by Delia Rosen
“There’s a match,” he said. “One of these lines was at your deli that morning.”
It wasn’t unusual for students to come to Murray’s. We had discount cards for students.
There was a sixth line now and a smaller seventh: someone was out walking their little wiener dog to our left.
“This is amazing,” I said. The dog walker’s lines strengthened, while two of the other three held steady. The third was jaggedly bolder. I looked through the filmy drizzle. The figures from the campus had stopped under a tree on the other side of Merritt. The dog walker’s gaze lingered on us, probably trying to figure out what the hell we were doing out on a wet night with electronics. He continued to the east under his umbrella.
It was rain now, no longer drizzle, and water was starting to run around the overhead lip of the shower curtain.
“We should probably go,” Banko said.
I was about to insist on the same thing, albeit for a different reason. Banko was so into his ethericism he forgot we came here to find bad guys. These men were not just lines on a graph; they were people, and they were near. We stood, Banko wrapping his computer in the plastic shroud, just as the men from the campus decided to cross the street. They weren’t walking, they were running. I had to know why.
I decided suddenly, impulsively—as I do most things—to stand my ground. I had come here to find out about a killer. The dog walker was still within earshot; there was still occasional vehicular traffic. If this man and his friends were bent on mischief, they wouldn’t do anything here—I hoped.
One would think, with all the knives I own, that I would have thought to bring one. Or a handgun. My uncle had owned a .38. It was in the safe in my office. I had not bothered to obtain a license, had never fired it, had never even held it except to check that it wasn’t loaded. So that wasn’t in my pocket either. All I had in the windbreaker were my hand and my cell phone. I took it out. I had a 911 app that took a picture and sent it to the police. That was useful in my business. I had my thumb at the ready as I pointed the phone ahead.
The three men arrived with a splat of feet on the sidewalk followed by a squoosh as they ran into the park. I turned on a flashlight app so I could see them. They were wearing security uniforms. They all squinted and shielded their eyes like vampires confronting a cross. One of the men turned a flashlight on me. It was a standoff in two wet, white beams. I shut mine. The man did not.
“We’ve had some trouble here,” he said in a cigarette-sandpapered drawl. “We wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
“It was. It is,” I said. “Would you switch off the searchlight?”
He obliged. I saw a big bluish blob where his head should be. They were keeping their distance, still just dark shapes in the night.
“You’re not a student,” the man went on.
“I’m not on college property. What’s this about?”
They talked quietly among themselves, like the witches in Macbeth. I would have left, only I was interested to see where this went. From his anxious backing-away and shifting from foot to foot, Banko was way less intrigued.
“There’s been trouble out here,” one of the men said. “We were just making sure you weren’t in danger.”
“Thanks, we’re fine. What kind of trouble?”
“Vandalism.”
“Have you seen any of the vandals?” I asked. “Any idea who they are?”
The men hesitated. “Is that why you’re here?” one of them asked.
“Is what why I’m here?”
“Investigating? You two reporters or something? Bloggers?”
“No.”
The rain kicked up a notch, and we were all getting soaked. The three men were a featureless blur. They had not done or said anything overtly intimidating. but that hulking silhouette was hostile nonetheless.
“I know you,” one of the men said suddenly. “You took over the Jewish deli from Murray Katz.”
“That’s right. He was my uncle.”
“Well, you should probably leave,” the man said.
“Why?” I asked defiantly.
“Because smart people don’t stand in the rain,” he said.
“Any other reason?” I asked.
“Smart people watch out when there’s a storm,” he added. That was more pointed, more menacing.
The man didn’t say anything else. He lingered a moment, and then they turned to go in segments, like a caterpillar. I watched them run back to the campus. I didn’t realize that my hands were tight balls at my side until I finally released them.
Banko brushed hair from his eyes and came back to my side. He was hugging his well-protected computer to his chest and bending over it. “Jesus. What was that about?”
“I’m not sure,” I admitted. “They were itchy about something. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Banko nodded enthusiastically. I turned and jumped back, nearly knocking my companion over. Someone was approaching from around the tennis courts. A man with a trench coat and an umbrella. I stood where I was, water pulling my hair along my neck and soaking my bandage.
“Care to get under?” the man said, as he came forward. It was Grant.
I stayed where I was. “Dammit, did you follow me?”
“The NPD has a murder to solve,” he said. “We’re not convinced you weren’t the target.”
“So the answer is yes.”
“You’re getting drenched—”
“It’s just water,” I said. “I can just wipe that off.”
“Nice,” he said.
“You could at least have told me what you were doing.”
“You can’t have it both ways, Gwen,” he said. “Either we’re friends, or I’m just a cop doing his job.”
I couldn’t argue with that. And there’s no disputing that I’m not at my best when I’m soaked and on edge. I resisted telling him that I was going to take Banko back to the hotel, then crash at the deli. That would just sound cranky, and besides, he’d have to follow me anyway if he were concerned about me being shot. With a short, deep sigh I started back to the car—
There was a muddy thud at my side, followed by a soft crack. Grant pushed me back and I hit the muck with a sickening sense of déjà vu. Behind me, I heard something crunch, like gears; it was followed by a clattering. I had no idea what it was and didn’t take the time to check.
“Down!” he shouted at Banko. Grant was sprawled on top of me and couldn’t get to my companion.
Grant wore his radio in his belt. Even as I tried to understand what exactly was happening, he was calling for assistance. Time oozed by. I felt him crawl over me to make sure my head was covered. I turned my face sideways so I could breathe. He did not place his weight on me, not entirely; I could feel him raised up at the chest, probably looking in the direction from which the shot had come.
“You okay?” I asked Banko, who was lying beside me.
“Yeah, though I’m not sure about the laptop.”
We stopped talking. I could hear Grant breathing, feel Banko breathing, realized I wasn’t. I took a breath. We waited like rabbits in a field, frozen, waiting for the farmer who’d had it to blow us away. Since I’m not a farmer and never have been, I wondered why I thought of that analogy. I remembered a story a great-great someone once told me of their farm in a Ukrainian shtetl, how they had to fight the local hare population for crops.
It could have been thirty seconds or five minutes that passed. I didn’t know. All I knew was that there wasn’t a second shot. Only when we heard sirens did Grant get up, and only then did I realize how cold and thoroughly soaked with rain and mud I was. Suction was actually holding me to the ground, and I needed a hand from Grant to get up.
“Don’t go near the impact site,” he said, pointing to the right. “We’ll want to get pictures, figure trajectory.”
As I flopped onto my relatively dry tush, he handed me the umbrella, and now I took it. Banko literally crawled over, dragging the muck-saturated sho
wer curtain beside him. He sat beside me with a sigh as he pulled the laptop from the plastic. The monitor part had snapped from the base on the left side, and water and mud had seeped in.
“How’s your device?” I asked.
“It’s safe. I removed it before I packed the computer away.”
“What about the data?”
“Everything we got tonight is probably gone,” he said. “The rest of it is backed up on a flash drive.”
“I’ll pay for the damage.”
“Thanks—it’s not that much. My laptops are pretty simple. It’s the software and the plug-in that are costly.”
We sat in silence for a moment while Grant ran to the cop cars on Alameda.
“Has anything like this every happened to you before?” he asked.
“Incredibly, it has. You?”
“Never, and I’m thinking I should start charging hazard pay for field work. Are we going to tell your friend what we discovered?”
“I think we better tell someone,” I said. “I don’t much care for this getting shot at.”
Chapter 10
“Not necessarily.”
The remark turned my head around. More than that, it reminded me that my good but linear brain might be over its parietal bone on this one.
Grant and I were sitting in the kitchen of the deli. There were two officers out front, and one had climbed the fence and was watching the back door, which was open. It was a little past eleven PM, and the rain had stopped, leaving a fresh feel to the chill night and an oil-like slickness on the asphalt under the dumpster. I was sitting on the stainless steel table, Grant was leaning against the sink, and Banko was in the office.
We had come to the deli in a squad car. I’m not ordinarily claustrophobic, but I felt that way now, sandwiched between Grant to my right and Banko to my left, with two officers up front. It was odd to feel more in danger when I was “safe” than when I was actually in danger. I was the proverbial fish in a barrel.
On the way to the deli, there had been a lot of chatter on Grant’s radio and on the squad car radio, and I didn’t really listen to any of it. Grant wanted to know about the security guards who were on duty. When he interrupted a message to text something, I’m sure he was asking them to run a check on Banko. He wanted to know as soon as the ballistics team on-site knew anything about the direction and nature of the bullet fired at me. He also asked the officer watching the martial arts school to report in.
I don’t know what he had learned or hoped to learn from all those inquiries. There was cross talk and broken reception and code, and ultimately he would boil it down for me. When we reached the deli, I apologized to the driver for the muddy seat; he gave me some perfunctory response, which I immediately forgot, and we went inside. I scrubbed myself in the bathroom and put on a change of clothes. Banko, less messy, rinsed off his shirt, wrung it out, and put it back on. He was more concerned about the computer, which was frozen. I left him alone, with the space heater on and the door closed.
I made coffee, gave Grant his—annoyed that I knew how he liked it, since that just reinforced the bond I was trying to put in my rearview mirror—and sat on the table with mine. There was a distinct unreality to the world right now. A man dying on top of me, culture shock from the martial arts school, embracing the idea of etheric readings, being abducted, redneck guards, another shooting, the rain, the park, and other things. All of that under my belt, yet here I was in the most familiar surroundings in my life—as though all of the rest of it could have been a dream. When I first got to Nashville, I’d spent a few nights at the deli while I familiarized myself with how it worked. I slept on this very table. Often, I wept with fear at the unfamiliarity of my new life and woke with renewed determination to succeed in it. The nightmares I had on those nights were exactly like the reality I had just come through: raw and messy. But those were the key words: I always came through it.
Buffered by the police, I believed I would come through this. And not just because of the police. Which brings me to the comment that turned my head around.
Grant was debriefing me. Slowly, gently, patiently, but progressively. He wanted me to come clean about Banko Juarez and why we were there.
I did. I told him about the etheric readings. He made notes in his pad, without expression. He once told me that police heard some pretty nutty things and could never dismiss any of it—not because they believed it, but because they wanted crazy people to keep talking. The more they said, the better the chance the officer might find some nuggets of truth. I hated the idea that Grant was humoring me, but I went along with it. Being shot at trumps righteous indignation any day or night.
While we were speaking, Detective Bean arrived. If she was annoyed to see Grant here, she didn’t show it. I had assumed this was “her” case. Maybe parts of it were, like the Chinese angle. Maybe other parts weren’t, like the “me” angle. She entered with her iPad held casually before her, as though it was a hand puppet ready to go onstage. It was like an electronic vacuum, sucking in evidence. Maybe Banko wasn’t nuts after all. How was this so very different from his ant-hair gadget?
Grant returned to the security guards, asking for any details I could remember about exactly what was said. He didn’t break his stride when Bean walked in. I looked at her, saw her stony expression, didn’t bother smiling, just kept on going with what I knew about Banko’s computer. When I was finished, silence fell like a sack of flour. Except for the low, vibrating hum of the motor that powered the freezer, it was quiet. Grant was in front of me, Bean was behind me, and I could see him looking at her and knew she was looking at him. I felt like a badminton net before the game.
“Anything from the field?” Grant asked.
She must have shaken her head because Grant looked down at his notes. “Given the M.O., I’m inclined to think we’ve got the same shooter.”
That was when a familiar, hot butterscotch voice said, “Not necessarily.”
I saw Grant look up as I turned. Bean turned back, with her iPad, and soon we were all staring as FBI Agent Lawrence Bowe-Pitt entered the room. He approached like the Hindenburg nosing its way into Lakehurst in the newsreel images: slowly, purposefully, with me as a mooring mast. I absently sipped coffee, which added an unseemly sound to his arrival, like someone grept-zing at a funeral.
“Listening to the scanners again?” Grant asked.
“Believe it or not, Detective, the FBI has its own sources of information,” Bowe-Pitt replied.
“Which we would ask you again to share,” Bean said, “only we don’t think that would do any good.”
“Right,” Grant added. “Because our job is preventing homicides, while your job is ripping out hate groups by the roots—only you need bodies to find those roots.”
In just a few seconds I went from feeling like a net to feeling like bait. I didn’t much care for either of them. I saw Bowe-Pitt’s smoky eyes looking down at me from that sequoia height of his. There was a look of not quite compassion but not quite disinterest there.
“You’ve had an eventful night,” he said to me.
“We’re in the middle of an interview,” Grant said. “If you wouldn’t mind waiting.”
The big man folded his hands in front of himself and stood where he was. The NPD was going to have to settle for his cooperation, not his departure. I wondered what Grant would do. I was a net again.
Grant turned the interview over to Bean and went to chat with Banko. He ever so slightly shoulder-butted Bowe-Pitt as he walked past. The agent towered a head higher, so it was more like an upper-arm butt. If Bowe-Pitt noticed, or cared, he didn’t show it.
Bean and I went back to the security guards. I told her as much as I could recall of the conversation. I said that, the exact words notwithstanding, there was nothing overtly hostile in the exchange. I wasn’t sure they would have known we were there if they hadn’t come out to smoke. I couldn’t say whether the smoking was a cover to get a closer look. Talking it out, I realized I d
idn’t know very much for a fact—ever ything was an impression, my own edginess imparting intent that may not have been there.
When I was finished, Bean looked over at Bowe-Pitt. “Since we all want to get the shooter or shooters, would you care to share anything you have?”
“Gladly, but I don’t ‘have’ anything,” Bowe-Pitt said.
“You said you don’t necessarily think we have the same gunmen—”
“I said nothing about what I think,” Bowe-Pitt said. “I was merely noting that we can’t assume it was the same shooter. It might be. He or she missed Ms. Katz through the reflective glass window of the deli, tried again in the park, and missed in the rain. Or it might be a copycat. The first killer was aiming for, and got, Mr. Chan. Now someone is looking to take out Ms. Katz or perhaps Mr. Juarez. The news reported the caliber and make of the rounds fired at the deli. Do you know how many hunters hereabout use 180-gr. Nosler E-Tip?”
“No,” Bean said. “How many?”
“One thousand, two hundred boxes, fifty count, in the last year,” he replied.
I heard that damn freezer motor again. It was like a maid pretending not to notice when the lord and lady were feuding.
“So we know very little, and that is frustrating to me,” Bowe-Pitt said. Despite the words, his voice showed no agitation, nor did his eyes display heat or hostility.
“Us too,” Bean replied. She looked at me. “Thanks for your help. Are you going to be all right?”
That question seemed like it was woman to woman. I appreciated it. She made her way around Bowe-Pitt with a little more finesse than her predecessor had exercised. The dirigible-man approached me.
“Who is the man in the office?”
I told him. He heard the information without comment. He stopped when he was a human mountain standing before me like Mount Sinai.
“There is this way of doing things,” he said, cocking his head toward the office where the two detectives were huddled outside the door, “and then there is another way.”
“I don’t follow.”
“The traditional way of solving crime is fact, fact, fact, thesis. I’m not sure that is the best way to go. You have been shot at or near. I also learned you were abducted. You are the only one who has been at the epicenter of these events. You’re a survivor, and I’m big on intuition. What does your gut tell you is going on?”