“About time you got here,” I said. I knew they’d been as fast as could be expected, but the situation had me scared, and when I’m scared I get mad, and when I’m mad I sound off.
They didn’t pay any attention to me, which was the right thing to do. One of them said to the woman, “Come on, honey, let’s fix the old arm.”
Their being dressed in white had made a connection with the woman, because now she started to yell, “I want my own doctor. You take me to my own doctor!”
The four attendants hustled the woman to the ambulance, having as much trouble with her as we’d had, and a second ambulance arrived, pulling in behind the first. Two guys came out of this one, both also dressed in white, and came over to us. One of them said, “Where’s the stiff?”
I couldn’t say anything; I was having trouble breathing. I just pointed at the building, and Paul said, “Third floor rear. In the kitchen. She really cut him to pieces.”
Two more had come out of the back of the second ambulance, carrying a rolled-up stretcher. The four of them went up the stoop and into the building. At the same time, the first four were getting the woman into the first ambulance, with some trouble. So much movement, so many flashing red lights, kept the crowd from deciding to join in; they’d just be spectators this time.
Paul and I were finished with this one, for right now. We still had to call in, and later on there’d be forms to do at the station, but for the next couple minutes the action had moved away from us. And it hadn’t happened any too soon.
Excitement carries you through the tense parts. It had been that way from the beginning, from the first time I was around at a violent situation, which was a ten-year-old kid hit by a cab on Central Park West. He was still alive, the kid, and when you looked at him you wished he wasn’t. But the excitement and noise and movement had carried me through the whole scene, and it wasn’t until we were driving away from it that I had Jerry, an older cop who was my first partner, pull the car over to the curb and stop so I could get out and up-chuck.
That’s never changed, from that day to this. I don’t upchuck anymore, but the run of emotions is still the same; the excitement carries me through the tense part or the ugly part or the violent part, and then there’s a sick queasy letdown that comes after it.
The patrol car was across the street where we’d left it, with its engine off and its flasher on. The two of us went over there, pushing our way through the crowd, ignoring the questions they were asking us and ignoring what was going on behind us. When we got to the car, we stood beside it a minute, not talking or moving or doing anything. I don’t know what Paul was looking at; I was looking at the car roof.
A siren started again. I looked around, and the first ambulance was leaving, taking the woman to Bellevue. I turned to look at Paul, and he had blood smeared all over his shirt-front, and dotted on his face and arms like measles. “You got blood on you,” I said.
“You, too,” he said.
I looked down at myself. When we’d come down from the third floor, I’d been on the side of the woman where her cut arm was, and I had even more blood on me than Paul did. My bare arms, from elbow to wrist, were soaked in blood, the hair all matted, like a cat that’s been run over. Now that I was looking at myself, with the sun beating down on me, I could feel the blood drying against my skin, shrinking up into a thin wrinkled layer of scab.
“Christ,” I said. I turned away from Paul and leaned my left side against the car and stretched my left arm away from me across the white car roof, where the flashing light kept changing the color of it. I couldn’t think about getting clean, I couldn’t think about what I was supposed to do next, all I could think was, I’ve got to get out of this. I’ve got to get out of this.
3
They were both on the four-to-midnight shift that time, so they got to drive home pretty late at night, after most of the traffic had thinned out. That was the advantage of the four-to-twelve; they got to drive into town in the middle of the afternoon, before the rush hour, and in any case in the opposite direction from most of the traffic, and then at the other end of the shift they could drive home along practically empty roads.
The disadvantage of the four-to-midnight was that it was the busiest shift of all. They weren’t driving during the rush hour, but they were working during it, and then on into the evening, the high-crime period of the day. Muggings hit their peak between six and eight, when people are coming home from work. Around the same time, the husbands and wives start fighting with each other, and a little later the drunks join in. And store robberies — like the one Joe had pulled — occur most frequently in that period between sundown and ten o’clock, when most of the stores finally close. So when they were on the four-to-midnight shift they tended to spend most of their time working, and very little of it sitting down.
But then midnight would come around at last, and this shift too would come to an end, and they would get to sail home along practically deserted highways once they’d left Manhattan, all by themselves, thinking their thoughts. Which is what they were doing now.
Tom was driving his Chevrolet tonight; six years old, bought used, a gas burner and an oil eater, with bad springs and a loose clutch. He kept talking about trading it in on something a little newer, but he couldn’t bring himself to take it to a used-car dealer and try to get a price on it. He knew too well what this car was worth.
They were riding along without any conversation between them, both tired from the long day, both remembering things that had happened earlier in the week. Tom was going over in his head the conversation with the hippie junk dealer, trying to find better answers to the things the guy had said, and also trying to figure out why he couldn’t seem to get that conversation out of his mind. And Joe was remembering the blood drying on his arm in the sun, stretched out across the roof of the patrol car, looking like something from a monster movie and not anything that could ever have been a part of himself at all. He didn’t particularly want to remember that scene, but it just seemed to stay in his head, no matter what.
Gradually, as they left the city behind them, Tom’s thoughts shifted away from the hippie, roamed around, touched on this and that, and settled on a new subject. It wasn’t exactly Joe’s liquor store, though the liquor store was behind what he was thinking about now. All at once he broke the silence, saying, “Joe?”
Joe blinked. It was like coming out of sleep, or a dentist’s anesthetic. He looked at Tom’s profile and said, “Yeah?”
“Let me ask you a question.”
“Sure.”
Tom kept looking straight ahead through the windshield. “What would you do,” he said, “if you had a million dollars?”
Joe’s answer was immediate, as if he’d been ready for this question all of his life. “Go to Montana with Chet Huntley,” he said.
Tom frowned slightly and shook his head. “No,” he said. “I mean really.”
“So do I.”
Tom turned his head and studied Joe’s face — they both had very serious expressions — and then he looked out the windshield again and said, “Not me. I’d go to the Caribbean.”
Joe watched him. “You would, huh?”
“That’s right.” Tom grinned a little, thinking about it. “One of those islands down there. Trinidad.” He stretched the word out, pronouncing it as though saying it was tasting something sweet.
Joe nodded, and looked around at the glove compartment. “But here we are instead,” he said.