by Margaret Carter, Crystal Green, Erica Orloff, Patricia Rosemor
“Think we should call someone to come take him to Bellevue?” Alex asked, turning up the collar of his coat. “It’s an awfully cold night. Even if they just keep him for a twenty-four-hour observation, he’ll get a warm bed for the night, maybe calm down. Sounds like this dude can use some Thorazine.”
Flynn squatted and tried to look the man in the eye. The man tried to reel away. Flynn said, “Easy there, partner. Take it easy. Now, what did you say you saw?”
“Zombies.” The man was clearly terrified. Even as he spoke, he kept looking over his shoulder, agitated. “They’re making Shanghai Red. Shanghai Red. Chinese zombies.”
“Jesus,” Williams said.
Flynn leaned in closer to the man. He was dressed in rags, and his teeth were rotted, eyes wild. But when he looked intently at Flynn, there was a hint of sanity.
“Shanghai Red?” Flynn whispered.
“Yeah. At the warehouse. Two blocks that way.” He pointed toward the river.
“Okay, buddy. You get inside the diner and have a hot meal.” Flynn stood and pulled a card from his wallet. “Then I want you to head to this shelter. Ask for Sister Teresa. She’ll help you.”
The man took the card and nodded.
“I mean it. Sister Teresa. Tell her Detective Flynn sent you.”
“Flynn…Flynn…” the man mumbled. “And…and you’re going to get the zombies, right?”
Alex and Flynn both nodded, then helped the homeless man to his feet, pointing him in the direction of the diner.
Flynn looked at Alex and said, “Let’s do this.”
They took off on foot toward the warehouse that the homeless man had indicated. They didn’t see the man in the shadows a block to the north. They didn’t see him snap the neck of the homeless man. They only saw the warehouse looming next to the cold and black Hudson River.
Tessa’s legs were cramping. She crouched on the fire escape, her arms hugging her sides for warmth, and tried to decide what she was going to do. Panic was one option—but one she couldn’t afford.
A fire was a logical choice, but with the Dobermans roaming down below, she had to do it without drawing too much attention to herself. On top of that, she wasn’t sure she could ignite a blaze big enough to destroy the building—and the creatures inside it.
She could drop in through the window and fight them. Vampire slaves were poor decision-makers. Even outnumbered, she could probably beat them—for a while. But eventually, the sheer number of them would render her powerless from exhaustion.
She could let the new batch of drugs hit the streets…and then pick off the chemist and Marco and the leaders of this new cartel one by one. But that would flood Manhattan with the most dangerous drug since crack. Right now, Shanghai Red was still elusive. If all the drugs in that warehouse hit the marketplace she imagined junkies dying in droves. And then it would, like all drugs, make its way out to the suburban shopping malls. There would be no stopping it.
She thought perhaps she could call Flynn and bring the wrath of the NYPD down on this warehouse. But involving police in vampire business wasn’t her style. That would leave too many unanswered questions for the police to delve into. One look at the zombies, and the cops would know something truly strange—even for New York City—was going on.
Suddenly, it became a moot point.
Below, a Doberman began barking sharply, almost howling. Soon, all four Dobies were agitated.
Tessa moved away from the window and saw Flynn and Williams squeezing through a hole in the chain-link fence. “Damn,” she whispered. Now what? They were good cops, excellent detectives, but they would be no match for what was behind those doors.
There was no time to warn them…. Then she grew excited. Oh, the gadgetry of the twenty-first century. Tessa took out her cell phone and dialed Flynn, praying he had his phone on vibrate. He did, as she didn’t hear a ringing down below.
“Flynn here” came the whispered voice on the other end.
“It’s Tessa,” she whispered. “You are in danger. Call for backup.”
“How do you—?”
“Please, Flynn. Trust me. Make the call.”
She hung up, not giving him time to ask questions. She knew Flynn, or at least she thought she did. Flynn would call for backup. But he was a warrior, so he would also get inside that warehouse. And she had to be sure the odds were more even before that happened. She raised the window farther and climbed into the building.
The warehouse was a maze of metal catwalks. Tessa crept along them, noiseless. Good thing she wasn’t afraid of heights. Peering down on the chemical lab below, she saw the crumpled body of the woman the chemist had shot in the temple. These weren’t people to mess around with, and she prayed Flynn and Alex Williams would be able to stay alive long enough for backup to arrive.
A commotion broke out on the floor.
“Did you just stick some of this Shanghai Red up your nose, asshole?” A guard took a billy club and raised it menacingly above the head of a fidgety young man.
“No,” the young man replied in a pleading voice.
“I saw you,” the guard said, bringing the club down on the young man’s skull with all his might. He fell in a heap like a sack of laundry.
Keep this up and you’ll have no one left to work here, Tessa mused. Then again, the more of their own they killed, the fewer there were for Flynn, Williams and her to fight against. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Flynn and Williams creeping in from the back of the building. The guard’s beating of the young man had provided just the distraction they needed.
Tessa moved along the catwalk, crouching low, blending into the ceiling with her black clothes. She willed Flynn to look up at her. Focusing her internal energy, she tried to concentrate on him, speak to him with her mind. She knew Marco sometimes did that to her. She was grateful when Flynn did look up, but his dark expression told her he was worried about her. Well, she thought, he’ll soon learn I can take care of myself.
Suddenly, a blood-curdling scream filled the warehouse, shaking Tessa to the core. Peering over the catwalk, she saw that a female slave had spotted Flynn and Williams. They had no choice but to dive for cover and draw their weapons.
“NYPD…Everyone put your hands up! We’ve got you surrounded.”
“He’s bluffing,” the Asian man in the lab coat said loudly. He made some hand signals to the guards, three or four of them, who withdrew guns and began fanning out across the warehouse floor.
Frightened, the drug slaves started their keening sound, moaning and wailing, and covered their faces with their hands. The Asian man was visibly irritated by their noise. He ripped a gun from the hands of one of the guards and let off a burst of firepower, mowing down five slaves.
“Stay silent or that’s what’ll happen to the rest of you.”
But the keening continued. The slaves ran behind crates and dove under tables. Chaos had taken over the once-methodical operations below.
“Put down your weapons.” Williams’s voice came from the shadows.
“You come out, and perhaps we’ll let you live,” the man in the lab coat taunted.
Tessa saw that he was the leader. She withdrew her weapon and took careful aim at the Asian man. Squeezing the trigger, she fired and landed a shot in his chest. He toppled to the ground, but the guards reacted by crouching down and firing wildly in her direction.
The sound of shots echoed in the cavernous interior of the warehouse, and bullets ricocheted off the catwalk and the ceiling, metal hitting metal. Tessa ran as fast as she could to the far wall and moved quickly along the catwalk into the shadows.
Flynn and Williams aimed their guns at the guards and fired. One, a huge man with a crewcut, shot at the boxes where Flynn and Williams appeared to be taking cover. Bullets fired with machine-gun speed. Tessa heard Williams cry out, and she could see Flynn leaning over his best friend, who was now sprawled on the floor.
Hoping to distract the guards, she fired off another round from her gu
n, dropped the clip and inserted a new one. She no longer needed to be quiet—they all knew she was up on the catwalk—so now she ran, her boots clanging on the metal bridges as she made her way to a stairwell. Bullets flew by her head. She fired off rounds as she ran, and eventually leaped down onto the floor of warehouse, scattering frightened slaves. One zombie drew near her, and she kicked him in the face, knocking him to the floor. She had to show them right away that she was not to be messed with.
Flynn, from somewhere behind her, picked off two of the guards. Only two were left, plus the band of the undead.
She moved straight toward one of the guards, his face covered in tribal tattoos, his skull bald. His back was to her, and he was aiming his gun in the direction of Flynn and Williams. She kicked his Uzi, and it flew out of his hands and landed with a clatter. The other guard took aim, but she ducked, and Flynn landed a bullet in the guy’s leg.
The guard cursed, but she showed him no mercy, kicking his wounded leg with her steel-toed boot, and then using a roundhouse kick to his hands, which knocked his gun away. He fell to the floor in pain.
That left only the guy with the tribal tattoos. And the massive biceps.
Tessa squared off against him, drawing up her fists. He lunged at her. Swiftly she shot a leg out and tripped him. He fell hard on the concrete floor, but grabbed her ankle, pulling her down, too.
Rolling over, he wrapped his large hands around her throat and started choking her. Trying to stay calm, all the while feeling a crushing sensation on her windpipe, Tessa pulled one of her knives from its sheath and jammed it upward, landing it in the muscle and fat of his belly.
He rolled off her, placing his hands on the blade, trying to staunch the flow of blood, which was spreading across the floor beneath him.
When Tessa looked up at the undead, they were closing in on her in a circle. She had no time to recover from the choking she’d just received. Scrambling up, she ran from the zombielike slaves and over to one of the tables filled with chemistry equipment. Something here had to be flammable.
Knocking over beakers, she watched chemicals and powder spill across the tables and onto the floor. A small Bunsen burner stood at the head of the table. She raced to it and turned it over.
As she had hoped, flames shot up, and the fire spread quickly. The drug slaves screamed in panic, covering their eyes and hands, yet no one moved. One of them flailed his arms, and his sleeve caught on fire. He squealed louder as the fire spread to his chest, and the smell of charred flesh turned the air acrid. Tessa thought she would throw up. The others started retreating into the shadows, shrieking. They were too stupid to run from the building; they were waiting to follow orders. They would all die of smoke inhalation.
She now raced over to where Flynn and Williams were hunkered down. The bullet had grazed Williams, and there was some blood loss, but he was now sitting, albeit woozily.
“Did I miss all the action?” he asked.
“Yes, Alex. Now lean against that box there,” Tessa urged him.
“Tessa.” Flynn hugged her. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“It’s a factory for Shanghai Red. They’re all drug slaves. So high on this crap they don’t know which end is up.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t explain everything—” His eyes jerked toward where the zombies retreated.
“Look, there’s a lot of smoke. You’ve got to get out of here. We all do.”
Sirens—and plenty of them—sounded outside. Tessa looked at Flynn. “I’ve got to go out the way I came in. I can’t have been here.”
“I wouldn’t even know what to put in my report.”
She smiled at him, then took off for a ladder that led to the ceiling and the rooftop. She was feeling a sense of relief as she made her way along the catwalk, hurrying, then climbed out a window. But when she looked back she couldn’t believe her eyes. One of the wounded guards suddenly stumbled forward with his machine gun and fired at Flynn, who fell to the ground. Cops blazed into the room in full SWAT gear, and Tessa put her hand over her mouth to stifle a scream as a pool of blood spread beneath Flynn’s body.
Chapter 17
Back in her loft, Tessa took a shower and finally, allowed herself to shed tears. She stood under the shower nozzle until the water went from steaming to hot to lukewarm and finally to cold. At three o’clock in the morning, Tessa dressed in a pair of simple black pants and a black sweater, her hair pulled back from her face, not a trace of makeup on, and went to the hospital by cab.
The bond among NYPD cops, especially post-9/11, was legendary, and the waiting area outside the operating room was wall-to-wall officers—both in uniform and off duty.
Leery of calling attention to herself, she quietly sat down in a plastic waiting room chair, folded her hands in her lap and eavesdropped, hoping to find out how Flynn was.
Back at the warehouse, Tessa had watched for as long as she could from the roof across the street. She had seen four ambulances pull away, some with body bags, and she had feared for Flynn, not knowing whether he was dead or alive.
Now, sitting in this waiting room, she learned he was having surgery to remove four bullets. He had lost a lot of blood—almost 10 percent of his blood, to be exact—and the cops were all signing up to donate type O for transfusions.
She listened to the man the others called Cap, Captain Joe McNally, and a woman she guessed was Alex Williams’s kid sister, Marie.
“Your brother is already bitching he wants out of the hospital bed. He’ll be fine,” Cap said. “The crazy bastard wants to be wheeled to Flynn’s room and donate blood.”
“And Tony?” Marie’s voice was laced with tears, and she knotted a tissue in her hand.
Cap sighed and shook his head. “Christ…We just don’t know. I think it’s gonna be touch and go for a while. He lost a hell of a lot of blood. One of the bullets pierced his spleen. They’re searching for another bullet…let’s pray it missed his liver.”
“And what happened? Does anyone know?”
“Well, Marie, honey, near as we can figure it, they were eating in some greasy spoon and got a tip that there was some suspicious activity at an abandoned warehouse. They went to check it out, and it wasn’t abandoned at all. These two unlucky sons of bitches stumbled on a gold mine of drugs. They were manufacturing this new shit, a new club drug, right there.”
“Why did they go in alone?”
“These two cowboys? You know your brother and Tony. That’s the kind of cops they are. Meanwhile, we’re still pulling out burned bodies. In all the gun-fighting, some chemicals caught on fire.”
“Does Tony have any family here?”
“No. Diana, his ex-wife, is remarried. I wouldn’t even waste a phone call on her. We have to call Gus, of course, but the guy’s in his seventies. We call him about this and wake him up, he’ll be rushing over here in shock, liable to have a heart attack. I’m sending Malone over there tomorrow morning. Better to tell him in person. Plus, we might have more definitive news by then.”
“Tony’s a good man, Cap.”
“The best. They don’t make ’em like Tony Flynn anymore.”
Tessa felt a tear land on her hand. She hadn’t even realized she’d been crying. She waited with the crowd of friends, but knew she had to leave by 4:30 a.m. in order to be safe in her bed by dawn. She rose from her chair and slipped out the door, determined to come back the following night.
As soon as she awoke the next night, Tessa called the hospital. They weren’t releasing any information on Detective Tony Flynn.
“Can you tell me if he’s even alive? Is he in a room?”
“Ma’am, are you a family member, or another nosy reporter?”
“Never mind.”
Tessa knelt at the statue of Buddha. She prayed for Flynn’s recovery and for his soul. She burned some sage, which had been given to her by a Native American shaman she met once. She hoped it kept the undead away and brought Flynn healing.
She dressed in black
wool pants and a black sweater, brushed her hair and pulled it into a chignon, and put on her heavy black leather coat. The radio said a cold snap was pulling the temperatures down into the twenties.
She left her loft and walked down the street. At a newspaper bodega on the corner, she saw that Flynn’s and Williams’s heroics had made the front page. It was the third-largest single-day drug bust in the history of law enforcement in the city. The fact that two NYPD detectives made the bust and not the DEA was something the police commissioner was trumpeting to any reporter who would listen. She laughed. Only Chicago had a history of more colorful politics than New York City.
Tessa paid for the Daily News and read through the article for information on Flynn, who was listed in critical condition in the intensive care unit. Williams was to be released in the next twenty-four hours.
Back at the hospital, Tessa strode purposefully. She had found that she could go almost anywhere without being questioned if she looked like she belonged there. Between her confident body language and her aristocratic looks, no one ever approached her.
Soon Tess found the waiting room for the intensive care unit. The policy stated that family members could visit for five minutes every two hours. Waiting for those rights were Alex Williams and his sister, an older gentleman, and a handful of cops in uniform.
Alex was sitting in a wheelchair in a plain blue hospital gown. He started to rise when he saw her. “Tessa…”
“Don’t even think about getting up, Detective.”
“Eh—” he waved his hand “—it’s a flesh wound.”
Suddenly, completely uncharacteristically, she grew hoarse fighting back tears. “How is he?”
Alex’s eyes welled up. “Not good. Not good. Our boy lost a lot of blood. He’s on a respirator. He can’t talk. He’s not even awake. They’re keeping him in an intentional coma state right now.”
“I’m so sorry.” Guilt coursed through Tessa. He’d never have been looking into Shanghai Red if she hadn’t approached him about it. She should have known better than to involve anyone else.