Delta Ghost (6 page)

The woman – he thought he’d caught her partner calling her
Harmony
, but that couldn’t be right; what kind of a name was that? – was profoundly threatening. She was small and lean and quick, and quite fanciable with her cornrows and her fine-boned features, but her eyes were mercurial. They’d switch from soft and friendly to burning, intense, like the flick of a cigarette lighter. And she really hadn’t liked Clune, he decided.
Really
hadn’t liked him. Her gaze back there in the office had been contemptuous throughout, as if he was something they’d dredged out of a sewer.

But the man, Venn... he was, if anything, more frightening. He was the more amiable, less obviously hostile of the pair. A bear of a man, tall and broad and with a shaved head and light scattering of stubble resembling a goatee, he should have exuded menace, but didn’t, oddly. Yet it was this very contrast, this fearsome appearance coupled with a mildness, almost gentleness, of nature, that made him deeply unsettling.

Anyway, Clune was clear of them. He’d persuaded them that he was of no use to them, just some idiot of a Brit who was pissing away his time in the United States before he knuckled down and got a proper job.

Now, he had other things to worry about.

Clune decided to get himself a new phone. He’d tried doing without one for the last 24 hours, and he felt utterly naked without that comforting heft in his hand, almost as though he’d been stripped of his skin. Even if he couldn’t access the internet, even if he’d lost all of his contacts, a phone gave him
options
.

He walked the streets, eyeing up the computer and phone shops and the street vendors. The woman copper, Harmony, had given Clune fifty dollars, which he didn’t think was especially generous. No doubt she and Venn expected him to eke it out over a few days, while he rearranged his return flight to Britain and got out of town.

Well, Clune had other plans. The trouble was, fifty dollars wasn’t going to get him a whole lot of phone.

He turned down a tree-lined sidestreet along which a market had been set up, and pushed his way through the crowds. He approached a canopied kiosk advertising phones. The vendor was Middle Eastern and greeted Clune cheerily.

“Step right up, sir! How may I help you?”

Venn explained what he was looking for. A smartphone with no contract, but rather a pay-as-you-go plan, for under fifty bucks.

The guy’s hearty laughter followed Clune as he stalked away up the street.

The next vendor was a sinister-looking skinhead with a spider’s web tattooed around one eye. When he informed Clune he couldn’t help him, Clune murmured conspiratorially, “Got any that have fallen off the back of a truck?”

“What?”

Damn.
The English idiom didn’t translate.

“Have you got any stolen ones you’re selling cheaply?” tried Clune.

“Fuck off.” The skinhead reached for a baseball bat.

Clune passed along the rows of stalls and kiosks, the heady aromas of assorted international foods flooding his mouth and causing his belly to growl. When another phone outlet presented itself, he approached it without much hope. The man beneath the canopy was older, sixty or so, and he regarded Clune glumly.

Clune repeated his request.

Wordlessly, the man rummaged in a box at his feet and came up with a handset, which he handed over. It was a clunky Samsung, a few years old, scuffed at the corners and with a cracked screen.

“You’re joking, right?” said Clune.

“Works,” said the man. “Try.”

Clune switched it on, watched the display appear sluggishly on the screen. He poked about. Yes, it was functional.

“Thirty,” said the man, his shoulders drooping as though two syllables were about as much as he could manage.

Clune handed over the cash, holding the phone up and away from him to try and improve the signal.

The phone exploded in a million fragments, wrenching his hand as it blew apart, and for a crazy moment Clune thought the old man was a practical joker.

Then the crash of the shot assaulted his ears, and the screaming began, and Clune was propelled forward into the front of the kiosk as the crowd went berserk.

V
enn saw the tails peel away from the crowd and set off after the kid fifty yards ahead.

They’d split up, Venn and Harmony, because the kid would be more likely to notice them if they were together. Harmony took the east side of Ninth, Venn the west, directly behind Clune. The kid was twitchy and nervous, casting his gaze about, but he was no trained operative and tailing him was easy.

The kid turned sharply and Venn increased his stride to keep up. He saw Clune’s head bobbing through the throng of the market, watched him stop at a stall, negotiate, move on. Since he’d slowed, Venn felt confident hanging back a little.

That was when Venn noticed the two men. Both Hispanic, both intense and hard-looking, moving with a prowling stealth that marked them out as fighters. Killers, maybe.

Quickly Venn looked around and behind him. He couldn’t see Harmony, and assumed she’d gone on up Ninth and was going to cut down a parallel street to the one the market was on and arrive ahead of the kid, boxing him unobtrusively. He debated calling or texting her, but he didn’t want to take his attention off the two men who were weaving and shouldering their way through the throng.

Venn picked up the pace, almost colliding with a couple of browsers and earning muttered rebukes. His height gave him a clear line of vision ahead. He saw the kid pause at another market stall, linger, check out something that might have been a phone.

The two men homed in. One pushed his cotton jacket aside, and at his hip Venn saw the black curve of a pistol grip.

Venn grabbed the shoulder of the person in front of him and heaved her aside, his right hand moving inside his jacket and drawing the Beretta from its holster as he yelled,
“Police.
Get
down.”

The man nearer him turned, his own gun coming up. He hadn’t fully extended his arm toward Venn before Venn fired.

The crash of the Beretta sent up a collective scream from the crowd like a flock of birds disturbed by a hunter’s shot. The gunman jerked backward, a red rose blooming in the centre of his white T-shirt, and collided with the second man, who also had a handgun drawn. The second man’s gun went off, the shot singing wild, and beyond him Clune yelped.

He’s hit, the kid’s hit,
was Venn’s first thought as he charged forward at a crouch, the Beretta aimed squarely at the second man. His second thought was:
Civilians around me. Scores of them. In the crossfire.

The second guy recovered quickly and whirled. Venn dove and rolled.

Prone on the sidewalk, Venn took careful aim and shot the man in the leg, blowing his knee away in a bloody mist. The guy roared and tipped sideways, but his gun was still extended and seeking a target so Venn fired again, hitting him in the chest just like the first guy and putting a second shot through his throat.

Venn was up and running toward the stall and he saw the kid sprinting away down the street, seemingly unharmed. He was about to yell at him to stop when he realized the danger wasn’t over, as two more men converged on Clune from ahead of him, both with handguns drawn.

What happened next wasn’t clear to Venn at the time, though he pieced it together afterward.

The kid seemed to drop as though shot. He lay face down, his hands behind his head.

One of the men reached him and aimed his gun at Clune’s head in a two-handed grip.

The other man dropped to one knee and took a bead on Venn.

Venn fired, but his shot wasn’t good because the other guy opened fire at the same time and Venn had to dodge behind the stall. He emerged immediately and loosed off two shots. The man yelled as one of the bullets tore through the fabric of his shirt at the shoulder.

Venn took a few steps forward, took aim for the kill-shot.

A woman ran along the sidewalk, screaming, and the gunman grabbed at her and swung her across himself like she was a mannekin and jammed his gun against the side of her head and shouted, “Stay
back
. Stay the fuck
back
.”

Venn stopped, took aim at the man’s head.

To the right of the guy, his partner was dragging Clune to his feet.

Harmony
, Venn thought.
Where the hell are you?

The man with the gun to the woman’s head called, “I warn you, cop. Back down.”

Venn watched the other man haul Clune away, toward the cars parked along the street.

Behind and around him, he heard the first sirens. Over the man’s shoulder, he saw a figure loping stealthily from down the street.

Venn took what he considered an
executive decision
. Others would have called it a crazy risk.

He threw the Beretta aside. Raised his arms away from his body.

“You got me,” he said. “Now let the woman go.”

The man’s dark eyes flickered. He hugged the woman closer so that her hair obscured most of his face.

Venn started walking toward him.

“You deaf?” the man snarled. “I said to keep back.”

Venn spread his arms wider. “Why?”

In the distance, and off to the right, the other guy reached a car with Clune. He fumbled at the door handle with one hand.

The man with the woman said, “Because otherwise I shoot her. Then you.”

“Okay,” said Venn, not breaking his stride. He was ten yards away, and closing. “And then what? You become a cop killer. That’s like signing your own fast-track execution order. That cop behind you will riddle you so full of holes they’ll need to use putty to embalm you.” He nodded over the guy’s shoulder.

It was a classic trick. Most people didn’t fall for it entirely. There was often the moment of instinctive doubt, the quick glance over the shoulder.

This guy didn’t buy it at all.

Harmony hit him from behind so hard that Venn heard the crack from where he was. At the same time she seized his gun arm and wrenched it upward, in case his index finger twitched reflexively.

The man sagged to the ground. The woman he’d been holding hostage collapsed to her knees, gasping, mewling, her hands scrabbling at her face and at her hair.

Venn dove for his Beretta and broke into a run, not looking at Harmony or the man she’d taken down, sprinting across the street toward the car that was pulling away from the curb.

It was a Honda Accord sedan, and Venn took a running jump and vaulted onto its hood without breaking stride, feeling it lurch beneath his sneakers as he steadied himself and pointed the gun downward into the windshield and fired, deliberately avoiding the driver but aiming at a point to his right in order to freak him out. The windshield exploded in a sunburst of glass and the car slewed, but Venn gripped the roof and held the Beretta steady and aimed directly down at the driver’s head and yelled,
“Stop.”

The driver moved fast, slamming on the brakes. Venn felt his grasp on the roof slip as his feet slid beneath him and down the hood. He was face to face with the driver and he brought the gun up and across but it was too late because the guy had the muzzle of his own gun against Venn’s nose.

The man fired just as Venn reeled away, his back against the hood. The blast stung Venn’s cheek, the noise exploding into his ear. He rolled back immediately, and this time didn’t bother pointing the gun but instead rammed it blindly into the space he judged the driver’s face to be.

The barrel of the Beretta smashed past the man’s teeth and deep into his mouth. Venn heard it, heard the teeth buckle and splinter, and saw the bloodied lips around the gun’s muzzle. But what he also saw was the gaping hole of the man’s own gun, inches from Venn’s eye.

Venn pulled the trigger.

The interior of the car erupted in a burst of red and gray, wetness spattering Venn’s cheeks and forehead through the ruined windshield. Beneath the car the tires screamed on the tarmac, and Venn was thrown sideways, bouncing off the hood and onto the road.

He rose, the aftershock of the shots ringing in his ears so that he thought he’d never be able to hear normally again, and he felt the ground tilt and veer beneath his feet.

Venn moved round the stalled car to the passenger side. The door was open.

He gazed about, disoriented.

Behind the wheel of the Honda, the driver sat, headless.

There was no sign of the kid, Clune.

H
armony looked up at Venn as he approached. She recoiled.

“Jesus, Venn. You look like a goddamn zombie. Like that
Walking Dead
shit, man.”

He wiped his face with his hand, looked at his palm. Blood and other stuff was smeared across it.

“It’s not mine,” he said.

She’d cuffed the man on the ground. He was out for the count, poleaxed by the blow she’d dealt the back of his head. Like the others, he was Latino, Venn noticed. Puerto Rican, maybe, or Mexican.

“You get the British guy?” said Harmony.

“No. He’s gone.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah.”

Further down the street, the cops had arrived, and were shepherding the dazed and hysterical crowds away. Four uniforms jogged over. Before they could speak, Venn and Harmony produced their shields.

“What the hell happened?” said one cop.

“Attempted abduction,” Venn said, distractedly. “Three perps down, plus this asshole.” He pointed a toe at the man cuffed on the ground.

Venn gave the uniforms a brief account of events. Behind them, he saw more cars arrive, and a couple of plainclothes guys emerge.

He turned to Harmony. “We screwed up. The kid we were tailing is gone. My fault. And we have no idea who the hell these guys are.”

“We got one of them alive,” she said. “And I’m claiming the first crack at him.”

Venn was about to reply when his phone rang. He fished it out of his pocket with bloody fingers.

“Yeah.”

“Joe. You need to get your ass over here. Like, an hour ago.”

Venn closed his eyes.