A Danger to Himself and Others: Bomb Squad NYC Incident 1 Read online

  Table of Contents

  A Danger to Himself and Others

  Copyright

  Books by J.E. Fishman

  Series Technical Advisor

  Author’s Note

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  Enjoy the book?

  Bomb Squad NYC

  A Danger to Himself and Others

  Bomb Squad NYC

  Incident 1

  A Danger to Himself and Others

  J.E. Fishman

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, institutions, businesses, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States of America and throughout the world in English by Verbitrage, LLC.

  Copyright © 2014 by Verbitrage, LLC, Series 5

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the copyright holder.

  Edited by Patrick LoBrutto.

  Cover design by Cory Clubb, Go Bold Designs.

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-9898461-0-3

  Print ISBN: 978-0-9898461-1-0

  Books by J.E. Fishman

  Standalone Fiction

  Primacy: A Thriller

  The Dead Field (short story)

  Cadaver Blues: A Phuoc Goldberg Fiasco

  The Dark Pool: A Thriller

  The Bomb Squad NYC Series

  A Danger to Himself and Others

  Death March

  The Long Black Hand

  Blast from the Past

  Bottle Rocket

  As Contributor

  The Beautiful Anthology

  Non-Fiction

  All I Need to Know I Learned from My Horse (co-author)

  Life Is a Series of Presentations (co-author)

  Dynamite: A Concise History of the NYPD Bomb Squad

  Dedicated to Paul “Buddy” Bucha,

  whom I am honored to call friend

  Series Technical Advisor

  Mark Torre

  Lieutenant, New York Police Department

  and

  Commander of the NYPD Bomb Squad

  Author’s Note

  Members of the NYPD Bomb Squad respond to more than 1500 calls a year. Most of these are precautionary sweeps or false alarms. When they find unexploded bombs or dangerous explosives, Bomb Squad technicians remotely disarm them or remove them ninety-nine percent of the time with minimal risk to themselves and others.

  Naturally, storytellers—and readers—aren’t so interested in the ninety-nine percent. It’s the unusual cases that call to us—the possibilities, the what-ifs, the dangers of tomorrow.

  With the help of Mark Torre, who currently commands the NYPD Bomb Squad, Kevin Miles, who retired in 2013 as the FBI’s leading bomb technician, and other sources, I have made every effort to achieve technical accuracy in this book without compromising the safety of law enforcement personnel or the public. In the interests of storytelling, I have taken some liberties with regard to police procedures. I hope readers will make appropriate allowances for this. After all, no one wants to spend his leisure time watching cops fill out forms.

  The real NYPD Bomb Squad, as many know, consists of fewer than forty individuals annexed to a police precinct in lower Manhattan. To avoid any confusion between the world in my head and the world “out there,” I have moved the Bomb Squad to an imaginary precinct on a different street.

  This is indeed a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, events, and incidents are either a product of my imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental. Like any novelist, I am ultimately not hunting facts here but the greater truths of the human condition.

  The real-life heroes of the NYPD, the FBI and other members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force do their best to protect all of us from harm. At some point, if not all of the time, even real heroes must face their own troubles and demons. The difference between them and the rest of us is that they set aside those troubles every day to pursue the greater good.

  In sum, this book isn’t factual. But you may find it true.

  A Danger to Himself and Others

  TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK,

  TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK, TICK

  1.

  DAY ONE—Light

  MANNY DIAZ HAD THIS DEAL where sometimes he’d play the voiceover to his own life in the back of his head.

  “Here’s Manny, down the sidelines—thirty, twenty, ten!” Or…

  “As Supercop walked along the dark alley, demons and serpents fled from his path.” Or, more poignantly…

  “Manuel Diaz occasionally wondered whether he was the hero of his own life or if someone else had landed the part.”

  In Iraq, when he was part of an EOD team, Manny would run a voiceover while looking for tripwires: “Lieutenant Diaz, fifth call of the day and not even two in the afternoon. One-twenty in the shade. Dust thicker than paint from a spray can. He approaches the target with caution, knowing that one false step could mean the end.”

  Kind of cute, right? But it wasn’t a joke exactly, more like comic relief, a means of keeping your heart light under pressure, of banishing distractions from the task at hand. Because, as everyone in this game knew, sometimes you looked away on purpose. Sometimes the booby trap was harder to see head-on and easier to see from the corner of a man’s eye.

  Today was nothing like that, more a way to keep the boredom at arm’s length. Manny was the junior detective on their third bomb sweep of the morning, tasked with the role of sweeper in half the hallway of the VIP floor at the Waldorf-Astoria while one of the dogs, Sheba, and her handler, Detective Third Grade Cam Fowler, went about their business sniffing for trouble in each room of his segment. A few other guys, including the sergeant, were playing sweeper behind another EDC or doing visual checks of their own.

  The US Secretary of State, someone said, would be staying here tonight in preparation for a speech at the UN. In another suite, some Arab potentate planned to sleep with his harem on satin sheets. Before all that, the Secret Service would take up their posts when the NYPD gave the all-clear. They already had the lobby secure.

  And Manny’s voiceover silently intoned: “In the shadows, danger lurks.” Except that it didn’t. Not here. Both Labrador retrievers came back without once alerting. The sergeant reappeared and began filling out his report. All as routine as could be.

  After raising the Secret Service guys on the radio, the Bomb Squad team waited to be relieved from covering the elevator and the emergency exits. The USSS agents showed up quick enough, chests out like someone held the tip of a knife to their spines. Showy. More full of crap than a week-old latrine, so far as Diaz was concerned.

  The cops left together via two elevators. Down on the street, Diaz ended up in one of the response trucks with Fowler, the dog resting inside the built-in cage in back, still licking his chops from the Milk-Bone reward.

  “You
’re quiet today,” Fowler said. “Something on your mind?”

  “Nah. Just bored. I was thinking about that expression: danger lurks. Why does it lurk? Where does it lurk?”

  Fowler bit his lip. He had a long face and a sharp jawline. His blue eyes looked past the expansive white hood of the vehicle. “I don’t know. Is this some kind of brain puzzle?”

  “The thing is,” Diaz said, “for the infantry, the marines, you know, danger don’t lurk. It smacks you in the face, dares you to confront it. This stuff here, what we do—”

  “It lurks.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you miss it, the other kind, facing it head-on.”

  Diaz’s defenses went up. “I didn’t say that. It’s just a different feeling. That’s all.”

  THE BOMB SQUAD OCCUPIED THE rear garage and a handful of cluttered upstairs rooms of the Third Precinct building on Commerce Street in the West Village. Most of the crew from the Waldorf had stopped along the way for coffee, but Diaz and Fowler came straight back because Fowler was eager to uncrate his dog. When they walked in, there were only a few warm bodies upstairs.

  Diaz heard Patti Morris, the squad secretary, fielding a call. The head of the squad, Lieutenant Joseph Capobianco, to whom she usually fed important decisions, had called in sick that afternoon, available only by phone or radio in an emergency.

  Morris placed the receiver in its cradle and turned to Sander Kahn, a sergeant supervisor who was the highest-ranking person in the room at the moment. When you reached that rank you got a higher pay grade, so colleagues sometimes affectionately called you, “Money.” Sometimes not so affectionately. She said, “Hey, Money, report from the Seventeenth of a suspicious package at Saint Pat’s.”

  “We have anyone in the vicinity?”

  She consulted a sheet. “Not really.”

  “I’ll take it myself. Diaz!”

  “On it.” Diaz turned right back around, checking reflexively for the Glock in a hip holster under his pullover.

  “Some kind of luggage by the Fifth Avenue steps,” Morris said, “south side.”

  “Great.” Kahn shook his head as he removed a key from the metal box on the wall. “Right by Saks. Should be nice and zooish this time of day.”

  The key belonged to one of the response trucks. In the garage Kahn opened the back doors and they peered inside to make sure they had all necessary equipment. Everything looked in order. Diaz climbed behind the wheel and Kahn slid in next to him. He was a large man, stocky with thick forearms and a broad chest. His hair and his eyebrows were fully gray, a shade or two lighter than the color of his suit, and the contrast made his dark eyes all the more penetrating. He carried himself like a person of formidable strength, but while Diaz didn’t doubt the man’s toughness, he suspected that Kahn had gone soft in the midsection like anyone middle-aged.

  Diaz had had a lot of opportunity to study the sergeant over the past six months. Nobody said anything specific, but they rode together a lot and Diaz thought he knew why. Although a detective third grade with six years on the force, Diaz had only joined the Bomb Squad eleven months ago. He figured that his rides with Kahn were supposed to season him. In the army, eleven months in theater burned you out. But in civilian law enforcement things moved slower. Even the Bomb Squad didn’t match the intensity of a combat environment.

  “Squad room’s like a damned ghost town today,” Diaz said as they drove up Hudson Street, heading for Eighth Avenue.

  Kahn kept his eyes on his phone, where he was thumbing out a text. “Eight guys down with the flu—eight! Plus two sergeants and the lieutenant. Never seen anything like it. Cap, I’m told, is totally on his ass, can’t even get out of bed.”

  “They say it started with some chickens in China. All these crazy diseases always seem to come from Africa or Asia.”

  “Maybe those Chinese cooked it up in an effort to reduce the local population. Wouldn’t put it past ‘em.” Kahn lifted his eyes to see rain falling and traffic building around Twenty-Third Street. He pocketed the phone and took hold of the squawk box mouthpiece. “Better hit the lights. Take it easy at the intersections though.”

  The voiceover in the back of Diaz’s head kicked in again. It said: “After two hundred rides together, SDS Sander Kahn still didn’t trust the new guy behind the wheel.”

  LEWIS SALINOWSKY NEEDED A FIX. He was also hungry for food, but that could wait. With great effort he pushed and pulled himself up to a standing position, bent over and picked up the cup that had lain at his feet. The soggy cardboard sign he left behind. He had a fresh Sharpie in his pocket and could always make another one.

  After hours sitting on the cold concrete, Salinowsky’s body felt like one of those frozen fish he always saw on the street tables of Chinatown. If a giant hand came down from heaven and lifted him off the ground and smacked him against the side of a building, he felt like he just might break in two. It would be so easy because other forces had already cracked him.

  He fished around in the paper cup with his stiff fingers, uncrumpling bills, refolding them, and slipping them into his pocket. Twenty-three dollars there plus the fourteen he already had—that made thirty-seven. He tilted the cup and dumped the change into his palm and counted. Looked like another seven bucks plus. Forty-four. He could buy half a bundle—carry him through the meat of the week if he was careful—and still have a few dollars left over for pizza. The pizza would hold him until the soup kitchen opened for dinner. Sounded like a plan.

  Rain began falling, small drops but tightly spaced. Salinowsky had to get from midtown, where he’d been testing new panhandling territory, to the Lower East Side, but he didn’t want to waste money on the subway. He thought about jumping the turnstile, but couldn’t risk that, had seen plenty of guys get caught lately with that stunt. Going to jail, even for a night, would bring on the super flu—withdrawal sickness. Not worth the risk. He decided to walk the sixty-some-odd blocks down to his neighborhood.

  Beginning near Columbus Circle, he went mostly east at first, then down Madison Avenue where, near the back of St. Patrick’s Cathedral he got diverted by some police action. After that it was smooth sailing except for the general wetness and the gimpiness that had begun forming in his bad leg. By the time Salinowsky reached Avenue C, he had a blister on his stump. But knowledge of what awaited kept him going.

  At East Second Street, he turned the corner, opened the door to an old tenement house, and hobbled up four flights of stairs. The door was unlocked, several people inside. Dripping on the stained rug, Salinowsky held out his forty dollars and watched the dealer count it with excruciating slowness. He got his half-load and went into the next room, where nearly a dozen people sat on the floor or on an old bed with a soiled macramé blanket bunched in one corner of the mattress.

  He leaned against a wall and collapsed to the floor.

  His hands shook. He’d cut this trip close.

  Some girl took pity on him and did the cooking with her blackened spoon and a Bic lighter. She didn’t even ask for anything in return, just handed him the loaded syringe and went to work on her own fix. From there Salinowsky managed to do himself up, finding a vein near his groin. He leaned his head against the wall and his mind floated off on angel wings.

  It didn’t take long for him to forget about the pizza.

  WORKING THE RADIO, KAHN LEARNED that the police had set up a perimeter by closing off East Fifty-First and East Fifty-Second to cars and pedestrians and taking two lanes out of action on the east side of Fifth Avenue.

  “The book says a thousand feet,” Kahn sniffed. “Never managed close to that in midtown except for a car bomb. Turn here.”

  Diaz didn’t need any reminders on what the book said, but he followed the instructions.

  “Probably they closed the north-side doors to Saks,” Kahn went on. “No doubt Fiftieth is already packed with people getting in the way of traffic. Let’s go north past it up Sixth and wrap around.”

  They had the siren on, as well
as the light bar.

  “We’ll go down Lex and through the barriers they got set up on Fifty-Second,” Kahn said. “Fifty-Second runs east but they’ll have it cleared, so we can go against traffic. Turn here for—”

  “Where you from originally, Sandy?” Diaz was starting to seethe.

  “Long Island. Merrick. Why?”

  “I grew up in Brooklyn myself. I know my way around Manhattan pretty well.”

  “And how much of that in a police car going to a bomb call? Turn it here, please, Detective.”

  They were making okay time. Diaz felt strongly that micromanagement from the guy in the passenger seat was unnecessary. Fortunately, Kahn cut off his own turn-by-turn directions to work the radio, checking in with the midtown precinct and with their precinct downtown. Nobody, so far, had called in any bomb threats against Saint Patrick’s or the Catholic Church in general.

  By the time Kahn started paying attention to the street again, Diaz had navigated them to Lexington and Fifty-Fourth. But from there complete gridlock ensued, even with the siren going and with Kahn over the squawk box telling cars to move aside.

  “Sometimes this city reminds me of Baghdad,” Diaz said. “One second we’d be doing eighty on the Highway of Death and then we’d hit town and it’s just a free-for-all, no lane markers, cars inching along at the speed of a donkey cart. Difference being that there you felt like a sitting duck. Here it’s only a pain in the balls.”

  “Yeah.” Kahn reached for his door handle. “Well, half the drivers look the same, too.”

  He jumped out and rapped on the window of the cab that blocked them, flashed his badge at the turbaned driver, and started barking words of one syllable. He moved onto a delivery van and two more cabs, giving them the same treatment.