Monroe drove his radio car in his almost-regular patrol pattern, still looking for things out of the ordinary. He noted that two new people had taken Ju-Ju’s place. He’d have to learn their street names, maybe have an informant check them out. Maybe the narcs from downtown could start making a few things happen out here. Someone had, however briefly, Monroe admitted, heading west towards the edge of his patrol area. Whoever the hell it was. A street bum. That made him smile in the darkness. The informal name applied to the case seemed so appropriate. The Invisible Man. Amazing that the papers hadn’t picked that one up. A dull night made for such thoughts. He was thankful for it. People had stayed up late to watch the Orioles sock it to the Yankees. He had learned that you could often track street crime by sports teams and their activities. The O’s were in a pennant race and were looking to go all the way on the strength of Frank Robinson’s bat and Brooks Robinson’s glove. Even hoods liked baseball, Monroe thought, perplexed by the incongruity but accepting it for the fact it was. It made for a boring night, and he didn’t mind. It gave him a chance to cruise and observe and learn, and to think. He knew all the regulars on the street now, and was now learning to spot what was different, to eyeball it as a seasoned cop could, to decide what to check out and what to let slide. In learning that he would come to prevent some crimes, not merely respond to them. It was a skill that could not come too quickly, Monroe thought to himself.
The very western border of his area was a north-south street. One side was his, the other that of another officer. He was about to turn onto it when he saw another street bum. Somehow the person looked familiar, though he was not one Monroe had shaken down several weeks earlier. Tired of sitting in his car, and bored with not having had anything more than a single traffic citation tonight, he pulled over.
‘Yo, hold up there, sport.’ The figure kept moving, slowly, unevenly. Maybe a public-drunkenness arrest in the making, more likely a street person whose brain was permanently impaired by long nights of guzzling the cheap stuff. Monroe slid his baton into the ring holder and walked quickly to catch up. It was only a fifty-foot walk, but it was like the poor old bastard was deaf or something, he didn’t even hear the click of his leather heels on the sidewalk. His hand came down on the bum’s shoulder. ‘I said hold up, now.’
Physical contact changed everything. This shoulder was firm and strong – and tense. Monroe simply wasn’t ready for it, too tired, too bored, too comfortable, too sure of what he’d seen, and though his brain immediately shouted the Invisible Man, his body was not ready for action. That wasn’t true of the bum. Almost before his hand came down, he saw the world rotate wildly from low-right to high-left, showing him a sky and then the sidewalk and then the sky again, but this time his view of the stars was interrupted by a pistol.
‘Why couldn’t you have just stayed in your fuckin’ car?’ the man asked angrily.
‘Who -‘
‘Quiet!’ The pistol against his forehead ensured that, almost. It was the surgical gloves that gave him away and forced the officer to speak.
‘Jesus.’ It was a respectful whisper. ‘You’re him.’
‘Yes, I am. Now, what the hell do I do about you?’ Kelly asked.
‘I ain’t gonna beg.’ The man’s name was Monroe, Kelly saw from the name tag. He didn’t seem like the sort for begging.
‘You don’t have to. Roll over – now!’ The policeman did so, with a little help. Kelly pulled the cuffs off his belt and secured them to both wrists. ‘Relax, Officer Monroe.’
‘What do you mean?’ The man kept his voice even, earning his captor’s admiration.
‘I mean I’m not going to kill any cops,’ Kelly stood him up and started walking him back to the car.
‘This doesn’t change anything, sport,’ Monroe told him, careful to keep his voice low.
‘Tell me about it. Where do you keep your keys?’
‘Right side pocket.’
‘Thank you;’ Kelly took them as he put the officer in the back seat of the car. There was a screen there to keep arrested passengers from annoying the driver. He quickly started the patrol car and parked it in an alley. ‘Your hands okay, not too tight on the cuffs?’
‘Yeah, I’m just fuckin’ fine back here.’ The cop was shaking now, mainly rage, Kelly figured. That was understandable.
‘Settle down. I don’t want you to get hurt. I’ll lock the car. Keys’ll be in a sewer somewhere.’
‘Am I supposed to thank you or something?’ Monroe said.
‘I didn’t ask for that, did I?’ Kelly had an overwhelming urge to apologize for embarrassing the man. ‘You made it easy for me. Next time be more careful, Officer Monroe.’
His own release of tension almost evoked a laugh as he walked away quickly to the rear. Thank God, he thought, heading west again, but not for everything. They’re still rousting drunks. He’d hoped that they’d gotten bored with it in the past month. One more complication. Kelly kept to the shadows and alleys as much as possible.
It was a storefront, just as Billy had told him and Burt had confirmed, an out-of-business store with vacant houses to the left and right. Such talkative people, under the proper circumstances. Kelly looked at it from across the street. Despite the vacant ground level, there was a light on upstairs. The front door, he could see, was secured with a large brass lock. The back one, too, probably. Well, he could do this one the hard way … or the other hard way. There was a clock ticking. Those cops had to have a regular reporting system. Even if not, sooner or later Monroe would be sent a call to get somebody’s kitten out of a tree, and real quick his sergeant would start wondering where the hell he was, and then the cops would be all over the place, looking for a missing man. They’d look carefully and hard. That was a possibility Kelly didn’t want to contemplate, and one which waiting would not improve.
He crossed the street briskly, for the first time breaking his cover in public, such as it was, weighing risks and finding the balance evenly set on madness. But then, the whole enterprise had been mad from the start, hadn’t it? First he did his best to check out the street level for people. Finding none, Kelly took the Ka-Bar from his sheath and started attacking the caulking around the full-length glass pane in the old wooden door. Perhaps burglars just weren’t patient, he thought, or maybe just dumb – or smarter than he was being at the moment, Kelly told himself, using both hands to strip the caulking away. It took six endless minutes, all of it under a streetlight not ten feet away, before he was able to lower the glass, cutting himself twice in the process. Kelly swore quietly, looking at the deep cut on his left hand. Then he stepped sideways through the opening and headed for the back of the building. Some mom-and-pop store, he thought, abandoned or something, probably because the neighborhood itself was dying. Well, it could have been worse. The floor was dusty but uncluttered. There were stairs in the back. Kelly could hear noise upstairs, and he went up, his .45 leading the way.
‘It’s been a nice party, honey, but it’s over now,’ a male voice said. Kelly heard the rough humor in it, followed by a female whimper.
‘Please … you don’t mean you’re …’
‘Sorry, honey, but that’s just the way things are,’ another voice said. ‘I’ll do the front.’
Kelly eased down the corridor. Again the floor was unobstructed, just dirty. The wooden floor was old, but had been recent –
– It creaked –
‘What’s that?’
Kelly froze for the briefest moment, but there was neither time nor a place to hide, and he darted the last fifteen feet, then dived in low and rolled to unmask his pistol.
There were two men, both in their twenties, just shapes, really, as his mind filtered out the irrelevancies and concentrated on what mattered now: size, distance, movement. One was reaching for a gun as Kelly rolled, and even got his gun out of his belt and coming around before two rounds entered his chest and another his head. Kelly brought his weapon around even before the body fell.
‘Jesus Christ! Okay! Okay!’ A small chrome revolver dropped to the floor There was a loud scream from the front of the building, which Kelly ignored as he got back to his feet, his automatic locked on the second man as though connected by a steel rod.