A series of small pops, sounding ridiculous in comparison to the rifle shots, told me the cop had unholstered his police-issue .38 and was doing what he could to keep the three gun-toting teenagers’ heads down.
That was my cue to stop being a passive spectator, get my ass down there, and see what I could do.
The boom of a shotgun bounced off buildings and streets as I bolted for the fire escape and the street below.
Chapter 3
“It’s a fucking mess,” Lieutenant Ed Durkee said, like it wasn’t obvious.
The cops had done a good job securing the site and keeping the media—damn they were fast!—away from the school perimeter, allowing them only oblique views from each end of the street to the killing fields in front of us.
That wouldn’t be enough to deter them.
I’d have been surprised if there wasn’t more than one eager reporter and camera crew already knocking on doors in the apartment block on the opposite side of Young Street, hoping to get an elevated view of the carnage and their network logo plastered coast-to-coast for the next news cycle.
Ed had been good enough to let me stay inside the police cordon. Probably too busy to throw me out but I repaid the favor by doing my best not to get in the way.
“What happened, Ed?”
“Looks like a couple of kids decided they were Rambo and the rest of the students were Charlies. Fucked if I know why, though.”
Ed’s description was accurate. The asphalt rec-area beyond the fence did look like an urban war movie.
Police and paramedics jockeyed with each other as they moved in and out of the schoolyard through a breach where a fence panel had been hastily snipped open and pulled to the side.
Like an open wound.
Inside the fence, bodies lay on the hard, dark bitumen like fallen leaves. The lucky were wrapped in blankets and being tended to, and simultaneously questioned, by the uniforms but there were too many silent, misshapen lumps under white sheets.
Two in a V-formation where I’d first seen the Overcoat Club.
Three lined up like piano keys on the main steps into the school building. Which way they’d been facing in their last moment, I couldn’t tell.
One crumpled outside a doorway at the top of the steps. Trying to barricade the door, maybe.
A few scattered single sheets behind steel-gray outdoor furniture.
Too many lined up side-by-side for their last assembly.
A few strands of straw-colored hair escaped from under the nearest shroud and wafted around. I knew it was only the breeze. Knew that there was no point pushing past Ed to rip the sheet off the poor girl and do my best to bring her back to life.
Knew it as well as I knew my own name.
But it still took everything I had to keep my feet rooted. I hacked and spat at the base of the fence. “I heard it happen, Ed. Lots of semi-auto rifle fire.”
“Yeah. There’re casings from one end of this yard to the other. It’s gonna take a lot of time to catalog it all. They musta been armed to the teeth.”
“Uh huh. Two were carrying duffel bags with spare ammo. The third one had a handgun, but coulda had something else under his jacket, too.”
“You saw them?” Ed eyebrows reached for the sky. “When? Where?”
“After it all started to go down. Didn’t see much, no more than a glimpse between buildings. There was a single big-bore shot, too. That was late in the piece, after your guys arrived on the scene.”
“Two, actually. You musta missed the other one. At this point we think there were two who took the coward’s way out. Least, that what it looks like. There’re a couple of bodies, still with weapons, and the duffel bags you saw, slung around their torsos.”
“Let me guess. Wearing overcoats and backwards baseball caps?”
“Negative on the caps. Neither one has enough of their head left to be wearing anything up top, but overcoats is right. Looks like they took turns eating the shotgun. I expect the first on scene’ll confirm that for us, if what you say about the timing is right.”
I swallowed. Ed continued.
“We’ll get a report from you. As a witness. But it might be a while. At this rate, Sergeant Ricco’s gonna be taking statements for the next few weeks. At the very least.”
I nodded and looked over Ed’s shoulder to where Ricco squatted on his haunches next to a dark-haired girl. In his natty pinstripe suit, wingtips and fedora, Ricco could have been at the craps game from Guys and Dolls.
Luck be a lady.
The girl streamed tears and whipped her corn-rowed head from side to side as she talked to Ricco. I caught a few words. “… in class, with everyone else … came outside … running back and forth … chasing … shooting … we were trying to hide … but there was nowhere to go … I was so lucky …” Looked like she’d lost control of her eyes; they rolled and bounced, dark and red and raw, reliving everything that she never wanted to see in the first place.
Ricco nodded, said, “Okay, Imani, what else?” and scribbled in a black notebook. So began the long and winding road of evidence collection.
I turned back. “How many, Ed?”
Ed mashed his face under both palms and let loose the biggest sigh I’d ever heard.
“Twenty-two dead. We figure two of those to be the shooters, though if what you say is right, there’s another one of them under a sheet back there.” He scrabbled inside his suit jacket and extracted a spiral notepad. “What’d he look like?”
“Like any other teenage kid, Ed.” He wrote down my description and nodded.
“We’ll confirm that soon enough.” He sighed again. “Only speck of good news is that there were only sixteen injured, but a shitload of kids and teachers traumatized to hell and back.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Listen, Rafferty, I gotta talk to the principal and Mayor Strauss wants an update in …” Ed checked a watch under his brown suit sleeve. “Shit, less than thirty minutes. I gotta go.”
“No problems, Ed. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
Ed flapped an arm at me and weaved his way between the uniforms, between wailing kids and quiet sheets, and trudged up the stairs into the school.
I packed a pipe and got it blazing. Eased my way through the opening in the fence.
My first footfall onto the school asphalt was like treading on hallowed ground. I tiptoed like a thief to avoid bullet casings glittering in the sun.
Though it had been less than an hour since I’d heard that first shot, DPD was already swinging from containing the scene and treating the injured to attempting to find out what the hell had happened, and to answer the bigger question.
Why?
Investigators were starting their work, a small group clustered around a senior detective to get briefed on the situation which would ensure they missed a lot of home-cooked dinners for the next few months. A young guy with a buzzcut locked eyes with me and I jerked my chin at him. He grimaced a thin smile, shook his head twice, and turned back to his briefing.
Looked back across Young Street. Between the apartment building—balconies filled with rubber-neckers—and the back of a weathered concrete office building, I could see my office building and roof top viewing position. From this end of the perspective, the distance appeared farther away than the reverse view had looked earlier in the morning.
Rafferty’s Rule Thirty-eight: There’s nothing like automatic gunfire to sharpen the senses and tighten the sphincter.
Lined up with the view I’d had from the roof and let myself drift back.
The first shot.
Impossible to tell where it had come from, or which direction it had been going. Wondered if that shot had been preceded by others. No way for me to even guess at that; DPD would have to put the timeline together from interviews.
I needed to start with what I could know, not what I couldn’t.
Okay.
Three shots spaced two to three seconds apart.
Then a three-shot burst.
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The wheeling flock of terrified teenagers. Swooping right to left in front of me, from over there—where the three sheets pointed the way back into the school—and headed towards that corner, where the girl with the straw-colored hair lay on the hard ground underneath a white sh—
Breathe, Rafferty.
Okay.
The two slowest in the flock were hit here, and Overcoat stood there while he wasted another half-dozen rounds shooting at kids who were already dead. The crimson blot creeping from underneath the shrouds told the story loud enough.
After that, the Overcoat Club had chased after the screaming kids while Skinny Boy came out the doors and down the steps to join in the fun.
I clamped my pipe in my teeth and headed across the rec-area.
Avoided the four shrouds as I climbed the steps. Peered in through the glass panels in the doors, and answered the question of whether there were any shots fired inside the school buildings. The hallway didn’t quite befit a scene from Carrie, but John Carpenter would have been proud.
Four more shrouds lay in the space, and all the walls I could see would need some heavy-duty cleaning before anyone other than cops could set foot in the hallway without tasting bile. There were a couple of techs taking photos and scribbling notes and doing their best not to trip over the bodies or each other.
I wondered how long it would take the Medical Examiner’s office to get moving, realized they wouldn’t know how to deal with this any better than the rest of us. Had the morgue ever had to deal with this many bodies at once?
“Hey you!”
I turned to see a patrol cop with a thick neck and razor burn heaving his bulk up the steps.
“Yeah?”
“This ain’t no peep show, buddy. Get the hell outta here.”
I pulled out my wallet and showed him my license. He stabbed it with a thick finger and read every word. I knew he did, I could see his lips moving.
“Private dick, huh? Don’t matter. Piss off.”
“Ed knows I’m here.”
“Well, don’t that change things? Since Ed knows you’re here, I guess you can … piss off. Now.” He moved to stand in front of the door and folded his arms across his chest. Must be nice to have a gut big enough to rest your arms on.
I could have pushed it, but I didn’t think there was much more to see without getting into the hallway itself, and that was already too crowded with bodies.
Headed down the stairs, didn’t give the fat cop the satisfaction of seeing me look back at him, and worked my way towards the street. Leaned on the chain-mesh fence and looked over the scene.
Kids still being comforted, questioned, and then escorted towards the police barricades where it looked like hysterical parents and hysterical media personnel heaved in equal numbers. For those unable to make the journey on their own feet, the occasional blart of an ambulance running the media gauntlet chronicled their progress.
Cops shuffled around on the street alongside the rec-area, sipped coffee, smoked, and shook their heads. More than one peeled back the scab to let their feelings out. “Goddamn it!” and more. Radios crackled.
Inside the fence, the investigators had broken from their huddle and started the tedious process of taking notes, placing crime scene markers, and photographing everything in sight. All while weaving between the sheets laying on the cold ground.
Stark. Silent. Still.
I’d have bet my favorite .45 that the two sheets slightly separated from the others would be covering two boys in overcoats and a pair of matching duffel bags.
But if that was the case, it meant the third shooter, the one that Ed hadn’t known about, wasn’t with those two. And, although I had faith that my favorite lieutenant would get back to the details after his mayoral audience, I was left wondering why the third shooter didn’t end up with his buddies.
And, assuming I was right, where the hell did he go?
Levered myself off the fence and shuffled around the perimeter of the rec-area to the left, keeping my back to the street and watching my feet. Headed towards the shrouds draped over my assumed shooters, see if I could sneak a look and confirm my thoughts. Was almost there before one of the techs taking pictures stepped out of the way, the fat cop saw me, and started down the stairs.
I held up a hand and backed away.
Not that he worried me, I just wasn’t in the mood for going head-to-head with a numb-nuts today. There’d already been too much violence for the morning and I didn’t feel like adding to it.
But I needed to do something. All I’d done while this shit-show played out was stand around and watch.
I felt useless.
Impotent.
To keep moving was all I had at the moment, so I headed the other way. Passed the bodies of the first two kids I saw get killed then weaved around four other sheets to get to the quiet corner at the opposite end of the rec-area.
Where the street-side fence turned back at right angles toward the school building, an elm tree soared overhead, dappling soft light on metal benches and a gaggle of backpacks and soft bags that might never be tossed carelessly in the living room corner again.
Looked like it could have been a smoker’s corner, the way it was tucked around a protruding brick wall and out of sight from all classroom and hallway windows.
An eight-foot-high green wall of out of control ivy sat behind the benches. The ground staff really needed to get onto that, the ivy was starting to pile up in the corner and a healthy crop of tendrils were making a move towards taking over the benches too.
I stepped up on the nearest bench. Couldn’t see over the wall, so pulled my way through enough ivy to find another chain link fence buried deep in the greenery. Kept pulling vines apart like I was looking for Dr Livingstone until I could see through to a service area behind. A scratched and rusted black dumpster took up most of the service area, the rest of the stained and cracked concrete driveway lay covered with ripped cardboard packing, some broken pallets, and ankle-deep piles of dead elm leaves.
Stepped off the bench and parked my butt while I relit my pipe. The wind shifted and I had to cock my head and cover the lighter close. As I pulled in a lungful of smoke, the pile of ivy in the corner lifted, hovered, and a dozen dead leaves came drifting out from underneath, got sucked up into a little vortex, and went spinning away over the schoolyard.
I sat and watched the nature show for a few minutes. With each gust of wind, the ivy in the corner lifted and moved. I’d never seen ivy do that before, but then who the hell was I, David Attenborough?
I looked around the rest of the scene. The investigators were busy concentrating in the opposite quarter of the rec-area. Fat cop was still at the top of the steps into the school and glaring at the world.
I stepped to the corner, dropped to my haunches, and grabbed a fistful of ivy.
It came off the asphalt easily and the higher I lifted, the more the ivy came away from the fence. Unlike when I was trying to see through to the service area, the ivy in this area wasn’t twisted and tangled through the wire. Like a living curtain, it pulled back to reveal an opening in the fence about three feet square.
Lifted the ivy as high as it would go and duck-walked into the opening. A pallet lay slant on the ground in front of me. I moved around it, made sure my head was clear, and stood.
I was in the service area and if I lifted the pallet and leaned it against the fence, no-one would be any the wiser as to how I got there. Neat little way in and out of the school. Perfect for cutting class without being seen. Definitely something I would have made use of back in my high school days when I would have rather been out with my friends than in another trig lesson.
I stepped over the pallet, lifted it back into place to see how well the hidey-hole would be concealed, and uncovered a familiar looking duffel bag.
Thought for a second that one of the shooters must have got over here and pitched the bag over the fence before eating his gun. Nope, Ed had said that the duffel bags were
still with them. Maybe this was a different bag, just garbage to be thrown away.
A shotgun barrel poking up from one end said differently.
The Mossberg 500 was nicked, spotted with rust, and unloaded but two full boxes of shells underneath would have solved those problems without hassle. A KA-BAR knife and a two-foot length of lead pipe lay ready to take care of any others that might arise.
Lotta weaponry and ammo to leave behind. Not that the Overcoats had looked like they needed the extra supplies. But the other kid; why leave all this behind and head out armed only with a handgun? That didn’t make sense.
Voices and rustling noises came from behind the pallet and I just got my fingers clear before it fell, covering the duffel bag again, and a young cop hauled himself through.
“Don’t you let him get away, you hear me?” The voice of the fat cop from the rec-area. No prizes for guessing why he wasn’t the first one through the hole.
“Yes sir!” The young cop in front of me put his hand on the butt of his gun and tried for his best sneer. I rolled my eyes at him and leaned against the dumpster.
It was two or three minutes later when Ed and the fat cop came hustling down the sidewalk and turned into the service area. I wouldn’t have called Ed fit, but the way that the fat cop was breathing and gasping as he tried to keep up made Ed look like he was ready for the Olympic marathon team.
“Rafferty,” Ed sighed. “I did you a solid by letting you stay on scene. Can’t you at least stay outta the way? Huh?”
“Don’t see why you need to do anything with me, but Jabba the Hutt there could do with a Richard Simmons video. Or a defibrillator.” The fat cop tried to glare at me but seemed to be fully occupied with standing upright and breathing right then.
“Already … told him to … leave the scene … once …,” he wheezed, “Sir.”
“Yeah, he’s a pain in the ass, all right,” said Ed. “Doesn’t take direction.”
“Character assassinations aside, Ed,” I replied, “you might be interested in this.” I gestured at the young cop, who was now trying a scowl, and he almost jumped. “Settle down. I just need you to step away from …” I pointed at the pallet. He moved and I lifted the pallet back against the fence.
Wright & Wrong Page 2
