Alpha Kill - 03

by Tim Stevens

  “No time,” said Drake.

  Skeet ground his teeth, the way speed freaks did. The way Drake remembered him. Some things didn’t change.

  “Jesus, dude,” Skeet muttered. “It’s all set up. Across the border. Kentucky. The twins are there. Rosenbloom too. We got shit arranged for you. A homecoming party like you wouldn’t believe. Champagne. Bourbon. A whole bunch of girls who’ll leave you raw.”

  “Guns?” said Drake.

  Skeet paused. “Guns. Hell, yeah. Just like I promised. But we’re talking about the party here.”

  Drake said, “No party.”

  “What?”

  Drake leaned forward, until his face was inches from Skeet’s profile.

  “No party. We’re going straight to New York.”

  Chapter 2

  Joe Venn hauled on the line and squinted hopefully at the glistening shape that burst thrashing above the surface.

  Nope. Another striper, and not a particularly large one at that.

  Venn reeled it in and dropped it into the pail alongside the others of its kind he’d accumulated, and the bluefish. He’d been hoping for a porgy or two – he was partial to the flavor – but for some reason, this evening they weren’t biting.

  The setting sun slanted its golden rays across the surface of the water. Venn gazed at the rippling vista around him for a minute or two, savoring the mellow light, the crisp bite of the early fall air.

  He supposed it was time to head home.

  Venn had discovered this spot on Long Island Sound three weeks earlier, and since then he’d made a habit every Sunday, when he wasn’t working a case, to load up his Jeep Grand Cherokee and head out of town. The fishing was good, the people were few and far between, and the air was clean and free of the industrial tang of Manhattan.

  He guided the boat to the shore, in no particular hurry, and moored it. At the moment he rented it on a pay-as-you-go basis, but maybe he’d consider buying one at some point, if these Sundays on the water became a regular thing.

  After all, it wasn’t like he was saving his money for anything special.

  Venn stacked his rods and his haul in its buckets into the rear of the Cherokee. He’d gotten it nearly new from a dealer in Yonkers almost three months ago, to replace his beloved Mustang GT which had been destroyed in a shootout in Harlem one afternoon. He liked the way the Jeep handled, and although he was used to sitting lower to the floor in the vehicles he drove - he was a cop, after all, accustomed to easing around town like a panther prowling through the undergrowth, and at first the Jeep had made him feel awkwardly exposed above the metaphorical grassline - he’d gradually adapted to it.

  He fired the engine and began the hour-long journey back to New York City.

  As he eased into the traffic, weekend trippers making their own weary way back to the bustle of city life, he pushed a CD into the dashboard player. A chirpy woman’s voice began speaking in Spanish. Venn listened for thirty seconds, before realizing he hadn’t been paying attention closely enough to the last CD, and had no idea what the woman was talking about. With a sigh, he punched the FM button instead.

  He’d decided to try to learn Spanish, something he had a basic working knowledge of but which, as America’s second language, he felt he really ought to master. He’d gotten back into fishing, a pastime he’d last pursued as a beat cop almost fifteen years earlier. He’d started reading more, mainly non-fiction: biographies, histories of war and political events, memoirs by former military and law enforcement heroes of his.

  All of this activity, he recognized in his more honest moments, was intended to try and blot out the three words that had taken a hold of his mind three months ago, and had branded themselves there like the mark of Cain.

  She said no.

  Jesus. Just thinking about it now sent a lance of pain through his gut.

  He flicked through the channels, past the inane chatter of DJs, trying to find something he could focus his attention on. A news channel, maybe. Something that would pull his thoughts away from that day back in July, in the waiting room of the hospital in San Antonio.

  He’d asked Beth to marry him.

  And she’d said no.

  She hadn’t stated it as baldly as that. Not immediately, anyhow. But when he’d popped the question, her silence afterwards gave him his answer.

  Instead of saying anything, she’d turned her face to his, and gazed sadly into his eyes.

  “Let’s talk about it later, okay?” she murmured.

  Dumbly, Venn had nodded. He’d been so certain her answer would be yes, he hadn’t prepared himself for the other possibility. And he didn’t know what to say, what to do. How to handle the churning bewilderment inside him.

  Venn found a news station on the car radio and tried to concentrate on the anchor’s grave tones.

  He and Beth had made the journey back to New York together, and on the way they’d talked about other stuff. About how she’d been taken hostage in the home they shared in Midtown, and transported to the airfield in South Texas where she’d been used as a bargaining chip by a drug baron named Salazar. How Venn had contrived her release, and taken Salazar down, with the help of a young British petty criminal named Danny Clune. How Clune had shown some guts right at the end.

  But they avoided the elephant in the room, a phrase Venn cordially detested but which seemed entirely apt in this situation. They avoided his question to her, and her reply.

  It all came out gradually over the next couple of weeks. Together, Venn and Beth put their ransacked house back together. They both returned to work, Venn dealing with the fallout from the Salazar operation, Beth taking up her duties as an attending physician at the downtown hospital where she had privileges. She’d dismissed her employer’s offer of a leave of absence after her ordeal, insisting she’d be better off plunging back into work to take her mind off things.

  One night, after Venn couldn’t stand the pretense any longer, the invisible barrier between them, he’d confronted Beth. Asked her to tell him what was wrong.

  Asked her if there was somebody else.

  Her reply had been immediate and sincere. No, there was nobody else. She loved him.

  But she couldn’t... be with him any longer.

  They talked through the night, Venn trying hard not to slip into police interrogator mode, but desperate to find out what was wrong. And piece by piece, it emerged.

  How, two years ago, after they’d met under traumatic circumstances, and survived a few days of extreme danger and violence, she’d thought it was all over.

  How the ambush at their home in July had brought all those memories flooding back.

  And Venn understood. Beth didn’t feel safe with him.

  He’d failed to protect her. Because of him, because of his stupidity, his sloppiness, Salazar and his men had kidnapped Beth. She might have been killed.

  Venn’s head told him it made sense for her to leave him, to get as far away from him as possible. She lived with a detective lieutenant who carried out politically sensitive investigations. He was always going to be a potential target. And she could be used to get to him. She didn’t deserve to live like that, always in a state of unease, constantly in danger of being used as a bargaining chip.

  Venn’s heart, on the other hand, told him to wrap her close and never let her go.

  He worked at it. Offered to quit his job, to apply for an alternative position in a more mainstream section of the New York Police department, where he’d be just another detective. To give up police work, even – he’d done it once before, after all – and find another way of making a living.

  But he sensed it was a lost cause. Beth insisted that the problem wasn’t him, or what he did. That it was her inability to get over what had happened to them that was the stumbling block. Venn knew she wasn’t telling the truth, or else didn’t realize what the truth was.

  He understood that Beth couldn’t be around him without being constantly reminded of all she’d gone through
. And there was only one way to begin to remedy that.

  He moved out of the house they shared in late August, as the summer was rallying itself for a last, ferocious assault. Beth made a half-hearted attempt to persuade him to stay, saying that she was the one who should go. She suggested that she rent another place on a trial basis, while she worked through the stuff she was having trouble dealing with. But Venn knew she was delaying the inevitable, and put his foot down.

  She’d left the house, too, and it was now on the market. Selling it was awkward, because it was in both their names, and that meant they had to meet up from time to time with real estate agents and potential buyers, together, as if they were any couple looking to sell a home together and move on to a new one. The price they were asking, the agent told them, was too high, and so they were dropping it incrementally, both hoping they’d get a bite soon.

  To cope, Venn threw himself into his job. He worked late at the office, sending his colleagues home when they tried to match his long hours. He took up distractions like his fishing and his Spanish and his reading. He started to drink more. Not excessively, but just a little bit, aware that he was easing his toes over the edge of that particular slippery slope.

  Despite all of that, he’d wake nights in his solitary bed in the new apartment he was renting, the sheets wadded in his fists, anguish wracking his body as though he was physically sick.

  Beth. Beautiful Beth. What the hell have I done?

  *

  Venn was approaching Brooklyn when something on the radio snagged him out of his brooding.

  He turned the dial up.

  “ – are coming in of a disturbance at Horn Creek Correctional Facility outside Rockford, Illinois. Details at this moment are scarce, but we’ve learned that a power failure this evening may have led to a riot within the complex. It’s understood that local and federal law enforcement agencies have responded. We’ll have more on that story as it unfolds.”

  The newsreader moved on to something else.

  Horn Creek. That brought back memories.

  Venn had been a narcotics detective lieutenant in Chicago until four years ago, when he’d left the force under a cloud. He’d despatched a number of offenders to Horn Creek during his time there. It was a high security institution, and in all his time in Chicago he’d never heard of a power failure there, or any significant disturbance which had made the news. Once you went in there, it was understood, you were under iron control. The only ways out were through serving your sentence, or in a coffin. Nobody ever got time off for good behavior, because good behavior was something you were by definition incapable of if you got yourself incarcerated there.

  He flipped through the stations, but none of the other news channels were reporting on the incident at that moment.

  Maybe he’d call up one of his old friends in Chicago when he got home, to see if they had any further information. Venn had burned his bridges with the Chicago PD top brass, but he’d still kept up some of his contacts with fellow cops there, who believed he’d gotten a raw deal when he’d been forced to leave.

  In the distance, he saw the Manhattan skyline, bright against the oppressive October sky.

  Venn was renting a brownstone apartment in Brooklyn, in Bay Ridge. It was several steps up from the seedy East Village bachelor pad he’d lived in until two years ago, but distinctly downmarket from the townhouse he and Beth had bought together west of Central Park.

  He could afford better, but he didn’t care.

  Venn parked the Jeep on the street and trudged up the steps to the front door, the buckets of fish hanging from his hands and his rods tucked under his arms. Cleaning and gutting his catch in the kitchen would give him a task to focus on, though he wasn’t sure he had either the appetite or the inclination to cook them afterwards. Into the freezer they’d probably go, to join a whole bunch of other stuff he’d probably never get around to eating.

  After he’d taken care of the fish... a sandwich, a shower, a few pages of the Ray L’Heureux autobiography he was currently reading, and then bed. Maybe a bourbon, just one, as a nightcap.

  A relaxed Sunday evening, ahead of a busy working week.

  A single person’s Sunday evening.

  Venn shook his head angrily. Sentimentality, maudlin self-pity, wasn’t his thing at all. He needed to snap out of it. Needed to get a grip.

  Life went on.

  He put down the buckets and was unlocking the door to his second-floor apartment when his cell phone rang.

  Venn looked at the display. He expected it to be Harmony, his second-in-command, or the new guy he’d hired for his team. Or maybe Captain Kang, his boss.

  Instead, Beth’s picture filled the screen.

  He stared at the photo, cursing himself for not deleting it, something he’d told himself to do a hundred times.

  He realized he’d been waiting so long the call was about to go to voicemail. Shouldering the front door open, he hit the receive key.

  “Hey,” he said, trying to keep his voice nonchalant.

  “Venn,” she said.

  It was always Venn. It had always been Venn. Never Joe. He thought that the day she started calling him Joe, they’d become strangers to one another.

  His detective’s ear caught something in her voice. A note of... worry?

  “What’s up?” he said. Something to do with the house?

  After a pause, she said: “It’s to do with here. The hospital.”

  For a crazy moment his mind whirled through the possibilities. “Beth, are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  “No, I’m... fine. Nothing to do with me. Well, it is, kind of. I - look, I’m really sorry to ask you like this.”

  “Beth, what’s wrong?”

  “I need your help. As a cop.”

  Venn dumped the buckets on the counter of the kitchenette, dropped the rods. He felt the adrenalin surge in his bloodstream.

  “Tell me.” He was already heading for the bedroom, where he kept his gun in its safe.

  “Not... like this.” Her voice was low, as if she was trying not to be overheard. “Listen, can we meet? If it’s not too much -”

  “Where?” he interrupted.

  She told him the address of a coffee shop a few blocks from the hospital. They’d met there many times before, when she’d come off shift and he’d snuck an hour away from work.

  He shrugged into his leather jacket. “Be right there,” he said. “But, Beth... if you need somebody there right away, you need to call 911.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s not like that. It’s not an emergency.”

  “Still –”

  “I don’t need a regular cop,” she said. “I need to ask you something.”

  Before he could reply, she’d said a quick goodbye and was gone.

  Chapter 3

  It wasn’t just the bite of the fall evening that made Beth Colby pull her coat around her as she stepped through the hospital doors and into the street.

  Yellow cabs cruised by, seeing rich pickings in the constant stream of people emerging from the building. Beth ignored them. She preferred to walk.

  She’d learned it was easier to spot followers that way.

  A voice in the back of her mind said, Don’t be ridiculous. Why would anybody follow her? She didn’t believe she was in any physical danger. If anybody wanted to get at her, after what she’d learned that day, there were numerous ways of doing it that wouldn’t involve anything illegal.

  Her career could be ruined, for one.

  Beth checked her watch. A quarter of nine. If Venn had been home when she’d called him, and she assumed he was, then it would take him at least a half hour to cross into Manhattan and reach the coffee shop. Say nine fifteen.

  She’d reach the coffee shop in five minutes, but she didn’t want to sit there alone. Nor did she feel comfortable remaining at the hospital. So she decided to take a walk, stretch her legs, allow the mild cardiovascular workout to flush through her brain. Maybe help her make sense o
f things.

  Beth had been an attending physician for a little under nine months. Although she was confident in her job, and liked to think she was good at it, she couldn’t shake off a nagging sense that she was a fraud. That the hospital had made a colossal mistake in believing her to be experienced enough, or even old enough, to take on the responsibilities she now found herself with. She knew this was a common feeling among professionals in all walks of life, the disorientation of finally reaching a position of seniority after years of striving for it. But knowing this didn’t make it any les daunting.

  She’d handed over to her resident, Kevin, an intense and gangly man just a couple of years younger than Beth. He’d peered at her through his glasses, as if sensing she was ill at ease, but he wasn’t yet relaxed enough with her to ask her something as personal as whether she was all right.

  Beth turned onto First Avenue, where the lights were bright, and headed north.

  When she’d made the decision to call Venn, she hadn’t hesitated. Truth be told, the idea had been growing in her mind ever since a couple of days earlier, when she’d first begun to notice the... irregularities. But she hadn’t thought about it until this evening, after her encounter with Dr Soper. On leaving his office, the decision had sprung fully formed into her consciousness.

  Call Venn.

  The awkwardness would have to be dealt with later.

  Because she knew there was no use avoiding it, she let herself think of him.

  Letting him know she wouldn’t – couldn’t – share his life any longer, let alone marry him, had been without question the most emotionally wrenching thing she’d ever done. Hands down. Not just because of the look of agony in his eyes, which was worst of all back in the San Antonio hospital when she hadn’t replied to his proposal, but because the prospect of no longer seeing him was almost too much for her to bear.

  The psychiatrist Beth had recently started to consult, Dr Abrams, identified it as PTSD. And of course he was right. Beth recognized the symptoms. She was a textbook case. Hyperarousal, which manifested in the constant sense of fearfulness that clung to her like a shroud, the way her resting pulse had edged up to seventy-six beats per minute instead of her customary sixty-four, the physical jolt of panic she felt whenever a door slammed or a car horn sounded too loud nearby. Avoidance: every time Abrams tried to get her even to visualize what had happened to her, she fought down an impulse to scream at him, to run out the door, to do anything that would help her not see and feel and smell the gun pressed against her head, hear the guttural voices snarling in her ears.