Warshot

“Yeah. Hook, line, and sinker. He won’t print.” The major paused. “You didn’t leave anything did you?”

“Nothing,” answered the lieutenant. “Dumped everything. Plastic gloves — everything.”

“Good!” and they went into their little Federal Express routine, laughing. “When it absolutely! positively! has to be there overnight…”

* * *

Later that day the editor of the Atlanta Journal in Georgia received an anonymous tip that in addition to a sniper attack on the road to the Savannah River plant, there had been two explosions near its three nuclear reactors. None had been perforated, but a truck carrying thirty drums of nuclear waste was blown clear off the road. At least four of the drums had ruptured, spilling their deadly poison, which, in a heavy rainfall, was now believed to have entered the water table through the porous soil.

The editor of the Journal, upon being paid a visit by the CIA after running the story, said he wouldn’t give the name of the tipster even if he knew it.

“Was it from New England?” the CIA asked. “From Logan?”

“Who’s Logan?”

“Place in New England.”

The editor shook his head. “We get all kinds of courier mail from all over the country. Especially now, the phone systems are so—”

“Yeah, yeah,” said the CIA agent, and left.

* * *

In the maze of Brooklyn’s back streets and in the vandalized cores of dozens of American inner cities that had decayed in the seventies, been rejuvenated in the eighties, only to die again the nineties, the dealers and users passed through America’s night with impunity, the police outnumbered and often outgunned — if not by the accuracy, then by the sheer number of weapons on the street. Most of all the police were consistently outmaneuvered by the high-priced lawyers who had the gunmen back out on the streets often in less time than it had taken for the police to book them.

In a Brooklyn alley not far from the bridge, there was a tinny noise of underground ventilation, gray steam bleeding into the night, many of the users already shooting up in the galleries, freebasing, the real “badasses” on crack levitating, not knowing where they were or what they were doing, TVs left on, screens flickering blue, as the president’s speech containing the phrases “arrest on reasonable suspicion” and “suspension of habeas corpus” was being broadcast. So many stations were carrying the address that some of the “dudes” uptown, the suppliers like Bobby “Bad-Ass” Duguid, were cussing and instructing their boys to turn off “that prezeedential shit, man,” Duguid demanding “video” instead — his favorite, “Wrestlin’ Witches.”

Duguid’s preppy lawyer detested wresting, especially the degrading sight of women in mud. In fact he hated everything about Bobby Duguid except the vast amounts of money he had to launder for Bobby and “muh associates— ‘Smith, Smith and Wesson.’ Ha! Ha! Ha!” The young lawyer liked something else, too — the raw power of a man like Duguid, who could daily “rip off the system,” as Bobby so accurately put it, and not even “touch the money, man.” Bobby made it a point of never carrying cash, and let it be known in the intricate, psychosis-webbed world of drugs that he never carried it. His lawyer handled that, a sight Bobby loved to see — fine striped shirts, his “whitey,” with the Cartier watches and Rockport shoes, handling the lucre with tear-off surgical gloves, terrified of catching “dis-eeze from muh clientele!”

At ten-thirty, outside one of the dozens of Harlem galleries owned and supplied by Duguid and his associates, the four men in the unmarked police car from the Sixth Precinct, the Alamo, knew that if they didn’t move within the next five minutes, even the crackheads who didn’t know what planet they were on would slip away into the garbage-tainted air. But they’d been ordered to wait. “No cart before the friggin’ horse,” as their chief had put it. “When we hit, it’s all got to happen simultaneously. I don’t want that roach in his flamingo-pink whorehouse uptown to get tipped off. Praise God for President Mayne. I’ll vote for him till I die.”

There had been a rough chorus of heartfelt amens.

The steam was still rising, going this way and that like some living thing fuming but in confusion, a red and blue neon slashing the vaporous cloud every four seconds, infusing it with a surrealistic look, hard on the eyes.

“No need for all this palaver,” said one of the four-member squad, the short-barrel, pump-action shotgun in his right hand. “What’s the difference? With this new Emergency Powers thing, we could pick him up in the morning, right? We could be home getting sleep by now.”

“Johnny,” said a detached, in-charge voice from the backseat, “once these friggin’ lawyers hear Mayne’s speech, they’re gonna go ape and tip off every slimeball in the territory.”

“So where can they go?” asked the policeman with the shotgun. “We shut all the fucking airports to Canada and Mexico.”

“They don’t have to leave the country,” said the man from the back. “Just hide out till the emergency power’s repealed. Then we’ll be back to square—”

The radio crackled, its volume low. “Car forty-five. A code one-eight-seven on Jefferson one-four-eight-nine. Corner store—7-Eleven.” A 187 was a homicide, Jefferson, the other side of town. It was the “get ready” code to foil the smartasses who might be listening in on police radios.

“All right, Phil,” said the lieutenant in the backseat, patting the man in the front who had the shotgun. “You do the kick. I’ll be on your left, Marty to your right. Jose stays with the car. Got it?”

“Got it.”

The radio crackled again. “Ah, car forty-five, that one-eight-seven on Jefferson’s bein’ looked after.” It meant the alley behind the shooting gallery was now covered.

“Right! Remember,” said the lieutenant, “no one out to the back door or you’ll get your balls blown off. Drabinsky’s got a pump back there and he’s so fucking short he can’t aim any higher than your prick.”

“How the hell he get on the force?” whispered Phil, opening the front passenger door.

“Aerobics,” said the detective. “Stretches, Simmons tapes, ah-one and ah-two and all—”

As they slipped through the steam, the detective felt his stomach muscles tightening. Sometimes the kick didn’t work, then it was a shmoozle and you ended up having to either shoot the friggin’ lock off or use the ram log. By the time you got in, they’d all rushed for the back, and then it got really dangerous. Finding their way blocked, they turned and headed back, spaced out and wild, knowing they were trapped and that if they rushed you, most of them would probably get away. “At Duguid’s uptown,” said Phil quietly, “I’ll be they’ve got Jeeves answering the door.” He was nervous but he loved it. Tonight especially, ‘reasonable suspicion’ meant no announcement, no badge shit, no Miranda.

Entering the crumbling brownstone, they heard an odd scrabbling noise, and the gut-thumping beat of rock in the air. There was a candle halfway up the stairs — the power long disconnected.

Phil saw a soft light issuing from beneath the second floor door and heard the scrabbling noise again — a rat scurrying into the darkness over newspapers on the stairs. He could smell human excrement. They walked up slowly, the candle flickering, now only the slit of light beneath the door to see by, the stink becoming worse.

“Ready?” whispered Phil.

“Ready.”

When Phil hit the door, it was so rotten it caved in. He was on the floor looking up through a cloud of dust and crud, the air reeking of dirty bodies, maybe fifteen or more junkies, some astonished, cigarettes, bottles held motionless in their hands, stilled for a second before they broke for the rear door. There was movement on the left side of the hallway. Phil’s flashlight picked out a man, his pants down. The man’s right hand flashed to his pocket. Phil fired twice, the blast lifting the man off the floor, slamming him against a doorjamb. A woman, breasts flying, came running through the dust-filled gloom, screaming her head off, tried to touch the man but couldn’t — blood everywhere. Now they were all coming back from a rear door — a mad-eyed sprinter, dirty T-shirt and jeans, some red thing in his hair, a shooter in each hand. He got off two wild rounds before they took him out, too. The man behind dropped his gun and raised his hands but was knocked flat by a scrawny teenager, born to raise hell on his chest. Phil gave him the butt, full face, and he was down. Phil heard his left ear ringing like an express train as the lieutenant fired twice.

“Be cool! Be cool!” came a voice from the hysteria of candlelight and dust.

“Put her out!” yelled Phil. One of the crackheads — a Latin — was on fire, her blouse ablaze, but no one did anything. Phil stepped forward, knocked her down, covered her with his jacket and began stomping out flame, the dust rising like talc, the smell of singed hair joining the sickly sweet smell of “dude rube,” the local wino