Ed McBain - Downtown

“Your license and your credit cards,” Connie said.

“What time was this?” Michael asked.

“Around eight-thirty,” Molly said.

“Right after Crandall stole my car,” Michael said.

“She probably told him that, too. That they also had your car.”

“So now the Spanish guy could plant the corpse in my car...”

“With Crandall’s I.D. on it...”

“And my stuff alongside the body...”

“And set the whole thing in motion.”

“What whole thing?” O’Hare asked.

“This is giving me a headache,” Molly said, and walked off.

The real headache began at eight o’clock that night, as they were approaching Connie’s building.

That was when the shots came.

Michael had developed a sixth sense in Vietnam, you didn’t survive unless you did. You learned to know when something was coming your way, you heard that tiny oiled click somewhere out there in the jungle, and you knew someone had squeezed a trigger and a round was right then speeding out of a rifle barrel, or a dozen rounds, you didn’t wait to find out, you threw yourself flat on the ground. They said in Vietnam that the only grunts who survived were the ones who got good at humping mud. Michael had survived.

There was no mud to hump on Pell Street that Wednesday night, there was only a lot of virgin white snow heaped against the curbs on either side of the street. The plows had been through, and the banks they’d left were three, four feet high. In the bright moonlight, Connie and Michael came walking up the middle of the street, which was clearer than the sidewalks, and were about to climb over the bank in front of her building when Michael heard the click.

The same oiled click he’d come to know and love in dear old Vietnam, a click only a trained bird dog might have heard, so soft and so tiny was it, but he knew at once what that click meant.

In Vietnam, he’d have thought only of his own skin.

Hear the click, hump the mud.

Here, there was Connie.

He threw himself at her sideways, knocking her off her feet and down, man, out of the path of that bullet or bullets that would be coming their way in about one-one hundreth of a—

There!

A sharp crack on the air.

And another one.

First the click, and then the crack.

If you hadn’t heard the click, you never heard the crack, because by then you were stone-cold dead in the market.

For a tall, slender girl, Connie went down like a sack of iron rivets. Whammo, on her back in the snow, legs flying. “Hey!” she yelled, getting angry. Another crack, and then another, little spurts of snow erupting on the ridge of snow above their heads, better snow spurts than blood spurts, Charlie.

“Keep down!” he yelled.

She was straggling to get up, cursing in Chinese.

He kept her pinned.

Listened.

Nothing.

But wait... wait... wait...

“Are you crazy?” she said.

“Yes,” he said.

Wail... wait...

He knew the shooter was still up there. Sensed it with every fiber in his being.

“Stay here,” he said. “And stay down. There’s someone up there trying to kill us.”

“What?”

“On the roof. Don’t even lift your head. I’ll be right back.”

“Michael,” she said. Softly.

“Yes?” he said.

“I love you, Michael, but you are crazy.”

It was the first time she’d said that.

The loving him part.

He smiled.

“I love you, too,” he said.

The street ran like a wide trench between the banks of moonlit snow on either side of it. Connie lay huddled close to the bank on the northern side of the street, hidden from the roof. Up there was where the shooter was. Michael began wiggling his way up the street, on his belly, using his elbows, dragging his legs. Working his way toward the corner of Pell and Mott, where he planned to make a right turn, out of the shooter’s line of fire. Then he would get up to those rooftops up there, and see what there was to see.

It was such a beautiful night.

Long Foot Howell, the only Indian guy in the platoon — an American Indian whose great-great grandfather had ridden the Plains with Sitting Bull — always used to say, “It’s a good day for dying.”

His people lived on a reservation out West someplace. Arizona, maybe, Michael couldn’t remember.

Long Foot told him that his people used to say that before they rode into battle.

It’s a good day for dying.

Meaning God alone knew what.

Maybe that if you were going to die, you might as well do it on a nice day instead of a shitty one.

Or maybe it referred to the enemy. A good day for killing the enemy. A good day for the enemy to die.

Or maybe it was a reverse sort of charm. The Indian’s way of wishing himself good luck. If he said it was a good day for dying, then maybe he wouldn’t get killed. Maybe whichever god or gods the Indian prayed to would hear what he’d said and spare him. If that was it, the charm hadn’t worked too well for Long Foot.

On a very good day in Vietnam, with the sun shining bright on his shiny black hair, Long Foot took a full mortar hit and went to join his ancestors in a hundred little pieces.

This was a beautiful night.

But not for dying.

Not here and not now.

However much whoever was on the roof might have wished it.

Michael had reached the corner now, the two narrow streets intersecting the way he imagined country roads did in England, where he’d never been. The hedgerows here, however, were made of snow, high enough to keep Michael hidden from the sniper on the roof, who was still up there silent and waiting.

On his hands and knees, Michael came around the corner.

The building immediately on his right had the inevitable Chinese restaurant on the ground floor, a blue door to the right of it. The door had a sign on it reading TAIWAN NOODLE FACTORY. Michael figured the door to a business would be locked shut on Christmas Day. He could not afford fiddling with a locked door after he climbed over the snowbank and onto the sidewalk where he would be seen if the sniper was roaming around up there.

He crawled to a spot paralleling the next building in line.

Lifted his head quickly.

Saw a door painted green.

Ducked his head.

Waited.

Lifted it again. Saw numerals over the door, nothing else, no sign, no anything. An apartment building. Meaning steps going up to the roof. He hoped.

Ducked again.

Waited.

He crawled several buildings down the street, staying close to the snowbank, and then he took a deep breath, counted to three, and scrambled over the side of the bank as if it were a suspect hill in Vietnam except that over there he’d have had a hand grenade in his fist. He landed on his feet and on the run, sprinting for the green door, which he now saw was slightly ajar, flattening himself against the side of the building to the right of the door. He shot a quick, almost unconscious glance upward toward the roof, saw nothing in the moonlight, and shoved the door fully open.

The entrance vestibule was dark and cold.

He closed the door behind him.

Or, at least, tried to close it. There was something wrong with the hinge, the door would not fully seat itself in the jamb. He gave it up for a lost cause, went to the closed inner door just past the doorbells and mailboxes, and tried the knob. The door was locked. He backed away from it at once, raised his knee, and kicked out flatfooted at a point just above the knob.

“Ow!” he yelled. “You son of a bitch!”

The door hadn’t budged an inch.

Still swearing, he moved over to where the doorbells were set under the mailboxes. At random, he selected the doorbell for apartment 2A, rang the doorbell, waited, waited, waited and got nothing. The sole of his foot was sending out flashing signals of pain. He wondered if it was possible to break the sole of your foot. He rang another doorbell. A voice came instantly from a speaker on the wall. The voice said something in Chinese. Michael said, “Police, open the door, please.” An answering buzz sounded at once. Pleased with himself, Michael opened the door and was starting toward the steps when another door opened at the end of the little cul de sac to the right of the staircase. A short, very fat Chinese man wearing a tank-top undershirt, black trousers, and black slippers, stepped out into the hallway, squinted toward where Michael was standing, and yelled, “Wassa motta?”