by Brad Parks
“And no blood means—”
“Wait, there’s more. We got this body early, and I made it our number one priority, so I’ve had people working it all morning. Okay, so no blood. Also, like I said, there’s a problem with the gunshot residue. This is a little more art than science sometimes, but this one was pretty clear. In a suicide you expect to see a certain pattern under the microscope from the swabs you take of the gun hand, particularly on the back of the hand. But in this case, there was a big area on the back of the hand where there was almost no residue at all. And you know what that, along with no blood, tells you?”
“Not … not really.”
Ibanez, who was relating all this with the joy of a scientist who has made a discovery, finished: “It tells you there’s only one possible scenario, or at least only one I can come up with. The perp had watched enough CSI to know there needed to be gunshot residue on Fusco’s hand. So first the perp killed Fusco, then he put the murder weapon in Fusco’s hand, wrapped his hand around Fusco’s, then fired the gun a second time.”
Which explains why Lawrence Taylor’s biggest fan heard two gunshots.
“You’d testify to that scenario in a court of law?” I asked.
“Sure would. And I’m sure the defense attorney would try to shred me,” he said, cracking a smile. “But the science is clear. Mike Fusco didn’t kill himself.”
They weren’t supposed to miss.
For the guys in the silver Mercedes, that had been a mistake. A rookie mistake, yes, but a mistake all the same. They weren’t trying to scare the newspaper reporter. They weren’t trying to shoot up the house behind him or the cars in front of him or any of the other numerous targets they hit. They certainly weren’t trying to merely scare him, either.
They had been hired to kill him. Their employer, Red Dot Enterprises, had been quite explicit: if they killed Carter Ross, they’d all be given brand-new guns. But they would only get paid if Ross was dead.
And they missed. Even when they had been tipped off as to exactly where Ross was going to be, they flat-out missed. Fifteen times.
It turns out drive-by shootings are not as easy as the movies make them look. Start with the “drive-by” part: it supposes the car is moving. And without the proper training, shooting someone from a moving vehicle is not easy. Most people have a hard time figuring out how much to lead a wide receiver in a game of touch football, and that’s just for a person running perhaps ten miles an hour. Trying to make the same kind of calculations in a car going thirty for a bullet that will travel faster than the speed of sound is that much trickier.
That was the first degree of difficulty. The second was that they couldn’t risk being identified. Kill some no-good punk drug dealer and most folks in Newark get a quick case of myopia. They figure he had it coming. Kill a newspaper reporter and someone is going to come up with twenty-twenty vision. So the Mercedes guys couldn’t afford to have the window rolled down more than just a crack, which made aiming a matter of guesswork.
The third degree of difficulty was the gun itself. In truth, they didn’t even know what kind of gun it was. Guns weren’t their thing. That was the Red Dot Enterprise guys’ specialty. All the guys in the silver Mercedes knew was that their piece was a bitty little thing, with a snub-nosed barrel—a Saturday Night Special, as the media so derisively referred to that kind of firearm. Even under the best of circumstances, it wasn’t particularly accurate.
Take all those factors and add their general ineptitude with this sort of thing, and it wasn’t hard to understand why they had missed so badly. It would have been something approaching a miracle if they had actually killed him—a hundred to one shot, especially with that popgun.
They knew before they even rounded the corner, as that fifteenth shot was still echoing, that they hadn’t killed him. They hoped the Red Dot Enterprise guys maybe wouldn’t find out, but of course they did; Red Dot seemed to know exactly where this Ross guy was at all times, so it knew quickly that Ross was on the move again.
The Mercedes guys worried that perhaps the Red Dot wouldn’t give them a second chance, that they had blown their one and only opportunity to get those free guns. But their contact at Red Dot had been very understanding.
His only request was that they not botch it the second time.
CHAPTER 7
Having shared his big theory, Raul Ibanez got in a hurry to have me depart. I guess he was worried someone else might step into the stairwell in the endless search for good cell reception. We agreed that if I had any more questions, I would call his secretary and identify myself as Robert Upshur. (An obscure reference to the first and middle names of the greatest reporter in journalism history, but I digress.)
That left me to stumble out back onto the street, into an afternoon that was trying to get sunny without much luck. Not to get all literary, but it was an appropriate metaphor for how my brain was working on this story.
If Fusco didn’t kill himself—and I believed Ibanez’s science more than I believed anything else I heard so far—then someone else did. Brilliant deduction, I know, but I did graduate in the top 10 percent of my high school class. Was it the same person who killed Darius Kipps? Or did Fusco kill Kipps and then someone else kill Fusco for revenge? I couldn’t say.
At the very least, I had enough new information that when I presented it to Public Disinformation Officer Hakeem Rogers for comment, it was going to make him feel like he was passing a kidney stone. Because, really, I could only imagine two scenarios here, neither of them particularly flattering for Rogers’s employer: One, Newark’s finest were allowing themselves to be snowed by cunning bad guys—possibly a minister, of all people—who were killing cops and getting away with it simply because the police chief didn’t want to look bad in the media; or, two, Newark’s finest were lying.
I couldn’t imagine why they would want to lie about something like this—other than that they’re cops, so lying to reporters comes rather naturally. But I had a fairly simple test to determine which scenario was true.
It hinged on the phone call Fusco allegedly made to Captain Boswell. If that call actually existed, then Fusco was acting under duress—calling because the cunning bad guys put a gun to his head. If that call didn’t exist, I was going to ask our editorial cartoonist to draw a caricature of Captain Boswell with a nose like Pinocchio.
Luckily, I had a way of finding out which it was—providing Fusco was a Verizon Wireless customer and the bosses at that fine company hadn’t yet gotten wise that fearless Eagle-Examiner reporter Tommy Hernandez was dating one of their customer service representatives.
I called Tommy to find out.
“It’s so good to hear from you,” he answered.
“And why is that?”
“Because I wanted to ask: When I saw you in the newsroom earlier, were you, in fact, wearing the same horrifically boring shirt, tie, and pleated pants combination you were wearing yesterday?”
“I was.”
“You know my eyes were still hurting from the last time I had to see it. Couldn’t you have given me a rest?”
“Guess not.”
“So, okay, he was wearing the same clothes … his eyes looked like a raccoon’s … he had a certain rumpled look … did someone have a big night last night?”
“Something like that,” I said. Tommy was a notorious gossip—the TMZ of the newsroom—and didn’t need to know I had spent the night at Tina’s place. He’d have the paparazzi hounding me for weeks.
“Oh, you don’t need to play coy with me. Everyone knows you’re shacking up with Kira the cute library chick.”
“Yep, you got me.”
“What about Tina?”
“What about her?” I asked, perhaps a little too quickly.
“I thought you guys were going to make me Carter Jr.’s special uncle. Or, even better, his fairy godfather.”
“I think that’s on hold for the time being.”
“So you can sow your oats?” Tommy said, clu
cking his tongue at me. “You’re such a mhore.”
“What’s a mhore?”
“A man-whore.”
He giggled, then apparently decided I had received a sufficient amount of abuse for one phone call, because he switched subjects.
“Hey, I visited my girl in the council clerk’s office this morning,” he said. “She told me there’s been nothing new put in for Reverend Alvin LeRioux, Redeemer Love Christian Church, or any of its various affiliates. So if your pastor is getting something for his cooperation, it isn’t coming from the Newark city fathers.”
“What if it was just expanding or extending an existing contract?” I asked.
“If it meant more money was being spent, it would still have to be approved by the city council. That’s Government 101. The council controls the purse strings.”
“Okay. Thanks for checking,” I said. “Mind if I press you for one more favor.”
“Sure.”
“Your current love interest still work for Verizon Wireless?”
“Yeah.”
I found Mike Fusco’s phone number in my notebook and recited it to Tommy. “Ask him if there were any outgoing calls made by that number around four o’clock this morning.”
“Sure. Want me to do it right now?”
“Wouldn’t hurt.”
“I’m going to put the phone down and call on the landline. Hang on.”
I leaned my elbow against the car door and rested my head on my hand as Tommy called “Stephen” and bantered a little bit before getting around to the purpose of his call. I listened as he asked a few follow-up questions, then made some way-too-precious kissing noises before getting off the phone.
“Sorry you had to hear that,” he said. “I know it offends your hetero sensibilities.”
“Yeah, why do you queers have to rub it in everyone’s face all the time?” I teased back. “I mean, next you’re going to want to hold hands in public or, God forbid, sully the sacred institution of marriage.”
“Yeah. Can you imagine the horror?”
“Anyhow, what did Stephen say?”
“Your subscriber made a phone call at four-oh-four this morning to here,” he said, reading a number with a 973 area code, which I copied. “It lasted a grand, whopping total of two minutes.”
“Two minutes, huh? Do you think you could confess to murdering your best friend and then announce your intention to kill yourself in two minutes?”
Tommy thought about it for a moment and said, “Sure. Not everyone is as wordy as you.”
Especially not when they’re a taciturn tough guy with a gun pointed at his head. I thanked Tommy for his assistance and promised his next fruity, umbrella-topped girl drink would be on me.
Just to make sure the call was for real, I dialed the number he had given me. It rang four times and then went to a voice mail for Captain Denise Boswell.
So Fusco really did talk to her. And it was his last worldly act. As I pulled out of my parking spot and began traveling back down South Orange Avenue toward the office, I conjured this image of Fusco in his final moments. He was bewildered, scared, and fuming, being made to call his captain and confess to a crime he never committed. And then, maybe while he was still trying to figure out how he might save himself, the gun pointed at his head went off.
I was so distracted by that thought, I nearly missed another image—and not one that existed only in my imagination. This was a real image, in my rearview mirror.
It was of a silver Mercedes. And it was closing in fast.
* * *
Daytime running lights save lives. I can now testify to that because it was the Mercedes’ daytime running lights that first caught the corner of my eye in that mirror. Otherwise, I never would have seen it coming, and that very likely might have cost me the privilege of continued respiration.
As it was, I had perhaps two seconds to make sense of what I was seeing, and four seconds of useful reaction time. I was puttering along, doing thirty miles per hour in the right lane of an avenue that had two lanes heading in my direction. The Mercedes was coming up behind me in the left lane doing at least sixty.
I had, as best I could figure, two choices: try to stop in the hopes that the Mercedes would overshoot me; or hit the gas and lose them in a chase.
My six-year-old Chevy Malibu couldn’t outrun a well-tuned moped, much less an E-class Mercedes with a magnificently engineered eight-cylinder engine. But I knew if I stopped, I might as well just strip off my shirt and scrawl “shoot me here” on my chest. Besides, for all my outward refinement and education, I’m still a Jersey guy. Aggressive driving is a state birthright. So I straightened my right leg to the point of hyperextension and pressed the accelerator down into the floorboards.
The Malibu’s engine hesitated for an instant—its protest to the more-than-111,431 miles it had been forced to carry me and other travelers throughout its life—then finally caught with a roar reminiscent of a gas-powered golf cart climbing a steep hill. In my peripheral vision, I could see the speedometer begin a determined journey up the dial.
The Mercedes was still gaining on me, albeit more slowly as I blasted through the intersection of Norfolk Street—if “blasted” is, in fact, a verb that can be used in conjunction with a used Malibu. South Orange Avenue squeezed down to one lane at that point, which meant I had a momentary reprieve from being overtaken, assuming my friends in the Mercedes weren’t going to want to tussle with oncoming traffic.
But I was knowledgeable enough about the roads of Newark—probably more familiar with them than any town I ever lived in—to recognize I had a problem coming up. South Orange Avenue would soon funnel into Springfield Avenue, then cross Martin Luther King Boulevard, then feed down into Market Street. And there was no possible way, here in the middle of the day, I was going to get through all of that without having to stop for a traffic light, a pedestrian, or a slow-moving city bus.
And stopping, as previously mentioned, was not a real savory menu option.
Without touching the brake, I pulled my wheel hard to the right at the next intersection. The Malibu’s tires, which I had replaced relatively recently—I had, right?—made a horrible squealing sound, and for a moment I wondered if they were going to slip right off their rims and leave me running steel-on-asphalt. But they held and I was soon hurtling down Prince Street, a narrow two-lane road and one of the better car chase venues in downtown Newark, if only because there wouldn’t be as much stuff on it to hit.
I hoped my one fancy maneuver would be enough to lose my chasers, but the Mercedes easily made the turn with me and was closing in on my rear bumper. The driver was not being particularly subtle about his intentions. Then again, why did he need to be? He didn’t exactly need to rely on artifice or subterfuge. He had the vehicle with the better engine, the better handling, the better suspension. Me? I was probably better at Scrabble, but that was about it.
He made a move to pass me on the left, which I countered by drifting to the middle, leaving no room to pass on either side. Knowing he couldn’t get by me, I laid off the accelerator a little but was still getting along quite quickly.
In this manner we sped down Prince Street, with the town houses of University Heights on my left just a blur, toward the first of two traffic lights. The second one, I knew, I wouldn’t have to worry about. It was just Court Street, a road that wouldn’t have much traffic on it. But the first? The first was a concern—the aforementioned Springfield Avenue, one of the most heavily traveled arteries in New Jersey’s largest city.
As I closed to within about a hundred yards, I could see the light facing me was still red, while the light for Springfield was still green. There was no chance it would be able to cycle through from yellow to red in time. I thought about slowing down a little. I couldn’t just bomb right through, kamikaze-style, could I?
Then, with about fifty yards to go, I heard a popping sound from behind me, then another, and I knew damn well it wasn’t the Mercedes backfiring. I was being
shot at, again. And that sort of solved the dilemma of whether to slow down. My quandary, instead, became how to elude whatever was in the intersection as I barreled through it. I glanced left and saw the way was clear. I wasn’t so lucky with the right. A red sedan of some sort, a Pontiac maybe, was approaching. If I maintained my current speed, I judged my front bumper would impale its side panel at roughly a ninety degree angle, and that wasn’t going to be good for either of us, especially the driver of the Pontiac.
Then again, if I jammed on the brakes, there was a good chance the Mercedes—now mere feet off my back bumper—was going to rear-end me. And that didn’t seem like it would end well, either.
I was left with one option, and that was to ask for more from the Malibu than it was perhaps able to give me. Using every muscle in my right leg to generate as much force as I could, I hammered the accelerator. Then I laid on the horn with my right palm, hoping it might alert the red car’s driver to the fact that I was coming, traffic signals be damned.
Then I held my breath and tensed my body for the collision.
* * *
I careened through the intersection like that, with the expected impact never coming. The red car responded to my blaring horn with an angry bleep of its own, but its antilock brakes were doing the job, bringing the Pontiac to a noisy but safe stop.
The next block was a short one, and I could already see the light was green. I was in the clear for a little while, except for the minor annoyance that there were some hostile young men behind me. I finally allowed myself a glance at my pursuers in the rearview mirror. On the passenger side of the car, I saw an arm stuck out of the front window holding a handgun. The muzzle flashed twice more, and I heard the shots, though the noise was surprisingly distant, almost like a BB gun.
