Read Manhattan 62 for Free Online Page A

line, their loading docks level with the trains. Some places the line goes through the buildings.
    My precinct includes the lower end of the line, which is why the cop on patrol called us earlier. Suddenly, a giant gold flower explodes over the Hudson, and in the light, I see the body.
    Is she alive? I’m scared she’s alive, afraid she’s dead. At first I think, desperately, it’s some teenage kid using the place for a game. Some kind of crazy game, like my pop used to say he played as a kid, using the struts of the overhead rail line for a jungle gym. Soon somebody would start a playground chant. The girl would grin, and pull herself up. I glance at my watch. It’s midnight. I yell out to her. No response.
    Her feet tied to the iron viaduct, she’s hanging head down, about twenty-four, twenty-five feet above me, she looks eighteen, twenty. Head seems to bob in the wind coming from the river, or maybe it’s some kind of momentum, the weight of her body making her swing, her long black hair whipped around. One arm in a pink and white checked sleeve, a blouse a young girl might wear, flopping like a rag doll’s arm. The other arm is gone. Most of the blouse has been ripped away, revealing a plain white bra. It feels obscene to look. Blood everywhere.
    Only a piece of the sleeve is left. The arm had been cut off at the shoulder. No chant. No playground games.
    Can she be alive? I shout at her. No response. I know she’s dead. I know it, but I jump up, trying to reach her. I can’t reach her, can’t really see her face, she’s too high. I can’t even grab her arm. This is like some fucking hallucination, but it’s real. I can’t find the damn cop who called this in.
    I can’t get to her this way. I’m yelling and running around, looking for some way up to the viaduct. God knows what’s up there. I need help.
    A block west is the meat-packing market. Warehouses open all night. The first one I get to, three men jump out, and open the back so it fits level with the loading dock. A meat packer, wearing a bloodied white coat, a smoke hanging from his lips, signals for them to start. They shoulder sides of beef off the truck and onto metal hooks, shoving the hooks along the ceiling of the warehouse. Once I worked a case where they found a dead man hanging from one of those hooks. Mob job pure and simple. At night, there’s always that dark smell of blood in the air.
    I grab for the guy in the white coat. “Where’s the phone? Get me a goddamn phone.”
    â€œWho the hell are you?”
    I show him my badge. Finally, he lets me into the warehouse office, and I call the precinct, and by the time I’m heading back to the crime scene, the sirens are screaming. The meat boss must have heard them too, because he comes running after me, a cleaver in his hand, maybe figuring he could help with some creep out murdering young women.
    When I get up the access ladder to the High Line, the place is already swarming, cops, medics, guys setting up portable lights, best they can. Flashlights flicker. The scene is like a movie set, black and white, cops and death.
    I get a look at the girl whose feet were fastened with rope, then tied with wire to an iron railing, her body pushed over, head first. Her feet are scarred bad like somebody beat her.
    Under the hot light, two hefty cops yank loose the wires, and pull the girl up. They lay her down on the side of the tracks, and the sight of these bulky young men attending so tenderly to this victim, this young girl, even younger than them, is hard to bear, even if you have a soul as calloused as mine.
    Detectives arrive. Somebody from the coroner’s office is already there. Reporters are crammed onto the narrow track. Flashbulbs go off, all in the ritual dance of death.
    â€œThey cut her arm off,” somebody yells. “They cut out her tongue,” a medic tells me. “Mafia thing, they want to shut