The detectives had to call in the Fire Department to break into Stewart Pierce’s apartment, because his parents lived in Moab, Utah, and the police had been unable to locate anyone locally who might have had a set of keys.  The mother said she’d been leaving messages for her son and his roommate for three days, to no avail, and as far as the Pierces knew, the super, an inexplicably nasty man who lived off-premises, never had a key to both locks.  Hawk confirmed that, of course.  No use expending the effort and ruining a sturdy, steel fire-door if there was a master key lying around.  It was curious about the roommate, though.  If he’d checked his messages even once over the thirty-six hours the police were required to wait before breaking into a private apartment, he could have spared himself the cost of a new door.

It was obvious the mother didn’t approve of the roommate.  She told Hawk she had never met the young man but had always felt he was somewhat shifty and unreliable.  Her son seemed quite attached to him, however, so she kept silent.  She admitted she would rather Stewart had any roommate, even one she didn’t care for, if he was going to live in New York, but this Alejandro person had not returned any of her increasingly frantic calls.  She was certain he had not delivered any of her urgent messages to Stewart.  Something was terribly wrong; her son was very devoted, an angel, really, who would have called home immediately if he could.  He would never have wanted his parents to worry about him like this.  She would never understand why artists had to live in New York.

Hawk spoke to Mrs. Pierce for about forty-five minutes on the telephone.  He’d encouraged her not to come to New York just yet, promising to go over to the apartment to see if he could find anything out.  He heard a male voice in the background as she talked, presumably Mr. Pierce, but Stewart’s father had never gotten on the phone.

Attached.  It was a strange word to use, Hawk thought.  But then, maybe people spoke like that in Utah.  Whatever the case, it was clear the mother was the worrier here.  And in crisis.  Hawk knew the type: an isolated, fearful, lonely woman who idolized her only child, had probably done everything for him, even ironed his undershorts, slavishly and without thanks, convinced he was destined for great things.  She claimed he was an extraordinary painter, the next Van Gogh.  Compulsive, co-dependent, the boy’s mother was now going slowly crazy because her pampered prince had left her, moved two-thousand miles away.  It seemed from their conversation like the classic case of a parent who, after smothering her child with too much love, was suffering a nervous breakdown at having lost the single purpose of her life.

Perhaps Stewart Pierce just wanted a few days of quiet, and this was an attempt to loosen the apron strings.  That was one of the reasons Hawk had suggested she wait in Moab.  He was glad she had listened to him, for he doubted she could have survived the horror of seeing her twenty-year old son hanging naked in a closet.

He had not been dead very long, a few days at most, as the odor of decomposition had not yet superseded the powerful fumes of fresh paint, which glistened, still wet, in some places.  An air- conditioner blasted at full power from the bedroom, filling the rooms with frigid air, keeping the body cold while drying the paint.

As they stepped inside the apartment, the detectives were struck speechless.  It was completely empty of furniture, but more astonishingly, every inch of every wall, ceiling and window had been painted over in rich, vibrant hues of blue, rust, purple and brown to depict a glorious, sprawling scene of the wild American west, replete with mountains, desert brush and giant rock formations in the distance.  It was as if they had been instantly transported to the Grand Canyon at dusk, the sun dipping below the horizon on the westernmost wall, and the sky gradually darkening in the east in the hallway leading to the bedroom.

Gerard whistled in amazement, turning slowly in a circle.  He followed as Hawk walked down the hall to the bedroom, staring in wonder at the cliffs painted on each side, creating the illusion of being at the bottom of an enormous, dry, ancient riverbed.  In the bedroom, large by Brooklyn standards, a green nylon sleeping bag lay spread-out neatly in the middle of the floor, a lone traveler’s bedroll unfurled in the heart of the desert, in view of the vague, purple shadow of the distant Rocky Mountains.   The closet door was missing, and Stewart’s body hung from a steel bar running across the top of the door frame, facing into the room.  Nick came in behind Gerard, donned his gloves, and immediately began to examine the body, checking the kid’s hands for wounds or torn nails under the dried paint.  But Hawk could not stop staring at the walls.  The ceiling was a deep, midnight blue; its track lights painted over to look like tiny, bright stars shining in the night sky.  This was the last sight Stewart had looked upon before he died.  It was magnificent.

The three detectives went through the apartment slowly, methodically, looking for evidence that it was anything but a suicide.  They found nothing.  There was very little to examine, as all the furniture, clothes, linens, lamps, papers and appliances that were part of daily life had been removed.  Hawk wondered how Stewart had managed it.  It was extremely difficult to get rid of everything.  Two rooms in the apartment had not been included in the artist’s final opus: the bathroom at the end of the hallway and the tiny kitchen.  But, apart from a ladder folded in the shower and a few paint cans and brushes arranged neatly on last week’s newspaper on the kitchen floor, there was nothing left to give them any clues as to what had happened here and why.

Finally, Nick came out of the closet looking triumphant.  In a groove between the shelf and the wall he had found a strip of photographs taken in one of those curtained booths that still existed only in amusement parks and passport offices.  There were four photos of a white boy with straw-colored hair and light blue eyes sitting next to a handsome Filipino boy with black hair and eyes and very white teeth.  In the bottom photo, the boys were kissing, their mouths open, tongues curled around each other’s.   Stewart’s eyes were closed.  Alejandro’s eyes were looking sideways, wickedly, into the camera.

Hawk studied Stewart’s face in the photos.  He looked young and reckless, his smile too wide, his deep-set eyes almost feverish.  He appeared to be high on something and Hawk suspected, from all he’d heard and hadn’t heard from the mother, that it was the fear – and possibly the thrill – of exposure that caused him to look so taut and wound up.  Hawk was one hundred percent sure Stewart’s mother had no idea her son was gay.

Nick looked under the sleeping bag, careful to replace it in the exact same position; he pulled at the boards in the closet floor, searching in vain for the pornography he was certain was hidden somewhere near the body.  He believed Stewart’s death was the result of autoerotic asphyxia – a tragic, often fatal, hazard of that favored method of masturbation among young gay men.

“Not only is there no porn, there’s no semen or other excretions,” Nick muttered, discouraged at not finding anything substantial to support his conclusion.

“So, the Asian kid must’ve come in, seen his boyfriend hanging around like an old coat, cleaned up everything and dumped it in the incinerator before getting the fuck out of Dodge,” Gerard offered.

“Would you start cleaning the house if you came home and found your boyfriend hanging in the closet?” Nick asked.  Gerard was looking at him with eyebrows raised and a knowing smile on his lips.

“Well, I wouldn’t.”

“But?”

“But maybe I would if I was a homo.”

Nick pursed his lips in disapproval.  “You’re saying that because gays like to clean things?”

“No, you asshole, what do you think I am?  I’m saying that if I was trying to hide something, like that I was queer, I would clean up any evidence I could.”

“Or if you killed him and wanted to cover it up,” Nick added.

“Or if he died while we were doing something kinky and I felt guilty or was scared I was gonna be blamed.”

“Yeah.”

The conversation petered out as they got caught up again in the strangeness and beauty of the painted scenes.  After what seemed like a very long time, Nick looked at Hawk, who’d been silently studying the room the whole time they’d been there.  “Well, what’s your theory?”

“Not accidental.  Not sexual, either.”

“So, why’s he naked?”

“Maybe he’s making a point.”

“What is it?”

“Maybe he’s trying to put everything back to its natural state, even himself.  I don’t know.”  But he did know.

Once, during a break from a special, assigned detail guarding the Turkish ambassador to the UN, Hawk had wandered into the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan.  He’d looked around, confounded by the rapturous expressions on people’s faces as they stood in front of priceless paintings that evoked no feeling in him whatsoever.  A tour-guide was speaking to a group gathered before a collection of landscapes.  Not sure if he was allowed to listen in, Hawk relied on his skills as a detective to appear as unobtrusive as possible.  The tour-guide was describing a study that had been conducted among American children of various ethnicities, including Indian kids who’d been brought up on reservations in the Midwest.  The researchers told the kids to draw a picture of themselves.  The black and white urban kids invariably put themselves in the middle of the paper, flanked on each side by parents, siblings, flowers and houses, all the same size or smaller than the central human figure.   The Indian children drew pictures of mountains, trees, water, rocks, and always off-center, tiny relative to their surroundings, they drew themselves.  Part of the background; never the main event.

Stewart Pierce had painted nearly every inch of the apartment, transforming the dark, dingy rooms into a breathtaking tribute to the vitality and splendor of nature, yet he had left himself unclothed, unadorned.  Perhaps he was declaring that the real Stewart, a human body like any other, not defined by clothes or sexuality, was leaving the world as he’d arrived: naked and alone.  Maybe he needed to prove that he’d occupied his own modest place in the world.  Or maybe he meant to show that his life and death were no less or more significant than the stunted cactus or sprawling desert painted on the walls.  He could be saying a lot of things.  But no one would ever know.

Hawk said nothing more.

Nick was peering closely at the wall in one of the corners, where a very real-looking, large, black spider was painted in a funnel-shaped web.  Suddenly, it appeared to move, making Nick jump back.   “Man, this is some sick shit.  Cool, but sick.  What are you gonna tell the mom?”

“As little as possible.  Nothing about this,” Hawk said, still holding the strip of photographs in the hand that swept through the air, indicating the painted room and the naked body.  “Right now, I’m just going to tell her he’s dead, that it’s likely a suicide and that we don’t know much.  Then, I’m going to hunt down Alejandro.”

* * * * *

It took several hours to discover Alejandro’s full name and contact information.  It took almost another hour to make contact with him, by phone, in Tokyo.  When Hawk hung up the phone, after instructing Alejandro to stay put and make sure he was available if NYPD needed to talk to him again, Nick shook his head.

“He didn’t seem too broken up about it when you told him his boyfriend was dead,” Nick said.

“No, he didn’t,” Hawk mused.  “And he was pretty evasive when I asked about the one-way ticket to Japan.”

“Yeah.  Man, that was some cold shit he was saying about the kid, too.  Those queens can be nasty as shit.  But, I hate to say it, it didn’t sound like he was covering up.  Most people act nicer when they’ve done something terrible, but this asshole didn’t fake concern or anything like that.  I’m sure he doesn’t even suspect we’re looking at him for murder.”

Hawk picked up the car keys.  “Let’s go talk to his boss.”

“Aw, fuck.”

“What?”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t say that.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a gay bar.”  Nick made a sour face.

Hawk threw a long arm around Nick’s neck and puckered his lips, making kissing noises next to Nick’s ear.  “I’ll just tell everyone you’re spoken for, and what a good partner you are… in bed,” Hawk lisped.   Nick twisted out of Hawk’s grasp and, with a limp-wristed slap to Hawk’s wrist, pranced to the door.

“You dirty bird,” he complained in a high falsetto.  “You make me feel so cheap.”

Hawk tilted his head to the side, squinting as he examined Nick from head to toe.  In his dark blue suit, Nick looked like a movie-star cop, complete with white, shiny teeth and sparkly blue eyes.  Hawk could see why Nick got propositioned all the time, by both women and men, and although he put on a big act, Hawk knew Nick wasn’t really homophobic.  The pretense was a long standing joke.  In fact, Nick was very good-natured about all of it.

Hawk flashed one of his rare smiles.

“You better have a damn good reason for smiling at me like that, you pervert,” Nick warned.

“I was just thinking, you are pretty cheap, buddy.  I wouldn’t pay more than twen – - “  Hawk ducked as Nick threw Sergeant Williams’ plastic flowerpot with the fake flowers at him.  It crashed to the floor and broke into pieces.  The two men looked at it for a moment, considering whether to pick it up and try to put it back together, ultimately deciding not to.

Nick looked accusingly at Hawk.  “You shouldn’t have ducked.”

Hawk laughed.

As they went down the stairs to where Gerard was waiting, Nick muttered, “You better not grab my ass like you did last time.”

“If your ass gets grabbed, you better hope it’s me.”

They kept up the banter all the way into Manhattan.  The bar was on Eighth Avenue in the heart of the theatre district.  Gerard stayed outside to finish his cigarette.  The moment Hawk and Nick walked into the Blazing Pistols, all eyes – except those belonging to the Hispanic busboys – turned to them.  The waiters were overtly, flamboyantly gay, and as most of them fixed bold, admiring glances on Nick, Hawk’s face settled into its hard, expressionless planes.   It wasn’t that Hawk wasn’t attractive, at 6’4”, lean and fit as a panther, with his short-cropped, red hair and slate-colored eyes.  His chiseled cheeks and jaw, slim, straight nose and thin lips were undeniably masculine, but Nick had the kind of pretty face that immediately drew the average eye.  Hawk was never jealous of the attention his partner received.  In fact, he used Nick’s natural magnetism as an opportunity to study people surreptitiously.

“I think you should handle this part of the investigation,” Hawk said.  “All the potential witnesses look like they’re dying to talk to you.”

“Don’t you dare disappear on one of your usual explorations.  In fact, gimme the car keys.”

Hawk frowned in mock hurt.  “You don’t trust me?”

“Not even a little bit.”

“You sound like my wife.”

Nick did not allow his surprise at this revelation to register. Even after all these years, Hawk rarely mentioned his private life.  He answered smoothly, “Yeah, but I hope you actually listen to me.”

“Don’t worry, Grasshopper.  I’ve got your back… side.”  Hawk grinned lasciviously.

Just then, a striking, model-thin, androgynous blond male approached them and said, “Hi, I’m Theo, your host for the evening.  Will it be two for dinner?”  Before Nick could respond, Gerard came up behind them.  Without missing a beat, Theo clapped his hands delightedly and added, “Oh, a threesome!”

“No,” Nick frowned, trying to look stern.  Flashing his badge, he said, “We’re here on business.”

Theo’s glance slid briefly over to Hawk whose face remained impassive, his opaque eyes revealing nothing.  Looking back at Nick and fluttering his eyelashes coyly, Theo said, “How can I help, Officers?”

“We’re detectives,” Nick corrected.

“Oh, my bad,” Theo said, pressing a finger to his cheek like Shirley Temple.

“Do you know a guy named Alejandro?”

“Oh, yes,” he gushed.  “Black hair, Spanish eyes, gor-geous body?”

Nick was about to say that he wouldn’t know about that kind of characterization, and would Theo mind sticking to relevant, helpful, heterosexual details, but Hawk intervened.

“Yep, that’s the one.”

“Sure,” Theo answered, his gaze drawn once again to Hawk’s sharply angled face.  Now, with a closer look into those slate eyes, his interest peaked.  “What do you want to know?”

Hawk waited a beat for Nick to jump in, but when he didn’t, Hawk asked, “How well do you know him?”

“Oh, quite well.  He’s been working here for about a year and a half, I guess, since he moved to New York from West Virginia, or Tennessee, or one of those “Deliverance” places, though he lies like a dog and pretends he came directly off the white sands of Ibiza.  Works four nights a week, lives in Brooklyn with his boyfriend.”

“Sounds like you do know him well.”

“I should; we dated for about three months, when Al first started working here.  I’ve gone through most of these guys.  I like to show them the ropes and chains when they first get to the big city, if you know what I mean,” Theo bragged, unaware or unconcerned how cliché his theatrics appeared to these hard, seasoned detectives from Brooklyn.  Hawk and Nick exchanged a nearly imperceptible glance.  Pros at extracting information from unwilling subjects, here there was nothing to do but sit back and raise their eyebrows encouragingly from time to time; this strange, gossipy, flighty creature just kept talking.  Theo reminded Hawk of Tinkerbell from the Peter Pan movie he’d been duty-bound to sit through at least a hundred times in his role as a father to daughters.  He had an urge to laugh.

Nick asked if Theo knew anything about Alejandro’s boyfriend.

“Oh yeah, he’s been here a bunch of times.  I think he’s an ex-Mormon or something.  But, anyway, he’s not out, so he pretends he’s one of Al’s straight friends, casually stopping by like he was in the neighborhood or something.  Meanwhile, Al told everyone everything about him, including how good he is at suck- -“ Nick’s scowl made Theo giggle.  “Well, anyway, we all act like we don’t know anything, but we laugh about it in the back.  To tell the truth, we all thought Al was ridiculous for getting involved with that uptight little Quaker-oat, but Al is all about the sex, and whatever the kid is hiding from the rest of us sure must be tight and sweet at home.”

Hawk felt the revulsion rolling off Gerard like fumes.  He heard Nick clearing his throat, and felt his own face redden, though he didn’t know why.  He and Nick had been in much more embarrassing situations than this, God knew.  There was the time they had responded to a domestic dispute and found the victim holding her bleeding crotch, screaming at them to find the piece of flesh her girlfriend had bitten off.  Nick had found it near the radiator, but refused to pick it up, even with gloves.  The most he would do was point it out to the EMTs when they arrived.  Even now he was defensive if anyone brought it up.  But Hawk prided himself on his reputation for being cool and imperturbable, even in the weirdest situations.   His reaction now upset him.

Theo chirped like a delighted cricket; he was having a grand time at their expense.  “Ruffled your feathers, have I, Red?” Theo said, far too perceptively.

Hawk silently reproached himself.  His reflexive discomfort with such overt homosexuality was a secret weakness of which he was deeply ashamed.  It brought up all his unpleasant memories of Gordon Hayes, that kid from high school whom all the jocks had ostracized for four years because he was so obviously gay.  Gordon refused to participate in any school sports, and although everybody knew it was because he was afraid to shower with the other boys, he acted as if it was because he was too smart to associate with the stupid jocks.  That provoked enormous hostility in his classmates, and it became almost a rite of passage among the athletes to devise ways of publicly humiliating him.  Though Hawk never actively participated in the bullying, he also never intervened on Gordon’s behalf.  Cowards annoyed him and he believed that if Gordon would have stood up for himself, just once, it would all have passed over.

On their senior trip, a terrible thing happened.  The hockey players managed to get Gordon to the back of the bus, trapping him there with their large bodies and gear.  Keith, the ringleader, an unapologetic homophobe whom Hawk had known and hung out with since fourth grade, taunted Gordon cruelly and without mercy.  Perhaps if Gordon had put up a fight, Keith would have been satisfied with just a few licks, or Hawk or someone else would have put a stop to it, but Gordon just cried and struggled, weakly, and that incited his tormentor to ever greater heights.  The other guys were shouting, laughing loudly, playing along, mostly because they were just happy to be in their senior year, nearly free, and on a co-ed class trip to Boston where they hoped to get laid, drunk and discovered.  Hawk, sitting a couple of seats away, heard Keith threatening to teach Gordon a lesson if Gordon didn’t admit to being a faggot and secretly wanting to suck Keith’s dick all these years.  Gordon was hysterical, thrashing like a fish in the bottom of the boat.  Finally, commanding the others to hold Gordon down, Keith opened his pants and shoved his penis in Gordon’s face, screaming obscenities at him.  Then, before anyone really understood what was happening, Keith urinated on Gordon’s face.  The guys groaned with disgust and shoved Gordon away from them before they got piss all over their hands and clothes.  To this day Hawk wondered how he had let it happen, had let it continue, without a single objection.  He was not afraid of Keith as some of the others were.  Keith considered Hawk one of his best friends, had confided his deepest secrets and insecurities to Hawk throughout the years.  It would have been a simple matter of pushing Keith off Gordon, checking him as he’d done a thousand times in practice.  But he had done nothing.

Gordon was removed from the bus and taken away by ambulance an hour later when one of the teachers discovered him under a seat in a totally catatonic state.  He never returned to school.  On the morning of graduation, he hanged himself in his parents’ basement.  There was no one at the ceremony to receive his academic achievement awards or applaud when the principal announced that Gordon had been accepted to Harvard on a full scholarship.  His family moved away at the end of the summer.

No one had ever been called in or questioned about what had happened on that bus, and there were never any consequences.  Eventually, like everything else about high school, Gordon Hayes faded into the distant past, all but forgotten.  Except for those rare moments when Hawk remembered him and then the memory shook him so profoundly, he was transported, altered, derailed, sometimes for hours at a time.

“Oh, shit!”

Hawk’s dark reverie was interrupted by Gerard’s expletive.  The country western music had been cranked up to full volume and the bartender and two waiters, wearing wife-beaters, skin-tight jeans, cowboy boots and big Stetson hats, climbed onto the bar and started dancing provocatively.  The detectives stared, horrified, fascinated, unable to look away.  They were good dancers, but so… effeminate.  They flexed their sculpted arms and wiggled their muscular buttocks, undulating their hips and scrunching up their faces as if in the throes of ecstasy.  Hawk was embarrassed by their crudeness, but as always, his face showed none of his thoughts.  A quick glance over at Gerard revealed a clenched jaw, green pallor and beads of sweat on his forehead.  Nick’s face was utterly impassive.  Hawk was surprised; for once, he could not tell what his partner was thinking.

Turning back to Theo, Hawk tried to act normal.  “Did Al discuss other things about his relationship?”

“Like what?”
“Like – - “

“I hate to interrupt you, Red, but you have gorgeous eyelashes.”  A tiny smile played around Theo’s lips, making it impossible to tell if he was flirting or being sarcastic.

Hawk blushed again, automatically.  It was hardly the first time he’d been propositioned by a man, but this was the most blatant overture.  More of an onslaught, really.  Momentarily thrown off course, Hawk forgot what he was going to say.  Nick chimed in smoothly, “He gets that a lot.  What we’re asking is, did Alejandro discuss with you whether he and his boyfriend fought a lot or whether they were going to break up?”

“Well, Stew – that’s the boyfriend – isn’t too happy that Al’s planning to go to Tokyo to look for modeling work.  He wants him to stay in New York.  Although now I think he wants Al to take him with him to Japan.  I can tell you right now, Al does not want him there.  For Al, it just isn’t as serious.  Stew probably feels rejected… Al is totally selfish.  Not real boyfriend material.”

“This may be a little awkward – well, maybe not for you,” Nick said dryly, “but, is Al into autoerotic asphyxiation?”  Hawk was impressed by the ease with which Nick slid into this line of questioning.  It was as if, suddenly, a different person had inhabited his partner’s body.

“Oh, Al is into everything: bondage, pain, et cetera.  But I think Stew is too scared – or too religious – to risk most of that stuff.  He’s afraid to buy gay porn, for Chrissakes.  I don’t know why he thinks anyone gives a shit, but as I said, he’s not out and closet homos do weird things.  I was never one myself.  Can you tell?”  Theo placed a fluttery hand on Nick’s lapel and laughed outright.  To Hawk’s surprise, Nick didn’t even flinch as Theo leaned in very closely and said in a low, sultry voice, “So Detective, can I buy you a drink?”

“Sorry, on duty.”

Leaning in even further to what seemed an alarming proximity to Nick’s mouth, Theo whispered theatrically, “How about your handsome friend?  I think he likes me.”

Nick bowed his head conspiratorially, and said, “He might be a little shy…”

It was only because Nick had been working with Hawk for so many years that he was able to tell that his partner was, at this very moment, envisioning slicing him up into little pieces behind his cold, unamused eyes.  However, Nick felt no remorse in enjoying himself at Hawk’s expense.  He smiled sweetly at Theo and, throwing up both hands, exclaimed, “Straight men!”

“I know!” Theo retorted, knowingly.

Someone called Theo’s name.  “Well, gotta go.  Is there anything else you guys need from me?”  As the detectives shook their heads, Theo said, “Hey!  It never occurred to me; why are you asking all this?  Is Alejandro in trouble?”

Nick answered, “No, no, nothing like that.”   Hawk stared at him.  He was glad that Nick hadn’t told Theo that Stewart was dead.  He just never expected Nick to be that sensitive.  Hawk hated to think that these busy bees would all be gossiping and laughing in the back about the tragedy of a lonely boy’s suicide.  “But can you ask the manager to come over, please?”

“I’ll go get him.  See you later, honey,” Theo said, winking at Nick as he sashayed across the room, which was starting to get crowded.

Hawk and Nick turned to find Gerard sitting at the bar, watching baseball on one of the large, overhanging screens.  “Hey, they still like some normal guy things, I guess,” he said, taking a sip of one of the three beers the bartender had solicitously placed on the bar, unordered.  Hoping there would be no more spontaneous dancing while they were at the bar, Hawk sat down and pushed the beer away.  Nick followed suit.  Gerard rolled his eyes at their sanctimonious rejection of a free beer, but said nothing.   If the Dynamic Duo wanted to pretend all of a sudden that they never drank on the job, that was their bullshit.

Hawk casually surveyed the saloon.  He was acutely aware of the many interested stares they were attracting, which was certainly different from the way people usually reacted when they realized the police were in a room.  Before quickly averting his eyes, he noticed a man sitting alone a few seats down from them, drinking something pink.  The guy was striking looking, with a craggy, masculine face like the Marlboro Man and sharp, bright, deep-set blue eyes.  He was remarkably well-dressed, and Hawk was sure his clothes were very expensive.  He seemed very dignified, but then, suddenly, he called out something vulgar to the young, flirtatious bartender.

Hawk turned away as the two men continued their loud exchange, disturbed less by the crass content than the aggression in its delivery.  He viewed this vicious substitution for courting as a form of domestic abuse, and knew it was not limited to drunk, angry homosexuals.  Beside him, Gerard hissed his disapproval.  Hawk and Nick looked at him.

“I don’t care if the entire world wants to pretend that this is all fine and dandy,” he said, “but man, I swear I’ll disown my kid if he turns out gay.”

“Bullshit,” Nick scoffed.

“No, I’m not kidding.  I don’t think I could take it.  Look at all this.  I’m sorry, but it’s fucking disgusting.  I don’t care about when I’m on the job – it doesn’t affect me one bit – but I won’t have this shit in my house, in my real life.  It’s perverted, that’s what it is, like we’re living in fucking Sodom and Gomorra.  Don’t tell me you don’t think the same thing, in the privacy of your own home,” Gerard said, turning to Hawk.

Hawk thought it over for a minute before shrugging.  “What are you going to do?”

“Man, you always say that!  What kind of bullshit answer is that?!”

“There is no answer.  It’s out of your control.  There’s nothing for you to do or not do,” Hawk said quietly.

“Yeah, well, you’re wrong, there is an answer in this case: I don’t have to tolerate it on my own turf.  People can get all sanctimonious, but I’m not afraid to admit that I’d be ashamed if my kid acted like this.  Even if I couldn’t see it, just knowing he was acting like this with his friends would make me sick.”

“So, what’s your kid now, ten,” Nick asked wryly.  “In five years you’re just gonna disown him if he comes to you and says, ‘Hey Dad, I’m really sorry, but I like boys’?”

“That’s exactly what I’m going to do.  Because the alternative is having to choke down my Christmas dinner with a bunch of freaks like this weirdo, Tip-oh, Tee-oh, whatever his name is, who make inappropriate comments just to get a reaction out of people, shoving their sexuality down your throat till you wanna throw up from it.  I mean, who acts like that?  Fags!  No one else acts like that.  Women don’t even act like that, and the homos are supposed to be copying them.  Like I said, I don’t care who or what you’re fucking, but why do I have to have it in my face twenty-four-seven, with their high, fake voices and nasty attitude, like if you don’t embrace ‘em, you must hate gays, and then you’re a redneck, homophobic, motherfucking bigot ‘cause you don’t want to have to be thinking about what they’re sticking their dicks into every minute of the day?!”

Nick said darkly, “Ah, so maybe it’s a good thing Stewart Pierce killed himself, because who needs another talented artist in the world if he’s going to offend his parents at Christmas dinner?”

“Oh fuck that.  It’s always the parents’ fault, isn’t it?  It’s their fault the kid is gay in the first place and then it’s their fault he kills himself.  How self-indulgent.  You don’t see kids hanging themselves for their art in fucking Africa where they’re so miserable, they have good reason to want to off themselves.”

“Yeah?  Well, Van Gogh chopped his ear off and then shot himself.  How self-indulgent of him,” Nick retorted.

Just then, the manager approached with a friendly smile, but when he saw the detectives’ closed, brooding faces, he slowed his step.  New York cops.  Such macho bastards.  These three fit the stereotype to a T.

As soon as Hawk confirmed the dates that Alejandro had given him over the phone, they left the bar and drove back to Brooklyn.

Driving past the Port Authority, Hawk was pensive.  Lost in his own thoughts, he hadn’t been paying attention, but gradually he became aware of Nick and Gerard’s quiet conversation.

“… close it as a suicide.”

“Yeah.  Too bad.  I woulda liked to charge that asshole boyfriend of his,” Nick responded.

“If he wasn’t out already, we could out him,” Gerard said. “In Texas!”

“Or Montana,” Nick added.

Catching Hawk’s glance in the rearview mirror, Gerard asked, “You decide what you’re gonna tell the parents?”

“I’m going to tell them their kid committed suicide.”

“You gonna tell ‘em about the apartment?”

“I don’t know.  I have to think about it some more.”

“What about the boyfriend?”

“No.  None of the gay stuff.  They don’t need that on top of what their lives are going to be like now and forever more.”

“You don’t think they’re gonna find out?  That someone’s gonna slip up and tell ‘em?  I mean, how do you hide something like that?  That’s the whole reason he killed himself.”

Hawk was upset, but he buried it so expertly, only Nick, who knew him better than anyone, could detect his true feelings beneath the quiet words.  “He didn’t kill himself because he was gay.  He killed himself because he was sad, and lonely, and scared.  And hopeless.  Maybe he felt all those things because he believed he had to hide what he was, but look at Theo and all those other guys.  You don’t kill yourself just because you’re gay.  Or self-indulgent.  That’s too simplistic.  Anyway, if his parents couldn’t tell up till now that their kid was a homosexual, no one needs to tell them.  They’ve spent all these years denying what’s obvious to everyone else, why not let them keep their lie intact?  The kid, too.  He died with his secret.  We should let him have some dignity in death.”

A heavy silence settled upon them as they drove down to the Battery.  Nick had never seen Hawk like this.  On the rare occasion, Hawk got into a bad mood; usually it was only noticeable to Nick and it always passed pretty quickly.  Nick never brought it up, and Hawk wasn’t the type to invite casual conversation about his home life.  Besides, who didn’t sometimes have a fight with the wife, or money worries, or whatever else bothered a guy from time to time?  And he knew how Hawk was when he couldn’t solve a case.  But this was different.  There was a darkness, a density, about Hawk now that seemed impenetrable.  He was like a stranger, sitting there, and Nick was startled to think how little anybody actually knew about his partner.  Nick would, without question or hesitation, walk through fire or run into a gang shootout with him, but it was disturbing to realize that, aside from the joking or scoffing at political candidates or griping about the bosses, he had no idea what Hawk really thought about stuff.  He knew about Hawk’s childhood, that his father had been stabbed to death when he was a kid, and that the killer had never been convicted for it.  There was a stepfather, too, at one time, but Nick didn’t know if he was still alive or if Hawk had gotten along with him.  He knew what school Hawk went to, what sports he played.  He’d even met Hawk’s wife and kids a bunch of times, as Hawk had met his.  But tonight’s conversation with Gerard seemed to have stirred something up in Hawk that made Nick uneasy.  Well, there was only one way Nick knew to handle situations that made him uncomfortable.

As Hawk turned onto the Brooklyn Bridge, leaving Manhattan, with all its jaded, seditious souls and dark magic behind, Nick said, “Wow.”

Hawk glanced over and was startled to see his partner sitting nearly sideways in the passenger seat, staring back at him in a way that indicated he’d been watching Hawk for some time.  “What?”

“That was maybe the most words I’ve ever heard you say at one time.”  Nick narrowed his eyes and looked at Hawk suspiciously.  “You don’t think Theo rubbed off on you, do you?”

“He wanted to rub himself off on you, pretty boy.”  In a high falsetto, Hawk mimicked, “’Oh, those awful straight men!’  ‘Oh, Honey, I know!’”

“’You have such pretty eyelashes, Red’,” Nick retorted.  “You’re just so handsome.  Why don’t you let me suck on your big, red – -‘  Ow!  Fuck it!  You’re driving, you bastard.  You’re gonna get us all killed!”

* * * * * * *

Hawk’s conversation with the Pierces had lasted approximately five minutes, with Hawk doing most of the talking.  They had no questions, they would call him if they needed anything.  They would fly in tomorrow afternoon to pick up their son’s body.

He finished the paperwork around 1:00 a.m.  He was tired, but too restless to go home.  He looked to see if there was anybody around who felt like going for a beer, but only Laverne and Ronnie were there and he was not interested in hanging out with either of them.

In the car, Hawk searched for a good radio station, but everything sounded brash, loud, discordant.  He turned off the noise and waited at the red light before making the turn onto the expressway.  And then it came, descending on him like a tidal wave, threatening to break his neck, or drown him with its infinite weight.

The light turned green, but he didn’t notice it.  A car honked behind him, two, but still, he didn’t move.  Finally, the irate drivers screeched past him, shouting epithets, leaning furiously on their horns.  The light changed to red again.  Green.  Red.  The darkness had come, and Hawk could no more drive on than he could fly.

In a dream, he looked left, towards Manhattan.  He could go to her.  No, even in his blackest mood, even though he knew that she, of all people, would understand and could make him feel better, he would not go there, not ever again.

He was sinking.  He could not stay here.  With some part of his brain, he knew he had to get out of the car, and fast, before he did something stupid, irreparable.   Deep down, in the void that was consuming him, crushed beneath the burden of Gordon Hayes and Stewart Pierce and all the nameless ghosts that came slinking out of the secret cave of horrors, Hawk knew he needed to go somewhere, that he couldn’t stay at this intersection all night, but he didn’t know where he could go.

And then, finally, he did know.  He made a U-turn, ignoring the light which was red again.  He drove past the precinct, the projects, and parked in front of the dark apartment house.  He climbed the stairs in silence, pulled the yellow crime scene tape away from the door and went inside.  The lock had been broken earlier, but the chain was intact and now he chained it from the inside.  He walked down the hall in the dark, oblivious to the fumes which had diminished somewhat as the paint continued to dry.  He stepped into the bedroom and turned on the stars.  He moved the sleeping bag to one side and lay down, fully-clothed, on the floor in the center of the room.  Several hours passed before he curled onto his side.  Only then did Hawk close his eyes against the distant Rocky Mountains, and slept and did not dream.

Hudson Avenue – all of downtown, in fact – was completely deserted.  Despite the street lights, visibility was close to zero, and if he hadn’t been looking closely, Hawk surely would have missed the slight movement on the southwest corner of Hudson and Laurel.

“There,” he pointed.  Nick pulled the car over carefully, skidding a little in the slippery slush.  They were right behind her, but apparently, she hadn’t heard them drive up.

Hawk watched her for a moment from the car, noting her hunched posture and desolate expression as she stared unseeingly at the ground in front of her.  She was shabbily dressed in a thin, faded sweatshirt, ripped jeans and pathetic canvas sneakers that were soaked through.  He felt sorry for her; for her mother, her stepfather – for all the families trying to make it work when love was not enough.

Tanya was not one of Hawk’s chronic runaways.  She was a first-time missing, and those always disturbed him the most, because he didn’t know what to expect or how to plan his search.  What would this one fall into, out on the street: prostitution? drugs?  Her mother had firmly rejected the idea that Tanya might be connected to a gang and though she didn’t know any of her daughter’s friends well, she was able to give the detectives the name of a boy Tanya had been hanging out with lately.  After talking to sixteen-year old Angel Rios, Hawk was convinced Tanya wasn’t involved in any gang activity, yet.  It gave him a modicum of hope that this missing might not be completely lost… if she was ever found.

Missings were a top priority for any squad.  Unless a detective was directly occupied with an exigent rape or homicide, a missing took precedence over any other type of case.  There was good reason for that, as those ubiquitous crime shows on TV accurately depicted: every hour that passed substantially diminished the chances of finding a missing child alive.  There were so many unspeakable things that could happen in a very short time.  Hawk had seen most of them.

On cases like these, as the hours ticked by, he was reminded of the scene from The Wizard of Oz, when the sand ran quickly through the hourglass and Dorothy wept for her aunt, the sound of her own frightened sobs compounding the terror.  It was utter torture to imagine the whimpered cries of kidnapped children facing a real, live predator before he killed them, or worse.  Hawk forbade himself to do so, for then it would be impossible to allow his children to leave his sight, to step out of the house, to live any life at all.  He didn’t need to see movies like Traffic or Taken – his life was those movies, and the parts they never showed, also.

The moment he opened the car door, hard, icy sleet pelted his face, blurring his vision.  His suit jacket was open and within seconds his tie and shirt were drenched.  She looked up and saw him approaching her purposefully, a tall, red-haired, serious-looking man who could only be a cop.  He could see her trying to decide whether to make a run for it.  He called out her name, told her, “Don’t run,” and in that split second, she bolted.

It was slippery and her sneakers had no traction whatsoever, but she ran in the wild, desperate way of an adolescent who has no experience of the pain of falling to hinder her stride.  When she felt him gaining on her and then saw him running beside her, she sobbed in frustration, but she kept going, unable to give up, spurred onward by the primal fear of capture.  It took her a moment to realize that he was keeping pace beside her, but was making no move to stop her.  The strangeness of it was both ridiculously funny and infuriating.  She wanted to push him away from her, but knew the effort of it would slow her down.

They sprinted together, side by side, until Tanya slipped and stumbled.  Long fingers encircled her arm to steady her.  She felt the pressure, strength without force.  They slowed down simultaneously until they came to a stop.  Clouds of steam spurted from their mouths with every rapid exhale, like car exhaust sputtering from a reluctant engine.  She stood, bent over with her hands on her knees, gasping in the cold air.  Hawk could not tell from the sound she was making if she was crying or laughing; maybe it was a mixture of both.  He straightened and brushed his jacket aside, momentarily revealing his badge as he panted out his introduction.  He told her his name, adding, “But everybody calls me Hawk.”

She looked at him from the sides of her eyes.  “How come?”

“Long story.  But I was this close to being Big Bird instead, so I’m okay with Hawk.”  She gave a tiny laugh, despite herself.

“Where were you going?” Hawk asked, casually, glancing up and down the deserted street.  Nick had pulled the car up and was waiting a few yards away.

She stopped smiling and looked away.  With her hands shoved into her front pants pockets and her shoulders hunched forward against the cold, she looked like a sad, little animal.  “Nowhere,” she replied in a bleak, dejected voice, adding bitterly, “Where’s there to go?”

“Oh, there’re plenty of places you could end up.”  Hawk paused.  It was snowing heavily now, thick, wet flakes.  They were both completely soaked.  “You look cold.  You wanna sit in the police car?”

She tensed immediately.  “No.  You go if you’re cold.”

Hawk was not cold.  Or rather, if he was, then he liked the sensation.  He never wore a winter coat on the job, nor hat, nor gloves.  His colleagues marveled that he never got sick, but Hawk had a perfect attendance record.  Certainly, there were times he felt under the weather, but even then he was too restless to stay home.  Lying in bed for a whole day was unbearable, a punishment.  He would rather be at work, where there was always a lot to do and he could be distracted from feeling lousy.

“I don’t get cold.”

“Never?”

“Nope.”

“You’re like my dad.  He never gets cold either.”  Instantly, the mood had shifted.

Hawk knew from her mother that Tanya’s disappearance had something to do with her father.  “Where’s he,” he asked gently.

“Who the fuck cares?”

Hawk could tell from her unnatural delivery that she was unused to swearing.  Perhaps she was testing its shock value.  It had none.  “Mmmm.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?  Oh, I bet I know what’s coming next.  You’re going to tell me that I shouldn’t say things like that, that I’ll regret it later, and blah, blah, blah.”

“No.  It’s not for me to judge how you feel about anything.”

“Yeah?  That’s that bullshit childhood psychology, right?  I know you’re here to take me back and I know what you’re thinking: you’d rather be home in your nice house with your nice family rather than chasing down some screwed up kid in the middle of a snow storm.  You all think I have nothing serious to worry about ‘cause I’m just a kid and you’re the know-it-all grown-ups.  But you don’t know anything!”  She was shouting now.  “You don’t know me.  Nobody knows me.  Why don’t you all just leave me alone?  I don’t want you here.  Even I don’t want to be here.  I hate it here.  HERE, on this fucking planet!”  She was crying, furious tears, which she batted away violently, ashamed of crying in front of a total stranger.

He did not take his eyes from her face.  Very quietly, without any mockery, he asked, “What’s the alternative?”

“I don’t know,” she yelled and threw her arms out wide.  At the top of her lungs she shouted toward an invisible sky, “I DON’T KNOW!!!”  She looked to see if he was laughing at her or wearing the typical, condescending, adult face.  He was doing neither.  He was just standing there, in the freezing, wet, miserable snow, this man with no coat, acting like he had all the time in the world to just listen to her.

“How am I supposed to know,” she shot at him.  “I’m a kid. You’re the grown-ups.  You’re supposed to take care of us!”

“You’re right,” he said.

“Yeah?  Well, nobody’s doing that these days.”

“I’m sorry.”  He said it simply, softly, utterly genuine.

“Well, you’re not the one who’s to blame.”

“I’m sorry anyway.”

“That doesn’t help.”

“What will?”

She stood there, shaking with cold, hesitating, knowing that to say it out loud would probably just make it hurt even worse than it did already, but needing so badly just to tell someone.  Hawk waited patiently, as she struggled between distrust and her desire to confide in him.

“I want my father back.”

A long moment passed before Hawk answered, “Yeah, I know how you feel.”

A confused, shockingly mature look crossed her face, and she asked, “Yours walk out on you, too?”

“In a way.”

“What does that mean?”

“He died.”

“Oh.  When?”  She didn’t know if she was allowed to ask that.  She’d said it tentatively, prepared for him to tell her it was none of her business.  That’s what grown-ups did when they didn’t feel like answering.  Funny, but they had no problems asking her personal questions.

“When I was a kid,” he answered.  “A bit younger than you.”

“Was he sick?”

“Nope.”

“How’d he die?

“Someone killed him.”  That was more than he had told most people over the course of his entire career.

She did not meet his eyes when she said, “Sorry.”

He shrugged.  “What’re you gonna do?”

Her teeth were chattering now as she said, “Well, mine’s not dead.  But he might as well be.”

“Where is he?”

“Detroit.”

“Oh.  That’s pretty far.”

She eyed him sharply.  “I wasn’t going there, if that’s what you think.  He doesn’t want me.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, he says he wouldn’t want to keep me away from my mother, but I don’t believe that crap.”

“Why not?”

“Because, if you want somebody, you don’t leave them.”

Hawk felt a burn behind his eyes.  She was so young, he thought.  He tried to remember a time when things seemed so simple to him, when the world was that black and white.  He couldn’t.  This was always the dilemma with his teenage runaways: did you treat them like adults, sparing no detail of the harsh realities of life, or did you try to protect them, preserve the last shred of innocence they wore so nakedly on their faces?  He thought of what he’d want someone to say to his own girls if, God help him, one of them was standing out here in the cold after nineteen heart-stopping hours of being missing.  It would never be one of his own, he vowed.  He would never get so far away from them that someone else would be having this conversation with them.  Suddenly, he was filled with a fierce, hot need to hold his children, to assure them that no matter what might be happening between him and their mother, he would never, ever leave them.

“There are some things that might make a father give up his child,” he lied.  Before she could ask, “Like what?” in her skeptical, yet childishly hopeful way, he said, “He must think good things about your mother to be willing to leave you with her.”

She answered back immediately, but Hawk could tell that she was thinking about what he had said.  “I don’t know about that.  They fought all the time.  Now she fights with me all the time.  I swear, sometimes I just… I just hate her.”

“Everybody feels like that at times.”

“Did you?”

“What?  Hate my mother?  Not really.  But, after my dad died, I felt guilty for doing anything she didn’t want me to do, or thought was too dangerous.  Then I’d be mad that I had to feel guilty in the first place and I’d take it out on her by doing even stupider things, or ignoring her.  That was worse, because I could tell she was hurt and worried and then I’d feel even guiltier than before.  It wasn’t easy.”

“Yeah.”  There was a long silence as she stared at the ground, absorbing his words, trying to work things out in her head.  Finally, pretending indifference, she said, “I guess we could sit in the car now.  If you want.”

Hawk suspected she must be freezing.  Teenagers fascinated him.  Parts of their brains were so undeveloped, like their judgment, or impulse control, or their capacity for self-preservation.  He was amazed so many actually survived adolescence.  On the other hand, their emotional lives were so complex, so raw and passionate, that dealing with them was like navigating a minefield.  It was a constant source of wonder to him that adults had any control over them at all.  It was an illusion, Hawk knew, contrived as a result of years of being small and helpless, conscious only of their powerlessness against the authority figure, that kept teenagers believing their parents still had power over them.  In truth, there was no power but that which the child perceived, accepted, allowed.  Like some mysterious, unspoken contract, it seemed a virtually unchallenged law of nature that made the strong youth cower before his weakening father.  This phenomenon never ceased to amaze Hawk.  Sometimes he found himself wondering what his relationship with his own father would have been like if he hadn’t been killed.

When they got in the car, Hawk in the front passenger seat, Tanya in back, he introduced her to Nick.

“My crazy partner here keep you freezing out there this whole time?”  Nick’s blue eyes twinkled merrily as they met hers in the rear-view mirror.  She gave a small smile.  His charm was hard to resist.  “I don’t know why he’s called ‘Hawk’ when he’s a freakin’ penguin.”  Hawk turned in his seat to grin at her, rolling his eyes.

“Where to,” Nick asked, casually.  “The station house, or home?”  Hawk said nothing, letting Tanya know it was her decision.

“Not home.  Not yet,” she said.

Nick drove them to the precinct, stopping first at the McDonald’s drive-thru.  The partners had this part of the routine well-synchronized, though it was sadly too infrequently that they got to give a missing their special, royal treatment a la NYPD.

Back at the precinct, Tanya followed Hawk around, like a sad, skinny shadow.  Nick, who had telephoned her mother the minute Hawk caught up to her on the street, called again and asked her to give them an hour or so before they brought her home.  Despite the snow storm, her mother insisted on coming to the station to pick Tanya up herself, but she agreed to wait an hour.

Tanya sat shyly next to Hawk as he typed up paperwork at his desk.  She made eye contact with no one else, and none of the detectives tried to engage her in conversation.  Outwardly, they pretended it was just an ordinary evening in the Eight-two, and that they didn’t even notice the silent, soaked fourteen-year old wrapped in an old, scratchy towel sitting next to Hawk.   But inwardly, the entire squad was enormously relieved that she had been found.  There were so many failures, after all, and those were horribly difficult to recover from.

Hawk was comfortable with silence, and he didn’t push her to speak.  The few times she did, he answered her honestly, naturally, as if they had known each other a long time.   He knew she just needed to be close to someone and he understood her temporary attachment to him.  She seemed very small and vulnerable, huddled beside him in the big, black chair, but she was stronger than she looked.  He had a good feeling about this girl.  He would bet money she was going to make it, that she wouldn’t become one of his chronic runaways, or, heaven forbid, one of his never founds.

An unbidden memory popped into his mind while he sat there, of another young girl, found three months after she disappeared, thrown away like some piece of garbage.  He had torn open the black plastic bag to reveal her broken face, contorted in death, track marks and cigarette burns and bruises from repeated sexual abuse tattooed forever onto her thirteen-year old skin.

Suddenly, like a fast-moving slideshow, a thousand images flashed through his head, parents holding photographs of children smiling at the camera, pushing them toward him like jewels, showing him, begging him, if only he could find this one precious child…  He was startled to realize that he was praying.

When her mother came to get her, Tanya was resigned, if not entirely ready to go.  Hawk walked her silently to the door and watched as mother and daughter stepped out into the freezing, blustering, unwelcoming night, thinking there was so much hard work for them ahead, but perhaps a new understanding, as well.

She turned once to look at him over her shoulder, gazing at him for a long moment before turning back into her life.  Then she patted her side pocket, where she’d put her phone, and Hawk understood she was telling him that she would use the number he had given her if things got too bad.  He hoped she never had to.

* * * * *

The phone rang three times before his wife picked up, sleepy, but instantly wary.  “Hello?”

“It’s me.  The girls okay?”

“They’re asleep.  Why?  What’s happened?”

He heard the fear in her voice; it was there all the time now.  Had it always been there, and he’d just never noticed?

He did not attempt to talk to her about his day.  It had been a tacit understanding between them, almost from the very beginning, that she preferred not to know about the realities he encountered every day, and he made every effort to shield her from that harsh world that frightened her so much.  It was kind of like leaving muddy boots outside the door.  Only, Hawk lived in that world.  He loved that world.  It was so deeply a part of him, he could no more imagine a civilian life than one in a wheelchair.

He found that he was staying later at the precinct these days, putting off going home where the atmosphere was always tense and nothing got said because neither of them said it.

He sighed into the receiver. “Nothing’s happened.  Everything’s fine.  Just checking in.  See you when I get home.”

“Alright.  Goodnight.”  She hung up.

He closed his eyes.  Pressing the receiver against his neck, he whispered, “Maybe we could just…”  He could not name his wish.

Hawk observed Devon Taylor, Will Carver and Jahmel Barnes sitting on a bench about half-way up the block, waiting for customers.  They noticed the red-haired detective just as that old crack-head Ernest came around from the back of Building Twelve, clutching a raggedy bill in his hand.   As Hawk drew near, he could hear Ernest, oblivious to his approach, alternately threatening and complaining that the three of them were rat bastards for refusing to sell him a rock.   Devon’s hand shot out and grabbed Ernest’s chin, forcing his pockmarked, toothless face sideways in Hawk’s direction.  Comprehension dawned slowly in the old man’s wasted eyes as the three young hoodlums laughed and cursed at him.  Hawk had no doubt that if any of them lived as long as Ernest, they would be no less pathetic.  The decrepit addict slunk away, back the way he had come.  He would wait for the despised cop to pass, and pray fervently he didn’t intend to linger; Ernest needed a fix desperately and for once, he had a little money.

Hawk grinned amiably as he came level with the bench.  “Hey, what’s going on?”

“Ain’t nothin’ goin’ on.  You see somethin’ goin’ on?”

“Just asking.”

“We don’t gotta talk to you.  It’s a free country, man.”

Hawk shrugged.  He turned and walked into the bodega directly across the street.  When he came out, the three of them were still sitting on the bench.  From the corner of his eye, he could see Ernest skulking along the side of the building, no doubt checking to see if Hawk had gone for good.  Poor Ernest, this wasn’t turning out to be his day.

Hawk opened the bag of potato chips he’d just bought and crossed back to the bench.  He plopped down right between Devon and Jahmel and popped a chip into his mouth.  All three of them jumped up.

“What you doin’, man?!” they cried in disgust.  “What you want?!”

“It’s a free country,” Hawk said, happily.  “Chip?”

“Aw shit, man.”  As the foul trio walked away, Hawk laughed.  Poor, poor Ernest.

Just then, his phone vibrated in his pocket.  Before he could check his text messages, Hawk heard shots fired nearby.  It sounded like they were coming from the inner courtyard between Six, Seven and Eight, an ugly cluster of twelve-story brick buildings in the southern quadrant of the Stillwell projects, due south from where Hawk was sitting.  Hawk dropped the chips and ran behind Twelve, intending to cross behind and over to the east before circling around to come from the back of Six.  Ernest had disappeared.  There was no sign of anyone.  The project’s inhabitants had all taken shelter, like small animals instinctively aware of the need to hide from a large predator stalking the forest.

As Hawk approached Six from the rear, he heard the popping of gunfire again and then voices, shouting back and forth.  He stopped moving.  Something was wrong.  His mind raced: another round of firing?  Was this a standoff situation?  No, there was no volley to indicate provocation and response.  In fact, all the shots had come from the same location, maybe the same gun.  Also, what about the shouting?  Though Hawk couldn’t make out the words, the tone was neither threatening nor hostile.  It seemed conversational.  There was none of the typical screaming and scattering he’d been listening for, either.  The eerie silence seemed almost expectant.

He waited.

An endless two-and-a-half minutes passed before Hawk heard more shouting.  He crept closer along the side of Six, toward the open center courtyard which joined all three buildings.  And then he heard, clearly, two – no three – males calling out to one another from what seemed to be the front entrances of each of the buildings.

“You seen him?”

“No,we ain’t seen him, mothafucka.”

“Somethin’s messed up, man.”

“Jes’ wait, he comin’.”

“Nah, dawg, it been too long.  He ain’t comin’.”

“Nah, man, he comin’.  I am damned sure!”

“Shut the fuck up, you damned sure!  He ain’t comin’.  An’ even if he is, I ain’t stayin’.  Because you know who gonna be here in a minute?  Mothafuckin’ cops, that’s who.  Curt, we leavin’.”

“Okay.”

“Nah, Rog, Curt, c’mon.  Y’all heard what the man said!  He be here any minute.  He jes’ bein’ careful.”

Hawk heard two more gunshots.  He inched back slowly, steadily, ducking behind Six, flattening himself against the bricks, trying to think over the loud, rapid beating of his heart.  That they’d been waiting for him, he was absolutely certain.  This was a trap that had been set specifically for him.  Someone must have given the signal that he was here.  Ernest?  Those three punks outside the bodega?  Cold sweat trickled down Hawk’s spine.  It was sheer luck he had not responded the way cops usually did, by running straight towards the sound of gunfire.

He felt his phone vibrating persistently in his pocket and realized it had been buzzing non-stop the whole time.  With his gun drawn and ready, Hawk quickly flipped open the phone.  Glancing down, he saw that there were a number of messages from Nick, two more from the lieutenant.  He was startled to see a missed call from the Captain, as well.

Hugging the sides of the buildings as closely as possible, only exposing himself when it was absolutely necessary to cross a portion of the yard with no cover, Hawk made his way cautiously, quickly, to the car.  He climbed in, shaken.  He turned the key and drove several blocks before pulling over and parking at the curb, leaving the engine running.  He listened for a minute to the familiar static of the police radio, staring out into the street, seeing nothing as the adrenalin coursing through his body began to abate.

Finally, he began to read his messages.  They were increasingly urgent, pleas and then commands to call the station.  The one from the Captain was a brusque order to make contact immediately.  They knew.  Someone must have tipped them off.  Hawk dialed the lieutenant’s office.

“Goddamnit, where the hell are you?” the lieutenant shouted into the phone.

“In the car.  What’s up?”  His voice sounded distant, disconnected, betraying nothing of the tension that was only now beginning to recede.

There were muffled voices and Hawk knew the lieutenant was talking to someone in the office, his hand covering the mouthpiece.  A short, harsh laugh burst from his throat.  If they only knew the futility of their efforts to hide from him what they believed to be a developing situation.

“You armed?”

“Of course.”

There was a pause at the other end, and then the lieutenant’s sharp voice spoke again.  He sounded much calmer now.  “Get in here.  Now.  No stops.  I mean it.”  He hung up.

Hawk was baffled.  How could they have known the exact moment he was walking into a trap?

* * * * *

When he came into the station house ten minutes later, his usual calm, controlled self, they were all waiting for him.

“There’s someone you need to talk to,” the lieutenant said, as Hawk entered his office.

Nick and the sergeant were there; the Captain as well, leaning his massive bulk on the window-sill, waiting for the soft click as the lieutenant pulled the door closed behind him.  Something had already been decided, Hawk could tell.  He looked at his partner, whose face was pale, his eyes shiny, excited.  Hawk could see the effort Nick was expending to keep from blurting out whatever was going on and he knew if the Captain hadn’t been there, Nick would not have bothered to restrain himself.

“What?” Hawk said, feigning ignorance as he looked around at the three of them.

“Detective Corrigan’s perp just told us there’s a hit out on you.”

Hawk looked at Nick.  “Oh yeah?”  His heart was racing again.  But there was no fear in him.  It was pure fury, now.  “Who?”

“Leon Robinson.”

Hawk shook his head after thinking for a moment.  “Not ringing a bell.”

“Got him in Room 2.  He’s saying Raheem Stallings was setting up to waste you over at Ingram houses.”

“Not Ingram,” Hawk growled in a low voice that only he could hear.

“What was that?”  The Captain was watching him closely.

Hawk’s slate eyes looked at him through heavy lids, shielded by white-blond eyelashes.  He raised one brow as if to say, “I didn’t say anything,” but silently cursed his own stupidity; the Captain was uncannily perceptive and for some inexplicable reason, always seemed to know what was happening in Hawk’s life.

Captain McKinney was a tough, iron-gray, American Irishman.  Six feet, built like a barrel, with twenty-two years on the force and ten years as a firefighter before that.  He was as unapproachable and dangerous as a wild mountain lion, but fiercely protective of his boys in blue.  He felt particularly paternal toward Hawk, although the only evidence of that was that he scowled at him a fraction less than everyone else.  No one, not even Hawk himself, was aware that McKinney had known Hawk’s father.  He’d been silently watching over Hawk since he’d come out of the academy, but that was McKinney’s secret and he had his reasons.  If a need ever arose to change his plan, he’d deal with it then.

Hawk hadn’t decided yet whether he was going to tell the Captain about what had just happened.  If he didn’t, and it came out somehow that he was there at the scene, he’d be clearly guilty of withholding important information relating to a crime.  He’d be risking a demerit, possibly a reprimand, which would mar his otherwise pristine record.  However, if he did tell, the Captain could very well take him off the street for a period of time, and then only after he got reamed for being out in the field alone after the Chief of Detectives had expressly forbidden it.  Hawk didn’t care about getting yelled at, but he wasn’t about to let himself be caged behind a desk for any length of time.  He was going after Stallings.

Raheem Stallings was a minor heroin dealer Hawk had locked up numerous times since he’d worked as a housing cop.  The last time he’d arrested Raheem, he’d found him in a very compromising position.  Hawk and his team had been executing a search warrant at the notorious drug-lord Double Mint’s barber shop, which was really just a front for his drug and skin business.  Double Mint, who weighed no less than 400 pounds and whose real name was Leroy Minty, was Raheem’s boss and master, and, as Hawk discovered to his utter disgust that night, special benefactor, as well.  In Housing, it was known that Double Mint paid his sellers very well to transport drugs and other contraband in their rectums, a talent for which they were remunerated in both cash and product, which they were then free to sell or use as they wished.  Invariably, they used up their stores almost as soon as they earned them.  Thus, they were inextricably bound to Double Mint in the way of addicts to their supplier, as well as employees to boss, which was just the way Minty liked it.  Double Mint had figured out, while sitting in jail for seven-to-ten on an armed robbery, that loyalty from your workers was paramount.  It helped if you had a terrible secret to hold over their heads.

Hawk had jimmied the lock and quietly entered the shop through the back door, moments before the narcotics officers were set to bust in at the front.  A bright, naked bulb hung from a ceiling cord, illuminating an ugly sight.  Raheem was bent over a table with his pants and underwear in a pile at his ankles.  Double was behind him, thrusting his enormous, black penis into Raheem’s anus, his tongue clamped between his teeth, his face a mask of intense concentration.  Hawk must have made some involuntary noise or movement, because suddenly Double Mint turned his head and looked directly at him.  Without a moment’s pause, he smiled at Hawk, and pumped even harder.

The sound of the police banging at the door seemed thunderous and even Hawk was momentarily startled.  Raheem reacted instantly.  He pulled his buttocks away from Double Mint reflexively, frantically reaching down to pull his pants up.  When he straightened, he saw Hawk and screamed in horror.  Double Mint was calmly zipping his pants, registering no emotion except, perhaps, a mild disappointment that his sport had been interrupted before he climaxed.  He made no attempt to hide the drugs or pornographic materials lying all over the place as the police burst in.   He knew he was going back to jail, and though the idea was instinctively objectionable, the reality of it evoked the same apathy Double Mint felt toward any of life’s harsh twists so far.  Incarceration changed his life not one whit.  Freedom meant nothing but having to pay rent and re-familiarizing himself with the drive-thru at the Kentucky Fried Chicken.

But Raheem was not as indifferent or seasoned as his boss, though at that moment, he was least concerned with the prospect of going to jail.  Actually, he was in a state of near paralysis, horrified at having been caught in such a vulnerable position, filled with fear that his humiliating secret would be exposed and he would be relegated to a life in which he would be forever used as someone’s sex slave.  If it ever became known, he would have to run away to a place where no one knew him.  A bleak childhood consisting of being tossed from one foster home to another had made him terrified to be alone in a strange place.

For the duration of the evening, as he was arrested, transported, searched, fingerprinted, and processed, Raheem was driven by a single, burning desire: he had to get rid of the loathsome enemy who had been witness to his unutterable shame.  Raheem could not even look at Hawk when he entered the interview room for fear of what he would see reflected back in those prescient, opaque, gray eyes.  More perilous still, Raheem was certain the cop would be able to recognize the murderous intent in his own eyes.

The night dragged on interminably.  Raheem was dying for it to end, ready to go to jail.  He told the cops everything they wanted to hear as long as the tall, red-haired detective wasn’t in the room.  Whenever Hawk came into the interview room, Raheem became silent and immovable as stone.

That was almost twelve months ago.  Double Mint had been sent upstate for five years, but Raheem had only served a ‘city’ year and now he was back out, crashing on the sofa at his aunt’s apartment in the Ingram housing project, a couple of blocks away from the Stillwell projects.  Raheem was traveling in dangerous circles, these days.  He’d been hanging out with Roger and Curtis Petrie, nineteen-year old twin brothers who were known for their own brand of terror in a place where brutality was built into the landscape and abject cruelty coursed in the veins of its savage inhabitants.  Roger and Curtis were insatiably violent, erupting at the smallest slight, real or imagined.  They regularly beat each other bloody, senseless, although they were identical in every way, including their ferocity, and neither ever won those absurd matches.  In short, they were maniacal psychopaths, so unpredictable and uncontrollable, no gang bothered to recruit them.

But Raheem needed them; they were his cover.  His security was equivocal, however; he was safe only as long as the twins never found out his secret.  For, in the nauseating turbulence of their insane reactions and behaviors, the twins’ most virulent provocation to violence was homosexuals.  No one who wanted to remain living would dare accuse them or one of their “associates” of being gay.

It was common knowledge what Roger and Curtis had done to that faggot teacher at Lincoln High when he’d tried to have them split up and placed in separate classes.  He’d died of internal bleeding, inflicted with a broken broomstick.  Although police always suspected the Petrie twins, they were unable to collect enough evidence to make an arrest.  The case remained unsolved.  No one had claimed to know anything during the investigation, of course, but ever after, residents of the Stillwell projects were careful to give the brothers a very wide berth when they came around.

Except Raheem.  He, of all people, should have kept as far away from them as possible, but he’d come out of jail reckless and furious, bent on revenge against Hawk.  The Petries were just the right kind of vicious thugs to help him.  Unfortunately, Raheem was no better able to perceive the lethal danger to himself by hanging around these two than he was to change the disastrous course of his life.

* * * * *

Hawk entered the holding cell alone, determination glittering in the stony eyes that silently examined Leon Robinson as he stared at his shoes, not bothering to look up.

“I need to piss.”

“What do you know about the hit on that cop?”

“I told y’all everything I know, man.  I ain’t goin’ through it again.  I need to piss.  You gonna violate my rights some more?”

Hawk answered coldly, “What rights are those?”

“All of ‘em.  I been here all day and no one give me nothin’ to eat.  I wanna smoke, I need to piss, and y’all just keep comin’ in here, askin’ me do I know this, do I know that – the same fucking questions night and day.”

“You’ve been here less than three hours.”

Leon rolled his eyes.  “Yeah?  That what it says in the log book?”

“Yup.  Or, maybe I read it wrong.  Maybe it says you’ve been here one hour.”

Leon muttered some obscenity.

“So, what did you hear about this cop?”

“I ain’t talking till you take me for a piss!”

“Fine.”  As Hawk turned and opened the door to leave, he added, “But we’re out of your size pants.”

“Aw fuck you.  Wait a minute.”  Leon finally looked up at Hawk.  “I can’t hold it no more.  Take me to the fuckin’ bathroom and I’ll tell you along the way.”

Hawk uncuffed Leon from the prisoner bar and recuffed his hands behind his back before taking him out of the interview room.  Leon talked the whole way, not even pausing as Hawk uncuffed one hand so he could unzip himself and then recuffed him once he had finished.

“So, what I said is that there’s this cop, they call him The Eagle or The Hawk or something like that, and they all want to waste him, but Stallings, Raheem Stallings, who got out of Rikers the other day and is staying over at Ingram, or somethin’ like that, wants to waste him worst of everybody.  So they was talking about how they was gonna shoot him down.  So, someone was gonna call when the cop showed up and I know they was setting it up for one of these days, today, tomorrow, someday soon.  And then, if no one saw him down there, they was gonna do a fake shooting and Raheem was gonna hide and then when the cops come, he was gonna shoot this bird guy in all the confusion.  And that’s all I know.  That’s it.”

By then, they were back in the interrogation room and Leon was cuffed once again to the prisoner bar.  “Who’s Stallings working with?” Hawk asked.

Leon looked at him squarely in the face, and in a hard voice he said, “I ain’t got no idea.”

“Yes, you do.”  Hawk said it so quietly, so seriously, Leon was struck, suddenly, by the realization that he was in a ton of trouble.   All jocularity disappeared from Leon’s speech and movements.  All the put-on walk-and-talk dissolved like an icicle in August, and the raw, real, Leon Robinson spoke out from behind his black eyes.

“No way, man.  No fucking way I’m going there with you.”

Hawk stared at him.  He was utterly still.  He didn’t even blink.  All those metaphors about how the eyes were the windows to the soul were just childish bits of romantic fantasy, for to look into his eyes was to see nothing of the depth or wrath of the man inside the gray.  On the contrary, their expression was flat, distant, impenetrable.   Leon perceived the detective’s infinite patience and, responding to the pressure he felt emanating from that implacable gaze, he repeated, “No way.”

Hawk realized that no amount of persuasion or coercion would move Robinson to say anything further.  But he really didn’t need anything from him anyway.  It would be an easy thing to find out whom Raheem had been hanging out with since leaving Rikers.  With a shrug, he broke the tension that had settled between them, and let the atmosphere become impersonal once again.  He walked to the door and opened it.  He heard Leon say, “Hey, you know this Hawk guy?”

“Yeah, I know him.”

He paused, waiting to see if Leon had something more to say.  He heard an intake of breath, and then, “Man, it’s you, ain’t it?”

Hawk turned to see Leon staring at him, eyes wide, incredulous.

There was a slight pause before Leon’s eyes narrowed and then he gave a snide, little chuckle.  “Man, they sure do hate your ass.”  The ghetto Leon was back, attitude, posture, belligerence, all slipped neatly back in place.

“What’re you gonna do?”  Hawk closed the door behind him as he stepped into the hall.

* * * * *

“So, what’s the plan?”

Hawk’s shrug was noncommittal which Nick understood to mean, “Wait and see.”

“Just don’t kill him in front of everyone,” Nick said, looking over at his partner sitting silently in the passenger seat.  He knew Hawk was churning with rage, but outwardly, he appeared as calm and aloof as ever.  “We can just pick him up now, nice and easy, save the beating for later.”  He thought a bit of levity might penetrate the wall Hawk had erected.  “We can always send him upstate to keep Double Mint company.” Glancing over again, he saw Hawk staring at him as if he were very far away.  Nick grinned his crooked grin and noticed something flicker in Hawk’s gray eyes, but then it was gone and they were hard once more.

“Don’t worry,” Hawk said finally, looking away again, out the window.

“That’s what you say, but I’ve already been called up twice, and they’ll be looking for us to do something stupid right now.”  To take the edge off his words, Nick added, “Well, I guess we can always go into show business, with my looks and your…”  His let his sentence peter out and looked over to see if Hawk had cracked a smile.  Nothing.  Serious once more, Nick said wistfully, “Sure would hate to lose the pension though.  Wife would be real upset.”

Hawk remained silent for the rest of the way until Nick pulled up beside the curb closest to Building Six of the Stillwell projects.  The records showed that Raheem’s aunt lived in the Ingram Houses, but for some reason Hawk had directed him to park here.

Hawk exited the car and looked around.  He felt strange.  This morning seemed like a thousand years ago.  He saw a large crowd gathered in the courtyard, clogging the footpaths.  Everybody was buzzing excitedly.  The cops that had eventually responded to the complaints of shots fired had apparently disturbed the hive with their intrusive questions; now folks were slow to settle.  Hawk walked through clusters of people who muttered at him as they moved out of his way.  He heard his name but couldn’t make out specific voices or words.  They all knew something was up.  Like sea creatures, residents of the projects were attuned to the fragile equilibrium of their environment; disruptions created ripples that could be felt throughout the ten-block radius.

Within seconds, Hawk’s sharp eyes spotted Raheem standing next to the Petrie brothers, twin monsters he knew very, very well.  They were violent, soulless creatures, the worst kind of criminal: young, pathological, devoid of conscience, utterly impossible to rehabilitate.  Hawk began to move swiftly through the crowd, leaving Nick to follow in his wake.

Raheem’s eyes detected the sudden movement toward him – or perhaps he felt the force of Hawk’s energy coming upon him like a tidal wave – and he immediately turned to run.  The Petrie brothers had neither the time nor the instinct to bar Hawk’s way.  The chase was on.  Hawk swerved to lessen the impact as he ran into bystanders standing stupidly in his way.  He could hear people running behind him and hoped at least one of them was his partner.

He’d run about thirty yards when he caught up with Raheem.  He reached out a long arm and grabbed a fistful of shirt, stopping Raheem short for the split second it took to throw his other arm around Raheem’s neck.   Raheem stumbled, twisted, tried to wrest himself out of Hawk’s talon-like grip, but he couldn’t escape and he fell forward, dragging Hawk down with him.  Hawk crashed to the ground, falling partially on top of Raheem, his left knee smashing into the pavement.  He heard the awful pop a moment before he felt the pain, but his involuntary groan was lost in the din of Raheem’s shouts as he thrashed wildly beneath him.

“Get off me, motherfucker, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you,” Raheem screamed.  His words were choked off abruptly as Hawk’s arm tightened around his throat.

“This is how you like it, isn’t it Raheem?” Hawk seethed in his ear, loudly enough for the gathering crowd to hear.

“No, no, no,” Raheem howled at the top of his lungs, still struggling fiercely, trying to drown out Hawk’s words before he could speak his death sentence.

Like a wrestler, Hawk jerked Raheem’s writhing body from side to side so that Raheem couldn’t gain a foothold, slamming him again and again into the pavement.  He was, himself, in excruciating pain, and each time his knee hit the pavement, mind-numbing agony coursed through his body, but his rage was boundless and it carried him through the pain.

Finally, Raheem tired and stopped fighting, relaxing in defeat in Hawk’s grip.  Hawk let him go and Raheem got shakily to his feet.  By dint of his iron will, Hawk rose to his feet as well, though he could not suppress a grimace when he bent his left knee.  Panting, Raheem stared at Hawk.  He was pale, sweaty, his eyes wide with fear.

“You tried to kill me today,” Hawk said in a deadly calm voice.

Raheem knew it was meant to be rhetorical, that Hawk knew everything, but he could not prevent his lips from spilling a denial.  “No, no, it wasn’t me.”  Panic made his voice quiver.

“Don’t deny it.  I know it was you.  And I know why, too.”

Raheem’s eyes pleaded with him, their expression one of such complete desperation, Hawk nearly relented.  But then an image of his children standing beside his grave flashed hot, like lightning, in his mind, and his chiseled face turned to granite.

Hawk’s eyes were glacial as he spoke his next, fatal words.  “You don’t want everyone here to know what I know.”

Raheem muttered a tiny, “Please,” his eyes flicking to the crowd of faces around them to see who was listening.  The silence was electric as the audience waited for Hawk to speak.  Raheem didn’t even realize he was shaking his head, dumbly, back and forth, like a cow at slaughter.  He wanted to apologize, to take it back; he fervently wished he had never provoked this white bastard who had the power to ruin his life.  It was so unfair!  But even as he thought those things, part of him was devising a new plan to kill this cop he detested more than anyone else alive.  Fury at the failure of those idiots he had entrusted to help him get the job done surged through him in the instant before Hawk spoke.

“You don’t want everyone here to know that you’re a homo.  That I saw you doing it with your boss, isn’t that right Raheem?  Your dirty little secret was safe with me. You should have left well enough alone.”

A murmur went through the crowd.  Hawk turned away, steeling himself against the throbbing in his leg, willing himself not to show how bad the pain was.  Raheem shouted behind him, “It was me who tried to kill you, motherfucker!  I confess, okay?  Attempted murder.  Arrest me!  Arrest me!”

Hawk kept going.  He had no intention of taking Raheem into his protective custody.  Nick fell in beside him and the two walked slowly through the throngs, back toward the car.

“Okay?” Nick asked.

“Mmmhmm,” Hawk answered, and said nothing more.  In the car, he leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes, pretending to sleep while Nick drove back to the station.

At the precinct, Hawk quickly swallowed a handful of pain-killers before answering Captain McKinney’s summons to meet him in the lieutenant’s office.  After an hour of what felt more like an interrogation than a debriefing, the Captain asked Hawk if he wanted to make an appointment with the psychologist.  Hawk looked at him coolly and remained silent despite feeling lightheaded and exhausted following the events of this interminable day, not to mention the pain and persistent throbbing of his inflamed, injured knee.

“Well, we’ll talk about that later,” the Captain said, gruffly, suddenly unable to meet Hawk’s eyes.

* * * * *

Three days later, Raheem Stallings’ body was found down by the canal, violated, mutilated.  There were no witnesses and no leads and the corpse had been washed clean of any potential DNA by the polluted waters of the canal.  Other than a brief blurb in the crime section of the local evening newspaper, his passing was neither noted nor mourned.

On the long drive in to work he put the radio on low and thought about the day ahead.  He and Nick were going to hit Teresa Mackey’s place early again in the hopes her son Chris was hiding out there.  It was Hawk’s practice – and it usually proved successful – to start knocking on doors in the very early morning hours, when people were most likely still sleeping and off their guard, even though that meant he got only a few hours of sleep himself.  Actually, Hawk couldn’t remember a night where he’d gotten enough sleep.  Often it was only four or five hours; never more than six.

Even on his days off, Hawk couldn’t sleep longer.  At times, he slept so little he wondered how he didn’t fall asleep on the hour-and-a-half long drive to and from work.  Yet, for all that, he had never taken a sick day, he racked up five hundred hours of overtime each year without even trying and after every week-long vacation he was forced to take twice a year, he was chomping at the bit to get back to work.

The truth was, the job was his life, and despite the growing tension and discord at home, Hawk expressed no desire or intention to resist its all-consuming hold upon him.  Naturally, there were aspects of it he didn’t like: the mindless bureaucracy, the arbitrary rules he broke without remorse, the tedium of filling out all the paperwork in triplicate, the frustration of constantly having to pick up the slack of lazy, incompetent colleagues.  But the work itself was thrilling and more addictive than any drug his perps could smoke, inject, inhale or ingest.   He loved investigating all kinds of cases: homicides, robberies, shootings, stabbings, rapes, home invasions, grand larcenies, kidnappings, missings, suicides.  He got a huge adrenalin rush scouring crime scenes for clues, interviewing witnesses, discovering the “break”, tracking down and apprehending defendants, getting them to talk.  The only cases he truly detested were domestic violence.  Hawk had his own reasons, but really, everybody hated them.  Playing mediator to a violent, co-dependent couple always turned out to be either a colossal waste of time because ninety-five percent of the victims of domestic abuse changed their minds about pressing charges, or exceedingly dangerous when either or both, or sometimes the whole household turned suddenly on the cops.  It got so it became impossible to tell who was the aggressor, who the victim, and it was hard to dredge up compassion when they dragged everyone else into their cycle of violence, especially the kids.  But other than that, the job was better than a seventh playoff game of NBA basketball.

Hawk didn’t even mind the part so many detectives hated and ardently resisted: going to court.  He got along well with the assistant district attorneys and actually enjoyed hanging out in their offices waiting to testify in the Grand Jury or at trial.  Most cops distrusted attorneys and it was commonplace to hear veterans warn rookies against mistaking the ADAs for friends or allies in law enforcement.  But Hawk felt differently.  He saw the district attorneys as part of his team, committed to building the case after his initial investigative work was done, making sure the perp he arrested and took off the street got convicted and stayed off the street.  He knew they felt the same way about him, and he was rather proud of his popularity among the ADAs.   Whenever he poked his head into their offices to say hello, they always invited him in, included him in their conversations.  They talked shop in a cerebral, thought-provoking way that cops never did, perhaps couldn’t do.  He loved it.

While in college, Hawk had briefly considered going to law school.  His mother had encouraged the idea, but he hadn’t pursued it once he was accepted into the police academy.   He had no regrets about that, but a certain intelligence factor was missing from his daily life and he sometimes felt as if he had become dull and stupid for the company he kept.

*****

By the time Patrick Callahan got to the precinct a little after 8:30 a.m., Hawk and Nick had already come and gone from Chris Mackey’s mother’s house with no success.  Nick was still chuckling over how mad Teresa Mackey had been when she saw that it was Hawk again at the door.  She had let loose such a foul stream of curses even Nick was astonished.  She was sixty-five, after all.  He expected an elderly woman to be more, well, decorous; certainly not as vulgar as the younger generations of harsh, irreverent gangsters and degenerates.  However, Hawk was pleased, because during her sleep-deprived tirade, Teresa had given them an important clue to finding her son.  Hawk immediately raced back to the station house and had been pecking earnestly at the computer ever since, waiting impatiently for Patrick to come in.

Callahan made his typical dramatic, excuse-filled entrance, but Hawk, hyped up and ready to go, refrained from voicing a well-deserved, sarcastic comment about Patrick being so old and slow he couldn’t be expected to show up to work on time.  The minute Patrick signed in, Hawk called to him and Nick that it was time to move.

“Where’re we going?” Nick asked, grabbing the keys to one of the squad cars.

“Road trip,” Hawk grinned, raising his eyebrows meaningfully while giving an almost imperceptible jerk of his head in Patrick’s direction.

Nick understood well enough not to ask anything further until they were in the car.  No one on the squad was lazier than Patrick – except maybe Laverne, and, well, Mike, if he could be considered “on” the squad.  It was universally known that if Callahan could find a way to get out of going into the field, even just to pick up an apprehended perp, he would.

True to form, Patrick already had a pretext for begging off.  “I hope it’s not far, boys.  I gotta leave early today.  The kid’s got a thing at school.”

That was the wrong thing to say.  Hawk gritted his teeth in anger.  Every cop on the force had had to miss countless milestones in his family’s lives: birthdays, little league, a school play.  But it was an unwritten rule that you never used your kids as a reason for not responding to a job.  If you absolutely needed the day for something like that, you switched your tour or took the day without pay and made it up to your partners another day.

Patrick’s hubris was just part of what Hawk found so insulting.  He was also unabashedly selfish, inconsiderate, and his misplaced sense of entitlement and superiority violated the most basic rules of partnership.  No one wanted to work with him, least of all his assigned partner, Gerard, and the detectives all privately counted the days until he retired.  In the squad’s eyes, Patrick was dead, stinking weight.

Only when they were about thirty minutes out of the City and too far to turn back, did Hawk called the precinct to tell the sergeant they were on their way to Albany to pick up Chris Mackey.  Patrick was furious.  He thought about ordering Nick to pull over and drop him off, but he knew it would make him look like a pansy, and Patrick was an old, macho dog who had a lot to prove.  Instead, he barked at Nick to go faster any time he dropped below ninety miles per hour, as he fumed in the back seat, despising these young, arrogant show-offs who refused to toe the line like they should or show their superiors proper respect.

He particularly disliked Hawk, whose ambition to make the next grade was so transparent, and whose workaholic habits made the rest of them look bad in the eyes of the captain and the chief.  Patrick would have been doubly incensed if he could have seen Hawk’s satisfied smile as he looked out the window at the gray and green smear of the Empire State streaking past.  He was in a good mood.

“What?” Nick asked, glancing over at his partner grinning like a jackal.

“That was funny, this morning.”

Nick laughed.  He knew Patrick was mad but, with the typical middle child, peace-maker mentality, Nick tried to defuse the tension by including him in the conversation.  Looking in the rear view mirror at Patrick, Nick said, “So, you know how we’ve been looking for Shaquana Howard for the past few months, right?”

Patrick didn’t answer, but Nick could tell he was listening because the muscle in his jaw pulsed.  Clapping his hand on Hawk’s shoulder, Nick continued.

“So, this crazy sonofabitch goes into the Whitfield houses this morning with about a hundred ‘wanted’ posters to replace the ones he already put up everywhere that got torn down two minutes after he left ‘em.  So, me and Bobby are, like, ‘What’s the goddamned point?’  Right?  I mean, they’re tearing ‘em down faster than he can stick ‘em up.  So, like usual, he says he’s got an idea.  So, we go there, and next thing you know, he’s jumping up, like seven, eight feet, sticking those things practically on the ceiling, too high up for normal people to reach.  But he’s not satisfied with that, so then we’re on the roof and he says, ‘Hold my feet,’ and next thing, he’s leaning over the edge of the roof, shimmying down the wall, plastering flyers like wallpaper on the side of the building while I’m holding his legs and laughing my ass off.  And people are coming out to look at Evel Knievel over here, and I swear, I nearly dropped him over the side of that building.”

“Bet they’re still there, though,” Hawk said, grinning.

“Yeah, well maybe you’ll catch her trying to tear ‘em down.”

“Yeah, or maybe someone else will see the poster now, before she has a chance to tear ‘em all down. “

“Yeah, but it’ll have to be someone tall.  Like maybe your C.I. from the Delarose case.  Isn’t he, like, seven feet tall?”

“Yeah, but that guy moved to Georgia last year.  He was a great informant though.  Remember the time…”

The rest of the drive to Albany was a trip down memory lane as Hawk and Nick recalled the more comical arrests and mishaps they had had together on the job.  Patrick alternately dozed and sulked in the back seat.

As they entered the city, Hawk called ahead to the local precinct, asking the officers to meet him at the address he’d found for Chris Mackey’s sister.  Just  before slamming the door in his face this morning, Teresa Mackey had unwittingly given him the precious nugget of information that led him here.  Y’all done chased my whole family outa this city, my daughter, my granbaby, now my boy Chris.  Denise, she a nurse in a big hospital, you know, doin’ good, helpin’ people, which is more ‘n I can say for you. Y’all done made it so I gotta travel up there, more ‘n two and a half hours on the Amtrak, jes’ to see my grandson.  I know what y’all doin’, y’all tryin’ to chase me on up there, too, with all this comin’ ‘round y’all doin’, but no matter how y’alls keep harassin’ me, I ain’t goin’.  You hear me Hawk, I ain’t leavin’. 

It was a small matter after that, finding an address for Denise Mackey Woods, registered nurse, in downtown Albany.

They found the duplex and parked across the street just as the local police pulled up in their vehicle. As Hawk got out of the car, he was assailed by a shock of cold wind which had the effect of a surprise slap after the warmth of the car.  Patrick woke up, cross of course, and got out of the car, stretching like a beat up old tomcat with a crick in its spine.  Hawk noticed how tightly Patrick’s shirt pulled across his belly, which, after twenty-six years on the force, had become soft and fleshy.  Nothing repulsed Hawk more than a slovenly police officer and he swore to himself, not for the first time, that he would never allow his body to look like that.

In fact, there was little chance of Hawk becoming flabby any time this decade.  He was as slim as he had always been, including during his years playing hockey, lacrosse, and basketball.  But secretly, Hawk was unhappy with his lack of definition.  His chest and stomach used to be visibly muscled.  He had even been asked to model back when he was playing ball in college.  He’d cooperated as far as posing for photographs, some even bare-chested, but he felt embarrassed by all the attention and found the whole process boring and ridiculous.

In essence, with all things outside of police work, Hawk was shy.  He could never get used to being looked at.  His shield was literal; he felt naked without it.  From a very young age Hawk knew he wanted to be a New York City cop, and that’s what he was.  His mother had insisted upon his going to college, and he was glad now that he had, though he hadn’t fully realized its importance back then.  He went because he’d always tried to accommodate his mother’s wishes as long as they didn’t infringe upon or directly contradict his own.  His acute sensitivity and sense of responsibility toward her had undoubtedly arisen out of the death of his father, though he had been a good boy, if somewhat mischievous, before that.  His mother, too, made efforts to be reasonable in her requests, careful not to impose too many constraints upon him.  She was grateful to have such a good son and thanked God he’d turned into a good man who was very like his father: kind, not too selfish, protective of those he loved, deeply committed to justice.  Those traits and values had existed in her boy always, before his father was killed.  All she had to do was keep him warm and fed, secure in his home.  That had been hard enough, but she had managed to keep him alive until he was mature enough to take responsibility for his own life.

Despite his mother’s aspirations for him, Hawk never seriously entertained law.  The minute he finished undergrad, he signed up for the NYPD.  It suited him then and it suited him still.  When he had mentioned to one of the ADAs that he was due to retire in five or six years, she joked that that could never happen for it was completely evident he had no other interests.  Hawk had smiled at that, but privately, he contemplated his options.  If pressed for an answer, he thought he might like to teach.  He’d taken a police- science course in high school and had enjoyed it.  He thought he could do that.

But these and other thoughts of change made him anxious.  There was enough to keep him occupied and interested in the present; he preferred not to think about the unknowable future.

Hawk strolled down the block perusing the buildings and their scrawny, frozen, fenced-in side yards, ignoring Nick and Patrick who stood conspicuously on the sidewalk in front of the house, talking to the local police.  When he’d seen enough, Hawk caught Nick’s eye and rolled his own toward the house.

“The back?”

“Nowhere to go from there.  But maybe that door,” Hawk answered, pointing to the left side of the house, to a door that led to the basement.

“Okay.  Got it,” Nick replied as he moved, casually, closer to the house.

Hawk climbed the steps to the front door, watching the shaded front windows as he ascended.  He knocked.  He saw a slight movement from behind the curtain at the window and called out, “Police!  Open up.”  Naturally, no one answered.  Hawk tried the knob.  It was locked.

Patrick called out, “Not without a warrant, you don’t!”

Hawk turned toward the local cops.  “You saying I need a warrant?”  As they hesitated, Hawk added, “because I think there may be a hostage situation in there.”

“Get a warrant,” ordered Patrick.  Hawk looked at him coldly for a long moment.  He glanced at Nick’s worried face – Nick tended to defer to Patrick’s experience, though Hawk felt such deference was utterly undeserved – and shifted his gaze to the two local cops.

“There’s someone in there.  Could be a fugitive.  I’m opening the door.”

The two police officers came immediately up the stairs.  Hawk turned to the door, calling out, “Police, open up.  If you don’t, we’re going to break down the door.”

The door opened instantly.  Hawk saw a tall, skinny boy, approximately 15-years old, standing barefoot in jeans and a sleeveless undershirt.

“You alright?” Hawk asked him.

“Yeah.”

“Who’s here with you?”
“Huh?”  The boy looked nervous.

“Who else is in the house?”

“No one.”

“No one?”

“Nuh uh.”

“So who was that who just looked out from behind the curtain?”

“Oh, that was me.”

“Oh yeah?  You changed your shirt that fast, huh?”  It was more a guess than a certainty.  Hawk hadn’t really seen the color of the shirt of the person behind the curtain, but he didn’t think it was white.

“Oh, yeah, I, uh, took off my sweatshirt when I came to answer the door.”

“You took off your sweatshirt to open the door?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, okay.  Where’s Chris?”

“Who?”

“You know who I’m talking about.  What, is he your brother?”

“No, he’s not my brother.”

Score.  From the cop’s expression, the boy realized he’d given something away.  He didn’t want to get caught lying, so he added cautiously, “He’s my uncle.”

Suddenly, Hawk felt sorry for this kid.  His depraved, fugitive uncle was hiding out somewhere in the apartment and that bastard had no compunction about sending his young nephew out to get rid of the police.  There were all kinds of hostages, he thought.

“Where’s your mother?”

“At work.”

“We want to talk to her.  Can we come in?”

“Well, she’s not home.”

“Maybe you can call her.  How come you’re not in school today?”

“Uh, I’m sick.”

“Okay.  Well, call your mother.  We can check up on that with her.”  Another guess.

“Um, she doesn’t like me to call her at work unless it’s an emergency.”

“Kid, you got five cops standing here outside your door.  I’d say that’s an emergency.”  He hated to do it.  He hated the scared, powerless look that crossed the kid’s face.

“Um, okay.  You can come in.”

“Thanks,” said Hawk as he gently, but firmly, pushed his way past the door before the kid changed his mind.  The local officers followed him in and started searching the apartment.  Patrick and Nick remained outside.  Nick drew his gun and guarded the possible escape route.

Hawk casually glanced around the living room.  The kid stood there, looking nervous and frightened, his hands shoved into his pants pockets.

“What’ve you got?”  Hawk attempted to ease the boy’s anxiety.

“Huh?”

“What’s the matter with you?  What are you sick from?”

“Oh.  A stomach ache.”

“Sit down if you want.”  The boy sat.  “Who do you live with?”

“My mom.”

“What grade are you in?”

“Ninth.”

“How’re you doing in school?”

“Okay.”

“Play basketball?”

“Yeah.”

“Position?”

“Guard.”

“I played shooting guard in college.”

The boy glanced up.  Hawk saw that he was a bit calmer now.  He seemed like a nice enough kid.

“You any good?” he asked.

“Good enough.”  A tiny note of pride crept into the boy’s voice.

“Good enough for what?  You planning on going to college?”

“Could do.”

“Well, you better not go down your uncle Chris’ road, then.”

Very quietly, the boy asked, “What’d he do?”

“Stabbed somebody.”  Hawk didn’t elaborate.  What purpose would it serve to tell this kid that his uncle Chris had stabbed a fifty-three year old store owner twelve times in the torso with a screwdriver for refusing to let him pay for a soda with a stolen credit card?

“Oh.”  It was so soft, it was nearly a whisper.

The cops came into the living room after searching the bedrooms, shaking their heads.  “He’s not here.”

The boy looked up, directly at Hawk.  There was an unmistakable, conflicted look in his eyes that Hawk had seen before.  The boy wanted to tell him something, but was bound to keep his secret.  They were not three feet apart from each other, yet it was as if they stood on opposite sides of a vast, unbridgeable chasm.

After their pronouncement that the place was clean, the cops headed toward the entrance.  Hawk called out for them to wait a minute.  He moved quickly down the hallway, glancing into the open bedrooms the officers had just searched.  To his right was the kitchen.  Hawk turned on the light and went in.  He stood still for a moment. The only sound was a wall clock ticking over a small round breakfast table.  Something was wrong.  It took no longer than a second for him to notice that the refrigerator was not flush against the wall, but protruded too far into the room.  Hawk walked over to the fridge and leaned against it hard, pushing it back toward the wall.

“Ow.”

Instantly, Hawk was pulling the refrigerator away from the wall with both hands, turning it sideways so he could look behind.  Chris Mackey peered up from where he’d been crouching.  He was covered in gray dust.

“Hawk?”

Hawk grinned with satisfaction as he moved aside so Chris could stand up and step out from behind the fridge.

“You came all this way for me?” Chris looked over his shoulder as he turned his back and put his wrists together behind him so Hawk could cuff him. “You sure take your job serious.”  He seemed proud to have earned such attention from the NYPD.

Hawk shrugged.  “What’re you gonna do?”

Chris walked ahead of him to the front door.  The boy stood in the living room, silently watching them go.  Hawk said nothing, but he shook his head slightly behind Chris, as if to assure the boy that he would not implicate him in any of this.  An intense flash of emotion – rage? shame? hatred? – shone in the kid’s black eyes and then was gone.  Hawk closed the door behind him.

On the way back from Albany, Hawk sat in the back with Mackey while Nick drove and Patrick brooded, staring unseeingly out of the front passenger window, now and then urging Nick to drive faster.  Nick was happy to comply, merrily speeding on the highway, singing along with the radio.  His euphoric mood was partly relief: being partnered with a guy like Hawk was like living on the edge, of Niagara fucking Falls.  He played by his own rules, taking risks that worried Nick although he’d never admit it.    Nick was careful not to show his doubt or do anything to undermine their relationship, which was so much more than a friendship, or a professional partnership.   However, Hawk’s methods sometimes left him anxious and shaken.  In the past ten years, Nick had been called up twice for possible misconduct, and though he’d been exonerated both times, he knew he had to be careful.  He couldn’t tell his wife about it, even a whitewashed version, because she would be frightened he would lose his job.  Besides, she loved Hawk.  Sometimes he thought she showed it a bit too much, but women always acted weird around Hawk.  Nick knew nothing would ever happen between them – Hawk was his partner, his best friend, his brother in arms.  Their lives depended on their absolute, mutual trust.

Patrick was preoccupied, as always, with his immediate wants and needs.  He was unimpressed by yet another example of Hawk’s unorthodox methods and waste of resources in apprehending a suspect who would eventually have returned to the City on his own.  As far as he was concerned, this new generation of detectives had no respect for the position or power he had attained, and frankly, he intended to continue to avoid working with them whenever possible.  He wouldn’t reject an opportunity to bring this boy down a notch or two if one arose, but for now, he just wanted to get back and clock out.

Hawk was remembering his own experience of ninth grade.  He thought about the boy and wondered what his future would be.   He could imagine nothing.

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.

“Jesus, it’s hot,” said Nick, as they drove slowly down Grand Avenue.

Hawk didn’t answer.  He didn’t need to.  His partner knew exactly what he would have said, anyway: What are you gonna do?  It was Hawk’s trademark, a verbal expression of his practical approach to those things in life that could not be changed and therefore had to be accepted; and then, of course, summarily ignored.

The detectives’ eyes moved constantly, each staring intently out his window, scanning the crowded, color-drenched street for that one particular face or a sudden movement among the throngs.

Hawk was remembering the last time he saw Tyrone.  It was about a year ago, a real scorcher like this one, when the City was like Hell: sticky, sweaty, full of irritations that too quickly escalated into savage violence.  It was never clear what started the altercation, and later, no one would say exactly who was involved, but Tyrone’s niece, a little girl of nine, was caught in the crossfire.  She took a bullet in the back and died in the street.

“How can all these people be out here in this heat?” Nick complained, bringing his partner back to the present.

“Can’t stay inside.  No one can afford air-conditioning anymore.”

“Tell me about it.  I told my wife to go live with her mother till the Fall.”

“Where does that put you?”

“In the doghouse.”

Hawk laughed.  Then, suddenly, he was opening his door and jumping out of the moving car.  “That’s him,” he called behind him and was off running.

Nick hit the accelerator, making a screeching right turn onto Payton Lane, which led directly into the projects.  He saw Hawk streak by, a white blur flying between buildings C-South and D-South.  It looked like Tyrone was aiming for A-East, but Hawk was closing the distance fast.  Tyrone zig-zagged a few times, trying to throw off the hunter that hounded him, but Hawk was no amateur and could not be tricked so easily.  Tyrone would have to take this inside.

Nick saw him turn sharply left.  Oh no.  He was headed straight for E-North, the worst building in the Carrington housing project – maybe of all the projects in Brooklyn – sometimes referred to as Evil North, but most commonly known as The Jungle.  Hawk was in for a very hard chase, and now, Nick thought, the outcome was no longer certain.  Nick quashed his doubts immediately for fear of jinxing his partner.  Cops were a superstitious lot.  Besides, his worry was more habitual than realistic considering that Hawk rarely, if ever, lost his prey.  He was the fastest runner Nick had ever seen.

Hawk had been athletic in his youth, though, surprisingly, he had never gone out for track and field.  He played basketball, lacrosse and hockey throughout high school and college.  Now, at thirty-seven, Hawk was in better shape than Nick had been since leaving the academy.

Not that Nick was soft or past his own prime.  He was good-looking in a boyish way, with blue eyes and an abundance of light brown, wavy hair.  When he smiled he had dimples.  He was charming, playful, easy-going; women loved him and he knew it.  The female ADAs nicknamed him Kenickie, from the movie “Grease”, and Nick was secretly pleased by it.

Hawk, on the other hand, with his narrow, chiseled face and serious expression, looked stern and forbidding unless he was smiling.  His slate gray eyes were hooded and aloof; it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.  At 6’4”, Hawk was half a foot taller than Nick, and though he looked slim in his clothes, he was 200 pounds of nails.  Hawk was able – and often required – to take on much bigger, heavier opponents, laying them flat on the ground in seconds.  He moved with the speed and precision of his namesake, and nowhere was this more evident than when he was chasing a perp who was trying to outrun him.

Nick could see why women were attracted to Hawk, even though they were more cautious around him.  It took them a while to realize that the severity of his looks was not reflective of his personality, but the effect of his unselfconscious masculinity was immediate: women automatically acted more feminine around him.  And, of course, when he chose to flash that rare smile of his, they seemed willing to do anything he asked.  Yeah, Nick thought, he and Hawk made a very good team.

He watched as Hawk ran into The Jungle after Tyrone.  He noticed two uniformed cops, out on foot patrol, standing nearby, doing nothing.  They had seen Hawk chasing Tyrone at a dead run, but that had produced no reaction from them.  Rookies, he thought angrily.  He sped across the grass, driving right up to the iron gate at the entrance to the small courtyard in front of E-North.  He tore out of the car, shouting back over his shoulder at the uniformed officers to get their asses over there.  They roused themselves with a jerk, as if from a dream, and came running toward him as he entered the broken, dilapidated front lobby.  It was airless, humid as a sauna, stinking of sweat and garbage.  Who could possibly run in this?

Nick stopped at the back hallway leading to stairwell B and cocked his head to listen for sounds of the chase.

But by then, Hawk was halfway up stairwell C, still in hot pursuit.  It was pitch black in the stairwell and the stench of urine and feces was overpowering.  Trash clogged the stairs, everything from used needles and crack pipes to soaked, rancid blankets and empty White Castle wrappers, for this was where many of the addicts camped out each night.  Stairwell C was the deepest, blackest part of The Jungle; Tyrone knew what he was doing, luring Hawk in there.  Usually, the stairs, coated with layers of filth and slime accumulated over decades, were slippery, dangerous to navigate.  Today, factoring in the overbearing heat and humidity, they were positively lethal.

An inexperienced cop would probably have gagged, given up the chase.  Not Hawk.  The adrenalin coursed through him as he concentrated on not slipping as he ran up, up, gripping the handrails, hauling himself up two stairs at a time.  Now he was one flight away from Tyrone, who was crashing about, making a lot of noise as he, too, tried to avoid slipping on the stairs.  Tyrone was kicking garbage down behind him in an attempt to impede Hawk’s progress.  Each time something wet and reeking slapped against Hawk’s face or body, he accelerated.  He was like a hard rain turned torrential downpour, fairly flying up the stairs.  Tyrone was panting painfully, slowing down, his heart beating frantically in fear and exhaustion before the cop’s relentless advance.

Just before the fifth floor landing, eight stairs below where Tyrone had stopped and was gasping for air, Hawk felt his hands touch upon some slimy substance coating the rail.  He lost his grip a second before his feet lost touch with the stairs; he was airborne.  He felt himself falling backward as if in slow motion.  His one clear thought was that this was going to hurt.

He heard the thud as his body hit the fourth floor landing.  He lay there stunned, trying to discern the damage.  He had struck several stairs on his way down and he could feel the sharp pain in his side where he knew at least one rib was broken.  His right hand throbbed painfully, and he felt the skin tightening at his fingers as it swelled.  It, too, was  broken, but Hawk was relieved; it was not his shooting hand.

Before he could take full inventory of his injuries, Hawk heard Tyrone’s boots crushing glass and aluminum cans on the steps right above him.  His heart lurched in his chest.  Tyrone was coming down!  Hawk’s left hand automatically grabbed for his gun, causing an excruciating stab of fire at his ribs.  He forced back a groan.  He struggled to roll onto his right side so he could try to sit up, but the agony was too great and he lay back gasping, gripping the gun, breathing slowly, deliberately through the pain, willing himself not to pass out.  He did not allow his mind to wander back to the conversation he had had with Nick last week about why he never wore his vest.  He knew there was only one reason Tyrone would come back.  He told himself that if he died now, at least Nick would know who did it.  Maybe Tyrone would even be stupid enough to shoot him with the same gun he used in that robbery last week.

It was darker than night, but Hawk thought he could see the dense black shape of Tyrone’s tall frame crouching near him, a few steps from his left elbow.  He slowly eased the gun from its holster, purposely giving a hurt moan to drown out any sound of the gun brushing against the leather.  In one split second, he would be pointing it in Tyrone’s face.  He listened with every particle of his being for the click of Tyrone’s finger on the trigger of his own gun.

“Hawk?  Man, you hurt?”

“Just lying here in this garbage ‘cause I got sleepy,” he panted.

He did not shout out as Tyrone’s hands reached beneath his armpits and pulled him up to a sitting position.  Smoothly, surreptitiously, he holstered his gun and then grabbed Tyrone’s shoulder with his good hand, letting himself be dragged up till he was standing.  He inhaled raggedly, still leaning on Tyrone’s shoulder, as he waited for his legs to stop trembling.  He nearly vomited from the pain.  When he could balance on his own , he reached behind him, though it was agony to do so, unhooked his handcuffs, and snapped them onto Tyrone’s loose wrists in one swift move.  He was dizzy and his head was pounding.

“You arresting me?  Man, I just helped you.  I coulda left you lying here all damn day!”

“Thank you for helping me, Tyrone.  Really.  But look at it this way: none of this would have happened if you didn’t rob Pedro Ortiz’s bodega and shoot him in the chest in front of a store full of witnesses.”   Hawk fought a shudder and hoped he wasn’t going to be sick.  Throwing up would just be too painful to withstand.

“Man, that was not me.  I don’t even go into Ortiz’s.”

“Did I mention a store full of witnesses?”

“He’s a thief hisself.  You see what he charges for beer?  You should arrest his ass, not mine.”

“You know, Tyrone, if you came back to help me you can’t be all bad.  Why don’t you change your ways and stop robbing people for a living?  You can live a decent life.”

“Yeah, what kinda life is that, Detective?  Where I’m gonna live that life you describing?  ‘Cause it shore ain’t here in these projects.  Look around you.  This is where I live.  You got ideas how to make it decent?”

“Yeah, I do.  Work for us.  We pay up to a thousand dollars a gun.”

“You want me to be a snitch?  You think that’s decent?”

“Saving lives is decent.  Earning a living by giving us information that we’re just gonna get anyway is a whole lot better than shooting old men in bodegas for a lousy three-hundred bucks.”

“Four-fifty.  And keep your voice down.  You’re gonna get me killed in a minute.”

“Okay,” Hawk said, lowering his voice though they had been talking pretty quietly all along.  “But think about it.”

“Yeah, I’m thinking.  I’m thinking.”  Hawk could tell he really was.

They emerged from Stairwell C just as Nick and the two uniforms burst into the lobby out of Stairwell B.  Nick took one look at his partner and had to stop himself from punching Tyrone in the face.  With a pointed look and a small shake of Hawk’s head, Nick whirled upon the two rookies and, in his most imperious, condescending tone, told them to put Tyrone in the car.  As they led Tyrone away, Nick overheard one of the cops say, “That was him.  The one that got the medal for taking down Carl Armstrong in that shootout couple years ago. They call him The Hawk, I think.”

Nick looked back at Hawk to see if he’d heard it, too.  Hawk was grinning, albeit somewhat sickly.  He’d heard.

“You smug bastard.  Look at you, you look like you’ve been in The Jungle for a month.  And you reek.”

Still trying to smile despite the pain that seared like fire throughout his entire body, Hawk said, “What are you gonna do?”

“Man, you’re gonna stink up that car.  Glad it’s not mine.”

They made their way slowly toward the car, Nick muttering epithets relating to Hawk’s noxious presence, and Hawk hobbling along, trying not to jar the left side of his ribcage while cradling his right hand.

Nick glanced at him and then kept his eyes focused straight ahead.  He knew his partner was hurting, but as long as he could walk out of The Jungle on his own two feet, he was going to be alright.  “How many did you break this time?”

“Maybe just one.  Two, at most.”

“Hospital or EMS at the squad?”

“The hand’s definitely broken.  It’ll have to be the hospital.  But take me to the squad first.  I need a shower.”

“Uh huh, I know why you want to go to the House first.  You want everyone to see how messed up you are.  Maybe earn yourself another medal, huh?”

“Please,” Hawk winced, “don’t make me laugh.”

“Did I ever tell you the one about the cop, the priest and the lawyer?”

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.

“We got maggots and a strong odor, 816 Mercy Ave., multiple dwelling, Apartment 5-B.”

“A D.O.A. to start the day,” Mike said cheerfully.

In fact, the day had started some time ago for everyone but Mike who usually sauntered in an hour later than shift time and schmoozed with the sergeant so no one could say anything to him.

Hawk had already been out in the field and back by the time Mike came in.  He was frustrated because he still hadn’t found Taniqua Moreland even though he’d knocked on her mother’s door at 5:30 a.m. for perhaps the twelfth time.  He had been looking for Taniqua for the past two months for slashing her ex-boyfriend’s pregnant girlfriend in the stomach.  The injuries hadn’t been life-threatening, but Taniqua was getting more and more out of control and it was time they got her off the street for a while.

Now, back at the precinct, Hawk was trying to close out some of his cases.  He liked this part of his job least, not only because of the extensive paperwork – a cop’s worst nightmare – but because he hated to leave cases unsolved.  The problem wasn’t that the cases were unsolvable.  It was that the detectives didn’t have enough time to work on each one properly.  Homicides, robberies, shootings, rapes, stabbings and, of course, missings were the top priorities and there were so many of those, with more piling up each day, that the non-violent cases or those requiring more intricate investigation often got placed on the back burner.  Six weeks went by without an opportunity to work on those kinds of cases and then the pressure began from above: unsolveds had to be closed.  He looked up just as Greg’s eyes lit on him.

“You up for it?”

Like all real cops, Hawk preferred action to paperwork.  “Yeah,” he said, logging out of the computer, closing the folder.  What was one more day on this open Identity Theft?  Maybe he’d get lucky and get a hit on the case.  It wasn’t likely, but anything was possible.

“It’s maggots,” Greg said.

Hawk shrugged.  “What are you gonna do?”

Nick was on vacation this week, which meant that they were stuck with Mike on their team.  On the way over to Mercy Ave., he sat in the back cracking jokes.  Neither Hawk nor Greg bothered to laugh.  They were sick of Mike, but there was nothing they could do about him, so they tolerated him as best they could and went about police business as if he weren’t there.

Hawk drove up to the building entrance, automatically scanning the area for prospective witnesses.  No one was about, which was unusual.  He wondered what was going on.  He glanced over at Greg and saw that he was noticing the same thing.

Greg was a decent enough cop, though the ADAs didn’t like him.  He had a reputation among the prosecutors for being lazy and sloppy, which wasn’t wholly wrong, but it wasn’t wholly right, either.  Greg just didn’t like to go to ‘court’ (which, in police jargon, included the D.A.’s office).  He felt it was a waste of his time and he didn’t see why he had to go down to their office to discuss a case when he could do that perfectly well over the phone and then just show up to testify if it became necessary later on.  The attorneys resented Greg’s arrogance and considered him a mediocre detective who suffered from unwarranted conceit.  They were relieved that he made so few arrests and that practically none of his cases went to trial.

Conversely, they adored Hawk, though of course they didn’t know him by the street name he had earned long ago, when he first became a detective.  Most detectives and police officers in neighboring precincts knew about the nickname and were secretly jealous of Hawk’s popularity among the residents of the communities they patrolled every day.  However, he harbored no misconceptions, himself: it was not popularity, it was notoriety, and there were a lot of people out there who wouldn’t mind it one little bit if he got himself killed, nickname or no.

One of the reasons the ADAs all loved Hawk was that he always came to court when he was notified and often when he wasn’t.  Sometimes he would come in with Nick or one of the other detectives even when he didn’t have a case on, just to visit, see which prosecutors were working what cases.  He was familiar with the facts of all the arrests and ongoing investigations coming out of his squad, and the ADAs loved to get updates on what the detectives were up to and what new cases were coming down the pike.  Additionally, Hawk testified well, both in the Grand Jury and on trial.  He never threw in the gratuitous comments and qualifiers that drove the prosecutors crazy and gave defense attorneys opportunities to poke holes in the People’s case on cross-examination.  He was naturally taciturn and didn’t feel compelled to add heretofore undisclosed but suddenly recollected details while on the stand as most cops did.  His arrest paperwork could be counted upon to be thorough and consistent, with few of the typos that always turned out to be volcanic – sometimes fatal – by the time a case got to trial.  On top of all that, they liked him because he was a superior detective and seemed like a decent guy.  They knew nothing about his private life, but it was apparent to everyone that he cared about his cases and took his job seriously.

Actually, many of his colleagues thought he took the job too seriously, calling him The Man, accusing him of acting like a brainwashed government soldier who believed blindly in The Cause.  But that was too simplistic for a man like Hawk.  Perhaps it was because his father had been stabbed to death when Hawk was just seven years old, and he, the only son, was helpless to protect or console his mother and sisters, but, in fact, Hawk was driven by a desire for justice.  He abhorred violence, though often his job required him to use force and, prior to becoming a police officer, the sports he’d played were notoriously brutal.  He felt sorry for people who were powerless to avoid or defend themselves against the circumstances of their lives that exposed them to criminal activity.  He believed that most people generally desired to live in peace.  He didn’t dwell on good versus evil, believing there was good and bad in everyone; though he recognized that some people listed more heavily in one direction than the other.  Mostly, he believed that a person could always choose not to sell drugs, shoot the gun, rob the store, stab his neighbor; so that if one chose incorrectly, he or she deserved to be caught and locked up and he had no compunction about being the one to do it.  It was no secret, Hawk loved his job.

Of course, the life of a cop took its toll.  Hawk never discussed his personal life, but to some of his colleagues, that in itself seemed a sure sign of trouble.  All the guys complained about their wives.  Many had girlfriends on the side, whom they saw even more infrequently than their wives and children.  Half of the phonecalls and text messages they received each day were plaintive or angry missives from the women in their lives, demanding to know when and if they planned to come home.

But Hawk kept his private life to himself.  A rare comment to Nick about having to go home to take care of something, or ducking outside to take a call coming in on his cellphone were the only indications that he had a life outside of work.  He divulged nothing and, of course, no one – not even Mike – was stupid enough to ask.  Everyone agreed that Hawk was one of the nicest people around, but he had an aloof, inviolable quality that even the least sensitive of his colleagues instinctively respected.

* * * * *

The moment they walked through the metal door into the tiny front vestibule of 816 Mercy Ave., they were assailed by a stench so powerful and repulsive they had to stagger out immediately to get some air.  Mike was gagging, bent over with his hands on his knees.

“What the fuck is that?!” he cried.

“That, my friend, is the smell of decomposing human matter,” Greg choked out.  “In other words, your DOA.”  Despite the fact that he was panting like a dog in order to avoid retching, Greg had a twinkle in his eyes when he saw Mike shudder.  Mike was so irritatingly confident and brash that the squad enjoyed embarrassing him whenever they could; it was an added pleasure when he was made to look foolish on the job – a feat he accomplished on his own with some frequency.

But now, Greg was a little shaken, himself.  Though he would never openly admit it, the smell was so bad, he was afraid of what he would find.  He looked over at Hawk.  The only sign he was perturbed was the slight watering of his slate gray eyes.  Seeing Hawk remain so composed gave Greg the necessary incentive to get control of himself, but he couldn’t entirely quell the panic that arose when he realized that this was only the first floor – the entrance – and they hadn’t even encountered the maggots yet.

“Well, we might as well get it over with,” he said.

Mike was green.  “I can’t.  I’ll throw up.  It’s too disgusting.  You guys take this one.  I’ll get the next one.  I’ll just wait near the car.”  Mike walked away.

“Yeah.  He’ll take the next one.”  Greg gave Mike’s back a hard look and then shrugged.  Hawk just ignored him and turned to go back into the building, saying, “The faster we go in, the faster we get out.”

By the time they reached the fifth floor, they were both sweating with exertion: it was difficult to run up stairs when you were concentrating on breathing only through your mouth.

They passed a short, balding guy on the third floor landing, who asked if they were here about the smell, but Greg had been too nauseous to try to talk to him.  Hawk had looked at the guy as if he had two heads.

“How long has it been like this?”  Hawk was apparently able to talk without vomiting, Greg noticed a little enviously.

“Don’t know.  ‘Bout a week or two.  Give or take, you know?”

“A week or two and nobody called before today?  Have you noticed maybe that it stinks a little in here?”

“You kinda get used to it, you know?  I just figured the sewer line was broke or someone forgot to take out the garbage.  You know how it is.  It wasn’t till I saw them maggots that I thought anything strange.”

Hawk was amazed.  The odor of decomposition was so distinct – a uniquely sour, putrid smell – he didn’t understand how anyone could mistake it for a sewage leak.  But, even if they did, how could they have waited so long to do anything about it?  Well, actually, that he did understand.  Mere yards from the projects, the tyrannical landlords who owned these properties were notorious for refusing the most basic repairs as their buildings fell apart and they waited for them to burn down so they could collect on the insurance.  To whom could residents direct their complaints?

As they reached the fifth floor, even Hawk was struggling not to gag.  He was very glad he had not gone with the guys from the night squad this morning for a breakfast calzone because he had no doubt he’d be puking it up right now.  It was hard enough to keep last night’s Chinese food down.  A swarming pile of maggots oozed from underneath the front door of apartment 5-B.  He could hear Greg starting to gag and he knew that if he looked at him, he was finished.  So, he stepped up to the door, squishing the yellowy maggots under his size 11 & 1/2 shoes and tested its strength.  Good, no metal fortifications.  He stepped back and gave such a forceful kick he almost slipped and fell into the convulsing pile of worms.  The door flew open.  Hawk regained his balance and rushed face first into the invisible, terrible fumes.  His eyes were burning and his stomach flipped – he was going to lose it.  He ran to a window, ignoring the mass of maggots moving like a live carpet beneath his feet, threw it open and leaned out, gulping for air.  Greg appeared beside him instantly and the two of them tried to inhale the sky outside of this one window.  Hawk thought, if there is a Hell, this is what it smells like.

Fortified with two lungs full of quasi-fresh oxygen, he turned around and surveyed the apartment.  Maggots everywhere.  His tearing eyes followed their trail into the bedroom.  He stepped forward to look inside the room and saw the deceased, a white male, lying face-up on the floor.  The lower half of the body was hidden under the bed which lay on top of the chest.  The arms were stretched out to each side.  What had once been a face was now only a squirming puddle of rotten flesh and slimy worms.

Hawk walked gingerly around the bedroom, crushing maggots with each step, trying to piece together what had happened.  The unnatural position of the body and the fact that he was lying on his back seemed to indicate that he hadn’t just been crawling under the bed to get something when he got pinned.  This was now looking like a homicide investigation.  They would have to call in the Medical Examiner and now Crime Scene, as well, to collect the evidence.  Hawk did not think they would enjoy this one.  Looking around the room, there didn’t seem to be any physical evidence that hadn’t been contaminated by what could only be termed maggot infestation, but then again, he was no scientist.  He revised his earlier conviction: they would probably love the challenge of a half-digested crime scene.

He motioned to Greg, who’d only gotten as far as the bedroom door before having to run back to the window, and they took the stairs down three at a time.  Even as they were scrambling to get the hell out of there, however, Hawk had to admit that he had gotten used to the smell.

Mike was leaning against the hood of the car, talking into his cell-phone like one of the lazy, entitled sergeants and lieutenants he sucked up to so much, but at least he wasn’t sitting inside.  If he had been, Greg would probably have lost his temper and dragged him out of the car.  When he saw them emerge, Mike closed his phone quickly and tried to look grave.

“What’s it like?  Sorry I couldn’t make it.  I can stand just about anything but that smell made me nauseous.  Don’t know how you guys stood it.”

Greg very deliberately turned his back on Mike.  Hawk just gave him one of his steely, unreadable stares until Mike looked away, becoming very interested in the front tire all of a sudden.  Hawk pulled out his phone and speed-dialed the sergeant, who called the detectives back several minutes later to say that it would take the M.E. about forty-five minutes to get there and the Crime Scene guys about a half hour after that.  Greg suggested they go get a cup of coffee.  He really wanted a stiff drink, but it was not yet 10:00 in the morning and he was never able to stop at just one.  Maybe he would have suggested it if Hawk had been a drinker, but other than an occasional beer on a slow turnaround, when they dipped out or the shift ended with the guys still wired and needing to unwind, Hawk didn’t drink.  Greg privately speculated that Hawk drank more heavily at home since he was so closed-mouthed about his personal life and people who were like that usually had something to hide.

Mike was eager to get out of there and bounced around like a golden retriever.  Greg and Hawk would have been happy to dump him back at the precinct but they were the designated babysitters today, so they took him with them, however reluctantly, to the diner.

“Detectives, nice to see you,” said Barbara, the head waitress behind the counter.  It was impossible to tell Barbara’s age.  She could be anywhere from thirty to sixty depending on how hard her life had actually been, which was one of those eternally unknowable mysteries.  Barbara was an icon: whenever anyone from the 8-2 squad came to the diner, no matter what time, how busy the place was or whose section they sat in, Barbara always served them personally.  She knew all their names and had memorized each one’s preferences down to the minute details, including how many sugars and for whom to hold the mayo from the first time she served them.  She was particularly fond of Nick and if ever Hawk came in without him, she always asked if he was alright.  Hawk was one of her favorites, too, though from her friendly demeanor – even with the grumpier detectives like Patrick and Gerald – she made everyone feel equally adored and cared for.

She immediately brought a Coke for Hawk and a cup of coffee, black and sweet, for Greg.  She looked politely at Mike and asked, “What’ll it be for you, dear?”

And that was how everyone knew Barbara didn’t like Mike.

Mike didn’t seem to notice the slight.  Yet another demonstration of how imperceptive he was.  This, and a thousand other flaws, plainly proved his lack of even the most basic skills necessary to be a good detective.  His presence among them was pure politics.

“Coffee, as usual,” Mike said with a wink as if they were old friends.  Barbara gave a nod and looked at Hawk.

“How’s Nickie?”  The anxious look in her eyes was indiscernible to the casual observer, but Hawk knew her well.

“He’s fine.  Not to worry.  He’s on vacation this week, probably getting beauty treatments and manicures.”  Hawk smiled at her.  The contented look returned to her kind brown eyes and she went to get Mike’s coffee.

Hawk didn’t eat.  He had thought they should stay and wait for the M.E. while they were somewhat inured to the smell, but he had allowed Greg to persuade him to come to the diner.  Nevertheless, he was fully aware of what awaited them back at apartment 5-B, and he knew he couldn’t manage the next part on a full stomach.  Greg had a bagel to quiet the roiling in his gut – some of it a remainder of last night’s bender – and to chase away the taste of bile.  Mike had three eggs, sausage, home fries, toast and a cinnamon danish.  Obviously, he had no plans to work this D.O.A.

Forty-five minutes later, as they were standing by the car near the building entrance, the M.E. arrived.  When Michelle Perez stepped out of the car, the three men automatically made small, unconscious physical adjustments to their clothes and posture: Hawk stood taller, Greg squared his shoulders and Mike ran a hand through his hair.  She was about twenty-seven years old, with thick, black hair pulled back in a ponytail and black-framed glasses outlining beautiful almond-shaped brown eyes fringed with lustrous black lashes, resting on a small, upturned nose.  She wore no makeup on her flawless, olive skin.  She was a normal height, about 5’4” – which, to Hawk, who was a full foot taller, seemed petite – dressed in a black, straight skirt and white silky blouse, her shapely legs enhanced by impractical, shiny black heels about three inches high.  She carried a white, lab coat and black doctor’s bag, but she still looked like a T.V. version of a medical examiner rather than the real thing.

She approached the detectives with a smile and introduced herself, directing her main comments at Hawk.  That always happened.  Maybe it was because of his commanding height or perhaps it was his serious countenance, but people always assumed he was the one in charge.

“Hi guys, what’ve we got?”  Her teeth were like little white pearls.

Just as Mike opened his mouth to speak, Hawk replied, “Deceased, male.  Lots of maggots.”

She seemed delighted.  “Let’s go!”

She turned toward the building entrance and Greg, watching her plump, round, Hispanic derriere sway slightly from side to side, smiled wickedly at Hawk.  The day had taken a decidedly brighter turn.

“Uh, I’m sure you don’t need all of us,” Mike stated.  The girl might be totally hot, but he wasn’t going in there again just to impress a pretty face.  “I’ll wait out here for Crime Scene.”

She half turned and looked at Mike appraisingly.  “Yes,” she said.  “That’s probably best.”  She looked at Greg and Hawk, raising one black eyebrow inquiringly.  Neither of them backed down.  With a shrug, she turned toward the entrance again.  Hawk reached a long arm out to open the door for her.

This time the men were better prepared to withstand the stench.  They breathed carefully through their mouths.  The M.E. was chattering away like she was at a picnic, her high heels clicking merrily up the stairs.  Silently, the men marveled that she was so unaffected by the odor that made them want to retch their guts out and cry like children.

She briefly glanced at the maggots squirming outside the front door.  Then she opened the door and, stepping almost daintily on the carpet of worms, walked directly toward the bedroom.  Greg was dying to run to the window again, but Hawk followed her without hesitation.  It was simple: if this very attractive girl could handle the putrid smell, much less the grisly scene itself, there was no way he was going to give in to any amateur reactions.  He was a seasoned cop, a detective now for years; he’d seen worse than this.  Well, he’d seen at least as bad as this, he convinced himself.  It was simply an exercise of mind over matter, however decomposed.

He noticed she had stopped talking and was looking at him expectantly.

“What?” he said.

“We’re going to have to pull him out from under the bed,” she answered.

He was momentarily startled.  He’d somehow thought he wouldn’t have to touch the body himself once it became the province of the M.E.’s office.  He recovered quickly and began putting on his latex gloves.  He searched around for Greg and subtly motioned for him to do the same.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Greg muttered.  But, he also put on his latex gloves.

Looking at Greg, the M.E. said, “You, Detective, help me lift the bed.”  To Hawk she said, “You grab his arms and pull him out.”

With some effort, they lifted the wooden bed frame that had lain atop the man’s chest for nearly two weeks.  Hawk bent down over the body by the head and tried to get a grip underneath the shoulders.  He tamped down the thought of maggots crawling up his jacket sleeves and unfocused his eyes so that he would not have to register the vision of quivering pulp that had once been a face.

He began to pull.  Though he was very strong from years of playing sports and working out, it was like trying to move the slippery carcass of a gelatinous, beached whale.  He could not get a firm grip.  His gloved hands moved to the armpits and then to the mushy part of the arms that had once been triceps.

He had managed to pull the body horizontally along the floor about eight inches so that the feet had just cleared the bed frame when the right arm tore off at the shoulder.  Greg dropped his corner of the bed and bolted from the room.  In the shocked silence that ensued, Hawk could hear Greg retching in the front room.  At least he had had sense enough not to taint the crime scene, Hawk thought.

The M.E. blinked behind her glasses.  No doubt she was expecting Hawk to follow suit.

He laughed.

Whatever she had been expecting, it certainly wasn’t that.  She smiled broadly.  “You need a hand with that?” she asked, indicating the limb dangling in the air.

“Nope.  I’m trained to disarm people,” he replied, and the two of them burst into boisterous laughter.

Greg returned, bleary-eyed.  He looked through the doorway at the two of them laughing and felt a little defensive, thinking they were poking fun at him.  But Hawk grinned at him and, waving the arm over the body, said, “Come on, Greg, give us a hand, will ya?”

Greg laughed shakily, uncertain of the political correctness of laughing at such a scene in front of the M.E.  But she seemed to be amused as well.  For the next forty minutes, the three of them processed the bedroom and the body, making tasteless jokes until the Crime Scene guys arrived to do their thing.

* * * * *

Back at the precinct, Hawk took a twenty-minute shower.  He set the water as hot as he could stand it, and washed his hair with two of the different types of shampoos people had left in there.  He scrubbed his body vigorously with the strongest scented bar of soap he found and then just stood there, replaying the day’s horror show in his mind.

There, in the privacy of the shower, he finally admitted to himself that that was the worst D.O.A. he had ever processed.  The human body was sometimes an awful, ugly thing.  Before he could re-route this train of thought, Hawk wondered, not for the first time, how he was going to die and what his body would look like at death.  Images of the countless corpses he had seen over the years – homicides, suicides, accidents – raced behind his eyes as the hot water pounded his skin.  There were so many experiences of death to choose from.

He forced his eyes open to dispel the pictures that flashed unbidden in his head.  They could only lead toward despair, that terrible emotion he refused to acknowledge.

Today.  He would concentrate only on today.

Today, he was proud of himself for not disgracing himself by getting sick.  Still, he knew it would take a very long time for the memory to fade.

He returned his attention to the video of Saturday night’s concert.  It had taken a day and a half for security at Brooklyn Coliseum to collect and deliver all the relevant surveillance to the precinct and now Hawk was combing through eight-and-a-half hours’ worth of footage from the second tier cameras where, according to witnesses, the fatal argument had begun.  He had little hope the effort would yield results.  It was like looking for a needle in a haystack, trying to catch a glimpse of an orange-and-black-clad killer in a crowd of nearly two thousand people on Halloween night.

After more than sixteen years on the force, ten as a detective, Hawk knew well that most investigative work was just plowing through tedious, meaningless material, waiting for that one inspired idea to worm its way into his conscious mind.  This worm was taking its own sweet time and there couldn’t be a worse occasion for it, but Hawk had learned to be patient.

He examined what he knew so far.  Four boys shot: three dead, one hanging on by a thread.  Six bullets, fired at close to intermediate range, as evidenced by the shell casings a single, probably male shooter had left behind.  Two of the victims had died of chest wounds at the scene, just outside the arena.  The third was pronounced at the hospital.  The fourth was considered ‘likely’, as in ‘likely to die’; after six hours in surgery he remained in critical condition.  Ironically, this one survivor appeared to have been the primary target of the attack.  The others had probably been shot as an afterthought, collateral consequences of the shooter’s adrenalin surge once he’d begun.

The four boys were seniors at the same high school, all of them heavyweight performers on the famed Roosevelt High basketball team.  The one on the breathing machine in the ICU was James Pelham, the 18-year old, 6’9”, Tigers’ team captain and potential NBA superstar.  Nicknamed ‘King James’, he was somewhat of a local hero; apparently it was common knowledge that he was being scouted by such big schools as North Carolina and UCONN after winning a number of awards for his achievements on the court.  He’d been shot first, twice, inexpertly.  That was anger.  Of hundreds of potential witnesses, only a few people could give Hawk a reasonably reliable description of the shooter: tall, young, black male wearing a notably oversized, bright-orange shirt with either a number or some sort of black writing on it.  Orange and black on Halloween – it could be anyone.  The two girls from the victims’ class Hawk had interviewed had been too hysterical to be of much use; all Hawk was able to divine was that the shooting was believed to be the culmination of a dispute begun hours earlier, its genesis one of the most ancient, primitive, motivating impulses known to man: a woman.  But, Hawk was careful not to give too much credence to the girls’ dramatic account of the night’s events.  It was an amateur cop who considered women more credible just because they cried and carried on – females could be as vicious, self-serving and capricious as males.

Nick poked his head in again.  “Anything?”

“No.”

“You wanna go back to the hospital?”

“Not yet.”

“You want me to look through some of the other surveillance tapes?”

“No.”  He definitely did not want that.  Hawk had to look through every bit of it himself.  He could never trust that someone else, even Nick, wouldn’t miss that crucial flash of something that could crack the whole case.  When Nick wanted to be annoying, he accused Hawk of being arrogant and conceited, convinced that no one was as good a detective as he, but that wasn’t precisely true.  He had to see or notice the thing itself to trigger his brain into solving the problem.  No one else could do that for him.   But that was elementary; he didn’t think it required explanation.  Let people think whatever they wanted.

There were at least three more hours of tape from this camera alone. Hawk was convinced by now that this was not the right angle to be looking from, but he would finish what he started, just in case.  He popped the top of another can of Coke.  It was going to be a long night.

As images moved silently in two-frame fast-forward on the computer screen, Hawk planned out the day ahead.  When he was done here, he would go back to the school, pick up the records the principal was putting aside for him and then return to the hospital to check on how the kid was doing, see if anyone interesting showed up.  From the moment they’d brought the victims in, early Sunday morning – hard to believe it was only yesterday – the hospital waiting room had been crowded to capacity with friends and fans, people who knew the boys or knew of them and wanted to be part of the hype, which continued to grow to startling proportions as breaking-news announcements aired on every local channel.

The families were devastated, of course.  Hawk felt especially sorry for James Pelham’s grandmother who seemed so frail when he’d talked to her at the hospital but who’d spent the past two decades on her hands and knees working as a maid to keep James and his siblings fed and clothed and off the street.  She reminded Hawk of his own grandmother who had played such an important role in his life, especially after his father was killed when he was seven.

His mind wandered to that summer afternoon, five months ago.  He was running errands in town on one of his rare days off when his mother called his cell phone, worried that his grandmother had not picked up when she had called to check in at their usual time.  Hawk hung up and immediately dialed his grandmother’s number.  The phone rang and rang, as he made a U-turn and sped directly to her house without stopping at his own, ten minutes away, to retrieve his set of keys.  He pulled up to the curb, threw the truck into park and sprinted to the door.  He banged loudly on the thick wood, calling her name.  When he pressed his ear against the door, he heard no noise or movement inside.  All he could hear was the thudding of his heart.

He took two steps back and crashed against the door, splintering the frame as it flew open.  She was lying unconscious on the floor in the hallway between the bedroom and the kitchen.  Hawk wondered how long she’d been like that and if she had been able to hear the phones ringing in both rooms, each equally, hopelessly out of reach.  His eyes smarted with unbidden tears to imagine her helplessness.  He knelt beside her and felt for a pulse.  It was weak, and her skin was clammy. As he scooped her up into his arms, surprise registered somewhere deep in his subconscious, for she was so delicate, as light as one of his children.  She had always seemed so solid to him, a pillar of strength.

With long strides he was out the door, catching it with his foot to pull it closed behind him.  The lock was broken and it didn’t close properly, but there was nothing he could do about that now.  He placed her in the narrow back seat of the pickup.  Her eyelids fluttered minutely, but did not open.

As he raced to the hospital, he made two quick calls, one to his mother and one to his sister, the nurse.  He did not bother with 911.  Afterward, he was silent, intensely focused on weaving through traffic at breakneck speed.  He glanced over his shoulder several times but she had not moved.  He had the inane thought that he should have brought her purse; she never went anywhere without it and she would be worried if she woke up and didn’t have it.  Memories of his childhood, his teenage years, momentous and mundane things he had learned from her and taken for granted tumbled around his mind without heed to chronology.  It occurred to him that he should talk to her, reassure her, but he could think of nothing to say.

Later, and forever after when he thought about it, he deeply regretted not using those precious minutes to tell her how he felt about her and how much he would miss her if she died.  He always seemed to know instinctively what to say to victims when he was on the job; defendants, too.  But in his own, personal life, when it mattered so much what he said and to whom, he clammed up.  He didn’t know why it was so difficult for him to speak.  He knew the words to say; sometimes he even wanted to say them, but he could never get them past the double-locked gates of clenched teeth and sealed lips.

She died around midnight, without ever waking.  By that time, the strong, competent women in his family, every one of them sadly too familiar with grieving to be numb, had taken over the immediate arrangements and there was nothing left for him to do but return home.  He sat quietly on the couch, in the dark, in the home he had built for his new family back when their future looked bright and portended none of the bitterness and resentment that was to come.  He pictured his children upstairs, sleeping, but he did not get up to check on them or see if his wife was still up.  There was no comfort for him there, nor did he want any.  He sat still and listened to the sounds of his house breathing.

He didn’t know how he could have fallen asleep like that, sitting up, fully dressed,  head tilted all the way back, touching the sofa.  As he wakened, his neck too stiff to move, he was shocked to realize it was morning.  He felt the warm body of his youngest curled against him, and heard the grating, high voices and crazed noises of cartoons coming from the television.  Eyes still closed, he croaked through his stretched, parched throat, “Spongebob?”

“Yes.”  Little fingers patted his thigh.  “Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“Did Nanna die?”

“Yes.”

“When’s she gonna be back?”

“When people die they don’t come back.”

“Where do they stay, then?”

“Nobody knows the answer to that.”

“But you know, right Daddy?”

“No.  Even I don’t know that.”

“But how are we going to see her?  Can she come back just for my birthday?  Or Christmas?”

“I wish she could.”  His hand rested against her little blonde head, remarkably grown from the tiny, soft globe he cupped so easily in his palm four-and-a-half years ago, but still small and infinitely fragile, as a butterfly.

“Well, Daddy, if you look on your GPS you could find her and we could go get her in the car.”

“Yes, but it might take us a long, long time to get there.  So, in the meantime, so we don’t forget her, we have to keep her in our memories, behind our eyes.  Okay?  We have to remind each other about Nanna, and tell each other lots of stories about her.”

She laughed the little gurgling laugh that always made him smile and sometimes broke his heart.  “Oh Daddy, we could never forget Nanna!  That’s silly.”

“Yes, you’re right.”

He felt the change in the room, the swish of air against the jamb.  He opened his eyes just as the hem of his wife’s robe disappeared beyond the doorway.

* * * * *

Nearly four hours later, there was nothing to show for his vigilance at the computer screen but a caffeine headache, the roiling of his empty stomach and the dubious satisfaction of having eliminated an entire avenue of search for evidence.  At one point, about an hour ago, he’d caught images of a scuffle involving a group of males but there was no orange shirt and it appeared to have begun and ended as a fist fight.  Still, Hawk recorded the time on the video.

Now he stood up and stretched his long arms to the ceiling.  His back bones popped – a pain he both sought and dreaded.  He was getting old.  He shook Nick awake and grabbed the car keys.  Nick raised his head from the table wearily, blinking in the harsh, fluorescent lights.

“What time is it?”

“Almost five-thirty.”  He jingled the keys to urge Nick to get moving.

“Where we going?”

“It’s too early to go to the school.  Let’s go back to the hospital.”

“Right now?”

“Yup.”

“Coffee first?  Please.”

“Fine.”

At the diner, Barbara brought Hawk a Coke and Nick a cup of coffee with half and half the moment they sat down.  She took one look at Hawk, his chiseled face gaunt, his unusual gray eyes bloodshot and cloudy, and headed back to the kitchen, not bothering with the customary small talk.  A few cops were scattered around, reading the paper or watching the early morning news at the counter.

Nick grumpily stirred his coffee.  “So, what have we got?”

“I don’t think the girls are telling it straight.  I think they know this guy, the shooter.”

“Why wouldn’t they tell the truth?  The vics were their friends.  You see the way everybody fawns all over the Pelham kid.  He’s a local celebrity.  You’d think they’d want to help us.”

“I do think they want to help us.  But I also think they want us to figure it out for ourselves.”

“No one wants to snitch?”

“There’s that, but there’s something else, too.  I don’t know what.  Guilt, maybe.  Protection.  I’m not sure.”

Barbara brought two plates of scrambled eggs and hash browns to the table.  She spoke before Hawk could protest.

“Detective, I know you didn’t order this, but you look terrible and I’m guessing you’re working that shooting from Saturday night, so I’m sure you haven’t eaten properly.  Your wife will thank me, even if you won’t.”  She turned her deep, concerned brown eyes on Nick.  “You have to take better care of him.  He’s too skinny.”

“He just looks skinny ‘cause he’s tall.”  Nick had an arsenal of retorts at the ready to counter the merciless teasing the partners were subjected to regarding the disparity in their sizes.  At 6’4”, Hawk towered over Nick, who topped off at 5’10”.

“But then that would mean that, because you’re short, you look f – - ”

Barbara laughed.  “Listen, Abbott, and you too, Costello, you both look like hell.  Do what I ask, please, like the good boys I know you are.  Or else.”

Nick raised his eyebrows at Hawk as he shoveled a forkful of eggs into his own mouth.  Shrugging as if nothing could be done to refute the Queen’s command, he said, “You better eat it.”

Hawk realized he was never leaving the diner unless Barbara was assured of his health, so he set about eating the first hot meal he’d had in three days.  Very few people knew why it seemed as if Barbara’s sole purpose in the world was to ensure the welfare of a handful of New York’s finest, but Hawk and Nick had discovered about six or seven years ago that she had lost her only child, whose dream it was to become a police officer, in a fatal shooting incident when he was 19-years old.  She had never spoken of it; they found out accidentally when they went to the diner one day and for the first time in memory, Barbara wasn’t there.  They joked with Pete, the short order cook, that she had finally run off with her hero, Emeril the TV chef, but Pete had smiled sadly and said the only day Barbara ever took off was September 30^th, the anniversary of her son’s death.  They never mentioned it, of course, but ever afterward, they treated Barbara like family.  On Christmas they brought her gifts and after a snowstorm one or the other of them always shoveled her car out.

At 8:30 a.m., Charlene and Tawanda met them at the hospital as Hawk had requested.  He’d already visited James Pelham’s room, stopping first at the cafeteria on the fifth floor to pick up a muffin and hot tea for the boy’s grandmother who looked so sad and worn out.  She had hardly left her grandson’s side these past few days despite the four, younger children at home.  The doctors and nurses left her alone; they understood instinctively that they would only be able to remove her from his bedside by force, and they were far too overworked in the crowded ER of one of the worst crime-ridden cities in the country to bother sticking to protocol where one stubborn, little old black lady was concerned.  Besides, it was touch and go for James right now, and because his brother and sisters were too young to be allowed into the ICU, his grandmother was his only visitor.  Apparently, James’ mother was in a drug treatment facility in Oregon and no one had seen his father since James was three.

Interviewing the girls was an exercise in futility.  They constantly interrupted the detectives’ focus and momentum, consulting their phones every few seconds and texting their friends.  They contradicted themselves and each other and argued about every detail, such as who was where, what happened in what order, et cetera.  Nick, who generally disliked teenagers for being evasive and self-absorbed, lost patience after about half an hour and wandered off to talk to the nurses and the steady stream of civilian visitors, hoping to find more reliable witnesses.  He knew, too, that if these flakey girls truly had any information of value, Hawk would get it out of them.  For some mysterious reason, the teenagers responded best to Hawk.  No one, Hawk included, could ever figure out why, but Nick was just glad someone could deal with them so he didn’t have to.

After another fifteen minutes of the runaround, Hawk determined the only way he was ever going to get any useful information was if he talked to each girl separately or managed to get a hold of one of their phones.  Nick was down the hall, but Hawk succeeded in catching his eye.  Responding automatically to the subtle, secret signals he and his partner had developed after years of working together, Nick came sauntering back.

“Nick, if you’re going to the cafeteria, could you get me some coffee, please?”

Nick’s eyes widened slightly in understanding: Hawk did not drink coffee.

“Large or small,” Nick asked meaningfully, his eyes sliding momentarily over the girls.

“Whichever one.”

Nick turned to the girls.  “Would either of you ladies like anything?”

Unwilling to pass up anything free, the girls looked at each other, trying to decide what to order, oblivious to Hawk’s minute nod.

“What they all got down there?”

“Maybe one of you should come with me and see.”

Bored with Hawk’s endless questions, they both volunteered to accompany Nick and then started arguing about which one should go.

Quietly, Hawk said, “You can both go.”  The girls stopped bickering immediately.  Nick was confused but he said nothing, confident Hawk knew what he was doing.  As the girls gathered their coats and bags, Hawk added, “Oh, you’re not allowed to have phones down there.”  The girls looked stumped for a minute.  “You can leave all that stuff here if you want.  I have to stay up here anyway, talk to some people.”  Their doubtful looks made him smile.  “I am a cop, you know.  Nobody’s gonna steal it from me.”

They laughed and, leaving everything strewn messily over the chairs, both girls followed Nick.  Hawk called after them, “I believe the cafeteria is on the eighth floor.”  Nick nodded without turning around.

When they were out of sight, Hawk, still sitting, leaned forward and casually straightened the items on the chairs.  Charlene’s phone fell from her jacket pocket to the floor.  Hawk pretended not to notice.  He sat back and then, after a moment, removed his own phone from his pants pocket, scrolled through a few messages and then tucked it into his jacket pocket.  He looked around, calmly surveying the activity on the floor, while surreptitiously counting three surveillance cameras covering his portion of the hall and sitting area.  He waited two minutes, silently counting out the full hundred and twenty seconds before standing up to stretch.  He took off his jacket and turned to drape it over the back of his chair.  As if by accident, Hawk’s shoe kicked Charlene’s phone.   It clattered as it slid along the floor several feet into the middle of the hall.  Hawk looked at the cell phone and then patted his pants pockets.  Then Hawk picked the phone off the floor, and placed it in his pants pocket without looking at it.  He stretched again.  Another full sixty seconds for the surveillance cameras and then Hawk ambled down the hallway, stopping at the nurse’s desk to ask the hospital orderly to keep an eye on the stuff in the corner while he went to the bathroom.

Inside the stall, Hawk opened Charlene’s phone and began scrolling through her Facebook pictures.  There were hundreds from the concert, mostly of people dressed up in Halloween costumes, some wearing masks.  Shit, what if the shooter had been wearing a mask?  That would be a nearly perfect way to disguise a very public murder!  But none of the witnesses had mentioned a mask.  Hawk quickly scanned through countless photos, some featuring James and the other three victims, smiling and laughing as they posed with Charlene, Tawanda and a half-dozen other fawning girls.  Finally, Hawk’s gaze landed upon one photograph in which a young, black male, fitting the description of the shooter, was standing almost directly behind James and his friends, fully facing the camera.  Over a black, long-sleeved shirt, the kid was wearing a huge, orange jersey that said Tigers, the name of the high school basketball team, and an orange baseball cap with a big black ‘T’ on it.  Hawk stared hard at the boy’s immobile face: he was about 16- or 17-years old, no visible scars or marks, utterly non-descript.  Looking into his eyes, Hawk could discern no anger, no malicious intent foreshadowing the disaster ahead.  Could it have been an accident?  If the shooting was premeditated, this kid surely hadn’t been thinking clearly while planning his wardrobe.  Hawk doubted anyone in criminal history had ever dressed so flamboyantly, in bright, noticeable, identifiable orange, before heading off to shoot a celebrity in a crowd of two thousand witnesses.  But the biggest irony was, of course, that no one had seen what actually happened.

By the time Nick came back with the girls, Charlene’s phone was tucked safely back in her jacket pocket and Hawk had a clear picture of his only suspect.

Thirty hours later, Trevor Saint-Jean was sitting in Interrogation Room II at the Eight-two precinct, crying and shaking uncontrollably.  Hawk left him alone while he went out to get the kid some tissues and a Coke.  Six pairs of eyes observed his exit, expressing an extraordinary range of emotions; everything from impatience and derision to concern and outright doubt.  This case had attracted the notice of the city’s biggest brass and it was impossible not to feel unnerved by the knowledge that some of NYPD’s most powerful men were observing his every move.

Hawk had tried to ignore the mounting pressure, but now, at the close of the fourth day since the shooting, he could no longer pretend his future wasn’t riding on the outcome of this investigation.

The media attention alone had been suffocating.  After that first press conference, when the public was promised no stone would be left unturned to apprehend the perpetrator of this vicious massacre, there was a general sense that the entire city was holding its breath, waiting for law enforcement to announce a break in the case and the imminent arrest of the monster who’d cut down the world’s next Michael Jordan.

The lieutenant had made it perfectly clear that all eyes were fixed on the squad’s performance.  None of them had seen home in the past four days and no one would be going home until the killer was in custody.  Other squads, including the pompous grade ones from the Brooklyn Homicide Detective Division, were chomping at the bit to join the highly publicized assignment.  In addition to the normal, sometimes hostile, competition among local detective squads, this case had become political.  The Eight-two was under strict orders to bring this arrest home; the detectives understood that their reputation depended upon it.  Failure would be unforgettable, unforgiveable.

That they were even permitted to keep this case was extremely unusual.  Rumor had it that Captain McKinney had persuaded his superiors, all the way up to the mayor’s office, that this squad would succeed and that additional units would only muddle and delay the investigation.  Mollified by the constant updates, it seemed the top brass had respected the Captain’s request for non-interference – but time was running out.

Tonight, the hurricane was peaking.  The mayor and police commissioner had been forced to make statements to the press earlier, for, despite a concerted effort to conceal their activities, the media had caught the detectives bringing Trevor into the station.  A sea of television cameras and newspaper reporters in vans and trucks were camped outside the station, as well as the hospital, waiting for official word that the prime suspect – the only suspect – was in custody.

Now, on his short trip to the Coke machine, Hawk’s insides were churning.  Because, in the face of all this hype and crushing expectation, he simply did not believe that Trevor was the shooter.

The adrenalin of the past four days, which had spiked off the charts during the time it had taken to identify the kid in the picture, hunt him down, get him settled at the precinct and begin the interrogation, had waned.  Now, Hawk felt completely drained.  He hadn’t eaten anything substantial for days.  His hands were shaking from the ten Cokes he’d drunk since this morning.  The combination of caffeine, hunger, lack of sleep, his wife’s reproach for missing parent-teacher conferences again, and his daughter’s plaintive message asking when he was coming home had all given him a colossal headache.  Furthermore, he needed to think how he was going to tell those men in there, who could pull him off this case at any time, the last thing they wanted to hear.

Nick came up silently beside Hawk as he waited for the can to fall to the trench at the bottom of the soda machine.  Glancing quickly at his partner’s angular face, Nick was startled to notice how the red stubble on his chin and the shadows under his strange, slate-colored eyes made him look menacing.  He had never seen Hawk looking so disheveled.  This case was obviously getting to him.  Nick muttered out of the side of his mouth, so only Hawk could hear.  “What the hell are you doing?”

“It’s not him,” Hawk said, staring at the glistening, red can, making no move to stoop and pick it up.

“C’mon, it’s him.  You don’t believe that shit about how he might of seen ‘some guy’ with the gun, do you?  He tossed that motherfucking thing into the Gowanus and now he’s crying like a fucking baby.  I can’t believe you’re buying that shit!”

“Nick, listen, he didn’t do it.  Believe me, I want this solved as much as you do – as much as they do – but this isn’t our shooter.  He doesn’t have the facts, he –”

Their exchange was interrupted by the sergeant.  “Lieutenant’s office,” he barked.

As Nick turned to follow the sergeant, Hawk could see the real concern in his partner’s eyes.  He hated that there was so much riding on this case.  He was upset that Nick was worried, and frustrated that he was being second-guessed every step of the way.  How could anyone ever get anything done?   In cases like this, Hawk knew they had to be extra careful not to jump to conclusions, especially because everyone was pushing for a quick answer.  Was he the only detective in the entire city who remembered this?

He reached for the Coke and, instead of following Nick, turned back to the interrogation room.   Certain that all the big players had gone into the Lieutenant’s office and no one was observing him through the two-way mirror, Hawk entered and set the can down on the table.

He strained to keep the impatience out of his voice, not wanting to alienate the kid or let on how desperate he was for some answers.  “C’mon Trevor, talk to me. It’s just me here, no one’s listening.  Give me just one word, a name, and you can go home.  I’m trying to help you.  I know you didn’t do this.  Tell me who did.”

“I told you, I don’t know.  I swear it.  I ain’t playing you.  You got to believe me.”  Trevor looked up at him, his dark brown eyes brimming with tears.  He was frightened, frightened to death, but Hawk had the same sensation he’d had when he’d looked at Trevor’s picture on Facebook: there was no malice or hidden rage in his face.  Over the years, Hawk had talked to many who were, but this kid was just not capable of shooting four people at close range, in cold blood.

As he exited the interrogation room, Hawk was startled to see the Chief of Detectives leaning against the door to the observation room, staring gravely at him.  The guy was a legend.  Even up close he didn’t look quite human.

“Detective.”

“Yes, Sir?”

“Hold up a minute.”

“Yes, Sir.”  Hawk stood still, quietly facing the commissioner’s senior advisor, the third in command of the entire police force.  He knew he should probably jump at the opportunity to state his case, explain why he was sure this kid was not the shooter, but he said nothing.  He just waited.

Finally, the Chief spoke. “Well.  What’s going on here?”

“He didn’t do it.  It’s not him.”

“I know he didn’t do it.”  The Chief paused.  Ten seconds ticked by.  “So what?”

“So what?”

“Yeah, so what?  Who cares?”

Hawk was shaken.  What was he saying?  “I do.  Sir.”  Wow.  Maybe he had just ended his career.

“Me, too.”

A burn crept up Hawk’s neck and flushed his cheeks.  “Yes, Sir,” he answered.

Still staring speculatively, the Chief said, “Captain McKinney thinks very highly of you.  Why?”

“I don’t know, Sir.”

“Well, you’re out on a limb here, Detective.  A lot of people like this guy for the shooter.”

“Yes, Sir, but you said yourself, it’s not him.”

“Who is it?”

The intense frustration Hawk had been fighting to suppress broke through into his next words like a flash-flood.  “I don’t know!  But I’m close.  I can feel it.”

“How much time do you need?”

“Three days.”

“You’ve got one.”

“Two.”

“One and a half, till Friday noon, and not a second over or you’re off the case and that’s the least of our problems.”  Hawk knew he didn’t mean “our.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Don’t disappoint me, Detective.”  He was already walking to the Lieutenant’s office.

“No, Sir,” Hawk said softly, falling in behind him.

* * * * *

Eventually, the shouting in the lieutenant’s small office subsided.  It was understandable that after four, extraordinarily stressful days, these men whose outward demeanor was always necessarily so controlled would need to blow off steam.  The pressure from the scared, outraged public and insatiable media was unrelenting.  Tempers were still high, but the outbursts were over, and the men turned their focus to strategizing their way through what had become a veritable mine-field: this case was now national news.

Leaning quietly, unobtrusively, against the wall, Hawk reflected that it could have gone quite differently.  It still could.  The only reason the Eight-two was still on the case was because the Chief of Detectives agreed with him that Saint-Jean was not the shooter.  However, no one was ready to rule out the possibility that Trevor knew who the actual shooter was, and Hawk was ordered to work on that some more, since the kid had obviously taken to him.  Nick and the sergeant exchanged a knowing look.  It was no accident that Hawk had been conducting the interview with Trevor: for some reason, teenagers tended to open up to Hawk, whereas Nick had a better rapport with women and homosexuals.

“Get back in there and find out if he knows anything,” sighed the Captain, as he stood up to follow the Chief.  At the door, he added, “Don’t let this go on too much longer, Detectives.  We need to wrap this thing up, ASAP.”

Hawk didn’t have to look to know Nick was rolling his eyes.  Those kinds of superfluous, condescending comments from the bosses infuriated his partner to no end.  Nick had difficulty ignoring the bureaucratic power games, but frankly, Hawk was relieved.  He recognized that underneath the admonition, the Captain had given them the green light.

“What’re you gonna do?” he said to Nick, cheerful despite his fatigue.

* * * * *

Day six.  Hawk hadn’t seen his children, slept in a bed, shaved in front of a mirror since Saturday.  The constant rumors, speculations and latest tabloid ‘disclosures’ were making it impossible to think clearly and objectively.  The trail was freezing up, nothing of significance had happened to turn the media wolves’ focus away from this case, and although everyone was praying he’d just sit up and identify the killer, James had not stirred from his comatose state.  The three other boys had all been buried, their funerals broadcast continuously on every local network for the past eighteen hours.  Hawk had been to each one, scouring faces, eavesdropping on conversations, hoping to glean any tiny piece of information that would lead him to his shooter.  Six days was not long in the realm of normal investigations, but in a case like this, it was an eternity.  And today was his own personal doomsday.

Trevor had not been able to give him anything.  Hawk ran their interview over and over in his head.  Could he have gotten this one wrong?  Scared, tear-filled eyes.  No gang affiliations, no personal beef against any of the four victims.  He, like everybody else at the high school, idolized Pelham and the others.  They were the pride of the community.  People who knew them wanted to take personal credit for their fame and talent.  Who could have profited from a tragedy like this?

By now, the atmosphere at the squad was oppressive.  Everyone working the case was exhausted and irritable, shooting furtive looks, trying to make subtle suggestions.  Hawk had taken to sitting in his car or on his perch to avoid talking to anyone.

There was something bothering him, niggling right at the back of his tired brain, floating tantalizingly in the gray ether just beyond his consciousness.  He was more frustrated than he could ever remember being; he just couldn’t catch his clue, and he became obsessive, convinced that that one missing piece of the puzzle would crack this whole case open.  Was it a visual?  The video surveillance after all?  Charlene’s Facebook page?  He went back to those things again and again.  Nothing.

Hawk lifted his forehead off the steering wheel and looked at the clock on the dashboard.  It was almost 7:00 a.m.  He’d been inside the airless car for about two and a half hours.  Without thinking, he turned the keys in the ignition and started driving.  Ten minutes later, he was surprised to find himself pulling into the high school parking lot.  He’d been here a number of times the last few days, talking to countless students and faculty.  At this time of morning, only three or four cars were parked behind the gym.  Just after he walked in, the double metal doors clanged loudly behind him and a group of huge teenage boys, each taller than his own six-feet four-inches, pushed past, making the kinds of noise only eighteen-year olds could make.  Hawk watched as they unzipped black, hooded sweatshirts, threw them onto the wooden benches surrounding the basketball court and began warming up, shooting and dribbling the brown, frayed basketballs that were the staple of inner-city school gymnasiums. There was a solemnity in the players’ movements, a result of the recent events that had taken four of their team all at once.  Hawk watched one intense boy practicing three-point side shots, his orange jersey displaying the number 2.  He was very, very good.  His talent far outshone the others, and they were all pretty impressive.

As Hawk stood there watching, another boy came in, threw his black hoodie to the bleachers and leaned over to tighten his shoelaces.

Hawk casually asked, “Who’s the kid over there, shooting those three-pointers?”

“What?  You a scout?”  The boy looked with interest at the tall, white man in the suit.

Hawk shrugged.

“That’s The Saint,” the boy said, once he realized he wasn’t going to get an answer.  “Shawn Saint-Jean,”

Hawk felt as if he’d been electrocuted.  He stared at the orange jersey across the court and repeated softly, “Saint-Jean.”

“Yeah.”

“Shooting guard?”

“No.  Well, maybe, now that King James is gone.”

“James Pelham,” Hawk breathed.  All the pieces began to slip into place.

“Yeah.  You think Saint-Jean is good, you ain’t seen nothing.  Pelham and Willis was better’n him, in my opinion.  Cartwright and Shine prob’ly just as good.  Or almost.  All four of them gone, though.”

Hawk stood absolutely still, watching Saint-Jean continue to make basket after basket.  Could jealousy have been a motive to shoot his teammates?  The girls had claimed it was an argument over a woman, but what did they know?  Maybe they were wrong.  Hawk understood ambition better than envy.

A conversation with the team’s coach clarified everything.  When they finished speaking, Hawk asked him not to mention that he was a detective.  Then he went outside to wait.

Shawn looked hopeful as he approached Hawk’s car in the parking lot.  He was gripping a white envelope, which he shoved into the pocket of his sweatshirt as he ducked into the passenger seat.  He held out his enormous hand for a shake.

“Coach said you wanted to talk to me.  I seen you in the gym.  You a scout?”

Hawk shook Saint-Jean’s hand and answered, “Not exactly.”  He could have lied.  The law permitted police to lie or trick or promise a suspect anything under the sun prior to taking him into custody.   But Hawk didn’t think he’d need to play it that way.  “I was hoping you could tell me something about what happened to your teammates last Saturday night.”  As he spoke, he looked straight into Shawn’s face.  He felt a profound sadness, because, like his brother, there was a complete absence of malice in Shawn’s frightened eyes; however, unlike Trevor, the guilt was plain to see.

“You’re a cop.”  It was not a question.

“Yes.  A detective from the Eight-two.  Do you want to come to the squad and make a statement?”

“Okay.”

Hawk was stunned.  This kid was as unschooled in police obstruction and street survival as he’d ever seen.  He was walking into the jaws of doom without seeming to sense the danger.  The usual thrill Hawk felt when he’d caught his prey and was about to close a case was strangely absent.  He felt sorry for the kid, for the terrible tragedy and senselessness of the deaths of three – possibly four – of his teammates.  But, despite his empathy, Hawk’s own survival instincts kicked in: this was a huge case for him and he could not afford to do anything, ANYTHING, wrong that might cost the state its conviction.

“Before we go any further, I’m going to inform you of your rights.  I want to make it very clear, now, Shawn, while you are still free to get out of this car.”

Shawn did not speak.

“When we get to the precinct I’m going to arrest you, Shawn.”

“I know.”   He began to cry.  As Hawk drove and softly recited Miranda warnings, Shawn wept, his face hidden in his forearm, his right hand clutching the envelope stuffed in his pocket.  Every now and then, Hawk heard a tiny gasp for breath, but otherwise, Shawn Saint-Jean made no sound the entire journey to the precinct.

* * * * *

It was nearing 5:00 p.m., but after six days, it was impossible to accurately gage time anymore.  In the windowless parts of the precinct where Hawk was entrenched in the hours-long process of filling out the paperwork, calling the D.A.’s office, and getting Saint-Jean ready for transport to Central Booking, it could have been 3:00 in the morning and he would not have been surprised.

What did surprise him was how he felt about this case.  And, of course, the silent reactions of the men in the viewing room; men who belonged to the highest echelons of the most powerful police force in the country, all sitting in that gray, dull, cinderblock room listening to one of the saddest stories of wasted life many of them had heard in a very long time.

When they arrived at the precinct, Hawk had placed Shawn in handcuffs and again read him his rights.  Then he told them everything.

For years he had been living in James Pelham’s shadow.  James was team captain, James was the most popular kid in school, in the neighborhood.  James was everybody’s friend; James was on his way to the top.  The best basketball schools were courting him and everyone knew that college was just a stepping stone to the NBA.  But James hadn’t become king by himself.  Roosevelt High School’s basketball team was one of the top five in the country.  Every player was good enough to get a scholarship.  They had been training since middle school; under the new rules, the city was allowed to bus in kids who lived too far to qualify for automatic placement.  Thus, the most promising young players were gathered into one group and trained by professional coaches-turned-gym teachers with a single-mindedness to rival the Chinese Olympic gymnastics team.

All the years, the boys on the team had been like brothers, deeply committed to helping each other out of the hood, make something of themselves.  But this year, their senior year, things had changed.  Suddenly, intense focus was being paid solely to James Pelham, and the rumor was that North Carolina and UCONN were ready to make him an offer.   The team played hard, harder than ever, and everybody was feeling the pressure, but it seemed as if the scouts weren’t biting this year.  Then, last week Shawn accidentally overheard Coach Tripper on the phone discussing Willis and Cartwright.  Shawn could hear the desperation in the coach’s tone as he tried to persuade the person on the other end to come see them play.  Shawn strained to hear his own name, standing stock still outside Coach’s office, but when he heard them planning to speak again on the matter next week, he took off.  His heart was beating so hard it hurt.  His face was flushed with shame; he was mortified that he had actually believed he was good enough to make it when all along it had been James, only James, they had wanted to see.  Here the coach was begging for someone to take a second look at his number two and three players, and he, Shawn, wasn’t even mentioned.  He was now eighteen years old with no goddamn future.  Talk about putting all the eggs in one basket.  He didn’t know how to do anything but play ball.

He had slammed out of the gym, and everything afterward had been a blur.  He described getting the gun from a cousin who was so thrilled to be asked for a favor by his near-famous relative that he never bothered to ask why Shawn needed it.  Shawn went to the concert without even stopping at home to change out of his practice clothes.  Consumed by rage, he sought out his teammates whom he knew would be there – they had planned to go together, after all.  His eyes located James almost immediately, sitting with a bunch of their classmates.  He started to make his way over – he had no specific plan – but when he saw Natalie White curled up against James, his insides contracted.  He had hooked up with Natalie for a few months last year, while James was dating Charlene’s cousin Crystal.  Natalie had never shown an interest in James; if she had, Shawn would not have gone out with her.  He avoided any outright competition with James; years of losing to Pelham had affected his self-confidence irreparably.  But here she was, with James, and Shawn felt as if he were exploding.

He didn’t know what he intended when he followed James out to the concession stand.  In the end, their confrontation was just a jumbled mess of misdirected accusations and flat denials, mostly about Natalie because Shawn’s bitterness about the real issue was too deep and wounding to express.  When they parted, Shawn’s emotions were running dangerously high.  Nothing had been resolved, but he was overtaken by a fury he had never known before, born of years of feeling inferior and a desperate need to escape the hood.  He could have left, he could have run from the stadium where just a week ago he had earned twenty-two points for his team in an important playoff game.  But he didn’t.  He sat back down, his long torso coiled tight, and nursed his rage to such a frenzy that his resentment of James became a living part of him.  Shawn realized then that he had always hated James, who had no problems, no competitors, whose path was blessed with praise and future riches; and this hatred was magnified by each remembered incident when James had bested him, taken what could have been his.

Hardly realizing that the concert was over, that everyone was exiting the arena, Shawn walked out in a daze.  His sweatshirt hung open, but he couldn’t feel the cold, October night air.  He never noticed it, but his orange jersey completed the Halloween motif.  He felt himself being shoved, jostled, as people moved towards the exit, ready to continue the party.  Shawn could feel the heavy, warm weight of the gun in his waistband, against his back.  His hand moved to adjust it, but miraculously it wound up in his palm, his fingers wrapped around it, half-tucked into his sweatshirt pocket.

“Yo, it’s the Tigers!  Guys, can we get a couple of photos for the Post?”  Shawn turned, ready with the automatic smile he saved for pictures, but the photographer’s back was turned to him; he hadn’t been talking to Shawn, he’d been talking to James.  Four of his teammates – his brothers – stood together without him, posing happily as a dozen cameras flashed and lit up their faces like Oscar night celebrities.  Without thinking, Shawn pointed his pocket at his friends and pulled the trigger.  Pop.  Pop.  Again.  Again.  He didn’t know how many times.  His hand burned, an acrid smell seared his nose and throat like tear gas.  He was shocked to see them fall, one after another, mouths open, blood leaking from holes that appeared magically in their chests.  Screaming, pushing; the din of hysteria sounded all around him, but Shawn didn’t move, didn’t understand what was happening until someone grabbed him by the arm and pulled him, and then he, too, was running, running for safety.

No, he didn’t see Trevor, or else he didn’t remember seeing him.  He didn’t remember losing his sweatshirt, tossing the gun; he didn’t remember anything like that.   At some point he went home.  Everyone was gathered outside, yelling incoherently or dumb with shock.  His own stunned silence caused no suspicion.  No one noticed him soaking his blistered hand in a bowl of raw egg.

Now, nearly a week later, Shawn was so tired, he hadn’t slept in so long, he just wanted it to be over.  Would Hawk mind if he just put his head down here for a few minutes?

* * * * *

Hawk’s eyes were itching for lack of sleep.  After two and a half hours of squinting over paperwork under the horrible fluorescent lights, he was nearly finished.  He was dying for a shower.  For the first time in ten years, he considered sleeping in the House tonight, though it was not his turnaround, just for a few hours before getting behind the wheel for the drive home.

He heard his name being called from upstairs and the urgency in the voice made him jump up so fast, his chair crashed to the floor.   He raced up the stairs, sleep forgotten.

When he got to the third floor, a crowd of cops was blocking the doorway to the holding cell.  Hawk was tall enough to see into the room and what he saw made him shove his way in.  He ran over and crouched next to the body, feeling for a pulse, ignoring the grotesquely swollen eyelids and lips.  He began CPR, but several of his colleagues pulled him away.  Curiously, as they pushed him out of the room, all he could smell was the powerful odor of peanut butter.

The exultation everyone expected to feel when the press finally reported that the murderer of three young, future basketball stars was behind bars never came.  Instead, there was a somber, empty quiet in the wake of the announcement that eighteen-year old Shawn Saint-Jean had died of anaphylactic shock after ingesting the four peanut butter sandwiches he had requested after writing out his confession.  It had happened so quickly, the watch officer had been unable to revive him once he noticed the boy’s condition.

There were no grand political statements about how such a tragedy was the fault of the NYPD, or the Board of Ed; no sophomoric commentaries about how this terrible waste of life could have been prevented.  Shawn Saint-Jean was no longer portrayed as a monster, just a sad, sick boy.

The press was unaware of the white envelope Hawk had removed from Shawn’s pocket during his mandatory “search” of the suspect at the time of arrest.  Hawk had not disclosed the contents of the letters from Michigan State, North Carolina and UCONN offering Shawn full basketball scholarships.  They had been sent to Roosevelt High, care of Coach Tripper, because Shawn and Trevor’s foster mother’s address was kept confidential by the State.  The coach had told Hawk this morning about the offers for both Shawn and James, who remained in a coma and, if he lived, would likely never play basketball again.

Hawk felt empty.  He’d seen it countless times: an otherwise decent, normal person overcome by jealousy or rage, momentarily lose all reason and commit, in one second, a life-altering act that could never be rectified.  He wondered if Shawn had read the letters before getting into his car this morning – a lifetime ago. Hawk would never know the answer to that question.  It would haunt him to the end of his days.