Read Online The Graving Dock by Gabriel Cohen - Free Book Online Page B

mugging, because the victim had nowhere to run. People tended to misjudge the center of the park; Jack had often seen odd loners wandering its interior paths. Even the nature didn’t look so bucolic here: Jack noticed a tree—hit by lightning?—that had crashed down and split its neighbor in half, and another one with an ugly tumor glommed around its trunk.
    A group of detectives, uniforms, and pathologists from the M.E.’s office stood, hands in coat pockets, outside a perimeter marked with more yellow tape. They were waiting for the Crime Scene team, in their paper jumpsuits, to finish photographing and collecting evidence. In the middle of the scene, two bodies were splayed out along the path. The nearest one was Caucasian, probably in his forties, wearing a high-tech silver-and-blue running outfit. The second, lying on his back with his head pointed up the path, was a squat African-American teenager engulfed in a bulbous down jacket.
    “Aw shit,” Vargas said dryly. “Someone done killed the Michelin Tire Man.”
    One of the uniforms looked startled by this gallows humor, but Anselmo Alvarez smiled as he ducked out under the tape. The Crime Scene supervisor lifted one of Vargas’s gloved hands to his lips. “Hermelinda,” he said, pronouncing the name flawlessly. “We have to stop meeting like this.”
    Jack shook hands with a rail-thin detective in a camel-colored coat: Richie Halpern, one of the Seven-eight’s senior detectives. The man’s rough pink skin and shock of white hair reminded him of a lab rat.
    “Your case?”
    Halpern nodded.
    “Any IDs yet?”
    “They found an empty wallet next to the white guy. He’s a doctor over at Methodist; lives near Seventh Avenue.”
    “And the other one?”
    “Unknown.”
    Alvarez signaled to the pathologists, who moved inside the perimeter for a preliminary examination of the bodies. They would check for rigor mortis and use rectal thermometers to help determine the time of death, take samples from the red pools under each body, bag the extremities of the victims to preserve trace evidence.
    While the detectives waited their turn, they shot the shit, traded news about colleagues, inquired about each other’s families…Jack stood to the side, contemplating the bodies. Even from yards away, he could see a couple of the bullet holes. They were not very dramatic, but years of experience had taught him that gunshot wounds were often quite modest.
    He knew all about bullets. He had seen them pried out of floors, out of walls, out of armchairs, toys, briefcases, books, TVs, even a Thanksgiving turkey. He knew their sizes, velocities, trajectories, how they rebounded off brick or metal. Over and over he had seen what they could do to human flesh. It was only recently, though, that he had literally absorbed the knowledge. Underneath his shirt now, between his solar plexus and his right nipple, was a scar the size of a dime. (A quarter, if he was feeling dramatic.) The burning metal had passed through his lung and a fragment had lodged in one of his vertebrae. That piece was still inside him, too difficult to remove—a doctor had shown him the ghostly white spot on his X-ray.
    The greatest damage was not physical. When his son, Ben, was small the boy had gone through a brief obsession with cuts and scrapes and Band-Aids. At the heart of it was the kid’s uneasy discovery that his body was vulnerable. The effect of a bullet was a thousand times greater: It was an invasion and a violation. It was an obscenity. It changed everything. Before Jack’s shooting, he had been unaware of his belief in an invisible membrane that protected him from the world. He only realized it after a bullet shredded that thin parchment.
    He glanced at his fellow detectives, chatting blithely. To them, corpses were remote objects, unrelated to their own bodies. They didn’t know how easy it could be to cross the line.
    Alvarez finally gave the go-ahead. “Keep to the asphalt,” he