"Then why were you asking me all those questions yesterday? You thought you were playing it real cool, didn't you, cop? Sounding me out about the meet. I was sounding you at the same time. It ain't easy, you know, not when you don't know what faces are gonna be at a meet. It ain't easy at all. I let you think I was stepping right into your pitches, but I saw your curves coming a mile off. That patrolman clinched it for me. When he dug that piece out of your pants, I knew for sure you were a bull. Up to then, I could only smell it on you."
"I'm still not after you," Carella said patiently. They were standing on loose rock in the shadow of the big boulder. Carella weighed the possibility of lunging at the boy suddenly, throwing him off balance on the loose rock, getting the gun away from him. The possibility seemed extremely remote.
"No, huh? Look, cop, don't snow me. I've been snowed by the best. You think you're going to tie me in to something big, don't you? You think you're gonna get me in your cozy little precinct house and beat the crap out of me until I'll confess to having raped my own mother. Well, you're wrong, cop."
"Goddammit, what do I want with a two-bit junkie?" Carella said.
"Me? A junkie? Come off it, will you? This time I'm not taking the pitches, cop. Don't try to sell me a new line of spitballs."
"What's with you, anyway?" Carella asked. "I've seen junkies panic before, but you're the uneasiest. Are you so scared of taking a fall? Damnit, I was only going to ask some questions about the guy you met. Can't you get that through your head? I don't want you. I want him."
"I thought you weren't interested in two-bit junkies," the boy said.
"I'm not."
"Then why bother with him? He's eighteen years old, and he's been hooked since he was fourteen. He goes to bed with H. You're inconsistent, cop."
"He's a pusher, isn't he?" Carella asked, puzzled.
"Him?" The boy began laughing. "Cop, you're a riot."
"What's…"
"All right, listen to me," the boy said. "You were tailing me yesterday, and you were tailing me today. I'm carrying enough junk on me right now to make a pinch pretty much worth your while. I'm also violating the Sullivan Act because I ain't got a license for this piece. You've got me on resisting an officer, and there's probably some kind of law against taking a cop's gun from him, too. You got me, cop. You can throw the book at me. And if I cut out now, you'll grab me tomorrow, and then it's your word against mine."
"Listen, take off. Put up the gun and take off," Carella said. "I'm not looking for a slug, and I'm not looking for trouble with you. I told you once. I want your pal." Carella paused. "I want Gonzo."
"I know," the boy said, his eyes tightening. "I'm Gonzo."
The only warning was the tightening of Gonzo's eyes. Carella saw them squinch up, and he tried to move sideways, but the gun was already speaking. He did not see it buck in the boy's fist. He felt searing pain lash at his chest, and he heard the shocking declaration of three explosions and then he was falling, and he felt very warm, and he also felt very ridiculous because his legs simply would not hold him up, how silly, how very silly, and his chest was on fire, and the sky was tilting to meet the earth, and then his face struck the ground. He did not put out his arms to stop his fall because his arms were somehow powerless. His face struck the loose stones, and his body crumpled behind it, and he shuddered and felt a warm stickiness beneath him, and only then did he try to move and then he realized he was lying in a spreading pool of his own blood. He wanted to laugh and he wanted to cry at the same time. He opened his mouth, but no sound came from it. And then the waves of blackness came at him, and he fought to keep them away, unaware that Gonzo was running off through the trees, aware only of the engulfing blackness, and suddenly sure that he was about to die.
It is to the credit of the 87th that it worked faster than either of the two precincts that reigned over Grover Park. Carella was not found by a patrolman until almost a half hour later, at which time the blood around him resembled a small swimming pool.
But another act of violence had been done in the 87th at about the same time Carella was being shot outside his precinct, and the results of that violence were discovered not ten minutes later.
The patrolman who called it in said, "She's an old woman. Her neighbors tell me her name is Dolores Faured."
"What's the story?" the desk sergeant asked.
The patrolman said, "Her neck is broken. She either fell or was pushed down an airshaft from the second floor."
Chapter Fourteen
In the heart of the city, the shoppers went about their business. The store fronts glowed like hot pot-belly stoves, inviting the cold citizens to come in and toast awhile, come in and browse awhile, come in and buy a little. The swank shops lining plush Hall Avenue were decked not in holly but in an austerely shrieking display of Christmas white and red and green electrical wizardry. The front of one department store was covered with a two-story-high display of blue angels, and the outdoor gardens across the street picked up the theme, multiplied it by a hundred, splashed the concrete with ethereal winged messengers of the Lord, escorting the passers-by to the giant Christmas tree near the skating rink. The tree climbed to the sky, ablaze with red and blue and yellow globes as big as a man's head, competing with the stiff formality of the giant office buildings around it.
The other shops dripped with incandescence, molten Christmas trees fashioned of light, giant white wreaths, windows aglow with the pristine brilliance of a new snowfall. The shoppers hurried in the streets, their arms loaded with packages. The office parties were in full swing behind the stiff formal fronts of the buildings. File clerks kissed file clerks behind banks of file cabinets. Bosses lifted the skirts of secretaries, and promotions were promised, and raises were bandied about like memo slips, and boys from the shipping department tilted glasses with executives from wood-paneled offices. There were lipstick stains, and Scotch stains, and hurried phone calls to waiting wives, and hurried phone calls to husbands who were enjoying their own Christmas parties behind the equally stiff fronts of other buildings. There was happiness of a sort because this was late Friday afternoon, December 22nd, and this was the culmination of a long year's waiting. And the accountant who'd had his discreet marital eye on the pretty, young, blond receptionist could now greet her with more than a polite "Good morning." Sharing a highball by the water cooler, his arm could encircle her waist in Christmas friendliness. Her head could rest upon his shoulder in yuletide camaraderie. He could take her lips beneath the mistletoe, and he could do all this without the slightest feeling of guilt because the Christmas Party was an established tradition of the American culture. Husbands went to Christmas parties, and wives were never invited. Wives did not expect to be invited. For one day a year, the marital contract was temporarily revoked. Christmas parties were joked about later, the way a person will joke about a bloody dagger on his living-room coffee table, unwilling to acknowledge how it got there.
And in the streets, the shoppers walked. Time was short, and time was running out. The advertising executives who had goaded the public since before Thanksgiving were now busy getting drunk in their offices. But the public, caught in the commercial machinations of a holiday that had somehow grown out of all proportion to the simple birth in Bethlehem it represented, hurried and scurried and wondered and worried. Had Josephine's gift been expensive enough? Were all the Christmas cards mailed? What about the tree, shouldn't the tree have been bought by now?
Beneath it all, despite the gaudy plot of the advertising master minds, despite the frantic commercial rat race it had become, there was something else. There was, for some of the people, a feeling they could not have described if they'd wanted to. This was Christmas. This was the holiday season. Some of the people saw through the sham and the electrical glitter and the skinny Santa Clauses with straggly beards lining Hall Avenue. Some of the people felt something other than what the advertising men wanted them to feel. Some of the people felt good, and kind, and happy to be alive. Christmas did that to some people.