The door was cut out of the counter and the plastic protective shield like a line-drawing door in an old Warner Bros, cartoon. Gregor pushed through, then shut the thing behind him with a strong push. It resisted and sucked closed in its own time. The air in the desk section was staler and hotter than that in the section from which Gregor had just come. The baseboard heat registers seemed to be turned on full.
The name tag on the sergeant’s uniform said E. WASHINGTON. Gregor took off his gloves and stuffed them in the pockets of his coat.
“Is all this really necessary?” he asked. “This looks like Beirut.”
“Gangs,” the sergeant said. He didn’t look too worked up about it. “This is Beirut.”
“You seem to be having a pretty quiet time this morning.
“Yep. Had a war zone here last night though. Sixteen people dead. Didn’t even make the front page of the newspaper.”
“No,” Gregor said. “No, I don’t suppose it would have.”
“Bob Cheswicki’s up on the third floor,” E. Washington said. “He told us to expect you. Go right on up.”
“Stairs only?”
“Used to have an elevator. Then the Hot Bloods rigged one of their Molotov cocktails to it, and for once the damned thing worked.”
Gregor went over to the door marked UPSTAIRS.
“I’m going up, then,” he said. “Have a quiet day.”
“I can only hope.”
Gregor thought about trying to make more conversation. Instead, he started climbing the stairs to the third floor.
2
The stairs were steep and there were a lot of them. This was an old building with ten- and twelve-foot-high ceilings, making for longer climbs. Fortunately, Bob Cheswicki was in plain sight when Gregor finally reached his destination. So were a lot of other people. Here was the population Gregor had expected to see downstairs where the sergeant was. Here were young men in black leather jackets and eye patches and face tattoos. Here were sharp-looking girls in high heels and not much else, chewing gum and swearing nonstop at everything that passed in a uniform. The young men were manacled and handcuffed. The girls were free but deprived of their handbags. None of the young men was more than twenty. None of the girls was more than fourteen. All of them had the rough-edged blue-red fingertips that were produced from too much skin-popping.
Bob Cheswicki was leaning over the shoulder of a uniformed officer who was sitting at a desk in the middle of the room. The uniformed officer was checking something on a computer printout. On the left side of the desk there was a pile of Saturday night specials.
“Seventeen,” the uniformed officer said. “That’s what it says here. Seventeen. We’ve only got fifteen.”
“Okay,” Bob Cheswicki said. “Take them all out and strip-search them again. Get a matron for the girls.”
The uniformed officer looked doubtful. “The Legal Aid guy is downstairs.”
“Send Stepanowski to deal with the Legal Aid guy.”
“But—”
“For God’s sake, Haraldsen. We’re not trying to convict them, we’re just trying to disarm them.”
“Right,” Haraldsen said.
Bob Cheswicki looked up and saw Gregor. “Oh, good. I get a reprieve. Hello, Gregor. Come along this way. We’ll let the officers get on with this mess on their own.”
Bob backed away from Haraldsen’s desk and made his way toward the other end of the room. Gregor followed him, weaving in and out among the young men and their girls, excusing himself to uniformed officers not much older than their charges. The officers looked tense as hell and scared to death. The door at the back led to a corridor of other doors, but not a very long one. Bob Cheswicki went through the third door on his left and sat down at the desk. The room was five by seven and barely large enough to fit the two of them. The desk was piled six inches deep in paper. Bob had a water maker and the makings of instant coffee on top of his two-drawer green metal file cabinet. The file cabinet was just the right height and size to serve as a kind of side table. Bob found two clean styrofoam cups, dumped heaping teaspoons of Folger’s crystals into each, and poured water. He handed one to Gregor.
“Sorry for all the confusion. Believe it or not, this is what I do with myself these days. They have an official name for it down at headquarters, but it keeps slipping my mind. Bureauspeak. I’m supposed to ‘mediate street conflicts.’ If you can believe that.”
“Gang wars.”
“Exactly.”
“Do you have a lot of them?”
“One or two a year in different areas of the city. Somehow, working on them lacks the satisfaction of working on something like the Hazzard case. Either Hazzard case. With the Hazzard case, you’re likely to catch somebody.”