Reversible Error (8 page)

Booth became aware that the two cops on either side of him were staring at him. He looked straight ahead. After a while the older one said, "Turn off here."

The driver swung left, heading toward the blackness of Colonial Park. He stopped the car in the dark of a big tree.

The older cop said, "Look at his head. It's the perfect shape."

"Don't start that again!" the big cop said nervously.

"I'm telling you, it'll work this time," said the older detective. Booth felt the older cop's body shift, and looked to see why. He had drawn out his pistol.

The driver turned around in the front seat. "Damn it, not in the damn car! The last time it took me three hours to clean all the blood and crap off of the upholstery. You want to play games, do it outside!"

Booth felt a cold touch at his right ear. His head jerked away by reflex, only to be stopped by a similar but harder pressure on the other ear. The big cop said, "Boss, I sure hope you know what you doin. You say this really works?"

"I know it," affirmed the older cop. "Now, just get it stuck in there solid, and don't be twitchin like you done last time."

Booth now could not move his head. He understood why. He had the muzzle of a.38-caliber revolver stuck firmly in each ear.

"Hey," he said. "Hey, what…?"

The driver leaned over the front seat and addressed him conversationally. "See, what he says, is if you do this just right, the two bullets will meet in the middle and cancel out. The same slug, the same load, same gun, understand. It's like physics. I happen to think it's horseshit, myself, but try and tell him anything!"

Booth's face twisted in a ghastly smile. "You shittin me, man. They can't do that. They's cops, they can't…"

The smile faded and Booth's jaw went slack, as if something more frightening than having a pistol in each ear had just occurred to him. A trickle of sweat fell into his eye. The older cop caught the change in expression.

"Say what? What can't cops do, brother?" Dugman asked.

Booth opened a dry mouth as if to say something, then shut it.

The cop in the front seat began to talk again, in the same tone of calm explanation. "Yeah, see, we know you killed Clarry, and we know there was cops involved. Now, ordinarily we would take you in, book you, and question you. We would figure, maybe we can make a deal-you give us the guy, we put in a good word with the D.A., and so on.

"But the word is, you don't deal. You're a stand-up dude. Fine. The problem is, we really need this guy. So we figured, you're no good to us on that, the best thing we could do is, maybe if we ace you out, your guy will-I dunno-get a hair up his ass. Do something dumb. Maybe he'll think we're in the same business, and he'll come after us. Or whatever. I mean it's pretty thin at this point, but I don't see the percentage in doing anything else, if you catch my drift-"

The older cop broke in, "That's enough. God damn, man, you ain't got to ask his fuckin permission!" He addressed the big cop on the other side of Booth. "OK, we gonna do it now."

"Just a second, lemme shift around here. Is this gonna fuck up my suit?"

"Not if you do it right. You lined up good?"

"Yeah, I guess."

"OK, squeeze off on the count of three," said the older cop.

"Um, hold it… you mean, right on three, or just after? Like, one-two-bang? Or one-two-three-bang?"

The older cop sounded exasperated. "Damn! I told you before; take up all the slack, then let go as soon as I say 'three'!"

Booth could hear surprisingly well, considering that his ears were full of gun. He understood the explanation given by the man in the front seat, and even sympathized with it, as much as he could, considering his position. He would have used the same reasoning himself. He heard the count, as from a great distance. Closer, more intimately, he heard the whisper of the revolver mechanisms as they brought the new bullets around to be fired. He seemed separated from his trembling body, floating above his own head. He heard the cop say "three" and, a pulse-beat later, the tiny snicks as the mechanisms released their hammers.

The hammers took a long time to fall. By the time they did, Booth was already far away.

"I don't think he believed us," said Maus, looking down at Booth's flaccid body.

"He ain't dead, is he?" asked Mack. Booth's head was resting on his knee.

Dugman reached out and touched Booth's neck. "Naw, he just fainted. God damn! He let go his business too!" Dugman flung open his door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. In another second, Mack cursed and did the same. They stood on either side of the car hooting and waving their hands past their faces.

"Say, Maus," said Dugman, "why don't you drive on down to the precinct and book the prisoner. Me and Mack got to do some detective work here on the street."

"Yo," said Mack. "We got to stay close to our people."

Maus rolled down his window. "Fuckin guys. I knew I was gonna have to clean the fuckin car again."

Marlene's bed sat on a high sleeping platform at one end of her loft, and from this vantage, at six-thirty on a workday morning, she watched the naked Karp drink water from her sink. He chugged a glass down, then filled another. Karp drank a lot of water, like a horse. It was the only healthy aspect of his diet, which consisted otherwise of junk food from cancer wagons and takeout windows-soggy pizza, elderly gray hot dogs, orange-colored knishes heavy as cinderblock, souvlaki oozing toxic oils, lukewarm eggrolls packed with substances mysterious as the East. Karp ate these in combinations and in quantities that would gag a wolverine, and washed it down with colorful, bubbled sugar-water.

Marlene had vaguely considered a campaign to change his diet into one that would enable him to survive into the coming decade. This was but one of the many such campaigns she had planned for after the Big Day. Karp, though a fountain of many virtues, could stand considerable improvement.

Once they learned about the baby, and Karp began to spend most of his time with Marlene, she had attempted to get her kitchen act together. She was a reasonably proficient cook, but like Karp, was no slave to the four basic food groups. Marlene subsisted largely on chocolate bars and yogurt.

Since she had started eating for two and began an effort to reform, Marlene had cooked a number of what she considered decent meals. Karp responded with enthusiasm, but he would have responded with equal enthusiasm to raw vulture, as long as there was enough of it.

More recently, she had been too exhausted to spend time in the kitchen, and on most evenings it seemed easier to take-out from one of the many grease joints, Italian, Chinese, or Greek, that perfumed the streets of lower Manhattan.

She watched Karp top off his tank and walk to the toilet. The diet hadn't affected his body yet, she thought approvingly. As large as he was, he was graceful and precise in motion, grounded and radiating contained power when at rest. The morning light flooding out through the big east windows of the loft lit up the hanging dust around his body like an aura.

The legs were long and smooth, the arms suspended from wide square shoulders down to those enormous hands, with their bony spatulate fingers. The scars-the Dr. Frankenstein mass of ladders from the knee operations and the smaller ragged ones in the shoulder where he had taken a couple of assassin's bullets-added somehow to the appeal. Scars: a real man!

What a nice butt he has, thought Marlene, scrooching around in the bed to get a better look. And how nice that he's retained that jockish habit of walking around naked all the time. How dull to be married to some lard-ass in a plaid robe. We like each other's asses, she mused; is that a really solid basis for a life relationship? Because although she knew his body nearly as well as she knew her own, her knowledge of what went on within that high and narrow skull remained vague and confused.

The light moved slowly across the floor of Marlene's loft. The big skylight in the center of its patterned tin ceiling was beginning to glow as well, like milk glass. The loft was one huge room, a hundred feet long by thirty-three, divided by portable screens into a living area, a kitchen, a dining area, and then the Limbo, a dusty zone occupied by athletic equipment- Karp's rowing machine, Marlene's body and speed bags-assorted junk, and the huge motors that ran the building's freight lift. Under the west windows, at the far end, Marlene had set up a little office, and about a hundred potted plants, ranging from African violets to giant ficus trees.

The place was entirely Marlene's creation, and waking up in it always gave her a little charge. The summer she had moved in she had taken on the herculean task of cleaning out the remnants of a defunct electroplater, heaving great tangles of wire and scrap down the freight shaft, scraping, sanding, painting, until it was as she wanted it, a great white, calm room, high above the street, flooded with light.

That summer, eight years ago, barely twenty-five people had lived full-time in the old industrial area south of Houston Street. Now they called it SoHo, the hottest property in New York. Recently a thin creature with black clothes and white hair had offered Marlene thirty thousand dollars for the key.

Marlene sighed and got out of bed, wrapped a frazzled pink blanket around her shoulders, and scooted down the ladder from the sleeping platform. She walked across the wide-planked white-painted floor, dropped the blanket, climbed four steps, and plunged into the hot water of the thousand-gallon hard rubber electroplating tank that served her as a bath.

Seated on the floor of this tank, perfumed water to her chin, she could not see over its rim. She heard the toilet flush, a door open, the sound of heavy naked steps toward the far end of the loft.

She stood up and began soaping her body and hair with almond liquid soap. She saw that Karp had pulled an old pair of sweatpants on. Now he sat down on his ancient rowing machine and began to pull at its wooden handles.

She watched the muscles in his back work as he pulled. He would row for exactly fifteen minutes, take a short wash in the tub, and be dressed and ready to leave ten minutes after that, impatiently pacing while he waited for her to complete her more complex preparations for the outside world. Then they would walk down the five splintery flights and the two grim industrial streets to the BMT subway at Prince and Broadway, or, if it were nice out and she felt up to it, they would hoof the distance, a little over a mile, to 100 Centre Street.

A routine. Marlene thought, ambivalently, about it going on indefinitely, with, eventually, a stop at the day-care to drop off the kid. Or kids, as it might turn out. She looked down at her belly. Only a slight rise as yet; she could still see her mop of pubic curls. If her mother could be believed, she would carry high and small, like all the women in her family. And have an easy labor, to hear her grandmother tell it. According to her grandmother, her Uncle Marco had been born late one night with so little trouble that he barely woke her up.

An easy slide into a stable life. Something tugged in a different direction. Watching Karp work out, the dense muscles rolling under the glowing skin, a familiar feeling spread through her groin. Her fingers began soaping more deeply between her thighs than proper hygiene strictly required.

It's been a while, she thought. She could hide in the bath and then when Karp appeared for his dip, she could spring on him, soapy and hot, and they could spend a delicious morning messing around.

But no, that would require calling in to the office, and a massive rescheduling of appointments and appearances. She could seduce Karp from his duty, but he would be racked with guilt for days afterward, and take it out on her. Besides, the staff, being skilled investigators, would soon figure out what was going on, with both of them out for the morning, and so they would also have to put up with the leers of their coworkers, ace leerers all: Uncle George and Aunti Mabel Fainted at the breakfast table This should serve sufficient warning Never do it in the morning.

No, on second thought, better later. She rose from the bath, thinking, I'm getting to be a horny old lady. Not too surprising, since I was a horny young lady too. Tonight, then, or earlier-maybe I can inveigle him into my office. Hard and fast on the desktop, amid the papers. The thought warmed her and brought a giggle to her throat as she reached for the towel.

Dressed and primped, she in black linen suit, he in his eternal blue pinstripe, they thundered down the stairs, Karp way in the lead, Marlene feeling like Winnie-the-Pooh bumping along after her gigantic Christopher Robin.

Out in the already dieseled air, Karp bought two newspapers, the Times and the Daily News. He stuck the Times and the brown accordion folder he used as a briefcase under his left arm and flipped through the News as he walked along. He was looking for crimes, and this morning he didn't have to flip long.

"Ah, shit!" he snarled, half under his breath.

"What's happening?" asked Marlene.

"They got another one. Jason Brown, twenty-seven. AKA Joker Brown."

"A personal friend?"

Karp gave her a look. "A dope dealer. Or 'drug lord,' as they now get called in the papers." He showed her the front page. The photograph was of the type familiar to Daily News readers for five decades: cops standing around appearing hapless, a shrouded form on the ground, black splotches on the white covering, an arm sticking out, palm up, rivulets of what you knew was blood, looking like shiny tar.

"You're right, 'drug lord slain, this makes eight,'" read Marlene from the huge black letters of the headline. "The same guys doing it, you think?"

Karp shrugged. "I don't know. Clay thinks so. I'd like to talk to him about it, if he would ever get back to me. What I'm worried about is his excellency the district attorney. This is the kind of crap Bloom lives for. Guaranteed he'll have a fucking press conference this morning and promise to set up a special unit to bring the perps to justice. Bloom loves special units."