First Blood

by S. Cedric

  “So, what happened?”

  Madeleine continued to look into the distance, at the grounds and the pathways that led to the gates, where wisps of blue fog sprawled close to the ground.

  “I don’t know, Jonathan.”

  She was lying to him. He knew it. She knew that he knew it, and she did not care.

  “Maybe I made a mistake,” she murmured.

  “What mistake?”

  “I got in touch with someone, an old friend.”

  “Do I know him?”

  Madeleine smiled. “No, you don’t know him. His name is Ismael. He’s a friend from before.”

  “From your former life,” Jonathan said with a sigh.

  “Yes, my former life.”

  “Why did you call this guy, this Ismael?”

  “I wanted to know if he was having dreams too.”

  “And?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me.”

  For the first time, Jonathan Reich recognized something in his wife’s voice that he had thought he would never hear in his lifetime.

  He heard fear.

  A deep, untamed fear.

  5

  Les Ruisseaux

  11 p.m.

  The housing project was on just the other side of the beltway. Its tall columns of buildings blistered with satellite dishes, overturned garbage cans, walls covered in graffiti, and teenagers driving scooters with no lights reminded Eva of Dante’s famous phrase, “Abandon hope all ye who enter here.”

  She swallowed hard.

  The unmarked Renault crept along from one traffic circle to the next.

  Leroy stopped to let a hairless dog cross the street.

  There was nothing official about this assignment. They had to remember that they were not supposed to be here. If things turned bad, they could count only on themselves.

  Eva found the idea exhilarating.

  She swallowed hard again. Daydreaming again. Like usual, these days. She balled her fists in her jacket pockets and lowered her chin ever so slightly so a curtain of white hair would fall over her face.

  Behind the wheel, Leroy had put his hat back on and looked serious. He did not find the situation exhilarating at all. But he had sworn to bring Constantin down, and he would do it. He still believed in justice. He was ready to fight the entire world for it. Eva hoped he would not lose his illusions too soon. Like the others.

  “We’re almost there,” he said.

  They drove along a deserted road with broken streetlamps. A wispy fog hovered above the ground. Beneath it, frost crystals glittered in the lights of the car.

  At an intersection, they passed a burned-out car that had been ignited during their raid two weeks earlier.

  “Did you see that? The mayor tried to remove it, but the city workers were pelted with stones. I imagine it will stay there for some time.”

  Eva nodded. It was no secret. No cops or city workers ventured into these neighborhoods anymore; they were systematically insulted and attacked. Most of the youths who grew up here would never leave the projects. It was a parallel world, closed off and inward looking, with its own economy. Dealers with handguns were a common sight. And those were the small shots. Higher up in the ranks, they had more sophisticated equipment, actual weapons of war.

  These thoughts were exciting Eva, and she immediately felt ashamed.

  Are you sinking that low? Is danger the only thing that can get you to react?

  To get you to forget this obsession of yours?

  It was not the right time to be thinking about that. Her obsession could wait. It was safe on her computer. For now, she had to focus on their goal. She had to be attentive to what was going on here. They were not safe.

  She made sure her Beretta was loaded and slipped it into the holster on her belt.

  Be a cop. That’s what you do best.

  That is the only damned thing you know how to do.

  She was there to help her colleague. Admittedly, it was outside standard procedure, but if something did happen in this place tonight, it would help them bring a case against Constantin. After the humiliation they had experienced in his hands, who would hold it against them?

  “Here it is.”

  Leroy parked at the curb, next to a low wall topped with green fencing. He turned off the ignition and made sure the doors were locked. Eva noticed how nervous he was. She saw it in a thousand tiny details: the way he blinked too frequently, the stiffness of his neck, how he clenched one hand on his thigh and dug the fingers of the other into his jeans.

  “You’re a ball of nerves,” she said.

  “It won’t be long now,” he said, taking out a tiny digital camera. “You’re with me, right?”

  Eva blew her bangs off her forehead. She, too, was more nervous than she would have liked.

  “Of course, Erwan.”

  She observed the street, trying to get a feel for the neighborhood. Her heightened sense of empathy had already saved her life on several occasions. It was her way of working, her very specific way of thinking and analyzing things. When she stepped into someone else’s shoes, she could predict what they would do.

  What she felt here was especially depressing.

  There were a few banged-up cars and half-dismantled barricades, making a play of shadow and light. Beyond the low wall, apartment buildings rose up. They were covered with graffiti to the top floors. Eva couldn’t help but wonder how the taggers had been able to do their work that high. Along the sidewalk, garbage cans had been systematically overturned, and trash was scattered all over. At the end of the street, Eva glimpsed a kind of small square, where teenagers had set fire to something. A pile of garbage, she figured. The flames rose several feet in the air. A dozen or so youths wearing jackets and knit hats were standing around the blaze, talking loudly and gesticulating. In the light of the flames, their young faces were already surprisingly hardened. Eva felt their violence, how on edge they were. The law of the strongest ruled here.

  “Constantin’s apartment building is right over there,” Leroy said.

  “Which building?”

  “The first one, on the other side of the parking lot. He lives on the top floor. He took the only two apartments up there so he wouldn’t have any neighbors. Of course, just about everyone living in the building works for him. Grandmas who stash, touts, steerers, gophers, bagboys. It’s a perfectly organized economy.”

  Constantin’s building was the tallest in the neighborhood. Eva counted twelve stories. The exterior corridors on all the floors were filled with mattresses and furniture. The balconies of the apartments were overrun with satellite dishes of every size. People did not live here; they burrowed here. They survived. Eva wondered how they managed to avoid going crazy.

  The car windows started to fog up.

  “Shit.”

  Leroy turned the key one notch to get some heat going.

  “Careful, there’s someone on the watch right over there,” Eva said.

  She pointed her chin toward a storefront down the street. Behind the fruit stalls and piles of multicolored plastic suitcases, a child was sitting at the cash register. He was playing with his cell phone but regularly looked up to observe what was going on outside the store.

  This was a common—and effective—defensive strategy. Anytime something even slightly suspicious occurred, the kid would send a text message to the dealers. He was certainly well trained and well paid.

  Leroy nodded.

  “Got it. But he’s not very close. If we don’t get out of the car, he probably won’t tell the others. Nobody in the building will notice us. We have a good view of the parking lot. Let’s film who comes and goes, okay?”

  “No problem,” Eva said.

  From the corner of her eye, she detected a shadowy presence across the street that she had not sensed a second earlier. It slipped past.

  She turned to see what it was.

  The sidewalk was deserted.

  She lowered her sunglasses. There was little light, so
she could do without them. She pushed her white curls behind her ears and observed.

  No, nobody was there. For a moment there, she had thought...

  “I think I’m tired too,” she said, sighing.

  She turned and reached into the back seat,

  “Do you want some tea?”

  “Sure,” Leroy said.

  She took a thermos out of her bag.

  When she looked up, her eyes fell on the rear window of the car.

  And this time, she clearly saw him.

  The world stopped spinning. Time froze, and her heart exploded into a thousand pieces.

  The man was standing behind the car, next to the low wall.

  He was tall. We was wearing a felt hat and a scaly-looking jacket. Underneath the hat, an old-man’s white hair reached almost to his shoulders.

  He had sunglasses on.

  It was him.

  It can’t be, she told herself. But there he was, watching her. Her obsession. Her secret. The red memories that woke her up at night, after he found her again in her nightmares. That man.

  “It can’t be,” she murmured, barely noticing that she had dropped the thermos.

  She had hunted for him everywhere. She had combed through crime scenes and interview reports, hoping to cross paths with him again someday.

  Even without seeing his eyes—red eyes like hers—she recognized him. She knew deep inside that it was him, just as she had always known.

  “Eva?” Leroy said, sounding worried. “Is something wrong?”

  Eva turned to him, breathing hard.

  “Him!”

  She looked back again.

  No one was there.

  “Who?”

  “It was him! He was there!”

  Leroy looked into the rearview mirror.

  “There’s nobody on the street, Eva.”

  “But I saw... I think I saw...”

  Her chest felt tight with panic. A thousand explanations crossed her mind, but she knew what this meant. Her ghosts were engulfing her, as her shrink had said they would. This was not just an anxiety attack anymore. The trauma from her past was more than that. It had become a poison. She was haunted. This kind of psychosis would burn her out.

  It makes you see things that are not there.

  Hallucinations.

  That’s exactly what she just saw, the same way she had for years when she spotted her dead sister everywhere. A hallucination.

  Or perhaps not.

  “Who? Who do you think you saw?”

  Eva opened her mouth and then closed it again. She could not tell him. It was her secret, a terrible secret. If she told him who it was, she would have to explain everything. And that was just not possible.

  She zipped up her jacket.

  “What are you doing?” Leroy asked, sounding worried.

  He put his hand on her shoulder.

  “You’re not going to get out, are you?”

  “Erwan, I...”

  Eva was having trouble breathing. She looked over her shoulder at the back window of the car. There was no one, just darkness and fog. What if the person she had glimpsed really was the man she was looking for?

  What if it was him?

  “I’m sorry. I have to check it out. It will only take a minute.”

  She opened the car door.

  “No,” Leroy said, powerless as she slid out of the vehicle.

  She slammed the door and stood in the middle of the street.

  There was no sign of the man.

  The child in the store stopped playing the game on his cell phone and put his forehead against the glass. With his thumb, he punched the number on his phone, Eva knew he had just sounded the alarm.

  Leroy rolled down his window and called to her in a soft voice, “Get back in before we attract attention.”

  “Just a second.”

  “At least tell me what is going on.”

  Eva could not. Asking a thousand questions, she surveyed the parking lot and the line of buildings. There were so many dark places where someone could be hiding.

  She took a few steps toward the parking lot. Her heels clicked on the concrete. Her breath vaporized in front of her.

  There was an opening in the fence—a passage someone had made long ago—at the place where the man had been standing.

  On the other side of the fence, the dark parking lot spread out.

  “Eva!”

  Leroy’s voice was filled with anxiety.

  “We’ve been spotted. Are you happy now?”

  The teenagers standing around the fire at the end of the street had stopped talking. They were motionless, staring at her. Their eyes shined like stars on their ink-black faces.

  “Come back,” Leroy insisted. “Let’s get out of here now, before we have any trouble.”

  Eva continued toward the opening in the fence, the passage that led to the parking lot and the buildings. It was the route that the man—her secret, her nightmare—might have taken.

  She would only need a minute.

  Just a glimpse.

  She climbed onto the low wall that bordered the sidewalk and slipped through the hole in the fence. The sound of her heels hitting the concrete was even louder as she hastened toward the parking lot.

  At the end of the street, one of the boys nodded and moved away from the fire. The others followed, and a silent formation moved up the street toward Leroy’s car.

  6

  Maybe she had been wrong after all. The parking lot was steeped in shadows. The windows of the stationary cars had a cold glint, and the silent fog clung to their wheels.

  There was nobody with white hair.

  There was no ghost from her past.

  Eva kept walking, though, her hand on the Beretta at her waist. Her eyes were hypersensitive, so she had no trouble examining the darkness between the vehicles. She spotted a rawboned cat crouching under a car. The animal did not move when she passed.

  She knew she did not have much time. It would not be long before the teenagers arrived to see what was going on.

  There was no evidence of the man she had seen—or thought she had seen.

  You imagined it all. You’re going crazy. That’s the only explanation.

  She bit her lip, feeling the anger swell after that crazy moment of hope. She took a deep breath of paralyzing cold air. The frost covering the concrete was slippery, and she had to concentrate to maintain her footing.

  She continued to examine the parking lot, looking for the slightest movement. Nothing.

  She approached the entrance to the first building slowly.

  The door was shattered. Shards of shiny glass covered the floor of the entryway. For some reason, the hall, a black chasm that led into the belly of the building, beckoned her as she stood just outside the building.

  Was there breathing in the shadows?

  “Dammit. Enough of this shit,” she said to herself.

  She knew she was being stupid. The frustration was making her shake.

  She sighed—a cloud of condensation rose in front of her face—and shook her hair nervously. Something was wrong. What was it? It was not the smell of urine, which was common in such hallways. The silence. She could not hear any parents yelling at their children. There was no rap music playing anywhere in the building. No television seemed to be turned on. She looked at the balconies, which formed black and gray lines across the façade. They were deserted.

  In the heavy silence, she felt a sense of anticipation. But anticipation of what? It bothered her. She pricked her ears, but she heard no steps in the stairwell. Gusts of wind whistled, raising the stench of urine, and that was all.

  The honking caused her to start.

  No more time. She turned to go back and saw that the small gang had surrounded Leroy’s car. There were fewer than a dozen boys, none of them over eighteen. They were talking loudly and had circled the Renault like a pack of wolves. One of them had his hands on the hood. Eva heard him shouting a flow of insults. An
other had started hitting the roof with his fist. Inside, Leroy ordered them to get away from the car, but that just sparked the boys’ latent violence. They hit the car harder.

  They needed to get out of there before things got out of control.

  One of the boys, who looked like the leader, jumped onto the low wall and grabbed the green fence. Without moving, he looked at Eva in front of the building. His skin was a black as coal, and his eyes stood out in the darkness: two lit circles.

  “Hey,” he called out. “You. You lost or something?”

  He turned to his buddies and waved.

  “Can you believe it? There’s a whore down there! A whore wandering around on our turf.”

  Eva slid her gun out of the holster. Her heart was beating fast. She could tell that her senses were dulled. For months she had let herself go, and here she needed to react quickly.

  “Police,” she called out as loud as she could.

  “What? What you saying?”

  The boy slipped through the opening in the fence, immediately followed by his buddies.

  “Police,” Eva repeated. “Stop where you are.”

  “What’s this shit? What do you want from us? What you doing giving us shit?”

  There were four of them coming down the path to the parking lot. Their bright eyes were focused on her. They had zipped up their jackets and pulled up their hoods to hide their faces. Meanness radiated from them, like a palpable, toxic aura. This was no show. These kids wanted blood. Their leader had decided it would be hers.

  She raised her Beretta so they could see it.

  “That’s enough. Stop right where you are! NOW!”

  The four teenagers slowed down, hesitating.

  “You’re just a whore, that’s all,” the leader shouted. “What are you doing here, cop whore?”

  He knelt down to pick up something from the ground.

  “I said don’t move.”

  The boy stood up, a sharp piece of concrete in his hand.

  Behind him, his buddies followed suit, picking up more chunks of concrete.

  “I know you’re here to get screwed. Isn’t that it? Come on, you love it, don’t you? Getting screwed.”

  They starting walking again, like a single entity, slower, spreading out between the parked cars, preparing to encircle her.