Concrete Savior (9 page)

“You sou extremely awake for a man who is not where he is supposed to be,”
came his partner’s always-polite voice.
“In fact, I would guess by the anxiety in your voice that you are also cognizant of the fact that we must be in court in slightly less than one hour and we had planned to meet at the station to review the case beforehand.”

“Yes—right. Of course.” Eran spun back toward the living room. He felt suddenly embarrassed that his partner had caught him, literally, with his pants not down but
off
, even if Bheru didn’t know it. “I’ll be there in a half hour—no, wait. I’ll meet you at the courthouse.”

“At the courthouse?”

“Yeah, that’s better.” Eran bent and scooped up his clothes. Brynna giggled at him and he scowled at her but couldn’t hold on to the expression—she was just too gorgeous, he felt way too good, and he had to look away or risk getting caught up in her all over again. “I’ll be there in thirty.” He hung up before his partner could say anything else. “You’re dangerous,” he told Brynna sternly. “I have
never
been late for court and you’re going to ruin my record.”

She shrugged. “Perfection is not all it’s cracked up to be,” she said. She stretched on the couch and Eran made himself look away again. “It leaves no room for improvement.”

“We could probably have a long and profound conversation about this, but the paycheck-providing job awaits.” He ducked into the bathroom and twisted on the shower, then sucked in his breath and stepped into it without waiting for the water to warm up. Just like back in his army days, when he and a whole barracks of the newly enlisted had mastered the task of getting head-to-toe clean in under two minutes. He was soaped, rinsed, out and toweling himself dry long before anything resembling hot water came out of the showerhead. “Don’t you have to work today?” he called.

“Nope,” she said from the bathroom door. “Today appears to be an entirely English-speaking day, at least among my usual customers.”

“That’s unusual,” Eran said. He risked a glance in the mirror and saw that she had slipped back into her customary jeans and T-shirt. What had she said? She was
addictive
. She wouldn’t have to tell him that again, and he was very glad she’d gotten dressed—it cut down his desire, at least a little. He was already re-dressed and working on his tie, a task which for some odd reason was now going quite well. “No depositions, nothing at the Industrial Commission?”

“Unless you have a witness or criminal stashed somewhere who speaks only Ngansan, I have a free day.”

“Really.” Ngansan? He didn’t even know what that was, much less the ethnicity of the people who spoke it. He knew what Brynna was and what she could do, but it was still astonishing to him that she could speak, read, and write any language in the world, whether it existed now or was extinct. He ran a comb through his hair a final time and straightened his glasses.

“Yep. I have nothing to do but relax and cuddle on Grunt.”

“She’ll like that.” He looked over toward the corner of the large bathroom, where his white Great Dane was sleeping soundly on a raised Kuranda bed. The sweet-natured deaf dog had tried to protect Brynna from the Hunter that had come calling and paid for it dearly when the creature had flung a fireball at her. Except for the deepest spot in the center, the horrendous burn was almost healed. The vet had even given him a break on the bills, which were damned steep, even though Eran had an inkling the man didn’t believe a word of how Grunt had gotten trapped in the midst of a kitchen fire. He accepted it, but only because Eran had a long record of taking excellent care of his dog.

“I’m out of here,” he said. Brynna moved aside as he hurried into the kitchen and grabbed his wallet, detective’s star, and gun holster. “I’ll call you later.”

Before he could give in to the urge to kiss her goodbye—a dangerous proposition—she gave him a single, slight touch on one cheek then pushed him out the door.

“YOU HAVE THE LOOK
of a man who’s met his match,” Bheru said in a low voice as Eran pushed through the double doors and into the courtroom. The Indian man’s face was carefully expressionless but he and Eran had been partners for a long time and Eran was really good at reading between the lines.

“Sorry I didn’t make it to the station,” Eran said. They had gone around several times about the wisdom—or not—of Eran having Brynna move in with him, and now Eran decided it was better to let Bheru’s statement pass. Bheru held out the folder on the case they were here for and Eran flipped it open.

“It’s all good,” his partner said. “I went through the file on my own and everything’s covered. There was no need for you to be on time after all.”

There was no missing the jab, but again, Eran let it go as they made their way to the front and took seats in the witness row. “Good. Let’s do this and move on to something else.”

Bheru raised one eyebrow and Eran kept his grin to himself. Bheru wasn’t the only one who could do subtext.

“
WHY ARE WE DOING
this?”

“Because,” Eran said as he punched parameters into the YouTube search box, “Brynna pointed out that there’s something weird about these rescues.”

“Define ‘something weird.’ Are you talking a little out of the ordinary or Brynna-related abnormal?”

That made Eran pause. “I guess it could be either at this point,” he admitted. The image on his monitor changed as he hit
SEARCH
. “Here’s the video of the guy who got pulled from his burning car yesterday. Let’s take a look.”

The video was listed as being almost four minutes long, but the “meat” of it—the rescue itself—took less than sixty seconds. They watched in silence as the video started with the film swinging wildly as the girl who’d taken it tried to focus through the school bus window at the same time as she and her friends nearly shrieked with excitement—

“—see it? Over there!”

“Oh my God, the car’s, like, on fire!”

“That guy is stuck in there, he’s going to fry—”

“Look at that dude, he’s going to save him—”

It wasn’t a very good capture, but it was clear enough to see that the rescuer was a tall blond man in his twenties or thirties, and that he seemed absolutely fearless when it came to rushing up to a car that was fast becoming engulfed in flames.

“Most people would have been too afraid to help him,” Bheru observed. “They would be afraid of the car exploding.”

“Very true,” Eran said. They were into the third minute of the video and the rescuer had freed the driver and pulled him from the car, then almost effortlessly carried him some thirty feet away. What had been a jam-packed expressway had almost magically cleared as the surrounding drivers were suddenly able to find room enough to get their vehicles as far away as possible. The inside of the car was completely in flames. “According to this morning’s paper, the victim’s name is Jack Gaynor. Definitely his lucky day. There’s no way a fire truck’s going to get through that congestion. I’m surprised his car didn’t blow.”

“There’s why,” Bheru said as he pointed to something blurry in the video. Another few seconds and the moving spot became a man, probably a trucker, brandishing a fire extinguisher and sprinting between the cars. The video focused on him for a few seconds as he wisely aimed the extinguisher’s nozzle under the wheel wells where the chemical would coat the engine, then the girl’s camera swung back to the victim. “And there,” added Bheru, “goes the mysterious Good Samaritan.”

“I see him,” Eran said. “Fading into the sunset without even waiting to see if the guy he rescued is all right.”

“Strange.” Bheru stared at the screen, but the video had played itself out. “Even if they want to be low-key about it, most folks can’t help wondering if the person’s going to live or die.”

“Unless he already knew Jack Gaynor would be just fine.”

Bheru turned to frown at him. “Excuse me?”

Eran sat back. “Brynna says she thinks the rescuer in this video is the same man who saved that guy in the subway last week.”

Their desks faced each other inside their small, shared office space. Bheru went around and sat where he could see Eran face-to-face. “You’re talking about—”

“Glenn Klinger.”

“—the man who shot eleven people at his workplace, then turned the gun on himself.”

“Yes.”

Bheru’s dark eyes widened. “What makes her say that?”

Eran spread his hands as he searched for the right words. His partner knew some things about Brynna, but what he
didn’t
know was a whole lot more complicated. What he didn’t know was the
truth
. “Your guess is as good as mine. It could be her belief that nothing happens because of coincidence, or it could be one of her feelings.”

“A premonition?”

“Something like that, although you know how Brynna insists she has no such ability.” Eran tried to keep his gaze level with Bheru’s. If he looked away now, it would be a giveaway that he wasn’t being entirely aboveboard. “I’m not exactly clear on it myself.”

“Then we should check it out,” Bheru said. He stood at the same time that Eran did. “Next stop, CTA Security.”

“OKAY, LET’S TAKE A
look.” Dave Pickett, one of the security supervisors in the video archives office of the Chicago Transit Authority, had Eran and Bheru sitting on either side of him as he swiftly tapped on a keyboard below a triple row of computer monitors. Eran had worked with Dave before, and the number of cases was growing as more and more cameras were installed in the Chicago area. It was now the most closely monitored city in the United States, and Eran couldn’t help agreeing with most of the citizenry, who actually thought that was a
good
thing. According to widely held reports, most of the complaints came from people who were snagged for petty crimes and those who were upset because a camera
wasn’t
installed or hadn’t been working when a crime had occurred.

Eran and Bheru leaned closer to the monitors, although they were seeing about as much as they were going to. “You said it was about three-thirty, right?” Dave asked. “Blue-collar go-home time?”

“Yeah,” Eran said. “The time’s estimated but that’s pretty close.”

“It’ll be easy to find,” Dave said. “I’ll do a fast-forward through the platform tape and just look for the glob of uniforms that shows the medics. Then we can go back and take a closer look until we find your rescue guy. I can get it within three or four minutes right off the bat because of the conductor’s emergency call-in.”

Dave was as good as his word, and in no time at all the three men were watching a grainy but fairly wide-ranging view of the subway platform in question. There were a number of factories in the area and it was crowded, filled with workers headed home after the day shift. Even though it was underground, it was hot, too—Eran could see that by the looks on the faces of the people waiting for the next train. Being a cop for so many years had made him very attuned to facial expression and body language, and there was a certain way that people held themselves and behaved when the temperature was jacked into the uncomfortable range. Like these folks, they stood apart from each other as much as possible, trying for breathing room; jackets and sweaters that had been worn in air-conditioned workplaces were held with only one or two fingers and Eran could see a lot of the men wiping at their foreheads.

“Right about here,” Dave said suddenly. He paused the image on the screen, then rolled it backward a couple of times until he got what he wanted, matching the date and time display on the lower left of the screen to a report that was open next to his keyboard. “That’s Klinger.” He tapped the screen to bring their gazes to a gangly-looking man in a work uniform. The guy had crazy hair that was sticking up in every possible direction. “Okay, here we go,” he said.

Another few seconds and they saw it all—Klinger holding his head then pitching forward onto the tracks, the surging movement of the bystanders as they instinctively crowded toward the spot where he’d gone over, the sudden blur from the left as a man ran forward and leaped down after Klinger, disappearing from view. After that Dave began taking the video forward incrementally, showing the train as it rolled over the spot where the two men had gone onto the tracks, people rushing back and forth, the white-faced conductor coming out of the stopped train as its passengers were told to disembark. Another few minutes and the cops were there and clearing the platform, the conductor went back onto the train, and the train slowly backed up.