In a Field—Two Miles West of Fort Lee, New Jersey: Late Evening
Whimsical Fatman knew that he was dying, and the thing that amazed him most was that he cared that he was dying. Goddammit, he'd had another twenty years in him, at least. If he'd mended his ways. There were places he'd never been to, people he'd never seen—his children all grown up, for instance. And it was possible, altogether possible, that his father was still alive, and it would have been a blessing to have seen him again.
But the cops had done a good job. They were smooth, and well trained.
("Just a little twist, right at the end of your kick, Tony—just before you make contact, and I guarantee it'll snap clean as a whistle.")
They'd broken his kneecap almost without effort.
("See, wasn't that easy? Like I said, it's all in that little twist—that's what does it. Just like you're throwing a punch, Tony. But with your foot.")
And seeing to it that he wouldn't be able to call for help had been easy, too.
("Know how easy it is to break a man's jaw, Tony? Real easy. Thing is, you don't try and break it so much as dislocate it, and that's just a matter of the correct angle. Kind of up, and over, and you make contact right close to his chin so you get the leverage—know what I mean?")
Whimsy groaned very softly; he could do no more than that—his jaw hung open, uselessly, a little to the right of where it should have been.
("So we'll let him rot here, Tony. It's better than letting him rot in New York, right?")
Whimsy supposed that the cops hadn't actually wanted to kill him. He supposed that they didn't care enough about him for that. They had merely wanted to give him some pain, lots of it, and if he happened to kick off, who was to care? And if someone found him, and he told a wild story about a couple of Manhattan cops beating the hell out of him, and then dumping him in a field just outside Fort Lee, New Jersey, who was to care, either?
The cops had had their fun. And now they could go back to chasing bad guys.
Whimsy closed his eyes. Not only against the pain in his jaw and in his kneecap—a pain which alternated from one moment to the next between the two points—but also from an incredible exhaustion which, all by itself, he thought, could take his life from him.
Consciousness stayed with him, though barely, as if he were tied to it by a very thin thread. And, distantly, he could hear what sounded for all the world like a dog growling.
The dogs which he had grown accustomed to dealing with in the past decade or so had been very much like the people he'd grown accustomed to dealing with—lean, and scruffy, and desperate. Dogs that would never curl up next to somebody's armchair, or fetch a Frisbee, or get used to twice-daily feedings of Alpo. He had learned to stay away from these dogs, and to let them have their own turf.
He thought that the dog growling at him now was much like a street dog because it had a street dog's smell, and a street dog's aura of desperation about it. And he knew that with a lot of street dogs, it was instinct to go first for an enemy's genitals. Whimsy wanted very much to slip into death with his genitals intact. He thought that he deserved at least that much.
And then he heard, "Hey, whatcha got there, boy?" And the beam of a flashlight stabbed into his eyes.