Hellhound (3 page)

“We’ll get you fed and watered. Take it easy. The operation’s set for midnight, so we’ll rally at ten. Got that?”

Bones looked at her for a moment and the sergeant nodded.

“Good dog.”

T
he tactical team was relatively small. Twelve officers in all, plus Bones and the drivers of the two tactical vehicles. Four car units had been assigned to back up the SWAT officers, but the pervading belief was they would be unnecessary. The Spec Ops guys would breach with a lot of sound and fury, the targets would fold, and they’d call it a night.

For his part, though, Bones was attentive. He knew it was game time. The excitement pulsing through the officers had infected the shepherd as well. He’d spent most of the afternoon and early evening asleep, waking only to eat moments before he was brought onto the truck. Once he was there, his temporary handler quickly attached a camera apparatus to his harness.

“We’re going to hit the lights in this place,” del Vecchio explained. “We send you up ahead, around a corner, into an apartment, and you’ll be our eyes. Got it?”

Bones hadn’t replied.

“Some toy,” O’Hara grunted from a few seats up as del Vecchio checked the camera feed on a handheld monitor.

“I’d let you borrow it, but I’m afraid of what I’d find on the memory stick when you gave it back,” del Vecchio quipped, tugging the harness. “Besides, with your pecs you’d need something more in the realm of a 44 regular, am I right?”

Rather than be offended, O’Hara grinned. “Got post-raid plans, sergeant?”

Del Vecchio offered O’Hara a smile that was at least part invitation before turning back to her charge. “Don’t worry, Bones. My mind’s totally on your safety ’cause I know your mind’s on mine. And I don’t take that lightly.”

Bones eyed del Vecchio expectantly, but she went quiet.

A second later, the captain at the front of the vehicle spoke up. “Three nights ago, a citizen, Mr. Devaris Clark, was thrown off the roof of the building we have business in tonight. We believe it to be the work of one Mr. Chiedozie, a Nigerian slum lord who lines up squats for incoming illegals and then calls INS once he’s drained them dry. He keeps his neighbors quiet with threats of violence. We’re here to round up him and his organization. Some of the people in your line of sight will probably be the victims of his fraud, while others will pretend to be. Not our job. We get ’em down, cuff ’em tight, slide them to booking, and go home. We’re the dog catchers, not the Board of Records, present company notwithstanding.”

He nodded to del Vecchio. She gripped Bones’s lead a little tighter.

“All right. Let’s hit the ground running.”

The tactical vehicles turned onto East 112th and slowed at Neville Houses, but did not stop. The back doors flew open and the teams hopped off and moved directly towards the building.

Sergeant del Vecchio and Bones were the first ones out of the second vehicle. The dank scents that had polluted Devaris’s nose only days before now ravaged Bones. But he had no time to investigate this piece of garbage or that fetid pool of rat piss. He was going where he was led, end of story.

“All right, Bones,” del Vecchio whispered. “Here we go.”

At that moment, Building 7 of Neville Houses was plunged into darkness as the power was cut half a block away by Con Ed employees. Anyone lingering around the courtyard had vacated the second the tactical vehicles showed up on the block, so the team had a clear path all the way to the front door.

“What happened to the lights?” came a voice from the lobby.

“Police!” the captain yelled back. “On the ground, now!”

Bones and del Vecchio moved past the captain to follow the other tactical officers up the stairs. They were heading for the sixth floor but were stopping on five to allow their four-pawed companion to take the lead.

“Ma’am? Please return to your apartment! This is a police matter.”

Whoever the words were directed at seemed to take heed. Del Vecchio heard a door quickly shut. She had on night vision goggles but was already staring into the handheld monitor as the image bounced up and down with Bones’s quick steps. It was times like this that she envied not the shepherd’s incredible sense of smell, but his ability to see in the dark.

“Easy, Bones,” she whispered into her throat mic, her voice traveling into his ears via specially designed ear buds, a loan from the military.

They reached the fifth-floor stairwell and stopped. Del Vecchio waited for the command from the captain, checking and rechecking the view from the monitor on Bones’s back.

“Send him in.”

Del Vecchio took Bones off the leash and indicated the next floor.

“All right, Bones. Search!”

Bones moved up the stairs and glanced down the dark hallway on the sixth floor. Seeing nothing, he walked down the hallway, sniffing at every closed door. A door cracked open up ahead. Bones looked up. As he did, del Vecchio glimpsed a large man peering down the hallway, holding a gun. Del Vecchio showed this to the captain, who nodded.

“That’s our guy. Give the command.”

“Take hold!” the sergeant barked into her mic.

Bones had a significant prey drive. He’d been silently sizing up the man since his hand had gripped the doorknob. When given the command to bite the fellow, it was like an invitation to play time. He would merely be doing exactly what domestication and training kept him from doing naturally.

The gunman sensed something coming at him from the darkness only seconds before Bones’s jaws clamped down with an average 200 psi on his right arm. He’d made the mistake of trying to aim the gun at the unseen intruder at the last moment, giving Bones the moving target he was looking for. The shepherd hit the man so hard that he fell over, dropping the gun as he hit the ground.

Immediately, there were shouts, followed by gunfire.

On the screen, Sergeant del Vecchio counted at least a dozen pairs of glowing eyes. Fear raced up her spine, though it wasn’t her own safety she was concerned for.

“First squad! Go!” cried the captain.

Six members of the tactical team swept up the stairs and onto the sixth floor. Del Vecchio, part of the second squad, stared at the monitor as muzzle flash repeatedly blinded the camera. When she could make something out, the image bounded around. Bones was clearly in attack mode. Her worry switched from the shepherd’s safety to that of the tactical team.

“Bones! Out!!” she cried into her throat mic, unsure whether the dog could hear.

“Second squad! Go!”

Del Vecchio leaped to her feet and followed the others up to the sixth floor. She looked down at the monitor but couldn’t tell if Bones had stood down. Just as she entered the hallway, she caught a glimpse of a man’s eyes staring up at the camera in terror as Bones tore at his shoulder, already out of its socket.

“Bones! Out!” she repeated.

This time, she knew he couldn’t hear, so loud had the gunfire grown. That’s when all other noise was blotted out by the sound of a gunshot so impossibly close to her head that she felt temporarily deafened. This was followed by a numb feeling behind her eye. She looked down at the monitor and saw its screen was now obscured by a thick greasy film of blood and brains.

Hers
.

No one had heard the door to 632 open. The building’s records had the apartment rented to one “Erna Fowler,” aged eighty-two years. She’d been a resident since 1979 and lived alone. The idea that she would step out of her apartment with the small six-shot .357 she kept in a drawer and begin killing the officers in the hall with shots to the back of the head simply hadn’t occurred to anyone in the planning stages of the operation.

As bullets continued to fly, the chaos allowed Mrs. Fowler, married in 1951 to Archie, who died in 1993, to reload the weapon with a speedloader and continue shooting. She felled another two members of the tactical squad and was aiming at a third when a stray bullet from a MPK 9mm entered her left tear duct and exploded out the back of her head.

Still noticed by no one, she dropped to the ground directly beside the corpse of Sergeant del Vecchio, the .357 skittering down the hall before coming to a rest in front of 639.

•  •  •

Down on the street, Detectives Leonhardt and Garza stared up at the dark building as the distant, hollow report of gunfire continued, punctuated by intermittent flashes of light from three sixth-floor windows.

Leonhardt scrunched his brow. “Weren’t they only breeching 638?”

Garza nodded. “That’s what they said.”

“Then somebody’s got their front door open.”

“Fuck. Hope we don’t have any civilian collaterals up there.”

“We do, and everybody in the precinct will be looking over their shoulder for the next year. To say nothing of how the press will take it.”

“Shit,” scoffed Garza. “Any time these Special Ops assholes come up to 22nd Precinct, they’ve got to make things hard for the rest of…”

Garza was interrupted by a terrified voice over the radio.

“Something’s happened up there!” someone squawked. “We have multiple officers down! We need emergency services and backup! Immediately!”

Leonhardt blanched. He glanced over to Garza, who popped a stick of gum in his mouth.

“You were saying?” Garza asked, his face painted in resignation.

•  •  •

Becca Baldwin was nobody’s fool and anyone would tell you that, or so she was fond of saying. With an agile intelligence, quick to backhand those who would question it with a taste of her biting wit, everyone knew Becca was going places. She was a favorite of the building and knew it. The grandmas loved her, the parents hoped their kids grew up to be like her, and those her own age accorded her the deference she felt she had earned and was deserved.

She lived with her one half-brother and her one brother-brother. The full brother was Kenny, aged twenty-four, who worked nights at a distribution warehouse for a grocery store chain. The half-brother was Trey. He ran with a small time drug-slinging crew that seemed bonded less by entrepreneurial spirit and more by the desire to spend the whole day fucked up. Becca had no interest in working at a warehouse or selling drugs. No, she was going to go to college on a scholarship and be a lady scientist and never look back. She would get married, move to Chicago or San Francisco or Seattle or Minneapolis-St. Paul, and never look back. All she had to do was bide her time and get the right grades. That’s what Mrs. Drucker told her, and she believed it.

She didn’t remember her mom, a crack head now deceased, and when she saw her dad on the streets, he didn’t remember her. She didn’t care, though. They were weak. She was strong and determined. She had brains, and she read all the time. She read books by and about Frederick Douglass, the poetry of Umar Bin Hassan, and the theater of Amiri Baraka. She listened to classical CDs she’d borrowed from her music teacher and didn’t get anything out of them but kept listening anyway.

Of the many other things Becca was, she was also twelve years old.

When the shooting started, she did what Kenny had always told her to do and hid in the hall bathtub. She pressed herself flat against the base, her nose touching the drain. The gunfire sounded far away, but she knew it was right outside the door. It alternated between machine gun fire and single shots, the singles sounding much louder than the others, echoing like thunder. She tried to focus on something else, finally settling on singing a song to herself. She tried to remember more than a couple of lines of this song or that and simply couldn’t do it.

Finally, she settled on Tupac Shakur’s “Keep Ya Head Up” and discovered that she could recite it from beginning to end. She did this four times.

By her final time through the song, the gunfire had stopped for a few minutes and she thought it safe to clamber out of the tub. She eased her way through the apartment to the front door. She could barely look through the peephole without standing on a chair but had no intention to do so. Instead, she was just looking for a better vantage point from which to hear the proceedings. She knew a stray bullet could still punch through the wall at any moment, but didn’t think it likely.

The silence was broken by the sound of someone moving down the hall. Becca went to the door to try to figure out if it was a police officer or one of the bad guys. She paid attention to the goings-on in the building so far as she needed to avoid them. The people moving in and out of 638 didn’t speak English, and she seldom saw any of them more than once. That is, except for Chiedozie and a couple of his crew. He’d glared at her a couple of times when she came up the steps, interrupting whatever conversation he was having with a “tenant.” But she’d just glared back until, unable to get a read on the situation, Chiedozie had gone back to his chat.

When Becca cracked the door, it was his face that she saw first. Illuminated in dim light trickling in from his apartment windows, the Nigerian gangster was flat on his back, staring at the ceiling through dead eyes. Surrounding him were the dead bodies of several people, police officers and folks she took for Chiedozie’s men alike.

That’s when she saw movement at her feet. Looking down, she saw a large dog peering up at her, his snout black with blood.

“Oh, my God!” she cried.

Bones glanced up at her, took a couple of sniffs to register her heightened levels of fear, and resumed sniffing the gun that had landed on her doorstep.

When Becca saw that the dog wasn’t particularly fazed by the goings-on, she bent down and offered him her hand to smell. Bones did so and followed it up with a quick couple of licks.

“It’s not safe out there, boy,” Becca whispered.

Bones looked up at her as she held the door open. The shepherd peeked in, took a couple more sniffs, and entered. Becca’s gaze returned to the gun at her feet. When she suddenly heard voices on the stairs, she bent down, picked up the gun, and closed the door, locking it behind her.

She hadn’t seen the pair of eyes at the end of the hall that had watched Bones’s egress from the scene. In fact, no one had seen it, but this wasn’t surprising, given the darkness.