Эд Макбейн: Ice

“Tell me, hijo de la gran puta,” she said grandly to Hawes, grinning at the detention cage, pleased with her receptive audience and playing to the house, “would you pay for somebody looks like me?” and here she grabbed both frisky breasts and squeezed them in her hands, the nipples popping between her index and middle fingers. “Would you? Hah?”

“Yes!” one of the drunks in the cage shouted.

“The arresting officer says you propositioned him,” Hawes said wearily.

“So where is this arresting officer, hah?” the woman asked.

“Yeah, where is he?” one of the drunks in the cage shouted.

“Down the hall,” Hawes said.

The arresting officer was Genero. Genero was a horse’s ass. Nobody in his right mind would have arrested a pregnant hooker. Nobody in his right mind would have filled the detention cage with drunks at 9:00 on a Saturday morning. There would be stale vomit in the cage tonight, when the citizenry began howling and the cage was really needed. Genero had first brought in the drunks, one at a time, and then he had brought in the pregnant hooker. Genero was on a crusade. Genero was a one-man Moral Majority. Which, perhaps, the real Moral Majority was as well.

“Sit down and shut up,” Hawes said to the hooker.

“No, keep standin’,” one of the drunks in the cage yelled.

“Turn this way, honey!” another one yelled. “Let’s see ’em one more time!”

“Muy linda, verdad?” the hooker said, and showed her breasts to the drunks again.

Hawes shook his head. In a squadroom where fairness was an unspoken credo, it rankled that Genero had dragged in a pregnant hooker. He could be forgiven the cageful of drunks — maybe — but a pregnant hooker? Even Hawes’s father would have looked the other way, and Jeremiah Hawes had been an extremely religious person, a man who’d felt that Cotton Mather was the greatest of the Puritan priests, a man who’d named his own son in honor of the colonial God-seeker who’d hunted witches with the worst of them. Hawes’s father had chalked off the Salem witch trials as the personal petty revenges of a town feeding on its own ingrown fears, thereby exonerating Cotton Mather and the role the priest had played in bringing the delusion to its fever pitch. Would his father, if he were still alive, have similarly excused Genero for his zeal? Hawes doubted it.

The woman came back to his desk.

“So what you say?” she said.

“About what?”

“You let me walk, okay?”

“I can’t,” Hawes said.

“I got somethin’ in the oven juss now,” the woman said, and spread her hands wide on her belly. “But I pay you back later, okay? When this is all finish, okay?” She winked at him. “Come on, let me walk,” she said. “You very cute, you know? We have a nice time together later, okay?”

“Cute?” one of the drunks in the cage yelled, insulted. “Jesus, lady!”

“He’s very cute, this little muchacho,” the woman said, and chucked Hawes under the chin as though he were a cuddly little ten-year-old dumpling. He was, in fact, six feet two inches tall, and he weighed an even 200 pounds now that he wasn’t watching his diet too closely, and he had somewhat unnervingly clear blue eyes and flaming red hair with a white streak over the left temple — the result of a peculiar accident while he was still working as a detective/3rd out of the 30th Precinct downtown. He had responded to a 1021, a Burglary Past, and the victim had been a hysterical woman who came screaming out of her apartment to greet him, and the super of the building had come running up with a knife when he spotted Hawes, mistaking Hawes for the burglar, who was already eighteen blocks away, and lunging at him with the knife and putting a big gash on his head. The doctors shaved the hair to get at the cut, and when it grew back, it grew in white — which had been the exact color of Hawes’s terror.

The streak in his hair had accounted for a great many different reactions from a great many different women — but none of them had ever thought he was “cute.” Looking at the pregnant hooker’s naked breasts and appraising eyes, he began to think that maybe he was cute, after all. He also began to think that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to let her walk and to take her up later on her fine proposition. She was a good-looking woman in her mid-thirties, he guessed, who carried her coming infant like a barrage balloon, but who had a good slender body otherwise, with long strong legs and very nice breasts indeed, swollen to bursting now and being flaunted with deliberate coercive intent as she sashayed past Hawes’s desk, back and forth, back and forth, black coat open, belly and breasts billowing like the mainsail and jibsail of an oceangoing schooner. The drunks began to applaud.

If he did let her walk, of course, Genero would bring departmental charges or do something else stupid. Hawes was pondering the inequity of having to work with someone like Genero when Hal Willis pushed through the slatted rail divider, dragging behind him two people handcuffed to each other. Hawes couldn’t tell whether the people were boys or girls because they were both wearing designer jeans and woolen ski masks. The drunks in the cage cheered again, this time in greeting to the masked couple. Willis took a bow, spotted the pregnant hooker with the open coat, said, “Close your coat, lady, you’ll freeze those sweet little darlings to death,” and then said, “Come in, gentlemen,” to the two people in the designer jeans and the ski masks. “Hello, Steve,” he said to Carella, “it’s starting early today, isn’t it? Who’s that in the cage? The Mormon Tabernacle Choir?”

The drunks found this almost as amusing as they found the pregnant hooker. The drunks were having the time of their lives. First a topless floor show, and now a stand-up comic with two guys in funny costumes. The drunks never wanted to leave this place.

“What’ve you got?” Carella asked.

“Two masked bandits,” Willis said, and turned to them. “Sit down, boys,” he said. “You won’t believe this,” he said to Carella, and then he turned to where Meyer was typing, and said, “You won’t believe this, Meyer.”

“What won’t I believe?” Meyer asked, and his words seemed to command the immediate respect of everyone in the squadroom, as though — like a superb ringmaster — he had cracked a whip to call attention to the morning’s star performers, diminutive Hal Willis and the two masked men. The pregnant hooker turned to look at them, and even closed her coat so that her own star performers would not detract from the action in the main ring. The drunks put their faces close to the meshed steel of the detention cage as if they were Death Row inmates in a B-movie, watching a fellow prisoner walk that Long Last Mile. Hawes looked, Carella looked, Meyer looked, everybody looked.

Willis, never one to shun the limelight, upstaged the two masked and manacled bandits, and said, “I was heading in to work, you know? Snow tires in the trunk ’cause I planned to have them put on at the garage on Ainsley and Third, okay? So I stop there, and I tell the mechanic to put on the tires for me — don’t ask why I waited till February, okay? The Farmer’s Almanac said it was gonna be a harsh winter. So he starts jackin’ up the car, and I take the key to the men’s room, and I go out to take a leak — excuse me, lady.”

“De nada,” the pregnant hooker said.

“And when I come back, these two guys are standin’ there with cannons in their hands and yelling at the mechanic, who already crapped his pants, to open the safe. The mechanic is babbling he hasn’t got the combination, and these two heroes here are yelling that he’d better find the combination fast or they’ll blow his goddamn brains out, excuse me, lady. That’s when I come out of the can zipping up my fly.”