Blind Man's Alley (6 page)

5

G
RAVEYARD FOOT
patrol in the NYPD’s Housing Bureau: no cop’s idea of a plum assignment. Officers Dooling and Garrity had done consecutive verticals in two buildings, walking up and down the stairwells, fourteen floors. Garrity, a smoker, started huffing after a couple of flights, his beefy face going red, sweat rolling along his jawline.

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.”