The Easytown Box Set

by Brian Parker

  She returned alone. “He’s going to get the mutation device. Neither of us think forcing the IV is the best thing.”

  “I’m giving the guy the benefit of the doubt by staying until this is done,” I replied. “I could just leave.”

  “And never be able to walk pain free again,” she reminded me. “It’s not really a good option.”

  “I’ll take what I can get.”

  “So you’re still gonna go down there?”

  “You’re goddamned right I am,” I replied. “I’m going to get Karimov, one way or another.”

  “I don’t like it, Zach.”

  “You don’t have to like it. I’m doing it.”

  “Why are you like this?” she asked, clenching her hands at her sides. “It’s maddening.”

  “Because I have a sense of duty.”

  “Your sense of duty has gotten you kicked off the police force! Your sense of duty has gotten you beat up, stabbed, run over, and shot. Your sense of duty has pushed away every woman who’s been interested in you. Have you ever thought about that?”

  I shook my head. “That’s just who I am. I have to see this through.”

  “No, you don’t. There’s an entire SWAT team in position to raid the Dockyards, as well as two precincts’ worth of uniformed cops surrounding that place. You don’t have to do anything except try to recover.”

  “I’ll get this guy and then take a few days of down time.”

  “You are such an arrogant asshole,” she stated, surprising me. “You have such an inflated sense of self-worth that you think all of those other cops aren’t going to be able to stop Karimov.” She turned and grasped the door handle before I could reply.

  Then she walked out of my life.

  EIGHTEEN: SATURDAY

  I ran my wrist over the credit scanner to pay the taxi and stepped out into the rain. I didn’t have a jacket or an umbrella since it’d been sunny on the day I was MEDEVAC’d by the police drone. I wore clothes from the donation pile and somehow, I’d lost my phone, so I wasn’t able to contact Andi or the Jeep. Thankfully, the hospital security had both my service pistol and the Aegis. I’d have been screwed if I lost either of those.

  It felt strange going to a case, or more appropriately, into combat, without Andi there beside me for instant updates and information gathering. It was the second time in as many months where I’d been without her assistance since I’d had to go off the net during the clone case as well.

  For a guy who hates tech, you’re awfully dependent upon it, a voice whispered in the back of my head.

  It was true. While I hadn’t been totally lost without her help, it had made that case much harder. I hoped that I didn’t run into any situations where I needed her today.

  I made my way through several layers of police security, flashing my badge and submitting to a facial scan at each checkpoint. Several officers patted me on the back, congratulating me on my speedy recover, while others scowled at me for being the source of their twenty-four hour duty on the perimeter of a major hostage situation. Finally, I made it to the Easytown Mobile Command Unit.

  The MCU was a massive wheeled hoverskiff variant, designed to provide real-time command and control to high-profile situations. The unwieldy beast was better suited for driving down the four-lane freeway than the crowded alleys of Easytown or of flying gracefully through the air, but it could do both, bringing the command suite to where it was needed most.

  Right now, the damn thing was simply a place for wet cops to get out of the rain and have a cup of coffee.

  “I don’t care what they’re demanding,” Brubaker shouted from his office far in the back of the MCU. “We aren’t negotiating with those dickwads. You hear me? No negotiations.”

  “That’s not how a hostage situation works, Chief Brubaker,” a male voice I hadn’t heard before replied.

  I stood on my tiptoes to see if I could figure out who it was back in the office with him, but I couldn’t make him out. The only thing I could see was the back of a blond head with short, styled hair and the shoulders of a dark blue or black suit. Brubaker glanced beyond the man and I ducked back down to avoid being seen by him.

  The only reason I’d come to the MCU was to get the latest intel on the situation. Otherwise, I’d have just gone to Warehouse Six and made my stand. It wasn’t a great plan, hell, it wasn’t even a smart one, but frontal assaults were my specialty.

  Like I said, I spent a lot of time in the hospital, and the NOPD Officer’s Union insurance plan worked on overdrive for me.

  I wondered what I’d do as a replacement once I was let go. I examined vidscreens and maps on the walls of the MCU while I listened passively to the officers manning the communications systems.

  Lieutenant Fairchild’s SWAT team was in position around Warehouse Six, where they believed the bulk of the hostages to be. Snipers were on top of the shipping container walls, ready to engage any threat they scoped.

  Our electronic countermeasures unit had also been called into play. The defensive team was actively jamming all signals coming from or going into the Dockyards that weren’t from a police radio, while the offensive team had tapped into the building’s security systems and watched everything that Karimov’s people did. They hadn’t seen Karimov in several hours, though, and a rumor circulated that he’d somehow managed to slip the net.

  I doubted it. There had to be another explanation. The guy had been able to run his synthaine operation from here, without anyone finding out about it except Ortega—that I knew of. In reality, I had no idea how many people he’d killed since Branch Corrigan wasn’t much of a talker while he tortured people in his videos.

  Two of the MCU’s vidscreens held images of the Dockyards. One was a real time satellite feed showing Warehouse Six and the immediate area that switched between thermal and naked eye views intermittently, while the other was of the registered blueprints from when the buildings were originally built.

  I studied the satellite thermal image view for a while. I saw hundreds of heat signatures inside the warehouse, but it was nearly impossible to tell who was a hostage and who was a hostage taker. With few exceptions, all of the signatures were a giant blob of white.

  When the screen switched back to the normal view, I examined the warehouse from above. Nothing really stood out as special or a place where a sniper could conceal themselves to fire at the SWAT guys as they advanced. I did note how the placement of the shipping containers resembled a series of concentric half-circles with the ends terminating at the water’s edge.

  The city had a token riverine force, primarily used for fishing bodies out of the Mississippi. It wasn’t capable of transporting part of the SWAT team in stealth for an amphibious attack. They could stop some of the criminals from escaping by boat though, which is why they were currently arrayed as a blocking force out toward the Gulf, and one of the reasons why I didn’t think that Karimov had escaped.

  Not that they’d be able to do anything if Karimov’s people got in one of those big cargo ships, I mused. They’d slice right through those trawlers like a hot knife through butter.

  Besides noting that my Jeep was still where I’d parked it, there wasn’t much else to see on the satellite imagery, so I switched my attention to the blueprints. There were several places highlighted on the screen, indicating possible points of entry for the SWAT breaching team. I studied the blueprints for almost ten minutes without anything jumping out at me. There were no secret underground tunnels connecting warehouses or hidden rooms where people could ride out a hurricane until the storm passed—although, I’m not sure why I’d thought that was even an option. The water table down here was so high that a hole filled with water after only eighteen inches, probably even worse right next to the water.

  I nudged one of the officers scrolling through additional imagery and cross-referencing it with MainFrame data to determine if there were options that no one was seeing here in the MCU. “Any luck finding a way in that doesn’t involve getting
a bunch of hostages killed?”

  “Not yet, Detective,” she replied, noting the golden badge I’d pinned to my belt.

  I could tell that she didn’t want to be bothered, but I needed to know who was talking to Brubaker, so I asked her.

  “FBI hostage negotiator,” she replied tersely.

  “Ah. Makes sense.” I stepped back. “Thanks for the info.”

  “Sure,” she said without missing a beat as she continued to scroll through the data. I began to turn to see if there was something else in the MCU that would give me inspiration to break the stalemate at the Dockyards when something on the officer’s screen caught my eye and I edged closer.

  “Excuse me, sir,” she said, sliding her shoulders out of the way so my wet clothing wouldn’t touch her.

  “Sorry,” I replied, easing back slightly. “Can you scroll through those historical satellite images again?”

  “I’ve been through them fifteen times,” she stated. “There’s nothing here.”

  “Can you just humor me, please?”

  “Sure. Why not, I’m not going anywhere until this thing is over anyways.”

  She began advancing the images, spaced about twenty-four hours apart; some more, some less, including several nighttime shots. Ships came and went at the piers, most often unloaded and reloaded within the time between images. By the time she’d gone through thirty images in the space of two minutes, I was convinced about what I’d seen.

  “Go to the satellite image from the moment we learned about the hostage situation.”

  Another glance over her shoulder at my badge; she was trying to determine whether or not to follow my instructions. After a few seconds of deliberation, she typed in the command and advanced the images a few times, then began reversing them until she came to where she started.

  “Son of a bitch!” I whooped. “He’s on that old cargo ship across the channel.”

  Sure enough, in all of the images, a rusty cargo ship had been docked across the channel from Warehouse Six. I’d noticed several boats pulled up alongside the old dock and trucks parked at various times of the day and night at the end of the jetty.

  “Forrest? You’re supposed to be in the hospital,” Chief Brubaker’s voice erupted from down the hallway.

  I pointed at the satellite image on the MCU’s vidscreen, realizing that the cargo ship wasn’t in view. “Chief, I know where Karimov is. Probably where the synthaine production facility is too.”

  “What do you mean you know where he is?” Brubaker said, pushing his way through the press of bodies inside the command unit. “You’re telling me he isn’t in Warehouse Six with the rest of his people and the hostages?”

  “I don’t think he is,” I replied, shaking my head.

  I waited for him to get through the crowd and then pointed to the smaller vidscreen in front of the female officer. “Can you go back a few weeks and then begin moving forward?” She complied and I pointed at the old cargo ship while she advanced the images slowly. “That ship has been moored up on the jetty across from the warehouse for several months, maybe longer, I’m not sure. See how every day new container ships come in, get unloaded and leave, while that thing stays there?”

  “Sure, but—Wait, there are boats and trucks coming and going to it, but it never leaves.”

  I smiled. Chief Brubaker still had the gift for investigative work. “That’s right. Then, right around the time that the standoff began, some smaller boats made their way from the warehouse side toward that bigger boat. Obviously, we can’t see where they go since this is just a photograph that happened to be taken at the right time, but I’d be willing to bet a few weeks’ pay that they went to that cargo ship.”

  “Our analysts have been staring at this place for almost forty-eight hours and haven’t seen shit. You sneak in here, soaking wet, and figure it out in a few minutes.” He looked up from the screen to me. “Who does the boat belong to?”

  “Uh… I hadn’t gotten that far yet, Chief.”

  He patted the female officer on the shoulder. “Get on that, Gracie. Find out who owns that boat and what its story is.”

  She nodded, gritting her teeth so hard that the muscle along her jaw threatened to jump from her skin.

  “Come on, Forrest. We have a few things to talk about.”

  “I’ve got some bad news for you, Zach,” Chief Brubaker stated once he’d closed the door to his tiny office in the MCU. It was the first time I could remember him calling me by my given name instead of my last name.

  “If it’s about the district chiefs’ panel vote, I already know.”

  “You do?” he asked, seeming genuinely surprised.

  “Yeah. Someone from Internal Affairs notified me this morning.”

  “Those sonsabitches,” he groused. “They weren’t supposed to notify you; I was. Probably sent a courier droid with a message to the hospital, didn’t they?”

  “No, it’s not like that, Chief. IA didn’t officially notify me. A friend of mine works there and she came to the hospital to tell me what the results were.”

  He scowled. “Your friend? You mean that skirt they sent to entrap you? She shouldn’t have told you anything; it wasn’t her place.”

  “If she hadn’t, I’d still be at the hospital and you wouldn’t have a potential lead,” I countered.

  “Okay, granted. Now, go back to the hospital and finish your treatment so you don’t come back and sue the department in a few months when you develop health complications due to inadequate treatment.”

  “I received the full treatment,” I replied, omitting the part where the doctor had told me he wasn’t sure it would take since I’d flooded ten hours’ worth of stem cells into my bloodstream in twenty minutes. Details.

  “Okay, then go home and rest up. I’m sure they gave you a mandatory rest period in your discharge instructions.”

  “I didn’t stick around to get the discharge instructions. This is my case and I’m gonna see it through before I get fired for all the other times I’ve done my job.”

  He looked as if I’d slapped him in the face. “I tried, you know. They were dead-set on making an example of you to keep the officers in their precincts in line.”

  I stopped him with raised hands. “Chief, it’s okay. I’m fine with it. I saw the writing on the wall a few months ago when I had to speak to IA about my inadvertent violation of the Immorality Clause. They had a hard-on to nail me to the wall; it just took a little longer than they’d expected. When I found out Katheryn was IA, I knew the outcome.”

  “Regardless, I’m sorry, Forrest. Damn piss poor way to run an organization.”

  “Really? That’s how it’s been the entire time I’ve been a cop.”

  “That’s a shitty memory of your time as a police officer,” he grunted.

  “It is what it is, Chief.”

  He picked at his fingernail for a moment before replying. “I should relieve you of all your current investigations to let you finalize any outstanding reports and to prepare a transition brief for your replacement.”

  “Who’s that gonna be?”

  “Doug Sanders, from the—”

  “I know the cocksucker,” I said, cutting him off. “He’s a shitty detective, Chief. He didn’t even get statements from the witnesses at the Liquid Genesis when all those people were shot by the cyborgs.”

  He nodded and shrugged. “I can’t help it, Forrest. I need an interim guy, and until I can grow somebody of my own choosing from within my precinct, I’m stuck with the department’s castoffs. You were supposed to be my guy for another ten to fifteen years.”

  It was my turn to shrug. “I didn’t ask for this.” Somehow, I was still surprisingly unfazed by the revelation that I’d been fired and wouldn’t have a job in a month.

  “I know you didn’t,” Chief Brubaker replied. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t cheapen yourself by apologizing for something that you didn’t have any control over
.”

  He grunted again and said, “So, what’s your idea on how to get Karimov?”

  I laid out the basics of my idea, pitching the concept of a classic feint, and glad that he didn’t try to patronize me with further attempts at an apology.

  It felt good to be doing something, even if it was, most likely, my last official act as a cop.

  NINETEEN: SUNDAY

  I yawned against the back of my hand. It was past midnight and I was in position on the jetty opposite the warehouse where the hostages were being held. Arresting Karimov was a secondary objective for the department. Safely rescuing those hostages was the primary mission, but the chief had enough faith in my theory and respect for me as a cop that he’d assigned Drake, Collins and O’Brien, who were members of the SWAT team, and one of their drones to come with me. He’d also re-tasked a sniper from the other side of the port to assist, which I wasn’t thrilled about since they were shooting toward me.

  We’d scanned the boat several times. Thermal imaging told us that there were two humans in a room on the top deck, probably Karimov’s security element, and several more standing or sitting at various locations below decks, plus another ten in the bottom of the boat. I thought those were likely workers producing the synthaine, or maybe a few more hostages, I couldn’t be sure until we went in.

  I’d been here for almost three hours, waiting for things to kick off. Drake mentioned on more than one occasion that today was Mothers’ Day and tomorrow was Memorial Day, both of which he was supposed to be off of work for. I couldn’t help but think he blamed me for screwing up his schedule since I’d sought out Karimov when I did. I’d have to take things like holidays into consideration when I wasn’t a cop anymore.

  Finally, it sounded like Lieutenant Fairchild’s teams were ready to breach the building and put an end to this hostage situation once and for all. The mayor was coming down hard on the department to resolve the issue before the FBI completely took control of the situation by bringing in their Hostage Rescue Team. He didn’t want the first crisis that he faced as the city’s new mayor to be yanked away from his control by the federal government.