by Celeste Raye
They headed off again. Craig said, “I think we are on the right track. We just need to keep working this angle. Everything about it feels right.”
“It does.” She piloted the car through the streets. Her mind was already going over a few things, trying to find pieces to put together. Just then, Craig’s phone chirped. He took it off his hip and glanced down at the screen. “Jack’s working a case. He says to meet him over…well, that’s weird. Over by the portal house.”
“No way!” She glared at him. “I am not getting sucked back over there, thank you very much.”
Craig chuckled. “The portal is closed now anyway, and what is more, he wants us to meet him at a warehouse a few blocks down. But in that neighborhood.”
She shook her head. “Oh hell no. One time going through that thing was enough for me. I got enough to worry about right now. Ask him to meet us somewhere else.”
“Just go. I swear to you I won’t let you get sucked through a portal.” He grinned at her. “No way am I getting sucked through either. I just got home.”
Her heart thundered in her ears. Home. He felt like this world was home and it was, to both of them, but for how long? She nodded. “Fine, but if I end this day facing down some Orcs, I am going to shoot you in the ass again, and this time I will do it on purpose.”
They pulled up in front of the warehouse just as the rain started again and in earnest. They raced through the fat and heavy drops to the door of the warehouse, which was propped open. The place was empty and echoed as they stepped into it. Gina’s nose wrinkled. “God it stinks in here.”
Craig looked around. The main room was a vast space, filled with tattered machines that looked like they had been left behind from an earlier century. Most were so rusted over, that large flakes of orange and brown lay in heaps below the metal creatures. He said, “I think this used to be a mill of some kind. Like I said, this was the place where the very wealthiest lived. They built their houses right next to the factories and after the river got polluted and the air got too bad to breathe, they moved out. They left their workers here and they stayed on until the factories closed.”
Gina surveyed the dim corners. “The city keeps talking about revitalizing it, but that has never happened. I wonder why?”
“No money. It’s a place everyone seems to have forgotten so why would they? You can’t live here, and what is more, they can’t find anyone who wants to work here given the air and water quality. Fixing those two things would cost probably billions, and the city is pretty broke if you haven’t noticed, except for the wealthy and they are damn sure not interested in doing a damn thing to fix what they broke.”
They stepped through the building. The air was chill and rank and tinged with that funky aroma that Gina could not quite put her finger on. Her nose wrinkled again. She cupped her hands around her mouth and called out, “Jack? You here?”
There was no answer. She shot a look at Craig. “You sure you got the address right? I mean, it doesn’t look like anyone is here at all and why he would be working a case here is beyond me. I mean, what dealer would be down here?
Just then the hard tip of a gun found its way to her temple. A hand snaked out and grabbed her arm and yanked her close to a body. A little scream came from her lips. Craig, walking ahead, turned and then froze in place.
Jack spoke up from behind her, his hot breath washing across her face and cheek, “Well then. I should have known it would be one or the both of you that finally saw the pattern. I hate to do this, I do, because I consider you both friends, really, I do, but I don’t intend to be caught.”
Chapter Sixteen
Jack! Jack was the Gripper! Jack was the Gripper, and he had Gina pressed close to his chest, a gun pointed at her head. Craig’s heart did a triple time beat in his chest as he tried to assess the situation, find a way to get her out of Jack’s reach and to safety.
Jack nudged Gina and stepped backward. Her eyes stared at Craig, and he saw the sheer horror written on her face. The horror was not just from the fact that there was a gun to her head; it came from her full understanding that she was being held by a serial killer, and a man she looked up to and respected, a man who had been her friend and mentor for so many years.
He spoke, “Jack, stop.”
Jack said, “Reach down to your hip there Gina and let the gun go. You too, Jack, or she dies. I mean it. I would hate to blow her brains out, really. But I will. So, do it.”
Craig caught her eyes and gave her a slight nod. She swallowed so hard that her throat worked in a visible way. He could see the rapid beat of her pulse against the delicate skin of her neck and his chest ached as he took the gun from his hip and she did the same. Jack took hers, and Craig laid his on the floor and then stepped back from it. He said, “Jack, it’s Gina. You know her. Let her go. Take me if you want but let her go.”
“Oh, now you know I can’t do that.” Jack shoved her forward just a step. The barrel of the gun ground hard against her skull and skin, making her jerk a bit. Her eyes went wide and glassy, like she was fighting back tears, fighting to be brave. Gina asked, “Why? For God’s sake, Jack, why? Why did you kill those people?”
He growled out, “Why? Hell, you should know why. You have been to my place upstate, my little vacation place. I bought that, supposedly, by scrimping and saving and living in a rent-controlled place. But the truth is, I have been working harder than any cop ever should, making sure I get mine. This city is so screwed, and there will never be an end to the crime here. I was serving two things really: justice, those people were all criminals and hopeless cases. Most didn’t really care if they lived or died anyway, and my own ends. I will admit that I have been something of a criminal myself.” He let out a deprecating little chuckle. “I mean, what the hell, right? Cops get lousy pay and long hours. We get to get shot at and beat down and the whole time the wealthy assholes in this city demand results while they lock themselves away in their fancy mansions at the top of the hills.”
Craig said, “I am not even going to argue with you that the city needs a good cleanup. I won’t even argue that cops need better pay, but it is a long jump from that to becoming a serial killer and…what, Jack? A dealer?”
He was buying time, and he knew it. He was buying time because he was trying to work out a plan, trying to work out a way to get Gina away from Jack and the path of the bullets in that gun.
Jack snorted. “It was fun, really. I mean, I liked killing the ones I killed. They were not even really people anymore, but the truth is every single one of them could have put me away if they had opened their mouths, and you just can’t trust that kind of people, you know? They would sell you out for a few bucks’ worth of coke or heroin or whatever it is they are doing.”
It was all coming very clear now. Jack had been the detective on the Gripper case for years. He had been able to hide or lose evidence, to send the direction of the case in ways that would guarantee it pointed away from him. He was the one who buried it year after year, always insisting that they had other crimes to deal with—and he had been right. The city was a cesspool of crime. It had shown improvement over the years, and there were large sections of the city that were crime free and good, but those neighborhoods were taken up by the wealthy, by the professionals who flocked to the city despite its grim reputation to work in the offices of the large corporations who seized upon the struggling city’s lenient tax laws and safer zones to come in and make a buck as fast as possible.
Every year the Gripper hit the worst sections of the city and terrorized it, and every year, after he was gone, the police force went right back to making sure the neighborhoods that were doing good and were crime free stayed that way because those were the neighborhoods that had taxpayer dollars to generate and people who were determined to either be safe or pack it in.
Jack said, “Move. Craig, move. Go to that door there and stand in the doorway until I get closer. We’re going into a different room.” His stomach dropped. This was the pla
ce then. This was where the Gripper brought his vics to kill them. He recognized the scent in the air then. Old blood. Pain. Agony. He nodded and moved. He did not turn his back though, and he did not drop his gaze away from her face. She was standing tough, and he could see that she was struggling to keep that courage up.
He recalled, too well, how she had gone into shock when they had entered his world. Her mind was not able to grasp the fantastical; he knew that too well. But she had already seen that, and Jack had not.
Jack had no idea he was screwing with an ancient dragon who just happened to love the human woman who was in his grip and had his gun pointed at her head.
He reached the doorway. He stood there, framed within it and said, “Onward to Raglan.”
Gina blinked. Her chest moved up and down, and hope came up in her eyes. She blinked at him, too deliberately and slowly for it to be a mere reaction. She was telling him something, and he hoped what she was saying was that she understood what he was going to do.
Jack asked, “What?”
Craig said, “Just an old…never mind. Now what?”
Jack pressed forward. Gina’s legs tangled into his and he swore and snarled, “Move or die right here. I do not care which.”
Gina moved. Jack ordered Craig, “Go, step way back. Two big steps. Take them.”
He did. The room he stepped into was not quite as large as the first room, but it was big enough for what he needed to do. The machinery was there as well, but the floor was far less cluttered. Out in the first room he would have risked being trapped between the machines, injuring himself and losing whatever edge he might have had. But in this room, there was less cover for Gina to take.
And she had no weapon either.
Okay. Whatever. They would just wing it, and literally.
Jack said, “Tell me how you figured it out.”
Gina said, in a voice that held no emotion, “We thought it was an informant because we saw that a lot of the vics should have had records but didn’t. So, either they were informants who never got a real arrest, or they were informants whose records got sealed. The Does would have made sense then. If their files had been sealed, their prints would not have been on file.”
Jack chuckled. “I thought that was my best cover. Boy did that come back to bite me in the ass. As I said, I knew it would be one of you. The two of you are the best cops I have ever met or seen. It is too bad you have to die, really, it is. Because this city could use good cops.”
“You were a good cop once, Jack.” Gina sounded like she was on the verge of tears and Craig could guess that if she were, it was because she was so hurt by the fact that Jack had betrayed not just them, but his badge. “What happened? How did this ever begin for you?”
“I got sick of seeing the rich get richer and making deals with dealers and killers just to try to keep the streets a little safer. It was just a thing that happened. I never meant for it to happen, but it did. I guess after it happened the first time, after I took that first payoff from a dealer, it just got easier and easier.’
“That is why nobody ever saw you.” Craig was putting it all together now. “They knew you because you had some kind of racket going where you took payoffs. They would not even have noticed you after a while. Those that did you see would have just assumed you were there to get a payoff and you did too, you grabbed your dough and dumped the body and did it all so slick nobody ever put the two things together.”
Oh, he was actually sure that someone had. But those that had, well, they had had a lot of reasons to stay silent. Jack could have put them in cuffs, or a coffin, and they knew it. Plus, he had arranged a lot of closed files over the years. Some got away clean and went to other cities, where whatever they knew stayed with them.
Craig said, “You do know that someone would have eventually noticed that the Gripper left town right around the time you did? I mean, eventually, someone would have figured it out.”
Jack chuckled. They moved further into the room. Craig watched Jack's face. He could see it hanging over Gina’s shoulder, and for some reason, the sight of Jack and his leering face and her slender shoulder and scared but being brave expression made him all the angrier.
Jack said, “Well, I have quite the retirement fund. I sold my little upstate place and bought myself, through an LLC of course, a spot down in a country without an extradition agreement with the US.”
Craig said, “You had it all figured out, didn’t you?” He stopped, his body taking up an empty space between two small machines. “But there is one thing you could never have counted on, had no way to know, and that is what is going to screw you over, Jack.”
Jack snorted. “Yeah? What is that?”
Gina said, in a voice that held a ring of both anticipation and hope, “He’s a dragon.”
Jack blinked a few times. “What?”
Craig said, “I’m a dragon.”
Then he changed. Gina, seeing the only advantage she would have, shoved Jack’s arm away and ran just as Craig’s enormous wings spanned out and gave her some shelter. She rolled behind him. Jack, shocked and pale, screamed. Then he aimed the gun at Craig.
Craig was already moving, and fire was already belching from his lips. The bullet was consumed in that fire, that dragon fire. The gun caught fire too, and Jack screamed and tried to drop it, but it stuck fast to his hand, searing away flesh. Jack went to his knees, still screaming. Gina rolled out from behind a machine and got behind Craig again as he stormed toward Jack, who was screaming in a high and keening voice. His hand was nearly gone, and his face was paper white now, pain making his entire body react by jerking back and forth.
Craig changed again. Gina yanked her secondary firearm from her ankle holster and tossed it to him and then she yanked her phone out of her pocket and hit the screen. She spoke into the phone; Jack went right on screaming.
The last word Jack said before he fainted from shock and agony was, “Dragon…”
The warehouse was filled with CSI people and what looked like half the cops in the city. There was evidence everywhere. Jack had cleaned up the scene after his kills, but he had not cleaned up that well. This part of the city was a wasteland after all, and he would have known way in advance if his little shop of ultimate horrors was about to be inspected.
Jack was gone. He had been screaming and shuddering the whole time they had loaded him onto the stretcher and hauled him away. Gina had found an old butane torch and when they were asked, she swore that Craig had used it as a weapon to save her life. Jack had been screaming about dragons, a clear sign that he was utterly insane, and if anyone had noticed that the torch was too old and rusted to have really worked, nobody had mentioned it at all.
Peterson stepped up to where the two of them stood. He said, “Man, I joined the force because of him. He did a recruitment campaign, you know? He was talking about how we had to be here for the citizens and all that. And he is the Gripper; I just can’t believe it.”
Craig said, “He used to be a good cop. He got himself turned bad and then from there it was easy to just keep sliding. Just remember that any time you start thinking that maybe it might be okay to turn the other cheek, any time you start considering how low your pay is and just how good that bribe and payoff might look. By the way, you did great work. We would never have considered that informant angle if you had not come up with the info you got.”
Peterson preened a bit. “Thanks. You two heading back to the station to write your reports?”
He would much rather go somewhere quiet and just be with Gina for a little while. He nodded, “Yeah.”
Gina waited until he was gone to say, “I am sorry. I should have seen that: that it had to be a cop. Maybe I did see it but just did not want to believe it.”
“You did not see it, not then. Neither did I. As soon as Jack knew we wanted the informant’s sealed files, he knew what we were onto and that it would be a natural conclusion that it was not a dealer but a cop who was the Gripper. I am sorry becau
se I should have thought about that when he asked us to meet him out here.”
They stood there for a moment longer, their gazes locked. She asked, “So what now?”
“We go write the report. The revised edition, of course.” A grin tugged at his lips, but then it faded. “I’m sorry, but I do have to go back.”
“You will be undercover again.”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
She looked away. That made his heart hurt. Could they ever have anything together? He did not want to go back to his own world, but he could not turn his back on a great wrong, and the Orcs were every wrong that had ever been done. They were born of evil, and there was always evil. It leached from world to world, and it grew no matter how many times good people stomped it out.
She said, “I am going with you. Do not argue with me. I get that I belong here. We will come back here, one day. We will, and when we do, we will have a life here. Maybe not in this city, because really, I think I have had all of this city I can stand. But we will come back one day.”
His heart lifted with joy and happiness. He peered at her face. “Are you sure?”
“I love to fight the bad guys.”
He grinned. “You do.”
“I would say Orcs are the baddest of the bad.”
He nodded, “I can’t argue that one.”
She said, “Let’s go write those reports. When we are done, we are going to my place, and we are going to order a lot of food, and we are going to eat that in bed.”
His eyebrow lifted. “That sounds really good. Though I might be hungry for more than food.”
Her smile was wicked, “Yeah, me too.”
They left the warehouse and walked out into the day. The rain had stopped, and she turned her face up to the weak sunlight filtering down from the sky. The sun lay on her face, warm and golden, and Craig felt a huge pain in his heart. It was not the pain of loss. It was the glad pain of love, one that would last a lifetime.