The Night of the Murder Sergeant John Hardy
THE NIGHT OF THE MURDER
Sergeant John Hardy
Cops in any major city in the United States quickly grow a thick skin.
Death is a daily companion.
Sergeant John Hardy had seen death in nearly all its guises.
Elderly men and women, dead for weeks, rotting in their hallways or in their beds.
He could usually give a good estimate of how long the person had been deceased judging by how hard he had to push the front door open.
The mail stacked up fast, even in these digital times.
Old people still preferred paper. When he had to repeatedly shove the door to push through the three-foot-high pile of mail jamming the door, that was usually a bad sign, normally followed by a smell that would stay on his skin for days.
Car wrecks, gun shots, stabbings, beatings, accidental falls, jumpers, strangulations and those who quietly slipped away on the streets, taken by the city under their cardboard sheets as they slept – the cold, and the loneliness, and the city itself taking her daily quotient of souls. Men and women. And children.
He remembered his first corpse.
A pedestrian mowed down by a bus. He remembered every detail of that young man.
The awkward, crooked shape of his back and legs.
The look on his dead face. He had a vague recollection of the second body – a stabbing.
He remembered the utter stillness of the stairwell and the blood that had run down over the steps like a macabre waterfall. He didn’t remember many after that.
And there had been many. His resistance to the visceral finality and violence of death had only increased with every passing day and every dead body.
The rookies who had called for his assistance that night hadn’t built up their resistance yet.
Garcia and Coates were eighteen months on the job.
They shouldn’t really be working together, but three cops had called in sick for the shift and it was better than sending them both out alone.
One less patrol car, but probably safer for both of them.
He parked behind that patrol car, in front of the apartment building, and got out of the vehicle.
The city never sleeps. Even now, the first thing he heard was the rumble from a generator across the street, powering lights and machines run by the five-man road-maintenance crew.
They had a dumper truck full of hot tarmac, and were filling in potholes.
Road crews in Manhattan tended to do emergency work during the day, and maintenance during the night, to minimize traffic disruption.
This was no comfort to the locals, who had to listen to diesel generators in the middle of the night.
As he reached the second floor of the apartment building, Sergeant Hardy noticed he was a little out of breath.
He needed to get back in the gym. Warming his ass behind a desk wasn’t good for his health, but he had gone up a couple of paygrades.
His wife was happier, but he sometimes missed the buzz of being a cop in New York City.
Coates and Garcia stood toward the end of the hallway, outside an apartment, hands on their belts.
The older of the two, Coates, had his back to the wall facing an open door, his pale face dripping in sweat.
Garcia, shorter and smarter, was making notes on the memo app to record key information: a cop’s greatest weapon is not their gun, or their pepper spray, it’s their notes.
They had moved on from physical notebooks to an app, and those notes put away more perps than anything else.
‘Sarge,’ said Garcia, nodding.
Coates glanced toward the door, covered his mouth with the back of his wrist and then looked away.
‘You got all your notes down?’ asked Hardy.
‘Every detail,’ said Garcia. ‘We arrived at the property at four forty-one. Spoke to the complainant Alison Karim at four forty-six. That’s her apartment up the hall there.
She asked what the hell was the point in having a police department if we didn’t respond to calls.
I told her it was a busy night, and her call had been logged as a noise complaint.
We’d woken her up, and she was pretty pissed.
She also said it wasn’t really a noise complaint – she was worried about her neighbor, a Molly Green.
Said she’d heard banging and a commotion.
She didn’t call on Molly, as she was too afraid. She called us instead.’
‘You got no answer when you knocked the door, you called the building supervisor who didn’t pick up, you were concerned for the occupant’s safety so you forced entry,’ said Hardy, looking at the broken frame on the open apartment door in front of him.
He said it as a statement, rather than a question, to make sure that if Coates and Garcia hadn’t followed the exact protocol, they at least knew now what to record in their reports.
‘Correct,’ said Garcia.
‘Who was first in?’ asked Hardy.
Coates held his hand up.
‘You alright?’
‘Not great, Sarge,’ said Coates.
‘Go get some fresh air, and don’t worry about it. The locker room will bust your balls for a while, but everybody’s been there. You’ll toughen up.’
Taking a deep breath, Coates thanked his sergeant and made his way down the hall to the stairwell. Hardy stepped into the apartment. Garcia, coming behind him, flicked on his flashlight and shone it inside.
The light fell over a shape on the floor.
Hardy froze.
Sometimes, it doesn’t matter what you have seen. There are images that will burn themselves into your mind no matter how toughened it has become.
There’s death.
And then there’s the violence of murder.
And then there’s this.
‘My God, turn off the flashlight . . .’ said Hardy.
‘Sarge?’
‘Turn it off!’ he said, spinning and barreling into Garcia, fighting to get out of the apartment, into the hallway.
Hardy didn’t make it outside. He lost his dinner on the stairs.
Leaning against the rail, he caught his breath, heard footsteps coming up the stairs toward him.
‘You okay, Sarge?’ asked Coates.
‘No, I’m not. Are you?’
‘I don’t think I’m going to be okay for a while,’ said Coates.
‘Call homicide. Tell them this is a bad one.’