by Steven Henry
“Three,” she corrected.
“Oh, right, the guy out back,” Webb said.
“And one of them is female,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”
“The last thing Newton said before he died was that the shooter was going to get the others. He said ‘Pat, Lonnie, and the girl.’”
“What girl?” Vic asked.
“I guess one of the shooters was a woman.”
“We lose one suspect and pick up another,” Webb said.
“Some days, the best you can do is break even,” Vic said. “So, who’s this chick with you?”
“Chick?” Piekarski echoed.
“I call people all kinds of names, all day long,” he said. “You gonna bust my balls about that one?”
“I dunno,” Piekarski said. “Think I can find them, or are they too small?”
Vic grinned. “I like this girl.”
“This is the first time a woman’s been mentioned in connection with the restaurant job,” Erin said. “We haven’t got anyone on our radar, except…”
“Except Finneran,” Webb finished. “You think it’s her?”
“She’s a trained assassin,” Erin said. “I saw her make a headshot at better than thirty yards with a handgun last year. She’s got the skills.”
“And the contacts,” Webb said. “And she’s in town. But it’s thin. If you’d gotten a name out of Newton, that might’ve been something, but as it is, we won’t get a warrant. ‘The girl’ is just hearsay, and there’s more than one girl connected to the O’Malleys.”
Erin nodded, but she was thinking about Siobhan. The more she thought about it, the more sense it made. The Irishwoman had been brought into New York once before to do a hit. She’d left town immediately afterward. Now she’d come back, just in time for a major takedown of an O’Malley rival. Erin thought again of what her dad said about coincidences.
“Coincidence is like winning the lottery,” she said quietly.
“Come again?” Webb asked.
She’d thought Ian Thompson was a good fit for the last gunman, and he was. Siobhan might be better. But they couldn’t prove any of it. And there was something else.
“Sir,” she said, “I don’t see how Rojas is coordinating this. He’s in the hospital, under guard, incommunicado. There’s another gunman running around taking guys down. Where’d he come from?”
“Colombia,” Piekarski said. “Right?”
“Right,” Erin replied. “But how’d he know who to go after?”
“Easy,” Vic said. “Rojas must’ve called him before he moved on McIntyre. The guy could’ve hopped a plane from Bogota this morning, got here in plenty of time to ghost Newton.”
“I buy that,” Erin said. “But how’d he know to track Newton?”
“Rojas knew about the other guys,” Vic said.
“He only confirmed their faces when he saw the photo in Liam’s apartment,” Erin reminded him. “He might have recognized the guys on the street, but he’d have had no way to send the info to anyone else before that. We took him into custody right afterward. He didn’t have a phone in the sewer with him. There’s no way he sent the information to anyone else. And even if he had, it was just faces. He didn’t have names. This targeting was too precise, too quick.”
“What are you saying?” Webb asked.
“I’m saying the Colombians have a source,” Erin said. “Either in the O’Malleys, or in the NYPD.”
All of them fell silent, thinking it over.
“Could be an O’Malley mole,” Vic said finally.
“I hope so,” Erin replied. The alternative was very unpleasant.
“In either case,” Webb said, “we’ve got to assume this shooter has the other names, all of them. Even the girl’s.”
“We don’t have the girl’s name,” Vic said.
“But the Department might not be the source he’s using,” Webb retorted. “The other thing we don’t have is time. We don’t know that there’s only one Colombian in town. The cartel might’ve sent a whole hit squad. They could be making moves on our other subjects right now. If they think they can come up here and play Wild West, they’re mistaken. Not in our city, not on our watch. I want a lid put on this, right now. I don’t want any more killings, not even bad guys. Forget about spooking these guys. Get close, keep them alive while we build the case. They move, you move. One of them takes a piss, I want one of you helping him zip up afterward. Get going. I’ll coordinate with CSU here, and I’ll be right behind you as soon as I’ve put them to work.”
“I guess the van’s part of the crime scene,” Erin said, glancing at the battered surveillance vehicle. It had caught the buckshot that had grazed her, its side panel resembling a colander. It was lucky Rolf hadn’t been hit. “Mind if I ride with you, Vic?”
“Sure. You and the mutt both?”
“I’m not leaving him behind.”
“What do you want me to do?” Piekarski asked.
“You want a ride?” Vic asked. “I’ll get you where you want to go.”
“We might need an extra pair of hands,” Erin said. “Hop in.”
“We going after Burke or Maginty?” Erin asked.
“Maginty,” Vic said. “Logan seemed to know what he was doing. Burke should be fine.”
“He does,” Piekarski agreed. She was riding shotgun. Erin was in the back seat next to Rolf. “Is it always this exciting in Major Crimes?”
“I dunno,” Vic said. “I’m asleep half the time, so I miss some stuff.”
“What’d you do before you got this job?”
“ESU.”
Piekarski whistled. “They have you knocking down doors?”
“Yeah,” Erin said. “With his head. That thick skull goes right through reinforced steel.”
“So I guess this must be boring by your standards,” Piekarski went on.
“Any day I take fire is pretty damn exciting,” Vic said.
“You hear about that thing in Little Odessa last year?” Erin asked Piekarski.
“Refresh my memory.”
“Vic got bushwhacked by a bunch of Russian Mafia. There was a crazy shootout. He got tagged a couple times, but we got out of it okay. He was protecting a witness, this young Russian woman. He was a hero.”
“Give it a rest, Erin,” Vic said. “We got no white knights in this car. Hero, my ass.”
“If she’s not telling it right, you can give me the skinny,” Piekarski said. “Maybe later, once we get off this babysitting detail.”
“Babysitting?” Erin echoed. “I don’t know what your teenage years were like, but when I was babysitting, we didn’t usually get shot at.”
Piekarski laughed. “You don’t know the neighborhood I grew up in.”
“Where’d Webb leave Maginty?” Erin asked.
“Just down the way,” Vic said. “At a bar, of course.”
“You saying something about the Irish and our leisure habits?”
“Every culture’s got alcohol,” he said, grinning. “C’mon, I’m Russian, for God’s sake. The first thing a civilization learns how to do is get dead drunk.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not true,” Erin said.
The car’s police radio crackled.
“Got a 10-13! This is Milton, shield three two six four! I’m at 17 John Street!”
“That’s right around the corner,” Vic said, startled. “That’s right by the bar where Maginty was… shit.”
Piekarski grabbed the radio handset. “This is Piekarski, responding. We’re a block out, already en route.”
Vic put on the sirens and sped up, using the horn to warn the New York traffic out of the way. A taxi tried to move to the side, but another taxi, oblivious, swung out from the curb directly into the first car’s path. There was a crunch of metal. Vic, cursing, twisted the wheel. The Taurus squeaked by with a coat of paint to spare. He laid rubber at the corner, fishtailing and narrowly missing a panel truck. Then they were clear and ro
lling down John Street.
“We’ve got three people down, including my partner,” Officer Milton was saying on the radio. His voice was oddly calm and detached. “And I’ve been hit. I need two buses, minimum, plus backup. One suspect, armed and dangerous. He’s got a rifle, semi-automatic.”
“Here we are,” Vic said. “You ready?”
“Damn right,” Erin said. From the sound of it, someone had just shot a couple of cops. She press-checked her Glock to make sure a round was chambered.
Piekarski nodded tightly, drawing her own sidearm. “Got your back, big guy.”
Vic pulled up outside the bar, behind a squad car. The blue-and-white was parked curbside. Its flashers were dark. The car’s windows were starred with bullet holes. Vic turned his car’s spotlight beam on the passenger compartment. Erin slid out of the back seat, gun in one hand, Rolf’s leash in the other. She could see two figures in the front seat of the squad car. Both of them were moving, she was glad to see.
“NYPD, coming up behind!” she shouted. Piekarski and Vic were right there with her, covering the street.
Someone was screaming inside the bar. It sounded like a young woman, probably hysterical. From the tone, Erin guessed the girl was freaked out but not injured. As the detectives moved closer, three people sprinted out the door of the bar, hands in the air, shouting “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
“Up against the wall!” Vic roared, covering them. “Now!” He didn’t know who might be an enemy.
While he and Piekarski secured the doorway, Erin looked into the squad car. She saw two uniformed officers. One was working feverishly on the other with one hand, his other holding a Glock. The pistol was pointed toward the front of the bar. The man he was tending was writhing in pain.
Erin opened the passenger door. “Milton?” she called. She smelled gunpowder and saw spent brass on the floor.
“Yeah,” the officer replied without turning.
“What’ve we got?” she asked.
“GSW, just over the shoulder,” Milton said. “High-velocity round, went through the vest. He’s conscious, but short of breath. I’m thinking pneumothorax.” He meant a sucking chest wound.
The man under him gave a wheezy, rasping sort of scream.
“It’s okay, Strucker,” Milton said, still sounding unnaturally calm. “We got you. The bus is on the way.”
“Where’s the shooter?” Erin asked.
“Inside.”
“He got hostages?”
“If he’s alive, maybe. I’m pretty sure I hit him.”
“How bad are you hit?”
“Not too bad. Caught one in the arm, high up. Bone’s not broken. I’m fine.”
Erin glanced up. Piekarski was talking to one of the bystanders who’d run out of the bar. Vic was pressed against the wall next to the building, aiming his pistol at the door.
“We’ll handle the shooter,” Erin promised. “You take care of your partner.”
She and Rolf went around the squad car and met up with Piekarski.
“They say the shooter’s still inside,” Piekarski said. “He’s holed up at a booth toward the back. They think he’s hurt.”
“Just one guy?”
“Just the one,” she confirmed. “How you guys want to handle this?”
“We better go in,” Erin said. “If there’s still civilians inside.”
Piekarski nodded. “Okay.”
“Vic,” Erin said.
“Yeah?”
“We’re going in. One shooter, with a rifle, toward the back. I can’t send Rolf, he won’t know who to bite. You good to take point?”
“Copy that. We’ll go on three. I want both you ladies right on my ass when I go in.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls,” Piekarski said with a tense smile.
Vic returned the smile. Then he was all business again. “One… two… three!”
The three officers rushed into the bar, guns ready. They passed shattered windows, broken glassware, and shaken, frightened people. The bar’s patrons were huddled in corners or lying on the floor. No one seemed to be badly hurt. Several civilians pointed toward the back of the room.
Rolf lowered his snout and snuffled. Erin saw what he’d noticed.
“We got a blood trail,” she said.
“I see it,” Vic said. He moved quickly, not quite running, poised for action.
“Got a body here,” Piekarski said, pointing toward the bar. A man lay sprawled there, unmoving, in a large pool of blood and spilled beer.
“That’s not our shooter,” Erin said. The man’s hands were empty, one of them lacerated by the shards of a broken beer glass.
Piekarski knelt beside the man, feeling for a pulse. She looked up and shook her head.
They followed the blood trail further into the bar. At the back of the room, in the last booth, a foot protruded. It was clad in a brown dress shoe.
Vic pointed to the booth and cocked his head. Erin and Piekarski nodded. Erin gripped Rolf’s leash tightly, ready to release him if necessary. The K-9, sensing her tension, was stiffly attentive.
Vic stepped sideways, pistol leveled. “Suspect down,” he said quietly, but didn’t move his gun away. For all they knew, the man might be faking.
He wasn’t. Erin saw a slender, olive-skinned man slumped in the booth. A short-barreled automatic rifle lay on the table in front of him, one hand resting on the grip, but the fingers were limp. The front of his windbreaker was slick with blood. He’d been hit twice, low in his center mass.
Erin took hold of the rifle by the front grip and pulled it out of the man’s unresisting grip. Then she took his pulse. Nothing.
“He’s gone,” she said.
“Good shooting by our boy Milton,” Vic said.
“Erin,” Piekarski said. She was looking at the dead man’s face and clothes.
“I know,” she said. It wasn’t the same man who’d shot Newton. They had multiple gunmen on the loose.
Chapter 13
“We’ve got to get Burke in protective custody right now,” Erin said.
Vic nodded. To no one’s surprise, they’d identified one of the dead guys at the bar as Pat Maginty. They’d have to wait for Levine’s report to know exactly how many times he’d been shot, but that was an academic question. He’d been hit repeatedly from behind, pretty much the same way Newton had gone down. Erin thought again about what her dad said about coincidence.
“I can call Logan,” Piekarski suggested. “He can pick up Burke.”
“Do it,” Erin said.
While Piekarski called her sergeant, Erin and Vic helped the Patrol guys secure the scene. Milton’s 10-13 had brought down all the available officers in the area, and the bar was swimming with blue uniforms. Milton himself was en route to the hospital, along with his partner. Both were likely to survive, thanks to Milton’s quick first aid work.
While they waited for Webb, the detectives took initial statements from some of the bystanders. They’d already guessed most of what had happened. Maginty had been drinking Guinness at the bar. The gunman had walked in, taken a quick look around, walked up behind the Irishman, whipped out his rifle, and blasted him. Milton and his partner had been monitoring Maginty from just up the street. They’d gotten new instructions, passed from Webb through Dispatch, to move in on Maginty and keep him safe. Unfortunately, they’d only just pulled up to the bar when Maginty was killed. The gunman was on his way out, still holding the rifle, when he saw the cops. Both sides had jumped to the correct conclusion and they’d traded fire at very close range. Then the gunman had tumbled through the door, picked himself up, and dragged his bleeding body to the back, where he’d died.
“I’ve lost count of how many bodies have dropped on this damn case,” Vic muttered.
“Fourteen,” Erin said absently.
“Jesus. What do we do now?”
“Bring in Burke, like we’re doing.” Erin shook her head. “Lean on him, hard. Once he learns what’s happened t
o his buddies, maybe he’ll figure we’re his best chance for survival.”
Vic smiled sourly. “He can’t give us much. By my count, he’s just about out of accomplices.”
“There’s still the girl,” Erin said.
“And the Colombian hit squad,” Vic added. “That’s what this is, right? Like those Russian bastards who tried to take me out in Brighton Beach last year. There’s at least two of them, we’ve gotta figure on more. You know anything about how Colombian cartels operate?”
“Not really. I never worked Narcotics.”
“Hey, maybe Piekarski knows,” Vic said. “She’s a Narc.” He looked around, taking a minute to locate her. She was off the phone, so he waved her over.
“I talked to Logan,” she reported. “He’s got Burke.”
“He still alive?” Vic asked.
“He was thirty seconds ago.”
“That’s no guarantee,” he said grimly. “I got a twenty says there’s a Colombian gunning for him as we speak.”
“No way could they have locations on all these guys this fast,” Piekarski objected. “Hell, the only reason we were able to scoop Burke up this quick is that our people were already watching him.”
“Yeah,” Erin said quietly. “They were.”
Piekarski blinked. “You think there’s a leak in the Department. You really think someone’s feeding info to the cartel.”
“You got a better idea?” Vic asked.
“I wish I did.”
“It’s got to be someone with access to our case info,” Erin said. “That probably means someone in Major Crimes.”
“Or Dispatch,” Vic said. “They’d know where we sent our surveillance teams. I mean, we weren’t doing this in secret or anything.”
“Could be someone in Patrol,” Piekarski added. “Or, hell, SNEU. There’ve got to be dozens of people who could’ve accessed this information. This is a big operation. Shit, it could even be Feds. FBI and Homeland Security are both involved.”
“Homeland Security,” Erin echoed. “Oh my God.”
“What?” Vic asked.
“Agent Johnson. He was going to talk to Rojas at the hospital. What if he cut a deal, offered Rojas a chance at revenge?”