He thinks I’m a cop.
Well, that wasn’t a miss, you son of a bitch. It was just to turn you around so you can watch me shoot you. He trembled in rage: he lifted the revolver and stared into the black man’s eyes, hard as glass. The man was lifting his hands into the air in surrender. The sight of his vicious sneering face electrified the skin of Paul’s spine.
He stepped forward into the light because it was important that the intruder see him. A muscle worked at the back of the black man’s jaw. Then the face changed: “Hey, man, what’s goin’ down?”
Flame streaked out of Paul’s gunbarrel; the shot laid hard echoes across the blacktop path and the firecracker stink of the smoke got into his nostrils.
The bullet plunged into the abdomen, rupturing it with a subcutaneous explosion of gases. Paul fired again; the black man fell back, turned, began to scramble toward the trees.
It was remarkable how much a human body could take and still keep functioning. He fired twice more into the back of the man’s head. It dropped him.
Paul glanced at the drunk. The drunk hadn’t even stirred. He was facing the other way, half-lying on the bench. Was he alive at all?
Paul crossed to the black man and looked at him. There were flecks of white saliva at the corners of the man’s mouth. His face was twisted to the side and the eyes stared blankly at nothing. His sphincter muscles had failed and an unmistakable odor hung around the body in a cloud.
Paul hurried to the drunk. The man was snoring softly.
He faded back into the trees along the bridle path. There might be a cop nearby. He hurried up toward the fence that surrounded the reservoir; just before he reached it he turned to the right and went along the side of the steep wooded slope, parallel to the fence but below it so that no one would see him silhouetted. Every few seconds he stopped and listened.
People would have heard the noise of the shots but no one would have a fix on it and they’d rationalize it had been a backfiring truck. It wouldn’t be reported. Gunshots never were. The only real risk was that someone might have seen something. A passing pedestrian he hadn’t spotted, or even another drunk lying concealed in the wood. He slipped out of the jacket and reversed it to show the bright red side; put the cap in his pocket and the gloves with it. The gun was back in his right front trouser pocket — the gun together with a rubber-banded roll of four hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills. If a cop decided for some reason to stop him and search him, Paul wanted the cop to find the four hundred dollars. It might work; he understood such things worked.
He went along the slope, losing his footing here and there on the slippery grass; he cut between the reservoir and the tennis courts and made his way across the oval drive and out of the Park by the Ninety-sixth Street gate. He felt exposed and vulnerable; he was sweating lightly in the cool air. Rickety and weak: but it was real, the lusting angry violence most people had never remotely tasted and would never understand...
In his mailbox he found a folded mimeographed flyer letterheaded with the legend of the West End Avenue Block Association and signed in the facsimile handwriting of Herbert Epstein.
Dear West End Avenue Resident:
The residents of this neighborhood are understandably and gravely concerned with the priority-matter of SAFETY on the streets.
Police statistics show that addicts and muggers are most likely to prey on the citizenry on dark, or poorly illuminated, streets; and that improved lighting on city streets has been demonstrated to cut crime as much as 75 percent.
Your Block Association hopes to purchase and install a system of total saturation street lighting along West End Avenue and the side streets from 70th to 74th.
City funds are not available for this type of installation. Many neighborhood associations have already exercised initiative in purchasing high-saturation lighting in their areas. The cost per light is $350; within the area of our Block Association, individual contributions of as little as $7 each will enable us to saturate our neighborhood with bright lights and drive the criminals away into darker areas.
Your contribution is tax deductible. Please contribute as much as you can, for your own safety.
With sincere thanks,
He left it open on his desk so he would remember to make out a check.
Years ago he had spent some of his weekends visiting his uncle and aunt in Rockaway. You could tell the rank and importance of the local mobsters by the brightness of the floodlights around their houses: they were the only people who had reason to fear for their lives.
Tuesday they took Carol to the rest home near Princeton. It was the first time he had seen her in weeks and although he had prepared himself he couldn’t help showing his shock. She looked twenty years older. There was no trace of the coltish girl with the sweet and touching smile. She might as well have been a display-window mannequin.
Jack kept talking to her in his gentle voice — cheerful meaningless talk, the kind you would use to soothe a skittish horse — but there was no sign she heard any of it; there was no sign she was aware of her own existence, let alone anyone else’s. They have this to pay for, he thought.
On the Amtrak train back to the city he sat beside Jack looking out the window at the slanting gray rain. Jack didn’t speak. He seemed worn out by the fruitless effort to reach Carol. Paul tried to think of something comforting to say but he quickly realized there was nothing.
There was a peculiar gratification in seeing how badly Jack was taking it. It made Paul feel the stronger of the two. He wasn’t breaking down at all; he was taking it in his stride.
But then his thoughts turned inward and he saw there was no reason to be smug; he was keeping his own equilibrium only because he seemed to have been struck by the edge of the same malaise that had infected Carol — the inability to feel anything. It was as if a transparent shield had been erected around him — as if his emotional center had been anesthetized. It had been closing in around him for several days, he realized. He remembered the mugger in Riverside Park: that had terrified him; but it was the last time he had known real fear. The second time — the man who’d tried to rob the drunk — he’d felt very little; he remembered it with vague detachment as if it were a scene from a movie he’d watched a long time ago.
He walked the streets that night but no one attacked him. At midnight he went home.
17
Wednesday morning from the office he telephoned Lieutenant Briggs, the Homicide detective. The police had nothing to report by way of progress in apprehending the intruders who had killed Esther and destroyed Carol’s life. Paul summoned enough righteous outrage to reduce the lieutenant to a string of whining apologies and excuses.
When he hung up he realized how counterfeit his indignant outburst had been. He had done it on impulse because it seemed to be the thing that was expected of him and he didn’t want to attract suspicion by any hint of unusual behavior. He was finding it surprisingly easy to act the innocent role: easy to be the injured helpless citizen, easy to look straight into people’s faces without fear that his guilt would show. How quickly he had picked up the habit of guarding his secrets — as if he had been allowed to write out his own letters of reference, leaving out everything except what he chose to put in.
That night he decided to invade a new part of the wilderness. He took the subway down to Fourteenth Street and walked over into the truck district underneath the West Side Highway. Drunks slept beneath the overhanging loading platforms of the warehouses; the huge gray doors to the loading bays were locked formidably. On the side streets under the shadow of the elevated highway the light was very poor and the big trucks were lined up in uneven rows, half blocking the narrow passages. The air was cold and heavy; it wasn’t raining but it had the feel of rain. The still thick night seemed to blot up light.