Soft Target

by Rachel Brune

  “Sounds fascinating,” said Mac.

  “It’s interesting reading,” said Nina.

  “You should write a book,” said Mac. “You’d have an interesting perspective on that. And probably better stories.”

  “Yeah, except then I’d have to go on tour,” said Nina, wondering what Mac was there to see her about. “And I hear you can’t get a good bagel once you get out of Jersey.”

  Although Nina shared an office, she rated a window desk. Kyle MacAllister found himself staring over her shoulder at the view of the building next door.

  “Okay, what is it?” asked Nina. “Is this about Scott? Because if it is, you already know what I’m going to say.”

  “I was talking to him and that news guy, and I don’t know, they might have something there,” said Mac. “At the very least, couldn’t we give him a little leeway?” Kyle knew he was pleading a lost cause. “Even if it turns out to be nothing, it will get him out of the office and keep his mind on something that won’t drive any of us nuts.”

  “Can you look me in the eyes and tell me you think he has a case that we need to pursue?” asked Nina.

  “I think he’s got something under his skin that he’s going to pursue whether we allow him or not,” said Kyle.

  “Mm.” Nina frowned. She looked down at her book. “So what you’re saying is that we should let Detective Mabry do what he wants because he’s going to do it anyway.”

  MacAllister winced. “Essentially.”

  “Essentially?” Nina looked up for clarification.

  “Yes ma’am,” said Kyle. “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Ah.” Nina pushed her chair back from her desk. “I’ll be honest with you, Kyle. When you pushed for him to come on board, I was very reluctant to extend the invitation.”

  “You were?”

  “Yes.” Nina stood up, making eye contact. “I frankly didn’t think that he was a good choice, at least not so quickly after returning from overseas. I felt he needed some time to readjust, decompress. I don’t think events have proven me wrong about that.”

  “The warehouse thing could have happened to anyone,” said MacAllister.

  “It could have, but it happened to him,” said Nina. “And it didn’t just happen to him—it happened to the entire task force.”

  “I don’t think that’s fair,” said Kyle.

  “Really?” asked Nina. “Listen, you should know by know, if someone in your organization does something, the media doesn’t just say oh, Detective Mabry did this. They say, a Joint Terrorism Task Force operative almost killed two little kids. That incident put my entire operation on the front page and jeopardized all of the thousands of interactions this unit does everyday to get the mission done.”

  “But—”

  “Let me finish. So then we put him on some easy PR mission, and what does he do? He goes off the grid and gets himself blown up.” Nina shook her head. “The only reason he is still working here, or even working as a cop, is because he has people like you going to bat for him. People I respect keep telling me to give him another chance.”

  “And I appreciate that,” said Kyle.

  “Believe me,” said Nina. “If I didn’t trust your judgment so much, your friend would be cut from the end of a very long rope.”

  “He’s a good officer,” said Kyle.

  “You’re right,” said Nina. “He is good. Scott is competent and brave, and I’m glad he chose to serve because he could make a lot of money in the private sector. But right now, he’s my problem child. And I want you to sit on him until he figures that out and does something about it.”

  Mac sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Mabry was quitting smoking again. He’d managed to quit after every deployment, only to start up again halfway through the next. It was long past time to stop, but he’d been hanging onto the habit. Now, with his injuries almost healed and the task of rebuilding his physical fitness ahead of him, he’d decided it was time to kick it. He’d stopped buying cigarettes, and was down to one last half-full pack that he was drawing out for as long as he could.

  The dark, gray mid-January morning was surprisingly warm with unseasonable temperatures. Without the wind-chill, the air was about forty-five degrees. Mabry chugged an energy shot, grimacing at the taste. He felt the B-Vitamin burn in his stomach and choked down nausea. He hadn’t been running since before the explosion, and wasn’t looking forward to getting his body back into the habit. He knew from experience that the next two weeks were going to involve a lot of pain, until his body remembered the motions and the endorphin rush of his daily run.

  Mabry stretched and began a slow jog. Under his shorts and an NYPD sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off, he wore a long-sleeve underarmor shirt and running tights. He looked ridiculous, but there were not that many people around and besides, he was warm. His bloodshot eyes accentuated the heavy stubble that he hadn’t shaved before leaving in the morning.

  His plan was to run two loops around the park next to the Brooklyn Museum, which would put him at a total of seven something miles, but halfway through the first loop, as his breath burned in his lungs, he was already thinking of excuses for not making a second pass.

  The three men waiting for Mabry at the top of the hill didn’t want to be there. From where Eddie and Dodger stood, hidden partially by the dark shadows but mostly by wishful thinking, the detective was still formidable. Marcus had come along, mostly for moral support, given his complete lack of stomach for any sort of fighting. Eddie had put him on the other side of the road and told him to keep a lookout for when they made their move. As they waited, Mabry cleared his throat, spit to the side and began running harder up the hill.

  Dodger had wanted to bring a weapon, but Eddie had talked him out of it. If things went sideways, as they sometimes did, he didn’t want to push a simple assault charge into aggravated assault. His plan, if they got caught, was to act like petty thugs and plead innocent of the awareness that Mabry was a cop. It would be a hard sell, given Mabry’s sweatshirt, but Eddie had pulled off dumb before, and he was pretty sure Dodger would manage just fine.

  Eddie moved back, pulling Dodger with him.

  “Hey man, what gives?” asked Dodger.

  “Let him go around again,” said Eddie. “Give him a chance to burn off all that energy.”

  “How do you know he’s going to come around again?”

  “Look at him, he’s barely breathing hard,” said Eddie. “He’ll be back. If not, we’ll get him tomorrow.”

  “If we miss him again, Al’s going to be pissed. We been tailing this guy two weeks now, this the first time he’s out by himself.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Eddie shook his head and watched Mabry run by.

  A buzzer in his head went off as Mabry passed their position. He caught their movement out of the corner of his eye, marked where they were and kept running. He closed his mouth, deliberately suppressed his breathing. He directed his path more into the center of the road and scanned both sides for additional signs of lurkers.

  The last week at work had gone by at a crawl. He had filed more than his share of dead information, which had slowly ventured him back into Gina’s good graces, helped along by a willingness to bring the donuts. His newfound productivity notwithstanding, he had continued to work on the e-mail, unbeknownst to Gina or Kyle. Or Nina—especially Nina. Still, even with his illicit use of task force resources, he had come up empty.

  The end of the first loop was coming up. Before him, the path crested a hill, then began another downward slope. Mabry had still not decided whether to keep going, but he let his legs carry him, pounding up the incline. He pushed himself to increase his speed, drawing breaths as deeply as he could to infuse his lungs with energy. As the path sloped downward again, the sudden lessening of effort left him revitalized.

  What finally made his mind up, in the end, was not the way he felt, or any exercise goal. Instead, a curiosity
about what he might have seen on his way up the hill picked at his subconscious. His ex-wife had once told him that he was too dumb to be afraid of the things he should be scared of. Mabry figured that it wasn’t merely stupidity, it was the fact that he was accustomed to carrying a weapon at all times—a habit that instilled a certain feeling of confident confrontation. He wasn’t carrying this morning—he was off duty and for some reason couldn’t find his belly holster that made it comfortable to run with a pistol. Still, he decided to do another loop—if only to see what was in the bushes. He laughed to himself. He was going to feel foolish if it turned out to be a colony of rats.

  Scott was pissed at himself for not seeing them coming. He should have anticipated that if someone were waiting for him, they would have moved down the hill, closer to where the path split the trees for easier access to the road. As he rounded the corner, he barely saw the tall, skinny Latino step in front of him.

  “Hey man,” Eddie said.

  Scott pulled up short, moving slightly to the side. Before him, he saw two men who didn’t look like much, although the one who addressed him looked mean. The other looked like he would take all of his orders from the first. Scott tried to edge to the side, but Eddie put up his hand and Dodger moved to intercept him.

  “Do you mind getting out of the way?” Scott squinted up. The slight slope put him down from the two men.

  “We just want to talk to you, man,” said Eddie.

  Scott felt a whisper of movement behind him, then side-stepped as a pair of long arms flailed over his shoulders. Grabbing a wrist, he shifted his weight to the side and forward, and brought Marcus over his hip onto the ground in front of him. Keeping a firm grip on his opponent’s hand, Scott put his foot on his neck. He looked down at the man, then up at the two who were keeping their distance.

  “A black guy, a white guy and a Latino guy try to mug a New York City police detective,” said Scott. “What the hell is this—a bad ethnic joke?”

  “Fuck you man,” said Eddie, and the two men came at him.

  In quick succession, Scott bent Marcus’ wrist almost to the breaking point. Scott stepped across his body, momentarily resting his full body weight on the man’s throat.

  Marcus choked, out of the fight he didn’t want to be in in the first place. Scott went for the leader, shooting his shoulders low into Eddie’s knees. As he stumbled, Scott pulled him down. He felt Dodger grasping for him and twisted out of the way. He landed on top of Eddie with his knee in the man’s throat.

  Dodger grasped the back of his sweatshirt. Scott yielded to the material, allowing himself to be pulled up to leverage two swift stomps down on Eddie’s face; his nose broke, but didn’t bleed.

  Scott twisted under Dodger’s grasp, pushing him backwards and struggling for control. Dodger stumbled backwards over Marcus, and they both went down. Scott landed across Dodger, his body weight causing the man to gasp and try to draw air into lungs that wouldn’t expand.

  Scott grabbed Dodger’s flailing arm, locking it uncomfortably and pushing it until the other man screamed. At the point of breaking, Scott let go, pain shooting through his spine.

  Eddie had gotten up and thrown down an elbow into the small of Scott’s back. He tried to follow it up by locking Scott’s head under his arm, but Scott pushed his way out of it. Coming from underneath, Scott landed flailing uppercuts. Eddie pushed the detective’s hands away, turning away from the blows. Scott followed up with a right hook that caught his opponent square on the sweet spot between cheek and ear. With a crunch, Eddie crumpled to the ground.

  Dodger was halfway up, one knee still on the ground, rotating his arm to bring back the feeling.

  Mabry turned to face him, and Dodger shrank back.

  “Hey man, take it easy.” Dodger stood, lifted up his arms to show him he meant no harm.

  “Who the hell are you, and what do you want?” Scott drew closer.

  “Nothing, man, nothing,” said Dodger.

  With more desperation than power, Dodger launched a kick square at Scott’s abdomen. It landed lucky, and Scott felt a memory of the pain that had sent him to the hospital. He sank down, cupping his hand over his stomach. The pain pierced deep into his gut.

  “C’mon, man.” Seeing Scott stagger to the ground, Dodger grabbed Eddie up. Marcus got to his feet as well, groaning with the effort.

  Scott’s vision swam. He watched the three men running. He pulled one hand away from his stomach, and it came away bloody. Dodger’s kick had split his healing scar. He held up his other hand. The wallet he had pulled from the tall leader’s pocket was cheap fake leather. With any luck, it might help him figure out who these men were who had waited for him, attacked him and then known where to strike him to cause the most pain.

  It was a full twenty minutes before another early morning jogger, this one prepared for contingencies with a cell phone and pepper spray, found Mabry sitting on the road.

  The painkillers were wearing off. The white glow from Scott’s computer screen had begun to pulse in time with the pain behind his eyes. He clicked on the e-mail he was reading and hit the “delete” button. Another dead end on his deployment efforts. This one didn’t seem to affect him as much as the others.

  Maybe he was finally getting used to being back. Or maybe the attack in the park had done something to his sense of perspective. He thought about searching for another slot. Instead, he closed the browser. The hell with it.

  “You’re in late.” Gina had come in unnoticed. Mabry started.

  “I brought a note,” said Mabry. He felt gingerly around his stomach, wondering if it was too soon to take another pill.

  “From who, your mom?” asked Gina.

  “No.” Scott looked up. “The doctor.”

  “You contagious?”

  “No, just bleeding.” Scott shrugged. “Tried to get back to running a few weeks too early.”

  “What?” Gina dropped the banter.

  “I already got my lecture and promised not to even think about working out again without his express written permission.”

  “Are you all right?” Gina asked, worried. “Did you tell someone?”

  “I’m fine.” Mabry lifted his mug. “I made coffee.”

  “Thank God.” Gina picked up her mug and disappeared into the hall.

  Mabry sighed out his breath. He opened another browser window, angling his screen away from Gina’s view. He didn’t want her to casually glance over and see that rather than finishing old analyses, he was running the name and address on the identification he had pulled from Eddie’s wallet. There was nothing yet to connect the assault with anything, but Scott had an itch and easy access to criminal databases. If he found something, he would call Mark, but until then, he was just satisfying his curiosity. And debating whether to press charges.

  None of the three men said very much in the car. Marcus shook his head and swore gutturally in accented dialect.

  Dodger rocked back and forth in his seat. He blew his breath out, wired from the adrenaline. He slammed his fist into the side of the car.

  “Knock it off.” Eddie, driving, tensed his hands. His nose was a sharp mass of pain and he blinked back involuntary tears as he tried to breathe through it.

  “Did you see what I did?” Dodger swallowed. He blinked rapidly. “We had that guy. We should go back.”

  “Shut up.” Eddie made a turn, heading for the Manhattan Bridge. Dodger’s bravado got on his nerves. “We’re lucky he wasn’t carrying.”

  “Whatever.” Dodger slammed his fist into the car door again. “It was dark, he could barely see us.”

  “Shut up and let me drive.”

  As Eddie drove the car into downtown Manhattan, he began to suspect that he and his friends had a different role in this particular piece of theater than they had signed up for.

  One of the perks of being a star reporter was a parking spot in the garage under the building that housed the studio offices. It sounded petty, but Mark had kicked more than one in
terloper out of his eight by twenty piece of concrete real estate. A good parking spot in midtown was hard to find.

  There was one elevator to the second level of the garage, and Mark took it at pretty much the same time every day. The last meeting of the day ended at five thirty, and he hit the road immediately afterward.

  At about five twenty-five, Eddie pulled his car into a shadowed alcove, running the engine as if waiting to pick up a friend.

  At five thirty-five, the elevator pinged and the lights showed a slow descent. Eddie nodded, and Marcus used a pair of pliers to disable the one security camera with a good view of the elevator bank.

  Mark leaned his head against the cool metal of the door. He felt momentarily guilty. He had seen a colleague trying to make it to the elevator, but had pressed the “Door Close” button. It just wasn’t a day where he wanted to face anyone. Once again, Taggert had taken his story, handed it to some hack, and told him to find something with more blood. He was tired of chasing blood.

  The door began to open, and he jerked his head up, rubbing his eyes.

  As Mark started forward, Dodger pushed by him, knocking him to the side.

  “Hey man, watch it.” Irritated, Mark turned around to toss the words over his shoulder. He turned back to find Eddie much closer to his face than was comfortable. “Can I help you with something?”

  Eddie nodded. “Yeah. I think you can.”

  Mark choked, his air suddenly cut off by Dodger’s headlock.

  “Hold him.” Eddie grabbed the reporter’s flailing arms, pinning them up and behind Mark’s head. “Go ahead.”

  The elevator doors attempted to close, but caught on Dodger’s heel and reopened.

  Working out and learning self-defense was always on Mark’s list of things to do, but somehow never made it to the top. He struggled, but could gain no leverage.

  Marcus patted him down, pocketing his wallet and his PDA. He missed the cell phone tucked into Mark’s inside jacket pocket, but found the reporter’s notebook, turned it over, tore out a few pages and tossed it away. Mark twisted and tried to pull away as the other man felt in his pants pockets.