Richard Hawke - Speak of the Devil

Something was seriously wrong here. I had lifted a service revolver from a freshly murdered policeman, given chase to the shooter, and discharged three bullets from the police revolver, striking the shooter once in the shoulder. Taking me into custody was the right thing to do. But pulling the squad car over beneath the West Side Highway and putting a blindfold on me, that wasn’t the right thing to do. The fat trails of sweat on Gumdrop’s fleshy face told me that he knew it, too.

“What the hell is this?” I snapped as my world went black.

“Down on the floor.”

The black guy took hold of my shoulders and guided me into position, semifetal, my ear against the hump. The cops got back into the front seat. The engine fired up. They spoke not a word.

This was all wrong.

Wherever it was I was being taken, the driver didn’t take the direct route. Most of Manhattan is a grid. You go north-south, you go east-west. In the Village, it gets all screwy, as well as down in Chinatown and in the Wall Street area. But where we were, midtown, everything is straight streets and ninety-degree turns. From the floor of the car, I tried to track our course, but after several sets of turns that could only suggest redundancies and doubling back, I was lost. Which I assumed was the point.

I thought again about Margo. By now even Margo would have moved off the bed. She’d have heard all the sirens coming up from near the park, and she’d have flipped on her television. She’d be one of the many millions of New Yorkers who were now glued to their sets. What was I saying? Not just New Yorkers, people all across the country. The network jinglemeisters were probably scrambling right now to lay down little five-second tracks in just the right tone: solemn yet provocatively urgent. The graphics people would have worked even faster. Their work was probably already up on the screen, blending with the horrific images.

THANKSGIVING DAY MASSACRE

MAYHEM IN MANHATTAN

PARADE OF TERROR

Margo would be sitting at her kitchen table watching the breaking reports. I could picture her, bare feet pulled up onto the chair, the Rangers jersey pulled over her legs, covering her like a tent. Her stomach would be grumbling for want of bagels.

And she’d know. Margo knows me. The same way her mother knew her old man when he was still in the game. My being gone this long, she’d know that somehow I had gotten myself involved. But Margo also knows the odds. She’d know in her heart of hearts that in all likelihood, I was probably okay. As she likes to say, I seem to have been born under the watchful eye of the Saint of Reckless Dumb Luck.

Even so, she’d be having fingernails for breakfast.

WE STOPPED. TWENTY MINUTES OF DRIVING, BY MY ESTIMATE. TAKING into account the little maneuvers to throw me off, we were still in Manhattan. I would have sussed out easily enough if we had traveled over a bridge or through a tunnel. My ear was close to the ground. Literally.

The two policemen got out of the car. Nothing happened for the next five minutes except that my calves cramped, first one, then the other. Finally, the men in blue returned and the rear door was opened. Unfolding me from the floor was not exactly a ballet, but we all did what we had to do. Outside the car, one of the cops adjusted the bag to sit straighter on my head.

“Thank you.”

I was taken by both elbows and led forward. “Step up,” one of the cops said. About twenty steps later, he said it again. I heard the click of a door being opened, and I was led inside. Even under the bag, I could practically taste the staleness of the air. I was somewhere cold.

We walked a few more feet and then stopped. I waited. After about twenty seconds, I said, “I hope you guys appreciate how docile I’m being.”

Gumdrop told me to shut up. This seemed to be his specialty.

“Listen,” I said. “I don’t know what academy you two attended, but you’ve both got a lot to learn about bringing a person in. This is bullshit. Take this goddamn bag off my head.”

Nothing. A moment later, I heard a small metallic squeaking sound. “Take three steps,” the black guy instructed. My elbows were released. I took the three steps.

“Later,” Gumdrop muttered, and I heard the squeaking again. Nothing. Then the ground shifted suddenly.

Elevator.

Going up.

I was pretty sure I was alone now.

SOMEONE WAS WAITING FOR ME WHEN THE ELEVATOR DOOR SLID open. My arm was grabbed tightly and I was yanked forward. I stumbled a few steps and jerked free.

“Whoever you are, fuck you.”

A gravelly voice muttered, “Just c’mon.”

My arm was taken again and I let myself be led forward. Tile floor, not wood. Something in the slap of the shoes. My other senses were already picking up the slack. We walked about fifty paces before we stopped.

“Sit down.”

I lowered myself carefully. The fingers of my cuffed hands found the chair before the rest of me did. Straight-backed metal chair. I perched lightly on the edge. Between the tumble down the steps at the Bethesda Fountain and my being curled up on the floor of a police car, my muscles were beginning to show me their aches. Even so, I tensed my legs, ready to leap. The bag was lifted from my head. The gravelly voice sounded. “Oh shit.”

The handcuffs were unlocked. I heard them being tossed onto a table as I kneaded the circulation back into my wrists, then I reached up and tugged off the blindfold.

I was in a room about the size of a small classroom. No windows, completely unadorned. The walls were painted infirmary green, circa several decades ago. A ridgeline of what looked like coffee stains ran about four feet off the floor along the wall facing me. Overhead, a bank of fluorescent lights buzzed, giving off cold, colorless light.

I was seated at the long end of a rectangular wooden table. The paper bag was on the table. So were the handcuffs.

Seated across from me was a large man in his late fifties. Huge chest. He was in a charcoal suit with a red tiepin. The tented handkerchief in his front pocket was a pale blue that somewhat matched his eyes, which were small, hard, clear and currently boring angrily into mine. His salty hair was cropped short and sat flat on his scalp, sort of a modified Roman-emperor look. On the local news, you don’t tend to notice the old acne scars. You see putty-colored skin, a twice-broken nose and an imposing ugliness that, in his job, seems to work in his favor. You also don’t notice the labored breathing. The man in front of me looked like he had just finished a couple of laps around a horse corral.

“Hello, Commissioner,” I said coolly. I massaged my right wrist again as I glanced about the dreary room. “I don’t know. Perhaps maybe a nice landscape over there? Pick the place right up. What do you think?”

Police Commissioner Tommy Carroll came forward, resting his arms heavily on the table. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

I met his angry gaze with as placid a one as I could muster under the circumstances. “I don’t even know where ‘here’ is.”

“We’re in the Municipal Building.”

“Oh. Really? What floor?”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

I could practically see the gears spinning in his head. The eyes were like blue-tinted windows behind which the thoughts were tumbling at high speed. Carroll probed the inside of his cheek with his tongue, as if fiddling with a jawbreaker. He stared hard at me a few seconds. Then he checked his watch. “I need to be across the street in fifteen minutes. You can imagine the hell that’s breaking loose.”

“I’ve just been through a little hell breaking loose myself, Tommy. I gather you’ve heard.”

“There were two guys with guns out there. That’s the report I got. You were one of them?”