Chapter 15: Reds and Blues

I throw my weight into the garbage can. It falls over and spills across the street. The flash grenade blends in with the rest of the trash.

I turn my back and hear the electric pop-whine as the grenade discharges. For a split-second, the alley lights up bright as the sun. I hear a chorus of surprised screams.

Still ducked low, I swing around the corner to take inventory of my pursuers. Of the big, trench-coated men, all four are holding pistols. Three are on their knees, stunned and temporarily blinded by the flash. But the fourth-who either anticipated the attack or is just lucky enough to have avoided direct eye contact-is still standing. His face lights up nastily as he sees me. He swings his pistol and fires.

There's an eruption of brick and mortar as the accelerated slug blows a hole the size of a champagne cork in the wall beside me, erasing any doubt of what these men are here to do to me. Whatever happens next, remember they had it coming.

I squeeze the trigger and pop him three times in the chest, fast. The zip-whirring reports of my akslug rounds sound like hummingbirds. He goes down. I advance, nearly fall over, and crack the nearest of the stunned killers with the snout of my pistol, just above the bridge of his nose. His eyes roll back, and he sprawls over, unconscious.

One of the remaining men aims toward the sound of my footfalls and fires blindly in my direction. I hear the strange, sucking sound of the bullet's trajectory as it whizzes by, inches from my earlobe.

I react out of pure reflex; it's less a dive for cover than a semi-controlled, drunken fall as I hit the ground, taking cover behind the other remaining thug. I hear two more reports, followed by painful shouts as thug number one caps thug number two in his blind firing. The poor sap tries to tell his buddy to stop, just before he's hammered twice in the chest and goes down. It's just sad. No guy wants his death to be funny.

I roll and see the blind-firing thug taking aim again at the sounds of my movement. Lying sideways on the ground, I'm holding my pistol with both hands, praying for dear life that despite the way the world spins around me my aim is true. I squeeze the trigger.

ZIP.

The thug's head jerks backward. He looks angry at his own rotten luck as he turns slightly, fires once into the air, and smacks dead against the street.

I waste no time. Scrambling through puddles, I hurry to remove the gun from the hand of the thug I knocked cold. I pat him down for additional weapons-

The sound of footsteps. I wheel around, raising my pistol-at the bartender, aiming a shotgun at me. I don't drop my gun, but I do put my hands up. The bartender takes the hint and lowers the shotgun.

"You hurt?" he asks.

"Call the police," I pant. "Tell them to send Detective Albright. Mention the Nathan Harland case."

He turns to hustle back into the bar.

I bind the hands of the unconscious thug behind his back using my necktie. The other three are dead. I try not to bloody my hands as I check their pockets. Nothing but a few personal items. No ID, of course.

It takes my body a while to believe the danger's passed. I breathe a shaky sigh of relief and sit down, leaning against the wall, feeling the rainwater soak through my trousers. The wail of approaching sirens drifts down through the rooftops. "Got to quit drinking," I say to no one.

***

I run a hand over my bald head. In all the excitement, I don't know where my hat went.

The alley is bathed in the on-and-off-and-on-again flashing of reds and blues. The lone survivor among my attackers is currently being loaded into the back of an ambulance. He gives me one last deadly look before the cops shut the door behind him.

In front of me, Jean-Luc Albright is standing there, turning my pistol back and forth in his hand to examine it.

"Your mother ever tell you not to play with guns?" I say.

"You got a permit for this?" he asks.

"In my other suit."

"And this?" says Jean-Luc, using his datapad's stylus to hold up the clamshell-like remnants of the discharged flash grenade.

"Oh, they don't make permits for that," I say.

Albright doesn't laugh. His little partner, Wilmer O'Hara standing beside him looks even less amused.

"He reeks," O'Hara says to Albright.

"You're no petunia yourself, Wilmer," I say.

"I mean you smell like you're drunk," Wilmer says. "Give me one reason why we shouldn't arrest you right now."

"Am I only allowed one?"