Ghost Zeb is getting to be something of a fixture in my head.
You’re like my spooky sidekick.
Screw you.
Charming. I need to get myself an actual live friend that I can leave in another room.
Anyway, the transport thing is covered. There are city-bike rails all over town, part of the mayor’s A Better, Cleaner Cloisters platform, along with dogshit-bag dispensers and zero tolerance for wino shacks.
I hurry outside leaving the turkey unexplored and swipe my Visa in the bike rack. Evening traffic the way it is in every town from here to Atlantic City, I shouldn’t have to break a sweat keeping up with Faber. He might have a problem keeping up with me, if he ever decided to do that. A big part of me is hoping he will. That would make things nice and simple, law of the jungle.
I’m still tucking my pants into my socks when I notice that Deacon has pulled a lazy U-turn. The blues are on Faber’s tail too.
We got a great big convoy, sings Ghost Zeb.
I nod, swinging my leg over the bar. Always liked that song. Appropriate, too.
Riding a bike didn’t used to be this dangerous. I almost get flattened three times crossing town to the strip. Three times! I’ve led patrols through hot zones with less aggravation than this. Eventually some redneck pick-up Jim Bob forces me to actually dismount and pound his hood to make him keep his distance.
Lucky the blues are focused on Faber’s car or they might have spotted my antics. As it is, they pull around the corner on to Cypress with barely a blink of the brake light.
I give Jim Bob my best stone-cold stare and pedal after them.
Not easy looking tough on a pushbike, sympathises Ghost Zeb.
He’s got that right.
When Faber pulls over, I brake and ditch the city-bike behind a debris mountain heaped against a derelict two-storey that once housed a Chinese restaurant, judging by the smell of the trash.
The Lotus Blossom. Remember those spring rolls?
Yeah. I got it now. They closed that place?
What do you think?
Ghost Zeb is getting a little strident. It’s like I’m giving myself a pass to be a lunatic.
I climb on to the knoll, which stinks of prawn crackers, and check the street with an old Vietnam-era Starlight scope I bought in a Hell’s Kitchen pawn shop.
Still works okay in spite of a few years in the bag. It’s pretty dark already, but the scope amplifies the streetlight a couple of thousand times and gives me a good view of the bar Faber is striding towards. It’s an upscale joint called The Brass Ring. A place I probably would never make it past the door, unless I decided that I really wanted to go in. Faber flings his keys at some poor schmuck doorman and bulls straight past. I know how the schmuck feels.
Goran and Deacon back into an alley and quickly settle into stakeout positions. Slouching down, cracking open the windows. Two minutes later, smoke curls from both sides. Give it another fifteen and Deacon will make a coffee run.
Their plan is as dumb as yours, Ghost Zeb points out. What happens now? We sit here wasting time?
You’re not here. I’m not arguing with you.
Real mature.
I whistle a few bars to distract him.
What is that song?
Come on. What are we doing right now?
Ghost Zeb’s chuckle whines through his nose, my mind displaying its attention to detail.
Elvis Costello. ‘Watching the Detectives’. Very good.
And that keeps him quiet for a while.
The blues call it stakeout and the army call it reconnaissance but it amounts to the same thing. Waiting and watching.
Two hours later and Faber is still in the club, and I can’t seem to find a position on the spicy mound that doesn’t involve a rock or root poking my groin.
Maybe you like having a root stuck in your groin.
I don’t dignify this with a reply.
Goran and Deacon are feeling the strain. The junior detective is out of the car stomping her feet against the cold and mouthing off. Goran wears a put-upon-mommy expression, riding out the tantrum.
With the Starlight I can almost read lips, and what I can’t make out, I make up.
Come on, Josie. Let me go in there, see who Faber is talking to.
No. We do this right. Hang back, make a case.
Fuck that. This is our man. You see how he freaked out? Started threatening us and shit.
We hang back, Detective.
Something along those lines.
Or maybe not.
The seriousness of the situation escalates suddenly and alarmingly. Deacon turns her back to her superior, shoulders hunched, agitated cigarette hand tracing jet trails in the air.
Jet trails? Not bad for a doorman.
There is no time for a back-and-forth with Ghost Zeb. Goran has slipped quietly from the passenger seat and drawn a pistol from her ankle holster. A throwdown. Shit.
I could be wrong. Maybe I’m misreading the situation.
Goran pulls a silencer from her handbag and casually twists it on to the barrel, all the time her lips moving, keeping the conversation smooth, no warning signs.
Warning signs or not, Deacon turns around and finds herself down a deserted alley in a bad part of town with the black eye of a silencer staring unblinkingly at her.
I’m not misreading anything. Detective Goran is about to execute her partner.
Pack up and go, says Zeb seriously.
This is the best advice of my life and I know it, but I’ve got this whole protection thing pulling at my psyche.
Go, now.
Cops shooting cops. There’s no way to get in the middle of that sandwich and not get bitten. Ultimately, though, I’m not an animal, so what choice do I have but to help Detective Deacon.
The backpack hasn’t been out of the wall in years. It was never supposed to be in that building for so long. Neither was I. Nothing is going to work. How could anything work? Not a spray of oil on the guns, not a rub of a rag for the bullets. The walls in my apartment are like sponges.
Through the sights, I see Deacon going through the stages. First her eyebrows knit in confusion.
What the hell are you doing?
Then realisation drags at her features like thirty years of hard living. This is followed by denial, and finally bravado.
Deacon is presenting her chest to Goran now, thumping it with a fist, cigarette sparks flying. I actually hear her challenge from across the street.
‘Come on, bitch, shoot me!’
It doesn’t sound real. It’s what a Hollywood cop might say.
All the time, I’m tugging on a pair of disposable gloves from a box in the bag, then searching for my rifle, which of course is in pieces. We were trained in this kind of thing in the army: assembling your weapon blindfolded, in the rain, some guy shooting blanks by your ear, getting pissed on by a group of privates. Okay, maybe not that last bit, but regardless I was always useless at the blindfold assembly thing. Generally it took me about an hour and I ended up with a piece of modem art that would look stunning with the right lighting, but couldn’t shoot worth a damn.
I spit a string of swear words and lay down the scope. Across the street, Goran is delivering a lecture before she pulls the trigger. Thank God for grandstanding killers. Back home, my squad were once brought in to hunt for an IRA kidnap squad who had crossed the border. We only caught them because they delayed a scheduled execution so they could film it from a couple of angles. Everyone wants their moment.
Now that I have two eyes on the job, the Custom Sharps
hooter seems to assemble itself, jumping out of the Velcro straps. The collapsible stock bolts on behind the trigger guard. The stainless-steel barrel screws in smoothly. Feels a little damp. Could be I’m imagining it.
I tear open a box of shells with my teeth and thumb one into the breech. Safety off, Starlight snapped into its bracket. The smell of soy sauce is really putting me off.
Time for one shot, maybe. Not a moment for adjustments or to figure consequences.
Goran is still talking, thank Christ. Maybe she’s warning Deacon; maybe there’s no need to shoot.
The younger detective sinks to her knees in the filth of the alley, tears streaming down her face.
Final stage, acceptance.
That’s a helluva warning.
Goran circles behind her partner, never allowing the barrel to droop. No room for Deacon to make her move. To her credit, she tries anyway, and gets a pistol-whipping for her trouble.
Goran is one cold customer. I had these two figured all wrong.
Deacon’s head nods; maybe she’s praying, or maybe she’s reacting to the gun barrel pressed to the crown of her skull.
Through the eerie glow of the Starlight, I see that Goran’s face is almost blank except for a little shadow of pain, like she’s lost her keys. The dirty detective cocks her revolver.
I pull my trigger . . .
. . . And surprise the hell out of myself by actually hitting what I was aiming for. Up high, right shoulder. Goran spins like a gyroscope and pitches face down into a bum-shack. Looks like the mayor missed one.
Detective Goran will live, but she won’t be aiming any guns with that arm for a while.
I am midway through breaking down my rifle and rehearsing a smug little Clint Eastwood movie reference for Ghost Zeb when Deacon realises that she hasn’t been shot. And after a little white-hot pain and a bout of coughing that would pull a couple of lungs free from their moorings, Goran is alive enough to realise that she is not dead.
Nice move, idiota, says GZ. Now we got a shootout situation.
Idiota. One of four Spanish words Zeb bandies about. The second is puta, the third is amigo and finally there’s gringo, which he loves to throw at me even though Zeb himself has a complexion like cottage cheese dropped on to a pavement from a tall building.