Lone Wolf, page 8
Behind Evan on the tile the burly cop coughed and groaned, reaching for Evan again. “There’s no time for this,” Evan said. Holding the straw in place with one hand, Evan placed the gun on the butcher block, crouched, and yanked him to his feet. “Hold here,” Evan told him. “And here. Steady.”
The big guy was breathing hard, nostrils flaring. He had a choice between his service weapon and the metal straw. He chose the straw, firming it in place. As Evan drew back, Jayla’s eyes darted about, panicked.
“I have to go,” he told her. “You’re safe now. They have you.” She tried to shake her head but he said, “Don’t move. You’re okay.”
Jeong had lowered his weapon but not holstered it. “Show me badge and creds. I have to frisk you.”
Evan wiped his bloody hand on his cargo pants as he breezed past Jeong onto the catwalk. “Is EMS dispatched?”
“We called it in.”
More commotion below as officers streamed into the foyer.
“Follow me upstairs,” Evan said.
Jeong hastened his pace up the stairs behind him. The third-floor catwalk held a spray of blood and a lump of human matter. Evan crouched over it.
“Oh, God.” Jeong’s curled forefinger rose to his lips, pressed to his septum. “Is that a…”
Evan scooped up the hunk of human ear, stuffed it in his cargo pocket, and stepped out onto the balcony.
“You can’t touch that,” Jeong said, moving behind him. “That’s evidence.”
Evan leaned over the railing. Nothing below but a puddle of curtain and a plastic trash can dented and toppled from a falling ninja.
Jeong moved next to him and peered over. “What are you looking for?”
“I need to check the roof. Wait here. Tell backup to hold the front.”
Evan hoisted himself to balance atop the balcony railing, bracing himself with one hand against the overhang. Grabbing the lip above with both hands, he pulled himself up, his belly scraping along the graveled flat roof.
“Wait!” Jeong called up after him. “What’s your badge number?”
Wind whipping at him, Evan ran across the joined rooftops of the row of town houses. Between them and the neighboring apartment building was a gap of ten feet and a drop of the same.
He had enough momentum for the leap, but the brief flight still spiked his heart rate. Already sailing, no time to think, chill air blasting his eyes and mouth, asphalt shingles flying up at him jaggedly and faster than he would have liked. Bending his knees so as not to jam the joints, he struck hard but left his feet immediately, rolling onto his side and then ridiculously up over his shoulders in a way that would have been more graceful a few years ago.
He sprinted for the far side, where handrails to a fire-escape ladder looped up over the building’s edge. A grab and a swing, clambering down, his hands squeaking painfully down the side rails, he slid-fell until asphalt smashed into the tread of his boots. Flashing lights, radio squalls, and siren bleeps issued around the corner from the front of the building.
Getting his legs back under him, he wobbled a few steps in the other direction, darting into the alley. It was blissfully empty.
He’d run less than ten meters when a garage gate rattled open in the building across from the town houses. A black Chevy Suburban reared up the ramp, scraping a wall and spewing sparks. High and menacing on oversize tires, it clipped a row of trash cans, veering toward Evan, a wall of horsepowered metal.
There were two people in the SUV. The driver was hidden behind windshield reflection, but Evan caught a glimpse of the face of the woman in the passenger seat, balaclava hood shoved atop her blood-smeared head. Her eyes locked on to his, a brief, searing moment of acknowledgment.
The driver completed the turn, filling the alley wall-to-wall, barreling at him.
He had nowhere to go.
16
The Wrath of God
Evan was in a sheer stretch of alley, the truck accelerating. No fire escape to grab hold of. No curb to fling himself behind. No manhole to disappear into.
If he ran forward he’d pancake into the Suburban’s grille. If he ran backward he’d be bulldozed before reaching the intersecting street.
The SUV was twenty meters out now, picking up speed.
The driver wore a mesh-back military-green trucker cap with a yellow army star, his teeth a clenched line in an unkempt beard. Despite the starburst of blood at her right ear and temple, the woman in the passenger seat looked as calm as ever.
Now fifteen meters.
Muscles tensed, Evan debated leaping onto the hood, but the truck was sufficiently lifted that there’d be no toppling up and over. His mind spun, grabbing for options that weren’t there. It struck him that he might very well die here frozen on his feet like a petrified deer.
Ten meters and quickening.
The Suburban shoved a wall of air before it, gusting against Evan’s cheeks, riffling his hair, the V-8 engine growling.
He left his feet, flinging himself down, pancaking to the gritty asphalt, head turned, ear mashed to the ground. He had time to shoot out a breath, forcing every last bit of oxygen from his lungs, collapsing his body like a bellows deflating.
And then it was upon him.
A roar like the wrath of God, fire and fury sweeping overhead, the hot reek of oil blasting down, his clothes snapping against his body hard enough that it seemed they might tear right off. A screech and a grind as the driver tried to swerve to catch him with a tire, but the girth of the car in the constrained alley allowed scant room for maneuvering.
All at once the world opened up again and there was light and a sky and air to breathe. The SUV had flown overhead with aeronautical thunder and was already rocketing away.
Head ringing, he came up and onto his feet, drawing his ARES and getting off a single shot before the truck hit the street and careened right. The back window absorbed the round, which clacked impotently, the safety glass popcorning.
An instant later two patrol cars whipped by the mouth of the alley, speeding after the Suburban. He heard a burst of automatic fire and then a crash. One of the patrol cars wobbled back into sight in reverse, windshield riddled and red. Drifting lethargically up a curb, it knocked a fire hydrant off its mount with alarming ease and freed a geyser of water into the undercarriage. The vehicle capped the torrent, forcing it to radiate outward like an atomic blast before the mushroom rise.
Evan turned and ran the other way up the alley, ARES swinging at his side. His senses felt misaligned, his breath thundering through him, dampening other sensations. As he passed the backs of the town houses, a tacked-up patrolman dove out of a rear door right on top of him, heel of his hand riding a holstered service pistol, crying, “Stop—wait—!”
Evan toggled back to nonlethal fight mode, ramming his ARES back into the appendix holster, freeing his hands just in time to catch the cop’s gun hand as it rose. A bong sau / lop sau trap locked up forearm and wrist, knocking the pistol free. The cop’s black-frame glasses made his eyes bulge; he was sturdy and bookish at once, Clark Kent on the juice.
Evan threw an elbow to the chin, not too hard, the cop staggering back, name tag flashing: GIBBONS. He snatched at Evan’s shirt, grabbing a flapping hem, magnetic buttons popping. Evan spun away and out of the shirt, Gibbons falling away with a fistful of fabric, his descent hastened by the weight of his gear. Gibbons’s pistol rasped in circles on the ground like a listless top and Evan kicked it across the alley and through the slender mouth of a storm drain. Wheezing and coughing, Gibbons rolled to his side, attempting to rise.
Evan stared at his shirt where it had fallen out of reach. He had to get it back on—he needed its facial-recognition-scrambling properties before Gibbons faced him squarely and captured him with his body cam.
Evan turned to lunge for it, but another tacked-up patrolman banged out of the rear door, stumbling sideways, pistol already drawn and rising. Evan was five meters away panting like a maniac, 1911 strapped to his sweat-glistening torso, an injured officer sprawled at his feet. The patrolman’s pistol was still coming north as if in slow motion, the bore now visible. An adrenalized terror flushed his face, pinking up a doughy nose and padded cheeks that still made him look like the teenage kid he’d been a few years prior.
Evan was too far away to engage in hand-to-hand, too close to run. The tiny lens of the cop’s body cam glinted, swinging around with the cop’s pivot, and Evan jerked to the side, inches ahead of its scope.
The most likely next occurrence was a bullet through Evan’s bare torso.
The muzzle almost level, the black circle of the bore waxing to full moon.
There were no good options left.
Evan quick-drew his ARES and shot the young cop in the chest.
17
Green-Screen Hero
Clutching his ribs, the cop left his boots, crashing back into the door he’d issued from. Face purpling, he stood propped against it, weapon tumbling to the side. Then he slid down to a slump, shuddering. Behind the door, sounds of commotion, officers darting to and fro, securing the building. Wouldn’t be long before they traced the gunfire to the alley.
Evan darted to the young cop, ripped his shirt open, and tore the body camera free, keeping his face clear.
He’d hit the standard-issue concealable bullet-resistant vest dead in the middle as he’d intended, denting the Kevlar. The greatest protection was around center mass, diffusing the pressure to avoid blunt-trauma injury, and he’d been careful to avoid impact over the heart.
Still the cop wasn’t breathing. Head lolling, spread lips quivering, no air moving in or out. The impact had knocked a few years off him; he looked even younger now, a high-school lineman with the wind knocked out of him. Sweat smeared his tight blond hair to his temples, terror emanating off him like heat. Evan shot a glance at his name tag.
“You’re okay, Lenik,” Evan told him, tearing at the Velcro straps, loosing the vest. “Kevlar got you. Just need to catch your breath.”
He tore the vest over Lenik’s head, tossing it aside. He was about to begin chest compressions when the young man’s lungs released with a screech and he took in greedy gasps of air.
“Good, good,” Evan said, already pivoting away. His shirt was before him, puddled on the ground, and he swept it up as he rose. Gibbons had just gotten to all fours. Running past, Evan said, “Sorry,” and kicked out one arm. Behind him, he heard Gibbons’s chest slap the asphalt.
Ramming the shirt into his back pocket, Evan sprinted down the alley to the far side of the block, his view rocking from side to side, a nautical effect.
As he spilled from the alley onto the sidewalk, the vroom of an engine startled him into a leaping turn.
The Suburban.
It accelerated off the curb from its tucked-in hideout between a U-Haul and a gardener’s truck and plowed into him. He almost managed to clear the grille, but the front headlight clipped him and sent him into a helicopter-rotor spin above the street. As the windshield flew crookedly by, Evan caught a glimpse of the driver’s bearded face behind the wheel. Through a haze of motion and pain, he registered the empty passenger seat, the assassin now gone from the Suburban, which meant she was—alarmingly—set up elsewhere.
The landing tore the heels of his hands, his cargo pants at the hip. He tumbled three times across the lanes of the main street, a station wagon stuttering to a stop on antilock brakes, the front bumper giving his cheek a cool metal kiss. The blare of the horn pressurized the inside of his head to the point of bursting.
He popped to his feet and something sliced past him, the station wagon’s hood crumpling. A split second later he heard the delayed crack of a sniper rifle. Spinning, he caught a glint of a scope from the low-slung roof of the Burger King diagonally across the intersection, noted the balaclava-hooded head tilted to the buttstock.
The driver of the station wagon was screaming, hands clamped to her cheeks with Munchian horror. Two toddlers lolled in car seats in the back, drool-slick chins and whale-spout ponytails. At least three different police sirens wailed in the surrounding blocks, their sounds morphing ventriloquially off the corridors of buildings.
Evan put distance between himself and the family, running into the open, zigzagging across the street. Sniper rounds chewed the blacktop at his heels, grit pattering against the calves of his cargo pants. He dove behind an empty bus-stop shelter, the supporting wall turned opaque by an action-movie one-sheet featuring an oiled-up green-screen hero. To his side, a graffitied sheet of plywood boarded up an abandoned storefront.
Replaying the sounds in his head, he registered the supersonic crack of the projectile. There’d been no trailing boom, which meant the rifle was suppressed, giving him less to work with. But the divots in the street, the secondary pieces of dislodged concrete, and the spalling of the projectiles meant he was dealing with a 7.62x51 mm at a minimum.
His mouth was dry and bitter, jaw clenched. Sprawled on his stomach, he hacked and spit, the glob of saliva laced with street grime. Then he risked a glance behind him. Cop cars were screaming up the alley, but the Suburban had embedded into the opening, stopping it up, the hood buried in a landslide of collapsed edifice. The driver’s window had spiderwebbed on impact, clouding white.
The crumpled door shuddered once, twice, kicked from within, and then it flew open. The driver in the army trucker hat stepped out and stared across the four lanes of traffic at Evan.
He looked uninjured, unrattled. Lacing his fingers, he thrust his palms outward, and even over the din of the collective mayhem, Evan heard the brisk rat-a-tat of popping knuckles. The man’s smile was yellow and jagged, teeth missing. His face said this was the most fun he’d had in years.
His finger rose to his ear and Evan read his lips as he spoke into the radio: Tanner to the Wolf, I’ve got visual. Behind the bus shelter.
Rolling to his side, Evan pulled his ARES from the appendix holster and aimed across the street. Panicked civilians swarmed his field of vision, running to safety, abandoning their vehicles. No clear shot.
Through the strobing bodies, Tanner looked at him. And smiled.
An incoming round snapped crisply, and then the bus shelter wall cracked like a wrenched ice-cube tray. Evan’s hands stung. It took a moment for him to realize what had happened, that the bullet had penetrated the movie poster and knocked the ARES right from his grip. Above him, the pane held its shape for a single confused moment, unsure which law of physics to obey, and then cascaded down in shards across his shoulders.
He was exposed, his 1911 lying mangled in the gutter.
He moved fast, leaping across the sidewalk, crashing into the plywood covering the storefront. The nails on one side gave, the wooden rectangle rocking inward like a crooked pivot door. He scraped across it, drawing splinters; tumbled into the dusky interior; and landed belly-down on a concrete floor sticky with filth. A big square of a room, perhaps a former lobby.
When he lifted his head, he sensed movement at the desecrated lobby’s perimeter. Dirt-blackened faces, glinting eyes, caved cheeks. And the smell—human waste and untreated infection, urine and the vinegar stench of meth. The tilted plywood door had freed a blast of daylight to enter the squat house, and Evan had to blink to acclimate his eyes to the severity of the contrast.
A water leak laid a bruise-colored amoeba across a third of the ceiling, a steady drip tapping a soggy jaundiced couch. Sleeping bags bulging like larvae, a plastic pink child’s vanity and stool set, black trash bags and white paint buckets, a row of ragged Christmas stockings nailed to crumbling Sheetrock, red Solo cups, rat nests, a legless teddy bear adorned with a tattered red bra. A squalid underworld less than a hundred meters from Dr. Hill’s airy three-story retreat. That’s what happened when poverty outpaced prosperity, crowding on top of it, leaving affluence nowhere to flee.
The squatters rose like zombies, black maws punctuated by peg teeth, and shuffled into the adjoining room, melting into darkness. The taste of ammonia coated the inside of Evan’s mouth, and he coughed hard, trying to clear his windpipe. As he got his hands beneath him, one palm pressed down into something squishy. Shaking the fog from his head, he forced himself upright.
The shaft of light through the mangled doorway laid a spotlight on the rear wall. As Evan rose, his shadow seemed to rise before him, stretching up the crumbling Sheetrock.
Then he noticed the shaggy outline of facial hair, the brim of a trucker hat, a curved spike held in one hand at the thigh, like a meat hook or tent stake.
Tanner standing in the doorway, his form thrown in a distorted shadow-puppet silhouette.
Evan wiped the grime off his hand onto his pant leg, clenched his teeth, drew a breath.
And turned to face what was coming.
18
Back to Lethal
Tanner stepped across the knocked-askew plank of plywood, through the ragged gullet into the onetime lobby, nose wrinkling at the smell. His discordantly pretty amber eyes held the light. From outside came shouts and cries, earsplitting sirens and radio blasts, flashing lights and car horns. Evan hadn’t had time to pull his shirt on; he felt it bulging in his back pocket, the tingle of cooling sweat across his bare shoulders.
Once more Tanner pressed his finger to his ear and spoke to the Wolf. “Through the plywood door. Got him cornered. Any cop comes near, put ’em down.” A pause. “I know, I know. No loose ends. I got him. Deal with the girl.” Then: “I said I got him. I don’t need backup.”
He hung up, then lifted his hat by the brim, swiped a forearm across his brow, lowered it back in place. Then he and Evan stared at each other. His skin had a sun-battered orange tinge from sleeping on the streets, his face like a pork rind.
“Former army?” Evan said. “And you’re okay killing cops and girls?”
