‘Hey, mama, spare a dollar?’ a voice said, already. behind her She’d seen the shadow and kept walking past it, not turning, not noticing, ignoring it in the hope that the same courtesy would be extended to her, but that sort of courtesy was becoming rare. She kept moving, lowering her head, telling herself to keep moving, that not too many street toughs would attack a woman from behind. A hand on her shoulder gave the lie to that assumption.
‘Give me money, bitch,’ the voice said next, not even with anger, just a matter-of-fact command in an even tone that defined what the new rules of the street were.
‘Ain’t got enough to interest you, boy,’ Virginia Charles said, twisting her shoulders so that she could keep moving, still not looking back, for there was safety in movement. Then she heard a click.
‘I’ll cut you,’ the voice said, still calm, explaining the hard facts of life to the dumb bitch.
That sound frightened her. She stopped, whispering a quiet prayer, and opened her small purse. She turned slowly, still more angry than frightened. She might have screamed, and only a few years earlier it would have made a difference. Men would have heard it and looked, perhaps come out to chase the assailant away. She could see him now, just a boy, seventeen or eighteen, and his eyes had the lifeless amplification of some sort of drug, that plus the arrogant inhumanity of power. Okay, she thought, pay him off and go home. She reached into the purse and extracted a five-dollar bill.
‘Five whole dollar?’ The youth smirked. ‘I need more’n that, bitch. Come on, or I’ll cut you.’
It was the look in the eyes that really scared her, causing her to lose her composure for the first time, insisting, ‘It’s all I have!’
‘More, or you bleed.’
Kelly turned the corner, only half a block from his car, just starting to relax. He hadn’t heard anything until he made the turn, but there were two people, not twenty feet from the rusting Volkswagen, and a flare of reflected light told him that one was holding a knife.
His first thought was Shit! He’d already decided about this sort of thing. He couldn’t save the whole world, and he wasn’t going to try. Stopping one street crime might be fine for a TV show, but he was after bigger game. What he had not considered was an incident right next to his car.
He stopped cold, looking, and his brain started grinding as quickly as the renewed flood of adrenaline allowed. If anything serious happened here, the police would come right to this place, might be here for hours, and he’d left a couple of dead bodies less than a quarter mile behind him – not even that far, because it wasn’t a straight line. This was not good, and he didn’t have much time to make a decision. The boy had the woman by the arm, brandishing a knife, with his back to him. Twenty feet was an easy shot even in the dark, but not with a .22 that penetrated too much, and not with someone innocent or at least nonthreatening behind him. She was wearing some sort of uniform, older, maybe forty, Kelly saw, starting to move that way. That’s when things changed again. The boy cut the woman’s upper arm, the red clear in the glow of the streetlights.
Virginia Charles gasped when the knife sliced her arm, and yanked away, or tried to, dropping the five-dollar bill. The boy’s other hand grabbed her throat to control her, and she could see in his eyes that he was deciding the next place for the knife to go. Then she saw movement, a man perhaps fifteen feet away, and in her pain and panic she tried to call for help. It wasn’t much of a sound, but enough for the mugger to notice. Her eyes were fixed on something – what?
The youth turned to see a street wino ten feet away. What had been an instant and automatic alarm changed to a lazy smile.
Shit. This was not going well at all. Kelly’s head was lowered, his eyes up and looking at the boy, sensing that the event was not really in his control.
‘Maybe you got some money, too, pop?’ he asked, intoxicated with power, and on a whim he took a step towards the man who had to have more money than this nursey bitch.
Kelly hadn’t expected it, and it threw his timing on. He reached for his gun, but the silencer caught on his waistband, and the incoming mugger instinctively took his movement for the threatening act it bad to be. He took another step, more quickly, extending his knife hand. There was no time now to bring the gun out. Kelly stopped, backing off a half step and coming up to an erect stance.
For all his aggressiveness, the mugger wasn’t very skillful. His first lunge with the knife was clumsy, and he was surprised at how easily the wino batted it aside, then stepped inside its arc. A stiff, straight right to the solar plexus deflated his lungs, winding him but not stopping his movements entirely. The knife hand came back wildly as the mugger started folding up. Kelly grabbed the hand, twisting and extending the arm, then stepping over the body already headed to the pavement. An extended ripping/cracking sound announced the dislocation of the youth’s shoulder, and Kelly continued the move, rendering the arm useless.
‘Why don’t you go home, ma’am,’ he told Virginia Charles quietly, turning his face away and hoping she hadn’t seen it very well. She ought not to have done so, Kelly told himself; he’d moved with lightning speed.
The nurse’s aide stooped down to recover the five-dollar bill from the sidewalk and left without a word. Kelly watched sideways, seeing her hold her right hand on the bleeding left arm as she tried not to stagger, probably in shock. He was grateful that she didn’t need any help. She would call someone, sure as hell, at least an ambulance, and he really ought to have helped her deal with her wound, but the risks were piling up faster than his ability to deal with them. The would-be mugger was starting to moan now, the pain from his destroyed shoulder penetrating the protective fog of narcotics. And this one had definitely seen his face, close up.
Shit, Kelly told himself. Well, he’d attempted to hurt a woman, and he’d attacked Kelly with a knife, both of them, arguably, failed attempts at murder. Surely this wasn’t his first such attempt. He’d picked the wrong game and, tonight, the wrong playground, and mistakes like that had a price. Kelly took the knife from his limp hand and shoved it hard into the base of his skull, leaving it there. Within a minute his Volkswagen was half a block away.
Seven, he told himself, turning east.
Shit.
CHAPTER 19
Quantity of Mercy
It was becoming more routine than the morning coffee and Danish at his desk, Lieutenant Ryan told himself. Two pushers down, both with a pair of .22s in the head, but not robbed this time. No loose cartridge cases around, no evident sign of a struggle. One with his hand on his pistol grip, but the gun hadn’t cleared his hip pocket. For all that, it was unusual. He’d at least seen danger and reacted to it, however ineffectively. Then had come the call from only a few blocks away, and he and Douglas had rolled to that one, leaving junior detectives to deal with this crime scene. The call had identified the new one as interesting.
‘Whoa,’ Douglas said, getting out first. One did not often see a knife sticking in the back of a head, up in the air like a fence post. ‘They weren’t kidding.’
The average murder in this part of the city, or any part of any city for that matter, was some sort of domestic argument. People killed other family members, or close friends, over the most trivial disputes. The previous Thanksgiving a father had killed his son over a turkey leg. Ryan’s personal ‘favorite’ was a homicide over a crab cake – not so much a matter of amusement as hyperbole. In all such cases the contributing factors were usually alcohol and a bleak life that transformed ordinarily petty disputes into matters of great import. I didn’t mean it was the phrase most often heard afterwards, followed by some variation of why didn’t he just back off a little? The sadness of such events was like a slow-acting acid on Ryan’s soul. The sameness of those murders was the worst part of all. Human life ought not to end like variations of a single theme. It was too precious for that, a lesson learned in the bocage country of Normandy and the snowy forests around Bastogne when he’d been a young paratrooper in the 101st Airborne. The typical murderer claimed not to have meant it, and frequently copped to the crime immediately, as remorseful as he or she could be over the loss of a friend or loved one by his or her own hand, and so two lives were often destroyed by the crime. Those were crimes of passion and poor judgment, and that’s what murder was, for the most part. But not this one.