by Blaze Ward
Rachel had never really felt like a lethal gun moll, at least until she saw the anger in Greyson’s face when he’d figured out who might have set him up.
Deadly as she was, that man pretty much made her look like a bantam facing a heavyweight in an open card bout.
Ugly, messy, and about to be painful.
She glanced back and caught movement as Greyson pursued on his side of the street. Jansen had his head down and was running like Hell itself was on his heels.
Not the most inapt metaphor, all things considered.
Fred was running loudly, too, shoes slapping leather on the drizzle-wet pavement. In fact, the drizzle was getting heavier as she watched.
Rachel wondered what a full-out rain might do to the range of a palmstunner.
There were weapons you could requisition when you were expecting weird weather. Beams designed to keep a tighter focus in rain and snow, range at a cost of accuracy. She hadn’t thought about it until now because they were only here to question Fred about some things that had looked awkward in the light of day.
Right?
Except that he’d run as soon as he’d seen them.
Bullets didn’t really give much of a shit about weather. Maybe she should qualify on a slug-thrower sometime? Except that nobody would certify her to carry one in the field. Too much risk of innocent bystanders getting hurt.
That was what the palmstunner was for.
Maybe she needed to see if there was something for Boston winters, and start carrying that? Heavy stunner with the nerve scrambler’s battery pack?
Fred ducked around a corner up there by more or less doing a parkour thing to run partly up the far wall and use that as a pivot. Pretty impressive.
He wasn’t as old as Leigh. Older than her. Still in good shape and it took a lot of training to pull that, unless blind terror was lending him reflexes.
Fred had about a block head start on them, so Rachel put her head down and tried to close the gap.
She looked over and Greyson was gone.
Rachel didn’t think he’d turned invisible. At least she really really really hoped that whatever he was these days couldn’t do that.
Probably ducked down the block back at the same time Fred had turned left up here.
Good. Catch him in a crossfire. Or something.
Rachel had no backup right now as she was running down her perp, but that was nothing new. Dominguez had always been a lover, not a fighter. He’d have probably lost the race by the end of that first alley, except that Carlos wouldn’t have tried to ambush Fred like this in the first place.
Would have shown up at his door and knocked. Or maybe walked up in the office, or at the coffee machine.
What sort of explosive confrontation would have resulted? Certainly not this sort of admission of guilt, if that was what this was. Box him maybe, where he could just brush everything off and they’d be no closer to an answer?
Greyson Leigh didn’t play nice.
Rachel was a good student.
Because she had a kitty-corner intersection to work with, she went right out diagonal, weaving a little until she could see. All these streets were narrow and a little twisty, going back to the cattle and sheep trail days when Boston was a tiny place.
And they changed names every three blocks for fifty kilometers, but she figured they did that just to mess with anyone not born here. Bostonians could be like that. They all still called themselves Massholes on any given day.
Some instinct warned her.
Rachel threw herself down and to one side as the beam flashed out of the night.
Cops were trained to shoot center body mass. With a beam, you had more flexibility than a bullet, because of how it attenuated at range. A bullet cut a path no bigger than her finger.
And the rain was doing weird things to the beam. Diffracting it almost, so it was twice as wide. Probably still hit like a bitch if it touched her, but she could see a million tiny rainbows as it crossed the drizzle.
At least that stupid son of a bitch hadn’t gone for his own nerve scrambler. She’d give him the benefit of the doubt on that, since that was a guaranteed lethal shot unless she got absolutely dead lucky at every step after that.
Rachel had trained how to fall. Part of staying in shape.
It was awkward and messy, the way she did. Jacket was probably ruined, if that was cloth tearing. Bruises galore tomorrow from the hard way she landed.
But he missed.
Stupid son of a bitch was dead meat now.
Rachel still had her pistol. She fired randomly on Jansen’s rough direction now, not quite sure where he was, but not trying to do anything but force the man’s head down.
Greyson was out there somewhere.
Hunting.
She popped off a second shot and kind of continued her tumble across the wet roadway, hoping like hell that there weren’t any half-blind drunks out tonight rumbling these back streets to stay away from the cops.
She’d get her stupid ass run over before she knew what happened.
Parked car. Illegal, since it was too close to the intersection, but she wasn’t about to complain as it gave her cover from the night.
Unless Jansen was coming at her now and circling, she had a second to catch her breath.
And Greyson had that much longer to get beyond the man.
It was uncharitable to think about the things Leigh might do to a bent cop, but she wasn’t feeling all that much love for her fellow man right now.
She got her feet under her and looked through the windshield, but couldn’t see Jansen or anybody else.
At least she wasn’t trying to do this at rush hour. He’d have already gotten away from them at that point.
Except where was Fred Jansen going to run to? She hadn’t thought that far ahead, any more than he probably had.
Guilty conscience and boom, out the back door.
Dumb-ass.
She popped to her feet, sniffing downrange with the palmstunner.
Empty streets.
He hadn’t gone past her, and she had this intersection covered, so he must be going deeper into whatever industrial complex this all represented.
She was up and giving chase again.
Maybe a little more careful.
Maybe not.
They both had nerve scramblers tucked away. Rachel hadn’t drawn hers because the range on them sucked. Probably the same for Fred.
She thought about it as she moved.
There was nobody about.
Not Jansen. Not Leigh.
Not even winos meandering around at nine at night in the rain.
Just a wet, sore, angry Rachel Asher and her gun.
Hopefully, she wouldn’t shoot a cat. They might not be strong enough to handle a palmstunner, and then they’d be down to eight.
Or whatever.
There. Movement.
Rachel took off again, hoping that it was Jansen she was after and not some punk panicked at beamfire.
He turned a corner and Rachel saw enough of his face in the distance to confirm that it was Jansen.
She had him now.
There is a particular sound rubber tires make, skidding loosely across wet pavement. Kind of a squeal with percussion because the tires bounce loose a little and then grab again.
She heard that.
A moment later, someone threw an orchestra down a flight of stairs, bass drum first, followed by trumpets.
It took her a moment to organize the sounds into coherence. Maybe she’d rung her own bell on the ground and not realized she had a mild concussion or something?
Rachel ran to the corner, chasing Jansen and confirmed what had happened.
There was a big-ass truck stopped in the middle of one of those narrow streets. The grill was dented inward pretty hard, from where the driver hadn’t been able to stop in time.
And had slammed into Fred Jansen at speed.
Greyson appeared on her left now as she got to the body lying i
n the street. She got a hand on his neck and confirmed a pulse, even as she holstered her pistol and grabbed her comm.
Two clicks and she had the emergency channel. The encrypted one that let the Bureau teams talk without civilians listening in.
“I have emergency traffic,” she said as the operator came on line.
“Go ahead,” the man said.
Rachel fed him the intersection, looking up at the sign.
“Officer down,” she continued. “He stepped off a curb and was blindsided by a truck. Unconscious and I have a pulse. Need medical teams here immediately.”
“Rolling now,” the man said. “ETA four minutes.”
Fred Jansen was a mess. Blood everywhere.
Thank God he’d been high enough that the bumper and grill had gotten him, instead of managing to fall under tires and get utterly squished.
Greyson leaned close as he walked by.
“I have his pistol,” the man muttered. “Good call on EMS.”
Rachel didn’t know what to do at this point, so she rolled him enough onto his side so that he wouldn’t accidentally drown in his own blood or the rain.
He was moaning, but she figured that was a good sign, all things considered.
Greyson was talking to the driver, who looked to be in almost as bad a shape as Jansen, but who goes to work and expects to run over someone who comes off a curb at full speed?
But maybe she could get some answers this way.
14
Hospital
Greyson was seated in the waiting room, meditating on his many sins. Rachel was the only other person here, sitting next to him and reading her homework, as usual, still a little damp and more than a little pissed at the world.
They were in an isolated wing, off from the main part of the hospital and quiet, but it still had that old industrial feel. Every hospital waiting room seemed cut from the same mold. Tile floors in a black and white checkerboard. Paint white above his waist and sand below. Hanging ceiling. Smell of over-roasted coffee stuck to the chairs and sofas around here.
Rutherford Parsons came through the outside door like a tornado. She was dressed for an evening out, in a slinky, emerald evening gown with a wrap, and not in her pretty, blue uniform that they all wore for dress occasions, so he figured he’d ruined her evening on top of everything else, but Greyson wasn’t sure if he should put that in the win column or not.
Edgar Redhawk was on her heels, but he didn’t see Denise.
Probably for the best.
The Captain took the whole scene in with those hard, glacial-blue eyes and Greyson felt the weight of them descend on him.
The room was currently empty as far as Greyson’s eyes or ears had been able to track anyone. It was the hospital, sure, but in a wing dedicated to special circumstances. Like wounded cops or high-value prisoners.
Nobody around, and even the nurses and doctors didn’t stay around any longer than they needed to. All anybody had to know was that Fred Jansen was a Hunter, and had been hit by a truck.
The staff here could handle the rest. At least the medical bits.
Greyson was handling the other problems.
Redhawk closed the door while Parsons watched, then checked the inner door back to the operating theater.
Greyson measured the woman.
Tough. That was the word he’d use for Parsons, if he only had one. Political would be the second.
Not an assassin like Redhawk, but not a bureaucrat like Owens had been.
Possibly the second most honest cop Greyson knew after Rachel.
“My briefing was probably inadequate,” she said abruptly, nodding to Redhawk as he came to rest.
Where she was big in personality and physicality, Redhawk was—not small, but Greyson didn’t have a good word to describe the man.
Forty-something, and that was as much detail as he ever let on to, and only then because he understood some of the old jokes kids like Rachel didn’t get. Black hair, representing his Sioux heritage. Skin a little darker than Rachel’s. Five eleven, maybe. Forgettable face, but on purpose.
Deadly in an emotionally-compact way. He’d been Owens’s right-hand hatchet man before the Commissioner overstepped his bounds and got thrown to the wolves. Redhawk had worked for Denise since.
As capable an operator as they came, and that was saying something.
“He didn’t have all the details, because I don’t even trust the encryption around here to hold,” Greyson replied.
Rachel slipped her reader into her pocket. She looked like a drowned raccoon that had just climbed out of a trash can, but hadn’t had any interest in running home to get clean or a change of clothes.
At least not until after this confrontation was over.
“Tell me,” Parsons ordered in that quiet voice she had.
One of the other things Greyson liked about the woman.
No bullshit. She wasn’t any tougher than her Hunters, but also wasn’t trying to constantly convince you she was.
Zielinski had been an asshole that way.
Greyson also nodded to Redhawk.
“I asked him to get me some files last night,” Greyson began as Parsons grabbed a nearby chair and sat, rather than towering over him in a Statue of Liberty kind of way.
“Was it in there?” Redhawk suddenly asked.
Greyson tended to forget what a nice voice the man had—soothing, fit for radio—because Redhawk spoke so little, and when he did they tended to be threatening words, at least for other people.
“It was,” Greyson replied, turning his attention back to Parsons, and wondered again if she’d been called out of the opera or some other fancy event to come to the hospital for one of her men.
She just studied him.
“The files on the six of us working prime on this case,” Greyson continued. “As a cover. I wanted to see who might have accessed my personnel file to get that picture that the shooter had.”
Parsons nodded now.
On top of everything else, Rutherford Parsons was a damned good cop. And a former street-level Hunter in her own right.
Another role model for Rachel to watch. To learn from.
“Jansen,” she stated, rather than asking the obvious question.
“The only name that didn’t have a perfect alibi,” Greyson agreed.
“Tell me what happened tonight,” she ordered.
Greyson began, getting her up to the moment he’d turned left and started circling the block. Rachel had to take up the thread now, filling in details he didn’t even know.
She also got to explain how she came by the drowned rat look and the bruises.
The right side of her face was starting to look like a night of really rough sex from the way it was red and starting to turn purple where she’d hit the ground hard.
Greyson had taken the report from the guy driving the truck, but that man hadn’t been able to say much. Just driving down the road to make his next delivery when somebody darted out from between two parked cars and right into the hood ornament of his Peterbilt beast before he could shut it down.
Bounced at least far enough not to be squished, which really was what mattered right now. Greyson could only imagine the shitshow that would have resulted from an accidental death.
And it would have been accidental. He was at pains to make sure that he hadn’t fired at all, and that Rachel had only returned fire to scare Jansen off, after he had started it.
“Why?” Parsons finally demanded after he sat for several lonely minutes and digested the whole.
“Somebody hates me enough to go through all that effort,” Greyson replied, starting his explanation at the top level. “But they had contacts in the Bureau, which suggested to me that it was more than just that. Maybe there is someone out there who hates you almost as much. Or maybe Denise. Maybe all of us.”
“All that from a name on a file access?” She almost sneered the words.
“I was there to talk to Fred off-property,” Greyson
said. “Get him on neutral ground that would favor him, maybe to get the man a little more relaxed than doing it at the office or just showing up at his front door. He bolted the moment he saw me. No words. No questions. Boom, out the back door. Didn’t slow down. Fired on Rachel when he realized that we were in better shape than he was and that we’d eventually run him down.”
“What game are you playing, Leigh?” Parsons pressed.
“Something Rachel pointed out to me early on in this case,” Greyson smiled grimly at the three of them. “Getting a suspect to admit to a crime without saying anything. Just by putting them into the right situation and watching their body language before they can control a flinch.”
“And Jansen flinched,” Parsons completed the thought.
Greyson nodded.
More words were interrupted by the inner doors bursting open suddenly and a woman in off-green scrubs entering the room. She was the surgeon, Greyson was guessing, based on the blood splatters on her arms and chest.
Greyson stood and she locked hard on him, quick-scanning the other three and ignoring them.
“Leigh?” the doc asked.
“That’s right,” he nodded to her.
Short and a little heavyset. Looked Japanese by way of five or so generations in Hawaii of California, but he was just going on the bones in her face.
“Your boy will survive,” the doctor said. “Miracles of modern medicine notwithstanding, he got lucky ten ways from Sunday. Broken arm. Broken leg. Several cracked ribs. Fractured skull. Concussions, contusions, and just about everything else, but we got to him in time. I’ve put him into a medical coma for a few days, just because we had to open him up in so many places to fix things, and there are limits to what even the best of the alien medicine can do for the man. But he should make a full recovery and be ready to briefly take visitors by Monday if everything works out right between now and then.”
“Thank you,” Greyson said simply.
Working with pros was lovely. Come in, deliver all the information he needed in a single breath.
“He’s also in a secured part of the hospital, so I’ll need your people to send over a list of all the visitors he’s allowed, as well as provide a contact for any unexpected relatives that come out of the woodwork.”
