Theaella

50

“Is there…?” Jack’s voice went hoarse, and he had to start over. “Is there someone else I could talk to? Another cop?”

“Oh, no,” Brust said. “I think it’s best we keep this discussion between these four walls.”

Nu?ez’s eyes were shaded by the brim of his baseball cap. “All nice and soundproof.”

Brust keyed to Jack’s gaze, traced it to the security camera. “Ah,” he said. “All these budget shortfalls have us operating on a shoestring.”

Nu?ez again. “Sometimes we have to turn off the cameras. You know, to save electricity.”

The words were pleasantly delivered, without a trace of menace. Jack was having trouble processing them. Was he reading into some dark intent? Was this all in his head?

Nu?ez fished a digital recorder from his pen-laden shirt pocket. He half turned, shielding Jack’s view with a muscular shoulder, and spoke into the microphone softly.

“Wait,” Jack said. “What are you saying?” He looked at Brust. “What is he saying?”

Nu?ez’s voice carried to him then. “—can be used against you in a court of law.”

“Guys,” Jack said. “What’s—”

“s**t!” Nu?ez shouted so abruptly that Jack jerked back in his chair. “Oh, s**t—grab him, he’s—” He fumbled the recorder in his hands purposefully and then clicked it off. Immediately he was as calm as before. He tucked the recorder back into his shirt pocket.

Nu?ez and Brust looked at Jack silently. Expressionless.

Jack had broken out in a full sweat. He stared at the two faces, but they gave nothing away.

And then Brust set his foot on the chair across from Jack and hiked up his pant leg. Strapped to his ankle was a banged-up, nickel-plated .22. He plucked the pistol from the holster and set it on the table between them.

“What … what’s that?” Jack asked.

“Oh, that?” Once again Brust gave with the grin. And once again Nu?ez mirrored it. “That one’s yours.”

The bullpen was bustling, abuzz with overlapping conversations, most of them unpleasant. Perched on a hard wooden chair to the side of the detective’s desk, Matthew made sure that each breath sounded labored, pushed through increasing pain.

The detective—O’Malley by his nameplate—looked exhausted, dark bags beneath his eyes. He wore sweat-matted brown curls in no discernible style and was slender to the point of frail. Lower body weight would prove useful.

His security key card was in full view, clipped to his belt, but his holster was empty. Matthew guessed O’Malley had either locked his weapon in the drawer or secured it in the gun safe before he’d entered the chaos of the bullpen.

His desk was one of four currently occupied in the immediate area, the other cops conducting similar interviews, keying in similar reports. A drug-animated p********e waved his arms around, using a high-pitched voice and noodle arms to illustrate his story. “—thought you were my brother-in-law when I approached the vehicle, uh-huh, that’s right. It was all a big mix-up, sweetie pie.”

The other cops burrowed further into their desks, trying to focus. That was helpful.

A corridor across the bullpen, guarded by a key-card-protected security door, led back to what Matthew guessed were the interrogation rooms. That’s where Nu?ez and Brust would have taken Jack. They’d need privacy to talk to him. And to do whatever else they needed to do.

O’Malley slurped at his coffee and reviewed the monitor onto which he’d begun to input the complaint. “Okay, so surname ‘Case,’ first name ‘Justin.’ Is that right, sir?”

“Yes.”

A few desks over, the p********e grew increasingly agitated. “b***h, puh-lease! I’m a upstanding member of this mothafucking community!”

Matthew set his RoamZone on his knee. Then he dug the Baggie from his pocket, rested it on his thigh just out of O’Malley’s line of sight. He took a deep breath, held it, and cracked the zippered seal. Given the state of his brain, the last thing he needed was a whiff of this stuff.

The cop at the adjacent desk was no more than five feet away, but his face stayed down as he chicken-pecked at the keyboard with two fingers, his brow furrowed from the effort. The faintest turn of his head and he’d have Matthew dead to rights.

O’Malley squinted at the monitor. Taped to the top was a frayed photo of a dachshund wearing a Spider-Man knit sweater. No wedding ring. He rubbed at his eyes once more. “Wait a sec,” he said. “‘Justin Case’? ‘Just in case’?”

His face snapped over to Matthew. Already Matthew had the sodden gauze pads in his palm. With his other hand, he hit REDIAL on the RoamZone.

There was a half-second delay as the call routed through to the Nokia in the dumpster outside. The flashbang’s effect, compounded within the metal walls, literally vibrated the building, the boom loud enough to send a passing officer airborne. Coffee rose from his cup in a brown fountain. The detective to Matthew’s side hit the floor, hands laced over the back of his head.

Matthew was up beside O’Malley in an instant, cupping his hand over the detective’s mouth and nose, steadying him and pretending to lean over the desk in an improvised duck-and-cover.

Desflurane was Matthew’s preferred halogenated ether. Its TV-trendy cousin, chloroform, was nearly useless, taking a solid five minutes to be effective and requiring ongoing inhalation to keep the target unconscious. In Matthew’s experience the onset of action for Desflurane hovered around two minutes, but a lightweight individual like the unfortunate Detective O’Malley would be functionally incapacitated at the thirty-second mark.

The drug was also much safer than chloroform, a key consideration if you were planning to knock out an innocent cop.

Over the furor in the lobby, the desk officer shouted, “Everyone please evacuate in a calm and orderly fashion!”

As the bullpen cleared, Matthew caged O’Malley’s head with his arm, tilting him forward at the big monitor to hide his face and the soaked gauze from view. O’Malley whipped his head back to c***k into Matthew’s, and Matthew pulled away just in time so it thudded ineffectively into his chest. A heartbeat slower and Matthew would’ve been laid out on the floor with second-impact syndrome, a second concussion ballooning the first, leaving him unconscious or dead.