by Steven Henry
Rolf was off again, sneezing and snorting. Erin went with him, keeping as low as she could. Another gunshot sounded, followed by two more from Vic.
“God damn it, Neshenko!” Webb shouted. “Cease fire!”
Erin found an overturned table, a looming shape in the smoke. Behind it, three firefighters were huddled with a fourth one at their feet. The wounded man was writhing in pain.
“We’ll cover you!” Erin shouted.
Ruiz was behind her. He tapped her shoulder to let her know he was there. He rested the barrel of his pistol on the edge of the upturned table. “Go!” he said.
Erin and Rolf moved back the way they’d come. The firefighters followed, carrying their downed buddy. No more shots were fired. Erin dared to hope Vic might’ve gotten lucky. Or maybe the shooter had gone down from smoke inhalation, or suffered an outbreak of common sense and just stopped shooting.
The police and firefighters tumbled out of the building onto the sidewalk, into blessed fresh air and sunlight. Erin thought a bleak, cold March day had never felt so good. They pulled off their masks and sucked in the air. Rolf, at her side, gave a wheezing cough and sank to the pavement.
Erin dropped to one knee beside her dog. “Good boy,” she said. “Sei brav, Rolf. Sei brav.”
He wagged his tail and coughed again.
“I need some help here!” she shouted. “It’s my K-9!”
One of the firemen hurried over, holding a special oxygen mask. Erin thanked God for Americans’ love for their pets. The FDNY had taken to stocking masks for dogs and cats in their trucks, and Rolf was the beneficiary of the policy. He was soon breathing more easily, but Erin stayed beside him, like a good partner should.
After the shooting, the firefighters drew back from the building and concentrated on containment, keeping the fire from spreading. There wasn’t much left to save in the restaurant by now anyway, and they weren’t about to risk more lives over a big pile of wet ashes. The uniformed officers on scene, very twitchy, kept an eye on the blaze and fingered their weapons.
Erin’s colleagues were a short distance away. Webb had his hands on his hips and was looking up at Vic, who had six inches of height and many pounds of muscle on his boss.
“Detective Neshenko,” Webb said in a dangerously quiet voice.
“Sir,” Vic said, looking at a point just over his commander’s shoulder.
“I’d love to hear why you disobeyed a direct order.”
“Incoming fire outranks the whole chain of command, sir.”
“You could’ve killed someone.”
“I think I did kill someone.”
“There’s easier ways to get time off than going on modified assignment,” Webb growled.
“We had a man down,” Vic said. “If we weren’t supposed to shoot back, why’d the department issue us guns?”
“You’ve already earned an insubordination rip for this,” Webb said. “Want to try for two?”
Vic didn’t say anything. His cheek twitched slightly.
Rolf nosed at Erin’s hand. She stroked his shoulder. The important thing was that they were okay. The fireman who’d been shot had been hit in the calf. It didn’t look like a serious injury. She understood Webb’s anger. With all that smoke in the place, Vic couldn’t possibly have known what was around his target. He could’ve easily hit an innocent victim. Hell, maybe he had; they wouldn’t know until the fire died down.
Erin settled herself to wait, resting a hand on her K-9. The smell of smoke wafted up from the Shepherd’s fur to her nostrils. Rolf had already had a tough day, and now he had a bath to look forward to.
“Lieutenant!”
A uniformed officer was running around the corner. He looked agitated, which wasn’t surprising, considering they were at an unsecured crime scene where shots had been fired and which was still ablaze.
Webb turned to the man. “What is it?”
“We’ve got bodies, sir.”
Webb looked confused. Erin felt the same. This guy’s uniform was clean. He hadn’t been inside the burning building. What could he possibly have to report?
“You looked in there?” Webb asked.
“Not inside,” the officer replied. “Around back. By the service door. Three of ‘em. All dead.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I counted.”
Webb gave him a look of long-suffering patience. “I mean, are you sure they’re dead?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I guess we’d better take a look,” Webb said. “Neshenko? Can I count on you not to shoot anyone else?”
“As long as they don’t shoot at me,” Vic said.
“O’Reilly? Your K-9 okay?”
Erin looked at her dog. “How you doing, kiddo? You ready to go back to work?”
Rolf wriggled his body to get his feet under him. He kicked at the oxygen mask on his face as if he was scratching an itch.
Erin knew he wasn’t badly damaged. He wasn’t coughing or wheezing anymore, and while his eyes were streaming, they didn’t look too bloodshot. Rolf would be more bothered by being left out of the action than he would be by any physical inconvenience.
“Okay, boy,” she said, helping him out of the mask. “Komm.”
Three detectives and one K-9 followed the uniform around to the back alley.
“I thought all the shooters were out front,” Vic said.
“That was my understanding,” Webb said.
“Maybe they got hit inside,” Erin suggested, “and crawled out to die, trying to get away from the flames.”
“All three?” Vic wondered. “Seems unlikely. Whoa.”
They’d just rounded the corner and seen the bodies, laid out as promised.
“Now there’s something you don’t see every day,” Webb said.
Erin nodded. She’d been at plenty of shooting scenes. Street violence, as a rule, was messy. Even trained shooters tended to fire wildly when the chips were down. Erin knew the numbers. On the firing range, cops could nail their targets over ninety percent of the time. But in gunfights, they hit with about one in six bullets. Untrained street thugs did worse. The victims in a gangland shootout tended to have holes in any number of random body parts, and getting killed in that kind of fight was more about bad luck than enemy skill.
This was different. The three bodies were sprawled just outside the restaurant’s back door, with pools of blood around each man’s head. They’d all gone down to perfect headshots.
“Bang, bang, bang,” Vic said quietly. “That’s some damn good shooting.”
“Steady hands,” Webb agreed. He approached the first body and knelt beside it, peering at the bullet hole in the man’s forehead. “One shot each. We’ll need to get Levine to take a look at these, but I’m not seeing any powder tattooing.”
“Not close enough for execution-style,” Erin said. “Besides, looks like two of these guys were shot from the front.” Even coldblooded killers tended to murder people from behind. Killing a man was hard enough even if you didn’t have to looking him in the eye.
“Looks like this guy took one in the temple,” Vic said, pointing to another victim. “I’m guessing he was the first one to get hit. That must’ve gotten the attention of the other two. They turned toward the shooter and he snuffed ‘em, one, two.”
“Fast shooting,” Erin said. “Fast and accurate.” She was looking at the dead guys’ hands. One of them was holding a pistol, a small revolver. The other’s hands were empty, but he had an automatic stuffed in his waistband. She crouched and peered at the revolver, seeing the blunt tips of bullets in every cylinder.
“They never got the chance to shoot back,” she said. “One poor sap didn’t even get his weapon out.”
“Must’ve been more than one shooter,” Vic said. “No one’s that fast and good.”
“Either that, or we’ve got a trained sniper,” Webb said. He didn’t sound happy about it.
“Whichever it is,” Vic said, “this is more than a homic
ide.”
“Yeah,” Erin agreed. “It’s a war.”
Chapter 2
Erin and her colleagues had to wait for the fire to die down before they could work the full crime scene. In the meantime, they had the three bodies in the back alley, but they needed to wait on Sarah Levine, the medical examiner, before they could do much with them.
“I should’ve brought a deck of cards,” Vic muttered.
“At least there aren’t any windows in back of the building,” Erin said. “The fire won’t get at these poor bastards.”
Webb was still crouched over the bodies, scanning them carefully. “These guys are Italians,” he said.
“Well, yeah,” Vic said. “We are in Little Italy. That’s not exactly unusual.”
“Two young men, one older one,” Webb continued. “And if you’re right, Neshenko, the old guy got it first.”
“And the two younger ones were carrying guns,” Erin said. “Bodyguards?”
Webb nodded. “That means the old man was the target. I don’t see a piece on him. He’s the least dangerous of the bunch. Why shoot him first, unless killing him was the point?”
“But if it was a sniper,” Erin said, “why bother shooting the other two at all? Why not just take the one shot and get away?”
“Targets of opportunity?” Vic guessed. “Or maybe we’ve got a sick son of a bitch who just likes killing people.”
Webb pulled a pencil out of his trench coat and probed at the entrance wound in one of the younger guys’ heads. “Levine can confirm,” he said. “But this looks like a nine-millimeter hole. Maybe a .38.”
“Not a rifle, then,” Erin said.
“Handgun,” Webb agreed.
“Please stop poking my body,” a woman said from behind them.
Vic choked on whatever he’d been about to say. He leaned against the wall and recovered his breath, while the other two turned to see Doctor Levine approaching.
“Hey,” Erin said, wondering if the other woman had any idea how odd her word choice was. “We’ve got three out here, at least one more inside. Probably more.”
“GSWs,” Webb added.
Levine went directly to the first body, without saying anything else to the detectives. She was already wearing her gloves. She examined the dead man for several moments.
“Cause of death is obvious,” she said, not directing her comments to anyone in particular. Levine tended to talk to herself. “Cerebral hemorrhage as a result of a single gunshot wound to the cranium. The exit wound indicates the bullet will be somewhere downrange. The wound channel transects the left frontal and parietal lobes, exiting just above the occipital. Death was instantaneous.”
“We’re thinking handgun,” Webb said.
“The caliber supports your hypothesis,” Levine said, keeping her eyes on the victim. “Lack of powder stippling indicates the range was at least thirty centimeters.”
“Assuming the bodies haven’t been moved, the shooter was on this line,” Webb said, pacing the alley away from the body.
“If we’re thinking one shooter, he wouldn’t have had time to move more than a step or two,” Erin said, checking the angles. She knew stationary shooting was much easier than firing on the go. “If he shot all three from the same spot, it would’ve been about here.” She toed the pavement.
“The second victim presents almost identically to the first,” Levine said. “Cause of death is congruent.”
“If it was a nine-mil, it was an automatic,” Vic said. “That means we should have casings. The bad guys didn’t have time to recover their brass.”
Erin nodded. While Levine continued her examination, they canvassed the alley. Unfortunately, shell casings didn’t tend to lie in nice, neat piles. Once ejected from a gun, they could fly surprising distances. Even knowing where the shooter had likely been standing, it still took a few minutes of looking through the litter in the alley before Vic snapped his fingers.
“Got one!” he announced. “It’s a nine, all right.”
“Most common ammunition in America,” Webb sighed. “At least we’ll be able to match it with the weapon, assuming we can recover it.”
No one commented that the killer would have to be awfully careless to let that happen. All of them could see this was a professional job, and professional hitmen knew to get rid of a murder weapon as soon as possible.
Erin found another casing, and Rolf nosed out a third with his keen snout for gunpowder. They marked the spent brass with yellow evidence numbers and left them for the CSU guys to pick up and bag. Then Erin stood next to her boss and watched Levine work.
“This is a weird one,” she said.
Webb nodded. “I can see the guys shooting up the place and throwing in firebombs. That’s typical gangland MO. A little heavy-handed, maybe, but typical. But then we’ve got this professional operator waiting out back? Why have your best shooter on the bench? They should’ve been out front.”
“I think the plan was to flush the target out the back,” Erin said. “It’s like they do in England when they hunt birds.”
“Yeah,” Vic said, joining them. “Those upper-class idiots get all their people to beat the bushes while they wait with the guns. Then, when the pheasants or grouse or whatever try to get away from the beaters, the shooters gun ‘em down.”
“What do you know about English aristocrats?” Webb asked, surprised.
“Not much,” Vic said. “But I know a lot about shotguns. You oughta try trap-shooting sometime. Might improve your marksmanship.”
“This is not a good time to discuss shooting with me,” Webb said dryly.
Vic’s jaw tightened and he shut up.
“It’s a good thought, though,” Webb said. “I think O’Reilly might be right.”
“This guy was someone important,” Erin guessed. “Mafia, maybe?”
“We’ll know soon enough,” Webb replied. “CSU should be able to get us IDs on the ones outside, at least.”
“We’ll need dental records for the poor mopes in the fire,” Vic added.
“And that needs to wait for the fire to be out,” Webb sighed. “We’d better get comfortable.”
As they stood back and watched the building burn, Skip Taylor wandered over. Like them, the bomb tech didn’t have much to do for the moment. His job would come later, identifying the incendiary devices used to start the fire.
“Good shooting, Tex,” he said to Vic.
“How do you know?” Vic retorted.
“Your Tango’s down,” Skip said, using a slang term from his military days meaning “target.”
“Maybe the fire got him,” Erin said.
“Oh, the fire definitely got him,” Skip said, grinning.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Saw it happen all the time in Baghdad. There’s a roadside bomb, or a gas tank gets lit up, some dope goes down in the fire, and a few minutes later the dead guy’s ammo starts popping off.”
“Damn it,” Vic said. “I should’ve known. That guy wasn’t shooting at me.”
“Nope,” Skip agreed. “His bullets were cooking off from the heat. He was done before you even showed up.”
“Congratulations,” Erin said to Vic. “You just won a gunfight with a dead man.”
“You think this is funny?” he growled.
“A little bit.”
Vic shook his head. “This is another thing I’m never gonna live down.”
It took about four hours of what the firefighters called “surround and drown” until smoke stopped pouring out of the charred remains of the restaurant. By that time, debris from the fire had clogged the storm drains and water from the hoses had pretty much flooded the street. It was March, and the cold seeped up into Erin’s body through her wet shoes. She’d loaded Rolf back into her car, and wished she’d done the same for herself. She tried not to shiver. Vic, doing his stoic Russian bit, gave no sign of discomfort. Webb was working his way through his second pack of cigarettes.
In the meantime, they had one useful witness. A kid, Tim Oney, sixteen years old, claimed to have seen the whole thing. He was more excited than traumatized, unable to hold still. Webb asked the questions, while Erin and Vic listened.
“What happened?”
“We had early dismissal today from my school, so they let us out at 1:30.”
“What school?”
“Bard High School, over on Houston Street. I picked up some snacks on the way home. I was gonna get together with a couple buddies and play Call of Duty until Mom kicks them out. I got Mountain Dew, a box of Twinkies, and some chips. Is that important?”
“Anything you remember might be important. We’ll decide that. Just tell us what you saw.”
“Anyway, I was walking past Antonio’s when I saw these three guys. They were wearing long black coats. They walked up to the windows and pulled out guns from under their coats, just like in the movies. You know, like the lobby scene in The Matrix? It looked like that. You know, when Neo opens up his coat and he’s got all these guns, and…”
“Kid, I’ve seen it.”
“Oh, yeah. Sure. Well, it was like that, except they only had one gun each, at least that I saw. Maybe they had more under their coats. But they hauled out what looked like an AR-15, an SA80, and a Benelli M4.”
“You recognized the guns?” Vic broke in.
“I play a lot of FPS.”
“FPS?” Webb asked.
“First-person shooters, you know, Call of Duty, Counterstrike, Halo.”
“Okay, kid. That’s good. That’s the sort of details we need. Are you sure about the guns?”
“Yeah. Well, the SA80 and the AR-15 for sure. I’m pretty sure the shotgun was a Benelli. It had a pistol grip.”
“What happened then?”
“They just started shooting, right through the windows. And it was loud. I mean, seriously loud. I think they tone down the noise in games. It was scary, but kind of cool, too, you know? Like, there’s this action scene happening right in front of me. I should’ve got my phone out and taken a picture, or some video, but it was so fast, you know?
“Anyway, they shot the shit out of the windows, and people were screaming and running around outside. I guess they were screaming inside, too. Then some cops showed up and yelled something, and the guys with the rifles shot at the cops. But they didn’t hit any of them. Then the guy with the shotgun took out a Molotov cocktail, you know, a bottle full of gas, and he threw it inside. The weird thing was, he didn’t light it first. You know, in the movies they always have a rag sticking out the top that they light with a lighter? But this one wasn’t lit. But that didn’t matter, because as soon as it hit inside, it blew up. It was a big frickin’ fireball, man. It’s a good thing for those guys that the windows were already shot out, or the glass would’ve cut them all up. I could feel the heat all the way from the other side of the street.”