Gideon waited patiently.
“Here’s the thing,” the cop repeated uneasily, seeking a way to say it. “The wrecked car is evidence in a homicide investigation. It’s locked up right now, nobody can even get to it.”
“Locked up?”
“Yeah. Inside an evidence cage in there.” He jerked a thumb toward the warehouse.
“But surely someone could just go in there and get the medallion off the mirror? That’s not evidence.”
“I understand. I really do. But that taxicab’s totally locked up. It’s in a chain-link cage, with a chain-link roof over it and everything. And the warehouse itself is locked and alarmed. You’ve got to understand, chain of custody for evidence is crucial in a case like this. The cab is evidence: there are scratches on it, paint from the other vehicle, evidence of ramming. This is a major homicide case — seven people died in that accident and others were badly injured. And they’re still looking for the scumbag who did it. Nobody can get in there except authorized personnel, and even then only by filling out forms and going through red tape. And everything they do to the car has to be videotaped. It’s for a good reason, to help us catch those responsible and make sure they’re convicted.”
Gideon’s face fell. “I see. That’s too bad, it would mean so much.” He looked up, brightening, as with a new idea. “Tony won’t be buried for a week or two, at least. Will it be locked up very long?”
“The way these things work, that cab will be locked up until the guys are caught, there’s a trial, maybe an appeal…It could be years. I wish it wasn’t like that.” The officer spread his hands. “Years.”
“What am I going to tell my sister? You say the warehouse is alarmed?”
“Alarmed and guarded, twenty-four seven. And even if you could get in there, as I said, the vehicle’s locked inside an evidence cage way in the back and not even the guard has a key.”
Gideon rubbed his chin. “Chain-link cage?”
“Yeah, sort of like those cages they use in Guantánamo.”
“The cage is also alarmed?”
“No.”
“How’s the warehouse alarmed?”
“Doors and windows.”
“Motion sensors? Lasers?”
“Nah, there’s a guard who makes his rounds every half hour in there. I think it’s just the doors and windows that have alarms.”
“Video cameras?”
“Yeah, they’re all over. The whole area’s covered.” He paused, his face becoming serious. “Don’t even think about it.”
Gideon shook his head. “You’re right. What the hell am I thinking?”
“Be patient. Eventually you’ll get that medallion back, and maybe by then you’ll have the satisfaction of seeing the perp doing twenty-five to life at Rikers Island.”
“I hope they fry the bastard.”
The cop reached out and laid a hammy hand on Gideon’s. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”
Gideon nodded quickly, pressed the cop’s hand, and walked off. When he reached the end of the block, he turned and looked back. He could see, under the eaves of the warehouse’s corners, a cluster of surveillance cameras providing full coverage of the outdoor area. He counted them: twelve from this vantage point alone. There would be many more on the other side of the building and an equal number within.
He turned and pondered what he’d learned. The fact was, most of what people called security systems were pastiches, just a lot of expensive electronic shit slapped up willy-nilly with no thought to building a coordinated, comprehensive network. One of Gideon’s worst habits, which ruined his enjoyment of museum-going, was his propensity to figure out how many ways he could rip the museum off: wireless transmitters, vibration and motion sensors, noncontact IR detectors, ultrasound — it was all so obvious.
He shook his head with something almost like regret. There would be no challenge here at the police warehouse — none at all.
20
Three o’clock in the morning. Gideon Crew sauntered down Brown Place and crossed 132nd Street, weaving slightly, muttering to himself. He was wearing baggy jeans and a thin hoodie sporting a Cab Calloway silkscreen—a nice touch, he thought—which flopped over his face. The fake gut he had purchased at a theatrical supply store hung hot and heavy on his midriff, and it pressed heavily on the Colt Python snugged into his waistband against his skin.
He crossed the street, stumbled on the opposite curb, and continued down 132nd toward Pulaski Park, alongside the chain-link fence surrounding the police warehouse. The sodium lamps cast a bright urine glow everywhere, and the separate security floods around the warehouse added their own brilliant white to the mix. The gatehouse was empty, the gate shut and locked, the rolls of concertina wire at the top of the fence gleaming in the light.
Reaching the point where the fence made a turn toward an old set of railroad tracks across an overgrown and abandoned parking lot, now used for storage of old tractor-trailers, he staggered around the corner, searching here and there as if looking for a place to piss. There was no one in the area he could see, and he doubted anyone was watching, but he felt certain the surveillance cameras were recording his every move; they probably weren’t monitored in real time, but they surely would be scrutinized later.
Staggering alongside the fence, he unzipped his fly, took a steaming leak, then continued to the tracks. Turning again, now out of sight from the street, he suddenly crouched, reached into his pocket, and pulled a stocking down over his face. The bottom of the chain-link fence was anchored into a cement apron with bent pieces of rebar and could not be pulled up. Reaching under his baggy sweatshirt, he pulled out a pair of bolt cutters and cut the links along the bottom, then up one side beside a pole. Grasping the cut section of links, he bent them inward. In another moment he was inside. He pushed the flap of chain link back into place and looked around.
The warehouse had two huge doors in the front and back, into which had been set smaller doors. He scooted up to the back door and found, as expected, a numerical keypad with a small LED screen to set or turn off the alarm. No peephole or window — the door was blank metal.
Naturally, he didn’t know the code to turn off the alarm. But there was someone who did, inside; all he needed to do was summon him.
He knocked on the door and waited.
Silence.
He knocked again, louder. “Yo!” he called.
And now he could hear, inside, the sound of the guard moving toward the door.
“Who is it?” came the disembodied voice.
“Officers Halsey and Medina,” Gideon barked out in a loud, officious voice. “You okay? We got a silent alarm going at the precinct house.”
“Silent alarm? I don’t know anything about it.” Gideon waited as the guard pressed the password into the keypad on the other side. The numbers came up only as asterisks on the external LED screen.
As the door began to open, Gideon ducked back around the corner, then fled to the outdoor wrecking yard he’d previously picked out as a hiding place. He climbed a stack of pancaked cars and lay down on top, watching and waiting.
“Hey!” shouted the guard at the threshold of the open door, looking about in a panic but not daring to venture outside. “Who’s there?” There was real alarm in his voice.
Gideon waited.
An alarm began to whoop — the guard had pulled it, right on cue — and within five minutes the cop cars arrived, three of them screeching up at the curb, the occupants leaping out. Six cops.
Gideon smiled. The more the merrier.
They began a search of the place, three taking the inside of the warehouse, and three searching the wrecking yard. Naturally, most of them being out of shape, they did not attempt to climb the stacks of crushed cars. Gideon watched them poking and shining their lights all over for about thirty minutes, amusing himself by reconstructing the complex bass line of the Cecil Taylor number he’d listened to the previous afternoon. They then inspected the perimeter fence but, as h
e’d figured, missed the carefully concealed gap he’d created.
Meanwhile, just as he’d hoped, the other three cops and the guard were coming and going from the warehouse without bothering to shut, lock, or alarm the door in their haste. Finally, search completed, the six cops gathered in the parking lot with the guard beside their cars, where they radioed back to the precinct.
Gideon climbed down the heap of flattened cars, ran out of the junkyard, flitted across the parking lot, and flattened himself against the warehouse wall. He crept up to the door, which was still halfway open, and slipped inside.
Keeping to the shadows, he found a new hiding place inside the warehouse, in a far corner behind two deep rows of chain-link cages, each protecting a car. It was stifling in the building, the muggy dead air redolent of gasoline, oil, and burned rubber.
Another fifteen minutes passed and the guard came back in, shutting and locking the door behind him and resetting the alarm. Gideon watched as the man walked the length of the warehouse and settled into a lighted area at the far end, replete with a chair and desk, a huge bank of CCTV monitors — and a television set.
And sure enough, the guard turned on the set, swung his feet up, and began to watch. It was some old show, and every few moments there was a laugh track. He listened. Was that really the penetrating voice of Lucille Ball and the answering bark of Ricky Ricardo? God bless the unions, Gideon thought, that had fought so hard for the right of municipal employees on night duty to have access to a TV set.
On his hands and knees, Gideon crawled along the row of cages, peering inside, until at last he found the wrecked Ford Escape. He removed the bolt cutters and a thick cotton rag. Winding the rag around the first chain link, he waited for the laugh track; made the cut; rewound the rag around the next link; waited for the laugh track; cut again.
He finished as the show ended with the usual burst of pseudo-Copacabana music. Opening the flap he’d created, he crawled inside.
The car was an absolute mess. It had been pried apart and cut into several pieces that were so mangled they were only vaguely recognizable as belonging to a vehicle. It was still drenched in blood and gore and smelled like a butcher shop on a hot summer’s day. Crawling around it, Gideon located the rear passenger area where Wu had been sitting and wormed his way inside. The seat was sticky with blood.
Trying his best to tune this out, he forced his hands into the space behind and groped around. Almost immediately he felt something hard and small. He grasped it, slipped it into a ziplock bag he pulled from his pocket, and sealed the bag with a feeling of triumph.
A cell phone.
21
In Roland Blocker’s four years of working the night shift at the warehouse, nothing had ever happened. Absolutely nothing. Night after night it was the same routine, the same rounds, the same comforting parade of late-night, black-and-white television sitcoms. Blocker loved the peace and quiet of the vast space. He had always felt safe, cocooned in the warehouse with its heavy metal doors and alarms and ceaselessly vigilant cameras, all safely enclosed within a twelve-foot chain-link fence topped by concertina wire. He’d never been bothered, no burglary attempts, nothing. After all, there was nothing to steal either inside or out — except wrecked cars, cars hauled out of the rivers with dead bodies in them, cars found with bodies locked in their trunks, burned-out cars, drug-smuggling cars, shot-up cars. What was there to steal?
But now, after the incident, with the cops gone, he felt spooked for the first time. That had been the strangest damn thing, that voice outside the door. Had he really heard it? A couple of the cops who’d responded to his alarm hinted around that maybe he’d been sleeping and had a dream. That pissed Blocker off — he never slept on the job. The surveillance cameras were always on and God only knew who might check the tapes later.
I Love Lucy had ended and the next show up was The Beverly Hillbillies, Blocker’s favorite of the night’s lineup. He tried to relax as the theme song started, the twang of banjos and the overdone hick accent always making him smile. He bent down to crank up the A/C and adjust the vents so they blew more directly on him.
And then he heard a sound. A clink—as if a piece of metal had dropped lightly onto the cement floor of the warehouse. He dropped his legs off the desk and, fumbling for the remote, muted the TV set to listen.
Clank came the sound again, closer this time. Suddenly his heart was pounding in his chest. First the voice, now this. He scanned the bank of inside CCTV monitors, but they showed nothing.
Should he pull the alarm again? No, the cops would never let him live that down. He considered calling out and realized that was plain stupid — if some intruder was in the warehouse, they wouldn’t answer.
Heaving himself out of the chair, Blocker unhooked his Maglite and headed in the direction of the second sound, moving cautiously, his free hand resting easily on the butt of his service piece.
Reaching the area from which the sound had come, he shone the light around. This corner contained stacked pallets of old shrink-wrapped pieces of cars, all labeled — evidence that had been cut from vehicles years before but couldn’t yet be tossed.
Nothing. He was just nervous, spooked by the earlier thing — that was all. Maybe rats had gotten into the warehouse. He went back to his little office and sat down, turning the sound of the television up, a little higher than usual this time. The noise comforted him. It was the episode where the banker fakes an attack of wild Indians on the Clampett mansion, one of his favorites. He cracked open a fresh Diet Coke and settled down to enjoy it.
Clank.
He sat up again, muting the television, listening intently.
Clank.
It was such a regular sound, unnatural, almost deliberate, coming from the same damn area. The CCTV monitors remained empty. Once again he rejected the idea of pulling the alarm.
Getting back to his feet, he yanked out the flashlight and shifted it to his left hand, unsnapping the keeper on his sidearm with his right and sliding out the weapon. He walked back to the corner from which the sounds had come and paused, hoping to hear it again. Nothing. He advanced, this time deciding to go behind the stacks of pallets to see if there was something or someone hiding between them and the wall.
He slowly walked down a long aisle between pallets, pausing just before the last one, listening. Still nothing. Weird.
Moving tentatively now, he approached the final stack of pallets and ducked around the corner, shining his light along the wall.
He felt something not unlike a displacement of air behind him and spun around; a black shadow burst out of the darkness but before he could scream there was a flash of steel and he felt a violent tug across his neck, and then everything was tumbling and crazy and red — and then it was over.
22
Gideon Crew waited, listening. There was someone else inside the warehouse who was not the guard: he was sure of it. The guard had heard it, too, and gone to inspect; returned; then investigated again. The second time he had not returned and Gideon had heard a faint scuffling sound, following by the sound of something wet landing softly on the floor.
He waited, absolutely still and unmoving. From his vantage point inside the car, he could see through several breaks in the wreckage, giving him a view of the central, cleared aisle of the warehouse, very broad, that ran to the security area at the far end. The guard was still gone, and he was taking much too long to investigate.
Gideon heard a soft plop, and then something rolled out from between two stacks of pallets on the right side and came slowly to rest in the open area.
The guard’s severed head.
Gideon’s mind kicked into overdrive. He knew instantly it was a trap — a way to flush him out, frighten him, or induce him to investigate. Another person was loose in the warehouse — and now Gideon was the target.
Quickly he reviewed his options. He could stay and fight, stalk his stalker. But his opponent was holding all the cards; he evidently knew exactly where Gideon
was, he had worked it all out, he had lured and killed the guard so efficiently that there hadn’t even been a sound…Gideon’s instincts told him this guy was very, very good, a true professional.
So what to do? Get the hell out. He already had the cell phone, and additional searching had turned up nothing else.
But that was obviously one of the things his opponent — or opponents — expected him to do. Opponents. Now that was a chilling thought.
He needed to do the unexpected. But what could be unexpected here? Gideon was well protected inside the twisted car, but any move he made to leave it would potentially expose him.
He was fucked.
As he mulled it over, he realized that the killer, or killers, had been tracking his progress all along. Now they were probably in position, aiming at his cage, just waiting for his appearance. They wouldn’t have rolled out the head if they didn’t know where he was.
There was a way out. It was a huge risk, but at least it had the advantage of leaving him alive. He had no other options.
He glanced at his watch. Then he eased the Colt Python out of his waistband and aimed it carefully at the lock on the door leading outside the warehouse. He squeezed off a shot, which sounded thunderously in the enclosed space, the round clipping the alarm keypad. The siren began to whoop again.
Now it was a question of outwaiting the killer. Because at some point the unknown assailant would have to bolt. And then Gideon would have to get his own ass out.
Who was it? The driver of the black SUV? It had to be — they’d have gotten a good look at him during the chase.
A shot rang out, ripping into the wrecked taxi with a clang, followed by another and another, heavy-caliber rounds that punched through the metal like butter. Gideon realized with dismay that the killer wasn’t going to run, at least not immediately. He had, for better or worse, forced the man’s hand.
At least he now knew where the shots were coming from. Flattening himself within the wreckage, keeping behind the engine block, he took aim and waited. Boom came the next shot; he saw the muzzle flash and quickly returned fire. Already he could hear the sirens. How long had it taken before the police arrived last time? About five minutes.
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