I give her my best doorman dead eyes. ‘I only kneel before the baby Jesus on Christmas morning.’ I glance over her shoulder. ‘Why don’t you ask my friend?’
Deacon closes one eye, like she needs to take careful aim. ‘Yeah, sure. I’ll ask the guy behind me. Kneel the fuck down, McEvoy.’
I press the remote button in my hand and the window buzzes open, swatting the detective on the butt.
Deacon puts three shots into the pane and I’m out the door before the glass stops tinkling.
I have a ten-second head start, and I can add a couple of minutes to that unless Deacon is crazy enough to chase me half naked.
Better pick up the pace.
CHAPTER 8
Army basic is a lot like school. You learn a lot of junk that you won’t ever need, and miss out on stuff that could save your life. I’ve been cracking heads for twenty-five years now and not once did spit-shined shoes or a shipshape locker give me an edge.
Some people learn the hard way that life lessons are the valuable ones, like a certain short-lived Private Edgar English who checked his Steyer for blockages by squinting down the barrel. Others are lucky enough to survive the lesson and bank the information. I know because I was that student of the bleeding obvious during my second tour.
One desert-dry evening, Tommy Fletcher and I were leapfrogging ahead of our patrol in the village of Haddataha when we were cut off by sniper fire. Suddenly the air was alive with buzzing, shimmering missiles. Metal sparked against metal and chunks of building rained on our shoulders. Jaded old men played backgammon on their steps, barely pausing to watch the intruders get shot at.
While I wasted time spouting military jargon and making hand signals, Tommy put his elbow through the window of the nearest car and twisted the ignition tumbler with his bayonet. Thirty seconds later we were safe in the ranks of the UN peacekeepers. And you can bet your grandma’s medical insurance that the first thing I did when my heart slowed down was learn how to start a car I don’t have papers for.
Different time, same strategy; I would make my getaway in Deacon’s car, bringing the evidence with me and leaving the detective without a ride.
I take the steps three at a time to the street, and it doesn’t take a genius to spot Deacon’s unmarked cruiser virtually abandoned in the vicinity of the kerb. For a start there’s a Police on Duty card on the dash. Then there’s the fact that I followed this crate around Cloisters on a bicycle not twelve hours since. But the major clue is the trail of blood leading from the popped trunk.
Smear, pool, smear is the pattern. Someone crawled, then rested, then crawled.
Goran’s alive, says Ghost Zeb in a Prince Vultan voice.
A cop leaking outside my apartment. Deacon will have me on death row for this.
I check the trunk to be certain that Goran isn’t in there, but the only thing I find is an In & Out Burger carton run aground on a metal ridge in the congealing crimson lake. No one with that much blood on the outside of their body is crawling very far.
‘What did you do, McEvoy?’
Deacon is beside me, her coat belted tightly at the waist. Pallor shines beneath her dark skin, like a ghost behind a window.
‘Not me,’ I say. ‘I just got here.’
Deacon jams her weapon into my kneecap, and I can see she’s got the hobble word on her mind again.
‘There are people on the street,’ I point out, but she’s beyond caring.
Enough of this.
I grab the gun and twist it clean out of Deacon’s hands. A move every doorman knows well.
‘Oh yeah?’ says the detective, and I glance down to see a small snub-nose tickling my kidney. Her ankle gun. Cobra.32 maybe.
This is insane. I need to eat something and sleep some more. A massage would be nice, and I hear body wraps are good.
It’s just gone sunrise and I’m wrestling a blue on the front porch.
‘You can’t just shoot me, Deacon.’
The detective shrugs. ‘Fuck it, McEvoy. I’m just staying alive until someone kills me.’
I know this fatalism well. There were nights in the Lebanon when death and life held more or less the same appeal.
‘We need to find Goran, Ronelle. It’s the only way out of the tunnel.’
Deacon dips a painted nail in the blood. ‘I put a full clip into her,’ she says, staring at her fingertip.
‘I carried a survivor out of a bomb crater once, and saw another guy killed by a bee sting. You never know.’
‘Jesus Christ, McEvoy,’ says Deacon, snapped out of it by my dime-store philosophising. ‘Bee sting? You on some kind of drugs? Any more crap about bees and I will put a slug into you.’
This is the Ronelle I am comfortable with.
The blood trail meanders across the street, along the kerb for a couple of gouts, then down a basement stairwell.
Deacon snatches her gun from my hand. ‘What do you think, Hawkeye? She at the bottom of the stairwell? Or maybe all that blood is from some guy with a bee sting.’
I am comfortable with this Ronelle; that’s not the same thing as happy.
A street sweeper trundles around the corner from Cruz Avenue, its twin revolving brushes scraping the surface of last night’s leftovers. We watch the bristles turn red as the sweeper ploughs heedlessly through Goran’s tracks. The driver’s forehead smudges the glass and he looks like he would need a defibrillator to get him noticing anything.
‘Christ,’ says Deacon, and I notice the blood on her bare legs.
We splash through the street sweeper’s backwash to the stairwell. Deacon swings herself around a lamppost, her coat balloons and I realise she has underwear and a shoulder holster on under there and nothing more.
Something occurs to me. ‘Careful, Detective.’
Too late. A bullet punches into the lamppost, sending a church bell bong along its shaft.
I pull Deacon away from the stairwell. ‘Did you bother to disarm your partner?’
‘She was dead. Why disarm her?’
Detective Deacon is the kind of person who would argue with St Peter.
‘Obviously she is not as dead as you thought.’
Deacon gets a two-handed grip on her automatic. ‘This is good. If I can take her alive, she can put me in the clear. Ish. The trunk bit could take some explaining.’
‘Call it in, then.’
‘With what? The spy radio in my panties?’
A mailman runs past us shouting into his radio, effectively doing the calling in for us. We have about three minutes before this place is swarming with police.
I lie on my stomach, wiggling my fingers at Deacon. ‘Gimme the Cobra.’
Deacon looks at me as though I’m asking her to donate a kidney. ‘Give you the what?’
‘You’ve read my file, Ronelle. This is what I do.’
Deacon slaps the gun against my chest like it’s a subpoena.
‘Make sure you shoot the right cop.’
I don’t respond. All this wisecracking is more exhausting than the gunplay.
My subconscious flicks through my memories for an appropriate Lebanon flashback, but I force that kaleidoscope of mayhem back down. Now is not the time for dwelling in the past. It would be a shame to take a bullet in the head because I was reliving Operation Green Line.
The basement stairways on my block are pretty uniform: cast-iron railing, eight steps down and a midget door wedged into a concrete alcove. These nooks were not built for someone of my size. I grab a rail and drag myself along the pavement, shirt rasping against the slabs.
There is noise below. Laboured breathing and rustling of material. I sense that Goran is nearly done, but it doesn’t take much energy to pull a trigger one last time. I’ve seen guys fight for half a day, fuelled by nothing more than bile.