She thought at first she was hearing things.
Her hand tightened on the butt of the gun.
Somebody whistling?
What?
She kept walking, peering into the darkness ahead, past the midway point now, McCann a bit more than three and a half minutes behind her, Abrahams two and a half minutes away in the opposite direction, still too far away, and saw a boy on a skateboard coming up the path, whistling as he curved the board in graceful arcs back and forth across the path. He couldn’t have been older than thirteen or fourteen, a hatless youngster wearing a blue ski parka and jeans, sneakered feet expertly guiding the skateboard, arms akimbo as he balanced himself, a midnight whistler enjoying the dark silence of the empty park, closer, now, still whistling. She smiled, and her hand relaxed on the butt of the gun.
And then, suddenly, he swerved the board into her, bending at the knees, leaning all his weight to one side so that the board slid out from under him, the wheels coming at her, the underside slamming her across the shins. She was pulling the gun from her bag when he punched her in the face. The gun went off while it was still inside the bag, blowing out leather and cigarettes and chewing gum and Kleenex tissues — but not the radio, she hoped, Jesus, not the radio!
In the next thirty seconds, it couldn’t have been longer than that, her finger tightening in reflex on the trigger again, the gun’s explosion shattering the stillness of the night again, their breaths pluming brokenly from their mouths, merging, blowing away on the wind, she thought, remembered, Force part of psychological interplay, he punched her over the breast, Attendant danger of being severely beaten or killed, the gun went off a third time, his fist smashed into her mouth, But he’s just a kid. She tasted blood, felt herself going limp, he was grabbing her right arm, turning her, behind her now, forcing her to her knees, he was going to break her arm, “Let go of it!” yanking on the arm, pulling up on it, “Let go!” her hand opened, the gun clattered to the asphalt.
She tried to get to her feet as he came around her, but he shoved her back onto the path, hard, knocking the wind out of her. As he started to straddle her, she kicked out at him with her booted left foot, white skirts flying, the black heel of the boot catching him on the thigh, a trifle too low for the money. She wondered how many seconds had gone by now, wondered where McCann and Abrahams were, she’d told them the setup was no good, she’d told them — he began slapping her. Straddling her, slapping her, both hands moving, the slaps somehow more painful than the punches had been, dizzying, big callused hands punishing her cheeks and her jaw, back and forth, her head flailing with each successive slap, his weight on her chest, pressing on her breasts — the gun. She remembered the gun in her bra.
She tried to twist away from him, her arms pinioned by his thighs on either side of her, tried to turn her head to avoid the incessant slaps, and idiotically noticed the nurse’s cap lying white and still on the path where it had fallen. She could not free her arms or her hands, she could not get to the gun.
The slapping stopped abruptly.
There was only the darkness now, and the sound of his vaporized breath coming in short, ragged bursts from his mouth. His hands reached for the front of the uniform. He grasped the fabric. He tore open the front, buttons flying, reached for her bra and her breasts — and stopped again. He had seen the gun, he must have seen the gun. His silence now was more frightening than his earlier fury had been. One gun might have meant a streetwise lady who knew the city’s parks were dangerous. Another gun, this one hidden in a bra, could mean only one thing. The lady was a cop. He shifted his weight. She knew he was reaching for something in his pants pocket. She knew the something would be a weapon, and she thought, He’s going to blind me.
In that moment, fear turned to ice. Cold, crystalline, hard. In that moment, she knew she couldn’t count on the cavalry or the marines getting here in time, there was nobody here but us chickens, boss, and nobody to look after little Eileen but little Eileen herself. She took advantage of the shift of his body weight to the left, his right hand going into his pocket, the balance an uneasy one for the barest fraction of a second, enough time for her to emulate the movement of his own body, her left shoulder rising in easy symmetry with his own cant, their bodies in motion together for only a fraction of a second, movement responding to movement as though they were true lovers, and suddenly she lurched, every ounce of strength concentrated in that left shoulder, adding her own weight and momentum to his already offcenter tilt — and he toppled over.
His right hand was still in his pocket as she scrambled to her feet. He rolled over onto the path, his right hand coming free of his pocket, the switchblade knife snapping open just as she pulled the Llama out of her bra. She knew she would kill him if he moved. He saw the gun in her hand, steady, leveled at his head, and perhaps he saw the look in her eyes as well, though there was no moon. She liked to think later that what happened next had nothing to do with the sound of footsteps pounding on the path from north and south, nothing to do with the approach of either Abrahams or McCann.
He dropped the knife.
First he said, “Don’t hurt me.”
Then he said, “Don’t tell on me.”
“You okay?” Abrahams asked.
She nodded. She couldn’t seem to catch her breath. The gun in her hand was trembling now.
“I would’ve killed him,” she whispered.
“What?” Abrahams said.
“A kid,” she whispered.
“We better call for a meat wagon,” McCann said. “It looks to me like she’s—”
“I’m all right!” she said fiercely, and both men stared at her. “I’m all right,” she said more softly, and felt suddenly faint, and hoped against hope that she wouldn’t pass out in front of these two hairbags from the Chinatown Precinct, and stood there sucking in great gulps of air until the queasiness and the dizziness passed, and then she smiled weakly and said, “What kept you?”
They had not finished with Moore until almost a quarter past one, and Kling did not get home until two in the morning. They had got from him essentially what they’d expected to get: only what he chose to admit. In approximately eight hours, Carella and Meyer would be accompanying Moore to the Complaint Room at Felony Court, where a clerk would draw up a short-form complaint listing the charges against him. This so-called yellow sheet would follow him later that morning to his arraignment — and indeed become a part of his permanent record. In the meantime, there was not much anyone could do until the wheels of justice began grinding, slowly.
He was exhausted, but the first thing he did when he came into the apartment was dial Eileen’s number. There was no answer. He let the phone ring a dozen times, hung up, dialed it again, slowly and carefully this time, and let it ring another dozen times. Still no answer. He thumbed through the R’s in his directory, and found the listing for Frank Riley, a man who’d gone through the Academy with him, and who was now a detective/2nd working out of the Chinatown Precinct. He dialed the precinct, told the desk sergeant who he was, and then asked if he had any information on the stakeout outside Worth Memorial earlier that night. The desk sergeant didn’t know anything about any stakeout. He put Kling through to the squadroom upstairs, where he talked to a weary detective on the graveyard shift. The detective told him he heard it had gone down as scheduled, but he didn’t know all the details. When Kling asked him if Detective Burke was okay, he said there was nobody by that name on the Chinatown Squad.