The Man Who Cast Two Shadows

by Carol O'Connell

  Charles sighed. “Mallory is an intensely private person. Her history was never open to discussion.”

  “If you could bend your mind outside the parameters of fact and logic, you might reach the conclusion that Mallory’s mother is dead, perhaps murdered.”

  “I think that’s a bit farfetched, Amanda.”

  “Is it? She’s predicting violence in the Riccalo family. You see a link between her and the boy. They’ve both lost their mothers. Doesn’t it make you wonder? What sent her into the street, a small child on the run? What was she running from?”

  “Perhaps she was abused as a child?”

  “By her mother? No. She loved Helen on first sight. Someone taught her to trust women like Helen Markowitz the nurturer, healer of scraped knees, lover of children. Suppose Mallory saw her mother killed?”

  “Oh, this is absolute rot. There are no facts to support that line of reasoning. Next you’ll be telling me that Justin saw his mother die, and that’s the common bond, as though Mallory could read that in his mind.”

  “Maybe they read one another’s eyes. Don’t they both have the look of damage? Justin doesn’t behave much like a child, does he? He doesn’t have a child’s conversations. There’s another commonality. Mallory was the same way, wasn’t she?”

  “The purpose of creating you was to find out who killed you.”

  “Yes, but was that your idea? She only gave you my manuscript when she realized that once you had this intimate piece of me, you could do the succubus illusion.”

  Could she be that convoluted? Mallory? Certainly. All those prompts about Malakhai? What else could that have been about? He’d been had.

  Amanda nodded her understanding and walked ahead of him.

  “And what about you, Amanda?” he called after her. “Who killed you? How could you be killed that way, and why?”

  “He lied to me.”

  He was too tired to sustain her and thus restrain her. Unable to keep her with him, he watched her go into the shadows. She was of such frail substance, she was killed by the first patch of darkness she encountered.

  To be abandoned by two women in one day.

  He stared at his shoes for a moment as he walked on, in and out of the light. Lost for a while in thoughts of Mallory, he meandered south and east for too many blocks into territory he was unsure of, unsafe in. When at last his eyes were looking outward again and he realized this, he found he didn’t care. And he was only dimly aware that the time was passing from Christmas Eve into Christmas morning.

  He shuffled through the pile of newspapers close to the brick of a building wall, and then he went sprawling. The cement came up to meet his face with a hard hello. Something small and alive was squirming out from under his splayed legs.

  She was standing in front of him now, and wearing a little red coat.

  Oh, dear God, he had tripped over the body of a child. She must have been sleeping under the newspapers. He was staring into the smudged face of a little girl with matted hair and the biggest eyes he’d ever seen. She might be six or seven. The child was extending a cup to him. It was torn and jingled with change. It took him a moment to grasp the idea that the little girl was begging for money, that she was thin and shivering.

  “Where’s your mother? Why are you—”

  Now the child was backing away from him. Bright eyes, quick with intelligence, had sized him up for a non-donating type, and maybe an authority type, and possibly even a cop, or worse, a social worker. As quickly as he realized all of this was going on behind her eyes, he was watching the back of her as she slipped away in the dark.

  He found his feet and gathered himself up to a stand and ran after her, pounding down the sidewalk, in and out of the black and bright zones of streetlamps, intact and broken. In one of these dark patches, she had disappeared. He stopped to listen for her soft footfalls.

  Silence.

  Now a jingle.

  He looked up to see her straddling the top of a chain-link fence, and he held his breath as she monkeyed down the links with amazing speed. He came up to the fence in time to see the small red coat flapping around a corner in the distance.

  And now the child was altogether gone, and with her, a ghost of Mallory’s Christmas past.

  Oh, fool.

  His head bowed into the cold metal of the fence. His eyes closed tightly. His heart was breaking.

  Fool.

  Her eyes were not a Christmas green, nor the green of living things, but cold and, just now, eerie. The lights from the dashboard made them glitter in the shadows. They seemed lit from within, as though Mother Nature had thought to do something different with the makings of Mallory—to break up the monotony of stereotypes and throw an occasional scare into Riker.

  “You know, Mallory, if I thought you had a heart, I’d think you were worried about me offing myself for the holidays.”

  Yeah, right, said the dip of her mouth on one side and no words necessary.

  He closed the passenger door of her small tan car. “I won’t be a minute—just a few things to pick up for breakfast.” He turned and walked toward the dim glow behind the plate-glass window of the bar. He peered in and waved one hand. Peggy leaned her broom against the bar and waved back to him. He ambled toward the front door.

  The beer he’d already put away had numbed him. He was only dimly aware of the teenage boy thirty yards to his right. Now he looked casually toward the boy. The kid was looking in all directions, probably waiting for someone. Riker looked back to Mallory, who was lost in the darkness of the car. The bartender opened the door, and he walked in.

  “Who’s your friend, Riker?” asked Peggy, looking over his shoulder.

  Riker slowly turned his head to see the teenager behind him. Peggy was not so slow, not drunk at all, and she was backing up to the bar where she kept her shotgun.

  Too late for that now.

  He was watching the boy reaching into his jacket, hand closing on the gun in his belt. Riker wondered if it would be the fast reflexes of youth that would kill him, or could he put it down to his own slowed reaction time—too much booze. Either way, the young thief would have him. All this was calculated in the second it took for the boy’s hand to pass into his jacket, just another second out of sixty.

  The boy never got a chance to pull the gun.

  Suddenly, a rush of manic energy with bright curls was pushing the boy through the open doorway, slamming him into the near table so hard Mallory nearly cut him in half at the gut level. She reached into the jacket and pulled out a .22 revolver. Now she was cuffing him and hustling him out the door. Momentum, stunned wonder and pain had made the boy docile.

  Riker never said a word to Peggy. He lifted his hands to catch the brown bag with his breakfast six-pack on the fly as he followed Mallory and her new pet out to the sidewalk.

  Hey, what’s the deal here?

  Mallory was pressing down on the boy’s head to ease him into the front seat of the car on the passenger side. Any kid who watched too much television would know the perp rode in the back of the car. What was she up to?

  She opened the back door of the car for Riker and said, “Sorry about the inconvenience, sir. I’ll get rid of him as soon as I can.”

  Since when did Mallory ever call anybody sir? She hadn’t called him that even when he’d held the rank of captain. But that was one wife and how many bottles ago. He nodded and settled into the back seat to play out her game.

  When Mallory was in the driver’s seat, she leaned over to the boy and said in a low voice, “It’s too bad you had to witness the deputy police commissioner drunk in an after-hours bar. I guess I’ll have to kill you. You understand, don’t you? It’s politics and nothing personal.”

  As Mallory drove the streets, Riker watched the boy’s face. The kid was sweating, and his mind was weaving between This is crap and true believing.

  “It’s a damn shame you had to pull this stunt on a night when a top cop is drunk in the back of my car. Yeah, I guess I�
��ll have to kill you.”

  It was ludicrous, but now Riker realized that this boy was so young, it had not been so many years ago that he had bought into Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. And then the kid had additional proof in Mallory’s eyes, the eyes of an assassin.

  Yeah, the kid was buying it.

  Riker felt a worry coming on in the pit of his stomach where he kept his ulcer. She hadn’t waited for the kid to pull the gun, to commit the crime. She hadn’t read the suspect his rights. She’d broken every rule, and now she was making up new ones to break.

  Well, he could relax a little. She wouldn’t actually kill the kid, because Markowitz wouldn’t have liked that. In the absence of a normal sense of right and wrong, good and evil, Mallory was much guided by what would have pissed off Markowitz and what wouldn’t.

  Now they were in the Wall Street area, deserted on Christmas Eve. She pulled into a blind street closed off by construction signs. Her eyes roved over the bins of debris left on the site.

  “No, not here,” she said. “Sorry it’s taking so long, sir. I’ll get rid of him on the next block. Okay?”

  “I won’t tell!” screamed the kid.

  Mallory said nothing as the minutes rolled by slow with the creep of the car, stopping in dark places, shaking her head and driving on.

  “I gotta wonder where that gun came from,” she said at last, “and I gotta wonder what you’ve done with it.”

  Riker found it interesting the way her expensive education fell away at warm moments like this one. Her voice had a rough edge that would scare any sane person into backing off with no sudden movements. He could only guess at what was going through the kid’s mind. His own body was pressing into the upholstery of the back seat.

  Mallory and the perp looked so young to him. With their unlined faces and blond hair, they might have been brother and sister. But he could almost feel the car dip to one side with the power on the driver’s end of the front seat.

  “Are you in a lot of pain?” asked Mallory, her voice switching gears, all mother love in her tone.

  “Yeah, my gut hurts something awful,” said the boy.

  “Good. I noticed there weren’t any bullets in the gun. That’s not too bright, is it?”

  The kid looked from the gun to Mallory and back to the gun, genuinely startled.

  “So you stole the gun, but not the bullets? When I wash this registration number through the computer, am I gonna find out that some taxpayer was burgled by a moron who thinks the gun makes its own bullets? What else did you steal?”

  “Nothing, I didn’t—”

  Riker jolted forward as Mallory slammed on the brakes. The boy didn’t fare as well. With hands cuffed behind him, his head hit the dashboard. The boy moaned and Riker looked away, the better not to see Mallory drawing first blood of Christmas morning.

  Wall Street was a ghost town after the financial houses’ end of business day. You could do what you liked in this neighborhood without fear of another pair of eyes.

  Mallory leaned over to grab the boy by his shirt collar. “You are stupid. When I run the gun through, you think they won’t mention the rest of the stuff?”

  “It was nothing. There was a ring and a bracelet, but it was junk. I took it to a jeweler. He said I’d be better off selling it at a flea market, and that’s the truth. I’ve known him all my life. He wouldn’t lie to me.”

  Riker shook his head and smiled. A baby felon who took stolen goods to his neighborhood jeweler. The criminal class was getting dumber every year. And no bullets. Didn’t these kids learn anything in school?

  He listened as Mallory called in on her car phone to run the dates and the jewelry description. But she neglected to mention that she had the suspect in custody, and she never mentioned she had the gun, and at the last, she said, “Sorry, it doesn’t match up,” and closed the call.

  “It checks out,” she said to the boy. “I’m gonna cut you loose. But you never tell anyone you saw the deputy police commissioner drunk in an after-hours bar. Deal?”

  The kid nodded his head like a trick pony. Yeah, whatever she wanted, so long as she didn’t hurt him anymore.

  Riker stopped smiling. He sat still in the dark at the back of the car and tried not to lose the glow of the previous six-pack of beer. No good. He was becoming unwillingly sober as he crept up on Mallory’s mind.

  Of course. It all fit.

  It was only the thief’s gun she wanted. He rolled his eyes up to the ceiling of the car.

  Ah, Markowitz, you bastard. How could you die on me and stick me with your kid? Can you hear me, you son of a bitch? Look at what your baby’s doing now. She’s robbing another baby.

  “If I don’t see you when I count to ten, I don’t shoot you. Okay?”

  She leaned across him to open the door on his side of the car. Riker listened to the metallic mechanics of Mallory unlocking the irons. She sat back. But the boy was tied to the upholstery by fear, and she had to finally cut the cords with “Get out, you idiot!”

  The boy did his dumb-pony nod again as he was half falling, half stumbling from the car. He staggered in a weaving line for all the seconds it took to understand that he was free, and then he ran.

  Riker got out of the car and slid into the front seat.

  “I’ll take the gun, Mallory.”

  “No, it’s mine.”

  “You never planned to take him in, and that wasn’t to save me the embarrassment of showing up at the station house drunk. Everyone already knows I’m a drunk. No, you wanted his gun for a throwaway piece. You wanna save it for the perp in the condo. Now if I’ve got this wrong, just stop me.”

  But he wasn’t about to let her stop him, and he went on with the relentless energy of a train running at her full speed, because it was the only way to deal with her—if he lost his breath, he lost his turn, and the train would turn around and crush him.

  “You figure the perp’s weapon of choice is his hands. If you have to kill an unarmed man, the Civilian Review Board will get you. But if you pull another gunslinger stunt, let’s say you get him in the knees, Coffey will get you for it. He’ll lock you up in the computer room, and you’ll never see the street again. Almost seems like you can’t win. But if the perp has a weapon lying on the floor beside him, if it looks like he brought his own gun to the party, you can’t lose, can you?”

  She wouldn’t look at him.

  “Markowitz never carried a throwaway piece, not in all the time he put in on the force. He hung out there in the breeze with all the rest of us. He played it straight, and that took guts. Maybe you don’t have the stuff, Kathy. Did you learn anything hanging out with the old man? Anything at all? . . . Kathy?”

  “Mallory to you,” she corrected him.

  “You’re going to give me that gun, or I’ll beat the crap out of you and take it. I loved Markowitz longer than you knew him. I’m not gonna let his kid screw up. Give it to me. You know I don’t bluff. Never have, never will.”

  Nothing.

  She was rigid, deaf and blind to him.

  “Now, Mallory, or it starts to get real ugly.”

  She handed him the gun. “And Merry Christmas to you too, Riker.”

  The device on his belt gave off the annoying beeps, the mechanical, nagging request to call in, and quickly. He picked up the car phone and dialed the number for Special Crimes Section.

  “Yeah,” he said into the receiver, “I know him. . . . No, it’s no problem, I’m on my way.”

  To Mallory, he said, “Charles is at the station. He needs something and says I’ll vouch for him. You coming?”

  “No, I’ll drop you off.”

  “Trouble between you and him?”

  “Charles asked for you, not me. He doesn’t need my help. He made that pretty clear.”

  When he stepped out of her car ten minutes later, he leaned down to say softly, “Have you given any thought to the toy gun on the inventory sheet?”

  Her eyes shone with sudden understanding. She smile
d slow and sly. He really hated it when she did that.

  Charles sat on a yellow plastic chair too small to accommodate his long body. His legs crossed and uncrossed, tucked in and splayed out, looking for a way to look un-foolish.

  At three in the morning, there was a constant activity under the bright fluorescent lights. A woman, wrapped in a blanket and screaming, walked past between two uniformed officers. A dazed and docile teenager was led along by a plainclothes detective Charles knew slightly. Two tourists came in yelling. By the snippets of their conversation, he deduced that they were minus their luggage, wallets, and jewelry. Next in the parade, two young men in handcuffs were escorted by four officers.

  Merry Christmas, said the bright-silver paper letters strung over the desk of the civilian clerk who had taken his report.

  Charles looked down at the lines and pockmarks on the floor until he saw the familiar scuffed pair of worn brown shoes, topped by a bad suit and a cloud of beer that was Riker’s breath.

  Riker nodded to him and walked on in the company of the two officers who had tried to reason with Charles and failed to communicate that there was no way to catch a kid who didn’t want to be caught. They had no problem catching grown-up felons, they told him, but kids could fit into hiding places they had never dreamed of. Then, in desperation, Charles had resorted to the crime of name dropping. One phone call from the desk sergeant and only minutes later, here was Riker, the improbable knight.

  Now Riker was sitting down at a desk and nodding amiably as the two officers leaned down to tell him all their problems with his friend the lunatic. Riker picked up the phone, and Charles watched him make three calls in quick succession. On the fourth call, Riker smiled into his telephone, eased back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. His hand waved to tell the officers they could go on about their business. In parting, one officer put a friendly grip on Riker’s shoulder.

  Riker set down the phone after another minute and motioned Charles over to the desk. He picked up the sheet of paper which Charles recognized as his report, and began to read it aloud.