W E B Griffin - Badge of Honor 01 - Men In Blue

by Men In Blue(lit)

  Five minutes later he was at the Bridge & Pratt Streets Terminal. A clock in a store window said ten minutes after five. This had worked out okay. The terminal, and the subway itself, would be crowded with people coming from work, or going downtown. He could hide in the crowd. He would be careful, when the train pulled into the station, to look for any cop that might be on it, and make sure he didn't get on that car.

  Then he would ride downtown to Market Street, walk underground to the Suburban Station, and ride from there to Thirtieth Street Station. There he would buy a ticket on the Pennsylvania Railroad to Baltimore. He would find out when it left, and then go to the men's crapper, where he would stay until it was time for the train to leave. Then a quick trip up to the platform, onto the train, and he would be home free.

  In Baltimore, he knew a couple of connections, if they were still in business, and he could get a little something to straighten him out. He was getting a little edgy, that way, and that would be the first thing to do, get himself straightened out. And then he would decide what to do next.

  He walked past a place called Tates, where the smell of pizza made his stomach turn. He stopped and went to the window and ordered a slice of pizza and a Coke. When the Coke came, he drank it down. He hadn't realized he had been that thirsty.

  "Do that again," he said, pushing the container toward the kid behind the counter, and laying another dollar bill on the counter. There was a newsstand right beside Tates called-somebody thought he was a fucking wit-Your Newsstand.

  Gerald Vincent Gallagher drank some of the second Coke, then set the container down on the top of a garbage can and, taking a bite of the pizza, stepped to a newspaper rack offering the Philadelphia Daily News, to get a quick look at the headline, maybe there would be something about the Waikiki Diner in it.

  There was. There were two photographs on the front page. One was of some cop in uniform, and the other was of Gerald Vincent Gallagher. The headline, in great big letters, asked, "COP KILLER?"

  Under the photographs was a story that began, "A massive citywide search is on for Gerald Vincent Gallagher, suspected of being the bandit who got away when Police Captain Richard C. Moffitt was shot to death in the Waikiki Diner yesterday."

  Gerald Vincent Gallagher's stomach tied in a painful knot. He felt a cold chill, and as if the hair on his neck was crawling. He spit out the piece of pizza he had been chewing, and carefully laid the piece in his hand on the garbage can beside the Coke container.

  Then he started walking past Your Newsstand. At the end of the building was a glass door leading to a bingo parlor upstairs, and then the covered stairs to the subway platform.

  Gerald Vincent Gallagher looked at the door and saw in it a reflection of the street. And something caught his eye. A big, fat sonofabitch was looking right at him as he came running across the street. The fat guy looked familiar and for a moment, Gerald Vincent Gallagher thought he was a guy he had done business with, but then the fat guy sort of kneeled down, and jerked up his pants leg, and pulled a gun from an ankle holster.

  Then, as he started running again, he shouted, "Hold it right there, Gallagher, or I'll blow your ass away!"

  Fuck him, Gerald Vincent Gallagher thought. That fucking narc isn't going to shoot that gun with all these people around!

  He ran up the stairs toward the subway platform. With a little bit of luck, there would be a train there and he could get on it, and away.

  ***

  The Bridge & Pratt Streets Terminal is the end of the line for the subway. The tracks are elevated, above Frank-ford Avenue, and widen as they reach the station. There is a center passenger platform, with stairs leading down to the lower level of the terminal, between the tracks, and a second passenger platform, to the right of the center platform. That way, passengers can exit incoming from downtown trains through doors on both sides of the car. Passengers heading downtown all have to board trains from the center platform.

  After incoming trains from downtown Philadelphia offload their passengers from the right (in direction of movement) track, they move several hundred yards farther on, where they stop, the crews move to the rear end of the train (which now becomes the front end), and move back, now on the left track, to the station, where they pick up downtown-bound passengers.

  The lower level of the terminal contains ticket booths, and two stairwells, one descending to the ground on either side of Frankford Avenue.

  When Officer Charley McFadden spotted Gerald Vincent Gallagher shoving pizza in his face in front of Your Newsstand, he was sitting in his Volkswagen, which was parked in front of Gene & Jerry's Restaurant & Sandwiches on Pratt Street, fifty feet to the north of Frankford Avenue.

  Officer Jesus Martinez was inside Gene & Jerry's sitting at the counter eating a ham and cheese sandwich, no mayonnaise or mustard or butter, just the ham and cheese and maybe a little piece of lettuce on whole wheat bread.

  He had his mouth full of ham and cheese when he saw Charley erupt from the Volkswagen.

  He swore, in Spanish, and spit out the sandwich, and jumped up and ran toward the door. As soon as he was through it, he dropped to his knees and drew his pistol from his ankle holster.

  He had not seen Gerald Vincent Gallagher, but he knew that Charley McFadden must have seen him, for Charley, moving with speed remarkable for his bulk, was now headed up the stairs to the subway station.

  Two cars and a truck, going like the hammers of hell, delayed Officer Martinez's passage across Pratt Street by thirty seconds. By the time he made it across, Charley McFadden was nowhere in sight. All he could see was people with wide eyes wondering what the fuck was going on.

  "Police! Police!" Officer Martinez shouted as he forced his way through a crowd of people trying to leave the station.

  He jumped over the turnstile, and then was forced to make a choice between stairs leading to the tracks for trains arriving from downtown and tracks for trains headed downtown. Deciding that it would be far more likely that McFadden and whoever it was he was chasing-almost certainly, Gerald Vincent Gallagher-would be on the downtown platform, he ran up those stairs.

  Officer McFadden, who had lost sight of Gerald Vincent Gallagher as he ran up the stairs from Pratt Street, had made the same decision. Already starting to puff a little, he ran onto the platform. A downtown train had just pulled into the station; the platform was crowded with people in the process of boarding it.

  Holding his pistol at the level of his head, muzzle pointed toward the sky, Charley McFadden ran down the train looking for Gallagher. He had reached the last car, and hadn't seen him, and had just about decided the little fucker was on the train, that he had missed him, and would have to start at the first car and work his way back through it when he did see him. Gallagher was in the middle of the tracks, the other tracks, the incoming from downtown tracks. As McFadden ran to the side of the center platform, Gerald Vincent Gallagher boosted himself up on the platform on the far side.

  It had been his intention to run back down the stairs and get onto Frankford Avenue, where he could lose himself in the crowd. The narc, Gerald Vincent Gallagher reasoned, would not dare use his pistol because of all the fucking people on the lower level of the terminal and on Frankford Avenue.

  But Gallagher had spotted him, and there was no way he could run back toward the station, because there were no people on that platform, and the goddamned narc would feel free to shoot at him. He turned, instead, and ran down the platform in the other direction, to the end, and jumped over a yellow painted barrier with a sign on it reading DANGER! KEEP OFF!

  Beyond the barrier was a narrow workman's walkway. It ran as far as the next station, but Gerald Vincent Gallagher wasn't planning on running that far, just maybe two, three, blocks where he knew there was a stairway, more of a ladder, really, he could climb down to Frankford Avenue.

  He looked over his shoulder and saw that the fucking narc was doing what he had done, crossing the tracks and then boosting himself up onto the passenger platfor
m. The big fat sonofabitch had trouble hauling all that lard onto the platform, and for a moment, the way the fucking narc was flailing around with his legs trying to get up on the platform, Gerald Vincent Gallagher thought he might get lucky and the narc's legs would touch the third rail, and the cocksucker would fry himself.

  But that didn't happen.

  Officer McFadden got first to his knees, and then stood up. Holding his pistol in both hands, he took aim at Gerald Vincent Gallagher.

  But he didn't pull the trigger. Heaving and panting the way he was, there was little chance that he could hit the little sonofabitch as far away as he was, and Christ only knew where the bullet would go after he fired. Probably get some nun between the eyes.

  "You little sonofabitch! I'm going to get your ass!" he screamed in fury, and started racing after him again.

  Officer Jesus Martinez reached the center platform at this time. He knew from the direction people were looking where the action was, and ran down the center platform to the end.

  He saw Officer McFadden first, and then, fifty, sixty yards ahead of him, a slight white male that almost certainly had to be Gerald Vincent Gallagher. They were running, carefully, along the walkway next to the rail.

  The reason they were running carefully was that the walkway was over the third rail. The walkway was built of short lengths, about five feet long, of prefabricated pieces. Some of them, the real old ones, were heavy wooden planking. Some of the newer ones were pierced steel, and the most modern were of exposed aggregate cement. They provided a precarious perch in any event, and they were not designed to be foot-racing paths.

  Officer Martinez made another snap decision. There was no way he could catch up with them, and even to try would mean that he would have to jump down and cross the tracks, and risk electrocuting himself on the third rail. But he could catch the departing train, ride to the next station, and then start walking back. That would put Gerald Vincent Gallagher between them.

  He ran for the train and jumped inside, just as the doors closed.

  He scared hell, with his pistol drawn, out of the people on the car, and they backed away from him as if he was on fire.

  "I'm a police officer," he said, not very loudly because he was out of breath. "Nothing to worry about."

  When the train passed Charley McFadden and Gerald Vincent Gallagher, they were both still running very carefully, watching their feet.

  Jesus Christ, Charley, shoot the sonofabitch!

  The same thought had occurred to Charley McFadden at just about that moment, and even as he ran, he wondered why he didn't stop running, drop to his knees, and, using a two-handed hold, try to put Gerald Vincent Gallagher down.

  There were several reasons, and they all came to him. For one thing, he wasn't at all sure that he could hit him. For another, he was worried about where the bullet, the bullets, plural, would go if he missed. People lived close to the tracks here. He didn't want to kill one of them.

  And then he realized the real reason. He didn't want to kill Gerald Vincent Gallagher. The little shit might deserve it, and it might mean that Officer Charley McFadden didn't have the balls to be a cop, but the facts were that Gerald Vincent Gallagher didn't have a gun-if he had, the little shit would have used it, he had nothing to lose from a second charge of murder-and wasn't posing, right now, any real threat to anybody but himself, running down the tracks like this.

  Hay-zus must have figured out what was going on by now, and got on the radio and called for help. In a couple of minutes, there would be cops responding from all over. All he had to do was keep Gerald Vincent Gallagher in sight, and keep him from hurting himself or somebody else, and everything would be all right.

  Eighteen hundred and fifty-three feet (as was later measured with great care) south of the Bridge & Pratt Streets Terminal, Gerald Vincent Gallagher realized that he could not run another ten feet. His chest hurt so much he wanted to cry from the pain. And that big, fat, fucking narc was still on his tail.

  Gerald Vincent Gallagher stopped running, and turned around and grabbed the railing beside the walkway, and dropped to his knees.

  "I give up," he said. "For Christ's sake, don't shoot me!"

  Officer Charley McFadden could understand what he said, even the way he said it puffing and out of breath.

  Unable to speak himself, he walked up the walkway, heaving with the exertion.

  And then he raised his arm, the left one, without the pistol, and pointed down the track, and tried to find his voice. What he wanted to say was "Watch out, there's a train coming!"

  He couldn't find his voice, but Gerald Vincent Gallagher took his meaning. He looked over his shoulder at the approaching train. And tried to get to his feet, so that he would be able to hold on to the railing good and tight as the train passed.

  And he slipped.

  And he fell onto the tracks.

  And he put his hand out as a reflex motion, to break his fall, and his wrist found the third rail and Gerald Vincent Gallagher fried.

  And then the train came, and all four cars rolled over him.

  When Officer Jesus Martinez came down the walkway, he found Officer Charley McFadden bent over the railing, sick white in the face, and covered with vomitus.

  ***

  Michael J. "Mickey" O'Hara had worked, at one time or another, for all the newspapers in Philadelphia, and had ventured as far afield as New York City and Washington, DC.

  He was an "old-time" reporter, and even something of a legend, although he was just past forty. He looked older than forty. Mickey liked a drop of the grape whenever he could get his hands on one, and that was the usual reason his employment had been terminated; for in his cups Mickey O'Hara was prone not only to describing the character flaws and ancestry of his superiors in picaresque profanity worthy of a cavalry sergeant, but also, depending on the imagined level of provocation and the amount of alcohol in his system, to punch them out.

  But on the other hand, Mickey O'Hara was, when off the sauce, one hell of a reporter. He had what some believe to be the genetic Irish talent for storytelling. He could breathe life into a story that otherwise really wouldn't deserve repeating. He was also a master practitioner of his craft, which was journalism generally and the police beat specifically. His car was equipped with a very elaborate shortwave receiver permitting Mickey to listen in to police communications.

  Mickey had come to know a lot of cops in twenty years, and although he was technically not a member of either organization, if there was an affair of the Emerald Society or the Fraternal Order of Police and Mickey O'Hara was not there, people wondered, with concern, if he was sick or something.

  Mickey liked most cops and most cops liked Mickey. Mickey, however, considered few cops above the grade of sergeant as cops. The cant of the law-enforcement community gets in the way here. All policemen are police officers, which means they are executing an office for the government.

  There is a rank structure in the police department, paralleling that of the army, even to the insignia of rank. So far as Mickey was concerned, anybody in the rank of lieutenant or higher (a white-shirt) was not really a cop, but a brass hat, a member of the establishment. There were exceptions to this, of course. Mickey was very fond of Chief Inspector Matt Lowenstein, for example, and had used his considerable influence with the managing editor to see that when Lowenstein's boys were bar mitzvahed, those socioreligious events had been prominently featured in the paper.

  And he had liked Dutch Moffitt. There were a few others, a captain here, a lieutenant there, whom Mickey liked, even including Staff Inspector Peter Wohl, but by and large he considered anyone who wore a white shirt with his uniform to be much like the officers he had known and actively disliked in the army.

  He liked the guys-the ordinary patrolmen and the corporals and detectives and sergeants-on the street, and they liked him. He got their pictures in the paper, with their names spelled right, and he never violated a confidence.

  Mickey O'Hara had just g
one to work when he heard the call, "man with a gun at the El terminal at Frankford and Pratt.'' That is to say, he had just left Mulvaney's Tap Room at Tabor and Rising Sun avenues, where he had had two beers and nobly refused the offer of a third, and gotten in his car to drive downtown, where he planned to begin the day by dropping by the Ninth District police station.

  Almost immediately, there were other calls. Another Fifteenth District car was ordered to the Margaret-Orthodox Station, which was the next station, headed downtown, from Bridge and Pratt Streets, and then right after that came an "assist officer" call, and then a warning that plainclothes officers were on the scene. Finally, there was a call for the rescue squad and the fire department.

  Mickey O'Hara decided that whatever was happening between the Pratt & Bridge Streets Terminal and the Margaret-Orthodox Station might be worthy of his professional attention.

  He went down to Roosevelt Boulevard, turned left, and entered the center lane. He drove fast, but not recklessly, weaving skillfully through traffic, cursing and being cursed in turn by the drivers of more slowly moving vehicles. He went around the bend at Friends' Hospital, slipped into the outside lane, and made a right turn, through a red light, onto Bridge Street.