Dead Mann Running (9781101596494) (6 page)

I probably had a broken rib. They’re a pain to Krazy Glue. I managed to get to my feet. The case was cracked, but intact.

I jogged back toward the street. Doing as I asked for a change, Chester floored it. The squad car fishtailed, then squealed forward, the open rear door flying shut.

The sedan was coming. I waved my arms at it and screamed, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!”

They drove right past me. Son of a bitch. I limped into the middle of the street, holding the briefcase over my head.

“Hey! Assholes! Here!”

No go. The squad car’s siren and flashing lights won the beauty contest. Trying to sacrifice myself, I’d made the perfect escape. Shit.

I climbed up on the hood of a parked car. If I was stuck watching helplessly, I may as well have a decent view. Essex was long and flat enough for me to see another set of flashing police lights headed our way. Chester and Misty would reach them in less than a minute.

But the sedan hadn’t given up. Brief stars appeared along the open windows, the pop-pop-pop of gunfire echoing back my way. Misty had already been hit. Christ, if anything happened to her.

No longer hampered by the park, the sedan caught up. It was kissing the squad car’s rear fender, the cavalry still blocks away.

Chester swerved left and right, trying to ruin their aim. It’s hard to drive like that. You have to look back and forward at the same time. You’re bound to miss something.

And he did.

A small figure, maybe four feet tall, stood in the road. It was a child, wearing a long coat, looking a little like Madeline from the kids’ books, one of those twelve little girls in two straight lines. She was nowhere near the center of the street, but Chester’s last swerve left him headed straight toward her.

A professional race car driver might’ve managed to miss the kid and keep going. But Chester did what I would’ve. He panicked, turned the wheel sharply and slammed on the brakes.

The squad car flipped.

The sedan, so close behind, smashed into the right side of its underbelly, making it spin on its side.

“Misty!”

I dropped the case on the hood of the car, jumped down and actually ran. My bones didn’t mesh quite the way they should, and I was probably tearing muscle, but it didn’t matter.

Smoke twirled from the squad car’s engine. The sedan skidded and stopped. The doors flew open and two men in black suits, ties, and white shirts, jumped out. They moved toward the sideways car, but hesitated when the smoke from the engine flared into a small fire.

I was screaming as I came up. “You sons of bitches! You bastards!”

The fire bigger every second, the police closer, they jumped back into the sedan and sped off. I never got a decent look at their faces.

Madeline, the girl Chester had swerved to avoid stood there, the blue siren and yellow flames glowing on her small form. As I rushed past to get to Misty, I got a closer look at her face. Half was bone. Beneath the coat, her left shoulder looked broken or missing.

She was a chak, a raggedy.

Child-chakz aren’t as uncommon as some would like to think. When ChemBet’s process was new, parents who’d lost a kid to illness, accident, or worse were allowed to jump to the head of the line. They were happy to have their sweeties back, until they lived with the results a while, the waxlike skin, the sunken eyes, the weakness, the rot, the tendency toward depression, and savagery.

Most tried to love their postmortem kids, but we’re not all saints. Some dumped them after a month, left them to fend for themselves. Outraged at the growing number of undead waifs, the blogosphere dubbed them “Annies” as in Orphan Annie. Language has a way of changing on its own. Annie begat Andy, leading, as sympathy waned, to raggedy. By then no one was surprised when any chak was abandoned, no matter how old they looked.

The kid was too close to the fire, so I slowed down enough to say, “Get the hell out of here.”

What was left of her nose turned up in the air, but she didn’t move.

I didn’t have time to explain the nuances. “Out! I said out!”

She hissed like a cat and made for an alley.

Did Chester know what she was? Would he have swerved if he did?

I pushed into dry heat and the smell of gas. Grabbing the center of the chassis where the metal was still cool, I scrambled to the upturned passenger door. Balancing as best I could, I yanked it open. Smoke poured out. I heard Misty coughing, saw her arms flail in the haze.

She was alive.

Chester, not so much.

Car bottoms have no airbags. The impact had crunched his side of the roof, forcing his head into a position only dead things can manage.

I tried to keep Misty from seeing him, but she was struggling too hard for me to do a very good job. No sooner did I have her out, than she tried to climb back in.

“Chester! We have to get Chester!”

“He’s gone,” I told her.

“No, he’s not! He’s right there! His head’s hurt!”

She pulled at me so hard, the tail of my jacket flew out and nearly caught on fire.

I pulled back, harder. “No, Misty. He’s dead.”

It was as if my saying it was more real than seeing it. She stopped struggling, went limp, and shrieked his name. She screamed it over and over as I dragged her back from the flames, blood from her wound seeping onto the gray skin of my right hand. And all the while, all I could think was that I wished I’d never opened my damn office door.

L
ight and heat and plenty to go around. The light was from the recently arrived squad cars blocking the street, the heat from the burning wreck, flames covering half its underbelly. The jaws of life nowhere in sight, four men in blue risked their lives pulling Chester’s mangled body up across the passenger seat and out. I recognized them, worked with them. Now I wished I could remember their names. One was Darnell, I think.

The body was laid on the street, the young, handsome face covered with someone’s jacket. They didn’t bother trying to put out the blaze with the rinky-dink extinguishers kept in the cars. That would have to wait for the fire trucks.

I took Misty to the side, as if that would help. Already exhausted, her screaming had slowed to a chugging sob. My more immediate concern was the wound. Hoping I looked apologetic, I tore the shoulder of her first new blouse in ages for a better look. The bullet hadn’t penetrated,
just left a long, angled gash. She might need a stitch or two to prevent unsightly scarring, but she’d live.

The cops had nothing against Misty, so I was about to call one over when another car arrived. It seemed bigger and louder than the others, but that could’ve been my mind playing tricks. Out stepped Chief Detective Tom Booth, square jaw clenched so hard it looked like he wanted to crack his teeth. He was my old boss, the man who slept with my wife, Lenore, and was still convinced I’d killed her. Lately, he’d left me to rot in the Bones, but our relationship was complicated.

Despite the carnage between us, his eyes found me. His looked like he was about to form some words, my name, an order to arrest me, or maybe a colorful invective. But one second there he was, the next, a blob appeared in the corner of my eyes and my whole field of vision went paper white. The color faded briefly into a sort of periwinkle, then settled in on yellow and red. The gas tank, cracked and weeping, had, at that moment, decided to blow.

Debris flew around us. More smoke would follow, so I pulled at Misty.

She resisted. “Just leave me,” she said.

There wasn’t any energy in her voice. Her arm felt cold, even to me. If she’d been a chak, I’d worry about her going feral. That’s when it happens, when you give up. As it was, I think she was going into shock.

Booth, in some ways a decent man, would’ve called her an ambulance, but with everyone dealing with the blast, I couldn’t bring myself to trust him. I dragged Misty out of sight, into an alley between a deli and a pharmacy.

We’d crashed on the other side of the park, liveblood territory, nowhere near as bad as the Bones, but the economy had taken its toll. The buildings were smart and stylish, but looked as if whoever had built them were long gone and their descendants had no idea how to maintain them. Still, there was a clinic about a block away. With any luck, they kept their needles and thread sterile.

Struggling with her weight, I propped Misty against a brick wall.

“Can you walk?”

“I don’t want to.”

“Not what I asked.”

I put my right arm under her good shoulder, hefted, and moved through the alley. We came out on Damon Street. The clinic was across the way.

As soon as we hobbled through the doors, a curly-haired male nurse rushed up, all googly-eyed. “My God!” he said. “Were you in that accident?”

Before I could stop him, he put his palm to my face. Realizing his mistake, he snatched it away. Must’ve been his first night.

“Too late for me,” I told him. “Not her, though.”

A taller, more tired but less frazzled woman, the doctor, I figured, came over, and helped us get Misty into a chair. I knelt beside her.

“Looks like you’re in good hands for the next ten minutes or so. I’ve got to get the case and hand it over to the police.”

A spark of energy took her. She grabbed my sleeve. “Hess, what if it’s meant for you?”

Was she delirious? Gently as I could, I took her hand from my sleeve and laid it on her lap.

“Remember what I said about that bullet with your name on it? The sooner I’m not the only one who knows where it is, the better I’ll feel about both of us. I’ll be right back.”

She said something else I didn’t make out. The bleary-eyed doctor started asking her questions, so I moved away and kept going.

I’d gotten here all right, but the first half block back was tough. My limp was more pronounced, the movement of my hips jagged. I’d done some damage when I rolled out of the car. Supporting Misty’s weight had made it worse. After another half block, it felt like a branch snapped inside me. A bone shifted back into place and I was once again what passed for normal in my world.

The case was where I left it, on the hood of a parked car. I picked it up and headed toward all the bright shiny lights at the accident scene, which now included a fire truck.

Sticking to the cool dark near the buildings, I moved up along the side of the accident, wondering what to say to Booth and how to say it. I decided to leave out the part about the arm. Hallucinations were a sign of mental problems, mental problems were a sign I might be going feral. With a cop down, he might listen to me, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t try to find an excuse to have me shipped off to a camp.

At least I
thought
he’d hear me out.

As I neared, thanks to a chak’s propensity for blending into the gray, he couldn’t see me, but I could see him. He was surrounded by six or seven officers, all eager to do what they could to find the cop killer. The wind
slapped the fabric of his coat against his torso like a plastic bag against a statue. He usually looked angry, but tonight a downright loathing lurked in his eyes. He looked like he’d been forced to swallow something big and shitty, and was struggling mightily to keep it down.

“Forget the sedan and the limo,” he said. “Find the girl and the chak. I want them in custody within an hour.”

In unison, the men’s jaws dropped. Chester O’Donnell, one of their own, was dead. Everyone knew he was seeing Misty, that she was my assistant. Several had seen the sedan speed off. The orders didn’t make sense. They stood there for so long, stunned, he had to say it again. “Find Mann and the girl. Arrest them on suspicion of murder. Go! Tonight!”

What the fuck? Booth wouldn’t go after the wrong perps with a cop down, no matter how much he hated me. There’s a myth, Greek, I think, where a poor bastard steps on an invisible temple and winds up turned into a bush or a plant as punishment. An
invisible
temple. I was beginning to understand how he felt. The gods must be sadists.

I pulled back, faded the rest of the way into the dark, then ran. I had to get Misty, figure out our next move, but being wanted by the police was too much for my body to process. Then my ankle acted up, clicking with every step, like it was about to crack.

I crashed through the clinic door. An old woman in midcough screamed. A puffy intern’s eyes shot up from his e-reader. Figuring I was feral, he came for me, wobbling on elephantine legs. Thankfully, he was slow enough for me to maneuver around.

“Misty?” I yelled.

I rushed past admitting into a wide space with curtained beds. Pulling back the first curtain, I saw a pug-nosed kid laid out. He was maybe sixteen, had a bullet or knife wound in the leg. He was blue, unconscious.

A caffeinated doctor leapt between us, waving his clipboard in the air like I was a dog he could scare off. “Get out of here!”

I snatched the clipboard, turned it around and handed it back to him.

“In a minute, pal.”

Misty was behind the curtain of the second bed, alone. There was a little more color in her face. The stitching on her arm looked finished, but the loose ends dangled, waiting to be cut.

“We’ve got to go,” I said. “The cops are after us.”

She didn’t even ask why. “I don’t want to. Let them take me.”

“Misty, no. There’s a lot going on here and I don’t know what it is. You wouldn’t leave me. I’m not leaving you.”

A lab coat hung on the wall. I grabbed it, wrapped it around her and pulled her to standing. Out front there was some kind of hubbub going on. Either the intern and the doctors were arguing about how to deal with me, or the police had arrived. With Misty wounded, the clinic would be the first place to check.

I steered her toward the rear of the building, scaring more patients in the process. Pushing open an emergency exit, I set off a lame whine of an alarm, but we were out. Despite the cold, Misty wouldn’t hold the lab coat on. I kept having to stop and wrap it around her
again. Other than getting us someplace safe, I didn’t want to think about her emotional state, but I couldn’t help it. She looked broken, helpless. Electric syrup pumped through my veins, tearing them open as it went, making me shiver.