Soft Target

by Rachel Brune

  Mark didn’t want to scream for help. He knew he needed it, but some inner shame kept him from crying out.

  “You got it?” Eddie asked.

  “Yeah.” Marcus showed him Mark’s identification cards.

  Screw it. Mark opened his mouth to cry out.

  Eddie’s punch broke his nose and shut his mouth. He staggered.

  “Eddie…” From behind the reporter, Dodger could see his friend’s face. “Come on, man, we’ve got what we need.”

  That statement filtered through the pain in Mark’s nose and ears. It struck him as sinister, and without thinking, he struck out. His punch fell short, but his kick connected with Eddie’s knee.

  Eddie’s vision went black. Dodger ducked and let go of Mark as Eddie began swinging. Mark tried to put up his hands in front of his face to block the blows, but Eddie kept throwing haymakers around his defenses until he finally dropped his hands, swatting too late as the strikes kept coming.

  Mark fell to one knee.

  “Eddie! Come on man, we got to get out of here,” said Marcus. He glanced around, nervous, expecting the evening flood of commuters.

  Eddie kept swinging. He opened a cut on Mark’s forehead, and blood coursed down his face, turning it into a gross Kabuki parody. Mark desperately grabbed for Eddie’s hands, then his waist, grasping Eddie’s knees to get out of the full force of the blows.

  “Eddie!” Dodger moved forward, drawing his heel out of the elevator door. Freed of the obstacle, the doors closed and the lift began moving upward.

  Dodger and Marcus looked at each other, then at Eddie, standing over the prone reporter who had finally collapsed. As one, they grabbed him, dragging him backwards to the car.

  On the car ride out of Manhattan, it was Eddie’s turn to sit rigid with adrenaline in the passenger seat, as Marcus took the wheel. Even Dodger’s bravado was gone at the ferocity Eddie had shown.

  Eddie sat in the backseat, breathing deeply. His nerves, shot as soon as he realized how easy it would have been for the wrong person to show up at the scene, were sinking fast. Eddie’s loss of control had shattered even Marcus’ calm.

  “Shit, man, you messed him up.” The silence reverberated after Dodger’s obvious statement, drowning out any thought of how they were going to explain the day’s events to the men back at the apartment.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Mark cleaned most of the blood off his face, but the collar of his shirt had dried in a sticky, tacky crust. Peering into the hospital bathroom mirror, he wet a paper towel and dabbed at the stain. The blood smeared further down his shirt, and he gave it up as a lost cause. He flipped the bloody towel into the garbage.

  “Hey, you can’t throw that in there.” A man in scrubs had walked into the bathroom.

  “Sorry?”

  “There’s blood on that towel,” said the man, who pointed at a sealed, red container mounted on the wall. A biohazard sign cautioned visitors not to get too close. “Any sort of biological waste, you have to stuff in there.”

  “Sorry.”

  Satisfied, the man went into the stall. Mark picked out his garbage and stuffed it into the small lid.

  Mark looked back in the mirror, poking at his new bandage. His instructions were to go home and rest, but he could barely stand still. His mind refused to let him rest, replaying the assault over and over. He could have been more alert. He could have held the door open so that he wouldn’t have been alone in the garage. He could have at least gotten one punch in. His mind kept measuring him up to his former image of himself, and finding him lacking.

  The toilet flushed and the man came out to find Mark still staring at himself in the mirror.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” said Mark. “Just fine.”

  Two uniformed police officers, male and female, waited for Mark in a small waiting room outside the emergency room.

  “Mr. Granger,” said the woman.

  “Yes?” asked Mark, bleary.

  “I’m Officer Parkinson, this is Officer Nguyen,” she said. “Can we talk to you for a few minutes?”

  “I already gave my statement to the two responding officers,” said Mark. “Is this necessary?”

  “Yes,” said Parkinson. She was short, but managed to give the appearance of looking straight into his eye. “We just have a few follow-up questions.”

  “Okay,” said Mark. He sighed. “Do you mind if I sit?”

  “Sure.” Parkinson took out a notebook and sat across from him. Nguyen remained standing. Mark wondered at that, but didn’t bother to ask.

  “Shoot.”

  “First, I just want to follow up with a few questions about your assailants.” Parkinson consulted her notes. “You told the officers on scene that there were three?”

  “That’s right.” Mark nodded. “The two that held me and the one that robbed me.”

  “What language did they speak?”

  Mark stared at her. “Um…English?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “You asking me or telling me?”

  “English.”

  “Did they have an accent? Any of them?”

  “Not that I could tell.”

  “What did they say to you?”

  Mark shrugged. “I told the officers on scene—they asked me for the time, then they attacked me.”

  “So, they didn’t throw anything out that sounded like a quote, or try to give you a message?”

  “No,” said Mark. “Nothing like that. The tall one just started punching me until the others dragged him off me. Then they left.”

  “Okay.” Parkinson closed her notebook.

  Mark suddenly found himself overwhelmed with emotion. He stared straight ahead, breathing deeply. Nguyen’s eyes flickered, but Parkinson gave no indication of noticing.

  The woman made to stand up, then checked herself.

  “So…I know you told the officers that you couldn’t think of a reason for the attack.”

  Mark nodded.

  “Now that you’ve had a bit to think, have you thought of anything?”

  Mark stared over her shoulder at a spot on the wall.

  “No, no specific reason.” Mark controlled his voice, which seemed to jump in time with his rapidly beating pulse. “Who knows, maybe guy saw me on TV or something. I’ve been getting a lot of weird messages lately. Work-related.”

  “Okay.” Parkinson stood up and Mark followed her. “Do you have a business card? Something with a number we can get a hold of you on?”

  Mark patted through his pockets. He came up with a couple of cards in his breast pocket. He handed one to the cop.

  She looked at him, then took it carefully by the edges. She pulled out a small plastic evidence bag, and dropped it in. Mark watched the process with confusion, then realized that the card was thoroughly bloodstained. The only legible writing was the embossed black lettering of his name.

  “Sorry.”

  The phone rang in MacAllister’s office. He picked it up.

  “MacAllister.”

  “Sir, it’s Officer Parkinson.” The voice sounded grainy, as if she had a bad connection.

  “How’s the reporter?”

  “He’s okay. Shaken up. Looked like he was going to cry.”

  “Did he remember anything else?”

  “Nah.” Parkinson paused. MacAllister thought he heard slurping. “I think he pegged it—some crazy asshole who saw him on television. We lent him forty bucks to take a cab home.”

  “Huh. Okay, thanks.” Kyle hung up. It wasn’t as if Scott had convinced him that something was going on with the kid or his “investigation.” But when he heard about the attack, he figured it wouldn’t hurt to cover the bases. The officer was right. It sounded like a run of the mill mugging. But it nagged at him.

  By tacit agreement, Dodger and Marcus decided to let Eddie brief Alan on the events of the day. Neither of them could quite explain Eddie’s loss of control on the reporter, nor figure out why it bothered them so muc
h. Both men were used to a certain level of random violence. They had both been on the giving and receiving ends more than once.

  Still, up to this point, neither had taken their “mission” as seriously as the other, foreign men. To them, it had seemed unreal, something illegal, yet lower-risk than their normal activities and with better pay. Today’s events had underscored that they were involved in something bigger. Unlike Eddie, they didn’t suspect that it might be bigger than they could handle. But they did understand that it was possibly larger than anything they had signed up for.

  The two were back on the couch, watching the news. They kept expecting to see something about the attack on Mark Granger, but the airwaves were uncharacteristically silent.

  “Wonder why they don’t have that reporter we messed up today on there?” Marcus wondered.

  Dodger popped the top off a beer. “Shit. You would think they would show that all over the place, with all the blood and everything.”

  Marcus shrugged and took a drag on a sweet-smelling cigarette. His arm was wrapped with an ACE bandage they had picked up on the way home, and he was self-medicating to dull the pain. “Fuck it. Let’s watch the game.”

  The sound of the Yankees game filtered past the closed door of the room where Alan and Eddie were talking. As if he had passed some test, Alan had invited Eddie into the inner sanctum and asked him to sit while he gave the man a rundown of the events of the day. A large bruise had formed around half his eye and across the bridge of his broken nose where Scott had clocked him, and he kept pressing his fingers to it.

  A phone call interrupted the briefing. Alan looked at the number, then flipped the phone open and shut. He pressed a button to silence further calls, then pocketed the phone.

  “Go on,” said Alan.

  Eddie shrugged. “Like I said, guy’s a cop. He’s not in the best condition, but I definitely wouldn’t say he was defenseless. Took down Marcus and Dodger pretty quick.”

  Alan raised an eyebrow. “And you?”

  “Lucky punch.” Eddie glared.

  “Ah.” Alan thought for a moment. “And the reporter?”

  “He’s nothing.” Eddie was silent.

  “But can we use him?” asked Alan.

  “Man, I don’t know,” said Eddie. “You tell me to go beat on someone, I’ll go beat on him. I have no idea what he’s going to do next.”

  “You have his address?” asked Alan.

  “We got his wallet,” said Eddie. “Cell phone, notebook, some other shit.”

  Alan frowned.

  “What do you want, man?” asked Eddie. “You said go find these two guys and take them down, and that’s what we did. What more did you want?”

  “A reaction.”

  “A what?”

  “A reaction,” said Alan. “I wanted to get their attention.”

  “I haven’t seen anything on the news,” said Eddie. “I guess they’re not making a big deal out of it.”

  “Which is uncharacteristic,” said Alan. “This incident, these two assaults, should have been spread all over the evening news.”

  “Maybe they got other stories.”

  Alan laughed. “No. Not an attack on one of their own.”

  “I don’t know man,” said Eddie. “All I can tell you is we left them both bleeding.”

  “All right.” Alan stood up and opened the door. “We’ve got a couple of days. Lay low. Stay off the radar.”

  Eddie shook his head. “Yeah, man.”

  Alan closed the door behind him. He wasn’t sure what went wrong. His plan was to follow up the death threat to the reporter with the assault. He had thrown in the attack on Mabry for good measure, to keep the cop and the reporter distracted, while at the same time generating more meat for the reporter to chew on. He knew that no plan was flawless; still he had hoped to see it mentioned at least in passing on the local evening news.

  There was also another possibility, which Alan considered reluctantly. If the two men were working as a team, they might have decided to keep the attacks out of the media, thus freeing them to work without distractions. Alan searched his mind for anything he could think of that they might have to work on, but came up with nothing. If what Eddie was telling him was true, each of the two attacks had been over in a matter of minutes. He suspected there was more to the assault on the cop than the men were sharing, but he was satisfied that they had accomplished the spirit of the mission, which was to get the man’s attention. Why that attention was not being focused in a media storm right now was a mystery.

  Alan breathed deeply. He might not be able to figure it out, and so was taking the precaution of keeping the men occupied and unobtrusive for the next couple of days, just in case. He frowned. He might have to invest in a couple cases of beer, which was sure to bring Said and Abdel’s disapproval, but Alan was nothing if not a practical man. And he was in charge.

  The office was dark. Scott realized this fact when he got up to get another cup of coffee. There were a few lights on down the hall, where other members of the task force were working some unpaid overtime hours, but down on his end of the floor, the doors had been shut and the lights turned off.

  Gina’s parting words of the evening had been a reminder that the task force hadn’t authorized overtime. If Scott hated sitting around in front of a computer all day, she didn’t know why he would do it any longer than he had to—for free. Scott had shrugged and said he hated leaving documents open for the next day. It wasn’t a lie. He had finished the file he was analyzing about ten minutes after she left, and only then had closed it out to reveal the results of the search he had conducted.

  At first, he viewed the data with disappointment. The profile on his screen was as close to banal as a petty crook’s could get—Eddie Lopes, according to the drivers’ license Scott found in his wallet. Three arrests, including one that resulted in conviction for the assault on two New York City police officers. The man was a high school graduate, but appeared to have spent his time after school sinking deeper and deeper into the environment that his education might have helped him overcome. Scott shook his head. He thought it was likely that Eddie had already been on that path while in school, and after graduating, had simply entered it full time.

  There was a short list of known associates, a few with their own criminal records. The address on Eddie’s license was that of a Mary Lopes, listed as his grandmother. Maybe it was she who had kept him in school as long as she could.

  On impulse, Scott brought up a search engine and typed in the two names. The search generated a few links to news stories.

  Scott clicked on one link, thinking for a moment he was seeing double. The headline read: “All-State Champ killed in Iraq.” Two younger versions of the man who had attacked him in the park stared happily out of the headline photo, one wearing a wrestling uniform. The two clasped an outsized trophy that was matched only by their grins.

  The article was an obituary for Marc Lopes, a former high school wrestling champion, who had enlisted in the Army right out of high school. He had been deployed once before, and this second time out had been killed while on patrol. The details in the article were sketchy, but apparently, they had come under fire, and Staff Sergeant Lopes had run into the street to grab a little boy who had gotten caught in the crossfire. For his pains, Lopes had been shot in the head by a sniper, sprawled dead in the road until his squad suppressed the enemy fire and retrieved his body. There were other pictures attached to the electronic article, these of the funeral. Scott peered at one. In front of the flag-draped casket, the older version of Eddie, one that looked closer to the man Scott had met in the park, held an older woman dressed in black.

  There was a connection, Scott thought, between this young man and the e-mails Mark had received. What that connection was, how any of the events of the past month were connected, he had no idea. But now, he had one face. And that could lead him somewhere.

  Scott picked up his cell phone. He had so few contacts saved in the device,
he didn’t even need to scroll to get to Mark Granger.

  The phone rang, but the reporter didn’t answer and it eventually switched over to voicemail.

  “Granger, it’s Mabry. When you’re finished with your latest broccoli story, give me a call.”

  Mark caught a cab from the hospital, but a few blocks from his apartment, he changed his mind. He didn’t want to go to his apartment. Something in him just couldn’t face the thought of being alone with the television.

  “Excuse me—right here is fine.” Mark handed the cab driver a twenty-dollar bill.

  “Fare’s twenty-five.” The cab driver eyed him in the rear view mirror.

  “Sorry.” Mark handed him a ten. “Thanks.”

  He got out of the cab without waiting for change. The cab driver shrugged and logged the fare on his clipboard. He looked around for another fare before the light changed, and he sped away.

  He was only a few blocks from his new apartment, and Mark found himself in unfamiliar territory. He had hardly ventured out into the neighborhood. When he did leave, it was mostly to go to work, and then he got into his car and drove straight to the studio.

  There wasn’t much open at this time of night. The stores in the area were a mix of cheap clothing shops and one or two all-night delis. Mark wandered down to the end of the block and spotted an open bar.

  Inside, the place was mostly empty except for what looked like a few regulars perched at the end of the bar watching the night’s recaps of the day’s sporting events. Mark inwardly gave thanks that they were watching ESPN. He didn’t think he could handle any more news.

  “What can I get you?” The bartender put down a napkin in front of Mark without tearing his gaze away from the recap. They were showing scenes of funny sports gaffes. Mark watched with the bartender as a baseball player tried for some outfield pop fly and ended up running face first into the foul pole.

  “I’ll have a…” Mark trailed off. He wasn’t sure what he wanted.