Hire a Hangman

by Collin Wilcox

  Only a dozen strides separated him from the fire door. Less than a dozen, now. And now his fingers touched the metal of the door. But should he go through the door, committing himself to the steel-and-concrete confines of the service staircase? With one of them below him and two of them above, he would be helpless, caught in their crossfire. Should he open the door, conceal himself, play the doorway game, cat catch a rat?

  Cat catch a rat—

  It was a game he’d played as a child.

  The sudden memory, a wayward flash from long ago, was touched with hysteria.

  Were they winning, then?

  Was he losing?

  All his life, even playing the games of childhood, he’d lost. Casting him up here now, cowering in this alien doorway, cat catch a rat.

  Once he’d been the cat. But now he—

  In the front hallway door he saw a flicker of movement, just a flicker. Then he saw first parts of the whole: first a shoe, then a leg—followed by a jacket-clad arm and a hand—

  The hand holding a gun.

  A revolver.

  A short-barreled revolver.

  A policeman’s weapon.

  10:15:30 PM

  With his foot and arm exposed—and the gun exposed—Hastings took a last look down the carpeted front stairway, drew a deep breath, stepped clear of the doorway. Vance’s apartment, he knew, was four doors ahead, on the left. What was Bernhardt’s situation, inside the apartment? Had Bernhardt bolted the door from the inside? If he hadn’t, he could be a captive—a hostage.

  Friedman was in the front lobby. Canelli was covering the rear, standard police procedure. And help was coming, already on the way. In minutes, Friedman would begin sending in the reinforcements. So it was only necessary to—

  At the far end of the corridor, something had moved—a hint, nothing more. Was someone leaving an apartment farther down the corridor, also on the left? Or was someone—

  The doorway to the rear stairs. It must be the fire door where someone was hiding, showing only the point of a shoulder, part of a face.

  A man’s face. Vance’s face? Someone else, a stranger?

  With his left hand, Hastings drew his shield case from his pocket, draped it over the breast pocket of his jacket. Then, gripping the revolver firmly in his right hand, slowly and deliberately, the sheriff advancing down the dusty Western street, he moved across the corridor to the left wall, then began advancing toward number 305, Vance’s apartment. At any moment, Friedman would send the reinforcements in. He would send a man to reinforce Canelli. He would send two or three men up the front staircase. Tactically, therefore, Hastings should wait. If Vance had a gun—the .45, a killer handgun—then the odds were too long.

  But where was Bernhardt? Was Bernhardt in danger? A captive?

  He had reached number 305. Cautiously he gripped the doorknob, turned, heard the latch click, felt it release. The door was unlocked. He stepped back, drew a long, deep breath, blinked to clear his vision, swallowed once—and pushed at the knob. Nothing. Whoever was inside, Bernhardt or Vance, he’d bolted the door. Gently, Hastings drew the door fully closed, slowly rotated the knob until there was no more pressure. Then he glanced back at the front stairway. Had he heard sounds from the front stairway? Holding his breath, he listened. Except for background street sounds, he heard nothing.

  Who was inside 305? Bernhardt? Vance? Both?

  Who was concealed in the open service doorway? Could it be Canelli?

  Always, it came down to this: crouching in a strange corridor, fighting to subdue the panic that rose like bitter bile. Hide-and-seek, a deadly game of guesses, loser leaves on a gurney, dead or dying. And if the cop was the winner, the reward was another hallway, another game of guesses. Another winner, another loser. And always there was the shameful secret: the paralysis of fear that could freeze the limbs in their sockets. Meaning that it was necessary to move forward. Not back, to safety. But forward, toward whatever waited in the shadows. Because others would come. Others would see—and would know.

  10:16 PM

  If he moved forward, took two steps into the corridor, raised the .45, aimed, fired, he could kill the detective who was flattened against the hallway wall, hand on the doorknob, eyes fixed on the door of 305. A split second, no more, kill or be killed, and Hastings would go down.

  But instead of stepping forward he was stepping back—one step, two steps—surrendering his view of the corridor, surrendering his advantage. Meaning that he must turn, go silently down the stairs. Before more police arrived—before Hastings appeared above him on the stairs—he must be in the alley. Two choices: go for the alley, or fire on Hastings.

  Kill or be killed.

  10:17 PM

  Canelli raised the walkie-talkie, keyed the mike, spoke softly: “Lieutenant …”

  “Go ahead.” Friedman’s voice, too, was soft. “Anything?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing here. Are you sure there’s no other way out?”

  “Not back here, there isn’t.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m still in my unit,” Canelli said. “But I thought I’d get a little closer to that door, if he comes out. There’s a dumpster back here. And I could—”

  In the alleyway darkness, the light changed on the steel door.

  “Canelli? What is it?”

  “I think someone’s coming out,” Canelli said. “I’d better go.” He released the Transmit switch, turned down the volume, holstered the walkie-talkie at his hip. Slowly he pushed the cruiser’s door open. Thank God, the dome light was disconnected, score one for the motor-pool mechanics. Or had the bulb simply burned out, the luck of the draw?

  Eyes fixed on the steel door, Canelli drew his revolver as he slowly, soundlessly advanced, angling toward the dumpster with its thick steel sides and its deep, safe shadows.

  10:17:20 PM

  From the metal stairs rising two flights above, Vance heard the sound of footsteps descending: Hastings, closing in, blocking escape. Looking up, Vance saw a hand clutching the railing, giving up one grip for another grip, a foot farther down.

  Years—months—minutes. All of them gone. Leaving only this: seconds, kill or be killed.

  Or surrender. Throw down the .45, beg them for mercy, offer his wrists for the handcuffs.

  Or escape. One last chance, through the alley.

  He turned his back on the stairs, grasped the knob of the steel door—

  Pulled it slowly open.

  10:19 PM

  Still midway between the open expanse of the alley’s entrance and the safety of the dumpster, exposed, Canelli saw the sheen of the flat steel door disappear, replaced by a rectangle of darkness.

  And a leg, emerging from the darkened rectangle.

  And an arm.

  And a hand, holding the gun: the big, deadly automatic. Vance turned to face him.

  Dropping into a crouch, revolver raised, the approved stance, Canelli shouted, “Drop it, Vance. Now.”

  10:20 PM

  Standing motionless on the second-floor landing, risking a momentary look down over the railing, Hastings heard Canelli shouting to Vance.

  A shot. A muffled cry. Another shot. And another. Hastings’s shoes rang on the steel stairs, echoing in the ringing silence after the shots. At ground level, the outside door was standing half-open.

  Headlong, Hastings kicked the door open wide, flattened himself momentarily against the rough concrete wall beside the door. Above him, a single light in a wire cage illuminated his position. He was exposed: bad tactics. Vance firing from the cover of darkness: good tactics.

  “Lieutenant. Watch it.” Canelli’s voice, barely audible, choked with pain. Canelli, down.

  Instinctively, a diversion, Hastings fired into the alley, aiming high, to draw fire. Five shots in the revolver, the hammer resting on an empty chamber, good police practice. Four shots remaining. Now he must—

  Answering fire: two deafening, close-range shots, from the big .45. Spark
s flew on the fire door, just above his head. Throwing himself forward into the alley, diving, rolling to his left, Hastings saw movement in the darkness: Vance, running. On his elbows, aiming, Hastings fired once, twice. A short-barreled revolver fired double-action, a waste of ammunition, only two shots remaining. He heaved himself to his feet. Was Canelli badly wounded? Bleeding to death in the darkness? Could Canelli—?

  A blaze of lights: two criss-crossed pairs of headlights. Shouts, a wild rattle of shots, one of them a shotgun, massive, booming. Instant warfare. And a man screaming. Vance, terrified, giving up, his silhouette sagging as he fell to his knees, screaming, “No. Stop. Stop. I’m shot. Shot.”

  And Canelli, lying full-length on the concrete. Face down. Motionless. Revolver still clutched in his right hand.

  “Ambulance,” Hastings shouted. “Ambulance, goddammit. Officer down. It’s Canelli, goddammit. It’s Canelli.”

  1:45 AM

  Wearily, the doctor stripped off a bloody pair of surgical gloves, dropped them in a refuse bin, lowered his gauze mask around his neck, drew off his green surgical beret, and shook out his medium-long, dark brown hair. Unmasked, his face was a young man’s, hardly more than thirty years old. Alert, perceptive eyes and a mobile mouth in a face as lean and handsome as a daytime TV doctor’s. His green surgical gown was blood-streaked. Burdened by fatigue, his shoulders hunched, the doctor’s arms hung slack at his sides.

  “You from the police?”

  In unison, Hastings and Friedman nodded.

  “Well, your guy …” The young doctor frowned.

  “Canelli,” Friedman said.

  “Yeah. Canelli. Well, I’ll tell you …” Infinitely weary, the surgeon shook his head. “I’ll tell you, about five minutes more, and he’d’ve bled to death. One bullet punctured a lung. No problem. But one bullet ruptured the femoral artery. That’s the big one that supplies the leg. The rupture was right up near the groin, so pressure didn’t work. If those ambulance guys hadn’t done it just right with the plasma extenders, you’d be looking for another cop.”

  “Inspector,” Friedman corrected. “Canelli’s a homicide inspector.”

  “My mistake.” The doctor raised a hand, then let it drop, as if the effort to finish the gesture was too much. “I’ve been on duty for twenty-seven hours. As Friday nights go in ER, this one was the shits.”

  “But Canelli’ll be okay,” Hastings pressed.

  The doctor nodded. “Barring complications—clots, like that—he’ll be fine. He won’t be walking for a while, though. Or doing any deep breathing, either.”

  “What about the other one? Vance?”

  “He’s got multiple gunshot wounds, most of them superficial. What was it? A shotgun?”

  “Buckshot. From about fifty feet.”

  “Ah.” As if he were filing the information for future reference, the doctor nodded. “Buckshot. Yes.”

  “When can we talk to them?”

  “Is Vance a criminal? I gather he is, by the two guards.”

  “He’s a suspect.”

  “Ah.” As if he were committing another fact to memory, the doctor nodded again. “Yes. I see.”

  They were standing in the corridor that led from the emergency room to surgery. A gurney and its crew came rushing down the corridor. The patient on the gurney was a young black woman whose hair was elaborately done in bejeweled cornrows. Her half-closed eyelids were fluttering, her gray lips quivering. Sections of her torso were becoming blood-soaked. The two detectives looked at the young woman, then looked quickly away. The doctor hardly looked.

  “So when can we talk to Vance?” Friedman asked.

  The doctor shrugged. “There’s nothing very serious wrong with him, aside from the aftereffects of shock and minor blood loss. If he were my patient—a private patient, I mean, that I felt obligated to protect, mostly for his psychic good health—I’d say you shouldn’t talk to him before, say, twelve hours, just to be safe. But if you’re willing to take the slight chance of causing him distress—bruising him, we might say, psychologically—then I’d say you could talk to him anytime.”

  “Like now?”

  The doctor shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Good.”

  2:02 AM

  “Jesus,” Friedman muttered as they walked down the hospital hallway toward the uniformed guard standing at the end of the corridor. “I’m bushed. I just can’t take these late nights anymore.”

  “You want to go home?” Hastings asked. “I’ll get the guard for a witness.”

  Doggedly, Friedman shook his head. “No. If we can get something before Vance gets a lawyer, it’s money in the bank.” As he spoke, he nodded to the young, alert-looking patrolman standing beside the door marked POLICE WARD. The patrolman nodded cheerfully in return, using a key attached to an enormous plywood fob to open the door for them. Of the three beds in the ward, only one was occupied. Eyes closed, snoring slightly, Vance lay on his back. His breathing was shallow, his face white.

  Just inside the door, Hastings hesitated. “He doesn’t look so good. Maybe we should come back.”

  “Don’t worry.” Friedman gestured, a signal that they should proceed. “By the way, was Vance given his rights, do you know?”

  “I didn’t do it. And Canelli didn’t, that’s for sure.”

  “It sounds like Canelli almost bought the farm,” Friedman observed. “Jesus, what’d we do without Canelli to kick around?” He went to Vance, touched the suspect on the shoulder, then gently shook him. Instantly, Vance’s eyes came open. He blinked once, blinked again, then turned to look at the detectives, who stood side by side, staring down at him impassively, implacable symbols of the law’s unyielding phalanx. Just as impassively, Friedman recited Vance’s constitutional right to refuse interrogation. When the recitation was concluded, Hastings spoke:

  “How’re you feeling, Vance?” He said it coldly, clinically.

  Beneath his brave guardsman’s mustache, Vance’s lips were pale as he muttered, “I hurt.”

  “You almost killed Inspector Canelli. Do you know that?”

  No response.

  “I have to tell you, Vance, that when someone shoots a cop—almost kills a cop, like you did—he’s a marked man. Do you understand that?”

  Still no response.

  “This gentleman”—he moved his head toward Friedman—“he’s a lieutenant, just like I am. We’re the co-commanders of Homicide. And we’re here—both of us—to tell you that we’re going to throw the fucking book at you. Us—the DA, everyone—we’re all out to get you. Because when someone shoots a cop and doesn’t suffer for it, then the next bastard with a gun in his hand is going to pull the trigger that much quicker. So we’re going to make an example of you, Vance. You think you’re suffering now? This is heaven, compared to what’s coming.”

  “The only way you can help yourself,” Friedman said, smoothly picking up the beat, “is to cooperate. Beginning now. Right now, right this minute. That’s why we’re here, to give you a chance to make it easy on yourself. Otherwise, it’s your ass. We walk out of that door, and it begins, for you. If you start to bleed, or you need a drink of water, or you have to take a crap, and you ring for a nurse, nothing will happen, not for an hour or two. But that’s only the beginning. When you get out of here and go to the county jail, where you’ll be held for your pretrial hearing, you’ll be put in a cell with the biggest, most brutal, most drugged-out sex offender we can find for you. And I guarantee you, Vance, that in about a week—a month, maybe, at the outside—you’ll have AIDS. So it doesn’t matter what happens to you in court. Because you’ll already be a dead man. If you keep yourself in shape in the prison gym, do a lot of exercises in your cell, it might be ten years before you die of AIDS. But you will die. And the way you’ll die, you’ll wish you’d killed Canelli and got the death sentence and gone to the gas chamber, quick and clean.”

  “Of course,” Hastings said, “we’ll deny we said this. We’ll deny this whole conversation.”<
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  Vance’s voice was hoarse, no more than a whisper. “I want a lawyer. I’ve got a right to a lawyer.”

  “That you do, Vance,” Hastings said. “But what Lieutenant Friedman is telling you—what we’re trying to make you understand—is that if you cooperate with us, then we’ll do our best to protect you while you’re locked up. But hiring a lawyer—refusing to talk until you get a lawyer—that’s not cooperating.” Heavily, Hastings shook his head. “That’s making it harder for us, not easier.”

  “Which means,” Friedman said, “that we have to make it harder for you. That’s just the way it goes.” Now Friedman, too, lugubriously shook his head.

  Except to blink, Vance made no response.

  Posing now as the suspect’s protector, Friedman continued in the same dire tone, “I hope you remember this, Vance. I hope you remember that we tried to help you. Because you’re different from most of the guys who wake up in this ward. You’ve never been to jail. You might not even believe me, what I’ve been telling you. But when you’re in that jail cell, getting screwed—getting AIDS—you’re going to remember this little talk we’re having here. But by then it’ll be too late. You’ll already have the virus. You’ll already—”

  “I believe you.” In the early-morning hospital hush, the words were almost inaudible.

  Hastings and Friedman exchanged a quick, covert glance. Was this the turning point, these three whispered words?

  “Well, then?” It was a delicately asked question, delicately timed.

  For a long, fateful moment the man in the bed remained mute, staring at the darkened ceiling. Then, clearing his throat nervously, he said, “It was Barbara. Right from the start, it was Barbara.”

  In the moment of charged silence that followed, Friedman inclined his head slightly toward Hastings. The message: Hastings should make the next move, attack from a different quarter, while Friedman watched, waited, calculated.

  Hastings spoke quietly. “There’s no proof that Barbara’s involved. You, we’ve got cold. The Llama you bought killed Hanchett. You didn’t pull the trigger, but we’ve got your fingerprints on the expended cartridges, because you loaded the gun. And the forty-five you bought killed Teresa Bell—and almost killed Canelli. So you’re in deep shit, Vance. But Barbara?” Projecting regret for the hapless suspect, Hastings shook his head. “There’s no proof. Nothing.”