Ed McBain_87th Precinct 22 Read Free

squadroom.
    “87th Squad,” he said, “Kling here.”
    “You’ve undoubtedly decided by now that I’m a crank,” the man’s voice said. “I’m not.”
    “Who is this?” Kling asked, and motioned across the room for Hawes to pick up the extension.
    “I was quite serious about what I promised,” the man said. “Parks Commissioner Cowper will be shot to death sometime tomorrow night unless I receive five thousanddollars by noon. This is how I want it. Have you got a pencil?”
    “Mister, why’d you pick on
us?”
Kling asked.
    “For sentimental reasons,” the man said, and Kling could have sworn he was smiling on the other end of the line. “Pencil ready?”
    “Where do you expect us to get five thousand dollars?”
    “Entirely your problem,” the man said.
“My
problem is killing Cowper if you fail to deliver. Do you want this information?”
    “Go ahead,” Kling said, and glanced across the room to where Hawes sat hunched over the other phone. Hawes nodded.
    “I want the money in singles, need I mention they must be unmarked?”
    “Mister, do you know what extortion is?” Kling asked suddenly.
    “I know what it is,” the man said. “Don’t try keeping me on the line. I plan to hang up long before you can effect a trace.”
    “Do you know the penalty for extortion?” Kling asked, and the man hung up.
    “Son
of a bitch,” Kling said.
    “He’ll call back. We’ll be ready next time,” Hawes said. “We can’t trace it through automatic equipment, anyway.”
    “We can try.”
    “What’d
he say?”
    “He said ‘sentimental reasons.’”
    “That’s what I thought he said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Search me,” Hawes said, and went back to his desk, where he had spread a paper towel over the dropcloth, and where he had been drinking tea from a cardboard container and eating a cheese Danish before the telephone call interrupted him.
    He was a huge man, six feet two inches tall and weighing two hundred pounds, some ten pounds more than was comfortable for him. He had blue eyes and a square jaw with a cleft chin. His hair was red, except for a streak over his left temple where he had once been knifed and where the hair had curiously grown in white after the wound healed. He had a straight unbroken nose, and a good mouth with a wide lower lip. Sipping his tea, munching his Danish, he looked like a burly Captain Ahab who had somehow been trapped in a civil service job. A gunbutt protruded from the holster under his coat as he leaned over the paper towel and allowed the Danish crumbs to fall onto it. The gun was a big one, as befitted the size of the man, a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum, weighing 44½ ounces, and capable of putting a hole the size of a baseball in your head if you happened to cross the path of Cotton Hawes on a night when the moon was full. He was biting into the Danish when the telephone rang again.
    “87th Squad, Kling here.”
    “The penalty for extortion,” the man said, “is imprisonment not exceeding fifteen years. Any other questions?”
    “Listen …” Kling started.
    “You
listen,” the man said. “I want five thousand dollars in unmarked singles. I want them put into a metal lunch pail, and I want the pail taken to the third bench on the Clinton Street footpath into Grover Park. More later,” he said, and hung up.
    “We’re going to play Fits and Starts, I see,” Kling said to Hawes.
    “Yeah. Shall we call Pete?”
    “Let’s wait till we have the whole picture,” Kling said, and sighed and tried to get back to typing up his report. The phone did not ring again until eleven-twenty. When he lifted the receiver, he recognized the man’s voice at once.
    “To repeat,” the man said, “I want the lunch pail taken to the third bench on the Clinton Street footpath into Grover Park. If the bench is watched, if your man is not alone, the pail will not be picked up, and the commissioner will be killed.”
    “You want five grand left on a