Free Lone Wolf #5: Havana Hit by Mike Barry Page B

moving now deep into the withdrawal stages and panic. The collar had been made while the kid was in the act of ripping a handbag off a fat woman in daylight at Broadway and 107th Street in front of the patrol car, an act so stupid that the kid obviously had been far gone to even consider it. Soon enough they would book him in on something or other and throw him into the Tombs where like it or not he would go into his private withdrawal program, but there was a chance before they gave up and took him upstairs that they might get the kid, in his panic, to blurt out some information they could use: something about sources of supply, connections, quality of drugs and so on. You could never tell with these things; you worked every angle you could. Nothing would happen or the junkies would be stupid and then, suddenly, you could fall into a great deal of information, enough to break open a pending case. What the hell: you tried. Williams didn’t mind this kind of work; it got closer to reality then most aspects of PD and because he was a black man he might be able to work on the kid’s confidence a little more than the white ones could, not that black or white made much difference in the present structure of the street or the PD. That kind of shit had gone out five or six years ago.
    Still, you gave it a whirl. You gave anything a whirl; nothing ventured, nothing gained and like that, and even though procedures had tightened quite a bit in recent years you could still put the screws in at least a little. It was mostly the
threat
of the screws which got the job done anyway. Williams hit the kid backhanded, pulling his punch carefully while the other cop sitting in the corner on a stool watched absently, chewing gum, letting this one be Williams’s party. Even in the basement, the black man got to do all the work. The kid screamed and backed further away, kicking the chair against the wall. “I don’t know shit,” he said, “I don’t know nothing about anything. I been off that stuff for months; I’m clean. I kicked all that shit; I’m just trying to stay alive now.” His voice cracked. “Please leave me alone,” he said, “you can’t fucking
do
this to me; I got my rights.”
    “You ain’t got no fucking rights,” Williams said, falling into the kid’s slang. Fordham Law School rhetoric wouldn’t take you far in a basement. “Your fucking rights are the rights I decide you got, and right now you ain’t got none.” He closed in on the kid, a nineteen-year-old, address 411 West 111th Street, furnished room, no friends or relatives. Bullshit about going to 411 to find anything out. Better to pound them face to face. “Who’s supplying you?” he said.
    “No one,” the kid said. His eyes rolled; his cheekbones almost transparent. At his best he weighed a hundred twenty on a six foot frame; a year ago he might have been almost double that. You could tell, you could see a big weight drop; the kid moved like a heavy man. “I told you I’m clean.”
    “You ain’t shit,” Williams said and hit the kid backhanded again. The kid screamed, a high wail; the cop on the stool looked at Williams in an inquisitive way.
Go easy
, the look was saying,
but then again go hard; it’s not my problem is it?
What it came down to was just two niggers in a basement working each other over, am I right? Williams shook his head and plowed down on the kid, feeling a sudden explosion of self-loathing. What was he doing here after all? Wasn’t he merely another black man tearing at a brother while the white man watched? Was it true what some of the militants said, that at the root it was always a race issue? Don’t think of that now, fuck it; he had a mortgage in St. Albans and a pregnant wife. The system gave him shelter. Choking on his rage he hit the kid once more, a little bit harder this time than he might have meant and the boy fell over, weeping. He squirmed on the floor like an insect. “All right!” he said, “all