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.
Gangsta Rap
Detective Pete Pasini, who knew the precinct, knew the Riis Houses and the thug culture that bred there, was assisting the investigation through Major Case, fielding it during Jack’s short disability. A thickset man, he had a grizzled pockmarked face, and looked more like a Mafiosi than Major Case cop.
Jamal Bryant, with tubes sticking out of him, had given the middle finger to Pasini’s questions at Beth Israel Emergency, then immediately passed out. Tough-guy villain, Pasini had thought, leaving him with the nurse, guarded by the uniformed officer posted at his door. Fuck him, Pasini had thought, I don’t need him right now anyway. It wasn’t like he was going anywhere anytime soon.
DaShawn Miller’s wound wasn’t serious, not life-threatening, so they’d patched him up and the uniforms took him back down into the stationhouse.
Observing them in the cooler, from behind the mirror glass in the watch room, Jack saw Pasini hand DaShawn a cup of water. When he was done drinking they’d have his fingerprints on the cup, and his DNA inside. An old trick.
Pasini wore a sympathetic face, worked his act like a Father Confessor, the good cop.
Jack tried to place DaShawn’s face, flashing past in his mad dash from the apartment. A pair of deep-set eyes, and a flat nose with thick greedy lips below. A face crossed with fatigue and anger.
Jack buttoned the speakers, saw Pasini look up toward the sound before taking the empty cup with him.
In the watch room Pasini said quietly, “You up for this?”
“All the way,” Jack answered.
“Look, it’s your case,” said Pasini. “The chief just needs to know you’re okay with it, the vic being Chinese and all.”
“Not a problem.”
“I didn’t want to push him into lawyering up. But he’s playing tough guy anyway.”
They watched DaShawn yawn, then spit on the floor through gold-capped teeth.
“Let’s see how tough,” Jack said.
“Step in anytime you’re ready.”
Jack nodded, took a slow, deep breath, and felt the pull of the stitches in his chest. He stepped into the cooler and heel-slammed the door behind him.
Bitch Up and Turn
DaShawn looked up, disgusted, whining, “Aw, man. Not you again.”
Jack had figured that DaShawn was weak.
Wordlessly, Jack placed a tape recorder on the table and activated it.
DaShawn sneered at the recorder. The machine started pounding out the gangsta rap lyrics of the tape taken from the crime scene. DaShawn was stunned to hear it so loud in the small room, surprised that the yellow cop had picked up on it.