‘Yes,’ Rosie said. Her legs were trembling. Bill was standing at the gate, looking at her, clearly concerned. She forced a smile for him and raised a single finger — one more minute.
‘You bet you are,’ Hale said. He glanced around the squadroom, and Rosie followed his eyes. At one desk, a cop was writing up a weeping teenager in a high-school letter-jacket. At another, this one by the chickenwired floor-to-ceiling windows, a uniformed cop and a detective with his jacket off so you could see the .38 Police Special clipped to his belt were examining a stack of photos, their heads close together. At a row of VDT screens all the way across the room, Gustafson was discussing his reports with a young bluesuit who looked no older than sixteen to Rosie.
‘You know a lot about cops,’ Hale said, ‘but most of what you know is wrong.’
She didn’t know how to answer that, but it was okay; he didn’t seem to require an answer.
‘You want to know what my biggest motivation for busting him is, Ms McClendon?
Numero uno on the old hit parade?’
She nodded.
‘I’m going to bust him because he’s a cop. A hero cop, for God’s sake. But the next time his puss is on the front page of the old hometown paper, he’s either going be the late Norman Daniels or he’s going to be in legirons and an orange tracksuit.’
‘Thank you for saying that,’ Rosie said. ‘It means a lot.’
He led her over to Bill, who opened the gate and put his arms around her. She hugged him tight, her eyes shut.
Hale asked, ‘Ms McClendon?’
She opened her eyes, saw Gert come back into the room, and waved. Then she looked at Hale shyly but not fearfully. ‘You can call me Rosie, if you want.’
He smiled briefly at that. ‘Would you like to hear something that’ll maybe make you feel a little better about your first less-than-enthusiastic reaction to this place?’
‘I . . . I guess so.’
‘Let me guess,’ Bill said. ‘You’re having problems with the cops back in Rosie’s hometown.’
Hale smiled sourly. ‘Indeed we are. They’re being shy about faxing us what they know about Daniels’s blood-medicals, even his prints. We’re already dealing with police lawyers.
Cop-shysters!’
‘They’re protecting him,’ Rosie said. ‘I knew they would.’
‘So far, yes. It’s an instinct, like the one that tells you to drop everything and go after the killer when a cop gets gunned down. They’ll stop trying to throw sand in the gears when they finally get it through their heads that this is real.’
‘Do you really believe that?’ Gert asked.
He thought this over, then nodded. ‘Yes. I do.’
‘What about police protection for Rosie until this is over?’ Bill asked.
Hale nodded again. ‘There’s already a black-and-white outside your place on Trenton Street, Rosie.’
She looked from Gert to Bill to Hale, dismayed and frightened all over again. The situation kept sandbagging her. She’d start to feel she was getting a handle on it, and then it would whop her flat all over again, from some new direction.
‘Why? Why? He doesn’t know where I live, he can’t know where I live! That’s why he
came to the picnic, because he thought I’d be there. Cynthia didn’t tell him, did she?’
‘She says not.’ Hale accented the second word, but so lightly Rosie didn’t catch it. Gert and Bill did, and they exchanged a look.
‘Well, there! And Gert didn’t tell him, either! Did you, Gert?’
‘No, ma’am,’ Gert said.
‘Well, I like to play safe — leave it at that. I’ve got the guys in front of your building, and backup cars — at least two — in the neighborhood. I don’t want to scare you all over again, but a nut who knows police procedure is a special nut. Best not to take chances.’
‘If you think so,’ Rosie said in a small voice.
‘Ms Kinshaw, I’ll send someone around to take you wherever you want to go — ‘
‘Ettinger’s,’ Gert said, and stroked her robe. ‘I’m going to make a fashion statement at the concert.’
Hale grinned, then put his hand out to Bill. ‘Mr Steiner, good to meet you.’
Bill shook it. ‘Same here. Thanks for everything.’
‘It’s my job.’ He glanced from Gert to Rosie. ‘Good night, girls.’ He looked back at Gert, fast, and his face broke into a grin that knocked fifteen years off his age in an instant.
‘Gotcha,’ he said, and laughed. After a moment’s thought, Gert laughed with him.
8
On the steps outside, Bill and Gert and Rosie huddled together a little. The air was damp, and fog was drifting in off the lake. It was still thin, really no more than a nimbus around the streetlights and low-lying smoke over the wet pavement, but Rose guessed that in another hour it would be almost thick enough to cut.
‘Want to come back to D and S tonight, Rosie?’ Gert asked. ‘They’ll be coming in from the concert in another couple of hours; we could have the popcorn all made.’
Rosie, who most definitely did not want to go back to D & S, turned to Bill. ‘If I go home, will you stay with me?’
‘Sure,’ he said promptly, and took her hand. ‘It’d be a pleasure. And don’t worry about the accommodations — I never saw a couch yet that I couldn’t sleep on.’
‘You haven’t seen mine,’ she said, knowing that her sofa wasn’t going to be a problem, because Bill wasn’t going to be sleeping there. Her bed was a single, which meant they’d be cramped, but she thought they would still manage quite nicely. Close quarters might even add something.
‘Thanks again, Gert,’ she said.
‘No problem.’ Gert gave her a brief, hard hug, then leaned forward and put a healthy smack on Bill’s cheek. A police car came around the corner and stopped, idling. ‘Take care of her, guy.’
‘I will.’
Gert went to her ride, then stopped to point at Bill’s Harley, heeled over on its kickstand in one of the parking spaces stencilled POLICE BUSINESS ONLY. ‘And don’t dump that thing in the goddam fog.’
‘I’ll take it easy, Ma, I promise.’
She drew back one big fist, mock-scowling, and Bill stuck out his chin with half-closed eyes and a longsuffering expression that made Rosie laugh hard. She had never expected to be laughing on the steps of a police station, but a lot of things she’d never expected had happened this year. A lot.
9
In spite of all that had happened, Rosie enjoyed the ride back to Trenton Street almost as much as the one out to the country that morning. She clung to Bill as they cut across the city on the surface streets, the big Harley-Davidson slicing smoothly through the thickening fog.
The last three blocks were like riding through a dream lined with cotton. The Harley’s headlight was a brilliant, cloudy cylinder, boring into the air like the beam of a flashlight cutting across a smoky room. When Bill finally turned onto Trenton Street, the buildings were little more than ghosts and Bryant Park was a vast white blank.
The black-and-white Hale had promised was parked in front of 897. The words To Serve and Protect were written on the side. The space in front of the car was empty. Bill swung his motorcycle into it, kicked the gearshift up into neutral with his foot, and killed the engine.
‘You’re shivering,’ he said as he helped her off.
She nodded and found she had to make a conscious effort to keep her teeth from chattering when she spoke. ‘It’s more the damp than the cold.’ And yet, even then, she supposed she knew it was really neither; knew on some deep level that things were not as they should be.
‘Well, let’s get you into something dry and warm.’ He stowed their helmets, locked the Harley’s ignition, and dropped the key into his pocket.
‘Sounds like the idea of the century to me.’
He took her hand and walked her down the sidewalk to the apartment building steps. As they passed the radio-car, Bill raised his hand to the cop behind the wheel. The cop lifted his own hand out the window in a lazy return salute, and the streetlight gleamed on the ring he wore. His partner appeared to be sleeping.
Rosie opened her purse, got out the key she would need to open the front door at this advanced hour, and turned it in the lock. She had only the faintest idea of what she was doing; her good feelings were gone and her earlier terror had crashed back in on her like some huge dead iron object falling through floor after floor of an old building, an object destined to drop all the way to the basement. Her stomach was suddenly freezing, her head was throbbing, and she didn’t know why.