“What confidence. Nice having muscles to spare.”
“Speed and leverage can beat raw strength in hand-to-hand,” he said.
“Easy for you to say.”
Cal looked up at the tenement. It was a five-story walk-up, the kind with a great crown at the top of the facade, one that had seen better days. He entered and searched the ground floor. Paint peeled off the heat pipes. It smelled like rice and beans and greasy chicken. Trash bags were piled in the corner by the basement door. Cal checked it. Locked. Erin stood in the vestibule by the mailboxes… no room to slip past her. Cal heard a noise from above, and looked up the stairwell. A woman was peering down from the fourth floor. She waved him up. He climbed the stairs slowly, making sure each landing was clear of people before proceeding.
The woman was a young Hispanic, short with brown eyes and cropped curly hair, in a loose tank top that barely contained her. Cal could see and hear a group of children peering through the crack in her apartment door.
“Callense!” she yelled at them. Then she turned to him. “Fue grande, mas grande que usted. Se fue a traves del techo y hacia el edificio abandonado al lado.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t speak Spanish. Here,” Cal said, pulling his radio mouthpiece toward the woman. “Say it into this.”
“He went next door through the roof,” Erin translated.
“Shit. That’s great. Poking around a decrepit building in the dark. If the perp doesn’t get me the tetanus will.”
“I can go,” Erin offered.
“No. You stay downstairs. Same plan, different building. I’ll follow him through the roof and flush him out.”
With a little luck, their backup would arrive by the time he got there.
3
It took Erin Ramos a few minutes to pull the wooden boards off the doorway. She walked into the vestibule holding her nightstick like a club. The smell was suffocating, like an unwashed hospital bedpan. She propped the front doors open with the boards to let the air in. The streetlights illuminated the vestibule and some of the lobby. Rain streamed in behind her-it felt good, natural. There was something about this building besides the odor that gave Erin the heebie-jeebies. The first thing she noticed was the cold, as though someone were running an air conditioner in the middle of winter. She was glad it was still Cal’s turn to flush out the perp. Since they alternated the task, Cal could have claimed he’d done his turn at the last building. A pang of guilt came over Erin about letting Cal go through the roof alone. It was a good thing her partner was a man without any known fears.
Finding Cal’s phobia turned into a mission at the precinct. Everyone had one thing that spooked them, but MacDonnell’s fear eluded the gang. During a nightcap at a local bar, Cal admitted the only thing he dreaded was losing his family. His coworkers razzed him. They wanted to hear he was afraid of snakes, heights, or clowns. Sergeant O’Malley made a crack about wishing someone would make his own wife and kids disappear. Cal was angered by the remark, and it almost came to blows. He refused to speak to O’Malley the rest of the night. The others refused to believe he wasn’t afraid of anything. Just the AIDS test alone every time a suspect bled on you was enough to make even the toughest cop balk. Erin knew better. Cat and Bree were as much a part of Cal as his limbs.
Erin walked past a line of battered mailboxes. The floor was inlaid with white and black hexagonal tiles, many of them chipped and cracked.
“Four-One Ida, what’s your status? Over,” the radio blared.
“Eighty-five is still requested, Central,” Erin responded. “What’s the ETA? Weren’t they supposed to be here by now?”
“Four-One Adam unable to respond due to vehicular accident en route-redirecting Four-One David to your location. ETA is ten minutes. Recommend you wait for backup, over.”
“Negative, Central. Officer already in pursuit, over and out.”
Erin was not happy with the turn of events. Ten minutes could be an eternity. A shadow at the top of the stairs dissolved into the darkness. If Cal had scared out the perp and he spotted her, then he’d be looking for another exit. Her plan was to sandwich the suspect between herself and Cal. Erin took out her Maglite and crept up the stairs.
At the top of the stairs she shone her light across the landing. Nothing.
She walked across the hall to the second set of stairs and put her foot on the first step. She heard a creak behind her. Before she could turn, there was a swish, like the sound of a switch whipped through the air. Then silence. Not a drop of rain, not a squeak; someone had pulled the plug on the whole world. She realized she was tumbling forward, only because the floor raced toward her. An odd sensation, like gravity had been turned off. She was floating. The moment slowed (a Hollywood special effect) and her view rotated, like clinging to a ball in flight, past the floor and back to the scene behind her. Her temple bore the weight of the fall, hard-she couldn’t move. A beautiful man with long dark hair and bronzed skin had one arm across his chest, and in his hands he held a gleaming sword parallel with the ground. He was the second-to-last thing she witnessed before everything went dark. The last thing Erin Ramos saw was her headless body falling toward her.
4
Cal searched the roof thoroughly before hopping over the brick divider between the buildings. He landed in a puddle. The cold rain was still coming down hard, and the door to this roof creaked open and shut at the wind’s whim. It was bent, which kept it from closing completely and there was a rusty hole where the lock had once been. He turned on his Maglite and carefully opened the roof door. Something scuttled on the floor below beyond the range of his light. He entered the access way and proceeded down the stairs, his white breath trailing behind him.
The dilapidated tenement, once a shelter for many, now reeked of must, urine, and burnt ashes, the by- product of transients trying to keep warm. Patterns pressed into the tin ceiling reflected a previous era when intricate moldings, rich with details and fancy woodwork, were built into every structure by skilled immigrants. Slumlords turned these edifices into havens for rodents, roaches, and drug addicts.
Cal started to unholster his gun, then changed his mind in favor of the nightstick. He was worried about squatters who might be living there. Nothing hurt worse than accidentally killing someone already down on his or her luck.
The air was colder inside the building. Cal took that as a bad omen. Back at the precinct, the veterans told stories to spook the rookies. The most popular was about taking statements from a person in a building who they later found out had been murdered there years earlier. When they checked photo records it would be a perfect match. Others spoke of homes, which even during winter, were colder inside than outside; it was as though they were no longer connected to the natural world. Nothing good ever came of these places. What they stressed most was, turn around and leave. Just get out of there. Cal chuckled at their intensity, especially Mookie Malone, who would get that glassy stare and even forget his beer. Grown men with guns getting spooked by bumps in the dark. Cal assumed those stories were an elaborate prank to haze the younger officers. He was sure of it-until he entered this building.
The hairs on his arms bristled and he could not shake the feeling that something was wrong. His decision not to wait for backup haunted him.
In his career, Cal had performed a wide range of unpleasant and dangerous tasks. He had recovered decomposed corpses, faced down drug dealers and violent addicts, and broke up angry mobs, while suffering the protestations of a police-wary citizenry. Each day, he left for work confident that he could handle anything “the citizens” threw at him. Now, he felt beyond the safety of that assurance. And, he thought he was being
