“It’s just fireworks, Skippy. Maintain an even strain.”
He stopped in his tracks, tensed and looked up at the dark starless city sky between the tall buildings flanking Avenue of the Americas near the Hilton Hotel. His head bobbled randomly, like he was watching a fly near his nose. Then his head stopped and tilted, then tracked around again. I looked up again and saw nothing.
“What is it, Lassie?” I asked Skippy. “The Dogstar?”
He made a whining noise that sounded like he was trying to talk, his snout sniffing the air at a high-rise building a hundred feet away, on the other side of a little plaza with a fountain and a few benches. He led me to the building, under a third-story overhang, an empty lobby visible behind large plate-glass windows. The building was obviously closed for the night and there was no door on our side. I heard something and looked up at the underside of the building overhang.
In the dim light, feathery gray, white and black shapes were clustered on ledges. I looked at my feet under the crowded eaves, white splatters on the cement.
Pigeons. Hundreds of them, sleeping. I always wondered where they went at night. I took a few sidesteps to avoid being dumped on by dreaming pigeons.
“Since when do you like pigeons?” I asked Skippy.
Usually Skippy went after bigger game: other dogs, cats, carriage horses. But I noticed he wasn’t looking up at the drowsy birds. He was looking out over the avenue, again intent on the empty sky, like he spotted a squirrel on a lamppost. I didn’t see any pigeons out there. Obviously they weren’t nocturnal.
Skippy tensed his muscles, as if he was going to lunge. I held the leash tightly. He could pull me over if he did that. I looked up again. I saw some of the Big Brother video camera bubbles mounted on poles and buildings, part of the expanding surveillance culture that terrorism had forced on us. Nothing else.
“Skippy, buddy, there’s nothing up there. Let these guys sleep. They have a busy day tomorrow. I’m hungry, let’s get…”
I saw it. A dark shape flashed across a light steel building checkered with reflective glass, like a spider sliding over a web. Then it vanished upwards. Fast.
What. The. Fuck.
“Easy, buddy. Sit. Good boy.”
He sat. I never taught Skippy anything but he came to me already highly trained, from a murdered reality show host. Someday, I would have to find out who had instructed my dog.
My rear eye was winking wild. I took out my phone and pretended to take a call. Then I switched on the camera, so it was pointing over my shoulder. I took a shot. Then I slowly traversed and did it again and again. I looked at the pictures. Nothing. I flipped through them faster, like a movie, and spotted something. I enlarged the spot. Fuck me if it didn’t look like a little spider in the sky. Goddamn. Every nerve in my body told me to move. Skippy growled low and kept looking over his shoulder, showing his teeth. My shoulder blades felt like someone was tickling them with a feather duster.
“Good dog!” I yelled. “Let’s run!”
Skippy and I took off and I changed course, tugging his leash back toward the building, under the eaves. I yelled loudly upwards; no words, just a throat-ripping Wolfman roar. Skippy began barking loudly.
“Good dog!” I yelled.
The flock of pigeons exploded down and then up into the open air, with a blast of wings all around us. We ran with them. The mass of panicked birds overhead was still climbing, shifting shape upwards, as it funneled around itself. Thumping, snapping noises and the brood changed direction, and disappeared. I heard buzzing, a crash and breaking glass, as something bounced off a parked car a hundred feet away. The car’s alarm sounded, whooping loudly.
“Damn! Skippy, stay,” I ordered him.
I left him in the plaza with a loose leash and raced over. It was big, maybe three feet across, like Sparky’s drone but bigger, and had bounced off the hood and windshield of the car. Half a dozen shredded pigeons were scattered all over. I felt bad. The poor birds had trashed at least four of the propellers. Several of the props on the eight-motored drone were still spinning, trying to fly, a huge, wounded spider with an angry wasp voice. In the center, a black camera with a long lens was still swiveling and zooming. Then I saw the familiar orange plastic-covered flat brick and wires underneath. It looked like a pound of cheddar cheese but smelled sweet, like marzipan. I didn’t think. I pulled out every wire as fast as I could, starting with the ones going to the soft brick, as if my life depended on it. One wire lead was attached to a silvery tube that looked familiar. One end of the detonator tube was stuck into the orange material, which had the consistency of firm clay. I tugged it from the brick and then ripped the other end out of a junction box. I carried it over to a sewer storm drain and tossed in the tube and attached wires. As I turned back to the crash site, there was a loud bang. I yanked the brick package and it popped out of its slot. When I was sure there were no more wires connected, I shoved it back in. It took me a few more tugs to disconnect the rotors. The wasp humming stopped. Everything stopped. Several curious people approached on the sidewalk. I called Skippy and he came running, cautiously sniffing the drone.
“Foof!” Skippy said. Then he froze, pointing his snout directly at the orange slab in the drone, his eyes glued to it.
“Holy shit!” I said.
“What happened?” a skinny guy asked me.
“Some kind of fireworks thing landed on somebody’s car,” I lied, picking up the whole apparatus with my gloved hands and walking away. “Skippy! Heel!”
I began moving as quickly as I could without breaking into a run across Seventh Avenue, with Skippy trotting at my side, before any asshole could whip out his cellphone camera.
I heard voices behind me, indecisive, confused. Someone called out but I ignored it and hurried around the corner at 58th Street, a one-way street. I thought I heard screeching tires behind me. Of course. They’d be in a vehicle with the remote control video rig. I broke into a full run. When I heard a distant siren a few minutes later, I ran faster for a few blocks north and went into the park. I was out of shape. After only ten minutes of running, I dropped my trophy on the ground and took a break on an empty bench. Skippy alerted on the drone again, in case I was completely stupid, and then lay on the bench next to me, nervous.
“Skippy, you are a pro,” I told him. “It’s okay, boy.”
I made a call.
“Sparky? It’s Shepherd. Yeah I know. A fuckin’ musket, right? Listen, pal, something just fell into my lap and I think it’s right up your alley… this could get hairy but you’re the only twidget I know who knows this stuff. I need your help… and your van. This thing is heavy. Yeah… right now… Central Park… uh… wait, hold on… North of the Plaza Hotel on 59th Street, there’s an entrance to the park at Fifth Avenue with a sculpture… not sure… yeah it might have been Alice in Wonderland. Yeah. That’s about the size of it. We’re down the fucking rabbithole now. Okay. How long? I’ll wait.”
As my rush receded, I had to smile. My third eye was working just fine after all. It was closed for now but the eye in the sky was closed. Who did it belong to? When they remotely blew the detonator, was that to kill me or were they just trying to destroy the drone so it wouldn’t lead to them? It seemed like they were more interested in watching me than wasting me. I tried not to take it personally.
When Sparky’s van screeched to a halt in the street nearby, he got out and made a face at me because I was laughing out loud. I had run with a broken spy drone through the middle of Manhattan and nobody looked twice. Then I sat on a public Central Park bench—with a trashed black drone covered with bloody pigeon feathers and a block of Semtex plastic explosive tucked inside—for more than twenty minutes. Not one person challenged me, bothered me or even suggested that was odd.
I love this crazy town.
49
I explained to Sparky what happened and told him not to touch the drone without gloves.
“Holy fat fuck-a-doodle-doo,” Sparky observed, raisin
g a camera and taking shots of the defeated drone. “You think the goddamn Mail did this?”
That hadn’t occurred to me. Would my competition follow me with a drone? Yes. But a brick of Semtex seemed a bit extreme, even for my favorite journalistic psychopath, Ginny McElhone. She had a hell of a temper. It would not be good if she had her own air force. I told Sparky I assumed the evil flying spider belonged to the bad guys. Hopefully, we would know soon.
“This is nice,” Sparky said, now shooting video. “What’s with the feathers?”
I told him how Skippy and I had sent the pigeons on their suicide mission. Sparky laughed his ass off.
“Nice camera,” he said. “Can I take out the card and download their video?”
“The cops will wrap my nuts with my guts if we do that.”
“I’ll put it back—they don’t have to know,” Sparky said.
“How fast can you do that?” I asked. “Without leaving fingerprints?”
He giggled and showed me it was very fast. When he was done, he asked where the drone was brought down and I told him.
“Sparky, don’t use anything from their camera unless I say, okay.”
“You got it, Shepherd. You da man.”
I dialed Izzy’s cell.
“Izzy? Shepherd. You still at the morgue? Got something for you.”
“Well, speak of the devil,” Izzy said. “No, we’re back at the convention center. Turns out I’ve got a question for you.”
“Okay, me first,” I said. “I’ve got somebody’s little toy and you need to check it out, especially for fingerprints. Where do you want me to bring this?”
“Bring what?”
I told him but he interrupted me when I got to the birds.
“You shot down a drone using pigeons?” he asked.
“Yeah. I feel really bad about that part. I just thought it would confuse the drone and I could escape.”
I resumed my story but when I got to the Semtex payload part, he interrupted me again.
“Hold it, Shepherd—you have a drone you claim was following you and it’s got a chunk of high explosive attached?”
“De-activated high explosive, Izzy. I told you. Just one brick, only big enough to take out a truck. But it’s safe now. Trust me.”
“Well, that may be a problem right now. Where are you?”
I told him.
“What do you mean that might be a problem right now?”
“Who is with you?” Izzy asked.
I did not like his tone.
“Umm… nobody,” I lied.
“Okay,” Izzy said. “I’m going to leave now but some people are going to get there before me. Do us all a big favor and don’t argue with them.”
“Oh, shit, Izzy. You’re hitting the panic button. I told you it’s safe. This is dumb.”
“No, Shepherd, playing around with plastic explosives in public is dumb. I have no option here.”
“I had no choice, Izzy. If I left it there, the bad guys would still have their flying monkey-bomb drone. Or the ordnance would be lying around in public.”
“Maybe. We’ll see. Sorry, but my advice to you, Shepherd, is to be really, really cool. No sudden moves, amigo. See you soon.”
“Fuck me!”
“Who was that?” Sparky asked.
“The cops,” I told him, picking up Skippy’s leash and walking toward Sparky’s van. “Damn. I need you to take Skippy and get the hell out of here until I call you back, okay?”
We put Skippy in the van.
“Get out of here as fast as you can,” I said, shoving him toward the driver’s side.
“Who is coming?”
“Everyone. Go!”
He drove away. I called Mel’s cellphone. He was not happy to get a nighttime call at home.
“What the sock do you want?” he demanded.
I told him I had captured an enemy drone that was carrying a surveillance camera and bomb.
“Christ, I knew you’d frosting crack,” Mel said. “Are you drunk? Don’t you guys take some kind of mother-fighting medication for flashbacks?”
I ignored him and said I would send him a text. I started typing a text to Mel but I stopped and sent what I had when I heard an unwelcome sound approaching.
“This is stupid,” I said out loud.
“What?” a passing woman jogger in red shorts and tank top asked me.
“Sorry, I wasn’t talking to you. You shouldn’t be here.”
“Why?” she asked, doing that silly jogging in place people do when they think they’re in the Olympics and don’t want to stop.
“A lot of cops are coming,” I told her.
“Why?”
“Alien spacecraft,” I told her, pointing at the broken drone on the sidewalk nearby.
She gave out with a knowing New York chuckle and jogged on. I walked a few yards down the path, away from the drone, to be more visible from the street. Maybe I should just jog to the subway? I took out my phone and dialed Jane.
“Where are you?” Jane asked. “I have some interesting details to tell you. I’m home. I ordered in Mongolian barbecue. When will you be here?”
“Yummy. Listen, I just heard from Izzy and we are meeting to go over a few things I found out tonight. You and I can compare notes later.”
“The food will get cold.”
“You eat, I’ll nuke it later when I get home. Hey, what do you know about Skippy’s background? Was he trained as a military or police dog?”
“No, not as far as I know but we know almost nothing. Some man in a car asked a neighborhood woman to watch Skippy while he did an errand. He tied the leash to a sign and drove away. She brought Skippy to us. Later, he went to your favorite reality show host. That’s it. Obviously he was well trained but I don’t know anything about police training. Why?”
“Just curious, thanks.”
Sirens were converging on me from every direction. I heard a helicopter. Crap.
“Gotta go, Jane. My ride’s here.”
50
I sat down on the hot pavement and waited as the sounds of cars, screeching brakes, slamming doors and yelling cops multiplied. Then I lay flat, put my hands behind my head, and waited. I was ordered to freeze by several nervous voices. Someone asked where the bomb was. I tried answering but they were all making too much noise to hear me.
“There’s no bomb,” I explained. “It’s safe. I removed the detonator. There’s just the plastique, the drone and the camera.”
They weren’t listening. I was searched and handcuffed, hand and foot. They removed my gloves and took my phone. I stayed still, knowing a lot of guns were pointed at me.
“Here it is!” someone shouted. “Looks like a drone. Don’t see any bomb.”
The Bomb Squad, when they arrived, disagreed, and forced an evacuation to a wider perimeter when they spotted the Semtex. I was told to stand up.
“I can’t. You handcuffed my ankles.”
Someone reluctantly took them off. Two guys helped me up and turkey-trotted me into the rear seat of a nearby squad car, which was then moved because they feared they were too close to the explosive. It took half an hour for a cop in blue overalls and an NYPD baseball cap to open the rear car door and tell me he was from the Bomb Squad.
“How is it rigged to go off?” he asked me.
“They had it on a radio remote but I ripped all that out. It’s just the brick—totally safe. How many times do I have to tell you guys that?”
“Because we don’t just trust guys who get caught with a bomb,” he told me.
“I didn’t get caught, jackass, I called it in.”
“So you claim. But actually, Major Case called it in and your gloves field-tested positive for RDX. You have been handling explosives.”
“Duh. I just told you. I ripped out the det and checked the payload for a backup. You are wasting the lead time I gave you with all this bullshit. They probably didn’t leave prints but the Semtex and the camera might be traceable. Also th
e video card in the camera may lead you back to these pricks. My guess is they’re in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, probably the APN, the Aryan Purity Nation group.”
“So who did you want to blow up?”
I laughed.
“You think this is my explosive drone? Look, either ask Izzy about this—and me—or come back with somebody smarter than you. And get me some food. I’m hungry.”
“If you’re with the good guys, why did you run off with the device?” he demanded. “Why not just leave it at the original scene and notify us?”
“Because they were obviously somewhere close, in a car, Einstein. If I hung about, I wouldn’t be around to have this chat now and you wouldn’t have the drone for forensics. Hey, come back when you have some food.”
“Even if we believe you, they could have some kind of hidden failsafe trigger in the brick.”
“Negative. They triggered their detonator after I took it out. Obviously to trash the drone because I brought it down. That was it. If they had another way of remotely detonating it, they would have done it already. Stop wasting time.”
“Not that simple,” he said. “There’s also a camera and a sealed GPS and command module. How did you bring this thing down?”
“Pigeons.”
He laughed.
“How fucking stupid do you think I am?”
“I refuse to answer that question, on the grounds that I am handcuffed.”
Later, I found out they used their rolling robot to check out the drone, wasting more than an hour. I understand they have to be careful but if you’re too cautious, you lose. If there was video stored on the SIM card in the videocam that led to these APN motherfuckers, Sparky may already be looking at it—but I couldn’t call him.
They drove me to Police Headquarters downtown, and marched me to a large room upstairs. A TV in a corner was playing CNN News on mute. They sat me in a chair that was welded alongside a metal desk. A cop opened my left cuff and secured it to the chair. I looked around. I was now alone. There were rows of similar desks and a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the river. It was difficult to get comfortable while chained to a chair. The desk next to me was neat, IN and OUT boxes both empty. There was only a phone console, a stapler and a pencil cup with a few pens stuck in it. I reached over with my un-cuffed right hand and pulled out a plastic ballpoint pen with a shiny, inch-long aluminum pocket clip. The metal clip snapped off cleanly and I stuck the flat end of the strip into the hole where the handcuff ratchet went into the cuff lock around my wrist—at the same time pushing the cuff teeth tighter into the lock area. The cuff popped open. I sat back more comfortably to wait.
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