Hades (18 page)

“Bird to all units,” a voice in the earpiece called. “Status report.”

“Ground Unit One, set.”

“Ground Unit Two, set.”

“Ground Unit Three, set,” Eden whispered. Her voice inside my head felt like an intrusion, a slow taking over of my mind.

The checkpoint units and sky unit called in. Now and then I could hear the dull beating of helicopter blades, but it was keeping well off, doing laps of the coastline until called to avoid scaring the killer away.

We waited. Somewhere, someone was having a barbecue. The smell made me suddenly ravenous. It was an hour and a half before anything happened. Eden crouched, rigid as a stone, staring at the Turner house, where lights burned behind the drawn curtains. I squirmed in the silence, shifting my feet on the gravel, sinking down to my knees to try to relieve the tension in my ankles. It seemed to me that Eden was hardly breathing. Her silhouette was as motionless as a statue and for a moment I thought of reaching out to touch her, just to be sure she was really still there.

“Checkpoint A, we have a suspect sighted.”

“Ground Unit Three checking registration.”

“Roger,” Bird confirmed.

I rolled up onto my haunches and turned towards the checkpoint. A bronze Toyota van had pulled into the street. The ground unit, stationed in the next street with a mobile patrol unit, began looking up the registration details of the van.

“Negative on that one. Registration checks out, Bird.”

I watched the car turn into a driveway three doors down. Two children leaped out of the vehicle and ran to the front door, while a man and a woman began unloading plastic shopping bags from the trunk.

Another hour passed. A huge black cockroach circled us curiously for a while and then disappeared. Shadows moved in the Turner house. I felt sweat rolling down my calves, catching in the hair, tickling in my socks. I wanted to talk to Eden but I was unsure if she would even answer. Her words rang between my ears, zinging in the silence of the street.

The voice in my earpiece sent electricity through my chest.

“Checkpoint B, we have a suspect sighted.”

A small green car, possibly a Kia, had rolled into the street from the other end. The windows were tinted almost black. Numbness prickled in my feet as I got up onto my heels. Eden shifted slightly, watching the car as it rolled towards us.

“Ground Unit Three to Bird. This isn’t his street. Car registered to a Michael Dalley, Chatswood.”

“Bird to all units, we could have Chopper. Get ready, guys.”

Eden slid her gun silently out of the holster on her belt. I did the same, flicking the safety off. The green Kia rolled past us quietly, pulling along the side of the road outside the Turner house. The lights on the car flicked off but no one exited. Trembling, I pressed a hand into the pebblecrete driveway I was crouching on, steadying myself in preparation for dashing forward.

“Steady all units,” Bird murmured.

Another minute. I counted the seconds as the car remained still. The sound of the door popping open echoed around the street like a gunshot. A man exited, tall and dark-haired, wearing a faded orange cap down over his eyes and carrying a black shoulder bag on his hip. Eden rose swiftly and began to run as the man moved towards the door. Suddenly, I was surrounded by running people. A cop from Ground Unit Two got there first, crash-tackling the man to the front step as he reached for the Turners’ doorbell.

“Get down! Get down! Get down!”

“Police! Get on the fucking ground!”

A howling voice, the scrambling of limbs. The radio was a wash of voices in my ear.

“Chopper is being subdued, call for patrol unit.”

Eden shoved aside the nearest cop and grabbed the man by the collar of his shirt.

I looked down at my feet as I recognized a smell. The bag the man had been carrying was crushed under my foot. The toe of my right boot was submerged in what I knew intimately to be butter chicken on jasmine rice, accompanied by what appeared to be Peshwari naan bread. One of my bachelor cuisine favorites.

“Christ!” someone yelled. Eden pulled the cap off the boy’s head. The logo on the front read CURRY 4 U.

“Please, please, don’t hurt me,” the boy sobbed, his hands shaking visibly in the air. A wave of panic rippled through the people around me. The Turners’ door opened and three officers tumbled out onto the porch, guns drawn.

“It’s not him.”

“Bird to all units. Withdraw. Withdraw.”

“We’ve fucked it,” I seethed. “All of it.”

I turned. At the south checkpoint, an unmarked car had been drawn out onto the road to block any attempt to escape. This was now unmanned, the officers having sprinted towards what was almost certainly Chopper, lying on the porch under the hands of fifteen men.

Beside the checkpoint was a single dark figure sitting astride a motorcycle, watching the commotion. As I spotted him, he turned and kicked the engine into life.

“Come on.” I grabbed a fistful of Eden’s jacket. “That’s him, come on!”

Eden beat me in the sprint to the patrol car parked at the checkpoint. I threw myself into the passenger seat as she began to pull away, the tires screeching as they momentarily failed to grip the wet road. I tugged the microphone out of my collar, grabbing the roof with my other hand to steady myself as Eden swung the car around a corner.

“Ground Unit Three to Bird, pursuing Chopper on Malabar Road heading south.”

Nothing came back to me. In the tense moments while I awaited a response, Eden leaned forward over the wheel, knuckles white in their grip. I was so wired that I jumped in my seat and smacked my skull against the roof of the car when a hand touched my neck.

“Isn’t this
fun
, comrades?”

Eric laughed and spread his arms over the backseats as though enjoying a carriage ride in the park. I had not heard him get into the car at the checkpoint. I wondered if he had been sitting there already when Eden and I climbed in.

I couldn’t think about Eric’s presence for long. Eden cut across a flat roundabout, screaming through a set of lights after the motorcyclist, who breezed between the cars on the main road. The patrol car flew over the hill towards Maroubra Junction. In the windows of a dozen tiny salt-sprayed apartments, people were watching television and sitting down for dinner. Eden blasted through another intersection, the red of the lights reflected in the rain on the road.

“Unit Three, we’re backing you up. Hang tight, keep the reports coming.”

Two marked cars, lights flashing, appeared on the road behind us. Eden gained and then lost ground on the motorcyclist. The man on the bike cut between two passing trucks, causing her to slam on the brakes. She followed at a distance, the red eye of his taillight blinking between the passing cars as we entered and then left the motorway. On Botany Road, the rider seemed to decide where he was going, leaning forward on the bike and gunning it between the cars waiting at the lights.

“Fucker,” Eden growled. She let out a short, hard sigh. “He’s heading for the airport. He’ll lose the helicopter out there and we’ll lose him in the crowd.”

“Ground Unit Three to Bird, Chopper is heading to Sydney Airport via Botany Road.”

I could almost hear Captain James swearing on the other end of the line. If the killer got into the airport, it would be a nightmare trying to find him.

“We’ll try to cut the entrances off before he gets there. Stay on him.”

“No chance.” Eric laughed from behind me. “He’s going to make it with room for an espresso.”

Eric was right. The red taillight of the motorcycle zipped right across an intersection of nine lanes of traffic, gliding down the domestic terminal lane like a kid on a bicycle. Eden wove and screeched into the intersection, leaning on her horn. By the time we reached the lineup of taxis waiting to pick up new arrivals the black helmet and leather-jacketed shoulders of the rider were bobbing through the traffic a hundred meters ahead of us. Eden threw the car into park and jumped out, dashing ahead of me. I sprinted onto the road, running between the cars.

“Police! Get out of the way!”

Ahead, the rider abandoned the bike and helmet and ran through the automatic doors into the terminal building. The crowd waiting at the taxi rank scattered as I approached, my gun hanging by my side.

I glanced behind me to try and find Eric but he was gone. There were five hundred or so people in the check-in area. No one was running. Fat elderly men in Hawaiian shirts. Young ladies in pantsuits. Army guys lugging duffel bags. The stairs to the food court were loaded with people laughing, talking, carrying plastic trays.

A plump airport security guard, already sweating, wobbled up to my side, his pistol in hand. I flashed my ID, barely looking at him. In a glance I saw clear pale skin over rounded cheeks, eyes pinched at the corners by fat. I dropped my eyes to his name badge, hardly aware of his presence in my tangled thoughts.

“You got comms to all units in the building?” I asked.

“Sure do,” he nodded eagerly.

“You’re looking for a white male, six foot something, wearing a black biker jacket and jeans.”

The security guard grabbed his radio and gave the report. Without waiting for him I ran off toward the restaurants, stopping at the top of the stairs to scan the hundred of diners.

If he had not been looking right at me, I might not have noticed him. The killer was standing at the far side, by a large blue fire door. As soon as I turned towards him, he slammed the silver bar on the door down. A great screeching alarm erupted through the dining area, causing every single person to freeze.

The killer disappeared through the fire escape. I ran down the stairs, sensing Eden as she fell into step beside me. On the way across the dining hall I knocked over a man standing with a tray in his hands, watching in numb shock as we approached. The alarm whirred overhead, buzzing in my ear canals.

The fire escape opened onto a loading dock. The killer was nowhere. Eden and I split up, taking two different sets of stairs to the bottom of the dock where pallets of frozen french fry boxes were waiting to be lifted up onto the next level.

To the left and right, dozens of similar loading docks stretched into darkness. I jogged uncertainly to my right, sweeping my gun around the next dock, glancing behind me as Eden appeared in the street, working her way down the left, her figure disappearing between the glowing circles of orange streetlights.

Don’t leave her,
I thought, an impulse that had no meaning.
Don’t let her get away.

I tried to shake the thought out of my head. Eden’s report crackled in my ear as she reached the other end of the building with no success. I opened my mouth to give my own report when all that came out was a howl. I didn’t even know I’d been hit. My mouth didn’t work and then my legs gave out, the oversized bulk of me in my bulletproof vest and flak jacket slumping to the ground.

I blinked away the lights in the corners of my eyes. I tried to move my arms but they were useless. The commands in my brain seemed to fizzle out. Two boots appeared beside my face before a hand seized my collar from behind.

“There’s no gratitude anymore, is there, Detective?” a voice sneered.

The man in the biker jacket rolled me onto my back. He was huge. As the feeling slowly returned to my legs and arms, I lay beneath him, panting. My gun was in his fingers. I could feel warm blood running down the back of my neck.

“You try to do people a service,” the killer smiled, his blue eyes glinting in the orange light, “and all you get is trouble. People don’t understand. This isn’t life. It’s survival. We’re forgetting where we came from.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. The gun was pointed at my face. I drew short hacking breaths as the killer lifted a boot and pressed it against my upper chest, the toe resting on my Adam’s apple.

“Don’t,” I said, trying to think of a way out and coming up blank. “Just don’t. You’ll only make this worse for yourself. Drop the gun and run.”

The killer laughed. The back of my head felt wet on the concrete. When he spoke again, they were practiced words. I could hear him saying them to me, and at the same time I could hear him saying them to men, to women, to children he had strapped to a steel operating table. His voice carried through my ears to the ears of waitresses, university students, council workers, business brokers. A mother. A father. A schoolgirl. His victims, gone and yet present with me at the same time, reliving their last moments as I was living mine.

“My name’s Jason Beck.” The man above me smiled. “I’m the last human being you’re ever going to see.”

Beck levelled the gun between my eyes. It bucked in his fingers, kicking upwards with a flash as the bullet cleaved into the concrete ten centimeters above my skull. I looked up in time to see Beck double in pain, clutching his shoulder. I blinked and he was gone, and the steel beams of the loading dock ceiling receded into the dark green mist of my fading consciousness.

 

 

I opened my eyes to a furious pain in my nose. Chester’s chubby fingers were crushing the cartilage in anxiety, his other hand holding my mouth ajar. I bucked wildly as his mouth descended towards mine.

“Holy Jesus!” I yelped, scrambling away from him. “I’m alive, goddamnit!”

Chester breathed a sigh of relief. There was sweat dripping from the line of his round jaw.

“You weren’t breathing,” he panted. “I just finished my certificate IV in first aid. You were in the right hands.”

Men and women appeared around me. Someone lifted me to my feet and my head began to throb. An ambulance buzzed and flashed its way through the street between the loading docks, the paramedics shoving aside cops and security guards to get to me. Eden and Eric stood in silence by the pallets, watching the fray with detached interest. A sickness brought on by their stares, as well as the blow to the head, pounded through my stomach. I retched but there was nothing in me.