Robert Walker - Fatal Instinct

“ You're a hero-heroine-what you did in Chicago.” He glanced at the cane, his eyes glued there long enough to embarrass her. “You're big news, and now you're here to help the NYPD find the Claw, aren't you? Aren't you?”

A uniformed police guard rushed over to them just as her car pulled up. The driver was Lou Pierce, who got out and joined the other uniformed man to help usher the reporter out of the restricted area, shouts filling the basement garage.

She got into the car, kicked off her shoes and massaged her ankles.

Lou returned and settled into the driver's seat, a broad smile, sandy-brown hair and blue eyes forming a pleasant demeanor. “We drew straws who'd get you, and I won,” he said triumphantly as he put the car in gear and started from the garage, the car tilting almost straight up on the exit ramp.

It was overcast out and there was a picket line in front of the precinct. The picketers carried signs, denouncing the police as fools, and they chanted, “The Claw controls the city… the Claw controls the city…” They had no idea just how true the slogan was.

Just as the car was turning out, a camera was all but slammed against the back window and Jessica saw a flash, realizing that Jim Drake had gotten his photographer to capture her before she could get away.

“ Damn, damn,” she muttered.

Lou was cursing under his breath, too. “Bloody reporters can be like camel shit on your shoe, Dr. Coran.”

“ How's that, Lou?”

“ Ever try to kick camel shit off your shoe, ma'am?”

She laughed for the first time that day.

“ You sure got one beautiful smile, Dr. Coran,” he said.

She smiled wider. “Thanks, I'm glad you won the draw.”

“ Oh, there was no question of it, ma'am.”

“ No?”

“ I cheated, ma'am. Had to pull this duty. You know, a lot of us guys see a pretty woman, and we just can't help ourselves.”

“ You're very flattering, Lou… Thanks.” Something had told her there'd been no drawing.

“ Some of us think a lot of what you did in Chicago, ma'am… really. That took some guts.”

She dropped her head, her eyes pinned on her sore ankles, her mind returning to that awful room where Matisak had begun to drain her of her blood, where Otto Boutine had come crashing through a window to her rescue, getting himself killed for her. “I lost my partner in Chicago,” she said.

“ Yes, ma'am… I know, ma'am.”

The rain started, slowly at first, like fairies appearing from nowhere on the windshield and the windows, and then suddenly the fairies were deluged by a thick, heavy, angry downpour as if the powers of heaven meant to destroy their own. Sometimes nature was as much at war with itself, she felt, as was the human psyche, filled with rage, chaos, violence, deposited there by some unseen and unknowable force. The human propensity for murder seemed to her quite closely akin to the universe's propensity to create black holes and violent, explosive stars. The dark New York landscape, sheathed in a slick downpour, made her cold inside, despite how warm and dry it was in the radio car. There was a steady, unending stream of human outbursts, turmoil and entanglements being reported over the police band. Not even nature's storm could quell the human fury of the large metropolis.

“ Have you home in a second, Dr. Coran.”

She missed her apartment home in Quantico, a refuge.

“ Honestly, Doctor,” Lou continued as he weaved expertly through traffic. “There wasn't any drawing to see who gets to drive you home, but that's only because I didn't give the others a chance.”

She smiled again. “I like honesty, Lou.”

“ Then you'll like New York and New Yorkers. They're… painfully honest, ma'am.”

She wanted to ask him twenty questions about Alan Rychman after his assurance of honesty. She wondered if she dared.

“ You and Captain Rychman seem close-for subordinate and superior, I mean.”

“ Hell, ma'am, I owe the captain my life.”

“ How's that?”

“ He saved my life, Doctor.”

“ Really?”

“ All in the line of duty, he'd say, but he put himself between me and danger, and I can never forget a thing like that, Doctor.”

“ Nor should you.” Her thoughts returned to the night Otto Boutine had done as much for her, except that Otto had not lived to reap the benefit of her undying gratitude.

“ Hell, I didn't even hardly know Rychman at the time, ma'am. He'd just taken over the 31st and was cleaning house good, and even me-a clean cop-was worried about 'the Boot.' That's what we called him back then-'bout nine, maybe ten years now. Been with him as his aide for seven. Anyway, back then, I was a real gung-ho fool and I charged into this crack house ahead of the others. The captain, he could've just parked it outside, but not Rychman. He wanted in on the action from the start, same as I did that night.

“ Anyway, if he hadn't come storming through the back when he did, I'd be in a box in Green lawn instead of telling you all this.”

They were at the hotel and she hurried from the car, wind rippling and beating at her clothes. Inside the lobby, Lou caught up with her and asked if she needed anything else.

“ You didn't have to leave your unit, Sergeant,” she told him.

“ Rychman told me to see you safely inside, ma'am.”

“ Well, you've done that.”

“ You've got carte blanche in this town, Dr. Coran, just remember, no cabs for you. You just call the squad room.”

“ Thank you, Sergeant.”

“ Oh, it isn't my doing, Doctor.” On that note he rushed back out into the stormy night.

Ovid was worried.

He had become progressively more brutal with each murder, as if he were working up to some sort of bizarre final brutality.

So had the Claw.

The Claw taught him everything.

But he didn't know that much, really. He didn't know where the Claw lived, for instance. Once, he started to follow him, and the Claw turned as if he felt him near. He had stared so long at the place where Ovid hid in the brush in Central Park that Ovid had almost begun to believe the Claw had cat's eyes, and could see him there. It so unnerved Ovid that he never dared to follow the Claw again.

He always feared that one day the Claw would turn on him, make a meal of him.

He knew he walked a thin, dangerous line. But it was the most thrilling thing that had happened in an otherwise dull and empty existence.

He even had a new name to proclaim his rebirth: Ovid. He'd wondered why “Ovid,” wondered if it held some special significance to the Claw, and so he had gone to the library and found a book on names. Opening it to the O's and trailing his finger along the column, he found Ovid there. It was strange and obscure and filled with ancient meaning, his new name. “Ovid” was Latin for “divine protector.” And in a sense, he did help and protect the Claw, who came to him in the night, needing him, needing his assistance. It was the first time anyone had ever needed him.

He located the history of the ancient poet Ovid, and began to feel some connection with him. He took out translations of Ovid's work along with the Latin subtext, and slowly he began to teach himself some Latin words and phrases.

The Claw had opened up a whole new world to him, and he began to wonder if he could, like his namesake, write poetry.

That was what he was doing now, writing a poem, a poem he intended to send to the New York Times, knowing somehow that they'd print it, if it was good enough and graphic enough.

But he worried about sending his poem to the newspaper. What would the Claw do to him? How would he react? Still, the poem proclaimed the inevitable power of the Claw over everyone in this life; it also spoke of disease and aging and death. It told the world that the Claw was good, not evil; that he ended suffering. He didn't create it. He ended it.