Ghosts

“Got you working on Christmas Day, huh?” O’Brien said casually.

“Yeah, you know how it is,” the man said.

“Must be an important load,” Meyer said. “Sent you to pick it up on Christmas.”

“Listen, what’s it to you?” the man said. “I got a flat here, I’m trying to change it, why don’t you just fuck off, huh?”

“Police officers,” O’Brien said, and was reaching into his pocket for his shield when the pistol appeared in the man’s hand. The move took them both by surprise. Not many crib burglars—as house and apartment burglars were called—carried weapons. The man committing a burglary at night, especially in a residence where there was a human being at the time, ran the risk of the heaviest burglary rap and might well be armed, even if the gun charge would lengthen his stay in prison. If they’d expected any show of violence—and they truly hadn’t—it might have come by way of a sudden grab for the tire iron on the pavement. But the man reached under his jacket, instead, and the gun appeared in his hand, a .38-caliber pistol pulled from the waistband of his trousers and aimed directly at Meyer now.

The gun went off before Meyer could react and draw his own pistol. The man fired twice, both shots taking Meyer in the leg and knocking him to the pavement. O’Brien’s gun was in his hand at once. He had no time to think that it was happening to him again. He thought only, My partner is down, and then he saw the man turning the gun toward him, and he fired instantly, catching him in the shoulder, and then fired again as the man toppled over, the second bullet taking him in the chest. The gun still in his right hand, O’Brien knelt over the wounded man, grabbed for the handcuffs at his belt in a clumsy left-handed pull, and then rolled him over with no concern for the wounds pouring blood and cuffed his hands behind his back. Out of breath, he turned to Meyer, who lay on the street with one leg buckled under him.

“How you doing?” he asked.

“Hurts,” Meyer said.

O’Brien went into the car and pulled the radio mike from the dashboard. “This is Eight-Seven-Four,” he said, “on Holmsby and North. Police officer down. I need an ambulance.”

“Who’s this?” the dispatcher said.

“Detective O’Brien.”

As if the dispatcher hadn’t already guessed.

The nearest hospital to Smoke Rise was Mercy General on North and Platte. There, as a holy crucifix of nuns fluttered about him in the emergency room, an intern slit Meyer’s left trouser leg on both sides, looked at the two holes in his leg—one in the thigh, the other just below the kneecap—and phoned upstairs for immediate use of an operating room. The burglar who’d shot Meyer was afforded the same meticulous care—all God’s creatures, large and small. By 1:00 that Christmas afternoon, both were doing fine in separate rooms on the sixth floor. A patrolman was posted outside the burglar’s room, but that was the only difference.

The burglar’s name was Michael Addison. In the van he’d stolen from the Culbertson parking lot in the next state, the police found not only the loot from the Feinberg job but also the flotsam and jetsam of several other burglaries he’d committed that day. Addison refused to admit anything. He said he was a sick man, and he wanted a lawyer. He said he was going to sue O’Brien personally and the city corporately for having shot an i

Back at the squadroom, Arthur Brown—who was an English literature freak—mentioned to Miscolo in the Clerical Office that the guy had been named absolutely perfectly for a burglar.

“What do you mean?” Miscolo said.

“Addison and Steal,” Brown said, and gri

“I don’t get it,” Miscolo said.

“Steal,” Brown said. “S-T-E-A-L.”

“I still don’t get it,” Miscolo said. “You want some coffee?”

This was before a team of six men stole an entire city street.

The call came in at ten minutes to 5:00. By then there had been the expected number of actual suicides or suicide attempts—in fact, a bit more than anyone could remember for previous Christmases. By then Lieutenant Byrnes had personally driven out to Meyer’s house to break the news to Sarah. Sarah was relieved to learn her husband had only been shot in the leg; the moment she saw Byrnes on her doorstep she’d assumed the worst of her fears had been realized. Byrnes drove her to the hospital after his brief visit, and she spent the rest of the afternoon with Meyer, who complained that when a man got shot, his wife should bring him a nize bowl tschicken soup. Along about then, as she was holding Meyer’s hand between both her own and telling him how glad she was that he was still alive, a truck pulled into Gedney Avenue, and six men got out of it to begin tearing up the cobblestone street.

Gedney was one of the few areas in the city that still boasted cobblestone streets—or at least until that Christmas Day it did. The cobblestones, some said, went back to when the Dutch still governed the city. Others maintained that the Dutch wouldn’t have known a cobblestone from a tulip, and it was the British who’d first paved Gedney. The name of the avenue was British, wasn’t it? So it had to be the British. Whoever had paved it, the six men who jumped out of the truck were now unpaving it. The plows had been through Gedney twice already, and the street was relatively clear of snow. The men set to work with great vigor—odd for civil service employees at any time, but especially peculiar on Christmas Day—using picks and crowbars, prying loose the precious cobblestones, lifting them into the truck, stacking them row on row there, working with the precision of a demolition squad. All up and down the street, people peered from their windows, watching the men at work, marveling at their dedicated industry. It took the men two hours to unpave the entire block from corner to corner. At the end of that time they piled back into the truck and drove off. No one noticed the license plate of the truck.

But one man was somewhat impressed by the fact that the Department of Public Works—for such it had seemed—was out there doing its bit for this much-maligned city even on Christmas Day. He called the mayor’s office to congratulate whoever was ma

So at 5:00 that evening, as the streetlamps came on and the shadows lengthened, Detectives Arthur Brown and Lou Moscowitz stood at one end of the block and looked at the same soil Indians must have trod in their moccasins centuries ago, when Columbus came to this hemisphere to start the whole she-bang. Shorn of its cobblestones from end to end, Gedney looked virginal and rustic. Brown and Moscowitz were gri

Carella, at home, felt guilty as hell. Not because someone had carted off a block of cobblestones but because Meyer had been shot twice in the leg. Had Carella switched holidays with him, then maybe Meyer wouldn’t have got shot. Maybe Carella would have got shot instead. Thinking about this, he felt a little less guilty. He’d been shot enough times, thanks—once just a few days before Christmas, in fact. But Carella was of Italian descent, and the Italians and Jews in this city shared guilt the way they shared matriarchal families. Carella had a cousin who, if he accidentally drove through a red traffic light, would stop in atonement at the green light on the next corner.