Grief Street

shadow come to kill again.
    I sat on the bumpy edge of a standpipe, dressed in faded jeans, sweatshirt, a baseball jacket, with the collar tom off, a moth-eaten watch cap, and boots I have owned since Quang Tri province. I drank from a prop bottle of Mogen David fortified wine—Mad Dog as the skells lining the block call the stuff. I took long, slow pulls off the bottle, the way I used to suck down whisky in the darkest of my drinking days. Some things about being a drunk I cannot forget, no more than I have forgot how to ride a bicycle.
    A brown paper bag lay at my feet, the kind liquor stores use for wrapping up small, flat bottles. Anybody walking the street would have thought that bag held another pint. Instead, it concealed my department-issue PTP. To kill the foul odor, I had a tin of Vicks chest rub stashed in my jacket pocket. My nine millimeter was clipped to my belt, my .44 Charter Arms Bulldog was holstered under my arm.
    The clothes were part of my SCUM patrol wardrobe. The bottle was a prop as well, full of colored tap water. One of the other loiterers on the block—likewise a guy who looked like a skell recently joined up with the crowd that sleeps in Bob’s Park; likewise a guy with a paper bag at handy reach—was Officer Tyrone Matson. Matson wore a raincoat a couple of sizes too big, a pair of madras Bermuda shorts strictly from Goodwill, sneakers, and an undershirt.
    We had been like this, Matson and me, for better than three hours now. Watching skells taking hits off a shared pipe, or passing around the needle for sweet-dream fixes, or going bottoms-up with a nightcap before heading through the park gates to settle in for another evening. That was Bob Smith’s only rule: no drugs or booze inside the gates. Everybody abided, in return for a night of sleep as safe as it gets in the streets of New York.
    The Kitchen sky was black and blue, the same as Good Friday, when everything had started. A soft rain began falling. In the gated arms of Bob’s Park, where in daylight happiness was pursued, how safe was this night? About as safe as Christ’d feel right about now.

    I had the cold, sinking-heart moments any cop would have pulling a long stake on a hunch. I consoled myself by thinking that for once I could blame lunatic imagination on somebody else, namely the author of Grief Street. But here was I, following a lunatic script, and so what did that say of me? Were my instincts wrong? Would the waiting come to nothing? This time, even worse...
    ... Would the devil make me for a cop?
    And who knew but that the dark prince might be staking me?
    Now coming along the street I spotted my friend Pauly Kerwin the pink-faced midget. He was walking his bow-legged walk, hobbled by the sour sign still hanging around his neck.
    Pauly was about a half-block away, weaving drunkenly toward the park, more than ready to lay and pray. A drained bottle of Mad Dog slipped from his stubby midget hand, crashing to the rain-slicked sidewalk.
    Then, there it was. Behind Pauly Kerwin, what I was waiting for: a shadow.
    I picked up the bag at my feet and whispered into it, “Matson.”
    A quiet crackle. Then Matson’s affirmative, “Yo.”
    “East of me, less than a block. The midget, and that dark thing closing in behind him. See?”
    “Check. What is that—a cape?”
    “Looks like it. I’m moving now. Come in for the backup as soon as the cape turns into the gate.”
    “Check.”
    I slipped the PTP into a back pocket. I rose from the standpipe and wobbled east toward the park gate, in a rendition of my own boozing days. I let the prop bottle of Mad Dog splinter into the street, just as Pauly Kerwin had. And there was I, just another skell on his way to dreamland.
    Pauly walked through the gate, not knowing he was at the head of a deadly parade.
    The shadow—face masked, head and body shrouded in a bowel-stinking tent of gray-black wool—followed Pauly like a storm cloud. I came loping after them both, right hand tucked inside my jacket, fingers closed over the hard rubber butt of the Bulldog revolver hanging under my left armpit.
    I laughed at myself. Exceptional clearance... Yeah, yeah, as if blowing a hole in a cloud can kill a murdering storm.
    Pauly tripped over his sour sign and fell on his face, rolling into the heap of a brother skell bunked down in damp card-board and fast asleep. Pauly swore and righted himself. And now stood, looking in my direction, with the shadow between himself and me.
    Of all