The Breaker

by Nick Petrie

  Inside, folded in old bath towels, were four SIG Sauer pistols with spare magazines, two combat shotguns, and two very nice Heckler & Koch assault rifles with scopes and suppressors and a row of thirty-round magazines. A pair of high-end armored vests completed the set.

  “Jesus, Lewis. You drive around town like this?” Peter traded the Colt 1911 for the more accurate SIG Sauer and stuffed two spare mags into his back pockets, then pulled a vest over his head and cinched the straps.

  Lewis tightened his own vest and laid the rifles on the rear seat with four mags. “Don’t you know the Boy Scout motto? Trustworthy, brave, and goddamn prepared.”

  “If you’re a Boy Scout,” Peter muttered, “I’m Mother fucking Teresa.” He dropped the top and slammed the hatch and ran back to the passenger seat as Lewis put the truck in gear. Carson’s phone was on the dashboard. “She’s still there, on the right, all the way down past the bathrooms. Remember, we don’t want to kill anyone, least of all Spark.”

  “What if that Edgar’s there?”

  “Oh, him you can kill all you want.”

  Lewis hit the gas. When they rounded the corner, Peter looked ahead a hundred yards and saw a human figure on the pavement beside a small red pickup with both doors open. A black Mercedes SUV stood in the other lane with all the windows down.

  Lewis coasted closer. The man was Kiko Tomczak, and he was sprawled in a crimson puddle, one hand propped on the ground as if still trying to push himself upright. His red wheelchair was dumped on the far side of his truck, still folded for transport. The seatback was pulled forward. The truck was empty.

  Twenty yards away, the Mercedes had a flat tire, a shattered side-view mirror, and holes in the side panels big enough to stick your thumb through. Peter couldn’t see any other people. Just beyond both vehicles, at the turnaround for the boat launch, a custom electric bike lay abandoned on its side in a pile of gravel, back wheel spinning fast. An assault rifle by the dumpster enclosure was bent into a crimped curve.

  “Shit,” Peter said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  Lewis cranked the wheel and powered back up the parking lot, looking for bad guys. Someone had dumped a scatter of painting supplies and drywall tools on the pavement, but the only other vehicles were a couple of empty compact cars at the far end past the yacht club. “Motherfucker.”

  He sped back and stopped near Kiko, whose head turned weakly as he tracked the arriving truck. Peter hopped out and knelt beside him. “Where’s Spark, Kiko? Where’d she go?” The knees of his pants wet with blood, his nose filled with its overpowering smell.

  The metalworker’s breathing was shallow and ragged, his eyelids at half-mast. His flannel shirt was saturated. He blinked at Peter and his mouth opened but no words came out. His pale blue lips flecked with pink foam made Peter think that at least one lung was punctured.

  He lifted the hem of Kiko’s shirt and tore it wide, popping the buttons and revealing a dozen or more deep cuts in the belly and chest. “Lewis, call 911. Get the paramedics now.” He looked at Kiko. “The fire station is only twelve blocks away, Kiko. Hang on.”

  Kiko’s eyes widened and he stared back balefully. One thick forearm rose from the sticky pool and a meaty hand clamped on Peter’s bicep with surprising force. But his voice was thin and weak. “They took her.”

  He coughed and more pink foam flecked his lips.

  Lewis was on his phone. “There’s a stabbing by the South Shore Yacht Club, in the south end of the parking lot. Look for the red pickup and the man on the ground. Please tell them to hurry, okay?”

  Peter wiped the worst of the blood from the big man’s chest and sides, looking for wounds where the blade had entered the lungs. If he could close them up, even a little, it would keep air out of the chest cavity and help Kiko breathe. He found two pink-bubbled slits, one high on the left side and the other above the right nipple, both perfectly placed to slide between the ribs and do the most damage.

  He put his blood-wet palms over the wounds, trying to seal them with pressure and keep the lungs from collapsing. He couldn’t do anything about the rest of it. “Keep breathing, Kiko. I got you. Paramedics coming.”

  The cry of a siren rose in the distance. Kiko licked his lips. Was he getting more air in? “You gotta. Save her.”

  Lewis bent at Peter’s shoulder. “What are they driving, Kiko? How do we find her?”

  Kiko didn’t have an answer.

  The siren went silent as a boxy ambulance tilted around the corner and rolled toward them. Two guys in Fire Department fleece hopped out, grabbed big orange cases from the side lockers, and jogged toward them. “What happened, guys?” If either man noticed the armored vests and pistols, they didn’t mention it.

  “Somebody stabbed him,” Peter said. “Multiple times. I got pink bubbles on two, my hands are covering them. His name is Kiko.”

  The younger paramedic knelt and popped open his case while the older man leaned in close and pulled on gloves. “Nice work,” he said. “Lemme see.” Peter leaned back but kept his palms in place. The paramedic did a quick survey. “Okay, we got him. You can step away.”

  When Peter let go and climbed to his feet, the paramedic took his place and started giving orders to the younger man. Peter’s hands and the fronts of his pants were covered with Kiko’s blood. His heart was pounding. Lewis stood beside him. They left red boot prints on the pavement.

  Peter closed his eyes and let out his breath. “What a fucking disaster.”

  They both knew the knife work was Edgar’s. And the Mercedes was Holloway’s, although another name would be on the registration.

  “We gotta lay hands on these assholes,” Lewis growled.

  “We goddamn well better.” Peter thought about Spark, maybe hurt, maybe dying. He thought about the loneliness of her apartment and the pain in her voice during their last conversation. He thought about her dead man’s switch.

  Then he thought about June at District Five, getting grilled by the detectives, and the patrol sergeant with Peter’s picture in his phone. Everything was unraveling. “We need to get to Metzger Machine and meet that delivery truck. Maybe the drivers can tell us something. It’s all we’ve got.”

  The older paramedic, taping dressings over Kiko’s lung punctures, called over his shoulder, “Don’t go anywhere, guys. The police are on their way. They’ll want to talk to you both.”

  “No problem,” Peter said. “We’ll be right here.” He looked down at his bloody clothes, then at Lewis’s Yukon. “Maybe I should ride in the back with the guns.”

  “On the roof is more like it,” Lewis said. “I just had this thing detailed.”

  Peter opened the passenger door. “Hell, it’s leather. It’ll wash right off.”

  Lewis shook his head. “Now I know why you always drive some old piece of shit.”

  Peter held up his bloody hands. “Got any wet wipes?”

  Sometimes gallows humor was the only thing that helped.

  57

  JUNE

  June sat across a table from Detective Hecht in a small police interview room that smelled of stale cigarette smoke and sweat. A female detective named Lorenz leaned against the side wall, silent and out of sight of the video camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling. The chrome .22 was in a plastic evidence bag between them, along with the remains of June’s lunch and Hecht’s phone with the voice recorder running. Hecht took notes on a yellow legal pad while she told about shooting Mr. Cheerful for the fourth goddamn time.

  Hecht was a short, nebbishy-looking guy, thoroughly middle-aged in a blue button-down shirt and rumpled tweed jacket with honest-to-god elbow patches. Combined with the stubbled head, frameless glasses over a feathery beard, and a necklace of small round wooden beads outside his shirt, he looked like a cross between a religious ascetic and an English professor.

  But despite the outfit and the calm, quiet v
oice, Hecht was all cop. Relentless and unwavering, he walked her all the way forward to why she’d fled the paper instead of waiting for the police, then abruptly back to the shooting at the market, then ahead again to the first Edgar encounter on her bike, trying all the while to knock her off balance and poke holes in her narrative.

  June found herself wishing again that she’d called a lawyer rather than showing up solo. If she had an actual job at the Journal Sentinel, they’d have sent their in-house attorney to cover her butt. If she hadn’t been writing that damn book and on sabbatical from Public Investigations, they would have provided a lawyer, too. Instead, in too big a hurry to find a local lawyer, she’d counted on her role as the victim and her profession as a journalist to make the cops behave, at least for the short term. This might not, she reflected now, have been the soundest of strategies.

  But June’s work as a reporter had taught her the strategies of dissembling from the other side. She knew not to overelaborate, and that a simple story was best. Plus her story had the benefit of being almost entirely true.

  Her most significant lies were those of omission.

  She wasn’t going to tell them about Metzger Machine, not yet. Not until poor Marty Metzger had a chance to get his people safely away from their homes. The police were generally good at their job, but they weren’t known for subtlety, and June didn’t want Metzger’s employees or their families to pay the price.

  She also didn’t want the cops to scare away the delivery driver, who was due any minute. She was certain that Peter and Lewis were the best chance to intervene and figure out where that delivery was going.

  Besides, if she told them about Metzger Machine, she’d have to tell them how she thought to go there, which meant telling about the connection between the machete murders and the butchered family in Virginia, which would lead to the stolen technology. If that got out, Oliver was unlikely to keep his promise.

  “I’m sorry, but I’m still not clear.” Hecht paged through his notes as if he were actually confused. “Why would Edgar try to kill you? He must want you dead pretty badly if he tried three times.”

  It was the fifth or sixth time they’d been over this part. The questions had begun to seem a little random, and June allowed herself to hope they were nearly done. Either that or they were stalling for time. She’d already been there for almost three hours. She badly needed more coffee, and also to pee.

  “I told you, he didn’t give me a reason.” She yawned, and allowed herself to make a little production out of it. “I’m sorry, I was up half the night and I still have work to do.”

  “But why do you think he wanted to kill you?” This from Detective Lorenz. She was tall and dark with high, lean hips and narrow shoulders and the sharpest cheekbones June had ever seen.

  She reminded herself again to keep it simple. “I assumed because of the market shooting. Maybe because I was trying to track down the gunman’s victim.”

  “Vincent Holloway,” Lorenz said. “A man whose face you just happened to recognize.”

  “Because I interviewed him eleven years ago, and I’m good with faces.” June had decided to give them Holloway’s name in hopes it would give them something else to focus on. “It took me a whole morning of digging through news clips to find him. He left the scene of the shooting, remember?”

  Hecht chimed in again. “And why would he do that, exactly?” His phone buzzed. He glanced at it, but left it on the table.

  “When I find him,” June said, “I’ll ask him.” She yawned again, this time widely enough to feel the hinges of her jaw creak. “Are we almost done here?”

  “Just about,” Hecht said. “So in your mind, Holloway hired Edgar, right?”

  “That’s my working hypothesis,” she said.

  “But why would Edgar have your laptop and phone and notebooks in his van?”

  “What? My laptop? In his van?” This was new information, and it took her a moment to catch up. “Oh. My house got broken into, the night after the market shooting. Someone took all my work stuff, it was on a table right inside the door. You’re saying it was Edgar?” The thought of Mr. Cheerful in her house made her shiver.

  “I’m saying your things were in his van. Did you report the robbery?”

  “No,” she said. “I thought you guys had more important things to do.”

  “You didn’t think it might mean something?”

  “I thought it meant somebody stole my stuff.” She tried to keep the edge out of her voice. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  Hecht was unruffled. “What about your boyfriend, Peter Murphy? He lives with you, right? Were any of his things stolen?”

  “We don’t think so,” she said. “He’s kind of a minimalist.”

  Already tired and tense, June felt her shoulder muscles get even tighter. She didn’t like any line of questioning that included Peter. Her biggest concern was that they’d make a connection between the fuzzy photos of the good Samaritans and the two men who’d chased off Edgar after he’d tried to run her down in the van. But it turned out they were coming from a different angle.

  Lorenz said, “When did you two meet, anyway?”

  Suddenly June wasn’t tired at all.

  58

  PETER

  At three-thirty, the fenced-in lot behind Metzger Machine was empty except for a pair of delivery trucks with the company name on the side and a sky-blue Chrysler minivan standing apart and alone on the expanse of faded asphalt.

  Lewis pulled up to the gate, but nobody responded to the buzzer. Peter made a call. “Marty, it’s Peter, from this morning. We’re out back, can you let us in?” The gate rolled aside and a door opened at the far end of the lot. Metzger leaned out and waved them in.

  They left the Yukon parked away from the loading dock, stripped off the bulky armored vests, and walked over.

  As they came closer, the engineer’s sagging eyes locked on to the blood drying thick and dark on Peter’s pants and hands and forearms. “Did you get him?”

  “No,” Peter said. “He got somebody else.”

  Metzger licked his lips and stepped aside, holding the door for them. “I guess you better come in.” The shop had big modern-looking equipment under bright lights with the strangely clean smell of machine oil over the acrid tang of cut metal. “Shipping and receiving is over here.”

  Peter looked around. “This delivery driver, is he ever early?”

  “I asked the shipping manager,” Metzger said. “He never leaves the truck, but he’s always right on time.”

  Peter had his go-bag over his shoulder with a change of clothes inside. “I need to clean up,” he said. “Where’s your washroom?”

  Behind a dented steel door covered with safety stickers, he found three stalls and three sinks. He ran the water hot while he stripped off his boots and crusted pants, then stood in his underwear and socks and scrubbed his hands and arms and sticky red knees, grateful for the abrasive industrial soap in the orange pump jug. What he really wanted was a shower, but he knew he probably wouldn’t get one for a while.

  He dried himself with paper towels, then wiped up any stray pink droplets and pulled on a fresh pair of jeans from his go-bag. He wasn’t remotely clean enough to fool a forensics expert, but if he found himself in police custody, he’d have bigger problems. Mostly Peter just didn’t want to wear another man’s blood.

  He found Lewis and Metzger beside the loading dock’s big doors, where an electric forklift stood beside twenty loaded pallets stacked two high and two deep on the concrete floor. Each pallet held four identical layers of sturdy cardboard boxes, making a four-foot cube wrapped up tight in clear packing film. “What’d I miss?”

  “Eighty of those things,” Lewis said. “All nice and neat.”

  Peter pointed at a single pallet that stood apart from the others. From the different shapes and sizes of the
boxes, he assumed it held a different cargo. “What’s that one?”

  Lewis shook his head. “Jarhead, you gonna love this.”

  “I swear, I didn’t know a thing about it.” Metzger kept his eyes on the pallet. “It’s our youngest guy’s account. We didn’t do any design or testing, we just built the things.”

  “What’s in the boxes?” Peter asked.

  “I already told your friend. I don’t usually pay attention to shipping details, but I’m the only one here to drive the forklift.”

  “Marty.”

  Metzger talked faster. “There’s another company name on the paperwork, but it’s on the same manifest as Holloway’s project. Like two stops on a delivery route, I thought. Until I went back and looked at the order. We made eight hundred of these things. Eighty of them on that pallet.”

  “Marty! What’s in the damn boxes?”

  Metzger wouldn’t look at him. “It’s a two-part assembly. One is a rifled tube wrapped with a series of magnetic coils. The other is a rectangular box that fits on the end.”

  “A magnetic gun barrel?” Peter felt his pulse accelerate. “So those things are armed? With an electric gun?”

  Lewis gave Peter that tilted smile. “Called a Gauss gun. Uses electromagnets to fire a steel round at high velocity.”

  Of course Lewis would know what it was. “Do they work?”

  Lewis shrugged. “Concept’s been around since the 1800s. Navy’s been testing electric artillery for a couple decades. Beauty is, no gunpowder. No cartridge to jam. Only moving parts are in the magazine, which means minimal cleaning and maintenance. Problem’s always been the power supply.”