Ed McBain - Downtown

At first, Michael thought she was a mirage.

Coming up out of the subway that way. Half-naked. In a snowstorm no less.

Flaming red hair to match the lingerie and boots. Blazing green eyes, five-feet four-inches tall and weighing at least a hundred and fifty pounds.

Michael picked up the gun and pointed it at the man in the snow.

“Up!” he said. “On your feet!”

“Drop the gun,” the fat redhead said.

Michael had no intention of dropping the gun. Not while the man sitting in the snow was still breathing.

“You hurt me,” the man said.

High, piping, frightened voice.

“No kidding?” Michael said, and reached down for the ski mask, pulling it off his head, wanting to see just how much he’d hurt him.

The man was Chinese.

Or Japanese.

Or, for all Michael knew, Vietnamese.

Everything seemed suddenly like a dream. He was back in the jungle again, where everyone had slanted eyes, and where day and night he dreamed of naked redheaded women materializing in the mist, though not as short or as fat as this one was. Back then the women who materialized were very slender, but they were all carrying hand grenades in their armpits. The bad guys were slender, too. And very small. This bad guy was very large.

“You son of a bitch,” he said.

In perfect English.

“Nice talk,” the fat redhead said. “You,” she said to Michael. “I told you to drop the gun.”

“Where’s your badge?” Michael said.

“Here’s my badge,” she said, and took from her handbag a shield that looked very much like the one Cahill had flashed in the bar, gold with blue enameling. “Detective O’Brien,” she said, “First Squad.”

“Officer,” the Oriental man said at once, “this person broke my nose.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Michael said.

“Get up,” Detective O’Brien said.

“I think he broke some of my teeth, too.”

He was on his feet now, tongue searching his teeth for chips, hand rubbing his nose at the same time. Michael knew the nose wasn’t broken. He’d have jumped out of his skin just touching it. The teeth were another matter. He’d butted the man pretty hard.

“What are you doing sticking up people?” he asked.

He had the idea that Chinese guys — if he was Chinese — didn’t go around sticking up people. Japanese guys, neither. He wasn’t so sure about Vietnamese.

“What are you doing trying to kill people?” the man said.

“I was defending myself,” Michael said.

“From what? A fake gun?”

Michael looked at the gun in his hand. It had the weight and heft of a real gun, but it was nonetheless plastic. By now, the man had decided that nothing was broken. Teeth all okay, nose still intact. Which put Michael in a dangerous position in that the gun in his hand was plastic and the man standing before him was beginning to look bigger and bigger every minute. Michael had never seen such a large Oriental in his life. He wondered if perhaps the man was a fake Oriental, the way Cahill had been a fake detective and the way the plastic gun in his hand was a fake Colt .45 automatic.

The gun Detective O’Brien pulled out of her handbag looked very real.

“I’ll shoot the first one of you fucks who moves,” she said.

Which sounded like authentic cop talk, too.

“You,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Charlie Wong.”

“Chinese, huh?” she asked.

“No, Jewish,” Wong said sarcastically, which Michael figured was the wrong way to sound when a fat lady in only her underwear and a monkey-fur jacket was standing in the shivering cold with a pistol in her hand.

“And you?” she said to Michael.

“Presbyterian,” he said.

“Your name,” she said impatiently, and wagged the gun at him.

“A cop,” Wong said, shaking his head, “I can’t believe it. I thought you were a hooker.”

“Why, thank you,” Detective O’Brien said.

“That’s the way the hookers dress down here,” Wong explained to Michael. “Even in cold weather like this. All year round, in fact.”

“If you two gentlemen don’t mind,” Detective O’Brien said, sounding as sarcastic as Wong had earlier sounded, “what we’re gonna do now is march to the station house, ’cause quite frankly I don’t appreciate disorderly conduct on my...”

Wong shoved out at Michael, who in turn lost his footing and crashed into Detective O’Brien, who fell over backward onto her almost-naked behind, her silk-stockinged legs flying into the air, her gun going off. Michael figured that what he had here was a fat lady who was a real cop with a real badge and a real gun, but who thought he was a two-bit brawler instead of a two-bit victim. He decided he did not want to spend the rest of the night explaining that Wong had tried to hold him up. Especially since Detective O’Brien was now sitting up in the snow at the top of the steps leading down to the subway, her elbows on her knees, the pistol in both hands, taking very careful aim at him.

He had learned another thing in Vietnam.

“Aiiii-eeeeeee!” he yelled.

When you heard this in the jungle, your blood ran cold.

It worked here in downtown Manhattan, too.

Detective O’Brien screamed back at him in terror. Her gun went off wildly, and so did Michael, in the same direction Wong had gone, running back toward Moore, and crossing the street, and seeing Wong up ahead going a hundred miles an hour.

Michael took a quick look at his watch.

8:45.

His plane would be leaving in two hours and twenty minutes.

He could not go down into the subway to catch his A-train to the airport because Detective O’Brien was behind him, sitting between him and his transportation. There was not a taxi anywhere in sight, and besides the ten dollars Bonano had loaned him was not enough for cab fare to Kennedy. He did not know this goddamn city where everyone seemed to be either a cop or a crook and all of them seemed to be crazy. He did not know where there might be another subway station where he could catch a train to the airport, because his map was behind him, too, there on the sidewalk between him and O’Brien. He knew only that when you were lost in the jungle, you followed a native guide.

Behind him, Detective O’Brien fired her gun. Into the air, he hoped.

He ran like hell after Wong.

They ran for what seemed like miles.

Wong was a good runner. Michael was out of shape and out of breath. His shoes were sodden and his socks were wet and his feet were cold and his eyeglasses kept caking with snow, which he repeatedly cleared as he followed Wong, both of them padding silently over fields of white, the curbs gone now, no difference now between sidewalk and street, just block after block of white after white after white in a part of the city that was totally alien to him. But at last he turned a corner behind Wong and saw him ducking into a doorway with Chinese lettering over it. Michael looked at his watch again. 8:57. Wong disappeared into the doorway. Michael followed him.

He wiped off his glasses and put them back on again.

He was inside a Chinese fortune-cookie factory.

A Chinese man in white pants, a white shirt, a long white apron, and a white chef’s hat stood behind a stainless steel counter stuffing fortune cookies with little slips of paper.

“Which way did he go?” Michael asked.

“True ecstasy is a golden lute on a purple night,” the fortune-cookie stuffer said.

There was a door at the far end of the room. Michael pointed to it.

“Did he go in there?” he asked.

“He who rages at fate rages at barking dogs,” the man said, and stuffed another cookie.

“Thank you,” Michael said, and went immediately toward the door.