Good Day to Die (2 page)

“I’m leaving, girl. You sure you’ll be all right?”

Melissa’s voice jerked Lorraine back to her little cubicle. “I’ll be okay, Melissa. Let me get back to work.”

She listened to Melissa’s retreating footsteps for a moment, then put on her earphones and pressed the foot pedal controlling the dictaphone.

Focal area of decreased echogenicity in the tip of the spleen. Differential diagnosis would include artifact vs splenic abscess vs splenic infarct vs tumor. Splenomegaly. Cholelithiasis. Phleboliths vs distal urethral calculi on both sides of the true pelvis.

She continued to work for another twenty minutes. The typing was purely mechanical, though it hadn’t been that way at first. In the beginning, her coach, John Tufaro, had set her down in front of an ancient Smith-Corona and said, “If you could type when you were sighted, you can type now. Do it.”

But she couldn’t do it. Not at first. What bothered her was the fact that she had no way to check her work. If she made a mistake, she wouldn’t (and didn’t) know it. Not knowing caused her to hesitate, to make mistakes. It wasn’t until after John took her into the lounge and played several cuts from his George Shearing collection that she finally took the hint. Shearing was a blind pianist, yet he never missed a note. In a way, his situation was worse than hers, because if George Shearing made a mistake, he
would
know it. And so would everybody in the audience.

What she needed, she’d realized, was confidence, and the best way to get it was to bang away at the keys with the abandon of a toddler stacking a pile of blocks. At first, she insisted that John Tufaro check her work. But after a few weeks she discovered that she could tell when she made a mistake. The same fingertips that had guided her over a floor littered with broken glass could differentiate between an
l
and a semicolon, even though they sometimes pressed the wrong key.

She didn’t know exactly
how
she perceived this information, but how didn’t really matter. What mattered was that her craft, her typing, was one more step on the road to independence. A road that led from a wrecked car to a hospital bed to an apartment in Queens, to a group home to a …

She had no concrete vision of the next step, but she was sure that each prior step was an expansion, and as long as she kept expanding, she was on the right track.

Half an hour later, Lorraine Cho flipped off her IBM. The waiting room was quiet, which meant the last patient had been taken to one of the screened cubicles that served as an examining room. She sat for a moment, enjoying the silence, then pushed her chair away from the desk, grabbed her long white cane, and stood up. Marching across the floor without hesitation, she took her wool jacket out of the staff closet and put it on. New York was in the middle of a cold spell, and it could easily take half an hour to walk the few blocks to the group home. After all, despite what she told Melissa Williams, she still had to cross Flatbush Avenue.

Lorraine moved quickly through the patients’ waiting room, sweeping the floor in front of her with practiced ease. She knew the territory well, but there was always the chance that some patient had left a surprise for her, had moved a chair or dropped a magazine on the floor. (Stepping on a magazine was like stepping on a patch of ice.) But she found nothing untoward as she made her way out to the street.

A bracing wind chipped at her nose and her ears, but instead of trying to pull her head down into the collar of her coat, she flared her nostrils and sucked in the clean, cold air. She could feel the sun’s heat despite the forty-five-degree temperature and gusty winds. The mix was delicious.

She made her way to the corner of Flatbush Avenue and Willoughby Street, stopping next to the mechanism that regulated the traffic light. The problem with Flatbush Avenue was that its eight lanes led directly to the Manhattan Bridge. At six on a weekday, it was inevitably packed in both directions with bumper-to-bumper traffic. Traffic that, as often as not, spilled back across the intersection when the light turned red, so that even though Lorraine could hear the light flip from green to yellow to red, she couldn’t be sure the intersection was clear. Nor could she be certain that vehicles making the turn from Willoughby Street onto Flatbush Avenue would respect her right to cross the street unimpeded. In New York, pedestrians and drivers seemed to be in a constant state of war, a fact she’d joyfully exploited when she was sighted, ignoring traffic lights and pedestrian crosswalks like any good citizen.

Now she had to pay the price. And there was only one way to do it. One way that didn’t involve a high probability of physical injury. Lorraine walked to the edge of the curb, then stood stock-still and waited for some good citizen to come to her rescue. A traffic agent usually worked this intersection, a man named Joe who guided her across the street whenever possible. Unfortunately, Joe wasn’t on duty. Lorraine knew he wasn’t around because Joe blew his whistle, stopping traffic, whenever the light changed. Lorraine could smell the stink of mixed gasoline and diesel exhausts, hear the animal roar of buses pulling away from the curb and the vicious chorus of car horns that challenged their right-of-way. But there was no whistle.

One day, she decided, she’d have to ask Joe why he wasn’t on duty every weekday at this time. Lord knew it had nothing to do with the volume of traffic. Traffic volume varied in direct proportion to the number of horns blaring at any given moment. The more frustrated the drivers, the louder the symphony. Tonight, she was listening to Tchaikovsky’s cannons.

“Do you need some help, miss?”

Lorraine smiled, relieved to hear a voice, especially a female voice. That was another thing Melissa was right about. The animals who roamed New York City streets looking for prey would respect neither Lorraine’s blindness nor the seeing eyes of potential witnesses. She was the quintessential victim, ripe for a takeoff, and the only surprise was that it hadn’t already happened. Everybody else in her group home had been attacked at least once. Vulnerability was the price of independence; there was no way around it.

“I’d surely appreciate it,” Lorraine answered. She waved at the unseen vehicles. “They don’t seem like they’re about to stop for me. Or for anything else.”

“Well, I must say that I’m new at this. If you will tell me what to do, I’ll be glad to help you.”

Lorraine listened closely, knowing the woman through her words. The accent was definitely southern, the voice young but serious, the phrases oddly separated.
Well, I must say
…
that Ah’m new … at this, if you will tell me
…
what to do … Ah’ll be glad
…
to help … you.

“Let me take your left arm. Then walk normally.”

“All right.” As the woman moved around her, Lorraine caught a trace of flowery perfume. Lilac predominated, but there were other scents as well. The perfume reinforced Lorraine’s sense of the woman’s rural origins. Lilac was definitely not New York. “Are there any potholes?” Lorraine asked.

“Well, the road
is
bumpy, but isn’t that just like the roads in New York? There is a crew—I believe they are from the telephone company—workin’ on the far corner, but we can pass around them. Are we ready?”

Lorraine took the woman’s arm, noting the slender limb and the underlying muscle.

“I did have an auntie,” the woman said as they stepped off the curb, “who was blind. But that was back in Atherton? In Mississippi? She surely did not have to worry about streets like this. And everybody did know her, so they would stop and help. I think it’s just awful that you should have to go out on your own. But isn’t that typical? Of New York City? It is such a
cold
place. Back home, people care about each other.”

Lorraine paid little attention to her Good Samaritan’s chatter, saving her concentration for the task at hand. She knew, from bitter experience, that small imperfections in the road, imperfections a sighted person wouldn’t notice, could send her sprawling. Nor could she entirely rely on the judgment of her benefactor when it came to larger obstacles. On one occasion, a well-meaning stranger had run her into the tail pipe of a small truck. Between the collision and the deep burn, she’d been hobbled for the better part of a week.

“Only a few more steps, miss, and we will be on the sidewalk. We just have to go around this truck.”

Lorraine stretched her left arm out to gauge the distance between herself and the truck. She didn’t want to insult the woman, but she could hear the truck’s motor running and she knew she was very close to it.

Her arm reached out into empty space, and it took her a moment to realize the truck’s rear doors had to be open. Then a hand grabbed her wrist and yanked her forward, smashing her knees into the truck’s bumper as she flew through the doors.

“Close ’em and go. Fast.” A man’s voice, tight and urgent, followed by slamming doors and a fist smashing into the side of her head. “Shut up, bitch. Shut the fuck up.”

She didn’t react; her mind was spinning too fast to fashion a response, though she was aware of everything. Aware of the odor of wood smoke and pipe tobacco clinging to the man. Of the sudden jerk as the truck pulled away. Of her benefactor’s tinkling laughter. Of the man’s hand thrust into her crotch. Of his finger poking at the glass orbs filling her eye sockets.

“Damn, Baby, looks like we got ourselves a keeper. A slanty-eyed slope with good tits and no eyes. A definite goddamned keeper.”

B
Y THE TIME MY
savior made her appearance, ramrod straight in her starched uniform, I was near madness. The preachers claim that salvation is a vision of light buried in the invisible depths of one’s darkest moments. Captain Vanessa Bouton didn’t fit that image, either. Mahogany skin, short and carefully styled black hair, widely spaced brown eyes—she was anything but a willowy spirit descending out of a backlit cloud. Nevertheless, the plain truth is that Vanessa Bouton saved my sorry little ass.

“Roland Means?” she said. “Detective Roland Means?”

I was standing at a workbench in the ballistics lab at the time, peering through a microscope at pairs of .22-caliber shell casings. Comparing, believe it or not, extractor marks.

This is not a fun way to spend your working days. Especially not for a street cop, which is what I’d always been and always wanted to be. Extractor marks are nothing more than scratches. Scratches made by the slide mechanism of a semiautomatic weapon as it loads and ejects cartridges. The official line is that extractor marks are as distinctive as fingerprints. Well, I’ve never thought much of fingerprints, either. There’s a line in a song—I forget the name of the singer; most of them are as alike as the lands and grooves on a spent slug—it goes like this:
It was the myth of fingerprints/I’ve seen them all and, man, they’re all the same.

I’m going too far, here. Ballistics is a science, and on those rare occasions when I got a match, the exact nature of those little scratches jumped out at me like a grouse breaking cover. No matter how many hours I spent in the forest (or peering through a microscope), I was never ready for it.

The only problem was that I spent almost all of my time on random searches.

“Run this .45 through the ringer, Detective. We think it was used in a hit.”

I’d begin by taking microphotographs of rifling, ejector, and firing-pin marks. Then I’d go to the files and pull similar photographs of slugs pulled from the carcasses of murder victims. Caliber was a limiting factor, of course, but mostly it was a fishing expedition. Some detective (usually a lieutenant) takes a piece off a bad guy and figures he’ll become a hero if he can get ballistics to elevate a weapons violation into a murder rap.

The saddest part is that it can all be done by computer. Fingerprints, too. The computer reads a photo of whatever you’re looking for, then searches for a match. It’s even possible to link your system to NCIC, the FBI’s memory bank. Unfortunately, the NYPD doesn’t use computers. The NYPD uses slobs like me to peer at slides for hours on end.

I shouldn’t exaggerate. Most of the cops I met in ballistics were glad to be there. The hours were regular and you didn’t have to worry about getting shot. Or piped or stabbed or second-guessed by some fat-ass in an office when you took steps to prevent all of the above from happening. No, for most of the cops working in one or another of the NYPD’s labs or crime-scene investigation teams, the work was a treat. (At the least. At the most, it was a career path laid out with microscopic exactitude.)

For me, on the other hand, the ten months I spent in the lab were pure punishment. The NYPD was that desperate to get me off the street.

“Detective Means?” Her voice was insistent (a matter of habit, I suspected), but the eyes were quizzical. Trying to figure out exactly what I was.

I was used to that reaction, had been getting it ever since I left the town of Paris, New York, more than fifteen years before. My father was a full-blooded American Indian, a wandering Cherokee and a straight-ahead drunk. My mother was Scotch-Irish and also a drunk. Somehow they married and conceived a child. (Or did they marry
because
they conceived a child?) My father, or so the story goes, was saved by an itinerant Pentecostal preacher a month or so after my mother gave birth. Dad hung around for six months, trying to convert dear old mom, but finally gave up and headed west to rejoin his people. That was the last time anybody in the town of Paris laid eyes on him.

The end result of that brief union (namely, myself) was not a blend of the races, but pieces of a genetic puzzle glued together to make a face. I have my father’s jet-black hair, narrow black eyes, high cheekbones, and forehead. Mom contributed a pug nose, thin mouth, and firm Irish jaw. Only my skin itself, a pale ivory, hints of any true union.

No, Captain Vanessa Bouton’s puzzled expression was nothing new to me. People tended to view me as some kind of hybrid Asian, but at six-two and two hundred and ten pounds, I was too tall and too broadly built to fit that stereotype, either.

“What can I do for you, Captain
…?”