by Brent Pilkey
“James Dwyer,” Jack said around a mouthful of fries.
“That matches with the name we have for him,” Mason said. “So what’s his connection to Sean Jacobs? And what was a mentally slow eighteen-year-old kid doing in the apartment? And why was he the one hiding? There’s a warrant out on Dwyer for aggravated sexual assault. He was in deep shit even before he shot at us.”
“Maybe they’re using him for transport?” Kris suggested.
“Doubtful,” Sy mused. “We might overlook him, but Sean would be an easy target for competitors.”
“It doesn’t make sense, him being in the apartment.”
“And a kid like him carrying a replica handgun does? Or wearing leather gloves in the summer?”
Mason’s head snapped up. “Leather gloves? You didn’t mention that.”
Sy shrugged an apology. “Didn’t think it mattered. Does it?”
“Maybe. . . .” Mason looked lost in thought. For a few minutes, the only sounds in the office were the clicking of computer keys and chewing from Jack and Sy. “I’ve got an idea. Jack, when you’re done eating, I’ll get you to help me.”
“Done,” Jack announced, tossing his take-out container in the garbage.
Sy looked up from his half-finished meal. “What did you do, inhale it?”
“I was hungry.”
“Listen up.” The sour expression wasn’t completely gone from Mason’s face, but he no longer looked like he was sipping unsweetened lime juice. “Dwyer hasn’t said a word, even though he’s facing a shitload of charges. He’s either very loyal to whoever’s in charge or scared shitless of him. I think it’s a bit of both. The only time I got a reaction out of him was when I mentioned the kid.”
“What did you tell him?” Jack asked.
Mason smiled an evil little grin. “Not much. Just that the kid pulled a fake gun on a cop and now he’s in the hospital.”
“That’s nasty, Rick,” Kris approved. “Tell him just enough of the truth and let his imagination fill in the rest.”
“Exactly. He didn’t say anything, but I could tell it shook him. Now Jack and I are going to shake him some more.”
The Criminal Investigation Bureau may have been larger than the MCU, taking up the north end of the second floor, but it was still too small. The detective sergeant’s office was in the corner opposite the entrance; to the left of the door were interview rooms 1 and 2. Another two interview rooms were tucked in behind the D/S’s office. Bulky desktop computers seemed out of place on the ancient metal desks crammed together in the limited floor space.
Abandoned and forgotten, resting in broken pieces atop a row of filing cabinets, were the remnants of manual typewriters. They seemed to stare at their successors with hate and envy as they waited to be shipped off to their final resting spot. Sy told Jack they had been waiting for several years.
The office was quiet; the only bodies being processed were the MCU’s, so most of the detectives were down in the lunchroom watching a ball game on TV.
Mason unbolted the door to interview room 1 and stepped in. Jack leaned in the door frame, trying to look unconcerned. Dwyer, still wearing only his jeans, sat on the built-in bench in the small, windowless room, his face set in a mask of resentment and defiance.
“Thought you might like to meet the other officer you tried to kill today,” Mason said in opening.
“Yeah? If the fuckin’ gun ’adn’t jammed, I’d kilt yo’ asses instead.” His voice held a lingering trace of a Jamaican accent.
“Guess we’ll never know, will we?”
“Whatcho wan’ dis time, mahn? I tolt you, I ain’t sayin’ shee-it.”
“No questions this time, James. This is also the officer Sean pulled a gun on.”
That sparked a nerve. Anger flushed Dwyer’s face. “You fucker ’urt ’im?”
“I shot him.” Stone faced. Uncaring. “He’s dead.”
Dwyer shot up from the bench, lunging for Jack, but Mason straight-armed him down. “Knock it off,” he warned, “or I’ll drag you down the stairs to the cells.”
Dwyer sat, but his body quivered with rage, and his eyes burned with hate. Jack hadn’t moved, was still leaning in the doorway, his arms crossed in relaxed boredom. His whole demeanour taunted Dwyer, told him, Yeah, I just shot the kid and I don’t give a shit. Just another day at work.
“’E didn’ ’ave no gun.” Dwyer’s voice was hoarse with emotion and tears glistened in his eyes.
“Yeah, he did, James. It was a fake gun, but it looked real, and he pointed it at an officer who had no choice but to shoot him. Dead.” Mason leaned in to emphasize his next point. “And you killed him. You hid him up in the box spring, you knew he had that toy gun, you left him alone, and now he’s dead.” Straightening up, Mason fixed him with an amused, pitying look. “I think someone’s gonna be really pissed at you.”
“No, mahn, not me, ’im.” Dwyer thrust his chin at Jack. “’E’s a dead mahn.” A pause, then his eyes widened, and his mouth snapped shut.
Mason smiled. “Thank you, James. You just told me what I needed to know.”
The detective left the room and Jack reached in to close the door. “By the way, Sean’s not dead. I didn’t even shoot him.” Jack shut the door on Dwyer’s shouts.
Sunday, 20 August
0130 hours
“Any idea what time we might be finished by?”
“Why? You got a hot date or something?”
“Sort of,” Jack said to Mason. “My wife’s coming to pick me up and I need to give her about an hour’s notice.”
“All right, Jacky-boy. You’ve got your woman well trained.” Taftmore never let an opportunity for a sexist comment pass by unmolested. Kris smacked the back of his head as she walked behind his chair.
“I could have given you a lift,” Sy offered, sounding offended. “Don’t you trust my driving?”
“It’s not you, it’s your car I don’t trust. That thing has more rust on it than paint. Besides, you live in the opposite direction.”
“Sure, use that as an excuse.” Sy returned to his paperwork, muttering something about cars and three wives.
Mason grinned at Sy’s discomfort. “Give your wife a shout now, Jack. We’re almost done for the night. What are our totals, people? Tank?”
Tank cleared his throat dramatically. “There were ten bags, each filled with approximately one hundred individual twenty pieces, for a grand total of just over eighty grams of crack, with an estimated street value of twenty thousand dollars.”
Kris had the money count. “Forty-three hundred in the apartment and our delivery man must also be responsible for picking up the cash. He had fifteen thousand on him.”
“Ouch. He’ll have some ’splaining to do.”
Jack looked at his partner and sighed in disgust. “Do you ever watch any TV filmed after the eighties?”
Sy gave him a withering look. “They’re classics. Just like my car.”
“Taft? What about the guns?”
For once, Taftmore was serious. “One AK-47 with two full clips and another missing a few rounds.”
“I say again: thank God for shitty ammunition.”
“Three handguns, two of them semi-autos, all loaded but no spare ammo, and one sawed-off shotgun.”
“Not a bad day’s work, people. And thanks to Mr. Dwyer, we know that Sean Jacobs is important to someone higher up on the food chain. Gives us a place to start.” Mason opened a bottom desk drawer and started pulling out beer cans, tossing them to his people. Jack caught his eagerly; a beer would go down perfectly right now. “Cheers, everyone,” Mason toasted.
Jack popped his can open and swigged the beer gratefully. Nice and cold, not icy the way he liked it, but cold enough. I could get used to this.
Once the beer was done — only one per person; Mason wasn’t going to have any of his guys picked up for impaired driving as they pulled out of the parking lot — he told Sy and Jack to take off. “Thanks for the help today. Sy, good
to have you back on the team, even for just a day.”
Heading down the stairs, Sy clapped Jack on the back. “You made a good impression with Rick. Looks like the next available spot in the unit is yours.”
“Aren’t they supposed to go by seniority?” Jack held open the locker room door for Sy.
“Not necessarily. And since Rick took over Major Crime, it’s been showing some impressive results, so the superintendent basically lets him pick who goes upstairs.”
“There something wrong with that? You sound a little weird about it.”
Sy paused, as if considering how much to say. “Mason’s a good guy and you can learn a lot from him, but be careful around him. Let’s just say nothing ever comes free from him.”
“Okay, thanks.” Jack dropped his gun belt. It felt almost as good as the beer had tasted. “That was a good day, wasn’t it?”
“Damn straight. You going to tell Karen about being shot at?” Sy was on the other side of the centre lockers but Jack could imagine his expression: waiting to see if grasshopper had taken the old man’s advice.
“Damn straight. Like you said: she’s got to learn what my life is like down here.” He added, “Although I may leave out the part about beating up the guy with the child’s IQ.”
Sy laughed. “Just tell her how you single-handedly disarmed an assailant. No need to get into the exact details.”
“Good call.” Jack bade Sy a good night as he headed for the showers wrapped in a towel.
“I can give you a lift. There’s no need for Karen to come all the way down here.”
“Thanks, but she’s on her way. I just want to grab a quick rinse before she gets here. I’ve discovered that automatic gunfire can cause one to perspire a touch more than usual.”
“It can at that. See you tomorrow.”
Jack showered, changed into his jeans and T-shirt and was waiting outside when Karen pulled their Honda CR-V into the parking lot. The blue SUV was just a year old, a gift to themselves, although Karen got to drive it most of the time. Jack’s old Ford was in the shop receiving another extension on its death sentence.
He popped open the passenger door and stuck his head in. “Hi, hon. Want me to drive?”
“No, thanks. I’m good.”
“You certainly are,” he said. He got in and leaned across the seat to give her a kiss. Her blond hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail and she was wearing an oversized T-shirt and cut-offs. He moved in for another kiss and snuck a hand up to cup a breast. There was nothing between his hand and her skin but the thin cotton.
Karen broke the kiss and gently pushed his hand away, saying, “Whoa, Romeo. I’ve got nothing against sex in the car but not where your co-workers could be watching.”
“Such a prude.” Smiling, he settled back in his seat and clicked on his seat belt as Karen pulled out onto Regent Street.
“You must have had a good day.”
“It’s been an amazing day . . . so far.” He drank in the sight of her long legs and made no effort to hide his interest.
“Down, boy,” she reproved him. “You can wait until we get home. Tell me about your day.”
“You know we did a search warrant with the Major Crime Unit, right? Well, you should see the cops we worked with.” As they drove up the sinuous length of the Don Valley Parkway, he described Mason and his team of mismatched coppers.
“Her arms are really as big as yours?” Karen asked incredulously when he described Kris.
“Well, mine might be a bit bigger, but I wouldn’t want to break out a tape measure to see.”
By the time she was merging with the eastbound traffic on the 401, Jack was entering the apartment again. He purposely drew out the story of how he and Mason approached the second bedroom door. Despite her disapproval of the police, he could tell Karen was enthralled by his tale, because she kept stealing quick glances at him. Then bullets ripped open the bedroom door.
“He shot at you?” The SUV swerved as her hands jerked on the wheel. A horn sounded behind them and she quickly righted the CR-V. “Are you hurt?”
Jack held up his left arm, proudly displaying the wood shrapnel scratches. “That’s as close as it got to me. And he didn’t shoot at me, he shot at us, Mason and me.”
“What did you do? Call for the SWAT team?”
“Hell, no!” He laughed. “And it’s called the ETF, hon. Emergency Task Force.”
“Whatever.” She waved away his explanation. “What did you do?”
“I kicked open the door and we both drew down on the guy in the room. He was holding an AK-47, a military assault rifle, but it had jammed. He was trying to clear it.”
“You didn’t shoot him, did you?”
Jack laughed again, this time without humour. “No. If we had, I probably wouldn’t be leaving the station until sometime in the afternoon, if I was lucky. No,” he repeated. “He finally decided to drop the gun. A good decision on his part.”
“Wow! Jack, that’s amazing. It sounds like something out of a movie. Weren’t you scared?”
“You know, I wasn’t.” He held up his hands to pre-empt any objections. “I know how it sounds, but I wasn’t. If you had told me before we broke down the door that there was a guy inside with an assault rifle waiting to shoot at us, yeah, I would’ve been shitting bricks. But when it happens like that, you just . . . do what you have to do.”
“My hero,” she said, not joking, and reached over to squeeze his thigh. Her hand lingered, then lightly brushed his crotch before she pulled it away. “Is there any more?”
“Not much. Well, there is a little bit more. . . .”
“Jack! I can’t believe it,” she exclaimed when he finished describing his fight with Sean Jacobs. “You tackled someone who had a gun!”
“Remember, it wasn’t real.” He heard the heat in her voice and tried to diffuse her anger at him for acting so recklessly.
“But you didn’t know that,” she countered.
“There was nothing I could — where are you going?”
Karen was exiting at the Port Union Road off-ramp. “I thought we could take the back roads from here. Go on, I want to hear the rest of the story.”
“Well, there isn’t much left,” he admitted hesitantly. He was confused by the mixed emotions radiating from Karen. She seemed excited by his story but royally pissed at him at the same time. This trip home by the back roads could be really enjoyable or . . . not.
Jack described the trip to the hospital as lightheartedly as he could, emphasizing Sean’s childlike wonder in the emergency room and his leather gloves so he could be like his “big brother Tony.” He was describing the undesirable cousin they had to turn Sean over to when Karen turned onto Twyn Rivers Road and headed into the valley.
The street snaked down a steep slope into darkness, the light of the street lamps left behind. Trees darker than the night sky crowded the road, swallowing the low rumble of the Honda’s engine. Jack had always loved this stretch of road; in daylight, it seemed miles outside the city. At night, it was another world.
Jack turned his face to the open window to feel the night air on his skin, savouring its touch and the scents borne on its warm currents. They crossed a single-lane bridge, the tires trundling on the wood planks. A shallow river wandered beneath the bridge, carrying the shimmering moonlight into the darkness before the waters passed away behind them and they were once again beneath the trees.
An unlit dirt parking lot opened on the right and Karen turned in without hesitation. There were a few other cars in the lot, each enjoying privacy in the dark. Karen found a secluded corner, wheeled around and backed in. She cut the engine and in the sudden stillness Jack could hear the river gurgling not far from them.
Karen unclipped her seat belt and turned to face him. He could see her in the moonlight, but it was just dark enough to shadow her face and hide her emotions from him. Jack freed himself from his belt and waited.
“My hero deserves a reward.” With that, Karen
peeled her shirt off over her head and tossed it onto the dash. Her shorts and sandals fell to the floor. Naked, she slunk across the seat to straddle his lap. She gripped his hair and pulled his mouth to hers. The kiss was hard and passionate, frantic even. She ground her hips against his pelvis and panted in his ear, “Fuck me, Jack. Fuck me now.”
Jack reclined the seat and together they pushed his jeans down to his knees. She impaled herself on him, riding him at a desperate pace. She reached behind him to grip the headrest, drawing her breasts up to his mouth. “Harder,” she hissed as he sucked first one, then the other, nipple into his mouth, his teeth nipping at the tender flesh.
The force of her thrusts built with an ever-increasing urgency until she exploded in climax. She arched her back, gripped by the intensity of her orgasm. Her hips continued to buck against him, the seat slamming beneath him with every thrust. At length she calmed, a final shudder rippling through her before she collapsed on his chest. “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “That was fantastic, Jack.”
“You did all the work, hon, not me.” He smiled and slid his hands down her back to cup her sweaty buttocks.
“Your turn.” Karen smiled wickedly and, not without some awkwardness and giggling from both, managed to twist beneath him. She was still wet and took him easily. “Don’t be gentle,” she urged.
Jack slowly pulled out, then drove himself back in. Karen grunted in pleasure. “Again. Harder,” she moaned and he did. Again and again until he was thrusting into her as hard as he could. As hard as he fucked her, still she wanted more. Wrapping her legs around him, she all but screamed, “That’s it, Jack. Give it to me, baby. Give it to me!”
She bucked beneath him, riding the crashing waves of another orgasm. She raked his back with her nails and he cried out in painful ecstasy. Seconds later he erupted inside her, coming with such force he felt he might black out. Spasms racked him, firing nerves throughout his body. At last he fell still.
