“What do you hunt down here?” he said to Stick, who was turning on the TV.
“Quail and turkey,” Stick said, turning up the volume. “What in the—”
Gannon walked over. On the news channel, there was a helicopter shot of the black Cadillac Escalade he’d shot up, now sitting sideways on the Lexington Avenue sidewalk. It looked like the carcass of a large dead animal that had been brought down. There were half a dozen cop cars around it. A fire truck. Gannon felt like he was going to be sick.
FOUR FEDERAL OFFICERS GUNNED DOWN, it said on the screen crawl beneath.
“And in further developments,” said some male talking head, “to those of you just tuning in, as if the shooting of four federal officers wasn’t shocking enough, we have just learned that three officers of the nearby 19th Precinct, Sergeant James Farina, Sergeant Carla Diaz and Detective Daniel Henrickson, seem to have gone missing during the shooting.”
“What?” Stick cried.
“Investigators are looking into it, but there are some still unconfirmed rumors that the police department coworkers used the emergency to ransack the precinct’s evidence locker of a drug cache and have fled to places unknown.”
Stick started actually laughing.
“Me and Diaz and Farina just became the Jesse James gang or something?” he said, wide-eyed. “That’s what they’re trying to sell?”
“They’re both dead, Stick,” Gannon said.
Stick turned to him wordlessly.
“They shot them when they came in to get us, and then they took the bodies with them,” Gannon said. “You can’t think of these guys as just bad cops, Stick. This was a military operation with highly trained soldiers and helicopters. This was straight-up covert urban guerrilla warfare.”
Stick was silent for a moment.
“We’re like Fallujah now, Mick? Or Somalia? Except instead of crazy warlords, the FBI is gunning after the NYPD?”
“No, it’s not the entire FBI. Just a rogue group within it. Hell, the guys I shot might not even be Americans. They’ve got multinational mercenary contracting companies now.”
“Government special forces murder American citizens now,” Stick said, nodding, absorbing this new reality. “Reporters and even cops. Then the press spins it. These damn feds. Top secret, my ass. Makes sense now why I quit the JTTF. Politicians and all that corporate cocktail party news network anchor reporter bullshit. Money, money, money. Pack of pencil-neck jackasses. I knew something wasn’t right.”
Gannon went into the kitchen. There was some instant pancake mix in a cupboard, and he poured it into a plastic mixing bowl with some water. He began beating it with a big fork he found in a drawer.
“This is some pretty unacceptable shit, Mick,” Stick said, following him into the kitchen. “Farina was kind of a jerk, but he was our brother, man. And the Spanish kid had just started. I’m not sitting still for them getting whacked. I need to...I need to call people.”
Gannon looked at his friend.
“No, Stick,” Gannon said, shaking his head slowly. “They know from the precinct video they scrubbed that we were in your office, that you helped us and left with us. Your house phone, your cell phone, all of it is tapped now. You try to contact someone, hell, you put your battery back into your phone, they’ll be here in an hour.”
“What the hell are we supposed to do, then?”
“Nothing,” Gannon said.
“Nothing?” said Stick.
“Not yet. We rest up for a while. Stay hunkered down. They’ll be looking for a moving target,” Gannon said.