Carol O’Connell - The Man Who Lied To Women

The boy never got the chance to pull the gun. Suddenly, a rush of manic energy with bright curls was pushing the boy through the open doorway, slamming him into the near table so hard Mallory nearly cut him in half at the gut level. She reached into the jacket and pulled out a.22 revolver. Now she was cuffing him and hustling him out of the door. Momentum, stunned wonder and pain had made the boy docile.

Riker never said a word to Peggy. He lifted his hands to catch the brown bag with his breakfast six-pack on the fly as he followed Mallory and her new pet out to the sidewalk.

Hey, what’s the deal here?

Mallory was pressing down on the boy’s head to ease him into the front seat of the car on the passenger side. Any kid who watched too much television would know the perp rode in the back of the car. What was she up to? She opened the back door of the car for Riker and said, ‘Sorry about the inconvenience, sir. I’ll get rid of him as soon as I can.’

Since when did Mallory ever call anybody sir! She hadn’t called him that even when he’d held the rank of captain. But that was one wife and how many bottles ago. He nodded and settled into the back seat to play out her game.

When Mallory was in the driver’s seat, she leaned over to the boy and said in a low voice, ‘It’s too bad you had to witness the deputy police commissioner drunk in an after-hours bar. I guess I’ll have to kill you. You understand, don’t you? It’s politics and nothing personal.’

As Mallory drove the streets, Riker watched the boy’s face. The kid was sweating, and his body was weaving between This is crap and true believing.

‘It’s a damn shame you had to pull this stunt on a night when a top cop is drunk in the back of my car. Yeah, I guess I’ll have to kill you.’

It was ludicrous, but now Riker realized that this boy was so young, it had not been so many years ago that he had bought into Santa Glaus and the Tooth Fairy. And then the kid had additional proof in Mallory’s eyes, the eyes of an assassin.

Yeah, the kid was buying it.

Riker felt a worry coming on in the pit of his stomach where he kept his ulcer. She hadn’t waited for the kid to pull the gun, to commit the crime. She hadn’t read the suspect his rights. She’d broken every rule, and now she was making up new ones to break.

Well, he could relax a little. She wouldn’t actually kill the kid, because Markowitz wouldn’t have liked that. In the absence of a normal sense of right and wrong, good and evil, Mallory was much guided by what would have pissed off Markowitz and what wouldn’t.

Now they were in the Wall Street area, deserted on Christmas Eve. She pulled into a blind street closed off by construction signs. Her eyes roved over the bins of debris left on the site.

‘No, not here,’ she said. ‘Sorry it’s taking so long, sir. I’ll get rid of him on the next block. Okay?’

‘I won’t tell!’ screamed the kid.

Mallory said nothing as the minutes rolled by slow with the creep of the car, stopping in dark places, shaking her head and driving on.

‘I gotta wonder where that gun came from,’ she said at last, ‘and I gotta wonder what you’ve done with it.’

Riker found it interesting the way her expensive education fell away at warm moments like this one. Her voice had a rough edge that would scare any sane person into backing off with no sudden movements. He could only guess at what was going through the kid’s mind. His own body was pressing into the upholstery of the back seat.

Mallory and the perp looked so young to him. With their unlined faces and blond hair, they might have been brother and sister. But he could almost feel the car dip to one side with the power on the driver’s end of the front seat.

‘Are you in a lot of pain?’ asked Mallory, her voice switching gears, all mother love in her tone. ‘Yeah, my gut hurts something awful,’ said the boy. ‘Good. I noticed there weren’t any bullets in the gun. That’s not too bright, is it?’

The kid looked from the gun to Mallory and back to the gun, genuinely startled.

‘So you stole the gun, but not the bullets? When I wash this registration number through the computer, am I gonna find out that some taxpayer was burgled by a moron who thinks the gun makes its own bullets? What else did you steal?’

‘Nothing, I didn’t – ’

Riker jolted forward as Mallory slammed on the brakes. The boy didn’t fare as well. With hands cuffed behind him, his head hit the dashboard. The boy moaned and Riker looked away, the better not to see Mallory drawing first blood of Christmas morning.

Wall Street was a ghost town after the financial houses’ end of business day. You could do what you liked in this neighborhood without fear of another pair of eyes.

Mallory leaned over to grab the boy by his shirt collar. ‘You are stupid. When I run the gun through, you think they won’t mention the rest of the stuff?’

‘It was nothing. There was a ring and a bracelet, but it was junk. I took it to a jeweler. He said I’d be better off selling it at a flea market, and that’s the truth. I’ve known him all my life. He wouldn’t lie to me.’

Riker shook his head and smiled. A baby felon who took stolen goods to his neighborhood jeweler. The criminal class was getting dumber every year. And no bullets. Didn’t these kids learn anything in school?

He listened as Mallory called in on her car phone to run the dates and the jewelry description. But she neglected to mention that she had the suspect in custody, and she never mentioned she had the gun, and at the last, she said, ‘Sorry, it doesn’t match up,’ and closed the call.

‘It checks out,’ she said to the boy. ‘I’m gonna cut you loose. But you never tell anyone you saw the deputy police commissioner drunk in an after-hours bar. Deal?’

The kid nodded his head like a trick pony. Yeah, whatever she wanted, so long as she didn’t hurt him any more.

Riker stopped smiling. He sat still in the dark at the back of the car and tried not to lose the glow of the previous six-pack of beer. No good. He was becoming unwillingly sober as he crept up on Mallory’s mind.

Of course. It all fit.

It was only the thief’s gun she wanted. He rolled his eyes up to the ceiling of the car.

Ah, Markowitz, you bastard. How could you die on me and stick me with your kid? Can you hear me, you son of a bitch‘? Look at what your baby’s doing now. She’s robbing another baby.

‘If I don’t see you when I count to ten, I don’t shoot you. Okay?’

She leaned across him to open the door on his side of the car. Riker listened to the metallic mechanics of Mallory unlocking the irons. She sat back. But the boy was tied to the upholstery by fear, and she had to finally cut the cords with ‘GET OUT, you idiot!’

The boy did his dumb-pony nod again as he was half falling, half stumbling from the car. He staggered in a weaving line for all the seconds it took to understand that he was free, and then he ran.

Riker got out of the car and slid into the front seat.

‘I’ll take the gun, Mallory.’

‘No, it’s mine.’

‘You never planned to take him in, and that wasn’t to save me the embarrassment of showing up at the station house drunk. Everyone already knows I’m a drunk. No, you wanted his gun for a throwaway piece. You wanna save it for the perp in the condo. Now if I’ve got this wrong, just stop me.’

But he wasn’t about to let her stop him, and he went on with the relentless energy of a train running at her full speed, because it was the only way to deal with her – if he lost, his breath, he lost his turn, and the train would turn around and crush him.