Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

  “Central, this is one-oh-four. I’m in pursuit of a black male suspect last seen on foot running north on Broadway at a Hundred and Seventh. Suspect is six one, one-sixty, clean-shaven black wearing jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt. Suspicion of felony assult. Suspect may be armed. Plainclothes officer is in foot pursuit. Any units in the area please respond.”

  “One-oh-four, do you need a bus?”

  “Negative, Central. I’m in vehicle pursuit northbound on Broadway. I do not have the suspect in sight. I do not have the officer in sight. There are no shots fired and no one is hurt. Just get me some cars, K?”

  “Ten four, one-oh-four. All units in the area of B’way and One-oh-seventh, we have an armed black male six one wearing jeans and a gray shirt. Wanted for felony assault. Last seen on foot running northbound on B’way at a Hundred and Seventh Street. May be armed. There is a plainclothes officer in pursuit. No shots fired. No emergency.”

  Three RMPs took up the call. Kennedy got the car to the next block and was pulling over to the curb to check the alleyways when Maksins called him on the radio, his voice coming in short bursts as he fought for breath.

  “Eddie, where the hell are you?”

  “I’m at One-oh-nine and the B’way, Wolfie! Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. He’s a fleet little shit. I’m at the lot next to the Cathedral. I lost him crossing the Parkway. Come and get me, will ya?”

  “Six Charlie to Central, K?”

  “Six Charlie?”

  “Central, we saw a male black answering that description going into the park at Manhattan and a Hundred Seventeenth Street. You have the unit eighty-five us here, we’ll do a sweep, K?”

  “Central, this is one-oh-four. We’ll eighty-five Six Charlie.”

  “Roger, one-oh-four. Six Charlie, that unit will eighty-five you. What is your present location?”

  Kennedy pulled up opposite Saint John the Divine and watched Maksins ignore every car on the road as he crossed the street to the cruiser. They were rolling again as soon as Maksins slammed the passenger door, which he did with such force that the glove compartment door flipped open. He closed it with his knee, almost incoherent with rage.

  Six Charlie was waiting for them at Manhattan and 115th Street, along with the same Neighborhood Stabilization car they had seen outside Mrs. McEnery’s apartment earlier in the day. Kennedy pulled up next to them and Maksins rolled down his window.

  The driver of Six Charlie was a black man in a crisp summer uniform. He spoke as soon as they stopped moving.

  “My Recorder is on foot in the park. The sergeant says we can have the rookies and I have Six Boy and Six Frank on the far side of the park. The guy you’re looking for, is he a lean sucker, runs like a deer?”

  Kennedy leaned forward to speak across Maksins.

  “Yeah, fast as hell. Was he wearing a gray sweatshirt? With a hood? Jeans all muddied up, like he’d slept in a ditch or something?”

  The patrolman nodded. “Yeah, that’s him.”

  The sergeant from the Stabilization Unit walked in between the cars. He leaned into Maksins’ window. Kennedy could see the interior of the car distorted in the man’s mirror lenses. Maksins looked like a pale mountain.

  “We’ll sweep the park for you. I have a Portable up at the diamond, and two cars coming through from the other side. You want to take the drive up by Columbia?”

  Kennedy shook his head. “No, we’ll stay here. You get your guys to do a foot sweep through if you can. Stay on the air. And remember, this kid isn’t John Fucking Dillinger, so tell your guys to be cool, hah?”

  The sergeant never smiled. Kennedy couldn’t see anything but his own inverted reflection in the glasses.

  “Sure. We’ll take him out nice and sweet. You guys sure tossed the Quad, I hear. We’ll catch shit from the manager for sure.”

  Maksins growled at this. “Fuck the Quad. You get your buddies to kick that little nigger out anywhere along Manhattan. We’ll be waiting.”

  The RMPs broke up, heading north and south, turning into the short, crowded cross streets, rolling slowly down the blocks. The brownstones were solid all the way to the hill, stoops and trash cans everywhere, and on every set of steps a group of blacks stood, women and men, small girls with their hair in ribbons and cornrows, wiry little boys with round cheeks and scraped knees, old men and women with lips sunken in over bare gums, young girls with smooth skin and full hips, and everywhere you looked, in threes and fours, lean black youths with closed-up faces, threatening, angry, sullen, full of resentment. The buildings needed paint, the brickwork was dirty and worn, and many of the windows were covered with boards or screened in heavy wire. The gutters were choked with scraps of paper and shreds of black rubber, beer cans, McDonald’s wrappers. As Kennedy drove the cruiser down a line of rusted cars on 115th Street, at least two hundred people watched them pass.

  Maksins wasn’t surprised when Kennedy finally pulled to a stop thirty yards west of the McEnery flat on 114th Street and shut the engine off. Maksins was breathing hard.

  “You okay, Wolfie?”

  He didn’t answer right away. “Yeah. I’m okay. Just give me a minute, Eddie.”

  Here, 114th Street was busy but not too busy. The action had drawn most of the kids up toward the park. There was no one on the steps in front of the McEnery place. The cruiser was fairly well hidden in a long row of parked cars, but Kennedy had a good line all the way down to the broad triangle formed by the intersection of St. Nicholas and Seventh Avenues, and beyond that, along a cluttered, dusty, and ragged line of tenements and cars and dense, scorched, and flattened earth, the wide flat stretch of Lenox Avenue and the bulk of the Martin Luther King Towers. Manhattan was full of tightly compressed visions like this. You could see a long way in Harlem, for all the good it did you.

  Kennedy looked at his watch: 1655 hours. Almost five o’clock in the afternoon. Long shadows were crawling east from the lamp posts and steps, and the light was changing as the sun went down at their backs. Some of the heat was going out of the day. A slanted shaft of sunlight lay on the north side of 114th Street, tinting all the brickwork a deep sepia, and the street seemed to be lit from beneath, as if it were burning. The two detectives sat without speaking in the stale luminous air of the squad car as motes of dust drifted in the fading day and the digital clock on the dashboard clicked off twenty-two minutes. Now and then a burst of chatter from the radio would startle both men. The search in the park was coming up empty. A 54 on 118th Street at Manhattan pulled Six Boy off the hunt, and a 30 assault call from a Portable holding two at 38 Claremont across from Barnard College took Six Charlie. At 1717, Central passed the word that the NSU car had been redirected to a meeting at the station. Did 104 want any further? Kennedy said no thanks, and cut the radio off.

  Dennis McEnery came out from between two derelict buildings on the near side of Seventh Avenue and stood, blinking in the sidelong sun, scuffed, panting, covered with dirt and sweat, his skin pulled like a drumhead over his cheekbones and his jawline, his lower lip sagging and pink. He shaded his eyes with a raised hand, still holding on to the railing of the tenement beside him as if there was some kind of help for him in the connection. He was on fire in the hot yellow light, a wavering flame sixty yards from home.

  Maksins made a sound deep in his chest. Kennedy held the man in place with his right hand.

  “Just wait, Wolfie. Where’s he going to go?”

  Maksins moved his head in a tight circle, indicating the walls and the roof lines, taking in the whole long block in one economical gesture. “They’ll warn him. I’m tired of chasing this little bastard.”

  “Where’s he gonna go, Wolfie? Just be still.”

  Maksins wavered for a few seconds, knowing that Kennedy was right. Where was he going to run to? But he wanted that kid. Maksins told himself, sometimes, that he never liked to hurt people. And, sometimes, it was true.

  Krush started to move west on the north side of 114th Street, on his
toes, his hands out in front of him, an expression on his drawn, tight face that reminded Kennedy of something … something. Krush took another step, now staring up at the roof lines. Kennedy could see the street through the kid’s eyes now, see him raking the roof lines and looking into each shadowed doorway on the block. He was staring down the line of cars now, to him a continuous chain of headlights and grill sections, fat black rubber with worn-out treads. Kennedy could hear him thinking:

  Do I know that car? Yes, that’s Rainy’s, and that Chevy it belongs to Mrs. Parker who works at Saint Luke’s and this old Pontiac here with the glow-in-the-dark crucifix hanging from the rearview that belongs to Leroy Delacorte who drove it all the way from someplace called Batten Rude or some such and this old mother yes I know you I do you’re the dark-green Cadillac de Ville I had a ride in you once when my brother was alive you belong to the Barnes man who runs the dealers on 116th Street. Last year, he let me fuck his best whore she was blond, but real blond with pure white skin and little blue veins running down the inside of her thighs all the way to her knees. She said her name was Dawn and she used to be a weather girl. Well, what the hell, Krush my man, you might as well go.…

  “Come on, kid, come on,” said Eddie Kennedy, right out loud in the squad car full of hot dead air and strange liquid amber light, and at that moment, as if he’d heard him speak, Dennis McEnery stiffened his back and pushed off against the sidewalk of 114th Street, staggering as if the shove had come too suddenly. And now he was into it, up at speed within three long loopy strides, reaching for it, going for it, coming straight up the line of parked cars with the garbage-can stoops and the ruined tenement walls all around him. As soon as Kennedy put a hand on the door latch and the late afternoon sun glinted off his gold detective’s ring, he got it all at once like a telegram from his id.

  Krush came up the street fast, laying his feet down and picking them up with a fine careless grace, rolling at the hip joints and taking in the air through a wide mouth, gasping, racing for the door step, sixty, fifty, forty, thirty yards from home. Is that Uncle Ray getting out of that car? What is old Uncle Ray doing in a car? There’s the door. He was only twenty yards from home.

  Kennedy had the sun right at his back when he stepped into the kid’s path, so Dennis couldn’t really see who the man was. He kept trying to make the silhouette fit into the rounded, defeated contours of his Uncle Ray.

  Kennedy stood there on the sidewalk watching two black boys race up a line of tenement stoops into a flat sideways sunset, the image of one superimposed and hovering over the other and then shifting back and forth.

  Kennedy shook this confusion off, just a little alarmed at his state of mind. Concentrate, you asshole. Wake up. He heard the side door slam as Maksins got out into the street. The McEnery kid swerved madly into the road and tried to angle toward the steps of his apartment. Kennedy moved a few yards to intercept him. He watched the kid’s hands but there was nothing in them. McEnery’s eyes were closing, and a sound was coming from him as if from someone in pain. He tried to run right over Kennedy, but Kennedy took it all in the body and chest as his arms closed around the boy and he used all the kid’s speed and momentum to sweep him right up and lay him across the hood of the squad car. Maksins stepped up to the hood as Kennedy pulled the boy’s left arm around behind his back and snapped on a cuff. Kennedy could see the hammer back on Maksins’ .357, but Maksins’ index finger was not inside the guard. He had it laid up underneath the cylinders, according to the regs. When Wolfie shoved the barrel up against the boy’s neck just behind the left ear and called him a few bad names, Kennedy knew everything was going to be okay.

  Kennedy pulled out a Frielich’s gun shop card with the Miranda rights printed on the reverse and started to read them off to Dennis McEnery. Around him in the street, people who had been nowhere were suddenly everywhere.

  Maksins was a little rougher than he had to be when he put the kid in the back of the cruiser. Kennedy gave him all the room he needed. When he came around to get in behind the wheel he could not help but look for Uncle Ray. He was there, standing inside the patched screen door at the top of the tenement steps, watching Kennedy from the shadow, his face a cipher. He didn’t raise his hand or make any motion toward Kennedy or toward the cruiser where Grace’s boy sat slumped and weary in the back. But Kennedy felt something coming from the man and it was enough.

  They went down Columbus as the last of the sunlight climbed the brickwork and the roof lines along the shops and cafes, and blue shadows lay in the doorways. At 72nd they pulled up in front of a David’s Cookies. Maksins went in and bought a tin of chocolate chip and three coffees, which the three of them shared. The streets were crowded on this Tuesday evening—white couples pushing baby strollers; a pair of young men jogging close together; people with clothes the color of ice cream and Reebok jogging shoes, headbands, Swatch watches, smooth well-tended skin, clear eyes. Dennis slouched in the back, traveling down Columbus Avenue past the Frusen Glädjé signs and the windows displaying Giorgio Armani suits and the café where all the people who work on the ABC daytime soaps can be seen at the corner tables in the greenhouse extension; returning the stares of the hundreds of people out strolling in their pastel jogging suits or their genuine British-Army-in-Africa khaki shorts with the cotton top seams, people dragging a brace of Akitas from Akitas of Distinction or sitting at the unsteady round sidewalk tables sipping Ramlösa, worrying about the progress of their in-vitro fertilization, listening, politely bored, to the troubles somebody’s two-year-old was having in his play group; passing block after block of the best and the brightest, the aggressive and the blessed and the fit, the trend setters, talking their talk in the West Side drawl, taking seriously the things that are said in Christopher Street and The Village Voice and The New York Times, thinking of their career paths and ambitions in terms of combat and duels, preening, stroked, swollen and fat with life, oblivious as livestock, bred to be praised and preyed-upon.

  Maksins ate the last of the chocolate chip cookies, and the McEnery boy slept as Kennedy cleared the tangle at Columbus and Broadway. Colored lights played over the dusty surfaces of the squad car and illuminated the faces of the men inside. Kennedy looked over at Wolfie. He had the rapt expression of a man at a movie, in a trance at the opening frames. The car pounded over the flat iron plates at 57th Street. Broadway filled the screen.

  CHAPTER 8

  JURIS DICTION

  The comatose biker had disappeared when Maksins and Kennedy got their prisoner up the stairs and into the squad room. So had the rest of the Task Force. The Westclox over the bulletin board gave the time as 1630 hours. Fratelli had left the coffee on and there was a note from Oliver Farrell saying that Kennedy had two calls—one from Stokovich which had come in at 1500 hours, and the other from Genno Sorvino saying he’d be in the office all evening and he wanted to talk to Detective Kennedy as soon as he got back from wherever the hell he was. There was also an interdepartmental flimsy from downtown that had IAD all over it. Kennedy read this first, read it slowly and carefully, taking in every cold-assed phrase and every hidden threat, and when he had finished he felt an overwhelming need to piss. He took the note with him into the squad room toilet with the cracked mirror and the grimy wash basin and the gray metal cubicle with the doors removed so the prisoners can’t ask to be allowed to crap in private. Standing at the urinal, he rested his arm along the top of the fixture and read the short, nasty little communiqué again and again until his bladder was empty. Then he folded it twice and dropped it into the urinal. The day he answered a call like that was the day he left this force.

  He called Stokovich first, partly because he knew that Bruno would have the latest word on this Internal nonsense, and partly because he’d rather talk to a cop than to an Assistant District Attorney. Maksins went downstairs to get Dennis McEnery a dinner, prepaid monthly by agreement with several local delicatessens. McEnery was lying on his back with an arm thrown across his face, shielding his eyes f
rom the forty-watt bulb in the wire cage overhead. One of Stokovich’s boys answered, Kennedy didn’t know which one, and then the lieutenant was on the phone. Kennedy had never known Stokovich to refuse to take a call, no matter when it came in. He was a son of a bitch, but through this latest tempest in a pisspot, Kennedy had been getting the idea that he was their son of a bitch. A boss who went to the wall for his men was like the white buffalo these days: an endangered species.

  “Kennedy, you miserable bastard! How the hell are you? Do not tell me you don’t have that MacIlwhatsit kid in the cage right now. Do not tell me that!”

  Kennedy spoke through an involuntary grin. Sometimes there was nothing like a line of patter to make you feel better.

  “No, sir, I do have him. He’s asleep in the back right now. He tried to go home around seventeen hundred hours. Wolfie and I scooped him outside his flat.”

  “Wolfie behave himself?”

  “Hey, Lieutenant, Wolfie’s okay. A little tense maybe, and he’s no Martin Luther King. But he’s fine. Did good today. He’ll get his attitude under control someday.”

  “You think so, huh? You ever ask him about Cardillo?”

  Kennedy was startled into silence.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so. Him and Cardillo, they knew each other in the Two-Eight. He took that pretty hard. Has a bitch of a grudge against Ward about it.”

  “This the Cardillo who got shot in the Harlem Mosque fuck-up back in ’71? Louis Farrakhan’s little office party up on a Hundred and Sixteenth Street?”