Michael Ridpath: Where the Shadows Lie

In the mouth of the alleyway stood a young woman, grocery bags in both arms, staring at Magnus, her mouth open. She was wide, real wide, and directly behind the kid in the yellow T-shirt in Magnus’s line of fire.

The hesitation gave the kid time to raise his own gun. Magnus was looking straight down the barrel. A stand off.

‘Police! Drop your weapon!’ Magnus shouted, even though he knew the kid wouldn’t.

What would happen next? If the kid fired first, he might miss Magnus, and then Magnus could get away his own shot. Although he was six foot four and weighed over two hundred pounds, Magnus was lying prone on the street, partially hidden by the dislodged trash can, a smallish target for a panicked kid.

Perhaps the kid would back off. If only the woman would move. She was still rooted to the spot, her mouth open, trying to scream.

Then Magnus saw the kid’s eyes flick upwards and behind Magnus. The bald guy.

The kid wouldn’t have taken his eyes off Magnus’s gun if the bald guy was holding back. He would only risk that if the bald guy was relevant to the situation, if he was his saviour, if he had his own gun and was approaching Magnus from behind. Hold off for a couple of seconds until the bald guy shot Magnus in the back, that was the kid’s plan.

Magnus pulled his trigger, just once, not the twice he had been trained. He wanted to keep the numbers of bullets flying towards the fat woman to a minimum. The kid was hit in the chest; he jerked and fired his own gun, missing Magnus.

Magnus reached out to the trash can and flung it behind him. He turned to see the empty container hitting the bald guy in the shins. The man was reaching under his belly for his own gun, but doubled over as he tripped on the can.

Magnus fired twice hitting the guy each time, once in the shoulder and once in the bald crown of his head. A mess.

Magnus pulled himself to his feet. Noise kicked in. The fat woman had dropped her groceries and was screaming now, loud, very loud. It turned out there was nothing wrong with her lungs. A police siren started up somewhere close. There was the sound of shouting and running feet.

The bald guy was still, but the kid was sprawled on his back on the ground, his chest heaving, his yellow T-shirt now stained red. His fingers were curled around his gun as he tried to summon up the strength to point it towards Magnus. Magnus stamped hard on his wrist and kicked the gun out of the way. He stood panting over the boy who had tried to kill him. Seventeen or eighteen, Hispanic, close-cropped black hair, a broken front tooth, a scar on his neck. Taut muscles under swirls of ink on his arms and chest, intricate gang tattoos. A tough kid. A kid his age in Cobra-15 could already have several dead bodies to his name.

But not Magnus’s. At least not today. But tomorrow?

Magnus could smell gunpowder and sweat and fear and once again the metallic bite of blood. Too much blood for one day.

‘I’m taking you off the street.’

Deputy Superintendent Williams, the chief of the Homicide Unit, was firm. He was always firm, that was one of the things Magnus appreciated about him. He also appreciated that he had come all the way from his office on Schroeder Plaza in downtown Boston to make sure that one of his men was safe. They were in an anonymous motel room in an anonymous motel somewhere off I-91 between Springfield, Massachusetts and Hartford, Connecticut, chaperoned by FBI agents with Midwestern accents. Magnus hadn’t been allowed back in the station since the shooting.

‘I don’t think that’s necessary,’ Magnus said.

‘Well, I do.’

‘Are we talking Witness Protection Programme?’

‘Possibly. This is the second time someone has tried to kill you within a week.’

‘I was tired. I let my guard down. It won’t happen again.’

Williams raised his eyebrows. His black face was deeply lined. He was small, compact, determined, a good boss, and honest. That was why Magnus had gone to him six months before when he had overheard his partner, Detective Lenahan, talking on his cell phone to another cop about tampering with evidence in a homicide investigation.

They were on a bullshit stakeout. Magnus had gone for a walk and was returning to the car when he stopped in the fall sunshine just behind the passenger window. The window was open a crack. Magnus could hear Lenahan clearly, wheedling, cajoling and threatening a Detective O’Driscoll to do the right thing and smudge the fingerprint evidence on a gun.

Magnus and Lenahan had not been partners for long. At fifty-three, Lenahan was twenty years older than Magnus. He was experienced, smart, popular, and he seemed to know everyone in the Boston Police Department, especially those with Irish last names. But he was lazy. He used his three decades of experience and knowledge of police methods to do as little work as possible.

Magnus saw things differently. As soon as he had closed one case he was eager to move on to the next; his determination to nail the perp was legendary within the department. Lenahan thought there were good guys and there were bad guys, there always were and there always would be. There was not very much that he or Magnus or the whole Boston police force could do about that. Magnus thought that every victim, and every victim’s family, deserved justice, and Magnus would do his very best to get it for them. So the Jonson-Lenahan partnership was hardly made in heaven.

But until that moment, Magnus had not imagined that Lenahan was crooked.

There are two things that a cop hates more than anything else. One is a crooked cop. Another is a cop who rats on one of his colleagues. For Magnus the choice was easy – if people like Lenahan were allowed to get away with destroying evidence of a homicide, then everything he had devoted his career towards was worthless.

Magnus knew that most of his colleagues would agree with him. But some would turn a blind eye, convince themselves that Magnus had misheard, that good old Sean Lenahan could not be one of the bad guys. And others would think that if good old Sean got himself a little retirement nest egg by taking money off one bad guy who had just killed another, then good luck to him. He deserved it after serving the citizens of Boston so loyally for thirty years.

Which is why Magnus had gone straight to Williams and only Williams. Williams had understood the situation. A couple of weeks later Magnus’s promotion came through and he and Lenahan were split up. An undercover team from the FBI was brought in from out of state. A major investigation was launched and Lenahan was linked with two other detectives, O’Driscoll and Montoya. The Feds discovered the gang that was paying them off; it was Dominican, led by a man named Pedro Soto, who operated out of Lawrence, a faded mill town just outside Boston. Soto supplied cocaine and heroin wholesale to street gangs all over New England. The three crooked detectives were arrested and charged. Magnus was billed as the star witness when the case eventually came to trial.

But the FBI hadn’t yet amassed enough evidence to charge Soto. He was still out there.

‘Your guard slips once, it can slip again,’ said Williams. ‘If we don’t do something you’ll be dead within two weeks. They want your ass and they’ll get it.’

‘But I don’t see why they want to kill me,’ Magnus said. ‘Sure, my testimony will nail Lenahan, but I can’t point to Soto or the Dominicans. And you said Lenahan isn’t cooperating.’

‘The FBI thinks it’s figured out Lenahan’s angle. The last thing he wants is to wind up in a maximum-security prison with a bunch of convicted killers, no cop would want that, he’d be better off dead. But without your testimony, he’ll walk. Our guess is that he has given the Dominicans an ultimatum: they get rid of you or he’ll give them to us. And if he doesn’t, his buddy Montoya will. If you die, Lenahan and the other two go free, and Soto’s operation continues as if nothing has happened. But if you live to testify, Lenahan does a deal with the FBI, and Soto and his boys will have to close down business and head home to the Dominican Republic. If we don’t get to them first.’