plus the implications of his corruption—it had never occurred to me that he might actually be a good investigator. But he was dead-on.
I’d set the bomb. I knew everything about the killings.
“And now,” Sikorsky went on, “just now, we got a tip. Did you know that?”
Both of us stayed quiet. Sikorsky slammed a fist into the computer tower he’d just been fondling, and Checker flinched.
“I asked you a question,” Sikorsky bellowed.
“We didn’t know,” I said.
“It’s a solid one. Real classy lady, and she might do some investigatin’ but she knows when to let the police handle things. And she’s heard all these whisperings on more bombings, a whole criminal plot.”
“Willow Grace.” I said it without thinking, my stomach going leaden. Fuck, she was still ahead of us. Now tipping off the police—what had she told them?
Sikorsky loomed over me, practically vibrating with rage. “Everything you say just digs you deeper. Some pissant judge might say we still don’t have enough, but I say this is terrorism, and that every fucking one of you should be in Gitmo. And in Gitmo, there are no rules.”
His hand went for his service weapon.
It was the moment I’d been waiting for. The visual that would slam-dunk Checker’s recording, just in case we needed it.
I lashed out to strike him just below the elbow and transfer a nice wad of kinetic energy to the nerves in his forearm. His hand jerked and dropped his weapon, which I brought up a foot to meet. I gave the Glock a pop like it was a hacky sack, and it sprang in the air and rotated, so I caught it pointing right at Sikorsky’s face.
“Why do you cops always have such bad taste in weapons?” I couldn’t help saying. “This is a toy, not a gun.”
Sikorsky had started to lurch toward me, but he aborted the move just as abruptly when the business end of his own firearm popped up right in front of him. His little deep-set eyes flicked around, assessing the situation, searching for a way to regain the upper hand. He wasn’t panicking, not yet, but his face was creeping over red with anger.
“What were you going to do?” I said. “Pistol whip us until we gave you something?”
“Oh, you’ve done it now.” Spittle limned the edge of Sikorsky’s mouth. “Put the motherfucking gun on the ground or I will end your motherfucking ass right here.”
“Look, we’re honestly not the people who—” I tried.
“Drop the fucking gun!”
He lunged at me. He executed the move fairly well, trying to trap me between him and the long desktop and tangle up my arm before I could shoot him. But I slipped my center of gravity just off where he needed it to be, and his lunge did nothing but take him wildly off balance. He crashed into Checker’s machines and hit the floor without any help from me.
But he didn’t stay down. Some part of me had to respect him—he thought we were terrorists out to blow up the world, or at least involved with someone who was, and due process wasn’t letting him torture information out of us, so he was going dark to do it. And now he probably believed this was a last stand and that I was going to shoot him with his own gun, but he wouldn’t stop fighting.
He threw himself back up at me, but the instant before I kicked him in the head, his limbs jerked and he went down with an unearthly yell.
Keeping the gun on Sikorsky, I followed the leads of the Taser back to Checker, who was holding the device in a white-knuckled grip. “I thought you didn’t—” I started.
“I don’t like guns. Fifty thousand volts is totally okay.”
The flatness he said it with belied any humor.
I bent down and searched a twitching, groaning Sikorsky, found a cell phone, and tossed it to Checker. “See if anyone’s going to come looking for him.”
“What are you—what are we going to do? He’s a cop—”
“We are going to worry about this after we find Tabitha, that’s what we’re going to do.” And if we didn’t find her … if we didn’t, nothing would matter anymore. “I’ll secure him until then.”
I zip-tied Sikorsky’s hands in front of him and forced him up and into the house at gunpoint, where I shoved him down on Checker’s bed and used more zip ties and some plastic rope to thoroughly hogtie him to it. By that time, he’d recovered himself enough to holler