Nantucket Five-Spot (25 page)

I stepped closer.

“You going to shoot me, Mr. Police Chief? You can't do it. Not like some gangland execution. You're no killer.”

I edged over to his side, past the rows of fireworks cannons, Beaumont watching me. The music from the beach was reaching a crescendo. We stood ten feet apart when the fireworks finale began. The cannons behind me jumped with a series of concussive blasts, like thunder and lightning ripping open the sky. I was stunned, deafened, immobilized.

Beaumont saw it and leapt at me.

I fired, but his movement rocked the barge. I missed. His shoulder drove into my chest, pitching us both into the water. I managed a breath before I went under, but I lost the gun. His shoes dug down on my shoulders, pushing me deeper as he clambered back onto the raft. I thrashed in the water and broke the surface. He wrestled his own gun out of his pants. The ear-shattering fusillade continued. He kicked at me and missed. I grabbed his ankle and he reeled backward.

I had one knee on the platform when he pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened—water had jammed his firing mechanism. His turn to be stunned. I took the split second advantage and lunged up at him. My head drilled into his stomach and knocked him over, slamming him hard on his back. I stomped his torso, stepped on his throat, and kicked his head lurching past him for the mortars. I heard him choking as I cranked the big barrels up toward vertical.

The wheel was stiff, turning too slowly. My arms burned, my throat seized, my body rocked with the effort. Too heavy, too much resistance, not moving fast enough. My skin crawled. Panic seized me. The blast could come any moment.

Beaumont flung himself at me, tipping the barge as he landed, his weight knocking the wind out of me. We struggled, wet, straining with effort, my arms aching, my shoulders cramping.

He pressed me to the deck, rasping, “Three seconds left. It's over.”

A burst of sheer rage and hate rocketed me up to knock him off and crawl under the mortars. I heaved upward with all the strength I had left. I hit the barrels, punching them vertical just as they went off. The explosion battered me. The fire singed my hair, the hot metal seared my shoulders. The waistband of my boxers ignited. I rolled frantically on the planks to put out sparks as the bombs flew up. Haunted seconds of silence closed around me. Four seconds, five seconds, six. The other fireworks finished. The night sky hung soundless, trailing streamers of fading smoke, awaiting the big bang finale.

Then the explosions hit, booming and concussive. The sky burst into flame as the napalm rained down and sizzled into the harbor, well short of the beach. I curled and covered my head when the first blast wave punched. The force pounded me onto the deck. The next blast waves slammed down like sandbags dropping on me, hammering my knees against the deck, crushing the air out of my chest, smacking my face against the wood. My head was ringing and my face was bleeding. The air around me turned into a raging tantrum, flinging shrapnel and gobs of burning napalm.

I struggled to my knees, dazed, to look around. Boxes of munitions stood stacked near the wheelhouse, meant to be loaded as the finale progressed. If they caught on fire, the whole barge would blow. I heaved mysef to my feet, stumbled over Beaumont's prostrate body, hobbled through patches of flame to the wheelhouse, yanked open the door, sucking charred air into my lungs, and pawed at the wall for a fire extinguisher. I felt cold metal and grabbed the cylinder off its hook, starting to spray down the deck fires. My back burned, and I twisted something pushing up on the mortars. My ribs had shifted, I'd twisted my spine. I was scorched—my body shrieked in pain from my neck to my tail bone.

When I limped to the other end of the barge, Haden was biting and kicking Beaumont. I pointed the nozzle at Zeke, then dropped it. I was too shaky, and they were too close together. I might miss and hit Haden.

Haden didn't need me anyway. He held Beaumont around the neck, brought a knee up hard into the bigger man's gut, then stepped away and threw a roundhouse punch with his whole weight and all the torque from his bending body behind it. The blow exploded on the point of Beaumont's jaw, dropping him, but the scream of pain came from Haden, cradling his right hand.

“Fuck! I broke my hand!”

I dropped the fire extinguisher. “Are you all right?”

He grinned in the flickering red light “I'm great. We beat them, Chief. It doesn't get any better than this.”

A cell phone rang from Beaumont's figure on the deck—that irritating, ringtone playing, and then playing again, louder and more urgent. I rummaged through his clothes to find it in a side pocket of his green camouflage cargo pants. The phone was a cheap throwaway, untraceable. The screen ID listed ‘Scooter,' but the phone stopped ringing as I grabbed it. I pushed the SEND button, determined to fake Beaumont's reedy voice and slight southern accent. Two could play at that game.

Beaumont's accomplice answered with one word, the way he always did.

“Tornovitch.”

It stopped me for a second, the gap between being sure of something and really knowing it, between theory and truth.

“Hey, Scooter,” I drawled.

“I heard the bombs but no sirens. What's happening over there?”

I disconnected the call, as if brushing a bug off my arm.

“Jack?” Haden asked.

I nodded. “He doesn't know what's going on. My bet is he's still at the station, putting on his show. Fearless leader of the DHS.”

His teeth gleamed through the smoke and soot. “Okay, it just got better.”

“Let's get moving. It won't take long for him to figure out his plan went sideways.”

My son Tim, who had watched the display from the roof of a friend's house on Lincoln Circle, summed it up perfectly the next morning. “Best fireworks ever.”

We revived the Drummonds and our cops. Shivering, I shrugged out of the knapsack and pulled the dry clothes out of the plastic bag, grateful for the sweater. No shoes, though—I had been moving too fast, and left my brogans on the beach when I hit the water. It didn't matter. I'd live.

I shackled Beaumont with Barnaby's handcuffs, and guided, pushed rolled and dragged everyone into the launch, keeping Beaumont up front with me. Haden stayed behind to secure the crime scene. There was a phone in the wheelhouse, so he could make the necessary calls. The most important call, to the station house. Tornovitch had to be held there, by force if necessary, until I arrived.

Elvis wasn't leaving the building. Not on my watch.

The whole left side of Beaumont's face was starting to bruise. At first I thought it was from Haden's beating but the contusions were too severe. The blast waves must have slapped him against the deck. I probably didn't look much better. Enraged, Beaumont kept his mouth shut. We were all battered and half-deaf. My body felt like a tuning fork, vibrating with the others—one harmonic pitch of horror and shock. My hands trembled starting the engine.

I eased the boat away from the barge and headed for the Hy-Line pier. Patches of napalm were still burning on the black water, like campfires on a battlefield.

Three cruisers waited for us on Straight Wharf. Howie and Randy hustled Beaumont into one car and the Drummonds into another. I hobbled to the third and climbed into the passenger side of the front seat. Kyle Donnelly was driving.

“You look like shit,” he said happily.

“Good to see you, too. Now get me to the station.”

“Can't do it, boss. You're going to the hospital.”

“I'm fine.”

“You're trashed! You can barely walk. You were obviously—I'm not sure how to put this—
on fire
a few minutes ago.”

He was right. I needed help. “Swing by my house on the way. I want to grab some shoes.”

Tim Lepore was on duty that night. He had worked at Mass General treating gang war victims, and he had an amusingly astringent bedside manner. He bound up my ribs and rubbed some new burn cream on my face and shoulders. He even had a spare shirt in his office. While he was there he grabbed some Tylenol-codeine samples. “So you won't have to get a prescription.” He refused to charge me for them, and when I asked about taking more than the normal dose to get to sleep, he was typically gruff. “Take as many as you need.”

“They're not addictive?”

“They're for pain, Chief. When the pain goes away so will the pills. Relax. You're not going to be selling your body for Tylenol-codeine. Now get out of here. I have people with real problems to treat.”

Kyle drove me back to the station. I wanted to brace Tornovitch and get some answers. Where did they procure the explosives? And the boat Beaumont used? Most of all—why did he do it? Was it really a girl in Kuwait? Was she so important to him that it still hurt, a full decade later? And how could he bear to wait so long for Beaumont's release, to plan so meticulously, and then set the plan aside for years? Did he care about the consequences of his reprisal? The people who would have died? Did he even understand it? Maybe not—for a true sociopath, no one else is real.

Still, I wanted to ask him and to see his face when he answered. I got my chance a few minutes later, not that it did me any good.

We turned into the parking lot of the station and stopped at a line of yellow crime scene tape. Crowds had gathered on the berm and both sides of Fairgrounds Road. All of my officers and half the summer specials were milling around the lot, barricaded away from the front doors by Lonnie Fraker, half a dozen staties and a couple of FBI suits.

Kyle parked the big SUV. I wrenched the door open, ducked under the tape and pushed my way past a jack-booted crew-cut off-island State Police storm trooper. Wearing a threadbare cotton sweater with chinos and a pair of topsiders, I didn't look particularly impressive—one more curious citizen. The trooper grabbed my arm as I brushed past, but I shook him off.

“Hey—!” he shouted after me.

“That's the police chief, asshole,” I heard Donnelly say. “This is his house.”

Nicely put, Kyle. Couldn't have put it better myself.

Jogging toward the big brick façade I saw Franny talking to one of the FBI guys. I shoved and shouldered up to them.

“What's going on?”

Franny spun around. “Jack's locked himself in his office. He says he'll shoot anyone who comes through the door.”

“Shit.”

“Well, we were right about him, at least.”

“I have the cell phone he used with Beaumont. He's finished.” I took her hand. “Come on.” We jogged together to the big glass doors.

Lonnie Fraker was the last line of defense. “What are you going to do in there, Chief?”

“End this.”

“I have a SWAT team scrambling right now.”

“No! Tell them to stand down. I'm not turning this station in a war zone, Lonnie. Let me handle it.”

He squinted at me. “You couldn't handle a hamster right now, Chief.”

“Thanks. That's perfect. The more unthreatening I look, the better.”

“But—”

“And he has me for backup,” Franny said. “I know Jack Tornovitch. We've worked together for years. He trusts me.”

Lonnie was still hesitating.

“Give us fifteen minutes, Lonnie. Okay? Fifteen minutes. Then you can storm the place.”

He stepped aside, cocked his wrist to check his watch. “Okay. Starting now.”

The big station was deserted in the spinning red and blue lights from the flashers in the lot. I thought back to a night in Los Angeles, that gangbanger in Compton, rap-battling me with what seemed like half the LAPD parked out front. The same angry lights, the same weird hush like the whisper of something big and heavy dropping from a roof.

I grabbed the key to Haden Krakauer's office out of the dispatch desk drawer and led Franny up the back stairs. Good to have her beside me. Poetry wasn't going to help me tonight, and I needed all the help I could get.

I banged on the door. “Jack, it's Henry. Franny is out here, too.”

“Going to negotiate with me, Kennis?”

“I have the key. We're coming in.”

“What's the deal? Immunity? Who do I trade for that? There's no one above me, Kennis.”

“If you're willing to talk, not just about this…scheme of yours, but about the drug traffic in the Army, in Iraq. There was somebody above you there. You couldn't have moved those drugs into the country by yourself. Beaumont's probably ratting him out right now. You're going to want to get in on that.”

Tornovitch laughed. “He's been trying to rat that turd out for a decade, Kennis.”

“But now he has corroboration. Now you can back him up. You have nothing to lose.”

“You can say that again, Boy Wonder.”

He had called me that in L.A. I'd forgotten. “We can build a case together, Jack. Let's try.”

Another laugh. “You are so full of shit. You'd say anything to get this gun out of my hand.”

I fitted the key into the lock, turned it. My own gun was long gone, at the bottom of Nantucket Sound.

“We're coming in, Jack. Let's do this face to face.”

I pushed open the door. He was standing beside the window in the swirling illumination from the flashers. Red and blue blobs of light traversed his white face. The all-American terrorist. The big Glock was pointed at the space between us.

“Jack—” Franny started.

“I knew you'd turn on me eventually,” he said to her. “Just a matter of time. You probably have them writing your name on my office door already. But just check your dedicated DHS Command e-mail account. Seriously, come here—take a look. I have it up on the screen. It looks like you were sabotaging fireworks security. All the commands to clear the harbor came from you.”

“You wouldn't—”

“Of course I would. If I have to go down I'm taking you with me.”

“And if the plan had worked—”