by Tom Barber
There were five people involved in breaking into the truck, and as she peered out of the crippled vehicle like an animal caught in a trap, through the smoke Kat O’Mara saw her four fellow thieves get cut down by two huge police officers who’d arrived at the intersection in a black and white CHPD squad car.
In horror, Kat saw the four fallen robbers getting hit again repeatedly; execution shots. The cops were using a shotgun and rifle, and all she had was a revolver in her pocket. Smoke from the grenade inside the cab was still flowing out of the broken windows which provided some cover, and Kat used the poor visibility to slide out of the truck and then start to run towards a narrow alleyway on her right.
Gunshots sounded again as this time bullets zipped around her through the smoke, a shotgun blast destroying a car windshield right beside her and making her flinch as she ran. One of the bags was proving too heavy for her to carry, knocking against her legs, and the holdall ended up dislodging the other lighter bag from her shoulder as it hit her thigh.
It fell to the concrete and she stopped to go back for it, but another sudden eruption of gunfire forced her to abandon the dropped holdall and scramble onwards towards the alleyway.
Having just gunned down the other thieves with his brother, Lupinetti covering their six, through the thickening smoke Brooks saw the woman drop one of the holdalls she’d been carrying. Real police units would be arriving at any moment so he knew they had to get clear of here right now, but not before they collected what they’d come for.
He whistled to Billy and pointed; his younger sibling ran forward through the thinning smoke and retrieved the bag. He stopped to look at the fallen truck for a moment, knowing there would be many more boxes inside, but then even his slow brain computed that neither he or his brother could squeeze through that small gap in the busted back door, and that the police would be here very soon.
He rushed back with the bag to join Brooks who was getting behind the wheel of their stolen cop car again. ‘Let’s split!’ Billy told him, slamming himself inside too.
‘Not yet,’ Brooks replied, turning the car down a parallel street in the same direction that the one remaining thief had just run down.
Alone and terrified, Kat had reached a two-panel chain link fence halfway down the alley and pushed the bag through a gap before sliding through herself, looking behind her quickly and seeing the officers hadn’t followed. She picked up the heavy bag again and kept going down the alleyway before emerging onto another street, but then found herself just fifty feet from the CHPD cop car which had just screeched to a halt to cut her off.
One of the large, bearded officers from East Superior was already halfway out of the driver’s door.
And before she could react or think about moving, he lifted a rifle and fired at her.
Getting shot happened so fast, Kat didn’t really register it. One instant she was fine, the next she was on the ground, feeling like she’d been smacked in the body with a baseball bat smeared with lidocaine. The huge CHPD officer who’d put her down her didn’t have a chance to squeeze off another round as a Cleveland PD squad car braked with its tires squealing and reversed back onto the cross-street behind him. The man who’d shot Kat turned and engaged the occupants with his partner, reloading his rifle before continuing to shoot up the police cruiser. Even in her numbed, wounded state, she was confused and realized something was wrong; cops shooting on cops?
Forgotten for a few seconds in the melee, Kat managed to get back to her feet, dragging the bag behind her which suddenly felt ten times heavier. She made it to a blue mailbox, the only cover available near her, leaving drops of blood behind as she went, her ski-mask still covering her face.
She slumped to the ground, her back against the postal box, then pulled her mask off to help get her breath before looking down at the gunshot wound to her body. Blood was starting to soak through her sweater.
Archer arrived in time to see two groups of cops shooting at each other and a woman lying against a mailbox with a bag beside her, what looked like a gunshot wound to her torso. Positioned south of her and the officers firing on one another, he swung out of his rental car, drawing his Sig Sauer, and ran forward to take cover behind another parked vehicle while assessing what he was seeing and trying to make sense of it.
But Billy Loughlin had just looked around to see where Kat was, making sure she wasn’t escaping, and caught sight of Archer moving up towards the parked car, at the same time that the NYPD detective saw him too; it would be hard to say which of the two men was more surprised when they instantly recognized each other from the bridge attack the previous night.
Billy shouted to his brother, who turned. Kat was forgotten as she cowered behind the mailbox, pain starting to radiate out from her side, as Archer came under intense fire from the two Gatlin fugitives now dressed as police officers. Before he’d ducked behind the car alongside him, he’d caught a glimpse of Lupinetti beside another vehicle which had just pulled up, now engaging with the police to keep them busy.
And then, one final player arrived at the scene.
Unnoticed by anyone, a car had just slid to a halt on an adjacent street, the driver having been following the sound of the gunshots, just like Archer. He got out and unseen by the Loughlins who were too busy trying to kill the NYPD cop who’d shot their brother the night before, ran across the street to the injured Kat.
‘C’mon!’ he told her, scooping her up. She stared up in shock and tried to say something but then sagged into him as he carried her and the bag towards his car; he ripped open the rear door, pushed her inside and threw the bag in after her.
Despite being focused on the brothers, who were doing their best to put bullets both into him and the genuine Cleveland police officers, from his cover Archer visually identified the man who he’d just seen rescue the girl from the mailbox. He’d seen his face on the news first thing this morning, as had most of Ohio.
It was Nicky Reyes.
The two men made eye contact for a brief moment, but then Archer was forced to duck again as he came under more fire. Reyes made the most of the opportunity, jumped back in behind the wheel and backed quickly down the street away from the shootout. As he reversed then spun the car around and drove off, the Loughlins took full control of the street firefight; Archer only managed to fire a couple of shots back before being forced to withdraw behind the thicker, more solid protection of the parked car’s engine block as it took the increased abuse from their weapons. The Cleveland PD officers down the street had also stopped engaging the brothers and Lupinetti, keeping their heads down under the onslaught while they waited for back up.
When the intense assault finally ceased, Archer checked through one of the shattered windows in time to see the brothers jumping into the vehicle Frank Lupinetti had shown up on the street in. As the echoes of the gunfire gave way to the sound of screeching tires, Archer immediately ran back to his rental and jumping in, turned the key still in the ignition, but the car wouldn’t start, the front hood and engine shot to pieces. Swearing, he got out and sprinted down a side alleyway to try and see which direction the brothers and Lupinetti had taken.
When he made it out the other side, the three fugitives were already gone, the noise of their engine becoming lost in the city as sirens, screams and shouts for help took over.
Through a thinning haze of smoke, Archer saw a toppled armored delivery truck, four bodies lying in pools of blood and two figures struggling to get out of the door of the vehicle lying on its side, a wrecking ball from a small crane resting against it.
Half an hour ago, he’d wondered if something specific might have been taking the Gatlin Four into Ohio and towards Cleveland, or if the Loughlins and Frank going in the direction everyone was assuming Nicky Reyes was also heading had just been a coincidence.
He now knew the answer.
TWENTY
‘Ten block square grid is being completely locked down,’ Cleveland SWAT task force’s commander told a chief deputy
US Marshal and a Robbery/Homicide lieutenant thirty minutes later, the three men striding across the E Superior Avenue intersection where the armored truck had been attacked. Other law-enforcement and detectives had arrived at the scene, the bodies of the four thieves who’d been killed in the robbery still on the street where they’d been gunned down; like Craig Loughlin, back on the bridge in West Virginia, they’d been kept there for investigators and crime scene techs to assess the scene and take their photos.
Although it was just past midday, the street had been cleared of the public, much of downtown already closed off as the SWAT commander had said, two police choppers circling above seeing if they could locate the perpetrators of whatever this had been. Like an earthquake, the shockwaves from the USP Gatlin prison escapes yesterday had now reached the Ohio city; reports were also coming in that two cops had just been found murdered in an alleyway in Cleveland Heights, their uniforms, weapons, radios and squad car missing. Videos on phones that onlookers had taken showed it was their cruiser which had been used in the attack. The city’s police departments now had blood in the game.
‘Your office were all over this situation, right?’ the Robbery/Homicide lieutenant called Richie asked the Marshal chief deputy. Richie was in his mid-forties, a fourteen year veteran with a mop of light brown hair and a pair of sharp eyes that had seen a lot and missed very little. ‘Heard you had this girl O’Mara under surveillance at her apartment and she still made it out here to help pull this off?’
‘My people were tapping her phones to catch a missing fugitive, not anticipating anything like this. She must’ve managed to slip out during the night.’
Richie’s sergeant, called Glick, approached. He was eight years younger than his boss, the same height but slightly leaner with darker hair, and had almost immediately proved himself an invaluable right-hand man. The two men stepped to one side; Glick nodded over towards Archer, who was standing slightly apart from the group taking in the scene around him. ‘From the NYPD. Detective badge.’
‘What’s he doing here?’
‘Says he was at Gatlin yesterday to help transport a prisoner, but the inmate got busted out by these two Loughlin brothers on that bridge assault in West Virginia last night we heard about. Been on his tail ever since. He’s the one who put an ID on Kat O’Mara and the Gatlin boys at the shootout.’
Richie moved away and approached Archer. ‘Heard you were one of the first on the scene,’ he told him, shaking hands as Glick went with him. ‘I’m Richie.’
‘First name?’
‘Last.’
‘Sam Archer.’
‘You have any idea this was something they were planning?’
Archer shook his head. ‘I wish. Sightings of them last night suggested the two Loughlins and Lupinetti might be heading this way.’ He sized up the toppled truck. ‘But none of us were expecting this. Or for them and Nicky Reyes to show up for a reunion either.’
‘That right? All four escapees?’
‘Yeah, Reyes was here too. Got the girl away from the shootout.’
‘We’re gonna have all of them back in shackles or shot dead before nightfall,’ the SWAT commander said, joining them. ‘They killed two CHPD cops. Every badge in Ohio is gonna want their heads stuffed and mounted on a wall.’
‘Lieutenant, a car with some bullet holes in the side was just found east of here on St Clair,’ one of the Robbery/Homicide detectives told them, approaching with a radio in her hand.
‘Description?’ Richie asked.
‘Blue Chrysler. Georgia plates.’
‘That’s the one Reyes and the girl took off in,’ Archer told them.
As back-up units started to arrive on St Clair Avenue where the Chrysler been located, one of the officers who’d come across the abandoned vehicle was looking at blood smeared on the back seat and on the open nearside rear door. ‘Dispatch said the woman got shot,’ he said to his partner, who didn’t answer, instead following a trail of blood droplets on the concrete. They were leading towards a small bodega thirty feet away.
The two officers pulled their sidearms and approached the entrance.
‘Katherine must’ve got clipped by one of the brothers,’ Archer said, quickly taking the Robbery/Homicide team through his arrival at the shootout and the fugitives’ eventual escapes. ‘A police unit engaged the Loughlins and Lupinetti’s attention, probably before they could put her down for good and take the other bag I saw her carrying,’ he said, his eyes on the bullet-ridden cruiser up the street, the officers who’d been in the firefight both having been taken to hospital with gunshot wounds.
‘Where were you?’ Richie asked.
‘Give you one guess,’ Archer said with a brief smile, nodding at something behind them; the detectives turned and saw a vehicle that had very obviously taken a lot of firepower.
‘Loughlins really showed you some love, huh?’ Sergeant Glick said, looking at the damage. ‘Damn.’
‘Think they recognized me. We had a run in on a bridge last night.’ Archer pointed to his right. ‘During the shootout, Nicky Reyes arrived over there in that Chrysler we just heard about. He got out, ran over to Kat O’Mara and carried her clear before they took off again. It was him, no mistake.’
‘A prison breakout yesterday four hundred miles away, and this morning all four fugitives show up on Superior at the same time during a robbery?’ Richie said.
‘They can’t have been working together,’ Archer said, looking at the bloodstains on the street from Kat’s gunshot wound. Her abandoned ski-mask was lying there too, numbered with a card as a piece of evidence. ‘The Gatlin COs said Reyes and the Loughlins hate each other’s guts.’
‘So what was this?’
‘I’m not sure yet. Do you have an ID on the four dead thieves back by the truck?’
‘We recognized two, straight off,’ Glick told him. ‘Arrested them before for burglary. They’re brother and sister; Vaughn and Erica Till. I’ll bet this month’s paycheck the other two have records too. They’d need experience to attempt something like this.’
‘Where were those deposit boxes headed?’
‘A Morningstar bank in Public Square. The vault down there’s been undergoing reconstruction, so they’ve been offsite for the past few months.’
‘So they paid for that information, or they got someone on the inside. Maybe same with the construction site, otherwise how’d they have access to it?’ Glick and Richie nodded, both of them surprised at how calm and focused the NYPD detective appeared to be, considering the sustained attack he’d just come under. ‘Kat O’Mara had a bag over her shoulder. Looked substantial. They took it with them when Reyes got her to the car.’
‘Witnesses back near the truck who stuck around said they saw the Loughlins take another that she dropped,’ Richie said. ‘My guys are going through an inventory with Morningstar to find out which ones are missing and what they made off with. Lot of boxes in the truck, but the thieves can’t have lifted many considering the timeframe. Just enough to fit into two sports bags.’
Archer’s eyes were still on the bloodstains on the concrete beside the mailbox.
‘Whatever was stolen, it must’ve been worth risking all this,’ he said.
TWENTY ONE
Inside the bodega across the city on St Clair Avenue, the two armed police officers who’d found Nicky and Kat’s dumped car entered to find the shaken owner hiding behind the counter, the man having been the one to call 911. One cop checked the aisles with his pistol drawn as the other indicated around the store to the owner, asking the silent question. The scared man shook his head quickly.
‘He took my car keys,’ he told the officer as the cop’s partner followed more drops of blood on the floor heading out back. ‘And some medical supplies.’
‘Attention all units, Loughlin brothers sighted in a red Chevrolet Blazer, West Virginia tag, near Willard Park,’ the dispatcher said over the radio, giving an address south of their current position. ‘Back up requested.’<
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Knowing other units would respond, the officers ignored the call, following the blood trail to the back door where it stopped right by an empty space where the stolen car belonging to the shaken store owner had to have been parked.
‘We need the plate, make and model for your car, sir,’ one of them told the owner who’d followed them out.
With the city going into manhunt mode for the Gatlin Four and Kat O’Mara, and with local Cleveland and federal authorities conducting the search, Archer found himself surplus to requirements for the time being. After calling Shepherd to fill him in on the latest, he’d answered more questions from the Robbery/Homicide squad, given them the number for his temporary pre-paid phone, then decided to stick to his original plan and find a hotel. From there he could work on hiring a replacement car and wait for a fresh sighting of Lupinetti.
He was now in a cheapish three star place somewhere downtown, the city’s layout still unfamiliar to him. He switched on the TV as soon as he entered the 1st floor room, flicking to the local news covering the interrupted heist and ongoing search for the suspects. He walked over to the window and saw the street twenty feet below was emptying, people not wanting to be out and about with armed convicts on the loose. Not a good last weekend of summer for the city.
He checked the door was locked, then undressed and showered, keeping his Sig Sauer on the ledge near the stall. The Loughlin brothers and Lupinetti were out there, maybe just a few blocks away, hemmed in by law-enforcement closing off any escape routes out of the city; it seemed crazy that they could have followed him here while trying to evade capture, but he’d learned through hard experience the consequences of false assumptions.
Once he’d toweled off and put his new clothes back on with a fresh pair of boxers and socks, he felt his empty stomach start to complain. The meal at the diner last night in Charleston had done a good job of filling him up, but his body had burned through the fuel some time ago. There was a room service menu, the limited choice vastly overpriced, but he was too worn out to be picky so used the room’s phone to place an order while looking down at the street. ‘It’ll be brought up shortly,’ they told him.
