The Magpye: Circus (21 page)

Jack Taylor didn't turn
around.

"Yes, Mr. King."

Owen White sat and waited. He'd
sweated suspects before in interview rooms just like this one, and
he knew the drill well. Metal chairs, chained to the floor, a metal
desk with enough scratches and grooves on it to be suspicious. One
door and bare walls except for the two way mirror that faced him.
Overhead, a sodium strip light buzzed and flickered, the sound of
dead flies haunting the light.

The medics had been and gone. A
splint on his leg, a patch and a bandage over the ragged, blood
encrusted hole where his eye used to be. Bandages around his ribs,
doing their best to hold everything in place, and a sling for one
arm. Pain killers, injections, antibiotics. Not a word spoken. Owen
White wondered how many other cops they'd patched up like this, and
how many suspects too. Silently, efficiently, they had turned him
from a jumble of human pieces in a torn and bloody suit to
something resembling a person, never asking what had happened,
never asking if he was OK, never asking anything at all.

Only in this city. Only in this
precinct.

And so Owen White had nothing
to do now but sit, wait, and feel the painkillers slowly turn his
body into a giant numb shell around him. He knew that everything
still hurt, hurt like hell, but for the moment the pain was held at
bay behind an invisible wall of narcotics. It didn't help. Whatever
part of his brain had the job of registering pain was telling him
that something very bad had happened to him, that things were very,
very broken, inside and out.

White knew that there would be
cops behind the two way mirror, looking in at him right now. He
stared with his one good eye and tried to fix a defiant look on his
face. A smashed and crippled cop stared back at him with something
that looked a lot like his own face.

Behind the two way mirror, Mick
Garrity bit down on a doughnut.

"How the hell did he get
here?"

"Cab," replied a fresh-faced
uniformed cop.

"Fuck me…"

"Driver complained like hell
about the blood, but White flashed his shield and the guy brought
him straight here."

"Why here, why not a
hospital?"

The uniformed cop shuffled
nervously.

"Spit it out Johnson," said
Garrity through the final mouthful of doughnut. The young cop
looked surprised that Garrity knew his name, but he shouldn't have
been. Garrity knew everyone's name, and usually much more than
that.

"He said he wanted to see you,
sir."

"Fuck…" said Garrity, and
picked up another doughnut from the box. When he bit down on it, a
globule of jam slithered out into the wiry stubble that sat on his
many chins. "Fuckity fuck fuck."

Swallowing the last of the
doughnut like a python gorging on a piglet, Garrity dusted sugar
off his sweaty shirt and straightened his tie before heading around
to the interview room door. There were others waiting, eager for a
peek at the show. Garrity was under no illusions that White had had
some supporters here. Not every cop was a dirty as the rest and
some of them were only dirty because they had to be. Had they hoped
that White would be their great redeemer, come to save them from
the likes of Garrity? Maybe. If they had, they hadn't let their
hopes spur them into action and that little shard of cowardice had
kept them alive. This was Cane King's city and this precinct house,
along with every other to the city's edge, was the exclusive
personal fiefdom of Mike Garrity. If anyone needed reminding of
that, Owen White would be that reminder now.

"Everyone out," he said, his
voice low and menacing. "This is between me and him. You want a
free show, go to a strip joint."

Garrity twisted the handle on
the door hard, and went in. From the corner of his beady eyes he
saw the cops creeping in behind the mirror as he closed the door.
There was no better way to get a cop to look than to tell him not
to, dirty or no.

Now all he had to do was give
them a show.

***

Owen White looked up.

"Garrity."

"What the fuck happened to you,
White?"

"Don't play games, Garrity. You know what happened to me.
You tipped off Cane, or maybe
he
told
you
to tip us off in the first place. Either way it was a
trap."

"I never said it was going to be easy, White. You go up
against Cane, it's
always
a
trap."

"You didn't say he'd have a
fucking army there."

Garrity bit his tongue. He
wanted to tell White that it hadn't been an army that been the
problem, it had been Jack Taylor, but that would mean admitting
that Jack Taylor was just as dangerous as everyone thought he was,
and maybe even more. Garrity thought White and his team were stupid
for coming to the city in the first place, but there was no denying
that at least some of them had been as hard as they come. Garrity
didn't need his guys thinking that there was a bigger dog in the
yard than him, especially a dog called Taylor.

"Low lives," said Garrity.
"Don't put your guy's problems on me. You go to fight, take
fighters."

"Like you?" asked White.

"Not every fight is face to
face, White. Sometimes you got to be the guy who waits around the
corner with the baseball bat in the dark. Sometimes, you've got to
be the guy who walks up to someone's door in the middle of the
night and puts a gun in his mouth before he's woken up. And you
know why? Because those are the fights you can win in this city.
Charging in there like Desert Storm? I'm amazed even one of you got
out."

White let out a painful lungful
of air. He wanted to stand up and tear Garrity to pieces for his
part in what had happened to his team, but he didn't have the
strength. Even if he had, was Garrity really the one to blame? He
was a convenient face, sure, and Owen White had punched a few of
those in his time, but Garrity wasn't the one at the heart of it
all. Neither was Cane King.

No, Owen White knew who was
really to blame for what had happened and was staring back at him
from the two way mirror.

White was smart enough to know
that he had been walking his team into a trap. He was smart enough
to know that a dirty cop like Garrity only thrived by never, ever,
biting the hand that fed him. No, no-one had tricked Owen White
into this. The truth was far simpler than that. The truth was that
White had known it was a trap and he hadn't cared. None of them
had. Even Rosa, who calculated the odds on everything, profiled
every person she met, had rolled the dice with him on this one.
They knew the odds, and they thought they could beat them. They'd
banked on Magpye, their little secret weapon, the man who did
impossible things. Impossible things like walk into one of Cane
King's operations and put cuffs on him, or a bullet in him,
whichever came easier.

"I tried to tell you," said
Garrity. His voice was soft, a tone White had never heard him use
before. No threats this time, no vitriol. No tugging of the heart
strings or calling him out. Mick Garrity was talking man to man,
cop to cop. "I tried to tell you what it would take for you to
survive here, and you didn't listen. You could have walked a line,
White. Cleaned up a little here, a little there, and turned a blind
eye when you needed to. Stopped the worst, let them have the rest.
You could have found a balance."

"A balance isn't justice."

"Of course it is. That's the
only
thing it is. You
think we're all dirty here and sure, we're none of us angels, but
that isn't the whole story. This city, it eats guys like you and
shits you out as something you don't even recognise in the mirror.
You can't be a white knight in this town."

White chuckled, then coughed
violently. Laughter, in his case, wasn't any kind of medicine.
"White Knight" - that had been his mother's pet name for him,
before she'd died. She'd been his rock and his moral compass. He'd
always wondered what he'd become without her. Now he knew.

In the mirror, Owen White saw someone that he didn't
recognise. He saw a cop who had gotten his friends killed. He saw a
cop who had thrown the rulebook out of the window for a shot at
revenge. He saw a cop who had gunned men down just because they
were between him and the man he blamed for everything. He saw a cop
who had put his faith in a lunatic in a mask to save lives and
bring order to a city out of control. He saw a cop who had done all
that and been the only one to survive it. Smashed, broken,
bloodied, but alive. Alive when he didn't deserve to be, alive
instead of all of his friends. Alive, but not the same as before.
Someone, some
thing
else. Whatever sort of thing can do
all that.

Owen White sat and waited.
He sat and waited for the real him to catch up and tell him
what the hell to do.

"It's time to come in, Owen,"
said Garrity.

"Sure," replied White. "Why
not? Where do we start?"

"We get you patched up," said Garrity. He offered White his
hand and the detective took it, putting his weight onto Garrity and
standing awkwardly on his splinted leg. "We get you some
rest,
then
we talk about where to
start."

Together, they limped slowly
towards towards the door. Garrity, the keeper of secrets, and his
new, but broken, friend.

"You don't got a girl, do you
Owen?"

"You know I don't."

"Well, let me see to that too,"
said Garrity. "Someone to take care of you."

"Sure," replied White. "What
have I got to lose?"

Garrity paused at the door long
enough for the cops who hadn't been watching and listening behind
the mirror to scurry back to their desks and find some work to
pretend to be doing. He'd given them a show alright, and he'd
gotten a new chess piece for his army into the bargain. Garrity
knew all about revenge, he'd taken a lot of it in his time in a
variety of creative and painful ways, and he knew that Owen White
wasn't going to give up on Cane King or Jack Taylor that easily.
But now, whatever dirt White dug up was going to go to Garrity
first and, right now, he felt the need for a little extra
leverage.

"Nothing," said Garrity.
"Nothing to lose."

Able woke up. Not Magpye, but
Able. Able in his entirety.

He woke up and tried to
scream.

He tried to scream and he tried
to scream, but there was no noise. There was no noise because there
was no air and there was no air because, as he gingerly brought a
hand down from his crushed throat to his torso, he touched what he
instinctively knew was the dead and flaccid tissue of a lung,
punctured and useless, exposed to the precious air. He thought his
stomach would have turned but his stomach, he quickly discovered,
was not a stomach any more. Just a mass of pulpy gore, chopped and
chopped and chopped until there was nothing left that resembled an
organ of any sort anymore.

His shaking hands explored
further, nervously fingering along a fragment of exposed rib before
becoming entangled with a loop of dislodged intestine. The pit was
dark around him, the only light a dirty disc of moonlight above
him, the opening of the pit, which seemed further away than the
moon itself. He was glad of the darkness as he pulled his fingers
free from the mess of flesh and closed his eyes.

"He's opened you up."

Dorothy's voice. Concern,
anger, fear. Able, conversely, felt nothing. He didn't have time
right now to wonder why.

"Able, you should be dead."

"I get that a lot."

Able reached out and found the
wall behind him. He realised his legs were bent at an impossible
angle underneath him.

"Dorothy?"

"They dropped you a long way,
kid. I think your neck is broken, back and pelvis too
probably."

"I'm paralysed," replied Able
glibly. "I can't feel anything."

It was Magpye who spoke next,
an old and cruel voice that smiled in Able's head like a shark with
a knife in its teeth.

"You will," it said. "You'll
feel it all. You can thank your friend Marv for that."

"Marv? Why?" asked Able. Along
with the memories of his past life, whole and intact, he remembered
as well what it was to have a creature living inside his head. The
ghosts were one thing, with his memories restored his dead friends
held little fear for him, but the creature was something else. The
creature was the thing that really haunted him. He willed himself
to show no fear, wondering if you could lie to something that lived
inside your head. He knew he could lie to himself, he hoped that
would be enough.

"Why?" taunted the creature.
"Because your friend Marv wanted you to be in the driving seat when
we got back here. Your memories intact and you in control, that's
what he said. Well, here you are. I just hope you know what to do.
I hope you know how to mend your dead flesh. I hope you know how to
put a bridle on your pain and make it silent. And I hope you know
how to stop the ghosts of every other dead thing in this pit
creeping into your head and making it their home."

"Every other dead thing?"

"Cane King had his little dog
drag your bones here, to his charnel pit. It's where he keeps the
things he's killed, his own private tally or murder and death. His
father used it before him, his grandfather before that. They're all
in here, every one. It goes down a long way, Able. A long way."

Able's hand crept tentatively
past his leg, felt the soft, strange something underneath him. He
felt flesh, a fragment of bone, and blood. Blood, the vessel of the
ghosts, their transport from wherever they were to the inside of
Able's head. Blood. It only took one drop, and he was steeped in
it. Steeped in blood, dead, and sinking.