Clawback

by Mike Cooper

  “What are they saying?” asked Clara, but Darryl ignored her, still working the board, apparently trying to improve the reception.

  Now Vivianna had turned to face a new figure: a trim tall man, middle-aged, graying hair cut almost but not quite too short for fashion. He reached out to shake Vivianna’s hand—the pinhole camera lens distorted everything around the periphery of its view, and it looked even more bizarre when he abruptly raised her hand to brush his lips over it.

  “Did he just kiss her hand?” Clara shook her head. “Yech!”

  I filed a mental note under Clara, Preferences, Physical Contact. “Is it Faust?”

  “Probably. The picture’s not great. But who else would be up there?”

  They were standing next to the loft’s vast window now, and Faust swung one arm, displaying the view. We didn’t need audio, the dialogue was easily imagined: “You can see all the way to Connecticut from here.” “Amazing.” “I’d call it a million-dollar view, but—” chuckle “it cost a lot more than that!”

  Vivianna dutifully turned to look out the window. Instead of the Hudson, it faced north, across the other loft buildings of the neighborhood, then uptown. Most of New York’s spires were visible.

  “Lean down,” I murmured.

  Clara looked at me. “What?”

  “If Vivianna were to lean forward, the camera would see the street below the window—where we are. We could wave. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  Well, Darryl laughed, at least.

  Inside, Vivianna and Faust seemed to be talking—or he was, gesturing widely, face animated.

  “Can’t you put them on speaker?” Clara said. “This is kind of pointless.”

  “Oh, sorry.” Darryl reached to the controls.

  CR-ACK!

  For a second, cognitive dissonance—the shot came from outside, up above us, but I saw the window behind Faust, on-screen, go opaque with spider crack. Then another shot, this one blowing out the window, and the image became a tumult of motion and noise as Vivianna fell or dived for the floor.

  “What the fuck?” Darryl, staring.

  “Someone…what…shit…gunshots?” Clara, ducking into the van, looking back and out.

  I spun, eyes raised, searching for the shooter. In my peripheral vision I noticed the cop by the cruiser doing the same.

  A third shot, and I had him. Directly across from Faust’s building, an old warehouse, four stories, with rows of nineteenth-century windows on each floor. At the top, one was open—all the others reflected sun or blue sky, but this one was black and empty.

  “Up there!” I tossed Clara my jacket. “Stay in the truck!”

  The patrolman and I arrived at the sniper’s building simultaneously. He had his sidearm drawn, holding it pointed down, finger outside the trigger guard. We crashed through the door into a marble-and-mirrors lobby. Two uniformed doormen had come around the security desk, both staring. One held a cellphone like a walkie-talkie, the way construction workers do, midcall.

  “Stairs?” The cop shouted at them. One pointed to a door alongside the elevators. “Back entrance?”

  “Through here.” The other gestured behind him, to a corridor leading away from the desk.

  The cop looked at me. “Who are you?”

  “I’m just—”

  “Stay here! Don’t do anything.” He glanced at the doormen. “I’m going after him. Can you shut down the elevators?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do it now. Freight elevator, too, if there is one.” The man with the phone clicked off and went to the desk, reaching for an unseen panel. “No one’s a hero, right? Backup will be here in a minute or two. Someone comes down the stairs, you just watch him go.”

  The officer disappeared into the back corridor. The remaining three of us looked at each other.

  “All residences up there?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” The shorter doorman had dark circles under his eyes and that worried-about-my-green-card look. He appeared willing to assume I was authority of some sort, and I was willing to let him. “And the landing pad.”

  “Landing pad?”

  “For the private helicopters.”

  Of course. “Who’s on the fourth floor, about halfway down that way?” I pointed, more or less in the direction of the open window.

  “No one. Three units and they all remain empty.”

  “Unsold?” The building looked too clean, too sparkly, to have been renovated more than a year ago.

  “I think that is right.”

  I could hear sirens now, but not close.

  “You should stay behind the desk,” I said. “Keep—”

  A sudden crashing from the back hallway, then an unintelligible shout—and three gunshots, almost inseparable.

  “Fuck.” I moved toward the hall, while the doormen sensibly dived for the floor.

  The sniper came out just as I cleared the edge of the desk. For an instant we stared at each other.

  It was the man from the park—the lean, stubbled one who’d led the attack on Clara.

  He wore a button-down shirt and khakis, straps of a small backpack over both shoulders—and a handgun held in both hands, right in front of his chest, pointed outward.

  His surprise at seeing me may have slowed him down, a fraction of a second, just enough. I was still moving, at speed. He got a shot off, but I’d already begun to drop and the round went high. I hit him hard, midcenter. We tumbled, his torso catching the corner of the desk.

  Wiry as a snake, he somehow managed in that halfsecond to twist, elbow me in the head, and land on top when we hit the floor. Another blow to my stomach and he rolled away, already coming to his feet.

  Jesus, he was fast.

  BR-A-A-APPPPP!

  The front windows of the lobby exploded inward, bullets shredding the plaster wall just to the sniper’s left. He jerked his handgun up, tracking the new threat, and fired back twice. I lunged off the floor, punching toward his groin, but he moved just enough to deflect the blow with his hip.

  Another fusillade came from the street.

  Perception shifted to frame by frame. I could almost see him thinking it through—an instant of indecision—as I punched with my other hand. He blocked my second strike as easily as the first, then abruptly spun backward and somehow flipped back into the hallway. Like we were in some Jet Li sequence—fucking ballet. And then he was gone.

  No movement. Noise came down the long tunnel of my blown hearing. The doormen were huddled behind the desk, but no blood was visible so I figured they were unharmed.

  I got up and ran after the gunman.

  Stupid? Positively, in retrospect. In the moment—training, adrenaline, anger, who knows why—I was going to apprehend the cocksucker. He’d been within a whisker of killing me, and I’d slipped the bonds of rationality.

  The policeman was lying fifteen yards in, crumpled in front of a steel exit door, under the red alarm connected to its push bar. The sniper couldn’t have gone over him and out because the alarm would be ringing. That meant the other way:

  Up.

  I hit the stairwell running. If he was one floor up and waiting to shoot me, fuck him—but he wasn’t.

  Four flights—twenty seconds. Breathing hard when I got there, yes. The metal door in the headhouse was only slightly ajar. Finally, some sensibility returned, and I stopped for a moment to think.

  The walls appeared to be utilitarian cinder block, which could certainly stop handheld calibers. I stepped to the hinge side of the door, reached up and—while flattening myself against the wall—shoved it open from the top corner.

  No reaction.

  The roof—what I could see of it—was black membrane, with a walkway of duckboards meandering over to a set of huge, beige, humming HVAC units. A three-foot parapet covered over with patinized copper walled the edge.

  My hearing had begun to return, and that’s when I noticed a slow whine, gradually accelerating and getting louder. I stood still, puzzled. A dynamo? An engin
e? A motor of some sort…

  A helicopter.

  I recognized the sound just as the rotors began to turn, slowly whipping the air.

  A private helipad, the doorman had said. Either the assassin had arrived by air, or he was taking advantage of someone else’s ride.

  But if he was operating a helicopter, he wouldn’t have two hands on a firearm, covering this doorway. Right?

  I went out in a combat tuck, low and fast, off the edge of the duckboards and rolling behind the air conditioners. No shots. The chopper’s noise rose to full pitch, overwhelming the rooftop, while rotor wash began to blow dirt and bits of debris my way.

  It was a—shit, I don’t know, I’ve always hated the fucking things. A little executive model, dark blue, with a bubble cockpit and a tiny passenger area behind the pilot. Inside the plexiglass I could clearly see a single occupant—the gunman—who was indeed too preoccupied to think about shooting at me.

  On the other hand, the bird was about to fly. One skid lifted from the roof in a tentative way. The engines whined even louder.

  I sprinted toward it.

  The next seconds were a fractured blur.

  The assassin saw me coming and jerked the cyclic. The helicopter surged upward just as I arrived. Instead of crashing the door, I collided with the skid, even as the entire craft began to glide horizontally above the roof. Knocked off balance, I grabbed wildly, not thinking—

  —and a moment later I was yanked into the air, the skid in my armpit, dangling like a hooked fish as the chopper shot over the edge of the roof.

  My whole body swung wildly, this way and that, as the gunman bobbed the helicopter. He must have known I was there, my weight screwing up the flight vectors. A kaleidoscope of the buildings, the street, the tops of cars, the white faces of people staring upward, all flashed past my eyes.

  We seemed to be over the West Side Highway, but on top of everything else, some sort of inner-ear dislocation had completely bollixed my sense of up, down and sideways. Wind and the roar of the chopper’s turbines overwhelmed my hearing.

  I thought I saw flashing lights below, maybe a fire truck or a police van. Just a glimpse—

  The landing gear jerked under my arm, and I almost slipped off. I yelled and couldn’t hear myself, grabbing at one arm with the other to lock my grip on the skid. Pain flared down my side as I tightened the death grip, squeezing it into my armpit.

  Uptown? My thoughts were broken and unconnected. Heading north.

  The helicopter dived, and for an instant I felt weightless. Cars and light poles rushed up—then the pilot yanked us into a screaming climb, and the skid was almost pulled from my hold. I gasped, swinging wildly, a monkey on a bucking rope.

  I looked up, and saw the pilot’s door start to open. Not good. One-handed, he could easily point a pistol down and fire until he hit me. I was in no position to do anything except cling and pray. The helicopter’s turbines screamed.

  Ahead I saw that monster parking garage on the river, at Houston. We were only a little higher—I could see the bizarre brilliant green of the soccer fields on its roof, white lines forming a bull’s-eye in the center.

  Uh-oh. The pilot apparently had a very bad idea, because we immediately lurched, dropping to a height that would skim the fence around the artificial turf.

  It rocketed toward us at a hundred miles an hour.

  He was trying to scrape me off, like mud from his boots. I yelled and swung my legs up, twisting away from the steel spikes. The chopper bucked again, the lunatic pilot taking us right between two light poles, no more than two yards of clearance on either side. Ten feet above the roof—if we hadn’t been moving so fast, I could have almost stepped off, as if I were disembarking from a train.

  We cleared the far side, rising slightly, and I looked up again. Above me the madman’s door swung wide, opened by centripetal acceleration as the helicopter turned sharply. His hand appeared, holding the pistol.

  I looked down and saw the bank of the Hudson, dropping away to blue choppy water.

  I let go.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Ouch.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Hey…fuck! That hurts!”

  “Try to stop moving around.”

  “Ow!”

  Me, embarrassingly enough. Shock endorphins had worn off long before, and all I had now was pain and self-recrimination.

  “I don’t see anything except this bruise.” Clara gently probed my ribs.

  “It’s a big bruise.”

  “If anything was broken, you’d be hurting worse.”

  Not much of a bedside manner, though I had to agree with the diagnosis.

  “It must have been fifty feet to the water,” I said.

  “You were lucky.”

  And that was the understatement of the year.

  I’d landed only about twenty yards from the shoreline, slamming into the water like a rock. But I didn’t lose consciousness, so I struggled to shore and dragged myself up onto the boulders that formed the base of the river wall. Then I just collapsed, utterly spent, for about five minutes, until I realized nobody knew I was there.

  The parking garage that had almost been my doom was three stories tall, sitting in between the greenway and the Hudson’s edge. The entire incident, from the gunman’s first shots at Faust all the way to my swan dive, had lasted a few minutes, tops. No one on the West Side Highway saw me fall, because the garage was in the way, and no one else noticed or realized what was happening or believed their eyes if they did see it.

  Emergency responders were focused on the dead and the wounded back at the scene. Clara and anyone else thinking about me would be trying to track the helicopter, which was probably headed across New Jersey, at top speed, toward the wilds of eastern Pennsylvania.

  While I figured this out, I began to shiver. I pushed myself to my feet, walked over to the cycling path and stood, watching bicyclists and joggers and traffic go by.

  Home was too far to walk, if I even wanted to go there. Official attention would be keenly focused on my role in the escapade. Clara had more sense than to start lying outright about who I was, so it would only take a question or two before the police had my name and address. Detectives were probably talking to my neighbors already. It didn’t matter that I’d been on their side. Unless they had evidence revealing the assassin’s identity, they’d be chasing every other lead, with all the urgency that only a spectacular attack on the very rich could command.

  I still had my wallet, and the money inside was usable—nobody likes the look, but all that new anticounterfeiting technology makes for surprisingly durable polymerized paper. Close to seven hundred dollars. Because I avoid traceable payments whenever possible, I tend to carry more cash than most people. Muggers aren’t really a concern.

  The sun shone bright in a cloudless sky, and even by the river the breeze was light. I was cold, but a brisk stroll would warm me up and help dry the clothes at the same time.

  So it was decided. I waited for the pedestrian signal at Watts Street, then set off crosstown, heading for one of the small, not-quite-awful, almost-cheap SRO hotels scattered throughout the East Village. In the anonymous company of drunks, doghouse husbands, European backpackers and midwestern tourists who really shouldn’t have booked the cheapest place possible, I’d dry off, rest up, and plan the next step.

  Clara showed up four hours later. I’d checked in, left her a message from the front-desk phone and barely gotten the soggy clothes off before falling into the bed. She woke me up by banging on the door, carrying a takeout container of steaming hot ramen noodles—almost as good as chicken soup.

  “The Mallory Arms,” she said, watching me eat. “It sounds nice, but I don’t know…”

  Scratches and holes in the plaster, a gritty floor, one thin blanket on the bed—she had a point.

  “Cheap, though.” I watched her watch me. It was good having her there. “What happened?”

  “Faust died.”

 
; “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Want to bet the ballistics are the same as Marlett?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “NYPD isn’t like Old Ridgefork. A box of donuts doesn’t get you anywhere.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.” I splashed broth in the plastic container, not adept at eating the slippery noodles with chopsticks. “The chief himself was probably on scene.”

  Clara handed me all the napkins from the paper sack. “You might need these.”

  “Nah.”

  “The detective interviewed me for half an hour,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “You, they’d really like to talk to.”

  “They know who I am?”

  “I couldn’t tell them much.”

  I was in the middle of drinking off the dashi and didn’t reply.

  “Because I don’t know much.”

  On the room’s small flat-panel television—bolted to the wall in an aftermarket steel frame, thank you very much—CNN was showing the fireball footage yet again. The sniper had landed the helicopter, only a few minutes after losing me, at an oil-tank farm just over the Hudson in New Jersey. He set down directly on top of one of the tanks, shot up the pipework until there was oil and gas spewing everywhere, then fled down the access ladder. Before he escaped, he set it all on fire—possibly with an explosive charge, since fuel oil doesn’t actually ignite all that easily.

  The tank was forty feet tall, so he might have used a grenade launcher, though I wasn’t sure how it would have fit into that bookpack he’d been carrying. In any event, thick smoke from the resulting conflagration shut down three highways, two rail lines and enough air traffic to snarl flights across the country.

  Of course he’d also burned the entire helicopter down to a few carbonized fragments. No forensic evidence there. I almost had to admire the choice he’d made. He could have snuck quietly away, at the cost of leaving a few clues behind. Instead, he’d completely obliterated his tracks—and was now the target of every law enforcement agency on the eastern seaboard.

  Not to mention he’d stolen the helicopter in the first place, once he realized his first escape route was problematic. Improvisation and luck, working together.