Black Velvet

by Steven Henry

  “Police! Hands in the air!” she ordered, charging into the room, tracking for a target with her eyes and Glock. “Rolf, geh rein! Fass!”

  Rolf leapt past her with a snarl, his training homing in on the command to charge and bite. Erin realized she’d made a procedural mistake. When in doubt, her instructors always told her, send the dog in first. Your life is more important than his. But when Rolf was on duty, he had his vest. Now he didn’t. So she’d gone first.

  Heart pounding, Erin took in the room in a series of fractured images. The executive suite had a living-room area, with a desk at one end and a two-seat leather couch at the other. On the couch, slumped as though sleeping, was Schenk. His suit coat was open and the white of his shirtfront was turning red just below the sternum. Erin couldn’t tell whether he was alive or dead.

  To one side was a bathroom and a kitchenette, to the other the bedroom. Rolf was making for the bedroom, but even as he rushed the doorway and Erin pivoted to cover him, the door slammed shut. Rolf sprang at it, scrabbling with his paws at the doorknob, barking and growling in frustration.

  “I know you’re in there, Van Ormond!” Erin shouted. “This is the police! Open the door and throw the gun out, then come out with your hands in the air!”

  There was a brief pause. “No, dear girl, I don’t think I shall,” came Van Ormond’s answer. He’d recovered his polish. The man sounded like he was talking over tea in an English country house, rather than barricaded in a hotel room with a cop outside and a man he’d just shot on the couch.

  “There’s nowhere to run, Professor,” she said. “We’re on the tenth floor, and this is the only door. Either you come out, or we come in and get you.”

  “I shall be coming out,” Van Ormond said. “But in my own time and in my own manner, thank you.”

  “There’s only two ways this ends,” she said, gritting her teeth. “Either you leave this building in handcuffs, or you leave in a body bag. Your choice.”

  “Call off your dog, and I shall emerge,” he promised.

  “Fräulein.”

  Erin started. Schenk was struggling to sit upright. His complexion, never healthy, was ghastly white.

  “Stay still, Doctor,” she said. “An ambulance is coming.”

  “Fräulein, take care,” Schenk whispered. “He is… very dangerous.”

  “No shit,” she muttered. Rolf was still leaping at the door, growling ferociously. “Okay, Van Ormond, here’s my offer,” she said more loudly. “I get my dog to stand back. Then you come out slowly. If you have a gun in your hand, if you try anything at all, Rolf tears your balls off and I shoot you right in the face. Deal?”

  “My dear girl, this is hardly the tone in which to conduct a delicate negotiation,” the professor said. “Very well, Miss O’Reilly. I shall do as you ask.”

  “I’m not your dear fucking girl,” she snapped. Erin didn’t trust him, but she couldn’t render first aid to Schenk with an armed man in the next room, and the wounded man was obviously fading. Where was the damn backup? Still eight minutes out, probably. That was eight minutes Schenk didn’t have.

  “Rolf. Hier!” she ordered.

  The Shepherd heeded the command, coming back to her side.

  “Bleib!” she ordered, the German for “stay.” Her partner obediently stood fast, but his hackles were raised and a low growl rumbled in his chest. “Okay, Van Ormond, come on out. Slow and careful, or I’ll shoot.”

  The doorknob turned and the door gradually opened. Erin held her pistol in both hands, sighting along the barrel, and remembered her instructors’ advice. When in doubt, put two in the chest and one in the head. If the target didn’t go down, keep shooting until he did. Don’t take chances. She tried to breathe slowly and deeply, wondering if she could do it. She’d never fired at a living person.

  A face came into view. But it wasn’t Van Ormond’s. It was an unnaturally peaceful woman, smiling with the benign good faith of a saint. Erin was staring at the Madonna of the Water. Van Ormond was holding the painting in front of himself as a shield.

  The little cabinet painting was much too small to cover the portly professor’s bulky body, but it did exactly what Van Ormond had intended. Erin hesitated, shifting aim. In that moment, the Englishman’s other hand came out from behind the painting. He was holding a little pistol, a Walther PPK automatic. Some disconnected part of Erin’s mind recognized it as the gun James Bond used. How cliché, she thought. It was pointed directly at her.

  “Rolf, fass!”

  Erin hadn’t gotten the words out. They’d come from the wounded man on the couch. Schenk, the German, had managed to force a commanding tone from his punctured body as he called to the dog in his native language.

  Rolf was a police dog, trained to respond to his partner’s commands, not those of a random bystander. But in this case, the man was telling him to do something Erin had told him to do just a few moments before, and it was something he wanted to do very badly. The German Shepherd’s powerful legs coiled into a spring, carrying him across the open space of the living room in less than a second. Van Ormond’s finger reflexively tightened on the Walther’s trigger, but the gun wavered halfway between Erin and her dog and the bullet whistled past her to bury itself in the wall. The professor had no time for a second shot. Rolf went for the weapon arm, exactly as he’d been trained, and bit. His powerful jaws clamped down on muscle and bone, even as the impact of his charging body forced the arm out and to the side. The professor sat down heavily, dropping the painting. He held onto the pistol a moment longer, muscles contracting involuntarily as Rolf’s teeth sank deeper, and another harmless shot skimmed the carpet into the baseboard. Then the Walther dropped from his hand.

  Erin took two steps forward, clearing her line of fire to aim over her dog at Van Ormond’s pudgy, sweating face. She kicked the fallen handgun away even as she heard the first sirens, distant but closing fast.

  “Phineas Van Ormond,” she said, “You’re under arrest for attempted murder, assaulting a police officer, armed robbery, receiving stolen goods… oh, Christ, I don’t know. A whole lot of other shit, too. I’ll read you your rights in a second. Right now, you have the right to stay the hell where you are. If you move, I really will have Rolf tear off your balls.”

  The art collector’s shoulders slumped in defeat. Rolf, still growling, kept his grip on the man’s arm but didn’t inflict any further damage. Erin scooped up the Walther and did a quick check on Van Ormond to ensure he didn’t have any other weapons. Then she hurried to Schenk’s side. The German’s breathing was labored and faint. Erin probed his injury. The bullet had missed his heart, but she guessed he had a pneumothorax injury—an air bubble in his chest that had partially collapsed one of his lungs. He was bleeding heavily and only semiconscious.

  “It’s okay, Doctor,” she said. “I’ll take care of you.” But there wasn’t much she could do without a chest tube. Where the hell were the EMTs? “The ambulance will be here any minute. Just hang on.”

  Schenk smiled faintly. “I told you… that you would not rest… until you found… your man,” he whispered. “Let me… see… her.”

  For a moment Erin couldn’t think what he meant. Then she scrambled across the room and snatched up the fallen painting. “See, Dr. Schenk, here’s the Madonna. She’s fine. We’ve saved her.” As she held up the ancient canvas, Erin saw to her dismay that she’d left bloody fingerprints on the upper portion of the painting. “Oh shit, I’m sorry.”

  “Do not worry, Fräulein,” he replied. “Blood can be… cleaned away.” His eyes were only half-open, but he stared at his family’s lost heirloom with undiminished love. “She… is… so beautiful.” His eyes closed and his head fell away to the side, that faint smile still tracing his lips.

  “No, damn it!” Erin shouted, grabbing his shoulder as if she could shake more life into him. “Not again! You don’t get to die on me, Schenk, you sour son of a bitch! You’re stronger than this! You’re too goddamn grumpy to die! You
hear me?”

  She was still talking, almost babbling, when the backup arrived. Two uniformed officers entered with guns drawn. The ambulance crew was close behind them. One of the officers drew Erin away from the wounded man while the other took Van Ormond into custody and the EMTs went to work. Erin stood back, staring numbly down at the priceless painting in her hands, her fingerprints etched in blood on the canvas. The Madonna smiled placidly, her expression as calm and forgiving as it had been when the Renaissance master had first painted it. Erin kept staring at it as she backed up to the wall and slid down to the floor.

  Chapter 20

  The press conference was long over by the time Erin got Van Ormond back to the precinct. She was booking him when Lyons and Spinelli came looking for her. Her call for backup had identified her, she was off-duty and somewhere she had no business being, and the detectives, for all their faults, weren’t total morons.

  “What the hell were you doing, O’Reilly?” Spinelli snapped.

  Erin was too tired to even try to play games with these two. “I was doing my job,” she shot back. “No, wait. That’s not right. I was doing your job.”

  Spinelli was so angry he just spluttered, his mouth opening and closing. Lyons stepped toward her threateningly. “You stupid bitch,” he growled. “You’ll lose your shield for this.”

  “For what?” Erin exploded. “For stopping a murder? For recovering stolen property? I was being a cop, for God’s sake!”

  “You should have told us what you knew,” Spinelli said, recovering a little.

  “You didn’t want my help!” Erin retorted. “You made that plenty clear. By the time you finished showing off for the reporters, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. Schenk would’ve been dead and this guy,” she prodded a dejected and bloodstained Van Ormond, “would’ve been on a plane back to England. He had the boarding pass in his pocket.”

  “There’s a chain of command, Officer,” Spinelli said coldly. “And you went around it. You interfered with a major investigation. You’ve been insubordinate, unruly, and reckless. You put yourself and others in danger. And you’re going to regret it.” He turned and stalked off. Lyons, with a final glare, followed.

  “Hey, guys,” Erin called after them. “I got the painting back. Just thought you might like to know, so you can announce it to the press.”

  Spinelli’s shoulders twitched. He just kept walking.

  “O’Reilly?”

  Erin gritted her teeth and turned, ready for another fight. But it was just Porter, her fellow Patrol Officer. “What’s up?” she asked.

  “Murphy wants to see you, as soon as you’re finished here,” Porter said. She looked Van Ormond up and down. “That’s him, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Erin said. “You done, Sarge?”

  “Just about,” the booking sergeant said. “You just need to sign.”

  Erin scribbled her name on the arrest report and took the long walk to her Lieutenant’s office. She tried to think how it was going to go. Had she gotten him in trouble? Had she just flushed away her whole career?

  Murphy was behind his desk, no trace of a smile on his usually-jovial face. “Come in, Officer,” he said. “Close the door.”

  Heart pounding, Erin did as she was told. She came to attention in front of his desk and braced herself.

  The Lieutenant sighed. “O’Reilly, you really stepped in it,” he said. “Spinelli’s filed an incident report over the shootout you and Paulson got in at that construction site. Now you go and grab a suspect, without a warrant, and he’s a foreign national? This just got political, kiddo.”

  “I had PC,” Erin protested. “I heard the gunshot and—”

  Murphy held up his hand. “Okay, okay. Save it. I’m on your side, believe it or not. You did what you thought you had to, and I understand you got the painting back. I just called the hospital, and it sounds like Dr. Schenk’s going to make it. So you saved his life. But this is going to a board of inquiry. I can’t stop that.” He sighed again. “I hate like hell to have to say this, O’Reilly. But pending the board’s review, you’re suspended from duty, with pay. I need your shield and gun.”

  Erin wanted to scream at him, to protest, but all her anger had drained out of her. This was it, end of career. Wordlessly, she unbuckled her Glock and slid it across the desk. She reached for her shield and laid it down beside the gun.

  “Go home, O’Reilly,” Murphy said. “You look like you could use a rest.”

  * * *

  But Erin couldn’t rest. She called Luke, as she’d promised. He met her outside her apartment. “Erin, what happened?” were his first words when he saw her face.

  “Let me put Rolf up,” she said. “Then I need a drink. I’m not saying another word until I’ve got a glass in my hand.”

  They went to the Priest. Luke got a beer, and Erin ordered a Black Velvet.

  “So,” he said when their drinks arrived, “what happened?”

  “It was your guy, Luke,” she said. “It was Van Ormond.”

  He blinked. “What do you mean?”

  She took a deep breath. “We haven’t done the interrogation yet, but here’s what they’re going to find. Van Ormond came over from England for the Madonna. He’s an out-of-town guy without any underworld connections, so he hired some local boys for the heist. I’m guessing he only worked through Jake Gallagher, so the others wouldn’t see his face or know his name. He gave them the job, and I’ll give Gallagher credit, they did it like pros. They learned about the extra security for the gala and figured it was an opportunity. They found out what uniforms the guards at the museum would be wearing and stole four of them from a local store. That was their first mistake. They should’ve just bought or rented them. I nabbed Cal Huntington at the scene of the robbery and found out some rent-a-cop outfits were missing. Still, if I hadn’t been at the gala, maybe no one would’ve put it together.

  “Of course, if I hadn’t made the crooks, Brunanski wouldn’t have gotten shot,” she added. She took a gulp of her drink, feeling the champagne burn in her throat, and went on.

  “With one of the gang wounded, and a cop dead, they went into panic mode and scattered. I’ll bet Gallagher sold them some BS about how he’d pay them off once the heat died down. Maybe it wasn’t even bullshit and he really did mean to look after his guys. We’ll never know. We started scooping them up one by one. Huntington gave up the other gang members, and pretty soon we had everyone but Gallagher.

  “He was the brains of the gang, though, and he’d gone to ground away from his usual stomping grounds. I think we’d have gotten him anyway, in just a couple of days, and Van Ormond thought so, too. They got in touch to finish the deal. Van Ormond got the painting, Gallagher got his payoff. Then Van Ormond tipped off the cops and we killed Gallagher.”

  “Wait a minute,” Luke said. “If Van wanted Gallagher dead, why pay him? Why not just shoot him?”

  “At that point, Van Ormond still hadn’t shot anyone,” Erin said. “He may have preferred to keep his hands as clean as possible. He probably wishes he’d just gunned Gallagher down. But killing someone is a big deal, and even bad guys usually try to avoid it. I think he had second thoughts, but by then it was too late. So he gambled and called the police, told them Gallagher was armed and dangerous, and basically used the NYPD as his personal hit squad. If ESU had been a little less trigger-happy, he might’ve been in trouble, but his plane was about to leave. At that point, it was either roll the dice or spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder.

  “It was a big risk, but it paid off. Now Van Ormond had the painting, no one could ID him, and he had a ticket out of New York. All he had to do was sit tight for a few hours, and he’d be home free. But he didn’t reckon on Schenk. I still don’t know how Schenk made him. I’ll have to talk to him. If I’d believed him at first, I could’ve stopped him from getting shot. That’s on me, too.”

  “And me,” Luke said ruefully. “I’m the one who told you it couldn’t be Van. I’m st
ill having trouble believing it.”

  “Schenk showed up at Van Ormond’s hotel room, right as he was getting ready to leave,” she continued. “That must’ve been awkward. But nothing Van Ormond couldn’t handle. Schenk’s no good at diplomacy. He said something stupid and confrontational. Van Ormond had a gun, just in case, and blam, problem solved. Except that he’d made one last mistake. He’d gotten a little careless and called in the tip about Gallagher from his own hotel lobby. If he’d used a phone somewhere closer to the hideout, I think he’d have gotten away with it. It’s the little things that catch big-time crooks, that’s what my dad says.

  “I got there just in time, heard the shot, busted in, and almost got myself killed,” she finished. “I wasn’t expecting him to use the Madonna as a human shield. Not a human shield, exactly, but you know what I mean.”

  “He hid behind the painting?” Luke said, eyes wide.

  “Yeah,” she said. “He figured I wouldn’t shoot up a priceless work of art just to take down a bad guy.”

  “Was he right?”

  Erin stared at her half-empty glass and thought about her answer. “No,” she said at last. “No, I would’ve put him down. If I hadn’t, Schenk and I both would’ve died, and maybe Rolf too. Schenk might’ve been willing to die for the Madonna, but I wasn’t about to let him. But I did hesitate. Just for a second, and it damn near killed me.”

  “So Van shot at you?”

  “He missed, and Rolf took him down,” she said. “Schenk knew Rolf was a German-trained dog, who knew German commands, and he told him to attack. It’s a good thing my partner didn’t freeze like I did. Rolf broke Van Ormond’s gun arm. That dog’s got a bite like you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Wow,” Luke said.

  “Here’s the thing, Luke,” she went on. “You talk about how much respect Van Ormond has for art. If that’d been true, he wouldn’t have put the Madonna in danger like that. Not even to save his own skin. I don’t think he ever intended to keep her.”