*****
Just past the kitchen, Mike and Ron found a staircase and made their way up to the second floor of the building. A disconcerting number of rotted wooden stairs caved in under their weight, but luckily, the noise of the band was enough to muffle both the sounds of the decaying wood crumbling to the floor below and their muttered curses.
The second floor was in a state of complete disrepair. Many of the floorboards, like the stairs, had rotted, exposing the ceiling of the renovated rooms on the first floor. Thin slabs of drywall making up the first-floor ceiling were the only intact separation between the two storeys. Mike was sure that he had cracked even that separation several times as he caught himself at the last minute to keep from falling right through the rotten floorboards.
There were no working lights that he could find. A bit of moonlight shone in here and there through the carelessly boarded-up windows in the rooms that fed off the dark hallway, but the weak light cast shadows that confused more than illuminating their way.
Ron decided that it was better to be able to see than to risk falling fourteen feet to the floor below and pulled out his service-issue flashlight. Clicking it on, he immediately shone the light around them both.
Within seconds, Mike found himself chest-on-chest—or, more aptly, chest-on-stomach—with a very large man.
Ron flicked off the flashlight and the entire floor was dark again. It was too late. They had been made. Without thinking, Mike reached around to the small of his back, but there was no gun waiting for him.
Shit. He had turned it over to Julia in the parking garage. Shit, shit, shit.
The man grabbed Mike’s jaw so tightly with one hand that Mike needed both of his hands to try to stop his assailant from squeezing the life out of him.
Where the fuck is Ron? he thought desperately. Fuck!
Mike’s assailant was talking. He could feel the warmth of the man’s breath on his cheek and smell the foulness of it, but his rising panic and fading consciousness ruled out any chance of understanding the man’s words. In desperation, Mike scratched and pulled at the hand until he was able to peel one of the fingers away from his jaw.
Just as he was about to maneuver the finger into his mouth and bite down on it as hard as he could, Mike heard a loud bang. He felt the full weight of the huge man on his left shoulder.
He stepped back and the man fell away with a loud thump that coincided with a brief break in the pounding of the band’s music.
The hallway lit up again.
Mike’s eyes were drawn to the light, but he couldn’t see who or what the source of it was. He looked down at the man lying on the floor to his left.
Mike looked up and saw Ron holding a flashlight in one hand, his service revolver in the other.
“What the fuck?”
“Marksmanship. One of my little hobbies. Travelled for years with the police team.”
“Of course, you did.”
“Clean shoot. He’s still got the gun in his right hand. There,” Ron pointed with the flashlight, not making any attempt to get closer to Mike. “So are we going to find these girls tonight or are we just going to stand around to wait for the band to start up again?”
Mike shook his head. “You, Constable Roberts, are wasting your talents in Traffic.”
“Traffic stop is the most dangerous encounter an officer can have with a member of the public,” Ron said bluntly, sounding more like an OPP patrol cop reading from a teleprompter for a PSA than a man who had just killed someone. “It’s almost midnight. Let’s get these girls of yours, and that’ll be the last you’ll see of me.”
*****
“Let me tell you, Hoagie,” Julia began as they climbed over the rotted wooden frame of the basement window they had just peeled the rusted bars off of, “if I knew that being a cop was this glamorous before I signed up…”
“It’s not too late,” Hoagie grunted, following close behind. “You could always find something else.”
“Madre di Cristo!” Julia exclaimed. “Of course, there have to be rats! Hoagie, mind the rats when you get down here. Why are we down here again?”
“Most likely spot for a fuse box is…?” Hoagie muttered as he lowered himself down onto the filthy dirt floor of the warehouse basement.
“Right, of course. You know,” Julia started musing, “I could always work in fashion. Shoes. Maybe be a buyer for one of those boutiques and get sent to Italy—”
“You got a flashlight?” Hoagie asked.
“Yeah. It’s in my… Oops, no. I don’t. I have one in my purse, but I left that in the car. You know,” Julia took a breath before continuing, “if I knew that being a cop—”
“Never mind. The panel is… Oh fuck!”
“What?”
“The basement leaks.”
“How can it leak? It’s a dirt floor.”
“Well, then, there’s a massive stream running through it. Watch your step.”
“Here,” Julia said, pulling on a cord dangling from the ceiling. “Why don’t we just turn on the lights?” A single light bulb lit up, dimly illuminating the unfinished space.
“And this is why your talents would be lost in retail. See anything that looks like a panel box?”
“No, but I do see someone running out that door.”
Julia took off after the fleeing figure. “HEY! Stronzo! Where do you think you’re going?”
“Julia, wait! I’m stuck!” Hoagie called out, his leg suddenly knee-deep in the mud of what was, in fact, a stream that ran beneath the building.
With his partner gone, Hoagie frantically twisted and turned his leg, the muscles in his foot beginning to spasm as he tried to pull out of the icy mud. He could hear some sort of altercation: a male voice, Julia saying something in what he assumed was Italian, and then nothing.
Fuck, he thought. Not Julia. Please not Ju—
“Hoagie? You coming out or what?”
“Julia!” Hoagie almost cried with relief. “I’m stuck.”
“Well, you better get unstuck because I’m not coming back down to that rat-infested hole. Besides, I think I knocked our fire-starter out cold.”
*****
“So, you found us,” a calm male voice said as Mike and Ron pushed open a door at the end of the hallway.
Mike glanced quickly around the room, his eyes adjusting to the near-darkness. He saw a man leaning casually against some bookshelves, a cell phone in one hand, something shiny in his other.
“I got both of them here,” the man said into the phone, not taking his eyes off the two cops. “Yeah. I can be out whenever you’re ready.”
Curled up on the floor next to the man were five girls, their hands bound with duct tape and duct tape covering their mouths. One girl wasn’t moving at all. Mike looked as closely as time would allow, which was more time than he needed to see that she was dead. The duct tape over her mouth, likely hastily applied, had been pulled up too high and had covered her nostrils. She had suffocated.
He focused on the rest of the girls. Could one of them be Chelsea Hendricks? Would he even recognize her if he saw her now? It had been two years. Two hard years. For both of them.
He looked back at the man and suddenly realized what he was holding in his other hand. Shit! A machete.
“Gun too complicated for you, Malcolm?” he said, now focusing on the machete.
“Too banal,” Malcolm corrected, dragging the tip of the machete across the face of one of the girls.
“You two know each other?” Ron asked, reaching for his still-hot gun.
“Intimately. This is the fucker who shot my partner.”
“I wouldn’t pull that trigger if I were you, officer,” Malcolm advised, yanking the girl he had been accosting up from the floor to shield his own body. “Wouldn’t want to kill both of us, would you?”
Mike glanced back at Ron. Shoot the bastard! he thought. You can make the shot!
Ron lowered his
revolver but did not re-holster it.
“Wise decision, officer. Now before you consider how to get a clear shot at my head…” Malcolm grinned, his lips as dark and narrow as the scar on the side of his face. “Oh, come on now, don’t tell me you were just going to give up? You’re too well-trained for that, aren’t you, officer?”
Holding Malcolm’s gaze, Mike reached to the small of his back and was once again surprised that his gun wasn’t there.
“You shoot and you miss, she dies,” Malcolm said, diverting his attention from Ron to Mike. “You shoot and my explosives guy thinks you didn’t miss, everyone in this building, including our esteemed guests, dies. Your choice, gentlemen.”
Mike found himself wishing, on so many levels, that Sal was here. They had been partners for years. They knew how to read each other. This Ron guy? Maybe he would dive in…and maybe he wouldn’t.
The floorboards began to jump as the band below began another set of noise.
Fuck it.
Mike lunged towards his scrawny opponent, his eyes on the machete. He knew that he was likely to get cut, but he saw no alternative.
There was a shot.
Mike froze.
Another shot...
A pause.
Then another shot. And another. And another.
Suddenly, all sound from the outside world was gone, and all Mike could hear was the thud of his own heart beating and the whoosh of blood rushing through his veins.
Then the world returned: the noise from the band, the duct tape-muffled squeaks from the girls, the ringing in his ears from the gunshots.
“You stupid man!” Malcolm screamed, dropping the machete. He heaved the bullet-riddled body of his human shield at Mike, then grabbed his wounded shoulder. Blood dripped through his fingers. He stared for a moment at his ruined rotator cuff and at the arm that now dangled from it, then turned to kick out the loose-fitting boards that covered the window behind him. Taking a deep breath, he grabbed another girl from the ground, threw her out the window, then leaped out the window himself, using his new hostage to cushion his fall.
Mike grabbed at the girl who had been pushed at him, watching in horror as the blood flooded out of her body to create a pool at his feet. Ron ran to the window, his gun dangling from his hand, and watched the killer and his hostage hobble off into the darkness. He turned and looked back at Mike cradling the dead girl in his arms, both of them sitting in a pool of blood.
“I—” Ron stammered.
“Don’t call it in,” Mike directed, gently laying the girl’s body down beside him as if he were tucking a sleeping child into bed. “We have to get these girls out of here now before he calls his guy and we all blow up. Get the duct tape off them. Have the first one hold the back of my shirt and the others hold hands.”
He looked down at the pitiful little body beside him. “I’ll carry this one over my shoulder and you take up the rear. We gotta get out of here now.”
“This is not at all like Traffic,” Mike thought he heard Ron mumble as the group prepared to mobilize.
*****
“Did you hear that, Hoagie?” Julia said, dropping her side of the man she had been pulling. “Sounded like gunshots.”
“Yeah, someone was shooting. I just hope it was our guys,” Hoagie grunted, still trying to drag their unconscious catch up the last couple of steps towards the back door.
“We gotta get everyone out of the building,” Julia said. She took up the dead weight of the unconscious man again, and they hauled him up the final step out into the fresh air behind the warehouse. “Someone’s going to get hurt.”
“I say we touch base with Robby,” Hoagie gasped, taking a moment to wipe the sweat from his brow as they dropped the handcuffed man. Julia checked to make sure he was still breathing. “Let him know that our pyro guy is down—nice work, by the way—and give him a heads-up that we’ll be ushering the guests out. Maybe he can help direct traffic.”
“Where’s your shoe, Hoagie?” Julia suddenly asked.
“Huh?”
“Your shoe. Where is it?”
“I don’t know. I just pulled my leg out of the mud downstairs and came over to you.”
“And this is why you’re not in retail. Look at you. You’re a mess!”
“Focus, Julia, focus!”
“I am. I’m thinking. Multitasking, even. We gotta get all of those people out and as far away from here as we can.”
She looked back at the warehouse and said softly, “This is not going to end well, is it?”
“Robby? Hoagie here.” Hoagie was already on his cell phone. “Me and Julia heard the shots. We gotta get everyone out of the building. Any ideas?”
There was a pause. Hoagie looked over at Julia.
“What?” Julia whispered.
“Okay, boss. We’re on it.” Hoagie jammed the phone back into his pocket. “Robby says we go in, ID ourselves, do our best to get people out individually or in groups, maybe say there is an urgent matter that they have to attend to outside, lead them out—”
“And that’s why he gets paid the big bucks.” Julia shook her head in mock disgust. “Buyer for a shoe store. That’s my next job. Okay, let’s do this.”
*****
“Listen, boss-man, you either heard shots fired or you didn’t. Which one is it?” Jimmy challenged Robby.
“If I had to put money on it, I’d say I heard shots,” Robby replied, hanging up his cell phone after speaking with Hoagie.
“We’re going in.”
“No. Give my guys five minutes.”
“For what?”
“To get out.”
“You’re fucked.”
“Just five minutes.”
“Listen, just so’s you know, me and my team were the team working the last time we had a copper shot.”
There was an awkward silence between the two men.
“Some white-shirt jackass ordered us to give them five minutes then, too,” Jimmy continued. He cleared his throat as he glanced over at his men who were looking to him for direction. Then he looked back at Robby. “And we all know how that turned out. So cut the crap.”
“That was more than five minutes, and this is completely different.”
“You tell that to my guys,” Jimmy shot back, nodding towards the heavily armed officers. “Or to the widow of the copper we left to die.”
“I’ve got enough notifications to do already, thank you very much,” Robby snapped.
Jimmy stepped away with an audible huff.
“Five minutes,” Robby repeated through clenched teeth, looking at the building and hoping to hell that his team could pull it off.
“No. I’m callin’ the duty inspector. Me and my guys aren’t going to stand around again while one of our own—”
“Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? Do you think I’d let one of my guys die in there? I’ve already lost one. I will not lose another.” Robby yelled, the veins on his forehead popping out. “Do you think I let—”
“I have no fucking clue. Hello, Inspector,” Jimmy said into his phone as he turned and walked a short distance away from Robby.
He returned in a couple of minutes and shoved the phone in Robby’s face. “Here. Says he wants to talk to you.”
Robby, in turn, walked away.
“Says you’re going to give me five minutes,” Robby lied when he returned, handing the disconnected phone back to the ETF sergeant. “Fucker,” he added in a mutter.
“Bullshit!” Jimmy spat, his nose almost touching Robby’s as he moved in to grab his phone.
“You think so? Call him back,” Robby suggested, pushing the phone against Jimmy’s cheek, forcing the ETF sergeant back. “Or do you want me to call him back for you? Tell him you don’t like his decision?”
“Okay. Five minutes. But we start the count from when this conversation began, so you got two minutes left.”
Bristling, the two men
glared at each other, waiting to see which one would back down, surrender, retreat.
“Guys!” Jimmy finally hollered over to his men. “Get ready to go in on my count.”
*****
“What the blazes is that?” Ron shouted to Mike.
“I’m hoping it’s fireworks. Keep moving. Come on,” Mike shouted back. He was starting to get winded, the weight of the dead girl taking its toll on him. “Don’t pull on me, ladies. Push them along, Ron!”
“That’s not fireworks. That’s—”
“Just fucking move!” Mike yelled without looking back, too busy trying to avoid the rotting or missing boards.
“This is not at all like Traffic.”
“Come on, ladies,” Mike called out again, feeling more like a cheerleader than an undercover cop. “Keep moving. I know you’re scared. I know you’re tired. Fuck. I don’t know what you are. Just keep moving.”
They heard another loud bang, and this time, the building shook.
“That is not fireworks,” Ron said as the original plaster on the old ceiling began to crumble and fall all around them.
“Thanks, Sherlock. Keep moving. Where’s your flashlight?”
“It won’t help. The shadows will only disorient you.”
“Try me.” Grunting, Mike hoisted the girl’s body higher up on his shoulder, unwilling to leave her behind.
Much to his annoyance, he realized that Ron was right. The unstable cone of light the flashlight provided was of little assistance beyond accentuating the precariousness of their escape down to the main floor.
“Pass it up to me,” Mike hollered, deciding that it was Ron, not the flashlight, that was the problem.
Somewhere between the two men, however, the flashlight got dropped, finding its resting place on the boards on top of the drywall that made up the ceiling of the finished room below. Their only independent source of light now lay shining up through the gaps in the floor.
“Shit!” Mike muttered.
Another loud bang shook the building, causing most of the remaining ceiling plaster to pelt down on the two cops and their charges.
10-33 Assist PC Page 18