I KILL RICH PEOPLE 2 (13 page)

The camera captured Spencer touching the Beretta 9mm at the small of his back inside his belt, but he didn’t draw. Spencer was obviously favoring one leg. He was trying to press himself away, but it was no good, the cop was too strong.

Stephen was glued to the action on screen.

Spencer put all of his strength into his good leg and leapt high. As he came down, he drove his entire force into the back of the cop’s head, slamming his face onto the edge of the concrete stair with a sickening crunch.

Spencer broke clear. He loped up the stairs, balancing on his weak leg and pushing his way forward. Bishop watched, momentarily forgetting to order his men to fire.

Stephen shifted the hijacked stadium security cam toward Bishop’s men. From inside the section tunnel, one of them wearing his black baseball cap turned backward held a rifle leveled straight at Spencer’s face.

“What’s the orders?” Bishop’s Team Leader demanded.

Bishop continued to hesitate. He knew better than to leave a witness, especially a cop, but he had no answer.

On his screen, Tremaine pressed himself up to his knees. He gripped the .38 revolver in one fist. His right eye was worthless. He squinted to aim through his left eye and cradled his revolver in the crook of his left elbow to stabilize his aim. When he fired, the camera caught the flame and smoke bursting from the snub-nosed barrel.

The first bullet hit like a rod of rebar ramming inside his right lung. Four more shots followed with each slug thudding home and jerking Spencer’s body in agony.

The last round slapped exactly onto the scar tissue where Afif’s blade had thrust.

A second rifle squared on the detective. “What about the cop?” Bishop’s team called out while Bishop froze.  He knew that the detective wasn’t going to sit quietly and let him take away the biggest collar of his life.  His orders were to get in and out fast with low friction. How was killing a cop consistent with that?

While Tremaine searched his pockets for his cell phone, two sets of eyes followed him with crosshairs aimed at him, center-chest and forehead.

“What are my orders?” Bishop’s man demanded. The shot was there, he had it, but not without clear orders, not shooting a cop.

Tremaine screamed “10-00”into his cell phone while Bishop’s team watched.

“Tremaine Bull DID. Shea. Citi-Field! Section 338. 10-12 on the sniper. Shooter down.”

Bishop’s man followed the cop through his rifle scope. The images relayed directly to Stephen’s screen.

Bright red blood poured out of Tremaine’s mouth like a running faucet, blood running through his broken teeth out over his chin as he straddled the man he had shot. The detective leaned down to get a closer look at the shooter. The first thing he saw was the Beretta inside Bigfoot’s waistband.

He paused, studying quizzically. Why, Tremaine wondered? Why didn’t draw the weapon?

Blood flowed over the body and onto the concrete. From above Spencer’s prone body, the cop’s head was twisted. Stephen recognized it on the monitor, too. He looked like he was confused, but he wasn’t able to identify the cause.  He couldn’t know that the detective he was studying had just realized that the blood below him was draining out of his own mouth and not coming from Spencer at all.

Tremaine’s good eye fixed on the shining brass end of a bullet where it stuck out from one of the five holes in the back of Spencer’s shirt. Spencer snapped two quick testicular blows then sprang up on his one good leg.

Bull was already going down when Stephen completed the thought.
Vest. He’s wearing a vest.

“Orders!” the commando demanded.

Spencer tried again to move beyond reach but the cop wouldn’t back off. Tremaine snagged him in a tight-fisted grip beneath the Kevlar vest and held on. Spencer drew the Baretta and pistol-whipped him, bringing a snapping clout against the socket and nearly closing Tremaine’s left eye now, too, but he would not let go.

What do I have to do?
Spencer wondered.

Whatever he did, the fool kept coming! With both eyes out of use, he couldn’t see, but the cop kept fighting!

Spencer twisted and swept both arms roundhouse to break the grip, but Tremaine’s hands grabbed again, both of his thick hands wrapping around Spencer’s Beretta. He jammed downward with such force that Spencer let go of the gun before his wrist snapped in two.

Spencer lifted his foot then he stamped his heel down onto the crown of the cop’s shoe. He felt the shattering bones caving into deep divot in the top of Tremaine’s foot, but the cop still held!

And then they were falling. Backwards. Each one of them waving his arms to regain balance as they both flipped over the railing.

“Whoa!” Stephen exclaimed, pressing his face closer to the monitor screen while the two looked like they were headed to an ugly death. He was relieved momentarily when the cop caught his arm around the metal railing pole. They dangled forty feet high above the concrete stairs and the brightly colored seats in the lower deck.

Spencer had one hand snagged onto the cop’s belt and held the other over the cop’s forehead. Then all was still and quiet as both of them concentrated on survival.

“I’m going to climb on you,” Spencer instructed. “Hang on. I’ll pull you up when I get to the top.”

Tremaine’s entire body heaved, his one arm trembling as his elbow held against the strain of 500 pounds dangling over the forty-five foot drop onto the concrete stairs below.

“You ain’t pulling up nobody,” Tremaine huffed. “You going to run.”

Spencer reached out and hooked his fingertips into the cop’s eye socket to get purchase to pull himself up. He heaved and made headway. His face was now pressed into Tremaine’s back. He brought up his leg and wedged the point of his shoe inside Tremaine’s belt.

At the edge of section 338 above them, Bishop’s second man saw the opportunity and acted upon it. He emerged out of the section tunnel and rushed down the stairs.

Tremaine’s arm curled around the railing, trembling but holding fast. Bishop’s man spun to position himself then lifted his leg. He aimed for the point of Tremaine’s elbow. The side kick snapped the humerus and the trochlear notch.

Stephen’s mouth dropped open. The shooter and the witness were dispatched onto the concrete below. Tremaine and Spencer both fell.

Problem solved. Stephen reversed the recording and watched again. His knees shook beneath the table.

The whole fight lasted twenty seconds.

The detective’s body still lay there, shattered. “You were a good man,” Bishop murmured. He didn’t order it, but the death was on him. He was going to have to carry it.

Bishop placed the call to Jeffers. “We have him,” Bishop reported. “Positive identity.

I had a team following the NYPD detective. The NYPD detective-sergeant was killed in a fall. Spencer is unconscious. He’s more dead than alive.”

Jeffers was very pleased with the news.  “Well done, Sheriff. Dimitri Vosilych and a dead hero, too. The villain’s dead and no witnesses. Well done.”

The detective really is a ‘dead hero’, Bishop thought.
  You sonofabitch. All you care about is having your Vision Partners back to business as usual. God help anyone who steps in the way.

The helicopter swooped over the center field scoreboard, coming in hot. Bishop’s contractors were running to meet it. The helicopter touched down, its load was tossed inside, and it lifted off again moving over the East River off Rikers Island.

He watched the copter getting smaller. Nine minutes out, the helicopter would be over the Bight.  Bishop imagined Spencer dumped a thousand feet into the Atlantic, where the currents and the fishes would erase every trace.

Bishop’s job was done, he thought. Right then he was about ready to be done with Jeffers, the APA, the Vision Partners and everything to do with them.

On to finding a new engagement, he thought.
Cash flow is good, but there is more to life than money.

*****

A freeway roared inside Spencer’s skull. He opened his eyes to a gray uniformity that felt different from eyesight, a monotone where nothing would focus into any shape that he could comprehend. He lifted his hands in front of his face, brought them close, then pushed them away, turned them over and repeated until and felt intensely dizzy from the effort. He tried to roll over onto his stomach, failed, and passed out. His last thought was that he could not feel his lower half.

The monotone gray remained when pain reawakened him. He felt piercing inside the hinges of his jaw, but the source was hidden beneath hip to ankle plaster casts anchoring his lower body to the plywood platform inside the windowless concrete cell.

You let yourself be captured.

*****

North Corona, Queens, NYC.

“Do you really need another beer that fucking bad?” Callie squealed. She sent Liam and Casey over to Shelley’s house until Owen stopped the drinking. His eyes were crimson, bloodshot from the crying and the booze.

He ignored her, sitting on the couch. He was transfixed by the same CNN report they had already watched a half-dozen times.

“Tremaine was my friend, too, O.”

He hadn’t showered or shaved since Tremaine’s funeral service. Now, he smelled so rank that there was no way she was letting him touch her, which was better anyway. Sex is no magic eraser.

Later in the day, after the beer supply was gone, he had another tantrum. This time Owen yanked on the refrigerator door hard enough to flip over the fridge, which obliterated Casey’s high chair on the way down.

“It was an accident,” he said.

“Don’t leave! Jesus! Get your butt back here, Owen Cullen, and help pick this thing up! You’re being a fucking a-hole,” Callie screamed. “There’s milk all over the floor!”

But Owen wasn’t listening. There was CNN again. The same reporter, shivering in front of a crumbling Soviet-era building.

“This Eastern Bulgarian village of muddy tracks and single-room shelters was the home of Dimitri Vosilych,” the reporter narrated. “The Muslim loner who entered the United States on a tourist visa and shot down two dozen Americans before he could be stopped.

“If you listen, we can hear now as the young boys inside this madrassa memorize Koranic verse. Earlier this afternoon, I interviewed the former headmaster of this school where Dimitri Vosilych was an instructor in Sharia law.”

Owen sucked down a long slug of the whiskey. A wizened old man in a skullcap spoke softly in an unintelligible language and shook his head in denial. The old man waved his hand backwards to emphasize the long distance between the village and anything Dimitri Vosilych had done.

[Translation] “This was a person employed here years ago. I don’t know anything. I thought he was dead.” He shook his gnarled hand close to the camera lens. “We have no guns here. No violence. We know nothing about this man. He has no friends here.”

“Bullshit!” Owen shouted at the television.

Dansk had him out on a mandatory one-week paid leave. More bullshit. Tremaine’s weapon was empty. Did Dansk explain that? No! How could she?

“Citi-Field is our territory! Why no NYPD forensics? Huh? Why is the Department letting everybody else handle the crime scene investigation?” Owen asked nobody aloud.

More empty boots in the stirrups on the TV as Tremaine’s public funeral replayed.

“Tee never rode a horse his whole life!”

“Owen!” Callie screamed around the kitchen door. “Get your boney ass off that couch and help me! I can’t lift this alone!”

“Fucking bullshit!” Owen snarled. “Where are the bullets? If they’re not in Vosilych’s dead body, where are they? They didn’t disappear in center field!” But the autopsy report was classified and he couldn’t find answers to his questions.

“The guy has feet, doesn’t he? Are they size thirteen? Bullshit! What happened to Master Sergeant Jonathan Spencer? How did you rule him out as a suspect, Commander Christiana? Explain that to me because I’m a little slow on the uptake! Why? On what basis? Even if this guy Vosilych is real, why can’t there be more than one shooter? Huh, Dansk? What do you say to that, Blondie?
”

He had asked Dansk right to her face: “The whole city turns out for Tee’s funeral; dress blues, salutes and NYPD moves on? That’s it?” Why the fuck was she moving this along so fast?

Owen knew he should drop it. He could shut up, play ball, get through the captain’s exam and look forward to another brass bar. His own precinct. But his Irish was up and there was no getting away from it.

“Tee was my best friend,” Owen muttered. He took another long slug from the bottle, knowing full well that he could never “play it smart.”

*****

After the helicopter banked west toward Connecticut, Bishop heard nothing more from APA or Carlton Jeffers for five weeks. Now, while Jeffers briefed him, Bishop sensed that something had shifted. Jeffers was offering him cold bottled water and acting almost chummy.

“Dimitri Vosilych was the right product at the right moment,” Jeffers explained. “A Chechen-trained Muslim terrorist from Bulgaria, a country Americans could never find on a map.” Jeffers’ grin said he was back on top of the world. Everything was getting back to normal. They hadn’t lost a single Vision Partner, either.

Killer marketing, Bishop thought, pun intended but left unsaid. Vosilych was dead, gone, and forgettable. He was already “that guy.” Most Americans probably couldn’t pronounce the name, much less remember it. Here was another Muslim commie foreigner coming after the number one nation in the world.

The Oswald look-alike piece was brilliant finesse. Jeffers had Emerson Elliot off the air and only a 9% polling share was still calling the killings “Justified.” The last dying ember of the far left.

All that for under $1 million
, Bishop speculated. APA had probably parleyed the shootings into $100 million at the last Vision Partners gathering.

“I had 2,500 fully-armed private contractors onto the streets of New Orleans thirty hours after Hurricane Katrina hit the city,” Jeffers went on, bragging about another one of his closeted successes.

“Leave others to take the credit. That’s the secret to longevity, stroking huge egos.  But I get to choose the golden words coming from thousands of voices every single morning. Me.”

Jeffers extolled. “It’s an iceberg, this great nation of ours. Ninety percent is below the surface.” He was ebullient; problem solved, the brothers had nothing to criticize. The boil was lanced and drained without a single further public mention. In fact, he had every reason to expect a lot of mileage down the road coming from their recent handiwork. Mission completed.

It felt strange; Bishop wasn’t prepared for this wholly different side to Jeffers. This Jeffers was engaging, charismatic even.

“Congratulations,” Bishop replied cautiously. “It’s been a while,” he reminded Jeffers. “Not a word in five weeks.”

“You were paid, weren’t you?”

“Yes. The funds were wired. Thank you.”

“No need to thank me. You earned it.”

First the bottle of ice cold Fiji water. Then a compliment? Bishop watched as Jeffers swayed side to side in his high-backed leather chair. He looked like a cobra.

“I have your shooter,” Jeffers announced smugly. He scrolled down a menu, clicked, and asked, “I want you to question him.” like he was God parting the clouds to have a look down at the mortals.

“You what?” Bishop exclaimed. From the way that Jeffers was acting, Bishop expected something, but not Jonathan Spencer.  That didn’t compute. In his head, that case was closed.