Mike Lawson - Dead on Arrival

The fire had started in a bedroom in an apartment on the third floor. Then the ceiling above the third floor unit had collapsed and two people sleeping on the fourth floor had dropped right down into the bedroom of the two people who’d been sleeping on the third floor. So he had four bodies — two couples — and the man and woman from the fourth floor were stacked on top of the couple from the third.

Crocker’s guys had done a good job. They’d managed to put the fire out less than an hour after they got the alarm, and although three other units in the apartment building had been heavily damaged, no one else had died and they’d managed to save the building. It was the cause of the fire that was bothering Crocker. He wasn’t the arson investigator but he’d been around a long time, and he was pretty sure that the fire hadn’t been caused by a natural gas explosion or somebody who’d fallen asleep with a cigarette burning. There had been an explosion, though — strong enough to blow out a couple windows in the building next door — and Crocker thought that whatever had exploded had been attached to a container of something flammable. In other words, a damn incendiary device had gone off in this apartment.

So they weren’t dealing with some semi-harmless firefly, some guy who got his rocks off watching buildings burn, or some schmuck trying to collect on the insurance. No, this was something else; he didn’t know what, but whatever was going on it wasn’t his problem. The cops and the arson investigator would have to sort that out.

‘Hey, Chief,’ a voice said.

Crocker turned. It was a cop, a young guy with ears like pitcher handles under his cap. Crocker wasn’t a fire chief, but there was no point telling the cop that; the cops always called the senior fireman on the scene chief.

‘You shouldn’t be up here,’ Crocker said. ‘That floor you’re standing on could give way.’

‘I talked to the manager,’ the cop said, ‘and we know who three of these people are.’

‘Yeah?’ Crocker said.

‘The couple from the fourth floor, their names were Sharon and Pat Montgomery. The gal was a teacher at some middle school and her husband worked at Macy’s over in Arlington.’

Just a couple of ordinary people who had the bad luck to be sleeping in the wrong place at the wrong time, Crocker thought.

‘Who owns this apartment?’ Crocker said.

‘A young gal named Jennifer Talbot. She was a secretary, and that’s why I came up here. You’re never gonna guess who she worked for.’

‘Well, who is it?’ Crocker said. He wished the damn cop would just get to the point and get out of here. He wanted to get away from the smell.

‘Broderick,’ the cop said.

‘You mean Senator Broderick?’ Crocker said.

‘Yeah.’

Oh, boy, Crocker thought, and took out his cell phone. He needed to tell his boss what the cop had just said, but before he dialed, he asked, ‘What about the fourth person, the one who was sleeping with Talbot?’

‘We don’t know yet,’ the cop said. ‘The manager, he said Talbot wasn’t married and he didn’t think she had a boyfriend, although he said she was one good-looking young lady.’

‘Well, you guys need to figure out who he is,’ Crocker said, ‘because …’

Before Crocker could finish telling the jug-eared cop that they were most likely dealing with a homicide, another cop burst into the room, panting, like he’d just run up the stairs. His name tag said wilmont.

‘Artie!’ Wilmont said to the cop who’d been talking to Crocker. ‘We got … oh, man, you’re not gonna fuckin’ believe it!’

‘Well, what is it?’ Crocker said. What the hell was it with these cops? And what the hell were they all doing up here?

‘I was down in the parking lot,’ Wilmont said, ‘looking around, and there was a car parked behind the car of the gal who owns this apartment. You know, blocking her in like she let whoever it was park there. Anyway, I figured maybe I could find out who the guy was, so I slim-jimmed the door open and checked the registration.’

‘Well, goddammit, who is it?’ Crocker said.

Within twenty minutes, a dozen FBI agents, two carloads of brass from the D.C. Metro Police, four guys from the Secret Service, and Tim Crocker’s boss’s boss were there.

Somebody had assassinated Senator William Davis Broderick.

Danny was going nuts; he’d been in the motel room eighteen straight hours. There wasn’t a damn thing to watch on TV, the crummy motel didn’t have payper-view, and he didn’t even have a deck of cards so he could play solitaire. Not only was he bored, he was tired, so worried he hadn’t been able to sleep all night. Joe had said that if this thing didn’t work out he was going back to Riker’s, and he knew Joe wasn’t kidding. If Pugh didn’t call today, he was fucked.

He turned on the television again. Something about some senator getting whacked. Who cared? He changed the channel and got Wheel of Fortune and that Vanna White broad. She’d been doing that show forever, smiling like she had lockjaw, turning over those letter blocks. She must hate those letters by now — and fuckin’ Pat Sajak too. He wondered how old she was. She had to be pushing fifty, but he had to admit she still looked damn good. And these people they got for contestants. How the hell did they find three idiots every day that would jump up and down and scream every time they-

His cell phone rang. The phone was sitting on the nightstand next to the bed, and he grabbed for it so fast he knocked it to the floor. He rolled off the bed, landing hard on his knees, and scrambled for the phone. He answered it on the second ring.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘Get on a land line. Call 540-432-2387. Got it?’

‘No! Wait a minute! Let me get a pen.’ Before the guy could say anything, he reached up and grabbed a pen sitting next to the motel phone. ‘Give me the number again.’ The guy repeated it, and Danny wrote the number down on his left forearm.

The caller had sounded like Jubal Pugh’s snake, that skinny rat-bastard Randy with the prison tats on his knuckles. Thank you, Jesus. He waited a couple of minutes and then picked up the motel phone and called the number Randy had given him.

‘Come on back out to Jubal’s place,’ Randy said. ‘If somebody follows you, we’ll know it.’

Shit, the guy could have told him that on the cell phone. ‘Aw, relax, Randy. I’ll be there in forty-five minutes. That’s how long it took me to get there yesterday.’

He hung up and called his cousin. ‘Joe, it’s me. It looks like we’re on. I’m heading out to Pugh’s place right now.’

Joe didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he said, ‘You better make this work, Danny,’ and hung up.

Jesus. Would it have killed the guy to say ‘good luck’?

There wasn’t anything for Joe to do but wait. And while he waited, all he could do was think about his ex-wife. Every time he spoke to his goddamn cousin, every time he looked at his goddamn cousin, he thought about her. He was sick of thinking about her.

His cell phone rang again. It was probably Danny calling back. With DeMarco’s luck, Danny had gotten a flat tire driving out to Pugh’s. But it wasn’t Danny; it was Emma.

‘Anisa Aziz called me late yesterday and I drove down to Charlottesville and spoke to her last night. I just got home. Anisa was abducted right before Mustafa tried to blow up the Capitol.’

‘Jesus. Will she tell the Bureau?’

‘No. I spent an hour trying to get her to change her mind, but she’s terrified. And I don’t blame her. The people who abducted her showed her pictures of her mother and her brother and said they’d kill them if she talked to the police. If the FBI gets somebody, she’ll be willing to testify, but she’s not going to go to them now.’