Harry recalled how strange the conversation had become toward the end. Dreisler had given him an odd sideways look.
"When you think about it, the Lefthand Path was inevitable. "
Carlisle had not rushed to reply. "What was inevitable?"
"The whole thing. It's almost Darwinian."
"It is?"
"Oh, yes. Any truly repressive regime is going eventually to produce a highly efficient clandestine opposition. I think we have ours."
Dreisler had looked quite pleased by the idea. Carlisle knew he had to call him on his choice of words.
"Are you saying that we're repressive?"
Dreisler had smiled, taken off his Raybans, and dangled them by one earpiece. "Not you, dear boy. You're much too busy being an honest cop."
Carlisle got up and went to the bar for another drink. His action caused only a slight ripple among some new arrivals who had failed to notice him sitting quietly in the corner away from the jukebox. The Grass Roots was getting used to him. He returned to his seat. There were levels of speculation about Dreisler that, for his own peace of mind, he did not particularly want to explore. The worst was that Dreisler had almost seemed proud of the Lefthand Path. Sure, he was pleased that the LP existed because it fitted in with his theory of cyclical cause and effect, but Carlisle was sure there was more to it than that. Dreisler had really seemed delighted that there was a terrorist operation running rings around the police and the deacons. A man like Dreisler scarcely seemed capable of being that delighted with something that was not his own creation. That was the thought that Harry did not want to think. If Dreisler was somehow involved with the LP, it opened a universe of wheels within wheels, and each wheel had cogs sharp enough to tear him apart. What really worried Harry was that he was becoming more and more certain that Dreisler had decided that he might be of some use to him. Harry Carlisle did not want to be of use to Deacon Matthew Dreisler, if for no other reason than the fact that he did not want to discover what might happen to him when he stopped being of use. Dreisler's parting remark had been the final enigma.
"Remember, Lieutenant, it is a natural process. Every so often there has to be a cleansing of the temple." He had given Carlisle a knowing smile. "I'll be in touch."
With that, he had summoned his aides and swept out.
Harry sat in the bar shaking his head. "I don't like this. I don't like this at all."
He realized that he was talking to his scotch on the rocks. He was spending too much time on his own. He rubbed his chin. Maybe he should flash his badge, take a complimentary bottle off the bartender, and head on home. With all the stuff that was running through his mind, he would have a hard time sleeping without a good deal of whiskey inside him.
He was just reaching for his hat when two men came in. They were local street punks, but bigger and badder than the usual. They were dressed in old, full-length military raincoats and heavy engineer boots. Their eyes, their expressions, and the way they moved combined to scream silently that they were in the advanced state of strung out where it hurt to be alive. Harry half recognized one of them, a guy with a record of low-class armed violence. What was his name? He used a street name, the title of some old TV show. Jetson. That was it.
They were too strung out to be drinking. Harry was reminded mat he was still carrying the Magnum under his left arm. Jetson was walking toward the bartender while his partner just stood his ground, halfway down the long narrow barroom. Heads were starting to turn. Harry was not the only one who could sense the tension. Jetson opened his coat and laid a caseless, stripped-down autoload on the bar with the muzzle pointing at Earl. Harry sighed. It was going down.
Jetson sounded as if he had been gargling razor blades. "We needs a loan, Earl. All you got in the till."
The partner also opened his coat. He had an Israeli needier, the kind that fired bursts of metal slivers from its triangular barrel. "Don't nobody get excited. There's a transaction going on here that ain't no concern of any of you."
How the hell had that punk gotten his hands on a needier? A single burst could decimate the room, and turn the Grass Roots into a bloody slaughterhouse.
When Earl finally found his voice, he sounded as bad as Jetson. "You're crazy. You can't get away with this. Everyone knows you."
It was a fact that probably did not need pointing out.
"The money, Earl, get the money. When we out of here, we gone."
Were they crazy enough to waste everyone in the place? It had happened before in narcotics-related holdups. Carlisle had his hand on the Magnum. He was easing back his chair. Earl was emptying the till. The two punks were watching the bartender intently. Carlisle was on his feet in combat stance, the Magnum pushed out at arm's length. His voice was soft but absolutely audible.
"Police officer. This is your only warning."
The punks were half turned away from him, but they started to bring their guns around. Carlisle fired twice. The recoil of the old gun felt reassuring. Jetson went down, shot through the head. Blood and brains were spattered all over the mirror and bottles in back of the bar. The second shot was a little low on the partner – he took it in the chest and spun around. The needier went off. Carlisle ducked, but the blast tore harmlessly into the ceiling. Dirt, paint, and plaster cascaded down. A section of the decaying tin ceiling fell out. Harry walked slowly forward, the smoking Magnum held loosely at his side. Jetson was sprawled across the bar, flat on his back and stone dead. His partner was in a fetal position on the floor with his chest making sucking sounds.
Harry looked at Earl. "I don't expect tearful gratitude, but first you could pour me a drink. After that you could call some uniforms and get this mess out of here."
Earl poured Harry a very large straight scotch. He peered over the bar. "Should I call the paramedics for him?"
"That's up to you."
Carlisle removed himself from the place as soon as the uniforms had taken control. When the sergeant in charge had asked him if he wanted to tape a statement, he had wearily shaken his head.
"I'll do it tomorrow. I'm beat."
There was always a degree of shock after a shooting, a blank numbness, as if a bit of him had been left with the dead. He did not relish killing, the way some in the department did, but this time he felt a certain sense of release. There had been something real about pulling the trigger, a reality that was the perfect antidote to the shadow play of conspiracy in which he had been spending too much of his time. Harry Carlisle knew what he was going to do. He flagged down a cab and took it to Eighty-sixth and Broadway, one of those blocks where the police turned a blind eye. As he got out of the cab, he took off his hat and draped his raincoat over his arm – he did not want to look like a cop. He was approached by a dark-skinned girl with long legs and straight black hair. She was wearing an old fur coat, which she opened to allow him a flash of naked flesh.
"You want to go out?"
Carlisle's smile was crooked. "Sure, I want to go all the way out."
Winters
At three o'clock in the morning Winters was still at his desk. His eyelids felt gritty, and the hard neon light was boring into the back of his head. There was the metallic taste of machine coffee in his mouth. And nothing he was doing seemed to have any useful purpose. He and the other junior deacons, on duty for more than sixteen hours, had been given what amounted to little more than make-work. He had interviewed four of the women from the house on Fifteenth Street, seen that they were locked down in the holding cells, and then completed four totally inconclusive reports. He had fed the reports into the database along with the transcripts of the interviews. His next task had been to run everything through an inconsistency filter and cross-match his results with those of the interviews that had been conducted by the other officers. The whole process had taken the best part of the day and had yielded nothing. The discrepancies in the prostitutes' statements were well within the parameters of standard eyewitness variations. If any of the whores knew anything about the triple assassination they were hiding it extremely well. In fact, they were hiding it like a professional. Oddly, the higher-ups still had not authorized a depth interrogation of any of them.