Witchblade: Talons

by John Dechancie

  “What do you think it is?”

  “That you’re mobbed up in some way.”

  “Of all the . . . He actually said this?”

  “Not in so many words, but that’s what the whole con­versation was noodling towards.”

  “He’s crazy.”

  “He’s Internal Affairs. They’re all paranoid up there.”

  “Maybe I’ll drop by your place today,” Sara said.

  “Don’t. You’ll get this crud I got.”

  “You California boys shouldn’t ever come east. You belong on Zuma Beach getting a tan and hanging ten.”

  “Or hanging with surfer girls. I do miss the beach. Noth­ing like roasting marshmallows on a driftwood fire at night.”

  “Catch you later. I have to roast one of our East Side snitches. On a spit, if possible.”

  Sara flipped the phone shut and rehooked it.

  Now, where the hell did Whip get to? Ah, a gouged and battered steel fire door hanging open, service entrance to a large abandoned building. She took out a small, slim but quite powerful lithium ion flashlight from her back pocket.

  Beyond the doorway lay jumbled shapes in the dark­ness: hulks of dead machinery, piles of boxes, assorted junked equipment all over a debris-littered floor. Everything of worth had been stripped away. Pipes had been cut, plumbing fixtures removed, even some windows had been surgically excised, carried away and sold long ago. After some cleanup, the structure would be ready for gutting and renovation. On her salary, Sara wouldn’t be able to afford the condos and apartments that would result.

  Sara tiptoed through a vast ruined silence, listening. Coming to a stairwell, she looked up, playing the tight, focused beam of the light through creepy shadows. She didn’t like the prospect of going up those stairs. Whip wasn’t ordinarily dangerous, but he scared easily. And frightened little men are to be treated circumspectly, she had discovered in her career as a detective for the Police Department of the City of New York.

  She turned off her cell phone and listened. The building creaked and moaned. Sara cocked her head to one side. Maybe he didn’t duck in here. But out in the alley his squeaking had stopped at about where the door was.

  She began to tour the ground floor of the building, following a corridor lined with more debris, wreck, and ruin. Every door she came across was nailed shut from the inside.

  She called out, “Whip! Come on, dude. I just want to ask you something.”

  Silence.

  “Just a talk. That’s all I want.”

  Nothing.

  “I’m not taking you in.”

  Lie. She had to haul him in now.

  She went on, “There’s just a few things I need to know.”

  More creaking upstairs.

  “Shit,” she said to herself.

  She turned to walk away. Maybe he got out some way. Well, she wasn’t going to risk stumbling around in this wreckage.

  “I got nothing for you!”

  She stopped and whirled, then walked cautiously through an archway into an expansive open area sur­rounded by a tier of railed balconies. What kind of place was this? There were things here, hulking in the darkness. Strange-looking things. “Whip, that you?”

  “Yeah. I don’t have anything for you today, Pez.” The voice echoed hollowly, coming from one of the galleries above the huge open space. She played the beam upward but couldn’t see its source.

  “I haven’t asked you anything yet,” she said.

  “You wanna know about Smokey.”

  “Okay.”

  “I heard he was killed. He tended to piss people off. Someone got mad at him and hit him.”

  “Did you do it?”

  “No. He was my friend.”

  “You two mixed it up a couple of times.”

  “Sure, we had a tiff now and then. But I swear, Pez. I didn’t hit him over the head.”

  “How do you know how he was killed?”

  “I heard.”

  “You hear a lot.”

  “That’s what you always say. That’s why you hassle me all the time.”

  “How many times have I hassled you this year?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “Come on,” Sara wanted to know. “How often did I ask you for information on a case I was working on? This past year.”

  “Who keeps track?”

  “Once, Whip. Once this year. I checked. I just looked at your file. Now, is that all the time?”

  “How do I know how often you bother the shit out of me? It seems like all the time.”

  “Accuracy in media. Come on down, Whip.”

  What the hell was this stuff down on the floor? Jum­bles of metal in odd configurations: grates and lattices, geometrical arrangements, juxtapositions and structures. It looked like . . .

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Why did you run?”

  “I didn’t run,” Whip said.

  “You walk faster than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

  “I saw you parking the car and I just had somewhere to go, so I went.”

  Sara had never noticed the Boston accent before. Pahking the cahh . . . It wasn’t thick, just a trace, but it was there. Amazing what you don’t pick up. “You were a little too quick. I gotta ask you about Smokey.”

  “So ask.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Christ, I don’t know.”

  “When was it?”

  “Don’t know. Couple of days ago.”

  “Where?”

  “How do I know where? On the street.”

  “When?”

  “Two days ago.”

  “How about last night?”

  “Didn’t see him.”

  “Where didn’t you see him?”

  “On the street.”

  This was getting nowhere. Besides, she was distracted.

  Sculpture. Suddenly she knew what she was looking at. She walked past an odd assortment of tall, conical, wickedly pointed shapes. Metal sculpture. Some artist was squatting here, using the place for a studio. The stuff looked pretty good. She was no judge but thought she saw talent sitting in the blackness.

  Back to business.

  “Whip, get your ass down here or I’m coming up to get you.”

  “Stay away from me.”

  Whip started moving as Sara walked back through the archway and went to the stairwell, which she mounted, taking each littered step carefully and letting the flash beam lance the darkness ahead. It looked clear to the second level. She came forth onto a wide balcony strewn with mountings for missing machinery. Appar­ently the artist’s squatting rights didn’t extend beyond the ground floor. This had been some kind of shop, probably a metal shop. Maybe the artist had worked here at some point, then came back to make art. She gave a glance downward, where the sculptures brooded in shadow. This guy—or gal, for that matter—could have quite a show.

  “Where are you?” Sara demanded.

  He stood by the rail running along the balcony. “Keep away, I’m warning you.”

  “Stay cool, dude. Nothing’s going to happen.” Except now I gotta arrest you, Sara thought.

  Whip was telepathic, apparently. “You’re not going to bust me,” Whip said. “You can’t. You don’t have a warrant.”

  “Don’t need one if you flee an interview. That means I get to take you in for questioning. You’d played it cool . . .”

  “I’m telling you, I didn’t run.”

  “Look, if you give up the truth about what happened, it could be Man One instead of murder. It could be something even less.”

  “I didn’t kill him!”

  Edge of desperation now, a cornered quavering to the voice that kept retreating as Whip bumped into things and sent debris skittering across the floor.

  “Okay, so let’s talk about it,” Sara said in her best touchy-feely voice. “Smokey stole from you again, right? He took your money when you were sleeping. He needed a fix, he ripped you off. He’d done it before
and you got mad, madder than ever before. So you picked up . . . what was it? What did you hit him with, Whip?”

  “I didn’t. Stay away from me, you.”

  “You stay right where you are.”

  He didn’t, then suddenly began climbing, and Sara’s sweep of light picked up a rickety ladder running between levels. Sara heard him clamber to the next bal­cony. She reentered her stairwell and went up another flight.

  “Tell me what happened, Whip.”

  “Nothing happened. I haven’t seen him in weeks.”

  “I thought you said you saw him a few days ago.”

  “Keep away.”

  Sara stopped. “Whip, I’ve never seen you like this. Lis­ten, it’s not so bad. You have a family, don’t you? Your parents are well-off. They can help you. They can get you a good lawyer.”

  “Stay away from me!”

  Sara stopped, letting the panicked echoes die. He was freaking out. Withdrawal symptoms? Probably. Smokey had stolen all his ready cash, and that was a tough posi­tion for an addict like Whip to be in.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “You.”

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  “You kill guys all the time.”

  “What?”

  “I know about you. You don’t like someone, you think they’re dirty, they’ve done something, you take ’em out. Guys get dead around you a lot, lady.”

  “It’s not true.” She winced saying it.

  “You’re some kind of witch. That’s what I hear.”

  “Who says this crap?”

  “Lots of people. You’re a killer cop. You’re a . . . I don’t know what. You’re a monster.”

  “Cut it out. Kool Whip, I gotta take you in. We have to talk, and you have to come clean. It’ll be better all around. You can call your family.”

  Whip laughed maniacally. “You have no idea what you’re saying.”

  “You don’t talk to them?”

  “They don’t talk to me. They talk only to Lowells and Cabots, and maybe God once in a while, when they have time for him.”

  “You don’t get along?”

  “I haven’t seen them in ten years. Not since I dropped out of Columbia.”

  “Well, maybe it’s time for a reconciliation. But, look, this has nothing to do with Smokey’s death. Just tell me where you were last night. That’s all I want to know.”

  “Get away from me, Pezzini!” He was screeching now.

  “Whip, calm down.”

  There was no more room for retreat. He suddenly turned and leapt upward. Balancing on the thin railing, he put one foot on a rung of the ladder.

  The ladder suddenly collapsed under his weight, and he fell.

  “Whip!”

  There was no sound but metal clattering to the floor. But with it came a strange, muted sound, like a knife go­ing into an overripe melon.

  Sara came to the edge of the balcony and sent the flash beam down, trying to make sense of what she saw.

  He had fallen on one of the sculptures. The beam illu­minated his face, which bore a look of such shock and dismay that it made Sara’s stomach lurch.

  She rushed down the stairwell, came out onto the floor, and advanced toward Whip’s still moving body.

  He had landed on a metal spike. The man was impaled, skewered like so much meat, a huge spear of metal run­ning up through his bowels.

  She couldn’t look. There was nothing to do for him. No 911 call would save him, though she got out her phone and punched in the numbers anyway as he made muted, gurgling noises deep in his throat and twitched horribly.

  Mercifully, he didn’t do either for long.

  After she got off the phone she saw what the artist had spray-painted on one of the other sculptures:

  USELESS JUNK

  It wasn’t a gang tag, not a graffiti vandal’s comment. It was artfully done, a despairing wail of self doubt from the sculptor himself. He had given up, abandoned his squatter studio and its contents. His life’s work, perhaps.

  HOPELESS

  The Witchblade made a dull drumbeat against her wrist.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  She stood in the alley, watching the paramedics take the body out on a gurney. It had taken them a long time, an agonizingly long, horrid time, to get him off the sculpture. He’d died before they arrived, she guessed, but only the autopsy would make that clear.

  The Witchblade was quiet now. She wondered what it had been trying to tell her, if anything. It had seemed mildly interested in the death of Charles Morton Bromley, the Second. As if it might be of some significance, but only in the abstract.

  Footsteps up the alley.

  “Pezzini!”

  She turned. It was her boss, Captain Joe Siry.

  Siry walked straight up to her and brought his haggard face up close to hers, close enough so that she smelled his sour breath. She wasn’t particularly keen on monitoring his oral health.

  “You have an explanation?” he demanded.

  “Simple.”

  He backed up a little. “Well, now, if it’s so simple, why don’t you tell me.”

  “Okay,” she said with a shrug. “Nothing special.”

  “Not what I heard. I heard you got a guy run through like a shish-kabob in there.”

  “That’s not a particularly tasteful way of putting it, but, yeah. There was a freak accident as the result of the suspect’s resisting arrest.”

  “This was a suspect?”

  “Not exactly. He was an informant.”

  “And you were arresting him?”

  “I tried to question him on a routine investigation. He ran. He had an accident. Fell and got impaled on some metal sculpture.”

  Siry turned at looked at the building. “Metal sculpture. This an art gallery?”

  “In a way. Place is full of somebody’s sculpture. Abandoned, looks like.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Some indications. You’ll get the report.”

  “So this guy wasn’t even a perp. He wasn’t a suspect at all.”

  “Not until he ran, Joe. Then it was pretty obvious . . .”

  “What was obvious?”

  “That he was good for the killing.”

  “Nothing’s ever obvious. You have any proof?”

  “Not a lot.”

  Siry began pacing. “Fingerprints?”

  “No murder weapon yet.”

  “Christ.”

  “What’s up?” Sara asked.

  “We have an evaluation coming up. I’m trying to think of how to play this.”

  “What’s there to play?”

  “To quote you, not a lot.”

  “It was an accident, Joe.”

  He poked a finger at her. “That’s ‘Captain Siry’ to you, Detective.”

  “Okay. A freak accident. That’s all.”

  “Too many,” Siry grumbled, still pacing.

  “Too many what?”

  “Too many freaky things happen to you.”

  “So I’ve been told.”

  He stopped and he fixed her in an admonitory stare. “Don’t get smart with me.”

  “Sorry.”

  That vein was popping out on his forehead again. She always had trouble stifling a laugh. She looked away.

  Siry was about to add something, but footsteps brought him around to look.

  “Oh, Christ.”

  It was Seltzer, from Internal Affairs, trooping up the alley.

  “Don’t answer any questions now, Pezzini,” Siry told her. “Write that report, and let me see it first before you send it to him.”

  “I always do, Cap.”

  “Good evening,” Seltzer said as he approached.

  “Any reason for this honor?” Siry wanted to know.

  Seltzer’s face could be described as pleasantly mean-spirited. It was pinched and narrow and smilingly thin-lipped.

  “Only the honor of watching our department’s men . . . uh, personnel .
. . in action.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Heard there was a death of a suspect. Have to investigate.”

  “Really? Even if it was an accident? Even if our man . . . if she never laid a hand on him?”

  “I can’t judge before I know the facts. This is just routine on my part. I’d like to see where it happened.”

  “In there,” Sara said, pointing.

  “Sounds very unusual,” Seltzer said, “the circumstances.” He licked his lips. “Freakish.”

  “It was,” Sara said.

  “An impaling. Is that true?”

  “You make it sound like an execution.”

  “Was it?” Seltzer said with a leer.

  “It was an accident.”

  “Keep quiet,” Siry told her. “Let me handle this.” He rotated to Seltzer. “Does she have to answer questions right this very minute? If you’re going to make a full investigation, she has certain rights, okay?”

  “Captain, I’m perfectly aware of departmental procedure.”

  “Well, maybe you’re not aware of this. I’d like to think that at least the dust can settle before you begin to make accusations against one of my best—”

  “I haven’t made any accusations.”

  “Well, what the hell was it I just heard?”

  Sara walked away as her boss continued sparring. Two uniformed patrolmen strolled by.

  “Right up the old kazoo,” one of them said with a shudder.

  “Man, what a way to go,” the other said.

  She shivered. The fool, running like that. If he’d simply played it cool, she never would have thought him a suspect.

  Routine investigation. Routine murder. Victim less than nobody. What did it matter?

  But, God, what a way to die. And for nothing.

  What the hell was the Witchblade’s interest?

  The mind of Kenneth Irons was a vast and labyrinthine place. Thoughts raced through it in geometric patterns, crossing and recrossing. Behind him, the city was a panorama of power, light-studded shafts thrusting into a black sky.

  He swiveled the chair slightly. His hands formed a pyramid on his chest, fingertips almost touching his chin. His eyes swept over the things on his desk. He had kept the same accoutrements over the years. That crystal paperweight, this clock. Knick-knacks here and there. Marble-based pen set. Gold cigarette lighter. Same objects. Same desk. Many, many years. They reassured him.