New York Dead (Stone Barrington 1)

“Has anyone ever completely satisfied you?”

“You satisfy me, for a time, but to answer your question honestly, no. At least, no man ever has. I knew a girl in college who could satisfy me longer than anyone. She was only twenty, but she knew everything about pleasing a woman, because she was a woman, I suppose.”

“Do you still see her?”

“No. She committed suicide our senior year, shot herself with a pistol borrowed from a boy we knew. She left a note saying she had done it for me, because she knew she could never have me, and she wanted to prove she really loved me. The housemother in the dorm found the note and showed it to me, then destroyed it.”

“How did you react to that?”

“I was elated. It did wonders for my self-esteem, that someone could love me so much. I never loved her, of course, I just liked having her make love to me.”

“You don’t make love, Cary. You merely fuck.”

Cary raised herself on an elbow and looked at him. “Do you really think so?” she asked wonderingly.

“Yes.”

She nodded. “You’re right, I think, but I do fuck surpassingly well, don’t I?”

“You do,” Stone said; then he fucked her again.

When they had exhausted each other, she lay on her back, her breasts pointing at the ceiling. “You think it’s terrible that I’m still fucking you, now that I’m married,” she said.

“Yes. And it’s just as bad that I’m still fucking you.”

“You wait. One of these days, perhaps before very long, you’ll get married, but you’ll still want to fuck me. And believe me, my darling, you will. Because I’ll never let go of you.”

“Yes,” he said, “I will.” Whenever she wanted him, for as long as she wanted him.

On Thursday nights at Elaine’s, the big table across from the bar was kept for the guys – the regulars who had been coming for years, whom Elaine had fed when they were broke, the starving writers who might not have made it in New York without the nurturing and bonding that went on in an uptown neighborhood saloon. They wandered in and out during the evening, bitching about their agents and the promotion budgets for their most recent books, moaning about the pitiful advance sales and the huge reserve for returns on their royalty statements.

There were guys who were getting a million dollars a book now – sometimes more – and others who were getting twenty-five thousand and pretending it was two hundred. There were guys who had given up on writing fiction and were churning out screenplays for the movies and television, and there were guys who were doing it all – books, magazines, television series – the works. They were bonded by the common knowledge that nobody – not their wives, sweet-hearts, or publishers – believed they really worked for a living, and, sometimes, they weren’t too sure of that themselves.

Stone often sat with the bunch these days, and he liked them. He wasn’t exactly sure he was working for a living either, so they had something in common. Most Thursday nights, somebody would bring a girl, and they were always smart and pretty. Stone envied them their girls.

This Thursday night, drained of desire by Cary, relaxed, and depressed, Stone got drunk. He had three Wild Turkeys before dinner – which was, in itself, a big mistake – drank most of a bottle of wine with his pasta, and, when Elaine said she was buying, couldn’t resist a Sambuca or two. He switched to mineral water for a while, until he felt steadier, then started on cognac. By the time he and a couple of other guys closed the place at 4:00 A.M., he was ambulatory, but only just.

He walked carefully from the place, uncharacteristically gave the burn on duty a buck, and thought for a minute about whether he should walk. He usually walked; it was good for the knee and for the gut, but tonight walking seemed out of the question. He flagged a cab, gave the driver the exact address, explaining that he wished to be driven to the door, not to the corner, then hunkered way down in the backseat and tried to keep from passing out. That was what he was doing when the shooting started.

They had pulled up to the light, and the cabbie had decided he felt like talking. “You follow baseball?” he asked, half-turning toward the backseat.

Stone was trying to answer him when there was a sound like a watermelon being dropped from a great height, and the driver’s face exploded, leaving a huge hole spouting blood. As Stone hit the floor of the backseat, the screech of rubber on pavement told him the shooter was on his way.

Stone scrambled out of the cab, and, operating instinctively, yanked the left side door open, shoved the dead driver aside, and got the cab in gear. A block and a half ahead, a van was roaring away. Stone stood on it. He switched the blinking caution lights on, leaned on the horn, and streaked off down Second Avenue after the van.

There was almost no traffic on the avenue at 4:00 A.M. “Where the fuck are the blue-and-whites?” he demanded aloud, suddenly aware that he was now cold sober. “Where are you, you sons of bitches?” The cab was new, and he gained on the van for a minute, until the driver realized he was being pursued. Still, Stone was keeping pace a block behind. He wasn’t sure he wanted to get any closer, since he wasn’t armed; all he wanted to do was to attract a blue-and-white or two. He tried to make out the license plate on the van and failed.

At Forty-second Street, the van hung a left and nearly turned over. “That would be good,” Stone said, “turn the fucking thing over and save me some trouble!” Good luck, too. On Forty-second Street a blue-and-white was parked in front of an all-night joint, the cops drinking coffee from paper cups. Stone glanced in the rearview mirror as he passed and saw the cups go out the windows on both sides and the car start after him.

The van turned left again and started up First Avenue, keeping all four wheels on the ground this time. Stone managed a wide four-wheel drift and made up a few yards on him. The blue-and-white was doing even better; it was faster than both the van and Stone’s cab. At Fifty-seventh Street, the blue-and-white overtook Stone, and the cop in the passenger seat was waving him over. Stone shook his head and pointed ahead. “No! Get him! Get him! He’s the cab killer!” The cop didn’t seem to understand, but the driver floored it and went after the van. Stone followed. At Seventy-second Street, another blue-and-white joined the chase. At Eighty-sixth Street, the van driver made his mistake. He started a turn to the left, then saw a hooker crossing the street. He wavered, missed her, then, too late, tried to get the van around the corner. It teetered on two wheels, then went over and slid twenty feet on its side, coming to rest against a parked car.

“This is one for Scoop Berman,” Stone cackled, skidding to a halt behind a blue-and-white. “I wonder where the little guy is tonight.”

The little guy came out of the driver’s window, holding an impossibly large pistol equipped with a silencer. He popped off one shot, which shattered the window of a blue-and-white, then a returning fusillade knocked him back inside the van.

Four cops approached the van warily now, three pistols out in front, another with a riot gun. They hesitated, then the bearer of the shotgun crept around the front of the van and peered in through the windshield. The shotgun went off, and Stone made it around the van in time to see the cop r

each into the cab through the hole he had blown open and remove Scoop Berman’s pistol.