Dead Bang (34 page)

Matty whispered in my ear, still calm, “Back away from Khan and dive into the Lexus.”

I racked the hammer on the Colt.

“Kill me,” said Khan. “I die a martyr.”

“Your father says to kill him,” I announced to the house. “We're all in agreement out here. Show me Karen Smith.”

“Back out! Now!” said Matty.

“You lie to trick me,” a voice yelled from the house.

“This pistol has a three-pound trigger pull. That's a truth you can trust. Show me Karen Smith.”

The house remained silent.

Matty said, “Try to get him to take the deal.”

“The money is here, including every dollar that was in my pocket. The car is here. The motor is running. Show me Karen Smith. You can walk out. You can take the money and your father and drive away.”

“Yes!” called the voice from the house. “Okay!” The voice sounded singsong. “I show you Karen Smith!”

Matty said, “The psychologist said that was a threat.”

In the house, I could hear something being dragged across a carpet and then a tile floor. The front door swung in and a light in the entrance hall came on. Karen arced past the storm door as the chair she was taped to tipped sideways into view. Duct tape covered her mouth and chin. At the back of the house, I heard glass shatter.

Matty said, “The entry team is coming in.”

“Here is your bitch!” yelled the voice from the house. An arm and fist appeared. In the fist, I saw a black box with dangling wires and a thumb cocked above, ready to plunge down.

Matty said, “Run! Take cover!”

Less than twenty feet separated me from the hand with the plunger. The Colt felt like I was swinging it up through mud. With both hands on the weapon, I lined the sights at six o'clock—at the bottom of the wrist—and squeezed. I didn't feel the shot, just realized the Colt was climbing left. The window in the storm door had fogged opaque with spiderweb cracks. I pumped two double taps into the aluminum siding a foot to the left of the door at shoulder height, ran to my right to get an angle to shoot past Karen, and popped another double tap at waist height through the doorjamb. In a bolt for the door, I thumbed out the magazine and slammed home a fresh one. Glass cascaded in pellets when I jerked open the door. From the darkness inside the house, I heard men yelling from different rooms, “Clear!”

The smell of urine burned my nostrils. Karen struggled against her bindings. Khan's son lay on the floor with his right hand at a sharp angle to his wrist. He reached for the detonator with his left. From the nearby darkness, I heard a male voice yell, “Take the shot!” I snapped a round into the hand reaching for the detonator. Khan's son rolled onto his back flailing his arms and legs and screamed—it seemed more in anger than pain.

I backed up to avoid the blood spray. Three black-clad men piled onto the wounded man. A fourth brushed by to get to Karen. A woman's hand reached around me and grasped the Colt across the top of the slide. I flicked up the safety with my thumb. From behind me, I heard Matty say, “Hardin, you're under arrest.”

The agent standing over Karen said, “Everybody freeze! This woman
has fifty pounds of plastic wired to her chair and a peck bag of nuts, bolts, and nails taped in her lap. She's soaked in urine. One static spark, and we'll be there to see if this asshole gets the flock of virgins or a handful of white raisins.”

“Is that a wool jacket?” asked Matty.

“With a kiss of Italian silk,” I said.

“Great,” said Matty. “My jacket is nylon. We're a static charge generator. Don't blink, don't move anything.”

“This is wired funny,” said the agent. An arm in a black sleeve reached around me and slowly lifted the camera pen out of my pocket. After a few silent seconds—that took what felt like minutes to pass—he said, “No, it's not the camera, all the wires are white. Look at this. … Now here. I think that's a battery pack. I don't know if it's in sequence or tandem. … Okay, I'm standing by.”

“Someone in here told you to take that last shot?” asked Matty.

“I didn't hear shit,” I said. “I was on a frolic of my own.”

“I heard it,” said Matty.

“I thought the question was whether I heard it.”

“We have to tourniquet this arm,” said an agent with Khan's son. “He's going to bleed out.”

“Just pressure for now,” said the agent with Karen.

“You don't even want to start getting cute with me, Hardin,” said Matty.

“I told him to take the shot,” said the agent with Karen. “Maybe we can talk about this in five minutes, if it's still important.”

On the street, tires squealed as vehicles vacated the area. The constant drub of helicopters overhead faded to silence.

“Beck, Miller, and Campbell,” said the agent with Karen. “You in here?”

“Beck and Miller—in the kitchen, Boss,” I heard from the darkness in the house.

“This is Campbell,” said a fainter voice from the other direction. “I'm in the garage. We've got twenty bags of nitrate fertilizer and four fifty-gallon drums marked ‘Auto Racing Fuel' out here.”

“You guys clear the area,” said Karen's agent.

They all answered, “Check, Boss.” They left.

“Yeah,” said the agent with Karen. He didn't seem to be speaking to us. “That's what it looks like to me. I got four or five bombs. … Yeah, like every time he got bored, he added plastic and a blasting cap. … No, I don't see a timer. But there's the battery pack and a green light on the command detonator box.”

I heard him pull open a Velcro pocket tab. “No, he's out. … Shot twice. … He quit moving two, three minutes ago. … I wouldn't trust him if he was awake. I'm going to check the battery pack.”

The Colt started to gain weight. I put my left hand back under it.

“You moved,” said the agent working on the bomb. “Don't move. Don't blink. Don't fart.”

“Why shouldn't I fart?” I asked.

“Because that's not the last thing I want to smell,” said Matty.

“It's not wired to anything. He just wound the leads into a doll and buried them in the plastic. … Yeah, we still have a green light on the command detonator. I'm going to trace the wires down from the detonator with my fingers. … Okay, I've got a battery pack here. … See it? … You think? … Okay.”

I heard the first snip and made a start. The agent said, “Chill, if this goes, you won't know it.” I could feel my collar getting damp. I'd always subscribed to the notion that you did know it, albeit not for long.

“Since we are all standing here on God's bus stop, I have a question,” I said.

“Whatever it is, it's probably none of your business,” said Matty.

“Since Karen is here,” I said, “whose body did they recover from the Detroit River?”

The agent working on the bomb said, “What do you mean, ‘No, wait'? I already cut it.”

“Khan's daughter,” said Matty. “He caught her ‘dishonoring' her family in a parked car with her American boyfriend.”

I had to urinate. I didn't mention it. Wondering where to find the bathroom had it all over listening to the agent take the bomb apart.

Finally, he said, “Th-that, th-that, th-that's all folks! This Looney Tune is over.”

Matty took her hand off the Colt and said, “Holster it.”

The bathroom turned out to be in the hall to the bedrooms. I took the back off the toilet before I flushed it. Maybe I was getting a little paranoid. Matty and the agent had moved to the kitchen and turned the light on. At the door, the ambulance crew had Khan's son on a gurney with an oxygen mask strapped to his face.

Two med-techs hovered over Karen, who remained taped to the chair. Unable to remove the tape from her face, they had cut a slit in the duct tape over her mouth. She asked for water. “Karen?” I said.

Her eyes gleamed razor sharp with fright.

“Hang in there, kiddo.”

She closed her eyes and nodded. Since her legs were still taped to the
chair, her bare feet thrust up in the air. I gave her foot a squeeze. It was cold. I rubbed it with both hands. “Wendy's outside waiting for you.”

Karen's chest heaved in a spasm of jerks. Without looking up, the med-tech said, “Mac, we need room to work here.”

I went to the kitchen and found that a clothing rod had been installed across the length of the kitchen. Police, airline security, Canadian immigration, and customs uniforms dangled from hangers among shirts marked for telephone, utility, and package-delivery companies.

“Don't touch anything,” said Matty.

I put my hands in my pockets.

“That was your backup pistol,” said Matty. “You forgot you had it.”

A boat anchor in my pants?
“Yes, ma'am,” I said.

The agent who had disarmed the bomb wore a flattop cut too short to yield more than a pinch of graying blond hair. At just under six feet, his muscular frame seemed out of place with the wrinkles across his forehead and at the corners of his eyes. He offered his hand and said, “Joe Erhardt.”

I took it for a shake and said, “Art Hardin.”

Erhardt took his hand back and said, “You saw the plastic and fired because you were in fear for your life.”

No stretch there.
“Yes, sir.”

“One of the local news stations has tape they shot from a helicopter,” said Matty. “They don't have your face. Don't do any interviews.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“We're telling the story. Period,” said Matty.

“What story?” I asked.

• • •

Matty's FBI Windbreaker was too small for me to shrug into without exploding the seams. I walked out of the house with it hooked over my shoulder Frank Sinatra style, my glasses in my pocket, wearing Erhardt's black ball cap.

Agent Azzara met me at the curb wearing a dour face. He handed me Wendy's pistol and the magazine I'd dumped in my dash for the door.

“I wondered what happened to you,” I said.

“Out of the academy three months and on my first assignment,” said Agent Azzara. “I'm lucky they let me hold the coats.”

“I didn't tell 'em you gave me the bank statement,” I said.

Azzara said, “I told them.” He patted my shoulder, forced a smile, and walked off toward the house.

Khan had made a five-or-six-step attempt to bolt for the Lexus before finding himself at the bottom of a ton-and-a-half pile of knees and elbows. He and his son went to Detroit Receiving Hospital. Karen went to Beaumont Hospital on Woodward. Wendy and I rode in the ambulance with her.

Karen winked in and out. Wendy held her hand. I turned Matty's Windbreaker inside out, rolled it tight around Erhardt's hat, and slipped Wendy's pistol back in her handbag.

At the hospital, I handed off the hat and jacket to the agents who followed the ambulance. Wendy and I settled into chairs in the emergency waiting room, and news crews spilled in like some media dam had burst. A tide of microphones rose before our faces, and from the crowd someone asked, “Are you here with the woman who was kidnapped?”

Wendy said, “My grandson fell off his skateboard.”

The wave of newsies immediately ebbed. I called after them, “Hey, I got some great pictures of my grandkids here.” They didn't want to see them.

A nurse told them that a Ms. Smith had just been admitted, and a rogue wave of cell phones washed up to face level, some to report the name and others tapping sources in an attempt to discover the “real name.”

Hospital security lured the news piranhas into the parking lot with the promise of a press release and locked the doors to the waiting room. The ruse lasted long enough for a nurse to come out and invite one of us to sit with Karen while the FBI attempted to interview her. Wendy took the job.

I retired to the vending machines. I got the coffee before the cup. For my second attempt, I left the first cup in place and, bingo, a cup of coffee. I left the second cup that fell into place for the next caffeine junkie.

After a while—I didn't watch the time—I'd nursed my coffee to the bottom of the cup and sat considering the brown granules swaying in the last sip. I was hoping they were coffee grounds when Wendy walked up, sat beside me, and put her hand on my knee.

“They taped her to the chair three days ago and never let her up. They never even gave her a drink. She's in X-ray right now, and then she's going upstairs. I'm going to stay with her.”

“Hon, we haven't had more than an hour's sleep. And last night, you were up until three with your mother.”

“They have a reclining chair with a stool. I can get a pillow. I think you should go and get some rest.”

“I'm not sure you'll be safe.”

“The agents that followed us here will be in the hallway,” said Wendy. She kissed me and walked back to the emergency room.

• • •

In Detroit, the sun seems to rise from Canada. Particulates in the air make the rising orb as red as a Canadian maple leaf. Along the river, the breeze is cool, and at five-thirty in the morning, the racing heart of the Motor City lumbers at idle.

Jamal met me in front of the motel as I paid my cabbie. “You said you wasn't no cop.”

“I'm not,” I said.

“The whole city watched you cap that cocksucker on CNN,” said Jamal. “It's been on every ten minutes. He dead?”

“Wasn't me,” I said. “What happened?”

Jamal laughed. “Right! I get it.” He walked me to the door. “You know the red-haired cop that gave you the ‘I-ain't-a-cop-and-I-didn't-shoot-nobody' ride in the chief of poe-lease's car?”

“McNeal,” I said.

“Yeah, McNeal. He came back and was stone-ass rude about your car.”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah, but he took Shawna away in handcuffs,” said Jamal, his smile as bright as the sun welling up from the Windsor skyline. He held his open hand over his head. I held up mine, and he smacked it. On the way to the door, he added, “I told that bitch she best not be fucking with my money.”