Ed McBain - Vespers

Maybe they'd bandaged the handsome one's hands and packed up and gone home, no sense trying to ride a tigress.

Maybe.

He came down the steps from the street outside the Criminal Courts Building, into the tiled subway passageway, and was walking toward the turnstiles when he saw the roses. Lavender roses. A man selling long-stemmed lavender roses, just to the left of the token booth. A dollar a rose. In the Mexican prison, there'd been a woman from Veracruz who'd wistfully told Marilyn that all the days were golden there, all the nights were purple. Lovely in Spanish.

Lovely the way Marilyn repeated it. En Veracruz, todos los dfas eran dorados, y todas las noches violetas.

The roses weren't quite purple, but lave: would do.

Maybe it was time to celebrate, who the knew?

Maybe they were really gone for good.

"I'll take a dozen," he told the vendor.

The clock on the wall of the token booth read minutes past three.

In this city, the Afghani cab drivers had a radio network. You got into the taxi, you told where you wanted to go, they threw the flag, was the last you heard from them. For the rest of trip, they ignored the passenger entirely and incessantly into their radios, babbling in alan incomprehensible to the vast majority of the population. Maybe they were all spies. Maybe were plotting the overthrow of the United government.

This did not seem likely. reasonable was the assumption that they homesick and needed the sound of other voices to get them through the grinding day.

Carlos Ortega didn't care what the needs of Afghani people might be. He knew only someone with an impossible name printed on Hack Bureau license affixed to the dashboard of taxi was shrieking into the radio at the top of lungs in an unintelligible language that was and intrusive.

"You!" he said in English.

The cabbie kept babbling.

"You!" he shouted.

The cabbie turned to him.

"Shut up!" Carlos said.

"What?" the cabbie said.

"Shut your mouth," Carlos said in heavily accented English. "You're making too much noise.”

"What?" the cabbie said. "What?”

His ethnic group back home in the Wakhin Corridor was Kirghiz, although a moment ago he'd been speaking not the language of that area, but Farsi instead ... which was the lingua franca of the city's Afghani drivers.

His ancestors, nonetheless, had come from Turkey, and he tried now to muster some good old Turkish indignity, which disappeared in a flash the moment he looked at the ugly giant sitting in the back seat. He turned away at once, muttered something soft and Farsic into his radio, and then fell into an immediate and sullen silence.

Carlos merely nodded.

He was used to people shutting up when he told them to shut up.

In Spanish, now that the chattering din had subsided, he said, "I don't trust her, do you?”

"Beautiful women are never to be trusted," Ramon said.

He was still angry over the fact that she'd cut him.

His hands were still bandaged and medicated and for the most part his wounds had healed. But there were some wounds that never healed. You did not cut hands of a person as handsome as Ramon C You did not even touch Ramon Castaneda unless gave you permission to do so. For her indiscre the blonde whore would pay. As soon as she them the money.

"Why her house?" Carlos asked.

"Because she's stupid," Ramon said.

"No, she's very smart, give her that at least." I'll give her this,” Ramon said, and grabbed genitals.

"Yes," Carlos said, and smiled. "After she us the money.”

"And then this," Ramon said, and took pocket a small bottle with glass stopper in its The bottle was full of a pale yellowish liquid. liquid was nitric acid. Ramon hoped that Hollis would live to have many children grandchildren, so that she could tell all of them her face had come to be scarred in such a manner. You did not cut someone who looked Ramon Castaneda, no.

"Put that-away," Carlos said.

Ramon put the bottle away.

"Why her house?" Carlos asked again. "Will police be there? Has she notified the police?”

"She murdered your uncle," Ramon r.e him.

"Still.”

"If you had murdered someone, would you call the police?”

"The police in Argentina aren't looking for her.”

"True. But she doesn't know that. Believe me, Carlos, she hasn't called the police.”

"Then why her house?”

“I told you. She's stupid," Ramon said again. "All beautiful women are stupid.”

"Can she be planning a trap?”

"Stupid people don't know how to plan traps.”

"I think we should be careful.”

"Why? We'll roll over her like a tank. Take the money, fuck her, throw the acid in her face," Ramon said, and nodded at the utter simplicity of it all.

But Carlos was still concerned.

"Why do you think she chose the house?" he asked again. "Why not a public place?”

“She told you why. She's afraid of carrying all that money on the street.”

"A public place would be safer for her.”

"Women think their own houses are the safest places in the world. They think their houses are nests.”

"She'll be armed in her nest," Carlos said.

"Certainly. She was armed last time.”

Both men fell silent.

Carlos looked at his watch.

The time was a quarter past three.

Suddenly, he grinned. He looked particularly ugly when he grinned.

"Do you remember how we got in last time?" asked.

Ramon grinned, too.

She heard the key in the front door at exactly twenty-eight minutes past three. There were two people who had keys to this house. The opening the front door had to be... "Marilyn?”

Willis's voice. Calling from the entry Calling to her where she sat in the red armchair facing the open-arch entrance to the room, the .38 Colt Detective Special in her fist.

Exactly what she hadn't wanted. Willis home the other two not here yet.

Willis stepping into middle of it. The one person she wanted to keep of it, clear of it... "Hi, honey," he said, and came into the room a bouquet of flowers wrapped in white paper, saw the gun in her hand. The flowers made her to weep, the incongruity of flowers when she expecting... His eyes suddenly shifted to the left, toward the stairs, and she knew even before his hand snapped to his shoulder holster that they were already in house. Somehow, they had got into the house again.

The spring-release on Willis's holster snapped his pistol up and out into his hand.

She came up out of the chair just as he fired.

He must have hit one of them - she heard someone yelling in pain just as she turned toward the stairway and then there was shooting from the steps, and she stuck the .38 out in front of her the way she had seen lady cops do on television shows, holding it in both hands, leveling it.

The big one was hit and was lurching toward Willis, firing as he stumbled into the living room. The handsome one was on his left, coming toward her, a gun in his hand.

She fired at once. The bullet went low, she'd been aiming for his chest.

But she was sure she'd hit him because she saw a dark stain appear where his jacket pocket was and at first she thought it was blood, but it wasn't dark enough for blood, and suddenly he began screaming. His screaming startled her, but there was no time to wonder what was causing it, there was time only to fire again because the hit hadn't stopped him, he was still coming at her, screaming, his handsome face distorted in anger and pain. The big one was still headed straight for Willis.

Both of them still coming. The bad and the beautiful in one spectacular fireworks package.

Willis had his. pistol stuck out straight in front of him, holding it in both hands the way she'd seen detectives do it on television, except that he happened to be a real detective and not Don Johnson. He was aiming very carefully at the ugly one's chest, taking his time, because this one was for the money. He fired in the same instant that the ugly one did. She fired, too. And saw the handsome one throw back his arms, the way extras did in mov: and then fly over backward as if he'd been hit by football linebacker. Except that the stain on pocket seemed to be spreading and his chest w suddenly spurting blood.