TUESDAY, 9:15 PM
Byrne didn't have to turn around to know who it was. The wet sounds coming from the man's mouth-the missing sibilance, the destroyed plosive, along with the deep nasal quality of the voice-said that it was someone who had recently had a number of upper teeth removed and his nose recently demolished.
It was Diablo. Gideon Pratt's bodyguard.
'Be cool,' Byrne said.
'Oh, I'm cool, cowboy,' Diablo said. 'I'm dry fuckin' ice.'
Then Byrne felt something much worse than the cold blade at his throat. He felt Diablo pat him down and take away his service Glock: the worst nightmare in the litany of bad dreams for a police officer.
Diablo put the barrel of the Glock to the back of Byrne's head.
'I'm a cop,' Byrne said.
'No shit,' Diablo said. 'Next time you commit aggravated assault, you should stay off TV.'
The press conference, Byrne thought. Diablo had seen the press conference, and then he had staked the Roundhouse and followed him.
'You don't want to do this,' Byrne said.
'Shut the fuck up.'
The tied-up kid looked between them, back and forth, his eyes shifting, looking for a way out. The tattoo on Diablo's forearm told Byrne he belonged to the P-Town Posse, an odd conglomerate of Vietnamese, Indonesians, and disaffected thugs who, for one reason or another, didn't fit elsewhere.
The P-Town Posse and the JBM were natural enemies, a hatred that ran ten years deep. Byrne now knew what was happening here.
Diablo was setting him up.
'Let him go,' Byrne said. 'We'll settle this between ourselves.'
'This won't be settled for a long time, motherfucker.'
Byrne knew he had to make a move. He swallowed hard, tasted the Vicodin at the back of his throat, felt the spark in his fingers.
Diablo made the move for him.
Without warning, without a modicum of conscience, Diablo stepped around him, leveled Byrne's Glock, and shot the kid point blank. One to the heart. Instantly, a spray of blood and tissue and flecks of bone hit the dirty brick wall, foaming deep scarlet, then washing to the ground in the heavy rain. The kid slumped.
Byrne closed his eyes. In his mind, he saw Luther White pointing the pistol at him so many years ago. He felt icy water swirl around him, sinking deeper, deeper.
Thunder clapped, lightning flashed.
Time crawled.
Stopped.
When the pain did not come, Byrne opened his eyes and saw Diablo turn the corner, then disappear. Byrne knew what came next. Diablo would dump the weapon nearby-Dumpster, garbage can, drainpipe. Cops would find it. They always did. And Kevin Francis Byrne's life would be over.
Who would come for him, he wondered?
Johnny Shepherd?
Would Ike volunteer to bring him in?
Byrne watched the rain hitting the dead kid's body, washing his blood into the rutted concrete, unable to move.
His thoughts scaled a tangled deadfall. He knew that, if he called this in, if he put this on the record, then all of this was just beginning. The Q amp;A, the forensic team, the detectives, the ADAs, the preliminary hearing, the press, the accusations, the Internal Affairs witch hunt, the administrative leave.
Fear ripped through him-shiny and metallic. The smiling, mocking face of Morris Blanchard danced behind his eyes.
The city would never forgive him for this.
The city would never forget.
He was standing over a dead black kid, no witnesses and no partner. He was drunk. A dead black gangbanger, killed execution style with a slug from his service Glock, a weapon that, at the moment, he could not account for. For a white cop in Philly, the nightmare couldn't get much deeper.
There was no time to think about it.
He squatted down, looked for a pulse. There was none. He got out his Maglite, cupping it in his hand to keep the light as hidden as possible. He looked closely at the body. From the angle, and the appearance of the entry wound, it looked like a through and through. He found the shell casing in short order, pocketed it. He searched the ground between the kid and the wall for the slug. Fast-food trash, sodden cigarette ends, a pair of pastel condoms. No bullet.
Above his head, in one of the rooms overlooking the alley, a light flipped on. Soon there would be a siren.
Byrne picked up the pace of his search. He tossed garbage bags, the foul stench of rotted food nearly making him gag. Sodden newspapers, wet magazines, orange peels, coffee filters, eggshells.
Then the angels smiled on him.
Next to the broken shards of a smashed beer bottle, was the slug. He picked it up, put it in his pocket. It was still warm. He then took out a plastic evidence bag. He always had a few in his coat. He turned it inside out and laid the bag over the entrance wound on the kid's chest, making sure that he got a thick smear of blood. He stepped away from the body and turned the Baggie right-side out, sealing it.
He heard the siren.
By the time he turned to run, something other than rational thought had taken over Kevin Byrne's mind, something much darker, something that had nothing to do with the academy, the manual, the job.
Something called survival.
He started down the alley, absolutely certain he had overlooked something. He was sure of it.
At the mouth of the alley, he glanced both ways. Deserted. He sprinted across the vacant lot, slipped into his car, reached into his pocket, and turned on his cell phone. It rang immediately. The sound nearly made him jump. He answered.
'Byrne.'
It was Eric Chavez.
'Where are you?' Chavez asked.
He wasn't here. Couldn't be here. He wondered about cell phone tracking. If it came to it, could they track where he was when he received this call? The siren grew closer. Could Chavez hear it?
'Old City,' Byrne said. 'What's up?'
'Call just came in. Nine-one-one. Someone saw a guy carrying a body up to the Rodin Museum.'
Jesus.
He had to go. Now. No time to think. This was how and why people got caught. But he had no choice. nil»
Im on my way.
Before he left, he glanced down the alley, at the dark vista on display there. In the center was a dead kid dropped into the middle of Kevin Byrne's nightmare, a kid whose own nightmare had just breached the dawn.
34
TUESDAY, 9:20 PM
He had fallen asleep. Ever since he had been a child in the Lake District, where the sound of rain on the roof was a lullaby, Simon had been soothed by the clatter of a storm. It was the car backfiring that awakened him.
