W E B Griffin - Badge of Honor 04 - The Witness

by The Witness(lit)

  "Officially, I just happened to be in the neighborhood."

  "Yeah," Suffern said, chuckling. "Sure."

  "Got a small problem, Ed," O'Hara said. "How am I going to get to see you catching-whatsisname?-Abu Ben Moham-med with Matt Payne sitting on my shoulders?"

  "What?"

  "Wohl says I can't go in the building until you have this guy in cuffs, and he sent Payne along with orders to sit on me if necessary."

  "I wondered what he was doing here," Suffern said. "No problem. Here, let me show you."

  He opened the door of his RPC and took a clipboard from the seat.

  "Somebody give me a light here," he ordered, and one of the ACT cops took his flashlight from its holster and shined it on the clipboard. It held a map.

  "This is Hawthorne Street," he said, pointing. "Mr. Abu Whatsisname-his real name is Charles D. Stevens, Wohl tell you that?"

  O'Hara nodded.

  "-lives here, just about in the middle of the block." He pointed. "There's a Homicide detective, he has the warrant, sitting here, right now. This is the way we're going to do this: One ACT car, with two cops and the Homicide guy, will go to the front door. Another ACT car, with two ACT guys and the sergeant, will go around to the back, via the alley here." He pointed again. "When they're in place, the sergeant will give the word. The Homicide guy will knock or ring the bell or whatever. We'll give him thirty seconds to open the door. Then they'll take both doors. When they have him in cuffs, they'll take him out the back. There's a wagon, here." He pointed again, this time to a point a block away. "The van will start for the alley the moment he hears they're going in. They'll put Abu Whatsisname in the van, with one cop from each of the ACT cars, and get out of the neighborhood. The same thing, the same sort of thing, will be going on here in the 5000 block of Saul Street. Two ACT cars, a sergeant, and a Homicide detective will pick up Kenneth H. Dome, also known as 'King' Dome, also known as Hussein Something. When they have him, the sergeant will call for the wagon. When both of these guys are in the van, they'll be taken to Homicide. Got it?"

  "Yeah," Mickey said thoughtfully.

  "So there's no problem, Mickey," Lieutenant Suffern fin-ished. "I'll put you and Payne in my car. We'll go into the alley behind Stevens's house, from the other direction. I'll let you two out, and I'll go in with the sergeant when he takes the back door. When you see us coming out, you can make your pictures. Okay?"

  "Can you give me a list of the names?" O'Hara asked. "I really hate to spell people's names wrong. And point them out to me, so I know who's who?"

  "Absolutely," Suffern said.

  Lieutenant Suffern, Officer Payne thought, is entertaining hopes that the next issue of the Bulletin will carry a photograph of Lieutenant Ed Suffern with the just arrested felon in his firm personal grip.

  "Payne," Lieutenant Suffern said, "if answering this puts you on a spot, don't answer it. Are we really going to move in here?" He waved in the general direction of the school build-ing.

  "I think so," Matt said. "I think the Board of Education wants to get rid of it."

  "My mother went to school in there," Suffern said. "I thought they were going to tear it down."

  "Okay," Inspector Peter Wohl's voice suddenly came over, with remarkable clarity, all the loudspeakers in all the vehicles in the playground. "Let's go do it."

  There was the sound of starters grinding, and then an angry voice.

  "I'm going to need a jump start here!"

  Headlights came on, their beams reflecting off the still fall-ing snow.

  Suffern opened the rear door of his car and waved Mickey O'Hara and Matt in. The hem of Matt's topcoat got caught in the door, and the door had to be reopened and then closed again.

  The cars and vans began to roll out of the playground, onto Frankford Avenue. Most turned left, but some turned right. Matt looked at his watch. It was twenty minutes to five.

  At ten minutes to five, they drove down Hawthorne Street. There were a number of cars, their roofs and windshields now coated with snow, parked on the street.

  If this snow keeps up, Matt thought, these cars are going to be buried.

  The headlights of a rusty and battered Chrysler flicked on and off quickly.

  "That's the Homicide guy," Lieutenant Suffern said, and then added, "That wasn't too smart."

  "Maybe he's just glad to see you," Mickey O'Hara said. "How long has he been there?"

  "Probably since midnight," Suffern said. "When he tries to get out of the car, he'll probably be frozen stiff."

  Suffern made the next right, turned his headlights off, and then turned right again into the alley and stopped.

  Matt started to open the door.

  "We got a couple of minutes," Suffern said, stopping him. "Better to stay in the car."

  "Right," Matt said.

  Said Officer Payne, the rookie, who don't know no better.

  "I want to get out," O'Hara said. "If I just jump out of the car, my lens is likely to fog over."

  "Okay, Mick," Suffern said obligingly. "But stick close to the walls, huh?"

  O'Hara got out and Matt followed him, carefully closing the car's door. Suffern put the car in gear and inched away from them, stopping fifty yards farther down the alley.

  It took Matt's eyes a minute to adjust to the darkness, but gradually the alley took shape. They were standing between two brick walls, but thirty feet away, the alley was lined with wooden fences. There was what looked like a derelict car parked against one wall, between them and Suffern's car. Matt wondered how Suffern had managed to get past it in the dark.

  And then, as he looked at Mickey O'Hara, who was wiping the lens of his 35-mm camera with a handkerchief, the hair on the back of Matt's neck began to curl.

  What the hell is the matter with me? Abu Ben Whatsisname is sound asleep in his bed. He won't know what hit him when those guys come crashing into his house. And I am a good hundred yards from where the action is going to be anyway.

  But he pulled off his right glove, stuffed it into the pocket of his topcoat, and then quickly knelt and took his revolver from the ankle holster on the inside of his left leg. Hoping that Mickey O'Hara hadn't seen him, he quickly put it, and the hand that held it, into his topcoat pocket.

  And then there was first a creaking, tearing noise, like a board being split, somewhere down the alley, and then the sound of crunching snow.

  A moment later he saw something moving.

  It has to be a cat, or a dog, or something-

  Then he realized that what was coming down the alley to-ward them was too large to be a dog.

  Everything shifted into slow motion.

  "Stop!" Matt heard himself say. He had trouble finding his voice. "Police officer-"

  "Out of my way, motherfucker!" an intensely angry voice called.

  There followed a series of orange flashes, accompanied by sharp cracks.

  "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" Mickey O'Hara said softly.

  Matt was slapped in the face and then, a half second later, with terrifying force, in his right calf. He felt himself falling hard against the brick wall to his side.

  As a voice from the recesses of his brain told him, Hold it in both hands, he pulled his revolver from his topcoat pocket. He got it free and up as he slid to the ground.

  There was no way to hold the pistol with both hands. He fired instinctively. And then again. And a third time.

  There was a grunt from the vague figure coming down the alley, and then the figure stood erect. Matt fired again. The figure took two more steps, and then fell forward.

  Matt tried to get on his feet by pushing himself up the wall, but his hands slipped and his leg seemed unstable. He got on all fours, and somehow, that way, managed to get on his feet.

  Now holding the pistol in both hands, Matt moved unstead-ily toward the fallen figure.

  You only have one cartridge left! Don't fuck this up!

  The man on the ground was writhing in pain. Matt saw his pistol-a semiautomatic, p
robably a Colt.45-on the ground, half buried in snow. The man made no move for it. Matt hob-bled to it and put his foot on it and nearly fell down.

  There was a white flash, and he turned quickly toward it, pistol extended.

  It was Mickey O'Hara's goddamn camera!

  "Easy, kid!" Mickey said, fear in his voice.

  Matt aimed the pistol at the man on the ground.

  A moment later the camera flash went off again.

  "Fuck you, O'Hara!" Matt heard himself shout furiously.

  Now there were lights, all kinds of lights, headlights, flash-ing red and blue lights, portable floodlights.

  He looked down the alley and saw an RPC squeeze past Lieutenant Suffern's car, and then, in his headlights, Suffern, his pistol drawn, running down the alley.

  Suffern hoisted the skirt of his coat and holstered his pistol and came out with handcuffs. He put his knee in the back of the man on the ground and grabbed his arm to handcuff him.

  The man screamed in pain.

  The Special Operations car slid to a stop and two cops jumped out.

  Suffern came to Matt, said, "Jesus!" and touched his face.

  "You can put your pistol away, Payne," Suffern said, and then raised his hand and gently forced Matt's arm down.

  Matt looked at him. He saw something sticky on Suffern's fingers, and then touched his face. His fingers, too, came away bloody.

  He squatted to feel his calf, and fell down.

  Suffern ran to the RPC, slid behind the wheel, and found the microphone.

  "This is Suffern, get the van here, now!" he called, then: "This is Team A Supervisor. We have had a shooting. We have an officer down. We have a suspect down."

  Matt, at the moment he was aware he was lying facedown in the snow, felt hands on his shoulders. He felt himself being first rolled over, and then being held up in a slumping position.

  He put his hands to his eyes, and wiped away the bloody slush over them. He could see one of the Special Operations cops looking down at him with concern in his eyes.

  "You all right?"

  "Shit!"

  He heard the wail of a siren in the distance, and then other sirens.

  "Suffern, where are you?" Wohl's voice came over the ra-dio.

  "In the alley behind the scene."

  "Who's down?"

  "Payne and the suspect."

  "On my way."

  Matt saw Suffern's face now, close to his.

  "Just take it easy, the van's on the way. We'll have you in a hospital in two minutes."

  Mickey O'Hara's flashgun went off again.

  "Get that fucking camera out of here, Mickey!" Suffern said angrily.

  "You all right, Matt?" O'Hara asked.

  "I'm shot, for Christ's sake!"

  There was the sound of squealing brakes, of clashing gears, and tires slipping on the ice and snow.

  Matt looked over his shoulder and saw a van backing into the alley.

  "Here's the van," Suffern said, quite unnecessarily.

  Matt felt something scrubbing at his face. When his vision cleared, he saw the cop who had rolled him over throwing a bloody handkerchief away and being handed another. He put the fresh handkerchief to Matt's forehead.

  "Can you hold that?" he asked.

  Matt put his hand to it.

  Two more cops appeared, carrying a stretcher.

  "Get me to my feet," Matt said. "I don't need that."

  They ignored him. He felt himself being unceremoniously picked up and then dumped onto the stretcher. Then he was lifted up and carried to the van. The feet of the stretcher screeched as it was pushed inside.

  "Where do you think you're going, Mickey?" someone asked.

  "Where does it look like?" O'Hara replied, and then he was sitting on the floor of the van beside Matt.

  And then something else was thrown in the van. Matt looked and saw that it was the man he had shot. He was unconscious.

  Two uniformed cops, neither of whom Matt recognized, scrambled inside. The van's rear doors slammed closed, and then a moment later, there was the sound of the front doors slamming. The engine raced and the siren began to wail again.

  "Is he dead?" Matt asked.

  "I don't know," Mickey replied, and then matter-of-factly turned and put his fingers to the unconscious man's jugular. "Not yet, anyway," he added.

  "Look at my leg," Matt said.

  "What's wrong with your leg?"

  "You tell me."

  He propped himself up, awkwardly, and watched as Mickey pulled his trouser leg up.

  "Looks like you got it there too," Mickey said. "Not much blood. It hurt?"

  "No, not much," Matt said. "It feels like I got hit with a rock or something."

  "There's only one hole," Mickey said. "The bullet's prob-ably still in there. I don't think anything is broken."

  When Matt let himself fall back on the stretcher, he saw that the man he had shot was bleeding from the nose and mouth. There was a froth of bloody bubbles on his lips. Matt looked away, wondering if he was going to be sick to his stomach.

  Matt suddenly started to shiver. Mickey looked around the interior of the van.

  "Hand me one of those blankets," he ordered. A gray, dirt-spotted blanket appeared, and O'Hara draped it over him.

  "Throw one on him too," Matt Payne ordered.

  Two minutes or so later the van leaned on its springs as it made a turn, then bounced over a curb. It stopped and the doors were jerked open.

  Three men in hospital whites and a nurse with a purple, sequin-decorated sweater thrown over the shoulders of her whites peered into the van. One of the men grabbed the handles of the stretcher and Matt felt himself sliding down the van's floor.

  Once the stretcher was out of the van, he felt himself being moved, and then he realized he had been transferred to a gurney; he could feel the cold plastic beneath the thin sheet on his stomach.

  "Get the handcuffs off him!" he heard his nurse order an-grily. "He's unconscious, for Christ's sake!"

  Matt's gurney began to move into the hospital. There were two sets of doors. The gurney slammed into the outer set, and then the inner set.

  "Out of the way!" the nurse's voice called, and Matt's gurney was moved to the wall, where it stopped. He saw a second gurney being pushed, at a trot, by two of the attendants, down the corridor.

  And then Staff Inspector Peter Wohl's face appeared next to his.

  "How are you doing?"

  "I'm all right," Matt said.

  Why the hell did I say that?

  "They'll take care of you in a minute."

  "Why not now?"

  "Because the guy you shot is in a lot worse shape than you are," Wohl said matter-of-factly.

  "Is he going to live?"

  "I don't think they know yet."

  "Shit, my car!"

  "What about your car?"

  "It's in the playground. With the keys in it."

  "I'll take care of it," Wohl said. "Don't worry about it."

  "I think I'm going to be sick to my stomach."

  All of a sudden, Matt found himself looking at Peter Wohl's stomach.

  He must have had to squat to get down to me.

  "Get me a towel or a bucket or something," Wohl ordered.

  Matt rolled on his side, and then completely over, onto his back.

  That's better. Now I won't have to throw up.

  He propped himself up on his elbows, and then the nausea came so quickly he barely had time to get his head over the edge of the gurney.

  He now felt faint, and his leg began to throb.

  The gurney began to move. He looked up and back and saw that he was being towed by a very tall, six feet six or better, very thin black man in hospital greens.

  He was pulled into a cubicle walled by white plastic curtains. A new face appeared in his. Another black one. "I'm Dr. Hampton. How you doing?"

  "Just fine, thank you."

  Dr. Hampton removed the handkerchief, jerking it quickly o
ff, and painfully prodded Matt's forehead.

  "Nothing serious," he said. "It will have to be sutured, but that can wait."

  "What about my leg?"