As the Crow Dies

by Kenneth Butcher

  “So, the fox did have rabies?”

  “Oh, they’ll confirm it with tests. The vet said there there’s no doubt it was rabid as hell,” Segal said. “The knuckleheads actually did a good deed putting it down.”

  Dinah took a sip of soda. They were at an outdoor table. The afternoon was waning, but it was still hot. “You’re pretty sure they were there at the Biltmore Estate checking out Lucile’s crows?”

  “She showed me the crow habitat she set up over there,” Segal said. “I don’t know what else would bring them there. My guess is they’re still looking for Richard.”

  “What else can we do with this?” She was watching the video again.

  “I’ll tell you what the guys at the station want to do. They want to put it up on the internet.”

  “Like, YouTube?”

  “Yeah, YouTube.” Segal gave a little laugh, and so did Dinah.

  “The thing would probably go viral,” Dinah said. “You did invoke rule number 11, and sure enough someone did something stupid.”

  Segal’s phone rang. He listened to dispatch. “Really? Tell them to stall the guys. Keep them there till we can get over.” He smiled at Dinah. “That was dispatch. Two guys just showed up at the ER at Park Ridge. One has his hand bandaged up. The other is asking if rabies can fly through the air. Looks like we finally caught a break.”

  Park Ridge Hospital was not the closest emergency room to the Biltmore Estate. It was a few miles south. Apparently, the two men had tried to put off the inevitable for a day, then decided they might be able to conceal their mishap by traveling that distance. The plan greatly underestimated the efficiency of modern communications, especially where outbreaks of rabies were concerned.

  Dinah drove. It took them about twenty minutes to reach the ER. Segal leaned into the receptionist’s office and discreetly showed his badge, and the two of them were ushered into the treatment area. The nurse and doctor were paged away to make sure the men were alone in the room when they entered. Dinah unclipped the strap on her holster.

  They stood in the hallway. The door to the room was open. The muscular man from the video sat on the bed, reclined against a pile of pillows. His right hand was massively wrapped with white gauze. In his left hand, he held a brochure.

  He’s going to suffer good, Segal thought.

  The brochure said, “Animal Bites and Rabies.” Segal could picture it describing the long and painful series of shots the patient would experience over the next few weeks. A thin man was sitting on a chair by the bed, absorbed in the screen of a large smartphone.

  Dinah entered and Segal followed.

  The thin man made a reflexive move with his hand inside his jacket. Dinah flicked her gun out and said, simply, “No.” The thin man brought his hand back out, and Segal reached into the man’s jacket pocket and removed a nine-millimeter automatic. The gun had an attachment on the muzzle end.

  He held up the gun for a better look. “This is an interesting little addition you have,” he said. He ejected the clip and checked to make sure no bullet was in the chamber. He turned the gun around and inspected it from different angles. “Is this a silencer?” He could not imagine what else it could be, although it was much smaller than any silencer he had seen.

  “Suppressor,” the man on the bed said.

  Dinah shrugged at Segal.

  “We call them suppressors,” the man said, as if that clarified the situation.

  “And who exactly is ‘we’?” Segal crossed his arms over his chest.

  “Huh?” the guy asked.

  “I’m Ira Segal, Asheville Police Department.” Segal took out his badge. “I’m asking who you are and who you work for.”

  The guy in the bed turned to his friend.

  “They already know who we are,” Dinah said. “You could see it on their faces the minute we walked in.” She took out a pair of handcuffs and stepped toward the thin man. “You’re both under arrest. Put your hands behind your back.”

  “What are you arresting us for?” the thin man asked.

  “Hunting foxes out of season and anything else I can think up,” she said. “We’ve got a lot to talk about.” She clamped the cuffs on.

  Segal pulled out another set of cuffs. He looked at the guy with the bandaged hand, which made it much too big for the cuff.

  Then he heard a commotion in the hall, one of the nurses telling someone the area was off-limits. Mr. ONI, Jerome Guilford, perfect brown shoes and all, walked through the door. He stopped and gave the room a quick appraisal. “You can take off the handcuffs, sergeant,” he said. “These men are agents in the employ of ONI.”

  Segal glared at him.

  Dinah unlocked the cuffs and pushed the guy’s hands away.

  Segal looked at Guilford for further explanation.

  “They were staking out a location known to be visited by Francis Elah. By chance they came across a rabid animal which had to be put down,” Guilford said.

  “Is that how you’re going to report this?” Dinah asked.

  “There won’t be any report. We need to keep this incident under wraps. These men are working undercover.”

  Segal realized that their big break had just collapsed into nothing. The man on the bed was not the man in the picture that Richard brought to Dinah. He was not their suspect.

  Dinah punched the screen of the cell phone she had taken from the thin man and pushed it into Guilford’s hands. “Hope you’re a fan of YouTube,” she said.

  Segal followed her out the door, not waiting to see Guilford’s reaction.

  CHAPTER 30

  Call of the Dog

  Dinah knew that the hot dog vendor, Conover by name, liked to set up on Pack Square, especially by the little plaza in front of the Diana Wortham Theatre and the art museum. He explained to her once that if he didn’t get too close to the entrance, no one hassled him. Business was good from tourists as well as from people who worked in the office buildings on the other side of the square, across from the Vance Memorial. He was even close to the courthouse and the police station, which was how Dinah met him.

  “But the real reason I like it here, I like the action of people coming and going, and I like to think about the history,” he told her.

  Dinah understood what he meant. South from the hot dog stand, the replica of Thomas Wolfe’s angel was just to his left, less than a hundred feet away. It marked the place where W. O. Wolfe, Tom’s father, had his stone-carving business.

  It was around ten in the morning, and Conover was already serving dogs. Many vendors didn’t set up that early. Conover found that a surprising number of people heard the call of the dog at this hour, perhaps making up for a missed breakfast or simply as a midmorning snack.

  He had just finished preparing a dog with ketchup, mustard, and onions for a girl who may or may not have had any sleep the night before when a man walking near Pack Square caught his eye. He hurried to complete the money part of the transaction before the man passed by. He handed the girl her change and thanked her while the man was still several paces to the east. Conover was pretty sure he recognized him as the guy in Dinah’s pictures. When the guy pulled closer, Conover said, “Breakfast dog?” As he hoped, the guy angled toward him so he got a good head-on look. The guy actually seemed to give the suggestion thoughtful consideration before shaking his head and proceeding on his way.

  As soon as the guy was a safe distance away, Conover took his cell phone from the pocket in his apron and pulled up the pictures for confirmation. He pressed Dinah’s number.

  “Dinah here,” she said.

  He didn’t slow her down with small talk. “Just spotted your bogey at Pack Square. He’s headed west on Patton Avenue, on foot.”

  “What’s he wearing?”

  “Khakis and a dark green golf shirt, some kind of emblem on the front of it,” Conover said. The guy rounded the corner where Patton took a little jog and disappeared from Conover’s sight.

  Dinah changed her path. She’d been hea
ded toward her car in her gym shorts and tank top after a morning workout, but walking would be quicker from where she was. Even so, she hesitated, realizing she did not have her gun or badge. She didn’t expect to need them, nevertheless, it didn’t feel right without them. Force of habit and conditioning: if you did police work, you had your gun and badge. Well, she didn’t have them and she needed to see where this guy was going. She imagined herself headed down College Street, possibly catching sight of the guy by the time she got to Prichard Park. Then she realized she would probably be a couple of streets behind. She continued walking quickly as she pulled up a number on her phone.

  “Hey, Di-nah,” said the voice on the other end.

  He always drew out the first syllable to sweeten it up. “Lester, are you at the boards?” she asked. “This is serious. I have a live one.”

  “Yeah, we here. Got no game going yet, but we here.” Her friend was a small black man of indeterminate age, sitting next to a nerdy, overweight white guy. The unlikely pair often claimed their places at the chessboards at Prichard Park.

  “Our man is headed your way, west on Patton. Khakis and dark green shirt. I need you to see which way he heads when he gets to the park.”

  “Got it,” Lester said.

  “And Lester, keep your head down.”

  “Even you won’t know I’m here.”

  Dinah turned onto College Street and walked quickly up the hill toward the park. She saw Lester as soon as she came to the traffic light. He gave her a little motion with his hand, indicating the guy had turned right. She scanned that direction in time to see the guy turn left at the next corner. The guy hesitated for the briefest moment and glanced in front and behind him. She pulled back behind the building at the corner, hoping he had not seen her. She was not sure if she would be recognized, especially out of her normal work clothes. She didn’t want to take any chances. She held a second, then turned right on Haywood and followed. After a short distance, she peeked left on Battery Park and turned the corner with caution, hoping to catch sight of the guy but having no wish to be spotted herself.

  Only a few feet farther there was an odd intersection where Wall Street came in at an angle to join Battery Park. On the other side of this intersection was a wedge-shaped structure known as the Flat Iron Building. Nearby was a little plaza with a sculpture; a big flatiron. At this plaza by the sculpture, musicians liked to set up to play, and it was there that Dinah saw Mattie, with a mandolin in her hands and blowing into a harmonica fixed to a metal bracket that rested on her shoulders, Bob Dylan style. She was accompanying a couple of guys playing guitars and singing. Mattie nodded her head down Wall Street, giving Dinah a serious gaze with her eyes.

  Dinah went left into the small street. She walked quickly through the plaza but then stopped. After a slight turn, Wall Street became a narrow path in a canyon formed by tall buildings. Dinah’s instincts took over—instincts formed from police service, instincts formed by military experience, including deployment in Afghanistan, instincts formed from the fundamental forces of animal evolution. Without thinking, her hand went to her hip, where she normally carried her service pistol. Damn. No gun. It was not a good feeling. She considered waiting for backup of some kind, knew this was a unique chance.

  Instead, her hand moved to the cell phone in her pocket. She pulled up Segal’s number to let him know where she was. He didn’t answer, and she left a brief message, all the while inching along the sidewalk, eyes on full alert.

  She rounded the bend to the point where she could see straight down the street, almost to the end where it joined Otis Street across from the federal building. To her surprise, she saw no sign of the man. He had disappeared. Only a few people were on the street, not as many as she would have wanted, no crowd into which she could disappear. She walked ahead, trying to take in everything, trying not to draw attention to herself.

  She passed by little shops on her left, pretending to window shop, searching the interiors for the man and also checking the other side of the narrow street by studying the reflection in the glass. She saw no sign of him. The deeper she got into the street, the more she felt the unease of being trapped in that canyon of brick and cement and glass.

  Cautiously, she progressed about halfway down the street. To her right was a parking garage that opened onto Battery Park on the opposite side. On her left was one of the best-known vegetarian restaurants in town, the Laughing Seed Café. Still no sign of the guy in the green shirt. Farther on, there were fewer shops, and then only the narrow lane that ran between the elevated decks of the parking garage on one side and the backs of buildings on the other.

  Dinah needed to think. She perused the window of the Laughing Seed as if to read the menu. She glanced to her right, looking for any sign of movement, then to her left, wondering if she had missed the man in one of the shops. She was confused and frustrated, but even more than that, her sense of danger was cranked so high she had to consciously slow her breathing.

  The man waited on the top deck of the parking garage, checking to make sure he was alone. He caught his breath, wincing with pain every time he inhaled deeply. He checked the street. He was pretty sure no one had seen him do the quick ascent, almost three stories straight up, using the handholds of the climbing wall built into the side of the structure. His ribs hurt like hell where she—The Dinosaur—had shot him a few days before dead center of his body armor. He saw her come into view on Wall Street and crouched to make sure she didn’t spot him. He smiled. The climb was part of his training. A quick, unexpected change in elevation almost always confused pursuers. Any doubt that she was following him vanished. This was trouble. He had wanted to take care of these “local complications,” however, the colonel put a low priority on it. This changed everything. He knew the colonel approved of decisions in the field dealing with significant changes in status. Well, this was certainly significant. This was his call, and he had a good setup.

  He glimpsed over the wall. The woman cop (he never called them by their names; made it too personal) stopped in front of a restaurant, pretending to read the menu way too much. He snapped a couple of pictures with his cell phone. Then he calmly put away the phone, withdrew the gun from his pocket, and pointed it at her, leaning against the wall for stability. He slowed his breathing as he lined up the sights.

  Dinah’s cell phone rang. It was Mattie. Dinah used her peripheral vision and saw her leaning against one of the buildings at the top of the street, trying to act nonchalant. But when Dinah answered, Mattie was anything but nonchalant. “You need to get off the street right now,” Mattie whispered, cupping her hand over the phone and her mouth.

  The urgency in her voice left no room for doubt. Dinah opened the door and stepped into the vestibule of the restaurant. She whispered into her phone, “What’s going on?”

  “Your guy. He’s on the top floor. The parking garage. He’s got a gun.”

  Dinah knelt and, staying within the shadows of the vestibule, peered through the plate glass to the top floor of the garage. Sure enough, she got an image of the guy leaning over the edge. She kneeled to make sure he didn’t see her. Wondering how he had managed to get up there in such short order, she caught sight of the climbing wall at the end of the parking garage across the street. It explained how he got up there, however it did not make her feel better. Free-climbing as quickly as he must have done was no easy feat. She thought of the guys she had met in the military. Special Forces were the only ones she knew who would have tried something like that.

  Still kneeling, she whispered into the phone, “Mattie, thanks. Walk away casually. Don’t draw attention. And if you see this guy again, give me a call.”

  “Be careful, Dino,” Mattie said.

  Dinah had that certain feeling that the hunter had become the hunted, a slow-burning sensation in the pit of her stomach. She was alone and unarmed. She knew exactly what Segal would tell her. It was the same thing any of her mentors throughout her training and deployment would have told
her: Get out and live to fight another day. She turned and walked into the restaurant.

  The man on the parking garage waited for the woman cop to come out. It was odd. People left a restaurant to talk on a phone; they didn’t go inside. He sized up the street, saw nothing unusual other than that hippy musician girl with the long legs. She was leaning against a wall talking on her cell phone, too. That’s all people do these days, he thought, talk on their cell phones.

  He scanned the street below, divided into sharp contrasts between dark shadows and bright sunlight. A few people walked up the ramp of the garage deck, talking loudly. He concealed the gun and walked toward them as if he had just left his car there. He ran down the steps onto Battery Park and then down the stairs that led to Wall Street across from the Laughing Seed; his turn to play the casual diner.

  He stopped inside the door, allowing his eyes to adjust from the brightness outside. The main room of the restaurant was down a few steps, tables to his right, bar in the center, more tables straight ahead.

  A girl approached with some menus, and he asked if he could sit at the bar for a quick drink. As he descended the steps, he scanned the room again, still not seeing the big-haired cop. He sat and ordered one of the blended drinks, acted casual as he kept tabs on the comings and goings, especially down the short hallway that led to the restrooms, where, he theorized, his target must be. He saw no other exits. He had her trapped.

  Five minutes passed. He was getting a bad feeling about the situation when the girl brought him his drink, something called a Tropicalia. He squinted at the first taste—not that the drink was bad, although not what he was expecting.

  A motion to his left caught his eye. A couple gathered their things at one of the smaller tables. The girl stood and unslung her purse from the chair where it had been hanging, a good-looking girl in a nice, loose dress. The guy signed the credit card slip and fumbled for his wallet to put the receipt away. Then they surprised him. They headed not for the front door but to the side of the room, where he watched their heads disappear as they descended a flight of stairs. He had not seen the stairway because it was concealed behind a low partition topped with a planter.