Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

  The lead car of the train shot out of the tunnel and the air was full of thunder and the shriek of iron wheels braking.

  CHAPTER 6

  THREE HUNDRED TWENTY-TWO HOURS

  At oh-one-hundred-seventeen hours, under a sky as lowdown and greasy-gray as the belly of a sixty-three Dodge, Detective Edward Kennedy developed liquidly out of the curbside door of a Checker taxi and overtipped the bored Chicano driver. He was still humming his Ry Cooder song as the taxi pulled away into the darkness beyond the street lamps. Pissed, thought Kennedy. I am seriously pissed.

  Kennedy felt himself called by nature and he gave the problem some slow and ponderous consideration. Okay, first, let’s try turning around on the sidewalk so we can find the door to the apartment building. Start with a three-quarter turn to the left. Come on, Eddie. You can do it.

  Kennedy raised his right foot and brought it across the scuffed toe of his burgundy Eagle, settling it delicately into a position on the sidewalk approximately four inches past and slightly to the rear of his left foot.

  The stance was rapidly degenerating into a slow fall when he heard a voice out of the night air.

  “Mr. Kennedy?”

  Hell. This was worth a look, even if he was about to fall over. He worked out a decent head-swivel by breaking it down into manageable units, starting with a lateral tug along the horizontal plane of his jaw, which brought his head around some. Next a slight extension of the shoulder to get some leverage on his upper body, followed by a thirty-degree torque at the midsection. This failed to resolve the problem entirely, but it did give him some small satisfaction. He was also rewarded by the intriguing sight of a single pale-yellow eye floating in the air a few inches above a dusty branch of the undernourished elm tree outside Roderigo’s Café Reggio.

  “You all right, Mr. Kennedy?”

  Now wait a minute! What the fuck is this? Kennedy was not a superstitious man, but he’d seen some things in his career that had left him feeling a little uncertain about ghosts and demons, that sort of shit. Now and then, in the Bronx, for instance, he’d seen some voodoo working. Sacrifice killings. Funny blue fires in those empty buildings near the old courthouse, up at Third and 159th Street. Evil lived! That was true. But not outside the affairs of men. Or women. Especially women, now that you mention it. Like Trudy. Nice tits, though. Great tits, now that we’re on the subject. But weird. Very weird.

  “You want me to come down, Eddie?”

  Christ! He’d forgotten about the vision! See! That’s how weird Trudy was. You could be facing the most incredible unbelievable and outrageous magical mysterious phenomenon like this oddly familiar single yellow eye sailing around in the atmosphere and talking directly at him like it had just done again for the third time and pow along comes a bizarro piece of work like Trudy the dietician, and poof there goes your contemplation of the fucking infinite! A sense of compelling urgency overcame Kennedy. Who knew how long the … the … manifestation! How long the manifestation would continue. Kennedy was blowing his chance to boldly go where no man had gone before. He might have only seconds to open a path into a new dimension. Talk to it, you asshole! Say something … dazzling. Profound.

  “So … how’s it goin’?”

  The yellow eye shifted slightly, snapped out of existence for a second, and then reappeared. Suddenly a set of sharp white fangs materialized just below the eye.

  “Rrrroowrr?”

  Despite the heat of the night, Kennedy experienced a pronounced chilling sensation along his spine. The thing had some serious dentistry going on there. There was something in this for Kennedy. We got one yellow eye. We got us some teeth. There’s something here just a little familiar.

  “Eddie? You look like shit!”

  Abuse. Fucking abuse. This ghost, or demon or devil or whatever—it had a nasty mouth on it. With serious fangs. What did it need a set of manglers like those for? And if it was really a demon or the devil or what, then was it all that smart of a guy such as Eddie Kennedy to open up some kind of meaningful dia—

  “Eddie? Mr. Kennedy, you wait there! I’m coming down before you get into trouble. And who you talking to, anyway?”

  Ah-hah! Puzzle piled on puzzle here. The voice that Evil was using was a voice Kennedy knew. The voice belonged to Jackson, the doorman of Kennedy’s building. Was this significant? Was Evil trying to establish direct contact with Kennedy by taking control of his doorman’s soul? No! Was it possible that all the doormen in Manhattan were in reality the … the minions! Yeah! The minions of Evil! It was not only possible, it was a dead certainty. The scope of the thing was staggering! Kennedy patted his belt, looking for his portable. Put a call in to Central right now. Signal Thirteen! A Citywide! Officer Needs Assistance. Evil has taken possession of all the doormen! Send the ESU guys! Get Koch up! Find Cuomo! Here’s your ticket to First Grade, Kennedy. The thing is not to show fear. Evil had a set of teeth on it like the headwaiter at Fiorella’s. Keep Evil talking until the ESU bus gets here.

  “So … you believe this fucking water shortage? You think it’ll ever rain in the right place? Hah?”

  The eye went away, came back. The fangs came back and went away. Kennedy sensed something subtle taking place around him. The ground was moving. Yes! The sidewalk was definitely rocking. A little to the left, then back to the right. A stiletto-tipped thrust of cold hard panic caught him in the center of his belly. He looked up at Evil.

  “Look, ahh, be cool here, okay? You don’t want to do something we’re gonna have to run you in for, right? How’s that gonna look on your résumé?”

  A sound came from behind him: keys rattling and heavy footsteps. Kennedy, sensing more trickery, refused to fall for it. The steps got closer.

  “Eddie, what are you doing?”

  Two things happened simultaneously. Evil popped right out of existence. Gone! And reappeared on the sidewalk right next to Kennedy in the body of Calvin Jackson. Kennedy turned carefully, controlling his fear. It sure looked like Jackson. Five nine, about 165 pounds. Skin a deep blue-black color, and the same broad fan of lines at the corners of his eyes. The uniform was wrong, though.

  “Calvin? What’re you wearing?”

  Jackson looked down at himself. “I’m wearing my robe and my pajamas, Eddie. You know what time it is?”

  Kennedy straightened his right arm out in front of him, extended his wrist. His watch was gone.

  Jackson’s face cracked open along a complicated network of seams and fissures, showing Kennedy a set of strong white teeth set off nicely by a pair of gold incisors.

  “Eddie, you are pissed! Let’s get you to bed.”

  “Calvin … Evil stole my goddam watch!”

  In a room still smelling faintly of burned duck-down, Kennedy lay on a bed that had finally stopped rolling up and to the left. Eighteen bars of pale-blue light striped the lower portion of the bed and laddered up the far wall to within a few inches of the bullet-marked Budweiser mirror. Items of his clothing lay in places around the floor. His tweed jacket was in a pile on the bottom of the bedroom closet, where Dudley had taken it while Kennedy sat on the bathroom floor. In the farthest distance a siren was sounding. Dudley’s ears swiveled, pointed, and he opened his eye for a moment. It closed again by millimeters, the way cats’ eyes will when they are at ease and weary. Dudley listened to Kennedy’s breathing. It was regular and slow. There was no sign of quickness or a break in the pattern. In another forty seconds Dudley was fully asleep.

  Downstairs at Roderigo’s the Rottweiler settled in behind the bar. Bats flitted in the darkness above the streetlights. A massive gray cloud moved across the midtown area and out over Central Park. Dusty winds stirred the surface of the lakes and ponds. Wrappers and ashes, cellophane and dry grasses skittered and fluttered down the walkways. In the room below Kennedy’s a woman moved in her sleep. Outside an allnight deli at Second and East 74th Street the grill of an empty cab ticked as it cooled. A chain of lights on the 59th Street Bridge was reflected on the greasy swell
s of the East River, deliquescent scintillations, breaking and forming.

  A digital clock radio with ruby-colored numerals emitted a low continual buzz. A colon between the numerals pulsed every second. After fifty-nine pulses, one of the ruby numbers would add a section or drop a bar to form a new number. A yard of cord hanging from the blinds moved a little in the breeze. The clock showed military time.

  It flashed 0319 and then it changed to 0320. Fifty-nine pulses later it changed silently to 0321.

  At 0322, Kennedy opened his eyes. He was lying on his left side, away from the window, holding a pillow up against his belly. His mouth was very dry. His left cheek felt numb, and the circulation was clamped off in his left arm. He rolled over onto his back and saw a small child standing in the bars of pale light at the foot of his bed. He could see in the blue light that the child was black. He was naked, and there was a purple liquid running freely down the insides of both legs. His legs were very skinny, and the knees were scored and scabbed. The top of his skull was gone. The cut was Marcuse’s cut, a squared incision down into the forehead and back up again. But the calvarium was gone. There was a long Y-shaped incision covering the boy’s torso. He was holding something in his right hand, holding it out to Kennedy as he stood barefoot on a fold of the duck-down comforter no more than a foot away from Kennedy’s legs. The thing in his hands was a brain. It looked like a gray sponge full of purple syrup. The syrup was dripping slowly from the brain, and wherever the drops hit on the rumpled down comforter there was a flash of red light, like a spark or candle flame.

  Kennedy’s heart and his belly muscles and his lungs reached absolute zero in one breath. He could feel the skin on his face icing up. His eyes seemed to burn. He tried to speak but his muscles had become sluggish and dull.

  The child closed his hand and more purple drops came from the brain in his hand, striking the bedding in pinpoint explosions of red and violet flame. When Kennedy looked carefully into each explosion, he could see streets, faces, gestures, landscapes. They’d flare up and out of the coverlet, waver, dance, a tiny moving image, traffic lights, crowded blocks, theater signs, storefronts, mouths open, birds flying.

  Kennedy went down very deep, came up with the faintest tremor of movement in his chest. He worked on it, felt it grow. It swelled up through his shoulders, opened his throat, flowed down into his arms. He spread both hands out beside him on the bed, gathered himself, and pushed himself back and up, kicking at the covers, backing up and away.

  The room was, of course, quite empty.

  CHAPTER 7

  TUESDAY

  Morning came to Kennedy in the usual manner, ricochet radiance striking his pillow early. He got up slowly, like an athlete feeling bruises, limping slightly as he crossed the room, rubbing his face, touching the tender places in his memory where the dream had left its marks. Dudley threaded himself in and out of Kennedy’s legs, half in an attempt to get breakfast on the road and half of it nothing more than an amiable greeting from one survivor to another. Kennedy stood at the bathroom sink with his hands on either side and looked carefully at the image in the mirror.

  Whatever was happening to him wasn’t easily detected. He stood for a while, leaning on the sink, staring at his reflection in the pitted mirror. His short arms were covered with red hair; his hands where they lay on the porcelain surface were broad, strong. One knuckle rode high on the tendons, a souvenir from a Bronx dealer who had ducked his head forward just as Kennedy had thrown a sucker punch at him. The hand healed eventually, but the knuckle didn’t.

  What was working on the detective now was the unfamiliar sensation that he was outside the core of things. All the years he’d been on the force, he’d never given more than a passing thought to what he was doing. Part of this came from the job itself, composed as it was of second-by-second decisions, snap judgments, action taken on the balls of your feet, at a dead run, many times at the highest pitch of nerves. Like most good cops, Kennedy had lived so long on adrenaline and a kind of careless adolescent joy in the game, trading on his wits, his street sense, his inborn skywalker’s balance, that he never noticed the erosion of his contemplative side. Few cops care to indulge in self-examination, partly because it’s a hindrance to the work; it clouds the instinct, slows the reactions in a subtle way that frequently proves fatal. And partly because most policemen who have been effective in the field have done things they’d rather not think about, things they’d rather not see dragged out into the daylight for the civil-liberties guys to poke around in. And there were other kinds of memories, the ones that came up on you from your blind side, stuff you told yourself you could cover up very nicely with a couple of coats of Jack Daniel’s. So how was it that all the things he had trained himself never to think about seemed to be thinking about him?

  After a shave and a shower he felt distinctly revived. He sat at the small round table where he ate his breakfast, idly breaking off sections of sugar donut and feeding them to Dudley, watching the sunlight move over the cat’s fur. Dudley’s single eye opened and closed as he ate. A trace of white sugar powder had stuck to his rough black nose.

  “Hey, hammerhead. Clean your face off.”

  Dudley looked up from his donut pieces. Part of his tongue was sticking out of his mouth. The overall effect made Kennedy feel a little better about life.

  Reaching over the table to brush away the sugar, he stroked the cat under the whiskers, running the side of his hand back toward the animal’s neck. Dudley pushed his large delta-shaped head up into Kennedy’s hand. A low chirruping sound came from his chest.

  “You’re supposed to purr, hammerhead. Not chirp. Birds chirp. Cats don’t chirp. It’s embarrassing to have a roommate who chirps.”

  Dudley settled onto the tabletop, enjoying the sound of Kennedy’s voice, watching his face as the man talked.

  “Duds, old chap. How was your night? Bad night? You go out, get laid? You get to that blue-point over at Lon Ky’s yet? You stayed in, huh? You’re a lying son of a bitch, you know. I think I saw you in that tree outside Roderigo’s last night. Am I right? Were you up there freaking out your buddy? Hah?”

  Perhaps there was something in Kennedy’s voice, a subharmonic, an unfamiliar demisemiquaver. With his tongue still caught between his teeth, the cat stared solemnly at the man, one forepaw extended, claws flexed.

  “No comment, hah? You have a good night, later on? You sleep right through? Nothing … disturb you? You didn’t hear anything?”

  The tone made the cat restless. “Rrroowr.”

  “Yeah? That’s what you always say.”

  Stokovich called a general conference for the task force at 0845 hours. The skeleton crew stayed around for the start of it, nodding over their coffee, propped up against the filing cabinets, collars loose, ties pulled off. A huge black-bearded man with blood on his knuckles lay on the holding-cell floor, greasy black jeans pulled taut over a belly like a spinnaker, arms out wide, chin up, mouth open, wheezing, putting out fumes Kennedy could smell across the room. Kolchinski, Wolf Maksins, and Detective Frank Robinson were all leaning against the bars of the cage. Maksins was trying to lob roasted peanuts into the man’s open mouth. Kolchinski and Robinson were providing him with moral support and forward fire data.

  The general conference was standard procedure. At least once a week, under Stokovich about three times a week, all the shifts in Kennedy’s Detective Area Task Force gathered together in the squad room to go over the progress each detective, or each unit, had made on various investigations. Stokovich ran the meeting and made whatever alterations in duty assignments he felt were necessary as the cases progressed. This morning, with members of the graveyard shift still around, there were eleven men in the room. There were no women detectives in this Task Force. Stokovich had a problem with female detectives. He hated them. He’d work with them on certain cases, he believed that he was always polite and respectful to them, he believed that he would never do anything to impede the career of a woman detective, no m
atter what kind of an incompetent bitch she truly was, and he did his level best to keep them out of his squad. He felt this even more strongly about black female detectives.

  Like Wolfgar Maksins, like others in the squad, Lieutenant Stokovich was quite capable of polite contempt for black cops. It was typical of them, however, that they would have gone cheerfully into a fire fight to rescue Detective Frank Robinson, who was as thoroughly black as it is possible to get. If you had called them on this, most of them would have looked at you with that dead-eyed glare that cops reserve for anyone who isn’t a cop. How could an outsider understand that Frank Robinson wasn’t a black—he was a cop.

  This magical eradication of racial identity was a common thing, wrought by the daily fires of New York life and squad-room friendship. In every masculine community there are three trials by which each male member will be judged and disposition carried out on his soul, and at none of these trials will a single word be spoken in open court. In male cop societies the first trial is a test of heart. Does this newcomer have a spine? Can he defend his place and his dignity? Has he made his mark on the street? Does he have the balls to go in first? The second trial is mind. Is he stupid enough to go in first every time? Or will he learn how to use his balls? And the third test is a trial of loyalty. Can this man be loyal, and if so, to whom is his loyalty given? If it’s given to the Commissioner, the borough bosses, and the administration, then he fails. If it’s placed on the anvil, between the Book and the Street, if he can step back from it and leave it there, at the mercy of the caprices of cop fate, knowing that there is no way to do a cop’s job in the way the city truly calls for it to be done without placing his reputation and his career and sometimes his freedom at risk—if he can leave his loyalty on that anvil, then he passes. These decisions are made about every man and woman who comes to work as a cop, and the only way to achieve the respect and affection of other detectives is to be found worthy. There is no other way. No legislation, no departmental memorandum, no fiat from the fourteenth floor, and no quota hiring system can ever accomplish it. Frank Robinson had passed. Oliver Farrell had failed. Robinson would always be a man among men. Farrell had been born insubstantial and would die invisible and there would never be one goddam thing he could do about it. Nobody in the squad room ever talked openly about this part of the job, but nobody ever missed the effect of it either.