by Andrew Case
He was pointing it at a woman standing on the landing of the house, squinting from the light bathing her. Eleanor recognized her. Peralta. The one who had pretended not to recognize her in the hospital. The woman was in plainclothes, her badge hanging outside her shirt. She was bending at the knees, keeping her back straight, and she was setting her gun on the ground. Behind her, just inside the house, Eleanor could see Robert Armstrong.
One cop was disarming another. If she hadn’t seen Bruder kidnap a boy from the precinct, she would not have known which one was the criminal. Peralta’s hand shook as she set her gun on the doormat.
Eleanor sensed movement behind her. She turned and saw Leonard swing around the rear bumper and start up the lawn. He was in the open, heading toward the detective in the headlights, unarmed. Leonard came at the police cruiser from behind, no longer protected by the parked car.
Eleanor turned to the left and caught Mulino’s eyes. Mulino was still crouching, steady, his eyes just above the hood, his gun at the ready. Maybe he was trying to get a bead on Bruder. It would mean shooting a man in the back. A man who was holding a gun on a detective, but shooting a man in the back nevertheless. She saw Mulino watch Leonard creep up toward the lawn. This wasn’t what they had promised the captain. But it wasn’t as though calling out for him to come back would be any safer. As Leonard made his way toward the RMP, Eleanor hoped he wouldn’t make enough noise for Detective Bruder to hear.
CHAPTER FORTY
Leonard scuttled up the lawn toward the police car. Almost on all fours. The lawn had been torn to shreds and the mud was all over his pants, but his suit couldn’t get any worse than it already was. He peeked over the edge of the car at Detective Bruder. He was still looking at Peralta, in the doorway. He hadn’t turned back toward the street. He didn’t know that any of them—Leonard, Mulino, Eleanor—had made it to the curb. Leonard took another step forward. The boy had to still be in the back seat of that car. Alive or otherwise.
Detective Peralta, slowly rising after setting down her gun, her hands in the air, shifted her gaze over the car. She had seen him. She gave a quick flash of recognition and looked back at Bruder. She didn’t want to give the other cop any ideas. Didn’t want him looking off in the direction she had been staring. Instead she spoke.
“You want anything else, Detective? Or are you just going to drive off with this criminal now?”
Bruder walked toward her and reached down for the gun. It was Leonard’s chance, with a little bit of noise and the detective crouching. He slipped open the car door and into the back seat.
The boy was strapped into the seat. Belt locked. The door wouldn’t open from the inside. They transport prisoners this way, after all. Leonard put a finger to his lips to shush the boy and did his best to unlatch the seat belt without making any noise. Bruder was standing back up, stepping away from Peralta, his gun still trained on her. The headlights were shining straight in his face. Leonard was lucky for that; Bruder’s sight was compromised by his own car. Leonard slipped out of the car with the boy, both skidding in the mud.
As they crept back toward the curb, the door swung shut, securing itself with a satisfying click. Leonard winced. It was too much noise. Bruder had heard it.
Bruder swung around from in front of the car, his gun steady. Leonard and the boy were not ten feet away. They were just low enough to the ground that he couldn’t see them, but if they stood up they would have been exposed to his fire. The boy’s eyes were wide with fear.
“Who is that?” Bruder looked into the back of the empty car. Bruder’s face contorted in the headlights, confused and angry, then determined. He stepped toward the hood and started to round the car.
Leonard pushed the boy toward the curb, and shouted, “Run!” Henry leapt and trucked toward the curb. Eleanor scuttled to the rear of the Volvo, showing him the path between the bumpers of the parked cars. The boy bolted toward her.
Leonard saw Eleanor whisk the boy to safety. He turned back toward the car and expected to see Bruder pointing a gun at him. Instead, the cop was looking behind him and to his left, where Mulino stood holding his revolver.
“Detective Bruder, put down your weapon.”
But Bruder had a semiautomatic handgun and Mulino had only a revolver. And Bruder was quick, young, and trigger-happy. Instead of answering, he fired at Mulino and took cover behind the front bumper of the RMP. Four bullets dug hot into the hood of the Volvo. Mulino hadn’t been hit, but he couldn’t stand in the clear and fire. He knelt behind the car, breathing deep and slowly.
Leonard was backing away from the police car toward the curb, but it left him stuck in the open, and still too far from the curb to join Mulino and Eleanor behind the Volvo. Bruder rose slowly from the front of the squad car. The headlights were tearing into him. If the detective had been able to see, he could have gotten a bead on Leonard and shot. Leonard bent on all fours, backing toward the sidewalk, his eyes glued to Bruder. If he stood up, the cop would see him over the car. But he was moving too slowly as he crawled back toward the sidewalk.
Bruder stepped out of the headlights and toward the right side of the car’s front bumper. Around the car, his eyes met Leonard’s. Leonard leapt to his feet to turn and run back toward Eleanor. But it was too late. He felt the pain before he even heard the shot, a swift hot spear barreling through his right shoulder, just below his collarbone. As if he had been yanked to the ground by an enormous hook. Because that was the other thing he noticed before he heard the shot. He was already on the ground. He couldn’t move his right arm. He didn’t have a gun. He pressed himself up with his left arm, expecting to see Bruder close in and shoot him again, and that was where he was standing when he heard the second shot.
He didn’t feel a thing. It took Leonard a moment to realize that the second shot had not hit him. He looked up at Bruder, staggering toward him. The detective gasped and dropped his gun as both hands reached to his throat. His throat had been entirely ripped away. Bruder slipped onto his right knee and collapsed, his life seeping dark into the grass from the hole that used to be his neck.
Detective Peralta stepped down from the stairs, through the headlights, holding a small gun. A twenty-two. Barely bigger than a toy. But easy enough to keep strapped in an ankle holster without drawing too much attention. She was training it on Bruder, making sure that he wasn’t about to jump up and start firing again. She didn’t have to worry.
Leonard was rolling on the ground, clutching the shoulder. He could hear Mulino, kneeling by him, speaking softly. “Hang on, Len. You did good. Hang on. It’s just your shoulder. We’ll get you in a bus and they’ll stitch you up and you’ll be fine.”
Leonard let out a sound that wasn’t quite a scream and wasn’t quite a sigh. He clenched his teeth again, trying to bite on something that wasn’t there, trying to force the pain out of his body. To pull his mind away from the wound and the blood and the seared flesh. He twisted on the ground, but could see behind him that Henry was safe, standing with Eleanor Hill.
Eleanor spoke to the boy. “Are you okay?” The child nodded. But he almost certainly wasn’t okay. Not in the way any adult would understand the word.
As Leonard rolled back toward them in the mud, struggling to speak, he heard a car starting. The RMP, right in front of him, was revving up. He rolled out of the way so it wouldn’t crush him on its way out of the lawn. The car spun in the grass and revved back toward the street, tearing out a new patch of fence, throwing up a new splatter of mud. Behind the wheel, Leonard saw the stringy white mane of Robert Armstrong.
He had slipped right by them and taken off in Bruder’s car. He was already on the street, tearing away, before Peralta and Mulino stood up. It was Mulino who spoke.
“Aurelia, get these people to a hospital. I’ll follow him. Let the dad know that his boy is okay.”
By the time Mulino was in the car, Armstrong had already turned the corner at the end of the street. Leonard could feel that his whole shoulder, his whole su
it now, was wet. With blood or mud or sweat it didn’t matter. At least it meant he could feel something. Eleanor was still talking to Adam Davenport’s son.
“We’re going to get you back to your dad. Okay?”
The boy nodded, a thin tear streaking the left side of his cheek.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Mulino had to wrench the seat in Peralta’s sedan back. His right knee was killing him. But it wasn’t as though he could wait for the precinct units. He flicked a switch and the blue-and-red lights came to life through the front grill. Down the street, turning back toward the parkway, Mulino could make out the lights of the RMP. Armstrong was running without lights and sirens, but Mulino wouldn’t have any trouble keeping a bead on it. Plus there wasn’t a hostage anymore. They didn’t need to worry about keeping it off the scanner. Mulino flipped on the radio. He reached the captain at the seven-one.
“Captain, can you put the RMP we’ve been chasing over the scanner? We have the boy. Leonard has been shot. They are getting a bus but I’m following the car. We can let him know we’re on to him.”
“Okay.”
Mulino hadn’t mentioned that Bruder had been shot. Likely dead. Maybe the captain had known him. Mulino had been supervising detectives for only six months, and already one had been shot by the other. And the shooter was the good one. Maybe management wasn’t really for him. Maybe he was a legwork detective after all. He would have to have a hard conversation with Chief Travis when this was over. But he had already made up his mind about a few things that were going to make that conversation shorter.
The RMP had hopped onto the Belt Parkway. It was headed out to Long Island. Maybe Armstrong thought he would lose the NYPD if he left the jurisdiction. As though Mulino couldn’t call Nassau County on the radio. As though half the Nassau County officers weren’t retired NYPD anyway. Mulino swerved past the parting traffic and onto the freeway. Mulino would gain on him on the open road.
Bruder had been in league with them all along, and Mulino hadn’t even seen it. He should have noticed when the detective abandoned his post at the hospital. No one is quite that lazy. It explained why the boy went with a stranger. Anyone shows a police shield to a child, and the child will follow. A seven-year-old hasn’t been taught yet to be skeptical, to think that some cops are dirty, are holding out for their own sinister objectives. Bruder could have told the boy that there was news about his mother. That his father was in the hospital. A child who has lost a parent, filled with fear and anger that he doesn’t understand, is an easy mark.
And Leonard had probably been right. If Bruder had been working with Armstrong, then they were looking for something that was left behind by the boy’s mother. Adam had thought it was paranoid to hide under the radar with his kid for a year, but in fact they had been looking the whole time. When he bought the house he had made himself a target to Armstrong and whoever else wanted some clue that they could profit by. Mulino had put that part of last year’s escapade out of his head. Not only had there been cops sabotaging the city, there had been someone profiting off of it. He had caught the cops, but Veronica had gotten away. That had been too much for Mulino. This part of the job was simpler. Just hunt down the shooter and lock him up. Maybe, Mulino thought, he really wasn’t cut out to be a supervisor after all.
He had nearly caught the car. What little traffic was on the road this late was slowing, parting, giving way to the scene. An unmarked car running its lights, chasing a marked RMP running without them. It must have been confusing to the other drivers, no one sure which driver was the good guy and which was the bad guy, or if maybe the two of them were both chasing somebody else.
Mulino’s headlights were close enough to shine an outline on Armstrong behind the wheel. The man was leaning over the dashboard as he drove. He didn’t know how to turn on the lights and sirens. He didn’t know how to run the radio. He was just an ordinary real estate scammer, after all. Mulino could see Armstrong fiddling, and suddenly find the switch. The RMP blossomed to life. Now cars ahead were parting for him as well. Mulino pushed the gas. If it came to racing down a straightaway, Armstrong would be able to lose him.
Armstrong had been the boots on the ground, Mulino figured. He had gotten one workman on the site to kill another. Likely he bribed him, but he could have had something else too. You always find a mark with a weakness. You tell him how easy it will be to make it look like an accident. And whatever dark moment there was in Manny Reeves’s past, Armstrong would have promised him he could make it go away. And if Armstrong had been paid by the overseas fund, so much the better. He had, Mulino figured, probably taken the money to do something that he had been planning to do anyway. But as soon as it didn’t look so much like an accident, Reeves himself had to be cleaned up.
As Mulino struggled to keep up with the now-surging sector car, he thought that he was right where he ought to be. He was the guy who chases down someone who pushes someone else over a ledge. That was straightforward, ordinary crime, the kind that Mulino understood.
They weren’t out of the city yet. They were in East New York, heading north toward the airport and eventually Queens and Nassau County. The RMP hit the brakes, veering suddenly for an exit. Mulino was taken by surprise. He swung his foot to the brake and his knee felt like hell. He hit it too hard, too soon, and started to spin out. There were no other cars around, but he skidded past the exit ramp as the RMP careened down.
He had overshot the exit. He looked over his shoulder, flipped the car into reverse, and hit the gas with his aching leg. An oncoming car swerved out of his way. He still had the siren running hot; it was still police business. Still, he felt foolish swerving the car around to the off-ramp. He aligned the car and swept down toward where he had last seen the RMP.
The exit curled underneath the parkway and then back up toward the city. At the bottom of the ramp, the street was bordered by a three-foot retaining wall on each side. Over the wall to the left was a scrappy little beach and Buttermilk Channel beyond. To his right, a thick mess of tall grass covering murky growth. It was pitch dark here; the streetlights hadn’t worked for years. You could hear the water, even if you couldn’t see it. Mulino followed the ramp down, then a quarter mile to an intersection. The RMP was parked at the light. But it was empty.
Mulino stepped out of Peralta’s car, the headlights flooding the car Armstrong had taken. He pulled out his gun. He walked up to the abandoned RMP. He checked the back seat, gun drawn, just in case Armstrong was planning an ambush. He cleared the front seat the same way. But there was no one in the car. It hadn’t been five minutes since he had overshot the exit ramp. If Armstrong had left on foot, he couldn’t have gotten far. Mulino swung his flashlight over the swamp to one side and the beach to the other. If someone had run to the right, the plants would have been trampled. There would have been signs of flight. On the beach, Armstrong would have been exposed.
Mulino wasn’t in any shape to give chase into the weeds anyway. His leg hurt. He was out of breath. Even back at the house in Sheepshead Bay, he hadn’t pulled the trigger. He had a bead on Bruder, just before Bruder had come around the car and shot Leonard. But he hadn’t felt right pulling the trigger. A year ago, he had shot someone, and killing a man does something to you. At least, it had done something to Detective Ralph Mulino. Standing by the open car, wondering where Armstrong had fled but unready to give chase, Mulino wondered if he would ever have the stomach to pull the trigger again. And if he didn’t have the stomach for that, another decision was already made.
He figured that Armstrong had reached out to someone. He had been picked up. It was easy enough to make a call while you’re driving. Armstrong had been working with the building owner, after all. Something with a V. Peralta had shown him the name when she had come into the office, all excited. Every time you look up the chain, there is always someone else. Mulino had been duped again. Had run down the suspect only to have him slip out of his grasp. He had helped them catch Bruder. But once again, the dirty
cop had just been the tip of the spear. Reeves had toppled Wade Valiant. Bruder had kidnapped the child. But these were the dupes, the stooges, the people who were doing someone else’s dirty work and who were being set up to be caught anyway. The people who orchestrated it were gone. Mulino slammed his fist onto the hood of the car. His best work had, once again, only gotten him part of the way home. That conversation with Chief Travis couldn’t come soon enough.
Mulino leaned back against the RMP and sighed. There wasn’t another car visible on the road. The intersection threaded back under the parkway and into the city. Armstrong would be in a civilian vehicle: no scanner, no description, no trace. They would put it over the radio. A man in his sixties, white, matted white hair, and a slight stoop. Half of Borough Park would get thrown up against the wall in the next two days, but Mulino knew that they wouldn’t catch Robert Armstrong. Staring toward the unforgiving ocean, Mulino wished for a cigarette for the first time in a decade. Instead, he closed the doors of the sector car, got back into the unmarked detective’s vehicle, and turned on the radio. The other precinct officers would be there soon enough.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“You can go in now. He’s awake.”
The receptionist had actually startled Eleanor Hill. Sitting in the squat, uncomfortable chair, she had been reviewing binders of leasing statistics. Her vacancy rates were higher than they should be. So much for the boom. That would be a problem for tomorrow. With its dull tiles and cheap Sheetrock, the waiting room could have been the Post Office or the DMV instead of a supposedly quality hospital. A lot of money gets spent in hospitals, mainly on high-end equipment and doctors’ salaries. Surgical waiting rooms couldn’t make visitors comfortable if they were plush, so why bother.