All The Big Ones Are Dead

by Christopher A. Gray

  Bishop called same number he had at terminal 1.

  “What’s up, Bish?” Rector answered.

  “Wait one,” Bishop replied, as he looked up at the counterman. “Let’s see your airline ID, your airport security authorization card and your driver’s license.”

  The airline employee fumbled for his cards and ID, and Bishop verified the photo ID as he read the numeric codes from each card to the man at the same time.

  “Now you wait,” Rector said.

  Bishop smiled at the counterman who seemed suddenly pale and shaky. Bishop, smile or no smile, could have that effect on most people. Still, the counterman was just a regular citizen until proven otherwise. Bishop’s nose was good enough to recognize an innocent civilian right in front of him. Try to put the poor guy at ease.

  It was chilly in the warehouse office. A couple of minutes passed. Two warehouse workers walked up to the office and almost tried the door, but the counterman waved them off. A couple of more minutes passed. There were muffled sounds of large tractor-trailers coming and going. Every so often, a shout or call from deeper in the warehouse could be heard. There were all the sounds of a busy warehouse. The commerce and freight of an airport, a busy warehouse and a busy country.

  “He’s clean,” Rector said, coming back to the call. “I could use more time, but there’s no hint of anything. Ask him how his daughter did at the state gymnastic trials, and in what event?”

  “Wait one.”

  “Carl?” Bishop said, startling the counterman. “How’d your daughter do in the state gymnastic trials?”

  “Wha…?” the counterman replied. “But I, uh, I don’t have a daughter. Two boys. Look, man, am I in some sort of trouble here? Is there something going on? I’m just an airline shipping employee.”

  “Just answer the question, Carl.”

  “Okay, fine. Answer the question,” he replied. “But your information is wrong. My boys play hockey.”

  Bishop nodded at the counterman.

  “He says no daughter. Two boys who play hockey.”

  “And he’d be right about that,” the man said. “He’s clean, Bish. He’s just a guy.”

  Bishop hung up, then turned to Carl.

  “I have to ask you a couple of questions, but I first needed to find out if you have any other connection to Eurocath. This is a federal and international matter. Breath a word of this to anyone, ever—your wife, your boys, talk in your sleep, one of your friends at a barbecue—and some anonymous branch of the government will send an agent around to change your life for the worse and forever. What I’m working on is important and dangerous. I have to be sure. Do you understand what I just said?”

  “Yes, sir. I really do.” Carl was leaning forward in his chair, eager to impress Bishop as agreeably as possible.

  “That’s good to hear. Without anyone else knowing exactly what you’re doing, can you get me the destination of the crate that was just released to Mr. Karst?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, I’ve got it right here in my scanner,” Carl said as he drew the large code scanner from the holster on his belt. “All the information is here. Most recent transaction scan. It updates in real time to the Eurocath computer server. It’s all tied to CBP eventually too, but not in real time. Probably updates DHS too, or something. Anyway, I can bring it up for you right now.”

  Bishop nodded, noted the information, then thanked Carl.

  “When I leave here, Carl, the first thought that is going to go through your head is, ‘Holy smoke, wait’ll I tell so-and-so about this one.’ Resist the urge, Carl. Resist the urge. Stay out of a federal prison. Watch your sons grow up. Grow old with your wife. Never say a word about this to anyone. You’re just a guy. You’re one of the reasons I do what I do for a living. I chase down bad people. I run them into the ground specifically so that you and your wife can raise a couple of smart, strong, healthy boys who’ll do a better job than we did. Do you get that?”

  Carl paused for a moment before answering. He was looking into Bishop’s eyes so there could be no equivocation.

  “Yes, sir. I get it. I really do.” Bishop believed him.

  ***

  The address in Brooklyn was in an area that Bishop knew well. 153 Front Street in Dumbo. Whenever he was in New York City with any free time, Dumbo was usually on his list of neighborhoods to visit. Art galleries, tech stores, coffee shops, good restaurants, and old streets to explore. He loved wandering around the neighborhood as much as he loved prowling Portobello Road and Brick Lane in London, Montmartre and Haut Marais in Paris. You could let time pass, read a good book, unwind, walk, watch the world go by. By any standard, they were all busy, hectic, eclectic neighborhoods, but Bishop found that they suited him perfectly.

  The building and the location bordered the shifting line between investment and improvement and the last of the old holdouts in Dumbo. That part of Front Street featured a grimy auto body shop next to an old, renovated eight story building full of tech startups; a trendy restaurant next to dry cleaning shop with windows so dirty you couldn’t see inside; a brand new, 14-story office building right next to a row of pawn shops and vintage clothing stores.

  The taxi dropped him off at the corner of York and Gold streets, two blocks east and one block south of the address. As soon as he got out of the taxi, he called Alexei Rector.

  “Hello, Bish,” was the answer, as usual. “What’s up?”

  “One fifty three Front Street in Brooklyn, New York. I need a landlord, a tenant list and a line on any building security you can find.”

  Rector hung up as Bishop continued strolling west along York Street. When he got to Bridge Street he turned right. He remembered a coffee shop or restaurant on the corner of Bridge and Front. He wanted a place to roost, and he had to kill some time until Rector called back. The Bridge Coffee Shop was right where it was supposed to be. He walked in the front door to find it only slightly noisy, with a Spanish-speaking radio station playing. A pleasant looking woman, all of five feet tall and a bit north of her ideal weight, was standing behind the counter talking to a twenty-something man that Bishop immediately pegged as an artist-or-musician-in-training. He appeared to be drinking a craft beer of some sort. The woman looked up and welcomed Bishop with a huge smile and a cheerful “Hola, senor!” Bishop had a good look around but the place was almost empty except for a business-looking couple at a table along the wall, and two middle-aged men sitting at different tables and engrossed in the Times. It looked like the lunch rush was well over, so Bishop gestured toward a small table at the window.

  “Por favor, está bien si me siento en esa mesa?” Bishop asked politely, pointing to one of the two unused tables.

  “Por supuesto, señor. Por favor tome asiento.” Bishop smiled back and took the table.

  After a minute or so, the woman finished her chat with the twenty-something and brought a coffee cup and saucer, cutlery, napkins and set Bishop’s table.

  “Your Spanish is quite good, but quite formal, sir,” she said smiling even more broadly.

  “Gracias,” Bishop replied, “I think.”

  At that she laughed out loud, then pulled out her order pad and said, “Qué onda?” It was her way of getting down to business. The lunch rush was over, they were probably closing in an hour or so until the dinner crowd showed up from the apartments and condos a few blocks away, so there was no menu. Bishop was okay with that too.

  “Coffee and a piece of apple pie, please,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “De nada,” she replied, turning away and attending to the order.

  Bishop pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of a flat clip in his right pants pocket, then tucked it under the sugar bowl. He might have to leave in a rush. A minute or two later, the coffee and pie arrived in good order. The coffee was good and the pie was fresh. He knew he could be doing a lot worse right at that moment, considering the company he’d been keeping lately.

  There’d been a vaguely acrid odor in the air as he walked to coffe
e shop. It had crept its way into the place. When the waitress came to back to the table to ask if everything was alright he asked he about it.

  “Oh that,” she laughed. She seemed to be happy about everything no matter what it was. “That’s the smell from those stacks over there. She was pointing at the window and curving her hand slightly to mean that the stacks were off to the right. “Not much of the old neighborhood left, thank god, but there are still a few small factories. That one makes metal plating, I think. Something like that.”

  She walked away and into the kitchen, and almost immediately got into a raucous but good natured argument with the cook about some sort of complaint he’d filed with the city about illegal parking in front of his street loading door into the basement. Bishop smiled as he listened. He didn’t know any of these people, but it all felt like home or at least something reliable and familiar.

  Reliable and familiar? Bishop thought. Wow. I really am jet-lagged. Starting to get maudlin. He gingerly rubbed the bruised side of his head. The area was tender. He took a deep breath and stretched as he did so. The action made him wince slightly, his momentarily tightened neck muscles aggravating the head injury. With his arms still above his head, stretching as far upwards as he could while sitting at the window table, he suddenly snapped his head back slightly and leaned as far as he could over the back of the chair.

  The slight snapping motion of his head, saved his life. The bullet burst through the window a split second before the muffled whump of a suppressed shot hit his ears. Bishop felt the sudden change in air pressure as the bullet tracked through the space between his left elbow and his left ear. He shoved as hard as he could manage in his awkward position to push the chair and himself backward to the coffee shop floor. As he was going down, two more bullets smashed through the window, the second shot taking out the entire pane of plate glass.

  “You!” Bishop hollered from the floor at the two other tables. “Get down, and stay down until the police get here. You in the kitchen!” he ordered, rolling on the floor, “get down and stay down!” The craft beer guy at the counter was already on the floor, looking scared and staring at Bishop for direction. He ignored the guy. Bishop had shouted at the same time as he was calculating the time interval between the bullet impacts and the sound of the shots.

  Not more than a hundred yards. Probably less. He crawled backward, away from the razor-edged glass window shards. Then sprinted to the kitchen in a deep crouch. He dived through the kitchen swinging door and landed near some open boxes of lettuce, opposite the terrified woman and cook.

  “Roof access?” he said quietly to the ashen-faced workers “A ladder to the roof? Is there a way to get onto the roof from inside? For the air conditioner on the roof maybe?”

  “Oh, si, si, si,” the cook said, his voice quivering, pointing to a back corner of the kitchen at a steel rung ladder mounted to the wall. “Straight up, straight up. The hatch at the top sticks.”

  “Thank you,” Bishop said. “Stay here. I don’t know how many are out there. But until they see me dead or the other way around, they will shoot you. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, yes, si, si,” the two said in unison.

  “If you have a storage room, lock yourself in it. Don’t move forward of this kitchen until I tell you to or until the police tell you to. And keep your heads down!”

  The terrified looks on their faces told Bishop everything he needed to know. They wouldn’t move outside the kitchen until someone bodily dragged them out.

  Bishop popped his head up near the swinging door’s grimy rectangular window pane. The view gave him a blurry but discernible view of the little restaurant and a narrow angle of view out to the street. It looked clear. He turned and walked in a crouch to the roof ladder, and made his way up. He shoved the latch aside then hinged open the hatch and rose up just enough to swing open the hatch all the way, setting it down quietly on the rooftop. He scanned several buildings to the north and west, windows and rooflines, but saw no movement or anything that shouldn’t be there from his second storey vantage point. He drew his Glock and checked it carefully. He re-holstered the gun and then moved onto to the rooftop itself.

  Hugging the inside of tall, wide roof parapet, Bishop crawled across the pea gravel spread on the roof until he estimated that he was lined up in the general direction in which he thought the shots had originated. He slowly lifted his head so that his eyes cleared the top of the parapet, scanned the buildings forward, to his right, and to the rear as quickly as possible. He saw nothing unusual. He unhurriedly raised himself up to get a look at the street below, directly in front of the coffee shop. Two men were approaching, right hands inside their jackets exactly where a shoulder holster would be, covering their weapons.

  You made a mistake, boys, he thought. You roosted across the street behind the hoarding around the empty lot. Thirty yards away at least, unstable ground, firing at a target in motion sitting behind a window that was bouncing glare into your eyes. Not smart.

  The two men had to have backup. These two he could take care of easily. They were just the appetizer. David Trask was in the area, expecting Bishop, but he’d sent a couple of contractors instead of getting the job done himself. Bishop wanted whomever was directing these two, so a couple of kill shots would not do. He needed at least one of them alive.

  Wary of movement in the building windows off and ahead to the right, Bishop watched the two men work their way toward the front window of the Bridge Coffee Shop right below his position. Neither of them had spared so much as a glance toward the roofline. They were working quickly because they wanted to be good and gone before the police arrived. Their weapons came out as they set foot on the sidewalk, and right at that moment Bishop’s phone vibrated. Bishop pulled the phone out of his left pants pocket and flicked the ringer on as he repositioned and aimed down at the two contractors. They looked up at the ringing. They froze momentarily as the image formed by Bishop’s shoulders and outstretched arms braced over the parapet registered in their minds.

  It was all Bishop needed to put one shot into each man; left upper shoulder of one, right upper shoulder of the other. Bishop was exhaling as he made the first shot. He tracked to his right instantly and made the second shot with a smooth squeeze of the trigger. He tracked right and upward, and scanned the building windows and rooflines again. Still nothing. He got to his feet and sprinted back to the roof hatch, almost jumped down the whole height of the ladder, then raced out to the sidewalk. If anybody had reported the gunplay, he had very little time to get what he needed from the two contractors before the police swarmed in.

  Still scanning adjacent building windows, he picked the contractor who was apparently still conscious. The man was struggling to get to his feet, but Bishop cuffed him on the ear then dragged and heaved him over the windowsill into the diner and laid him down on the glass-littered floor. They were out of sight of any of the upper building windows across the street.

  “You have ID?”

  “No,” the man said between gritted teeth. He was in obvious agony. “I’m clean.”

  “Who is your boss?” Bishop said coldly. “Make it good and I’ll get you out of here. Stall and the local police will put you into the system. After that, the only thing you’ll hear from your boss is likely to be the sound of a knife sliding between your ribs in a federal lockup.”

  “Guarantees?” the man asked. He was asking for federal protection.

  “None,” Bishop replied. “Only my personal word. Your partner is done. Hasn’t moved yet. He’s out. I did not have a great angle on him from the roof. Probably nicked an artery. Maybe his heart or lung.”

  The sound of sirens was keening in the distance.

  Bishop looked up, then down again and smiled at the contractor. “It’s up to you. Choose now, before the choice is lost altogether. Them or me.”

  “Karst. His name is Avida Karst. Ex-military, ex-Agency. One fifty-three Front Street. He’s got half the third floor. Nobody above or b
elow. I think he rents or owns those spaces as well. Keeps them empty for security purposes. Now help me up.”

  “Stay put,” Bishop said, holding him down with one boot. “Security? CCTV?”

  “No… uh,” the contractor grunted in pain. “Front entrance to the building is on a timer. Lobby, back entrance and loading dock CCTV only during the day.”

  “What about halls and stairwells?”

  “Nothing, I mean, I don’t think so.”

  Bishop kneeled down about a meter away from the man, just far enough to be able to safely react if the contractor decided to make a stupid move.

  “There is security. I know Karst. Tell me what I need to know.”

  “No. You’re wrong,” the contractor was sweating profusely and he was starting to look very pale. It was blood loss, or something worse. “I swear it. S’far as I know they moved into the third floor not more than a month or two ago. Second, third and fourth floors were a tech outfit of some kind. Software. I think. Vacated. Out of business. You can check this. For fuck’s sake, help me up! That’s all there is!”

  In response Bishop stood up and offered his left hand. The contractor reached slowly and painfully over with his right hand to get a good grip. As soon as Bishop was sure his grip wouldn’t slip, he snapped his right hand, arm and shoulder toward the contractor in downward driving punch. As intended, it caught the contractor right on the button, that spot halfway up the jawline that guaranteed a knockout every time when delivered by Bishop.

  “You wanted a guarantee,” Bishop said to the inert contractor. “There it is. Pain and unconsciousness followed by a hospital stay, rehab, endless interrogation and a miserable jail cell for a long, long time.”

  Bishop ran back to the kitchen. He pulled a pen and a small notepad out of his inside jacket pocket. He wrote a number down quickly, tore out the page and gave it to the woman.

  “I am sorry for the trouble. Call this number, tell whoever answers that you spoke to Bish about a special cleanup for your restaurant. Someone will come quite soon. They’ll come this afternoon or this evening, but you must wait for them to arrive. Say nothing to the police who will be here in less than a minute. The cleanup crew will deal with the police for you. Understood?” The woman and the cook were wide-eyed, and more than slightly shocked. But they nodded. “Remember the name,” he reminded the woman, looking directly into her eyes. “Bish.”