Beyond Blue

by Austin S. Camacho

  “Yes. You have to catch him, bring him back to reality, and redirect his energies in a useful direction.”

  “But, G, how do I…”

  “Sorry, Ms. Chiba, there’s another line going and I need to grab it. Get going and report when you’re done.” Gorman punched the button cutting off Chastity’s call and connecting him to the second line. “Hello?”

  “Gorman. Gotta be brief. Not much time.”

  “Ruby!” Paul said her name louder than he had intended. He grabbed his pencil and pulled his pad closer. Long shadows on the paper made him realize he had no lights on and the sun was moving toward the horizon. He could hear the wind passing the phone she was using. She was outdoors, but he heard no automotive traffic. “Where the hell are you?”

  “Later,” Ruby said. “First, take an address. You got a pencil?”

  “Of course,” Gorman said, and printed the street address Ruby gave him on his yellow pad in the space he had left for her location.

  “That’s where the bad guys are holed up, Paul,” Ruby said. Gorman’s head snapped up. Ruby never called him by his first name when they were talking business, only when she was calling out to a friend.

  “What’s the rest?”

  “They’ve got Rafe Sandoval in there as a hostage.”

  “Wait a minute,” Gorman said. “I thought Sandoval was the drug smuggler you went undercover to nab.”

  “First, it ain’t him, it’s his asshole brother,” Ruby said. “And even he thought he was running cocaine for the Colombians, but it turns out it’s not really coke. It’s anthrax powder.”

  “Jesus.”

  “And they ain’t even real Colombians,” Ruby said, her voice rising to a chalk-on-blackboard screech. “They’re Peruvians. Paul, they’re Shining Path. You gotta get Rafe out of there.”

  “I hear you, Ruby.” Paul stood and began to pace in the semidarkness. “Those guys are as vicious as Al Qaida. We’ll get him out. Now, where are you?”

  “This nice gentleman who loaned me his phone says we’re in Silver Lakes Park. North Shore of Staten Island.”

  “I know,” Gorman said. Ruby’s use of the term “nice gentleman” meant that he was older. No help in a fight. Her lack of time meant that she was hiding, running from someone. In trouble. Calling in the cavalry. “How do we find you?”

  “Well, I’m on the move but I’ll keep circling back near the…SHIT!”

  Gorman called her name twice, beads of sweat breaking on his forehead. Then he sat with the phone pressed to his ear for a full minute after the line went dead.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Everyone else tended to stand at attention or more like parade rest when they stood before Tony Lacata. Lorenzo Lucania wondered if it bothered his boss that he didn’t. He wondered, but he didn’t really care.

  “So you come here to tell me you botched your assignment,” Lacata said, “You think you’re still the man to run my protection and the union rackets.”

  “Actually,” Lucania said, “if you really didn’t know that this particular crusading ADA was being investigated by his own people and the Feds, then you definitely need a strong lieutenant on the protection business, because there’s too much going on that isn’t getting back to you.”

  “Uh huh.” Lacata said. He sipped his scotch and stared around at the mirrors in his apartment. “What about the cop? You think this guy is investigating us? I wanted this Preston out of the way because he knows too much about my operation. If the cop investigating him is crooked, he might be sharing that information with a rival gang. You get a good look at him?”

  “It wasn’t a guy,” Lucania said. “The cop was a woman. Eurasian girl, long black hair, short but fast, with a smart mouth. She might have busted all of us if one of my boys hadn’t covered me with a good story.” Lucania noticed big Mike staring down Lacata’s biggest muscle man. At least it was clear where Mike’s loyalties lay.

  “You think she was looking for trouble?” Lacata asked. “From what you told me, I figure this dame knew the ADA was dirty and wanted to bail him out. She saw you moving on him, figured you were out of town law and snatched him up to cover his ass. Don’t really matter. If he’s dirty, then his credibility is shot and that means he’s no threat to me. In any case, it sounds like it wasn’t your fault things went screwy. And you stayed cool. I like that.”

  “Good.” Lucania maintained eye contact with his boss. “So?”

  “So, let’s you and me talk tomorrow about how to set this up so you can have some control, and I have visibility, at least in the beginning. Copacetic?”

  Lucania nodded. “I think I’ll take the boys over to the Good Chinese Kitchen to discuss reorganization.”

  Lucania picked up Gus and Robbie in the hall, and the four went downstairs to their new Continental. The old car was abandoned someplace up in The Bronx. Lucania was very much inside of himself on the drive down to Chinatown.

  For the past few years, Lucania had worked for two sharks. Of the two, only Lacata offered some reward for his efforts and praised his effectiveness. Mike, Gus and Robbie showed him the kind of loyalty he craved. These men would not just kill for him, he knew they would die for him. As Robbie guided them through the rush hour traffic, Lucania suddenly realized what had changed in his life. A working man defines his life by his work. In his case, his life as a criminal was his real life. The previous time as a law enforcement detective was little more than a fantasy now, play acting for him until he could get back to his real pursuits.

  “Well, I’m on the move but I’ll keep circling back near the…SHIT!” Ruby stood with a borrowed cell phone pressed to her ear on a narrow gravel path when a man in a black sweat suit walked out of the tree line pointing a silenced pistol at her. Her first thought was not for herself, but for the gray-haired man standing beside her. He had committed no crime except for choosing to walk his little Lhasa Apso where Ruby could see him. If this gunman was a believer in the spray and pray school of marksmanship, the old man would be swept away with her.

  All those thoughts passed through Ruby’s mind in less time than it took her to throw the phone as hard as she could at the gunman’s face. When he raised his left arm to deflect it, she dived for the tree line. His pistol coughed twice, and Ruby heard bullets tear the bark off the elm tree she crawled behind. She turned to see the man walking slowly toward the dog walker. His pistol was still raised. The bastard was going to dispatch the witness, just as a matter of course. What must it feel like to be over seventy years old and suddenly find yourself staring into a gun barrel? It was too bad he wasn’t walking a German shepherd or Doberman pinscher.

  The gunman was only eight paces from his target when Ruby stepped out of the trees with her hands raised.

  “Hey, Sisco,” she called. The muzzle of the silencer spun toward her. “Look I know your boss wants me alive. He doesn’t know who I work for, and leaving a corpse lying out here could cause a little firestorm for him and his bosses. So I’ll tell you what. You get to be the hero and take me in. All you have to do is leave the old man alone.”

  She walked toward him while she was talking. He held the gun at arm’s length but didn’t speak. They certainly trained them well in Shining Path School, she thought. When she was almost within reach of him, he reached to the back of his belt and pulled out a pair of handcuffs. Clearly their orders were to bring her back alive if possible. It appeared that these guys were pretty disciplined. Even cuffed, she would have the ride back to the house to cause trouble, and being in the house when the authorities arrived might not be such a bad idea. She held her arms out, planning to relax and cooperate.

  Then his lips twisted into a lopsided smile and she knew something was wrong. His right arm seemed to swing back toward the old man in slow motion and she realized that their standing orders must include the silencing of any witnesses. As the terrorist turned, Ruby dropped into a crouch, feeling as if she was moving through molasses. She gripped the cuffs of the man’s pants in
both hands and pushed to stand back up. She heard the quiet pop of his gun a fraction of a second before his feet left the ground. When she was upright again she had a moment to watch the man’s face as he hung almost horizontal, four feet above the earth. Then he tried to swing his gun back on her but it could never happen before his head smashed down onto the ground. By crossing her arms violently, Ruby turned the man over. She dropped her right knee onto his neck and snatched his gun before he could make a fist again. She pressed the muzzle of the silencer against his temple, which apparently inspired the man to lie still. Only then did she allow herself to look to the path.

  The old man lay on his back, his feet toward her. His little dog was licking his face. An ugly stain was spreading underneath him, darkening the gravel path. She had never even asked his name.

  Ruby’s jaws were clenched so tightly that her teeth began to ache. She stood carefully, never moving the gun from her assailant’s head. She replaced her knee with her right foot and pulled the gun away, only to bend and nuzzle the gun’s barrel into his ear. For the first time she noticed the weapon itself. It was a nicely blued Browning Hi-power, a popular nine-millimeter. Quickly she patted the man down and secured the handcuffs and a backup clip.

  “You cold blooded bastard,” she said. “He was just a harmless old man. I should put a bullet in your head. But that would piss Gorman off. On the other hand, preventing you from following me, that’s he’d go along with.”

  Ruby shifted her foot to the base of the man’s skull and pressed hard. At the same time she reached down, pressed the gun’s muzzle against the back of his right knee and pulled the trigger. His scream of pain was lost in the grassy turf. When he tried to raise himself, she raised her foot a few inches and stamped down hard.

  “You know these fifteen round magazines are illegal in the states?” she asked. “Well, I guess it’s a good thing in this case. When your friends find you, you tell them that I’ve got twenty-seven rounds and a bad attitude, hear? People looking for me out here could get dead real quick.”

  A bullet unexpectedly thumped the ground a foot away from her. Ruby returned fire in that direction. The instant she lifted her foot from the first gunman’s neck he reached up, grabbing her ankle. Startled and off balance, Ruby fell to the grassy ground.

  “Ramera!” he spat, reaching with surprising strength to wrap his other hand around the same leg. Ruby’s left hand slipped on the slick grass as she tried to pull free. But she was out of options and couldn’t even see the other approaching shooter yet.

  “Who you calling a bitch?” she shot back. She raised the pistol and put a bullet into the terrorist’s left eye. His grip relaxed. She scrambled to her feet, kicked off her shoes and sprinted away. She was panting, and her hands shook, as much from killing a man as from the fear of being killed. She accepted for the first time that she had been wrong about their plan to take her alive.

  They had found her, but she believed she could lose them quickly enough. No more shots followed her, which indicated that the man who spotted her had already lost her. The woods were dense there. The trees were low and close together. She doubted the ground would hold her footprints long enough for anyone to use them to follow her. But that was no solution, just a temporary break. She was sure that they would surround the park because their greatest fear would be that she’d make contact with someone who could help. Inside the park she was helpless and contained. They would stalk her, and of course she would stalk them. But she was outnumbered by an unknown margin and handicapped by the fact that they knew she cared about innocent bystanders.

  Now Ruby had settled into a comfortable running pace, her breathing deep but steady, covering ground toward what she hoped was the center of the park where the least number of people would be found. At least she could be confident that Gorman would send a team to capture whoever was at Rafe’s house before they could pack up and get lost. Her greatest fear was for any police sent into the park to help her. Against well-disciplined terrorists they would be at a terrible disadvantage just because the police aren’t trained to kill. She had no idea how many were on the other team and that would make it hard to know when the battle was over. And worse, when she stopped running, she would not be able to ignore the cold for long.

  As those thoughts formed she felt the first raindrop on her neck.

  Chastity hit her intermittent wipers, cursing the beginning rain. Rush hour on the Prospect Expressway was bad enough without the weather making people even more timid at the wheel. She dragged her little MX-5 in and out of the three westbound lanes, seeking out the pockets that would let her advance past slower vehicles. The road was packed in her direction with returning city workers whose haste to get back to their Brooklyn homes seemed to slow everything down. During her time stuck in traffic Chastity alternated between cursing her own bad judgment back at the hospital and praying that Alex Brooks maintained his self-control when he reached home.

  The rain had settled into a steady patter by the time Chastity pulled onto the Brooks’ street. The asphalt seemed so clean at times like this and every car shined. It was too bad that a soft autumn rain couldn’t cleanse what was happening inside these little suburban homes. How many real child molesters were hidden there, Chastity wondered. How many wife beaters crouched behind these walls? How many killers, kidnappers, and thieves made their home there? And in all this she had found one good man, and may have driven him to commit the kind of violence she hated most.

  Chastity finally reached the right block and pulled to the curb behind the Brooks’ van. She sat for a moment, listening to the rain tapping at her roof like fingernails on a computer keyboard. The living room was lighted at the Brooks house, but with the drapes drawn Chastity could see nothing inside. She could think of only one way to learn if everything was all right in the house.

  The air smelled fresh as lilac soap as Chastity stepped out of her car, ignoring the light rain speckling her clothes. After checking to make sure there was no one else on the street, she pulled her automatic out of her purse and slipped it into the back of her waistband under her jacket. She dropped the purse back into the car and closed the door. She showed no outward sign of unsteadiness as she walked up the damp sidewalk, but inside she felt acid rolling in her stomach. Chastity Chiba seldom knew the taste of fear but she knew it right then. She was afraid of what she might find in this innocent-looking suburban home. She was afraid she was too late.

  At the door she raised her hand to knock but froze at the sound of a high-pitched scream. Listening more closely, she heard Alex Brooks’ voice.

  “I said sit down and shut up!” He sounded hysterical. She waited for a punch or slapping noise but heard neither. Still, conflict was evident, and that was enough to stop her from proceeding. A knock on the door might be enough to disturb whatever balance there may be inside and set off the physical violence she was there to prevent. She cast about for another option.

  After a couple of seconds she heard a thump that could have been a person being thrown onto a couch. Francine’s usually strident voice said, “No, don’t” in a pleading tone, then lowered so that Chastity couldn’t make out the words. Spurred by renewed concern, Chastity stepped back from the door and ran around to the back of the house. There she saw a kitchen window, probably above the sink, where a man of average height could look into the Brooks home. Chastity grasped the windowsill and pulled herself up so that she could just see into the house.

  The kitchen was as dark as hell’s outer waiting room. Over the empty sink she had a long view into the living room. Alex was standing with his back to her. He seemed to be rocking back and forth and talking to someone. Beyond him, Francine sat on the sofa. The fear in her eyes was evident and there was anger there as well. Then Chastity heard a new voice.

  “Daddy?” Amy had entered from Chastity’s left but stopped halfway across the kitchen floor. She raised her hands to chest height, as if she was about to push something out of her way. Alex Brooks turned halfway t
oward her, not wanting to lose sight of his wife.

  Water dripped down Chastity’s long black hair onto her tailbone, but that was not the cause of the chill running down her spine. Alex Brooks caused that. When he turned, she could finally see his service pistol clenched in his right fist.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Gunny used his key card to open the office door and stepped into the darkened reception area. Only after he turned on the lights did Gorman step out of his own little room. It was dark there too, and his face was even darker.

  “What’s up, boss? You look like hell.”

  I look like I feel,” Gorman said, moving out to the front desk counter. “It’s all coming down right now and I’m having a tough time keeping it all together. Where’s Lucania?”

  “Don’t really know,” Gunny said, aiming for the coffeepot. “He had to report in and I figured it was better for me to be elsewhere.”

  Gorman put both palms on the counter and leaned heavily. “We need him now. He still bugged with the directional gizmo?”

  “Probably,” Gunny said, filling his mug. “Not likely he had time to change his clothes.”

  “Well, get over here,” Gorman said. “You’re the only one who knows how to work that gear. We got to find him now.”

  Gunny looked over his shoulder, more worried than angry. Gorman had never spoken to him that way, in all the years they had worked together. He must have really been worried. Gunny carried his mug over to his seat, dropped into his oversized chair and booted up his computer. While he typed in his password, Gorman’s fingertips were drumming an erratic rhythm on the counter surface. Gunny could feel his boss’ eyes on him as he opened the GPS-based locator program.

  “What are we going to do, boss?” Gunny asked. “I’m afraid Lorenzo’s probably on his boss’ shit list right now, and I’m also afraid he might have shot that guy if you hadn’t sent Chastity over to bail us out.”