“So why today?”
“Just crazy. I don’t know. My girl got hurt today. I must have gone batshit, blamed myself or something. Maybe I wanted to get hurt, too. Who knows?”
“What, you cracked up the car?”
“No, if you can believe this, some shithead sent me a bomb in the mail and she opened it by mistake. She’s in Bellevue.”
“Well, don’t worry, she’s in good hands.”
“In Bellevue? I thought it was a … you know, where they send the poverty cases.”
“Yeah, but it’s also the best hospital in the city. Funny, right? If the president got shot in New York, they’d send him there. Don’t worry. Look, give me her name and I’ll look her up. I’ll tell her you’re flat on your ass for a week and won’t be chasing any tail.”
Karp did so. When the cab reached Karp’s building, Delgado helped him out. A black man leaning against the doorway sprang forward and opened the outer door for them. Karp thought his face looked familiar. I’ve probably ridden on the elevator with him a hundred times and never said a word, he thought. New York, right? The coldest inhabited place on the globe. On the other hand there were people like Delgado, who would go out of their way to help a stranger.
Delgado guided Karp into his apartment, set him on the bed, took off the newspapers, helped him out of his shoes and trousers, and made a cold pack with ice from the freezer and a towel. Karp thought achingly of Marlene, who had filled his ice trays for the first time. Delgado fed Karp some pills from the medicine cabinet, and Karp sank back on the pillows to wait for the codeine to kick in.
“OK, Chief,” said Delgado, “you’re all set. Hey, you got no food in the fridge. You just move in? You want me to bring some stuff up from the corner?”
“No, that’s fine, Hector. You’re a prince. You ever want to kill somebody, let me know. I work for the DA. I’ll cop you a good plea.”
Delgado laughed. “Hey, all right, I got a list. OK, I got to run, take it easy.”
After the man left Karp felt the first pangs of utter loneliness. He reached out to the bedside table and lifted the phone onto his chest. Who should he call? V.T. was out of town. Hrcany? Guma? Yeah, he’d call Guma, who’d bring a pizza and a bottle of wine, and they’d sit around and bullshit and maybe he’d figure out what he was going to do with the rest of his life.
He started to dial Guma’s number and then stopped. He didn’t want to see Guma. He wanted to see Marlene. He should have let them take him to Bellevue. They could have given him a walking cast, or a wheelchair, and then he could have sat by her room at least and been there when she came around. OK, Guma could drive him to the hospital. He had just started to dial again when he heard the first sounds from the door.
Clicking, bumping sounds. Somebody was trying to get in. It couldn’t be Delgado, or a friend with chicken soup. They would ring the bell. Karp heard the lock snap and the turning of the doorknob. There was nothing in the apartment to absorb the sound, so Karp could hear all the details of the break-in. Of course, he hadn’t followed Delgado to the door, so the dead bolt wasn’t set. The door swung open and Karp heard someone come into the apartment.
And he knew exactly who it was, because he had just remembered why the guy who had opened the door downstairs looked so familiar. Karp had been looking at his Identikit portrait almost every day for three years.
For a panicked moment Karp considered dialing 911. Then he realized that not only would the line be busy but that Elvis would hear him dialing. Karp placed the phone on the bed carefully, and slowly slid off, balancing on his good leg and clenching his teeth against the pain. The codeine was starting to work, but the knee still sent darts of fire up his leg. It was still completely useless as something to walk on.
Karp thought of all the scene-of-the-crime pictures he had seen while at Homicide. Lots of macho hard-boiled laughs about those. He imagined himself in one of them. Not funny. He imagined his own body on an autopsy table. His heart thumped audibly against his chest. A few hours ago he had fancied himself ready to die, but now-with a killer in the next room-he found himself not wanting to die at all. Instead, he wanted to kill.
The first thing to do was to get moving. Elvis was checking out the kitchen, and would be coming through the closed bedroom door in a few seconds. Karp didn’t think it was a good strategy to hide under the bed. In the movies, killers always looked under the bed. Karp looked under the bed anyway. It was still a bad idea. But one of the slats would do for a cane. He jimmied it out and rose wretchedly to his feet.
He heard steps coming toward the bedroom door. An image from his childhood flashed into his mind. He had done something very bad, broke a lamp or something, and he was cowering in the bedroom listening to his mother searching the house for him. He was in for a serious spanking. He remembered what he had done then and he did it again. He hobbled over to the bathroom and locked himself in.
Elvis heard the bathroom door close and the shower go on. He smiled. This was going to go down smooth as shit. Mostly everything had been going right since his phone call from Louis. He had written it all out, under Louis’s coaching, on the piece of brown paper bag that he kept in his wallet and consulted half a dozen times a day. No more forgetting stuff for Pres. He had made contact with the Claremont Press. He had talked all that political bullshit with Barlow and them, and got the names of brothers who were into trashing the system. They had been glad to send a tough kid who was ready for anything and obviously not a cop (they had checked, of course-people remembered him from Attica), to Chingo Ray, who could always use another mule. He’d picked up the bomb. He’d dropped it into a mail cart. He waited outside until he heard it go off. It had all worked out as Louis said it would.
Except for the cop coming to see Vera. That wasn’t supposed to happen. OK, he could ditch that scene all right. Couple of clothes was all he had there. The bitch was getting too nosy anyway. There were plenty of people he could stay with. DeVonne, for example.
Everything was fine-except for the chick getting wasted instead of Karp. Elvis had watched the small, bloodied form loaded into the ambulance at Foley Square, and had stamped his foot in rage; damn, he had marked the damn package “personal,” meaning Karp was supposed to open it himself. He had waited around for a while until he saw Karp, obviously unhurt, rush out of the building and hail a cab.
Elvis had studied the brown paper again, but got no new advice. He definitely did not want to call Louis and tell him the bomb had gone off and Karp was still alive. He only wanted to call Louis and tell him Karp was dead, that was the only way the crazy motherfucker would get off his ass.
So he had looked up Karp’s address in the phone book, taken the subway to the Village, and waited. He had his piece with him for the occasion, a real Smith amp; Wesson.38, nickel-plated, with the four-inch barrel, that he had bought off a guy in a bar for ninety bucks. Big time. No more Saturday Night Specials for old Pres.
With this new toy in hand, Elvis flung open Karp’s bedroom door and whirled into the room, in the predatory crouch he had seen in so many TV shows. You never could tell, maybe the guy wasn’t in the shower yet. Maybe he had a gun, too.
OK, nobody here. Check under the bed. In the closet. OK, all clear. Bathroom door locked. No problem. Elvis pulled out the piece of steel shim he had used to spring the front door lock, popped the latch, threw open the door, and burst into the bathroom.
The bathroom was filled with steam. Elvis was inside a white cloud, lit by the light over the sink. He moved slowly over the steam-slick tile floor toward the sound of the shower. He was sweating heavily. Damn! Motherfucker liked hot showers. He cocked the pistol and pulled back the shower curtain. What the fuck …? He peered into the tub. Visibility was about four inches, but it was enough to see that nobody was there.