He saw Officer McFadden first, and then, fifty, sixty yards ahead of him, a slight white male that almost certainly had to be Gerald Vincent Gallagher. They were running, carefully, along the walkway next to the rail.
The reason they were running carefully was that the walkway was over the third rail. The walkway was built of short lengths, about five feet long, of prefabricated pieces. Some of them, the real old ones, were heavy wooden planking. Some of the newer ones were pierced steel, and the most modern were of exposed aggregate cement. They provided a precarious perch in any event, and they were not designed to be foot-racing paths.
Officer Martinez made another snap decision. There was no way he could catch up with them, and even to try would mean that he would have to jump down and cross the tracks, and risk electrocuting himself on the third rail. But he could catch the departing train, ride to the next station, and then start walking back. That would put Gerald Vincent Gallagher between them.
He ran for the train and jumped inside, just as the doors closed.
He scared hell, with his pistol drawn, out of the people on the car, and they backed away from him as if he was on fire.
“I’m a police officer,” he said, not very loudly because he was out of breath. “Nothing to worry about.”
When the train passed Charley McFadden and Gerald Vincent Gallagher, they were both still running very carefully, watching their feet.
Jesus Christ, Charley, shoot the sonofabitch!
The same thought had occurred to Charley McFadden at just about that moment, and even as he ran, he wondered why he didn’t stop running, drop to his knees, and, using a two-handed hold, try to put Gerald Vincent Gallagher down.
There were several reasons, and they all came to him. For one thing, he wasn’t at all sure that he could hit him. For another, he was worried about where the bullet, the bullets, plural, would go if he missed. People lived close to the tracks here. He didn’t want to kill one of them.
And then he realized the real reason. He didn’t want to kill Gerald Vincent Gallagher. The little shit might deserve it, and it might mean that Officer Charley McFadden didn’t have the balls to be a cop, but the facts were that Gerald Vincent Gallagher didn’t have a gun—if he had, the little shit would have used it, he had nothing to lose from a second charge of murder—and wasn’t posing, right now, any real threat to anybody but himself, running down the tracks like this.
Hay-zus must have figured out what was going on by now, and got on the radio and called for help. In a couple of minutes, there would be cops responding from all over. All he had to do was keep Gerald Vincent Gallagher in sight, and keep him from hurting himself or somebody else, and everything would be all right.
Eighteen hundred and fifty-three feet (as was later measured with great care) south of the Bridge & Pratt Streets Terminal, Gerald Vincent Gallagher realized that he could not run another ten feet. His chest hurt so much he wanted to cry from the pain. And that big, fat, fucking narc was still on his tail.
Gerald Vincent Gallagher stopped running, and turned around and grabbed the railing beside the walkway, and dropped to his knees.
“I give up,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, don’t shoot me!”
Officer Charley McFadden could understand what he said, even the way he said it puffing and out of breath.
Unable to speak himself, he walked up the walkway, heaving with the exertion.
And then he raised his arm, the left one, without the pistol, and pointed down the track, and tried to find his voice. What he wanted to say was “Watch out, there’s a train coming!”
He couldn’t find his voice, but Gerald Vincent Gallagher took his meaning. He looked over his shoulder at the approaching train. And tried to get to his feet, so that he would be able to hold on to the railing good and tight as the train passed.
And he slipped.
And he fell onto the tracks.
And he put his hand out as a reflex motion, to break his fall, and his wrist found the third rail and Gerald Vincent Gallagher fried.
And then the train came, and all four cars rolled over him.
When Officer Jesus Martinez came down the walkway, he found Officer Charley McFadden bent over the railing, sick white in the face, and covered with vomitus.
****
Michael J. “Mickey” O’Hara had worked, at one time or another, for all the newspapers in Philadelphia, and had ventured as far afield as New York City and Washington, DC.
He was an “old-time” reporter, and even something of a legend, although he was just past forty. He looked older than forty. Mickey liked a drop of the grape whenever he could get his hands on one, and that was the usual reason his employment had been terminated; for in his cups Mickey O’Hara was prone not only to describing the character flaws and ancestry of his superiors in picaresque profanity worthy of a cavalry sergeant, but also, depending on the imagined level of provocation and the amount of alcohol in his system, to punch them out.
But on the other hand, Mickey O’Hara was, when off the sauce, one hell of a reporter. He had what some believe to be the genetic Irish talent for storytelling. He could breathe life into a story that otherwise really wouldn’t deserve repeating. He was also a master practitioner of his craft, which was journalism generally and the police beat specifically. His car was equipped with a very elaborate shortwave receiver permitting Mickey to listen in to police communications.
Mickey had come to know a lot of cops in twenty years, and although he was technically not a member of either organization, if there was an affair of the Emerald Society or the Fraternal Order of Police and Mickey O’Hara was not there, people wondered, with concern, if he was sick or something.
Mickey liked most cops and most cops liked Mickey. Mickey, however, considered few cops above the grade of sergeant as cops. The cant of the law-enforcement community gets in the way here. All policemen are police officers, which means they are executing an office for the government.