“Silver,” he corrected.
“Sounds like the Lone Ranger’s horse,” she said.
He flared for a moment. And then burst out laughing. She watched him. Even white teeth, strong jaw, he really was quite attractive.
“Make it Sil then,” he said, still laughing. “That’s what all my friends call me.”
“Sil,” she said, “I need some real cash. I want to keep this apartment I’m in, but the lease runs out the end of April and I know they plan to raise the rent, and the truth is I’m still doing the kind of work I was doing when my husband got killed, but I don’t much…”
“What kind of work do you do?” he asked.
She looked him dead in the eye.
“I’m a dancer,” she said.
But didn’t tell him she danced naked for men who touched her breasts and her legs, and even kissed her nipples….
“But I’m not enjoying it…”
Which was the truth.
“…so I’d like to start my own business, open a beauty salon in Diamondback, there’s always room for another beauty salon.”
“I would guess you know a great deal about beauty,” he said, intending a compliment and hoping she took it as such, relieved when she said, “Why, thank you, Sil,” sounding enormously surprised.
“A great deal,” he repeated, like a politician emphasizing key words in his speech.
“Thank you,” she said, “but I need cash if I’m going to go out on my own, do you understand what I mean?”
She did not say that some of her girlfriends were pulling down five, six hundred dollars a day, five days a week, twenty-five hundred to three thousand a week, something like a hundred and fifty thousand a year, she did not tell him that. Nor did she tell him how tempted she was lately, or how trapped she was beginning to feel. She did not want to become a whore. She did not.
Outside the windows, night had already claimed the city.
“How much are you looking for?” he asked.
“Twenty thousand,” she said.
Which was outrageous.
“You’ve got it,” he said.
THE TWO POLICE OFFICERS in Adam One were taking another quick run at the sector before they parked awhile to fool around a little. Necking on the job, not to mention reciprocal masturbation, was specifically forbidden by police-department regulations, but boys will be boys and girls will be girls, and the police officers in Adam One were respectively named Adam O’Hare, no relation to the car, and Josie Ruggiero, and they had been playing around on the job and running around on their respective spouses for the past month and a half now. Their burgeoning affair had started with a little hand-holding on the front seat, the walkie-talkie squawking between them, and had rapidly progressed to a little kissy-facey and then a little touchy-feely, and it would be merely a matter of time now before they found themselves a deserted stretch of turf on the graveyard shift and went “all the way,” as such mischief was known in the trade.
It was now a quarter past five on this rainy morning. It would be dark until sixA .M., and they were not due back at the Eight-Seven till a quarter of eight, at which time they would turn in the car and be relieved by the next shift. Relief of quite another sort was what they had in mind at the moment, however. As soon as they completed this routine pass at the sector, they would drive over to the posted Quiet Zone surrounding St. Sebastian’s Hospital. Considering what their present separate but identical states of mind were urgently demanding, the dark, tree-lined streets there would perfectly serve their needs. Rarely if ever, and certainly not at this hour of the morning, was the area frequented by through traffic; the posted speed limit was ten miles per hour and there were traffic lights on every corner, blinking to the deserted streets. Park in the empty visitors’ parking lot, douse the headlights, anyone saw a patrol car sitting there in the rain, they’d think it was a radar speed trap instead of two horny cops unzipping each other’s flies.
O’Hare wished they’d let Josie wear a skirt to work, make life so much simpler. Josie wished her husband never found out what Adam and she had been doing every night on the job since the middle of February. Her husband was a sergeant who worked out of Narcotics and he was six feet two inches tall and he weighed two hundred and ten pounds and he had been known to bust a few heads in his lifetime. Adam, on the other hand, was five feet eight inches tall, and he weighed a hundred and fifty-four pounds, although when it came to size he was adequately compensated elsewhere.
“Wanna park awhile?” he asked now.
“Mmm, yeah,” she said.
Adam nodded. He was already outrageously erect inside his blue uniform trousers, and he couldn’t wait to have her hands on him again. Adam’s wife, Susan, was seven months pregnant and there wasn’t much activity at home for him these days. Susan—like every other cop’s wife in this city—didn’t like the idea of him being partnered with a woman, no less a darkhaired beauty like Josie Ruggiero,Italian in the bargain, whom she’d met at the Policemen’s Benevolent Association Ball this past Christmas, before anything had started between her husband and his new partner. His old partner had been killed on the job. Susan told Adam that if he ever so much as looked cockeyed at Josie, his new partner would be killed also, though not necessarily on the job. Adam, too. There would be a double homicide there in the old Eight-Seven, and no judge in his right mind would ever blame Susan.
Adam rationalized his actions by telling himself a stiff cock had no conscience.
Josie rationalized hers by telling herself she was gloriously in love.
Either way, they were consenting adults who knew exactly what they were doing and who looked forward to ever-escalating ecstasy night after night after night.
What they weren’t looking forward to on this early morning of March twenty-sixth, the very last thing they wanted this morning as they drove into the Quiet Zone, each one separately entertaining high hopes and great expectations of secret steamy congress in the snugness of their blue-and-white cocoon, the surprise they definitely had not anticipated and did not now expect to find in the middle of the parking lot was a little old man sitting in a wheelchair in the rain.
THE INTERN in the emergency room at St. Sebastian’s Hospital was telling Meyer Meyer that someone had dumped an old man in the hospital’s parking lot sometime early this morning, and he was wondering now if the police had any missing-persons reports that might describe the man, his name was Charlie. That was all they were able to get from him, Charlie. This was now a little after eight o’clock in the morning. The day shift had relieved some twenty minutes ago, and Meyer was now having his breakfast—a cup of coffee and a toasted English muffin—at his desk.
“Charlie what?” he asked.
“I just told you,” the intern said. “Charlie is all we got from him.”
“That isn’t much to go on,” Meyer said, “just Charlie.”
“I can give you a description,” the intern said. “He’s got to be at least seventy-five years old….”
“Is that a guess, or did he tell you?”
“No. All he knows is his first name.”
“Then you’re just guessing he’s seventy-five.”
“Educated guess.”
“Seventy-five, right. Color of his eyes?”
“Blue.”
“Hair?”
“Fringe of white around the ears. Otherwise, he’s bald.”
Like me, Meyer thought.
“I’ll check Missing Persons,” he said, “see if they have anything.”
THERE WERE CURRENTLY two hospitals within the confines of the 87th Precinct’s geographical boundaries, both of them lousy. Morehouse General was considered one of the worst hospitals in the city, but St. Sab’s—as it was familiarly known—ran a close second. Cops knew where all the good hospitals were; whenever a cop got shot, a radio car raced him to the nearest good hospital, siren screaming. The Old Chancery in the Eight-Six was another wonderful hospital to be avoided at all costs. Buenavista was a good one, and there were several others to which you could quickly transport a wounded cop if you were hitting the hammer and riding hell-bent for leather.