Quicksand (2 page)

He switched off the flashing lights, indicating to Nora that they were near. She sat up a little in the seat, taking in the neighborhood. Northern Liberties had undergone a series of gentrification efforts, and rehabbed buildings and town houses preened under the muted early morning light. Nora spotted Calder's car parked across from a former factory; long fire escapes snaked along the building's sides, linking the cramped, wrought-iron balconies. Just beyond Calder's car was that of Agent Lin. His partner Jacobs sat up front, with two sergeants from the sheriff's office rounding out the task force group in the back. Nora struggled for their names and came up blank. “Looks kinda conspicuous, don't you think?” she observed as they pulled closer.

“Too early in the morning for anyone to be paying attention,” Wansbrough said. “Difference between us and the bad guys is the bad guys get to sleep in.”

At Wansbrough's suggestion, she called Calder.

“Hi, Nora.”

“You awake?”

“For you, always.”

“You're on speaker, Ben.”

Wansbrough tsk-tsk'd as he began parallel parking the Suburban, then said loudly: “Focus on this arrest, Calder, and keep your mind off my rookie.”

Nora glared at her partner and tapped the mute button. “What did we just talk about?”

He waved away her glare. “Never mind. I also told your dad that, as a father, I would keep you safe from young men with bad intentions.”

Nora's nostrils flared. She opened her mouth and then shut it again, speechless.

“Plus,” John added, “Ben's so obvious. He needs to tone down his flirting a little. Or at least do something original.” He tapped the mute button, opening the line, and grinned at Nora. “What do you have, Ben?”

The Suburban's dashboard screen flashed with two photos. One was a face she'd memorized by now, Dewayne Fulton. The other was of a thin white woman with a curtain of chestnut-colored hair. Special Agent Calder cleared his throat loudly and said, “Apartment 4-F is a corner unit. Two occupants: Fulton, Dewayne, male, a.k.a. ‘Reality,' boss of the Junior Black Mafia, aged twenty-one, and the lessee, Halston, Lisa, female, aged twenty-six. John, you want us to cover the balcony by sealing off the fire escape?”

“You read my mind,” Wansbrough said. “Two with Ben, four with me. Burton—you there?”

Eric Burton's voice floated through the speaker, succinct as always. “Yes, John.”

“Burton, you come with me and Nora. Calder, try not to shoot anyone today.”

“I hardly ever shoot anyone on Fridays,” came the response.

Nora strapped on the bulletproof vest John handed her, then accepted the task force raid jacket.

She looked at John. “Crowbar?”

He shook his head, pulling off his sunglasses and tucking them carefully into the visor clip. Gesturing at the building, he said, as though stating the obvious, “Nice building. Doorman.
Key
.”

They slid quickly out of the car and jogged toward the building. Eric Burton and Lin and Jacobs materialized behind them, all looking grim and unshaven. Eric was shoving his arm into a black Windbreaker that matched the one John had given Nora. She saw Ben Calder leading the rest of the arrest team toward the fire escape. She wished that Ben was with them. Ben's flirting made her uncomfortable, but Eric's icy cold shoulder always left her disconcerted.

Nora pressed her badge against the glass door. The concierge stared at the group in confusion, then hesitantly released the lock. They watched her closely, but she did not seem to be reaching for a cell phone or any buttons that might function to warn Unit 4-F. She wore a name tag reading
JUANITA
, and she stared at them with fearful eyes.

Wansbrough advanced on the woman quickly, showing his badge and smoothing out the warrant for her perusal. “Federal officers. I need the spare key for 4-F.”

She began in heavily accented English, “We do not…”

John leaned in close. “Now.”

The concierge leapt out of her seat and unlocked a cabinet set against the wall. Her hand shook slightly as she handed over the key. “Shut down the elevator and let no one up the stairs,” Nora said over her shoulder, as the five of them started the climb.

Juanita did not need to be told twice.

Unit 4-F was clearly marked. Wansbrough plunged the key into the lock and turned it quickly. The door was chained from the inside. He gave his team a mirthless smile, then motioned at Eric to join him. The two leaned against the door and shoved hard. The chain snapped immediately, and as the door swung open, the five of them darted into the spacious loft apartment as Wansbrough shouted, “Federal officers! Come out with your hands up!”

The door crashed against the inside wall, and Nora heard shouts of surprise from behind a low divider wall that demarcated the bedroom area in the otherwise entirely open space. Billowing, gauzy curtains dangled from the tall ceiling down to the low wall, concealing what lay within; beyond these, a woman's voice began screaming and did not stop.

With fierce, abbreviated motions, Wansbrough waved Burton and Lin into position in front of the door they'd just entered, and directed Nora and Jacobs toward the open kitchen area. They hunkered down by a set of cabinets, a position that still afforded them a sweeping view of the loft. Nora worked to breathe deeply in order to slow her thumping heart. Wansbrough darted to the low wall, crouching, waiting, and called again for Dewayne to come out and surrender himself.

It was only a moment before Dewayne Fulton pushed aside the curtains and burst out from behind the half wall, wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a dark web of tattoos. He was waving a heavy pistol, what looked like a .44 Magnum, and stumbled slightly. He saw Burton and pointed the gun at him, but Wansbrough landed a sweeping kick to Dewayne's knees from behind. Dewayne thudded to the floor, the gun discharging. The bullet plowed into the exposed brick of the wall, and a shower of shards rained down on the polished hardwood. In an instant, Wansbrough had his knee in Dewayne's back and was twisting his gun arm up behind him as Dewayne unleashed a hail of expletives.

Nora and Jacobs leapt in unison over the dividing wall, seeking the source of the uninterrupted screaming. They saw a mostly naked woman, her long, brown hair a disheveled mess, sitting upright in the middle of a king-sized bed. “Shut up,” Jacobs yelled at her, aiming his gun in her direction. The screaming stopped. Nora trained her own gun on the woman as she scanned the bedroom area. She called out to Wansbrough, “We've located Lisa Halston!”

Nora found that her back was to the one solid retaining wall and what looked like a bathroom door, and it flashed through her mind that her position wasn't secure. The woman on the bed raised her hands as if in slow-motion, and Nora saw immediately that her pupils were wide and dilated. The bedside table was piled high with more ice methamphetamine than Nora had ever seen in one place.

Nora began edging back toward Wansbrough and Burton, and was about to tell the woman to get slowly off the bed, when the bathroom door behind her flew open, and Nora felt steel at the base of her neck. She froze, not breathing, her eyes holding Jacobs's alarmed gaze. Jacobs immediately began shouting, “Federal officers! Lower your weapon!”

The gun rested just below Nora's tightly wound chignon. The weapon was at least as heavy as the .44 Dewayne had been wielding.

A woman's voice shrieked in Nora's ear, drowning out Jacobs's. “I've got your girl! Now get the hell out of here or I'll kill her!”

Nora could feel the woman's breath in her hair. Nora had not stopped pointing her gun at the woman in the bed, who watched the scene in detached, but mercifully silent, terror. Nora was rigid, waiting breathlessly for what would happen next. She heard no voices or movement from the next room, though she strained for any hint of Calder and his team. From the corner of her eye, she saw Wansbrough peek around the divider wall. Nora knew he didn't have a clean shot. They exchanged a quick glance, then his low voice called out, “Drop your weapon. You got nowhere to go here.”

The woman's voice seemed to climb an entire register higher. “You drop your goddam weapon or I will kill this bitch, so help me God…”

Nora called out in as calm a voice as she could muster, “We've got some drugs in play here, John, so we may not all be thinking clearly…”

The gun dug more deeply into Nora's neck. “Shut up, just shut the fuck up!” In the living room, Nora heard Dewayne Fulton begin laughing almost hysterically.

Nora fought for breath and found her gun arm starting to shake. She thought about plunging her elbow backward into the woman's sternum, but she was too scared that the heavy gun would go off.

Suddenly the sound of a gunshot thundered through the loft, and Nora found herself tumbling to the floor, as the nearly naked woman resumed her screams.

*   *   *

The wait was
interminable. It was rush hour, and the medical examiner, the EMTs, and the evidence techs from the field office had all been slow in coming.

The very blood-soaked Nora could only seem to focus on her shoes. And her partial hearing loss, for which none of the support crews had any remedy. The tech team was busy photographing the scene within the loft apartment and cataloging the weapons in preparation for transporting them to the office. The two men and one woman would wait for Nora and Calder to carefully collect the meth and its accompanying paraphernalia; Benjamin Calder was an expert on street drugs—how they looked, how they were made, and the intricate silk roads of production and distribution that entangled the city. He had logged endless hours on this case. They all had.

But it was Nora and John who had been on the scene shortly after Kylie Baker's body was discovered. They had found her mother shrieking with grief on the bloodstained grass of her Kingsessing home, refusing to leave her daughter's fast-cooling, knife-slashed body. It was the first time since Nora had entered law enforcement that she wished she'd listened to Baba and picked a different career.

Not that being murdered at fourteen had made Kylie Baker at all remarkable. It was Philly, after all. And Kingsessing was … well, Kingsessing was boarded-up buildings that somehow still seethed with listless energy. It was the sound of daytime screaming. It was head wounds that left indelible, forever-stains on gappy, stumbling sidewalks.

Nora had had no reason to wander that far into Southwest Philly before joining the force. She had grown used to Kingsessing, the domestic violence calls and small-time drug busts and even the occasional corpse with a bullet wound or two. But this task force work found her looking at a little girl whose neck was slashed so deeply that her trachea lay exposed. Nora had knelt beside Kylie's thin, naked frame. She was charged with counting knife wounds for the preliminary report, but she found herself counting other things as well. She counted the number of piercings arching up along the cartilage of Kylie's right ear (six). She counted the dusting of freckles along the bridge of her nose and across her smooth cheeks (eighteen). She counted the shards of brown bottle glass that lay on the sidewalk, just beyond the girl's jarringly fuchsia toenails (seven large shards, three small).

Apart from its extreme violence, Kylie Baker's murder had drawn the task force's attention as an act of vengeance. Her brother Kevin's gang trafficked in meth and heroin—not only in Kingsessing, West Philly, and Northeast Philly, but over the Delaware River in angry, dilapidated Camden. Kevin's gang, the A&As, had engineered a drive-by shooting that took out a member of the Junior Black Mafia.

Dewayne Fulton led the Junior Black Mafia. But rather than take revenge for the shooting by killing a member of Kevin's gang, he had killed a member of Kevin's family.
Kylie
.

Everyone knew the story. Everyone was talking about it. The two gangs ran strong in Kingsessing, where crack houses outnumbered grocery stores, and there were more pawnshops than schools or parks.

But something had broken in Kylie's mother as she had watched the task force begin work on her little girl's corpse. She had turned to Agent John Wansbrough and said, plain as day and loud enough for all the neighbors to hear, that she would talk. She would tell him everything she knew about every gang member she had ever known. From her own son Kevin and his gangbangers to Dewayne Fulton and his. Nora had looked up, her latex gloves damp with Kylie's blood, listening to the girl's mother in open-mouthed astonishment.

John, stunned, had had the presence of mind to coax her into the Suburban and take her with him to the William J. Green, Jr. Federal Building. There, he recorded a detailed statement before the shock of Kylie's death wore off and the fear of the gangs reasserted itself. The Safe Streets Task Force acquired more information on Philadelphia gang members from Mrs. Baker than they had from all sources in the entire previous year.

It was Mrs. Baker who had told them where to locate Daniella Miller, and Daniella Miller who had given them Dewayne himself. And now, Ben and Nora sat on the small balcony, watching the swirl of activity inside and down below in the street. Nora had peeled off the task force Windbreaker, drenched with the blood and tissue of Halston, Lisa, aged twenty-six, and she sat now in her T-shirt that had never quite dried from her morning run. Nora had asked for a large glass of water, then demanded that Calder pour it over the back of her head. She was grateful her hair had been tied in its customary knot. Still, both of them had stared as the pinkened run-off dripped through four floors of wrought-iron balconies to tumble down to the street below. Calder went back to the kitchen to refill the glass three times before the improvised shower ran clear. Nora kept resisting the urge to pat the back of her head. Finally, she wrapped her arms hard around her knees.

“They're ruined, Ben.”

Calder put an arm around her shoulder. “I will get you new ones. I promise.”