Andrew Vachss: Footsteps of the Hawk

I stopped in an alley, reached down, pulled the detachable soles and heels off my boots and walked away on the new ones. A few blocks over, I dropped the pull–aways down a gutter sewer.

A few blocks later, I took off the gloves and tossed them into a Dumpster. Once I slipped a token into the slot for the Spring Street subway, I was gone.

Hauser never got his story. By the time he came back from Chicago, it was all over the news. TV, radio, the papers, everything. Hero cop Jorge Morales had cracked a serial murder case….A rogue female detective was the culprit, and he'd taken her out in a vicious gun battle that saw him catch a slug in the chest. He lost a lung, but he was going to make it. Politicians knocked each other over trying for photo ops standing next to his hospital bed. NYPD loved him. If they had questions about the bootleg cellular phone or the extra gun, they kept them to themselves.

I called Helene from a pay phone. "The contract's back on," is all I said.

When Hauser called the prison to set up another interview with Piersall, they told him Piersall wasn't going to be having any visitors. Seems he was out of PC only one day when somebody shanked him— he was DOA by the time they got him to the prison infirmary.

Frankie's got another fight coming up in ninety days— Ristone got him a match with a tomato can. The big buildup had already started. No more real fights for Frankie until he had a string of setup KOs under his belt.

Hauser told me he wasn't done. "This Adelnaws Foundation stinks," he said. "Did you know this guy Capshaw had a conviction for child molesting? Almost forty years ago, in Toronto. And this foundation, it's on the Internet, the server's over in Finland somewhere. I'm gonna take a look."

"Be yourself," I told him.

It was good advice I gave Hauser. But it was a couple more weeks before I took it myself. Vyra called from the Vista. And I climbed in the Plymouth and drove over to see her new shoes.