An old watch on my wrist. The time reads 11:11am. Such an odd set of numbers.
My abdomen aches. The stab wound has barely begun to heal and every movement sends shooting pain. I stretch and writhe constantly, cracking vertebrae and squeezing my fists till the knuckles pop.
A bleak fortress of brick and grey concrete looms ahead, lined by long white Ford police cars crowned with sirens, emblazoned with red stripes and bold lettering. “Piercing Police,” and under it, “To Protect And Serve.” I expected an army, but it looks strangely deserted.
Almost a pity. My stomach is full of bile and pain, anger and vengeance. I thirst for blood like the hounds in the Devil’s basement, like the devils that hunted us since Care and I met. I want to destroy the enemy that showed no mercy to me. And suddenly I find this feeling oddly familiar.
Decaying leaves and skid marks of burnt rubber fill my nose as I walk straight to the door through dead patchy grass.
“Supervisor,” I tell the front desk man behind glass, who is also working dispatch. He can barely take a second away from the stirring radios to see me. He jumps up and runs off, disappearing to a back room.
I pace around the lobby impatiently. Sweat is beading. My chest is hot and heavy, weighed down by a bulky vest beneath my jacket that irritates the healing stab wound in my belly.
Footsteps approach. I move toward the sealed door, dropping a worn leather handbag on the faux-marble tiles. A voice cries, “Hey!” as the door opens. I shove my gun against his throat and push him down the short hallway, slamming his back against the white-painted concrete brick wall.
A swarthy cop with close-cropped curly black hair and terror-filled brown eyes ringed in pouring sweat. Fear-smell stains are growing from his armpits, down the sides of his light blue uniform shirt. His weapon is in hand but I have his wrist grasped.
“Drop it,” I say. It hits the floor. Looking behind, heads and guns pop out from doorways and down the hall. A face or two looks stern and ready, but the rest look full of dread.
“You can fill me with lead, but if I go down, this whole building does too.” I release the officer’s wrist. There’s a thin metal switch with a red button in my hand, depressed by my thumb, a wire running to my coat. I pull the bottom of it up and reveal the lumpy beige vest underneath.
“Holy God,” a voice groans.
“You’ll meet God soon if you don’t do what I say. Get the boss. Whoever’s in charge.”
“I’m here. I’m the chief.” A man appears from around the corner. He’s stout and portly, a wide nose and face and cool blue eyes, peppered ashen hair slicked back in thin wisps that betray onset baldness. “Before you do anything extreme, let’s talk it out. What do you want?”
“You know what I want,” I growl, shoving the barrel of my 1911 further into the officer’s neck, wishing it were the chief’s. “The girl.”
“We don’t have her,” he says lightly, concealing almost all his fear. “They took her.”
“Who’s they?”
He enrages me by throwing up his hands, his head and fat belly undulating on those short legs. “I figure you’d know better than me. But I don’t wanna know. We were given instructions.” He waits for a reply, but I give only silence. “We hand her over to them, scramble the troops, keep the station on skeleton crew. So here we are.”
“Here we are,” I echo. “So you just handed over a teen girl to a bunch of murdering psychopaths?”
“To her father,” he says, holding back a smirk. “Or her uncle, I don’t know. Matt Goddard, if you know him. She’s with him, and a bunch of scary-looking spooks. He wasn’t looking so hot, that Matty.”
Goddard. A godly name for an ungodly man. “Matty isn’t her family.”
“They had the credentials. What can I say? Even the chief has bosses.”
Not me. Not anymore. “Some cops you are. Isn’t that Protect And Serve written on every vehicle outside? But you know all about this town, don’t you? All about the kids. Everything.”
The chief shakes his head and that smile almost breaks across his face again. If it does, I’ll just shoot him there, see if his soldiers respond.
“I don’t know anything about that,” he insists. “We’re supposed to take you in if we can, but here you are, you got us. This isn’t our fight. They got her at the Ryan with Goddard. I don’t want to lose any of my guys for something that doesn’t have to do with us, so let Officer Stanley there go and you can be on your way.”
“This has everything to do with you. Every last one of you.” I look Stanley in the eyes as I keep his throat pinned to the wall. “You have kids?” I ask him.
“Y-yes.”
“He does,” the chief agrees. Grunts of affirmation from the officers aiming pistols at my back.
“You know how many kids I’ve made fatherless?” I try to remember and my head starts to ache. His head shakes side to side. “Me neither. Now think about them, your kids. As babies. And now. And older. Think if they had no one to defend them, if they ended up in some pervert’s hands, used and killed behind closed doors, where no one could hear their screams. Wouldn’t that break your heart?”
Officer Stanley’s eyes well with tears.
“It’s a gut-wrenching feeling. But that’s you, officer, that’s the tyranny you enforce with a blind eye. Isn’t it? ISN’T IT?”
“Y-Y-YES...!”
“And all of you...” I turn my head back, scanning the small throng of heads, arms, and aimed guns. Their barrels stare at me like hollow eyes, black as space, death in each man’s shaking hands. “Every one of you knows what goes on, don’t you? You might even have a little taste yourselves, or just take a cut. You might just look the other way. But you brought Care here and gave her to the bad guys. You didn’t know what they’d do to her, but it wasn’t your problem, right?”
Silence, dotted only by gulping throats, if I’m not imagining them. I lift the detonator higher, kneading it with my thumb, my teeth tight together.
“Tell her what she wants to hear, boys,” the chief orders.
“I didn’t know about anything,” Stanley swears. I pull his eyes to mine, search for truth or lie behind the fear.
“He’s new. Hasn’t been here for more than a month,” one cop says. A few mutters of agreement behind. “But we knew.”
“About what?!”
“About the Ryan,” he says.
“And... the other things,” another says begrudgingly. “Drugs, whores... kids...”
“What were we supposed to do?”
“Your fucking job,” I say. “Protect And Serve. Who do you work for? The vilest filth, the scum that make this world a nightmare for people. You only care about your own skins. Your special little club. Good people lie to save lives. You break your oaths to watch you and your buddies’ backs. It’s unforgivable.”
I start backing me and Stanley toward the sealed door, pulling him by his wrist. “When I’m done cutting the head off the serpent, I’ll burn this whole town to the ground, down to the last dirty pig. You hear me?”
My back opens the door behind and I inch out. The guns trained on me disappear behind the grey-painted door. The lock clicks. I shove Stanley against the door and pat him down for backup guns. I throw his mace and cuffs across the lobby with clatter and jingle. “Got anything else?”
“N-n-no.”
“Were you lying about having kids?”
“N-no.”
“Get a stutter all of the sudden?” My eyes thin. “Those guys in there, they have kids too I bet.”
He nods slowly, fingers twitching in his shaking hands. The vein in his neck thumps almost hypnotically.
“Too bad. But it’s your lucky day. In a second, you’re going to run home to your kids without looking back, hug them and tell them you love them.”
Tears stream down his cheeks.
“Don’t leave your house till tomorrow morning. Then you throw away your badge and get a real job. But before that, you tell everyone left on the force what happened here today. Every last one. Then leave town and never come back, or I swear to God I’ll take you down to hell. Understand?”
He hesitated for just a moment, then nodded.
“Then run fast. And don’t try anything or I’ll shoot you in the back of the neck. Just keep running forever. Go.”
Stanley flies out the door faster than I thought a man could run, a dark trail of piss running down his navy pants.
I take one breath, reach into the bag beside the door, twist something that sounds like an egg timer, then dash out of the station, gun in hand, running for my life.
I vault over an old stone wall into woods blanketed with dead pine needles, running for thirty seconds that seem forever, tripping over a rock and spilling the walkie-talkie on the ground from my jacket. I hurry to grab it and sit tight against a tree, my back pointed directly back at where I came from, though it’s all out of sight.
I switch on the radio and send a few beeps. No reply.
Then a few beeps come back, as police sirens race down the nearby street. I breathe deep and catch my breath.
“Party Girl here, over,” a masked, robotic voice says over the radio.
“This is Killer... Site 1 confirmed, over,” I pant.
“Site 1, copy that. 30 minutes, over.”
“30 minutes affirmative, over.” I put the radio in my pocket, catching my breath.
A boom rocks the world behind me. A song of emergency sirens soon fills the air. I think of the chief’s almost-smirk washed away in smoke and fire, and for a moment, the same satisfied smile almost catches on my face.