So the perps ate here too.
Or maybe they’re just tourists.
“Dessert?” asked Cate. “Good God, I feel like I just ate an entire Zamboni drowning in marinara.”
“I’m having a cannoli,” said Skwarecki. “It’s just been that kind of day.”
“You don’t have to get back to work?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I’m RDO.”
I must have looked confused.
“Regular day off, Maddie,” Kyle explained. “Our pal here’s getting paid overtime to testify.”
Skwarecki grinned. “Your tax dollars at work.”
“Hey,” I said. “Any job where they shoot at you should be worth at least a million bucks a year, net.”
“Your lips to God’s ears,” said Skwarecki, clinking my glass of Diet Coke with her own.
There was a trilling noise from under the table, like R2-D2 had gotten lost down there.
Skwarecki consulted the beeper hooked onto her belt. “They must be finished.”
She got up and walked into the entrance to use the pay phone. I could see the lump of a gun at her hip under the blazer.
Our waiter returned to the table. Kyle told him we wanted a cannoli and four espressos.
Skwarecki came back in and sat down.
“True bill?” asked Kyle.
“Better than that,” she said. “Eight counts each.”
Cate and I high-fived.
I dropped my stinging palm back down to my lap. “So eight is good?”
“Eight is excellent,” said Skwarecki, “but she wants to talk to us about the sneaker.”
“What about it?” asked Cate.
“The grand jury had a lot of questions about the way it turned up. Bost needs the other one safe in hand before this thing goes to trial. One of you want to play tour guide for me tomorrow morning?”
The boys at the next table ignored us, laughing.
“Does it have to be tomorrow?” asked Cate. “I’m up to my neck at work for the next few days.”
Skwarecki crossed her arms and swiveled toward me.
Bost stepped into the room’s arched doorway, scanning the crowd until she spotted our table.
“Sign me up,” I said. “What the hell.”
Bost pulled up a chair.
“Good work today,” said Skwarecki.
“Not enough,” said Bost.
She looked at me and Cate. “Has Detective Skwarecki told you about the necessity of finding the second shoe?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m going back to Prospect with her tomorrow
morning.”
“And you understand that any further evidence-hunting requires the detective’s official presence and oversight—start to finish—if we want a chance in hell of nailing these assholes at trial?”
“Yes,” I said again.
She lifted her right hand, palm up, to count off a list of further directives slowly on her fingers, each successive digit extended and then bent farther back beneath the downbeat of her fist: manual bullet points.
“You do not move anything, Ms. Dare,” she said. “You do not touch anything. You do not think about touching anything—and I mean not even a gum wrapper.”
Only the index finger to go. Bost raised her hand to eye level.
“In fact,” she continued, that last finger now a pistol barrel aimed dead-center at the bridge of my nose, “you will not so much as consider the act of thinking about touching anything.”
She dropped her hand and leaned forward, right in my face and drill-sergeant close. “Are we clear?”
“Dude,” I said, “back off.”
I was on the brink of giving her a Three-Stooges doink to the eyes when the flare of her nostrils died down and she dropped her shoulders, resuming a civilized distance.
“Ms. Bost,” I said, “if you’d prefer that I not accompany Detective Skwarecki to the cemetery tomorrow, just tell me so. I’d be more than happy to bow out.”
She looked at the floor, her voice quiet. “We’d appreciate your help, but it’s essential that you understand how crucial maintaining a proper chain of evidence is right now.”
“Of course,” I said.
Bost stood up, saying good-byes around the table as she gathered up her purse and briefcase.
Skwarecki watched her stride away. “Fucking lawyers.”
Kyle laughed.
“No offense,” added Skwarecki.
“Not exactly a team player, is she?” asked Cate.
Skwarecki snorted. “You could suit us all up for the World Series at Shea and Bost still wouldn’t admit we’re walking to bat from the same dugout, you know?”
“Of course not,” I said. “She thinks it’s Wimbledon.”
“I gotta hit it,” said Kyle, standing up. “See you ladies round the campus.”
Skwarecki made her excuses and followed him out once they’d both chipped in for the check.
One of our neighbor boys pulled out a Polaroid camera, standing up to take pictures of his pals. The other guys started goofing around, shoving each other and laughing, making bunny ears behind each other’s heads.
Tourists, then. Or maybe a field trip.
I blinked when the flash went off again, straight into my eyes.
Dean got home that night at eight on the dot. I’d blown off wearing his coveralls, but Pagan and Sue were out playing pool, so we didn’t have to share the noodles.
35
The rain had blown through by Thursday morning, but the sky was still heavy with dryer-lint rafts of cloud, sunlight distilled to a squinty dim glare that made my teeth hurt.
Skwarecki had told me eight o’clock, and I was pissed about having made it to Prospect’s front gate on time just so I could spend the subsequent twenty-five minutes pacing alone on the broken sidewalk, shivering and undercaffeinated.
“Bitch better show up with doughnuts,” I said, my words unheeded by a passing squirrel.
I had Cate’s gate key in my coat pocket, but no pen or paper with which to write my detective pal a note explaining how I’d gotten sick enough of waiting to embark upon our Quest for Sneaker-Grail without her, Bost or no Bost.
Skwarecki was now half an hour late, and I wanted to get started—or at least get off the damn sidewalk and behind the chapel.
There was a low passageway under the train tracks, and the post-rush-hour stragglers coming through it kept giving me the hairy eyeball.
I couldn’t tell whether they were sizing me up for a mugging or just presuming, pissed off, that I was some crack-harpie suburban skank looking to score cheap rock and generally taint the neighborhood.
Door Number One made me a paranoid racist asshole; Door Number Two scrawled “kick my guilty liberal ass” across a piece of binder paper and Scotch-taped it to the back of my coat.
Either way, I doubted I could endear myself by humming a few bars of “Don’t Mind Me—I’m Just Waiting On a Cop.”
Two young guys sauntered by and then slowed to establish an observation post twenty feet away. They were in watch caps and down jackets, jeans riding so low the denim hems puddled atop their slack-laced sneakers.
It was time to move my Skwarecki vigil to a better-trafficked location, so I started walking slowly down my side of the block, trying to keep it loose.
Eye contact or not?
Still undecided by the time I’d reached visual-acknowledgment range, I avoided the question entirely by squinching my eyes shut and yawning, then speeded up to join the crowd at a bus stop.
Skwarecki was forty-five minutes late now. I thought about finding a pay phone, but didn’t want to miss her if she did finally show.
A bus rolled up to the curb and everyone else got on it. It pulled away and I stood alone, traffic whipping by. Five more minutes, then ten. Still no sign of her.
I looked down the block for a pay phone—no such luck. I checked back over my shoulder to see if the pair of gate-sentry dudes had moved on yet.
There
was only one now, and he smiled at me.
I heard the gun of an engine behind my back, followed by what I hoped to hell wasn’t the whump-ump of fast tires jumping a curb.
Just when I thought about turning to look, something slammed into my legs.
First I was airborne, and then I wasn’t anywhere at all.
“… Head wound… possible fracture to…”
Skwarecki’s voice, tuning in and out.
I opened one eye to find her face blurry above me, then twitched my hand with the intention of checking my scalp for blood, only somebody had shoved a whole bunch of big fat pointy railroad spikes into the flesh of my right forearm.
“Get me a bus down here right goddamned now,” she said.
I tried saying, Fuck the bus, how ’bout a goddamned ambulance? but all that came out was “ Aaaamn…”
“She’s coming around.” A man’s voice.
I lifted my head, saw stars, and blacked out again.
A bump and a swerve and then my eyes were open. Siren going and a guy leaning across me in a paramedic jacket. Something stiff around my neck so I couldn’t move my head.
“Skwarecki?” Talking made my throat hurt.
The guy looked down at me. “Right behind us.”
“My arm.”
“You’re okay. Almost there.”
We pitched to the side one more time and the siren wound down.
The guy moved out of my field of sight, everything bumping as they shoved me out the back, then the sound of hydraulic doors and after that strips of light rolling by overhead.
Somebody yanked a curtain back, and then it all stopped moving.
A hairy hand moved a flashlight across my eyes, and I felt the snick of scissors along my left sleeve.
It’s the right arm that hurts.
The curtain slid wider on its rails and I heard Skwarecki say “Jesus Christ” down by my feet.
“Can’t take me anywhere,” I mumbled, hoarse.
“Yeah, right?” She was trying for cocky but just came off scared.
Which, frankly, scared the hell out of me.
The scissors kept going on my shirt until I was lying there pretty much starko from the waist up, and then the guy with the hairy hands started poking and prodding, making me whimper with pain.
Please let me not have worn the bra with safety pins where that strap unraveled.
“You’re gonna be okay,” said Skwarecki.
“Absolutely,” said Hairy-Hand Guy. “We’ll get that arm set in a jiffy.”
“I don’t have to be awake for that part, right?”
No response. Great.
Skwarecki gave my right instep a squeeze, the significance of which took a second to register.
“I’m barefoot?”
Jesus, who’d want a pair of five-year-old high-tops I’d scored at a Goodwill in the first place?
“I’ve got your sneaks bagged up right here,” said Skwarecki.
Maybe my amputated feet were still in them only I didn’t know it yet.
Except I’d just felt the squeeze of her hand.
I tried wiggling both sets of toes—was that really the gurney’s surface behind each heel, or some kind of phantom-limb thing? Fuck feet—did I even have legs?
I screwed my eyes shut, fingers crossed at the end of my non-
excruciating arm. “Skwarecki, please tell me why you have my shoes in a bag.”
“I figured you’d want ’em,” she said.
Okay, so presumably they weren’t soaked in blood with my shinbones sticking out the top. “Um, why’d you take them off me?”
“I didn’t,” she said. “That’s just what happens when you get hit by a car hard as you were. The force’ll knock you right out of your shoes.”
“Out of a pair of laced-up Converse? How is that even possible?”
“Basic laws of physics,” said Hairy Hands. “Let’s cut those pants off, too. I want a look at her knee.”
I tried to shake my head. “Why can’t I move my head?”
“You’re strapped into a neckboard,” said Skwarecki. “It’s okay.”
The cold scissor-blade slid along my belly.
“This is such bullshit,” I said. “And I’m freezing.”
Dr. Hairy draped a sheet over my torso. “Now let’s get you up to X-ray.”
“This is really starting to hurt,” I said, tears leaking sideways out of my eyes and down my temples as I stared up from my gurney at a different hallway ceiling.
The pain was worst in my arm, but the rest of me throbbed in concert. We’d been sitting outside the X-ray room for what felt like weeks.
“Shock’s wearing off,” said Skwarecki. “You still feel cold?”
“Now that you mention it.”
“I’ll ask that guy for a blanket or some shit when he gets back.”
“Oh, like he’s coming back. Ever.”
“He will if he doesn’t want his ass shot off by yours truly,” she said.
My teeth started chattering. “I love having a friend with a g-gun. Cuts through so much paperwork.”
“Speaking of that, I’m going to need a statement from you.”
“L-later?”
“Sure,” she said. “But did you see anything? Get a look at the car?”
“Skwarecki, I’m so c-cold.… ”
“Hey,” she called out. “Somebody got a blanket around here?”
I heard squeaky footsteps approaching, then felt something soft settle over my legs.
Better.
She waited a moment until my teeth came to rest. “You remember anything about the car? Get any kind of look at it?”
I started to shake my head, then remembered the neckboard. “I got a look at the air. After that I don’t remember anything. Even hitting the ground.”
Skwarecki didn’t say anything. The noise of everyone else rushing through the hallway filled in the silence.
“There were these two guys hanging around, though,” I said. “Across from me when I was out front at Prospect. That’s why I walked out to the bus stop. When I looked back, one of them had left and the other one was staring at me, smiling. Freaked me out.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Well, maybe the other guy went off to call somebody, you know? Like, say, a friend with a car.”
“I’m figuring this for a random hit-and-run,” she said. “Fucked up, but random.”
I thought back to the smiling guy. “It kind of felt like he knew…”
“Knew what?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. He was smiling at me and it gave me the creeps.”
“Maybe he liked the view of your ass.”
“I’m serious.”
“Fine,” she said. “What’d these guys look like?”
“Watch caps,” I said, “big down jackets, sloppy jeans, and very white sneakers.”
“You just described ninety percent of the male population between the ages of ten and thirty. In all five boroughs.”
“African American.”
“Narrows it down to twenty-six percent. That all you got?”
“Yeah,” I said, “pretty much.”
The truth was, I had no idea what the two guys looked like because I’d been doing my best not to look at them, and Skwarecki was no doubt totally right about it all just being random.
“You’re going back, right?” I asked.
“Where you got hit? I’ve already sent out a couple of uniforms, doing a canvass—see if anybody got a plate number.”
“Not that,” I said. “Back to the cemetery. I’m really glad you guys are checking whether anyone saw me get hit, but Bost is right—we need the other shoe.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Why the fuck not?”
“Because you’re bleeding and your arm is broken and you’re working up to a helluva shiner on that left eye?”
“So?”
“So take a load off.”
“Skwarecki, what�
�re you, gonna make me guilt you into this?”
“Into what?”
“I’d like to have something to show for having gotten run down by a car this morning, okay? If it weren’t for the damn shoe, I wouldn’t have been there.”
I didn’t mention the part about how I’d been out on that corner waiting for her to show up.
“Of course I’m going back,” she said, in this cheesy soothing voice. “Soon as they get you squared away.”
“You’re just waiting around to see if I cry once they start yanking on this arm to get the bones set, so you can tease me later for being a total pussy.”
“Oh, like you’re not already crying?”
“Fuck yourself. Showed up an hour late and you didn’t bring doughnuts?”
“There was some shit going down at the precinct. We gotta get you a beeper or something.”
“Yeah, maybe it would have taken the impact.”
“Jesus, if I’d known…?”
“It’s not like you ran me over, Skwarecki. And I’m grateful as all hell you showed up when you did, but I still want you to get your tits out of my face and go find that shoe.”
“And you’re planning to, what, take a taxi home?”
“Subway,” I said.
“I don’t fucking think so.”
“Try and stop me.”
“I handcuff your good wrist to the gurney here, Madeline? Not like you’ll be breezing through any turnstiles. In your underwear.”
“Fine. I’ll call my husband. Ask him to take off early.”
“He’s at work?”
“Yeah. North Jersey.”
“Got a car?” she asked.
“Might be able to borrow one.”
“Better leave now, even still. What’s his number?”
I recited it. “Ask him to bring me some pants, will you?”
“I’ve got a pair of sweats out in the car.”
I said “Great,” then waited to hear her footsteps fading well away down the noisy hall before I closed my eyes against the pain and started crying for real, which only made everything hurt worse. Plus which now my nose was all runny and I didn’t want to wipe it on my blanket.
“Here’s a tissue,” said Skwarecki, leaning into view as she pressed a Kleenex gently against my upper lip.
“Oh, perfect,” I said, “you’re still here?”
Invisible Boy Page 18
