The punch came out of the blinding light, smashing into her left ear and sending her reeling against a table, overturning it.
Hobbs was on her so fast she didn’t have time to think about the pain. His initial punches were wild. Then his fist landed on her ribs, which were still perhaps cracked from her last beating. That pain jolted through her, and she was sitting on the carpet, unable to breathe. Hobbs rested a foot on her shoulder and shoved her down so she was lying on her side.
He stood glaring down at her with his fists propped on his hips. “Goddamn lush. You’re screwin’ around on me, too, aren’t you?”
“No! Never!”
“Boozin’ and screwin’ around!”
He kicked her hard in the upper thigh and she rolled over onto her stomach.
This is going to be bad. Worse than usual. I have to get through it. No choice. Have to…
“Into the bedroom,” he said, and began kicking her repeatedly, not hard now. He wanted her able to crawl, and in the right direction. Her bare left elbow bumped a table leg.
“You’re too drunk even to crawl straight,” he said in disgust.
And she was. Lavern had to admit he was right. Were it not for the persistent guiding probes of his shoe she wouldn’t have been headed for the hall and the bedroom door. The door seemed so distant now.
Has he somehow injured my sight?
He kicked harder, hurting the base of her spine, and she crawled faster, shredding her panty hose on the carpet and skinning her knees, scraping the heels of her hands on the rough fiber.
He had to help her into the bed. She flopped back onto the soft mattress, watching the rectangular white ceiling spin up and away, and wished she could keep falling, falling…
Hobbs began to undress her. She didn’t resist, but he lost his patience with buttons and snaps and started ripping off of her clothes.
It proved to be more difficult than he’d thought.
He gave up completely and stalked off into the hall. Steel clattered in the kitchen, and he returned to the bedroom holding a carving knife.
He began slicing not flesh, but material with the knife. So expertly did he use the knife on her resistant clothing that it made her afraid of what he’d be able to do with such expertise to her flesh.
Amazingly, considering his frenzy, the blade didn’t so much as touch her.
Lavern clenched her eyes tightly shut and sent herself somewhere else, somewhere where this was happening to someone else.
You can be two people if you must. You really can. One afraid and in pain, and the other drifting and unfeeling…
Right now, the choice of which to be was easy.
With the morning already heating up like hell, Hobbs left for work without disturbing her where she lay in bed pretending to be asleep, the thin sheet pulled up over her face as if it were a shroud.
Beneath the taut white linen, her eyes were open and afraid.
63
They’d begun to gather in the park before dawn, and now there were hundreds of them.
At eight o’clock, New York One estimated the crowd at a thousand. It sure looked like a thousand massed on a TV screen. Traffic on Central Park West had to be diverted when their numbers spilled out onto the street.
They carried identical neatly produced FREE BERTY signs, and some wore T-shirts bearing the same demand in large black letters.
The event was large enough to disrupt traffic patterns throughout Midtown Manhattan, and made Quinn late on his way to Alfred Beeker’s Park Avenue office. He wanted to get there by nine, before Beeker’s first patients began to arrive.
He wanted to be in a room alone with Beeker.
Quinn sat as patiently as he could, draping his right wrist over the Lincoln’s steering wheel, watching the brown UPS van ahead of him advance along the street ten feet at a time. His right foot moved automatically between accelerator and brake pedal, advancing the Lincoln along with the van. The car’s air conditioner was sucking in some of the van’s exhaust, so Quinn dropped the driver’s side window about six inches. Heat rolled in, along with more exhaust fumes. The metallic chattering emitted by the air conditioner was louder with the window down. Too loud.
The window was gliding back up when Quinn’s cell phone chirped. He leaned to the side and worked it out of his pocket, flipped it open, and pressed the button to answer.
“That you, Quinn?”
Renz’s voice.
“It’s my phone,” Quinn said.
“That might not mean shit. You mighta just lost it, and I’m talking to some clown pretending to be you.”
“I’m me, and not pretending.”
“What about the clown part?”
“It’s what I don’t want to waste time on now, Harley.”
“I tried to get in touch with you yesterday afternoon to tell you this movement to sympathize with Berty Wrenner is picking up steam, and you know what goes with steam.”
“Pressure,” Quinn said, trying not to yawn. The hot sun beating through the windshield was making him sleepy.
“Where were you yesterday, Quinn?”
“Pearl and I drove upstate to investigate a lead. Guy named Dwayne Avis. Nothing came of it, but I’ll get a report to you so it’s in the mix.”
“Seen TV news this morning?”
“I managed to avoid it.”
“Berty’s due to be arraigned today, so his supporters are having a big demonstration in the park. Signs, songs, the whole shebang.”
“You don’t hear that word very often anymore,” Quinn said. “Shebang.”
“Parse it,” Renz said, “and you got sexism.” He seemed to mean it. There were times when nothing seemed too trivial for Renz to worry over.
“I won’t mention you said it,” Quinn assured him.
“Thanks. The news says the shebang is growing larger.”
“That must be what’s causing the traffic mess I’m stuck in. So what does Berty’s army want?”
“Freedom for Berty.”
“Despite the murder charge with evidence and a confession to back it up?”
“All that doesn’t seem important to them. You know how it goes, Quinn. The little guy’s perfect to play the poor schmuck who’s a victim of the machine.”
“We the machine?”
“We’re part of it.”
“So you wanna turn Berty free?”
“Not me. But if certain politicians could think of an excuse, they’d be out there marching with Berty’s army.”
“You’re about the most opportunistic politician I know,” Quinn said, “and you’re not out there marching.”
“I’m also first and foremost a cop, or I wouldn’t associate with you and your fouled-up crew.”
“You including Vitali and Mishkin?”
“Mishkin’s Barney Fife with a brush mustache and Vitali’s turning into Columbo.”
