Special Operations

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Jesus!” she said.

  “Miss Flannery,” Hemmings said. “Sometimes, when it’s hot like this, and my air conditioner’s not working, and there’s nobody around to see me, when I watch television, I do it in my underwear. Was that what happened with you?”

  She nodded her head, but still kept her head turned away from him.

  “Bra and pants, is that what you were wearing, because it was so damned hot?”

  “Just my panties,” she said, faintly, after a moment, and then she flared. “You’re trying to make it sound like it was my fault.”

  “No, I’m not, Miss Flannery,” Hemmings said, with all the sincerity he could muster.

  He probably would have broken in if you had been wearing an ankle-length fur coat, but looking through the window and seeing you wearing nothing but your underpants didn’t discourage him any, either, Hemmings thought. And was immediately ashamed of himself.

  “You say he cut your clothing? You mean your underclothes?”

  “He came over to me and put the knife down the front of my panties and jerked it,” she said.

  “Did he say anything? Or did you?”

  “I tried to scream when I first saw him, and couldn’t,” she said. “And then when he was using the knife, I was too scared to scream.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “He said, ‘Let’s see the rest,’” she said, very faintly.

  “What was he doing with the knife at this time?” Hemmings asked, gently.

  “Oh, my God! Is this necessary?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m afraid it is.”

  “He was pushing me in the breast with it, with the point.”

  She turned her face to look at him, then as quickly averted it.

  “Then he said, ‘Take your panties off,’ and I did,” she said, quickly, softly. “And then he took me into my bedroom and made me get on the bed, and then he tied me to the bed—”

  “What did he use to tie you to the bed?”

  “My panty hose,” she said. “He went in my dresser and got panty hose and tied me up.”

  “Up?” Hemmings interrupted. “Or to the bed?”

  “To the bed,” she said. “I’ve got a brass bed, and he tied me to the headboard and footboard.”

  “On your back? Or on your stomach?”

  “On my back,” she said.

  “And then what?”

  “Then he started talking dirty,” she said.

  “Do you remember what he said?”

  “What do you think?” she flared.

  “Can you tell me exactly what he said?” Hemmings asked.

  “Jesus!” she said. “He used words like ‘teats’ and…and ‘pussy’ and words like that.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Isn’t that enough? Or do you mean what he did to me?”

  “Anything and everything you can tell me, Miss Flannery…”

  “Then he started taking off his overalls—”

  “Let’s get that fact straight,” Hemmings said. “Overalls are what farmers wear, if you follow me. They have straps over the shoulders, and a sort of flap in front. Coveralls are what mechanics sometimes wear. They cover everything; they have sleeves. Which was he wearing?”

  “Coveralls,” she said. “Black coveralls.”

  “Black, or maybe dark blue?”

  “Black,” she said firmly.

  “Sometimes people who wear coveralls get them at work,” Hemmings said. “And they have embroidery on them, or little patches. ‘Joe’s Garage,’ or something like that. Or a name embroidered. Did you notice anything like that?”

  “No,” she said, surely.

  “When he took off his coveralls, did you notice what kind of underclothes he was wearing?”

  “When I saw what he was doing, I closed my eyes.”

  “And?”

  “And said Hail Marys,” she said.

  “And then what happened?”

  “He wasn’t wearing a T-shirt,” she said, “an undershirt. I saw that much. He was barechested. He was hairy. He had a lot of hair.”

  “And then what happened.”

  “I felt him getting on the bed, and when I opened my eyes, he was on top of me.”

  “Lying on top of you?”

  “No! Kneeling, squatting, over me. Over my head. And he had all his clothes off.”

  “And then what did he do?”

  “He told me to suck it,” she said, bitterly.

  “He meant his penis?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Was he erect? Did he have an erection?”

  “No,” she said. “No. He said, ‘Suck it and make it hard.’”

  “And he put his penis in your mouth?”

  “He had his goddamned knife on my throat!”

  “And forced his penis into your mouth?”

  “Yes, God damn you, yes!”

  “And did he ejaculate?”

  “What? Oh. No. No, thank God, he didn’t.”

  “What did he do?”

  “After a while he took it out, and sat back on his heels and…played with himself.”

  “Did he ejaculate then?”

  “All over me,” she said, almost moaning, “my face, my mouth, my chest…”

  “You said he was hairy,” Hemmings asked. “Did you notice anything else? Were there any scars on his body? Any marks? Any tattoos? Anything like that?”

  “I was trying not to look at him.”

  “You had your eyes closed all this time?”

  “He pushed me with the knife and made me open them,” she said. “He said he wanted me to watch.”

  “And after he had masturbated, what did he do?”

  “He sat there, on my legs, for a while, and then he got off and put his overalls, coveralls, back on.”

  “Did he go to the bathroom, anything like that?”

  “He went to the bathroom on me,” she said, in mingled horror and fury. “He got off me, off the bed, and then stood by the side of it and…pissed all over me.”

  “He stood by the side of the bed and urinated on you. Before or after he put his coveralls back on?”

  “Before,” she said.

  “And you didn’t see any markings of any kind on his body?”

  “I told you already, no.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “He cut me loose and made me roll over, and then he tied me up again,” she said.

  “When Officer Dohner found you, Miss Flannery, your hands were tied with lamp cord. Do you remember where he got that?”

  “No,” she said.

  “He cut the panty hose with which you were tied, is that right? He didn’t untie you?”

  “He tried,” she said. “And then when he couldn’t, he got mad. And then he got even madder when he couldn’t find any more panty hose. He pulled the dresser drawer all the way out and threw it on the floor.”

  “And after he had tied your hands behind you, what did he do?”

  “He said we were going for a little ride, he wanted everybody to—”

  “To what?”

  “To have a look at me.”

  “Are those, more or less, his exact words?”

  “He said he wanted everybody to see…my private parts, and to see his come all over me.”

  “Then what?”

  “He found my raincoat….”

  “Where was that?”

  “In the hall closet,” she said. “And he told me to get up, and he put my raincoat over my shoulders. And he said that if I tried to run away, he’d…he’d stick the knife up…in me…he’d stick the knife between my legs.”

  “And then?”

  “He took me out the back and put me in the back of his van.”

  “Tell me about the van,” Hemmings said. “Where was it?”

  “In the parking lot behind my apartment.”

  Hemmings tried and failed to recall a mental image of the garden apartment complex parking lot.

&n
bsp; “What kind of a van was it?”

  “A van,” she said, impatiently.

  “Where did he put you in the van?”

  “In the back.”

  “Was there a door on the side, a sliding door, maybe? Or did you get in the front?”

  “There was a sliding door. He opened it, and told me to get in and lay down on my face.”

  “Did you see anything in the back of the van? I mean, was it plain in there, or did he have it fixed up with chairs and upholstery? Was there a carpet, maybe?”

  “No. The floor was metal. And there was nothing in there. Just a van.”

  “Did it look to you like a new van, or one that has been around awhile? Was it scratched up, maybe? Was there a peculiar smell? Anything like that?”

  “It was dark, and I had my face on the floor, and I couldn’t see anything,” she said.

  “And then what happened?”

  “He got in front and started it up, and I guess he just drove me to where he pushed me out and the cop found me.”

  “Did anything happen while you were in the van? Did you hear something, maybe, that stuck in your mind. Can you think of anything at all?”

  “I thought he was going to kill me,” she said. “I was praying.”

  “Tell me about what happened when you got to Forbidden Drive,” Hemmings said.

  “I knew we’d left the street,” she said. “A regular street, I mean. It sounded different under the wheels.”

  That response disappointed Dick Hemmings a little; if she had picked up on that, she more than likely would have picked up on anything else odd that had happened. Therefore, nothing interesting had happened.

  “And?”

  “And then he stopped, and I heard him opening the door, and then he told me to get out. He said that I should walk away from him, and if I turned around to look, he would kill me.”

  “And he was still wearing his mask?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then?”

  “He took my raincoat off, and pushed me, and I started walking,” she said. “And then I heard him driving off.”

  “Did you know where you were?”

  “I thought the park,” she said. “We hadn’t come that far. But where in the park, I didn’t have any idea.”

  “Did anyone come by before Officer Dohner got there?”

  “No,” she said. “I saw lights, headlights, and started walking toward where they were going past.”

  “I’ll certainly be talking to you again, Miss Flannery,” Hemmings said. “But this is enough to get us started. Thank you for being so frank with me.”

  “I hope he runs away when you catch him, so you can shoot the sonofabitch!” she said.

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” Hemmings said.

  I shouldn’t have said that.

  “What happens to me now?” Mary Elizabeth Flannery said.

  “Well, I guess that’s up to the doctor,” Hemmings said. “He’ll probably want you to spend the night here.”

  “I don’t want to spend the night here,” she said, angrily. “I want to go home.”

  “Well, that’s probably your decision….”

  “How am I going to get home? I don’t have any clothing, my purse…”

  “If you’d like me to, Miss Flannery,” Hemmings said, “I’ll be going to your apartment. I could bring you some clothing, and if you can work it out with the doctor, I’d be happy to drive you home. But if you want my advice, I’d stay here, or at least spend the night with your family, or a friend—”

  “‘Hello, Daddy, guess what happened to me?’”

  “I’m sure your father would understand,” Hemmings said.

  She snorted.

  “What my father would say would be, ‘I told you if you insisted on getting an apartment by yourself, something like this would happen.’”

  “Well, what about a friend?”

  “I don’t want to have to answer any more questions from anybody,” she said.

  “Well, I’ll go get you some clothing,” Hemmings said. “And bring it here. You think about it.”

  THREE

  As Mickey O’Hara had walked across the fine carpets laid over the marble floor of the lobby of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel, and then onto South Broad Street, 6.3 miles to the north, where Old York Road cuts into Broad Street at an angle, about a mile south of the city line, the line of traffic headed toward downtown Philadelphia from the north suddenly slowed, taking the driver of a 1971 Buick Super sedan by surprise.

  He braked sharply and the nose of the Buick dipped, and there was a squeal from the brakes. The driver of the Mercury in front of him looked back first with alarm, and then with annoyance.

  I’m probably a little gassed, the driver of the Buick thought. I’ll have to watch myself.

  His name was David James Pekach, and he was thirty-two years old. He was five feet nine inches tall, and weighed 143 pounds. He was smooth shaven, but he wore his hair long, parted in the middle, and gathered together in the back in a pigtail held in place by a rubber band. He was wearing a white shirt and a necktie. The shirt was mussed and sweat stained. The jacket of his seersucker suit was on the seat beside him.

  The Buick Super was not quite three years old, but the odometer had already turned over at 100,000 miles. The shocks were shot, and so were the brakes. The foam rubber cushion under David James Pekach’s rear end had long ago lost its resilience, and the front-end suspension was shot, and the right-rear passenger door had to be kicked to get it open. But the air conditioner still worked, and Pekach had been running it full blast against the ninety-eight percent humidity and ninety-three degree temperature of the late June night.

  David James Pekach was on his way home from upper Bucks County. His cousin Stanley had been married at eleven o’clock that morning at Saint Stanislaus’s Roman Catholic Church in Bethlehem, and there had been a reception following at the bride’s home near Riegelsville, on the Delaware River, at the absolute upper end of Bucks County.

  The booze had really flowed, and he had had more than he could handle. He was a little guy, at least compared to his brothers and cousins, and he couldn’t handle very much, anyway.

  There had been the usual cracks about his size, and of course the pigtail, at the reception (“You know what Davie is? With that pigtail? One Hung Low. The world’s only Polack Chink.”) and every time he’d looked at the priest, he’d found the priest looking at him, then suddenly turning on an uneasy smile. He wasn’t their priest, he was the bride’s family’s priest, and what he was obviously thinking was, “What’s a bum like that doing in the Pekach family?”

  He saw the reason for the sudden slowdown, flashing blue lights on two Philadelphia police cars at the corner. A wreck. Probably a bad one, he thought, with two cars at the scene.

  He hadn’t been paying much attention to where he was. He looked around to see where he was.

  When he got to the cop directing traffic, the cop signaled him to stop. Dave Pekach rolled down the window.

  “You almost rear-ended the Mercury,” the cop accused. From the way the cop looked at him, Dave Pekach knew that he didn’t like men who wore long blond hair in a pigtail any more than the priest had.

  “I know,” Dave Pekach said, politely. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “You been drinking?” It was an accusation, not a question.

  “I just came from a wedding,” Pekach admitted. “But I’m all right.”

  The cop flashed his light around the inside of the Buick, to see what he could see, let Pekach sweat twenty seconds, then waved him on.

  Pekach drove fifty feet, swore, and then braked hard again. The brakes squealed again, and there was a loud, dull groan from the front end as he bounced over a curb and stopped.

  He opened the door and got out and started walking toward two men standing by the hood of a five-year-old Ford sedan.

  “Hey, buddy!” the cop who had stopped him called. “What do you think you’re doing?”


  Pekach ignored him.

  The cop, trotting over, reached the old Ford just as Pekach did, just in time to hear one of the men greet Pekach: “Hey, Captain,” one of the men said. He was a heavy, redheaded Irishman in a T-shirt and blue jeans. “Don’t you look spiffy!”

  The cop was embarrassed. He had sensed there was something not quite right with the car, or the man driving it. There were some subtle things. The relatively new automobile had obviously not been washed, much less polished, in some time. It looked as if it had been used hard. The driver’s side vent window had a thumb-sized piece of glass missing, and was badly cracked. The tires had black walls, and on closer examination were larger than the tires that had come with the car.

  But until right now, the cop had been looking for something-wrong, something that would have given him reasonable cause to see what the clown in the pigtail might have under the seat or in the glove compartment or in the trunk. Now he looked at the car again, and saw that he had missed the real giveaway: On the shelf between the top of the backseat and the window was a thin eight-inch-tall shortwave radio antenna.

  The battered Buick was a police car, and the funny-looking little guy with the hippy pigtail was a police officer. More than a cop. One of the Narcotics guys had called him “Captain.”

  And then the cop put it all together. The little guy with the pigtail was Captain David Pekach, of the Narcotics Division of the Philadelphia Police Department. He remembered now, too, that Pekach had just made captain. Now that he was a captain, the cop thought, Pekach was probably going to have to get rid of the pigtail. Captains don’t work undercover; neither do lieutenants, and only rarely a sergeant. The cop remembered a story that had gone around the bar of the Fraternal Order of Police. A Narcotics Lieutenant (obviously, now Pekach) had been jumped on by the Commissioner himself for the pigtail. Pekach had stood up to him. If he was supposed to supervise his undercover men working the streets, the only way he could do that was, from time to time, to go on the streets with them. And a very good way to blow the cover of plainclothes cops working Narcotics dressed like addicts was to have them seen talking to some guy in a business suit and a neat, show-your-ears haircut. No questions were likely to be asked about a guy in a dirty sweatshirt and a pigtail. The story going around the FOP bar was that Commissioner Czernick had backed off.