Nightcrawler (4 page)

“We can have someone else come by if you'd rather have a man-to-man talk,” Sabrina said menacingly.

“I'm telling you for the last time, you better get your little white ass outta here,” he stuck his finger in Sabrina's face. “You send some cracker out here and I'll rip his head off!”

“Fine,” she said tautly. “You just wait right here.”

“I think we'll have to let the authorities handle this,” a tear trickled down Rita's cheek as they left the building.

“I don't,” Sabrina was beside herself with indignation. “Rita, I want you to swear to me before God that you won't betray me if I take care of this for you.”

“You do whatever you want to help that little girl in there,” Rita insisted.

Sabrina popped the trunk and pulled her ninja jacket, her balaclava and her utility pouch out of her workout bag. Rita watched wide-eyed as Sabrina tossed her purse into the trunk after pocketing the car keys, then slamming it shut and storming back towards the building.

“What are you gonna do?” Rita stood flabbergasted.

“I'll be right back.”

Hijo heard the hammering on the door and threw it open, both surprised and infuriated to see the dark figure in the doorway.

“What the hell you doing here, you runty little—!”

The ninja jacket had metal forearm guards sewn into both sleeves, and the figure sent one as a hammerblow across Hijo's face. He staggered backward as his nose was broken, and at once the figure threw a sandy-colored powder in his face. His throat was immediately clogged with mucus but he was unable to gag or spit because his face had frozen as if turned to stone. The figure then grabbed the edge of his hand and twisted it towards the ceiling, leading him by his locked arm into the kitchen. Bobby watched in awe as the figure produced a roll of duct tape and taped Hijo's wrist in the locked position to a radiator pipe in the corner.

“Wow,” Bobby was amazed. “Are you Batman?”

“You just tell your Mom the police'll be here in ten minutes to take her to shelter,” the figure spoke in an electronically-distorted voice through a device on the balaclava.

“Gee, you talk funny,” Bobby said as the figure looked into the bedroom. Emma appeared to have been sedated, her bruised face angelic in repose.

“So do you,” the figure teased him.

She was still psyched, and as an afterthought she fumbled beneath the ninja jacket and found lipstick in her suit pocket. She pulled off the cap and scrawled on the refrigerator door:

ZERO TOLERANCE ————- NIGHTCRAWLER

She regretted it almost as soon as she wrote it, but was not about to try and erase it with Rita waiting outside. She glared at Hijo as he remained bent over with his wrist tied at an excruciating angle up behind his back, foaming at the mouth.

“You walk funny too,” Bobby giggled as the figure's hips swayed in leaving the apartment.

“What happened?” Rita stared as Sabrina hurried back to the Porsche, pulling off the ninja jacket. “Is everything okay?”

“Call the—“ Sabrina said with a squawky voice, then yanked the balaclava and the voice distorter off her head impatiently. “Call the police and tell them to get her to the shelter. I'll get you back to the church so you can get everything set up.”

“I owe you,” Rita was misty eyed as they got in the car. “I don't know how to thank you.”

“Don't thank me, praise the Lord,” Sabrina smiled, trying to smooth her hair out. “You can buy me a cup of coffee sometime, and a chocolate donut.”

Sabrina drove back out to Staten Island after dropping Rita off in front of the Force of God Christian Church, leaving it to her to explain everything to the Pastor. Undoubtedly the police would ask Rita what happened at the apartment, but her story was that the women had been threatened by Hijo and fled the premises before calling 911. They would be left with Bobby's tale about a ninja coming into the house and tying Hijo to the radiator before writing graffiti on the refrigerator.

She went back to the apartment to change into a T-shirt and jeans after taking a quick shower and grabbing a bag of rabbit food. She took the ten-minute drive to the BCC campus and headed inside to look over some contracts and proposals. She took the elevator to the second floor and was somewhat surprised to see Jon Aeppli's office light on in the darkened suite.

“Hey, Jon,” Sabrina leaned into the doorway. “I hope your wife isn't blaming me for this.”

“I really didn't try and give her much of an explanation,” Jon's pale blue eyes bored into hers. “That friend of yours really made an impact tonight, didn't he?”

“Who was that, Hoyt?” she asked weakly, slipping into the armchair in front of Jon's desk.

“I take it you haven't seen the news or gotten on the Internet.”

“Well, not really.”

“That Nightcrawler friend of yours attacked a man in his own home with a chemical weapon a few hours ago,” Jon was nettled. “The man happened to be a distant relative of the Mayor's partner. He's got the Mayor out for blood. The NYPD has an all-points alert out for the Nightcrawler. Your guy was crazy enough to leave a handwritten note on the victim's refrigerator.”

“You mean the Mayor's a sissy?” Sabrina was wide-eyed.

“That's really not the issue here,” Jon leaned over the desk towards her. “Besides, if you hadn't spent so much time partying over the last couple of years instead of watching the news, you would've known that. At any rate, the Mayor's partner says his nephew was gassed because he was a black man living with a white woman, and the assailant allegedly told him that when he attacked him. He even said the zero tolerance note was a warning to blacks who date white women.”

“That lying dog!” she exploded. “He beat her so bad she was taken to the hospital the night before! It had nothing to do with race, it was a warning to guys who beat on women!”

“Now how would you know that?” Jon said gently.

At once the tension boiled over, and Sabrina cupped her forehead as she covered her eyes, weeping softly. Jon got up from his desk and walked around, patting her shoulder softly.

“It's okay, kid,” he consoled her.

“It happened so fast, he made me so mad, and he was acting like he was going to hit my friend Rita,” she sobbed as Jon handed her a handkerchief. “He was treating that little boy so mean, and I knew he had just put that poor girl in the hospital. I knew I should've never gone over there, but they didn't have anyone else and the Pastor couldn't go. I was just so upset.”

“Bree, you're not telling me you're the Nightcrawler,” Jon said in disbelief.

“I didn't say that,” she sniffed halfheartedly.

“For crying out loud,” Jon walked over to the plate glass window and stared out unseeingly at the river. “What on earth have you gotten yourself into?”

“I was just trying to make a difference, I wasn't trying to hurt anyone or get in trouble,” she wailed. “I knew if I tried to get back into the Academy, you'd probably leave me. I just thought that with all this money, and the chemical weapons you and my Dad developed, maybe I could do something to help people. How could I have known this was going to happen?”

“Well, I can't walk away from you now,” Jon shook his head as he turned to face her. “Now, you listen up, young lady. No more Nightcrawling for you, it's over. As your father's friend, I'm not gonna stand by and watch you get yourself killed. This all ends tonight, you understand?”

“Yes, sir,” she wiped her eyes.

“We've got enough on our plate trying to keep our doors open without you going out and risking everything using chemical weapons on the street,” he admonished her. “We'll just pretend this never happened, and when the Homeland Security people come back—which I know they will—I'll whitewash this as best I can. You just focus on being the CEO of this Company, and make sure you don't do anything to ruin your family name!”

“Okay, Jon,” she smiled sweetly. “I promise.”

She left the office shortly afterward, and returned home to spend an hour of quiet time with the Lord, asking Him to show her the right way.

She had no way of knowing that the powers of darkness were not about to let her walk away so quickly.

“The days of discrimination against minority groups in New York City has come to an end!” Mayor John Jordan fumed as the crowded conference room at City Hall burst into applause. “This Administration will never tolerate hate crimes against any citizens in this City, and we will not abide by any acts of racial or gender discrimination! We are asking that this criminal calling himself the Nightcrawler turn himself in so that we can get him the kind of help and counseling he needs to live a productive life in rejoining our community. The kind of racial hatred he represents must be stopped at all costs, and we ask anyone who has any information about the hateful attack on Hijo Shabazz call 1-800-CRAWLER immediately.”

“Man, what happened to you, brother, turning yourself out like that,” UFC champion and ex-football player Lorenzo Jefferson sidled over to the Mayor's significant other, Mohammed Lincoln. Mohammed was also an NFL veteran who had supposedly come out of the closet last year.

“Brother, if all I got to do is take care of some dude for all this money and power, then I can just close my eyes when the lights go down and pretend I'm taking care of somebody else, you hear what I'm sayin'?” he said as they shared a hearty laugh.

On an upper floor, a tall, powerfully-built man in a dark blue designer suit walked into the Mayor's Office, smiling politely at the secretary.

“How can I help you?” he lisped.

“Perhaps you can,” the blond, ruggedly handsome man smiled. “I'm a reporter with
New Socialist
magazine, and I had this all-access pass from last year. Can you see if this is still good?”

“I sure can, sweetie,” he smiled pleasantly at the man. “Just one second.”

The man pulled an unmarked legal-sized envelope from his inside jacket pocket and slipped it into the pile of letters in the IN box on the desk, then turned and walked out as he winked to the secretary.

“I think I gave you an expired card. Sorry.”

“No problem. Have a great day,” the secretary smiled, then sighed happily as he resumed his paperwork.

Dalibor Branko walked out of the office, smiling and shaking his head in disgust. He had been virulently homophobic since his teenage years as a volunteer in the Serbian Liberation Army. He had been on a personal crusade against Muslims, homosexuals and Communists, and rapidly rose through the ranks of the Army of the Serbian Republic as the Serbian War progressed through the 90's. After he fled Serbia to avoid prosecution for war crimes, he migrated to the USA and made connections with the Russian Mob in Brooklyn. He decided to start his own gang, and thought it was a masterful touch to recruit exclusively from the homosexual community.

He was known as the Grim Reaper in Bosnia and Kosovo for his willingness to execute Muslim captives, annihilating entire hamlets without hesitation. Upon arriving in America, he became known simply as the Reaper. He and his hand-picked LGBT (*lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transvestites) team had become specialists at murder, extortion, loan sharking and arson for the Russians. They saw so much money pass through their hands that Branko thought it idiotic to continue working under the sanction of others.

Mayor Jordan had held the press conference at ten AM that Saturday morning, and the unmarked letter was opened by his secretary and brought to his attention less than an hour later. The Mayor immediately contacted Police Commissioner John Martin, who in turn called Chief Joel Madden and Captain Ty Willard for an emergency session. Homeland Security and the FBI were also notified as to details of the mysterious letter.

“Gentlemen, it appears that we've got another wacko on the loose,” the Commissioner brought the meeting at One Police Plaza to order. “Just a couple of hours ago, an unmarked letter was discovered at the Mayor's Office demanding the transfer of one million dollars to a bank account to be specified by a group claiming to be connected to Al Qaeda. This nut job is calling himself the Reaper, claiming he's the leader of a group known as the Octagon.”

“Sounds like a bunch of UFC rejects, if you ask me,” a cop called out, causing the room to echo with laughter.

“This sicko claims to have access to an anthrax bomb he is going to detonate at an undisclosed point along the East River,” Chief Madden spoke up. ”The White House has been notified, but as you know, this Administration refuses to negotiate with terrorists. At this point, we'll be looking at every known and suspected Al Qaeda sympathizer and Muslim militant activist group on record. We want everyone to scour their databases, squeeze every informer we've got on the field, and follow every lead that comes in to nip this thing in the bud. We don't need another Boston Massacre here in the City, people. We haven't leaked anything to the papers yet, so let's put these dirtbags away before this gets out of hand.”

Just the night before, Hoyt Wexford and Sabrina Brooks had been socializing with a group of the officers who had been summoned to that meeting. They had convened at 310 Bowery, where more than a couple of franchises had tried and failed to make it in NYC's volatile economy. Sabrina knew most of the cops from the academy class that Hoyt had graduated from. They were happy to see her again and very glad that she was doing so well.

“Hey, Bree,” one of the cops called as she returned to their joined tables from the restroom. “We just voted you as having the Best-Looking Feet in this place.”

“Why, thanks, guys,” she smiled, holding her leg up and wiggling her toes in her gold sandals.

“We were gonna vote you having the Best Butt, but some of the faeries around here might've insisted it should've gone to Hoyt,” another cop joked. “We definitely didn't want to get accused of discrimination, so we let it go.”

“What's this world come to?” a third cop bellowed in exasperation as a nearby table of gay men stared at them angrily. “How can anyone not appreciate the perfection of Bree's backside? Lady, I think you and me need to find ourselves a deserted island somewhere. This world is definitely screwed up.”

“Not happening, I already got first prize,” Hoyt waved him off. “You get to ride a fairy out to Fruitcake Island.”

“Definitely screwed up,” another cop sipped from a case of Bud bottles opened and unopened across the tables. “How do you figure that Nightcrawler guy, anyway? I talked to a couple of the guys who investigated the call at that apartment the other day. They said the note was written in lipstick on the wife-beater's ice box. Everybody out there said it looked more like he got what he deserved for putting that girl in the hospital. The Mayor's boyfriend was the one who played the race card.”

As it turned out, the investigating cop who went out to the church after the incident only took Rita Hunt's name in his report. Sabrina was only mentioned as a 'second person' on the scene. The cop was more interested in learning the identity of the masked man who Hijo and little Bobby described, and Rita truthfully declared she never saw a man out there. Hijo wanted to blow it off because of what he had done to Emma, but when his uncle found out what happened, he would not let it go.

“I couldn't wrap my head around that chemical weapons angle,” one cop admitted. “If he's got the kind of stuff they say he's got, then why isn't he committing an act of terrorism somewhere? They said they saw the same pattern with that attack up in East Harlem a few weeks ago. I'll betcha he's just a do-gooder

hitting the dirtbags with some souped-up pepper spray.”

“This whole country's gone paranoid since 9/11, and the Boston Massacre had made things worse,” a cop scoffed. “Next thing you know, they'll ban the Fourth of July because of all the people carrying explosives.”

“Here's to the Nightcrawler,” another cop raised his bottle. “May all the wife-beating animals in this city get what they deserve!”

“Here's to Twinkletoes!” the first cop stood up in a toast to Sabrina. “May I get that deserted island vacation I deserve!”

“Yeah? Well, here's to Fruitcake Island,” she retorted as they all howled with laughter.

Sabrina called Hoyt the following afternoon and was deeply disappointed when he told her he would not be able to meet her at church on Sunday morning.

“Gee, what's wrong?” she asked softly. “Was it something I said the other day?”

“Of course not,” he chuckled in exasperation. “Everybody had a great time. The guys were all glad you see you again. A couple of them were kinda jealous that I was still getting to work out with you. It's just that something came up at work. They're putting a few of us on stand-by alert.”

“Why, what's going on?”

“Well, it's sort of like that thing with the Special Forces and their top secret missions. I'd be letting you in on highly classified information. If you were to divulge any of the information I'd have to spank you.”

“I suppose I'll have to take that risk, Hoyt,” she got very quiet and serious sounding. “Now tell me!”

“There was a note that turned up at the Mayor's Office warning of a terrorist attack,” he relented. “It's got everybody paranoid after the Boston Massacre. I think we're just going high-profile to send a message. They'll probably have us working overtime for the next couple of weeks, I guess. I'd be glad to take you out for dinner to make it up.”

“Promise not to spank me?”

“Scout's honor.”

“Let me know where and when.”

She had called him from the office, and immediately stopped what she was doing to consider the situation. This had to be the gang that tried to blackmail Ryan Hoffman. She was very close to having ditched the whole Nightcrawler project, but her sense of responsibility was dumping it right back on the table. Undoubtedly they would be contacting him soon, and she realized she would have to work with him to make a connection with the terrorists.

“No, I haven't heard anything from them yet,” Ryan admitted after Sabrina had called him into her office. It was a Saturday, but all the upper management personnel were putting in a couple of hours in an effort to accelerate some of their projects in stimulating cash flow. “Have you found out anything about those two people who met with me?”

“Not yet. Ryan, I was wondering if you knew anyone who works in upper management at the New York Telephone Company. I'm thinking we can do a trace on the numbers that try and make contact with the switch that controls the electronic transactions for the Fund.”

“Well,” he mused, “there was this one guy I dated back a few years ago before Rick and I began having our affair. He had a lot of top-level access, but I haven't spoken to him for quite a while. He's like me, he's still in the closet, he has a wife and two kids.”

“Maybe that's how you'll be able to reach out to him,” she pointed out. “If you tell him you've been blackmailed, he'll see how people like this can make anyone a victim unless gay people join together to defend themselves.”

“Okay, I'll talk to him,” Ryan said uneasily. “It's like I said, I haven't seen him for a couple of years. Plus I don't know if he's going to be worried that the gang might try and get revenge against him if they find out he's helped me.”

“You've got to make him see that blackmailing gays is just another kind of terrorism,” she insisted. “If you give in to them, it just inspires greater demands. If you hadn't come to me, they would've probably tried to make you a permanent part of their money-laundering network. Plus, if their scheme was discovered, they'd just cut you loose and leave you with the blame.”

“All right, I'll call him,” Ryan's voice was taut with fear.

“I'm going to be here for most of the afternoon,” she assured him. “I'd be more than glad to go meet him. As a matter of fact, maybe you can set us up for Starbucks later on.”

“Let me see what I can do.”

She went back to reviewing her reports, trying to stay focused despite all the distractions spinning around her head. She was suddenly concerned about Hoyt and hoped he did not get thrown into a hot spot anywhere. She knew that the blackmailers who had contacted Ryan were probably planning on making their move soon. She was just as certain that it involved the terror threat that Hoyt told her about. She knew that this was getting too big for her, and she might have to get Jon involved lest she fumbled the ball and made strategic blunders that could never be undone.

The phone rang again, and she was nearly flustered by the caller ID but composed herself nonetheless.

“Bree? Hi, it's Rita.”

“Hi, hon, how are you?”

“Oh, just fine. Say, the Pastor asked me to call to see if you might be available this evening for an hour or so. We've had something come up with the Outreach Program. I know it's Saturday night, so if you've got plans…”

“No, no, it's okay. Whatcha got?”

“There's this one little girl who's on suicide watch. She's past her twentieth week and tried to get an abortion but her family pressured her out of it. They're Christians and want her to have the baby but the guy who made her pregnant doesn't want to deal with the child support, and he's been threatening her. The Pastor was hoping we could talk to her.”

“Sure, I'll go out. What time you want to meet at the church?”

“Would five be okay?”

“Fine, I'll see you then.”

“Oh, Bree, I also had a family member who wanted to talk to you. I told him a little bit about you and he wanted to ask you a question. I can give you his number.”

“All right,” Bree jotted down the number. “I'm here at the office for most of the afternoon, I'll give him a call. See you at five.”

Once again she considered the church obligation with mixed emotions. Her heart and soul assured her that it was her highest priority. Yet her mind was distracted by her budding relationship with Hoyt, her concern for his safety, and the crisis facing her Company. To top it off, Ryan's problem had now become part of a greater extortion scheme. Maybe Rita was going to be part of the answer for her. Sabrina needed moral support more than anything, and she actually did not have any close friends. Rita appeared as a kindred spirit who just might provide her with a shoulder to lean on in the weeks ahead.

“Hello?”

“Hi, this is Sabrina Brooks, I'm a friend of Rita Hunt. She gave me your number, she said you wanted to talk to me.”