Blind Man's Alley by Justin Peacock Page A

Fitzgerald said. “Ex-cop, I hear, Sean Fowler.”
    “Fowler,” Gomez said. “I remember him from the job. What’s the status?”
    “They took him to Beth Israel, but from what I hear they’re just running due diligence on a miracle. He didn’t have any vitals when they put him in the ambo.”
    “Ex-cop, huh?” Jaworski said, shaking his head. He didn’t like hearing it was a brother officer, but he also didn’t like that his run-of-the-mill projects shooting had just turned into a red ball. The bosses would be all over him once they knew the vic had worn blue.
    “Good news is, we’ve got an eyeball witness. A sharp one too: another ex-cop.”
    “Where is he?” Jaworski said.
    “Our house,” Fitzgerald said.
    Jaworski wasn’t happy with that. “Why isn’t he at the scene?” he asked brusquely.
    “We’ve got him looking at photos.”
    “Shit,” Jaworski said.
    “What?” Fitzgerald said defensively.
    “Who’s showing him photos?”
    “The patrol guys who were first on the scene.”
    “They fuck up the procedures, a defense attorney will get the ID tossed.”
    “My men know the rules,” Fitzgerald said, a little pissed now too.
    “Are your men homicide detectives? Then they should leave the homicide detecting to me.” Jaworski turned to his partner. “You run things here; I’m going to go down with Fitz and see where the eyeball’s at.”
    JAWORSKI WAS trying to remember whether he’d ever been this lucky. By the time he and Fitzgerald had arrived at the Housing Bureau station and found the patrol officers who were taking the witness through photographs, the guy’d just made an ID. Rafael Nazario, nineteen years old, lived with his grandmother in Tower Six. The patrol cops had run a solid ID procedure: pulling out forty or so photos that matched the witness’s general description, handing him a stack to sift through all together.
    Things were moving, and Jaworski wanted to keep them that way. He borrowed a bulletproof vest, even more uncomfortable than usual in the summer heat, then took the two patrol cops, Dooling and Garrity, and headed into Riis while Fitzgerald radioed over for additional backup to meet them.
    “You guys were first on the scene?” Jaworski asked.
    “Yeah,” Garrity said. “We were maybe a block away when we heard the shots.”
    “Just a block? But you didn’t catch a look at the shooter?”
    Garrity shook his head. “We lost a little bit of time on the scene, getting the four-one-one from the witness, Driscoll. We took off in the direction this kid had run to, but he must’ve made the project already by then.”
    “You were on foot patrol?”
    “We were doing verticals of the buildings, stairways, roofs, that sort of thing,” Dooling said.
    “You were doing verticals when you heard the shots?” Jaworski asked.
    “We’d just come down,” Garrity said. “I was taking a quick smoke before we did the next one. So we were on the ground when the shots went off.”
    Jaworski decided not to follow up. Anyone looking at Garrity would make him for somebody not built for going up and down stairs all night. Experience told him that the patrol schedule and their actual whereabouts wouldn’t sync up.
    Jaworski called his partner on the walk over, caught Gomez up on what was happening, asked him to coordinate getting a warrant on the apartment rather than helping out with the arrest.
    A cluster of uniforms were waiting for them outside the building, so Jaworski led a small army up to Nazario’s apartment. Jaworski considered taking down the door, claiming exigent circumstances for a limited search, but decided there was too much risk that it would come back to bite the case down the road. Besides, it wasn’t like the kid could flush a pistol down the toilet.
    Jaworski reached out to knock, identified himself as police, then stood away from the door, his heart bouncing around in his chest like a pinball. The last place you wanted to be standing when knocking on