Firewalk

by Chris Roberson

  “That gullible chucklehead.” Harrison stroked his mustache with his thumb and forefinger, starting just beneath his nose and smoothing outwards to the corners of his mouth. He had made the same gesture at least four times since they’d left the station house, and Izzie was beginning to think it was a tic. “He thinks that all of the skells he’s minding are model parolees. He wouldn’t know probable cause if it bit him in the ass.”

  Chavez ignored his partner and continued. “His record is clean since he got out, and he hasn’t been associating with any known felons. But he’s also still unemployed, to the best of our knowledge, which makes it hard to explain how he’s affording this place.”

  He reached over and swiped the tablet’s screen, and brought up a photo taken with a telescopic lens of Malcolm Price unlocking the front door of a two-story bungalow.

  “It’s a rental,” Chavez said. “The landlord says that Price pays his rent every month in cash. When he signed the lease Price listed Pinnacle Tower as his place of employment—said he was doing janitorial work there—but we checked and the placement service that provides that staff doesn’t have any record of him.”

  “Maybe he’s working there under a different name?” Izzie looked up from the tablet. “It can be hard for an ex-con to get honest work. An alias might help.”

  Harrison shook his head. “No dice. We did door duty in the Pinnacle, seeing if anyone there recognized a photo of Price, but came up empty.”

  Izzie wondered how reliable those findings were. She knew from growing up with aunts who worked as maids that there were many people who couldn’t pick out of a lineup the person who emptied their trash and swept their floors every day if their lives depended on it.

  “Is there any doubt that he’s the man seen meeting with Tyler Campbell in the surveillance video?” Patrick asked.

  “None at all,” Harrison answered.

  “It checks out.” Chavez swiped back to the mugshot and pointed out Price’s neck tattoo. “The tat is clearly visible in the video.”

  Patrick seemed satisfied. “So what’s the plan?”

  “We’ve had his place under surveillance for the last forty-eight hours, and we’ve tracked him coming and going with canvas tote bags full of something.” Harrison flapped his hand. “You know, the kind the hippies want you to use at the grocery store?”

  “We’re pretty sure he’s trafficking.” Chavez took the tablet back from Izzie and powered it down. “And we have reasonable suspicion that there are quantities of Ink inside the house. The judge signed off on a no-knock warrant, so this is a straight-up raid.” He nodded towards one of the officers in tactical gear, who was carrying a door ram. “We bust in, secure the place, and see what we find.”

  “And we know he’s home?” Patrick said.

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant answered. “We had eyes on him entering two hours ago with an unidentified adult male and female, and none of them have come out yet.”

  Harrison leered suggestively.

  “Any idea who they are?” Patrick turned to Chavez, who shook his head.

  “We weren’t able to ID them from seeing just the backs of their heads.” The sergeant scowled fractionally, and Izzie couldn’t tell if he was annoyed at Patrick’s question or his own failure to identify the two suspects, or both.

  Chavez motioned towards the door. “The house is one block to the west of here. We’ve got another team standing by in a service van up the street, and when we give the signal they’ll approach from the other side. Squad cars will block the intersections on the eastern and western approaches, so there won’t be any vehicles passing by. There’s entrances on the front and back sides of the house, and we’re going in both sides at once. Looks like there’s windows big enough for egress on the north side, so we’ll need a pair of officers watching those at the same time. There’s a dormer window in the attic, but it’s about a twenty-five-foot drop from there to the pavement so I don’t think they’ll be taking that way out.”

  “Mullins,” the sergeant said, glancing at his team, “you and Dobson take the windows on the north side.” He nodded to the man carrying the door ram. “Carlson, you’re on the front door.”

  “Okay. Everybody ready?” Chavez scanned the faces of the others. Patrick nodded, and Izzie put her hand on her hol-stered pistol.

  “Let’s go already.” Harrison rolled his eyes like an impatient teenager.

  Chavez thumbed the side of the radio clipped to his bulletproof vest. “Team 2, we are moving out.”

  “Copy that,” buzzed a voice from the speaker.

  “Team 3, block off the streets when I give the word.”

  “On it,” another voice buzzed in response.

  “Move out!” Chavez shouted, and shouldered open the door.

  The moments that followed were a flurry of images and sounds. The flash of the red and blues atop the squad car that blazed past, brilliant in the late afternoon dim. The screech of the tires as the patrol cars swerved and slammed to a halt, blocking the intersections. The rattle of gun belts and the thud of boots on the pavement as the police raced up the sidewalk without saying a word.

  Izzie trailed behind the others, pistol held low at her side in a two-handed grip. Patrick was just ahead of her, bringing up the rear of the column as Chavez and Harrison charged ahead.

  Further up the street, Izzie could see another black-and-white pulling into position, sealing off the other end of the block from traffic. A panel van had run halfway up the curb in front of the rental house, and a team of officers in tactical gear was leaping out onto the ground.

  Izzie couldn’t have kept up with the others even if she hadn’t been intentionally hanging back. Just running at this pace was enough of a strain, never having fully recovered from the cut that very nearly cost her the use of one leg. By the time she reached the front yard of the rental house, Chavez’s team was already in position and one of the uniformed officers was preparing to take down the door with the ram. It was roughly the size and shape of a stovepipe, with handles at the middle and one end, and made of solid steel so it weighed as much as a small child.

  At a signal from Chavez, the officer swung the ram back and then slammed it with a massive thud into the door, shattering the wood around the doorknob and lock.

  “Go!” Chavez shouted.

  The officer with the ram immediately jumped to one side as the sergeant kicked the door the rest of the way in and the others surged inside, weapons aimed and shouting for anyone inside to get down on the floor. Izzie could hear the other team doing the same from around the back of the house, while two officers peeled away from the rest and took up positions beneath the big bay windows on the north side of the building.

  Patrick was waiting in the yard and watching the house when Izzie caught up with him.

  “You’re not going in?” she asked.

  He glanced in her direction. “Figured I’d give you a chance to catch up. Besides, this is Chavez and Harrison’s party, I’m just along for the ride.”

  “Are they good cops? How confident are you that this is the—”

  Suddenly a quick burst of gunfire erupted from the second floor of the house.

  Patrick thumbed on his radio. “Shots fired. Repeat, shots fired!”

  Izzie had stepped back to get a better look at the upper part of the house. There was the narrow dormer window that Chavez had mentioned, at least twenty-five feet up. While there was light shining from the broken doorway on the front and the bay windows to one side, the space beyond the dormer window was pitch-black.

  When Patrick lowered his hand from the radio, Izzie drew his attention to the high window. “Do you think maybe there’s—”

  Before she could complete the thought, the window suddenly burst outward as a man hurtled headfirst through the glass. He plummeted to the paved walkway below, wreathed in a cloud of shattered glass. The shards twinkled like stars in the light of a streetlamp as they fell, but the man himself seemed wrapped in shadows.
>
  The man landed on the concrete with a sickening thud and the scraping crunch of breaking bones, just a few steps in front of where Izzie was standing.

  “Is … ?” Patrick said. “Is that … ?”

  The man’s left shoulder had been forced back by the impact, so that his left arm was almost pressed against his spine, and the whiteness of the bones that had torn through flesh and clothing on his rib cage and right leg were cast in stark contrast to the bright arterial blood that was welling up around them. His head had snapped back at an unnatural angle, broken bones sticking out of the side of his neck, and his eyes were wide open and sightless. There were fresh bullet wounds in his chest, and the condition of the exit wounds on his back indicated that he had been shot at close range by someone right in front of him. The shots would’ve had to have passed through his lungs and probably his heart as well, possibly shattering his spine.

  Izzie crouched down and searched for a pulse on his neck with her left hand, and failed to find one. If the man had been alive when he went through the window, he wasn’t anymore.

  “Yeah, it’s him. Or was, at any rate. See the neck tattoo?” Izzie pointed at the dead man’s neck as she straightened up. “This is your guy Malcolm Price, all right.”

  Someone was shouting for an ambulance upstairs, and at first Izzie thought it was just for the dead man on the pavement. She glanced up at the dormer window above. The sergeant was looking down, a stricken expression on his face, and she could hear him say “Holy …” He had a hand pressed to the side of his neck above his tactical armor, and Izzie could see blood welling up between his fingers.

  “The late Malcolm Price, now,” Patrick said. “But did he jump, was he thrown, or … ?”

  He left off when the dead man on the pavement began to climb to his feet, his broken bones making a sickening sound as they ground against each other.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “The hell?!” Patrick shouted, raising his pistol and aiming it at the man who was sprawled dead on the ground the moment before.

  Izzie jumped back, raising her own pistol in a two-handed grip. “He didn’t have a pulse!”

  Malcolm Price stood awkwardly for a moment, his head still lolling far to one side, eyes open but unfocused. His mouth moved, but no sound came out. Izzie found it horribly familiar.

  Black welts suddenly began to rise up on the skin of his face, neck, and arms. Small at first, no bigger than a fingerprint, but swelling in size until they were as large as handprints between one blink and the next.

  “Patrick?” Izzie said, without taking her eyes off the dead man in front of them. She felt suddenly nauseated, and a foul taste stung her tongue. “Are you seeing this?”

  From the corner of her eye she could see Patrick nodding. “Seeing,” he said, “but not understanding.”

  The dead man swayed on his feet, then took a staggering step forward, like a drunken marionette.

  “Malcolm Price!” Patrick yelled. “You are under arrest. Get down on your knees and keep your hands where I can see them.”

  If the dead man heard him, he gave no sign, but instead took another staggering step forward, directly towards Izzie. His mouth continued to move in silence as sightless eyes turned on her.

  Izzie felt a familiar dread rising up from the pit of her stomach, as the nausea grew.

  “Freeze!” she shouted.

  The dead man took another step, now halfway to where Izzie stood.

  “Sir, don’t make us shoot!” Patrick said, but the dead man continued on, raising his arms towards Izzie.

  Suddenly, there was the piercing sound of a shotgun firing from off to the right. The blast hit the dead man square in the back, and he staggered forward for half a step, but stayed on his feet.

  Izzie turned to see one of the tactical team members at the corner of the house, his shotgun still at his shoulder.

  “Go down, damn it!” the officer shouted, and fired another blast from his shotgun, which hit the dead man in the left leg, shredding his knee.

  With a sickening crunch, the dead man pitched forward face-first onto the ground.

  “Hold your fire, Tiltson!” Patrick called out to the officer. He turned to Izzie. “You okay?”

  “He had already taken at least three shots to the chest before he went through the window,” Izzie said, her tone level but with a tension beneath the words. “Then the injuries sustained hitting the pavement. And there was no pulse. How was he able to get up and move around?”

  As the tactical officer with the shotgun approached slowly, Chavez and several of the other uniformed officers raced out the door, including Officer Carlson, who was still holding the door ram.

  “Tevake!” Chavez shouted. “Everything under control?”

  “Yeah,” Patrick answered, lowering his pistol as he turned to answer. “The suspect was coming for Agent Lefevre, but Officer Tiltson was able to—”

  “Patrick!” Izzie shouted as the dead man struggled to climb to his feet again.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Patrick said.

  The black welts had bloomed even larger, until now it was as if the dead man were a walking shadow.

  As if he were covered in ink….

  Patrick and Izzie jumped back, putting more distance between the dead man and themselves.

  “On your hands and knees, now!” Chavez shouted at the dead man, a stabbing gesturing with his pistol punctuating each word.

  “Tried that,” Patrick deadpanned. “Didn’t work.”

  “Shooting him clearly doesn’t seem to work, either,” Izzie said.

  Once more on his feet, the dead man again began to stagger towards Izzie, hands out and grasping, mouth working.

  “He’s jacked up on something,” Chavez said. “I’ve seen guys on PCP do stuff like this, break half the bones in their bodies and still keep on trucking.”

  Izzie realized that the others didn’t understand what was happening. Patrick might, but not the rest of them. They still thought this was a living thing they were facing. But she knew better.

  “You! Carlson!” She pointed at the officer with the door ram. “Get over here!”

  Carlson glanced from Izzie to Chavez, who shrugged. “You heard her, get over there.”

  As Carlson double-timed it over from the front door of the house, Izzie kept backing up, staying a couple of steps out of the dead man’s reach as he continued to lurch towards her.

  “The door ram!” Izzie shouted, as she sidestepped to lure the dead man away from the others, his back turned towards the approaching Carlson. “Hit him in the head as hard as you can. Try to snap his neck.”

  Carlson glanced back to Chavez again, who motioned him to hurry up.

  Taking the handles of the door ram in either hand, he reared back, then rushed forward as he swung the ram in a wide arc at shoulder level, aiming for the side of the dead man’s head.

  The steel cylinder connected with a crunch, whipping the dead man’s head hard to the other side. Bones audibly snapped and cracked, but the head still remained connected to the body. The impact knocked the dead man off his feet, though, and he went tumbling onto his left side.

  His right arm still reached out for Izzie, and he began to try standing once more.

  Izzie holstered her pistol, took three quick steps forward, and took hold of the door ram in Carlson’s hands.

  “Get back,” she told him as she took the ram from him.

  He took a step away, bewildered.

  Izzie planted a foot on the dead man’s chest, pinning him to the ground. Then she grunted in exertion as she lifted the door ram high over her head, and brought it crashing down as hard as she could on the dead man’s neck.

  The bones of the dead man’s neck shattered to powder, and his head was only attached to the rest of his body by tattered muscle and the shredded remains of his spinal cord.

  She dropped the ram clattering to the ground.

  The dead man’s mouth had stopped moving. But as Izzi
e watched, the black welts began to fade, like water drops evaporating on a skillet.

  By the time Patrick and the others were at her side, only seconds later, the inky blotches had completely faded.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “What the hell was that?” Officer Carlson said, looking from the mangled corpse to the bloodied door ram

  and back. “Some kind of zombie or something?”

  Patrick and Izzie shared a glance.

  “Don’t be an idiot, Carlson,” Chavez sneered, holstering his pistol. “Like I said, he was just jacked up on something, probably didn’t even realize he’d been shot. I’ve seen this kind of thing before.”

  An ambulance siren could be heard Dopplering in from up the street.

  “Why were you away from your post, Tiltson?” Chavez went on, wheeling on the officer with the shotgun. “You were supposed to be watching the other side of the house.”

  “I heard the window breaking,” the officer answered, shifting uneasily. He seemed to be the rookie on the squad, and had clearly gotten caught up in the heat of the moment. “I came around the corner, and saw the suspect advancing on Lieutenant Tevake and Agent Lefevre, and I …” He paused, taking a breath. “I saw a shot and I took it.”

  Chavez shook his head. “Well, just remember to keep the facts straight when we review the incident. The captain will have my ass if he thinks this wasn’t a righteous kill.” He turned to Izzie. “Will you be available for an interview for the departmental shooting investigation, agent? Might not be necessary, but just in case …”

  Izzie nodded. But she knew that Chavez and his superiors wouldn’t be eager to hear her interpretation of the events.

  “Look, just what happened in there?” Patrick asked Chavez as he holstered his own pistol.

  Chavez turned and headed back towards the front door of the rental house, Patrick and Izzie following close behind.

  “We entered the residence, and found an unidentified male and female in the kitchen. Sergeant Jefferson and Officers Dewey and Ramirez continued to the second floor while Harrison and I detained the two suspects. Shots were fired upstairs, and then the third suspect went out the window.” Chavez glanced back at Patrick as he entered the house. “We’re still piecing together what happened.”