W E B Griffin - Badge of Honor 03 - The Victim

by The Victim(lit)

  There was a moment's silence, and Charles decided that DeZego had reached the landing. The door would open any second.

  But then there came the unmistakable sound of footsteps on the metal stairs again.

  What the fuck?

  Lover Boy is going up to the roof. He's daydreaming, or stupid, or something, his Caddy is on this floor, not the fuck-ing roof! In a moment he'll come back down.

  But he did not.

  Charles considered the situation very quickly.

  No real problem. There or here. There's nobody on the roof, and if he sees me, he doesn't know me.

  He pulled the door open and, as quietly as he could, quickly ran up the stairs to the roof. He pulled the stairwell door open.

  Lover Boy was right there, leaning against the concrete blocks of the stairwell, like he was waiting for somebody.

  "Long walk up here," Charles said, smiling at him.

  "You said it," Anthony J. DeZego said.

  Charles walked ten feet past Anthony J. DeZego, turned around suddenly, raised the shotgun to his shoulder, and blew off the top of Anthony J. DeZego's head.

  DeZego fell backward against the concrete blocks of the stairwell and slumped to the ground.

  There was a sound like a run-over dog.

  Charles looked around the roof. In the middle of the ve-hicular passageway was a young woman, her eyes wide, both of her hands pressed against her mouth, making run-over-dog noises.

  Charles raised the Remington and fired. She went down like a rock.

  The goddamned broad in the goddamned Mercedes! She didn't go downstairs. She sat there and fixed her fucking hair or something!

  Charles went to Anthony J. DeZego's corpse and took the Caddy keys from his pocket.

  I better do her again, to make sure she's dead.

  There was the sound of tires squealing. Another car was coming up.

  And since there's no room on the fourth floor, he'II be coming up here! Damn!

  Charles went into the stairwell and down to the fourth floor. He opened the door a crack, saw nothing, and then pushed it open wide enough to get through.

  He went to DeZego's Cadillac, unlocked the door, put the Remington on the floor, and got behind the wheel. He started the engine and drove down the vehicular ramp. He stopped at the barrier, put the window down, handed the attendant a five-dollar bill and the claim check, waited for his change, and then for the barrier to be lifted.

  Then he drove out onto the street and turned left. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw the Pontiac pull away from the curb and start to follow him.

  ***

  "Damn, here we are already," Matt Payne said as he turned the Porsche into the Penn Services Parking Garage behind the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in downtown Philadel-phia.

  "How time flies," Amanda said, mocking him gently.

  He stopped to get a ticket from a dispensing machine and then drove inside. He drove slowly, hoping to find a space on a lower floor. There were none. He searched the second level, and then the third and fourth. They finally emerged on the roof.

  Matt stepped hard on the brakes. The Porsche shuddered and skidded to a stop, throwing Amanda against the dash-board.

  "My God!" she exclaimed.

  "Stay here," Matt Payne ordered firmly.

  "What is it?" Amanda asked.

  He didn't answer. He got out of the Porsche and ran across the rooftop parking lot. Amanda saw him drop to one knee, and then for the first time saw that a girl was lying facedown, on the roadway between lines of parked cars.

  She pushed open her door and got out and ran to him.

  "What happened?" Amanda asked.

  "I told you to stay in the fucking car!" he said furiously.

  She looked at him, shocked as much by the tone of his voice as by the language, and then at the girl on the floor. For the first time she saw there was a pool of blood.

  "What happened?" she asked, her voice weak.

  "Will you please go get in the goddamned car?" Matt asked.

  "Oh, my God!" Amanda wailed. "That's Penny!"

  "You know her?"

  "Penny Detweiler," Amanda said. "You must know her. She's one of the bridesmaids."

  Matt looked at the girl on the floor. It was Penelope Det-weiler, Precious Penny to Matt, to her intense annoyance, because that's what her father had once called her in Matt's hearing.

  Why didn't I recognize her? I've known her all of my life!

  "I'll be damned," he said softly.

  "Matt, what happened to her?"

  "She's been shot," Matt Payne said, and looked at Amanda.

  You don't expect to find people you know, especially people like Precious Penny, lying in a pool of blood after somebody's shot them in a garage. Things like that aren't supposed to happen to people like Precious Penny.

  He found his voice: "Now, for chrissake, will you go get in the goddamned car!" he ordered furiously.

  Amanda looked at him with confusion and hurt in her eyes.

  "This just happened," he explained more kindly. "Who-ever did it may still be up here."

  "Matt, let's get out of here. Let's go find a cop."

  "I am a cop, Amanda," Matt Payne said. "Now, for the last fucking time, will you go get in the car? Stay there until I come for you. Lock the doors."

  He stooped, bending one knee, and when he stood erect again, there was a snub-nosed revolver in his hand. Amanda ran back to the silver Porsche and locked the doors. When she looked for Matt, she couldn't see him at first, but then she did, and he was holding his gun at the ready, slowly making his way between the parked cars.

  I don't believe this is happening. I don't believe Penny Detweiler is lying out there bleeding to death, and I don't believe that Matt Payne is out there with a gun in his hand, a cop looking for whoever shot Penny.

  Oh, my God. What if he gets killed?

  FOUR

  With difficulty, for there is not much room in the passenger compartment of a Porsche 911 Carrera, Amanda Spencer crawled over from the passenger seat to the driver's and turned the ignition key.

  There was a scream of tortured starter gears, for the engine was still running. She threw the gearshift lever into reverse, spun the wheels, and turned around, then drove as fast as she dared down the ramps of the parking garage to street level.

  She slammed on the brakes and jumped out of the car and ran to the attendant's window.

  "Call the police!" she said. "Call the police and get an ambulance."

  "Hey, lady, what's going on?"

  "Get on that phone and call the police and get an ambu-lance," Amanda ordered firmly. "Tell them there's been a shooting."

  ***

  A red light began to flash on one of the control consoles in the radio room of the Philadelphia Police Department.

  Foster H. Lewis, Jr., who was sitting slumped in a battered and sagging metal chair, a headset clamped to his head, threw a switch and spoke into his microphone. "Police Emer-gency," he said.

  Foster H. Lewis, Jr., was twenty-three years old, weighed two hundred and twenty-seven pounds, stood six feet three inches tall, and was perhaps inevitably known as Tiny. For more than five years before he had entered the Police Acad-emy, he had worked as a temporary employee in Police Emergency: five years of nights and weekends and during the summers answering calls from excited citizens in trouble and needing help had turned him into a skilled and experienced operator.

  He had more or less quit when he entered the Police Acad-emy and was working tonight as a favor to Lieutenant Jack Fitch, who had called him and said he had five people out with some kind of a virus and could he help out.

  "This the police?" his caller asked.

  "This is Police Emergency," Tiny Lewis said. "May I help you, sir?"

  "I'm the attendant at the Penn Services Parking Garage on Fifteenth, behind the Bellevue-Stratford."

  "How may I help you, sir?"

  "I got a white lady here says there's been a shooting on the roof
and somebody got shot and says to send an ambu-lance."

  "Could you put her on the phone, please?"

  "I'm in the booth, you know, can't get her in here."

  "Please stay on the line, sir," Tiny said.

  There are twenty-two police districts in Philadelphia. Without having to consult a map, Tiny Lewis knew that the parking garage behind the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel was in the 9th District, whose headquarters are at 22nd Street and Penn-sylvania Avenue.

  He checked his console display for the 9th District and saw that an indicator with 914 on it was lit up. The 9 made ref-erence to the District; 14 was the number of a radio patrol car assigned to cover the City Hall area.

  Tiny Lewis reached for a small black toggle switch on the console before him and held it down for a full two seconds. A long beep was broadcast on the Central Division radio frequency, alerting all cars in the Central Division, which includes the 9th District, that an important message is about to be broadcast.

  "Fifteenth and Walnut, the Penn Services Parking Garage, report of a shooting and a hospital case," Tiny Lewis said into his microphone, and added, "914, 906, 9A."

  There was an immediate response: "914 okay."

  This was from Officer Archie Hellerman, who had just entered Rittenhouse Square from the west. He then put the microphone down, flipped on the siren and the flashing lights, and began to move as rapidly as he could through the heavy early-evening traffic on the narrow streets toward the Penn Services Parking Garage.

  Tiny Lewis began to write the pertinent information on a three-by-five index card. At this stage the incident was offi-cially an "investigation, shooting, and hospital case."

  As he reached up to put the card between electrical con-tacts on a shelf above his console, which would interrupt the current lighting the small bulb behind the 914 block on the display console, three other radio calls came in.

  "Radio, EPW 906 in."

  "9A okay."

  "Highway 4B in on that."

  EPW 906 was an emergency patrol van, in this case a battered 1970 Ford, one of the two-man emergency patrol wagons assigned to the 9th District to transport the injured, prisoners, and otherwise assist in law enforcement. If this was not a bullshit call, 906 would carry whoever was shot to a hospital.

  The district sergeant, 9A, was assigned to the eastern half of the 9th District.

  Highway 4B was a radio patrol car of the Highway Patrol, an elite unit of the Philadelphia Police Department which the Philadelphia Ledger had recently taken to calling Carlucci's Commandos.

  As a police captain, the Honorable Jerome H. "Jerry" Carlucci, mayor of the City of Philadelphia, had commanded the Highway Patrol, which had begun, as its name implied, as a special organization to patrol the highways. Even before Captain Jerry Carlucci's reign, Highway Patrol had evolved into something more than motorcycle-mounted cops riding up and down Roosevelt Boulevard and the Schuylkill Express-way handing out speeding tickets. Carlucci, however, had presided over the ultimate transition of a traffic unit into an all-volunteer elite force. Highway had traded most of its mo-torcycles for two-man patrol cars and had citywide authority. Other Philadelphia police rode alone in patrol cars and pa-trolled specific areas in specific districts.

  Highway Patrol had kept its motorcyclist's special uni-forms (crushed crown cap, leather jacket, boots, and Sam Browne belts) and prided itself on being where the action was; in other words, in high-crime areas.

  Highway Patrol was either "a highly trained, highly mo-bile anticrime task force of proven effectiveness" (Mayor Jerry Carlucci in a speech to the Sons of Italy) or "a jack-booted Gestapo" (an editorial in the Philadelphia Ledger).

  Tiny Lewis had expected prompt responses to his call. EPWs generally were sent in on any call where an injury was reported, a supervisor responded to all major calls, and somebody from Highway Patrol (sometimes four or five cars) always went in on a "shooting and hospital case."

  The door buzzer for the radio room went off. One of the uniformed officers on duty walked to it, opened it, smiled, and admitted a tall, immaculately uniformed lieutenant.

  He was tall, nearly as tall as Tiny Lewis, but much leaner. He had very black skin and sharp Semitic features. He walked to Tiny Lewis's control console and said, somewhat menac-ingly, "I didn't expect to find you here. I went to your apartment and they told me where to find you."

  "My apartment? Not my 'disgusting hovel'?"

  "We have to talk," Lieutenant Lewis said.

  "Not now, Pop," Tiny Lewis said. "I'm working a shoot-ing and hospital case." And then he added, "In your district, come to think of it. On the roof of the Penn Services Parking Garage behind the Bellevue-Stratford. Civilian by phone, but I don't think it's bullshit."

  "Can we have coffee when you get off?" Lieutenant Lewis asked. "I just heard you're going to Special Operations."

  "Strange, I thought you arranged that," Tiny said.

  "I told you, I just heard about it."

  "Okay, Pop," Tiny said. "I'll meet you downstairs."

  Lieutenant Lewis nodded, then walked very quickly out of the radio room.

  ***

  Officer Archie Hellerman, driving RPC 914, couldn't count how many times he had been summoned to the Penn Services Parking Garage since it had been built seven years before. The attendant had been robbed at least once a month. One attendant, with more guts than brains, had even been shot at when he had refused to hand over the money.

  Like most policemen who had been on the same job for years, Archie Hellerman had an encyclopedic knowledge of the buildings in his patrol area. He knew how the Penn Services Parking Garage operated. Incoming cars turned off South 15th Street into the entranceway. Ten yards inside, there was a wooden barrier across the roadway. Taking a ticket from an automatic ticket dispenser activated a mechanism that raised the barrier.

  Departing cars left the building at the opposite end of the building, where an attendant in a small, allegedly robbery-proof booth collected the parking ticket, computed the charges, and, when they had been paid, raised another bar-rier, giving the customer access to the street.

  Archie Hellerman in RPC 914 was the first police vehicle to arrive at the crime scene. As he approached the garage, he turned off his siren but left the flashing lights on. He pulled the nose of his Ford blue-and-white onto the exit ramp, which was blocked by a silver Porsche 911 Carrera, and jumped out of the car.

  There was a civilian woman, a good-looking young blonde in a fancy dress, standing between the Porsche and the atten-dant's booth. She was obviously the complainant, the civilian who had reported the shooting.

  Just seeing the blonde and her state of excitement was enough to convince Archie that the call was for real. Some-thing serious had gone down.

  "What's going on, miss?" Archie Hellerman asked.

  "A girl has been shot on the roof. We need an ambu-lance."

  The dying growl of a siren caught Archie's attention. He stepped back on the sidewalk and saw a radio patrol wagon, its warning lights still flashing, pulling up. There was another siren wailing, but that car, almost certainly the Highway car that had radioed in that it was going in on the call, was not yet in sight.

  Archie signaled for the wagon to block the entrance ramp and then turned back to the good-looking blonde.

  "You want to tell me what happened, please?"

  "Well, we drove onto the roof, and my boyfriend saw her lying on the floor-"

  "Your boyfriend? Where is he?"

  I said "my boyfriend.'' Why did I say "my boyfriend'' ?

  "He's up there," Amanda Spencer said. "He's a police-man. ''

  "Your boyfriend is a cop?"

  Amanda Spencer nodded her head.

  Matt Payne is a cop. He really is a cop, as incredible as that seems. He had a gun, and he talked to me like a cop.

  The driver of EPW 906, Officer Howard C. Sawyer, a very large twenty-six-year-old who had been dropped from a farm team of the Baltimore Orioles just before joining the Depart-me
nt sixteen months ago, pulled the Ford van onto the en-trance ramp and started to get out.

  He heard a siren die behind him, then growl again, and turned to look.

  "Get that out of there!'' the driver of Highway 4B shouted, his head out the window of the antenna-festooned but other-wise unmarked car.

  Officer Sawyer backed the van up enough for the Highway Patrol car to get past him. The tires squealed as the car, in low gear, drove inside the building and started up the ramp to the upper floors. Sawyer saw that the driver was a sergeant; and, surprised, he noticed that the other cop was a regular cop, wearing a regular, as opposed to crushed-crown, uniform cap.