Keeper

by Greg Rucka

  “And he killed Katie believing that he was balancing the scales, I guess. Romero took his child, so Grant took hers,” she said. “They both died because Melanie Baechler needed a Pap smear.”

  We were getting into the car when my pager went off. I got back out and used a pay phone by the bodega.

  “We’ve found Barry,” Fowler said. “He’s at your place.”

  “My place?”

  “Asshole’s threatening to blow the building up.”

  “I was making a circuit of the building,” the patrolman said. There were sweat stains under' his armpits, and around his collar. “Came around through the alley on Sullivan into the courtyard here, saw this guy up on the fire escape on the sixth floor. For a moment I thought, I don’t know, I thought it was just some fuck trying a little B and E. He was toting a duffel bag, big blue-and-green thing. So I called backup and we went around, left my partner at the bottom of the fire escape in case he tried to come down that way. We’re halfway up the stairs when my partner calls us back. Says he’d been made, said the shithead swears he has a bomb and is going to blow the place up. I got up to the sixth floor and Barry—and it’s him, he gave his name—said if anyone comes any closer he is going to start shooting. Says he has a gun and a bomb.

  “Then the circus came to town.” The patrolman waved his arm around the courtyard, smiled apologetically at me, then asked Lozano if that was all.

  “That’s all,” the detective told him.

  Lozano, Bridgett, and I stood on the outer perimeter line, at least twenty-five uniforms between us and the inner perimeter, where the commanding officers were assembled. There was no radio traffic, that had been disallowed the moment it was suspected that Barry might have a bomb, but the racket was still considerable, mostly from the crowd that had gathered. The media was still arriving, camera crews and photographers and reporters, and then there were the spectators, a lot of them kids freed for summer, with nothing better to do it seemed than to take bets on whether my home would be going up in a ball of flame.

  Floodlights were up and running, bathing the building in halogen light. The courtyard spread in a perfect square at the back of all four buildings, with my apartment on the east side, sixth floor. Barry had pulled the blinds in Rubin’s bedroom, preventing prying eyes from seeing just what he was up to. Facing that window, from the opposite building’s roof, was one ESU sniper, poised and set with his rifle sighted on the bedroom window. Snipers waited on other roofs, covering all the possible angles of attack. There were really only two shots they could take, the first through Rubin’s bedroom window and the second across the alley, and the snipers would take the shot only if Barry started gunning for lives.

  Or if Barry was really serious, if he was really going to bum the place down.

  And the cop was right. It was a circus.

  Bridgett and I had arrived only seconds after the Manhattan North Emergency Service Unit team. Manhattan South had already been there, in position, for five minutes. They used to be called SWAT teams, but the title was changed to something less provocative, I guess, and now there were roughly forty ESU personnel milling about outside and inside the buildings. Only eight of them were snipers, the rest devoted to other tasks I could only guess at.

  The Sixth Precinct commander was already on scene when we arrived, but he was quickly replaced by some inspector from One Police Plaza; I don’t know what he did, either, but everybody deferred to him until the Chief of Detectives arrived and started commiserating with SAIC Carter, who showed up at roughly the same time, that is, about three minutes after we got there. Fowler was already there, and joined Carter when he saw him. Scott and I hadn’t had a chance to speak, and I knew we wouldn’t get one. Not now.

  Then there was the Bomb Squad supervisor and one of his technicians, and a TARU guy, though nobody seemed to know what exactly he was supposed to do, but he was working closely with the hostage negotiator and all the personnel under the HN’s command. That was just the police, mind: I’m not even talking about the fire units or the EMS units or the press, or all the units that had been evacuating the building. Everybody inside the perimeter wore heavy ballistic vests, the kind that would stop a .44 bullet, and consequently everyone was sweating like pigs. The night had cooled things a bit, but the humidity was rough. At least the snipers were comfortable; they don’t wear the vests—hinders their movement, don’t you know.

  The hostage negotiator was on the phone when we arrived, talking carefully, but I couldn’t hear a damn thing he was saying. He was talking to Barry, though, I knew that, because the negotiator kept watching the windows as he spoke.

  So that was the circus, all gathered to see a little man from the Appalachians try to blow up my home because I scared him enough to wet his pants.

  Lozano had his badge out, hung off his belt, and he wandered around inside the outer perimeter, and then returned to tell Bridgett and me what was going on, tugging at his vest like it pinched him. They wouldn’t let us through; civilians had no place here. Bridgett ate Life Savers and I stood beside her in a comer of the courtyard, in a patch of shade, my hands in my pockets. It was a beautiful night, the sky deep and dark, no clouds, nothing to cut the depth. Every so often Bridgett would lean in and whisper something in my ear.

  “They’ve cut the power and the water to the apartment,” she would say.

  Or, “See that guy? He’s taking high-res photos. They’ll develop them here and see if they show anything going on inside.”

  Or, “Looks like Barry cut the phone, they’re going to have to use bullhorns now.”

  Lozano came back, sweat beaded like glass pebbles across his brow. “He wants you to go up,” he told me. “He’s demanding you go up, and then he wants safe passage to La Guardia and a flight to fuck knows where. Or else he blasts the building. He says he’s got fifteen pounds of Semtex and he’s holding the detonator.”

  Bridgett said to Lozano, “He’s not going up there.” It took me a second to realize she meant me.

  “Of course he isn’t,” Lozano said. “You think we’re nuts?”

  “You got a phone I can use?” I asked him.

  He pulled a cellular out of his jacket. “He pulled the line to your apartment.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and dialed the safe apartment.

  Rubin answered on the first ring. “What’s up?”

  “How’s it look there?” I asked him.

  “Dale and the doctor are napping, Natalie and me are just hanging loose. Why?”

  “You got the television on?”

  “Not yet. Hold on. Any channel?”

  “Pick one.”

  I waited while he turned on the TV, watching the crowd. There was activity inside the perimeter now, the ESU commander having a heated debate with the negotiator. Lozano lit a cigarette.

  “Fuck me,” Rubin said.

  “Yeah. I’m outside right now.”

  “Barry is in there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, fuck me. Atticus, all of our stuff . . .”

  “It’s just stuff,” I said. It came out flat.

  “The cocksucking motherfucking pimple-gnawing son of a bitch,” Rubin said softly. “What does he want? The TV isn’t saying what he wants.”

  “He wants me to go in there, I think.”

  Rubin didn’t ask why. He didn’t need to ask why. Instead he said, “How’s it look?”

  “Barry just killed the phone connection, they’ve evacuated the building and the neighboring ones, too, and I have no idea how this is going to jump. He’s nuts. He’s gone around the bend.”

  “I’m coming over.”

  “Come around on Sullivan. Bridgett and I are in the southwest comer of the courtyard.” I handed the phone back to Lozano in time to see two women who lived across the alley from me get escorted firmly away from the perimeter line by a uniform. One of them saw me and said something to her friend and pointed and they both looked at me like I was Evil Incarnate.

  Lozano wa
s asking me what was in my apartment, if there were any weapons or things like that.

  “Kitchen stuff, knives. No guns, but there’s about one hundred rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition in the lockbox in my room,” I told him. “There’s a bottle of lighter fluid for my old Zippo, and Rubin’s got some turpentine, paint thinner, you know. That’s about it. Nothing much there.”

  He nodded, and tried to readjust his vest.

  Up on the roof two ESU guys were setting rappelling lines to jump down onto the fire escape if it came to that.

  “We sent a team up there with the fiber-optic camera,” Lozano told us. “He’s lying about the amount of Semtex, apparently, not more than one or two pounds. He’s got some gasoline spilled around, too. He’s pretty much trashed the place.”

  “What’s the procedure?” Bridgett asked. She hadn’t said anything in a while.

  “We want him alive, if he’s willing, but we’re not too sold on that happening. When he saw the sniper across the alley Barry freaked, that’s when he cut the phone connection.”

  “I don’t believe this,” 1 said, and sat down with my back to the wall, looking up at the window. “I just don’t believe this. This just isn’t fucking happening.”

  Lozano stepped on his cigarette, then headed back to the command post, and Bridgett knelt beside me. She put a hand on my shoulder, resting it there for only a moment, then withdrawing it.

  She didn’t have anything to say, I guess.

  /“Clarence, can you hear me?”

  The bullhorn’s sound echoed and reverberated off the buildings, and the negotiator’s voice bounced around the courtyard like a Super Ball.

  No movement at the window.

  “Clarence, can you hear me?” the negotiator called again. “Clarence, we’ve been talking about what you want and we’re working on it, but you’ve got to understand we can’t send a civilian inside, you know that, don’t you?”

  Nothing.

  “Clarence, I think maybe we should talk about this, try to work something out, okay?”

  Just the echoes.

  “Clarence? If you don’t talk to me we can’t—”

  And from an open window, “Fuck you, you nigger, give me Kodiak, you cocksucking ape, give me Kodiak or I’ll turn the whole block into rubble!”

  The negotiator lowered his bullhorn, and even from where I was I could see him struggling for control, for the right words, the words that wouldn’t act like a match to Barry’s anger. He raised the bullhorn back to his lips and said, “We can’t send him inside, Clarence. Why don’t we talk about what we can do?”

  All the snipers were motionless.

  There was a slight breeze now, smelling of exhaust. “I’m going to fucking do this place, damn you!”

  /Rubin showed, working his way through the crowd and then pushing over to me, looking wound up and a little ill. He had changed out of his suit, at least, now in jeans and a T-shirt, both black. He sat beside me on my right, Bridgett on my left. It was almost nine, and some of the crowd had dispersed, but other people had shown up, had heard about it on the news and commuted in from wherever they had been to watch the show.

  “Sorry it took me so long,” Rubin said.

  “No problem.”

  “What’s he said?”

  “Nothing for about an hour. He wants me to go in there or he’s going to set off the bomb.”

  “You’re not thinking about doing it, are you?”

  “What do you think?” I asked him.

  “Stupid question, sorry.”

  We were quiet for a while, watching the cops, watching the crowd. Then Bridgett said, “I think he’s realized he’s not getting out of this free and clear. I think he’s realized he’s gonna die.”

  ——

  She was right. About twenty-five minutes later a new negotiator, this one white, tried one last dialogue with Barry via the bullhorn and that ended with Barry shouting that he either got me to kill or that was it, end of block, end of story.

  Lozano came over shortly after that and was telling us that ESU was probably going to try to take him, break through the wall from the next-door apartment, when Barry stuck his hand out of Rubin’s window and started firing.

  It happened really quick.

  He was using a .357 revolver and the reports were loud. His first or second shot hit one of the ESU personnel on the ground, punching hard into the vest and knocking the cop down. Barry kept firing, but that was the only person he hit, and he sent bullets whistling in ricochets off the brick and brownstone, and everybody dove for the ground with the exception of Rubin, Bridgett, and me, and maybe a couple of others who felt secure under their cover. Which is why most of the people missed what happened next.

  Barry’s first or second shot must have sparked the gasoline he had spilled. By the third shot, a blossom of fire already licked out the window. Barry’s hand was visible for less than a second, but the snipers had been waiting with a green light, and that second was all they needed. They’re professionals, they know their job, and from the angle of a hand they can estimate where the rest of the body is. The two working the west rooftops fired at the same time, high-velocity rounds that flew supersonic. Barry fell through the blinds face first, on fire, onto the fire escape landing. He screamed once as he fell to the metal grate, but that was it, and he was probably dead by the time he hit the landing. The gasoline must have gotten into his clothes, though, because he continued to bum outside while our apartment went up. The detonator fell with him, clattering on the metal, then falling until the wires running off it went taut. It swung in the air, maybe fifteen feet under the landing where Barry burned.

  The Bomb Squad went in immediately and pulled the device out, disarming it, while the fire department got the blaze under control. There was no explosion, much to the crowd’s disappointment. Worse, from the crowd’s point of view, the fire didn’t spread out of our apartment.

  But the apartment and Barry, both were a total loss.

  It was after eleven that evening before Rubin and I could get into the apartment, and even then we got only a quick look around. It was depressingly straightforward. Barry had soaked everything he could with the gasoline, and when it went, it went fast. Some things caught, like the futons, and kept going, others smoldered and died. The bathroom had survived relatively unscathed. My room was a distant second as it was furthest from Rubin’s, where the fire had ignited. But Barry had ripped, shredded, and otherwise destroyed everything identifiable as mine. Some of my clothing was dry and had escaped the fire, and I thought maybe I’d have some changes of underwear, but they hadn’t escaped Barry, either. Each shirt had been sliced up the back, and he had pissed and defecated on my underwear. Every book I owned he had stacked in the kitchen, along with every book Rubin had owned, including his six thousand comic books, and they were nothing more than wet ash. That made me feel it most, what he had done to our books, our things. I loved my books, many of them gifts, many of them prized possessions I had haunted used bookstores for or had picked up in library sales or when I was with the service.

  All of Rubin’s art supplies, all of his drawings, all of his paintings, were ash. As he moved through the wreckage, Rubin trailed his hands alongside him, lightly brushing each blackened object, tears shining in his eyes.

  We were out about five minutes after going in, and none of our neighbors said anything to us, but their accusing stares dug at our spirits as much as our backs when we descended the steps.

  Natalie was waiting for us outside, having come over when Rubin called her. Dale was with Dr. Romero, and for now it seemed that one-person coverage would be enough. Bridgett stood with her. When Natalie saw Rubin, she went to give him a hug, and I watched them as they held each other.

  “It’s so fucking stupid,” Rubin said. “It’s just . . . stuff . . . it’s just stuff and it’s nothing. . . .”

  “It was your stuff,” Natalie told him.

  They held each other. Then Rubin pulled back and turn
ed to me. “So, what now?”

  The question surprised me a bit. “We think we know who killed Katie,” I said. “Bridgett and I need to find Fowler, let him know what we’ve found.”

  “Is Felice still in danger?”

  “Barry is dead, Rich is in custody, and Crowell has probably bugged out,” I said. “With everybody looking for Grant, I think the threat’s diminished considerably.”

  “I’ll go back to post,” Rubin said. “Natalie and I will go.”

  I looked at him, at the fatigue and grief in his eyes, and I knew he would be useless.

  “No,” I said. “Natalie, call your father, see if we can get some of his people to cover for us tonight. I’ll call the marshals, let them assist. Then you both go home, get some food, something.”

  “She’s expecting us to cover at the funeral,” Natalie said. “I think she really wants us there.”

  “Monday morning, day after tomorrow, we’ll resume coverage,” I told them. “We’ll meet at the apartment before the funeral.”

  They seemed okay with that, and Rubin and I talked about the insurance and stuff for a little bit, and we were covered, and that was good, and it could have been worse, it could have been one of us, and I said yeah, and he said yeah.

  “Get some rest,” I told him.

  “Practice what you preach,” he told me.

  I called Fowler’s cellular from a pay phone by the drugstore on the comer, asking him to get me in touch with Deputy Marshal Pascal. He gave me the number and I dropped another quarter while Bridgett went into a bodega for more Life Savers and some coffee. I was put on hold at the marshals’ office, then told that Pascal was out, and did I want to leave a message?

  “My name’s Kodiak. I’m the guy who’s been running Dr. Felice Romero’s protection.”

  The woman I spoke to said she would transfer me. I waited, watching the street. Saturday night in the Village, and people had things to do. There was a newspaper machine holding a copy of Newsday, and I could see a tag line about a story on page two regarding Katie and the hunt for her murderer. A homeless woman reclined on a large piece of cardboard in front of a toy store down the block, singing Billie Holiday. Even over the traffic I could hear her voice, clear and clean. An invisible woman singing a dead lady’s song.