"Now this here is what the Morse code looks like," the instructor said, "but it's pure shit to think you're gonna learn anything from looking at a chart even though I'm gonna give each of you a small card with the code on it to study. What you're gonna do," he told them, "is you're gonna listen." He stressed the word and it reverberated in the air as he yanked on the metal ring and sent the chart spinning out of sight. As it disappeared, John O'Malley felt a nameless sense of relief.

"You're gonna listen and listen and listen. You're gonna close your goddamn eyes and listen!"

Dot dash; dash dot dot dot; dot dot wait dot; dash dot dot. The electrical sounds buzzed through him, not just through his brain, but through his body, his chest and stomach and arms and legs. He could feel the sounds at the tip of his fingers, at the ends of his curled toes. He saw the letters beneath his closed eyelids, actually saw them as they flashed through him. He chanted in unison with the others, identifying the sounds as letters. His voice rose strangely strong and certain and an odd sense of elation filled every part of John O'Malley's being.

By the end of the introductory lesson, John had absorbed the entire Morse alphabet, effortlessly, naturally, as though all his life he had been waiting for some special language, some clarifying magic which would render the whole mysterious world comprehensible at last.

Through some freak quirk or accidental arrangement of nerve endings, through some blood-born never-before-encountered natural instinctive rhythm, he, of all of them, had a positive genius for codes.

The instructor said he was a wise guy for failing to answer truthfully when the class was asked if anyone knew the code already. A few of the other guys convinced the instructor that John O'Malley didn't lie, not ever. They also had to convince John O'Malley that the code, the dashes and dots and pauses and flickers, did not speak to anyone else the way it spoke to him.

The magic sounds, which spoke to him more clearly than anything he had ever encountered before, were truly a special gift. In his bunk that night, the other guys threw sounds at him, beeps and clicks. With a sense of awe and bemused admiration, they heard him respond accurately, astonishingly.

He lay awake that night, afraid to sleep. He moved his eyes from side to side, traced the sagging bulges of the mattress inches over his face, blinked himself awake time and again so that he wouldn't fall asleep. Because, he reasoned, if he fell asleep, he might lose the gift; it might all drift away. And he had been waiting too long.

But it didn't drift away. It became firmly fixed in his brain and he devoured codes like sustenance, was the first in the class to raise his hand, shyly, to hand in the decoded message which had flashed, singing, through his brain.

The instructor discussed John O'Malley with the Senior Coding Instructor and they went over John O'Malley's records. It was decided that he was one of those rare flukes that turn up from time to time: a nearly retarded boy, messing up at almost everything he touched, but with an absolute gift for codes.

They jumped him into advanced code classes, threw the most complicated codes at him. It was all the same to John O'Malley.

The Senior Coding Instructor scratched his chin and said, "I guess it's because the rest of his head is so damn empty. All his concentration goes into what he hears on the earphones. I guess it's something like the way a blind man can concentrate on sound. Ya know, nothing to distract him."

Cables were sent, thousands of miles away, about John O'Malley's rare and perfect gift. After his leave, because of his facility, he was to be given a very special assignment.

TWENTY-NINE.

KIT O'MALLEY CAREFULLY STRETCHED her pistol-holding hand along the branch of the huge old tree and aimed directly into the window of Eileen Fahey's living room. She closed one eye, sighted, and systematically shot all six of the stupid girls dead as they bobbed and ducked into the pan of water and came up with apples stuck in their mouths like pigs.

What a dumb way to spend Halloween. Kit remembered all the things she and Bobby Kelly had planned to do. It hadn't been much fun doing them with some of the other boys; it just wasn't the same. Bobby Kelly had the mumps and there was a whole year of anticipation shot to hell. He'd tried to sneak out the fire escape but his father caught him and whacked him, because, he yelled, "A sneak is a sneak, mumps or no mumps!"

Kit fingered the heavy stocking filled with flour which was tied around her waist; that was for thumping people. Her water pistol was filled with Waterman's ink; there was a bag of rotten eggs, carefully collected, one at a time, from the refrigerator over a period of weeks. She squinted at her Mickey Mouse watch; she still had an hour until she had to be home. Her limit was nine o'clock because it was a special night. She'd run the streets with the boys, knocking over ash cans in front of apartment houses where the janitor was known as a rat, making as much commotion as possible. She'd marked sidewalks and gutters with chalk and hunks of coal; she'd had a few thumping fights with opponents bigger than herself and considered herself victorious.

But there had to be something more, to make up for Bobby Kelly having let her down.

Her eyes moved from Eileen Fahey's dumb party to the tin shack on the big lot across the street. The plan came to her, full-blown, as though long conceived and just waiting for her to recognize it. She would blitz the shack; singlehanded she would mess it up so badly that the big guys would talk about nothing else until next year.

Carefully, she eased herself down the branches to the ground. Her heart pounded with building excitement and her mouth went dry from self-inflicted fear. She scanned the block, snatched up her bag of eggs, darted in the shadows to the edge of the street, waited until a car went by, ran across the street and leaped into the shadows on the edge of the lot. She climbed the hill in the big lot, breathless, body close to earth in a slithering motion. She willed herself to become invisible: no one could see her or know of her existence.

She crept to the edge of the silent shack and listened, then released her breath. The world was different from up here, strange and unfamiliar. She pressed her ear against the side of the shack and counted to ten, then waited again and surveyed the shack carefully.

It had been put together from bits and pieces of whatever materials a neighborhood of growing boys could scrounge. There were tin walls and a cutout window with a real wooden window frame. Instead of glass, the window had cardboard panes which kept out nosy people. The roof was flat, either tin or heavy cardboard.

Carefully, Kit O'Malley transferred her water pistol from her right hand to her left. She reached out, tested the doorknob. It turned with a creaking sound and the door opened inward with a sudden lunge. Kit found herself inside a dimly lit room, about ten feet by ten feet. The light came from a small electric bulb which dangled at the end of a cord which had been strung over a hook on the ceiling. The question of how they had ever managed to get electricity into the shack never even occurred to Kit.

She was more immediately concerned with what Timmy Mulcahy was doing here and how to get free of his grasp.

"What the fuck do you want here?" he demanded thickly as he bent her left wrist almost off her arm. "C'mere, lemme get a look at you, kid. Who the hell are you?"

The heavy odor of beer came not only from the row of empties along one side of the room but from Timmy Mulcahy's breath and from the sweaty odor of his body. Kit tried to pull free but Mulcahy held her in a terrible grip.

"Hey, come on, Mulcahy. Come on, will ya? Look, let go. It's me, Kit O'Malley. You know me. Let go, will ya?"

He leaned into her face, his hand went roughly to the back of her head and he jerked her face toward the light so abruptly that her sailor cap fell to the floor. His small eyes narrowed, then widened in appreciation.

"Hey, yeah. I know ya, don't I? You're that little girl plays ball so good, right? Hey, what the fuck you doin' dressed like a sailor boy anyways?"

"For Halloween, ya know. I'm wearin' my brother's Sea Scout shirt and my cousin's sailor cap. Hey, look, Mulcahy, let go of my arm, huh? You're hurting me."

He tightened his grip and moved closer to her face and said suspiciously, "Yeah? Well, what the fuck are you doin' here? What's in that bag? What are you up to?" He shook her with each question.

Kit began to feel afraid. It was one thing for boys her own age to use rough language around her or to jostle her. It was another thing for a grown-up man like Timmy Mulcahy. She moved, an inch at a time, tried to get nearer to the door, which Mulcahy had slammed shut.

"I was just going to...kind of...you know, just Halloween stuff. I was gonna shake some flour around and smash some eggs on the wall and stuff like that. You know, Timmy, for a Halloween joke on the big guys."

He released her, folded his arms across his chest and flung his head back with a snapping motion so that the heavy hank of greasy black hair was off his forehead for a moment before it fell back again. He studied Kit appraisingly.

"Hey, you know something, kid? You got real balls planning to do something like that"

"Well, look, I won't do anything now. I mean, okay, I got caught and fair is fair, so I'll just leave." Instinctively, she added, "See, my three friends dared me to do this, and they'll be wondering what I'm up to if I don't get back down from the lot, Mulcahy."

He didn't seem to even be aware of her rush of words. He seemed to be thinking about his own last remark. He made a strange laughing sound down in his throat. "Hey, kid, don't you get it? Ain't that funny? You hear what I just said? Shit, I just said you got real balls planning to do something like that." He stopped laughing suddenly and lowered his head to peer at her through his hair. "You ain't got no balls at all, have you, girly? Huh, have you?"

Kit looked around quickly, searched for escape. There were no real windows; they were covered dummies. There was just the one door and Timmy Mulcahy's massive bulk covered it completely. On the walls were calendar pictures of half-naked women and a few dirty words neatly printed and repeated with artistic flourishes and a few dirty drawings in crayon. There were some dirty old couch cushions against one wall. And the line of empty beer bottles.

Kit dove for a bottle, clutched it by its long neck. "Get outta my way, Mulcahy."

Mulcahy, lost in his own contemplation, might have been deaf. "If you ain't got no balls down there, girly, then what have you got, huh? Let's have a look at what you got there, kid."

He moved so ponderously, so irrevocably that she hadn't time to elude him. The bottle flew harmlessly from her hand as he knocked her to the hard-packed dirt floor. She felt the bulk of her water pistol press into her buttock, felt the rough, coarse, sandpaper hands grab at her as she whirled and twisted and kicked.

There was a sudden explosion of shock in the pit of her stomach and her breathing stopped. She could neither inhale nor exhale or move or make a sound from the sledge-hammer impact of Timmy Mulcahy's fist.

"Now keep the hell quiet, you little bitch," the dark reddened face over her said. "I'm gonna see for myself what the fuck you got down there."

There were parts of it she would never remember, a totally blank passage of time during which she somehow found her way down the hill of the big lot, crossed the street, walked through the darkness of the small lot, climbed a fence which separated Dr. Fineman's tiny back yard from the lot and fell in a huddle against the back door of the doctor's house.

She remembered that the dog, Murphy, came over to her and that she reached up and wrapped her arms around his bobbing, nodding head and hid her face against his acrid fur.

That was where Mrs. Fineman found her, bleeding, torn, gray with shock but adamantly refusing to release her rigid grasp of arms and locked fingers which held the dog close to her and kept others away.

It took Brian O'Malley three days to get Timmy Mulcahy.

Had he caught him on the night of the rape, there was no question but that he would have killed him. Dr. Fineman and Dr. Mahoney both sensed that immediately. They fed him a couple of shots of cheap abrasive whiskey, handed him a lit cigarette, tried physically to restrain him.

"We'll not let you go running off into the streets the way you are now, Brian," Dr. Mahoney told him. "We've your family to think of if you're not sane enough to think about them yourself." The large hand was firm on his shoulder and only released him when Brian sat down on one of the stiff wooden chairs in the doctors' inner office.

"Now, Brian," Dr. Mahoney said carefully, "you could arrest him, you know. That's one alternative."

Dr. Fineman's bushy black brows shot up; he yanked the short cigar from between his teeth. "One alternative?" he asked his colleague. "Are there alternatives in this situation? The man's committed an act of criminal sexual assault on a fourteen-year-old child. O'Malley's a policeman; he knows the law. What are the alternatives to arresting this bum, Peter? I'm really curious."

Mahoney cursed softly, then jabbed an index finger at Fineman. "You'd have the child subjected to a courtroom trial? After what she's been through?"

Fineman lit a match and puffed the dead cigar to life until clouds of foul smoke surrounded him. "No, not necessarily a trial. I don't think it would ever get that far. But, God, this bum should be arrested and charged. It can be handled discreetly. Look, I've got a few friends who could see to it-"

Brian stood up and towered over the doctors. "Fuck your few friends, Dr. Fineman. Look. You both mean well. Okay. Take care of my sister. I'll take care of Mulcahy."

Mulcahy disappeared for a while and Brian's search became not so much a physical thing as a carefully controlled emotional ordeal. He took time off from the job, used some overtime that was coming to him, pleaded family illness, and devoted himself to searching and waiting. Mostly waiting, because he considered Mulcahy an animal, and with an animal's instinct, he would head for home.

On the third night, Brian watched as Mulcahy finally returned to his family's flat on Park Avenue and East 180th Street. He felt no change in the dead, still calmness of his brain as he leaned into the wooden doorframe of the tenement next to Mulcahy's and waited. It would have been so easy, right there, in the rain-empty street to confront Mulcahy; his fists clenched and unclenched as he watched his prey lean heavily on the doorknob, then shove himself through the creaking, battered front door.

Brian lit a cigarette and breathed evenly. Now he knew where Mulcahy was, that he felt it was safe to return home, that he was no longer wary. There was the sound of a train as it roared down the tracks of the Central. It was a short train, just a few cars with a few vague passengers returning from Manhattan, heading to Westchester, peering blankly out toward the dark walls which lined their passage.

None of them saw Mulcahy as he shuffled out of the house and walked to the middle of the sidewalk and faced the building where he lived and hollered at the blackened windows, "Hey, Patsy, open the fuckin' door, you dummy. I ain't got no key. Patsy, open the fuckin' door or I'll kill ya."

There was a sliding sound, a pale face appeared at a window, the voice was thin and frightened. "Timmy, come back tomorrow. Ya can't come in tonight; ya been away so long and ya scared me just now. Come back in the mornin' when you ain't drunk, Timmy. Me and the kids're sick; ya can't come in tonight." The window closed and Mulcahy lurched toward the house, then back.

He stood, shook his fist in the air at his wife, barricaded with their children against the rage with which he always returned from a drinking bout.

He cried out obscenities and threats, circled uncertainly, then headed up the street. Brian dropped the cigarette, stepped on it, shoved his hands in his pants pockets and followed Timmy Mulcahy at a safe distance.

Mulcahy stopped at a corner bar two blocks away, pounded with heavy fists at the closed door. He ripped a sign off the door and held it toward the streetlamp. "Closed due to death in family" the handprinted message explained. Mulcahy ripped the cardboard sign into several pieces, dropped the debris onto the sidewalk into a puddle of rain water. Brian hunched against a renewed onslaught of rain and walked close beside the line of parked cars as Mulcahy picked up speed toward a new destination.

It was a dank, tiny bar on Fordham Road and Third Avenue, empty except for an elderly couple who sipped beer wordlessly in one of the two booths and the beefy, bare-armed bartender who glanced at his wristwatch when Mulcahy entered. Brian watched from outside as Mulcahy swallowed a shot, followed by beer, which he guzzled, and reordered. After thirty minutes, the elderly couple emerged, walked stiff-legged and in matched slow stride, silently beneath the Third Avenue el. Then Mulcahy came out onto the black wet street and staggered up the hill of Fordham Road.

It was nearly 1 A.M. All the stores were closed; no loiterers or strollers were tempted by the cold, wet autumn night.

The terrible, building, anguished fury, held tightly within the deliberate coldness with which he regarded Mulcahy, nearly choked Brian. He knew he was going to get Mulcahy now, on this broad deserted street.

Mulcahy missed his footing, slipped on a paper bag, fell, his face hitting the sidewalk. He got to his feet, cursed, kicked at the paper bag, looked up toward the sky, seemed finally to realize that it was raining. He pulled his soaking jacket tightly around him, carefully turned his collar up, then sought some protection in the deep-recessed entrance to a shoe store. He leaned against the showcase of women's shoes for a moment, then moved out of the entranceway and stopped in front of a jewelry store.

The window of the jewelry store glittered with the reflected light of the streetlamp. Small diamond rings glowed and sparkled. Wrist-watches took on luster from the gleaming raindrops which ran slowly in long slender rivulets down the length of the window. Mulcahy balanced with his fingers pressed heavily against the window, stared unseeing at the merchandise displayed before him.

"Turn around, Mulcahy," Brian said hoarsely.

"Huh?"

Stupidly, slowly, face thrust forward, eyes narrowed to pierce the dark, Mulcahy turned. "Yeah? Who's that?"

He wasn't as tall as Brian but he was heavier, in the chest and shoulders, through his massive arms and muscled legs. Timmy Mulcahy, twenty-four, father of cretins, ex-amateur light heavyweight, dock-walloper, raper of little girls. It overwhelmed Brian for one shattering moment: the breathing, grunting, stinking physicality of the man.

He delivered the first essential blow swiftly. He hadn't realized how huge Mulcahy was, and in the first breathless instant of confrontation, a cold, clear terror of reality sent Brian's knee to Mulcahy's unprotected and unprepared groin.

The rest was professional and methodical. Brian felt the leather covering of his blackjack grow damp in the palm of his hand as he delivered butt-end blows to Mulcahy's face and throat.

Mulcahy moved heavily, hunched to protect himself, but Brian kicked his head hard enough to flatten Mulcahy to his back.

"You bastard, you bastard, you dirty fucking bastard," Brian whispered over and over again. "I want to kill you, you dirty fucking bastard."

Mulcahy peered at him through swollen lids, shook his head from side to side as though trying to clear it. Unable to defend himself, taken too swiftly and without warning, he absorbed the battering without comprehension.

Who the hell is this guy anyways?

Mulcahy's torn and bloody mouth formed some words and finally Brian heard him say, "A mistake, mister; you're making some mistake. Hey, a mistake, a mistake."

"Yeah, a mistake, Mulcahy. You made a mistake you're not gonna forget for the rest of your life."

Mulcahy's head fell heavily to the sidewalk, unconscious.

Brian, breathing in short, quick, unsatisfying gasps, looked up and down both sides of the street. No one. Silence. Just rain and some wind and his own breathing and some groaning from Mulcahy. He felt a sudden empty hollowness.

It wasn't enough. Beating Mulcahy wasn't enough. He could kill him, right here, right now, but that wouldn't be enough. He wanted to shake Mulcahy conscious, stand him up, start again.

Brian pressed his forehead against the cool wet window and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, his eyes fastened on the small twinkling diamond rings, a display box, right down in the front of the window, with unreadable little price tags attached to each ring.

It came to him full-blown, and as the plan came, he acted on it immediately and without hesitation.

With the butt end of his jack, Brian smashed the jeweler's window three times, four times before the glass cracked and shattered into the display case. Carefully, he reached in, grabbed rings and watches indiscriminately, turned and jammed them into Mulcahy's jacket pocket. He reached for a little jeweled music box, small enough to fit the palm of his hand, and he shoved that into Mulcahy's pocket.

He dragged Mulcahy, dead weight, comatose, halfway to his feet and shoved his right arm along the broken glass edge of the window. Blood burst through Mulcahy's torn wrist and smeared the satin lining on which the jewelry rested inside the window. He forced a few gold rings inside Mulcahy's fist, then let him fall back to the sidewalk.

Brian dug in his back pocket and found his throwaway: the .32, caliber gun he had acquired on advice of his uncles.

Listen, kid, you never know when the hell you'll find yourself in a situation that calls for some quick protective thinking. If you damage some bastard, always make sure he has a weapon on him.

He carefully wiped the gun with his handkerchief, then forced it into Mulcahy's hand, then dropped it inside the jeweler's window: the butt of the gun had served as Mulcahy's burglar tool. Then Brian turned and walked quickly away without turning back.

Two blocks away, Brian walked over to a small green police call box, opened it, picked up the receiver and in a low muffled voice he said very quickly, "Hey, listen, there's some man and he's robbing the window of Fox's Jewelry Store on Fordham Road and Webster Avenue. Yeah, he's there right now. I just went past him on the other side of the street. And hey, listen, the guy's got a gun."

He hung up without waiting for the inevitable questions, closed the little metal door, walked across Fordham Road and down to the Valentine Theater, where he waited and watched as the patrol car pulled up three minutes later.

He knew just how they felt, the patrolmen, as they leaped from the patrol car, guns drawn, flashlights picking out the scene. He knew how tense and excited and ready they were.

"Holy Christ," the patrolman closest to Mulcahy said, "the guy musta fallen through the window. He's all cut up. Better call an ambulance, Frank. Hold it a minute till I get the bum's gun."

Brian moved silently, unseen, along the wet street, up to the Grand Concourse, where he turned left and headed directly into the rain and toward home.

They never mentioned it among them. His mother's mouth tightened, her face went pale when she read about Timmy Mulcahy's arrest in the Bronx Home News, and later when she read that he had been sentenced to fifteen years in prison for armed robbery, she said nothing but Brian noticed a strange, unfamiliar hard glow in her eyes.

Kit was quiet and seemed thoughtful and withdrawn and she developed an odd hesitation when she spoke, not quite a stutter but a pause between words. One Saturday, Brian heard his mother tell Kit to go out and play and he heard his sister's response, slow and tortured and not like Kit at all.