“Someone’s in here with us,” I said, lifting my flashlight up higher.
Mike laughed again. “A loose bison, Coop? A hippo in a hurry? I’m so psyched I could take them with my bare hands.”
“No moving,” a man’s voice said. Whoever spoke was just a few feet away from us.
Mike stepped in front of me. In the same moment, he dropped his flashlight to the ground—maybe hoping to be lost in the dark to whoever was confronting us. He reached under his jacket for his gun.
I lowered my light but didn’t shut it off. I was shaking now, not just shivering, and everything seemed to be happening at once—at warp speed.
“No moving, I said,” the voice repeated.
From within the shadows, I could see a figure on the path.
“Don’t touch that gun, policeman,” he said, with a lilting accent that was part Nigerian and part New York City street talk.
The black-skinned young man had a rifle pointed at us, and the size of it made Mike’s handgun look like a toy.
“You, son,” Mike said, stretching out his left arm in front of him, “you put that gun down.”
“No light,” he said to me. “No light, no moving.”
He was shifting from one foot to the other. He looked as nervous as I felt.
I turned the beam off and lowered the flashlight to my side.
“Drop it,” he said. “Drop the light.”
I let it fall beside my foot.
“I know who you are, son,” Mike said, playing a dangerous game of chicken with his adversary. “Your name is Henry Dibaba.”
The kid seemed startled by Mike’s naming him. The tip of his rifle instantly dipped toward the ground, but he raised it again.
I was startled by the connection Mike made, too—only now remembering that he had seen Dibaba on police surveillance video hours after the kid had been fleeing from our burning car. Later Mike had been given close-ups of the suspected arsonist’s face in a mug shot.
“You can’t shoot a cop, son,” Mike said, as calmly as though he was talking to a friend. “Put that rifle down before you make a bad mistake.”
“You the one making a mistake,” Dibaba said. “You here. Here is the mistake.”
“You have no idea why we’re here, Henry, so you need to just step aside and let us out. No gunshots, no mistakes,” Mike said. “Everybody goes home happy.”
Dibaba lifted the rifle to his narrow shoulder. There was a scope attached to it that I could see. I also assumed there was a suppressor, to silence the terrible noise that shots would make.
“Back up,” Dibaba said. “Two of you back away from here.”
Then he squeezed his lips together and whistled. He whistled three times, long and loud.
Mike stepped backward, onto my toes. When he released them, I shuffled my feet to move backward too.
“You’re already in trouble, Henry,” Mike said. “What are you whistling for? You want help? You think someone’s going to come help you?”
I didn’t want Mike to keep talking. He was making the kid more jittery each time he spoke.
“No trouble,” Dibaba said. “Not my trouble.”
“You set my car on fire on Thursday night,” Mike said. “You tried to kill me. It’s all your trouble.”
Dibaba held his head up and stared at Mike.
“Oh, yeah, Henry. My car, on East Sixty-Fourth Street,” Mike said. “We got you on camera.”
“No way,” Dibaba said, a short, clipped phrase that was totally New York City.
Mike pointed over his head and Dibaba looked up. “There are cameras on streetlamps all over the city, Henry,” Mike said. “You dumped the bicycle on Sixty-Fifth Street and we could see you running.”
“Running where?”
Dibaba was distracted from his own rifle by Mike’s words. He lowered it to his side.
“Into the zoo, Henry. The Central Park Zoo, right on Fifth Avenue.”
“But how—?”
“Where you feed the animals,” Mike said. “There are cameras everywhere. Even here, right outside the fence.”
Dibaba whistled again, three more times. Then he turned his head to look over his shoulder, as though he expected someone to respond to his calls.
Mike was getting to the kid. He was beginning to understand that Mike was not just a stranger who had stumbled onto the stash of ivory.
“So far, Henry, you don’t have a problem with me,” Mike said, “or I would have been on your ass before you had a chance to point your gun.”
Mike listed his parents’ names and their Nigerian origins and his ex-girlfriend’s name and the charge for which Henry had been arrested, right outside the rail yard.
The young man was skittish.
“Just let the two of us walk out that gate, Henry, and then I’ll come back and talk to you—man-to-man. Let you know how you can make this right.”
Henry’s eyes darted from the large hoard of ivory tusks, aware that we had seen the treasure he must have been sent to guard, to the open gate behind his back.
“I’m going to pass through, Henry,” Mike said, taking a step forward, “and you’re going to let us walk out. Is that okay?”
“I heard you talk. I heard you on the phone.”
I was hoping Mike didn’t tell him the cavalry was coming. I was hoping that Mike didn’t lay on the stuff about cops arriving to reinforce us, because I thought it would have Henry jumping out of his skin, thinking that we had already called for other police backup.
“Forget it, Henry,” Mike said. “That had nothing to do with you.”
The young man took a few steps closer to Mike.
I heard noise outside the gate, twenty feet or so behind where Henry Dibaba was standing. He heard it too.
A male voice called out to him in an African dialect. I guessed the cavalry was on location after all—just not our troops. The fear was paralyzing.
Dibaba turned his head again, and Mike turned his to me. “Pick up your light, Coop. Get ready to bolt.”
“No talk,” Dibaba said to us.
“Who you got there, Henry?” Mike said.
“Men. My men, to help me.”
Men—I didn’t know how many, and at least one of them was armed with a rifle—stood between us and a path back to the street.
Dibaba let one hand off his rifle, rotating his body to wave his backup in through the gate. He was speaking to him—or them—in the same dialect.
I stooped to grab my flashlight but didn’t turn it on.
Mike had the three seconds he needed, too. He lunged forward, tackling the skinny kid around the hips and throwing him to the ground.
The rifle fell free—like a football jogged loose in a fumble.
Mike picked it up and stood, yelling at me to run away. I stood still, unwilling and unable to move, watching as he stomped on Dibaba’s chest with his left foot, stunning the kid.
Someone outside the gate fired the first shot. It was aimed in our direction, so I turned away and headed deeper into the woods.
“Go, Coop,” Mike yelled, and then I heard him discharge the rifle.
There were shouts in another language, but no screams, so I doubted he had fired at them.
I paused to look for him. He was standing over Henry, who was rolling on the ground and holding his stomach with both hands.