Terrified and flooded with adrenaline, I clobbered the thing with my purse again, and it fell down again. We did this once more with feeling, and I was just starting to think the gargoyle was reassuringly stupid when it changed tactics and, instead of attacking me, now attacked my purse.
The other creature, also a gargoyle, was still struggling with the large human figure nearby. I didn’t have time to take a good look, but the size, like the deep grunts and moans, confirmed that the vicious creature’s victim was a man. In my peripheral vision, I could see that he was trying to get away, but was moving clumsily and staggering around in evident confusion, tugging ineffectually at the arm that the growling gargoyle clung to.
“Hit it!” I shouted at him, while I played tug-of-war for my purse with my own adversary. “Kick it!”
The creature wrestling for possession of my purse was surprisingly strong for its size. I was fighting with all my might to keep the thing from ripping my purse out of my hands as we scrabbled around on the sidewalk, circling unsteadily with it caught between us. The gargoyle’s growls were rabid and enraged, and its breath was so foul I thought I’d be sick from the stench. I had a feeling that letting it scratch me with those filthy claws would be a big mistake, so when it tried to do so, I reluctantly let go of my purse and jumped back. With a foamy-mouthed shriek of triumph, the creature turned around and ran away, clutching my purse to its chest like a war trophy.
I turned to face the other gargoyle, the one that was still attacking the man staggering around the sidewalk. Remembering the ruthless boots I wore, I raised a leg and kicked the creature in the back as hard as I could, striking it mercilessly with Jilly C-Note’s long, sharp heel. The creature screamed loudly in pain and rage, whirled to bare its terrifying fangs at me, and then—to my relief—also turned and ran off.
The struggling man, freed of his attacker, staggered into another garbage can and fell down.
“
Dangerous shit,
” I choked out, panting with fear and exertion.
Shaking, I found myself in a sitting position on the sidewalk without quite knowing how I’d gotten there. I stayed there for a few moments, catching my breath and trying to absorb what had just happened. Then I turned to look at the prone figure nearby. He was lying there in a heap, not moving. I crawled over to him.
“Hey, are you okay?” I said, my voice still breathless.
He moaned pathetically.
“Did they bite you?” I asked. “Or scratch you?”
Dangerous shit, indeed!
He said, “Unnng . . .”
“Jesus, what the hell
are
those things?” I said. “Do you know?”
“Ba . . . ka . . .”
“What?” I said.
“Ba . . . ka . . .” he said faintly.
The disjointed syllables meant nothing to me. They probably meant nothing, period. And that wasn’t important right now, I realized. “Are you hurt?”
In response, he moaned again.
“My name is Esther Diamond,” I said, trying to sound much calmer than I felt. “Can you tell me yours?”
He was a black man, tall and well-built, with a neatly trimmed beard. He looked very ill and smelled weird, but he was wearing a well-cut tuxedo, though it was a little worse for wear after his struggle.
“Your name,” I said. “Tell me your name.”
He seemed so dazed, I was afraid he might not
know
his name. But then he said, “Da . . .”
“Da?”
“Dari . . . Darius.”
“Darius! Excellent,” I said encouragingly. “Darius what?”
“Mmm . . . Ph . . . Phelps.”
“Okay, Darius Phelps.” Since he seemed unable to tell me whether he was hurt, I said, “I’m going to check you for injuries now. All right?”
He neither protested nor agreed. After a moment, I started my search for injuries in the obvious place: the arm that the greenish gargoyle had been attacking with such ferocity while I fought its companion.
I also
stopped
my investigation there, since I immediately saw that the hand had been torn off the wrist and was hanging by just a thin shred of flesh.
I gave a choked scream of horror. Then I tried to get control of myself so as not to alarm the wounded man.
I steeled myself to look again . . . and saw that the hand was
moving
. I uttered a sharp cry of shock and threw myself backward, flinching away from the active appendage.
Darius grunted, evidently wondering what was wrong.
I heard myself panting with panic and revulsion. My hands were shaking. My heart was pounding frantically.
Calm down,
I told myself, unwilling to look at Darius’ dismembered appendage again.
It’s just a spasm or something. Like a chicken running around without its head.
I needed to get help for this man. Right away!
I reached for my cell phone so I could call 911 . . . which was when I realized that my phone was in my purse, and my purse was in the clutches of a demented gargoyle.
“Shit!”
I said.
No reaction from Darius. I checked to see if he was still conscious. His eyes were half-open, his dazed expression unchanged. I thought he must be in shock.
I tried to pull myself together and
think
.
My first thought was to go find a hospital or a police station.
I was already on my feet before I realized that wasn’t a practical plan.
“No. A
phone,
” I muttered. “I need a phone.”
I turned to Darius and forced myself to speak calmly. Or at least, I tried; I probably sounded as confused and scared as I felt.
“Darius,” I said loudly, “I’ve got to find a phone so that I can call for help. I won’t go far. And as soon as I find a phone, I’ll be right back by your side. In the meantime, don’t try to move. That’s very important, all right?
Don’t move.
”
Darius moaned pathetically again, which I interpreted as acknowledgment of my instructions. I repeated that I’d be right back as soon as I found a phone.
Then I tried ringing the doorbells of a couple of nearby row houses. No one answered in the first one. In the second house, a resident shouted down from the second floor that he was calling the police.
“Yes!” I shouted back. “Call the police! A man has been hurt out here!”
“Get away from this house!” he shouted back. Which convinced me that he might not call for help after all. I rang his doorbell a few more times. No response.
Then I heard a siren wailing. It sounded like it was only a block or two away. I followed the noise, moving as fast as I could in those cruel boots, and I reached Lexington Avenue. There were a number of businesses there, but it was past midnight on a weeknight, and they were all closed. I didn’t immediately see any pedestrians, either, but at least there was a modest quantity of vehicular traffic on the street.
I started trying to wave down a car, hoping I could convince someone to stop and let me use their phone. But the cars on Lexington just kept careening past me. I was terrified that Darius would die from his wound before I got help for him, or that those vicious gargoyles would return to attack him as he lay on the sidewalk, alone and helpless. Frustrated, confused, and panicking at the prospect of Darius dying because of my failure to summon help, I waded out into traffic, boldly—or quite stupidly—trying to force cars to stop if they didn’t want to be responsible for running me over.
Only later did two important things occur to me.
The first was that, considering my costume that night—which I had by then completely forgotten about—my behavior was bound to be drastically misinterpreted.
Indeed, it didn’t take long for two cops in a squad car to find me. Given the way I looked, my misunderstood aggression toward the passing strangers whom I stopped, my lack of ID, the crazed things I was babbling, and the fact that, in my frustration, I struggled physically with one of the cops, the results were probably predictable: They cuffed me, arrested me, and tossed me into the squad car.
The second important thing that finally occurred to me, as I was being taken to the Twenty-fifth Precinct to be processed and locked up, was that despite the gruesome severity of Darius’ injury, there had been no blood at all.
3
I
was leaning against the cool bars of my jail cell in the Twenty-fifth Precinct, exhausted, angry, crazed with worry, and also plagued by a vague feeling that I should start singing the blues . . . when Detective Connor Lopez entered the detention area.
He flashed his gold shield at the female cop on duty, introduced himself, and said he’d like to talk to me. She grinned and said they’d all been looking forward to his arrival. Then she announced she was taking a coffee break and tactfully left us alone. (Well, “alone” unless you count my only cell mate, who seemed to be sleeping off quite a bender.)
Lopez looked roughly the way you’d expect a guy to look after being hauled out of bed by an urgent summons in the middle of the night. His straight black hair was rumpled, he needed a shave, and there were circles under his blue eyes. He had evidently dressed in a hurry, just grabbing the first items at hand when he’d staggered out of bed: cut-offs, a faded SUNY T-shirt, and flip-flops. Oddly, the overall effect of his untidy fatigue made him look younger than his thirty-one years, more like a grad student during exam week than a police officer dragged from his bed to bust me out of stir.
He’d inherited exotic good looks from his Cuban immigrant father and clear blue eyes from his Irish-American mother. I noticed that his golden olive skin was darker than usual. Maybe he’d spent some time out at the beach this summer, or maybe he’d been helping his parents with yard work at their home in Nyack, just north of the city and across the Hudson River. Or perhaps he had taken a vacation since the last time I’d seen him. Which had been in May. When he had told me he couldn’t date me anymore.
My relationship with Lopez, though short- lived and unconsummated, was complicated. So I had been
extremely
reluctant to ask him to come to my rescue tonight. By the time I had decided to do it, I was out of other feasible options.
Besides, he
had
said that if I ever needed his help, I should call him.
And this was certainly an occasion when I needed his help.
Lopez’s thick- lashed gaze traveled over me now, taking in the black high- heeled boots, purple fishnet stockings, and embarrassingly short vinyl skirt. When he got to my tight, leopard-patterned top, he lingered on my well-exposed cleavage, which looked noticeably more impressive than usual; one of the things that made Jilly’s costume so uncomfortable was the push-up bra beneath it.
“Eyes front, soldier,” I said irritably.
His gaze shifted to my face, where Jilly’s makeup was probably making me look like a tubercular raccoon by now.
“Sorry.” Lopez gave my overall appearance another quick appraisal, then said, “Are you really that hard up for money?”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped.
He smiled wearily. “I take it you got a job?”
He meant an acting job, of course. As a detective in the Organized Crime Control Bureau, as well as a personal acquaintance of mine, he presumably knew that I still waited tables regularly at Bella Stella, which had been my day job in recent months (though it mostly involved working nights). It was a famous restaurant in Little Italy that was owned by a woman with close connections to the Gambello crime family. Lopez had been involved in investigating a Mafia murder that occurred there in May. I had witnessed the hit, and the subsequent strange events surrounding that murder had ultimately led to Lopez breaking up with me—before we’d even really started a relationship.
“Yes, I got a job,” I said. “A TV guest spot. One week of work.”
Stella Butera, owner of Bella Stella, had given me the whole week off for
D30
without any fuss or complaint. Stella was good about letting her singing servers schedule our restaurant work around our professional opportunities, and it was one of the reasons I liked working for her.
“TV, huh?” Lopez tilted his head. “And you’re playing—let me guess—a Benedictine nun?”
“Yes. I suppose the outfit gives it away,” I said sourly, recalling some of the insulting comments that the arresting officers had made tonight, assuming that I was exactly what I appeared to be.
“Well, I’m glad you got work, Esther. But the sixty-four thousand dollar question is,” Lopez said, “why were you wearing your hooker costume and soliciting tricks on Lexington Avenue?”
“I was
not
soliciting tr—”
“I got a call from the desk sergeant here saying—”
“I
told
them what I was doing!”
“—that a crack whore who claims to be a friend of mine was stopping cars on Lexington and reaching into the windows to grab the drivers’ crotches.”