David Rosenfelt - Airtight

Another round of weapons fire shattered the quiet, and dirt and concrete kicked out from all around us. We were in a completely untenable position; any effort to find the person shooting at us would leave me totally vulnerable.

But I had to do something, because Emmit could well have been dying. And the way things were setting up, I was going to join him.

I started to work my way around the tower, but more shots cut me off. Then I heard a sound; it was a human sound, maybe a small shout of surprise. Or pain. Or both.

I waited sixty seconds, which in that situation was an eternity. Then I started to make my way around again, bracing myself for more gunfire.

But there was only silence.

So I kept going, gun at the ready, prepared to shoot at anything I saw. And what I saw was a man, standing off in the distance near a building, looking down.

I raised my gun, but I didn’t shoot, because the man was Chris Gallagher. And he was looking down at a body.

Gallagher looked up at me, clearly not afraid of the gun in my hand.

He bent over and seemed to be searching the pockets of the person lying at his feet. I wanted to ask him what the hell was going on, but I had Emmit to worry about.

I took off in a run towards my car, and as I passed by Gallagher I yelled, “My partner’s been hit!”

Gallagher nodded and started running back towards where we had been. I continued on to my car, and drove it to where Emmit was lying, now with Gallagher beside him and pressing down on the wound. As I approached, Gallagher picked Emmit up. It seemed effortless, amazing since Emmit weighed more than two hundred and fifty pounds.

I helped Gallagher put Emmit into the backseat, closed the door, and ran back around to the driver’s side. As I passed by Gallagher, he slipped something into my hand. I didn’t look at it; I was too busy programming the GPS to find the nearest hospital.

It was seven miles away, and while en route I called in to Barone’s office to report what had happened, and to tell them to have the hospital waiting for our arrival.

I called to Emmit a few times, but he didn’t answer. I was hoping that he was just unconscious.

When we got there, I pulled up and was immediately surrounded by emergency personnel. The hospital appeared unimpressive, a one-level place that looked more like a veterinary hospital, but the people there had their act together.

Emmit was out of the car, on a gurney, and in the hospital within a minute. By the time I got inside, he was gone, and I had to ask the person behind the desk where they had taken him.

She asked me to fill out some papers, but I refused, at least for the time being. I wanted to be with Emmit, and she understood and directed me to the area where he was being treated.

I was in the waiting room for over an hour when Captain Barone and three other cops from our station showed up. “How is Emmit?” Barone asked.

“He’s in surgery. They’re not telling me anything, but he lost a lot of blood. Did you reach his wife?”

He shook his head. “She’s on a plane to Seattle to visit her parents. There’s a message for her to call in when she lands. Who did this?”

It was then that I realized that I hadn’t looked at whatever Gallagher had given me. I took it out of my pocket. It was a Nevada Driver’s License, in the name of Frank Kagan.

I showed it to Barone. “He did.”

“How do you know that? Where is he?”

“He’s dead. Chris Gallagher killed him.”

“Excuse me?”

“This guy had us pinned down. Emmit was hit and I was next. Gallagher was there, I don’t know why, but he killed him.”

I told Barone where it happened as best as I could, and he made a phone call to dispatch officers to the scene. Then we waited on Emmit.

It was another hour and forty minutes before the doctor came out to talk to us. “He’s going to make it. He may not go dancing any time soon, but he’s going to make it.”

He went on to say that no major organs were hit, but that Emmit had lost a lot of blood, and if he had gotten to the hospital ten minutes later, it might have been too late.

The bottom line was that Gallagher had saved Emmit’s life.

And mine as well.

Gallagher instantly regretted what he had done.

Intervening had not been a mistake, even though he was operating mostly on instinct. Kagan was going to kill those two cops, and Gallagher was not about to let that happen.

What he regretted was killing Kagan. He could have knocked him unconscious as easily as he broke his neck, and if he had, Kagan would have remained alive to answer Gallagher’s questions. And Gallagher had no doubt that Kagan would have found it in his best interest to answer them; Gallagher could be very persuasive that way.

But now it was too late for that; Kagan’s question-answering days were behind him. So now Gallagher would have to do the answering for him. He’d find out why Kagan was there to kill Somers and his partner, and he had no doubt it was related to the Brennan murder investigation.

Gallagher had a strong feeling that Kagan was military, just based on the way he handled his weapon, and how he chose the optimum spot and position to take out the cops. If he was right, it would make it easier for Gallagher to find out what he needed to know.

But Somers certainly had more resources at his disposal, which was why Gallagher gave him the driver’s license. They’d be able to track down Kagan’s history, and find out a great deal of information about him.

But Gallagher kept a prize for himself. It was a hotel key, a card that would provide entry to Kagan’s room at Cod Cove Inn. At that moment Gallagher had no idea where that was, as there was no address on the key. But he’d find it, and he’d get into the room. And once he did, if he learned anything that made sense to share with Somers, he could do so.

Gallagher placed a phone call to Lieutenant Linda Worley, a military police officer assigned to the Intelligence Unit at Quantico. Worley and Gallagher had briefly been stationed together in Germany about eight years prior. They almost had an affair, and would have, had not Worley remembered that she had a husband back in the states. They’d run into each other a few times in the intervening years, but not for long enough for anything to have happened.

“This is Gallagher,” he said, when she got on the phone.

“And this is a happy coincidence,” she replied. “I’ve been divorced six months.”

He laughed. “Well, if you give me some information, I just might work my way down there to see you.”

They bantered some more, until he got around to telling her what he needed. “There’s a guy named Frank Kagan, last known address Las Vegas; I need to know all there is to know about him.”

“What else have you got?”

“I think he was military.”

“Well, that narrows it right down,” she said.

“He’s maybe forty-two, and probably has a criminal record.”

Gallagher had a pang of conscience in asking her to help. She had no way of knowing that he had gone renegade; if she checked, his records would simply say that he was on leave. But before long the police, military and civilian, would be after him. It would come out that she’d helped him, and at the very least wouldn’t look good in her file.

She said that she’d get back to him, so he turned to his computer to find out where the Cod Cove Inn was. There were three of them in the Northeast, the closest being near Brayton. Having followed Lucas to Brayton and met Alex Hutchinson, he knew there wasn’t any need to check out the other Cod Cove Inns. That was the one.

Knowing that time was of the essence, Gallagher set out to drive to Brayton. He certainly wanted to examine the room, and there was always the chance that the police would find out where Kagan had been staying and seal the place off.