Shoot (23 page)

That hadn’t occurred to me. Would my competition follow me with a drone? Yes. But a brick of Semtex seemed a bit extreme, even for my favorite journalistic psychopath, Ginny McElhone. She had a hell of a temper. It would not be good if she had her own air force. I told Sparky I assumed the evil flying spider belonged to the bad guys. Hopefully, we would know soon.

“This is nice,” Sparky said, now shooting video. “What’s with the feathers?”

I told him how Skippy and I had sent the pigeons on their suicide mission. Sparky laughed his ass off.

“Nice camera,” he said. “Can I take out the card and download their video?”

“The cops will wrap my nuts with my guts if we do that.”

“I’ll put it back—they don’t have to know,” Sparky said.

“How fast can you do that?” I asked. “Without leaving fingerprints?”

He giggled and showed me it was very fast. When he was done, he asked where the drone was brought down and I told him.

“Sparky, don’t use anything from their camera unless I say, okay.”

“You got it, Shepherd. You da man.”

I dialed Izzy’s cell.

“Izzy? Shepherd. You still at the morgue? Got something for you.”

“Well, speak of the devil,” Izzy said. “No, we’re back at the convention center. Turns out I’ve got a question for you.”

“Okay, me first,” I said. “I’ve got somebody’s little toy and you need to check it out, especially for fingerprints. Where do you want me to bring this?”

“Bring what?”

I told him but he interrupted me when I got to the birds.

“You shot down a drone using pigeons?” he asked.

“Yeah. I feel really bad about that part. I just thought it would confuse the drone and I could escape.”

I resumed my story but when I got to the Semtex payload part, he interrupted me again.

“Hold it, Shepherd—you have a drone you claim was following you and it’s got a chunk of high explosive attached?”

“De-activated high explosive, Izzy. I told you. Just one brick, only big enough to take out a truck. But it’s safe now. Trust me.”

“Well, that may be a problem right now. Where are you?”

I told him.

“What do you mean that might be a problem right now?”

“Who is with you?” Izzy asked.

I did not like his tone.

“Umm… nobody,” I lied.

“Okay,” Izzy said. “I’m going to leave now but some people are going to get there before me. Do us all a big favor and don’t argue with them.”

“Oh, shit, Izzy. You’re hitting the panic button. I told you it’s safe. This is dumb.”

“No, Shepherd, playing around with plastic explosives in public is dumb. I have no option here.”

“I had no choice, Izzy. If I left it there, the bad guys would still have their flying monkey-bomb drone. Or the ordnance would be lying around in public.”

“Maybe. We’ll see. Sorry, but my advice to you, Shepherd, is to be really, really cool. No sudden moves, amigo. See you soon.”

“Fuck me!”

“Who was that?” Sparky asked.

“The cops,” I told him, picking up Skippy’s leash and walking toward Sparky’s van. “Damn. I need you to take Skippy and get the hell out of here until I call you back, okay?”

We put Skippy in the van.

“Get out of here as fast as you can,” I said, shoving him toward the driver’s side.

“Who is coming?”

“Everyone. Go!”

He drove away. I called Mel’s cellphone. He was not happy to get a nighttime call at home.

“What the sock do you want?” he demanded.

I told him I had captured an enemy drone that was carrying a surveillance camera and bomb.

“Christ, I knew you’d frosting crack,” Mel said. “Are you drunk? Don’t you guys take some kind of mother-fighting medication for flashbacks?”

I ignored him and said I would send him a text. I started typing a text to Mel but I stopped and sent what I had when I heard an unwelcome sound approaching.

“This is stupid,” I said out loud.

“What?” a passing woman jogger in red shorts and tank top asked me.

“Sorry, I wasn’t talking to you. You shouldn’t be here.”

“Why?” she asked, doing that silly jogging in place people do when they think they’re in the Olympics and don’t want to stop.

“A lot of cops are coming,” I told her.

“Why?”

“Alien spacecraft,” I told her, pointing at the broken drone on the sidewalk nearby.

She gave out with a knowing New York chuckle and jogged on. I walked a few yards down the path, away from the drone, to be more visible from the street. Maybe I should just jog to the subway? I took out my phone and dialed Jane.

“Where are you?” Jane asked. “I have some interesting details to tell you. I’m home. I ordered in Mongolian barbecue. When will you be here?”

“Yummy. Listen, I just heard from Izzy and we are meeting to go over a few things I found out tonight. You and I can compare notes later.”

“The food will get cold.”

“You eat, I’ll nuke it later when I get home. Hey, what do you know about Skippy’s background? Was he trained as a military or police dog?”

“No, not as far as I know but we know almost nothing. Some man in a car asked a neighborhood woman to watch Skippy while he did an errand. He tied the leash to a sign and drove away. She brought Skippy to us. Later, he went to your favorite reality show host. That’s it. Obviously he was well trained but I don’t know anything about
police
training. Why?”

“Just curious, thanks.”

Sirens were converging on me from every direction. I heard a helicopter. Crap.

“Gotta go, Jane. My ride’s here.”

I sat down on the hot pavement and waited as the sounds of cars, screeching brakes, slamming doors and yelling cops multiplied. Then I lay flat, put my hands behind my head, and waited. I was ordered to freeze by several nervous voices. Someone asked where the bomb was. I tried answering but they were all making too much noise to hear me.

“There’s no bomb,” I explained. “It’s safe. I removed the detonator. There’s just the plastique, the drone and the camera.”

They weren’t listening. I was searched and handcuffed, hand and foot. They removed my gloves and took my phone. I stayed still, knowing a lot of guns were pointed at me.

“Here it is!” someone shouted. “Looks like a drone. Don’t see any bomb.”

The Bomb Squad, when they arrived, disagreed, and forced an evacuation to a wider perimeter when they spotted the Semtex. I was told to stand up.

“I can’t. You handcuffed my ankles.”

Someone reluctantly took them off. Two guys helped me up and turkey-trotted me into the rear seat of a nearby squad car, which was then moved because they feared they were too close to the explosive. It took half an hour for a cop in blue overalls and an NYPD baseball cap to open the rear car door and tell me he was from the Bomb Squad.

“How is it rigged to go off?” he asked me.

“They had it on a radio remote but I ripped all that out. It’s just the brick—totally safe. How many times do I have to tell you guys that?”

“Because we don’t just trust guys who get caught with a bomb,” he told me.

“I didn’t get caught, jackass, I called it in.”

“So you claim. But actually, Major Case called it in and your gloves field-tested positive for RDX. You have been handling explosives.”

“Duh. I just told you. I ripped out the det and checked the payload for a backup. You are wasting the lead time I gave you with all this bullshit. They probably didn’t leave prints but the Semtex and the camera might be traceable. Also the video card in the camera may lead you back to these pricks. My guess is they’re in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, probably the APN, the Aryan Purity Nation group.”

“So who did you want to blow up?”

I laughed.

“You think this is my explosive drone? Look, either ask Izzy about this—and me—or come back with somebody smarter than you. And get me some food. I’m hungry.”

“If you’re with the good guys, why did you run off with the device?” he demanded. “Why not just leave it at the original scene and notify us?”

“Because they were obviously somewhere close, in a car, Einstein. If I hung about, I wouldn’t be around to have this chat now and you wouldn’t have the drone for forensics. Hey, come back when you have some food.”

“Even if we believe you, they could have some kind of hidden failsafe trigger in the brick.”

“Negative. They triggered their detonator after I took it out. Obviously to trash the drone because I brought it down. That was it. If they had another way of remotely detonating it, they would have done it already. Stop wasting time.”

“Not that simple,” he said. “There’s also a camera and a sealed GPS and command module. How did you bring this thing down?”

“Pigeons.”

He laughed.

“How fucking stupid do you think I am?”

“I refuse to answer that question, on the grounds that I am handcuffed.”

Later, I found out they used their rolling robot to check out the drone, wasting more than an hour. I understand they have to be careful but if you’re too cautious, you lose. If there was video stored on the SIM card in the videocam that led to these APN motherfuckers, Sparky may already be looking at it—but I couldn’t call him.

They drove me to Police Headquarters downtown, and marched me to a large room upstairs. A TV in a corner was playing CNN News on mute. They sat me in a chair that was welded alongside a metal desk. A cop opened my left cuff and secured it to the chair. I looked around. I was now alone. There were rows of similar desks and a view of the Brooklyn Bridge and the river. It was difficult to get comfortable while chained to a chair. The desk next to me was neat, IN and OUT boxes both empty. There was only a phone console, a stapler and a pencil cup with a few pens stuck in it. I reached over with my un-cuffed right hand and pulled out a plastic ballpoint pen with a shiny, inch-long aluminum pocket clip. The metal clip snapped off cleanly and I stuck the flat end of the strip into the hole where the handcuff ratchet went into the cuff lock around my wrist—at the same time pushing the cuff teeth tighter into the lock area. The cuff popped open. I sat back more comfortably to wait.

Izzy arrived with Phil, who was carrying a case folder. I stood and shook their hands. They looked at me and at each other.

“You were supposed to be cuffed,” Izzy said.

“Maybe they forgot,” I told them. “That whole show was really stupid, Izzy. You wasted a lot of time and probably blew our edge.”

“I had no choice,” he protested. “I can’t take a chance with bomb shit. You tied my hands. I’ve got the commissioner, the mayor, the governor and the president looking over my shoulder.”

“More reason not to drop the ball,” I told him.

“We also have to deal with that question I have for you. Sit down and tell me again what you did the night Chesterfield and his pals were killed.”

I asked him if he was kidding. He wasn’t. He said he had to ask.

“Why?”

“You want a lawyer?”

“No. Tell me why.”

“Why did you have a key to Chesterfield’s room?”

“What? I didn’t.”

“You sure?” Phil asked.

“Yeah, I’m sure. I didn’t have any key. I wasn’t a guest there.”

“Exactly,” said Phil, placing the folder on the desk and extracting a plastic evidence bag with a gold keycard, smudged with black fingerprint powder.

“Do you know what this is?” Izzy asked.

“Looks like a keycard.”

“Yes, it is. In fact, it is a coded key to Chesterfield’s suite. It was found inside his room, on the rug behind the door during the CSU search.”

“And?”

“Is this yours?”

“No.”

“Then can you tell us how your index finger and thumbprint got on this card found at the scene of the homicide?”

“What? You’re serious?”

“Oh, yeah.”

This shit was falling apart, a soup sandwich.

“Izzy, Phil, I didn’t have any room keys. The only… wait… When Tiffany and I went out after the smoke alarm went off that night, to Chesterfield’s room… she left her copy of his room key on the counter and asked me to grab it. I did and handed it to her. That could be it!”

“Why didn’t you tell us this before?” Izzy asked.

“You never asked before. I didn’t know it was a thing. Tiffany took that card from me and I never touched it— or any other room key—again. That’s the truth. Take it or leave it. What does Tiffany say?”

“She admits that she had a key to Chesterfield’s room but she doesn’t know where it went,” Phil said. “She said she used it to get into his room when she found the body and then she lost track of it.”

“Okay, there you go. She opened the door, found her boss blown away and dropped the card. You said it was found on the rug behind the door?”

“Yeah,” Izzy admitted, “but she doesn’t remember dropping it.”

“Okay,” I said. “The key is the same color as the rug. If Tiffany dropped it when she found Chesterfield, it could have been swept behind the door when she let me in. You asked her if I had a key?”

They looked at each other.

“She said you had no key,” Phil admitted. “As far as she knew. Of course, she could be protecting you.”

“Ha. But my prints were on the card you found. Were her prints on the card?”

“We have some partials, nothing definitive. The problem with women is that so many use hand lotions that can smudge prints. We need her to come in for full prints of the sides of her fingers, hands and palms,” Izzy said. “Also DNA.”

“That’s her card and I handed it to her. She dropped it. Get her in here now so we can settle this.”

“Can’t,” Izzy said. “She’s out of town. Back in Washington.”

“Oh, okay. Meanwhile, the APN bad guys are skating because you’re investigating me. What about prints on the drone and camera?”

“Wiped clean, under all that pigeon mess,” Izzy said. “Identifying marks on the whirlybird have been removed. We’re trying to trace the purchase history of the drone and the camera but nothing yet. We’re waiting for TARU to set up a screening of the SIM card video from the digital camera. They said they’d be ready in about ten minutes.”

I asked and was told that TARU was the NYPD’s Technical Assistance Response Unit.