“I got some good stuff on Evans,” Fields said. “I mean—that was some mess.”
“I just been thinkin’ about it. Doesn’t make much sense, does it? Whoever did that must have hated the hell out of the guy. And right in broad daylight, right in the middle of the park. Strange as hell, weird as hell, you ask me.”
“Look close, boss. The doll and the old guy?”
“That’s them. Get moving.”
Fields opened the door of the car and walked forward to the base of the statue of Teddy Roosevelt that stood before the museum entrance. In this position he would be concealed from Neff and Wilson until they came down the steps and were beside him. They were moving quickly. Another man, hunched, tall, his hands folded before him, walked just behind them. There was something familiar in the way they moved. And then Fields realized why: in ’Nam, people under fire had moved like that.
As they came nearer he could hear their footsteps crunching on the snow. He stepped out from his position near the statue and started shooting. The flash popped in the gray afternoon light, and the three figures jumped away startled. Almost before he knew it there was a pistol in the hand of the old guy. The woman was also pointing a pistol at him. This all happened in the same strange slow motion that things had happened in the war, when an attack was going on. The closer you got to action, the more events separated into individual components. Then an end would come, usually violent, the roar of a claymore going up, the black arcing shapes against the sky, the screams and smoke… “Goddamn, they have guns and all I got is a camera.”
Something else moved and the old guy’s pistol roared. “Don’t shoot!” But it roared again, sending out sparks. The tall man shrieked. Now the woman’s pistol roared, kicking back in her hand, and roared again and again. But there, off in the snow, something black was skittering along—two things. That’s what they were firing at, not him. Then the three of them sprinted toward Sam’s car. “Come on,” the woman shouted over her shoulder, “move or you’re dead!”
Rich moved damn fast, diving into the back seat right across the lady cop’s knees. She pulled the door closed and extricated herself. “Step on it!” the old guy snarled at Sam, “step on it, Goddammit!”
But Sam wasn’t stepping on anything. He turned to face the old detective who was beside him in the front seat. “What the fuck,” he said in a high, silly-sounding voice.
The detective leveled his pistol on Sam. “Move this vehicle,” he said, “or I’ll blow your brains out.”
Sam pulled out into traffic very smartly. Neither he nor Rich had a mind to ask any more questions just now.
“We got one,” Becky said.
“Not dead,” Wilson replied.
Becky turned to Rich, who was sitting beside her, acutely aware of her salty, perfumey odor, of the warm pressure of her hip against his. “Thanks,” she said, “you saved our asses just then.”
“What the hell happened?” Sam managed to bleat.
“Nothin’,” Wilson replied. “Nothin’ happened. Your buddy with the camera got us riled.”
“Oh, come on, Wilson, tell them,” Ferguson said.
“Shut up, Doctor!” Becky said. “I’ll handle this. We don’t need press, we’ve talked about that.”
Wilson turned around in his seat, his face a twisted, mottled parody of itself. “If this gets out,” he said, “we might as well just kiss our asses good-bye right now! We haven’t got evidence, baby, and without it we’ll come across as a couple of kooks. Lemme tell you what’d happen. Shithead downtown would get us retired disabled. Mental. You know what’d happen then? Damn right you do! Those fuckers’d be on us so Goddamn fast!” He laughed, more of a snarl. Then he turned and faced forward. Ferguson glared at his back.
“Take us to One fifteen East Eighty-eighth Street,” Becky said, “and get the hell away from the park. Go down Columbus to Fifty-seventh and over that way.”
“And move the Goddamn thing,” Wilson said hoarsely. “You’re a Goddamn reporter, you can drive!” He chuckled now, a dry, spent noise. “What’re you gonna put in your gunfire report?” he asked her.
“Cleaning accident. Fired three shots while cleaning.”
Wilson nodded.
“Goddammit, I’ve got a right to know,” Sam said. “I have a right. I was the only reporter in the whole city smart enough to figure you two had the real story. The other fucks are down at Police Headquarters tryin’ to get a statement from the Commissioner. Just tell me what happened to Evans. Hell, what was going on just now I won’t even ask.”
Becky had leaned forward as he spoke, Wilson was in no shape to keep talking.
“Evans got killed. If we knew anything more we’d have a collar.”
“Oh. Then I suppose that shootumup was nothin’. I gotta tell you, you are two very funny cops. I ain’t never seen a cop pull out a piece and fire it like that just for a dog. Hell, that in itself is news.”
“I bet. Just keep your mouth shut and drive, please.”
“Is that any way to talk to a citizen?”
“You aren’t a citizen, you’re a reporter. There’s a difference.”
“What?”
Becky didn’t answer. Through the whole exchange Ferguson had sat motionless, leaning toward Becky Neff in the middle of the back seat, leaning away from the window. Sam noticed that Wilson was also sitting well away from the window, almost in the middle of the front seat. You could almost say that they were afraid something was going to come at them through the windows… except the windows were closed.
Chapter 10
« ^ »
This daylight was a curse. The leader of the pack, the one the others called Old Father, waited behind the fence that separated the front staircase of the museum from the surrounding lawn. He had stationed himself here because he knew that the two were most likely to exit the museum by this door. It was going to be dangerous, difficult work, sad work. It was the luck of his race to prey on humanity, but at times like this, when he was forced to kill the young and strong, he wondered very much about his place in the world. His children thought of humanity merely in terms of food, but long years had taught him that man was also a thinking being, that he too enjoyed the beauties of the world. Man also had language, past, and hope. But knowing this did not change the need—call it compulsion—to kill and eat the prey. Every single human being he saw he evaluated at once out of habit. He enjoyed the way the flesh popped between his jaws and the hot blood poured down his throat. Living in human cities he gloried in the heady poetry of the scents. The pack was wealthy, for many humans lived in its territory. He loved his wealth, the wealth he had bought so dearly when the pack had migrated to this city. In his own youth their leader had preferred the isolation of rural life to the harder job of maintaining a city territory. Other packs would never try to take the sparse territory of that old coward. Its inhabitants starved in winter and skulked through summer, always wary, always risking discovery.