Deadout (2 page)

Six months earlier, while on suspension and out of jurisdiction, I'd stepped into a big case and got banged up. A lot. It had taken a while for things to get back to normal. Guess they weren't normal yet.

“So, I want you to think about it seriously: are you sure you don't want to take some leave time? You've already been approved for it. Just a few weeks on us, take your time and come back right.”

I snuck a glance at Danny and got the look I expected: a little bit worried, a lot pissed off.

“No,” I said, my eyes firmly back on Suarez. “I'm good.”

 

2

The sun had been up since six, but you couldn't tell from the blue-gray light seeping through the window. I'd been awake since four, lying there looking at Nola, waiting for the moment when that first golden ray would play across her face. Wasn't going to happen today.

She looked beautiful as always, but the gray light brought out the sadness in her face. My insomnia had been going on for months, but this part I didn't mind. I loved watching as she slept, and not just because these days that was the time we got along best. Her face was endlessly fascinating, and I loved to study its lines. Lately, her brow would furrow as she slept, but in the suffused, early morning light, you almost couldn't see the crease between her eyes.

She sighed deeply, stretched, and rolled away from me. Soon, she'd be awake, and things would get tricky.

I got up and made coffee.

The place was tiny and a bit of a mess, not that I minded. When Nola first moved in, she'd enjoyed keeping it spotless. Now it was almost as bad as when I lived on my own. A few months earlier, we'd talked about buying a place. We even found one, at the edge of the city but right on the woods. We ran the numbers, figured out how much we'd need to make it happen. But then things started getting weird, and we both let it go. We hadn't mentioned it in weeks, like a silent agreement that we weren't ready and maybe never would be.

By the time the coffee was done, Nola was in the shower. I put hers on the sink, then pulled on my jeans and a shirt, grabbed my shoes, and got out of the way.

Twenty minutes later she came out of the bedroom wearing jeans and a T-shirt, boots in one hand, mug in the other. “Thanks for the coffee,” she said as she drained it.

“You look great,” I told her. “And Greensgrow would be crazy not to hire you.”

She did look great, but not great for her. The stress was pulled tight across her face. She'd been looking for a job for months, but there wasn't a lot of work for an organic farmer in the middle of Philadelphia. And not too much else Nola felt comfortable doing. She had a history of chemical sensitivity; she'd ended up in the hospital a couple of times when she was younger because of lawn spray or new carpets. Greensgrow was an urban farm less than a mile from our apartment. I'd told Nola about it but had never been there, because before I met her it never would have crossed my mind. Now it seemed like the ideal job for her.

“Yeah, right,” she said, her smile nervous but giddy with excitement. “I'll see you afterward for lunch, right?”

“Green Eggs Café,” I said. “Two o'clock.”

*   *   *

“This sucks,” Danny muttered, breaking the silence between us.

“Tell me about it,” I replied, immediately realizing my mistake.

I'd been watching the tension build in his jaw all morning, and I knew something was coming, but after standing in that hallway for four hours, I guess I'd gotten careless.

“Of course, it could be worse,” he said. “You could be on paid leave. But then again, that would mean I could be out tracking down Simeon Jarrett instead of making sure the deputy assistant undersecretary of useless bullshit doesn't get ambushed by a Mexican drug cartel in the middle of Philadelphia's City Hall.”

We were babysitting some low-level federal bureaucrat who was too big a deal for a regular uniform escort but too small for Federal Protective Services. Suarez had snickered when he assigned us. Danny's eyes hadn't stopped smoldering since.

“Come on, Danny,” I said. “That's not fair.”

“Life's not fair, Doyle. Besides, it's true and you know it. And while we're standing here with our dicks in our hands so you can try to prove whatever you're trying to prove, Jarrett's out there doing whatever he came to do and going on his merry way.”

Danny had been closing in on Jarrett three years earlier, and the guy had vanished. Now he was back, and we didn't want him to get away again.

I kept quiet, hoping he was done.

He wasn't.

“I know you went through some crazy shit out there, and a lesser man might have crumbled completely, but you're delusional if you don't think you got a little dinged up.” He pointed to his head, in case I missed the point. “You got to heal, buddy. You might have saved the day up there, proved you're a certifiable badass, but I'll tell you what—right now you're not. You walk into that same situation right now, and you're toast.”

I don't know if I was more pissed off because what he was saying wasn't true or because it was. I didn't have an argument to make, but that had never stopped me before. I opened my mouth. Luckily, before I could say something stupid, the door behind us opened as well, and the deputy assistant undersecretary of useless bullshit walked out.

We escorted our guest back onto I-95 South under a light rain. It was one-thirty and I wasn't supposed to meet Nola until two, but I had Danny drop me off near the restaurant anyway. I figured a walk in the rain would be more pleasant than hanging around with Danny. Besides, unencumbered by me, maybe he could go out and do some real police work.

I was walking north on Second Street, approaching Spring Garden, when the guy walking toward me stopped abruptly and turned down Green. Medium height and broad shoulders, face obscured by a blue hoodie. Something about him seemed suspicious, and familiar. I turned and followed. At the end of the block was a sheer concrete retaining wall with I-95 on top of it. Squeezed right up against it was a narrow block of Hancock Street. Not a typical pedestrian route. I kept back but kept up, and at the end of the block, he turned to look at me.

Simeon fucking Jarrett.

He took off like a shot. I paused long enough for a heavy sigh, because I really wasn't up for a chase. Then I took off after him.

“Police,” I yelled, holding up my badge. “Simeon Jarrett, you are under arrest.”

Jarrett cut down an alley next to a house being gutted and rebuilt. I followed, pushing as hard as I could and closing the distance between us. He was at least ten years younger than me, and if the chase dragged on I knew stamina would become an issue.

Halfway down the alley, he jumped onto a row of Dumpsters, running along the lids. I followed suit, maybe not quite so gracefully. As I was bounding across the third Dumpster, my foot hit the gap between the two sections of the lid, and my leg went in up to the thigh. The lid scraped the length of my leg, something pulled in my groin, and my foot hit something squishy, suddenly soaking wet. Jarrett was extending himself to reach for the bottom rung of a fire escape hanging over the last Dumpster. I knew if he pulled himself up, he was gone.

I launched myself at him, but my arms closed on air. I looked up to see him swinging around the ladder, using his momentum and his upper-body strength to propel himself back the way he had come.

He planted one foot between my neck and my right shoulder and landed his other foot on my left triceps, squashing me back into the Dumpster and using me as a springboard to vault back onto the pavement. By the time I pulled myself up, he was turning up another alley and out of sight.

I punched the lid of the Dumpster and growled, my face burning with a mixture of humiliation and fury as I climbed out. No way I was going to catch up with him, but there was a good chance he was going to double back up Second Street.

I sprinted, hoping to head him off. The sounds of my own heavy breathing and the rhythmic squelch of my wet left foot were soon drowned out by a pounding noise in my ears. My lungs were aching almost as much as my leg and my neck and my shoulder and my arm. I knew Jarrett was probably gone, halfway across the city, laughing once again at some dumbass cop who couldn't keep up. The heat from my face spread throughout my entire body with exertion and shame and anger. And hatred.

I threw myself around the corner, and was almost startled to see Simeon Jarrett coming straight at me.

I swung a left into the middle of his face. At the speed he was going, I could have just held up my fist and the effect would have been the same. His face seemed to split: the lower half trying to keep going until he flipped up into the air, ass over elbows. Somehow, he managed to land on his toes and his fingertips, ready to take off again, but I planted another left into his face, knocking him back onto his heels. As I closed on him, his right arm came around with a knife, sweeping toward my midsection in an arc that would have disemboweled me if I hadn't pulled back at the last second. I kicked him hard under the elbow, and I might have heard a crack, but I definitely heard the knife go spinning off across the concrete. I looked down and saw an eight-inch slit in my shirt, and that's when I set on him. Two more in the face with enough in them to push him back onto his ass. He still had a little fight left in him, landing a vigorous kick, so I used the last bit of mine to beat it out of him.

By the time we were both done, his face was a bloody mess, but only marginally worse than mine. I read him his rights and tumbled back onto the sidewalk.

That's when I saw Nola standing fifteen feet away, her face twisted in horror and disgust.

I went to her and she stepped back, away from me. “Are you okay?”

“I'm okay.”

She wouldn't look at me. “Then I'll see you at home.”

 

3

“I'm not saying he didn't resist, I'm not saying he didn't try to stab you, and I'm not saying he didn't hit you. I'm not denying he's an asshole who deserved everything he got and more, but Jesus, Carrick, you broke his wrist, fractured his jaw, and bruised his spleen for Chrissake.” Suarez sat back and rubbed his face with both hands. “I mean, what did you do, run him over with a truck?”

“Hey, I got a little nicked up, too, you know. It's not like he's some boy scout.”

“I know, Doyle. And I'm sure maybe you used appropriate force. But you busted up this asshole pretty good, and you're supposedly on light duty.”

I didn't say anything.

“You sure you don't want to take some time off?”

“I'm leaving tonight.”

“For how long?”

“The weekend.”

“A long weekend?”

“Back on Monday.”

He shook his head with a weary laugh. “That wouldn't be what I'm talking about anyway, Carrick. You need to take some time off.”

“I'll take the weekend off, and I'll come back good as new.”

“You'll take the weekend off, and you'll come back to admin duty.”

“Bullshit, admin duty. You can't do that. I just brought in Simeon Jarrett.”

“You think I want you on admin duty, Carrick? You think the folks in admin want you in admin? You don't think they die a little bit inside, knowing they're going to be working with you? Watching you move your fucking lips as you fill out forms, taking five times as long as them and they know they're going to have to redo it because you always fuck something up?”

“Fuck you, I'm not that bad.”

“Worse, Carrick. Seriously, you suck. But that's what I'm going to have to do. You leave me no choice.”

“But—”

He put up a hand to silence me. “Have a nice weekend.”

*   *   *

When I got home that night, there were suitcases by the door, and my stomach lurched before I remembered we were going on a trip. Nola was putting dinner on the table. She smiled awkwardly and returned to the kitchen without looking at me.

“Sorry about today,” I said when she came back with salad and bread.

“I know. You were just working.” She sat down, still not looking at me. “It's just … I have a hard time thinking that's what you do when you're out there.”

“Not usually, baby. But he resisted, he went after me.” Even in my ears it sounded lame:
He started it
.

She closed her eyes, almost in time to hide them rolling. “A lot of them resist, don't they, Doyle? And that doesn't make it easier, knowing these criminals and drug dealers are attacking you.” Her eyes went moist, and her voice thickened. “I worry about you out there. I worry about you getting hurt. And I worry about you hurting people. What does that do to you?”

“It's scrapes and bruises, Nola. It's just part of the job. Speaking of which,” I said, grateful to change the subject, “how was your interview?”

She looked down, away from me. “They offered me the job,” she said quietly.

“That's great—” I started to say, but when she looked up I stopped.

“I didn't take it.” Her cheeks were wet.

“You didn't…”

“It's on a brownfield, Doyle. An industrial waste site. The ground is … tainted.”

“I thought it was organic.”

“It's all up on platforms, off the ground.” She shook her head sadly.

“It sounds kind of cool.”

“It is cool,” she snapped. “And good for them, but it doesn't help me any. I can't work at a place like that.”

“Well … are you sure?”

“Doyle, don't start that again.”

“Well, it's just, you've been exposed to a lot of chemicals, and you haven't had a reaction, not even to the decontamination in Dunston. The whole reason you went to the biodetox center with Cheryl was because there was a chance it could cure you. Don't you think it's possible maybe it worked?”