Friendly Fire

by John Gilstrap

“Depends on what the target is,” Jonathan said. “Let’s keep watching for a while.”

  “It looks like they’re carpooling,” Boxers said.

  “Concentrating firepower, maybe?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  In reality, there were as many possible reasons to combine cars as there were wild guesses to be considered.

  “Maybe they’re launching multiple, simultaneous assaults,” Jonathan said.

  “Or that, too,” Boxers agreed.

  “There he is!” Jonathan said, pointing at the screen. “That’s the guy I hit. Unless someone else would be wearing a big ass bandage over his right ear.” The man Jonathan pointed to wore the battle beard, and the correct high-and-tight hair style, but more than that, he wore a distinctive white gauze bandage on the exact spot where Jonathan had opened him up. He appeared to be the last one to leave.

  “Some of the vehicles are leaving,” Boxers said, pointing to the screen. “We’re gonna lose somebody if I don’t bring Roxie back home.”

  “A few more seconds,” Jonathan said. “I want to see where my guy goes.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Zoom out all the way,” Jonathan said. “We’ll watch them for as long as we can.”

  As the image fell away farther, and the vehicles started to move, Jonathan’s attention was drawn from the video world to the real one as the first in the line of vehicles passed by them out on the street.

  “We’re gonna have to make a decision here soon, Boss,” Boxers said.

  Jonathan didn’t reply. Instead, he watched as Battle Beard put his duffel into the back of a white Grand Cherokee and climbed into the shotgun seat. Outside, another vehicle passed by them.

  “Okay, bring Roxie back in now. We’re following the Cherokee. If he’s the leader then we’ll find the others. If he’s not, then we’ll still have the guys in the Cherokee.”

  The image on the screen reacted immediately, as if to Jonathan’s voice command. Boxers had pushed the abort button, which automatically brought the UAV back home. “Suppose I’m right and they’re separating?” Big Guy asked.

  “Then we’ll know what one part of them is doing.”

  The Batmobile appeared on the screen again as Roxie hovered overhead and eased down to the ground on the pavement outside.

  Boxers opened the door to retrieve it, but paused when Jonathan grabbed his shoulder. “Let’s let the Cherokee go by first,” he said. “You get ready to drive, and I’ll bring your electronic girlfriend back inside.”

  Jonathan watched through the tinted window as Battle Beard and his crew drove by in the Cherokee. That vehicle’s windows were also tinted, but Jonathan was pretty sure that he saw at least two others in the vehicle in addition to Battle Beard and his driver.

  “Hey, Scorpion, are we gonna go or not?”

  Thirty seconds later, Jonathan had pulled Roxie into the back of the vehicle with him, and he was making his way back to the front. Boxers’ foot found the gas and they were on their way before Jonathan was even close to his seat.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  The megaplex movie theater at Mason’s Corner was a relatively new addition to an old shopping center that had recently undergone a massive renovation. According to people who had grown up and grown old in Braddock County, Mason’s Corner had literally been an unpaved crossroads as recently as the Johnson administration. With the completion of the Capital Beltway in the sixties, places that were barely dots on the map had grown over the years into massive suburban sprawl. Nowadays, real country folk were hard to find in Northern Virginia because they’d all made millions selling their land to developers who’d spun those millions into billions. Now Mason’s Corner was home to some of the biggest corporate names in the world, and residential real estate had shot through the stratosphere.

  It wasn’t a corner of the county that Pam visited very often, but it offered the greatest variety of dining and entertainment options short of traveling into the District, which she avoided at any price. But if an evening at the movies and dinner to follow would get Josh Levine to stop tormenting her for a date, then this was an evening well spent. They’d gone to the seven o’clock showing of some comic book shoot-’em-up action thriller—Josh’s choice, of course, absent consultation with his date—and now they were in Silvio’s, a reasonably high-end tapas place.

  They’d asked for and had received a quiet corner in the back room of the restaurant, separated by distance and shielding from the cacophony of the mall. Mason’s Corner management had decided to place six popular restaurants all in a cluster near both the movie theaters and the massive bookstore. Most of the “eating” establishments were in fact geared to the hard-drinking sports bar crowd, and the result was a constant drone of noise that was driven even higher by the presence of live music in two of the venues. Pam didn’t understand how the employees could stand it, or how OSHA didn’t require them to wear hearing protection.

  Here in the back room, though, the atmosphere was calmer, but a table full of Korean businessmen was driving the decibels higher here, too.

  They’d ordered their drinks—Josh a Corona beer with lime, and Pam a screwdriver—and they were both working hard to salvage the date from disaster.

  “I’ve always wondered why we don’t post DWI checkpoints outside of bars,” Josh said. “It seems like it would be such low-hanging fruit.”

  Pam chuckled because chuckling was the thing to do. “I believe the chief would find himself at war with the Chamber of Commerce,” she said. “Remember that overreach ten, twelve years ago in Fairfax County, when the cops raided the bar in Herndon and had people blow for public drunkenness?”

  Josh screwed up his face. “No. Really? Is there a threshold for public drunkenness?”

  “Of course not,” Pam said. “It was during the holidays and a couple of flatfoots decided to be Grinches. The cases were thrown out. I don’t know what happened to the cops. I’m just saying your suggestion has sort of already been tried.”

  Uncomfortable silence.

  “So, how was your trip to Ohio?” Josh asked.

  “How did you hear about that?”

  “BCPD is a pretty small club. I hear things.”

  “And what did you hear?” Pam didn’t mean for her tone to sound as defensive as it did, but Josh clearly felt it.

  “Nothing bad,” he said. “Just that you were going.”

  “That detail being prompted by what?”

  “You’re getting pissed,” he said. He looked unnerved.

  “Not pissed,” she said. “But I’m getting tired of feeling watched. I’d like for you to tell me what kinds of things are being said about my trip to Ohio.”

  He broke eye contact. “Just that, you know, you were going.”

  “For what reason?”

  “To check up on details of that parking-lot murder case.”

  “Was it considered to be a noble mission?”

  Josh grew visibly uncomfortable and shifted in his chair. “Look, I’m turning this into a really crappy evening, aren’t I? I just wanted to go out, get to know you better, and I chose the wrong movie. Now this.”

  Pam felt bad for him. She put out her hands in a halting motion—whether to stop him or herself she wasn’t sure. “No,” she said. “That’s more me than you, I’m sure. I’ve been a weird headspace the past couple of weeks.”

  “Personal headspace or job headspace?” His expression showed real interest, not superficial, small talk interest.

  Pam took a sip of her drink. A little more OJ than she liked, but still pleasant. “You don’t want to go there,” she said. “We won’t know each other that well.”

  The waiter approached—his name was Juan and he’d be their server for the evening. While Juan waited patiently, she and Josh agreed that they would split a roasted roma tomato flatbread, and that she would have the ahi tuna tartare appetizer for her entrée while Josh would have the rack of lamb. A two-thousand-calorie delta, and what do you bet
that he wouldn’t gain an ounce while she put on another half-pound?

  Of course the Italian bread slathered in olive oil didn’t help.

  “You know,” Josh said, “when I put myself in your position, I think things could be pretty difficult.” He added salt and pepper to his plate of olive oil, and swirled a slice in the green pool.

  Pam waited for it, girded for something inappropriate and patronizing.

  “I know how tough it is being accepted into the blue line”—he used finger quotes—“as a middle class white guy with a law degree. That alone makes it hard for me to blend in. Being a smart, articulate woman—”

  “Wait,” Pam interrupted. “You have a law degree?”

  He nodded.

  “How old are you?”

  He grinned. “Kind of a rude question, don’t you think? First date and all?”

  Pam felt herself blush.

  “I’m twenty-four,” Josh said. “But I’m very smart. Smarter than I look.” When his smile was genuine, it was a pleasant thing to behold.

  Pam did the math in her head. She was thirty. There were no statutory issues, but six was a lot of years. “How did I not know this?” she said. “About the law degree, I mean?”

  He blushed a little. “I don’t hide it, but I don’t lead with it, either. I figure I’ve got to earn respect just like everybody else, and the second somebody thinks I’m trying to get an edge, I’m screwed. You know how it works.”

  “Do I?”

  “How could you not? Shit, Pam, you’ve got so many protective shields, you’re like the Starship Enterprise.” As soon as the words were out, he winced at the sound of them. “Yeah, and I’m also a nerd,” he said. “Anyway, I’m really not trying to pry. Hell, at this point, I’m just trying to not dig myself into a deeper hole.”

  Pam smiled and reached across the table to grasp his hand. “Relax,” she said. “You’re absolutely right. I have shields on shields. What was it that Bob Cratchit said? We wear the chains we forged in life. I guess I’m carrying more than my share.”

  “That was Jacob Marley,” Josh said through a smirk. “Bob Cratchit was Tiny Tim’s father.”

  “And you worry about showing off.”

  They shared a laugh. And then silence prevailed again.

  “Some of the officers are pissed that you’re working too hard to get the Falk kid acquitted,” Josh said.

  That got her attention.

  “You asked,” Josh reminded. “That’s how your trip came up in conversation. Some of the cops think that you’re working for the wrong side.”

  “There is no side to justice,” Pam said. “That’s an absolute.”

  “Okay.”

  She couldn’t read his tone. “What does ‘okay’ mean?”

  “In this case, it means that I more or less don’t care,” Josh said. “I arrest people all the time, and I don’t give them a second thought. I put the cuffs on, fill out the paperwork, and take the cuffs off. Rinse and repeat. That’s one of the reasons I’m not champing at the bit to become a detective. I like staying above the fray.”

  Pam appreciated the honesty. A good part of her missed the neutrality that came with patrol work. “I get that,” she said.

  “So, how did it go?” Josh said. “Ohio, I mean.”

  She hesitated, yet she didn’t know why. Again, what angle was he working? Finally, she decided that she had nothing to hide. “Do you know about Ethan Falk’s backstory? What he said happened to him in his past?”

  “Just what I heard there on the scene when we arrested him. He’d been kidnapped, right?”

  “Exactly,” Pam said. “At first, we all thought his stories were outlandish, but then his lawyer brought in Wendy Adams—”

  “The psychiatrist?”

  “Right. And she worked with him and he was consistent in his story and very passionate about it.” Pam told him about how she connected the dots to the cold case in Ohio. “What I found there all supported his story. I think he was rescued completely off the record by some kind of mercenary team. That’s why there was no record.”

  Josh’s eyebrows knitted together. “Mercenaries? Really?”

  Pam pointed at him. “And that reaction right there is the biggest problem Ethan Falk faces. There were no useable prints on the scene after the shootings.”

  “Not even the kid’s?”

  “They kept him in a sub-basement with a dirt floor and concrete walls. The techs couldn’t lift anything useable. So, all we’ve got is an eleven-year-old story from someone who was eleven years old when it all happened. And the rescuers all wore masks—balaclavas, I guess. So all Ethan can testify to is a man with no face and blue—”

  Pam stopped herself in mid-sentence. Blue eyes. Jesus Christ, could it really be that?

  “What’s wrong?” Josh asked. He seemed genuinely concerned.

  “Holy shit,” Pam said. “I think I met the guy who rescued him.”

  * * *

  Wendy Adams jerked her Prius to a stop in a space marked “Official Vehicles Only,” jammed the transmission into Park, and threw her door open. She left her coat in the car as she rushed through the front door of the Braddock County Police headquarters building. The public space of the police station was pleasant yet Spartan, decorated in plastic and Naugahyde. Five people in their fifties sat in three clusters, clearly distraught, no doubt awaiting news on the disposition of their recently arrested loved ones.

  Wendy paid them no mind. She made eye contact with the duty officer who sat in an open window that was reminiscent of a medical office reception station. He reached for the button that buzzed her past the inner door that led to the guts of the police station. This part of the building hadn’t been built for heavy security, so there was nothing remarkable about the construction materials. The door and everything that lay beyond might have been any other business office—until you turned the angle in the hallway up ahead and walked down a much longer hallway, where the Sheetrock and stud work gave way to concrete block, and then finally to reinforced concrete. Halfway down that hallway, a hard right took her to a heavy steel door that had no handle.

  Wendy strode to the door, pressed the call button, then looked straight into the camera lens. The heavy door buzzed and a heavy bolt slid out of place. She pushed, and the well-balanced door moved out of the way with virtually no effort. When she was on the other side, a hydraulic piston pushed the door closed again. In here, there was no pretense of an office environment. Gray and dull yellow were the dominant colors, and the furniture and fixtures made the Spartan elements up front look like luxury. She walked to the bottom of the stairs.

  “I’m here for Ethan Falk,” she said to the first face she saw.

  The officer pointed to the other end of the prisoner processing spaces. “I think they put him in the medical exam room.”

  “How is he?”

  “I don’t know,” the officer said. “All I know is that he stopped screaming.”

  A half hour ago, around eight o’clock, and only moments before she was on her way to the bathtub and then bed, she’d received a phone call from the police station that Ethan was in the middle of a “psychic episode”—meaning, she presumed, a psychotic episode—which itself was a diagnosis that lay far beyond the expertise of any custodial cop. Ethan had created a huge ruckus by screaming incoherent things and throwing himself around his cell. It took more than a few officers to subdue him, and even at that, they had to use a Taser before they could put him in restraints.

  That’s all she knew because that was all they had at the time of the call.

  As she approached the closed door to the infirmary, she slowed her pace and steeled herself. She would have sworn that they’d made better progress, that Ethan was coming to terms with his past—and with the glimmers of hope for his future. Life had put him on a terrible path, and he’d done everything he could, it seemed, to make it as bad as it could possibly be. Outbursts like the one reported by the police officer who called her did noth
ing to help his case in the future, and in fact might have done it a lot of harm.

  It was her job, over the course of this visit—over the course of the next hour or so—to explain these realities to him without triggering more panic.

  With her hand on the door latch, she stopped, inhaled deeply, and let the breath go slowly. Showtime.

  Ethan Falk lay in a semi-reclining position on his back, wearing only a pair of county-issued boxer shorts. His hands were cuffed to the bed’s side rails, and his ankles were buckled into padded hospital restraints, which had in turn been fastened to the bedframe. Another restraint around his waist kept his middle tied to the bed as well. The restraint buckles were themselves locked.

  Her patient had lost a noticeable amount of weight since he’d first been arrested, weight that he could not afford to lose. She’d not seen him unclothed like this before, but she doubted that on their first meeting she’d have been able to count each of his ribs as she could now. Angry red marks on his chest and his gut marked the locations where the Taser probes hit.

  Ethan needed a shave and his hair was a mess. He stared at the ceiling, and he didn’t bother to turn his head to acknowledge Wendy’s entry.

  “It appears that you’ve had an exciting evening,” Wendy said. She wanted to start things light, if only to gauge the depths of his angst.

  “Why don’t they let you commit suicide in jail?” Ethan asked the ceiling. He still had not acknowledged her.

  And hell would freeze over before she went along with that game. He knew the rules. If he wanted to speak with her, he needed to speak to her. She waited him out.

  After ten seconds, he rocked his head to the side and made eye contact. “That was a real question,” he said.

  “And I believe it’s one to which you already know the answer,” Wendy said.

  “I can’t do this, Doc,” Ethan said. His eyes glistened red. “There’s just no way I can do this. Not for another day, and certainly not for years. I just can’t. I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  She let the words hang for a while, fully aware that she could make no response that would counter the awfulness he saw ahead. “Tell me what happened,” she said at last.