Backlash

by Paula Gosling

  ‘Code nine – officer down,’ he whispered. ‘Please . . .’

  FOURTEEN

  ‘I think I have something,’ Dana said.

  ‘Lady, you have everything, as far as I’m concerned,’ Harvey Neilson said, gazing dreamily at her. ‘Let’s give this another twenty minutes and then break for about two weeks. I was thinking Hawaii.’

  ‘And here I was thinking you were a police officer,’ Dana said. ‘I guess you’re just on an apprenticeship or something, is that it?’

  ‘I’d like to learn a lot about you.’

  Dana sighed and turned away from the microfilm screen to glare at Neilson for a change. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-eight and in my prime,’ Neilson said, lifting his chin in case he was showing any puppy fat.

  ‘You must watch a lot of television.’

  ‘Hardly ever touch the stuff,’ he protested.

  ‘Then why does your conversation sound like old Warner Brothers scripts?’ Dana asked. ‘You’re too young to have seen them in Saturday matinées.’

  ‘I had other things to do during Saturday matinées,’ Neilson said, expansively.

  ‘Oh, God – the spitball king of row G, were you?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ He was irritated at her lack of respect. Also he felt peculiar – she wasn’t giving the right responses. Usually, when he made his play for a woman, he either got slapped in the face or accepted. This smart-ass stuff was tiring, and definitely not worth it. ‘Look, sorry if my conversation bores you . . .’

  Dana turned back to the screen. ‘I didn’t say it bored me, exactly . . .’

  ‘Well, then—’ He brightened.

  ‘But this is not the place for it.’

  ‘Name the place, just name it.’ He leaned a little closer. There was no-one around, and while this cold basement room was not exactly his choice of venue first time out, she—

  ‘328 Porter Avenue.’

  Neilson straightened abruptly. ‘Where the hell is that?’

  ‘It’s the address of the Abiding Light Association in Washington. And it’s the same address given here for Boston Footwear, owned in turn by Cardinal Enterprises, who hold the lease of the French Street mission, here in Grantham. We’ve got our connection, Harvey! Now we have to find out who owns Cardinal. That would be under C . . .’

  ‘Congratulations are in order,’ he said, and taking hold of the swivel chair he turned her around and kissed her, thoroughly. When he had finished, he looked at her and smiled, broadly, waiting for compliments.

  She stood up. ‘I think the C section is one row over,’ she said, and disappeared back into the stacks.

  ‘Damn,’ Harvey muttered. Well, that was it. He’d given it his best shot and failed. Okay, fair enough. There wasn’t much point in trying any more. She was frigid, that was it. Definitely a frigid girl. The trouble was, he couldn’t make that fit with the definite impression he had that under all that tough exterior there were fires burning. He also had the feeling she was fragile, and easy to break. It worried him. It also worried him that it worried him, because he never bothered to think that much about the women he went after. Mostly they were girls he met in singles bars, or got introduced to at parties. They were bed or non-bed. You hoped any effort you put in to get them into bed was worth it, but if not, better luck next time, right, Harvey boy?

  But this one worried him. This one was different.

  He found her leaning against the shelves, eyes closed. ‘Hey,’ he said, concerned. Maybe she was sick, maybe that was why she didn’t respond to his kiss. ‘You okay?’

  She opened her eyes and looked at him. ‘Delayed reaction?’

  ‘Oh, right – I forgot I put that in,’ he said, modestly. He looked at her more closely. ‘Are you sure that’s all it is?’ he asked. ‘I mean, I know I’m devastating, but—’

  ‘Can I level with you, Harvey Neilson?’ she interrupted.

  He looked alarmed. No girl ever levelled with him. Not Good-Time Harvey, Laughs and Jokes a Speciality. ‘Sure,’ he said, cautiously.

  ‘I am thirty-four years old. Does that bother you?’

  ‘Only in the nicest way,’ he said. ‘I like older women.’ That didn’t sound quite right. ‘Not that you’re exactly . . .’

  She ignored him and went on. She seemed to need to make things very, very clear. That was good, Harvey thought, because I don’t know what the hell is going on here.

  ‘I have recently suffered a rejection,’ Dana said. She really did sound like Miss Johnson, a teacher he used to have a crush on in the tenth grade. ‘I am feeling vulnerable, and in need of reassurance. However, I am from out of town and not interested in a long-term relationship. You have a certain animal attraction. Also, I like your aftershave. We could have dinner tonight and discuss all of this, or we could just let it go. Your decision.’

  He stared at her. Brains, that was it, she was one of those brainy women, right? Maybe she was laughing at him. She didn’t look as if she was laughing at him, though. She looked like she was just saying the truth. She also looked like Miss Johnson, beautiful and unreachable. He would have died for a chance to hear Miss Johnson make him this offer. He couldn’t refuse. Harvey was in trouble, and he knew it. Trouble right up to his goddamn eyebrows. ‘I always get hungry around eight,’ he said, rather unsteadily.

  ‘Fine. Now, can we look for Cardinal, please?’

  ‘Who rejected you?’ He would punch the bastard out.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ She moved away, running a finger along the files.

  ‘I guess I should be grateful to him, huh?’

  Dana turned and regarded him. ‘No, I should be grateful. Are you a bastard, Harvey?’

  ‘No!’ He was hurt.

  ‘I meant are you a stinker, a rogue, a rat with women?’

  Now he was suspicious. ‘Who’s been talking about me?’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Maybe a little bit,’ he conceded. She was really throwing him off-balance. What the hell was the matter with her? ‘Hey, listen, I don’t pretend to be perfect, but I never make any promises, so—’

  ‘That’s good,’ Dana said. ‘That’s fine. You’re just what I deserve.’ She went back to the files.

  ‘I think I’ve just been insulted,’ he said, after some consideration. ‘I think maybe we should forget the dinner.’

  ‘Whatever you say.’ She didn’t seem to be upset about it one way or the other. Harvey felt a wave of miff wash over him. He had never encountered this kind of situation before. Dealing with women was easy, everybody knew how to do it. You lied, they lied, everybody lied, it was easy. It was The Game. Wasn’t it?

  ‘Well, what do you mean, anyway, you “deserve” me?’ he demanded.

  She lifted her lovely shoulders. ‘You’re going to hurt me,’ she said, negligently. ‘You’re going to break my heart.’

  ‘I am not!’ He’d never broken a heart in his life. Some said it was because he didn’t have one himself, but that wasn’t true. He had one – he just never let it out on its own, that’s all.

  She turned her big, smoky eyes on him, and he felt his kneecaps start to go. ‘Oh yes you are. And I think I’ll be glad. Do you understand? It will mean I’ve let myself out of jail – become a woman again. Does that make any sense to you?’

  ‘Not a goddamn bit,’ he said, bitterly. ‘Dinner is definitely off.’

  ‘Okay.’ She shrugged and turned back to the shelves. She moved along them, then spoke again, carelessly. ‘Who’s that big, good-looking blond detective whose desk is over in the corner of the outer office at headquarters?’ she asked. ‘I think his name is Eddie or—’

  ‘Oh, hey, listen now – he would hurt you,’ Neilson said, quickly. ‘Eddie Klusky is a real son of a bitch with women, you want to stay away from him. If you’re determined to get “hurt” like you’re
saying, you better do it with me. You can trust me.’

  She turned to look at him. He looked at her.

  She started to laugh.

  ‘You never laughed before,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she agreed.

  ‘You look funny when you laugh,’ he said, badly shaken now. ‘Like a little girl. Your nose wrinkles up . . .’

  ‘I know,’ she said, and laughed harder.

  He stared at her in a kind of wonder. The more perplexed he looked, the more she laughed. He began to laugh, too, although he didn’t know why the hell he was doing it because this girl was definitely crazy and he would be smart to drop the whole thing but he couldn’t. He couldn’t. They both jumped at the sound of a clearing throat.

  ‘Excuse me, is one of you Officer Neilson?’

  ‘Me, I’m Neilson. I think,’ Harvey said, in a strangled voice.

  ‘There’s a telephone call for you at the desk. I believe it’s urgent. Something about your union?’

  Neilson, thoroughly unsettled, stared at him. ‘The Police Federation is calling me? Here?’

  The clerk looked apologetic. ‘Well, but he said something about a striker being shot. Maybe you’d better speak to him yourself.’ Neilson then moved fast toward the phone. The clerk turned to look at Dana, who was staring after Neilson’s retreating back, all traces of laughter gone from her white face.

  ‘I didn’t know the police were on strike,’ the clerk said. ‘Did you?’

  FIFTEEN

  They wouldn’t let him sit up until the X-rays were back.

  ‘Look, I can wiggle my fingers, for crying out loud!’ he kept protesting, but they just smiled and said rest now.

  The overhead light was in his eyes, making them water, and he kept wiping it away with his good hand. He asked one of the doctors to turn the light out. They couldn’t, so they moved the table he was on back a little, but it didn’t help.

  The tears kept coming.

  Pinsky appeared and stood beside him.

  ‘Did you get the bastard?’ Stryker demanded, knowing the answer already because he knew Pinsky and could read his eyes. ‘Goddamn it!’ he said, as Pinsky shook his head. ‘And Tos?’

  Pinsky opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. His voice was rough and he cleared his throat. ‘They’re operating on him now.’

  ‘He’s not dead.’

  ‘No, he’s not dead.’ The word that hung in the air, almost visible in that very bright, very painful light, was ‘yet’. Pinsky swallowed. ‘The bullet took some skull and some brain, but they said it wasn’t important brain, whatever that means.’

  ‘It means non-functional matter,’ put in the intern who was keeping an eye on Stryker while waiting for the X-rays to come back. ‘We’ve got a lot of extra stuff up there in the skull just hanging around. He might be lucky. Which side was it?’

  Stryker raised his good hand and sketched the path of the bullet as he remembered it. The intern nodded.

  ‘He might be lucky,’ he repeated, in a doubtful tone, and straightened up from where he had been leaning against the wall. ‘I’ll see what’s holding up those X-rays.’ He went out, and the cheerful flowered curtain flapped shut behind him. Stryker looked at Pinsky.

  ‘You looked for him?’

  ‘We’re still looking,’ Pinsky said. ‘We’ve got people going over that street with nit-combs. Harvey’s still there.’

  ‘That’s good – Neilson is a fussy son of a bitch.’

  ‘Yeah. Dana’s outside.’

  ‘Keep her there.’ He shifted slightly. They’d given him something to dull the pain in his shoulder. They didn’t have anything for the rest of it. ‘We’d checked with Rivera on French Street, then stopped for coffee. We’re getting into the car when bam! comes the shots, from nowhere. Rifle, wasn’t it? Had to be, there was nobody in sight.’ He’d answered his own question. ‘Filthy goddamn bastard . . .’

  ‘All right, all right, take it easy,’ Pinsky said.

  ‘Which one of us was he after?’

  ‘Does it matter? He got you both,’ Pinsky said, grimly.

  Stryker clenched his left fist, almost enjoying the wave of dull pain that surged out and down from his injured shoulder. ‘Why, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘If we knew why, we’d probably know who,’ Pinsky said, trying to be reasonable. It was an effort, with Stryker lying there and Tos up in surgery. Jamming his hands in his pockets, he went over and inspected the stainless steel trolley that held the suture packs and quite a lot of Stryker’s blood on gauze and cotton balls. In a kidney dish was the bullet they’d taken out of Stryker’s shoulder. ‘Looks like a seven point six.’

  ‘Felt like it, too,’ Stryker agreed, trying to turn his head to look. It hurt to pivot on his ear and he gave it up, addressing the rest of his remarks to the overhead light which was still giving him glare. ‘You’d better take it.’

  ‘I guess.’ Pinsky felt in his pockets and eventually produced a small brown envelope that had held his electricity bill. Using a piece of gauze, he carefully picked up the bloodied bullet and inserted it into one corner of the envelope, then tucked the packet in his inside jacket pocket. ‘We dug the one that hit Tos out of the dashboard – too distorted to read anything from it. This one looks better.’

  ‘So glad to be of help,’ Stryker said, bleakly.

  The intern came back, looking cheerful. ‘Missed the bone.’

  ‘Told you,’ grumbled Stryker. ‘Can I go now?’

  ‘We’d like to keep you in for obs—’

  ‘Hell with that. I’m a cop, I’ve been shot before. I want out, I’ll sign whatever you want.’

  ‘Jack, maybe—’ Pinsky began.

  ‘No, I want out, I want to get to work.’

  The intern sighed. ‘There’s dedicated and there’s dumb.’ He met Stryker’s glare and gave in. ‘Okay, okay, I’ll strap you up. You won’t be able to get much use out of that arm for a week or so. And remember you’ve lost a lot of blood, so you’ll feel weak for a couple of days.’

  ‘I’ve lost blood before,’ Stryker said.

  ‘Oh, right – I forgot, you’re a big, tough cop. So you know about shock, too.’

  Stryker stared up at the light, and watched again the long, terrible moment when Tos was hit and thrown against the dashboard and then fell on to the seat and his good Italian blood was everywhere. Everywhere.

  ‘Yeah – I know about shock,’ he agreed.

  He leaned his head back against the wall in the waiting room, having chosen a straight chair as the one least likely to let him fall asleep. Dana was beside him, as pale as he was, too shocked to speak, for which he was inordinately grateful. She was just a pretty girl now, and nothing more. Shock insulated him from anything else, it was a shield and he was grateful for it. He wondered, weakly, whether this was retribution for his even having considered . . . what he had considered. He couldn’t even form it in his mind, except that it had to do with betrayal and Kate. Pinsky was in the corner of the sofa opposite, pretending to read a magazine. They all looked up every time there was a flicker of white past the doorway.

  Dana felt totally isolated. These men were accustomed to sudden violence, but she was not. Although outwardly she might appear to be as calm as they, it was not calm but a numbness she had only once before encountered – when Peter died. She had to seem calm and brave for little Pete, but then, as now, it was a frozen kind of calm that she felt did her little credit. No praise was due for being a zombie because she hadn’t willed it – it had simply arrived and taken her over. She walked, she talked, she functioned – it meant nothing.

  When somebody finally came in, it was Neilson.

  ‘How is he?’ he demanded.

  ‘We’re waiting,’ Pinsky said.

  ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ Stryker said.

  Neilson turned to
look at him. ‘Yeah, I know you’re fine, I asked downstairs already. You look like hell.’

  Stryker shrugged and instantly regretted it. Neilson winced, sympathetically. ‘Oops – that was a mistake, right?’

  ‘Right,’ Stryker agreed. ‘Did you find anything?’

  Neilson’s attempt at being cheerful faded. He sat down on Dana’s other side, but did not touch her, instead leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and rubbed his face. ‘Not a goddamn thing, unless you count about fifty used condoms and two thousand beer tins.’ He unbuttoned his jacket and leaned back. ‘We found where he fired from, though. Or we think we did. Upstairs in a derelict building. Marks on the windowsill, footsteps in the dust. The forensic guys are in seventh heaven, crawling around in the cobwebs, talking to the spiders, bribing the rats for a description. Of course, rats don’t rat on rats, do they? I forgot.’

  ‘Cartridge cases?’

  ‘Picked ‘em up. He did, I mean – not us.’

  Pinsky tossed his magazine back on to the table in the centre of the room. ‘Really?’

  Neilson shrugged. ‘We found where they fell, sure. But they weren’t there, and they hadn’t rolled. Believe me, we looked.’

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ Dana said. ‘Somebody who knew what was dangerous to leave around, and took the time to pick it up.’

  ‘Somebody who likes to kill cops,’ Neilson said, in a strangled voice. ‘Jesus, I want that bastard.’

  The others stared at him. ‘You think it’s the same one?’ Pinsky asked. ‘I haven’t even given the bullet to Ballistics yet.’

  ‘I can smell it,’ Neilson said.

  ‘But how did he know we were cops?’ Stryker wanted to know.

  ‘How did he know Yentall was a cop?’ Neilson countered.