Chapter 2: Shield 8805

This candy store is called Chris’s. There must be ten thousand like it in the city. A marble counter with perhaps five stools, a display case of cigars and a bigger one of candy, a few dozen girlie magazines hanging by clothespin-sort-of things from wire ropes along the wall. It has a couple of very small glass-topped tables under the magazines. And a juke--I can’t imagine a place like Chris’s without a juke.

I had been sitting around Chris’s for a couple of hours, and I was beginning to get edgy. The reason I was sitting around Chris’s was not that I liked Cokes particularly, but that it was one of the hanging-out places of a juvenile gang called The Leopards, with whom I had been trying to work for nearly a year; and the reason I was becoming edgy was that I didn’t see any of them there.

The boy behind the counter--he had the same first name as I, Walter in both cases, though my last name is Hutner and his is, I believe, something Puerto Rican--the boy behind the counter was dummying up, too. I tried to talk to him, on and off, when he wasn’t busy. He wasn’t busy most of the time; it was too cold for sodas. But he just didn’t want to talk. Now, these kids love to talk. A lot of what they say doesn’t make sense--either bullying, or bragging, or purposeless swearing--but talk is their normal state; when they quiet down it means trouble. For instance, if you ever find yourself walking down Thirty-Fifth Street and a couple of kids pass you, talking, you don’t have to bother looking around; but if they stop talking, turn quickly. You’re about to be mugged. Not that Walt was a mugger--as far as I know; but that’s the pattern of the enclave.

So his being quiet was a bad sign. It might mean that a rumble was brewing--and that meant that my work so far had been pretty nearly a failure. Even worse, it might mean that somehow the Leopards had discovered that I had at last passed my examinations and been appointed to the New York City Police Force as a rookie patrolman, Shield 8805.

Trying to work with these kids is hard enough at best. They don’t like outsiders. But they particularly hate cops, and I had been trying for some weeks to decide how I could break the news to them.

The door opened. Hawk stood there. He didn’t look at me, which was a bad sign. Hawk was one of the youngest in the Leopards, a skinny, very dark kid who had been reasonably friendly to me. He stood in the open door, with snow blowing in past him. “Walt. Out here, man.”

It wasn’t me he meant--they call me “Champ,” I suppose because I beat them all shooting eight-ball pool. Walt put down the comic he had been reading and walked out, also without looking at me. They closed the door.

Time passed. I saw them through the window, talking to each other, looking at me. It was something, all right. They were scared. That’s bad, because these kids are like wild animals; if you scare them, they hit first--it’s the only way they know to defend themselves. But on the other hand, a rumble wouldn’t scare them--not where they would show it; and finding out about the shield in my pocket wouldn’t scare them, either. They hated cops, as I say; but cops were a part of their environment. It was strange, and baffling.

Walt came back in, and Hawk walked rapidly away. Walt went behind the counter, lit a cigaret, wiped at the marble top, picked up his comic, put it down again and finally looked at me. He said: “Some punk busted Fayo and a couple of the boys. It’s real trouble.”

I didn’t say anything.

He took a puff on his cigaret. “They’re chilled, Champ. Five of them.”

“Chilled? Dead?” It sounded bad; there hadn’t been a real rumble in months, not with a killing.

He shook his head. “Not dead. You’re wanting to see, you go down Gomez’s cellar. Yeah, they’re all stiff but they’re breathing. I be along soon as the old man comes back in the store.”

He looked pretty sick. I left it at that and hurried down the block to the tenement where the Gomez family lived, and then I found out why.

They were sprawled on the filthy floor of the cellar like winoes in an alley. Fayo, who ran the gang; Jap; Baker; two others I didn’t know as well. They were breathing, as Walt had said, but you just couldn’t wake them up.

Hawk and his twin brother, Yogi, were there with them, looking scared. I couldn’t blame them. The kids looked perfectly all right, but it was obvious that they weren’t. I bent down and smelled, but there was no trace of liquor or anything else on their breath.