Lawrence Block - Eight Million Ways to Die

And tonight I'd been unable to do it. Because something clued me that the car I was aiming at held drunken kids instead of assassins? Because some subtle intuitive perception made me wait until I was certain what I was shooting at?

No. I couldn't make myself believe that.

I had frozen. If instead of a kid with a whiskey bottle I'd seen a thug with a tommy gun, I wouldn't have been any more capable of squeezing the trigger. My finger'd been paralyzed.

I broke the gun, shook the bullets out of the cylinder, closed it up again. I pointed the empty weapon at the wastebasket across the room and squeezed the trigger a couple of times. The click the hammer made as it fell upon an empty chamber was surprisingly loud and sharp in my little room.

I aimed at the mirror over the dresser. Click!

Proved nothing. It was empty, I knew it was empty. I could take the thing to a pistol range, load it and fire at targets, and that wouldn't prove anything either.

It bothered me that I'd been unable to fire the gun. And yet I was grateful it had happened that way, because otherwise I'd have emptied the gun into that car of kids, probably killed a few of them, and what would that have done to my peace of mind? Tired as I was, I went a few hard rounds with that particular conundrum. I was glad I hadn't shot anyone and frightened of the implications of not shooting, and my mind went around and around, chasing its tail.

I took off the robe, got into bed, and couldn't even begin to loosen up. I got dressed again in street clothes, used the back end of a nail file as a screwdriver, and took the revolver apart for cleaning. I put its parts in one pocket, and in another I stowed the four live cartridges along with the two knives I'd taken from the mugger.

It was morning and the sky was bright. I walked over to Ninth Avenue and up to Fifty-eighth Street, where I dropped both knives into a sewer grating. I crossed the street and walked to another grating and stood near it with my hands in my pockets, one holding the four cartridges, the other touching the pieces of the disassembled revolver.

Why carry a gun you're not going to shoot? Why own a gun you can't carry?

I stopped in a deli on the way back to the hotel. The customer ahead of me bought two six-packs of Old English 800 Malt Liquor. I picked out four candy bars and paid for them, ate one as I walked and the other three in my room. Then I took the revolver's parts from my pocket and put them back together again. I loaded four of the six chambers and put the gun in the dresser drawer.

I got into bed, told myself I'd stay there whether I could sleep or not, and smiled at the thought as I felt myself drifting off.

The telephone woke me. I fought my way out of sleep like an underwater swimmer coming up for air. I sat up, blinking and trying to catch my breath. The phone was still ringing and I couldn't figure out what was making that damned sound. Then I caught on and answered it.

It was Chance. "Just saw the paper," he said. "What do you figure? That the same guy as got Kim?"

"Give me a minute," I said.

"You asleep?"

"I'm awake now."

"Then you don't know what I'm talkin' about. There was another killing, this time in Queens, some sex-change streetwalker cut to ribbons."

"I know."

"How do you know if you been sleeping?"

"I was out there last night."

"Out there in Queens?"

He sounded impressed. "Out there on Queens Boulevard," I told him. "With a couple of cops. It was the same killer."

"You sure of that?"

"They didn't have the scientific evidence sorted out when I was there. But yes, I'm sure of it."

He thought about it. "Then Kim was just unlucky," he said. "Just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"Maybe."

"Just maybe?"

I got my watch from the nightstand. It was almost noon.

"There are elements that don't fit," I said. "At least it seems that way to me. A cop last night told me my problem is I'm too stubborn. I've only got the one case and I don't want to let go of it."

"So?"

"He could be right, but there are still some things that don't fit. What happened to Kim's ring?"

"What ring?"

"She had a ring with a green stone."

"Ring," he said, and thought about it. "Was it Kim had that ring? I guess it was."

"What happened to it?"

"Wasn't it in her jewelry box?"

"That was her class ring. From high school back home."

"Yeah, right. I recall the ring you mean. Big green stone. Was a birthstone ring, something like that."

"Where'd she get it?"

"Out of a Crackerjack box, most likely. Think she said she bought it for herself. It was just a piece of junk, man. Chunk of green glass is all."

Shatter wine bottles at her feet.

"It wasn't an emerald?"

"You shuckin', man? You know what emeralds cost?"

"No."

"More'n diamonds. Why's the ring important?"

"Maybe it's not."

"What do you do next?"

"I don't know," I said. "If Kim got killed by a psycho striking at random, I don't know what I can do that the cops can't do better. But there's somebody who wants me off the case, and there's a hotel clerk who got scared into leaving town, and there's a missing ring."

"That maybe doesn't mean anything."

"Maybe."

"Wasn't there something in Sunny's note about a ring turning somebody's finger green? Maybe it was a cheap ring, turned Kim's finger green, and she got rid of it."

"I don't think that's what Sunny meant."

"What did she mean, then?"

"I don't know that either." I took a breath. "I'd like to connect Cookie Blue and Kim Dakkinen," I said. "That's what I'd like to do. If I can manage that I can probably find the man who killed them both."

"Maybe. You be at Sunny's service tomorrow?"

"I'll be there."

"Then I'll see you. Maybe we can talk a little afterward."

"Fine."

"Yeah," he said. "Kim and Cookie. What could they have in common?"

"Didn't Kim work the streets for a while? Didn't she take a bust on that Long Island City stroll?"

"Years ago."

"She had a pimp named Duffy, didn't she? Did Cookie have a pimp?"

"Could be. Some of the TVs do. Most of 'em don't, from what I know. Maybe I could ask around."

"Maybe you could."

"I haven't seen Duffy in months. I think I heard he was dead. But I'll ask around. Hard to figure, though, that a girl like Kim had anything in common with a little Jewish queen from the Island."

A Jewish queen and a Dairy Queen, I thought, and thought of Donna.

"Maybe they were sisters," I suggested.

"Sisters?"

"Under the skin."

I wanted breakfast, but when I hit the street I bought a paper before I did anything else, and I could see right away that it wasn't going to make a good accompaniment for my bacon and eggs. Hotel Ripper Claims Second Victim, the top teaser headline announced. And then, in big block caps, sex-change hooker butchered in queens.

I folded it, tucked it under my arm. I don't know what I thought I was going to do first, read the paper or eat, but my feet decided for me and picked neither of those choices. I walked two blocks before I realized I was heading for the Y on West Sixty-third, and that I was going to get there just in time for the twelve-thirty meeting.

What the hell, I thought. Their coffee was as good as anybody else's.

I got out of there an hour later and had breakfast in a Greek joint around the corner on Broadway. I read the paper while I ate. It didn't seem to bother me now.

There wasn't much in the story I didn't already know. The victim was described as having lived in the East Village; I'd somehow assumed she lived across the river in Queens. Garfein had mentioned Floral Park, just across the line in Nassau County, and evidently that was where she'd grown up. Her parents, according to the Post, had both died several years earlier in an air crash. Mark/Sara/Cookie's sole surviving relative was a brother, Adrian Blaustein, a wholesale jeweler residing in Forest Hills with offices on West Forty-seventh Street. He was out of the country and had not yet been notified of his brother's death.