Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

  Never get out of the boat. Crazy bastard in that movie was right. Kennedy gets up into a running stumble, his right hand going back to the holster where he fumbles at the Chief. The radio! It’s on the seat—no time. He gets the butt in his palm and tugs, hearing some lining rip where he snags the hammer, but he just pulls it through and now it’s Kennedy who’s racing down the block in his goddam Florsheim Eagles, the shock going pom pom pompom. He’s old, that’s clear, no speedster like the kid. Doorways are flashing by on his left, and now there are people in the streets as if they’d risen up from the ground and they swivel to watch him as he goes by with his jacket billowing out and his tie flapping. Kennedy sees them as a flurry of lidded eyes, grim black faces, faded jeans and shiny head scarves, ritual tattoos, fucking home boys with skin the color of bunker oil and the threat coming off them in waves. Christ, they hate us, thinks Kennedy, can’t they see what the hell’s going on here? He wants to stop and explain it, to make them understand but he keeps going with his heart ripping up his chest, pounding on his framework like a fighter working a bag.

  He clears the curb, a car cuts left in a glitter of chrome and a whiff of hot vapor. Kennedy doesn’t look back and he’s in the air as he hits the next block. Which door? Which ruined fucking pile? Here! No, here? How far down? A shattered wall comes up fast on his left, here’s the yellow Pinto he saw the kid near. He stops, heaving, and puts a shoulder to the wall, passing his gun hand across his eyes. This is the door, he knows that. Up the street and down, the people are crowding the upper windows, leaning on pillows, hanging their legs over the roof lines, holding cans of Coors, staring at him with half-closed eyes, quietly hating him as only the blacks can. He turns away and looks into the hole in the wall. Backup? He’s alone and that’s that, fuck the backup. He flips out the cylinder and watches as a single drop of sweat comes off his face and lands on one of the brass circles, and the stamped letters w-w 38 SP swell and waver in the droplet. He snaps the cylinder shut and takes a ragged breath. Shit. The doorway smells like a grave.

  He tries to go in fast and to the right, get out of the silhouette and get some stone up against his back like they taught him at Rodman’s Neck, but he hooks a spike in the shoulder of his jacket and tumbles into the dark like a mailbag full of bad news, his gun up in front of him wavering and his other hand sinking up to the wrist in something cold and slick. Now the smell is on him. In him. A ferocious exhalation of rotting mattresses, old piss, mold and age, dead wood and rodent passions, things that crawl and things that leave a trail. The shadows in here are shot through with pale-yellow beams from the cracks in the walls. All six floors have burned and fallen into each other long ago, collapsing onto the ground floor, leaving a huge hollow space full of dust motes and scents, and the thought comes to Kennedy that he hasn’t been to Mass in seven months. Like a chapel in hell, he thinks, and the urge to get up and get out is so strong he can feel his thigh muscles tensing. Oh, kid, what the fuck are we doing here?

  Five long seconds go by without a sound from the street and without a bullet out of the darkness, so Kennedy pushes himself up and takes another step. The smell gets worse. He can see better now, he can see the walls running wet. The middle of the summer, and the place is still wet. There’s a heap in the middle of the floor where a tangle of pipes and timbers rises up in a monkey puzzle of crazy angles. Another step and the floor gives way slowly and then comes back, as if he were walking over the body of something asleep and breathing. Well, we don’t want to wake that fucker, thinks Kennedy, grinning. What’s that line? We don’t want to be here when it gets hungry. Woody Allen is saying this to some item he’s trying to hustle. He laughs out loud, takes another step, his left foot lands on nothing and now he’s down to the hip, something’s got him by the ankle, and here comes that feeling everybody braces for but nobody can handle, when an injury comes your way you never even tried to imagine. A spike, a pipe, a shattered plank, whatever it is it’s deep deep in his thigh. Kennedy shrieks like a girl here—a woman’s cry, it goes seventy feet straight up into the dripping roof and loses itself in a blanket of dark fur and leathery wings. A slow rustle comes back down, tiny claws flex, and now the air is full of shrill crystalline piping. Kennedy freezes, looks up at the roof line and back down at his leg where it disappears into the dirt and garbage, all panic gone and thinking with perfect clarity: Kennedy, you fucking dildo, you are going to die in this fucking hole. He hears a step, there’s a shimmer of black satin, blue eyes, now for a shining moment the place is full of blue light. A second blow comes up against his ear, his head rocks back. This fucker can kick! The back of his head comes off a brick but by then he’s out.

  CHAPTER 2

  CARNIVORES

  Kennedy’s cat woke him up at five on Monday morning by bringing him an imperfectly killed bat and dropping it on his pillow. Kennedy was still in the dream, at the point where he has gone through a hole in the floor of this burnout up in the Bronx and he’s got the spike stuck in his thigh muscle. Kennedy’s cat knows this part because every time Kennedy dreams it he jerks and shivers on the bed and Dudley has to get off and get out, just to find some peace. Dudley doesn’t mind this too much, since it is Dudley’s pleasure to go forth into the long Manhattan nights to fornicate and/or fight with anything pretty enough or stupid enough to get in his way. He goes out through a two-foot hole in the screening that he went to no end of trouble to claw open the second week he and Kennedy started rooming together. It’s a short hop to the awning of an Italian café. Then over to the threadbare elm at the curbside and onto the streets. The streets go everywhere a jet-black thirteen-pound one-eyed tomcat could ever want to go. Whenever Dudley hit the street—usually around midnight and nothing showing but that big yellow eye with the bright red gleam way down inside it—whenever he hit the street the word got around fast. Pigeons under the eaves stopped talking things over with their mates; big brown rats in the garbage bins went down flat and slitted up their eyes; candy-assed peke-a-poos stopped yapping and headed for the nearest friendly doorman. The rust-colored Rottweiler who took care of the Italian café after hours moved to the front window and thanked whatever dog-gods there are that he had some plate glass in front of him. He had more or less decided that this particular cat was a major shitstorm of bad dog-news after they’d gone a few rounds in the Dumpster out back six months ago. He still had the slits in his nose and he’d have them forever. Last night Dudley’s foray had bagged him a pair of brown bats who had been stunting and soaring around the street lamp outside the café, exulting in whatever it is that bats exult in, and the leap out of the dark had taken both of them down into the gutter in a tangle of black fur and leathery wings, blood and white bones. The Rottweiler picked up the supersonic chittering from the street. So did the rats and the pigeons in the sky.

  The sun gets into Kennedy’s room in a kind of triple play, Tinker to Evers to Chance, striking a slanted facet of a local high-rise and ricocheting down into the canyon floor. There it hits six perfectly placed panes of glass on the Florida room of a brownstone on the south side of the street and shoots up through the Venetian blinds at the bedroom window of Kennedy’s flat on the north side. Finally it strikes a bullet-starred Budweiser mirror on the opposite wall which Kennedy is too lazy or too stubborn to move, and it would hit Kennedy right in the eyes if he hadn’t learned to sleep with a pillow over his face.

  So there was just enough light for Kennedy to get a pretty good look at what it was that Dudley had dropped onto his pillow. Kennedy bounded out of the bed so fast that Dudley lost his concentration for a nanosecond, just long enough for the not-quite-dead bat to slither out from under the tomcat’s paw and take off, hell-for-leather, toward the nearest exit.

  Kennedy was doing pretty much the same thing at half the speed, but since the bat had twice the distance to cover, and since they had both decided that the nearest exit was the door into the bathroom, well, it didn’t take a degree in ballistics to figure out that they were going to end up in
the same place in about three seconds. Dudley, who considered himself something of an authority in these matters, and who was by now only too aware of Kennedy’s negative reaction to raw bat for breakfast, decided to bring this unhappy affair to a timely end and launched himself off the foot of the bed with a view to intercepting the bat in midflight.

  Heroic though this leap certainly was, Dudley from time to time failed to allow for the fact that he had only one eye and was therefore at a disadvantage when it came to judging distances in stressful situations. He fell rather short of his airborne intercept, landing instead on the broad expanse of Kennedy’s naked back at roughly the same time that Kennedy and the bat reached the bathroom door.

  Kennedy, feeling something dreadfully sharp and energetic sinking tiny terrible claws into his body, went into a low crouch and spun madly about in the doorway, visions of rabid bats and ten-inch needles flickering in his mind. As he came around he managed to get himself in a virtual nose-to-snout confrontation with the flying bat.

  Eye-to-beady-red-eye, it came to Kennedy that the moment was right for a little gunplay, and he lurched back through the doorway in the direction of his ankle holster lying beside the bed. Dudley, still aboard and slightly confused by all the spinning and leaping, dug in and went along for the ride.

  Meanwhile the bat executed a double Immelmann and a barrel rollout and flew straight back the way he had come, fetching up, breathless and panicked, on top of the Venetian blinds over the bedroom window.

  Dudley, seeing this maneuver, pushed off against Kennedy’s back and scrambled across the floor toward the window while Kennedy, off-balance, stumbled into the night table, snagging his Smith & Wesson and bringing it up into a firing position just as the alarm clock on the falling night table hit the floor in a shower of blue sparks and set fire to a corner of the down comforter that Kennedy’s ex-girlfriend had left behind.

  Kennedy had the bat in his sights and was squeezing the trigger when the fire got his attention. By the time he had beaten out the flames, Dudley had taken out the bat. He was in the corner doing something undeniably fatal to it and Kennedy sat for a while at the foot of the bed, watching him do it. After about three minutes of this, Kennedy brought the gun back up and leveled the sights on a spot just behind Dudley’s right shoulder-joint. He held this position for another thirty seconds, letting his breath out slowly, in a slightly ragged way, keeping his index finger outside the trigger guard. His mind delivered a series of apparently unrelated facts having to do with the building materials of his bedroom wall, the penetrating power of his semi-wadcutter .38 special load, the value of Dudley’s company, his relationship with the CO of the 19th Precinct, just a few blocks away, and the possibility of removing bloodstains from the wallpaper on Dudley’s far side. His hand shook very little during this period. The smoke from the brief fire on his down cover rose, in patterns of ovals and deltas and sinuous curls, up through the shaft of sunlight coming in through the window until it reached the ceiling, where it flattened out, spreading itself along the plaster in a posture suggestive of mild expectancy and polite interest in the tableau beneath it. Dudley settled onto his belly and ate quietly, even daintily, not looking at Kennedy but with his right ear laid back along his skull and a certain tautness in his lines. The phone rang. It was Stokovich.

  An hour later Detective Eddie Kennedy got out of a gypsy cab at the intersection of Avenue C and East 4th in Alphabet City. A Radio Motor Patrol car, an RMP, with two officers—a black policewoman and an older white cop—was waiting for him. The two cops, looking bored, were drinking coffee out of a Mickey Mouse thermos. Another uniform, a young foot patrolman, was sitting on the curb holding his head in his hands. All three of them straightened up a bit as Kennedy walked over with his badge out.

  About ten feet from this boy, inside a yellow crime-scene ribbon, the body of a young male lay in that curiously boneless disarray of the truly and suddenly dead. His head was lying in a lake of brown blood, and a delta of blood had formed in the pits and cracks along the sidewalk, running toward the curb in a system of canals and rivulets, looking like an aerial photograph of Mars. Kennedy asked the older of the RMP officers whether or not the body had been checked for vital signs. The man chuckled into his coffee and said the body had rigor and lividity and was as dead as it gets. The black policewoman nodded, unsmiling, and held herself apart from the talk. Kennedy took out his pocket Kodak and loaded a new film cassette into it.

  While he was doing this, Dudley was lapping water out of the apartment toilet, feeling a little drowsy, and watching the way slender threads of rich red bat’s blood were drifting down into the deep. Being a cat, he could not see the blood as red. He saw it instead as a slow undulation of dark-gray lines against a shimmering field of pale-white. It was the scent that held him, so powerful and detailed, so layered and shaded and full of nuance.

  First Rule: Never Get Out of the Boat. Kennedy stood at the edge of the ribbon and looked across the distance at the body. Poor bastard. So what the hell do we have here? He had spent a little while talking to the First Officer, the kid now looking ghostly in the back of the RMP. He’d been at the tail of his shift when Central got a call: male Hispanic voice; time in, 0437 hours; this date. “You go to ‘La Colonización,’ you dumb fucks, you get a maricon to play with. Hasta!” “La Colonización” was hard to miss. The body was right underneath it.

  It’s a mural painted on the side wall of a ruined market on the northwest corner of C and East 4th. It’s fifty feet long, perhaps ten feet high. There’s a long expanse of Caribbean shoreline, an eggshell beach bordered by palms and loaded with tropical fruit: mangoes and bananas, papayas, avocados, coconuts—nature’s riches. The sea rolls in through shades of tourmaline and deep-purple to emerald and pale-green, the lightest blue. Three sailing ships have just cleared the horizon. The Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. “La Colonización.” You have to step back a few yards to get the joke: The pretty thing is on a ruined building, next door to a vacant lot full of bricks and rubble.

  Across the street there are more bombed-out and empty buildings. The place looks like Beirut, as if running battles were fought here every Saturday night. The next block is worse. In the whole area, bounded by 14th Street, First Avenue, East Houston, and the FDR Drive, there are hundreds of five- and six-story buildings that went up in the thirties and have been allowed to fall down ever since the near-bankruptcy of New York in 1975. It’s also home to roughly 100,000 people who live either in the Jacob Riis and Lillian Wald projects off Avenue D or here and there in flats and basements in the brownstones. There isn’t a block without a burnout or a pit full of ruin—protected, for some demented reason, by brand-new wire fencing, as if there were a problem with rubble-thievery. Whatever isn’t fenced off or burned down is covered with iron bars and graffiti. The man who invented the spray can ought to be dragged down to Alphabet City and put to work with a toothbrush and some Ajax. There isn’t a space unmarked from ankle-high to the top of the first-floor windows.

  If you can ignore the scars, you can see that the proportions of these old brownstones are perfect; a nice rhythm has been set up between the corniced windows and the brickwork. There’s symmetry here, and craftsmanship in the cut-stone lintels, the gargoyles and the mullions, and in the wholeness of the execution. Italianate and well-proportioned in design, the whole area was scaled down and set out in wide streets and avenues. The men who built Alphabet City are all dead now. So is Alphabet City.

  The solid citizens who live here now, and there are a lot of them, stay here because there’s no place else to go. Black and Hispanic in the main, the population also includes some whites and Orientals, and even a few tough trendoids from the East Village and SoHo who have been forced into the region by gentrification. This area is clearly destined for the same thing. The landlords who own these buildings have only to wait about ten years and the property will triple in value, and then the white-painters and the fan-window crowd will buy in by the phalanx. I
n the meantime, it’s a free-fire zone and heroin heaven.

  Kennedy had been working this area for about three years, ever since he was transferred from the South Bronx at his own request. It still made him nervous.

  There’s a rule called 24/24 in the Homicide lexicon. It means that the most important hours in the investigation of any murder are the last twenty-four hours in the victim’s life and the first twenty-four hours after his body has been discovered. The secret of the killing lies in this time zone. Go back beyond that and the forces that led to his death are too diffuse, and after the first twenty-four hours the witnesses are starting to forget things; the tissues are drying out; the weapons are being destroyed. Clothes are being burned and stories are being agreed upon. Under the circumstances, Kennedy felt a sense of urgency. The trick was to ignore that. Kennedy’s first partner used to say, “The stiff will still be dead in the morning.” The one thing a Homicide cop has that no other cop can count on is time to do it right. But he gets no second chance.

  Kennedy’s system had been worked out over the years, and much of it has passed into formal NYPD Academy training. It was second nature to him by now, a kind of Zen attitude that came over him in the first minutes of a case, giving him the stillness and the focus he needed to see what there was to see and to know it when he saw it.

  Kennedy kept a pack of steno notepads in the top drawer of his dresser. When he’d gotten the call from his lieutenant, the first thing he’d done was to take one of these new pads along with him. He flipped it open now and started writing in it.

  He wrote out the time of Stokovich’s call—0516 hours—and the date. Beneath this he wrote out the means by which he had received the call. He wrote down landline, which is NYPD jargon for a telephone call. He identified his boss in this way: