Beed again rapped his gloved knuckles on the door and waited for the answer. Footsteps approached and a moment later, the door opened. Just as the occupants of the house came into view, Beed was startled by the unexpected sound of a voice over his radio.
“Unit 739, dispatch.”
The man who stood inside the door raised an eyebrow and waved permission to Beed to take the call. He was a tall, dark-featured man with Eastern European features, in his late twenties or early thirties. His face carried an indifferent expression.
“739,” Beed replied into his handset.
“10–12, be advised of possible 10–99 Adem, 10–32. 10–69 en-route.”
As the coded message came across the radio, Beed instinctively pressed the talk button and said in a calm, almost robotic voice, “10-4, 10–37 on scene. 10–68.”
Another man, shorter with blond hair and lighter complexion, joined the first. The two stood in the doorway as they heard the encoded words of the dispatcher and politely waited for the officer to finish his reply to the voice on the other end.
Beed thought, Great timing folks. The armed and dangerous suspects are standing right in front me. Hopefully that backup will arrive faster than the warning message did.
He let go of the transmitter button on the microphone and turned back to the two men. His expression revealed nothing out of the ordinary. Not wanting to make a scene that might spook them, he decided to go ahead and ask a couple of basic questions while waiting for the promised backup.
“Good evening, gentlemen.” He put his body in what is called by law enforcement trainers as “the interview position”. Body squarely set, feet shoulder-width apart, both hands in the center of the front of the body, fingertips touching, but not clasped. This position enabled an officer to quickly react to any multitude of attacks, as the hands were at center mass and could be quickly deployed in any direction to deflect a punch, grab a suspect, or reach for the ten-millimeter Glock semi-automatic pistol that hung in the black leather holster on his hip.
“Sorry to disturb you so late, but it seems some folks witnessed two men getting out of a stolen pickup truck a little while ago, and then leaving in that Blazer parked in your driveway.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about, officer,” said the tall one. Beed noted that the man had a strong accent.
He continued, “We have been home all day doing homework. We are university students. And tonight we’ve been watching TV.”
The blond man spoke clear English, with no noticeable accent. “Besides, how could someone have identified a person they saw in the dark, especially in this cold weather? Whoever was out of doors would have had a parka on.”
The accented one spoke again. “Perhaps someone stole our Blazer. We wouldn’t have noticed it, since we’ve been inside all day.”
“Hmmm,” Beed said. “Maybe. At any rate, I need to see your student IDs and immigration cards, if you have them.”
“Officer, umm,” the tall one looked at his nametag. “Beed. Officer Beed, please step inside our house. It is too cold out here.”
“No, that’s all right. I’ll stand out here. I’ve only got a couple more questions, then I’ll be going.”
“Well,” said the one with no accent, “it is cold for us.”
He handed a coat to the tall one, and reached for his own. Then he said, “By the way, your dispatcher was correct in her ten codes. We are armed and dangerous.”
There was a flash of movement behind the tall, dark European. Before Beed could react, the Albanian’s hand came up holding a semi-automatic pistol, a long, thick, sound suppressor extended from the end of the barrel. The policeman heard the quiet puffs and saw the bright flash in the dim light of the small incandescent fixture that hung next to the door. His body convulsed hard as two bullets smashed into his chest, piercing his body armor at close range. The shot sent him sprawling backwards over the steps. Beed landed flat on his back in the snow at the base of the porch.
His protective vest had slowed and deflected the trajectory of the bullets sufficiently so as not to kill him right away. The blond man took a step to the edge of the landing and looked into the rolling eyes of the shocked young officer. He raised the pistol again and fired a quick shot into the center of Beed’s forehead. The back of Officer Jimmy Beed’s skull exploded against the frozen ground. A slimy splatter of brains and blood burst against the white background of snow.
“We’d better get out of here,” Nikola said, a grim expression on his dark features. “They were sending backup.”
The two men grabbed a pair of daypacks from just inside the door and ran to the Blazer, carefully avoiding the gore on the snow. Adem, the blond, took a cell phone from his jacket pocket and pressed a speed dial number. He spoke quickly as they drove several blocks deeper into the residential neighborhood.
He hung up as Nikola pulled the Blazer off the road onto a snowy path on a tree-covered vacant lot. Pot-smoking teenagers frequently used the lot to get high away from their parents’ view. Tonight, it seemed the perfect place to ditch the Blazer.
The pair got out of the vehicle and returned to the road on foot. They ran down the recently plowed road for half a block, then turned up to a house that had a single light on in a downstairs room.
Adem knocked on the door. Both of them had broken into a sweat as they ran. That sweat evaporated in a steamy cloud around their heads in the frigid night air. It was negative twenty, or colder. The sweat beads froze solid in the shell of their clothing. They both started to shiver uncontrollably, hands stuffed deep into their pockets, shoulders raised against the cold, as they awaited the response from within the house.
A short, stocky Korean man in his early sixties with slate gray hair answered the knock. He motioned for them to enter and closed the door behind them. “Did anyone see your faces?” he asked.
“No one who is still alive,” Nikola replied, a deathly tone in his voice.
“Good. The vehicle is in the garage. Move to the other house across town. We are too close to finishing to evacuate you now. As long as no one saw your faces, you are in no danger and the mission will continue.”
They walked through the living room of the house to the kitchen. A door led from there to the garage. A red Dodge Dakota pickup truck sat waiting for them. As Adem and Nikola stepped over to the vehicle, the Korean man pressed the garage door opener button on the wall just inside. The large, paneled garage door yawned open, letting the cold night air drift into the heated room in billowing clouds of condensation that looked like a nightclub fog machine.
“Thank you, Mr. Kim,” Adem said. “We will await your call.”
Nikola got into the driver’s seat of the Dakota and started the engine. Having been stored in the garage, the vehicle needed no extra time to warm up. Adem jumped into the passenger seat. Nikola put it in gear and backed down the driveway. As they left the neighborhood, several police cruisers turned onto the road that led directly to the house they had left. They were moving very fast. The colorful emergency lights twirled on top of the cruisers, but they did not sound their sirens.
“The cops are trying to sneak up on us,” Adem said, and then grinned. “They are too late.”
Chapter 8