dissed like that? He goes Look, fair is fair, Jeeb, only some of the headliners got bigger mention in the ads. So I go Look, Mort, maybe you don’t realize how many times we topped the charts this past year, and he goes Anyway,I’m not the one placin the ads, it ain’t Windows Entertainment takin the ads, it’s the bank , it’s FirstBank. I go Come on, Mort, you’re the fuckin puh-motor, what does the bank know about rock or rap or anything but elevator music, for Christ’s sake! He says he’s tellin me the God’s honest truth, but he appreciates what I’m sayin, and he’ll go to the bank, the guy at the bank who’s feedin the ads to the papers, and tell him he’s had complaints from some of the artists…”

“Who else complained?” Sophie asked.

“Group named Double Damn.”

“Never heard of them.”

“I tole Ackerman some unknown group gets its name in the ads same size an prominence as Spit Shine, he’s gonna have an hour an a half, two hours of dead air on that stage, time we’re supposed to be performin. Cause we just won’t show, man, he can let Double Damn open the fuckin concert!”

“I’m not even sure i like that opening spot,” Sophie said. “Biggest crowds’ll be there at night, we ought to be next to closin on Sunday.”

“Sunday’d be bad,” Grass said. “People got to get up early, go to work the next day.”

“Who’s got next to closin Saturday night?” Sil asked.

“Guess.”

“Yeah,” Sil said.

“Anyway, Ackerman’s gonna let us know what the bank has to say. I tole him to remind the bank that we’re the ones doin the gig free , it don’t reflect too kindly when a fucking bank sticks up somebody instead of the other way around. He said he’d tell them. He better.”

“We’ll get the ad,” Sophie said. “Don’t worry.”

“We better,” Jeeb said. “So far, they headlined three other groups, and we get a half-inch near the bottom with groups like Moses Roses.”

“Who’s Moses Roses?” Sophie asked.

“Who the fuck knows?”

“We get the right ad or we walk,” Silver said, “plain and simple.”

“That’s the onliest way, Sil,” Grass agreed, as if it was his thought and not Jeeb’s. Man.

“Tell us your new idea,” she said, and grinned at him, all eyes.

“We do a love song,” Sil said.

THE PLACE parker decided to take Cathy Herrera to brunch was a steak joint frequented by high-ranking police officers, very few of whom Parker knew. But he thought he would impress her by suggesting that he hobnobbed with rank.

Yesterday, the city’s two tabloids had both done a number on the spray-paint killer, one in its morning edition, the other in its afternoon edition. The morning paper had zeroed in on Peter Wilkins, the dead lawyer, with the headline:

SECRET SPRAYER

…which related to the page-four profile they did on the successful litigator who went around at night spraying graffiti on the walls of buildings.

The afternoon paper’s headline read:

SPRAYER

PREY

BETTER

PRAY

(…who’s next?)

The inside story was subtitledDESTINY WITH DEATH. A lame journalistic exercise, it attempted to show how three people of diverse backgrounds—an attorney, a veteran graffiti writer, and an immigrant novice—had met the same fate at the hands of someone the newspaper called “an obsessed vigilante.” In addition, several men and women in the street had been interviewed regarding the prevalence of graffiti in the city, the question posed to them being:What should we do about graffiti writers? These expert criminologists—a telephone operator, a letter carrier, a construction worker, an obstetrician, and a woman protesting pornography in magazines—had varying views.

The telephone operator said that if they got caught, they should be forced to wear uniforms with stenciling that read I AM A VANDAL while publicly and under guard they cleaned off all the walls in the city.

The obstetrician said that like Norman Mailer, he considered graffiti an art form with macho qualities, and aesthetic and political values. Besides, what ever happened to free speech in this country?

The woman protesting pornography said that graffiti was a mild abuse when compared to the millions of women who became the victims of rape and other forms of sexual assault inspired by pornographic magazines.

The construction worker said that anybody caught spraying buildings should be shot.

The letter carrier said he had work to do.

Parker agreed with the construction worker, but he couldn’t very well say this to Cathy because, after all, her son had been shot while spraying a building. He wasn’t even sure she had seen the afternoon paper, which painted a somewhat unflattering picture of young Alfredo Herrera, intimating that because he and his mother had come from a town called Francisco de Macoris—a place with a reputation for exporting drug dealers to this city and importing dope money back to the Dominican Republic—why then wasn’t it possible that Herrera himself had been part of the notorious Los Cubanos drug ring? Parker tended to agree that all spics were in some way related to the drug trade, but he couldn’t say this, either, because after all Catalina Herrera was herself a spic, even if she called herself Cathy.

He decided instead to wave over at a man he’d met only briefly in court once when they were both testifying on the same case, a deputy inspector sitting in full regalia with three suits who looked important, too, all of them digging into the huge portions of steak and eggs before them.

“Inspector,” Parker said, and nodded chummily, and the inspector looked back sort of bewildered, but returned the nod, and Parker said to Cathy, “Good friend of mine,” and then, “Would you care for something to drink before lunch?”

EILEEN KEPT WAITING for the door to open again.

She was still standing in the hallway outside apartment 409, just to the left of the doorframe. Inspector Brady had figured out a plan to get the girl out of the apartment. Once she was out, they would talk to Jimmy about putting down the gun. Meanwhile, the important thing was to get her out of there safely. Jimmy’s feelings about her seemed ambivalent at best; Michael Goodman, the negotiating team’s psychiatrist, figured he could jump either way. Tom, the younger brother, had vehemently denied ever having laid a hand on his wife; Brady was inclined to believe him. More likely was his story that the sounds of their lovemaking had infuriated Jimmy. If this was true, Goodman was fearful that Jimmy would act out the fantasy he himself had created, that of his sister-in-law as the victim of physical abuse. The girl was handcuffed to the bed in there and no one knew how long it would be before Jimmy moved into action, one way or another. Goodman felt rape was a distinct possibility.

Eileen just wished she thought better of Brady’s plan.

He had asked her to tell Jimmy—if and when he opened the damn door again—that her boss wanted only to protect the girl at all costs, which he was sure Jimmy also wanted. Toward that end, he was willing to recommend an investigation of possible assault by the brother, and to turn young Lisa over to a social agency that would help her to construct a healthful way of dealing with the battered-wife syndrome. In the meantime, because Jimmy had embarked upon this present course of action—the inspector’s exact words—only to protect his sister-in-law from further abuse, Brady would recommend dropping any charges against him.

All of this was premised on the wife abuse being a reality. If, instead and in fact, Jimmy had been lusting for young Lisa all along and had finally been driven over the edge by the sounds of passion next door—which both Brady and Goodman believed to be the actual case—then why would Jimmy come out of that apartment, why would he now be willing to release the object of his desire? None of it made any sense to Eileen.

Jimmy had made no demands of them. He hadn’t asked for a limo to the airport and a jet plane to Rio, he hadn’t even asked for a cheeseburger and a bottle of beer. He wanted nothing more than to be left alone with the girl. This they were denying him. He had threatened to kill the girl if they did not leave him alone with her. She doubted if he really planned to do this; he was, after all, still talking to them. But she couldn’t see how the inspector’s offer in any way jibed with Jimmy’s stated wishes. Wouldn’t it be better, not to mention safer, if they offered to leave him alone with the girl once she was out of the apartment? Promise him the honeymoon suite at the nearest hotel, just get them both the hell out of there.

You weren’t supposed to lie to them, you weren’t supposed to say I’ll get you this or that and then not deliver while there were still hostages in there. But this would be different—or so she told herself—this would be saying, Look, you come out of there with the girl, we’ll deliver you in a limo to such and such a luxury hotel, where a room’s been reserved for you and Lisa, you can go there to talk this over, work something out, what do you say? Nab him the minute he walked out of the apartment. Provided he first put down the gun. That had to be part of the deal. First you put down the gun. Then you come out with the girl. Nobody gets hurt. We leave you alone with her to work it out. No gun. That’s what you want, anyway, isn’t it? To be left alone with the girl?

Georgia Mowbry was coming down the hall toward her. Brady’s top female negotiator, on the job long before Eileen joined the team. Was he pulling her from the door? Turn it over to someone more experienced? She hoped not. Georgia was a big rangy woman who’d recently frizzed and bleached her hair a sort of honey-blonde color. She was wearing jeans and the same blue department jacket Eileen was wearing. Stopping to say hello to one of the E.S. men, she exchanged a few words with him, and then continued down the hall to where the door to 409 was still adamantly closed.

“Lieutenant wants to know if you need anything,” she said.

“No, I’m fine.”

“Cup of coffee, anything?”

“Thanks, I’m okay, Georgia.”

“How about the ladies’ room? You want to go down the hall, I can…”

Both women heard the click of the lock. They both turned toward the door. It opened a crack. The night chain caught it. What happened next happened so quickly that neither of them even had time to catch her breath. There was suddenly the blunt muzzle of a pistol in the crack between door and jamb, and then there was a sudden flash of yellow at the muzzle, and the shocking sound of the gun’s explosion, and the bullet took Georgia in the right eye and sent her flying backward into the corridor. Moments later, unconscious, she began vomiting.

THE POLICE DEPARTMENT’S deputy chief surgeon was a woman named Sharyn Cooke. The unfortunate spelling of her name was due to the fact that her then sixteen-year-old, unwed mother didn’t know how to spell Sharon. This same mother later put Sharyn through college and then medical school on money earned scrubbing floors in white men’s offices after dark. Sharyn Cooke was black, the first woman of her color ever to be appointed to the job she now held.

Her skin was the color of burnt almond, her eyes the color of loam. She wore her black hair in a modified Afro, her high cheekbones and generous mouth giving her the look of a proud Masai woman. She had turned forty this past October fifteenth, birth date of great men—and women, too—and was still getting accustomed to the fact. At five-nine, she always felt cramped in the new compact automobile she’d bought, and was constantly adjusting the front seat to accommodate her long legs. She was fiddling with the seat again on her way home from church that Sunday at twelve-twenty, when the police radio erupted with the words “Cop shot, cop down, confirmed shooting, going to Buenavista!” She hit the hammer and slammed her foot down on the accelerator. A moment later, her beeper went off. She lifted it from the seat, glanced at the number calling, punched it into her car phone, hit the SEND button and—still racing through the streets of Isola at seventy miles an hour—got Deputy Inspector Brady.

“Yes, hello, Inspector,” she said.

“Doc,” he said. “I’ve got a cop shot.”

It was common knowledge in the department that the commander of the hostage negotiating team had lost his very first female negotiator to a woman who was wielding a meat cleaver. There’d been a hell of a fuss downtown over the fatal string of events—one of the taker’s kids dead even before the negotiating team got there, then a police officer killed, and then the taker herself killed when the E.S. stormed the door. For a while, the entire program was in jeopardy, all the hard work Chief McCleary had done getting it started, all the advances Brady had made when he took over, everything almost went up the chimney in smoke. Took Brady a long time to get over it. Even when he felt confident that the program wouldn’t be scratched, it was forever before he put another woman on the team. There were two women working for him now, an old pro—well, thirty-six years old—named Georgia Mowbry, and Eileen Burke, a new addition.

What had happened in the building at 310 South Cumberland was almost a replay of what had happened all those years back when Brady lost Julie Gunnison to a murderer with a cleaver in her hands. TheE.S. cops had rushed the door the moment the guy inside fired at Georgia. They asked no questions. They knocked the door off its hinges and then six of them opened fire simultaneously with their heavy-caliber guns, blowing the guy halfway across the apartment. In the bedroom, they found his seventeen-year-old sister-in-law handcuffed to the bed and bleeding from two bullet wounds in her chest. She was dead. Probably had been dead long before the negotiating team even got there.

Hostage dead, taker dead, police officer critically wounded.

Almost a replay.

Except that back then, the police officer had died, too.

Brady didn’t want to lose Georgia Mowbry now.

He told Sharyn to make damn sure they didn’t lose her.

Sharyn told him she’d make sure everybody did the best job possible. She herself was a board-certified surgeon—which meant she’d gone through four years of medical school, and then five years as a resident surgeon in a hospital, after which she’d been approved for board certification by the American College of Surgeons. She still had her own private practice, but as a uniformed one-star chief she worked fifteen to eighteen hours a week in the Chief Surgeon’s Office for an annual salary of $68,000. In this city, some twenty to thirty police officers were shot every year. Part of Sharyn’s job was to make certain these injured officers received the best possible hospital care.

Georgia was in coma when Sharyn arrived at Buenavista Hospital at twelve-thirty-two that afternoon. She strode into the emergency room, identified herself, and then asked, “Who’s in charge?”—the way she always did. The brass hadn’t yet assembled. They would be here later, she knew, everyone from the Commish on down if this turned out to be a serious one. For now, there was a battery of nurses, the trauma team, a doctor named Harold Adderley, who introduced himself as the chief resident surgeon, and a junior resident surgeon named Anthony Bonifacio.

Adderley told her that Detective Mowbry had been shot in the right eye, the bullet exiting on the right lateral side of the skull. X rays showed bullet fragments in the brain and fracture on the right side of the skull. She’d been sedated with phenobarbital, and they were administering Decadron intravenously to prevent brain swelling. They were now waiting for her blood pressure and vital signs to stabilize before they did a CAT scan. Adderley expected this would be in the next ten to fifteen minutes.

“Is the O.R. ready for her?” Sharyn asked.

“We’ll move her in as soon as we get the results.”

“Who’s standing by?”

“Pair of neurosurgeons, an ophthalmologist, and a plastic surgeon.”

“How does the eye look?” Sharyn asked.

“Bad,” Adderley said.

BERT KLING was sitting in his pajamas at the small round table in his tiny kitchen, eating bran flakes with strawberries that had cost him an arm and a leg at the Korean market around the corner, listening to music on the radio, when the news came on at one o’clock that Sunday afternoon. An announcer said that a police officer had been seriously wounded not half an hour ago…

Kling glanced up from his bowl of cereal.

…and was now in critical condition at Buenavista Hospital.

He looked at the radio.

“The officer, a member of the hostage negotiating team…”

He put down his spoon.

“…was shot in the head while negotiating with a man inside an apartment on Cumberland Avenue.”

Eileen, Kling thought.

Don’t let it be her, he thought.

“In Majesta this morning,” the announcer said, “two young men flying pigeons on a rooftop…”

He got up from the table at once, turned off the radio, went into the bedroom, picked up the receiver from the bedside phone, and immediately dialed Buenavista, the best hospital in the vicinity of Cumberland. They’d have taken her there in a patrol car with the siren screaming, a radioed 10-13 alerting any other car or beat officer on the route to block traffic, expedite transport to the hospital, and provide a motor escort where possible. Nobody knew how to take care of their own like cops.

“Buenavista Hospital, good afternoon,” a woman said.

“This is Detective Bert Kling,” he said, “Eighty-Seventh Precinct. A shooting victim was just brought in, an officer on the hostage negotiating…”

“One moment, please.”

He waited.

“Emergency Room,” a man’s voice said.

“Yes, this is Detective Bert Kling, I’m looking for information on the shooting victim that was just brought in.”

“Which shooting victim did you want?” the man asked, making it sound as if a dozen of them were lying around there.

“This one’s a police negotiator,” Kling said.

“You’ll have to talk to your own people about that,” the man said abruptly, and hung up.

Kling looked at the phone receiver. He put it back on its cradle, took off his pajamas, and—without bothering to shower or shave—pulled on a pair of Jockey shorts, jeans, a T-shirt that had the words 87TH PRECINCT SOFTBALL TEAMlettered on the front in green, a pair of loafers without socks, and an overcoat, and then immediately left the apartment.

THE FIRST PERSON he saw when he walked into the waiting room was Eileen Burke. He went to her at once.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” she said.

In that brief exchange, any bystander would have known immediately that these two had once been lovers.

“I thought it was you,” he said. “I came right over.”

Confirming it.

“Georgia Mowbry,” she said.

“How bad is it?”

“I think it’s pretty bad.”

There were other police officers in the waiting room. First Deputy Commissioner Anderson and Chief of Detectives Fremont were standing near the nurse’s station, talking earnestly to Inspector Brady. The First Dep was wondering out loud what they should put out to the media. He was concerned because the injured police officer was a woman. He wanted to make certain they didn’t get any negative feedback about placing female officers in extremely dangerous situations. After recent disclosures of what had happened to women members of the armed forces during Desert Storm, everybody was suddenly wondering whether women could cut the mustard. This was why they hadn’t yet released the officer’s name. Georgia Mowbry was a wife and a mother. If the department wasn’t careful, the media would have a field day with this one. They were still wondering what to do when Adderley came into the room, Sharyn at his side. He didn’t have to signal for attention. All eyes turned to him the moment he made his entrance.

“Gentlemen,” he said, and then, seeing that there were women present as well, “ladies, we now have the results of the CAT scan, and I’d like to pass those on to you. There’s a bullet wound and concomitant skull fracture in the right temporoparietal region. The orbit of the eye was blown out, there’s orbit fracture and hematoma in the orbit. The eye itself has collapsed. At the moment, it’s hanging by the optic nerve and some minor blood vessels in the canal. The scan gave us a good blueprint, and Detective Mowbry will be moved into the operating room for craniotomy as soon as she’s been prepped. I think that’s everything, unless Dr. Cooke has something to add.”

“I just wanted to say that Dr. Adderley and I will be joining the others in the O.R. as soon as we’re finished with the briefing here,” Sharyn said. “I must caution you,” she said, and hesitated. “This is a hazardous procedure, it might be touch and go all the way.”

Touch and go, Eileen thought.

“How long will the operation take?” Brady asked.

“Depends,” Sharyn said. “Five, six hours, wouldn’t you say?” she asked Adderley.

“At least,” Adderley said.

“What are her chances?” the First Dep asked.

“In a trauma of this sort, all bets are off,” Adderley said.

“Let me put it this way,” Sharyn said. “Withoutthe surgery, her chances are nil.”

Kling was staring at her.

T/P/O meant Time and Place of Occurrence.

MOS meant Member of the Service.

GSW meant Gun Shot Wound.

VS meant Vital Signs.

By the time this report was filed, Georgia Mowbry had already been on the operating table for three hours.

THEY HAD REMOVED a portion of her skull to allow for expansion of the brain. The pistol Jimmy had used first on his sister-in-law and next on Georgia was a .22 caliber Llama. It could have been worse; he could have used a .357 Magnum. But the trauma was severe nonetheless, and in all such cases blood rushes to the injured area, causing swelling that, if it is not decompressed, can result either in death or irreparable damage to the brain. This was one of the risks Adderley hadn’t been willing to discuss.

As Sharyn had told the gathered cops, the procedure was hazardous; but it was nonetheless commonplace: You went in, you stopped the bleeding, and you repaired the damage. But a big vein was open, and it took a long time to clip it, and tie it, and control the major bleeding, by which time Georgia’s pulse rate had dropped to forty, and then thirty, and her blood pressure had fallen alarmingly. When her vital signs were stable again, the surgeons were confronted with the choice of either digging for the bullet fragments in the brain or else leaving them in, and decided that probing for them presented the greater risk. They chose, however, to try getting the dead bone out rather than chancing possible later abscess and infection. They had lowered the temperature of the brain with a cold saline solution; the swelling seemed to be under control.

The eye presented problems of its own.

The bullet had punctured it and caused the gel to leak out, collapsing the eye like a deflated balloon. Blown back into the skull, it now hung precariously in the canal, waiting for the eye surgeon’s decision. He determined that the eye was completely destroyed and therefore unsalvageable; there was nothing to do but sever the connecting nerve and blood vessels and surgically remove it. The plastic surgeon was there to reinforce the back of the orbit and to patch the broken bones around the eye and the zygoma, the bone supporting the cheek.

All of this was painstaking, delicate, risky, and time-consuming work. At twenty minutes past midnight, some twelve hours after she’d been shot, Georgia, in a barbiturate-induced coma, was wheeled into the recovery room. She had been on the table for more than ten hours. Now there was an oxygen tube in her mouth to help her breathe, and a tube in her nose to draw out stomach contents, and a catheter going to her bladder, and tubes and lines feeding her intravenously and monitoring all her vital signs.

Early on the morning of March thirtieth, another note was added to the sick-desk report:

**0515 hours. Dep Ch Cooke advises MOS in recovery room listed as Critical/Stable. Prognosis guarded for recovery.