He was too tired to sustain her and thus restrain her. Unable to keep her with him, he watched her go into the shadows. She was of such frail substance, she was killed by the first patch of darkness she encountered.
To be abandoned by two women in one day.
He stared at his shoes for a moment as he walked on, in and out of the light. Lost for a while in thoughts of Mallory, he meandered south and east for too many blocks into territory he was unsure of, unsafe in. When, at last, his eyes were looking outward again and he realized this, he found he didn’t care. And he was only dimly aware that the time was passing from Christmas Eve into Christmas morning.
He shuffled through the pile of newspapers close to the brick of a building wall, and then he went sprawling. The cement came up to meet his face with a hard hello. Something small and alive was squirming out from under his splayed legs.
She was standing in front of him now, and wearing a little red coat.
Oh, dear God, he had tripped over the body of a child. She must have been sleeping under the newspapers. He was staring into the smudged face of a little girl with matted hair and the biggest eyes he’d ever seen. She might be six or seven. The child was extending a cup to him. It was torn and jingled with change. It took him a moment to grasp the idea that the little girl was begging for money, that she was thin and shivering.
‘Where’s your mother? Why are you – ’
Now the child was backing away from him. Bright eyes, quick with intelligence, had sized him up for a non-donating type, and maybe an authority type, and possibly even a cop, or worse, a social worker. As quickly as he realized all of this was going on behind her eyes, he was watching the back of her as she slipped away in the dark.
He found his feet and gathered himself up to a stand and ran after her, pounding down the sidewalk, in and out of the black and bright zones of street lamps, intact and broken. In one of these dark patches, she had disappeared. He stopped to listen for her soft footfalls.
Silence.
Now a jingle.
He looked up to see her straddling the top of a chainlink fence, and he held his breath as she monkeyed down the links with amazing speed. He came up to the fence in time to see the small red coat flapping around a corner in the distance.
And now the child was altogether gone, and with her, a ghost of Mallory’s Christmas past.
Oh, fool.
His head bowed into the cold metal of the fence. His eyes closed tightly. His heart was breaking.
Fool.
Her eyes were not a Christmas green, nor the green of living things, but cold and, just now, eerie. The lights from the dashboard made them glitter in the shadows. They seemed lit from within, as though Mother Nature had thought to do something different with the makings of Mallory – to break up the monotony of stereotypes and throw an occasional scare into Riker.
‘You know, Mallory, if I thought you had a heart, I’d think you were worried about me offering myself for the holidays.’
Yeah, right, said the dip of her mouth on one side and no words necessary.
He closed the passenger door of her small tan car. ‘I won’t be a minute – just a few things to pick up for breakfast.’ He turned and walked toward the dim glow behind the plate-glass window of the bar. He peered in and waved one hand. Peggy leaned her broom against the bar and waved back to him. He ambled toward the front door.
The beer he’d already put away had numbed him. He was only dimly aware of the teenage boy thirty yards to his right. Now he looked casually toward the boy. The kid was looking in all directions, probably waiting for someone. Riker looked back to Mallory, who was lost in the darkness of the car. The bartender opened the door, and he walked in.
‘Who’s your friend, Riker?’ asked Peggy, looking over his shoulder.
Riker slowly turned his head to see the teenager behind him. Peggy was not so slow, not drunk at all, and she was backing up to the bar where she kept her shotgun. Too late for that now.
He was watching the boy reaching into his jacket, hand closing on the gun in his belt. Riker wondered if it would be the fast reflexes of youth that would kill him, or could he put it down to his own slowed reaction time – too much booze? Either way, the young thief would have him. All this was calculated in the second it took for the boy’s hand to pass into his jacket, just another second out of sixty.
The boy never got the chance to pull the gun. Suddenly, a rush of manic energy with bright curls was pushing the boy through the open doorway, slamming him into the near table so hard Mallory nearly cut him in half at the gut level. She reached into the jacket and pulled out a.22 revolver. Now she was cuffing him and hustling him out of the door. Momentum, stunned wonder and pain had made the boy docile.
Riker never said a word to Peggy. He lifted his hands to catch the brown bag with his breakfast six-pack on the fly as he followed Mallory and her new pet out to the sidewalk.
Hey, what’s the deal here?
Mallory was pressing down on the boy’s head to ease him into the front seat of the car on the passenger side. Any kid who watched too much television would know the perp rode in the back of the car. What was she up to? She opened the back door of the car for Riker and said, ‘Sorry about the inconvenience, sir. I’ll get rid of him as soon as I can.’
Since when did Mallory ever call anybody sir! She hadn’t called him that even when he’d held the rank of captain. But that was one wife and how many bottles ago. He nodded and settled into the back seat to play out her game.
When Mallory was in the driver’s seat, she leaned over to the boy and said in a low voice, ‘It’s too bad you had to witness the deputy police commissioner drunk in an after-hours bar. I guess I’ll have to kill you. You understand, don’t you? It’s politics and nothing personal.’
As Mallory drove the streets, Riker watched the boy’s face. The kid was sweating, and his body was weaving between This is crap and true believing.
‘It’s a damn shame you had to pull this stunt on a night when a top cop is drunk in the back of my car. Yeah, I guess I’ll have to kill you.’
It was ludicrous, but now Riker realized that this boy was so young, it had not been so many years ago that he had bought into Santa Glaus and the Tooth Fairy. And then the kid had additional proof in Mallory’s eyes, the eyes of an assassin.
Yeah, the kid was buying it.
Riker felt a worry coming on in the pit of his stomach where he kept his ulcer. She hadn’t waited for the kid to pull the gun, to commit the crime. She hadn’t read the suspect his rights. She’d broken every rule, and now she was making up new ones to break.
Well, he could relax a little. She wouldn’t actually kill the kid, because Markowitz wouldn’t have liked that. In the absence of a normal sense of right and wrong, good and evil, Mallory was much guided by what would have pissed off Markowitz and what wouldn’t.
Now they were in the Wall Street area, deserted on Christmas Eve. She pulled into a blind street closed off by construction signs. Her eyes roved over the bins of debris left on the site.
‘No, not here,’ she said. ‘Sorry it’s taking so long, sir. I’ll get rid of him on the next block. Okay?’
‘I won’t tell!’ screamed the kid.
Mallory said nothing as the minutes rolled by slow with the creep of the car, stopping in dark places, shaking her head and driving on.
‘I gotta wonder where that gun came from,’ she said at last, ‘and I gotta wonder what you’ve done with it.’
Riker found it interesting the way her expensive education fell away at warm moments like this one. Her voice had a rough edge that would scare any sane person into backing off with no sudden movements. He could only guess at what was going through the kid’s mind. His own body was pressing into the upholstery of the back seat.