Grief Street

couch over her, making a sort of tent. Ruby, clutching the script of Grief Street to her chest, shouted at me as I hopped toward the bedroom, “Come back in one piece, damn you, Irish!”
    From the bedroom closet, I grabbed my shoulder holster with the big piece inside of it—a .44 caliber Charter Arms Bulldog, capable of blowing a hole the size of a baseball in a man’s chest. It was the perfect complement of the Glock nine-millimeter already clipped to my belt. I pulled on a denim jacket, ran out the door and down the stairway, to the fading sounds of Ruby’s admonitions.
    “Damn you, Irish! Be careful! Come back in one piece, you hear me? Come back to us! Come back...!”
    A squad car from the Manhattan North station house careened into the Plexiglas bus shelter on Tenth Avenue, almost flattening me in the process. Four uniforms piled out and ignored me. They ran into the clogged avenue and started assaulting vehicles, banging on windows and fenders with their nightsticks, shouting at the drivers: Let’s clear the fucking fire lane! Come on, come on—move it!
    The distant wail of ambulance sirens.
    Crack-crack-crack.
    Again, the sound of automatic rifle fire. Bullets thudding into the enormous cross fallen to the street, splintering wood; bullets ripping into the thrashing bodies of its seven martyred bearers.
    Someone in a clump of gawkers pointed upward, to the top of the five-storey white brick building on the south side of Forty-second—the National Video Center, housing New York’s all-news television station, Channel 1. Then everybody started pointing, including some cops. There was nothing to see up there but blackness, then spits of yellow fire...

    Crack-crack-crack.
    Then someone screamed and the crowd panicked, stampeding toward the shelter of a coffee shop across the way. People did not bother about the door, they simply crashed through the windows.
    Then: blade-whomping sounds of NYPD helicopters, low in the sky, speeding uptown from the police chopper pad in Chelsea.
    Seconds later: a tidal wave of blazing white light from overhead, turning the Hell’s Kitchen night into mazda day.
    I ran around the stampede outside the coffee shop, down Tenth Avenue, gold shield held high in my left hand, the nina ready in my shooting hand.
    And just who was it I expected to shoot?
    I stopped at the corner, pressed myself against the white brick, and peered around into the gritty bleakness of Forty-first Street. This street and Fortieth are dead blocks, bounded by gas stations and warehouses west of Tenth Avenue, the Lincoln Tunnel to Jersey on the south where Thirty-ninth Street used to be, and the long back shadows of the Port Authority Bus Terminal to the east on Ninth Avenue.
    Here, in this dead patch of Hell’s Kitchen, are only the sheltering arms of Covenant House, some nickel-and-dime drug trade, an ever-changing cast of skells, and enough strolling pross to account for a morning-after litter of used condoms.
    An old smoke once told me of a much different street in the days when he was young: a street of lime kilns and stone masons’ yards, where brownstone slabs quarried from across the river at Weehawken and Guttenberg arrived in skiffs each morning, to be properly cut and shaped in the Kitchen for rich men’s homes. For a suspended second, I indulged the thought of this ironic past. Then, down toward the end of Forty-first, nearly to Ninth Avenue, I saw a man; that is, I saw a silhouette.
    The silhouette appeared to have a pistol. It moved toward a car—a station wagon half-illuminated by the yellow plume of a streetlamp, clear enough for me to see Jersey plates. The silhouette raised a foot, kicked the driver side door.
    “Police!” it shouted. “Get the fuck out of the car!”
    No response. The car door was kicked several more times, the window bashed with the gun butt.
    “Let’s go, let’s go! Police! Get the fuck out!”
    Another figure approached from behind the car, slowly. When he stepped into light I could see he wore the bag, the navy blue NYPD uniform. Also that he was African American, and young enough to be a rookie. And by now I saw fully his silhouetted partner—a white plainclothes cop in his thirties, wearing jeans and construction boots and a denim jacket like the one I was wearing myself.
    The white cop stepped back from the car, raised a foot, and rammed it against the driver window, smashing it. Then he pulled open the door, and yanked a guy out from behind the