by David Wind
“I’m almost afraid to ask what that means.”
“He missed, which means a lot.” A good sniper knows when to fire. He becomes one with the target. He breathes the same way, sees the same thing, and knows when to shoot and when to hold. It wasn’t something easily explained; you had to live it. No, I hadn’t been a sniper, but there’d been a two-man team in our Ranger unit, and they never missed—not ever.
“Did you learn anything?” she asked, accepting I wasn’t going to explain my statement.
“I learned a lot, here and now.” I pulled her head up, leaned toward her and kissed her hard. Her response was equal and soon the world around us disappeared.
<><><>
I woke before Gina and watched her sleep. It took a moment to realize I hadn’t had one of my regular dreams. One of the benefits of sleeping with Gina, which I’d given up a year ago, was in her ability to somehow, more times than not, chase away my subconscious demons.
While last night was clear in my head, there were a hundred other thoughts pushing into my consciousness. I wrestled with them while watching the gentle rise and fall of her breasts against the sheet, which in turn threatened to restart the fires inside me. It was a feeling I hadn’t had in a while: I hoped we could work things out—no, I corrected myself, I had to work it out. Shifting, I got out of bed without disturbing her and hit the bathroom.
Fifteen minutes later, showered and dressed and in the kitchen setting up the coffee, I heard the shower start again. A minute later, my phone rang. The Caller ID glowed with Chris Bolt’s home phone number. The clock read nine-twenty seven.
“Morning, Amigo.”
“Morning killer,” Chris shot back. “I just got the CSIU report. The round was a 7.62 millimeter of H&K origination. The rifle stand was a bipod. They think it was an H&K MSG90 or their PSG-1, but they could be wrong.”
“They got there early.”
“No, they finished the night shift late. Got there around six and called me twenty minutes ago. There was nothing on the roof, except the scratches you found.”
“Thanks, Chris. I appreciate it.”
“Hey, just doing my civic duty. What are you up to today? Going sniper hunting?”
“First I’d need to figure out whom to hunt. No, I thought I’d start on getting Scotty’s apartment cleaned up.” While it was the truth, I also felt the need to look around some more and see if I could come up with something.
“Want company? I’ve got the weekend off and Anna’s doing a sleepover with a friend so Amanda and I are free.”
It would be good not to face the apartment alone. “Figure an hour.”
“We’ll meet you there at eleven.”
“At eleven,” I repeated and hung up.
“What’s at eleven?” Gina asked, padding into the kitchen wearing one of my shirts and nothing else.
I ran my eyes from her bare feet to her wet hair, enjoying the way the long blue shirt clung to her still damp body “I’m meeting Chris at Scotty’s to do some cleanup, but,” I added as my eyes lingered on the shirt, “I can always call him and make it at twelve.”
“You always were insatiable.”
I answered with a leer.
“I’m starving, you cooking?”
“Yes ma’am.”
She walked to the counter and sat as I pulled out two pans and set them on the stovetop. Five minutes later four eggs were frying and the coffee had finished brewing. Gina got two mugs out from the cabinet. As she filled them, she said, “I’m off for the weekend. I’d like to go with you to Scotty’s.”
The spatula hung over the eggs. “You’ll be okay with that?”
“I’ll be with you, I’ll be fine. Don’t burn the eggs.”
Salvaging the eggs before the whites turned to blacks, I slid them onto the plates. We sat at the counter and ate. When our plates were clean and the first cup of coffee was gone, Gina reached over and took my hand.
“It’s going to be hard work this time.”
I squeezed her hand gently. “I know.”
<><><>
We got to the apartment at a quarter to eleven, having stopped at Gina’s for her to change into fresh clothing. She’d also grabbed a box of plastic garbage bags.
The apartment smelled off; a combination of old garbage and the remnants of dried blood tainted the air. We opened the windows and turned on the air conditioning. Gina went into the kitchen and began emptying the refrigerator while I decided what to tackle first.
Chris showed up five minutes later with Amanda who, after giving me a kiss on the cheek and learning Gina was with me, went off to the kitchen to work with her. They’d become good friends when she and I had been a couple. Their friendship had lasted even though our romance had gone into hiatus.
“Where do you want to start?” Chris asked.
I looked around the living room and again saw Scotty lying on the floor, covered in blood. “Not here… in the bedroom.”
The bedroom was the way it had been on Monday—a mess. “We need some packing boxes. I should have thought of it.”
“That’s right Amigo, you’re Gabriel Storm. You’re supposed to think of everything. There’s a package-shipping store a couple of blocks over. I’ll go get some.”
With his footsteps fading, I gazed at the mess, looking for a starting point. I went to the bed and dumped its littered contents to the floor. Then, without trying to figure out anything, I began to pick things up and array them on the bed.
Chris returned fifteen minutes later and in the next half hour, we had everything packed into two boxes. We tackled the closet next, hanging up all the clothing and taking the things off the shelves and putting them into a third carton. Everything we wanted to save was in one box. The other two boxes were giveaways. When the bedroom was done, we joined the women in the living room.
Amanda was boxing the contents of the shelves while Gina was on her hands and knees scrubbing the blood off the floor. “I was going to call a cleaning company to handle that.”
Gina looked up at me. “I need to do this.”
The look on her face dared me to argue. Grief is personal and everyone needs to work it out in their own way—this was hers. I motioned for Chris to follow me into Scotty’s office.
“I want you and Amanda to take whatever pictures you want.” I looked at the bookcase above his desk. “I’m going to donate his original scripts and the Tony to the Dramatists Guild.”
“He’d like that,” Chris said as he set up two boxes. “You have thoughts you want to share?”
I started to shake off the question, but stopped. I owed him, and Scotty, more than that. “I’m stuck. It’s like I’m in a paper bag, trying to punch my way out.”
“Maybe there is no way out. Maybe it was a burglary.”
“Then what was the shit at the Looker’s Club and why did someone try to put a bullet into me last night. Damn it Chris, there’s a bad stink in all of this.”
He pulled a picture off the wall and set it in the box before turning back to me. “Let’s say– hypothetically—that I agree with you and something is off. My hands are tied. There isn’t a shred of evidence to tell me it was anything but a B & E gone wrong. How do we… no, how do you prove it?”
While I didn’t have an answer for him, I knew there had to be a way.
“You said the other day, we need to know the why before we can go any further,” Chris pushed on. “All you’re running around hasn’t found the why yet, has it?”
“No. But I keep thinking it has to do with Albright. Something there doesn’t fit. Albright has a lot of ways to make money. Why did he borrow a mil and a half and invest in a play? And don’t give me that ‘Scotty’s plays make a lot of money’ shit either.”
“They do,” he said after packing a picture of Scotty, Chris and his daughter in Central Park.
“Don’t forget he talked a half dozen or so of his clients into investing as well. He’s a fucking stockbroker!”
“Yes, he is,�
� Chris agreed in an annoying level tone. “That doesn’t make him a murderer.”
“I’d like to know who loaned him the money.”
“Like I already said, try asking him.”
“I haven’t had the opportunity.”
Chris snorted. “Since when are you above tracing a money trail?”
“It’s private money.”
“Then you need to look at a different angle, don’t you.”
“What angle? Don’t you think I’ve looked into everything? But all I can see is Scotty, lying on the floor in a pool of blood, his guts half spilled out because whoever shot him was so fucking angry he wasn’t satisfied at killing him, he needed to obliterate him, to destroy everything and watch Scotty suffer while he did! He was putting an end to whatever it was he thought Scotty had done. And Chris, it doesn’t get any more personal than that! The worst damned part of it is I can’t figure out who, why or what. I’m chasing my tail in circles and I don’t even have one.”
“Jesus Christ, enough!” Chris’ face was mottled red; his fists were balled into two tight knots. “You’re the guy who ran off to the Army to get trained in whatever the hell it was. You’re the hard ass PI who doesn’t let the law interfere with solving your case. God! Damn! It! Stop telling me how you can’t figure anything out, and for fuck sake stop whining like a ten year old! Just go out and do what needs to be done! You damned well know I can’t!”
I withstood the fiery blast from my oldest friend and waited a few seconds until his color returned to normal before laughing. “Jeez, why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
“It’s not funny.”
“Yeah, it is. And it’s because you’re right. I’m trying to think this out instead of play it out. Thanks for the spanking.”
“Anytime…asshole.”
“Now look who’s ten years old. And– ”
I waved off whatever he was going to say. “Okay. So now, we can both say it wasn’t a burglary, unofficially of course. And we both know it wasn’t Albright. He doesn’t have balls enough to pull the trigger—but I feel he’s involved somehow. Suggestions?”
“Unofficial suggestions, of course,” Chris said, cocking his head at Scotty’s filing cabinet. “You look there yet?”
The drawers were open and the files were ransacked. But he was right, again. I needed to look in there. “I will, after we’ve finished in here.”
He gazed around the office, at everything that had been part of Scotty’s life. “No. I’ll finish with this, you work on the files.”
My cell chose to ring just then. “Storm,” I said, bringing it to my ear. As I listened to the voice on the other end, the blood drained from my face. When he finished, I asked, “Where?”
“Ten minutes.” I hung up and turned to Chris.
He studied my face. “What?” Concern etched the single word.
“I have to go to the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin.”
“What?” he repeated.
“That was Danny Herman—one of your beat cops. They just found the fourteen-year-old hooker I was looking for. She was the reason I got into it with the pimp last Sunday.”
“At the Boat Basin?”
“In the water: she was caught up in an anchor line.”
Chapter 24
The Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin is a knuckle extending out from under the fist of the West Side Highway overpass. One of the last reminders of the gentile life the earlier parts of the twentieth century had supported, it now docked small sailboats, cruisers and a handful of houseboats where the more adventurous lived on in the habitable times of the year. Today wasn’t one of those times.
Half a dozen patrol cars littered the small exit circle from the West Side Highway. The ME’s van and car were there as well. Three uniformed cops held back the crowd that had gathered with the usual morbid curiosity of city dwellers.
I spotted Danny Herman, dressed in civvies, standing halfway between the barricade and the lead-in to the dock. He came up to the barricade and passed me through. “What happened?” I asked as we walked to a small circle of cops.
“One of the sailboat owners was going out. He was pulling up the anchor and found something caught on it. When he got the rope moving up, he saw the body and called in.”
“You were on shift?”
He shook his head. “No, I was…” His voice went low. “I was out looking for her.”
“Off duty?”
He nodded. “None of Streeter’s girls were on the street. I spend a few hours a week looking for missing kids—been doing it for a while now. There are a couple of us who do it. In the long run, it makes our job easier, you know what I mean?”
I knew. You could take just so much of following the law and feeling helpless when the young and innocent are used for someone’s warped ideas of what life should be. Danny Herman wasn’t the only cop who cared about his beat and the people on it. Nor was he the only one who did something positive on his off time; and, since he was young and single, he had the time. But the real question was would it last, or would he get to the point where fighting a losing battle took too much out of him?
“I know,” I said aloud.
“I was in the station house when the call came. When I got the details, I had a feeling.”
“That it was her?”
His young-old eyes narrowed. “Yeah, the one you were looking for.”
We moved on and when we reached the circle of blue, I patted one of the cops on the shoulder and he moved out of the way. The girl was on a gurney, but hadn’t been closed up in the body bag yet. The ME was next to her, talking to a uniformed lieutenant.
For the second time in less than a week, I stared at a bad death. She’d been in the water a couple of days. She was bloated but recognizable. Her eyes were closed in her puffed up face. Her blonde hair was water darkened and matted. Her face was bruised, and her throat had been slit, but there was no mistaking Margaret Ann McNickles face—the one on the poster in Save Them. In death, she looked like the little girl she was.
I ignored the sick twisting in my stomach. She was naked and bruised. There was no way for me to tell how many of the bruises were post mortem, but I was willing to bet more of them had come before she’d died. Why?
I tasted coppery bile. I knew the why of it as surely as I stood there breathing: it was my fault because I’d come charging like a white knight and set the dogs of war onto her.
“Streeter?” I asked the young cop.
“It feels like it. A year ago, we found another of his girls in the East River. She had been beaten to death and then dumped.”
“And he still ran the girls?” I asked without taking my eyes from Margaret Ann’s distorted body.
“We couldn’t tie him to it.”
“How the hell can he run girls this young and get away with it?”
“He’s slick. He doesn’t have a lot of underage ones, and the ones he has aren’t green. They’ve been around, no matter what their age—they’re mindless and used up by the time he puts them out there. Don’t think we haven’t tried. But when he’s working the young girls, he doesn’t let them out of his site. He watches every John that comes close. We try, but he smells us—I don’t know how, but he does and goes into this outraged act of yelling and screaming, calling the undercover a lowlife for chasing little girls. Believe me, we’ve tried.”
I believed him, but didn’t like it. “You have no idea where he’s gone to ground?”
Again, the young beat cop shook his head. “It’s like he pulled up a piece of sidewalk and disappeared inside it. I’ve spent a dozen hours trying to find him. I’ve talked to everyone I know who runs with him or had business with him. They either don’t know or are too scared to say. He’s mean, Streeter is—and he’s nowhere to be found. My bet is he’s long gone.”
I pointed to Margaret Ann McNickles’ body. “He was around a couple of days ago.”
<><><>
“I just don’t get it. What makes these
kids do something this stupid?” I asked out of frustration.
An hour and a half had passed since I’d seen Margaret Ann McNickles’ bloated body at the boat basin. After finishing with Danny Herman, I’d returned to Scotty’s apartment and found all the small things had been packed up and stacked against one wall of the now clean living room.
We were in the dining room, drinking coffee. Chris had left fifteen minutes earlier when an emergency call on a case he and his team were working came in. Amanda sat across from me and Gina was next to me.
“Girls like Margaret Ann are different from the ones who are abducted,” Amanda said, her eyes unfocused. “They aren’t stupid, but many were in situations that, to them, were far worse than what they got into after taking off. Some are abused at home by a father, a stepfather, or a mother. Their lives are a hell you don’t even want to imagine, so they look for hope by running away, or finding someone who will take them away.” Her eyes locked on mine.
“There are others who get caught in the game. They think it’s exciting, dangerous and sexy. The predators who hunt them know what to say and how to make them want to be taken away. It’s them we need to fight—the ones who take our children and turn them into… things.”
Her grip on the coffee cup turned her knuckles white. “They take them and brainwash them, and turn them into slaves. They’ve got it down to an art: the younger the child, the easier to work them. The youngest ones are so destroyed, their only memories of childhood are like fantasy dreams they can’t tell apart from reality—if they allow themselves to remember at all.”
“And no one can stop them?” My words were low and guttural.
“For every predator we catch, another takes over. You can’t know what’s out there, not unless you look hard and long. There are bands of people, men and women, who trade young children like baseball cards.”
“Look at what happened to Scotty’s family. They took his little sister when she was eight years old! God alone knows if she’s alive, and if so, where she might be. She could be in a brothel somewhere, or a slave in the orient or Middle East. And with all likelihood, any memory she has of her family was lost the first year of her abduction.”
