Death Wish by Brian Garfield

far over on the East Side near the U.N. complex and it wasn’t a busy night-traffic area.
    The air was clouded with a fine drizzle. He turned up his jacket collar and put his hands in his pockets and walked up toward Second Avenue, avoiding puddles and refuse. He stayed to the curb edge of the sidewalk because the buildings—parking lots, loading bays—were filled with deep shadows where anyone could be lurking. Only half a block from the lights and traffic of the avenue; but places like this seethed with muggers, he knew. Sour spirals came up from his stomach. His shoulders lifted, his gut hardened. One pace at a time up the gray street, raindrops chilling the back of his neck. His heels echoed on the wet pavement.
    It was like running a gauntlet. When he reached the corner he felt he had achieved something.
    Reflected neon colors melted and ran along the wet avenue. He crossed it and stood waiting for the roof-light of a free cab to come in sight. Waited several minutes but by then he knew it was going to be one of those nights when there wasn’t a taxi anywhere in the world. He turned a full circle on his heels, making a sweep—nothing. Trucks, the occasional green bus headed downtown, big sedans rushing past with pneumatic hissings, occupied taxis.
    A half block north of him a figure staggered into sight under the lights of a storefront: a drunk trying to avoid stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk. Coming right toward Paul. In fear he turned quickly and began to walk west along Forty-fifth Street.
    It was early but the neighborhood had a four-o’clock-in-the-morning feeling. He didn’t see anyone at all until he got near the corner of Third Avenue. A young couple came in sight, walking uptown, a pudgy fluffy young man in a flared jacket and a girl in belled slacks with straight hair down to her waist: liberated singles, carefully not touching each other, talking animatedly about something fashionable and banal. Perhaps they were deciding whether to go to her apartment or his; perhaps they had already reached the stage of sharing an apartment, their surnames connected by hyphenation on the mailbox. They looked as if they didn’t like each other very much.
    Paul waved at an approaching taxi. Its cruise-light was illuminated but it swished past him without slowing. He fought the impulse to yell at it.
    He waited through four red lights before a taxi stopped by him. “Seventieth and West End,” he said through his teeth; sat back and banged the top of his head against the car’s fiberboard ceiling. Was it just taxicabs or were the rear seats of all modern cars impossible to sit in without slouching and cringing? Paul hadn’t owned a car since they had returned to the city from their brief fling at suburban life; other than taxis the only car he had been inside in the past year had been the mortuary limousine.
    Through the Plexiglas screen that sealed off the rear compartment he had a bad view of the driver; he had an impression of a huge Negro head, a hard roll of dark flesh at the back of the neck. Neither of them said a word.
    A red light ahead was out of synch and the driver avoided it by swinging left on Forty-seventh and heading across town. All along the block west of Eighth Avenue there were girls leaning against the walk in dark doorways. On Ninth Avenue there was a troubleseeking cluster of teenage kids with their hands inevitably in their pockets, faces closed up into an unbreakable apathy. Addicts? Perhaps it was just that nothing short of the most violent brutality excited them any more. They looked as if they were waiting to kill someone.
    Would he have had the same thought two weeks ago? Probably not, he thought; probably he would have sensed their boredom and resolved to dedicate more time to the neighborhood athletic league: “What these kids need is an interest. We need to set up some ball teams. Now let’s get a committee together and raise a little