Read Death Dance for Free Online Page B

theater.
    Mike waited until they were out of range. He leaned both
elbows on the bar and rested his head in his hands. "Sorry. It's been
an uphill battle all night to get these guys to let us in. They'll go
nuts when ESU shows up with all their gear."
    "You called for Emergency Services?" I asked. They were the
unit of last resort, teams of fearless cops who got into and around
places that no others could manage. They rescued jumpers from bridges
and building cornices, recovered bodies from tunnels and train tracks,
and broke down doorways and barriers to get into wherever their
colleagues needed to go. "Battering rams and the jaws of death? Isn't
that giving up the ghost a little bit early?"
    "Jaws of life. They're what get you out of the jaws of death.
I guess you've never been backstage here, have you, kid? You're in for
an eye-opener." Mike swiveled around to look at me. "Remember how old
you were the first time you came to Lincoln Center?"
    "Maybe eight or nine."
    "What for?"
    "To see the
Nutcracker
, next door at the
State Theater. My mother brought me there every Christmas." It was
almost a ritual for little girls who loved ballet and who had grown up
in the city or, as I had, in the suburbs less than an hour away.
    "And the Met?" Mike asked.
    "A year or two later."
    "How many times since?"
    He knew the answer to that question. I subscribed to the
annual repertory season of American Ballet Theater and frequented the
opera whenever I had the chance. "Dozens of times, Mike. Maybe
hundreds."
    He was going somewhere with this and I waited patiently for
him to make his point.
    "I know you don't like the parking garage much, but did it
ever scare you to sit inside the Met?"
    "Scare me? To be in the audience? It's where I come to get
away from the tawdry things we see and hear every day at work. It
transports me to be here, to put it mildly."
    I truly loved to sink into a velvet-cushioned seat at the end
of a day at the prosecutor's office, wait for the 1,500 yards of
Scalaman-dre silk curtain to lift and drape in Wagnerian style, and the
thirty-two crystal chandeliers to rise up against the twenty-four-karat
gold-leaf ceiling as they dimmed to darkness. For two or three hours I
was able to lose myself in whatever world of make-believe the artists
drew around me.
    "Let me tell you about the first time I came here," Mike said.
"Same age as you—maybe ten at the time."
    Mike had turned thirty-seven a few months earlier, and I would
celebrate the same birthday at the end of this month. Mercer was five
years older than us, now married to another detective named Vickee and
father to a baby born a bit more than a year ago.
    "My old man and I were out together for the afternoon, a
weekday in late July. It didn't happen often that I got to spend a
whole day with him," Mike said. We knew all about his father, who'd
been on the force for twenty-six years. Brian Chapman was a legend in
the department, and the heart attack that killed him forty-eight hours
after he turned in his gun and shield made Mike even more determined to
follow in his footsteps.
    "Somebody gave him tickets for the Yankees game and, man, was
I psyched. He got off duty at eight a. m., slept a couple of hours,
took my buddies and me out on the street to pitch to us so we could
play stickball, see how far we could whack the ball. Three manhole
covers or more."
    Mercer nodded his head, familiar with the New York City street
game.
    "Something you never did in the burbs, right, Coop? It was
before cell phones. My mother shouted him in from the stoop to take an
emergency call from his boss. When he got back out, my dad pulled me
aside and asked me if I wanted to take a ride. Told me he wouldn't be
able to go to the game after all, 'cause something had come up with
work. He knew how unhappy that made me, except he told me I could come
along with him this time. Me, I'd give up every Yankee from the Babe to
Mantle to Guidry to Piniella—and throw in Jeter and A-Rod
now,