Enemy within kac-13

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  He touched her lips delicately with his bloodstained hands.

  "Are you going to kill me, David?"

  She saw the startle, the shock on his face. "My God, no! Why would I want to kill you? You're beautiful and good and everyone loves you."

  "Well, usually when you find out who the serial killer is," she said carefully, as to a small child, "he kills you to shut you up."

  He seemed to find this amusing. "Is that what I am? I guess everybody has to have a label. But what if you're something that doesn't have one? You, for example. Or your mom. Is she a serial killer? No, you can tell them what you want. And I have no intention of hurting you. After you rest a bit, I'll take you back to the main branch. You can find your way back to your parents easy from there."

  "Then I'd like to go now," she said, and struggled to her feet, wavering as dizziness washed through her. He gripped her arm.

  They found her other boot under the corpse. He pulled it out and helped her on with it. Then they walked in silence down the dark passage.

  "This is it," he said. "Just go to the right and you'll be-"

  "Lucy!" came a shout. Her father. He'd seen her light.

  She answered the shout. They heard running steps.

  "I better go," Grale said. "Good-bye, Lucy."

  "But what will you do?"

  "Oh, I think I'll stick around here for a while. I like it down here. It's a simple life." He laughed. She could see his shining teeth, that glorious smile. "In fact, I think maybe I've finally found my ministry."

  She kissed him then, on the mouth, pressing hard, and after a second or two of teeth-clunking surprise he kissed her back, and it was really her first real kiss, and very good it was, too, although the circumstances were not what she had dreamed of, and the person, while the right person, was not whom she had imagined him to be.

  Then she was in her father's arms and crying again, but not for long. The cop hurried them back. When they arrived, everyone pretended to ignore Marlene's state of dress, but she was soon relieved of warming duties by Cooley's fleece-lined jacket.

  "I should get that guy out of there," Cooley said, staring at the newspaper fort across the tunnel. "He could start tossing bombs again."

  "Why would he do that? We're not attacking him," Lucy objected.

  "Yeah, but a psycho killer like him, you can't tell what they'll do."

  "He's not a killer," said Lucy. "David Grale is the bum slasher."

  Simultaneous expressions of shock, surprise, and disbelief from the three adults standing.

  "No, really," said Lucy over their objections, "he told me so himself. A couple of the moles had me in a side passage, and they were going to assault me, and he killed them both with his knife. And then he told me." She started to cry, then bit her lip to suppress it.

  Marlene said, "In that case, Canman can stay there forever, for all I care. I'm going for help. Give me your radio, Cooley. I'll put in a call as soon as I reach the river gate. Keep looking for the dog."

  After a moment's hesitation, Cooley handed her his radio, and she ran off.

  Lucy went over to sit with Father Dugan. Cooley and Karp settled some distance away. The only light came from the wounded man's flashlight tourniquet, and it was growing dim. Time passed in silence but for the quiet conversation between Lucy and the priest. Karp's watch did not glow in the dark, so he lost track of time. It could have been twenty minutes or an hour. He was thirsty, and his knee hurt. Now Cooley was walking around flashing his light in both directions, and on the ground. He came back and sat down again. "There's four of them dead. No sign of the dog."

  More silence. Karp cleared his throat and said, "Interesting development about Grale." Karp was glad that Cooley couldn't see his face, and that he couldn't see Cooley's. He was angry, embarrassed, and confused, angry at Canman, at Grale, at Cooley, at Marlene for concocting this expedition, at Tran, whose heavy artillery would have come in handy for once, but most of all at himself. He had gone down the wrong path many times before-it was a hazard of his occupation-but never as badly as this, and never in a way so void of the constraints built into the system, constraints designed to keep nasty prosecutors such as himself from screwing up the lives of the innocent. That the system had let him down badly was small comfort at this point, and certainly not to a seasoned self-flagellator like Karp.

  "If it's on the level," said Cooley after a long silence.

  "I think it is. Lucy wouldn't invent something like that, and if you noticed, the legs of her coverall and one of her boots are covered with blood, globs of it."

  "Yeah, I guess. Does this mean you don't like me for it anymore?"

  "Okay, Cooley, I was wrong," Karp snarled. "If you want, I'll kiss your ass in Macy's window. But I still like you a lot for the other thing."

  Cooley made a disgusted noise and stood up. He switched on his flashlight.

  "Where're you going?" Karp asked.

  "I'm going over there and grab up that asshole."

  "I'm coming with you," said Karp, getting up, too.

  "No, you're not."

  "Oh, yes, I am. I don't want my witness conveniently shot while escaping."

  Karp heard a curse and a rustle of fabric, and suddenly he was looking at the butt end of a Glock 17.

  "Take it, you fucker!" Cooley shouted.

  "Don't be stupid, Cooley. Sit down, and we'll wait for the cavalry to get here."

  Cooley took a step forward, and Karp put up his hands defensively, but the detective only grasped Karp's coverall and jammed the weapon into the big patch pocket on its breast. Then Cooley strode off, becoming a bobbing circle of light and the sound of trodden bricks.

  "What's going on, Dad?" Lucy was standing by his side, only a voice in the dark.

  "Cooley's gone off after Canman, the idiot!"

  "No!" Lucy cried, and in an instant all Karp could see of her was a running silhouette against Cooley's light. Without thinking, Karp ran after her, stumbling on the uneven surface and on the dead mole people.

  Cooley's beam made a white circle on the newspaper barricade. He tossed a chunk of brick at it and yelled, "Canman! You crazy bastard! Come out of there!"

  Nothing. Then a scrabbling sound from behind the barricade.

  Lucy came up and stood next to Cooley. "Let me go up there. He knows me."

  "Are you nuts! Get the hell out of here!" Karp came staggering up, and Cooley yelled at him to take his daughter away, which he had every intention of doing, and taking Cooley as well.

  But she ran away from Karp, and only stopped when Canman's head popped over the bales of paper. A red glow sprang up, lighting his face like a fun-house devil's. He stepped over the barricade, and they saw that he had a highway flare in one hand and a can grasped in the other. The flare was bright enough so that they could see that the can contained two pounds of Hercules Red Dot smokeless gunpowder, and that a short fuse was sticking out of the top of it.

  "Get away!" yelled the Canman. "Get away from me or I'll light this off. I swear I will." The flare hovered around the tip of the fuse. Karp and Cooley instinctively backed away, although they knew at some level that if a pound or so of powder went off in this place, a few feet was not going to make any difference.

  But Lucy went right up to him. "What are you doing?" she cried. "What are you doing? Haven't enough people been hurt?"

  "Get out of my way!" he yelled.

  "No! Where are you going to go? You're already in the most horrible place in the world. Living in a sewer! You idiot! Look at me! Do you want to kill me? Why do you think I'm here? Do you think I'm a cop? A social worker? I'm here because of you, John Carey Williams. I care about you, and you know it. It drives you crazy, but it's true."

  And she lowered her voice and kept talking. Karp couldn't hear what she said, but the guy wasn't moving. He was listening, his mouth slightly open, his eyes fixed on Lucy. Karp didn't want to move either. None of them did. They were all fixed to the floor like stalagmites. It went on, Lucy talki
ng quietly to the madman, the flare fuming, inches from the fuse, but not moving either. Something uncanny was happening, something outside Karp's experience, something out of a half-remembered myth: the Virgin and the monster in the deep cave. He tried to remember how it came out, what its deeper meaning was, but he could not. It was not his department, this sort of thing.

  Then he became aware that Cooley was no longer by his side, although his flashlight was still there illuminating its circle of wall. It had been propped up on a pile of fallen brick.

  A scuffling sound, and Lucy's scream, and Karp saw that Cooley had crept up behind Canman and grasped him from behind. The flare wavered and fell. Cooley and Canman went down in a heap, and Karp saw a tiny spark separate itself from the struggling men and roll toward him. It rolled almost to his feet. He could read the label by its sparkling red light. Time stopped. He thought about running, but there was nowhere to run, and there were Lucy and the others to consider. He could pick it up and throw it, but it looked heavy, and how could he be sure of the blast radius of such a bomb? It might bring down the whole rotten tunnel, burying them all under tons of brick. He could throw himself down on it, but he did not really want to do that.

  Another second expired. He picked it up instead. The spark had almost vanished into its nail hole. There was no way to pinch it off. Karp lifted the thing to his face and stuck out his tongue. He felt a jolt of intense pain and heard a brief sizzle.

  19

  The NYPD does not stint on resources when one of their own is in trouble, especially when one of their own happens to be Brendan Cooley. They sent SWAT teams and bomb squads, and detective chief inspectors and crime scene units and paramedics and canine teams and generators, and thousand-candlepower lighting rigs, and there were guys from Public Works with hard hats, yellow slickers, and rolled-up maps, and others with pneumatic drills, and they would have brought in the helicopters had they figured out how to get them down in the tunnels. Fulton was there, too, and on Karp's insistence took charge of John Carey Williams, the artist formerly known as Canman, not before informing Karp, with some satisfaction, that Brendan Cooley had alibis for every one of the bum slashings. Which Karp already knew. Fulton was short with Karp, and the police brass were even shorter, but it was also the case that the district attorney is formally in charge of every police investigation. The actual ADAs almost never pressed this point, but it was there to be pressed, and Karp knew it, and so did they. Fulton's career was probably damaged by it-another doleful burden for Karp to carry.

  Father Dugan was rushed off to the hospital along with Lucy, who did not want to go, but Karp insisted with a ferocity that surprised even him, and Marlene went along with her. Karp was happy to observe that an assaulted and beat-up daughter trumped the lost dog. You could never tell with Marlene. The cops had sequestered a pier and brought in a trailer for their operations center, and Karp hung around drinking bad coffee and being treated with correct frostiness by the cops. They were bringing out bags now, stretchers with the dead, and bags of remains. Cooley had apparently killed four men outright, and one had died later of wounds received. There were also two corpses with their throats torn out. What there wasn't was live people. No cannibal moles, no David Grale. And no large dog, dead or alive. Karp assembled a picture of what was happening below as reports filtered back to the command trailer. The old sewer, it turned out, had numerous unmapped branchings, and there were any number of passages broken into subways, real sewers, utility tunnels. Tracking through all of it would take weeks, and by that time the fugitives could be scattered anywhere in the thousands of miles of the city's catacombs.

  Toward evening, there was a sense of anticlimax among the command cops. The press was avid for a statement, and there were no perps to parade except for a bunch of homeless, whose major crime was being poor. There were grisly human remains (some of them cooked, but they weren't anxious to let that out) and a new prime suspect in the bum slashings, but that was not going to advance anyone's career. Karp didn't feel he had to be present while they concocted their plausible untruths, so he left and ran right into Brendan Cooley, about to come in.

  They looked at each other for a moment, and Karp thought that Cooley was thinking of pushing right by without a word, so he stuck his hand out and said, "Look, Cooley, I didn't get to thank you for saving me and my family. I mean it-thanks."

  Cooley took the hand and gave it a brief, reluctant shake. He said, "No problem. I should say the same. That was a fancy piece of work there with that bomb. With your tongue. I got to say, you got a pair on you, man. I thought that was fucking farewell and adieu for sure. And that's quite a girl you got there. I never saw anything like it. Fucking guy's holding a bomb, and she just goes right up to him and gives him hell. Hypnotized the bastard like a goddamn chicken."

  "Yeah, I don't know whether to be proud of her or lock her in her room forever." Karp shook his head ruefully. "I'll tell you, it never for one minute occurred to me that I would have a daughter like that. My heart's up around my collar half the time. Yours are still young-you got time to prepare, but the day will come."

  Their eyes met, and a certain understanding passed between them. Cooley said, "I got to go in there and talk to the chief."

  "Yeah. Look, we got stuff we need to discuss. Why don't you come by my office tomorrow, say around ten? We'll talk."

  "Should I bring my lawyer?"

  "That's your right, of course. But I thought it would be good if we just talked informally, just a couple of heroes shooting the shit. You know how fucked up lawyers can be."

  "I'll think about it," said Cooley, and went into the trailer.

  Past the cops on guard, and the yellow tape and the gabbling barrier of reporters, Karp was gratified to see his driver and Murrow leaning against a dark sedan. In the car, to Karp's relief, Murrow did not ask for a thrilling replay of the tunnel adventures, but instead conveyed information.

  "The thing went down about two hours ago. Paxton's in custody at the One-six."

  "Good. Any problems?"

  "No. They called your office as arranged when they scooped him up."

  "The bust was legit?"

  "Oh, yeah. Half the people on that block are snitches. Three Mob-looking guys carrying a duffel bag into a building, the lines were humming half an hour later. Meanwhile, everyone's glued to the tube back at the office. Your exploits. The DA wants to see you as soon as you get in."

  "He can wait." Karp looked out the window at the city. It looked the same-people, cars, buildings, all oblivious to what they walked, drove, and stood over. It seemed wrong somehow that only hours had passed since he had descended into the underworld. Like all people who have experienced the remarkable and terrifying, Karp wanted the world to have been changed and was irrationally annoyed that it was going on in its accustomed way, like ants in a child's ant farm.

  "What's wrong with your face, Murrow?"

  "My face?"

  "Yeah, you look like you stepped in dog shit. I stink, don't I?"

  "You might want to change your clothes," said Murrow delicately.

  They went to the loft on Crosby Street, and Karp stripped and tossed the sewer gear into a trash bag and took a long, hot shower. Bruises he had not felt at the time were blossoming like flowers after a rain, blue and purple. Dressing, he found he had to sit on the bed to get into his trousers. I am getting too old for this shit, he thought.

  At the precinct, Karp found Ralphie Paxton in an interview room, looking gray and frightened. Karp gave him a smile.

  "So, Mr. Paxton, we meet again. You've got yourself in some trouble now, haven't you? Have you been read your rights?"

  "Yeah. Look, I don't know nothing about any bag of dope. Someone must've laid it on me, in my place, while I was out."

  "Yes, and I see here on this paper that you have waived your rights. Are you absolutely sure you don't want to talk to an attorney?"

  "I don't need no attorney. I didn't do nothing. I told you, they dumped that shit i
n there when I was out. How do I know what's in the back of some damn closet?"

  "I see. The problem with that story, Mr. Paxton, is we have witnesses say you were there when the package was delivered. We even have a witness who says you set up the whole thing for money."

  "He's a goddamn liar!"

  "Uh-huh. Mr. Paxton, are you aware of the penalties this state provides for possession of narcotic drugs? Under Section 220.21, possession of more than four ounces of narcotic drugs is a class A-one felony. That carries with it a mandatory fifteen-year minimum sentence upon conviction, and then sentences can go as high as twenty-five years. We don't like drug lords in the state of New York."

  "I ain't no drug lord, for God's sake! Do I look like a damn drug lord?"

  Karp ignored this and went on calmly, still smiling. "On the other hand, we often make allowances for people caught in a squeeze. You don't have to be charged with anything. I can't make you any promises, but sometimes when a person comes forward of their own volition and helps us out, we can help them out. You know how the system works."

  "You mean like I tell you who gave me the stuff?"

  Karp pretended to think this over. "Well, yes, sometimes that's possible. But in this case, we know very well who gave you the stuff. So we don't need you for that. Can you think of anything else?"