War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  My goal had simply been to get enough information to the right people to get Daniel arrested, and, I hoped, put away for life. My conversation with the security guard might provide the very last piece of the puzzle, the thing that conclusively linked Daniel Kirkland and his gang to a very real act of violence as well as the dynamite itself.

  I hurried to the address that Tucker had given me. It was just a few blocks down on Third Avenue, a brownstone in terrible repair. I had to step over some people sleeping on the sidewalk. A few kids hanging out near the door of one of the buildings disappeared inside as they saw me.

  The street was remarkably empty, especially compared to Eleventh. Eleventh had looked pretty quiet, though, when I left: the sirens must have scared people off.

  I hurried up the steps and into the building. The door was half off its hinges, and the names scrawled beside the mailboxes were fading. I did see Jervis’s name, but someone had tried to write over it.

  The apartment number placed it on the fourth floor. I let myself in, overwhelmed by the stench of stale beer and vomit. I stepped around the pile of goop that looked like it caused the smell.

  Some of the lights were out in the hallway. The main area was wide, with four apartments on either side. Through an open door, the stairway loomed.

  A white man in a police uniform stood at the base of the stairs with his arms crossed. He looked at me suspiciously.

  I played a hunch.

  “Detective O’Connor’s on the fourth floor, right? He told me to meet him at Jervis’s place, and I’ve been in three other buildings. This is the right one, right?”

  The officer nodded. “They just went up.”

  “They?”

  “Him and the manager. Nobody’s answering the door.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and walked past him. I could hear footsteps on the wooden stairs above me, and the low grumble of voices. I would let the two men open the door, and then I’d join them in Jervis’s apartment.

  The stairs wound crazily, finally stopping on a landing just shy of the second floor. There they widened, taking up most of the hallway. I walked up, getting closer to the voice. From this point, the steps were more traditional — about fifteen, then a landing with a window overlooking the street, a turn, and another fifteen steps, cross the main floor, and go up again.

  This part of the building looked like it had been grafted on to an earlier building. Or perhaps the first floor stairway wasn’t supposed to come up this far when the building had been built. This part of the building was cleaner, too, but it was clear that no one who lived here had a lot of money.

  I reached the third floor as the footsteps above me stopped. I moved as quietly as I could, so that they wouldn’t think anyone was behind them.

  “He added an extra deadbolt,” someone said. I didn’t recognize the voice, so I assumed it was the manager. “I know he gave me the key. Give me a second.”

  “Be quick about it.” O’Connor’s voice was low.

  “Got it,” the manager said.

  I could hear the key click against the lock, startlingly loud in the small space. I started up the next flight of steps. I figured I’d be on the landing by the time they got inside the apartment.

  “He hasn’t been any trouble. Just a nice guy, a little quiet—”

  The explosion sent me backward. I hit the wall on the third floor so hard that the breath left my body. Debris came flying at me, and I tried to cover myself, but I couldn’t move.

  Something hit me in the head, and I closed my eyes — to protect them, I thought — but maybe I was closing them because I had gone unconscious.

  Because I don’t remember part of that afternoon, still. All I know is from the moment the explosion boomed outward to the moment I actually started to move again seemed like a very, very long time.

  Hours, maybe days.

  When, in fact, it was probably only minutes.

  FIFTY-TWO

  I was choking on the dust. It came at me in clouds, billowing from what remained of the wall.

  The wall that had protected me. If I had been on the landing, I probably would have died.

  I couldn’t see very far ahead of me. My eyes burned from the grit that filled them, and chalky-tasting plaster fragments filled my mouth.

  My entire body ached from a thousand bruises. The air had been knocked out of my body. It took a long time to catch my breath. My left arm burned, and something — probably blood — dripped into my right eye. My ears rang, and I couldn’t hear myself breathe.

  I pushed debris off me — wood, nails, that odd metal that some doors were made out of, and more blood. My pants were covered with dust. A jagged piece of wood stuck out of my thigh — a small piece, thank heavens, and I pulled it out without feeling a thing. I made myself look at the wound, to see if the wood had punctured anything important, but it was scarcely bleeding.

  The dust billowed past me, one cloud, then another, almost as if a breeze was pushing it toward me. But I couldn’t feel anything.

  The world was strangely silent.

  I patted myself down, and was startled to discover that I was okay.

  Still, standing was difficult. My balance was gone. I swayed, nearly fell, and caught myself. There was a Smokey-size hole in the wall, showing how very hard I hit. I would feel that in the morning.

  I would feel all of it.

  I was moving slowly and thinking even more slowly. Shock. I cursed it — I needed all my faculties here — but I couldn’t force the thoughts any quicker.

  The stairs above me seemed intact, but I couldn’t see much beyond them. The landing had vanished in a cloud of white. I didn’t know if there were stairs above it or not. That ninety-degree angle from the landing had saved my life, but it made seeing what was ahead impossible.

  I shook, remembering how I picked up colleagues in Korea, carried them, how cold it had been, the way the light had played on the frozen ground, the snow—

  I closed my eyes, forced myself to breathe like I had trained myself over a decade before, reminded myself: New York, I was in New York, someone had just set off a bomb in New York, and that made me open my eyes.

  They were scratchy with dust. One eye watered. The other stuck together — that blood again. I was afraid to touch my face.

  I bent slightly at the waist, pulled myself up the stairs using the shaky banister. My feet kept slipping on things that I didn’t initially see, sometimes couldn’t see when I looked down, and I knew, without checking, that I was slipping on blood or remains or something organic. Wood, metal, scrap wouldn’t feel like that.

  Finally, I reached the landing. It seemed shaky. The white clouds were even thicker here, and what I saw of the stairs was chunks of wood and debris. I got on my hands and knees, crawling to distribute my weight. With luck, I wouldn’t fall through the destroyed staircase.

  With luck, I’d make it to the fourth floor.

  It seemed to take ten years to make it to the top step. My sense of time had vanished along with the sense of sound. I hadn’t realized how much I relied on both: my hearing was my safeguard, the way I knew if something was behind me, in front of me, hiding.

  I didn’t know if someone lurked around the next corner with a gun, ready to shoot whoever came up here.

  But I couldn’t stop. What if O’Connor was lying on the ground, bleeding to death, and all it would take was a little pressure in the right spot to save him? What if the manager hadn’t been hurt after all, what if the blood belonged not to him but to the bomber?

  I wasn’t thinking very clearly. I knew I wasn’t thinking very clearly when I reached the top step, came through the debris cloud as if I had emerged from a snow storm, and saw the open hole where the apartment across the hall had been, saw the hole that went farther in, the furniture moved, the bits of clothing and charred wood, and the cat on its side, the lower half of its body severed and slammed against the remaining wall, and that vision meant little to me. I saw it; I didn’t process it. I hadn�
��t yet realized how much impact the blast had.

  If I had thought it through, I would have known there was no one alive in that rubble. I wouldn’t have gotten down on my hands and knees and started searching through the wood, the hot nails, the even hotter metal shards of the door, digging like a mad thing, looking for O’Connor, the manager, anyone — even the owner of that poor, unfortunate cat. I searched and searched, and then I found it.

  The hand. It looked so small and unassuming, not an adult hand at all. I picked it up as if it were an artifact, and until it dripped blood on my leg, until I felt the warmth of the blood hit my skin through my pants, I didn’t realize what I had.

  I let out a yelp, dropped the hand, and backed away. At that moment, I knew the search was futile.

  Someone touched my back, and I yelled again. It was the cop from downstairs. He was even whiter than he had been before. His uniform was white, his face was white, even his hair was white. The dust coated him as it probably coated me.

  He spoke to me. His lips moved, his face registered concern, but I couldn’t hear him. My ears kept ringing.

  I couldn’t read lips. He patted me, pointed to the stairs, indicated that I should go down them, get away. But I couldn’t. There were men under the rubble. And a dead cat, meaning someone had lived in that hole across the hall. Fire was burning one of the curtains in the back, a trail of embers led toward it.

  The cop touched me again, pointed to the stairs.

  I shook my head, put a hand against the hot wall, and stood. I had to see what caused this. I had to look.

  I took a few more steps forward and looked at the apartment that O’Connor and the manager had tried to get into.

  Jervis’s apartment.

  The door was gone, blown outward with the force of the explosion, but the rest of the apartment was intact. The windows were covered with blackout cloth, but a bit of light came in from the side — a spyhole — and a rifle leaned against the wall. Wind blew in from somewhere else — somewhere inside.

  I looked at the side of the door, saw something both unexpected and completely expected: a homemade bomb. It resembled a claymore, only it wasn’t. Instead of using shotgun shells, wire, and a hammer, he had set it up with something more powerful, something that got triggered when the door opened, something that would blow outward to destroy the enemy but leave the good guys intact.

  We’d learned that. I’d learned it long ago.

  This wasn’t an apartment. It was a bunker. And that meant there was an escape route.

  I started to step inside, but the officer held me back. I tried to shake him off, and he still held me, and it showed how very weak I was that I couldn’t fight him off.

  “There’s an escape route,” I said, or I think I said, my lips moving awkwardly, my mouth tasting of blood.

  He nodded, but it was that nod people use when faced with someone crazy.

  “He set up a bunker,” I said. “His hidey-hole. He has an escape route. He was here. You have to catch him.”

  The officer moved his lips again, gave me a fake smile, led me to the stairs. I kept looking over my shoulder at that blown-away door, the impact of the explosion, going outward, the hole that had been an apartment just across the hall.

  What had caused all the debris on the floor? I looked up as I reached the stairs, saw that the ceiling was mostly gone, too, and so was the ceiling over the other apartment.

  What had Jervis used? Whatever it was, it had been ingenious, and effective, and oh so wrong.

  The next thing I knew I was on an ambulance stretcher in the street below, being strapped in. Two ambulance attendants in bloodstained white were leaning over me.

  My ears were popping and my head hurt, and my eyes felt like they were on fire. A man not much older than Malcolm was winding a bandage around my left arm, telling me the bleeding would stop soon. At least, I think that was what he was saying. His lips were easier to read than the officer’s.

  Words were fading in and out, sirens hitting, missing, like the needle of a record player hitting a scratch in the album. Sound, then nothing, then different sound, then nothing, then sound again.

  I was incredibly thirsty and panicked. I couldn’t go to any hospital. What would happen to Jimmy? Malcolm and Jimmy needed me. I had to find them. I had to meet them.

  I must have been saying some of this, because the attendant pushed me back. He gave me a calm look, nodded at me, and assured me I would be fine. The easiest sentence to mouth-read in the English language: You’ll be just fine.

  But I wouldn’t be.

  Jervis had built a bunker.

  O’Connor was dead.

  And Jimmy didn’t know what had happened to me.

  Jervis had blackout cloths in the window. A spyhole. A bunker.

  He was military. He’d been beaten, drugged, left for dead.

  He’d been in Vietnam.

  He had built a bunker.

  And now he was loose in the city, thinking the enemy had finally arrived.

  The enemy was here, and he was at war.

  FIFTY-THREE

  St. Vincent’s emergency room: a whirl of lights, and plastic curtains, and screams. A baby whooping like it couldn’t get its breath. Someone crying. The stench of rubbing alcohol and pee. Fake wood paneling on one wall, a nurse’s station that seemed tiny: behind it, the word EMERGENCY in a small lighted sign.

  They left me in the hall next to a pile of dirty laundry. Across from me, a desk. A phone with a lot of cords coming out of its back sat in the center, surrounded by medical equipment, seemingly abandoned in the middle of some task.

  The bulletin board above the desk was covered with papers: instructions — How to Bandage a Suppurating Wound; employee sheets — names followed by phone numbers and sometimes an order Do Not Call Unless Serious!!; a half-completed prescription form with the words Forget Something? scrawled in red; and patient ID bracelets tacked together.

  My hearing still wobbled in and out, hurting with each sound. A nurse flew past me, her white dress marked with sweat, her starched cap sliding back on her head. Behind her, a stretcher, and a little girl, white, her back arched, eyes floating into the back of her head. Two orderlies held her down, but they could barely control her. She was convulsing.

  “…Valium!…” the nurse shouted as she went into the exam room. The girl followed, the orderlies doing their best to keep her still. “…tongue depressor…”

  I was still strapped to my stretcher, forgotten, like the laundry, as other emergencies floated by me. I faded in and out of consciousness, too exhausted to be frightened by my lack of energy.

  Finally the nurse who had worked with the little girl was bending over me.

  Her mouth moved, but once again, I heard no words.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “My hearing only works sometimes.”

  She looked in my right ear, then in my left. Shook her head, nodded toward an exam room. Someone shoved the cart forward.

  The exam room was smaller than I expected. A vinyl sliding door covered a supply closet, and a sink hung against the wall. Above it, a medical cabinet had a lock on it.

  She unstrapped me, helped me sit up. My balance was still gone.

  “…the doctor will be here shortly. I don’t think your eardrum is ruptured. You wouldn’t be able to sit up. Do you remember…?”

  “I heard part of that,” I said.

  She smiled at me, wiped a damp cloth over my face. Moved her lips again.

  I shrugged. The sound had gone out again, like a bad signal on the radio. And the ringing. It wasn’t a better substitute for real sound. It wasn’t a substitute at all.

  A doctor came in, big white man with stubble on his chin, his white coat flowing behind him. He looked as stressed as I felt. He spoke to the nurse, and I wished I could hear. I couldn’t even see their lips.

  She gestured toward me, then turned.

  “I pulled some wood from my leg,” I said. “It didn’t seem to bleed much.”
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br />   They continued to talk. He looked in my ears, at my eyes, in my mouth. She wiped off my left arm, then stuck a needle in my elbow. I started. He held me back.

  I looked at the arm. A gash ran from my shoulder to the elbow, over an inch wide. They were going to give me stitches.

  “…and a tetanus shot. I don’t know if he ever had one, so we may as well do the whole spectrum,” the doctor was saying. He sounded like he was inside a bottle, his words garbled.

  “Just a booster,” I said.

  “You heard that?” he asked.

  “Barely. My ears ring. The sound fades in and out.”

  “That’s common after a blast like that,” he said. “You have some bleeding, but the drum is fine. Your other wounds are worse. We gave you a local so that I can stitch up your arm. I’m going to look at the rest of you. I’m afraid of shrapnel. That blast sounded awful. We even heard it here. I think half the city did…”

  The ringing grew even more intense and I had trouble concentrating on his words. He threaded a needle, moved a tray close, set some small metal tools on it. The nurse was working behind him, getting the booster ready.

  He started to stitch. I looked away. My shirt was ripped. I hadn’t realized that. I wasn’t wearing a hospital gown, though, and I was still wearing pants and shoes.

  That didn’t last long, however. They helped me strip, examined the rest of me, gave me the booster, which hurt worse than the stitches, and found another long cut in my thigh. Another local, more stitches.

  I closed my eyes, opened them in a hospital room. A clock in the hall, barely visible above the nurse’s station, read 7:18, the second hand ticking away.

  Jimmy. Malcolm. I had to meet them. If I didn’t get there, they’d think something had happened to me.

  I couldn’t do that to Jimmy, not again. I’d nearly died on a case in December, and at first I thought he wouldn’t forgive me. If Malcolm had to drag him to Newark, Jimmy would be terrified.

  I had to keep them safe.

  I wasn’t keeping them safe here. If the doctors gave me something for the pain, I might be out for days.