Men In Blue (Badge of Honor 1)

Gerald Vincent Gallagher’s stomach tied in a painful knot. He felt a cold chill, and as if the hair on his neck was crawling. He spit out the piece of pizza he had been chewing, and carefully laid the piece in his hand on the garbage can beside the Coke container.

Then he started walking past Your Newsstand. At the end of the building was a glass door leading to a bingo parlor upstairs, and then the covered stairs to the subway platform.

Gerald Vincent Gallagher looked at the door and saw in it a reflection of the street. And something caught his eye. A big, fat sonofabitch was looking right at him as he came running across the street. The fat guy looked familiar and for a moment, Gerald Vincent Gallagher thought he was a guy he had done business with, but then the fat guy sort of kneeled down, and jerked up his pants leg, and pulled a gun from an ankle holster.

Then, as he started running again, he shouted, “Hold it right there, Gallagher, or I’ll blow your ass away!”

Fuck him, Gerald Vincent Gallagher thought. That fucking narc isn’t going to shoot that gun with all these people around!

He ran up the stairs toward the subway platform. With a little bit of luck, there would be a train there and he could get on it, and away.

****

The Bridge & Pratt Streets Terminal is the end of the line for the subway. The tracks are elevated, above Frank-ford Avenue, and widen as they reach the station. There is a center passenger platform, with stairs leading down to the lower level of the terminal, between the tracks, and a second passenger platform, to the right of the center platform. That way, passengers can exit incoming from downtown trains through doors on both sides of the car. Passengers heading downtown all have to board trains from the center platform.

After incoming trains from downtown Philadelphia offload their passengers from the right (in direction of movement) track, they move several hundred yards farther on, where they stop, the crews move to the rear end of the train (which now becomes the front end), and move back, now on the left track, to the station, where they pick up downtown-bound passengers.

The lower level of the terminal contains ticket booths, and two stairwells, one descending to the ground on either side of Frankford Avenue.

When Officer Charley McFadden spotted Gerald Vincent Gallagher shoving pizza in his face in front of Your Newsstand, he was sitting in his Volkswagen, which was parked in front of Gene & Jerry’s Restaurant & Sandwiches on Pratt Street, fifty feet to the north of Frankford Avenue.

Officer Jesus Martinez was inside Gene & Jerry’s sitting at the counter eating a ham and cheese sandwich, no mayonnaise or mustard or butter, just the ham and cheese and maybe a little piece of lettuce on whole wheat bread.

He had his mouth full of ham and cheese when he saw Charley erupt from the Volkswagen.

He swore, in Spanish, and spit out the sandwich, and jumped up and ran toward the door. As soon as he was through it, he dropped to his knees and drew his pistol from his ankle holster.

He had not seen Gerald Vincent Gallagher, but he knew that Charley McFadden must have seen him, for

Charley, moving with speed remarkable for his bulk, was now headed up the stairs to the subway station.

Two cars and a truck, going like the hammers of hell, delayed Officer Martinez’s passage across Pratt Street by thirty seconds. By the time he made it across, Charley McFadden was nowhere in sight. All he could see was people with wide eyes wondering what the fuck was going on.

“Police! Police!” Officer Martinez shouted as he forced his way through a crowd of people trying to leave the station.

He jumped over the turnstile, and then was forced to make a choice between stairs leading to the tracks for trains arriving from downtown and tracks for trains headed downtown. Deciding that it would be far more likely that McFadden and whoever it was he was chasing—almost certainly, Gerald Vincent Gallagher—would be on the downtown platform, he ran up those stairs.

Officer McFadden, who had lost sight of Gerald Vincent Gallagher as he ran up the stairs from Pratt Street, had made the same decision. Already starting to puff a little, he ran onto the platform. A downtown train had just pulled into the station; the platform was crowded with people in the process of boarding it.

Holding his pistol at the level of his head, muzzle pointed toward the sky, Charley McFadden ran down the train looking for Gallagher. He had reached the last car, and hadn’t seen him, and had just about decided the little fucker was on the train, that he had missed him, and would have to start at the first car and work his way back through it when he did see him. Gallagher was in the middle of the tracks, the other tracks, the incoming from downtown tracks. As McFadden ran to the side of the center platform, Gerald Vincent Gallagher boosted himself up on the platform on the far side.

It had been his intention to run back down the stairs and get onto Frankford Avenue, where he could lose himself in the crowd. The narc, Gerald Vincent Gallagher reasoned, would not dare use his pistol because of all the fucking people on the lower level of the terminal and on Frankford Avenue.

But Gallagher had spotted him, and there was no way he could run back toward the station, because there were no people on that platform, and the goddamned narc would feel free to shoot at him. He turned, instead, and ran down the platform in the other direction, to the end, and jumped over a yellow painted barrier with a sign on it reading DANGER! KEEP OFF!

Beyond the barrier was a narrow workman’s walkway. It ran as far as the next station, but Gerald Vincent Gallagher wasn’t planning on running that far, just maybe two, three, blocks where he knew there was a stairway, more of a ladder, really, he could climb down to Frankford Avenue.

He looked over his shoulder and saw that the fucking narc was doing what he had done, crossing the tracks and then boosting himself up onto the passenger platform. The big fat sonofabitch had trouble hauling all that lard onto the platform, and for a moment, the way the fucking narc was flailing around with his legs trying to get up on the platform, Gerald Vincent Gallagher thought he might get lucky and the narc’s legs would touch the third rail, and the cocksucker would fry himself.

But that didn’t happen.

Officer McFadden got first to his knees, and then stood up. Holding his pistol in both hands, he took aim at Gerald Vincent Gallagher.

But he didn’t pull the trigger. Heaving and panting the way he was, there was little chance that he could hit the little sonofabitch as far away as he was, and Christ only knew where the bullet would go after he fired. Probably get some nun between the eyes.

“You little sonofabitch! I’m going to get your ass!” he screamed in fury, and started racing after him again.

Officer Jesus Martinez reached the center platform at this time. He knew from the direction people were looking where the action was, and ran down the center platform to the end.