Ed McBain - Widows

Their eyes met. Chinese eyes meeting Chinese eyes, dark brown and slanting downward, the Carella heritage clearly evident, brother and sister reaffirming blood ties as powerful as life itself. Angela nodded.

"I'll talk to him," he whispered, and walked her pregnant down the grassy knoll to where Teddy and his mother stood waiting in black in the sunshine.

The gun had been a gift from him.

Everyone m fnis city should have a gun, he'd said, should know how to use a gun if and when the need arose. Said the police were worthless when it came to protecting the lives of ordinary citizens. The police were too busy tracking down prostitutes and drug addicts.

Where he'd bought the gun was anybody's guess.

He traveled a lot by car, he could have picked it up in any of the states that thought America was still the Wild West with hostile Indians massing to attack, better get those wagons in a circle and unholster the MAC-10s. Bought you something, he'd said. I'll teach you to use it.

That was the irony of it.

The gun was a .22-caliber Colt Cobra.

He'd explained that it was a part-aluminum version of the higher caliber Detective Special, but people shouldn't let the caliber of a gun fool them, a .22 could do as much damage -even more damage sometimes - than a higher-caliber gun. The reason for this was that the lower-caliber slug would bounce around inside the body without the power to exit, and it could wreak havoc with all the organs in there. Wreak havoc. Those had been his exact words. Wreak havoc. Which was exactly what was planned for tonight. The wreaking of a little more havoc.

The gun was a revolver with a six-shot capacity, it weighed

only fifteen ounces, and he had chosen the one with the two-inch barrel, which made it nice in that it wouldn't snag on your clothing. A nice gun. It had been easy learning how to use it, too, he'd kept his promise. That was the irony.

This time, it would be deliberate.

Malice aforethought, wasn't that what they called it?

Tuesday afternoon had been different.

Tonight would be simpler.

Tonight there was the gun.

The building was tree-shaded, and so the sidewalks had not been baking under a merciless sun for hours on end; the street at nine o'clock was refreshingly cool. Cool here in the shadows across the street from the building. Cool waiting here under a big old tree with thick leaves, right hand wrapped around the butt of the Cobra, index finger inside the trigger guard. He would walk his dog at nine o'clock sharp. A creature of habit. Walk a dog at nine, fuck a mistress any chance he got. In ten minutes, he would be dead.

Waiting.

Dressed entirely in black, a black cotton jumpsuit, black socks and jogging shoes, black woolen ski hat pulled down over the ears, sweltering in the woolen hat, but it covered the hair, concealed the color of the hair, no stray pedestrian or motorist would later be able to come up with a good description.

He came out of the building at two minutes to nine, eight fifty-eight on the digital watch, said something to the doorman who was out taking the air, and then started toward the corner, leading his dog. Eight fifty-nine now, and a dark empty street. No cars, no people. Even the doorman had gone back inside again. Go\

Cross the street diagonally . . .

Gun out and ready . . .

Step onto the sidewalk and into his path and level the gun at him . . .

"Are you crazy?" he said.

"Yes."

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Calmly.

And shot him four times in the head.

And shot the whimpering dog, too, for good measure.

The neighborhood was still largely Italian, the bakery shop wedged between a grocery store and a sausage shop that had an Italian sign in the window, salumeria. Two- or three-story buildings along the street here, clapboard and frame, stores on the ground-floor level, owners usually occupying the upper floor or floors. There were still trees along this street. No graffiti on the buildings. Still something Old World about it.

Carella could remember growing up in this neighborhood when many of the cadences were still Italian, when Italian-language radio stations still played songs like "La Tarantella" and "O Sole Mio" and "Funiculi-Funicula," the music floating out on the summertime air through open windows all up and down the street. He could remember helping his father in the bakery shop on weekends, when the crowds were thickest, kneading the dough for the bread while his father handled the more delicate art of pastry-making. Carella's hands would be covered with flour. Kneading the dough. When he turned fourteen, fifteen - who could remember now, he'd been a late bloomer - he began to think the dough felt exactly like a girl's breasts. Kneading the dough. Well, exactly like Margie Gannon's breasts, in fact, because this was after he'd experienced his first heavy petting session with her. Or with anyone, for that matter.

Margie Gannon.

Freckled all over, including her breasts, which he'd released from her blouse and her bra one Saturday afternoon while the rain and her breasts came tumbling down, he and she feverish and intent in the living room of the two-story brick house two houses down from his own, her parents out doing the marketing or the shopping or wherever they were, the only thing that mattered was that they'd be gone all afternoon - They won't be back till four or five, she'd told him, come in out of the rain, Steve.

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He had gone there to read comic books with her. Margie had the best comic-book collection in the neighborhood. Kids used to come from blocks away, boys and girls, all of them barely pubescent, to read Margie Gannon's comic books. Her parents encouraged it as a nice clean way of socializing. But they should not have left their lovely young daughter (heh-heh) in the clutches of the mad beast named Stephen the Horny, certainly not on a sultry afternoon in August, with lightning flashing and thunder booming outside, and with all his adolescent juices coming to a boil, not to mention hers.

Alone with Margie Gannon in the ground-floor living room of her house. Parents gone. Rain pelting the windows. Their heads bent over the comic book. Heads almost touching. His arm on the couch behind her. She was holding one side of the comic book in her right hand, he was holding the other side in his left. Heads together. There was the sudden feel of her hair against his cheek. Long reddish-blonde hair. Silken hair against his cheek. Green-eyed, freckle-faced, Irish Margie Gannon sitting beside him with her hair touching his cheek. He was suddenly erect in his pants.

He could not remember now which comic they were reading. Something to do with cops and archcriminals? He could not remember. He remembered what she was wearing, though, still remembered that. A short, faded blue-denim skirt and a white, short-sleeved blouse buttoned up the front. Freckled pretty Irish face, freckled slender arms, freckled everything, he was soon to discover, but for now there was only the tingling thrill of her silken hair touching his cheek. She reached up with her left hand, brushed the hair back from her face. Their cheeks touched.

It was as if an intensely sharp light suddenly spilled onto the open comic book. Not daring to look at her, he concentrated his vision on the brilliantly illuminated pages, alive now with pulsating primary colors, red and blue and yellow outlined in the blackest black, focused his white-hot gaze on the action-frozen figures and the shouted oversized words, POW and BAM and BANG and YIIIIKES leaping from the pages,

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repeating in print the trip-hammer of his heart, POW, BAM,

BANG, echoing the fierce erection in his pants, YIIIIKES!

He turned his face toward hers, she turned her face toward his.

Their noses banged. Their lips collided.

And oh, dear God, he kissed sweet Margie Gannon, and she moved into his suddenly encircling arms, the comic book POW-ing and BAM-ing and BANG-ing and sliding off her knees and falling to the floor with a whispered YIIIIKES as lightning flashed and thunder boomed and rain relentlessly drilled the sidewalk outside the street-level living room. They kissed for he could not remember how long. He would never again in his life kiss anyone this long or this hard, pressing her close, lips fusing, adolescent yearnings merging, steamy young passions crazing the sky with blue-white flashes, rending the sky with blue-black explosions.