Speak of the Devil Read Free

know,” I said, “I’m the good guy here.”
    “Sit. Back.”
    I sat back. We crossed to Ninth Avenue and passed a restaurant called Zen Palate. Margo loves that place. There are three of them in the city, the closest one to her being the one on Broadway in the mid-Seventies. She’s dragged me there a couple times. I like half the stuff I’ve tried there with her. The other half tastes like cardboard.
    Margo.
    With all that had just happened, it was hard for me to imagine that Margo could still just be sitting up on her pillows, dressed in her oversize Rangers jersey, waiting for me to come back with the bagels. But maybe she was. Margo can balance on the precipice of a moment better than anyone I know.
    The car hit a pothole, and my head slammed hard against the roof. I tallied no fewer than four ways I could have sued the city. A minute later, Gumdrop pulled off the headset. He turned to his partner. “We’re supposed to get a bag.”
    The driver gave him a look. “A bag?”
    “Yeah. That’s what they said. We’ve got to cover his whole head.”
    The driver looked at me in his mirror. “You hear that?”
    I nodded. “I heard. You’re supposed to cover my whole head. Whatever the hell that means.”
    We hit another pothole. The driver swore softly, then glanced into the mirror again. “What’s your name?”
    “Malone,” I said. “Fritz Malone.”
    The driver nodded. “You prefer paper or plastic?”
     
     
    AFTER FETCHING THE BAG (PAPER) FROM A MARKET ON FORTY-EIGHTH, the cops drove to a spot under the West Side Highway, just north of the U.S.S.
Intrepid
. I could make out the tail wing of one of the jet fighters on the rear of the aircraft carrier. Before they put the bag over my head, the black guy blindfolded me. He was leaning in the back door, one knee on the seat. His partner stood behind him, looking around anxiously. Gumdrop looked pale. I’d have given him a cocky wink right before getting the blindfold, just to make him a little more nervous, but to tell God’s honest truth, I wasn’t feeling too happy myself.
    Something was seriously wrong here. I had lifted a service revolver from a freshly murdered policeman, given chase to the shooter, and discharged three bullets from the police revolver, striking the shooter once in the shoulder. Taking me into custody was the right thing to do. But pulling the squad car over beneath the West Side Highway and putting a blindfold on me, that wasn’t the right thing to do. The fat trails of sweat on Gumdrop’s fleshy face told me that he knew it, too.
    “What the hell is this?” I snapped as my world went black.
    “Down on the floor.”
    The black guy took hold of my shoulders and guided me into position, semifetal, my ear against the hump. The cops got back into the front seat. The engine fired up. They spoke not a word.
    This was all wrong.
    Wherever it was I was being taken, the driver didn’t take the direct route. Most of Manhattan is a grid. You go north–south, you go east–west. In the Village, it gets all screwy, as well as down in Chinatown and in the Wall Street area. But where we were, midtown, everything is straight streets and ninety-degree turns. From the floor of the car, I tried to track our course, but after several sets of turns that could only suggest redundancies and doubling back, I was lost. Which I assumed was the point.
    I thought again about Margo. By now even Margo would have moved off the bed. She’d have heard all the sirens coming up from near the park, and she’d have flipped on her television. She’d be one of the many millions of New Yorkers who were now glued to their sets. What was I saying? Not just New Yorkers, people all across the country. The network jinglemeisters were probably scrambling right now to lay down little five-second tracks in just the right tone: solemn yet provocatively urgent. The graphics people would have worked even faster. Their work was probably already up on the screen, blending