Irish Car Bomb

by Steven Henry

  “It’s possible,” Jones said. “I’m just looking at the what. I can’t tell the why.”

  “We definitely need to talk to Fergus,” Webb said. “Neshenko, O’Reilly, why don’t you go see him? Vice has him listed as doing business at a joint called Bernie’s over on 36th.”

  “Sure thing,” Vic said.

  “Sir, I need a car,” Erin said. “Rolf needs a K-9 modified vehicle, with a remote door so I can deploy him.”

  “I know,” Webb said. “When I heard you’d be joining the squad, I filed the request with the motor pool. I haven’t heard back yet. Go down to the garage and see if there’s any movement on that. If not, see if you can requisition a marked squad with the right specs. It’s not ideal, I know, but it’s better than nothing.”

  “Thanks, sir.”

  Erin, Vic, and Rolf went to the elevator. “You want to drive, or are you okay with a woman doing it?” she asked him as they descended.

  “You go ahead,” Vic said. “I took out two parking meters and a stoplight the last time I pulled a guy over.”

  “Bullshit,” said Erin.

  “Okay, it wasn’t quite that bad,” he admitted. “But it’s still probably better if you’re at the wheel.”

  Erin knew the speed at which bureaucracies usually moved, so she was pleasantly surprised to find a black Dodge Charger waiting for her in the garage, complete with K-9 compartment. It wasn’t brand-new; she suspected it was a repainted patrol car. When she opened the door, she recognized the smell of strong disinfectant that characterized a well-used police vehicle. People threw up in squad cars, they bled on the upholstery, and they tracked in all sorts of awful things. They were worse than inner-city taxis.

  She got Rolf situated while Vic folded himself into the passenger seat. Then she adjusted her seat and mirrors to match her height, several inches shorter than the average NYPD driver. “Okay, here we go,” she said, turning the key. Her patrol car in Queens had been a Charger about the same age, and the throaty roar of the engine sounded like an old friend’s greeting.

  “So,” Vic said. “We’re gonna brace this guy, see what he knows about O’Connell. Ask him about the debt cancellation, see what he gives up?”

  “Yeah,” Erin said. “You want to try the good cop/bad cop thing?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Which do you want to be?”

  “You really think you can play good cop?” she said, raising an eyebrow.

  “Everyone says that about me,” Vic said. “Is it the broken nose?”

  “I think maybe it is,” she said. “You kinda look like a thug. No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  Chapter 7

  Bernie’s was a seedy bar, in a seedy neighborhood. It was squeezed between a payday loan office and the sort of video store that had a few ordinary movies just inside and a big back room full of the dirty stuff. Erin couldn’t help comparing it to the Barley Corner. The Corner was a classy place. Bernie’s looked like the sort of place they’d put on a billboard for Alcoholics Anonymous as a warning to drunks that they’d hit rock bottom.

  “You want to bring the dog in?” Vic asked.

  Erin thought about it. “Not right away,” she said. “I don’t want to spook Frankie.” She left the window down a couple of inches, though the day wasn’t too warm.

  “Okay,” Vic said. He looked the building over. “That’s gotta be a front. Nobody’s gonna hang out in a place like that unless it’s a cover for something else.”

  She nodded, squared her shoulders, and walked in.

  The interior was dark and smelled terrible. She squinted, trying to adjust to the dimness, and saw three muscular guys at the bar, watching a TV that was the only expensive thing in the place. The bartender was a short, fat man with a pockmarked face, a sleazy mustache, and a sour expression.

  The three toughs at the bar glanced at the newcomers. “Hey babe,” the one on the left said. “I think maybe you’re in the wrong place, but if you want, I can make it the right one.” He had a shaved head and was wearing a wife-beater that showed off tattooed arms. Erin recognized some of his tats as prison-yard ink.

  She sighed. Guys like this were so predictable. They were all posture, especially to a woman. They weren’t even trying to impress her; just one another. She ignored him and looked at the other two. One of them was enough like the first that they could’ve been brothers, down to a matching tattoo of a cobweb on his bicep. That was a common prison tat that meant the wearer had done time. The other guy matched the mug shot she’d seen back at the precinct. Franklin Fergus wasn’t very tall, but he was built like a brick, broad-shouldered and strong. He had short, spiky hair and two-day stubble on his chin. He flexed his hands as he looked at her and Vic, cracking his knuckles.

  “Franklin Fergus?” she asked, addressing the third guy.

  “Say who?” he shot back.

  “Frankie Fingers?” Vic translated.

  “What about him?” Frankie asked. He stood up, as did his two compatriots. Erin found herself wishing she’d brought Rolf after all. She was getting a really ugly vibe from these three.

  “Neshenko and O’Reilly,” Vic said. “NYPD.”

  “Ah, shit,” Frankie said. Then he turned and ran for the back door.

  “Dammit!” Vic snapped. He lunged after the fleeing man. Erin hesitated an instant, debating going outside for Rolf. But there wasn’t time. The two thugs stepped in Vic’s way. The room was narrow and the big Russian couldn’t get around them.

  Vic wasn’t much on diplomacy. The men were deliberately obstructing him, so he didn’t waste time asking them to move. He grabbed the guy on the left by the belt with one hand and under the chin with the other and threw him over the bar. The bartender let out a startled yelp and ducked. Glass shattered and the man landed with a crash.

  Vic tried to shoulder past the other guy, who was momentarily frozen in shock, as was Erin. Then things happened fast. The guy Vic had thrown came up roaring, scalp streaming blood from a shallow gash. The other goon swung a hard right jab into Vic’s face, catching him on the cheekbone. The two men were about evenly matched in size. The punch didn’t knock Vic over, but it stopped his forward momentum and rocked him back on his heels. He countered with a body blow to the thug’s ribs, fist meeting flesh with a meaty thud.

  Erin saw that Vic had his hands full. She thought of going for her gun or her Taser, but there was too much chance of hitting her fellow detective. The guy Vic had thrown was climbing back over the bar with a beer bottle in his hand, looking to come in behind Vic, but he wasn’t paying any attention to her. There were advantages to being small and female in a fight.

  Erin came in low and fast. She knew she wasn’t as big as most guys, so when she got in a fight she relied on her lower center of gravity and using her opponents’ momentum against them. She looped an arm up under the thug’s left arm and around his neck, used her hip as a pivot point, and flipped him. He went over backward with a startled squawk that turned into a groan as he hit the floor hard for the second time in less than ten seconds. He lay there, stunned, and she turned her attention to Vic’s fight.

  It lasted only a little longer. Vic was a classic boxer, a big guy who knew how to use his strength. He slammed a left-right-left combination into his opponent’s stomach, doubling the man over. Then he brought down his right hand in a hammer-blow between the guy’s shoulder blades, leaving him sprawled on the ground. Vic spun on his heel, fists cocked, ready to strike. He saw Erin and grinned.

  “I’ll get Frankie,” she said.

  “I’ve got these two,” Vic agreed, pointing to the two prone men.

  Erin didn’t go straight after Frankie, however. She ran back the way she’d come. As she went, she keyed the remote control on Rolf’s compartment, popping the door. The Shepherd was waiting. Trained and conditioned for moments like this, he hit the sidewalk ready for action.

  “Rolf! Komm hier!” she ordered. The dog followed hard on her heels, back into Bernie’s. Vic
had already cuffed one of the goons and was on top of the other, a knee planted in the man’s back, tightening a zip-tie as a temporary restraint. Erin and her K-9 raced past them and out the back.

  They emerged into a back alley choked with trash and debris. Frankie Fingers had a good head start. Erin couldn’t see him, had no idea which way he’d gone, and would’ve been lost on her own.

  “Rolf! Such!” she said, giving the German command which meant “track.”

  Partnership with a K-9 relied foremost on training, on the endless hours human and dog spent working on commands and practice scenarios. But it also counted on something more intangible, the bond forged during that training. A K-9 couldn’t just be passed off to another officer and function with anything like the same effectiveness. Rolf and Erin had worked together for three years, and she swore he could read her thoughts. If Rolf could talk, he might have explained the subtleties of her body language and tone of voice. But as it was, he caught the fresh smell of a frightened, agitated man and he was off on his appointed task.

  Rolf went left, leapt a tipped-over trash can, slalomed around a couple of discarded packing crates, and came to a six-foot chain-link fence blocking the way. He tensed, jumped, and scrambled the rest of the way over the fence before Erin was halfway there. Erin lost sight of him as he hit the ground on the far side and went around a corner, but she knew he had the scent. He wouldn’t stop until he ran down his quarry, or until he came to an obstacle he couldn’t cross.

  She ran after the dog. As she vaulted the fence and came down on the far side, she heard Rolf give a tremendous snarl, followed by a yell of fear and pain. She drew her gun as she rounded the corner, the snarls and cries continuing.

  “Stop fighting my dog!” she shouted, then felt a little foolish when she saw what had happened. She was in a maintenance alley behind a row of seedy tenements. Thirty yards ahead was a fire escape. Frankie had tried to clamber up the rickety metal, but since the bottom of the escape was a drop-down ladder, he’d had to climb on top of a trash dumpster and jump for a handhold. He’d made the leap, but before he’d been able to pull himself the rest of the way up, Rolf had caught up with him. The K-9 had sprung to the top of the dumpster and launched himself at the tempting target of his target’s dangling legs. Now Frankie hung from his fingertips with the strength of desperation as almost a hundred pounds of pissed-off police dog swung beneath him, teeth clamped firmly to the leg of his jeans. If the pants had been tight-fitting, they might have ripped and freed the escaping man, but they were loose, and so Rolf’s weight was slowly pulling Frankie’s pants off.

  Erin was tempted to wait and see whether Frankie’s grip or his trousers gave way first, but she didn’t want to risk the man falling on top of her dog. She holstered her gun and pulled her Taser instead. “Frankie!” she shouted. “I’m going to call off my dog in a second. When I do, count to three and then let go. If you try anything else, I’m gonna zap your ass. Either way, you’re hitting the ground.”

  “Sure! Whatever! Just get this crazy thing offa me!” was the agreeable reply.

  “Rolf! Pust! Hier!” she called, ordering him to leave his target and return to her. Obedient to his training, he immediately released his hold on Frankie’s leg, dropped to the pavement, and trotted back to Erin, tail wagging excitedly.

  Frankie thought about making a run for it. Erin saw his arms tense. Her own finger went inside the trigger guard of her Taser and she sighted on his midsection. But he thought better of it and tumbled to the ground. He started to stand up, tripped over his tangled jeans, and went down again.

  “Stay on the ground!” she snapped, though it was hard not to laugh at the man’s predicament. “Get on your stomach! Spread your arms!”

  All the fight had gone out of Frankie. He obeyed. She cuffed him, read him his rights, and searched him, looking for weapons and finding a knife with a four-inch folding blade. Then she got him back on his feet. They circled around the fence to come back into the bar from the front.

  Vic looked up as she re-entered Bernie’s, prisoner in tow, Rolf proudly pacing beside them. The two thugs were propped against the wall, seated on the floor, properly secured. The Russian detective saw Frankie struggling to pull up the seat of his pants and raised an eyebrow at Erin.

  “I didn’t think the two of you were out there that long,” he said. “Couldn’t it wait till you got off-duty?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Rolf pulled his pants down with his teeth.”

  Vic’s other eyebrow joined the first one. “Didn’t know the dog was into that sort of thing.”

  Erin couldn’t help smiling. “You’ve got no idea,” she said. “Let’s get these three back to lockup.”

  “We’d better call a backup car,” Vic said. “I don’t think everyone’s gonna fit.” He had a point. Erin’s Charger only had room for one prisoner in the back seat, the other half being taken up by Rolf’s compartment.

  “I’ll call it in,” she said.

  “Hey, O’Reilly?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re not half bad.”

  “Neither are you,” Erin said. “I guess maybe you can tag along on my next collar.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Frankie muttered. “Do you two have to make out while you’re on the clock?”

  “He resisting arrest?” Vic said, taking a step toward the man and curling one massive hand into a fist. “He looks like he’s resisting arrest.”

  “Okay, okay! Jesus!” Frankie said, shutting up.

  *

  “I sent you out to talk to one guy,” Webb said. “Catch-and-release. Now you’ve got him in my interrogation room, plus two more meatheads. Was there a bulk discount?”

  “He ran,” Vic said. “The other two got in the way, picked a fight.”

  The lieutenant glanced at Erin, who nodded. “He’s right, sir. Fergus bolted the second Vic ID’d himself, and the others obstructed. Vic tossed one out of the way, and then the fight was on.”

  “Either of you get marked?”

  “Nope,” Vic said. “I took down one, Erin put the other on the floor. We didn’t get hurt.”

  “You’ve got a bruise on your cheek,” Webb observed. “You want to press for felony assault?”

  Vic shrugged and touched his swollen face, none too gently. “Forgot about that,” he said. “We’re running down Murder One. Maybe use the assault as leverage, get the mug to talk, but otherwise, I don’t give a damn.”

  “Not a bad thought,” Webb said. “You okay, O’Reilly?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “That’s a pretty big guy you were mixing it up with,” he said. “You have to use the dog?”

  She bristled at the implication. “Rolf was in the car,” she said. “The guy rushed me and I gave him a hip-throw. He underestimated me, like a lot of guys do.”

  Webb let that one pass. “Okay, Fergus is definitely into something, or he wouldn’t have run. O’Reilly, why don’t you and I brace the goons and see what shakes loose? Then we’ll lean on Frankie Fingers.”

  “Me, sir?” Erin said, startled.

  Webb gave her a sour smile. “You’re a detective, aren’t you? This is what we do. You need to get a start sometime. I’ll be running the interrogations. You can assist. Just follow my lead. Neshenko, Jones, you can watch.”

  Chapter 8

  Thug Number One was named Damien Knox. He’d been in and out of the system ever since being placed in a foster home at age eleven, moving through Juvie into half a dozen arrests and three short sentences for assault and disorderly conduct. Webb handed Erin a bulging police file with the particulars on the way down to the interrogation room. She tried to scan the relevant information, feeling rushed. Her body was still hopping with adrenaline and she had trouble concentrating on written words. It struck her that Webb probably knew this and that the whole thing was some sort of test.

  When they got to the interrogation room, Webb didn’t go straight in. He went into the observation room wit
h the other detectives. There was a one-way mirror taking up a whole wall. On the other side, Erin saw the guy she’d thrown in the fight. He sat slouched in a plain metal chair, a chain linking his cuffed wrists to the table. His expression was somewhere between boredom and exasperation.

  “You always want to take a minute to look over your man before bracing him,” Webb said. “See if he’s nervous or calm, angry or sad. You can use all that in your approach. How’s he look to you?”

  “Seems pretty cool,” Erin said.

  “And what’s that tell you?”

  “He’s been in these rooms before.”

  “You already knew that from his file,” Webb said. “What else?”

  She thought about the guys she’d brought in over her years on patrol. “I kicked his ass a little while ago. He’s feeling silly for getting slapped around by a girl, so he’s making up for it by acting tough.”

  “We can use that,” Webb said. “Now, remember, we don’t really want Knox. We want Frankie.”

  “Got it.”

  “Okay, Detective,” he said. “Put on your game face.”

  Knox looked up as they entered, trying to hold his look of bored annoyance, but Erin didn’t miss the way his eyes flicked nervously at her. He stayed slumped down in his chair, but his shoulders and neck were tense.

  “Damien Knox,” Webb said conversationally. “I’m Lieutenant Webb. You’ve met Detective O’Reilly already.” He pulled out a chair on the other side of the table from the man and sat down. Erin remained standing against the wall beside the door, arms crossed. Webb’s whole manner was nonchalant, managing to convey a sense of casual disregard. It was calculated to poke at Knox’s pride. In Knox’s world, Erin knew, respect was the most valuable coin.

  “It’s been a while since we’ve had you in here,” Webb continued, not even bothering to look directly at him. “I guess you just haven’t been important enough to waste our time.”

  Knox glared at him. “Screw you, man. Do I get a lawyer?”