Homicide A Year On The Killing Streets by David Simon

Author:David Simon
Language: es
Format: mobi
Tags: det_police
Published: 2011-02-28T23:00:00+00:00

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 29

Fred Ceruti knows it’s a bad one when he turns the corner on Whittier and sees the ambulance. Time of call was 0343 and that was a half an hour ago, he calculates, so what the hell is the guy still doing in the ambo?

The detective edges the Cavalier up behind the red glow of the medic unit’s emergency lights, then stares for a moment at the frenzied paramedics in the rear of the ambulance. Standing on the ambo’s rear running board, a Western uniform looks back at Ceruti and gives a quick thumb’s down.

“He don’t look so hot,” says the uniform as Ceruti gets out of his car and steps toward the red strobes. “They’ve been here twenty minutes and he still ain’t stable.”

“Where’s he hit?”

“Head shot. One in the arm too.”

The victim is writhing on his litter, moaning, with his legs buckling back and forth in slow repetition-outward at the knees, inward at the toes-an involuntary movement that tells a homicide detective to post the vacancy sign. When a head-shot victim starts dancing on his ambo litter-“doing the Funky Chicken,” Jay Landsman calls it-you can write it down as a murder.

Ceruti watches the paramedics struggle as they begin working a pair of pressure pants around the victim’s legs. Fully inflated with air, the device greatly constricts blood flow to the lower extremities, thereby maintaining blood pressure in the head and torso. In Ceruti’s mind, the pressure pants are as much of a threat as anything else; the damn things can keep a man alive until he arrives at an emergency room, but the trauma team eventually has to deflate those bad boys, and at that point, blood pressure takes a nose dive and all hell breaks loose.

“Where’s he going?” Ceruti asks.

“Shock-Trauma, if we can stabilize him,” says the ambo driver. “But I mean, shit, we haven’t been able to get him leveled out.”

Ceruti looks up and down Whittier Avenue and reads the scene like a short grocery list. Dark side street. Ambush. No witnesses. No physical evidence. Probable drug murder. Don’t die on me, you bastard. Don’t you dare go and die on me.

“Are you the first officer?”

“Yeah. Seven-A-thirty-four unit.”

Ceruti begins collecting the particulars in his notebook, then follows the uniform to an alleyway between the rowhouses at 2300 and 2302.

“We got the call as shots fired and found him lying right there, head to the wall. He still had this in his waistband when we rolled him.”

The patrolman holds up a.38 five-shot.

No good, thinks Ceruti, no good at all. His last case was also a drug murder from the Western. Boy by the name of Stokes shot down in an alley off Carrollton, skinny kid who turned out to be HIV-positive when they got him down to the ME’s office. That case, too, is still open.

Ceruti fills a couple of pages in his notepad, then walks a block and a half east to a corner pay phone to call for reinforcements. Landsman answers the phone on the first ring.

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