The Cat Dancers

14

Cam had been dreaming something truly lascivious when his phone went off at 2:15 in the morning. “Richter,” he growled while fumbling for the bedside light. “And it better be dead, bleeding, or burning.” He was getting much too old for this middle-of-the-night shit.

It was the Major Crimes desk sergeant. There’d been an incident. “I just had me a hysterical mother on the phone, as in the mother of one Deleon Butts.”

“And why do I care, exactly?” Cam asked, and then the name penetrated and it occurred to him why he might indeed care. But he was wrong.

“Lady reports her darling baby boy, Deleon, was crashing at her place for the night after a tough day with the ‘po-lice.’ According to her, Deleon came out on the front stoop at around midnight to commune with the local gentry and maybe score a rock. Said gentry report a pickup truck came around the corner an hour later, about zero one hundred. Truck stops suddenly in front of the house, guy drops the curbside window, sticks some kind of machine gun out the window, and goes to town.”

Cam was fully awake now. Machine gun? Someone wanting to assassinate Flash? “They get his ass?” he asked.

“Seems all the homeys didn’t stay around to find out, seeing as there was a sudden general interest in finding a direct route to China. Anyways, when the smoke cleared, brother Flash was MIA.”

“MIA. But not dead on the sidewalk?”

“Just plain gone.”

“Any blood on the steps?”

“No, but other leakages aplenty, if you catch my drift,” the sergeant said with a chuckle. “But interestingly, no blood. And no Flash. One extremely drunk citizen claims he saw a hooded MFer jump out of the truck, snatch Flash off the sidewalk, coldcock him, physically throw his ass into the back of the pickup truck, and then boogie the hell out of there.”

“And of course we have a full description of the truck, license plates, et cetera?”

“The consensus in that particular neighborhood is that all pickup trucks look alike to a black man, especially when there’s a machine gun working.”

Cam sighed. A hooded dude had abducted Flash. Here we go again, Cam thought.

“Lieutenant? You want me to roust the on-call detectives? Right now, the city cops have the scene.”

“No, not yet,” Cam said. “Abduction isn’t homicide.” Yet, he thought. “Have patrol collect what they can from the Triboro cops. I’ll be down in a little bit. Then I’ll make the call on whether we take it or leave it with the city.”

“Should I call the sheriff?”

“Negative,” Cam said. “I’ll do that when I know more.”

Cam arrived at the Sheriff’s Office complex forty minutes later. The watch commander was Bud Winters, the lieutenant who ran the community policing program. He filled Cam in on what few hard details they’d been able to retrieve from the city cops. Most interesting was that, in addition to there being no blood, there were no bullet holes in any of the buildings or nearby cars.

“He shot the place up with blanks?”

“Those who were willing to talk all said the same thing-machine gun, looked military, spitting fire. Lotsa noise, big, kinda sideways muzzle flash. That’s consistent with blanks. They have casings. Our ballistics guys will be able to tell.”

“Son of a bitch. And Flash would have been paralyzed with fear.”

“Paralyzed and incontinent. One among many, apparently.”

“Can we believe this guy about seeing Flash getting tossed into the back of the pickup truck?”

The lieutenant consulted the patrol reports. “I quote: ‘MFer done throwed the nigger in the MFing truck, turned that MFing gun on the whole MFing street one more time, and then peeled that MFer the F out of there.’ Unquote. You interpret that as you will.”

Cam grinned despite himself. “So, no description of the vehicle or the shooter?”

“Nothing that doesn’t involve further and copious sexual interactions with various mothers,” the lieutenant said wearily, closing the report folder. “This incident is related to your Internet Fry Baby hair ball, if I’m not mistaken?”

“I got it,” Cam said reluctantly, taking the folder. “City still have the scene secured?”

“Yep,” he said. “There’s already book on whether or not this is number two, in case you’re wondering.”

Cam rolled his eyes. “I hate the crime, too, Bud, but in this case, if Simmonds was the teeth on that rabid dog, Flash here was the tail.”

Bud was unimpressed. “He was there,” he said. “And I’ll bet he spent some of the money they took. This whole hotseat idea works just fine for me.”

He gave Cam a wry two-finger salute and went back to the watch commander’s office. Cam drove himself down to the scene, talked to the street unit people, and then returned to the Washington Street complex. He went to his own office and cranked up the coffeemaker. Then he sat down and tried to figure out what the hell he was going to do next. The phone rang; it was Bobby Lee.

“What are you doing about this mess down in the projects?” he asked without preamble. “I understand you went down there yourself?”

“There really wasn’t a scene when I got there,” Cam told him. “Lots of yellow tape and two city patrol units, but by then the word was out that the gunfire was all bogus, and all the regulars had done their usual fade. I didn’t bother with CSI.”

“Was that wise?” Bobby Lee asked. “You did have an abduction. There could have been evidence on the street, something from the truck or the abductor.”

“The scene was hopeless. The city cops bagged what they think is Flash’s ball cap and what is presumably one of his shoes, plus some shell casings they want our lab to work.”

“How do they know it’s his shoe?”

“The shoe was full of urine, and it smelled a lot like the ball cap. The few people they did interview at the scene still had their shoes.”

The sheriff hesitated for a moment. “If this is what I think it is,” he said, “he won’t be needing shoes.”

Cam nodded to himself. He could still visualize Simmonds’s bony feet being welded to the frame of the footrest. He wondered idly if the executioner would clean the chair up before doing Flash.

“Why screw around any more?” Cam asked. “Let’s call in the Bureau, or the ATF, or both. This was a public abduction, a kidnapping, with a machine gun, even if it was shooting blanks. They’ll get a twofer.”

“You want to be sidelined on this one?”

“To be honest, Sheriff,” Cam said. “I don’t share the popular notion that MCAT caused this mess, so I feel no personal affiliation with this chair thing.”

“Lieutenant, it was your-”

“It was Judge Bellamy who released them and dismissed the charges,” Cam said, surprising himself by interrupting Bobby Lee, something deputies rarely did.

The sheriff went silent, and then surprised him. “Reasons to turn it over to the Bureau?” he asked.

Relieved that they weren’t going to spend the morning squaring off like two male dogs, Cam laid it out. “We don’t have the assets to track the Internet video. Kenny Cox is the best Webhead we have in MCAT, and he says this would take some heavy-duty computer expertise. The feds are all over that. They have that program that watches everyone on-line, so they can probably find the source. Plus, we now have a terrorist-style street abduction of a subject related to the guy who supposedly got fried. The Bureau does kidnapping cases. And finally, the Internet is, by definition, interstate. Crimes across lines also means the Bureau.”

“They come in, they’ll push you and your guys aside like so many annoying insects.”

“I’m ready to be pushed aside,” Cam said. “We’re not getting anywhere.”

Another silence. “Okay,” Bobby Lee said. “I’ll call ’em. Let’s just hope we don’t get act two in the meantime.”

“For what it’s worth, Sheriff, you might be all alone in that sentiment.”