And missed it.
And then Derek was on him. He moved straight to the cop, knife held low in his right hand, and then he swiped the weapon upward as the man stumbled back and reached in desperation for his gun a second time.
“No!” Greg shouted, knowing it was pointless but unable to stop himself.
The knife disappeared into the cop’s ample belly and he hit the pavement, dropping onto his ass and then striking the back of his head with a crack that Greg could hear clearly, even from at least ten feet away.
Greg found himself moving without conscious thought, rushing forward toward his brother and the cop, the unease that had begun developing the minute he received the phone call from his wife now exploding into black despair.
Derek dropped to his knees next to the downed cop and scrabbled for the gun, unsnapping the man’s holster and sliding the weapon out like a seasoned firearms expert. If the cop had been able to do it as cleanly a second ago, the situation would probably be over now.
“Dude, what the fuck have you done?” Greg heard himself say as he reached the two men.
“Get away from me!” Derek shouted as he swung the gun around. His eyes were wild and glazed and his face had twisted into a look of sheer panic, a look unlike anything Greg had ever seen, on his brother or any other human being.
Greg skidded to a stop and backpedaled, hands held up in a gesture that would be utterly futile if Derek decided to pull the trigger. “Slow down and get a grip.”
“Help me get him into the diner,” Derek said. He licked his lips and looked up at Greg with recognition dawning in his eyes, and Greg thought maybe he’d live beyond the next couple of seconds after all.
“Derek, stop,” he said. “You’ve got to stop before anyone else gets hurt. This has to end.”
But Derek ignored him. He tucked the cop’s handgun under his arm and crouched behind the man, slipping his hands under the cop’s armpits and lifting his upper body off the ground. His movements were awkward as he tried to make sure he didn’t drop the gun. Blood bubbled out from the stab wound, soaking the cop’s uniform shirt.
“Get back here right now,” Derek hissed. “I can’t move him by myself. I’m too fucking sick.”
Greg hesitated and then did as he was told. He circled the cop’s prone body, and as he did, Derek removed his right arm from the cop’s armpit and pulled the gun out from under his own arm. He pointed it for the second time at Greg and said, “Drag him into the diner.”
“Don’t point that fucking thing at me,” Greg said, the fear and the stress and the confusion exploding into anger.
“Just do as I say, Greg. Please don’t make me shoot you. Please.”
Sirens began sounding in the distance, an unsurprising development considering a cop had just been stabbed in a moderately busy parking lot in the middle of a Wednesday morning.
Greg gestured at the sound. “Dude, it’s OVER. You just stabbed a cop. The police are on the way. What do you think is going to happen next?”
“Shut up and pull him inside!” Derek screamed. The panic was back in his voice and he was panting as though he’d just run five miles, and Greg knew if he didn’t do as he was told, right now, someone else was going to get hurt even if it wasn’t him.
He crouched behind the cop and grabbed him under the armpits, exactly as Derek had done. Derek moved back a few feet. He continued to hold the gun in Greg’s general direction.
And Greg started dragging the man. He was sickened by the amount of blood exiting the wound, and while he’d never been a fan of the cops, prayed silently that the guy wasn’t bleeding out because of all the jostling.
By the time they reached the diner’s front entrance, Greg’s arms were burning. The cop really was heavy, overweight as well as naturally stocky. Derek yanked open the door and Greg dragged the cop the rest of the way inside to the sound of chaos: toppling chairs and smashing dishes and panicked screams as patrons rushed the kitchen, crowding toward the service entrance to escape the madman with the gun and the knife.
And that was fine with Greg. Hopefully everyone would run. The last thing the situation needed was a bystander trying to play hero and someone else ending up dead.
Derek yanked the door closed with a teeth-rattling slam as Greg eased the cop’s head and shoulders onto the floor. He dropped to one knee next to the man’s head and tried to catch his breath, conscious of Derek pacing back and forth next to him, muttering something Greg could not make out. He closed his eyes and pressed his ear to the cop’s chest, listening for a heartbeat and trying to wrap his head around the notion that a little more than an hour ago, his biggest problem was his crumbling marriage.
Now he was probably watching a cop die and would likely see his brother follow suit.
And he might not live much longer, either.
To his surprise, Greg heard/felt a heartbeat through the bloody shirt. It was weak but it was there. He lifted his head and swiped his cheek onto his shoulder, wiping away the blood that had smeared onto his face.
Next to him, the sound of Derek’s shuffling feet stopped suddenly and everything was quiet. The diner customers and staff had apparently all escaped the building. Derek began chanting softly, “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” as he stared through the front door.
Greg leaned and looked past his brother’s body and lifted his eyebrows in surprise. Cops were everywhere, and more continued to pour into the lot. He’d known they were coming, but the sheer number of them was staggering. Police cars were parked randomly, light bars flashing but sirens off, and Greg could see men in blue uniforms crouched behind their open doors. He couldn’t see any guns but knew they were there.
“Get away from the door, asshole,” he said.
Derek spun and met Greg’s eyes and did as he was told. “I’m fucked,” he said, and Greg couldn’t disagree.
9
For a few minutes not much happened outside. It seemed obvious to Greg that the first responders—the beat cops—had been told to secure the area and wait for the hostage negotiating team to arrive on-scene.
He imagined cops sneaking in the rear service entrance and putting bullets in the backs of both their heads, and that possibility seemed to occur to Derek at the same time it occurred to him. His brother disappeared into the kitchen and a moment later Greg heard the heavy scraping sound of a metal security door being slammed shut and then locked.
Greg stepped behind the counter and rummaged around until finding a stack of clean towels. He grabbed several and returned to the downed cop, who was still alive but also still unconscious, breathing erratically and looking almost as pale as Derek.
He knelt on the floor, checking out the bloody wound and debating whether to try to remove the knife. It stuck obscenely out of the man’s stomach/chest, quivering like a flagpole in a heavy wind with the cop’s every labored breath. He decided to leave it, fearing one final gush of blood that would kill the man should he pull it out.
Instead, he unbuttoned the soaked shirt and began packing towels as tightly as possible around the wound. The shirt was sticky with blood and the floor was slippery with more blood and it was all he could do not to puke on the unconscious man. When he’d packed the area around the wound as best he could, he squeezed the two sides of the dress shirt back together and refastened the buttons, hoping the shirt would hold everything in place.
Then he sat back on his haunches and examined his handiwork. He doubted it would make a damned bit of difference. It seemed clear the man would be dead soon. He looked up to see Derek looming over them, holding the cop’s gun by his side, his eyes wet and terrified.
“You’ve got to end this,” Greg said.
“I already told you, I can’t go to prison. I’ll be dead within a week, and it won’t be quick, either. Crowder’s guys will drag it out. They’ll torture me and do things to me that you can’t even imagine.”
Greg tilted his head, indicating the cop while keeping his eyes focused
squarely on his brother’s. “We’ll figure something out, I promise. In the meantime, this man is still alive. For now. You can save him, Derek.”
“Save him? I’m the one who stuck the knife in his ribs. If he dies, it’s because of me.”
“I’m not gonna try to argue that.”
“There is no argument to that.”
“Fine. But what’s done is done. The point is he’s still alive and if you make the right move—you put the gun down and let me go to the door and talk to the cops, negotiate your peaceful surrender—you’ll save his life. He can recover and go back to his wife and kids, or his girlfriend or even his lonely shitty life in a one-room apartment. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that whatever else happens from this point on, you will have saved this man’s life.”
Derek stood uncertainly, swaying on his feet. Greg thought he looked like a little kid, lost and alone.
“You’ll save a life, Buddy. That’s gotta count for something, to the cops and the judge and a jury, but most importantly to you.” Greg hadn’t called his little brother “Buddy” in at least fifteen years and wasn’t sure why he’d done so now. It had been a long time since he thought of Derek as his “Buddy,” but the words came out without any conscious thought and they seemed right. Appropriate.
Derek continued to sway, his eyes still wide and terrified but also now thoughtful. He looked around the diner absently and Greg knew he was seeing not the smashed dishes and overturned chairs and half-eaten meals but the consequences of a lifetime of bad decisions.
Then he nodded sadly and Greg knew he’d convinced him.
“Put the gun down,” Greg whispered, “and let me go talk to the cops. I’ll protect you, I promise.”
Derek reached for the nearest table and placed the cop’s gun on top of it. It looked absurdly out of place next to the omelettes and toast and half-full cups of cooling coffee. He stepped away from the table and stood with his hands fidgeting, like he wasn’t sure what to do with them.
And that was when the phone rang.
10
Greg flinched and Derek jumped—literally jumped, both feet leaving the floor—and then stumbled when he came down, nearly toppling over. The thoughtful look disappeared from his eyes and the terror returned, a mushroom cloud of fear and confusion. He spun and snatched up the handgun and held it in front of him like some sort of mystical talisman.
“It’s okay,” Greg said. “Don’t blow a gasket. It’s just the cops. The hostage negotiator has arrived and he wants to open the lines of communication, that’s all.”
Derek licked his lips and looked wildly from the telephone hanging on the wall behind the counter to Greg and then back to the phone.
Greg cursed inwardly at the timing of the call. “This is a good thing,” he said as the phone continued to ring insistently. “It’ll make it easier to negotiate your surrender.”
But he’d lost him. It was obvious. Derek turned a full three hundred sixty degrees, gun now held in a two-handed grip like every hero in every action movie he’d ever watched.
And he was panicked again. He was no more likely to surrender now than he was to snap his fingers and magically become clean and sober.
The phone continued to ring. It was one of the old-fashioned wall-hanging jobs with the jangling ringer and it was giving Greg a headache. He could only imagine the effect it was having on his brother, as ill as he felt and as desperate as he was.
“Let me answer it,” Greg said. “Let’s see what they have to say.”
“No. I’ll talk to them.” Derek marched behind the counter and lifted the handset off the cradle and finally silenced the goddamned ringing. It seemed to have been jangling forever and felt like the most hopeless, desolate sound Greg had ever heard.
“What,” Derek spat into the phone. He immediately began pacing back and forth, short little trips limited by the length of the landline’s cord.
Greg checked on the condition of the cop as he listened closely to the one side of the conversation he could hear. His packing job with the towels must have worked because the blood flow seemed to have stopped, more or less, and the injured man was still breathing, although his respiration was labored.
“Yeah, he’s alive,” Derek said into the phone. He was trying hard for arrogance and bravado in his conversation with the cop, but to Greg the fear in his voice was plain. He guessed that fear would be no less obvious to a professional police negotiator trained in these types of situations.
“You can’t,” Derek said after listening for a moment.
“Because he’s unconscious, that’s why. So I can’t prove it. You’ll just have to take my word for it, I guess.”
More listening.
“That’s right, there is a third person in here. Yes, he’s a hostage, too. So if you’re planning on busting in here guns blazing, you’d better take that into consideration.”
A little more listening, but only for a moment. This time when Derek spoke, Greg got the distinct impression that he was cutting off the negotiator in mid-sentence. “At the moment all I want is more time.”
“Because I need to get my shit together, that’s why. And I’d watch my step if I were you, because if you piss me off I’ll rip this fucking phone right off the wall.” Derek slammed the handset down on the cradle and stalked back toward Greg and the cop, and Greg noticed he’d begun crying again.
“I am so fucked,” he said quietly.
Greg had no idea what to say.
Derek looked around the diner again and said, “There’s something I don’t understand.”
“There are a lot of things I don’t understand,” Greg countered, “including why you’re fucking with the cops. The longer this goes on, the more likely it becomes that you leave here in a body bag.”
“How did he know?” Derek said, continuing as if Greg hadn’t spoken.
“How did who know what?”
“How did the cop know who I was? He walked past us and the minute he saw me, it was like instant recognition. I just can’t believe there’s been time for any investigation to narrow down what happened in Boxford and the fact that I was inside that house.”
Greg pushed off the floor and stood. He winced at the pain in his back and the cracking of his knees. He began walking toward Derek and immediately his brother tensed up, so he raised his hands in a placating gesture and said, “Dude, I’m not going to rush you and try to take away your gun. I’m not that stupid. I just need to stretch, that’s all.”
“But you were about to say something. You have an answer to my question, don’t you? About how the cop knew who I was?”
“I don’t know if it qualifies as an answer. There are a number of possibilities, including that the cops are better at investigating violent death than you want to give them credit for.”
“Meaning what?”
“Well, the girl you taped to the chair saw you. The first thing the cops would have done would be to get a description.”
“But how would they have found her that quickly? The neighborhood was empty when I left. I’m certain nobody saw or heard anything.”
Greg said, “If you didn’t gag her, she started screaming five minutes after you walked out the door, guaranteed.”
“Dude, have you ever been to Boxford?”
Greg shrugged. “I don’t think so.”
“The town is tiny. And the houses are separated by what seems like miles, especially in McHugh’s neighborhood. I’m telling you, nobody would have heard her scream unless they walked or drove at least three-quarters of the way up the driveway.”
“Maybe somebody did exactly that.”
Derek began pacing again. “There’s something else, isn’t there? Something I’m missing. Tell me what it is.”
An enormous sense of loss welled up in Greg at his brother’s words. Derek had always been an intelligent kid, too smart for his own good in many ways. Even now, dopesick and terrified and under
the most extreme stress imaginable, his innate sense of perception was spot-on. Not for the first time, Greg thought things could have—and should have—turned out much differently for his brother than they did. A hundred-eighty degrees opposite. He should have been a scientist or a researcher or a university professor, not a homeless junkie facing an unimaginably bleak fate.
Tears were starting to form in his eyes and he realized Derek was staring at him, waiting for an answer. He didn’t know what difference the topic could possibly make at this point, with a cop dying on the dirty floor and a buttload of other cops waiting outside to send him straight to hell, but Greg supposed offering a theory couldn’t hurt the situation, either. “You said this Crowder guy is a some kind of criminal bigshot, right?”
“You have no idea.”
“Okay. Well if he wants to put you out of commission as badly as you say—”
“He demonstrated quite convincingly last night to me that he does.”
“Then the most likely scenario is that he dimed you out to the cops himself, or had one of his stooges do it. Putting the police on your trail makes it much less likely you’ll be able to skip town successfully, and it saves him the trouble of having to run you down himself.”
“But he has to know the first thing I’ll do is point the finger at him. He’s the whole reason I was in Boxford.”
“We already talked about that. You convinced me that he doesn’t care, remember? He isn’t worried about defending himself. There’s no proof he sent you there, is there? Do you have a handwritten note, signed by Crowder, telling you what to do?”
“Of course not.”
“Exactly. That’s my point. There’s nothing tying Crowder to the dead bodies besides your accusation. All he has to do is deny that and there’s nothing any prosecutor can do as long as he doesn’t deviate from his story. So he has nothing to lose and everything to gain by turning informant on you. The risk to him is nonexistent.”
Derek blinked as he considered Greg’s words. “I am so fucked,” he muttered for the third time. Or perhaps the hundredth. Greg had lost track.
Chasing China White Page 9