Taylor stuffed the .357 in one of the outside pockets of his field jacket, fell back three rows, and slipped between the shelves. He brushed a box. A cloud of dust swirled up. He had to sneeze, but somehow did it silently. The act of holding it in made the wound at the back of his head explode with pain. Bent low, he moved toward the center aisle that divided the rows of shelves in the basement. Something glinted in a plastic tub. Handcuffs. No, not handcuffs. These were for cuffing someone’s hands and feet, with a chain that connected both sets of bracelets.
Could come in handy.
In a tub next to them were whips and cat o’ nine tails.
Also helpful. Time for a disturbance.
He grabbed one of the four-way manacles and a cat o’ nine tales, drove his shoulder into the shelf on his right, and raced across the center aisle. By the time he was pressed up against the opposite wall, the first shelf had toppled into the next with a crash and then sent over another with an even louder noise. The dominos tumbled to the back of the basement where the office was. Half the room’s shelves were down.
“What the fuck?” That was Priscotti.
Taylor shoved the cuffs and cat into his other jacket pocket and pulled out the collapsible Polaroid.
“Who’d you come with, Sammie?” That was Slive.
“Who would come with me is the question.”
The crack of flesh on flesh. Samantha cried out. Taylor moved to the center aisle and peered around the shelf. Slive stood over her. He didn’t look like he was enjoying himself now. “That goddamn pest of a reporter?”
“Don’t trust him.”
“Then why did he rescue you?” He turned to Priscotti. “Find him and shoot him in the fucking face.”
Priscotti slowly walked down the center aisle. The cop swung his gun left over the tumbled shelves then right as he reached each new intact row. Taylor stood with his back to a shelf. Priscotti stepped into full view, pointed the gun at the fallen shelves and started swinging back toward Taylor. As he did, Taylor stepped out and put the Polaroid in the fat cop’s eyes and tripped the shutter. The flash went off and Priscotti’s gun roared, ripping the head off a mannequin.
Lightning.
Thunder.
Stay focused.
He dropped the camera and yanked out the cat o’ nine tails. With all his strength, he swung at Priscotti’s face. Priscotti screamed as lashes appeared and filled with blood. Taylor hit him again, harder.
Priscotti dropped to his knees, his hands on his face. Taylor hauled him behind the row of shelves to get out of Slive’s direct line of fire, put a knee on his back, and snapped a handcuff on his right wrist, then his left. Priscotti’s head cleared enough to know this was trouble and started bucking like a steer in the rodeo. Taylor got kicked in the face as he cuffed the right leg. A thunderous roar. A box above exploded. Feathers floated down. Slive was shooting through the shelves. Two arms and a leg would have to do. He scrambled back to the wall as Slive fired again.
Priscotti screamed in pain. “Stop! You shot me.”
“Your fault for letting him jump you. Where is he?”
“Oh God, I’m shot. Help me.”
“Where the fuck is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, get back here.”
“Can’t.” His voice was a pained whine. “He cuffed my arms and a leg. I’m going to bleed to death chained here.”
“Is that you, Taylor? Because you turned out to be a complete pain in my ass. No matter. I’m going to kill you and these two. I’m going to solve all my problems in one night.”
Taylor didn’t answer. He slipped along the wall up toward the small room, stopping at each row of shelves to check for Slive in the doorway, or even a shadow that would tell him something. He was only going to get one shot, and he was far from being a good shot. Everything depended on skill he didn’t have using a gun that hefted like a bazooka.
Priscotti moaned. “Slive, please come help me. I need help. I’m shot.” His voice rose. “What kind of partner are you?” He started screeching. “Help, help. I need—”
Slive’s gun cracked once from the doorway. Priscotti went silent. “Guess this is the night to tie up all my loose ends.” A scraping noise. Slive pushed Samantha’s chair into the doorway. He crouched down behind, using her as a shield, and sighted his gun on her shoulder.
“Get out of here,” yelled Samantha. “Lock the basement door and get backup. He can’t do anything. He’s trapped with enough evidence to bury him forever.”
Slive hit Samantha hard above the right ear with the gun. A half scream and her head lolled to the side. It was all Taylor could do not to call out her name. He moved to the last row of shelves and aimed between boxes at the doorway. The only shot he had was of Samantha.
“She’s wrong, you know. They’ll all be dead and I’ll still get away. Surrender in three, or I shoot her.”
“One.” The muzzle turned toward the side of Samantha’s head. “Two.”
Give in. Talk us out of this.
Before he could step in the open, a shadow rose behind Slive. Mick Callahan, somehow back on his feet, blood covering his chest, screamed something that wasn’t words and ran head down at Slive like a wounded rhino.
For Taylor, time didn’t so much slow down as jump and stutter like in a silent movie.
Callahan drove Slive into the right wall of the office. Slive yelled, spit, and struck at Callahan. With both feet, Slive kicked Callahan away and then shot him three more times. The .357 was at Taylor’s side, then up and aimed at Slive. Taylor fired. The kick threw the gun high. Taylor pulled it back down and closed the distance to the doorway.
Slive fell back with a leg wound. He brought his gun up to fire. Taylor shot again, catching Slive in the arm. He spun once, twice, spraying blood on the wall, then tumbled onto the table, tipping it over and crashing onto the floor. Gold canisters dropped all over him, opening to spill more black strips of film everywhere.
Taylor kneeled in front of Samantha, who had blood trickling down the side of her head into her ear. “Hey, you with me?”
She groaned and her eyes fluttered. “What happened?”
“The short answer is Slive hit you. The long answer will have to wait until your head hurts a lot less.”
“That could take a really long time. What about my dad?”
Taylor picked up the handcuff keys from the floor and unlocked her. “It’s not good.”
“God, no.”
“You need to keep it together a little longer.” Her eyes were filling with tears. “Watch Slive while I run upstairs and call for help. Can you?”
She rose with a groan and leaned against the door jam, taking the gun from Taylor.
“You sure you can?”
“I’ll shoot him if he ever moves again.”
Keeping the gun aimed at Slive, she walked on shaky legs to crouch next to her father.
Taylor ran through the basement past Priscotti’s still handcuffed body. He took the stairs two at a time to the theater, where the same four guys had sat through everything that had happened in the basement.
In the store, he found Jersey Stein browsing the shelves like your average shopper. Cloudy was on his feet holding a handkerchief to his face. “That’s him.” The counterman pointed at Taylor. “He was with her. She hit me and they took my guns.”
Stein peered over a shelf at Taylor. “What’s going on?”
“You need to get four wagons down here. Three people shot in the basement and an officer hurt. And get more guys from your office. Make the calls, then come down. Cuff that bastard too.” Too late. Cloudy was out the door and running west on 42nd Street. “Never mind. He’s the least of our worries.”
Stein went out to his car to use the radio. Taylor went back even faster then he’d come. Samantha had unlocked Mick’s handcuffs and had her father’s head on her lap, the gun half trained on Slive.
She was sobbing. Her father was dead.
Taylor wonder
ed if it would have killed The Sergeant anyway to explain himself to his daughter. Then he wondered if he’d ever be able to do it. The facts had always been everything to him. These would stab like knives.
Chapter 30
On November 21, Taylor walked into CBGB to celebrate. Sort of. He’d spent most of the past nine days getting grilled by investigators. This morning, Jersey Stein had told him off the record he wouldn’t face charges for shooting Slive, who had lived, in part, because of Taylor’s crappy marksmanship. Slive would be charged with the murders of Dodd and Mortelli—he’d used Dodd’s gun to kill the punk—another count for Kristy Copper and various charges related to his corruption and porn activities. It appeared Slive used cleaning out precincts as a cover for his own criminal operations. He’d moved into IA from one of the more corrupt stations right as the Knapp Commission was beginning work. Call it reading the writing on the wall. Call it a business decision. After that, the more cops he put away, the more control he had.
Stein had worked it out so Taylor would only have to pay for the damages to the rental car and the tickets. The DA’s investigator had thrown around “life and death situation” a few times. No one in the Ninth was in a position to argue.
There ended the good news in Taylor’s life.
He’d tried to get Samantha to join him, just to get out of her apartment. She wouldn’t. She’d repeated what she’d said before. She didn’t blame him. She had to make some decisions. Taylor knew she wouldn’t go back to the cops. He still hoped she’d come back to him.
Frederick the Dutch slid a beer across the bar. “On the house, my friend.”
“Free beer at CBGB? World ending?”
“Everyone knows. You figured out who killed Johnny Mort. Cleared his name. The whole neighborhood talks.”
Must be word of mouth. They didn’t get it from any story he’d written. He’d typed up the whole thing in the shortest form he could and hand-delivered it to the City News Bureau’s five radio stations. Broadcast news abhorred complexity. The stations boiled it down to shootings with a mention of pornography. After that, he’d called Tom Sabatini at the Daily News and given him everything. Over the past few days, when investigators weren’t interviewing him, Sabatini and his editors were. The story ran a week after the shootings across pages six and seven under Sabatini’s byline. Taylor didn’t get a mention.
There was one other bit of good news this evening. The Ramones were starting a three-night gig. He needed “Blitzkrieg Bop” to make any kind of celebration of this.
Six days later, the City News Bureau re-opened for full-time operation. The office had been re-equipped as a result of several anonymous donations—Taylor guessed from news organizations around town. They never liked attacks on their own, even if their own was an unknown newswire two weeks old.
Taylor stopped in at an office down the hall first. Lew Raymond & Associates, Investigators. Samantha sat at a desk in the front office, looking at once both odd and lovely in a skirt and blouse. A deep voice boomed from the backroom.
“Your boss does have some pipes.”
“Yeah, was in radio.”
“A deejay?”
“No, before that. He played a detective in the old radio days.”
“No, don’t tell me—”
“Lew Raymond, Consulting Detective.”
“And he does it for real now?’
“Has for years. His given name was Marion Sarnoff. Seems to know his stuff, least when it comes to cheating husbands and sticky-fingered shop clerks.”
“I’m sorry. I know this isn’t what you—”
“No apologies. Thank you for putting in the good word. Who knows? He might even end up respecting my work. Says a woman is perfect for staking out stores and love nests. People are less suspecting. Already treats me better than all the boys down at the Oh-Nine. I was never going to make detective on the force. After what my dad did ….” Her head dropped during a long pause. She looked back up at him with those blue eyes. “You never know. Maybe some really interesting cases will come along.”
“Some interesting cases come along, then we’ll both have something.”
“That we will.”
“Lunch?”
“Yes. But not Howard Johnson.”
Novak was in the office, his right arm in a sling, and already talking about how he was going to expand the business. He’d somehow convinced Cramly to come back, and Terry Simpleton—an ex-Messenger-Telegram reporter who drank more than he wrote—had signed on because he had nowhere else to go.
Just like me.
Novak came over and sat on the edge of Taylor’s desk a few minutes after he’d settled in. “I’ve got an idea.”
“Uh-oh.”
“I’m trying to sign some of the suburban papers. After all that stuff you were chasing, how about a feature on what’s really going on in Times Square?”
“You want a story on the porn business?”
“Atmospheric, just, you know, without mentioning the porn itself. Out in the suburbs they love to hate the city. Look at these I had done.” He put down several grainy black and whites. A porn shop. Several theaters. Women dressed to sell. Tawdry Times Square at its lowest best. Except any offending film titles and store names had somehow been blurred out.
Taylor had to laugh. “I get it. Cake and eat it too. See what I can do.”
He went back to reading the New York Times’ banner story. The night before, President Ford had abandoned his opposition to helping the city and proposed $2.3 billion in federal loans to save New York from default. Legislation was expected to race through Congress for the President’s signature. New York City would not, after all, drop dead. Not even a President could let that happen.
* * *
Photo by Domenica Comfort
Rich Zahradnik has been a journalist for 30-plus years, working as a reporter and editor in all major news media, including online, newspaper, broadcast, magazine, and wire services.
Zahradnik held editorial positions at CNN, Bloomberg News, Fox Business Network, AOL, and The Hollywood Reporter, often writing news stories and analysis about the journalism business, broadcasting, film production, publishing, and the online industry. In January 2012, he was one of 20 writers selected for the inaugural class of the Crime Fiction Academy, a first-of-its-kind program run by New York’s Center for Fiction.
A media entrepreneur throughout his career, he was founding executive producer of CNNfn.com, a leading financial news website and a Webby winner; managing editor of Netscape.com, and a partner in the soccer-news website company, Goal Networks. Zahradnik also co-founded the weekly newspaper, The Peekskill Herald, at the age of 25, leading it to seven state press association awards in its first three years.
Zahradnik was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, and received his B.A. in journalism and political science from George Washington University. He lives with his wife Sheri and son Patrick in Pelham, New York, where he teaches elementary school kids how to publish online and print newspapers.
Drop Dead Punk is the second book in the Coleridge Taylor Mystery series, which began with Last Words.
For more information, go to www.richzahradnik.com.
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