Chapter 21

“Right there!”

The shout, firm and authoritative, stopped both of us in our tracks. I recognized Hernandez’s voice, and wasn’t sure whether to rejoice or curse. She emerged from between two stacks of containers, pistol held firmly in a two-handed grip and leveled at the black-clad thug.

“New Lyons Police Department. You move, asshole, and I’ll put a bullet in your brain.” She looked past the man, watching me.

He hadn’t turned yet; I could see his eyes, and she couldn’t. Hernandez was concentrating on me, waiting for my cue on whether to pull the trigger. We needed the guy alive, but where was the sniper? I felt exposed, too exposed. I eased my pistol from its holster, leveling it at my would-be killer. “I’ve got him, Hernandez,” I said. “We need to find some cover. There may be a guy with a rifle out—”

I didn’t have time to finish the sentence.

There was no report. Just a sound like a hammer hitting a melon. I felt a wet, warm spray splash across my face and almost fired on reflex. Instead, I dove to the ground. I think I screamed for Hernandez, but everything was happening so fast that I couldn’t be sure. I hit the pavement and rolled, coming to a hard stop against one of the containers. Part of my mind, the soldier part, was still working, processing. Wherever the shooter was, he had a clear shot down the alleyway, which meant that he was likely at one end or the other of the “street” created by the stacked containers.

I low-crawled backward as fast as I could, keeping my body tight to the metal and feeling my way with my feet. When I found a break in the containers, I risked a half crouch and hurled myself around the corner. It hadn’t taken long, maybe five seconds, maybe ten. Long enough for a competent shooter to have gotten off at least one more round. “Hernandez?” I shouted. Stealth was out the window anyway. “You hit?”

“Fuck! No!” came the angry reply. “Whoever pulled the trigger shot the perp. He’s dead.”

Shit. So much for getting answers from him. “He wasn’t alone,” I called back. “I dropped two more. One’s cuffed. The other should still be out.”

“Great. Now how do we get to them without getting shot?” A pause. “My screen doesn’t seem to be working.”

“Mine, either.” We couldn’t stay where we were. The shooter knew our location and if I were him, I’d be on the move already, trying to find a better angle to take one, or both, of us out. “We have to move. I’m coming to you.”

I didn’t wait for her to object, but put my words to action. I wasn’t, however, stupid enough to run right back out into the lane where my would-be assassin had himself been assassinated. Instead, I sprinted around the other side of the containers, my shoulder brushing the wall as I ran. I didn’t know exactly where Hernandez had taken cover, but I had a general idea, and I didn’t make any effort to be quiet. If the sniper wanted to get close enough where he could hear me running, then he’d be close enough for me to do something about.

“Campbell?” the hiss came from off to my left, and I turned down a narrow alley between two stacks.

“Here,” I said.

“This way.” It was a woman’s voice, but distorted by a strained whisper.

I had one fleeting what-if moment. What if that wasn’t Hernandez? What if the shooter was a woman who, in my agitated state, just sounded a little bit like Hernandez? Hell, what if Hernandez was somehow in on it all? I squashed that thought. She was a friend, and she hadn’t hesitated to help, even once she knew the truth.

I turned another corner, and there she was, crouched with her back pressed against a red shipping crate and her service weapon grasped in both hands. The barrel came up, just a bit, as I came into view, but then she recognized me and let it drop down. “You’ve got us in some serious shit, hermano,” she growled.

“Yeah, yeah,” I grunted. “Mea culpa. Can we maybe save that for a time when we’re not getting shot at?”

She chuckled at that. Actually chuckled. Pinned down by sniper fire—or at least the threat of it, operating without backup, a dead body on our hands, and very shaky ground from a legal standpoint, and she chuckled. Hernandez was a bona fide badass. “All right, Campbell,” she agreed. “But what do we do now?”

I shrugged, putting my back against the wall next to hers and sliding down in a crouch. She was keeping her eyes to the left, scanning the tops of the containers, watching for any kind of movement. I did the same, keeping mine to the right. Unless the bastard managed to come up on the container behind us, we had at least a chance of seeing him moving around. “Well, I was going to head out to sea and swim for it. But that was before I realized I had a real chance at interrogating one of these bastards.”

“How many are there?”

“At least four. The one you saw. Two more that I made go night-night. And the shooter.”

The reminder of the one she saw seemed to shake her for a moment. “Why would they gun down their own man?”

“We had him,” I replied. “Dead to rights. He wasn’t going to get away. I guess the shooter didn’t want anyone telling tales.”

“Then why shoot him? Why not us?”

I thought about that for a moment. “He’s smart. He knew he’d only get one good shot. Maybe he kills me. Maybe you. But the other one could still get away. And maybe keep the bad guy collared while they did it. This way, he guaranteed we wouldn’t get a chance to question him.”

“Shit. You know what that means, hermano? The two you took down...” She trailed off.

I thought a moment and then cursed. “They’re probably gone or dead already. Fuck. But I have to be sure. If there’s even a chance that we can talk to one of them...”

“OK. You’re the former supersoldier. This shit’s way out of the norm for G&G. You lead the way. And if you get me shot, so help me God, Campbell, I’m going to be pissed.”

Badass.

We moved quickly, keeping low and staying in cover. When we had to leave the relative safety of our positions pressed up against the container walls, we did so at a sprint. No sparking walls or powdering concrete indicated a near miss from an observant sniper as we made our way through the steel maze. I wasn’t entirely sure where my encounters with the goons had taken place—in the dark, with adrenaline pumping, and running for my life it was hard to be all that observant as to exactly which random turns I had taken. But, after a number of false starts, we made our way back to where I’d taken down the second guy.

There was nothing to be seen. A smear of drying blood where the bad guy’s skull had met the steel wall of the container. A few more crimson splashes on the concrete, barely distinguishable in the darkness. That was it.

“Shit,” I muttered.

“At least we didn’t find a corpse,” Hernandez quipped.

“We might have been able to get some information from a corpse.”

“Yeah. But not without some serious investigation from Internal Affairs. I don’t think we want that.”

She had a point. The dead guy lying somewhere amid the maze had a bullet in his head—what was left of it, but that bullet hadn’t come from a cop’s gun. Bad-guy-on-bad-guy action wasn’t likely to get me in any trouble, as long as I could come up with a reason for being here in the first place. Something better than “So, this synthetic was killed....”

I grunted. “Let’s go find the other guy. I cuffed that bastard to a crate. He’s not getting away so easily.”

We kept in cover, but I had the growing impression that it wasn’t necessary. My instincts told me that the shooter was gone. One bad guy dead. One disabled but missing. One shooter gone. And one that wouldn’t get away easily.

“It definitely wasn’t easy,” Hernandez said, looking down at the pool of blood.

My cuffs were still there. One ring was closed around a metal bar on the container. The other was empty, hanging from its short length of chain. Empty, but still closed. A puddle of slowly congealing blood pooled beneath it and a spray of lines and droplets ran down the side of the container.

“Christ,” I whispered. “He cut off his fucking hand.”

“And then took it with him,” Hernandez added, her eyes sweeping the ground around the container. “That doesn’t sound like ordinary corporate thugs or mercenaries, Campbell. I can understand—maybe—taking out the guy we had the drop on to prevent us from getting any information, but this?”

She had a point. The shooter had already demonstrated his willingness to kill his own men. Taking the shot would have cost the gunman only a few seconds, and left him plenty of time to make a clean escape. But coming down here, finding the cuffed man, and freeing him? That spoke of a level of confidence and discipline that few could boast. It also hinted at a pragmatism—eliminate the unrecoverable asset and rescue the recoverable at any cost—that sent a cold shiver rolling down my spine. We hadn’t even heard any screams—and we would have, unless they had timed things so perfectly that the crash of the cranes would cover them.

“What now?” Hernandez asked.

She wasn’t talking about how to get out of the maze alive—not anymore. She must have sensed, just as I had, that the danger was past. We could walk back to her cruiser and be on our merry way, none the wiser, but significantly less dead than our adversaries had hoped.

But that didn’t account for the body with a mostly missing head lying on the concrete in the midst of the container stacks. “We have to call it in,” I said with a sigh.

Hernandez nodded. Neither of us wanted to call it in, but we weren’t spoiled for choice. Even if Hernandez was willing to walk away—and I wasn’t sure either of us could do that—we didn’t have that luxury. There might not have been cameras among the electromagnetic wasteland inside the dockyards, but we went through the main gate. No one would buy the notion that we just happened upon a murder victim in the midst of some other kind of investigation.

Which meant that it was going to be a long night of questions and explaining. The captain was going to want to know why a Guns and Gangs detective and a Homicide detective were working together in the first place. If she found out that we were investigating the death of a synthetic, she’d blow a gasket. And probably suspend me. And possibly Hernandez as well. I didn’t want to go down that path.

Some part of me—some dark part that I was trying hard to suppress—knew that my time on the NLPD was coming to a close. But I needed the authority the badge granted me to keep going on my investigation. Without that stamp of legitimacy, I worried that the scant leads I’d managed to wrap my fingers around so far would slip through my desperate grasp, dry up, and blow away. But what about Hernandez? Would she agree to get our stories straight before calling it in?

“So,” I asked, trying to hedge my way around the issue, “what’s our play?”

She was still looking at the handcuffs. She was quiet for a moment; then, as if making a decision, she reached out and pressed her thumb to the release pad on the cuffs. They clicked open, and she tossed them to me. “You may want to throw those in the ocean, hermano,” she said. “As for our play, we tell the truth.” I felt a sinking in my stomach, until an evil little grin split her face. “To a point.”

“And what point is that?” I asked, trying to keep the edge of nervousness from my voice.

“To the point that doesn’t get us kicked off the job.” She turned and started walking back toward the landward side of the container stacks. She wasn’t moving in the sprinting half crouch we used before. But she was staying close to the metal walls. We were fairly sure the shooter was gone, but there was no need to be too careless, after all. “We tell the brass we were reviewing footage from Manny’s shop, looking for new G&G contacts. I do that from time to time anyway. Suit guy came up and looked pretty suspicious—which he did. So I went down to investigate, see if maybe Manny was branching out to new customers, or if we had tumbled onto a gang lawyer or accountant. Those are always good for a bunch of arrests, since they think they’re too smart to get caught and don’t ever want their lily-white asses to see the inside of a prison cell. That lead took me here, and the guy at Translantic told us to meet him here. But all we found was a body.”

It was a good story. Almost too good. There were always rumors about the people on Guns and Gangs, and how their version of the law was just a little different than that of other cops. But now was not the time to start second-guessing Hernandez. Her story might satisfy the brass, except for one little detail. “And why am I here?” I asked.

“Because you pussies in Homicide never get to do any real work anymore. You were bored and lonely and wanted something to do. So I let you tag along.” She shot another evil grin over her shoulder.

It was going to be a long night.