Early Warning

by Michael Walsh

  The.38, his dad’s service revolver, was in his hand as he looked up at what had been the AMC on 42nd Street.

  The entire front of the building had been blown away, leaving two flanking sides with a great gap in the middle, with only the back wall of the lower floors still standing, although for how much longer was hard to tell. It was sagging, groaning with the agony of collapsing steel, a great expiring beast on its last legs, gravity about to claim it. If there was anybody still alive in there it was a miracle.

  In the distance he could hear the sirens of the fire trucks. His job lay to the east, toward the gunfire that he could still discern among all the other sounds-screaming, moaning, shattering glass, the wordless voices of destruction. The voices that had always surrounded him, even back in Woodside, back when New York had been safe, when little Irish boys could sleep soundly in their beds, back before Kitty Genovese and the first World Trade Center bombing and 9/11. Back before the greatest city in the world had nearly been brought to its knees in fear and shame and guilt by 19 men from Saudi Arabia and other parts unknown. Back before invincible New York was bloodied. Back before the spiritual rot and nihilism that had long since infected the engine of capitalism and freedom had taken hold, hollowed it out, and rendered it supine before a handful of savages armed with box cutters and faith.

  Twenty years ago, he remembered sitting in an Irish bar with Sy Sheinberg, Sid’s late uncle, and musing that the exhausted Irish couldn’t even muster one of their own as a bartender; today, the entire city couldn’t even muster a single priest to give it the Last Rites, if not absolution, on its way to Hell.

  A man was running toward him. The hot dog vendor. Byrne didn’t have to think about the make: he knew.

  Hope knew who it was before she looked at the display. Knew by the ring, the very same ring that announced the arrival of every incoming call. Hope didn’t have the patience of her children, who somehow had managed to assign a special ring tone to each of the callers in the phone books, the better to sort them out aurally as well as visually. How long that would take, she had no idea, but it was just one of those things she was never going to get around to. When Hope was a kid, all the phones came pretty much in black and rang pretty much the same, although there were those weird pink Princess phones, but you still couldn’t buy them, you just rented them from the phone company at a premium, and thought you were getting a bargain on some level. Such was the power of marketing.

  “Danny?” she cried. “Help us! Oh my God, please help us!”

  She knew he couldn’t. Even if he were overhead in one of his choppers right this minute he still wouldn’t be able to help her. But help was not really what she was after at this moment, not with the building swaying the way it was, not with hope fading so fast, not with her children clinging to her as if she were some sort of goddess, able to save them with a wave of her divine wand.

  Well, why not-she had, once before. She had plucked her son out of the rubble of the middle school in Edwardsville, found her daughter in that awful prison in France when all hope had been lost.

  “Hope-HOPE! Where are you? What’s happening?” She could hear the fear in his voice, but more than the fear-there was something else. Something else that she herself had been feeling, but not letting herself feel. It was too soon, that’s what she’d kept telling herself. Too soon for feeling, too soon after the death of her husband, too soon after the adventure in France, too soon. But Fate had a way of trumping Time, and too soon may not after all be quite soon enough.

  “We’re okay, Danny, but we’re trapped. We were in the AMC on 42nd Street, when-”

  Even in the vortex of sound, she could hear him punching a computer. “I’ve got you on video feed from the police helicopters,” he said, and she didn’t even bother to wonder how that was possible. “I’ve got the building on Google Earth. Now listen to me, Hope-”

  Hope screamed as the building shifted and tilted. She had a flash of being on the Titanic, just like in the movie, when the boat began to slide beneath the waves, the elevation of the stern growing ever steeper.

  “Hope. HOPE. Listen to me, baby, listen to me. I’ve tapped into the city building archives, so I’ve got the plans right here in front of me. Can you see all right? Can you breathe?

  “We’re on the roof, Danny. Can’t you get someone here to pick us up?”

  “Not right now, baby. So stay as calm as you can and listen very carefully…”

  Ben Addison, Jr., saw the cop in front of him, made him as sure as he’d ever made any cop in his life. Cops were something he knew almost from childhood, cops were the things you’d best avoided unless you were ready to take them on, cops were the white men-even if they were black, like you-the white men who made your life miserable, the white men who were the font of all your misery, and your mama’s misery and your long-gone daddy’s misery, because after all he was probably in the jug somewhere, some guy you never knew whose rash action had brought you into this shitass world, and now here you were face-to-face with the Man, and it was long since past payback time.

  To your left was the crackling hulk of the AMC, another evil infidel pleasure palace, where men and women could watch shameful films together, not segregated but side by side. There was a time when Ben Addison, Jr., enjoyed the company of women and, like every man, had measured his progress as a man by the number of women he’d seduced, or coerced or, once in a while, had even raped. But none of that was his fault-those were just terms, arbitrary definitions, judgments made by another culture on his culture. That was what they had taught him in the joint, the reason why the words of the imam had soothed rather than inflamed, had made him feel better about his own base appetites, although still ashamed, rather than angry. After all, he had a lot to thank the white man for, the removal of that awful guilt he had once felt, felt for so much of his life, to be replaced not by atonement but by righteous anger-by a burning desire for revenge, which had become his own personal version of atonement.

  The cop was running toward him. So what if one of his AK’s was gone? The other one would be plenty to take this sucka down…

  Byrne knew he had no chance if the shooter got off more than a few shots. Even a spray-painting gangbanger like this guy could get lucky once in a while. Byrne firmly believed in the cop’s adage that a single law enforcement officer with the right training and experience could take down an asshat with a single round left in the cylinder, before said asshat could blow away two little girls, an old woman, the milkman, a couple of cleaning ladies and half the side of the building, but miss his target, with an Uzi or an AK. As politically incorrect as it was to say, there wasn’t a cop in that situation, facing those odds, who didn’t like his chances.

  Ben Addison, Jr., liked his chances. He’s seen the way the people fell when he pointed and shot them. What a feeling of power-to merely wish and will and down they went, all his tormentors from childhood, defenseless and helpless, unable to fight back because they were unwilling to fight back, having long ago disarmed themselves morally and emotionally. Whereas he had found the truth in the white man’s jail, where his brothers had come to him with love and mercy and the promise of justice, and then had put a gun in his hand to prove it.

  The cop was his. He brought his weapon up into a firing position…

  Byrne saw the AK: ghetto sideways, body out of alignment, weight on the wrong foot. His odds had just markedly improved. Closing fast, it wasn’t about firepower now, it was about marksmanship. And aside from blind luck, marksmanship was always the deciding factor in a firefight.

  Like a.335 hitter watching a pitcher’s release point and picking up the rotation of the baseball, Byrne could see the shooter’s finger on the trigger, could follow as if in slow motion, every twitch of the muscle ordering the cartridge into position, the firing pin to engage, the powder to ignite, the bullet to shoot down the rifling, spinning, heading straight for him-

  His hand on his piece, Byrne dropped to the ground, rolled…came up ready to f
ire-

  As he did, somewhere in the distance, he heard a woman scream.

  Ben Addison, Jr., knew that he’d gotten off at least twenty rounds at a single pull. Fuck that bullshit they tried to teach him at the range at the mujahideen camp upstate, the shit about the deep breath and the exhalation and the slow squeezing instead of pulling or jerking-this was a righteous piece he held in his hands, a thing that had never let him down, a death-dealer.

  Which is why he missed the son of a bitch. That damn scream. Bitch threw him off. He’d take care of her right after he finished waxing this pig’s infidel ass.

  Addison stumbled, caught himself. But he almost dropped his AK and, instinctively, he reached out with his right hand, his firing hand, his trigger finger, to grab the weapon before it clattered to the ground and, in so doing, he forgot another of the lessons the upstate Arabs had tried to teach him, which was never grab the gun barrel after you’d fired.

  His voice joined the screams of the woman as the burning gun barrel flayed the skin off his palm.

  Just as a parent also knows the sound of a child’s voice, a man can always hear a woman’s screams no matter what the surrounding auditory noise. Byrne had heard plenty of women scream in his life, of course, both privately and professionally, and it was the one sound that a cop, even a homicide dick as he had been for many years, could not abide. It meant a lot of things-pain, suffering, fear, anguish, torture, death-but more than anything it meant this: you were not doing your job. Cops knew that they could barely solve crimes, much less stop them, but they went out on the streets every day hoping to do the latter instead of having to do the former. You couldn’t tell how many people did not die today because of your presence, and you most certainly would never know them if you saw them, but they were there and you knew they were there. They were the good ghosts, the kind you hoped to meet someday, instead of the kind you actually did meet, every day, the ghosts of the people whose lives you were not there to save, the ghosts of the dead, their faces bloodied, their mouths open in agony, the ones who would haunt you, and rightly so, for the rest of your life. Until at last you joined them in whatever hell or purgatory was reserved for cops.

  But one thing Byrne knew-the hot dog guy had put his last innocent victim in the grave.

  Hope felt the dying building move, shift again. This was, she imagined, what it must be like to be in one of those California earthquakes. They were one of the reasons she and Jack had never gone to Disneyland, her fear of earthquakes. She’d seen enough movies, read enough books, seen enough articles in the Post-Dispatch to know that earthquakes shook buildings, sent the crockery flying, and worst-case scenario, split the ground asunder and swallowed up cars and houses and most certainly small children.

  A voice in her ear: “There’s a fire escape out the back.” Danny. “Not on the AMC building itself, but on the one next door. You’re going to have to jump for it.”

  Hope wasn’t sure how to process the information. “You mean in the building, right? One of those enclosed things.” In the distance she could hear the sound of gunfire, of wailing sirens, of explosions. This must be what hell is like, she thought.

  “No, don’t use them. You won’t make it.”

  “But-”

  “Listen to me, Hope.” More formal now, the voice in command, in control. “You’re not going to make it. The building isn’t going to make it. It can’t withstand the fire down below. It’s going to collapse, and very soon. You’ve got to get off that roof or you’re all going to die.”

  Hope looked around, trying to control her terror. Rory and Emma clung to her, hoping. “But-”

  “Listen to me. It’s your only chance. How far is it?”

  Hope drew as much breath as she could and looked at her son. “Rory,” she said as calmly as possible, “how far is that fire escape over there? You’re good at these things-tell me. ” she whispered into her cell phone: “Hang on, Danny.”

  “No, you hang on, Hope. Say a prayer, and don’t worry.” She could hear the concern in his voice, which she knew, at that moment, was starting to turn to love.

  She hadn’t even realized that Rory had left her side when he was back. “That building next door, Mom?” he said, trying not to show his fear. “It’s wrecked.”

  Across the country, Danny heard that. “Hope-listen to me. Listen to me. It’s an old building. I’m looking at the plans right now. All they did was add on to it. There’s an old fire escape, a few floors down. You know, the kind you see in the movies. Look for it.”

  “Over here, Mom!”

  “Rory sees something.”

  “Hurry.” She could hear the worry, and the urgency in his voice.

  Hope ran to the spot where Rory was staring down. Much of the other building had collapsed. But there, just as Danny had predicted, was an old fire escape that had managed to survive the restoration and retrofitting. It had vanished into a disused air shaft, like the ones in the old dumbbell flats that used to populate this area, and if Hope had had time to think about it, she might have realized that it made perfect sense.

  Originally, it would never have reached this high. But, in a fit of building-code observance, somebody-or, more likely, somebody’s brother-in-law-had gotten a contract to extend the redundant fire escape up the side of the new addition, and then sealed it off. The contractor billed the owner for twice his costs, probably billed the city for some give-back that only a lawyer could love, kicked back to his relative, and walked away with some nice money for building something nobody would ever use.

  Until now. Thank God for honest graft.

  “I see it,” she breathed to Danny. There was a slight roar in the background of wherever he was calling from.

  “Then use it.” His voice was raised, loud.

  “What if it won’t hold us?”

  “It’s got to. It’s your only chance. Now go.”

  Hope looked at her children. They were braver than she; they knew what to do. “I’ll go first, Mom,” said Rory. “It’ll be just fine.”

  And then he was over the side and gone. Hope looked at Emma. “Your turn, young lady,” she said.

  Emma hesitated, but only for a moment. “Well, I guess I’ve been through worse,” she said, and then she, too, disappeared.

  Now it was Hope’s turn. She threw one leg over the side. “Where are you, Danny?” she said. “Please, after this is over-”

  “We’re on our way,” he said. “All you have to do is stay safe for a few more hours.”

  Hope thought she would cry. But she didn’t. Instead, she went over the side and down, into the smoke and darkness.

  Byrne was on his feet now. The hot-dog vendor was hopping around, open, vulnerable. Byrne ran toward him, closing the distance fast.

  Byrne had learned a lot on the streets of New York, streets he had known practically since the day he was born, since the days when he and Tommy had crawled around in the sewers of Queens, under the streets of Woodside and Middle Village when they were kids, playing hide-and-seek, playing sapper, playing city-bombing bad guys, playing the cops that had to hunt them down, the cops of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. There was no scenario he had not rehearsed a million times in his mind, no spot no matter how tight in which he had not imagined himself, no moment that he could not rise to.

  He fired as he ran, emptying his father’s.38 into the man in front of him. Every shot found its mark. Each one tore through the gunman’s body in a pattern that even Byrne would have been hard-pressed to duplicate at the firing range.

  His first shot hit Ben Addison, Jr., in the side, not enough to kill but plenty enough to hurt. The second bullet hit him square in the chest, the center of mass, just like they taught you at the Academy, and just as Byrne had learned to do on the streets many years before. The third hit the shooter a little lower, in the groin, and Byrne knew from experience watching gut-shot men die that it would be the killing blow, only just not fast enough. The fourth shot took off most of Addison ’s left hand
, leaving only a single finger and half a palm, while the fifth slug caught him in the right shoulder, forcing him at last to drop the weapon. But not before he got off one last shot.

  Byrne sensed it coming and threw his body to one side. He may not have been as fast as he once was, but his instincts were honed and his reflexes sharp. He felt the sear as the slug tore across his left shoulder, taking a chunk of flesh and a piece of his suit with it. That was what worried him-if he survived this encounter, he was going to have to get any material out of the wound quickly before it infected him. That was how 18th-century soldiers died, not necessarily from the ball or even the bloodshed, but from infection. That was why accounts of the old battlefields were always replete with the cries of the wounded, the screams of paralyzing agony, the gradual loss of the mental faculties, men being driven mad by the fever was that eating them alive from the inside.

  He hit the pavement hard, landing on his wounded shoulder and striking his head against some of the rubble. He yearned for a breather, a brief respite from the shouts and screams and the din of war. But it was not to be.

  Unbelievably, the hot dog man was still coming toward him.

  “God is great,” the former Ben Addison, Jr., kept repeating to himself as he dragged himself toward the cop. Even surrounded by the stench of death, he could always smell a cop, and nothing spelled martyrdom to him more than this pig’s death. All his pent-up resentment-at the white man, at the law, at the Man-fueled him, fed his rage, and kept him moving. That and his faith. The Brothers had been right: this faith was more powerful than any drug, stronger than anything he had ever encountered on the streets. This was a thing of beauty, a synthesis of love and hatred, the nexus of life and death, the portal to paradise.