Chapter 7: On the DL
I spent the better part of the rest of the day after the shoot-out walking the scene. I was uncertain of how the MS-13 attack failed. Yes, we managed to intercept the pointmen in the lobby. Yes, we stole enough of their grenades to orbit the owners of Planet Hollywood. But they opened with an RPG attack that could have wiped us out if they had kept it up.
Within the first fifteen minutes, I kept coming back to the opening of the attack from the white van. It had been blown onto its roof. There was a giant crater in the middle of the sidewalk, where my car had been when this all started. It shouldn’t have really stood out in the middle of the all the other holes, but this one was more obvious, and bigger. Fragmentation grenades weren’t meant to blast through concrete like this.
There had been a bomb in our car.
I groaned. Lovely. Bombers, too. I wonder if they’re bomb squad, or if there’s someone else who could have slipped past.
“What’s the matter?” Alex said behind me.
I pointed out the crater and the white van and explained.
He rolled his eyes. “Great. Time to put you in WitSec. Now.”
I shook my head. “Can’t do that.”
Alex sighed. “Sure. Of course you can’t. Can we at least get Mariel and Jeremy off to a safe house.”
I arched my brow. “Where do you think we could go that would guarantee that no cops would be tempted by ten million dollars? Mary just tried to kill us. Mary. Who has been at the desk for how long? I can’t even remember.”
Alex frowned. “So we don’t use cops? Maybe feds?” He grimaced. “Yeah, because feds don’t have bills to pay either. Never mind.”
“You see my problem.”
“Hey! I thought I was the cynical one.”
I chuckled. “This is my moment to be as clever as a serpent. Innocent as a dove can come later.”
I had three ideas about what to do with my family. Technically, there were only two of them. I had friends in the Catholic Church, and there were two places within the Church I could think about. One place would be with my friend Father Freeman. But he was also a police psychologist, degrees and everything. That made him far too close for comfort. Not that I thought he was a threat, but he had too many cops too close to him. Hiding Mariel and Jeremy with him wouldn’t guarantee their safety. I had personal connections with the Church as well, which was a problem.
I had one more option, short of taking my family outside of the tri-state area, which also wasn’t a bad idea.
I slid out my cell phone and found the number I needed.
“What do you want, Detective?” D answered. He still sounded a little snarly from earlier this morning.
“Have you moved your family to a safe house?” I asked him. “Because I’d like to add one or two more people to the bunker.”
My family had only one rifle, a shotgun, and two handguns between Jeremy and Mariel. I still had my weapons. Statler and Waldorf didn’t take my two on-duty weapons, which surprised me. But then again, they were in the action, so they weren’t even in charge of investigating the shootout.
Either way, I told the two of them that my family was going off the grid for a while. The IA team thought that I was going to join them in hiding. It was a temptation, to be honest. But as I told Statler and Waldorf, I couldn’t run and hide. I didn’t know if this was building to a head, or if this was only a buildup to something worse.
Ugh. Something worse. What could be worse than a demon serial killer and a death cult, with their own Bokor and a few zombies to boot?
The first thing to come to mind was the warlock. I didn’t have something else to latch on to. When Rene Ormeno of MS-13 was in the nuthouse, he had waxed psychotic about a warlock who was out to get me...but, obviously, the warlock hadn’t confronted me yet, because I was still alive at the time. Ormeno had been nuts ... except when I was in the room. Then, he was crystal clear that I was going to get killed.
Hopefully, this isn’t the time for fighting the warlock. Otherwise, I might just get killed in the crossfire.
I brought my family to an apartment complex about twenty stories tall. It was located in a nice area called Bayside. It was an interesting place to meet D and his “bunker,” since Bayside was a primarily Jewish neighborhood, and oh boy, did D not look Jewish.
Today, we were met by one of the security officers for the apartment complex. She was a pleasant-looking brunette in an Allied Universal uniform. She met us and took the three of us up to an apartment—Alex stayed in the car.
The apartment was on a lower floor. Thinking tactically, I could only conclude that D wanted to smash out the windows and lower themselves to street level.
Despite wanting to take the stairs, we took the elevator (call me paranoid, but being locked in a suspended metal box with people out to kill me didn’t seem like a great idea). The guard had bad knees, and Mariel gave me a look when I suggested taking several guns and hundreds of rounds of ammo up a flight of stairs.
The guard took us to the apartment at the end of the hall, nearest the stairs.
The door opened. D stood in the doorway, filling it. Today he wore a navy-blue suit, and a gold tie with the Vatican keys all over it. Daniel David DiLeo and I had more or less come up together. I had been on the streets as a uniform while he had been running numbers. This was after D had graduated from child bike-courier. He basically went from bike messenger to MBA in ten easy years. I didn’t ask too many details about what he may have done during his less savory years. I had always known that he was the best of a lot of bad options. He ran multiple legitimate operations. To my knowledge, he hadn’t sold drugs in years. He owned guns, but didn’t sell any, as far as I knew.
And the only people I’m certain that D had killed had all been in my defense. If there was anyone outside of my family or my partner that I could trust, it was D. The last thing he would do is try to collect on the bounty. He would especially avoid collecting the bounty in his own safe house.
“Come in, quickly.”
We did, then I made introductions. D had a nice little apartment. The door opened to an open living room. To the right was the kitchen, sealed off from the rest of the living room. As we walked in, I could see that the corner of the living room (going around the kitchen) was a small offshoot with a dining room table. The boundary of the room was a couch, facing a giant, wall-mounted television. There were no blank spaces of wall. Bookcases lined the apartment.
“Lovely home,” Mariel said. “Thank you for letting us in.”
He shrugged. “Don’t thank me yet. We’re going to need to talk about one or two things.”
Before D could say more, a stunning young woman walked in from the hallway branching off the living room. She was tall and leggy, with a black and white skirt that fell below her knees. Her hair was long and straight. Her nails were perfectly manicured with white French tips on them. Her posture was model-perfect and elegant. She was black, with dark hair and eyes to match.
“Hello,” she said in a smooth, rich voice. “I’m Anna. You must be Detective Nolan.”
I nodded as I shook her hand. “Correct. This is my wife Mariel, and my son Jeremy.”
D stepped closer and wrapped an arm around her tiny frame. “Anna is my wife.”
I blinked. I knew that D had a daughter named Julie he loved intensely. He was faithful to his many girlfriends. While he wasn’t the type to refer to a woman as a “baby momma,” this was the first time I had heard of a wife.
D smiled. “Don’t worry, Detective. I don’t advertise. It’s bad for business.”
I nodded slowly, noting that his elocution was even better than normal, and he usually spoke better than I did. Occasionally, I had heard him pronounce it “bidness.” But at that moment, I wondered how many of the “slips” in elocution were deliberate attempts to throw me off. I knew better than to ask for an explanation.
Jeremy, however, didn’t. “Why not?”
D looked down at my son and smiled. “Because there are people I deal with who think that being committed to one person is not cool and that working a full-time job is ‘acting white.’ So it’s for her protection.”
Jeremy cocked his head. “Are you a superhero, too, like Daddy?”
D shook his head gently. Jeremy didn’t casually refer to me as a superhero that often. “Not quite like your father, no. Though you could say this is my secret identity.” He looked to me. “We must talk.”
I followed D into an office just off of that hall. I closed the door behind me. “We come with our own artillery if we need it.”
“That’s not what I’m concerned about. Have a seat.” D sat in an office chair built for his bulk. I sat on the ottoman against the wall. “Why me?” he asked.
I nodded. Bringing my family to D was unusual. “Even my fellow police officers are tempted by ten million dollars. Someone I considered at least a good work acquaintance, maybe even a friend, tried to kill me this morning. Anyone I could think of within the state has ties to the cops, or close ties to me.”
“You’re tied to me,” D rumbled. “You insist on filing me in your DD5s.”
I shrugged. “Yes, but you’re better armed than the Catholic Church.”
D chuckled at that. “Point taken.”
I nodded towards the living room. “So. Anna?”
D grinned. “It’s like I said, man. Public displays of matrimony are a great way to get folks killed.”
I shrugged. “And here I thought that your ‘image as self-defense’ stopped at your public displays of being ‘gangsta.’”
D rolled his eyes and readjusted his bulk. “Please. These numbnuts who keep their pants pulled down think they're cool, except what they’re doing is a jail sign saying that they’re available for a hook up behind bars. They’re idiots, man. But they think someone is all ‘resspecable,’ ” he said with air quotes and deliberately slurred speech, “they believe that he’s a soft target. I could spend weeks or months fighting off enough bozos to prove to them, once more, that no, I’m not soft. But that would require more effort than I want to expend, hitting fools who come at me. Though as you’ve seen, I have weapons in case I need to do that.”
I laughed that time. D had been part of my backup during the assault on the death cult. He had gone up against real gunmen, as well as zombie gunmen, and probably would have taken out the Bokor if D hadn’t been knocked out. And since the Bokor had unnatural strength, it said something that D wasn’t dead.
“Pity you can’t take credit for the hit out at King’s Point.”
D shrugged. He frowned a moment, considering his next statement. “So, we never did talk about all the zombies. What was up with that?”
I paused for a long moment there. On the one hand, King’s Point was merely a nice neighborhood. On the other hand, it was also the final stand of the WHC a few months ago. “It’s hard to explain.”
“That much I figured. Make it easy.”
“Remember Christopher Curran? The serial killer?” D nodded, and I continued. “He was possessed by a demon.”
D hesitated a moment. His thoughts played out all over his face, from incredulous furrowed brow to “No, that makes sense” bunched lips and back again. “That makes sense of certain things. What did that have to do with King’s Point?”
“They raised the demon.”
D sighed. “Of course, they did.” His expression then changed. His eyes squinted with amusement. “Now, what about you?”
This was the moment I dreaded. When the supernatural came up before, so did my little secret relationship with God. Or maybe I should say His relationship with me. “What about me?”
D smiled. “Nate Brindle got out of Rikers. I’m told you’re a Jedi now?”
The bottom fell out of my stomach. During the demon’s incarceration, he had started a riot in jail at Rikers Island. Though I should be more specific ... the legion of demons within the serial killer Curran had run rampant, starting a riot. Inmate Nate Brindle had been instrumental in helping me quell parts of the riot. He’d also seen me die and fade away. I hadn’t explained that I could bi-locate (in that instant, it was tri-locate) and Brindle had concluded I must have been a Jedi. I hadn’t corrected him.
“I pray a lot,” I answered. “And God listens. In my case, He says yes more than He says no. I suspect a lot of it has to do with me being up against supernatural forces of darkness. Therefore, God grants me ways around it.”
D’s only reaction was for his eyebrows to twitch up a little.“You’re saying you have superpowers now?”
I sighed. No matter how many times I had to do it, I was always wary and uncomfortable trying to explain this to other people. “I’m saying I have superpowers when I need them. I don’t exactly use them so I can casually take a day off and come into work at the same time.”
“Uh huh.”
I opened my mouth to say more when I was struck with a horrible smell. It was something I hadn’t been hit with in months. It was the stench of evil. It was foul and overpowering. I had only smelled it around the truly vile: the demon, the death cult, and Rene Ormeno.
I was up from the chair in a shot. I said “On me” to D as I opened the door and dashed down the hall. I drew my handgun as I entered the living room. I spun towards the door, gun up, as the door came crashing in. I fired at a distance of ten feet. I couldn’t miss.
The first two through the door were shambling zombies. They showed obvious signs of decay. But they were stable enough to hold machetes. Instead of a Mozambique drill, I fired three to the face of the first one, then dropped to a crouch and blasted away both knees. The first zombie fell to the floor, still squirming, but harmless. I readjusted my aim for the next zombie, but a loud blast from behind me struck it in the shoulder. Its shoulder exploded, and the zombie fell back. I added two rounds under the chin for good measure.
Four people wheeled around the door frame in the hall. Two were down in a crouch and two more were standing. All of them armed. All of their pointed their guns straight at me.
I fired, and the world exploded around me.