Hurt People by S.W. Hubbard

Author:S.W. Hubbard [Hubbard, S.W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-13T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31

On Monday afternoon, Gordon ducked out of the office, ostensibly to follow up on some leads in a gang shooting, and headed uptown to the Bronx. An hour later, after a futile attempt to get some public housing residents to divulge information about the shooting, he crossed the borough and was sitting across from a professor with wild curly red hair and eyes that threatened to pop right out of her head. When Gordon opened with a vague request for her insights into Hannah as a person, Hannah’s sociology professor was surprisingly forthcoming.

A gusher, in fact.

She gushed about how much she had valued Hannah as a student and a member of their seminar community. She gushed about how devastated she’d been by Hannah’s violent death.

She continued gushing about Hannah’s intellectual curiosity and willingness to challenge the patriarchy.

Hmmm. That sounded like the direction Gordon wanted to go.

When Gordon asked how Hannah had been challenging conventions, the professor gushed some incomprehensible jargon. But when he said that Hannah’s roommate had mentioned the final project for the sociology class, the professor erupted like a geyser.

Yes, Hannah had been excited about the project. Hannah saw herself as an integral part of the project, and her unveiling it to the seminar would be a direct challenge to the community’s own biases.

Gordon figured unveiling a nude portrait of yourself to your professor and your classmates would be a pretty ballsy thing to do. But when he asked what, precisely, the project was, he set off another geyser.

The professor didn’t know. The project was worthless if Hannah had to seek pre-approval from an authority figure, even one as enlightened as the professor. One could not seek permission to subvert the status quo. She had no idea what Hannah had planned. Sadly, now she would never know.

And neither would Gordon. Still, he left the professor’s office even more convinced that the sociology project is what had brought Hannah to the apartment in the high rise.

The trip to the Bronx had taken a chunk out of Gordon’s workday that he’d have to scramble to make up. He walked briskly to the subway station, only to see a downtown train departing just as he cleared the turnstile.

He resigned himself to a ten-minute wait. Gordon stood with one foot against the tile wall of the station, watching a group of college students, backpacks slung over their shoulders, hair in various shades not found in nature, as they stood talking and laughing on the platform. Hannah would’ve blended right in with them.

A young woman moaned as she checked her phone. “Come on! Where’s that freakin’ train?”

The group surged closer to the edge of the platform, and one boy stuck his head out to peer down the long, dark tunnel.

A transit cop approached them. “Step back from the edge of the platform, please.”

“Yeah, Josh,” his friend jeered. “If you get run over by the train, service will be disrupted while they mop your guts off the track, and we’ll never make it downtown.

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