by Layton Green
Preach didn’t think either of them had heard his shout. He debated getting into his car and then took off on foot, reasoning they would be veering off the street. By the time he drove down the street and parked, they might already be gone.
Without taking the time to call the local police for help, worried he would lose them, Preach pulled his gun and sprinted after them, startling a hardware store owner who had stepped onto the street to lock his door.
Preach turned left at a flashing red light, down the same street Blue had fled. Neither of them were in sight. With a curse, he kept running, scanning to the sides for a hedge or another place where Cobra might have taken her. Preach dreaded hearing a scream or the crack of a gunshot, and he prayed the gang member wanted her alive.
Why wasn’t she calling out? Was she saving her breath? The street dead-ended at a large building up ahead, set back from the road. Too exposed; he doubted she would have chosen that direction. Where, then? Had she headed to the creek bed on his left, partially hidden from view ? What if he went that way and lost her ?
As he raced through his options, pulling out his phone to call for backup, he passed a paved alley and thought he heard voices. He slowed, breathing hard, but saw nothing except for an unhitched equipment trailer squatting in the weeds, halfway down the alley. Maybe those voices had belonged to the neighbors. After whispering his location to the Old Fort police, Preach pulled his gun and crept forward. He had to balance his desire for surprise versus waiting too long and risking Blue’s life.
Moving in a swift crouch, gun gripped in both hands and aimed at chest height, he drew to within twenty feet of the equipment trailer. Just as he got close enough to hear shuffling, Cobra emerged holding Blue by the arm with one hand, a knife pressed against her throat with the other.
“Police!” Preach shouted. “Step away from the girl!”
“Put the gun down,” Cobra rasped.
“Not gonna happen.”
“Do it!” Cobra said, pressing the knife tighter. Blue arched to relieve the pressure, her eyes wild with fear.
Cobra was shielding his own body with Blue’s, making an impossible target. Preach was a good shot, but not good enough to hit a sliver of Cobra’s head or arm while ensuring the bullet missed Blue. As far as Preach could tell, the gang member wasn’t carrying a gun, though he could have one stuck in the back of his black jeans. “Let the girl go.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
In response, Cobra began dragging her toward the other end of the alley. “If you follow, I’ll kill her.”
“There’s nowhere to go. The local police have the roads out of town sealed.”
Cobra gave a thin smile, and Preach knew that, to a man with a weapon and no compunction about hurting people, there was always an option.
Still, the odds were not in Cobra’s favor. Preach didn’t care if he escaped dead or alive at this point. He just couldn’t let him escape with Blue. That would sign her death warrant.
Yet how to intervene without Cobra slitting her throat?
“It’s the camera, isn’t it ?” Preach said, trying to buy time.
The gang member didn’t react, but the comment caused Blue to wriggle harder in his grasp. Cobra had one of her arms pinned at her side, and she wasn’t strong enough to get loose.
“I know who killed David,” Preach lied. “You don’t need her anymore.”
Still no response. Cobra, his dispassionate eyes locked onto Preach, kept walking backward. Twenty feet to go before he reached the end of the alley and the greater freedom of the street. Preach advanced at a steady pace, gun still raised.
“Let her go, and we can strike a deal,” Preach said. “I promise I’ll talk to the judge—”
“One more step, and I’ll slit her throat.” Though Cobra hadn’t raised his voice, the emotionless tone of his delivery convinced Preach he would do just what he said.
Preach stopped moving. They were ten feet from the end of the alley. Think, Joe.
“If I see you or any other cop on my way out,” Cobra said, “I’ll kill her on the spot.”
“I can’t let you take her,” Preach said.
“You don’t have a choice.”
“There’s always a choice. Do you have friends, family, kids? You’ll never see them again.” In Preach’s experience, there was always at least one person that even the hardest criminal had a soft spot for. A friend, a grandmother, a son or daughter. “There are three roads out of town, Cobra, and they’re all covered. Backup will be here in moments. You’re only at kidnapping right now. Don’t be a murder one.”
They were five feet from the end of the alley. Cobra continued dragging Blue backward, eyes locked onto the detective. Preach had no choice but to follow. Cobra could hole up with his hostage in a house, but he couldn’t get her in a car or on his bike without exposing himself to a shot.
Blue had gone limp in his arms, resigned to her fate. Preach would have to wait it out and pray he could reason with the assassin, or somehow pressure him into giving her up.
As they reached the end of the alley, and Cobra turned the corner with his hostage, Blue gave a sudden violent twist and threw her free hand into the assassin’s face, clawing at his eyes. Before he could react, her fingers found purchase, and the gang member screamed in pain. When his free hand reached for his injured eye, Blue spun out of his grip, though the knife etched a red line into the side of her throat. Before Cobra could grab her again, Preach fired twice into his chest, dropping him.
Preach dashed forward, gun raised, wary of a concealed firearm. As he drew nearer, Cobra lunged at him with the knife, forcing Preach to shoot him again, this time in the shoulder. The knife clanged to the pavement as Cobra slumped on his back.
“Stay!” Preach yelled at Blue, as she fled down the alley holding her neck. When she hit the corner, she turned left and disappeared.
Preach patted down the gang member. No other weapons. Preach kicked the knife away and took in his condition. The two chest wounds, both near the heart, were pouring blood. Cobra’s face had paled and his eyes looked dim and unfocused.
“Did you kill David?” he asked.
No response.
Preach snarled and knelt next to him. “It was you, wasn’t it? Who else was with you?”
“Lo siento,” Cobra whispered, as he stared at the sky.
“You’re sorry? For what?”
The gang member started murmuring in Spanish as the whirr of sirens cut through the air.
“Who else was it?” Preach shouted, over and over, but Cobra wouldn’t say another word. The moment local police appeared at the end of the alley, Preach took off after Blue.
38
Preach cut back to Main Street, racing toward the shelter on foot, guessing he would arrive faster than backtracking for his car. Maybe Blue had gone in a different direction, but he was betting she wouldn’t leave the camera behind. He could sense it had come to represent something far greater than material value to her.
Though grateful he had saved her from Cobra, if the gang member died from his wounds, then his knowledge of the night of David’s murder would die with him. And if Blue slipped through the cracks again . . .
Preach ran faster.
The smell of burning leaves drifted to his nostrils. Cold mountain air crackled in his lungs. The adrenaline from the confrontation in the alley started to fade, leaving him ragged and nervous, jittery with desperation to find Blue.
As he stepped onto the cement path at the entrance to Promise House, she burst out of the front door carrying a canvas satchel slung over her shoulder. Blue’s fingers and the side of her neck were stained crimson from her wound. She saw him at once. After leaping down the front stoop with a single bound, she took off across the lawn as Betty- Anne tottered out of the door behind her, bearing a look of horrified confusion.
Summoning another burst of energy, Preach ran after Blue, shouting that he only wanted to talk. Nothing slowed her
, and her long legs churned with the swift and easy stride of a deer. She might have evaded him, except clearly she had not walked the grounds yet, because the path she chose dead-ended at a six-foot wooden fence beside the house. With Preach steps behind her, she tried to cut through a hedge of holly that led to a neighboring yard, crying out as the edges of the nasty shrub bit into her flesh. Preach pulled her out, holding her at arm’s length as he spoke as soothingly as he could.
“It’s okay” he said, releasing her and raising his badge at a distance to show he meant her no harm. She was backed against the hedge and had nowhere to go. “We got him. He’ll never come after you again.”
At first, Blue looked as if she might try to slip past him or put up a fight, but then she collapsed on the ground and hugged her knees. Her jaw quivered, and she composed herself with an angry shake of her head.
“Let me see the wound,” he said.
“It’s just a scratch.”
He peered closer and saw that she was right. Though messy, the knife swipe across her neck had already stopped bleeding. “Let me take you home,” he said, offering to help her up.
She stared at the outstretched hand. “Is he dead?”
“I don’t know.”
“I hope he is.”
“Either way, he’s in custody. He’ll go away for a long time.”
She fiddled with the sleeve of her jacket. “I can’t go home. They know who I am.”
“And who are you? What do you know ?”
“I don’t know anything. They just think I do. And nothing I say will convince them I don’t. You don’t know them.”
“I do, Blue. I know exactly who they are.”
“You’re just a Creekville cop.”
“Blue,” he said, taking a knee to look her in the eye. “You overestimate them. Most of them are scared kids, just like you. And I spent more than a decade working homicide in Atlanta. I’ve dealt with gangs far, far scarier than this one.”
She looked away again. “Doesn’t change anything.”
“I’ll tell you what will change things.”
“What?” she said, turning sullen.
“Catching the other person in the woods that night. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you? I believe two people murdered David Stratton, and one of them was Cobra. Do you think the same ?”
Slowly, untrusting, she raised her eyes to meet his gaze. After a moment, she nodded, once.
“Do you know who the other person is ?” he asked.
“No. I swear.”
“I’ll protect you either way,” he said. “But if we can catch the other one, then there won’t be any need for protection, will there ?”
She thought about it for a moment. “What if they think I talked?”
“These guys aren’t the mafia. They’re small-town thugs. However this turns out, I’ll have a talk with them and let them know you didn’t say a word, and that if they ever lay a finger on you, I’ll spend every second of every day making sure they regret it.”
“You will ?” she said, almost in a whisper.
He stuck out a hand. “You have my word.”
After another hesitation, she accepted his gesture, and he pulled her to her feet.
“How will you protect me right now?” she asked.
“Didn’t you steal a camera?”
“Yeah,” she said, wary again. “Why?”
He gave her a tight smile. “No one told you that sort of thing can land you in jail?”
On the ride home, Blue told him everything she knew about the night of David’s death: how she was filming in the woods and heard voices she could not identify, the muted gunshots, dropping her bag and stepping through the rotten log, the terrified flight through the forest.
Poor thing, he thought. She had lived in fear for weeks.
Unfortunately, her story didn’t do him much good beyond confirming what he already knew, and they were no closer to discovering the identity of the second person in the woods. He hoped to change that back at the station. While Blue said there was nothing helpful on the camera, the video techs might say otherwise.
On the drive home, he insisted Blue call her mother and tell her she was okay. After a phone call that turned tearful, Preach took the phone back and told her mother about his plan to keep Blue in a holding cell for a few days, where he could keep an eye on her. Gigi gratefully consented.
When they arrived at the station, he had never seen anyone so content to sit behind bars. Blue looked relieved, exhausted, and grateful beyond words for a hot meal. He ordered Bill to find some books she liked from the library and bring them over in the morning. Claire, who was three cells further down the hallway, never saw them come in. When he had questioned Blue earlier, she had claimed she knew who David’s mother was but had never met her.
Preach kept Blue’s incarceration off the books, both to ensure her record stayed clean and to keep her off the radar of anyone who might be snooping. The only people he told at the station were Chief Higgins and Terry Haskins. They had video surveillance, and Preach would sleep at the station if he needed to.
When the chief asked why he was off in Western North Carolina running down a camera, he said he wanted more evidence to pin on Claire. The chief had glared at him but let it pass.
Early the next morning, Lela Jimenez hovered over a large monitor in the Chapel Hill crime lab, booting up the department’s latest video enhancement software. Both she and Preach had viewed several times the footage Blue had shot on the Canon the night of David’s death. Starting with Blue’s video of the trailer park, the entire film was less than two hours long. The relevant portion was much shorter, the few minutes in the woods when Blue had tried to catch a rendezvous on film. Date notations on the video feed made it easy to pinpoint the exact start time: 12:43 a.m.
“She didn’t know what she was doing,” the forensics expert said, as the enhancement program loaded. So far, almost nothing could be seen. The footage was too dark and grainy, the subjects too far away. “The low resolution, poor lighting, background noise, shaky picture? That’s not the camera. It’s the operator. This camera is a Cadillac. And that EF-L lens? If she’d known how to use it, she could have shot a snail’s slime on a tree from a hundred feet away.”
“Can you restore anything?”
“It’s not restoring,” Lela chided. “It’s enhancing. Used to be,” she said, as the home screen for the software popped up and she inserted a USB drive with the footage into the computer, “this would take hours, at least. We had to convert, stabilize, register, de-warp, sharpen. Trust me, it was a huge pain. All manual and error-prone.” She snapped her fingers and grinned. “Watch this.”
Her fingers went to work, running through the choices onscreen faster than Preach could follow. Eventually the beginning of Blue’s footage appeared. Lela clicked the mouse, a percentage bar zoomed from zero to one hundred, and the image began to clarify. “Super-resolution-based reconstruction algorithm,” she said, her normally taciturn personality bubbling over with excitement. “De-interlacing, dynamic lighting correction, stabilization. Hours of hard work in minutes. And better results.”
“Just find me something,” he murmured.
“I can’t believe the department splurged on this software. Used to be this was fed territory. DOD and FBI.”
“What’s that?” he said, pointing at the screen. “That’s new.”
At the edge of the picture, two shapes had appeared, clarifying into distinct human forms. The camera lost them again, and Preach cursed.
Moments later, the shapes returned. They were still quite a distance away, shadowy and anonymous, but one of them was clearly shorter than the other, with longer hair. They kept walking toward the camera, and Preach gripped the back of the chair he was leaning over. He had seen this before, though not as clear.
“That isn’t Claire,” he said.
“What? How can you tell? There’s no face yet.”
“Her walk. It’s different.�
� He leaned back on his heels, feeling as if a great weight had just lifted.
“Different how?”
“This woman and Claire both have good posture, but Claire’s gait is less . . . bouncy.”
“Really? You can tell that?”
“I’m a detective. I’m paid to notice things.”
That, and the way Claire sways as she walks has been burned into my memory for twenty years.
He knew something like that would never hold up in court, and he was embarrassed for recognizing it. But that was okay. He was sure it wasn’t Claire. She didn’t kill her own son.
But who had?
The people stopped moving and began talking. Even with the enhanced resolution, their faces remained unclear, and they were too far away to make out the words. As Preach knew from repeated viewings, after the short conversation, the two people moved offscreen, the gunshots sounded, and they never reentered the footage.
Except this time, in the long pause before the second gunshot, a flicker had appeared at the edge of the screen. A barely visible man stepping out of the foliage to the left of the clearing, then walking forward with a gun in his hand. The man took a moment to scan the clearing, and for a brief instant, his face was visible.
Cobra.
“Got you,” Preach said, staring intently at the screen. One down.
“That’s your guy?”
“Yep. Can we boost the volume ?” he asked. “Try to hear what they were saying at the beginning ?”
“It’s already at the maximum.”
“Damn.” He ran a hand through his hair. They let the portion in the woods run to the end again but never saw a second face. “Back it up.”
“Where to ?”
“Right before they go offscreen, before the first gunshot. I thought I caught a flash of something.”
“Me too. Probably just a trick of the light.”
“Try it anyway. We need something.”