Nonviolent junkies were left on the street and used as informants. Their dealers, however, were fair game.

And if one of the family got hurt by a bad player—a street girl having her eye blackened or finger broken by her Slapaho Mac Daddy, a Wild Geeser catching a paintball or pellet-gun round in the back, a casino operator or bodega owner taken off by the local mokes—then they would all descend as one, and the beatdowns and banishments would commence. It was all about family; they would do the job as required, but they would really step to the fore for those they deemed “worthy,” given that some people in the East Bronx, as elsewhere, as everywhere, would always try to get high to escape, want a little extracurricular loving, chase a money dream scribbled in numbers across a crumple of paper. Not all cops were as laissez-faire in their attitude toward the outriders of the precinct, but the Wild Geese, in the eyes of the people they protected and occasionally avenged, walked the streets like gods.

The good news and the bad news was that their kind of high-yield police work was a fast track to a gold shield. Within five years, all the original WGs had moved on, the irony being that Billy, who was the youngest and least experienced, had been the first one to get the nod. After the double shooting, which earned him both a citation for bravery and a civilian review board hearing, the department, in its slap/caress way, decided to promote him in order to bury him—in his case, to the basement of the morgue, since the Identification Squad, like any other, was composed primarily of detectives.

At the end of the day, some of the WGs became better detectives than street soldiers, others lesser cops behind their gold shields. Some discovered gifts never used before; others lost the opportunity to use the gifts they had had all along.

And it was also as detectives, dispersed to various squads across the boroughs, that, like Pavlicek coming up against a Jeffrey Bannion, they had all met their personal Whites, those who had committed criminal obscenities on their watch and then walked away untouched by justice, leaving their obsessed ex-WG hunters heading into retirement with pilfered case files to pore over in their offices and basements at night, still making the odd unsanctioned follow-up call: to the overlooked counterman in the deli where the killer had had a coffee the morning of the murder, to the cousin upstate who had never been properly interviewed about that last phone conversation he had with the victim, to the elderly next-door neighbor who left on a Greyhound to live with her grandchildren down in Virginia two days after the bloodbath on the other side of the shared living room wall—and always, always, calling the spouses, children, and parents of the murdered: on the anniversary of the crime, on the victims’ birthdays, at Christmas, just to keep in touch, to remind those left behind that they had promised an arrest that bloody night so many years ago and were still on it.

No one asked for these crimes to set up house in their lives, no one asked for these murderers to constantly and arbitrarily lay siege to their psyches like bouts of malaria, no one asked to feel so helplessly in the grip of this nonstop black study that they had no choice but to pursue and pursue. But there they all were: Pavlicek forever stalking Jeffrey Bannion; Jimmy Whelan pursuing Brian Tomassi, the ringleader of a white street gang who, in the aftermath of 9/11, had chased a Pakistani kid into an oncoming car; Redman Brown stalking Sweetpea Harris, the murderer of a college-bound high school baller who had made him look bad in a playground pickup game; Yasmeen Assaf-Doyle forever tracking Eric Cortez, a twenty-eight-year-old small-time felon who had stabbed to death a reedy myopic ninth grader because the kid had talked to Cortez’s fourteen-year-old girlfriend at their school.

And Billy himself, in his first year aboveground as a precinct detective after too many living below like a mushroom among the dead, shackled for all time to Curtis Taft, the killer of three females in one evening: Tonya Howard, a twenty-eight-year-old who had just dumped the man who would become her murderer; her fourteen-year-old niece, Memori Williams, who happened to be sleeping over the night Taft decided to get back at his ex; and Dreena Bailey, Tonya’s four-year-old daughter by another man. Three shots, three dead, then right back to bed, Curtis Taft, as far as Billy was concerned, the most black-hearted of the Whites. But so were they all, if you asked each of their star-crossed hunters.

Twenty years after they had started out running the streets like high-topped commandos, almost all of them were living new lives. Redman got shot through the hips in a hostage situation, went out on a three-quarters medical, and took over his father’s funeral parlor in Harlem. Fast-and-loose Jimmy Whelan put in his papers before he could be fired and became an itinerant building super, living from year to year in some of the finer basement apartments of the city. Yasmeen, who couldn’t take the boss mentality, quit to become assistant head of crimes against students at a university in lower Manhattan and achieved a black belt in complaining about her new bosses over there. Pavlicek, already on the make while still in uniform, just got too busy being rich. Only Billy, the baby of the group, still hung in. He had no reason not to: as his father had declared over a raised glass on the night of Billy’s graduation from the academy: “Here’s to God, because the man had to be a natural-born genius to invent this job.”

*   *   *

AN HOUR AFTER HIS PHONE call with Pavlicek, Billy was dreaming about Jeffrey Bannion—nude and adrift in an oversized bell jar filled with red punch—when one of the kids came home from school and slammed the front door as if he were being chased by wolves. A moment later he heard Carlos yelling at his brother, “You quit so I win!,” followed by Carmen shouting, “What did I tell you about yelling in the house!”

Even so, Billy managed to fall back asleep for half an hour, until the sheets began to rustle and Carmen, naked, nuzzled into the small of his back, her left hand reaching around to burrow into his boxers. Billy was so tired he thought he would die, but her hand on his prick was her hand on his prick.

“We had three kids brought in with gunshot wounds three days in a row,” she murmured in his ear. “Turns out the second kid shot the first for shooting someone in his crew, the third shot the second in retaliation, and the best friend of the second shot the third for the same reason. It was like the bonehead Olympics. Anything going on down there?”

“Give me a second, will you?”

After twelve years they were doing pretty good, he thought, hitting it twice a week more often than once, and they seemed to be putting on weight apace of each other, also not so bad, Carmen still able to pull off wearing a two-piece, although Billy kept his T-shirt on at the beach. In the beginning, there wasn’t a physical position or a sexual fancy off-limits, but as they grew more comfortable with each other, it always seemed like straight-up missionary, after a little of this and a little of that, unfailingly ended with both of them afterward euphorically raiding the refrigerator in search of the next fun thing to do.

“So,” she said.

And in a rush of bleary optimism Billy decided that maybe he didn’t need to sleep this week after all.

 

 

MILTON RAMOS

The handcuffed drunk in the backseat had lost three thousand dollars betting on the NCAA Final Four and decided that it was the fault of his wife’s face, which he promptly set to rearranging.

“March Madness. I was you, that would be my defense,” Milton’s partner said without turning around.

“Fuck her, and fuck you.”

“You know what? Stick with that attitude, because judges hate sincere remorse.”

“And what are you?” the drunk said, squinting at Milton sitting silently behind the wheel.

“Excuse me?” Seeking the guy’s eyes via the rearview mirror.

“You know what SPIC stands for?” The drunk leaned forward, his alcohol-fueled malice expanding, searching. “Spanish Indian Colored. Otherwise known as Greaser, Savage, Nigger. Put them all together you get one big fucking unibrow Monkey. You.”

Milton pulled the car over alongside Roberto Clemente Park, then turned off the ignition. He sat there for a moment with his hands palms up in his lap.

“Can we not do this?” his partner asked with an air of resignation.

“Ook, ook,” from the rear seat.

Milton popped the trunk via the lever beneath the steering wheel, got out, and walked to the back of the car.

“The fuck’s he doing?” the drunk asked.

“Shut up,” the partner said, sounding both angry and a little depressed.

The rear door opened abruptly and Milton lifted the prisoner out of the car by his elbow. In his free hand he carried a telescoping baton and a grease-smudged towel.

“The fuck are you doing?”

Without answering, Milton frog-walked his prisoner into the maw of the park until he found what he considered a suitable spot. Not too open, not too constricted, and branches low enough to grip.

“What are you doing?”

“Down, please?”

“What?”

Milton popped him in the chest and the drunk was suddenly lying faceup in the grass, his shoulders on fire from the impact of landing with his hands cuffed behind his back.

“Jesus, man, what are you doing?” Near-pleading now, his voice suddenly much closer to sober than a few minutes earlier.

*   *   *

MILTON KNEW HE SHOULD NEVER have been given a gold shield.