Returning Fire

by Frans Harmon

  Anstice exited her unmarked patrol car. Several others, including a couple of the SUV’s used in the morning’s raid, were parked along the curbs on both sides. A purple mini-van pulled into a spot several houses down the street. Anstice was ready.

  She grabbed the brown-paper wrapped package and headed for Trayn’s front door. At the door, she paused, glanced back at the van, and then took a heavy hand to the brass knocker.

  A din of chatter, 40’s swing music, and a pink-faced Jack rushed through the open doorway. “Sergeant,” Jack said with a slur, “you’re late, but, hey, just glad to see you. Trayn’s in the kitchen.” He head-pointed directly behind him. She stepped inside.

  “Hold it, Sarge,” he said and patted her sides and waist. His hands hovered over her breasts.

  “Touch those,” she hissed, “you’ll be on the floor before you take another drunken breath.”

  Jack flashed a smile and backed away from the entrance, head tilted, and an arm gesturing her inside.

  The doorway opened into a contemporary styled living area, dark leather, bulky furniture, and two muted large flat-screens conveying a testosterone-charged room. Four members of the raid team, all with black stubble for hair, chiseled faces, and dressed in clean denim and crew neck T-shirts, glared her way and then resumed guffawing jabber.

  Trayn was pouring whiskey over ice on the counter of a pass-through kitchen. Two more of the raid team sat at a white-wire dinette set beyond the kitchen. Anstice dropped the package next to him. Trayn looked over at her, his head doing his rhythmic nodding. “You’re late.”

  “So I’ve been told. Traffic, what can I say?”

  “On Grand River, this time of night?”

  “We good? Been a long day,” she said, her eyes locked on Trayn’s.

  “Stay, enjoy the party.”

  Anstice looked around. The two men at the dinette were standing. “Not my kind of party,” she said, mustering a smile. She turned toward the front door. The four from the living room occupied that space.

  Trayn downed his drink and reached over and twisted a wall stitch. The music died to a whisper. “Got a call from Stem.”

  She faced Trayn. “Should that mean something to me?”

  “Yeah, it should, Ants. Stem said he was light. Only ones handling the money were you and me. I know what I did, do you?”

  Anstice’s cell-phone rang. She pulled it out of her pocket.

  Trayn glared. “Don’t answer that.”

  Anstice eyed him back. It rang again. Anstice tapped the screen, and it fell silent.

  Anstice’s heart was beating fast, she worked to control her breathing. Their eyes laser locked. Her body coiled for a fight. A fight she knew she would lose. “Don’t know what you mean, Trayn. Stem’s probably trying to claw your cut back. Wait, you’re not accusing me of making a grab on my first action? That’s crazy.”

  His head resumed nodding.

  “Look, I really have to go.”

  “I’ll give you one chance to make this right, Ants. One time only. Understand?”

  Chin up, her face rigid. “You were going to set me up anyway, Trayn. Plant the money in my desk, my apartment, whatever. So maybe I took a shortcut, saved you the trouble.”

  Trayn shook his head. “Smart girl Ants, I’ll give you that. Yeah, I was going to IA, they’ve been snooping around, needed to give them some meat. Up to me, I wouldn’t care ‘bout you taking a cut, Ants. Thing is, I have to make it up to Stem, these boys are going to be short. Not a good thing.”

  “Maybe we should take it out in trade.” One of the men by the dinette said.

  She turned towards the door, Trayn pulled her arm back. Anstice used the leverage to spin behind Trayn, she pulled her Glock from her holster and held it to his head, her arm coiling under his throat. Six guns were pointed at her.

  Trayn held his up hands, pushing out in front of him.

  “Back off guys,” she shouted, “you talking rape, a woman can get pretty crazy around six guys talking like that.” Her eyes darted from the two men to the four. The room was silent.

  Trayn laughed. “I told you she was a bitch, guys. Put the hardware away. It was just her cut, not the way I intended, but she just proved she thinks like us. We’re good, okay.”

  Trayn was nodding, and she knew the look he was giving them. Eyes unblinking, sweeping their faces, stopping laser-focused on each one delivering the message, there would be hell to pay if they didn’t do what he said.

  Anstice released Trayn and holstered her Glock. She chuckled, shook her head, and fluff punched his chest. “Later, Trayn.” She turned for the door, and the four, weapons raised in firing position, remained fixed blocking the door.

  “Jesus Christ, what did I just say. Stand down, now.”

  They lowered their weapons and parted like gates. Anstice exited, stepping out into large snowflakes yielding to cold rain, her heart pounding a hummingbird’s beat, her feet matched the pace to her car.

  Is betraying the man I love the only way out of this hate triangle? Her phone squawked with an APB alert. Was it the opportunity she needed? She waived to her back-up, Mace in the purple mini-van. Maybe it was, after all, she still had the tape.

  Chapter Forty-One

  The failsafe, Mace texting Anstice, hadn’t gone as planned, but somehow, she emerged from Trayn’s house okay. Now Mace was trying to keep up as she barreled through intersections at eighty plus, lights blazing and siren yelping.

  He had questions about today, this evening with Trayn, and a burning one, who she called Thursday night at her apartment. Anstice slammed her vehicle to a stop in the Eighth Precinct parking lot. Mace pulled his rental van alongside. Anstice rolled down her window, Mace followed, stretching across the front bench seat, cranking down the passenger side window. “I thought we were going—”

  “Get in, Emmitt found Sar’s truck.”

  Not a sentence he thought he would ever hear. His stomach churned at the thought of dealing with Emmitt, but lives were at stake, and he needed answers. Mace bolted from the van and barely managed to shut the door before Anstice did a tire squealing three-point turn. “It’s at Zug island, twenty minutes away.”

  She made it in less.

  A DPD patrol car, FSD crime scene truck, and two black SUV’s surrounded Sar’s flatbed recovery vehicle. It was parked at an odd angle behind an abandoned rust-stained Esso service station at Dearborn and West Jefferson Avenues. The industrial area forsaken and more trash heap than anything else. Mace and Anstice bounded from her patrol car. Brok and a second FSD tech were setting up around the truck.

  “DPD reported it two hours ago,” Emmitt said, “what took you so long?”

  Anstice signed a crime scene log held by a uniformed officer monitoring the scene and ducked under a strand of yellow tape. “We were busy.”

  “I heard you were partying at Trayn’s.”

  “Yeah, quite a story there,” Mace said, entering the scene, “we’ll fill you in later. Mace grabbed shoe coverings and gloves from a box at the officer’s feet.

  Anstice snapped her gloves in place. “What do we have here?”

  “Three concrete vaults strapped to the back of the truck,” Emmitt said, “I’m thinking that is how he transported the women without raising a hair of suspicion.”

  Mace mounted the truck, followed by Anstice. Mace inspected the inside of the casket sized concrete vaults. “Is that blood, Brok?” He asked, pointing inside one.

  “Believe so, already sampled. Will let you know.”

  Anstice peered into the same enclosure. “What do you think it means?”

  “Red. Red moon, partial of something else?” Mace said, shaking his head. “Don’t know, but she, whoever it was, took a big risk, it must mean something.”

  Mace jumped down from the truck bed. “What’s next, Emmitt? You canvasing, cameras?”

  “Not much to canvas on West Jefferson, everything discarded or forgotten.”

  “I’ll get uniforms canvasing and
looking for cameras I know the desk sergeant at the Fourth,” Anstice said.

  “Good luck with that,” Emmitt said, “But I thought you were assigned to the Eighth now.”

  Anstice grimaced. “Don’t officially start until Monday.”

  Emmitt jerked his head back. He hadn’t expected that answer. Both Mace and Anstice took note of his reaction. “Catch you up later,” Anstice added

  Mace stepped out of the crime scene, tossing his gloves and foot coverings in a receptacle. “What’s that across the street, Bear?” He asked, pointing to a trestle-bridge that looked rusting and more desolate than its surroundings.

  “Access to Zug. Combination road and tracks. U.S. Steel still uses the docks for iron ore, coke, and coal. A nasty place.”

  At the trestle entrance, there was a large No Trespass sign, warning that it was a one-way exit. “You think we can get an unmarked from your old stomping grounds?”

  * * * *

  At the Fourth, Anstice passed the canvasing and camera search request to the desk sergeant. She grabbed a set of keys for an SUV, Mace took the wheel. Returning to the Esso station, Emmitt and FSD had departed. A blue and white patrol was there waiting for a recovery vehicle to remove Sar’s truck. Mace drove the SUV onto the trestle-road bridge.

  Anstice cringed. “What are you doing, Mace? It’s the wrong way.”

  “I know I’m just trying to find a camera.”

  As they reached the island terminus for the bridge, two white pickup trucks surged onto the road, their amber lights flashing. Mace shrugged, and Anstice shook her head, restraining a surging giggle.

  Anstice activated the hidden hazard lights and leaned out her passenger side window. “DPD,” she said, holding her shield aloft, “we need a copy of your security recordings for the last forty-eight hours.”

  At the desk, she had cleaned out two days prior, Anstice connected U.S. Steel’s thumb drive to a desktop computer. The video captured activity from mid-trestle to Jefferson. The view of the station was limited to the left side of the abandoned building. Mace sat slouched back with his arms folded, and Anstice sat with her elbows propped on her desk, twirling a pencil.

  “Could be a photo for all the traffic we are seeing.” Anstice sighed.

  “Truck’s not there yet, and it is already daylight, same time as the raid went down.”

  A dump truck passed the station.

  “Going to be a long wait.” Anstice increased the scanning speed for the video. Blips of vehicles darted onto and off the screen.

  “What happened during the drop-off? I texted you, but—"

  “I pushed it, okay, but it worked,” Anstice said, her voice faltering.

  “You okay?”

  “Yes, sure, why wouldn’t I?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, a room full of angry guys – with guns, you the only woman, I can think of a thousand ways that could have gone wrong. They threaten rape?”

  Anstice swallowed hard. “I handled it, Mace, okay, just forget about it.”

  Anstice’s eyes shimmered with welling tears. “No, I won’t,” Mace said, “what happened?”

  “Why do you care?”

  Mace’s eyes locked onto Anstice's face tilted toward him, her red hair loose and cascading down to the desk. He reached behind her, caressed her hair, and gently pulled her lips to his. “That’s why,” he said when they parted, “now tell me.”

  Anstice pivoted facing away, then back again, arms folded. She told him about Trayn’s crew blocking her in the kitchen and using the momentum of Trayn’s grab to get her gun on him.

  “That was over-the-top tense, Bear. A finger twitch, and there could have been a lot of blood on the floor. You should have followed the plan, answered the call.”

  “Had to make it real, only thing Trayn and his scum bags understand. Anyway, it worked.”

  “You walked out with your hide intact.”

  “And the money, traceable money.”

  “I guess being raised with three older brothers has benefits. I never doubted you, but Trayn’s been planning to take you down from the get-go, makes you disposable.”

  They refocused on the screen. A black flatbed truck shot into view.

  “Back it up a bit,” Mace said.

  Sar’s recovery truck pulled into the station and parked behind it. Joining Anstice, Mace crowded her desk, peering into the screen. “Timestamp?”

  “Zero-seven-ten. We had just secured from the raid.”

  They watched as Sar left his vehicle and walked out of view.

  A white panel truck backed up broadside to the bed of Sar’s truck. The front license plate visible. “Freeze that. Can we zoom in on the plate?” Mace asked. The image quality was grainy, and the more they magnified the video, the more ambiguous the letters and numbers became.

  “WUP, something, something, or WOB. Can you make it out any better, Mace?”

  “No, we’re going to have to go with that. Can you put out an APB with what we have? Maybe something will pop.”

  Anstice tapped some keys and added the information to the all-points-bulletin list. ‘Done.”

  They watched as Sar transferred three limp bodies and drove the white van out of the Esso station, making a left onto West Jefferson. “So that’s it,” Mace smiled, “now how about dinner, and we crash at your place.”

  Getting more deeply involved with him was dangerous. Accepting her fate, she could love him, but it would be too risky, a slip of the tongue, and she would know the truth or what sounded like the truth. Would she weaken?

  Anstice rotated her chair, facing Mace. “About that, Mace. I’ve been thinking about Helyn.”

  “Really, that’s interesting, because—”

  “No, let me finish. I like you and all, but I’m not being fair. You wanted to put your marriage back together, and… I was… a distraction. I got too involved, and you didn’t seem to be ready. So, let’s cool it for a while.”

  “Who did you call the night, hmm… well, the morning of the raid?”

  Her face flushed to flame the heat shooting through her body. Should she lie? Would he know? “You knew about that?”

  “Yeah, I heard voices, never did wake up, you rode me hard that night.”

  Anstice bit her lip. After what happened in the raid, she questioned why she did it. A knot formed in her gut, anticipating his reaction. Her eyes teared, she folded her hands in her lap. “My mother.”

  “You’re what?”

  Anstice spun in her chair. “I know, I know, it was a teenage thing.”

  Mace laughed and folded her hands into his. “It’s just that,” she continued, “it… everything was so great. I haven’t felt like that since I was a kid.”

  Mace kissed her hands and then her lips. “Good thing this is Saturday, and no one’s around.”

  “But, Helyn, Mace. How can I—"

  “Helyn’s engaged.”

  “What?”

  “She told me yesterday, so quit worrying about it. We broke up. Hmm, can that happen if you are divorced? Anyway, if it went the way she thought it would, today she is engaged to some trauma doctor from U of M.”

  “Oh, Mace, that’s great. I mean, isn’t it?”

  Mace laughed, and Anstice wiped streams of tears from her now beaming face. He brought her hands to his lips and kissed them. “We need to get a room. Your place?”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Carrying a boxed pizza, Mace followed Anstice into her apartment. Exhaustion gaining a hold over him, he shed his jacket onto a chair inside the door.

  He flopped down on her sofa, dropping the pizza, holding less of his interest, onto a coffee table. He leaned back his head and body sinking into supple cushions. Anstice retrieved two beers from her refrigerator and held one high. “You up for it?”

  Mace nodded in acceptance. “Pizza and beer on a Saturday night, what could be better?”

  “Cept, it’s Sunday.”

  Mace nodded, raised eyebrows acknowledging reality. Anstice joined Mac
e at the sofa, handing him his beer as she slipped down next to him. She sat close, an arm propped against the sofa’s back, and her hand bracing her face. She sipped her beer.

  His eyes were closed. “What did you tell her?”

  “We getting into that again?”

  “Not often I’m the topic of a daughter-mother conversation. So, yeah, just the juicy bits.”

  Her hand fluttered from her face and dove into his dark curls pulling random strands just to watch them spring back into place. “Well, I said I met this dreamy blond…”

  Mace spun around, landing his beer on the coffee table and coiling his arms around Anstice. She shrieked with laughter as the sudden movement set her beer foaming out of the bottle. She managed to get the frothing brew to the coffee table just as Mace tumbled on top of her. Grinning, she guided his face to hers. They shared kisses, soft, warm, and numerous.

  Mace framed Anstice’s face with his hands, absently brushing her hair away. “Your growing on me, Bear. I think I might be falling…”

  Anstice placed a finger over Mace’s lips and then prodded him up and off her. She smiled and retrieved some paper towels from the kitchen and began sopping up the puddle of beer.

  “Meant to catch you up on my Friday, met with Brok and Helyn, some interesting things popped,” he said and flipped open the pizza box and grabbed a slice.

  Anstice backed into on overstuffed chair next to the sofa with the remnants of her beer. “Oh, such as?”

  “Joan Tuller. Helyn found MEKP on her, likely she was the last of Jirair’s victims.”

  “The Vulcan, but she wasn’t torched.”

  “Yeah, I’m thinking Tuller interrupted. So, when I told you I believed I did it, that wasn’t the source of my nightmare. The guilt reel my brain kept playing was my not stopping Tuller.”

  Anstice removed her phone from her belt and looked at it. “Mom,” she mumbled, tapping her phone and placing it display down on the counter between them. “So, what do you think happened?”