For the only time he can ever remember, there’s nobody on his stoop. Home free! He backs up the stoop, dragging the carriage by its handlebars up the four stone steps and into the vestibule of his tenement, then down the long, carpeted hallway to the door to the basement stairway, and parks it there in the dark. No one can see him reach in and take the doll in its frilly dress into his arms.
“Be good now, baby,” he cautions, then lays it back down in the carriage, covering it, head and all, with the pink blanket so no one can see.
He climbs the four flights of stairs, holding tight to the wooden banister worn smooth by generations of hands, all the way to the top where he lives with Nan and Aunt May. Nan’s his grandmother and Aunt May’s mother and his father’s mother. He knows this because they told him, and his home will always be with them as long as he’s a good boy, and his mother drinks and his father’s a whoremaster. He does not remember his mother because she dropped him off when he was eight months and didn’t come back. Nan keeps house and Aunt May goes to work at the phone company. And Aunt May is the boss of all of them, Nan says when Aunt May can’t hear her. There’s an old dog named Dinah lives with them, it’s Aunt May’s dog, it won’t let him walk it. He reaches up for the doorknob and goes inside.
“Young man!” Aunt May calls from the parlor. He goes in to her. She’s in her housecoat, sitting in the arthritis chair by the window. Nan calls it that because Aunt May has that, and sits in it all the time. Nan’s not there, she went to the store. He sees the open window and pillow on the sill, the sheer curtain wafting in and out on the summer breeze, before dropping his eyes to the little fox terrier sitting alongside the chair, studying him, alert as if also waiting for him to account.
“I found it,” he says, staring at the dog who stares back, weighing his words with beady, angry eyes. Then, curling its upper lip to show fangs, growls from deep down in its little chest.
“Where did you find it?” Aunt May snaps.
“In the schoolyard.”
“Liar!”
“She gave it to me.”
Aunt May makes him push it all the way back. As he runs the gauntlet, he again keeps his head down, eyes to the pavement. The little girl is still there, bawlin’, with her mother and a bunch of little girls. The other little girls are bawlin’ too; he has no idea why. When the little girl sees him, she stops, runs to the carriage, snatches up her doll and hugs it. But when Aunt May holds him by the scruff of the neck in front of the little girl and tells her to give him a good slap right across his face, she starts bawlin’ again. Staked out by bloodthirsty hostiles, his face burns under their piteous stares. In sight of the Stone Saints across the street giving him the ass, he prays with all his might that all the windows in all the houses on every block be nailed shut.
Bottom of the sixth
by Alan Gordon
Rego Park
Plaster dust fell lazily through the air. He watched it idly, betting on which finger it would land. His right hand was dominating his field of vision at the moment. His right hand, and the dust that drifted down from the crappy plasterboard someone had once used to patch up the ceiling, so old and crumbled that a loud noise could loosen it.
Like, say, a gunshot.
The dust fell on his ring and middle fingers, which twitched slightly when it hit them. That was a good thing, he decided. He moved the other three fingers, then rotated his hand on the floor where it rested. Even better. He was falling very much in love with the plaster dust, with his working fingers, with the hand and the wrist that turned it. He did a quick inventory of the rest of his body. Everything seemed accounted for, or at least attached. Something hurt around the right side of his rib cage.
Let’s try breathing, he thought. Haven’t done that for a while.
He sucked in air, and started to cough violently. The thing that hurt in his rib cage, which apparently had only been kidding before, began to throb badly. He used the right hand that he still liked so much to poke cautiously at the spot. It was tender and painful. But it wasn’t bleeding. Protruding slightly from the inside of the vest was the mashed tip of a bullet.
Michaels pushed himself up from the floor, pointing his gun unsteadily in front of him.
“You okay?” asked Carter, who was getting to his feet.
“Basically, yeah,” said Michaels. “Might have cracked a rib.”
Carter looked at Michaels’s vest, which had a neat entry hole on the front.
“Damn, those things actually work,” he said. “Who knew?”
“Not that guy,” said Michaels, pointing in front of him.
The man lying on the floor was groaning weakly, two bullet holes in his back and a pool of blood seeping out from under him.
“Shot his own man in the back,” observed Carter. “Just because he got in the way. That’s cold.”
A pile of blue uniforms burst through the door, guns drawn.
“Oh good, now you’re here,” wheezed Michaels. “Tell me you got him.”
“Got who?” asked one of the uniforms.
“Wasn’t someone supposed to be covering the fire escape?”
“Yeah. Merck. He’s still out there. He didn’t see anything.”
Michaels and Carter looked at each other.
“Two-bedroom apartment,” said Michaels. “There’s the door, which was us, and the fire escape, which is Merck. Where is the fucker?”
One of the uniforms called for EMS. The two detectives and the other three fanned out across the living room. Carter took a deep breath, then kicked open a bedroom door. He waited two beats. Nothing happened.
“Portillo, if you’re in there, you know you ain’t getting away,” he called. “Make this easy. No one got hurt.”
“Wait a second,” protested Michaels.
“Shut up, I’m working,” said Carter. He barged through the door, a uniform close behind.
“Clear!” they called a second later.
Carter came out and looked at the second bedroom.
“Portillo, I am not playing!” he shouted. “Don’t get any stupider on me!”
There was no response. Carter sighed, then kicked the door in.
“Fuck me, it’s empty,” he said, peering inside. “Guy did a Houdini. Where’d he go?”
“Hey, detective,” called a uniform from the first bedroom. “Take a look at this.”
They all crowded in. There was a floorboard that wasn’t quite flush with the rest. The uniform pulled, and a section of floor came up. The hole underneath was ringed by a dozen brick-sized packages wrapped in layers of plastic.
“Crawl space,” said Carter, shining a flashlight into it. “Looks like it goes all the way to the elevator shaft. He’s probably gotten to the basement by now.”
“Not one of our finer days,” said Michaels.
The EMS crew came in and went to work on the wounded man. Michaels took his first deep breath, regretting it immediately. He pried the bullet out of his vest and tossed it to one of the uniforms.
“Bag this,” he ordered. “Bag the coke. Get Evidence Retrieval in here for prints. I’m gonna ride along with the Swiss guy.”
“I thought he was Latino,” said the uniform. “How do you figure he’s Swiss?”
“’Cause of all the holes in him,” said Michaels.
The ambulance screeched up the ramp to the emergency room at Queens General, with Carter’s Corvette pulling up right behind them, his bubble light flashing on top. Two RMPs brought up the rear.