The Reign of the Kingfisher

by T. J. Martinson

  He shrugged, still laughing. “He hurt me back then. He hurt me very badly, but now I get to hurt him, too. I want him to remember what it feels like.”

  He pressed the record button on the camera. A red, blinking light stared forward into the room. He walked between Tillman and the woman in his uneven limp. She saw that he was staring forward at the camera, preparing himself for the thousands and millions of eyes that would consume this moment. His gun he held at his side, fingers dancing along the grip in anticipation.

  “You did not come forward,” Peter said into the camera. “You did not save her.”

  If the Kingfisher is still out there, Tillman thought to herself, he’s out of time. She was going to die. Paulina was going to die. May was going to die.

  Tillman tried to say something that might stall the moment, something that might distract Peter’s rigid focus on the red light blinking before him. But she felt lost inside whatever it was unfolding around her, as though she were caught in some powerful tide leading her out into a near-infinite sea.

  At once, the door to the room parted just enough to allow a small, tennis ball–sized object to bounce across the floor. It seemed so out of place and unlikely, that in that initial fraction of a second, she first thought she was imagining it.

  She had just enough time to look up and see Peter looking down at the flash grenade. Without turning away, he held the gun up at his side, the barrel aimed at May’s unconscious head.

  Tillman launched forward and tackled him, leveling her shoulder into his chest. She brought him down into the boxes and heard his gun scatter across the floor. A lightning flash of white burned straight through her eyes and etched into her brain, followed by a lagging eruption of sound. A ringing that seemed to feed upon itself. All sensation, all direction, all history lost to a ringing expanse of sea and she was now drowning in it. She released herself to it, felt her body roll onto the cold floor. She tried to press herself into it just to feel something solid and unmoving and unchanged.

  She tried opening her eyes. It was horrendously painful and she felt herself screaming as the world was silent. Cold dark. Wet dark. Thin air, heavy air, hot air. Lights so bright they burrow. She tried to remember where she was, who she was.

  Muffled voices, many voices, emerged from the darkness, softly at first, but growing louder. Ringing, ringing.

  She closed her eyes, felt the return of sensation growing in her toes, crawling up through her legs and into her chest.

  And then she was on her back, and there were blankets around her. Straps tied across her chest. She pushed against the straps with wild force, screaming. A gentle hand pushed her back down, squeezed her shoulder. There were voices, whispering words she ought to have recognized. She opened her eyes partly. But there wasn’t light. There was only total, revelatory darkness. And then there were lights flickering softly in her periphery, halogen and industrial, and then there was the cusp of fresh air and stars, or at least brilliant spots of electric light that could pass as stars on a night such as this. And she heard the wheels rolling beneath her, ambulance lights, police lights, city lights, and there were the words again, and she ought to say something, but what could she say to something she’d never heard?

  And there was someone speaking now directly over her. She recognized his voice, even distant and shrouded behind the static erupting from her head. She struggled to open her eyes once again, but she didn’t need to see him to know he was staring back at her, smiling weakly, hand brushing her hair behind her ears, and he called her Tilly, which was a name she knew she hated to be called and she knew that he knew this, yet he always insisted, didn’t he, because he knew she hated it and it made him smile to see her angry with him and he was smiling now and she was angry with him and that was enough. On this night, that was enough.

  42 HOPE

  MARCUS PUSHED, SHOULDERED, and fought through the barricade of police officers that surrounded the perimeter around the parking garage, twisting his body through the narrow openings between cruisers and ambulances idling in the street. Everywhere, a choreographed state of emergency. His shoulder bag bounced against his hip. He turned and looked for Wren, who moments ago had been behind him. He saw her, flanked by two federal agents, staring at the ground beneath her sneakered feet. As if sensing Marcus’s gaze, she looked up and met his stare for a brief instant before a cruiser passed between them. She might have been smiling, she might have been crying, she might not have seen him at all.

  He turned and pushed onward, deeper into the thick of the commotion.

  A stretcher was being loaded into an ambulance, the first stretcher to emerge from the parking garage. He saw Tillman lying there, blanketed, an oxygen mask strapped to her face. Next to her, Jeremiah was arguing with the attending paramedics. “I don’t fucking care what the procedure is!” Jeremiah shouted, squaring up with a young paramedic. “I’m going with her.”

  “Jeremiah,” Marcus called out. “Is Tillman OK?”

  Jeremiah turned around, regarded Marcus with a quick nod, and turned back to the paramedic. “I’m going to ride with her to the hospital, and if you want to try to stop me, you be my fucking guest.” The paramedics exchanged a glance, acquiesced, and climbed into the back of the ambulance. Jeremiah turned back to Marcus. “They say she’s going to be fine.”

  “What about May? Paulina?”

  But Jeremiah was already stepping into the back of the ambulance, seating himself beside the paramedics. Jeremiah leaned over Tillman, his fingers gently touching her own, whispering silently into her ear.

  Marcus watched the ambulance pull away, sirens crying into the night. He turned and saw two other stretchers emerging from the parking garage, each of them setting off for respective ambulances. He ran toward them, but an officer restrained him.

  “Mr. Waters,” the officer said. “Please come with me.”

  Marcus strained to see over the officer’s shoulder as the stretchers were loaded into the ambulances. On one, he saw Miss May. Her red hair lay against the white sheets beneath her. Blood on her forehead running down her cheeks. “She’s bleeding,” Marcus said. “She’s bleeding.”

  “Please come with me, Mr. Waters.”

  The officer forcefully guided Marcus away from the ambulances and SWAT vans toward an unmarked town car parked on the opposite side of the street. The officer opened the passenger-side door for Marcus and gestured for him to sit, closing the door behind him. Marcus lay his bag at his feet. Keys dangled in the ignition. A pineapple-scented car freshener swung from the rearview. But all of his attention drifted out the window as the remaining ambulances pulled away, shuttling down the street in a convoy of accompanying cruisers. He turned his focus to the parking garage, where a final stretcher emerged accompanied by members of the SWAT team, their rifles slung around their shoulders. They ushered the final stretcher directly into the back of the remaining ambulance.

  The driver’s-side door of the town car opened. A musky cologne wafted inside. Marcus turned from the window to find Gregory Stetson sitting in the driver’s seat, stone-faced, his head against the headrest. Eyes closed, breathing heavily. He opened his eyes and stared forward at the squall of police lights illuminating the thin layer of fog that crawled over the street.

  “She was bleeding,” Marcus said. “Miss May. She was bleeding.”

  “Took a hit to the head,” Stetson said with a flat inflection, as though reading from a news bulletin, “but she’s stable. The other hostage will be out of the hospital in a few days, I’d guess, after recovering from the gunshot wound.”

  “What about Tillman?”

  Stetson sighed. “She’s fine. I don’t know what on earth possessed her to do what she did, but she’s going to be fine.”

  Marcus paused. “And Peter?”

  “He’s alive.”

  “He shouldn’t be,” Marcus said, feeling no shame in his disappointment.

  “Yeah, well.” Stetson sighed. “It’s over. That’s what matters.”


  Marcus looked out the window. “This isn’t over. People are angry. They’re confused. Whatever this was, it’s only beginning.”

  Stetson turned the car on. Cool air blasted through the vents. “Where do you live, Marcus?”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to give you a ride home.”

  “I actually drove here.” Marcus pointed behind them at his car, parked just a block away.

  “Then let’s just drive for a bit,” Stetson said, pulling out into the road and passing slowly through the blockade at the end of the street. “We need to talk. Just the two of us.”

  “Figured you’d want to talk at the station,” Marcus said, but Stetson didn’t respond. He only piloted the car slowly through the streets. With the cavalcade of sirens and lights and commotion behind them, the streets ahead were quiet and still. Like driving through a dream. Stetson changed lanes with a slow, drifting turn of the wheel. Marcus felt Stetson’s silence as a pressure in his chest. Marcus turned to him. “Look, if I’d known—or even suspected—Peter was the gunman, I would have—”

  “Stop,” Stetson sighed. “There is a time for all that. And it isn’t now.”

  “You said you wanted to talk.”

  “I do.” Stetson turned the car onto another street. “We seized the computer of that girl,” Stetson said. “The Liber-teen you showed up with. Evidently, she’d collected more from our servers than we initially thought. You can imagine my surprise when I hear that she sent a particular file to you and only you.”

  Marcus looked out the window. On the sidewalk, stray remnants of protestors. They held their signs, they held hands. They watched the car pass them, day-weary smiles plastered to their young faces. He wondered if they knew what had just occurred several blocks away from them or if they even cared. They walked in groups of twos and threes. Friends and lovers, closer for having briefly shared something they thought they understood.

  “I didn’t ask her to send me anything,” Marcus said. “I didn’t even know her before today.”

  “I don’t care. I’m not asking you how it came to be that you met her. I’m not even asking how it came to be that she sent you that file. Like I said, that will come later. All I ask for the moment is that you don’t do anything foolish with the file that she gave you.”

  Stetson turned left on another street. Marcus realized they were driving in a large circle, touring a city that was falling back asleep after a nightmare.

  “If you’re going to threaten me, at least be more specific,” Marcus said.

  Stetson shook his head, sighing loudly through his nostrils. “I just want you to understand something, Marcus.” His eyes trained ahead of him. “You may have always been a pain in my ass back in the day, but fact of the matter is that you and I are cut from the same cloth. I don’t care if you don’t believe me. I don’t care if you think it’s outlandish or whatever the hell you’d call it.” Stetson shook his head. Marcus hadn’t ever seen him like this, speaking with desperate insistence over stumbling words. “But you did what you did back then because you knew that what you were doing was important and good. You wrote those articles about him because you knew that people needed to know about him. You knew that people needed to know there was someone out there doing some extraordinary things because once people knew that, they could feel something like hope. They could know that it was possible for things to be better than they were. You knew that this city needed to know what hope felt like when they had long forgotten the feeling. You understood the importance of that just like I did. And I can tell you this, Marcus—everything I ever did in my career, everything I ever will do in my career, has always been to give this city a reason to look forward to the future.”

  “Look, I’m not questioning your—”

  But Stetson interrupted. “Even after he was gone—after he’d had enough, after he’d given up—I never once gave up the fight, Marcus. Never once. Maybe that meant making sacrifices along the way, maybe that meant doing things I’ve since come to regret, maybe that meant seeing—” He ran his hand over his mouth, wiping away a stray thought before it could pass his lips. He gripped the steering wheel tighter. “What I’m trying to say to you is that I did what I did because it was for the best. And if you want to write some new book about all my misdealing along the way, all I ask you to remember is that you would have done the same exact thing if you were in my position, because you wanted the same exact thing I did. You wanted them, everyone, to know that there was hope in the world. You wanted them to know that there was someone out there doing what needed to be done at all costs. Even if he would one day leave, even if he would one day have to give up. There was a moment in time when he was out there doing something incredible and awe-inspiring. That’s why you told his story. That’s why you gave him a name. Isn’t that right?”

  Marcus considered the question, which felt to him more like an accusation. As a journalist, Marcus had prided himself on the belief that he could separate himself from the world he described, that he could distance his feelings as he carefully annotated reality. He believed that he could dispassionately report on a man who once looked over these streets and protected them. A man who ignored due process and whose conception of justice began and ended with his knuckles. A man who bullets could not bring down, a man who heard the thousands of discordant cries rising up from the city he must have loved dearly. A man who ruptured the lives of petty criminals simply making their way through the world, a man who put away some of the city’s most dangerous aberrations. A man who killed, a man who saved. A man who cooperated with the law to subvert the law. A man who gave five years of anonymous service. A man who did not return when the city he must have once loved dearly needed him the most. A man who never once asked to be given a name.

  “I think I believed he was a hero,” Marcus said. “That’s why I wrote about him. That’s why I gave him a name.”

  Stetson nodded somberly, relaxing his grip on the steering wheel. “Then I hope you understand what I’m trying to tell you.”

  Marcus watched out the window as streets passed under dull lamplight. The city seemed quiet tonight, maybe even quieter than usual. But he knew that if you listened closely enough, the world screamed with thousands of stories desperate to be heard, thousands of lives desperate to be saved, thousands of yesterdays clawing to be remembered. A woman pushed a shopping cart up a curb. A man in camouflage pants held his arms out and shouted at an open apartment window three stories above.

  “I won’t share the file with anyone,” Marcus said, his voice trailing off.

  “Good.” Stetson nodded. “I think that’s for the best.”

  “But I want you to do something in return.”

  Stetson glanced over, eyebrows raised.

  “Don’t bring any charges against Wren. The Liber-teen. I know she’s back in custody. But she’s the one who found the gunman. She’s the reason May and that other hostage are still alive. I can attest to it. So can Detective Combs. Don’t prosecute her.”

  Stetson shook his head, turning down another street. “She hacked our servers, stole confidential information, and then released that information for the purpose of assisting a criminal. Even if she did end up locating the gunman, I can’t just let her off. The FBI is involved. They’re going to bring charges against her. You know I couldn’t do anything for her even if I wanted to.”

  “Yes, you can. And you will.”

  Passing lamplight cut across Stetson’s face like a scar as the car slowed to a halt. Marcus saw that they had parked next to his car, the police blockade ahead of them populated by a crowd of onlookers, news vans, and reporters with microphones raised to catch their words of revelation.

  “Is that right?” Stetson asked, an inscrutable mixture of amused and annoyed. “Enlighten me, Marcus Waters. How can I let a criminal walk free?”

  “For the exact same reason you did before.”

  Stetson pursed his lips and looked out the window in contemplation. Aft
er a moment, he said, “It’s not the same. She wouldn’t cooperate with law enforcement. Especially after all of this.”

  “You’re right. She wouldn’t cooperate with the cops or the feds. But maybe, if you’re lucky, she’d cooperate with you.”

  “And just why would she do that?”

  Marcus picked his bag up from his feet and laid it on his lap. “If everything that you’ve told me is even halfway true, I think the two of you may be more similar than either of you would ever care to admit.” He opened the car door to get out, but stopped. He turned back to Stetson. “But unlike you, she has a conscience. She cares about consequences. You could learn from her. She’s not going to simply follow your orders, but she’ll do what’s right for this city. If she knows that you share that goal, the two of you could accomplish extraordinary things. But she’s not the Kingfisher, Greg. If you’re going to work with her, then work with her. But don’t you dare use her.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Marcus,” Stetson said. “Do you honestly think I used the Kingfisher? You think I could control that man? You think I would even want to? No.” Stetson shook his head. “Everything the Kingfisher did, he did out of his own volition. He and I, we shared a vision for this city. It was the greatest honor of my life to know that I was able to assist that great man’s mission, because he was a hero.” Stetson jabbed his finger in the space between them like a knife. “To hear you imply otherwise makes me fucking sick. The Kingfisher gave this city everything he had until he didn’t have anything left to give. He was a hero, Marcus. The last true hero.”

  Marcus looked out the window. An enormous crowd had now amassed around the perimeter of the parking garage. Curious onlookers, witnesses to something that very few would ever fully understand. “There was a time when I would have agreed with you. But I never knew the Kingfisher the way you did. I don’t know what motivated him to do the things that he did, but some of those things I would never call heroic.” He heard Stetson begin to say something, a fierce challenge, but Marcus continued. “But tonight, I witnessed a girl with a laptop risk her entire future to save the hostages you yourself could or would not save. I met a woman who ran into a room not knowing what she would find, ready to risk her life for the sake of strangers. It was the greatest honor of my life to meet them, because they are heroes. And to hear you imply otherwise, well, you can probably guess how that makes me feel.”