City of Endless Night

23

Vincent D’Agosta stood on the corner of Ninth Avenue, looking down Fourteenth Street. It was a madhouse. The entire neighborhood had gone into lockdown, the target building evacuated; they had the ESU team and had deployed two negotiators, an armored cherry-picker, a robot, a K-9 unit, and a bunch of snipers, with a chopper circling above. Beyond the police barricades was practically the entire press contingent of the city — network television, cable, print media, bloggers — everyone. The shooter was still holed up in the apartment. So far they hadn’t been able to get a peep out of him, or even a glimpse. The armored cherry-picker was maneuvering into position and would soon have a clear shot, and four guys were on the roof, laying down Kevlar mats and punching holes through the membrane to lower cameras inside.

D’Agosta was coordinating the assault by radio, choreographing it like a ballet, with multiple lines of action, each one of which could resolve the standoff. The rational part of him wanted to take Lasher alive. He had gone from a person of interest to suspect number one in the Cantucci killing, and dead he’d be a lot less useful. On the other hand, the motherfucker had shot a cop. The primitive part of D’Agosta’s brain wanted to take the bastard out. Hammer was in surgery, critically wounded, might not even pull through.

What a disaster. Singleton had gotten his “progress,” all right. Who would have guessed that a relatively routine assignment would turn into this? He wondered what kind of shit rain was going to come down on him now; but he quickly shook off those thoughts. Just get through this with a successful outcome — then worry about fallout.

The sun had set hours before and a brutal wind was howling off the Hudson and blasting down Fourteenth Street, the temperature plunging. His radio crackled to life. It was Curry. “The negotiator has made contact. Channel forty-two.”

D’Agosta adjusted his headset to channel 42 and listened. The negotiator, speaking from behind a bulletproof shield, was talking to the shooter through the door. It was hard to pick up what Lasher was saying, but as the negotiation continued D’Agosta gathered pretty quickly that Lasher was one of those anti-government types who believed that 9/11 was perpetrated by the Bushes, that the Newtown massacre was a hoax, and that the Federal Reserve and a cabal of international bankers secretly ran the world and were in a conspiracy to take away his guns. For these reasons he didn’t recognize the authority of the police.

The negotiator was speaking in a calm voice, going through the usual routine, trying to get him to give up and come out, nobody was going to hurt him. Thank God the guy was alone in the apartment and didn’t have a hostage. Snipers were in place but D’Agosta had resisted his impulse to give them the order to shoot on sight. He could feel the pressure all around him to put into motion the string of events that would result in Lasher being killed. That would be easy enough, and no one would second-guess him.

Another ten minutes passed. The negotiator was getting nowhere: this guy Lasher had drunk the anti-establishment Kool-Aid, and he was convinced that if he surrendered they would kill him. They wouldn’t let him live, he told the negotiator — he knew too much. He alone knew what they were up to, he knew their evil plans, and for that they would execute him.

There was no reasoning with the son of a bitch. D’Agosta was getting colder and more impatient by the minute. The longer this went on the worse he would look as commander.

“All right,” he said. “Retire the negotiator. Get ready to drop a flash-bang through the roof and go in through the door and the wall simultaneously. On my orders. I’m coming up.”

He wanted to be on-site; he didn’t want to coordinate this from afar. He walked down the block and went into the shabby building, passing the ESU, the K-9 team, the heavy trucks and armored cherry-picker. They really liked their toys, he thought with a certain affection, and brought them out at every opportunity.

He climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, one below the action. He confirmed that the four men on the roof had carefully and silently opened a hole right down to the drywall ceiling of the apartment, and that it was ready to be punched through and a flash-bang dropped. The two A-Team units on the fifth floor both confirmed they were in position and ready to roll.

“Okay,” said D’Agosta into the radio. “Proceed.”

A moment later he heard the sharp crack-boom of the stun grenade, followed by the double crash of the A-Team units simultaneously breaching the door and wall and storming the apartment. A shot rang out from inside, followed by another and another — and then it was over.

“Disarmed and apprehended,” came the announcement over the channel.

D’Agosta ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and entered the apartment. Here was Lasher, on the floor, cuffed, with two cops on him, in the middle of a tiny, messy, and malodorous hole of an apartment. They hauled him to his feet, whimpering. He was about five foot three, skinny, with acne and a wisp of a goatee. He was bleeding profusely from both the shoulder and the abdomen.

This is Lasher?

“He fired at us, sir,” one of the officers said, “justifying return fire to disarm him.”

“Good.” D’Agosta stepped aside as a medic came in to treat the gunshot wounds.

“You hurt me!” Lasher blubbered, and D’Agosta saw he was pissing himself.

D’Agosta scanned the room. There were posters for death-metal groups on the walls, a disorganized scatter of guns in a corner, half a dozen disassembled computers and heaps of other electronic devices of unknown function. The whole place was comico-absurd-frightening, like a dystopian movie set. This level of weirdness wasn’t what he’d been expecting. Looking at Lasher, his hair full of plaster dust, blood ponding across the littered floor, his skinny body shaking — well, was this really the guy who stalked and killed Cantucci with such ruthless precision? He just couldn’t see it. Then again, there was no denying the little prick had just shot a cop with a sawed-off shotgun…and then tried to kill some more.

“It hurts,” Lasher said more faintly, then slipped out of consciousness.

“Get him to Bellevue.” With a deep sigh, D’Agosta turned away. He would question the bastard once he was stabilized — his wounds were severe, but maybe not fatal. But not tonight. He needed to get some sleep — and the paperwork just kept piling up.

Christ, what a headache he had.