I landed just short of Carl, and a single heartbeat after, a piece of burning acoustic tile impacted his back and set his coat ablaze. I scrambled to my knees and pulled my bare hand up into my coat sleeve, slapping at the flames to keep them away from his head as I struggled to pull his coat off. Ben was immediately on the other side, hefting him up and extracting his right arm from the sleeve. With a quick twist, we wrenched Deckert out of the lined trench coat and threw it across the room.
Ducking under his limp arms and draping them over our shoulders on either side, we supported him between us and rushed headlong for the now open door. The cold air embraced us as we stumbled through the opening, me going first. Ben supported Deckert’s weight from below as we struggled up the concrete stairwell, slipping and sliding on the fresh snow.
Ben pushed upward, and I shouldered more of Carl’s weight as he moved up the stairs. I twisted to increase my support and slipped from the edge of the step, tumbling backward. Ben caught Deckert and held him as I grabbed frantically for the handrail. I managed to grip the cold metal at the last moment, keeping myself from crashing at the bottom but ending up a pair of steps below the two of them.
I started back upward, and a heavy “whump” sounded behind me. A rush of hot air and smoke pushed past through the door and into the exterior stairwell, forcing us to choke on our breath once again. Flame licked past me on the right, and I ducked my face into my shoulder as I continued to move. Fear kicked in once again, and I scrambled up the stairs, ducking beneath Deckert’s shoulder and taking the lead once again.
The frozen precipitation was coming down hard above us, forming its own brand of haze in the atmosphere, and our labored breaths puffed out like bursts of steam escaping from an old locomotive. The frosty air filled my lungs only to be vomited back out in a violent sputter. I hacked violently and felt myself going lightheaded. I pushed hard, the muscles in my legs burning with the strain. We had to get away from the house, and Ben wasn’t going to be able to drag both of us. I gulped in another deep breath and willed myself to hold onto it.
I topped the stairs and pushed out, trying to pull the dead weight behind me, all the while hoping that the “dead” part would remain a figure of speech. I found my footing as I stepped into the yard and pressed forward. A split second later, Ben crested the flight of steps, and we limped away from the danger of the house, trudging through a good two inches of icy, white fluff.
We were stumbling almost drunkenly across the yard, traveling in no particular direction other than away. The sound of a distant siren tickled the inside of my ears, thrusting itself past the ringing that had been left in the wake of the close-proximity gunfire.
I hoped that it was on its way here.
My cheek was beginning to throb where the shrapnel had impacted it earlier, and I remembered that it was probably still protruding from my face. The fog in my brain was starting to clear, ushered away by the quick dose of adrenalin my body elected to inject into my bloodstream at the bottom of the stairs. I realized that I was aching in more places than just my cheek, and I was going to have to take inventory at some point.
However, at this particular moment, Deckert was my primary concern. I released the breath to which I had willed myself to cling and drank in a new volume of the clean atmosphere, continuing to press forward. Even though we were heading away from the house at a wounded trot, the stench of the fire remained with me as if I was still standing in the basement. I was afraid to look back at the house because I feared that I would see the monster chasing after me. I could still feel the heat at my back.
I continued on my trajectory in the opposite direction of the burning house, not exactly sure where we should go. I only knew that we needed to get far enough away that we would be safe, and then we could use a cell phone to call for help.
I was just about to look up and try to gain my bearings when the dull pain of a full-force tackle tore into my back. I was twisted away from Deckert by the blow, and pitched forward. An unintelligible banshee wail soaked through the curtain of semi-deafness in my ears, and someone rode me to the ground, flailing madly all the way.
CHAPTER 17:
The utter shock of being tackled took a moment to set in. Initially, my face was filled with snow, and I was blinded to what was going on around me. That, combined with my still diminished hearing, left me in a surprised daze. All I knew was that someone was on top of me, and I thought that I was being hit repeatedly. Whoever was attacking me was also yelling something, which to me was, for all intents and purposes, unintelligible, coming across as nothing more than a jumble of excited noise.
I was pinned in place and stunned into immobilization. As the bewilderment wore off, however, I could definitely feel the thumping against my back. I started to wince as the next blow fell and then realized that it didn’t really hurt all that much. My mind raced as I tried to reconcile the absence of serious agony in connection with the blows. Unfortunately, the equation simply didn’t work out for me.
I finally decided that either I had already taken so much abuse while in the house that it just didn’t matter any more or that the adrenalin in my system was dulling the pain for the time being so that it could spring it on me later. Whichever it was, my attacker was having very little effect at the moment other than just generating some general discomfort.
I suddenly felt myself being rolled to the side, and it crossed my mind that maybe I could seize the opportunity. I clenched my fists, preparing to fight back against the mysterious combatant. As my right shoulder rotated upward, I pulled my left arm in and slid it beneath my rising chest. By the time I was on my side, I had twisted it free, and I tensed my muscles in preparation. Using the supplied momentum to roll myself the rest of the way over, I swung my left arm in a wide, roundhouse arc.
Fortunately for both of us, the firefighter kneeling next to me jerked back just in time to cause me to miss.
“Whoa, sir!” she shouted as her hand came up and deflected my arm.
Her voice was just audible enough for me to make out what she had said, and the sight of her brought my tension back down to a manageable level. I allowed myself to relax, and my head fell back into the snow. “Carl…” I wheezed. “Heart…”
Her lips moved, and I shook my head.
“He’s right here.” She raised her voice and repeated the comment as she fought the zipper on the front of my coat with a sense of urgency. “The paramedics are already with him. Are you having trouble hearing?”
“Yeah. Explosion. Ringing.” I sputtered once again as my breathing started to come under control for the first time in what seemed like forever. “He okay?”
“He’ll be fine, sir,” she told me.
“Ben?”
She pointed above and to my left, so I twisted my head to have a look. My friend was remaining staunchly by Deckert’s side as the paramedics were loading him onto a backboard.
Ben pulled a clear, plastic oxygen mask away from his face and sputtered, “I’m here, white man.”
I made out what he was saying more from reading his lips than actually hearing him.
“Can you walk, sir?” The firefighter was talking to me again.
I turned my face back to her and managed a weak grin. “I was before you tackled me.”
She smiled back. “You didn’t give me much choice. We were coming around the back to vent the structure, and the first thing we saw was the three of you running like maniacs. We couldn’t seem to get your attention though.”
“Well, there was this fire you see…” I let my voice trail off.
“Yeah, that’s what I hear,” she answered with a grin. “So, we need to get this coat off of you.”
I swallowed hard and looked back at her as if she had lost her mind. “You did notice that it’s snowing out here, didn’t you?”
My wry comment was peppered with small fits of coughing.
“Yes,” she nodded as she spoke. “But apparently you DIDN’T notice that you were on fire.�
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The abrupt tackle suddenly made all kinds of sense. The light must have snapped on behind my eyes because she just looked back at me and grinned.
“I thought someone was attacking me,” I offered.
She nodded. “I pretty much got that from the roundhouse. Can you sit up?”
I pushed myself up and felt half the joints in my body pop and creak as I did so. I winced and continued until I was fully upright. The firefighter gingerly extracted my arms from the heavy winter coat, and without hesitation, the cold air wrapped itself around my sweaty body, bringing an instant chill. The snow beneath me was already melting from my body heat and soaking into my pants, leeching the warmth from me. Sitting there, I started to realize just how miserable I felt.
The firefighter worked her fingers through the elastic strap on another oxygen mask and pulled it over the back of my head then adjusted the business end over my nose and mouth.
“Just breath normally,” she instructed.
I nodded as I sucked in the fresh oxygen then spit out a quick cough.
“I know it’s hard, but don’t gulp it,” she told me again. “Just breath normally.”
I stared across the yard at the back of the house and saw that with the exception of the smoke billowing from the basement door, the outer structure seemed relatively intact. Of course, I had no idea what the damage was like from the front. In any case, the blurry scene before me sat farther in the distance than I had expected. Apparently, we had been covering ground at a pretty good clip when we escaped.
“You’re lucky,” my rescuer told me as she shuffled around and draped a blanket across my shoulders. “It looks like your coat took it all, except maybe…”
“Except maybe…” I started to ask then pulled the mask out from my face for a moment. “Except maybe what?”
“Did you happen to have a ponytail?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Well… Not so much anymore.”
* * * * *
The front of the house was a somewhat different story as compared to the back. Although it could have looked far worse, it was obvious upon first glance that the structure had been involved in a fire. A portion of the roof had been burned through, and all of the windows were broken. Smoke still streamed out of any open orifice, mixing itself with the falling snow to form an eerie curtain of haze.
Firefighters were still entering and exiting the home, attacking what remained of the blaze with hoses that trailed in through the front door as well as around to the back side. Still, from outward appearances, it didn’t look anywhere near as bad as it had been on the inside.
Being mid-afternoon on a weekday, there was a noticeable absence of onlookers; something I’m sure made life easier on the professionals trying to do their jobs. One of the firefighters had told us, however, that a news crew was on the scene.
Ben and I were presently parked in the back of an ambulance, watching the goings-on through the open back door. Carl Deckert had already been rushed from the scene in a different life support vehicle, siren blaring and emergency lights strobing. The last thing we had been told was that he had gone into a full-blown cardiac arrest but that the paramedics had been able to defibrillate his heart. He certainly wasn’t out of danger, but he had a strong, regular pulse and was stable for the time being.
My cheek was throbbing where an EMT had extracted a piece of shiny, brass-colored metal about the size of the nail on my pinky finger. From the look of it and the circumstances of it embedding itself there, we decided that it was probably a piece of the collar surrounding the deadbolt.
Ben was seated across from me in the back of the ambulance. He had been far from immune to the flying shrapnel himself. He was presently slouched forward with his elbows on his knees, quietly staring out the opening in the back of the vehicle. His hands were wrapped in loose windings of gauze that were stained bright red in the spots where blood had soaked through, and he allowed them to hang limp.
I hugged the blanket tighter about myself and reached around to carefully feel the back of my neck. There was some minor soreness but nothing worse than one would get with a mild sunburn. However, just as the firefighter had told me earlier, where there had once been eight inches of hair gathered into a ponytail, my hand felt a singed stump of bristles.
“You needed a haircut anyway, white man,” my friend said with little emotion as he glanced in my direction.
Neither of us seemed to be able to muster much feeling other than exhaustion. My hearing had begun to return although my ears still felt stuffy, and there was a faint ring in the background. Ben complained of the same, but at least we were able to carry on a conversation without shouting at one another.
The ambient noise of thrumming diesel engines on the emergency vehicles drifted in low, and we could hear radios and various voices of the firefighters on the scene.
“Maybe so,” I returned. “But I can think of an easier way to have gone about it. How are your hands?”
“Fuckin’ killin’ me,” he answered in a flat tone. “How ‘bout your face?”
“About the same.”
One corner of his mouth turned up in a weak attempt at a grin. “Yeah, it ain’t doin’ me any good either.”
I shook my head. “You must be feeling okay. You’ve still got your sense of humor.”
“I’m alive,” he agreed. “So are you. So’s Deck… For now… That’s somethin’.”
“He’ll make it.”
“Yeah.”
My shoulder was throbbing, and I reached my right hand up to massage it. The over-the-counter painkiller Felicity had dosed me with earlier had long since dissipated from my system, and I was starting to wish for something a bit stronger. I had all but forgotten about my ethereal migraine when the situation in this plane of existence had demanded my full attention; however, now that I was beginning to relax, it was starting to rap on the back of my skull, insisting that it be permitted entry.
“Really, Ben. He’ll make it. It’s not his time.”
“You got some hocus-pocus goin’ on there?” He raised an eyebrow.
Under different circumstances, he would have looked pathetic. He still had soot streaking his face although one cheek had been cleaned where he had an abrasion. His lower lip was swollen, and his reddish skin peeked out around his mouth where the dirt had also been wiped away. There were rings around his eyes. The whole picture came together with fuzzy edges due to my missing spectacles, and when he arched his eyebrow, I had the overwhelming need to chuckle.
“What’re you laughin’ at?” he asked.
“You should see yourself,” I offered.
“Yo, Kemosabe, you got an Al Jolson thing goin’ on yourself.”
“Yeah, so I guess we’re both a sight.”
“Prob’ly. So, you never answered me. The thing with Deck. You got some inside info from the great beyond?”
“Just a feeling.” I shrugged.
“I hope you’re right.”
“We just have to believe that I am,” I offered.
He fell quiet for a long measure and stared at the floor of the ambulance. When he finally spoke again, his voice was heavy—weighted with a level of seriousness that made me listen intently.
“Ya’know, cops get that too.”
“What’s that?”
“Feelings. Kinda like intuition or somethin’.”
“Everyone does to some extent,” I replied.
“Yeah, I guess.” He nodded then looked up at me. “I ever tell you about Chris?”
“Wasn’t he your partner when you first got out of the academy?” I asked. “The one that…”
He finished the sentence for me. “…Got killed, yeah, that’s him.”
“You’ve never really talked about it to me, no.”
“He was a good guy. Big S.O.B. Biggern’ me. Good copper. You knew you could count on ‘im to have your back. I learned a lot from ‘im.”
I just nodded acknowledgement and let him talk.
/> “Anyway, the night he was killed we were workin’ third. He was actin’ pretty nervous, real squirrely like. We stopped to grab some coffee, and he finally opens up and tells me that he’s got a weird feelin’ like it’s his night or somethin’. Like he’s wearin’ a target. He said he’d had it all day and that when he left his house, he turned around and went back in twice to call in sick, but didn’t do it ‘cause he felt guilty.
“I didn’t think much of it at the time, but he’d told me before that you develop a kinda sense about stuff. Told me not to ignore my gut, ‘cause it was one thing a copper had that could save his ass. Anyway, half an hour later we responded on a liquor store holdup. He was hit the minute we got outta the car. He was wearin’ a vest, but it didn’t matter ‘cause he got hit in the neck. Last thing he said to me was ‘I shoulda stayed home today.’”
I watched him as he fell silent, and then I finally asked, “Have you talked to someone about this?”
“Hell yeah,” he returned, slightly more life in his voice than there had been during the morose reminiscence. “Helen got me through it a long time ago. I’m just sayin’ that coppers get those feelings too.”
There was still a strange undertone in his voice. Something told me that there was more to this story than just an idle observation. It took a moment to dawn on me, but when it did, it struck me like a hard slap.
“Did Carl say something to you?” I asked.
“When we got here,” he finally said with a nod. “Told me he had a weird feelin’ like maybe he shoulda stayed home today.”
CHAPTER 18:
“And how are you gentlemen doing?” The paramedic asked almost cheerfully as he climbed into the back of the ambulance with us and levered the door shut.
“Horrible,” Ben answered.
The Law Of Three: A Rowan Gant Investigation Page 15