Irish Car Bomb

by Steven Henry

  “Yeah,” Erin said absently, remembering how Corky had caught the beer glass she’d knocked off the counter. “But does he know about bombs?”

  “He could. He and Carlyle were in the IRA together.”

  “I think,” Erin said, still speaking quietly, “someone needs to have a talk with Corcoran.”

  “Maybe,” Vic said, but he sounded dubious. “I think we need to remember how we got pointed at Carlyle.”

  “The bomb,” Erin said. Then she managed to shake her head clear of her personal feelings for a few moments and think like a cop again. “And Fergus’s guys. They sold him out to us.”

  “Yeah,” Vic said. “I thought the Lieutenant cracked them, but…”

  “They played us,” Erin said. “Damn it, that whole scene in the interrogation room was scripted!”

  “We wouldn’t have believed it if they’d given it up easy,” Vic said. He was on his feet now, excited, pacing back and forth.

  “They knew we’d be coming, once we figured out O’Connell’s connection to Fergus,” Erin said.

  “I don’t think their plan included getting their asses kicked,” Vic said.

  She shrugged. “Maybe they’re smarter than we thought.”

  “That wouldn’t take much,” Vic said. He was walking faster, working his hands into fists, then shaking them loose again, over and over. “Okay. Let’s try this for size. Frankie hates Carlyle. Why?”

  “He’s jealous,” Erin offered. “Carlyle’s a bigger guy in the organization, especially in the sports book.”

  “Okay, he wants Carlyle’s book,” Vic agreed. “So why not just whack Carlyle?”

  “Cars is too strong to go after directly,” she suggested. “He’s well-connected, maybe O’Malley wouldn’t sanction the hit.”

  Vic snapped his fingers. “Yeah! But what if Carlyle took out someone else and got caught doing it? That leaves Frankie clean.”

  “I dunno,” Erin said. “It seems awful complicated. Maybe Fergus found out O’Connell wanted his wife dead and just grabbed the opportunity.”

  “Okay, sure,” Vic said. “Why not? O’Connell’s working for Fergus, he comes up to him one day, says, ‘Hey, boss, I got this wife, she hates me, but there’s an insurance policy. It’d pay off my debts, you think we could make this work?’”

  “Fergus suggests using a car bomb,” Erin said. “Makes it look like his rival did it.”

  “Two birds, one stone,” Vic said.

  They stopped, staring at each other. “It’s Fergus,” they said in unison.

  Then Erin sighed. “So what? We can’t prove it. The bomb was built on-site. Fergus never would’ve touched it.”

  Vic shared the sigh. “It’s down to he-said, she-said, and O’Connell’s not exactly gonna say anything. But we’ve got it! We just need to hold on, and something’s gonna shake loose.” He grabbed his cup off his desk and took another long pull on the straw.

  “Vic? What exactly are you drinking?”

  “Mountain Dew,” he said. “Might be some caffeine pills crushed up in it. Sixty-four ounces.”

  She blinked. “And they say the Irish have a drinking problem. Your kidneys are gonna kill you.”

  “Better than my liver,” Vic said. “I could’ve put vodka in it.”

  “Well,” Erin said, thinking out loud, “if O’Connell talked to one guy about murdering his wife, he might’ve talked to others first.”

  “Could be,” Vic said. “You want to brace some of the Irish?”

  “Oh, I’m definitely going to be talking to at least one of these guys,” Erin said, gritting her teeth. “But I’m thinking we take one more crack at Fergus’s boys. Try them when they’re not on a script.”

  “I wouldn’t mind having a few minutes with those two goons,” Vic said. His hands clenched again. “Sometime they’re not looking to take a dive.”

  “You and me both,” she said. At that moment, Erin really wanted to hit something.

  A shout echoed from the stairwell.

  “What in the name of God is going on?”

  Erin and Vic looked up, instinctively guilty, to see the face of Lieutenant Webb. He waved his hands at the mess in disbelief.

  “What the hell have you done to this office?”

  “Redoing the filing, sir,” Vic said. “O’Reilly was helping me.”

  Webb looked from one of them to the other.

  “Had to be done, sir,” Erin said, fighting down a sudden, hysterical laugh. “Otherwise we couldn’t find anything.”

  “Okay, I can’t deal with this,” Webb said. “Not before my coffee. By the time I’m done with my second cup, I want to be able to see the floor.”

  “On it, sir,” she said.

  “And on the subject of paperwork,” Webb went on, “I want the reports from the bomb lab on my desk before noon.”

  Vic stifled a groan. He and Erin got down on their hands and knees, to the great interest of Rolf, and started bundling the files back into their boxes.

  *

  The cleanup didn’t take as long as Erin thought it might, but the final result promised to be a little confusing the next time anyone tried to research the O’Malleys. Jones arrived partway through and lent a hand. Rolf lay beside Erin’s desk and supervised.

  “Okay,” Webb said. “That’s better. You know we can’t leave crap lying around like that. Next thing you know, we’ll have Chinese takeout and empty pizza boxes everywhere.”

  “Like I found my desk,” Erin said. “Sir?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Vic… Detective Neshenko and I, we were thinking we should talk to Fergus one more time.”

  Webb glanced at the two of them. “Really? What for?”

  “We think he helped O’Connell plan the bombing.”

  The Lieutenant rubbed his chin. “You think that, do you?”

  Vic and Erin nodded.

  “Any particular reason?”

  Erin went to the whiteboard and started writing a list, talking as she did it. “O’Connell worked for Fergus. They had a lot of chances to discuss this. O’Connell was connected to the Irish mob, through Fergus again. Fergus has motive to want Carlyle out of the picture, but probably doesn’t want to cause an internal war. Fergus and his buddies tossed Carlyle under the bus when we leaned on them.”

  “Okay,” Webb said. “I can see how all that could fit together. But detective work isn’t about building a plausible story. It’s about building a case. And for a case, you need evidence. Do you have any?”

  “Nope,” Vic said. He didn’t seem troubled by the fact.

  “And your plan to get this evidence is…?” Webb prompted.

  “We’re gonna ask,” Vic said. He paused, then went on, “nicely.”

  “You know I can’t get you a search warrant on this.”

  “What about the dog?” Vic asked.

  “What about him?” Erin echoed.

  “Can’t he get us a warrant?”

  “No,” Erin said. “I can take Rolf along, and he’ll alert if he smells explosives. If Fergus was speeding and we stopped his car, that’d be enough for us to search it. But to go into his house? The dog’s not enough for PC.”

  Webb shrugged. “She’s right,” he said. “Do you really want to be the poster children for the next Supreme Court civil-liberty case?”

  “Maybe we can spook him,” Erin said.

  “How so?” Webb asked.

  “I’ll reintroduce him to Rolf,” she said. “See what happens.”

  “O’Reilly,” Webb said, “be careful. No lawsuits. Follow the rules—all of you.”

  “Sir, he’s not gonna bite him,” she said. “Not this time.”

  Chapter 15

  As Erin and Vic went down the stairs, Jones fell in step with them.

  “Want to get out of the office, see how the real cops work?” Vic asked.

  “I dunno,” Jones said. “You see any real cops around?”

  “So,” Vic said to Erin. “What’s the plan?”
<
br />   “We shake Fergus, see what falls off him.”

  “How?” Jones asked.

  “If he’s guilty, he’ll make some assumptions,” Erin said. “That may make him react.”

  “Okay,” Jones said, but she didn’t look convinced.

  They took two cars to Bernie’s, Erin and Rolf in her Charger, Jones and Vic in Jones’s Taurus. It was a little before eleven o’clock, not exactly peak time for a bar. Erin did a drive-by, but couldn’t see anything through the smudged glass of the front window. They parked around the corner and consulted.

  “Vests?” Vic suggested.

  “Vests,” Erin agreed. “This could get ugly.”

  They strapped on their body armor, including Rolf’s K-9 vest. Whenever the dog wore his armor, he knew it was time to do serious work. His tail whipped back and forth, his nose twitching. Vic went into the trunk of his car and came up with a Remington 870 pump shotgun. Erin checked her Glock, Jones her Sig-Sauer.

  “Okay,” Vic said. “Someone needs to watch the back, in case any of them do a rabbit. Erin’s up front, we’ll need the dog, and damned if I’m sitting this out, so that leaves you, Kira.”

  “Fine with me,” Jones said.

  “You hear us call, you come in hard,” Vic said. “Otherwise, stay in the alley.” He looked Erin over. “You’ve got the lead on this, as long as we’re talking. But if shit goes tactical, I’m calling the shots.”

  Erin didn’t argue. She was trying to control the pounding of her heart. It was silly. They’d been in here before, with no real problem. But now they were deliberately provoking trouble. She wondered if they should have more backup. But they weren’t serving a warrant. This was still a fishing expedition.

  “Right, then,” Vic said. “Ready when you are.”

  Erin took a deep breath, patted the grip of her Glock in its holster, and twitched Rolf’s leash. “Fuss,” she said, ordering him to heel. The Shepherd went into motion, sticking to her side in perfect step.

  The interior of the bar looked exactly like they’d left it. The broken glass from their previous fight had been swept into a corner, but no one had even bothered to pick it up. The place was deserted except for Damien Knox, still wearing the marks of the beating Erin had given him. He looked up, blinked, and his mouth dropped open.

  “Hey, Damien,” Erin said with a sweet smile. “Remember me?”

  “What the hell you want?”

  “Just coming in, taking a look around,” she said. Vic drifted to the side, splitting off from her and taking up a covering position. His shotgun was held easily, angled so it was pointing toward the floor but in Knox’s general direction.

  “You got a warrant?” Knox demanded.

  Erin didn’t have a warrant. But she didn’t need one yet. They were in a place of business, and a cop had just as much right as anyone else to walk in the door. If there was something obviously illegal going on, or an illegal substance in plain view, like a pile of cocaine on the bar, they could take action. But they couldn’t search the place. And they certainly couldn’t go upstairs, to the apartment where Fergus was probably hanging out, at least not without permission. She wondered if Knox knew all this, deciding he probably did. Few people were better versed in search-and-seizure law than career criminals.

  But he might not know so much about police dogs. It was time to run her bluff. “You know what I’ve got here?” she asked. “This is Rolf. He’s a K-9 police dog.”

  “No shit, lady,” Knox said. He was trying to keep an eye on her, Rolf, and Vic all at once, with the result that his eyes were darting back and forth. He was backing slowly away from them.

  “He’s a trained detection dog,” she went on. “That means he can find explosives. It doesn’t matter if they’re hidden. And if he tells me there’s a bomb in here, I can search the whole place.” That wasn’t completely true. Generally speaking, a dog giving a positive alert only counted as reasonable suspicion, not probable cause. There were exceptions, mostly pertaining to potential acts of terrorism, but that got complicated.

  “So what?” Knox retorted, but he licked his lips as he said it and his eyes kept darting. Erin saw the fear in his eyes, and knew she’d guessed right.

  “Frankie didn’t build the bomb for Fourth-Place Billy,” she said. “But he knows how. And he’s got another one here, doesn’t he. Rolf, such!”

  Rolf started sniffing, head down, tail whipping side to side.

  Knox hesitated. Then he made his decision. Erin saw the look that came into his eyes an instant before he acted. Oh, shit, she thought. Then things happened very fast.

  Knox reached behind the bar in a quick motion. Erin was moving, too, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Vic bring up his Remington.

  “Don’t!” Vic shouted.

  “Rolf, fass!” Erin snapped simultaneously, ordering him to bite and releasing the catch on his collar. She went for her gun.

  Rolf gave a ferocious snarl and sprang at Knox.

  Knox’s hand came up with a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun. The hammers were already cocked and ready. He swung the weapon to cover the charging dog.

  Erin had the Glock in her hand, but she felt like she was moving through deep water. “Drop it!” she and Vic yelled with a single voice. But she already knew he wasn’t going to.

  Vic had been the only one of the three with a gun already in his hand, and it gave him a split-second edge. The Remington roared, the sound overlapping the double blast of the sawed-off.

  Vic’s shot caught Knox in the right shoulder, spinning him clean around. It deflected the other man’s aim as he fired. The sawed-off had an impressive spread, though, and pellets sprayed into the dog, along with just about everything in the front half of the bar. Rolf staggered sideways, losing his forward momentum. Erin felt something smack into her chest and something else brush past her cheek with a rush of air. She didn’t care. She hardly even noticed. She had her Glock in line, sighting down the barrel at the man who’d just shot her partner.

  In some corner of her brain she knew that he’d fired both barrels of the sawed-off. The weapon was empty. In that instant, though her instincts screamed at her, and the law would be on her side, she decided not to kill him.

  As she hesitated for that brief moment, Rolf scrambled back into forward motion. The thing about K-9s was that they didn’t know how to lose. In their training, they always, always won. Getting hit only made them mad. If you were going to shoot at a charging K-9, Erin knew, you got only one shot at it, and God help you if you didn’t put the dog down with that shot.

  Erin didn’t have a clear line of fire anymore, as ninety pounds of extremely angry dog hit Knox, smashed him against the bar, and brought him down, teeth clamped on his gun-arm.

  Vic pumped another shell into his shotgun and scanned the room, weapon held tight to his shoulder. Erin rushed Knox. “Drop the gun!” she shouted, but between Knox’s screaming and Rolf’s growling, she might as well have been yelling baseball scores.

  It didn’t matter. The shotgun fell out of Knox’s hand. He flailed at Rolf’s head with his free hand, which did him no good at all. Rolf kept up a continuous growl and tightened his grip.

  Erin kicked the sawed-off away from the scuffle. Knox’s blows were getting weaker and he was clearly out of the fight. She reached to the back of her belt with her left hand and pulled out her cuffs. She glanced at Rolf and saw blood flecking his cheek where a shotgun pellet had grazed him, but he didn’t seem otherwise injured. His vest had stopped most of the blast.

  Vic had his radio out. “Ten-thirteen, shots fired!” he barked into it. That was sure to bring every cop within a ten-block radius. They’d have all the backup they needed, Erin thought, just in time for the fight to be over.

  The door to the upstairs apartment flew open. It was the exact wrong moment. Vic had only one hand on his shotgun, his head bent to talk into the radio. Erin was fumbling with her handcuffs, her Glock pointing down at Knox’s face. Rolf’s teeth were fully enga
ged in biting Knox.

  Erin acted on reflex, bringing up the Glock. Another guy was coming through the doorway. Even as she saw the revolver in the man’s hand, she snapped off a one-handed shot. He sagged back against the doorframe, blood blossoming on the thigh of his jeans. She’d clipped him with her lucky shot. She dropped the cuffs to get both hands back on her pistol and went into a shooter’s stance. “NYPD! Drop it or I drop you!”

  The man dropped the gun, a nickel-plated .38, and clapped his hands over the leg.

  “Let it bleed! Hands in the air!” Vic shouted.

  Erin recognized Gary Morgan. “Who else is upstairs?” she demanded, closing the distance.

  “Help…” Knox whimpered from the floor. No one paid him any attention except Rolf, who wasn’t interested in helping him.

  Morgan muttered something inaudible.

  The moment these two meatheads had started shooting at cops, the rulebook had changed. They could search everything and detain everybody in the place. “Where’s Frankie?” Erin shouted in Morgan’s face.

  He was going pale from shock, even though the wound didn’t look too serious. He sank to his knees, his hands in the air. “Upstairs,” he said.

  Vic grabbed Morgan and slung him around, cuffing him with brutal efficiency. He booted the revolver into a corner. “Go!” he barked at Erin. Sirens were sounding in the distance, closing fast.

  “Rolf! Pust!” she ordered. The dog released his victim and trotted to Erin’s side. His tongue was hanging out. At least someone was enjoying this, she thought. He didn’t seem to have noticed the wound to his face, and he was still very eager for action. “Voran!” she said, giving him the command for a blind search of a building. This was a risky order. He’d bite anyone he found inside. But it was a pretty good bet that the only guy in the place was Franklin Fergus, and he could well be waiting with a gun at the top of the stairs. Procedure in this situation called for sending the dog in first.

  Rolf went up the stairs at a run, Erin close behind him. Vic kept an eye on the two wounded men in the bar. Neither of the gunshot victims was cuffed, but it was clear they weren’t going anywhere. As Erin climbed the stairs, she heard the rattling scrape of a window being opened.