Becky pulled the Pontiac up behind the scooters and the three of them jumped out. “I’m a doctor,” Evans shouted pointlessly. There wasn’t a person in the NYPD who didn’t know that the Medical Examiner was a doctor. Evans reached the wounded man, followed closely by Becky. He was a middle-aged cop, one of the guys who had been out beating the bushes for evidence, one of the searchers. “Fuckin’ dog,” he said almost laughing, “fuckin’ dog bit a hole in my side.” The voice was anguished and confused. “Fuckin’ dog!”
“Holy shit,” Evans said.
“Is it bad, Doc?” the man said through gathering tears.
Evans looked away. “I’m not movin’ you till the stretcher gets here, buddy. You aren’t losing any blood out of it, however bad it is.”
“Oh, fuck, it hurts!” he shouted. Then his eyes rolled and his head slumped to his chest.
“Get some pressure on it, he’s passed out,” Evans said. Two of the man’s friends applied a pressure bandage to the gash in his overcoat. “Where’s that friggin’ meatwagon!” Evans rasped. “This man’s not gonna make it if they don’t hurry.”
Just then it pulled up and the medics piled out with their equipment. They cut the coat away and for the first time the wound was visible.
It was devastating. You could see the blue-black bulge of the man’s intestine pulsing in the blood. Becky started to sob, stifling it as it came. They had done this! Just now, just minutes ago. They were right around here! She put a trembling hand on the M. E.’s shoulder.
“Leave me alone.” He was examining the wound. “Move him out,” he murmured to the orderlies. He looked up at Becky. “He ain’t gonna live,” he said simply.
They got the man on the stretcher and took him to the ambulance, heading for the emergency room as fast as they could go. There was an M.D. on the wagon so Evans returned to Becky’s car.
The other cops were still standing in a little clump, staring at the blood-smeared thrash marks in the snow. For a moment nobody spoke. What could you say? A man had just had his intestines laid open— and he claimed it had been done by a dog. The Precinct Captain came up puffing hard. For some reason he hadn’t made it into a car. “What the fuck— what the fuck happened?”
“Baker got hit.”
“What by? Hit and run?”
“Something took about nine inches of hide off his gut. Laid him open.”
“What the fuck—”
“You said that, sir. He says it was a dog.” Becky felt Wilson’s hand grasp her shoulder. A sharp pang of fear ran through her. “Listen, kid,” he said in an unnaturally calm tone, “stroll real easy-like over to those two scooters.” He breathed it into her ear. “You can ride a scooter?”
“I suppose.”
“Good, because you gotta. Just go real easy.”
“What about our car?”
“Stay the hell away from our car! And when you get on that scooter, move.”
She didn’t ask questions even though she didn’t quite understand why he wanted to do this. You get to trust a good partner, and Becky trusted Wilson more than enough to just do what he said without asking why. He’d do the same for her. Hell, he had often enough.
As she walked she noticed that he was meandering in the same direction, getting closer and closer to the scooters without making it particularly obvious. “Now, Becky!”
They leaped, the scooters coughed to life, they skidded onto the snowy pavement, Becky swayed, righted herself and headed straight down the Mall, which stretched to Park East Drive and the safety of the streets. She heard a shout behind, an incredulous shout from one of the scooter cops who saw the two detectives suddenly hijack his transportation. Then something else was there, a gray shape moving like the wind, a furious pulsing mass of hair and muscle. And she knew what had happened. “Oh God God God,” she said softly as she rode. She turned the gas all the way up and the scooter darted through the snow, bouncing and shaking, threatening from instant to instant to go into a skid. Thirty. Forty. Fifty. Was the thing dropping back? She risked a glance. God, it was right there. Its teeth were bared, and its face, something unbelievable, twisted with hate and fury and effort—animal, man, something. She choked out a sob and just held on. The thing’s breathing was clearly audible for a moment, then it fell back, fell back making little sharp noises, sounds of pure anger! It was gone and the scooters bounded off the Mall, crashed through ripping naked shrubs, shot into the roadway and tore down toward the park entrance at Fifth Avenue. Ahead the Plaza Hotel and the General Motors Building. General Sherman with his permanent toupee of pigeon droppings. Horse-drawn carriages waiting in rows, the breath of the horses steaming. Then stopping, bringing the scooters to a halt at the bustling entrance to the hotel. “We’re at the Plaza,” Wilson was growling into the scooter’s radio, “come get us.”
A squad car appeared. “What’s the problem, Lieutenant?” the driver said. “You just got reported for stealing two scooters.”
“Fuck that. We were under orders. We thought we saw a suspect.”
“Yeah. So get in. We’ll drive you up to the Twentieth.”
They left the scooters for the men from the park precinct who were approaching in another car. Wilson and Neff were silent as they rode toward the precinct, Wilson because he had nothing to say, Becky because she couldn’t have talked if she had wanted to. It felt funny to her to be alive right now, like she had just broken through a wall into a time she was never intended to see. “I was supposed to die back there,” she thought. She looked at her partner. He had figured it out just in time—a trap. God, what a clever trap! And they had slipped out just as it had been sprung.
“You know what happened,” Wilson asked.
“Yeah.”
He nodded, silent for a few minutes. The squad car wheeled up Central Park West. Wilson touched the door lock; the windows were closed. “They’re very smart,” he said.
“We knew that”
“But that was a very neat trap. Wounding that guy… knowing that we would respond… setting an ambush. All very smart.”
“How did you figure it out? I’ve gotta confess I was completely taken in.”
“You oughta start thinking defensively. They wounded that guy, didn’t kill him. That’s what tipped me off. Why wound, when killing is easier? It had to be the same reason a hunter wounds. To lure. When I figured that out, I decided we ought to go for the scooters. Frankly I’m surprised we made it.”
The squad car pulled up to the precinct house. After a long look up and down the street the two detectives got out and hurried up the steps. The desk sergeant looked up. “Captain’s waiting for you,” he said.
“Must be antsy as hell,” Wilson muttered as they walked into the Captain’s office.
He was a trim, neatly turned out man with steel-gray hair and a deeply wrinkled face. But his movements, his posture, belonged to a younger man. He had just taken off his overcoat and sat down at his desk. Now he looked up, raising his eyebrows. “I’m Captain Walker,” he said. “What the hell’s going on?”
“We saw a suspect—”
“Can that bullshit. Everybody saw those dogs come out from under your car and chase you halfway to Grand Army Plaza. What the hell was that all about?”
“Dogs?” Wilson was no actor. The fact that he was hiding something was perfectly clear to Becky. But maybe she underestimated him.
“Yes, dogs. I saw them. We all did. And Baker said it was dogs that laid him open.”
Wilson shook his head. “Beats the hell out of me.”
“Look, I don’t know quite what’s going on here— I mean you two are some kind of special team, that’s OK by me—but I got a guy hurt bad down at Roosevelt and he says a dog did it. I saw you two light out like you were runnin’ from death itself. And you were chased by two dogs. Now I’d like to know what the fuck’s goin’ on.” His phone rang. A few muttered words, a curse, then he hung up. “And so would the New York Post. They got a photographer and a reporter waiting out front to see me right now. What do I tell them?”