A Falling Knife (Hollow City Series)

by Andrew Case

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  Aurelia Peralta looked over the desk. It was old. She opened one of the steel drawers, grimacing at the screech. There wouldn’t be any gliding runners here. There was a hardware store up the street; she would go get a can of WD-40 and it would be working by tomorrow. She was never one to call up and ask for maintenance to come fix it. They would take too long and probably do it wrong anyway. A creaky, old steel desk was a small price to pay for the promotion.

  She had almost fainted when the bureau chief had told her. Promotion to SDS, only eighteen months after making detective at all. Bruder was dead and Mulino was retiring. She would be able to staff up her own squad. And she would be in Mulino’s old office, which meant that she would have a door she could close off to the rest of the squad. Not quite thirty and she had her own office. It might seem routine to her classmates at Nutley High, now working as lawyers or accountants, but to have your own office in the NYPD meant that they trusted you. The powers that be recognized that, left to your own devices, you were not going to just close the door and play games on your phone all afternoon. In this organization, that was a higher bar than you’d think.

  Chief Travis had called her in the day after the shooting. There was going to be an investigation, sure. The Firearms Discharge Control Board was involved; DIMAC would run through the paces; she had taken and passed the Breathalyzer on the scene. Her gun was in safekeeping for a few days while she sat in a cubicle and wrote up a couple of twenty-page reports summarizing the investigation. But shootings don’t get much cleaner than this one. Bruder had abducted a child in front of forty sworn officers. He had shot a civilian just before being killed. There wasn’t going to be a protest for him. No one was going to wonder why Peralta wasn’t going before the Grand Jury. She supposed, looking over her desk, that she shouldn’t have been surprised. The tabloid stories were making her out as a hero. They managed to leave out the part where she’d been surprised and disarmed by Bruder to begin with. She was doing her best to forget that part at all.

  Even more than the promotion, she had been glad to see that Gabriel Smyth was let out. And the Homicide detectives had been dressed down. There was going to be an internal investigation there, too. Did the officers coerce a confession? Did they have a conflict of interest? The sort of thing that usually happens only twenty years after the guy is convicted when some eager young lawyer gets his hands on subpoena power for the first time. She wished she had been able to see the faces of those proud, fat, white guys when they got the news. Generally, she wasn’t the kind to gloat, but there is always a little room for an exception.

  Chief Travis had walked her through the assignment. Based in Brooklyn, she would have citywide jurisdiction. The same deal Mulino had. She would get two detectives. There was a stack of twenty resumes in a manila folder sitting on her desk. That was what her afternoon was going to be. Looking through those and picking one. Because she had already picked the first one.

  “Aurelia.”

  She turned around from the desk. Standing in the doorway—her doorway—was Leonard Mitchell. His shoulder was still bandaged, but it was no longer so heavily bundled as to look absurd.

  “Leonard. Good to see that you’re out.”

  “Mulino told me that he put in his papers.”

  “Can you believe that? Scottsdale.” Peralta waited a moment to see if Leonard asked if she had ever been. If maybe he, like the Homicide guys or the cadets in her Academy class, thought that every woman with a Spanish name was actually Mexican, and had probably snuck through Nogales as a kid. But Leonard wasn’t that type. That was a good sign.

  “And he told me that you wanted to talk to me.”

  “Yeah. I’m taking over the squad.”

  “I know. Congratulations.”

  It was time for the pitch. Not that he could refuse. She knew he wouldn’t refuse. But she wasn’t comfortable with wielding power yet. She didn’t know that she didn’t have to sell anything, she only had to command.

  She hesitated as she asked, suddenly feeling almost as though she were in high school again. Spit it out, she told herself. “Leonard, you did good work on this case. You helped out Mulino a lot. You helped out me. And I want to know, if you want in on this, well, we would love to have you.”

  “And I’m supposed to thank you for saving my life, Detective.”

  “I wish I’d gotten him before he hit you once.”

  Leonard nodded. Peralta thought for a moment that he was thinking it over. She didn’t want to get to the point of talking about money. Civilians in the department have their own pay scale. When he spoke, he said maybe the one thing that could have surprised her.

  “I can’t carry a gun. I don’t know how much help I can be.”

  “You don’t investigate with a gun, Leonard. You investigate with your eyes and your ears and your brain. We’d like to have you on board.”

  “Then I guess I can’t say no.”

  Peralta reached out to shake his hand. It was dry and thin, but firm. Inside the wiry frame was a man who had been beaten down, pepper-sprayed, imprisoned, and shot. And he was signing up for more. Peralta knew she could use him for what was coming. She knew that Armstrong had gotten away, that he had stolen something from the boy. Chief Travis talked to her about that too. But that was for later. Now she just had to get Leonard on board. He grimaced a little. The shoulder would have to hurt still. But he was toughing it out. She appreciated that.

  Peralta stepped back. “I’ve got to look through these. I’m getting one more team member. You go rest that shoulder, talk to HR. I expect to see you tomorrow at eight.”

  “Of course, Detective.” And as Leonard smiled, Peralta saw why she wanted to work with him. His smile showed that, like her, he would never be happier doing anything else in the world. He didn’t need to have a gun, because she would always have hers. He would be her eyes and her ears and he would always owe her one. He would always owe her his life.

  This was going to be fun.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To Jacque Ben-Zekry at Thomas & Mercer, who championed The Big Fear and shepherded this sequel, thank you for your continued commitment to my work and for all the support you have offered to me in the past eighteen months. To the rest of the Thomas & Mercer team—Sarah Shaw, Grace Doyle, Dennelle Catlett, and many others—you have created an incredible project that feels more like a family than a publisher, and I am honored to be a part of it.

  To Kim Witherspoon and Monika Woods at InkWell Management, who took me on two years ago and have never stopped fighting for me, I am in awe of your dedication and devotion to writers, and feel so grateful to be in your hands.

  To my editor Charlotte Herscher, who fought (sometimes with me) to make the first book and this one better, I owe a great debt for your clear and honest feedback, always in service of the work. I am grateful for Jeff Quick’s insights and Ray Vallese’s careful eye; they both added clarity and force to the book. Having an ally like Sarah Burningham of Little Bird Publicity is an enormous honor, and I cannot be more grateful to her for her efforts in publicizing my books.

  I received terrific early feedback from family and friends who read early drafts of this book. My father, Claude Case, gave invaluable insight on both the book and its subject matter. Robin Hessman, Wade Carper, and Lorin Wortheimer all gave terrific notes on early drafts, and this book is better for all of their efforts. There is much in A Falling Knife that comes from my work and my life in a changing Brooklyn, and many of those who I came across, spoke to, and worked with on these issues did not know their thoughts might end up in a book, so it would be improper to name them. But they are in my thoughts and I have thanked them in person when I could.

  Most of all I want to thank my wife, Claudia Case, who not only read and gave feedback on the book but offered incredible support throughout the process of creating it, and my two curious and inspirational children, David and Helen, without whom none of this would be possible.

 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © 2015 Trevor Williams

  Andrew Case is the author of the novel The Big Fear and the stage plays The Electric Century, The Rant, and many others. He has been a member of the New American Writers Group at Primary Stages, a participating playwright at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, and a member of the PEN America Center. For nearly a decade he served as an investigator, spokesman, and policy director at the Civilian Complaint Review Board, which investigates allegations of misconduct by New York City Police Department officers. Andrew has written on police reform for Newsweek, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review, and other publications. A Falling Knife, the sequel to The Big Fear, is the second novel in the Hollow City series. He lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn, with his wife, Claudia, and their two children.