He found a car parked askew to the curb, as if it had been disabled and its driver had pushed it out of the center of the roadway and gone for help. The car had been stripped: the hood was up, the trunk-lid up, the car propped on bricks and stones. Its wheels and tires were gone. He looked under the hood: the battery had been removed. The window of the driver’s door had been smashed in. When he looked at the raised trunk-lid he saw it had been pried open; the lip of it was badly mangled. Six hours ago it might have been a good car with a leaf in the fuel line or an empty gas tank; now it was a gutted derelict.
A lump of hot rage grew in his belly.
Set a trap for them, he thought. There had to be a way. He kept walking, gripping the gun in his pocket, and after a little while he had it worked out in his mind.
Wednesday morning he phoned a rent-a-car office and reserved a car for overnight use.
At half-past ten he drove down the West Side Highway to the Eighteenth Street ramp and went rattling down the chuckholed exit to the warehouse district. On Sixteenth Street a police cruiser rolled slowly past him and the cops inside gave him an incurious glance. He went around the block and found a spot between two double-parked trucks on the right-hand side of the street, away from the street lights. He parked the car there at an awkward angle and wrote in a crabbed hand on a scrap of paper, “Out of gas — back soon,” and stuck it under the windshield-wiper blade. It was the sort of thing motorists did to avoid getting tickets. He locked the doors conscientiously and walked away from the car making a show of his disgust; went around the corner and quickly continued around the entire block; and posted himself in the shadows diagonally across the street from the car. He stood between the close-parked trailers of two semi-rig trucks, with a good field of view and good cover in the deep shadows.
Now and then a car went by. A pair of homosexual pedestrians, walking fast out of fear, touching each other intimately and laughing. He had heard the faggots sometimes drifted “the trucks” in search of pickups. It was the first time he’d seen it.
He found them vaguely revolting; they induced the same kind of discomfort he experienced when he had to look at a cripple. There was always something deeply disturbing about deformities you weren’t used to and couldn’t understand. But they were no threat to anyone except themselves and he had no impulse to do anything but let them go by. Fools, he thought, wandering this area at night unarmed. They’re asking for it.
He backed up: that was wrong. They had a right to walk unmolested; everyone did.
Someone had to guard the city. Obviously the cops weren’t doing it. He’d spent quite a bit of time in this neighborhood two nights in a row and he’d seen only one passing patrol car.
Then it’s up to me, isn’t it?
He had to wait nearly an hour but finally they came — two thin boys in a battered old station wagon. They drove past the parked rental car at first. Went by it very slowly, the boy in the passenger seat rolling down his window and craning his neck out to read the little message under the wiper. Paul tensed. The two boys were in animated conversation but he couldn’t hear their words; then the station wagon gunned away and he eased back between the two trailers. He would give it another half hour and then call it a night.
It came down the street again. The old station wagon. Rolled to a stop in front of Paul’s car.
They’d gone around the block then. To make sure there weren’t any cops.
They got out of the station wagon and opened its tailgate. He watched them remove tools — a crowbar, something else. Very professional.
When they opened the hood of his car Paul shot them both.
18
Thursday he returned the car to the agency before he went to work. He spent most of the day in the corner office with Henry Ives and George Eng going over the collated Jainchill figures. He had trouble keeping his mind on the subject at hand. George Eng was among the liberal wealthy; he lived behind the barricades of a great Park Avenue apartment house and sent his children to a private school but even so he spent twenty minutes that afternoon in bitter indignant complaint about the savage adolescents who extorted money from kids outside the school and, if they didn’t have any, beat them up for sport. Eng’s younger son had come home a few days ago bruised and limping. The police hadn’t found his attackers. Eng’s son wasn’t reticent about it; it was just that they had been strangers to him. Public school kids, or dropouts; they were taking to hanging around private schools waiting for the students to come out.
He had dinner with Jack and they talked pointlessly about Carol. Jack had been out to see her yesterday; there was no change. Every day left room for a little less hope.
Later that night in the East Village he shot a man coming down a fire escape with a portable TV set.
It had been a slow weekend for news. Somewhere along the line the police had begun to make connections and the story made the Saturday evening newscasts and the front page of the Sunday Times as well as its editorial page.
Three men, all with criminal records, and two teen-age boys with narcotics arrest records, have been found shot to death in four Manhattan areas within the past ten days — all five shot by bullets from the same revolver, according to the police.
Deputy Inspector Frank Ochoa, placed in charge of the case on Friday, is calling it “the vigilante case.” Inspector Ochoa said no connection has been found among the five victims except for their “criminal tendencies” and the fact that postmortem ballistics tests have shown that all five were killed by bullets from the same .32 revolver.
From circumstantial evidence the police theorize that all five victims may have been engaged in criminal acts at the time of their deaths. Three of them, including the two 17-year-old boys (the only two of the five who were found dead at the same place and time), were found under suggestive circumstances. The two boys were found in the midst of a station wagon-load of car-stripping tools. The most recent victim, George Lambert, 22, was found with a stolen television set at the foot of a fire escape leading down from the window of an apartment from which the set had been stolen. The window showed signs of forcible entry.
The other two victims, found in upper Manhattan parks, may have been engaged in narcotics trading or armed robbery. Both were armed with knives.
These facts have led the police to the tentative conclusion that a self-styled, one-man vigilante force is stalking the city with a .32 revolver. “It has to be some guy looking for retribution,” Inspector Ochoa believes. “Some nut that thinks he’s a one-man police force.”
Inspector Ochoa has assigned a special detail to the case. “We’re beginning to put it all together. Until a couple of days ago these cases were all in separate Precincts, which is why we’ve been a little slow making the connection. But we’re on it now and the Department expects to apprehend the killer very quickly.”
By the next morning the newspapers had picked it up with full energy. Inspector Ochoa was the Times’s Man-in-the-News. In the Daily News on the editorial page the Inquiring Fotographer’s man-in-the-street question was, “How do you feel about the vigilante killer?” and the six answers ranged from “You can’t take the law into your own hands” to “They ought to leave that guy alone, he’s doing what the cops should have done a long time ago.” The afternoon Post editorialized, “Murder answers no questions. The vigilante must be nailed before he murders any more victims. We urge the Manhattan D.A. and the NYPD to spare no effort to bring the psychopath to justice.”