Out of Exile: Hard Boiled: 2

by Jack Quaid

  They included Damien Rodine, who was the grandson of a mayor and had a master’s in politics; Kristin Larsen, who was tall, blonde, wore heels, and had a master’s in marketing; and Ronald Grey, who was short, with a beard and glasses, and had a bachelor’s in Political Science.

  They were under thirty-five, never wore suits, and all thought Mackler was a rock star. As far as she was concerned, they represented the best of the new Detroit Police Department. They were the future.

  The only boss from the old guard she couldn’t retire out was Assistant Chief Raymond O’Conner. He was the sole member of her inner circle without an expensive education and the only one who knew what it was like to kick in a door without any idea what was on the other side. Now in his fifties, with his pure white hair, barrel chest, and a flat nose from a beating he took when he was jumped twenty years before by a fistful of Hell’s Angels, he was the only person in the group who knew how to behave in a crisis.

  The Brat Pack poured cans of Red Bull down their throats while Mackler assumed her position behind Jones’s desk.

  The iPhone sat, at the center of attention, on his busy desk. He put it on speaker and played the message. The quality was poor and the conversation barely audible. As she listened, Mackler’s eyes were wide-open.

  Documented Evidence Insert Number: #302

  DOCUMENT TYPE: Official Detroit Police telephone call transcript: ‘Recorded at the Chief’s request’

  DATE: 31/01/2012

  CONFIDENTIAL: ‘Chief’s Eyes Only’

  PERSONS: UNKNOWN MALE #1, UNKNOWN MALE #2, UNKNOWN MALE #3

  * * *

  >>BEGINNING OF TRANSCRIPT<<

  * * *

  UNKNOWN MALE #1: . . . We go in quietly and take out the surveillance.

  UNKNOWN MALE #2: All the footage captured on site, stays on site. If we destroy their gear, they won’t have a backup.

  UNKNOWN MALE #1: I’ll head up to Sarah Jones’s room. She’ll think her husband has sent us to put her into protection.

  UNKNOWN MALE #2: Is the daughter going to be a problem?

  UNKNOWN MALE #1: She’s twelve? So probably not. If she is, slap her around. That goes for the both of them.

  (INDISTINGUISHABLE)

  UNKNOWN MALE #2: . . . what if Jones doesn’t want to play?

  UNKNOWN MALE #1: Put a blade to the belly of his little girl and he’ll turn to jelly.

  (INDISTINGUISHABLE)

  UNKNOWN MALE #1: We’re going to get bloody on this one. If things go south and we get boxed in. The men that come after us are going to be men you’ve served with, worked with and kicked in doors with. You would have shared a beer with these men. You would have been to their houses. But they stand in the way of everything we are trying to achieve. Do not hesitate. Pull that trigger and move on to the next target.

  (INDISTINGUISHABLE)

  * * *

  >>END OF TRANSCRIPT<<

  Chapter Six

  When the recording was over, nobody wanted to be the first to speak. Mackler leaned forward, the leather of her jacket creaking as she stabbed her index finger at the phone on the desk. ‘Who the fuck are these people?’

  Everybody spoke at once. A mess of noise and words that turned into panic-filled arguments and finger pointing.

  ‘HEY!’ Mackler yelled. Everyone shut up. ‘What do we know?’

  A pause hung in the office; then O’Conner stepped forward as much as he could in the cramped space. ‘Here are the facts, Chief: we know that Sarah and Monique Jones are staying in a hotel in the city. We know that, within the next few hours, somebody is going to attempt a kidnapping. And we assume the suspects are, or used to be, Detroit police officers.’

  ‘All right,’ Mackler said. ‘What don’t we know?’

  O’Conner drew air into his lungs. ‘We don’t know when it’s happening or why it’s happening. We don’t know what hotel they’re staying in, and we don’t know what the kidnappers’ intentions are.’

  The chief let O’Conner’s words sink in. ‘I want every hotel in the city canvassed in the next hour.’

  ‘Do we have enough manpower for that?’ Grey asked.

  ‘Wake people up. Bring in the kids from the academy. We don’t need seasoned officers for this, we need boots on concrete. Once they check every hotel, they check them again and keep doing it until we find them.’

  ‘There may be one thing we have in our corner,’ O’Conner said. Everybody looked his way. ‘The number was blocked, but somebody made that telephone call. Somebody who’s on their side is maybe on our side.’

  ‘Have the telco look into it,’ Mackler said to Larsen. ‘Find out who’s paying the bill.’ Then her gaze traveled over them all. ‘This is our number-one priority. Nobody goes home, nobody rests, until we have these fuckers in cuffs. Any questions?’

  They lingered for a moment, and just as Mackler was about to dismiss them, O’Conner spoke. ‘Why weren’t they at home?’

  ‘What?’ Jones said.

  ‘They’re in a hotel. Why?’ O’Conner asked. ‘Was there trouble at home?’

  Jones shifted in his chair, obviously uncomfortable.

  ‘That’s something for Jim and me to discuss,’ Mackler said. ‘You all know what to do, so go do it well.’

  They left the office, and the room outside got even noisier. Mackler closed the door, lit a cigarette, and looked to Jones. ‘Why the fuck aren’t they at home?’

  His head fell to his hands, his elbows on his knees. ‘I don’t know,’ he mumbled. ‘I haven’t spoken to Sarah in . . . days.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘This job hasn’t been too family friendly in the past couple of years, if you know what I mean.’

  Mackler took a seat across from him. ‘We’ll get them back. And the cocksuckers behind this will pay.’ She slipped the cigarette between her lips again and pulled out a notebook and pen. ‘Can you think of anybody who may have a grudge against you?’

  Jones leaned back and stretched out his leg. ‘I’ve just spent three years burying crooked cops. I’ve been very good at it.’

  ‘Have you gotten threats before?’

  ‘Chief, with all due respect, we both know canvassing hotels and patrolling the streets isn’t going to resolve this. Our only hope is that whoever called and left that voicemail message calls back. Until then, we can only wait.’

  Chapter Seven

  They were better armed than the police department.

  M-16s.

  Glocks.

  Remington 12-gauge pumps.

  And automatic MP5s with shoulder holsters, so they could wear them under their jackets without raising any eyebrows. Sullivan didn’t ask where the weapons came from. He figured it didn’t matter.

  The sun was on the rise. The sky turned from blue to blood orange. It was going to be another hot bastard of a day. They drove for ten minutes, and the conversation in the vehicle was minimal at best. Sullivan sat up front with Campbell. Hogan sat in the back, napping, while Deacon pushed his knee into the back of Sullivan’s seat, presumably just for kicks.

  ‘Anyone got any cigarettes?’ Sullivan asked.

  Deacon passed over a pack. Sullivan lit one, cracked the window, and kept the rest. Deacon didn’t mouth off, just pushed his knee harder into the back of the seat.

  ‘I imagined this moment,’ Campbell said. ‘Shoving it up the department, shoving it up Jones. I thought I would be more … I don’t know, conflicted.’

  Sullivan put the cigarette to his lips again. His hand was shaking.

  Campbell saw it. ‘How are you feeling about all this?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘It’s okay to be angry.’

  Sullivan stared out the window. ‘I know.’

  The city was starting to wake. Vehicles filled the road, the first buses rattled down the street, and joggers did their best to live longer as they bounced down the footpath listening to their iPods and preparing their minds for the workday ahead.

  ‘Where a
re we headed?’ Sullivan asked.

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’

  Chapter Eight

  They waited.

  The phone rang once, but it was just O’Conner with a status update on the hotel sweeps. They had turned up nothing. Jones ended the call and sat back across from Mackler, and they both watched the phone and waited.

  All across the city of Detroit, cops were dealing with the waiting in their own way. Some filled the time sleeping or talking shit. Others chain-smoked, paced, or double-checked the rounds in their weapons every few minutes. Three SWAT teams were stationed in the CBD. Locked, loaded, and ready to raise hell on sixty seconds’ notice. They were no more than minutes away from any of the major hotels, and the engines of their vehicles sat idling in gear.

  They all waited.

  Jones’s knee bounced up and down.

  ‘Relax,’ Mackler said.

  ‘I don’t want to relax. I want my wife and daughter.’

  ‘And everything that can be done to retrieve them is being done. In the meantime, relax.’

  Mackler lit another cigarette and eyeballed the office, not for the first time. ‘You sure you don’t have an ashtray?’

  ‘I don’t smoke.’

  Mackler ashed on the floor and picked up the telephone. She told Officer Barlow, on the other end, to bring them some sandwiches. A deli open at five in the morning was a hard thing to find, so he returned half an hour later with a couple of BLTs. Mackler scoffed hers. Jones barely touched his.

  Eating in a hurry was a bad habit she had learned growing up in a place where meals were scarce. Mackler had grown up poor in the Frederick Douglass projects, the fourth child of seven. When they weren’t unemployed, her father labored at the meatworks and her mother tended bar at the local bar on topless nights. Mackler left when she was fifteen. It took them three days to notice she had gone, and when they did, no one begged her to come back. She dropped out of school, and when she was old enough, applied for the police department, failing the entrance exam three times before finally being accepted. She finished high school through night classes; then, also studying at nights, got a Bachelor of Criminology. She had made up a story about her boring middle-class past to tell everybody. But, occasionally, when her guard was down, little telltale signs would break through. Eating fast was one of them.

  Chapter Nine

  They circled the outskirts of the CBD for close to ten minutes before pulling into the taxi bay outside the Westin Hotel on Michigan Avenue. The building was thirty-one stories tall, with an underground car park three stories deep.

  ‘How did you know Jones’s wife would be here?’ Sullivan asked.

  Campbell let loose the smile on the posters for his failed political campaign. ‘We didn’t just think this up yesterday.’

  Sullivan climbed out of the vehicle and clocked the street. There was no sign of Jones or any cop, anywhere. A horn blared; a cab driver sided up to him and honked three more times. Campbell’s SUVs had taken all the spaces in the taxi rank.

  Hogan bent and stared the driver down through the passenger-side window, then tapped his badge against its glass. ‘Get out of here, dickhead.’

  The cabbie spun the wheel, floored it, and when he was out of sight, the street fell quiet again. The unit congregated on the footpath and surrounded Campbell, as if it were halftime at a football game.

  ‘This is the right thing to do,’ Campbell said. ‘No second thoughts. Remember the plan and your training, and I’ll see you back at the safe house.’ The group broke off in different directions.

  Sullivan grabbed Campbell’s arm. ‘I need a weapon.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Deacon said.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere without a weapon.’

  Campbell looked at Deacon, looked at Sullivan. There was no time to argue. He took out a Beretta, glanced over his shoulder, and discreetly palmed it to Sullivan.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Deacon said. ‘What are you doing?’

  Campbell looked at him, hard. ‘You just worry about yourself,’ he said and stepped away.

  When he was gone, Deacon turned to Sullivan. ‘You’ve got a bad habit of killing dirty cops. I see that shooter looking my way, and we’re going to have a problem.’

  Sullivan nodded. ‘We wouldn’t want a problem now, would we?’

  They all had a role to play. Sullivan and Deacon were to disarm the security cameras and destroy any evidence of them entering the building, which meant wiping the hard drives.

  Sullivan had spent ten minutes in the car on the way over memorizing the floor plan. The lobby was the most complicated area, with annexes serving as a bar, a restaurant, bathrooms, and a reading room, and behind a door marked private, there was a maze of corridors with rooms fanning off them that served as kitchens, and offices for housekeeping, security, and maintenance. The underground car park had two entries: one on Michigan Avenue, and the other around the block, on State Street Lane. The remaining thirty-one floors had identical floor plans. It had taken Sullivan some time to get his head around it all, but he knew that the worst thing you could do in a building where you didn’t belong was to look like you didn’t belong.

  They crossed the lobby and reached the door marked private. Deacon put a key card to the sensor, the light turned green, and they were in. The hall was hot, empty, and smelled like the heavy-duty chemical products used to clean it. Deacon led the way into the concrete maze. There was no air and no windows. They made a couple of turns and came to the security office.

  Deacon pulled his weapon.

  Sullivan pounded on the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ the guard yelled. He sounded fat and didn’t wait for an answer.

  The door opened; they rushed the room. The guard stumbled to the floor. Sullivan swung his weapon to the right. Swung it to the left. Except for the guard, the small control room was empty. Computer servers covered one wall, and monitors were on the other. Various images of the hotel flickered across them with rotating surveillance.

  ‘Where is he?’ Deacon shouted.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The other guard?’

  The guard paused.

  Deacon lowered his weapon. ‘You don’t get paid enough to cop a bullet in the knee.’

  The guard took a short breath. ‘He’s on a patrol.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you expecting him back anytime soon?’ Sullivan asked.

  He nodded. ‘In a couple of minutes.’

  Sullivan shifted his gaze over to the wall of monitors and saw a guard with his gut hanging out over his belt enter one of the elevators and press the button for the lobby. ‘We don’t have much time,’ he said.

  Deacon threw an uppercut into the guard’s jaw, and the poor bastard crashed to the ground out cold. ‘You sort this surveillance,’ Deacon said. ‘I’ll take care of the other guard.’

  Sullivan waited until Deacon was out of the room and watched him on one surveillance monitor after another as he headed down the hall. Sullivan pulled the phone from his pocket and dialed.

  Chapter Ten

  Jones had been staring at the telephone for the past hour, willing it to ring, but it never did. He peeled himself off the couch, hobbled over to the window, and stared out at the new morning falling across the city.

  O’Conner knocked gently on the open door, ignored Jones, and looked to Mackler. ‘The boys have just finished a sweep of another three hotels; nothing yet.’

  O’Conner was already two-thirds of the way to the door when he froze at the sound of Jones’s telephone. The ring echoed through the Internal Affairs department and in the ears of those who had been sipping coffee, waiting for this very moment.

  They all looked to Jones.

  ‘Well?’ Mackler said to him. ‘Do you want to answer that?’

  He picked up the telephone, pressed the button, and pushed it to his ear.

  ‘This is Jones.’

  The voice on the other end
sounded as if it had been given the once-over with a sander. ‘Send as many units as you can to the Westin Hotel on Michigan Avenue.’

  O’Conner listened in, picked up another phone, and commanded the units they had had circling the CBD for the past hour to head toward the Westin. Once the call went out, half the badges waiting in IA made a mad dash for the elevators and stairs. Within moments, the department was only a fraction as full as it had been.

  Jones kept speaking. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Your wife and daughter are going to be kidnapped.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’

  ‘No! Tell your units to stay outside the hotel until Campbell and his unit exit the building.’

  ‘Campbell?’

  ‘William Campbell. Jason Deacon, Benjamin Robinson, Dave Hogan, Adams, Pierce, and a few others. They’re armed and organized.’

  ‘What do they want?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just do not come into the hotel. If you try and storm the building, this thing will turn into a bloody mess, fast. They’ll be exiting through the lobby onto State Street. Take them down on the street.’

  ‘How can I trust you?’

  ‘. . . Do you have a choice?’

  The line went dead.

  Chapter Eleven

  Deacon banged twice on the door before walking through it. Just enough time for Sullivan to end the call and slip the phone into his hip pocket.

  Deacon’s eyes scanned the room and settled on Sullivan. ‘Is the surveillance offline?’

  Sullivan stepped back from the monitor as if he had just been using it. ‘The last twenty minutes is being wiped as we speak.’

  Deacon nodded. ‘Good. Let’s get out of here.’

  They exited the security office, leaving every video camera in the building operational and all the footage captured on the hard drive. The concrete halls behind the curtain of the hotel were coming alive with housekeeping, catering, and other hotel staff clocking on for their 6 a.m. shift. None of the staff so much as looked sideways at Sullivan and Deacon as they passed.