Against All Enemies (47 page)

Pam didn’t know where the other units were coming from, but she was only a quarter mile away, and that meant that she would be first on the scene.

“Units responding be advised that we’ve received multiple calls on this. Callers report a man in the parking lot next to the Caf-Fiend Coffee House with a knife in his hand. One victim appears to be down.”

To be sure, that raised the stakes. If the callers were right—and when multiple callers had the same story, the situation was almost always as reported—Pam was cruising into the middle of a murder in progress. That was the best case. There was no ceiling on what the worst case might be. She used her right thumb to release the snap on her thumb-break holster. If she was going to need her weapon, she was going to need it quickly. Milliseconds counted.

Peripheral vision became a blur as Pam pushed the speedometer to its limit down Little Creek Turnpike, switching the siren to Yelp as she approached intersections. Someone was being killed, and people needed to get out of her way. The penalty for being a little too slow might be the ultimate one, but she’d learned over her thirteen years on the job that if you move with enough conviction—whether on foot or in a vehicle—people will move to let you pass.

As Fair Haven Shopping Center whizzed past her on the left—a blur of colorful signage and logos—she lifted her foot off the gas to prepare for the hard left onto Pickett Lane, named after the famed Civil War general. She tapped the brakes but didn’t jam them, taking the turn twenty miles an hour faster than the intersection was designed for, but a solid fifteen miles an hour slower than her tires could handle. Her seat belt kept her from being launched into the passenger seat by the centrifugal force.

The ass end of her cruiser tried to kick out from her, but Pam wrestled it back in line with gentle pressure on the wheel. The casual observer wouldn’t have seen even the slightest fishtail.

Straightaway.

The engine growled as she pressed the accelerator to the floor. Up ahead, as far as she could see, the traffic parted. She saw cars in the median, a truck up on the curb on the right. Somehow, they knew. Somehow, they always knew. This was the part of the job that she loved more than any other.

The Antebellum Shopping Center was now in view, ahead and on the right, and she slowed. It was one thing to get to the scene quickly; it was something else to rush into an ambush. Because weapons were involved, county protocols required that she wait for backup. But because someone was in the process of being murdered, she decided to disobey the rules. The fact that the murderer had a knife and she had both a. 40-caliber handgun and a 12-gauge shotgun within easy reach made the decision a little easier. Still, violence in progress required a careful approach.

Pam cut her siren and slowed to twenty miles an hour as she turned in to the shopping center. She pulled the mike from its clamp again and keyed the mike. “One-four-three on the scene.”

“Four-four-seven. Hold what you’ve got. I’m ninety seconds out.” That would be Josh Levine, a cool kid with a big heart and a bit of a crush.

Pam opted not to respond. A good guy was being stabbed to death. Ninety seconds was quite literally a lifetime. Waiting was out of the question. But she wasn’t going to go on the record violating protocol. Sometimes it truly was easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission.

A crowd had gathered in the parking lot outside the Caf-Fiend Coffee House, naturally forming the kind of semicircle that inadvertently directed Pam’s eye directly to where the threat stood. The gawkers closest to her beckoned her forward, while the ones who were farther away continued to stare and point at the hazard.

“The situation is critical,” Pam said into the radio. Translation:
I’m triggering the protocol’s exception clause.
“Other units expedite.” Translation:
Run over anybody in your way if you want a piece of the fun.

She threw the transmission into Park, kept the engine running, and stepped out of the cruiser.

“He’s up there!” a lady yelled. “Shoot him!”

Pam ignored her. In fact, she ignored everything but the facts as she saw them play out before her. With her Glock 23 at low-ready, she approached carefully yet steadily, sweeping her eyes left and right, ever vigilant for an unseen threat, perhaps an accomplice. She tried to focus on her tactical breathing—four seconds in, four seconds held, then four seconds to exhale. It made all the sense in the world when she learned about it in the classroom, but it was pretty damned hard to do in real life.

The intensity of the combined energy from all the people watching her seemed to create its own form of heat. Crime scene gawkers were a funny lot. Roughly a third of them thought you were a god, a second third thought you were Satan incarnate, and the rest didn’t give a shit. They were the ones with the cell phone cameras. She saw three devices on her periphery, one of which hovered in the air at the end of one of those extender rods that had become ubiquitous among the selfie crowd. Of the thirty or so people who had gathered, she noted that none of them had pressed forward to help the victim or to confront the attacker. That was her job. The crowd’s job was to film it and to offer criticism after the fact.

She’d nearly made it to the front of the crowd when she caught her first glimpse of the gore. Two cars were painted with it, as was a nice-looking, terrified young man in the apron of a Caf-Fiend barista. The kid looked confused. He looked at the knife in his hands as if it belonged to someone else.

Pam raised her Glock to high-ready and rested the front sight at the center of the attacker’s chest. “Police officer!” she yelled. Her voice cracked just a little. She hoped it wasn’t obvious to anyone else that she was in way over her head. You train for the scenario where you single-handedly confront a murderer, but you never really expect it to happen on your watch. “Put the knife down or I will shoot you!”

The attacker held out his free hand as if to ward her off. “No!” he said. “I’m not the killer. He’s the killer. He’s a kidnapper, a rapist, and a killer!”

“Put the knife down!”

“You don’t understand. I’m the victim here. He’s . . .” The kid’s face seemed to clear for an instant, and he looked at his hand. At the blood. “Oh, my God.” Then he looked at the bloody man who lay motionless at his feet. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

Pam moved her finger inside the trigger guard. The experts all agreed that inside of twenty-one feet, a man with a knife could kill a cop before the cop could pull a firearm from its holster. Correcting for the fact that she was scared shitless, but that her gun was already trained on the badguy, a finger on the trigger pretty much canceled out that research. Still, if he took a step toward her, she was going to blast his heart out through his spine.

“Listen to me!” Pam yelled. Her voice was firm and strong this time. “Put the knife down and lie down on the ground.”

“I’m the victim!”

“You’re the victim with a knife,” she replied. “You’re putting me in danger, and you’re putting all these other people in danger, too. Put the knife down, do what I tell you, and then I’ll listen to your side of the story.”

In the distance, the sound of sirens crescendoed. One of them would be Josh Levine. If he thought she was in mortal danger, he would shoot before talking.

The assailant didn’t move.

“What’s your name?” Pam shouted.

The kid seemed confused. Perhaps it was the ordinariness of the question.

“Your name,” Pam prompted. “What is it?”

“Um, Ethan. Ethan Falk.”

Pam lowered her weapon a few degrees. “Nice to meet you, Ethan Falk. I am Officer Hastings, and I am here to arrest you. Whether you’re innocent or guilty, victim or perpetrator is not my concern. All I know is that right now, there’s a man on the ground at your feet, and you’re standing over him with a bloody knife. What would you assume if you were in my position?”

“It looks bad, doesn’t it?”

The comment struck Pam as funny and she smiled. “I think we all can agree that this does look bad. So how about you put the knife—”

“But I didn’t do—”

“Listen to me, Ethan! Do you hear those other sirens? Those are other cops, and when they arrive, they’re going to see you still standing there with a knife. They’re going to see the blood, and there’s going to be that many more guns pointing at you. You don’t want that. Please just drop the knife and—”

He dropped it. The knife landed on the victim’s back, but not point-first. Baby steps.

“Thank you, Ethan,” Pam said. “Now, keeping your hands where I can see them, I need you to step forward into the road—”

Just then, a Toyota driven by a soccer mom in a pink top sped down the parking lot aisle that separated cop from felon.

“Jesus,” Pam cursed. “Really?” Refocus. She stepped out into the roadway and over to her right, keeping more or less the same distance between herself and her suspect.

“Four-four-seven is on the scene.” Josh Levine had arrived.

Pam moved her left hand from her weapon to the microphone on her epaulette. “Come in easy, Four-four-seven. I have the situation under control, but it’s fragile. I don’t need a lot of noise and mayhem.” To her suspect: “Ethan, I need you to take two big steps forward into the street and lie flat on your face, your hands out to the side.”

He still seemed to be caught somewhere between reality and someplace else.

“Come on, Ethan, I know you can do it.”

“Don’t shoot me.”

“I won’t shoot you if you don’t threaten anyone. Come on, two big steps forward, and then just sprawl on the ground. We’ll get past this one step and then everything else will be easy.”

Josh Levine burst out of the crowd on Pam’s left, Mossberg shotgun pressed to his shoulder. “You heard her!” he shouted. “Get on the ground! Now!” He pressed in three steps too close, ruining the safe zone that Pam had been trying to create. “I said now!”

“Josh, shut up!” Pam shouted. The words were out before she had a chance to stop them. But once out, they needed to be followed up. “I’ve got this. Step back.” In the back of her brain, she was distantly aware that she was making some great video for the cell phone crowd.

“Look at me, Ethan,” she said. “Not at him, at me. He won’t hurt you. But do you see how nervous you’re making everyone?” She dared a couple of steps forward, if only to earn the frightened glances that were going toward Levine. More sirens approached, and more units marked on the scene. The entire Braddock County Police Department was descending on them.

Ethan took two exaggerated steps forward, taking care not to step on the body, and ostentatiously avoiding the stream of blood, to stand in the middle of the street. If the Toyota had come by at that moment, he’d have been launched over the hood. He walked with his hands out to the side, cruciform, his finger splayed.

“You’re doing great, Ethan,” Pam said. “Now, I just need you to—”

Levine rushed him. With the shotgun one-armed into his shoulder, he closed the distance in two or three quick strides. Grabbing the back of the kid’s shirt at the collar, he kicked his right foot from underneath him while at the same instant driving him forward and down. Ethan barely had enough time to get his hands out in front to prevent his face from being smashed into the pavement.

With the kid down, Levine kneeled on the small of his back and pressed the muzzle of the shotgun against the base of the kid’s skull. “I’ve got him!” he announced. He looked to Pam. “You cuff him.”

Pam’s shoulders sagged. She holstered her Glock and approached the two men on the ground. “You didn’t have to do that,” she said when she was within easy earshot. “I had this under control.”

“Yeah, but I have him under arrest,” Josh said. “That’s better. Are you going to cuff him or chat?”

Anger boiled in Pam’s gut, but she swallowed it down. Cuffing Ethan was a cakewalk. He did everything he was asked to do, and by the time that fifteen-second process was completed, at least ten more cops had arrived.

“I’ve got this,” she said to Levine.

He cocked his head. “Why are you so pissed?”

“Because you didn’t have to hurt him,” she said.

“You know he killed a guy, right?”

Pam didn’t answer. She helped Ethan to his feet and Mirandized him. She did her best to ignore the citizens who crowded her as she escorted her prisoner to her cruiser, and she didn’t acknowledge any of the other officers. It was the damn cameras. She just wanted to be out of their range.

“Watch your head,” she said as Ethan lowered his butt into the backseat.

“Officer Hastings?” They were Ethan’s first words since he’d been pressed into the pavement.

Pam made eye contact.

“That man kidnapped me when I was eleven years old. You look it up. It was terrible. He was a monster. I’m sorry for what I did, but he was . . . a
monster.
”

Just from his tone, Pam believed him. “Okay,” she said. “Make sure you tell your lawyer. And the prosecutor if you decide to talk to him. The FBI will have a record of your rescue, and that will surely help.”

“But I wasn’t rescued by the FBI,” Ethan said.

“Then how did you get away? Did you escape?”

Ethan shook his head. “No, I was rescued, but not by the FBI. I was rescued by a guy named Scorpion.”

“Who?”

“That’s all I know. His name was Scorpion.”

“That’s not a name.”

“Of course it’s not a name. But that’s what he called himself. He saved my life.”

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