‘Hurry the fuck up, man, or I’ll blow your fucking brains all over this dirty floor. I ain’t got all fucking night,’ she heard somebody say in a very anxious voice, even before she had a chance to peek around the corner again.
Instantly, Taylor reached for her Glock 22, thumbed the safety off, and very quietly chambered a round. Her stomach’s mating whales had gone quiet all of a sudden, giving way to a heavy-metal drum solo from her heart. This was no well-prepared and thought-out FBI operation. This was no drill. This was sheer bad luck. This was real, and this was happening right there and then.
Crouching down to keep herself hidden from view from the front counter, Taylor moved stealthily up the aisle. She paused before reaching the end of it, and through a gap between some items on one of the shelves, was able to check the round surveillance mirror in one of the ceiling corners.
‘Motherfucker, you think I’m playing wit’ you?’ she heard the anxious voice say again. ‘You think this is a fucking game? You better speed the fuck up or I’ll pop a cap in your ugly ass. You dig what I’m saying, holmes?’
The drum solo in Taylor’s heart gathered momentum. Through the mirror she could see a single perpetrator. He looked young. He was tall and skinny, wearing blue jeans, a dark, loose, New York Yankees sweatshirt, and had a red and black bandana covering most of his face. He was pointing a Beretta 92 semi-automatic pistol directly at the terrified store clerk’s head.
Like a frantic chicken, the perpetrator kept on quickly turning his head every few seconds to check the store’s entrance and aisles. Even from a distance, Taylor could tell that he was completely wasted, wired up on some kind of drug. And that made everything a lot worse.
Despite his incessant checking, the kid with the Beretta was so out of it that he didn’t even notice the police car that had parked just outside the shop.
Officer Turkowski wasn’t responding to a distress call. That small grocery store, stashed away in a dark corner of Queens, had no silent alarm or panic button hidden behind the counter. No, Officer Turkowski simply got hungry and decided to grab a couple of donuts and maybe a few Twinkies to keep him going for the next hour or so. He thought about grabbing a burrito from the Taco Bell on Jackson Avenue, but he was just around the corner from the 24-hour grocery store, and he decided that he fancied something sweet.
Turkowski was a young officer who had been with the NYPD for two and a half years. He’d only started doing solo patrols — twice a week — in the past two months. Tonight, as luck would have it, was a solo-patrol night.
He stepped out of his Crown Vic and, for once, closed the driver’s door without slamming it shut — no noise.
Inside the shop, the terrified store clerk had finished placing all the cash from the register into a paper bag, and was about to hand it over to his assailant when he saw the young police officer appear at the shop’s door.
Turkowski saw the kid with the Beretta a second before the kid saw him. No time to call for backup. Hardcore police training kicked in, and in a flash he had unholstered his gun and, in a two-hand grip, had it aimed at the kid.
‘Drop it,’ he called out in a steady voice.
The kid had already forgotten everything about the money and the store clerk. His only concern now was the cop with the gun. He swung his body around, and in a split second he had his Beretta aimed at Turkowski’s chest.
‘Fuck that, cop. You drop it,’ the kid said, holding his gun sideways in a one-hand grip — street gangster-style.
It was obvious the kid was nervous, but he was no first-timer. In a very agile move, as he pivoted his body to face the police officer, he had taken a step back and strategically positioned himself with his back to the front of the shop. He now had the store clerk slightly to his left, the police officer slightly to his right, and the shop aisles directly in front of him, giving him, out of the three of them, the best overall viewpoint of the entire scene.
Hiding in the aisle, Taylor had the kid’s inverse viewpoint.
‘I said drop it,’ Turkowski repeated, easing himself one step to his right. ‘Put your weapon on the ground, take a step forward, and kneel down with your hands behind your head.’
Still crouching down, Taylor had silently moved up the aisle and was now almost at the front of the shop. No one had noticed her yet. From her hidden position, she got a better look at the entire scene, especially the perpetrator. The kid’s eyes were wild with a mixture of adrenaline, anxiety and drugs. His posture was rigid, but fearless, as if he’d been in that position before. As if he had everything under total control. Turkowski, on the other hand, seemed edgier.
‘Fuck you, cop,’ the kid said, using his left hand to pull the red and black bandana down from his nose and mouth, allowing it to hang loosely around his neck, and revealing his face.
Taylor instantly knew that that was a bad sign. She instantly knew it was time to act before the whole situation got out of control.
Too late.
Like a film on the big screen, as Taylor started getting up from her crouching position, the entire scene switched into slow motion. The kid hadn’t yet noticed her, and no one will ever know if he sensed her presence before she revealed herself, but he gave Officer Turkowski no chance. . no warning. He squeezed the trigger on his Beretta 92 three times in quick succession.
The first bullet hit Turkowski on his right shoulder, rupturing tendons, shattering bone, and blowing up a red mist of blood. The second and third hit him square on the chest, directly over his heart, destroying the organ’s left and right atria, and the pulmonary artery and veins. Turkowski was dead before he hit the ground.
Despite the mess and the blood, the kid didn’t panic. He quickly swung on the balls of his feet to face the store clerk again, grabbed the bag with the cash, and raised his gun. The way he saw it, since he’d already killed a cop, why leave a living witness?
Taylor had read that resolve in the kid’s crazed eyes and movement. She could foresee what was coming, and before he could turn the nightmare into a reality, Taylor was up on her feet. She had stepped away from her aisle cover and into clear view, her Glock 22 firmly aimed at the kid with the Beretta.
Through the corner of his eye, the kid caught a glimpse of movement coming from his right. Instinctively he began spinning his body around, his finger already starting to apply pressure to the trigger.
Taylor had no time to shout out a command or a warning, but she also knew that it would make no difference. The kid wouldn’t have responded. He would’ve shot her with the same determination with which he had shot the police officer.
Taylor squeezed her trigger only once.
The .40 Smith & Wesson bullet was intended to just wound. To hit the kid on the upper arm or shoulder. To force him to drop his weapon, but the shot had been hurried and the kid was in mid-movement. The bullet hit him higher than intended and a few inches to the right. The kid fell back. A chunk of his throat splattered onto the wall behind him. It took him three and a half minutes to bleed out. It took the ambulance ten minutes to get to the store.
He was only eighteen years old.
Fifty-One
Doing her best to keep her face and movements as steady as she could manage, Taylor blinked away the memory.
‘Excuse me?’ She angled her head in a way that suggested she hadn’t heard Lucien’s question properly.
‘I’m sure you’ve been involved in hundreds of FBI investigations, Agent Taylor,’ Lucien said. ‘What I want to know is: have you, in any of them, had to pull out your gun and kill someone, even if in “self-defense”?’