His third run that night was on Madison Avenue, a four a.m. smash-and-grab of a tiny jewelry store set inside the exterior arcade of an office building in midtown, almost all of the stock snatched out of the brick-bashed window, nothing much to see now but bare earring trees and daggers of broken glass.
At this hour, the canyoned street was a ghost town, and Billy easily spotted the late-model Nissan Pathfinder slowly approaching from three blocks south. When it finally pulled to the curb, an elderly woman sporting a high helmet of frosted tangerine hair, lipsticked and dressed in a nubby plaid skirt suit as if she had been sitting up all night waiting for the phone to ring, stepped carefully out of the passenger-side door onto Madison. The driver—her husband, Billy assumed—remained behind the wheel with the engine still running, staring straight ahead as if waiting for the light to change.
She absorbed the carnage without expression. “I been here thirty-seven years and nothing ever happened,” she said quietly, a soft thread of old Europe running through her words.
When Billy was a kid all of his aunts had filigreed birdcage hair like hers, and he could never figure out how they slept.
“How’s your insurance?”
The woman blushed. “It only covers jewelry that’s in the safe.”
“How much is in the safe?”
“I have arthritis. Every little piece, in and out, in and out, morning and night, takes me two hours, I can’t do it anymore.” She was wiped out.
“Is that your husband?” Billy asked.
She glanced at the old guy still behind the wheel but said nothing.
“And where was he tonight?” Theodore Moretti asked.
“Do I even have to answer a question like that?” The woman addressed Billy, more amazed than insulted.
He had no idea how Moretti had gotten back on the sign-up sheet after being blackballed just the month before, but he had. “I thought you were at the Three-two,” Billy snapped.
Moretti’s cell rang and he walked down the block, hissing into his shoulder.
“What happens now?” she asked, Billy picking up on that near-buried refugee inflection again, thinking, This is nothing for her.
Before he could respond, a patrol car flying the wrong way down Madison came to a rocking stop in front of the store. One of the uniforms jumped out, holding a black plastic garbage bag.
“We caught the guy running on Park,” he said, gesturing to the head-down, handcuffed thief in the backseat. “I feel like goddamn Santa Claus.”
The woman took the bag and peered inside at her life, then up at Billy.
“Who would do such a thing?”
“I hate to say it,” Billy said, “but all of this has to be vouchered as evidence.”
She looked at him blankly, Billy unable to tell whether she didn’t understand him or didn’t care; nonetheless, he decided, it was a reasonably happy ending.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My editor, John Sterling, a highly incisive and diligent master builder—and as ruthless as ever.
To all the friends and guides who have schooled me over the last few years—
First and always, John McCormack.
Irma Rivera, Barry Warhit, Richie Roberts, Rafiyq Abdellah, John McAuliffe.
And to my street-writer heroes—Michael Daly and Mark Jacobson.