Read Online The Eye: A Novel of Suspense by Bill Pronzini, John Lutz - Free Book Online Page A

squadroom and left the precinct house alone, down the thirteen concrete steps to the street. As he walked to his car, he glanced about him at the darkened apartment and office buildings nearby; the night concealed the disrepair of the old brick structures. The warm air seemed clean and oddly comforting. His footfalls gave off a resonant, larger-than-life sound that seemed to fly back at him from all directions.
    Like most New Yorkers, his feelings about his city were paradoxical. He was a native; he’d been born in Brooklyn, and he’d lived there near Prospect Park until his mother’s death from cancer when he was nine. Then he’d been sent away to Chicago to be raised by an aunt who had treated him decently enough but always in a brisk and impersonal fashion that was the antithesis of his mother’s natural effusiveness and warmth. He remembered most his mother’s rich laugh, her head thrown back, her long dark hair swaying with her mirth. She had been healthy-looking, vital, right up to the final days. His mind, but not his heart, had finally forgiven her for leaving him and his father alone.
    At eighteen, after his graduation from high school, he had returned to live with his father, who had managed a chain of dry-cleaning establishments in Queens. He and his father had never been close, and he had resented the decision to ship him off to Chicago after his mother’s death, although he understood that it was grief that had made the old man do it. But after his return they had spent time together, and grown to know each other; they had remained close until his father’s death seven years ago. They had exchanged letters regularly during Oxman’s hitch in the Army in Europe, then during his brief stay at the University of Michigan.
    With both the Army and his fling as a student among younger and more serious scholars behind him, he had returned again to New York. Always he seemed drawn back to the city. From its majestic towers to its miserable tramps in the Bowery, it was part of him, and he of it. Though he had never been able to articulate the fact, he had known it even in his early twenties. In a way, it was the reason why he had married Beth—a native New Yorker like himself—four months after meeting her at a party in the Village. And it was what had compelled him to join the New York City Police Department that same year.
    He’d been a good cop from the beginning. Stable. Steady. Marked by superiors as a methodical and conscientious officer whose career would be useful and rewarding, if never meteoric. He had never questioned an order, never questioned the law. He had always understood the law, at least that aspect of it that made being a cop difficult sometimes, that a cop had to accept and learn to work around.
    Then, four years ago, he had been injured in the line of duty, struck by a getaway car driven by a frightened armed robber who was out on parole at the time he tried to heist a luggage shop on West Forty-fourth. Oxman had seen his face through the windshield; the felon had realized that, had stopped the car and reversed it, deliberately swerving to run him down. Oxman had leapt out of the way, but not soon enough to avoid a broken pelvis. He’d still managed to draw his revolver and fire several shots at the car, blowing a tire; the holdup man had been caught and charged with attempted murder as well as armed robbery. But plea bargaining had gotten him off with a seven-year sentence, and he had been paroled after two years and three months and was still free as far as Oxman knew. Oxman had spent weeks in a hospital bed and almost a year as an outpatient. He still limped a bit in cold weather.
    Maybe that incident was what had made him begin to wonder about the law, about his life. It was about that time that the worm of doubt had started to bore into his mind. It was easy enough to accept the law’s faults if you looked at them objectively; but this was something else. This was personal. And the