Zombies! (Episode 7): Conflicts of Interest (2 page)

"Hold on," Heron whispered into the phone before he double-checked Alicia and then closed the door. Putting down the toilet cover, he took a seat and lifted the phone to his ear. "Frank?"

"Sorry to call you so early, Lieutenant," came Culph's wary voice.

"You're at your apartment." It wasn't a question. The caller ID gave him all of the information he needed.

"I needed a few things. I won't be here long."

"Did you kill that woman, Frank?"

There was silence for a minute while Culph considered his answer. "Does it matter?"

"Of course it matters."

"I need a favor, Lieutenant…Anthony."

Heron sighed. "Frank, you're a fugitive. I can't do you any favors. I shouldn't even be having this conversation without thinking of a way to make it work against you."

"I know," Culph said. "I didn't want to have to put you in this position, but I need to get out of the city, start over. You know?"

"Frank, what you need…"

"Please don't tell me I need to turn myself in, face up to what I did…allegedly. It's never going to happen. I won't miss anything from this life and nothing's going to miss me. I just need some money, you know? Just a little cash to get under way."

"I can't give you any money, Frank."

When Culph didn't immediately reply, Heron thought he was going to beg. But he didn't. He never would. "Okay. I didn't think so."

"I don't know what to say, Frank."

"It's cool. Look, I know you've got to call this in as soon as we're done so I'll be real quick. The money wasn't the only reason I called." He paused but Anthony didn't say anything. He couldn't even imagine a position even more difficult than the one in which Culph had already put him. "I wanted to say thank you."

"For what?" Heron's voice had gone hoarse.

"Well, maybe I was just in the right place at the right time, but you gave me a chance that no one else was ever going to give me. So, thank you. And, I'm sorry I let you down."

"Don't be sorry, Frank," Heron said. "I think I kind of let you down."

Culph chuckled. "Not a chance. Well, I know you've got a phone call to make. Goodbye, Anthony."

"Goodbye, Frank."

The line went dead and Heron's mind told him let the homicide detectives know that Culph was at his apartment, but his hands were shaking so badly that it took him several minutes to make the call.

***

BY
the time he went back to bed, Alicia was snoring softly. He loved the way she snored. She sounded like a purring cat. Instead of keeping him awake, it often lulled him to sleep. It did that too often nowadays as he was always getting home and getting to bed after she was already asleep. He missed his family. He missed the hectic schedule of a homicide detective because it was far less hectic than the schedule of a zombie cop.

It was getting close to 5:00.

Heron knew that sleep was over for the night despite the fact that he'd gotten just shy of four hours of it. He didn't technically have to be at work for another three hours but he would go in early. There was no point in staying around the house. Even if he waited, he wouldn't get to see Alicia and Mellie. They might just be getting up if he was lucky. Maybe if he went in early, he could beg off early. And maybe there wouldn't be any phone calls after he got home. And maybe they would find a cure and the zombies would all just go away.

Gathering up some clothing for the day, he went back into the bathroom and ran the shower. At least he could take his time. Through the fogging mirror, he looked at his aging face. His hair had started to grow back and he was too tired to shave it. The chemotherapy was over and so his body was supposed to be recovering. Meanwhile he felt worse than ever. Of course, running around the city looking for zombies would have that effect on anyone. Heron didn't need cancer to look and feel like crap.

After the shower, he dressed quickly, shoveled in a Pop Tart (chocolate), and was on his way. As always, he felt sad as he was leaving home. Now more than ever it seemed to him as if he was a stranger in his house. Alicia tolerated his hours. She tolerated it because he felt strongly about his work and because she knew that his was one of the most important jobs in the city. There had been a couple of moments when she had broken and screamed at him.
There has to be someone else!
And she was right. Ultimately, the job was going to kill him. And it seemed a lot more painful than cancer. So why should Heron be the only man in New York City who could handle a zombie outbreak? Even when Captain Naughton had given him the job, he had told him that there were more qualified people. And yet Heron had excelled. The city was relatively safe, which meant that zombies hadn't taken over completely. His squads were quick to respond and kept the number of casualties from incidents down. Still, they couldn't police the spread of the infection. That was Denise Luco's job.

According to Naughton, who was openly dating Luco, she was making strides. There had been talk of an expert coming in from overseas, but very little had been said about this expert's qualifications. Naughton, who was usually up front with Heron, had told him outright that there was very little he could say about the expert. But he had nodded and winked, which meant very little to Anthony Heron.

It was just before 6:00 and the traffic was starting to thicken up around the city. Rush hour had been evolving for many years as work hours had changed and people had tried every which way they could to beat the traffic. There had been a time when Heron could never understand how people got into their cars and spend an hour and a half going sixteen miles to work. It seemed like the stuff of madness. And yet he had grown up and done it himself. The radio helped. Giving up on the fantasy of a better method and accepting it helped even more.

The office was almost empty at that time of the morning. It would be another two hours before the bulk of the staff started coming in to work. There were always people manning the phones and two squads available for immediate deployment. But they tried to give most of the staff daytime hours, rotating everyone in and out of night shifts. By keeping staff numbers low during the night hours, it gave everyone time with their families. Everyone except Anthony Heron.

His voice mail was choked with messages about zombie attacks, zombie experiments, zombie recipes, and zombies from outer space. It took him an hour to sift through all of them every day and he didn't even listen all the way through most of them. There was a written message from Jamie Mijaro, who was the investigating detective on the Culph murder case. Of course, he had reported the phone call with Culph and Mijaro would want to question him about it. In his email, there was a report from Gregory Smith. He and his team were investigating what had been termed
Zombie Safe Houses
, places where the zombie rights nuts were collecting and storing zombies so that they wouldn't be "slaughtered" by police or turned in for experimentation. The week before, they'd discovered such a collection at
Angus Construction Yard
, when Shawn Rudd had texted Heron during what appeared to be a zombie hunt. Shawn was missing now. Smith had posted officers to watch the yard in an effort to find out who was responsible for the collection. Nothing had come of it on that end, but he had arrested two people posting signs labeling the yard as a safe house.

Jeff and Belle Percy were the parents of Tiffany Percy. During the hunt at
Angus
, she had been bitten by a zombie and, of course, subsequently died as a result. Apparently unsatisfied with the efforts of the police department, Jeff and Belle had taken matters into their own hands. They had posted signs all over the yard, identifying it to the public. Though they claimed to be working on their own, similar signs had popped up in two other locations, one of which had been set afire. The result of that fire was that one firefighter had been killed and another had been critically injured. He was still in the hospital.

For a long while, Heron just sat at his desk and was lost in thought. It was rare that he had nothing to do, at least nothing that couldn't wait, and he basked in it. Sometime after 8:00, the light on his phone went on so he picked it up. The receptionist informed him that Officer Greg Smith was on the line for him so he instructed her to put him through.

"Good morning, Lieutenant."

"Morning, Smith. What's up?"

"Do you feel like coming out to Brooklyn?"

Heron sighed.

***

SMITH
was feeling a bit anxious over having the lieutenant out to the
Angus
site. After their discovery of the location, Heron had put him in charge of what essentially amounted to a stakeout. He was given men to assign and ordered to wait and watch. But no one had come to the site to check on the zombies. In fact, until their arrest of the Jeff and Belle Percy, they hadn't even known the significance of the location. That was actually a primary goal of the job. Heron wanted to know how and why so many different zombies were in that one place. Well, they knew that now. The
ZRA
was collecting them into safe houses so they wouldn't be persecuted. Their web site actually used that word.
Persecuted
.

But now there was a new development. The zombie activity over the last few days, since they had caught the Percys hanging signs, had been steadily diminishing. The day before had marked two days since any of the officers on duty had reported a sighting on the grounds. Choosing to use his authority as commander of the mission, he ordered a squad inside. All of the zombies were gone. All but one, that is.

Heron arrived about an hour after their phone conversation. Traffic was a bear at that time of day. By the time he arrived, he was craving a cigarette badly. The cravings had been coming back since the end of the chemotherapy. He knew it was psychological but that didn't seem to help any. Two officers were standing by the squad van smoking and when he saw them it was all he could do not to pick out some minor detail and rail on them about it. Instead, he located Smith and tried to regulate his breathing.

Between Smith's anxiety and Heron's irritability, their conversation was volatile.

"What's brought me out to Brooklyn?" Heron asked sharply.

In a clipped tone, Smith filled him in on the details. He could see the lines around Heron's eyes and mouth tightening as he listened. He was not pleased and there were any number of reasons why. Dozens of zombies had been smuggled away right out from under the noses of Smith's men. Smith had ordered a raid without getting authorization. But Heron wasn't upset about any of those things. He was just wondering why he'd had to come all the way to Brooklyn to hear a report that could just as easily have been emailed to him. In fact, aside from that, he was pleased with Smith's initiative in ordering the raid. He was thinking that Smith would make a better second in command than Culph had. So good, in fact, that he could shoulder some of the burden.

"I wanted you to see this, Lieutenant, and tell me how to handle it," Smith was saying.

Nodding, Heron followed him into the yard. It looked a lot different in the daylight than it had at night. The piles of work material weren't nearly as foreboding as they had been. The dark buildings weren't so dark. He could see that all of the windows had been broken. Every last one of them. Smith had ordered that so that there would be as much sunlight as possible when his men went inside.

"There's a tunnel that leads from a subbasement to an unused sewage pipe. It leads to the river, but there's an accessway that opens out onto dry land. It's pretty obvious that they used that to get all of the zombies out. If they did it at night, it would have been easy to move them all without my men knowing."

Heron nodded, understanding.

"We've checked every building," Smith continued. "The
ZRA
people were pretty thorough. There's only one zombie left on the premises and we think she was, well, hiding."

Heron stopped short. "Did you say hiding?"

Smith turned to look at him, big saucer eyes and well defined cheekbones making an odd medley with his worried expression. "Yes, sir."

"What makes you think that?"

"You really need to see her to understand."

Heron gestured forward and Smith resumed walking. The two didn't speak after that. They went past the materials and into one of the buildings that was near where Heron had found Shawn's cell phone. He patted his pocket where he kept it. He'd bought a charger for it so the battery wouldn't die and he prayed every day that Shawn would return or he would call it or something would come through that would lead him to the boy's whereabouts. He had personally filed the missing persons report and paid for two thousand fliers to be made and distributed. But there were so many missing persons nowadays and it was a one in a million chance that Shawn would ever be found.