by S J Hunter
“Get this vicious animal off me,” Josephson said. He was surprisingly cool, given the fact that he had a 30 kilo dog attached to his arm and was surrounded by illegal armaments and a kidnapped boy.
“Good boy, Louie,” Chris said. He put another duoload in each guard, not caring if it was superfluous. These guards had to know about Jesse, and had perhaps helped kill Mickey and her bodyguard. One had used a grenade on Livvy.
“Where’s Jesse Bedford?” he asked.
“He’s in the back bedroom, under sedation,” Josephson said. “Now get this damned dog off me.”
Chris ignored him, other than to pause and make sure Louie’s hold was secure before going to the first guard to extract weapons. This was the one who’d tossed the grenade; Chris went to his knees to search him. He found two more.
“These are illegal,” Chris said, holding up the grenades before pocketing them. “You might have killed my partner. Mickey Bedford and her bodyguard are dead. You participated in Jesse’s kidnapping. For money, and for your nasty little hobby.”
Chris moved to the second guard and disarmed him. By now, Josephson had apparently realized that struggling caused Louie to grip more firmly. He was standing very still. Chris couldn’t help but be impressed. Louie was still attached to his arm and eyeing him steadily, but the cold-blooded bastard was recovering.
“You think so? My lawyer will keep this tied up in the courts for years. I know the law. You have no proof that you can use in court. As far as the world will know, Bedford himself recovered his injured grandson from the kidnappers. From a series of misunderstandings or worse, outright incompetence, surely in the area of respecting our rights after we rescued the boy, we suffered abuse at the hands of Longevity Law Enforcers. With Bedford’s resources, we won’t spend a day in jail.”
Chris studied him consideringly. “Louie, enough. Out,” he said, snapping his fingers and pointing to the door. Louie let Josephson go with what appeared to be a great deal of reluctance and slowly padded out.
“What a misguided toad you are. Haven’t you heard? LLE no longer tolerates catch and release. My partner and I know too much, Josephson. You’re not going to get away with this like you did with Sara Ann Torkelson,” Chris said. “This time, Forensics will figure it out, and we’ll testify and destroy you in court, whatever the cost. At the very least we’ll deprive you of all your playthings.”
With this last provocative statement, Chris turned away ostensibly to observe Louie’s reluctant progress out the door. Josephson bent down to pick up the Stinger and was bringing it up to aim at Chris’ back when Chris dropped his Stinger and drew Bedford’s gun out of his belt, pivoting and lunging to one side in one smooth, costly move. Josephson was still aiming at the point where Chris’ back had been when Chris shot him three times in the chest with the gun.
It was getting harder and harder to stay erect, but by now just about any other posture was equally painful. Chris straightened up and walked slowly back to stand over the doctor. There was blood pumping profusely out of Josephson’s wounds, and he was coughing up even more.
“Or,” Chris said softly, distinctly. “I can just kill you.”
With impotent fear and rage, Josephson stared up at him, and Chris stared back until the doctor’s eyes unfocused and the bleeding turned to a sluggish seepage. Chris felt for a jugular pulse to confirm it. Josephson was dead.
He stepped over the body and headed for the bedroom, to check on Jesse.
Chp. 16 Casualties (Saturday)
Feeling a dull but receding pain, Livvy woke up slowly with a nightmare still in mind, and she grasped at it before it receded beyond memory. It was a true one, and she started to sit up quickly.
“Hey hey hey. I’m the medic. You’re in a van being treated,” said a woman all in white sitting next to her. It was a soothing voice, and with a firm but gentle restraining arm the woman pressed her back down.
Livvy allowed it. I failed. Someone shot me before I reached Jesse. All for nothing.
She started to take in her surroundings and found that she was indeed lying in a moving medivan. When she turned her head she could see enough of the man lying motionless on the other side of the van to know it was Chris, but she couldn’t see his face. Seated in the aisle between them, the attractive dark-haired woman who’d spoken was wearing a very grim expression.
“Good, you’re really awake this time,” the med tech said kindly to Livvy. “Lie still, please. I’ve got tissue-sensitive retrieval microprobes already hunting down the flechettes and debris in your leg and dispensing antibiotics and anesthetics in situ. I’m setting the ones for your arm. You understand? Not too much discomfort?”
“Yes. I mean, I’m fine,” Livvy said. “How’s my partner?”
“He’ll do,” the tech said.
Chris moved a little and raised his head so that he could face her. He was alert and, she thought, looking a little apprehensive. “Hutchins. Ready to go?”
“What happened? I don’t know what happened,” Livvy said.
“Jesse will be fine. Big bad guys are both dead. The rest can wait until you’re feeling better,” Chris said.
Livvy turned back towards the roof of the med transport and squeezed her eye shut. The rest could wait. Or at least most of it.
She opened them again and turned back to look at the kindly med tech beseechingly. “I don’t suppose you have a shower at City Central Clinic, do you? I mean a real one with hot water, not a laver?”
“I suppose we can manage one, once the retrieval probes are done,” the tech said. “What happened to your shoes?”
“Yes, Hutchins, your shoes?” Chris asked, lifting his head again, a little higher this time so that he could see Livvy better.
“Squishy,” Livvy began, but didn’t have a chance to elaborate. Apparently, Chris had just given the med tech some sort of conversational opening that was too good to let pass, and the dam burst.
“You. Lie. Back. Down. You came very close to a punctured lung, you know,” the med tech said with asperity, and then with an effort seemed to restrain herself.
It was too good to resist, and Livvy didn’t try. “He was shot with two large caliber bullets at point blank range two… no, three days ago. Wearing a vest, but…”
She shrugged with her sore right shoulder and looked across at Chris, who was staring at her expressionlessly. “It helps them do their job when they have the history, you know,” she explained gently, staring at him owlishly and approximating the voice she used with her five-year-old nephew.
His expression didn’t change.
“I knew it,” the med tech said triumphantly. “I knew that some of that bruising had to be from an older injury. Three days? You get hit with large calibers at close range and you’ve got to know that the tunics are one thing but with the ultra-thin armor Enforcement uses in those vests you’re going to have fractured ribs. They’ll stop a bullet and save your life, but…
“Don’t they train you people on this equipment? Even if you’ve forgotten, when you feel that sort of pain you should know enough to get yourself in somewhere and get your ticket to start occupying a desk for a while, instead of running around like a decapitated chicken for three more days. People have a brain. It’s meant to be used. They’re supposed to know better, to listen to what their body is telling them. If you’d punctured a lung and tried to keep going, you might have died and then where would your case be?”
“I was abducted…” Chris said very softly.
“Sure,” the tech said. She didn’t seem to have heard. “You know, Longevity just gives you protection from aging. It doesn’t truly make you immortal. You can still get shot and die, or hit by a car and die, or even get an infection and die. Or aggravate a relatively minor injury, and die. There are all kinds of evil things out there that medicine can’t beat yet. So I have a question for you, Detective McGregor, how is it that you’re still alive? I’m talking about your whole history, not your current injury.”
At some point, Chris had placed his crooked arm over his face, but it didn’t deter the tech.
“Well, even with accelerated healing, you better get used to the idea that you’re going to be spending at least the next two weeks at your desk,” the tech added with grim satisfaction. “Flat on your back would be better.”
“Huh. I’m going to guess that you’ve met my partner before,” Livvy said when she could get a word in.
The tech nodded. “Only professionally. But all too often. Oh, he’s heard the lecture before, at least a couple of times every decade. Much good it did.”
At which Livvy enjoyed a good laugh. Fortunately, the pain medications had taken effect, and she didn’t have any fractured ribs.
Chp. 17 The Rookie (Monday)
When Livvy came in late Monday morning, her second week in LLE, Agnew and the rest of the squad looked up and nodded at her in greeting. She nodded back, and felt hopeful.
She’d spent the first hour of the day at an accelerated healing appointment at the City Central Clinic, so when she arrived, Chris was already in the Chief’s office, probably giving an unofficial report. She sat down a little awkwardly and started trying to complete some notes on the case memotab, while surreptitiously keeping an eye on the Chief.
The door was closed, and this time she wasn’t sitting on the bench right outside it, so she couldn’t hear a word. She was actually very good at lip-reading but Chris had his back to her and often when the Chief did say something he was staring right at her, so she didn’t dare stare back. It was disconcerting, to say the least. Maybe he knew about the lip-reading.
She went back to her case memotab, writing her own report, with the official report written by the Chief before her for reference. Chris had explained to her, with a totally straight face, that for complicated, newsworthy cases, LLE handled the official reports by having the Chief write them based on verbal accounts or memos from the detectives. Then whoever handled the case wrote their own official report, using that written by the Chief as a reference.
The Chief’s official report made very little mention of anything that might be considered an LLE concern. As released to the media, the facts were that Bedford and his personal physician Dr. Josephson had both been fatally injured in a deadly struggle with the men who had kidnapped Bedford’s grandson, Jesse. Some ill-defined misunderstanding about the ransom. It made them both sound vaguely heroic but that couldn’t be helped. LLE’s involvement was solely attributed to the fact that Josephson was a licensed LLE practitioner and researcher who had been missing. His role had officially been to care for Bedford and his recovered grandson in a stressful situation and to be available in case of injury. The timing of his disappearance relative to the kidnapping was also very vague.
Livvy knew some of the truth. Bedford and Josephson were both dead, which meant that for LLE this was the best possible outcome. As far as she could tell, LLE might consider it the only acceptable outcome. She was afraid to ask, since it might diminish some of her personal satisfaction to know the actual details, but she trusted her partner’s sense of fairness, which in her experience was unassailable. He’d risked his life to talk to Williams, and he’d given her a week to prove herself.
She believed she knew how Josephson had died. He was probably the one who’d shot her with an illegal Stinger. She wasn’t sure about Bedford. He’d had a glancing, bruising blow to the arm and chest – Chris said he’d thrown a fireplace poker at him – and had two Stinger duoloads in him. Bedford had apparently stopped breathing at some point while Chris was up in the cottage and before the Med Techs had arrived. The only one in the room at the time was Williams, and he’d had a gunshot wound.
None of the guards, either from the mansion or the horse farm, were charged with anything. Apparently, they were all happy to be able to go on their own way to find the next wealthy employer. To justify the LLE raids, they were told that Bedford had had illegal hotlabs on his properties. They surely knew this was true, despite the official story that was fed to the media, and they were willing to accept it. The man who’d been paying them was dead; there was absolutely nothing to be gained from questioning LLE’s verisimilitude on other details. Among the subculture of professional security guards, LLE was known to have a very long arm, and the fact that both Bedford and Josephson were dead only added to LLE’s mystique. Surely its officers were dangerous to cross.
Livvy heard a rumor that the guard who’d thrown the armor-shredding grenade at her had awakened on Sunday morning in an alley in one of the roughest neighborhoods of the worst ghetto in D.C. with no memory of how he’d gotten there. He was naked and sore all over but there wasn’t a mark on him other than the new permanent tattoo on his forearm. In dark black antique script of the kind that might be used to print a bible on paper it said, “Absent in body but present in spirit. We know where and who you are.” He was smart enough to know LLE wasn’t just referring to the alley or his current alias. Sometimes there are no second chances, and he decided the life of a mercenary overseas had more appeal at this point in his life.
The memorial services for Bedford and Josephson were three days later, and were widely attended by a great many glamorous, youthful-looking and attractive people, but neither one had a family member present. Jesse was still too traumatized by his mother’s death and his own kidnapping, and only a very few even remembered John Bedford still had a daughter.
*****
While Chris was still in the Chief’s office Dalton stopped at Livvy’s desk with a fresh cup of black coffee, which she put on Livvy’s new desktop cup warmer.
“Nice work,” she said. “And all within your first five – or was it six? – days on the job. You really were thrown into the briar patch right from the start.
“So. Do you think you’ll be staying with LLE for a while? Now that Williams will be retiring on partial disability, we could use another body.”
“DE didn’t have anything to say about him?” Livvy asked.
“Why? Because he was at the site of a battle over a couple of hotlabs, or a kidnapped boy if you prefer, and wounded, by the way?”
Livvy frowned. “You mean even DE…”
“DE, and all of the other squads, including Homicide and, as you already found out, Tactical,” Dalton said, and smiled at her, “know LLE handles its own cases in its own way. Things tend to get very messy if they try to step in, and sometimes it takes years to clean up the mess. LLE is accorded a certain amount of trust. We try not to abuse it.”
Livvy was still frowning as she looked up at Dalton. “You mentioned Williams retiring. Does that mean LLE is looking specifically for someone to partner Agnew?”
“Ah, no. That will probably be me or another LLE veteran. The Chief would never put two LLE rookies together. Despite everything that you went through in the last week, you’re still considered an LLE rookie. He’ll try to get someone in from some other squad to partner with Toscano. Or you, if you choose.
“One of the reasons McGregor isn’t a training officer is that the Chief likes to give the rookies a chance to actually get some training. You know, before they almost get killed.”
Meg looked down at Livvy’s desk and toyed with the coffee mug on the warmer. “McGregor will always count this case as a failure because Mickey Bedford and her bodyguard died. But personally, I can’t think of anyone else who would have even been onto Bedford in time to warn her. As far as the rest of LLE is concerned, you got your men, both of them. And Jesse Bedford survived, and you survived. Good work.”
“Th…Thank you,” Livvy said.
“Can you live with the fact that they’ll never say it?” Meg asked, jerking her head towards the Chief’s office.
“You’ve never met my parents,” Livvy said wryly.
Meg laughed. “Also, in case you’ve forgotten what I said before, let me remind you. LLE tends to be a career-snuffer. No one ever gets out alive, even if they want to leave. But it’s not too late for you.”
“I r
emember a warning to that effect.”
Chris came out of the Chief’s office and stopped at her desk. His face told her nothing. He nodded at Meg, who nodded back with a lingering smile and moved away.
Chris was moving even more stiffly than she was, although she supposed technically they’d call her manner of walking a limp. She hoped to be ready to go back into the field by the end of the week. McGregor, who had bony injuries, would need longer, even with accelerated healing sessions.
Chris raised his eyebrows as he looked down at her.
“You know, Hutchins, wounded officers are usually entitled to a few days off.”
“I’ve been wounded before,” Livvy said. “Worse than this.”
“But as long as you’re here, maybe you can find Brian Clifford and let him know he can go home and thank him appropriately. And don’t tell him anything about anything. He can read it in the papers.”
“Swell,” Livvy said. “I forgot all about him. I don’t suppose you…” She looked at his face, but he was already turning away. She thought she caught a half-smile.
“No, I suppose not,” she said. “Have a heart. I’m fifty-four. He’s a child.”
“You did say, didn’t you,” Chris said as he was sitting down, “that I should think of your face as a kind of armor?”
The Chief saved her from responding. “Hutchins. In here, now.
“Shut the door.”
Livvy sat in one of the straight-backed chairs and endured the Chief’s scrutiny. It lasted a little longer this morning, but even with her wounded leg she refused to squirm.
“Fatigue. By Saturday morning you’d been almost thirty hours without sleep. You did remarkably well before you got to the cottage. The clean-up crew that went in after you two and Jesse and the two bodies were out said that everyone else, even the guard you took down on the run and pulled into that stall had two solidly placed duoloads and no lasting damage. They may often be scuz but they’re still citizens.”