Chapter 1: Warrant Roulette
Getting shot sucks.
This is, of course, the short version.
It doesn’t matter if one is covered in body armor. It hurts to be shot. No one gets shot, rolls out of the line of fire, and casually returns fire. That’s only in the movies and not the good ones. Even John Wick fell down after being shot while wearing armor.
I had been careful and cautious in the approach to the apartment. We covered up the peephole and the ring camera. I stood off to the side of the apartment door, over three feet away from the archway.
I still caught a bullet anyway. They had shot through the door and the walls on both sides. The impact had been softened by both my Kevlar vest and penetrating the apartment walls. It still felt like I’d been hit with a 2×4. I let myself go with the impact and staggered back down the stairway—and out of the way of the next swarm of bullets.
I had four other cops with me. One was my partner, Alex Packard, who was skinnier and shorter than I was. He had also been behind me, so he wasn’t hit with a small piece of lead—he was hit with me.
One of the other cops, Daniel Humphreys only got clipped by a bullet in the side of his vest, spinning him around.
I grabbed my radio from my belt. “This is Detective Nolan. Suspect is armed with an automatic weapon. Repeat, automatic weapon. Officer needs assistance.”
Over my shoulder, Alex said, “No one said this guy was armed.” He spat out in a harsh whisper. His words were, as always, short and clipped. “You said he had no priors.”
“He didn’t!” I insisted. “But I guess no one told him that.”
If you’re wondering why there wasn’t a SWAT team with us—or more accurately, Emergency Service—it’s for exactly that reason. There had been no priors. No sign of being armed. No sign of ... anything, really.
Edward Bergman was forty-five years old and a suspect in the death of one Flavia Jensen. She had been strangled in a motel on Jamaica Avenue, only a few blocks away. She had been a working girl and not one I knew. The theory had been that it was an assignation gone wrong.
This was one case where the solution had been an easy bit of forensics. Once we had found the right piece of evidence—a hard candy under the sink—it was all downhill from there. Bergman was a public school teacher, so his prints were on file. It was a stroke of luck, but his thumbprint was on the broad side of the hard candy.
One could almost call it a miracle. I wouldn’t. Alex did. But Alex thinks he’s funny.
Again, Bergman had no priors. He barely had parking tickets. Alex felt that three uniforms for backup was overkill.
Obviously, it wasn’t enough.
Unfortunately, waiting for the men with the bulletproof shields wasn’t an option. There were uniformed policemen under Bergman’s window. But they would be cut to pieces if he decided to go out that way.
The burst of automatic fire stopped. I rushed the door and kicked it in. I knocked it off one of the hinges. A narrow hallway that barely fit me confronted me. I figured this way that I was a perfect shield for anyone behind me.
I bellowed once more, “Police! Bergman, you’re under arrest!”
I swept forward checking each room as I passed it. Alex and the others stacked up behind me.
And people tell me that detectives never have any fun.
We made it to the living room. We had our man. It was Edward Bergman. He was dead. In fact, he looked like he could have been dead long enough to have been killed not long after Flavia Jensen had been murdered.
So who killed Bergman? And who shot at us?
“Now what?” Alex asked. He looked at me. “Pick up anything?”
I shook my head slightly. I hadn’t picked up the smell of evil. I hadn’t picked it up at the murder scene, either. But that was usually just for supernatural evils ... or human evils taken to extremes. And one murder did not a monster make.
A spat of automatic fire echoed outside the window, in the apartment courtyard. I ran to the only open window. There was a rope tied to the radiator. I looked outside and found the gunman sliding down the rope. He pinned down the uniforms as he fired an Uzi one-handed.
I grabbed a heavy textbook from the radiator and flung it down the rope. It slammed into the side of the gunman’s head. He lost his grip on the rope and fell three stories. He hit the ground and dropped into a roll, preventing himself from breaking a leg.
I threw a leg out the window, grabbed the rope, and slid down. At the second floor, I kicked off of the wall so I swung. Once I had a good head of steam, I let go of the rope.
As I had planned, the gunman broke my fall.
The gunman tried to swing the gun towards me. But his arm hit my combat boot as I kicked the gun away.
The killer looked at me and gave me a little smile. He kicked away from me and rolled along the courtyard. He came up and pulled a K-Bar knife.
It was my turn to smile as I held the gun on him. “You have the right to remain silent.”
He drove the knife for my stomach. I hollowed out, sucking my gut in and shooting my hips back. I smacked the back of his knife hand with my left and clamped down on his wrist. I straightened my left arm and charged in. I didn’t punch him so much as I drove the muzzle of my gun into his face. His nose crunched satisfyingly. Then his eye socket.
The killer didn’t seem to feel it. His kicked out with his right leg, slamming into my hip. It hurt enough to make me crumple. However, I crumpled right into him, driving my left shoulder into his chest. I kept my grip on his wrist, locking my arm straight, and dragged him down with me.
The uniforms rushed in and checked the gunman. They ripped the knife from his hand and wrestled him onto his stomach. They slapped the cuffs on him and hauled him towards the police car, Mirandizing him as they dragged him off.
I straightened as best I could and holstered my gun. The gunman kept struggling as the two uniforms muscled him to the car.
“Be seeing you, cop,” the psycho barked.
I rolled my eyes. “At your indictment, you twit.”
The door slammed shut.
I sighed. We were going to be here a while. Even though we had our original perpetrator, Mister Bergman’s body had to be processed. Thankfully, there wouldn’t be an Internal Affairs investigation, since we hadn’t discharged our weapons or kill anyone. I didn’t need their attention after coming back so soon from Europe.
I holstered my gun and sighed. “Can’t have a normal day if my life depended on it.”
And I smiled. I had missed the city. I had missed the insanity. I had missed having rude drivers I could predict (as opposed to Roman drivers where I needed a crystal ball to track). I had missed my arsenal.
My name is Detective Thomas Nolan. And I am a saint. It was good to be back home.