Ford’s eyes came open and slowly moved around until they found Freddy. After a moment they went to Hooper.
“Hey, Tom.”
“Hey, Harrison. Sorry about this.”
“It’s over.”
“Yeah.”
Ford’s eyes closed again. Hooper looked at Freddy, who shrugged.
“Harrison,” Hooper said, “I need to ask you some questions, find out what happened. Why did you go to that warehouse anyway?”
The eyes focused on Hooper’s face. They stayed there a while, went to Freddy, then back to Hooper. Harrison Ronald licked his lips, then said, “I want a lawyer.”
“What?”
“A lawyer. I ain’t saying anything without my lawyer’s approval.”
“Aww, wait a goddamn minute! I’m not charging you with anything. You’re the sole witness to a serious—”
The word “crime” was right there on the tip of his tongue but he bit it off. He swallowed once. “All this has to be investigated. You know that. You’re a cop, for Chrissake!”
“I want a lawyer. That’s all I have to say.”
Hooper opened his mouth and closed it again. He glanced at Freddy, who was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the man in the bed.
“Okay. We’ll get you a lawyer. I’ll stop by tomorrow and see how you’re doing.”
“Fine. See you then.”
“Come on, Freddy. We have work to do.”
Harrison Ronald Ford went back to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
The first man the soldiers killed was Larry Ticono. At the age of sixteen he had dropped out of the seventh grade after failing it three times. In spite of the nine years he spent in the public school system, he was illiterate. On those rare occasions when he was asked to sign his name he used an illegible scrawl.
Larry Ticono had been arrested three times in his short life — twice for possession of illegal drugs and once for burglary — but he had spent a grand total of only five days in jail. After each arrest he was released on his own recognizance. He returned to court only when the police picked him up again. One of his possession arrests had apparently fallen completely through the cracks and been forgotten. He had pleaded guilty to the other two charges and had received probation.
The wonder was that he had lived so long. He had a two-hundred-dollar-a-day crack habit and his welfare check was only $436 a month. The shortfall he made up by stealing anything that wasn’t welded in place. Cameras, radios, televisions, and car stereos were his favorite targets. He sold his loot to fences for fifteen to twenty percent of their market value — not retail value when new, but market value used. He tried to avoid muggings, which were dangerous, but did them when nothing else readily presented itself.
Larry Ticono’s life defined the term “hand to mouth.” He slept under bridges in good weather and in abandoned buildings in bad. He rarely had more than twenty dollars in his pocket and was never more than three hours away from withdrawal.
This afternoon Larry Ticono’s three-hour margin had melted to zero. He was on the edge with only $17.34 in his pocket. The corner where he usually purchased crack was empty. Although Ticono didn’t know it, his suppliers were the retail end of the distribution network of Willie Teal, who had been forcibly and permanently retired from the crack business the previous night. So the street-corner salesmen had no product and were not there.
Frustrated and desperate, Ticono walked a half mile to another neighborhood that he knew about and tried to make a deal with a fifteen-year-old in a pair of hundred-dollar Nike running shoes. That worthy had not received his morning delivery from his supplier, an employee of Freeman McNally. The streetwise dealers sensed that something was wrong although they had no hard information. They had seen the troops coming and going and had heard the news on television, and they were worried. Many of them were drifting away, back to the welfare apartments and ramshackle row houses they called home.
When Larry Ticono approached the fifteen-year-old, that youngster had only four crack bags left and no prospect of readily obtaining more. So that young capitalist demanded forty dollars a hit.
The thought occurred to Larry Ticono that he should just mug the kid, but it vaporized after one look at the corner boss, a heavyset man standing by a garbage can watching. Larry knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the guard had a weapon within easy reach and would cheerfully kill him if he so much as touched the youngster.
After trying futilely to bargain, he reluctantly turned away.
Two blocks later Larry Ticono threw a brick through a window of an electronics store and grabbed a ghetto blaster. He was promptly shot by a convenience-store salesclerk wearing a National Guard uniform. The blaster was just too large and heavy to run with at any speed.
The fifty-five-grain .223 bullet from the M-16 hit Larry high up in the center of the back, a perfect shot, which was pure luck because the clerk was wearing a pair of fogged-up glasses and had barely qualified with the M-16 in training. Before he threw the rifle to his shoulder and pulled the trigger the clerk had never killed any creature larger than a cockroach.
Still traveling at over three thousand feet per second when it pierced Larry Ticono’s skin, the jacketed bullet expended a major portion of its eleven hundred foot-pounds of energy shattering his backbone and driving the fragments through his heart, exploding it. The slug then exited his chest and buried itself in a parked car sixty yards away.
Larry Ticono, age nineteen, was dead before his body hit the pavement.
The convenience-store clerk vomited beside the body.
Jack Yocke took in the scene at a glance a half hour later when he arrived. He busied himself taking names and trying to think of something to say to the clerk-private, who was sitting on the tailgate of an olive-drab pickup staring at his hands.
“I shouted for him to stop, but he didn’t,” the private said so softly Yocke had to strain to hear. “He didn’t stop,” he repeated wonderingly, amazed at the perverse ways of fate.
“No. He didn’t.”
“He should have stopped.”
“Yes.”
“He really should have stopped.”
The reporter wandered over to a sergeant standing near the body smoking a cigarette. Some fifteen feet away a group of army or National Guard officers were conferring with a uniformed policeman. Yocke had yet to learn the nuances of the shoulder patches on the uniforms, which as far as he could see, were the only way to tell which service was which. The sergeant glanced at Yocke and continued to puff leisurely on his cigarette. He was thoughtfully surveying the faces of the watchers on the sidewalk across the street.
“I thought,” Jack Yocke said, “that your people were supposed to fire their weapons only in self-defense.”
The sergeant appraised him carefully. “That’s right,” he said, then went back to scanning the crowd.
“Yet as I understand it, the victim was running away when the private shot him?”
“Something like that, I suppose.”
“So why’d he shoot?”
A look of disgust registered on the sergeant’s face. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Jack Yocke, Washington Post. I didn’t mean—”
“Shove off, pencil pilot. Before I lose my temper and ram that notebook up your ass.”
“I’m sorry. No offense,” Yocke said, then turned away. He shouldn’t have asked that question. Why had he done it? Now he felt guilty. It was a new experience.
Disgusted with himself, he looked again at the private slumped on the tailgate and the body covered with a sheet, then walked to his car.
He had always been so confident, so sure of himself and his perceptions. And now …
Six blocks away a group of people outside a closed liquor store — the military authorities had ordered them all closed — were throwing rocks at passing cars. One of them thudded into the side of the Post’s little sedan.