Two Bare Arms

by Blake Banner

  I gave him my best rueful smile and shifted my automatic to my left hand. He thought I did it so we could shake. He was wrong. I did it so I could land a right cross on his jaw that would have put an elephant to sleep. He fell back with a soft splat in the wet grass, and I sprinted to the door. I had about five minutes, if that, before the circus arrived. I tried the handle and was not surprised to find it was locked. I took off my jacket and wrapped it around the barrel of my gun. It muffled some of the sound when I blew out the lock. I waited. Nobody came storming out, so I inched open the door and edged in.

  I was in a short corridor. There were a couple of doors that looked like storerooms. At the end, the passage opened out into the nave of the church, and I could see a few rows of pews. From the left, there was a soft glow of light. I moved forward a couple of feet and peered around. There was the altar, and beyond it, in the transept, somebody had some candles burning, and I could hear the murmur of voices. I waited, hoping to hear a female voice. I didn’t.

  What I did hear was the thud of a chopper and the wail of sirens. Then I heard cussing and swearing, and I saw six Angels, all armed, run toward the main door at the far end of the church. There was a gallery above the door that I figured had room for about eight pews. At the back there was a window. The access to the gallery was via a short wooden staircase. Four of them took positions covering the door, and Zak and another scrambled up the stairs to look out of the window.

  Even these guys were not stupid enough to forget they had a back door. I had a matter of a few seconds in which to decide what I was going to do.

  Zak made a noise like a wounded pterodactyl that turned out to be a laugh. “We got a whole fuckin’ army out here, boys! We are gonna have a bloodbath!” He leaned over the gallery and said, “Hey! Gas, Lenny. Take the back door.” He turned back to the window as Gas and Lenny started moving down the center aisle toward me.

  It was now. It had to be now. And as I thought that, the bullhorn started bellowing outside and Zak started shouting abuse back at it. I didn’t aim for the approaching Angels. I aimed for the two at the front door. I figured the shot at twenty yards and aimed for the middle of the body. They were big bodies; it was hard to miss. I squeezed off four rounds—two double taps. With all the noise of the chopper and the bullhorn, they went down in silence.

  Gas and Lenny saw the flames spit from the muzzle of my gun in the shadows, and for a moment they stood staring. They were only about ten yards away. I’m a good shot and I was real mad, so they got it between the eyes.

  Then I ran. I sprinted along the side aisle and took the stairs two at a time. Zak had smashed the window and was leaning out, screaming abuse at the Feds outside. His pal looked at me in astonishment as I came up the stairs. Instead of shooting me, he stared down into the nave, looking for his pals, trying to understand. Maybe Mephistopheles could explain it to him when he got to Hell. I shot him through his right eye, and he sank to his knees. Zak turned. He brought his shotgun around, but it was too late. I drove my fist into his belly, and we both went crashing to the floor.

  I don’t know if he was tough, or if he just enjoyed the pain. A normal guy would have been curled up in the fetal position vomiting. He just grinned, grabbed me by the throat, and started strangling me. It’s surprisingly difficult to punch somebody when you are lying down, especially if they have their hands around your throat. So I didn’t even try. Instead I forced my elbow between his arms, placed it on his eye, and leaned on him, hard. He screamed and thrashed his legs like a speared fish, then let go of my throat and started tearing at my hair.

  Somehow, he scrambled out from underneath me and connected two powerful blows that sent me reeling against the wall. Outside, the bullhorn was still going. Zak came at me. I drove my fist in his belly again, but he didn’t seem to feel it. He grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and hurled me toward the edge of the gallery. I staggered and stumbled, and he rushed at me, screaming. We collided and fell against the rail. For a moment I was going over. I clawed at his beard with my left hand. He backed away and pulled me back with him. I came forward, and as I did so, I smashed my right fist into his head.

  However high you are, there are laws of physics that still apply. I saw his eyes roll and his legs wobble, and I laid into him until he fell on the floor. Then I cuffed him and ran down to the south transept, reaching for my cell. I dialed the captain.

  “Stone! Where the hell are you?”

  “In the church. Dehan isn’t here.” I swore violently and kicked a few pews. “Check the pickup and the Cherokee.”

  “But… who’s in there?”

  “They’re all dead, except Zak.”

  I hung up and ran up the stairs. I had a few seconds before the 7th Cavalry came pouring in. I grabbed Zak by the scruff of his neck and woke him up with two powerful slaps. His eyes stared at me like animated saucers. I leaned down real close to him and snarled, “You have fifteen seconds, Zak. Where is she or I will gut you with a blunt screwdriver. Where is she?”

  His head flopped back, and he closed his eyes. “I killed her, man. Out by the fucking lake at Camp Kaufmann.”

  I stared at him. The church was rocking. I said, “No, you haven’t had time.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Detective Dehan! Where have you put Detective Dehan?”

  He laughed. “Oh dear, have we lost Detective Dehan?”

  There were feet running, tramping up the stairs, and a voice saying, “Put the gun down, Detective. Put the gun down!”

  I half turned. There was a special agent pointing a gun at me, and the captain was coming up the stairs behind him. I put my gun in my holster and stood.

  “Go fuck yourself, Special Agent. I just did your goddamn job for you.”

  I pushed past the captain and went down the stairs to the nave. The place was crawling with Feds who kept giving me quizzical looks. They were crouching over the bodies and sealing off the area. The agent I had just told to fuck himself came down with the captain. He showed me his badge. “I am Special Agent Turner. Did you kill these men?”

  “No, it was the Tooth Fairy. Of course I killed them.”

  “There will have to be an investigation, Detective Stone…”

  I burst out laughing. “In to how I used excessive force against six heavily armed Hell’s Angels who were about to open fire on federal agents? Be my guest. You done?”

  His face flushed. “There is also the matter of the agent you knocked out!”

  “He was pointing a gun at me. Now are we done? Because right now there is the matter of my partner, who will be murdered in two hours!” I turned and pointed at Zak, who was being led down the stairs. “And that man knows where she is!”

  He leered at me as he was led past.

  Turner scowled at me. “Make yourself available, Detective.”

  “Screw you, Special Agent!”

  He ignored me and walked out.

  We were silent for a moment. Then the captain said, “Stone, professionally I cannot condone what you have done. But I get it, and I will back you all the way.”

  I stared at him.

  “Where is she, Captain?”

  TWENTY

  I sat on the steps of the church. The drizzle had turned to freezing rain. The wet blacktop beyond the grass pulsed with red and blue over a silver sheen. The meat wagons had arrived, and the gurneys made a grim procession, driven by men and women in glistening masks, ferrying the dead out of the church, while the Feds set about the business of minutely analyzing the crime scene.

  I was staring at Dehan’s phone. I had one hour and fifty minutes. I hadn’t a single lead. And with every passing minute, the chances of finding her alive diminished. I kept asking myself, where was she going? Why had she left the observation room?

  I flipped to her call register. Five minutes before I’d finished the interrogation with David, she had received a call from a cell phone. If it had been Zak or Peter, she
would have put her head in the door and told me. The fact that she hadn’t meant it was either private or she didn’t think it was important. Somebody she’d met recently? A guy she’d given her number to? But if she didn’t think it was important, why did she leave the observation room? I tried to visualize Dehan walking out of an interrogation to talk to a guy. It didn’t work. That wasn’t the Dehan I knew…

  And so I kept going, around and around in circles.

  I looked over at Newman, talking to a Fed.

  “Captain!” He approached me across the muddy grass. I showed him the phone. “This number called Dehan five minutes before she was taken. Two gets you twenty it’s a prepaid, unregistered phone, but can you have it checked anyhow?”

  He nodded and reached for his cell. “Sure.”

  I scrolled down through her calls as he walked away. I could hear him saying, “Yeah, trace a number for me, will you…?”

  There was no record of that number having called her before or of her calling that number. So the chances of the call being related to some private, personal matter were slim at best. Which meant it was a call related to work, to this case…

  Slowly, as the rain fell on the gleaming cars and vans and the blacktop, and the icy air crept off the river and felt its way into my muscles and my blood, the clear, simple reality began to dawn on me. This son of a bitch was all about showing you things the wrong way around. His game was to take the obvious and show it to you so that it looked like the opposite of what it was. The photograph was classic. That photograph was like a picture of him. It represented everything that he was about. Everything was the wrong way around and focused on the wrong person. That was him. That was the essence of how he operated.

  All along, the focus had been on David. All along, the picture had been framed around David, with him as the focal point. But who was the photographer? Who was holding the camera and focusing the lens? Who had created the picture in the first place? Somebody nearby. Somebody clever. Somebody disciplined and organized. Somebody who was almost a mirror image of David.

  I stood and walked to Turner, who was standing by one of the bureau vans.

  “You got a computer I can use?”

  He looked at me like I was a piece of shit somebody had failed to clean up. I sighed.

  “Detective Dehan will die in less than two hours if I don’t find out where she is. I may have an idea, but I need a computer. Will you let me use one or not?”

  He made an ugly face that even his mother would have wanted to slap. “I’m busy.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder and leaned real close to his ear. “Turner, if you don’t give me a computer, first I am going to blow your testicles off. Then I am going to sue you for Detective Dehan’s wrongful death. I will take your job, your house, your car. I will break up your marriage, and I will make sure your kids hate your miserable guts for the rest of their lives. I will not stop, I will not desist, until I destroy you completely.”

  I pulled back a little so he could look into my eyes and know that I meant it. He stared at me. I wasn’t shit anymore. Now I was a freak. I was moving up in the world. He leaned into the van and said, “Jerry, give me my laptop.”

  He typed in his password and handed it to me. “I’ll check the history. Don’t do anything you might regret.”

  I held his eye and tried to suppress the rage that was building inside me. “Right now, Special Agent Turner, you need to be worrying about whether I am going to do something you may regret. Stop waving your fucking dick around and get on the case.”

  I took the computer into the church and started searching the land registry. It didn’t take long before I found what I was looking for. Peter Smith had a second house, on Jackson Avenue, in the Bronx. I knew the street. I knew the house. It was rough. Not what you would expect from Peter.

  I went to call the captain, but he was coming for me. I said, “There is a chance she is at this address. We need to get there fast, and we need a warrant to search the property.”

  “What property?”

  “It’s a house on Jackson Avenue. It belongs to Peter Smith, the guy who owns the lockup. To be honest, I have never liked him as our guy, but…” I shook my head. “Unless I’m missing something really obvious, it’s either David or Peter, and now we know it’s not David. We are out of options.”

  He held up his cell. “That number you asked me to trace? It was Peter’s cell.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s go. I’ll call Judge Sanders for search warrants on that place and his house.”

  I drove fast. We were both silent. I was thinking hard as we roared down the darkened highway. In my mind, I could see almost the whole thing now. It all made perfect sense, and I was raging at myself for not having seen it before Dehan got taken. It had been obvious from the start. But that was how this guy operated. His genius, if that was what it was, was to invert things, turn them into negatives of themselves, show them back to front.

  The only time the captain spoke was as we streaked between two sixteen-wheelers. “I do appreciate the urgency, John. But it would be useful to arrive there alive.”

  I glanced at him and nodded, but I didn’t slow down. It was a journey that should have taken forty-five minutes. It took us barely half an hour.

  There was a patrol car waiting at the house. Officer Sanchez and his partner climbed out as we pulled up. He handed the search warrants to the captain. I ran up the stairs, hammered on the door, and leaned on the bell. There was no reply. I took out my piece and shot out the lock.

  I heard Sanchez say, “Woah!” I didn’t give a damn. I ran in. Captain Newman, Sanchez, and his partner were right behind me. There was a short passage that led to a kitchen at the back. A door on the left opened into a living room, and on the right, stairs led to an upper floor.

  I pushed into the living room while the captain went to the kitchen and the patrolmen went upstairs. The living room was shabby and seedy. There was a sofa, and two armchairs in brown vinyl. A TV was positioned opposite the sofa, and stacked next to it on the floor was a collection of pornographic DVDs. There was a cheap dining table and four chairs, and beyond them a set of french doors looked onto an overgrown back garden. Whoever used this place didn’t use it for gardening.

  The captain came in from the kitchen. “Nothing.”

  Sanchez called down from upstairs. “Clear, Detective!”

  I went up and had a look around. There were two bedrooms and a bathroom. In the bathroom, there were patches of mold on the walls. The mirror was speckled, and the floorboards creaked underfoot.

  In the master bedroom, there was a large king-size bed. It looked like IKEA, new. The sheets were fresh and clean. There was a cheap carpet on the floor, but that was also new, as were the drapes on the window. The walls seemed to be recently painted. I looked in the wardrobe. The only clothes were women’s BDSM role-playing costumes.

  In the second bedroom, the paper was peeling off the walls. There was a single aluminum-framed bed. The sheets were old, stained, and frayed. It was hard to imagine Peter in a place like this. And once again, I had the feeling that the picture was wrong. I had it all—almost. But something was missing.

  I ran down the stairs and went out to the back garden. The captain followed. Sanchez flipped a switch in the kitchen and an outside light came on. Around the side of the house, I found a flight of stairs that led down to a door. I glanced at the captain. My heart was pounding.

  “It’s a cellar.”

  I pulled out my piece to shoot out the lock again, but Sanchez said, “Detective?”

  I looked up. He was holding some keys. “They were by the light switch, in the kitchen.”

  I nodded. I unlocked the door and went in, shouting, “Dehan! Dehan!” There was only an empty echo.

  I hit the switch by the door. There was a boiler against one wall, pipes running across the ceiling, boxes, a washing machine and dryer. I went to every wall and knocked on each one to see if they were hollow. They
were all solid. I examined the pipes for scrape marks made by cuffs. There was nothing there. She was not here. She had never been here. I felt the cold, white fingers of despair clenching inside. The captain, Sanchez, and his partner were staring at me.

  “She’s not here, Stone.”

  I checked Dehan’s phone. We had half an hour.

  The captain spoke again. His voice sounded too loud in the empty cellar. “She’s not here. So she’s got to be at his house. And if she’s not there, we’ll make him tell us where she is.”

  I nodded, but I couldn’t shake that feeling—the feeling that I was missing the main point, like when I kept looking at the photograph.

  “We are missing something.”

  He wasn’t listening. He made for the door. “Let’s go and pull this son of a bitch in.”

  I followed him back up the stairs. We climbed into the Jag, and the patrol car led the way through the darkness and the rain, with its siren howling and its lights pulsing. We came fast down Bruckner Boulevard and turned in to Revere with the tires skidding and screeching on the wet road. We had ten minutes.

  His vehicle was parked out front, and there was light in his windows. I jumped out of the car and ran. I hammered on the door and heard voices inside. Peter pulled the door open. He looked scandalized.

  The captain was showing him the warrant as I pushed past him and ran up the stairs. I could hear Newman asking him, “Where were you this afternoon at three p.m.?”

  I went into the master bedroom. I could hear Sanchez and his partner coming up behind me. I went onto the landing, pointing back into the bedroom. “Every drawer, under the bed, every inch for any trace of her.”

  I checked the other bedrooms and shouted, “When you’re done in there, check the other rooms. Every damned inch!”

  I ran down the stairs. The captain was still talking to Peter. Peter was saying, “I have been here all afternoon. My wife will attest to that!”