Alpha Kill - 03 (7 page)

“I’m in a cab, crossing the bridge. I’ll pick you up.”

Beth didn’t think Venn would be able to hear the words. But he’d know it was a man’s voice.

She said, “Oh, that’s okay. Don’t worry. I’d prefer to walk. Need to stretch my legs.”

There was a slight pause. “Beth, are you okay?”

“Fine,” she muttered, desperate for the call to end. “Just had a long day. See you.”

“Your place?”

“Sure.”

She rang off before he could say anything else.

Still avoiding looking at Venn, she said: “Work colleague.” She meant her tone to be light, but it came out as absurdly fake, at least to her ears.

“Uh-huh.” Was that skepticism in Venn’s voice?

Beth’s face burned.
Damn.
The timing was terrible.

She and Venn were drawing level with the drunks milling around on the sidewalk in front of the bar. They were engaged in a mock fight, shoving each other good-naturedly.

Venn said, “You really don’t have to explain when somebody calls you, Beth. It’s your business.” His tone was neutral.

Oh no
, she thought.

One of the drunks started coughing violently. Then he groaned, “Shit,” and lurched away from the group. Before Beth could jump back, the guy doubled over and puked copiously on the sidewalk, beery vomit fanning across the stone and splattering Beth’s shoes.

She felt Venn tense beside her, and realized what was going to happen next.

With two strides Venn reached the drunk. He grabbed him by the collar of his shirt with one hand and hauled him upright and shoved him back against the wall. The guy bounced and stumbled, and would have fallen if Venn hadn’t slammed a hand into his chest, pinning him.

Venn’s other arm hung by his side, the fist clenching and unclenching.

Beth heard him say, between his teeth: “Apologize.”

The man’s head bobbed, and Beth wasn’t sure if he’d understood, or was even
capable
of understanding.

One of the other drunks, who’d stopped their noisy horsing around and were gazing in incomprehension, stepped forward. “Hey, asshole,” he slurred. “You got a problem?”

Still keeping the first guy pinned to the wall, Venn turned his head. “Back off,” he said, in a voice that was low and menacing. “All of you.”

Slowly the others seemed to draw together, as if they were one organism with unruly parts that didn’t function properly individually but could combine into an effective whole. Their faces were belligerent, and Beth knew they were the type of drinker whose cheeriness could switch to aggression in the blink of an eye.

Five of them, not including the man who’d puked.

Venn pulled his hand away and the guy slid down the wall, landing on the sidewalk on his butt and slumping sideways. He didn’t try to get up. The other five men closed in on Venn.

He faced them with his head lowered, his arms by his sides. Beth noticed that he eased across the sidewalk a little so that he was putting himself directly between the men and her.

“Venn,” she said from behind him.

He ignored her, looking at each of the five men’s faces in turn, shaking his head slowly.

“You do
not
want to do this,” he murmured.

“Venn,” Beth said again, more insistently. “Forget them. It’s just vomit. I’ve had worse –”

“Yeah,” said one of the men, the guy who’d spoken before. “Bitch is right. Listen to her.”

At the mention of the word, Beth closed her eyes for an instant.

Venn didn’t begin with any fancy moves, any feints or flourishes. He simply took a step forward and punched the man full in the face.

The guy was drunk, but not
that
drunk, and he saw it coming and tried to duck. He was too slow. The blow snapped his head back and sent him cannoning into the shoulder of the man just behind him, knocking that guy sideways.

“Hey, shit...” somebody yelled. Beth felt terror flood her veins. Were they armed with knives or anything? But they looked like college kids, and not especially athletic ones.

Venn didn’t pause. He grabbed two of the men by the ears, one on either side, and cracked their heads together so hard Beth heard the thud of bone on bone. Another guy got in a frantic punch to Venn’s torso. Venn let out a grunt, but the blow had been weak and off-center and didn’t do much. Pivoting on one foot, Venn swung his other knee up into the man’s belly, doubling him over and causing him, too, to spew beer and stomach acids into the air.

On the sidewalk, a crowd was gathering. Many of the onlookers were shocked, though several started up an enthusiastic chant.

One man was left standing. He stared around him, looking utterly bewildered.

Venn grabbed his arm.

“Venn,”
Beth hissed for the third time. “For God’s sake. Leave him alone.”

Venn twisted the man’s arm deftly behind his back. The guy began to blubber and stammer.

Next to his ear, but loudly enough that Beth could hear, Venn said, “Your lowlife buddy on the sidewalk there is too out of it to apologize to the lady. So you’ll have to do it.”

“Sorry,” the guy whimpered.

His face wrenched as Venn twisted his arm further.

“Louder,” said Venn. “Like you mean it.”

“S-sorry, ma’am,” he managed.

Venn let go his arm and the guy lurched away, rubbing his shoulder. He stared wild-eyed at Venn, as if expecting another assault, and began stumbling away down the street, the crowd parting to let him pass.

Venn took out his detective’s shield and held it up for the crowd to see. Without a glance at the pile of groaning bodies on the sidewalk, he strode over and grabbed Beth’s arm. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

She let him drag her round the corner before she shook herself free from his grasp. “Let go of me,” she said.

He turned to face her. “You all right?”

She was aware that she was shaking, and that her face must be pale despite her anger. The delayed impact of the encounter was setting in.

Please,
she thought.
Not another flashback. Not now.

Because it would mean she’d have to rely on Venn’s support. And what she wanted right now was to get as far away from him as possible.

“No,” she whispered. “I am not all right.”

He took a step toward her but she backed off.

“This is what I mean, Venn,” Beth said, her voice catching in her throat. “Wherever you go, people get hurt.”

He gazed at her for a second, his expression unreadable. He said: “Those guys needed taking down a peg.”

“They were a bunch of drunk kids, Venn. Not enemy combatants. One of them splattered my shoes with vomit. That’s all. They were obnoxious. They weren’t a threat. They didn’t deserve to get beaten up like that.”

“Beth –”

“You see the world like it’s a constant war between good and evil. People are either your friend, or they’re opponents to be defeated. There’s no middle ground. And I can’t live like that, Venn. Not day to day.”

Beth felt a sob rising in her chest and she choked it back angrily.

“I’ve got to go.”

“I’ll walk you –”

“No.”
It came out more vehemently than she’d intended. More quietly, she said, “I need to be alone.”

She began walking away down the street.

Please don’t follow me. Just... don’t.

After twenty paces she glanced back. But Venn was still there, on the corner, standing quite still, staring after her.

––––––––

T
wo years ago or more, when Venn had first been living in New York and working as a private eye, he’d have hit a bar or two afterwards, gotten a load on. He wouldn’t have deliberately sought out fights, but he wouldn’t exactly have avoided them either.

He thought it was a sign of maturity, or maybe just encroaching middle age, that this time he simply went home.

He turned the heat in the shower up until it was almost more than he could bear, and stood under the scalding jets.

Venn had always been mistrustful of emotion. He viewed it as an evolutionary quirk, and as something that was granted far more importance than it deserved. People made stupid decisions all the time because they allowed their feelings to guide them to action. Religious wars, racial conflict... all of it could be avoided if individuals, and societies, and governments, just stopped acting on the whim of whatever they were feeling and instead started relying on their brains instead.

Which was why Venn had a hard time dealing with strong emotions when they seized hold of
him
.

He became aware, as his skin reddened under the blasts of water, that his fists were clenched, his jaw muscles bunched. Consciously, he relaxed them.

He couldn’t figure out why he was still so angry now. Normally, fury would drive him through a fight, but then dissipate rapidly afterward, once he’d gotten the job done. But now, nearly an hour after he’d roughed the drunks up, his heart was still pounding, his limbs prepared for more action.

Then a realization struck him, and although he tried to force it away, it had gotten into his mind and wouldn’t be moved.

He wasn’t angry. He was
frightened
.

Beth was right, of course. He’d overreacted spectacularly. Ordinarily he would have uttered a few sharp words to the kids outside the bar, and it would have been enough. It would have more effective, in fact, than laying into them like he’d done. A quiet warning, with the full authority of his cop’s persona behind it, and they’d likely have slunk away, chastened and relieved that they hadn’t gotten into more trouble. They’d have sobered up somewhere, and maybe the next time they’d have thought twice before bringing their drunken fratboy bullshit out into the street.

Two years ago, shortly after he’d first met Beth, Venn had beaten a man to death in front of her. The situation had been completely different than tonight. The man had been a professional assassin, hired to kill Beth, and he’d damn near succeeded and killed Venn too. But even then, Venn had gone way over the top, continuing to pound the guy long after it was all over. Beth had been distressed by Venn’s behavior, and had called him out on it.

Tonight, he’d been ready to kill the six kids outside the bar. He’d been disappointed when they’d folded so easily, and a tiny voice in his head had been begging them to pull switchblades or, even better, handguns. He had his Beretta in its shoulder holster, and he’d felt its weight, familiar and comfortable, against his chest.

“Crazy,” he muttered to himself. He was turning into one of those crazy cops. The ones who, if they were working narcotics, started dipping their noses into the product. Or who, after years of immersion in the world of money laundering and fraud and other financial skulduggery, began to help themselves here and there to little treats of cash. Venn dealt with violence on a regular basis. He’d taken down armed robbers and drug kingpins and Bosnian warlords. Men who communicated through force.

And he was becoming one of them.

He reached up and twisted the shower control as low as it would go. The sudden freezing torrent knocked the breath out of his chest.

Except his theory wasn’t quite right. He’d always had a hairtrigger temper, even as a kid. In school, he’d been a brawler. At boot camp in the Marines, he’d reacted badly to the pranks his peers had played on him, even though it was nothing personal and everybody got the same treatment sooner or later.

He’d learned to control that temper, to channel it. He wasn’t always successful, but he’d understood early on as a Marine, and later as a cop, that a real man, whatever that was, exercised self-control. And he was getting better at it. He’d been slung out of the Chicago PD because he’d crossed the line while bringing a drug dealer to justice. Since he’d become a cop once again, after the intervening years out in the wilderness, he’d found it far easier to display restraint.

So what had happened tonight? Why had he lost it so completely?

His frustration at being so near to Beth once again, yet still being so far away from her, was part of it, he suspected. But that wasn’t all.

It was the phone call
, said a mocking voice in his head.

Those goddamn voices. Venn could easily understand how they drove people nuts.

He towelled himself off fiercely, angry at his self-absorption. There was no use wallowing in regret. Even if there’d been a chance of Beth and him getting back together, of trying again, he’d screwed it up with his attack on the drunk guys. That would have been final proof to Beth that she’d made the right decision.

Venn wondered suddenly if she still wanted his help with the other business, the abnormal statistics. She hadn’t said anything when she’d run off, and he didn’t dare to call her yet. Venn decided to proceed as planned, to start looking into Bruce Collins and his connection to the hospital. Everything else would have to wait until Beth emailed Venn the screenshots she’d taken of the patients Dr Collins had transferred out.

Assuming she did email them to him, of course.

*

V
enn threw on a Tee-shirt and jeans and went into the apartment’s second bedroom, which he used as a makeshift study. While he waited for his computer to boot up, he remembered the news he’d heard earlier about Horn Creek in Illinois, and he turned on the small TV on the bookshelf.

It was the second item on the bulletin. A power failure at Horn Creek had been followed by a full-scale riot. Local and Federal law enforcement had contained the situation promptly and power had been restored, but not before four guards had been killed, nine others injured, and seven inmates had escaped.

The dead guards hadn’t been named yet, but the escapees sure had. Te public was advised to exercise extreme vigilance, and not to approach any of the men under any circumstances whatsoever.

Seven photographs appeared on the screen in succession. Venn watched carefully, and with a sense of disorienting familiarity. It was a regular rogue’s gallery, a parade of some of Illinois’ and the Midwest’s most horrendous denizens. Armed robbers. Rapists. Murderers.