Read Online Half-Past Dawn by Richard Doetsch - Free Book Online

symbols, the unfamiliar language. “What the hell is going on?”
    • • •
    I T 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 Ramón 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 oncardboard 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,