Contents Under Pressure (29 page)

“Jesus,” Fred said, shaking his head. He looked up, “You guys get going. We need more reaction and art for the state.”

“I have to talk to you as soon as we get back. It’s important,” I said urgently, “and we’ll need Mark Seybold to sit in. I’ve got one hell of a story.”

“Okay, okay,” he waved us off.

“Hell’s fire, do we have to take Ryan?” Lottie mouthed, looking disgruntled.

“Fred, we don’t need another reporter…”

“Will you guys just go?” He pointed impatiently toward the elevator. “Do as Gretchen says for a change.”

Gretchen looked smug. “Watch out for them, Ryan,” she called after us.

“Sure thing,” he responded.

Fortunately, neither she nor Ryan could see us rolling our eyes.

It got worse. “I’ll take the keys,” Ryan said manfully, when we got to Lottie’s Chrysler under the building.

“No, Ryan,” she said. “This is my company car. I drive.”

“I’m the man, I drive.”

“Oh no!” we shrieked.

“Look Ryan,” I said, “Lottie and I have both had police combat driving courses.”

“Which is exactly why I’m going to drive,” he said. “I know what happened to your other cars.”

“It was only one, and it wasn’t our fault! Ryan, that rafting experience has made you crazy!”

“I’d like to see you survive a week at sea.” Pouting, he folded his arms and leaned stubbornly against the driver’s door.

“You’ve become macho,” I cried. I thought of Jessie St. Juste. “I swear I’ll bite off your finger!”

“What?”

“Oh hell, Britt.” Lottie had unloaded the camera equipment she needed from the trunk. “We’re wasting too much time as it is. Give him his way. I can shoot pictures, you can take notes.” She tossed him the keys and looked him sternly in the eye. “Damage this car, Ryan, and you are a dead man.”

He grinned. They piled into the front.

“Lottie,” I said, settling in the backseat, amid all her packets of pictures, “you should have let me bite off his finger.”

“Hell, Britt, you don’t want to do that. He’s not a policeman. And he needs them all to count”

We rolled out from under the building into the brilliant afternoon air.

“It’s nice to get out of the office for awhile,” Ryan said happily, as if on a pleasure jaunt. “Where to, girls?”

Lottie and I stared at each other.

We stopped to interview several people at a Liberty City bus stop. All had heard the verdict. Radio and TV news bulletins had swept the city. Even older women, on their way home from day jobs, seemed wary and hostile. A lanky youth approached us, angry and jabbing his finger. “The pigs,” he cried, his eyes wild and wet with rage. “They beat up on the easy targets, they let the bad people go! They’re dead!” he shouted, referring to the defendants. “They’re dead!”

We thanked him and moved on.

“Ryan, lock your door, and be careful,” I said.

“If we yell
go,
you floor it,” added Lottie.

“Okay?”

“Sure, sure.” He was smiling, enjoying this. “How about them?” He nodded toward a corner bar with a small knot of men outside.

“No point in trying to open a dialogue with a bunch of drunks.”

Lottie agreed. “No point in stirring ‘em up.”

They shouted, raising fists as we passed.

We stopped at a small corner grocery, where there were women and kids. Ryan pulled to the curb. Lottie and I stepped out and approached a small group of people. “We’re from the
News,
have you heard about the verdict in the Hudson case?” I said.

“You better get outta here,” a heavyset woman said. Her eyes slid back to the store. I took a step toward the door, hoping to interview the owner.

Two men lurched from inside, shouting. “White mothafuckers,” one screamed. One lunged for Lottie’s camera, arm outstretched as though he was a baseball player diving for a line drive.

“Go, Ryan!” we yelled, scrambling back into the Chrysler. He had switched off the ignition, which we had warned him not to do. He fumbled with the keys. “Go!” I screamed, engaging in a tug of war with one of the men over my car door. I finally yanked it closed as the man beat on the window with his bare fists.

“Go!” Lottie yelled. She had managed to slam her door. The man after her camera spat on the window, then dropped his eyes, scanning the gutter. We knew what he was looking for, something heavy enough to break glass.

“Go!” we screamed.

Ryan floored it, first in reverse, throwing us forward, then he slammed it into drive, grinding gears, hurling us back into our seats and screeching through a stop sign.

“That’s it!” I said. “I’m driving.”

“Dad blasted right,” Lottie said, rolling down her spit-streaked window and leaning out to shoot a picture of the shouting group on the corner we had just escaped.

Ryan looked shocked. “Why didn’t you just tell ‘em that you’re the one who broke the story, Britt? Those cops wouldn’t have been arrested if it hadn’t been for you.”

“You try telling them,” I said. “I doubt these people are our subscribers, Ryan.”

The smell of smoke hung on the air, and I vaguely wondered where it came from. A bottle smashed in the street in front of us. Ryan swerved and hit the brakes.

“Don’t stop,” I yelled.

“Keep going, keep going, keep going,” Lottie said.

“Don’t panic,” Ryan said. “I’m driving.”

I rolled my window down an inch. “Did you hear that?”

“Yeah.” Lottie’s face was taut.

“What, what?” said Ryan.

“Those loud pops. That’s gunfire. Must be a sniper.” I scanned the upper floors of the buildings around us.

Ryan gripped the wheel. Black smoke up ahead, cascading down the street. For a moment it cleared and we saw what was burning. A late-model car in flames, overturned and totally engulfed.

“Man oh man,” Lottie was muttering. I heard the click and whirr of her shutter.

Ryan stomped the brake, face stunned. Two crumpled bodies were sprawled in the street near the flaming car. Between them and us was a mob of about thirty or forty people, some carrying weapons.

Lottie kept shooting. “Sure don’t like their looks,” I said, scribbling notes.

“Great stuff.” Lottie reached for another camera. “Let’s move.”

“See that!” I cried. Something kicked up powdery dust and shattered pavement in the street next to us and in front of us. Sniper fire from high in one of the apartment houses we were passing; or maybe the roof.

“Time to go.” I spoke calmly. “Make a hughie, Ryan.”

As he swung the wheel there was a thud as something hit the car, rocking it slightly. About ten men and boys were in the street behind us, about half a block away, coming up on us fast. The larger mob advanced from the front. Lottie was shooting pictures. My hands itched for the steering wheel. “Go through ‘em Ryan,” I warned. “Don’t stop.”

Something hit the windshield, rolled and bounced off the hood.

“Son of a bitch!” Lottie muttered, still shooting. “They better not damage this car!”

Too late. Cracks cobwebbed across the glass. I scribbled notes. “Lean on the horn and go, Ryan,” I said quietly. He floored it.

“Noooo!” Lottie and I screamed. Instead of heading back down Twelfth Avenue, he turned and swerved into an open-ended alley between Sixty-first and Sixty-second Streets.

“Don’t worry,” he said confidently. “I’m taking evasive action.”

“Never let yourself get trapped in an alley!” Lottie cried.

“Get on the radio,” I yelled. The local community center was at the far end of the alley. There would surely be more people and more violence there. The car bounced against garbage cans and trash in the alley. Rocks and bottles crashed onto the trunk and roof from behind us, dense smoke up ahead. Running figures passed the mouth of the alley. Ryan hesitated, taking his foot off the gas.

“Go! Go! Go! You can’t stop now,” I said, glancing at the mob behind us.

We emerged onto the open street over the crunch of broken glass; shattered store windows. People were running. A man, his face contorted in rage, grabbed the door handle on my side and hung on, half running, half dragging alongside for a few moments. Ryan was yelling, “Mayday! Mayday!” into the radio mike.

“Give them our location!” I shouted.

“Where are we?” His voice was panicky.

I screamed the answer. Lottie was shooting pictures again. The service station on the corner was in flames. I realized now what had struck me as so odd. With all the smoke around us, there were no fire engines, no fire fighters.

The car was being pelted from every direction now. Newspaper racks, bus benches, and garbage cans had been hurled into the street ahead. Suddenly I saw something coming and gasped. Lottie ducked. A huge piece of concrete crashed through the windshield and hit Ryan square in the face.

Blood flew, spattering the windows from the inside. We were all screaming, and in that terrible moment of chaos and panic, bombarded from all sides, I thought of D. Wayne Hudson and knew what the last conscious moments of his life had been like.

Then survival instinct took over. Ryan was slumped to the side, both hands to his head.

“I’ll drive,” I yelled, and somehow scrambled feet first over the seat to grab the wheel. Lottie had Ryan in her arms, dragging him out of my way, toward her. I couldn’t see if he was still conscious or not.

Four or five men were converging on the car from behind us. I threw it into reverse, and screeched back toward them, as they scattered in surprise, then floored it, trying to see through the shattered windshield, weaving, trying to avoid the deadly barrage of flying missiles.

Lottie was on the radio to the city desk. “We’re under sniper fire, at Sixty-first Street and Thirteenth Avenue, being rocked and bottled. Ryan is injured. We need a rescue unit. I repeat, Sixty-one Street and Thirteen Avenue. We have an injury. There are also two bodies back there in the street, overturned cars, and a gas station burning.”

The idiotic voice of Gretchen responded, a dubious pitch to her words. “Is that you, Lottie? Repeat that please. What did you say is going on?”

If I survive this, I vowed, swerving at top speed around a burning garbage can in the street and a man swinging a baseball bat, I will kill that woman. The thought gave me comfort.

We were gallumping along on rims now, with at least two flat tires. Up ahead, thank God, I saw police barricades. They had blocked off the street. Too late, I thought, for the motorists trapped inside.

We pulled up there, and I got out. Nobody came rushing to our aid. Too much was going on. The car looked as though it had rolled sideways down a steep hill and seemed to be leaking both gas and oil. I managed with difficulty to open the battered trunk lid, snatched out Lottie’s first-aid kit and some towels, and ran around to the passenger side. Ryan lay slumped across Lottie’s lap. I wiped his face with a hand towel. It didn’t look as bad as I had feared. His bloodied nose didn’t seem broken, but the ragged gash across his forehead would definitely need stitches. At least he was conscious, mumbling, “I’m sorry, Britt”; a good sign. I folded a towel into a compress, placed it across the wound, and told him to hold it there. Lottie was squirming out from under him to shoot pictures of the police barricades.

We ignored Gretchen’s voice bleating shrilly from the radio, demanding to talk to Ryan.

“Look,” I told Lottie, “I don’t know how long the car will keep running. Drop Ryan at the emergency room and get your film back to the paper so it can be processed for the state.”

“You ain’t comin’?” She gave me a long look.

“Hell no, I’ll stay out on the story until it’s time to write for the final. I’ll stick with these cops and use their barricade as a base. Get us another car and meet me back here.”

She nodded. “Watch yourself.” She crouched, focusing her camera on the cops manning the barricade, then a long shot down the street we had just escaped. Then she stepped back and took one of the car.

“Lordy,” she said. “Look at this wreck. We’re in trouble now.”

“It wasn’t our fault.” We both looked at Ryan, who groaned. “You’re okay,” I told him. I patted his cheek, made sure his fingers and toes were all tucked into the car, and closed the door.

Lottie took off, the car lurching along on its two good tires.

It was too late to stop it—the juggernaut was rolling over our city. I could hear it on the radios of the cops assigned to the perimeter. Sections of expressway that cut through black neighborhoods had been shut down as unsafe for motorists. An angry radio personality had urged people to gather at the courthouse for a candlelight vigil. More than 2,000 were there within an hour, but they didn’t bring candles. They brought guns, piled out of their cars, and began shooting at the building. Employees and a few court liaison officers with a limited amount of ammo were barricaded inside like the defenders of the Alamo. Fires and looting had broken out as far south as Goulds and in Coconut Grove. I told police at the barricades about the people we had seen lying in the street. They might still be alive. The cops said their orders were to remain where they were, and keep motorists from entering the area.

Except for a few drops of Ryan’s blood splashed onto my yellow cotton sweater, I was in pretty good shape, glad I was wearing slacks and comfortable shoes.

Prevailing police strategy seemed to be to avoid confrontation, pulling back the perimeter whenever necessary, letting the mobs take the neighborhood. The tactic took me by surprise at first. While I watched rioters torch an auto parts store, the police around me swiftly pulled out. After I became aware of this and took off down the block after them, two cops in a squad car picked me up and let me ride with them. They seemed to find it funny that I had found myself alone, on foot in a riot zone. I wondered if McDonald had been called in and where he was in all this.

With the perimeters constantly changing, it would be tougher to team up with Lottie again. I decided not to worry about how to get back to the paper until the time came to go. More press was arriving. I saw a TV crew broadcasting live from high up on an over pass; a perfect place to shoot from and still keep their expensive equipment intact.

I heard via police radios that another station’s TV news car had been lost attacked, and burned on Thirty-fifth Street. There were injuries.

Acrid smells of fear, smoke, gunpowder, and panic filled the air. Blood-drenched motorists in shattered cars continued to pull up to the safety of the barricades, where fire rescue men now waited to render first aid.

The new perimeter was at an intersection with two liquor stores on opposite corners. The owners had had no time to board up before fleeing. The establishments had already been broken open, and the burglar alarms were ringing. When the time came to pull back again, I heard a lieutenant ask on the air what he should do about the package stores. “Use your own judgment,” he was advised.

He directed his men into the stores and I tagged along, to watch. Wielding riot sticks and clubs, the officers cleared the shelves, smashing bottles into showers of broken glass. The only thing worse than an enraged mob, presumably, was a drunken, enraged mob. The smells of spilled booze mingled with smoke and cordite made me queasy, and my knees shook. I wished now I had eaten some lunch, or breakfast.

Police radios erupted with reports of looting at a big Zayre’s department store, just three blocks south. I jogged along the sidewalk, arrived just after the first police unit, and stood, stunned, near the patrol car. Hundreds of people had smashed the store’s front doors and windows, surged inside, and were in the process of taking the place apart. The parking lot was a sea of shopping carts with legs. You could not see the upper bodies of the people pushing them because the carts were stacked so high with merchandise of every description. Men, women, and children of all ages, shapes, and sizes were hauling their booty in all directions.

A young cop in the first unit radioed for help. “We need policemen here.” The crackled response was that five or six officers would be dispatched.

“No,” he responded, “we need fifty or sixty!”

Undermanned and ill-prepared, the cops were as disorganized as the chaos mushrooming around them. There was no way to arrest everybody, or anybody, at that point. A handful of frustrated cops finally snatched baseball bats from a display inside the front door. Unable to escape out the steel-reinforced back door, the thieves were forced to run a gauntlet of policemen swinging nightsticks and baseball bats.

Two officers snatched cans of spray paint from toppled displays and sprayed
LOOTER
and
THIEF
on cars backed up to the store.

Across the street, several officers dove for cover and began returning fire at a burning convenience store, thinking they were being shot at by someone inside. An angry captain ordered them to hold their fire, pointing out that no gunmen could be alive, much less shooting from within the inferno. They were engaging in a gunfight with soda cans and mayonnaise jars exploding in the heat.

Some of the looters torched storerooms at the rear of the big Zayre’s store. Sprinklers went on and lights flashed. Black smoke began streaming out the back of the building. The lights kept flashing on and off. The entire scene was surreal. My thoughts raced as I tried to follow what was happening. Sniper fire in the street was interspersed by the occasional boom of a shotgun and the crashing of broken glass.

I returned to the action at the command post. More cops were showing up, brought in from home and other departments. Several, mostly military veterans, volunteered to man a rescue mission into the riot zone to save any survivors among motorists who had been dragged from their cars and brutalized. They had brought up a paddy wagon and were stripping the bench seats from inside. I pushed my way up to the coordinator, Sgt. Randy Springer, a tough, rock-hard, middle-aged veteran.

“I saw two of them,” I said. “In the street near an overturned car that was burning. That was a couple of hours ago. They weren’t moving, I couldn’t tell if they were alive or not.” I paused to collect my thoughts. He watched my face intently, a shotgun in his hand. “There was sniper fire, lots of it. At least one shooting from a rooftop in the middle of the block on the west side of Twelfth Avenue, between Sixtieth and Sixty-first.” He nodded and they took off in the paddy wagon, a crew of five: Springer and another man poised to go into the streets for victims, two riding shotgun, and a driver. “Good luck,” I whispered.

I held my breath as they swooped down a street littered with rocks and broken glass, under a late-afternoon sun that glowed eerie orange through dense smoke and lengthening shadows.

The sniper fire and shotgun blasts picked up as they disappeared into no man’s land, straight into the screaming mob. Onnie, you were right, I thought, praying that she and Darryl had stayed safe inside their little apartment.

The wagon seemed to be gone forever. My watch said it was sixteen minutes before the lumbering truck reappeared like an apparition emerging from the smoke, dented and bullet-torn, headlights shot out. They brought back eight maimed and badly injured men and women, four dead motorists, and half of another body, found in the street.

Firemen worked on the survivors as I approached Springer. Under the streaked soot and perspiration, his face looked gray.

“We just grabbed bodies and threw them in the paddy wagon, Britt. My guys covering us kept firing over the mob right down to the last shotgun round.”

“You think you found them all?”

“Jesus, Britt.” He paused. “I hope so.” His eyes were wet. I pretended not to see his hands jumping and shaking. He stared down at them himself, his expression odd, as though the quirky appendages belonged to someone else. “I was shot in Vietnam,” he whispered, “but I never saw anything like this.” He shook the tears out of his eyes, gulped, and looked away. “We needed air support,” he said shakily.

I fought the urge to hug him. I couldn’t, because I am a professional, but I knew he needed a hug. I needed one, too.

A woman police officer shared an orange with me, which I accepted gratefully. Feeling slightly better, I hiked back to see what was happening at Zayre’s. I had filled my notebook, and was now using the backs of the used pages, still taking notes. The fire continued to burn at the rear, in a storeroom area. The place looked as though it had been totally cleaned out. Alarms were still ringing. The sprinklers seemed to have stopped. I wondered if anyone was hurt inside. I stepped through the shattered front door and felt sucked in by the building’s hot smoky breath.

Dark shapes and shadows materialized on the floors between the aisles. Were they people who had been overcome, or mannequins? I took a few more steps inside. The empty, smashed display cases and bare shelves yawned in eerie abandonment. A broken doll lay discarded on the floor. Water dripped somewhere. I wondered what the cost in dollar damage would be, the stolen stock as well as the building, and scribbled a note to myself to check with company officials when I got back to the office. The loss has to be well into six figures, I thought.

A sudden sound startled me, and my heart hammered a triple beat. With nothing left to steal here, newly arrived looters would probably turn ugly. With relief I saw that a patrol car had pulled up close to the front entrance. Glad to see a uniform approaching the door behind me, I resolved to stick closer to the cops from now on. I hoped this one didn’t think I was a looter.

I turned and called, “It’s only me, trying to come up with a ball-park figure on the damage. What do you think?”

The man in uniform kicked a piece of debris out of his way and stepped closer, moving out of the shadow until I could see his face. He smiled, and my heart lurched into my throat. Francisco Alvarez. I hadn’t even thought of him during the last few hours. Yet I should have. All of this was his doing. I swallowed hard.

“They really cleaned the place out, huh?” I said, and moved to step by him, heading for the door.

“You really think you’re going somewhere?” He spoke slowly.

His words and tone were so passionless, so calm, yet so chilling that, without thinking, I broke into a run. He caught my right arm as I passed, throwing me off balance and spinning me around. He drew me close, his face looming large over mine.

“You were so anxious to see me,
chica,
remember?”

“That was before all this happened. I’m on deadline now. I don’t have time.” I tried to sound firm and businesslike and shake myself loose, but his grip was iron.

His left hand groped between my legs. He was smiling. “I hear you like to screw cops.”

“No, I don’t,” I panted, my blood turning to ice water. “Let me go!” I said angrily.

I shot a glance at the door as though expecting someone. “The field force unit will be here any minute.”

He reacted with a smirk. “I command the field force unit.”

“My editor, the medical examiner, and the state attorney’s office all have the story. I told them everything.” My voice seemed to be coming from underwater.

He hesitated for a moment, glaring into my eyes. Then he put his left hand tightly around my throat, bruising my chin and drawing my face even closer to his. He smiled, baring his teeth in a look that dissolved my bones into icy dust. “I don’t think so. I know a bluff when I see it.”

He let go of my arm, reached under my sweater, and twisted my left breast. “Like that?” he said. I whimpered. Shouts sounded out in the street He reacted by spinning me around, right off my feet twisting my arm behind my back, and kicking me forward. “Let’s go,” he said, “where we can be alone.”

I heard him unsnap the handcuffs from his belt. “Major,” I said, fighting panic, trying to sound rational, “you can’t do this. This is ridiculous. I’m sure we can talk, outside somewhere.” I made a slight movement in the direction of the door, but he jerked me back.

“No,” he whispered softly, almost seductively, into my ear. “First we’ll have some fun, and then you won’t talk to anybody. No more stories for you.”

“This is not worth your career,” I said, coughing from the smoke that wafted from the back of the building. My eyes stung.

“No, it isn’t” he whispered. “And never fear,
chica,
it won’t be.”

He was marching me back toward what had been the women’s clothing department. Curtained dressing rooms lined the wall. “Excellent,” he whispered, shoving me inside one and turning me to face him. “Now,” he said briskly, “on your knees.” His eyes glittered, his expression expectant. I got the distinct impression, as his body pressed against mine, that the man had an erection.

As he snapped the cuffs around my left wrist, I chopped his adam’s apple with my right hand, kneed him in the groin with all the strength I could muster, and was off and running.

He followed, amazingly fast for someone I thought I had just disabled. I had hoped to be outside before he recovered; but I heard the crunch of his footsteps on broken glass behind me.

“Halt, or I’ll shoot,” he shouted, hoarse and gasping.

I dove down behind a counter, next to a cash register broken open on the floor. The metal cuffs still dangled from my left wrist. “I have a gun,
chica.
I will if I have to, but I would prefer not to shoot you.”

No, I thought, skittering on all fours to the cover of another counter, he would rather make it look like rioters killed me. No ballistics in beating deaths. I would be a statistic, another casualty of this huge disaster, lost in the numbers. I held my breath.

If I could make it out the door, the barricades were not far away. Once in sight of other cops, he wouldn’t dare.

I strained to listen, ears wide open, unsure of exactly where he was. The unfought fire was slowly spreading, smoke swirling around me. I got closer to the floor and tried not to cough. Only one thing was clear—I had to get out of there. I raised myself up to a crouch, like a sprinter at the starting line, breathed deeply, counted to three and bolted.

I heard his surprised grunt from somewhere to my right, but concentrated on moving fast and keeping my footing on the tittered, slippery floor. Ten feet from the door I heard the shot and the tinkling sound of glass shards falling as the slug jammed into a window frame ahead of me. I kept going and burst out the door, moving as fast as I ever have in my life.