Blind Man's Alley by Justin Peacock

but whose names he didn’t know. They’d rousted these kids from their perch before, threatening loitering collars, but never actually busted them. “I’m making it simple for you,” Dooling was saying. “You tell me where he went, we’re on our way, leave you alone. You don’t tell me, we’re going to take you to our house, hold you there as witnesses for the rest of the night.”
    “I ain’t no snitch,” the taller of the two dealers said.
    “This ain’t no snitching,” Dooling replied. “This is saving yourself a night at the station, which is more likely to get you a snitch jacket than just telling me here and now who you saw and where he went.”
    “We didn’t see nobody,” the other kid said. He was maybe younger, a good twenty pounds overweight.
    “Last call to tell me, or I’m bringing you in,” Dooling said.
    “Didn’t nobody go past us,” the shorter one said again.
    Dooling looked at Garrity, who shrugged. “You mind them; I’ll do a last sprint?” Dooling asked.
    Garrity nodded, and Dooling took off. He ran straight for a block or so, then cut east, deeper into the project, looking for anybody who wasn’t moving right, any kind of reaction that he could use for a stop and frisk. There were few people around, nobody alone, just some loose clusters of young men, everybody giving Dooling reflexive hard stares as he went by. He ran in a rough zigzag for five minutes, but nothing snagged his attention, and he gave up and headed back to the crime scene as he heard the sound of approaching sirens.
    There were already a couple of patrol cars and an ambulance on site, not surprising, since the Housing Bureau’s local HQ was just a few blocks away. Dooling didn’t see his partner, so he made his way over to Driscoll, who was sitting on a curb by himself. “I didn’t spot anybody who looked wrong,” Dooling said. “But we’ve got pictures of everybody who lives in the project. You think you could make him from a photo?”
    “I think I sure as fuck would like to try,” Driscoll said.
    “WE’RE UP,” Detective Alexander Jaworski said, blinking the lights in the interview room on and off. His partner, Jorge Gomez, was lying sprawled across three metal chairs arranged into a makeshift cot in the far corner of the room.
    Gomez groaned in response. “You can’t have a hangover at one in the morning,” Jaworski said. “It’s not natural.”
    “Working graveyards isn’t natural,” Gomez said, nearly falling to the floor as he sat up, the chair his legs had been resting on skidding away.
    “We’ve got shots fired, possible DOA at Riis,” Jaworski said. “We gotta be out the door now.”
    Gomez stood, rubbed at his face, following Jaworski out of the interview room. Jaworski handed Gomez his sports jacket as they descended the stairs to the back parking lot.
    It was a short drive from the Ninth Precinct on Fifth Street to the Jacob Riis projects. While Jaworski drove, Gomez pulled himself together, tightening his tie and combing back his disheveled hair. Gomez was a good detective, but his wife had kicked him out three months ago and now he was going on daytime benders, coming in for his graveyards looking like he’d just rolled out of bed, still needed a few more hours to sleep it off. Jaworski had told himself that he’d hold his tongue so long as his partner was only showing up hungover and not drunk.
    The carnival was well under way by the time he pulled up at Tenth and D: a quick scan showed at least a half dozen uniforms, EMS, two ambos even though there was only one vic—private companies monitoring cop frequencies, looking to pick up a fare. The only small mercy was that Jaworski didn’t scope any press: one advantage of an after-hours shooting in the projects.
    Jaworski recognized the night watch commander from the Housing Bureau, Sergeant Fitzgerald, shouted out to him as he approached, “What we got?”
    “One of Loomis’s guys, working construction security,”