Jeffery Deaver: The Steel Kiss

I’m turning here, slipping through socks and underwear, men’s.

Henry Street, Exit Four, is right ahead of me. Should I get out that way?

Better pause. I take in a deep breath. Let’s not go too fast here. First, I should lose the green jacket and cap. Buy something new. I duck into a cheap store to pay cash for some China-made Italian blue blazer. Thirty-five long, which is lucky. That size is hard to find. Hipster fedora hat. A Middle Eastern kid rings the sale up while texting. Rude. My desire is to crack a bone in his head. At least he’s not looking at me. That’s good. Put the old jacket in my backpack, the green plaid one. The jacket is from my brother, so I’m not throwing it out. The sports cap goes inside too.

The Chinese Italian hipster leaves the store and goes back into the mall. So, which way to escape? Henry Street?

No. Not smart. There’ll be plenty of cops outside.

I’m looking around. Everywhere, everywhere. Ah, a service door. There’ll be a loading dock, I’m sure.

I push through the doorway like I belong here, knuckles not palm (prints, of course), past a sign saying Employees Only . Except not now.

Thinking: What lucky timing, the escalator, Red next to it when the screams began. Lucky me.

Head down, I keep walking steadily. Nobody stops me in the corridor.

Ah, here’s a cotton jacket on a peg. I unpin the employee name badge and repin the shiny rectangle on my chest. I’m now Courteous Team Member Mario. I don’t look much like a Mario but it’ll have to do.

Just now two workers, young men, one brown, one white, come through a door ahead of me. I nod at them. They nod back.

Hope one isn’t Mario. Or his best friend. If so, I’ll have to reach into my backpack and we know that means: cracking bones from on high. I pass them.

Good.

Or not good: A voice shoots my way: “Yo?”

“Yeah?” I ask, hand near the hammer.

“What’s going on out there?”

“Robbery, I think. That jewelry store. Maybe.”

“Fuckers never had security there. I coulda told ’em.”

His co-worker: “Only had cheap crap. Zircons, shit like that. Who’d get his ass shot for a zircon?”

I see a sign for Deliveries and dutifully follow the arrow.

I hear voices ahead, stop and look around the corner. One little black guard, skinny as me, a twig, is all. I could break him easily with the hammer. Make his face crack into ten pieces. And then—

Oh, no. Why is life such a chore?

Two others show up. One white, one black. Both twice my weight.

I duck back. And then things get worse. Behind me, other end of the corridor I’ve just come down. I hear more voices. Maybe it’s Red and some others, making a sweep this way.

And the only exit, ahead of me, has four rental cops, who live for the day they too have a chance to break bones... or Tase or spray.

Me, in the middle and nowhere to go.

Where?”

“Still searching, Amelia,” Buddy Everett, the patrolman from the 84, told her. “Six teams. Exits’re all covered, us or private security. He’s got to be here somewhere.”

Wiping away the blood on her boot with a Starbucks napkin. Or trying to, futilely. Her jacket, in a trash bag she’d gotten from the coffee shop too, might not be irreparably ruined but she wasn’t inclined to wear a garment that had been saturated with blood. The young patrolman noted the stains on her hands, his eyes troubled. Didn’t say anything. Cops are, of course, human too. Immunity comes eventually but later to some than others, and Buddy Everett was young still.

Through red-framed glasses, he looked at the open access panel. “And he...?”

“He didn’t make it.”

A nod. Eyes now on the floor, Sachs’s bloody boot prints leading away from the escalator.

“No idea which direction he went?” he asked.

“None.” She sighed. Only a few minutes had elapsed between the time that Unsub 40 might have seen her and fled, and the deployment of the backup officers. But that seemed to be enough to turn him invisible. “All right. I’ll be searching with you.”

“They’ll need help in the basement. It’s a warren down there.”

“Sure. But get bodies canvassing in the street too. If he saw me he had a window to get the hell out of Dodge ASAP.”

“Sure, Amelia.”

The youthful officer with the glasses the shade of cooling blood nodded and headed off.

“Detective?” A man’s voice from behind her.

She turned to a compact Latino of about fifty, in a striped navy-blue suit and yellow shirt. His tie was spotless white. Don’t see that combo often.

She nodded.

“Captain Madino.”

She shook his hand. He was surveying her with dark eyes, lids low. Seductive but not sexual; captivating in the way powerful men — some women too — were.

Madino would be from the 84th Precinct and would have nothing to do with the Unsub 40 case, which was on the Major Cases roster. He was here because of the accident, though the police would probably step out pretty soon, unless there was a finding that there had been criminal negligence in the maintenance of the escalator, which rarely happened. But it still would be Madino’s boys and girls who ran the scene.

“What happened?” he asked her.

“Fire department could tell you better than I could. I was moving on a homicide suspect. All I know is the escalator malfunctioned somehow and a male, middle-aged, fell into the gears. I got to him, tried to stop the bleeding but there wasn’t much to do. He hung in there for a while. But ended up DCDS.”

Deceased, confirmed dead at scene.

“Emergency switch?”

“Somebody hit it but that only shuts the stairs off, not the main motor. The gears keep going. Got him around the groin and belly.”

“Man.” The captain’s lips tightened. He stepped forward to look down into the pit. Madino gave no reaction. He gripped his white tie to make sure it didn’t swing forward and get soiled on the railing. Blood had made its way up there too. Unemotional, he turned back to Sachs. “You were down there ?”

“I was.”

“Must have been tough.”

She decided that her initial impression of him was wrong. The sympathy in his eyes seemed genuine.

“Tell me about the weapons discharge.”

“The motor,” Sachs explained. “There was no cutoff switch that I could find. No wires to cut. I couldn’t leave him to find it or climb to the top to tell somebody to kill the juice; I was putting pressure on the wounds. So I parked a round in the coil of the motor itself. Stopped it from cutting him in half. But he was pretty much gone by then. Lost eighty percent of his blood, the EMT said.”

Madino was nodding. “That was a good try, Detective.”

“Didn’t work.”

“Not much else you could do.” He looked back to the open access panel. “We’ll have to convene a Shooting Team but, on this scenario, it’ll be a formality. Nothing to worry about.”

“Appreciate that, Captain.”

Despite what one sees on screens large and small, a police officer’s firing a weapon is a rare and consequential occurrence. A gun can be discharged only in the event the officer believes his or her life or that of a bystander is endangered or when an armed felon flees. And force can be used only to kill, not wound. A Glock may not be used like a wrench to shut off renegade machinery (or to open doors — tactical officers use special shotguns to take out hinges, not doorknobs or locks).

In the event of a shooting by a cop, on or off duty, a supervisor from the precinct where it happened comes to the scene to secure and inspect the officer’s weapon. He then convenes the Patrol Borough Shooting Team — which has to be run by a captain. Since there was no death or injury resulting from the shot, Sachs didn’t need to submit to an Intoxilizer test or go on administrative leave for the mandatory three days. And, in the absence of malfeasance, she wasn’t required to surrender her weapon. Just offer it to the supervisor to inspect and note the serial number.