Shadow Girl

by Gerry Schmitt

  His pulse pounding like a timpani and every nerve end fizzing, Hack caught a quick glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror and liked what he saw. Cocksure grin across his face, eyes in a half-knowing squint, buzz-cut hair. In just the right light, he thought he kinda looked like Bruce Willis.

  4

  AFTON and Max didn’t have to go far before they came upon a scene of complete chaos. To Afton it looked like news footage that had been shot following a bombing in Lebanon or Syria. All that was missing was a grim-faced reporter in a flak jacket.

  “This is bad,” Max said as they coasted toward the scene.

  Flames lit the night sky, throwing eerie specters of shadow on the nearby campus buildings. Chunks of unidentifiable metal stuck out like jagged tumors from the side of a concrete wall. Noxious, oily black smoke boiled from a gasoline fire that smoldered in the middle of Washington Avenue. Injured students were everywhere. The walking wounded.

  “What happened?” Afton wondered. “Plane crash?”

  “Or some kind of explosion.”

  Max ran his car up onto the sidewalk, threw a POLICE card on the dashboard, and the two of them jumped out. Dozens of people were injured and dazed, and Afton spotted a nurse, on her hands and knees, frantically applying pressure to the leg of a wounded coed. More nurses and med students were pouring out of the nearby university hospital. From blocks away, sirens screamed their approach. The cavalry was coming.

  Afton sprinted toward a young man in a white hoodie who was stumbling toward one of the medical buildings. As she reached him, the kid collapsed to the ground.

  “Max!” she hollered. “Give me a hand.”

  In an instant Max was right there. They braced their arms around the kid’s waist, hoisted him up, and began carrying him toward the hospital.

  “What . . . ?” the kid muttered.

  “You’re going to be okay,” Afton told him. “Just try to stay awake, try to focus.”

  Blood soaked Afton’s shirt as the kid’s head lolled against her shoulder. Her legs began to cramp with the effort of hauling the deadweight, but she and Max kept going.

  “Almost there,” Max huffed.

  And then they were at the glass-door entrance to the hospital, where two orderlies in blue scrubs met them and hastily laid the kid on a gurney.

  “Do you know what happened?” Max asked one of the orderlies.

  “Helicopter crash,” the orderly said as they rushed the kid off. “They were on approach to the hospital’s helipad.”

  “Oh no,” Afton said.

  “Hard landing,” Max grunted.

  They rushed back outside to find that dozens of vehicles had arrived—ambulances, police cruisers, fire trucks, big black SUVs packed with life-saving gear, even a BearCat armored vehicle. More doctors, nurses, and paramedics had spilled out onto the street from the various medical buildings and were tending to the wounded. Police officers were questioning dazed-looking gawkers, other officers strung up yellow crime scene tape, and firemen were uncoiling hoses to deal with the last bits of flaming wreckage.

  “Thacker’s here,” Afton said. She’d just caught sight of the black van the Minneapolis Police Department often used as a mobile command post.

  “Let’s go check in,” Max said. “See how we can help.”

  Deputy Chief Gerald Thacker was pretty much unflappable, but tonight he looked harried. He stood at the back gate of the van, a phone in each hand, barking orders. He was tall, with a commanding presence and salt-and-pepper gray hair that gave him an almost corporate look. Tonight he wore a black MPD windbreaker over blue jeans. Like so many other first responders, he’d gotten the emergency call at home.

  “Anything we can do, Chief?” Max asked.

  Thacker gave a slow reptilian blink when he recognized Max and Afton. “You guys got called out for this?”

  “We were down the street doing a town hall,” Afton said.

  “Good, I can use you,” Thacker said. “This is the worst damn thing since the I-35 bridge went down.” His phone buzzed again and he held up an index finger. “Wait one.” He lifted the phone to his ear, listened for a few moments, and said, “We don’t know yet. NTSB and Crime Scene are on their way.” He nodded. “Okay, sure.” Dropping the phone to his side, he said, “Homeland Security is worried this might be a terrorist attack.”

  “What do you think happened?” Afton asked. She knew that when Thacker ventured a guess it was usually the right guess.

  “Hell if I know for sure,” Thacker said. “But it was probably a malfunctioning helicopter.”

  “Passengers on board?” Max asked.

  Thacker shook his head. “Far as we know, it was just the two pilots.”

  Afton gazed at Max and lifted an eyebrow. At least some poor stroke victim hadn’t been on his way in for a clot-busting dose of TPA. Still, she assumed that both pilots were goners. Looking at the twisted metal that was strewn everywhere, there was no way they could have survived such a devastating crash.

  “Hey!” an officer called out. He was running toward then in a shambling, flat-footed way, his right hand lifted in a wave. Afton recognized his uniform as that of a University of Minnesota Police reserve officer. He was a young guy, maybe twenty-two at most, with brush-cut blond hair and a blond fuzz of a moustache.

  “Can you see what this guy wants?” Thacker asked Max. He was talking on the phone again, trying to give directions to two different people at once.

  Max nodded as he turned to meet the young officer, who’d just skidded to a halt in front of them. “What’s up? You okay?”

  “There’s a problem in one of the dorms,” the reserve officer said. “Some kid just called in, said they need help real bad.” He took a gulp of air. “It’s just a couple blocks over.”

  Max gave a quick nod. “Show us.”

  Max and Afton ran after the young officer. They jogged down the middle of the street, hung a right at Upton, and dashed up a grassy hill, running up against a crush of frightened-looking students who had heard the sirens and been inexorably drawn to the crash scene. Afton figured that grisly photos would be plastered all over social media in a matter of milliseconds.

  They followed the reserve officer across the street and up to a ten-story redbrick building that had MILBURN HALL emblazoned above the glass entrance doors. A crowd of panicked students milled about inside the lobby while alarms blared and strobe lights flashed. Some nervous Nellie had obviously pulled the fire alarm.

  The reserve officer doggedly pushed his way through the crowd, Afton and Max following closely in his wake. With the elevators out of commission, they ducked into the stairwell, took the steps two at a time, and finally slammed through the crash-bar door on the sixth floor.

  They banged down the hallway as students in various states of dress and undress peeked out at them, their curiosity mingled with abject fear. This was, after all, the 9/11 generation.

  “Is this dorm coed?” Max asked as they jogged along. “Or are these kids just amusing themselves with a pajama party?”

  “It’s the new world order,” Afton said.

  “Hell of a thing.”

  “Right here,” the reserve officer said, indicating a door. “Room six-twenty-three.”

  “Okay, we got this,” Max said. “You go back to your unit and do what you can to help.”

  “Sure thing,” the officer said.

  The door was half open, so Max did a pro forma knock with his knuckles and pushed his way in. “Minneapolis Police responding to a call,” he boomed out. “We’re coming in.”

  Two frightened-looking students were inside the room—a boy and a girl. The place reeked of gasoline and smoke, just like the street below. Twin beds were pushed together, and books, pizza boxes, clothes, and computer shit were strewn everywhere. There was an enormous, gaping hole in the window that looked out toward the river, and the curtains billowed from the strong updraft. The temperature in the room had probably dropped to a chilly fifty degrees.

&nb
sp; “Holy shit,” Max said. “Are you kids okay?” He gave the kids a quick once-over and determined that they were relatively unharmed.

  “You guys are cops?” the boy asked.

  “Detectives,” Max said. “Minneapolis PD.” He pulled out his ID and held it up. “I’m Detective Max Montgomery and this is Liaison Officer Afton Tangler. We were right here on campus when we got the call.” He spun on his heels and surveyed the huge jagged opening in the window. Glass shards rimmed the hole like gleaming shark’s teeth. From down below came the whoop-whoop of ambulance and police sirens. More first responders were arriving every second.

  “You’re sure nobody’s injured?” Afton asked. The kids were white-faced and shivering. Shock.

  “We’re okay,” the boy said, though he didn’t look okay. His eyes bulged out of their sockets and his face was flushed. His blood pressure was probably off the charts right now.

  “We better call Building Services and get some guys in here with nails and big sheets of plywood right away,” Max said. “Board up this window.”

  “We appreciate your help,” the young man said. “But that’s not the problem. That’s not why we had our RA call the police.”

  Max turned to Afton. “What’s an RA?”

  “Resident assistant,” she said. She looked at the boy. “Why did you ask him to call? What’s the problem?”

  “Over there,” the young woman said. She pointed toward an open closet that was jammed solid with clothing, mostly jeans and plaid shirts. Another rat’s nest of sneakers, boots, and pale blue towels lay on the floor. A small red-and-white cooler was canted atop a denim jacket. It stuck halfway out of the open closet.

  “That cooler came flying through our window and almost conked Ashley in the head,” the boy said.

  Max fixed his gaze on Ashley. “Are you sure you didn’t get hit?”

  Ashley twisted her hands in her long sweater and nodded shyly. “When I saw the fireball out the window and heard the screams, I thought I was going to die. And then when the glass broke, I thought the whole building was going to explode.”

  “The cooler must have come shooting out of the helo,” Afton said.

  “You kids are damn lucky that you didn’t get clipped,” Max said. “With an explosion like that, pretty much anything and everything becomes a deadly missile. Hunks of glass, metal parts from that bird, any medical junk they were transporting inside.”

  “Do you know why the helicopter exploded?” the boy asked.

  “Not yet,” Max said. “But we’ll figure it out, you can count on it. For now, we’ll bag your cooler and take it in as evidence. The NTSB’s gonna want to look at every bit of debris that we can round up.”

  Ashley screwed up her face, seemingly to summon up her courage, and spoke again. “You need to look inside.”

  “Inside the cooler?” Afton asked. She’d detected a funny tension between the two students. Like there might be more going on here than met the eye.

  “What’s the problem?” Max asked, stepping across the room to stand directly over the cooler.

  “Open it,” said the boy.

  Max leaned down and flipped open the two latches, tilting the red top away from the white bottom part.

  Afton leaned forward as well, expecting . . . well, she wasn’t sure what to expect.

  “Jesus Christ,” Max breathed.

  Now they were all staring into the cooler, where an amorphous red glob wrapped in some kind of netting was surrounded by sterile cool packs.

  “What is that?” Max asked.

  “It’s a heart,” Afton said. “A human heart.”

  5

  HACK liked to think of himself as a facilitator. Should a Panamanian tanker come steaming into Duluth Harbor and a little weed or crank needed to be offloaded privately, he could handle that. If you happened to have some excess cargo that a first mate wanted to sell on the down low, he could make that happen, too. And should you be a Greek sailor looking for some amorous female companionship—well, that was in Hack’s wheelhouse as well. Besides the facilitating and the dope and the smuggling and the covert appropriation, Hack also ran a few girls out of the Silver Seas Bar in West Duluth.

  Tonight, however, sitting here with the old lady and the Asian kid, Hack felt that he’d finally moved up a notch in the hierarchy of criminality, if there was such a phrase. And to tell the truth, it felt pretty damn good.

  He’d driven his two contacts back to their suite at the Hotel Itasca and was sitting with them now, adrenaline still coursing through his veins like fire as he sipped a fine, smooth whisky in a cut-glass tumbler. He was savoring the victory so to speak. The kid was sitting across from him, basically mute, must be some kind of servant, he thought. But the old lady . . . well, she was clearly a big shot who’d come all the way from Thailand just to get her kicks.

  Mom Chao Cherry was staring at him now as he sprawled in a black leather club chair, sipping his liquor. Her eyes were flat, dark pools and reminded him of the eyes of a cobra he’d once seen. The snake had been smuggled in on a freighter from the Philippines and the snake’s owner was trying to sell him to one or another of the various dockworkers, talking up the finer points of owning a venomous reptile.

  “You performed extremely well tonight, Mr. Hacket,” Mom Chao Cherry said in her somewhat clipped English.

  “Hack,” Hack said. “Just call me Hack.” After all, they’d just done some crazy business together. And he was pretty sure there was more coming his way.

  “Very well, Mr. Hack. You came highly recommended as a man who can be trusted, as well as be useful in any number of critical situations.”

  Hack tipped his drink toward her. “That’s me, ma’am. Always happy to oblige.”

  Mom Chao Cherry smiled, but there was very little warmth. “I have some additional requirements that Narong will fill you in on.”

  Hack nodded at Narong and said, “Dude.”

  Narong stood up abruptly as if some sort of silent alarm had just gone off, prompting Hack to pull himself to his feet as well.

  “Gonna cost you,” Hack said, but there was a genial tone to his voice, no implied threat, nothing contentious. Hack was a businessman who prided himself on his strong work ethic and highly flexible morals. His attitude was: If somebody needs dirty work and they’ve put cash on the table, then let’s get that mother done.

  “We will speak again tomorrow,” Mom Chao Cherry said. “For now . . .” She nodded at Narong, who responded with a formal half bow. Then Narong led Hack out of the suite and down the hallway to his own, much more modest room.

  • • •

  MOM Chao Cherry, whose long-ago given name had been Regina, after a second-century Christian martyr who’d been tortured and beheaded for her unyielding faith, had changed out of her poor clothes and into a gold embroidered Roberto Cavalli caftan. Now she reclined on a white velvet chaise lounge in the bedroom of her penthouse suite.

  She was musing happily about the carefully engineered helicopter crash. And the donor heart that had certainly plunged into the murky depths of the Mississippi River, serving now as a tasty banquet for the bottom-feeding fish that lived there.

  She was also doing a celebratory line of coke.

  The TV set flickered and blared as her glazed eyes idly watched Newswatch 7’s coverage of the chaos that was still ongoing at the University of Minnesota. Jittering, wide-eyed students gave disjointed, firsthand accounts of the explosion, while police and firemen scurried around like frazzled little ants.

  She barely heard Narong slip back into her suite. When he politely cleared his throat, she looked up. “You gave the man his instructions?”

  “All will be prepared.”

  “The other,” she said. “Dead?”

  Narong shook his head. “Not yet.”

  Mom Chao Cherry’s face betrayed no trace of emotion. She was still savoring the euphoria and the hot drip that trickled down the back of her throat. What dopers liked to call the burn.

&nbs
p; Finally, she licked her lips and said, “How much time does our contact think he might have?”

  “He doesn’t know for sure,” Narong said. “The doctors are saying perhaps a few more days.” He shrugged. “Maybe only hours.” Narong had been studying English for the past two years under his employer’s tutelage and was excited to finally put his new language skills to work.

  “That’s good,” Mom Chao Cherry said. When she was stoned, her voice took on the soft purr of a jungle cat. “Once we are able to take possession of our merchandise we will kill him.”

  “When?” Narong asked. He’d been driven to a fever pitch by tonight’s wondrous and deadly explosion. Now the need for more killing was practically boiling up inside him.

  “Soon. Tomorrow.” She lifted a finger. “Call Sing and tell him to send three men. Make it clear that he’s to put them on a plane immediately.”

  Narong bristled slightly. “I have weapons. I can handle any problem. Plus we have the American, Mr. Hack.”

  She smiled a tolerant smile. “Three men. Just in case.”

  “As you wish.” Narong did his half bow again, then turned and slipped out of the room.

  Mom Chao Cherry smiled as she pulled a pale pink cashmere shawl around her thin shoulders. The accommodations here were better than she’d expected. A three-room suite on the top floor of the Hotel Itasca, a luxury boutique hotel that sat squarely on the Mississippi River, overlooking Lock and Dam No. 1 and the original Pillsbury A Mill. Rock stars had stayed here. Sports celebrities. One has-been movie star had even OD’d here.

  Mom Chao Cherry opened her gold case and spilled out another tiny pile of white powder. She tamped it into a line, leaned forward, and, using a thin glass straw, snorted it quickly.

  A hot rush exploded inside her head. She flopped back, letting the fire ripple and roar but feeling the euphoria ooze over her as well. A friend had once told her that cocaine was the selfish drug, the drug that made you love yourself more than anything in the world. She smiled lazily. That was true. But, of course, it hadn’t always been that way.