Grip moved quickly through the shanties and was soon disoriented; the drums, the smells, the strange sameness of these little alleys. He hated this fucking place and it didn’t help that Ole Koss was in here somewhere along with three edgy cops with guns—Westermann, Morphy, and a single beat cop.
Grip held his gun pointed forward and kept his left shoulder to the shanty walls as he hurried along. The goddamn drums! He felt eyes on him from the darkness behind open doors.
He heard footsteps and grunts down a perpendicular alley and tightened his finger on the trigger. He spun around the corner, ready to fire, but found a kid with a rope dragging a resisting goat. Grip managed a nod at the kid, but his nerves were through the roof.
Up ahead, in a blur, he saw someone, a Caucasian, cross on a perpendicular alley. Grip closed his eyes, counted to three, and took off after him.
Westermann had branched off to the left, away from the river, while Grip had gone right and Morphy and the uniform had headed straight in and then split.
Westermann tried to concentrate, address the real danger of the situation, but exhaustion, fear, the impact of the ceremony in the Square … they overwhelmed him. He moved in a daze, his eyes doing slow sweeps of the alley before him, his gun out but pressed against his thigh. The drums played with his perceptions, made his legs weak. He heard voices from the shacks, but they were either women’s or had that Caribbean patois.
Jimmy Symmes walking away with Ole Koss.
Klasnic lying dead in a pool of blood.
Old women speaking in tongues, hands shaking.
He crept through the alleys, trying to get a hold on the situation, but the drums seemed to fracture his thoughts. His breathing went shallow. He edged up to another intersection, turned to peek around the corner, and felt the barrel of a gun against his forehead.
“I could hear you coming a mile away, Lieut.” Morphy was almost apologetic as he forced Westermann back into the alley he had just left.
“Larry, this isn’t the time—”
Morphy’s temper exploded from nowhere. “Shut the fuck up and drop your gun.”
Westermann knelt, placed his gun gently on the ground. His hands shook.
Morphy put his lips to Westermann’s ear, whispering. “The past few days, I wake up, I ask myself if today’s the day that I kill the lieut. Every day the answer is no. But one day, the answer won’t be no, and I won’t have to ask the question anymore.”
Westermann nodded, trying to pull away from where the barrel pressed into his forehead.
“You dropped off the edge,” Morphy said.
“I know.”
Morphy pulled the gun back and walked away, heading left down an alley. Westermann stood with his eyes closed, shaking, until he remembered why he was there in the first place, picked up his gun with his still-shaking hands, and walked unsteadily forward.