The Mugger 87th Precinct Series, Book 2 - By Ed McBain Page 0,4

He was twenty-four years old and a veteran of the Korean fracas, and he could remember the women he’d seen there, but never once connected those women with the pleasure he felt in watching the girls in America.

He had seen women crouched in the mud, their cheeks gaunt, their eyes glowing with the reflected light of napalm infernos, wide with terror at the swishing roar of the jet bombers. He had seen underfed bodies hung with baggy quilted garments. He had seen women nursing babies, breasts exposed. The breasts should have been ripe and full with nourishment. They had been, instead, puckered and dried—withered fruits clinging to starved vines.

He had seen young women and old women clawing in the rubble for food, and he could still remember the muted, begging faces and the hollow eyes.

And now he watched the girls. He watched the strong legs, and the firm breasts, and the well-rounded buttocks, and he felt good. Maybe he was crazy, but there was something exhilarating about strong white teeth and sun-tanned faces and sun-bleached hair. Somehow, they made him feel strong, too, and never once did he make any connection with what he had seen in Korea.

The knock on the door startled him. He whirled from the window and called, “Who is it?”

“Me,” the voice answered. “Peter.”

“Who?” he asked.

“Peter. Peter Bell.”

Who’s Peter Bell? he wondered. He shrugged and went to the dresser. He opened the top drawer and took his .38 from where it lay alongside a box holding his tie clasps. With the gun dangling at his side, he walked to the door and opened it a crack. A man can get shot only once before he realizes you don’t open doors too wide, even when the man outside has already given his name.

“Bert?” a voice said. “This is Peter Bell. Open the door.”

“I don’t think I know you,” Kling said cautiously, peering into the darkened hallway, half expecting a volley of shots to splinter the door’s wood.

“You don’t know me? Hey, kid, this is Peter. Hey, don’t you remember me? When we were kids? Up in Riverhead? This is me. Peter Bell.”

Kling opened the door a little wider. The man standing in the hallway was no older than twenty-seven. He was tall and muscularly built. He wore a brown leather jacket and yachting cap. In the dimness, Kling could not make out his features clearly, but there was something familiar in the face, and he began to feel a little foolish holding a gun. He swung the door open.

“Come in,” he said.

Peter Bell walked into the room. He saw the gun almost instantly, and his eyes went wide. “Hey!” he said. “Hey, Bert, what’s the matter?”

Holding the gun loosely, finally recognizing the man who stood before him in the center of the room, Kling felt immensely ridiculous. He smiled sheepishly. “I was cleaning it,” he said.

“You recognize me now?” Bell asked, and Kling had the distinct impression that his lie had not been accepted.

“Yes,” he said. “How are you, Peter?”

“Oh, so-so, can’t kick.” He extended his hand, and Kling took it, studying his face more carefully in the light of the room. Bell would have been a good-looking man were it not for the prominence and structure of his nose. In fact, if there was any one part of the face Kling did not recognize, it was the massive, craggy structure that protruded incongruously between sensitive brown eyes. Peter Bell, he remembered now, had been an extremely handsome youth, and he imagined the nose had been one of those things that, during adolescence, simply grow on you. The last time he’d seen Bell had been fifteen years ago, when Bell had moved to another section of Riverhead. The nose, then, had been acquired sometime during that span of years. He realized abruptly that he was staring at the protuberance, and his discomfort increased when Bell said, “Some schnoz, huh? Eek, what a beak! Is it a nose or a hose?”

Kling chose that point in the conversation to return his revolver to the open dresser drawer.

“I guess you’re wondering what I want,” Bell said.

Kling was, in truth, wondering just that. He turned from the dresser and said, “Well, no. Old friends often…” He stopped, unable to complete the lie. He did not consider Peter Bell a friend. He had not laid eyes on him for fifteen years, and even when they’d been boys together, they’d never been particularly close.

“I read in the papers where you got shot,” Bell