A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1 (2 page)

LEWIS SALINOWSKY NEEDED A FIX.
He was also hungry for food, but that could wait. With great effort he pushed and pulled himself up to a standing position, bent over and picked up the cup that had lain at his feet. The soggy cardboard sign he left behind. He had a fresh Sharpie in his pocket and could always make another one.

After hours sitting on the cold concrete, Salinowsky’s body felt like one of those frozen fish he always saw on the street tables of Chinatown. If a giant hand came down from heaven and lifted him off the ground and smacked him against the side of a building, he felt like he just might break in two. It would be so easy because other forces had already cracked him.

He fished around in the paper cup with his stiff fingers, uncrumpling bills, refolding them, and slipping them into his pocket. Twenty-three dollars there plus the fourteen he already had—that made thirty-seven. He tilted the cup and dumped the change into his palm and counted. Looked like another seven bucks plus. Forty-four. He could buy half a bundle—carry him through the meat of the week if he was careful—and still have a few dollars left over for pizza. The pizza would hold him until the soup kitchen opened for dinner. Sounded like a plan.

Rain began falling, small drops but tightly spaced. Salinowsky had to get from midtown, where he’d been testing new panhandling territory, to the Lower East Side, but he didn’t want to waste money on the subway. He thought about jumping the turnstile, but couldn’t risk that, had seen plenty of guys get caught lately with that stunt. Going to jail, even for a night, would bring on the super flu—withdrawal sickness. Not worth the risk. He decided to walk the sixty-some-odd blocks down to his neighborhood.

Beginning near Columbus Circle, he went mostly east at first, then down Madison Avenue where, near the back of St. Patrick’s Cathedral he got diverted by some police action. After that it was smooth sailing except for the general wetness and the gimpiness that had begun forming in his bad leg. By the time Salinowsky reached Avenue C, he had a blister on his stump. But knowledge of what awaited kept him going.

At East Second Street, he turned the corner, opened the door to an old tenement house, and hobbled up four flights of stairs. The door was unlocked, several people inside. Dripping on the stained rug, Salinowsky held out his forty dollars and watched the dealer count it with excruciating slowness. He got his half-load and went into the next room, where nearly a dozen people sat on the floor or on an old bed with a soiled macramé blanket bunched in one corner of the mattress.

He leaned against a wall and collapsed to the floor.

His hands shook. He’d cut this trip close.

Some girl took pity on him and did the cooking with her blackened spoon and a Bic lighter. She didn’t even ask for anything in return, just handed him the loaded syringe and went to work on her own fix. From there Salinowsky managed to do himself up, finding a vein near his groin. He leaned his head against the wall and his mind floated off on angel wings.

It didn’t take long for him to forget about the pizza.

WORKING THE RADIO, KAHN LEARNED
that the police had set up a perimeter by closing off East Fifty-First and East Fifty-Second to cars and pedestrians and taking two lanes out of action on the east side of Fifth Avenue.

“The book says a thousand feet,” Kahn sniffed. “Never managed close to that in midtown except for a car bomb. Turn here.”

Diaz didn’t need any reminders on what the book said, but he followed the instructions.

“Probably they closed the north-side doors to Saks,” Kahn went on. “No doubt Fiftieth is already packed with people getting in the way of traffic. Let’s go north past it up Sixth and wrap around.”

They had the siren on, as well as the light bar.

“We’ll go down Lex and through the barriers they got set up on Fifty-Second,” Kahn said. “Fifty-Second runs east but they’ll have it cleared, so we can go against traffic. Turn here for—”

“Where you from originally, Sandy?” Diaz was starting to seethe.

“Long Island. Merrick. Why?”

“I grew up in Brooklyn myself. I know my way around Manhattan pretty well.”

“And how much of that in a police car going to a bomb call? Turn it here, please, Detective.”

They were making okay time. Diaz felt strongly that micromanagement from the guy in the passenger seat was unnecessary. Fortunately, Kahn cut off his own turn-by-turn directions to work the radio, checking in with the midtown precinct and with their precinct downtown. Nobody, so far, had called in any bomb threats against Saint Patrick’s or the Catholic Church in general.

By the time Kahn started paying attention to the street again, Diaz had navigated them to Lexington and Fifty-Fourth. But from there complete gridlock ensued, even with the siren going and with Kahn over the squawk box telling cars to move aside.

“Sometimes this city reminds me of Baghdad,” Diaz said. “One second we’d be doing eighty on the Highway of Death and then we’d hit town and it’s just a free-for-all, no lane markers, cars inching along at the speed of a donkey cart. Difference being that there you felt like a sitting duck. Here it’s only a pain in the balls.”

“Yeah.” Kahn reached for his door handle. “Well, half the drivers look the same, too.”

He jumped out and rapped on the window of the cab that blocked them, flashed his badge at the turbaned driver, and started barking words of one syllable. He moved onto a delivery van and two more cabs, giving them the same treatment.

That cleared the worst of it. Kahn jumped back into the truck and Diaz started moving before the door closed. Out of habit, Kahn re-buckled his seatbelt. Then he brushed the water from the lapels of his raincoat.

They nodded to the uniformed cops at Lexington and Fifty-Second, chirped through the intersection at Madison, and nodded again to the uniforms at the blue sawhorses, obtaining immediate admittance. Along Fifth Avenue by the cathedral, eight police vehicles stood in a line, functioning as a steel curtain.

Kahn rolled down his window and talked to a uniformed sergeant. Over his shoulder, a family of duded-up Hispanics, held back by police along with the rest of the crowd, shouted in hysteria, the woman alternating between wails and the dabbing of her tears. The guy looked so agitated that steam rose into the cold February air from his shoulders and slicked-back hair. From what Diaz could glean, they were missing a funeral.

“It’s on the other corner,” the uniformed sergeant said. “What took you?”

“We’re shorthanded this week. Friggin’ bird flu. We’ll jump the curb here and take the sidewalk.”

“Roger that.” The uniformed sergeant instructed his men to move the barricade. Diaz took it slow and the response truck rode high, but its suspension groaned and the equipment in back rattled as they clambered over the curb.

Diaz had been on a hundred bomb calls in New York City, but this one involved more craziness than usual: rain coming down in a fine mist, honking cars and wailing mourners pressing to get inside, cops shouting at everyone, cameras flashing in the hands of rubberneckers, sirens still converging on the scene. Kahn had predicted right, Diaz admitted to himself. The place was a zoo.

But, over the din, when they stepped outside he thought he perceived organ music coming through the closed doors of the cathedral.

“You hear that?”

Kahn half nodded. “Guess the funeral started without us.”

The uniformed sergeant pointed out the suspicious package and retreated. It rested against the bottom step, an overstuffed black messenger bag with unnatural bulges, partly held together with brown packing tape.

“Whoever made that,” Kahn said, “had no appreciation for aesthetics.” He took the key from Diaz and opened the truck’s rear doors. The Wolverine robot inside looked like a folded stainless steel crane. They checked for obstructions and unlocked the black nylon straps that held fast the gleaming machine. Kahn powered it up, watching closely as it rolled down the aluminum ramp and onto the sidewalk. Then Kahn twisted the joystick on the controller. The robot began to turn, juddered and appeared to die.

While Kahn fiddled with the control panel, Diaz used a pair of khaki green Celestron Cavalry binoculars to peer over the hood of their truck at the suspect IED. Given the constraints of midtown geography, they were closer to the device than they’d like to be, no more than forty feet. If a blast went off, it would reach them in a fraction of a second. But at least that proximity afforded him a pretty good look.

The messenger bag was frayed at the corners, like someone had carried it around for a good long time before repurposing it as a means of terror. The tape had been applied hastily but not recently. It appeared to hold together a tear where the fabric met the piping, and it also showed signs of wear. From the top of the bag, the corner of what looked like a manila folder protruded. Between that folder and the half-open zipper, a pair of white wires looped out of the bag and back inside.

Kahn was cursing at the robot, which rested right where it had frozen two minutes ago, hadn’t made a sound or moved an inch. He crouched over it, checking the inner workings and looking back and forth to the control panel, which lay on the floor of the truck bay like a prop in a
Batman
movie, Diaz thought. Kahn worked the joystick some more and turned a couple of knobs. The thing didn’t respond. From what Diaz could see, no image feed from the camera appeared on the controller screen.

Fifty feet behind Kahn, the Hispanic woman with the handkerchief broke past the police barrier wailing like her hair was on fire. She made a run for the front door to the cathedral in her patent leather high heels, big bosoms flopping like water balloons under an open coat. A police officer gave chase in his long yellow slicker, and it proved to be an unequal match. She collapsed on her ass as he caught up to her. Didn’t even make it to the first step.

“Fucking thing!” Kahn said. He’d attached the orange backup cable and resumed working the robot’s controls, but he continued to stare in astonishment as nothing happened.

“The definition of insanity…” began the voice in Diaz’s head. Kahn looked up at him. Had he said it aloud?

“It worked yesterday morning and I know the battery’s good,” Kahn said. “Couple more things I can try.”

Diaz went back to analyzing the bag. The wires looked like the kind that attach earbuds to an iPod. Beyond the actual explosives—for which in practicality there were only a few options—the materials that went into a bomb were as limitless as the human imagination. Yet Diaz thought someone’s imagination had run wild on this one, and it wasn’t the bomb maker’s.

He might take a ScanX x-ray kit and get a shot inside the messenger bag, but instead Diaz went around the truck and approached the thing with what he considered to be appropriate caution. That tape...unless someone built this bomb months ago and carried it around ever since, it didn’t add up. The tape was there to fix the old tear, not to help hold together a bomb package. And without the tape the bag looked a lot less suspicious.

When he got within fifteen feet, he felt pretty confident that his judgment had been correct. He lifted his right pant leg and reached into the scabbard on his calf, extracting his Leatherman folding knife. Again he thought maybe he should go get the bomb suit and initiate an x-ray procedure, but he knew x-rays and personal protection would be a waste of time.

Diaz looked over his shoulder just once. Kahn was still messing with the robot, paying him no mind. The hysterical funeral people had been hustled away. The rest of the crowd and the traffic had fallen silent—not in real life, but their constant murmur had receded beyond the periphery of the bomb tech’s concentration.

Using one hand, held up at the level of his ribs, Diaz flicked the blade launcher to open the knife. He kept it as sharp as any folding knife could be and the straight-edge/serrated blade combination gave him maximum flexibility. With even strides he closed the rest of the distance to the bag and dropped to one knee in the rain.

Now a sound did come from behind him. It was Kahn, calling over the noise of the crowd. Diaz couldn’t hear the words exactly, just his own name, delivered with an attitude. Screw it—today forced patience felt nearly as suffocating to him as the bomb suit could be. And he’d already drawn his conclusions about the bag. Crouched on top of it now, Diaz ignored the sergeant. Steadying the messenger bag gently with his left hand, he used the straight edge of his knife to slice with even pressure through the middle of the fabric.

For two seconds blade through nylon sounded vaguely like fingernails on a chalkboard. When he’d finished, the insides lay exposed.

This was no IED. It contained only a sheaf of legal papers, a navel orange, a paperback book, a tin of Altoids, and, as Diaz had suspected, an iPod Nano with earbuds attached.

“YOU! DON’T! DO! THAT!” KAHN
was still red in the face halfway back to the station house.

“I could see it was nothing,” Diaz repeated for the third time.

“You could see—how could you see? Did you x-ray it?”

Diaz shook his head. “The time it took—what? I was gonna climb into the bomb suit while you messed with the robot? Or we were gonna send back to the garage for another robot? Stand out there getting wet? Block Fifth Avenue for half the day for a bag of papers? It was nothing. I could feel it and I could see it.”

“First of all, the rain isn’t an excuse for anything. Second, how did you do the RSP?”

“There was nothing dangerous, therefore nothing to render safe.”

“How did you open it?”

“With my knife. You saw.”

“Why not pull the zipper?”

“Because it could be booby trapped.”

“But you said it was nothing. You knew there was no bomb—just knew! So how could it be booby trapped, a bag of papers?”

“Better safe than sorry. If it was a bomb—”

“So you didn’t know. If you knew for sure, why not use the zipper? Why cut it open?”

Diaz scratched his forehead with his thumbnail. “Following procedures? Is that what you want me to say?”