Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Sooner or later we’ll catch him, Jack.”

“Either that or the city’ll run out of Ackermans. Maybe his name is Ackerman.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Getting even with his father, hating himself, I don’t know. You want to start looking somewhere, it’s gotta be easier to start with people named Ackerman than with people not named Ackerman.”

“Even so there’s a hell of a lot of Ackermans. It’s going to be some job checking them all out. There’s got to be a few hundred in the five boroughs, plus God knows how many who don’t have telephones. And if the guy we’re looking for is a drifter living in a dump of a hotel somewhere, there’s no way to find him, and that’s if he’s even using his name in the first place, which he probably isn’t, considering the way he feels about the name.”

Freitag lit a cigarette. “Maybe he likes the name,” he said. “Maybe he wants to be the only one left with it.”

“You really think we should check all the Ackermans?”

“Well, the job gets easier every day, Ken. ’Cause every day there’s fewer Ackermans to check on.”

“God.”

“Yeah.”

“Do we just do this ourselves, Jack?”

“I don’t see how we can. We better take it upstairs and let the brass figure out what to do with it. You know what’s gonna happen.”

“What?”

“It’s gonna get in the papers.”

“Oh, God.”

“Yeah.” Freitag drew on his cigarette, coughed, cursed, and took another drag anyway. “The newspapers. At which point all the Ackermans left in the city start panicking, and so does everybody else, and don’t ask me what our crazy does because I don’t have any idea. Well, it’ll be somebody else’s worry.” He got to his feet. “And that’s what we need — for it to be somebody else’s worry. Let’s take this to the lieutenant right now and let him figure out what to do with it.”

The pink rubberball came bouncing crazily down the driveway toward the street. The street was a quiet suburban cul-de-sac in a recently developed neighborhood on Staten Island. The house was a three-bedroom expandable colonial ranchette. The driveway was concrete, with the footprints of a largish dog evident in two of its squares. The small boy who came bouncing crazily after the rubber ball was towheaded and azure-eyed and, when a rangy young man emerged from behind the barberry hedge and speared the ball one-handed, seemed suitably amazed.

“Gotcha,” the man said, and flipped the ball underhand to the small boy, who missed it, but picked it up on the second bounce.

“Hi,” the boy said.

“Hi yourself.”

“Thanks,” the boy said, and looked at the pink rubber ball in his hand. “It was gonna go in the street.”

“Sure looked that way.”

“I’m not supposed to go in the street. On account of the cars.”

“Makes sense.”

“But sometimes the dumb ball goes in the street anyhow, and then what am I supposed to do?”

“It’s a problem,” the man agreed, reaching over to rumple the boy’s straw-colored hair. “How old are you, my good young man?”

“Five and a half.”

“That’s a good age.”

“Goin’ on six.”

“A logical assumption.”

“Those are funny glasses you got on.”

“These?” The man took them off, looked at them for a moment, then put them on. “Mirrors,” he said.

“Yeah, I know. They’re funny.”

“They are indeed. What’s your name?”

“Mark.”

“I bet I know your last name.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I bet it’s Ackerman.”

“How’d you know?” The boy wrinkled up his face in a frown. “Aw, I bet you know my daddy.”

“We’re old friends. Is he home?”

“You silly. He’s workin’.”

“I should have guessed as much. What else would Hale Ackerman be doing on such a beautiful sunshiny day, hmmmm? How about your mommy? She home?”

“Yeah. She’s watchin’ the teevee.”

“And you’re playing in the driveway.”

“Yeah.”

The man rumpled the boy’s hair again. Pitching his voice theatrically low, he said, “It’s a tough business, son, but that doesn’t mean it’s a heartless business. Keep that in mind.”

“Huh?”

“Nothing. A pleasure meeting you, Mark, me lad. Tell your parents they’re lucky to have you. Luckier than they’ll ever have to know.”

“Whatcha mean?”

“Nothing,” the man said agreeably. “Now I have to walk all the way back to the ferry slip and take the dumb old boat all the way back to Manhattan and then I have to go to...” he consulted a slip of paper from his pocket “... to Seaman Avenue way the hell up in Washington Heights. Pardon me. Way the heck up in Washington Heights. Let’s just hope they don’t turn out to have a charming kid.”

“You’re funny.”

“You bet,” the man said.

“Police protection,” thelieutenant was saying. He was a beefy man with an abundance of jaw. He had not been born looking particularly happy, and years of police work had drawn deep lines of disappointment around his eyes and mouth. “That’s the first step, but how do you even go about offering it? There’s a couple of hundred people named Ackerman in the five boroughs and one’s as likely to be a target as the next one. And we don’t know who the hell we’re protecting ’em from. We don’t know if this is one maniac or a platoon of them. Meaning we have to take every dead Ackerman on this list and backtrack, looking for some common element, which since we haven’t been looking for it all along we’re about as likely to find it as a virgin on Eighth Avenue. Twenty-two years ago I coulda gone with the police or the fire department and I couldn’t make up my mind. You know what I did? I tossed a goddam coin. It hadda come up heads.”

“As far as protecting these people—”

“As far as protecting ’em, how do you do that without you let out the story? And when the story gets out it’s all over the papers, and suppose you’re a guy named Ackerman and you find out some moron just declared war on your last name?”

“I suppose you get out of town.”

“Maybe you get out of town, and maybe you have a heart attack, and maybe you call the mayor’s office and yell a lot, and maybe you sit in your apartment with a loaded gun and shoot the mailman when he does something you figure is suspicious. And maybe if you’re some other lunatic you read the story and it’s like tellin’ a kid don’t put beans up your nose, so you go out and join in the Ackerman hunt yourself. Or if you’re another kind of lunatic which we’re all of us familiar with you call up the police and confess. Just to give the nice cops something to do.”

A cop groaned.

“Yeah,” the lieutenant said. “That about sums it up. So the one thing you don’t want is for this to get in the papers, but—”

“But it’s too late for that,” said a voice from the doorway. And a uniformed patrolman entered the office holding a fresh copy of the New York Post. “Either somebody told them or they went and put two and two together.”

“I coulda been a fireman,” the lieutenant said. “I woulda got to slide down the pole and wear one of those hats and everything, but instead the goddam coin had to come up heads.”

The young manpaid the cashier and carried his tray of food across the lunchroom to a long table at the rear. A half dozen people were already sitting there. The young man joined them, ate his macaroni and cheese, sipped his coffee, and listened as they discussed the Ackerman murders.

“I think it’s a cult thing,” one girl was saying. “They have this sort of thing all the time out in California, like surfing and est and all those West Coast trips. In order to be a member you have to kill somebody named Ackerman.”