Hidden River (Five Star Paperback)

by Adrian McKinty

  “It’s clean,” John said. I nodded. John and I bolted for the fire escape.

  “Get that cap down again, real low,” I said.

  He pulled down the baseball cap as low as it would go, I pulled mine down too. Not much of an aid in concealing our identities, but it would have to serve.

  “When we get out of the building, we walk away calmly, and then when we’re clear, we run, ok?” I said.

  “What?”

  “John, you eejit, get with the fucking program, just do everything I tell you, ok?”

  “Ok,” he said sullenly.

  We ran down the concrete corridor of the fire escape. Came out in a side lobby. A few potted plants, green-painted concrete walls, a mirror, a notice about trash, but otherwise empty. We sprinted through a door and outside into the sunlight.

  A black guy stood there blocking our way. Tall guy, shorts, sneakers, sweat-stained gray T-shirt with the words “United States Army” printed on the front. He’d been jogging, seen the whole thing, come around to the front of the building to stop the murderers or anyone else getting out.

  “Por favor, señor, muy urgente, es tarde,” I explained, and went to go past him.

  “No one’s leaving this building till the cops show up,” he said.

  John tried to shove past him, but with a big hand the soldier pushed him to the ground. A clear violation of Posse Comitatus, but this wasn’t the time to mention that. John spun on the ground, knocking the legs from under the soldier. He went down like a ton of bricks and I kicked him in the head, knocking him out, nearly breaking his neck.

  Interfering bastard. I pulled John up. We didn’t know which way to go. East into the streets, west into the park. A cop car appeared ten blocks east, heading for the building. It made up our minds. We went across the park. A crowd of about twenty people around the body.

  We walked as calmly as we could muster. Got about fifty feet.

  “What about those two?” someone called out.

  John started to run. I ran after him.

  Six years as a copper in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (which has one of the highest death rates in the Western world) and I never once fired a gun in anger and never once had a gun fired at me. My greatest danger there was from my own side, five pay grades above me. No guns. Nothing so blunt. But now…

  We were halfway across the park when we heard the peelers shouting:

  “Stop. Police. Stop or we’ll shoot.”

  The sky swimming-pool blue. The grass a dirty copper color. The temperature 92. My lungs aching. My eyes filled with streaks of white light. The front range all across the horizon to the west. Green foothills, blue mountains behind, and then more behind that. A big one in the middle with a horn peak and a bowl of curved magenta. Beautiful. One even had a trace of snow on it from Victoria Patawasti’s storm.

  We cut another fifty yards through pine trees and some kind of open-air theater. It was late afternoon and hot. Few people. A man was jogging in front of us but he had his earphones on, didn’t hear the peelers yelling.

  We made it to the edge of the park.

  I looked back.

  Three coppers in tan uniforms. Guns out. Two fat guys and an older skinny bastard another seventy yards back but bearing down like a greyhound.

  John ran up the grass slope out of the park and onto Sixth Street and I ran after him. Sirens everywhere. It registered in a second that they were all coming for us. I slipped in a pool of water from a broken sprinkler and skidded in front of a building and John, turning to see what was happening, ran into an old man with a beard who was carrying a Scottie dog. All three went sprawling. I pulled John up. The dog was biting him.

  “Christ,” John screamed, and tried to shake the dog off.

  The old man started yelling in Russian.

  I grabbed the dog by its hind legs and threw it twenty feet away. The old man ran after it, swearing.

  “Come on,” I said to John.

  We darted out into the street between massive condominium buildings and a few large private houses with high, ivy-clad walls and iron railings. No way over them.

  “Hey, you,” someone shouted behind us.

  John turned.

  “Run, you bastard,” I said. We sprinted along the sidewalk. A doorman in front of a luxury condominium complex put his arm out, whether to stop us or hail a cab or see if it was bloody raining, I don’t know.

  I shouldered him and he went down.

  “Fucksake, Alex, never get away from the peelers,” John said.

  “Run, you eejit, and save your fucking breath.”

  There were more sirens and I knew the cops running across the park would be radioing our position so they’d block our road ahead.

  They knew the town, we didn’t. They were acclimatized to altitude, we weren’t. They were on local time, we were jet-lagged. They were in shape, we were a couple of druggies.

  Things didn’t look good.

  “Down here,” John said, and we turned at an alley.

  No people. High walls between condominium complexes. Trash bins. Baking asphalt. Harsh transition from sunlight to shadow.

  Cops still on our trail.

  “Here,” I said. Another alley, smaller. Heading west again, view of the mountains. Lungs exploding, heart so loud in my ears I couldn’t hear anything else.

  A side street: no pedestrians, concrete walls, town houses.

  “I hear a helicopter,” John said.

  I didn’t look up.

  A big alley. North this time. Kids playing catch with huge baseball mitts. A white kid, a black kid, a Spanish kid, all in bright T-shirts, like a scene from bloody Sesame Street. We weaved through them and a few seconds later the cops came busting through as well.

  Another turn. The alley ahead wide and clear. Houses and garages backing onto smooth tar macadam.

  John a good ten feet ahead now. A main road seven or eight blocks ahead that looked like Colfax Avenue. Getting darker, too, and if we could just get to Colfax, where traffic was heavy and there were many people, we might just make it.

  Perhaps the peelers felt the same, for at that moment they decided to shoot. They didn’t bother with a warning. Just a loud crack and then four more cracks. Bullets smattered into a trash compactor. The police are allowed to fire their weapons only if the suspect is a potential danger to the public or a potential danger to the arresting officer. I think it was reasonably clear that we were in neither category. These guys just wanted to fucking shoot us. A bullet screamed off the concrete in front of me. The cops firing wildly and the bullets skidding by. Close, though. And they weren’t shooting on the run. They were stopping to shoot, which lengthened the distance between us. I took a look back. They were about two tennis courts behind us. Strangely, not the cops from the park. Two chunky guys in blue-and-green uniforms. Hard to tell with all the sunlight glaring off the concrete walls, but they looked like older men. Maybe out of shape, but they should have known better.

  And they were shooting to kill. Only on TV do coppers aim at legs or arms, real cops aim at the torso. I ran on. More bullets.

  “Zigzag,” I yelled to John.

  “What?”

  “Zig, zag,” I said, and started running zigs. If you’re firing at a moving target with a nine-millimeter semiautomatic, you’ll miss if that target changes direction fast and unpredictably.

  The peelers unloaded nearly a clip each at us. The bullets kicking up fragments of tar and concrete. Echoing horribly off the walls and the condo complexes.

  They were yelling at us now, too, but you couldn’t make it out. They started up again. Bloody pigs. The same peelers whose stellar work would be highlighted in the JonBenet Ramsey murder case and the Columbine massacre. They burned off the rest of their clips, bullets tearing down the alley and carrying on for a thousand yards. Then they must have been reloading, since the shooting stopped.

  “I’m surrendering,” John said.

  “They’ll give you the fucking chair, you asshole
.”

  “They’re going to kill us.”

  “Run, you big shite, they’re reloading, we’ll make it,” I said.

  John started running. And the heroin hurt and helped. Crippled my running but eased my mind. Stringing out the ketch from this morning so that I saw myself from way above. Me: calm, in slow motion, fleeing from peeler Pete through wide alleys, in the golden hour, with the sun behind the mountains and the sky crimson and the brilliant white cirrus clouds in lines between the buildings. Almost a moment of transcendence. The two of us running between piles of tires and wooden pallets, cardboard boxes, bins, machinery, car parts, garbage. And shadows across the alley and our reflections back at us off black-glass apartment windows.

  “Nearly there,” I said.

  One of the cops fired twice more. Bullets flying past us, hitting nothing. Well, hitting many things, but not us. How were they going to explain this in their log? Probably say we were carrying sawed-off shotguns or Armalites or something.

  Colfax closer and closer.

  And the ketch lets you exist outside of time, outside of place, as if you are a being seeing yourself from above. Can’t get caught up in that. Disembodied. Running.

  Hubris, saying they were hitting nothing.

  A bullet nicked a soda can, then clattered sideways in front of me, I fell, spun, smashed my shoulder into the ground.

  “I’m hit,” I said to John in a panic.

  This time it was John who had his shit together. He pulled me up with one arm.

  “You’re not hit, you’re ok,” he said.

  Quick look at my shoulder. A slice through the sweat-drenched jacket and T-shirt and a nasty cut on my shoulder. But I was ok. I had been lucky. He looked at me for another quarter of a second and then we both gazed back. Only one cop, staring at us, frustrated. We were too near Colfax, he couldn’t risk a shot now. He had that much sense, at least.

  “Let’s go,” John said.

  We cut down the first alley on our left and dodged back up, running north to Colfax Avenue.

  Seven at night. The main strip of Denver, busy, packed. This part of Colfax was like all those main streets in Westerns: wide avenues, big store-fronts, low-rise buildings. But past its peak, run-down, decaying, dirty. Prostitutes everywhere. Scores of them. Same as yesterday. Black and Latina girls in short skirts and tank tops, pimps, men cruising the drag, checking out the talent, looking for regulars. Pushers, users, hangers-on. No cops.

  “You ok?” John asked.

  I looked at my shoulder, it was bleeding, but not deep.

  “I’m ok,” I said.

  We caught our breaths. The sidewalks were thronged and it was easy for us to blend into the masses of people.

  “Just walk, don’t run, don’t run, I think we’re safe,” I gasped.

  My shoulder was stiffening up but already the bleeding was less. No one was looking at us. No one paid us any attention at all.

  After about five blocks we juked behind a car and took a check back. Peeler Pete scoping for us, inventive—standing on top of a parked car, looking everywhere, speaking into a radio. We were lost in the sidewalk crowd and backlit against the sunset.

  “No chance, peeler,” John said with satisfaction.

  “Yeah.”

  “What now?” John asked.

  “Hotel, get our stuff, leave town,” I said.

  “Forget Victoria?”

  I looked at him to see if he was fucking insane.

  “Of course, forget Victoria,” I barked.

  We walked all the way to the state capitol and downtown. We got back to our hotel. Desk clerk watching a game show. Ignoring us.

  We entered the room. It hadn’t been cleaned. Our stuff was all still there. The beds hadn’t been slept in. We packed quickly, saying nothing. At one point John went to the bathroom and threw up.

  “Ok, now, John, listen to me and listen good, you’re going to cut your hair short, just do the best you can, and I’m going to shave my beard off, ok?” I said gently.

  He nodded.

  I got my razor and clippers and trimmed the beard and then shaved the bastard. I had a quick shower and looked for something to use as a bandage on my shoulder. There wasn’t anything, so instead I stuck on four or five Band-Aids. When I came out, John had done a reasonable job on his hair. It didn’t look crazy, at least.

  “John, you got any aspirin or anything?”

  “No. How’s your shoulder?”

  “Ok.”

  “You took a spill.”

  “I know.”

  “I killed a man, Jesus Christ, Alex, I fucking killed somebody. Oh my God, oh my God, I can’t believe it.”

  John put his head in his hands. He sat on the edge of the bed and started to cry. I let him get on with it for a minute or two. Good thing. Let him cry it out.

  “Listen, John, he went for you, it was an accident. It was like a car accident. It wasn’t anybody’s fault. He wasn’t Mother Teresa, either. Remember, he was a bad man, he was an accessory after the fact to a murder, withholding evidence,” I said softly.

  It wasn’t true, Klimmer was just scared and we really might have talked him into going to the peelers. John had fucked up big time.

  “Yeah, I suppose,” John said.

  “Ok, we have to get out of town.”

  “How?”

  “Greyhound bus, anywhere, now.”

  We went downstairs and left the desk clerk our keys.

  “Checking out?” he asked.

  “Aye.”

  “Ok.”

  He didn’t seem a bit interested, so I didn’t spin him any kind of story. We walked out onto Broadway. Dark now. We asked the way to the bus station and someone told us it was downtown, but there was a free shuttle bus that took you there.

  The outdoor Sixteenth Street Mall was stuffed with people. The Colorado Rockies were playing a baseball game. People kept bumping into our luggage on the free mall bus, giving us dirty looks. Final stop. Two coppers standing outside the bus station. Could have been there because of the baseball game, they could have always been stationed there. But we couldn’t take the chance that they had our descriptions. It had been well over an hour since Klimmer’s fall, plenty of time to get the word out.

  “Fuck,” John muttered. “What now?”

  We were concealed by the crowds going to the game but we couldn’t wait out here forever.

  “Walk with the crowd,” I said, “follow them away from the cops.”

  A lucky break. We walked nearly all the way to Coors Field and when we were close we saw a train waiting in Union Station.

  “The train, John, we’ll get the train,” I said.

  “Aye.”

  We tried to cross the street with our backpacks, but traffic was again heavy because of the baseball game.

  A loud air horn, a pause, and the massive train began to move.

  “Holy shit, it’s leaving,” I said. When I’d come to America before, I’d traveled on Amtrak. I knew that the east-west trains were very infrequent. This might be the only train leaving Denver’s Union Station that day.

  “John, we gotta get this train,” I said.

  John nodded.

  We ran across the street, dodging the traffic. Brakes squealing, people honking, swearing. We sprinted up the wheelchair ramp and onto the platform. The train was moving very slowly, but it’s hard to get onto any kind of moving thing with a backpack on your back and your shoulder hurting and exhaustion and jet lag eating at your coordination.

  A really little guy in front of us hopped on one carriage down. John found an open door and jumped in. He put out his hand and pulled me on too.

  * * *

  Darkness. The train shunting out of Denver in big curves. It took me a while to realize we were heading west. I went to the bathroom and looked at my shoulder. There was a nasty scrape where the bone met the skin, the whole area an ugly scab of blood. The Band-Aids had fallen off. It didn’t hurt much, but there was always the possibility of i
nfection. I stripped, scooped water from the sink, and bathed it. I cleaned the wound with soap and water and bandaged it with paper towels. Changed my T-shirt, put my jacket back on. We found a couple of seats in the bar car and ordered beers and a sandwich. We asked the barman what train it was and he was used to dealing with stupid questions and said it was the California Zephyr going to San Francisco—which suited us just fine. California was ok. We could fly from San Francisco to London or Frankfurt or anywhere, really, just as long as it was bloody miles from here.

  The train climbed up into the mountains and the track went through tunnels and curved back on itself. On those big bends you could see the whole of Denver in lights all the way up to Boulder and down to Castle Rock. We had just finished our beer when the ticket lady came up to us. An Afro stood eight inches from her short frame and thick neck. Long lacquered nails—painted with the stars and stripes—were pointing at us.

  “Where you sitting?” she asked.

  “Here,” John said, not trying to be funny.

  She took it the wrong way.

  “Where are you sitting on the train?” she asked a little more sharply.

  “We just got on, we’re not sitting anywhere.”

  “Let me see your tickets,” she said, glaring at John.

  “We don’t have any tickets,” John said.

  “The train was just pulling out and they told us we could buy tickets on board, we’re tourists,” I said quickly and gave her a big smile.

  “Who told you that?” she asked me.

  “Uh, the man at the station,” I said.

  “What man?”

  “I don’t know, just the man, he was in a uniform, I don’t know,” I said placatingly.

  “Well, I don’t know why he told you that because no one is allowed on the train without a ticket, this isn’t a commuter train, this is a transcontinental Amtrak, you’re going to have to get off at the next stop and buy a ticket at the station and then get back on again.”

  “Ok,” I said.

  “Ok,” John said.

  “The next stop is Fraser, Colorado, get off there and buy your ticket,” the woman said curtly.

  “Ok,” we both said again, smiling.

  She wandered off down the car.