Killing Critics

by Carol O’Connell

“Yes, you were right about everything.”

  “You believe she killed Starr and Koozeman. And you gave her Andrew. You told her about that pathetic little rooftop confession-all the sins he ever committed before the age of twelve. But all that Sabra knows is that he confessed. Am I right? For all I know, Andrew is already dead. Now I’m going to get Sabra, and you’re not going to stop me.”

  He pushed her into the doorway and blocked her escape with outstretched arms, palms pressed to the stone wall on either side of her. He was surprised to see the gun in her hand. It just appeared. He never saw her pull it from the holster, and now it was leveled at his heart.

  “Get out of my way, Quinn.”

  “No, you won’t fire that. The game field is all different now. Different rules and weapons. I’m unarmed, and you’re a police officer. I know you a little better now. You do have rules, Mallory, and I don’t think you’ll break them. You wouldn’t maim me with a sword when I was helpless, and you won’t shoot me now.”

  Mallory shot him.

  He was so startled by the explosion of sound and the sight of the blood, he never felt the butt end of the gun as she pistol-whipped him and sent him to the ground.

  A naked man can walk unmolested down any street in New York City. It is a place where people rely on peripheral vision for the imminent dangers of day-to-day living. If no figure rushes at them in peripheral, then no one else exists. There should be no eye contact with lunatics; they all agree on this. When the eye of the New Yorker does fall upon an unfortunate whose mind is absent without leave, said New Yorker’s eye, in the interest of preserving the life of the body, will often fail to inform the brain so long as the lunatic remains on some outer periphery. Eye contact might draw the crazy closer. Eye contact, they tell their young, is to be avoided.

  And so it was that Andrew crossed all the traffic lanes of wide streets without incident or interference. No homeward-bound commuter, no hack-bound cabdriver ever thought of pulling over to alert the authorities. So Andrew continued to walk north, wearing only a broken smile that tipped up on one side of his mouth and down on the other.

  Two men, standing on a street corner, were speaking in heated, rapid Spanish. He passed by them without causing a lull in their conversation. Near Seventieth Street, he walked by a young woman who was debating the affordability of a cheeseburger. After he passed by, she decided, yeah, she might as well spend the money. An old woman carrying a bag of groceries came out of the deli on the corner of Lexington and had to make a detour around Andrew when he paused on the sidewalk. The woman’s mind only registered the darkness. She wanted to be off the street while it was still only a semi-savage hour.

  The naked man walked on, stopped by no one, safe in the constant that a cop was never where a cop was needed.

  The cellular phone beeped. He raised the antenna. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Andrew.”

  “Oh, Mallory.” She asked where he was, and he told her.

  “Look out for a bag lady, Andrew. I’m on my way.”

  Mallory was coming for him. He had not long to make his last act of atonement. He should hurry.

  He crossed the street.

  Charles heard the beeping noise and opened his eyes to focus on the burning ember of a cigarette dangling from the side of Riker’s mouth. The spinning cherry light of a police car was illuminating his immediate surroundings in revolving bright red flashes. It was clear that he was not in his own bed, but spread out on the concrete. Riker’s worried face was relaxing to a broad smile of relief.

  “Riker, I think your phone is beeping.” Charles put one hand to the back of his head where it ached with dull, throbbing pain. When he tried to sit up, it hurt more. He lay back again, staring at the sky.

  Riker was speaking into the phone. “Yeah?” He listened a moment and said to Charles, “It’s Mallory.” Into the phone he said, “Naw, Charles is fine. The other one’s still breathing too… Sure. No problem.”

  Charles propped himself up on one elbow and looked down at Quinn’s prone body. He reached over and placed one finger on Quinn’s jugular. As he felt for the pulse, he was wondering if Riker might think it was rude of him to double-check on Quinn’s continuation among the living. Above the bloody wound on the man’s arm was the makeshift tourniquet, an Irish linen handkerchief with the initial M.

  “Riker, did you call an ambulance?”

  “What-for a little flesh wound like that? Naw, think of the paperwork. And Mallory would have to take another psych evaluation. It’s standard after a shooting. How many of those tests do you think she can take before the department finds out what they’ve really got here?”

  “He has a big hole in his arm, Riker, and he’s losing blood.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen a lot worse wounds than that one. She put the shot where she wanted it. That’s the least amount of damage it’s possible to do with a cannon like Mallory’s. And I’ve got twenty bucks says she didn’t even fracture his skull with the gun butt. Look at that scalp wound,” he said, turning Quinn’s head to the side and pointing at the cut as though offering up something to be admired. “See how low it is? She laid him out right. Her old man would’ve approved.”

  “He’s not conscious, Riker. He needs medical attention, and right now.”

  “When he gets to the hospital, they’ll file the mandatory report for a gunshot wound. No way you can pass that off as an accident with a knitting needle. If he mentions that a cop shot him, we’ll be going round and round with the paperwork and the newspapers for weeks. Quinn’s not gonna like that any better than we will. We’d have to nail him with obstruction charges to cover for Mallory, and her career would still go down the tubes. It’s just not a real good idea, Charles.”

  “He’s right,” said Quinn. His eyes were not yet open as one hand was going to the base of his skull where Mallory had kissed him with the butt of her gun. “I’m sure we can manage without the ambulance.”

  “You need a doctor.”

  “But I don’t need the media circus. And then there’s Mallory to consider.”

  Riker gave him the thumbs-up sign. “You’re a good sport, Quinn.”

  Now Charles realized that he and Jamie Quinn had a great deal more in common than fencing. First she shot him, and now Quinn would rather bleed to death than damage her in any way. And Riker was right. She would not go on with her career after shooting a prominent art critic. It would not play well in the newspapers or the commissioner’s office.

  “Jamie, you still need medical attention. There’s a doctor in my building who could patch that up in a hurry.” He watched Quinn’s face go slack again, fading out of consciousness.

  Riker stood up and signaled to a uniformed officer leaning against a police car. “Charles. That kid’ll take you wherever you like. So I can tell Mallory we’re bypassing channels on the shoot, right?”

  “Right.”

  Riker held up his phone. “You need this?”

  “Yes. Thanks.” Charles took the phone, and Riker stood up and walked to the car to speak to the young uniformed officer.

  Quinn was back among them again, his eyes opening as he struggled to raise himself on one arm. “Charles, we’ll have to come up with a plausible story for your doctor friend.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it will be much of a problem. Henrietta will understand.”

  “According to Riker, she’s bound by law to report the bullet wound. It’s highly unlikely she’d risk her license for neglecting that bit of paperwork.”

  “We’ll see.” Charles picked up Riker’s cellular phone and punched in a number. “Henrietta? It’s Charles… Fine, thank you. I’ve got a slight problem, an emergency really, with a bit of blood. Do you have your medical bag handy?… Good. Could I drop by in a few minutes?”

  The doorman recognized Andrew Bliss immediately. He also recognized that Mr. Bliss was stark naked but for the telephone clutched in one hand. He wondered if he was expected to do something about that. He only had fifteen minutes
to go before his shift was over, and so he elected to assume that Mr. Bliss was a mugging victim on his way to visit the friend who lived nearest to the scene of the crime, possibly seeking comfort and clothing.

  Yes, that was a reasonable assumption.

  And since Mr. Bliss had brought his own telephone, the doorman felt relieved of any necessity of making a police report. Now Mr. Bliss was entering the elevator, the doors sliding shut behind him. The doorman’s problem was out of sight, and therefore it did not exist.

  However, when his gaze fell on the bag lady, that was another story. He knew his duty now, and he quickly shot out one arm, palm to her face, to block her way without the necessity of actually touching her and possibly contracting the dreaded head lice which New Yorkers feared more than AIDS. He was quite sure the old hag would get the message via his angry scowl and the flat of his palm. These people were only lazy, not stupid.

  The motion was so quick. He saw the flash of light on metal, and then his white-gloved hand was a bloody rag of ripped cloth and flesh. The woman passed by him, entering the stairwell, as he sank to the floor with the shock of seeing the white bones of his hand exposed to the light.

  “Andrew, you smell.” This was Emma Sue Hollaran’s first observation when she opened the door to him. He walked past her and entered the apartment in the manner of a sleepwalker. She waved the air between them to chase the odor away. Then she walked over to the French windows. “Andrew, let’s go out on the terrace, all right?”

  He nodded, following docilely behind her as she opened the doors and preceded him into the night air. The deep cover of potted trees gave them privacy from the windows of the building across the way, but a scattering of small, bright eyes looked down on them from the sky.

  “There has to be a confession,” he said, “and an Act of Contrition.”

  “So you knew.”

  His head tilted to one side, and his face gave the impression that some part of his mind might have tumbled out of his head. “Of course I knew. How could I not-”

  “Have you discussed this with anyone?”

  “No. Emma Sue, you must listen. I don’t know how much time we have. The confession is very important. I don’t want you to die with a stain on your soul.” His face turned up to the sky, and he was suddenly preoccupied with the stars. The clouds were parting to clear a wider space in the heavens so more of them could watch.

  “Now don’t excite yourself, Andrew. If it will make you happy, I’ll confess, all right? But you know, I wouldn’t have killed Dean if he hadn’t been so greedy.”

  Andrew was moving his head from side to side, as though that would help. What was she saying? How could-

  “Dean was starting the old scam all over again with Koozeman.” She walked to the French windows and turned back to face him. “You know those tickets were Koozeman’s concept, not Dean’s. I think it was his idea of a joke. He couldn’t believe that people would buy them. Could you move back just a little, dear?”

  She pressed on his chest to gently push him farther into the cover of the trees. “I didn’t want any part of it. Too risky.”

  Emma Sue bent down to a large ceramic planter and began to root around in the dirt. ‘ “That little bastard Dean threatened me. He was still a junkie, you know. All junkies are dangerous. You can’t trust them. Then Koozeman figured it out. He read the article about the long pick.”

  She pulled an ice pick from the pot and shook the dirt off its gold handle. “It is unusually long, isn’t it? Do you remember this, dear?” She held it up to Andrew’s passive face. “No? Well, Koozeman did. He asked me if I was still chipping ice with the murder weapon.”

  Wiping the rest of the dirt off the pick with the hem of her dress, she polished the gold handle till it shone. “Then that pig Koozeman said I’d have to go along with the scam for a second showing of the tickets. He needed to make his profit fast.”

  She held the pick up to the light of the door, and nodded in satisfaction with her cleaning job. “I think he was planning on leaving the country. He was going to have problems unloading those stupid tickets, and he needed me to prime the pump with publicity and a list of new suckers. I told him he couldn’t blackmail me. He was part of the original crime, wasn’t he? He laughed at me. Said that line hadn’t worked when he tried it on Dean. But Dean was only threatening to expose Koozeman’s list of clients in the ghoul market. Koozeman said, in my case, he could supply the police with physical evidence. Then, at the gallery, he pointed out a cop, a blond cop in a black silk dress.”

  Emma Sue held the long ice pick out to Andrew. He only stared at it. She picked up one of his limp hands and closed his fingers over its handle. “Just hold on to that for a minute, Andrew. I’ll be right back.”

  She disappeared from the terrace and reappeared a moment later. He looked at the gun in her hand, and then dropped the ice pick to the stone tiles of the terrace. It rolled to a rest at Emma Sue’s feet.

  “Pick it up, dear.” She kicked it back to him. “Oh, do pick it up, Andrew. I really want to give you a sporting chance. Think you can beat a bullet? Want to give it a try?”

  “You killed Starr and Koozeman?” He said this slowly, as though trying to make sense of a foreign tongue.

  “Yes, dear. And it was just a matter of time before I got around to you. Ah, but now you’ve come to me.”

  “Why did you have to-? No, wait. Perhaps it wouldn’t be proper for me to hear any more of your confession. We’ll wait till she comes.”

  Emma Sue put up the barrel of the gun for a moment. “Who’s coming, Andrew?”

  “An angel. She’ll hear your confession. But while we’re waiting for her, we could pray together and ask for forgiveness.” He sank down to his knees.

  “No, Andrew. It’s really better if you stand. The police can be such sticklers for details. I don’t want to have to think up a scenario for shooting a man on his knees. Now take the ice pick and stand up.”

  Andrew only bowed his head and clasped his hands together in prayer.

  “Oh, well, a little improvisation.” She knelt down in front of him and leveled the gun at his chest. “The reporters have gotten bored with you, haven’t they? But you had enough time to make your voice heard. It was very considerate of you to demonstrate your insanity to the whole world. When they find your prints on the pick, I think I’ll have a credible case for self-defense.”

  “How can you do this?” There was no panic in his voice. He felt very calm. He was trusting in a higher power-Mallory.

  “You were always the weak sister, Andrew. Koozeman even mentioned that. And now you’re just not dependable anymore. You’re the last witness.”

  Mallory found the doorman slumped to the floor just inside the glass door and cradling his bloodied hand. A woman with a grocery bag was kneeling beside him, only staring at the wound, making no move to actually help the man.

  Mallory bent over the doorman. “Who did this to you?”

  There was no response. He seemed utterly fascinated by his own blood. She looked closely at the hand.

  A knife wound. Not a pick.

  She hovered over the woman, who only now noticed the large gun in Mallory’s hand. “Did you call for an ambulance?”

  “No, I didn’t.” The woman’s eyes were panic-round and full of the gun. “I’m not good at emergencies.”

  “Call nine-one-one and tell them an officer needs backup and an ambulance. Do you understand?”

  The woman nodded, and Mallory tossed her the cellular phone. “Plan on being here awhile. The response time for the ambulance is the pits, even in this neighborhood.” Mallory stopped to consult the mailboxes, then passed up the elevator and took the stairs at a dead run.

  Andrew lifted his head to the sky. The field of stars was fading. He watched the slow creep of cloud cover blotting them out one by one. The gun barrel was rising. He stretched out his arms in the posture of supplication, and his head lolled back as he waited for death.

  He heard t
he first shot, his eyes closed tightly, but he never felt the bullet. Then a second shot. And still he remained alive. When he opened his eyes, Emma Sue Hollaran was lying at his feet, hands stretching up to ward off the dark creature. The knife point was glinting in the light, the handle clutched tight in the fist of a woman in rags.

  There were two bloody holes in this strange woman, this apparition from hell, and small rivers of blood pouring out of her. So she had taken Emma Sue’s bullets and Emma Sue had received this woman’s knife into her own body. Now the blood of the old hag merged into the blood of Emma Sue Hollaran, as the woman brought the blade down again and again. And all the while, someone was pounding on the door.

  Behind him he heard the explosion of another gunshot. He turned to see the splintered wood of the door just before it flew open. The Angel Mallory with her avenging revolver was coming toward him with long strides.

  His knees and his feet were wet with blood from the body of Emma Sue. He looked down at the eyes of a stunned animal, throat slashed. Her screams were gurgles as she strangled in her own blood. Just like Aubry.

  The angel called out, “Sabra, stop!”

  Sabra?

  Was it possible? Yes, it was she, a dark animalistic form, rags flapping like bloody wings, bending over the body, cutting up the meat. Emma Sue’s hair had blended from brassy blond waves to bloody ropes that curled like snakes with each thrust of the knife, until the eyes of the Medusa head rolled up to expose solid whites.

  Sabra bent low to look into Andrew’s eyes with all the hate in the world. Her knife raised up again. And the Angel Mallory raised her gun and yelled, “No!”

  The two women stared at one another above his kneeling body.

  “You don’t understand,” said Sabra, as she retreated a few steps.

  “Everyone tells me that, and I’m getting damned sick of it,” said Mallory. “I understand revenge-I understand obsession. I’ve understood these things for a long, long time.”

  Sabra looked down at Andrew’s sorry face, raising her knife, not heeding the gun Mallory leveled at her head, but only advancing on her next target-himself. He bowed his head. He was ready.