Free The McBain Brief by Ed McBain

time.”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œReally,” she said eagerly. “I’d . . . I’d never gone out looking for . . . for men before. This was my first time.”
    â€œAnd you picked me, huh?” Randolph asked, unbelievingly. “Well, honey, you picked the wrong man for your first one.”
    â€œI didn’t know you were a cop.”
    â€œNow you know.”
    â€œYes. Now I know.”
    â€œAnd you also know you’re in pretty big trouble.”
    â€œYes,” the girl said.
    â€œGood,” Randolph answered, grinning.
    Actually, the girl wasn’t in as much trouble as she imagined herself to be—and Randolph knew it. She had indeed stopped him on the street and asked, “Want some fun, mister?” and Randolph had immediately put the collar on her. But in the city for which Randolph worked, it would have been next to impossible to make a prostitution charge stick. Randolph conceivably had a Dis Cond case, but disorderly conduct was a dime-a-dozen misdemeanor and was hardly worth bothering with in a precinct where felonies ran wild. So Randolph knew all this, and he had known it when he collared the girl, and he sat now with a grin on his face and watched her, pleased by her troubled expression, pleased with the way her hands fluttered aimlessly in her lap.
    â€œYou can get out of it,” he said softly.
    â€œHow?” the girl asked eagerly.
    His voice dropped to a whisper. “If you know the right cop,” he said.
    The girl stared at him blankly for a moment. “I haven’t any money,” she said at last. “I . . . I wouldn’t have done this if I had money.”
    â€œThere are other ways,” Randolph said.
    â€œOh.” She stared at him and then nodded slightly. “I see.”
    â€œWell?”
    â€œYes,” she said, still nodding. “All right. Whatever you say.”
    â€œLet’s go,” Randolph said.
    He walked briskly to the railing and leaned on it. To no one in particular, he said, “I’ll be back in an hour or so.” Before he turned, he noticed the curiously sour expression on Dave Fields’ face. Briskly, he walked to the girl. “Come on,” he said.
    They went down the steps to the ground floor. At the desk, a patrolman was booking a seventeen-year-old kid who was bleeding from a large cut behind his ear. The blood had trailed down his neck and stained his tee-shirt a bright red. The girl gasped when she saw the boy, and then turned quickly away, heading for the steps.
    â€œIf he’s the one they’re booking,” Randolph said, “I hate to think what the other guy must look like.”
    The girl didn’t answer. She began walking quickly, and Randolph fell in beside her. “Where to?” he asked.
    â€œMy place,” she said. An undisguised coldness had crept into her voice.
    â€œDon’t take this so big,” he said. “It’s part of a working day.”
    â€œI didn’t know that,” the girl said.
    â€œWell, now you do.”
    They walked in silence. Around them, the concrete fingers of the city poked at the October sky. The fingers were black with the soot of decades, grimy fingers covered with waste and not with the honest dirt of labor. The streets crawled with humanity. Old men and young men, kids playing stickball, kids chalking up the sidewalks, women with shopping bags, the honest citizens of the precinct—and the others. In the ten minutes it took them to walk from the precinct to the girl’s apartment, Randolph saw fourteen junkies in the streets. Some of those junkies would be mugging before the day ended. Some would be shoplifting and committing burglaries. All would be blind by nightfall.
    He saw the bright green and yellow silk jackets of a teenage gang known as “The Marauders,” and he knew that the appearance of a blue and gold jacket in their territory would bring on a street bop and broken ribs