Steel Dragon

by Kevin McLaughlin

  And then there was the incident when they’d attacked the station. That had been a well-coordinated, precise strike, in and out with no casualties on either side. They must have known the layout of the station for their assault to go so smoothly. But it shouldn’t have, she recalled. She could have pursued them but someone had stopped her. He had stopped her and he’d also prevented Butters from taking a shot he could have probably made blindfolded.

  What if Jim Washington, Wonderkid extraordinaire, was a mole?

  “You know what?” she said as she watched him walk toward the lights of downtown with his bouquet. “I think I want to go home and veg out. If I hurry, I might be able to watch twenty whole minutes of TV before I fall asleep.”

  “That means the vote is three to two again. Airsoft wins.” Hernandez pumped her fist in the air.

  “What? No way,” Keith whined. “Come on. I want to drink a beer with the Lost Dragon and maybe put some money on some dude beating you in an arm-wrestling contest. I could watch his face when you turn to steel and make him buy me wings all night.”

  “Gee, how could I miss the Rookie using my mysterious steel dragon abilities to win free hot wings? I’ll see you guys tomorrow morning, okay?”

  Hernandez snorted and entered the SUV. If she was pissed, she’d take it out on the rest of the team. Kristen felt maybe a little bad about that, but she had to see where Washington was going.

  The rest of her team loaded up in the vehicle. She dilly dallied around her car until they drove off because she didn’t want them to see her leave on foot. It would arouse suspicions she didn’t want.

  Once they were out of sight, she jogged back and looked down Bates street. Despite it being a fairly long way before there were any turn offs, she didn’t see any sign of Washington.

  “Damn,” she cursed quietly and sprinted after him.

  Oh, it felt good to run at her full speed. She raced down Bates and her muscles pumped faster than they ever had before. Her training with Sebastian had helped her understand what she was capable of. She could move faster, her legs firing like pistons, but she could also leap farther with each step. It wasn’t that she had super-speed. She wasn’t the Flash and couldn’t vibrate her whole body so fast the world slowed down. It was more that if she learned to control herself properly, she could move somewhere in fewer steps than a regular human and make each step much faster.

  She did that now as she sprinted down the road. The concrete walls on her left blurred and the iron fence with its tips bent toward the street flickered past on her right. She had a sense of how Sebastian moved. He couldn’t vanish into shadow—she didn’t think he could, anyway—but simply knew his abilities well enough to fully exploit them. She aspired to that level of control.

  Obviously, she wasn’t there yet. When she made it to Jefferson and tried to stop, she almost careened all the way across the street. She slowed herself enough after one lane, which drew a blaring car horn and a few profanities from the driver who had to swerve to avoid hitting her.

  Kristen cursed and scrambled back to the sidewalk. A young couple laughed at her. And old man shook his head, but there was no sign of—there he was.

  Washington had already made it down Jefferson and now crossed the street. She checked for traffic and hurried across as he vanished inside Millender Center.

  She reached the other side, checked for pedestrians, and ran with everything she had—fast enough to blow the newspaper out of someone’s hand. If she hadn’t been so focused on her need to see what Washington was up to, she would have been thrilled.

  Moments later, she reached Millender center as Washington left Ashley’s Flowers, now without a bouquet.

  There was no way he had hurried all the way there only to return the flowers. Who did that? She felt like her suspicion was proving to be justified. No one returned flowers so something was definitely up.

  He didn’t exit the building but instead, took the stairs to the People Mover station two at a time.

  “Shit!” The People Mover was a rail car that ran on a fairly small loop in downtown Detroit. Some people joked that it was faster to walk than it was to use it, but she had always found it endearing. Although she might miss her ride if she didn’t hurry. A train was moving over her head and would be in the station in less than a minute.

  Kristen darted inside, hopped the turnstile—wondering if cops ever bothered to pay for civil services like that—and took the stairs three at a time, four at a time, then five at a time. She made it to the top not even slightly winded.

  Which was good, because she had to throw herself behind a trashcan to not be seen. She held her breath until she heard the hiss as the doors opened, then stood and tried to act casual. It occurred to her that she had no idea what the man would say if he saw her now, but she knew that her plan to spy on him would be ruined.

  He had been near the front of the platform, so she walked onto the rear car.

  Her gamble paid off. While her teammate wasn’t on it, she could see him through the window. He looked around nervously but hadn’t noticed her.

  The People Mover lurched into motion. He didn’t get off at the next stop, which was the Renaissance Center. She exhaled when he didn’t stand up to exit.

  That was where the dragon’s rooftop party had been held. If he had gotten off there, she would have been certain that he was working with a dragon. He didn’t, which meant…exactly nothing. It didn’t mean that he wasn’t working with a dragon, only that he wasn’t definitely working with a dragon.

  She shook her head and focused. There would be time for speculation later. Now was the time to obtain the facts. Hypotheses would follow when she had information.

  They rode the People Mover past Bricktown and the stop near the Greektown Casino, then past the Cadillac Center and Broadway Street stations.

  Kristen was about to give up and chalk his adventure up to merely another nostalgic ride on the elevated train—she had certainly taken her fair share of those—when he stood at the Grand Circus Park Station and exited.

  Fortunately, he didn’t look around and she waited until the last possible moment, then darted through the doors as they closed. She leapt through them like a grasshopper. One moment she was inside the train and the next, she stood ten feet in on the platform, all in one jump. She looked to her right. Washington was already heading down the stairs. After a few moments to give him a little lead time, she followed.

  He was easy to see as he crossed Park Avenue. He glanced back and she ran behind a bus and kept up with it easily enough. By the time she stopped, she wasn’t behind him anymore but a block over. She watched him move deeper into the park toward the Edison Memorial Fountain.

  Her dragon powers were definitely growing stronger. Despite it being dark and Grand Circus Park being less than well-lit, she could easily tell him from the other late-night visitors to the park.

  She darted across the street and wove in and out of the speeding cars with ease. One honked at her and she had to put on an extra burst of speed to get out of the way. She was glad she did. The close call had activated her steel skin. If she’d been struck by the car, she would probably have been fine but it would have destroyed the vehicle and her quarry would’ve seen her.

  As it was, she thumped onto the sidewalk and her weight pulverized the already crumbling surface. She made a mental note to not complain about her taxes—after all, she’d done some damage to the city—and followed him into the park.

  He was more nervous now and looked around almost constantly. In fact, he looked damned paranoid, which made him more difficult to follow but also convinced her that she couldn’t give up now.

  Cautiously, she moved from tree to tree, trying to get closer and closer without being seen, but he suddenly stopped.

  He stood in a bubble of light, illuminated by the Edison Memorial fountain and the lights in the park.

  Kristen couldn’t get any closer without the risk of betraying her presence. She accepted that despite he
r impatience, waited in the shadows, and watched him.

  It was a little surreal to be there on a stake-out. She had seen the fountain on dozens of postcards while growing up, always with the jets at full blast and a rainbow of lights reflected in the water.

  It wasn’t quite as grand in real life as it was on the postcards, but it was still a sight worth seeing. She also noticed that pigeons—honest to God pigeons—were sculpted into the fountain itself, when someone stepped out of the gloom on the far side of the park and approached Washington.

  The two men nodded and her teammate looked both uncomfortable and angry while the other man looked more guilty than anything else. She strained to hear what they were saying, but the fountain was too loud. Maybe that was why they had chosen it as a place to meet.

  She squinted through the gloom and strained to hear but with little success. Her dragon abilities meant she had better sight than humans, but should she have better hearing too? She didn’t know and it wasn’t like she could call Sebastian and ask him how to activate more of her powers, so she resigned herself to the fact that all she could do was watch.

  The stranger was light-skinned, had a neatly trimmed brown mustache, and seemed familiar to her. She could almost place him but not quite.

  After a few minutes of conversation, Washington’s expression turned to anger. “That’s unacceptable and you know it,” he yelled at his companion.

  The man scowled and ran a hand through his hair. The gesture triggered the memory and she recognized him immediately. She’d seen him do the same thing—rub his face with his hand and push his hair back—but the last time she’d seen the gesture, it was because he’d pushed a ski mask off his face.

  It was one of the men who’d attacked the station—the one who had slipped on the papers and the man Washington had stopped Butters from shooting.

  His outburst seemed to have ruined the conversation, though, because the man muttered something. Jim protested but whatever he said apparently had little effect as his contact mumbled something else and vanished into the park. Washington didn’t follow.

  Suddenly, she didn’t care so much that she hadn’t been able to hear them. He was working with the enemy. Instead of arresting this man, he had chatted to him. What more evidence did she need?

  Jim Washington felt like eyes were boring into the back of his neck, but he didn’t see anyone following him and ascribed the sensation to still working through PTSD. Sometimes, the worst part of being in a hostile situation was the waiting. At least when you were shooting, you knew where the enemy was. It was the rest of it that could make a man’s mind itch and eat itself alive.

  Jim exited the People Mover and hurried off the platform, checking once more to make sure he wasn’t followed. He didn’t see anyone and hurried down the stairs before he heard the doors hiss shut.

  He crossed Park Avenue and headed to the center of Grand Circus Park and the Edison fountain.

  “Where the elephants play and the lights go away,” the poem had said.

  Except it wasn’t a poem, but a rap lyric he and a buddy from Detroit had written when they were overseas together. It was supposed to be a dumb song about how nothing ever was what it promised to be when you grew up poor in Detroit—no elephants at the circus and lights that looked better on a postcard than in real life because they were out half the damn time.

  That wasn’t the case anymore, of course. The city had changed.

  So had his friend, apparently. Dwight Olsen was a noncommissioned officer Jim had met while serving in the Marines. They were both from Detroit but hadn’t known each other until they’d met overseas.

  He had almost had a heart attack when he’d seen Dwight pull his mask off after the attack on the station. He had been a good man—not perfect because no one who grew up on the wrong side of the poverty line could afford to be perfect, but good all the same. Now, he tried to be a goddamn cop killer?

  It simply didn’t make sense. Jim had reached out to him through back channels and hoped to meet at a bar where he could maybe get a few drinks in his old friend before he grilled him to discover his role in all this. Dwight, however, had seen right through that and sent the flowers with a note that only he would have understood.

  Which meant that his friend was deep in this shit, deeper than he had wanted to believe.

  Full of misgivings, he’d waited at the fountain and looked for the man he was supposed to meet. Part of him worried that he looked paranoid, but there were a handful of people waiting to meet someone, so he told himself he was merely being jittery.

  Finally, after what felt like an eternity, Dwight sauntered out of the dark.

  “Dwight, how are you, my man? What’s with all the cloak and dagger stuff?” he said, hoping to play on their friendship.

  “I wanted to make sure you were still the Jim I served with.”

  “I couldn’t forget those damn lyrics if I wanted to.”

  “Oh, so you don’t want to?” Dwight smiled. It looked mostly genuine, although it was forced near his eyes.

  He laughed all the same. The boot hadn’t dropped…yet

  “So how long you been in the city, Dwight?”

  “Jim, we can cut right to it, man. I know you saw me at the station—shit man, you saved my damn life back there.”

  “Yeah, man, just returning the favor,” he said. The forced casualness of the statement worked as intended. Dwight flinched at the words. He continued. “The thing is, I now have all these other people who depend on me to protect them, and you came in there and tried to blow all their damn heads off.”

  “We weren’t trying to blow all their heads off, Jim, and we both know I wouldn’t have let any of them go in there if I knew one of my old buddies from the Marines might get hurt.”

  “The thing is, I was in there. And we both damn well know that when you bust in shooting, people get hurt—innocent people.”

  “They’re cops, man.”

  “So am I.”

  Dwight simply stared at him for second as if sizing him up. “We won’t hit that place again. But Jim, man, you should really get out of town.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “That’s need to know information. The people I’m with…let’s say they make the Marines look like a gaggle of first-graders. Organization like you would not believe. You and that fat cop who almost shot me can’t stop them. And I tell you what, you talk to them for ten minutes and you wouldn’t want to.”

  “Oh yeah? Are you offering me a meeting?” It wasn’t what he had planned, but if he could meet someone higher in this well-organized group, he would exploit that contact.

  “Do you think they’re gonna come sit down with a cop? Come on, Jim. You’re supposed to be smart.”

  “You’re the one who said I needed to meet with them.” He was getting frustrated. The man was giving him the runaround.

  “What you need to do,” Dwight continued and put a hand on his shoulder, “is get the hell out of Detroit.”

  “We both know I won’t do that.”

  “We go back, Jim, way back. That’s why I’m here, man, because I don’t want to see you hurt. Get out of here, take your girl if you got one, and forget all about the Motor City. It’s gonna get messy for a while.”

  “That’s unacceptable and you know it,” Washington yelled, losing his composure. He was reasonably certain Dwight had chosen to meet there because the sound of the fountain would make eavesdropping difficult, but anyone could’ve heard that.

  His companion ran his hand through his hair. He used to do that when he was given an order he didn’t like. Shit. He had fucked this up.

  “I gotta go, Jim. Nice talking to you.”

  “Dwight, come in with me. I can get you immunity.”

  “After trying to shoot a cop? Yeah, right. Plus, I told you it was a damn tight operation. If I’m not back in thirty… Well, I gotta get back or some of the boys I told you about are gonna get theirs.”

  Jim nodded and let him go. He
thought he could take him, cuff him, and bring him in if he needed to, but Dwight wasn’t one to lie. If he said the folks he was running with had threatened his friends, they probably had.

  He sighed and looked around once more—he still felt eyes boring into his back—then shoved his hands in his pockets and headed home. He could get a cab or take the People Mover again, but he’d always liked to think when he walked, and he had much to think about.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  It was Kristen’s day off, which meant she was at Sebastian’s training court.

  The dragon had her doing weight drills. He’d set up a number of the sculptures in the sandy arena and she had to lug them around. At first, it had seemed impossible, but once she learned how to balance them, it was easier. Not easy, merely easier than impossible.

  She was supposed to move the one she currently held from one side of the arena to the other without stopping. It was a sculpture of a woman carrying a bouquet of flowers. She had a look of pensive dread on her face, and she thought the frozen features suggested she was searching for someone.

  The flowers made her think about Washington. How could he work behind their back? It was disgusting to think that he’d betray his own damn team. They were supposed to be working together, not—

  Her foot slipped and the stature teetered out of her grasp.

  “Kristen!” Sebastian yelled and rushed forward. He shoved one hand under the sculpture and prevented it from crashing to the ground. It irked her that he caught it as easily as she would’ve caught a can of beer.

  Although he didn’t exactly look happy about it. “Kristen. I chose these statues to work with because I thought it would help you focus on not breaking them.”

  “I am focused!”

  His raised eyebrow told her exactly what he thought of her bald-faced lie.

  “I am focused. Only…not on this.”

  “Then on what?”

  She hesitated. Washington wasn’t his business. It was police work, but she couldn’t exactly tell her coworkers she’d tailed him through the park, could she? She was certain Drew would freak out and the captain would—at the very least—demand a mountain range of paperwork. Still, she reasoned that she should probably tell them, but would it hurt to tell Sebastian? It wasn’t like he had made his feelings about regular people a secret. Some drama on the force was probably beneath his notice. Maybe it would be better to tell him first. She could present what she’d found to him, see how he took it, and use his reaction to do a better job of convincing the captain and Drew.