by Steven Henry
“Mujer policía?”
The voice was faint, coming up from the manhole, and tight with pain.
“Yeah, I’m here,” Erin said, dropping to one knee beside the shaft. “How you doing down there, Diego?”
“I want a doctor.”
“We’ll get you one,” she said. “Where are you hurt?”
“My leg and… my cabeza.”
Erin knew only a little Spanish. “Your head?”
“Si.”
He was slurring his words a little and losing some of his English. Erin guessed he was going into shock.
“Hey, stay with me, Diego,” she said. “Here’s what I need you to do. I need you to drop your gun. I can’t help you if you shoot at me, okay?”
“Hey, Detective,” the Patrol sergeant muttered into her ear. “Why don’t we just wait for the negotiator?”
“This guy could be dying,” Erin said softly. “I don’t know if he’s got fifteen minutes. He sounds shocky.”
“He shot at cops,” the sergeant reminded her.
She nodded but didn’t turn away from the manhole. The guy really didn’t sound so good. “Diego?” she called more loudly. “Drop the gun. Now.”
There was a faint but audible splash.
Erin took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said to the officers around her. “Let’s get this lid open.”
The rookie came forward to lend a hand. The cover wasn’t fully seated in the shaft. It was heavy but not hard to shift. Metal grated on concrete.
“You don’t know what he did,” the sergeant objected. He stood with four other cops, guns pointed at the open hatch. “Maybe he’s got another gun.”
“Diego,” she called.
There was no answer.
“Diego!”
He mumbled something inaudible.
“Flashlight,” Erin said to the nearest uniform. He pulled his big Maglite and extended it to her. She took it, flicked it on, and shone it down the hole, keeping her head back from the opening. Anyone looking up would see only a bright light. If Rojas was waiting to shoot at someone, there was a good chance he’d fire now.
He didn’t.
Erin gave it a few seconds, then cautiously poked her head over the lip of the shaft, peering down. She saw a damp, circular hole with an iron ladder bolted to one side. A man lay crumpled at the bottom like a discarded piece of trash. She saw blood on his head. He was half-submerged in brown, filthy water. His head was sagging down. Even as she watched, he slumped sideways, his head going under the surface.
“Shit,” Erin muttered. There was no time to do this by the book. She shoved her Glock into its holster and thrust the flashlight back at the man who’d given it to her.
“Keep that pointed down,” she told him. “Bleib,” she ordered Rolf, who was perfectly happy to stay with his toy. Then she went down the ladder as fast as she could without jumping onto the poor bastard at the bottom.
It was a tight fit to work her way around the wounded man’s body. Erin was glad she was smaller than the average cop. She splashed into the water at the floor of the shaft, hissing at the icy cold that immediately shot up her legs. She bent down, grabbed him by the shoulders, and pulled him to a sitting position. In the light from the flashlight beam, he looked like a fresh-drowned corpse. She shook him and slapped his cheek.
“Diego!” she shouted in his face. “Come on!”
He coughed brown water and moaned.
“Good, good,” she said. “Stay with me. We’re gonna get you out of here.” She tilted her head up and shouted, “We need a bus!”
“Already on the way,” the sergeant called back.
Erin knew better than to try to move a man who’d taken a fall, especially one with a head injury. Her job was to keep him from drowning until the paramedics got there. It was crazy. He’d been shooting at her and Vic less than ten minutes earlier, and now here they were, both of them soaking wet, with her just trying to keep him alive. This was not how armed standoffs usually ended. She was already shivering. The water was near freezing and wasn’t going to help Rojas’s chances. He was in deep shock and rapidly going hypothermic.
Erin didn’t see much choice. The best thing to do with a shock victim was to elevate the legs and lower the head, but she couldn’t do that without drowning him. She carefully eased herself under him and raised his body as cautiously as possible, trying to hoist him most of the way out of the water. Then she wrapped her arms around him in a weird embrace, trying to share and conserve body heat.
They were down there for what felt like a very long time. Erin’s toes and feet first throbbed, then went completely numb. But she grimly held on. She couldn’t tell how badly Rojas was hurt, but he was definitely bleeding from a gash on the side of his head. The blood trickled down, staining both their coats.
“Detective!”
Erin blinked up at the flashlight. She saw a silhouette against it.
“I’m coming down!” the guy called. “I’m an EMT.”
“Great,” she managed to say through chattering teeth.
She’d thought it was crowded before. Now, when the burly paramedic squeezed down the shaft, it was almost impossible to move. After some awkward wriggling, she managed to get partway down the storm sewer passage and give him some room to work.
There was no way they’d get a stretcher down, of course. The paramedics worked with calm, professional skill, fitting the injured man with a cervical collar to immobilize his head, splinting his leg, and getting him rigged to a hoist. Then they winched him up the shaft. Finally, Erin tried to follow. She made it three rungs up the ladder before her legs buckled. All she could do was hold onto the ladder.
Erin hung there, too weak to climb further, too stubborn to let go. She didn’t think she’d ever felt so cold in her life.
“Jesus Christ, you bunch of idiots,” she heard a familiar voice growl. “Get outta my way.” Then a big, strong hand snaked down under her arms and around her shoulders. She recognized the distinctive smell of Vic’s aftershave. He hauled her up as if she weighed nothing, lifting her clear of the manhole.
“Vic?” she mumbled.
“Yeah?”
“What kept you?”
He grinned. “Securing the scene, just like I promised. What the hell were you doing down there?”
“Figured we needed him,” she said. “Alive.”
A cold, wet nose poked Erin in the ear. She turned to see Rolf’s furry, anxious face. He licked her, then bent down and nosed his chew-toy toward her. He wagged his tail. It was his favorite thing in the world, he seemed to be saying, and maybe it would make his partner feel better, too.
Erin reached for her dog and rubbed his head behind the ears. “Let’s get somewhere warm,” she said, still shivering. “And dry.”
Chapter 9
“Erin, how many times have I told you I don’t want to see you during your shift?”
Sean O’Reilly Junior glared at the woman he’d never stopped thinking of as his kid sister.
“Comes with the job, Sean,” she replied.
“I’m just glad you’re not the one in my OR,” he said, sinking into a waiting-room chair beside her.
They were at Bellevue Hospital, where the ambulance had taken Diego Rojas. Sean was a trauma surgeon. He’d just gotten done operating on the gunman.
“Don’t worry about me,” Erin said. They’d wanted to check her out at the hospital to be on the safe side, but she was fine once she’d changed out of her wet clothes and warmed up. Now she was wearing a set of dark blue NYPD sweats she’d had in the trunk of her Charger. She had her hands wrapped around a cup of almost-palatable hospital coffee and was feeling pretty much human again. Rolf lay beside her, taking an after-action nap.
“He’s pretty banged up,” Sean said. “But he’ll pull through. The concussion is mild, and I don’t expect any lasting neurological effects. The leg’s the bad part. Compound fractures of the tibia and fibula.”
“He ran half a block on th
at leg,” Erin said.
“I’m surprised he got two steps,” Sean replied. “He’s a tough guy, no doubt about it. But we’ve pinned the bones and pumped him so full of antibiotics he’ll be pissing amoxicillin. Assuming no secondary infection, he won’t walk for a couple of months, but he will walk.”
“No he won’t,” she said with a smile. “We’ve got him cold on attempted murder of police officers, and assuming a ballistic match on the gun we pulled out of the sewer, we have him on murder one for good measure. No way does he walk.”
Sean smiled back. “Different priorities, you and me.”
“Not as different as you think. I tried to save his life.”
“And you did,” he said, giving her shoulder a squeeze. “The shock, blood loss, and hypothermia probably would’ve done for him even without the drowning, if you hadn’t found him. You done good, kiddo.”
“When can we talk to him?” she asked.
“You better leave it overnight. His system’s still pretty fragile.”
“I need to know if he’s got an accomplice out there,” she argued. “Sean, there’s a war going on. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t want to throw you guys any more business than we have to.”
“Tomorrow morning,” he insisted.
A man in a black suit came into the waiting room. He scanned the room and made eye contact with Erin. They recognized one another immediately. She stood up, setting her coffee cup aside, conscious of her disheveled appearance but not really caring.
“Agent Johnson.”
“Detective O’Reilly. How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine,” she said, wondering where Homeland Security was getting their information. She hadn’t contacted him yet.
“What’s the situation with my guy?” Johnson asked.
“Excuse me, sir,” Sean said, joining Erin and looking the Homeland Security guy over. “I’d like to see some ID, please.”
Johnson looked at Erin, who gave him her best poker face. He shrugged and flipped open his wallet.
“Homeland Security,” Sean said, whistling quietly and pretending to be impressed. “This guy a terrorist?”
“That’s classified, sir,” Johnson said. Erin saw the twinkle in his eye and half expected him to wink at her.
“Our guy,” Erin said, “is recovering from surgery. We’ve got him in protective custody. He’ll be charged in the morning.”
“With what?”
“Murder, attempted murder, resisting arrest, breaking and entering, maybe some drug charges.”
Johnson scratched his cheek thoughtfully. “That would not be the recommendation of Homeland Security.”
Erin’s jaw tightened. “He shot at cops.”
“I understand that, Detective. But you have to look at the larger picture—”
“He killed a man on a Manhattan sidewalk, in broad daylight,” she interrupted. “Outside a restaurant I was sitting in.”
“There’s bigger fish he can—” Johnson started to say.
“He sprayed automatic gunfire on a busy street,” she countered.
“I’m just saying, if I could talk to him—”
“I froze my ass off holding his dead weight out of the water in a damn storm sewer,” she snapped. “You can have your time with him once we’re done with him. Once he’s charged.”
Johnson’s teeth grated on each other. “I’ve been impressed with our interagency cooperation in the past, Detective,” he said quietly. “I’d be disappointed if that pattern didn’t continue. I’ll talk to my superiors and tell them the NYPD has the situation in hand. I assume you’ll reciprocate by keeping me apprised of any future developments?”
“Copy that,” Erin said.
“You think maybe you were a little hard on him?” Sean asked after the Homeland Security guy had left.
“He wants to turn that jerk loose,” she said. “After what he did!”
“He didn’t say that.”
“Read between the lines!” she snapped. “He wants to offer Rojas a deal. We don’t cut deals with murderers. Not in my town!”
Sean grinned. “You know what they say in The Godfather, right?”
She gave him a suspicious look.
“This is business, Erin,” he said, doing his best James Caan impression. “This is business, and you’re takin’ it very personal.”
“You know what else they say in that movie?” she retorted. This was the second time she’d had that movie line thrown at her that week, and she was sick of it. “You’re my brother, and I love you, but don’t ever take sides against the family.”
He laughed. “Okay, Don Erin. But if you hate this guy Rojas so much, why’d you go down a sewer drain to save him?”
“You’re one to talk. You stuck his leg back together.”
“That’s my job, Erin.”
“Mine, too.”
“But you still want to lock him up.”
“That’s different.”
He looked at her. “Yeah, maybe it is. You know what? Maybe you’d better talk to Rojas now, after all.”
Erin was surprised. “What? But you said…”
“I know what I said. But who knows what this Homeland guy will come up with overnight? You’ve got to take it easy on him, though. And one condition: I’ve got to be in the room while you’re talking to him.”
“To make sure I don’t beat a confession out of him?” she suggested, half joking.
“To make sure he doesn’t go back into shock and die,” Sean replied, not joking at all.
Rojas lay in the hospital bed, a bandage swaddling his head, an IV line in his arm, a rigid cast on his leg. A handcuff secured one wrist to the bedframe. The usual array of beeping medical machinery kept time with the slow rise and fall of his chest.
He watched Erin’s approach through half-open eyes. She came to a stop a couple of steps away and looked down at him, wondering how clear-headed he’d be.
“Buenos dias, senora,” he said. “I have seen you before, I think.”
“How are you feeling, Mr. Rojas?” she asked.
His lip curled into a slight hint of a smile. “I have been worse. What do you want?”
Erin considered the man. Sean was right. He was a tough guy, for sure, Colombian cartel muscle. There was absolutely nothing she could threaten him with that his employer couldn’t go one better. He might be buyable, and he might not. What approach might work best?
“What do you want?” she echoed.
“Nothing you can give me.”
Erin saw a chair in the corner. She pulled it over and took a seat close to the bed, staying just out of arm’s reach. He was weak and injured, but that was no reason to be careless.
“Mr. Rojas, I know why you’re here,” she said. “You got screwed, buddy. You came up to New York to do some business, and it didn’t go the way it was supposed to. I know who screwed you, too. I know about Liam, and the drugs.”
She was guessing, but she knew they were good guesses. One of the best ways to get suspects to give up information was to make them think you already had the answers.
Rojas said nothing. He was watching Erin from under his eyelids, measuring her. All interrogations were two-way streets. What was he learning from her?
“You can’t go back to Colombia,” she said.
He gave his slight smile again. “You think I am stupid?” He rattled the handcuff against the bed rail. “I am not going anywhere.”
“That’s not what I mean.” Erin took out her cuff key. They weren’t her handcuffs, but that didn’t matter. Police cuffs had universal keys. She leaned in and unlocked the cuffs. She was ready if he tried anything, but Rojas didn’t move. He kept watching her, confused now. That was good. Confused criminals let things slip.
“We’re not the guys you need to worry about,” she said. “You lost your shipment, the guys you came with are all dead. Hell, your bosses just might think you stole the goods yourself, since you’re the only one still standing.”
<
br /> She saw the reaction in Rojas’s eyes and knew she was right. She wasn’t saying anything he hadn’t already thought. This guy was no idiot. The cartels had a very low tolerance for failure and none whatsoever for betrayal.
“So what are you offering, senora? You give me protection?” He gave a short bark of a laugh.
“Nope,” Erin said. She had a guess what he did want. Oddly, manipulating him to help her actually required telling him the truth. “We got a guy who’s going to come in here tomorrow morning and offer you a pretty sweet deal.”
“Why are you here now, if that is true?” Rojas was definitely confused now.
“He’ll offer you government protection, hell, maybe full immunity. He’ll want information about your bosses. But as long as you cough that up, you can pretty much write your own ticket.”
“I will tell you nothing about my employers. And I will tell him nothing.”
Erin nodded. She’d expected as much. He was a good soldier, loyal, dedicated. “I don’t give a shit about your employers.”
“I do not understand.”
She made eye contact with him, drawing on everything she’d learned from all her time with Carlyle and his associates. “You’re in deep trouble, Rojas. Your only way out is to take care of the guys who screwed you, and to get your product back. That’ll prove your loyalty. But you’ve got two problems. We’ve got you, and you’ve got a bad leg, so you aren’t going to be chasing anybody, even if you get out of the hospital.”
“What are you saying?” Rojas asked.
Erin leaned forward, speaking low and quietly. “These bastards shot up a restaurant. They didn’t just kill your people, they killed innocent bystanders. My boss wants them, as much as you do. I know Liam was one of them. But so do you. Tell me who the others are.”
“You think I know them?”
“I think you know something. Names, faces, something. You knew where Liam lived.”
Rojas was smiling again. “I am good at my job.”