Keeper

by Greg Rucka

  At exactly two o’clock, I performed our hourly radio check. Both Dale and Natalie called in, told me that I was loud and clear. Rubin didn’t respond because he was out of range. I went for a cup of coffee in the second-floor waiting room, and was headed back past the nurses’ station when I heard sudden yelling and the sounds of metal hitting the floor.

  Stupid Things You Think When The Adrenaline Pumps #87: Well, Jesus, Atticus, if you knew this was going to happen, why did you just pour yourself a cup of coffee?

  I dropped the mug, running to the noise, and pulled my radio. Just before I keyed the transmitter, Natalie came over the air, saying, “Room two twenty-three, principal’s inside.”

  I pressed the button and said, “En route.” Came around the comer, bringing my gun out as I heard Dale call in that he was on his way.

  It took maybe another five seconds to find the right door, and that was more than enough time to commit murder, but I couldn’t move any faster. I found 223 as Natalie pushed inside, following her into the room.

  The woman I’d seen in the waiting room earlier stood behind the examination table, a plastic pop bottle in her hand. The cap was off, and the bottle was half-filled with a red liquid that had been splashed over the equipment, walls, and Dr. Romero. The woman was shouting.

  I went for Romero as Natalie went for the other woman.

  “She’s pregnant,” I shouted to Natalie. Felice Romero had her glasses off, and the skin that had been protected by them was untouched, although a thick strip of red ran from her dark hair down across her lab coat. I wrapped my arms around her, pivoted, and dropped her outside the room, just as Dale came around the comer.

  “Principal’s clear,” I told him. “Get her secure and call the police.” Then I turned back to see that Natalie had the pregnant woman pinned against the wall, one hand on the bottle, immobilizing it. Natalie’s right forearm was pressed under the woman’s chin.

  “You’ve been marked!” the woman was screaming. “Anytime we want to, butcher! Anytime we want to!”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Natalie said, “or I will knee you so hard you’ll miscarry right here.”

  The woman shut up. Whether because she believed the threat, or because Natalie had six inches on her and the ability to crush her larynx, I don’t know.

  I holstered my weapon and then took the bottle out of the woman’s hand, setting it down on the counter.

  “She got paint on my blouse,” Natalie told me.

  “You’re overdressed anyway,” I said.

  “It’s going on my expense report,” she said.

  I took the woman’s purse and began looking through the contents. “Write it up,” I told Natalie. “All expenses will be reviewed.”

  “Skinflint,” she said.

  “No free rides,” I told her. The purse held a lipstick, a pocket Bible, a hairbrush, five subway tokens, a folded piece of paper, and a driver’s license. The license was state of New York, and identified the pregnant woman as Mary Werthin. I showed the license to Natalie, who snorted, then I dropped it back in the purse and unfolded the sheet of paper.

  It was a photocopied wanted poster, with a grainy picture of Dr. Romero centered on it. At the top of the sheet were the words WANTED FOR MURDER, and beneath the picture, DOCTOR FELICE ROMERO. At the bottom of the sheet was a list of her crimes. According to the paper, Dr. Romero had murdered over one thousand children.

  I kept the wanted poster, putting it in a pocket, then set the purse on the counter beside the bottle.

  “I want a lawyer,” Mary Werthin said.

  Natalie sighed heavily. “Would you cuff her, please?” she asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You two look so nice together.”

  “You can’t hold me, you’re not the police,” Mary Werthin said.

  I got my cuffs and locked them around the hand that had held the bottle. Natalie backed up, releasing her grip, and I turned Werthin carefully toward the wall, and cuffed her other hand behind her back. Natalie dragged a chair away from the comer and I led Werthin to it. Once she was seated, Natalie went to the sink and ran some water over a paper towel, dabbing it at her blouse. The blouse was white, and the paint had pretty much ruined it. After a few more swipes at the paint, Natalie sighed and threw the towel in the trash can.

  I said, “Whose idea was this, Mary?”

  Mary didn’t look at me. She found a paint blotch on the floor and examined that. After a while she said, “Anytime we want to, we can stop her. This was only a warning.”

  I looked around at the paint-spattered room. It wasn’t as bad as I’d first thought coming in. “You stay with her,” I told Natalie. “The police should be here in a couple of minutes. I’m going to check on the doctor.”

  Natalie nodded.

  I picked up my coffee mug and stopped at the nurses’ station. I asked Lynn Delfleur to check the appointment book for Mary Werthin. “When did she make her appointment?” I asked.

  She flipped pages until she found the name, then said, “Two weeks ago. She came in for a counseling session last week, just before you guys started here.”

  “She was going to have an abortion?”

  Lynn shook her head. “Prenatal checkup. Second trimester.”

  “You checked her ID when she showed up today?”

  “I always check IDs,” Lynn said.

  “And she did nothing suspicious?”

  She glared at me. “Not that I noticed.”

  I thanked her and continued down the hall.

  Dr. Romero was in the bathroom opposite her office, the door shut, Dale standing outside. I’m tall, but Dale is big, with about two inches and thirty pounds on me, mostly muscle and bone. His face is broad and smooth, his Japanese features clear. As I approached he said, “She’s unhurt. The glasses kept the paint out of her eyes.”

  “When that lady came in, you and Sheldon ran her through the metal detector, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Didn’t check the purse?”

  “We haven’t been checking bags. I assume that’s about to change?” He said it without sarcasm.

  “Yeah. Go on downstairs, meet the cops when they get here,” I told him. “We’re holding the assailant in two twenty-three. Her name’s Mary Werthin.” I handed him my mug. “Dump that for me.”

  He took the mug with a nod and headed off down the hall. I could hear water running in the bathroom. After a moment, I knocked on the door.

  “What?” Dr. Romero asked.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “How the hell did that woman get in here?” she asked. “Why didn’t you people stop her?”

  “Ms. Werthin made her appointment two weeks ago. Lynn checked her ID. There’s no way we could have known she was going to pull something like that.”

  “She could have had a gun,” Dr. Romero said.

  “No, she couldn’t have. At least, not easily. She went through the metal detector downstairs. We haven’t been checking bags. We’ll start now.”

  “You’re searching bags?”

  “We will now,” I repeated.

  The door opened. The doctor was wearing a black T-shirt, and her hair was wet, but the paint had come off. She put her glasses on and said, “I’m not certain I want that.”

  “It’s your choice, of course.”

  She stepped past me and across the hall, into her office, motioning for me to follow. I shut the door after me, and sat down in one of the chairs by her desk. Dr. Romero lit a cigarette, and remained standing.

  “She could have killed me,” she said after a moment.

  “She could have.”

  “You’re supposed to keep that from happening.”

  “Yes.”

  She turned and looked at me, waiting.

  I hated this part of the job. This was the Cold Hard Truth part. I said, “I can’t protect you completely. No one can. If somebody really wants you dead, if they’ve got the patience, half a brain, and a lit
tle money, they’ll get the job done. It might take them ten years, but they’ll do it. No depth of security will keep it from happening, no number of bodyguards, no amount of money. You could move to the Yukon Territory, and if somebody really wanted you dead, they would follow and find a way. There is no such thing as absolute protection.

  “What you’ve hired me to do is to protect you to the best of my ability. My ability is substantial. I work with some of the best people around, and I’m very good at my job. But I can’t guarantee you anything. From now on, we will search all bags that enter the building.”

  “Invasion of privacy,” Dr. Romero said.

  I nodded. “Yes, it is. But that’s your choice. We can risk another Mary Werthin, or I can have every bag searched. No gun is going to find its way in here.”

  “But there are guns that can be smuggled past metal detectors.”

  “Knives, too,” I admitted. “But both take a lot of money and some connections, and the odds of either of those items finding their way in here without whoever’s carrying them attracting our attention are very low. And we’re still not certain that the threat against you is lethal. What that woman did reeks of terrorism, not murder.”

  She struggled with it for almost a minute, finally sitting down in her chair. “All right, search the bags,” she said.

  I pulled my radio and keyed it, saying, “All units, SOP change: Search the bags.”

  Natalie radioed a confirmation, followed by Dale, followed by Sheldon.

  “That woman . . . she didn’t want to kill me,” Felice said. “Even what she said, that was just a scare tactic, wasn’t it?”

  “I think so. She had a wanted poster for you.” I took the sheet out of my pocket and unfolded it, placing it on her desk.

  She smoked for a few seconds, looking at it. 1 waited. “Not a good picture,” she said finally.

  “No.”

  “You think this came from Sword of the Silent?”

  “Possibly.”

  “I am used to being harassed, I’ve told you that. This won’t work on me. Common Ground is in six days, and I won’t be scared off.” She said the last more to herself than to me. “I have done nothing wrong.”

  For nearly a minute Felice was quiet, thinking, and then she remembered I was there, and she ground out her cigarette. “Have the police officers stop by my office, please. I want to swear out a complaint.”

  “Natalie and I will do that, if you like. It’ll keep your name out of it.”

  She thought about that, then nodded. “All right.”

  I stood up. “We’ll leave at six-thirty,” I said. “Call me if you need me.”

  “Of course.”

  Mary Werthin was taken away by two of New York’s finest, who returned my cuffs to me before they left, having replaced them with a set of their own. After briefing Natalie and Dale on my conversation with Romero, I went to the Two-six to take care of the paperwork and to speak to Detective Lozano.

  “You’re not doing a very good job,” he told me. His black hair was short and receding, and sweat shone on his forehead.

  “She’s still alive,” I said.

  “True enough.” Lozano wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, then offered me a cup of horrible coffee, and I took it more out of courtesy than need. “She’s made a statement,” he said. “She says that you and Miss Trent assaulted her. She has no idea where the paint came from.”

  I laughed and handed him the letters that had arrived in the morning’s mail. Four more, all offensive, which brought the grand total to seventeen since I’d begun the job a week ago. Today’s batch was relatively tame. Only one threatened Romero’s life. The author wrote that he or she would “butcher every doctor” who performed an abortion.

  Lozano looked at the stack and made a face, then put them on his desk. “I’ll get these to Fowler.”

  “Anything else on Ms. Werthin?” I asked.

  “We put a call in to the SOS offices, and she is a dues-paying member. Doesn’t prove jack-shit but it’s a connection.”

  “They collect dues?”

  “How do you think Crowell affords his suits?” Lozano shrugged. “Son of a bitch has more money than I do, that’s for certain. That’s not saying much, admittedly.” He scratched his jaw with a chewed fingernail, wiped his forehead again. “Too fucking hot,” he mumbled.

  “The Feds have anything on her?”

  “Fowler is running it, but I doubt they’ll find anything. You could go talk to him.”

  “Where’s he at?”

  “How should I know? Goddamn feebies. I’ll keep you informed,” Lozano said.

  I took that as my exit cue and headed back to the street, and ultimately back to the clinic.

  Lozano had the unenviable assignment of watching the clinic and the protesters on both sides of the line. Special Agent Fowler had pretty much the same assignment, but on a federal level, and the LifeCare clinic was only one of several he was concerned with. Fowler and Lozano didn’t get along for a number of reasons, but I supposed the major one was simply that Fowler was FBI and thirty-two, and Lozano was NYPD and late forties. There’s a long and distinguished history spiced with plenty of animosity between the FBI and the NYPD. The NYPD looks upon the FBI as meddling, arrogant busybodies who can’t use a toilet without executive authorization from Washington, D.C. Conversely, most of the special agents I’ve met think that NYPD detectives are arrogant, stuck-up bullies who believe an interrogation is simply Twenty Questions played with a baseball bat.

  Every threat Dr. Romero or the clinic received got forwarded to Fowler as a matter of course, to be processed by the Bureau labs in D.C. Then the document would be copied and sent to the NYPD. Lozano had told me that this sometimes took a week or more. The FBI kept the originals. Today’s letters would be no exception. Lozano didn’t like being second, and since it was he who was most frequently on site, I had to grant him the point. Unlike Fowler, Lozano made a point of coming on scene when he heard that something was going down. He had been watching the day I first arrived at the clinic with Alison. Fowler worked out of the Bureau offices, and visited only when necessary.

  Dale went for the car at five-thirty. I gave him the extra hour before we had to move Dr. Romero, so he could double-check the vehicle. Dale knows cars; he took the Crash Course when we were at Spec War together. I went from the Executive Protection Squad to the CID, sort of a sideways transfer, but Dale stayed EPS from the ground up. We were renting a vehicle from Natalie’s father, a souped-up Ford that Sentinel reserved for “high risk” clients.

  I doubted we would need the bulletproof glass or the solid rubber tires. For that matter, I doubted that someone had wired a bomb to the ignition, but Romero was paying me to be certain.

  Dale backed the gray Ford into the alley behind the clinic at six twenty-five, by which time Natalie and 1 had Romero ready to go. We walked her downstairs, waited while she said good night to the few staff members who were still around. While she did this, I went out to check the alley and talk to Dale.

  “Clear,” he told me.

  I gave the surrounding rooftops one last survey, then unlocked the back car door nearest the clinic. “Two minutes,” I told Dale, and went back inside. Dr. Romero had finished her good nights, and was now putting on her Kevlar vest with Natalie’s assistance. For some reason, watching the two of them made me think of a bridal fitting, but I kept that observation to myself.

  “I hate this thing,” Dr. Romero told me as she slipped her coat back on over the vest. “As if it’s not hot enough out there already.”

  “You’ll love that thing when it stops a bullet.” I handed her back her briefcase and the plastic bag she had put her paint-stained clothes in. “You ready?”

  She nodded, and I looked at Natalie, and Natalie nodded. I used my radio and told Dale, “Pogo’s coming out.” The code name had been chosen by Felice herself, and she looked faintly embarrassed every time I said it.

  To Natalie I said, “Go.”r />
  Natalie went out the door and headed straight to the Ford while I held Romero back in the hall. Natalie opened the car door, then came back into the building, turned around, and now, with Romero close behind her, went back out. I took up the rear, and then we were all in the car, Natalie, Dr. Romero, and myself, a cozy protective sandwich. I closed and locked our door, said, “Charlie,” to Dale, and sat back as he pulled out onto 135th.

  “We did Charlie day before yesterday,” Natalie said, looking out the window.

  Dr. Romero shifted uncomfortably between us.

  “Everybody’s a critic,” I said, and looked out my own window. I’d worked out seven routes for our travel, and each had a call sign, A to G. All of us were absolutely familiar with them. All I had to do was give Dale a letter and he would know which route I wanted to take.

  The routes mattered to me because, in my opinion, cars are death traps. If I’d had the people and the money, there would’ve been four more bodyguards on the road with us, two in a follow car and two in a lead car. All the security professionals I know have a particular paranoia—for some it’s snipers; others, bombs. Mine is ambushes. When I’m not working, it doesn’t bother me, but when I’m on, I’m very careful about avoiding anything that could be used to set up an ambush. And it’s too damn easy to ambush someone in a car.

  “I’m clear on my side,” I said.

  Dale grunted.

  “Clear,” Natalie said.

  “So we’re not being followed?” Dr. Romero asked.

  “We are most definitely not being followed,” Dale told her.

  She sighed and wiped sweat from her forehead. “I don’t suppose that means I can remove the vest?”

  “No,” Natalie said.

  “Dale, you want to put the air conditioner on?” I said.

  He shook his head. “Car’s too heavy. We’ll overheat.”

  I looked at the doctor sympathetically. The ride was hard for her, cramped between both Natalie and me. With the New York humidity, the vest, the tension of the ride, and the rotten day she’d had, she had every reason to get pissy. But she hadn’t yet. She even managed to not smoke in the car, knowing that the windows couldn’t be opened.