Guns! Kaem thought.
One of the approaching men shouted, “Police! Down on your stomachs!”
Kaem was kneeling next to Arya. She was pressing a hand to her chest! “Are you okay?” Kaem asked apprehensively.
Arya looked up into his eyes, “I think so.” She lifted her hand away from her chest and lifted her head to look down at the area. Kaem saw a hole in her coat!
“You got shot!” he said, panic-stricken.
“Yeah,” she said, “but this is my ‘warm’ coat.”
One of the policemen was screaming at him to lie flat. As Kaem slowly lowered his body, he asked, “It hit a stade and bounced off?”
She nodded, “Then it hit the window. You’re not hurt, are you?”
Kaem shook his head, saying, “No. Not unless shitting my pants counts as an injury.” He rolled his eyes at himself, thinking, She does not think your jokes are funny! Aloud, he said, “Sorry. Trying to make light of the situation and not doing it well.”
A policeman knelt with a knee in the small of Kaem’s back and started patting him down.
~~~
Melnick and Rose had parked their unmarked car. They were trotting up the dirt lane toward the SUV holding the presumed kidnapper and his victims when they heard a couple of gunshots. Drawing their weapons, they chambered rounds and started moving as fast as they could considering the dim lighting from a low-in-the-sky quarter moon.
Approaching with weapons at the ready, Melnick saw three people.
Closest was what looked like a man who was rolling from supine to prone and trying to push up on one hand. The other hand was clasped to his face.
A feminine form lay on her side. Someone else was on hands and knees next to her.
“Get down on your stomachs!” Melnick bellowed, pulling out his tactical flashlight with his left hand. He played the light over the scene. The man who’d just rolled over had blood dripping through the fingers clasped to his face. That guy got shot, Melnick thought.
Melnick’s unconscious bias dismissed the girl as a possible shooter. He moved on to check out the man on his hands and knees next to her. Arriving at the man’s side, Melnick screamed at him to lie flat. The guy slowly lowered himself to his stomach, still talking to the girl, though Harris couldn’t really understand what they were talking about. With his partner standing beside him, weapon trained on the guy’s back, Melnick knelt and quickly checked him for a weapon. “Clear,” he said to let Rose know it was safe. He waved, “See if the guy who got shot needs help,” he told Rose. Pushing down on the man he’d just checked over, Melnick commanded, “Stay flat! Hands behind your back!”
Grabbing one of the man’s hands and reaching for his cuffs, Melnick turned to the woman. She’s good-looking, he thought with some surprise. “You okay?”
She nodded.
“You’re the one who called 911?”
She nodded again.
Melnick indicated the prone guy he’d just cleared of weapons, “This is your kidnapper?”
She shook her head and used her chin to indicate the guy who’d been shot in the face.
As he turned to look that direction, Melnick was wondering, What? Did the guy try to commit suicide?
Oh shit! Melnick thought as he stood.
The guy with the bloodied face had a gun trained on Rose’s head. Glancing at Melnick, the man said, “Drop your weapon.”
Heart sinking, Melnick crouched and placed his gun on the ground. As he stood back up, he distantly noticed his hands were trembling. It was hard to read Rose’s face but Melnick could tell his new partner was terrified.
The man said, “Take off your vests.”
Shit, shit, shit! Melnick thought. He started slowly removing his bulletproof vest. Trying to keep his voice steady and reasonable, Melnick said, “There’re a lot more police on the way, you should give yourself up before somebody gets killed and you wind up with a murder rap.” Melnick winced, noticing the crazed look in the man’s eyes for the first time. I probably shouldn’t have said that, he thought. Further study revealed the man’s copious bleeding all seemed to be pouring out of his nose.
It didn’t look at all like a gunshot wound.
“Shut up!” the man said. “How the hell’d you bastards get here so fast?!”
Melnick hesitated. The man had, after all, just told him to shut up. Also, he didn’t want to sell the girl down the river for calling them.
The man began, “I said—”
The girl stepped forward, interrupting by saying, “I called 911.”
“You bitch…!” He paused, “Wait. How? I didn’t hear you make any calls!”
She shrugged. Stepping closer to him, she said, “I have a code phrase for my phone’s AI. If it hears the phrase it connects itself to 911.”
Turning the weapon on her, the man stepped closer. His voice had a frenetic tone as he said, “Why would you do that?! Are you insane? I told you I just wanted to talk!”
Melnick slowly lowered his hand to the pepper spray on his belt and surreptitiously unsnapped its cover. To his dismay, the girl kept moving closer and closer to the man with the gun! Step away! Melnick thought.
As she drifted even closer the girl shrugged again, “It seemed like you were kidnapping us.”
Melnick glanced at Rose who seemed paralyzed. The perp seemed totally focused on the girl so Melnick slid the pepper spray canister out of its holder on his belt, trying to keep it palmed while trying to adjust its spray to maximum distance by feel.
My God! Melnick thought as he realized the girl was only a couple of feet from the perp. The gun was centered on her chest. Is she crazy?! Even in the dim light, he could tell when she looked out past the perp’s shoulder, saying, “Oh, shit!”
The perp started to look back over his shoulder.
Melnick was taken in too. His eyes turned in the same direction.
As soon as the perp’s eyes left her, the girl lunged forward, pivoting, extending, and punching up into his temple. Distantly, Melnick observed that the evolution of her movement was quite graceful.
The gun went off. It must have missed the girl to hit something hard because Melnick heard a ricochet “whing” off into the night.
The guy was down, the girl on top of him.
The girl tossed something away.
As Melnick strode toward them he recognized that she’d cast aside the perp’s gun.
She rolled the guy on his stomach. As Melnick knelt beside her she pulled the perp’s wrists back and presented them.
As Melnick applied his handcuffs to the guy’s wrists, he thought to himself, This girl just saved my ass… In more ways than one, he thought considering the fact that he’d tried to arrest the wrong person, that he and Rose had let the perp get the drop on them, and that the perp had the crazy look of the kind of guy who might’ve killed them. He looked her in the eye. “Thanks,” he said, expressing all the gratitude he felt in that one word. Then he caught himself, “But those were some crazy risks you took, getting so close. You’re really lucky he missed.” He caught himself again, “He did miss, right? You’re okay?”
She nodded, “I’m fine.”
Sylvia was shouting in Melnick’s earbud. “Melnick! What the hell’s going on! We heard gunshots! We’ve scrambled an ambulance. Do you need it?!”
“We’re okay,” Melnick told her. He rolled the perp up. Out cold! He thought with a little surprise. The punch that girl threw was not only elegant but it packed a wallop. He amplified his earlier statement to Sylvia, “We need the ambulance though, for the perp. He’s, uh, suffered some head trauma.”
With even more respect, Melnick turned his eyes back to the girl. “Where’d you learn to fight?”
“Karate,” she said.
Huh, Melnick thought. He checked the perp again. Unconscious but breathing. This time he’s properly restrained. Melnick looked up at Rose who was staring wide-eyed. “Rose…” Melnick abruptly noticed Rose’s empty holster, “Retrieve your weapon, the
n guard our prisoner. We don’t want him lying on his cuffed wrists, so undo them and re-cuff them in front so he can lay on his back.”
Melnick looked up and saw a train of headlights bumping down the dirt lane toward then. He looked back at the second man who was still lying flat on his stomach. Compliant guy, Melnick thought. He looked at the girl, then pointed at the man on his stomach. “That guy’s okay? We can let him up?”
She nodded.
After uncuffing the other guy and telling him he could get up, Melnick turned to the girl and waved at the guy Rose was guarding, “You know who our perp is?”
“James Harris. Owner of Harris Laboratories.”
Eyeing the perp, Melnick frowned as he thought about something Sylvia had said to them. “He was trying… trying to get you to sign some kind of contract?”
She nodded.
“And he thought such a contract would be enforceable?”
“I, um, think he’s had some kind of… nervous breakdown. He wasn’t really making much sense… He seemed really manic.”
Melnick turned his flashlight slowly around the scene, noticing the shattered glass in the driver’s window of the SUV. He turned back to the girl. The other guy’d come up beside her. “You two are really okay?”
She nodded, “Just a little shaken up.”
The guy nodded in agreement.
“Okay,” Melnick said. He raised an eyebrow, “I’d advise you not to punch people holding guns in the future, okay? If that shot he got off had hit you, you could be dead.”
“I hope there’s no more being held at gunpoint in my future,” the girl said.
Melnick nodded affirmatively, “Me too.”
~~~
Other officers were detailed to take Harris to the hospital. Melnick and Rose took the girl, Vaii, and the guy, Seba, down to the station to get their statements. According to them, Seba had invented some kind of new technology that Harris wanted a piece of. They didn’t want to talk much about the technology because it was confidential, but it apparently had something to do with rocket engines.
It wasn’t until they were getting ready to leave the station that the girl put her coat back on and Melnick saw the holes in it. Four holes over the left side of her chest. “Wait a minute. What happened here?” he asked, pointing at the round perforations in the cloth of the jacket.
“Nothing important,” the girl said. “Just some rips in the fabric.”
Melnick frowned, “Those look like bullet holes!” He held out his hand, “Let me check your coat.”
Her face closed in, “I’d rather you didn’t. As you can see, I’m not injured.”
“Let me see your jacket. I need to understand what’s going on.”
“You’ve seen my blouse underneath. There’s no blood. Even if they’re bullet holes, they must be shallow, in-and-out perforations.”
“Let me see the jacket,” Melnick said impatiently.
“Why? Are we on trial now?” the girl asked.
Melnick rolled his eyes. “No, but if those are bullet holes it significantly affects the charges we’ll be bringing against Mr. Harris.”
“I thought kidnapping was already a bad thing to be charged with. Surely, whether or not a bullet punched a hole in the cloth of my jacket but didn’t injure me doesn’t affect the severity of his charges, does it?”
Melnick glanced at Seba who’d remained quiet through the entire interview except when personally put on the spot. He wasn’t reacting to this either, merely watching Ms. Vaii. Melnick looked back at Vaii and he sighed, “If I were to let you get out of here with unrecorded bullet holes in your jacket the Lieutenant would have my ass.”
Vaii sighed in return. She unzipped the jacket and folded it back so he could see the inside of the front left panel. Displaying, she said, “See, those holes don’t go all the way through.”
Saying, “Let me see,” Melnick stepped close and took the folded-back panel from her, putting his finger in one of the holes on the outside and then sliding a finger from his left hand to the same location on the inside to feel for a defect. “Wait a minute,” he said, raising his eyes to hers as he felt hard segments in the jacket. The finger that was lifting them told him they were too light to be metal, but… “What’s this?”
“What’s what?” she asked innocently.
Melnick tried to bend the segment between his fingers, expecting it to be merely firm. Instead, as he put substantial pressure on it, he realized it was completely rigid. “What the hell?”
She sighed again, “It’s confidential. Can we talk about it somewhere besides your main hallway?”
~~~
Back in an interview and interrogation room, Arya said, “I sewed 3” x 6” plates of our new rocket engine material in between the inner and outer shells of my jacket. It’s a great insulator, so even this lightweight jacket is nice and warm on a really cold day like today.”
“And it stops bullets?” Melnick said dubiously.
“If it’s strong enough to tolerate the heat and pressure inside a rocket engine, it should be strong enough to stop bullets, don’t you think?” she asked reasonably.
Melnick looked at Seba but he returned an expressionless look. Melnick reached a hand out to Arya and said, “Take off the jacket so I can examine it, please.”
“No.”
Irritated, Melnick said, “Let me see it!”
“What are you charging me with?” she asked.
“I’m not charging you with anything,” Melnick said, getting more frustrated. “I just… need to examine the evidence.”
“Evidence of what?” she asked.
“That you were shot!”
“As I’ve told you, I wasn’t shot. The materials in this jacket are confidential. I don’t intend to let you examine them, nor to let you keep them. I will be perfectly satisfied if Mr. Harris is administered justice appropriate to kidnapping and any charges of shooting at or near me are dropped.”
“I need to impound that jacket as evidence!”
“I demand my right to legal counsel.”
“You don’t stand accused of any crimes!”
“Yet you’re intending to deprive me of my property. I believe I have a right to an advocate in this situation.”
Having never confronted such circumstances, Melnick felt uncertain. “Let me go talk to my Sergeant. I’ll be right back.”
As soon Melnick left the room, Kaem said, “Let me have the jacket.”
“Why?” Arya asked, nonetheless taking off the jacket.
Kaem flipped the jacket inside out. Using his pocket knife, he deftly slit and stripped out its liner in two big pieces. Within a minute he’d pulled out Arya’s vest of stade plates. Kaem quickly pulled off his shirt and slipped on the stade vest. He pulled his shirt back on over the vest, then picked up the segments of the liner from Arya’s jacket and stuffed one into each of the jacket’s pockets. He handed her the jacket. As he slipped his own coat back on, Kaem said, “When the officer returns, tell him you changed your mind and you’ll let him keep the jacket for evidence. Try to put it in the evidence bag yourself.”
Wide-eyed, she said, “That’s never going to work! You’ve seen how he wants to feel the plates himself!”
Kaem shrugged, “The worst that can…” He broke off as the door to the room opened.
Melnick stepped inside, but as he opened his mouth, Arya said, “I’ve changed my mind. You can keep the jacket for evidence.”
Melnick gave her a surprised look, but then said, “Great, I’ll just get a bag.” He stepped out of the room and returned a few seconds later with a large bag, a stapler, and some labeling tape.
Arya bundled up the jacket and when Melnick held the bag open she stuffed it in. “May we go now?”
“Would you like a ride—”
“No,” she interrupted. “We’ll call an Uber.”
Melnick let them out of the room and walked them to the front door of the police station. She had her phone call the Uber while they
were walking.
“Thank you for letting us keep the jacket,” Melnick said. “Pieces of evidence like that can be tremendously important at trial.”
Arya rolled her eyes, “Don’t try to butter me up. I like that jacket and I’m still not happy.”
Outside it was cold. Once they’d gone about 10 feet, Kaem took off his jacket and handed it to her. “Oh,” she said, “after destroying my jacket, the gentleman lets me borrow his.”
“You weren’t going to get to keep it. At least I saved the stades.” He cocked his head as if noting the sensation, “Wow, they really do keep you warm.”
“I told you so,” Arya said. “Wait, how do you know I wouldn’t be able to keep my jacket?”
“My dad told me to read up on the law as it applied to getting arrested. As you may know, young black men get arrested a lot. His theory is that things go a lot better if you know your rights and don’t act like an asshole, demanding rights you don’t actually have.”
“So, you’re saying that the police can keep our property?”
“As evidence in a case, yeah.”
“Don’t they have to pay us for it?!”
“No. In some states they’re supposed to return it to you after court.” He shrugged, “Virginia’s not one of those… Hey,” he gave her a close look, “even if the stades kept them from penetrating, didn’t it hurt getting hit by those bullets?”
She barked a laugh, “Oh, hell yes. I think the second one hit close to an edge, tilting the stade it hit. I’m pretty sure I’m gonna have quite the linear bruise in the morning.”
~~~
Back in the station, Melnick pulled the jacket out of the bag, dying of curiosity about the plates in the bag. His suspicions began when he started to unroll it and it didn’t seem lumpy any more.
A few minutes later he was shaking his head as he stared at the liner-less jacket and the two rags of liner he’d pulled out of the pockets. Son of a bitch, he thought. For a few moments he wondered whether he should try to track them down and demand the plates.
Then he shrugged and put the jacket back in the bag. I guess not. They aren’t the criminals and this is the part of the jacket that has the bullet holes.
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