Urge to Kill (39 page)

Victor (or whoever) had thrown a punch at the bartender that was so ineffective it had been ignored, and there they were out on the sidewalk, barely able to stand.

Lavern had leaned back against a streetlight, closed her eyes, and almost passed out. Or maybe she had briefly lost consciousness. When she opened her eyes, Victor was gone. A man who might have been Victor was crossing the street at the intersection half a block down.

Too far away for her to catch up with him. All that effort…

Well, the hell with Victor.

So Lavern had walked, too, in the opposite direction, weaving noticeably at first and attracting attention. People slowed when they saw her approaching and veered out of her path. They seemed to be ashamed of her, embarrassed for her.

Screw you! All of you!

A woman in a gray business suit gave her a disdainful glance. A teenage boy with baggy pants low on his pelvis kept a hold on his fly and grinned at her as he bopped past.
Fellow clowns and rebels.

After a few blocks she began to sober up; she could feel it.

On the cab ride home she’d impressed the driver with her terse and logical conversation about everything from politics to professional basketball.
Pretty damned good!
She was sure she’d reached the point where it wouldn’t be obvious that she’d been drinking.

She’d been wrong. Hobbs must have smelled liquor on her breath, maybe on her clothes.

“Shut the goddamned door all the way and come in here,” he said.

She obeyed, and at the click of the door latch the lights winked on in the living room, temporarily blinding her.

She gasped. Hobbs was standing ten inches from her and had flipped the wall switch.

The punch came out of the blinding light, smashing into her left ear and sending her reeling against a table, overturning it.

Hobbs was on her so fast she didn’t have time to think about the pain. His initial punches were wild. Then his fist landed on her ribs, which were still perhaps cracked from her last beating.
That
pain jolted through her, and she was sitting on the carpet, unable to breathe. Hobbs rested a foot on her shoulder and shoved her down so she was lying on her side.

He stood glaring down at her with his fists propped on his hips. “Goddamn lush. You’re screwin’ around on me, too, aren’t you?”

“No! Never!”

“Boozin’ and screwin’ around!”

He kicked her hard in the upper thigh and she rolled over onto her stomach.

This is going to be bad. Worse than usual. I have to get through it. No choice. Have to…

“Into the bedroom,” he said, and began kicking her repeatedly, not hard now. He wanted her able to crawl, and in the right direction. Her bare left elbow bumped a table leg.

“You’re too drunk even to crawl straight,” he said in disgust.

And she was. Lavern had to admit he was right. Were it not for the persistent guiding probes of his shoe she wouldn’t have been headed for the hall and the bedroom door. The door seemed so distant now.

Has he somehow injured my sight?

He kicked harder, hurting the base of her spine, and she crawled faster, shredding her panty hose on the carpet and skinning her knees, scraping the heels of her hands on the rough fiber.

He had to help her into the bed. She flopped back onto the soft mattress, watching the rectangular white ceiling spin up and away, and wished she could keep falling, falling…

Hobbs began to undress her. She didn’t resist, but he lost his patience with buttons and snaps and started ripping off of her clothes.

It proved to be more difficult than he’d thought.

He gave up completely and stalked off into the hall. Steel clattered in the kitchen, and he returned to the bedroom holding a carving knife.

He began slicing not flesh, but material with the knife. So expertly did he use the knife on her resistant clothing that it made her afraid of what he’d be able to do with such expertise to her flesh.

Amazingly, considering his frenzy, the blade didn’t so much as touch her.

Lavern clenched her eyes tightly shut and sent herself somewhere else, somewhere where this was happening to someone else.

You can be two people if you must. You really can. One afraid and in pain, and the other drifting and unfeeling…

Right now, the choice of which to be was easy.

With the morning already heating up like hell, Hobbs left for work without disturbing her where she lay in bed pretending to be asleep, the thin sheet pulled up over her face as if it were a shroud.

Beneath the taut white linen, her eyes were open and afraid.

They’d begun to gather in the park before dawn, and now there were hundreds of them.

At eight o’clock, New York One estimated the crowd at a thousand. It sure looked like a thousand massed on a TV screen. Traffic on Central Park West had to be diverted when their numbers spilled out onto the street.

They carried identical neatly produced FREE BERTY signs, and some wore T-shirts bearing the same demand in large black letters.

The event was large enough to disrupt traffic patterns throughout Midtown Manhattan, and made Quinn late on his way to Alfred Beeker’s Park Avenue office. He wanted to get there by nine, before Beeker’s first patients began to arrive.

He wanted to be in a room alone with Beeker.

Quinn sat as patiently as he could, draping his right wrist over the Lincoln’s steering wheel, watching the brown UPS van ahead of him advance along the street ten feet at a time. His right foot moved automatically between accelerator and brake pedal, advancing the Lincoln along with the van. The car’s air conditioner was sucking in some of the van’s exhaust, so Quinn dropped the driver’s side window about six inches. Heat rolled in, along with more exhaust fumes. The metallic chattering emitted by the air conditioner was louder with the window down. Too loud.

The window was gliding back up when Quinn’s cell phone chirped. He leaned to the side and worked it out of his pocket, flipped it open, and pressed the button to answer.

“That you, Quinn?”

Renz’s voice.

“It’s my phone,” Quinn said.

“That might not mean shit. You mighta just lost it, and I’m talking to some clown pretending to be you.”

“I’m me, and not pretending.”

“What about the clown part?”

“It’s what I don’t want to waste time on now, Harley.”

“I tried to get in touch with you yesterday afternoon to tell you this movement to sympathize with Berty Wrenner is picking up steam, and you know what goes with steam.”

“Pressure,” Quinn said, trying not to yawn. The hot sun beating through the windshield was making him sleepy.

“Where were you yesterday, Quinn?”

“Pearl and I drove upstate to investigate a lead. Guy named Dwayne Avis. Nothing came of it, but I’ll get a report to you so it’s in the mix.”

“Seen TV news this morning?”

“I managed to avoid it.”

“Berty’s due to be arraigned today, so his supporters are having a big demonstration in the park. Signs, songs, the whole shebang.”

“You don’t hear that word very often anymore,” Quinn said. “Shebang.”

“Parse it,” Renz said, “and you got sexism.” He seemed to mean it. There were times when nothing seemed too trivial for Renz to worry over.

“I won’t mention you said it,” Quinn assured him.

“Thanks. The news says the shebang is growing larger.”

“That must be what’s causing the traffic mess I’m stuck in. So what does Berty’s army want?”

“Freedom for Berty.”

“Despite the murder charge with evidence and a confession to back it up?”

“All that doesn’t seem important to them. You know how it goes, Quinn. The little guy’s perfect to play the poor schmuck who’s a victim of the machine.”

“We the machine?”

“We’re part of it.”

“So you wanna turn Berty free?”

“Not me. But if certain politicians could think of an excuse, they’d be out there marching with Berty’s army.”

“You’re about the most opportunistic politician I know,” Quinn said, “and you’re not out there marching.”

“I’m also first and foremost a cop, or I wouldn’t associate with you and your fouled-up crew.”

“You including Vitali and Mishkin?”

“Mishkin’s Barney Fife with a brush mustache and Vitali’s turning into Columbo.”

“Television again,” Quinn said.

“Between the Slicer, and the Twenty-five-Caliber Killer, and this dueling bullshit, this friggin’ city’s gone nuts.”

“Always has been. That’s why we love it.”

“So you on your way to the Seventy-ninth Street office?”

“I’ve gotta make a stop first; then I’m going there.”

“Keep me better informed, Quinn. Give me some raw meat now and then to throw to the people who want to turn
me
into raw meat. You know how the game is played. That’s the reason why I hire you when we run into this kind of shit storm.”

“Would you throw them Vitali and Mishkin?”

“I can promise you they’ll go before you do.”

“You’re an honest evil man, Harley. That’s so rare in this world.”

“I’m working on the honest part.”

“And making progress. I’ll fax you that report.”

“You do that, the whole shebang. Whenever you find time in your frenetic schedule.”

That sounded like an exit line to Quinn. He broke the connection and stuck the phone back in his pocket.

The NYPD must have been getting the “Free Berty” demonstration under control. Traffic was creeping ahead steadily now, without the nerve-racking stop and go.

The city had caught its breath and was moving on.

Lavern removed the sheet from over her face and found a lance of sunlight aimed at her head, illuminating her pillow and igniting the pain in her ear where Hobbs had struck her last night. She moaned and glanced at the clock near the bed. Almost nine o’clock.

She recalled last night and shrank within herself. The apartment was quiet. Hobbs had left for work over an hour ago. At least there was that. She had some peace for a while. Some freedom from fear and fists.

And knives. Something new from Hobbs.

As she sat up in bed the pain in her ribs flared, and she drew a sharp breath. Her injured ear began to ring. She got both bare feet on the floor and stood up, dizzy at first so that she had to stoop slightly and touch the edge of the mattress to keep her balance. Then she worked her sleep shirt over her head and removed her panties. Every move hurt. It was as if she’d been in a terrible auto accident the day before and the pain and stiffness had caught up with her overnight. Knowing she was stooped like an old woman, she made her way toward the bathroom.

In the full-length mirror on the bathroom door she was shocked by how relatively unmarked her body was. Though her ear and the side of her head ached, there was only a slight discoloration at her temple and around the corner of her eye. Her sides were red and turning purplish and would be colorfully bruised, but not for a while. The bruising would be vivid but limited, and not visible when she was dressed. But if she looked as bad as she felt, someone would rush her to a hospital.

She was still proud of her body and thought that, considering what she’d been through, she looked all right, even sexy, though it was obvious something had happened to her ribs. As long as they were covered, she could pass for one of the world’s uninjured. Hobbs had it down to an art.

Lavern sometimes wondered how many other bruised but seemingly uninjured women she passed every day on the street, concealing their pain, holding it inside.

As she turned on the shower, she heard the rasp of the intercom. After hesitating a few seconds, she swiveled the white porcelain faucet handles to off. She dried her hands on a towel and put on a robe. Her hair looked like a birds’ nest from sleeping on it, but it would have to do.

Yanking the robe’s sash tight about her waist, she hurried from the bathroom and answered another, longer intercom buzz.

A metallic male voice from the lobby said there was a delivery for Lavern Neeson in 5C. She told the deliveryman she was the recipient and buzzed him in.

A few minutes later he was at the door, a young, acne-cursed man wearing dirt-crusted jeans and a gray T-shirt. The shirt had FLORA DORA lettered on it. Lavern knew it was the name of a small florist shop in the next block.

She accepted the narrow white box from the man, told him to wait a minute, and then dug a few dollars from her purse to tip him.

When he was gone, she carried the box to the coffee table and sat down before it on the sofa. Her ear began to ring louder, and her headache was pulsing. When she was finished here she’d take two Aleves with a glass of water, see if that helped.

She leaned forward in the quiet apartment and opened the box.

It was full of pink and red roses. There was a small white card affixed with a delicate pink ribbon to one of the stems. Lavern opened the card so she could read the blue-ink scrawling inside it and recognized the handwriting.

The roses were from Hobbs. The writing on the card proclaimed that he loved her.

The sad part about it, Lavern thought, was that he really did.

Martin Hawk sat back, sipped his espresso, and idly watched the pigeons scratching out their brief existence on the sidewalk outside the restaurant where he’d just enjoyed a delicious breakfast. He mused on how his life had changed for the better. Had it been luck? Fate? He preferred to credit it to design, but he was a realist.

At sixteen his intelligence had been obvious, especially in his knowledge of the outdoors and in the scores he accumulated on various tests meant to measure scholarly potential. Yet he’d been a hopeless student. His father had become concerned, and when Alma’s widowed and childless sister, Adriella, offered to take the boy into her home in Little Rock and see that he was enrolled in a better school and tutored, Carl thanked her for her generosity and told Marty it was time for him to become a scholar. Education was important, and he’d be a neglectful father if he didn’t see that Marty obtained some.