Ed McBain - He Who Hesitates

"Roger."

"Roger who?"

"Roger Broome."

"I don't know any Roger Broome," the woman said.

"Amelia knows me."

"Amelia isn't here. What do you want?"

"Where is she?"

"She went downstairs to the store. What do you want?"

"She asked me to call. When will she be back?"

"Five, ten minutes," the woman said.

"Will you tell her I called?"

"I'll tell her you called," the woman said, and hung up.

Roger stood with the silent receiver to his ear for a moment, and then replaced it on the hook and went out of the booth. The man behind the desk gave him a sour look. A clock on the wall told him it was almost two o'clock. He wondered if Amelia would really be back in five or ten minutes. The woman who'd answered the phone had sounded very colored, with the kind of speech that could sometimes be mistaken for white Southerner, but more often was identified immediately as coming from a Negro. It was just his luck, he thought. The first pretty girl he'd ever met who seemed to take a real liking to him, and she had to be colored. He wondered why he was bothering to call her at all, and then decided the hell with her, and headed back for the police station.

I mean, what's the sense of this, he thought. What am I putting this off for? It's got to be done, I've got to go in there sooner or later and tell them about it, so it might as well be now. What do I get by calling Amelia, she's probably up on the roof with one of those Persian Lords she was telling me about, getting her ass screwed off, the hell with her.

The thought of Amelia in embrace with one of the Persian Lords was infuriating to him, he didn't know why. He barely knew the girl, and yet the idea of her being laid by one of those gang members, no less all the members of the gang, filled him with a dark rage that twitched into his huge hands hanging at his sides. He had half a mind to tell the police about .that, too, about young punks jumping on a nice girl like Amelia, she was probably a slut anyway, letting them do that to her.

He heard voices in the park.

Through the snow, he heard the voices of children, loud and strident, cutting through the falling snow, a sound of glee, a half-remembered sound, he and his father on the small hill behind the clapboard house they'd lived in near the tracks when Buddy was still a baby, "Off you go, Roger!" and a push down the hill, the rush of wind against his face, his lips pulled back over a wide joyous grin, "That's the boy!" his father shouted behind him and above him.

There were three boys with sleds.

He walked into the park and sat on a bench some fifteen feet from where they were sliding down a wide snow-covered slope, the snow packed hard by the runners of their sleds. The boys couldn't have been older than six or seven, probably kindergarten kids who'd been let out of school early, or maybe first-graders, no older than that. Two of them were wearing old ski parkas, and the third had on a green mackinaw. The one with the mackinaw had a woolen hat pulled down over his forehead and his ears and damn near over his eyes as well. Roger wondered how he could see where he was going. The other two were hatless, their hair covered with snow. They yelled and screamed and shouted, "Watch me! Hey, watch me!" and took running starts and then threw the sleds down and leaped onto them in belly-whops and went down the hill screaming happily all the way, one of them imitating a police siren with his mouth. Roger got up off the bench and walked to the crest of the hill and waited for them to climb up again. The boys ignored him. They were talking among themselves, reliving the excitement of the ride down the hill — "Did you see the way I almost hit that tree?" — pulling the sleds behind them on their ropes, glancing back over their shoulders down the hill every now and then, anticipating the next ride down. The one with the mackinaw walked past Roger, took a deep breath and then turned to face the downhill slope again, ready for another run.

"Hi," Roger said.

The kid looked up from under the woolen hat pulled almost clear down over his eyes. He wiped a gloved hand across his running nose, mumbled, "Hi," and turned away.

"The hill looks good," Roger said.

"Mmm," the kid mumbled.

"Can I take a ride?"

"What?"

"Can I take a ride?"

"No," the kid said. He looked up at Roger in brief contempt, took his running start, threw himself onto the sled, and went down the hill again. Roger watched the sled go. He was still angry at the thought of those Persian Lords jumping Amelia, and he was also beginning to get a little apprehensive about what might await him in the police station across the way, nice detective or not. Besides, this snotnosed little kid had no right to talk to him that way. His hands began to twitch again. He waited for the boy to climb back to the top of the hill.

"Didn't your mother teach you any manners?" he asked.

The boy looked up at him from under the hat. The other two boys had stopped some three feet away, and they were staring at Roger curiously, with that odd, belligerent, somewhat frightened look all kids wear when they're expecting crap from a grownup.

"Why don't you get lost, mister?" the kid said from under his hat.

"What's the matter, Tommy?" one of the other boys called.

"This guy's some kind of nut," Tommy said, and he turned away and looked down the hill again.

"All I did was ask you if I could have a ride," Roger said.

"And I told you no."

"What's that sled made of, gold or something?" Roger asked.

"Come on, mister, don't bug me," Tommy said.

"I want a ride!" Roger said suddenly and harshly, and he reached out for the sled, grasping it near the steering mechanism at the top, and pulling it away from Tommy, who clung to it for just a moment before releasing his grip. Tommy was the first to begin yelling, and the two other kids began yelling with him, but Roger was already running, propelled at first by anger and then by a rising exhilaration as he moved toward the brow of the hill and threw the sled down and then hurled two hundred and ten pounds of muscle and bone onto it. The sled made a sound beneath his weight as though it would splinter, but it began sliding immediately and the forward motion eased the strain of the load, gravity pulling the sled down the slope, gaining momentum, two hundred and ten pounds hurtling down the hill, faster, faster, he opened his mouth and yelled like a kid, "Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" as the sled raced through the falling snow. Behind him, Tommy and the other kids were shouting and ranting and running down the hill after him, he didn't give a damn about them. His eyes were tearing from the wind roaring over the front end of the sled, the big falling flakes made visibility almost impossible, the sled suddenly turned over and he rolled into the snow, the sled flying up into the air, he landing on his side and continuing to roll down the hill, laughing as his coat and his trousers and his face and his hair got covered with snow, and then finally sitting up at the base of the hill, still laughing, and looking up to where Tommy and the others were yelling as they retrieved the sled from a snowbank.

"Call a cop, Tommy," one of the boys said.

"Go on, do it," the other boy said.

Roger got to his feet. Laughing, he glanced over his shoulder once, quickly, and began running.

He wondered how much time had passed. Was it five or ten minutes already, would Amelia be back?

He laughed again. That ride had really been something, he'd left those little yelling bastards clear up at the top of the hill, boy that had really been something. He shook his head in bemused wonder and then suddenly stopped and threw back his head and shouted "Yahoooo!" to the falling snowflakes, and then began running again, out of the park. He stopped running when he reached the sidewalk. He put his hands into his coat pockets and began walking at a very gentlemanly dignified pace. He could remember him and his father and the fun they used to have together before Buddy was born, and even when Buddy was just a little baby. And then of course when Buddy was two, his father had got killed, and it was Roger who'd had to take care of the family, that was what his mother had told him at the time, even though he was only seven years old, It's you who's the man in the family now, Roger. Riding down the hill on that kid's sled had been just like it was before his father died, just a lot of fun, that was all. And now, walking like a gentleman on the sidewalk, this was the way it got after his father was killed in the train wreck, you couldn't kid around too much anymore, you had to be a man. It's you who's the man in the family now, Roger.