“Warren! It’s Burkhardt! Over here! Can you stay with Monroe here?”
“Yeah, detective, I got this,” came the reply
Nick stood up. He was so adrenalized and angry that he pushed past Warren, almost knocking him over as he headed to the front door of the storefront.
Nick pocketed the flashlight, drew his side arm, and banged on the front door with the muzzle.
“Police! Open the door!”
Silence.
He tried the doorknob. It was locked.
Nick stepped to the left, in case someone fired through the door, and waited.
Come on, you bastards, open up.
Still no response. Then he thought he heard a scrabbling sound.
“Nick!” Hank called. “Wait up!”
Nick saw that Hank was helping one of the uniformed officers transfer the prisoner to the patrol car.
They’re getting away, Nick thought. No time to run around the back. I’m not waiting.
Nick stepped back, raised the gun in readiness, then kicked the door, hard, close to the lock. It smashed open, swinging crookedly inward. He scanned the room beyond it.
No one there.
It was a kind of improvised waiting room, with plastic chairs around the walls, and one lamp, a red-painted door leading beyond.
He stepped inside, swinging his gun to make certain the room was clear.
Nick continued onward to the next door, found it unlocked. He flung it open, revealing a long hallway stretching toward the back of the low building. To the left were four doors, all of them open. He rushed down the hall, gun at the ready, swung it into the nearest doorway, and saw a room with two sets of bunk beds. Empty. There was a girl’s shoe lying on the floor, and a rumpled pair of silk underwear. Nothing else.
He hurried on to the next room, but found nothing but cots, a smell of perfume, and some torn lingerie.
It was the same in the next two rooms. When he emerged from the last room, he saw an open closet across from the doorway—there was a raw earthy smell emanating from it.
He pushed through the door at the end of the hallway. It opened onto a small kitchen. There were liquor bottles on a kitchen table, partly drained. A few Styrofoam cups were scattered on the floor and dishes were piled in the sink.
The back door of the kitchen led to a stairway, up into the taller building behind the storefront. But he doubted they’d gone up there. They’d be trying to get to the street.
Then he saw the blood on the floor: a trail of scarlet splashes leading down a narrow hallway past the stairs.
Heart banging in his chest, mouth dry, Nick strode past the stairway, following the trail of blood toward a door at the back of the mold-reeking hallway. The back door was closed, and locked. He kicked it open and stepped onto a ramshackle back porch.
Someone lay on the ground, outside.
It was the Geier—the vulture Wesen—squirming in pain. Hank’s gunshot had connected.
Beyond the injured creature was a weedy back lot, littered with empty bottles, and then the next street. There were no police cars there yet; no one at all except the Geier.
Nick approached the Geier, who had transformed back into a fairly ordinary-looking man, gaunt and bald. He clutched his wounded belly, eyes squeezed shut. The Geier wore a brown-leather jacket and jeans, no shoes. The nickel-plated automatic lay next to him. There was blood on the Geier’s feet—Nick figured this was the one who’d wounded Monroe.
“Where are they?” Nick demanded, standing over the Wesen.
The Geier opened his eyes.
“You shot me,” he said.
“My partner shot you, but I’ll shoot you myself unless you tell me where the girls are. They were in there just a few minutes ago, right?”
The Geier’s lips moved soundlessly. Then he managed, “Don’t know... what you’re...”
Nick holstered his gun and went down on one knee. He was literally seeing red—the air seemed suffused with a scarlet tint. This creature had attacked his friend, and Nick wanted him to suffer. He was surprised at the depth of his anger.
Nick grabbed the Wesen by the throat.
“Come on, tell me, Geier. You’re dying—maybe if you do the right thing for once you won’t go to Hell! Where are they? Where did they take them?”
“You’re the one who can... go to Hell... Grimm...”
Nick lifted the Wesen up by his neck and slammed him hard onto the ground.
“Where’d they take them? Come on, the guy you just cut to ribbons is not going down for nothing!”
Nick slammed the Wesen on the hard ground again.
“Where are they?”
“Don’t... don’t...”
The red and blue lights of a patrol car, pulling up behind the building, flashed in Nick’s peripheral vision. A car door opened, and police radio voices sounded. He ignored them.
“Where?” he demanded again.
The creature laughed wheezily at him, and he saw the flicker of its repellent Geier features.
Nick shook the Geier, hard.
“Where are they?”
The vulture Wesen gasped—and with that single gasp came a single word.
“Closet...”
Then blood streamed from the Geier’s nose, he shuddered, and his eyes rolled back in his head.
As blood ran over his hands, Nick let go and jumped to his feet. He was distantly aware that the red rage had taken over—he was driven by the fury of a Grimm state he’d never felt before.
“Detective!” called the cop who’d gotten out of the cruiser.
Nick turned away, stalked back toward the building, muttering to himself.
“Closet. I’m an idiot. Walked right by it...”
“Detective, hold up!”
Nick ignored the officer and ran into the building, back through the hallway, the kitchen, into the storefront hall, and back to the closet he’d walked by.
An old dull-yellow piece of carpet was thrown sloppily over the back of the empty closet. Nick crouched for a closer look—there was dirt around its edges. He pulled the carpet away, to reveal a square of darkness, a large hole leading downward at a slight angle, past the concrete foundation and into the earth. He got his flashlight out, clicked it on. The dig-marks looked like Drang-zorn work and the dirt was dry, as if long exposed. Probably the tunnel had been here for weeks. He could just make out the petit prints of bare feet, and boot prints beside them.
“Nick!” It was Hank, calling from somewhere behind him. “You find something back there?”
“Yeah,” he replied, “they bundled the girls out this way. They can’t be far ahead...”
“Nick, wait—”
Nick vaulted into the hole, dropping to the dirt floor. A little dirt pattered down around him. He heard Hank telling a uniformed cop to look for the tunnel’s egress. Nick drew his gun, peering down the tunnel. The flashlight beam showed only a low passage, and, farther down, something glimmering in the dirt.
More earth pattered down around him, and Nick stepped out of Hank’s way as his partner clambered down into the hole, cursing under his breath.
“New suit... brand new jacket...” Hank muttered.
He dropped beside Nick, dusted his hands off.
“Second damn time I followed you into a nasty old tunnel. But come to think of it there was that other time too—”
“Come on,” Nick interrupted him.
Bent under the low dirt ceiling, the detectives followed the tunnel. After a few steps, Nick stopped to pick up the thing he’d seen glittering: a girl’s charm bracelet.
They went about sixty yards, then came to an aluminum carpenter’s ladder leading out another hole. Nick looked up as Hank crowded behind him. No one was visible up there. Just a soft yellow light past another old, cracked foundation and a crudely cut square in a wooden floor. They both listened. Nothing except, very distantly, a siren.
Nick pocketed the flashlight, and climbed the ladder, slowly. He held the gun careful
ly in his right hand, using the heel of his hand to help in climbing.
His eyes came level with the floor, and he peered cautiously over the edge, half expecting to get his head blown off. But there was only an empty room, dust whirling in the light from a naked overhead bulb. Blue paint was flaking off the walls. He climbed up the rest of the way, as quietly as he could. It was an empty bedroom in a decrepit old house.
Hank climbed up after him, gun in his hand.
“Glad to be out of there. Might’ve collapsed any time,” he murmured.
Nick went to the hallway, stepped out gun first, swinging the Glock left and right. The hall was empty; the house was silent. There were dirty footprints on the floor, leading to the back of the building.
Out back, the two detectives found a gravel alley, a burned up ’57 Chevy with missing wheels, tire tracks. No Icy Touch thugs; no girls.
Hank squinted at the ground.
“Truck was here recently, looks like. Maybe a cargo truck.”
Nick nodded, feeling hollow.
“Yeah. Probably shoved the girls in there and... gone.”
Hank got on a hand radio, called for backup, and put out a call for a large truck in the immediate area.
“That’s all we can do right now,” he said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky. Or maybe they got the jump on us.”
Nick looked at him. “How’s Monroe?”
“On his way to North Portland ER.”
“Anybody have an opinion on... Will he make it?”
“Ambulance jockeys said he had a pulse. Blood pressure was dangerously low. They were giving him plasma when the ambulance left.”
Nick took a deep breath. “Blutbad are tough. But a Geier gouged him. Vulture Wesen. The guy you shot at... He went down behind the building...”
“I know. I saw the body. Perp is dead. Nick...” Hank cleared his throat and looked away from him. “They said you were, what, hammering the guy on the ground?”
“He was dying. You put a bullet in him. But... yeah. Could be I finished him.”
Hank shook his head. “Doesn’t sound like you.”
“I... had to find out where they took the girls. He told me about the tunnel.”
“Okay, but... Nick, in case you didn’t get the memo, the police department doesn’t actually torture anyone for information. Take it easy, okay?”
Nick nodded. “I... wasn’t thinking of it like that. Like torture.” How had he been thinking of it? He didn’t know, not right now. His head was aching, his mind full of what had happened.
“That’s how it looked to the patrolman. He’s already reported it. What happened to you back there?”
“I don’t know. I guess... I’m more attached to Monroe than I thought I was. And maybe... maybe a Grimm is more instinctual than I realized. More driven by Grimm genes than I knew. It was like...”
He broke off as a patrol car bumped down the narrow alley, and pulled up behind the old building. Sergeant Wu got out, with a female cop, an Asian American Nick didn’t know. She looked at Nick with cold disapproval.
“Nick!” Wu looked pretty uncomfortable. “What’d you find here?”
“Just tracks. Good sized truck. Tunnel in the building back there. They got away. Anybody stop a truck in the area?”
“Not last I heard.”
Wu looked at Nick for a long moment, and finally took a deep breath and said, “Nick... I got a call from Lieutenant Jacobs. Internal Affairs. He wants you in his office first thing tomorrow morning. And—he says I’ve got to take your gun and badge. If you refuse, I’m supposed to put you under arrest.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Nick knew Lieutenant Jacobs only superficially. He had a feeling he was going to get to know him a lot better now.
The Portland Police Department’s Internal Affairs Officer had Nick’s personnel files open on his computer. He was an older, heavyset, uniformed cop, an African-American with short white hair, a white mustache. He peered at the screen through small reading glasses. He was known to be a guy who did his job, and did it solidly, without being overzealous. He had a reputation for giving an officer on the street the benefit of the doubt.
But Nick had heard that once he pursued a bad cop, he kept going until the guy was either neutralized at a desk or fired.
Jacobs’ forehead was crimped with worry, his lips compressed—making Nick suspect he was in trouble.
“You’ve got a lot of shootings, some kills, some unresolved issues here, Nick,” Jacobs said, his voice a deep rumble.
“Shootings went through the routine investigations, Lieutenant. They were all cleared.”
Jacobs continued to pore over Nick’s personnel records.
“Some of these cases... wow. You seem to get the crazy ones. Every time a crackpot sees a werewolf or something, off you go to check it out, huh?”
Nick chuckled. “Just kind of lined up that way for me. Roll of the dice. Mostly I pursue homicides, Lieutenant.”
“Yeah. You have a good record of successful convictions. Lot of commendations. But all these shootings. And now this—interrogating a perp by cracking his head on the ground...”
“I didn’t exactly do that. I got a little physical with him. But—there’s good reason to believe a group of young women, including some teenagers, have been forced into prostitution. And it seemed urgent.”
“So all of a sudden you’re Dirty Harry? No, that doesn’t fly, Detective. There were witnesses.” He pointed his finger at Nick and peered at him over the top of his glasses. “And you were out of control.”
Nick started to deny it. Then he thought about it a moment, and nodded.
“Yes I was, Lieutenant. But I don’t think I killed him. He had been gut shot by another officer already.”
“I’ve got the Coroner’s report. They can’t be sure but right here it says, there was a good chance the perp would have lived longer if you hadn’t gotten rough with him. Maybe he’d have lived long enough to give some really useful evidence, you ever think of that? All you got from him was a tunnel that led to nothing.”
Nick felt like he was sinking in quicksand. And it was his own fault for stepping into it.
“Yes, sir. It was bad judgment. Adrenaline and...”
What else could he tell him? I’m a Grimm, and I don’t have being a Grimm completely under control yet. There are Grimm instincts and they can really take a man over if he’s not careful. Oh yeah, let me explain what a Grimm is, Lieutenant Jacobs...
Yeah, right.
“Adrenaline’s the classic excuse, Detective, and I know all about that. When I was a patrolman I fired my gun one time without intending to and the wrong person was shot. I was lucky he wasn’t badly hurt. But this was something more than that, Detective Burkhardt.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I mean—you shocked some people who were watching you do this interrogation. And those officers don’t shock easy.”
Nick just nodded, and waited for the ax to fall.
“Detective Burkhardt, in light of this event and this long history of shootings—cleared shootings or not—” Jacobs glanced at his screen again “—in light of all that, I’m going to have to recommend you be put on suspension pending a full investigation. No gun, no badge. Detective Griffin and Sergeant Wu will take over your duties for now. Are we clear?”
Nick stood up.
“Yes, sir.” He cleared his throat, to get the hoarseness out, and kept his face as emotionless as he could. “We’re clear.”
* * *
It was an overcast morning. Nick had slept badly, and was still smarting from his meeting with Jacobs. He was craving coffee as he strode into the hospital, but he had someone to see first. Rosalee had left the hospital room number on his voicemail. Ground floor, toward the back.
“Monroe?”
Monroe opened his eyes a crack, peered up at Nick.
“Hey, dude.” His voice was weak, his face pale. His upper body was heavily bandaged and there was an IV tube in his left
arm. “Like my new digs?”
Nick nodded, swallowing the lump in his throat.
“Private hospital room. You rate high around here, man.”
“Yeah. I’m a big shot.” He pushed a button to raise his bed up a little. “You find Lily Perkins?”
Nick shook his head. “Just—confirmed they were there. The gang got them out through a tunnel.”
“Drang-zorn hole?”
“Looked like it. We’re on it, Monroe. We’ll find her.”
Or rather Hank would find them. Nick was short a badge and a gun, for the moment. He didn’t mention that fact. He didn’t feel like laying that weight on Monroe right now.
“You come to say ‘I told you so’?” Monroe asked.
Nick sat down in the chair by his bed.
“About what?”
“You guys warned me... to wait...”
“You did what you thought was right.”
“I was just talking to the guy out front... kind of feeling it out. I didn’t go busting in but...” He licked his lips.
“You want some water?”
“Yeah, thanks, Nurse Burkhardt.”
Nick smiled, and poured some water from a plastic pitcher into a glass, handed it carefully to Monroe.
Monroe sipped. “You need me to testify?”
“We might.”
“Rosalee doesn’t want me to.”
“I can understand that.”
Monroe rubbed his forehead. “The drugs they got me on here, sometimes I worry I might—” he glanced at the door and lowered his voice “—I might woge. Like, in some hallucination. Some guys’ve been known to woge in their sleep. I never did. That I know of. But...”
“I checked with the doctor. You might not need the morphine for much longer. Good news is, you’re... well, you’ve got tough stomach muscles or something. The Geier didn’t cut as deep as it might’ve. Missed your vitals. It probably doesn’t feel that way, but... you’ve got a good prognosis.”
“Definitely doesn’t feel that way. But I’m healing.” He glanced at the door again. A nurse walked by, in a hurry, ignoring them. “It’s a Blutbad thing.”
Nick nodded. “I went to the trailer last night, looked it up. Book says Blutbad heal pretty fast.”
“Not overnight. But faster than... I don’t know about Grimms.”
Grimm - The Icy Touch Page 15
