Read Ed McBain - Downtown for Free Online Page A

put Michael in a dangerous position in that the gun in his hand was plastic and the man standing before him was beginning to look bigger and bigger every minute. Michael had never seen such a large Oriental in his life. He wondered if perhaps the man was a fake Oriental, the way Cahill had been a fake detective and the way the plastic gun in his hand was a fake Colt .45 automatic. The gun Detective O'Brien pulled out of her handbag looked very real. "I'll shoot the first one of you fucks who moves," she said. Which sounded like authentic cop talk, too. "You," she said. "What's your name?" "Charlie Wong." "Chinese, huh?" she asked.
    "No, Jewish," Wong said sarcastically, which Michael figured was the wrong way to sound when a fat lady in only her underwear and a monkey-fur jacket was standing in the shivering cold with a pistol in her hand. "And you?" she said to Michael. "Presbyterian," he said.
    "Your _name," she said impatiently, and wagged the gun at him.
    "A cop," Wong said, shaking his head, "I can't believe it. I thought you were a hooker."
    "Why, thank you," Detective O'Brien said.
    "That's the way the hookers dress down here," Wong explained to Michael. "Even in cold weather like this. All year round, in fact." "If you two _gentlemen don't mind," Detective O'Brien said, sounding as sarcastic as Wong had earlier sounded, "what we're gonna do now is march to the station house, 'cause quite frankly I don't appreciate disorderly conduct on my ..."
    Wong shoved out at Michael, who in turn lost his footing and crashed into Detective O'Brien, who fell over backward onto her almost-naked behind, her silk-stockinged legs flying
    into the air, her gun going off. Michael
    61 figured that what he had here was a fat lady who was a real cop with a real badge and a real gun, but who thought he was a two-bit brawler instead of a two-bit victim. He decided he did not want to spend the rest of the night explaining that Wong had tried to hold him up. Especially since Detective O'Brien was now sitting up in the snow at the top of the steps leading down to the subway, her elbows on her knees, the pistol in both hands, taking very careful aim at him.
    He had learned another thing in Vietnam. "Aiiii-eeeeeee!" he yelled.
    When you heard this in the jungle, your blood ran cold.
    It worked here in downtown Manhattan, too.
    Detective O'Brien screamed back at him in terror. Her gun went off wildly, and so did Michael, in the same direction Wong had gone, running back toward Moore, and crossing the street, and seeing Wong up ahead going a hundred miles an hour.
    Michael took a quick look at his watch. 8:45. His plane would be leaving in two hours and twenty minutes.
    He could not go down into the subway to catch his A-train to the airport because Detective O'Brien was behind him, sitting between him and his transportation. There was not a taxi anywhere in sight, and besides the ten dollars Bonano had loaned him was not enough for cab fare to Kennedy. He did not know this goddamn city where everyone seemed to be either a cop or a crook and all of them seemed to be crazy. He did not know where there might be _another subway station where he could catch a train to the airport, because his map was behind him, too, there on the sidewalk between him and O'Brien. He knew only that when you were lost in the jungle, you followed a native guide.
    Behind him, Detective O'Brien fired her gun. Into the air, he hoped. He ran like hell after Wong. They ran for what seemed like miles. Wong was a good runner. Michael was out of shape and out of breath. His shoes were sodden and his socks were wet and his feet were cold and his eyeglasses kept caking with snow, which he repeatedly cleared as he followed Wong, both of
    them padding silently over fields of
    63 white, the curbs gone now, no difference now between sidewalk and street, just block after block of white after white after white in a part of the city that was totally alien to him. But at last he turned a