Rose City Renegade

by DL Barbur

  I had time to crank off another shot or two as he launched himself at me, then he slammed into me like a cruise missile, driving me backward. I managed to tuck my chin, but still saw stars as my head slammed into the metal rail. My pistol went flying and the fight was on.

  He was a beast. Wounded though he was, he was all over me. He’d managed to land straddling me, and inched his way up my chest, pinning me to the rails with his body weight. I tried the most basic of ground fighting maneuvers, bucking him off, but he was too high on my chest for that to work. He unleashed a rain of blows at my head. I covered my face with my forearms and tried to punch back blindly with my right.

  That was almost a costly mistake. He grabbed my right arm and started to apply a joint lock, but I was able to slip out of his ruined right hand. It was slick with blood, and I felt a jagged edge of bone scrape against my hand as I pulled.

  Todd was clearly more skilled on the ground. The only advantage I had was I hadn’t been shot full of holes. In my free time after getting fired from the Bureau, I’d trained with a former Louisiana dope cope who specialized in exactly this type of fight. He called it a Fucked Up Tangle, and what I’d learned from him was about to save my life.

  I fought that familiar panic that always came when I was pinned on the ground. I’d spent hours on the mat, just overcoming that panic before I could learn any actual skills. I tried to shrimp upwards, towards my shoulders, so I could get his weight lower down, towards my hips, and at the same time launched a sloppy attack upwards with my left hand.

  My pistol was on the gravel, just out of arm’s reach. The flashlight was still activated, and in the glow reflected off the sides of the tunnel, I saw him give me a predator’s grin. He countered my moves easily, and actually managed to slide farther up on my chest, to the point his knees were in my armpits. That actually worked to my advantage, as it got him off my belt line. I reached past his body, where, strapped to my belt, just to the right of the buckle, was an odd little knife. The blade was about as long as my hand, and the handle was egg shaped. I grabbed it and the edge was oriented inward towards me, instead of out like most knives.

  It had been designed for situations just like this. I’d tried all sorts of fancy martial arts shit when it came to knives. When my instructor told me “just jam it into him over and over like a monkey with a screwdriver,” I knew I’d found my trainer.

  I wrapped my left arm around Todd’s waist and buried my head in his belly. My cheek was pressed against his bloody abdomen, and I almost retched at the taste of blood. It was hard for him to hit me in the head like that, but if I stayed that way there were all sorts of nasty things he could do to me. Hopefully, this wouldn’t take long.

  I jammed the knife in his back. I’d never stabbed somebody before. I was surprised at the amount of resistance to the blade, particularly when I tried to cut sideways. He gave a little grunt and doubled down on his efforts to punch me in the back of the head.

  I pulled the knife out and tried again, lower this time. I felt the tip grate off the top of his hip bone, then sink into soft flesh. I realized he was wearing body armor. The first time I’d been stabbing him through Kevlar. I sunk the knife in as deep as it would go, then ripped sideways. That was why the edge was on the inside, I was stronger pulling than pushing.

  He jumped like he’d been touched with a hot electrical wire. Hot blood ran over my hand. I pulled the knife out and stabbed again, this time reaching as far to my left as I could. I almost drove the point through my own left hand where I had him clinched, then adjusted. This time when I ripped to the right, I felt the blade grate against his spinal column.

  Todd screamed, an animal sound that I knew I would remember for many nights to come. He weakened and flinched away from the blade in his back. Even with him high up on my chest, I was able to roll, flipping him underneath me. I wound up on top of him, between his legs. In jujitsu terms, I was in his guard, and a skilled practitioner had plenty of options, but not when they were bleeding out from a knife wound.

  Still, he tried. I was in a shitty position, with my shoulders right under his hips. He wrapped his legs around my head and neck and tried to put a lock on my outstretched left arm. I just kept stabbing into his lower abdomen, then managed to drive forward and up with my knees. I got his ass lifted up off the ground and started stabbing into his buttocks and perineum.

  One blow sunk into his testicles. He screamed, and he broke. All thoughts of technique were gone. He simply writhed and tried to get away from the pain. His legs dropped and he tried to sit up. I drove forward with my legs and cracked him under the chin with the top of my helmet. Then I pushed his face into the ground with my left hand and slammed the Clinch Pick into his throat, then ripped out.

  A hot spray of blood hit me in the face. I recoiled backward for a half-second, then stabbed again. His feet drummed against the floor, and then he was still. I rolled off of him, sweaty and hyperventilating. The taste of his blood was in my mouth. I tried to spit, but I was so dry nothing came out. I vomited instead and found I actually preferred that taste.

  I got up on shaky legs, almost collapsed, then gained my footing. I was trembling all over, and my muscles burned. I managed to sheath the Clinch Pick with quivering hands and not stab myself in the process, then walked over to my pistol. I cleared a jammed shell casing, and pointed it at Todd.

  He was still and covered with blood, but I had this image of him rising up and trying to kill me again, like some monster from a horror movie. I took a step towards him, and without even making a conscious decision, put the sights on his forehead and squeezed the trigger.

  The sound of the shot echoed up and down the tunnel for a long time.

  “I probably didn’t need to do that,” I said out loud as I holstered the pistol. “But it made me feel better.”

  I took stock. I felt like I’d been dragged behind a truck, and I thought at least some of the blood on my face was from the re-opened cut on my head, and my chest hurt when I breathed but I didn’t have any serious wounds.

  With my last energy, I hauled Todd off the train tracks and onto the platform. I wasn’t sure if hitting a body on the tracks would derail a train, but I didn’t want to find out. I marked his body with a chemlight, then started walking back the way I’d come. I hadn’t noticed the slight downward slope on the way out, but I sure noticed the uphill climb coming back. I gave some serious thought about just sitting down and waiting for someone to come help me, but didn’t want things to end like that.

  I just trudged onward, thinking about nothing in particular other than the throbbing pain in my head, and the ringing in my ears. After a while, I perked up when I saw the light shining down from the station and started walking a little faster.

  As I walked into the underground station, I ran into the Portland Police SWAT team, and had about ten rifles not quite pointed at me. After a fun few moments establishing my identity, I found myself riding up in the elevator with a Sergeant and Lieutenant, both of whom stayed silent for the whole ride, but kept looking at me out of the corner of their eyes and standing as far away from me as they could to keep from getting any blood on them.

  At the top, a paramedic bandaged my head, and then I climbed into the back of the Sergeant’s car for a ride downtown. As we drove away, a light rain began to fall. There were still hundreds of people standing around outside the zoo, and through the rain-streaked windows I looked at as many of them as I could, particularly the kids. I knew some people had gotten shot, but all these people were ok, and I was glad.

  We pulled out past a cordon of police cars with their lights flashing, then with the smell of blood and gunpowder in my nostrils, I put my head against the door frame and fell asleep.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  In the end, only four innocent people died at the zoo, none of them children. Many more had been shot. Quite a few of them had been saved by their fellow Portlanders who improvised bandages with t-shirts and whatever came to hand. I tried to tell my
self that considering the number of shooters, we’d pulled off a miracle keeping the casualty count that low, but I knew those four deaths would weigh on me, just like the eighteen dead from the Pioneer Place mall haunted my dreams.

  I managed to get cleaned up, and, after a massive jurisdictional fight between the Multnomah District Attorney and the US Attorney for Oregon, gave a deposition to both of them at once. They listened with rapt attention as I described the fight at the zoo and the long chase down the tunnel. I didn’t pull any punches or leave anything out. Finally, I ran out of steam when I finished the story and the room was silent.

  “Jesus. It sounds like something out of a movie,” Burke said.

  “Hell, I was there,” I said. “And I hardly believe it myself.”

  I walked out into the waiting room to find Alex sitting there by herself. She looked up at me but didn’t rise to greet me. She looked pale, and somehow smaller as if she’d shrunk into herself.

  “Hey,” I said. “You saved that girl.”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  She didn’t say anything else, and I was kind of at a loss for words myself. The silence hung there between us.

  “I shot that guy too,” she said, finally.

  “Yeah. You did good.”

  She nodded, didn’t say anything for a little while.

  “Then you shot him in the head, while he was lying there,” she said.

  “Yep,” I said, and that was it. I could give a long laundry list of reasons why I’d done that. Every second we spent trying to secure a suspect was time his buddies could use to murder people. He could have had a bomb. I could go on for hours. But I didn’t.

  She rubbed her hands together as if washing them.

  “Do you think my dad would have done that?” she asked.

  “Yes.” I said it without hesitation. Al Pace had killed two men during his days at the Police Bureau, bad men, and never lost a moment of sleep over it. He would have shot that man without pausing for thought.

  “I said I wanted in, didn’t I?” she asked and gave a bitter little laugh.

  I didn’t know what to say to that. Violence had been a way of life for me for as long as I could remember. I was happy to get through a day without having to hurt somebody, but I didn’t take it for granted. I guess even though she was a cop’s kid, it just wasn’t the same. I felt like there was a gulf between us that could never be crossed unless she saw and did the same things I’d had to do, which was the last thing I wanted for her. It seemed like I always wound up stuck in this place in my relationships.

  The door to the conference room opened, and Burke stepped out.

  “Dr. Pace, we’re ready for you.”

  She stood and walked to the door, giving me a haunted look. I wanted to go to her, hug her, maybe kiss her, but she kept moving away from me and I didn’t pursue her.

  Downtown was quiet when I stepped out of the building. I saw Dale standing the regulation distance from the courthouse, puffing on a cigarette and talking on his cell phone. He nodded in my direction and I walked over.

  “Well, I’m glad that’s over,” he said as he pocketed his phone.

  “No kidding,” I said. “Now what?”

  I was asking myself that question as much as I was asking him. I had no idea what to do right now.

  “If we were younger, I’d suggest we go get drunk and chase some women, but at our age that ain’t likely to end well. What do you say we go see Dalton and Eddie up at the hospital?”

  That seemed like as good an idea as any. Dale had the keys to a bland government sedan, and as we drove up the hill to Oregon Health Sciences University, we listened to radio coverage of the zoo attack. Much of what was being said was wild speculation, mixed with incorrect facts and the occasional bit of truth. In my experience, that was par for the course.

  We parked in the garage and walked over to the hospital. The last time I’d been here, I’d found myself in a vicious fight for my life in one of the stairwells that ended with me ripping a guy’s ear off and breaking his neck. He had been the third man I’d killed since leaving the army. Since then, I’d lost track.

  Dalton and Eddie were sharing a room. Eddie was asleep over by the window, his head wrapped in a bandage. Dalton’s bed was closest to the door. He was awake, with his leg propped up and encased in a complicated apparatus made of straps and rods that looked like it belonged in a museum for medieval torture devices. He was watching news coverage of the zoo attack with the sound turned almost all the way down.

  Dale and I took seats and I handed Dalton the cup of coffee I’d picked up at the stand downstairs. He breathed in the smell like a starving man smelling a t-bone.

  “My life is better, thank you.” He was glassy-eyed and his speech was a little slurred. There was a myriad of gadgets hooked up to him by tubes and wires. One of them I recognized as a morphine pump. He was probably stewed to the eyeballs on opiates, and I didn’t blame him.

  “Femur’s shattered,” he said between sips of coffee. “This is gonna take a while. Probably get a titanium rod.”

  I winced. That was a horrible injury. He was lucky he wasn’t getting his leg amputated.

  Dalton shifted in his bed to get more comfortable, or maybe just less uncomfortable.

  “Tell me what happened after you ran down the tunnel,” he said.

  I told him about the fight with Todd. It seemed like a bad dream to me. For a couple hours after, right up until the time I went into the room to give my deposition, I’d been checking myself for wounds, to make sure I didn’t have a hole in my somewhere that somebody had missed. Telling it for the second time seemed to make it feel like a more distant memory.

  “You stabbed him in the junk? That’s badass,” Dalton said when I finished. “I can’t believe that fucker’s finally dead. I wish I could have been there.”

  “Me too,” I said and meant it for multiple reasons. Some day I’d have to try to get Dalton to tell me his history with Todd, but today wasn’t the day.

  Dalton’s attention was captured by the television. Henderson Marshall was on the screen. Apparently, he wasn’t in Portland anymore. He was standing in front of a white sheet hung on a wall, with a rifle propped up next to him. I almost asked Dalton to turn up the sound, but then realized I didn’t really want to hear Marshall’s voice right now.

  “One down, one to go,” Dalton said, then mimed shooting the TV screen. He felt around on the arm of his bed for the button that would give him a hit of morphine from the pain pump.

  “Oh, I’m sure there’s more,” Dale said as he stirred his coffee. “This shit never ends.”

  “No, it really doesn’t,” I said. At that moment my phone vibrated. I dug it out of a pocket and looked at the screen.

  Need you back at ops. Strategy meeting with Bolle. Casey

  I realized Dale was looking at his phone too. “No rest for the weary,” he said as he stood to go.

  Dalton was nodding off, so we slipped out quietly. As we walked out of the room, we nearly collided with a nurse who was pushing a cart laden with flowers, baked goods, and fruit baskets.

  “Your friends in there are popular,” the nurse said. “I guess word got out they were patients here and stuff has been showing up non stop.”

  Dale reached down and picked up a piece of bright orange construction paper with a child’s drawing on it. It showed a bunch of stick people holding hands and an elephant. A very good likeness of the Little Bird hovered overhead. Scrawled below, I could just make out “Thanks for not letting me get shot at the zoo.”

  Dale was blinking, hard. I realized the old guy was trying not to cry in front of me, about the same time my own vision got a little blurry.

  He put the card down on the cart.

  “Make sure the guys in there get those, ok?” he said, then pulled a bandanna out of his back pocket and blew his nose.

  The nurse nodded and squeezed him on the shoulder.

  As we headed towards the elevator, our phones buzzed
again.

  “I was thinking about heading home,” Dale said. “But I reckon I’ll see this through.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess I will too.”

  Did you enjoy Rose City Renegade? Please leave a review on Amazon!

  Join the Dent Miller Army Mailing List and we’ll send you a link to a free Dent Miller short story! We promise not to spam your inbox. We'll email you a few times a year, when there is a new DL Barbur book release, or we have something interesting to say.

  Join by clicking on this link.

  You can also check out the Dent Miller community on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DLBarbur/