Lock and Key

Sergeant Harrison wasn't the kind of cop that could have been the inspiration for movies like Die Hard or Lethal Weapon, and the only thing he really had in common with Dirty Harry was his age. Still, he'd seen enough of those movies to know what the media was likely to try if he returned to the station house where they expected to find him. In the movies, this is usually the front door; in real life, that only happens with news conferences. Reporters may be predictable to a fault at times, but the good ones aren't stupid, and tend to know where the employees' entrance is as well as the cops who use it do. And like anyone seriously engaged in the business of law and disorder, reporters tend to recognize unmarked police cars when they see them. Even if they aren't sprouting an unconscionable number of antennae, they all come from the same manufacturer; at most, a department that actually provides unmarked units for its officers seldom has more than two models in operation at a time.

This being the case, Harrison returned to the station in a cab and walked through the front doors with a Wall Street Journal under one arm and a battered briefcase in the other hand, looking considerably more like an embattled public defender than a homicide detective. While this was sufficient to bypass the reporters at present, his fellow officers were another matter. The beat cops on the first floor were either preoccupied by their own immediate business or unaware as yet that he was in charge of the case, but by the time he got back to his own desk, he was almost grateful for the stack of paperwork waiting on it. That, at least, was a reasonable excuse for him to avoid dealing with people for awhile. In another half-hour, he'd be able to face his co-workers without letting the first question about his case get the better of him, but not right now.

He very narrowly avoided pushing the phone off the desk into the trash can when it rang before the chair had a chance to get warm. Instead, he only answered it with all the day's frustrations undisguised. "Harrison."

"I don't know what's got you taking this so personal, Matt," the voice said from the other end, "but you might want to see what I've got down here in the morgue."

Harrison took a deep breath. "Don't tell me this is the first I'm hearing about a body they dug out of there, Karl, 'cause I don't wanna hear it."

"Better than that. This is the DJ. Guy went ballistic in interrogation about an hour ago, blew right through the glass, down the hall and out the window. Figured he must've been doin' PCP, but now I don't know. You might want to be here when the coroner goes in. Pictures turned up something that may be up your alley."

"You tell the Captain yet?" If the DJ was involved, and this news made that look much more likely, it would definitely get the press off his back for a day or two while they were busy castigating the deceased instead. Hell, even if the DJ wasn't involved, his taking a three-story header out the station window was enough to make the reporters think he'd been into something shady. Especially if the right spin got put on the 'leak'.

"If I'm blowin' this, I'd rather not embarrass myself that bad. You won't broadcast it all the way to New Jersey on me." Okay, so Harrison had no plans to let it get as far as the Garden State and they both knew it; he and Parks had been friends ever since the academy and knew each other better than a lot of other cops knew their partners. Parks wouldn't have mentioned New Jersey at all if he'd had a better way to suggest Team Banzai might find it of interest.

"How long do I have to get over there? Can I check with the lab first?" They all knew the green goo on the flechettes was talava, but he'd have to get it properly documented sooner or later. With a little more luck, Murphy'd know by now -- and be able to give him an update on other matters as well if she'd been able to stay in touch.

"Maybe half an hour. Much more stall than that, people'll notice."

"I'll be there." He hung up the phone without further formalities, pushed the paperwork into his top drawer where it would at least stay in the current sequence until he got back, and headed off to the lab. If the growls he acknowledged his fellow officers with were a little softer than before, no one let on.

Murphy wasn't the name the lady'd been born with, and not one Harrison would have admitting knowing her by in public in any case. If it suited her better than the one on her driver's license, what of it? Her knack for causing men -- particularly crooks -- problems at the worst possible moment was well known throughout the department, but written off largely to the fact that she had the misfortune of being drop-dead gorgeous as well as a genius with chemicals. She could no more help distracting young male officers than she could stop breathing, which meant that she spent as much of her working hours in a tiny lab as she could manage. Harrison had himself considered asking her out when they'd first met, but he'd dumped any thought of getting serious about her immediately when he'd discovered she wasn't in the restaurant by chance. Dating another cop was iffy enough in terms of office politics, doubly so in her case for other reasons.

So when he reached her door, Harrison rapped on it loudly and announced himself, then waited a beat before opening it. Murphy guarded her privacy for more reasons than the dangerous chemicals, though chances were good that he was the only one in the building at present who knew why. "Anything on the flechettes?" he asked first.

"Only what we both already knew," she said. "It's just official now. Which the boss already knows, near as I can tell." He didn't need to watch her pull the drape off the go-phone sitting on the counter to know she meant Buckaroo Banzai rather than his own Captain, not when the two of them accounted for the majority of active Blue Blaze Irregulars in the precinct. The display on it was dark, the audio scarcely a whisper even with the fabric out of the way; any louder and the drape wouldn't have been enough to conceal it. Advertising those extracurricular activities wasn't advisable under normal circumstances and just now all it was likely to accomplish would be to get the most knowledgeable personnel thrown off the case immediately. As it was, it was likely he'd end up taking early retirement, or a desk job, as soon as possible after this one.

"I figured you might be in the loop. Anything you can tell me?"

"Big Norse figured we might be able to use an audio feed. This old thing can barely handle that much the way she's got it encrypted; we have got to get our hands on the Mk.2 even if we have to track down the gypsy talent ourselves to do it. Hell, if we have to go to work for them directly."

"I'll ask. Maybe if we shed a little light on this for people, we'll get moved up the list some."

"That's a happy thought," said Murphy, actually smiling a bit for the first time he knew of since things had begun. "There hasn't really been a lot of traffic, though. Reno and a guy named Wayback came out awhile before you got washed out, and I'm listening to them back-and-forth with Mouse now. Some kind of problem with their GPS, so she's verifying their navigation from World Watch One. The rest of it's mostly routine stuff; about all I know that may be related is that they didn't have a clue about the weather either, and that it looks like you've got an good case for attempted murder if we can ever track down which one of Xan's toadies started it."

"Replay's not dead?"

"I'm not clear on how or why, but evidently not. When she was still on comm herself, Big Norse told Reno that Replay wanted a sniffer dog check before she was staying in that hotel again. Aside from that, your guess is as good as mine."

"Well, that's something good, anyway. It's only a one way connection, though, right?"

"So I'm warned. I try to send back, I might be holding up a big 'look here' sign for the bravos."

"Well, if you get any opportunity, I'm headed to the morgue. The DJ wanted a flying lesson more than he wanted to answer questions."

"Figures. Watch your back, huh? I'm not exactly at liberty to do it for you."

***

Wayback was behind the wheel again and we were both listening to Mouse tell us about the next turnoff when the go-phone in my hand went dead. I gave it a moment on the off chance that we'd been cut off by accident, only to be dissuaded of that possibility by a series of electronic shrieks that would have made fingernails on a chalkboard sound pleasant. It didn't take an expert to realize those sounds meant trouble of some sort; the only questions either of us had were where and when it would hit.

Had we suspected that anyone else was listening in at the time, we might not have been as concerned about our own position as we were. There were only the two of us, after all, trying to find our way around an unfamiliar city and coming up on one of the only three bridges across a river. The only better spot for an ambush in traffic would have been in the middle of a traffic jam where we wouldn't have had any maneuverability at all. With communications with World Watch One clearly out of the question, we were left with a limited number of choices: press on like nothing was happening, make a try for whatever cover we could find and hole up there until the situation was resolved, or presume that the safehouse was being targeted and hope we could generate enough surprise by returning to turn the tide of that battle. Presuming, of course, that we weren't intended to make a run back to the safehouse so that the bravos could use us as guides. If my own first instincts were to worry more about Buckaroo and the rest than about my own position, it was as much from habit as aught else and logic dictated that I consider all the possibilities.

Normally I might have expected Wayback to have an answer for me, but under the circumstances I wasn't sure I wanted to ask. Traffic was heavy enough given the weather that distracting him from the road wasn't especially wise. Since even Jet or Cameo would have needed a moment's concentration to assess the threat properly with all the variables that were involved, I could only presume the same was even truer of the Canadian intern, who might well be encountering this sort of thing for the very first time. He wouldn't knowingly drive into a situation without at least sharing that information, but he hadn't been with us long enough for me to be at all certain how much it would take to distract him from realizing he was about to do just that.

Being so distracted myself by debating what the right move was, I scarcely noticed that Wayback was angling for the first exit until he pulled the wheel back to the left sharply as another driver cut him off. "Deliberate bastard," he said, no more heat in it than if he'd been dictating a shopping list. "I think we've got a problem." He was clearly hoping he was wrong, but not especially expecting that to be the case.

I didn't bother to tell him to do what he could about it; that would have been redundant. Until and unless we were overtly attacked at fairly close range, there was nothing I could do about things but double check both my seat belt and my sidearm, and perhaps offer a suggestion or two. Neither one of us knew the town very well, which made his navigational choices as good as anyone's if he was trying to take things out of range of civilians, and no worse than mine would have been in any event. Rather belatedly, I resolved to consistently use the GPS as a backup system in the future, provided we got out of this alive.

Neither one of us actually expected the sudden disintegration of the windshield but we both understood its cause before we registered the impact of a single rifle slug in the upholstery. There was a sniper ahead of us, undoubtedly hidden in the superstructure of the fast-approaching bridge. We both flinched at the unexpected event, but to his credit, Wayback managed to correct his involuntary jerk of the wheel before our car sideswiped anything. For a moment I was more concerned about the civilians than anything else, then it occurred to me that the anticipated second bullet hadn't come at all. This bunch of bravos wasn't out for our blood; they were trying to herd us somewhere. That suggested we were targeted for a kidnapping, and I said as much.

"I presume we're already paying damages on the car," was all Wayback said about it before he swerved violently to the left, narrowly missing the front end of a second suspicious car as he deliberately pushed the gas pedal to the floor in spite of the risk of hydroplaning. "Act of war clause, or would it be terrorism?"

***

Murphy nearly knocked her microscope over in startlement when the go-phone abruptly emitted the same offensive sounds I have already mentioned. As with the rest of us who were hearing those noises, it took her only a few seconds to realize something was up, and several more to power down the go-phone. Being so far removed from the rest of us, her first instincts were that Wayback and I were at considerably greater risk; everyone else was in a better position to back each other at least briefly.

Even so, doing anything about it probably meant her career. Absolutely it meant she'd be pulled off the case immediately and that someone else would have to repeat the work she'd done so far if there was any hope of salvaging a case, but chances were high that the Captain would fire her on the spot for her outside affiliation; the number of times in the past two months that she'd personally heard him badmouthing Team Banzai as vigilantes and the Blue Blaze Irregulars as wannabes was already approaching his golf handicap. If she wanted to have any real hope of getting us any help, she'd have to admit what she was, and that would probably be that; the only real question there was how long it would take to get back to the Captain.

Altogether, she spent a full ten seconds debating with herself before she picked up the phone and dialed for an outside line. She'd heard enough before the jamming had started to be fairly certain she was calling the right department; there was only one route she knew that would fit Mouse's navigational instructions. Giving that set of instructions would have been pointless unless we were within a certain range of I-270, which left her with a fix that was at least as accurate as most motorists could give a tow driver. And since the chances were good that a show of force would be sufficient to keep any bravos from starting trouble, she wasn't particularly worried about not being able to describe the rental car.

It was possible that she was just overreacting by calling St. Charles and that the real trouble was brewing further west. It was also possible that her first call was already belated. Better to do everything she could to minimize the problems anyway; at least then she'd be able to sleep nights. It was always easier to apologize to a fellow cop for wasting their time than to the relatives of the victim for failing to prevent a tragedy. If she was going to blow her career as a cop in this man's town, then at least she was going to do it for the right reasons.

***

When you get right down to it, telephones are electrical devices. For the most part, people forget this, in spite of such terms as circuit and wire applying as much to phones as to, say, light fixtures. It's not hard to forget these things when the first thing most people do when the power goes off is reach for the phone to call the electric company.

Still, every year, thousands of meteorologists and weather readers remind people that they shouldn't use the phone during electrical storms unless necessary. And apart from phone company technicians, probably fewer than one person in ten really understands why. Perhaps it would help to explain the massive number of batteries that power the entire phone system and make comparisons to situations where batteries and water or other electricity simply don't mix; certainly most motorists are more cautious about hooking up jumper cables in dry weather than they are about telephones and storms.

Lindbergh studied the rain more than he did the junction box itself, taking a moment to determine the best way to angle the box's cover in order to minimize the amount of water that reached his working area. He was perhaps more aware than usual of the fact that this was realistically about as bright as using a blow dryer in the shower, but he couldn't see any other viable options. "Don't try this at home, kiddies," he said under his breath, and got down to the business of determining which line to tap into. For most people, this would have been a real guessing game without some way of testing for an active line, but he'd never quite decided if he was just an exceptional guesser or if he really could tell the difference between a complex circuit that was getting power and one that wasn't just by looking at them. He'd had friends try to tell him it was just pilot instinct, something that went along with being a natural as much as his ability to handle almost anything that flew, and which should have held true only with his planes -- but apart from the lack of a connection to an engine, how different could a junction box be from one of the small sections of wiring easily accessible in a large plane?

He wasn't expecting to get lucky with his second try, but it didn't surprise him either. He was rewarded with a dial tone at his ear when he touched the wires together, and quickly twisted them to firm up the connection in spite of the shock he got from it and the blisters that began to form on his fingers almost immediately. Dialing took considerably longer than his short prayer of thanks for the string of miracles which included the police, fire, and ambulance numbers being printed on a label pasted to the side of the phone. Certainly it was a good bit slower than he remembered push-button phones being on rotary-grade lines, although later he admitted he'd never really paid that much attention before. Then the wait for someone to pick up at the other end seemed interminable as well, although he realized it was probably only a matter of a few seconds. "O'Fallon Police Department, Sergeant Fuller. How can I help you?"

Chapter 7 HTML enhancements last updated: 29 August 1998
Go to Chapter Eight