The Night Market

by Jonathan Moore

  “Is that her?” Mia whispered.

  He saw Hernandez coming along the sidewalk on the other side of Diamond Street.

  “Stay here.”

  He touched his finger to her lips, then went down the steps and across the street. He timed it so that he reached Hernandez as she was opening the car’s door. When he put the gun’s muzzle against the back of her head, she went stiff.

  “Hands on the roof.”

  “Carver?”

  “The roof, Hernandez. I’m not saying it again.”

  She did it, and he swept his left arm quickly along her chest and sides until he found her holster. He took her service weapon and put it in his waistband. He knelt quickly and patted the rest of her down. He’d seen her using a .25 auto on the range, and thought it might be on her ankle. But there was nothing. He took the phone from her hip pocket and the keys from her right hand.

  “I’m not being as thorough as I could be,” Carver said. “You weren’t the worst lieutenant I ever had—so I respect you enough to stop short. But you know what that means?”

  She didn’t answer, so he went on.

  “If you reach for anything, I pull the trigger. And after you’re down I’ll find out what it was.”

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “Jenner. To start with. That’s just the beginning.”

  “This isn’t the right way, Carver,” she said. “If you and Jenner want ​—”

  He spun her around and put the gun under her chin.

  “If Jenner and I want to do what?” he said. “What do you know about Jenner?”

  “He missed his psych evaluation,” she said. “And so did you.”

  She didn’t do herself any favors by sounding so calm. He thumbed back the hammer and pushed the muzzle against the soft flesh under her jaw.

  “Ross?”

  He hadn’t even heard Mia walk up.

  He stepped back from his lieutenant, a gun in each hand. When he gave Hernandez’s weapon to Mia, she eased the slide back and held it in place with her thumb and forefinger around the barrel. Then she used her index finger to check the chamber for a round. It was the cleanest press check he’d ever seen. She released the slide, thumped the base of the magazine to seat it, and aimed the gun at Hernandez’s chest.

  He hadn’t thought she knew how to shoot. There was so much about her he still didn’t know.

  “Hernandez drives,” he said. “You take the back. Get in—I’ll sit up front.”

  After Mia was in the car, Carver motioned Hernandez to get behind the wheel. Mia put her gun against Hernandez’s neck.

  “I’ve got this,” Mia said. “Check under the seat, and in the door. Make sure she doesn’t have anything.”

  He knelt on the pavement and felt under the driver’s seat, then brushed his fingers through the cup holders and the storage compartment in the door. He found a ballpoint pen and tossed it over his shoulder. He shut the door, then came around the front and got in next to Hernandez.

  “Your hands stay on the wheel.”

  He leaned across and put the key into the ignition, then watched the car’s systems come up. When the GPS screen blinked on, he used the butt of his pistol to smash it in. Then he took Hernandez’s phone from his pocket, swiped the screen, and came to the password prompt. He entered the four-digit number without looking up.

  “We always loved your memory,” Hernandez said. “The way you sweep things up, and save them. It’s what makes you special.”

  He didn’t answer her. Everything he saw stayed with him. It had always been like that. He hadn’t realized she’d known that about him. Nine months ago he’d been next to her in a court elevator. She’d taken out her phone to check her email, punching her password with her thumb. He’d learned her address more or less the same way.

  “Who should we start with, Hernandez?” Carver asked. “I bet Sheldon Lassen doesn’t take your calls. I bet, to him, you’re just a speck. Let’s think of someone closer to your level.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Carver went to the phone’s contact list and began scrolling through it.

  “Or we could start with your friend, the guy who killed Hadley Hardgrave—is he in here?”

  Hernandez didn’t move. Her hands were locked tight on the steering wheel, and she was staring at the glare of raindrops on the windshield. Either she was waiting for something, or she was looking for a way out of the box.

  After ten seconds of silence, she tilted her eyes toward Carver. She didn’t turn her neck at all.

  “You should’ve come to your psych eval,” she said. “Maybe we could’ve done something for you. Maybe we still could. And we could set the record straight. I don’t know what she’s been telling you.”

  Carver waited to see what else Hernandez had to say about Mia, but she must have been done. She looked out the windshield and kept her mouth closed. He checked the back seat. Mia still had the gun to Hernandez’s neck.

  “You got it?” Carver asked. “I want to show her.”

  Mia switched the gun to her left hand and reached into her jacket. She took Johnny Wong’s envelope and passed it to him. He slid the photograph out, then switched on the dome light. He looked at the picture for a moment before setting it on Hernandez’s lap.

  “Pick it up,” he said. “Take a good look.”

  She took the photograph and held it in front of the steering wheel. There was no surprise on her face. As he watched her look at it, her phone began to vibrate in his hand. She didn’t seem very surprised about that, either. The caller’s number was blocked. Hernandez tossed the photograph onto the dashboard and put her hands back on the steering wheel.

  “Answer it,” she said. “It’s probably for you.”

  “What?”

  “They called to warn me,” she said. “After they picked up Henry Newcomb, they knew you’d be coming here.”

  The phone was pulsing in his hand, its screen flashing. Everything went silent, and his mind dropped into a blurring race. Outside, the raindrops hung motionless in the car’s headlights. She’d used Henry’s name. If she knew his name, then it couldn’t be a lie. They had him.

  “If you want Jenner to live,” Hernandez whispered, “then answer the goddamned phone.”

  Now there was no choice at all. But as soon as he answered the call, everything belonged to them. It would be their initiative, and their terms. It made him sick to imagine it, but he knew what he had to do. He looked through the windshield at the night. He answered the phone and brought it to his ear.

  “This is Carver.”

  As soon as the words left his mouth, he put the phone on mute, stuck his gun in Hernandez’s kidney, and turned to face the back seat.

  “You have to get out,” he said to Mia. “You have to go, right now.”

  “Ross,” Mia whispered. “Don’t ​—”

  “Out,” he shouted. “Run. I’m not leaving Jenner and I’m not taking you to die. You have to live.”

  She didn’t move, and again, there was only one way forward. It was clear to him. He took the gun from Hernandez’s side and put it in Mia’s face. He’d carried a gun just like it every day since he was twenty-two years old, but this was the heaviest weight he’d ever lifted. His hand shook from the strain of it.

  Beside him, Hernandez didn’t move. The muzzle of Mia’s gun was still pressed against her neck.

  From the phone, a machine-altered voice was squealing into his ear. He paid it no mind.

  “Get out,” he said. “You’re the one good thing. So go.”

  “How do I find you?”

  “You don’t. Not if you want to live.”

  She tried to say something, but couldn’t. When she stepped from the car, her throat was struggling with whatever was caught there. She still had Hernandez’s gun. At least there was that. He wasn’t taking her to die, and he wasn’t leaving her with nothing.

  She slammed the door, and he took the phone off mute. He shoved the gu
n against Hernandez’s temple, hard enough to make her bleed. She cried out, but he didn’t care. From the street, Mia caught his eyes. She touched her fingers to her lips. Then she walked back into the ruins on the far side of Diamond Street. He watched until she was gone. It was so dark, it didn’t take long at all.

  He put the phone against his ear.

  “I didn’t catch that,” he said. He didn’t sound calm. “Say again?”

  “I . . . said . . . do you want to hear Jenner? Do you . . . want . . . to hear him . . . talk?”

  It sounded like the metal-on-metal screech of a train racing into one of the city’s outer-limit stations. A place where the lights were gone, where children crept through the shadows.

  “Just tell me what you want,” Carver said.

  “Jenner . . . wants to tell you.”

  “You sonofabitch.”

  “ . . . yes . . .”

  He heard the phone change hands, and then he heard three loud slaps. He pictured a palm hitting Jenner’s face. Rousing him, maybe.

  “Ross.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Go with Hernandez,” Jenner said. His voice was quiet, his growl slowed either by pain or by drugs.

  “And then what?”

  “Time to take our psych eval.”

  The connection went silent. Someone had taken the phone from Jenner, had ended the call. It had lasted twelve seconds. But the entire landscape had shifted, a fault line splitting across it.

  “I wouldn’t have thought you’d get into something like this,” Carver said. He put her phone away. “I thought you were a good cop.”

  Hernandez leaned away from the gun and looked at him.

  “When they come for you, you don’t have a choice,” she said. “You know that.”

  “Drive, then,” Carver said. “Wherever you’re supposed to take me.”

  She put the transmission into gear and began turning the wheel to the left so that she could pull away from the curb. As she took her foot from the brake and the car began to roll into the street, Carver heard three gunshots from across the way. At the first shot, he jerked to look out the back window. He saw the second and third muzzle flashes.

  “Mia didn’t make it very far,” Hernandez said. “It was a good idea, though. Trying to keep her out of this.”

  There were two more shots, and then a scream. He couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. He yanked the emergency brake and the car lurched to a stop. Then he put the transmission into park, pulled the keys from the ignition, and took Hernandez’s thermal scope from the clip between the seats.

  “You don’t want to do that,” she said. “Jenner doesn’t have much time.”

  “Shut up,” he said. “And stay put.”

  He shot out her left kneecap.

  Inside the enclosed car, the gun blast was deafening. Hernandez’s mouth flew open, but he couldn’t hear her screaming. He stepped out of the car and slammed the door. Everything was muffled and cottony except for the ringing in his ears. He put the keys in his pocket, then ran up the hill. There was no movement, and he heard no more gunfire.

  When he was one door down from the house where he’d seen the muzzle flashes, he crouched at the rear bumper of a parked car and turned on Hernandez’s thermal scope. There was no one moving on the first or second floors. But at the street level, in what had probably been the garage, there was the red-orange heat signature of a person laid out on the cold concrete floor. He put the scope down and got out his flashlight, then went up the steps and through the shattered front door. He picked his way across the exposed beams in the living room and then aimed his light down.

  There were droplets of blood on the beam. A body in the rubble down in the basement. Mia had shot him up here, and then he’d fallen through. It was the man he’d punched on the subway, the man who’d killed Hadley Hardgrave. His right eye was black and swollen nearly shut, and his nose was covered in medical tape and gauze. His left eye was gone; Mia had shot it out. Another bullet had gone through his throat.

  A car door slammed, and Carver looked up. He almost lost his balance on the beams, which would have sent him tumbling into the basement to land on the dead man. He caught himself by stepping sideways to the next beam and dropping to a crouch.

  Now he could hear feet scuffling on the gravelly pavement outside. Not out front, on Diamond Street, but toward the back of the house. There was silence, and then a woman’s stifled cry.

  Carver picked his way across the living room, went through the remains of the kitchen, and then turned off his flashlight. He approached the dining room window, which looked out the back of the house. The glass panes were missing, and the rain blew in. He stood to the side of the window frame and looked out in time to see two men pushing Mia into the back of a car. Her hands were bound behind her. He saw the glitter of steel cuffs. One of the men climbed in after her, and the other got into the front passenger seat. The car began to roll into the alley before the second man had even closed his door.

  Carver raised his gun and aimed at the silhouette in the back window, but he couldn’t pull the trigger. It would have been too easy to miss, to hit Mia. Instead, he turned and ran back to the front of the house.

  31

  HERNANDEZ HAD GOTTEN out of the car and was sitting on the street with her back against the front tire. She’d taken off her jacket and twisted it up as if to wring water from it. She’d tied that like a tourniquet above her knee. He stood above her so she’d have to look up the barrel of his gun when he spoke to her.

  “Where are they taking Mia?”

  “The same place they have Jenner, and Henry,” she said. “Where I’m supposed to take you.”

  “Then let’s go,” Carver said.

  She looked at him, not sure what he was telling her to do.

  “Jesus, Lieutenant. It’s only the one leg. You can drive.”

  He watched her get up, pushing off the pavement and then using the car’s hood as a crutch. She hobbled around the open door and fell into the seat, then used her hands to pull her wounded leg inside. Carver shut the door and came around. He got in next to her and put the keys in the ignition. The car smelled of gunpowder and blood.

  “Go,” he said. “Take us there.”

  He put on his seatbelt and leaned against the door to put as much distance between them as possible. He had the gun on his lap, pointed at her kidney.

  “You were there that night, weren’t you?” Carver asked.

  “What night?”

  She was sucking air between words, and her face was covered with sweat. She put the car in drive and released the parking brake.

  “Thursday night, Friday morning. Filbert Street,” he said. “That was you on the radio, at the end.”

  She came to a stop sign and took a left turn. Now they were going east on Twenty-First Street, down a steep hill. The houses on both sides of them were completely destroyed, but in a few blocks they would be past the footprint of the future mall and back into a neighborhood where the houses were intact and the power was still on.

  “It was you,” Carver said. “It was your voice.”

  “What if it was?” she asked.

  He saw a bulge on her jawline when she clenched her teeth.

  “We all had a job to do that night,” she whispered.

  “What was yours?”

  “To see that you got processed. Handled the right way. When that call came in, I didn’t know what was inside—if I had, I wouldn’t have sent you. When I started getting details through the backchannels, I wanted to be there.”

  “A good lieutenant, looking after her men.”

  “I thought so.”

  “They decontaminated you, but they didn’t touch your memory,” Carver said. “No need to mess with yours, since you’re on their side. But that’s why we smelled it, the burnt metal, in your office.”

  Hernandez turned north onto Dolores, and they followed under the shadows of the date palms until they passed the old mission. Pr
iests with candle-lanterns stood their nightly vigil around the building, pacing to keep warm in the rain, holding up their lights to warn back the thieves.

  “What happened that night?” Carver asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “An Ønske scientist lived in that house, didn’t he?”

  “You honestly think they tell me anything, Carver?”

  “And he’d been stealing secrets. Maybe to sell, maybe to strike off on his own. He’d set up a lab in his basement ​—”

  “You’re crazy, Carver.”

  “—​and something went wrong. He didn’t know what he was doing,” Carver said. He waved the gun at her. “How much do you know about the machines? The things in our heads.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Hernandez said. “You’ve been talking to crazy people. Spies.”

  Her voice had been very quiet when they’d started driving, but it was coming back now. And she was driving a straight course, not weaving through the street. Either she was getting on top of her pain or she was good at faking it. He was ready to grab the wheel if she passed out.

  “You do what Lyndon Ivies tells you,” Carver said. “Isn’t that right?”

  She nodded.

  “So you stood there and let this happen.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Then what was it like?”

  “You’re not responsible for anyone but yourself, so you wouldn’t understand,” Hernandez said. “And it had already happened—happened a long time ago. All we did was step up. The world was already made. Plus, Lassen gave us a deal.”

  “You pay your dues, stay in line, and they won’t hurt you. That’s the deal?”

  “More or less.”