back down. Ron started dragging Elena toward the edge of the platform. I couldn’t make him out except as a bundle of darkness moving along the paler sheen of the concrete. I forced myself to follow him, to fight down the spinning in my head, to place the muzzle in his back and pull the trigger.
A yard from the edge Ron collapsed, falling on top of Elena. I had never killed a man before, but I knew from the way his body lay, crumpled as a dark blob on the concrete deck, that he was dead. I couldn’t bring myself to walk close enough to check-but what would I have done even if he had been alive? My hands were still cuffed and the hoist was somewhere below us.
My aunt began thrashing about, trying to move away from him. That finally brought me over to the body. Even a yard from the edge of the deck my head swam, I shut my eyes and managed to roll Ron from my aunt’s torso, I brought her with me to the center of the platform.
Behind us the crane loomed up. The pale light of the midnight sky glinted from its long swaying arm. I thought of the hole underneath, going down thirty stories to the bottom of the elevator shaft, and shuddered.
Ernie was still alive. I’d shattered his shoulder. He was losing enough blood to want to get help, but he told me there wasn’t any way to bring the hoist up myself. Ernie wasn’t inclined to talk much. I tried asking him about his relations with Boots and MacDonald and why he and Ron did so much for them, but he told me I was a nosy interfering bitch and to mind my own business before it was too late. At the same time he was peeved with me for not climbing down to the ground-he told me they nailed ladders into the openings where fire stairs would eventually be poured.
“You could at least try to get some help,” he complained. “You shot me-you owe me something.”
“Ernie, sweetie, I shot you because you were going to throw me over the side of the building. I’m not climbing down thirty stories of ladders in the dark, specially not with my hands not working.”
At that Wunsch cursed some more, this time at his partners. It seems Furey had given Cray the key to my handcuffs-he’d been supposed to undo me right before I went over-they didn’t want to run the risk of not getting to me before some passerby did. “Now look at that jerk. Takes off and leaves us alone up here to die.”
“I thought you were a real macho kind of guy,” I said disapprovingly. “John Wayne would never have lain around pissing at how rotten his pals were just because he’d taken a bullet.”
Ernie swore at me, then asked me to take off my sweatshirt to wrap him up, he was getting so cold with blood loss.
“Ernie, I can’t get it over my hands. Remember? They’re locked together. Anyway, I don’t want to hang around up here all night with nothing but a bra between me and the cold cruel wind.”
Ernie flung a few more unimaginative epithets at me, then lapsed into silence. I wished Elena would too. Playing a heroine’s role for once in her life, my aunt grew loquacious. She went on as though shot full of pentobarbital, talking about her childhood, her quarrels with her mother, what Tony-my father-said when he cut all the hair off her dolls when she was eight.
After a while I thought I might scream at the emotional inconsequential torrent. Ernie found it so intolerable, he demanded I shut her up.
“She’s driving me round the bend with that drivel,” he announced. In his own living room this probably got instant results. I could picture LeAnn giggling and saying “You’re so cute, Ernie,” but taking her offending friends or children or mother off to the kitchen. I wondered what LeAnn and Clara would do now.
“She’s not doing anything to you, Ernie. Listen to her- it’ll take your mind off your troubles.” I asked Elena to repeat a particularly tangled narrative involving my uncle Peter, a dog, and the neighbor’s flower garden.
I don’t know how much time passed that way when I heard the hoist returning. It can’t have been long, but in the dark, surrounded by the wounded and the babbling, it felt like hours.
I persuaded Elena to stop talking and move with me behind one of the girders. “Just be quiet, Auntie. They may have come back to shoot us and we don’t want to give them any help finding us.”
“Sure, Vicki. You know what you’re doing. Whatever you say. I was never so scared in my life as I was when that boy with the gorgeous eyes picked me up at the liquor store-”
I put a hand over her mouth. “Shut up, darling, for now. You can tell me about it later.”
The hoist groaned to a stop. My hands were thick with cold, I was having trouble remembering which was the right hand and which the left. I counted painfully in my head, trying to figure out how many shots were in the clip. I tried to subdue the tremor in my right hand so I could make all of them count.
I waited for the noise of doors opening or feet on concrete. When a minute had gone by with no sound, I peered around the edge of the pillar. I couldn’t see the box-like car inside the frame. Over the wind in the girders and Elena’s nervous whispers, I strained to hear. Finally I moved away from her in the dark, ignoring her piteous cry.
To my left I suddenly saw a bobbing point of light. I moved toward it cautiously, keeping my weight on my back foot with each step until I was certain I hadn’t come to some unexpected hole.
The light flickered again and went out. Ernie had mentioned a ladder in the stairwell opening. This must be Cray or some other confederate hoping to climb up and surprise us from behind.
My eyes were so accustomed to the dark that I saw the stairwell opening loom in front of me as a darker patch in the black night. I lay on my stomach and watched until the black changed again, a blob crawling up the side to the top. When a hand emerged on the deck I smashed the butt of the Smith & Wesson into it with all my strength.
Cray cried out but leaned against the ladder and brought his other hand up and fired. The bullet went wide in the night but I slid back, away from the opening, as he hoisted himself one-handed to the deck.
I aimed at the dark shape in front of me and fired. Lying awkwardly as I was, the recoil wrenched my right shoulder. I fell over but managed to hang on to the gun. Light shone on me, blinding me, and I rolled instinctively as he shot.
Somehow I managed to get to my feet and around behind one of the girders. Cray kept the light on for a moment but realized when I fired again that it made him as much a target as it did me. When the light went out I dropped to my knees and elbows and scooted to the next girder. I stopped there and listened. Elena had started talking again, in an undertone, the sound just audible above the wind.
“You can get the old woman, Cray,” Ernie called in the thread of a voice. “She’s jabbering away over here. You can find her by the babble.”
Elena whimpered but couldn’t make herself shut up.
“You still there, Wunsch?” Cray shouted back. “Keep the faith-I’ll have you down in no time.”
Cray started circling around behind me in the dark. I couldn’t keep track of where he was. I was tired and disoriented and I clung to my girder without trying to figure out his next move. Suddenly he gave a cry, a scream of such panic that my heart thudded violently.
“What happened? Where are you?” Ernie called out.
From the middle of the deck I could hear Cray screaming, his voice muffled, coming from a distance. He had fallen down the opening for the crane, but the safety nets around it had saved him.
46
On the Scales of Justice
I have a hard time remembering what remained of the night. I managed somehow to climb down the slats connecting the deck to the floor below. My arms trembled so violently that I don’t know how I made it-more by will than by muscle. And I got the hoist up, after a painful round of trial and error. It wasn’t easy to run at the best of times; with one hand it was pure bloody hell. And I got Elena and Ernie into the cage and lowered us down to the ground.
Furey was waiting there but he’d been joined by some uniformed cops. A passing blue-and-white had heard the gunshots and swung over to the site. They were keeping Furey company until the hoist came down. I spent a good chunk of what was left of the night in a lockup at Eleventh Street-I was in cuffs and Furey persuaded the uniformed boys that I’d resisted arrest.
Furey went off to the hospital to get his knee attended to. He had bravely stayed at the construction site in
