Hawk nodded some more, still looking almost absently at the boy’s body. His clothes were wet, which meant he’d been left here while it was still raining. There was a dark patch of blood on the front of his sweatshirt, in the middle of his chest.
“Ain’t no trash can fire,” Hawk said.
He was surveying the project again.
“He told me he was going to even up for his girlfriend,” I said. “He was drunk.”
“Probably drunk when he tried,” Hawk said, his eyes moving carefully over the silent buildings.
“Figure they’re watching from somewhere?” I said.
“They kids,” Hawk said. “They got to be watching, see what we do.”
I was still looking at Tallboy. I didn’t bother looking for the gang. If they were there, Hawk would see them. Tallboy appeared to be maybe sixteen in death’s frozen repose. Soft faced, not mean. Kind of kid would probably really rather have stayed home and talked with his mother and his aunts, if he’d had any, and they were sober, and their boyfriends wouldn’t slap him around. Might have not gotten killed if I hadn’t gone and talked with him and gotten him stirred up about who killed his girlfriend and her baby, that might have been his baby. He probably liked the baby, not like a father; not to change diapers, and earn money, and take care of-that would have been beyond him. But she’d have been fun to hug, and she’d have been cute, and he would probably have liked it when the three of them were alone and they could play together. It had started to rain again, not much, a light drizzle that beaded sparsely on his upturned defenseless face.
Hawk said, “Third building from the right, second floor, three middle windows.”
I glanced up slowly, and not toward the windows. I glanced obliquely past them and looked out of the corner of my eye. There was a shade half drawn and some movement behind it.
“What makes you think it’s them?” I said.
“Been here every day,” Hawk said. “While you and the schoolteacher dashing around the ghetto. Nobody live on that floor.”
“Well, maybe some evasive action and come up behind them?” I said.
“Sure,” Hawk said. “Little acting, too.” He gestured suddenly at the vacant lot across the street. I whirled to look where he pointed.
“Now we hustle into the car,” Hawk said. And we did, and pulled out of the quadrangle with Hawk’s tires screaming as they spun on the wet pavement. We went around the corner onto McCrory Street and slammed into the alley back of the third building. Hawk popped the trunk and we each grabbed a shotgun. As we moved toward the back door of the building each of us pumped a shell into the chamber at the same moment.
“We could set this to music,” I said.
The back entryway had been padlocked, but the hasp had been jimmied loose and it hung, with its still intact padlock attached, limply beside the partly open door. We went in, I to the right, Hawk to the left. We were in a dim cellar. It was full of cardboard boxes which had gotten wet and collapsed, spilling whatever had once been in them onto the floor, where whatever soaked the boxes had, over time, reduced it to an indeterminute mass of mildewing stuff. In the middle of the cellar was a defunct boiler with rust staining the sides of it and adding to the indiscernible detritus on the floor.
We moved past the boiler to the stairs. Hawk, in hightop Reebok pump-ups, moved through the trash beneath the building like a dark ghost, holding the eight-pound shotgun in his right hand as if it were a wand. It was as if he were floating. We went up the two flights of stairs without a sound. In the dim, claustrophobic corridor we paused, Hawk counting the doors until he found what we wanted. He stepped to it and put his ear against it and listened. There was litter nearly ankle deep in places all up and down the corridor-broken glass, fast-food paper and plastic, beer cans, and food scraps that were no longer identifiable. In the silence while Hawk listened I could hear vermin rustle in the trash. I waited. Hawk listened. Then he smiled at me and nodded.
With the shotgun in my right hand I reached over with my left and took hold of the knob and turned it slowly. It gave and the door opened inward and Hawk went in and left. I came in behind him and moved right. There were eight kids in there grouped near the windows, wondering where we were. Beside the window was a large cable spool, standing on end. On top of it lay a Tec-9 automatic which would fire thirty-two rounds if we let it.
One kid spun toward the gun. It was the same small, quick one I’d taken the Browning from in the van. I fired at the cable spool and hit it, chips of plastic flew off the handle of the Tec-9, and a ragged chunk of the wooden top flew up as well. The handgun ricocheted off the wall and bounced on the floor, the clip separated and skittered across the room, some of the shotgun pellets pocked the wall beyond.
Everyone froze.
In the reverberating silence after the gunshot, Hawk’s voice was almost piercing.
“Where’s Major?” Hawk said quietly. No one said anything.
“Guess he won’t be going down for it,” Hawk said.
No one said a word. All eight stood in perfect stillness. Under the gun like that they didn’t seem frightful. They seemed like scared kids whose prank had gotten out of hand. They were that, but they were the other thing too, they were kids who would shoot a fourteen-year-old girl and her three-month-old baby. They were kids who would gun down her boyfriend and leave him as a statement. That was the hard part, remembering that they weren’t inhuman predators, and that they were. One must have a mind of winter, I thought, to behold the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
“Any of you guys read Wallace Stevens?” I said. No one spoke. The shotgun felt solid and weighty as I held it. The faint smell of the exploded shell lingered.
“We’ll check the slug that killed Tallboy,” Hawk said. “And we’ll check the Tec-9, and we’ll see whose prints are on it.”
Hawk let his gaze rest quietly on the kid who’d first made a move for the gun.
“You the shooter, Shoe?”
