He found the super, went past the Crime Scene tape into 14D.
Stepping carefully through the scene, he remembered the progression of events like a series of snapshots: red do-rag fronting him, the screaming hip-hop music, the pit bull coming out of nowhere. Flashes of gunfire, the racking pain, then the wild gunfight. He’d emptied his Colt. Looking back, he realized he’d been fighting off shock, trying to stay focused in those moments, blood draining from him even then.
Everything else had been just background.
Now, it was all background, Crime Scene Unit having been all over it, anything important to the investigation already carted away. Seeing it in daylight now, a stack of dirty plastic dishes in the sink, a half-empty sack of dog food, crushed takeout containers scattered across the floor, cockroaches all over.
Jack knew this run-down projects apartment was typical, a haven for junkie absentee parents and illegitimate drop-out children, siblings, and cousins mixed in together in an environment of violence and drugs.
In the bedroom, piles of dirty clothing lay on top of bare mattresses. There was a scatter of broken and stained furniture, a couple of filthy sleeping bags in the corners, jackets and boots against the wall. The place was more like a homeless encampment than a residential unit. There was a stack of fuck magazines on top of a dresser. Ghetto Bitches, BadAss Hos, Black Pussy Mamas, black girls fondling and spreading themselves for the camera. Next to the stack, a crumpled photograph of the two killas and a third youth, making gang signs, posing somewhere in one of the project’s courtyards. The one he’d shot in the chest had his hair done up in fifty-dollar cornrows, long enough to trail stiffly off the back of his neck, smiling out a mouth of gold caps, flashing CZ studs in both ears.
The one he’d shot in the leg wore a New York Knicks cap, and an Oakland Raiders football shirt. A thick silver chain with a big cross of shiny glass chips dangled from his neck. Putting on a hard thug look for the camera.
The third youth wore a black T- shirt tucked into a big silver belt buckle encrusted with glittery letters that spelled out the word ICE, his baggy jeans threatening to slide off his hips. Challenging the camera with his gangsta sneer.
All three living large. Posing and fronting.
He pocketed the photo.
Jack noticed a foul odor coming from the bathroom. He saw an empty jug of Lysol there. From the grimy kitchen window, he could see the four lanes of the FDR Drive below, running north-south, and the overpass that spanned them, the ramp next to where they’d found the body. A high-school scholar, dumped in cold blood like a sack of garbage by the gutter. Sai m’sai, what a waste.
Looking across the East River to the Brooklyn waterfront, to Williamsburg, he saw dilapidated docks and crumbling warehouses along the piers, camouflaged by the clean cover of snow. Garages and gritty industrial dumpsites along a graffiti-tagged and run-down shoreline. An area slowly being converted to residential lofts and low-rise condos, with pioneering urban homesteaders paving the way for the gentrification that was sure to come, the reality of realty finding its way across the river from Manhattan.
His focus came back to the apartment. A rag in the kitchen corner. Streaks of blood along the baseboard. There was a cracked-open boom box lying on its side. He squatted down, tapped the play button. The box exploded into a hip-hop rant, angry yelling rapping blasting the small space, a homemade recording, that sounded like:
Whup dat Chinee
Whup dat Chinee
Beat him down,
Down wit da hamma,
Beat him down!
Thump dat yellow
Eveebody hello!
Slam wit da baseball
Bat dat Chinee
Bat dat Chinee
Mutha-Fucka!
Stab the blade down
Punch it up
Whup da Chinee
Chop chop chop
Thump dat yellow
Slam dat Chinee
Mutha-Fuck!
Which then faded to a chorus of
Huh huh
Yo! Yo!
Stunned by the lyrics, Jack hit the Stop button, and wondered if Crime Scene had bothered to play it.
Killing chinks was fun now.
Call it a blanket party. Yo! Yo!
A dull throbbing pain moved down his left side. The meds wearing off.
He pocketed the tape.
His cell phone buzzed; they had an address. Five-Twenty-Six. Apartment 4C. One of the corner buildings.
He left the crime scene, the icy wind dulling the pinching pain in his left chest. He took one of the uniforms with him, a veteran black officer who’d worked the regular vertical patrol before Housing and Transit were merged into one NYPD. A Community Affairs officer.
Jack showed him the photo. “Looking for this kid, Ice,” he said.
The cop shook his head sadly. “Tyrone. Lives with his grandma.” He broke down the kid’s story.
Tyrone Walker, eighteen, was a punk-ass wannabe, wanting to be in with the Eastside Blunts, wear the colors. A fronting punk-ass coward. Even the Blunts could see that, playing him along, but not blooding him in, using him as a go-fer.
Now he’d brought cop heat to the drug projects and the projects had given him up.
Together, they dragged him out of his grandma’s apartment closet in Five-Twenty-Six, cowering in fear. They tossed him in a cab, cuffed and whimpering. When they got to the 0-Nine Jack took a Polaroid of Tyrone before putting him in a holding cell.
Down the hall, the other perp sat cuffed to a table inside the interview room the cops had nicknamed “the cooler.” He was chillin’ like a villain.
According to the notes an exhausted P.O. Wong had left on Jack’s desk, the shooter in the cooler was DaShawn Miller, eighteen, with a rap sheet that detailed his ascent of the thug ladder: early busts for loitering, drinking from an open container, turnstile-hopping, then from criminal mischief to purse-snatching, to menacing, assault, possession of controlled substances, possession with intent to sell, and now finally, gun possession and attempted murder of a New York City police officer. The investigation would be ongoing.
The other perp, the one with the bat, who Jack had shot in the chest, was Jamal Bryant, or JB, aka Jelly Bean, also eighteen, with a juvie file that had been sealed by the court, which meant the kid had committed some heinous felony, that he was a damaged child, possibly a danger to others, a menace to society, but because of his age, the courts in their wisdom had decided he was to receive correction and rehabilitation. Following that, Jamal had had a few other beefs: shoplifting, burglary, auto theft.
Both had dropped out of Seward Park High, and fallen into the thug life.