Barking Dogs - A Mitch Helwig Book Read online

  DeMarco looked up from the paper he’d been reading from. “Pretty incredible, isn’t it?”

  Karoulis sighed. “Everything’s incredible.”

  “We figure they’d been in there most of the night, but only near the end made the mistake of triggering an alarm.”

  “The place cleaned out?”

  “Just about.”

  “How bad is Fedwick?”

  “Critical. It was a laser, Captain.”

  Karoulis’s face sagged.

  “He was hit at least three times in the chest, and twice in the arms. It looks as though he threw up his arms to protect himself after he took the first shot in the chest. The doctors think the other two shots to the chest came after he was lying on the ground. The burns are, they say, more intense in those two.”

  “And he’s still alive?”

  DeMarco nodded. “They missed the heart. But,” he added, “they got just about everything else. The admitting doctors figured the aorta’d been nicked. Also, the liver, a lung, a kidney, bowel. He also lost a finger when he was shot in the arms.”

  Karoulis’s eyes widened. “We’re looking for animals!”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Any family to notify?”

  DeMarco glanced down at his notes. “Fedwick was divorced. Forty-nine years old. Three children, though—daughters, all grown. He was one year from retirement, if he wanted it, Captain.”

  Karoulis felt the anger rising in him, the fury of impotence in the face of this type of slaughter.

  “His gun was still in his holster, Captain.”

  “I want the area blocked off.”

  DeMarco looked stunned.

  “Call Peel. Ask for reinforcements. And North York. Even York County.”

  “I don’t think we’ve got the manpower, Captain. We’d need two or three hundred men!”

  Karoulis’s eyes had hardened. He swung his gaze back to DeMarco. “Then ask for volunteers. Get on the phones!”

  DeMarco hesitated, looked at Huziak, who had remained silent throughout. “I don’t know, Captain, if the union allows for this type of volunteering. I mean, suppose someone gets hurt or something? What kind of compensation, insurance, is in effect? You can’t—”

  “Get on the fucking phones, and get on them now! I’ll take all the heat, you hear me? I want that fucking area sealed tight! Mount Pleasant to Leslie; Eglinton to O’Connor. We’ll stop every car. All police are to be armed with shotguns, you hear? If we can’t get enough men from those on duty today from the forces, then start calling off-duty men and putting it to them, understand?”

  “Off-duty—”

  “Would you stay at home and have a second cup of coffee if you were called and asked to come in to help collar the killer of one of your colleagues? Would the union rules be an issue?” He was breathing hard now, his jaw clenching.

  DeMarco pulled at his ear and dropped his eyes.

  “Put it to them! Try it!”

  Huziak left the room, heading for the phones and shouting names. Heads turned and listened as the news broke.

  DeMarco looked from Karoulis to the activity out on the floor, then back. He smiled weakly and nodded in compliance. “Maybe you’re right, Captain. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s time to break a few rules.”

  He scratched the back of his neck and walked out the door to join the others.

  Alone in his office, Karoulis felt the blood pounding in his temple and neck. Fucking animals! he thought. Fucking lasers! Fucking everything!

  He closed his eyes then and saw, as he did more and more often, the island with the blue-green water, the sky clear and still, a kid in short pants, and his mother’s face.

  16

  Elaine had gotten up to get Barbie off to school and to phone in sick at work. Then she returned to bed, where she had left Mitch sleeping soundly, and curled into his secure contours beneath the warmth of the blankets. For the next hour or so, she drifted in and out of a dreamy sleep, while Mitch slept, unmoving.

  The beeping of the V-phone at the bedside roused her. Without pressing the video button, she lifted the receiver to her ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello. Mrs. Helwig? It’s Huziak at the station. Is Mitch there?”

  “He’s still sleeping. Can I take a message?” Mitch was stirring, rolling, listening now with half-open lids.

  “If he’s there, I think you better wake him for me. It’s important.”

  “He’s off today, you know.”

  “I know. I still need to speak to him.”

  Without waiting for her to reply, Mitch reached up and took the phone from her hand and held it to his ear. “’Morning. What can I do for you?”

  “’Morning, Mitch. Sorry to disturb you like this. Captain’s orders.” He cleared his throat. “One of our men got shot early this morning, and Karoulis wants a dragnet thrown up around the area where the shooting took place. We’re gonna need hundreds, Mitch. Calls are going out now to other adjacent forces and to all off-duty officers to ask for sanctioned help and for volunteer help.”

  “Volunteer?” The word was out before Mitch could think.

  “That’s right. The captain is really hopping about this one. He’s thrown away the rule book. I think he might have a point. Want to get involved?”

  “Tell me more. Who was shot? What happened?”

  “Mark Fedwick. Know him?”

  “I know who he is. I’ve met him. Is he alive?”

  “Barely. Just barely. He answered an alarm at a computer factory on Wicksteed this morning, went in alone without waiting for a backup, and was cut down. A laser. Three hits in the torso, two in the arms. He’s really bad.”

  Mitch said nothing.

  “You still there?”

  Mitch took a deep breath. “Yeah. I’m still here.”

  “We can use you, Mitch.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Thanks, Mitch.”

  Pressing the button on the receiver, Mitch ended the conversation.

  Sitting beside him, Elaine began to rub his back. “I guess that’s the end of our glorious day in bed together.”

  “I have to go.”

  “I know.” She continued to rub his back.

  “Bastards. We’ve got to stop this, you know.”

  “What can you do?”

  “Well, this is something. At least Karoulis is finally sitting up and taking notice.”

  “He said he wanted volunteers. Will you get paid for going in today?”

  “Don’t know. I doubt it though. Budget. That’s all we ever hear, remember?”

  “Are you sure you should be going then?”

  He looked at her. “Yes.”

  She said nothing for a while as he got out of bed and dressed, hauling out his uniform.

  “Why didn’t he wait for a backup?” she asked. “Why wasn’t he more wary?”

  Mitch was tucking his shirt into his pants. “It’s the odds. They just finally caught up to him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Odds always favor that the alarm will be false.” He buckled his belt. “Odds favor that the wind rattled a door, that a book fell off a shelf, that an unwitting employee tripped up the system.” He buttoned the cuffs on his shirt. “I’ve seen the statistics. Last year we answered almost a quarter-million alarms in the Metro area. About two thousand of them were valid. Less than one in a hundred. So you see, Fedwick had reason to feel secure when he answered this one, too. Your guard goes down; you become nonchalant. It can be a year or two before you draw a valid alarm, before you randomly pull out the short straw. And then, the last thing you expect is that you’re going to be assassinated as you walk through the door. It’d be easy to have a million other things in your head in the middle of the night, to not be paying total attention. A third of all false alarms are attributed to system malfunction, a fifth to human error, the rest to weather and security-alarm testings. It’s the whole system. It stinks. Companies with an unaccep
table quota of false alarms should simply be cut off. That way we’d shift the odds slightly; that way, more cops would be likely to be anticipating an illegal entry when responding to an alarm.”

  “I’ve never understood why you didn’t just use police dogs first—send them in to answer an alarm. Let them get killed if there’s anyone there crazy enough to kill.”

  Mitch pulled on his boots and stood up. “They’d tell you ‘budget’ again. The magic word.” A look of wry pain crossed his face. “But it’s never that simple. And,” he added, “they lie to you. You never get to hear the paranoia that results in the real reason. It’s always politics—keeping some pressure group happy. The SPCA maybe. Can you imagine the hue and cry if we said we were going to use dogs the way they used canaries in the coal mines in England? As expendables to warn us of danger?” He shook his head. “The antivivisectionists would be out in force; the humane society. The fucking stoop ’n’ scoopers would have a coronary.”

  “I think you’re the one who’s going to have the coronary.” She got up and kissed him, and he gradually put his arms around her and held her to him tightly. “Go,” she said. “Do what you have to do.”

  Her eyes told him that she understood.

  In the hall, he took his duffle bag from its place in the closet, gripping it in a fist that caused the knuckles to turn to snow.

  He suspected that he would never find Mario’s killer. It was bigger than Mario, bigger than him.

  They would all have to pay. He would see to it.

  17

  “Did I ever tell you about Max Rosen?”

  Mitch turned and glanced at Mario, who was driving, his left arm resting out the open window of the cruiser.

  “Don’t think so.”

  “He was one of my closest friends in high school. He was crazy, though. I think that’s why I liked him.”

  “You mean you had something in common.”

  Mario gave Mitch a quick, wry, dismissive glance. “Yeah. Both our names begin with ‘M.’”

  Mitch smiled. “So, what’s the story with Max Rosen?”

  “Well, he was a drummer in the high school band—you know, percussion.”

  “I understand a percussion can be serious. Hope he was O.K.”

  “You dumb ass.”

  Mitch smiled.

  “Anyway, after high school he drifted to Europe and met up with some guy in Italy who played electric organ. Together, they did a few gigs in Greece, then moved to Scandinavia.”

  “Seen him lately?”

  “Naw. That’s just it. We swap the odd letter—couple of times a year, maybe. Got one from him yesterday.”

  “Still in Scandinavia?”

  “He’s in Greenland.”

  “Greenland!”

  Mario smiled and nodded. “Incredible, eh?”

  “Greenland!” Mitch shook his head, trying to decide if he was being put on or not. It didn’t seem to be the case. “What the hell does one do in fucking Greenland?”

  “He and this other guy answered an ad and ended up as a two-man band in Jakobshavn.”

  “Where?”

  “Do you have to get everything twice?”

  “In this case, I think I do.”

  “Jakobshavn. According to his letter, it’s above the Arctic Circle. Says it has three thousand husky dogs and thirty-seven hundred people, mainly Inuit.”

  “Where does a two-man band play in Jakobshavn? And for whom?”

  “Some hotel there.”

  “You mean people actually go there? Outsiders? Enough to maintain a hotel?” Mitch paused, thinking about it. “Amazing.”

  “His letter was full of wild stuff. Really interesting.”

  “How long’s he going to stay there? Or does he know?”

  “Probably all his life.”

  Mitch looked perplexed. “Why? What for?”

  “He married a local Inuit girl. He’s got ties now.” Mario was silent for a minute, driving easily. “Something like us.”

  “I fail to see the similarity.”

  “We ain’t going anywhere. He ain’t either.”

  “But what the hell could you do in Greenland? At least here, you can, you can...go to a show, or—”

  “Get mugged.”

  “Or watch TV, go out to a nice restaurant—”

  “You can do all that stuff in Jakobshavn.”

  “C’mon, Mario. You don’t really believe that. That’s the end of the world up there. The fucking end!”

  “It’s only forty kilometers from North America.”

  “Yeah. Right. Forty kilometers. If you count Ellesmere Island as part of anything—let alone embellish it by terming it part of North America. It’s about as pertinent to North America as...as Easter Island is, for Christ’s sake.”

  They were both quiet for a moment. Mitch wasn’t sure why he had reacted so passionately. He was rather surprised at himself. He couldn’t believe Mario’s support of his friend’s decision to live in Greenland. It was the last thing he would have expected from the irreverent Italian. Maybe, he thought, they were closer friends than I can understand. Or maybe impending parenthood is playing on his mind, making him take a long, slow look at his surroundings.

  “Max Rosen,” Mitch said, finally.

  Mario didn’t respond.

  “Jewish?”

  Mario nodded. “His parents are having a bird. They raise him up to go to the temple, to take his place in society, and he off and goes to Greenland.” He smiled.

  Mitch felt he should let Mario talk about it if he wanted, without putting him so much on the defensive. “So,” he asked, “what does he do in Jakobshavn?”

  “He says there are apartment blocks there. And flowers flown from Europe. Even got tequila at the booze counter. And dishes for receiving hockey and soccer games on TV, and stores that sell blue movies on videocassettes.” He looked at Mitch briefly. “He can do what we can do, and he can do it safer, and he gets to watch the sun after midnight if he wants.”

  “That’s unnatural,” Mitch said.

  “What is?”

  “The sun after midnight. That’s weird.”

  “And fingerprinting seven-year-olds against possible future abductions...footprinting infants...smuggling dope into the country inside dead birds and crocodile skins—that’s natural, eh? That’s normal.”

  “What’re you talking about? Dead birds, crocodile skins...”

  “I heard the guys in Narcotics talking about it last night. Some wildlife preservation group has discovered that the white ‘preservative’ powder they sometimes find sprinkled on crocodile skins is really cocaine or heroin. The guys who receive ’em just vacuum it off. Same goes for the birds. A shipment of exotic birds comes in from animal dealers in South America. Customs officials aren’t too surprised to discover that some of them have died in transit. Now they’re discovering the birds have been killed before being shipped out and their bodies stuffed with drugs. Why, Helwig, old boy! We’ve left old Greenland with mud on its face. How can it ever hope to match the achievements of the civilized world? Eh?”

  Mitch was silent again. Finally, he said, “Do they need cops in Greenland?”

  Mario looked at him and chuckled. “Just to arrest the jerks who shoot more than three deer a year for their pot.” They drove on for several minutes without speaking. “You ever think you’d like to move away? Anywhere?”

  “No. I like it here.” He paused. “Don’t you?”

  Mario was tugging idly at one end of his bushy moustache. “Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t know if it’s a good place to raise a kid.” Then he glanced at Mitch. “Is it?”

  Mitch, too, was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Don’t know.”

  A red light ahead eased them to a stop. They met one another’s eyes, and Mitch said, “Greenland, eh?”

  Mario’s dark eyes twinkled in response and his white teeth surfaced in a slow smile. “Fucking Greenland,” he said.

  18

  “Capta
in?”

  “What is it, Huziak?”

  The sergeant cleared his throat and did everything but hem and haw. Karoulis looked up from his paper-strewn desk, his eyebrows creasing his forehead as he waited.

  “Well, uh, it’s noon, and I was wondering—as were the others—how long you wanted the dragnet for Fedwick’s killer to stay in effect.”

  Karoulis sat silently.

  “I mean, you know, the chances of actually stopping a vehicle with the guy in it—or even knowing it was the guy if you did happen to stop the right vehicle—are, uh, pretty slim.”

  Karoulis still didn’t answer.

  “News on both radio and TV is having a field day with it. You know—police overkill, that sort of thing.”

  Karoulis finally spoke. “Police overkill, my ass.”

  Huziak looked apologetic. “It’s what they’re saying.”

  Karoulis met Huziak’s eyes. “Suppose Fedwick was their father, or their son, or their husband. Do you think the jackasses would still scream ‘overkill’?” He looked away. “You bet your sweet ass, they wouldn’t. Hypocritical bastards. And it’s not as if it’s costing the taxpayers anything extra. It’s only the volunteers that made it possible. So what’s the squawk? You tell me—what’s the squawk? Eh?”

  Huziak shrugged, waiting. Then he turned to leave the office.

  “Huziak.”

  The sergeant turned.

  “You’re right. Tell the men it’s over. Thank them. And give me a list of everyone who volunteered. I’d like to know who was involved, so I can thank them all personally.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  Karoulis stood up and walked over to the row of file cabinets, leaned an elbow on one, and was silent for a minute. Then, without facing Huziak, he asked, “You think the laser is one of the stolen ones from the armory?”

  “Don’t know, Captain. No way of telling. There were a few kicking around before. Now...” He puffed his cheeks and exhaled a steady stream of air, his face showing the strain that had been building.

  Karoulis nodded, his back still to the sergeant. “One other thing,” he continued, as Huziak headed once more for the door.

  Huziak stopped, waiting.

  “How’s Fedwick doing?”

  “Bad.”

  “He going to make it?”