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above or below. Mr. Hooper on nineteen wound up with Miss Cooper s pizza more
times than he cared to, and, as Cooper, I was regularly confused with Kupler
on twenty-three.
I was daydreaming as I removed my keys from my jacket pocket and opened the
door. Zac was sitting upright as though she had been waiting for my arrival.
Her left paw covered a sheet of paper, which must have been slipped under the
door.
I picked up the plain white page, which had huge red letters scrawled across
it in a childlike hand, and stared at the words.  CAREFUL. IT S NOT ALL BLACK
AND WHITE. DEADLY MISTAKE.
My heart raced as I bolted the door behind me. Zac stayed at my heels as I
ran to the phone and dialed Lieutenant Peterson s number at the small office
within the squad room. It rang in dead air. No one was around to pick it up.
My watch showed ten-thirty as I went to the intercom and called down to Victor
on the front door.
 That guy you let up here, the deliveryman? Have you seen him go out?
 Yeah, he came out of the back elevator while you was on your way up, I
guess. Still had a bag in his hand. Said he had the wrong building off by a
block. I shoulda checked that, Miss Cooper, sorry.
I slammed down the phone and sat on the sofa. No point spoiling Chapman s
foreign affair at this hour or bothering Battaglia until morning. The reason I
paid the ridiculously high rent I did each month was for the security of a
luxury building. Someone was obviously trying to put a scare into me. He was
succeeding.
16
COURT OFFICERS ON THEIR HANDS ANDknees were backing out of the row of sickly
looking shrubs that lined the front of the Criminal Courts Building when I got
out of the cab at eight-thirty on Monday morning. It was a well-kept secret
that one of the best places in Manhattan to find a loaded gun was behind those
pathetic bushes, some civil servant s ludicrous notion of urban landscaping.
Directly inside the main doors of the building were groups of metal detectors
set up to screen everyone who passed through. Each day hundreds of present and
future felons arrived in the halls of justice to appear for the calendar call
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of their cases. Many of them were too dense to realize, at least on the first
visit, that they would have to be searched and scanned. Occasionally,
throughout the day and night, you could watch men and women mount the stairs,
then turn back and step behind the scrawny growth to deposit guns, knives, and
assorted homemade weapons.
Those who entered via the front but failed to anticipate they might be
leaving the building through the back door in a green bus with caged windows,
courtesy of the Department of Correction regularly deposited their debris
behind the greenery. Two or three court officers who swept the area several
times a day retrieved the overflow.
 Find anything good? I called out to Jimmy O Mara as he stood up and dropped
some items into a leather bag.
 Two automatics and a box cutter. Slow night, Alex.
I ran into Sarah at the bagel cart. We bought our coffee and went upstairs
together to open the office. Chapman had beat me to it and was sitting in my
chair, feet up on the desk, laughing hysterically into the phone. He slammed
down the receiver when we entered and stood up, his voice booming in his best
imitation of a television announcer.
 No more calls, ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner!
 What are you talking about?
 The hospital follies have reached a new height and Detective Forester may
have snagged the big one.
I winced at the idea that Maureen had been in any danger while I was enjoying
my evening with Drew. Sarah and I spoke over each other as we asked what
happened to Mo.
 Nothing, nothing, nothing. She s fine. Had the husband and kids with her all
day. Right before it s time for lights out, the nurse comes in with an order
to give Maureen an enema before bedtime. From her doctor.
 Mo knows it s not possible  cause her doctor s out of town until today. The
R.N. was insistent, so she and Maureen battled back and forth for twenty
minutes while the broad goes to get her supervisor.
 Meantime, half an hour later Maureen s phone rings. Man introduces himself
as Dr. Haven. Says he s covering for the night and her doctor left orders for
a soapsuds enema. Mo pretends to go along with him. Says she just had it. Then
the guy starts asking her all kinds of weird questions, telling her to
describe how it felt I mean, he wanted detail.
Sarah shook her head and eased herself into one of the chairs.
 While Mo has him on the phone, she signals the guys on the monitor to trap
the call. Little does this idiot know he s talking to the one patient who s
wired up. She jerks the guy around for eight minutes, he thanks her for the
information and hangs up. New technology allows us to literally trap the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]