Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

Genres: Action & Adventure; Hard-Boiled; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

“The action is breathtaking and the book is a spellbinding view of a world like no other.”—Detroit News
 
Another night falls on New York City. A victim screams. A siren wails. Eddie Kennedy is on his beat. He’s a gold shield homicide detective, and his next week of investigations is a journey you will never forget—an electrifying rite of passage into the heart of what it takes to be a cop. From hookers to murderers, from street-wise muggers to stationhouse rats, from the hectic squad room to a bloody alley, Kennedy takes on a killing city—and takes the reader on a rare ride into a frightening hidden world.

Release date: February 1, 2012

Publisher: Bantam

Print pages: 352

Sample

CHAPTER 1
DREAM SEQUENCE
 
This little black kid is running, he’s got one knee out of the fabric and every time his right leg comes up the cap shows like the top swivel of a camshaft rod, down it goes again and up comes the other. Kennedy is watching this from his car and he can see that the kid isn’t running for fun: His blue-black skin is streaming wet and pulled back tight and his mouth is wide and gasping, the bony little body stretching out for every yard of sidewalk. Kennedy can see the kid coming from two blocks away but the scene is compressed: just a small nigger kid racing toward Kennedy, straight into the slanting sundown so that the dusty yellow light is glinting off the kid’s cheeks and his eyes are almost closed, he’s flying up this street with a solid wall of grills and smashed headlights and rusting fenders on his left and the tenement stoops and the garbage on his right. Kennedy can hear the pam pam pam pa-pam of the kid’s shoes and see the dust puff up each time the toe comes down. Kennedy’s own heart is working and his breath is short and chuffing, keeping a pace with the kid. He feels he ought to get out of the car, get down there on the street but he’s in a post here, can’t leave that or the whole number’s blown. In his mind he’s saying come on come on, kid, move move. The kid seems to hear this, Christ knows how, and he gets some speed from somewhere and now he can see Kennedy in the car, something to run to, so his eyes change and some of the panic is going from his face …
 
 … THERE! There that’s the son of a bitch, Kennedy’s belly muscles jump and the skin across his shoulders tightens up. A sharp-faced white guy with bottle-blue eyes, half-hidden, he’s got a black satin jacket, come on, kid, run, but the guy’s between them, between Kennedy and the kid, the man’s too close. Kennedy sees all this in the time it takes for the kid’s leg to come forward, toe out, heel drops and takes the shock and the dust comes up. Kennedy reaches for the door latch, he can see the thick gold ring on his heavy hand, and he starts to get out.
 
Now he’s out on the sidewalk and down on a knee, he’s yelling to the kid and his arms are wide like he’s a catcher or a saint. Kennedy can feel the sidewalk grit digging into his knee through the gray wool of his slacks. Maybe the gun, should he have the gun out? No, this is a street kid, he’ll think it’s for him, he knows I’m a cop but the gun will slow him up. Kennedy calls again, he can feel the places in his arms where the kid will hit, he can feel the skinny body and the weight of it as he takes him in and picks him up off the ground, his left hand locked around his right wrist, he’ll swing the kid straight into the car and then go for the asshole down the street. He lives this future-second five times and each time the kid makes it to him his chest fills up with a lightness so liquid he can feel tears start. Safe safe and home. Now a car door slams from up the block behind him, he’s back in real time, the kid is still closing fast, and the lieutenant is severely pissed here, Kennedy can hear that. Kennedy, you fuckin’ dildo, what the fuck are you doing? Kennedy turns to call back. It’s okay, I’m just going to save this kid, sir. When he looks back there’s a flicker of black satin fifty yards down the block and the street is empty.
 
Never get out of the boat. Crazy bastard in that movie was right. Kennedy gets up into a running stumble, his right hand going back to the holster where he fumbles at the Chief. The radio! It’s on the seat—no time. He gets the butt in his palm and tugs, hearing some lining rip where he snags the hammer, but he just pulls it through and now it’s Kennedy who’s racing down the block in his goddam Florsheim Eagles, the shock going pom pom pompom. He’s old, that’s clear, no speedster like the kid. Doorways are flashing by on his left, and now there are people in the streets as if they’d risen up from the ground and they swivel to watch him as he goes by with his jacket billowing out and his tie flapping. Kennedy sees them as a flurry of lidded eyes, grim black faces, faded jeans and shiny head scarves, ritual tattoos, fucking home boys with skin the color of bunker oil and the threat coming off them in waves. Christ, they hate us, thinks Kennedy, can’t they see what the hell’s going on here? He wants to stop and explain it, to make them understand but he keeps going with his heart ripping up his chest, pounding on his framework like a fighter working a bag.
 
He clears the curb, a car cuts left in a glitter of chrome and a whiff of hot vapor. Kennedy doesn’t look back and he’s in the air as he hits the next block. Which door? Which ruined fucking pile? Here! No, here? How far down? A shattered wall comes up fast on his left, here’s the yellow Pinto he saw the kid near. He stops, heaving, and puts a shoulder to the wall, passing his gun hand across his eyes. This is the door, he knows that. Up the street and down, the people are crowding the upper windows, leaning on pillows, hanging their legs over the roof lines, holding cans of Coors, staring at him with half-closed eyes, quietly hating him as only the blacks can. He turns away and looks into the hole in the wall. Backup? He’s alone and that’s that, fuck the backup. He flips out the cylinder and watches as a single drop of sweat comes off his face and lands on one of the brass circles, and the stamped letters w-w 38 SP swell and waver in the droplet. He snaps the cylinder shut and takes a ragged breath. Shit. The doorway smells like a grave.
 
He tries to go in fast and to the right, get out of the silhouette and get some stone up against his back like they taught him at Rodman’s Neck, but he hooks a spike in the shoulder of his jacket and tumbles into the dark like a mailbag full of bad news, his gun up in front of him wavering and his other hand sinking up to the wrist in something cold and slick. Now the smell is on him. In him. A ferocious exhalation of rotting mattresses, old piss, mold and age, dead wood and rodent passions, things that crawl and things that leave a trail. The shadows in here are shot through with pale-yellow beams from the cracks in the walls. All six floors have burned and fallen into each other long ago, collapsing onto the ground floor, leaving a huge hollow space full of dust motes and scents, and the thought comes to Kennedy that he hasn’t been to Mass in seven months. Like a chapel in hell, he thinks, and the urge to get up and get out is so strong he can feel his thigh muscles tensing. Oh, kid, what the fuck are we doing here?
 
Five long seconds go by without a sound from the street and without a bullet out of the darkness, so Kennedy pushes himself up and takes another step. The smell gets worse. He can see better now, he can see the walls running wet. The middle of the summer, and the place is still wet. There’s a heap in the middle of the floor where a tangle of pipes and timbers rises up in a monkey puzzle of crazy angles. Another step and the floor gives way slowly and then comes back, as if he were walking over the body of something asleep and breathing. Well, we don’t want to wake that fucker, thinks Kennedy, grinning. What’s that line? We don’t want to be here when it gets hungry. Woody Allen is saying this to some item he’s trying to hustle. He laughs out loud, takes another step, his left foot lands on nothing and now he’s down to the hip, something’s got him by the ankle, and here comes that feeling everybody braces for but nobody can handle, when an injury comes your way you never even tried to imagine. A spike, a pipe, a shattered plank, whatever it is it’s deep deep in his thigh. Kennedy shrieks like a girl here—a woman’s cry, it goes seventy feet straight up into the dripping roof and loses itself in a blanket of dark fur and leathery wings. A slow rustle comes back down, tiny claws flex, and now the air is full of shrill crystalline piping. Kennedy freezes, looks up at the roof line and back down at his leg where it disappears into the dirt and garbage, all panic gone and thinking with perfect clarity: Kennedy, you fucking dildo, you are going to die in this fucking hole. He hears a step, there’s a shimmer of black satin, blue eyes, now for a shining moment the place is full of blue light. A second blow comes up against his ear, his head rocks back. This fucker can kick! The back of his head comes off a brick but by then he’s out.