Last Dark Place

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Suit yourself,” said Abe, unsure of the weapon in his hand, concerned that a wild bullet might kill someone else in the small sanctuary.

  “A suggestion,” said Rabbi Wass, behind Abe.

  “It better be a goddamn good one,” said the gunman, looking into Lieberman’s eyes. “We got ourselves one hell of a situation here and running out of time.”

  “You put down your gun,” Rabbi Wass said. “And Detective Lieberman lets you walk out. We all pretend you were never here. We thank God for having saved us and we pray to him to have mercy on you.”

  “And he’ll have mercy on me, your God?”

  Rabbi Wass shrugged.

  “Our God will do whatever he wants to do. We ask. He does what he wants to do.”

  “Very damn reassuring,” the gunman said. “Makes me feel all safe and comfortable. The hell with it.”

  He raised his weapon at Abe, who did the same to him.

  “Let’s get it on,” the gunman said.

  “You’re shickered,” said Marv. “Drunk.”

  “If I wasn’t, I couldn’t be doing this,” the man shouted.

  “I’m going to shoot you in the eye,” said Lieberman. “The right eye. That should be very painful, but it should work. You’re shaking. You can’t shoot straight and I’d say you haven’t spent any time on the range. I’ve got a good chance of living and you’ve got a sure chance of dying. Think about it.”

  The gun wavered in the man’s hand. He chewed on his lower lip and considered his fate.

  “Hell,” he said with a sigh. “I can’t see Lance coming in here and doing this for me. He was always a selfish little prick, but don’t tell my mom I said it.”

  He backed toward the door.

  “Stop,” said Lieberman. “Drop the gun.”

  The man turned his weapon quickly away from Abe, aiming it at Rabbi Wass.

  “I’m going,” he said. “Or I’m going to kill a priest.”

  “I’m a rabbi,” said Rabbi Wass. “We haven’t had priests for almost two thousand years.”

  Odds were, Lieberman calculated, that at this distance and shaking drunk the man with the gun might not hit Rabbi Wass. But then again, he might.

  Abe watched as the man stepped back to the door through which he had come, fumbled at the handle and opened it.

  “Forget I was here,” he said. “I’ll find a better time.” He was looking at Abe now. “I’ll come back sober. I’ll come to your apartment. Your wife’s got a baby growing in her. I’ll come and pay your family a visit. Think about that. Lance wasn’t much but he was my brother and I got to live with myself.”

  “Who says?” said Morrie.

  The man with the gun went through the door and slammed it behind him.

  Abe ran to the door hearing the voices behind him, hearing his brother shout, “Abe, wait.”

  Abe didn’t wait. He went through the door. The gunman was running awkwardly down the synagogue’s hallway toward the front door. Across the hall, the door to the main sanctuary was open. A group of men and women were talking in front of the small platform, the bimah, setting up flowers. One of the women turned and looked at Lieberman and the gun in his hand.

  Abe, tallis flying like a cape, yarmulke held down by his free hand, charged after the fleeing man who was now out the door and into the morning. The man looked, ran to his left and momentarily out of sight. Abe followed into a light morning drizzle.

  The man was running more slowly now, drunk, out of shape. He looked back at Abe, who leveled his weapon. There was no one on the street. People inside the houses adjoining the synagogue were just waking up. Abe was aware of a few cars moving down the street.

  “Stop,” Abe called, not exactly a shout, more like a resigned call.

  The man stumbled forward, turned and fired a shot that went in the general direction of the dark clouds. Abe fired back. The bullet from the small gun hit the concrete sidewalk a few feet behind the now gasping man.

  The man turned, breathing heavily, and lifted his gun. It was hard to read the look on his face, confusion, hate, maybe a little self-pity. Abe fired again and the man tripped backward and fell, his gun leaping from his hand and skittering down the sidewalk away from him.

  Abe stepped forward and stood over the fallen man.

  “My leg,” he said. “Damn, I picked the wrong day to do this.”

  “Want your gun back?” Abe said evenly, aiming his weapon at the man’s face.

  “My gun? I want an ambulance, a doctor. You shot me in the goddamn leg. I’m bleeding to death.”

  “I’ll give you your gun back and shoot you in the face if that will make you feel better,” said Abe, hearing voices behind him coming out of the synagogue. “No more pain.”

  “A doctor,” the man said.

  Abe knelt next to the man and said, “I’m not a religious man, but that”—glancing back at the synagogue—“is where my father and brother pray, where my friends and their families feel safe. You made it dirty. You went to where I live and you came here and threatened my wife and daughter. I take umbrage at that. Can you blame me?”

  The man looking up at him shook his head “no.”

  Footsteps were moving quickly toward the detective and the gunman now.

  “I’m calling an ambulance and I’m having you booked and when you get out, don’t come here or anywhere near my home, my family, or my brother’s family. You understand? No questions. No discussions. I’ll kill you.”

  The man nodded, looking over Lieberman’s shoulder at the men hurrying toward them, tallises flying, a flock of Jew-birds swooping down on their prey.

  “I understand,” the man said, closing his eyes. “It hurts. It goddamn hurts.”

  “It’s supposed to. It’ll hurt for a few years,” said Lieberman, standing. “Then it’ll go away. One more thing, Connie. I didn’t shoot your brother. I was there but another cop did it.”

  “Why didn’t you just say that in there?” the man groaned.

  “Would you have believed me?”

  “No,” said the man, gritting his teeth, blood streaming from his leg.

  “You believe me now?”

  “No, yes. I don’t know. My leg.”

  “Abe,” Maish called behind him. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” said Abe, moving to pick up the gunman’s fallen weapon by the barrel. “Someone call an ambulance and the police.”

  “My son already called the police,” said Rabbi Wass.

  “I’ll call an ambulance,” said Morrie, scurrying back to the synagogue.

  Abe looked at the men who had come to help him: Josh Kornpelt, Marv Stein, and behind them old Cal Schwartz and the tenth man Morrie had pulled from the corridor, Mr. Green. They were shuffling forward clutching their prayer books. Rabbi Wass moved to the fallen, moaning intruder.

  “A gun in the synagogue?” Abe said to his brother reproachfully.

  “When did I ever have a gun?” Maish said, pointing to himself, his droopy face looking hurt.

  “It’s mine,” said Green.

  “He handed it to me,” said Maish. “I passed it to you.”

  Abe looked at the old man.

  “You have a permit for this?”

  “I was a cop,” said Green. “Long time ago, but I was a cop. I got a permit.”

  Abe was about to ask another question when he saw a tall, thin woman in her late thirties come running out of the synagogue holding a black hat on her head with the palm of her hand. The woman was heading for the men and screaming, “Pop.”

  They all turned to watch her join them. Her hair was red, her eyes green and frightened. She looked at Abe who held two guns, at the fallen man, and at Mr. Green.

  “I’m a police officer,” Abe said.

  “He is,” said Rabbi Wass.

  “Pop,” the woman said to Green. “What’s going on? What happened to you? You go to the bathroom and get lost and then I find you out on the street with guns.”

  “They neede
d me,” said Green.

  “For what?” she asked. “We’re here for Dolly’s son’s confirmation.”

  “Bar mitzvah,” said Marvin. “It’s called a bar mitzvah.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” she said, ignoring Marvin.

  “I know,” said Green. “But they needed me.”

  “For what?” the woman demanded.

  “Prayers,” Green said proudly. “They need ten men for prayers.”

  “They need ten Jews for prayers, Pop. Ten Jews. You’re Catholic.”

  “They needed me.”

  “My father’s name is Patrick Ryan Green,” the woman said in exasperation to the men around her as the drizzle stopped. “He doesn’t count.”

  “I think he does,” said Maish.

  “Let’s get to Dolly’s boy’s confir—bar mitzvah,” she said, taking her father’s arm and leading him back toward the synagogue.

  The man stopped abruptly and faced Abe.

  “Is it always like this?” Patrick Green asked.

  “Not always,” said Abe.

  “When are you doing it again?”

  “Tomorrow,” said Maish.

  “Can I come back?” asked Green.

  “Anyone’s welcome,” said Marvin.

  “Amen,” said Cal Schwartz.

  “Pop,” the woman said, rolling her eyes and leading her father away.

  “I’ll get the gun back to you,” called Abe. “Thanks.”

  Green looked over his shoulder, smiled, and said, “I’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

  2

  Thirty-Three Years Later

  LIEBERMAN STOOD IN THE food court of the Yuma airport trying to decide if there was anything there he could eat that wouldn’t be bad for him.

  He was hungry.

  His cholesterol was high. The burning of a future ulcer played his stomach lining like a mandolin. There was almost nothing he could safely eat.

  He was hungry.

  “Hungry?” he asked the men at his side.

  The nearest one, Connie Gower, was taller than Lieberman, heavier, darker, and far more sullen. In thirty years, Gower had lost all his teeth, installed large white ones, cut his hair, and clicked off at least eight mob hits and who knows how many freelance killings. His hair was white, cut short and he always wore a solid turtleneck shirt under a sports jacket. It had become his trademark.

  Lieberman had no trademark. He stood five-foot-seven, weighed 140 pounds, was white of hair, had the face of a sad beagle, and looked a decade older than his sixty years.

  He reached up to touch his mustache and considered his dietary options. They were glum and he was handcuffed to Gower, which didn’t make things better because Connie was definitely in need of a shower. With his right hand, Lieberman grasped a small carry-on, which contained two changes of everything, his toiletries, a paperback copy of Theodore Rex, and a locked metal box. He had put the cuff on Connie’s right hand and his own left so Lieberman could reach under his jacket for his gun if Connie decided to do something stupid, which was not likely, but Connie was desperate and had a few hundred reasons for not wanting to go back to Chicago.

  The primary reason wasn’t even that there was a warrant for his arrest for murder. He could probably beat that. Connie had a short sheet. Besides the terrorizing of Abe’s synagogue thirty years earlier, he had only one other conviction, for carrying a concealed weapon without a license. No, what concerned Connie was the people for whom he had committed the most recent murder and, if it came to it, his other past clients whom he might turn evidence on to cut a deal with the Cook County state attorney, which was why Lieberman’s six-shot .357 Smith & Wesson revolver was tucked into the holster under his jacket. A week earlier he had passed the annual qualification with the weapon with twenty-eight of thirty shots “in the box” at five-, ten-, and thirty-feet ranges.

  Lieberman had come to Yuma because Connie Gower had fled Chicago where he was wanted for murder. Lieberman had fed information on Gower into the LEADS, the national law enforcement computer network, and had sent information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the FBI Fugitive Task Force. Gower had been picked up in Yuma after a traffic accident and the Yuma police had identified him as a fugitive. Abe had obtained an Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution warrant according to Detective Division Special Order 02-03 and filed it with LEADS.

  The man on the other side of Connie was Yuma detective Martin Parsons, no more than thirty, lean, redheaded, neat-suited, and very serious. Parsons was accompanying them through security and onto the plane and no further.

  Parsons was hungry but he was also anxious to get rid of this responsibility. Gower glanced around and said, “Let’s just get on the fucking plane.”

  Lieberman held back a sigh. There would be nothing but pretzels or peanuts and coffee on the America West flight that would take almost six hours with a stop in Phoenix.

  They didn’t stop for food, but Lieberman did pause at a kiosk and pick up two Snickers bars. It would have to hold him. He had no intention of getting off the plane with his prisoner in Phoenix where they had a half-hour layover.

  Lieberman’s partner, Bill Hanrahan, would meet Lieberman and his prisoner when they got off the plane at O’Hare in Chicago. There was no place for Connie to run once they were on the plane and really no place to run before they got on unless he was going to drag Lieberman with him.

  Now a man of Connie’s size, who did not know the little Jewish cop, might consider his odds of simply ripping off the cop’s arm, hitting the Yuma cop with it, and running. There were people in Chicago who wanted Connie dead and had a good track record of making people dead.

  But Connie knew Lieberman not just from their encounter three decades earlier. Both men had reputations. Lieberman had earned his for being willing to do whatever was necessary to control a situation, even if that meant putting a large hole in a big man.

  Lieberman had not shot as many people as Connie Gower. Current count was sixteen. He would have to have a good lawyer and a lot of luck to get a chance at seventeen. Connie had heard that Lieberman had shot five people, killing three of them.

  That’s what Connie was thinking in the food court in the Yuma airport at three in the afternoon, but Lieberman’s mind had been on other things, namely, his hunger and how he and his wife Bess were going to come up with the ever-rising cost of his grandson Barry’s coming bar mitzvah.

  Connie would gladly have given the Chicago cop fifty thousand, cash, nothing traceable, just to turn the key on the cuff and look the other way. But Connie knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  The airport wasn’t crowded. It hardly qualified as near empty. It had rained heavily, was still raining heavily. Flights had been canceled. Their flight to Chicago had been delayed. Lieberman was hungry. He wanted a kosher hot dog. He wasn’t going to get one, not for a while. He considered pulling one of the Snickers bars out of his pocket and decided he would wait till they were safely seated on the plane.

  There were wet spots on the floor. An old black man was mopping them. A man and woman in their fifties, the man with a belly, the woman without, were standing in front of the Burger King counter with two kids, both boys no more than ten and eleven, sulking behind them. One kid was poking the other in the chest with his finger and grinning. The poked kid was turning red. Of course, he was smaller. Lieberman wondered if the couple were the kids’ parents or grandparents.

  A few other people, two flight attendants, both lean women in blue uniforms, hurried past talking. Both women were in their forties.

  Lieberman followed the young cop through security after Parsons showed the uniformed security guard his identification. Security had been expecting the trio.

  On the other side of the machine, through the arch, Lieberman opened his carry-on case under the eye of the heavyset black woman in a blue uniform who didn’t even glance at the handcuffs or Connie. She stayed focused on Lieberman, who removed his weapon, placed it in the metal box, locked the box, put
the box in the carry-on, tucked the key in his pocket, and zipped the carry-on. The woman nodded.

  Lieberman, Parsons, and Connie moved on and a thin, white security checker said to the black woman, “That old guy’s a cop?”

  “Chicago,” she said.

  “They must be desperate in Chicago,” he said with a shake of his head.

  She smiled, looking at the three men about to turn the corner and head down the corridor toward their plane. The old cleaning man pushing his cart waved at the security man and the black woman, and moved around the gate. She waved at him and called, “How you doin’, Billy?”

  The old man nodded and waved back.

  The two detectives and their prisoner were moving slowly. No hurry. There would have been time for a Whopper, a taco, a Big Mac, a chicken salad sandwich. Too late now. No crowds. It was Yuma, early morning. A pair of female flight attendants pulling carry-ons hurried past talking about having three hours in Chicago. A couple with two little kids, one an infant in her father’s arms, the other a little girl no more than three or four with long curls and a pout, being pulled forward toward the gate by her mother, who wore a purple T-shirt with turquoise letters telling those who looked her way that she was She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  A few people were seated by the gate watching the television monitor, which cooed Hawaiian-sounding music and showed a sandy beach. At the desk, the Yuma cop talked to the woman behind it, who nodded and moved to the door to the gangway.

  Lieberman looked around under his droopy lids. He was unarmed but so was everyone else at the gate with the exception of Parsons.

  Actually, that was wrong. One other person was armed. His name was Billy Johnstone. He was almost seventy. He was lean, black, and pushing a cleaning cart on which, under a towel, rested a gun. He stopped about a dozen feet from the three men, pulled a pair of glasses from the pocket of his gray uniform, perched them on his nose with shaking fingers, and reached under the towel.

  Lieberman’s eyes met those of Billy Johnstone. Recognition, not of the face of the man but of the face of a man who suddenly looked odd. No, it was more than “odd,” it was frantic. Lieberman’s hand started under the jacket for the weapon that wasn’t there. Neither Parsons, the young cop, nor Connie Gower saw the old man with the gun. Lieberman shoved at Gower, knowing it was too late.