Middle of Nowhere

by Ridley Pearson

  Boldt missed a rung and fell.

  It happened so quickly: one moment descending; the next, free-falling. He dropped his gun, lunging to grab hold of absolutely anything he could, but hit the tower’s cement pad on his left foot, twisting his ankle and buckling his knee. White pain blinded him. He forced himself to breathe in order to avoid passing out. He could see past his fallen gun, down to the water, Flek’s arms sticking up and holding the rifle as he quickly negotiated the narrow passage, swimming and walking through the chest-deep water. Flek and that weapon would reach the shore within the minute. Boldt tried to stand, but cried out and fell with the pain—fell to within an arm’s length of his handgun. Across the narrow bay, LaMoia appeared at water’s M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  edge. But Flek spun around and managed several shots in that direction, and Boldt saw LaMoia dive for cover. No contest. Flek would reach the Eldorado—and Daphne—unchallenged. He intended for Daphne to pay for his brother’s death.

  Boldt again tried to stand. Again he fell, this time onto his back, writhing in pain.

  He looked up into the sky, and there was the answer. Boldt rolled. LaMoia crawled toward the water’s edge. Boldt cupped his lips and shouted, “No, John! Get back!” knowing full well that LaMoia would make the swim in an effort to save Daphne. “Back! Back!” Boldt shouted, pleased to see his normally disobedient sergeant retreat toward the boatyard. Lou Boldt was no crack shot. He regularly visited the firing range and put in the time required of him to place four out of eight shots somewhere on the body. Given a brace on which to rest his hands, he could manage a head shot on a lighted target thirty feet away. But something the size of a forearm, in the dark, at a hundred feet . . . he wasn’t convinced he could hit it once, much less accomplish the repeated hits he believed required of him. Nonetheless, he dragged himself to the base pod of the nearest leg and braced for the shot. He steadied his two-fisted grip, checked once over his shoulder at Flek, now only a matter of yards from shore, returned his rain-blurred vision down the barrel, stretching it long and dark to the bead that he aimed 466

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  onto the glistening, silver, high-voltage cable well overhead. He had six shots available. The first missed entirely, racing up into the night sky. Rain stung his eyes. He cleared his vision with the swipe of a hand, held his breath, took steady aim and squeezed. A blinding shower of sparks—he had nicked the line, or perhaps the insulated support binding it to the tower. His third shot missed. The fourth rained more sparks, this time like fireworks. The fifth severed the line. Boldt pulled his hands from the steel and rolled.

  It fell like a dragon’s neck spitting fire, a blinding, lightning arc as it grounded first to one of the tower’s legs, and then, whistling and veering through the black sky and grounding to another, dancing like a fire hose that has broken loose. It fell directly for Boldt with alarming speed, several tons of high-voltage cable without a home, all the while spitting sparks into the rainlaced air. Boldt could smell the burning ozone as the dragon’s head free-fell for him, curving away only at the last instant, and winding itself up again, lifting higher and higher, that static-charged roar chasing its every move.

  It whispered and whipped through the wet air, suddenly like a broken rubber band, rebounding toward the distant tower across Miller Bay, taking its hissing sound and metal smell with it. The air became a flurry of white lightning and small explosions. It raised its head one final time—higher, higher, higher—stretching for the heavens, before turning and diving like a M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  Kamikaze, the buzzing of electrically charged energy, rich and ripe and destined for the ultimate ground of all: water.

  It struck Miller Bay with a small explosion, a huge, white, pulsing light ripping through the water in waves that reminded Boldt of dropping a pebble in a still pond.

  Flek, no doubt, saw it approaching, this white apron of raw voltage. Saw it like a tsunami ripping through the water toward him. When it hit, it lighted his body unnaturally—a glowing white stick in a black pond. The weapon he held above his head exploded as its ammunition combusted. For a brief few seconds, Bryce Abbott Flek was his own fireworks display, culminated by the detonation of what sounded like a small bomb, which experts later said had probably been his head. M

  The houses north of Miller Bay were black and without power. Boldt dragged himself to the chain-link fence, a section of which had been melted by that tongue of fire, and crawled out and onto the wet ground, half-walking, falling, stumbling, rolling his way toward that Eldorado. LaMoia would later say that he looked like a man who’d spent weeks in the desert.

  LaMoia came the long way around, over a mile of roadway, the last half of which he hitched a ride with a volunteer fireman; he wasn’t going anywhere near that water, littered as it was with the carcasses of dead fish and the gruesome remains of one human being. De-468

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  spite the time it took him to reach the Eldorado, LaMoia arrived to find Boldt still crawling, twenty yards out. He briefly kept the fireman at bay, helped the lieutenant to his feet, and together they approached the Eldorado, from which there was no movement, no sound.

  “Please, God,” Boldt whispered under his breath.

  “Matthews?” a tight-jawed LaMoia called out, his crippled body attempting to support Boldt. The blind leading the blind.

  “Daffy!” Boldt hollered.

  The exploding windshield had rained cubes of tempered glass into the vehicle so that she seemed covered in huge, sparkling diamonds. For a moment the scene looked almost beautiful. But her body was slumped against the car door, perfectly still, her face scratched, her chin bleeding.

  “She’s bleeding!” Boldt chortled excitedly. “She’s bleeding!” he said, gripping LaMoia’s shoulder with enthusiastic force. A heart had to be beating for a body to bleed. Homicide cops rarely saw bleeders.

  “I believe she is!” LaMoia said, tears choking him as he leaned Boldt against the car and he and the fireman hurried to the passenger door to try for a pulse.

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  “My last conscious thought was that we needed him alive.” Two days after her ordeal, Daphne’s voice remained weak and trembling.

  They sat in the front seat of Boldt’s Crown Vic, outside the home of Ron Chapman, awaiting LaMoia. Boldt wore a walking cast on his left leg. Daphne wore a cast on the same foot. Ever the pair.

  “He didn’t feel the same way about you,” Boldt reminded her.

  “He assumed he’d be blamed for Sanchez, but he didn’t do her. He claimed to have an alibi. The AirTyme cellular records put him on the Bainbridge ferry for the night you were shot at. Flek did the burglaries, no question about it. He pushed Kawamoto down some stairs. But not Sanchez. Not you. Certainly not Schock and Phillipp. He’s not good for any of that.”

  “Which is why we’re here—to get to the bottom of it.”

  “Despite the obvious risks to our careers that video represents,” Daphne reminded him.

  “Leave well enough alone?” he asked. “Is that what I’m hearing? We put Flek down in the books for the Sanchez assault, and we walk away from it?”

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  “There are those who wouldn’t give that a second thought, given the stakes.”

  “And are we them?” he asked. “Daffy, I’m not going to force this on you. It’s both of our careers. We either do this unanimously, or not at all.” He added, “I thought we’d—”

  “Been over it?” she interrupted. “So did I. But sitting here now, ready to dig back into it, it feels a lot different. It would be so easy to cover it up.”

  “Say the word,” Boldt advised her, glancing up at the dashboard clock.

  LaMoia parked across the street. He crossed, and slipped into the backseat. He carried a file under his arm that Boldt had been expecting. “It arrived a few minutes ago,” he
informed his lieutenant. “Typical I.I.—

  they hand-delivered it, and made me sign off on it twice.” Speaking to Daphne, LaMoia said through his wired jaw, “If it’s any consolation, Matthews, I’ve been jammed in a lot worse ways than this—the video, I’m talking about—and I know the value of a person keeping his mouth shut, if it comes to that. No pun intended.”

  Daphne thanked him.

  Boldt flipped open the folder LaMoia had delivered and angled it to catch the street light. He read the contents, flipped pages and read some more. “Ronnie wasn’t cut out for this.”

  “He denied any involvement when Sanchez interviewed him,” LaMoia pointed out.

  “Hopefully, we can change that,” Daphne said. M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  “I feel like I’m visiting a convalescent home,” Ron Chapman said, sitting across from Boldt at his own kitchen table. He’d been reluctant to speak with them, but Boldt flashed him a look at the I.I. folder, and Chapman had acquiesced. The story of Bryce Abbott Flek’s fiery death had already come and gone from the papers and newscasts. Public interest in the case had faded as quickly as the fish had washed out to sea from Miller Bay, as quickly as it had taken work crews to restore power to eleven hundred households. In the world of local TV, two days proved to be an eternity. Boldt, Daphne and LaMoia sat side by side across the table from Chapman.

  “Between us we’ve got over forty years, Ronnie,”

  Boldt reminded the man.

  “Some good, some bad,” Chapman said. “I’ve never had a beef with you, Lou.”

  “The three of us over here have an ongoing investigation into that assault of the female officer.”

  “Sanchez,” Daphne said.

  LaMoia told the uniform, “Mine is more of a personal interest. Sanchez and I were . . . friends.”

  “I’m with you,” Chapman told the three.

  “You’ve always been straight with me, Ron.”

  “Same here, Lou.”

  “And I need you to be so now.” He repeated,

  “Straight.”

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  “I’ve spoken to I.I. already, if that’s what this is about.”

  “That’s part of what it’s about,” Boldt acknowledged. “Krishevski paid me a visit. Told me about a video you have. Wouldn’t tell me what’s on it.”

  “So maybe you’re wasting your time.”

  “You want to go down with them?” Boldt asked, having a vague idea of who “them” was. “I.I.’ll get you for hindering prosecution—you understand that, don’t you?”

  “I got no comment, Lou.”

  Boldt said, “I was with you when you discovered that rifle being switched. I think it surprised you.”

  He waited a moment. “ ’Course it surprised me,”

  Chapman said.

  “This is about the Flu, Ronnie. That’s what I think. It’s about some of the guys buying themselves a little extra insurance that the cash flow would be there when the guild funds started running dry. It’s about inside information, which is where Krishevski fits in: He talked when he shouldn’t have. The best pressure we have is that a missing assault rifle took a shot at me.”

  Chapman’s eyes went wide.

  LaMoia suggested, “You’ll be hooked up to that if you keep playing it the way you are.”

  Daphne explained, “The shooting offers us the best leverage in terms of getting one of them to talk.” She had no idea what she was talking about, but she hoped Chapman didn’t know that.

  “And I fit in, how?” Chapman asked, vamping. M I D D L E O F N O W H E R E

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  Boldt said, “Property has always been a clean department, Ronnie.”

  “Damn right.”

  “And now this,” LaMoia said. “Gotta break your heart.”

  “It does,” the man insisted.

  “And us too,” LaMoia said.

  Daphne added, “We hate to see anyone look bad.”

  Boldt said, “And we understand that when a guy is dealing with I.I. he’s not about to so much as whisper a fellow officer’s name without damn good proof, because no matter what anyone says, any kind of I.I. association hurts an officer, jams him up. Even ruins him, sometimes. And for no good reason.”

  “Agreed.”

  “It was Krishevski’s shift,” Boldt stated, as if certain.

  “How long do you cover, Ronnie?” Boldt readjusted his cast. “Krishevski has three officers under him: Pendegrass, Riorden, and Smythe.”

  Chapman was feeling uncomfortable. “I’m aware of that, Lou.”

  “Who was it? What was it?” Boldt tried to sound convincing, “One of them stole some assault rifles. Probably more like two of them, given the way the mechanics work—one guy having to trip a button upstairs in order for the vault to come open downstairs. They sold them into the marketplace for some spending money.”

  “Is that what’s on this missing video?” LaMoia asked.

  “Or was it you who threw the switch to open the warehouse?”

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  “I didn’t throw no switch. I didn’t have nothing to do with that.”

  Daphne speculated, “You saw something.”

  Chapman answered, “I caught one of Sergeant K’s guys in house on my shift, and he hadn’t signed in. You gotta sign in, Lou—that’s on penalty of death in our unit. There were threats exchanged. Obviously, I realized something wrong was going down. Something had come out of the warehouse, and it came out on my shift—that was on purpose. And if it came out, then it had to go somewhere. Had to leave the building. And fast.”

  “The garage,” Boldt nodded, understanding the logic. The warehouse and the lower deck of the parking garage were on the same level.

  “I don’t know if these guys planned on covering their backsides later or not. Maybe they’re just plain stupid.” He looked at LaMoia. “Maybe they planned to give me what someone gave you, what someone gave Sanchez. Schock. Phillipp. You gotta be some kind of stupid to try any of this. But I got the leg up on ’em. If I hadn’t, maybe somebody would have clubbed me in an alley or on the way out of a bar or something.”

  “Leg up, Ronnie?” Boldt asked.

  “You remember that vandalism in the garage . . . must be two years ago now?”

  “Vaguely,” Boldt answered.

  “I.I. had a pair of cameras installed.” He recognized Boldt’s blank expression.

  LaMoia said, “The video.”

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  “No one knows about those cameras,” Chapman said. “The brass wanted it that way. They didn’t want anyone knowing. They knew the vandalism had to be internal, cop to cop, and they wanted to put somebody right for it. The wiring for the closed-circuit stuff runs into the boneyard. They installed it saying they were doing maintenance. Thought they’d hidden the VCRs where we’d never see them—way up on a shelf in the back. But I knew. I had to know. I’ve been in that room going on twenty-one years. I know every creak, every sound. I’ve been fighting rats and spiders so long that I’ve given them names. I know every inch of those shelves. But no one knew I knew.”

  “The videotape,” LaMoia repeated.

  The ruddy-cheeked man grinned. “I grabbed it that night, knowing it was my insurance package. Locked it away good and tight. And if anything happens to me, it goes directly to KSTV’s News Four at Five.”

  “Oh . . . my . . . God,” Boldt gasped, realizing Chapman had images that could ID the cops responsible for the theft. “I.I. caught on, how?”

  Chapman explained, “I loosened a wire, put a blank tape into the VCR, hoping to satisfy I.I. But it didn’t, of course. The Flu hit. I.I. sent Sanchez to talk to me.”

  LaMoia guessed. “You reported that visit to Krishevski.”

  Daphne read the man’s face. “Not Krishevski. Then to whom?”

  “I need that tape
,” Boldt said.

  “It’s hidden. They watch me. Probably you too, now. 476

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  They want that tape. They get hold of it, and a week from now you’ll find me face down in my shower, or lying up next to Sanchez with my neck broke.”

  “Where does Krishevski fit in?” Boldt inquired, recalling the man’s visit to his home two days before.

  “Don’t look at him for this.”

  “He knows about your videotape.”

  “I imagine that’s right.”

  Daphne said, “Having part of the story isn’t going to help.”

  Chapman agreed, but couldn’t quite bring himself to talk.

  Boldt reminded Chapman, “When we looked in the warehouse for the rifle, there was a rifle. Your doing?”

  “I’ve never tampered with evidence. Never will.”

  “Those videotapes,” Daphne said. “You tampered with those.”

  “Hey!” he complained. “Those weren’t part of Property. You show me one piece of paper saying those were part of Property.”

  LaMoia tipped back in his kitchen chair. “Okay.” He sighed. “I say we leave this for I.I. to mop up. He’s not going to help us.”

  Chapman looked over at Boldt, the first real sign of fear on his face.

  Boldt looked the man in the eye. “You don’t want to go down on the record as having told anyone anything.”

  Daphne added, “Because you’ve seen what they did to Sanchez.”

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  Chapman told her, “I got a family. I got kids.”

  Boldt suggested, “So I’ll tell you what’s right, and you’ll stop me where I’m wrong.”

  Chapman nodded his okay.

  Boldt closed his eyes and assembled the pieces. When he reopened them, he looked straight at Chapman. The two pairs of eyes locked together. “You figured out these guns were stolen and you accused Krishevski because his guys were on that tape.” He paused. Chapman made no corrections. “Either he told you, or you figured out he wasn’t directly involved. So when Sanchez shows up four different times, asking questions, Pendegrass gets worried. The next day Sanchez is in the hospital.” Another pause. Chapman’s eyes were glassy. “Your loyalty is to the room itself, not to any officer. Krishevski feels pretty much the same as you do. Knowing you possess this incriminating tape, Krishevski suggests his boys will return the stolen weapons. They’ll make it right, if you keep quiet. And until you and I pulled that gun off the shelf, you thought they had returned them.” He added, “How am I doing?”