David Rosenfelt: Play Dead

I can hear the shooter coming closer. I can’t tell how close, but I would guess he’s thirty feet away. It is impossible to avoid the realization that this person is going to kill us unless I do something to stop him. I have no idea how to do so, and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t have the courage or ability to pull it off.

On the other hand, I do have Karen, and she pushes something into me which feels rock hard. I reach out and take it; it feels like a piece of firewood. It makes sense; if she or her neighbor has a fireplace, this would be a likely place to keep the wood.

So I have a log, and he has a large gun. Advantage, bad guy, although I wouldn’t feel confident even if the weapons were reversed.

I whisper to Karen: “Move as slowly and quietly as you can away from the Dumpster and back toward that wall.” I say it so softly that I’m not even sure if actual sounds are coming out of my mouth, but she must hear me, because I can feel her slowly move away.

I can hear the shooter’s footsteps move toward me, and I force myself to come up with a plan. It’s not a good one, but it’s the best that I can do.

As he gets closer, I slowly stand, dreading the clicking sound that my knee usually makes when I get up after sitting for a while. This time it doesn’t; I wonder if fear-induced adrenaline is a cure for knee clicking.

Taking a deep breath, I quickly raise the lid of the Dumpster a few inches and let it drop. It is a distinctive sound, and I want the shooter to think we have taken refuge inside.

It seems to work, because I can hear him move quickly to the Dumpster. He opens the lid, and the next sounds I hear are bullets being fired into it.

Using that deafening sound to camouflage the sounds I will make, I stand and start swinging the log at the spot where his head and body are most likely to be. I seem to strike him a glancing blow, probably on the shoulder, and I hear him yell in pain.

I know that he must be readying the gun to fire, and I make an adjustment and bring the log down as hard as I can at where I think his head must be. It makes a crunching sound, and he moans and seems to fall.

I’m not taking anything for granted, and I keep swinging the log at him, alternating between hitting cement, Dumpster, and something else that I hope is his head. I’m sure the sound of wood hitting skull is quite disgusting to most humans, but right now it sounds pretty good to me.

I start screaming to Karen to run into the house and call 911. I eventually stop swinging the log, because the shooter is completely silent and apparently unmoving. Lights go on in Karen’s neighbor’s house, probably because they are wondering what the racket is about.

My eyes adjust to the dim light, and I can see the shooter at my feet. His head is literally smashed in, and a pool of blood is forming next to him.

I can’t see his face, and I gently move him with my foot so that I’ll be able to. I’m guessing it’s Banks, Carelli, or Winston, since they are the unaccounted-for people in that alleged helicopter crash.

I’ve seen pictures of them all, but the damaged face on the shooter does not seem to match any of them. It’s disappointing; there seems to be enough people in this conspiracy to fill Yankee Stadium, all of whom want to kill Karen.

Within a few minutes the area is filled with seemingly every cop in New Jersey, and the paramedics arrive moments later. But this particular conspirator is not going to kill anyone ever again.

He is dead, just the latest bad guy to learn that you don’t mess with Andy Carpenter.

* * * * *

KAREN AND I don’t get back to my house until four in the morning.

It would have been even later, but Pete Stanton arrived on the scene at Karen’s house and ushered us out of there faster than another detective would have.

After what happened, Karen hadn’t wanted to spend the night at her house, which was totally understandable. Right now we’re both exhausted, and I show Karen the bedroom where she can sleep, and head to my own to go to bed. I call Laurie to tell her what happened, since I know she would want to hear about it as soon as possible.

I wake her, but she quickly becomes alert when I start to tell her what happened. This is the first time I have ever told a story about my own actions that is simultaneously heroic and truthful. I faced death without Marcus to protect me, and I prevailed. The mind boggles.

Laurie has many questions for me about tonight’s events, the last of which is, “Andy, are you okay?”

I know that right now she is referring to my state of mind, my emotional health. I have killed a man, violently and at close range, and that is known to have an often terrible effect on one’s psyche.

Not on mine.

Maybe it will set in later, but I feel absolutely no remorse or revulsion about what I’ve done. This is a guy who deserved to die, whose intent was to gun down Karen and me. “Better him than us” is an understatement.

I get off the phone and try to sleep, and my exhaustion enters into a pitched battle with my adrenaline, the result of which is, I don’t sleep well at all. I get up at seven to take Tara for her walk; it will give me time to consider the impact that what happened last night will have on our investigation.

Karen was obviously the target, since the shooter could not have known that I would be there. But the reason for the attempt on her life is bewildering. How could she possibly be a threat to their conspiracy? It’s the same question I’ve been asking myself since she got shot, and I’m no closer to the answer than before.

Pete Stanton makes the situation slightly clearer when he calls and says that the fingerprints of the guy I killed showed that he was, in fact, Mike Carelli, the Special Forces officer who supposedly piloted the chopper. I didn’t recognize him from the picture, but as in the case of Archie Durelle, the picture I had seen was seven years old.

Either way, I’m getting a little tired of people trying to kill people that I care about, including myself. And I’m getting more than a little angry about my government standing by and not doing anything to prevent it.

I call Alice Massengale at her Newark office and tell her I want to see her about her representations at the hearing. She seems reluctant, so I use the same approach on her that I used on Hamadi: I tell her that if she doesn’t meet with me today, she can learn what I have to say by turning on the television tomorrow. It works again, and an hour later I’m in her office.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Carpenter.”

Cindy Spodek said that Massengale can be trusted completely, but at this point I’m not ready to give her the complete benefit of the doubt. I’m certainly not concerned about the social niceties. “You misled the court about Stacy Harriman.”

If she’s cowed by my direct approach, she hides it well. “That’s a serious accusation.”

I nod. “And an inaccurate one. I should have said, “You misled the court about Diana Carmichael.”

“Diana Carmichael,” she says, concealing whether the name has any meaning for her. “Suppose you tell me what you are talking about.”

I continue. “Here’s some of what I know.” I then proceed to detail some, but not all, of the facts I have learned about Hamadi et al. I tell her that a group of people stole billions during the chaotic reconstruction period in Afghanistan and then faked their deaths and disappeared.

“But it is difficult to disappear with a huge amount of ill-gotten money and exist in society. So an elaborate scheme was set up, whereby fake companies would do fake business with each other, showing huge earnings in the process. But in reality they were earning nothing; the money that they received was the stolen money, effectively laundering it. Hamadi was the front man for the operation.