“You sure fucked up,” she said from the back seat in a sort of dazed singsong, a trilling laugh. “Yes, you sure fucked up.”
“You can tell whatever story you want to tell,” Stetson said, meeting her face in the rearview mirror. She was smiling back at him, head tilted. “But no matter what you say, doesn’t change the fact you resisted arrest and assaulted an officer. You’ll regret those theatrics when you’re sitting in a cell. That’ll give you some time to maybe reconsider your life decisions.”
In response, she offered only noiseless laughter intermixed with pained whimpers as she shifted in the seat. “You’re out of your fucking head if you think we’re going to the station,” she said between breaths before falling suddenly silent. She whispered, “Listen.”
Stetson was just about to put the car in drive when a whistling came from the rooftops overhead. High-pitched, but expanding to a loud rushing wind and then growing into a roar. His first and only thought was of classroom lectures on Soviet missiles, the way they fall faster than sound can travel. So fast that death finds you first. And then came a crash. An impact against the sidewalk that shook the entire street. Stetson saw dust billowing from the broken concrete, wrapping around a dark shape at the center. But as the dust slowly cleared, the shape was gone.
“Took you long enough,” the woman said from the back seat. Stetson understood, slowly, that she wasn’t speaking to him.
His white knuckles gripped the steering wheel. He peeled one shaking hand off the wheel, fumbling with the keys in the ignition.
“Hey, Good Cop, you want some good advice?” the woman asked in a low voice. “Beg. He hates when they beg. Says it drives him crazy. He can’t sleep at night when they beg.”
A second. A silence. A footstep. By the time he understood who it was outside of the car, it was too late.
He had fucked up.
The driver’s-side door exploded from its hinges, and Stetson saw it spin through the air like a Frisbee, colliding against a building across the street and chipping the brick wall. And then there were hands, rough and calloused, gripping his neck, lifting him easily from the car, dangling him over the sidewalk.
He leveled kicks at the shadowed man before him, but he felt his toes bend backward against this immovable force. So he grasped at the fingers tightening around his neck—each one hard and cold as stone—and tried to pry them away with all the strength he could summon, but they did not budge. They only constricted. Tighter and tighter. Stetson’s vision went dark, the world narrowing into a single point somewhere beyond his reach.
“You shouldn’t be here,” the man said. His was a deep voice, but hollow. An echo of itself. Stetson prayed this voice—a distant bomb blast rising from a subaltern cave—wouldn’t be the last thing he ever heard.
“Please,” he managed to whisper, spit falling from his lips. “Please don’t. Please. I beg you.”
And then there was only empty space as he was thrown across the street. Sprawling, spinning, weightless. He collided with the pavement, a blur of arms and legs and grunts and cracked bones.
He rolled to a stop on the asphalt. There was a dull pain in his side that transformed immediately into an agony unlike anything he had known. A dagger digging deeper and deeper through his skin and tissue with each unlikely breath. He had broken a rib. Maybe two or three. With a hand, he felt the disconnected bones pressed against his skin like fingers meeting his own.
He lay motionless on his back. The night sky. Constellations, spinning, spinning. Circling like vultures waiting to descend.
He heard the thud of boots approaching. “You will let her go.”
Stetson tried to stand, rising so far as his knees. But the rush of pain in his side knocked him back down. He fought tooth and nail for each poisoned breath. He tasted blood in his mouth.
“Let her go,” the man was able to shout without raising his voice above a whisper.
“Who are you?” Stetson wheezed. But he already knew.
“Just let her go.”
Stetson grasped for the ground beneath him, his fingernails scraping against the concrete. He tried, once more, to rise to his feet. And this time he did, fighting through the fire burning and spreading in his side. And through his watery gaze, Stetson saw him. A shadowed figure. The man from the newspapers, his name passed in exultant and clandestine whispers through the precinct. The Kingfisher.
He was not the giant that Stetson had pictured, but he was even more imposing than Stetson could possibly have imagined. Hulking shoulders, fists clenched, breathing from his nose like a rodeo bull. Stetson squinted to make out the man’s face, but he couldn’t. His features withdrew further the harder Stetson looked.
Stetson clutched more tightly at his ribs. He thought of Mindy asleep in their bed in their three-bedroom home where he would curl against her in the spare light of another morning and she would rise and he would sleep, just so, for those minutes in a state of unconscious togetherness, their dreams joined, momentarily, in the lax space between them.
Stetson looked at the cruiser. He saw the woman’s face in the back seat, pressed against the window. She was smiling like she was watching her favorite movie in the back row of an empty theater.
“Why are you doing this for her?” Stetson asked.
“Just let her go.”
“She’s a street whore.”
“Say that again.”
“Since when do you save criminals?”
“She’s not a criminal.” The man stepped forward as though to grab Stetson, hurl him once more or otherwise snap his neck, but he stopped himself.
Stetson did not flinch. The pain and the delirium cohabitating Stetson’s semi-broken body was all-consuming. “You love her? Is that what this is? Or is she just something to keep you warm?”
“Stop talking,” the man said, his voice bending the space between them. “Just let her go right now.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Stetson said, straightening up. Each word welcomed a fresh wave of torturous pain, but he forced himself to stand even taller, to look this shadowed man directly in his face the way his father had taught him to look into the face of fear. “I won’t ever bother her again. And I’ll even make sure no one at the precinct ever bothers her again. But only if we understand each other.”
The man remained fixed. Waiting.
“I respect what you do,” Stetson said. “We all do, all of us cops. Everyone in this city, except the low-down shit-bags you kick the shit out of.”
“What do you want?” he asked sharply.
“I want you and I.” Stetson gestured at the indeterminable space separating them. “I want us to work together. We can help each other. You know this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean we help each other.” He pretended to smile. “I have access that you need. I have information you want. You’re looking for some bad guys to rough up? You must spend a lot of time looking around for the worst of the worst. The filth of Chicago. Well, shit, I can get my hands on a whole lot of names for you. More names than you’ll know what to do with.”
The Kingfisher shook his head, laughing. “I don’t need your help.”
“You don’t understand. In the eyes of the law, you’re a criminal. A vigilante. Most of us don’t care because we see what you’re doing, but others are playing by the book. I could keep them away.”
“I’m not worried about them.”
“What about your friend over there?” Stetson raised a weak arm and pointed at the woman, her face pressed against the car window. “Girl like that in her profession—it’s a tough road. You going to rough up every cop that stops her? No, you can’t do that since I’m guessing you have enough enemies as it is. Last thing you’d want is the cops on your back, not to mention hers.”
The Kingfisher glanced back at the cruiser and then back at Stetson. He took a step forward. “Are you threatening her?”
“No,” Stetson said, holding up his hands. “I’m just stating
facts. But maybe if we work together, we can rearrange the facts a little bit. Maybe I make sure no one from the department gives her any more hassle and no one gives you hassle. Everyone wins.”
“And what do you want from me?”
“Don’t worry about me.” Stetson clutched his ribs tighter. Cold sweat lined his lips. “I want what you want. I want to put away dangerous people. I want to help you.”
To Stetson’s surprise, the man laughed at this. Like a bass drum kicking in an empty room. “I knew you were full of shit.”
“No, listen,” Stetson said, clutching tighter at his side, trying to hold himself together. “You and I, we’re cut from the same cloth. We love this city. I know you do. And me, I love this city more than life itself. I want to see it become what I know it can be. And I know you want that, too. Because we’re cut from the same cloth.”
“You don’t know me.”
“Christ,” Stetson laughed, which made him wince, coughing between words. “This whole city knows you. But I know you better than they do.”
“You don’t know me,” he insisted, louder this time. “Stop saying you do.”
“We’re cut from the same goddamned cloth. You and I, we care. We care about protecting those we love.” Stetson nodded at the woman’s face pressed ghostly against the glass, hanging on every muted word beyond her reach. Her eyes danced between the two of them. “See,” Stetson said, daring a step forward. The Kingfisher didn’t move. “You could have just taken her by now. You could have beaten me into the dirt. You could have ripped that back door and thrown it to the moon and back, but you didn’t do it. Because you know that you need us, the police. Because you care about doing good. And you could use someone like me. You and I, we can do more good together than we can do alone. We can do something for this city for once. Something important. Something good.”
Stetson saw the shadowed figure shift his step, weighing the proposition. “Why should I trust anything you’re telling me? How do I know you’re not setting me up?”
“Setting you up?” Stetson managed a pained smile. “Setting you up for what, exactly? Who in the hell could possibly hurt you? Who would ever want to try?” And then he added, lowering his voice into a register that seemed to him sincere, “I’ll let her go. No questions asked. And you and I, we do something great. Because we care about this city. Because we’re the good guys.”
Stetson stepped forward on shaking legs and outstretched a hand.
But the man was looking at the back seat of the cruiser, his fingers rapidly curling and uncurling into fists. Stetson eyed them nervously, these weapons of war. From behind the cruiser window, the woman was looking back at the man. She touched her forehead to the glass and smiled at him, only him. And dawn was bleeding into the sky.
The man’s fingers slowly relaxed.
He turned back to Stetson and took his hand, which Stetson hadn’t realized he was still holding out.
“Now let her go,” the man said. “And don’t ever bother her again.”
13 A CASTLE WITHIN A CASTLE
SHAFTS OF THE DAY’S LAST HOURS of light speared flakes of dust hanging frozen in the air. Wren and Parker sat next to each other on the mattress, both of them hunched over their laptops. Parker had approximated the height of the woman hostage, judging by the dimensions of the office chair, to be between five foot three and five foot five. In the meantime, Wren had created a makeshift algorithm to sort through the missing persons database. She input the height range, and the already-narrowed list narrowed to fifteen names. It was still too many, but it was close.
“We don’t even know the woman in that video was reported missing.” Parker rubbed her eyes. “It’s not even been twenty-four hours, right? Would the cops post her info in that time?”
“We don’t know how long she’s been missing. We don’t know much of anything.”
“That’s the problem, Wren. We don’t know much of anything.” Parker leaned back on the mattress, stretching her back against the wall. From overhead came the sounds of their upstairs neighbor’s porn. A man exhaling nonsensical sounds while a woman shouted the name of God like some desert prophet. “Honestly,” Parker said, “your—our—best bet is to get into each of the fifteen women’s phones. We need their locations. You could do that easily. An SS7 hack. That’s right up your alley.”
“What would that accomplish?” Wren said, her voice soft but sharpened. “Getting their locations wouldn’t do anything. The gunman could be keeping her anywhere.”
“You could search their individual metadata?”
“For what?” Wren asked, louder than she meant to. “You think the gunman was sending them pictures before he abducted them? You think he was texting them?”
“I’m just trying to help.”
“I know,” Wren sighed.
Both of their cell phones chimed at once. Parker pulled her phone from her bra. Her eyes widened and she brought the phone closer to her face. “Oh, fuck,” she whispered.
“What is it?”
“We need to get on the forum.”
“You said you’d help me identify the hostage. We’re not finished.”
“There’s another video, Wren.”
Someone had posted a link on the latest thread titled: “Second video.” It led to a YouTube page where the user who had uploaded it had written in the description: THIS IS NOT MY VIDEO. FOUND IT ON REDDIT. ORIGINAL VIDEO DELETED. DON’T ARREST ME FBI PLZ N THANKS ☺
The upstairs porn stopped abruptly. And for the first time Wren could remember, the city lurking outside their bedroom window was silent. As though the entire world had stopped its spinning, bating its celestial breath.
Wren watched the video from behind the curtain of her fingers. But Parker leaned in close, observing each detail. It was the gunman. He stood perfectly still, head cocked to his shoulder. His Liber-teen mask shined in the swinging light overhead. Before him, another hostage struggled in an office chair. The gunman ripped the burlap sack from the hostage’s head, revealing a Latino man. He had a black eye, and dried blood covered his nose, his jaw. His head rolled on his shoulders. Beaten to the cusp of consciousness. The gunman grabbed the man’s thinning hair and held his head upright to face the camera.
“Turn it off,” Wren whispered. “Please. We don’t need to see this.”
But Parker either didn’t hear or didn’t care. She only leaned in closer.
The gunman reached for his pistol, off camera, and brought it to the man’s head. He held it there, pressed it tightly against the man’s head.
And the whole time, the man’s eyes opened and shut, opened and shut. His lips kept moving, without sound. For a moment, his briefly opened eyes landed directly on the camera, and he held Wren’s relenting stare, as though he were looking into this exact room, speaking inaudibly to only her. Wren wanted to touch the screen, run her fingers across his serene and sweating face, and provide him with some false assurance that he was not alone.
“His time is running out,” the gunman said in his digitally modulated growl. “I have waited patiently for you to turn over the medical examiner’s report, Gregory Stetson. But still you have not done so, and I, along with the rest of the city, am growing impatient. We deserve to know what you have been hiding. And this man deserves not to die. You, Gregory Stetson, have until midnight to turn over the report and save his life. If you do not, he will die, and others will follow. Their blood is on your hands.”
The gunman leaned forward, reaching out to the camera. He knocked it over on its side. The sideways frame showed the other hostage, bound to her chair. Twisting against the ropes. And the screen went dark.
Wren watched that black screen, waiting for it resolve into something she could forget.
“Fuck,” Wren said. And then louder, “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” She stood up, pacing the room, knotting her hair around her knuckles.
“Hey.” Parker stood and grabbed Wren by the shoulders, her fingertips warm against Wren’s cold skin. “That
hostage still has a chance. We can help.”
“It doesn’t matter what we do. He’ll kill him. And then he’ll kill her.”
“Not if he gets the ME report. That’s all he wants. You heard him. We can save both of those hostages.”
Wren broke away from Parker’s hold and leaned against the wall. Her legs felt numb. She slid to the ground, put her head between her knees.
The box fan in the window whined into the room. Its oscillation was infuriating. It was all Wren could hear. It grew louder and louder. Wren leaned over and ripped it from the window frame. She threw it across the room.
Parker squatted in front of her, grabbing her face. She waited until Wren returned her stare to speak. “We need to act right now. The police aren’t going to bend. That man in that video is going to die if we don’t do something. So will the woman you are looking for. We need to act.”
“Just please stop talking,” Wren said.
She closed her eyes, but saw only the hostage’s face materializing in the total dark. Bruised and bloodied. Shifting dimensions, disappearing and reappearing. His eyes rolling around in his head, as though searching the dark for something or anything, someone or anyone.
Wren opened her eyes. Parker was still there in front of Wren, her warm hands pressed against her cheeks.
Wren nodded. “OK.”
“Good. I’ll get everyone mobilized on the forum. They should be ready to go in soon, though.”
The Reign of the Kingfisher Page 13