He had just heard on his walkie that their missing unmarked Ford Crown Victoria had been sighted from an overpass by a Florida highway patrolman responding to a serious multicar pileup in the opposite direction. Dyson was now reported southbound on Interstate 95, speeding toward the city. He had slapped the detectives’ blue flasher onto the dashboard and was weaving through heavy traffic.
“Cross the 163rd Street causeway,” Corso yelled. “We can cut him off at the pass!” He dove into the front seat. “Wanna come, Pete? You up to it?”
Nazario paused for a moment, watching Corso reload his weapon. He shook his head. Screams still echoed from half a block away.
“I’ll check out the collateral damage here.”
“Okay, but get yourself checked out first.”
The patrol car tore away from the curb, lights flashing, siren screaming.
More sirens as paramedics arrived. Nazario pointed down the street, waving them on in the direction of the screams. His handheld radio was dead, run over in the street by an SUV that narrowly missed him. He limped painfully down the sidewalk toward the retirement hotel.
“Dios mío.” A tiny elderly woman, her dress bloodied, lay pale and dazed, holding a blood-soaked towel to her head as shocked senior citizens and hysterical hotel employees milled about her.
Shit, he thought. Este hijo de puta mato a una vieja. My God, the son of a bitch killed an old lady.
Medics scrambled to treat the injured woman as Nazario trudged grimly on down the street to the restaurant. Shots had shattered the front windows, showering an early lunch crowd with flying glass. Bullet holes pocked an inside wall. Nazario ventured inside. Broken glass crunching beneath his feet. Small tables and chairs had been overturned in the chaotic stampede. Broken crystal and fresh flowers from the tables littered the floor.
“Everybody okay in here?” he called hopefully.
“It’s dead!” The manager raised his head from behind the counter. He was trembling.
“¿Qué?” The detective dreaded the answer.
“The cappuccino machine!” the man burbled emotionally. “They killed it. Shot it dead center in the middle of lunch hour. What happened? Was it terrorists?”
“No, not terrorists. No, no es un terrorista, es peor, un policia comemierda.”
Miraculously, no one was dead or seriously hurt, though scores of customers had fled during the confusion without paying their checks. The detective stepped out, scanned the street for other casualties, and returned to the hotel.
The news was better than he dared hope. One of Corso’s hollow-point bullets had nicked the elderly woman’s right earlobe as she rocked in her chair on the hotel’s front porch.
Though the wound bled freely, medics believed that Irma Jolly, eighty-six, would be fine. The outcome would have been far different had the slug struck a mere fraction of an inch to the right. Gracias, señor. Nazario fought the urge to drop to the ground and give thanks. His battered knees ached too much.
The medics wanted him checked out at the ER.
“Later,” he said. “After we get our car back.”
Nazario used the radio of a Miami police sergeant who had just arrived. He saw no life-threatening injuries at the scene, he said, and was proceeding with the sergeant in the direction of the chase.
Corso and the young patrolman were in hot pursuit, with Dyson in sight, still handcuffed and at the wheel of the Crown Vic. The blue flasher on the dashboard alerted motorists, many of whom yielded or pulled over. An angry Metro-Dade bus driver called 911 and complained about cops chasing each other through traffic.
WTVJ-TV launched its news chopper and broke into regular programming to cover the chase live. Lou, the tattoo artist, watched it on TV from his shop.
“Not for a very long time,” he murmured aloud, and wondered what a help-wanted ad in the News would cost him.
Dyson’s unmarked police car sideswiped several motorists, then careened down an exit ramp, with the pursuing patrol unit just five car lengths behind. He had located the siren button and was using that too.
“Go! Go! Go!” Corso bellowed to the rookie behind the wheel.
The rookie radioed that Dyson was blowing red lights and stop signs as the stolen car rocketed through a residential neighborhood at a high rate of speed.
“Takes after his old man,” Nazario muttered, as he heard the transmission from three miles away. “They should call off the pursuit,” he told the sergeant, “before somebody else gets hurt.”
In the pursuing patrol car, Corso urged the rookie driver to stop Dyson with the PIT maneuver. Officers trained in the Pursuit Intervention Technique deliberately tap fleeing vehicles with their own cars to end dangerous pursuits. The officer aligns his car’s front end with the fleeing vehicle, maintains speed, and targets a strike area between the tire and the bumper. If done right, the fleeing car spins to a stop.
“They taught us how to do it in the academy,” the young patrolman said, wrenching the wheel to avoid a smoking city sanitation truck that seemed about to burst into flames, “but I never tried it in a real chase.”
“No time like now,” Corso said. “It’s fun.”
Uncertain, the officer radioed for permission to use the PIT maneuver and received an affirmative. But before they could close the gap between them, Dyson lost control, clipped the side mirror off a pickup truck half a block ahead, and careened off a bright yellow Hummer at a stop sign.
“He’s losing it! He’s losing it!” Corso shouted.
Dyson skidded sideways across a green velvet lawn, through the sprinklers, and slammed into a house. Roof tiles flew as the big Ford Crown Vic crashed through the northeast wall. The front end of the unmarked penetrated the living room, the blue light on the dash still flashing, the siren still wailing. Dazed, Dyson stumbled out the driver’s side and fell over a broken coffee table.
“We got ’im now! We got ’im now!” Corso screamed into the radio.
“Sounds like they have him,” Riley said, with a sigh of relief, as she and Burch backtracked from Sunny Isles.
“There he goes!” Corso’s voice shouted from the radio. “He’s running!”
“Oh, shit,” Riley said.
“Badder than his old man,” Nazario said, listening as they fought heavy traffic. “Este hijo de puta es peor que su padre.”
Sam Stone, alone in an unmarked car, was closest, as everyone converged.
Dyson sprinted through the backyard of the house he’d hit as a man ran out the front door screaming, “My big-screen TV! It was brand new!”
“I didn’t do the PIT,” the young patrolman shouted into his radio. “Be advised. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.”
A trucker told 911, “A crazy cop just ran me off the road and hit a house!”
Corso and the patrolman bailed out and took up the foot chase as helicopter blades battered the air above them. They were so focused on their quarry that the rookie forgot to put the car in park.
The WTVJ cameraman caught great footage as the police car as rolled down an incline, picked up speed, and crashed into a huge gumbo limbo tree.
Dogs barked, residents shouted, and mothers rushed to snatch up their small children as the chase pounded through backyards and flower gardens.
Dyson, still in handcuffs, leaped like a gazelle, straight up and over a concrete retaining wall and onto higher ground bordering the expressway. He was about to sprint across six lanes of heavy high-speed traffic.
Back in Sunny Isles, Lou covered his eyes. “Go! Go!” chanted the crowd of beachgoers and construction workers clustered around his TV.
Dyson made a false start, then pulled up as motorists leaned on their horns without slowing down. Deciding against becoming road-kill, he scrambled back down the embankment, jumped to the surface street, and dashed for the cover of dense trees and bushes at the end of the block, with Corso and the young cop fifty yards behind.
“I think there’s a canal back there,” Corso panted. “We’ve got ’i
m trapped.”
Crashing and stumbling through wild cherry hedges and thick Florida holly, they unexpectedly came face-to-face with Dyson, who stood twelve feet away on the bank of a wide drainage canal.
“Stop right there!” The panting patrolman brandished his gun.
“Like hell,” Dyson gasped, chest heaving. “You can’t shoot a handcuffed man.”
He turned and dove into the water.
He tried to swim but quickly began to flail and thrash as Corso and the patrolman searched the canal bank for something to throw him. But before they found anything, Dyson slipped beneath the water’s surface and disappeared.
“What the hell?” Stone stopped behind a damaged patrol car resting against a gumbo limbo tree and looked around. A siren wailed from inside a nearby house as eerie flashing blue lights pulsated in the windows. He ran toward an agitated civilian out front.
“Everybody inside all right?”
“I was the only one home.” The man clutched his heart. “Nobody hurt, but my big-screen TV, and the kids’ aquarium—”
“What’s that smell?” Stone interrupted. The odor was familiar. He skirted the outside of the house to the crumbled wall, the homeowner following. They heard an ominous hissing.
“Oh, shit!” cried the homeowner.
“Get the next-door neighbors out,” Stone told him. “Take them across the street. Now! Keep everybody away!”
He radioed dispatch to send City Gas on a three, an emergency signal. “The stolen unmarked struck a gas meter at this location. We’ve got a broken line with escaping gas.
“Which way did they go?” he asked the retreating homeowner, who pointed to the far end of the street; other residents directed him along the way.
Stone burst through the foliage. He found Corso, red-faced from the chase, hands on his knees, sucking up deep breaths.
“Hey, bro,” Corso said, looking up.
“Where’s the suspect?” Stone’s eyes darted around.
Corso jerked his head toward the canal. “Son of a bitch jumped in. Thought he could swim in handcuffs. He thought wrong.”
“He went down.” The young patrolman pointed to the spot where they last saw Dyson.
Corso read Stone’s expression.
“Not me, I ain’t jumping in there,” he said. “It’s murky as hell. Probably thirty feet deep. I called for divers.”
“What’s their ETA?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
The young patrolman took a step back from Stone’s hard stare. “I can’t swim,” he said.
Traditionally, Miami police applicants were required to swim one hundred yards underwater while carrying a two-hundred-pound weight. The requirement was eliminated several years ago in order to speed recruitment. Today, police officers protecting a city surrounded by water don’t have to know how to swim.
“How long?” Stone shouted, stripping off his shirt.
Corso shrugged. “Coupla minutes.”
“Here, take my gun.” Stone kicked off his shoes.
“Hey,” Corso said. “Hold on. You blacks can’t swim for shit. We got divers on the way.”
Stone dove into the canal, submerged, surfaced, then dove again. This time he didn’t surface.
“Holy shit,” Corso said.
Stone broke the mirrored surface, shook his head, gasped for air, took several deep breaths, and dove twice more.
After the third dive, Stone surfaced with one arm around Dyson’s neck and swam to the canal bank, where the others dragged the unconscious man up the steep incline.
“Is he breathing?” Stone gasped, as he followed. Dyson’s face was blue, lips purple.
“No.” The patrolman shook his head.
Corso looked puzzled. “I guess some blacks can swim.”
Stone started CPR.
Back at the tattoo parlor, Lou got up from his TV and propped a hand-lettered HELP WANTED sign in his front window.
“Where the hell is rescue?” Stone gasped. “Tell them to speed it up.”
“I wouldn’t do that in a million years,” Corso muttered, as Stone performed mouth-to-mouth and then chest compressions.
He was still doing CPR when patrol units, K. C. Riley, and Burch arrived.
“Need me to take over?” Burch asked.
A huge amount of water suddenly gushed from Dyson’s mouth. His eyelids fluttered.
“Atta boy,” Stone panted. “He’s breathing.” He turned to Corso. “Where’s the damn key? Take his cuffs off.”
A Fire Rescue unit arrived moments later. “It was hard as hell to find him,” Stone said, still breathing hard. “There’s a ton of junk on the bottom. I think I even saw a couple of cars down there.”
The paramedics inserted an IV, put a cervical collar on Dyson, placed him on a backboard, and lifted him into their van.
Nazario arrived as it departed for county hospital, lights flashing, siren screaming. “Is he alive?”
“If he makes it, he has Stone to thank,” Corso said. “So, bro, where’d you learn how to swim?”
“My grandmother took me to the beach growing up,” Stone said, words clipped, his tone chilly. “She taught herself to swim so she could teach me, because so many kids in Overtown didn’t learn how and drowned.” He still sat on the rocky ground, dripping perspiration and canal water and trying to catch his breath.
“That kid didn’t fall far from the tree,” Burch said. “No mystery who he takes after.”
“Somebody obviously pissed in that gene pool,” Riley said.
“He ruined my suit,” Nazario complained. “It got torn when the car hit me.”
“Stone and his clothes look like shit, too,” Burch said.
They all turned to Corso.
“Hey,” he said, “this ain’t my fault. This coulda happened to anybody.”
They returned to their cars, as the homeowner rushed toward the flashing yellow lights of an arriving City Gas truck.
As Stone and Nazario briefed Riley, the various police radios around them simultaneously emitted a high-pitched emergency signal: Female paramedic pushed from a moving rescue van by a violent patient who escaped.
On the way to the hospital Dyson had yanked out his IV, ripped off his cervical collar, and struggled with the paramedic treating him. As her male partner looked for a safe place to pull over, Dyson shoved the medic out the back door, jumped from the rescue wagon, and fled.
He didn’t go far. The female medic suffered only bruises, abrasions, and acute embarrassment. But Dyson broke his right ankle when he leaped out of the moving vehicle. Police tackled him as he limped along, several blocks away.
“What is with you?” Nazario asked Dyson, now sedated and handcuffed to a bed in the hospital’s jail ward. “¿Qué te pasó, cabrón, por qué corriste? Why did you run?”
“I din’t do it,” Dyson mumbled.
“What?”
“What’d you want me for?” Dyson asked, his bloodshot eyes wary.
“We just wanted to ask about something that happened when you were eleven years old.”
“I din’t do it.”
Nazario sighed. “Did you ever meet Spencer York? He called himself the Custody Crusader. Wore army fatigues, was an acquaintance of your dad’s.”
“That sonbitch.”
“York?”
“No, my father.”
“I don’t get it,” Nazario said, perplexed. “All you had was an old open traffic warrant. For that you almost kill a cop, half a dozen other people, and yourself?”
“I din’t wanna go to jail.”
Stone got a tetanus shot and went home for dry clothes. Nazario was scanned, X-rayed, and tested, and treated for cuts, deep bruises, and road rash but declined to remain overnight for observation.
Back at headquarters, facing daunting paperwork, with every phone lit up, Emma interrupted.
“Colin Dyson on the line.”
“Jesus Christ!” Riley groaned. “Don’t tell me they gave him one call and it’s to
us.”
“Maybe he wants to apologize.” Burch picked up the phone.
“It’s the father,” he told Riley, moments later. “He says there’s something he forgot to tell us.”
There was something odd about Spencer York’s behavior the night of the Fathers First meeting, Colin Dyson said.
“He was off the wall, super hyper. The guy reacted every time a female walked into the hotel. Not like he was looking for a date, like he had the jitters.
“We leave, and he thinks we’re being followed. I’m driving and he’s watching the mirrors, looking over his shoulder. Once he tells me to turn at the next corner, and takes us blocks out of the way, to see if the car behind us follows. I asked if the cops were tailing him. ‘It’s not the cops I’m worried about,’ he said.
“Then who? I wanted to know. The Feminazis? A woman? I was joking. That’s when he said it.”
“What?”
“That females are the deadliest of the species, the cause of all the trouble in the world since Eve. Went on and on about it. Sounded like he was being stalked by a woman.”
“What kind of stalking are we talking about here?”
“Well, the guy wasn’t exactly known for his youth, good looks, and sex appeal.”
Burch thanked him for calling. “I assume you’re aware of what happened today, regarding your son.”
“Saw some of it live, on TV,” Dyson said flatly. “Told you, didn’t I? Biggest mistake I ever made.”
“That’s exactly what he said,” Burch told the others, his expression incredulous. “I’m expecting him to ask about his kid’s condition. How’s Junior? Is he seriously hurt? When can I see him? Does he need a lawyer? Nothing. That guy’s no father.”
“Takes more than sperm to be one,” Riley said.
A sergeant from the police shooting team, which investigates whenever a weapon is fired in the line of duty, arrived to interview Corso, who declined unless he was accompanied by his union representative and his lawyer.
“A cop has the right to shoot the sorry ass of anybody who threatens him after being told to stop,” he griped defensively, after the sergeant left. “And that includes sorry asses who speak no English. If they don’t understand stop or freeze, they shoulda learned the language before they came here.”
Love Kills Page 13
