“C’mon, c’mon, move your ass…”
Traffic let up as Judge circled the apartment building. He knew who he was looking for. The Feds might notice her if she were attached to an assault weapon, otherwise, they might not. The low-rise was being evacuated and agents hovered in the lobby, at the bottom of the fire escape and at other exits. This would be a room-by-room search. An SUV on the street was overrun by a bomb squad, the agents dressed for the part.
Judge’s assertion was she’d already left, was out here somewhere on foot.
“J.D., you’re up, dude,” he told his dog, whose ears perked to attention. Judge found space for the van, parked and opened the back door. His dog was in his face. “Easy, boy, hold on.”
Kevlar for them both, a longer leash, high-intensity LED flashlight, extra clips, and handcuffs. An ankle holster and handgun. He retrieved the bounty’s tee shirt from a plastic grocery bag to reacquaint J.D. with it, his partner now super-stoked. They followed the perimeter of the building. J.D. picked up a scent at a side door.
“Hold it, Cowboy,” was directed at Judge. Another agent in a suit. “Don’t. Move.”
His partner sniffed and continued straining hard on his leash. “Fugitive recovery agent,” Judge announced. The agent let him badge him, the agent’s associate too busy shaking down exiting apartment residents.
Judge got chatty. “Look, you guys might be wasting your time. My dog is a tracker. His nose says the sniper was here, is gone, and is headed…” he let his partner pull him forward, “this way.”
Judge and dog now had company. Two agents were freed up to walk with them, which meant trot some when J.D.’s Shepherd legs got frisky, and run some as well. They put two blocks between them and the apartment building and were headed southeast. He still had a scent, still tracked the sidewalk, with occasional detours into alleys that dead-ended, returning to the street each time, always moving.
Four blocks into their trek an agent spoke up, his hand to his ear, stopping the entourage. J.D. whined, pulled at his master to step it up. “The supervisor says we’re two blocks from the Key Bridge Boathouse. He thinks that’s where she went. They’re setting up on the bridge so they can get a look at the river.”
Back on the scent his Shepherd took them around an electric gate and underneath one of the arches for the Francis Scott Key Bridge. At the bottom of an incline were stacked kayaks and canoes on a dock, with paddleboats tied together and bobbing in the water next to a few outboards. His dog paced the length of the dock, soon sat panting and out of breath on the canoe end. He waited for a reward.
“She’s in a canoe or a kayak?” an agent asked.
“That’s what my deputy says.”
“Good job. Pay the man,” one of the agents said, and Judge tossed his partner a treat.
Judge retrieved his flashlight, switched it on, the other agents doing likewise with theirs. Their lights swept the area near the shoreline and the dock, showed nothing, so they shined the lights farther out into the river, where distance made them less effective. The agent called his supervisor and seconds later two spotlights on the Key Bridge above them flipped on. A third sparked up, the three of them spaced out along the bridge’s pedestrian walkway. Behind them on the bridge, pulsing red and blue bursts of light sprayed the nighttime sky from the cop cars belonging to the handhelds, the spotlights as bright as searchlights at a Hollywood premiere. The cops aimed them down at the river, close to the bridge, the water murky but calm. Suddenly all lights converged.
A canoe. In it someone with long dark hair was paddling like a champ. A woman. She glided through at a silent clip, the spots lighting her up like a figure skater in a darkened stadium. She put the paddle down, stayed seated, motionless. The canoe drifted a little, the lights blinding her; she raised her arm to shield them. A bullhorn delivered a tinny, garbled voice that might have been a cop, might not have been, sounding more like it came from the river. A deafening foghorn followed the bullhorn.
Christ, Judge thought, a fucking boat, it’s gonna ram her…
A short burst of semi-auto gunfire from the canoe interrupted the foghorn, chipping the face of the bridge beneath the closest spotlight. A second burst, longer and raised higher, found the spotlight the first burst missed. The agents around him on the dock un-holstered their weapons and fired on the canoe, a distance of maybe seventy yards. An uninterrupted burst from the canoe moved from light to light, wild, erratic, the canoe bucking from the recoil but the burst still aimed well enough to neutralize two lights out of three. Judge’s canine pulled hard, wanted to give chase in the water, his master needing two hands to restrain him. The one spotlight on the bridge stayed functional, crammed into barbed wire fencing.
Another blast of the foghorn, and the cop repositioned the last shaft of light to illuminate a cabin cruiser bearing down on the canoe. The cruiser slowed, but not enough. The canoe flipped, was churned underneath, resurfacing in its wake in pieces as the cruiser continued under the bridge. Flashing lights strobed the sky from additional cop cars on the bridge and across the river on the Virginia shoreline, with vehicles advertising in red and blue arriving in large numbers.
A Coast Guard cutter drew alongside the cabin cruiser, both vessels anchoring near the Virginia side after passing under the bridge. A frantic half-hour search found canoe parts and a paddle but no shooter. The effort remained search and rescue for now.
After an hour it became a recovery mission. Divers entered the river to find the body.
On the phone with Geenie, Judge related what he knew, Geenie grunting her responses. After that he read texts from Owen, who’d been trying for the past few hours to get his attention. The texts were frantic, disturbing. Judge and J.D. hitched a ride back to his van then headed to the hospital ER where Owen held vigil.