Shoot

by Kieran Crowley

  The medicine cabinet had been cleaned out, only black fingerprint powder smears remaining. The shower floor had a nice mosaic of a porpoise. The spigots in the shower, tub and sink were matching gold-plated dolphins. Draped over the side of the tub was a floor mat, which had suction cups on one side—so guests wouldn’t slip and fall and sue the hotel. The bathroom alone must have cost twice what my apartment was worth—and I couldn’t afford that either.

  “He should have been safe,” I told Reed. “He was locked in a soundproof room, he was armed, his majesty couldn’t slip in the bath and no one could brain him with a potty top or a lamp or shove him out a window.”

  “Yeah,” Reed agreed. “Too bad he opened the door.”

  “Speaking of which, the hotel must be bugged that all these fancy rooms are still crime scenes?”

  “Tell me about it,” Reed laughed. “Those guys are up here every hour on the hour, batshit, telling us how much coin they’re losing every day. They claim they’ll go to a judge if we don’t leave soon but I think they’re just huffing and puffing.”

  Chesterfield’s suite alone cost $5,000 a day. With the other rooms at lower rates, it had to be fifteen or twenty grand a day the hotel was losing.

  “What kind of asshole blows people away with a flintlock anyway?” Reed asked.

  “An asshole who owns a flintlock and wants to make a really stupid point.”

  “I guess. How the hell did they get it in and out of here?”

  “This place was a gun convention,” I said.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Also, it doesn’t have to be huge—it might have been a pistol,” I suggested.

  “You mean like a pirate pistol?”

  “Yeah, or a dueling pistol. I think that might have the same effect.”

  “Okay. So, this is the Tea Party guys bumping off their own people who are in their way?”

  “Maybe. Not sure yet.”

  “Don’t muzzle-loaders take, like, five minutes to reload?” she asked.

  It was a good point. Did the killer waste one person, reload for several minutes, and then proceed to the next room to do it again—until all five were dead? That would mean a lot of exposure for a single gunman.

  “I think you’re right. Maybe there was one rifle—or pistol—for each hit.”

  “So you could be looking for five guys with one gun each, or one guy with five guns?”

  “Or six—looks like they wanted to whack Senator Carroll, too, but maybe something went wrong.”

  If Carroll really was an intended target.

  “So there was probably a crew of half a dozen or more, who offed armed, highly protected politicians inside a security fortress and got away clean, along with an arsenal, and you have to find them?”

  “Uhhh… yeah.”

  “Better you than me, pal. Watch your ass.”

  “Thanks.”

  46

  It was already dark when I left the convention center, walking south on Seventh Avenue, the hot, humid air rumbling everywhere with the sharp sounds of combat— firecrackers, heavy fireworks exploding like small arms fire, artillery and missile strikes, near and far, echoing off the buildings. It sounded like the whole world was at war. I could feel the larger detonations in my gut, the adrenaline building. My senses began to speed up at the familiar noises, my heartbeat matching the battle rattle, gearing up mentally for attack.

  The crowds of demonstrators and counter-demonstrators were gone but the barricades were still up. My parents were nowhere in sight. Manhattan seemed normal after the incredible events at the convention, or as normal as Manhattan ever got. The crowds were light, probably because of the holiday.

  I thought about what Sergeant Reed had said. It felt like an inside job, of course. The most logical conclusion was that the politicians got whacked as a result of a power struggle within the party. What she said also felt like a warning. The victims all opened their doors to their murderers, which meant the killers looked like good guys. Also, if these guys could do this to powerful men and get away with it, I was a bug. I suddenly needed dinner badly—I was dying of thirst.

  That was when the eye in my neck blinked again. I spun around but no one was there. I walked back the way I came but saw no familiar or suspicious faces. I continued south toward Amy’s place. Every few blocks, I would try to shake out a possible tail but I couldn’t find anybody. Nobody paid attention to the paranoid guy whirling around and charging backwards, then turning back on his original course. Just another psycho on the streets of the City That Never Sleeps. All the way, the eye blinked. Maybe it was on the blink? Maybe the fireworks were freaking me out. Where could I go for a repair job? My best idea was arak. Booze and food and then sleep. Couldn’t hurt.

  “Siri, where can I get the eye in the back of my head repaired?”

  “I don’t know what that means, Shepherd.”

  “Neither do I.”

  Skippy went berserk again when I arrived back at Amy’s place. I brought Amy up to speed, while wrestling with Skippy.

  The sensation of being followed was gone. Amy invited me for a barbecue but I told her Skippy and I were going back to Jane’s. I would work from there.

  “Good,” Amy responded, as she followed me upstairs, followed by bounding Skippy and his playmate, Dr. Strangelove. “Glad to hear it.”

  “You know, Amy, you come off as a tough chameleon, a hard-ass professional, but it turns out you’re just a goopy blob of warm feelings.”

  “Don’t be a dick. I’m trying to like you.”

  We laughed.

  “Seriously, Shepherd. That’s the last time you fuck a client of mine. Bad for business.”

  “Tiffany wasn’t really the client,” I pointed out.

  “If you can’t follow my rules, there’s the door.”

  “Okay, Amy. You got it. Shouldn’t be a problem—anyway, she blew me off.”

  “Yeah, like you wouldn’t jump through hoops naked if she changed her mind tomorrow.”

  It always felt great to be a predictable male moron. I couldn’t argue.

  “Either way, no hanky-panky or I spanky,” Amy concluded.

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  I fastened his leash onto Skippy’s collar and apologized to him. He hated the leash but I had already gotten a ticket for having him off it. In the City That Never Sleeps, neither did the people who gave out tickets. I turned to my new boss.

  “Group hug?” I asked.

  “Fuck off and get back to work,” she said, slamming the front door.

  Skippy had some business to take care of in a local park, which was why I carried plastic bags in my knapsack along with the computer. When he was done, I called Jane.

  “Hi,” Jane answered. “I’m still at the morgue. This is taking forever.”

  “So leave and we can get some dinner,” I told her.

  “I’m going to hang in for a while because the lab results should be ready in an hour or two and we’ll be done. Then we’ll get something to eat.”

  “You’re really taking this seriously,” I told her.

  “I said I wanted to help. I’m curious about the lab results.”

  “Anything new?” I asked.

  “Well, so far, nothing new except Congressman Abner Hatfield has a tattoo on his groin just above his penis of a little red devil guy pointing his pitchfork and the words ‘HOT STUFF.’”

  “Sweet. Abner, we hardly knew ya. Okay. I got Skippy. Maybe we’ll get a snack or something and see you later.”

  “Okay, Shepherd. See you at home.”

  Again, she called it home. Our home? I found a deserted upscale deli, got a bottle of fancy water from a glass cooler and ordered a turkey sandwich on whole wheat bread from the man behind a high, food-jammed glass counter. I also asked him for a plastic soup bowl.

  “What kind of soup do you want, sir?”

  “No soup, just the empty bowl, please.”

  He made a face.

  “Can you cut that s
andwich in half and only put mustard on one half, please?”

  “Yessir. Only half?” the guy asked, confused.

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you want on the other half?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No mustard?”

  “Right.”

  I watched him make the sandwich, cut it in half, and pick up a knife from a mustard bowl.

  “Which half?” he asked, pointing the mustard knife.

  I looked at him but couldn’t tell if he was serious.

  “You pick.”

  47

  Skippy got the half without mustard. We wolfed down our food on the sidewalk. He even ate half of the pickle. I poured half the contents of the water bottle into the empty soup bowl and put it on the pavement for him. We both drank from our respective containers and I made a satisfied “ahhhh” sound. Skippy did the same. It tasted better that way. We walked for a few minutes and I decided that, since Jane was still busy, I’d do a little more work.

  “What do you say, Skippy—shall we go hunting in the bowels of Brooklyn?”

  “Wowf!”

  “Okay.”

  I scanned the street at the corner but I couldn’t find a yellow cab. I preferred to use official medallion cabs but it was often hard or impossible to find one when you needed it. Also more expensive. After a while, I took out my phone, and opened the Uber app.

  In five minutes, a black SUV pulled up. A guy with a beret lowered the window.

  “Hi, I’m Raymond. Are you Shepherd?”

  He was listening to jazz.

  “I am. My dog okay?”

  “Sure, but if he makes a mess, you get charged a hundred bucks.”

  “You don’t mean fur, right?”

  “No, I mean solid or liquid waste.”

  “Not an issue,” I assured Raymond, giving him the address in Brooklyn of the APN, the Aryan Purity Nation, which had been raided by the FBI.

  We crossed over the East River on the Williamsburg Bridge, a huge monster that looked like a giant child had pasted it together out of rusty popsicle sticks. As we crossed, a subway was also crossing next to us, rumbling and screeching toward the City of Churches.

  I was surprised how quickly we were there, the dim streets filled with groups of Hassidic men in long black coats, long beards and black hats. Williamsburg was almost entirely an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood.

  “Do you want me to wait?” Raymond asked.

  “Nope, thanks, Raymond. I’m going back soon but I’m not sure how long I’ll be.”

  “Okay, take care.”

  He drove away with a friendly wave. Having him wait would be expensive. Also, I might not want a witness.

  The raided building was a converted storefront with bricks where the large plate glass had been. There was yellow crime scene tape across a steel door, and a blue-and-white NYPD car out front with two cops inside. Some businesses seemed to be still functioning but were closed at this hour.

  I walked toward the entrance of the white supremacists’ headquarters, Skippy pulling at his leash. There was a small sign on the door that read “APN,” but nothing that identified it as a right-wing terror group. The two cops popped out of their car, hands on their pistols.

  “Can we help you, sir?” one of them asked, suspiciously eyeing Skippy.

  “Yeah, thanks,” I replied.

  I gave them my name, the fact that I had just come from the convention center, and was investigating the homicides. One of them clicked a flashlight onto my GOP ID card and looked at my face.

  “Okay, but this is a crime scene and we can’t let you in unless one of our bosses says it’s a go,” the cop said. “They pretty much cleaned the place out, anyway. We’re just babysitting.”

  “Oh. Okay. I’ll just ask around the neighborhood.”

  “Good luck with that.”

  Across the street, there were several townhouses with lights on inside. I went up the steps to the closest one, as the cops got back inside their patrol car. Neither ringing the doorbell nor knocking on the door got any answer. Same thing at the second house. At the third, a peephole in the door flashed. Someone was looking out. Slowly, cautiously, the door opened. I smelled food. I wasn’t sure what kind of food but it smelled good and probably wasn’t pork. I told Skippy to sit. A teenaged girl opened the door wider.

  “You another detective?” she asked. “Are you a canine cop?”

  “I’m Shepherd. I’m investigating the people down the block.” I stuck out my hand to shake, but a large, bearded man stepped in between us, sweeping his daughter back with one arm—horrified that I was about to touch her. Oops. Obviously the Hassidim did not approve of inter-gender touching. Sort of like the Amish, but Jewish and in Brooklyn.

  “What do you want?” he demanded.

  I started to tell him but he cut me off.

  “We know nothing, thank you. Good night.”

  Slam.

  Skippy and I continued down the block toward the river but that was the best I got. I came to an apartment building but there was a uniformed doorman who started scowling at me from one hundred paces out. After that the street got darker and there were more dark, silent factories than homes. I rounded the corner, just curious. Skippy sniffed the air.

  “Foof!”

  The street here was down to the original cobblestones, paving that had been placed down more than a century earlier. Most of the streetlights were out or missing. From here, the bridge loomed above, arching out over dark industrial buildings and across the river. The dark bridgework began shaking and thumping, as arcing electrical sparks flashed inside its lattice. The vibrations shook the ground under me like an earthquake but it was just an elevated train rattling into Brooklyn.

  After the noise faded, Skippy snapped his head right, toward something I could not hear or see. As my eyes got used to the darkness, I realized Skippy was looking at three men with long beards, long black coats and wide-brimmed hats, clustered in the shadows, their faces dark. Kosher vampires? I approached them but they turned and walked away. Shy vampires. It occurred to me that the Orthodox uniform was an excellent criminal disguise because it made them all look alike—beards and glasses and hats and long black clothing that hid faces and shapes and age.

  I stopped and called Izzy.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hey, Izzy, I’m in Brooklyn, where they raided the APN cell.”

  “Why?”

  “Just nosing around,” I told him.

  “Not much to see. My landsmen welcoming you?”

  “What’s a landsman?” I asked.

  “It’s Yiddish for countryman, a fellow Jew.”

  “Oh. Not so much.”

  “A goy in the hood,” Izzy chuckled. “I thought you weren’t getting paid anymore?”

  “I’m not. What’s new?”

  “Guess what one of the congressmen had tattooed below the belt.”

  “A little devil?”

  “Jane told you.”

  “Yup. Anything else major?”

  “Not really. No new leads. Time to call it a night.”

  “Okay, talk to you in the morning.”

  I looked around the corner from where I had come. Lights from cars and streetlights beckoned from a few blocks away, through a dead zone of warehouses and empty lots and fences and abandoned vehicles. Fireworks exploded and cascaded above the river. As I walked over the uneven cobblestones toward the light, I activated the Uber app again.

  Skippy suddenly jerked me around, a low growl in his chest. Three figures were following us at a distance, a block away; long black coats, long dark beards, dark brimmed hats. The same guys? I considered waiting for them and trying to chat but my gut rejected that. I kept walking toward civilization. Better in the light, I thought, quickening my step.

  They stepped up their pace, too, now half a block behind me. I noticed they were spreading out. One went straight down the middle of the deserted street and the other two took to the gutters on either side. There
were no sidewalks. Why would three friends do that? I’d only do that if I was going to do something and was worried about the dog. Wouldn’t it be funny if I was mugged while hunting for killers? I headed for the closest working streetlight, stopped under it and turned around, an excellent target. Skippy was tensed, his fur rippling. The three men also stopped, staying out of the light. Weird. I had a strange vibe that they were armed but I didn’t think many Hassidic types packed heat. Of course, I was new in town. I began putting on my gun gloves.

  “Good evening, landsmen,” I said loudly.

  They did not reply. Headlights came down the block behind them, temporarily wiping out my night vision. A dark SUV pulled right up to me.

  “Hi, Shepherd,” Raymond said, through his open window. “I was nearby and got the return call.”

  We got in but Skippy kept his eyes on the dark street behind us, where the trio had been skulking. The three men seemed to have vanished. Raymond asked if it was okay if we picked up another passenger on Delancey Street in Manhattan. Somebody going to Radio City Music Hall.

  “Of course, that means your fare is reduced,” Raymond explained.

  “Fine with us,” I agreed.

  On the way, my phone rang but no one was on the line. I looked at the screen, which said NUMBER BLOCKED. I texted Jane, in case it was her, and said we would be home soon. On the other side of the bridge, back in Manhattan, a chunky older guy got in the front with Raymond. He did a double-take at Skippy but settled in for the ride. Apparently he didn’t speak much English. When we got to the music hall, on Avenue of the Americas at 50th Street, near Rockefeller Center, I told Raymond I wasn’t far from home and Skippy needed a walk. I thanked him and said goodnight.

  “You got a real cool dog,” Raymond said, as we got out. “You trained him well.”

  “Thanks,” I agreed, reaching for the door handle. “But I didn’t train him.”

  “Who did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  48

  Skippy took care of his business quickly and we started to jog north toward Jane’s, Skippy barking at fireworks. The third eye feeling I had earlier returned, the itchy shoulder blades, like a switch had been toggled on. Fuck. If I couldn’t trust my third eye, I had no edge. I was just another fat, dumb and happy Jethro waiting for impact. Skippy’s ears were working overtime, like fuzzy radar dishes, swiveling left and right as the explosions went off around us.