Brian Freeman - Marathon

Ethan went downstairs to the finished basement. He let himself out through the patio doors onto the screened porch that bordered the garden, the storage shed, and the woods behind the house. The evening was warm and dank. A mosquito whined in his ear, and he slapped it away. He went to the screen door that led outside and peered into the darkness.

“Fuzzball!” he hissed. “Fuzzball, come!”

But Fuzzball was a cat, and he didn’t come when he was called.

Ethan went back inside and retrieved a flashlight and brought it to the screen door and shined a light into the yard. He checked the garden. No cat. He cast a beam up and down the grass. No cat.

“Fuzzball!”

Ethan unhooked the lock on the screen door and stepped outside. He wasn’t visible from the street here, so he figured the cops wouldn’t see him. He left the porch light off to keep the mosquitoes away, but they dove for him, anyway, as if he’d bathed in sugar water. He walked to the wire fence around the garden and cast the light along the rows of tomatoes. Despite the fence, rabbits still got inside sometimes, and he wondered if the smell of rabbit had encouraged the cat to go streaking out of the house.

But Fuzzball wasn’t in the garden.

He lit up the crabapple tree and the spireas growing along the foundation of the house. No cat. Then he walked deeper into the yard, past the garden, toward the old metal storage shed, swinging his flashlight beam along the grass; it was short, because he’d mowed it that afternoon.

There was Fuzzball, outside the shed, lapping up water that had pooled near the door.

“Hey, buddy, there you are,” Ethan said quietly, not wanting the cat to scamper for the woods. If the cat did that, he’d never see him again. “You know, if you were thirsty, we’ve got water inside.”

He approached with slow, careful steps, but Fuzzball paid no attention. The cat let Ethan come right up next to him, and Ethan bent over and scooped the cat up by its stomach.

“Gotcha!” he said with a sigh of relief. Fuzzball fussed, but Ethan held him tightly.

The cat’s paws were wet. Soaking wet. Ethan turned the flashlight around to light up his white T-shirt, and he was puzzled to see red paw prints smudged all over his chest. He lit up Fuzzball’s paws. They were red, too. The underside of the cat’s fur was all red. So were Ethan’s hands.

He swung the cone of light back to the ground. He could see a puddle leeching from under the door of the metal shed, but it wasn’t water. The liquid was dark red, like wine. He sniffed his fingers, and he knew what it was.

It was blood.

Ethan stared at the storage shed and saw that there was blood everywhere. On the ground. On the grass. On the door. It was a lake of blood, growing larger. From inside the shed, someone groaned, and the frame of the door rattled.

With Fuzzball still in his arms, Ethan spun around, shouted, and ran for the street.

“Khan Rashid! Open the door, and keep your hands in the air!”

The voice of the FBI negotiator boomed through the speaker in the DECC conference room that served as the command center. There was no answer from the metal shed on Northfield Street. There had been no answer for an hour.

As the FBI, police, and SWAT teams communicated back and forth between the Woodland neighborhood and the DECC, Stride found himself scribbling on the legal pad in front of him.

He wrote: Rashid shot a cop.

Then he changed it.

Rashid shot a cop?

Special Agent Durkin, who was seated next to him, glanced at the pad and whispered into his ear. “What’s up? What are you thinking?”

Stride was thinking that none of this made sense.

“I don’t know. I was shocked when the report came in that we had an officer down. I know Rashid was on the run, but I didn’t think he’d turn violent. I really didn’t think we had the right man.”

“ Khan Rashid! You’re bleeding. You need medical attention. Open the door, and keep your hands away from your body. ”

Again there was no answer.

“Do we have any options for getting the door of the shed open?” Agent Maloney asked the tactical commander on the scene.

“We sent in the robot, but we couldn’t unjam the door,” the commander replied. “Either the suspect locked it from inside, or he’s got it blocked. It means we’re blind for now. All we can do is listen.”

“What are we hearing?” Maloney asked.

“The suspect doesn’t seem to be moving. We think he’s on the ground. We can hear the occasional moan, but that could be a fake to mislead us about his condition. However, he’s lost a lot of blood, and there’s still blood coming from under the door. Sooner or later, he’ll be critical, if he isn’t already.”

Maloney turned to the people in the command center. “Thoughts?”

“If he dies, we lose the chance to question him and find out if he was part of a larger network,” Durkin said. “We should go in.”

“Yes, I’d like him alive, if possible,” Maloney agreed. He turned to Stride. “What about the officers who had eyes on him? What can they tell us about the magnitude of the threat?”

“He fired at them,” Stride replied, “so we know he has at least one gun. Beyond that, it was too dark to assess if he had other weapons or additional ammunition.”

“Have we found any unclaimed vehicles in the neighborhood? Do we know if he came by car or by foot?”

“Nothing on that yet,” Stride said.

Maloney tapped the eraser of a pencil rhythmically on the conference room table. The point of the pencil was perfectly sharp. The agent’s face was a mask as he wrestled with the decision. What to do next. To go in or to wait.

Stride had been in Maloney’s shoes more than once. There were no easy answers when a suspect was injured and trapped. You could storm the hideout and risk the lives of your officers. You could wait and risk walking away without the truth. He knew what he would do if the decision were his alone. He’d wait. He’d let Rashid die, if it came to that, rather than put more men in jeopardy. He hoped that Maloney, who was a cautious man, would do the same.

And yet something still bothered him.

He had a hard time reconciling the Khan Rashid he’d met on the stairs of the house near UMD with the man who could put a bullet into a police officer’s throat. He was certain then that they’d made a mistake about Rashid, but here they were, anyway. A cop was in the hospital; Khan Rashid was bleeding to death in a shed. He’d been wrong about suspects plenty of times in his life, but he was honestly surprised to be wrong about Rashid.

Agent Maloney spoke into the microphone. “Commander, tell him again to toss out his gun.”

There was a pause from the scene in Woodland, and then a voice blared through the loudspeaker.

“ Rashid! Slide open the door, and toss out your gun. We’re trying to save your life. ”

Silence took over the communications channel. Stride heard nothing from the radio feed. He wanted to hear the metal shed door slide upward on its tracks, but he didn’t. The robot outside the shed broadcast a faint noise that sounded like Rashid’s ragged breathing.

“Any movement on site?” Maloney asked.

“Negative.”

Then everyone in the room flinched in surprise. Gunshots burst over the speaker, one after another in rapid succession, muffled shots from the interior of the shed. It was Rashid, shooting, and the sudden noise triggered a response from the tactical team, whose jittery fingers were already on their weapons. Outside the shed, someone fired, and then someone else fired, and the entire scene erupted in gunfire banging into the metal walls. Fifteen seconds of chaos filled the room before the commander regained control and silenced the weapons.