It was a beautiful day in the projects. The piles of wet garbage strewn across the compound and the unbearable stench coming off Desmond Two-tooth who’d gone a record hundred and ninety-six days without a shower, seemed less noticeable today as hopeful rays of sunshine filtered down into this godforsaken corner of Brooklyn from a typically stingy sky.
Gangs of kids hung out in the courtyards, fighting each other with chains and knives for ownership of the indestructible iron benches bolted into the concrete. If the original, inner-city planning committee could have seen what had become of its grand scheme for a pleasant urban living complex, they would have cringed. Surely, no one had ever conceived of this post-apocalyptic scene of thousands of mostly black bodies fenced in by the invisible, unbreakable boundaries of American-style poverty. Those big dreams had failed to allow for the fact that nothing gentle and green grew in the jungles of Brooklyn.
Only the trees, imported from northern forests, hadn’t received notice not to flourish. They stretched high branches toward the sun, exposing their vulnerable trunks to all manner of violence and indignity: switchblade carvings – “Kiki hates Coco” – the desperate clawing and climbing of fugitives, blood and urine splatter; even the token bullet holes incurred on wild, tragic nights. Maybe they cried in their quiet tree way. Or maybe they were as indifferent as every other half-live thing in the projects.
He came sauntering through the southern quad at around two in the afternoon. Young girls jumping rope, practicing moves that would soon turn into the sexy, rhythmic sway of the human female mating call, chanted a bit quieter so as not to attract his attention or interrupt his passing. Like all mysteries of nature here, his presence was noted with a faintly hostile respect and then deliberately ignored.
Despite the suit and tie, a different kind of uniform to match his new rank, everyone knew exactly where his gun watched unblinking from its comfortable home, nestled like a lover against his left hip, just visible under his open jacket. It kept company with his gold badge, as shiny as it was superfluous. Guns and badges didn’t impress anyone here. Who didn’t have access to a gun in the projects? And no one with half a brain wanted anything to do with a police badge, for Chrissakes: its possession was the death sentence of the one who acquired it, on the assumption that its original owner had only relinquished it due to unnatural causes. Life here was dangerous enough without having to contend with the concentrated wrath of twenty-three precincts’ worth of cops that would be unleashed upon them if this one happened to get himself killed on their turf.
No, what made everyone wary of him wasn’t that he was armed police. It was his prescience: he was always one step ahead of his man. Clearly, he had an extensive network of confidential informants, but no one could ever figure out who was doing the snitching. This cop knew everything about everybody, including that K.G. was hiding out in South Carolina after shooting that crack-head Oneisha Brown in the neck last month, and that JJ Johnson, two-time convicted child-molester, was holed up at his sister’s place with her and her five kids after getting released from Sing-Sing. In fact, it seemed there wasn’t a person over sixteen the cop didn’t have some kind of dirt on.
He had ways of making people tell him stuff, too. He just stared with those hypnotic, impenetrable, slate-colored eyes and didn’t say anything for the longest time, forcing the unlucky recipient of his attention to confess to things just to relieve the tension.
Black eyes bored into his back as he passed the crumbled, defiled ruins of a water fountain, eyes full of anger, hatred, fear, distrust, vengeance, jealousy – even desire, though he was white, really white, and his hair was red, and the gray eyes reflected no warmth or emotion to make him seem human.
Yet, whatever else they thought of him, he was respected in these projects. He knew everyone, but they also knew him. He had a reputation for being tough and uncompromising, but there wasn’t one among them who could claim he’d been unfair or underhanded in his treatment of them, or that he had a personal agenda like so many other cops they knew. He was just doing his job. And although, by definition, that made him an adversary, he was also, in a tacit, undeniable way, one of them.
He was tall at 6’4”, and seemed skinny, but anybody he’d ever chased and caught or tackled, knew he was solid as rock and too fast to outrun, even in full uniform. Jimmy Harris was famous throughout the projects for outrunning him once, but insiders knew it had only been sheer luck – the combination of complete darkness and weird acoustics – that had allowed Jimmy to elude him. Harris had run into building Seven-oh-five, where the stairwells were close enough to jump from one to the other for three whole floors. That night the electricity had been out, again. Additionally, Grammy Ellie was still in her door-slamming phase. (For months, all the babies in the building woke up screaming and no one got any sleep thanks to Grammy Ellie and her dementia. Finally, the Housing Authority was forced to respond to the hundreds of complaints, replacing her door with one that worked on hydraulics and could not be closed quickly. But that was some time after the night of the chase that had made Jimmy Harris famous.) Now Jimmy was buried somewhere in Pennsylvania, dead from getting his throat cut when he tried to encroach upon Fat Robbie’s crack corner.
For a brief moment, his red hair shone in the sun as he entered the playground. Five greasy hoods smoking a foul-smelling skunk-weed slyly dispersed, receding like the ominous black shadow of cockroaches in sudden light. He wasn’t stopping there, though. From the direction of his stare and purposeful walk, everybody could see where he was headed. And for whom. Now, those who knew it was not their day to get arrested gathered surreptitiously behind and around him, making sure to keep a good running-start distance while following to see what the cop had planned for Derek Carter and his boys.
It was an outrageous display of guts – or a death wish – coming out here alone and walking right onto the court in the middle of a game. One by one the players, all considered somewhat dangerous in the projects, came to a full stop when they noticed him standing there.
“You disruptin’ our game, man,” someone said in a low, threatening tone.
“I’ve seen a bunch of nine-year old girls play better than this,” he said, straight-faced.
He heard the usual ooohs and aaahs and intakes of breath from the crowd while the players puffed up to act offended. He knew what was coming now. It was time for the power display, resistance against The Man. All eyes looked to Derek to make the next move. As one of the reputedly meanest dealers in the projects, it was Derek’s official duty to defy the police whenever possible. Derek knew that he was probably going to get arrested today anyway for violating his parole by being out here on the basketball court, so, he thought, it wouldn’t hurt his reputation to get in a few licks before the handcuffs came out. He gave a sidelong glance at his red-haired nemesis.
“What you want, De-tective? Ain’t you got nothin’ more important to do than be botherin’ us all the time?” he said with an exaggerated sigh.
“Today Derek, you are important to me.”
“Yeah? Well, you ain’t that important to me.” Derek was about to turn his back to show he wasn’t going to submit so easily, but a dangerous glint sparked in the cop’s flat, hard eyes.
“Oh, I should be,” he said, so softly only the few people standing immediately next to them could hear. Things had gotten too serious all of a sudden. Derek glanced quickly into those eyes and shifted his own off to one side, then the other, to the fence, to the exit that was now blocked with too many faces looking at them.
He watched as Derek contemplated, for an instant, whether or not to run. But eventually Derek’s face sank with resignation; he must have realized he didn’t stand a chance and it would only be embarrassing to get caught in front of the whole goddamned project.
In a pleasant, nonchalant, meeting-you-for-the-first-time kind of voice, the detective added, “Derek, I’m just wondering about that condition of parole you’re breaking. You know, the one that says you can’t congregate with more than one other in a public place.”
“This ain’t no public place. This my own backyard.” Derek was irritated now, trapped, with no available escape.
The gray eyes glittered as the cop slowly shook his head back and forth, his mouth set in a straight line, little ‘tsk’ sounds coming from between his lips. He was not about to let Derek off the hook. “That’s interesting, because just last week Jerome was telling me how this was his own backyard.”
At the mention of Jerome Battle, Derek was effectively put in his place. Even with all his accumulated power, he wasn’t strong or stupid enough to cross Battle. Battle was a very bad guy. He’d shot six people in the past ten years, killed two, and never did state time for any of it. He was practically untouchable, even by the cops. Everyone secretly hoped that somebody would just come in and dispose of Jerome once and for all – maybe with a nice .38 caliber bullet right between the eyes – but that hadn’t happened. Jerome had survived three shootings (the worst had left him with a hook for a left hand), several stabbings, countless beatings as a young crack dealer rising through the ranks, and one poisoning attempt by his old lady when he pawned her grandmother’s jewelry to buy himself a Rolex watch. But, Jerome had never died and now everyone was too terrified of him to try again.
The bitter taste of humiliation aroused Derek’s hatred for this white, interfering bastard. He fantasized for two seconds about killing him with his bare hands.
But the cop was impervious to Derek’s rage. The sunshine put him in a good mood and truthfully, he wasn’t interested in Derek. He’d come poking around to see if anybody had anything for him on Deshawn Jackson, who’d clubbed that Asian college kid into a coma two nights ago for an i-phone and thirty dollars cash.
However, as far as he could see, none of his usual informants was around, so he’d walked over to the basketball court. Now that he was here, what he really wanted was to get his hands on the ball.
“Tell you what, Derek. If I make this three-shot from here, you gotta go. If I miss, you can stay for another hour.”
Hoots and laughter came from the audience that had grown large enough to be oppressive if he were the type to feel intimidated. He wasn’t.
“What, you think you Larry Bird or something?”
“More like Big Bird,” someone mumbled behind him. Laughter rippled through the crowd, but he didn’t bother to look around to see who was talking.
“Big Bird my ass, you ever seen the dude run? He so fast, he could fly.”
“Yeah, and the way he be watchin’ eve’ybody all the time with them beady eyes he got, he like one of them hawks what lives on the top of the post office,” came from somewhere to the left.
“Yeah, man, word, the way he always swoopin’ down at us from nowhere, like we some kind of food, he jes’ like one them hawks.” Behind him, to the right.
“Yeah, well, he could be a elephant, ain’t no way he making that shot.” Now everybody was getting into it. He raised his eyebrows, but said nothing. “Do it, do it,” they called out.
Derek felt the tension between him and the cop slip away, as the atmosphere brightened considerably. There was nothing to lose. But, he could drag it out a little, save some face. Making a big show of handing him the ball, Derek spoke in a gently mocking tone.
“Now, you got to hold this with two hands, man.”
The detective smiled. He looked like a completely different person when he did that. The sharp, hard lines of his jaw, cheeks and brow were wholly transformed, and if anyone had cared to notice, there was a nice, even friendly, man underneath the tough veneer. The toughness wasn’t artifice, however. Without that smile – which came so rarely – it was a hard face. It could have been the years in uniform that carved out the lines that would make a person think twice before teasing him. It could have been a dark, secret past. In the end, much of it was just genetics. It perfectly suited his profession that his natural expression was so serious as to be frightening, belying a quiet, but good-natured personality. Among friends and family, he laughed easily and appreciated a good practical joke, even at his own expense.
In fact, he was having fun out here on the court, despite being surrounded by at least a hundred bodies now pressed against the fence, most, if not all, of whom didn’t care if he lived or died. He had no delusions that anyone here would actually root for him to make the shot. On the contrary, he was sure he was the least liked person in the projects right now, Jerome Battle included. But he didn’t care what anyone thought of him. He had the ball in his hands and he was happy.
The fine, blond hairs on the back of his neck never rose in warning as they normally would have the moment Deshawn Jackson peeked out of his cousin’s fifth floor window with a loaded semi-automatic pistol trained directly at the side of the detective’s angular face. Deshawn had good reasons to pull the trigger. This particular cop had sent him to jail three times for armed robbery, once for assaulting his son’s baby-momma with a broken bottle, and twice for selling crack. Now, some traitorous bastard must have snitched on him about that Asian kid. He had nowhere to run. As he stared out the window, Deshawn knew with cold certainty that if he was going to get caught, it would be this red-haired cop with the ESP who would catch him. He should just shoot him now. Everyone would probably thank him. He’d be famous! But then all the furies of hell wearing NYPD blue would be set loose upon the projects, and Deshawn would be sacrificed up so fast he wouldn’t stand a chance of escaping. He’d spend the rest of his life in jail. The risk was too grim to consider.
Still, he thought, as he waggled the gun slightly so that now it was aimed at the shadowy hollow of his target’s jaw and now at the tight, corded, pink neck poking out of the collared shirt, no one would necessarily know it was him.
But then, Deshawn saw Derek Carter hand the cop the ball. He became curious. It looked like the guy was going to take the shot from where he was standing. No way was he making that!
Even those standing right beside him noticed that he didn’t appear to look at the basket. The way his eyelashes were, long and so blond as to be nearly white, it was hard to tell if his eyes were even open unless he was staring straight ahead. He didn’t dribble the ball. He just straightened his back, kind of unfolded himself so he was even taller, shifted the ball into his left hand, tilted it up and around over his head in one, smooth movement and flicked his wrist. That was it.
More than a hundred pairs of eyes watched in silence. It was impossible to believe that the ball, so casually tossed, with no particular concentration and seemingly no strength behind it, would go in. On its downward arc, the ball appeared to sail out a little further, as if carried by a puff of wind, and then, miraculously, it was spinning around the rim. There was an endless, surreal moment, where nothing existed beyond the suspended, brown-orange blur, now spinning slower and slower. It could so easily fall to one side or the other: outside or in. And then, finally, it fell in.
There was a huge cheer from the fences. Everyone was incredulous, as they moved in spontaneously to crowd around him. A few even reached out to slap him on the back until they remembered who he was. In the window, Deshawn couldn’t have gotten a clear shot even if he had made up his mind to take it. People were laughing, acting friendly, as if they had all borne witness together to a momentous event. It was bizarre how people who witnessed murders, drug deals and beatings every day, got so excited to see a great shot. For this brief moment, he was no longer the enemy. He was just an ordinary guy who deserved credit for a beautiful basket, and they were happy enough to give him his due.
“Look out Bulls, the Hawk has landed,” someone shouted. And then suddenly they were all calling him Hawk, kind of chanting it.
Derek approached him and the others moved back a bit, but they did not disperse.
“Okay, Hawk, you can play with us,” he said.
“Can’t. I’m on duty. But that reminds me: I won. You gotta go.”
“Come on! You ain’t got nothing else going on, everybody know that.”
“Derek, a bet’s a bet. You gonna go or am I gonna have to arrest you?”
“Shit, man, come here, ruin a man’s day…” Derek muttered and cursed under his breath all the way off the court.
Everyone drifted back to what they’d been doing before. Deshawn had a decent shot of him now, but he let the curtain fall. He could always get him later. If not Deshawn, then somebody else. That, at least, could be counted upon, because in one way, Hawk was just like one of them: he always returned to the projects and one day, the projects were going to spit him out dead.