3 • REPAIRMAN JACK
They weren't making muggers like they used to.
Jack had been trolling for about an hour now and this was the second he'd found—or rather had found him. Jack was wearing his Hard Rock Cafe sweatshirt, acid-washed jeans, and an I ♥ New York visor. The compleat tourist. A piece of raw steak dangling before a hungry wolf.
When he'd spotted the guy tailing him, he'd wandered off the pavement and down into this leafy glade. Off to his right the mercury-vapor glow from Central Park West backlit the trees. Far behind his assailant he could make out the year-round Christmas lights on the trees that flanked the Tavern-on-the-Green.
Jack studied the guy facing him. A tall, hulking figure in the shadows, maybe twenty-five years, about six-feet, pushing two-hundred pounds, giving him an inch and thirty pounds on Jack. He had stringy brown hair bleached blond on top, all combed to the side so it hung over his right eye; the left side of his head above the ear and below the part had been buzzcut down to the scalp—Veronica Lake after a run-in with a lawn mower. Pale, pimply skin and a skull dangling on a chain from his left ear. Black boots, baggy black pants, black shirt, flngerless black leather gloves, one of which was wrapped around the handle of a big Special Forces knife, the point angled toward Jack's belly.
"You talking to me, Rambo?" Jack said.
"Yeah." The guy's voice was nasal. He twitched and sniffed, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. "I'm talkin' to you. You see anybody else around?"
Jack glanced around. "No. I guess if there were, you wouldn't have stopped me here."
"Gimme your wallet."
Jack looked him in the eye. This was the part he liked.
"No."
The guy jerked back as if he'd been slapped, then stared at Jack, obviously unsure of how to take that.
"What you say?"
"I said no. En-oh. What's the matter? You never heard that word before?"
Probably hadn't. Probably grew up in a home—"household" would no doubt be a more accurate term—where the parents were mere cohabitants, present now and then in body but hardly ever in spirit, who had endowed their offspring with their DNA and little else. A household in which no one gave enough of a damn to say no. Saying no meant you had to care about a kid. Saying no and meaning it meant you had to follow it up, be consistent. And that took effort. Or maybe he grew up in a place where one or both of his adult cohabitants beat the shit out of him every time he turned around, just for the hell of it, whether he was good or bad, till he didn't know which end was up.
You needed a license to drive a car, own a gun, dig a ditch, or sell hot dogs from a pushcart, but you didn't need a license to have a kid. The rationale for all the licenses was that those things affected public safety. Yet someone had popped this guy out a quarter of a century ago so he could spend his childhood being beaten or ignored or both, so he could grow up to spend his days sucking crack and his nights rolling people in Central Park. He was a loaded weapon. And that affected public safety.
So why didn't you have to have a license to be a parent?
Didn't matter where he started out—upper crust, middle class, poverty row—he'd left wherever he'd been, whether it was Boise or the Bronx, and had come here, to the Park, to be a menace, a walking time bomb waiting to go off. Didn't matter if he'd been abused or neglected as a kid, that was the past and Jack couldn't do anything about that. What did matter was that the guy was facing Jack here and now in the Park, and he was armed, dangerous, and lethal. That was what Jack had to deal with.
"You crazy?" the guy said, voice rising. "Gimme your wallet or I cut you. You wanna get cut?"
"No," Jack said. "Don't want to get cut." He reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. "I left my wallet home. Will this do?"
The guy's eyes all but bulged. His free hand darted out.
"Give it!"
Jack shoved it back into his pocket.
"No."
"You crazy fucker—!"
As the guy lunged at Jack, jabbing the bladepoint at his belly, Jack spun away, giving him plenty of room to miss. Not that he was worried about any surprises from the guy. Most of his type had wasted muscles and sluggish reflexes. But you had to respect that saw-toothed knife. It was a mean sucker.
The guy made a clumsy turn and came at Jack again, slashing high this time, at his face. Jack pulled his head back, grabbed the wrist behind the knife as it went by, got a two-handed grip, and twisted. Hard. The guy shouted with pain as he was jerked into an armlock with his weapon flattened between his shoulder blades. He kicked backward, landing a bootheel on one of Jack's shins. Jack winced with pain, gritted his teeth, and kicked the mugger's feet out from under him. As the guy went down on his face, Jack yanked the imprisoned arm back straight and rammed his right sneaker behind the shoulder, pinning him.
And then he stopped and counted to ten.
Jack knew it was at times like these that he was in danger of losing control. The blackness was there on the edges, beckoning him, urging him to go crazy on this guy, to take out all his accumulated anger, frustration, and rage on this one unlucky jerk.
Plenty accumulated during day to day life in this place. And every day it seemed to get a little worse.
The city had become ungovernable. Hardly anyone seemed to have any pride anymore, or possessed enough self-esteem to think anything was beneath them. Rip off an old lady's handbag or a toddler's candy bar. No item too small, no deed too low. Everything was up for grabs. Anything was okay if you got away with it. That was the operating ethic. "Mine" was anything I could take and keep. If you put something down and left it unguarded, it became mine if I could snatch it and make off with it. The civilized people were on the run. Those who could afford to were leaving, others were withdrawing, tightening their range of activities, limiting their hours on the street, in public. And those unfortunates who had to be out on the streets and on the subways, they were fodder. And they knew it.
On the way to the Park tonight Jack had passed car after car with "No Radio" signs in the windows. Every street was flanked with them. It was symptomatic of the city-dwellers' response to the predators. With no faith in City Hall's ability to make the streets safe, they took one more step in the direction they'd been heading over the past couple of decades—they retreated. They removed the radio when they parked their car and took it with them into the steel-doored, barred-windowed fortresses they called home. One more piece of ground surrendered. They'd pulled all their belongings in from the street a generation ago; after having the shrubs repeatedly dug up and carted off from the fronts of their apartment houses, they'd stopped planting them, and they'd chained—chained—the trunks of the few larger ones that remained.
Jack was fed up with retreating. He'd had it up to here with retreating. And when one of these creeps got within reach, like this doughy lump of dung, he wanted to stomp him into the earth, leaving nothing but a wet stain on the ground when he was finished. So when he felt that blackness rising, he did a ten count and willed it back down to wherever it lived. There was a thin line here, one he tip-toed along, one he tried to keep from crossing over. Spend too much time on the far side of that line and you became like them.
Jack let out his breath and looked down at the mugger.
He was whining.
"Hey, man! Can't you take a joke? I was only—"
"Drop the knife."
"Sure, sure."
The bare fingers opened, the big blade slipped from the gloved palm and clattered to the earth.
"Okay? I dropped it, okay? Now let me up."
Jack released his arm but kept a foot on his back.