One of the skinheads was on the sidewalk, presumably to keep watch.
To keep watch for cops like us.
Luckily he was already stoned-looking. Otherwise, he would have spotted us.
I squinted, trying to see what they were passing from the trunk. It was impossible to know; we were too far away.
“That’s trouble,” Claire declared.
“Can you see what they’re doing?” I asked. Damn, I needed some glasses or something.
“Nah, but look at their body language.”
“I see that.”
Sure enough, the two guys near the trunk hunched over, looking around like animals searching for a predator.
They were acting like people who were afraid of getting caught doing something.
Sometimes it scared me how much the average person could get away with just by acting confident. The important things that gave criminals away was their posture, their fluttering fingers, their nervous energy.
Again, I thought of Luke when he was about to succumb to one of his anxiety attacks. He had that same nervous energy swirling around him, almost identical to the one that set off my cop senses.
Sometimes I wondered if that’s why I first noticed him in the bookstore all those months ago.
But as I got to know Luke, I realized that his nervousness wasn’t because he was doing something bad, per se. It was because his brain convinced him that going about his normal life was bad.
“Yo! You zonin’ out again, Big Guy?” Claire hissed. “Now is not the time!”
I gritted my teeth. I needed to fix things with Luke, but now I needed to stay focused. With sadness, I forced my mind to file the “Luke” folder out of my thoughts.
“Come on, they went inside,” she said, gesturing for me to follow.
We rounded the corner and looked down the empty, snowy street.
Tentatively, we approached the Toyota.
It was such an ugly thing — a model from the early 2000s. Hard on the eyes but more durable than Adamantium.
Claire shone her flashlight into the back seat.
Empty.
She inspected the wheels, then the front of the car, and then tapped on the trunk.
“Nothin’.”
I turned my head and looked at the building we’d seen the skinheads duck inside. It looked like it used to be a beautiful brownstone once upon a time, but decades of neglect had made it derelict. Paint was chipping from the windows, the brick face needed restoration work, and the stoop was almost crumbling.
The needles poking at the back of my neck twisted.
Claire followed my gaze. “Something’s up in there.”
“This house looks familiar,” I said, taking in the position of the windows, the crack in the upper right corner near the roof, the exact shingles that were missing in a “D” pattern…
“I don’t think we have a warrant on it,” Claire said, crossing her arms.
I closed my eyes, trying to place where I’d seen this house before. It only took me a few seconds.
“We do,” I said.
Every night before I left the station, I would take one last look at the warrants that had popped up over each day. My boss always yelled at me to go home, but I had to find out if any areas near Luke were dangerous.
I had to protect Luke.
And a little while ago, a search warrant for this house near our neighborhood went up.
“Huh, guess you’re right, Big Guy,” Claire said, squinting at one of her screens. “Oh wait, it looks like it expired last week.”
“It’s worth knocking,” I said.
I scratched the back of my neck. The needles were digging in.
Claire nodded and followed me up the crumbling steps.
I knocked on the door three times, the adrenaline coursing through my veins.
God, I loved my job.
There was a fluttering noise inside, and then footsteps as the knob turned.
The door flung open, and my hand instinctively lingered just over my holster.
A little blond kid no older than five stood in the threshold, blinking at us innocently.
“Hello,” Claire said in a surprisingly gentle voice. “Are your parents home?”
The kid turned his big brown eyes up to her, then to me.
All of a sudden, he started screaming.
Two of the skinheads came rushing down the stairs, guns in their hands.
“Weapons!” Claire cried.
With lightning-fast reflexes, we withdrew our own, crouched, and stormed into the house.
A whirlwind of noise swirled around me as I felt pure adrenaline coursing through my veins.
My body was on high-alert, but my head was clear.
The skinheads began yelling in Russian, the kid was screaming, and another skinhead appeared at the top of the stairs.
The guy in front of me was looking at me with pure, animal fear in his eyes. I knew that look; that was the look of desperation.
He raised his gun, but Claire was quicker. She swooped in front of me, whacked the guy’s gun out of his hand, and swept her leg under his feet so he stumbled.
The other skinhead was yelling in Russian and raised his fingers to his temples. It seemed from his tone and body language that he was saying something along the lines of, “I can’t believe you could be so stupid!”
Claire had the man bent over a table and began to cuff him.
I had the guy in front of me cuffed — he seemed to have already given up.
The guy at the top of the stairs was still yelling, pointing his gun not at me, but his friends.
“He’s gonna shoot them, Claire!” I said.
Then a clicking echoed through the air as the skinhead at the top of the stars pulled the trigger.
He uttered one single scrap of broken English:
“Fook!”
“It’s empty!” I said as I flew up the stairs, Claire right on my heels.
The kid was still screaming in the middle of the foyer, the skinheads yelling in Russian.
The guy at the top of the stairs tried to run towards a door, but I was faster. I had him handcuffed within seconds, and Claire took his gun.
“There could be more,” I announced breathlessly.
“I’ve got your six,” Claire said, turning around so we were back to back.
There was something about this kind of bonding with another police officer — something thrilling. It was a different type of bond than any
