Justin Peacock

by Blind Man's Alley (v5)

  After the back-to-back verticals Garrity insisted they skip a round, so the two of them stood behind the building they were supposed to be patrolling, Garrity lighting up a cigarette. Nightfall hadn’t broken the thick July heat: the air was muggy and still. Garrity, still sweating, logged it in his book that they were doing another up-and-down. Everybody skimmed on verticals, and in Garrity’s view two out of three was a reasonable compromise.

  The last straw for Garrity had been halfway up in Tower Two, when he’d turned in a stairwell, skidded in something wet, only a quick arm brace on the wall keeping him from falling on his ass. A cursory sniff confirmed his suspicion that it’d been somebody’s piss that had almost tripped him. He’d muttered to himself through his ragged breath for the rest of the climb, Dooling knowing to let his partner work through his anger before riding him about it.

  “You drop of a heart attack while the two of us are out here, you best believe I’m not doing CPR,” Dooling said. He could hear the faint rumble of traffic from the FDR Drive, which marked the eastern end of the project.

  “Like your black ass knows CPR,” Garrity replied. They’d been partnered for almost a year, rookie cops stuck in a dead-end beat. Like most partners with nothing in common, they interacted with a rude banter meant to cover over the fact that they didn’t actually like each other.

  “I know a man who needs to be put out of his misery when I see him.”

  Garrity took a deep drag off his smoke, blew it out at Dooling, though it dissipated in the air before reaching its target. Dooling took a step back anyway, going into a boxer’s crouch, feet dancing in the scuffed dirt, a show of energy.

  “I can bench four hundred pounds,” Garrity said. “So don’t get any ideas just because I don’t like going up and down twenty flights of stairs.”

  “So we going to do Tower Four?”

  “Half an hour,” Garrity said, after checking his watch and then pulling out his activity log, calculating how much time their phantom patrol of Tower Three was taking.

  Dooling scanned the empty surroundings. There’d been a couple of people on a bench twenty feet away when the two cops had crossed over from Tower Two, but they’d ghosted away as soon as the uniforms had planted their flag along the building’s back wall.

  “Standing out here isn’t much better than walking a vertical, you ask me,” Dooling said, mostly just to say something.

  “I didn’t,” Garrity said, lighting a fresh cigarette off the nub of the one he’d been smoking.

  “I’m sure usually when you smell like piss this time of night, at least it’s your own.”

  “Hey, I get that you feel right at home trolling the projects, but I had a father growing up, was raised in a house.”

  Dooling’s retort was lost to the snapping sound, three quick bursts, the noise echoing a little in the valley created by the high-rises. Garrity looked a question at Dooling, who replied with a curt nod, taking out his gun before launching into a sprint down the walkway between two buildings in the direction of the shots. Garrity dropped his cigarette before getting his own gun out, taking off behind his faster partner.

  Dooling rounded onto Tenth Street at a small traffic circle, eyes scrambling for danger, spotting a crumpled body across the street, a man in a uniform crouching nearby. Dooling skidded to a stop, looking for movement, anything wrong in the scene beside the guy on the ground. Although the streets would still be buzzing with people a few blocks over in the heart of the East Village, on the far side of Avenue D it was quiet, nobody else nearby. He heard Garrity catching up, Dooling on his walkie-talkie now, calling in shots fired, person hit, asking for backup and an ambulance.

  Garrity jogged past Dooling toward the fallen body. The crouched man put his hands up by his shoulders, fingers spread wide, showing them he wasn’t a threat. Dooling recognized the uniform: the private security company that was patrolling the construction under way throughout the northern part of Jacob Riis. Dooling had interacted with the private guards a little: there’d been at least some effort to coordinate with them; plus the security people, mostly ex-cops, had fed some low-level busts to the Housing Bureau rank and file. This had made them friends among the beat cops.

  “Chris Driscoll,” the security guy called to them as the cops approached. “I was on the job at the Three-two.”

  “He conscious?” Garrity asked.

  “I wasn’t catching a pulse,” Driscoll said, shaking his head, looking down but not quite at the fallen man, who was also dressed as a security guard. “I think it’s already too late.”

  “What happened?” Garrity said.

  “I was coming over to sub Sean out for his break, saw him arguing with someone. No sooner had I turned the corner on D than the shots went off, Sean going down. I got a decent look at the shooter: male Hispanic, young, close to six feet, thin.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “He ran into the project, must’ve been running along the front side of that building right there while you two were coming along the back.”

  “He ran in there?” Dooling said, pointing to a walkway about half a block from the one he and his partner had just come down.

  Driscoll nodded. “By the time I got over here and checked on Sean, I figured there was no way I was catching him.”

  Dooling sprinted off in the direction Driscoll had pointed. Garrity asked Driscoll if he was okay staying with the victim till backups and the EMTs arrived, then went chasing after his partner.

  When he caught up, Dooling had buttonholed a couple of sullen young men from off a bench, Garrity pegging them as dealers, or at least lookouts, teenagers he recognized on sight but whose names he didn’t know. They’d rousted these kids from their perch before, threatening loitering collars, but never actually busted them. “I’m making it simple for you,” Dooling was saying. “You tell me where he went, we’re on our way, leave you alone. You don’t tell me, we’re going to take you to our house, hold you there as witnesses for the rest of the night.”

  “I ain’t no snitch,” the taller of the two dealers said.

  “This ain’t no snitching,” Dooling replied. “This is saving yourself a night at the station, which is more likely to get you a snitch jacket than just telling me here and now who you saw and where he went.”

  “We didn’t see nobody,” the other kid said. He was maybe younger, a good twenty pounds overweight.

  “Last call to tell me, or I’m bringing you in,” Dooling said.

  “Didn’t nobody go past us,” the shorter one said again.

  Dooling looked at Garrity, who shrugged. “You mind them; I’ll do a last sprint?” Dooling asked.

  Garrity nodded, and Dooling took off. He ran straight for a block or so, then cut east, deeper into the project, looking for anybody who wasn’t moving right, any kind of reaction that he could use for a stop and frisk. There were few people around, nobody alone, just some loose clusters of young men, everybody giving Dooling reflexive hard stares as he went by. He ran in a rough zigzag for five minutes, but nothing snagged his attention, and he gave up and headed back to the crime scene as he heard the sound of approaching sirens.

  There were already a couple of patrol cars and an ambulance on site, not surprising, since the Housing Bureau’s local HQ was just a few blocks away. Dooling didn’t see his partner, so he made his way over to Driscoll, who was sitting on a curb by himself. “I didn’t spot anybody who looked wrong,” Dooling said. “But we’ve got pictures of everybody who lives in the project. You think you could make him from a photo?”

  “I think I sure as fuck would like to try,” Driscoll said.

  “WE’RE UP,” Detective Alexander Jaworski said, blinking the lights in the interview room on and off. His partner, Jorge Gomez, was lying sprawled across three metal chairs arranged into a makeshift cot in the far corner of the room.

  Gomez groaned in response. “You can’t have a hangover at one in the morning,” Jaworski said. “It’s not natural.”

 
; “Working graveyards isn’t natural,” Gomez said, nearly falling to the floor as he sat up, the chair his legs had been resting on skidding away.

  “We’ve got shots fired, possible DOA at Riis,” Jaworski said. “We gotta be out the door now.”

  Gomez stood, rubbed at his face, following Jaworski out of the interview room. Jaworski handed Gomez his sports jacket as they descended the stairs to the back parking lot.

  It was a short drive from the Ninth Precinct on Fifth Street to the Jacob Riis projects. While Jaworski drove, Gomez pulled himself together, tightening his tie and combing back his disheveled hair. Gomez was a good detective, but his wife had kicked him out three months ago and now he was going on daytime benders, coming in for his graveyards looking like he’d just rolled out of bed, still needed a few more hours to sleep it off. Jaworski had told himself that he’d hold his tongue so long as his partner was only showing up hungover and not drunk.

  The carnival was well under way by the time he pulled up at Tenth and D: a quick scan showed at least a half dozen uniforms, EMS, two ambos even though there was only one vic—private companies monitoring cop frequencies, looking to pick up a fare. The only small mercy was that Jaworski didn’t scope any press: one advantage of an after-hours shooting in the projects.

  Jaworski recognized the night watch commander from the Housing Bureau, Sergeant Fitzgerald, shouted out to him as he approached, “What we got?”

  “One of Loomis’s guys, working construction security,” Fitzgerald said. “Ex-cop, I hear, Sean Fowler.”

  “Fowler,” Gomez said. “I remember him from the job. What’s the status?”

  “They took him to Beth Israel, but from what I hear they’re just running due diligence on a miracle. He didn’t have any vitals when they put him in the ambo.”

  “Ex-cop, huh?” Jaworski said, shaking his head. He didn’t like hearing it was a brother officer, but he also didn’t like that his run-of-the-mill projects shooting had just turned into a red ball. The bosses would be all over him once they knew the vic had worn blue.

  “Good news is, we’ve got an eyeball witness. A sharp one too: another ex-cop.”

  “Where is he?” Jaworski said.

  “Our house,” Fitzgerald said.

  Jaworski wasn’t happy with that. “Why isn’t he at the scene?” he asked brusquely.

  “We’ve got him looking at photos.”

  “Shit,” Jaworski said.

  “What?” Fitzgerald said defensively.

  “Who’s showing him photos?”

  “The patrol guys who were first on the scene.”

  “They fuck up the procedures, a defense attorney will get the ID tossed.”

  “My men know the rules,” Fitzgerald said, a little pissed now too.

  “Are your men homicide detectives? Then they should leave the homicide detecting to me.” Jaworski turned to his partner. “You run things here; I’m going to go down with Fitz and see where the eyeball’s at.”

  JAWORSKI WAS trying to remember whether he’d ever been this lucky. By the time he and Fitzgerald had arrived at the Housing Bureau station and found the patrol officers who were taking the witness through photographs, the guy’d just made an ID. Rafael Nazario, nineteen years old, lived with his grandmother in Tower Six. The patrol cops had run a solid ID procedure: pulling out forty or so photos that matched the witness’s general description, handing him a stack to sift through all together.

  Things were moving, and Jaworski wanted to keep them that way. He borrowed a bulletproof vest, even more uncomfortable than usual in the summer heat, then took the two patrol cops, Dooling and Garrity, and headed into Riis while Fitzgerald radioed over for additional backup to meet them.

  “You guys were first on the scene?” Jaworski asked.

  “Yeah,” Garrity said. “We were maybe a block away when we heard the shots.”

  “Just a block? But you didn’t catch a look at the shooter?”

  Garrity shook his head. “We lost a little bit of time on the scene, getting the four-one-one from the witness, Driscoll. We took off in the direction this kid had run to, but he must’ve made the project already by then.”

  “You were on foot patrol?”

  “We were doing verticals of the buildings, stairways, roofs, that sort of thing,” Dooling said.

  “You were doing verticals when you heard the shots?” Jaworski asked.

  “We’d just come down,” Garrity said. “I was taking a quick smoke before we did the next one. So we were on the ground when the shots went off.”

  Jaworski decided not to follow up. Anyone looking at Garrity would make him for somebody not built for going up and down stairs all night. Experience told him that the patrol schedule and their actual whereabouts wouldn’t sync up.

  Jaworski called his partner on the walk over, caught Gomez up on what was happening, asked him to coordinate getting a warrant on the apartment rather than helping out with the arrest.

  A cluster of uniforms were waiting for them outside the building, so Jaworski led a small army up to Nazario’s apartment. Jaworski considered taking down the door, claiming exigent circumstances for a limited search, but decided there was too much risk that it would come back to bite the case down the road. Besides, it wasn’t like the kid could flush a pistol down the toilet.

  Jaworski reached out to knock, identified himself as police, then stood away from the door, his heart bouncing around in his chest like a pinball. The last place you wanted to be standing when knocking on the door of a cornered suspect was in the doorway; if a blind shot was fired that was where it would go. After a minute he knocked again, louder, again identifying himself as police. Finally the door opened, still latched on the chain, and a small, plump, elderly woman stared out at him. “Dios mío,” she said. “You see what time it is?”

  “IT’S LIKE this, Rafael,” Detective Jaworski said to the young man across the table. “We’ve got guys searching through your apartment right now. They’re turning the place upside down. Your grandmother’s room too.”

  Over an hour had passed since they’d brought Rafael in. The uniforms had driven him back to the Housing Bureau, where they had Fowler make a confirmation in-person ID. Once they’d brought him to the Ninth they’d left him to cool his heels for a while, running his sheet, waiting till the warrant was granted and the search of the Nazario apartment was under way. They’d also run Rafael’s hands and clothes for gunshot residue.

  “You got no reason to be dogging me,” Rafael said. He was loose-limbed and lanky, maybe still growing.

  Gomez shook his head. “Oh, but we do, Rafael. You going to deny you had a beef with Sean Fowler?”

  “I got no love for the man, sure, after what he done. The only reason they got those fake police there is to throw us out of where we live.”

  “I know it’s hard to believe when you live in the projects, Rafael,” Jaworski said, “but smoking weed is still illegal in these United States.”

  “He didn’t catch me smoking no weed.”

  “We have the police report and the court file, Rafael,” Jaworski said. “We know you pled out.”

  “I pled to disorderly conduct is all. That’s not even a crime. Besides, I only pled to that to get out of jail. It don’t mean I did nothing.”

  “Actually it does,” Gomez said. “Or don’t you remember the part where you told a judge that you were guilty?”

  “I was just doing like my free lawyer told me to do. She didn’t believe me neither, but I wasn’t doing shit when Fowler came up on me that night.”

  “I understand why that’s your story now, Rafael,” Jaworski said. “I guess your Legal Aid lawyer neglected to fill you in on what could happen if you pled guilty to a drug charge.”

  “This is all just bullshit,” Rafael protested.

  “You didn’t realize that pleading guilty on smoking a blunt would lead to your losing the roof over your head, did you?”

  Rafael winced in frustration. “How am I suppos
ed to know that?” he said. “If my stupid-ass lawyer don’t bother to tell me, then how’m I gonna know?”

  “Let alone that it would mean your grandmother’s looking at being out on the street too,” Jaworski said. “Can’t feel too good, doing that to the woman who raised you.”

  “We got a new lawyer now, a real lawyer, taking care of all that.”

  “A real lawyer, huh?” Gomez snorted.

  “Let me make sure I have this, Rafael,” Jaworski said. “You’re saying that Sean Fowler framed you on a drug charge, that now because of that charge you and your grandmother are getting evicted from your apartment, meaning that the woman who raised you up is looking to be out on the street in the twilight of her years, and you’re saying that with all that you’ve got no motive to kill Fowler?”

  “Anybody do that shit to me and mine I’d have something to say about it,” Gomez added.

  “I got plenty to say about it. But I’m saying it through the lawyer. He’s straightening all this out.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Gomez said. “But it’s all because of Sean Fowler.”

  “Look, Rafael,” Jaworski said. “We’re all reasonable people here. Now, we obviously know that you and Fowler had a history. We’ve got an eyewitness that puts you at the scene. The lab will be back to us within the hour, let us know whether you’ve got gunshot residue or blood spatter on your hands or the clothes you were wearing. If you’re going to help yourself by talking to us, now’s the time.”

  “I got nothing to do with a murder, and nobody going to say I did.”

  “You’re a lying-ass piece of shit,” Gomez said. “You think I don’t know a lying-ass piece of shit when I sit across the table from one?”

  Rafael leaned back in his chair, away from Gomez. “You got no reason to talk to me like that,” he said, his voice low.

  “I got no reason to talk to you with respect, you murdering son of a bitch.”

  There was a knock on the door. “That’s going to be forensics,” Jaworski said. “You want to help yourself, now’s the time.”