Speak of the Devil (2 page)

I took off running. Holding the pistol down next to my leg, I crossed the street and started up the paved path that leads into the park. Some hundred or so feet in from the street, the path opens to a small plaza. There’s a decorative stone circle embedded in the walkway. The word IMAGINE is inscribed in mosaic on the circle. The city did this after John Lennon was murdered in 1980 outside the Dakota, which was where he lived.
Him
they let in.

Compared to what had just transpired on the street, the plaza was eerily quiet. As usual, several kids were seated on the periphery of the IMAGINE circle, strumming guitars and softly singing “All You Need Is Love.” A girl in an oversize army coat was arranging flowers on the pavement.

The paved path continues past the memorial into the park. Benches and bushes line the path for another thirty feet, until it comes to a small clearing.

That was where the shooter came from.

He dashed from the clearing onto the path and raced farther into the park, in the direction of the Bethesda Fountain. I chased. He turned to look back and saw me charging after him. His arms pumped even harder, and he reached the small bridge overlooking the fountain plaza. He veered left and started down the stone steps. As I approached the bridge, two police cars sped past on the roadway, their sirens shrieking out of synch. I reached the bridge and started down the steps.

Mistake.

The shooter was already standing at the bottom of the steps. In a wide stance. Facing me. Aiming the Beretta. Behind him, the wings of the angel in the fountain stretched majestically against the blue sky. I dropped as the gun barked, getting off three shots myself before I hit the steps. One of them took the shooter in the right shoulder, near the collarbone. The Beretta fell to the bricks as the shooter staggered backward.

I lunged, knowing the instant I did that it was the wrong thing to do. I was half running, half falling down the steps. Somewhere in the tumbling, I lost my grip on the policeman’s service revolver. Below me, the shooter was hugging his bad arm with his good, taking Frankenstein steps toward his gun. He’d reach it years before I could.

A body went flying past me down the stone steps. It was a cop. Gun drawn and shouting. A second cop grabbed me from behind and stopped my tumbling descent. It was a good strong grip.

“Fucking move, you’re fucking dead! Just freeze!”

I did. Below me, the other cop reached the wounded shooter. With a nifty sweep of a foot, he brought the shooter to the ground. Ignoring the wounded shoulder, the cop jerked the guy’s hands behind him and cuffed him. I was cuffed, too. I offered no resistance and no explanations. My cop was a tall, fierce-looking black man. His heartbeat was probably nearing two hundred blows a minute. Mine sure as hell was. Way too many engines running way too high. I relaxed into custody. There would be time to talk.

The shooter was dragged back up the steps and shoved into the back of a patrol car. My cop was joined by another one, his partner. Squatty guy shaped like a gumdrop. The gumdrop patted me down for weapons, then shoved me into the back of a second patrol car. I was separated from the front seat by a cage. The black guy got behind the wheel. Gumdrop took shotgun.

They did the next part without sirens, which surprised me. It also surprised me that they didn’t take the eastern exit out of the park, or the exit to the south. Either would have taken us away from the parade mess. Instead, the two cars rolled west to Central Park West, where at least a dozen more police cars and several ambulances were already crisscrossing the street, lights whirling. The screaming had ceased. Now it was time for the crying. The crying and the wailing. People hugging people. People staggering in a daze. Faces registering disbelief, horror, shock. Gumdrop muttered, “Jesus goddamn Christ,” as we inched our way forward.

The parade was in tatters. Band instruments were strewn all over the place. I spotted the Pink Panther far to the south, near Columbus Circle, hovering precariously above the street. The wind had kicked up, and the huge figure looked like it was being uppity, bucking and shifting against its ropes.

As we crossed Central Park West at a walker’s pace, I spotted a second balloon. This one was much smaller. A white balloon. The towheaded kid was still clutching the string. As the stretcher bearing the boy’s mother was being slid into the back of an ambulance, one of the EMS workers gathered the boy up into her arms, and the balloon drifted lightly against her face.

Ezra, for the last time . . .

The little boy released the string.

WE HIT BROADWAY AND WENT LEFT. I FIGURED I WAS BEING TAKEN TO the Midtown North station on Fifty-fourth, a five-minute drive, tops, with the cherry spinning and the siren clearing the way. But the accessories remained undeployed, and as we drifted past Fifty-third, I leaned forward in the seat. “Boys. You missed the turn.”

The driver said nothing. Gumdrop half turned in his seat. “Shaddup.”

The radio crackled, and a female voice spit out a series of numbers and letters. Gumdrop glanced curiously at his partner, who nodded tersely. Gumdrop fished a headset from the glove compartment and put it on, glancing at me briefly as he leaned forward to plug it into the radio, which suddenly went silent. I placed both the cops somewhere in their early thirties, which meant I was the senior man in the car. The driver looked up in his mirror and saw that I was still leaning forward.

“Sit back.”

“Just so you know,” I said, “I’m the good guy here.”

“Sit. Back.”

I sat back. We crossed to Ninth Avenue and passed a restaurant called Zen Palate. Margo loves that place. There are three of them in the city, the closest one to her being the one on Broadway in the mid-Seventies. She’s dragged me there a couple times. I like half the stuff I’ve tried there with her. The other half tastes like cardboard.

Margo.

With all that had just happened, it was hard for me to imagine that Margo could still just be sitting up on her pillows, dressed in her oversize Rangers jersey, waiting for me to come back with the bagels. But maybe she was. Margo can balance on the precipice of a moment better than anyone I know.

The car hit a pothole, and my head slammed hard against the roof. I tallied no fewer than four ways I could have sued the city. A minute later, Gumdrop pulled off the headset. He turned to his partner. “We’re supposed to get a bag.”

The driver gave him a look. “A bag?”

“Yeah. That’s what they said. We’ve got to cover his whole head.”

The driver looked at me in his mirror. “You hear that?”

I nodded. “I heard. You’re supposed to cover my whole head. Whatever the hell that means.”

We hit another pothole. The driver swore softly, then glanced into the mirror again. “What’s your name?”

“Malone,” I said. “Fritz Malone.”

The driver nodded. “You prefer paper or plastic?”

AFTER FETCHING THE BAG (PAPER) FROM A MARKET ON FORTY-EIGHTH, the cops drove to a spot under the West Side Highway, just north of the U.S.S.
Intrepid
. I could make out the tail wing of one of the jet fighters on the rear of the aircraft carrier. Before they put the bag over my head, the black guy blindfolded me. He was leaning in the back door, one knee on the seat. His partner stood behind him, looking around anxiously. Gumdrop looked pale. I’d have given him a cocky wink right before getting the blindfold, just to make him a little more nervous, but to tell God’s honest truth, I wasn’t feeling too happy myself.

Something was seriously wrong here. I had lifted a service revolver from a freshly murdered policeman, given chase to the shooter, and discharged three bullets from the police revolver, striking the shooter once in the shoulder. Taking me into custody was the right thing to do. But pulling the squad car over beneath the West Side Highway and putting a blindfold on me, that wasn’t the right thing to do. The fat trails of sweat on Gumdrop’s fleshy face told me that he knew it, too.

“What the hell is this?” I snapped as my world went black.

“Down on the floor.”

The black guy took hold of my shoulders and guided me into position, semifetal, my ear against the hump. The cops got back into the front seat. The engine fired up. They spoke not a word.

This was all wrong.

Wherever it was I was being taken, the driver didn’t take the direct route. Most of Manhattan is a grid. You go north–south, you go east–west. In the Village, it gets all screwy, as well as down in Chinatown and in the Wall Street area. But where we were, midtown, everything is straight streets and ninety-degree turns. From the floor of the car, I tried to track our course, but after several sets of turns that could only suggest redundancies and doubling back, I was lost. Which I assumed was the point.

I thought again about Margo. By now even Margo would have moved off the bed. She’d have heard all the sirens coming up from near the park, and she’d have flipped on her television. She’d be one of the many millions of New Yorkers who were now glued to their sets. What was I saying? Not just New Yorkers, people all across the country. The network jinglemeisters were probably scrambling right now to lay down little five-second tracks in just the right tone: solemn yet provocatively urgent. The graphics people would have worked even faster. Their work was probably already up on the screen, blending with the horrific images.

Margo would be sitting at her kitchen table watching the breaking reports. I could picture her, bare feet pulled up onto the chair, the Rangers jersey pulled over her legs, covering her like a tent. Her stomach would be grumbling for want of bagels.

And she’d know. Margo knows me. The same way her mother knew her old man when he was still in the game. My being gone this long, she’d know that somehow I had gotten myself involved. But Margo also knows the odds. She’d know in her heart of hearts that in all likelihood, I was probably okay. As she likes to say, I seem to have been born under the watchful eye of the Saint of Reckless Dumb Luck.

Even so, she’d be having fingernails for breakfast.

WE STOPPED. TWENTY MINUTES OF DRIVING, BY MY ESTIMATE. TAKING into account the little maneuvers to throw me off, we were still in Manhattan. I would have sussed out easily enough if we had traveled over a bridge or through a tunnel. My ear was close to the ground. Literally.

The two policemen got out of the car. Nothing happened for the next five minutes except that my calves cramped, first one, then the other. Finally, the men in blue returned and the rear door was opened. Unfolding me from the floor was not exactly a ballet, but we all did what we had to do. Outside the car, one of the cops adjusted the bag to sit straighter on my head.

“Thank you.”

I was taken by both elbows and led forward. “Step up,” one of the cops said. About twenty steps later, he said it again. I heard the click of a door being opened, and I was led inside. Even under the bag, I could practically taste the staleness of the air. I was somewhere cold.

We walked a few more feet and then stopped. I waited. After about twenty seconds, I said, “I hope you guys appreciate how docile I’m being.”

Gumdrop told me to shut up. This seemed to be his specialty.

“Listen,” I said. “I don’t know what academy you two attended, but you’ve both got a lot to learn about bringing a person in. This is bullshit. Take this goddamn bag off my head.”

Nothing. A moment later, I heard a small metallic squeaking sound. “Take three steps,” the black guy instructed. My elbows were released. I took the three steps.

“Later,” Gumdrop muttered, and I heard the squeaking again. Nothing. Then the ground shifted suddenly.

Elevator.

Going up.

I was pretty sure I was alone now.

SOMEONE WAS WAITING FOR ME WHEN THE ELEVATOR DOOR SLID open. My arm was grabbed tightly and I was yanked forward. I stumbled a few steps and jerked free.

“Whoever you are, fuck you.”

A gravelly voice muttered, “Just c’mon.”

My arm was taken again and I let myself be led forward. Tile floor, not wood. Something in the slap of the shoes. My other senses were already picking up the slack. We walked about fifty paces before we stopped.

“Sit down.”

I lowered myself carefully. The fingers of my cuffed hands found the chair before the rest of me did. Straight-backed metal chair. I perched lightly on the edge. Between the tumble down the steps at the Bethesda Fountain and my being curled up on the floor of a police car, my muscles were beginning to show me their aches. Even so, I tensed my legs, ready to leap. The bag was lifted from my head. The gravelly voice sounded. “Oh shit.”

The handcuffs were unlocked. I heard them being tossed onto a table as I kneaded the circulation back into my wrists, then I reached up and tugged off the blindfold.

I was in a room about the size of a small classroom. No windows, completely unadorned. The walls were painted infirmary green, circa several decades ago. A ridgeline of what looked like coffee stains ran about four feet off the floor along the wall facing me. Overhead, a bank of fluorescent lights buzzed, giving off cold, colorless light.

I was seated at the long end of a rectangular wooden table. The paper bag was on the table. So were the handcuffs.

Seated across from me was a large man in his late fifties. Huge chest. He was in a charcoal suit with a red tiepin. The tented handkerchief in his front pocket was a pale blue that somewhat matched his eyes, which were small, hard, clear and currently boring angrily into mine. His salty hair was cropped short and sat flat on his scalp, sort of a modified Roman-emperor look. On the local news, you don’t tend to notice the old acne scars. You see putty-colored skin, a twice-broken nose and an imposing ugliness that, in his job, seems to work in his favor. You also don’t notice the labored breathing. The man in front of me looked like he had just finished a couple of laps around a horse corral.