Storm Rising

by Douglas Schofield

  He bent to release the lock on the passenger seat and shoved it all the way back to make room for his long legs.

  “I would’ve driven, you know,” he said as he yanked the passenger door closed.

  “My car, my rules. You’ll get your chance.”

  Tait twisted the key. Jack felt the powerful engine respond. They pulled out of the lot.

  “How long were you and Cal partners?”

  “Seven years, eight months, ten days.”

  “Good friends, then.”

  “Yeah.”

  Tait swung north on Avenue C. He stayed in the outside lane, tires alternately crunching and splashing, moving with the subdued traffic flow. Ahead of them, a sedan fishtailed as it swung into traffic. Even here in the center of town, the roads were still slick.

  “How did he end up behind that warehouse alone?”

  Tait turned to his new partner. “Look, kid,” he said in his low rumbling voice, “if you want us to get along, you won’t bring up Cal Parrish again.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Hen-dricks…” Tait rolled Jack’s surname off his tongue. “Sounds a lot like an old Bayonne name.”

  “One of the oldest.”

  Tait gave him a sideways look. “How’s that?”

  “Dutch settlers … from way back.”

  “How far back is ‘way back’?”

  “If you believe the stories, my family took up their land grant in the 1650s. Didn’t last. Indians drove ’em out. They finally made it back a few years later.”

  Tait grunted. “What’d they do? Call in the troops?”

  “No. They did it the Dutch way. They negotiated an agreement, and then they kept their word.”

  “So … old family … old connections. Explains how you got into plainclothes so fast.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You were only in uniform for, what, a couple of years?”

  Jack exhaled. “I applied. I got the transfer. Last cop in my family was back in the thirties, so I don’t think my name helped much.”

  “Sorry, kid. Took me a lot longer to get down the hall. Always figured it was because I’m a FOOT.”

  Jack knew what that meant in local slang: fucking-out-of-towner. He replied carefully. “I’ve heard that before. People saying locals look out for each other. One guy said it was like the Freemasons.”

  “Yep.”

  “I can’t say … I grew up here, went to school here, spent time in the Army, and came back. My name never opened any doors.”

  “Maybe. But you’re sitting in this car.”

  First Cal Parrish. Now this …

  Jack decided to change the subject. “Where are we heading anyway?”

  “Captain wants us to talk to a witness. Guy was sitting in his car outside Irv’s Liquors when that robbery went down. Said he was afraid to come forward last night, but his wife talked him into calling us.”

  “Whose case is it?”

  “The guys who caught the file are off tonight. Blackburn asked us to take the hand-off.”

  “I haven’t even seen the file.”

  “In my briefcase.”

  Jack twisted in his seat and reached back. Just as he snared the briefcase, their radio came to life.

  Seven-Five-One … Respond Code One … We have a report of a carjacking Hook Road and Four-Forty. Female victim unconscious. Witness describes two male actors, heading north on Four-Forty in the victim’s dark blue BMW SUV. We’ve got a partial—begins Mike Two Eight, repeat Mike Two Eight.

  Jack keyed the mike.

  “Five-Eight-One, myself, and Five-Eight-Two are uptown, we’ll head to Four-Forty and the Av C ramp.”

  Dispatch came back instantly.

  Received Five-Eight-One.

  At Tait’s nod, Jack lit them up and hit the siren. Tait punched the accelerator. Too hard. The rear tires spun. Jack grimaced. Tait backed off, waited for the tires to grip, and then started edging up their speed. The traffic cleared obediently, and they made it to the Route 440 ramp in less than five minutes.

  At the top of the ramp, Jack killed the lights and siren as Tait swung the Charger up over the left-side curb onto the verge. They waited behind a brake of juniper bushes, conveniently evergreen even in the depths of winter.

  A few minutes later, a dark blue BMW blasted by.

  Jack got back on the radio.

  “Five-Eight-One … we have that vehicle north on Four-Forty from Av C. We’re in pursuit.”

  Jack hit the lights and siren as Tait rolled the Charger back onto the ramp. They merged onto Route 440 and took up pursuit.

  Bayonne received. All units clear channel one.

  After three-tenths of a mile, the roadway bent left into the notorious 440 loop. It was an apparently pointless curve that inexplicably forced northbound traffic south, then abruptly north, toward Jersey City. The Bayonne police had long cursed the road design for its sharp curves. Local towing companies, not so much … overturned tractor-trailer units were the norm along the section’s half-mile length.

  “Five-Eight-One … entering the loop, speed forty-five, surface slush, target vehicle speed estimated sixty.”

  The north zone supervisor took over.

  North Super received. I have it, Dispatch—notify Jersey City. Five-Eight-One, use care!

  “Five-Eight-One, received.”

  A warning sign ahead displayed a switchback arrow and a twenty-five-mile-per-hour warning. Tait was already backing off their speed. “Idiot’s going to roll that thing,” he muttered as the BMW disappeared in a spray of slush around the bend at the bottom of the loop.

  True to prediction, they rounded the corner in time to see the target vehicle in a broadside slide. It capsized, rolled, and came to rest upright on the far side of the median. Oncoming cars swerved.

  “Five-Eight-One … north bend on the loop. He lost it. We’re out of the car.”

  As the Charger slid to a stop, Jack bailed, weapon ready. He rounded the nose of their car and started moving toward the BMW. He heard Tait behind him, then heard him yell, “Kid!” and suddenly found himself facedown in the slush and the dirt. Tait landed heavily right next to him. In the same instant, a spray of automatic gunfire whipped just above their heads and chewed up their car. Almost simultaneously, they heard the wet slide of braking traffic and the boom of a collision on the road behind them.

  “Fuck this,” Tait said. He took careful aim with his Glock and fired three quick rounds. A black barrel protruding from the SUV’s driver’s-side window jerked upward and disappeared. An instant later, from their ground-level vantage point, they both saw a pair of boots hit the ground on the far side of the BMW and start running away from the scene.

  Jack and Tait jumped wordlessly to their feet, separated, and made a weapons-ready run at the vehicle. Tait jerked the driver’s door open and swung into position, flashlight on, gun ready.

  A scruffy male, mid-twenties, lay sprawled across the seats. There was a neat hole in his cheek just below his right eye and the back of his head was missing. Blood and gray matter dripped from the seat back and the ceiling above him.

  Jack lifted an automatic weapon off the floor of the vehicle, where it lay among a litter of shell casings. “It’s an AR-15.”

  He straightened and stood for a second, noting the stopped traffic to his right … the vehicles trying to reverse … the few men who had emerged from their cars jogging back up the line of traffic, waving arms and shouting. He shifted his attention to the figure of the other carjacker, running and slipping, silhouetted against the lights of the Rutkowski Park entrance and the Port Newark container terminal a half-mile across the bay beyond.

  “He’s heading for the park,” he said thoughtfully.

  Tait guessed what he was thinking.

  “Don’t do it, kid! We’ll get him!”

  Sirens were closing in from two directions.

  Jack started moving. “The name’s Jack. And yes, we will.” He strode into the middle of the highway. H
e held up a flat palm to make it plain to the goggling drivers at the front of the line that they’d better not move.

  As if anyone was going to argue with a mud-covered man packing an assault rifle.

  Tait yelled after him. “Jack! Not in the back!”

  Jack raised the rifle and took aim.

  “Jack!”

  The young detective squeezed off a single shot. The distant figure dropped.

  The sound of the gunshot hung on the heavy night air.

  Jack strolled back to the BMW. Tait was staring at him in disbelief.

  “Thanks for getting my name right,” Jack said evenly. “Scratch one tibia. It’s going to be a while before he runs from the cops again.”

  The downed man’s squeals and moans reached their ears.

  “I thought you Dutch guys would rather negotiate.”

  “He didn’t have anything to trade.”

  Tait allowed himself a faint smile. “I think maybe you and I are gonna get along.”

  Jack nodded. He gestured toward the writhing carjacker. “I better go get him.”

  “I’ll do it.” Tait jerked a thumb at traffic chaos behind their Charger. “Check for injuries back there. And make sure someone called the medics.” His dark eyes cut to the BMW. “And the M.E.”

  “Right. And, Ernie…”

  “What?”

  “Thanks for the save.”

  “My pleasure. I thought you’d rather eat slush than take a bullet.”

  3

  Kevin’s first visit with Megan Avedon, the child psychologist—a kindly woman in her forties with a welcoming smile—hadn’t been very productive. He was still limping, although not all day, every day. He wouldn’t engage with Dr. Avedon at all, either in or out of Lucy’s presence, even to discuss his apparently painful gait. At the end of the session, she reported to Lucy that Kevin had just stared at her with “those old-soul eyes” and asked her if she had a gear set he could play with.

  The psychologist had wanted to interview Lucy ahead of time, alone. Lucy told her that she’d need time to arrange a sitter for Kevin because her sister Erica was busy at their father’s bar. So they’d made two appointments for later in January—one for Lucy, and a later one for Kevin.

  The babysitter excuse wasn’t precisely accurate, but it had given Lucy some breathing room.

  Some time to prepare herself.

  The fact was, the whole process left her cold. She’d already been down the grief counseling road, and she realized this would be more of the same, just under another name. She’d never been someone to share her deepest feelings—except with Jack, who was now lost forever in unreplying death—and she dreaded having to explore them with another pretend-friend analyst.

  On the other hand, she knew she owed it to her son. Especially since, at least once a day for the past two weeks, Kevin had burst into tears for no apparent reason. At least, for no reason that he could be persuaded to explain.

  Then, today, just after four o’clock in the afternoon, something happened that rocked Lucy’s perception of reality. Kevin crawled into her lap, hugged her, looked up into her eyes and said, “Mommy, it’s time to go home.”

  Lucy’s heart sank.

  “I don’t understand, honey. What do you mean by ‘home’?”

  “Home to b-bay … to Bay-onne.”

  Bayonne.

  Lucy was shaken.

  She had left New Jersey before Kevin was born.

  He had never been to Bayonne.

  Lucy had been four months pregnant when her sister Ricki arrived to move her back to Florida. She’d been dealing with the indifference of pension board bureaucrats, trying to sort out a payout and allowance. The constant rumor-mongering that Jack had been corrupt, the attitude of the police toward her, the attitude of fellow teachers at the school—it was all too much. The last straw was when she returned home from an appointment with a specialist ob-gyn physician in Manhattan to discover that her home had been burglarized and ransacked. The uniformed patrol officers who answered the call had seemed almost indifferent, and the actions of the BCI crime scene technician cursory and slipshod. Ricki had been trying to persuade her to move back to Florida; now Lucy was ready to agree. Wallowing in her loss, and feeling increasingly isolated, she began to believe that if she didn’t get away from the whispers and the stony looks, she would lose her sanity.

  Ricki had driven thirteen hundred miles to help her pack up her life.

  To save her from the dolore immenso that was sapping her will to live.

  They’d moved most of her effects to a self-storage unit at the north end of town. Then they’d driven south—Ricki deliberately taking it slow, making the journey last, so they could talk. Well … so Ricki could try to talk to her silent, paralyzed sister. When they arrived in Coral Gables, Ricki and Jeff had installed her in a spare bedroom in the main residence so they could keep an eye on her until she made it past her period of darkest thoughts. She was remote and impenetrable, and they feared for her life. It wasn’t until Kevin was three weeks old, when Lucy finally seemed to have found something to live for—someone to live for—that they’d agreed to let her move into the guesthouse behind the pool.

  In the meantime, unable to help herself, Lucy had kept a watch on the New Jersey media websites. Stories kept appearing in the Bayonne and Jersey City press under headlines that seemed expressly designed to lacerate:

  DEAD COP MAY HAVE BEEN INVOLVED WITH ORGANIZED CRIME

  BAYONNE POLICE REMAIN QUIET ABOUT CORRUPT COP INVESTIGATION

  Allegations that amounted to nothing more than rumor-mongering were regularly recycled. The main allegation was that Jack had been somehow connected to an unnamed New Jersey crime family. Lucy knew the reporters were talking about the infamous Lanza family. After spending several weeks tormenting herself with these articles, she finally terminated her online searches.

  But the unwelcome reminders didn’t end. Not long after her move south, she received a call from the owner of the compound where she and Ricki had rented the storage unit. Someone had cut the lock off her unit and rummaged through her effects. Exasperated, she asked the man to secure it with a new lock, mail her a key, and let her know what she owed for the extra expense. She promised she would include it in her next payment.

  “But, ma’am, don’t you want me to call the cops?” Whatever the man may have thought about all the rumors, his tone showed that he was sympathetic to Lucy.

  “Thanks, but no. They won’t do anything about it.”

  “But, why wouldn’t they?”

  “Because they’re probably the ones who broke in.”

  Although she had never returned to Bayonne, Lucy hadn’t been able to bring herself to sell the house that she and Jack had bought together. So she’d used the lump-sum payout from his police pension to make a balloon payment on the mortgage, and then left the property in the hands of a rental agency.

  She cradled her little boy’s head against her breast, searching her memory, trying to recall if she had ever talked to him about Bayonne, or to someone else in his listening presence.

  But what came to her mind was something else.

  She remembered his mystifying obsession with her old Rand McNally atlas. It had started early last fall. Poring over maps of the fifty states had seemed a strange interest for a four-year-old boy. The aging atlas’s spine had deteriorated and some of the maps were coming loose. Concerned that he might damage it further, she’d taken it away when he wasn’t looking. But he cried so piteously that she finally relented. After that, he’d spent days flipping back and forth through the book.

  Stranger still, thinking about it, had been her later discovery of a clue card from his I SPY Preschool Game protruding from page 108. It was as if her son had deliberately bookmarked the map of New Jersey.

  New Jersey.

  The state she had left behind five months before Kevin was born.

  His fixation on Bayonne made no sense.

  For the last four years,
she’d put her life on hold, waiting for something to happen—something to help her decide what to do next.

  Maybe the universe was trying to tell her something.

  What happened ten seconds after that very thought crossed her mind shook her to the core.

  Her phone rang. The call display showed a number she didn’t recognize, but an area code that she did: 201.

  It was one of the area codes for Bayonne.

  Lucy’s hand trembled as she answered.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi! Is that Lucy? Lucy Hendricks?”

  “Who’s speaking?”

  “It’s Garrett, Lucy. Garrett Lindsay.”

  She blanked for a second.

  “Garrett?”

  “Yeah, it’s me. How are you, Lucy? It’s been a long time.”

  “I’m … I’m fine. Can I ask how you got this number?”

  “Teachers’ Fed. Your last renewal.”

  “I thought I’d let that go.”

  “You did, but this contact number was on your form from ’09. I took a chance.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve been thinking about you.”

  “Why?”

  “I know you went through hell back then. I mean, pretty obvious why you felt you had to leave. Leave the job. Leave Bayonne. Everyone understood.”

  “Yeah. Thanks, but—”

  “It’s been a few years now. I mean—”

  “Garrett. Why are you calling me?”

  “Okay. I’ll just come out and say it.” He spoke quickly. “I’m calling because I’m hoping you’re ready to come back … to, you know, move back. Come back to your old job. Okay, not exactly your old job, but come back, join my team, and—” He stopped abruptly, as if he was embarrassed by his rapid-fire sales pitch.

  Lucy was completely unnerved. She looked down at Kevin. He was lying with his knees drawn up, his head on her lap, his face pressed to her stomach.

  “Your team?”

  “I’m the principal at Oresko. We had a resignation over Christmas, and I thought—”

  “Oresko?”

  “Sorry. The Nicholas Oresko School. It’s the new one on the site of old P.S. Fourteen. They named it after the medal of honor winner. I guess you missed that.”