had been burned through, and all of the windows were broken. Smoke still streamed out of any open orifice, mixing itself with the falling snow to form an eerie curtain of haze.
Firefighters were still entering and exiting the home, attacking what remained of the blaze with hoses that trailed in through the front door as well as around to the back side. Still, from outward appearances, it didn’t look anywhere near as bad as it had been on the inside.
Being mid-afternoon on a weekday, there was a noticeable absence of onlookers; something I’m sure made life easier on the professionals trying to do their jobs. One of the firefighters had told us, however, that a news crew was on the scene.
Ben and I were presently parked in the back of an ambulance, watching the goings-on through the open back door. Carl Deckert had already been rushed from the scene in a different life support vehicle, siren blaring and emergency lights strobing. The last thing we had been told was that he had gone into a full-blown cardiac arrest but that the paramedics had been able to defibrillate his heart. He certainly wasn’t out of danger, but he had a strong, regular pulse and was stable for the time being.
My cheek was throbbing where an EMT had extracted a piece of shiny, brass-colored metal about the size of the nail on my pinky finger. From the look of it and the circumstances of it embedding itself there, we decided that it was probably a piece of the collar surrounding the deadbolt.
Ben was seated across from me in the back of the ambulance. He had been far from immune to the flying shrapnel himself. He was presently slouched forward with his elbows on his knees, quietly staring out the opening in the back of the vehicle. His hands were wrapped in loose windings of gauze that were stained bright red in the spots where blood had soaked through, and he allowed them to hang limp.
I hugged the blanket tighter about myself and reached around to carefully feel the back of my neck. There was some minor soreness but nothing worse than one would get with a mild sunburn. However, just as the firefighter had told me earlier, where there had once been eight inches of hair gathered into a ponytail, my hand felt a singed stump of bristles.
“You needed a haircut anyway, white man,” my friend said with little emotion as he glanced in my direction.
Neither of us seemed to be able to muster much feeling other than exhaustion. My hearing had begun to return although my ears still felt stuffy, and there was a faint ring in the background. Ben complained of the same, but at least we were able to carry on a conversation without shouting at one another.
The ambient noise of thrumming diesel engines on the emergency vehicles drifted in low, and we could hear radios and various voices of the firefighters on the scene.
“Maybe so,” I returned. “But I can think of an easier way to have gone about it. How are your hands?”
“Fuckin’ killin’ me,” he answered in a flat tone. “How ‘bout your face?”
“About the same.”
One corner of his mouth turned up in a weak attempt at a grin. “Yeah, it ain’t doin’ me any good either.”
I shook my head. “You must be feeling okay. You’ve still got your sense of humor.”
“I’m alive,” he agreed. “So are you. So’s Deck… For now… That’s somethin’.”
“He’ll make it.”
“Yeah.”
My shoulder was throbbing, and I reached my right hand up to massage it. The over-the-counter painkiller Felicity had dosed me with earlier had long since dissipated from my system, and I was starting to wish for something a bit stronger. I had all but forgotten about my ethereal migraine when the situation in this plane of existence had demanded my full attention; however, now that I was beginning to relax, it was starting to rap on the back of my skull, insisting that it be permitted entry.
“Really, Ben. He’ll make it. It’s not his time.”
“You got some hocus-pocus goin’ on there?” He raised an eyebrow.
Under different circumstances, he would have looked pathetic. He still had soot streaking his face although one cheek had been cleaned where he had an abrasion. His lower lip was swollen, and his reddish skin peeked out around his mouth where the dirt had also been wiped away. There were rings around his eyes. The whole picture came together with fuzzy edges due to my missing spectacles, and when he arched his eyebrow, I had the overwhelming need to chuckle.
“What’re you laughin’ at?” he asked.
“You should see yourself,” I offered.
“Yo, Kemosabe, you got an Al Jolson thing goin’ on yourself.”
“Yeah, so I guess we’re both a sight.”
“Prob’ly. So, you never answered me. The thing with Deck. You got some inside info from the great beyond?”
“Just a feeling.” I shrugged.
“I hope you’re right.”
“We just have to believe that I am,” I offered.
He fell quiet for a long measure and stared at the floor of the ambulance. When he finally spoke again, his voice was heavy-weighted with a level of seriousness that made me listen intently.
“Ya’know, cops get that too.”
“What’s that?”
“Feelings. Kinda like intuition or somethin’.”
“Everyone does to some extent,” I replied.
“Yeah, I guess.” He nodded then looked up at me. “I ever tell you about Chris?”
“Wasn’t he your partner when you first got out of the academy?” I asked. “The one that…”
He finished the sentence for me. “…Got killed, yeah, that’s him.”
“You’ve never really talked about it to me, no.”
“He was a good guy. Big S.O.B. Biggern’ me. Good copper. You knew you could count on ‘im to have your back. I learned a lot from ‘im.”
I just nodded acknowledgement and let him talk.
“Anyway, the night he was killed we were workin’ third. He was actin’ pretty nervous, real squirrely like. We stopped to grab some coffee, and he finally opens up and tells me that he’s got a weird feelin’ like it’s his night or somethin’. Like he’s wearin’ a target. He said he’d had it all day and that when he left his house, he turned around and went back in twice to call in sick, but didn’t do it ‘cause he felt guilty.
“I didn’t think much of it at the time, but he’d told me before that you develop a kinda sense about stuff. Told me not to ignore my gut, ‘cause it was one thing a copper had that could save his ass. Anyway, half an hour later we responded on a liquor store holdup. He was hit the minute we got outta the car. He was wearin’ a vest, but it didn’t matter ‘cause he got hit in the neck. Last thing he said to me was ‘I shoulda stayed home today.’”
I watched him as he fell silent, and then I finally asked, “Have you talked to someone about this?”
“Hell yeah,” he returned, slightly more life in his voice than there had been during the morose reminiscence. “Helen got me through it a long time ago. I’m just sayin’ that coppers get those feelings too.”
There was still a strange undertone in his voice. Something told me that there was more to this story than just an idle observation. It took a moment to dawn on me, but when it did, it struck me like a hard slap.
“Did Carl say something to you?” I asked.
“When we got here,” he finally said with a nod. “Told me he had a weird feelin’ like maybe he shoulda stayed home today.”
CHAPTER 18:
“And how are you gentlemen doing?” The paramedic asked almost cheerfully as he climbed into the back of the ambulance with us and levered the door shut.
“Horrible,” Ben answered.
I felt like adding “and terrible” as my answer to the question, but I really had no complaints that he could help me with, so I elected to keep my mouth shut. My migraine had returned full force, and it seemed to have
