Delta Stevens 1: Taken by Storm (4 page)

“Miles?”

Looking at Delta, Miles grinned. “Not yet. I’m on to something big. Really big. I don’t have all of the pieces yet, so it would be too early to unfold it all to you. I have bits and pieces that are just now starting to come together. I want to tell you Del, and I will. As soon as I know what we’re up against. ”

Delta suddenly jerked the car into a vacant parking lot and turned on him. “You’ve never kept a secret from me. Why now? Is it so dangerous that you would keep it from me? Or is it something else? Are you doing something you shouldn’t be?”

Miles reached out and took one of Delta’s hands. “I swear, that’s not it. Right now, I’m just collecting pieces of a puzzle. I’m not about to jeopardize you or anyone else until I’m sure of what I have.”

“What puzzle? What are you doing that is keeping you out on the streets at all hours of the night? Tell me. Give me something I can handle, but don’t lock me out. Are you working undercover? Is that it?”

Miles shook his head. “Not officially. Look, Del, I really want to tell you—”

“Then do!”

“I can’t. It’s too soon to tell.”

“I take it that woman is a part of it?” Delta’s voice was heavy on the word “woman.”

“You sound jealous,” Miles responded, grinning.

“Maybe I am. You trust a hooker for God knows what, and you won’t let your own partner in on it? Come on, Miles, how would you feel?”

“If you asked me to trust you Del, then that’s what I’d do. I would know that no matter what you were doing, you had my safety first and foremost in mind because you care so much.”

Delta turned her face away. She hated when he turned the tables and was right.

“Trust me.”

Delta raised her face and looked hard into his steel blue eyes. “Would I really be in any danger if I knew what it was you were up to?”

Miles nodded. “Possibly. I’m not going to take that chance.”

For a moment, the two officers locked eyes as they had done so often in the past when they fought to understand each other. Delta wanted to pry it out of him, but respected him too much to push him into a corner.

“Trust me?”

Delta acquiesced. “Of course. That goes without saying. When you’re ready to tell me, I’ll be ready to listen.” Delta returned her hands to the steering wheel and dropped the gear into drive.

As she pulled out of the parking lot, Delta wondered how soon it would be before Williams put Miles on the desk.

Finishing off Val’s chili, Delta leaned back in the booth and turned her radio up. Nothing could warm her in the frosty winters like Val’s homemade chili.

“Did you see L.A. today?” Miles asked, pushing his burger away. “They’re getting better. They might even make the playoffs.”

Delta smiled. He was setting her up for this one. “Maybe a woman can own and run a professional football team afterall?”

Miles groaned. “Not that again. Come on Del, she got it by default.”

“Yeah, it was default of her husband to die on her Miles, but you can’t take what she’s accomplished away because of how she got there. She’s taken that team farther than he ever did.” Delta waited for Miles to parley that into his own rhetorical assault, but instead, he was peering out the window watching a blue van coast by.

“What is it?”

“That’s the third time that van has made a pass at this place.”

“Got a number?”

Miles squinted. His night vision wasn’t the greatest. “Yeah. Zebra Adam Peter, 914.”

Delta hastily scratched it out on a napkin and called the number into dispatch. “Think they’re casing?”

Miles shrugged. “Who knows? Let’s wait for dispatch before leaving without dessert. It may be nothing.”

Delta waited for the radio to crackle. Dispatch announced that the owner of the vehicle had no outstanding warrants, and that the vehicle registration appeared clean. Nothing out of the ordinary, yet Delta’s stomach twitched as the van made its fourth swing by the restaurant.

“That’s it,” Miles grunted, tossing his napkin on the cable. “Let’s roll.”

Jumping into the passenger side, Delta looked around the dark and nearly deserted streets. Many of the cops in the department hated their beat because of the macabre darkness sweeping through the many alleys and tiny one way streets. But, not Delta. She loved it. There was something surrealistic about their beat. The night seemed darker and the cold, colder than other areas in the city, yet the night people who owned the city when the streets got dark, seemed to glow like the neon signs. They were the alter egos of the businessmen and women who tromped up and down the sidewalks during the day. And although the vampires of the night weren’t wearing business suits and skirts, their safety was every bit as important to Delta as the businessmen and women’s was to Officer Cornelius of the day shift.

“Where did it go?”

“South on East 14th, I think.” Pushing the pedal to the floor, Miles burned out of the parking lot and down East 14th.

“This is S1012,” Delta barked, her palms began sweating as she gripped the mike. Instinctively, her foot reached to the button on the floorboards and pressed it to release the shotgun. A slight click could be heard as the sturdy iron gate snapped open. Delta did not take the gun out, but rested in the fact that it was ready to go. “Vehicle is heading east on 14th past Johnson. Request backup unit between Poe and Woolf Street.”

“S1012, is vehicle in sight?” came another voice from the radio.

Delta looked around. She felt the beating of her heart in her chest and temples. This adrenaline rush, this collaged moment dangling precariously between fact and fiction, was what so many cops lived for. It was the ten minutes of pants-shitting fear that made the other seven hours and fifty minutes worth doing. In that ten minutes, one experienced emotions that ran the gamut from fear of losing one’s life to fear that they might not get there in time. It was the reason they loved their job. But even reason warned her that a suspicious vehicle was as dangerous to them as an armed man.

“Negative,” Delta responded, just before looking in her rearview mirror. 10-22. Suspect vehicle is now behind us.”

Miles’s eyes grew wide as he checked his own mirror. “I’ll be damned.”

“S1012, 10-9. Did you say behind you?”

Miles and Delta exchanged curious glances. “10-4.”

As the radio came to life with various communications, Delta turned uneasily to Miles, who had slowed down considerably.

“I don’t like it,” Delta said, eyeing the van. “Wait for backup.”

Miles shook his head. “Come on, Del. They obviously don’t think we suspect them of anything or they wouldn’t be behind us. Relax.”

Before Delta could respond, the van made a quick Uturn and dashed down the street away from them.

Instantly, Miles jammed his foot on the accelerator, sending the patrol car rocketing forward and Delta back into her headrest. In the same instant, he turned the car to a perfect 180 degree turn and was quickly upon the speeding vehicle.

“This is S1012. Suspect vehicle is now heading west. Request backup.”

The van made a sudden turn down Wilde Street. She did not like the way the people in the van appeared to be calling all the shots.

Flicking on the lamps and siren, Delta and Miles both reached for the spotlights on either side of the patrol car. Delta felt the ball of adrenaline gnawing on her stomach. Although she felt it was her job to protect the people of the night, she often found that she was protecting them from themselves. The city at night was much like a foaming ocean; turn your back to it, and it would devour you.

“Don’t let him get to the freeway!” Delta shouted as they pulled up behind the van. Picking up the mike, she radioed dispatch of their location.

Positioning the spotlight on the two back doors of the van, Delta suddenly remembered her Sergeant in the Academy.

“Vans are the worst. They can see you, but you can’t see them. They have the definite upper hand all the way. If the back door starts to open, you’re shit outta luck if they’re packing. That’s their advantage. They know we’re loaded, but we have to wait to see the weapon before blowing their fucking heads off. So be extremely cautious when pulling vans over. If you ever doubt your position of safety, stay in the car until every fucking advantage is yours. Whatever you do, don’t get caught with your pants down.”

Since that talk, Delta hated pulling over vans, hated knowing that they had the upper hand, and hated feeling vulnerable the moment she stepped away from the vehicle.

Watching the van slowly pull over, she turned to Miles and forced a grin. “

I know,” he said, smiling back at her. “You hate vans. I’ll take the lead.”

Delta felt a pull in her stomach. The Sergeant’s words echoed in her mind. “Let’s wait for backup.”

“Why?” Miles asked, reaching over and flipping off the siren and turning on the loud speaker. “They pulled over, didn’t they? Come on, Del, this is the most excitement we’ve had all night.”

Delta shifted her gaze to the van. It was very still and quiet outside and of the three street lamps towering over the road, only one was lit and it cast only a dim pallor on the concrete below it. To either side of them were old warehouses and a run-down railroad depot. Nothing outside moved. It was an eerie silence that lingered on her mind like rotten deviled egg lingered in the air.

“Besides, backup’ll be here in a jiff. Relax.” Without waiting for her indecision to transform, Miles opened his door, picked up the mike, and called to the driver.

“Put both hands out of the window so I can see them.”

Delta opened her door and watched carefully as the passenger also put two slender arms out the window. Since Miles had angled the car on them so that their right headlight was aiming at the middle of the van, Delta could not see the driver’s side of the van. This did nothing to ease the growing apprehension inside her.

“Where in the hell is that back-up?” she thought angrily. For a second, she reached for the shotgun, but decided not to when the arms on her side started to move.

“Now reach your right hand out and open the door from the outside.” Miles's voice crashed through the silence like thunder. Maybe that’s what bothered her so. It was a silence stiller than dawn. Why weren’t these people saying anything? Usually people responded when Miles or she gave simple orders. Most people were scared that the cops would accidentally shoot them.

This strange quiet was odd. The night was so silent, Delta heard the slow click of the driver’s door as it opened.

“Hey man, couldya turn those lights down? You’re blindin’ me already.” Delta heard the deep, resounding voice of the driver and knew it was a male. The passenger on her side did not move again.

“Let’s just ID these punks and run ’em through,” Miles said out of the corner of his mouth, not taking his eyes off the driver.

Delta nodded, still unmoving from behind her door. “Be careful.“

She must have said those two words to Miles at least a thousand times since they became partners. It amused her in a strange sort of way, because that was exactly what her mother had always said to her as she headed off for school. And now, as a grown woman of twenty-eight, she echoed the same sentiments every time Miles left her side. It had become their standard trademark; one many of their colleagues teased them about often.

Watching Miles maneuver around his door and toward the front of the police car, the bright beam from the spotlight shone across his broad shoulders. The light seemed to come alive as he entered it, and for a split second, appeared as an intense, dreamlike aura around his body.

In that fraction of a second, as the two back doors of the van loudly burst open, the world suddenly slowed to a sickening pace. Delta reached for the shotgun lazily reclining against the seat, but it was eternity before her fingers finally reached the cold metal barrel.

Grasping the shotgun, Delta yanked it to her, but in her gut she knew it was too late. She knew, by the crashing silence and too-still surroundings that the night had turned on them. As the doors noisily flew open, the gleaming barrel of a shotgun kicked toward the sky as the luminous orange blast reverberated through the air like the sound of a crashing avalanche. The flash from the barrel made the spotlights appear as two twenty watt bulbs, so bright and firey was the explosion. As the reel of film in life’s camera ever so slowly clicked each frame away, Delta heard her own scream of pain and horror echo through the night as Miles’s body was lifted like a broken marionette dangling by invisible guide wires.

In the harrowing moment that followed, his body was suspended for an instant, still captured by the aura of the spotlights, before being violently slammed to the cold pavement below.

“Miles!“ Delta screamed, releasing the shotgun barrel she just managed to get a grip on and pulling out her own service revolver from its snug holster. By then, the van’s doors had closed, and it was screeching out of the cover of the lights and down Wilde Street into the enveloping darkness.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Delta cried, jamming her revolver back in the holster as she scrambled around the front of the car. “Oh God, please, no, please.”