Ed McBain - Downtown

“Nothing,” Michael said.

“You police?” the man yelled.

“Yes.”

“Me supahtennin.”

“Go back to sleep,” Michael said. “This is routine.”

“Where you badge?”

“I’m undercover,” Michael said.

The man blinked.

“Wah you wann here?” he asked.

“There’s a sniper on the roof,” Michael said.

“I go get key,” the man said, nodding.

“What key?”

“For loof,” the man said, and went back into his apartment.

Michael waited. He did not want a partner. On the other hand, his foot still hurt and he didn’t want to have to try kicking in another door. He suddenly wondered if in real life it was possible to kick in a door the way detectives did in the movies and on television. He knew it wasn’t possible in real life to slam a car into another car and just go on your merry way. Teenagers saw a car chase in a movie, they thought, Hey terrific, I can run into el pillars and concrete mixers and I’ll just bounce right off them like a rubber ball, that should be great fun. That same teenager got a drink or two in him, he decided he was a big-city detective in a car chase. He rammed his car into a bus, expecting either the bus would roll over on its back or else his car would bounce off it like in the movies and the next thing you knew a real-life steering wheel was crushing his chest or his head was going through a real-life windshield. Michael suddenly wondered if Sylvester Stallone had ever been to Vietnam.

“Okay, I gotta key,” the man said, and came out into the hallway, and pulled the door to his apartment shut behind him. To Michael’s dismay, the man had taken off his slippers and put on socks and high-topped boots that looked like combat boots. He had also put on a shirt and a heavy Mackinaw and a woolen stocking cap.

They climbed the steps to the fourth floor and then up another short flight of steps to a metal door. Nodding, flapping his hands, turning the key on the air, shaping his other hand into a gun, Michael’s guide and new partner indicated that this was indeed the door to the roof and that he was now going to open the door to the roof, so if Michael was a real cop and there was a real sniper out there maybe he should take out a gun or something. Obligingly, Michael took out a gun. The one he had taken from Crandall, which upon inspection had turned out to be a .32 caliber Harrington & Richardson Model 4, double-action revolver.

“Ahhhhhh,” the man said, and nodded. He liked the gun. He showed Michael the key again, and then inserted it into the padlock that hung from a hinge and hasp on the metal door, and as if performing a magic trick, he turned the key and opened the padlock, and grinned and nodded at Michael. Michael nodded back. The Chinese man took the padlock off the hasp, and then moved aside. If there really was a sniper out there, he wasn’t going to be the first one to step out onto the roof. He almost bowed Michael out ahead of him.

“You stay here,” Michael said.

“More cops,” the man said, and nodded. “I call more cops.”

“No!” Michael said. “No more cops. This is undercover.”

The man looked at him.

“What’s your name?” Michael asked.

“Peter Chen,” the man said.

“Mr. Chen, thank you very much,” Michael said, “the city is proud of you. But you can go back down, thank you,” Michael said. “Good-bye, Mr. Chen, thank you.”

“I come with you,” Chen said.

Michael looked at him.

Chen smiled.

Michael sighed in resignation, opened the door, and stepped quickly out onto the roof. He paused for a moment, getting his new bearings, trying to work out where he was in relationship to Connie’s building, where the sniper was. Because once he did that, the rest would be simple. The buildings here were all joined side by side, there were no airshafts to leap, it would merely be a matter of climbing the parapets that separated one rooftop from the next. So if the cross street was here, then Connie’s street was there, and he’d have to go over this rooftop and then the next one to the corner—

“What you do?” Chen asked.

“I’m thinking.”

“Ahhhhh.”

— and then make a left turn and continue on over the rooftops till he came to the middle of the block somewhere. Long before then, on a clear moonlit night like tonight, he’d have seen the sniper. The trick was to make sure the sniper didn’t see him. Or his new friend, Chen, who was now behind him and staying very close as he made his way across the roof toward—

“I see nobody,” Chen said.

“Give it time,” Michael whispered. “And keep it down.”

The snow had drifted some four feet high in places. It was almost impossible to tell where one rooftop ended and the next began. He discovered the first parapet only by banging into it. He climbed over it, Chen close behind him, and was working his way laboriously through the snow toward the corner where the buildings joined at a right angle when he saw up ahead—

He signaled with his hand, palm down and patting the air.

Chen got the meaning at once, and dropped immediately flat to the snow.

Michael raised his head.

There.

He squinted into the distance. Someone in black. Crouching behind the parapet facing the street. Rifle in his hands.

“Stay here,” he whispered to Chen.

Chen nodded.

Michael began creeping forward.

He did not want to kill anyone. He had Crandall’s .32 in his right hand and Frankie Zeppelin’s .45 in the left-hand pocket of his bomber jacket, but he did not want to use either of those guns to kill anyone. He’d already been accused of killing one person, and he did not want to add to that list the actual murder of yet another person. It was too bad, of course, that the person lying on the roof up ahead was armed with a rifle he’d already fired at Michael. Because if that person wanted to kill him, as seemed to be the case, then he certainly wasn’t going to put down his rifle and come along like a nice little boy. In which case Michael might very well have to shoot him. Perhaps kill him. The way he’d killed people in Vietnam, where it hadn’t seemed to matter much. Kill or be killed. Like tonight. Maybe.

He suddenly wondered why this person wanted him dead.

Crawling across the snow — closer and closer, keeping his eyes on the man as he advanced steadily toward him, ready to fire if he had to, if he was spotted, if the man turned that rifle on him — the question assumed paramount importance in his mind.

Why does this person want to kill me?

And then another question followed on its heels, so fierce in its intensity that it stopped Michael dead in his tracks.

Who is the person they’ve already killed?

The corpse wasn’t Crandall’s, that was for sure, even though Crandall’s identification had been found on it.

But there was a corpse, there was no mistake about that, the police of the Seventh Precinct had found a dead man in the car Michael had rented, so who was that man?

Maybe the man in black over there would have the answers to both questions.

Michael began moving toward him again.

He could see the man clearly in the moonlight now. Forty yards away from him now. Black watch cap. Black leather jacket. Black jeans. Black boots. Black gloves. Crouched behind the parapet facing the street, hunched over a rifle, Michael couldn’t tell what kind at this distance. Telescopic sight on it.

The man suddenly got to his feet.

Michael froze.

In an instant, the man would spot him, and turn the rifle on him.

In an instant, Michael would have to shoot him.

But no, the man—

Huh?