Robert Tanenbaum - Enemy within

Then he heard the whick of a bullet flying by his head and the sound of a couple of shots not from Cooley's gun. He crouched instinctively and fired twice into the Cherokee. He saw that Cooley was creeping around the rear of the wreck, toward the passenger side. More shots. This was the negative part of being Brendan Cooley's partner. Bent almost double, with his pistol out in front of him, Nash trotted gamely toward the left side of the vehicle. Another shot cracked past, right in front of him, and the driver's-side rear window starred around a fat hole. Three more shots in rapid succession, and the windshield splintered. Oh, great! He screamed at the two cops in the blue-and-white to stop firing, nor was he polite about it.

An instant later he had his right shoulder pressed tight against the wet metal of the Cherokee's flank. He worked the door latch and swung the driver's door out, his pistol pointing. The upper torso of a man slumped down, its lower end held in the car by the seat belt. Nash stared at the face. It was, in fact, the well-known thief, fence, and general nogoodnik Cisco Lomax, Nash was relieved to observe, or rather the exwell-known. The front of the man's tan sweater was black with blood, and big wads of distressed tissue bulged from his face and neck. The back of the driver's seat showed nearly a dozen little puffs of exploded filling, some still white, others as red as wound dressings; the windshield was a spiderweb, sagging in its frame.

Nash looked up and met the eyes of his partner through the passenger-side window.

"How is he?" asked Cooley.

"He's dead, Cooley."

"Are you sure?"

"He took one through the head and one through the neck. That usually does the job, plus about ten or so through the back of the seat. Hey, where are you…?"

Cooley had dashed off, back to their Dodge. Nash saw that he had the radio mike in front of his face. Calling it in. Good. And here were the two cops from the first blue-and-white.

"He's dead, huh?" said one of them. He was a slight, dark kid who looked about seventeen, hatless, his hair glued to his forehead by the rain. Franciosa was the name on his tag.

"Yeah. Was that you doing the shooting?"

"My partner. I didn't get one off."

"Good for you." Nash crooked a finger at the kid's partner, who seemed to be hanging back. The man came forward. He was a light-skinned black man a little older than Franciosa, inclined to be overweight, with a neat mustache. He stared at the hanging corpse.

"Is he…?"

"Dead," said Nash, "Yeah, who are you… Higgs? Higgs, why were you shooting bullets at me?"

"I wasn't shooting at you, Detective."

"You were, son. You might not have been aiming at me, but you were shooting at me. Did they train you on that weapon at the Academy?"

"Sure. But the way it was…"

"Well, when I was there, the instructor said, 'Always make sure of your target and what is behind it.' I recall it because he said it about five hundred times. I guess they left that part out when you went through. Did they?"

"No." Sullen now.

"I'm glad to hear it. That last shot of yours missed my head by about two feet. What were you firing at?"

"At the… at the car, you know, I thought…"

"At the car? You thought the vehicle was a danger to yourself or the public?"

"I mean the driver. Your partner was shooting like crazy, and I thought, you know…"

"That you would join in the fun. Well, you did put one through the passenger window, maybe killing the hostages back there…"

The cop gaped. "Oh, shit, I didn't now…"

"No, you didn't." A long pause. "But in this case there weren't any, which is your dumb good luck."

Why do I bother? Nash thought; let their sergeant give them the nickel lesson. Cooley was approaching, his head down, the collar of his blue nylon jacket up against the rain.

"You call it in?"

"Yeah." Cooley looked at the corpse and shook his head. "The bastard tried to ram us. I had no choice. He spun the car around and headed right toward us. A big fucking car like that would've gone through that Fury like a ball bat through a cream pie. Christ, the two of us would've both been strained through the fucking radiator grille. Stolen car, too. We saw the little fuck-head in a stolen car, and we pursued. And he tried to kill us."

Nash saw the two uniforms exchange a glance. He could see that they knew who Cooley was and that a subtle transformation was going on in their minds, the little neural charges deposited by memory being overwritten by the story Cooley was spinning now. They were recalling how the fleeing vehicle had spun around and become a deadly missile heading toward the unmarked, until Cooley had shot the life out of its driver, and look, the SUV had come to rest conveniently pointing south, the proper direction. Nash, too, was making the story happen in his mind, rather more self-consciously than were the two young cops, mainly because he had enough experience to understand how vulnerable the story was.

But… but just maybe it had happened that way. There had certainly been a lot of swerving around on the slick black road, and he had been totally consumed with keeping the Fury under control. He would go with it. The car had been stolen, the chase was legit. There was no point in dwelling on the fusillade Cooley had let off during the pursuit, or the shots fired after the car had stopped. Nash just prayed that some of the bullets had hit the son of a bitch from the front.

Afterward, it was the usual mob scene. The ambulance arrived first, and then the crime-scene people crawling around, marking and retrieving shell casings and taking photographs. Five minutes later there arrived a couple of extremely unlucky homicide investigators from the Twentieth Precinct, within whose jurisdiction the event (technically a homicide) had occurred. The two of them, a thin, scholarly-looking fellow with horn-rims and a small Hispanic man built like a fire hydrant, examined what they were supposed to examine-the corpse, the corpse's vehicle, the surrounding highway, and the cops involved. The scholarly looking one grabbed a CSU photographer and directed her along the roadway, taking photographs of skid marks and guardrail scrapes, and of the bits of metal and glass lying on the road. He also pulled a big surveyor's tape measure from the trunk of his car and took a remarkable number of measurements. Meanwhile, his partner was directing another CSU person with a camcorder and light. They were walking slowly up and down the highway. The camcorder light beam pointed downward, and both men were bent slightly, as if making a nature film about the lives of roadway insects.

Soon after this investigation had begun, Cooley and Nash's shift lieutenant, Robert Maguire, drove up and looked around, carefully avoiding any contact with the two homicide detectives. He had a conversation with the four officers involved and then called the zone captain, James P. Robb, who was responsible for all detective work in a fat band across the West Side midsection of Manhattan. Robb had, of course, been in bed, and it had been a while since his last visit to a graveyard-shift crime scene, but he had driven in from the Rockland County suburb where he lived, arriving about half an hour later.

Robb took a look around, too, and spoke with Maguire, and also did not talk to the two homicide investigators, although they knew he was there. Every cop on the scene knew that the bosses had arrived. They all exerted themselves at their tasks with exemplary zeal.

Cooley repeated his story to Robb, using nearly the same words he had used with Maguire and the two homicide detectives. Nash and the patrolmen from the blue-and-white confirmed it in separate conversations with the two bosses. The bosses were not happy. It was late, it was raining, it was cold, and a news helicopter was swooping around above, making it difficult to converse and shining its light in everyone's eyes. Several news vans had also appeared, held back by the roadblock, but obviously sniffing blood. Robb called his superior, the borough detective commander, Deputy Chief Inspector Charles T. Gavin, and gave him the short version of what had happened. Gavin did not come himself, but demanded that a full report of the event be ready on his desk first thing that morning and told Robb to make a statement perfectly void of information to the press, and to tell them that a press conference would take place at One Police Plaza that morning, too late to make the morning shows and early enough so that there was a good chance something more newsworthy and gory would transpire before the evening local news. Robb supposed that Gavin would soon be on the horn with the chief of detectives. Good. Everyone should be pulled from the cozy covers by this abortion.