“Station fourteen, camera thirty-three,” he said, pointing at the screen.
A sixteen-foot box truck had backed into the loading dock. It was pure white except for the words Med Waste Evac painted in red on the side.
“What’s the issue?” I asked. “Don’t you recognize them?”
“They’re our regular biohazard removal service,” Cavallaro said, “but it’s only ten thirty. They’re not supposed to show up till three a.m., when there’s a minimal amount of patients roaming around. It skeeves people out to see a big container with the words Infectious Waste rolling down the halls.”
I keyed my radio. “All units, this is Triage One. Code orange at station fourteen. Fourteen, he’s not due till three a.m. Find out his story.”
We turned the sound up on the monitor and watched as the guard at the loading dock, a decorated ESU sergeant, approached the driver’s side of the truck, clipboard in hand.
“You fellas in a hurry to get home?” he said. “You’re about four hours early.”
“One of our trucks is out of commission,” the driver said, “so they’ve got us covering two routes. And don’t worry about us getting home early. Four hours from now we’ll be working in Brooklyn.”
“Wave them through, fourteen,” I said.
The guard shrugged. “No skin off my nose,” he said. “Go do what you’ve got to do.” He walked back to his booth at the loading dock and picked up a newspaper.
The driver and three other men got out of the truck. They were all wearing hooded white Tyvek jumpsuits, chemical gloves, and gas masks. They dropped the hydraulic tailgate, opened the rear doors, climbed up inside, and wheeled out a large metal bin that also had Med Waste Evac signage on it.
“They’re bogus,” Cavallaro said. “First of all, they’re overdressed. This is a hospital, not Chernobyl. Second, all they need is a couple of hundred-and-fifty-gallon plastic hampers. I wonder who they stole that shipping container from. It’s big enough to hold four refrigerators... or a 3-D mammogram machine.”
The four men moved quickly through the corridors, navigating their way past several elevator banks until they got to the one they knew would take them exactly where they wanted to go.
Because of privacy regulations, none of the surveillance cameras past the loading dock had audio capabilities, but we could visually track their progress every step of the way. Once they got to the third floor, the only thing between them and the mammogram machines was an oversize set of metal double doors with a single hasp and padlock holding them together.
“I could open that lock with a bobby pin,” Cavallaro said. “It’s only there to keep out the nosy staffers who want to see how the renovations are coming along.”
The medical waste quartet didn’t need a bobby pin. They had a bolt cutter. Within seconds they were inside the construction area, had wheeled up to one of the mammogram machines, and had opened the doors of their transport bin. The driver produced a walkie-talkie, removed his gas mask, and started talking.
“Who is he calling?” Kylie said. “Is it possible they have someone else in the—”
Every picture on the wall of monitors flickered, turned to gray-and-white electronic snow, and then blipped out.
“Shit,” Cavallaro yelled. “How the hell did they do that?”
I grabbed my radio. “All units, code red. We’ve lost visual contact. We have four suspects in white jumpsuits. Lock it down. Repeat: lock down all exits.”
I raced out of the security room, Kylie right behind me. Saturday night was no longer lonely.
Chapter 63
In an ideal world, we’d have tracked the theft on video just long enough to have conclusive proof of intention that would hold up in court. We hadn’t quite gotten as much as we wanted, but as soon as they cut the power, all bets were off. The cat-and-mouse game was now a manhunt.
I had officers on the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors, and as Kylie and I raced up the stairs, I gave the order for them to converge on the third.
The first shots rang out just as we got to the lobby. Seconds later, I got the radio report.
“Shots fired, third floor. Suspects split up and are on the run. I’m in pursuit of one headed upstairs. The others went south.”
The lobby was well covered. Kylie and I ran up to the second floor just in time to see a man in a white jumpsuit racing down the hall. We drew our guns, and Kylie yelled, “Police! Freeze! Drop your weapon!”
He didn’t stop, or freeze, but he did drop something. It wasn’t his gun. Kylie and I both dove for cover as the black canister rolled toward us. It exploded in a blinding flash of light, and the earsplitting blast was magnified by the acoustics of the hospital hallway.
Flash grenades aren’t designed to cause permanent injury, but what they lack in destructive power they make up for in their ability to stun anyone who’s on the receiving end. I couldn’t see for at least five seconds, my legs were shaky when I tried to stand, and my ears were ringing. I helped Kylie to her feet, and by the time we both regained our bearings, our target was at the far end of the corridor.
We got there just in time to see him vault a nurses’ station, grab a fire extinguisher off the wall, and race into a room.
We stopped and took positions on either side of the door. “You’ve got nowhere to go,” Kylie yelled, breathing hard. “Come out with your hands up.”
He responded by firing a shot. The bullet didn’t hit anything, but he’d made his point. He wasn’t giving up without a fight. The gunshot was followed by the sound of glass shattering. And then nothing.
Ten seconds into the silence, Kylie dropped low, darted her head inside the room, and pulled back. “He went out the window.”
“It’s a two-story jump,” I said as we entered.
“No, it’s not,” she said, looking down. “The roof to the emergency entrance is directly below us, which is why he made for this room.”
He had smashed the window with the fire extinguisher, but he’d left jagged shards sticking up from the bottom, and the glass was bloodied.
“Looks like he cut himself up pretty good,” Kylie said, picking up the extinguisher. “Maybe it will slow him down.” She knocked out the glass stalagmites protruding from the sill, climbed out, and jumped.
I followed. It was only about eight feet to the ER canopy. It was a perfect vantage point to scan the area, and I spotted his standout white jumpsuit a block away, just as he ran down the stairs of the Grand Street subway station.
We dropped from our perch onto the top of an EMS truck parked below, scrambled down the hood of the ambulance, and ran toward the station.
Just as we got to the entrance, we heard the train pull in. We raced down the stairs and hurdled the turnstile. About a dozen people had gotten off the train, and we scanned them just in case he tried to double back and blend in with the people who were exiting.
We didn’t see him, and by now everyone who had been waiting for the train was on board. The platform was empty except for a crumpled heap of white Tyvek.
The conductor’s voice bounced off the cavernous walls. “Watch the closing doors.”
I body-blocked one just as it was about to shut, and the two of us squeezed onto the last car of the train.
A woman saw our guns and screamed. “Police,” I yelled as we dug out our shields. “Everybody stay where you are.”
It was a Saturday night crowd, so there were a lot of young people along with the usual melting pot of New Yorkers you find on any given subway ride. Nobody said a word.