Bones Omnibus (7 page)

The New York Police Department’s Canine Team was part of the NYPD Emergency Services Unit, which was part of the even larger Special Operations Division. There was a training facility on West 20th across the street from the large kennels that housed active-duty dogs on operation days.

“The reason we had to bring you in, Mr. Bones, is because we’re just stretched too thin and have had too many injuries lately,” del Vecchio said, leading the shepherd out of her car on a lead. “My dog, Perseus, got shot on a narcotics raid in Staten Island a few weeks ago after being loaned out to those bozos. I’m still pissed on that one. So, when we go after these assholes today, I’m going to have you in a vest. Pretty sure you’re only being used on point. Detection, intimidation, possible pursuit but not likely.”

The Special Ops division building was old and in desperate need of a facelift. A onetime precinct house, the place had been taken over by Special Ops in the late seventies. Year after year, renovations projects were budgeted and put forth to the city and, year after year, they were among the first things cut. It got so bad that a couple of officers had even come in with buckets of paint on their days off to at least make the first floor presentable. They made it an hour before a visiting administrator accosted them for a work order and shut them down.

So now, alongside curling linoleum, rat-eaten corkboard ceilings, and chipped doorframes, were four half-painted hallways, a reminder to all of the power and absurdity of police bureaucracy.

“That the Pittsburgh mutt?” called a uniformed tactical officer when he spied Bones and del Vecchio.

“This is the guy. Already told him if he felt like biting someone in the ass, O’Hara was just the douchebag to see.”

“Oh, fuck off, del Vecchio,” O’Hara snarled. “Ever wonder why no one buys your shit about gender bias in the division? Five minutes next to you and they know it’s your mouth holding you back. And in an outfit as small as New York’s finest, people talk.”

“Fuck yourself,” del Vecchio called. “But I guess you’ll be doing that a lot now that your wife ran off with your son’s LittleLleague coach.”

O’Hara blanched. “How’d you…?”

“Like you said, people talk.”

A smirk on her lips, del Vecchio led Bones towards the kennel in back.

“Problem is, he’s
exactly
my type,
Huesos
. Six-foot, family of cops going back four generations, Irish drunken fuck, works out every day, probably going to be a captain one day, maybe even deputy chief. His whole life is policing. Kind of guy needs a cop-wife to keep him in line. I just might try to get in on that.”

Bones picked up the scents of at least two dozen different enforcement dogs in the kennel, though there was only one being housed. Del Vecchio led him to the last enclosure, swung open the chain-link gate, and put him inside.

“We’ll get you fed and watered. Take it easy. The operation’s set for midnight, so we’ll rally at ten. Got that?”

Bones looked at her for a moment and the sergeant nodded.

“Good dog.”

T
he tactical team was relatively small. Twelve officers in all, plus Bones and the drivers of the two tactical vehicles. Four car units had been assigned to back up the SWAT officers, but the pervading belief was they would be unnecessary. The Spec Ops guys would breach with a lot of sound and fury, the targets would fold, and they’d call it a night.

For his part, though, Bones was attentive. He knew it was game time. The excitement pulsing through the officers had infected the shepherd as well. He’d spent most of the afternoon and early evening asleep, waking only to eat moments before he was brought onto the truck. Once he was there, his temporary handler quickly attached a camera apparatus to his harness.

“We’re going to hit the lights in this place,” del Vecchio explained. “We send you up ahead, around a corner, into an apartment, and you’ll be our eyes. Got it?”

Bones hadn’t replied.

“Some toy,” O’Hara grunted from a few seats up as del Vecchio checked the camera feed on a handheld monitor.

“I’d let you borrow it, but I’m afraid of what I’d find on the memory stick when you gave it back,” del Vecchio quipped, tugging the harness. “Besides, with your pecs you’d need something more in the realm of a 44 regular, am I right?”

Rather than be offended, O’Hara grinned.

“Post-raid plans, sergeant?”

Del Vecchio offered O’Hara a smile that was at least part invitation before turning back to her charge.

“Don’t worry, Bones. My mind’s totally on your safety ’cause I know your mind’s on mine. I don’t take that lightly.”

Bones eyed del Vecchio expectantly, but she went quiet.

A second later, the captain at the front of the vehicle spoke up.

“Three nights ago, a Mr. Devaris Clark was thrown off the roof of the building we have business in tonight. We believe it to be the work of one Mr. Chiedozie, a Nigerian slum lord who lines up squats for incoming illegals and then calls INS once he’s drained them dry. He keeps his neighbors quiet with threats of violence. We’re here to round up him and his organization.Some of the people in your line of sight will probably be the victims of his fraud, while others will pretend to be. Not our job. We get ’em down, cuff ’em tight, slide them to booking, and go home. We’re the dog catchers, not the Board of Records, present company notwithstanding.”

He nodded to del Vecchio. She gripped Bones’s lead a little tighter.

“All right. Let’s hit the ground running.”

The tactical vehicles turned onto East 112th and slowed at Neville Houses, but did not stop. The back doors flew open and the teams hopped off and moved directly towards the building.

Sergeant del Vecchio and Bones were the first ones out of the second vehicle. The dank scents that had polluted Devaris’s nose only days before now ravaged Bones. But he had no time to investigate this piece of garbage or that fetid pool of rat piss. He was going where he was led, end of story.

“Here we go, Bones,” del Vecchio whispered.

At that moment, Building 7 of Neville Houses was plunged into darkness as the power was cut half a block away by Con Ed employees. Anyone lingering around the courtyard had vacated the second the tactical vehicles showed up on the block, so the team had a clear path all the way to the front door.

“What happened to the lights?” came a voice from the lobby.

“Police!” the captain yelled back. “On the ground, now!”

Bones and del Vecchio moved past the captain to follow the other tactical officers up the stairs. They were heading for the sixth floor but were stopping on five to allow their four-pawed companion to take the lead.

“Ma’am? Please return to your apartment! This is a police matter.”

Whoever the words were directed at seemed to take heed. Del Vecchio heard a door slam shut. She had on night vision goggles but was already staring into the handheld monitor as the image bounced up and down with Bones’s quick steps. It was times like this that she envied not the shepherd’s incredible sense of smell, but his ability to see in the dark.

“Easy, Bones,” she whispered into her throat mic, her voice traveling into his ears via specially designed ear buds, a loan from the military.

They reached the fifth-floor stairwell and stopped. Del Vecchio waited for the command from the captain, checking and rechecking the view from the monitor on Bones’s back.

“Send him in.”

Del Vecchio took Bones off the leash and indicated the next floor.

“Okay, Bones. Search!”

Bones moved up the stairs and glanced down the dark hallway on the sixth floor. Seeing nothing, he walked down the hallway, sniffing at every closed door. A door cracked open up ahead. Bones looked up. As he did, del Vecchio glimpsed a large man peering down the hallway, holding a gun. She showed this to the captain, who nodded.

“That’s our guy. Give the command.”

“Take hold!” the sergeant barked into her mic.

Bones had a significant prey drive. He’d been silently sizing up the man since his hand had gripped the doorknob. When given the command to bite the fellow, it was like an invitation to play time. He would merely be doing exactly what domestication and training kept him from doing naturally.

The gunman sensed something coming at him from the darkness only seconds before Bones’s jaws clamped down with an average 200 psi on his right arm. He’d made the mistake of trying to aim the gun at the unseen intruder at the last moment, giving Bones the moving target he was looking for. The shepherd hit the man so hard that he fell over, dropping the gun as he hit the ground.

Immediately, there were shouts, followed by gunfire.

On the screen, Sergeant del Vecchio counted a dozen pairs of glowing eyes. Fear raced up her spine, though it wasn’t her own safety she was concerned for.

“First squad! Go!” cried the captain.

Six members of the tactical team swept up the stairs and onto the sixth floor. Del Vecchio, part of the second squad, stared at the monitor as muzzle flash repeatedly blinded the camera. When she could make something out, the image bounded around. Bones was clearly in attack mode. Her worry switched from the shepherd’s safety to that of the tactical team.

“Bones! Out!!” she cried into her throat mic, unsure whether the dog could hear.

“Second squad! Go!”

Del Vecchio leaped to her feet and followed the others up to the sixth floor. She looked down at the monitor but couldn’t tell if Bones had stood down. Just as she entered the hallway, she caught a glimpse of a man’s eyes staring up at the camera in terror as Bones tore at his shoulder, already out of its socket.

“Bones! Out!” she repeated, panic in her voice.

This time, she knew he couldn’t hear, so loud had the gunfire grown. That’s when all other noise was blotted out by the sound of a gunshot so impossibly close to her head that she felt temporarily deafened. This was followed by a numb feeling behind her eye. She looked down at the monitor and saw its screen was now obscured by a thick greasy film of blood and brains.

Hers
.

No one had heard the door to 632 open. The building’s records had the apartment rented to one “Erna Fowler,” aged eighty-two years. She’d been a resident since 1979 and lived alone. The idea that she would step out of her apartment with the small six-shot .357 she kept in a drawer and begin killing the officers in the hall with shots to the back of the head simply hadn’t occurred to anyone in the planning stages of the operation.

As bullets flew, the chaos allowed Mrs. Fowler, married in 1951 to Archie, who died in 1993, to reload the weapon with a speedloader and continue shooting. She felled another two members of the tactical squad and was aiming at a third when a stray bullet from a MPK 9mm entered her left tear duct and exploded out the back of her head.

Still noticed by no one, she dropped to the ground directly beside the corpse of Sergeant del Vecchio, the .357 skittering down the hall before coming to a rest in front of 639.

Down on the street, Detectives Leonhardt and Garza stared up at the dark building as the distant, hollow report of gunfire continued, punctuated by intermittent flashes of light from three sixth-floor windows.

Leonhardt scrunched his brow.

“Weren’t they only breeching 638?”

“That’s what they said,” Garza nodded.

“Then somebody’s got their front door open.”

“Fuck. Hope we don’t have any civilian collaterals up there.”

“We do, and everybody in the precinct will be looking over their shoulder for the next year. To say nothing of how the press will take it.”

“Shit,” scoffed Garza. “Any time these Special Ops assholes come up to 22nd Precinct, they’ve got to make things hard for the rest of…”

Garza was interrupted by a terrified voice over the radio.

“Something’s happened up there!” someone squawked. “We have multiple officers down! We need emergency services and backup! Immediately!”

Leonhardt blanched. Garza popped a stick of gum in his mouth.

“You were saying?”

Becca Baldwin was nobody’s fool and anyone would tell you that, or so she was fond of saying. With an agile intelligence, quick to backhand those who would question it with a taste of her biting wit, everyone knew Becca was going places. She was a favorite of the building and knew it. The grandmas loved her, the parents hoped their kids grew up to be like her, and those her own age accorded her the deference she felt she had earned and was deserved.

She lived with her one half-brother and her one brother-brother. The full brother was Kenny, aged twenty-four, who worked nights at a distribution warehouse for a grocery store chain. The half was Trey. He ran with a small time drug-slinging crew that seemed bonded less by entrepreneurial spirit and more by the desire to spend the whole day fucked up. Becca had no interest in working at a warehouse or selling drugs. No, she was going to go to college on a scholarship and be a lady scientist and never look back. She would get married, move to Chicago or San Francisco or Seattle or Minneapolis-St. Paul, and never look back. All she had to do was bide her time and get the right grades. That’s what Mrs. Drucker told her, and she believed it.

She didn’t remember her mom, a crack head now deceased, and when she saw her dad on the streets, he didn’t remember her. She didn’t care, though. They were weak; she was strong and determined. She had brains, and she read all the time. She read books by and about Frederick Douglass, the poetry of Umar Bin Hassan, and the theater of Amiri Baraka. She listened to classical CDs she’d borrowed from her music teacher and didn’t get anything out of them but kept listening anyway.

Of the many other things Becca was, she was also twelve years old.

When the shooting started, she did what Kenny had always told her to do and hid in the hall bathtub. She pressed herself flat against the base, her nose touching the drain. The gunfire sounded far away, but she knew it was right outside the door. It alternated between machine gun fire and single shots, the singles sounding much louder than the others, echoing like thunder. She tried focusing on something else, finally settling on singing a song to herself. She ached to remember more than a couple of lines of this song or that and simply couldn’t do it.