"All right. Let's try it again. Let's get some concentrated fire on that. I don't want to see you spraying. I don't want to see you holding up. I want short bursts and I want that thing riddled. Riddled," yelled McGurk. He pointed to the mansized dark target.
"Now, you're not going to fire when I count three. You're not going to fire when you feel like it. You're going to fire when you hear this little gadget go click." McGurk held up a child's metal clicker shaped like a frog. McGurk shook the frog. He was in gray slacks and blue shirt and perspiration dripped from his forehead, but there was a grin on his face. Here was a machine that could do what it was supposed to do, it seemed to say.
"All right. On the click," yelled McGurk. The three officers bunched in a semi-circle, readied to fire down the alley at the single target. Nothing. Three seconds. Ten seconds. Twelve seconds. Nothing.
McGurk held up the clicker but made no sound. He watched the men. Thirty seconds. Forty-five seconds. One of the men dried his trigger finger. Another licked his lips and looked over at McGurk. One minute. A minute, ten seconds. The third gunner lowered his weapon.
Two minutes. All the guns lowered. Eyes fixed on McGurk who appeared to notice nothing unusual.
"Hey, when you going to click that thing?" yelled one of the gunners.
"What?" said McGurk, leaning forward as if he had not understood the question.
"I said, when you going…?"
"Click," went the little frog and one man got off a wild burst. The other two machine gunners opened up hesitantly, firing wide of the target.
"Awright, awright," shouted McGurk. "Cease firing. Cease firing."
The gunfire died with a last single shot that plunked a neat hole in the dark outline of a man at the end of the range.
McGurk shook his head and trudged to the alley, standing before the guns, between the men and the targets.
"You three are going to be commanders," he said, still shaking his head. "As we get more men, you're going to be the ones who are supposed to be doing the teaching. You're the leaders and you stink, sewer deep, cesspool wide. Stink. Stupid. Stink."
His face reddened.
"You don't know what I'm talking about, do you. Unfair, right? I didn't play by the rules you learned, did I?"
"Sir," said one of the three men. "You took an awful long time on the click and we relaxed and…"
"Oh," said McGurk, interrupting the man, "I took an awful long time. They didn't teach you that way in police academy training. And since you weren't taught that way, you're not going to learn any other way. Well, how many of you have ever set an ambush? Raise your hands."
One hand went up.
"What ambush?" McGurk said.
"It was these bootleggers …"
"How many'd you kill?"
The man paused. "We wounded three."
"You ever set an ambush where you got 'em all? I mean the way we get them? Well, that's what we're talking about now. You've got to stop thinking like cops, with a 30,000 man department behind you. You're not cops now."
"But we wanted to be better cops is why we joined," said another man.
"Forget it," McGurk snarled. "You're being trained for the ambush. And as we go on and things get stickier, I suggest you get it down pat, because if you don't there may not be enough left of you for a mortician to patch up." They were still unhappy, but their anger was slowly changing to respect.
McGurk sensed this. Standing in front of them, he clicked the frog. The hands went to the triggers and one machine gun almost fired. McGurk laughed loudly, and his laughter helped relax the men. Good.
He walked out of the line of fire and before he reached his observation post clicked again. This time the firing range exploded, with a continuous roar of lead through the air.
"Beautiful," McGurk yelled without turning around. "Beautiful."
"How can you tell?" asked one of the men.
"On an ambush, you listen for the timing. You don't look," said McGurk happily. "You sounded beautiful."
The sound of the firing and McGurk's lesson was not beautiful to another man who was listening. The deputy chief had missed McGurk at headquarters and had come here to get him to sign some papers on manpower shifts in Brooklyn. He had been standing outside in the little hallway leading into the range and gym, and had recognized both the voice of McGurk and the machine gun fire. It was definitely a non-standard approach. He knew instantly that in the New York City police force a movement had been started like that in South America. He was a wise man as well as cunning, and he waited quietly, until he had heard enough, and then walked away with his papers still unsigned.
The deputy chief knew there was only one man in the entire department whom he could trust with this information. He was the only man obsessed enough with civil liberties to anger the entire force-the commissioner. The deputy chief had forcefully disagreed with Commissioner O'Toole many times. Once he had threatened to resign and O'Toole had said:
"Bear with me. If we survive the turmoil of the times with our constitutional liberties intact, it will be because men like you stood firm. We're taking the hard road. Please. Trust me."
"O'Toole, I think you're wrong. I think what happened to your daughter should have showed you you were wrong. But I'll stick, O'Toole. Mainly because in St. Cecilia's they taught me respect for authority. I'm offering this one up to the Virgin Mary because it isn't worth anything to anyone else. Mark it. This is an act of faith in God, not in your competence, Commissioner."
And the deputy chief had followed, enduring the little everyday revolts of a department harassed by militants, abused by the press, condemned by citizens for lack of protection, and called "pigs" by those who never saw a bar of soap. The deputy chief had stuck even when his relatives condemned him for sticking. And he knew that if he suffered, O'Toole must have suffered ten… a hundred times worse. So if there was one person the deputy chief knew he could trust it was Police Commissioner O'Toole. He went directly from the old police range to O'Toole's home, a big brick home in an urban-renewed Irish neighbourhood.
They talked for four hours, O'Toole's bulblike face becoming grimmer. During the conversation, O'Toole had to phone headquarters for his nightly midnight check.
Off the phone, he said, "I can hardly believe it. I can't. I know McGurk. Reactionary, yes. A murderer, no."
The deputy chief detailed exactly what he heard.
"Is it possible that you misunderstood?"
"No."
"Is it possible the firing hurt your ears?"
"No."
"Is it possible McGurk was playing some kind of game with recruits?"
"No, dammit. These weren't recruits. These were veteran cops."
"Oh, my Lord. My Lord, my Lord." O'Toole buried his head in his hands. "So it has come to this. Well, go home and tell no one. Promise me that. You'll tell no one. Tomorrow, we'll make plans. I guess we'll have to go to the state."
"What about the FBI?"
"Maybe they're in it?"
"I doubt it," the deputy chief said. "If we've got one agency we can trust, it's the FBI. The best in the world."
"Well, yes. But don't phone them now. Come to my office in the morning, and we'll meet them together."
"Very good, sir."
The deputy chief did not give it a second thought in the morning. He did not give it a first thought. Outside his own home in Staten Island, he heard the click of a cricket. Or was it a child's clicker? He had no time to think about that either. He went up in a burst of crossing slugs like a body with simultaneous bombs in his bloodstream. The firing lifted him off his feet and sustained him in air for almost a half-second. It seemed like a small eternity to the men firing.
"See what I mean?" said McGurk to his men later. "Beautiful. It works beautifully when it's organized."