Chapter 5 #2
Bob rubbed his hands together and shivered as he stood in front of Tower 1 and watched as the SWAT team jumped out of the armored truck.
There were twelve of them, wearing green uniforms and helmets, black bulletproof vests and automatic weapons that looked so small and neat they always made Bob think of the toy guns he and his childhood friends used to play with.
It was their show now, but the few remaining members of the audience had hidden themselves behind the windows of the high-rises.
The sidewalks and parking lot were deserted, even the onlookers behind the crime scene tape in front of Tower 3 had vanished now that the ambulance had come and gone.
A solitary boy, hunched over in a hoodie, hurried by.
“Excuse me,” said Bob, “is there anywhere around here to get something to eat?”
“Fuck you.” The boy didn’t look up or slow down.
Bob shrugged.
The leader of the SWAT team approached Bob.
He was well built, walked like an Iraq vet with landmines on his mind every time his feet hit the ground, and that radar scan of a look that never rested in one place for more than a second.
On the name tag above his breast pocket it said “Sergeant O’Rourke.
” He handed Bob a bulletproof vest with the word POLICE stamped across it in yellow lettering.
“What would I want with that?” said Bob, looking blankly at it.
“You not coming in?”
“You need help?”
“No, but—”
“Then go and do your job.” Bob waved O’Rourke toward the entrance. “Fetch, Bonzo, fetch.”
The SWAT leader stared at Bob in disbelief.
Then he turned away, head shaking, and made his way back to his men, who had spread out and taken up positions by the front and back entrances to the tower.
O’Rourke gave a quick command through the microphone in his earpiece.
It was as if he’d turned on a vacuum cleaner that sucked his men into the building.
Bob surveyed the area as he stamped his thin brown leather shoes against the pavement to get the blood circulating through his toes.
Tried to understand why he was here. Not just here in Jordan, working for the city police, but here on this earth.
Then he thought, fuck it. Fuck Alice, for whom he’d sacrificed a life of glorious polygamy just so he could live with her.
Fuck the failed attempt to kill someone in this drug- and gang-infested neighborhood with its murders he’d spent his entire professional career immunizing himself against. Because once you’ve had everything and then lost it all you just don’t give a shit.
A gravestone with two dates on it, dates too close together—that was all he had left. So yeah, he just said fuck it all.
Bob heard a car stop behind him, turned and saw Kay Myers climb out of a Ford identical to the one he was driving himself.
She had her police ID hanging around her neck, identifying her as a detective in the MPD Homicide Unit.
Myers was in her late thirties, wore her hair in an afro, which Bob had gathered was back in fashion but which Myers had worn as long as he had known her.
She was small and thin and had the best marathon time of anyone in the MPD, male or female.
She claimed she never trained, that she must have a runner’s genes—she’d traced her roots back to Kenya.
She was one of the at most two people in the Homicide Unit whose company Bob could endure.
When that sober face of hers occasionally broke into a smile, Bob could see how some might describe her as attractive.
But since Kay Myers didn’t act like she was interested in anything other than a professional relationship with her male colleagues, and didn’t dress that way either, that was how it worked out.
It might also have been the case that her tough, self-assured and direct manner scared guys off, at least guys who liked at least a touch of female submissiveness.
Which—Bob thought—went for most of them.
She wasn’t the type to talk about herself much and Bob assumed her tough exterior had something to do with her being raised in Englewood, Chicago.
“Victim’s name is Marco Dante,” Kay Myers called out even before she’d shut the car door behind her. “Arrested three times for illegal sale of weapons but they couldn’t hang anything on him, big surprise.”
Bob waited until she came over to him.
“Gun trafficker?”
“Yep. Weapons with probably more lives on their conscience in Minneapolis than all the hunting rifles in this state put together so please excuse me for not shedding a tear. Did…?”
“Yeah, they just went in. Sixth floor—that open window up there.”
“We’ve got witnesses who say they saw that’s where the shot came from?”
“Yes, one. Unfortunately they wouldn’t give a name and address and bolted.”
“Really?”
Bob saw that Kay was looking aslant at him.
“So this isn’t just Bob Oz’s famous gut feeling?”
“Bob Oz’s gut feeling tells me that this witness was telling the truth.”
“You remember how much trouble there was last time we went in without a search warrant?”
“No,” said Bob, with a look that suggested honest astonishment. “I really don’t remember that.”
Kay Myers snorted dismissively. “Where were you this morning, Bob? Or let me put it like this, whose bed did you oversleep in?”
“Unclear. She’d already left.”
“You do realize I can’t keep covering for you much longer?”
“Longer? Have I ever asked you to cover for me at all?”
That was another thing he’d never worked out about Kay Myers, why she backed him the way she did.
She was clearly not interested in him as a man; Bob wasn’t often tuned in to the rumors circulating at work but he had gathered that word around the unit was that she was gay.
And she wasn’t interested in having him as a friend either, they had never even had a beer together.
Some women like bastards, but Kay Myers didn’t seem to belong in that category either.
That left only the worst alternative: that she felt sorry for him.
There was a flash between the black drapes in the open window, followed by a dull thud that echoed around the buildings. Stun grenade.
“As usual you’re not interested in the fireworks display?” said Kay.
Bob shook his head.
“You know word around the unit is that Bob Oz is chicken?”
“Because I won’t play cops and robbers?”
“Because you don’t carry a gun, so you always have an excuse not to be part of any life-threatening situations. I’ve tried telling them they’re wrong.”
“Oh, but they aren’t wrong, Kay. I am chicken.” Bob nodded in the direction of the leader of the SWAT team as he emerged from the entrance, talking on his headset. “A smart and cowardly homicide detective with an estimated lifespan eight years longer than that overtrained adrenaline junkie there.”
O’Rourke approached, demonstratively ignoring Bob and addressed himself to Kay Myers. “It’s clear, but I’m afraid our bird has flown.”
“Thanks,” said Myers.
“It’s nothing. And if any more bad guys show up…” He turned his gaze on Bob and spat on the ground, just missing Bob’s brown leather shoes. “…just call Bonzo again.”
Myers and Bob watched O’Rourke as he stomped over toward the car and his men emerged from the tower.
“Bob, Bob, you make friends wherever you go,” sighed Myers.
—
They stopped outside the open door of the sixth-floor apartment. Bob saw that the lock had been broken open, probably using a small battering ram.
“I’ll go talk to the neighbors,” said Myers.
“Okay,” said Bob as he stepped carefully over the threshold.
He would primarily be looking for things that could be used to put out a BOLO or lead to a quick arrest, but out of habit he kept close to the walls to reduce the risk of contaminating any technical evidence.
His first thought was that the apartment reminded him of another place that had the same atmosphere of melancholy, maybe the apartment of some lonely woman where one night he and she had tried to make each other feel a little less lonely.
This particular apartment was one room with the kitchen area nearest the door, a couch which Bob assumed had originally been over by the window but which had been pulled out farther into the room.
Of course, it might have been SWAT making sure no one was hiding beneath it, but he doubted that.
Water was dripping from the red tablecloth hanging over the table, and that was most definitely SWAT’s work.
You throw stun grenades into a room containing people you want to neutralize but not actually harm because the flash of light is so bright that for five seconds that person can’t see a thing, and the noise is so loud they can’t hear either, and that destroys their sense of balance.
In the course of those few seconds the perpetrator will probably be immobilized, on the floor and handcuffed.
But what sometimes happened—as Bob noted here from the tablecloth—was that the heat developed could easily ignite flammable materials.
A few years back an elderly couple had died from smoke inhalation following a narcotics raid in which stun grenades had been used.
The whole unit had been disciplined, not least because it turned out the raid had been based on false information. People had lost their jobs.
Bob cursed silently and scanned the room. Myers was right, he didn’t have a lot of friends, especially not in the MPD. So why did he do stuff like this? Why call in SWAT? Why act like he had a search warrant? Did he want to get fired? Was that it?