Hell to Pay (A Tom Kincaid Crime Mystery) by William R. Cox

Author:William R. Cox [Cox, William R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: hardboiled thrillers, street gangs, tom kincaid mystery, crime novel, gamblers
Publisher: Piccadilly
Published: 2000-07-31T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

I THOUGHT ABOUT Molly’s prediction that I’d forget, and I knew she was right. A man can only remember some things at certain times. I tried to picture her as she was back in Jersey when we were young, a wholesome, large girl but sexy and eager; she gave gladly yet held something back; she was provocatively shocking but sometimes too easily shocked. How were we, what was our real relationship?

You try and put your finger on an old emotion and it fades or it becomes distorted like an unsatisfactory television screen. A fact or an event will come clear, but how can you remember your exact relationship to it when you are no longer the same person who experienced the event? The whys and wherefores must forever be obscure.

This is not a handy thing to think about. It tends to make of life a futile procession of days lived without rhyme or reason. No one likes to stop and realize that this is true.

Trying, possibly, to postpone the forgetting of Molly even for a brief interlude, I went over to the precinct. I was inside the big doors and the three young men were facing me before I had untangled my attempted reminiscences. They stood staring at me, and behind them was the big desk and Sully and the officer on duty and there was a moment of silence, frozen.

They wore the uniform; the jacket, the tight jeans, the heavy shoes. Their age was uncertain but averaged not more than twenty-one or two. They had the greasy hair, the sideburns, the leer. The shock which held me was that they knew me.

I didn’t know them, but they had seen me, or had been coached on a picture of me. Recognition was as much a part of their expression as hatred and threatened danger. They did not speak but made low noises, like animals at the sight of a hated trainer. Instinctively I put my hand on my gun, then ashamedly took it away. The danger was raw and naked, no one could miss it.

They refused to move. They stood like obsidian idols, all dark, all glowering, making that sound. I shoved forward. They did not part until the last possible second, and then only because they were in the precinct house, and the enemy was behind them as well as in front of them. I could smell the defiance on them and the hair oil and the hatred as I went through them, brushing one of them with my elbow. It took all I had to keep from turning after I passed them. A knife seemed to be slicing my ribs & and spine.

I walked as slowly as possible to the desk. Sully was looking past me, at the three hoodlums. The doors opened, seemed to remain open for a long moment, then closed. A young cop on duty growled something under his breath. Sully’s face was creased with deep lines. He looked older and thinner than the jolly fat man everyone around Broadway knew and liked.

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