Night Watch

by David C. Taylor

  Spencer Shaw crammed her into the footwell behind the front seat, covered her with a blanket, and put his feet on top to hold her down if she came to. Stefan slid into the driver’s seat. ‘Go,’ Shaw said. They pulled into traffic and headed uptown toward the Village. Shaw lit a cigarette. A sweet little operation. Snatched a broad in broad daylight, and no one blinked.

  Freddy watched Rhonda come out of the New York Post building from across the street. She was in a hurry, and she looked scared. A man was waiting near the door of a car parked at the curb. Another man waited in the back seat. When Rhonda started to get into the car, she suddenly lurched forward as if she had fallen, and then Freddy did not see her again. Had something happened? Who were the men? He pulled his bicycle out of the alley behind him and took off after the car. The traffic was slow moving uptown, and he would have no trouble keeping the car in sight.

  Fifteen minutes later the car stopped in front of a house on Leroy Street in the Village. Freddy stood in a shadowed doorway half a block away and watched the driver ring the doorbell. A man came to the door. He had a shaggy beard and too much hair on his head. He wore old corduroy pants, house slippers, a wool shirt, and a baggy sweater. He looked to Freddy like a poor man, but it was not a poor man’s house. The driver went back to the car and opened the back door. The other man got out and helped the driver carry Rhonda into the house past the man with the beard. The bearded man looked around once and then closed the door. Who were they? Why had they taken the reporter woman? Should he do something? Call the police? No. The police had never been his friends. He would wait for a while. He would watch.

  The light coming in the window had changed as the sun moved west, but it was hard for Cassidy to make sense of the thought. Something to do with time. He had a watch. Could he see his watch? He tried to move his hand and realized his wrist was bound to the rails of the metal headboard. Did he know that before? Maybe. He raised his head and looked down the bed at his feet. They seemed far away. No colors trailed from them when he moved them. Why was that important? The drug. Maybe the drug was weakening.

  He heard footsteps in the hall. A door opened. After a while, the door closed and the people passed his door again and went down the stairs. Why didn’t they stop and talk to him? He needed to ask questions. He needed to know why. Wait, he knew why, but it skittered away out of reach. Frustration and anger flared in him. He jerked at the bonds that held his wrists and the bedstead rattled, but he could not get loose, and that blew the anger hotter. He jerked again and again. He had to get out. He had to be free. He did not know it, but he began to roar as he slammed back and forth on the bed. Something snapped metallically above his head, out of sight. He craned back to see what it was.

  ‘What the hell’s going on up there?’ Shaw asked. They could hear Cassidy’s roars and the banging of the bed against the wall and floor. Shaw stood up, but Ambrose held up a hand to stop him.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Ambrose said. ‘He’s in a different stage of the drug. This sometimes happens when it begins to weaken in the system. The mood changes radically. It often brings feelings to the surface that the subject normally suppresses. It seems that Detective Cassidy is a very angry man underneath. I’ll give him a sedative, and that way when you remove him, he’ll be calm.’ He went to a black doctor’s bag on the counter near the refrigerator and prepared a hypodermic.

  ‘Do you need us any more today?’ Magda asked.

  Ambrose looked at Shaw, who shrugged. ‘We’ve got it covered.’

  ‘Then we will go. We have things to do if we are going to leave New York.’

  Magda and Karl left through the front door as Ambrose started up the stairs.

  Freddy watched a man and a woman come out of the house across the street. They turned east toward Hudson Street. The woman took a cigarette from her purse and said something to the man, and they stopped opposite where Freddy sat in the shadows while the man lit her cigarette. When she raised her head from the match, the sun was on her face and he knew who she was – Eis. The man was her husband. He remembered his hair. The doctors from the medical unit where no one got healthy. What did the prisoners say? You could be cured of anything there, you just wouldn’t be alive to enjoy it.

  Leon had been right. They were here in New York.

  The woman took her husband’s arm, and they went on toward Hudson Street. He said something to her, and Freddy heard her laugh. He retrieved his bicycle from where he had hidden it behind a row of garbage cans and trailed after them.

  Ambrose unlocked the door and went into Cassidy’s room. Cassidy lay on his back with his head turned toward the window. He no longer thrashed on the bed, but the sedative would make him more docile for what Ambrose told himself was ‘the removal.’ It was too bad, because Cassidy would have been a good subject for extended experimentation. His hostility would be useful. The ideal use of the drug was to control people who were not well disposed toward their interrogators. The more they knew of the drug’s ability to control and change hostility the more efficient it would be.

  ‘Hello, Michael. I’ve brought you something to help you sleep.’

  Cassidy watched Ambrose approach the bed. He knew he had planned to do something when someone came back into the room, but he could not sort out what it was. Ambrose put the hypodermic down on the bedside table and started to pull down Cassidy’s sleeve. Ambrose’s eyes widened as he noticed something. Oh, yes, Cassidy remembered, his thrashing had broken the weld at the top of the metal slat that held his right hand. As Ambrose began to straighten in alarm, Cassidy yanked his hand free and grabbed Ambrose by the beard. Ambrose bleated in surprise. Cassidy jerked his head down by his beard and lunged up to head butt him hard. He could hear and feel the crunch as the man’s nose broke. Ambrose went over backward, and Cassidy was left with a handful of hair. He sat up and untied his other hand quickly. He swung his feet to the floor and stood up.

  A mistake.

  His head spun, and he had to sit down again. Ambrose moaned and twitched. Cassidy took the hypodermic from the bedside table, lowered himself to the floor, and crawled to Ambrose. He drove the needle into the man’s neck and pushed the plunger and left the hypodermic hanging there. He patted the unconscious man’s clothes, hoping for a weapon, but found nothing useful. He pushed himself back up to sit on the bed.

  He stood and steadied himself for a moment with a hand on the headboard and then went to the door. He went out into the hall and locked the door behind him and put the key in his pocket. The stairs were to his left. He moved to them trailing a hand along the wall for support. Indistinct voices rose from below. Could he make it out the front door before they heard him? His legs and body felt weak and insubstantial and he was not sure he could run. He turned away. Maybe there was another way out.

  There was a door down the hall past the room where he had been held. It was locked, so he moved on. Another door revealed a bathroom. Its window looked out on a two-story drop to the street. He ran cold water and splashed his face to try to banish the lingering effects of the drug. Out in the hall again. Another staircase climbed to the third floor. He needed to go down, not up.

  Footsteps on the stairs. Two men talked as they walked up.

  For the first time he noticed the key in the door of the locked room. It was only a few steps away. Cassidy unlocked it, stepped into the darkened room, and shut and locked the door from the inside. He started toward the window, but a noise made his heart jump, and he realized there was someone on the bed. He turned on the bedside light and looked down into Rhonda’s terrified eyes. Her hands and feet were tied to the bed, and she was gagged. He fumbled at the knot of the gag until it gave, and pulled the cloth from her mouth. Her mouth was swollen, and there was a livid bruise the side of her neck. She tried to speak, but her voice caught in her throat and choked off. He leaned down and whispered in her ear, ‘Don’t talk. Someone’s coming upstairs.’ He freed her feet and hands, and she grabbed his shirtfront and pulled him down and whispered
harshly, ‘Where are we? Michael, what’s happening?’

  ‘Shhhh. It’s going to be all right.’

  He went quickly to the window and pulled up the shade and looked down into the backyard. Again a two-story drop, and the backyard was walled. It did not look like there was a gate or other way out except back through the house. When he turned, Rhonda was sitting up on the bed massaging her wrists. He went to the door and pressed his ear against it. The two men sounded like they were at the top of the stairs, but he could not hear what they were saying. ‘Turn off the light,’ he said. Rhonda turned it off and came to stand next to him. The two men stopped down the hall. They could hear the rattle as one of them tried the doorknob of the room where Cassidy had been held.

  In the hall Spencer Shaw tried the door again. ‘What the hell?’

  ‘What is it?’ Stefan asked.

  ‘It’s locked.’

  ‘Yes? So?’

  ‘So where’s the key?’

  ‘The doc must have taken it.’

  ‘What the hell for?’

  ‘How do I know?’

  Cassidy and Rhonda heard the two men walk down the hall. They stopped on the other side of the door. Cassidy watched the knob turn on the inside. It turned back the other way. A fist slammed against the other side of the door with a bang that made Rhonda jump. Cassidy put a reassuring hand on her arm.

  ‘He took this one too.’ The door muted Shaw’s voice, but they could hear his annoyance. ‘Where is he? Hey, Ambrose,’ he shouted. ‘Ambrose …’ He kicked the door. ‘Goddamn it. Okay, let’s find him. He’s got to be somewhere. You take upstairs. I’ll go down. Maybe he’s outside fucking the goat.’ Their footsteps went along the hall in either direction.

  ‘Michael, what are we going to do?’

  ‘Let’s see if we can find a weapon. We’ll take them one at a time while they’re separated. One of them is Shaw. I don’t know who the other one is.’

  ‘He must be the driver.’ She told him about the ruse that took her downstairs and out to the kidnap car while they searched the room. The only thing they found was the wooden bar in the closet for hanging clothes. It was about three feet long and two inches in diameter and had a good solid heft for a club.

  Suddenly Cassidy’s head was as light as a balloon, and he had to lean against the wall for support. Rhonda put a hand on his arm. ‘What’s wrong? Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. Sure. I’m fine.’

  Cassidy unlocked the door. They went quickly along the hall and went into the room where Cassidy had been held. Ambrose snored gently on the floor. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘His name is Sebastian Ambrose. He’s a doctor. He was running drug experiments in the house on West Fourth for the CIA. We got too close, and now we’re here.’

  ‘The CIA? Christ, I wish I had a camera.’ Her reporter’s instinct knocked her fear down a few notches.

  ‘Right. I’d much rather have a camera than a gun too.’

  They heard Stefan clatter down the stairs from the third floor. ‘He’s not upstairs,’ he yelled as he came down the hall.

  When he passed the door, Cassidy eased it open and went out. He was a couple of yards behind Stefan, but he closed fast and raised the wooden bar.

  Cassidy felt a bright flare behind his eyes, and something went sideways in his head. He lurched to the left, and thumped the wall. Stefan whirled and came at him. Cassidy swung the club, but Stefan blocked it, and the club flew from Cassidy’s hand. Stefan bulled him back against the wall. Cassidy tried to knee him in the balls, but Stefan turned enough so he missed and caught his thigh. He hammered overhand punches at the big man’s head, but he was crowded and could get no leverage. Stefan hit him with a short punch under the ribs, and his breath whistled out of him. He heard a shout from below as Shaw heard the noise of the fight. Cassidy grabbed one of Stefan’s ears and tried to tear it off. He butted the big man in the face. The blow slowed him and drove him back a step, and Cassidy hit him in the mouth with two jabs, tried for a right hook that missed, and then kicked him in the knee. Stefan grunted in pain, shifted his weight to the other leg, and threw a straight right. Cassidy tried to duck and took the blow on his forehead. It drove him back and turned the world misty. There was another shout from Shaw that sounded like it came from the bottom of the stairs. He knew that when Shaw got to the second floor he was done. He hooked Stefan in the groin, drawing another grunt, but the man wrapped him in a bear hug and pinned his arms. Cassidy kneed him ineffectually and tried to head butt him again.

  Footsteps pounded up the stairs.

  Over Stefan’s shoulder Cassidy saw Rhonda come out into the hall. She picked up the wooden bar and hit Stefan in the back of the head as hard as she could. His grip loosened, and Cassidy broke free. Cassidy hit him with a jab and crossed with his right, and Stefan staggered back toward the head of the stairs. Rhonda hit him across the face with the club, and when he put his hands up, Cassidy kicked him in the balls. Stefan teetered for a moment at the top of the stairs. His arms windmilled for balance, and then he toppled over backward.

  Shaw, gun in hand, was halfway up the stairs when Stefan fell. The dead weight of the falling man slammed into him and drove them both down, tumbling and banging. Stefan was unconscious when they hit the floor in the front hall, and Shaw was stunned.

  ‘Come on,’ Cassidy said. He led Rhonda down the stairs in a rush. Shaw was trying to push Stefan off him with one hand while he scrabbled for the gun he had dropped with the other. Cassidy wrenched at the door, but it was locked from the inside. He twisted the bolt free, yanked open the door, and shoved Rhonda out. As she went, Shaw fired, and the bullet blew splinters off the doorframe. Then Cassidy was out and pulling the door shut. Another shot and the bullet slammed into the closed door.

  Cassidy found Rhonda at the bottom of the stoop, and they ran. Halfway up the block he looked back. The door to the house was still shut. No one came after them.

  On Hudson Street Cassidy hailed a cab. ‘The first thing is to get you someplace safe,’ he said to Rhonda.

  ‘I could go to my mother’s.’

  ‘If they’ve done their research, they’ll know where she lives. Don’t go to your apartment. Don’t go to mine. A hotel or a friend. Call me at the precinct when you’re settled. Leave a message, but only there. Don’t leave any addresses or phone numbers with my answering service. It’s just a precaution. These guys are going to be too busy to think about you.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’ve got some things to take care of.’

  She hugged him tight before she got into the cab. ‘Be careful, Michael.’

  He used a telephone booth on the corner to call the Ninth Precinct, identified himself to the desk sergeant who passed him on to Lt Blandon, who said, ‘Cassidy, you’re spending more time in my precinct than some of my detectives. Why don’t you put in for a transfer? What’s up?’

  ‘I’ve got a situation in a house over on Leroy. Kidnapping. Unlawful restraint.’

  ‘Who’s the victim?’

  ‘Rhonda Raskin, the reporter from the Post.’

  ‘Jesus, she ought to stay home more, stay out of trouble.’

  ‘And me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I left one of the perps unconscious upstairs in a room, but there are two others. They’re armed.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m on Hudson near Christopher.’

  ‘Meet my guys at the scene. What’s the address?’

  Cassidy gave Blandon the address and hung up as Blandon began to talk again. Blandon would be pissed off when he didn’t show up, but he had other things to do.

  He flagged a cab and told the driver, ‘Central Park West and Sixty-third.’ He lit a cigarette and took stock as the city night went by out his window. There were some bumps and bruises from the fight. His ribs hurt on his right side if he took a deep breath, and there was a place below his left ear that was tender to the touch. He could not remember how that had happened.
His right thigh ached from where the man kneed him, and the knuckles of his left hand were skinned and swollen from hitting the man’s head. The lights that went by outside the cab were normal and unremarkable. No street lamps bent and melted. The effects of the drug seemed to have dissipated. Maybe he was going to be all right.

  The Germans lived in a brownstone on 63rd Street a few houses in from Central Park West. Cassidy watched from the across the street. The sidewalks were empty except for a man and two women who walked arm in arm toward Columbus Avenue. Somewhere down the block a radio played jazz near an open window. Traffic ran like a river on Central Park West, but no cars moved on 63rd. There were lights on behind the windows in the Brandts’ house. No one crossed in front of a window. No one threw a shadow on a curtain as he passed through a room. Maybe they were in the back rooms. Or maybe they had already taken off. That worried him.

  Cassidy retreated to the phone booth on the corner to call the Ninth Precinct. He watched the Brandts’ house through the glass panels smudged with city grime while he dialed. The desk sergeant put him through to Lieutenant Blandon.

  ‘They weren’t there,’ Blandon said. ‘There was blood on the floor in the front hall, but they were gone.’ Cassidy said nothing. ‘We found the guy locked in the room upstairs. He was unconscious. Someone stuck a needle in his neck. His driver’s license gives the house on Leroy as his address, so we figure he owns it or rents. We didn’t know if he was part of the deal, locked up like that, the needle and everything. He’s over at St Vincent’s till he wakes up. So, what the fuck, Cassidy? What’s going on here?’

  ‘The guy in the upstairs room is Dr Sebastian Ambrose. He’s part of the deal. Better put someone on his room in the hospital.’

  ‘Yeah, I already thought of that, being a cop and all.’ Blandon’s displeasure was coming through loud and clear.

  ‘I’ll come in tomorrow and give you a full report.’

  ‘Yeah, you do that.’ Blandon banged the phone down.

  Cassidy opened the booth door and lit a cigarette. There had been no movement from the house. Shaw would want to clean up the operation quickly. The first thing would be to get everyone clear of New York. Maybe he had already called the Brandts. Maybe they were already gone. Time was not on his side. He had to make a move.