Half-Past Dawn

CHAPTER 10

Jack rolled up his sleeve and stared at the intricate tattoo on his left forearm. It was truly like nothing he had ever seen before, not in print, not on canvas, and certainly not on skin. He looked at it closely, examining the dark ink, the tightly woven pattern, the odd lettering from a language he couldn’t fathom. He wracked his brain but could find no recollection of getting it. It certainly wasn’t something he would have chosen. The one on his hip was one thing, a drunken mistake. This was different, and while his memory of the last two days seemed to have slipped away, he knew that this mosaic on his flesh was somehow connected to Mia’s disappearance.

“Like my body art?” Jack asked, trying keep a little humor in the car before Mia’s situation overwhelmed them. He rolled down his sleeve.

“You know”-Frank suppressed a smile as he ate the bacon sandwich Jack’s mom had made for him-“that’s going to come up in this year’s campaign.”

“Front-page material,” Jack said.

“Mia’s not going to be happy.” Frank spoke as if confident that finding her was already a given.

“Hell,” Jack said, “she probably knows about it. Who’s to say we haven’t already fought about it?”

“Did it occur to you that maybe it was her idea? She may have had you branded, trying to make sure her prize cattle didn’t get lost.”

Jack reached around to his side and pulled out his Sig Sauer. He had fetched it from the oversized gun safe in his workshop before they left. He rarely touched it except to clean it, having left his particular talent with the weapon in his past.

“I haven’t seen you holding that in forever,” Frank said. “You remember how to use it?”

“Yeah,” Jack said quietly. “Don’t worry about me.”

“Why don’t you let me handle things involving weapons?” Frank smiled. “I have an aversion to being shot.”

Jack ignored the joke. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”

“You’ve got to learn to put that guilt away.” Frank admonished his friend as if he were his son. “Everyone else has except you.”

Jack didn’t respond. The car fell silent as Frank turned his eyes on the highway ahead.

Jack Keeler was dead-the world thought it, the papers screamed it, and it was the lead story on every local news channel. In the matter of an hour, Jack’s mind had gone from confusion to fear to relief and back to confusion. While the faint odor of Mia’s perfume had sparked his memory of the night before, and the two bears had helped fill in his memory from the beginning of the week, nothing else came forth. He tried everything: he looked at pictures, looked at her clothes in her closet, read her various Post-it note reminders around the house in hopes of dredging up those lost days, but he found no key to unleash his recent past.

“You know, if someone sees you alive,” Frank said, “it’s going to create a lot of questions.”

“Whoever has her thinks I’m dead. It’s an advantage for the moment.”

“Do you think this is connected to a case out of your office?”

“I’m sure the list of people who want me dead isn’t small, but then, why ask Mia about the box?”

“And you didn’t see the box before?”

He heard their demand; it still rang in his ears, box 7138. No matter how he tried, he could remember nothing about a box. When he saw it pulled from the rear of the Tahoe, he was more than surprised. Mia must have hidden it there underneath the tons of crap-soccer balls and tennis rackets, water bottles and blankets, shopping bags and toys-that they had accumulated over the summer. And what it contained he had no idea.

“No. At least, I don’t think-” Jack paused. Something gnawed at the periphery of his mind, just out of reach of clear thought, like a two-day-old dream that was discarded as insignificant… although he couldn’t grasp it.

“Listen,” Frank said, “you said you remember last night, you remember the attack, going over the bridge, climbing out of the water. But how did you get home?”

Jack remained silent.

“Someone else was there,” Frank said slowly.

Jack didn’t respond.

“Stitched you up. Do you remember and are just not saying?”

“No,” Jack said.

“Jack?”

“Don’t you think if I could remember, I would?”

“Someone helped you, kept you alive. Maybe if we could figure out how you got home-”

“How did I get home?” Jack asked rhetorically. “How the hell did I survive the fall off the bridge? Being shot? I’m not Rasputin. Who sewed me up, got me back to my house? Who wrote this crap on my arm?” Jack pulled up his sleeve, revealing the dense black symbols, the unfamiliar language. “What the hell is going on?”

• • •

It was on a hot August day when Jack completed his tenure with Frank. And while Jack regretted parting ways, he was looking forward to shedding his apprentice label and getting more actively involved in homicide. There were six guys in the Manhattan Detective Bureau’s Homicide Division, a breed apart from the other divisions. They were tenacious, hardened by what they had seen, and thankful for new blood with Jack’s arrival. It was more akin to a club, with their own way of doing business, ensuring arrests, making sure the cases they built were seamlessly turned over to the DA’s office for successful prosecution. No cop wanted a murderer back on the street as a result of his incompetence.

A tight group, they all had nicknames for one another: Double D for Dicky Donaldson; Shank, short for Hank the Shank, whose real name was Hank Ramon and who had a tee shot that went forever to the right; Sean Sullivan arrived at homicide with the name Red for obvious follicle reasons; Two used to be called Two Ton Tonelli but had lost so much weight that they shortened his name; for Apollo, there was debate about whether the name came from the Greek god, the solving of some murder near the Apollo Theater up in Harlem, or Rocky Balboa’s toughest opponent and friend, Apollo Creed; and there was Deuce, not to be confused with Two, who loved playing poker, both literally and figuratively.

That evening, Jack was asked by Shank to follow up on a lead on a gang murder. When he got into the car, he found Apollo in the driver’s seat, his thick, meaty hands wrapped around the wheel as he drove out of the garage.

“So, Jack, unless you came into homicide with a nickname like I did, we get to name you.”

“So, the name Apollo has nothing to do with a murder at the Apollo Theater?

“You don’t see the slight resemblance to Apollo Creed?”

Jack smiled.

“Irony of ironies, I was on a case near the Apollo Theater, but truth be told, my uncle was kind of a mythology buff and gave me the moniker when I was eleven.”

“Why?”

“You want to hear the big story?

Jack nodded.

“There isn’t one.” Apollo laughed. “It’s what my uncle called my father when they were kids.”

Jack rolled his eyes.

“Laugh it up, Shooter.”

“Shooter? You’re kidding, right?”

“Well, we thought about Lily for Lily White, you being so pure, but that would be too cruel. Then Golden for Golden Boy, seeing you were the pride of the force who got fast-tracked onto our team. But Shooter won out, because we all had to admit it, you’re a hell of a shot.”

They drove over to Alphabet City, and Jack hopped out of the car while Apollo parked. Although Apollo had told Jack to wait, Jack was overanxious and figured nothing could go wrong in speaking with the grandmother of the victim. Apollo would only be two minutes behind him.

Jack met the grandmother in her apartment on the sixth floor of the 1920s walk-up and asked her a few routine questions about the grandson she had raised only to see him lose his life at the age of sixteen during a drug deal gone bad. Jack promised her that they would do everything to find his killer.

As Jack emerged from the tenement, he saw Apollo racing down the street, pursuing two thugs. Jack took up the chase, following the three as they sprinted across the city streets. They cut down through the subway, leaping turnstiles, across platforms, hopping up the far stairs, emerging onto the street and crashing into a vacant loft building. Apollo and the thugs seemed to have vanished as Jack entered just steps behind them.

The building was dark. Rats scurried in the shadows, and the stench of urine filled Jack’s nostrils. Several homeless people lay on cardboard in their makeshift homes, casting their eyes downward, paying no attention to the pursuit in their midst.

Jack crept along, working his way up the stairs, four stories up, following the elusive sounds of racing footfalls.

There was a sudden shouting of “Police! Stop where you are! Drop your weapon!”

And then a gunshot. And another. And another.

Jack honed in on the cacophony of violence and burst through a door to see the two thugs with their guns aimed at Apollo, who was pinned behind a column in the wide-open space. A hail of bullets erupted, shredding the column, skipping along the floor around Apollo.

The world seemed to slow down. It was as if Jack could see every bullet explode from the barrels of the guns, as if life had fallen to half-time while his senses and reflexes doubled.

And for the briefest of seconds, Jack froze.

On the range, with paper targets popping up left and right, Jack was supreme, decisions made on instinct, his reaction time barely measurable. But this was real life, with real consequences; this wasn’t for a medal, a trophy, or first place. This was for survival, both his and Apollo’s.

Jack quickly recovered. His hand suddenly rocketed to his hip, quickly drawing his Sig Sauer. He raised his weapon and, without hesitation, fired two shots. The two assailants were thrust back as if a rope had wrapped around their bodies and yanked at them, a single bullet erupting out of the backs of their heads. They were both dead before they hit the floor.

Jack ran over to the two bodies and leaned down, confirming that they no longer posed a threat. He looked at the small bullet wounds in their foreheads, almost identical in placement, just like in target practice. And while the backs of their heads had been blown out, their faces were serene and unmarred but for the single bullet hole. And it hit Jack that the two young faces before him were not men, as he had assumed-they were teens, hardened children of the street, and he had killed them both. It was the first time he had killed, and he was overwhelmed by what he had done, a sudden nausea taking over his body.

He heard movement, a subtle moan. He raced to Apollo’s side, where he lay sprawled on the bare concrete floor, a bullet wound to the chest.

“Took you long enough,” Apollo said with a smile.

And the world seemed to fall into double-time, moving at hyperspeed now. The bullet had missed the bulletproof vest; like threading a needle, it had found the small gap beneath Apollo’s armpit. Jack tore Apollo’s shirt open, ripped the vest off, and quickly examined the wound. Blood pumped out of the hole on the left side of Apollo’s chest in a rhythmic pulse, his life flowing out of him with every beat of his heart.

Knowing that he was in a war zone, Jack hoisted Apollo off the floor and threw him over his shoulder. He raced down the stairs, his partner on his back, and out the door.

After laying him down on the sidewalk, Jack grabbed the med kit from the back of his car, trying desperately to plug the wound while he waited for the ambulance to respond to the “officer down” call.

But despite his efforts, despite everything he could do, Apollo died. They were partners for all of one hour.

In the wake of the incident, a tragedy that hit the front page of every newspaper, Jack nearly succumbed to his grief. The guilt he carried over the deaths of his partner and the two teens was overwhelming. If he hadn’t hesitated, if he had listened to Apollo about waiting for him, if he had held his emotions in check and instead followed procedure, Apollo would still be alive.

And although Jack was cleared of any wrongdoing, he knew that the death was his fault. The irony of his nickname in the wake of his failure was like a heavy chain around his body.

At such a young age, Jack found himself at a crossroads in life. He resolved to push ahead. He swore that he would never pick up a gun again in the line of duty, he would never take a life, he would find other ways of carrying out law enforcement.

He enrolled in Fordham Law, attending at night, dreaming of a way out of the life he had chosen. He remained on the police force, taking a desk job until he could finish law school, all with the understanding and respect of his superiors and the men in homicide.

When Jack graduated, he was a natural for the DA’s office. He was an attorney from the street who could bridge the gap between cops and lawyers. His conviction rate was high, and his reputation grew.

After ten years, he became the natural choice to succeed the retiring district attorney. Handsome, successful, with a beautiful wife in the FBI and two baby girls, he was packaged and sold by the powers-that-be and won his first election by a ten-percent margin. His first year in office saw a rise in investigations and convictions, but his new reality set in after that. As a cop, things were black-and-white; either a crime was committed or it wasn’t. But the DA didn’t just handle crimes of the street. There was the more nuanced realm of white-collar crime, subjective areas where political favors were sought, where things beyond facts and reality came to bear.

In his second year, his office became involved in the unsuccessful pursuit of the real estate industry, while the third dealt with Wall Street-something that further distanced him from his father. In his fourth year, the final year of his term, the powers-that-be were looking for his successor, since they had no tolerance for backing a man who would seek to end their livelihoods. If Jack wanted to remain in office, he would have to play the game.

Jack loved his job. He loved carrying out justice, amassing convictions. And as much as he didn’t want to admit it, he had enjoyed the limelight, the prestige of the office.

What he had first thought of with disdain eventually lured him in. He had gone out glad-handing, soliciting money, wearing false smiles, and making promises that he knew couldn’t be fulfilled. But it was all in sacrifice to his career, to the job, to getting reelected; the end justifyied the means.

And with his compromised values, Jack realized that he had become his father.