Steaming cardboard containers of coffee in their hands, the detectives climbed the six stories to the roof of Santiago's building, opened the fire door, and stepped outside. The city almost caught them by surprise. They almost found it beautiful. They stood by the parapet, sipping their coffees, staring down at the lights spread below them like a nest of jewels. Darkness was fading fast. On the far side of the roof, they could hear the gentle cooing of Santiago's pigeons. They walked over to the coop.
The perching pigeons were hunkered down inside their grey and white overcoats.
The floor of the coop was covered with feathers and shit.
Santiago was nowhere in sight.
The time was 6:5.
In three minutes, Yolande would be dead.
The preppie whose cock was in her hand a minute ago now has her by the right wrist, and the one who was fucking her has hold of her left wrist, and now they all join in the fun, the three Richards, two of them keeping her pinned down, the third one making sure the bag is in place over her head and tight around her neck. She is going to die, she knows she is going to die. She knows that in a minute, in thirty seconds, two seconds, she will run out of breath and… "No, bitch."
And he yanks off the bag, and sticks his cock in her mouth again.
This is a game for them, she thinks. She hopes. a game. Put the bag on, take the bag off. They read someplace that depriving a person of air heightens the sexual pleasure. She hopes. But why are they calling her cunt and bitch and shit face why is one of them pushing… "No!" she screams, but it is too late, he has shoved it inside her, whatever it is, hurting her, tearin her, no, please, and now the plastic bag is on her again, and she hears over the ringing in her ears Richard from across the room mumbling, "Hey, whut's…?" and she screams inside the bag, tries to scream inside the bag, and she hears black yelling, "The fuck you doin?" and she thinks Help! and she screams "Help!" inside the bag, and this time she knows she is going to die, this time the pain is so overwhelming, why is he doing this to her twisting something jagged and sharp inside her, she is going to die, please, she wants to die, she breathes, she can't bear it a moment…
"No, cunt!" he shouts, and yanks the bag from head.
The rush of oxygen is so sweet.
She feels something Sticky,and wet on her lips.
She thinks this will be the end of it. They will leave her alone now.
She hurts too badly. She is too torn and ragged below, she knows she is hemorrhaging below. Please, she thinks. Just leave me alone now. Please. Enough.
"You guys crazy?"
Richard.
Good, she thinks. This is the end of it. But the bag is over her head again. And they are holding her down again.
They were back in the car maybe two or three minutes when they caught a 10-29 to proceed to 841 St. Sebastian Avenue. The dispatcher wouldn't call this a homicide for sure because all she had was a dead body in the alleyway there and nobody yet knew what the cause of death was.
Could've been a heart attack there in the alley. So she told them the blues had a corpse there, and mentioned that she had also notified Homicide just in case, which is how Monoghan and Monroe got into the act for the second time that night.
The time was a quarter past seven, the sun was just coming up, sort of.
This wasn't going to be any rosy-fingered dawn, that was for sure. This was just the end of another hard day's night, the shift almost having run its course, except that now they did, as it turned out, have another homicide on their hands. The freezer bag over the girl's head told them that.
The girl looked like a hooker, but nowadays it was difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. You got Hollywood starlets showing up at the Academy Awards wearing dresses that made them look like streetwalkers, but you also got bona fide prosties standing on the corner looking like apple-cheeked college girls Minnesota, so who was to say for sure? "A hooker," Monoghan said.
"For sure," Monroe said.
"Probably her pimp done her," Monoghan suggested.
"That's why her handbag's gone."
Which was keen deduction. Carella figured if he hung around long enough, he might learn something. He was wondering why, if this had been a pimp, why the guy hadn't simply stabbed her. Or shot her. Why fancy? Why a freezer bag over her head? It was obvious that someone, pimp or whoever, had dragged her into the alley. She was lying on her back in a pool of coagulating blood, but bloody smears led from the curb, where the track seemed to have begun. someone driven her here, and then dragged her to where she now lay beside a bank of garbage cans and stacks of black-bagged garbage?
"She might have been pregnant," speculated. "All that blood."
"Nowadays, people kill you so they can tear the baby out of your belly,"
Monoghan said.
"It's ancient times all over again," Monroe said.
