Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

“I don’t have cancer and I don’t have emphysema.”

“So it’s the other thing.”

Bourque said nothing.

“Maybe you came back too soon.”

“I took two weeks. I was fine. I could have taken two years. It wouldn’t have made any difference.”

Delgado said, “You don’t know that. What happened to you, that kind of shit can mess you up. There’s no shame in not coming back until you’re ready.”

She decided not to push, and drove a few more blocks without saying anything, except for one “Fuckin’ asshole” when a cab cut her off.

“The doctor says there’s nothing physiological,” Bourque finally said.

“Okay.”

“It’s... like you say. It’s a reaction to stress.”

She nodded. “So... at those times, your windpipe starts shrinking on you?”

He nodded. “More or less. Couple hits off the inhaler usually takes care of it. Until the next time.”

“And this has been going on since it happened?”

Bourque shook his head. “No. Maybe three, four months after. I’d been having a lot of trouble sleeping. And when I did finally nod off, there were nightmares. And then, through the day... there’d be times when I found myself struggling to catch my breath. The memory gets triggered, and it starts.”

“You can’t blame yourself,” Delgado said. “It wasn’t your fault. Is that what this is about? Guilt? Because you didn’t do anything different than I would have done.”

“Tell that to the kid,” Bourque said.

“You know and I know the only person who gets the blame is Blair Evans. What were you supposed to do? Stand there and let him shoot you? There was a review. You did nothing wrong.”

“I should have taken the bullet. He might have missed anything vital.”

“Listen to you. More likely he would have put it right between your eyes.”

Bourque’s voice went low. “I should have been ready. I was going for my weapon but I wasn’t fast enough.”

“Well, the son of a bitch got what was coming to him anyway. Running into traffic right in front of a double-decker tour bus. Wham. Look, you’re going by the Waldorf when you hear a shot. This Evans asshole comes running out the front, armed, before you’ve even got a chance to react. You yell, ‘Freeze.’ He’s aiming right for you, he pulls the trigger, and you dive out of the way. Exactly what I would have done.”

“I didn’t know she was behind me,” he said so quietly that she almost didn’t hear him.

“How could you, Jerry? You got eyes in the back of your head? If it hadn’t been her, that bullet would have kept heading up Park Avenue until it found someone .”

“Her name was Sasha.”

Delgado nodded. “I know.”

“And her baby’s name is Amanda.”

“I know that, too.”

Bourque’s voice went even quieter. “There were drops of blood on Amanda’s face. She’s in a baby carriage, on her back, she’s looking up. Imagine being fourteen months old... and seeing your mother... take a bullet through the head. Tasting her blood as the drops land on your lips.”

Delgado could find no words.

“It’s the drops I see,” Bourque said. “Whenever I close my eyes, I see the drops.”

“You should talk to someone.”

Bourque looked at his partner. “I’m talking to you.” And when he breathed in, they both heard a whistle.

“Oh, shit,” he said.

He took his inhaler from his pocket and uncapped it. Before he could put it to his mouth, it slipped from his fingers and landed in the footwell in front of him.

“Damn thing slips out of my hand half the time,” he said. The inhaler was beyond his reach. He briefly unbuckled his seat belt so he could shift forward to scoop it up.

He took a couple of hits from it before tucking it back into his jacket.

“If you didn’t have that thing, what would happen?” Delgado asked.

“Asked my doctor the same question,” Bourque said. “He never really gave me an answer.”

Chris Vallins said to Barbara Matheson, “Here.”

He’d stopped in front of the doors to a plain, white brick apartment building on the south side of East Twenty-Ninth Street between Second and Third.

“My place,” he said.

Sitting on the sidewalk, his back supported by the apartment building, was an unshaven man in his forties or fifties, a paper coffee cup on the ground in front of him with a few coins in it. His clothes were worn and dirty, but he was wearing a blue pullover sweater that looked relatively new.

“Hey,” Chris said to the man, who gave every indication of being homeless.

He looked at Chris and smiled. “My man!” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Not bad,” Chris said. “You?”

“It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood,” he sang. “A beautiful day for a neighbor. Will you be mine?”

Chris grinned. “How’s the sweater working out?”

The man gripped the front of the sweater, gave it a tug, then let go. “Mighty fine. Nice to have when there’s no room at the inn overnight. Got any more?”

“I’ll look through my closet again. In the meantime,” Chris said, taking off his gloves, “you might as well have these.” The leather on the fingers of the right glove was torn in several places from when Chris had hit the pavement.

“No, I couldn’t,” the man said, but reached up anyway to take them.

“The right one’s a bit ripped up, I’m afraid.” Vallins glanced at his bruised knuckles. “Me, too, apparently.”

Barbara looked at Vallins’s hand. “I’m sorry. That’s because of me.”

Vallins shrugged, his attention still focused on the homeless man, who was already trying the gloves on for size. “They fit?”

The homeless man grinned and said, “Not bad. Got a receipt in case I need to return them?”

“Think I lost it,” Vallins said.

The man finally looked at Barbara and said, “He’s a keeper.”

She said, “Oh no, we’re not—”

“This is a friend of mine, Jack. Barbara.”

“Hi, Barbara.”

“Hello, Jack,” Barbara said.

“Jack served his country with honor and distinction in Afghanistan,” Chris said.

Barbara gave the man a solemn nod as Chris opened the door and said, “See ya later, Jack.”

The homeless man gave them a thumbs-up.

As they entered the lobby, Barbara said, “I should have given him something.”

Chris shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. Drop a buck in his cup on the way out if you feel like it.”

They took the elevator to the fifteenth floor, walked to the end of a hall, and entered his apartment. Chris went straight to the kitchen. “Take the tour while I find some ice.”

He shuffled things around in the freezer compartment of his refrigerator while Barbara admired the view from his apartment window.

“If you look between those two buildings over on the left,” he called out from the kitchen, “you can see a small sliver of the East River.”

“I bet when they advertised this place, they touted the river view, ” she said, one arm crossing her midsection so she could hold her elbow.

“You guessed it. Allowed them to add another two hundred a month to the rent,” he said.

“When a boat goes by, it’s like looking at it through a keyhole.”

While the view was not spectacular, it was a decent apartment. Spacious enough living room, a sliding glass door that led to a balcony big enough for two chairs. A peek down the hallway showed three doors, so a bathroom and two bedrooms. Not bad. Barbara would have killed for an extra bedroom that she could have turned into an office, instead of always using her kitchen table to do her work. The furnishings were modern, and there was the obligatory wall with the flat-screen TV, audio equipment, and shelves for speakers, CDs, DVDs, books, and a few framed snapshots.