Strawman Made Steel (23 page)

Without another word the cop took my gun.

I decided to open up diplomatic talks.

“Which one of you wants to be Bait, and
which Switch?”

“Heard you were a smart-ass, Mac,” said the
cop. And now another piece of my brain ran off trying to match the face to a
name. “I don’t give a shit what you call me, so long as you sit tight. Move and
I’ll tear you a new one.”

I felt the steel of a muzzle nestle into my
side.

“Dammit man,” I said. “Bullets don’t tear.
They crush. Don’t words mean anything to you?” I crossed my arms.
“Barbarian.”
 

The cop swept a hand over his face. “Geez.
We got ten minutes of this.”

Ten minutes. That would be Kuzton. Next
station.

I was impatient for the piece of my brain
gone fishing for the cop’s name, but needed to know something about the
gentleman on my right.

“What’s your gig?” I said.

He looked at me, then returned his gaze to
the window and the vista of light-spiked sprawl outside.

I said, “You need to work on your people
skills.”

He turned back to me, raised his fist so I
could see it, and said, “I got people skills. When we get out, and before the
sarge tears you that new one, I’ll show ‘em to you.”

“Shut-up,” said the cop absently.

Sergeant...?

Dumb budget brain.

From the bulge in Bait’s coat, I saw he had
his piece trained on my gut. I nodded at it. “Does your mother know you carry a
Couper?”

“What?” he said.

“Shut-up,” said the cop again with equal
abstraction.

“Your piece, the Couper. Copy of a copy of
the Heckler USP. Right?”

“S’right,” he said, and I thought I
detected a faint spark of interest beneath his beetled brow. Needed to fan that
spark.

“Lot of things to like about the original,”
I said. I nodded at the bulge that betrayed the handgun. “Pity most of it got
lost in translation.”

His lids tightened with irritation. “Like
what?”

I twisted in my seat so I could face him.

The cop dug the gun into my ribs, and said
“Watch it.”

I ignored him. “The frame, for starters.
Heckler & Koch created the original USP, and they
pioneered
the
molded polymer frame. The Couper’s polymer is low-grade. Wears in days.”

The guy leaned forward and looked at the
cop, raised his eyebrows. The cop sighed, and said, “Go ahead. Show the man
your gun.”

I was still covered by the cop. And it wasn’t
against the law to carry in the open. The guy uncovered the Couper and laid it
on its side on his lap, the epitome of innocence. Its handle remained gripped
by his hand, his index finger poised on its trigger.

I admired the uniform, shiny gloss of the
gun’s polymer frame.

“Seems I was misinformed,” I said.

Car lights strafed the carriage’s interior
as we passed a level crossing.

I waited for my brain to return some intel
on the cop. Nothing doing. I was going to have to send out a search party for
that grey matter.

In the meantime I gnawed on what was
obvious. He was a NYC cop of captain’s rank, or at least wore the uniform of
one. He knew I was a smart-ass (which narrowed the search none), and he’d been
called out to put me away. If he’d moved fast, he could have received orders,
or a telegram direct, and caught the outbound train in time to switch over to
the inbound on my tail.

“You got here fast,” I said. “You must have
been top dog at obedience training.”

I didn’t get a rise out of him. He simply
smiled and shook his head mildly.

“I could get you a bigger gold watch,” I
tried, but my delivery lacked conviction. Even I would have thrown popcorn at
me.

I turned back to the guy on my right.

“They buggered the magazine release,” I
said, flicking my chin at the Couper again.

He smiled, all over me. “You think I’m
going to demo that?”

Then I got it, the flash of recall I’d been
waiting for, late but welcome:
Giannakis
.

Laslo Giannakis, small time mobster from
Jervis-Battery, and the last reason I’d had to trade intel with the Organised
Crime Bureau.

The OC chief I’d dealt with was no more,
replaced by the MacLure mentioned by Tunney, but the staff turnover is always
slower in OC. Digging up snitches from crime networks constructed by
intelligent men to resist precisely that threat is always a long ball game―much
longer than narcotics―and detectives and undercover cops keep at it a long
time, burn-out, or die trying.

Or switch sides.

The name of the cop next to me was Peter
Gallant. Lieutenant Peter Gallant. He was a dick, no longer a beat cop, but
wearing an old uniform. I should have seen the way it was straining over his
stomach, and round his thighs.

When last I saw him, he’d been less than an
acquaintance. Merely a body in the background at a briefing on Giannakis given
by the then OC chief.

The fact he was sitting next to me with his
police issue tickling my ribs meant he was working for whichever boss I’d
ticked off. The same one that was trying to frame me.

I guess the frame-up was taking too long.
Impatient types criminal overlords.

While I mulled this over, I turned back to
the thug on my right and lobbed another pebble into the puddle of his mind:
“Couper’s recoil sucks too. Supposed to be short, but the spring is
underpowered.” I mimed taking two pot shots into the back of the next seat.
“Knocks that second tap, yeah?”

He looked at the gun as if that was a new
one.

Before he could reply I turned back to the
cop.

“So Gallant,” I said, and saw the faintest
twitch of an eyebrow. “How long have you been running interference on the
Strawman in the OC? Right from the start, or was it a recent career change?”

“You’re right, McIlwraith. I won’t tear you
a new one. I’m packing hollow tips.”

So crush and splatter.

I began feeding both conversations rapid
fire, feeling like the mediator between a feuding couple.

To the thug: “And the blowback. Breathes
like an asthmatic. Bit of dust and it sneezes itself to bits.”

To the cop: “What do you do? Replace the
reports wholesale? Or just tamper here and there? A little creative snipping
and slipping, a little reticent redaction?”

To the thug: “They tested the original, the
USP, by jamming a round in the barrel. One shot cleared it and the next tagged
a target at fifty yards.”

To the cop: “If I were a suspicious Chief
of OC, what signs of tampering would I look for? What’s your spore? Did you
sign your work―you that sort of cop? Junior reports counter-signed by Detective
Peter Gallant? Is that what I’d look for?”

But both of them had dried up. Nothing but
silence answered me on either side.

Then I felt a tug forward. The train was
slowing. Outside, a signal flashed past, a quarter-mile marker. We were closing
on Kuzton Station.

I spoke to the thug. “The Couper did get
one thing right.”

With a judder the train dropped speed
again.

“Want to know what it is?” I said.

Only a couple of hundred feet remained
between us and the station.

The station, where the mill of passengers
coming and going, would offer the best chance to slip my escort.

That’s what Gallant and his lackey would
think.

And why I made my move now.

“Largest trigger-guard on a handgun,” I
said, and began the sequence I’d mentally rehearsed from the moment Gallant
sat.

My right hand darted to the Couper still
gripped in the thug’s lap. He was already moving, and presented the gun to me a
few inches above his lap―gripped in his hand. But that didn’t matter.

I clasped my hand over his as if giving him
a lesson. I inserted my index finger into the space between the trigger-guard
and his finger, and pulled the gun clear of my gut.

On my left, Gallant was twisting on his
seat. He’d kept his gun in my ribs, beneath my arm. With my elbow I smashed it
back into the seat.

The barrel didn’t quite clear me before it
discharged a shot that lanced my hip in a fiery line.

But I didn’t give him a second chance. I
squeezed on the thug’s finger I had trapped in the Couper. The muzzle blast was
raw in my ears. The bullet shattered Gallant’s right knee, and he went down
gurgling in agony. He would have a lifelong limp.

The sting in my hip went into the
roundhouse I planted on the thug’s chin. His head smashed back into the window
and put a cobweb crack in it. His eyes stayed open, but pointing in different
directions.

Someone screamed.

I reached up and yanked on the emergency
brake. Over the squeal of clamping brakes, holding myself upright on the brake
cable, I yelled: “He shot a cop!”

I floundered over the moaning Gallant into
the aisle, and flung myself forward, pushed by the inertia the train was
shedding.

I made the door at the head of the
carriage, and hurled it open.

A wall of sound howled at me. The scenery
was flying past. Too fast.

But closing in was the station’s lead-in
fence. If I didn’t get off, I’d be hemmed in.

I waited a beat. Watching the blur of
bluestone verge, already feeling its bite on my back. And jumped.

For a moment of free-fall the world was
cool air slipping around me. Then my feet struck the bank of the track, and the
cool air became a memory.

My knees buckled on contact and I tucked
into a roll. But the bluestone bit like hell all over my body as I tumbled
down.

I hit the far bank of the trackside drain,
winded, and lay sprawled in its muddy bottom until the world gyroscoped
rightway up. Above me, the carriages screeched past, wheels alive with sparks.
By the time it came to a complete halt, the caboose was only thirty feet away
from me.

I picked myself up, and in a body that felt
like a broken toe, waded into the scrub screening the tracks.

Ten minutes later I was sitting in a warm
truck cab, feeling every divot in the road.

The eyes of the trucker who’d taken pity on
me kept sliding my way, until I said: “I know. I look like I jumped from a
train.”

He grunted. It seemed to satisfy his
curiosity.

We hurtled toward New York, past lamp-lit
smokestacks venting smog that loomed in the sky like vast yellow ghosts. For my
part, I pried my thoughts away from my aching flesh and applied them to the
Speigh conundrum.

Which hurt less was a toss-up.

That another Speigh was on the chopping
block was clear. What I didn’t know was which one.

But the clock was ticking.

— 15 —

“Sanctuary,” I whispered.

I heard a step, and the metallic snick of
the safety on a Stoeger shotgun.

“Sanctuary?” came the reply. “We do two
kinds here: one either side the grave.” The bores of two barrels loomed in the
light, pointed at me. They were followed by a face, dark and age-worn. “Which
one you want?”

I reached forward and with a finger pushed
the gun away.

“I liked it better when people were shoving
money at me.”

The dark face was a mask a moment longer,
then split into a wide-toothed smile. The sound of Preacher Nate’s laughter was
a car starting on a cold morning.

“You look like what the cat pukes up on my
doorstep,” he said, and turned to shuffle back through the wicket gate and into
the darkness of the New Metropolitan Methodist Church in Harlem.

I followed, pausing to shut the door behind
me and drop its inch-thick bar.

We padded along the short, dark hallway―the
blind leading the cat puke. Floorboards creaked under foot, and betrayed Nate’s
limp with a drag and scrape. The air smelt of disinfectant.

“Someone give up their dinner in here
again?”

“Lady gave up her soul,” he said.

He meant ‘Lady of the Night’. The church
backed onto a brothel. But Nate only ever said lady.

We emerged into the sanctuary where at last
a little light filtered through its high windows. The light cast a faint glow
over ranks of pews, and at the far end, a raised pulpit.

“Come into the light and let me get a look
at you.”

I waved him off.

“Just stitches. Antibiotics if you have
them.”

While Nate went to fetch the medicines, I
doffed my coat and tucked my shirt up. Blood had stained my shirt and run down
the side of my trousers.

I peered at the bullet wound from Gallant’s
gun in the poor light. The bullet’s flight was easy to trace. It had scored a
line of puckered flesh through the still festering teethmarks left a few nights
earlier by the dog. The blistering bullet wound, fired as it was point blank,
seemed to me a cleansing wound―an honest, uncomplicated injury.