BLUE MERCY (43 page)

This time it was Kay who moved to embrace Finn, holding him tight for a long time as the scene bustled around them.

“The only person who needs to forgive you is you.”
Spencer’s words. No, they’d been her own. She hadn’t spoken to the dead tonight, or touched some higher plane. At least, that’s the reality she would cling to because, right now, any other explanation was beyond her comfort zone.

And there, on the lawn of Hagen’s funeral home, Kay felt the subtle shift. The move toward forgiveness. For Spencer. For Valley. For Coombs’s victims. She had a long way to go still, but Kay at last believed in the possibilities.

Kay Delaney eased the unmarked police car through the amber at Franklin. Water sprayed the Lumina’s underbelly as the tires took a pothole, and, in the passenger seat, Bobby Curran balanced his take-out double latte, saving his tailor-made, crepe-wool suit yet again.

“I tell you, Kay, no dealer in his right mind is dogging the streets this early in the morning. All’s we’re doing is wasting time and gas.”

She ignored his comment. Kept scanning.

Two years as a deputized agent with the special Redrum Unit working with DEA, Bobby Curran knew a thing or two about drug organizations and gangs. But when it came to murders, Kay thought, the former Bostonian and her new partner, as of three weeks ago, was a rookie. A proven investigator, a spiffy dresser, and a flirt. But still a homicide rookie.

“Trust me, he’ll show,” she said again, making a left onto Edmonson.

Under a gunmetal sky, Harlem Park was a bleak stretch of desolation and despair, owned by dealers at night and haunted by crack-addicted ghosts during the day. Trash cluttered the narrow back alleys, cans toppled and leaking their contents into the slushy gutters.

Last night’s freak snowfall had blanketed the city with a pristine but fleeting patina, and now Baltimore was gray again. Kay slowed the car, passing a couple of homeboys, their hoods drawn up for warmth, their breath haloing around them as they blew on their hands and shivered next to a public bench. On the back of the bench, the rampant slogan “Baltimore: the city that reads”—a dying memory of the former mayor’s Literacy Campaign—had been altered with spray paint to read: “the city that bleeds.”

For two years she’d done patrol here in the Western. A decade and a half ago. Back when the neighborhood wasn’t quite as bold. When a shield meant something.

“Look, I know Dante and his crew,” Bobby went on, licking foamed milk from his lip. “These dealers don’t come crawlin’ outta their cribs till after noon.”

“With three murder warrants on his head, our boy isn’t exactly keeping dealer’s hours anymore.”

She’d driven through here at least a dozen times in the past three weeks, usually at night, when the streets pulsed with drug activity. She’d cruise it like she was working a grid on a crime scene, the smell of car fumes and pot wafting in through the open window as servers and jugglers—teenage dealers— scowled at the unmarked car and gave the “five-oh” to their hand-to-hand men on the corners to signal police.

“How is it you even figure Dante’s still around anyway? You think he’s a dumb-ass with a repeat
prescription for stupid pills at the Eckert or something?”

“It’s not about stupid, Bobby. It’s about nature. Dante’s a homie. Farthest he ever strayed from west Baltimore was probably the Inner Harbor on a field trip before he bailed out of grade school. When a guy like Dante starts feeling insecure, last place he’s heading is out of town.”

Rolling onto the first stretch of the three blocks that had become the Western District’s hottest corners, Kay slowed the Lumina, casing each narrow side alley. Just past the grounds of Harlem Park Middle School two homeless men shared a shopping cart filled with crushed soda cans and scrap metal, and salvaged damp cigarette butts from the sidewalk. Three boys Kay guessed were no older than seven dragged their sneakers through the slush, fists jammed into their pockets. When they spotted the unmarked, they practiced their own version of the five-oh hand signal. In the rearview mirror, Kay caught the biggest of the three giving her a sneer and the finger.

“Dante needs to feel safe,” she said to Bobby. “Needs the security of his own turf. He’s here.”

“Then let Fugitive flush him out. ’Sides, the longer Dante Toomey’s on the streets, the more chance someone else’ll pop a bullet into him.”

Kay spared Bobby a sideways glance, sitting there in his pressed suit, his perfect hair, and the aftershave that she’d been growing accustomed to for the past three weeks. She knew he would rather have
lingered at the Daily Grind with his cinnamon-sprinkled latte, his jacket drawn back to reveal the badge tucked in his belt, charming the med students from Hopkins.

“Besides,” he added, “it’s not like he killed someone’s grandma. Texaco was just another dealer. If Dante hadn’t put those .45 slugs in his brain, someone else woulda. Welcome to the lifestyle of death.”

The Redrum Unit had made Bobby Curran a cynic years before he should have been, Kay thought. Bobby had probably worked more drug cases than she had, even though she’d been on the streets twice as long. He knew convictions in drug murders were little better than a coin toss. Witnesses were too afraid to talk, or, more often, preferred to take the law into their own hands. The system was clogged and a “speedy trial” wasn’t always possible, so, in the end, killers like Dante frequently walked or, at best, took a plea.

Bobby had a point: what was another dead dealer in Baltimore City?

But for Kay, this one was different. Texaco, the dead dealer Bobby was referring to, had a kid brother. And she’d made that kid a promise.

“When exactly did you stop caring, Bobby?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

She steered north off Edmonson. “I mean, you need to care. If getting someone like Dante isn’t
important to you, how do you figure you’re going to close any murders?”

If Bobby had had a witty rebuttal, he didn’t have a chance to voice it.

Kay pointed out the windshield. “Bingo,” she said, coming off the gas and easing the Lumina to a crawl.

Two hundred feet down the block she spotted him, shuffling past crumbling stoops and boarded-up doors in his two-hundred-dollar Nikes, and wearing the same Jamaican Rasta Wig hat their witness had described, like he’d just stepped off the boat instead of having been raised six blocks west of these drug corners.

“That ain’t Dante.” Bobby tipped his disposable cup at him.

“No, Detective Curran,
that
is Quortez Squirl.” Adrenaline licked through her. “And my daddy always says if you’re aiming to catch the big fish, sometimes you gotta follow the little ones.”

Kay checked her rearview: no one behind her. And the occasional southbound car masked the idle of the Lumina’s engine.

She reached for the police radio and tossed it into Bobby’s lap. “Call it in,” she said, unclipping her seat-belt.

But before Bobby had even grabbed the radio, Quortez Squirl turned. In the three seconds it took Dante Toomey’s main runner to case the situation, Kay slammed the car into park in the middle of the street and was out the door.

“Hey, Squirl!”

Squirl ran. And so did Kay.

Dodging an oncoming Acura, Kay ignored the horn’s blast and the driver’s glare from behind the wheel, and headed full tilt down the sidewalk.

At five-foot-eleven, Quortez Squirl covered more ground in those flashy sneakers. Still, Kay gained on him, swallowing up the garbage-littered sidewalk behind him. When Squirl snatched a backward glance, Kay pushed harder.

She thought she heard Bobby in the street behind her. But Kay’s eyes locked on Squirl’s back, his arms pumping in the oversized hoodie and those dreadlocks flapping wildly in the air behind him.

Her heart was beating fast, her senses jacked up. Twenty yards between them. She could hear Squirl’s sneakers smacking through the icy puddles.

Nineteen yards. Eighteen. Then Squirl skidded, his laces whirling around his feet. She hoped he’d trip. Instead, he veered left, headlong into the side alley.

By the time she reached the opening, Kay’s hand was on the grip of her nine. Behind her Bobby was a half block down, the police radio in one hand, dodging traffic.

She couldn’t wait.

Drawing a breath, she ducked around the corner, her eyes taking several precious seconds to adjust to the dark. Searching.

And then Kay spotted the hat. The bright red and
yellow Rasta bobbed at the end of the alley, and there was the clash of chain-link as Squirl scaled the ten-foot fence.

She was running again, negotiating trash cans and flying through greasy pools of refuse. Kay swore, then threw herself at the fence, one eye on Squirl’s hat. And when she hit the top, she swung over too fast. She landed hard, slipping on soaked cardboard boxes, and rolled.

She could see him in flashes. The bright hat. The black hoodie. He was heading out to Mount Street. At the mouth of the alley he cut right, bounding into the gray light. When she hit the street, Squirl was zigzagging through traffic, narrowly escaping the grille of a turquoise city sanitation truck.

So close now she could hear his breath, smell his sweat on his slipstream. Kay cleared the corner of the truck in time to see Squirl duck into the next alley. This time she didn’t enter as cautiously. And she regretted it the second she rounded the corner.

Squirl was there. Kay saw the flash of gold on his wide black fist and ducked. There was no time to draw her gun. Instead, she took out his leg. With one sharp kick, the thick rubber sole of her duty shoe met the delicate bone and cartilage of his knee. She heard his cry just as she wished she’d aimed higher.

Before he could recover, she spun a kick to his good leg, and he almost went down. But he lunged a second time. And she dodged again, grabbing a fistful of his hoodie and trying to wrestle him to the
ground. For one panicked moment, Kay imagined him wriggling out of the oversized shirt and running again.

He swore at her. And then Kay felt his hand. Reaching back. Groping for the butt of her Glock, tugging at the hip holster. She’d lost her gun once. Two years ago.
Never again.

She brought her elbow back and up in a hard, well-aimed swing. Felt bone and saw a stream of blood fly from Squirl’s mouth, spray red against the grime-slicked wall of the alley. When he turned in a flurry of fists, she blocked the blows and felt something hot splash her face. Blood and spit.

“ … crazy-ass bitch.”

“What d’you just call me, Squirl?” She followed the question with a smooth upward arch of her knee and thought she felt a rib crack under the impact as he buckled.

One hand skidded along the sidewalk as he tried to catch himself, and just when Kay thought he was at last going down, Quortez Squirl kicked back. The soft sole of his Nike met her shin. Pain knifed up her leg and she staggered back, catching herself against the alley wall. Then Squirl was crawling, scurrying to get his feet under him, moving toward the street again.

He was almost vertical when Kay nailed him from behind. In a flying leap, she hit him hard, felt the wind rush out of him as they came down together, cold concrete tearing through the knee of her good suit, biting into skin.

“Son of a bitch, Squirl!” She jammed the heel of her hand into the back of his skull, forcing his face into the grimy slush, and brought her knee up between his shoulder blades. “Haven’t you learned yet? When you put up a fight, you only go to jail tired.”

The cuffs from the back of her belt came out easily and she slid them around his thick, black wrists. Only when they were snug did she dismount him, dragging him to his feet.

“Now, why don’t you tell me where your dawg Dante’s laying his head these days, hmm?”

She gave him a shove, one hand locked on the cuffs, the other grabbing a fistful of the hoodie.

Quortez Squirl’s face glistened with blood and the flesh over his right eye had started to swell. He sucked at his split bottom lip, his chin thrust in the air, his mouth tight as he watched Bobby jog through traffic to join them. The police radio crackled in Bobby’s hand.

“Oh shit, Bobby. Sorry about the shirt,” Kay said, nodding to the dark stain of coffee down the crisp, white linen.

“Son of a bitch ruined my shirt. See what you did, you dumb-ass? You have any idea how much this shirt cost?”

Kay caught the flash of Squirl’s eyes. “You might wanna get out of the way, Bobby.”

“What?” But he was too late.

Quortez Squirl’s lips pursed, and the runner
hawked a bloody goober, sending it flying against the lapel of Bobby’s suit jacket.

“I warned you,” Kay said, trying not to laugh as she guided Squirl across the street.

JUST OFF A SHIFT
of midnights, it seemed like weeks since Detective Danny Finnerty had seen the sun. The gray, mid-April sky pressed down on the grounds of Langley Country High School in Roland Park, and the dusting of snow on the sports fields and tennis courts wasn’t melting fast.

The first thing Finn had noticed when he’d arrived a half hour ago was the crows. A turf war had broken out over the narrow strip of woods bordering the west edge of the school grounds. The trees were black with the squabbling, quasi-reptilian birds, and the air filled with their shrieks as they circled and dove like kamikazes, oblivious to the flapping police tape and crime scene below.