The Big Fear

by Andrew Case

  “Ahhh. Oh. You hit me, Officer.”

  The man was curled into a ball, wailing. Sergeant Sparks stepped forward. The building was loaded with explosives and he had to get out of there. But he didn’t want to get caught, either, and running over an old man on his way out of the building would have been too suspicious. He reached out a hand.

  “I’m sorry. I was just . . . I’m sorry, sir.”

  When you’re a cop, you are supposed to grovel to everyone. Every drug-slinging mope is a sir and every ten-dollar whore is a ma’am. The kids can yell and wail at you, call you every sort of farm animal name that they like, and you’re expected to come back with calm and reserve. You curse them out like they deserve and it will end up on YouTube with you as the bad guy. It was one of the reasons Sparks had been doing what he’d been doing. What had seemed so appealing when his boss had brought him the idea. Maybe people would start to speak to the police with dignity again, if they knew what they were being protected from.

  The man’s grip was firm for someone so old. He tugged down on Sparks and the cop nearly toppled onto him. With a heave, the sergeant pulled the man into a standing position. Suddenly, the old man’s arms were all over him. The man had seemed small, but was pressing all around him now; it was everything Sparks could do to keep himself steady. The man’s hands were around his waist, and he was groaning.

  “My hip. I think you broke my hip, Sergeant.”

  Sparks was ready to leave him and flee the building, but he couldn’t shrug the guy off. The man yanked closer, unsteadying Sparks, until he was nose to nose with him. Sparks stared at the man’s sleek chin and his square eyes, wondering how he could have been fooled into thinking that the man was timid and frail. The lips parted gently and the man whispered into his ear, “Surprise.”

  The man shoved off and Sparks stumbled back. As he did, he banged into another man. Sparks hadn’t noticed someone standing behind him while he was in the dance with the old man. Untangled, he reached for his gun. He would just shoot his way out and set off the building. Anyone who could say that they’d seen him do it would be killed in the blast anyway. Except his gun wasn’t there. The man he had banged into had lifted it while he had been struggling. He turned and his eyes came in to focus. He saw a skinny young man in a nice suit that didn’t quite fit, taunting him with his weapon.

  “Good to meet you in person, Sergeant.” Sparks recognized the man from the picture in the paper. Leonard Mitchell. The one who had killed Officer Del Rio.

  “Stealing an NYPD firearm is a serious crime.”

  “I’m well aware. I’m familiar with a number of serious crimes. Sabotage. Blackmail. Burglary. Murder. You think maybe we should start counting them up? See who’s got the better tally?”

  The sergeant stepped toward Leonard slowly. Men who aren’t used to carrying guns don’t hold them right. The weapon was in Leonard’s hand but his grip was loose; he wasn’t aiming it. Sergeant Sparks wasn’t threatened at all. If the moment was right he would spring for it.

  “You can count up whatever you want. I was doing what I was doing for the good of the city.”

  “Except you and I know that isn’t true. You were doing it because someone was telling you.”

  “No one ever made me do a thing I didn’t want to.”

  “Of course not. But you got transferred to Harbor too. Didn’t you? How many complaints did I see? Eleven? Thirteen? Sexual harassment? Inappropriate comments?”

  “Nothing happened with any of those women.”

  “Not for lack of trying. And if you had gone to the trial room on that, you would have hit rock bottom. You only had one way left to get any power.”

  Sparks stewed. He had been promised that those had been scrubbed from the file. Not just redacted like the screwups by Del Rio or Rowson or the others. But physically swiped from the paper files in the bottom of some cabinet in 1PP. If he hadn’t gotten that promise, he wouldn’t have been here.

  “I have plenty of power as it is.”

  “No you don’t. You can’t scrub people’s histories. You can’t orchestrate a sanitation strike with a handful of cops working for you. You can’t send sanitation trucks out to dump trash and make the strike look even worse than it actually is.”

  “I can do a lot.”

  Sparks kept his eyes on the man as he spoke. He didn’t like to be accused of anything. Least of all if it was true. “You’ve been working this game for Victor Ells, Sergeant. Just trying to make the mayor look bad so he can swoop in and take over. You weren’t just paid off. You were promised something.”

  “I told you I don’t care about the money.” Leonard remembered seeing Sparks’s name in Roshni’s file. He might not care about it. But he was getting plenty of it. And he was likely getting something else too.

  “What did he offer you? Chief of Detectives? The Academy? Commissioner? You’ve been murdering people just to get Victor Ells in charge of the city.”

  “Maybe Ells deserves to be in charge.”

  “If that were true, he wouldn’t need you to blow things up. He wouldn’t have asked you to murder Christine Davenport once he learned she was on to him.”

  “That woman,” Sparks said, “brought all of this on herself. She could have kept quiet and ended up with an awful lot of power.”

  Leonard nodded, started to look down. Sparks sensed his chance was coming. They always go soft when they start thinking about people they could have saved. The kid whose buddy tried to leap from one building to the next and blames himself. The guy who thought his girlfriend could handle an eight-ball. They feel guilty and that’s when you move in and get them to confess.

  Or simply take them out. The moment Sparks noticed Leonard’s glassy contemplation, he lunged at the gun. Leonard snapped out of his dream and yanked back, but was nowhere near quick enough. As Sparks sent the gun spinning across the field of green marble, he made a quick calculation: Getting out was more important than getting the gun back. He still had his cell phone, wired to the Semtex below, and as soon as he could get far enough away that he wouldn’t come down in the blast himself, he could use it. He bolted for the door.

  Behind him, he could hear the chaos of the two men, shouting to the doormen and the passersby to get out of the building. They were more intent on wrangling civilians to safety than on catching Sparks. Just as he had figured, they had made a mistake. Because if he could get clear enough of the building himself, it really wouldn’t matter if they were inside it or not. They would be caught in the collapse all the same.

  He turned left on Albany Street at a full sprint. It would only take him a minute.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  THE FALL

  As Sparks ran, Leonard took flight. Eliot could handle the evacuation. Someone had to stop the sergeant. He huffed south, toward Rector Street. Leonard’s old office stood on the right, and on the left was an above-ground parking garage. Mainly empty, waiting to get torn down, the thing housed a couple of fleets of city vehicles. The ones used by minor agencies where the staffers really never had need for a car. Leonard saw Sparks turn left and run up a narrow stairway. He followed into the darkness.

  Leonard climbed to the second floor of the parking garage. He couldn’t see a thing. They were only a block and a half away from the bank. If Sparks blew it up now, they would both be choking with soot and dust. He could make out thin dull shadows of worn-out cars rumbling into the darkness, but no sign of the sergeant. At least he knew the cop no longer had his gun.

  “Are you out there, Sparks? Don’t do anything stupid.”

  Leonard could sense a figure now, bobbing from behind one of the cars. He walked toward it. Sparks stepped silently through the shadows, his eyes glinting in the dark.

  “Oh, I won’t. I won’t go stalking the deputy mayor in Crown Heights. I won’t throw a cop out a sixth-floor window. I won’t do any of these things because if
I do, I’m likely to get arrested. Or maybe even shot.”

  Leonard started walking slowly backward. Sparks was coming toward him. Leonard could sense he had a good ten feet before the ledge. He’d already lured one cop too close to the edge of a building. It was worth a try.

  “You take out that building now and it could come down right on this garage, Sparks. You could kill us both. You didn’t get into this to kill yourself.”

  The sergeant kept walking. Leonard couldn’t help but feel that Sparks had a better feel for space than Del Rio did. That he wasn’t likely to tumble off the edge. He was closing in on Leonard.

  “That’s right, I didn’t. But I didn’t set out to get caught, either.”

  “You haven’t done so much yet. You could always pin it on Del Rio. On Rowson. They were the ones leading it. You haven’t killed anyone.” He wasn’t about to mention the people on the water taxi, the woman who had been struck by the falling crane. Getting Sparks to believe he wasn’t too far gone was part of the plan. If Leonard could talk him down, it would be something. It would at least buy him time. They could always go after him later; it doesn’t matter what they said to him. Just like it doesn’t matter if a cop lies to you in the interview room. The truth is fair game when the stakes are high. Even if Leonard could slow the sergeant down so that Eliot could get someone in the building who could defuse the bombs. Just yanking at the wires would have been likely to set them off.

  Sparks crept closer, and Leonard readied himself for the fight. The sergeant had both hands out, fists clenched. He wasn’t going to trigger the bombs just yet. When the sergeant was within five feet, Leonard took his chance and charged, hoping to push him backward toward the edge. But he had misjudged the man’s strength—he was rock hard and didn’t budge. Leonard nearly bounced off of him. Sparks grabbed Leonard’s arm and Leonard tugged him closer. As the two of them tangled together, Leonard looked him square in his small sleek eyes. It was Sparks who spoke.

  “You must know how it is. Dealing with people making demands of you. I bet you get pretty sick people coming into your office making complaints all day long. Maybe you wish they were grateful. I just got fed up with them and decided to take matters into my own hands. Ells thought he was using me. But I was using him.”

  There it was in a nutshell. Sergeant Sparks was as sick of the mopes and the skells as anyone. Kids jacking liquor stores, drunks beating their wives, people calling the cops to ask for protection and then calling to complain about the cops the moment they walked out the door. Who wants to patrol the city and keep the animals safe from each other only to find that you are their common enemy? He was working for Ells, sure. He had been bought off like the rest of them, maybe. But deep down, it didn’t matter. He might have done it anyway. Sparks had simply had it with the general public.

  And Sparks was right: Leonard did know how he felt. What is the point of fighting to rid the city of corruption when corruption is just the status quo for the powerless and the powerful alike? The average person on the street has no better a soul than the dirtiest cop on the force. He just doesn’t have a badge and a gun. Maybe Leonard couldn’t blame the guy much for turning. Maybe he had been closer than he thought to turning himself.

  Sparks stepped toward Leonard. Leonard took his last step backward, feeling the edge of the platform. Sparks wasn’t in danger now. He wasn’t going to just slide by and fall. Leonard’s heel came down right at the edge. Not secure enough. He began to teeter. Don’t look down. His left knee buckled and he waved his right arm. He was slipping backward, thinking of Del Rio, going down the same way. He started to tumble when something grabbed his right wrist. Hard, firm. Secure. Sergeant Sparks pulled him back from the edge and tugged him close, chins almost touching.

  “You don’t think I’d let you die that easily, do you? Without even getting roughed up a little bit first?”

  Leonard winced. The sergeant hoisted and launched him against a cement column. His spine went hot and his head cracked, and he could feel the sticky warmth of blood oozing out the back of his head. The sergeant walked up to him again. Two-a-days in the weight room and carrying eighteen pounds on the gunbelt every day can beef you up. Leonard held up his arms to stop him, but they were feeble in the face of Sparks’s assault. The cop grabbed him by the shoulders and threw him to the ground. Leonard could barely reach his hands up to break his fall. His palms scraped hard against the asphalt, and before he could stop himself his cheek cracked open as well. Blood there now too. He pressed himself up onto all fours. One of his wrists didn’t seem like it was bending right.

  He had made it to his knees when the sergeant confronted him. He couldn’t move his right hand. Sergeant Sparks looked down with a broad smile on his face. He planted his left leg and reached back with his right, as though getting ready to kick a field goal. Leonard started to scamper backward but he was in too much pain to move quickly enough. The sergeant’s iron foot came screaming at his face, Leonard’s left hand offering too little protection.

  And then nothing. Leonard’s eyes were closed and his hand was clutched and he was braced for the pain when it didn’t seem to come. Instead there was a sound. A deep harsh boom. And still nothing. Leonard allowed himself to squint open for a moment, to see what happened. The sergeant was lurching in front of him, his thigh blossoming burgundy and the smile suddenly twisted. The man’s eyes were shocked with pain and the right leg was swinging out from under him. Sparks looked down at the wound, gritted his teeth, and planted his foot to steady himself. Secure, he started toward Leonard again. Then another boom. This one to the head. This one took him out completely. Sparks’s arms flew sideways, the last message from the shattered brain telling them to prepare for a fall. But they weren’t going to do any good. His body stumbled sideways, already limp, and slid into a heap on the asphalt.

  Leonard leaned forward and tried to lift himself. His right hand was useless. With the left one he could brace himself upward. Then to one knee. Then he could hoist himself to standing. He surveyed the ruined body of Sergeant Sparks. Leonard hurt all over. The body bled out into the sea of quiet cars, and Leonard looked out to see where the shot had come from.

  Detective Ralph Mulino lowered the nine millimeter in his right hand and smiled at Leonard. Sparks’s gun. Fresh from the lobby of the Bank of Bremen.

  “Don’t get too close to that ledge. You aren’t steady, in your condition.”

  Leonard nodded and stepped back toward the cars. Gaining composure. Breathing deep. Mulino lowered the gun and climbed upstairs. He held a hand to Leonard and smiled.

  “Come on down. If you trust me.”

  Leonard couldn’t tell if the back of his head was covered with blood or sweat. His shoulder still ached from the beating and he thought the sergeant had probably broken his wrist. But Detective Mulino wasn’t going to hurt him. He held out his left hand and let himself be guided down the stairwell and back to the open air.

  At the bottom of the stairs stood a man whose jacket almost matched his trousers. “You look like hell,” Tony Licata chirped. “But thanks for the tip anyways.”

  So Licata had gotten his message that morning after all. Had called up the only cop that would have believed the story. Just as Leonard had asked. Leonard propped himself against a wall and slid to the ground. He hadn’t sat on a sidewalk in years. He looked up at the Bank of Bremen building two blocks away. Still standing. Everything in the city looks taller from below. Licata had brought Mulino downtown just in time.

  Mulino heaved. “Your friend here kept me from getting sent over to Wall Street to look at a false alarm that someone pulled.”

  Leonard nodded. Veronica was going to walk right out of the building with the gun in her purse and no one would ever see her again.

  “They find her? Veronica?”

  “She has a pretty good head start now. But I’m sure they will.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on it thi
s time.”

  Detective Mulino nodded. Eliot had been right. What does it matter whether you catch the parasite or not. The real criminal was just above them, the second cop that this detective had shot in a week. They wouldn’t let Leonard investigate this shooting. Mulino would probably need him as a witness. He laughed to himself thinking about it, how in a month or two he would be testifying at the Firearms Discharge Control Board about the cop who had saved his life by shooting another cop. Licata whipped out his notebook and slipped up the stairs, ready to take notes on the gruesome scene. Another story to be written.

  As Leonard turned his neck to watch the reporter go, the pain swooped in hard. He leaned forward and felt maybe that he was going to vomit. He sucked in a deep breath and convinced himself that he was going to be okay. Then he passed out.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  ONE UNDER

  Leonard was sitting on the sidewalk of Albany Street while a paramedic stitched up the back of his head. He was groggy and tired, but he was still alive. Mulino stood as close as the tech would allow. “You know it wouldn’t have killed you to tell someone what you had found out, rather than go vigilante on us.”

  Leonard would have looked up, but the latex hand pressed his head forward. He spoke into the ground. “I wasn’t sure who I could trust.”

  “Sure. I guess I know how that feels.”

  Eliot Holm-Anderson stood behind Mulino, looking down at Leonard. “That’s quite a blow you took.”

  “You oughta see the other guy.” Sparks was already bagged and being packed away for his trip to the morgue.

  Eliot was close as well now. Leonard couldn’t see any of them, just a half-dozen very interesting pebbles that had spilled out into the sidewalk from somewhere. Eliot was congratulating him, but it sounded maybe as though really he was congratulating himself. “You did well, young man. And the building was secured. It looks as though we pulled it off.”