RCC04 - And Every Man Has to Die

by Frank Zafiro

  Sexual tension? Sure, it existed, but you handled it the way you handled it anywhere else. Professionally. Prudently. And if anything ever happened with anyone on the job, you kept it discreet. Mostly you didn’t let it happen, because it almost always led to disaster. That’s what happened with her and Stef. She’d learned her lesson there on her own. No one pulled her aside and gave her the template for dealing with it. She certainly hadn’t called anyone at home and pleaded for advice.

  And who did this Carson chick think she was, anyway? Time was, a rookie remembered his place. Open ears, close mouth. Work hard. Learn. It didn’t come to you on a silver platter. You figured it out over time and if you proved yourself to be a brave and hard worker, the veterans on the platoon gave you some subtle guidance, but you didn’t call them on the phone and ask for it. You earned it. At seven years on the job, Katie knew she was just now entering that veteran phase of her career. She’d earned that respect from most of her platoon mates, with the possible exception of Kahn, and who cared about that prick? She’d faced impossible situations and come through them. Maybe not whole, maybe not all right, but she’d come through. And no one held her hand or gave her some secret potion to deal with all of it. It wouldn’t have mattered if they had, anyway. Some knowledge has no value unless you learn it on your own.

  Katie drew in a breath and prepared to tell Carson some version of all these thoughts. She wasn’t sure how they’d tumble out but she was pretty sure this little beauty queen would know by the end of the conversation that even if she had some sort of secret wisdom, she wasn’t just going to hand it over to some bimbo playing dress-up. Carson was going to have to earn it. Like she did.

  “Are you still there?” Carson asked.

  “Yes,” Katie said. Her stomach was warm with the wine. Maybe she shouldn’t say those things. Or if she did, maybe it shouldn’t be when she was feeling the wine so much. Maybe she should suggest that she and Carson meet for coffee sometime in the next couple of days and she could decide if there was any advice she could give her that would help.

  “Should I call you some other time? You sound a little funny.”

  “No,” Katie said. “I’m fine. I’m just a little surprised, that’s all.”

  “Oh. Well, I just figured you were the best person to talk to.” She paused. “Maybe the only one who’d understand.”

  Katie did understand.

  “There aren’t any women on your platoon?” Katie asked.

  “No. Just you. Besides me, of course.”

  “Wait a minute. You’re on my platoon now?”

  “Yeah,” Carson said. “I got reassigned when you were injured. You didn’t know?”

  “No,” Katie answered. “I didn’t know.”

  Katie digested this. They sure didn’t take long to replace her. What the hell was this? Any chick will do? She knew that wasn’t the case, but it still burned at her. Not only was she going to be out of commission, but in the meantime Carson was supposed to replace her? And now Carson had the audacity to call her up and ask her exactly how to do that?

  “Anyway,” Carson said, “I just figured you probably went through a lot of the same stuff I’m dealing with, so I wanted to call and see if you can offer any advice.”

  Katie opened and closed her mouth. She choked down the bilious words that threatened to spill out. Even through the vino she could tell that while Carson didn’t know how utterly ignorant she was, she wasn’t calling to be malicious. She didn’t deserve a magic totem to get her through what Katie learned the hard way, but she didn’t deserve Katie biting her head off, either.

  “The best advice I can give you is to do the job,” Katie said. She knew her words had a slight slur, but she repeated them anyway. “Just do the job the best you can.” When Carson didn’t reply right away, Katie added, “Be a good cop.”

  Katie nodded. Her advice might sound simple, but she knew it was also profound. In fact it was as close to a magical secret as Carson, or any other cop for that matter, was likely to ever get.

  “Okay,” Carson replied, her voice unsure. “But I was also wondering about—”

  “I’m sorry,” Katie said, “but I’ve got to go. This pain medication makes me nauseous. I’m not feeling very good.”

  “Oh. All right. Well, thanks for—”

  “You’re welcome,” Katie said, and hung up.

  For a long while Katie MacLeod stared down at her empty wine glass, awash in emotions. Guilt gave way to frustration, which faded into a tickling anger. A little bit of self-pity tried to worm its way in, but she pushed it away with pride. Finally the guilt rose to the top again.

  Katie slid her injured foot off the support chair, stood up, and limped toward the refrigerator. She was pretty sure that another bottle of Wenatchee’s best was in there. And right now, that seemed the simplest and easiest thing to do.

  1811 hours

  Valeriy Romanov sat sipping his Turkish coffee. A half-eaten pastry sat on the plate in front of him. He stared down at the deep black coffee in the tiny cup between his hands. Sergey could not be moved from his decision to address the heads of the various gangs. This was despite Val’s strong counsel that he insulate himself and allow Val to handle the meeting. “No,” Sergey had said, “a subjugated people need to know who their ruler is, even if they never see my face again.”

  Val had argued, raising several valid points. Sergey was unmoved. Of course, secretly Val was glad that Sergey had been obstinate. It was exactly what he’d wanted.

  Val lifted the powerful coffee to his lips and sipped. The strong taste and odor filled his senses while he considered how to execute the next stage of his plan. He saw the endgame very clearly, but the plays between now and then were still shadowy. Perhaps Sergey would show him the way. He glanced around the small coffee shop, a habit from his days on the street as a young man. Natalia stood by the cash register striking a seductive pose and glancing up at him often enough to let him know that she was his for the taking. He thought that perhaps after he finished with the evening’s business he might avail himself of that particular opportunity. But for now he needed to remain focused.

  Focused. The lack of focus made him think momentarily of Pavel. He fingered a battered paperback copy of Dune that sat next to his plate. It was printed in Russian, purchased from a street vendor in Kiev. He’d brought it along to give to his nephew. The boy needed to become more serious, and soon. What better way to reach him than through the same book that stirred his own Machiavellian nature?

  He turned his thoughts to the top men in the organization. None of them lacked in loyalty. Several had been soldiers who served in Spetsnaz with him, and those that hadn’t had been on the streets of Kiev with him and Sergey.

  Still, Val had to admit he had missed Oleg’s treachery. The accountant had voiced several points of dissatisfaction, but Val had never read that to be disloyalty. He encouraged his men to speak up and advise him of any problems they saw with operations. It was in that light that he had heard Oleg’s challenges. Instead, the man turned out to be a traitor, a dirty musor.

  Val took another sip of his Turkish coffee and considered that for a moment. Oleg had been vocal, but was that traitorous? The transgression for which Sergey had sentenced him to die was embezzlement. Stealing from Sergey was certainly not the most loyal of practices, but Val wondered still if he would classify Oleg as disloyal. Everyone skimmed a little. It was a cash business, after all. As long as a man wasn’t too greedy, he could do that indefinitely. Val set aside significant amounts before kicking up to Sergey and the boss had been never the wiser. Either that or he considered it the cost of doing business. His decision to punish Oleg most likely had to do with the amount Oleg was skimming and not necessarily the practice itself.

  Val asked himself why he was so concerned with this, but the answer came immediately behind. Because if he missed signs of Oleg’s disloyalty, how well could he gauge the others?

  Val thought on that for a long while. In the e
nd he was forced to conclude that all of the men were as loyal as any man could be. Oleg’s treachery with the police was because of the fire. He sat for a while, considering his rationalization. Finally he accepted his own analysis.

  He mentally walked through each of his top men again. This time he gauged their loyalty to Sergey versus their loyalty to him. He found that task considerably easier. The men who had served in the military were his. Of that he had no doubt. The others he was less certain of. However, his efforts over the past several months to bring them closer at Sergey’s expense seemed to have been largely successful. He believed that if he made his move now the coup might well be bloodless.

  Aside from Sergey, that is.

  And Marina, of course. Val thought about his sister again. He didn’t like the idea of bringing her pain, but knew it could not be helped. He told himself he would be there to comfort her, and tried to push thoughts of her from his mind.

  He glanced at his pastry and decided that he wasn’t hungry anymore. He pushed the plate away and a moment later Natalia appeared at his table.

  “Are you finished with that?” she asked in a sultry tone.

  Val grunted affirmatively.

  She leaned over further than was necessary to retrieve the small plate, then turned and walked away, adding a bit of sway to her step. Val took a moment to appreciate the view as she made her way back to the kitchen.

  Val’s cellular phone rang. He wasn’t entirely sold on these devices. They were becoming more and more commonplace, if expensive. They would likely become immensely popular with Americans because they represented another luxury. For him, it was a very expedient tool, but he distrusted it from the vantage point of communication security. He discouraged anyone from saying anything incriminating over any telephone, but particularly a cell phone. Perhaps a day would come when he and his crew could purchase scrambled cell phones, but until then he was glad that they spoke only Russian in the clear.

  “Yes,” he said into the receiver.

  Yuri spoke quickly. “Dinner is arranged,” he said cryptically. “All the guests will attend.”

  Val did not answer. He snapped the phone shut and put it back into his pocket. So far, everything was a go. All his strategies were working out. He had done his groundwork. He had the loyalty of the men, he had the tools, and things were proceeding according to plan.

  According to plans within plans within plans.

  1927 hours

  Detective Ray Browning sat at his desk staring down at the case file in front of him. The lights above the desks of his colleagues had been turned off hours ago. The only sound he heard was Glenda’s rapid typing in the foyer as she transcribed one of the detectives’ reports on overtime. Browning found himself envying whichever detective had made enough progress on a case to ship a report to her.

  Browning never officially learned to type. He still nurtured his hunting and pecking skills when he was forced to type something. But right now, even he could type up his report without Glenda’s skills.

  He resisted the urge to review the contents of the case file again. He knew them virtually by heart already, but if he were to open the file the result would be another hour poring over every detail again, looking for something that he might have missed the first dozen times.

  But an empty cupboard was an empty cupboard, no matter how many times he opened the door and peered inside.

  Something about the case bothered him. It wasn’t the meddling of Special Agent Payne. It wasn’t even the fact that the victims had been young black men, stirring in him some sort of sympathy born of kinship. Browning didn’t think along those lines. Men were men. Good was good. And criminals were criminals. He barely paid attention to skin color unless it helped him identify the bad guy.

  No, what bothered him was the sheer brutality of it. Three dead and one in a drug-induced coma who was likely to be a vegetable for the rest of his life.

  The gang member witnesses ranged from unhelpful to flat-out adversarial. Only DeShawn Brown, the apparent leader of this Crip set, had been both helpful and useful. And even his information hadn’t given Browning any particularly powerful or solid leads.

  The police database for Russian criminals was shallow, and most of their information sketchy. He spoke with DeShawn very frankly about gang matters, assuring the young man that he could speak freely without concern for criminal matters so long as they were drug or property crimes. DeShawn had been wary nonetheless and avoided anything directly incriminating. When Browning had asked about political issues, the gang leader shook his head.

  “Ain’t nobody said nothin’ to me about nothin’,” he’d stated emphatically. “This was a flat-out ambush and we didn’t do shit to piss them motherfuckers off.”

  Browning wondered if the move by the Russians was truly unprovoked, but he had no call to disbelieve DeShawn.

  Beyond the carnage, what bothered Browning just as much was the setting. It irritated him that the gang members would hole up in a residential area that even by gang standards would have been considered civilian. Their presence was a trouble magnet. But the bulk of Browning’s ire was directed at the men who had fired their automatic weapons in a neighborhood full of working people and children.

  He accepted Chisolm’s analysis that they were military trained and that their rounds had been largely accurate, but that didn’t negate the fact that a stray round could have taken an innocent life.

  All of this didn’t help solve the case.

  Browning examined instead what physical evidence existed. They recovered 106 AK-47 shell cases. According to Chisolm, each of the three shooters probably had a thirty-round magazine and probably carried two or more in reserve. At least one or more of the men had done a tactical reload at some point. Browning hadn’t needed Chisolm’s input to figure that part out. He might not have been in the military, but he understood math.

  He’d ordered a fingerprint check on all the casings and was astounded to learn that there hadn’t been a single smudge or smear, much less a print. That meant the shooters had wiped down each round before loading them. Furthermore, they must have worn gloves while doing so. That level of meticulous caution dismayed him.

  During any detective’s career, the majority of cases were broken because the detective discovered a mistake that the criminal made. He knew that you could be a brilliant investigator and follow out every lead to its natural end, but if the perpetrator didn’t make a mistake somewhere along the way, you were unlikely to break the case. That sentiment didn’t sit well with some of the more hotshot detectives, but Browning’s days of worrying about image were long behind him, if they ever existed at all. His primary consideration was simple: Figure out what happened, find the bad guy, and build a case against him that’ll stand up in court. Nothing more, nothing less. Although in this case he was coming up with a lot less.

  “If this is the way the Russians do business,” he whispered down to the closed case file, “we could be in for a long haul.”

  Speaking those words sapped the last of his motivation for the day. His wife, Veronica, and son, Marcus, were waiting at home for him, probably holding dinner. There was nothing more for him to do today except hope that maybe someone made a mistake overnight.

  2217 hours

  “Baker-122, Baker-128.” The dispatcher’s monotone voice broke into the still night of B.J. Carson’s patrol car as she cruised up Division Street. She waited until Battaglia answered up, then keyed her own mike. “Go ahead,” she said, trying to project a confidence she didn’t entirely feel.

  “In Adam Sector at 119 W Central. Male caller states he thinks his wife has committed suicide. She went in the bathroom and he heard a loud bang. He is standing by at the front door of 119 W Central.”

  “Copy,”came Battaglia’s unflappable voice.

  “Copy,” Carson said, putting on her overhead lights and heading that direction. “Time delay?”

  “He called less than a minute ago. Also, medics will be standin
g by.”

  Carson copied that, too. She hung up the microphone. Katie’s words echoed in her mind: just be a good cop.

  She pressed down on the accelerator and drove hard. No way were medics going to beat her there. She only had about five blocks to drive.

  As she turned onto the correct block she dumped all her lights and rolled to a stop one house east of 119. In the distance she could hear the loud air horn and siren of the fire truck. Battaglia cruised in behind her, lights out.

  Carson headed up to the door. A middle-aged man opened the door as she approached. Worry lines etched his face.

  “Straight back,” he said, pointing with a trembling hand.

  Carson entered the house, her heart pounding with adrenaline. The smell of body odor and dirty cat boxes filled her nostrils. She heard Battaglia’s footsteps and creaking leather right behind her. The sounds comforted her. Directly inside the doorway was a large, messy living room. On the other side of that she could see the bright light of the bathroom. The bathroom door stood half open.

  Drawing her weapon, Carson approached the door cautiously. The man at the door gasped at the action, but Carson ignored him. The woman in the bathroom might still be alive. She might still want to commit suicide. And she might want to make Carson do it for her. She’d learned in the academy that suicide by cop was getting more and more popular.

  Battaglia moved to the opposite side of the doorway, his gun drawn and at the ready. Carson tried to peek through the crack at the hinges. She saw a body seated on the closed toilet. There was no movement. She glanced up at Battaglia and shook her head.

  Battaglia shrugged. “Ma’am?” he said. “Ma’am, are you all right in there?”

  The man who had let them in approached them. “Help her, please!”

  “Sir, just go to the door,” Carson said as firmly as she could muster. She knew her voice had to cut through the man’s worry and impending grief. “Medics are on the way. You’ll need to let them in.”