Nardone was pale and had a nasty abrasion down the left side of his face, and he was holding his left arm tightly to his chest.
Any minute now paramedics would load him into an ambulance, but I held on to hope that before then I’d get his statement. I’d known Sergeant Robert Nardone for years. He had a sharp eye, worked hard, and was angling for a job in Homicide. Although he’d been injured, he was sitting up, speaking, and seemed to be tracking the scene as it devolved.
I said, “Nardone. Are you okay?”
“Good enough.”
“The guy who did this. Was it Barkley?”
“I forgot to ask for his ID.”
Sarcasm was a good sign. Nardone had a gift for it.
I brushed little bars of soap, bottles of shampoo, sponges, and a spray bottle off a step and sat down beside him. I now had a wide view of the parking lot.
Tourists, paying guests, and local looky-loos meandered across the two hundred square feet of asphalt, stepping on possible evidence and getting in the way of the cops who were doing their best to clear and cordon off the area. No one was taking witness names or statements. A lot rested on what Nardone had to tell me.
EMTs with lights flashing and sirens whooping filed into the area, and civilian drivers leaned on their horns as they tried to leave.
I told Nardone I was concerned that Barkley had hijacked a police cruiser. An armed criminal driving a patrol car could speed without being stopped, could pull drivers over, and if he could get them to step out of their vehicle, he could rob them, kill them, take their car. That stolen black-and-white made Leonard Barkley more dangerous than before.
Nardone gave me his car’s tag number and I called it in, requesting an APB, forthwith. And now I saw another victim. Standing beside the second bus, Lemke and Samuels talked to a patient who was strapped onto a gurney. She was sobbing, and I saw blood running down an arm.
I turned back to Nardone. “Who is she?”
“Housekeeper. Accidental casualty.”
He’d dropped the bravado and was fixing me with a hurt look in his eyes.
“He kicked the shit out of us, Boxer, and took everything but our skivvies. Healy got the worst of it. Way worse.”
“Okay,” I said. “Please start at the beginning.”
Nardone sighed and gingerly touched his face with his fingertips.
When he was ready, he said, “Healy was driving. We were looking for a coffee shop when I saw a guy looked like Barkley cross the road, heading to the motel. I was pretty sure it was him, but the picture I have of Barkley, the dude had a beard.”
“Yep. He shaved. Go on.”
“So we pulled in the lot and saw him take the stairs to the second floor and enter room 208. You can see it at the head of the stairs. We parked over there, where we could watch the room, and I called in a sighting of a suspect wanted for questioning, and we requested backup.”
“But he saw you, right?”
“Yeah. He peeks through the curtain, then opens the door, and I see him assessing his next steps. He’s going to either bolt for the elevator at the end of the building. Or he’s going to vault over the railing. Healy and I get out of the car, draw our weapons, and I yell, ‘Stay where you are. Show us your hands.’
“That’s when the cleaning woman comes out of room 206 and slow-walks her cart along the second-floor walkway, blocking our view of the suspect. She’s wearing earbuds and she’s humming. I can’t see around her, and she doesn’t hear me.”
“And then?”
“And then fucking Barkley lunges, grabs her, and shoves her and her cart down the stairs. I’m in front and she bowls me over. Strike! I fall on top of Healy, who hits his head against the railing. Now all three of us are in a pile, right? Disoriented. Out of breath. The suspect, assumed to be Barkley, grabs Healy out of the pile, pushes him against our car, and yells into his face, ‘I’m the good guy, you dumb shit.’”
“Aw, jeez.”
Nardone swallowed, coughed, and then he continued.
“I’d lost my gun while rolling down the stairs with four or five hundred pounds of people and a cleaning cart on top of me. I hear Barkley gut-punching Healy, who’s grunting and trying to get free of him. Then I see that Barkley has bent Healy over the hood and he’s patting him down, saying, ‘Give me the keys.’
“And then the keys jingle. He’s got them.”