Friendly Fire

by John Gilstrap

  Pam didn’t know where the other units were coming from, but she knew that she was only a quarter-mile away, and that almost certainly meant that she would be first on the scene.

  “Units responding be advised that we’ve received multiple calls on this. Callers report a man in the parking lot next to the Caf-Fiend Coffee House with a knife in his hand. One victim appears to be down.”

  That raised the stakes. If the callers were right—and when multiple callers had the same story, the situation was almost always as reported—Pam was at best cruising into the middle of an attempted murder in progress. At worst, well, there was no ceiling on what the worst might be. She used her right thumb to release the snap on her thumb-break holster. If she was going to need her weapon, she was going to need it quickly. Milliseconds counted.

  Peripheral vision became a blur as Pam pushed the speedometer to its limit down Little Creek Turnpike, switching the siren to Yelp as she approached intersections. She’d learned over her thirteen years on the job that if you move with enough conviction—whether on foot or in a vehicle—people will get out of your way.

  As Fair Haven Shopping Center whizzed past her on the left—a blur of colorful signage and logos—she lifted her foot off the gas to prepare for the hard left onto Pickett Lane, named after a Civil War loser who led thousands of his men to slaughter at the Battle of Gettysburg. She couldn’t live with the irony of dying on a road named after such a man. She tapped the brakes, but didn’t jam them, taking the turn twenty miles an hour faster than the intersection was designed for, but a solid fifteen miles an hour slower than her tires could handle. Her seat belt kept her from being launched into the passenger seat.

  The ass end of her cruiser tried to kick out from her, but Pam wrestled it back in line with gentle pressure on the wheel. The casual observer wouldn’t have seen even the slightest fishtail.

  Straightaway. The engine growled as she pressed the accelerator to the floor. Up ahead, as far as she could see, the traffic somehow knew to pull over. She saw cars in the median, a truck up on the curb on the right. This was the part of the job that she loved more than any other.

  The Antebellum Shopping Center was now in sight, ahead and on the right, and she slowed. It was one thing to get to the scene quickly; it was something else to rush into an ambush. Because weapons were involved, county protocols required that she wait for backup. But because someone was in the process of being murdered, she decided to disobey the rules. The fact that the murderer had a knife and she had both a .40 caliber handgun and a 12 gauge shotgun within easy reach made the decision a little easier.

  Pam cut her siren and slowed to twenty miles an hour as she turned into the shopping center. She pulled the mike from its clamp again and keyed it. “Detective One-four-three on the scene.”

  “Four-four-seven. Hold what you’ve got. I’m ninety seconds out.” That would be Josh Levine, a cool kid with a big heart and a bigger crush.

  Pam opted not to reply. A crowd had gathered in the parking lot outside the Caf-Fiend Coffee House, naturally forming the kind of semicircle that directed Pam’s eye to the threat. The closest gawkers beckoned her forward, while the ones who were farther away continued to stare and point at the hazard.

  “The situation is critical,” Pam said into the radio. Translation: I’m triggering the backup protocol’s exception clause. “Other units expedite.” Translation: Run over anybody in your way if you want a piece of the fun.

  She threw the transmission into Park, kept the engine running, and stepped out of the cruiser.

  “He’s up there!” a lady yelled. “Shoot him!”

  Pam ignored her. In fact, she ignored everything but the events she saw play out before her. With her Glock 23 at low-ready, she approached carefully yet steadily, sweeping her eyes left and right, vigilant for an unseen threat, perhaps an accomplice. She tried to focus on her tactical breathing—four seconds in, four seconds held, then four seconds to exhale. It made all the sense in the world when she learned about it in the classroom, but it was pretty damned hard to do in real life. The combined energy from all the people watching her created its own form of heat.

  Crime scene gawkers were a funny lot. Roughly a third of them thought you were a God, a second third thought you were Satan incarnate, and the rest didn’t give a shit. They were the ones with the cell phone cameras. She saw three on her periphery, one of which hovered in the air at the end of a selfie stick. Of the thirty or so people who had gathered, none of them had pressed forward to help the victim or to confront the attacker. That was her job. The crowd’s job was to film it and to offer criticism after the fact.

  She’d nearly made it to the front when she caught her first glimpse of the gore. Two cars were painted with it, as was a tall, rail thin, terrified young man in the apron of a Caf-Fiend barista. The kid seemed confused. His artificially blond hair dangled in his eyes as he looked at the knife in his hands. It was as if he wondered where the knife had come from.

  Pam raised her Glock to high ready and rested the front sight at the center of the attacker’s chest. “Police officer!” she yelled. Her voice cracked a little. She hoped it wasn’t obvious to anyone else that she was in way over her head. “Put the knife down or I will shoot you!”

  The attacker held out his free hand as if to ward her off. “No!” he said. “I’m not the killer. He’s the killer. He’s a kidnapper. A rapist, and a killer!”

  “Put the knife down!”

  “You don’t understand. I’m the victim here. He’s . . .” The kid’s face seemed to clear, and he looked at his hand. At the blood. “Oh, my God.” Then he looked at the bloody man who lay motionless at his feet. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

  Pam moved her finger lower on the trigger guard. The experts all agreed that inside of twenty-one feet, a man with a knife could kill a cop before the cop could pull a firearm from its holster. Correcting for the fact that she was scared shitless, but that her gun was already trained on the bad guy, a finger only a quarter inch from the trigger pretty much canceled out that research. If he took a step toward her, she was going to blast his heart out through his spine.

  “Listen to me!” Pam yelled. Her voice was firm and strong this time. “Put the knife down and lie down on the ground.”

  “I’m the victim!”

  “You’re the victim with a knife,” she replied. “You’re putting me in danger, and you’re putting all these other people in danger, too. Put the knife down. Do what I tell you, and then I’ll listen to your side of the story.”

  In the distance, the sound of sirens crescendoed. One of them would be Josh Levine. If he thought she was in mortal danger, he would shoot before talking.

  The assailant didn’t move.

  “What’s your name?” Pam shouted.

  The kid seemed confused. Perhaps it was the ordinariness of the question.

  “Your name,” Pam prompted. “What is it?”

  “Um, Ethan. Ethan Falk.”

  Pam lowered her weapon a few degrees. “Nice to meet you, Ethan Falk. I am Detective Hastings, and I am here to arrest you. Whether you’re innocent or guilty, victim or perpetrator, is not my concern. All I know is that right now, there’s a man on the ground at your feet, and you’re standing over him with a bloody knife. What would you assume if you were in my position?”

  “It looks bad, doesn’t it?”

  The comment struck Pam as funny and she smiled. “Yes, it looks bad. So how about you put the knife—”

  “But I didn’t do—”

  “Listen to me, Ethan! Do you hear those sirens? Those are other cops, and when they arrive, they’re going to see you still standing there with a knife. They’re going to see the blood, and there’s going to be many more guns pointing at you. You don’t want that. Please just drop the knife and—”

  He dropped it. The knife landed flat on the victim’s belly. Baby steps.

  “Thank you, Ethan,” Pam said. “Now, keeping your hands where I can see them, I nee
d you to step forward into the road—”

  Just then, a Toyota driven by a soccer mom in a pink top sped down the parking lot aisle that separated cop from felon.

  “Jesus,” Pam cursed. “Really?” Refocus. She stepped out into the roadway and pivoted to her right, keeping more or less the same distance between herself and her suspect.

  “Four-four-seven is on the scene.” Josh Levine had arrived.

  Pam’s portable radio was out of reach while she was covering the killer. She wished she could tell everyone to come in easy. To her suspect, she said, “Ethan, I need you to take two giant steps forward into the street and lie flat on your face, your hands out to the side.”

  He seemed to be caught between reality and someplace else.

  “Come on, Ethan, I know you can do it.”

  “Don’t shoot me.”

  “I won’t shoot you if you don’t threaten anyone. Come on, two big steps forward, and then just sprawl on the ground. We’ll get past this one step, and then everything else will be easy.”

  Josh Levine burst out of the crowd on Pam’s left, Mossberg shotgun pressed to his shoulder. “You heard her!” he shouted. “Get on the ground! Now!” He pressed in three steps too close, ruining the safe zone that Pam had been trying to create. “I said now!”

  “Josh, shut up!” Pam shouted. The words were out before she had a chance to stop them. But once out, they needed to be followed up. “I’ve got this. Step back.” She was distantly aware that she was making some great video for the cell phone crowd.

  “Look at me, Ethan,” she said. “Not at him, at me. He won’t hurt you. But do you see how nervous you’re making everyone?” She dared a couple of steps forward, if only to earn the frightened glances that were going toward Levine. More sirens approached, and more units marked on the scene. The entire Braddock County Police Department would be in the parking lot soon.

  Ethan took two exaggerated steps forward, taking care not to step on the body, and ostentatiously avoiding the stream of blood, to stand in the middle of the street. If the Toyota had come by then, he’d have been launched over the hood. He walked with his hands out to the side, cruciform, his finger splayed.

  “You’re doing great, Ethan,” Pam said. “Now, I just need you to—”

  Levine rushed him. With the shotgun one-armed into his shoulder, he closed the distance in two or three quick strides. Grabbing the back of the kid’s shirt at the collar, he kicked his right foot from underneath him while driving him forward and down. Ethan barely had enough time to get his hands out in front to prevent his face from being smashed into the pavement.

  With the kid down, Levine kneeled on the small of his back and pressed the muzzle of the shotgun against the base of the kid’s skull. “I’ve got him!” he announced. He used expert technique to cuff the kid.

  Pam’s shoulders sagged. She holstered her Glock and approached the two men on the ground. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said when she was within easy earshot. “I had this under control.”

  “Yeah, but I have him under arrest,” Josh said. “You’re not going anywhere,” he said to Ethan Falk.

  Anger boiled in Pam’s gut, but she swallowed it down. The kid had been one hundred percent compliant.

  Josh cocked his head. “Are you pissed?”

  “You didn’t have to hurt him,” she said.

  “You know he killed a guy, right?”

  Pam didn’t answer. She helped Ethan to his feet and Mirandized him. She did her best to ignore the citizens who crowded her as she escorted her prisoner to Levine’s cruiser, and she didn’t acknowledge any of the other officers. It was the damn cameras. She just wanted to be out of their range.

  “Watch your head,” she said as Ethan lowered his butt into the backseat.

  “Detective Hastings?” They were Ethan’s first words since he’d been pressed into the pavement.

  Pam made eye contact.

  “That man kidnapped me when I was eleven years old. You look it up. It was terrible. He was a monster. I’m sorry for what I did, but he was . . . a monster.”

  Just from his tone, Pam believed him. “Okay,” she said. “Make sure you tell your lawyer. And the prosecutor if you decide to talk to him. The FBI will have a record of your rescue, and that will surely help. We’ll talk again in a little while—”

  “But I wasn’t rescued by the FBI,” Ethan said.

  “Then how did you get away? Did you escape?”

  Ethan shook his head. “No, I was rescued, but not by the FBI. I was rescued by a guy named Scorpion.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s all I know. His name was Scorpion.”

  “That’s not a name.”

  “Of course it’s not a name. But that’s what he called himself. He saved my life.”

  Chapter Two

  The Sleeping Genie Motel seemed to get its own joke. Nestled behind a strip mall in an unincorporated stretch of Route 1 between Woodbridge and Quantico, Virginia, the seedy low-rise 1960s-vintage motor court had a reputation. Let’s just say that precious few of the genies in residence did much sleeping, and that the rooms turned over two or three times on a good night.

  Jonathan Grave had seen places like this in every military town. The forty-dollars-per-night marquee was a dead giveaway. He’d fail a lie detector if he swore he’d never frequented such a place, but it had been a long, long time—back when most of the promiscuity-related diseases could be cured with penicillin.

  “Hey, look, Dig,” Boxers said, pointing through the windshield as they cruised into the crumbling parking lot. “The genie wants you. She’s winking.”

  Indeed, the circle of neon that made up the busty sign’s left eye had started to wear out, and it looked for all the world like she was flirting. “I’m saving myself for that special genie,” Jonathan said.

  “Looking like that, she wouldn’t have you anyway,” Boxers said. In deference to the daylight hours, Jonathan had done what he could to change his appearance. His nose was slightly larger than normal, and he sported teeth that gave him an overbite. A specially designed T-shirt gave him a paunch that wasn’t real, and he wore a pair of taped-up glasses over his normally blue eyes that were now brown. In general, people overestimated the capabilities of face-recognition software, and nine times out of ten, if police interviewed the people with whom he and Boxers interacted, all they’d remember was the tape on the glasses and sheer size of Boxers, who’d similarly altered his features. In general, Jonathan hated disguises, but sometimes, they were the smart move.

  Jonathan waved his hand to the right—at the edge of the lot closest to the highway. “Pull over here while we work things out.” He lifted his portable radio from where he’d placed it on the center console and pressed the Transmit button. “Mother Hen, Scorpion,” he said.

  He knew that Venice Alexander would be monitoring everything from the office in Fisherman’s Cove, Virginia, about fifty miles to the south and east of here. She pronounced her name Ven-EE-chay, and she was the person every NSA recruiter would sell his left arm to add to his staff.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Do we have any stronger confirmation on the room number?”

  Islamist nutjobs had snatched nine-year-old Mindy Johnson, a congressman’s daughter, from the parking lot of a shopping mall north of here in Montgomery County, Maryland, and had declared that any attempts to contact the police would result in her execution. The bad guys wanted $1.3 million in cash to get her back. Her father—Congressman William H. Johnson of Massachusetts—had opted to invest in Jonathan’s services instead. Mindy had been visiting her father for the weekend, and had been on her way home from hanging out at a theater in Rockville, where she’d seen a movie with friends.

  Apparently Congressman Dad knew neither that she had gone to a movie nor that she hadn’t come home. The first he heard of it was when the kidnapper contacted him at work.

  Reaching out to Jonathan was a difficult thing to do, what with all the blind e-ma
ils and cutouts that made him nearly impossible to find. The fact that the congressman had been able to do so within the first eight hours of his daughter’s kidnapping told Jonathan that the guy had leveraged some inside information. This was not the first time Jonathan had done work for very important people in Washington.

  That initial contact with Jonathan had been nearly eighteen hours ago, and in the interim, Jonathan and his team had been working all angles to find the kid. As often was the case, the big break had lain buried in the electronic metadata that piloted e-mails through cyberspace. With that head start, followed by a lot of phone calls and shoe leather, they’d narrowed the options down to this motel. They had everything but the room number.

  “Nothing much has changed since we last spoke,” Venice said. “I’m ninety percent sure that this is the right place. And if that’s the case, then I am eighty percent sure that they’re in room one twenty-four.”

  Jonathan looked to Boxers for an opinion. At six-foot-huge, Boxers, who was born Brian Van de Muelebroecke, was hands-down the largest, most intelligent, and most lethal person Jonathan had ever known. “What say you, Big Guy?” Jonathan asked.

  Boxers rumbled out a laugh. “Eighty percent stacked against ninety percent. I can’t do that math in my head, but it sounds an awful lot like a guess.”

  Jonathan agreed. Given the stakes, if only from the firepower they were about to bring to bear, they needed better than that.

  “Okay, I copy,” Jonathan said into the microphone.

  “Does that mean you’re about to go hot?” Venice asked.

  “I’ll let you know when I do,” he replied. He looked across the console. “We need more, don’t we?”