Blast
Andrew Kim

Prologue

   When a butterfly hit his dirty windshield with a disgusting squish, Jerry shuddered. He reflexively turned on the wipers and pulled the washer knob, before remembering that the windshield wiper tank had been empty for a week. Once again he made a mental note to fill it, knowing full well that he would forget it again. Jerry took a sip from his beer can and, belching loudly, switched the radio to another station.
   The dirty pickup made its way along the night road toward the city, the dim light of its dusty headlights illuminating the pavement ahead. The city lights ahead were almost impossible to make out through the dirty windshield. But somewhere in the east there was a glow: Soon it would be morning.
   There was some kind of ridiculous comedy program on the radio. Through the wheezing old speakers he could hear a girl laughing, with an amazingly vile, squeaky voice:
   “What? Don’t you know, a wedding in Vegas is no joke! That’s a real wedding!”
   “That was funny when you weren’t even born yet, you idiot,” Jerry grumbled, belching again, and tried another station. The old speaker coughed out country music. Nodding with satisfaction, Jerry – a corpulent, bearded man under 50, almost as unkempt as his truck – reached for the beer.
   His pickup drove past a brightly lit construction hypermarket that had opened a few years ago, three miles outside the city. He had heard on the radio that the city government had quarreled with the county over this site, since a hypermarket would be a tasty morsel for both of them. In the end, the city won and the city limits were formally extended along the highway to the hypermarket. Then the suckerfish, as Jerry called them, started to appear – smaller shops for construction supplies, eateries, offices of construction firms. But life in these prts was in full swing only in the daytime; in the pre-dawn hours it was as deserted as a cemetery. Only the street lights, devouring hundreds of dollars for nothing, and emptiness. And Jerry’s lone pickup truck crawling toward the city.
   Taking the last swig, Jerry crumpled up the can, tossed it onto the back seat, and reached for another beer. With his peripheral vision, he thought he noticed some movement ahead.
   He frowned, squinted, trying to peer through the dirty windshield.
   Fifty yards away, to the right along the ramp to some sort of office or construction goods store, a shadowy figure was running, discernible against the brightly lit building. The shadow waved its arms and seems to be shouting something – Jerry thought he heard a voice over the blare of the music.
   “What the hell?”
   He slowed down a bit and craned his neck, trying to make out what was going on. A man was careening toward the road, waving his arms. The dim headlights showed him running to the curbside. A suit, tie, face contorted, eyes wide from horror. Over the wheezing of the music, Jerry clearly heard the cry: “Help!”
   Screaming and waving with one hand, the man seemed to be grabbing at his throat with the other. Jerry frantically glanced from side to side (where’s his car, for crying out loud? Is this a trap? How did he get here?). He tried to gather his wits, decide whether to slow down or drive past. The man was just ten yards ahead when Jerry suddenly noticed, in the dim light of the headlights, his gleaming metal collar. A circular pipe a couple of inches thick. Jerry looked in amazement at the stranger running towards him, screaming with holy terror in his eyes: “Please! Help me! Take it off…!”
   “What the…?!” Jerry was thunderstruck.
   But he never got as far as “… hell.” Because the collar around the neck of the suit, who was by then practically under the wheels of Jerry’s vehicle, exploded with a deafening roar, blinding Jerry, shattering the dirty glass of the pickup, and leaving its driver stunned. Amid the roar of the explosion, he was peppered with debris traveling at the speed of a bullet, ripping into his face, piercing his skin, stabbing his eyes and throat.
   The pickup zoomed past the man, flew onto the shoulder, flipped over, and crashed, wheels up. But Jerry didn’t feel it. He was already dead.
   The suit, with his head blown off, kept running a couple of yards out of inertia, then also collapsed on the asphalt.
   And then there was silence, broken only by the wheeze of Jerry’s radio from the wrecked, upside-down car.

Chapter 1

   Troy Brown was not completely against moving to Perte. Shelley’s main problem was not with him, but with their daughter Carol. Which meant they had to explain at great length that the school girlfriends of a seven-year-old are not the most important thing in the life of a family. But hell, when Brown couldn’t even find his favorite coffee mug in the morning because Shelley had already packed it – now that was too much.
   “Shelley, don’t go off the deep end,” he grumbled, rummaging around in the box for the mug. “We’ve got a whole week ahead of us, so there’s no need to pack dishes, clothes… and my mug! What am I going to drink my coffee out of? Plastic cups?”
   “We don’t have any plastic cups,” she smiled, pushing Brown away from the box. “Cut it out, before you get all steamed up. I’ll find it.”
   In the kitchen, Carol was finishing breakfast, drinking juice and chattering:
   “When will we get there? Are we going on vacation? I promised my classmates.”
   “You will have other classmates,” Shelley muttered, fumbling in the box.
   “Mom!” Carol whined.
   “What? We’ve already discussed this a hundred times. Hell, where did I put it? Wait. Maybe the mugs are in the other one.”
   Shelley left the room. Seeing his daughter’s skeptical look, Brown patted Carol on the head.
   “Eat up. If you like, I’ll drop you off. And everything will be fine. You’ll like the new house.”
   Carol did not think so, and stared sullenly at her plate. Shelley returned, triumphantly handing Brown his mug. And while he poured his coffee, Shelley said, with a dreamy smile,
   “I can’t believe it. You’ve started your last week. Five days, and you’re free.”
   That was when Brown’s cell phone rang.

   As he drove along, Brown counted six patrol cars on the highway. Only one lane was open, with two patrolmen directing traffic, letting the cars by in one direction at a time. The yellow tape of the police cordon was tied to the cars” mirrors, blocking off a solid stretch of road. Crime Scene Investigation people were milling around on the pavement, inspecting something. The corpse had been covered with a cloth, with just a pair of expensive boots sticking out.
   When Brown got out of the air-conditioned car, the heat slammed him. That’s really what he wasn’t going to miss in the cooler climate of Perte – this scorching heat. Nodding at the patrolmen, one of whom obligingly lifted the cordon for him to pass, Brown walked over to the corpse. A puzzled and somewhat confused DiMaggio appeared.
   “Good morning.”
   “I don’t know about that, Troy.” DiMaggio was already soaked in sweat. He squinted wistfully along the road, where a sparse line of cars stretched toward the city. “Just our luck. Half a mile further ahead, and the state would be dealing with this, not us.”
   “Killers don’t give a damn about geography, didn’t you hear?”
   “Want to take a look?”
   DiMaggio motioned toward the corpse. With a frown, Brown stepped toward the sheet covering the body and, after lifting it for a second, instinctively turned his head in revulsion. The corpse looked as if some giant had just torn off the guy’s head. Brown couldn’t get the image out of his mind.
   “What the fuck…”
   “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
   “Who is he?”
   “Eric Pickman, age thirty-eight.” DiMaggio checked his notebook. “Owner and director of Plate Build Construction. That’s the office, over there.”
   DiMaggio motioned toward the two-story building along the side of the road.
   “That’s what it looks like, I guess, when your job blows you away.” Brown tried to joke, not having regained his composure.
   “Only it wasn’t work that blew him away, but a bomb or grenade. Did he stick it in his mouth, or what? Can you imagine? The guys from the lab have already collected fragments, and promise to give us the information as soon as possible.” DiMaggio nodded at the overturned pickup which had been moved over to the shoulder, where the patrolmen and CSI guys were checking things out. “That guy was just passing by. And then, kaboom! Bummer.”
   “Uh-huh, in the wrong place at the wrong time. When did it happen?”
   “The 911 call came in at 5:40 a.m. A patrol car was here in five minutes. The body was still warm.” After a pause, the usually swaggering macho DiMaggio could no longer contain himself. “Troy, Pickman’s head just exploded! And the explosion was so big that we have two corpses instead of one. This is… Damn, how could this happen?”
   It was a rhetorical question, really. Moreover, Brown was now interested in something else.
   “At 5:40? What the hell was the boss of the company doing around the office at 5:40 on a Monday morning?”

   The Plate Build Construction office was a two-story building made of glass and concrete —Pickman had clearly been trying to impress potential customers. Several detectives from Brown’s department had interviewed staff who were just coming to work. Brown went into a room with one of them, Sergeant Chambers.
   “There was no security at the office at night, only an alarm,” said the security guard apologetically, “and also a surveillance camera.” There was a picture on the monitor. At Brown’s request, the guard fast-forwarded the recording to the relevant time.
   A black van was driving toward the building, but stopped suddenly, 20 yards away. The numbers in the corner of the screen recorded the time: 5:27. The man in the suit, Eric Pickman, got out of the van. Like a zombie, stumbling as if in shock and clearly not seeing anything in front of him, Pickman made for the office door. The van disappeared around the corner of the building.
   “What’s that thing around his neck?” exclaimed Brown, looking at the monitor. When Pickman arrived at the office, the camera showed not only his face, contorted in horror, but the strange contraption around his neck. A metal collar a couple of inches thick, with a tiny, square mini-camera fastened to the front.
   “I’ve never seen the boss wearing anything like that,” the guard confessed.
   “It’s a bomb.” Chambers was impressed. “Pickman came to the office with a bomb around his neck!”
   Meanwhile Pickman disappeared from the monitor’s field of view and entered the building. Brown gestured at the monitor, asking the guard: “And the van? Is that your boss’s car?”
   “No, sir. He drives a BMW. I’ve never seen this van here, sir; it’s not from the company.”
   “They turned the corner. What’s over there?”
   “The dumpster, that’s all,” Chambers replied. “The guys from the lab are trying to find traces of the tread.”
   “We should send them this clip. Maybe they’ll be able to make out the van’s license plate.”
   For seven minutes the camera didn’t pick up anything else, but then headlights flashed and the van came around the corner again, pulling onto the freeway at high speed. And less than a minute later, Pickman came charging out the door, slamming it open so hard that the image on the monitor shook. Stumbling, waving his arms, and tugging at the collar, Pickman raced after the van. Brown and Chambers stared at the screen, waiting for what was about to happen. And after half a minute came the answer: Something blazed up brightly for just a moment, somewhere over on the side, and the image shook again.
   “The blast save,” Chambers muttered. The security guard involuntarily closed his eyes and whispered, “Oh, my God…”
   “They put that damn thing on him to make him do something for them in the office.” Brown hesitantly began to put together an argument. “But why the hell did they leave? Why did he run out empty-handed?”
   “And why didn’t he call the police, if he was alone in the office?” Chambers added.
   A patrolman looked into the room. Seeing Brown, he announced, “Lieutenant, they’ve found something on the second floor.”

   One of the shelves in the safe was full of papers, the second completely empty. A pale woman in a suit, upset and confused, looked at Brown and Chambers.
   “There was cash in there, nearly $500,000. It was just there on Saturday. And now…”
   “$500 K, not bad,” whistled Chambers. “Did Pickman have the combination?”
   “Of course, he was the owner of the company.”
   Brown went over to the window, taking a glove out of his pocket just in case, which helped him to open the sash. He looked outside. The front office. An asphalt walkway around the building, with the dumpster at the corner. Under the windows, one of the crime scene guys was studying the pavement. Brown nervously wondered what Pickman had been through in the last minutes of his life. Emptying out the safe in a panic, throwing the money into a bag or package. Opening the window, throwing the money out. The people in the black van seizing it and racing off. Realizing that they had left him with the collar on, Pickman in a panic rushes downstairs as if he might have been able to catch up with the van… Guided by instinct. Brown imagined that the only thought in Pickman’s head as he careened toward the road, was “TO LIVE!” But the guys in the van had other plans. BAM! And Pickman’s head burst, like a watermelon falling from a skyscraper.
   “Pickman did everything to get them to take that collar off,” Brown said grimly, closing the window. “But they had other plans.”

   They’d been working at the crime scene for almost half a day. With a tow truck, they pulled away the dirty pickup truck of the poor bastard who had just happened to be driving by. A CSI crew gathered up all the fragments of the collar and what was left of Pickman’s head, which were scattered about the road within a forty-yard radius. Then the road was opened to traffic. The detectives interviewed all the company’s employees. Pickman was single and lived alone in a house outside of town. A police cruiser immediately headed there. The patrolmen and DiMaggio found the owner’s BMW in front of the house. When DiMaggio climbed into the car, he noticed the driver’s door ajar. Automatically putting his hand on his holster, he noticed something on the front lawn. He bent over: It was the car keys.
   DiMaggio turned to the patrolmen. “They waited for him here. When he arrived and got out of the car, they stuffed him into the van,” DiMaggio inferred.
   Brown had already found this out on the way to the Police Department, where he had gone with Chambers. When DiMaggio called him to report, Brown had just arrived at the underground parking lot.
   “Get on the horn and get the CSI guys,” he ordered. “And go canvas the neighborhood with the beat cops. Talk to the neighbors. Hopefully, someone suddenly saw a black van. Dave?”
   Instead of a reply, a kind of croak came from the telephone. Repeating DiMaggio’s name and not hearing anything, Brown looked at the screen of his phone and saw no bars at all. The connection was lost.
   “Fucking wireless. Why do you always lose the connection underground?”
   “Because we are right under the evidence repository here,” Chambers said as he got out of the car. “It’s got thick walls. Directly above us.”
   Brown still had no idea that the repository would save his life. There was a lot more that Brown still didn’t know.
   Together they walked to the elevator. Chambers looked at Brown.
   “Is Carol still on strike?”
   “She is positive that her friends are friends for life,” Brown replied, pressing the elevator button.
   “Did you explain it to her what life in a new two-story house with a swimming pool is going to be like? That there’s not going to be any shortage of new friends?”
   “She is not yet such a callous, cynical pig as you are, Rick,” Brown chuckled, stepping into the elevator. “At the age of seven, we all think that classmates and friends are the most important thing in life.”
   “I don’t know about seven-year-olds. At forty, I’m more concerned that we have a good going away bash to celebrate your transfer. Booze’s on you, of course.”
   “Rick, Shelley wants us to go to Perte on Friday. We are supposed to spend the entire weekend settling into our new home. You know, unpacking the stuff. Trying out the grill in the backyard. That kind of thing.”
   “Never mind, we’ll get wasted on Thursday. Troy, you just can’t wiggle out of it, buddy! You’ve been head of the division for almost a decade. An important milestone in life, and all that.”
   “Do I have to explain to you that life in a new two-story house with a swimming pool is much cooler than boozing it up with a bunch of losers like you?” Brown laughed.
   “Oh, may the termites eat your house,” Chambers retorted.
   Brown and Chambers had worked together for eight years, since right after Chambers was hired by the homicide division, where Brown was a sergeant. After six years as partners, Brown was promoted to lieutenant and head of the division. They spent a lot of time together, and such conversations had become a sort of tradition long ago.
   When they got to the floor where their division was, Brown met the youngest detective, Tommy Porras.
   “Troy, the captain wants to see you.”

   “The Plate Build Construction Company had closed a large deal,” reported Brown, sinking into an easy chair. “They built a motel in the next county over. At the end of the week, their account at Rentier Bank had 700,000 bucks in it. The accountant and two guards cashed a check for $500,000 on Friday. The guys with the collar somehow found out about it. They nabbed Pickman in front of his house. Now we are trying to find out exactly when.”
   Captain Tierney listened to Brown with a scowl, tapping a pencil on his desk. The city’s Deputy Chief of Police was going to have a tough week, and had already had a headache since morning.
   “What the hell? Wouldn’t it have been easier to go with him and take the money out of the safe? Why these tricks? And this collar… Fuck, I’ve been in the police force for twenty years, and I’ve never even heard of crap like this.”
   Brown nodded grimly. After a pause, he delicately approached the main point:
   “Captain, who are you going to refer the matter to? The Organized Crime Division or the Robbery Division?”
   Tierney frowned, peering intently at Brown, as though trying to imagine his reaction to what Tierney was about to say. During his years on the job, Brown had learned very well what that look meant, so he immediately protested:
   “No! Don’t even think about it!”
   “Troy, wait, don’t you get all pumped up about it.”
   “Bob, this is my last week! Five days! More precisely,” Brown demonstratively checked his watch, “four and a half. I’m almost not here at all, get it?”
   “Troy, there’s no one else I can trust with this.”
   “You’re kidding me, right?”
   “Mack from Organized Crime is in the hospital. Henry from Robbery is too fucking stupid…”
   “Bob, what do I care?!” Brown resisted. “My wife has already packed everything! Even my mug, damn it! Now I am just closing out all my old cases! The Perte police are expecting me next Monday! Forget about me, do you hear?”
   Waiting until Brown stopped talking, Tierney raised his cheerless eyes, showing that he was not about to change his mind.
   “Almost half an hour ago I spoke with the Mayor. The press is grabbing this story and tomorrow information about exploding heads will be in every newspaper and on every TV and radio channel. Do you do realize that this is the number one news item?”
   “What’s it got to do with me, Bob? It’s my last…” But Tierney brusquely cut him off:
   “The Mayor and the chief of police want the best person on this case. And you’re my best. You know it, Troy. So, do what I ask. Take the case. Just consider it a favor to the old man who has covered your ass a hundred times.”
   “Fuck me Freddy,” said Brown fatalistically, imagining what Shelley would say when she heard about it.
   “I called Perte.”
   “What? What are you talking about?”
   “They are willing to wait. As long as necessary, if you aren’t finished by the end of the week. And they wish you good luck. Would you like to be a captain in Perte? If you solve this case, that cushy chair will be yours. So it’s in everyone’s interest. What do you say?”
   “My wife is going to kill me,” said Brown gloomily, getting up to go.

   Fifteen minutes later, he called his detectives together for a quick briefing. Trying to be optimistic, Brown realized that if he tried hard and solved the case by the end of the week it would be the best-case scenario. Shelley would be happy, and so would Tierney – and Brown didn’t want to let him down.
   “Our main lead is the money. The guys with the collars somehow learned that Pickman had a large sum handy. Therefore, the number one question is, who told them?”
   “Someone working for the company. That would be the most natural explanation,” said Porras.
   “Okay, you take care of that. Check them all out, each and every one of them. Convictions, rap sheets, parking tickets – everything. Get their call logs too, both business and personal.”
   “Got it, boss.”
   “Dave, go see the owner of the motel that Pickman’s company built. Check him out fully. Find out what the local police have on him. DiMaggio, you take Pickman’s personal relationships. His whole social circle: who he slept with, who he drank with – everyone. Gilan, you take Rentier Bank. There may be a leak there. On Friday, the accountant withdrew cash from the company account.”
   “I’m more worried about the explosives,” Chambers said. “The collar wasn’t big. But did you see the flash from that explosion on the video?”
   “Contact the Feds, maybe they know something,” Brown agreed. “Now everybody pay attention. As you know, Friday is my last day at the office. So by Friday we have to get these guys.”
   “By Thursday,” said DiMaggio cheerfully, with a nod at Chambers. “Rick said on Thursday we’ll go boozing.”
   Brown grinned, then became serious again.
   “We’ll see about that later. That’s what I wanted to tell you, guys. Pickman was killed, even though he had done everything they wanted, and paid them. Why?” The detectives, apparently not quite sure of what to say, simply looked at each other. Brown answered for them: “Because they need people to start talking about them. They need everyone in town to know they are serious and that you can’t mess around with them. And that means, they’re going to do it again.”

   It was about six o’clock in the evening when Brown’s car rolled around the corner and past the old houses on Thurmont Street. A kid pushing drugs at the crossroads clammed up, sensing the police presence. But Brown had bigger fish to fry. Taking notice of a car at the curb with three tough-looking guys inside, following the uninvited guest to their neighborhood with suspicious eyes, Brown drove up alongside. He knew one of the guys – he worked for Hash, and was known as Basso. Lowering his window on the passenger side, Brown barked out: “I’m looking for Hash.”
   Basso, exchanging glances with the others, nodded: “Wait around the corner. Hash will be there.”
   Brown drove on. Reaching the corner, he got out of the car, sat on the hood, and waited, toying with the knife he always carried with him. An old Spyderco, one of the first. Brown remembered his delight as a teenager, when he received the gift from his late father. A heavy, impressive, deadly sharp knife that could be opened with just a flick of the thumb.
   Hash showed up five minutes later. He had an imposing and unhurried stride, afraid of nothing, and was sipping a cocktail through a straw. This was his turf.
   “Long time no see. Problems, boss?”
   “Not exactly,” Brown replied, hooking the knife to his belt. “Have you been listening to the radio?”
   “Yup,” said Hash with a grin. “The guy with no head? They really blasted it right off? We’ve been arguing all day about how it could have happened. Were the explosives taped up to his noggin?”
   “Hash, six months ago you passed me some information on those guys who were selling grenades. Do you still have any contacts with arms dealers? I’m interested in C—4.”
   “Plastic explosives? Oh, mama!” Hash shook his head with a smirk, but then grew serious. “People don’t bring that kind of shit to me. I’m a peaceful dude. You know that, boss.”
   “You only have your peace because you have me, Hash,” Brown reminded him.
   Hash’s real name was Tommy, but the nickname had stuck to him back in high school, where he started his street career selling weed. Tommy quit school, figuring that the main thing is to go into business and make money, and he knew how to do it. Also, there were rumors buzzing around school, and Tommy was afraid that he would end up in handcuffs. Almost immediately Hash switched to trading in harder stuff, pushing only to people he knew. His clientele at first was mostly former classmates and their friends. But this simple precaution did not help him, and before long one of his new customers turned out to be an undercover police officer. When he was arrested, Hash displayed unusual dexterity dumping the goodies. They had to let him go, but Hash still found his way into someone’s Rolodex at the Police Department.
   That was when he met Brown, who had an interest in an acquaintance of Hash’s, another drug dealer. The pusher had decided to make himself a reputation for harshly punishing his debtors: He broke their arms. Brown arrested Hash with dope in hand, and offered him a choice: Go to prison for at least ten years or help catch the dealer. Of course, Hash chose the latter.
   That was almost ten years ago. Now Hash himself had become a boss, king of the neighborhood between Griffin Road and Thurmont Street. His runners stood on the street corners selling meth, with secret caches and drop-boxes. Over the years, Brown had accumulated enough dirt on Hash to put him away for twenty years. But Hash turned out to be more valuable as an informer. “Use you brain, Hash, this is important. Ask around. Pretend you are just thinking about whether you should try dealing in something besides meth. Know what I mean? Check out carefully how much it might cost, whether you can actually buy C—4 in town. And if the answer is yes, find out who to contact.”
   “Listen, boss, I try not to get involved in this kind of stuff.” Hash said. “I do business in my neighborhood and don’t poke my nose into other people’s shit. Boss, dope is one thing, or even guns. But explosives… Those guys, they really mean business, you savvy?”
   “And I want to know who they are. Hash, they nabbed the director of the company when there was cash in the office. That means they have informants. So I think it’s someone local.”
   Hash was skeptical.
   “I’ve never heard of a crew like that. There’s been no buzz on the street about anyone out there about to hit the jackpot, nothing. And I’ve been on the street for fifteen years.”
   “They don’t seem like some new guys in town.” After a pause, Brown decided to try another angle: “Hash, I’m moving to another city. If the gang continues to operate, the Feds will come in, and the cops will shake up the whole city to find these suckers. Businesses like yours will suffer. But I won’t be around, you’ll have no one to cover for you. So it’s in your interests too.”
   “I’ll give it a try,” said Hash reluctantly.
   “Get me the information, and you’ll be completely clean before the law. I’ll destroy all your files. Does that sound like a good deal to you?”
   Grinning and slapping Hash on the shoulder, Brown got behind the wheel and started the engine. But he couldn’t resist saying, before driving off:
   “And tell those three sleeping beauties of yours that a reconnaissance detail should stand watch on the perimeter, not smack in the middle of the neighborhood. Your pusher noticed me before they did. You are getting too soft, man.”

   The explosives expert in the city Police Department’s forensic laboratory was a cheerful fellow by the name of Holtz. Despite his rather advanced age, Holtz adored gadgets and gizmos. That’s why he had stayed late in the lab. He was almost ecstatic.
   “Just look at this! A hollow aluminum tube two inches thick. It had compartments separated by a partition. So far I’ve counted ten segments. A portion of the explosives was in each of them.”
   Fragments of the explosive were lying on Holtz’s table: blackened bits of aluminum, burnt-out wiring, a scorched chip, and other bits and pieces of the device. Brown picked up one of them, trying to figure out what it was. “What kind of explosive?
   “Plastic, C—4.”
   “You sure?” Brown frowned.
   “One hundred percent, Troy. Although I haven’t seen any C—4 for 10 years. Where did someone get an explosive like that in our sleepy town? And the most interesting thing is that they weren’t exactly stingy: There was about a pound of C—4 in the collar.”
   “Is that a lot?”
   “Let’s just say this collar would be the envy of any suicide bomber. If the explosion had occurred in a crowd, our morgue would have had nowhere to put all the corpses.”
   “That’s just great,” Brown commented glumly. “Have you figured out how it worked?”
   “Oh, that’s the most interesting part of all. Hell, it’s a real gem! These guys knew their business, Troy. Look here.” Holtz took one of the fragments of aluminum with partitions. “A web camera is attached to the front of the segmented tube packed with C—4, and there’s a cell phone on the side. This is a chip you see here, from the phone. The phone was for transmission. And the camera on the front transmitted the image in front of it to the phone and from there it went to someone on the other end, via a wifi connection. That is, the criminals saw everything that was happening to the victim and around him. What he did, where he was going, what he picked up – everything.”
   “Now I see,” Brown nodded. “That’s why Pickman didn’t even try to call the police. He just did what they wanted. He gave them the money. But they still pushed the button.”
   “In all the years I’ve worked in the police force, Troy, I’ve never seen anything like this! Don’t hold back,” said Holtz cheerfully. “This case is going straight into the textbook!”
   Brown has already started to think along the same lines, but with much less enthusiasm.

   The story of the explosion on the outskirts of the city got top billing on the 10:00 evening news. Half of the split screen image showed a picture taken by a cameraman at the crime scene: the cordon, a hearse from the city morgue, patrolmen. The anchorwoman, looking at the audience from the other side of the screen, announced:
   “According to the Police Department, the victim, Eric Pickman, was the owner of Plate Build Construction. The criminals made off with $100,000 which was in the construction company office.”
   But in the Browns” apartment, nobody was looking at the TV screen. Shelley, combing her hair in front of the mirror, indignantly snapped at her husband:
   “I knew this would happen! I knew it!”
   “I wonder how you knew, if even I didn’t,” muttered Brown in reply, flopping on the bed with a bottle of beer in his hand.
   “Oh, don’t give me that!! You and I made an agreement!”
   “What can I do about it? I’m the head of the homicide division, not a traveling salesman. They ordered me to do it, so I’m doing it.”
   “You’ve been making such excuses your whole life!”
   “It’s not an excuse, it’s an oath!”
   “Oh yes, of course!”
   Carol appeared in the doorway, with interest and timid hope in her eyes.
   “Mom, we’re not going?”
   “We’re going! Carol, go to your room. Or go look at cartoons, whatever!”
   Not accustomed to people raising their voices, Carol ran off.
   And immediately, as was usual with her, Shelley was ashamed. Sighing deeply, she went over to Brown and put her arms around his shoulders. “We had agreed on everything. On Monday they’re expecting me at my new job. They’re also waiting for you at the department in Perte. Don’t forget that in a couple of years the captain there will be retiring, and there are no candidates to replace him. Troy, that means a career for you.”
   “Don’t worry.” Brown hugged his wife and drew her close. “There’s almost a week to go. I’ll do what I can, and on Friday I’ll turn in my badge. And on the weekend we’ll be setting up our new house.”
   “Promise?”
   Brown wanted to believe it, but to avoid answering, he raised the bottle: “How about a beer?”

   But at the morning briefing, Brown realized that they were almost at an impasse. Porras had checked out the employees at Plate Build Construction, but a full day’s work had yielded nothing. No suspicious phone calls or suspicious conflicts with Pickman or suspicious movements in their bank accounts.
   “The key thing is the cash,” Porras added. “So they can keep the money to themselves. But all the banks have been warned. If someone brings in a large sum for deposit, we will be immediately notified.”
   The company that paid Pickman for the motel was clean, according to both the police and the IRS. Detectives visited Rentier Bank, but with no results there either. The branch of the bank where the accountant of Plate Build Construction cashed the check employed about 30 people.
   “And what about the Feds?”
   “Nothing about any explosives, Troy,” said Chambers. “Or they just don’t want to share it.”
   “This case sucks, big time,” Brown admitted. “If Tierney finds out that we have no leads, he will rip me apart. So let’s do something.”
   “I suggest we go through the archives and files,” said DiMaggio, after some hesitation.
   “Archives and agents – that’s all that we’ve got. Go talk to your informants. You can offer a reward, more than usual, for any information; if need be, we’ll get more money. And then get on the databases. We’re interested in all extortionists, arms dealers, people recently released from prison – any clues at all.”
   Brown’s cell phone rang. “Brown here,” he barked in his usual brusque manner. He heard Hash’s voice:
   “Under the overpass in an hour.”
   Between the pillars of the overpass, there was a vacant lot that served as a nighttime refuge for junkies looking to shoot up. It was one of Hash’s and Brown’s regular meeting places. Hash never asked Brown to come to his own neighborhood, so as not to scare away potential customers with the type of person that every addict, with an unerring instinct, recognized as a cop. After the briefing with the detectives, Brown dropped in on Captain Tierney, assuring him that the investigation was moving ahead, and then went to the rendezvous. Hash arrived with what was, for him, amazing punctuality. He was accompanied by Bosso, who stayed in the car.
   “Last night I was at the club at Nash,” said the informant. “I chatted with a couple of guys about this little thing of ours. Both said pretty much the same thing. Deuce.”
   “King,” Brown parried. “What are we playing?”
   “That’s the moniker the guy who can get it all goes by. From any kind of piece to fragmentation grenades.”
   “How about C—4?”
   “I’m not sure about explosives. But the guys said that if there’s anyone in town who can get that stuff, it’s gotta be Deuce.’” “The men guys…,” Brown repeated sourly. “Okay, Hash, let’s suppose it’s true. So who is he?”
   “That’s the problem, boss. Nobody knows.”
   “Hold on,” Brown frowned. “You give me a nickname, which could belong to fifty people in the city, which would take me a couple of years to check out, and the best you can do on top of that is “nobody knows”? Hash, we don’t work that way, and you know it. This is not enough.”
   “I don’t know who he is,” Hash repeated emphatically but nervously. “And nobody knows. Boss, I’ve heard that nickname a couple of times before. They say that Deuce is a tough customer. And very careful, you know what I mean? Very. Even more than us. He never attracts attention and does not work with strangers. And nobody knows who he is. But if you want someone who can get C—4, it’s Deuce.”
   That was the information that was going to lead to a slaughter that would shake the Police Department to the core. But Brown didn’t know that yet.

Chapter 2

   In the evening, Brown and Chambers met at a bar two blocks from police headquarters on Main Street – a favored watering hole where cops often gathered in the evenings to quaff a few beers or maybe something stronger. Chambers grinned, pulling out some papers from his bag and watching Brown put two mugs of lager on their table:
   “What’s up, Troy, don’t feel like going home?”
   “Drop dead!” said Brown half-heartedly, lighting up a cigarette.
   “Shelley?”
   “She’s called me five times. There’s always a different reason, but all the calls boil down to: ‘We’re leaving on Friday, it’s decided.” “She’s called me five times. There’s always a different reason, but all the calls boil down to: ‘We’re leaving on Friday, it’s decided.”
   “Have you changed your mind?”
   “Of course not. I’ve had it up to here with our hot weather.”
   “Does Shelley have relatives in Perte?”
   “Yeah, they helped her find a job,” Brown nodded. “An aunt or a cousin, God knows who. It’s all very complicated. Anyway, to hell with it. What have you dug up?”
   “There’s nothing on Deuce. We’ve never arrested a man by that nickname on weapons charges. Just in case, I sent an inquiry to the state police, but I doubt they’ll have anything. It seems he is really a very cautious fellow.”
   “If he exists.”
   “Oh yes he does, Troy. Look here.”
   Chambers opened a folder and handed Brown a police file. Brown looked at a photo of a dark-haired, grim-looking fellow.
   “Peter Adamidi,” he read. “And who’s that?”
   “His nickname is “Greek.’ He’s in jail now. The guys from the 13th Precinct brought him in a month ago. Do you remember the shooting on Ross Avenue?”
   Brown remembered. About three months ago, several guys got into a fight at night at a gas station. One started threatening another with a pistol. His opponent, in a rage, snatched an AK-47 from the trunk and went postal.
   “Smashed up the gas station,” Brown recalled. “The bozo opened fire with a Kalashnikov and wounded two people.”
   While the guys from the 13th Precinct were looking for the shooter, they squeezed his broad to find Greek, who had sold him the gun. Under the guise of being customers, they met Greek and nabbed him when he tried to sell them three banana clips for a Kalashnikov.”
   “And what does Deuce have to do with all this?”
   “I called the guys at the 13th Precinct. They recorded all their conversations with Greek. He boasted that he works for Deuce. And since he works for Deuce, that means his goods are top quality.”
   “Really?” Brown was surprised. “How is it that Deuce’s weapons are now a top brand on the street, and we know nothing about it?

   Well, better late than never. So on Wednesday morning, Brown went straight to the city jail. He turned in his pistol and knife at the entrance and was led to the interrogation room. The guard brought in Greek, wearing an orange jumpsuit. The prisoner gave Brown a long, penetrating look.
   “What do you want?”
   “I am Lieutenant Brown, homicide division.”
   “And?”
   Greek was clearly not eager to cooperate and tried to take the initiative in the conversation. Brown offered him a cigarette to loosen him up, even though smoking was forbidden within these walls. He looked Greek in the eye, but the con man didn’t flinch, answering with a calm and composed demeanor.
   “Greek, who’s Deuce?”
   “A card. Lower than a three. Anything else?”
   “Very funny,” Brown snorted. “Several times you’ve mentioned a man named Deuce. We’ve got it on tape.”
   “Listen to the recording again, carefully. Maybe I also mentioned little green men. So what?”
   Brown paused. “Could Deuce get C—4?” He kept watching Greek closely and saw him tense up. Smiling at his own thoughts, Greek drawled: “I heard the news. Some guy got his head blown off. That’s what we’re talking about, right?”
   “Do you know anything about it?”
   Greek put out his cigarette. Apparently, he was not inclined to beat around the bush. “Maybe, lieutenant, and maybe not. Why should I talk to you? What’s in it for me?”
   “What do you want?”
   “Deuce might be able to get C—4,” said Greek, after a pause. “He knows a lot of important people in different states. Do you need him? Fine, I’ll give him to you. No problem. But only if you get me out of here.”
   Brown frowned. “We can discuss it.”
   “There’s nothing to discuss,” said Greek firmly, seeing his opportunity. “I’ll get you Deuce, and you get out me out of here. They’ve got me in here for arms trading. That’s not a serious crime, and I know that you can spring me out. I want a deal, and that’s all there is to it. I’m not interested in anything else.”

   Negotiations with the 13th Precinct and the prosecutor’s office presented no problems, and after dinner, accompanied by detectives Gilan and Porras, Brown returned to the jail with signed papers which stated that Greek would be set free until his trial. On the way out, Brown watched Greek collect his belongings with obvious satisfaction – keys, watch, wallet. He led him to the parking lot. Then all of them, including the other two detectives, got into two cars for the ride back to the city.
   “I’ve done my part,” Brown began. “Now it’s your turn, Greek. Who is he?”
   “Where are we going?”
   “To a motel. Until we get Deuce, you’ll be staying with my detectives.”
   “That wasn’t part of the deal,” said Greek apprehensively.
   Brown cut him off: “I’m not going to risk you suddenly backing out. Or warning your buddy that the cops are hunting for him. I will only let you go when I have Deuce. Then you can go do what you want. But for the time being, I too need guarantees. If you’re not happy with it, you can go back where you came from.”
   This was clearly not what Greek had in mind, but he just nodded sullenly. “Whatever you say, boss.”
   “Great. Who is he?”
   “His name is Matt Highley.”
   “How do we contact him?”
   “You don’t. I know his phone number, but he will only speak on the phone to people he knows personally.”
   “Fine. Clear your throat before you dial the number. Is Deuce connected or something? I mean, if they learn you sold them down the river, would it come back to you?”
   “I’ll take care of my own business, thank you,” Greek said drily, and turned away, looking out the window as the suburbs flew by.
   Brown didn’t like him. There was something not quite kosher about him, but what exactly it was, Brown didn’t know. Anyway every criminal had his own fish to fry. Brown was interested in only one thing: that the conversation with Deuce would be a slam dunk. On the Department’s tab, they checked in to a room at the back of a quiet motel on the outskirts of town. They decided to use the phone in the room to make the call. A technician came down from the Department with the recording equipment they needed. When everything was ready, Brown instructed Greek how to behave, and handed him the phone.
   After three rings, Brown heard, through the headphones, a cautious male voice:
   “Yeah.”
   “Deuce, it’s me.”
   There was a pause. “Where are you?” the voice asked.
   “They let me out. I was lucky with my lawyer. It’s a long story, I can tell you when we meet.”
   “How long ago?”
   “A couple of days.”
   “Why are you calling?” Deuce clearly was not dying to buy his good friend a brewskie.
   “Deuce, I’ve got a buddy,” Greek said, exchanging glances with Brown, who nodded to him, “go ahead.” “He needs some wheels.”
   “Who is he?”
   “A good buddy. You know, we got it all figured, but then the cops grabbed me, and the deal fell through. Yesterday I saw the guy, and he still needs the cars.”
   “Why don’t you get them yourself?” There was a hint of malice in Deuce’s voice. “You’re a real bad-ass businessman. You’ve got everything under control.”
   “I just got out of the slammer,” Greek blurted out. “I haven’t even washed off the prison stink yet! I’m not such a moron as to draw attention to myself right away. I don’t want to go back there. But I don’t want to lose a client either. Deuce, it’s a piece of cake, I tell you.”
   Deuce paused, as if listening to his instincts. Brown also sensed, judging from the silence, that Deuce was gauging the chances that this was a setup.
   “I don’t work with people I don’t know.”
   “I’m telling you, his creds are rock solid. I’ve known him for a couple of years, and I did business with him twice. High-end wheels both times. Spare parts too. Deuce, have I ever let you down?”
   The code they used was simple. “Cars” were weapons, and “spare parts” parts were ammunition. Not the most powerful cryptography, but criminals always feel more comfortable talking in code. Over the years, Brown had heard many epithets used by crooks over the telephone to refer to their goods: weapons, drugs, whatever. Anything from “cactuses” to “workers.”
   “What kind of cars are you talking about?” asked Deuce, after another pause. Brown exchanged glances with DiMaggio: Looks like he’s rising to the bait.
   “Ten sedans. Not used; nice and clean, you got it? If it comes together, my buddy will be ready to talk trucks.”
   Trucks were full auto rifles.
   “Where is he going to drive them?”
   “Not here,” Greek hastened to reply, taking the hint. “He needs them to work in another state. No sweat.”
   Another pause. Then Deuce finally said what they had been waiting for: “Write down this number. He should call at exactly 2:00. Exactly. If he calls earlier or later, no deal.”

   Brown was standing at the curb in front of the supermarket. The large parking lot in front of the building was full, with cars pulling in and out all the time, parading before Brown’s eyes in one incessant flow. Deuce had picked a good meeting place: It’s a simple matter to lose oneself in a crowd here. Brown was holding an ice cream cone, the signal that Deuce had chosen during their conversation, which took place at exactly 2:00 p.m.
   One of the cars crawling past, a used and battered Toyota, suddenly stopped, and the rear door swung open. A tough-looking guy barked from the back seat: “Get in.”
   Glancing around, Brown dropped his ice cream and climbed in. The car instantly took off, drove past the parking lot, and headed for the street. Picking up speed, the Toyota sped toward the city center.
   Behind the wheel was a scrawny, middle-aged fellow with a sharp, piercing look about him. He glanced at the rearview mirror every other second. Making sure there’s no tail, thought Brown. The goon cornered Brown on the far right of the seat and began to quickly and professionally search his pockets and tap his clothes, feeling for a wire.
   “Take it easy,” Brown growled.
   “Gotta check you out, bud. We don’t know you.”
   “Are you Deuce?”
   “No, “said the goon tersely, fishing out the knife mounted on Brown’s belt. Turning it over, he handed it to Brown, then curtly told the driver, “Clean.”
   “I don’t know you either,” Brown remarked. “I agreed to meet with Deuce.”
   “You’ll meet him,” said the goon, and gave Brown a tablet computer.
   “What’s this for?”
   “What guns do you need? Take your pick.”
   Brown was amazed, the more so when he turned on the tablet. Before him was an already opened photo gallery, showing dozens of photographs of pistols, which could be enlarged for close inspection.
   “A catalog? What’s on sale today? Any house specials?”
   The goon grimaced and said nothing. The driver kept looking in the rearview mirror. The car raced along the busy street at high speed, weaving from lane to lane.
   They did not realize that all the available cops in the city police force were taking part in the operation. Five carloads of detectives were following right behind them, switching every half mile. Ten more cars had scattered throughout the area at the start of the operation and were listening in on the police wave. As soon as the Toyota left the supermarket, unmarked police cars started moving on parallel streets, so they could all converge at the right moment. A police helicopter coordinated the surveillance, with a cop on board carefully watching through binoculars as the subject sped along the streets.
   “Attention everybody, subject is merging into the far left lane. Turning onto Duval Street.”
   “Car 10—15. Copy that.”
   “11—8 and 10—12, proceed along Junior Street.”
   “Subject is moving east toward Walton Street. Over.”
   “10—16, don’t get so close to him, move over one lane.”
   And in the Toyota, which dozens of policemen were following in person and via the airwaves, Brown handed the tablet back to the goon. The screen had a Sig P210 on it, magnified to the actual size.
   “Here! This!”
   “Ten?”
   “Ammo too. Two boxes apiece, so twenty boxes.”
   “We can do it today. You got the money?”
   “Not on me, of course. I’ll bring it once I see the goods.”
   “You can transfer the money using Ray Pay,” said the goon, giving Brown a piece of paper with numbers scribbled on it. “Here’s the number. When we see the money in the account, we’ll deliver the guns.”
   “Yeah, right,” Brown exclaimed. “I wasn’t born yesterday, man. When I see the guns, I’ll give you the money.”
   “We don’t do business face to face, get it?” the goon growled in annoyance. “Delivery only. You got a problem with that?”
   “Take it easy, okay?” Brown’s mind was racing. “How about this? You show me the guns. If everything is in order, I’ll call my man, and he’ll deposit the money into your account.”
   The goon glanced at the driver, who, seeing him in the rearview mirror, gave a barely perceptible nod. The goon relaxed. “Yeah, that should work. We’ll call you.”
   The car pulled over to the curb. The goon gestured at the door, indicating that Brown should get out.
   “When?”
   “We’ll call you.”
   Brown got out and the Toyota raced off. Behind it, driving at high speed, was a nondescript sedan; Brown caught a glimpse of a familiar detective behind the wheel. The man was speaking into the walkie-talkie: “They’ve split up; subject is heading north along Cross Road.”
   Following a jeep there were a couple more cars, and in one of them, Brown saw another policeman in plain clothes. Then Chambers” car pulled up alongside Brown, and the passenger door opened. Sitting down beside him, Brown said, “It wasn’t Deuce. One of his people, but not him.”
   As the car pulled off, Chambers handed Brown a thin folder that was lying on the dashboard.
   “Is Deuce’s real name Matt Highley? We found his file, here it is.”
   Now Brown was really puzzled: The goon’s driver was looking at him from the mug shot in the police file.
   After that, everything went haywire.

   The police kept following Deuce and the goon’s car, which seemed to be circling around aimlessly. The helicopter kept on coordinating the detectives, maintaining its distance and a good height, with a running narrative by walkie-talkie: “Subject is turning right on Heuman Street. 9—17, take a left. Over.”
   The Toyota kept driving along. Deuce scowled into the rearview mirror. He felt something was up, but couldn’t quite put his finger on it. His intuition had never deceived him, so Deuce had learned to trust it, always and everywhere – that’s why he was still in business, rather than rotting away in prison. One of the cars behind him aroused his suspicion. But, casting another glance in the mirror, Deuce saw it turn left.
   “What’s wrong?” growled the goon, looking back.
   “I don’t know yet. It doesn’t seem like we’ve got a tail, but… I don’t know,” Deuce replied sourly. “I think something’s wrong.”
   Chambers and Brown listened carefully to the radio chatter.
   “Why they are they running in circles? Chambers wondered nervously.
   “They’re checking.”
   “Everything go okay?”
   “I did everything as we agreed. They didn’t have any reason to suspect anything,” Brown replied, trying to think whether he had slipped up somewhere. It didn’t seem so. Yes, he had been unyielding, but that was rule number one in undercover work. There is nothing more suspicious than a buyer who agrees to everything immediately just to make the deal happen.
   Voices kept chirping out of the walkie-talkie: “They’re turning toward Kirby Street. Heading down toward Mason.”
   “9—8, take them starting at Mason.”
   “Rodger.”
   “10—13, take a left.”
   Brown quickly looked through Deuce’s file. “Two arrests and a year in prison for possession. No operational information about where he fits into the business. This guy is really good.”
   “There’s a highway patrol car on Kinsey Street,” the radio croaked. “Tell them to leave the buggers alone.”
   His eyes still on the rearview mirror, Deuce turned onto Kinsey. Just ahead, at the next intersection, was a police cruiser lying in ambush. Diddling his radar gun, perhaps, Deuce sneered under his breath. The second patrolman was walking around the car. They were still 100 yards away when the patrolman on the outside mumbled something into his walkie-talkie and hurried back into the car. But before that, he managed to cast a quick glance in the direction of Deuce’s Toyota.
   Deuce caught his breath and squinted. There was something wrong, right now. And there was a way to check.
   “The main thing now is not to lose my nerve,” he muttered, and stepped on the gas.
   Accelerating quickly, the Toyota whizzed and roared past the patrol car. The policeman at the wheel was looking straight at it, and his radar was pointing that way too.
   Crossing the intersection, Deuce looked carefully in the rearview mirror. If everything was normal, the patrol car would now turn on its flashers and go after them.
   “Deuce, what are you doing?” asked the goon incredulously.
   The patrol car did not budge. Deuce clenched his teeth: “He was a cop.”
   The policemen’s voices chirped over the walkie-talkie: “Subject accelerated quickly, ahead of the patrol car on Kinsey.”
   “Oh, fuck,” Brown swore. “He’s figured us out.”
   “What? How?”
   “How do I know! Damn!”
   “Attention everyone, subject is turning around!” squeaked the voice on the radio with surprise. “He’s turned around and is going back!”
   Deuce had made a U-turn in the middle of the street. The goon rolled his eyes, not understanding a thing: “What are you doing? Where are we going?”
   “See a man about a cow,” Deuce replied. Taking a deep breath and regaining his composure, he again crossed the intersection, ending up near the patrol car. He pulled over to the curb, directly alongside the cruiser.
   The cop in the helicopter, watching this through binoculars, raised the radio to his face in confusion. “He… is going over to the patrol car.”
   Brown closed his eyes in despair. It was a total bust. “Let’s go, Rick,” he said wearily.
   The goon in the back seat was taken aback, but Deuce didn’t need his advice. Quietly sliding out from behind the wheel, he went up to the patrol car. The policeman with the radar looked no less perplexed when he rolled his window down.
   “Sir?”
   “I want to talk,” said Deuce.
   “Excuse me?”
   “I want to talk,” Deuce repeated calmly. “And you know what I mean. Contact whoever ordered you to let us be. I think they’ll know.”
   The patrolmen looked at each other, not knowing what to do. But no contact with anyone was necessary. A car pulled up, and Brown got out. Seeing him, Deuce just snorted.

   Greek was glad to take a shower. The motel was an old fleabag, but after jail, this place seemed like paradise. The more so, because the room had its own kitchenette. So right after his shower, he went straight to the refrigerator. On the way to the motel, the police had picked up some food. Detective Porras, flipping the TV channels out of boredom, sullenly watched Greek, who was getting out the ham and cheese and making a sandwich. Pulling a knife out of a drawer, he asked Porras: “You want a bite?”
   “Not now.”
   “Suit yourself. I’m in a good mood, and when I’m in a good mood, I have a great appetite. How about you?” Porras didn’t answer. “What’s your name, detective?”
   “Detective Porras,” came the reluctant reply.
   “You got a first name?” Porras said nothing. “Okay, whatever. I just wanted to make contact. God knows how long we’ll be sitting here together, eh?”
   Detective Max Gilan was sitting in the car outside, sipping coffee from a styrofoam cup. He looked at his watch. Only 3:00. Gilan wondered when the deal Brown had made was going to go down. They would only be able to get rid of Greek when the arms dealer was arrested. Gilan didn’t trust Greek. A real scumbag.
   Gilan and Porras had been partners for six months. Right after passing his exams to become a detective, Porras was assigned to the homicide division. Brown knew him from when Porras had worked the beat, and there was something he liked about this guy. Many people in the Department were pissed that a youngster like Porras immediately got into an elite unit. Gilan was one of them. But soon Porras proved that Brown had made the right choice. He learned everything on the fly, and his zeal more than made up for his lack of experience.
   Gilan got out of the car. The window of the room they had booked for Greek was nearby, and Gilan could hear the sound of the TV. He lit up a cigarette, sitting on the hood of the car.
   “Could we order a pizza?” asked Greek, cutting off a piece of tomato and plopping it onto a slice of bread. “For some reason there is no pizza delivery in jail.”
   “There’s a reason they call it redemption,” Porras scoffed.
   Greek burst out laughing. “Bull’s eye, man! Well said.” Then he added seriously, “Listen, I know you’re not exactly thrilled with my company. The feeling is mutual. But since we are sitting here, we might as well shoot us a little breeze. You got a family?”

   Deuce sat in the interrogation room and calmly watched Brown entering the room with two styrofoam cups. He put one in front of Deuce.
   “Black, no sugar, the way you wanted it.”
   Brown sat down, watching as Deuce nodded his thanks and took a sip of the coffee. Brown was slightly at a loss. In all his years in the force, he had never found himself in a situation like this. A couple of times over the years the suspect had detected surveillance, but in such cases, the cops just lay low, put everything on hold. None of the crooks were smart enough or brash enough to ask the police straight out what they were looking for.
   “Are you sure you don’t need a lawyer?”
   “I hope it doesn’t come to that, detective.”
   “Ain’t we cocky, huh?” said Brown with a wry smile. “How did you know this was a setup?”
   “Your cops on my tail went a little too far. Too much of a good thing, you know.”
   “And you’re so sharp that you noticed it right away?”
   “Not right away. Detective, are you taping this?”
   “No,” Brown lied.
   “Tell them to turn it off.”
   Brown gestured toward the mirror. In the room on the other side, Chambers cursed and turned off the video camera.
   And Deuce started to talk: “I came on my own. I want to know what you need from me. To lock me up? Why?”
   “Illegal gun trafficking isn’t a good enough reason?”
   “First of all, one can always negotiate. Maybe you just need information. Why complicate things? And second… This is homicide, right? I’ve never killed anyone. Never, detective. That means you need me to get to somebody else. So I ask again: What do you need?”
   “C—4,” Brown replied.
   Deuce raised his eyebrows in surprise.

   “Have you worked in Homicide long?” Greek kept trying to engage Porras, while spreading mustard with the knife on another piece of bread.
   Porras hesitated. “Long enough.”
   “You’re young. Who’d you sleep with to get such a promotion, eh?”
   Annoyed, Porras cut him off. “Greek, I don’t mind chatting with you, but we’re unlikely to become best pals today, you know what I mean?”
   Greek shrugged. “That’s for sure. But relax, will you? I am not prying. It’s just that… Listen, this ain’t no comic book. I’m no Joker, you’re no Batman. We’re regular folks. Regular folks talk. Plus, I might be useful to you sometime, right?”
   Porras could not deny that. In the division, many people knew about Brown’s agents – among his informants were petty street thieves and bigger fish, like the drug dealer Hash, who had snagged for himself a couple of blocks in the eastern part of the city. And Greek had a point. So, reluctantly, Porras decided to change his tone.
   “That’s interesting. Do you need friends in the police force?”
   “After two months in jail, you start to look at many things differently,” Greek chuckled. “Should I make you a sandwich or not?”
   That Greek seemed so eager to please him amused Porras. And, to be perfectly honest, he was a little flattered: It’s not every day that crooks treat you with respect, like a truly experienced cop, when you’re only 25 years old. Porras got up and went to the refrigerator. “I’ll do it.”
   Greek looked at him with a slight smile. Porras didn’t notice any tension in Greek’s demeanor. He should have.

   “C—4?” asked Deuce with astonishment. “Is that some kind of a joke?”
   “Do I look like a comedian?” Brown retorted. “Or maybe you’re hearing canned laughter?”
   “Hold on, detective. Stop right there. I have never worked with C—4.”
   “People in the city think otherwise. They say that if anyone can get it, it’s you, and you alone.”
   “They’re wrong.” Deuce frowned, thinking about something. He looked closely at Brown. “It’s Greek. He ratted on me. What kind of bull did that freak give you?”
   “What does Greek have to do with it?” Brown shot back. “It is not about him, Deuce!”
   “Take it easy, detective! Don’t forget, I came to you of my own free will.” Deuce tried to reason with Brown, but his face displayed genuine incomprehension, which Brown found puzzling. “But… Damn it. So, Greek ratted on me? And you got him out of jail for his troubles?” Deuce shook his head.
   “Who did you sell C—4 to?” Brown almost barked it out. “Just give me the name. That’s all we need from you.”
   “I don’t do explosives! “Deuce repeated emphatically. “Listen, detective. I remember. Greek… You’ve been had.”
   Brown froze. “What do you mean?”

   “Now let’s see what we’ve got here.” Porras opened the fridge, inspecting the scarce provisions with a jaundiced eye. “Not much. Maybe we really should order a pizza. What do you say?”
   Porras turned around. And the last thing he saw in his life was Greek’s face, contorted with fury, as the man flung himself at him with the speed of a predatory beast, as soon as Porras turned. Greek slammed Porras in the jaw with the open palm of his left hand, shoving his head up and exposing his throat. Clutching the kitchen knife in his right hand, Greek cut that throat with a powerful blow.

   “Greek used to work for me,” Deuce hastened to explain. “Then he said that he was leaving. It was a month before he was arrested. That idiot, he never knew how to do anything right, so they put him away soon enough. And right about that time, he brought C—4 into the city. He didn’t tell me, but I heard rumors.”
   “Greek brought in C—4?” Brown frowned. “Deuce, are you two just trying to put it on each other? If you are just jerking me around, I’ll go straight to a judge and get a warrant to search your place!”
   “Jeez, man, I am telling you the truth.” Deuce was now gesticulating wildly. His coffee cup, swept right off the table, was bleeding on the floor, but he paid it no heed. “Greek brought C—4 into the city and then left me. Said he was starting his own business. That’s how it was! Why should I lie? If I had sold explosives to someone, I would have just given you the name and walked out of here and to hell with the whole thing!”
   As he listened, Brown felt a wave of something icy and disgusting rise in his chest.

   Porras couldn’t do a thing – the attack came too quickly. He collapsed on the floor, his frantically jerking hand knocking groceries off the refrigerator shelves with a bang. He gasped, his eyes darting about in terror, while from his severed trachea there gushed a fountain of blood, splattering the floor and his clothes.
   Gilan roused himself, dropping his cigarette. He was standing beside the car and suddenly heard a strange crash through the window of the room. Automatically reaching for his gun, Gilan hurried to the room, kicking the door open: “Tom, everything okay?”
   He stopped in mid-sentence as he opened the door and saw the dying Porras lying on the floor. The man was jerking about in his death throes, blood spouting from his larynx. And Greek, his face pale, was rummaging in his pockets, holding a gun.
   “You fuck!” yelled Gilan, getting out of the line of fire and grabbing his own pistol.
   But Greek was faster: Raising his arm, he emptied half a clip into Gilan’s chest. The detective’s corpse crashed to the floor like a bag of bricks.
   Greek stayed in the room for a few seconds: He emptied Porras’s pockets, tossing aside the dead man’s police badge and cell phone, and took with him only the gun and wallet. While Greek ran out of the room and jumped into Gilan’s car to make his getaway, Porras’s phone, lying in a pool of blood, started ringing.
   It was Brown. But there was no one there to take the call.

Chapter 3

   The coroners laid Gilan’s corpse on a stretcher and carried it out of the room, but the CSI team was not finished yet with Porras’s corpse, photographing it and the various items scattered over the floor, from different angles. They were talking grimly, but Brown hardly heard them; it was as though he were inside an enormous diving bell in the depths of the ocean. He could not keep his eyes off Porras’s face. The man’s eyes were open, congealed forever with the horror of death. Brown swallowed, afraid of vomiting, and forced himself to turn away. “That motherfucker…”
   Chambers came over, depressed and gloomy. “Troy, every patrolman in the city has the license number of Gilan’s car. They’re stopping vehicles at all the exits from the city. The orders are to check everybody, in case the son-of-a-bitch switched cars.
   Brown only nodded, suddenly feeling that, although the window was open, the room was suffused with a sickening smell of blood.
   When it had become clear that neither Porras nor Gilan was responding to phone calls, Brown and the detectives had rushed over, arriving at the motel in a quarter of an hour. Their corpses were still warm, and everything was covered with blood. Blood… Brown had to go outside for some fresh air.
   In front of the motel, patrolmen were milling around, discussing what had happened from every possible vantage point. Seeing their curious glances, Brown couldn’t restrain himself: “What the hell are you doing here? Is this how you go about finding the cop-killer, you fuckers?”
   Another car drove up to the motel, Tierney’s service vehicle, with its lights flashing. Brown stepped into the shade of a tree and sat down on a bench. Lit up a cigarette. His hands were shaking. He inhaled deeply.
   Tierney stayed in the room for less than a minute. Coming out, gloomy and morose, he went over to Brown. “How did it happen?”
   “You saw everything there was to see,” Brown replied hoarsely.
   “Fuck… Damn it… Why? Why did he do it? He’s a witness, for crying out loud! Why would a witness open fire on the cops who were protecting him?”
   “I don’t know, Bob.”
   Brown stared into space. The first time, in fifteen years on the police force. Fifteen years! And never a single loss in his division. Brown had never lost a partner or colleague. Of course, people from the city Police Department had been killed, but it had never been a personal matter for Brown. He led the homicide division, and the detectives there worked with all sorts of scum. But if you follow the rules, the risk can be minimized. Detectives were always sent in pairs or in a group to dangerous places. For arrests, they always wore body armor and had support from SWAT teams. Minimize the risk… Two people in fifteen years of service. Both on the same day.
   “Porras,” Brown said softly. “I brought him into Homicide. He seemed like such a promising guy. So I brought him in, and it was I who sent them here. Now they are corpses. Because of me.”
   Tierney understood, and could have said a lot on this subject, but he said something else instead.
   “You can’t break down, Troy. You’ve got to act. We’ve got to catch the varmint.”

   So they did everything they could. It was one of the darkest days in the lives of many in the department.
   Within ten minutes of the emergency alert going out, all the police helicopters took off, sweeping over one neighborhood after another. All exits from the city were blocked: Three or four patrol cars were posted on the roads, reinforced by canine handlers with their dogs and by SWAT teams. They inspected every car trying to leave the city. Meanwhile, in the homicide division, Brown’s people and detectives from other units who had been sent to help them checked out all Greek’s connections. Stakeouts were put in place at all the addresses where he might turn up – relatives, former lovers, etc. Chambers went to question Deuce, to extract from him anything he might know about Greek.
   Brown, as head of the division, had the hardest job of all: informing the relatives of the murdered detectives about their deaths. Neither of them was married. Gilan, Brown recalled, had not even been seen with anyone recently. His mother lived in a nursing home in the country. A nurse brought Brown to an elderly woman who was watering the flowers on the lawn, with a lost look on her face.
   “Your son Max was killed while on duty.”
   “Maxim was always a good student,” Gilan’s mother replied dreamily, smiling at Brown without interrupting her duties. “When will he be coming?”
   “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Gilan. Your son Max died today.”
   But she didn’t understand. Brown shuddered inside at the enormity of it all. The nurse asked him to come back another day, saying that today Mrs. Gilan was not at her best, but hopefully the following day she would be better.
   As he was driving to the home of the Porras family, it seemed to Brown that nothing worse had ever happened to him. The woman did not even realize what she was being told.
   But Brown was wrong; there was worse to come.
   Tommy Porras’s mother lived with his two younger sisters. The eldest was in college, and Brown remembered that most of the detective’s wages went toward that. Porras’s mother was completely cognizant, but with tears streaming down her face, she screamed: “To hell with you and your police! To hell with you! Where’s my son? My God, Tom…! Why him?!…”
   Meanwhile, work continued non-stop back at the homicide division. The phones were ringing off the hook. Returning from the questioning of Deuce, Chambers told the detectives who had been sent to help: “I got the name of a friend Greek used to hang out with, when he worked for Deuce. You and you there, take a couple of people and go talk to his friend, on the double. Here’s the address. Be careful, check things out first. If the friend is alone, drag him over to the department and shake him down until he tells us something.”
   Right then DiMaggio, who was on the phone, hung up and announced with excitement: “They found Gilan’s car, over on Wardlaw!”
   Meanwhile, Brown, exhausted after his conversations with the relatives of the murdered detectives, had returned to the Department. The duty officer in the lobby immediately told him that the Chief of Police wanted to see him. Tierney was sitting in the chief’s office with several deputies and the assistant for public relations. The chief was interested in only one thing: Did Brown’s team break any of the rules? Was the Department to blame for the death of its people?
   “Peter Adamidi was an important witness for us,” Brown replied dully. “No one knew that he would open fire. Gilan and Porras – their mission was to protect him, and not to allow him to phone any of his friends until we had nabbed the arms dealer, Deuce. No one could even imagine that…”
   “Was Adamidi released from prison properly?”
   “We made a deal with the prosecutors, the release paper was signed by the prosecutor,” Tierney hastened to inform him.
   Having looked at the papers, thought things over, and exchanged glances and nods with the deputies, the police chief delivered his verdict: “So, we’re clean? No one will be able to accuse us of breaking the rules and other such crap? Good. Brown, are you leaving the department? Your people were killed. If you can’t… stay, you can leave now. Everyone will understand.”
   But Brown had totally different plans. Just a few hours ago, he had wanted to hand over this case to someone else, so as not to upset Shelley. But everything changed when he saw the floor of the motel, stained with the blood of his subordinates.
   “No thanks,” he said firmly. “I can’t leave. Not now. Please don’t take me off the case, Sir.”
   Chambers and DiMaggio drove to where Gilan’s car had been found, accompanied by two patrol cars. Gilan’s car was at the back of a building under construction, in the ghetto. The detectives and patrolmen approached it stealthily from all sides, guns at the ready. But, as expected, there was no one there.
   “There are a couple of dives near here where the local riffraff hang out,” DiMaggio remembered. “Maybe he decided to hole up in one of them?”
   Working until evening, the police forced their way into seven apartments, raided four street gangs hang-outs, and visited most of the ghetto eateries. All their informants were instructed to get them something on Greek or his friends.
   But it was all in vain. During the full-scale raids, which continued in the city until evening, they managed to arrest two criminals on the “wanted” list, and to seize more than 200 grams of narcotics and several firearms.
   They did a lot, but not the main thing.
   It was as though Greek had disappeared without a trace.

   It was late in the evening when they finally decided that Greek had won – for today. Brown, DiMaggio, and Chambers met in the bar, exhausted and discouraged, to have a few drinks – for themselves and to honor those who were no longer with them.
   “A whole day. The whole department on its feet, And nothing came of it,” said DiMaggio. He was outraged. “Why? Where has this scumbag dug himself in?”
   “That’s what I’d like to know,” Chambers chimed in. We’ll really whack this bastard when we get him, Troy. Drill him so full of holes he looks like a sieve.”
   “First we have to find him,” said Brown softly. Chambers swore under his breath and went for another beer. Brown pulled out his knife and started toying with it, and lit up a cigarette. “I’ve smoked two packs today” was the thought that flashed through his mind. Fuck it, Brown thought. He really didn’t give a damn about himself right now.
   Let’s just find the creep.
   “So,” said Brown, when Chambers had returned. “Why did he murder two police officers? That means an automatic death penalty. Why did he do it?”
   “Because he’s a nitwit,” growled DiMaggio, leaning over his beer.
   “Deuce said that Greek had left him three months ago. He decided to start his own business, play his own game.”
   “A crappy player, to get himself arrested within a month,” Chambers remarked. “Deuce works carefully, he’s smarter.”
   “He’s member of the gang,” said Brown, after a pause.
   “What? Who’s a gang member?”
   “Greek. He is a member of the gang that makes these collars. He supplies their explosives.”
   “He only sold them C—4,” said Chambers with a shrug. “What makes you think he’s a member of the gang?”
   “First, the timing. Greek brings the C—4 explosives into the city at the same time that he leaves Deuce, supposedly because he had decided to work on his own. But that’s not what was really going on. He had decided to be a team player again, but on a different team.”
   “And second?”
   “Pickman was only the beginning, as I said before. But now it’s a fact. Because Greek went over to them. That means they need a stable supply of C—4 in the city.” Brown put out his cigarette, but lit another right away. “And that’s why they blew up Pickman. They wanted to be famous, so that the next victims wouldn’t even think of resisting. They needed all the newspapers and TV and radio channels to cover them.” After a pause, Brown added, “And he’s hiding with them. That’s why we couldn’t find Greek’s trail today, although our people turned half the town upside down.
   “OK, maybe so,” DiMaggio nodded. “But that doesn’t explain why this scumbag decided to kill the cops.”
   Brown nodded. “That’s right, it doesn’t explain it.”
   Chambers went for another beer.
   By the time the mugs were almost empty again, Brown had a new idea. “Three months,” he mused. “Greek brought the explosives three months ago. And they’ve been getting ready all that time. They were doing highly technical work – look how amazed our lab was at these collars. They say the case will go down in the history of criminology.”
   “After the murder of two cops, sure,” said DiMaggio with a nasty curse.
   “And they were planning from the outset not only to intimidate people, but to kill them,” Brown continued. “What happens when the gang kills a person?”
   “We go looking for them?” Chambers suggested uncertainly.
   “There are several people in the gang, and one of them could get scared and betray all of them. We’ve seen that hundreds of times over the years. There’s always someone who hasn’t got the guts to go through with it. And what do they do then?”
   Chambers and DiMaggio glanced at one another. The answer was obvious, but Chambers guessed it first. “Fuck… They’ve killed already. The gang had killed before. They’re bound to each other by blood.”
   “Including Greek,” said Brown, nodding grimly. “If we catch the gang, it’s a death sentence for him anyway, because he had already killed, along with them. And Greek used me to get out of from prison. Even the murder of two policemen didn’t give him pause, because his only chance to escape a death sentence was to disappear. Along with the rest of the gang.”
   They sat at the bar for about an hour until Brown looked at his watch and realized how late it had gotten. And tomorrow, the hunt begins again. Brown told everyone to go home.
   Shelley didn’t say a word when Brown lay down beside her, although she was still awake. She knew about the murder of Gilan and Porras, and had decided not to pry. But Brown tossed and turned for half the night.
   Had he known what the morrow would bring, Brown would not have been able to sleep at all.

   The murder of two police officers is an emergency for any city, no matter how large. So all night long, police patrolled on the outskirts, manning checkpoints, but now only inspecting random cars. By morning, they had managed to apprehend some carjackers who were trying to make a breakout onto the highway. After a couple of shots at their tires, the carjackers surrendered. But this brought them no closer to finding Greek.
   Street patrols were increased during the night, because of the influx of emergency forces. It was a tough shift, and two policemen from the 8th Precinct were about ready to drop from exhaustion by 8:00 a. m., when the shift changed. The patrol car on Belinda Avenue was heading back to the precinct station, only a few blocks away. The policeman at the wheel, whose name was Ron, was annoyed. “This is all public relations, to reassure the public,” he said.
   “That bastard killed two cops,” said his partner, a younger fellow named Barry.
   “And is he such a cretin as to walk about the streets? Is that what you think? ‘I killed the cops, here I am’? Street patrols can only be effective when we’re dealing with street gangs! But what they’re having us do now is simply out of desperation.”
   “Ron, look at 2 o’clock,” said Barry, suddenly alert.
   On the other side of the road, a man in a suit was hurrying along. His gait was odd, as though he had a steel rod instead of a spine and every movement shot pain through his body. He was carrying a briefcase. Not that there is anything suspicious about a man with a briefcase and a suit on Belinda Avenue, where there are many office buildings – if it were not for that odd gait. And the fact that it was 7:50 a. m., and he was the only passer-by.
   “Wonder why he’s walking funny.”
   “Let’s go check.”
   Ron sped up and pulled alongside the man. Hearing the sound of the engine, the man turned around, his face contorted in horror. Rushing to one side, he suddenly began to run and shout something. “Fuck, what’s that psycho doing?”
   Barry jumped out of the car, grabbing his nightstick, and rushed toward the man. Turning on the siren, Ron came along behind. Barry shouted as he ran: “Police! Stop!”
   The man suddenly turned, thrusting his arms in front of him and screaming in panic: “No, don’t come near! Don’t! Please!”
   Only then did Barry notice the strange device on the man’s neck, like a thick metal collar.
   And at the moment, there was a powerful explosion.
   The blast wave threw Barry to the ground and smashed the windows of the building. The collar, stuffed with plastic explosives, blew the head of the fleeing man to pieces; his raised arms were ripped off at the elbow, and his briefcase was sliced as if by a knife through butter. The burning dollar bills with which the briefcase was packed swept along the street, together with fragments of what had once been the victim’s head.

   The police cordoned off the whole section of the street, stretching yellow tape across the roadway. The patrolmen only let the ambulance and police cars pass, to the outrage of those who worked on the block and couldn’t get to work. “We’ll tell you when you can go through, but right now it’s a crime scene,” they patiently explained to the crowd, pushing them away from.
   The CSI officers gathered up all the burned bills and fragments of the explosive device, or rather what was left of them. The corpse was covered with a sheet, hiding the dreadful sight from curiosity-seekers.
   Slipping behind the cordon, Brown, still disheveled from sleep since he had not had time to freshen up after the duty call came in, noted the arrival of the local television station’s van.
   “And Bob, the journalists are here,” he said into his cell phone. “Still only one channel, but soon there will be a mob. Send someone from public relations over.”
   Chambers was talking to Barry, who was pale, drinking coffee, seated on the step of the ambulance. When Chambers saw Brown, he walked over. “The guys noticed he was behaving strangely, and decided to check it out. When he saw them, he ran away, yelling something. And then… BOOM.”
   “Well at least they weren’t hit.”
   “Yes, we’ve had enough police corpses. He was running toward his car, which we found around the corner. But it’s clean.”
   “Did you search his pockets?”
   Brown and Chambers went over to one of the patrol cars, on the hood of which were plastic bags containing the victim’s personal belongings. Brown pulled out the man’s wallet, found the driver’s license. “Theodore A. Marino,” he read aloud. He also found several identical business cards. “Theodore A. Marino, director. Ò. Î. S. Construction Ltd. A construction company?”
   “Yes indeed,” frowned Chambers. “Troy, that’s something!”
   “Their office is nearby,” said Brown, reading the address on the business card, and handed it to Chambers. “Bring in anybody who’s free, we’ve got to interview everyone. First, to find out whether there is any connection between Marino and Pickman. And between their two companies. Maybe joint projects or something like that.”
   “Got it.”
   “How much money did he have in the briefcase?”
   “No one has counted it yet, they’re swamped, as you can see, But it was clearly not a small sum.”
   “A second corpse,” Brown said, grimly shaking his head, glancing at the sheet-covered body. The sheet was soaked with blood, which was still flowing from the arm and neck where the blast wave had hit. ‘Three days. They didn’t even take a break. What kind of friggin’ gang is this anyway?”

   He sent DiMaggio to Marino’s home with two detectives. It was a sturdily built and expensive house in an upscale neighborhood. A maid opened the door. Seeing the police badge with alarm, she quickly reported: “Mr. Marino is not home.”
   “And I’m afraid he won’t be.” DiMaggio tried to say it gently. “He’s dead. May we come in?”
   DiMaggio found the safe in the living room, sunk into the wall and hidden behind a painting. But all this camouflage accomplished nothing, because the safe was wide open.
   “I got here half an hour ago,” said the maid, with a stammer. “The safe was open. I… I mean, Mr. Marino never left it open.”
   DiMaggio picked up some papers on the floor under the safe. Official documents with the seal T. O. S. Construction Ltd.
   “He was in a hurry,” DiMaggio remarked. “Papers are scattered all over the room.”
   “What happened to him?” wailed the maid. “I can’t believe it. How did it happen? When?”
   “Was he married?”
   “Mr. Marino was divorced over a year ago, and his wife moved somewhere, I don’t know exactly where. Oh my Lord, I can’t believe it! Why was he killed, Mr. Policeman?”
   “See here: You go get a drink of water in the kitchen and calm down, and then answer a few questions, OK?”
   DiMaggio nodded to one of the detectives, who gently but firmly led the maid to the kitchen. Looking around the living room, DiMaggio found the TV remote on the floor near the sofa. Reflexively glancing at the television, DiMaggio frowned. The screensaver with a logo showed that the TV was on. DiMaggio noticed something sticking out of the front of the set. Going closer, he discovered a flash drive inserted into a USB port. “Marino watched something on the flash drive,” he said. The detective pressed the button on the remote, accessing the TV menu. He chose “play from USB device” and clicked “OK.”
   What happened next, was completely unexpected.

   Less than an hour later, in Tierney’s office, the captain himself, Brown, and Chambers watched what was on the flash drive. They watched a man on the screen, with a ski mask stretched over his face and slits for the eyes.
   “Listen to me carefully, bitch,” the man snarled. “If you don’t get it the first time, scroll back and watch again. There’s a pound of explosives in your collar. That’s enough for there not even to be a wet spot left of you, bitch.”
   The bastards, Brown seethed, looking intently at the screen. The bastard in chief – Brown was confident that this was the ringleader – had cruel, black eyes. Behind him was some sort of old wall, in something like a warehouse. A dim light shone from above. There were no other significant markings.
   “If you watch the news, you know I’m not kidding,” the masked man threatened. “You want to end up like that, you bitch? The first one got his head torn off. If you don’t strictly follow the instructions, you will be in the same boat. OK bitch, you’ll see now what awaits you.”
   The image on the screen changed. Brown and the others saw a vacant lot in front of a small storage building, overgrown with weeds. Grabbing the remote, Brown pressed “pause,” looking intently at the frame. Old gray walls, black elevator gates, a door. Long, narrow little windows with dirty glass in the upper part of the wall, near the ceiling. Several empty boxes against the wall.
   “Some sort of warehouse,” Brown observed. “I bet they filmed the first part inside this joint. So, the gang has a warehouse. That’s something.”
   “It’s abandoned,” said Chambers. “I can’t see any car tracks on the ground.”
   “There are some kind of warehouses in the background, too,” Brown added. “So it’s in the city. Somewhere on the outskirts.”
   “Keep playing it; the experts will study the recording,” Tierney snapped impatiently. Brown pressed “play.”
   In the center of the frame was a mannequin in the shape of a man – no legs, only the upper body. A man appeared wearing a mask and khaki, military-style clothing. He was holding a collar. Having attached it to the neck of the mannequin, he disappeared. A second later, there was an explosion. The mannequin’s head was ripped off, its body shot up, and, flipping over a few times in the air, it fell to the side.
   “Holy shit,” was the only thing Tierney managed to say.
   The picture changed, returning indoors. The guy in the mask again snarled into the camera:
   “There’s a camera on the front of your collar, and a telephone on the back. We’ll see whatever you see. So keep it in mind, bitch. If you try to remove the collar, you’ll croak. If you try to go to the cops or call someone, you’ll croak. If you do anything at all wrong, you’ll croak. Remember? You’ll CROAK, bitch. If you don’t do everything right.” And after a pause for the poor bastard Marino to assimilate the whole tragedy of his situation, the gangster continued: “Get all the cash you can. At least $100 K. Got it, bitch? AT LEAST $100 K. If you’ve got that amount at home, good. If not, go to the office. You’ll have to enter so that you avoid the security guard. If you start talking to someone, do you remember what will happen to you, bitch?”
   “He’ll croak,” Tierney grimly answered the masked man.

   They took the flash drive to the forensics lab. On Tierney’s order, investigation of the recording and the flash drive itself became their top priority. The laboratory had to enlarge each frame, with particular attention to the building and to details that would allow them to figure out where the warehouse was. Computer experts from the lab had to try to squeeze something out of the flash drive itself and the video file recorded on it – when and where it could have been recorded, on what sort of device – and check all the technical features. The experts were ordered to call the homicide division or Tierney personally as soon as they figured out something, no matter what.
   But they couldn’t figure out a thing. The gangsters were tech-savvy and had left the police no clues.
   By evening, Brown had almost all the information gleaned from the detectives” day’s work. Sitting in the office with coffee and cigarettes, Brown and Chambers reread the reports, hoping to find the needle in the haystack.
   But there was no needle.
   “So, Marino’s briefcase contained about $100,000. He got exactly $80,000 from the office,” Brown said, flipping through the reports. “And he came out of the office three minutes before his death.”
   “Why did he park the car around the corner?”
   “The front of T. O. S. Construction was a no-parking zone, and the underground parking lot was closed at night.”
   “The policemen noticed him at just the wrong moment.”
   “Forget it, Rick,” Brown replied grimly. “They would have killed him anyway, just as they did Pickman. Even if they’d got the money. Did Forensics find anything?”
   “We’ve got a pile of photos,” Chambers showed them to his boss. “But what do they amount to?” he asked.
   “T. O. S. Construction and Plate Build Construction had nothing in common.” Brown was already paging through the next report. ‘They talked with the managers and verified the two companies’ documents. They took the lists of the employees of both companies, including those who left a long time ago, and compared them. No overlap.”
   “But both are construction companies.”
   “But both are construction companies,” Brown agreed. “What could two construction firms have in common? Besides employees and common projects?”
   “Good question,” Chambers said. “Maybe… they were once bidding for the same job? Maybe a trade union? Or… they’re competitors of a third company? That contracted with them? And the ransom is just a decoy? Hell, I don’t know, Troy. I can’t wrap my mind around it.”
   “But we’ve got to. If we find Greek, we find the gang. And if we find the gang, we find Greek.”
   Chambers brought them more coffee, and they went back to the reports.
   Then DiMaggio burst into the office. “We’ve got something!” he exclaimed. “T. O. S. Construction has accounts in several banks. But the $80,000, which the company had only received on Monday, guess which bank cashed it?”
   “Rentier Bank?” Brown’s voice sounded slightly hopeful.
   “Not just Rentier Bank, boss!” DiMaggio said triumphantly. “But the VERY SAME branch that Pickman’s company uses!”

   That was a breakthrough. As Brown drive home through the nighttime city, he could think about nothing else. Yes, a breakthrough. But one thing was still unclear: why both companies are in the construction business. Still, the fact that they had a bank in common, where, before the directors of each company were kidnapped, their employees had withdrawn cash, was nothing to be sneezed at.
   While yesterday Shelley had not said a word to Brown, today she wanted to talk. Brown understood that as soon as he saw her, and swore to himself. She entered the room where Brown was putting his things on the top shelf, where his daughter couldn’t reach them – his keys and knife, his badge and service weapon.
   “How’s it going? Did you catch him?”
   “No. It’s as through the earth swallowed him up. Nearly 15 detectives spent the second day sitting in ambush at all the addresses where the creep might be. Total silence.”
   “When is the funeral, Troy?”
   “Saturday morning.”
   He knew what was coming next. Shelley frowned. “I thought we had other plans for Saturday.”
   “Are you kidding?” Brown protested, almost defiantly, but trying not to raise his voice. “Two guys from my division died! To hell with the plans! I couldn’t save them, so the least I can do is to bury them. It’s my duty.”
   “You couldn’t save them? Troy, they were good guys, but… you’re not a nursemaid.”
   With a sigh, Brown muttered something like, “I know.” He went to kiss Carol before she went to sleep, then went to the kitchen for a beer. Shelley was waiting for him. For her, the conversation was not over.
   “Troy, I won’t force you to go to Perte on Friday. You can come after the funeral. But I have to go there tomorrow, with you or without you. You realize, we have Carol to think of. We need to put together something that looks like a home over the weekend, rather than… boxes in a warehouse.”
   “I understand.”
   Something in his voice alerted Shelley. “You will be coming on Monday, right?”
   Brown hesitated for a moment. “I will come when I can. When I catch the creep who killed two of my men.”
   “And when might that be?!” Shelley was furious. “What if you take six months looking for that gang? Or a year? Or you never find them?”
   “Do you think I’m doing this on purpose?” Brown couldn’t contain himself. “That I asked the bastard to kill the two guys, huh? And I asked his cronies to blow off their two heads? All of this, just not to go with you to Perte! Is that what you think? My friends were killed, the whole city is on edge, don’t you understand? I simply cannot up and leave! Now it’s personal!”
   Shelley rewarded him with a long, cold stare. “Got it,” she said, and left the room.
   Brown punched his fist against the wall. The fist responded by howling in pain. Gritting his teeth, Brown sat down, trying to calm himself. Mentally swearing again, he opened a bottle.
   And his cell phone rang.
   He quickly walked into the bedroom, where Shelley was already in bed, lying demonstratively turned in the other direction. Brown picked up the phone. “Brown here.”
   It was Hash.

   Brown got dressed and told Shelley he wouldn’t be long. She didn’t answer. But he couldn’t deal with that now.
   Half an hour later he was at the corner of Griffin Road and Tampa, waiting for Hash. When the latter got into Brown’s car, they drove off.
   “I heard about the explosion on Belinda Avenue,” Hash said. “I read online that this fellow who had his head blown off was named Marino. The boss of a construction company. Is that right?”
   “Do you know him?”
   “Not really. I myself never even heard of him. But today one of my dudes whispered something to me.”
   “Don’t drag it out, Hash.”
   “Take it easy, I’m helping you! Long story short: A couple of weeks ago, some thug was making inquiries about the construction company and Marino.”
   “Who was he asking?”
   “Whoever was necessary,” said Hash curtly. “Boss, you yourself know that big kahunas launder their money through all these construction sites. Chinese, Italians, Russians. And that thug wanted to know whether Marino’s firm was worth bothering with. Whether it had protection from high places, you follow? The thug was probing the situation.”
   “Hash, what’s his name? Who is he?”
   “What’s in it for me?” Hash chuckled.
   “If you read the news online, maybe you saw that two cops were murdered?” Brown growled. “They were my friends, Hash. So tell me, or I swear I’ll smash your teeth in!”
   “Brad Healey,” said Hash after thinking for a moment.
   “Who is he? What do you know about him?”
   “He’s up to something, but I don’t know anything about it. A strong guy, this Healey, a real muscle man. One of my runners works out at the Richmond. He said Healey’s a regular customer there.”
   Fearful of spiking his good luck, Brown was afraid even to think about what had just fallen into his hands.
   He’d landed amidst a gang of explosive-detonators!

Chapter 4

   Brown hardly slept at all. In the morning at the Police Department, the first thing he did was to brew some strong coffee and go up on the roof, where management had allocated a spot for smoking. Several detectives from the night shift had searched the files and databases all night for everything they could find on Brad Healey. By morning they had some information, but it was extremely frustrating.
   “Brad Healey, age 32. Five arrests for possession of weapons and drugs, suspect in two robberies. One prison term for extortion, released five years ago,” Chambers read from the reports. “But the main problem, Troy, is that we haven’t got an address for him.”
   “Relatives, lovers?”
   “In the morning we visited his parents. They say they haven’t seen him for several years.”
   “Shit…”
   “But there is one clue. A year ago, Healey figured in a case of a missing person. He was even locked up for a few days, but no charges were filed.”
   “A year ago?” Brown said thoughtfully. “Nothing more recent?” Chambers shook his head. “It’s not much. Who handled the case?”
   “The 21st Precinct. Shall I call them?”
   “I’ll do it myself. What about the bank?”
   “I thought I would contact security at the head office of Rentier Bank, and ask for a list of the employees who were on the job when Pickman’s and Marino’s companies withdrew the cash.”
   “It’s risky, Rick.” Brown shook his head. “What if the gang’s inside man is a guard at the branch office and has friends at the head office? He’ll just go into hiding and we’ll never find out anything.”
   “What do you propose?”

   Within half an hour, Chambers was at the Rentier Bank branch office. Without a gun, so as not to set off the metal detector at the entrance. He had a quite different weapon: a bag with a shoulder strap that had a miniature camera mounted on the side. The camera sent images directly to an unmarked police van across the street.
   “Hi.” The bank employee, a pretty young woman about 25, smiled cheerfully at Chambers through the bullet-proof plexiglass. “May I open an account?” he asked.
   Meanwhile, at the Police Department, detectives contacted Security at the head office of Rentier Bank. On the same day, the Department had already gotten a list of the employees at the branch that was used by the construction firms of the murdered Pickman and Marino, and, most importantly, their work schedules.
   A list of 23 names soon appeared on the board in the operations room of the homicide division. Alongside them were photographs of the employees, printed from the video taken inside the bank: tellers, cashier, security guards.
   “We have a total of 23 Rentier Bank employees,” Chambers reported. “They were working on the days that the bookkeepers from Plate Build Construction and T. O. S. Construction Ltd. withdrew the cash from their accounts.”
   “Strange photos,” remarked one of the backup detectives assigned to the homicide division. “A hidden camera?”
   “We don’t know who the gang’s informant is. The inside man could be one of these 23 people, or could be someone from the main office,” Chambers explained, “because cash withdrawals can be monitored by computer at the bank’s main office. So we don’t want someone at the bank to know we are going after them in earnest.”
   “And what do we do now?” asked another detective.
   “It’s very simple. We need to check out each of these 23 people. Phone numbers, addresses, connections, biography. Let’s go for it!”

   At the 21st Precinct, Brown found out that the detective assigned to the case had retired from the police force six months before. His name was Andy Ross. Brown knew him, having crossed paths a few times on the job. Brown went to Ross’s home, but only managed to find him along the river bank: After his retirement, Ross became an avid fisherman. He would sit by the hour on the riverbank with a fishing rod, smoking cigars, sipping beer, and enjoying his well-deserved relaxation.
   “I don’t watch the news. Fed up with it. Nothing but blood and gore. I had enough of that when I was working. But I did hear about the cops who were killed. Did they work with you?” Brown nodded. “Sorry to hear it.”
   “It was one of my last cases,” said Ross. “Six months before I stopped dealing with all this crap and left the police force.”
   “Did you suspect him? Brad Healey?”
   Brown showed him a photo of Healey, but Ross remembered the name anyway.
   “Not just him. Nick Stoller was the name of the missing person. He was moonlighting, buying stolen goods, sometimes pushing dope. A real loser. Want a cigar?” Brown declined. “As you like. So, they told me that Stoller had not been seen anywhere for a few days and was not returning calls. I got to work. One of my informants saw several guys around Stoller’s house, dragging somebody into a van.”
   “Stoller?”
   “It was dark, and he couldn’t see any faces. But I proceeded from the assumption that Stoller was being kidnapped, because no one, including the neighbors, ever saw him again after that.”
   “And what does Healey have to do with this?”
   “I shook down Stoller’s buddies, and one of them said that Stoller owed Healey a couple of thousand bucks. A few days before the kidnapping, they had a fight in a bar, which other people also saw. Of course, I arrested Healey and questioned him about what happened.”
   “And what went wrong?”
   “Everything. Healey had an alibi. On the night of the abduction, he was at a birthday party for one of his friends. There were four of them there, and all four unanimously declared that they had been boozing it up and having fun, and that neither Healey nor any of the others left the house for a single minute. So what could I do? I had to let the bastard go.”
   “The bastard?” asked Brown. “Do you still think he was one?”
   “I spent almost 30 years on the police force, son. Do you know what it means to have a nose for something? If you have it, it seldom fails you. I had it.” After a silence, Ross added: “I am not sure that Healey killed Stoller, and I can’t prove it. After all, he had an alibi. But that bastard has skeletons in his closet – that I am willing to bet.”
   A weak argument. Brown was disappointed, but he didn’t want to toss out a clue that had just appeared on his radar screen.
   “That sucks. Listen, those three men who gave Healey an alibi – who are they?”
   Ross sighed. “I’ve got my old records at home. Notebooks, transcripts. It should all be in there. We can dig around.”
   “OK, let’s go.”
   Ross looked ruefully at his bait. No more fishing today.
   His house was close by, but Brown offered to drive to save time. The box containing Ross’s records was in the garage. Leafing through a couple of battered notebooks, Ross finally found what he was looking for. “Here we go. There were four of them at the party. Brad Healey and three others.”
   Brown got out a pen and paper. “You writing it down? Walter Fifer, age 35. Luke Thompson, age 29. It was his birthday. And Peter Adamidi, age 31.”
   Brown couldn’t believe his ears. All his doubts vanished. “Peter Adamidi?”
   “Nickname Greek,” Ross confirmed. “Adamidi is a Greek name. A rotten son-of-a-bitch.”

   By evening, Brown knew everything the police had on Fifer and Thompson.
   “Thompson never went to trial, although there were arrests and rap sheets. Mainly for getting into fights and for drugs,” DiMaggio reported. “According to the latest information, he lives in Lakewood.”
   “Lived there,” Brown corrected him. “What else?
   “Fifer is a much tougher cookie: three convictions: weapons, assault, resisting arrest, armed robbery. A real gentleman’s CV.”
   “Do we know where he lives?”
   “There’s a snag there too, Troy. His parents died, and their house belongs to him. But he rents the house to a married couple. They don’t know where the owner lives. He just comes by for the rent once a month. He insists that they pay in cash.”
   “How interesting,” Brown said ironically. “We have three people, three suspects, and not a single address. What does that mean?”
   “Well, what?” Chambers asked.
   “They were getting prepared,” said Brown. “It was they who killed Stoller a year ago. All of them, I’m certain of it. And they all provided Healey and each other with alibis. Since then, they have been getting their ducks in a row. Maybe they were looking for a technician who could make a collar like that. And Greek was looking for C—4 suppliers, to get the gang the explosives they needed for the job. They spent a whole year preparing the operation. So there’s no doubt the sons-of-bitches have thought of nearly everything.”
   DiMaggio swore. “We’ll have to activate all our informers in the city. These bastards, four of them! We’ll have to find something on at least one of them.”
   “We already have something,” Brown noted. “We know the gym where Healey works out.”

   All day Friday, the police van kept the Rentier Bank branch under surveillance. The detectives took note of not only those who came to work there in the morning, but also the customers. Around noon, a woman in a suit arrived, accompanied by two security guards. When they left, the briefcase one of the guards was carrying was noticeably heavier. The detective doing the outside surveillance quickly relayed the license plate number of their car, via walkie-talkie:
   “Got to check it. Most likely it’s the bookkeeper and her security guard. They pulled out cash, clearly a large sum. Find out who they are.”
   Preemptive work was simultaneously being done with other construction companies. Detectives went to the offices of companies working in the city, briefing them about the gang and telling them to be careful, to refrain temporarily from withdrawing large amounts of cash from their bank accounts, and so on. Nothing was said about Rentier Bank, since there was no guarantee that the insiders were not employees of one of the construction firms. Another group of investigators continued checking out all the workers and managers of Plate Build Construction and T. O. S. Construction Ltd.
   Brown returned home earlier than usual. The bus that was taking his family to Perte was scheduled to leave at 7:00 p.m. Shelley had already sent ahead boxes of their possessions, with a freight company. Brown took his wife and Carol to the bus station and saw them to the bus. There was palpable tension between the couple, but now that everything was decided, neither of them knew how to act.
   “Call when you get there,” said Brown.
   “Sure,” Shelley nodded with reserve. “You… call too. And be careful. We’ll be waiting for you. If you don’t change your mind, of course.”
   “Don’t be silly.”
   Brown kissed his wife. Carol, adjusting her backpack – she had valiantly decided to carry her favorite toys herself – asked Brown, with a genuinely puzzled and confused expression: “Daddy, why can’t you come with us?”
   “Because I still have work here.”
   “But won’t you have another job there?” Brown said he would. “Mom, but still, maybe… maybe I could stay with Dad until he comes?”
   Shelley sighed wearily. While Brown was absorbed in his work, she had already heard this record dozens of times.
   Brown hugged his daughter: “I’ll come soon, I promise.”
   The driver was glaring at them – all the other passengers were already on board. Brown waved at him, then walked Shelley and Carol to the door and helped his daughter climb the stairs.
   The bus started up, and Carol waved at her father, shouting something. Shelley told her to calm down. With a sad smile, Brown waved back. But as soon as the bus disappeared, he went to the car and rushed over to the Department.
   But there was nothing new.

   DiMaggio had been watching the fitness club since the minute it opened, sitting in his car across the street. He couldn’t leave the post, so colleagues brought him food from the nearest police station. Customer traffic to the club was heavy after lunch and in the evening. DiMaggio scrutinized every weight-lifter, constantly looking back at the photo of Brad Healey from the police records. Nothing. There was no one who looked like him.
   Deuce and his goon were released. Each was placed under external surveillance, and a wiretap was put on their phones. But the first day showed that, even if they had something to hide, they were not planning to draw attention to it – they were both quiet, going nowhere and communicating with no one.
   “Deuce only made two calls the whole day. One to his mother, to see how things were going. And the other to order Chinese food,” Chambers griped.
   “They know they’re being watched. Cunning bitches,” said Brown.
   “Do you think he can lead us to Greek?”
   “Deuce might try to take revenge against him for the set-up. But maybe he won’t, if he doesn’t want to try on a collar filled with C—4. I think Greek and the gang have nothing to lose. The only thing they need now is money – as fast and as much as possible.”
   Brown was constantly distracted by meetings. Twice a day, he reported on the progress of the investigation to Captain Tierney. And now the Chief of Police had decided to set up yet another unit. After the murders of the two construction company directors and the two policemen, the Mayor had called him personally, because at the press conference he had promised that the police would solve the high-profile crimes as quickly as possible. And now the Mayor was worried about whether he had lied to the voters. Brown remarked that the Mayor was just not used to this sort of thing, but the police chief was not reassured.
   When he finally got home in the evening, Brown was surprised to realize that he almost couldn’t bear being there without Shelley and Carol. The empty house felt strange. He opened a beer and phoned his wife.
   “Carol likes the house very much, she’s crazy about it!” said Shelley happily. “She has already forgotten that she didn’t want to leave. When you come, you’ll have to clean the pool. Carol wants to set it up now, but I’m against it.”
   “Tell her if she doesn’t behave, I’ll bring her back here,” Brown said with a smile. “As for me… I miss you. I’ve just realized that you were always at home. Every evening. It’s empty and rotten here.”
   “It’s all up to you, Troy.”
   “You know that’s not so.”
   “We miss you, too,” Shelley admitted reluctantly.
   On the TV evening news, half the program was devoted to the most scandalous series of crimes the city had seen in recent years. The Mayor had made another pronouncement.
   “The Mayor’s Office and the Police Department have decided to ask the people for help,” he told reporters at City Hall. “We are offering a reward for any information about this criminal.”
   A photo of Greek appeared on the screen, with his description and all the phone numbers people could call. The reward was not bad: $10,000.
   That evening Brown could hardly keep from getting drunk. And it was not even being alone and all the stress of the recent days. Or more precisely, it was not only these things. Brown held off from the booze only because tomorrow he would have to be on his feet. It was his sacred duty.
   On Saturday, they buried Gilan and Porras.
   The city cemetery was full of police officers, all in their dress uniforms. Porras’s mother and sisters wept bitterly. The Chief of Police came with Captain Tierney, to give an impassioned speech.
   “Fifty years!” he proclaimed. “After half a century, two servants of the law in our city died on one day!”
   The chief’s speech was full of the usual ritual platitudes. In almost every sentence he repeated banal phrases like “they were one of us” and “the policemen’s brotherhood.” Brown scarcely heard him, clenching his fists in impotent rage. In his mind’s eye, he could still see Porras with his throat cut, lying in a huge puddle of his own blood. And with terror in his dead eyes. For two days, Brown had done nothing that brought them any closer to catching Greek. He had beaten his head against the wall, but nothing had come of it.
   But after just a few hours, his luck changed.
   In the evening DiMaggio, still keeping watch at the fitness club, called Brown on his cell and exclaimed: “Healey came to the club! He’s here, Troy.”

   Healey certainly was a healthy guy – a veritable mountain of muscles and tattoos. Throwing his gym bag over his shoulder and sipping a protein shake, he emerged from the fitness club after an hour and a half.
   “Subject came out,” the radio croaked.
   The neighborhood was teeming with police, but Healey didn’t know it. DiMaggio’s car was in its usual place, and just down the street was Chambers, waiting behind the wheel of his car for news from Brown. On the next street over, there were three more police cars waiting.
   “He’s getting in the car, a gray Pontiac.”
   After the blunder with Deuce, Brown decided to do the surveillance thoroughly. When they followed Healey, they did it by the book. When Healey moved out, DiMaggio didn’t budge – that would look suspicious. Chambers followed him first. After a couple of blocks, when Healey turned at an intersection, Chambers kept right on going, and another detective replaced him as the tail. You would have had to be a genius at surveillance or have an animal’s instinct to sense that you were being followed. With Healey, neither was the case. So half an hour later he led the detectives to his shack, which turned out to be a trailer on the outskirts of town.
   “It’s already dark, and there’s no light on in the trailer,” Brown noted, looking at the structure with binoculars. “Nobody there.”
   The backup detectives were released when it became clear that Healey wasn’t going anywhere. Taking a few bottles of beer, he pulled a TV and a plastic chair out of the trailer and placed them on the lawn.
   “That’s it for today,” Brown ordered by radio. “Keep watch for an hour, then you’ll be replaced. If anyone comes to see him, phone me right away.”
   Nobody visited Healey that day.
   In the morning, Brown had an unpleasant conversation with his landlord, who had been certain that the family was moving out this week. Brown promised to increase the rent, if he could stay there a couple more weeks.
   Healey woke up around 11 a.m. He clearly was going nowhere fast. He took a short jog, then shut himself up in the trailer again for an hour. Only at about 1:00 did he head for town. There were two surveillance cars this time, Chambers in one of them. External surveillance came along behind him.
   A mile from the Plate Build Construction office, Healey pulled off the highway and drove up to a small, shabby building. It was a little office and had seen better times, but the company was still in business: Through the window facing the street Chambers saw people in front of the office and employees and customers going in and out.
   The detectives in the other car had a camera with a powerful telephoto lens. They took pictures of the man who went out to meet Healey: dark-haired and swarthy, tall and well built, middle-aged, with a black mustache and beard.
   Chambers phoned Brown. “Katanyan Ceilings Co.” Chambers could barely read the sign. “Service and installation. It’s not far from Pickman’s company. Healey is meeting someone.”
   Healey spent no more than half an hour at the ceiling installation company, and then headed for the center of town. He parked near a small diner and went inside. Through the window he could be seen placing an order with the waitress.
   “The son-of-a-bitch is just hanging out,” Chambers swore. “I should have it so good. He’s enjoying life, the bastard. We could watch him for a month and all for nothing!”
   But ten minutes later, a motorcycle pulled up. Chambers was munching on a sandwich he had brought from home, and nearly choked with amazement when he saw the motorcyclist, who took off his helmet and headed for the door of the diner.
   He had shaved his head and was trying to let his mustache grow to disguise his appearance, but every policeman in the city had seen pictures of this face on the walls of every police station:
   It was Greek. Barely containing his glee, Chambers called Brown. “He’s meeting with Greek! Troy, fuck it, he’s meeting with Greek!”

   Brown raced to the underground parking garage and jumped into the car, trying to make a call on his cell phone. But there was no signal. “This fucking parking lot!” When his car flew onto the street, with siren wailing and lights flashing, he called Tierney. “I need a SWAT team, Bob, we’ve found Greek!”
   Ten blocks from the diner, Brown turned off the siren and took the flashing lights off the roof. Mindful of the fact that Greek knew his car and had even sat in it, Brown stopped at the corner. He always carried binoculars in the glove compartment. Looking through the diner window, Brown immediately recognized Greek. Ostentatiously lounging at the table, he dined slowly and was talking to Healey about something. “Son of a bitch…”
   But Greek was alert. From time to time he cast furtive glances out the window.
   Chambers sat down next to Brown. “What’s the plan?”
   “He’s got a motorcycle,” Brown replied, thinking frantically and yet keeping his eyes on Greek. “That means surveillance is impossible. If he recognizes us, he’ll take off in a flash. We’ve got to bring him in here.”
   “And Healey?”
   “He’s meeting with Greek. He’s known him for at least a year, for sure. And he should know that Greek is on the ‘wanted’ list. So we’ve got the grounds to arrest him. Let’s punch out a search warrant and see what pops up. I don’t see any other options.”
   The radio chirped. It was the SWAT team: “5—18, team 3 arriving.”
   “This is 5—18,” Brown responded. “Subject is sitting by the window and may notice you. Park at least two or three buildings before the diner, on the same side of the street.”
   The special forces arrived in an unmarked police van with blacked-out windows. They pulled up a good 50 yards away from the diner.
   Now it was DiMaggio speaking over the radio: “5—18, Troy, we’re in place.”
   “Good. Get your body armor and let’s go. Remember, we’ll get them as they leave the diner.”
   Brown always carried two bullet-proof vests in the trunk of his car. He and Chambers quickly put them on under their jackets, concealing themselves from view behind the trunk’s open lid. Then they crossed the road, heading away from the café – they had to make a wide detour so as not to be visible from the diner window.
   They were 15 yards away when Brown’s pocket radio croaked into his earpiece: “They’re leaving!”
   Quickening his pace, Brown put his hand on his holster.
   Greek and Healey were going out the door, and Greek quickly looked around. Just at that moment, DiMaggio and two detectives appeared on the other side of the road, also hurrying toward the diner. One of the detectives was holding a gun.
   “Fuck,” Brown growled and, grabbing his weapon, rushed toward the criminals. “Police! Stop!”
   Drawing a pistol from his belt, Greek fired twice at Brown, rushing back toward the café. Brown and Chambers opened fire, on the run. One of the bullets pierced Greek’s thigh, and he fell at the doorstep.
   Healey started running down the sidewalk, right towards the SWAT team. The fully equipped fighters spilled out of the van, taking aim at Healey with their automatic weapons: “Police, hit the ground!”
   Greek, trying to get up, kept shooting. One of the bullets hit its target, with a powerful blow to Brown’s body. He almost fell, but immediately jumped up. Then DiMaggio, running toward the diner, opened fire. A couple of bullets hit Greek in the back, and he fell dead on the doorstep of the diner, smashing the glass door with his head.
   There was panic in the diner, visitors and staff shouting and screaming. Keeping Greek in their gun sights, Brown, Chambers, and DiMaggio ran up to him. Chambers kicked the man’s pistol aside, while Brown felt the pulse at his neck. And only said, through clenched teeth: “He’s a goner.”
   “Oh my God,” muttered DiMaggio in dismay. “Troy, I’m sorry, but I… I saw that he had hit you and…! He fired!”
   “Relax, you did everything right.”
   The special forces had already put handcuffs on Healey and were checking his pockets, still holding him at gunpoint. Brown suddenly felt a piercing pain in his side. Glancing down, he was surprised to find a hole in his jacket. He unbuttoned it, and found the tip of a flattened bullet protruding from his bullet-proof vest.
   “You did everything right,” he repeated to DiMaggio. “We have the second bastard, anyway.”

   Work at the scene of the shootout continued for several hours. Brown, as head of the operation, had to wait for Tierney and the police chief, who always visited the crime scene in such cases. Curiosity seekers lined up along the exclusion zone, enthusiastically filming the group’s work with their cell phone cameras.
   “Tell the patrolmen that these guys have to stop filming,” Brown ordered Chambers.
   “No problem. What about Greek’s motorcycle?”
   “Whose is it, do we know?”
   “It’s registered to some dude from the suburbs. I’ve already sent people to find him.”
   Brown nodded. His side was aching again. Certainly a cracked rib, maybe even a fracture. Brown took off his jacket, tore off the Velcro, removed his bullet-proof vest.
   This image appeared in the video made by one of the bystanders with his cellphone. An hour later, a couple of clips from the shootout were posted online.
   None of the police officers knew that on the outskirts of town, one person was watching this video with particular interest. Greek’s death meant that his plans required big adjustments. Over the previous two days, Greek had managed to organize a new delivery of C—4 to the city, and now the deal was in a shambles. The man was furious.
   What bothered him even more, was that the cops had Healey. He never saw Healey on any of the videos, but at 8:30 p. m., on the website of the city police, a short press release appeared about the death of one suspect during a shootout and the arrest of a second. This came as quite a blow to the man, because he had too few people working with him as it was. And he needed people desperately.
   When the man saw a tall cop in the background of one of the videos, behind the patrolmen who were keeping onlookers out of the diner, wincing in pain and taking off his vest, the man didn’t pay any attention.
   But during the 10:00 news on a local channel, he saw the man again. The city police chief was proudly telling the assembled journalists: “During the shooting, a suspect in the murder of two of our detectives was killed. We promised that the crime would be solved as soon as possible, and we have fulfilled our promise. For us this is a matter of honor, so all I personally supervised all the detectives” work.”
   After this lunge, the journalists could not help but ask about the other heroes of the day. Less willingly and less proudly, the police chief said: “The operation to capture the criminals was conducted by the homicide division, headed by Lieutenant Troy Brown, one of the most experienced detectives in our department. But all the work that resulted in today’s operation, I repeat, was supervised by Captain Tierney, the Deputy Chief of Police, and myself, personally.”
   The channel felt duty-bound to find a photo of Brown in its archives and to show the audience the hero’s face.
   After that, the man went back to watching the online video. Now he was only searching for Brown in the background.
   He was a man with a plan.

Chapter 5

   “I was just having dinner. I didn’t know anyone was looking for him.”
   “Come off it, Brad, you’re lying. His face is plastered all over the newspapers, on all the channels.”
   “I don’t read newspapers.”
   “And you don’t watch TV?”
   “Only my favorite shows. What, do I have to watch the news? I thought we lived in a free country.”
   “So, you were having dinner with Greek?”
   “I don’t know any Greek. That is, I know a guy who’s Greek, but his name is Pete.”
   “Pete, nicknamed Greek?”
   “I never heard any such nickname. Nobody called him that.”
   Brown couldn’t get back to the Department until evening. And then he watched through a one-way mirror while Chambers and DiMaggio grilled Healey for a solid hour. The man was pale and scared, but he didn’t budge one inch. The lawyer sitting next to him tried not to interfere.
   “Nobody called him Greek? How about Walter or Luke?”
   And for the umpteenth time, Healey looked tense. But he stubbornly insisted: “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”
   “Who are you kidding, Brad? Walter Fifer. I thought he was your buddy.”
   “I know him, and that’s it.”
   “And Luke? Luke Thompson? Do you know him?”
   “Haven’t seen him for ages. He moved to Lakewood.”
   “Were you buddies?”
   “As I already told you, no. I haven’t seen him in ages.”
   “How long? A year, two, three?”
   “A couple of years.”
   “That’s funny,” said Chambers. “A couple of years, are you sure?”
   “Something like that. I don’t exactly remember.”
   “What about the party? A year ago? Luke’s birthday?”
   Tension. Shifty eyes. Healey swallowed nervously but stuck to his line: “Y-yes, that’s when it was. I forgot.”
   Chambers and DiMaggio took a break and went out to consult with Brown.
   “He’s not the big shot he wants to appear to be,” said DiMaggio. “But he’s not about to break.”
   “Which confirms my theory,” Brown agreed. “They are bound together by blood. If he rats anybody out, then he’ll be hit with a murder rap himself, even if he was just a spotter or an errand boy for the gang. He’s got plenty to lose.”
   “Damn! What do we do?”
   “Keep at it.”
   So they kept at it.
   “I never heard about any collars,” Healey persisted. “I told you, I don’t watch the news.”
   “OK, Brad, relax, what are you so nervous?” DiMaggio smiled ironically.
   “Why do you think, you fucker?”
   “Marino,” said Chambers. “Theodore Marino. Know the name?”
   “No.” A nervous, shifty look; an uneasy swallow, trying to pull himself together. “A football player?”
   “No. A builder. You were asking around about him. Interested in him. A couple of weeks ago. Remember?”
   “Do you have any evidence that my client was interested in this man?” asked the lawyer.
   “We know he was. And you know it too, right, Brad?”
   “Don’t answer that question,” the lawyer told him. “Listen, detectives, that’s just speculation. Keep it to yourselves.”
   “Fine. So, Brad, you never heard of this guy? You’re not interested in him? Or what?”
   “No. Why would I be? I don’t even know who you’re talking about.”
   “You try to find out whether a man has criminal protection, and two weeks later his head blows up on Belinda Street?”
   “I already asked you not to provoke him,” the lawyer intervened firmly. “If you have something substantial to ask, go ahead. If not…”
   Brown entered the interrogation room, nodding to Chambers and DiMaggio at the door: “Go on, get a cup of coffee.”
   The detectives left. Brown sat down in front of Healey, looking at him carefully. Healey didn’t flinch before the steady gaze. His weakness was questions that hit close to home.
   “I want to explain what we are doing now,” Brown began. “So, there’s this gang. They kidnap people, put collars on their necks filled with C—4, and force them to hand over money. But then they kill them anyway. You never heard about it, of course?”
   “No.”
   “There are several people in the gang. Just a few, I think. Maybe three, maybe four. More likely four.”
   The lawyer was watching them anxiously. Brown guessed he was right about Healey. The man’s eyes darted about, but he got himself under control again, with an effort, and said gruffly: “I don’t give a damn if there were a hundred.”
   “Oh no, Brad, you do give a damn. But we’ll get to that later. So, we know that Pete was involved with the gang.” Glancing at the lawyer: “And we can prove it. So, Brad. Pete was supplying them with explosives. C—4.”
   “You’d have to ask him about that.” Healey took the offensive. “Oh, that’s right, you can’t, because you killed him!”
   “Pete killed two policemen and escaped,” Brown continued. “A gang member who all the state cops are looking for would only contact his accomplices. Other gang members. Brad, don’t you think it strange that Pete took the time to meet with you? Every cop in the city was looking for him. And yet he drove to a crowded place to have lunch with you.”
   “I didn’t know they were looking for him. I’ve told you a hundred times, I don’t watch the news and…!”
   “Oh yes, you only watch your favorite programs. Which ones, by the way? Detective stories?”
   “Sitcoms.”
   “A good choice.” Brown paused to start a new line of attack. “Brad, do you remember Nick Stoller?”
   “Yeah.”
   “He disappeared on the day you were at the party at Luke’s.”
   “Maybe, I don’t know.”
   “You were interrogated by the police a year ago?”
   “There was a case.”
   “But you had an alibi for the time that the cops were asking about, eh?”
   “Seems so,” Healey replied. Alarm flashed in his eyes again. “It was a year ago, a long time.”
   “Three men gave you an alibi. Luke. Walt. And Peter, known as “Greek,’ a member of the gang of about four guys. Your three friends and you. The four of you were at the party. Not a very big party.”
   “Yeah, we were just drinking beer and having…”
   “You don’t want to talk about it? How come? You were drinking beer, enjoying yourselves. Why are you so determined not to reminisce about that party, Brad?”
   “What gave you the idea that I don’t want to?” Healey, now a bundle of nerves, almost shouted. He understood very well what Brown was driving at, and it scared him. “I don’t give a damn!”
   His eyes betrayed him. In fact, they were screaming.
   “Brad, we know all about it. All of you killed Stoller together. To bind one another with blood, so that no one would get cold feet when the real operation began. The operation you’d been preparing for a whole year.”
   Healey nearly panicked, and the lawyer again had to come to his rescue:
   “You’re pressuring my client! What, do the police have new orders, to throw people a ton of speculation?”
   “Brad,” Brown continued, ignoring the lawyer. “If they forced you do to do it, if you didn’t want to do it, tell me about it. Then you won’t have to answer for Stoller’s murder.”
   Healey was breathing heavily, on the edge. The lawyer silently watched him. But the detainee controlled himself, albeit with difficulty, and stammered: “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

   Brown got home late that night. There’s nowhere to hurry off to, he reminded himself, taking a bottle of beer out of the fridge. Late as it was, he called his wife. Shelley was still awake.
   “How’s it going?” she asked, after an exchange of pleasantries. What she really meant was, “When are you coming?”
   “It’s complicated. Have you been watching the news? We’ve made headway. Arrested one of them today.”
   “So can I tell Carol you’ll be coming soon?”
   He hesitated. “Not yet.”
   “Meaning what?”
   “As I said, it’s complicated. I’ll try. Give me another week.”
   “Damn!” Shelley stretched wearily. After a pause, her anger was audible: “Troy, you did this on purpose, right?”
   “What? What are you talking about?”
   “You sent us to another city and now you’re saying, “Give me a week.’ Then it’ll be, “Give me two more weeks.’ Then a month. Is this how you get rid of us?”
   “Shel, don’t talk nonsense. And besides, I didn’t send anybody anywhere, it was your decision.”
   “Because I have work here!”
   “And so do I, remember?”
   “You also have a family. Remember?”
   “I don’t want to argue. Call Carol to the phone so I can tell her goodnight.”
   “She’s asleep,” Shelley replied coldly. “And I’m getting ready for bed. I had a tough day. See you later.”
   “Wait, Shel, I don’t want…”
   Shelley had hung up. With a curse, Brown went to the kitchen for another beer.
   While Healey was being interrogated, a group of detectives got a search warrant and searched his trailer. They found nothing that could lead the police to the other gang members, but they did find about $15,000. Rather strange for an unemployed man. Among the bills were two packs of twenties, wrapped in Rentier Bank letterhead. This might constitute evidence, since Healey had no account there.
   The case of the dead Greek was more difficult. They found money in his pockets, a couple of discount cards from stores, keys. But what lock the keys might fit remained a riddle. The only way left to find Greek’s hideout was to check all the phone calls on Healey’s cell.
   But Brown had done that already. He was keen on revenge for his guys. Of course, Brown would have preferred to have personally put a bullet in Greek’s back, but that’s the way it goes. Knowing that bastard would no longer pollute the earth at least gave Brown a certain satisfaction. Not joy, but satisfaction. It turned out the way it should have turned out. You remember such things for a long time to come.
   With these thoughts running through his mind, he went to bed, setting the alarm for 7 a.m. When it rang, Brown leaped up to turn it off as soon as possible. This had been his habit for exactly seven years: When Carol was born, Brown had trained himself to jump up and turn off the alarm so as not to wake the baby and Shelley, who had tended to Carol during the night.
   Hastily taking a shower and swallowing a mug of coffee, without which Brown never got behind the wheel of a car, he stuffed his wallet, keys, and badge into his pocket, attached his knife to his belt, looped his shoulder holster around his back, and stuck his gun into it. A minute later he was walking toward his car, which was parked in front of the house.
   What happened next went by so fast that Brown could scarcely grasp what hit him. As he approached the driver’s door, there was a screech of tires right behind him: a black van, braking hard. The shadow of a masked man jumping out. A crackle of electricity. Pain in the neck, where the masked man had jabbed in electrodes. An electric shocker. The powerful current hurled Brown against the car, and he passed out.
   Two masked men grabbed him under the arms and dragged him into the van, which tore off, picking up speed as it went, and disappeared around the corner.

   The first thing Brown felt was pain. Pain in the neck, pain in the arms, pain in the back. A moan escaped him, but he quickly clenched his teeth, remembering the last things he had seen: an electric shocker, a mask, a van…
   He found himself in the middle of a warehouse. Gray walls, a narrow, long, dirty window near the ceiling. Brown had seen it before: on the video.
   It was the very warehouse where the gang had tested the collar. He’d been kidnapped! The thought zapped through him like a lightning bolt. Brown was immobilized with fear and horror that seemed to rise from his chest, spreading their icy tentacles throughout his body.
   “You awake, bitch?”
   A voice. And the word “bitch.” It’s the dude in the video. The gang leader.
   First a shadow appeared, and then from somewhere over on the right, a man emerged, dressed in khaki, a mask with eye slits. The cold, black eyes of a cruel son-of-a-bitch who would stop at nothing.
   Brown had a coughing fit, which made his pain worse. He hurt all over. On the way here, after he had passed out from the electroshocker, they had beaten him, the swine.
   He was sitting on the ground with his legs stretched out in front of him. His hands were handcuffed behind his back, binding him to some kind of post – Brown could feel the hard wood digging into his vertebrae. The post was thick, and his hands were so stretched that each movement caused a searing pain in his wrists, tendons, and back.
   “Where am I?” he muttered, frantically trying to regain control. But it was no use: Fear was flooding through him, weakening his will, panic rising. When you find yourself in the grip of animals who will stop at nothing, the last thing you do is behave like some hero in a cheap action flick.
   “You are our guest. I have some questions for you.”
   “I’m a police officer.”
   “Oh really, bitch?” Numero Uno’s voice dripped with mockery.
   “Do you know what they do to cop-killers? They’ll track you down. They’ll turn the whole city upside-down, but they’ll find you. Whatever it takes.”
   “Take it easy, bitch. You’re in no position to play the Big Cheese.”
   “The shithead,” someone behind him said with undisguised hatred. Brown turned his head, trying to make out who else was there. His hands were stretched to the limit, but his peripheral vision allowed him to make out two silhouettes, almost right behind him. So, there were three of them. Was this the whole gang, or were there more?
   “Who are you?”
   “Shut up, bitch,” Numero Uno stepped up to him. “How did you find Greek and Healey?”
   “Who?”
   The gang leader chuckled as if he’d heard a good joke, then gave Brown a swift kick between the legs with his heavy army boot.
   Brown howled in pain, jerking away so that the bones of his hands nearly cracked. His arms were almost wrenched out of their shoulder and elbow sockets. Everything grew dark before his eyes, but then flashes of light flared up, cavorting like devils around a campfire. He hit his head against the post a couple of times with a cry, trying to dull the greater pain with lesser pain.
   “How did you find Greek and Healey?”
   “It wasn’t me,” Brown gasped, starting to calm down a bit. The excruciating pain that had first pulsed throughout his body was now compressed into a lump in his groin. “It was another group. Another team went after them. I don’t know how.”
   “He’s lying, the shithead!” snarled someone behind him.
   Numero Uno kicked Brown in the chest, landing the blow at his solar plexus. His rib cage exploded in pain, and Brown nearly passed out. He couldn’t breathe! When the picture finally came back into focus, Brown felt himself writhing and gasping, convulsively trying to gulp in a breath of air. And not being able to do it.
   A new blow to the side, smashing his ribs. With a cry of pain, Brown was finally able to breathe, and screamed again. A new blow to the chest. For a moment he seemed to be blacking out, but coming back around, he saw his puke on his own feet. The morning coffee. Only now did he grasp what was going on. He covered his head. With every cell in his body groaning from agony, Brown realized that this nightmare was no dream, but it was really happening!
   “I hate you, you scum, I’ll kill you!” roared inside his head.
   “Bitches,” he gurgled, spitting out the rest of the vomit. “They’ll waste you all. I will personally, I promise.”
   A new kick to the groin. A thousand lightning flashes exploded before his eyes, and the electric charge through his body was so painful that Brown shrieked. He seemed to hear his own voice, hollow and wild, from somewhere outside himself.
   “Decided to play the hero, eh bitch? Just like in the movies? You’re mine, cop. And you’re where nobody can find you. I can cut you into pieces and feed you your balls to eat. I can do anything I want with you, bitch. And you’ll be shitting on yourself and you’ll slowly kick the bucket.”
   A new blow, again to the groin. Brown cowered in terror, feeling something wet between his legs. Either he had pissed on himself or it was blood. If only it was piss! Numero Uno punched him in the face with his fist, splitting his lip. His mouth filled with blood. Another blow, another, and still another. Brown felt like throwing up again.
   As if from far away, Numero Uno’s voice intoned: “How did you find Greek and Healey, bitch?”
   “OK,” he wheezed. “OK, I’ll tell you. Don’t beat me.”
   Numero Uno stopped for a couple of seconds. Brown tried convulsively to breathe. Filling his lungs with oxygen, his mind became clearer.
   “The waitress,” he muttered, spitting blood. It seemed like they had broken his teeth or gums. “The waitress in the diner. She called 911. She knew who Greek was. Saw him on TV.”
   “You’re lying, bitch.”
   “No, it’s the truth! I’m not lying! She recognized him and called 911.”
   “The shithead, he still doesn’t know we’re serious!” growled someone behind him. Luke or Walt, flashed through Brown’s head.
   “Damn it, why would I lie?”
   “You killed my friend and locked up another,” growled Numero Uno. “Start talking, you bitch. It’s the only chance for you to crawl out of here alive.”
   Masks. Only now did Brown suddenly realize why they were wearing MASKS! They didn’t intend to kill him! A flicker of hope.
   “Greek killed two cops,” Brown said hoarsely. “They were also my friends.”
   “He should have got more of them!” barked out a second voice behind him.
   “I don’t believe you, bitch,” shouted Numero Uno after a moment’s thought. Then he growled menacingly: “You will tell us everything. Sooner or later, but you will tell us everything. Better sooner than later… But it’s up to you, bitch.”
   Numero Uno stepped over and started beating him again. He made a point of not hitting his face, but Brown didn’t even notice that, having turned into a lump of unbearable pain. He had no idea how many times they had hit him, but soon the pain grew dull, as though he were floating outside his body. And they kept beating him mercilessly. Brown passed out again.
   But only for a few seconds. Then Numero Uno sadistically stepped on his scrotum, bearing down with all his weight. Brown screamed in agony, feeling that his eyes were bursting out of their sockets. He was shaking, as if in convulsions. This is the end, wailed a panicky voice inside him. They are going to make me a basket-case. Shelley! His wife’s face rose before him for a moment, through the pain.
   “Don’t! AHHH! Don’t! I’ll tell you everything! I’ll talk, I’ll talk!!”
   The leader stepped back. Below the waist, Brown’s body was a solid knot of pain. Even a brief glance in that direction sufficed to increase the pain almost to a blackout. In order not to pass out, Brown closed his eyes, clenching his teeth till his jaws hurt.
   They hit him once more. “Shelley!” he thought again. “And Carol. My daughter.” Brown was ready for anything, except to die here and leave Carol an orphan. A short blast – “You dishrag, out with it!” – was drowned by his instinct for self-preservation.
   “Hash,” Brown choked it out.
   “What?
   “What, you want to smoke some weed, shithead?” someone behind him cursed. Most likely Walt, thought Brown. Sounds like he’s older than 30. That means it’s Walt. “Let’s get it over with!”
   “It was Hash,” Brown repeated quickly. “He ratted on Healey.”
   “Hash?” said Numero Uno, thinking it over. “The pusher from Griffin Road? You mean him?”
   Brown nodded feebly. He had felt feverish, but now that feeling was giving way to a vacuum. He couldn’t feel a thing in his groin. Absolutely nothing. And the dead zone was slowly creeping along his thighs.
   “Is he your snitch?”
   “He sometimes helps us…”
   “You’re lying, bitch. He doesn’t even know us.”
   “But he knows Healey. Healey found out from Hash and his people about Mirano. About his influential friends. In short, whether he had protection.”
   Numero Uno was thinking about it; you could see that in his black eyes. He looked behind Brown, at his accomplices, but Brown couldn’t see whether they nodded or not. Numero Uno walked past him, and Brown cringed involuntarily, expecting new pain. Then somewhere behind his back there was a flash of light for a second, as a door was opened. The door slammed closed.
   Brown was alone.
   He collapsed.

   Brown didn’t remain unconscious for long, but how long it was, he had no idea. He came around when he moved a bit, which caused excruciating pain in the groin. Opening his eyes, he gnawed on his lips to keep from screaming, and an agonized moan rose from his chest.
   The swine.
   Now what? What would they do with him? Let him go? They were wearing masks. Why would they let him go? That would be stupid. After such a brazen kidnapping, that would be the height of idiocy. The police are turning the whole city upside down. They would call out the National Guard if they had to, but they would find them. Where are the bastards now? What are they doing? “Hash,” the name flashed through his mind. Shit… If he had not betrayed Hash, Brown would have been crippled for the rest of his life and would have had to eat through a straw. No doubt about that. A cardinal rule: Never betray one of your agents. But when they torture you… There’s not much choice. Charity begins at home. Besides, now Hash was safe, but Brown was not.
   But what if they go after Hash? Brown dismissed the idea. Taking revenge against a snitch who had handed over their accomplice to the police was not the gang’s top priority.
   What are Chambers and DiMaggio doing? How the hell much time do we have? Have they already grabbed him? And if not, what are they going to do? Will they look for him? The events of the preceding day flashed through his mind. They’d shot Greek. Damn… What if the division decides that after all this, Brown had just gone on a bender? Nothing like this had ever happened before. Nobody had ever killed detectives in his division before. Damn it all!
   And anyway, he had betrayed Hash. His informant. To save his own skin.
   You’re a real douche bag, Brown.
   “The Mayor and the Chief of Police want the best person on this case. And you’re my best. You know it, Troy.” That’s what Tierney said after the first explosion.
   Tierney, you were dead wrong.
   A ray of light streaked across the floor, and the door creaked open. He was not alone. Brown froze with a shudder. They’re going to kill me. They’ve come to kill me. To finish off the kidnapped cop from whom they had found out everything they could. He yearned for Shelley and Carol.
   The form of Numero Uno loomed before him, in his mask. Take off your mask, you pig! Show your loathsome, disgusting mug to the person you’re about to kill!
   “You didn’t get bored did you, shithead?”
   “What are you going to do?”
   “Funny you should ask,” the leader smirked. “I have a surprise for you, asshole. You’re going to love it.”
   He nodded to someone behind Brown’s back. Another fellow appeared, wearing the same type of mask, a bit shorter in stature. Someone grabbed his hands from behind, pulling them so hard that Brown cried out. They undid the handcuffs. Someone’s hand yanked him by the hair. Brown fell on his stomach. He tried to stand up, but a powerful blow to the head knocked him down again, and darkness descended.

   At first, Brown felt like someone was strangling him. Gasping for air, he began to come around. He was lying down, shaking. An engine was running. They carried him into a vehicle. Brown tried to get up, but someone’s knee jabbed him hard in the back. A strong hand grabbed his head and yanked it up. His Adam’s apple was mashed against a metal surface, squeezing his throat. Something was pressing the back of the head. Before him was the dirty floor of the van, and right in front was someone’s feet, wearing sneakers.
   “Feel better?” It was Numero Uno’s voice. “Hear me?”
   “Yes,” Brown managed to croak. “What are you…?”
   “Shut up and listen. Listen very carefully.”
   Brown gasped, unable to swallow without pulling his chin towards his neck. They didn’t strangle him, but around his neck, tightly fastened, there was something metallic. The horrible truth dawned on him: A COLLAR!
   “We’ve put a collar on you,” said Numero Uno. “With almost a pound of C—4. Do you know what will happen to you if it explodes?”
   “You’re out of your fucking mind,” Brown said.
   “DO YOU KNOW?” barked out Numero Uno, jerking Brown’s head until everything went black.
   “Yes,” Brown wheezed.
   “There will be absolutely nothing left of you. Your brains will be spattered all down the block; they’ll have to be picked out of the bricks of the walls.”
   “Why?”
   “Do you have Healey now? Is he in the police station?”
   “Yeah. He’ll be transferred to prison this evening or tomorrow.”
   “Fine. Because you’re going to get him out.”
   They’d gone mad. Stark, raving mad.
   “You’re off your rocker,” muttered Brown, struggling not to suffocate. “He’s in a cell under guard. In the isolation area there are two cops and surveillance cameras, with a third cop watching the monitors.”
   “That’s where you’re going. You’re going to bring him out of the cell, and you’re going to guide him to your car and leave with him. Go where he tells you. Then you’ll live to see another day.”
   “You’re nuts,” Brown repeated. “He’s in a cell under guard. In the isolation area there are two cops and surveillance cameras, with a third cop watching the monitors. They… they’ll see the collar. All the police know about your collars. They’ll immediately realize what’s up.”
   “I don’t give a flying fuck. If they want to live, they’ll let Healey go. There’s a camera on the collar, and a phone. That’s it squeezing you now on the back of the head, shithead. We will be watching everything, and if someone makes a false move, I’ll press the button. All of you will be blown up.”
   “Healey too.”
   “Tough shit. Do you want to live, copper? I can’t hear you.”
   “Yes,” Brown grunted.
   “Then you do just like I tell you. You go into the cell. You get Healey. You take him to the car. If someone tries to stop you, tell him to get lost. Everyone will see your collar. And all the cops want to live.”
   The car stopped. Someone knocked on its metal side. An unfamiliar voice announced: “We’re there.”
   A third voice, younger. Luke Thompson, age 29. The gang’s driver.
   “If you try to get the collar off, it will explode,” Numero Uno snapped, his teeth bared. “It’s programmed. If you turn off the camera and I can’t see anything, I will press the button and the collar will explode. If you go to the wrong place, I will see it and the collar will explode. If you say something to the cops that I don’t like, I will hear you. And what will happen?”
   “The collar will explode,” Brown replied.
   “All right. I will see everything and hear everything. And at any moment I will press the button, if something happens that I don’t like. My finger will be sitting right there, on the button. One false move, and that’s the end of you. Got it?”
   “Yeah.”
   “And now, beat it.”
   Numero Uno yanked Brown up by the hair. Brown managed to catch a glimpse of the dude in sneakers, the one he had already seen in the warehouse. Fifer. Brown also noticed the open laptop on the car seat, with something flickering on the screen. It was the image on the camera that was affixed to the front of his collar.
   The door swung open, and they shoved Brown out into the street. He fell on the pavement. The van zoomed off and vanished. Brown got up with difficulty, every movement shooting excruciating pain to his groin. The collar encircled his neck so tightly that he could barely breathe.
   He was standing near the door to his house, two yards from his own car.
   He glanced around, dazed. About 20 yards away, some people were walking by, a couple it seemed. They paid no attention to him.
   Brown stumbled into the car and reflexively patted his pocket; the car keys were in their usual place. He looked at the keys and the keychain alarm with amazement, as if they were objects from a parallel universe. He pushed the button on the remote, and the car doors were unlocked.
   Brown opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat. The pain in his body, especially the groin, was so unbearable that every movement made him gasp for breath, his eyes welling up with tears.
   Inspecting himself in the mirror, he saw that around his neck, like a scarf, was an aluminum tube about two inches thick. In the front, right under the chin, was a miniature camera, embedded in the collar. Its black eye stared menacingly at Brown, reminding him that they were watching him.
   In order to swallow, he had to pull his shoulders back, lessening the pressure from the collar on his Adam’s apple. He closed his eyes for a second.
   This has got to be a dream. A fucking dream. This could never happen in real life. It’s impossible.
   But it was happening. A booby-trapped police lieutenant was sitting behind the wheel of his own car.
   He rummaged around in his pockets. No badge, no pistol, no knife. But the wallet was there. They left him his wallet and the car keys.
   Realizing that he had already sat there doing nothing for some 10 seconds, Brown caught himself and started the engine. The last thing he wanted was for the bastards to decide he was up to something and to push that goddamned button.
   “Do you hear me? I’m leaving. I was just trying to get oriented.”
   Brown’s car started off smoothly and, merging onto the highway, headed toward the city center.
   He was thinking frantically as he drove. What to do now? What sort of plan? There was no plan. None whatsoever. It was the middle of the night.
   Brown took a deep breath. This was not the time to fall apart. Whenever you want, but not right now. Pull yourself together, he told himself.
   An image of the crime scene flashed through his mind. The white-faced patrolman sitting on the step of the ambulance. Brown suddenly remembered Chambers” words. After talking with the patrolmen that day, Chambers had told Brown that the first strange thing they noticed about Marino, when he was walking along with a briefcase full of money on the pre-dawn street, was his odd gait. Now Brown knew why Marino walked so strangely. This thing wrapped around his neck and squeezing his throat, preventing him from swallowing, forced the victim to pull his shoulders back and practically flatten his chin against his neck, pushing his Adam’s apple back, inside his throat.
   Need a plan. What kind of plan?
   Brown would be driving up to the Police Department. The duty officer would see the collar immediately, no doubt about that. Brown would head for the isolation cell, its door just to the right of the guard’s post. The guard would understand what’s going on. “Good Lord, what is that,” he’d begin to bawl. Brown could almost hear the shriek. “I’ve got to get to the isolation cell. Don’t get in my way,” Brown would tell him, quickly moving toward the door. Behind it would be the officer on duty at the isolation cell. Who would also notice the collar. By that time, the duty officer would have set off the alarm.
   And by the time Brown ordered him to open Healey’s cell and pulled Healey out, the lobby would already be swarming with cops.
   “Don’t come near, or the collar will explode! Everybody back! Let us by! I’ve got to get him out, so nobody gets hurt! Don’t come near, or we’re all going to die!”
   And if someone dared to disobey? If someone rushed over to Brown to try to get the collar off?
   Then suddenly, Brown figured it out.
   Numero Uno couldn’t give a flying fuck whether Brown and Healey ever left the Police Department. The gang didn’t want to get Healey out. He was already a goner. And they’re cruel bastards, who had blown Pickman to smithereens, even though he had met all their demands.
   They don’t want to save Healey – they want to destroy him. To bump off their own accomplice who had gone and gotten himself arrested, along with Brown, the top cop who had led the investigation into their gang. Brown remembered Healey during the interrogation: Despite his mountain of muscles and his rough appearance, Healey was no bad-ass criminal; he trembled after each question that really hit the mark. Despite the murder of Stoller, which allowed Numero Uno to bind all the members of the gang to each other by blood. Healey was a piece of toilet paper, the weak link of the gang.
   Two birds with one stone. As soon as Brown entered the isolation cell and appeared on camera next to Healey, they would press the button. Brown’s head would be blown to kingdom come, leaving bits of his skull and brain all over the place. The explosion would kill the guards in the isolation cell, and it would also kill Healey. And the police would have nothing on Numero Uno. No risk that Healey would spill the beans and betray his accomplices.
   Just in case Brown decided to play the hero, the leader had worn a mask. Before his death, Brown would not even be able to tell the other cops what the leader looked like.
   Brown’s blood ran cold. His hands broke into a sweat. He wiped first one palm, then the other, on his pants. Staring vacantly ahead, driving almost on autopilot, he kept going. “Now you are going to die,” said a voice in his head.
   And if he didn’t go into the isolation cell?
   Then they would just press the button. Healey would still be alive, but not Brown.
   Panicking, Brown felt like a cornered animal. He was already doomed, and there was no way out.
   Or was there?
   His thoughts flew at the speed of light. What could he do? Try to rip off the collar? Useless, they aren’t fools. Tear off the camera? If the image from the camera disappeared, they would press the button. Stop, stop, stop! How is the collar put together? The camera is on the front. It transmits a signal by a mobile phone attached to the rear of the collar. The phone is turned on and it sends a signal and the picture to the gang’s computer. What could he do? Rip off the phone? Break it? If done very quickly, it might work. But what if it didn’t? Could he rip off the phone in a fraction of a second? Brown cursed. He didn’t even know how the phone was attached to the collar! What if it was embedded?
   He turned onto Main Street. The Police Department was four blocks away. He would be there in a minute. One little minute. Just one. He didn’t know what to do… This is the end. Brown couldn’t accept that, but he understood it: the end. A fiasco. He’d lost.
   Should he give up? Let them set off the charge! At least, only one person would die. If he stayed in the car, nobody else would suffer. Drive past the Department? Just keep going until they realized that he was not going to cooperate, until they pressed the button? Brown imagined the powerful explosion. The blast would blow out the whole interior of the car. They’d be able to identify him later only by his fingerprints. That is, if he managed to keep his hands out of the direct line of the blast – otherwise they’d be ripped off, as was the case with Marino.
   A patrol car drove by. Just ahead, looming larger, was the Police Department. Ten floors of glass and concrete. The parking lot for visitors in front of the building. A rectangular hole – the entrance to the underground parking garage for service vehicles.
   THE UNDERGROUND PARKING GARAGE. The thought rang in his head like a gong. The underground parking garage!
   “Fucking connection. Why do phone calls always get cut off in the underground parking garage?”
   “There’s a repository for material evidence. It’s got thick walls. Directly above us.”
   The underground parking garage. The dead zone, right by the exit.
   If the cell phone signal is lost, what happens then?
   The picture from the camera disappears from the gang’s laptop display. No signal. The phone doesn’t transmit or receive the signal. Numero Uno squeezes the button to set off the explosives, but the phone doesn’t receive the signal. There’s no explosion.
   Brown tried not to breathe, so as not to scare off the glimmer of hope. But what if it didn’t happen that way? What if the telephone is more powerful? What if the collar has an additional antenna, amplifying the signal to the mobile phone?
   Then it’s curtains.
   But what if it doesn’t happen that way?
   It’s the only chance.
   Brown turned in at the Department, making his way through visitors parking lot, approaching the entrance to the underground garage.
   “I’m going down,” he said aloud. His voice sounded hoarse and weak and he was noticeably trembling. “If I stop here, the guard at the entrance will figure it out. They may not let me in to the isolation cell. The underground lot will allow me access to Healey, bypassing the guard at the entrance.”
   He didn’t know whether they heard him or not. Fuck it.
   The car was approaching the underground entrance. Teeth clenched, he kept going. Close to the barrier gate. Brown signaled. The cop guarding the entrance appeared in the little window for a moment and waved him along. The barrier gate slowly started rising. Brown had never noticed how slow it was. Faster, son-of-a-bitch!
   He stepped on the gas, and the car started down the ramp. He made the turn and drove between two rows of cars.
   The repository was right above him. Right up there.
   Brown put on the brake.
   Finally.
   He turned on the hazard lights, which started to light up the car in the darkened garage like a Christmas tree.
   He put his hands down, hiding them under his thighs. So that he could be recognized by his fingerprints. Got to save my hands.
   “Fuck you up the ass, you motherfuckers.” He exhaled and closed his eyes. Now there will be an explosion. His head will be scattered into a thousand pieces, all over the garage. But at least his body will be identifiable.
   He’ll be buried in a closed coffin. Shelley and Carol will never see his face. No one will see it. It simply will not exist.
   But at least no one else gets hurt.
   No explosion came. It dawned on Brown, after a few seconds that seemed like eternity: no explosion.
   Fending off illusory hope, he hissed: “Press the button, you bastard. Have a nice day.”
   Brown held his breath and braced himself, saying goodbye to life.
   No explosion.
   The repository was right above him. A dead zone. Cell phones don’t work here. The thick walls of the repository.
   Brown exhaled, trembling slightly. Hesitantly, he pulled his hands out from under his thighs. His hands were shaking.
   No explosion.
   Behind him an alarm went off, which sounded very loud to him in the closed space of the parking garage. In the rear view mirror Brown saw a patrol car blocking the passage, preventing Brown from driving through.
   He clenched his teeth, trying to stop trembling. He’d have to talk clearly, and make sure he didn’t have to repeat himself.
   The patrol car signaled again. Brown raised a weak hand. He beeped the horn in reply to the officer.
   A cop got out of the patrol car and walked over to Brown’s car, frowning. Slowly turning his head, Brown pressed the button to open the window.
   “We aren’t allowed through here. Everything OK?”
   The patrolman glanced inside. Very young fellow, looked like he was not long out of police academy. Brown looked him straight in the eye. And the eye of the camera on the two-inch aluminum collar around Brown’s neck was also looking at the patrolman.
   “Mother of God!” gasped the cop, turning white, eyes wide with horror, at the sight of the collar.
   “Call the bomb squad.” Brown managed to spit out the words, trying to speak firmly. “Don’t let anyone into the garage. I’ve got a pound of C—4 explosives on me. Call the damn bomb squad…”
   The patrolman ran towards the guard post at the entrance to the garage.
   Brown was still waiting for an explosion. If the signal is still there after all, if the collar has an amplifying antenna… Maybe Numero Uno was ignoring his “Push the button, you bastard. Have a nice day.” But the order to the patrolman to call the bomb squad – nobody had shown up yet.
   No explosion.

   The bomb squad, in protective clothing, came down to the parking garage and set up around the corner. Two concrete walls would protect them from the blast. Tierney was with them, and Brown saw his alarmed face peering around the corner a couple of times. One of the team moved toward Brown. On his helmet was a miniature camera.
   “Don’t move, sir.”
   Brown didn’t even have to try to obey – every motion sent a rush of pain shooting through his body, especially the scrotum. The bomb got into the cabin through the passenger door. Brown closed his eyes when the expert shined a flashlight right into his face.
   “Here’s the telephone,” the expert transmitted to the rest of the team around the corner. “It’s inside, no wires, no nothing.”
   That means ripping out the phone would be a bad option, Brown thought to himself.
   In a quarter of an hour it was all over. The expert, having studied how the collar was hooked up, found the wiring and the terminal. “If you try to take off the collar, it will explode.” And so, Numero Uno was not bluffing. The bomb expert, with all due precautions, disconnected the wiring and the terminal from the contact. After that, not finding any other booby-traps, he simply disconnected the mechanism and removed Brown’s collar.
   Crawling out of the car, Brown tried to stumble to the corner, his strength ebbing away, his feet barely responding. Some people with protective suits and some without them picked him up. A couple of guys in paramedic outfits ran over. Everything floated past him as if in a fog.
   But he was alive.

Chapter 6

   They took him right to the hospital. The doctors took a few x-rays and checked him out. His head was scarcely injured at all, but three ribs were fractured. Brown was more worried about the family jewels. It turned out that he had isolated hematomas of the scrotum, but nothing catastrophic. The doctor said that the pain might persist for two or three weeks. Brown had been sure that the scumbag in the warehouse had left him a eunuch, so he was ready to kiss the doctor. Maybe it was the effect of the painkillers.
   Brown stayed in the hospital until evening. Just after sunset, he convinced the doctor he was OK and persuaded him to let his friends in, who were waiting in the hall.
   They had made no progress during the day. Questioning Healey again had come up dry, even though the bundles of money from his trailer were found to have the fingerprints of Pickman and the accountant from Plate Build Construction.
   “Healey said, through his lawyer, that Greek had loaned him the money,” Chambers grumbled. “And just try to prove that it’s not so.”
   “We know it’s not,” interjected DiMaggio.
   “Son of a bitch. What’s up with him now?”
   “Healey is still at the Department, but tomorrow they’ll take him to the jail.”
   After a moment’s thought, Brown said, “We’d better get in touch with the jail. They should put him in a cell with one of their snitches. Maybe that will get the bastard to talk. Did you bring me my clothes?”
   “Are you sure you don’t want to stay here for a couple of days?” Chambers was worried. “Nobody would complain, Troy.”
   “Give me my damn pants.”
   Brown managed to put them on by himself, although with great difficulty. After a squabble with the doctor, Brown signed himself out, taking along a package of painkillers. Leaving the hospital with Chambers and DiMaggio, the first thing he did when he reached the parking lot was to light up a smoke.
   Brown still wasn’t sure that he was alive and it was all behind him.
   “I thought it was curtains. I was sure of it.”
   “We came looking for you,” DiMaggio told him. “Your car was parked in front of the house, and nobody opened the door. To be honest, we figured that you’d gone out drinking yesterday and…”
   “It would have been better to be drunk,” Brown chuckled weakly.
   “They’re fearless,” said Chambers grimly. “To kidnap a cop in broad daylight, the head of the homicide division yet, at his own home… You gotta be out of your fucking mind! I’ve never seen a gang like this in my life.”
   “We’ve never had gangs like this,” Brown replied. Gradually coming to his senses, he suddenly remembered Hash. “Shit! Where’s my phone?”
   “No phone, no gun, no badge.”
   “The fuckers! Give me yours.”
   Brown stepped aside and dialed Hash’s cell. He always tried to memorize his informants” contact information, and now it came in useful.
   “Hash, this is Lieutenant Brown. Where are you?”
   “What’s up, boss? Hash replied cheerfully. That means things are still OK with him. Brown breathed a sigh of relief.
   “Listen carefully, Hash. Put someone else in charge. You’ve got to hole up for a while. Don’t stick your neck out and don’t go outside, get it? Lay low until I tell you.”
   “Why?” Hash was alarmed. “What’s the problem?”
   “It’s a long story. Healey’s cronies may be looking for you. Ramp up the protection in your neighborhood. Tell them to be very careful about strangers and not to trust anyone.”
   “Healey’s cronies? Boss, what the hell is going on? Did you double-cross me?!”
   “I want to help you. I need you. Do what I tell you, Hash. Right now. Drop everything and split. Go somewhere no one knows about. And don’t stick your neck out, as I said. It’s important, Hash.”
   Brown hung up to avoid any more questions.
   His car was still being inspected by the forensics guys, so Chambers drove him home. There was a cruiser in front of his house.
   “Tierney’s order,” Chambers explained, with a nod to the cops in the cruiser. “The brass decided to give you protection until everything blows over.”
   Brown said good-bye and entered the house. Thanks to a knockout dose of painkillers, he didn’t feel too awful, although his whole body was throbbing, the way your gums feel where the dentist has pulled out a tooth. Laboriously climbing into a cool bathtub, Brown put an ice pack between his legs.
   He nearly passed out, then suddenly remembered Shelley. Limping over to the land line, he sprawled out on the couch and called her.
   Shelley’s voice was cold as steel. “So, you’ve deigned to call?”
   “What’s the matter with you?”
   “Today Carol decided to talk to her Dad, but your phone was turned off. We tried to call you several times: on your cell, at home, at the Department. Where were you?”
   “It’s a long story. I’ve run into some trouble. God only knows where my phone is. I’ll have to buy a new one.”
   “Did you lose it?” Shelley’s voice fairly dripped with sarcasm. “Or did you not want your wife to call you at a most inconvenient moment?”
   “Shel, just listen to yourself,” Brown groaned. He was exhausted, didn’t have the strength or the desire to argue with her.
   “Then explain what you were doing that was so all-fired important! I’ve got my own theory! Did you have a nice time? What’s her name?”
   “Don’t play the bitch, please.”
   “I haven’t even started yet!”
   “Shelley, I just want to say I love you. More than anything in the world. You and Carol.”
   “How sweet,” Shelley cut him off sharply. “And what I want to say is, don’t call again until you’ve got an explanation.”
   And she hung up.
   Crap. It’s all crap. The main thing was that Brown was alive, and it was all behind him. He could work out the rest of it; they’d gone through a lot together over the years.

   “We don’t want to go public with the story, Troy. Sure, you’d probably become a hero, but you can see that this would not exactly enhance the Department’s reputation.”
   Swallowing a painkiller to dull the pain in every cell in his body, Brown headed for the Department in the patrol car. They told him at the garage that he could reclaim his own vehicle. That, at least, was good news.
   Then Brown went to see Tierney, who gave him the bad news: The forensics people had found nothing in his car. The gang had been very careful. The only evidence was the collar, and Holtz from Forensics was working on that now. There was a clear print of an index finger on the collar – Fifer’s fingerprint. They were sure Brown was a goner, and that the explosion would wipe out the greasy print.
   “I know,” Brown agreed.
   “That’s how come we lost two people. If the public finds out that we could have lost another… that there could have been an explosion in the parking garage right under the Police Department…”
   “I know,” Brown repeated.
   “People will start asking questions. “How can the police can protect us, if they can’t even protect themselves?’ That’s what they’ll say.”
   “I know,” Brown said again. “I don’t need anything. I just want to get the bastards, Bob. Right now that’s the only thing important to me.”
   Brown went to his own division, where the detectives greeted him with applause. That was the last thing in the world he wanted. He knew he was far from being a hero. So he immediately summoned Chambers and DiMaggio into his office to go over the preliminary results.
   “We checked all the calls on Healey’s cell phone,” DiMaggio reported. “Nothing, Troy. They’re very careful. The word “conspiracy” means something to them.”
   “Pretty much nothing,” Chambers added. “After Greek escaped, he called Healey twice from a pay phone on Desert Road.”
   “Desert Road? The industrial suburb,” Brown frowned. “There’s a bunch of warehouses there.”
   “Lots of warehouses,” DiMaggio added skeptically, with emphasis on the word “lots.” “A couple of hundred warehouses, Troy.”
   “Still, it’s a lead. Let’s have a helicopter fly over the area and inspect each warehouse with binoculars. We know how the gang’s warehouse looks from the outside, and how the yard in front of it looks.”
   “We’re looking for a needle in a haystack, but we’ve got to try,” Chambers agreed uncertainly.
   Chambers was thinking: Greek, Healey, Fifer, and Thompson. Four men, plus the ringleader makes five. We’ve got nothing on them yet. Nothing on the others either. Shit.
   “We’ve got zero,” Brown admitted gloomily. “Damn it, why did fucking Healey meet with Greek, rather than one of the others? Then at least we would have had something by now.”
   Suddenly Brown remembered something. “Hold it! We followed Healey for half a day. Who did he meet besides Greek?”
   “Nobody. He went to a couple of stores… Some company office…”
   “Where are the photos? Did they take surveillance photos?”
   Chambers brought in a stack: Healey’s trailer, Healey drinking beer in front of the trailer, Healey’s car on city streets… When Brown found what he was looking for, he coiled up like a spring, his eyes drilling into the photos: the old Katanyan Ceilings office building. Healey talking with somebody. Tall, dark, well-built, middle-aged, with a black mustache and beard. Brown stared at the man’s face for a long time before saying: “The motherfucker… That’s him. It’s their chief.”
   “What? Are you sure? Who, that guy?”
   “I’ve seen his eyes staring right at me. I’ll stake my life on it: It’s him.”
   After a few hours, they had the whole story. Katanyan Ceilings was a tiny company that installed stretched ceilings. It had opened a year and a half ago. Business was bad, the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. Only some miracle kept it afloat.
   “The owner of the firm was Randy Katanyan,” said Chambers. “The guy in the photo. No criminal record. Native of Lakewood, moved here a year and a half ago and immediately opened the firm.”
   “Lakewood.” Brown mused, studying the materials. “That was where Thompson lived before returning to the city. It’s all coming together. Lakewood was where Katanyan met Thompson, who brought in the others. What about business property? Did you contact the IRS?”
   “According to its tax returns, Katanyan Ceilings was barely making ends meet.”
   “The company is only a cover.”
   “Property…” Chambers flipped through the papers. “Main office. Workshop for production of stretch ceilings, but they rented it out six months ago. And more… Katanyan Ceilings also owns a warehouse on Harrison Street.”
   Harrison Street was on the industrial outskirts of the city, in the warehouse district.
   “Harrison Street,” Brown gasped with excitement. “That’s parallel to Desert Road, where Greek was when he called Healey!”
   “Holy shit, it’s all coming together,” said DiMaggio.
   “First we’ve got to check everything. I don’t want any mistakes.”
   Brown contacted a police helicopter, which headed straight for the industrial district. Finding the warehouse, the cops in the helicopter took a couple of photos and transmitted them to the Department. When Brown opened the photos on his computer, he knew right away they had hit the bull’s-eye. This was the building they’d seen on the video, where the gang put a collar on a mannequin to show Marino what would happen to his head if he disobeyed their orders.
   “The very same place.” he exclaimed. “Jeez, we’ve found them.”

   The machinery of the Police Department swung into action. While one group of detectives, led by Brown, got search and arrest warrants, others went to set up surveillance around the Katanyan Ceilings office, the company’s warehouse, and in front of Katanyan’s house.
   Meanwhile, the raids began.
   A SWAT team surrounded the warehouse. The windows were high, so there was no danger of being seen from the inside. They moved quickly: One group blocked the back door, and the main assault team fastened an explosive to the warehouse door. As the explosion ripped the door off its hinges, light grenades and a smoke bomb sailed through the window. Smashing the back door with a sledgehammer, the second group also entered the warehouse.
   But it was empty. The troopers found only dried spots of blood on the floor in the center of the main room, around the post where Brown had been beaten.
   “Everything’s clean,” reported the senior officer by walkie-talkie.
   Another group of police, led by DiMaggio, meanwhile raided the Katanyan Ceilings office. The employees were shocked to see the police.
   “Your boss, Randy Katanyan, where is he?”
   “Mr. K-K-Katanyan didn’t show up today,” his secretary stuttered.
   Chambers and a SWAT team went to the gang leader’s house. The police who had been watching the building reported: “About an hour ago, we saw a male silhouette. The target is there.”
   They surrounded the house, and the special forces broke down the door with a sledgehammer and burst inside, shouting, “Police! Search warrant!” The troopers, with helmets and assault rifles, dispersed and checked all the rooms in the house.
   It was empty. Katanyan had left.
   “I swear, we saw him!” insisted the detective who had been monitoring the house before Chambers and his team arrived. “A silhouette in the window, he parted the curtains and looked out.”
   Chambers phoned Brown right away. “Bad news, Troy. It seems that Katanyan noticed our surveillance and left through the back door.”
   In the back room, which had once served as an office, they found a table with drawers. On top of it was a computer mouse and some wires, which had evidently been plugged into a laptop until recently. Brown turned around, looking at the wall behind him. “This is where they shot the video.”
   “Look, sir!” one of the detectives exclaimed, as he flung open the rickety closet against the wall.
   There lay pieces of future collars: aluminum cases, cell phones, and miniature video cameras. Wires and terminals. A soldering iron. A box containing bolts, screws, and screwdrivers.
   Brown discovered his own things on one of the shelves. His badge, pistol, knife, and cell phone. He sniffed the gun, but there was no smell of gunpowder; it hadn’t been fired.
   There was a safe on the bottom shelf of the closet.
   “Call for the experts to open it.”
   “There’s another room,” said one of the officers.
   Going inside, Brown found himself in a tiny enclosure with no windows, something like a storage room or closet. A cot, empty beer bottles, an old TV in the corner.
   “It’s his hideout,” said Brown. “While we were looking for Greek, he was holed up here the whole time.”
   Chambers and the detectives were searching Katanyan’s house.
   “Rick, take a look at this.”
   They were finishing the search in Katanyan’s bedroom. The detective who had called out to Chambers handed him a strip of photos taken at an automatic booth in a shopping plaza in the city.
   They showed a couple posing, embracing, for the camera. Chambers recognized the man in the pictures right away: It was Katanyan. But who’s the woman hugging him? Chambers couldn’t remember, although he could have sworn he had seen her somewhere. “Shit. I know her, but where from?”
   “Maybe she works in his office?”
   “I only saw Katanyan there, when he was meeting Healey. Must have been somewhere else…”
   The experts who had been summoned to the warehouse carefully opened the safe. There were packets of money inside. Brown counted $63,000. On another shelf, there was a package. Brown carefully picked it up and peered inside: an object weighing about 3 pounds. A brown mass, like plasticine or clay.
   Plastic explosive. C—4.
   At Katanyan’s house, Chambers was frantically reviewing the events of recent days, trying to piece together exactly when he might have seen the woman. Twenty-five years old, pretty, sweet face. Where? The diner where they arrested Healey and shot Greek? No… One of the crime scenes? No… The bank?
   Hmm… the bank. Chambers looked closely at the picture again. “She works at Rentier Bank. The young woman who opened an account for me. That’s her!”
   By evening, the police knew her name: Nina Pitillo, age 26. They had her address and immediately dispatched several plain-clothes teams for surveillance. They tapped her home and cell phones.
   At the warehouse, they found fingerprints of Fifer, Thompson, and Katanyan. Including on bits of future collars. That was enough to issue arrest warrants for all three of them.
   By the time night fell, every patrolman in the city had the APB on each of them. Their pictures and distinguishing features were shown on TV and posted on the Internet. The police put up cordons and roadblocks at the exits from the city. In the evening, the police raided the seediest joints in town.
   But none of the criminals were apprehended that day.
   Back home, Brown took a shower, relieved that his body was beginning to recover. His chest, covered with crimson bruises the size of a fist, ached with every movement, but at least the swelling in his groin had begun to subside. He could walk now without cursing a blue streak at every step.
   Before going to bed, he decided to call Shelley. She didn’t pick up. He tried again – same thing. She obviously didn’t want to talk to him. He was angry at first, but then tried to put himself in her place. She had no idea what had happened to him yesterday. So he sent a text message. The first was, “Why aren’t you answering? Phone me.” Second: “Pick up the phone.” Still no signs of life. Brown was starting to get pissed.
   To distract himself, he turned on the TV. And there, on the nightly news, he was surprised to see his own photo on the screen.
   “… We learned about it from our sources in the Police Department. Lieutenant Brown, chief of the Homicide Division, was kidnapped near his own home. According to unconfirmed reports, the criminals tried to persuade the policeman to release one of their accomplices. But the Department would not comment on our source’s report, neither confirming nor denying it.”

   Tierney hit the roof. His voice thundered in Brown’s ear from the speaker phone: “The sons-of-bitches! Somebody sold the TV station this story. And they sure must have landed a pile of dough for it.”
   “It wasn’t me, if you’re interested.”
   “Of course it wasn’t you! No one thinks you’d boast about how they almost cut your balls off in some filthy warehouse!”
   Good old Tierney. After a few more words with the chief, Brown hung up and drove toward the highway. The road led to a gate through a wall topped with barbed wire. The city jail. The last time Brown was there was when he was taking Greek out.
   Healey and his lawyer were already in the interrogation room, and looked at him suspiciously. Sitting down across from them, Brown dispensed with any preliminaries. “You probably already know that we’re on to your head man. Randy Katanyan is now on the wanted list.”
   Healey said nothing.
   “Brad, we know all about the murder of Stoller. Was that Katanyan’s idea? To bind you all together by blood? So that if one of you was arrested, he would keep his mouth shut and not squeal on the others to the cops?”
   Healey said not a word.
   “Testify, Brad. There’s no cops” blood on your hands, as there was on Greek’s. You didn’t kidnap a policeman or try to perpetrate a terrorist act in the Police Department building. And it is an act of terrorism, Brad. They are facing the death penalty. Katanyan, Fifer, Thompson – all of them. You’re cleaner than they are. If you testify, we can make a deal.”
   Healey was silent, but from the look in his eyes, Brown knew that he was on the right track. Then he played his main card. “They didn’t want to get you out, Brad. They put a collar on me, so I would come to the detention center and find you. And then they would push the button, to kill both of us.”
   “Why?” asked Healey, hesitating.
   “Because you got caught. While they were beating me up at the warehouse, they were talking about you. They called you a wimp. They said you broke under interrogation. They didn’t trust you, Brad.”
   Brown had invented that. But in the first interrogations, Healey showed that he really was weak and ready to break; they should have pushed him harder. If it had not been for the lawyer, Healey would have broken during the first interrogation. And if Brown noticed this, then certainly Healey’s accomplices, who knew him much better, would have known it.
   Healey leaned over to his lawyer and whispered something in his ear. The lawyer looked at Healey with surprise, nodded, then turned to Brown: “We need to confer.”
   While waiting in the hallway, Brown called Chambers at the Department.
   “Nothing to brag about, Troy,” the latter answered. “At night, Nina Pitillo called her parents. We verified that it was them. And in the morning she went to the bank. She didn’t communicate with anyone on the way there. Now she’s at work.”
   Brown told him to keep up the surveillance and not let Nina out of his sight. She was now the only one they had. However, if Katanyan were really as cruel a bastard as Brown believed him to be, he would ditch a girlfriend in a minute to save his own skin. But it was a chance that couldn’t be passed up.
   Healey’s lawyer came over to Brown. “What do you propose?”
   Brown had discussed the terms of a deal that morning on the phone with the Assistant DA: Minimum sentence.
   After about two hours, in the same interrogation room, with the Assistant DA present, Healey began to testify. He spoke slowly and precisely, looking into the lens of the video camera that was mounted on a tripod in front of him and recording his every word.
   “Katanyan is very careful. In Lakewood, he had some kind of dealings with an Armenian gang. As I understood it, he scammed them out of some money, so he decided to escape to here. Luke Thompson drove him, with Greek and Walter Fifer. Then I joined them.”
   The Assistant DA asked about Stoller’s murder. Healey didn’t want to talk about that, but a deal is a deal. “Stoller owed me money. Almost $20,000. I told Walt about it, Walter Fifer. Then the word got to Randy. I didn’t know it yet, but Katanyan was already planning to kill someone. We would all do it together, so we’d be a real team. Forged in blood.”
   “When did it happen?”
   “One week after Katanyan came up with the Stoller plan, it was Thompson’s birthday. Randy said this would be the perfect murder. Each of us would have an alibi.”
   “Was Katanyan also there?”
   “Of course,” Healey nodded morosely. “But in case the cops came after us, he forbade us to mention him. As if he wasn’t there. Randy didn’t want a soul to find out that he even existed. Everyone must take me for just a businessman, he told us.”
   Healey fell silent. The Assistant DA reminded him that he was being listened to carefully.
   “We got to Stoller’s place in Walt’s van. I knocked on the door, asked him to come out. But Stoller seemed to realize that I hadn’t come on a social visit, and slipped out through a window. But they saw him from the van. Walt and Luke headed him off, beat him, and dragged him into the van. He was yelling his head off.”
   “Then what?”
   “We drove him out of town.”
   “And?”
   “And… killed him. Each… each of us took a shot. From the chest to the head. Then we buried him.”
   “Do you remember where?”
   Healey nodded. The Assistant DA asked him a number of questions about the gang’s first murder, and then went on to the latest developments.
   Healey told him everything.
   “Randy tried for a long time to get an inside person at the bank. And four months ago, it seems, he met Nina. One of his former girlfriends brought the two of them together.”
   “Nina was his informant?”
   “She called Katanyan when the time seemed right. She had access to all company documents, so she told him everything he wanted to know. Addresses, recent transactions, how much money was cashed, the name of the firm’s owner, and even his home address – everything.”
   “A total of two kidnappings. In both cases, the victims headed construction companies. Why?”
   “It was Randy’s idea. He said the targets should be working in the same business. That would send the cops off on a wild goose chase.”
   The questioning took more than an hour and a half. Healey told them all the details of Katanyan’s plan.
   “Fine, Mr. Healey. Where might Katanyan be now?”
   “I’m not exactly sure. I’ve heard that he has a couple of apartments, where you could go and sit things out. But I don’t know where he is. Katanyan was always careful. That’s why the cops never caught him, even though he’s left behind ten corpses. He boasted to us about that.”
   “What was Katanyan planning to do after the second kidnapping?”
   “A third. He wasn’t going to stop.”
   “Do you know who he wanted to kidnap the third time?”
   Healey hesitated. “Greek and I talked about that once, when… when the cops appeared.”

   The third victim was to be Sanford Haas, the president of one of the biggest construction companies in the city, NNS Industrial Engineering. Brown went there immediately with a group of detectives.
   Haas was shocked. “Me? They want to kidnap me? Are you kidding?”
   “Do you follow the news?” Brown replied. “Over the past week, two heads of construction companies have already been killed. Mr. Haas, this is very serious. If they put a collar on you, you’re as good as doomed.”
   “Oh, my God…”
   “Do you use a security company?”
   “Personally no, but the company has a contract with one.”
   “Personal protection?”
   “Only for the driver; he’s a former policeman. I… I never needed protection. We live in a quiet town…”
   “Not anymore we don’t.”
   It was decided to give Haas “by-the-book” protection: Two police cars were posted around his house, and two more detectives in bullet-proof vests would follow him at all times. Several groups of cops would start surveillance of Haas immediately, trying to identify and head off all possible threats.
   But the gang struck somewhere else altogether.
   “The hardest thing is to catch them red-handed, but shit, what choice do we have but to try?” Brown said to Chambers as they left the office of NNS Industrial Engineering.
   “And what if they try to… I don’t know, blow themselves up when we arrest them?”
   “We have to brief all the cops who will be guarding Haas. He won’t leave the office for the next couple of hours, so there’s still time.”
   Brown’s cell phone rang. The display showed an unfamiliar number. When Brown replied, he heard an alarmed, but familiar, voice: “This is Basso on Griffin Road. We’ve got a problem. Hash has disappeared.”

Chapter 7

   Brown took Chambers along and rushed to Griffin Road. Along the street the tension was palpable. At every corner, people from Hash’s gang clustered around the car, watching the police apprehensively. Basso, who had been left in charge, came up to Brown. “What’s happening?” he demanded.
   “I don’t know.”
   “Hash decided to lay low after your call, and now he’s disappeared! What’s up? Where is he?”
   “Did you hear me? I don’t know.”
   “He’s lying!” One of the guys stepped forward. He had evidently been an ordinary street runner not long ago, to judge by the fact that he was wearing several layers of oversized clothing of the sort street runners use to hide their merchandise. ‘It’s because of him that Hash got involved in this shit! Freakin’ cop!”
   The guy spat on the ground in Brown’s direction, took another step forward and, staring hard at the policeman, showed the chrome-plated barrel protruding from his belt. Chambers reached for his holster, spitting out a warning: “Take it easy, boy! Stay right where you are!”
   “Basso, do you want a fight with cops in the middle of the street?” said Brown to the boss. “Do you think that’ll get Hash back?”
   Thinking for a minute, Basso motioned the guy to step back. The latter, clenching his teeth with fury, reluctantly complied.
   “Where did Hash go after my call?”
   “He did what you told him to. We drove home, got his belongings. Then I took him to a motel on Deward. Sometimes he hung out there with chicks. Today I took him some dough, but he wasn’t there. And the room looked as if it had been searched. His phone lay on the floor, broken.”
   “Those motherfuckers…”
   Brown was at a loss. He cursed himself for having done no more than call Hash. After all, it was he who betrayed his informant to the gang. And now the guy had one foot in the grave – if he was lucky. At worst, he was already a corpse.
   “Wait, Basso. You took him cash? Right off the street? Did he keep it on himself?”
   “Of course not.”
   “Did he take it somewhere?” astonished, Brown let loose a string of expletives. “Dammit, did I fail to express myself clearly? Do I have a diction problem? I told Hash to sit tight and not stick his neck out ANYWHERE! Where did he take the cash?”
   Basso hesitated. On the one hand, he was worried about Hash. On the other, a bunch of cops was standing in front of him with their guns at the ready, and he didn’t trust them as far as he could throw them. That’s what he’d learned, growing up on the streets.
   “I don’t know.”
   “Think about it. Not to a bank, of course. Where did Hash put his money? Where’s his stash of cash, Basso?” Basso kept his lips zipped. Brown sighed, suppressing his irritation. “Listen, buddy. The gang that we are now rounding up came after him. The bastards with aluminum collars stuffed with C—4. And they need money now to clear out of the city, because they’re not going to get anything here. Can you imagine what they’ll do with Hash, if we don’t find him? They need money, and Hash has some.”
   Basso still hesitated. Brown said to him and the others: “We don’t give a damn about the money and drugs! We’re not narcs, we’re from Homicide! No cop is going to touch the money, you hear? I promise. Are you satisfied now, Basso, you fucker? Where is Hash’s hiding place?”
   Hesitating, turning to look at the others, Basso finally spoke. “Hash has another apartment, on Steel Court. A couple of times I was with him when he took his dough over there.”

   Steel Court was on the other side of town. Brown and Chambers jumped into their car and rushed over. Behind them came Basso and his heavies in two cars; they were not going to rely on Brown’s word. Turning on his flashers on the roof, Brown called DiMaggio, who was on duty at the Department.
   “Run over to 1530 Steel Court, it’s two minutes from the Department! Don’t let on that you’re a cop, they might follow you home. Apartment 48. If the coast is clear, just keep a lookout.”
   “I don’t trust these guys,” muttered Chambers anxiously, checking his rear-view mirror. “They’ve got a raft of guns but no brains. If they start shooting…”
   “Rick, they’re on our side now.”
   Ten minutes later, DiMaggio called back. “Troy, there’s nothing suspicious in and around the building. The apartment is locked, no traces of a break-in. Maybe they’ve already been here and emptied out his stash?”
   “Hash turned over the gang to the cops, and they know it. If Katanyan already had the money, we would know about it. Just keep watching, we’re close by.”
   DiMaggio stood in front of the house, wondering what to do next. Noticing some movement in his peripheral vision, he looked, and his jaw dropped. He turned aside and whispered into the phone:
   “Black van, tinted glass. Troy, is this what I think it is?”
   Hash, pale as death, climbed stiffly out of the van. His face was swollen – they had obviously beaten him. But that wasn’t all. Around his neck was an aluminum tube two inches thick, which looked like a collar.
   DiMaggio blanched and headed for the corner of the building, instinctively moving away from the bomb. “He’s got a collar on, Troy. A collar! Your guy is booby-trapped.”
   “Fuck! Don’t do anything, we’re nearby, you hear?”
   Hash leaned helplessly to one side. The door slammed shut behind him, and DiMaggio caught a glimpse of the guy in the cabin. It was Fifer, whose photographs and distinguishing features every cop in town knew by heart. Hash crossed the street to the house, wobbling from side to side in confusion. It looked like he was high, but it was actually something quite different: shock.
   Struggling to keep control over the speeding car, Brown grabbed the phone and called Basso.
   “They’ve brought Hash here. He’s got the collar on. Wait a block away; if they see you, they’ll know what’s going on and press the button. Do you hear me? Don’t try to do anything!”
   Hash had crossed the street. His eyes had an otherworldly and blind expression; he was only thinking about that pound of plastic explosive around his neck. He walked with a strange gait, as if he had a steel rod along his spine. He disappeared inside the building.
   Brown parked his car around the corner from the gang’s van, on the other side of the street. Getting out, he cautiously looked around. Now the van’s license plate was not covered with dirt. The gang was no longer concerned with secrecy – they were going for broke. The van had no side windows, but there was tinted glass on the back door. Bad news.
   Across the street, DiMaggio was walking along, posing as a passer-by. Brown phoned him and whispered: “Go into the building; you stand out like a sore thumb, they may figure out who you are!”
   DiMaggio was ready for anything except going inside after a guy who was wearing a pound of plastic explosive. But he obeyed.
   Brown and Chambers fastened on the bullet-proof vests that were lying in the trunk and put on jackets over them. Then the last dash. They hurried around the corner and headed for the van. The gangsters were most likely looking at the laptop display, but you don’t want to take risks. So Brown walked along, pretending to dial a number or send a text message on his cell. Ten yards away, he stepped off the sidewalk and crossed the street. As soon as he calculated that he was no longer in the field of view from inside the van, he rushed to its side door and stopped, silently grabbing his weapon.
   Deep breath, exhale. Deep breath, exhale. Clenching his pistol, he grabbed the door of the van and opened it.
   “Police! Hands up!”
   At that instant, Chambers, who had come up on the driver’s side, broke the glass of the driver’s door and shouted, aiming at the terrified Thompson:
   “Hands on the wheel, you bastard!”
   That left Fifer inside the van, sitting with the open laptop. His face was motionless and his hands had frozen halfway to the keyboard.
   “Hands up, pronto! It’s all over! Hands up! Hands up!”
   Fifer hesitated, but at the last instant resolve flashed in his eyes. His right hand shot to the keyboard. Brown opened fire.
   Three shots, three bullets to the head and chest. The impact hurled Fifer backwards, his head shattering the glass in the back door as he came to rest sticking halfway out of the van.
   People were shouting somewhere, and the couple across the street rushed away.
   Chambers yanked Thompson, who was in a state of shock, out of the van by the scruff the neck. Knocking him to the pavement, he twisted his arms behind him and clamped on handcuffs.
   “Rick, drag him over here!” Brown shouted, jumping into the van. On the computer display, as in a first person computer game, he saw the apartment tthrough which Hash was slowly making his way. Toward a massive safe. With trembling hands, Hash appeared in the frame, getting ready to open it.
   “Call the bomb squad and the cavalry!” Brown barked out to Chambers, and, jumping over to Thompson, grabbed him by the throat. “How do you turn off the collar? How do you turn it off, you bastard?”
   “You can’t,” Thompson gasped. “It can’t be turned off. They’ll all have to croak.”
   Cursing like blazes, Brown rushed to the laptop. Hash had already opened the safe. Inside were stacks of money, stolen jewels with which addicts had paid for their dope on Griffin Road, and some papers. Brown quickly phoned DiMaggio.
   DiMaggio carefully crept up to the door of apartment 48, opened the door, and, trying to sound calm, leapt into the unknown: “Hash, police!”
   Hash stopped and turned deathly pale.
   “Hash, do you hear me? I’m from the police, from Brown!”
   “Don’t come near!” Hash’s voice shook. “Not one step, do you hear?”
   “Relax, buddy, we’ve got them! Those cruds in the van, we’ve got them! Nobody is going to push the button, relax, do you hear?”
   Hash froze, not believing his ears. DiMaggio cautiously headed further into the apartment. Hash looked at him, eyes wide with fear and panic.
   “It’s all over, Hash,” DiMaggio said reassuringly. The main problem was to get Hash to calm down and not to panic. “We’ve got them. You’re not going to explode, but we’ve still got to take off this fucking thing, and we won’t be able to cope with it ourselves. Understand?”
   Hash nodded weakly.
   “Atta boy. So listen to me. There’s a vacant lot behind the building. That’s where we’re going. Slowly, no hurry. And we’re going to wait for the bomb squad. When they get there, it’ll be all over for you. Do you understand?”
   Hash again nodded weakly.
   “Excellent, Hash. But… try not to nod, OK? You don’t want to jostle that thing on your neck, buddy.”
   Slowly, as if carrying the fate of the world in their hands, they headed to the stairs. It took about ten minutes to go down. There were already patrolmen by the back door by the vacant lot, and they got out of the way at the sight of Hash.
   Brown had called in the same bomb squad that had taken the collar off his own neck. At least they had experience.
   Hash closed his eyes tightly, muttering something under his break when the bomb expert in protective clothing approached. Tears streamed down the gangster’s swollen, battered cheeks. In a minute, the bomb expert had very carefully removed the collar.
   “Finished.” Brown heard the magic word by radio. And only now did he breathe with relief. Hash was alive. Brown had set the guy up by betraying him to Katanyan, but it was he who ultimately saved his life. Thank God.
   When the paramedics helped Hash to the street, persuading him to let them look him over, Hash noticed Brown, who crossed the street toward him. But Hash threw up his hands, shouting with hatred: “Don’t come near, you scumbag! Not one step closer. I personally will bite your head off, you bitch, if you come near! Don’t let me lay eyes on you ever again! I’m serious! If I see you again, it’s curtains for you, you scumbag!”
   Brown grimly looked away. He knew that he deserved every word of it.
   But overall, it had ended well.
   Except for one thing.
   Katanyan was still at large.

   “We lost the target,” phoned in one of the detectives who were conducting tailing Nina Pitillo.
   “What? How could you, you ass-hole?” Brown was taken aback.
   “Sorry, Lieutenant. She went into a café for lunch, and never came out. It turned out that she left through the back way. She left her phone on the table.”
   “Shit!”
   Slamming down the phone, Brown banged his fist on the table with all his might.
   Detectives were interrogating Thompson in the interrogation room of the homicide division. Still shocked that he fallen into the hands of the police, Thompson could hardly say a word. But they did manage to drag something out of him: Katanyan had another apartment, on Ash Street, in case of need. But Thompson didn’t know exactly where it was. Or didn’t want to say. Brown sent nearly a dozen plainclothes detectives to Ash Street, but their chances were negligible of seeing Katanyan or Nina, or finding the owner of some nearby shop who would suddenly remember that the guy in the photo often went to the building across the street.
   When Brown went up to see Tierney and report the latest news, his chief received him enthusiastically: “It’s not so bad, Troy! On the contrary, everything is fine! Only one gang member is still at large, and he won’t be able to hide for long! The exits from the city are closed off, and we’ll get him, sooner or later!”
   Brown wasn’t so sure. When he returned to his office, his cell phone rang. Seeing the name “Shelley” on display, Brown didn’t believe it at first.
   “My God, Troy! Shelley was crying. “Why didn’t you tell me anything? Why?”
   “What?”
   “I saw the news about you on the Internet! They beat you? How are you? My God, why didn’t you say anything?!”
   “Excuse me, I tried…”
   “It’s not for you to excuse yourself to me! Is that why you didn’t answer the phone? Troy, my God, I’m so ashamed. I acted like such a bitch! Shall I come to be with you? I can drop everything, and Carol and I could be there by evening!”
   “It’s not necessary, darling,” Brown smiled. “I’m OK. And I won’t need to be here much longer.”
   As if to confirm these words, five minutes later Chambers, brimming with excitement, came into his office. “We’ve found Nina. She bought a ticket for a bus to Lakewood.”

   Lakewood. Katayan had come from there. So he might also be on that bus.
   The bus was scheduled to leave at 4:25 p.m. An hour before, detectives started heading for the bus station. One by one, in jeans or sportswear, no suits with jackets and ties. Brown was convinced that Katanyan had a truly animal-like instinct for trouble. One mistake on their part, and he would vanish.
   Brown pulled up to the bus station half an hour before the scheduled departure. In the locker room he had grabbed a hoodie belonging to one of the detectives in his division. There was a chance that Katanyan would recognize him.
   “All local cops stand aside,” he said by walkie-talkie. “Tell everyone. Make sure there’s not a soul in uniform in the area of Terminal D.”
   Some detectives kept watch in the waiting room, trying to blend in with the crowd. Several other men were in the terminal area. Carrying suitcases and backpacks, they looked like people waiting for a bus, but they surveyed the scene carefully.
   Before getting out of his car, Brown swallowed a handful of painkillers.
   He walked over to Terminal D about 15 minutes prior to departure. The regular bus had just pulled up. Although the door was still closed, passengers began to gather around with their bags. Bus station workers brought a cart with the passengers” luggage and began to slowly load the bags into the baggage compartment.
   Nina and Katanyan were nowhere to be seen.
   Brown exchanged glances with DiMaggio, who was at Terminal C with a bag slung over his shoulder. He shook his head, barely noticeably: nobody here.
   Chambers was in Terminal E, pretending to be studying the tourist guidebook to Lakewood. He had managed to buy it half an hour before at the newspaper shop in the waiting room. Peering anxiously at Brown, he returned to the travel guide, surreptitiously casting glances around him.
   Nina and Katanyan were nowhere to be seen.
   The bus driver opened the door. Passengers, chatting among themselves, started slowly boarding the bus.
   Nina and Katanyan were still nowhere to be seen.
   Brown carefully looked around. Suddenly, in the crowd near Terminal B, he saw a familiar face. Or was it his imagination? Brown took a good look: Nina, with a bag over her shoulder, appeared in the crowd waiting for the bus. She had dyed her hair, but her face was easy to recognize. She walked along, chatting cheerfully, without a care in the world, with a tall fellow in a baseball cap and sunglasses.
   Brown stopped dead in his tracks. It was Katanyan. He had shaved off his mustache and beard, but Brown immediately recognized him. Moving toward them in a half-turn, Brown pretended to scratch his ear, while whispering into the microphone hidden in his sleeve:
   “I see them. Terminal B. Nina is a brunette, Katanyan a tall guy in a baseball cap and glasses.”
   Chambers didn’t bat an eyelash until they had passed by. Only then, turning around, did his eyes find the back of Katanyan’s head in the crowd, and he nodded, ever-so-slightly, to Brown.
   Five people were standing in front of the bus’s wide-open door. Nina and Katanyan had to wait their turns, just ordinary passengers, without a trace of excitement or anxiety.
   Or was there? Katanyan, smiling light-heartedly, was looking furtively around him.
   “We’ll get them after the others get in,” Brown whispered into the microphone, as he walked toward the bus.
   Chambers was coming toward him from Terminal E, and DiMaggio from the other side. They were closing in on Katanyan and he didn’t even suspect it. Of the three of them, he only knew Brown, who was standing just a dozen yards behind him with head bowed low, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled low over his forehead.
   Katanyan was nervous. He knew it was a natural reaction, but he was on the alert, picking up every movement around him. His sunglasses hid his eyes, but he was constantly looking about him. Some guy walked towards them from Terminal C, adjusting the bag on his shoulder. Young, about 30. He wasn’t looking at them. Act calm.
   There were only two more passengers still in front of them in line. In a minute, Katanyan and Nina would be inside. He was carrying fake documents in the name of Samuel Krespo. The cops don’t know Nina, Katanyan was sure of that. Lots of people worked at Rentier Bank, after all. It would take time for the cops to check them all out.
   Katanyan again looked quickly around him.
   At the exit of Terminal E there were two uniformed cops. They were standing there and looking curiously in his direction.
   Turning away, Katanyan’s blood ran cold. Patrolmen did not intervene when detectives were getting ready for a sudden capture, he’d known that for a long time.
   “Got the tickets?” Nina smiled at him.
   Katanyan nodded curtly, getting ready. Money and a gun in his pocket. Suitcase… to hell with it.
   The last passenger in front of them stepped up.
   Now!
   Katanyan pushed Nina aside and took off running.
   Chambers charged to head him off. Katanyan whipped out a pistol on the run and fired, without aiming. Chambers fell to the ground with a cry.
   Pandemonium broke out on the platform. All the passengers were rushing about, shouting and shrieking, trying to get as far away as their legs would carry them. Forcing his way through the terrified crowd, DiMaggio tried to reach the bus.
   “Make way, police! I’m with the police!”
   Brown grabbed his gun and rushed after Katanyan.
   Katanyan hurtled across the square in front of the bus station, toward the outbuildings, the parking area for buses, and the service station. Still running, he turned around. Seeing Brown, he shot twice in his direction, then raced around the corner to the service station.
   “Stop! Police! It’s all cordoned off here!” Brown shouted. Katanyan kept running. Brown fired, on the run. The bullet knocked off a piece of plaster from the gas station building, a yard behind Katanyan. Brown shot again, and Katanyan responded with two shots. One bullet flashed by, burning Brown’s left hand.
   Katanyan disappeared around the corner. Sputtering with pain, Brown brushed his right palm, which was clutching the gun, against his left hand: It was covered with blood. “Son-of-a-bitch.”
   He kept running.
   Reaching the turn, Brown held the pistol in front of him. Shots rang out, and he barely managed to dodge the bullets, which sliced chunks of paint and plaster from the corner of the building, throwing a cloud of dust into his eyes. Cursing, he wiped his face with his hand.
   He crouched down and looked around the corner, ready to shoot. There was nobody there. Holding the pistol in his outstretched hands, Brown moved forward.
   Breathing heavily, he thanked God for the existence of painkillers. With every leap, he felt a pain in his groin, but knew that if it were not for those pills, he’d already have collapsed to the ground, half-dead from excruciating pain.
   He walked briskly, weapon at the ready. The gas station was on the right, the indoor parking spaces to the left, some sheds and low and narrow warehouses. Brown was starting to get flustered, when he saw a side street to the left. Go straight or turn?
   Looking more closely, he saw a spent cartridge in the yard to the left, and rushed in that direction.
   He ran by a row of low, motley buildings along the dusty road. He really had no idea where he was. Are these warehouses for the bus station or for some other property?
   No sign of Katanyan. And nobody who might be able to point out which way he ran.
   An intersection ahead. Right or left? First Brown turn left, going in a wide semicircle to the right, as they’d been taught in SWAT courses. Nobody. Then he did the same thing with a turn to the right. Not a soul. On both sides, nothing but broken-down buildings, warehouses, half-abandoned wrecks that had formerly served some industrial purpose. But no signs of life.
   Somewhere from the right came a low rumble. Raising his pistol, Brown rushed in that direction.
   After 20 yards, he slowed down. There was an empty clip lying on the ground. Katanyan had run out of ammunition.
   Brown concentrated on every sight and sound, moving forward one step at a time. No motion around him. He held his pistol at the ready, listening intently and frantically wondering where Katanyan could have disappeared to. Total silence.
   And then he noticed the flicker of a shadow on the ground next to him, and he managed to look around.
   Katanyan dropped from the roof of the building, knocking Brown to the ground. The lieutenant smashed his face against the pavement, and his gun flew aside. Katanyan delivered a powerful punch to his jaw, but Brown, desperately resisting and trying to shove Katanyan away, blocked with his shoulder and blunted the blow.
   “You bitch! I’m going to kill you, bitch!” snarled Katanyan, socking Brown in the face with his right fist. Brown, blocking the blows with his left elbow, managed to grab the wrist of Katanyan’s left hand, which was clutching his throat. Yanking it sharply, he wrenched the elbow joint.
   Katanyan screamed in pain and fell to the ground. But he was not ready to give up. Howling from the pain in his dislocated elbow, he drew his legs toward his body and smashed his knee into Brown’s groin.

   Brown screamed and let go of Katanyan’s hand. The pain nearly blinded him, and he could only see bright flashes against the backdrop of a black veil. Katanyan grabbed Brown by the scruff of his neck and hurled him against the wall of the building. Brown slid to the ground like a sack. Katanyan jumped on top of him, pressing his knee between Brown’s shoulder blades, and squeezed his neck with all his might.
   “Die, bitch!”
   The powerful grip completely choked Brown so that he couldn’t breathe. Snarling with rage, Katanyan kept squeezing and beat his face against the ground, becoming more furious with each blow. Brown felt that the pain was receding, his consciousness slipping away. Vomit was rising into his throat, but it couldn’t get out, past Katanyan’s powerful grip.
   A couple of seconds more and he would pass out.
   And after that, death.
   Only at that moment, reeling from suffocation, did Brown remember his knife. He frantically groped with a shaking hand for the handle of the knife on his belt, pulled it out, and felt the click of the clip. He was fading fast, but he opened the knife, clumsily, all thumbs. The characteristic click.
   If you want to live, get your act together, he told himself.
   Summoning all the strength remaining in his oxygen-deprived and convulsive body, Brown grabbed the knife handle and thrust the blade into Katanyan’s thigh.
   Katanyan screamed, but Brown scarcely heard him. The grip loosened, and Brown’s chest exploded as he drew a breath. He was blacking out, but he kept hold of the blade, pressed it in a circular motion, maximally expanding the wound.
   Katanyan managed to roll out of the way. Brown was still holding the knife though, and as it left the thigh, he managed to slice the leg up to the knee, tearing muscles, arteries, and tendons.
   Growling with fear and rage, Katanyan tried to stand on his good leg, but couldn’t. Then he started crawling away.
   But he only made it three yards. Blood was streaming through the sliced artery and the palm-sized wound. When the second quart of blood started flowing, Katanyan passed out.

Epilogue

   DiMaggio loaded the last box into the trunk of the car. “That’s about it.”
   Chambers couldn’t help because of his injured arm. He was incredibly lucky: The bullet had passed through his forearm and hit the bulletproof vest. A couple of inches higher, and it would have entered his body at the armpit, tearing him up inside.
   Brown limped out of the house, carrying his mug. He showed it to the others with a chuckle:
   “Holy smokes, I gave Shelley a hard time because she had already packed up my favorite mug. But in the end I almost forgot it.”
   “I always said you should listen to your wife,” Chambers laughed. “If you’d said to hell with the Captain and left with her, your balls would still be fine.”
   “Since when are you so interested in my balls? Rick, I’m not ready for a relationship like that.”
   “Oh, fuck off!”
   But in fact, his balls were all right. True, Brown had not finished the course of antibiotics to get rid of the inflammation, but the main thing was, there was no irreparable injury.
   “So, is that it?” Brown slammed the trunk closed. “I’ll be waiting for you on your birthday, a month from now.”
   “I’ll bring you a collar as a gift,” Chambers cackled. “The guys from the bomb squad were saying it really suits you.”
   “To hell with that, we’ll go drinking,” DiMaggio laughed. “You really screwed us out of a good-bye party.”
   “I have a wife and daughter, remember?”
   Brown embraced DiMaggio, then Chambers. A couple of obligatory phrases, then an awkward silence. Time to go. With a last look at them, Brown got behind the wheel and started the engine.
   Half an hour later, his car was speeding out of the city. It whizzed past the Plate Build Construction office. Brown inadvertently looked to that side, remembering how it all began. And how it ended.
   Katanyan’s and Brown’s scarcely breathing bodies were found five minutes later. The first to see them were the cops in the police helicopter that had been summoned after reports of shooting at the bus station. When the police rushed to the place where the slaughter took place, they were sure there would be two corpses waiting for them. Brown was lying face-down in his own vomit, holding the bloodied knife in an iron grip with his twisted hand. Katanyan was spread-eagled a few yards away. A bloody trail extended from Brown to Katanyan, ending in a dense, crimson puddle. Katanyan had lost too much blood. When they found him, he was still alive, but he died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
   After Katanyan’s death, Thompson, who had been terrified of the gang leader, decided to come clean. It didn’t even require a plea bargain; he just talked about everything that happened. His confession fully confirmed what Healey had told them.
   Nina was taken to the women’s section of the jail, where on the second day she wrote a suicide note and slit her wrists. In the note she declared that she loved Randy and did not want to live without him. Even though he left her.
   The doctor said she had simulated suicide to try to escape punishment on the grounds of insanity. Whatever happened after that, Brown wasn’t interested.
   His car zipped past the construction hypermarket, with its parking lot full of vehicles.
   He remembered that some years ago, when the hypermarket had just opened, a veritable war broke out between the city and the county. Both wanted the hypermarket’s taxes in their coffers. In the end, the city offered the county a deal, giving it another property. The hypermarket went to the city and the city’s borders were officially extended along the road to the hypermarket.
   A few seconds later, Brown spotted a sign on the side of the road as he sped out of the city. “You are leaving…”
   What city he was leaving, the visitor would not find out, since there was a tree growing next to the sign, which for some unknown reason no one had bothered to cut back, so that its branches covered half of the sign.
   But Brown wasn’t interested.
   Shelley and Carol were waiting for him.

Blast Andrew Kim