The Hidden_A Black Force Thriller

by Matt Rogers

  So when the driver pulled the police cruiser to a halt in front of the station’s side entrance and disappeared off down the footpath, Slater kept a close eye on D’Agostino. The man slipped out of the passenger seat, glanced in both directions with intense focus, and then skirted around to the rear door.

  To Slater’s door.

  Slater was in no position to fight back. With his wrists cuffed, there was little he could do to protest. So he kept up the drunken act, gazing into the distance and letting his shoulders slump as D’Agostino pulled him out of the car. He got his feet underneath him and grimaced as the rapid motion sent a stab of pain through his shattered nose.

  That would need medical attention as soon as he got out of this mess.

  Interestingly, he noted that he might have underestimated the police commander. A quick look at his surroundings revealed an empty parking lot, cordoned off from the street by a tall wire fence, populated sparsely by a handful of official Chicago P.D. vehicles. The station itself was a long low building with a white brick exterior, its perimeter illuminated by harsh LED floodlights. Without a soul in sight, D’Agostino would be free to kill Slater here and pretend his body never existed.

  But Slater’s eyes wandered to the security cameras covering every inch of the concrete expanse, and figured D’Agostino was unwilling to make that bold of a move.

  He was right.

  D’Agostino eyed the cameras and grunted his frustration, confirming Slater’s suspicious that the commander wanted him out of the picture.

  The hairs on the back of Slater’s neck rose. A certain dynamic unfolded when you knew someone wanted you in the ground. Slater stood inches away from the man, sensing his trepidation.

  D’Agostino shoved a hand into the small of Slater’s back and hurried him into the station through a side door.

  9

  The atmosphere shifted.

  At the beginning of the night, Slater hadn’t been fully convinced that D’Agostino was corrupt. Angry at Lars for interfering with his personal life, he’d spent most of the time loitering outside the construction site running through a list of reasons why the vagrants’ deaths could be chalked up to simple coincidence. But now, after having met Ray D’Agostino in the flesh, and quietly observing how the man behaved, Slater knew he would have to see this through to its bloody conclusion.

  Because D’Agostino wanted him dead for what he’d said in the car, and the man wasn’t bothering to hide it anymore.

  The commander led him through sterile white-washed corridors that probably stank of disinfectant — not that Slater could smell anything. They passed no other officers — either the station was sparsely populated at this time of the evening, or D’Agostino had deliberately headed down a deserted stretch of the building.

  Slater imagined it was the latter.

  At any point, he expected the big commander to make a lunge for him. The Glock sidearm was still in its holster at D’Agostino’s waist as he led Slater through the building, but the man made no attempt to snatch for it. Slater imagined he would need a damn good reason for firing on a vagrant in restraints.

  He was biding his time.

  And Slater could see it was eating the man alive.

  They pulled up to a row of single-man holding cells and D’Agostino unlocked the door to the closest one, shoving Slater inside the tiny concrete box.

  Slater turned as D’Agostino slammed the cell door closed — they were now separated by the metal bars.

  Last chance, Slater thought. Send a message.

  ‘I know what you’re doing at that construction site,’ he said, his voice suddenly sober, his drunken rambling ceased. ‘How many more of us are you going to kill before you get busted, big man?’

  D’Agostino froze in his tracks, his eyes flaring with surprise. Slater could almost see his mind racing behind his pupils, analysing just how much trouble he was in.

  Not much, D’Agostino must have concluded. If I can shut this guy up forever.

  Slater eyed the corridor outside the cell and found a single surveillance camera in the far corner, but there was no flashing digital light underneath the lens.

  It wasn’t rolling.

  ‘Going to try and kill me, too?’ Slater said. ‘Come on in. Still got these cuffs on but I’ll put up a fight. How you going to explain that?’

  D’Agostino remained resolutely quiet.

  Big guy, Slater could see him thinking. Well-built. Strong frame. He’ll be trickier to handle.

  ‘You’re going in the drunk tank,’ D’Agostino said.

  ‘The drunk tank?’

  Wordlessly, the commander unlocked the cell again and pulled Slater back out into the corridor. He led him down another set of hallways, darting this way and that, energy in his stride.

  Nervous energy.

  ‘What was wrong with that cell?’ Slater grumbled.

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘I know what you’re doing at the construction site.’

  ‘No idea what the hell you’re talking about, kid.’

  But D’Agostino wasn’t even bothering to maintain any semblance of believability. His cheeks had turned pale, and the bravado he’d been holding himself with had dissipated. Slater figured the other vagrants he’d killed may have only hinted at seeing something in the construction site. Slater had not only confessed to being in the know; he’d actively tried to antagonise D’Agostino.

  That must have thrown the man through a loop.

  They pulled to a halt a minute later in front of a cell only a few feet wider than the previous one. This cell, however, was populated by another man in custody. He was a true vagrant, with a filthy beard and long hair matted to his scalp. He wore the same dirty clothes he’d been arrested in — long khaki pants and an oversized rain jacket that looked at least ten years old. He was reclined on a bench along one wall, facing the ceiling, fast asleep.

  ‘The drunk tank,’ D’Agostino said.

  Slater didn’t understand why he’d been moved, but he wasn’t about to kick up a fuss. D’Agostino unlocked his cuffs and shoved him into the cell before he could do anything to retaliate. Slater stepped straight in through the gap in the steel bars, and D’Agostino yanked the door shut behind him. The homeless man remained fast asleep, knocked out by the alcohol in his system.

  Why the hell did D’Agostino want him here? If Slater was in the commander’s shoes, he would put the man he wanted dead in as isolated a place as he could manage. The other homeless guy was simply an additional potential witness.

  Slater crossed to the other side of the windowless concrete box, breathing through his mouth because of his broken nose. Casting a glance across the floor of the holding cell, he realised he probably didn’t want to be able to smell in any case. Dried vomit and other bodily fluids were caked across the concrete floor. Disgusted, Slater planted himself down on the opposite bench and set to work overcoming the pain of his shattered septum.

  Still, D’Agostino lingered.

  ‘I’ll be back later,’ he said.

  Still, the homeless man didn’t stir.

  ‘I’m sure you will be,’ Slater said.

  ‘You’re messing with the wrong guy.’

  ‘You’re the one killing vagrants. Which makes you the right guy.’

  Bingo.

  Slater had been preparing to drop the bombshell for some time, and by the way D’Agostino reacted he figured he’d nailed it. The police commander darted his gaze in every direction at once, searching for anyone who might have overheard the accusation. Finding nobody, he sent a dark look of fury in Slater’s direction, then strode off down the corridor without a word.

  Slater had made him angry.

  He wondered what the night would entail.

  10

  The answer came only a couple of hours later.

  Slater spent the time rolling with the waves of pain from his nose — the injury proved mind-numbingly annoying. Usually he was able to force all thoughts of his wounds in the field to
the back of his mind until the task was complete, but in this instance the task entailed waiting around for hours in a dark concrete box with nothing but his own thoughts to keep him company. He could hardly focus on anything other than the pain in his head. But he fought time and time again to push the pain to a darker place, a place where he could retrieve it and deal with it later.

  After a hundred and twenty minutes, Slater had most of the agony under control.

  He’d elected to spread out across the bench and keep his eyes closed, pretending he was asleep until someone came for him. Whether that was normal cops or D’Agostino himself, he figured the best option regardless was to play up his vulnerability. So he stretched himself out, lying sideways on the cold steel, and kept one eye open a crack to observe what was happening in the corridor outside.

  For hours, there was nothing.

  The homeless guy across the cell must have consumed enough alcohol to kill a horse, because he didn’t stir once in the time Slater spent reclined on the opposite bench. He snored and coughed and spluttered, but he didn’t wake up.

  Slater preferred that.

  He didn’t feel like striking up a conversation right now.

  When D’Agostino returned, lumbering into Slater’s vision with a switchblade in one hand and a steely expression on his face, Slater knew exactly why he’d been put in the drunk tank.

  So there was someone to pin the following incident on.

  The knife must have been retrieved from the evidence room, unless D’Agostino had left the station to purchase it. It was small enough to be feasibly concealed inside the homeless man’s clothes, which would make an excellent cover story in the proceedings that followed. It was a simple enough explanation — two bums had started arguing and one had produced a weapon.

  If there were no cameras capturing the proceedings, then it was D’Agostino’s word against a homeless man who hadn’t even been conscious at the time.

  A foolproof cover story.

  Slater didn’t move a muscle. D’Agostino crept down the corridor, trying his best to keep quiet as he approached the cell, but Slater didn’t react. He kept his eyes closed and his demeanour relaxed. He took a deep breath in, then released it over the course of a few seconds. It proved strangely difficult — acting calm and subdued in the face of a man coming to stab you to death.

  But it was vital for what was to follow.

  D’Agostino pulled to a halt in front of the cell and hovered behind the door for a long beat, his chest rising and falling, his gaze boring into Slater. Slater remained deathly still, seemingly passed out, completely vulnerable to attack.

  Silently, D’Agostino unlocked the door.

  He let the bars swing inward, and he stepped through into the cell, quiet as a mouse. He planted one boot on the dusty concrete floor and advanced forward.

  Still, Slater didn’t budge.

  When D’Agostino came within a foot of the bench, Slater burst off it like a freight train, getting his feet underneath him before the bulky police commander could blink. D’Agostino jolted in place, suitably shocked by the sudden outburst, and made a wild thrust with the switchblade, stabbing forward in a kneejerk reaction. Slater saw it coming a mile away and twisted his body out of the way. The tip of the blade passed within a few inches of his spleen, then went sailing past.

  And then Slater was in range.

  And he was furious.

  Game on.

  He grabbed the back of D’Agostino’s skull with one hand, and used the other arm to deliver an elbow that carried all the rage he’d been building for the past few hours. The point of his bone punched the commander’s nose into the back of his head, completely destroying all the delicate tissue around the guy’s septum, and shattering the nose itself.

  A gruesome injury, all things considered, but Slater couldn’t dredge up an ounce of remorse. Whatever this man was involved with in the dark heart of an unfinished skyscraper, it was worth protecting enough to kill any vagrants that stumbled across it.

  That was reason enough to destroy the man’s life.

  The break caused such a sickening crunch to echo through the holding cell that for a moment Slater feared the homeless man might wake up. D’Agostino stumbled back, arms flailing, swinging wildly with the switchblade, hitting nothing but empty air. Slater grimaced as the knife came swinging past his throat from a wild haymaker.

  Too close for comfort.

  He drilled the ball of his foot into D’Agostino’s gut, doubling the big man over as he tore a muscle in the guy’s torso. Slater seized hold of the commander’s head with both hands and smashed a knee into the side of his skull, targeting the soft skin above the ear.

  Unconscious.

  Like a switch being flipped.

  All the energy sapped out of the man’s limbs and he went down like a rag doll, sprawling across the floor of the cell with his nose broken and his hands empty. In one fluid motion Slater snatched the switchblade off the floor and planted it in the top of D’Agostino’s skull, killing the man with a single downward swing. He wiped his hands on the man’s jacket, stepped over his bloody corpse, and shut the door of the cell behind him as he left.

  He guessed D’Agostino was a man of painstaking preparation, in which case all trace of Slater arriving at the station had been wiped from the archives of footage to provide the commander with an alibi. Unfortunately, due to extraneous circumstances, D’Agostino’s whereabouts couldn’t be accounted for, but who else could have murdered Slater other than the homeless man in the cell with him?

  If the footage had been wiped as Slater suspected, then it would be a simple process of breaking out of the station and disappearing into the freezing Chicago night.

  He could do that.

  As he hurried down white brick corridors, keeping his face to the ground, he thought of what he’d done. He could’ve left the man unconscious in the cell, but he knew that he would soon be approaching the construction site to investigate, and what he found there would inevitably send him straight back to the station hunting for D’Agostino’s head. It was easier to get the job done now.

  Less messy.

  Besides, all that moral trickery aside, D’Agostino had just tried to stab him to death.

  That alone warranted an equal reaction on Slater’s behalf.

  So he barely gave it a second thought as he hurried away from the cell.

  He reached the end of the corridor as it ran into a locked door that required authorised keycard access, and was halfway through positing how to overcome that particular obstacle when the door burst open in his face and a moronic Chicago P.D. officer came hurrying through.

  11

  The guy hadn’t even looked through the foggy glass partition to check whether there was anyone waiting on the other side of the door. He might as well have handed Slater his freedom on a silver platter.

  Then again, not many people on this earth could take advantages of weaknesses the way Slater could.

  The officer — a plain-looking Hispanic guy in his thirties — was already in the process of fumbling for the sidearm in its black leather holster at his waist when Slater put him down with a right hook to the jaw. He knew he would need to knock the man unconscious to avoid getting ambushed from behind minutes later, so he put as much force into the punch as he dared, annoyed that he had to incapacitate an innocent man but aware of the implications of leaving him alone.

  The guy collapsed in a heap, shut off at the neurological light switch by the strike. He bounced off the opposite wall and came to rest slumped over in a seated position, chin drooped to his chest, well and truly unconscious. He would come around in less than a minute, but it would take him far longer than that to get his bearings and piece together what had happened.

  By then, Slater figured he’d be miles away.

  He relieved the officer of his Glock 17 and hurried straight through the open doorway, ignoring the tiny red light blinking on the display to indicate that a body had passed through the secu
rity checkpoint without scanning their keycard. He considered turning back and fishing the guard’s pass out of his belt, but it simply wasn’t worth the effort — ahead he saw the corridor open out into a wide lobby at the front of the station.

  There would be a officer on the front desk for the night shift, without question.

  Slater figured he could handle that.

  As he hurried straight toward freedom it surprised him how drastically his life had changed in the space of a couple of years. Some time ago, he would have considered arrest a death sentence. Now, it was a simple inconvenience. His heart rate had barely elevated at the thought of being thrust into the holding cell, because he had the subliminal confidence to know he could manoeuvre his way out of nearly any situation.

  Like the encounter that followed.

  Without breaking stride he burst out into the open, maintaining a brisk pace through the lobby. He had the Glock trained on the man behind the reception desk before the guy realised what was happening. A pale man in his late twenties with thinning brown hair styled in a dreadful combover, he looked up from his papers after a beat of hesitation. Fear speared through his bleary eyes, and he froze on the spot.

  The lobby was silent, save for Slater’s thudding footsteps.

  ‘Don’t even think about moving,’ Slater said. ‘Stay right there and you’ll be fine. Nod if you understand.’

  The guy nodded, but there was nothing he could do regardless. By the time Slater had finished his sentence he’d already made it more than halfway across the tiled floor. Out of the corner of his eye Slater noticed the bulky shape of a surveillance camera positioned in the upper corner of the lobby, and he turned his face imperceptibly away from the line of sight.

  The CCTV footage would pick up nothing but a dark-skinned man flying across the reception area in a blur.

  He kept the barrel of the Glock trained rigidly on the desk grunt, unwavering in his intensity. Having memorised the route to the entrance doors, he didn’t take his eyes off the guy. A cold sweat had broken out across the man’s forehead, and he sported the expression of a deer in headlights. Slater had seen enough tense situations to know there was zero risk of the guy putting up a fight. The Glock’s safety had been switched off by the mere act of resting his finger against the trigger, but he had no intention of actually firing his weapon. D’Agostino — as far as Slater knew — had been acting alone. If there were others, Slater would know soon enough.