Urge to Kill by John Lutz Page B

Everyone on Manhattan Island seemed to walk fast. It amused Pearl sometimes to think that if everyone just kept walking fast the direction they were going, it wouldn’t take long for all of them to reach the water. Then what would they do? Simply keep going like lemmings and all drown? Or mill about until the mood grew ugly and violence would ensue? The smokers would die first.
    Pearl was irritated. Fedderman was supposed to have picked her up this morning in an unmarked and driven her to Quinn’s apartment, where the three of them were to discuss developments and plan the day.
    But Fedderman hadn’t shown. Most likely he’d overslept, having drunk himself to sleep last night. Not that Pearl knew or had heard anything about Fedderman being in the bottle, but why wouldn’t he be? Pearl figured that in his place she’d probably become an alky herself, living a solitary life in some ten-by-ten condo in Florida, going outside now and then so the sun could bake your brain.
    Different strokes…
    She wished she could stroke Fedderman with a baseball bat.
    Pearl had taken the subway uptown, and was now walking the remaining few blocks to Quinn’s apartment. It was a hot morning. The sun seemed to burn with an extra fierceness and cast long, stark shadows that emphasized angles. Traffic gleamed like multicolored gems strung along streets. Bagged trash was still piled curbside. Some of the plastic bags had burst or been cut open to get to the contents. New York could smell sweet and rotten on a morning like this.
    She was standing with half a dozen other people waiting for a traffic light to change, everyone starting to perspire like her in the building morning heat, when her cell phone played its four solemn notes from the old
Dragnet
TV show. She fished it from her pocket and answered it a second before checking caller ID to see who was on the other end of the connection.
    She was a second too late. She’d expected Quinn, wondering where she was and what was keeping her. Instead she saw letters spelling out Sunset Assisted Living. Pearl’s mother was calling from her modest but specially equipped apartment.
    “Milton Kahn says you have something on your neck,” her mother said, without preamble. “Just behind your ear.”
    Pearl wasn’t surprised. It was the way her mother often began phone conversations.
    “I’ve got Milton Kahn on my back,” Pearl said, about the former lover she was trying to shed.
    “He cares deeply about you, dear.”
    “Mom, we tried. We’re simply not compatible. It wasn’t a take.
Kaput!
It’s over.”
    “What are you trying to tell me, Pearl?”
    “That I’m at work and don’t have time to talk.”
    “Even about your future, God willing that you have one.”
    Huh?
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “The thing on your neck, Pearl—Milton Kahn says it might be serious, and he of all people should know, the necks he looks at. Not that it’s critical now, but such things should be kept in check, dear, through regular visits to your doctor.”
    “In this case my doctor would be Milton,” Pearl said. She knew the game. Milton Kahn was a dermatologist. He and Pearl had been the object of a matchmaking maneuver involving Milton’s aunt, also a resident of Sunset Assisted Living, and Pearl’s mother.
    “Milton and I had a fling,” Pearl said, “that’s all. It can never be anything more.”
    “Fling, schming,” her mother said.
    “Almost all schming,” Pearl said, not even knowing what she meant.
    Actually Pearl had enjoyed their brief, exploratory affair, but Milton Kahn could never be the steady lover of a cop, much less the husband that his aunt and Pearl’s mother envisioned. Pearl had broken off the affair. Milton didn’t want it to stay broken. Now he was apparently plotting to get Pearl concerned about what appeared to be a simple brown mole on her neck, just behind her right ear. The last time they’d seen each other, at a mutual friend’s daughter’s bat