Ed McBain: See Them Die

And so he'd left the island. He'd left the island in search of a beginning. He had worked hard for the luncheonette. It was still owned mostly by the bank, but he knew now that he would never go hungry again. And if he had lost something else, something quite dear to him, he had another sort of satisfaction, and this satisfaction was in his stomach and his bowels where perhaps a man feels it most.

The sailor sipped at his coffee and thought of Fletcher, Colorado.

He did not often think of Fletcher because he found he got sad whenever he did. He had been born in Fletcher, and he learned early the meaning of the words "small town". When a place is called a small town, it has nothing whatever to do with the size of the town. A giant metropolis can be a small town, and some very large cities are small towns in every sense of the word. Fletcher, Colorado, was just like every other small town in the United States of America. There was a schoolhouse, and a church, and a row of stores. There were DRIVE — CHILDREN — SLOW signs, and SPEED LIMIT STRICTLY enforced signs, and there were the teenage kids hanging out in the corner drugstore, and the Boy Scout cookouts, and the Little League, and the choir practice, and the Saturday Evening Post route, and in the spring the forsythias lined the highway with bright yellow and there was the bursting pink of cherry blossoms, and in the fall he would go hunting for deer with his father and his older brother, and the woods would shriek with color. In the winter, there was deep snow and skiing. The mountains surrounded the town. You could always see the mountains. Everybody in town knew everybody else in town. He met Corrine at a church picnic when he was six years old. By the time they were eleven, everybody in town had decided that one day they would get married. When he got a swimming medal in his freshman year at high school, he gave it to Corrine. He went everywhere with Corrine and did everything with Corrine, and it became plain to him after a while that Corrine was perfectly happy to have been born and raised in a town like Fletcher, and that she would be happy to get married there, and breed kids there, and eventually to die there. And suddenly, he wondered if this was what he himself wanted.

Oh, he loved Corrine, it wasn't that. He supposed he loved her. She had very straight red hair that she wore loose around her shoulders, and she had very bright blue eyes and a nose that tilted slightly at the tip, she looked exactly like those pictures of small-town American girls he had seen on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post when he used to deliver the magazine. And he liked to neck with her. He liked to touch her, too, whenever she let him, which wasn't often, and he never could figure out when she wanted him to and when she didn't want him to; he supposed he loved her because he respected her wishes in the matter.

And then, one day, all of a sudden, he decided he was going to join the Navy. When his parents asked him why, when Gorrine asked him why, when his friends asked him why, he told them he would be drafted soon anyway, and he might just as well go into the Navy where a fellow didn't have to go on hikes or sleep in the mud. That was what he told all these people. But he knew why he was really joining the Navy. He was joining the Navy to get out of Fletcher. He was joining the Navy because Fletcher was slowly and surely suffocating him, and he could feel those mountains moving in closer and closer every day, and he knew that one day he would no longer be able to breathe, that one day he would be crushed by everything in this small town. When he left, he told himself he would never return. And so it made him sad to think about Fletcher.

Zip, drinking his coffee, studying his reflection in the mirror behind the counter, did not feel sad at all. Zip felt pretty damn good. Zip felt, at last, that things were beginning to click. They had never clicked for him in that ratty neighborhood downtown. There'd been nothing there for him but getting kicked by the older kids. Fat Ass Charlie, they used to call him. Fat Ass Charlie, and bam! a well-placed kick right in the middle of that fat ass. The nickname had persisted even when he began thinning into adolescence. And then they'd moved.

And suddenly, he wasn't fat-assed any more, and he wasn't even Charlie any more. He began calling himself Zip, and he began feeling that there was opportunity in this new neighborhood, the opportunity to be the person he wanted to be, and not the person everybody else thought he should be. He'd met Cooch, and Cooch had shown him the ropes and suggested that they join the biggest club in the neighborhood, the Royal Guardians.

But Zip had ideas of his own. Why become a schnook running around the fringes of the higher-ups when you could have a club of your own? And so he suggested the Latin Purples, and he planned to start it small, six, seven guys to begin with — so far there were only four. And Cooch's sister-in-law had sewn the purple jackets for them, and he wore his jacket with a great deal of pride now because the jacket meant something to him, the jacket meant that he was on his way.

If you'd asked him where he was going, he couldn't have told you.

But he knew he was on his way, and he knew that today would be the clincher, today would be the day he realized himself fully as a person.

And so the three of them sat with their separate thoughts, thoughts which were strangely similar, and when the sailor finally spoke, both Luis and Zip knew instantly what he meant.

The sailor said, "You can lose yourself in Fletcher. You can get just plumb lost." He shook his head. "That's why I left. I wanted to know who I was."

"And have you found out?" Luis asked.

"Give him time," Zip said. "You think a guy can make a rep in one day?"

"I'll find out, Louise," the sailor said.

"How? With the girls from La Gallina?"

"Huh?"

"Sailor, take my advice," Luis said. "Go back to your ship. This neighborhood is not always a nice place."

"Leave him alone," Zip said. "He wants a girl, I'll help him find one." He winked at the sailor, and then he grinned broadly.

"Don't let Sunday morning fool you," Luis said. "Last night, there was drinking and guitars. And this morning, everyone sleeps. But sometimes ... sailor, take my advice. Go back to your ship..."

"I think I'll hang around for a while."

"Then be careful, eh? You are a stranger here. Choose your company." He looked at Zip meaningfully. "There are good and bad, entiende? You understand? Take care."

The sailor swung around on his stool. He leaned his elbows on the counter top and drunkenly looked out over the sun-washed street.

"It looks nice and peaceful to me," he murmured.

"Can you see through the walls, sailor?" Luis asked. "Do you know what goes on under the skin of the buildings?"

3

The skin of the building which housed the uniformed cops and detectives of the 87th Precinct was not lovely, nor engaged, nor had it been washed in more than half a century. It presented a characterless gray to the park across the street, a gray which seemed contradictory to the bright sunshine that filled the air. The gray stones were rough and uneven, covered with the soot and grime of the city, relieved only by the hanging green globes which announced in white numerals to the world at large that this was Precinct 87.

The low, flat steps of the front stoop led to a pair of glass-fronted doors which were open now to permit the entrance of whatever scant breeze rustled across Grover Park. The breeze, unfortunately, did not get very much further than the entrance doors. It certainly did not pass into the muster room where Sergeant Dave Murchison sat behind his high desk pulling at his undershorts and cursing the heat. A rotating electric fan sat on top of the switchboard to the left of the desk. The switchboard, at the moment, wasn't blinking with calls from the violated citizenry, thank God. Murchison wiped sweat from his brow, tugged at his undershorts, and wondered if it was any cooler upstairs.