Dead Bang (23 page)

“Don't do that,” said Officer Lowell—too late.

With his hands free Bani Patel snatched Officer Lowell's revolver and shot the med-tech in the chest. My kitchen window shattered. Officer Lowell clapped his left hand on the cylinder of the revolver and cracked Bani Patel on the elbow with his night stick.

Bani gave up the gun with a shriek.

The med-tech lurched to his feet, stepping backwards and clutching his chest. He looked at his hands and said, “Oh my God!” He hurried for the door. His partner helped him down the stairs.

Officer Lowell holstered his weapon and shoved Bani over. Rolling him face down, the officer pinned Bani to the floor with a knee on his neck and chopped handcuffs onto his wrists. The ambulance roared out of the drive, lights rolling and siren screaming.

“It's going to take forty-five minutes to an hour to get another bus out here,” said Officer Lowell, as he stood. “I have to call this in.” He looked at me, his eyes now wide and his face pale. He squeezed his left hand with his right and looked at the floor. “I need a statement from you and your son.”

“You okay?” I asked.

“There's a car coming up the drive,” said Ben.

Officer Lowell looked at me again. “Yeah.” He handed me my Colt, which he'd cleared and shoved in his belt right after he'd walked in the door. “I'm going to call from the car,” he said, his voice wan. At the door, he stopped and turned to face me. His left arm was stiff and he was rubbing his left bicep with his right hand. “Don't shoot him.”

“I don't think you're okay, Officer,” I said.

“I'm calling from my car,” he said his voice hardly a whisper. “‘Officer needs assistance.'”

• • •

Ben met Matty Svenson and Amad Azzara in the drive. Matty roared off, driving Officer Lowell in his own car.

“Praise Allah, I am still a martyr,” said Bani Patel from the floor.

I righted the short kitchen stool. “Rest your legs on that, and shut up,” I said.

“This is some torture?”

It was to keep him from going into shock from blood loss. “Yes,” I said. “Get your feet up.” He spit in my direction. I locked and loaded the Colt. “There can be a lot more pain before you die.” Bani put his feet on the stool.

Ben and Special Agent Amad Azzara hurried in the door. Azzara carried a brushed aluminum case the size of an overnight bag. “Mr. Hardin, you are injured?”

I pointed to Bani. “His blood. I had to wrestle him to get the bandage on his chest and the tourniquet on his leg.”

“This man is torturing me,” said Bani. “See how he makes me lay?”

“How long has the band been on his leg?” asked Azzara.

“Half hour, forty minutes.”

Azzara spoke to Bani in Arabic. Bani answered and Azzara looked at me and said, “Perhaps a few moments. If you could leave the room?”

I asked Ben to put the ribs in the oven and headed for the bathroom where I'd had Ben put the dog to keep him out from underfoot. Rusty met me at the door and watched as I ran cold water into the tub and threw in my clothes. Blood had soaked through to my underwear. The conversation in the dining room occasionally grew loud—first Bani and then Azzara. I washed up in the sink and wore a towel to the bedroom for fresh attire, taking the dog with me.

While I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, I heard the front door open and several voices, including that of Matty Svenson. I dropped my Colt in a dresser drawer and left Rusty in the bedroom. He whined and pawed the door. I patted the door and said “Shush!” In the dining room I found a state policeman talking to Ben and two med-techs loading Bani, still handcuffed, on a gurney.

Agent Azzara had taken the telephone off the wall in the kitchen and jacked in a line from the brushed aluminum case he'd opened on the counter. He slid on a headset, pushed my wall phone—with a line from the case plugged in—over to me, and said, “See if you have a dial tone.”

I picked up the handset. “Sounds like a long way away—not very loud.” Azzara made an adjustment, and the tone seemed right. “That sounds good.”

“Good,” he said. “You may hang up.”

“He tell you where my wife is?”

“Not in detail, I'm sorry to say,” said Azzara, fiddling with the machine. “His name is Sunil Khan. He flew from Kashmir to Canada,
where he claimed political asylum using the name Bani Patel. His brother Seema, the man who shot him, had done the same thing. Their father, Amed Khan, had instructed them not to shoot you because you had the money.”

“So where's my wife?”

“Sunil said, ‘Southfield.' I think that is north of Detroit. He did not have an address.”

“A street?”

“No, and I believe he told me all he knew,” said Agent Azzara. “I loosened his tourniquet and promised to let him die.”

“You're supposed to loosen the tourniquet occasionally.”

“He did not know that.”

The ambulance crew carried Bani/Sunil by me strapped to the gurney. He growled a short, caustic-sounding phrase at Agent Azzara. Azzara answered with two curt words.

The state policeman handed me a card. “I have to go in the ambulance with this guy, but I'll need a statement from you.”

I looked at the card. “Officer Fenwick,” I said. “You're at the Rockford post?”

“Call me,” he said. “Couple of days will be all right.”

I shook his hand. He left and I turned back to Agent Azzara and said, “You speak Arabic.”

“I was born in Egypt. My father was an Egyptologist from the University of Michigan. My mother was a curator at the Cairo Museum. I didn't come to live in America until I was eleven.”

“I'm surprised you aren't a Middle Eastern analyst—especially with your language skills.”

“Middle Eastern,” said Azzara. He chuckled.

I waited for an explanation. He ignored me, so I asked, “What are we doing about Wendy?”

“I have advised Agent Svenson of the information. She has directed me to set up this recording and tracing equipment.”

Matty stood with her back to me, looking out the door-wall at the lake, with her cell phone plastered to her face. I started over to her, but Ben stopped me.

“What about Mom?” he asked.

“The guy said she was in Southfield—down by Detroit. He didn't have an address. When they call, you know, they'll trace the call. I'll talk to Agent Svenson when she gets off the telephone. In the meantime why don't you take the stool out and hose it off.” A square yard of blood smeared my dining room tile. “I'll get the floor.”

Ben and I moved the table, and he took a rag from under the sink to pick up the bloody stool. I got a sponge and a bucket of water and was already at work on the floor when Matty finally snapped her telephone shut and shoved it into her pocket.

“Southfield?” I asked.

“I called it in,” she said. “They'll contact the Detroit office.”

“What will they do?”

“Everything they can, Art. We have to wait for the telephone call from the people who took Wendy.”

I wrung the sponge over my bucket. Filaments of red swirled in the clear water. “How do we know they'll call tonight?”

“If they were going to call tomorrow,” said Matty, “they would have left Wendy's pendant in the mailbox, out by the road.”

Ben carried the stool in and left it on the landing with his shoes. He padded down the hall in his socks and called out, “The dog's having a fit in the bedroom.”

“You can let him out now,” I said. I heard Rusty thunder up the hall. He pranced around to give everyone a sniff and then walked up to look at my bucket. I nudged him with my shoulder and elbow. “G'wan!”

I cruised the sponge around the floor.

“How'd the ambulance guy make out?” I asked.

“He was in surgery when I got there,” said Matty. “Bullet was through and through—missed the heart, but collapsed a lung.”

“Through him and through my window,” I said. “How's Officer Lowell?”

“Stable,” said Matty. “Definitely a heart attack. He just transferred up here from Lansing. He and his wife bought an old farmhouse out by Ionia. He was planning to retire and renovate the house.”

“I hope it works out for him. He told the medic not to untie that fella's hands. It happened in a flash.”

“He blames himself,” said Matty.

Ben came up the hall wiping his hands on a towel. He walked down to the landing, picked up the stool, and wiped it dry on his way back to the kitchen.

“If you're done with that towel, I can use it here,” I said. I used the towel to dry the floor, and we moved the table back. “I have to wash my hands.”

I poured the bucket of water down the toilet. Ben's head loomed around the door. “What did she say about Mom?”

“Matty called the FBI office in Grand Rapids. She said they'd contact
the Detroit office.” I stepped over to the sink to wash my hands. “We have to wait for a call from whoever took your mother.”

Ben's face colored. “The FBI! And that's it?”

“They got what they could out of the guy with your mother's pendant. We're further ahead—”

“Than nothing,” said Ben. “We're just standing around.”

“I'm taking suggestions,” I said.

Ben showed me an ugly face, turned, and marched up the hallway. “I have to clean the mud off my shoes,” he announced in a curt voice, without looking back.

I walked back to the kitchen and fired up the coffeemaker.

“Smells great,” said Matty.

“Help yourself,” I said.

“You don't mind?”

I took plates out of the cupboard and set them on the table.

“We've been living on candy bars and cold pizza since that asshole blew up the Waters Building,” said Matty as she hung her blazer on the back of the chair. I took the ribs out of the oven and set a roll of paper towels on the table.

“We'll be using the linen that comes on a roll tonight,” I said and went back to the kitchen for silverware. Matty scooted her chair up to the table and ripped three towels off the roll.

“I cannot eat this,” said Agent Azzara, looking up from the machine in the aluminum case.

“Amad,” said Matty, tucking a corner of the paper towels into the turtleneck of her white cotton sweater, “you're Catholic.”

“My mother kept a
halal
kitchen, as does my wife.” Whatever was on my face caused Agent Azzara to look at me and add, “I am Caldean, but still an Arab, so you may continue to suspect me.”

“I'm a detective,” I said. “I suspect everybody.” I pointed at the table. “The big bones are beef ribs.”

“You cooked them together?”

“Broiled them separately,” I said, “just kept them warm in the same oven.”

Matty twisted a pair of ribs off the platter with her fingers. “You pick the sausage off the cold pizza,” she said. “Sit.” She pointed at a chair. “Art's family.”

I left the silverware in a pile on the table and went back to the fridge for the coleslaw and potato salad I'd picked up at the deli counter when I bought the ribs. Azzara hung his sport coat on a chair and tucked his tie into his shirt before he slid up to the table.

I pulled up a chair and plunked a rib and a dab of potato salad on a plate to be polite. My appetite had vanished. “You made a face when I mentioned the Middle East,” I said. “What was that about?”

Matty closed her eyes and paused before gnawing happily on. Azzara cut three large beef ribs loose from the rack and loaded them onto his plate. “As I said,” said Azzara. “My family is Caldean. They came to this country in the thirties.” He licked the barbecue sauce from his finger. “That is not such a long time when you consider that civilization rose in Caldea six thousand years ago.”

“And?” I said.

“And people from the Fertile Crescent have a different map in their heads than do Westerners. Arabia is at the center of their map—at the very heart of the world. To say “Middle East” is to deny thousands of years of history when Arabs were farmers with livestock and Westerners were still clubbing small rodents with sticks.”

“I'm Irish,” I said. “We just stole our neighbors' rodents.”

Matty gasped and clutched the end of her paper towel bib to her mouth. Her eyes merry, she started to laugh. I looked at Azzara. His stern face melted, and he whacked my shoulder. We all laughed. Ben came in the door. Rusty trotted over to him.

“Come get something to eat, Son,” I said.

“Sure, Pop,” said Ben, anger burning his face into a scowl. “Let's yuck it up. Whoo-wee! Mom is gone.” He thrust his fists over his head and pumped his arms to, “Winna', winna'—chicken dinna'. Let's eat!”

“Son,” I said, “I understand you're frustrated and angry. But these people won't call any faster if the food's getting cold on the table. And once they call, we may not have time to eat.”

Ben snapped the chain on Rusty's collar and sulked out the door after him. I took the coffee pot off the counter and topped off Matty's and Azzara's coffees. Matty sawed through the silence with, “Khan has four sons. Two are accounted for.”

Ben came in the door and up the stairs to the table, his face still stern. He dished up a plate of food but took it into the living room to eat.

“You were watching the guys who kidnapped my wife,” I said. “You showed me pictures of them this morning.”

“I'm sorry,” said Matty. She dabbed her mouth with the end of her paper-towel bib. “They duck in from Canada. They started showing up at mosques in Dearborn and Detroit about six months ago. They said they were soliciting funds for Middle Eastern relief organizations.”

“What's Manny got to do with these guys?” I asked.

“Don't know,” said Matty. “Until Manny turned up at Karen's house with a suitcase full of money, he wasn't on the radar.”