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  THE BIG BAD CITY

  Welcome to

  THE BIG BAD CITY

  “Classic McBain—taut with trenchant dialogue…. In THE BIG BAD CITY, McBain proves he can pack punches in both the physical and emotional arenas.”

  — Boston Herald

  “As good as it gets … compulsively readable.”

  — Seattle Times-Post Intelligencer

  Look for Ed McBain’s next novel of the 87th Precinct—fiftieth in his acclaimed series!

  THE LAST DANCE

  Coming soon in hardcover from Simon & Schuster

  And don’t miss the thrilling return of the book that started it all … Ed McBain’s first 87th Precinct novel

  COP HATER

  Coming soon from Pocket Books

  Praise for the 87th Precinct Novels from America’s Unparalleled, Award-Winning Master of Crime Fiction

  ED McBAIN

  THE BIG BAD CITY

  “Full of noir touches and snappy dialogue.”

  — New York Newsday

  “Vintage stuff. The dialogue is sharp, the plotting accomplished, and the prose bears the McBain stamp—uncluttered, unpretentious, ironic.”

  — The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “[A] juicy mystery … McBain … lives up to his daunting reputation…. The 87th Precinct is always an exciting place to visit.”

  — Omaha World-Herald (NE)

  “If you’re looking for a sure thing, pick this one up.”

  — Syracuse Herald-American (NY)

  “You wouldn’t want to live there, but you will enjoy visiting THE BIG BAD CITY.”

  — Winston-Salem Journal (NC)

  MORE THAN 100 MILLION COPIES OF HIS BOOKS IN PRINT!

  More Acclaim for Ed McBain and His Previous 87th Precinct Novels

  “I never read Ed McBain without the awful thought that I still have a lot to learn. And when you think you’re catching up, he gets better.”

  —Tony Hillerman

  “The best crime writer in the business.”

  — Houston Post

  “Ed McBain is a national treasure.”

  — Mystery News

  “Raw and realistic … The bad guys are very bad, and the good guys are better.”

  — Detroit Free Press

  “Ed McBain is a master.”

  — Newsweek

  “Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series … simply the best police procedurals being written in the United States.”

  — Washington Post

  “A story so sharp you could shave with it.”

  — Orlando Sentinel

  “McBain is the unquestioned king…. Light-years ahead of anyone else in the field.”

  — San Diego Union-Tribune

  “A master storyteller.”

  — Washington Times

  “McBain tells great stories.”

  —Elmore Leonard

  “The McBain stamp: sharp dialogue and crisp plotting.”

  — The Miami Herald

  “You’ll be engrossed by McBain’s fast, lean prose.”

  — Chicago Tribune

  “McBain redefines the American police novel…. He can stop you dead in your tracks with a line of dialogue.”

  — Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “The wit, the pacing, his relish for the drama of human diversity [are] what you remember about the McBain novels.”

  — Philadelphia Inquirer

  “McBain is a top pro, at the top of his game.”

  — Los Angeles Daily News

  BOOKS BY ED MCBAIN

  THE 87TH PRECINCT NOVELS

  Cop Hater* · The Mugger · The Pusher* (1956) The Con Man · Killer’s Choice (1957) Killer’s Payoff * · Killer’s Wedge · Lady Killer (1958) ’Til Death · King’s Ransom (1959) Give the Boys a Great Big Hand · The Heckler * · See Them Die (1960) Lady, Lady, I Did It! (1961) The Empty Hours · Like Love (1962) Ten Plus One (1963) Ax (1964) He Who Hesitates · Doll (1965) Eighty Million Eyes (1966) Fuzz (1968) Shotgun (1969) Jigsaw (1970) Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here (1971) Sadie When She Died · Let’s Hear It for the Deaf Man (1972) Hail to the Chief (1973) Bread (1974) Blood Relatives (1975) So Long As You Both Shall Live (1976) Long Time, No See (1977) Calypso (1979) Ghosts (1980) Heat (1981) Ice (1983) Lightning (1984) Eight Black Horses* (1985) Poison · Tricks (1987) Lullaby* (1989) Vespers* (1990) Widows* (1991) Kiss (1992) Mischief* (1993) And All Through the House (1994) Romance (1995) Nocturne (1997) The Big Bad City* (1999) The Last Dance* (2000) Money, Money, Money* (2001) Fat Ollie’s Book* (2003)

  THE MATTHEW HOPE NOVELS

  Goldilocks (1978) Rumpelstiltskin (1981) Beauty & the Beast (1982) Jack & the Beanstalk (1984) Snow White & Rose Red (1985) Cinderella (1986) Puss in Boots (1987) The House That Jack Built (1988) Three Blind Mice (1990) Mary, Mary (1993) There Was a Little Girl (1994) Gladly the Cross-Eyed Bear (1996) The Last Best Hope (1998)

  OTHER NOVELS

  The Sentries (1965) Where There’s Smoke · Doors (1975) Guns (1976) Another Part of the City (1986) Downtown (1991) Driving Lessons (2001) Candyland* (2001)

  BOOKS BY EVAN HUNTER

  NOVELS

  The Blackboard Jungle (1954) Second Ending (1956) Strangers When We Meet (1958) A Matter of Conviction (1959) Mothers and Daughters (1961) Buddwing (1964) The Paper Dragon (1966) A Horse’s Head (1967) Last Summer (1968) Sons (1969) Nobody Knew They Were There (1971) Every Little Crook and Nanny (1972) Come Winter (1973) Streets of Gold (1974) The Chisholms (1976) Love, Dad (1981) Far from the Sea (1983) Lizzie (1985) Criminal Conversation* (1994) Privileged Conversation (1996) Candyland* (2001) The Moment She Was Gone** (2002)

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  Happy New Year, Herbie (1963) The Easter Man (1972)

  CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  Find the Feathered Serpent (1952) The Remarkable Harry (1959) The Wonderful Button (1961) Me and Mr. Stenner (1976)

  SCREENPLAYS

  Strangers When We Meet (1959) The Birds (1962) Fuzz (1972) Walk Proud (1979)

  TELEPLAYS

  The Chisholms (1979) The Legend of Walks Far Woman (1980) Dream West (1986)

  *Available in paperback from Pocket Books

  **Available in hardcover from Simon & Schuster

  Ed McBain

  THE BIG BAD CITY

  A NOVEL OF THE 87TH PRECINCT

  POCKET STAR BOOKS

  New York London Toronto Sydney

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Originally published in hardcover in 1999 by Simon & Schuster Inc.

  A Pocket Star Book published by

  POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1999 by Hui Corp.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  For information address Simon & Schuster Inc., 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-02569-4

  eISBN 13: 978-0-671-02569-4

  ISBN 978-0-671-02569-4

  First Pocket Books printing November 1999

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Front cover photo by Tony Stone Images

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  This, again, is for my wife—

  Dragica Dimitrijević-Hunter

  The city in these pages is imaginary. The people, the places are all fictitious. Only the police routine is based on established i
nvestigatory technique.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Fat Ollie’s Book

  About the Author

  THE BIG BAD CITY

  1

  THE DETECTIVES HADN’T EVEN KNOWN THE TWO MEN WERE ACQUAINTED. ONE OF THE MEN WAS IN THE HOLDING cell because he’d inconsiderately shot a little Korean grocer who’d resisted his attempts to empty the store’s cash register. The other one was just being led into the cell. He’d been caught running from the scene of a liquor store holdup on Culver and Twelfth.

  Aside from their occupations, the two men had nothing in common. One was white, the other was black. One was tall, the other was short. One had blue eyes, the other had brown eyes. One had the body of a weight lifter, possibly because he’d spent two years upstate on a prior felony. The one being led into the cell was somewhat plump. Sometimes, the plump ones were the ones to watch.

  “Inside, let’s move it,” Andy Parker said and nudged him into the cell. Parker would later tell anyone who’d listen that he’d automatically figured the arresting blues had frisked the perp at the scene. “How was I to know he had a knife tucked into his crack?” he would ask the air.

  In this instance, “crack” was not a controlled substance. Detective Parker was referring to the wedge between the man’s ample buttocks, from which hiding place he had drawn a sling-blade knife the instant he spotted the body builder slouching and sulking in the far corner of the cage. What Parker did the minute he saw the plump little magician pull a knife out of his ass was slam the cell door shut and turn the key. At that very moment, Steve Carella and Artie Brown were together leading nine handcuffed basketball players into the squadroom. Both detectives smelled trouble at once.

  The trouble was not that any policeman was in danger from the chubby little knife-wielding man in the cage. But the body builder was in police custody, and presumably under police protection as well, and every cop in that room conjured up visions of monumental lawsuits against the city for allowing a black man—black, no less—to be carved up while in a locked cell—locked, no less—with a fat white assassin who kept slashing the air with the knife and repeating over and over again, “Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?”

  Carella fired a shot at the ceiling.

  “A minute before I was about to,” Parker would later claim.

  “You!” Carella yelled, sprinting toward the cage.

  “Don’t get any ideas,” Brown warned the nine basketball players, who, although they were not lawyers, were already spouting learned Supreme Court decisions on false arrest and civil rights and such. Just in case one of them decided to drag the rest of his handcuffed buddies after him into the corridor, Brown drew his own gun and stood massively and menacingly between the players and the slatted wooden railing that separated the squadroom from the hallway outside.

  “Oh, yeah?” the knifer in the cage said again, and slashed the air. The body builder kept backing away, hands circling the air in front of him. He had seen a few knife-wielders in his time, this dude, and he was waiting for the next gunshot from outside the cage, hoping the cops would help distract this crazy fat bastard who kept coming at him with the knife and yelling “Oh, yeah?” as if he was supposed to know what it meant. “Oh, yeah?” the corpulent little shit said again and again came at him.

  “You hear me?” Carella shouted from just outside the cage now. “Throw that knife down! Now!”

  “Juke him, man!” one of the basketball players shouted.

  “Oh, yeah?” the fat man yelled, and lunged again, and this time drew blood.

  The body builder yanked back his right hand as if a searing line of fire had scorched the palm, which in fact was exactly what the knife slash had felt like. His face went ashen when he turned his palm up and saw the deep cut spurting from pinkie to thumb. By then, the knifer, smelling blood, smelling fear, was closing in for the kill.

  Parker, standing outside the cage with his gun in his hand, Carella standing alongside him with his own gun in his hand, had to decide in the next ten seconds whether they would be justified within the guidelines to drop the man in his tracks. They were both certain that a man pulling a knife while in police custody was reason enough for them to have drawn their weapons and shouted a warning. They both shouted warnings again, “Drop the knife!” from Carella, “Freeze!” from Parker, but the fat little man was neither freezing nor dropping the knife.

  He simply kept moving closer and closer to the black body builder whose palm was steadily and alarmingly gushing blood, the knife swinging in the air ahead of him as he advanced, muttering, “Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?”

  “You crazy sumbitch, what’s wrong with you?” the black man yelled, but the knifer kept coming on like a tank in the streets, the knife swinging,” Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah?”

  “Steve?” Parker asked.

  “Drop him,” Carella said, and fired the first shot, hitting the knifer in the right thigh, collapsing him to his knees. Parker fired an instant later, taking the man in the right forearm, causing him to release his grip on the knife. As it clattered to the cell floor, the black man lunged for it.

  “Don’t,” Carella said very softly.

  The reason there were only nine basketball players in the squadroom—rather than the customary ten, five to a team—was that the forward on one of the teams had been shot while running downcourt for a basket. Presumably, one of the remaining nine players had fired the shot, since this had been a practice game without spectators, on a deserted playground court, on a sizzling Friday evening in August.

  The oppressive heat notwithstanding, the pair of blues riding Adam Four knew the sound of a gunshot when they heard one. Two, in fact. In rapid succession. Bang, bang, like in the comics. They rolled up outside the cyclone fence in time to stop nine youths from dispersing fast, as was the usual case in this neighborhood whenever the music of gunfire filled the air.

  The kids ranged in age from seventeen to twenty-four, twenty-five, the blues guessed, all of them wearing T-shirts and what one of the Adam Four cops described as “droopy shorts,” which meant they hung down below the knees. The white team was wearing white T-shirts. The blue team was wearing blue T-shirts. The kid lying on the ground with two bullet holes in his chest was—or had been—a member of the white team, but his T-shirt was now stained a bright red.

  The Adam Four cops found a .32 Smith & Wesson revolver in the weeds lining the dilapidated court. None of the nine knew anything at all about the gun or how Jabez Courtney happened to have got himself shot with it. All of them—presumably including the one who’d shot young Jabez—complained that they were being rounded up and herded to the cop shop simply because they were black, the O.J. legacy.

  Now, at ten minutes to eight, Carella and Brown started doing their paperwork. In this city, the tempo in August slowed down to what Lieutenant Byrnes had once described as “summertime,” not quite the equivalent of “ragtime,” a slow-motion rhythm that leisurely waltzed the relieving team into the sometimes frantic pace of police work. There were three eight-hour shifts in any working day. First came the day shift, from eight in the morning to four in the afternoon. Next came the night shift, from four to midnight. Lastly, and least desirably, came the morning shift, from midnight to eight A.M. Usually, the teams were relieved at a quarter to the hour, but not during the month of August. In August, a good third of the squad was on vacation, and many of the detectives were pulling overtime working double shifts. Which perhaps explained why Carella and Brown, who had both clocked in at a quarter to eight this morning, were still here more than twelve hours later.

  At
this hour, there was a sort of languid tranquility to the squadroom. Despite the clamor of the nine ballplayers and their arriving attorneys, all armed to the teeth with arguments pertaining to mass and indiscriminate roundups of suspects, all prepared to summon the spectres of the Holocaust and the World War II Japanese-American concentration camps …

  Despite the arrival of a paramedic team, all urgency and haste in earnest imitation of the actors on ER, rushing the bleeding body builder onto a stretcher and down the iron-ranged steps to the waiting ambulance even though the patient kept protesting he could walk, damn it, wasn’t nothin wrong with his legs …

  Despite the arrival of a second team of paramedics, no less skilled in TV emulation than the first, who briskly and efficiently lifted the plump little former knifer onto another stretcher, bleeding from forearm and thigh and shouting to his benefactors that the man he’d stabbed had stolen his wife from him, an accusation dismissed by one of the paramedics with the consolation, “Cool it, amigo,” though the knifer wasn’t Hispanic …

  Despite the arrival of two detectives from Internal Affairs who wanted to know what the hell had happened up here, how come a man in custody had been wounded by another man in custody, and how come sidearms had been drawn and fired, and all that bullshit, which Parker and Carella—and even Brown, who’d innocently been riding herd on the nine ballplayers—had to address before they could call it a day …

  Despite the arrival of a man and his helper from what was euphemistically called the police department’s Maintenance and Repair Division, here to fix the building’s decrepit air-conditioning system, which of course was malfunctioning on a day with a high of ninety-two Fahrenheit, thirty-three Celsius …

  Despite what to a disinterested observer might have appeared merely excessive motion and commotion, but which to the detectives coming and going was simply the usual ambience of the place in which they worked, give or take a few warm bodies …