by Steven Henry
“The Captain’s not gonna like that,” Vic observed. “One PP is breathing down his neck to close this one. We better make some arrests soon.”
“Let me worry about the Captain,” Webb said. “I want convictions, not arrests, and so does Holliday. Patience.”
“I hate being patient,” Vic growled.
“If Rolf can do it, so can you,” Erin said.
Rolf, hearing his name, looked at Erin and wagged his tail.
“Okay, team,” Webb said. “We’ve got three of us, and three goons to shadow. I’ll take Maginty. Neshenko, you’re on Burke. O’Reilly, you’ve got Newton. I’ll give you each a plainclothes officer.”
“When are they gonna toss us another detective?” Vic asked. “It’s been months since Kira bailed on us. We could use another warm body in the office.”
Webb shrugged. “I put in the request when she gave notice. It’s bureaucracy. What can you do? You’ll each have a mobile reserve standing by, two cars with two more officers each, in case you need them. Remember preschool? Buddy system. These guys are dangerous, so don’t get too close and don’t play hero.”
Erin looked over Timothy Newton’s information. He lived just two blocks over from Liam’s place, in an apartment over a bar. He had no landline phone, unsurprisingly, and no internet connection. According to his parole officer’s report, he lived alone. Then again, according to the report, he didn’t associate with other felons and didn’t have firearms in his possession, so Erin wasn’t about to take anything for granted.
Her plainclothes buddy met her in the garage. Erin was startled to see that she recognized the other officer, a petite blonde woman.
“Piekarski!” she exclaimed.
The other woman grinned. “O’Reilly. How’s it going?”
“What’re you doing here?” Erin asked.
“Watching your ass, sounds like.”
“No, I mean, what’re you doing at the Eightball?” Piekarski worked for Precinct 5’s Street Narcotics unit.
“Logan said you guys needed a hand with some street stuff. No one seems to know whether this is a Narcotics case, or Homicide, so it’s all lumped in with Major Crimes now. He’s rolling with your buddy, the big Russian. We just got here a couple minutes ago. We’re gonna have to come up with some new ethnic stats, so we know who’s buying the drinks when this is all over.”
“Glad to have you,” Erin said, shaking hands. Piekarski offered her hand to Rolf, who gave her a polite sniff.
“Let’s see what they’ve got for us,” Piekarski said, looking over the unmarked surveillance vehicle. “Sketchy POS?”
“Affirmative,” Erin said. Their ride was a rusty brown van, no windows in back, that looked like it dated back to the early Nineties. Upon opening the back doors, they discovered it had a smell.
“Phew,” Piekarski said, wrinkling her nose. “Smells like my grandma’s house. She had a pipe burst in the basement and mold got into the drywall.”
“Equipment looks good,” Erin said. The van had the usual set of cameras and monitors, shotgun microphones, and fiber-optics. They ran through the checklist and made sure everything was accounted for.
“You want to drive?” Piekarski asked as Erin loaded Rolf into the back. The Shepherd gave Erin a very dubious look and circled several times before finding a patch of floor mat that was more or less acceptable and curling into a ball.
“I’d better,” Erin said, handing the other woman Newton’s file. “You can read up on the guy on the way over.” She cranked the key. The van’s engine was noisy, but it ran okay once it got going.
“So, we gonna bust his ass?” Piekarski asked as they drove up the ramp to the street.
“Not yet,” Erin said. “We need to make the case. This isn’t a buy-and-bust. We want to make a clean sweep, all the way up the chain.”
“Too bad. There’s no feeling quite like slapping the cuffs on a bad guy. Especially one of these big, macho bullshitters.” Piekarski was about five foot four and weighed less than a hundred and twenty pounds, but Erin knew the Narcotics officer was tough as nails.
“Easy, girl,” Erin said with a smile. “We’ll get him.”
“So it’s my turn to see how your office does things,” Piekarski said. “It’s gonna be exciting, right?”
“It’s going to be sitting for hours in a van that smells like your grandma’s basement,” Erin replied.
Piekarski made a pouty face. “I can see why you took the chance to hang out with us for that drug bust. We get better rides in SNEU.”
They got to Newton’s apartment and, by some miracle, found a parking space just a few spaces down the block. Erin parked the car. While she climbed in back and got the recording gear up and running, Piekarski took a walk and casually planted a mini-camera at the door to the apartment stairs. She disappeared around the building and came back a few minutes later.
“Got eyes on the fire escape and the back door,” she reported.
Erin checked the feeds. All three cameras were working fine. “Okay, we’re up,” she said.
“Now we wait?” Piekarski asked.
“Now we wait.”
Hours later, the sun had set, the streetlights were burning, and the two women were swapping stories of the most ridiculous arrests they’d made. They’d taken turns making trips to the bathroom, Erin had given Rolf a quick walk around the adjoining block, and Piekarski had grabbed sandwiches from a café up the street. Rolf was snoozing in the back.
Nothing had happened. There was no sign of Newton. Just after sundown, a street performer had taken up a post on the corner with a pair of guitar cases, popped one open, and started playing. He was actually pretty good, and looked to be taking in a decent amount of pocket change from the pedestrians. He was still there, the bar was open and doing a brisk business, and Erin was bored out of her mind.
Around ten o’ clock, Piekarski suddenly stopped in the middle of one of her anecdotes. She sat up straight.
“There,” she said.
Erin cracked her neck and groaned. “What?”
“That looks like our boy.”
Piekarski was right. Newton was coming down the sidewalk. He was big and broad-shouldered, but there was a definite edginess to him. His eyes darted from side to side and he drummed his fingers against the legs of his jeans as he walked. The man looked seriously scared.
The two policewomen watched their target as he passed the guitar player. He gave the man a wide berth and a suspicious stare. A couple was on their way out of the bar, holding hands. When they stepped onto the sidewalk, Newton jumped and shoved a hand into his coat pocket. Then he recovered and kept walking.
“He’s carrying,” Erin murmured.
“We can stop-and-frisk, bust him on the weapon charge,” Piekarski suggested. A felon with a gun was a major parole violation.
“No. We wait.” They needed more. A parole violation wouldn’t be enough to get him to turn on his buddies.
Newton got to the door that led to the apartment stairs. He pulled out his keys and shuffled them around to find the right one.
The guitar player had put his guitar back in its case. He was kneeling on the concrete, opening the other case. Erin caught the motion as she was watching Newton. She saw the sudden, decisive movement.
“Gun!”
The word was out of her mouth before she’d consciously thought about it. Then she forgot about the surveillance mission. Even as she shouted and reached for the door handle with one hand and her Glock with the other, a dozen things happened at once.
The guitar player came up with a sawed-off shotgun in his hands, aimed at Newton. Erin flung open her door and lunged onto the street, drawing her pistol. Piekarski, with her good street instincts, whipped out her own sidearm and hurled herself out the passenger door of the van. Newton, twitchy as ever, saw the man aiming at him and turned sharply sideways. His keys tumbled out of his hand toward the ground and his right hand went into his coat again. The young woman of the couple g
ave a muffled cry of scared surprise. Her date saw what was happening and his eyes got wide.
“NYPD!” Erin shouted, but her yell was drowned out by the roar of the shotgun. Newton twisted and convulsed. A puff of white feathers blew out from his jacket and danced in the streetlight beam. As he went down, a blast of flame blew another hole in his coat just over the pocket. He’d fired through his own clothes. Erin didn’t see where that bullet went.
Maybe three seconds had passed. Time seemed to move both very slowly and very fast. The young man on the sidewalk grabbed his girl and tackled her to the sidewalk, flattening her under himself. Somebody screamed. Erin had no idea who. The guitar player pumped the shotgun and fired again into Newton’s body as the Irishman slumped against the brickwork and slid to the concrete. Newton’s own gun fired two more times, probably in reflex. Erin shouted again and fired two quick shots at the guitar player. Piekarski was shooting too. Rolf, sealed in the back of the van, started barking.
The guitar player’s head snapped around and he was looking right at Erin. She didn’t think she’d hit him. The range was something over thirty yards, and between the dim light and the rush of adrenaline, she’d missed. She fired again just as he let go with another blast from his shotgun. She felt something sting the back of her knuckles, a hot, raw pain like a bad rope burn, and her hand jerked involuntarily. She’d missed again. There was an earsplitting crash from the van at her back. Then the guitar player spun and ducked back around the corner and out of sight.
“You hit?” Piekarski shouted.
“I’m good!” Erin yelled back. “Cover me!”
She sprinted across the street toward the scene of the shooting, grabbing some shelter behind a parked car. She could see Newton crumpled at the base of the wall, and the two bystanders lying flat. Rolf was still barking, but she couldn’t take the time to let him out of the van.
Erin kept her eyes on the corner where the gunman had gone. She took a breath and ran toward the front of the bar. Then she crouched low at the corner and thrust herself around it, leading with the barrel of her Glock.
She saw taillights as a car roared away from the curb, but the small bulbs at the license plate were dark, probably deliberately deactivated. A horn blared and it sideswiped another car with a squeal of metal. Then it was around another corner and gone.
“Clear!” Erin shouted to Piekarski. “Call it in! Got a black sedan, Honda, southbound. Didn’t catch the plates, but it’s crunched in on the right door panels. And we need a bus, forthwith!”
“Copy!” Piekarski replied, jumping back into the van and grabbing the radio. Even as she did, a patrol car pulled up with lights and sirens going. A shooting in Manhattan pretty much guaranteed a very quick police response.
Erin held up her shield with one hand while she approached Newton, keeping her gun in the other hand. She saw a lot of blood on his coat. Little bits of the jacket’s lining drifted down like snowflakes, sticking to the blood.
Newton’s hand spasmed and he jerked it out of his pocket. He held a snub-nosed revolver.
“Shit! Gun!” Erin barked. She kicked out and caught the man’s forearm just as he pulled the trigger. The revolver went off one more time, then spun out of his hand. Newton sagged and coughed. Blood spattered out of his mouth and nostrils.
“Clear,” Erin said again, dropping to one knee beside the wounded man. He wasn’t in good shape. He’d taken two shotgun shells at close range, both center mass; one in the chest, the other in the side. The blood he was coughing up meant he’d caught a pellet in the lungs or windpipe.
“First aid!” she shouted to one of the uniformed officers who’d jumped out of the patrol car. The man nodded and went back to the car. The other uniform went to check on the bystanders, who were cautiously sitting up.
The wounded gangster was staring up at Erin with oddly clear, bright eyes. He coughed again and spat blood.
“It’s okay, Newton,” Erin said. “Geez, they don’t call you Twitchy for nothing. You nearly tagged me. Just stay still, we got an ambulance on the way. Stay awake, you hear me?”
“Shot… me,” Newton said. His voice had a breathy bubbliness to it. He’d definitely taken a hit to the lungs.
“Yeah, he sure did,” Erin said. “But you’re going to be fine.” She put pressure on the chest wound. The patrolman got there with the first aid kit and started pulling out bandages.
“Got… Liam,” Newton mumbled. “Then they got… me. Gonna get… the others…”
“What others?” she asked. He was losing a lot of blood, leaking from more holes than she could possibly plug. The shotgun had punched buckshot through his chest in at least a half dozen places.
“Pat… Lonnie… the girl…”
“Girl?” Erin echoed. “What girl?”
But Newton’s eyes had gone cloudy as he slipped into shock. He choked and gurgled and then went still.
The ambulance arrived less than five minutes after Piekarski called it in, which was better than average for New York City, but not fast enough for Timothy Newton. He was dead by the time the paramedics got there.
Chapter 12
“You’re bleeding,” Piekarski said quietly.
“Huh?” Erin was spattered with blood. She hadn’t thought any of it was hers.
Piekarski pointed. Erin looked down and saw a red furrow down the back of her left hand.
“Oh,” Erin said. “I think a pellet grazed me.” Now she could feel the burning heat again and wondered how she could’ve forgotten it.
“Better have the medics patch you up.”
The street was full of cops now. The EMTs, after determining Newton was beyond their help, were examining the bystanders. The girl had bloodied her nose when her boyfriend had tackled her, but they were otherwise fine. Unfortunately for the boy, his girl wasn’t at all happy about what had happened. She seemed to think the gunfire was all his fault, that he’d somehow planned the whole thing just so he could deliberately smash her face into the concrete. She was listing his shortcomings as a boyfriend and lover, loudly and angrily. Erin wouldn’t bet on that relationship’s longevity.
One of the paramedics was only too glad to step away from the young woman and check Erin over. He disinfected the wound, pronounced it minor, and slapped a butterfly bandage on it. Piekarski didn’t have a scratch on her. Then the detective and the SNEU cop sat down on the curb to wait for Lieutenant Webb and the CSU team to arrive.
“First time I’ve shot at anyone,” Piekarski observed. “I missed, of course. Dammit.”
“So did I,” Erin said. She was mad at herself. The range hadn’t been that long, the light hadn’t been that bad, and she’d been in other gunfights.
“I’ve mixed it up with plenty of bad guys,” Piekarski went on. “Fists, knives a couple of times, hell, even had one guy whack me with a steel chain with a padlock on it.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah, I woke up halfway to the hospital. But never guns.” Piekarski sighed. “You got any idea who the hell the shooter was?”
“Buddy of Diego Rojas,” Erin said. She thought back, trying to see the guy’s face. He’d definitely looked Latin American. “Colombian cartel gunman.”
“You know he was out there?”
“No. I thought Rojas was the only guy gunning for McIntyre’s boys.”
“Think we’ll catch him?”
“Yeah.” They’d put out a BOLO for the getaway car, and this case was a high priority for the NYPD. There was a good chance a Patrol unit might grab him. But if they didn’t get him before he ditched the car, Erin wasn’t so sure. They didn’t have a name, and the man had been wearing a bulky coat and hat. Erin thought she might recognize him if she saw him again, but couldn’t give a good description.
“I should’ve hit him,” Piekarski said.
“Me, too.” Erin shrugged. “It’s probably best not to get too upset about failing to kill someone. He’s just muscle, anyway. It’d be nice to get the guys who sent him.”
<
br /> “Where are they?”
“Colombia, I’d expect.”
Piekarski smiled suddenly. “You know, I’m feeling pretty weird right now. Wired. I feel like I want to get drunk, or maybe laid. You think that’s normal after a gunfight?”
Erin returned the smile as well as she could. “There’s nothing normal about being in a gunfight,” she said. “Everyone reacts to it differently.”
“You been in them before?”
“A couple times.”
“Do you get used to it?”
“Not really. And you don’t want to.”
“Nothing personal, O’Reilly, but I think I’m gonna go back to SNEU after this. Gold shields are overrated. Too boring, then too exciting. You wanna come with me?”
Erin shook her head. “I like it here fine.”
Vic’s unmarked Taurus pulled up to the scene and squealed to a halt. The big Russian was out of the car almost before the engine died. Webb was still trying to pry himself out of the passenger seat when Vic ran up to the two women.
“Jesus, Erin,” he said. “You gotta have all the fun without me?”
“You didn’t both need to come,” she said, getting to her feet. “Who’s watching the other Irish?”
“I left Logan watching Burke with a couple of uniforms,” he said. “We got the reserve team watching Maginty. You okay? Shit, you look like a mess.”
“I’m fine. Just got grazed.”
“You the cavalry?” Piekarski asked, looking him up and down.
“Some of it.” Vic gave the blonde a quick smile.
“Another gunfight, O’Reilly?” Webb asked.
Erin sighed. “Yes, sir. If it’s any consolation, I don’t think we hit anybody.”
The Lieutenant put his hands on his hips and took a look around. “So, that’s another one down, two left.”