Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

There had been one final bit of bullshit affecting the general problem of race wars in the NYPD and on the streets of the city itself. It was generally believed that white cops were far more willing to shoot black people than were black cops. That was one of the main reasons for the quota system in the first place. Stokovich’s squad room library included an internal stat sheet that listed shooting-board investigations during the late sixties and early seventies. They showed that one out of every thirty-eight black policemen had shot and killed someone during this period, as opposed to one out of two hundred and fifty white cops. A few more than nineteen hundred black police officers had shot forty-four black people. Thirty thousand white cops in this same period had accounted for only sixty-four black deaths and twenty Hispanic deaths. The stats got a little muddy when he considered that black policemen are usually assigned to the roughest areas, but the point had some validity. The whole affair had been dealt with in a Police Science journal article published in December 1981, in which a researcher named James Fyfe had demonstrated that minority officers are more likely to have been involved in a fatal shooting than any white officer. Stokovich was using this report as justification for his prejudice against black female detectives. Which just goes to show that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

  Kennedy decided the thing was a bag of snakes and turned on the police radio to listen to the sound of Harlem until Maksins got tired of intimidating school kids.

  “All right, Six Adam, ahh, they’re not giving any description on this but according to the caller there’s a man on her fire escape and he’s waving a dead bird at her, K?”

  beep … beep …

  “Ah, Six Adam to Central, he’s waving a what at her?”

  “Eight Frank to Central, we have a call-back?”

  “Nah, Eight Frank, no call-back.”

  “Six Charlie to Central, K?”

  “Six Charlie?”

  “Ah, we’re ninety-Z, Central.”

  “Oooh, not for long, Seven Charlie.”

  “Two Eddy to Central, K?”

  “Two Eddy?”

  “We’re hearing a ten-eleven at three thirty-two West a Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street.”

  “A what?”

  The dispatcher was a young black woman with a heavy Bronx accent. She ran the net with an iron hand. Kennedy tracked the hectic cross-talk while he updated his Spiegel case notes. The time was 1533 hours, and whatever the schools were doing to slow down the crime rate in Harlem was going to be officially over in a few minutes. Maksins was talking into his portable. He had probably left it turned up while he ate his hamburger. Look at the guy, Kennedy thought: six two, an easy two hundred pounds, a weight lifter who looks like an ad for the Third Reich, a punk brush-cut and a piece of weaponry under his arm that could punch a hole through a concrete wall, talking into the radio and staring out the plate glass at Kennedy. If he could ever get over his reflexes, he’d be a good cop someday.

  “Five Charlie, that was no cardiac, that was a seizure. Can we have a bus at One Thirty-Seven East a Hundred Twenty-ninth Street, apartment seven?”

  “Five Charlie, ten four, the bus is on the way.”

  “All units, on the Hudson Parkway at the tollbooth; she’s reporting a black male with a gun, a possible EDP. He’s harassing the people in the cars there.”

  “Emergency Services, Central, we’re on the parkway. We’ll take that call.”

  “Roger, ESU, we have a call-back on that. She says there are shots fired, repeat, shots fired. All units respond.”

  “Central, was that the Hudson Parkway or the Hudson Bridge?”

  “Ah, it’s from the toll sergeant at the Hudson Bridge. She’s reporting that shots have been fired. Stand by, I’m on a landline.… (Some static here, and the sound of an open carrier, agitated voices, and a siren whooping and falling away)

  “ESU to Central, we’re on the Parkway. We’ll take that call—no further, no further!”

  “All right, ESU, slow it down. All units, slow it down. Emergency Services is on the scene. No further.”

  “Three Auto Recovery to Central.”

  “Three Auto?”

  “Central, one of the people we’re looking for is a sixteen-year-old black male last seen on the Bronx end of the Hudson Bridge going south into Harlem. We had units of the five-oh and the five-two in pursuit. We’re going to take that gun run at the tollbooth too!”

  “Three Auto, that’s a possible black male EDP and shots have been fired. I have a complainant and a call-back on the landline and she says that they have a man down. Approach with caution, Three Auto. Emergency Services is on the scene.”

  “ESU to Central, we’re not on the scene yet. Have you called for a bus?”

  This cross-talk was suddenly interrupted by a rapid high-pitched beeping on all channels. Kennedy saw Maksins push himself away from the wall and head for the door of the White Rock.

  “All units, all units, we have a Signal Thirteen at the emergency room, Harlem Hospital, Lenox and a Hundred Thirty-fifth. Shots fired. All units respond.…”

  Shit! Holy hell could break loose up here in three minutes. Kennedy was backing out of the White Rock parking lot as Maksins jerked open the passenger door and clambered in.

  “Eddie, where are you going?”

  “There’s a Thirteen at Lenox and a Hundred Thirty-fifth, Wolfie! What do you think I’m doing!”

  The radio was crackling and firing with taut, edgy cross-talk from units of the Two-Six, the Two-Eight, and the Two-Five. Every time a car got the air you could hear the sirens blaring in the background of the transmission. Even Street Crime Units and Neighborhood Stabilization Units were answering the citywide Code Thirteen, which means “officer needs assistance.” Coupled with a “shots fired,” it was a combination guaranteed to galvanize every field unit in any nearby precinct. Kennedy had hardly pulled out onto 145th Street when two RMPs from the 32nd Precinct went looping by him on their rims.

  “Jesus, Wolfie, they’re coming down from the three-two! Belt up, will you?”

  Maksins reached over and put a grip on the steering rim. He shut the radio off with his right hand and pulled Eddie’s portable out from under the briefcase on the bench seat between them. “It’s fucking off! Kennedy, they were calling us from the bureau at the two-seven. One of their SNAP guys says he saw the McEnery kid going into the Olympia Quad about two hours ago.”

  Kennedy felt a warmth shooting up the back of his neck. What was he doing? This was no RMP and he wasn’t any patrolman from the 28th. The Signal Thirteen had just canceled his brains. And here it was again, the out-of-step sensation he’d been having all week. Maksins was watching him warily.

  “Fuck, Wolfie, you’re right. Sorry. The Quad’s on the B’way at a Hundred and Seventh. It runs all day. Figures the kid would rack up there until dark and try for his block. Did the SNAP crew bag him?”

  Maksins straightened up and belted in. “Nah … they’re running some op against a banker around the corner. They say not to come in like stormtroopers—just take the kid quiet or we’ll fuck up their collar.”

  “Two hours past? Have they seen the kid come out?”

  “No, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t. Come on, Eddie, drive, will you? You see the guy in that NSU car, outside the McEnery broad’s apartment? Yeah? Well he says the McEnery kid is always hanging out around a Hundred and Sixteenth and he’s got a crew who play slow-pitch at the diamond in Morningside Park. If he’s not in the Quad we’ll do a Hundred and Sixteenth Street and shake up some of the shits over in the park. They’ll drop a dime on him. These people have no balls.”

  Feeling a mixture of anger and embarrassment, Kennedy took it out on cabbies and pedestrians all the way down Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard riding the gas and the brakes and saying little to Maksins. The wide street was lined with boarded-up shops and graffiti-covered walls. There were plenty of people about, all of them black and Hispanic, mainly young kids of several mixtures walking in and out of mom-and
-pop stores, sipping Coca-Cola, throwing the Frisbee or playing with a hackey-sack ball. On Seventh the latest trend was preppy, and most of the black teens were wearing white Bermuda shorts and lime-green Izod shirts. At a basketball court five lean black boys hung on the chicken-wire fencing and catcalled at the DT car as it went racing past, Kennedy pounding the horn with his fist, making the siren yelp whenever a car wandered into his path or a gang of black kids took too long to cross at a light. By the time the two detectives reached Cathedral Parkway they were in a very bad mood.

  The Thirteen at Lenox and 135th Street had drawn RMPs from all over Harlem. There were no detective units around to give Maksins and Kennedy a hand at the theater on Broadway, and neither man felt much like waiting. They flipped out their shields at the booth, pushing their way past a lineup of black teens. There was no way in the world anybody would have taken them for anything but cops.

  The Quad was running four films on a Monday-to-Friday matinee schedule. The detectives looked at the show cards for the various screening halls. Rambo was running in the first, Brewster’s Millions in Two, Secret Admirer in Three, and Desperately Seeking Susan in the last room. It wasn’t hard to make a choice.

  Screening Room One was close to capacity. Rambo was drawing very well even on a slow Tuesday afternoon. There were no white faces in the crowds in any of the rooms. Maksins stayed at the head of the ramps, covering the exit doors, while Kennedy tried to slide down the side aisle toward the front of the hall without attracting too much attention. If it hadn’t been for the action on the screen, he’d never have reached the midpoint. The 70-millimeter camera was lingering on Stallone’s latissimus dorsi as some devolved lout in a butch-cut cranked a current through him. Stallone was writhing and flexing magnificently, to the apparent delight of the teenage crowd in the hall. The girls were screaming, the boys were cheering, and nobody in the room was paying much attention to the obvious jake tippy-toeing down the sticky carpet in the marijuana-laden darkness.

  The hall worried both men. It had a couple of exits down beside the screen, and it was full of people. If Krush was in here, and armed, he could make one hell of a mess out of the theater, cause a panic with a couple of shots, and stand a pretty good chance of getting out in the aftermath. Kennedy walked slowly and looked very carefully at every black male in the place, trying to make that eidetic connect-the-dots matchup on Dennis McEnery before McEnery realized there was a DT in the room. Maksins and Kennedy had looked at the CATCH photo again just before they got out of the car. If he was in here, Kennedy would know him.

  But, Jesus, there are a lot of similarities in faces. There’s a kid with the right build, popping jujubes like Quaaludes, mesmerized by the screen. But the ears are wrong, the lobes are connected, not extended and full the way McEnery’s ears are. And the nose is flat and wide. What about the kid in front of him? Tall, clean lines, the right age. A moustache? Is it real? Yeah, it’s real. Okay, this one, six seats over, with his arm around the girl? No, the head’s wrong. Too heavy in the face, too.

  Kennedy ran the internal scan along every seat and down each aisle, making the process as mechanical as he could, resisting the urge to leap from one to the other. This one? That one? He was close to the final eight rows now, and he was getting some attention from the crowd. Well, that’s all right now, thought Kennedy. He was close enough to cover the front, and if the kid ran back toward Maksins he was in for a thumping at the top of the ramp. Heads were turning all over the theater now, eyes widening in recognition, and a low murmur was starting to run through the kids. Kennedy got to the end of the aisle. The screen swept away off his shoulder in a vast distorted landscape across which abstract lines and colors split and formed, broke apart and clashed again while the solid thump of a heavy-caliber machine gun made the speakers rock above Kennedy’s head. Five young kids a few rows back started to stamp their feet. Fine, thought Kennedy. Raise some hell. Let’s scare this kid into moving.

  The stamping was spreading over the room now. It grew into a booming. There was a motion out of place up there to the right, about halfway back. A face had dropped down; something was jostling a couple. A popcorn bag flew up in the air; a voice was raised, a high-pitched falsetto. There!

  Dennis McEnery exploded out from the cover of a row of seat backs, leaping up into the aisle in a pinwheel of long legs and flailing arms and a wet white flash from his eyes as they caught the light from the screen. He gaped at Kennedy for a moment and then pelted up toward the door at the back.

  “Go for it, bro! Fuck you, assholes!” The crowd was on its feet, yelling and chanting. Kids were crowding into the aisles as Kennedy pounded around the bottom of the theater and came up after McEnery. All he had to do was drive him into Maksins, who would be covering the upper exit.

  Now the room was chaos. Faces and open mouths, cursing and pushing into his vision, kids laughing at him. The foot-stamping grew louder. Three heavyset black males got out of their seats and ran into his path, blocking his view of the fleeing boy. Kennedy backhanded one boy above the ear. He went down. A second man caught at Kennedy’s jacket. He could feel someone fumbling for his gun. This was getting crazy. He pivoted on his right heel, with his elbow up. He could feel bone on bone as his elbow took the youth in the cheekbone. Kennedy put his right hand down and brought out his gun. While he had no intention of using it, he had no intention of losing it either. The third boy decided that it was the better part of valor to get interested in the movie again. Other kids got out of his way, opening up a section of the aisle for ten feet. Kennedy saw a rectangle of white open up at the top of the aisle. It filled up immediately with Wolfgar Maksins. The McEnery boy skidded to a stop, sliding in the grease and the spilled Coke on the floor. He turned again, showing Kennedy wide white eyes full of feral intensity and shock. It crossed Kennedy’s mind to bring the gun up and tell the kid to stop, but the boy was showing no weapon, and the place was too crowded and too unpredictable. Let’s hope Wolfie sees it that way, thought Kennedy, bracing for an impact with the McEnery kid, now less than three rows away. Wolfie puts one into the McEnery kid, he thought, that slug won’t stop until it blows out a searchlight on the Empire State Building.

  McEnery hesitated less than a tenth of a second. Up he went, a muscular, a superb leap really, landing on the balls of his feet along the line of seat backs, dancing and weaving like a slack-wire walker, moving fast and well, trapping the DTs in the aisle, now almost all the way to the far side of the theater. The crowd gave him a sustained cheer. Maksins jumped up on the seat backs and started to pursue him while Kennedy turned and raced toward the front of the theater, thinking that the whole goddam chase was coming dangerously close to vaudeville. Kids were backing away from all of them, sensing that the cops were getting angry, not wanting to draw any fire. Two girls screamed as McEnery landed in their laps. Then he was up again, running along the tops of the seats, leaping from row to row, bobbing and dancing in the projected beam, little droplets of water flaring like sparks off his slick stretched face as moved through the cone of light, blotting out the helicopter chase on the screen. Maksins was closing in fast, moving like a wingback over the rows, his face set and grim, but no gun in his hand. God help the kid, Kennedy said to himself. He’s being a serious pain here. When Wolfie gets to him, he is going to damage that boy. Maksins wavered in the cone, staggered, dropped one foot onto an empty seat, and then went down as his leather soles slid off the material. A rigid railback took him in the crotch and he fell between the rows, raging. Krush reached the exit door and was through it, caught for a flash in the outside light like a snapshot of a long-distance runner with his weight forward, on his toes, arms reaching for it, head down. And he was gone.

  Maksins was back on his feet. He plowed through the rest of the aisle, shoving kids out of the way like a bull moving the locitos at Pamplona, bellowing curses, calling them every racist name he could think of, and he knew many.

  Wolfie was out the same door, flashing the same stop-motion imag
e, and then he was gone too. All the way to the exit door Kennedy listened for the heavy concussive boom of that goddam Dan Wesson Wolfie was pulling out as he went through the doorway. Kennedy slithered and scrambled up to the door as the crowd cheered and whooped and he felt a temptation to stop at the door and bow. He hit the door with the flat of his hand. It bounced off and back into the wall, and Kennedy lumbered out into the busy street, sweeping the cars and the crowd, checking the corners, looking hot and wild with his coat open and his shirt pulled out at the waist and his cheeks flushed from the scramble, almost in pain with the compulsion to detect that scrap of cloth, that bobbing motion, that ripple in the street scene that would tell him which way the kid had run. A clatter of metal and glass and a hoarse cry from behind him brought Kennedy around. There! A glimpse of Maksins’ wide back as he plowed through a pushcart peddler at the corner of 107th, sending burning pretzels and hot coals flying into the street, sending the black man rolling. Cursing, panting, fumbling for his keys, fumbling with the lock and the door handle, Kennedy piled into the car, started it, and came around in a tight-cranked lock-to-lock pivot with his off-side radial smoking and the positraction grinding. He let the wheel race between his fingers as the cruiser came around and then he shoved the pedal right into the matting.

  Goddamn goddamn that fucking little nigger and that asshole Wolfie. This was just what Stokovich had warned him about and this was just what Kennedy had been afraid of all day, drag-assing around Harlem with that goddamn werewolf for a partner! And when Wolfie found the kid, was he going to say, “Now, just hold up there a minute, son. We just want to ask you a few questions”? No fucking way! He was going to chase that poor little nigger until he got him backed into an alleyway or a Sloan’s or the Little Flower Baptist Church and then he’d use that mothering zebra-striped 105 on the kid and he’d put a hole through him so damn big you could put your arm in and not get any blood on your cuffs.

  Did Wolfie have a drop gun? Was Wolfie stupid enough to think that a drop gun was going to help anybody out of the shitstorm? You just try to run a drop gun past Forensic and the Shooting Board these days! No cadaveric spasm? No sign of the automatic clamp a dying man puts on anything he’s holding when you shoot him? No way to tie the gun to the dead man? Adios, sonny. You’re gone. Kennedy tried to remember if he had ever seen Wolfie with a throwaway piece. God knows there were enough of them around the station house. They took little junk pieces off shits and skells every night of the week.