"Hey, Kathy." His greeting was met with a cold glare to remind him of the rules: it was always Mallory now and never Kathy anymore, not since she had joined NYPD. As if he could throw away all of her puppy days – watching Kathy grow, though his old friend's foster daughter had never been a real child, not in terms of innocence. After a little girl had lived on the streets awhile, homeless and eating her dinner from trash cans, childhood was over. But Riker had done his small part to make certain that she never went hungry again. He had a favorite memory of taking Kathy to a baseball game when she was eleven years old. He had bought her enough hot dogs and soda to bring on projectile vomit.
Food was love.
In that same spirit, he pushed the remaining goat cheese in her direction. It was all that he had to offer her these days. "Mallory," he said. "Hungry?"
She leaned over his desk to drop a computer spit-out on top of his mountain of bills and forms, time sheets and invoices. Without even glancing at her offering, he guessed that she had made good on a threat, and this was the background check on Jo.
"Her name isn't Josephine Richards," said Mallory. "That's an alias."
"Yeah, yeah. Big surprise." Riker picked up the sheet, and, without reading it, he wadded it into a ball. "You might've noticed – " He dropped it into a wastebasket. "I don't need any more paper today. But thanks anyway."
She glared at the pile on his desk and the other pile that had slopped to the floor, all the paperwork that was burying him alive. He could see that she was longing to create order out of the chaos, to align every sheet and envelope, every paper clip and pencil at right angles. Mallory was freakish about neatness, and that was her most benign personality trait.
With a slow shift of strategy, she settled into a chair. Her head rolled to one side, eyes closing to languid slits of green, calm and drowsy. Riker had seen Jo's cat do this, and he knew it was a trick to lull him into a false idea that he was safe from attack.
"You haven't been reading your personal mail," she said. "I bet you're wondering how I know that."
Riker did not like to repeat himself, so this time he only waved one hand to say, Yeah, yeah. Letters from One Police Plaza had been stacking up unopened in his new SoHo apartment for months. He could guess that most of them required his immediate attention. One clue was a slew of stamped messages on the outside of last month's envelopes, words in red ink and capital letters, OPEN IMMEDIATELY The heaviest one had been pushed under his door, and it had borne a more expansive wording in Mallory's machine-perfect penmanship: Open this IMMEDIATELY, you bastard!
"Well, I'm not much of a reader," he said. "Haven't touched a newspaper in six months." Riker preferred to spend his time cocooning in the company of a quiet bartender. "But I do open some of my mail." He held up both hands. "See? Paper cuts." This was what came of handling dangerous utility bills in the evening hours after the lights had been turned off for nonpayment due to apathy.
His partner was not amused, and he could hardly blame her. The young cop deserved a better explanation for her abandonment. Regardless of the circumstances, she took every desertion so personally. She had yet to forgive her foster parents for dying. Helen Markowitz had been wheeled away into surgery, then returned to her family as a corpse. Unfair. And Lou Markowitz, Riker's oldest friend, had died in the line of duty. Kathy Mallory was not about to stand for any more defections.
"Your leave time expired." Her voice was a bit testy, and this was akin to Jo's cat switching its tail. "You never showed up for the physical or the psych evaluation." And that was an accusation. "They ran you out of the department on a medical discharge." She leaned forward, a prelude to a lunge. "If you'd bothered to open your damn mail, you'd know that they pensioned you off." She slammed her hand on the desk and sent papers flying to the floor. "Is that what you wanted?"
Riker shrugged as if this meant nothing. It meant the world to him.
She held up an envelope, and by its thickness, he guessed it was a twin to the one on his kitchen table at home. "This is the form to appeal your discharge. I've got Lieutenant Coffey's signature. Now I need yours." After pulling out the sheets and unfolding them, she pointed to a red X so large that he could find his signature line without the bifocals he never wore in public. Mallory had often pointed out to him that his refusal to wear eyeglasses was an absurd vanity in a man with a shabby wardrobe, scruffy shoes and a bad haircut. And she had also meant well on that occasion.
She handed the heavy document across the desk. "Sign it," she said to him, ordered him. "Then I'll set up new dates for your exams."
He could not even touch it. "I'll read the form tonight, okay?"
No, that was obviously not okay, but she let the bundle of sheets fall from her hand to the desk, then leaned down to retrieve the crumpled ball he had tossed in the wastebasket. "Now, back to your hunchback, Johanna Apollo."
So that was the lady's real name.
Mallory tossed the wadded paper at him, and he caught it in one hand. Was she testing his reflexes – wondering if he could pass the police physical? Or had she guessed that he was most afraid of the psychiatric test?
"Are you listening to me?"
"Yeah, I hear you," he said.
She rose from her chair, braced both hands on the edge of the desk and stared him down, settling for no less than his complete attention. "But you never listen to the radio, do you, Riker?"
Chapter 2
JOHANNA APOLLO'S EYES WERE DOWNCAST AS SHE crossed the avenue, moving toward the Italianate row houses along St. Luke's Place. She lacked a hunchback's gooseneck aspect, for she rarely raised her head to cope with the curious faces of strangers. Instead, she studied their feet, and, based solely upon the science of shoes, made personal judgments on her more upright fellowman. A cab stopped up ahead, and the trendy loafers of a soulless yuppie stepped out onto the pavement to cross paths with the dusty work boots of a blue-collar man who could not afford the rents in this Greenwich Village neighborhood. In her previous life, Johanna had often mused that she should have cultivated foot fetishists, for they would have had more to talk about.
Behind her, she heard the hesitation steps of clicking high heels, some woman in a pedestrian dilemma of political correctness: how to get past the cripple on a sidewalk made narrower by lines of garbage cans? Impatience won out, and the shoes of an office girl walked abreast of her, hurrying to pass the leisurely hunchback. Without raising her head, Johanna knew the girl would be young. These were the dangerous spiked heels of an on-the-job man hunter, seeking fun or rescue in that other sex. The shoe design was flirty and flimsy, not made for the dead run at a moment's notice – like now. Two rats slithered out of a mound of trash bags torn open by sharp little teeth. The office girl's feet turned skittish, skipping to the side, followed by a sudden breathy surprise when she collided with a garbage pail and knocked it over.
"Turn at the corner," said Johanna, raising her eyes to the younger woman's face. "The vermin aren't your worst problem." She pointed toward the ragged man standing in the center of the sidewalk on the next block.
And now that the beggar had an audience, his arms raised slowly, then flapped up and down in the manner of demented pump handles. Bunny was what he called himself, but Johanna knew him by all his street names: Bum, Fool, and You Crazy Son of a Bitch. He was waiting for his tribute money, but first – a little fun, another fright night.