by Eoin Colfer
‘How you feeling, Detective?’
‘Screw you.’
‘We did that, remember.’
‘Did we? I didn’t notice.’
‘I have it on very good authority that I have a lovely pee-pee, so lay off.’
Deacon’s eyes are clearing up now. I can see craftiness in the corners.
‘Okay. It was wonderful. You were like a stallion, Daniel.’ She rattles her cuffs under my nose. ‘So let me go.’
I nod slowly. ‘You put together a good argument, me being like a stallion and so forth. So okay.’
I slip off one cuff just long enough to attach it to the sofa’s exposed metal frame. Deacon does not bother yanking her chain.
‘Bastard,’ she sighs, rolling her eyes.
‘It’s temporary,’ I assure her. ‘Just until I can figure out what to do with you.’
‘You could stick a knife in my forehead.’
I mull this over. ‘Tempting. But no. What if I winged you, then you shoot yourself half a dozen times?’
‘That’s not funny, McEvoy,’ says Deacon, throwing a futile kick in my direction.
‘Exactly.’
I finish dressing, hang my jacket on a nail and run the kitchen faucet over my head.
‘Why did Goran want to kill you?’
Deacon hawks and spits on my floor. ‘Blood. I bit my tongue. I’m going to track that crazy bitch down, no doubt about that.’
‘It was because of Faber, right? For some reason she didn’t want Faber investigated.’
‘I don’t care where she hides. Nobody takes a swing at Ronelle Deacon and gets away with it’
I clap my hands triumphantly. ‘Ronelle! Well hello, Ronelle.’
Deacon scowls, disgusted. ‘People call me Ronnie. Good for the straights and the gays.’
I nod. ‘Ronnie. Yeah, that would work. Cute or butch, depends on how you look at it.’ I dry my head gingerly, zip my bag and throw it over my shoulder. ‘Well, Ronnie, you ready to cooperate?’
‘You are a wanted man, McEvoy. Surrender yourself into my custody and I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Come on. You got a body in the trunk.’
‘You’re the only one who knows that. And you’re a fucking knife killer. What kind of credibility do you have? If I was as bent as Goran used to be, I bet I could come up with a scenario where you killed my partner and held me captive.’
I am not liking the sound of that, or the glint in Deacon’s eyes when she says it.
‘I think I’ll turn you in and take my chances.’
Deacon shakes her head. ‘I don’t believe you. One of those bullets in Goran’s shoulder is yours. Maybe you killed Connie DeLyne, then you shot down the investigating officer. I bet my superiors would go for that.’
She’s right. So I say: ‘Ronnie, when you’re right, you’re right.’
‘You got it, Daniel. All I need to do is put a bullet in your brain and then cry at Goran’s funeral.’
She sneers Daniel like it’s a fake name that might fool others but it won’t fool Ronelle Deacon.
‘You, cry? I’d pay money to see that.’
‘You already saw it, asshole.’
The lady is right again. Last night, coming in the door, there were tears on Deacon’s cheeks.
‘You’re not going to kill me, Ronnie.’
She shrugs. ‘Not without a gun. Unless you want to fight like a man.’
‘I gave up being macho for New Year’s. Bad for my health.’
‘Pussy.’
‘No thanks.’
I turn my back on the exchange because it’s giving me a headache and duck into the bathroom to use the facilities and check my hat. I talk while I work.
‘Here’s the plan, Ronnie. I’m going to stash your car somewhere safe. You know, the one with the dead detective covered in trace in the trunk. I’m also taking your blouse with the blood spatter that I’m sure the forensics guys can read like a book. Then I’m coming back here and we can work this out. You want a career and I want you to have a career.’
‘Blackmailing motherfucker,’ Deacon calls from behind the sofa. ‘Maybe I should just throw you out the goddamn window. You could land on the car.’
‘Bring it on, doll head.’
My headache spikes behind one eye. Even at a time like this, people will not lay off the scalp.
‘I have had transplants, if you must know,’ I say, a little touchy, striding into the living area. ‘This bald thing is temporary.’
Deacon is standing by the window, cuffs on the floor, her gun in one hand, mine in the other.
‘For you, Dan,’ she says, ‘everything is temporary.’
If I had the time and the flexibility, I would kick myself in the arse, not a glancing blow either.
‘You had a key on the memory bracelet, right?’
Deacon smiles like a wolf. ‘That’s right. One of my fondest memories is a little handcuff session a couple of years ago. Now take your hand out of your pocket, kneel down and say please, please don’t shoot me in the balls, Detective Deacon.’
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.
I screw my eye socket into the tiny wedge of space between the railing and the pavement.
Deacon tugs on my pants. ‘What do you see?’
‘I see a leg.’
‘Just one?’
‘The other one’s bent back. I think she fell down those last few steps.’
‘Good. You see a weapon?’
I wiggle forward another inch. Goran’s hand is flapping like a fish out of water; her gun glints just out of reach.
‘Dropped it. Let’s go.’
I scramble to my feet, but Deacon is up before me, elbowing past to the first step.
She’s fast, but not fast enough. There is just time to register an impression of Goran’s battered and bloody frame, slumped like a broken mannequin, when the door behind her opens. An extremely hairy pair of hands reaches out, grabs Goran by the shoulders and hauls her inside. She’s gone in a second, like she was never there. The door slams and bolts are shot.
‘You see those hands?’ says Deacon, stunned. ‘Like goddamn monkey hands. Can you believe that?’
I push past her and knuckle the door. It’s steel-reinforced.
‘Get it open, McEvoy. Use some military trickery.’
I try to trick the door with my shoulder. The central panel buckles and wobbles but does not give.
‘Got an oxyacetylene torch tucked into your underwear beside that spy radio, Ronelle?’
‘I’m thinking of a word, McEvoy. Hobble. You remember that one?’
We don’t have time for this. Cloisters is a small place and shots fired is big news. Half the police force will be landing on this block any second, and I don’t think now is a good time for armed company.
‘So, are you waiting for backup?’
Deacon thinks aloud. ‘I can’t wait. I need to follow the monkey hands.’
‘You’re getting in deeper, Ronnie. Every step you take makes it harder to go back.’
Deacon has a look in her eyes, like she’s squinting at the horizon. ‘We’re getting in deeper, McEvoy. Us. Okay, we’re on a tangled road now, but it could straighten out.’
I’m not the only dime-store philosopher in the group. ‘Yeah. With a couple of bee stings maybe.’
Once again, it’s the bee stings that bring Deacon back. ‘Screw you, Daniel. We gotta get out of here. I need Goran alive; without her I’m finished on the force.’ She stares into my eyes and I glimpse a hopeful expression I haven’t seen before; makes her seem at least ten years younger. ‘If I bring Goran in, and you make a statement, I could salvage something out of this shitty day. They’ll bounce me back to uniform, sure. Maybe even make me take some psych sessions, but I can stay on the force.’
My palm is resting on the reinforced door throughout this speech and I feel a sudden shock wave run through my fingers as vibration from the building transfers through the surface. Door slam.
‘They’re out the back door.’
‘To a hospital, maybe?’
‘It must be Faber who’s behind this. And I sincerely doubt they took her to a hospital.’
Deacon smiles, and I am reminded of a wolf that tracked me
through the Loup Valley once. ‘They gotta believe we’re on their tails,’ she says thoughtfully.
I see where she’s going. ‘So maybe they’ll drive around a bit.’
‘Except we know where they’re going.’
‘Maybe.’
‘So we can get there before them.’
‘Big maybe.’
Deacon lopes up the stairs.
‘Big maybe,’ she agrees. ‘I’ve survived worse odds than that.’
Deacon makes me sit in the back seat on the drive across town, which is completely ridiculous as I’m not under arrest and it’s not even a secure cruiser. There’s no mesh, and if I had a mind to, I could probably get at the shotgun cradled under the passenger seat. I don’t have a mind to. Instead I use the short trip to grab a little shut-eye.
Power napping doesn’t usually work for me. If I nod off for ten minutes during sunlight hours, I’m groggy for the rest of the day. But in this instance I have no choice. In spite of the few hours’ sleep in the apartment, I am so exhausted it feels like my eyes are bleeding.
Daniel McEvoy is not as young as he used to be.
True as God.
Deacon is driving faster than she should, drawing attention to herself, but I don’t mind. All the bouncing is rocking me to sleep. Even the drone of her voice, stringing together long and complicated litanies of swear words, is soothing.
I slide down on the back seat, cradling my head in the safety belt, which smells of marijuana. My thoughts are just dissolving into dreams when Macey Barrett’s phone rings in my pocket.
The damn thing is leaking radiation into my ear before I think to check caller ID.
‘Hmmph?’ I blurt sleepily.
‘You bloody AWOL asshole.’
‘Hmmph?’ I say again, not sure what’s going on exactly. The military term messing with my reality.
‘Are you stoned, you prick? I warned you about that.’
‘No. Not stoned, Major. Just dog tired.’
The voice is not happy with this. ‘What the hell did you call me, Barrett? Major? Are you trying to be fucking funny?’
Ghost Zeb decides to help me out. Come on, Dan. Whose cell phone is this? And suddenly I’m awake. This is Barrett’s phone, and that’s obviously Irish Mike on the other end.