The Magpye: Circus (27 page)

"You're supposed to be dead,"
said White.

"I think I am."

"There is a gun," said White through gritted teeth, "Under
that pillow. Four steps and I'm there. I'm there, and you're
really
dead. Four steps. That's exactly how long you've got
to get the hell of that balcony and disappear."

Magpye didn't move.

"Four steps, Magpye."

"I'll be on you in two, and you
know it."

The reply came from Able Quirk. Magpye, the real Magpye,
the thing that had spoken to Owen White before, had vanished down
into the murky depths of Able's crowded mind. Able could tell that
it despised White now, despised him partly for his weak and
crippled body but also for his stubborn refusal to die. In his
prime, Owen White would have made a fine addition The Magpye's
collection of minds and memories. Now he was damaged goods, a
liability. It didn't matter to Able. He remembered White as someone
who had accepted him, trusted him, when his mind was nothing but
loose fragments rattling around inside his skull. He remembered him
as a friend, a friend who he had failed like he had failed so many
others. Able didn't want Magpye here right now. He wanted to speak
to White himself, to deal with him on his own terms.

White slumped to one side,
letting the wall take his weight for a moment.

"What the hell happened?" he
asked.

"They trapped me," replied
Able. He wanted to tell White the truth, the whole truth, including
the real fate of the police that had died at his side that night,
but the haunted look in the man's eyes told Able that the last
thing Owen White needed to hear about was ghosts. He had plenty of
ghosts of his own. "I got out, but it was too late. I found King,
we fought, he won."

"He won?" asked White. "Against
you?"

"He
… had help." Able
didn't know how to begin to explain about what had happened to
King, the power he suddenly possessed thanks to The Ink. Even Adam
King couldn't explain fully what the stuff was. All that mattered
to Able was that it made King strong and very, very difficult to
kill.

"Well, my guys bought it too.
You know that, right?"

"I know," replied Able. He watched as White limped to the
bed and sat down with a thud. He cop's head dropped to his chest.
"I wish I'd gone with them. Dead would be better than this. They
broke me," he said weakly. "They broke me
…"

Able didn't answer. His head
was full of dead cops, all of them desperate to get a message to
White. He pushed them down and it felt like swallowing vomit.

"They broke me too, once."

White looked up from the
carpet. "You still look pretty broken to me, kid."

Jerking his thumb at Able,
White pulled a half drunk bottle of vodka from under the bed.

"You want a drink?" he asked
"I've got more of these stashed than I have guns."

Able walked slowly into the
room, his heavy boots staining the pale carpets.

"They've got me lying for them," said White, taking a swig
from the bottle. "About what happened that night. I've lied to the
cops, to the feds. Hell, I've even had the NSA breathing down my
neck. We were put here by the president and
… let's just say he's kind of pissed at me right now.
The
president
is pissed
at
me
."

"What exactly have you told
them?"

"That the team went rogue,
after what happened to Grice, and that I went there to try and stop
them. It stinks. I've tarnished the names of good cops just to save
my own skin."

"I think they'd
understand."

"Do you?" spat White. "Well,
you didn't know them. They were good cops, good people. All of
them. They lived the job and what did it do? It chewed them up and
spat them out. Now they can't even go to their graves clean. I've
made dirty cops of each and every one of them."

Able's head filled with voices
again, the cops forcing their way through. They'd spent a lot of
time learning to break down suspects and break down doors, Able's
newly learned defences just didn't cut it. He tried to pick one
voice out from the crowd. Of course, it was Rosa Blind.

"Are they buying the story?"
she asked.

"I think they know it's
bullshit,” replied White. “Some of them are on the take and those
that aren't know a good story when they hear one. It's turned into
politics. What plays better - a hero cop crippled in the line of
duty or the whole clean squad including me going off the rails?
Right now the lie is more useful to them than the truth."

"Because it gives them a hero,"
said Rosa, speaking through Able. "Someone to put a medal on whilst
the rest of us are swept under the carpet?"

Able snapped his mouth shut,
realising his mistake, Rosa's mistake immediately.

White just took another slug
from the bottle and stared off into the middle distance with his
one good eye.

"What about King?" asked Able
quickly.

"Wiped from the history books.
He was never there."

"It's his building."

"They're
all
his buildings," said White, waving
the vodka bottle at the open window. "It's his city. So are most
others. You don't know what I've learnt, since I've been on the
inside of this thing. The sheer scale of it, it's beyond anything
that anyone would believe possible. That's the genius of it. That's
what makes them fearless. We can't ever take them down because they
are so much bigger than us."

White took another slug, then
another, chugging down the vodka like water at the end of a
marathon run.

"They
engulf
us, do you understand that? We
exist
inside
their world. There's no fighting
it."

"I'm fighting it."

In his mind, Able heard Adam
King's voice whispering. "We're fighting it, son." Able pushed him
down too.

"I'm going to take him down,"
continued Able. "Once and for all."

"You said that last time."

White stood up on unsteady legs
and limped awkwardly towards the balcony, taking the bottle with
him. From somewhere in the city beyond the window, a police siren
wailed like a dying animal. There was smoke on the breeze and the
smell of burning. It reminded Able of the circus, a place that was
dead but refused to die.

"I go back to work tomorrow,"
White said. "I was expecting a desk job, but Garrity's got me a
slot on a new task force. We're going to hunt down this vigilante
that everyone was talking about before my squad became front page
news."

"That's perfect," said Able enthusiastically. "We can work
together again and
…"

"No," interrupted White. "We
can't. We won't. Haven't you listened to anything I've said? I was
an idiot to think we could go up against King. I was an idiot to
trust you. I've got a busted leg and a missing eye to remind me of
that, plus that rat bastard Garrity crawling all over me. So right
now I've got to be as dirty as they are, as dirty as they come, to
survive. It's a shit way to finish out, but it does come with one
advantage. As of tomorrow I'll be hunting you down and the next
time I see you I'll put a bullet in you, no questions and no due
process. Cane King wants you found, I want you dead. It's
win-win."

"I'll get you out," said Able.
"When I take down King, you'll be free."

White snorted, gulped down the
last of the vodka, and tossed the empty bottle out of the window.
It smashed somewhere distant, setting off a car alarm. "Guess we'll
see," he said, "Guess we'll see."

Somewhere inside Able Quirk's
head, the dead cops looked at their friend and one by turned their
backs on him. Only Rosa Blind continued to watch and Able was glad
of his mask as he felt her tears on his cheeks.

Jack Taylor walked slowly down
the steps into the crypt. He smiled. He liked the place. The homely
décor, the old posters, the photos, the heirlooms and the
bric-a-brac. It reminded Taylor of a house he had lived in, for a
little while at least, back when he was a foster kid. He'd burnt it
down. It wasn't that he disliked the place, but the strange habit
the people had there of cluttering their house with things from
their past felt like it was dragging him, and them, down; as if
time were some sort of sucking parasite that, if you let it, would
trap you in one single moment forever. You would live on, of
course, move forward at the same rate and pace as everyone else,
but your heart and soul would be left behind. You would slowly
become divorced from them as the distance grew greater until you
were dead in the now and only alive then, in the past. As a child,
back when he'd still enjoyed the childish notions of things like
hearts and souls, the thought had terrified him. Burning the house
down was the only logical choice.

Taylor had spent his life that
way, bouncing around in the system, never in any one place for very
long. A problem child, a face that didn't fit, a kid that didn't
play well with others. There were no end of bleeding hearts who
thought they could fix him, make him better, but all of them
failed. What they didn't understand was that Jack Taylor didn't
want to be fixed. He didn't need to be fixed. He knew what he was
and it hadn't bothered him a day in his life.

He remembered with a strange
detached fondness the burning of that house. He remembered the
warmth on his skin and the distinct aroma of all those old papers
and books and posters and photos burning. Paper was such a weak
material, but people spent their lives coveting and collecting it.
He remembered when the police came too, and how they hadn't
appreciated the beauty of the moment as Taylor did. But even that
didn't really matter. By then he already understood the way the
world worked, he'd already achieved the perfect clarity that would
guide him through his life with almost unerring certainty. Each
house, each place, each cell, each psychiatric ward, was only
temporary.

Everything was only
temporary.

You don't like your house? You burn it down. It's
temporary
.

The current state of affairs
with Cane King was nothing different. A temporary setback, and
nothing more. The King had feigned fury at the news that his
nephew, or brother, or whatever the hell that freak was, was alive
and still running around in his city. Taylor could see the truth
though. The boy being alive had served King's agenda. Putting
Taylor on the back foot served his agenda as well. King wasn't as
afraid of Taylor as he once had been. Taylor could sense the change
in the balance of power like a sharp tang in the wind. Like blood
in the water, and the blood was his.

The woman, Grace, was dead and
King, somehow, had her tattoos. Anyone else would be looking for a
way out, but not Taylor. The unknown was temporary. Clarity would
turn it all into opportunity and Taylor would find himself on top
again. He had a plan.

Taylor focussed himself back in
the moment as he reached the bottom of the stairs. The magician was
ahead of him, his back turned, working at a makeshift stove. There
was a putrid, acrid smell in the air. King had told Taylor that
this guy was dangerous. Perhaps he'd meant his cooking.

There were other rooms off this
one, the mausoleum being far more grand than the small stone
entrance gave credit for. In the middle of the room was a small
bench table, laid for dinner.

"You can come in," said Marv.
"But I don't think this pot is going to stretch to all of us."

Taylor stopped in his tracks.
There wasn't anyone he couldn't creep up on, at least until today.
He pulled his gun from inside his jacket and aimed at the old man's
back.

"We're going to be skipping
dinner."

"Pity," replied Marv. Spinning
and ducking at the same time, he flung one of the cooking pots at
Taylor. It spun flat, like a discus, through the air, the metal
handle wobbling up and down in a fight with gravity. The outcome of
the fight was never reached, as the pot hit Taylor across the
bridge of the nose, splashing hot liquid into his face.

Taylor stumbled backwards,
keeping his body across the entrance to the stairs. Wiping his eyes
with the back of his jacket sleeve, he got his vision back just in
time to see Marv running at him along the top of the small table
that sat in the centre of the room. He kicked a plate, sending it
on the same trajectory as the pot. Taylor deflected it, and got a
shot off before Marv collided with him feet first. The shot pinged
off the stone ceiling and embedded itself in the table as the two
men tumbled back into the stairs.

Panting, Marv tried to run up
Taylor's body and onto the stairs proper. Taylor stabbed upwards
with his gun hand, slamming the metal barrel of his pistol in
Marv's groin. The magician groaned and crumpled, falling so that
his lower legs were still on top of Taylor. Marv crawled up the
stairs, trying to drive himself back into an upright position as
Taylor rolled over on the hard stone steps and pulled himself to
his feet.

"You nearly broke my nose," he
spat, his voice hollow and nasal. "I'll hurt you for that."

Struggling to his feet, Marv
turned. He had the higher ground now and, contrary to appearances,
Taylor had just seen that the guy could fight, sort of.

"You broke my good plate," said
Marv. He was still backing up the stairs, his hand tracing along
the brickwork wall. "And my stew is totally ruined. Who the hell
are you?"

"I'm Jack Taylor. Cane King
sent me and I'm the guy who is going to kill you if you take
another step up those stairs."