by Tim Stevens
Reason stopped him.
Because as the voice uttered the second syllable, the unmistakable ratcheting click echoing off the narrow walls of the alley told him that a gun had been cocked.
Venn slowed to a walk.
He stopped.
From behind him, the voice said, softly: “That’s right.”
Venn heard footsteps, faintly squeaking and almost as quiet as the voice. Sneakers, he guessed.
“I’m aiming at the back of your neck.”
The voice was closer now. Maybe ten feet behind him.
Venn figured the guy had been crouching behind the dumpster he’d passed.
The man continued: “You’re a big guy. But if I pull the trigger, your size won’t matter. A nine-millimeter slug will tear through the base of your skull, and your brain will be veggie burger. It’ll shut down. You won’t even know what hit you.”
Venn focused on the voice. It was lightly accented. Latino. But with perfectly emphasized, idiomatically correct English. The voice of a man in his thirties, although at which end of the range Venn couldn’t tell.
The man said: “Hold your arms out to the sides where I can see your hands.”
Every fiber of Venn’s being resisted what he was doing. But once again, his rational faculty held sway.
He spread his arms wide, the Beretta in his right hand.
Behind him, the voice said, “Good. Now drop the gun.”
It was wrong.
It was all wrong.
Venn told people to drop their guns. He was a cop.
Punks didn’t get to tell him to lose his firearm.
He’d been in a similar situation once, long ago, before he was a cop. It was in the late 1990s, and he’d been serving in the Corps in Kosovo, cleaning up after the NATO bombings had cleared the way. His outfit had been ambushed while out on patrol in a stretch of woodland, a series of decoy bombs going off ahead of them amongst the trees. They’d headed in the direction of the explosions, expecting a firefight. Instead, the enemy forces, the footsoldiers of the Serbian dictator Milosevic, had stepped out from their hiding places behind them and gotten the drop on them.
That time, too, Venn had been forced to cast his gun aside, and he’d experienced the same sense of intense, almost paralyzing outrage that he felt now.
The difference then was that the Corps itself had operated a backup system, so that a group of Marines had been following the vanguard at a distance of half a click. The backup guys had taken out the Serbs in short order.
This time, here in this Miami alleyway, there was nobody watching Venn’s back.
The man behind him said, closer still: “Don’t be an asshole. Drop it. Or I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off your neck.”
With the feeling of a novice parachutist jumping from the door of a plane for the first time, Venn opened his right hand and let the Beretta fall.
The gun hit the ground hard, the metallic echo bouncing off the walls.
Swift footsteps behind him and Venn tensed, ready to pivot on the balls of his feet and strike with a swordhand, aiming for where he estimated the man’s throat would be. It would be a desperate move, but he didn’t exactly have a whole lot of options at this point.
But the voice came again, several feet back - too far - and Venn understood he was dealing with a professional.
“You won’t be fast enough, whatever you’re thinking,” the man said. “The instant I see you turning, I’ll shoot.”
Almost before Venn could register the words, he heard the squeak of sneakers on asphalt again and he glanced down as a boot-tip kicked the Beretta to send it spinning ahead down the alleyway. It stopped ten feet away, its indistinct black shape on the ground like a tease.
Or a rebuke.
The man said, a few feet distant again - he’d stepped back - “So who are you?”
Venn had known the question was coming. And he’d already debated what answer to give.
He was dressed in a sharp suit, and he was aware his size and cropped hair gave him a slightly rough look. He carried a gun. So he might be in private security.
A bodyguard, maybe. Or a bouncer.
Either way, he wasn’t immediately recognizable as a cop. He’d identified himself as such to the man he’d been chasing, but he didn’t know if the guy pointing the gun at his back had heard him.
So he didn’t necessarily need to say he was a police officer.
The guy behind him might hate cops. Might jump at the chance to waste one of them. In which case, to show the man his ID would be to sign his own death warrant.
On the other hand... often, when you told an attacker you were a cop, he backed off. The repercussions of killing a cop were enormous. You only did so if you were a desperado, strung out on adrenaline and drugs. Or if you considered yourself untouchable.
The man standing behind Venn was a professional, as Venn had already established. That didn’t say anything about whether or not he’d be willing to take on the risks of a cop-killer label. To take on the target that would tattoo on his forehead, for ever more.
Venn made his decision.
He called out, his head facing forward.
“I’m a cop.”
There was the briefest pause. It probably lasted no more than two seconds, but to Venn it felt like the eons steadily eroding the wall of a cliff.
The man said: “Show me some ID.”
Venn kept his arms spread out on either side.
“I’ll need to reach into my jacket.”
“So do it.” The guy’s voice had taken on an edge.
Venn slipped his right hand - his empty right hand - into his pocket. He took out his wallet, extended his arm once more, flipped it open in reverse so that the shield was showing over his shoulder. He tilted the wallet this way and that, to allow the sparse incoming light from the street at the end of the alley behind him to show the tin.
The man said: “Toss it toward me.”
His gun, and now his shield. Venn felt like a stereotyped TV cop from the 1970s, handing in his resignation.
Except maybe he was doing just that. Resigning, permanently, and not just from the force, but from the human race itself.
He lobbed the wallet back over his shoulder.
There was the faintest scamper of noise at his back.
“NYPD.” The man pronounced each letter with a slight pause between them. He sounded about the same distance behind Venn as before. “Kind of out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you, Lieutenant Venn?”
Venn said nothing.
This time, he counted a full six seconds of silence. It was a relative silence. The sounds of the city were up ahead, and behind. Venn thought he could hear a siren, somewhere, most likely many blocks away, but drawing nearer.
The man’s voice was closer when he spoke again.
He said: “Get down on your knees.”
And Venn knew, with a sickening punch to his gut, that he’d made the wrong call.
Chapter 7
You made a man get down on his knees, with your gun aimed at the back of his head, under two circumstances, and two alone.
You were taking him prisoner, if you were a soldier or a law-enforcement officer.
Or you were preparing him for execution.
Something told Venn the man behind him wasn’t about to cuff him, that he wasn’t a cop or a soldier of any kind.
Which left one likely outcome.
The voice came again, paradoxically more softly: “Down on your knees. Now.”
For dramatic effect, the gun at Venn’s back was uncocked. Then cocked again. Venn was acutely aware of every minute component of the ratcheting, rasping click.
He considered his options once more. If the man was going to shoot him, then Venn would rather take it standing up. On the other hand, complying with the guy’s instructions might buy Venn a few, precious seconds.
What he’d do with those seconds, he didn’t know. The guy was smart. He was hanging back, so that even Venn, with
his long arms and legs, wouldn’t be able to reach him with a backward kick or a sudden, spinning sweep of his fist.
But when you were facing death - or, in this case, facing away from death - you conserved every last moment of time granted to you.
The man said, his voice low and neutral: “If you don’t do as I say, my first shot will be through your kneecap. From behind.”
Venn believed him.
And that meant he had to obey. Because he knew a bullet through the kneecap came close to the ultimate in agony. He’d seen men in the battlefield, shot in just that way. That kind of injury was apt to reduce the toughest, meanest bastard to a state of blubbering infancy. It was the reason the IRA had employed the technique so effectively during Britain’s so-called ‘Troubles’.
Slowly, with the shroud of humiliation and defeat settling over him, Venn lowered himself to first one knee, then the other.
His ears listened past the pounding of his pulse and detected the faintest whisper of the man’s sneakers as he came closer.
Venn kept his head still, but his eyes flicked around, surveying the immediate environment. A half-brick lay off to the right, within lunging distance. But a lunge wouldn’t be fast enough to beat a bullet. And even if he did manage to grab the brick, he’d have to turn, aim, and hit the man in the head.
It would take a couple of seconds, at least. Too long.
Fatally, too long.
Venn had come close to death many, many times in his life, both as a Marine and as a police officer. But on all those other occasions there’d been a suddenness about the danger. This kind of slow-burn, impending doom was something new.
Never before, when Venn had found himself on the brink of extinction, had his life flashed before his eyes, as the cliché had it. He didn’t believe that ever really happened to anybody.
And it didn’t happen to him now. But, rather than his mind being filled with crazy ideas about how he could conceivably escape, turn the tables upon the man behind him, he found his consciousness filled with Beth.
Beth, who’d dropped into his life out of nowhere, in the most bizarre and frightening circumstances imaginable.
Beth, who had given his life a meaning he’d thought he’d found in the Marine Corps and in the police, but hadn’t.
Beth, who’d agreed to spend the rest of her life with him - with him, big dumb Joe Venn from semi-rural Illinois, a hick who’d never even dreamed he’d meet anybody as beautiful and intelligent and wonderful as her, still yet persuade her to marry him.
Beth, who was carrying his child. Their child.
And Venn understood, with the force of a divine revelation, that he couldn’t die now. The cosmos couldn’t permit it.
It wasn’t meant to be.
He found that each of his senses was heightened.
The hardness of the concrete against his knees through the thin fabric of his suit.
The brightness of the streetlights ahead, beyond the mouth of the alleyway.
The faint, sharp tang of urine from the dark recesses of the alley.
The swarming noise of traffic and yells and music from the city above and around him.
The copper taste of dryness in his mouth.
He said, enunciating very clearly: “You’re making a big mistake, asshole.”
The man’s reply was delayed by a couple of seconds. Two seconds in which Venn tensed his neck, in anticipation of the bullet that was about to come ripping through it.
The voice, when it came, was interested. Conversational, almost. “You think? How so?”
“Because I’m wired,” Venn said. “Check my jacket, if you don’t believe me. Right now, everything you and I are saying is being transmitted. Recorded. The wire will pick up the shot. And you’ll be a cop killer, on the run from a department which has your voice on tape.” He felt his tone growing bolder. “You a gambling man? I sure am. But even I wouldn’t put money on your chances after that.”
A flash of blue light swept down the alley from behind Venn, and he felt a flicker of hope. But whatever it was, a cop car or an ambulance, it had passed by.
The seconds ticked by, taut as a thread stretched to breaking point.
Then the man said: “You’re lying.”
Again, the soft footfalls. He was close to Venn now.
Venn sensed the gun being raised. He pictured the pistol held at arm’s length, as the man drew a careful bead on the curve of his cranium at the back.
And he knew he’d lost.
Venn closed his eyes.
Not because he was scared.
But because he could see Beth better that way.
He smiled at her image.
Take care, Beth, he murmured silently. Of yourself. And of the baby.
Above him, behind him, so close that in the final seconds Venn thought he might have a chance at lashing backward and doing some damage, the guy said, in a voice that was barely above a harsh whisper: “Nighty night, cop.”
The pain exploded in Venn’s head a nanosecond before he was consumed by darkness.
Chapter 8
Beth glanced over her shoulder, saw the flaring lights of the ambulance, its flasher strobing on top as it pulled up, and turned back to the man on the ground.
He lay on his side, in the recovery position into which she’d gently maneuvered him: one knee bent, a hand beneath the side of his face, supporting it against the sidewalk, the other arm stretched out before him.
She’d established quickly that he didn’t have a neck injury, so it was safe to turn him. His airway was open, he was breathing spontaneously, and he had a strong, steady carotid pulse.
Still, he’d taken one hell of a blow to the head.
Beth guessed he’d been struck by the barrel of a gun. There was a bleeding slash across the back of his scalp, a few inches above the hairline, and although the skin wasn’t visible under his dark hair she could feel the swelling already starting in the soft tissues.
His pupils had been reactive to light, equally, and he was moving all his limbs in a vague but symmetrical manner.
With the hem of her dress she’d stanched the flow of blood from the scalp wound. As the material had soaked red, she’d ripped a length of it free so that she could press it harder against the cut.
Briefly, she’d glanced up and looked around, but Venn was nowhere to be seen. She remembered: he’d gone after the man who’d hit the guy she was attending to.
And the man probably had a gun...
Beth forced down this realization, and the surge of panic it provoked, and concentrated on her patient. His eyes were closed, and his lips moved in an uncoordinated fashion. There was no blood in his ears, no bruising beneath his eyes to suggest a base-of-skull fracture.
But he was unconscious, and required immediate, higher-level attention.
The ambulance drew up close and the first of the paramedics hopped down and ran to Beth’s side. Without looking up at him, she said: “Caucasian male, approximately late thirties to early forties. Sustained trauma to the back of the head. A blunt object, but with an edge. Maybe a gun barrel. Pupils are good, moving all limbs, resp rate is fourteen, pulse sixty-eight and regular.”
The EMT squatted down beside her. “You a doctor?”
“Yes.”
He began running expert hands over the man, probing, evaluating. Beth glanced back and saw his colleague, a female paramedic, rolling a gurney out of the back of the ambulance.
Beth stood. Instinctively, she placed the palm of her hand on her belly.
She looked toward the line of storefronts and buildings where Venn had run to. A scattering of bewildered-looking pedestrians milled about, but there was no sign of Venn.
The feeling of dread, so familiar and yet so terrifying each time it came, cut through her heart.
She hadn’t heard gunfire. That was a good thing. It probably meant Venn had either lost the guy, or had caught up with him and subdued him without needing to fire a shot.
As she watched
the street, a dark figure emerged from the end of a narrow alleyway between two tall buildings. It was a man’s shape, lean and wiry, dressed all in black. His features weren’t discernible in the shadows. Beth thought that he was white, or maybe a light-skinned Latino.
He wasn’t running, exactly, but he wasn’t strolling either. Rather, he came out of the alley at a lope, glancing from side to side. Like a wolf, skulking through hostile territory.
As a physician, Beth had learned to trust her instincts. Not blindly, not in the face of reason and evidence. But when something felt wrong about a patient’s presentation, even when in most respects the patient appeared entirely healthy, she’d come to recognize that her years of training and experience had embedded an intuition deep within her which she ignored at her peril. They’d talked about this, Beth and Venn. He told her that cops got to be the same, after long enough in the field. You got a prickling, a gut-sense, that something wasn’t right, and more often than not when you followed where that sixth sense was going, you wound up discovering things most people would have missed.
Beth had that feeling right now.
The man who’d appeared at the mouth of the alleyway, and who’d turned to his right and begun striding down the street, was connected with Venn.
Beth glanced down at the man on the ground. She saw that the two EMTs had collapsed the legs of the gurney and were easing him onto it, in preparation for transport in the ambulance.
She wasn’t needed here for now.
Beth began to trot across the sidewalk toward the darkness of the alleyway entrance.
Behind her, she heard a second ambulance arrive in a wail of sirens. Or maybe it was a police car.
She reached the dark aperture and looked down it, at the high walls which narrowed toward the slit of an exit at the other end.
She saw a mound of shadow on the ground, limned by the light of the distant cross-street.
Beth broke into a run.
She dodged a dumpster halfway along, felt plastic sacks and crumpled tin cans scattering beneath her feet.
As she drew near, she watched the shape on the ground take form. A man’s body, big, rangy, sprawled unnaturally, on its knees, with the head and torso sagging forward over the legs.