True Detective

'It's five miles!'

'I had to come. You see, I knew if I come to see you fight, you win.'

'But you hate fighting. Ma.'

'Sitting home waiting, I hate. Besides, I figure if you can take the punishment, I can take it.'

'Anything you say, Ma. Nate, come over here!'

I went over. 'Hello, Mrs. Ross. Why don't you let me drive you home? You can make an exception on riding on the Shabbes. Sick people do it.'

'Aren't you the smart Shabbes goy? Do I look sick?'

Barney said, 'Nate's right. Ma. You'll collapse or something, and then you will be sick. Let me drive you.'

'No.'

'All right.' Barney said. 'I'll walk home with you.'

Barney's West Side pals, listening to all this, protested: what about the party?'

'I'll be there later.' Barney promised them. 'First I got to walk my girl home.'

And he did; all five miles, with his Ma on his arm.

Or so he said; I didn't walk along with 'em. I wasn't crazy, and I wasn't near as Jewish.

I went upstairs and the windup fight was over and folks were wandering up the ramps out into the lobby. They were all wound up. still caught up in the Ross-Canzoneri bout, some of them arguing the decision, most of them saying it was a fight they'd tell their grandkids about, and as I was going down the ramp into the gray cement lobby. I saw him.

Dipper Cooney.

He was dressed like a college kid: sweater, slacks- that was his game. That was how he turned looking twenty when he was nearly twice that into a living; red-haired, freckle-faced, friendly, he did not look like a pickpocket.

But brother, was he.

I moved through the crowd as quickly as I could without attracting attention or getting swung at; Dipper was following a guy and studying him to make the hook, and I had time.

Then about ten feet from him I got overanxious, and pushed past a guy, who pushed back and said. 'Hey! Watch it, bub!'

And Dipper turned, and saw me.

And recognized me.

To him, I supposed, I was still just a pickpocket detail cop. And he could see I was moving toward him, fast enough, furious enough, to have caused a commotion (goddamnit!), and he started pushing through the crowd himself, and was out the door and into the starry night.

I followed him, and he left an angry trail of people, as the fans in front of the stadium, lingering, chatting about the great fight, were in both our ways, and got pushed out of it, and we had to be well away from the stadium and into the residential district surrounding it before either of us could really run.

And one thing a pickpocket can do is run.

Cooney, who'd kept his weight down to help with the college kid pose, was light, small, wiry, and he had half a block on me.

But I wanted him bad.

I ran full throttle after him. feeling like a track star, and I shouted, 'Cooney! I'm not the cops anymore!'

He kept running.

So did I.

'Cooney!' I yelled. 'I just want to talk, goddamnit,' and that last was just to myself; my side was starting to ache. I never ran this fast, this far, before.

The neighborhood was mostly two-flats and row houses, and it was almost midnight, so we were alone on our sidewalk track, nothing, nobody in our way, and I began to cut the distance, and then he was just out in front of me and I threw myself at him, tackled the son of a bitch, and we skidded, skinned ourselves on the sidewalk and landed in a pile.

I didn't have a gun on me, but that was okay: pickpockets rarely cany guns, as it takes up stash space and weights 'em down. And I was bigger than this forty-year-old college kid, and I crawled on top of him like a rapist and grabbed the front of his shirt and the two green eyes in the midst of that freckle-face looked up at me round as the colored kid's in Our Gang.

'What the fuck you want. Heller?' he managed. He was panting. So was 1.1 hoped my breath was better than his. 'You ain't no goddamn cop no more.'

'You know about that?'

'I can read. I seen the papers.'

'Then why'd you run?'

He thought about it. 'Force of habit. Let me up.'

'No.'