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

  The sound, Brandon thought. It wasn’t right.

  He called in, shots fired, subject down, Medcu ASAP. Falling to his knees he yanked the ski mask off so the guy could breath, but he wasn’t really a guy. He was a kid, maybe sixteen, pale whiskerless face, skin icy gray against the gravel. Brandon could see the holes in the kid’s black jacket, three of them, a triangle of small punctures in the nylon fabric. But the blood was soaking the ground underneath him, big holes there, Brandon knew. He started to reach under the kid, try to get a hand in there, keep him from bleeding out. And then the kid coughed and choked and a black-red spurt erupted from his mouth like vomit. Three gushes, his heart pumping the blood up his trachea like oil from a well. And then the blood stopped gushing, just ran down his cheek and onto his neck.

  And he was gone.

  “No,” Brandon said, and he started to pump the kid’s chest, all hard bone and thin flesh. But nothing happened, and he leaned back as he heard boot steps behind him. The kid stared up at him, eyes open, half smiling, like dying here in this place was expected, part of the plan.

  It was Kat who came on the scene first, trotted past him, picked up the kid’s gun. He knew. The way she handled it, no weight to it.

  A toy.

  Two

  Medcu had been there, paramedics crouched over the guy, going through the motions. Now the body was covered with a sheet, cops moving around it. Uniforms. Detectives. Brass. Out at the sidewalk, on the other side of the police tape, gawkers were gathered, drawn to the lights like moths. A TV truck, reporters and photographers, strobes flashing, the floodlight beaming from a video camera. Some on their phones, Tweeting, posting to Facebook.

  Brandon was in the passenger seat of O’Farrell’s SUV, the door open. He went over it. And then again and again.

  The ten seconds replayed in Brandon’s head, pausing in between loops for him to think, I can’t believe this is real. I can’t believe this just happened.

  The same questions, spinning around in his head. What had the kid been thinking? What was with the GoPro camera on the his head? Didn’t he know that if you pointed a gun at a cop, refused to put it down, acted like a crazy person, you’d get shot? “What choice did I have?” Brandon said aloud. “Stand there and wait for him to shoot me?”

  And then, back inside his head: I mean, I had no other options. At the academy, they’d say I waited way too long. I could have been killed.

  If it had been real.

  He heard it again—the brittle, plastic clatter as the gun hit the brick wall and skittered lightly across the gravel.

  The kid was lifted onto the stretcher now. When they moved toward the ambulance, Brandon could see his face again. Young. Longish blonde hair swept back behind his ears, like Mia’s lacrosse-player friends from college. Black running shoes splayed outward. Feet too big for the rest of him, like paws on a puppy. A half-hour earlier he’d been alive, somebody’s son, brother, friend. Now he was just a body, a slab of meat, a cadaver for the M.E. to dissect.

  Fluids draining. Organs in bowls. The clink of the misshapen .45 Gold Dots dropped into a stainless steel bowl. The slugs from Brandon’s gun. Unless they went straight through.

  He looked down at his empty holster, the Glock taken for ballistics.

  God almighty.

  Brandon rested his face in his hands. Cops came by one at a time and patted him on the shoulder, leaned close to say, “Hang in there, Blake.…We’re with you, Brandon.…You had no choice, man.…Anything you need, B. Blake.…You did what you had to do, man.”

  Johnny Fiola, a stand-up guy, said, “It was a good shoot, Blake. Good shoot.”

  Brandon stared, still stunned. He said nothing.

  And then Kat. Her hand on his shoulder, clasping tight.

  “How you doing?”

  Brandon exhaled. Shrugged.

  “I’m here for you,” she said.

  He nodded. “Thanks.”

  “Let’s go.”

  Brandon looked at her, thinking she wanted them to go back out, finish the shift. His mind still whirling.

  “I can’t,” he said. “Not now, they’re still—”

  “No,” Kat said. “I’m supposed to drive you back.”

  Cops cleared a path through the crowd and Kat tried to ease the cruiser through. A young woman with a big phone—flannel shirt, blue bandanna on her head like a pirate—stepped in front of the car, started shooting video. She darted around the cruiser so she was on the passenger side, the phone up to the glass at Brandon’s face. Kat hit the klaxon horn and the woman jumped, screamed, “Fucking cops, fucking murderers.” TV converged, video of the woman getting video. Fiola moving the woman out of the way, the woman slapping at him, screaming, “Get your fucking pig hands off me.”

  The cameras swung back to Brandon, the siren whooping as Kat pushed through. And then they were back on the dark and deserted streets, Brandon thinking, We were just here. Right here. Everything was fine.

  Kat looked over and said, “It’s going to be okay.”

  “I just killed a kid. He had a plastic gun.”

  “A replica. You can’t tell the difference.”

  “He’s dead. What was he? Sixteen? My god, Kat.”

  “I would have done the exact same thing,” Kat said.

  “Oh, dear Jesus, I knew it when it hit the ground.”

  “What were you supposed to do? ‘Excuse me, but might I check to see if that gun that you’re pointing at my face is real?’”

  “What was he thinking?”

  “He wasn’t, Blake. Maybe he was nuts. Maybe he was high or tripping or a freakin’ meth head. Whatever. He made his bed.”

  “I gave him two warnings,” Brandon said. “I said, ‘Just put it down. Just put the gun down.’”

  “Two too many,” Kat said. “Could be you lying dead back there.”

  “I told him to just toss it. We could all go home. I said that. It would be on the video. Was that thing recording?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “God, me on the camera, shooting him. It would be right on there.”

  “On your body cam, too.”

  Brandon reached to his shoulder, but the camera was gone. With his gun.

  “I don’t know if I turned it on.”

  From behind the wheel, Kat gave him a hard glance. “Friggin’ A, Brandon.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s alright. They’ll figure it out.”

  They stopped at the light at Spring and Middle, three guys crossing in front of them, all three staring at him, knowing who he was, Brandon was sure.

  “The word’s out already.”

  “Gonna be fine,” Kat said.

  “I couldn’t tell it was a kid. You couldn’t see how old he was, under the mask.”

  “Doesn’t matter if he was twelve or eighty. You’d still be dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” Brandon said.

  “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

  “That it happened, I mean.”

  “I know. Me, too.”

  They swung off Middle Street and up Pearl, then around into the police lot. Kat pulled the cruiser up close to the doors and parked and they got out. Brandon felt like his right side was floating, without the weight of his Glock. He took his bag out of the trunk, his water bottle and his leftovers from dinner—a taco salad from Whole Foods. A lifetime ago. Kat patted his shoulder, said, “O’Farrell and the lawyer will meet you. I’d get out of that uniform.”

  Brandon looked down at the front of his shirt, the kid’s blood drying, sticky and stiff like varnish.

  “Right,” he said.

  “You gonna be okay, partner?” Kat said.

  “Yeah.”

  He paused and looked at her.

  “What if Mia doesn’t understand?” he said.

  “She will. Hey, what’s not to understand? Someone pointed a gun at you and refused to put it down.”

  Brandon turned away, then back.

  “You know he had the
drop on me. He must have been in the back of that little doorway and he slipped up behind me when I was checking under the truck.”

  “Then look at it this way, Blake,” Kat said. “If you had nine lives, now you have eight.”

  “He said, “You’re dead.”

  “All I’d need to hear, Blake. I’d empty the goddamn magazine, I’m telling ya. I’m going home, that’s all I know.”

  “And then he said, ‘And I’m—’”

  “I’m what?” Kat said.

  “I don’t know. That’s when I fired, at that second. What if he was gonna say, ‘I’m just goofing on you.’ It’s a paintball gun.’ Or—”

  “Who knows what he was thinking, Brandon? You don’t know. Suicide by cop? Maybe he had a mental illness. Or he was just stupid. You may never know.”

  Brandon looked at her. “All he had to do was drop it. Throw it down. That’s all. We’d be doing paperwork right now. He’d be out in two hours. Don’t get in any trouble for a year, they file it.”

  “Crazy,” Kat said. “He didn’t even get any money.”

  “Scared off?”

  “No, more like some weird movie. He ran through, said, ‘Hands up.’ Told everybody to get on the floor but people thought it was a joke or something so nobody did. Bartender dials 911 and he runs out.”

  “A paintball gun,” Brandon said, his voice soft and low. “I knew it when I heard it hit the wall. Too light. A replica. Sig P226. But no red on the muzzle.”

  “He ground the orange down, painted the tip black,” Kat said.

  Brandon processed it, said. “Why the hell would he do that?”

  “The GoPro,” Kat said. “They’ll just have to check the card.”

  It was all sinking in, Brandon sinking with it. “So it was just a kid screwing around? Friggin’ put it on YouTube?”

  “Playing a dangerous game, if he was.”

  “What if I’d decided to wait for Christiansen and the dog, not go deeper into that doorway,” Brandon said.

  “I know. You said that.”

  “Dog would have just grabbed him. End of story. Instead...”

  “It was the right decision, Blake. The only decision. It’s okay.”

  A long pause, the garage curiously empty, even at this time of night usually something moving. In the distance there was a Medcu siren. Then, from the darkness, the call of a gull. What the hell was a gull doing, flying around in the middle of the night? Brandon said, “What do you think? Tenth grade?”

  Kat shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Fuckin-A,” Brandon said.

  “You did your job, Blake. You went by the book, using the information you had at the time, at that moment.”

  “I wish I’d missed,” Brandon said. “Hit the ground and kept going.”

  “Blake.”

  “Maybe if I’d just fired once, maybe he would have lived.”

  “You fire until the threat is neutralized, you know that. All he needed was time and strength to squeeze that trigger.”

  “I could’ve called in sick, not been there at all.”

  Kat walked over to him, took him by both shoulders and turned him square to her.

  “It’s gonna get harder,” she said.

  Brandon looked at her. “I know. Ferguson. Every other goddamn place.”

  “Don’t read the news.”

  “Right.”

  “Or the comments on line.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Drink a lot of water.”

  “Okay.”

  “Stay away from alcohol.”

  “Yup.”

  “You can do this,Blake. You’ve done it—”

  She caught herself.

  “Before?” Brandon said. “Well, yeah, but not like this. Not even close.”

  Three

  There were three of them in the duty room: Charlie Carew, the shop steward, Esli Hernandez, the city lawyer, and Officer Brandon Blake, the principal in officer-involved shooting, Portland, Maine, September 15, 2018. Carew, an Irish-looking guy with red cheeks and hair, had brought three coffees from Dunkin’ Donuts. He set them out, slid one across to Brandon. Hernandez—silver-haired, terse, tough, and smart—ignored her coffee and said she had two questions:

  Brandon waited, feeling like she was scrutinizing his face, his reaction, even to that.

  “One, are you okay?”

  “Yes,” Brandon said. “I mean, as much as you can be.”

  “Two, what happened? Just tell us.”

  He told them, from getting the call, to the foot chase, to pulling the trigger—once, twice, three times. And the kid dying in front of him. “The blood. It just kept spurting,” he said. “And then it stopped. It was all over the place, all over me, all over him, it was...”

  He paused. They could fill in the blank: horrible, unbelievable, a mess.

  There was a long pause. Carew took a swallow of coffee. Brandon picked up his cup, just held it.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Hernandez said again.

  “Yes.”

  She asked about distances: from Brandon to the kid when he fired, from Brandon to the kid during the chase.

  “Totally straightforward,” Carew said. “Subject points an apparent handgun at the officer’s face, refuses repeated orders to put the weapon down. When Officer Blake chose to use deadly force, he clearly and understandably felt his life was in danger.”

  Hernandez was writing on a legal pad. She stopped, put down the pen. Her diamond engagement ring was very glittery, like it might have magic powers. It couldn’t undo this.

  “Complicating factors, Officer Blake,” she said. “One, your body cam. It wasn’t on.”

  “I know. I saw him running, jumped out to pursue him on foot. I just didn’t think of it.”

  “Two, still looking for the SD card for the subject’s GoPro.”

  “Was there one?” Brandon said.

  They looked at him.

  “I don’t think the kid would wear the GoPro if he wasn’t filming,” Hernandez said.

  “What are you saying? I didn’t touch the camera. I was just trying to stop him from dying.”

  “Nobody’s saying anything,” Carew said. “We’d just really like to have that card.”

  “So would I,” Brandon said. “It would be on there. Everything.”

  They looked at him, and it clicked. The reason it was gone. That it would all be on there.

  Hernandez said, “Three. On the way over here, I got a call. The subject of the deadly force is Thatcher Rawlings. Mom and Dad live in Moresby and have serious money.”

  “You will be sued,” Carew said. “You would anyway. Only difference is rich people get better lawyers.”

  “And your history,” Hernandez said. “It’s gonna come up. Big time. You’ve done this before.”

  “I wasn’t a cop then.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  They left him alone, Carew going to the men’s room, Hernandez to call the city manager. “Hang tight,” she said. Brandon sat at the table, his hands folded in front of him. Sitting there in the silent room he heard the shots, saw the holes, the torn jacket, the shocked expression frozen on the dead guy’s face.

  Not the kid, not Rawlings. This was Joel Fuller, almost three years ago now. He didn’t think about it often, could go weeks without even a glimmer. But now it was playing full-screen, as vivid as it had been that night.

  The Royal Arms Hotel, three blocks away from where he sat. Fourth floor, the far end of the corridor. Room 423. Fuller and Kelvin, their ransom plans unraveling. Mia bound and gagged and stuffed inside a big black suitcase, Brandon stopping them in the hallway. Fuller aiming the big revolver at Mia’s head, muzzle pressed on the round lump in the black fabric.

  Three shots that time, too, all in the chest. Center mass, they call it. Brandon knew that now. Back then he was just shooting to kill, to put Fuller down before he pulled the trigger.

  Fuller blown back into the wall. No blood spurting from his m
outh, just three quarter-sized holes in his shirt that turned to one plate-sized splotch. And then his cry, the crazy psycho wailing like a terrified child. And then breaths coming quicker and quicker, shallower and shallower. And then a last breath followed by nothing.

  Gone.

  Brandon holding Mia tightly in the corridor—no tears, just her dry, retching sobs. Cops, counselors. Talk, talk, talk, them trying to figure out this new normal. It took months for Mia. Brandon had a few days of bad dreams, one reoccurring one—a nightmare where he pulled the trigger and nothing happened. And then life went on, the killing of Joel Fuller an unspoken bond between them.

  Regrets? Brandon had none. The counselor said, “It isn’t healthy to keep it bottled up inside.”

  Brandon said, “There’s nothing bottled up. I’m glad he’s dead. I’m glad Mia’s not.”

  So had he done it before, like Hernandez had said? No, not this. Not even close.

  The first time he hadn’t shot a kid playing some stupid game. A kid holding a toy gun from WalMart. He hadn’t left a sixteen-year-old dead, when he could have walked right up to him, taken the gun out of his hands. Put him on the ground, game over.

  Brandon could picture it, so real it was tantalizing: the kid face down, cuffs snapping on. Brandon lifting him to his feet, pulling the mask off, saying, “Dude, what the hell do you think you’re doing? You know how close you just came to getting killed?” Thinking, jeez, won’t his parents be some pissed when they get this call. Brandon and Kat finishing the booking, leaving the idiot at intake, talking it over back in the cruiser.

  What the hell’s wrong with kids these days? Richey Rich gonna have a rude awakening if he ends up in Long Creek. Nah, the parents will bring in some high-priced lawyer, get him released to their custody. Probably that was the problem. No consequences for the spoiled little bastard. Parents aren’t doing them any favor when they—