“What do you think this is?” I shouted. “Showdown at the OK Corral? Go on! Get out of here!”
Just then another rad rat stepped out of the shadows. I’d read somewhere that they mated for life. How touching.
“Okay, which one of you freaks of nature wants to be widowed first?”
I snapped my whip at the one who’d been acting like John Wayne. “Bull’s-eye!” I shouted triumphantly as it squealed and ran.
The second rat, apparently outraged by the assault, ran toward me so fast I couldn’t use my whip again, so I met it halfway and punted it, literally. The squealing—I swear, screaming—creature flew through the air and landed hard against the brick wall, then limped away.
“Ha!” At least I was warmed up. I only hoped these disgusting creatures weren’t an omen.
I ran the rest of the way down the alley to the entrance to the Cloisters, so named because it was a square courtyard surrounded by arches, as in a medieval monastery. It used to be a loading dock where trucks would unload their wares. But it was abandoned about fifteen years ago, and soon after was the site of a terrible shoot-out between police and drug runners that claimed the lives of nine officers.
Since then the Cloisters had been virtually crime free. Word on the street was that the slain cops haunted the place. Retributionists, who weren’t as a rule superstitious, sometimes took advantage of the empty real estate because it was centrally located. It was a convenient place to meet with a client who wanted a contract to remain secret.
I found the square courtyard well-lit and littered with the remains of a giant forklift, whose metal parts were scattered like the bones of a small dinosaur.
“Roy?” I called out. “Roy, where are you?”
“Here!” came his croaking reply. “It’s safe. They’re gone.”
Spying his bloody, prone body amid the metal rubble, I raced to his side, scraping my knees as I dropped to the dirty concrete. I touched his damp and cold forehead. He was very weak and, I suspected, badly in need of blood. He eyed me with a glint of affection. “Hey, Blue Dragon.”
He often called me that because of the easy-stick dragon tattoo I sometimes wore on my forehead during retribution gigs. It had become my symbol. In Chinese mythology, blue dragons are powerful creatures that live in water. Since one of my great joys as a child was swimming in Lake Michigan, and since I’d learned my best combat techniques from a former Shaolin kung fu monk, the imagery seemed to fit and gave me confidence.
“What are you doing in this shitty neighborhood?”
“You called me, remember?” I squeezed his hand hard, willing my life into him. Blood had splattered his white shirt like a panel from a Rorschach test. His abdomen looked like meat ready for a sausage grinder.
“Shit!” I muttered, momentarily squeezing my eyes tight.
I jammed my earpiece in place and called for an ambulance and police, then snapped it back on my lapel and took Roy’s pulse. It was too slow. If the ambulance didn’t hurry, he wouldn’t make it.
“Angel…”
“Yes, Roy?” I stroked his cheek. “What is it?”
He looked at me with eyes I had once watched so carefully for approval. With a gray mustache and silver hair, Roy was elegant and smart. He was also wily. He’d been the first man to tell me it was okay to be a little bad for a good cause.
“Go help the boy,” he croaked.
“What boy?”
He raised his right hand and pointed, then dropped it and passed out.
I checked his pulse again to make sure he was still alive. Then I carefully headed in the direction in which he’d pointed. My stomach surged with vertigo when I spotted a second body, which was so utterly still I knew immediately that “the boy” was dead.
As I knelt, both fascinated and horrified beside the lifeless form, I thought of Marco’s question to me: do you really know what death is? Trying to take it in as much as I could, I carefully tugged on the shoulder of the young man’s Hawaiian shirt. The weight of his shoulders pulled his still-supple torso toward me, and I winced at the scarlet carnage. I reached down and pulled his head my way so I could look at his face, in case I recognized him.
Who it was nearly stopped my heart. “Oh, my God!”
It was Victor Alvarez, the seventeen-year-old son of the Chicago mayor. I’d met Victor briefly when I’d done a top secret retribution job for his father. This was a disaster of monstrous proportions. What the hell had happened here? Had Roy and Victor been in a shoot-out?
“Angel,” came Roy’s weak cry.
I ran the thirty feet back to his side and my eyes widened when I saw how white he was. He looked at me with terror shimmering in his eyes.
“Angel, I’m dying.” He started to convulse, gasping desperately for air.
I knelt and took him in my arms, but he shook so violently his hand socked me in the temple and I nearly blacked out. When I regained my composure, he was still, his eyes wide open.
“No!” I shouted and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I fought to keep the cold of death out of my lungs while I stubbornly forced the warmth of life into his, one breath at a time.
By the time emergency technicians arrived, I was sweating and frantic, pumping at Roy’s chest, willing him to live. Strong hands gripped my upper arms and lifted me away.
“Hold it, ma’am,” said a brawny EMT, pulling me around. His round, ebony face was serious and soothing. “We have it under control now. You can stop. We’ll take over from here.”
I took in a hitching breath and nodded, as an EMT took over working on Roy. I looked around and realized the once-empty courtyard was now teaming with detectives, special forces and beat cops. When I looked back at Roy, the technician was pulling a white sheet over him.
“That’s it?” I shouted. “Why did you stop? Can’t you take him to the hospital?”
The big guy who had pulled me aside said, “We did a brain scan. There’s no activity.”
I nodded, finally admitting what I’d known from the beginning. Roy was gone. As devastating as this fact was, I could not cry for him. Not here. I had to know first who killed him. As always, I trusted my own ability to find out more than the cops.
“Angel Baker?” a voice intoned over my shoulder.
“That’s me,” I muttered, still staring at the white sheet.
“My name is Lieutenant William Townsend, director of Q.E.D.”
I tore my gaze from Roy’s body and focused on a man who towered above me a good six inches. Gray-haired and quietly arrogant, he regarded me assessingly.
“How did you know who I am?” I asked, refusing to be cowed.
“Detective Marco briefed me when I arrived,” he answered in an upper-crust British accent. He was apparently a UK immigrant who’d tenaciously clung to his distinguished way of speaking.
“Marco?” The word was like a bad dream suddenly remembered in the light of day. I glanced over and saw Marco talking to a bevy of crime scene techs and investigators.
“What time is it?” I hissed.
Arching one brow in surprise, Lieutenant Townsend replied, “Four-fifty.”
The proverbial clock had struck midnight. In Marco’s eyes, I was now officially a pumpkin. I’d failed our agreement. I rubbed my eyes with both hands and sighed.
“I need to see your license,” Townsend said in a clipped manner.
Without enthusiasm, I handed over my certification card and studied him as he held it by the edges with his uncallused, manicured fingers, as if I had cooties. I’d always been curious about Q.E.D., which was short for the Latin term quad erat demonstrandum, “that which is to be demonstrated.” I’d never met a Q.E.D. officer before but I’d heard the group jokingly referred to as the Quad Squad.
An elite group, it consisted of about ten cops who had elected to undergo psychosurgery to limit their capacity to feel emotions. After surgery, the officers took the latest bio-meds to spur connections in the logical, left side of the brain, which would then take over functions that had been surgically freed up in the right, or emotional, side of the brain. The idea being that a more logical cop could better solve crimes and would be less inclined to abuse criminals in a fit of anger.
“Are you carrying a weapon, Ms. Baker?” Townsend inquired, handing me back my ID.
“A knife and a whip. No gun.”
He fixed me with cold, gray eyes that fronted a brain working apparently with computer-like precision. In fact, he stared down his aquiline nose at me for so long with so little emotion that I began to wonder if he considered me a suspect.
“I didn’t do it, Lieutenant. But perhaps I can help you find out who did.”
“That won’t be necessary.” He gave me a perfunctory smile, perhaps one remembered from presurgery days. He motioned above my head and soon another detective joined us. My skin began to tingle ominously in this new presence and I turned to see who it was.
Marco. His jaded eyes that so recently glittered at me with desire now shone with reproof.
“Detective Marco,” Townsend said, “I’m arresting Angel Baker in connection with this double homicide. Would you be so kind as to read her her Miranda rights?”
Townsend walked away without waiting for a reply. Marco put his hands on his hips and sighed heavily. Our gazes met again. “You just couldn’t wait, could you?” he said accusingly. “What? Another hour was it?”
“Marco, I—”
“You have the right to remain silent,” he said in a monotone voice, cutting me off. “You have the right to an attorney….”
Chapter 3
Nothing but the Truth
To say I was stunned by the turn of events would be a gross understatement. I was nearly in shock. I rode calmly in the police aerocar, as if out for a Sunday drive. This is all a mistake, I kept thinking. They have to let me go. When you step in serious doo-doo, you usually don’t realize what a mess you’re in until the action settles and your olfactory senses kick into high gear.
I got a powerful whiff of it when I walked into Police Substation #1. Fondly known as the Crypt, P.S. #1 was a highly secure concrete fortress built underground so that mobs couldn’t blow it up whenever one of their leaders went there for a pit stop in crime’s never-ending rat race. It was hard to get into and out of without a police escort. Not that I planned on trying to escape. I was innocent, after all. I simply had to prove it, right? It was amazing how someone as hard-bitten as I am could be so naive.
Still handcuffed, I rode down a concrete corridor lined with twenty glass prison cells on either side. My chauffeur was a beat cop who transported me in the back of an aerocart-type vehicle you see at O’Hare Airport that carry disabled passengers and beep obnoxiously at able-bodied passengers in the way.
Slowly accepting the fact that I was a criminal suspect and not a tourist, I hunkered down in the back seat and watched the parade of prisoners with growing dismay and increasing alarm over my predicament. My eyes popped when I saw a tall, shirtless body builder in one of the clear cells. His skin was covered with so many body piercings that he looked like a human pin cushion. He glanced at me sullenly as I passed.
The next cell contained a Skinny—a prostitute who wore no clothes. Ever. Except for the facsimile of clothing permanently tattooed on her body—in this case red short-shorts and a white short-sleeve top. Since it was too painful to tattoo nipples, they remained intact, pink and perpetually protruding from her white “blouse.” Skinnies didn’t like to waste time undressing. Time was money, after all.
And just when I thought I’d seen it all, we drove past a person I’d hoped I’d never see again as long as I lived.
“Cyclops!” I exclaimed without thinking.
The pudgy, red-haired cop in the front looked back and sneered. “He a friend of yours?”
“Not exactly.” More like enemies. Cy ran his own underground prison in Emerald City, the homeless community that dwelled in the abandoned underground subway system.
Unlike the previous jailbirds I’d just seen, Cy wore a green city-issued jumpsuit with a hood, which he’d pulled over his hairless head. He’d been badly burned in an underground gas fire when he was young. Blinded in one eye, enraged and twisted by the incident, both physically and mentally, he’d been nicknamed Cyclops after the one-eyed monster in Greek mythology.
“How did you guys catch him?” I asked. Cops as a rule stayed clear of Emerald City.
“From what I hear, it wasn’t hard,” the officer replied. “He’s blind.”
“Blind?” I sat up for a closer look as we drove out of sight, so to speak. Hunched over and scowling, he looked not unlike Shakespeare’s Richard III, whom he was fond of quoting. “I thought he had one good eye.”
“Yeah,” the cop said, “some chicks wandered down in Emerald City and poked his eye out. Ain’t that a bite?”
“Yeah,” I replied without enthusiasm. The chicks just so happened to be me and my mother. Lola had stabbed Cy in the face with a stick during our fight. It was the coup de grâce that enabled us to escape from his prison. It must have left him totally sightless. Somehow I felt bad about it. Roy always told me I was a sucker for the underdogs of the world.
With a tug of guilt and the loss of Roy squeezing my heart, my numbness began to fade and I felt shaky by the time we arrived at the interrogation wing of the station. My chauffeur deposited me, still handcuffed, into a windowless rectangle and locked the door. If this tactic was meant to make me brood over the evening’s events, it worked.
I would miss Roy terribly. And Victor had been cheated out of his future. I felt for his father’s loss all the more because Mayor Alvarez was a friend of Henry Bassett, my foster father. Both men would grieve, and it killed me that I had to be associated with Victor’s death in any way.
And, as always, I felt abandoned. It was my natural reaction to everything. Marco could have come to my defense at the crime scene, but he hadn’t. I wasn’t even sure if he thought I was innocent. Now, that really hurt.
I’d refused to let Lieutenant Townsend, not to mention Marco, see me cry, but now a tear escaped down my placid face. I cried silently, a trick I’d learned during a two-year stint in an abusive foster home before I’d been mercifully rescued by the Bassetts. It was a trick I hoped Lin would never have to learn. God, I had to get out of here and get back to her.
The door opened with a brisk whoosh and a nerdy little man bearing an underarm full of electronic files, a coffee-stained tie and a suit he must have purchased at the local print shop. I could recognize the unnatural creases of a reconstituted paper suit a mile away. Was this a law student intern? I wondered as I surreptitiously wiped my face.
“Miss Baker?” he inquired, flashing a row of neglected teeth with his overly exuberant smile.
“Yes?”
“I’m your lawyer.”
“I don’t need a lawyer.”
He nodded patronizingly as he dropped his load of files on the table. “I’ve heard that before, Miss Baker. And I suppose you’re going to tell me that you’re—”
“Innocent. Damned straight.”
He looked up, startled, I presume, by my lack of remorse for the crime he clearly thought I’d committed. “Innocent,” he repeated, clearly speculating on the credibility of my reply, adding doubtfully, “Okay.”
“What’s your name?”
“Terrence Murray.”
“Don’t be an asshole, Mr. Murray. I’ve already got one, and I don’t need another.”
His eyes rounded and he pursed his wet lips. “Look here, Miss Baker, you’re lucky to have me. This is a busy place, as you may have noticed. Most people have to wait days for a chance to meet with a public defender.”
“Lucky me.”
He shook his head and opened the top file, muttering, “You’re awfully confident for someone who has caught the interest of Q.E.D.”
“What do you mean?”
He looked up from his papers. “Q.E.D. is the police department’s latest effort to reestablish law and order and polish its tarnished image. If the members of this elite force were willing to go under the knife just to increase their odds of nailing criminals, they won’t back down easily in a case involving a CRS. You’re the competition.”