The envelope opened as the knife came out the other side. Kovaks saw the wires immediately. He shot out of his seat, dropped the phone, shouted, ‘Oh Jesus shit — BOMB!’ and threw the envelope across the room where it smacked on a wall and dropped to the floor. He flung himself at Sue and forced her to the floor; out of the corner of his eyes he saw the other agents in the room drop instinctively down out of sight, taking flimsy protection from their desks. The coffee Sue had been holding went everywhere as Kovaks landed on top of her. She was too surprised and winded to say anything other than, ‘Ungphf’
Nothing happened.
Kovaks rose slowly to his knees. ‘Keep down,’ he warned the others. He peered over the top of the desk at the envelope which lay innocently on the floor. Two wires poked out of it. Shaking, his heart pulsating to the point of bursting, he reached for and picked up the phone which dangled on its wire over the edge of the desk. He could hear Donaldson shouting at the other end. ‘Joe, Joe! You OK, Joe?’
‘ Yeah, yeah,’ he breathed. He looked down at the prostrate figure of Sue who hadn’t moved. Her dress had ridden up to reveal her plump thighs and skimpy underclothes. ‘I think I’ve just opened a letter bomb — but it didn’t go bang. Speak to you later.’
He slammed the phone down.
‘ I think we’re OK, people,’ he announced. ‘If it was going to blow it would’ve done by now.’
Gingerly the other two agents appeared from hiding. Kovaks held out a hand to Sue and heaved her into an unladylike sitting position, legs akimbo. She grinned her lop-sided grin at him and said, ‘You don’t need an excuse to throw me to the ground and leap on me, you know.’
He chuckled with a slightly hysterical undertone, but before he could confound her with an off-the-cuff witty remark, the phone on his desk rang out. He answered it. ‘Kovaks.’
‘ Agent Kovaks?’
‘ Speaking. ‘
‘ Broward Country Police here, Fort Lauderdale. Sheriff Tomlinson.’
‘ Yep?’
‘ You live up here with a lady called Chrissy Strand?’
‘ Yep — why?’ Kovaks asked cautiously. His eyes flickered to the envelope on the floor.
‘ I’m sorry, but I’ve some bad news, sir. She’s in hospital. Some kind of explosion at your apartment this morning… We think it could’ve been a letter bomb. It went off in her face.’
It was a one-room apartment over a row of sleazy shops near to Flagler Street in downtown Miami. In one corner of the room a baby cried itself hoarse in a cot. It was poorly cared for, a scrawny child, its growth stunted perhaps for ever by lack of proper feeding and loving attention. Its diaper stank and probably hadn’t been changed for twelve hours. It was soiled and wet. Underneath, the baby’s skin was red-raw and sore. And the baby was hungry, but it couldn’t have kept anything down because of a recurring stomach infection.
But it hadn’t always been this way.
In another corner of the room lay the baby’s mother on a low camp bed with a thin mattress and brown, stained sheets.
She was a black girl, nineteen years old.
She hadn’t always been this way.
Not many months ago she had been beautiful, big and full of life.
Now she lay there half-listening to her baby’s screams of anguish.
But they were noises that only vaguely registered in her ears. They were miles away, of no consequence. What was immediate was that her head was swimming and she was in a different, crack-induced world.
She was on a high, but it wasn’t all that high. She needed some more. The last hadn’t taken her far enough up. She’d seen the peak she wanted to conquer in the distant mist, but it had remained just out of reach. So she needed a lot more, but for the moment this would have to do.
She closed her dry eyes and ran her hands down her naked body, quivering with the sensation in her head.
Once her body had been beautiful, desirable.
Now she was thin and wasted. No one, no man, could possibly want to make love to her. Her bones stuck out hard and cold, her thin legs looked like they had rickets, her once large firm breasts were shadows of their former selves. Her nipples, once rich and scarlet, were pitiful and lifeless.
All she retained was her mouth.
That was still sensual, her lips thick and moist.
And that was how she made her living, with her mouth. She was good with it — the very best. Last night forty customers queued up and testified to the fact. At fifty dollars each that made two thousand dollars, and it wasn’t her best night by any means. All she got though was a measly two hundred, a hundred and fifty of which went straight back to the man for dope.
And the baby cried in the corner.
The mother sat up, desperate for more. She searched frantically for some in her bag. There was none, but she already knew that anyway.
Then the door opened and two men came into the room.
One was THE man.
‘ Oh God, thank God,’ she breathed in relief, not even beginning to wonder why they’d come, just pleased with her good luck. ‘I need it, man, I need it. I’ve got fifty dollars left here.’ A hand slid under the pillow and came out clutching a wad of crumpled dollar bills.
The man crossed to her.
With the flat of his hand he smacked her hard and accurately across the face. ‘Get the fuck out of here — now — and take that little piece of Whisper-shit with you.’
‘ I don’t understand,’ she whined, holding her face. ‘What’s going on? What’ve I done? I need it, man. Please!’
‘ You’re being evicted. He’s decided,’ said the man, pointing upwards as if to heaven, ‘that he don’t like bitches in any way connected to people who talk to the law. Now, nigger, get your clothes on, you skinny, ugly bitch, collect that thing and get out. From this moment on, you’re a homeless person — and you can thank Whisper for that.’
Joe Kovaks had a four-hour wait before they let him in to see Chrissy. Part of the time he was accompanied by Sue who plied him with sweet black coffee from a nearby dispenser and machine-gunned him with small talk, which included her minor clash with Ritter. Everything went in one ear and out the other before eventually starting to irritate him. In the end he told her — not unkindly — to go, explaining that he needed to be alone.
She understood and left reluctantly, only to be replaced almost immediately by a young detective from Fort Lauderdale who got Chrissy’s personal details from him, then a statement. It was like getting blood from a stone. Kovaks didn’t feel very much like talking. He wanted to sit and brood. He spoke in angry monosyllables where he could and didn’t feel any remorse or empathy for the detective. Fuck him, he thought. Just fuck him.
All Kovaks wanted to do was see Chrissy. Until then, he wasn’t interested in making anyone’s life easy. What the fuck were they doing with her?
When the detective left, muttering and bearing a statement a rookie would have laughed at, Kovaks sat there alone at last… but only for a short time. In less than five minutes a nurse turned up and asked him to accompany her.
He dropped the stub of his cigarette into his cold coffee, and stood up on quaking legs. He wanted to see her, yet he didn’t. He wanted, yet dreaded, the moment. With this conflict battling inside him, he followed the nurse.
For the first time in his life he was totally shocked and speechless as he stood at the door of the Burns Unit and looked at the pathetic charred figure of Chrissy Strand, the woman he had definitely grown to love.
In truth he couldn’t see all that much of her. There was a spaghetti-like mess of tubes running across and into her body and arms. A suit that looked like it was made of a combination of plastic and tinfoil covered her upper torso and a sheet was drawn up to cover the part of her body from her stomach downwards. A hairnet, rather like a shower cap, was on her head and the whole left side of her face was concealed by gauze. Her hands and arms were covered with plastic bags.