A Witness Above (2 page)

“Drop your weapons and come out with your hands where we can see them.”

Still nothing.

I thought I saw a shadow of movement between the Dumpsters. Then, at the side of the building, where the light was a little better, two figures turned and started to run.

I had the better angle. “Stop where you are and put your hands in the air!”

They kept going. I fired a warning round over their heads. One of the figures ignored the shot and darted into the shadows, but the other one stopped without raising his hands—he kept them at his side as he turned to face us. There was something dark and metallic in one of them—it looked just like one of our Glocks; not surprising since the gangs had them before we did.

“Drop the weapon!” I said.

Toronto was moving into position beside me. Cahill took another shot at the still-fleeing suspect but missed.

“I said, drop the weapon!”

He took a step into better light, a black teenager wearing a sweatsuit with high-top sneakers and down vest, wide-eyed in fear.

“Don't do it, my man,” Toronto muttered beneath his breath. “Don't do it.”

But his weapon arm rose, clearly pointing in our direction.

The strange thing was, the actual act of pulling the trigger felt no different than pumping rounds into targets on the range. Toronto and I had trained for a moment like this, been prepared for that horrible instant when a decision must be made—kill or be killed—but when the time actually arrived, the response was more knee-jerk than contemplative. We fired almost simultaneously. The teen slumped to the ground.

No time to think about what had happened. Officer Cahill was already out in front, hot-footing toward the downed shooter, a ballsy move since the kid was still armed.

“I'm on the runner,” I said to Jake. “You better start CPR.”

My best chance was to cut around the side of the building and try to head the kid off before he made it back to the avenue. I sprinted around the front and swam into darkness on the other side, tripping over a pile of torn insulation. One streetlight illuminated the fence at the back of the lot, which allowed me to catch a glimpse of him just as he hurdled the chain-link. This one looked to be bigger than his companion, probably faster, and he looked like he knew where he was going. I was in decent shape, but I would need every bit of stamina I owned to have any chance of running him down.

The supine image of Singer drove me—it could have just as easily been me lying there. I didn't care who the runner was, where he came from or who his parents were. I didn't think about what socioeconomic rung he or his family or friends were hung up on, or the prejudices, real and otherwise, mounted against him.

I was at the fence in a few seconds. On the other side a poorly-lit parking lot backed a small commercial building. There were houses lining the rest of the street, however, lights blazing in a few windows: people awakened, no doubt, by all the shooting, phoning 911 or just sitting tight waiting for something to happen, not wanting to get involved. The snow blew almost horizontally now, mixed with sleet that stung my face. The rest of me had gone numb.

I sprinted across the lot. Too slow. The shooter was maybe a hundred yards distant now, knifing between parked cars in front of a row of bungalows. My last glimpse of him came as he ducked between bushes across someone's back lawn. The place was almost totally dark; he could have gone any one of three different directions from in there.

Reaching the spot, I watched and waited a few minutes for any sign: footfalls, a clothesline rattling, a dog barking. Nothing. Within a quarter hour uniforms and cruisers would be crawling all over the area, beaming bright lanterns and interviewing neighbors, all to no avail.

Back by the Dumpsters, support had begun to arrive in force: three or four NRPD squad cars, an ambulance and paramedics leaping to the pavement. Jake, blood soaking his turtleneck, was still working on Singer with another officer assisting. Cahill limped toward me, looking anxious—for the first time I noticed he had been wounded in the leg.

“How's your partner?” I said.

“Don't know. It don't look good. Singer's got a …” He stared blankly into the sidewalk.

“I'm sorry.”

He didn't move for a few seconds. Then he looked up and refocused on me. “I don't know, but listen, detective, we got problems.”

“What do you mean?”

Another officer, a woman, tried to approach and enter the conversation. “Cat, we've—”

He waved her away. “Give us a second, will you?”

“But, Cat—”

“Give us a goddamned second!”

She stared at us then retreated to go help with Singer.

Cahill lowered his voice. “What I mean is, I know this kid you guys put down. He's from the neighborhood, only fourteen.”

I nodded, only half-listening.

“What I'm trying to say, this was a good kid … and … well …” He handed something to me. “This is what I found in his hand.” It looked like a piece of drainage pipe, the inside stuffed with nickel bags.

“Where's the Glock?” I said.

“What Glock?”

“The kid's.”

He shook his head. “No gun.”

My gut tightened. I stared at him. “But I saw him raise the weapon. Jake must have seen it too. We …”

He pursed his lips and shook his head again.

My head began to swirl and I closed my eyes. Why hadn't I listened to Toronto? Why did I always have to push things? Jake could have been watching his game right now, or maybe we could have stopped for pie and coffee at the Thruway Diner. Why hadn't I just taken us home?

“Hey, listen, detective—it's Pavlicek, right? You said your name was Pavlicek.”

I nodded dumbly. An ambulance was arriving now, siren screaming.

The big man's eyes blazed with a sudden intensity. “It may be too late for Singer, but you all saved my ass. I got a throw-down in the car. You fellas say the word and it's done.”

I continued to look at him, but my mind was reeling now, somewhere else, away from this madness, somewhere safe and warm. Down the block a TV van was already turning into view. There was a big empty billboard attached to a building on the corner with words that read:
APPLE MACINTOSH. THINK DIFFERENT.

Cahill clutched my arm. But his big hand was frozen and fell away. His voice seemed to come from another world. “Detective?”

The snow was changing now to larger flakes that had begun to cling like bits of cotton candy to the cars and the bodies. Soon the sidewalk would be covered, then the block, the whole city, maybe the entire world.

“Listen to me, will ya? All you gotta do is say the word. …”

1

Thirteen Years Later

That September Friday I took the morning off to enter my hawk, though the foliage was still too thick for decent hunting, the weather not ideal, and the red-tail barely out of moult. Armistead's bells, bewit-attached to her pounces, trailed jingles over my head as she shadowed me through the muddy glare. I had squandered the night before keeping tabs on a Charlottesville architect whose wife wanted to know why her husband had started to come home so late, the idea being the good woman would continue to pay me, particularly if I uncovered genuine philandering for once. With Armistead the idea was simpler: build fitness for tackling game, maybe flush a tidbit or two across the stubble of an unused field so her instinct might draw her to a stoop.

It would be the big raptor's second season out. She was a survivor—no doubt about that. When I had trapped her as a passage bird the year before, she had borne deep gash marks across her breast and flanks, probably from a life-or-death tussle with an owl. Most of her wild cousins had already succumbed by now to disease, man-made blight or been taken as prey themselves. After a few years with me, Armistead would have a better chance.

We reached a tangle of downed trees. Virginia pine—over the top of their bonsai branches. Old Rag Mountain towered before the line of the Blue Ridge like a displaced canine tooth. Armistead followed on, easing ahead to settle in the limbs of a nearby oak. When her bells went quiet I realized what was happening: her hunter's eyes sweeping the terrain, absorbing every detail in a millisecond. The anticipatory quality of her movements suggested a knowing preamble to flight.

The wiregrass cracked with sound. A cottontail burst into view running. Armistead did not disappoint. I caught sight of her against the sun, already rearing at the pitch of her climb.

It was over fast. The hawk dropped with such speed her talons struck like hammers. In one smooth motion she snared her prey and drove it to the ground, spreading her wings wide to hide the catch. Good girl. But suddenly she wheeled skyward again, no rabbit limp in her grasp.

Keeee-rr-rrr … Keeee-rr-rrr …
The red-tail's plaintive cries split the air.

I could hardly believe what I had seen. She must have somehow missed what should have been an easy meal. Or worse, she had actually knocked the creature into the overgrowth in a flutter of dust and squeal, wounded. The last thing I needed right now was an incomplete kill: the cottontail suffering a prolonged death since the force of the strike would have damaged vital internal organs. I fingered the sharp awl I carried to dispatch quarry if it became necessary. There was no alternative. I would have to go in to finish the job myself.

I jogged along the edge of the field to the spot where Armistead, still screeching, swooped back and forth. No sign of Mr. Bunny. The place reminded me of an instance, a few weeks before, when I had brought my daughter along for Armistead's first outing of the fall. Nicole, loquacious and impulsive; just turned eighteen and with the same spectacular looks as her mother, minus the duplicity. She was a senior in high school, preparing for college, and she loved to go hunting with me. Falconry was one of the few things we shared since her mother and I had divorced years before and I had left her to be fathered, for all intents and purposes and despite my regular support payments, by a now-deceased stepparent, a man who had provided a much wealthier backdrop than I would've ever been able to afford.

Unfortunately, our most recent trip had turned out quite differently than expected. Armistead had acted skittish all day and kept flying off for long stretches, forcing us to chase her over the rolling terrain. The land we were on belonged to an uncle of Cat Cahill, none other than the same Cahill I had first met on that fated night so many years before. The farm had been passed down from his great-great-grandfather, an officer in the Army of Northern Virginia. It was Nicole, not myself, who had finally coaxed Armistead out of the tree where the hawk had perched for over an hour that day. I was only an apprentice falconer, after all, and though my daughter was no practitioner herself, she and the red-tail seemed to enjoy a certain understanding. A girl/girl thing, Nicky explained.

“Ho hawk!” I blew my whistle now and held up my arm with a piece of meat to call Armistead to the glove.

No response. If anything, she made even more of a racket. Like most birds of prey, she could take to the ground after a wounded catch, hopping and flitting about, and she would come to my call when hungry. But not this time. Maybe it was the girl thing again. Maybe she was embarrassed. Maybe I ought to give up anthropomorphic psychology.

I stepped over a pile of rocks into the weeds where the rabbit had disappeared. Armistead suddenly decided to follow, scolding, as if I were the one to blame for her miss.

“Pipe down. If you hadn't dropped your lunch, we wouldn't be in this predicament.”

But as if to spite me the great bird extended her wings and glided several yards ahead. She stopped at the edge of the woods to hover above the base of a large tulip poplar, staring down and calling toward the ground. Maybe she had rediscovered her prey.

I hurried to catch up. Only to stumble then take a step back. The carcass of a turkey vulture, hideous to look at up close, blocked the path. This particular specimen, a putrid odor from its bones, had ended up as carrion itself. Maybe that was what had upset Armistead.

I turned and hurried after her again, but no sooner had I stepped around the dead vulture than I began to notice an even more powerful stench, an all-too-familiar odor that stopped me in my tracks once more. Inching toward the shade beneath the poplar, straining to make out what lay there, I prayed that my first impression was a mistake.

But there was no mistake. You could tell it was a body now, or at least what was left of one. Not this, I thought. Not here. Not now—the memories of working homicide were dark apparitions I had worked to expunge.

I pulled out a handkerchief to cover my nose and mouth and rocked back on my heels. Sweat dripped from my temples. Blood, the color of oil and coated with flies, saturated the clay. Armistead, having shown me what she wanted me to see, retreated to the sky to ring effortlessly over the field.

I looked over the remains. They appeared to be those of a young black male: dark blue Filas; a green hooded sweatshirt; baggy, filth-stained jeans. An attempt had been made to conceal the body beneath a pile of brush, which had failed, obviously. The corpse lay facedown, arms akimbo. The right posterior of the midsection bore a gunshot injury, a wide starburst splitting of the skin, evidence of a contact entry wound. There didn't appear to be any defense wounds on the hands, which had blown up like swollen gloves, but something glinted in one of them—a thin silver chain affixed to a rosewood cross.

I swung at the air. The flies that had scattered at my approach now returned with aggravated ferocity. I was about to walk away—this wasn't my problem, after all; I just had to notify the proper authorities—when I noticed a flap of brown leather protruding from a clump of leaves. It appeared to be the side of a wallet, flecked with mud.

I picked up a stick and prodded it open to peer inside. Some damp, folded money became visible, lots of it. However the young man had died, he hadn't been robbed. Probing at the seams of a fold-out section, I flipped through photos of a middle-aged woman, a family with brothers, no sisters or father in evidence. And there, in the centerfold, the dead teen's driver's license.