A Visible Darkness - By Jonathon King Page 0,80

closed and I was back in O’Hara’s gym and my father’s face was showing his disgust, and I landed another, and another…

I was still punching when I felt the presence behind me. When I turned, McCane’s girth had filled the doorway. Light caught the brushed metal of the 9mm in his hand.

“Don’t stop on account of me, bud,” he said.

Eddie lay unconscious in the corner and when I looked down at my hand, his blood was glistening on my fist and up to my forearm.

“Is this what you wanted, McCane?” I said, turning back to the investigator, trying to see his eyes. His face was shrouded in the dark and I could not register his reaction.

“Hell, Freeman. I’m just helpin’ you out. Like partners, right?” he said, moving from the doorway to the window and taking a quick look outside. “And it does look like you found our man.”

A sound like a low boil in a deep cave came from down in the corner and I felt one of Eddie’s boots shift against my pant leg.

“Course, it’s not gonna do either of us any good if this boy lives now, is it, Freeman?”

“He said enough already, McCane. Enough to tie him in with Marshack. And it’ll be a short jump to put Marshack with you.”

“Yeah, I heard him,” McCane said, reaching back into his waist band with his free hand and coming out with a small, tape-handled .38.

“You ever carry a throw-down piece when you worked Philly, Freeman?”

He was looking at the gun, his other hand still flexing on the 9mm at his side.

“Now this little shit piece is just the kind that a boy like this might be carryin’. Just the kind he might use when some P.I. tries to arrest him out here in the dark,” he said, waving the short barrel at Eddie.

McCane moved a step forward. His face was dark and I could still not see his eyes, and he could not see the flash of gunmetal come through the window behind him. My recognition started to turn him when the barrel of Richards’s Glock found the spot just behind the curve of his ear.

“Freeze it up, asshole!” she yelled.

McCane did not flinch, but only chuckled at the sound of her voice.

“Now, missy. Ya’ll sound real tough when you use them movie words. But I don’t suspect you ever pulled that trigger on a real man,” he said, as he subtly shifted the aim of the .38 from Eddie’s chest to mine.

I could see the skin tighten around Richards’s eyes and I was just about to warn her of the 9mm still in McCane’s other hand when the explosion of noise filled the room and stole the air from my chest.

McCane toppled, stiff-legged, to the floor, his finger frozen on the trigger of the .38. I stared at the window and could see Richards’s gun, extended into the smoke and smell of cordite. She was still sighting down the barrel.

“You don’t let anyone point a gun at a fellow cop,” she said, her lips beginning to tremble. “That’s one of the first things you learn when you’re a real officer on the street.”

35

Red and blue lights swirled through the trees and headlights crosshatched the open field, and all the sudden attention on the place seemed to make it shrink. A few residents had gathered at a distance in the street.

I sat on the rear bumper of an open ambulance. One paramedic was trying to cradle my arm into a sling while another was using an antiseptic soaked towel to wipe the blood off the knuckles of my right fist.

Richards was next to me. Her weapon had been taken and placed into a plastic evidence bag for the shooting review board.

We both watched as Eddie Baines was taken from the blockhouse to a waiting ambulance. It took four men to lift him onto a wheeled stretcher and push him through the high grass. Sergeant Carannante said Baines was unconscious when they arrived. A paramedic had guessed the man had lost several pints of blood from the gunshot wound. He doubted he would survive.

Almost apologetically the sergeant explained that the call to the river had been a false alarm, that the man seen pushing a cart had been a late-night janitor wheeling a bin of trash through the alley to a dumpster.

“There was so much radio traffic, no one recognized your call,” he said to Richards. “The dispatcher thought you were with us, and so did I.

“Then it