“Who, Jav? Who’s gonna kill you?”
“Man, there’s a hundred people out there, that heard the damn shots. I mean, if this goddamn fuckin’ shit were any deeper I’d be gargling. Richie, man, you gotta help me. You gotta do something. Or my ass is grass, man.”
Richie was getting it. “He’s dead? Perp’s dead?”
“He’s dead, I’m dead. They’re gonna kill me!”
Doing his best to calm his partner out of his hysteria, Richie said, “Cool it. Stay cool. Where are you? Javy?... Talk to me. Where are you, buddy?”
“... That’s the problem.”
“What is?”
“Where I am is.”
“Which is where?”
“Projects. Stephen Crane.”
Oh shit, Richie thought, then said, “No problem. Stay cool. If it’s not my voice, don’t answer the door.”
“Don’t fuckin’ worry.”
And Javy gave him the building and apartment number.
Richie threw on a shirt, jeans, gun and his brown leather jacket, responding to his bedmate’s question of “Should I wait?” with “Up to you.”
Within minutes he was in his Plymouth Fury, moving quickly; this was Sunday, not long after dawn, traffic dead as Javy’s perp.
The radio kept cutting in and out on him, but he didn’t have any trouble hearing the male dispatcher’s nasty news: “There are no cars in that area, Detective Roberts.”
“Bullshit,” he spat into the mike. “I got a man in trouble and I need backup an hour ago.”
“... missed that... you... breaking up...”
“Put the call out again!”
“... still can’t... you’re breaking...”
“I said put the fucking call out again—”
“I just did, Detective. Nobody responded. I’ll try once more, but it won’t do any—”
“Fuck you very much,” Richie said, and slammed the mike into its slot, thinking, I’ll bet he heard that.
When Richie’s car rounded the corner onto Central Avenue, the three dark thirty-floor towers of the Stephen Crane Projects loomed like massive tombstones from the war zone landscape. If a more forbidding place existed on the planet, Richie had no desire to see it. A torched and abandoned patrol car sat silent sentry just beyond the curb, dating back to one riot or another.
After he parked, Richie moved through the agitated all-black crowd swiftly and confidently, which was the only way to survive; the morning was unseasonably warm and, early as it was, the Crane residents and other neighborhood gawkers had come out to enjoy the fun and outrage. He spotted an ambulance pulled up on the sidewalk in front of one tower, and headed for that building.
Just inside the doors, a frightened female paramedic, pretty cute — stop it, Richie told himself — pointed the way for him: fifth floor. He went up the graffiti-adorned elevator and down a graffiti-adorned hall. Outside the apartment, two more scared shitless medics, male, were milling.
Richie displayed his badge in its wallet.
One medic, a white guy pale as his uniform, said desperately, “He won’t let us in there, officer. There was a shooting and—”
Richie held up a hand and said, “I’m his partner. Give me a minute.”
He knocked, said, “It’s me!” and Javy, in jeans and a dark brown leather jacket, let him right in. Jav’s shoulder-length dark hair, muttonchops and mustache overwhelmed his hangdog face.
“Thank God you come, Rich, thank God.”
Then, without waiting for Richie to say anything, Javy made his zombie-like way over to the couch and sat, slumped, hands folded prayerfully, head bowed, though Richie was fairly confident nothing religious was going on here.
On the other hand, the skinny black guy on the floor in a blood-spattered yellow undershirt and jeans and no shoes was making like Jesus, in a crucifixion posture. Brains and lots of blood had drained out of him making a mostly scarlet Rorschach pattern on the cream-color shag throw rug. The dead dealer lay next to a low-slung white coffee table whose glass top was littered with drugs and drug paraphernalia, as well as a few empty beer bottles and soda cans.
Richie let the paramedics in; they wheeled in their gurney while the detective called in the shooting.
Before long he was saying into the phone, “Sergeant, does it sound like I’m asking? I’m fuckin’ telling you: get some patrolmen over here, right now.”
Richie hung up, hard, and the paramedics — their gurney not even unstrapped — were staring at him like his fly was open and his dick was hanging out. They’d been listening.
“You got no backup?” one of them asked.
The other added: “Why don’t you? Have any backup.”
Richie pointed at the corpse and said, “Bandage that asshole’s head.”
“Detective,” the pale paramedic said, “he’s dead.”
The other paramedic, a heavy-set guy, asked, “Should we even be moving him? Isn’t this a crime scene?”
Richie walked over; the dead guy on the throw rug was between him and the paramedics. On the couch, hunkered over, despondent as hell, Javy sat staring at the shag rug, like a gypsy reading tea leaves.
“This will be a crime scene,” Richie said, “if a couple hundred people start rioting and kill all our asses. As for our pal on the floor here? Yes, he’s fucking dead, I know he’s fucking dead. Now bandage his head, clean him up, put him on your gurney and... prop him up a little.”
The pale paramedic squinted. “Prop him up...?”
“Yeah, so he’s sitting, kind of. Can you open his eyes? Use a little tape on his lids or something.”
The paramedics were goggling at him, as if maybe they should be skipping the corpse’s gurney and instead going down to get a straitjacket out of their ambulance for the detective.
Richie pointed to the stiff. “He needs to be less dead. Way less dead.”
Pretty soon, Richie came out of the building fast — holding up his badge in its ID wallet Olympic torch-style — motioning and yelling at the crowd to get back, like it was a matter of life and death.
Which it was. Even more than his damn Bar exams...
“We need a path here!” he called. “Step back — injured man coming through! Let these fellas do their job and he’ll be all right... Ma’am, excuse me. Step back. Sir! Please...”
The paramedics were right behind Richie bearing a gurney whose rider had tubes in his nostrils, an IV in his arm and eyes open wide. If anybody had gotten a closer, longer look, the corpse would still have seemed a corpse; but nobody got much of any kind of look, and, wham, bam, the gurney was hauled up into the ambulance with one paramedic alongside, the rear doors shutting behind.
“Nothing to see here!” Richie called, motioning for Javy to come out of the building and join him. He was guiding his partner away in one direction, as the crowd began spreading out in the other, to trail after the siren-wailing ambulance as it pulled away from the ominous towers.
Richie and Javy walked.
Quickly. Not so quickly as to draw attention, but quickly enough, and in a nearby commercial area, Richie ducked into an alley, taking his partner with him, and they cut through almost to the next street. Near its mouth, they found a place between a bin and some garbage cans to stand and catch their breath and talk.
“Jesus, Rich,” Javy said, shaking his head, sighing in relief, even grinning a little. “Thank you, man.”
Richie shoved Javy against the brick wall. “You dumb bastard — you ripped him off, didn’t you?”
“What?” Javy’s eyes popped. “Are you high, Rich?”