Grief Street

people, at all times, Pauly made me.
    “Hock!” he shouted merrily, voice rattling with catarrh. "Hey, hey boyo—how’s it hanging?”
    The shadow reeled around fiercely. The front of it was the same gauzy gray-black mass as the back, save for one thing: the flash of a long blade, hacking the air.
    Silver coming at me was all I could see.
    “Hah!” the shadow hissed.
    I could have fallen over from the stench of its breath alone.
    Then fall I did. But not from stink. There was a slash of heat in my right shoulder, the sound of knife ripping through jacket sleeve. My fingers sprang open, the Bulldog chunked down to damp bare ground.
    A shot rang from behind me. Matson’s revolver. The bullet went wild, pinging into a low window of the adjacent tenement house. Light popped on in a window, shafting down over the rows of bodies lumped on makeshift bunks. Skells screamed.
    “Hah!”
    There was the sound of Matson running toward me. And the sound and blur of the shadow, moving to meet the force of Matson. A blur of movement, the ugly sound of knife ripping into limb. Not mine this time. Then Matson, swearing, clutching at himself, twirling and falling.
    I pulled the nina from my belt and took an off-kilter aim at the shadow. But it was no good. For there was Pauly Kerwin jumping up and down in my line of fire, yelling— crazily, drunkenly—as the shadow swept past me and vaulted over Matson’s downed body: “Don’t be passing me up! Hey! For the love of God—talk to me, talk to me!”
    I struggled to my feet and moved toward Matson, writhing fifty feet away from me on a patch of muddy ground turning blood red beneath him. I slipped in the mud and fell again, landing on my injured right side. The nina went flying out of my weakened firing hand, somewhere into the crazed movie-house dark. I rolled the rest of the way to Matson, rose to my knees, and knelt over him.
    “Take it easy, Matson,” I said. The top of his right thigh had been opened. Lucky for him, there was nothing coming out of the leg but blood. But that was bad enough. Matson’s rich voice was going faint, so was his color. “Don’t be squirming around,” I told him. “Save your energy.”
    “You got to take him down all alone,” Matson said, rain spattering a face full of pain. It was hard for him to talk or breathe. His hands were wrapped around his leg, in a death grip. Blood poured thickly over his brown thumbs. “I'm no good to you. Hock. Goddammit, Hock, I’m no good... I’m sorry—”
    “Save it, Matson. I’ll get you help...”
    Then before I could even stand up, a big shaggy white guy charged out from the house next door, making a lot of noise about it. Besides that noise, there was now a whole park full of screeching skells. Lights popped on in window after window.
    The shaggy guy flapped through the rain in pajama bottoms and sneakers and no shirt, stumbling through the gate and into the park. When he reached Matson and me, I recognized him from a photograph in New York magazine— one of the pictures that went along with the Pete Benjaminson piece about the right to happiness, even in Hell’s Kitchen.
    “Bob Smith,” he said, kneeling next to me in the mud. He turned back a torn flap of my jacket, which I saw was soaked in blood. “Can you move your arm?” he asked.
    “Yeah, a little.” I put my hand on Matson’s forehead. “This man’s been hurt worse, he’s an injured cop.”
    “A cop? Say, I know you from the papers, don’t I?” Smith said. Then he answered himself. “You’re Detective Hockaday. How can I help?”
    “Call nine-one-one. Tell them you’re with an ‘officer down.’ Exactly those words —officer down. Ask for an ambulance, and a mobile blood transfusion crew.”
    “I saw somebody heading up Eleventh Avenue,” Smith said. He rose, and pulled me up with him. Before he flapped back into the house to telephone, he said, “Whoever he was, he was all in black—like a big blanket. Walking along just as calm as could be.”
    “You can get him,” Matson wheezed. “Go on, Hock— take him down!”
    I ran west on Thirty-seventh to the corner. It rained from the black-and-blue sky. And from my stiffened right side, it was raining blood.
    Following Smith’s direction, I turned up the avenue after the shadow. I fumbled into my jacket with my left hand, in search of a gun, only to realize how both had been lost to the mud and black of the park.
    So there was I, chasing in the sopping streets