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 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 off-center 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 the 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?”
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/Second 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.
He was wondering who to try next when the knock sounded on his door. He went to the door.
“Who is it?” he asked.
“Me,” she answered. Her voice sounded very weary and very small.
He look off the night chain, unlocked the dead bolt, and opened the door. She was wearing a navy pea jacket over blue jeans and black boots. Her long red hair was hanging loose around her face. In the dim illumination of the hallway light bulb, he could see that her face was discolored and bruised, her lip swollen.
“Okay to come in?” she asked.
“Come in,” he said, and immediately, “Are you okay?”
“Tired,” she said.
He locked the door behind her, and put on the night chain. When he turned from the door, she was sitting on the edge of the bed.
“How’d it go?” he asked.
“We got him,” she said. “Fourteen years old,” she said. “I almost killed him,” she said.
Their eyes met.
“Would you mind very much making love to me?” she said.
Ice, 1983
The two women were sizing each other up.
Annie Rawles had been told that Eileen Burke was the best decoy in Special Forces. Eileen had been told that Annie Rawles was a hard-nosed Rape Squad cop who’d once worked out of Robbery and had shot down two hoods trying to rip off a midtown bank. Eileen was looking at a woman with eyes the color of loam behind glasses that gave her a scholarly look, wedge-cut hair the color of midnight, firm cupcake breasts, and a slender boy’s body. They were both about the same age, Eileen guessed, give or take a year or so. Eileen kept wondering how somebody who looked so much like a bookkeeper could have pulled her service revolver and blown away two desperate punks facing a max of twenty years hard time.
“What do you think?” Annie asked.
“You say this isn’t the only repeat?” Eileen said.
They were still sizing each other up. Eileen figured this wasn’t a matter of choice. If Annie Rawles had asked for her, and if her lieutenant had assigned Eileen to the job, then that was it, they both outranked her. Still, she liked to know whom she’d be working with. Annie was wondering if Eileen was really as good at the job as they’d said she was. She looked a little flashy for a decoy. Spot her strutting along in high heels with those tits bouncing, a rapist would make her in a minute and run for the hills. This was a very special rapist they were dealing with here; Annie didn’t want an amateur screwing it up.
“We’ve got three women say they were raped more than once by this same guy. Fits the description in each case,” Annie said. “There may be more, we haven’t run an m.o. cross-check.”
“When will you be doing that?” Eileen asked; she liked to know whom she was working with, how efficient they were. It wouldn’t be Annie Rawles’s ass out there on the street, it would be her own.