Manhattan Is My Beat

settling was over. Haarte ran to the column and undid the rope. He tossed it into a Dumpster. Then he pulled off the latex gloves and left the construction site, careful to avoid the spreading pool of blood migrating outward from the mound of debris in the center of the sidewalk.

     
    The man stood at the top of the stairs, turning three hundred sixty degrees around the girl’s loft.
    Any notes? Any diaries? Any witnesses?
    He was wearing a jacket with a name stitched on it,
Hank
. Below the name he himself had stenciled
Dept. of Public Works. Meter Reading Service
.
    The Meter Man turned back to the loft. Walked along the bookshelves, pulled out several books, and flipped through them.
    There had to be something here. She’d looked like a scavenger. The sort who doesn’t throw anything away. And, fuck, it looked like she hadn’t.
    He got to work: Looking through all the books, papers, all the shit. Stuffed animals, scraps of notes, diaries … Shit, she wasn’t the least bit organized. This was gonna take forever. His urge was to fling everything around the room, rip open the suitcases, cut open mattresses. But he didn’t. He worked slowly, methodically. This was against his nature. If you’re in a hurry, do it slowly. Somebody told him that and he always remembered it. One of the guys he worked for, a guy now dead—dead not because he got careless but dead because they were in a business where you sometimes got dead and that was all there was to it.
    You’re in a hurry, do it slowly
.
    Carefully looking through the cushions, boxes, bookcases.
    A box stuffed into the futon was labeled MAGIC CRYSTALS. Inside were pieces of quartz. “Magic.” He whispered the word as if he’d never said it before, as if it were Japanese.
    Jesus. I’m in outer fucking space.
    He found a cassette labeled
Manhattan Is My Beat
and picked it up, set it down.
    Then: footsteps.
    Shit. Who the hell was
this?
    Giggling. A woman’s voice: “Not here, come on. No, wait!”
    He reached into his pocket and wrapped his hand around his pistol.
    A twentyish woman, in a white bra and dress bunched around her waist, stopped at the top of the stairs. She looked at him. He looked at her tits.
    “Who the fuck are you?” she demanded. Pulling the cloth halfheartedly up to her chest.
    “Who’re
you?
“ he asked.
    The way he asked it she said, “Sandra,” immediately.
    “You’re her roommate?”
    “Rune? Yeah, I guess.”
    He laughed. “You
guess?
How long you known her?”
    “Not, you know, long.”
    He took in this information carefully, noted her body language. If she was dangerous, innocent. If she’d ever killed anyone. “How long is ‘you know long’?”
    “Huh?”
    “How the fuck long’ve you known her?”
    “A couple of months is all. What the hell’re you doing here?”
    A man, late twenties, blond, jockish, came up the stairs. He squinted, then stepped up beside Sandra.
    The Meter Man ignored him.
    She said, “Like, what’re you doing here?”
    He finished looking through the bookcase. Jesus, he didn’t want to have to flip through every book. There must’ve been five hundred of them.
    “Hey,” the blond man called, “the lady asked you a question.”
    Sounded like a line from a really bad movie. The Meter Man loved movies. He lived alone and spent every Saturday afternoon at the Quadriplex near him.
    He squinted. “What was it? The question?”
    “What’re you doing here?” she asked uneasily.
    He pointed to his chest. “I read meters.”
    “You can’t just come in here,” the young man said. Sandra tried to shush him—not concerned so much about the words themselves as the attitude. But the boy waved her off. “You can’t enter without permission. It’s trespassing. That’s actionable.”
    “Oh. Actionable. What’s that mean?”
    “That she can sue your ass.”
    “Oh. Actionable. Well, we had reports of a leak.”
    “Yeah, what leak?” Sandra asked. “Who reported it?”
    The Meter Man grinned at her, looked at her chest again. Nice tits. And she wasn’t ugly. Just needed some color and to get rid of that punky makeup. And why a white bra like old ladies wear? He shrugged. “I dunno. Somebody downstairs complained.”
    “Well, I don’t see a leak,” she said. “So why don’t you leave?”
    “You haven’t had any water damage lately?”
    “Why’s a meter reader interested in repairs and leaks?” From Sandra’s horny companion.
    The Meter Man glanced out the window. It