The blue edge of midnight - By Jonathon King Page 0,1

in the face never bothered me much. How that trait worked with my other “talent,” my mother could never explain. But the combination of a cloaked intelligence, some size, and an indifference to a crack on the nose made police work easy for me.

In my years on the force I’d climbed a bit of a ladder, taken some special assignments, worked for a short time in the detective bureau. I’d passed the sergeant’s exam a couple of times. But misunderstandings with management and “Officer Freeman’s seeming total lack of ambition” found me walking a downtown beat on the four-to-twelve shift. It was fine with me until the night I shot a child in the back.

It was near the end of my shift. I was standing out of a cold drizzle at Murphy’s Newsstand, a little step-in shop next to a deli just off Broad Street. Murph peddled the daily newspapers, three shelves of magazines holding the monthly array of faked- up cleavage, and probably the most important item of his business, the daily racing forms. With some thirty years on the street, Murph was the most sour and skeptical human being I’d ever met. He was a huge lump of a man who sat for hours at a time on a four-legged stool with what seemed like half of his weight dripping over the sides of the small circular cushion. He had a fat face that folded in on itself like a two-week-old Halloween pumpkin and you couldn’t tell the color of his small slit eyes. He was never without a cigar planted in the corner of his mouth.

“Max, you’re a fuckin’ idiot you stay on a job what wit da way they been stickin’ it to ya,” was his standard conversation with me every night for two years. He had a voice like gravel shuffling around in the bottom of a cardboard box. And he called everyone from the mayor to his own mother a “fuckin’ idiot,” so you didn’t take it personally.

On that night he was grumbling over the day’s results from Garden State Raceway when my radio started crackling with a report of a silent alarm at C&M’s Stop and Shop on Thirteenth Street, just around the corner. I reached down to turn up the volume and Murph rolled the cigar with his tongue and that’s when we heard the snap of small caliber gunfire in the distance. The old vendor looked straight into my face and for the first time in two years I could see that his eyes were a pale, clear blue.

“Casamir,” he croaked as I started out the open door, my hand already going to the holster strap on my 9mm.

It doesn’t take long for adrenaline to flush into your blood when you hear gunshots. As a cop in the city I had heard too many. And each time I had to fight the immediate urge to turn and walk the other way.

I was halfway to the corner and my normally slow heartbeat was banging in my chest. I was trying to set up a scene in my head of Casamir’s place; second storefront around the corner, glass doors flush against the wall, dingy fluorescent lighting inside, Casamir with his too-big smile and that pissy little taped-handled .25 behind the counter. I wasn’t thinking about the rain-slick sidewalk or the lack of decent cover when I made the corner and tried to plant my foot and went skidding out in full view of some kid’s gun barrel.

Snap.

I heard the crack of his pistol but barely registered the sharp smack against my neck and I came up on one knee, brought up the 9mm and saw the kid standing thirty feet away, a black hole of a gun barrel as his only eye. I was staring into that hole when I picked up the movement of something coming out of Casamir’s door and then Snap, another round went off.

I hesitated for one bad instant, and then pulled the trigger. My weapon jumped. My eyes instinctively blinked. Chaos competed for only a second. And then the street went quiet.

The first kid went down without so much as a whimper. Casamir’s .25 had sounded the third report of the night and caught the shooter in the street flush in the temple. My round hit the second boy, the one who had jumped out the door just as I hesitated. The 9mm slug caught him in the back between his skinny shoulder blades and he dropped. Unlike