A Piece of the Action

month.

The bedroom was dark when he came in, but he could see well enough to know that she was in his bed. And that her clothing was draped over the back of a chair. He reached out to put the cup on the bureau and missed by a foot. The cup landed on the wood floor and splattered hot coffee over his right foot. He didn’t notice it any more then he’d noticed the punch that’d broken his nose.

“I love you, Stanley,” she whispered. “And I don’t want to wait anymore. Not another minute. Even if you do look like Frankenstein come back from the dead.”

Moodrow touched a finger to the tape covering his nose. He thought about taking it off, then realized that what he was going to have to take off was his bathrobe. With Kathleen watching.

“I thought the girl was supposed to do the striptease,” he said.

Kathleen giggled. “Take it off. Take it off.”

“All right, I will.”

Moodrow sat on the edge of the bed and slowly drew the covers back. Kathleen, surprised, started to cover her breasts with her hands, then fell back on the pillows. Her breath was shallow, her eyes half-closed. Moodrow laid the fingers of his right hand on her throat, then slid them gently down her throat, over her breasts and along her smooth, flat belly. When his fingers crossed the dark triangle of hair and dropped into the moist flesh below, she moaned softly and her legs came apart.

“Be gentle, Stanley,” she whispered. “Don’t hurt me.”

But he knew he was going to hurt her. Of all the dirty tricks nature had laid on human beings, this was the dirtiest. There was no painless way, short of surgery, for a woman to lose her virginity. But that didn’t mean there couldn’t be pleasure, too. Moodrow had been thinking about it for a long time and he’d already decided what he was going to do. If she let him. If she didn’t withdraw from what she had to see as a perversion.

He let his lips and tongue follow the line his finger had traced, though he took much longer, playing with her nipples and her belly and the soft hollow spot on the inside of her thigh. Her milky white skin reddened until it seemed like her whole body was blushing, but the deep, almost guttural sound coming from her throat indicated something other than embarrassment. At some point, she began to call his name. Repeating it until the single word became lost in a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a scream.

Moodrow sat up on the bed and yanked off his bathrobe and his underwear. Kathleen, he knew, was as ready as a virgin, male or female, could be. Her eyes were joyous (if somewhat glazed) and her body was completely open to him. It was the perfect moment to enfold her in his arms, to gently lift her legs …

And that’s exactly what he would have done. If he hadn’t put the Trojan on backwards. If he hadn’t ripped it and had to fumble in the nightstand for another one. By the time he managed to open the foil and get it on, the glaze in Kathleen’s eyes had disappeared.

“I’ve never seen one of those before,” she said.

“That makes two things you’ve never seen before.”

She ignored the humor, reaching out to take his erection in her hand. He would have expected her to be reluctant, but she seemed more curious than naive. She drew him into her, opening for him, accepting his thrusts until he began to call her name, until he was lost in his own fire.

By the time Moodrow finally rolled over to one side of the narrow bed, they were both covered with sweat. He knew that he should take her in his arms, that she needed to be reassured, but somewhere along the line he must have smacked his nose, because it hurt like hell.

“Are you all right, Stanley?”

“My nose,” he answered. “I think I broke my nose again.”

He opened his eyes to find her propped up on one arm. Her breasts were inches from his face. Suddenly, the realization that he would marry this woman, that he’d spend his life with her, rushed over him. What he felt was grateful.

“I love you, Kathleen,” he said, ignoring his nose.

“I love you too, Stanley.” She leaned down to kiss him gently on the lips. “We’re going to have a good life together. A great life.”

Six

January 7

The sergeant at the duty desk, Stefan Kirsch, grinned from ear to ear when Stanley Moodrow walked into the 7th Precinct.

“Jesus, Stanley,” he said, “I thought you won the fight.”

“That’s just a rumor, Sarge. The real truth is that only the doctor won.”

Moodrow felt awkward coming into the stationhouse in a suit and tie. He’d been proud enough when he’d examined himself in the privacy of his bedroom, but now he felt almost naked. He felt like a civilian.

“Well, congratulations, anyway. You deserve it.”

“Thanks, Sarge.”

There were several other uniforms in the outer lobby, all cops Moodrow had been working with for the past five years. They, too, greeted him like the celebrity he was supposed to be. One, James Curley, walked over and ran his fingers along Moodrow’s lapel.

“Where’d ya get the rag, Stanley? Robert Hall?”

“Robert Hall? If you wanna say I’m cheap, why not try S. Klein’s?”

“Alright, S. Klein’s.”

“Jimmy, the suit’s custom-made.” Moodrow wasn’t lying, even if he’d left out the part about going down to Robert Hall and not finding a suit big enough to fit him. He didn’t mention the part about the tailor, Larry Chin, working out of his apartment on Division Street, either. Or the one about the bolt of cloth being a factory second from a mill in South Carolina.

“I’m only kiddin’ ya, Stanley.” He took Moodrow’s hand and shook it. “Congratulations on the Gold Shield. Lookin’ at your face, I’d have to say you deserve it.”

“That seems to be the general opinion.”

The needling was just what Moodrow expected. After all, he (in their minds, at least) had been fighting for every cop in the Department and for the cops in the 7th in particular. That was why they’d come to watch two men beat the crap out of each other. Because they somehow shared in the victory.

“I’ll see you later, Jimmy. I gotta report upstairs.”

For Stanley Moodrow, walking up those stairs was a far greater reward than having the referee lift his arm. Uniformed cops almost never left the first floor of the 7th Precinct. The second story contained the captain’s and the lieutenants’ offices, as well as the detectives’ squad room. Going up there was like being given a day pass to Mount Olympus.

Now, he’d be walking up these stairs every day. The squad room would be a second home, the other detectives a second family. Which is why he was hoping for a big hello from those detectives who happened to be at their desks. What he got, on the other hand, was ignored.

The 7th Precinct squad room (like every other detectives’ squad room in New York City) was nothing more than a large room crowded with wooden desks. Ancient wooden desks. Desks blackened with decades of grime and covered with unfinished paperwork. The telephones were so old, the numbers had worn off the dials.

Moodrow picked his way between the desks. He knew a few of the detectives from one or another of his fights, but even the familiar faces kept their backs turned to him. Of course, there was always the possibility that this was the way they treated all newly appointed detectives, third grade. Maybe their studied indifference was a kind of initiation rite, like fraternity hazing.