The Big Fear

by Andrew Case

  “If someone killed your boss, he did a great job of making her look like she did it herself.”

  “You’ve mentioned.”

  “Someone is going to come and talk to you about this thing too. About you being in here hurt. It isn’t going to be me. I just came by to check in on you. You’ve been out three days, this morning is the first it got announced you were here.”

  Leonard looked up at the detective. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that. Head of DIMAC found on the street and taken to the hospital. No one heard from you for days. You were here. I hadn’t known and I figure I’d stop by.”

  “You’re not investigating this.”

  “I’m on my meal from Property. I gotta get back to 100 Gold.”

  Mulino stood up, shaking out his bad knee. He took out his card. “I know you have some ideas about Davenport. I don’t know, myself. Maybe I’m not supposed to talk to you. But I figure you are interested in the truth same as anyone.” He handed the card over and Leonard pocketed it.

  Mulino turned and walked down the hallway. Leonard watched him leave. Mulino would go back to the outside world and to his normal life. Maybe it was a life filled with petty crimes, dirty streets, and fights with kids who had stabbed each other over how to split up the dime bag. But as a detective, those were fights Mulino would get to win. Even in Property, he got to hold a little bit of authority over the rest of the world. And he’d head out at the end of his tour and drive out to Long Island where his own family was probably waiting, safely walled off from the world he worked in all day, with Turkey Tetrazzini and a game of Chutes and Ladders. That was over for Leonard now.

  As he watched Mulino leave, he thought of one more thing. It had been in the papers, that he’d been hurt. Until then, nobody knew. Nobody knew if he had even survived. Now whoever had done it could find him. And a hospital guard would wave through a badge just like anyone else. No one ever asks questions. Leonard set down his coffee. He stood up. His shoulder hurt like hell, but he didn’t have much time. He walked out into the hallway of the hospital, leaving his view behind.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  FLIGHT

  The quiet of his room gave way to the steady clamor of the ward. Carts bouncing along regulated hallways. Professionals clattering away at patient machines. Relatives of other inmates ducking their way into a room. But all Leonard could hear was the noise inside his head. The police thought Davenport had killed herself. A police officer, or someone who was trying very hard to look like one, had assaulted him and left him for nearly dead. And now it was in the paper. Bylined by his old friend Tony Licata, probably. Anyone looking for him would suddenly know where he was. He wasn’t only worried about keeping himself from being arrested now. He had to keep from being killed. His shoulder hurt and his shirt was too tight, but at least he had his street clothes on. The suit was ruined, but it was never all that nice to begin with. He started walking down the hallway to his left when he saw them rounding a corner behind him. Two uniform cops. One of them was Officer Davies.

  “Mr. Mitchell?”

  Leonard didn’t turn his head. Maybe they’d go into the room to check if it was actually him. It would give him a little more time. He picked up his pace. Run full speed in a hospital and someone is likely to tackle you, but a brisk walk was safe. He shuffled through the slow crowd, residents and patients giving him a bit of human cover. Everyone on the floor was in some sort of a rush. He saw a suite of elevators about twenty feet in front of him. He didn’t hear any running; he picked up his pace.

  The other cop was talking, the one he didn’t recognize. “Mr. Mitchell? We’d just like to talk to you.”

  He’d reached the elevators. He didn’t have time to wait for one. The footsteps were gaining. They were fit from daily trips to the weight room, but both carried eighteen pounds of gear on their gunbelts. They weren’t as fast as they thought. Leonard slipped around a woman in a wheelchair and opened a door into a stairwell. He heard the cops pick up speed behind him.

  His shoulder seared and his back ached and he ran as fast as he could. He was down one flight when he heard a pair of shoes clatter onto the stairs. Just one. The other had taken the elevator and would be waiting on the ground floor. Leonard shimmied as best he could past the sixth floor, the fifth. He would have to try something else. He burst out of the stairwell and onto the fourth floor.

  Leonard turned left and took off at a run along the hallway. The wall to his right offered a mural of an absurdly bright blue sky, a crooked rainbow, and odd shapes that could be flowers or clouds or dinosaurs dancing through hallucinogenic green fields below. Fewer people here, and they looked hollow and shell-shocked, wandering aimlessly around the forced cheer. The children’s ward. Where the burned or beaten get swaddled with Silverex and Bacitracin and the parents blame themselves. There was a second bank of elevators just ahead of him. A man stood inside it looking very much like Leonard, except that he was holding his entire fist in his mouth, eyes squinted shut and teeth just starting to cut into his own flesh. Leonard slipped in the doors just as they closed; he could hear the clatter of Officer Davies behind, losing steam. And as bad as his day had been, the guy in the elevator with him had it worse.

  Leonard stayed alert as the elevator hit the ground floor. The other cop would be at the end of the hallway, straight ahead, maybe two hundred feet away. Officer Davies might have called him on the radio and he might already be on his way. The man next to him was still chewing on his hand, crushing shut his eyes, trying to forget whatever horrible news he had just been given.

  The doors opened to the crowd of a busy hospital. No officer in sight. The stunned man made no effort to get out, so Leonard pushed his way into the mob and started to float with them toward the main entrance. The other cop was waiting for him there, scanning the faces as they left the building. Leonard could see that he wouldn’t get far. He turned back toward the elevator. He couldn’t go back upstairs. He pushed past the crowd and pulled open a door into another stairwell. Going down. He didn’t have anything to lose.

  He thought about where he would go if he got out. If the police were looking for him, he couldn’t stay at home for long. He couldn’t go see friends, coworkers, anyone who would show up in a background check. They could put a tap on his phone, a track on his cell, a trace on every bank transaction, leading them to him like so many electronic breadcrumbs. The cell phone tracing would be the hardest to shake. He could throw away his MetroCard, shred his credit cards, live off whatever cash was left in his pocket, but soon his cell phone would be a homing beacon. He pulled it out of his pocket and saw that he had missed seventy calls over the past three days. His voicemail was full. People were trying to find him, but he didn’t want to be found just now. He had to ditch it.

  He slunk down the bright concrete stairwell. Painted white, purely utilitarian and spotless. The door at the bottom had a heavy square of fortified glass in its center and a painted warning on its body: Staff Only. The door had a fire bar on it. Leonard hoped that he wouldn’t set off an alarm, ignored his pain for a moment, and pushed through, ready to run at the sound if it came. But the door swung open and the hallway kept quiet; he was still safe for the moment. He was in a broad cement hallway, empty buckets and neat mops aligned by the wall. Darkness at the end. He crept along.

  At the end of the hallway, he saw a red exit light above another door. He pushed it open and found himself in a small garage filled with service vehicles. Ambulances, patrol cars, a couple of trucks. He walked up to an ambulance and tried the back door. It was open. He slipped out his cell phone and slid it under the cushioning in the side bench. Deep, so it couldn’t shake loose and so whichever paramedic sat on it wouldn’t notice it. Tossing it out a window or leaving it in a garbage can would have given the cops a static point to trace, and they would have found the abandoned phone in an hour or so. This way, whoever traced him would think that he was zippi
ng around the city at seventy miles an hour.

  He turned away from the vehicles, out of the garage, and toward Seventy-First Street. He stepped clear onto the sidewalk. No sign of the cops. They had only covered the public exits. He started west. The street on the north end of the hospital was narrow, and shaded by imperial buildings on both sides. He would take the subway back to Brooklyn; he had already decided where he would stay. He looked up as he neared York Avenue.

  A heavy black sedan was parked on the corner of York, about twenty feet ahead of him. The lights flashed on as he approached. The engine hummed to life and it started toward him. He turned and ran back toward the hospital. Someone was following him still. He ran past the garage—the doors had locked shut behind him. At the corner he would be at the FDR. Maybe if traffic wasn’t heavy, he could dash across to the walkway on the other side. A car couldn’t make that leap. Then maybe he would swim the East River.

  The car sped past him and turned up onto the sidewalk, blocking his way. Leonard spun back and looked behind him. There was nowhere to go. He ran toward the car, thinking he could leap the hood and keep on his mad dash to the river. The door opened and a familiar figure stepped out. A sleek suit. Serious posture. And a fierce pair of green eyes. Leonard stopped. Veronica spoke.

  “Leonard, they are looking for you everywhere. You aren’t going to make it without help. Get in and let me take you somewhere safe.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THE SEVEN-OH

  Detective Ralph Mulino was startled by how calm the cops were when they came back. Minutes before, using the bathroom after leaving Leonard Mitchell to his recovery, he had heard a commotion on the floor. Looking out into the hallway, he had seen two young officers—patrol rookies—flinging themselves toward the stairwell. He had remembered being that eager once himself, always wanting to be the first on the scene, the kid to make the collar. The sucker. He wouldn’t join this race, but he nodded acknowledgement to the cop by the elevator, going ahead to cut the suspect off at the ground floor. Mulino had nursed his coffee in the dull waiting room and was standing to leave when they huffed back up.

  When they approached, the elevator cop was collected, pristine, and the one who had taken the stairs heaved and whimpered. Mulino marveled that with all the new technology and all the best tactics, the NYPD couldn’t keep its officers in shape even six months into the job. Everyone can do the obstacle course in six minutes when they have to take the POPAT at the academy, and then when they’re out in the field, they can’t run up and down a few flights of stairs without panting.

  “Detective,” the elevator cop said.

  Mulino looked at the kid’s badge. He glanced at the collar brass—the Seven-Oh. A neighborhood precinct in Brooklyn. That didn’t make sense. These guys weren’t even on the right side of the river. Mulino looked back up at the kid’s face, remembering the nameplate.

  “Officer Davies. What brings you to the hospital?”

  He recognized the name when he spoke it. Davies. The Seven-Oh. Just like Leonard had said.

  “We were asked to bring a patient in for questioning. He did flee the premises. Someone will apprehend him at his house.”

  “I only have the one coffee, or I’d offer you boys one.” Something about the rookie cops didn’t strike Mulino as quite right. They weren’t afraid enough. They had come across a detective almost by chance, and they were shrugging off the fact that they had just lost their man. If Mulino had lost a footrace thirty years before, and he’d turned the corner to find himself face-to-face with a sunburst blue badge, he would have dropped to his knees and begged forgiveness. Maybe it was just the generation. Or maybe Leonard had been telling the truth. This was the guy who had sent him here. His uniform certainly looked authentic to Mulino.

  The one who had taken the stairs was still catching his breath. “That’s okay. We have to go inside and tell the nurses to give a call in case he comes back.” They started to walk past him toward the nurses’ station.

  Mulino looked up and called after them. “Your suspect came from in there?”

  The elevator cop turned around. “Yeah. Guy who got picked up in front of Ebbets Field a few days ago. The detective squad wants to talk with him. Something about a body washing up in the river.”

  Mulino stared after the cops. Davenport had been investigated by Manhattan Homicide. The precinct of location always catches the crime. The only thing the detectives in the Seven-Oh might want to talk to Leonard about was how he’d ended up in a heap on Bedford Avenue. And if he told them the same story that he had told Mulino, these guys wouldn’t want their brass to know about it. If there was any brass for them to tell.

  He thought about what Leonard had told him. It was all coming together. Davenport investigates dirty cops, dirty cops fight back and kill her. He hadn’t liked it much himself when he heard they’d knocked Davenport down to a suicide. It had sounded to him a little too much like 1PP wanted one fewer tick on the dial, what with crime on the rise. Christine Davenport had made plenty of enemies at the NYPD over the years. But he still couldn’t imagine police officers kidnapping a city official and hoisting her over the side of a boat. Yet here was Officer Davies, going to the very hospital that was treating Leonard for the tune-up. Maybe Leonard hadn’t been so wrong to be afraid. Maybe he had clammed up to Mulino because he was afraid of him too.

  Mulino sighed. He had learned a lot more that week than he had wanted to about the wrong side of the police department. He fished into his corduroy jacket pocket and read over the report from Harrison. The more he read, the more it seemed like a whitewash to keep the murder rate from getting any higher. He thought about what Leonard had said about people averting their eyes. How they don’t get involved in police business. Maybe a cop could drag a screaming woman off of a boat after all. He had seen people look away from worse. He folded the report and put it back into his pocket. He had to get back to Gold Street. After all, he was going to be late coming in the next morning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  ESCAPE

  The car squealed south on the FDR and Veronica threaded into the wave of traffic before taking a breath. Leonard curled himself into a ball in the front seat. Now that he wasn’t worried about being caught, the pain was back. He started to stretch out as Veronica eased off of the accelerator. His feet had just reached the floor when she spoke.

  “Look behind us. Is there anyone?”

  Leonard slid around and checked the road. The hospital towered behind them, the United Nations ahead, and the traffic buzzed on both sides. But nothing unusual. A sunny summer afternoon commute.

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  Leonard slumped back round to face forward. He pulled the seat belt shut. Veronica sped past a taxi and cut in front of it. Her fingers were taut on the wheel, the fingernails digging into the leather. The road curved east and the on-ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge appeared. He looked up at the bridge and over to Veronica.

  “How did you find me? How did you know I would be coming out the back?”

  “It was in the paper. The investigation is ongoing. I was planning on checking in to visit you. They have cops at the entrance, and when I said I was coming to see you they tried to stop me. If you were coming out that way you weren’t going to make it. You were either going to be coming out of that garage or you weren’t going to be coming out at all.”

  Leonard nodded. He had been even closer to getting locked up than he thought.

  One hand on the wheel, she reached across him to his wounded shoulder. “How do you feel?”

  “I’m okay.” Five minutes earlier, Leonard had been afraid for his life. In the chase, with his instincts running full throttle, he had forgotten about mere pain. Now the beating was talking to him again, reminding him. As they took a broad turn up the bridge, Leonard saw the fresh bright downtown sparkle in front of him. Magnificent glass condominiums rising sixty stories, th
e newly finished complex of towers, all scoffing at the mere Woolworth Building, a stone relic chugging along into the twenty-first century. It all seemed stained somehow, false. A glittering future that had been imposed upon the city, laughing at people who had liked things the way it had been before. Thinking of it slipping back to that raucous past, Leonard felt almost a hint of relief. They swooped onto the bridge.

  “Do you know who did this to you?”

  He turned to look at her. Her eyes were steady on the road, watching the hum of cars pressing their luck along the bridge. She was the one who had told him what Davenport had really been up to. That Eliot Holm-Anderson had been betting against companies and blowing them up. That the little disasters weren’t just the by-product of a swiftly collapsing city but acts of affirmative sabotage. That Davenport had known. Veronica had trusted him with dangerous information, so it was only right that he trust her back.

  “I was beat up by a cop.”

  “What?”

  He told her the whole story. Coming home at night. Seeing the car; Victor Ells. And Officer Davies. “Mulino doesn’t believe me. He thinks at best it was someone who bought a fake uniform. But I’m pretty good at spotting that.”

  Veronica pulled the car down the long exit off the bridge. “Why would they assault you? You had only just spoken to me. You hadn’t found anything out yet.”

  “I wonder about that.” They wouldn’t have known about his talk with Veronica. But they would have known he was investigating Mulino. And they just might have known that he had his doubts about whether Mulino had done it. About whether the trophy was worth it after all. Leaking the interview to the papers had been a test balloon. It wasn’t great for the cop, but it didn’t lead to marches in the street demanding his head. And if your jury pool is skeptical of your best evidence, you don’t have a case. Just maybe, word had got out that Leonard wasn’t as convinced as he was supposed to be that Mulino was the fall guy. And if the cops came after Leonard for that, it would mean that they were laying the trap for Mulino after all.