No Witness But the Moon(99)

And suddenly he did. A rumble of voices over the soft, compacted snow. Angry voices growing louder. Encircling the building forty feet below. Not police. There were no sirens. These people were chanting.

“Kill-er cop! Kill-er cop!”

“What do you think is going to happen,” asked Torres, “if you shoot me up here? You think they’re going to say it was all in the line of duty?”

“Open the door, Freddy!”

Torres pulled the copper-colored key out of his pocket. It was attached to a white plastic key fob. He dangled it in his hand for a second and then flung it over the side of the building.

“What did you do that for?” Vega demanded. “Now we’re both locked up here.”

“That’s right, Jimmy. There’s no escape. Either you shoot me and the Bronx mourns a fallen hero or I shoot you and they lament the tragedy of a cop who went off the deep end. Those are your only two choices.”





Chapter 40


Adele left Fordham quickly, zigzagging through one-way streets, maneuvering around parked cars. Her GPS had told her the location of the Bronx Academy of Achievement. But she had no idea if she could get within a block of the building.

She wondered if she was already too late.

She parked her Prius on a cross street and raced back to the building. It was surrounded in front by several dozen people, all of them chanting, with fists raised in the air. The police had arrived, their flashing lights lending a circus atmosphere to the crowd. A woman watched the spectacle from the doorway of an adjacent laundromat.

“What’s going on?” Adele asked her.

“This police officer went crazy. He dragged a young girl out of here and into the school. And now I think he’s holding poor Dr. Torres at gunpoint.”

Adele’s head was spinning. None of it sounded like Vega. Then again, when he called her Friday night and told her he’d shot a man, that didn’t sound like him either. Nor did that fistfight with a bunch of college students last night.

Nothing sounded like the man she knew and loved anymore.

She cupped a hand across her eyes to blot out the glare of the streetlights and stared up at the roof. The edge of the four-story building was too high to see over. She had no idea what was going on up there. Her feet had gone numb and soggy from the pavement slush. Snow fell down the back of her coat. She felt chilled so deep inside of her that she didn’t think she could ever get warm. She fantasized for a moment that she could speak to these people and calm them down. But she was not Ruben Tate-Rivera. They might listen to him. They would not listen to her.

Conveniently Tate was nowhere to be found.

Four police officers began suiting up in flak vests and body armor. Adele felt the old fear returning, that sense of powerlessness in the face of authority. She tried to tell herself that this was different. Vega was a police officer—just like these men. But then she saw them checking their weaponry and she understood: These officers weren’t here to rescue Vega. They were here to subdue him.

By any means necessary.

*

Vega heard the sirens split the night air. They had an odd compacted quality in the snow. He was near the edge of the roof now, with only a thin lip between him and a forty-foot drop to the basketball court below. He saw flashes of red and blue bouncing off the brick front of the tenements across the street from the school.

Torres stepped closer.

“Down on the ground,” shouted Vega. “Hands above your head!”

Torres ignored him. “Shoot me, Jimmy. Go ahead. You know you want to. It’s you or me. What’s it going to be? You killed Ponce’s brother. You know what it’s like to take a life. You’ve tasted blood. Pull the trigger.”

“Get down. Now!” Vega heard the hard, battle-ready voices of cops on the stairs. Not just uniformed officers, either. This sounded like a tactical squad. They were here to take down the shooter. And since he was the one with a gun in his hand, he qualified.

His feet had gone numb. His arm ached from holding up the gun. His fingers could barely feel the trigger. The snow had gotten a hard crystalline glaze on its surface, the pebbly slickness of moss-covered river stones. It had piled up along the edges of the roof so that the entire surface felt less defined. Plus, it was dark. The ever-present streetlights offered a hazy peach glow to the snowfall, but their pools of light petered off into shadows up here. One wrong move and forty feet of vertical drop guaranteed a quick and messy death.

“Get down!” Vega said to Torres again.

Torres remained standing. “What’s the matter, man? Gun-shy now? Shoot me! I don’t want to be locked up in some ten-foot cell. Shoot me!”

Every ligament in Vega’s body stiffened. He felt paralyzed by his predicament. He could feel his blood rushing through his veins. He didn’t want to pull the trigger. Not again.

Dear God, not again.

Civilians always think you can just shoot a person in an extremity and stop them. But it doesn’t work that way. Moving extremities, even at close range, are hard to hit, and even when you do, the suspect is so charged up on adrenaline, they sometimes don’t feel it and just keep moving anyway. He could miss and hit a cop coming through the doorway. The bullet could ricochet and hit some civilian having dinner in a building across the street. It could pierce an artery and Torres could bleed out anyway. Or Torres could use the seconds it would take Vega to re-aim the gun and push him right off the roof.