Michael Ledwidge - Alert

“Hey, Detective. This is Sergeant Rowe,” he said. “I think you should head over here to Thirty-Seventh Street near Eighth. I’m not positive, but I think I found that doodad you’re looking for on a building about a quarter of the way toward Seventh.”

“Good job, Rowe,” I said as I grabbed Emily’s arm and immediately started hustling her west toward Eighth Avenue. “We’re about a block away. Don’t leave yet, and try to stay out of sight. Keep your eyes peeled for Yevdokimov coming out of the building across the street. It looks like he’s on the move.”

We heard the yelling right as we made it to the corner of Eighth.

A block to the north, at the intersection of 37th, there was some kind of commotion in the street between a guy in a car and some guys on a motorcycle.

The car was a silver Mercedes double-parked beside a sidewalk construction shed, its bald driver half out of its window as he yelled. The two guys on the motorcycle beside him were dressed in black and wearing black full-face helmets. The big glossy orange Japanese motorcycle they sat on was so close to the Benz it seemed to be leaning on its left rear quarter panel.

Had the bike tapped the Benz? I thought, staring, as I started crossing 36th. A fender bender?

As I reached the other corner of 36th, the motorcycle’s engine suddenly screamed as it roared away from the Benz like a rocket east up 37th.

East up westbound 37th! I thought as the driver threw open his door.

“Down!” I yelled as I dove to the ground.

I was just able to pull Emily down on top of me on the sidewalk when the Mercedes exploded with a blast of light and a deafening boom.

I got up off my knees a disoriented moment later. I stood there with my hands over my ears, waiting for them to stop ringing, before I realized the ringing was the piercing blare of a stuck car horn.

I looked north and saw that the sound was coming from the half-blown-apart Mercedes. Through what looked like billowing white smoke, I could see the car up on the sidewalk, its front end wedged under the wreckage of the now-collapsed sidewalk shed.

I called in the description of the motorcycle over the radio as I ran toward the wreckage, pushing through an already clustering crowd on the sidewalk and street. I squinted against the nasty tang of burned metal as I began pulling away the aluminum poles and wooden sheets of the destroyed construction shed, trying to get access to the car.

As I peeled away the last couple of splintered plywood sheets, I saw that some type of tarp from the shed had fallen perfectly over the side of the car, like a showroom cover. Then I pulled the cover away, and I got my first good look at the damage.

The car’s hood was folded in, and its front and rear windshields were completely shattered. All the interior air bags had gone off, and all the tires were blown flat.

I had to move one last sheet of wood to get a look at the driver. He gasped as he sat in the driver’s seat of the ruined car, clutching the wheel with his right hand. The driver’s door was missing. So was the driver’s left arm below the elbow. His striped polo shirt was scorched and sliced to tatters from bomb shrapnel, and when he turned, I could see a still-smoking piece of metal the size and shape of a Dorito embedded in his right cheekbone.

“You’re going to be okay,” I lied to him. “Just sit tight. What happened? Did you see who did it?”

He didn’t say anything. I watched his jaw suddenly clench and his lips begin to tremble. His whole face started shivering, like he was suddenly freezing. I was looking into his blue eyes when they glazed over and he stopped moving. I stepped back in startled horror, looking away. I knew I’d just watched him die.

I recognized his face when I peered back at him a split second later. It was Anatoly Gavrilov, the other Russian we’d brought in during the Bronx arrest of Yevdokimov.

Yevdokimov! I thought as I quickly looked past Gavrilov’s body to the passenger door on the other side of the car. Shit! It was open, and there was blood on the passenger seat and in the footwell.

“Yevdokimov!” I yelled to Emily as I scrambled out of the wreckage and headed into the street around the destroyed vehicle’s trunk. “He was in the car. He’s hurt and on foot. The real bombers must have tried to hit him. C’mon, he can’t have gotten far.”

Around the other side of the car, there was an actual blood trail on the sidewalk. A lot of blood. Yevdokimov was obviously hurt very badly. It was like we were tracking a gut-shot deer up Eighth Avenue.

“Back out of the damn way!” I said to all the looky-loos, trying to preserve the crime scene.

We turned the corner, and the trail ran smack-dab into a tall West African street vendor who was crouched down, picking up iPhone covers out of the gutter.

“Hey! Anyone come past here bleeding?” I said.

“Yes! A white man. A crazy white man,” said the vendor in a musical voice. “He had blood on his arm and pouring off his chin. I tried to get him to sit, but he pushed past me and knocked over all my stuff. He got into a taxi not a minute ago.”

I couldn’t see any taxi on 37th when I stepped into the street, so I radioed it in.

Officer Rowe and his buddies had arrived and were surrounding the scene when we went back around the corner to the wreckage. There had to be about a thousand people standing around now. Cars stopped in the street. Everybody had their phones out, immortalizing our bombing scene for the folks at YouTube to instantly globally disseminate.

“Fuck the police!” someone in the crowd threw out over the still-wailing horn to get a laugh. He got several, unfortunately.

“Isn’t this great? We’re going viral,” Emily said as we stood there gaping at the still-steaming, torn-apart car.

“Of course we are,” I said. “Who wants to watch Times Square Elmo beat the crap out of Times Square Spidey when you got a real live blown-up guy in a car?”

“So I’m going to take a wild guess and say we’re not the only ones looking for Yevdokimov,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

“Guess not,” I said as I moved back through the crowd into the street. I walked around Rowe and crawled back toward the front of the car and reached in over the dead Russian and found the keys still in the ignition.

People in the crowd actually booed as I finally cut the car’s engine and the horn.

“That’s all, folks,” I said.

“So... anything yet?” I said for the twentieth time over Chuck Jordan’s shoulder as he sat at the desk, tapping at Yevdokimov’s laptop.

“Oh, plenty, Mike, but I’m keeping it to myself,” the young agent said, rolling his eyes.

“Why don’t we give Chuck a little space to work, Mike?” Emily said, yanking me out into the hallway.

We were in Yevdokimov’s flop now. We’d found it soon after the bombing. Sergeant Rowe had been spot-on. The building was just where he said it was, down the block from the bombing off Eighth Avenue on the north side of 37th. Yevdokimov’s crash pad was on the tenth floor, and it was filled with me and Emily and about twenty FBI agents who were scouring every nook and cranny for some sign of who the real bombers could be.

We still were unsure of Yevdokimov’s whereabouts. We’d told all the hospitals to be on the lookout for him, but so far, nothing was shaking. The good news was that we’d actually found three computers, which Chuck Jordan and his guys were now poking through.

“This isn’t exactly what people have in mind when they think ‘New York loft,’ is it?” Emily said, looking at the moldering plaster and probably asbestos-covered overhead pipes. “What did the building manager say? This used to be a sewing machine factory? Wasn’t there a famous fire in a sewing machine factory in New York in the eighteen hundreds or something? Because this place definitely looks haunted.”