If it weren’t for the rat, Adele and I would have been inside the Nissan when the RAV-4, screened by the falling snow, pulled away from the curb with its headlights off. If it wasn’t for the rat, I would certainly have been preoccupied — starting the Nissan in cold weather was a challenge that required my complete attention. If it weren’t for the rat, Adele would have been inside the car, facing forward, her view restricted by the wiper blades running across the windshield.
Trapped in a small enclosed space? With no warning? Time to sing your death song.
But we weren’t inside the Nissan when the RAV-4 pulled away from the curb. Instead, having cleared the windows of snow and opened the door, I was circling the car, pounding on the roof, the hood and the windows. Just in case some mischievous co-worker had decided to play a little joke on me. The unattended Nissan had been parked a couple of blocks from the precinct for nearly four hours.
Adele was standing by the passenger’s door when I finally got to the trunk, watching me with apparent amusement. Then she glanced over my shoulder toward the end of the block and her eyes narrowed.
‘Heads up, Corbin,’ she said as she slipped her right arm out of the sling. ‘I think we’re gonna have company.’
I spun around to find the silver SUV a half-block away, its tires spinning in several inches of frozen slush despite the four-wheel drive. On the passenger side, the head, shoulders and right arm of a man extended through the fully open window. Though the snow was falling pretty hard and I couldn’t see his hand clearly, I was fairly certain the object he clutched was not a wallet. Nevertheless, though I drew my Glock and laid the sights on the center of his face, I did not fire my weapon until fired upon. Nor did I seek cover. I simply stood there, ignoring the wet, wind-driven snow in my face, muzzle flashes that lit the falling lines of snow with the intensity of a strobe, the SUV itself, which fishtailed back-and-forth, passing within a few feet of my body before describing a complete circle, then finally crashing into a mini-van parked near the corner.
The whole business took no more than a few seconds. I’d fired my weapon six times as the vehicle approached, then passed me, carefully re-sighting after each shot. All the while, I was aware of Adele’s. 40 caliber AMT firing behind me. That she continued to pull the trigger after the man shooting at us abruptly stopped was reassuring. True, the RAV-4 had been fishtailing from side to side, but there was still the chance that one of the bullets pegged in our general direction had found its mark.
‘You hurt, Corbin?’
In fact, despite my inner calm, I’d somehow bitten deep enough into my lower lip to draw blood. ‘Outside of a self-inflicted bite wound, I seem to have escaped without harm.’ My weapon extended, I began to approach the RAV-4. ‘And you?’
‘Never better.’
I came up on the driver’s side first. The RAV-4 was nosed almost vertically into the side of the mini-van and both its air bags had deployed upon impact. Though I couldn’t know it at the time, the driver, foolish enough to pilot the vehicle without fastening his seat belt, had been killed by his air bag and not by any of the four bullets that passed through the windshield. I only knew that when I put my fingers to his throat, he had no pulse to take.
As for the second man, the shooter, he’d been hit twice in the face, once near his mouth, the other almost dead center in his forehead. I didn’t bother to take his pulse, nor did I worry about making an identification. These were the same two men who’d trailed us in their boss’s Jaguar on the previous night.
What a party we had. Internal Affairs, a shooting team, homicide and squad detectives, the Crime Scene Unit, the morgue wagon, a gaggle of overly caffeinated bosses, a pack of media jackals — everybody showed up. At one point, the job brought in a Winnebago outfitted as a command center. Since there was nothing to command, I assumed its function was to give the big dogs a private space in which to consume the coffee and donuts fetched for them by a series of fawning lieutenants.
Adele and I were separated, then subjected to thorough interrogations. But the shooting was justified and there was no getting past it. At one point, when we were alone, Inspector Clark whispered, ‘You’re a hero now, you hump, but trust me on this: unless you walk away from the job, there’s gonna be a later on.’
I thanked him for his kind words, but held onto my shield nonetheless.
Adele had another problem, this one more immediate, but she managed to work her way past it. Somehow, she’d failed to register her AMT with the job, an oversight that could have resulted in departmental charges being filed against her. But Adele cleverly pointed out that she wasn’t on duty, she was on vacation, plus as a police officer, she was legally entitled to possess the weapon in New York State. The bosses, she later told me, were grateful for the technicality. If we were to be presented as heroes, however briefly, tainting Adele would obviously be counter-productive.
It was approaching nine o’clock when a uniformed officer summoned me to the command center where I found Adele waiting alone. I wanted to put my arms around her, but settled for a wink. A moment later, Bill Sarney stepped inside and closed the door behind him.
‘Congratulations,’ he said, ‘you won.’
‘It’s not a game,’ Adele replied.
‘Don’t go there.’
But Adele was on a roll and she simply continued. ‘It’s not a football game, lieutenant, one side wins, the other side loses, next week we get to do it all over again. It’s real people really getting killed and the NYPD acquiescing to an innocent man being framed for another man’s crime.’
Far from losing his temper, Sarney folded his arms across his chest and completed his mission. It was over now, for better or for worse.
‘You’re being put on paid administrative leave until you’re cleared to work by a department shrink,’ he told us without addressing Adele’s accusation. ‘Make the appointment whenever you’re ready. You wanna take a month, fine. You wanna take a year, that’s also fine.’
But Adele wasn’t about to be bribed. She reached into her purse, withdrew the wallet holding her badge and ID, then tossed the wallet to Sarney. ‘You’re never going to get the message,’ she declared. ‘Never.’
Sarney looked down at the wallet in his hands, then slowly raised his eyes to meet mine. ‘What about you, Harry? You wanna give up your shield?’
‘Not me, boss. And I’m gonna make that appointment right away. I can’t wait to get all this horrible killing off my chest so I can come back to work.’