Chapter Text
March 1983
The city had a way of making even a bad decision feel like independence if you walked fast enough.
Christine Cagney came out of the bar just after one in the morning, the brass bell over the door giving one tired little jangle behind her, as though it had seen her off with a warning it did not have the strength to repeat. A yellow wash of light spilled onto the sidewalk, then narrowed and vanished as the door swung shut. Inside, there was still laughter, the wet clink of ice in short glasses, some man raising his voice to prove to another man that he knew more about baseball, politics, women, God, probably all four. Outside, there was March cold, clean enough to cut through the smoke in her hair and the scotch on her breath.
She paused under the sign long enough to decide whether she was drunk. Not drunk, she concluded. Certainly not sober. But there was a great civilized territory between the two, and Christine had spent enough years traveling through it to know the landmarks.
She could stand. She could walk. She could produce her shield if the occasion required it and recite her name, rank, and command with perfect clarity. Detective, Third Grade, Fourteenth Squad. There. See? Functional. The sidewalk had performed one small tilt beneath her when she stepped down from the doorway, but that was a matter of municipal maintenance, not personal failure.
She turned her collar up against the wind and started south.
The Village was doing what the Village did on a Saturday night: refusing to go to bed with any dignity. Music bled from basement clubs and second-floor windows. Steam lifted from a manhole with theatrical persistence. A couple stood arguing beside a hydrant, the woman’s face pale and furious beneath her dark bangs, the man gesturing too much with a slice of pizza folded in his hand. A girl in a black coat and silver shoes laughed so hard she had to lean against a parking meter. A cab nosed through the intersection, horn tapping twice, not angry enough to mean it. Everybody wanted something. Everybody was going somewhere. Nobody looked twice at a blonde woman in a belted coat walking home alone.
That was the great mercy of New York, Christine thought, and also the great danger of it. You could disappear in public.
She had meant to take a cab. She had put money aside for it, folded neatly in the small zippered compartment of her purse, a little adult arrangement she had made with herself at seven o’clock, when she had still been drinking coffee at her kitchen table and considering whether going out alone was bold or pathetic. By eleven, bold had won. By midnight, pathetic had climbed up onto the barstool beside her and ordered a drink. By one, they had both become tiresome company.
So she walked. It was only a few blocks to the loft. More than a few, technically, but she knew these streets. She knew which bodegas stayed open late, which corners gathered trouble like lint, which doorways smelled of piss and which smelled of bread from the bakery ovens starting early for Sunday morning. She knew how to keep her keys laced between her fingers without making a show of it. She knew how to read a reflection in a darkened shop window. She knew all the sensible things a woman knew and all the professional things a cop knew, and because of that she allowed herself certain exemptions from fear.
Besides, fear was for women who had not spent the week looking at dead bodies, bruised faces, ransacked apartments, statements written by shaking hands. Fear was for civilians. Fear was for wives in Queens who watched the eleven o’clock news and called their husbands into the room. Christine had a gun in her purse and a badge in her wallet and a temper sharp enough to qualify as a backup weapon.
Still, she wished Mary Beth had been there. The thought arrived uninvited and sat down heavily.
Mary Beth would have disapproved of the fourth scotch. Not out loud, probably. That was the lethal thing about Mary Beth: she could disapprove with kindness. She would have put one hand on Christine’s arm and said, “How about we get you home, huh?” in that warm, practical voice that made resistance seem childish. Christine would have protested, because protest was one of the few social rituals she understood without instruction, and Mary Beth would have let her protest for exactly long enough to preserve her dignity before taking her coat from the back of the chair and handing it to her.
But Mary Beth was not there. Mary Beth was home with Harvey and the boys, or asleep, or pretending to sleep while the television muttered through the wall and the neighbors upstairs took off their shoes one at a time. Mary Beth had a Saturday night that belonged to other people. Christine had one that belonged to nobody, which meant she could ruin it any way she liked.
She crossed against the light, because there were no cars coming and because she disliked being told what to do by machines. Her heel landed badly on the far curb, and she caught herself with one hand against a lamppost.
“Beautiful,” she muttered.
The word came out with more slurring than she would have preferred. She straightened, lifted her chin, and continued walking with exaggerated control, every step an argument entered into evidence. The night air had begun to clear the fog at the edges of her vision, but it had also made her aware of how much she had drunk. Her mouth tasted of peat and old cigarettes, though she had not smoked, and there was a thick warmth behind her eyes. Her thoughts moved in long, elegant sweeps, then occasionally dropped a stitch.
At the corner of Bleecker, she passed the dark window of a closed record shop and glanced at herself without meaning to. A pale face, wind-stung. Blonde hair loosened from its careful arrangement. Lipstick faded except at the edges, giving her mouth a bruised, stubborn look. She looked, she thought, like a woman somebody might invent if they had only ever heard about her from men.
That annoyed her.
She stopped in front of the glass and used the reflection to smooth her hair, not because anyone was watching, but because she had been raised by Margaret Cagney, and some training survived all revolutions. Behind her, the street stretched back in streaks of neon and shadow. A delivery truck idled near the corner. Two men came out of a bar laughing. A figure moved from one pool of light to another half a block away, then slowed.
Christine’s hand paused at her hair. She looked harder, but the glass was dirty and the night behind her was broken into pieces. A coat. A hat, maybe. A man-shaped interruption in the rhythm of other people. Then a cab passed between them, and when it cleared, he was only a dark shape near a doorway, lighting a cigarette or pretending to.
Christine turned away from the window.
It was nothing. It was always nothing until it wasn’t, and the job had trained her to live inside that ugly little contradiction. You could not arrest a shadow for being present. You could not draw on a man because he occupied the same street. You could not let every glance become a threat, not unless you wanted to spend your life flinching at your own reflection. She knew this. She had built whole fortresses inside herself out of knowing this.
But she walked faster. The soles of her shoes sounded too loud now. The city, which had been all brass and percussion a minute earlier, seemed to thin around her. Storefront grates. Sleeping cars. A cat vanishing beneath a stoop. Somewhere far away, a siren rose and fell with no interest in her particular stretch of pavement. Christine shifted her purse higher on her shoulder and slid her right hand inside it, past her compact, her wallet, the crumpled receipt from the bar, until her fingers touched the familiar shape of her revolver.
That steadied her. She did not take it out. She was drunk, not stupid. There were rules, even alone at one in the morning with the back of her neck beginning to prickle. Especially then. But the metal under her fingertips brought her back into her body, into training, into sequence.
Breathe. Listen. Confirm. Do not let pride make you careless. Do not let fear make you theatrical.
At the next corner, she stopped as if reconsidering her direction. She pretended to study a theater poster peeling from a plywood wall, some earnest production with a title that sounded like a threat disguised as poetry. In the corner of her eye, she watched the sidewalk behind her.
The man stopped too. Not immediately. That would have been too easy. He took another three or four steps, enough to preserve the fiction of coincidence, then bent his head toward the window of a closed laundromat. There was nothing to see there but rows of dead machines and his own reflection looking back at him. He wore a dark overcoat and no hat. His hair was close-cropped or hidden by shadow; she could not tell. His hands were in his pockets.
Christine felt her irritation flare before her fear did.
Men. Jesus Christ. Men could not even be ominous without assuming a woman would be too stupid or too polite to notice.
She turned the corner.
The sensible thing would be to cross to the avenue, find an open place, call a cab, maybe duck into the all-night diner two blocks over and let the fluorescent lights and bad coffee do what they had done for generations of women with sense. The professional thing would be much the same, with more attention to exits. The Christine thing, unfortunately, had other opinions. It disliked being moved by another person’s intentions. It disliked retreat. It disliked, most of all, the hot little pulse of shame that had started beneath her breastbone, as if being followed were somehow evidence that she had made herself available to danger by existing in public after midnight with liquor in her blood.
She hated that feeling enough to mistrust every decision it produced.
So she did not go directly home. She took a left she did not need, onto a narrower street where the buildings leaned closer and the trees, still mostly bare, scribbled black lines against the streetlamps. Her loft was no longer straight ahead but off to the east, waiting with its big windows and its silence and the Scotch bottle she should have put away before she left. She could picture the answering machine on the table, the little red light either blinking or not blinking. She could picture the unmade bed. She could picture herself locking the door behind her and standing there in the dark, listening to her own pulse, furious that she had been frightened.
Behind her, footsteps turned onto the narrow street.
Christine kept walking.
Her body had gone cold in the efficient way it did at work when a situation clarified. The drunkenness did not vanish; that only happened in bad novels and worse police reports. It remained in her blood, slowing some things and sharpening others strangely, like a radio station coming through between bursts of static. She knew she was not at her best. She also knew that not being at her best had never made her harmless.
She passed a row of brownstones, each with its little iron fence, its small square of dirt waiting for spring. One basement window glowed blue with television light. A man’s laugh floated out, then vanished as someone lowered the volume. Christine’s thumb brushed the edge of the revolver’s grip. She counted steps. Hers. His. Hers again.
Too close now.
She stopped.
The sound behind her stopped too, a fraction late.
Christine turned.
The man stood under the streetlamp twenty feet away, close enough now that she could see his face without seeing it clearly. Ordinary. That was the first insult. He was not monstrous, not visibly deranged, not obliging enough to announce himself as danger. He might have been a salesman, a clerk, somebody’s brother-in-law. Mid-thirties, maybe. Average height. A mouth that had been watching her for hours before it ever considered speaking.
“Can I help you?” she said.
Her voice came out steady. A little low. Good.
He smiled as if she had made a joke meant only for him. “You dropped something.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You didn’t even look.”
“I don’t have to.”
He took one step closer. “You always this friendly?”
Christine’s fingers closed around the gun in her purse. Not drawn. Not yet. Her badge was in there too, but something told her he would like the badge less than the gun and the gun less than the fact that she had turned around. Men like that often wanted the back of a woman, the uncertainty of her, the private little movie of her not knowing.
“I asked you a question,” she said. “Can I help you?”
The smile shifted. Not gone, exactly. Thinned.
From the basement window, a television laugh track burst suddenly into the street, bright and artificial, then cut away into muffled dialogue. Christine did not look toward it. She did not take her eyes off him. The whole block seemed to be holding its breath badly, like a witness who knew something and hoped not to be called.
He tilted his head. “I just thought you might want company.”
“No.”
“Come on. Pretty girl like you shouldn’t be walking alone.”
“There it is,” Christine said softly.
“What?”
“The civic concern.”
He stared at her, trying to decide whether he had been insulted. She hoped he would decide correctly. She hoped he would get angry enough to reveal himself or embarrassed enough to go away, and she knew even as she hoped it that men rarely chose the option that saved everyone paperwork.
The wind moved between them. It lifted the loose hair at her temple and slid cold fingers down the back of her neck. Christine stood with one hand inside her purse and one foot angled slightly behind the other, knees loose, balance set. She thought of Mary Beth then—not sentimentally, not with longing, but as a voice: Don’t be a hero, Christine. For once in your life, don’t make it harder than it has to be.
The trouble was that Christine had never understood where bravery ended and stubbornness began. In her, they had been poured from the same bottle.
“Turn around,” she said, “and walk away.”
The man’s eyes dropped briefly to her purse. Then back to her face.
“Or what?”
Christine smiled, and this time she let him see the whole blade of it.
“Try me.”