Manhattan Noir - Lawrence Block [50]
“Jesus, Laura, we’ve gotta call the police. This—”
“Roger!”
“We’ve gotta tell somebody, no matter what. This is—”
“Don’t touch anything on the way out.”
He followed her. He touched nothing. In a dream. All in a dream. He saw Laura use her sleeve to wipe the outside doorknob after the door to the hall was closed behind them.
Out on the sidewalk, half a block away, they stopped, and Laura stooped low and vomited in a dark doorway.
Roger felt stronger than his wife now. At least he’d kept his food down. He pushed away a vivid image of the scene in the apartment kitchen and felt his own stomach roil. Swallowing a rising bitterness, he pulled his cell phone from his pocket.
“Don’t do that,” Laura said. “Not on a cell phone.”
“If we don’t call the police—”
“We’ll call them from home. We’ve got to talk. Got to talk with Davy. You know what will happen if we call the police. To all of us.”
“There’s no if about it. We’re going to call them. And maybe it should happen. Maybe we’ve all been partly to blame.”
“All of us?” She stared at him, astounded.
He thought for the first time that what had happened tonight, what they’d just seen, might have unhinged her mind. “All right,” he said, replacing the phone in his pocket. “We’ll go home. We’ll call from there.”
That seemed to mollify her, but he knew the subject hadn’t been dropped. They walked on to the subway stop and stood on the platform, which was now crowded. It must have been a while since the last train, so another should be due soon.
Even as he formulated the thought, a cool wash of air moved across the platform, pushed by an approaching train. A light appeared down the narrow, dark tunnel, and an increasing roar chased away all other sound. Everyone moved closer to where the speeding train would growl and squeal to a stop.
Roger was aware of Laura edging back behind him, which she did sometimes to protect her hairdo from the breeze of an approaching train.
When the train was no more than fifty feet away, he was surprised to feel her fists firm in the small of his back, and amazingly he was airborne, out and dropping, blinded by the brilliant light of the train, consumed by its thunder.
After the funeral, life, routine, settled back in. Roger had been dead less than six months, but Laura and Davy seldom spoke of him, and Laura and Roger’s wedding photo was tucked away in a box of his possessions that someday Laura would put out curbside with the trash.
Davy was doing better in school now. The Slicer murders were happening less frequently, as if the killer were maturing and learning restraint. There was no sense of urgency about the murders now in the media. In fact, amidst all the ongoing mayhem of Manhattan, they were hardly news at all.
Laura rarely patronized dry cleaners or laundromats, choosing instead to do most of the family wash herself. She would spend hours in the basement laundry room, scrubbing diligently, removing stains, scrubbing them again and again to make sure they were removed.
Some of the stains never completely came clean, but they were hardly noticeable, so she didn’t mind them. She didn’t see that they made much difference.
FREDDIE PRINZE IS MY GUARDIAN ANGEL
BY LIZ MARTÍNEZ
Washington Heights
Freddie Prinze had been dead for four years when he spoke to me the first time. I was in my room in my family’s apartment in Washington Heights, saying the Rosary, when he appeared. At first, I thought the dark spot on my wall was a shadow, and I closed my eyes tightly, trying to concentrate with fervor. I was preparing for my confirmation, and I knew that the ability to pray without distraction from the outside world was important.
He must have gotten impatient waiting for me to finish because he cleared his throat. I jumped at the sound, but for some reason I wasn’t afraid to see him standing in my room in the fading January light. He winked at me. “Hey, mamacita,” he said. “What’s goin’ on?”
I wasn’t really sure how to talk to a celebrity, but he was just slouching against the wall, the way I’d seen him do in