The Seven Sequels bundle

by Orca Various

  There’s another bang. Like another gunshot.

  Then a loud clang. It comes from overhead and sounds like a door closing. Maybe someone just came out onto the fire escape. I look up, but I don’t see anyone on it.

  Spider Face hears the clang too. He glances up. Then he shouts to me, “Hey!”

  A beam of light illuminates something—a gun—sailing through the air at me. Geez. I catch it by reflex. I’m afraid if I don’t and it hits the ground, it will go off and someone, maybe me, will get hurt.

  The lights click off. I hear footsteps, running.

  I look around to see what Duane makes of what just happened. But he isn’t there. It takes a few seconds for me to realize that he hasn’t taken off. He’s down on the ground. He doesn’t answer when I ask him what he’s doing. I crouch. He’s so still. I touch him. He doesn’t move. I realize I’m still holding the gun, and I drop it and press my ear to Duane’s mouth. He’s not breathing—or if he is, I can’t tell. I yell for Eric as I start CPR. I yell for him a couple of times, but he doesn’t show up.

  Duane still isn’t moving. I’m pretty sure he’s dead. I sit back on my heels and put a hand to the ground to steady myself. That’s when I feel something warm and wet—and sticky. I bring my hand up to my face, but I still can’t see what it is. It’s too dark. But I know. Boy, do I know. It’s blood.

  Suddenly I’m shaking all over, but it’s not from the cold. The bangs I heard, the ones that sounded like gunshots—that’s exactly what they were. Spider Face shot Duane. I can’t believe it. I was standing with Duane. I could have been hit too. I could be lying there instead of Duane—or beside him—not breathing. Dead in an alley in Detroit. Worse, with no one I care about having any idea where I am. As far as the Major is concerned, I’m safely back in Toronto with my grandmother. As far as my grandmother knows, I’m about to show up on her doorstep, relaxed (well, as relaxed as anyone can be after ten straight days with the Major) and tanned from a beach vacation in Uruguay.

  I fumble for my cell phone and call 9-1-1. I report the shooting. When the operator asks for my location, I realize I have no idea where I am. I stumble back down the alley to the street. When I get there, I see headlights coming in my direction. I freeze. Is it Spider Face? Has he come back to finish the job?

  But it’s not him. It’s Eric, in the truck. He pulls to a stop and jumps out.

  “Where’s the fridge?” he demands. “Where’s Duane?”

  “Where were you? You said you were going to back up. Where the hell were you?” My voice doesn’t sound right. For one thing, it’s hollow, like an echo. And shaky, like the rest of me. I want to drive my fist through something. I can’t believe any of this.

  “I went to gas up,” Eric says. “Where’s Duane? What happened? Wasn’t the fridge there? Because if it wasn’t—”

  I’m looking around for a street sign. There isn’t one.

  “Where are we?” I ask Eric.

  “What? What do you mean? We’re here.”

  “Where’s here? What street is this?”

  He tells me. I tell the 9-1-1 operator.

  “Who’s that?” Eric wants to know. “Who are you talking to?”

  “The cross street?” I say. “What’s the nearest cross street?”

  “What’s going on?”

  I scream the question at him. My fury stuns him. He answers. I tell the 9-1-1 operator. I also tell her the few store signs I can see. She tells me to stay put.

  I feel sick when I shove the phone back into my pocket. I was right there. I was no more than two feet away from him. I could have been shot.

  That’s it. I double over and throw up Katya’s dinner.

  “What the…?” Eric says. He calls Duane’s name.

  “He’s dead,” I say.

  “Dead? What do you mean, dead?”

  “Someone shot him.”

  Eric laughs. He takes another look at me. The laugh dies in his throat.

  “What are you talking about?” He looks at the alley. Then he starts toward it.

  I grab him to hold him back.

  “Where is he?” he demands.

  “You can’t go back there. Someone shot him. It’s a crime scene. We have to stay here.”

  We stay. We stand and wait, and I get colder and colder, until my teeth are chattering. It doesn’t occur to me to get into the truck. Anyway, the heater isn’t working properly.

  An ambulance arrives.

  The cops arrive.

  NINE

  I’m covered in blood after my attempted CPR. I’m still shaking. The ambulance guys check me out. They wrap me in a blanket because I’m shaking so hard. They inspect me for wounds. They listen to my heart a couple of times. Apparently, it’s racing. They tell me it’s shock at what I’ve witnessed. Once they’re satisfied I’m not hurt, they hand me over to the cops, who take me back to a police station, put me into a small room and tell me to take a seat, that someone will be with me shortly. If I’m suspected of anything or under arrest, no one bothers to tell me. I’m not worried—not yet anyway. I haven’t done anything. Besides, down here the cops have to tell you whether you’re arrested or not. If they don’t and the case goes to trial, it will get kicked because they didn’t follow the rules. But they fingerprinted me, which I don’t understand. Why the fingerprints if I’m not under arrest? I guess I could have said no. But, like I said, I haven’t done anything. If you haven’t broken any laws, you have no worries, right?

  So I sit—or try to—and I wait. I’m as squirmy as an addict in need of a top-up. I still can’t believe what happened. I don’t want to believe it. I stand again, and I pace. I stop for a few seconds to look at the mirror on one wall. Of course, I know it’s not really a mirror. It’s a one-way window. Whoever is on the other side can see me, and that’s all I can see too. Me. With blood on the front of my jacket. With a face that looks too white considering how much surf and sun I’ve had lately.

  Me, pacing. Which makes me look guilty of something. But I can’t stop. I don’t even want to think about sitting still. I just want out.

  The door opens and a massive black guy comes into the room. He tells me his name—Daniel Carver—and says he’s a homicide detective. He’s wearing a dark suit with a shirt and tie, and he’s carrying a file folder. He flashes me his badge and tells me to take a seat.

  “I didn’t do anything,” I tell him. That doesn’t sound right. I don’t want him to get the wrong idea. “I mean, I tried CPR. But it was too late.” There, that’s better. Sort of.

  “I said sit.” He doesn’t yell it at me. It sounds more like a guy giving a command to his dog. And like a good dog—or like someone who knows enough about cops to know it’s not a good idea to annoy them, not when something this serious has happened—I sit. But one of my legs is jumping up and down like it’s keeping time to music that no one can hear. Carver notices. He looks at it. I make it stop. Carver looks me in the eye. My leg starts to jump again.

  “Rennie Charbonneau. That’s your name?” He’s got the deepest voice I’ve ever heard and a way of talking like I’m a piece of garbage he’s about to ditch as soon as he can find out who tossed me in his path. He scares me more than the Major ever has, and that’s rare. I don’t get scared very often, and I sure don’t get intimidated. Maybe it’s shock, like the ambulance guy said. “That’s a French name, right?”

  I nod. “My dad’s Quebecois.” Will a Detroit cop know what that is? “He’s from Quebec. It’s in Canada.”

  “I know where Quebec is,” Carver says mildly. He’s looking at a page inside the file folder. “What’s a Canadian boy from Quebec doing down here in Detroit over Christmas, Rennie?”

  I start to relax, even though I know I probably shouldn’t. Just because a cop—a homicide cop, at that—sounds friendly, it doesn’t mean he is. More than likely he’s trying to find out what I sound like and look like and how I act when I’m not being grilled and not spinning a web of lies. He’s using psychology on me. I tell my
self to relax. I remind myself of something I’ve heard the Major say before, which is that you might be able to put one over on a good investigator now and then, but unless you’re a career criminal—a successful career criminal—you’re basically a rookie up against someone who’s seen and heard it all. Carver is doing his job here, the same job he’s been doing for a couple of decades, judging by the look of him. Me—I’m just in a situation that I sincerely hope is temporary.

  “I’m on my way home from a vacation with my dad,” I say.

  He glances up from the folder. “Oh? He’s here with you?”

  “No, sir.”

  He hears the “sir,” and a wolflike smile appears on his face.

  “You trying to snow me, Rennie?”

  “No, sir.”

  His eyes lock onto mine. If I look hard enough, I can see his vision of my future in their black depths. I want to look away, but I know not to. If you don’t look straight at the cops when they’re talking to you, they start to think you’re lying. And if you’re lying, then you’re probably guilty of something. But what I said is true. For once I’m not trying to snow anyone with the “sir.” It’s just that Carver reminds me of the Major, so the “sir” is an automatic reflex.

  “My dad shipped out,” I tell him. Then, before he can ask, I add, “He’s with the military. He has an assignment overseas. Afghanistan.”

  “And you?”

  “Me?”

  “You haven’t explained what you’re doing in Detroit. It says here you’re a Canadian citizen, residing in Canada. You have friends here?”

  “No, sir.”

  He looks at the file folder again. “You told the officers on the scene that you had dinner with friends and that you were in the alley where the shooting occurred because you were doing a favor for one of those friends.”

  I feel my leg jump. I wish it wouldn’t, but I can’t stop it. I realize it looks like he’s caught me in a lie. But it’s not a lie. The fact is, I can barely remember what I told the two uniforms who questioned me at the scene. Mostly I was thinking how close I’d just come to being a corpse like Duane. If those cops were to walk into the room right now, I doubt I’d recognize them. There are only two faces burned into my brain, and believe me, I wish they weren’t. They’re Duane after he stopped breathing and the guy with the massive spider tattoo.

  “They aren’t really friends,” I tell Carver. “I mean, I didn’t know any of them until the day before yesterday. They’re more like acquaintances.”

  Carver shakes his head. He’s disappointed. “It’s late, Rennie, and it’s been a long day. Let’s not play word games, okay?”

  “I was just trying to clari—”

  “How long have you known McLennan?”

  “Who?” Who’s McLennan? I’ve never heard the name before.

  Carver lets out a long, heavy sigh, like, Please Lord, why do you keep sending me kids who think that playing dumb is their smartest move?

  “Eric McLennan. You telling me you don’t know him?”

  “I didn’t know his last name.” I assumed it was Forrester. Looks like I’m wrong. And where is he anyway? I lost track of him when the cops showed up. Did they bring him in too?

  “It’s McLennan,” Carver says, like he can’t believe he has to tell me this. Like he thinks the only reason he has to is because I’m wasting his precious time by acting clueless. “How long have you known him?”

  “I met him the day before yesterday.”

  “But you were doing him a favor. That’s what you said, isn’t it?”

  “Well, yeah. But it’s not what you think.”

  “You have no idea what I think, Rennie.”

  My leg jumps again. The thing is, I have a pretty good idea what’s running through his mind. I’ve dealt with cops before. Plenty of times. But it was always for stupid stuff, never for anything this serious. Never for homicide. The stupid stuff I did, I could deal with that. And those cops didn’t scare me because, seriously, what was the worst they could do? I live with the Major, after all, and there isn’t a cop alive that can be harder on me than the Major is.

  At least, there hasn’t been until now.

  I remind myself of some important facts. Fact one: I am old enough to be tried as an adult in any jurisdiction in North America. Fact two: homicide is as serious as it gets. Fact three: some states have the death penalty, and I’m not at all sure that Michigan isn’t one of them.

  Carver leans back in his chair. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what happened tonight, Rennie?”

  Finally, I have a chance to lay it out so that it makes sense.

  I start by telling him that I had supper at Eric’s house, but that it had nothing to do with Eric, that it was his grandfather who invited me. I say that I know the grandfather because I was hoping he could help me with some information I need. I don’t go into what that information was. It isn’t important to what happened, and I have a feeling it will only annoy Carver if he thinks I’m digressing. If he wants to know more about anything, he’ll ask. I go straight to the part where I’m helping Eric and Duane with the fridge. I tell it all exactly how it happened. I don’t leave out a single thing, and every word is the truth, which makes me feel more confident because if Carver questions me about any of it, he’ll get the same answer every time. I won’t be one of those idiots who tells a lie and then gets tripped up on it. I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff in my life, but this isn’t going to be one of those times. This time I do it straight up. When I finish, the room is silent.

  Carver looks steadily at me.

  “A guy with a spider tattoo on his face, huh?”

  “A giant one. It practically covered his whole face.”

  “You’d recognize him again, I suppose.”

  “I’d recognize that tattoo.” How could anyone forget a thing like that?

  “You say there was another guy there?”

  I nod.

  “We’re recording this, Rennie. Say yes or no.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  I think hard. “No, I can’t.” I was aware of someone else there, but I couldn’t take my eyes off that spider.

  More silence. Another look at the file folder. A shuffle of the few papers in there.

  “Your fingerprints are on the murder weapon, Rennie. You want to explain that to me?”

  There’s something in the way he says it, like he’s accusing me, that makes my leg jump again.

  “You don’t think I shot him, do you?”

  “Did you?”

  “No!”

  “So, what, the fingerprint guys are wrong when they say the prints are yours?” He shakes his head. “I don’t think so, Rennie.”

  I could kick myself. I realize I forgot the part about Spider Face throwing the gun at me. I went straight from him taking off after shooting Duane to me trying to help Duane. And now when I explain that to Carver—“The guy threw the gun at me”—it sounds lame. But it’s the truth.

  One of Carver’s eyebrows arches.

  “The killer threw his gun at you? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  I nod. I remember that I’m being recorded. “Yes. He said hey, then he threw the gun at me and I caught it.”

  Carver sighs. I’m not sure what that means. Maybe he can’t believe I’m stupid enough to think he’ll swallow what I’m dishing out. Maybe he thinks I’m the dumbest shooter he’s ever met. Maybe he’s just tired.

  “You didn’t mention that to the officers at the scene,” he says finally. “Or when I asked you to tell me what happened. Did you just make that up, Rennie?”

  “No!” I have never wanted anyone to believe me as badly as I want Detective Carver to now. “I’m telling you the truth. He threw it and I caught it. Kind of like a reflex.” I’m beginning to think that my reflexes are not my best friend.

  Carver is silent. Right about the time I start to sweat, he says, “Michigan was the first state to abolish the death penalty. Did
you know that, Rennie?”

  “No, sir.” But I sure am glad to hear it.

  “In 1846,” Carver says. “Decades ahead of some states. At least a century before most of them. But that doesn’t mean we’re not tough on crime. You murder someone here, you pay. You murder a cop, you pay for the rest of your life.”

  Maybe Carver is one of those trivia buffs, and maybe he likes showing off. But I doubt it. Not in this situation anyway. I know that when the Major has to do a big interrogation, he prepares. I know because he tells me. According to the Major, preparation is the key to the success of every endeavor he can think of, from a military campaign to catching a wrong-doer to passing a history exam. The Major is like a Boy Scout that way. I think most military personnel are. Which makes me think this isn’t just trivia Carver is spouting. There’s a definite point behind it.

  “I’m not sure I follow you,” I say.

  “The victim known to you as Duane—”

  Known to me? What’s going on?

  “—was a police officer.”

  My leg starts in again, keeping time to a rocking drum solo I can’t hear.

  “He was a cop? I don’t get it.”

  Carver’s eyes are hard on me. “You’re telling me you didn’t know?”

  “How would I know? I told you. I just met the guy. I didn’t even know his name until tonight.”

  “He was a police officer, Rennie.”

  There’s no way. “Why would a cop hang around with Eric?”

  “Are you trying to tell me you don’t know that either?” There’s a bite to Carver’s voice now, like he’s well aware that I’m stringing him along and he doesn’t appreciate it one little bit. But it isn’t an act, and I’m not stringing him along.

  “I told you. I don’t really know Eric. I barely talked to him.”

  “Except to agree to do him a favor.” Like, yeah, pull the other leg, Rennie.

  “Yeah. That’s exactly right.” Now I’m not only scared, but I’m also angry. I didn’t do anything wrong. Not this time. “I don’t really know him. I didn’t know Duane at all. I didn’t know he was a cop. And I have no idea why a cop would be interested in a loser like Eric.”