Killed in Action

by Michael Sloan

  The Equalizer was at the back of the store picking up some Oreo cookies. When he was in a store like this, he always gave a thought to his older brother Caleb. Eight years after his brother Zachary had been gunned down by the White Jaguars, Caleb had been killed in a convenience-store robbery over in SoHo. Caleb had run in to grab some Christmas lights for their mom’s tree, which had been in dire need of new strands. Caleb had been about to take the New York City bar exam. His dream had been to practice law somewhere right there in their neighborhood. He was already a civic leader in the community and becoming a real champion for the rights of the people. The SoHo convenience store had been robbed by two guys who took sixty bucks out of the cash register. Caleb had tried to stop them when they threatened the Asian proprietor and had been killed for his trouble.

  The Equalizer had that very afternoon been to the Cedar Grove Cemetery in Flushing, New York, where both of his brothers were buried. He’d left fresh flowers on their graves. He talked to Caleb most often when he was in the graveyard. His older brother had understood that the Lower East Side needed a hero. Hell, all of the neighborhoods around there needed one, from Hell’s Kitchen down to the Financial District. Someone who would fight for the oppressed, right their wrongs, keep them safe.

  The Equalizer had just taken a quart of 2 percent milk out of the refrigerated section, which he now put back, stuck the Oreo cookies into the pocket of his big overcoat, and strolled over to where a coffeemaker stood on a table near the counter for the benefit of the customers. That was because Thug #2—he kept them in the order he’d seen them enter the store—had moved right beside it. His jacket was slightly open, a Glock 34 9mm in his belt. Thug #1 stayed in the doorway of the store, blocking anyone else from coming in. Thug #3 was on his way to the counter, behind which the Muslim-refugee grocery-store manager was stacking lottery tickets. He spoke little English, but rattled off a torrent of some foreign language into his cell phone all day.

  The Equalizer picked up the coffeepot and poured black coffee into a styrofoam cup. He noted his favorite young Hispanic girl was behind the cash register. He thought her name was Raquel, a hottie with a great smile. She was ringing up some purchases for an old guy he’d seen around the neighborhood. The Equalizer shifted his gaze. A big guy in jeans and a Windbreaker was over by the Lay’s potato chips freestanding display. Two black teenagers were bopping to whatever rap music was blasting in their earpods, checking out, of all things, the fruit aisle.

  Thug #3 pulled a Ruger 9mm pistol from his pocket and waved it in the manager’s face. “Give me all the money in the register! All the lottery tickets!” The manager just stared at him, paralyzed. “Do it now!”

  The shouted demand had almost a touch of desperation.

  The manager started grabbing the various lottery tickets from their stand.

  The Equalizer turned and threw the scalding-hot coffee into Thug #2’s face, then smashed the coffeepot against the side of his head. It shattered as he fell, spilling glass shards and what was left of the hot coffee down his face. The Equalizer crouched beside him, grabbing the Glock out of his belt.

  In the doorway, Thug #1 pulled out another Glock 34. The Equalizer dragged Thug #2 up to shield his body. Thug #1 fired, and two bullets struck his pal in the back. The Equalizer fired, but even though Thug #1 was a pretty big target, he missed. The glass exploded in the door behind him.

  Then several things happened simultaneously.

  The guy in the Windbreaker at the Lay’s potato chips drew a Sig P226 from a holster on his hip. The thought flashed through the Equalizer’s mind—Off-duty cop. Thug #3, panicked by the gunfire, fired on the cop, who was Dirty Harry and fired a split-second quicker. Thug #3 kicked around and fell to the floor. Blood spurted from the off-duty cop’s right leg. He went down hard to the floor, taking the Lay’s potato-chip stand with him.

  Raquel ran around the end of the counter from her cash register.

  The Equalizer fired again on Thug #1. This time he didn’t miss. The man took the bullet in the chest, firing as he was flung back against the shattered door. His bullet struck the fleeing cashier. She fell to her knees with a cry and grabbed her chest, blood gushing through her fingers. The two black teenagers pulled their earpods out of their ears and just stood there like they were watching a movie. The old man ran out of the store, stepping over the body of Thug #1. The manager grabbed his cell phone and dialed 911.

  The Equalizer didn’t have much time.

  He felt for a pulse at Thug #2’s throat. Dead. He ran over to where Thug #1 lay moaning in the doorway, picked up his fallen Glock 34, and put it into his overcoat pocket. He moved up to the counter where Thug #3 lay unmoving. The undercover cop had gone for a head shot. Pretty good shooting. The Equalizer picked up Thug #3’s fallen gun and stuck it into his other overcoat pocket. He looked over at Raquel. Her blouse had come apart and blood ran over her breasts. He had spent a lot of time admiring her chest. Too bad having to see it like this.

  He ran over to where the off-duty cop lay on the floor and knelt beside him. Bags of Lay’s potato chips lay scattered around him. The Equalizer pulled off his own belt and tied it around the cop’s leg as a tourniquet, cinching it tightly. The belt couldn’t be traced back to him. He’d picked it up at a thrift shop in SoHo for a buck. The cop raised up a little to look at him. The Equalizer pulled the collar of his overcoat up around his face. He couldn’t let the authorities know who he really was. That’s why superheroes had secret identities—they needed to be secret! But the cop’s eyes weren’t focusing. The Equalizer snapped his fingers at the two black teenagers, who ran to his side. He motioned for the first kid to press his palms against the wound in the cop’s thigh. The kid nodded, got it. The Equalizer didn’t want to talk to them so they could describe his voice later. He thrust the second kid down beside the first one. The second kid got it, too. They’d take turns.

  The Equalizer straightened and looked over the deadly scene. Good thing he’d been there—no knowing how badly these three assholes would have shot up the grocery store if he hadn’t intervened. He sauntered over to the counter. The manager had just finished his 911 call. He looked at the Equalizer almost in awe. The Equalizer nodded. He took the two guns out of his overcoat pockets and dropped them onto the counter. He decided to keep Thug #2’s Glock 34. He took out one of his new Equalizer cards with the figure’s silhouette holding a gun in front of the Jag below the NYC skyline and set it down on the counter beside the confiscated weapons.

  Then he knelt down beside Raquel. She looked up at him with fear and pain in her eyes. He squeezed her shoulder. “You’re going to be okay,” he said softly. “Paramedics are on their way.”

  She nodded. Grateful. He stood, knowing it wouldn’t make any difference when the EMTs got there. She was dying. You got used to collateral damage when you did the job he did, but it was too bad. She should have stayed behind her cash register.

  He heard sirens faintly in the distance, getting closer.

  The Equalizer glanced around once more at the carnage, then walked out of the grocery store into the night.

  CHAPTER 14

  She’d awakened him at four in the morning and apologized for calling so early. McCall had told her the time didn’t matter. It was just before 5:00 a.m. when he sat down at one of the metal tables under a red umbrella in front of the NYPD booth in Times Square. It was a little chilly and he was wearing his dark overcoat. To one side a huge neon American flag was lit up on a billboard, while others had commercials for a new Ferrari and a new Chanel fragrance. He was always amazed at how crowded Times Square was at this hour of the morning. He spotted Helen Coleman striding toward him. She had described herself on the phone. She was dressed in an elegant tailored Donatella Versace herringbone gray suit and carried a Tory Burch tote in light blue over one shoulder. An attractive woman in her early sixties, she had brown hair tumbled around her shoulders. He hadn’t given her a description of himself, but she walked right up to his table and sat
down. Closer to, he could see she had been doing a lot of crying. But she held her emotions in check. All she’d told him on the phone was her name and that she worked for the UN.

  “Helen, my name is Robert McCall. What’s your problem?”

  If she was disoriented by the abrupt greeting, she didn’t show it. She took a thin manila envelope out of her tote bag and slid it across the table.

  “My son is Captain Josh Coleman. He’s with the US Army Observation Unit in Syria advising the Syrian Army in their fight against the Jihadists. He was killed two days ago in a skirmish in a Syrian village. A two-star general, a colonel, and an Army chaplain came to my door to tell me he’d been killed.”

  McCall glanced through the slim file. Brahms always said that McCall “worked miracles,” but he wasn’t bringing Helen’s son back from the dead. There could only be one reason she had called him.

  “You didn’t believe the Army officers.”

  “I won’t say that. But … something’s not right. I spent all day yesterday trying to get answers from the Pentagon. I used every bit of influence I have, which is considerable, and got stonewalled. No one will give me any details of what happened.” She took out a small bottle of pills from her tote bag and swallowed one of them with no water. “I’m on medication. Sorry. I have a friend in the Army, a colonel, they call him Gunner. He hasn’t returned any of my voice mails or emails, which is unheard of. He wouldn’t ignore me like this unless he doesn’t have a choice.”

  “What does your husband say about this?”

  “Married twice, divorced twice. First time was a big fucking mistake. Second time I was the one who fucked up. Sorry. My son was always picking me up on my language.”

  McCall closed the file and sighed. “Mrs. Coleman…”

  “Please call me Helen. I know what you’re going to say. This is just my own desperate plea for this nightmare not to be happening. Isn’t that the second stage in the cycle? Pain and grief? I’m past that stage, but not to acceptance. Josh might be a prisoner of the Jihadists—maybe there’s a prisoner exchange in the works—maybe Josh is going to be used as a bargaining tool in some high-level covert mission. I know that I’m clutching at emotional straws, but I believe that maybe, just maybe, my son is alive and the Army is covering it up.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know. But I need proof that my son is dead. Or proof that he’s still alive.” She took a breath, the words having finally run out. She regarded McCall frankly. “Were you once Special Forces?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “But you worked for some kind of clandestine organization in our government. Black ops, some splinter spy group. Would that be close?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Something about you. Can you help me?”

  McCall spotted him jogging down Seventh Avenue from uptown. He’d also spotted McCall and changed direction. McCall looked back at Helen Coleman.

  “I’ll help you.”

  It looked as if a great weight had been lifted off Helen’s shoulders. Her body relaxed, just a little, and she nodded. “Thank you. I don’t know what you charge as a fee…”

  “I don’t charge clients.”

  “Wow. No shit. Sorry.”

  She stood up. Jimmy jogged over to the table. Helen smiled at McCall. Not a hundred-watt light-up-Broadway smile, but the best she could manage in the circumstances.

  “Your next Equalizer client?”

  McCall didn’t detect any irony in her words.

  “An old colleague. I’ll be in touch with you, Helen.”

  She nodded again and walked away from the table. Jimmy jogged gently in place. He was slight in stature, just under five-ten, a sharp face with luminous eyes. He wore a dark green running suit and his usual orange Nikes.

  “I saw your ad in The New York Times. You may not have friends, McCall, but at least now you have clients.” Jimmy looked after Helen Coleman, who disappeared down the stairs into the Forty-Second Street/Times Square subway station. “Can you equalize her odds?”

  There was no irony in Jimmy’s words, either.

  “I don’t know,” McCall said.

  Jimmy sat down in the chair Helen had vacated. “I haven’t seen Granny at his chess table on any of my runs in a month.” He glanced at his GPS Epson running watch, checking his time, distance, and pace. “I went by Mickey Kostmayer’s apartment yesterday. A lovely young woman is living there. His girlfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Who is she?”

  “A friend of mine.”

  “I thought we’d agreed you have no friends.”

  “An acquaintance. She’s going to stay at Kostmayer’s until I can find her a permanent apartment.”

  “She’s from out of town?”

  “No, she’s lived in Manhattan all her life. But not aboveground.”

  “I won’t ask. I can’t get a squeak off the spook network about Kostmayer and Granny. Not even from Sam Kinney, and he hears birds fart in Central Park. I’m worried.”

  “I’ll talk to Control. Find out what’s happened to them. How’s the security business?”

  “People still want to be protected. You didn’t ask me to stop by to chat about my work. You always want something. It’s one of your more endearing qualities.”

  “Not everyone finds it so endearing,” McCall said wryly. He took a photograph of Norman Rosemont out of his overcoat pocket and handed it to Jimmy. “You know this guy?”

  “Sure. Big real-estate tycoon. Always on the news. Got a loud mouth.”

  “I need to know his daily routine. Where he goes, what deals he’s making, what lawsuits he’s involved in.”

  Jimmy nodded, folded the picture, put it into the inside pocket of his lightweight running jacket, and stood. He looked down at McCall, a little sadly.

  “Sarah says the invitation for dinner one night is still open.”

  “I’ll have to pass. But thank her for me.”

  “You can’t isolate yourself forever, McCall. Someone has to come to your funeral and throw a white rose on your grave. I’ll get you Norman Rosemont’s schedule and the highlights of his corporate life by tomorrow night. Let me know if Control has intel on Kostmayer and Granny.”

  Jimmy jogged away, heading downtown.

  Maybe Cassie would toss a white rose on my grave one day, McCall thought.

  Then again, maybe not.

  A silver Nissan Sentra pulled up, a red light pulsing in the passenger-side window. Detective Steve Lansing got out and walked over to McCall’s table.

  “Are you having me followed?” McCall asked.

  “Come with me.”

  * * *

  The grocery store was now a crime scene. One of the uniforms pulled back the yellow police tape to let Detective Lansing and McCall in. More uniformed cops were inside and a forensic team. McCall recognized Catelyn, in her NYPD—CSI UNIT jacket, kneeling beside an overturned Lay’s potato-chip stand. She was bagging one of the spilled potato-chip packages strewn around it. A Middle Eastern man in his forties—obviously the grocery-store manager—was talking animatedly to a somewhat heavyset detective with kind eyes in a craggy face. Probably Lansing’s partner. The manager stopped his torrent of words and backed away.

  He thinks he recognizes me, McCall thought.

  Not good.

  Lansing led McCall to an office at the back. Another detective, midtwenties whose blue jacket read NYPD TECH, sat at a computer. On the monitor was a still frame from a high angle on the interior of the grocery store.

  “One surveillance camera, at the back,” Detective Lansing said. McCall had noted it on their walk through the store. “We loaded in the tape. If ‘the Equalizer’ had just let the robbery play out, no one would have got hurt. But you had to be a hero.”

  Lansing motioned to the NYPD tech, who hit a key. Grainy black-and-white footage rolled. A figure wearing exactly the same overcoat as McCall threw coffee into the face of one of the thugs.
He smashed the coffeepot against the side of the thug’s head, bringing him to the ground. Then the shooting started. Six seconds later it was all over. There was no clear frontal shot of the figure in the dark overcoat. He’d known where the camera was and had kept his back to it.

  “Who’s the guy at the Lay’s potato chips who fired?” McCall asked.

  “Off-duty cop. He shot the perp at the counter. Probably saved everyone else’s life. The officer is going to be okay. You applied a tourniquet around his leg wound using your belt, stopped him from bleeding out. But there was nothing you could do for the girl.”

  “I’m still wearing my belt.”

  Lansing ignored that. “You left this behind on the counter, your good deed done for the night.”

  He showed McCall another of the Justice Is Here cards with the words The Equalizer below it, in a polyethylene bag. On the computer screen, the figure in the overcoat stepped over the body of the thug in the doorway and out into the street. The NYPD tech froze the frame.

  “Same height, same build, same hair color, same coat,” Lansing said. “Where were you two hours ago?”

  “Asleep in my hotel suite.”

  “Anyone with you?”

  “No.”

  “The off-duty cop is in good shape, but he probably never saw you. You didn’t talk to anyone but the cashier, and she was dead before the EMTs got there. The perp in the doorway came out of the OR at Bellevue twenty minutes ago. If I put you in a lineup, what are the odds he’ll swear you’re the guy who shot him?”

  “Pretty high. But the body language is wrong.” McCall said to the police tech, “Run it back to where the figure is standing with the coffeepot in his hand. Right before he smashes it into the guy’s head.”