Nickel City Crossfire

by Gary Earl Ross

  “Did she drop in here often?”

  “I guess once or twice a week.” There was no stress in his voice. “You get to know a lot of the regulars, but Nica stood out. She had a real foul mouth, cussed like a sailor. And…”

  “And?”

  “Her smile.” He stopped and looked back at us. “Musta been a nice smile at one time, you know? Kinda smile that makes guys hold open doors and wish they’d get lucky. But with her teeth all gross and shit, that smile just made her look pathetic. Even scary.”

  “Did you know she was a doctor?”

  “I heard that a couple of times. I remember thinking, Damn. Life’s a bitch.”

  We resumed climbing the stairs. I half expected Brother Grace to bolt when we hit the main floor. I wasn’t worried because we had the doors covered. But he reached the first floor and kept moving up, the three of us in his wake.

  “I know people thought Dr. Surowiec drowned,” Chalmers said. “But we didn’t find any water in her lungs, which meant she was dead when she went into the canal.”

  “No shit? Huh.”

  “Somebody beat her to death, bro,” Piñero said.

  “That’s terrible,” Brother Grace said.

  “The killer wore a ring,” Chalmers said.

  Three steps below the small landing at the top of the stairs and the dark wooden door that led to the bell tower, we came to a shadowy split-level tile floor that held a disused choir loft. Inside were cracked benches, broken folding chairs, parts of music stands—all dimly lit by a flickering sconce on the outside wall, just above a bookcase full of old programs, paper church fans, and hymnals that smelled of mold. Brother Grace stepped onto the tiles.

  “That’s far enough,” Chalmers said.

  I was behind him, still on the steps. Piñero was behind me.

  “But the keys to the bell tower are on that hook.” Brother Grace pointed to a brass coat hook beside the sconce. On it was a large key hoop.

  “We don’t need to go in the bell tower,” Chalmers said. He withdrew a folded blue paper from his inside pocket and handed it to Brother Grace. “We have a search warrant here for an infinity ring. Since you’re wearing one, we’ll start with yours. Then you can tell us if any more are in the building.”

  Brother Grace opened the warrant and leaned close to the sconce to read it.

  His forehead nudged the fixture, and the light went out.

  Something cut through the sudden darkness with a whipping sound that connected with flesh. I heard Chalmers cry out. He stumbled backward into me, forcing me to flail for the handrail. I caught it before my eyes began to adjust and strained to hold on as Chalmers’s weight forced me backward into Piñero. As we tried to keep ourselves from tumbling down the stairs, something clattered to the floor. Now a shadow, Brother Grace pounded up the last steps, jerked open the door, and disappeared into the bell tower like a bat into the night.

  “Son of a bitch!” The light came back on, Chalmers having reached the sconce and jiggled it. Blood dripped out of a gash in his left cheek. He pulled tissue from his pocket and pressed it against his wound. “Bastard knew the wiring was shaky.”

  “Jesus.” Piñero pointed to a tubular steel rod that lay on the floor. It looked as if it had come from a music stand. One end was wet. In the dimness, the color was uncertain to the eye but we knew it was red.

  I pushed past Chalmers and opened the bell tower door, but he came right behind me and caught my arm.

  “His advantage,” he said. “You’re lit. He’s not. If he’s got something up there—”

  As if on cue, I heard the unmistakable sound of a slide racked on a semiautomatic pistol. The first shot boomed down through the darkness, tearing a hole between us in the wooden floor of the bell tower landing. The gun was at least .40 caliber.

  Chalmers and I pressed our backs against the walls as much as possible. A second shot just missed my foot. The landing was too narrow. Sooner or later Brother Grace would hit one of us. Chalmers and I both unholstered and fired back, two shots each. It didn’t matter that his standard-issue Glock 22 S&W.40 was louder than my baby Glock. Each explosion in so tight a space must have hurt everyone else’s ears as much as it did mine. Backing down the stairs to give us room to retreat, Piñero screamed, “Shots fired! Shots fired!” into the handy-talky he pulled off his belt but his words sounded distant to my ringing ears. “Get in here and get these people out of the building!”

  The ringing faded. I heard screaming. “Out the back!” I shouted. “Not the front!”

  “Active shooter in the bell tower! Shooter in the tower!” Piñero said. “Get people out the back so he can’t pick ‘em off! Call for back-up!”

  Chalmers pushed me past him down the stairs. “You got nowhere to go!” he shouted up to Brother Grace, who answered with another shot. Chalmers grunted and clutched his upper chest, toppling into me. We both hit the tile floor outside the choir loft, me on my side, Chalmers on his back. Fedora askew, Piñero pulled his partner to one side, while I skittered backward to the bookcase beside the loft.

  “Shit,” Chalmers said through clenched teeth. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  “Officer down! Officer down!” Piñero said into his handy-talky. “We need EMTs in the bell tower now.” Then he tried to peel open Chalmers’s leather coat. “Lemme see. Lemme see.” Chalmers choked back his pain as Piñero worked the ruined leather over his shoulder.

  “How bad?” Chalmers and I said, almost in unison.

  “Upper chest, just under the clavicle, maybe two inches from his left shoulder.”

  Piñero wadded a handkerchief with tissue and pressed it into the wound. I heard feet thudding up the stairs and spun my gun toward the sound just as a rifle came into view.

  “Whoa, man! Just me!” Pete Kim said. “My heart’s too old for shocks.” He held up an AR-15. “From the SUV. The officers are clearing out the church. SWAT is on the way.”

  “Fucked up my face and shot me,” Chalmers said, his breathing labored. “The bastard fucked up my face—”

  “You’re a tough SOB, Terry,” Piñero said. “All that time in the gym, you got this pendejo trying to shoot through rhino hide. We’ll bring him down so you can spit in his eye.”

  Three EMTs reached us in less than ten minutes. Piñero, Kim, and I kept our guns trained on the bell tower landing as two men and a woman stabilized Chalmers in the choir loft and got him downstairs. We followed them part of the way down and held our position to keep Brother Grace in check. After a few minutes the SWAT commander, a big man named Stoll, stepped in to take charge.

  “I’m going to the ER,” Piñero said when we reached street level and went outside, where the ambulance was just closing its doors. “Pete, you run point till the brass get here.”

  “Got it, Raf,” Kim said as SWAT team members hurried past in various directions.

  A few minutes after Piñero took off, Stoll came back down with one of his officers and pulled Kim out of earshot. The three of them spoke for a few minutes. Then the SWAT men moved off and Kim returned to where I stood.

  “Standard breach?” I said.

  He nodded. “It’ll take a bit to set up. Once they establish a perimeter and get some shooters on nearby roofs, we’ll all have to knock on doors to evacuate the nearest homes and get other people to their basements. We know he’s got at least one piece up there, probably a pistol.”

  “Sounded like a handgun,” I said.

  Kim looked at the AR-15 still in his hands and shook his head. “I sure hope he doesn’t have any long guns. The last thing a residential neighborhood needs is bullets whizzing every which way.”

  “This your first SWAT op?” I asked.

  He sighed and looked down. “My first was a long time ago, when I was on patrol. A guy with a warrant out on him took his own kids hostage. Didn’t end well.” He swallowed. “Twenty-three years on the job, ten in a suit, I have a reputation for taking everything in stride. People still ask where I’m from. Or why I’m not in co
mputer science or medicine. I tell them I’m as bad at math as every other kid born here, and my Korean is even worse. Good old Pete, reliable smartass. But I still think about those two little boys and wonder what might have happened if I’d just let the guy jump that stop sign and didn’t follow him home.”

  “Whatever you can’t let go makes you a better cop,” I said.

  “Thanks.” He smiled. “At least there are no hostages in play this time. They might be able to talk him out.”

  I doubted Brother Grace would surrender but kept the thought to myself.

  Later, when several captains were on the scene and everything was in place, the SWAT team geared up and went inside. Kim and I crouched behind a cruiser as Commander Stoll made his final megaphone appeal to Brother Grace, which was answered by a single gunshot. Half a minute passed before we heard wood shattering, followed by the whoompf of tear gas canisters. No other shots were fired, which made me wonder if Brother Grace had put one through the roof of his mouth.

  Presently, the cruiser’s radio crackled with Stoll’s scream: “Everybody pull back now!”

  Kim and I stood up and looked at the bell tower. At first we saw nothing. Then, between the louvers, there was an orange glow. Within minutes the tower was engulfed in flames and gunfire filled the night.

  What the SWAT team had not known—and no one would know with certainty for almost a week—was that the tower was full of decades-old newspapers, German Bibles, and hymnals from the church’s Nineteenth-Century immigrant founders, all ignited by hot tear gas canisters fired up into the darkness. There were also assorted firearms and enough drugs of various kinds to get half the city high. Boxes of ammunition cooked off during the blaze. Bullets bounced and zinged within the stone walls for fifteen or twenty minutes, but no one outside was hurt. The air grew heavy with a burning smell—a mixture of antiseptics, ammonia, other cleaning agents, melting plastic, pungent weed, and something sickening that made a WIVB reporter in a live TV report describe the air as a “cacophony of olfactory horrors.”

  Pete Kim and I watched the wooden cross atop the tower burst into flames, light up the neighborhood sky, and fall to the street below. Soon the charred frame could no longer support the stone. The building began to fall in upon itself, shattering the few elegant stained glass windows that had not yet blown out and sending up clouds of debris to join the billowing smoke. Covering our mouths and noses as best we could, we choked and coughed and spat as we began to back away from a blossoming hazmat nightmare. I recognized one odor I had not experienced since Iraq and had never wanted to encounter again.

  Part of me hoped Brother Grace was already dead when the fire reached his flesh. But another part of me remembered the autopsy photos of Veronica Surowiec and imagined that even in her morgue drawer across town, Nasty Nica must be smiling her scary smile one last time.

  45

  Having heard from Piñero that Chalmers was in recovery and would be in the ICU by nine or ten that morning, I went home after the Sanctuary Nimbus fire, showered off the smell of smoke, and climbed into bed when most people were having breakfast. I slept till one-fifteen.

  Coffee in hand and rereading the account of the Sanctuary Nimbus fire in the Sunday Buffalo News, I was still in my robe when my doorbell surprised me. There was no name label in the slot above my doorbell, and all my mail went straight to my office a quarter-mile away. Few people knew my actual address. Most friends would call ahead before coming. Bobby used his landlord key whenever he felt the need to check on me, and Phoenix had her own key—which I hoped she would want to use again. My bell rarely rang, even by accident.

  I went to the intercom by the door and pressed the TALK button. “Yes?”

  “Rimes?” a woman’s voice crackled. “It’s Jen. Me and Bianca are downstairs.”

  The one hitch in my need for privacy. Law enforcement could always find an address.

  “We have to talk to you,” another voice crackled, tearful and unsteady. Bianca.

  I pressed TALK. “Okay.” I buzzed them up and tightened my robe. Then I opened my door and watched them climb the stairs.

  Both wore jeans and ski jackets. Jen’s knit watch cap was a lighter purple than her ski jacket. With a blue hoodie under a puffy red jacket, Bianca looked less elegant than when I first met her at the Galleria, and her face looked more tired.

  I gestured them into my living room. Despite tired eyes and an arm around her wife, Jen, the cop, took in everything—the arched windows above the built-in bookcases, the flat-screen TV and sound system, the prints of Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor and Faith Ringgold’s Echoes of Harlem, the free weights, push-up disks, and heavy bag in my workout corner. Then she noticed the bandage on my chin and looked away. My assessment of her had been right. One day she would make a fine detective. On the other hand, her eyes wet and haunted-looking, Bianca seemed to notice nothing. Both women sat on the black leather couch, as I dropped into the leather armchair I used to watch television.

  “How can I help you?” I asked.

  Jen helped Bianca out of her ski jacket. “I thought she was heading to the Rowhouse around the corner to get pastries to go with our coffee.” Then she removed her own jacket, revealing a heavy beige sweater, and put both coats on the far end of the couch. “But she went to see Keisha and now she’s scared.”

  “Keisha’s got a gun,” Bianca said, her voice low and her face looking distant and taut in the hoodie. “She’s going after Mrs. Markham.”

  I sat forward. “You know this how?”

  “I saw it.” She pushed her hoodie back. “I—” Her face fell then, tears beginning to trickle down her cheeks. She turned into Jen’s shoulder and cried.

  “Keisha sent her a text this morning,” Jen said, matter-of-factly, as she had been trained. “She asked if they could meet at the bakery near our apartment, without me so she could give Bianca something private. It was this.” From her back pocket, she took a folded piece of lined spiral notebook paper and handed it to me.

  I opened it and sat back. I recognized the tight, precise handwriting.

  Dear Mom & Dad, Bianca (+ Jen) & Fatimah (+ your family),

  First, I love you all. Before, if you asked me if there was a hell, I’d have said it doesn’t matter. If what the church says is true and you live a good life, you don’t have to worry. If it’s all just myth and you live a good life, you still don’t have to worry. You did the right thing, doing more good than bad, helping more people than you hurt. A good life lived can be its own reward. I tried to live a good life. But then I went to hell. Dr. Markham likes to say we’re born in the crossfire between heaven and hell and we remain there until the end. Which way we’re pushed is not always up to us. That’s why our faith must be strong. But I saw the man I loved murdered. I nearly died myself. This left me on the run and afraid.

  This hell was created by a woman I admired, maybe even loved. At first, I thought she couldn’t possibly be involved. She must be as much a victim as I was. Then I looked out the back window of a car and saw one of my former Sunday school students trying to kill me. That’s when I knew the suspicions I had denied were true. His crush on her was never a secret. He would do anything she asked.

  But that all ends today. If you’re reading this, I am dead. At least I died knowing I put an end to the woman who destroyed me.

  Thank you for loving me. Please remember me to Ileana and all my friends at work, and to Odell’s parents, who deserved better. Don’t forget Mr. Rimes and Ms. Trinidad for saving my life so I can complete what I think God may have put me on this earth to do.

  Love always,

  Keisha

  “What time was this?” I asked, folding the note and handing it back to Jen.

  “About eight-thirty,” Bianca said, sniffling. “She gave me that because she said she was going to take the fight to Mrs. Markham and finish it. Today. There was a good chance she might not make it out, so she wanted me to have this for her parents and friends.
If she called me tonight, that meant she was okay and I should rip it up or burn it. If not—”

  “May I see the text?”

  Bianca took an iPhone from her hoodie pocket, tapped the screen, and passed it to me. I read the cell number and the message, which matched Jen’s summary. For a moment I thought about all of it. Then I handed back the phone.

  “You saw the gun,” I said.

  “Yes, it was in her purse.”

  “A handgun then. Any idea where she got it?”

  “No.”

  “Describe it.”

  “She didn’t take it out. I saw it when she opened her bag to give me the note.” Bianca looked at Jen. “It kinda looked like your guns, baby, smaller than the one you take to work, a little bigger than the one you let me shoot in the woods.” She turned back to me. “Black, with a split trigger thingy.”

  “So maybe a Glock, probably 9mm,” Jen said.

  “I saw the letters PPQ on it,” Bianca said.

  “A Walther?” Jen said. “Who does she think she is, Jane Bond?”

  I let out a breath. “What kind of purse?” I asked.

  “Medium size, brown with a shoulder strap.”

  “What is she wearing?”

  “A black jacket with a fur collar. Black pants. Brown boots.”

  I vaguely remembered the jacket from Keisha’s coat tree the first time I saw it. I was certain she hadn’t slept in her own bed last night because Loni and Dante knew where she lived, but clearly she had gone home to dress for her mission. Had drunk a glass of wine.

  Jen looked at me and bit her lip. “People who don’t know what they’re doing can have accidents with safety triggers.”

  I nodded. “This is something you could take to your department.”

  “Bianca asked me not to.”

  “I’m afraid angry black woman with gun will mean shoot on sight.” Bianca squeezed Jen’s hand. “I know it’s not always like that, baby, but this is my sister we’re talking about.”