The Fall by Chuck Hogan, Guillermo Del Toro Page B

expression also, and you still got nicked for it. Order was a fragile thing, with chaos always just a few steps away.
    The city was seeing that now, firsthand.
    Riots had claimed whole blocks in the South Bronx. Nighttime was the worst. Jackson kept waiting for a call from a captain that would put him back in the old uniform and out on the street. But no word yet. Not a lot of radio chatter at all, whenever he switched it on inside his car. So he kept on doing what he was paid to do.
    The governor had resisted calls for the National Guard, but he was just a guy in Albany, weighing his political future. Supposedly, with so many units still in Iraq and Afghanistan, the guard was undermanned and underequipped—but, looking at the black smoke in the distant sky, Jackson would have welcomed any help.
    Jackson dealt with vandals in all five boroughs, but nobody bombed as much of the city’s fa$clade as Phade. Dude was everywhere. Must have slept all day, tagged all night. He was fifteen or sixteen now, had been getting up since he was twelve. That was the age most taggers start, toying up at schools, on newspaper boxes, etc. In surveillance photos, Phade’s face was always obscured, usually by a Yankees cap tucked underneath a sweatshirt hood, sometimes even an aerosol mask. He wore typical tagger get-up: cargo pants with many pockets, a backpack for his Krylons, hi-top kicks.
    Most vandals work in tagging crews, but not Phade. He was a young legend, moving with apparent impunity throughout diverse neighborhoods. He was said to carry a stolen set of transit keys, including a skeleton that unlocked subway cars. His tags earned respect. The typical profile of a young tagger is low self-esteem, a desire for peer recognition, a distorted view of fame. Phade fit none of these traits. His signature wasn’t a tag—usually a nickname or a repetitive motif—but his style itself. His pieces jumped off walls. Jackson’s own suspicion—long since moved from a hunch to a foregone certainty—was that Phade was likely obsessive-compulsive, perhaps showing symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome or even full-spectrum autism.
    Jackson understood this, in part, because he was an obsessive himself. He carried a full book on Phade, quite similar in appearance to the “piece books” taggers carried, featuring their graffiti outlines in a black-cover Cachet sketchbook. As one of five officers assigned to the GHOST unit within the Vandals Taskforce—the Graffiti Habitual Offender Suppression Team—he was responsible for maintaining a graffiti offender databank cross-referencing tags and throw-ups with addresses. People who consider graffiti a kind of “street art” think of brightly colored, Wild Style bubble bombs on building murals and subway cars. They don’t think of tagging crews etching storefronts, competing for high-profile—and often dangerous—”gets.” Or, more often, marking gang territory, establishing name recognition and intimidation.
    The other four GHOST cops had stopped showing up for shifts. Some radio reports had NYPD officers deserting the city like the New Orleans cops after Hurricane Katrina, but Jackson couldn’t believe that. Something else was happening—something beyond this sickness spreading throughout the boroughs. You’re sick, you bang in. You get your shift covered so you don’t leave a brother to pick up your slack. These claims of abandonment and cowardice offended him like some incompetent tagger’s clumsy-ass signature over a freshly painted wall. Jackson would believe this crazy vampire shit people were talking before he’d accept that his guys had turned tail and skedaddled to Jersey.
    He got inside his unmarked car and drove down the quiet street to Coney Island. He did this three days a week, at least. It was his favorite spot growing up, but his parents didn’t take him there nearly as much as he’d have liked. While he’d abandoned his pledge to go every day when he was a grown-up, he went