Port City Crossfire (A Brandon Blake Mystery, Book 1) Read online

  “Yes.”

  “Is this Police Officer Blake?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Amanda. The one who tried to kill you.”

  As opposed to any other Amandas he knew.

  “Hey. How are you doing, Amanda?”

  “OK, I guess. Except I’m alive.”

  “That’s a good thing, right?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Take my word for it,” Brandon said.

  “You didn’t tell them about the knife. How come?”

  “It wasn’t much of a knife.”

  “Are you trying to be nice to me?”

  “Nice? Not really. Just figured you needed a break.”

  “So I’m supposed to, like, thank you?”

  “No need. Over and done.”

  There was silence, then voices in the background, then silence again.

  “I’m supposed to get out of here in a while. The hospital part. My mother went to get me some clothes. These are still from yesterday. They’re gonna put me in the psycho ward.”

  “They just want to make sure you’re doing okay. They can help you.”

  “I doubt it,” Amada said. “I still don’t, like, want to go on living. Without Thatch.”

  “Yeah, well. Give it a chance. I’ll bet Thatch would want you to.”

  “I guess. I don’t know.”

  She coughed and then he heard her breathing. He waited. The boat ground against the fenders like it was impatient.

  “Anyway, I think, maybe you’re not so, like, evil. It could be the meds, though. They’re mellowing me out. But I’m also thinking that’s fake, you know? Underneath it I still want to die.”

  “I hope not.”

  “Anyway, I think I need to talk to you.”

  “What about?”

  “Can we talk face to face?” Brandon considered it.

  “I don’t know. I’m sort of a witness. And I’m not supposed to be working.”

  “Oh,” Amanda said. “Even if it has to do with Thatch?”

  “Especially if it has to do with Thatcher. I mean, I can’t just march in there and go see you.”

  “Oh. Then maybe I should just tell you.”

  “Tell me what?” Brandon said.

  “It’s like, something with his parents.”

  “Oh.”

  “But the thing is, he told me I couldn’t tell anyone. He made me, like, swear. But now he’s gone and I don’t know if that counts anymore. The swearing part. If you swear to be married to someone, and then they, like, die. Then you don’t have to be sworn to be with them anymore, right?”

  “I suppose it would be hard to be. If they were dead. Don’t they say, Until death does you part?”

  There was a rustling on the line and Amanda said, “I think I gotta go.”

  “Listen, Amanda, why don’t you just talk to somebody there? They can tell you if—”

  But she was gone. Brandon looked at the phone. 8:48.

  “What the hell?”

  Something with Thatcher’s parents. Something he’d told Amanda but sworn her to secrecy. What would Thatcher be ashamed of? They abused him? They were embezzlers. They had orgies? He swears his girlfriend to secrecy then goes out and gets himself killed?

  He walked out to the stern, phone in hand. There were two strings of floats that led to a third string that paralleled the shore and extended out on both ends, like a double T. People were pushing carts out on the far float, the first two stopping at their slips on the far side. And then Brandon noticed a third group, the Andersons with their little boy, Hans, take the long way around to their big Grady White, five slips beyond Brandon and Bay Witch.

  He seemed like a nice guy, but shooting somebody to death? What do you say?

  Brandon looked back to the yard, saw a car pull in, a TV station logo on the door. A woman got out, walked to the gate and waved. The boat owners were avoiding him; the media couldn’t stay away.

  He should have gone up to the office, checked the mail, made sure the clunky ice machine was operating. Instead, he climbed the ladder to the flybridge, sat down at the helm seat. Now he could see how much activity there was, people on their boats, the owners of the adjacent boats to Bay Witch staying away. He looked out over the harbor, told himself he wouldn’t check the news on his phone. There were dark clouds rearing up to the northeast, the breeze stiffening.

  Just the weather, he thought, flicked his phone on, saw the three-day forecast. Rain in the afternoon, continuing through the early morning hours. Seas 2-4, building to 3-5 by sunset, then diminishing. Another touch and there was his email. Google alerts for “Brandon Blake” and “Portland Police.”

  Rally Planned in Portland Police Shooting

  Critics charge police cover-up; family and supporters of teen victim say death followed harmless prank

  The rally was outside the P.D., three o’clock. The story talked about rogue cops, excessive force, no accountability. The missing GoPro card. Patrolman Brandon Blake turning his body cam off.

  “It was never on,” Brandon muttered.

  The shooting has sparked a groundswell of protest on social media under the hashtag #kidslivesmatter. Activists charge that this latest death shows a continuing pattern of excessive force like the shootings elsewhere in the country. ‘Police officers cannot be allowed to indiscriminately levy the death penalty on innocent people,’ said Roger Williams of the National Union for Civil Liberties. ‘Law enforcement can’t function as some sort of Third-World death squad.’”

  “Jesus,” Brandon said. He clicked the screen dead, put the phone down on the console. Sat back in the chair and gazed out over the harbor. The wind was picking up, kicking up silvery chop on the Portland side. A crane was loading containers onto a ship, swinging like a movie dinosaur. A dragger was coming back into port, a cloud of gulls following it like a swarm of deer flies. Beyond the floats, a big ketch coming in under power had picked up a mooring. The Jaegers in Gypsy IV, back from a cruise up to Deer Isle. Brandon could see David Jaeger clinching the mooring line tight, his wife Liz pulling the inflatable up to the stern.

  None of it mattered. It was like it was all from a previous life, everything before the shooting just some odd and distant memory, like it belonged to someone else. The kid who worked in the marina and bought Bay Witch, scraped and sanded, painted and varnished. The guy who had busted his butt to become a cop. The cop who loved putting on his uniform, who liked his partner, the cruiser, the streets, the people he met, even the people he arrested.

  It was like he was looking back through a haze.

  Brandon looked at the phone.

  A demonstration. #kidslivematter. No shit. It was why he was a cop. Had been a cop? Would it ever return to any sort of normal? He blew out a long, weary breath, took another look out over the water. The Jaegers were snapping a sail cover over the boom. A tug was headed upriver, passing under the bridge. Gulls were hovering on the wind like kites.

  He turned. The woman from the TV station was standing with her back to the boats, the cameraman standing behind a tripod. She turned and gestured toward the water, then stopped. The guy reached for the camera and they started to pack up. What did they call it? B-roll?

  Brandon slid down off the seat, grabbed his phone and climbed down the ladder and went below. It was cool in the cabin and he turned on the heater. Opened the fridge and saw two beers. Considered it for a second, then reached for orange juice. He drank out of the carton, put it back, turned and reached for his police radio and turned it on.

  The sound of the department filled the boat: Chooch and the other dispatchers at their consoles, directing traffic. Somebody giving a parking cop a hard time on Middle Street. A missing barbeque grill on Munjoy Hill. Domestic disturbance in the West End, Brandon recognizing the address. Guy was a dirtbag. Car accident with injury, Brighton Avenue. Drunk harassing the cashier at a Somali market on Forest Avenue.

  Subject fallen off parking garage, Maine Med.

&n
bsp; Ten

  Brandon froze. Listened. Picked up the radio and held it in front of his face. Waited, the sinking feeling growing. Medcu rolling. Cops on the way, Kat calling in. Sergeant Perry asking for better location. Chooch saying victim on embankment just west of the Congress Street entrance.

  “Medical there from the hospital,” she said.

  “Where’d she fall from?” Kat said.

  Brandon waiting, praying for the second floor. Chooch saying, “Witness says level four.”

  “Oh, no,” Brandon said.

  He pulled his phone out, hit Amanda’s number. Phone at his ear he grabbed a baseball cap, sunglasses, truck keys. He vaulted the stern, sprinted down the float, through the yard, slammed through the gate. The TV crew was pulling out of the lot but they stopped. Brandon ran past them to his truck, slammed the door, started the engine, stomped the pedal, spun out of the lot in a spray of gravel.

  Units were off at the scene, voices calm on the radio, cops and Medcu, Chooch, too. Brandon was approaching the bridge when his phone buzzed. He glanced, saw Kat’s ID.

  “Shit,” he said. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  He picked it up.

  “Is it her? Amanda?”

  A pause before Kat answered.

  “Yeah.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Goddamn it. Goddamn it all to hell.”

  “Went off the fourth floor of the garage,” Kat said.

  “She just called me, like twenty minutes ago. Shit.”

  “Brandon, where are you?”

  He was coming off the bridge, headed for State Street.

  “On my way.”

  “Brandon, you shouldn’t—”

  “She said they were gonna keep her. The psych unit. Her mother had gone to get her clean clothes.”

  “She didn’t want to stay?”

  “No, she seemed okay about it. She said she wanted to tell me something. Thatcher told her something and swore her to secrecy.”

  “Did she tell you?” Kat said.

  “No. She said she had to go.”

  “Damn.”

  “She was just a kid, Kat.”

  “This isn’t your fault. None of it is,” Kat said.

  “Yeah, right. All strung together, he dies, she dies, who’s next? The mom? Goddamn it.”

  “You coming here?”

  “Five minutes.”

  “Sarge is gonna flip out.”

  “Yup.”

  “Oh, Christ, the mom’s here. I gotta go.”

  Kat rang off, Brandon drove. Flashers on, he swerved around turning cars, a city bus. And then there were the blue lights, cops blocking the street. He pulled over and parked and Park, Kat’s new partner, approached to tell Brandon to move it. Saw Brandon and said, “Sorry, man,” and gave Brandon a pat on the shoulder as he strode by.

  Amanda was on a landscaped embankment, the kind with juniper bushes and pine mulch. Medcu had covered her with a green sheet, and there was a woman on her knees beside the body, sobbing into her hands. The mom. Kat was crouched beside her, her arms around the woman’s shoulders. One Converse hightop was sticking out from under the sheet. There was no visible blood. The mulch soaked it up.

  Brandon, hat and sunglasses on, stood thirty feet away, watched as an EMT wheeled a stretcher along the entrance ramp, and she and another EMT picked it up and carried it up the embankment. They wrapped the sheet around Amanda Shakespeare and, on three, lifted her up and onto the stretchers. Her mother wailed and then sobbed and then wailed again. “My baby. Oh, my baby.”

  Brandon felt his eyes well behind the sunglasses. He swallowed hard, forced himself to watch as they carried the stretcher down the embankment, dropped the wheels onto the pavement. Amanda’s mother got unsteadily to her feet and, Kat still with her, and started to follow. Stepping over the curb she stumbled, caught herself and looked up.

  “You?” she said.

  She was looking at Brandon.

  “You son of a bitch. You did this, you bastard.”

  She started for Brandon, her fists clenched in front of her.

  “You killed her,” she screamed. “You killed both of them.”

  Brandon didn’t answer. Kat took the woman by the shoulders, held her back. She was still screaming and people were watching, hospital people in printed shirts and green scrubs, cops and EMTs, a couple of scroungy guys from that end of Congress.

  “Arrest him,” Amanda’s mother screamed. “He killed my daughter. He did it. He did it.”

  And then she collapsed to her knees again, her body wracked in sobs, her fists pounding the pavement. Brandon started to turn away, felt a hand on his shoulder. Perry.

  “Blake,” he said. “Get the hell out of here.”

  Brandon turned with him, felt himself pushed along.

  “What the hell are you thinking?” Perry said.

  “I just talked to her,” Brandon said, both of them still hurrying toward the line of cruisers.

  Perry jerked to a stop. Brandon turned.

  “You talked to her? The dead girl?”

  “Amanda Shakespeare. Yeah.”

  He explained. Amanda calling the P.D., asking for him. Chooch calling, his text back. Amanda calling, wanting to talk about something Rawlings told her. Perry stopped him.

  “Friggin’ A, Blake,” he said. “Is there anything you don’t wind up in the middle of?”

  The front seat of an unmarked Impala, still on scene at the hospital. Amy Smythe, a detective on the day shift, at the wheel, a legal pad on her lap. She was making a time line. Brandon had his phone out.

  “It was 8:48,” he said. “When she rang off.”

  “Said she had to go?”

  “Abruptly. Like she had another call. Or someone had come in. I sort of expected her to call back, say, ‘Sorry about that.’ Keep talking.”

  Smythe wrote the time on the pad. Drew a line to make a column. Word was she did her reports in Excel. Before she was a cop she studied accounting. Fortyish. Widow, husband killed in Iraq. No outward display of emotions. Some of the cops called her Mrs. Spock but they liked her because she was cool under pressure, smart, dependable, consistent.

  “What did she want, Brandon?”

  “I think she wanted to tell me something, some sort of secret. Something to do with Thatcher and is parents.”

  “Did she start right in with that or work her way up to it?”

  Smythe. Methodical and thorough. Nothing slipped through.

  “Worked her way up to it, I guess.”

  “Tell me the whole conversation, step by step,” Smythe said.

  Brandon considered it, knew he had no choice. So he laid it out. The girl had attacked him with a knife, or tried to. He hadn’t included that in his account to South Portland P.D.

  Smythe scribbled, didn’t flinch.

  “So you’re saying you omitted that part?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I felt bad for her. She was upset, had lost her boyfriend and all. I didn’t think she deserved whatever she’d get for it. Assault with a dangerous weapon, criminal threatening, whatever. A felony.”

  Smythe was writing.

  “So she wasn’t distraught when she called? Didn’t threaten you again?”

  “No. She was pretty calm.”

  “Despondent?”

  “Yeah, but more exhausted. She said she was medicated.”

  “Did she say anything to indicate she was going to kill herself?”

  “No. Nothing like that,” Brandon said. “She said they were going to put her in the psycho ward, as she called it. She didn’t indicate she wasn’t going to go. She said her mom had gone to get her clean clothes.”

  He watched her writing, then stop. Still staring at the page, Smythe said, “Are you omitting anything now, Brandon? Is there anything you haven’t told me?”

  “No. That’s the whole thing.”

  Smythe looked up. The ambulance transporting the body of Amanda
Shakespeare was pulling away. Lights, no siren. CSI was taking photos of the garage from across the street. More cops were up at the fourth floor. Two of them poked their heads over the concrete wall and peered down. One of them took more pictures.

  “Not to tell you how to do your job,” Smythe said.

  “Right.”

  “And this shooting, I’m with you. I think what’s going on is way over the top.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But you start cutting corners, Brandon. Even if you’re trying to be a good guy, it’s gonna come back to bite you.”

  He nodded, took the lecture. It was odd but he felt better here, didn’t want to leave the sanctuary of the unmarked car.

  “So what do you think it was? What this girl wanted to tell you?”

  “I don’t know. What would a sixteen-year-old guy tell his girlfriend about his parents? Then have her promise not to tell anybody?”

  “One of them having an affair?” Smythe said. “Dad beats the mom. You met them?”

  He looked at her.

  “Sort of. The mother came out to where I live and screamed at me. Father said they were going to have me locked up.”

  “Other than that?” Smythe said.

  “Perfectly normal.”

  She wrote on the pad.

  “Yeah, well, I have to talk to the hospital people before they scatter. How the girl got out to the garage. Did she say anything. Her demeanor leading up to this.”

  She gave him a last glance.

  “Remember what I said, Brandon. Word to the wise.”

  And then she out of the car, the door slamming behind her. Brandon sat for a minute, hiding behind the sunglasses and hat. And then the door snapped open and Kat was standing there.

  “Are you out of your mind?” she said.

  “No.”

  “You can’t be here, Blake.”

  “I had to.”

  “You didn’t have to do anything. Jesus, jumping into the middle of this shitstorm?”

  “I’d just talked to her.”

  “So run the other freakin’ way.”

  “It’s not about me,” Brandon said.

  “Sure it is. All about you wallowing in your bad luck. Well, listen to me, partner. You’re gonna wallow your way out of a job and into a whopper of a lawsuit. Listen, you gotta get the hell out of here. Estusa is coming down the street. I heard him ask if you were here.”