Ed McBain - Pusher

Pusher

Ed McBain

Published by the Penguin Group, December 1973. ISBN 0-451-15080-5

This is for Evelyn and Dick

The city in these pages is imaginary. The people, the places are all fictitious. The police routine is based on established investigatory technique.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter One

Winter came in like an anarchist with a bomb.

Wild-eyed, shrieking, puffing hard, it caught the city in cold, froze the marrow and froze the heart.

The wind roared under eaves and tore around corners, lifting hats and lifting skirts, caressing warm thighs with icy-cold fingers. The citizens blew on their hands and lifted their coat collars and tightened their mufflers. They had been enmeshed in the slow-dying lethargy of autumn, and now winter was upon them, rapping their teeth with knuckles of ice. The citizens grinned into the wind, but the wind was not in a smiling mood. The wind roared and bellowed, and snow spilled from the skies, covered the city with white and then, muddied and dirtied, yielded to the wind and the cold and turned to treacherous ice.

The citizens deserted the streets. They sought pot-bellied stoves and hissing radiators. They drank cheap rye or expensive Scotch. They crawled under the covers alone, or they found the warmth of another body in the primitive ritual of love while the wind howled outside.

Winter was going to be a bitch this year.

The patrolman's name was Dick Genero, and he was cold. He didn't like winter, and that was that. You could sell him ice skating and skiing and bobsledding and hot rum toddies and all the other fictions of a happy, happy snowy season and he would still tell you to go drop dead someplace. Summer was Genero's season. He was one of those people, that's all. He liked warm sand and a hot sun and blue skies with hardly any clouds in them, and he also liked summer storms with lots of lightning, and he liked flowers blooming and gin-tonics, and you could take all the winters that ever were and stuff them into a beat up old tin can and dump them in the River Dix, and Genero would have been a very happy man.

His ears were cold.

"When your ears are cold, you're cold all over," Genero's mother used to say, and Genero's mother was a well of wisdom on weather conditions. Genero walked his beat with his cold ears, and he thought of his mother, and then unrelatedly and belatedly thought of his wife and wished he were home with her in bed. It was two o'clock in the morning, and any man in his right mind would not be walking the streets of the city at two in the morning with a temperature in the low twenties and a pretty woman at home in bed.

The wind ripped at his winter overcoat, pierced the heavy blue material and licked at his winter blouse. The cold soaked into his undershirt, and Genero shivered and thought of his ears, remembering not to touch them because if you touched them when they were cold, they would fall off. His mother had told him that, too. He had been tempted on several occasions in his life to touch his ears when they were cold, just to see if they would fall off. He was, in truth, afraid they would not—and there would go a son's faith in his mom. So he dutifully kept his gloved hands away from his head, and he ducked his head against the wind and thought of Rosalie home in bed, and thought of Florida and Puerto Rico and the Virgin Isles and Africa, working his way south until he realized abruptly he had reached the South Pole, where the cold still persisted.

It's warm , he told himself. Come on, now—it's warm .

Look at all the bathing beauties in their scanty suits, Jesus, but this sand is hot today. Listen to that ocean, ah, thank God for the cool breeze, we can certainly use a cool breeze on a scorcher like today, that's for sure. And…

And I'll bet maybe they will fall off if I touch them.

The streets were empty. Well sure, that figured. Only idiots and cops were out tonight. He walked to the candy store and automatically tried the doorknob, cursing the proprietor for not having the store open so that a cop with his ears ready to fall off could go in and have a cup of coffee. Ingrates, he thought, all ingrates. Home and asleep while I'm trying the stupid doorknob. Who'd pull a burglary on a night like this, anyway? A man's fingers would freeze solid to the burglar's tools, the way fingers freeze solid to metal in the Arctic. There's a cheerful thought. Jesus, I am cold !

He started up the street. Lanny's Bar was probably still open. He would stop there to see that no fights were in progress and perhaps sneak an against-regulations nip to take the edge off this cold. He could see nothing wrong with a little nip. A man could pretend he was chilly, true, but when a man's underwear showed the ability to stand unaided and independently in the middle of the street, it was time to dispense with the "chilly" fantasy and realize that freezing was but a stone's throw away. Genero clapped his gloved hands together and lifted his head.

He saw the light.

It came from somewhere up the street. The street was black except for the light. Genero stopped and squinted his eyes against the wind. The tailor shop , he thought instantly. That stupid ass Cohen is pressing clothes in the wee hours of the morn again. He would have to warn him. "Max," he would have to say, "you're a hell of a nice guy, but when you're going to be pressing late at night, give the house a ring and wise up us poor bastards, will you?"

Then Max would nod and smile and give him a glass of that sweet wine he kept behind the counter. All at once, Max didn't seem so stupid.

Max was the kind benefactor of all cops walking beats everywhere. Max's light was a shining beacon, the shop a sanctuary for ice-bound freighters. Get the bottle out, Max , Genero thought. I'm on my way .

He headed for the tailor shop and the light, and he would have really enjoyed that glass of wine with Max, were it not for one thing:

The light was not coming from the tailor shop.

The light came from farther up the street, spilling from the open mouth of the basement steps under one of the tenements. For a moment, Genero was puzzled. If not Max…

Genero quickened his step. Quite unconsciously, he drew off his right glove and yanked his service revolver from its holster. The faces of the buildings were closed with sleep. Only the light pierced the darkness, and he approached the light warily, stopping before the steps where they descended beyond the hanging chain to enter the bowels of the tenement.

A door was hooded in shadow beneath the brick stoop of the building, and a window was set high up in the brick alongside the door. The window was caked with grime, but it glowed like a single wakeful eye. Cautiously, Genero climbed over the chain and started down the steps.

A narrow alley ran straight as an arrow to the back yard of the tenement. The garbage cans were in for the night, stacked haphazardly in the alleyway, dispelling their stench on the crisp December air. Genero glanced quickly up the alleyway, and then walked quietly to the door.

He stood listening. There was no sound from beyond the door. He held the revolver ready in his right hand, and with his left hand, he twisted the doorknob.

Surprisingly, the door swung open.

Genero backed away suddenly. He was sweating. His ears were still cold, but he was sweating. He listened to the sound of his own breathing, listened for other sounds in the cold sleeping city, listened for the silent scrape of a foot, something, anything. He listened for a long time, and then he entered the basement room.