Michael Ledwidge - Alert

Like how he’d come out of one of his shoes, a new cordovan loafer. How though he was married, I saw he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. How there were little pink anchors on his navy-blue socks.

Though there were more than a hundred people standing around — cops, reporters, photographers, neighborhood residents — none of them seemed to be moving, either. It was suddenly impossibly quiet, as if someone had just called for a moment of silence. I distinctly remember hearing birds chirping in the park across from the precinct, and off in the distance on Saint Nicholas Avenue there was the brief grumble of a passing bus.

Then out of the dead silence, someone in a shrieking voice that was so high and loud it was impossible to tell if it was a man or a woman suddenly yelled.

“Sniper!”

The spell broke instantly. Everyone in the vicinity of the fallen mayor, including me, broke away like a stampeding herd from his body.

I didn’t know where Lieutenant Miller had gotten to, but Chief Fabretti and I dove immediately between a couple of cruisers parked out in front of the precinct. I could hear several cops crying out, “Where? Where? Where?” simultaneously over the chief’s radio as we crawled on our hands and knees in the gutter.

“Unbelievable! This isn’t happening! You hear the shot, Mike? I didn’t hear jack shit!” Fabretti said beside me, where he gripped a short-barreled.38 he had pulled out of somewhere. “Damn it! We have a sniper team covering the rooftops. What just happened?!”

I shook my head and was about to take a peek out at the rooftops myself when there was a loud, thunking crack of wood as another bullet ripped into the podium.

“Down!” I yelled. “We’re still under fire!”

I noticed that there wasn’t even a hint of a gun crack for the second shot, either. Which meant one of two things — either the shooter was using a suppressor, or he was really far away. I was going with the latter. The mayor’s massive wound indicated a large-caliber round probably shot from a rifle with a long range. I shook my head. Like Kennedy, I thought in horror. The mayor had just been assassinated!

“That second shot just hit the front of the podium, Chief,” I said after a moment. “Tell your men that it seems to be coming from dead west, up a Hundred and Seventieth.”

Fabretti was calling it in when I heard a woman’s friendly voice.

“Excuse me, Officer. Over here, please. Excuse me.”

I looked up and squinted into a painfully bright light above the sidewalk. Next to it materialized a tall, attractive woman. It was the statuesque network reporter I’d seen previously, her painted eyes huge and dark and almond-shaped, her thick pancake makeup a garish, yellowy tan. Her camera guy was a short, stocky, friendly-looking bearded Hispanic guy who gave me a wink with his free eye.

We were still being shot at, and they wanted a sideline report?

I guess I wasn’t the only one in full-out shock.

“Get down!” I yelled as I grabbed them and yanked them behind the car.

Twenty minutes later I was in my Impala, hammering it toward the west side of Washington Heights behind a trio of commando-filled NYPD Emergency Service Unit trucks. The trucks were military surplus BearCat armored personnel carriers; I used to think using them was overkill — at least I did up until I saw the mayor get blown away. The countersniper team in position near the precinct had triangulated the shot with their gunshot echo system, and we were headed now toward a high-rise building on Haven Avenue, where it seemed like the shots had come from.

I almost didn’t believe it when one of the SWAT cops pointed out the suspected building to me. It was so far away. On the other side of Manhattan. Easily three-quarters of a mile. The chill that had gone down my spine had stayed there. Because only a world-class sniper could have made a shot like that, I knew.

Which raised the question: Who, or what, were we dealing with?

“Dude, I blame the media. It’s all their fault, damn it!” cried out an uncharacteristically pissed-off Arturo in the front seat beside me as we roared west toward the building. The young Puerto Rican cop, whom I met on the Ombudsman Outreach Squad, was usually pretty even-tempered.

Along with half the department, my crew had responded immediately to the shooting. I’d grabbed them and taken them with me the moment the decision had been made to raid the suspected building.

And no wonder Arturo was freaking out. The mayor had been rushed to Columbia Presbyterian, but everyone knew he was dead. First a bombing and now an assassination? We were in a new territory of spooky, and the adrenaline couldn’t have been running higher.

“What did you just say?” said Brooklyn Kale from the backseat. “The media? What are you talking about, Lopez?”

“Exactly, Arturo,” said Doyle, sitting beside her. “When you open your mouth, it would be nice if you maybe made some sense from time to time.” Jimmy Doyle, another young cop from the Ombudsman Outreach Squad, had become my right-hand man.

“Use your brains, fools,” Arturo insisted. “The media are right now in the process of doing millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of free PR work for whoever is doing this. Such over-the-top, wall-to-wall coverage just sets the bar higher and higher each time for the nut jobs and terrorists to get everybody’s attention.

“Which means bigger explosions, more bodies, and more atrocities. They should take their cue from the baseball media, which nipped fan stupidity in the bud when they wisely decided to stop showing people who run onto the field.”

“So don’t tell people there’s terrorism? That’s your solution?” said Brooklyn.

“How about at least not sensationalizing it so much?” Arturo said. “This is a bloodbath. Stop selling the frickin’ popcorn.”

“Congrats, Arturo,” Doyle said as we skidded to a stop in the driveway of the Haven Avenue building’s underground parking garage. “I think you actually might have made your first-ever good point.”

“Shut up, people, please,” I said, turning up my radio as a just-arriving NYPD helicopter swooped in from the south and hovered over the building.

“There’s something on the east side of the building,” the pilot said after a minute. “It looks like some sort of a rifle.”

The ESU cops spilled out into the driveway and busted out their ballistic riot shields and submachine guns. We stayed behind them as we went across the pavement toward the side door of the building. Having neither the time nor the inclination to find and ask the super for the key, the ESU breach team unhesitatingly cracked the door open with a battering ram.

After dismissing the elevators as dangerous because of potential tampering, the ESU guys left a small contingent in the new building’s sleek marble lobby as the rest split up into the building’s two stairwells.

My team and I followed the ESU team in the north stairwell. Despite being pumped up with adrenaline, we had to stop twice for short breathers to get up the thirty-two floors.

We were the first team there. An alarm went off as the lead ESU guy hit the roof door, and we were out in the suddenly cool air with the roaring, hovering NYPD Bell helicopter right there almost on top of us. The pilot pointed to the top of a little structure that housed the elevator equipment.

I ran across the tar paper to its ladder and climbed up and just stood there staring at it.

I’d never seen anything like it before. I wasn’t an expert, but the long black rifle looked huge, like a sniper rifle, perhaps a.50 caliber. It was bolted into two strange, bulky stands that could have been motorized.