Dark Maze

Street and then out of sight.
    Behind me, a woman screamed in Spanish.

ELEVEN

    Han matado a mi esposo!"
    The screams came from inside the bodega. They grew louder and louder, piercing through all other sounds of a Hell’s Kitchen night until only the widow’s cry was heard: “Han matado a mi esposo!” They killed my husband!
    A gang of teenagers loitering outside a video store at the corner heard her. They started toward me, en masse.
    A woman appeared on the fire escape outside an apartment directly over the bodega’s door. She leaned over the edge of the black wrought-iron railing and called, “Carolena, Carolena?”
    I crouched, pulled the .38 revolver from my shoulder holster and scuttled toward the doorway. I shielded myself behind a steel corner plate that connected the long curved glass display window and the entrance.
    The woman up on the fire escape spotted the gun in my band and shrieked.
    “Carolena! Benito!”
    The gang of teens, maybe a dozen boys and three or four girls, had become silent. They moved toward me, but more slowly now.
    I pulled back the firing hammer of the revolver, gripped the hand stock and tucked the barrel close against my chest I had only seconds to get a fix on whatever lay waiting inside the bodega.
    There was a small sales floor with a couple of dividers that made aisles of canned goods, cellophane-wrapped snack foods, infant formula and diapers, six-packs of beer, soda, mousetraps, cockroach bombs. Noisy cooling cabinets held milk, cheese and fresh meats. Cigarettes, coffee, candy and sandwiches were sold at the counter. There was a curtained door in the back that probably led to an illegal apartment.
    A woman about fifty years old sat squat-legged on the floor in front of the counter, with a man’s bloody head flopped in her lap. "Han matado a mi esposo!” She looked directly at me, seeing nothing but her own fear and loss.
    She raised her head to the ceiling. Her body rocked back and forth. Blood sloshed across her large bosoms, and trickled down her arms and elbows into the dusty cracks of the wooden floor. Her screams turned to desperate prayer: "Dios, guardar mi esposo!” God, save my husband!
    The teenagers had stopped about thirty feet from me, afraid to come farther and startled by the sight of my gun.
    I pulled my gold shield from a side pocket of my jacket and held it up high, so the woman on the fire escape could see it as well as the teenagers. I said in Spanish, then English, "Llamar por teléfono las policía.” Call the police.
    The woman on the fire escape disappeared into her apartment.
    One of the teenaged boys stepped forward. I knew the kid, thank God.
    “Luis, I need your help,” I said to him.
    “What’s going on here, Hock?”
    “Listen to me carefully. There’s been a murder. People are afraid. I'm afraid, Luis. The killer might still be inside there.”
    I jerked my head around and looked at the widow again. She kept on screaming and rocking. The huge gash across her husband’s neck kept spewing blood.
    “You understand it’s dangerous?”
    Luis turned to the others and said something that persuaded them to take several steps back and out of harm’s way. My own Spanish was nowhere near fluent enough to handle a crowd. And so Luis, the busboy at my regular neighborhood spoon, had become my deputy.
    He turned back to me now, eyes hot and excited. “What do you need, Hock?”
    “A police backup squad. Somebody should call up 911. Say an officer’s in trouble, got it?”
    “Yeah.” He turned and said all this in Spanish to the girl just behind him. She ran to the public phone at the comer.
    “Okay, I’m counting on you, Luis. On you and your friends. You all have to stay cool, and you have to help me by keeping the area clear, understand? I don’t want anybody in the neighborhood getting hurt.”
    Already there were separate streams of curious forming crowds. There was a knot of them across the street, another at the opposite corner.
    “You got it, friend.”
    “Great. Thanks, Luis.”
    Luis and the rest formed a line between me and the people starting to get closer and closer to the widow’s screams.
    And then I heard the comforting sound of approaching sirens. Soon I would have plenty of help. I looked back inside the bodega.
    So far as I could tell, the killer had already left. And only moments ago, just moments before Neglio’s car had delivered me to another murder in my own backyard.
    The killer could be hiding yet in