Nickel City Crossfire by Gary Ross (popular romance novels .txt) 📗

Later, when several captains were on the scene and everything was in place, the SWAT team geared up and went inside. Kim and I crouched behind a cruiser as Commander Stoll made his final megaphone appeal to Brother Grace, which was answered by a single gunshot. Half a minute passed before we heard wood shattering, followed by the whoompf of tear gas canisters. No other shots were fired, which made me wonder if Brother Grace had put one through the roof of his mouth.

Presently, the cruiser’s radio crackled with Stoll’s scream: “Everybody pull back now!”

Kim and I stood up and looked at the bell tower. At first we saw nothing. Then, between the louvers, there was an orange glow. Within minutes the tower was engulfed in flames and gunfire filled the night.

What the SWAT team had not known—and no one would know with certainty for almost a week—was that the tower was full of decades-old newspapers, German Bibles, and hymnals from the church’s Nineteenth-Century immigrant founders, all ignited by hot tear gas canisters fired up into the darkness. There were also assorted firearms and enough drugs of various kinds to get half the city high. Boxes of ammunition cooked off during the blaze. Bullets bounced and zinged within the stone walls for fifteen or twenty minutes, but no one outside was hurt. The air grew heavy with a burning smell—a mixture of antiseptics, ammonia, other cleaning agents, melting plastic, pungent weed, and something sickening that made a WIVB reporter in a live TV report describe the air as a “cacophony of olfactory horrors.”

Pete Kim and I watched the wooden cross atop the tower burst into flames, light up the neighborhood sky, and fall to the street below. Soon the charred frame could no longer support the stone. The building began to fall in upon itself, shattering the few elegant stained glass windows that had not yet blown out and sending up clouds of debris to join the billowing smoke. Covering our mouths and noses as best we could, we choked and coughed and spat as we began to back away from a blossoming hazmat nightmare. I recognized one odor I had not experienced since Iraq and had never wanted to encounter again.

Part of me hoped Brother Grace was already dead when the fire reached his flesh. But another part of me remembered the autopsy photos of Veronica Surowiec and imagined that even in her morgue drawer across town, Nasty Nica must be smiling her scary smile one last time.

45

Having heard from Piñero that Chalmers was in recovery and would be in the ICU by nine or ten that morning, I went home after the Sanctuary Nimbus fire, showered off the smell of smoke, and climbed into bed when most people were having breakfast. I slept till one-fifteen.

Coffee in hand and rereading the account of the Sanctuary Nimbus fire in the Sunday Buffalo News, I was still in my robe when my doorbell surprised me. There was no name label in the slot above my doorbell, and all my mail went straight to my office a quarter-mile away. Few people knew my actual address. Most friends would call ahead before coming. Bobby used his landlord key whenever he felt the need to check on me, and Phoenix had her own key—which I hoped she would want to use again. My bell rarely rang, even by accident.

I went to the intercom by the door and pressed the TALK button. “Yes?”

“Rimes?” a woman’s voice crackled. “It’s Jen. Me and Bianca are downstairs.”

The one hitch in my need for privacy. Law enforcement could always find an address.

“We have to talk to you,” another voice crackled, tearful and unsteady. Bianca.

I pressed TALK. “Okay.” I buzzed them up and tightened my robe. Then I opened my door and watched them climb the stairs.

Both wore jeans and ski jackets. Jen’s knit watch cap was a lighter purple than her ski jacket. With a blue hoodie under a puffy red jacket, Bianca looked less elegant than when I first met her at the Galleria, and her face looked more tired.

I gestured them into my living room. Despite tired eyes and an arm around her wife, Jen, the cop, took in everything—the arched windows above the built-in bookcases, the flat-screen TV and sound system, the prints of Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor and Faith Ringgold’s Echoes of Harlem, the free weights, push-up disks, and heavy bag in my workout corner. Then she noticed the bandage on my chin and looked away. My assessment of her had been right. One day she would make a fine detective. On the other hand, her eyes wet and haunted-looking, Bianca seemed to notice nothing. Both women sat on the black leather couch, as I dropped into the leather armchair I used to watch television.

“How can I help you?” I asked.

Jen helped Bianca out of her ski jacket. “I thought she was heading to the Rowhouse around the corner to get pastries to go with our coffee.” Then she removed her own jacket, revealing a heavy beige sweater, and put both coats on the far end of the couch. “But she went to see Keisha and now she’s scared.”

“Keisha’s got a gun,” Bianca said, her voice low and her face looking distant and taut in the hoodie. “She’s going after Mrs. Markham.”

I sat forward. “You know this how?”

“I saw it.” She pushed her hoodie back. “I—” Her face fell then, tears beginning to trickle down her cheeks. She turned into Jen’s shoulder and cried.

“Keisha sent her a text this morning,” Jen said, matter-of-factly, as she had been trained. “She asked if they could meet at the bakery near our apartment, without me so she could give Bianca something private. It was this.” From her back pocket, she took a folded piece of lined spiral notebook paper and handed it to me.

I opened it and sat back. I recognized the tight, precise handwriting.

Dear