Ed Mcbain - Cop Hater

He put on the black jacket to his suit, and then he went to the dresser and opened the top drawer. The .45 lay on his handkerchiefs, lethal and blue-black. He pushed a fresh clip into the gun, and then put the gun into his jacket pocket.

He walked to the door in a ducklike waddle, opened it, took a last look around the apartment, flicked out the lights, and went into the night.

Steve Carella was relieved at 11:33 by a detective named Hal Willis. He filled Willis in on anything that was urgent, left him and walked downstairs.

"Going to see the girlfriend, Steve?" the desk sergeant asked.

"Yep," Carella answered.

"Wish I was as young as you," the sergeant said.

"Ah, come on," Carella replied. "You can't be more than seventy."

The sergeant chuckled. "Not a day over," he answered.

"Good night," Carella said.

"Night."

Carella walked out of the building and headed for his car, which was parked two blocks away in a "No Parking" zone.

Hank Bush left the precinct at 11:52 when his relief showed up.

"I thought you'd never get here," he said.

"I thought so, too."

"What happened?"

"It's too hot to run."

Bush grimaced, went to the phone, and dialed his home number. He waited several moments. The phone kept ringing on the other end.

"Hello?"

"Alice?"

"Yes." She paused. "Hank?"

"I'm on my way, honey. Why don't you make some iced coffee?"

"All right, I will."

"Is it very hot there?"

"Yes. Maybe you should pick up some ice cream."

"All right."

"No, never mind. No. Just come home. The iced coffee will do."

"Okay. I'll see you later."

"Yes, darling."

Bush hung up. He turned to his relief. "I hope you don't get relieved 'til nine, you bastard," he said.

'The heat's gone to his head," the detective said to the air. Bush snorted, signed out, and left the building.

The man with the .45 waited in the shadows.

His hand sweated on the walnut stock of the .45 in his jacket pocket. Wearing black, he knew he blended with the void of the alley mouth, but he was nonetheless nervous and a little frightened. Still, this had to be done.

He heard footsteps approaching. Long, firm strides. A man in a hurry. He stared up the street Yes.

Yes, this was his man.

His hand tightened on the .45.

The cop was closer now. The man in black stepped out of the alleyway abruptly. The cop stopped in his tracks. They were almost of the same height. A street lamp on the corner cast their shadows onto the pavement.

"Have you got a light, Mac?"

The cop was staring at the man in black. Then, suddenly, the cop was reaching for his back pocket. The man in black saw what was happening, and he brought up the .45 quickly, wrenching it free from his pocket. Both men fired simultaneously.

He felt the cop's bullet rip into his shoulder, but the .45 was bucking now, again and again, and he saw the cop clutch at his chest and fall for the pavement. The Detective's Special lay several feet from the cop's body now.

He backed away from the cop, ready to run.

"You son of a bitch," the cop said.

He whirled. The cop was on his feet, rushing for him. He brought up the .45 again, but he was too late. The cop had him, his thick arms churning. He fought pulling free, and the cop clutched at his head, and he felt hair wrench loose, and then the cop's fingers clawed at his face, ripping, gouging.

He fired again. The cop doubled over and then fell to the pavement, his face colliding with the harsh concrete.

His shoulder was bleeding badly. He cursed the cop, and he stood over him, and his blood dripped onto the lifeless shoulders, and he held the .45 out at arm's length and squeezed the trigger again. The cop's head gave a sidewards lurch and then was still.

The man in black ran off down the street.

The cop on the sidewalk was Hank Bush.

Chapter SIXTEEN

sam grossman was a police lieutenant. He was also a lab technician. He was tall and angular, a man who'd have looked more at home on a craggy New England farm than in the sterile orderliness of the Police Laboratory which stretched almost half the length of the first floor at Headquarters.

Grossman wore glasses, and his eyes were a guileless blue behind them. There was a gentility to his manner, a quiet warmth reminiscent of a long-lost era, even though his speech bore the clipped stamp of a man who is used to dealing with cold scientific fact.

"Hank was a smart cop," he said to Carella.

Carella nodded. It was Hank who'd said that it didn't take much brain power to be a detective.

"The way I figure it," Grossman went on, "Hank thought he was a goner. The autopsy disclosed four wounds altogether, three in the chest, one at the back of the head. We can safely assume, I think, that the head shot was the last one fired, a coup de grace."

"Go ahead," Carella said.

"Figure he'd been shot two or three times already, and possibly knew he'd be a dead pigeon before this was over. Whatever the case, he knew we could use more information on the bastard doing the shooting."

"The hair, you mean?" Carella asked.

"Yes. We found clumps of hair on the sidewalk. All the hairs had living roots, so we'd have known they were pulled away by force even if we hadn't found some in the palms and fingers of Hank's hands. But he was thinking overtime. He also tore a goodly chunk of meat from the ambusher's face. That told us a few things, too."

"And what else?"

"Blood. Hank shot this guy, Steve. Well, undoubtedly you know that already."

"Yes. What does it all add up to?"

"A lot," Grossman said. He picked up a report from his desk. "This is what we know for sure, from what we were able to piece together, from what Hank gave us."

Grossman cleared his throat and began reading.

"The killer is a male, white, adult, not over say fifty years of age. He is a mechanic, possibly highly skilled and highly paid. He is dark complected, his skin is oily, he has a heavy · beard which he tries to disguise with talc. His hair is dark brown, and he is approximately six feet tall. Within the past two days, he took a haircut and a singe. He is fast, possibly indicating a man who is not overweight. Judging from the hair, he should weigh about 180. He is wounded, most likely above the waist, and not superficially."

"Break it down for me," Carella said, somewhat amazed— as he always was—by what the Lab boys could do with a rag, a bone, and a hank of hair.

"Okay," Grossman said. "Male. In this day and age, this sometimes poses a problem, especially if we've got only hair from the head. Luckily, Hank solved that one for us. The head hairs of either a male or a female will have an average diameter of less than 0.08 mm. Okay, having only a batch of head hairs to go on, we've got to resort to other measurements to determine whether or not the hair came from a male or a female. Length of the hair used to be a good gauge. If the length was more than 8 cm., we could assume the hair came from a woman. But the goddamn women nowadays are wearing their hair as short as, if not shorter than, the men. So we could have been fooled on this one, if Hank hadn't scratched this guy's face."

"What's the scratch have to do with it?"

"It gave us a skin sample, to begin with. That's how we knew the man was white, dark complected, and oily. But it also gave us a beard hair."

"How do you know it was a beard hair?"

"Simple," Grossman said. "Under the microscope, it showed up in cross-section as being triangular, with concave sides. Only beard hairs are shaped that way. The diameter, too, was greater than 0.1 mm. Simple. A beard hair. Had to be a man."

"How do you know he was a mechanic?"

"The head hairs were covered with metal dust."