Eight Black Horses

by Ed McBain

  On New Year’s Day there was only one police officer on duty at the armory. Even on days that were not legal holidays there were three officers there at most. The stable hands—four of them—were civil service employees, but not policemen. On New Year’s Day only one stable hand was at the armory. Both he and the patrolman were nursing terrific hangovers.

  It was a cold rainy day—a bad harbinger for the year ahead.

  The man who arrived at the armory was carrying a pizza in a white cardboard carton. He was also carrying a white paper bag. He approached the big wooden door with its iron hinges, lifted the knocker, and waited.

  The patrolman on duty opened the door and looked out into the rain.

  ‘Yeah?’ he said.

  ‘Got a pizza and some sodas for you,’ the man outside the door said.

  He was wearing a black trench coat. He was blond and hatless. There was a hearing aid in his right ear.

  ‘Nobody ordered no pizza,’ the patrolman said, and started to close the door.

  ‘It’s from the Eight-Seven,’ the man said.

  ‘What?’ the patrolman said.

  ‘Okay to come in?’ the man said. ‘It’s kinda wet out here.’

  ‘Sure,’ the patrolman said.

  The delivery man went into the armory. The patrolman closed the door behind him. It thundered shut—or so it seemed to him because of his hangover—with a ponderous roar, which caused him to wince. The armory smelled of horses and horse manure. From somewhere in its cavernous reaches one of the horses whinnied.

  ‘They don’t like rain,’ the patrolman said.

  ‘Where do you want this?’

  ‘Bring it in the office here,’ the patrolman said.

  The office was a small cubicle that still had regimental flags on its walls. The stable hand was sitting in the office, his feet up on the desk.

  ‘That smells good,’ he said.

  ‘Little present from the boys of the Eight-Seven,’ the delivery man said, putting the carton down on the desk. ‘Thought you might be getting hungry all alone here on New Year’s Day.’ He took two Pepsis from the white paper bag and put them down on the desk beside the pizza carton. He reached into his pocket for a bottle opener and uncapped both bottles. The caps came off easily and soundlessly, with no fizzy pop of released carbonation.

  ‘That’s very nice of them,’ the patrolman said.

  He did not know anybody at the Eight-Seven. He himself was a Bow-and-Arrow cop, who’d once been a mountie. He was still officially assigned to the Mounted Patrol, but he never rode a horse any more, nor was he permitted to carry a weapon—hence the sobriquet ‘Bow and Arrow.’ The police department had taken away both his horse and his gun three years ago, after he rode a big black stallion into a gathering of some thousand people, firing the gun into the crowd. He was drunk at the time. Nobody got hurt but the horse, who bolted at the sound of the pistol and shimmed into a lamppost, breaking his leg. The horse had to be shot. Horse lovers all over the city protested.

  ‘What’s on it?’ the stable hand asked.

  He had already opened the lid of the box. The delivery man was hanging around as if he expected a tip.

  ‘Sausage and cheese,’ the delivery man said.

  The patrolman and the stable hand were looking al each other, wondering how much they should up for something like this, guy delivering a pizza on a cold rainy day.

  ‘Better eat it before it gets cold,’ he said.

  The stable man took a slice of pizza from the carton. He bit into it.

  ‘Good,’ he said, chewing.

  He reached for one of the Pepsi bottles, tilted it to his mouth, and drank.

  ‘This is a little flat,’ he said.

  The patrolman took a slice of pizza.

  ‘Still nice and hot,’ he said. ‘You want a piece?’ he asked the delivery man.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘You got any change?’ he asked the stable hand and reached for the other Pepsi bottle.

  ‘Yeah, just a second,’ the stable hand said. He took another bite of pizza, washed it down with the flat Pepsi, and then reached into his pocket.

  ‘No, that’s okay,’ the delivery man said. ‘Happy New Year.’

  ‘Sure you don’t want a piece?’ the stable hand said.

  ‘Just want to warm up a little before I go out there again,’ the delivery man said.

  ‘Sit down, sit down,’ the patrolman said, and tilted the Pepsi bottle to his mouth again.

  The patrolman and the stable hand sat eating pizza and drinking Pepsi. Somewhere in the armory another horse whinnied. The delivery man kept rubbing his hands together, trying to get warm.

  Ten minutes later the patrolman and the stable hand were both unconscious on the floor of the office.

  The Deaf Man smiled.

  The chloral hydrate had worked swiftly and efficiently.

  He reached into the pocket of his trench coat for the pistol. As he walked back to the stalls, where the horses were kept, he affixed the long silencer to its barrel.

  * * * *

  The eighth day of Christmas was n legal holiday, and nobody expected anything from the Deaf Man. No mail delivery on legal holidays. No United Parcel deliveries. No Federal, Emory, Purolator, or whatever other kind of express deliveries. Just peace and quiet. As befitted New Year’s Day.

  Car Adam One was dispatched to the armory at one-thirty that afternoon because someone in the neighborhood had called 911 to report horses screaming.

  Sixteen horses were still alive when the two patrolmen got there. They were not actually screaming. Just white-eyed with terror and—one of the patrolmen described it as ‘keening,’ but he was Irish.

  Eight horses were dead.

  Each of them had been shot.

  They were black horses.

  * * * *

  So now it was serious.

  Well, maybe the severed ear had been serious, too. Maybe the severed ear hadn’t been merely the Deaf Man’s way of announcing himself for certain, but was, in addition, a promise that this was going to gel bloody.

  Carella and Brown looked at the dead horses.

  There was a great deal of blood.

  ‘It doesn’t make sense,’ Carella said.

  He was thinking the horses hadn’t done anything.

  He was thinking they were beautiful, innocent animals.

  Eight of them dead.

  All of them black.

  Brown was thinking this had been planned all the way back in October. The thought was chilling.

  Both men stood looking at the dead horses for a long time.

  Outside it was still raining.

  * * * *

  The rain stopped on the second day of the New Year, the ninth day of Christmas. It was replaced by clear blue skies and arctic temperatures. Gopher did not mind the cold. Rain would have been troublesome. Explosives had to be kept dry.

  Getting in was easier than Gopher had expected.

  There was a uniformed cop at the entrance gate in the cyclone fence, but Gopher was wearing a plastic-encased tag on his coveralls, and the tag showed his picture in full color and over that the words ISOLA P.D. DEPARTMENT OF VEHICLES. He was also carrying an order form, printed on an Isola P.D. Department of Vehicles letterhead, which authorized him to check the electrical wiring of all fifteen cars issued to the 87th Precinct.

  The cop at the gate glanced at his tag and said, ‘What’s up?’

  Gopher showed him the order form.

  The cop at the gate said, ‘Did you talk to the sergeant?’

  ‘Told me to come on back,’ Gopher said.

  Actually he hadn’t talked to anybody. Never ask, never regret, that was his motto. March in as if you belonged wherever you were, explain only if you’re questioned. He hadn’t wanted to show himself the precinct again because, even though he’d shaved the mustache he’d been wearing ever since Nam and though he was now wearing windowpane eyeglasses, he didn’t want to chance anybody’s recognizing him.
He figured he could bluff his way through if a sergeant popped out here and asked him what the hell he was doing. Show him the papers again, say he didn’t know he was supposed in check inside to service a few fuckin’ cars, you’d think they’d be happy to see him here instead of giving him static. If it got tight in any way, he was ready to back out of the job in a minute. No job was worth doing time. Work out here with the puffy lip and the phony glasses, hope nobody made a connection with the guy who’d been upstairs in the squadroom on New Year’s Eve. He was counting on the fact that most people—even cops—only noticed the trimmings.

  ‘Most of the junk’s on the road,’ the cop said. ‘The shift don’t change till a quarter to eight.’

  It was now ten minutes past seven. Full daylight would not come till seven twenty-two. It would get dark this afternoon at four forty-six. The light behind the station house was what Gopher had heard called morngloam in some parts of the country.

  ‘I’ll do whichever ones I can get to now,’ Gopher said. ‘Catch the others when they come in.’

  ‘Since when did you guys start making house calls?’ the cop asked. ‘We used to have to bring them to the garage downtown, anything went wrong.’

  ‘The holidays,’ Gopher said. ‘We’re backed up downtown.’

  ‘Well, go ahead,’ the cop said. ‘Christ knows, they can use it.’

  It had been that easy.

  The 87th Precinct territory was divided into eight sectors, and a radio motor patrol car was assigned to each sector. The patrol sergeant had a car and driver of his own, which brought the total to nine cars in use at any given time. In addition, there were six so-called standby cars. These six were often pressed into service because police cars—like police stations—took a hell of a beating in any given twenty-four-hour period, and there were a great many breakdowns on the road. A team of officers would often be driving one car at nine in the morning and a different car at eleven.

  No differentiation was made between the standby cars and the ones they often replaced. In the jargon of the precinct they were all called ‘the junk.’ Cops would pile into the junk when their tour of duty started and would drop off the junk when the tour ended. The junk was both singular and plural. One patrol car was the junk. Six patrol cars were the junk. A hundred patrol cars would have been the junk. Whenever a car broke down, it was called ‘the fuckin’ junk.’ To listen to the motorized cops of the Eight-Seven, you’d have thought they were narcotics dealers. Only one of the cars had ever had a name. This had been the favorite car in the precinct, an old workhorse that rarely broke down. The cops called her Sadie. Eventually Sadie’s motor gave out, and the city decided it was cheaper to replace her than to repair her. The cops of the Eighty-seventh held a small ceremony for Sadie when she died. She still remained their favorite.

  As a matter of practice all the junk in the precinct—the regularly assigned cars and the standby cars—was used on a more or less rotating basis. There were also several unmarked sedans, which the detectives drove, but these were not considered part of the junk. The junk had white door panels with the city’s seal and the number of the precinct painted on them, black fenders, a black hood, and a white roof with a row of lights on it. The unmarked detectives’ cars were always parked in the lot behind the station house. The junk was parked either there or in front of the station, angled into the curb.

  There were seven cars parked in the lot behind the station house when Gopher got to work—the six standby cars and the sergeant’s car. It took him literally three minutes to wire each of the cars. By seven twenty-two, when dawn came, he had already wired four of them. By seven-forty, when the cars on the midnight-to-eight tour began drifting in, he had finished wiring the remaining three and was waiting to do only two more. As soon as a pair of patrolmen left a car to go into the station house, Gopher threw up the hood. Between the grille and the radiator he planted a box containing a plastic bag of black powder and a live-pound charge of dynamite. He attached a ground wire to the chassis. He unplugged the connector wire he knew would be there, and loosely twisted the cleaned ends of both wires. The wires ran into the plastic bag of black powder. The dynamite fuse ran into that same plastic bag.

  By seven forty-five, when the cars began pulling out for the eight-to-four tour, Gopher was packing his tools in the truck.

  He wished the relief cop at the gate a Happy New Year, got into the truck and drove off.

  * * * *

  The first explosion did not come until the four-to-midnight tour was almost a half hour old.

  The patrolmen assigned to Charlie Two had checked out the car at ten minutes to four. The patrol sergeant, who was a pain in the ass when it came to the junk, came out to look over the vehicle for dents or scratches, jotting down even the slightest mark for comparison when the car was checked in again at eleven forty-five that night. The sergeant’s name was Preuss, but the patrolmen called him ‘Priss’ behind his back. Charlie Two left the precinct at five minutes to four. At four-fifteen, after a single run at the sector, they decided to stop for some coffee. The shotgun cop got back into the car at four twenty-two, a container of coffee in each hand.

  ‘Starting to get dark,’ he said.

  The driver reached for the container of coffee with his right hand and the light switch with his left hand. He pulled the light switch. The plug-in connector wire Gopher had removed from the right front head light and twisted into his ground wire was suddenly alive with current from the 12-volt battery. The loosely twisted wires lying in the plastic bag of black powder shorted and sparked, the powder flashed, the fuse flared, and the dynamite went up an instant later.

  That was at 4:23 p.m.

  * * * *

  Al 4:27 p.m., nineteen minutes before sunset, the patrolmen riding Boy One saw a man running up Culver Avenue in Sector Two. Patrolmen were normally assigned to the same sector on each of their tours, on the theory that familiarity bred better crime prevention. If a patrolman spotted something that looked unusual to him—a grocery store closed when it was supposed to be open, a snatch of hookers standing on the wrong corner—he immediately checked it out. A running man was always suspicious. If you were a runner in this city, you were supposed to be wearing a track suit and running shoes. Everyone else walked fast, but they rarely ran. A running man in ordinary clothing was usually running away from something.

  The patrolman riding shotgun in Boy One said, ‘Up ahead, Frank.’

  ‘I see him,’ the driver said.

  The time was 4:28 p.m.

  The driver eased the car over into the curbside lane. The man was still running.

  ‘In one hell of a hurry,’ the shotgun cop said.

  They kept watching him.

  ‘He’s just trying to catch that bus on the corner,’ the driver said.

  ‘Yeah,’ the shotgun cop said.

  The man got on the bus. The bus pulled away from the curb.

  ‘Getting dark,’ the shotgun cop said. ‘Better put on the ...’

  The driver was already reaching for the light switch.

  An instant later, Boy One exploded.

  * * * *

  Preuss, the patrol sergeant, looked at his digital watch as he came out of the station house and started for his car, his driver immediately behind him. The time was 4:31 p.m. The watch also told him that this was Monday, January 2. Watches could tell you almost anything these days. Preuss knew somebody who had an alarm clock, when it went off, you said ‘Stop’ to it, and it let you sleep for another four minutes.

  As Preuss got into the car, he was thinking one explosion could be an accident, two explosions were a conspiracy. He had dreaded a conspiracy ever since he’d made sergeant. He knew that the cops in this city wouldn’t stand a fuckin’ chance if all the bad guys got together and decided to wipe them out.

  The driver put the key into the ignition switch and turned it.

  The engine roared into life.

  And because it was rapidly becoming dark, he reached for the ligh
t switch.

  * * * *

  By 4:38 p.m. six of the eight cars on patrol were out of service. The remaining two cars all received an urgently radioed 10-02—report to your command. The Bomb Squad was already on its way to the 87th Precinct.

  Neither of them made it back safely to the station house.