The silent night surrendered to twirling siren lights and a whirlwind of activity. Four cruisers and an ambulance clogged the now cordoned off block. A few early morning enthusiasts watched from behind, craning their necks to get a good view of the commotion. Paramedics hunkered over the injured man, working frantically, administering anesthesia, taping his injuries with sheets of gauze. A few policemen from the 13th precinct gathered about the medical team, watching inquisitively, while others casually leaned on the cruisers and laughed amongst themselves. Frank heard them cracking gay jokes about the victim.
"So Smoky...what brings you out at this time of night?"
Frank recognized the voice at once. Smiling, he turned to face Captain Hector Rodriguez. Frank had worked his longest tour of duty with Hector at the 13th, nearly twenty years, before being promoted—and transferred—to the 12th eleven years ago.
In 1968, his first month as a rookie cop, Frank had been posted at the corner of Bleeker and 3rd, three blocks from an open air concert being performed by the Grateful Dead. Greenwich Village in the late sixties always offered a great deal of culture to look at: drunk and stoned kids roaming the streets, all living life to its fullest, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Frank was just a kid himself at the time, and being from Brooklyn, had had many friends participating in all the far-out activities thriving at the time. The day of the concert he had been perched at the corner watching the semblance of activity, wondering with a bit of envy what his life would have been like had he not chosen to become an officer of the law. He pictured himself dressed in bell-bottom jeans, a tie-dye shirt, headband, John Lennon specs, and a cigarette dangling from his lip.
As he daydreamed, a group of teens approached him, most of them proudly sporting marijuana joints. They jeered him, and Frank—as young and as naive as they got at the time—just stood there against a brick building as frozen as a snowman while they all took turns blowing pot smoke into his face. He felt so helpless that they probably could have helped themselves to his gun. It was a good thing they didn't; he wouldn't have been a cop today.
As it happened, the whole episode was simply a harmless prank on the part of the hippies, and as far as they had been concerned, were simply spreading the 'word', love, peace and happiness, man. Frank had gotten so stoned he needed to wait until the following day before he could write up a report on the incident. Of course by that time he had completely forgotten what any of the teens looked like. It was an incident that would haunt him for the rest of his career, and it was how he got the nickname 'Smoky'.
"Please don't call me that, Hect."
"C'mon," Hector said, his voice rife with sarcasm. "I couldn't imagine calling you by any other name." He gave Frank a smile and a wink.
Ballaro returned the playful gesture with a grin of his own. It took effort given the circumstances and the exhaustion racing through in his veins, but Hector was a pal, and deserved his respect. "Well...how about 'Frank'. That has a nice ring to it." He wondered how Hector, especially at his age, found the energy to be so vibrant at this early hour.
Rodriguez gave Frank a soft tap on the shoulder. "Okay. You got it. No more Smoky jokes...if I can help it." Another wink.
Frank took a good look at his old friend. Lines adorned every crevice of his face, around the eyes, nose, mouth. And his hair looked like vanilla frosting, white tufts escaping the brim of his cap. Lord, how times flies. He had to be pushing, what, fifty-nine, sixty?
"So what are you doing here? And when in God's name are you going to retire?" Frank pointed a thumb towards the paramedics, who were now racing the body on a stretcher along with an IV rig toward the ambulance. "You don't need this crap anymore."
"Can't Frank," he answered succinctly, tipping his hat—a motion handled subconsciously. "This is my life. Call me crazy, but I love this, crap and all."
Frank knew quite well how Hector Rodriguez felt. He inexplicably felt the same way. It was something special deep inside, something that compelled him to seek out answers to every challenging mystery confronting him. Take criminals off the streets where they could threaten the innocent. He had no idea why all his life he urged for this lifestyle. Growing up, his parents never made any efforts to steer him towards a career of law enforcement. On the contrary, they had painstakingly tried to avert his enthusiasm for becoming an officer, constantly pestering him about all the money doctors and lawyers made, reassuring him that he'd quit his job as soon he saw his first dead body.
That was nearly thirty years ago, and he'd seen many bodies since then, murdered ones, raped ones, kidnapped ones. Terrible encounters that tormented him with nightmares, migraines, an ulcer. But not once had he wanted to leave the force. It all seemed worth it when an opportunity arose to shut a piece of filth away, expunge all the crimes that he or she might have committed had they continued roaming the streets. It was almost like playing God: he could intervene, he could make a difference and put an end to one bad person's string of crimes. And as far as retiring, well, every time thoughts of packing it in toyed with his mind, he would suffer sick visions of Jaimie in the grasp of some scum-of-the-earth, and he'd find the will to continue. "Takes a crazy man, huh Captain?"
With this, Rodriguez asked the inevitable. "Speaking of crazy men, what the hell're you doing out here? What happened?"
Frank rubbed his tired eyes with a thumb and forefinger. "It all happened so quickly." He went on to explain how he had worked late on the Lindsay case, parked the car, heard the scream. The cabby, flailing wildly—it seemed he was good at this—was now telling his version to an officer who took notes on a small scratch pad.
"Must be something in the air," Hector said, watching the ambulance pull away from the scene.
"That time of year, Hect. Weather gets cooler, people get depressed and toss themselves in front of moving vehicles."
Hector pointed up 4th street. "You said you were standing on the corner when you heard the scream and came running?"
"Yes, I...wait..." Frank stepped away towards the curb. "There's something else..."
Hector followed.
"Come, look." Frank crouched down next to the curb. The rain had stopped altogether, and although the sun had not yet broken over the East River, it started to grow lighter out and he was able to see the blood more clearly than before: dried now, thin stains streaking along the crevice joining the curb and the street.
"This is what originally caught my attention. Don't ask me what made me look down, I just did. I stepped in it as I got out of my car tonight." Frank stood back up, stretched out his right leg and displayed his shoe to Hector. There were crustlets of dried blood edging the sole. "Look, see?"
Hector peered down, his interest obviously piqued. "You sure that didn't come from the naked boy?"
Frank shrugged his shoulders. "Could've. But not while I was trying to help him."
"So you heard the scream then stepped in the blood?"
"No, the other way around."
"So he'd been injured before the cab hit him."
"Yes, I'd say so. Assuming all this blood came from him. When I got to him, his genitals were badly mutilated. My guess is that that injury occurred before he fled into the street."
"Probably much before," Hector said. "It'd take time for the rain to carry the blood around the corner."
"That means the kid was tortured by someone."
"Looks that way. Unless it was self-inflicted, and I doubt that very much."
Frank locked gazes with Hector. "He must have been fleeing someone when he darted into the street."
Hector nodded. "Can you remember anything else?"
Frank closed his eyes, rubbed his chin, digging through the cloud of fatigue shrouding his memories. "Well, after I stepped in the blood," he said, pacing along the curb, pointing, "I followed it to the corner." Both he and Hector trailed the veiny smears, which ran a few yards down Mason, then up the curb and across the sidewalk into a thin alley. The two men peered wide-eyed into the dark of the alley like two young boys trying to drum up the nerve to descend into a darkened cellar.
"Hector...he came from here, the naked boy. I'm almost positive of it."
"You sure?"
"Hect, the blood. Look at it."
Hector Rodriguez turned around and silently motioned to one of his men with a wave of an arm. A young officer, maybe thirty years of age, trotted over. His badge read 'Muldoon'.
"Officer Kevin Muldoon, this is Detective Frank Ballaro, from the 12th." The two men exchanged handshakes and then Hector said, "Kevin, bring a light. I want to check out the alley." Muldoon jogged away and returned with a halogen flashlight.
"Kevin, we think the kid came from back there. We also think he was trying to escape from someone when the cab got him. Let's see if we can find anything."
Muldoon nodded and the three cops entered the alley in a single file, Muldoon in the lead, flashlight in his left hand. Frank kept a hand on his holstered .45.
They slowly shuffled forward, Frank at once feeling closed in; the cramped buildings snuffed out much of the growing light—it was probably dark here at midday—and the ominous gloom nearly swallowed up the flashlight beam. Litter blanketed the ground, newspapers, flattened cans, broken glass, candy wrappers, everything saturated with rain water. Their footsteps squashed over everything.
Suddenly, from within the near-distant shadows, a pained whimper pitched forth.
Muldoon stopped dead in his tracks. Frank glanced over his shoulder. "You hear that?"
"Keep going, slowly," Hector said, pointing with his chin. He heard it.
All of a sudden Hector's belted radio squelched, ripping apart the silence in the alley like a whistling firecracker. He grumbled a shit, fumbling to turn it off. As soon as the silence was resurrected, a sickly moan loomed as if in answer to the radio's cry. The three cops stood in position, listening to it as it leveled for a moment then tapered down into a gurgly cough before finally evaporating. The cry clearly claimed more pain than the unobtrusive snivel that preceded it, sounding like an animal with a leg snared in a hunter's trap.
Muldoon held the flashlight high in attempt to get a better angle, waving it around in ovals. "I can't see anything."
Frank tried to shove his lassitude aside, force some wheels spinning in his head. Throughout his career he had unwrapped numerous crimes clue by perplexing clue. But this? So far: blood led into an alley from where a naked, castrated man emerged in an obvious state of alarm, entrenched to the point where he ended up as a piece of road under the wheels of a cab. The poor bastard never so much as flinched before he was mowed down. And now, someone else here, hidden and hurt, someone who would no doubt provide another piece to an already intriguing puzzle.
They stepped forward, one step, and then the next, slowly and carefully, Frank considering two possibilities: one, the moan came from the perpetrator, the individual guilty of the heinous castration, the presumed murderer. Assuming this to be a likelihood, extreme caution had to be necessitated, defensive postures set in effect. He pulled his gun, finger gently touching the trigger.
Second, the unseen person could very well be a victim himself, henceforth requiring immediate medical assistance. This scenario, however, could not be trusted until an injured person in fact lay in their sights. Expect the worst, pray for the best.
They inched closer. From Frank's vantage he could see in the beams of Muldoon's flashlight a chain link fence separating a courtyard from the alley. From the shadows he saw a large tree growing just beyond the fence on the other side. A park bench sat a few feet to the right under the tree. The crooked branches and leaves of additional trees swayed like ghosts in the distance, their wet dying leaves sending a static-like noise through the air. To the right, four battered aluminum trash cans hugged the alley wall like barnacles on a ship's hull.
In the silence of the moment, Frank wondered if it could have been the fatigue shrouding his mind that concocted the pained cry—just as he thought it had conjured the blood on his shoes when all this started.
But then he heard it again, louder, more pained.
Positioning himself, Frank stepped to the left side of Muldoon. Shoulder to shoulder, they almost touched the alley walls. "Who's there?" he yelled, craning his neck but still unable to see the source of the moan.
Then, like a wicked alarm in the middle of the night, horrifying laughter sounded. It sent a dreadful chill coursing through Frank's body, as if a metal fork had been slowly scraped along a chalky blackboard. Shivering, Frank stayed motionless, feet rooted, listening to the shrouded cackle as its cadence rose and fell. He tightened his grip further on the .45. He and Muldoon looked at each other, nodded an affirmative, then edged ahead, Muldoon in the lead. In his peripheral vision Frank saw Hector hang back and quietly radio for assistance.
Frank was about to shout a come out with your hands in the air so I can see them threat when Muldoon uttered "Jesus-H-Christ" in a quiet yet panicked tone. Frank quickly stepped forward, in front of Muldoon, looked to the corner of the alley where Muldoon had the flashlight's beam aimed.
His heart trembled.
Flanking the right wall, a portion of the link fence had been peeled open from the bottom, exposing a hole large enough for a man to fit through. Between the hole and the last garbage can, two naked legs jutted out, covered with blood.