Bringing Out the Dead by Joe Connelly

Author:Joe Connelly
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307765475
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-22T10:00:00+00:00

10

———

“Stop looking like that,” Marcus said.

“Like what?”

“Like you just screwed Dispatcher Love.”

“I want to go to Forty-third between Ninth and Tenth.”

“You’re not listening to me, Frank. I know that look, that tonight’s-a-new-night-things-are-going-to-get-better look. Marcus has been there, and he wants you to know, you’re setting yourself up for a major fall.”

“I already fell, Marcus. Too many times. In fact, there’s no place I haven’t fallen.”

“I ever tell you about the time years ago I was on this ledge uptown, trying to talk this psycho inside?”

“Where the guy jumped, right, and you almost fell. No, you never told me this story.”

“No, you never listened. Seventeen flights up, and I’m standing next to this nut on a two-foot little piece-of-shit stone. I didn’t care; I’d go anywhere back then. Everything was going right, you know, nothing I couldn’t do, like I could fly, man. And so the asshole jumps.”

“And you flew after him and caught him just before he landed.”

“You think this is funny. I was going, man, if someone on high hadn’t pulled me in. I put all I had into saving that guy and when he went down I was so out of my head it was like I fucked up, I should go too, and yeah, there was this other part of me that had gotten away with so much in the past I thought for a second I can save him on the way down, this dumb-ass lowlife suicidal. The Lord pulled me in, and that’s when I woke up.”

“That’s when you got that twitch in your eye.”

“What twitch?” He turned to me, holding both eyes open as long as he could.

“Look, Marcus, I’m not out to save the world. I hit bottom, and now I just want to get back onto some middle ground where I can rest and get something to eat.”

“I heard it all before, Frank, but the look, it don’t lie. If you ain’t gonna listen to me, then listen to Love. She speaks the truth. What’s out there. What’s always gonna be.” Marcus pulled the radio from behind his seat and placed it on the dash and turned up the volume, the violent beauty of Love’s voice: “Okay, units, I’ve got calls to give out. One-Three Zebra, you got a man trying to throw a woman and her dog off the tenth floor at 220 East Fiftieth Street. One-Four Boy, on the corner of Twentieth and Eighth there’s an elderly female tied up in the trunk of a gray gypsy cab. Twelve Eddie, you’re going to 55 West Thirty-three. In apartment Twenty-eight Adam there’s a woman in a fur coat with her head in the oven. Sixteen Xray, take it uptown to One-two-five and Douglass. About halfway up the block there you’ll find a pregnant female being stoned by a mob.”

“It’s not what she says,” I said. “It’s how she says it. I’ve heard she wears only black and works with a whip.”

“She’s more woman than you could handle.” To Marcus every woman

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