“Sonofabitch!” Santos bellowed, gaping with disbelief.
The Puerto Rican fired.
The shot went wide, ricocheting off the walls way above Nick’s head.
The gunman fired again.
The second bullet hit Fat Boy in the back of the neck, exiting his throat in a spray of esophagus, skin and blood before creasing Timpone’s right bicep.
Gore sprayed Santos as Timpone cried out, dropping his gun.
“Die, asshole!” Santos pulled the trigger as he aimed at Fat Boy’s face.
The top of his head exploded in a shower of brain, bone and red.
Fat Boy stopped, swayed, fell like a truncated redwood, hitting the floor with a sickly wet thud.
Orr was still screaming.
Nick fired at the Puerto Rican, the first shot going wide. The second also missed, but was closer. He was sweating and shaking like a pig having its throat slit. Whatever calm instinct had worked for him yesterday when he’d wounded the psycho with the shotgun had now deserted him.
The gunman fired in return.
So did Santos, who also missed.
Timpone was down on the ground, reaching for his gun, pain and shock creasing his face.
Orr’s screams competed with the deafening claps of the shots.
None of them were thinking straight, the insanity of the situation clamping their fingers on their triggers. But Santos shifted position, moving into target-range stance.
And fired twice.
Both shots hit the Puerto Rican in the upper chest, snapping him back but not putting him down.
“Shit!” Santos spat. “The head, aim for the head!” he shouted at Nick, who steadied himself.
They fired simultaneously.
Once. Twice. Three shots.
A bullet hit the gunman below the left eye, spinning him against the wall.
As Timpone staggered to his feet, gun in hand, Nick saw that Orr had pushed the girl off his chest, frantically punching the back of her head, which was between his legs. Then the sound of his screams changed as she rose up, a bloody piece of meat and torn trousers in her mouth.
All three cops saw it at once and opened fire, Timpone’s hammer clicking on empty chambers, Santos getting off his last shot. Nick fired twice.
The girl jumped for a second. Then a bullet took off the back of her head and she slumped over Orr’s spasming body. His screams stopped suddenly as he passed out.
“I shot him, man. I shot him, three, four times, he kept coming, he kept coming,” Timpone said over and over, his shoulder shaking, his swarthy Italian face a glazed mask of sweat, tears and shock.
“Yeah, man, you shot him. You shot him good. He kept coming,” Santos replied, slapping Timpone across the face, shutting him up. “Don’t lose it, son. Yeah, you killed him, he kept coming.”
Nick was also shaking, his breath pumping in and out in a rush of hyperventilation.
“What…what the…what the fuck’s…going—”
“Going on here? Man, I don’t fucking know,” Santos said as he ran a hand through his hair.
The hallway oozed, awash with blood, cranial matter, viscera, the smell of shit more pungent than ever. But behind it lay a worse odor, the aroma of spoiled meat, and all three cops felt nauseous.
“Call the Medics. And get another couple of cruisers down here,” Santos instructed Nick, then slapped Timpone again, who was weeping like a little kid. “Get a grip, man. It’s over,” he said, putting a hand over his mouth, fighting the desire to throw up.
Nick placed the call, trying to control his shaking body.
“Control, this is Car Seven, copy?”
“Ten-four, Car Seven. What’s your status?”
“We have a 10-39. Three dead bodies and an officer down.” His voice trembled. “Send a couple of E.M.S. vans and backup.”
“Copy, Car Seven. Hang in there.”
“Ten-four, Control. Over and out.”
Sweet Jesus, this was too fucking much, he thought as he turned to look at the carnage. Santos had dragged the dead girl off of Orr, who was bleeding profusely from his wounds. She bit his cock off! Holy God, she chowed down on his balls. Bile fizzed in his stomach, and he gripped the wall, attempting to keep it down. Not again. No. Jesus, this…this is totally bugfuck. He shot him, he shot him four times before Santos put him down. Nick’s mind spun and he felt reality bend at the edges.
Timpone was shaking worse than Nick was, gripping his arm like it was going to drop off, his fingers clenched around the empty gun as he watched Santos check Orr’s vital signs. The cop was losing a river of blood from his groin, and Nick looked away, again ready to puke.
Without realizing it, he started to walk down the hallway in the opposite direction, trying to escape from the stench and the sight of Orr’s severed cock lying in a puddle of blood.
“Packard!”
Nick wasn’t listening.
“Hey, Packard, get your ass back here, now!”
He turned to face Santos, but he couldn’t move.
The detective was trying to stanch the flow of blood from Orr’s groin. “Get down here!”
Keep it together. Got to do it. He forced himself to walk back towards the bodies. Timpone was staring into space, trembling with shock as he let himself slip down the wall to sit on the floor.
“I shot him, man, I shot him. He kept coming.”
How could a wounded man take four—no, five, Nick reminded himself, thinking about the slug which had torn through Fat Boy’s throat—five hits and stay standing? And what about the girl? What was this biting thing? Were they on some kind of super-Angel Dust or something? God only knew. He couldn’t deal with it, the whole thing was too fucking weird for words.
“Help me, man. He’s bleeding bad.” Santo’s face had softened with real concern, and Nick knelt down beside the unconscious cop, his mind strangely lucid, his muscles relaxing as the gravity of the situation came into focus. Orr was going to die from loss of blood if the E.M.S. guys didn’t get here fast.
“Take over,” said Santos, pulling Nick’s hand over to replace his on the wound. “I’m going to check the other rooms.”
The detective stood, taking a new clip of bullets from his belt and reloading.
Nick looked at the dead girl. She was a bag of bones, her once pretty features sunken from drug abuse, her skin pale in comparison to the smear of blood across her lips.
He squeezed his eyes shut to blot out the image, vaguely aware of the faint banshee wail of approaching sirens.
Please, God, let me wake up from this nightmare.
But there would be no more pleasant dreams. Some prescient instinct told him the real shit had yet to hit the bricks, and before it was going to be over, it was going to get worse.
A hell of a lot worse.
WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN.
2:07 P.M.
The Avallone Funeral Home had stood on the corner of North 8th Street and Metropolitan Avenue for over thirty years, and as far as Dick Austin was concerned, if it stood there for another day it was one fuckin’ day too long.
He ran a hand through his short, spiked hair as he dragged on the Marlboro, savoring the smoke during his short break. He found himself looking at the rear of the building because he had nothing better to do in the five minutes before he went back to dressing stiffs.
The building’s original color had been gray, but that was long gone. Dried bird shit ran in white, crusted streaks down the monoxide-stained brick like melted Haagen Dazs. Real pretty. The front of the building was pale blue, neat and regularly scrubbed of the grime that coated every house and shop front in the neighborhood. The idea, he guessed, was to make the business of death seem as clean as possible. But the back revealed the Home’s true face. Just like the corpses inside, he thought; clean, neat, cosmetic on the surface, but rotting away on the inside.
Some damn job. Some fuckin’ life.
Six weeks before, Dick had been working at a mini-mart down on the south side, stocking shelves wit
h cans of spic food—Goya beans, Goya clam sauce, Goya baby shit, Enchilada TV dinners, and the rest of the crap those grease monkeys ate. He’d been doing that shit for a month, day in and day out, trying to earn enough to get up the deposit on a new apartment so he and Ruthie and the kid could get out of Brooklyn. Maybe they’d try New Jersey, find a cheap place in the ‘burbs. Long Branch, or somewhere like that. Anywhere was better than here.
Williamsburg’s South Side was another neighborhood that’d been run into the ground by those lowlife pieces of shit from Puerto Rico. Scum. Every last one of them. It didn’t matter where you put them, those greasy bastards could turn a building into a shithole in the space of a week, then a street, then a neighborhood. Fuckin’ Salsa music day and night, drugs, shitty food and the worst taste in clothes imaginable. But he’d fucked it up again. Juan, the manager, had caught him taking a small Boar’s Head ham, and the shit had hit the fan. Out of a job, out of money, and a beating at the hands and feet of Juan and his brother. He’d lost a tooth and he realized he was unconsciously probing the gap, as the bitter memory rubbed salt into an already open wound.
Some life.
New York wasn’t the Big Apple; it was a big fucking black hole that devoured your dreams. Dick had hoped—no, believed—he could make it as a musician here. There’d been fat chance of that in Mansfield, Ohio, a reality he’d come to realize with the cold sober clarity of an alcoholic waking up and finding the bottle dry. Marty Turkis had been the one who’d taught him that lesson, good old Marty the Blues player, a man who could make a guitar sing to your heart; Marty who, at forty-three, was still playing bars because he couldn’t leave town. Oh, he’d tried. He’d tried several times, but Marty had that small town mentality John Mellencamp sang about.
Turkis just couldn’t cut it in the big city, but you’re different, Dick, he’d told him one night after they were done practicing, Dick having mastered “All Along the Watchtower” until it sounded as good as Dylan. You’ve got a real talent, kid, Marty had repeated, don’t waste it in a town like this one. So he’d practiced, worked hard, saved his money and when he was eighteen, left the place of his birth for the big city. Marty had put him in touch with Gerry Johnson, a drummer who played the NY circuit as a sessions man, and within a week he was playing gigs twice a week at Dan Lynch’s on Second Avenue, covering Muddy Waters tunes, Robert Johnson’s Delta Blues and every standard you could think of. It wasn’t Madison Square Garden, but that didn’t matter. He was playing the big city and making a living at it.
Then, once the city had him fooled, had him believing nothing could go wrong, it took his hopes and dreams and tore them apart as viciously as the knife that cut the tendons in his left wrist.
He took one last drag on the butt and threw it down, looking at the ivory scars that were a constant reminder of the night three years ago when two greaseballs had attacked him at the 14th Street station, trying to get his billfold. He’d put one of them down with a kick to the balls, but the other had cut him. He’d lost four hundred bucks and his ability to play, and life had turned sour in a big way.
There was no point thinking about all that again. He better get back to work. The Avallone brothers were regular slave drivers, always on his case if he didn’t get things done by last Tuesday.
“This sucks.”
He had to dress some fat old woman who’d choked on a chicken bone and who was due to go into the ground tomorrow. Still, being a mortuary assistant paid better than working for that spic fuck, Juan. He’d learned the basics as a teenager, working part-time for Uncle Freddy, but soon decided he didn’t want to make a living among the dead. But never say, never, right? He sighed.
Dick got off the trash can he’d been using as a seat and strolled towards the rear entrance.
A scream rent the air, slapping him out of his bitter state.
He dashed towards the door.
The Avallones were a couple of faggy muscle boys who swanned around like a pair of queens in a bogus deck when the doors to the funeral home were closed and they got to play Barbie’s Beauty Parlor with the stiffs and their make-up kit. The scream could have come from either of them. Once they came out to play Dorothy and Wendy, you couldn’t tell the brothers apart.
Maybe they were just having a bitch fit, he thought, skidding to a halt on the gravel outside the door, feeling stupid at his freaked-out response.
It was the scream Ruthie had shrieked when those two Spic Crack pimps had tried to bang her, his mind echoed.
A second, longer scream tore from the building.
“Shit,” he spat.
Didn’t sound like an hysterical queen. The scream sounded
like—
The door opened and the naked fat woman wobbled out, the drainage tube he’d inserted in her neck that morning poking out like an arrow from her throat. Her eyes blazed insanely as she plucked the metal tube out, dropping it on the ground.
“Yum-yums,” she muttered as she laid eyes on Dick.
“No fucking way, man!” His mind yelled, his feet backpedaling on the gravel.
The old bitch was dead, and he wasn’t really seeing this—
An emaciated naked man stumbled out behind her, blood staining his pale, shriveled torso. The old World War II veteran who used to live down the street until he’d kicked off last week.
Jesus God and the Saints, the old boy had an arm in his hands and was chewing like a dog scavenging the flesh off of a bone.
“Yum-yums,” the fat woman repeated, licking her lips.
Dick let out a yelp, turned and ran, leaping onto the chain link fence at the end of the yard and frantically hauling himself over. He threw himself down on the other side, rolling off the trash sacks as he heard the fat woman run to the fence, shrieking in rage.
Dick scrabbled upright, not daring to look back as he raced for the passageway leading between the buildings in front of him.
THE 19th PRECINCT.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
4:30 P.M.
Every cop crowding the muster room looked tired and strung-out, Nick thought, as he and Santos made space for themselves at the back. Even the most seasoned patrolmen were tense, nervous. The last twenty-four hours had taken the men of the 19th on a quick tour of Hell. Thirty-five assaults, twenty-five shooting incidents, seventeen rapes, numerous burglaries, a small riot on Union and Cherry—it was no wonder every cop looked ready to explode.
Captain Sienkiewicz entered the room via the double doors at the front and made his way up to the podium. A hush fell on the room. Even those cops off-duty had been called in for the briefing, and rumors were rife that something big was going down. Word had it the Mayor had called a meeting with the top brass that morning and every precinct captain was invited, too.
“I’m not going to beat around the bush,” the captain said. “As you’re all aware, the streets of Washington have condensed into one giant pressure cooker, and the situation is dangerously close to exploding. In the last twenty-four hours the crime rate has jumped forty-three percent in this precinct alone, and we’ve lost five men. Before I continue with this address, I’d like us all to observe a minute’s silence in respect of the fine officers we’ve lost.
“Hampton, Orr, Wrightson, Gaydos and Gentile.
“All were fine men. Let us honor them.”
The captain bowed his head and most of the cops did likewise.
The minute passed slowly.
“Thank you,” Sienkiewicz said, looking up to face his men.
He sighed, paused, searching for the right words.
“As some of you—most of you—are aware, the situation we’re facing is,” he hesitated, “extremely unusual. And to be honest, I don’t really know what to say.” He paused again, looking down at his polished shoes.
“There was an emergency meeting with the Mayor this morning. It appears Washington is the target of a gang of subversives.”
A ripple went through the crowd of cops.
“No shit,” Tranksen m
uttered under his breath.
“Based on the information we have, it appears this city has been infiltrated by a terrorist group who is provoking social unrest in the projects.”
Several cops whispered amongst themselves. Captain Sienkiewicz raised a hand to silence them.
“I know. It sounds unbelievable, but the evidence suggests it is a truth we’re going to have to deal with. Only we don’t exactly know who, or what, we’re dealing with.”
Another ripple passed through the room.
“As a result, the Mayor has requested all leave be canceled. Due to the gravity of the situation, not only do we need every available man and woman on the streets, but you’re also going to have to work double-shifts effective now.”
Every cop in the room’s face dropped.
“I know, it’s not what any of you need, but it’s official. This city is fast approaching a state of emergency, and as the police force, it is our duty to protect and serve the citizens of the community.
“Every officer is to be issued with a bulletproof vest and riot gear. We’re expecting major trouble.”
The room erupted into a throng of angry, confused voices, just as the captain expected.
Santos laid a paternal hand on Nick’s shoulder.
“What the hell’s he talking about?” Packard asked.
Santos placed a finger to his lips.
“Let’s have some order here!” Duty Sergeant Allred shouted from the side of the podium. “Come on, order!”
The captain raised a hand to quiet his audience.
“Listen to me, men. I know this is an intimidating situation we’re facing—”
“This is bullshit!” shouted a large, beefy cop near the door whom Nick hadn’t seen before. “Terrorists? Subversives? What the fuck is going on, captain?”
“Order!” Allred bellowed. “You’re out of line, Eisner!”
“No way!” Eisner shot back. “This is crap. What’s really going on? This has nothing to do with subversives—”
“Order!” Allred bellowed again.
“—this involves some crazy shit. What about the dead people?!”
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