Burn (Michael Bennett 7)

“I…” she said.

A plane took off from somewhere with a terrific vacuumlike whoosh as we clinched on the sidewalk. Around us, car and trunk doors thunked opened and closed. And then it was happening. She was letting me go.

Torn from her, I stood, rooted, on the sun-bleached concrete beside the van, watching her leave. As if as long as I kept my eyes on the bob of her curly blond hair, on the outline of her sweater and jeans, it somehow wouldn’t happen.

But it did. She went through the sliding doors. I still stood there and stood there.

Even when the parking enforcement guy walking toward the van to get us moving stopped and turned around when he saw my face.

PART FOUR

LAST SUPPER

CHAPTER 73

THAT MONDAY MORNING, AFTER somehow getting my still-devastated kids off to school, I put my high-profile jewel-heist case on the back burner for the moment. Instead, I trekked up to Harlem to head the Ombudsman Outreach Squad morning briefing.

As we went over all the current open cases as well as some new ones, I could see that good things were happening here in terms of the group dynamic. Doyle and Brooklyn Kale seemed to be getting along much better now, Noah Robertson had toned down the sartorial splendor, and good ol’ Arturo Lopez actually seemed to have a lost a few.

Like every great squad, they were acting much more like a team now, depending on one another, developing their own unique culture. Best of all, instead of being laid back like on the first day I’d gotten here, everybody seemed to be stepping up and taking personal ownership of the squad’s mission to truly help people. How do you like that? Progress at last.

Suddenly, Ariel Tyson, the squad’s affable clerk, burst through the open doors, not looking so affable. In fact, her eyes were wide and looking pretty panicked behind her red-framed eyeglasses.

“Detective Bennett, I just got a call from dispatch. The Twenty-Eighth Precinct squad supervisor just spotted Holly Jacobs’s murder suspect. They pursued him and apparently now he’s holed himself up in a construction site on a Hundred and Twenty-Seventh between Madison and Fifth.”

The entire squad cleared out and headed over. Three blue-and-whites were there already. Half a dozen worried-looking uniforms were outside their cars, standing in front of a row of scaffolding-clad town houses on the north side of 127th Street neighboring St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church.

The house the cops were focused on was in horrendous shape. Bricked-up windows and crumbling stairs and an NYC subway system of cracks webbed over the whole narrow length of its brownstone facade. It was leaning a little to the left like it was going to collapse. Even the fantasy sales brochure mockup of what the run-down block was going to look like on the huge LUMINOUS PROPERTIES sign attached to the scaffolding was faded and covered in graffiti.

“What do you got?” I said to Gomez, the wiseacre cop Doyle and I had dealt with at the gang-related shooting scene a couple of weeks before.

“An alert security guard at the dollar store on Lenox ID’d your guy from those flyers we handed out and called us the second he walked in,” Gomez said. “He took off as soon as he saw us. Guy is faster than a Kenyan.

“I thought we had him penned in between Fifth and Madison, but then he squeezes himself into the leaning tower of Harlem here. Went through the tiny gap between those padlocked doors like a rat or something, the skinny bastard. I got another car around back covering the back alley. He hasn’t come out. He’s holed himself up. ESU is five minutes out.”

I turned as Doyle went to my car and returned with the bolt cutters from the trunk.

“ESU?” Doyle scoffed as he stepped up the stairs. He gave me a wink as he snipped neatly through the chain.

“Haven’t you ever heard of improvising, Gomez?” he said.

Under the cavelike shade of the scaffolding, I watched Doyle borrow a flashlight from one of the patrolmen and take out his gun. His usually glib expression was tauter as he stood by the brownstone’s now-unlocked plywood doors, his brows knitted in concentration. Then I watched Arturo take out his gun as well, along with Brooklyn and Noah.

My squad was stepping up, all right, I thought, walking to the front of the line and taking the flashlight from Doyle.

The plywood door swung in silently when I toed it. The narrow building was even rougher inside, if that was possible. There was no sign of the decorative wainscoting or pocket doors that charming brownstones are generally known for. There was nothing but rubble and squatters’ garbage and the almost unbearable smell of a backed-up sewer.

“And I thought Detroit was bad,” Brooklyn said, covering her nose with a hand.

Within a minute of carefully stepping inside, we heard a scuffing sound from up the stairs directly opposite the front door. I ran the flashlight over the staircase. Some of the steps were missing, as well as the banister. I kept the light’s beam trained on the top, where Roger was holed up somewhere, probably waiting for us.

I was just about to tell Doyle that we should wait for ESU after all when he started up the stairs.

That was when the odd creaking sound came. A split second later, something huge and square fell from above and exploded onto the staircase

a foot in front of Doyle’s nose. It went through the stairs with a crunching, thunderous metal bang. The staircase ripped apart like a bomb had hit it, sending plaster chunks and dusty wood shrapnel flying all over everyone.

Through the dust and my fluttering heart, I watched Doyle teetering on the edge of the gaping hole that had been the staircase.