Linda Fairstein - Death Dance

As he reached behind himself to the chair he'd been sitting on to straighten himself up against it, Mona Berk turned and saw him as clearly as I did in a beam of light that streamed in from overhead.

"Stop moving around, you idiot!" I heard her call to Dobbis as she aimed the gun and discharged another round.

This time he yelled out in pain. He had only been upright for seconds, but Mona had found her mark. Dobbis had been hit.

I pushed up and ran toward him. "Get away from me," he yelled.

There was blood coming from his right shoulder and I grabbed hold of his left elbow to start dragging him with me away from the wildly frantic Mona Berk. I was trying to keep count of the bullets that had been spent, assuming the revolver held six and not knowing how many more Kehoe had in his pocket.

"Give it up," Kehoe said, trying to get his gun away from his out-of-control cohort. "I won't miss."

"We're never going to get out of here, you damn liar," Mona said, refocusing her rage on her partner. "You're going to get us both killed."

I saw the flash of the gun firing and again the sound of the blast echoing within the domed room. Another shot followed immediately and I saw Ross Kehoe fall backward from the impact and heard the crack of his skull against the surface of the floor.

Mona dropped to her knees beside him and ignored me for the moment. Her bloodcurdling screams scattered all the pigeons perched on the edge of the broken skylight. The gunsmoke trailed upward and gave off an acrid smell as it drifted toward the skylight.

I dropped Chet Dobbis's arm and started in the direction of Mona Berk and the fallen Ross Kehoe. The bullet count was in my favor, and the whirring noise at the door behind me continued to give me courage.

As I passed the bar, I grabbed a crystal decanter and cracked it against the marble countertop, holding the jagged glass in my hand by the neck of the broken bottle, and making a run at Mona Berk, who was sobbing now, while Kehoe was silent and still beside her.

"The gun is empty, Mona," I said. "Put it down."

She didn't look up the first time I said it. She was mesmerized, it seemed, by the pool of blood collecting on the floor next to Kehoe's chest, trickling toward her.

"Drop it," I said, determined to get it out of her hands before anyone managed to enter the room.

As I neared them, I could see that Kehoe's chest was moving up and down, but Mona wasn't watching that. She couldn't take her eyes off the blood as the rivulet reached her knee and the crimson stain started to spread on the leg of her pants.

I took a few steps closer to her and she lifted her head, bellowing at me like a shrew, from her kneeling position on the floor. No words came out-only a primal scream. When she picked up her right hand-bringing the gun up with it-I charged at her and knocked her off balance. The revolver dropped onto the floor and slid under the bed a few feet away, while the crystal decanter splintered into hundreds of tiny pieces as I lost my grip, and Mona Berk landed on it as she fell backward.

While she rolled back and forth in pain, trying hopelessly to brush off the shards that were embedded in the skin of her neck, I retrieved the gun and ran to alert my rescuers through the widening crack they were creating in the entryway. Then I untied Chet Dobbis and examined the wound that had grazed his shoulder, reassuring him-and myself-while I waited for the powerful spreader to open the heavy door of the great old forgotten dome of the Mecca Temple.

"You certainly took your time coming to get me."

We were sitting in the squad room of the Midtown North station house, a couple of blocks away from the City Center of Music and Drama. It was five o'clock in the morning and about the only time in Manhattan you couldn't find an open joint that was still serving liquor.

"It was a toss-up for Mercer. His SVU pals came up with Ramon Carido in a homeless shelter in Queens, and they wanted him to go out there for the collar. We thought we'd have good news for you on that score, if we ever found you again. Battaglia was so damn afraid to lose you-or to get bad press over losing you-that he got on the phone with Interpol himself. The local Turkish constables know where Dr. Sengor's parents live, and any day now we'll have that pervert cuffed. Ralph Harney? Bronx Homicide's got him back in for questioning. It'll be a trifecta, Coop. Not a bad night for the good guys."

"How come you won't answer my questions?"

"You know the drill, Coop. Major Case has to debrief you first."

"Tell me something, will you? What were you really doing all those hours?"

"Classified. Top secret. No can do."

"Were you there at the dome with Emergency Services?"

"I wanted to be at the door, right behind the ESU guys when they were opening it up. First time I saw a space, I was gonna yell it into you, Coop. Final Jeopardy answer. That's what I was gonna say. Only there was no room for me up there. Hey, loo, you got a bottle of scotch stashed in one of your drawers here? Give the blonde a break."

"So what was the answer?" I asked. "What kind of clue were you planning on giving me?"

"Phoebe Moses. That was the answer."

"You win, Mike. It wouldn't have helped me." I rubbed my eyes and tried to control my anxiety so that I would be useful when the detectives began questioning me.

"You don't know Phoebe Moses? That's twenty bucks from you," he said, pouring the golden liquid into a coffee mug that depicted a homicide cop standing over a body, and the familiar slogan: Our Day Begins When Your Day Ends.

"Mercer?"

"You got my money."

"Who was Annie Oakley? I figured if I told you that, you'd be ready for me to toss my gun in to you. I thought if you were still alive, you'd put it together with my hint and do something to help yourself. Shoot one of those bloodsuckers."

I lifted the mug and sipped the scotch. I knew Mike was just trying to humor me, trying to take my mind off the dreadful events of the night. "That's quite a stretch, Detective Chapman."

"You gotta get over your phobia of guns. Kaiser Wilhelm, he even let Oakley shoot the ashes off a cigar he had in his mouth. I'm telling you, Coop, Oakley was so good that she outshot the greatest sharpshooter alive, Frank Butler. And you know what? Even though she humiliated him in public-like you're always doing to me-he married her. He got over it."

"You willing to take that chance if you teach me how to shoot?"

"I'll just settle for my twenty bucks."

"Were there any rounds left in the gun?" I asked.

Mike shook his head. "You can't shoot yet, but your math was okay."

"Kehoe was sure you'd never find us in the dome."

"He came close to being right," Mercer said. "We had a team scouring that upstairs area-but they just didn't go deep enough. Couldn't see anything, couldn't hear anything. Didn't look like people had been up in back there in ages. We couldn't even find anybody from the crew in the middle of the night who knew how to get to it, once we knew you were there. We finally had to wake the director up, but that was only after we got lucky."

"Where did you think we'd gone?"

Mercer stood behind me and rubbed my shoulders. "Most of us figured Kehoe had taken you out on the street. You know, kidnapped you and had you in the trunk of a car on your way out of town."

"So when are you going to tell me how it went down? Who's my hero?"

"Have mercy," Mercer said, looking over at Mike. "Don't make her read about it in tomorrow's papers. It doesn't have anything to do with her debriefing."

Mike started to explain. "Once we got out of our trap on that stage, I told Peterson to send in the detectives who were sitting on Mona Berk's SoHo apartment. See if there was anything inside there-notes, tickets, maps, phone messages on the machine-anything at all that would give us some direction to look for Kehoe. Don't act so surprised, don't be giving me any of your gotta-get-a-warrant bullshit. We're talking exigent circumstances here, life and death. Your life. I wasn't looking for evidence to use in court, Coop. I was looking for you."