Come Out Tonight Read Online Free

Hell’s Kitchen.   That New York toughens you up, makes you sharper, and forces you to be more persistent.   I don’t dispute any of that, but it’s only half the story.   What New York does to people is to put them through a caldron of fire, yes, and sometimes what comes out is a shiny, hard glaze, all but indestructible.   Other times, what comes out is a cracked, burnt mess.   But there’s always more clay where that came from, so we glorify the process, and throw out the failures.   What a wonderful town.
    For the record, even though it looked like Miss Pollack had been totally sanitized by the hospital staff - her head wound was completely bandaged and off limits to further inspection - I scraped under her fingernails. Forensics has since found nothing there.  
    Meanwhile, at the hospital, I met the boyfriend for the first time.   Henry Jackman is not a particularly impressive specimen.   With no distinguishing features: thirtiesh, tallish, baldish, he’s the type of person best described in approximations.
      Asked him to take off his shirt and discovered a big scratch on his surprisingly hairy left shoulder.   No explanation other than, “Wouldja believe rough sex?” with a lascivious grin.   A little insensitive, I’d say, considering his girl friend was just almost clubbed to death, but consistent with the total lack of concern about destroying evidence.   Normally, I’d go with Anderson ’s assessment that Jackman is just plain dumb, but the smart-alecky smirk makes me question that.   Hopefully, I’ll get the full story from Miss Pollack when and if she wakes up.    
    After Jackman left, I asked the nurse whether the parents had shown up yet.  
    “Not that I know of,” she answered.  
    “Were they notified?” I asked.
    “Not that I know of,” she said again.   So much for getting any information there.   I pulled out my cell phone to call the precinct, but there wasn’t as much as a dial tone.   I walked over to the window; still no signal.
    My cell never works well in a hospital – too much steel, too many beeping, cross-talking devices.   So I took the elevator down to the lobby, crossed a cavernous thoroughfare crowded with white and green-uniformed professionals, smiling, balloon-carrying visitors, and anguished families,   everyone talking in a polyglot of languages, and none of them looking where they were going.   A tall black orderly more interested in his iPhone than in noticing who was in front of him practically knocked me over, then glared at me as if it was my fault.    “Watch it, Buster,” I said, turning my back on him, and stepping out the revolving door onto the sidewalk where the reception was better.   As I took out my cell to call Ricardo at the precinct desk, I glanced back through the window to see the orderly still standing there, glaring at me.   I guess he doesn’t like bossy white women who won’t back down.
    Well, what you see is what you get with me.     I am a bossy white woman who won’t back down. And it took me a lot of years to get to this point.   I joined the force as a beat cop when I was 20.   I’m 37, so you do the math.     I may have started out an innocent young recruit, full of self-righteousness and enthusiasm, making the world safe for humanity.    But seventeen long years of scratching my way up the pole, fighting off the old boys’ network, as well as, for that matter, some of the old boys themselves, has sanded down the self-righteousness, jaded most of the enthusiasm, leaving, you guessed it: a bossy white woman who won’t back down.    
    And somewhere along the way, after battling the guys who asked me to get them coffee, who dismissed my successes as the result of feminine intuition not logic, or who simply didn’t want to partner with a woman, I changed my career path to detective.   This way I’m not above or below them.   I make up my own mind and do my own thing.   And solve a lot of