by John Donohue
I swung down for the knife and spun to face the gunman. He had a clear shot now. I don’t know what the pistol was—some automatic, maybe a 9mm, or a .40. What do I know about guns? They tell me that technically a firearm of that caliber is not considered large, but that’s the sort of comment made by people who aren’t worried about being shot by one.
The gunman was backing away, looking to put a little bit of distance between us so he could choose his target. He didn’t have much space to work with in the hallway, but that wasn’t critical: most shootings take place at targets closer than fifteen feet. I knew that in about a split second, that black thing in his hand was going to go boom and it was going to be all over.
I couldn’t hesitate, so I just followed the momentum of my spin and lunged at him. I slammed the pistol to one side as it flashed into life, a ringing explosion that bounced sound off the walls around us. I felt the burn of a round as it grazed my side, but I was focused on my target. My body would have carried through with the attack even if the bullet had killed me.
I had the knife up high and drove it with all the force I could muster deep into his eye socket. The blade was a long one. It sliced through the eyeball and buried itself deep in his brain. I could feel the edge of the weapon grind against the bone of the orbit. He gave one involuntary gasp and went down like he was pole-axed. We fell together, locked tight.
He dropped the pistol and it bounced away from us. I pushed up off him, looking for the gun. The shooter’s legs were jerking slightly, his heels drumming on the floor, but he was dead. It was a grisly sight, but there’s no nice way to kill someone with a knife.
I glanced toward the kitchen and started to move that way, toward Sarah. Then I heard the sound behind me and knew that I was doomed.
The man in the black raincoat had gotten his hands on the gun.
He looked shaky and his knife hand hung uselessly at his side. The gun was in his left fist and it looked awkward there. But at this range neither precision nor elegance would be needed.
His nostrils flared with rage. “Puta!” he spat and began squeezing rounds off. One gouged out a splinter in the floor. Another shot by me and buried itself into the dense plaster of the old walls. The third one slammed into my arm, knocking me back onto the staircase. It was like having someone clip your arm with a baseball bat—hard and powerful, even if it was glancing.
It was a freak shot—his aim was off because he was firing left-handed, he was in pain, and he was angry—but it was enough.
The slug had torn its way across the inside bend of my arm and the artery was spurting blood all over the hall.
I could see the gleam of satisfaction grow in his eyes. I was clasping my arm, trying to get some pressure on the wound, to slow the thick pulse of blood that was soaking my side and everything around me. If I didn’t get a tourniquet on it soon, I was going to bleed out right there on the stairs. And he knew it, too. It’s what animated the cruel smile that broke out on his face.
The man with the tattoos came closer to me, a look of deep satisfaction in his eyes.
“Y ahora,” he said. “No hay mas preguntas.” Now there are no more questions.
There was a ringing in my ears and it was growing hard to hear him. I was feeling dizzy, slightly sick. My vision began to blur. The hall seemed a dimmer place, and I could focus only with difficulty. His cruel face was still there as I began to slip under. I saw him raise the pistol for one, last, finishing shot. His lips opened to say something.
The double impact rocked him and his mouth opened wider to belch forth a deep crimson bubble. The sounds of the gunshots hardly registered on me at all. I was slipping away, vaguely aware of Sarah standing there with a gun in her hand, wide-eyed.
“Burke!” she screamed and came toward me, looking panicky, overwhelmed at sight of the bodies. There was blood everywhere.
“Burke!” she screamed again, but it seemed far away, a distant call that blended with the approaching wail of a siren, the two merging to make something that sounded to me like a small despairing wail.
11 Twins
I drifted, for a time, in a place between worlds. I have a vague recollection of voices, movement, and distant sensation, but nothing pierced through to wake me.
After a while, I imagined myself in a dark, low-ceilinged room that stretched away from me on either side. I was confused, and kept spinning around, frantic with an unfocused sense of having lost something important. At one distant end of the room, a figure crouched in a pool of warm light. I moved toward it, eager to go and yet hindered by a nagging sense that what I really needed lay somewhere behind me. When I turned to look there, I was confronted only by blackness. And the room seemed to stretch and lengthen even as I fought toward the lighted figure. No matter how I struggled, I had the despairing sense that I would never find what I had lost somewhere in the gloom, nor would I ever reach the light. I squinted into the brightness at the remote figure that sat there, solid, dense, and immovable. Suddenly, his eyes opened. “Burke!” Yamashita called.
“Mr. Burke,” another voice said. It was gentle, yet insistent. I felt a hand on my arm and I opened my eyes. The doctor, chart in hand, gave me a quick smile when my eyes opened. “Welcome back,” he told me.
I licked my lips and blinked. Took a look around. The hospital room was dimly lit and I was on the only bed in it. I had a big bandage on my left arm. There were wires attached to my right hand and one of those machines that displays your vital signs was playing the Burke’s Awake Show through the spiky medium of a heartbeat monitor. I shifted my body to check the muscular connections, felt a slight tug of pain in my side and some soreness on my head. But, since the last thing I remembered was being bathed in blood that was mostly my own, things were looking up.
“Nice to be back,” I answered him thickly, and then cleared my throat. The doctor had a pocket protector full of pens and bags under his eyes. He pulled a chair close to me and flashed a small light in my eyes. He grunted.
“I’m Doctor Weiss. You were pretty banged up when they brought you in this morning,” he began thoughtfully. He consulted the sheaf of clipped papers in his hand, “But I can see that you’ve been in this sort of situation before.” Weiss looked at me expectantly.
“Yeah,” I had to admit.
“Well, you were lucky that your friend got a tourniquet on you as soon as she did. You were down pretty low.”
I was slowly gaining focus, recalling the last images I had of Sarah standing over me. “How is she?” I asked Weiss.
“Hmm?” he said, distracted by the notations on my chart. “Oh, she was fine. A little shook up, obviously…” A nurse came in and whispered in his ear. Dr. Weiss nodded. “Give us a minute,” he instructed her.
“OK,” he concluded as she left. “We got some units of blood into you and repaired the gunshot wound. The bullet nicked the brachial artery, and I’ll want you to take it easy and stay with us for a few days. You’ve got a fractured rib and a surface contusion on your side—you’re lucky the bullet there just grazed you—and I put some stitches into your scalp. How do you feel?”
“A little tired, but OK,” I said.
“You’re able to focus all right?” he queried. I nodded gently. “Good. There are some people outside from the police department who want to get a statement now that you’re awake.” He made some notes on the chart and hung it back on the foot of the bed. “Nurses will be in frequently to check your pressure…”
“In case I spring a leak?” I teased.
“Precisely,” Weiss told me in all seriousness. “We’ll see later today whether you can get up and move around. I don’t want you bedridden for too long. Pneumonia’s a common complication in cases like this…”
“Hey, I want to get out of here as soon as I can,” I assured him.
Weiss looked skeptical. He jerked his head toward the door. “I wouldn’t be in a rush. They’ve got a guard on your room, Mr. Burke. The police seem to think someone’s trying to kill y
ou.”
“Somebody was,” I corrected him.
“Well, they almost succeeded,” he shot back grumpily. “Get some rest.” And he was gone in a swirl of lab coat.
A pair of detectives from the 68th precinct came in to talk. I’d had some contact with the people in the 68th a few times in the last few years, but I didn’t recognize these two, which was probably a good thing. Cops live in an untidy world and accommodate themselves to that fact, but they still get upset when you keep kicking buckets over on their turf.
These two had the standard moves down. One asked questions, the other hung back and watched. I’d seen my brother and his partner Art do it often enough. The questions come at you in no discernible order. The logic is subtler than that. They push and prod, listen to the timbre of your voice, watch the movement of your hands, and note the flicker in your eyes.
“So you never saw these guys before?” the lead cop asked after a while. His name was Berger. His face was big, and middle age had wrapped him in a thick, even blanket of fat that made him seem larger and more powerful than he probably was. Berger’s eyes were sharp, though. Ice blue and alive.
“No,” I told them, shaking my head. “At first I thought it was just a push-in robbery.” You hear about them all the time: a thief hangs around and times his approach to catch someone as they open their door. Then he simply pushes the victim inside. It’s got a certain simple elegance to it from the criminal’s perspective. No need to fiddle with locks.
“At first?” Berger’s partner asked. He was leaning quietly against the wall and his body language didn’t make it seem like he was particularly interested in my answer.
“Yeah. Two things were wrong about it,” I replied. Berger just raised his eyebrows to encourage me to go on. “In the first place, this kind of crime usually targets someone who’s easy to overpower. The elderly. Women.”
“They got in at your place,” Berger reminded me.
“It took three of them,” I said. “How inconspicuous did that look? Three Hispanic guys piling through my front door?”
Berger shrugged. “They’re crooks,” he told me. “Nobody ever said they were geniuses.”
His partner smirked. “Lucky for you. The old guy across the street saw them force the door and called it in to 911. Probably the only reason the EMT’s got to you before you pumped out.”
I said nothing while that thought sunk in. “What else?” Berger finally prompted.
“Huh?” I was still thinking about how close I came this time to not waking up.
“You said there were two things that weren’t right about this,” he reminded me.
I closed my eyes for a minute. “Yeah. The second thing was that these guys were armed to the teeth. And it wasn’t street junk. The knife was a pro’s weapon… “
“How do you know that?” Berger asked suspiciously.
I shrugged and the action tugged a bit on the leads to my hand. I saw the lines on the monitor near the bed jump a little.
“You can feel it in the balance, the heft of a weapon,” I explained. “Particularly something like a knife.” The cops looked significantly at each other.
“You know a lot about things like this,” Berger said. It sounded like an indictment.
I got a quick flash of a knife jutting from an eye socket. The ring of gunshots. Blood. “Hey,” I told them, “they broke into my house. They weren’t there looking for my social security check or to steal the stereo.”
“What do you think they were there for then?” Berger pressed.
I paused. I fidgeted a bit and the monitor spiked again. “They were there to get… me.” I concluded.
“They came close,” Berger’s partner observed. He was watching me half the time and eyeing the heart rate monitor the other half.
But Berger was focused on me. He sat down in the chair next to the bed, as if he had finally heard something worth his time.
“And why were they after you, Mr. Burke?” he said quietly. Berger’s blue eyes glittered. His partner didn’t move a muscle.
I shifted in the bed. “I don’t know,” I replied, shaking my head wearily. And it was partially true.
“You never saw these men before?” Berger pressed. He sounded incredulous. I signaled no. He sighed and slipped a folded piece of paper out of his jacket. It was a printout of mug shots. He flattened the paper out and laid it gently in my lap. I looked at the two pictures there. The photographs captured the stolid features well enough, but didn’t convey the air of menace these men had in person. I recognized them anyway.
“These two gentlemen are Geronimo Martín and Xavier Soledad. They’ve got a rep on the street that’s pretty fierce,” Berger told me. “They’re shooters. They don’t come cheap. And they always work together.”
“They call them Los Gemenos,” his partner chimed in. “The Twins.”
“These guys are not street punks,” Berger told me. “Various law enforcement entities like them for a lot of different crimes, but they always skate. You got a special job to do in the Hispanic underworld, you call them.” Berger looked at me with those cold eyes. “And you’re telling me you don’t know why these two came calling at your place?”
“No clue,” I said. In retrospect, it wasn’t the brightest move I’ve ever made, but I was still trying to put pieces together and wasn’t ready to share my suspicions.
I don’t think the detectives bought my claims of innocence. They just looked at me for a few minutes, saying nothing. Waiting for me to crack. I shifted in bed, moving my torso and feeling the click and stretch of muscle and bone. A cart rattled by in the hallway. Finally, Berger’s partner pushed himself off the wall. “OK. Sure,” he concluded wearily. He nodded at Berger and gestured with his head toward the door.
Berger stood up and handed me a card. “You think about it, Mr. Burke. What with all the excitement, I’ll bet you’re still a little foggy on things…” He tapped his business card. “You know the drill. Anything occurs to you, give me a call.” He moved toward the door, and then turned slowly to face me. “Think about this, too. The Twins. They were inseparable. Word on the street was that they were lovers. When they came to your place, it was just a job. But you put a blade in Soledad’s brain. And Martín is still at large…” He pushed open the door to the hallway and paused, the movement heavy with significance.
“Rest up, Mr. Burke. Think hard. Whatever brought the Twins into your world is not going to go away. Neither is Martín. It’s personal now.” Berger looked at me impassively. I looked back. We probably could have gone on like this for some time, but he was a busy guy. He winked at me, and the door swung close behind him.
I leaned back and shut my eyes. I could hear noise from the hospital corridor: the squeak of shoes on the linoleum, an intercom page calling someone, the rattle of metal trays. I sensed the change in air pressure as the door to my room opened again. I expected to see a nurse, yet had a sudden alarming thought: how good would the guard at my door be when a street psycho like Martín came calling?
Art’s a big guy, and he pretty much filled the doorway. He smiled at me. “Hey, back in the land of the living, Connor. Pink, pretty, and patched up.”
“Me in a nutshell,” I agreed, relieved to see a familiar face.
Art gestured behind him with his thumb. “I ran into a coupla guys from the 68th who are not exactly crazy about you, though.”
I shrugged. “They’ll have to take a number and get in line.”
Art sat down at the foot of the bed, resting comfortably and eyeing me with an odd, contented satisfaction. “They seem to think you’re holding out on them.”
I shrugged. “I’m still trying to sort things out myself.”
“I bet. What do you remember?”
I lay back and stared at the ceiling. Faint water stains marred the acoustical tiles in one corner, the marks a reddish brown like old blood. “I remember the three guys coming in. Two with guns. One with a knife.”
“Right,” Art said
. “One guy heads down the hall after Sarah and you tussle with the other two. Correct.”
I nodded. “The knife came at me first. It was pretty crowded and we were moving a lot. The shooter didn’t have a clean shot. I got the knife away and used it on the shooter…”
“OK,” he nodded, recreating the scene in his mind. “But the pistol got away from you somehow and the other guy got it and started in on you?”
“I guess,” I replied, squinting. “Things get a little jumbled after that.”
“I’ll bet,” Art commented. “Let me fill in some blanks. One of the shooters— Martín—heads after Sarah. You shout out a warning to her and when Martín comes through the kitchen door, Sarah swings a plastic bag full of cans at him. It’s a freak shot, but she catches him just right and down he goes like a sack of potatoes. She hears all the excitement from the front of the house, scoops up the gun, and heads your way.” Art looked at me significantly. “Pretty impressive, Connor. There’s screaming and banging and gunshots. She’s just escaped an attack by an armed intruder. But your girlfriend heads toward the fight.” He shook his head. “Most people I know would be running the other way.”
I nodded in agreement. “Good thing she didn’t.”
“Oh yeah. ‘Cause the third guy is, by this time, pretty pissed and about to empty a pistol into you. Sarah gets him first. The rest is history. She does what she can until the PD and EMT arrive. They slip you into a shock suit and away we go…”
“They ID the third guy?” I asked him.
“Nah,” Art said. “Soledad and Martín usually didn’t take on extra help. Whoever he is, he’s not local. I’ve got some old friends keeping me up to date. They’re running his prints now through the FBI’s IAFIS system. We’ll see what it turns up.”