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Doyle and I both had our service weapons drawn when we arrived on the corner of Eighth. Two people were down. Two young black men, neither of them older than twenty. One was facedown in the gutter between two parked cars, not moving. The other one was sitting, leaning up against the doorjamb of the corner bodega, bleeding heavily from his chest and mouth.
A large, older black man with short dreads and Carhartt coveralls was down on his knees beside the victim, holding a dirty towel to the kid’s chest with his left hand while holding the kid’s hand with his right. The gasping youth had on a Dodgers hoodie and had a pale-blue bandanna tied Tupac-style around his head.
Gangs, I thought immediately, seeing the rag. Pale blue. Crips.
“C’mon, c’mon,” the man said to the bleeding youth in a Jamaican accent. “C’mon, son. Stay awake, now. They’re comin’ to help ya.”
I went and squatted by the kid in the gutter. He was stocky, wearing a pristine white-and-light-blue-striped polo and oversize jeans. But there was no helping him. There was a large-caliber bullet hole the size of a bouncy ball just above his right temple, and blood and brain matter covered the left leg of his pants.
I saw a gun tucked at the back of his waistband, some type of Taurus semiautomatic. I retrieved it carefully and unloaded it as I stood.
“What happened?” I said to the Jamaican guy.
“These two was comin’ out the store,” the man said, “and it was ‘blam blam blam.’ Some fools shootin’ a long rifle gun from the window of a green car right there on the corner right in the middle of the damn day.”
“What kind of car was it?” I said.
“Like a Honda maybe, or a Nissan. With the loud muffler on it. You know? It was like a teal green.”
I was about to call it in on the radio when I saw that Doyle had beaten me to the punch. He was also moving back the growing crowd of people. The kid took control well, I noticed. He had an easy, convincing authority for such a young cop. I was immediately impressed.
I knelt and clapped my hands by the face of the young man, who was now bleeding out, as his eyes started to flutter. The kneeling Jamaican looked at the kid and shook his head before he pointed his sad and stunned face at me.
“This young, young man,” the Jamaican said, staring at me furiously. “Over what? What?”
A Twenty-Eighth Precinct squad car shrieked up a moment later, an ambulance right behind it.
“What is it? What’s up?” said the thin sergeant who leaped out of the car. He had one of his black-gloved hands on his gun and Ray-Ban sunglasses propped on top of his shaved head.
“Drive-by,” I said, handing him the Taurus, watching the EMTs hurry the teen wearing the Dodgers hoodie into the back of the ambulance. “Two down. One gone, the other likely. Crips gangbangers, looks like.”
“What are you guys? Gang squad?” the sergeant, whose name was Gomez, said, staring at us as he called it in.
“No, we’re the, um, ombudsman squad over on a Hundred and Twenty-Fifth,” I said.
“The what?” Gomez said, utterly confused. “Wait, you mean the mayor’s thing? Are you frickin’ kidding me? You heard the call and just came running, huh? Or did you zip-line out of the building like Batman and Robin?”
“Yeah, we ran,” Doyle said, immediately squaring up on the skinny wise guy. “What did you do, Gomez? Crawl?”
The screaming ambulance pulled away.
“Good job, do-gooder squad, but wait,” the sergeant said as he pretended to answer his cell phone. “That was Commissioner Gordon,” he went on, lowering his phone. “He said your new orders are to go back and deactivate the bat signal.”
“C’mon, Doyle,” I said, getting between him and Gomez. “Let’s leave the paperwork on this one to the Joker.” I turned to leave.
CHAPTER 15
THE BUILDING AT 793 West End Avenue looks a lot like the rest of the prewar buildings on the Upper West Side. Its brick-and-limestone-trimmed facade is worn and probably due for a power wash, but there’s no denying that its lines are still grand, its hunter-green awning and polished brass poles still classy and stately.
The words sight for sore eyes could have been added to its description as I scored a rare parking spot across from my apartment house that afternoon after work.
I sat for a moment and just stared up at the dusty windows of my apartment on the eighth floor. There were so many memories there. My mind spun at all the christenings and birthday parties and anniversaries. All the happy faces lit by candlelight around the table.
How my deceased wife, Maeve, had put the calculus of all those dates together in her head and never missed a one, I will never know. She never forgot an occasion to celebrate all of us, the people she loved so dearly, with a card and a cupcake, with a book, with a prayer.
“We’ll be starting on all the graduations soon enough, won’t we?” I said to Maeve as I sat there in the car. Weddings someday, too, I thought, and then new christenings and new birthday parties and on and on and on. I smiled as I got out onto the sidewalk. It was good to be home.
I crossed the tree-lined street and went under the awning into the lobby.
