CHAPTER THREE
“This is EMT 1-5-4, transit orders logged and copied. We are 10-6 to posted call.”
“Roger, 1-5-4.”
Goodwin hung up the mike, readdressed the wheel. Cooper rode in the passenger seat, fingering the county map. “Shit, man,” he said. “We’re headed into No-Man’s Land. This whole call smells like a jacking.”
Goodwin tried to allay his partner, as the ambulance’s red-and-whites popped down the street ahead of them. “You heard the watch commander’s spiel. ‘Be wary of 911 calls with little or no detail or substance.’ I listened to the tape myself, Coop, right after we left the lounge. It was some male cauc. claiming his father suffered from WPW Syndrome, and he ran out of Quinidex Extentabs, 300 mgs. The guy knew what he was talking about. You think some ghetto dope jacker is gonna have the know-how to make up a call with that much clinical detail? Christ, something like only one person out of every half a million have WPW Syndrome.”
Cooper rubbed an eye; he was tired. “Can’t argue with ya there. Guess you called this one right. Yeah, sure, I can see it. Some ambulance jacker studying the PDR to research phony distress calls about fuckin’ WPW Syndrome.”
Pipe down, Goodwin thought. He turned left onto Utah Street. Sure, this was Precinct Five, a tough block, and God knew enough EMT trucks had been ambushed for pharmaceutical dope on phony 911 calls. Christ, you’d think these guys would wise up after so long, Goodwin thought. Ambulance jacking was getting to be old hat these days. All CDS was kept in safes; some of the crews were even packing guns without a license. “You could go to jail for that,” Goodwin had suggested to some guy in P6 who liked to keep a Colt .32 in his pocket. “Yeah,” the guy’d said back. “But I’d rather be judged by twelve than carried by six.” Goodwin figured the guy had a point.
“1500-Block, right?” Cooper repeated the call data.
“Yeah.”
“Well…we’re here.”
Goodwin idled the Ford F-150 Custom down the block, the GT Qualifier Dunlop radials crunching over broken glass. The red and whites continued to pop silently against old brick and dark windows. Boarded up rowhouses stared at them; Goodwin felt watched.
“I don’t see any—”
“That row there,” Cooper pointed. “The only one with the lights on.”
“Yeah. Come on.”
Goodwin took the keys with him; even though this looked perfectly legit, he wasn’t stupid. He’d been stupid once, in Falks County, and look what happened. I almost did time, he remembered. They got out, trotted up to the row, and knocked.
They knocked again.
“This has to be it,” Cooper commented. “Every other unit on the street is boarded up.”
Goodwin peered in the window, paused. “Jesus Christ, so is this one. Look.”
Pried off planks lay at the window footing. Inside, a single lit lamp sat on the floor—a battery-powered lamp. The rest of the interior lay in shambles.
“Somebody put that lamp in there to draw us off,” Cooper said.
But Goodwin already smelled the rat. “We been set up. Get ready to run.”
They edged back to the truck, their eyes peeled for anything, a shadow, a face, the tracest movement. But—
Nothing.
“Looks like we’re all right.”
“Let’s get the hell out of here.”
They got back in, slammed the doors shut and locked them. But just before Goodwin would restart County Unit EMT 154, Cooper jerked back, shot a glance behind him.
“Hey, you mother—”
That was all Cooper got out of him mouth before—
pop!
It was the oddest sound, not even as loud as someone popping a plastic baggie. Nevertheless, Coop fell back into the footwell, his feet flying upward as a thin stream of blood sailed across Goodwin’s shocked face. A gurgling followed—Goodwin had heard it many times—a sucking chest wound, Coop’s lungs bubbling foamy blood through the hole. Then, again—
pop!
The gurgling abated. So did EMT Cooper’s death throes.
The whole scene seemed like a freeze-frame. It was over in less than the second it took to occur. Only then did Goodwin turn.
“God…damn…”
The figure in the back cabin stood perfectly still. A leather jacket, a dark-blue ski mask. White rimmed eyes seemed calm as they gazed.
The figure held a long low-caliber semi-automatic pistol in his left hand. Affixed to the barrel’s tip was, of all things, an empty twenty-ounce soda bottle full of gray smoke.
Then the figure’s gloved right hand gestured the DieBold med safe.
“Open it,” he said very coolly.
“Yeah. Yeah, sure,” Goodwin replied. He fumbled for his ring, then fumbled for the key to the safe, not even realizing that he’d urinated in his county pants.
««—»»
“Helen, look at this,” Deputy Chief Larrel Olsher called out from his office. “It’s unbelievable.”
Helen had just been crossing the hall. She stuck her head in. “How did you know I was in the hall? You couldn’t possibly have seen me.”
“Your high heels, they’re the dead giveaway. Come in here and take a look at this.”
Helen, rather reluctantly, eased in. She liked Olsher, she just didn’t like going into his office, for all the smoke. Cigar smoke, the worse kind. Her clothes and hair would reek of it after just one minute in her immediate supervisor’s office. Helen could hardly talk, though; she’d smoked cigarettes until just last year, when she’d first met Tom. He’d invited her to the state morgue, offered to show her around, and when she asked if she could smoke, Tom said nothing but instead pointed across the room. “Look in that white bucket there. The one on the end, third shelf.” Helen’s fingers touched the plastic lid, but didn’t move. “Go on,” Tom said. “Open the bucket. Look inside.” Helen raised the lid and looked in. Settled in the bottom of the bucket were two blob-shaped objects which resembled giant moldering leeches. They were brown-black and glistening, flecked minutely with white. Tom smiled grimly. “You know what those are, Helen? They’re metastacized human lungs. Small-cell lung cancer is what I’m talking here. Look at them.” “I’m… looking,” Helen complained. Tom went on: “That’s what your lungs will look like one day if you don’t quit smoking.” He washed his hands in the sink, thumping a pink-filled soap dispenser like an inverted service bell. His lab coat bore a craggy reddish stain the shape of West Virginia. “A small-cell metastatic mass? It’s the worst. Lung cancer’s like rotting to death, slowly, from the inside out.” Helen had quit that very instant, and hadn’t even been tempted to light up since then.
But more smoke haunted her now. Deputy Police Chief Larrel Olsher’s face looked as rigid as a black marble bust of Attila the Hun as he brutally crushed out his current cigar stub. He was black and ugly and bad. Some called him “the Shadow,” for his 6’2”, 270-pound frame tended to darken any hallway he chose to traverse. Olsher had risen to his status the hard way, by kicking ass and taking names and putting a lot of perps up for life. Beneath the veneer, though, was an unselfish man who cared about people. He and Helen had climbed up the hierarchal ladder together, had been friends for years. In fact, Olsher may have been one of Helen’s only true friends on the department.
Maybe he’s got a case for me, she hoped. All everyone was talking about, still, was Dahmer, and after having seen the body, she hoped she never heard the man’s name again.
“Look at this picture of Dahmer,” he said. “It’s unbelievable that they could print that in a newspaper.”