Plugged

Something along those lines.

Or maybe not.

The seriousness of the situation escalates suddenly and alarmingly. Deacon turns her back to her superior, shoulders hunched, agitated cigarette hand tracing jet trails in the air.

Jet trails? Not bad for a doorman.

There is no time for a back-and-forth with Ghost Zeb. Goran has slipped quietly from the passenger seat and drawn a pistol from her ankle holster. A throwdown. Shit.

I could be wrong. Maybe I’m misreading the situation.

Goran pulls a silencer from her handbag and casually twists it on to the barrel, all the time her lips moving, keeping the conversation smooth, no warning signs.

Warning signs or not, Deacon turns around and finds herself down a deserted alley in a bad part of town with the black eye of a silencer staring unblinkingly at her.

I’m not misreading anything. Detective Goran is about to execute her partner.

Pack up and go, says Zeb seriously.

This is the best advice of my life and I know it, but I’ve got this whole protection thing pulling at my psyche.

Go, now.

Cops shooting cops. There’s no way to get in the middle of that sandwich and not get bitten. Ultimately, though, I’m not an animal, so what choice do I have but to help Detective Deacon.

The backpack hasn’t been out of the wall in years. It was never supposed to be in that building for so long. Neither was I. Nothing is going to work. How could anything work? Not a spray of oil on the guns, not a rub of a rag for the bullets. The walls in my apartment are like sponges.

Through the sights, I see Deacon going through the stages. First her eyebrows knit in confusion.

What the hell are you doing?

Then realisation drags at her features like thirty years of hard living. This is followed by denial, and finally bravado.

Deacon is presenting her chest to Goran now, thumping it with a fist, cigarette sparks flying. I actually hear her challenge from across the street.

‘Come on, bitch, shoot me!’

It doesn’t sound real. It’s what a Hollywood cop might say.

All the time, I’m tugging on a pair of disposable gloves from a box in the bag, then searching for my rifle, which of course is in pieces. We were trained in this kind of thing in the army: assembling your weapon blindfolded, in the rain, some guy shooting blanks by your ear, getting pissed on by a group of privates. Okay, maybe not that last bit, but regardless I was always useless at the blindfold assembly thing. Generally it took me about an hour and I ended up with a piece of modem art that would look stunning with the right lighting, but couldn’t shoot worth a damn.

I spit a string of swear words and lay down the scope. Across the street, Goran is delivering a lecture before she pulls the trigger. Thank God for grandstanding killers. Back home, my squad were once brought in to hunt for an IRA kidnap squad who had crossed the border. We only caught them because they delayed a scheduled execution so they could film it from a couple of angles. Everyone wants their moment.

Now that I have two eyes on the job, the Custom Sharpshooter seems to assemble itself, jumping out of the Velcro straps. The collapsible stock bolts on behind the trigger guard. The stainless-steel barrel screws in smoothly. Feels a little damp. Could be I’m imagining it.

I tear open a box of shells with my teeth and thumb one into the breech. Safety off, Starlight snapped into its bracket. The smell of soy sauce is really putting me off.

Time for one shot, maybe. Not a moment for adjustments or to figure consequences.

Goran is still talking, thank Christ. Maybe she’s warning Deacon; maybe there’s no need to shoot.

The younger detective sinks to her knees in the filth of the alley, tears streaming down her face.

Final stage, acceptance.

That’s a helluva warning.

Goran circles behind her partner, never allowing the barrel to droop. No room for Deacon to make her move. To her credit, she tries anyway, and gets a pistol-whipping for her trouble.

Goran is one cold customer. I had these two figured all wrong.

Deacon’s head nods; maybe she’s praying, or maybe she’s reacting to the gun barrel pressed to the crown of her skull.

Through the eerie glow of the Starlight, I see that Goran’s face is almost blank except for a little shadow of pain, like she’s lost her keys. The dirty detective cocks her revolver.

I pull my trigger. .

. . And surprise the hell out of myself by actually hitting what I was aiming for. Up high, right shoulder. Goran spins like a gyroscope and pitches face down into a bum-shack. Looks like the mayor missed one.

Detective Goran will live, but she won’t be aiming any guns with that arm for a while.

I am midway through breaking down my rifle and rehearsing a smug little Clint Eastwood movie reference for Ghost Zeb when Deacon realises that she hasn’t been shot. And after a little white-hot pain and a bout of coughing that would pull a couple of lungs free from their moorings, Goran is alive enough to realise that she is not dead.

Nice move, idiota, says GZ. Now we got a shootout situation.

Idiota. One of four Spanish words Zeb bandies about. The second is puta, the third is amigo and finally there’s gringo, which he loves to throw at me even though Zeb himself has a complexion like cottage cheese dropped on to a pavement from a tall building.

Deacon sees her partner roll over, coming face-up with her police special cocked, spluttering blood-bubbled curses. Deacon ducks under a wild shot, scrabbles in the trash for Goran’s throwdown and puts half a dozen shots into her partner’s upper body.

Ex-partner, I guess.

It takes me a moment to process. Someone who was supposed to be winged is now dead, and approximately fourteen per cent of the bullets in the corpse belong to me.

That was self-defence, I tell Zeb. It’s a tough report for Deacon to write up, but self-defence all the same.

Go now, says Ghost Zeb. You don’t get to write up a report.

This time I listen.

CHAPTER 7

Zeb waited around Queers that night until I knocked off. I say waited, but a more accurate description would be passed out in the all-night pharmacy across the street. He was more or less hurled into my path by the proprietor as I walked home.

‘And keep your prick away from my customers!’ was the farewell comment.

Obviously Zeb had been up to no good just before passing out. Perhaps the two were connected.

I was in a pretty crappy mood, having just told my boss where he could shove his mascara pencil, but something about the sheer wretchedness of this figure at my feet dissolved my gloom, and I picked the little guy off the ground and frogmarched him a couple of blocks to Kellogg’s diner on Metropolitan.

He came to a little after a jug of coffee, and greeted me like a lost comrade.

‘Hey, Paddy O’Mickster. Where are we? What happened?’

‘You were trying to inject some dick fat into a customer, apparently.’