Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  “BPD,” he said, as loudly as he could. “I’m here to help.”

  A tremendous amount of gunfire followed, but none of it appeared to be aimed in his direction. He poked his head around.

  It was another long corridor, ending at what looked like a balcony. Another guard’s body was lying still at the edge of the railing. There was a firefight going on, on the other side of that railing.

  Nobody was actually shooting at Joe on purpose. There was a pitched battle in the room with the balcony, though. He headed towards it, wondering as he went how many people Sheila had with her, and if they were all dressed like guards, as she was. In short, although he had yet to come across another living employee of the jail, if he did, he wasn’t positive he could trust them.

  That realization, coupled with the active fire in the upcoming room and the fact that he was still losing blood, should have resulted in him making the rational decision to turn heel and head out while he still could.

  He kept going.

  The railing was the end of a raised walkway that overlooked what appeared to be the jail’s cafeteria. The walkway was designed to provide elevated fire positions to guards in the event there was a need to shoot at someone in the middle of the floor. When Joe got there—picking up the dead guard’s rifle on the way—this was exactly what was happening.

  There were a dozen round tables staged in strategic positions around the cafeteria, and nobody at or under those tables; it was mid-afternoon, and between meal times. But Sheila was there, right in the middle of the cafeteria floor. She was taking on constant fire from three directions on the elevated walkway, and was still standing.

  “Jesus Christ,” Joe muttered. “Is she bulletproof?”

  He confirmed that the rifle in his hands had a few rounds left, and took aim himself.

  That was when he realized what he was actually seeing.

  Sheila was doing something like dancing. It was an awkward dance, and might less charitably be termed a series of brief seizures, but its goal was not aesthetic; she was dodging the bullets, somehow.

  Joe took aim at her head, and fired. Just as he did this, the head moved away from where it had been, seemingly after he pulled the trigger but before the bullet had a chance to get there.

  That wasn’t what happened; it couldn’t have been. She was moving before he fired the shot, but after he decided where he was aiming. She’d anticipated the need to move her head—without knowing he was even there, because he was behind her.

  After moving her head, she turned to look at Joe. She flashed a devilish smile, and a wink.

  Someone gave a signal Joe didn’t see, and the hail of gunfire ceased. A quarter of the way around the circular balcony, one of the guards stood.

  “You on the floor,” he barked. “There’s no way you’re getting out of here. Surrender if you want to live.”

  She laughed.

  “Darling, if you could shoot me, you would have already.”

  To punctuate this point, she drew a handgun and fired it, but not at the guard who’d issued the command. He stood at her twelve; she fired at her three. The bullet hit the guard who was positioned there, in the forehead.

  Everyone left—this was just two guards now, and Joe—opened fire again. This time, it seemed as if Sheila had run out of patience with the entire exercise. She continued to pirouette around the room, as bullets struck the tables, the floor, everything but her. Her impatience was expressed facially; she looked the same way someone might look if they’d just missed the bus, or dropped an egg. Aggravated, somehow, that this was what it had come to.

  Given she was reacting this way to a constant hail of gunfire left Joe with the impression—although this was surely the blood loss talking—that he was dealing with an especially annoyed god.

  Joe could barely see straight, and the room was spinning, such that he would have had trouble hitting a stationary target in his current condition.

  He kept shooting, though, as useless as the effort was. Then two things happened: Sheila decided to finish off the rest of the room, with two staggeringly difficult shots; and Joe ran out of bullets.

  Sheila realized this before he did. Her gun was pointed at him, and for a few heartbeats he thought this was the moment when they both fired, like the last scene of a western. But then she smiled, and he heard the tell-tale click of an empty chamber.

  “I let you live as thanks for all the help,” she said. “Take the charity, and stop being so stupid. Don’t follow me again.”

  She knelt down and picked up a new gun, then sauntered out of the cafeteria.

  Joe heard shouts, and more gunshots, and then nothing. He tried to get up again, but this time it looked like he was staying where he was, either until someone found him and administered first aid, or he bled out and died.

  Have you ever witnessed a miracle, detective?

  That was what Bernard asked him.

  “Shiva,” Joe said. “The name is Shiva.”

  13

  Police aren’t talking, but as we all know, this is happening in the same place the notorious terrorist Bernard Jenks is being held. Coincidence? We’ll have to wait and see.

  —on-the-scene Eyewitness News, Channel 7 Local

  The Suffolk County Jail took up what was a mental dead spot on the area maps most locals carried around in their heads. It wasn’t far from the Museum of Science, the Garden (where the Celtics and Bruins both played) and the Charlestown dock where Old Ironsides lived. One could exit an Italian restaurant in Boston’s North End and reach the front door of the jail in a walk that was scarcely a mile, if one were so inclined.

  The fact that a large portion of the citizenry was unaware of this had to do with the fact that nothing of note ever happened at the jail—which is an absolute minimum expectation when it came to places housing criminals.

  The problem with all of this was that there were a large number of roads which went around the jail, and a profound number of cars used those roads daily; they connected Route 93 to Storrow Drive along one direction, and one part of Cambridge to one part of Boston along another direction.

  So, when the Suffolk County Jail, and everything within a half-mile radius, went into total lockdown, all of these roads were closed. This had a drastic effect on traffic for the entire metropolitan area that was far worse than what transpired a few weeks earlier, at the State House.

  Maggie had to talk her way to the scene, because between the Boston Police, the Cambridge Police, the state police, the Suffolk County sheriff’s department, and the FBI, basically everyone in the state with a badge had an interest in what was going on at the jail. It was officially Sheriff McCarthy’s scene, though, and he was there in person to make sure the place wasn’t overrun by uniforms.

  She could barely pick Lou McCarthy out of a lineup, but he knew enough about her and the investigation she was heading to recognize that granting her passage was a good idea, especially since she had two men inside already.

  Dave and Joe were actually BPD, and only Dave was even attached to Maggie’s task force, but she wasn’t going to let McCarthy’s failure to see the distinction get in the way of things.

  “Have you heard from either of your guys?” he asked her, as soon as she reached his command center. There was hardly any room available to establish a perimeter beyond the walls of the jail itself. They were standing at the back of a police van in the parking lot of a credit union.

  “No,” she said. “I’ve been trying.”

  “They were here for Jenks?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  She’d only gotten a cursory look at the scene on the drive-up. They gave her an escort down Storrow and onto Nashua Street, which encircled the jail, but that told her about as much as a rubbernecker checking out a crash on the highway might get, which wasn’t much.

  “Can I get a sit-rep?” she asked. “What do we know?”

  “Not a fucking thing,” McCarthy said. “Step into my office.”

  The ba
ck of the van was taken up by an overhead map of the area, on a card table.

  “We got the place surrounded,” he said. “Not that it was hard to do, it was built surrounded.”

  “Maybe you should pretend I don’t know anything at all,” she said, “and start at the top.”

  “It’s an active shooter situation, agent,” he said. “That’s all we know for sure. I’ve got two-hundred and twelve employees in the building, most of ‘em unarmed and hunkered down in their offices, waiting for an all-clear I can’t give.”

  “No eyes inside?”

  “Working on it. Cameras are a closed system, which makes sense for not wanting anyone outside the place to jack into the feed, except for now when we’re the ones trying.”

  A radio at the front of the van squawked.

  “Excuse me,” he said. He stepped away, to engage in a long exchange with whoever was on the other end of that radio.

  Maggie stood at the back of the open van, and tried to take in the entire scene. She could see the steps leading to the front of the jail from there, as well as the ring of law enforcement vehicles. It didn’t look like anybody was in charge, which was partly true only because when something like this happens—and nothing like this had ever happened before—it causes a lot of jurisdictional issues. McCarthy was the county sheriff, and the county sheriff ran the jail, so he was officially in charge. Except he didn’t really have the manpower to run what amounted to a siege attack on a fixed battlement, especially since some of his people were inside, and thus not free to mount an attack from the field.

  After that, it was the Boston Police, who did have the manpower. Depending on whether there was anybody inside, communicating with the outside, this would either be treated like a terrorist attack or a hostage situation, which meant it fell in the same nether space as the events at the Pru.

  Then she thought of Corrigan, and how great it would be if he were there to help out. Having him in a hospital bed instead of free to save the day made all of this just that much more terrifying. That she had been unconsciously relying upon his seemingly mystical abilities as a backstop to the unknown, for all this time, was a jarring realization, but no more so than the fact that Maggie had to fight off tears two or three times a day whenever she thought he might die in that bed.

  “What do you kind-of know,” she shouted to McCarthy, as soon as she heard his call end.

  “We kind-of know that an unclear number of individuals shot their way into the jail portion of the building.”

  “As opposed to?”

  “Transpo, booking, property. The kitchen. It’s a big place.”

  “Not a disgruntled employee, then.”

  “We can’t rule it out, but I don’t think so.”

  “Anyone made it clear?”

  “Nobody’s tried. Procedure’s to sit where you are and wait for us to go in and get you.”

  Maggie took another look at the door.

  “Looks like a clean go,” she said.

  “Yeah I agree. But look, we’ve got reports coming in from all over the building, from everyone with a cell phone, meaning everyone except the people in cells, and a few of them have a phone too. Nothing we’re getting back makes sense. What we know is there are bodies, and there continue to be reports of gunshots, but nobody’s straight about from where and by whom. Could be the good guys, or the bad guys. Thing is, there are a few dozen armed good guys in there, so this thing should be over, and it’s not. That either means a small army of bad guys breached the place, or something I don’t understand right now is going on. We think it’s isolated to the cells, so in a few minutes we’re sending in a team to evac the admin section, and then maybe we can get a few witnesses in front of us who are making sense.”

  “Got it. So why am I here?”

  “You’ve got men inside.”

  “Sounds like everyone with a badge and a local address has someone inside.”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked off into the middle distance for a second, seemingly able to shut out the tremendous amount of noise and activity swirling around them: sirens, dome lights, a helicopter overhead, horns in the distance, people shouting, people running, orders being barked. It looked like everyone was in the middle of shooting a movie, but half were on the wrong scene and hadn’t figured that out yet.

  “I’m leaning on the theory that Jenks is involved in this,” McCarthy said.

  “I don’t disagree,” Maggie said, “but what makes you say that?”

  “He’s the only terrorist on the premises today. But that’s not the only reason. White and Spence were the last two people to enter the building.”

  “I thought you didn’t have any eyes inside.”

  “I don’t, but the cameras out here belong to BPD. Alarms sounded, and then White and Spence ran back inside. It was only after that we got word this was a hostage-slash-takeover scenario, which by procedure meant nobody followed them in until we got an idea of who, and why, and so on. You understand that because this is a jail, containment is one of the things we worry about a lot more than if this was just an office building. Most times, we just focus on getting everyone out. Here, we worry about getting almost everybody out.”

  “I understand.”

  “So let’s pretend whoever stormed this supposedly impossible-to-storm facility was doing so order to get to Jenks. You worked the case. The other one, Ledo and Borowitz. My understanding is, Bernard Jenks is connected to them. I think we all thought that whole case was put to bed on account of everyone got a medal, but obviously not. Do you have any idea who could be behind this?”

  Maggie remembered what Erica Smalls said, just a few minutes before word came down that the jail was under attack: there was someone on the other end of the device Bernard used, and that someone could see things the same way Corrigan could.

  “Let’s just say we left some leads on the table,” Maggie said. “But I don’t know who they pointed to. Aside from Bernard Jenks.”

  “Right. Well, we know it’s not him.”

  His radio squawked again. He stepped away to deal with it, while Maggie pulled out her phone and tried David for the hundredth time and Joe for the fiftieth. She was trying to ignore the creeping fear that the reason neither of them were answering was that they were dead, a fear that only intensified as soon as McCarthy confirmed they were seen re-entering the building after the alarms sounded.

  As before, nobody picked up.

  The plaza in front of the jail was filling up with officers in riot gear. It was BPD’s spec ops, and they looked like they were about to charge up the steps and breach the door. She wondered if McCarthy was aware of this, and decided probably not. The chaos she’d witnessed to this point was self-evidently due, in part, to the fact that nobody was sure who was in charge, so everyone decided it was them.

  Then her phone rang.

  It was Joe.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “Joe? Are you okay? Is David with you?”

  The line was open, but if someone on the other end of the call was speaking, she couldn’t hear them.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you,” Maggie said, in case this helped. “Are you there?”

  The plaza was turning into a case study on the importance of clean jurisdictional claims. McCarthy’s people were trying to tell the Boston Police that they couldn’t breach, and BPD was telling the sheriff’s deputies that it wasn’t their call to make. McCarthy was on the radio in the back of the van, holding two separate conversations and shouting in both of them. Everyone had a stake in this.

  “They’re about to breach, Joe,” she said. “Can you tell me where you are?”

  “Don’t…” Joe creaked.

  He was barely audible. Maggie stuck a finger in her other ear to try and drown out the ambient noise of the plaza, and ducked around the side of the van.

  “Don’t? Don’t breach? I’m not calling the shots, I can’t stop them.”

  She could pick up background noise now, around Joe.
Someone in the distance was shouting in pain. She wondered if that was David.

  “Don’t let her escape,” he said. Joe’s breathing was ragged, and his words were forceful, as though just this amount of work was taking all he had.

  “Who is her?” Maggie asked.

  “Don’t…let her escape,” he repeated.

  “Give me more, Joe. Tell me what happened.”

  Joe didn’t answer. She could hear him breathing, which was probably ultimately a good sign, but in context was mostly just alarming.

  Meanwhile, cooler heads appeared to be winning the scene on the stairs in front of the prison. McCarthy had stepped out of the van and was in conversation with the head of the spec ops team, and nobody was running at the doors. Maggie thought someone probably realized they were all on camera—local media was covering the scene from a great distance, but the camera on the news chopper was all-seeing—and decided to at least try looking more professional.

  “Joe, tell me how many there are,” Maggie said.

  She got a grunt, and a sharp inhale.

  “We’re all dead,” he whispered.

  “What? What does that mean?”

  Joe didn’t answer, and she couldn’t hear his breathing any longer.

  Doesn’t mean he stopped breathing, she thought. He just dropped the phone.

  From halfway across the open plaza, McCarthy caught her eye and waved her over.

  They were going in.

  Erica thought it probably wasn’t okay for her to just wander around the FBI, but at the same time there was hardly anybody around to stop her, which was how she eventually ended up looking at a visual breakdown of the State House bombing. It was pinned to a corkboard wall, with connecting bits of yarn, just like they did it on television. She couldn’t decide if this low-tech method of breaking down the case was fantastic or not. She’d seen more interactive displays on weather forecasts, but at the same time, it was just like TV, and that was a little cool.

  Maggie left Erica in the care of someone named Francie, about two hour earlier. Then Francie handed her off to George, a half hour after that. George disappeared a short time later, although Erica wasn’t sure when, since he didn’t announce he was stepping out. He just sort of drifted off or something.