It was the city's fifteenth day without a homicide. The tabloids blared the news, almost daring the crazies to break the streak. I worried too, worried that there were deaths we weren't seeing, worried that something had turned, something was different, something was making the world into a strange and unrecognizable place.
I missed the mayhem. I didn't want to admit it, to myself or anyone else, but I missed the uncertainty of walking into a murder scene, of feeling that edge of violence still lingering in the air. Not that there wasn't violence. In New York, violence is as common as air--maybe even more common--but during the last fifteen days, it didn't lead to anything. People got mugged, just like always, beaten just like always, but no one seemed to have the urge to haul out a gun and fire it at someone else.
And they should have. That's what got me. It was August--hot, stinking, humid August--and we'd just come off a full moon. The lunatics should have been out in force, and they weren't.
For the first time in years, I wished I was a flatfoot and not a member of the mayor's special homicide task force. I wanted to ride a car, have a partner, walk a beat. I wanted to bust up a few fights, threaten a few crackheads, rescue a kid from a tree.
I wanted something, anything, except the old cases in front of me, the ones whose trails were so cold that the ice on the files was thick and blue. On day three of the Silence, as the Daily News was calling the strangeness, the chief called the entire Homicide task force into his office and gave us options: we could assist the some of other task forces--Narcotics or Robbery or, god forbid, Missing Persons--or we could close some cases we didn't have time to close. Me, I thought closing would be good. It would keep the task force together, and I thought the task force was one of the few things from the mayor's anti-crime initiatives that was working. Closing would also prove what I had always said, that a good cop could solve any case given enough time.
A man should carry a tape recorder around to know how fatuous he sounds when he makes pronouncements like that. Then he wouldn't have to eat his words twelve days later when not one cold case had turned hot, when not one file, iced open, warmed shut.
I didn't even have anything promising: not the Puerto Rican wife stabbed fifteen times in her apartment; not the street thug shot once through the heart and left inside a dumpster on 42nd; not even the bloated naked fish-belly white corpse that had floated up the East River one July afternoon. On him, I couldn't even get an i.d.
So it didn't seem strange when Evelyn sauntered over to my desk, wearing a light brown suit that made her look as if her mother had dressed her in her older sister's clothes. She slapped her hand on the gray Formica surface, and the sound echoed in the nearly empty House.
Three other Homicide detectives looked up. They were surrounded by stacks of files, just like I was. Only the five of us remained. The others in our task force had scattered like the winds, knowing early the need for action was much more important than the need for closure.
"I say what we need is a wager." She leaned against my desk because I was best known as the task force's betting man. I'd wager on anything legal, and even some things that weren't, given Vice didn't hear about it.
Because I was intrigued and because I didn't want to show it, I gave her a good old fashioned up and down. "What do you need a wager for?" I asked. "You got court today. That's enough excitement for any person."
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