By the time they arrived at the scene, the rain was coming down hard. Hawk observed Eduardo Garcia rolling from side to side on the pavement, the paramedics crouched over him. Dark blood seeped through fingers that clutched his stomach as if he could hold his life in with his hands. His panicked shrieks and the spasmodic jerking of his legs were making it difficult for the EMTs to treat his wound. Hawk could hear them trying to persuade Garcia to move his hands so they could see, but he was too hysterical to obey.
Hawk stood still a moment, surveying the surroundings. The street was empty of pedestrians. He knew this was due to his presence rather than the weather. Even in the worst storm, where there was blood, there was an audience. Until the cops arrived. Only the police could cure curiosity in the projects.
Cars slowed down as they passed, spraying the small desperate group on the sidewalk with the dirty water that flooded the city’s streets every time it rained. Dark faces, devoid of empathy, stared through rain-streaked car windows and Hawk thought, people couldn’t help themselves, they just had to look, especially when death was hovering near, ready to stake its claim.
The flashing lights reflected in the raindrops, making everything glitter the color of blood. Hawk noticed one of the paramedics step away from Garcia and walk in the direction of the ambulance, head bent against the pelting rain while speaking quietly into his cell phone. Subtly opening his jacket to reveal his shield, Hawk approached.
“What’s his condition?”
“Well, he’ll live.”
“Does he know that?”
“What?”
“Did you tell him that already? I don’t want him to know that just yet. I need to talk to him first.”
The paramedic wiped his face nervously with a small towel, uncertain if he was being asked to participate in some unethical police practice. “Uh, I don’t know. We should be getting him to the hospital.”
Hawk responded coolly, his eyes flat, steely, slate gray stones. “Who should I speak to?”
The paramedic dialed the ER. The manner in which the tall, red-haired detective held out his hand out to receive the phone was so authoritative, the medic could do nothing but obey.
“Doc?”
“Who’s this?”
“I’m from the Eight-two squad. I understand Mr. Garcia here is going to live. I want to talk to him before they bring him in, if that’s okay with you.” Not a request so much as a polite, veiled command.
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line before Hawk heard the doctor sigh. “Alright, just don’t drag it out too long. We don’t want him going into shock. Give me back to the medic and I’ll clear it.”
“Thanks.”
“By the way, is this Hawk?”
Hawk laughed. Such a pleased, modest, boyish laugh didn’t exactly fit the legend of the infamous detective who swooped fearlessly through the eastern sector of one of the heaviest crime-ridden cities in the United States. “How’d you know?” he asked the doctor.
“A wild guess,” came the dry reply. “Your reputation precedes you.”
“Well, what’re you gonna do?”
Hawk handed the phone back to the paramedic and walked over to Garcia. He knelt on the pavement and immediately cursed his own stupidity as the blood seeped into his pants leg. He silently calculated the dry cleaning expense. Well, at least it was a tax write-off. His main regret was that it was only nine o’clock and he didn’t have another suit at the station house to change into. He’d be wearing Garcia’s blood till the end of shift – 1:00 a.m. at least – but he was glad it wasn’t his turnaround.
The police department was as inefficient as any other large bureaucracy, and detectives had a ridiculous schedule that no amount of research or complaint had managed to alter. They worked rotating schedules of four days on, two days off. The first two days were evening shifts, the second two were day shifts with the turnaround – the overnight shift – in between days two and three. Most turnarounds, Hawk never got more than three hours of sleep, as the real action on those nights only seemed to heat up some time after two in the morning. He usually kept an extra suit in the car for the turnaround, but tonight he’d only brought a pair of sweatpants, t-shirt and sneakers in case he had time to work out at the nearby gym. He always had a towel in his locker, so he’d shower tonight at the station house and wear his workout clothes on the drive home. None of them ever slept at the House on shifts that weren’t their turnarounds, even if they went deep into overtime. Most of the detectives, including Hawk, lived so far away, it hardly seemed worth it to go home, butt Hawk liked to sleep in his own bed. And he didn’t mind the long drive home because it took him that much time to unwind after his shift anyway. It was his only time to be alone, to think.
Garcia clutched at Hawk’s arm reflexively as the cop leaned down and spoke urgently into his ear.
“Tell me who shot you.”
Garcia moaned, “I don’t know, man. I don’t know. It was dark, you know? How bad am I?”
“You’re going to die.”
“What?! What?! No, man, no,” Garcia sobbed, his eyes and nose streaming like a child’s. “I don’t want to die. Can’t they do something? Can’t they save me?”
Hawk shook his head sadly. “It doesn’t look good. Listen, you gotta tell me who did this to you.”
“No, no, I can’t. He’ll kill me. You know that. I ain’t no snitch. No way, I can’t.”
“He’s already killed you. Do you want to die for nothing? Are you gonna let him get away with murder?”
Frantic, hysterical, oblivious of the eye-rolling of the two paramedics watching the drama from the dry interior of the ambulance, Garcia begged, “Don’t let me die. I don’t wanna die. Do something!”
Hawk clucked his tongue, his face a study in resigned disappointment. “You’re gonna die here, like this, like a dog in the rain, and he’s going to be walking around free. It’s up to you. It’s all up to you, now.”
“Okay, okay. Christ!” Garcia was talking very fast now, aware of the necessity of getting it all in. “I got nothin’ to lose no more. I see that. But he’s bad. He’s really bad. You’ll never get him. But you gotta try for my sake. He got a big nose. Really big. You understand what I’m sayin’? You’ll see. That’s all I can say. You’ll see.”
Hawk’s mind was racing now, running names and mug shots through his head, Garcia all but forgotten.
“I’m cold, man. I’m freezing. Oh God, oh shit, I’m dying! Someone gotta call my old lady. She’ll be real sad. I know she will.” Garcia was reaching with bloody, shaking fingers into his pocket to get his cell phone.
Hawk stood up and said absentmindedly, “Yeah, we’ll call her.” He motioned to the paramedics that he was finished with Garcia and started walking around the area, scouring the drenched shadows for evidence. As he bent over to pick up what appeared to be a shell casing, he heard the paramedic tell Eduardo that he was going to make it after all. He smiled to himself when Garcia replied that the paramedic must be mistaken or was purposely lying to make him feel better before he died.
The ambulance was gone and Hawk was bagging an empty beer can to send to the lab when David and Nick returned from canvassing the periphery on foot.
“Nothing,” Nick answered to Hawk’s silent gesture of inquiry.
“Who’s got a big nose?”
“What was that?” David snapped. He was sensitive about being the only Jewish detective on the squad and always thought the others, especially Hawk and Nick who were notorious, merciless jokers, were making fun of him. No one was spared the irreverent teasing of those two. After so many years together, they were like one of those comedy teams, keeping up a steady banter, finishing each other’s sentences and setting up each other’s jokes expertly. But, in this case, Hawk just ignored Dave’s bristling and repeated his question.
“Who do we know who’s got a big nose who’d want to shoot Eduardo Garcia?”
“Hell, everybody’d want to shoot Eduardo Garcia! Abig nose is our only i.d.?” Nick asked.
“He won’t give me a name. He’ll only say the perp’s got a big nose.”
Nick thought for a few minutes. David was silent as well, embarrassed at his hyper-sensitivity.
“I don’t know off hand. Let’s look at some pictures. We getting anything else off Garcia?”
“Nope.”
“You done here? I’m hungry.”
“You’re always hungry.”
“That’s ‘cause we never get a chance to eat.”
Hawk shrugged. It was true. Their meals were always rushed or interrupted. As if a secret satellite broadcast a message through the projects that law enforcement had just sat down to dine, eight times out of ten, they had to leave their food half-eaten to answer some emergency. Hawk didn’t mind it as much as Nick did. He wasn’t a big eater anyway, and he was extremely picky. His tastes were narrowly limited, and he rarely varied his regular diet of pizza or a turkey sandwich. He would only eat if the food was fresh, refusing to touch anything that had been reheated or left-over. His colleagues insisted it was his bird-like eating habits that had earned him his nickname.
After picking up their dinner and taking it back to the House – a sandwich for Hawk and a burrito for Nick – Dave’s wife had packed him a delicious-smelling, home-cooked meal, as usual, the lucky dog – the three detectives sat before Hawk’s computer searching the database for photographs of every criminal in the area who fit within the specified parameters. As one photograph after another appeared on the screen, the only sound was a concentrated chewing. Periodically, when a picture of a perp with a particularly large nose would pop up, one of the men would grunt past a mouthful of food. His partners would vote it down.
“No, that’s Baby Fat. He’s been upstate for a year.”
Or, “Nah, that’s Casey Mitchell, he’s still in Rikers on a shooting in the Six-four precinct two months ago.”
Finally, the database displayed a picture of Terrell Washington, A.K.A. ‘T-Rex’. All three men instantly froze. You could say nothing more accurately descriptive than that T-Rex had a gigantic nose. And that he was exceedingly dangerous.
Hawk had first locked up Terrell when he was fourteen-years old. He had shot up a rival’s apartment in broad daylight, injuring a five-year old with a stray bullet as part of his gang initiation. The case had gone to Family Court because of his age. The judge, known and feared for her tough, no-nonsense demeanor, had offered Terrell a non-jail sentence and a chance to get his life in order. Most defendants knew well enough to speak respectfully and act seriously when she was yelling at them from the bench. But Terrell was not most defendants. He had laughed during his allocution and the judge remanded him. As they removed him from the courtroom, Terrell grinned back over his shoulder and called her an ugly bitch. He went to juvie for two years, and by the time he got out, he was a holy terror, as frightening as his new moniker, Tyrannosaurus Rex.
In the years that followed, T-Rex advanced quickly through the gang ranks by simply eliminating anyone who presented even the slightest competition as easily as if he were getting rid of a pesky bug. A kid like him was very useful in a gang because he was willing to kill indiscriminately, or sit in jail for the rest of his life; he just didn’t care. He couldn’t be embarrassed, or hurt, or taught. He would continue to do evil until he was dead, and nothing would ever change that. He didn’t even bother to hide his crimes, but the cops could never pin him for murder because by the time they arrived at the scene, there was never enough physical evidence and, of course, there were never any witnesses. He was as well-protected as a foreign diplomat from a hostile, anti-American country.
Whenever Hawk had picked him up, Terrell did nothing but stare through dead, reptilian eyes, indifferent to threats, reasoning, kindness. He was one of the soulless thousands coming out of the projects with teeth bared and a hunger for blood. Hawk compared them to Somalia’s child-soldiers, adolescent killers whose toys were machetes and machine guns instead of basketballs and video games. They had no conscience, no empathy, no humanity. They were hideous automatons on the loose in the city, and it didn’t help to get one of them off the street when armies of kids just like them rose up from the garbage of the projects. T-Rex had become untouchable over the years. To snitch on him was to wind up dead, but only after your grandmother’s face was slashed to ribbons with a box-cutter or your ten-year old sister was gang-raped by T-Rex and his buddies.
They put an I-card out for Terrell. Hawk sat at the computer, finishing his Coke while browsing through various databases, looking for Terrell’s last known address, though he was aware of the futility of the effort so many hours after the Garcia shooting. Terrell was way too smart to get caught like that. Hawk punched the keys and brooded. He was annoyed with himself for not having thought of Terrell right away, based on Garcia’s description. Nick had suggested that maybe it was because T-Rex never left live witnesses who could identify him, but Hawk was worried that he was too distracted lately and that, for the first time in his career, his personal life was interfering with his job performance. There was a deeper worry, too; if a cop lost focus, he either ended up at a desk for the next fifteen years or dead. Both options were equally horrendous to contemplate.
Hawk went out to make a call to the D.A.’s office. Poor cell-phone reception inside the station house and his extremely private nature drove him outside, no matter the weather, to talk on the fire escape, which everybody referred to now as his ‘perch’. He didn’t like to call this particular ADA from his desk phone where all the guys could hear his part of the conversation. He did not intend to provide fodder for the gossip mills that were the bread and butter of internal police interaction. It had not gone unnoticed, however, that in the past few months, Hawk spent a lot more time out on his perch. His colleagues had their suspicions, of course, but as in all personal matters concerning this detective, they kept their thoughts and observations to themselves.
Undeterred by the dark green tarp that snapped and sagged on its flimsy wires above his head, cold rain pelted Hawk’s face and dripped down his neck. He took no notice. “Hello?”
“Hello, Supercop.”
“Can you look something up for me?”
“Sure. What’s up?” And there it was, the intense undercurrent in her sensuous voice that flowed through the line, electrifying him whenever he called. His favorite ADA, one of the most intelligent, opinionated people he knew, not to mention very attractive – a fact he had given up trying to deny, though he tried his hardest to suppress it. But he loved talking shop with her. She always had the energy to talk about a case, even after hours, as was happening more frequently, lately. He would call her to discuss things like the legality of or the grounds for an arrest or to get her opinion about the quantity or quality of evidence before deciding whether to get a warrant. She would ask a million questions about the cases he was working and she always sounded as if she found his answers thrilling – found him thrilling. He refused to acknowledge that his craving for her company was growing into an addiction, because to admit the truth of it would force him to put an end to their association and he didn’t think he could bear to give it up. Not now, anyway.
Hawk told her what he was looking for and after about ten minutes, while she searched and he filled her in on the details of the case, she found something: Terrell Washington had a court date on an open domestic violence matter in Criminal Court in two days. Hawk planned to be there, waiting.
* * * * *
As they pulled up in front of the criminal courthouse, that once beautiful building whose dilapidated exterior now mirrored the misery and depravity contained within, Nick stared moodily out of the window, quiet after his uncharacteristic loss of temper this morning. He had stormed into the precinct at 6:00 a.m., taken one look at the new pile of files on his desk and slammed his umbrella into the wall until it was just a mess of spikes poking in every direction. “For fuck’s sake, it’s been nothing but blood and rain for two goddamn weeks!”
For a second, all movement ceased. Even the sergeant looked up in surprise. It was so rare to see Nick, of all people, lose his cool. But everyone had been on edge lately, sick of the rain which had been coming down for nearly fourteen days straight. Only Hawk seemed unaffected by the damp, depressing weather, a fact which irritated Nick even further.
“You better not say it!” Nick shouted at Hawk. Hawk looked at his partner’s broken umbrella, and then tucked his head to hide his laughter. He didn’t say it, but he sure thought it, What’re you gonna do?
Now, as silvery raindrops splattered the windshield, Hawk watched Nick run into the gray, stone building, and thought to himself that it was true, he did not really mind the rain. Once you accepted that you were going to get wet, instead of going to ridiculous lengths to try to stay dry, it wasn’t that bad. It even had its advantages, as he hoped to prove this very day.
Because rain made people do stupid things, and Terrell Washington was no exception. He had parked his black Ford Econoline SUV as close as he could to the courthouse to avoid getting drenched, and now Hawk, parked in a police vehicle behind it, had nothing to do but keep his eye on the car and the courthouse, and wait for Terrell to come out.
When he’d first matched up Terrell’s SUV by its license plate, Hawk could not believe his luck. Obviously T-Rex had driven himself to court. He probably hadn’t been able to convince any of his criminal ‘friends’ to come within such close proximity to central booking with all the uniformed officers milling about. Hawk had walked around the car, peering inside, looking for the gun he knew was in there. T-Rex wouldn’t have been able to sneak it past the metal detectors into the courthouse, and though he was too smart to leave it in plain view of every cop who had to pass his car to get to court, he was too paranoid – with good reason – to leave it at home. No, Hawk knew that wherever T-Rex went, his gun was nearby.
He adjusted his cap in the mirror. He didn’t wear his uniform often, and almost never donned the cap, but today it was part of his plan. He stared briefly into his own eyes. Once, when he was in her office, she had described his eyes as opaque. He hadn’t known what she meant so he’d looked it up later. Although he still wasn’t sure she’d meant it as a compliment, he liked knowing she had been looking at him closely enough to notice his eyes. He tried to shake her out of his head.
At 11:42 a.m., he received Nick’s text that T-Rex was on his way out. Hawk stepped out of the car and stood in front of Terrell’s SUV with his back to the courthouse. He pretended to write the ticket, some dumb, unlucky cop stuck out in the rain doing traffic detail. A sudden rush behind him told him T-Rex was there, right behind his shoulder. It took a force of will not to whirl around immediately and face him, for it was like turning one’s back on a tiger hidden in the grass.
“Yo, Officer, wait! I’ma move it right now.”
“Is this your car, sir?” Hawk asked without turning around.
T-Rex hesitated. Hawk knew why he couldn’t admit the car belonged to him. This guy had terrific survival instincts. Hawk ripped off the phony ticket with a flourish and turned, finally, to face the tiger. The first thing he saw was T-Rex’s enormous nose.
T-Rex recognized Hawk instantly. Right before he bolted, Hawk said, “Don’t do it.” His voice was icy, lethal, but T-Rex was a feral beast. Had he been armed, without question he would have pulled out his gun and shot Hawk in the face, but absent his weapon, his only recourse was to run.
Just before he lunged sideways, Nick came up behind and grabbed T-Rex’s arms, yanking them behind his back. Nick had caught him off guard, but T-Rex was a fighter, and he struggled so forcefully, he was able to break his right arm free. His fist missed Hawk’s jaw by a fraction and then Hawk was right up at his chest, bending T-Rex’s arm high behind his back, his right elbow crushing T-Rex’s windpipe. T-Rex gurgled curses and threats while Nick got the handcuffs on him. Furiously kicking and spitting at them until they both let go simultaneously, T-Rex fell to the ground. Still handcuffed, he rolled to his side, screaming obscenities, continuing to kick out at their legs. Hawk stepped back and looked on, calmly, as T-Rex writhed and squirmed like a rattlesnake. Nick laughed.
“T-Rex, you’re like a rabid dog. ASPCA should have put you out of your misery long ago.”
“You motherfuckinwhitecuntholefuckincocksuckingpussyassbitch, I’ma kill you,” he screamed.
“Oh, that hurts. But, who’s gonna be the bitch now, T? Maybe your cellmate will confuse your nostrils for your asshole and fuck you up your nose,” Nick sneered.
Hawk looked on dispassionately. When he’d had enough, he said, “Okay, let’s get him out of here,” he said.
They grabbed T-Rex by the arms, dragged his squirming body to the car and threw him in the back seat, face first. He was cursing the entire time, threatening to throw pieces of Nick, one by one, to his pitbulls. As Hawk was ducking out of the back seat to close the door, he heard T-Rex say, very softly, “But you, Hawkman, I’ma kill you myself. After I make you watch me rape your wife and kids.”
Hawk was upon him in an instant, his knee pressed into T-Rex’s back, his left hand twisting T-Rex’s chin painfully to the side. One little pop and Terrell Washington would be dead of a broken neck. The world would be a lot less dangerous.
He whispered in T-Rex’s ear, “This is the only warning you are ever going to get, Terrell. You don’t want to make this personal with me.”
T-Rex panted and mewed with the strain of keeping his neck muscles tight enough to resist the pull that would end his life, all the while feeling the crush of Hawk’s 200 pounds against his kidney.
“Grunt if you understand what I’m saying to you.”
T-Rex capitulated immediately. Another time, another place, he thought. But soon.