“How many hostiles, do you think?”
“Hard to say.” Park flinched as another bullet ricocheted off the car. “Twelve, fifteen maybe? The park’s not very big but it’s not as if they’ve got anywhere to go; we’ve got them walled off on both sides facing the street, and there’s only the water behind them.”
Gray frowned. “I remember,” he said. “Listen, did you boys see a woman with them?”
“There’s a couple of women with them,” Park said. “As near as we can tell.”
“This would be a non-combatant,” Gray said. “Thin girl, well-built, but not First Nations in the slightest. Black, long hair, no tattoos. Really nice-looking.” He felt a gush of anger and lust try and challenge the hold of the Solunex, but the drug held as he forced those emotions down again. He wondered just how long the stuff would last against whatever it was that Angie had put in him.
But Park shook his head. “I haven’t seen anyone exactly like that,” he said. “But there was a black woman with them earlier. Short hair, though. I didn’t get a good look at her.”
Gray’s heart began to beat harder. He didn’t need Park to know for certain; with those words, he knew in his own polluted blood that she was somewhere beyond the trees and the primal gang. “Tell me something, Park,” he said, urgency written over his tongue. “Do you guys have suppression gas on hand? Riot launchers?”
“Yeah,” said Park with a nod. “Yeah, we do – why?”
“I want you to tell your men to prime their launchers with gas canisters and have them prepare to fire on Officer Carter’s command.” Gray strained to contain the feelings that were building inside of him, the urge to leap up and vault the fence, to charge into the park – to kill everyone who got in the way between him and Angie, put them down for the temerity of resistance. It was a nasty thing, a bestial drive that he felt growing louder and louder. “Do you hear me?”
Park blinked at him, unable to speak for a moment, and Gray realized that he had been growling. “I…yeah,” he said, “I will, but – I’m not the officer in charge here, Gray. I don’t–”
“No, you’re not,” Gray snapped. “Carter is. Make it happen, kid; we’re gonna get this thing done before the murder squad arrives. I don’t want Special Tactics burning the park down around us before we can make an arrest.” He didn’t stop to see the shocked expression on Park’s face – the kid gaped after him as Gray made his way back toward where Carter awaited him.
“All right,” Carter said as Gray drew near again. “What’s the situation?”
“They got twelve or fifteen in there,” said Gray. “And she’s in there with them. Our boys have them contained, and were just waiting for us to arrive – and then for Special Tactics to show up.”
“All right,” said Carter, “So we wait for them to show.”
“Fuck that!” Gray shook his head. “No, man, they get here and you won’t have an arrest, you’ll have a corpse. You know it.”
Carter’s eyes narrowed. “How are you feeling, Dan?”
I want to kill you and get to her, Gray’s mind roared, but he only shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said. “Hard. I feel…clear inside, but angry.”
“That’s the Solunex fighting with whatever she put in you,” said Carter with a nod. His eyes opened a bit more, but he didn’t seem entirely convinced. “All right, fine. You got a plan?”
“The Pacifiers have suppression gas and riot launchers,” Gray told him. “And I figure if they can saturate a sufficient amount of the park, we can rush in and take out most of them as they’re overcome with the gas. As far as I know, they don’t have filtration masks with them.”
“But you do,” said Carter. His heavy brows arched in new appreciation. “Oh ho.”
“Well, yes.” Gray shook his head; he felt the anger grow stronger. “Damn it, Brutus, so does everyone else, don’t they? Pacifiers, I mean. I’m not trying anything.”
“I’m not entirely convinced, Dan.”
Gray gritted his teeth. “Look, damn it,” he growled, the words coming out in a hot stream, “You’re the one who pumped me full of anti-psychotic drugs, stimulants, and dragged me along with you when you could pack me up and send me back to Central. So don’t give me shit now, all right? Either you trust me or you don’t, but don’t fucking squint at me.” He wanted to reach out and claw at Carter’s face, to shred him, blind him. It was so strange, the rage that boiled behind the glass wall set up by the drugs, the chemical that sang in his body – like a rogue charge in the wires of his bones, riding every nerve, overloading every circuit. His back hurt, sizzled with the force of it, and he realized that what had said was true. She had killed them all, and for what? To mask her activities, to cover her tracks. It was an old story, and he should understand it objectively and file it away – but he felt his stomach churning like a cauldron full of acid and betrayal and despair once more, and worse, felt the murderous rage flicker from Carter’s face to Angie’s for just a moment before being pulled back once more.
Carter looked him in his face, and perhaps he saw more in Gray’s eyes than just the angry, drugged-up shambles that he must have seemed. “All right,” he said. “Strap that mask on. I’ll give the order when you’re ready.”
Gray didn’t need to be told twice. Within moments the mask was out of his coat and pulled over his face, and he was encased in its claustrophobic plastic veil. “Make it happen,” he said, his voice muffled by the filters. “Let’s go.”
There was a moment of silence. No gunfire, no shouting, nothing but the dying echo of what came before. They two men looked at one another, faces severe, eyes hard as they stared at one another. A nameless understanding passed between them.
“Fine.” Carter reached up and touched his earbud phone, tuned it to a new frequency, and gave the command. “This is Officer Brutus Carter,” he announced. “Ready launchers and fire suppression gas on my mark. I want nonlethal ammunition used once you’ve gassed the area – I want as many taken alive as possible. Officer Gray will be going in with you.” He gave Gray another challenging squint before shaking his head once more. “Three, two, one….and mark. Fire gas now.”
There was a sound like a recording of many champagne bottles being uncorked at once, played at half speed. Meteors of green-white smoke arced from among the cars and over the blue rail into the park, canisters that spewed the riot gas in great clouds around them as they bounced across the grass. Soon a mist hung, and the sound of coughing and retching could be heard from within – a fog of misery, waiting to be breached by the Pacifiers with magazines now full of tranquilizer flechettes. Carter gave the order to advance, and Gray found himself on his feet and sliding across the hood of the Lapis on his way toward the fence. He leapt over the painted iron as if it were a row of stones, easily cleared, and charged into the bank of ghoulish vapor with a song of rage and longing in his heart.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Gray would find her. He would claim her. He would kill anyone who got in his way. That much he knew, but what he didn’t know was what he would do when he got to her – and that terrified him more than he could ever say.
The gas washed over him, warm and dry, as Gray plunged into the park. The Henekker was held out like a dowser’s wand, drawing him across the field. The clouds were illuminated dimly by the streetlights ringing the area; human shapes, blurry silhouettes, swam up toward him as he passed them. He heard them puking their guts out, coughing wetly as the gas drove them down; suppression gas wasn’t the love-tap tear gas that police used to use. Prolonged exposure would kill you, but as his own skin had begun to burn it was hard to feel pity for the tattooed gang scum sprawling in the grass.
He charged across the park in a straight line, letting the pistol lead him through the choking clouds. Gray made his way toward the interior of the park where the gas was bound to be thinner. His skin itched and burned as the stuff clung to him, though it hadn’t begun to blister – he’d need to get out before then else he wouldn’
t be any good to anybody. Behind him, the telltale crack-crack of flechettes being fired from their guns meant that Park and his Pacifiers were already on the charge. That was good, he thought as he ran toward the edge of the cordon of gas. They’d be trapped between the cops and the water.
With a final push, he broke through the gas into the dimly-lit interior of the park. Fully half of the park stretched on ahead of him, encircled by the drifting gas; he saw shapes running toward the beach, the wreck of a small barge that jutted from the surface of the diseased water beyond. Someone turned toward him; he saw the glint of metal in their arms, a long shadow lifting toward him. He fired the silenced Henekker twice and the figure dropped as if its hissing were some magic spell meant to fell him. Another dragon’s breath flash erupted in the dark ahead and he heard something whizzing past his ear. Gray dove for the ground as a hail of automatic fire whistled overhead; he landed hard on the patchy earth and fired once in the direction of the muzzle flash, and was rewarded with silence.
He picked himself up again after a moment and picked up where he left off, pausing only long enough to pick up an assault rifle from the body of the young man that he had shot at first – hit twice in the chest, he’d died almost on the spot. The kid couldn’t have been more than nineteen, a fact that Gray tried very hard to push out of his mind as he searched the fallen boy’s jacket for spare magazines, but found none. He racked the slide on the recovered Guanxin Alfa, the ancient weapon responding as if new, when the sound of something heavy hitting the water pulled his attention back to the beach. Gray’s heart skipped a beat. Had they boarded the wreck? Or was there a boat nearby? Gray charged ahead toward the beach and the darkness beyond.
He reached the sand to find nothing. There was the chair that Black-Eyes had been sitting upon when Gray had first met him, still bleeding stuffing on the sand. Beyond, a long gangplank of soldered metal had been cobbled together and laid out between the beach and the wreck of the barge. Gray stared at it as if it were the darkest sort of omen; it was a skeletal arm jutting out of the water, ancient cargo containers bolted to the deck like rusted tumors.
“That’s as far as you’re going, man.” A figure stepped out from behind the cargo containers closest to the gangplank; his features were shadowed at first, but Gray knew that it was Jaguar – or Alexander, as Black-Eyes had called him – from the sound of his voice as he called down to him.
“Alexander, is it?” Gray braced the rifle against his shoulder; he knew how fast the man was, or at least how good his reflexes were. He might not get another shot if he had to fire and missed. “How you doing?”
Jaguar smirked. “Better than you,” he said. “You look like shit, Detective man. You shouldn’t run through gas like that, you know.” A smirk lined his thin lips. “That shit’ll kill ya.”
“I’ve heard it said.” Gray grinned at him, a cold and angry thing, but then sobered. “Look, you don’t need to get involved in this. My friends are cleaning things up behind me as we speak – I don’t have any problem with you. Just step aside and let me up there.”
“Not likely to happen, I’m afraid.” Jaguar began to pace at the edge of the barge; the lamps that lined the water threw lances of light across his face as he moved, showing the horrible tattoos on his face, the cat’s leer inviting him to death.
“Oh yeah?” Gray hefted to Alfa in his hands. “I have a friend here that says that it’s likely. Why don’t you get out of here instead?”
Jaguar’s grin only persisted. “You know I’m boosted, Detective man,” he said, and executed a roundhouse kick with that ridiculous speed of his, his foot moving as if at one-and-a-half speed. “I’m faster than you, man. Stronger. I can take that rifle out of your hands and ram it up your ass before you have the chance to pull the trigger.”
Maybe he could at that, Gray thought. “Giving you one last chance, Alexander,” he said instead, tensing his finger on the trigger. He should just cut him down, his instinct said so. Just shoot the fucker and let him drop. He’s only in the way. “Step aside, or jump off, or whatever. All I want is the girl.” The way he saw it, as fast as Jaguar might be, he couldn’t be so fast as to make the whole length of the gangplank before Gray hosed him down with a stream of full-metal jackets. And he figured that Jaguar knew it. So why the delay?
“She’s not even here,” Jaguar was saying. “She and Black-Eyes are far away.”
Which meant that they weren’t. No way he’d still be here if they had been. Gray tracked the beach, looking for footprints – and, sure enough, found several pair of fresh tracks moving off not toward the gangplank but down the shore to the right. “Shit,” Gray snarled, cursing himself for not seeing it sooner. “They aren’t even fucking here, are they?”
“Exactly the wrong thing to say, Mr. Cop.” Jaguar took a blurring step forward.
Shit. Gray hitched the muzzle of the Alfa up high and squeezed the trigger, firing a long burst over Jaguar’s head; the gun bucked in his hands like an angry bull as it roared, spewing lead into the air. Gray knew that he would not be able to nail the kid with the gun, but he didn’t have to – boosted though he may have been, Jaguar wasn’t an entirely hardened killer. He dove toward the deck in a blur, arms over his head. Thank fuck for that, Gray muttered darkly to himself; he broke right and ran down the narrow beach, leaving Jaguar to sprawl. It probably wouldn’t be long before the kid came after him, however – and so he ran, tracking the footprints and knowing that his mercy would probably be short-lived.
Pressing on down the beach, Gray looked wildly about for any sign of Angie. Jaguar had been a distraction, either for police in general or for him specifically. They must have surprised the whole lot of them, or at the very least interrupted Angie’s business with the Duwamish, though what kind of business that might be was still a mystery to him. Maybe she was just using them for protection; maybe they were in on the whole thing with her. It didn’t matter to him. What mattered was that she was close, and that he would get to her soon. What he’d do with her was still an unknown to him.
The sand ran out just before he hit the fence line at the northeast corner of the park. The gas hadn’t reached there; Gray looked over his shoulder and saw Pacification officers emerging in force from the ghastly smog behind him, riot masks over their faces and dragging behind them unconscious figures with binding strips around their wrists. At their head was Carter, whose movements were angry and martial as he sprinted into the middle of the park – he’d slow Jaguar down, at least, should the kid be dumb enough not to take off while the getting was good.
Gray looked ahead of him. On the other side of a narrow lane there was another fence, a much taller one made of chain link and welded steel panels. A gate set into the fence facing the park was open just enough so that a narrow shaft of light spilled out onto pale concrete. Gray jumped the park cordon as sounds of shouts and renewed combat arose behind him, indicating that Carter and the others had encountered Jaguar. He sprinted across the lane, keeping low, and quickly sidled up to the entrance. He crouched low, his heart pounding and his skin still smarting from the gas, and peeked in through the through the gap in the gate. Anonymous gray squares of industrial buildings squatted in a concrete yard filled with rusted barrels and stacks of wooden pallets gone warped and green from time and exposure to the ceaseless damp. In front of one such building, the sleek black form of a Renault Piaf sat low on its tires. Seeing it, Gray knew where his target lay.
He eased the gate open a little more before slipping in through the gap, then closed it behind him before taking off across the yard, head low, creeping amid the islands of industrial rot and the shadows they provided. The rifle in his hands grew heavier as he moved, as if drawn by building gravity – or perhaps his body was waging subtle rebellion against his will. Gray crouched by a cluster of empty barrels, squinting at the car; there was no driver, nor was there a guard at the door of the building beyond it. Maybe whoever was here ran across the street to join the other Sons when the Pacifiers
arrived. That made sense, the cavalry going to help delay an escape.
Or maybe something was wrong. The thought drove a surge of horror into his blood, an irrational thing that he knew was thanks to Angie’s tampering but could not help but feel to the bone despite the Solunex in his system. For a moment, Gray wondered if the anti-psych was fading, but only for a moment. The task ahead jolted him from doubt and pushed him on. He dashed to the car, moving around the front end to keep hidden from the front of the building. As he approached, he saw that the building had a pair of double doors set in the front of the structure; these were not open, nor were there windows in their rust-pitted surfaces. A pair of loop handles provided access, and a length of fairly recent chain dangling from one of them suggested that it had seen recent use.
Gray looked at the car a moment, committing the code on the front plate to memory and wishing like hell that he had a pocketknife to slit the tires since shooting them would attract attention. Then he sidled around the front of the Piaf and made for the door. He was careful as he pulled it open, using the side without the chain – the hinges made little noise as Gray pulled it open, millimeter by millimeter, and peered through the crack it made. Beyond, there was only a narrow hallway into which Gray carefully made his way, lit by a single bulb mounted in a ceiling socket.
Carefully Gray made his way down the corridor. Several doors with narrow windows were set on either side; Gray peered through them into dark offices and storerooms, the contents of which had long been given over to the ravages of time. As he reached the end of the corridor, which terminated into a heavy, blank-faced fire door, he heard a soft, muffled sound that he couldn’t identify. He leaned in to press his ear against the door, feeling the cold steel kiss his ear through its thin veil of paint. There it was again, heard magnified through the hollow door. What was it? He closed his eyes and waited for It to come again; something soft, feminine, pleading –
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