Sergeant Crewes was silent as he drove the cruiser slowly past the entrance to the Spofford facility and turned left onto Barretto. The Doctor, also very quiet now, had recently discovered in himself a gift for rueful contemplation, and he watched the Spofford gates receding into the middle distance with regret and a dawning appreciation for the consequences that sometimes come upon a man for acting without thinking.
Crewes drove south on Barretto wrapped in a silence composed of pure basalt, the unit drifting over the cracked and rotting pavement, through the grid blocks of low warehouse buildings, vacant and chained lots, ruined and deserted burn-outs, fields of dead grass and junkyard debris, past fifty-gallon oil drums burning and smoldering, oily black plumes rising into the deepening winter dark and spreading out on the wind from the river as if the black Bronx night were made out of their fires, past clusters of black men and Hispanic men and white men and Asian men standing around coffee trucks and open warehouse doors, black silhouettes against the green glow of the factory lights, past more small shops and factories and past workmen standing here and there on loading docks and by the open doors of metal shops and packing houses, smoking cigarettes, sipping beer out of brown paper bags, men who watched Five Frank slide by with blank faces and careful eyes, saw the pale crewcut cop at the wheel, and the prisoner in the back, staring at them with worried eyes.
Finally, the developing situation and the implications for his immediate future forced Doctor Dred to set aside his pretense of stoicism and break the awkward silence. Marshaling his hitherto untapped reservoirs of persuasive charm and colloquial ingenuity, he composed a careful question:
“So, where the fuck we going?”
No answer from the cop.
“Yo, fuckhead! You can’t do this, you know. You listening? Fool?”
“Watch me.”
Sheeit. Doctor Dred shook his head, rolled his eyes upward as if he were calling on whatever gods ruled the Bronx to intervene.
“This ain’t right, man!”
Crewes slowed as they bounced over a pothole, then picked up speed again. The radio popped and crackled with casual cross-talk from cars in the next sector.
“Yo, peckerhead, what’s a ten-56?”
Silence.
“I’m asking, okay? Come on, man?”
“Advise if ambulance needed,” said Crewes, finally.
Barretto dead-ended on Ryawa, at the Hunts Point Sewage Treatment Works, a low-walled facility that ran for almost five blocks eastward along Ryawa. At close to six o’clock on a Friday, Ryawa was empty, most of the business of Hunts Point being concentrated in the fruit and produce centers of the Terminal Market, several blocks away across Hunts Point Avenue.
The sewage treatment plant rode a flat delta of broken concrete and scrub plain out into the East River. About a mile away across the river the low angular buildings of Rikers Island seemed to float in a permanent haze. The river was a broad expanse of hammered tin, pale and shimmering in the glimmer of lights from Queens and Rikers Island, and the sound of the city was a muted roar from across the river. Planes with bellies tinted pale orange by the runway lights floated down into La Guardia, the sound of their jets rising and falling in the damp, chilling air.
Crewes stopped the blue and white Caprice at the entrance to an inset in the brick wall of the sewage plant, an indented space about ten feet wide and fifteen feet deep, which provided access to some water mains. The cruiser made the space a closed square.
Crewes took the keys out. He slid his gun out of the holster and placed it inside the gun locker under the dashboard, slammed the door upward, and thumbed the alarm. Then he got out of the car and walked around to the right rear door.
“What the fuck you gonna do, asshole?” said the Doctor.
Crewes pulled the rear door open, reached in, and dragged Doctor Dred out of the rear seat by the right ear, pulled him right out of the back seat and onto the sidewalk.
The Doctor hit hard on his shoulder and squealed with rage and fright. He kicked out at the cop’s left knee and missed, huffing with the effort, using his shoulder to pivot on. Crewes stepped in fast and kicked him hard in the belly, flipped him over onto his face. He put his right boot down hard on the back of the Doctor’s neck, reached down, and unlocked the boy’s handcuffs.
Then he stepped back a few feet while Doctor Dred lay there on his face, thinking over the latest developments.
Still not moving, still facedown in the broken sidewalk, Doctor Dred addressed the ground.
“What’s this bullshit, asshole?”
“Get up,” said Crewes.
“Get up?” said the Doctor, his tone a tad less antagonistic. He craned his neck around so he could look up at Sergeant Crewes. The cop was looking back down at him with a flat expressionless face, his hands down at his sides. The Doctor looked at both of his hands carefully. Then he looked at the cop’s holster and saw that it was empty.
“What’s this?”
“Your lucky day, Mr. Garr.”
Garr was the Doctor’s actual name. Clayton Garr.
“My lucky day! Fuck you. I get up, you air out my ass, lay off a drop tool, say, Yo man, it be self-defense.”
Crewes held his hands up to show they were empty. “No. You get up. If you can get past me, you walk.”
“Oh yeah? How you gonna manage that?”
“What, you want me to read you the Patrol Guide?”
“You shittin’ me.”
“No shit. Now either get up and get it done, or shut the fuck up and stop whining, say you’re sorry, and get back into the car.”
A second passed, then the Doctor got up, quickly, a fluid motion, coming up on his toes, a fast look around at the three eight-foot-high walls that surrounded him, then back at the open daylight on the far side of Sergeant Crewes and the patrol car.
A light came into his black eyes, and a ridge of muscle between his eyes bunched up. He came straight in at the cop, his hands and arms loose, not taking an angle, not signaling a tactic or a style until he was inside his range, and then he snaked out a loopy left, felt the cop block it with his own right forearm, the cop’s feet spaced slightly, his body relaxed but taking the blow the way the Doctor wanted him to, leaving his belly exposed for the Doctor’s sideways knee-strike, the doctor’s weight on his forward left leg, raising the knee hard and fast, aiming for the cop’s rib cage—which simply wasn’t there when it should have been—say!—and then the Doctor’s eyes burst into a fiery red pain, he felt his head snapping back so hard, he could hear the meat and sinews in his neck creaking and grinding—his vision was gone, his nose was a blossom of blue-white pain, and he felt hot wet blood all over his teeth, tasted it—and then his crotch was lifted up, he felt the lightness in his toes, the weight coming off his feet as the cop’s boot lifted him upward—his crotch became a corona of pains so infinite and varied he was amazed that his nerves could register every one of them. The ground hit his back very hard, and his breath hoofed out of him, and the cop stepped in again as the Doctor folded up onto his side, vomiting, blood spilling out of his nose—and Sergeant Crewes kicked him very hard right in the upper belly, kicked him so hard, the boy rolled away and fetched up against the rear wall by the standpipe valve.
He lay there for a while, struggling for breath, hoping for unconsciousness, experiencing new horizons of pain in a wide range of nerve-bundles and sensory locations.
Crewes was puffing a bit as he leaned down and pulled the boy by the left ear, lifting his skull off the concrete. The Doctor blinked, spit blood, groaned once. Crewes leaned in very close and spoke directly into the boy’s ear. “Can you hear me, Mr. Garr?”
A cough, then another. Finally, “Yes.”
“You’re in pain, Mr. Garr?”
“Where?”
“Sheeit … everywhere.”
“Everywhere, Mr. Garr?”
“Yes.”
“Your balls?”
“Yes—Jesus.”
“Your nose there? That looks like it smarts a bit.”
“Yes.”
“You wanna go to the hospital, Mr. Garr? Make a full statement? Get this whole thing on the record, how a little white cop beat the ever-loving shit right outta you, no guns, no help, just flat-out pulled your panties down and paddled your wiseguy butt?”
“No … no, I don’t.”
“You wanna call your homies, get them to help your sorry ass?”
“No.”
“You wanna make a complaint, Mr. Garr? You wanna bring in the ACLU?”
“No.”
“No what?”
“No. I don’t.”
“No you don’t what?”
“No … I don’t … sir.”
“And your chest, Mr. Garr? How’s your chest?”
“It hurts. It hurts bad!”
“See?” said Sergeant Crewes, still leaning in close, smelling the boy’s blood and his juices.
“See what?”
“Chest pains. I told you you had chest pains. You shoulda believed me, Mr. Garr.”
Doctor Dred looked up at the cop’s bland pale face, struggling to focus on it. “How—why you think I had chest pains—why?”
“What?”
“Back there, when you accidentally spit on me, that’s excess saliva. It sometimes indicates the early stages of angina. It was accidental, wasn’t it?”
A whisper.
“What, Mr. Garr?”
“Yes,” said Doctor Dred. “It was an accident.”
“And you’re sorry, right?”
Nothing. A groan, then some coughed-up blood.
“I didn’t catch that.”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“There you go,” said Sergeant Crewes, patting the Doctor’s head a little too hard. “I just knew it had to be an accident.”
He put the cuffs back on the boy and walked back to the patrol car. He unlocked the car, released the gun safe, and reholstered his revolver. He checked his reflection in the mirror, then picked up the radio handset.
“Five Frank, K?”
“Five Frank? You been outta the car?”
“Call of nature, Central.”
“Instructional interlude, Five Frank?”
“Ten-four. I’ll clear Spofford in five, K?”
“Negative, Five Frank. Secure your prisoner and answer a ten-eleven, ten-31 at unit two niner seven, Timpson Place at 144th Street. That’s a ten-31, Five Frank.”
Shit. Ten-eleven was a silent alarm. Ten-31 was a burglary in progress. Crewes looked down at Doctor Dred. Christ, he’d have to cord-cuff him. The mope was gonna leak all over his back seat too. God-damn, shows you the price of self-indulgence.
“Units to cover, Central?”
“We’re looking. Four Frank is on an aided case.”
“Ten-four, Central.”
“K?”
“We mark this a ten-56 now?”
“Negative, Central. Mark it ten-97R.”
“Refused treatment?”
“Ten-four, Central.”
“Okay, Five Frank. 144th and Timpson, K?”
“Rolling now, Central.”
Crewes got out and dragged Mr. Garr back to the open door of the squad car, cuffed him again, then cord-cuffed him using a nylon restraint kit from the glove box, securing his cuffed hands behind his back and then running the long section of the cord-cuff around Garr’s ankles and back up to the handcuff links. Then he tensed, grunted, lifted him bodily, and more or less launched him onto the greasy vinyl of the back seat. Doctor Dred moaned and cursed but seemed to have other issues to deal with and offered no pertinent comments at this time.
Crewes slammed the door and ran around to the driver’s side. Two seconds later he was accelerating eastward along Ryawa toward Halleck. He was about three minutes away from La Luna Negra.
It was exactly 1800 hours, six o’clock in the evening of Friday, the thirteenth day of January, in the year 1995.
Across the East River the lights of Queens and La Guardia showed dimly through a chilly gathering mist that floated above the water. Beyond Queens, beyond the Throgs Neck Bridge, a dull brown night was turning black, and Long Island Sound was disappearing into a huge murmuring undefined darkness, an absolute emptiness, as if the edge of the world were only a mile offshore and grinding in closer by the minute. Now and then the muffled clanging of the marker buoys sounded faintly from out of the fog bank.
On Rikers Island the first meals were being slapped down on plastic dishes under red-glowing heat lamps, in the brutal white light of the huge dining hall. The noise was bright, staccato, harsh, the clangor of dented stainless trays, the brass notes of voices, and the tympana of curses, the forced laughter, chairs grating on the floor, tables pushed, flatware clattering. At the Terminal Market the dock loaders worked in heavy coats, shifting crates and pallets of produce, fish, bags of rice, swinging racks of frozen beef bound for Sloan’s and Gristede’s and the Red Ball and a thousand little food markets in Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Staten Island.
The FDR Drive was an unbroken scarlet ribbon of taillights snaking north to the bridges. In midtown the bars were filling up with people, glasses glimmered in down lights, and the talk went around; greetings, jokes, affection, lies. Grand Central echoed and boomed with crowd noise and the shuffle-and-stamp of passengers. In neighborhoods like Chelsea, Turtle Bay, the Upper West Side, people shopped for dinner and wine and hurried along toward their apartments with their arms full of brown paper parcels, heads down, wrapped up, cheeks bright, breath pluming. Limousines jammed up on the Queensboro ramps, trying for La Guardia or Kennedy. Sirens howled and car horns beeped and cabbies threatened walkers with eight circles of damnation.
Beyond Battery Park, far across the bay, the dockyards along the Staten Island shoreline burned with a dirty yellow sheen, and the rosary-bead lights of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge shimmered and wavered in the sea mist On the far side of the narrows the ocean boomed and rolled and sighed its way out into a black infinity filled with gull cries, the curling hiss and the liquid slap of waves, the thrumming murmurs of the deep. At La Luna Negra Delivery and Storage, questions were being asked.