The Hunt Club Read Free

all, in the field. The rest of it was writing reports of what I’d done. The supervisors got the offices, and as far as I was concerned, they could have them. Supervisors worried about closing cases and about numbers and about following established procedures. I cared about saving kids’ lives. There tended to be a difference in approach.
    After negotiating the gauntlet of homeless persons camped on the surrounding streets, I would arrive at the Otis Street building every morning somewhere around eight o’clock, check in for any possible true emergency calls, then most days pick up my daily allotment of “normal” cases. Every one of these was an emergency of some kind, although too often not designated as such by the bureaucracy.
    To get an emergency declaration and hence the immediate attention of a caseworker or team of them, the home situation of the child had to be defined as life-threatening in the near term. Say, a woman holding her three-year-old by the heels out of a six-story window would be an emergency. Day-to-day problems were of a lesser nature and included chronic starvation or suspected physical abuse or a parent in some drug-induced or otherwise psychically impaired state. Or an uncle in a suspected carnal relationship with his eight-year-old niece.
    The more or less routine call this morning was from Holly Park, a housing project near the southern border of the city. Due to its internal and conflicting gang affiliations, its grinding poverty and persistent air of hopelessness, and the astronomical percentage of its population that either used or dealt street drugs, it had the highest neighborhood homicide rate after Hunter’s Point. And was undefeated for number one in most other crimes, violent and not.
    I don’t mind fog or rain, heat or cold, but I hate the wind, and today, a Thursday in early April, it was blowing hard. In an effort to save it from the vandalism that plagued Holly Park, I parked my already beat-up Lumina three blocks east of the project, then opened my door to a gust of Alaskan Express against which my parka was about as effective as chain mail. The day was bright and sunny, but the wind was relentless and bitter, bitter, bitter cold.
    Hands tucked into the bottoms of my jacket pockets, I got to the address I’d memorized and, from across the street, stared at the tagged and scarred wasteland I was supposed to enter. I knew that fifty years ago the place had once been a showcase of sorts—the barracks-style apartment units freshly painted, with grassy areas and well-kept gardens, even trees. Residents got fined if they didn’t mow their lawns, keep their individual porches and balconies clean and free of laundry or garbage. Now there wasn’t one tree left, no hint of a garden, barely a blade of grass. From my vantage across the street, I picked up hundreds of glints of light in the packed tan earth surrounding the buildings—I’d been here many times before, knew that these were remains of countless discarded and broken bottles of beer, wine, liquor, anything alcoholic that came in glass. Pepsi and Coke weren’t locked in combat in this arena.
    Perhaps most disturbing of all, I saw no one. Of course, with the cold and the wind, people wouldn’t be out to bask and frolic, but I kind of expected to see some soul passing between the pods of buildings, some woman hanging laundry, somebody doing something. But the place appeared completely deserted.
    I wondered whether I should have waited a few more minutes at the office and hooked up with a partner for this call. One of the relatively new hires, maybe, who still had some fire in the gut. But finding someone in the office I could count on, with whom I could stand to spend much time, had become all but impossible.
    Because the office had in the past couple of years become cancerous. This coincided with the appointment and arrival of Deputy Director Wilson Mayhew. From my line