Eoin Colfer - Plugged

‘You can’t just shoot me, Deacon.’

The detective shrugs. ‘Fuck it, McEvoy. I’m just staying alive until someone kills me.’

I know this fatalism well. There were nights in the Lebanon when death and life held more or less the same appeal.

‘We need to find Goran, Ronelle. It’s the only way out of the tunnel.’

Deacon dips a painted nail in the blood. ‘I put a full clip into her,’ she says, staring at her fingertip.

‘I carried a survivor out of a bomb crater once, and saw another guy killed by a bee sting. You never know.’

‘Jesus Christ, McEvoy,’ says Deacon, snapped out of it by my dime-store philosophising. ‘Bee sting? You on some kind of drugs? Any more crap about bees and I will put a slug into you.’

This is the Ronelle I am comfortable with.

The blood trail meanders across the street, along the kerb for a couple of gouts, then down a basement stairwell.

Deacon snatches her gun from my hand. ‘What do you think, Hawkeye? She at the bottom of the stairwell? Or maybe all that blood is from some guy with a bee sting.’

I am comfortable with this Ronelle; that’s not the same thing as happy.

A street sweeper trundles around the corner from Cruz Avenue, its twin revolving brushes scraping the surface of last night’s leftovers. We watch the bristles turn red as the sweeper ploughs heedlessly through Goran’s tracks. The driver’s forehead smudges the glass and he looks like he would need a defibrillator to get him noticing anything.

‘Christ,’ says Deacon, and I notice the blood on her bare legs.

We splash through the street sweeper’s backwash to the stairwell. Deacon swings herself around a lamppost, her coat balloons and I realise she has underwear and a shoulder holster on under there and nothing more.

Something occurs to me. ‘Careful, Detective.’

Too late. A bullet punches into the lamppost, sending a church bell bong along its shaft.

I pull Deacon away from the stairwell. ‘Did you bother to disarm your partner?’

‘She was dead. Why disarm her?’

Detective Deacon is the kind of person who would argue with St Peter.

‘Obviously she is not as dead as you thought.’

Deacon gets a two-handed grip on her automatic. ‘This is good. If I can take her alive, she can put me in the clear. Ish. The trunk bit could take some explaining.’

‘Call it in, then.’

‘With what? The spy radio in my panties?’

A mailman runs past us shouting into his radio, effectively doing the calling in for us. We have about three minutes before this place is swarming with police.

I lie on my stomach, wiggling my fingers at Deacon. ‘Gimme the Cobra.’

Deacon looks at me as though I’m asking her to donate a kidney. ‘Give you the what? ’

‘You’ve read my file, Ronelle. This is what I do.’

Deacon slaps the gun against my chest like it’s a subpoena.

‘Make sure you shoot the right cop.’

I don’t respond. All this wisecracking is more exhausting than the gunplay.

My subconscious flicks through my memories for an appropriate Lebanon flashback, but I force that kaleidoscope of mayhem back down. Now is not the time for dwelling in the past. It would be a shame to take a bullet in the head because I was reliving Operation Green Line.

The basement stairways on my block are pretty uniform: cast-iron railing, eight steps down and a midget door wedged into a concrete alcove. These nooks were not built for someone of my size. I grab a rail and drag myself along the pavement, shirt rasping against the slabs.

There is noise below. Laboured breathing and rustling of material. I sense that Goran is nearly done, but it doesn’t take much energy to pull a trigger one last time. I’ve seen guys fight for half a day, fuelled by nothing more than bile.

I screw my eye socket into the tiny wedge of space between the railing and the pavement.

Deacon tugs on my pants. ‘What do you see?’

‘I see a leg.’

‘Just one?’

‘The other one’s bent back. I think she fell down those last few steps.’

‘Good. You see a weapon?’

I wiggle forward another inch. Goran’s hand is flapping like a fish out of water; her gun glints just out of reach.

‘Dropped it. Let’s go.’

I scramble to my feet, but Deacon is up before me, elbowing past to the first step.

She’s fast, but not fast enough. There is just time to register an impression of Goran’s battered and bloody frame, slumped like a broken mannequin, when the door behind her opens. An extremely hairy pair of hands reaches out, grabs Goran by the shoulders and hauls her inside. She’s gone in a second, like she was never there. The door slams and bolts are shot.

‘You see those hands?’ says Deacon, stunned. ‘Like goddamn monkey hands. Can you believe that?’

I push past her and knuckle the door. It’s steel-reinforced.

‘Get it open, McEvoy. Use some military trickery.’

I try to trick the door with my shoulder. The central panel buckles and wobbles but does not give.

‘Got an oxyacetylene torch tucked into your underwear beside that spy radio, Ronelle?’

‘I’m thinking of a word, McEvoy. Hobble. You remember that one?’

We don’t have time for this. Cloisters is a small place and shots fired is big news. Half the police force will be landing on this block any second, and I don’t think now is a good time for armed company.

‘So, are you waiting for backup?’

Deacon thinks aloud. ‘I can’t wait. I need to follow the monkey hands.’

‘You’re getting in deeper, Ronnie. Every step you take makes it harder to go back.’

Deacon has a look in her eyes, like she’s squinting at the horizon. ‘ We’re getting in deeper, McEvoy. Us. Okay, we’re on a tangled road now, but it could straighten out.’

I’m not the only dime-store philosopher in the group. ‘Yeah. With a couple of bee stings maybe.’

Once again, it’s the bee stings that bring Deacon back. ‘Screw you, Daniel. We gotta get out of here. I need Goran alive; without her I’m finished on the force.’ She stares into my eyes and I glimpse a hopeful expression I haven’t seen before; makes her seem at least ten years younger. ‘If I bring Goran in, and you make a statement, I could salvage something out of this shitty day. They’ll bounce me back to uniform, sure. Maybe even make me take some psych sessions, but I can stay on the force.’

My palm is resting on the reinforced door throughout this speech and I feel a sudden shock wave run through my fingers as vibration from the building transfers through the surface. Door slam.

‘They’re out the back door.’

‘To a hospital, maybe?’

‘It must be Faber who’s behind this. And I sincerely doubt they took her to a hospital.’

Deacon smiles, and I am reminded of a wolf that tracked me through the Loup Valley once. ‘They gotta believe we’re on their tails,’ she says thoughtfully.

I see where she’s going. ‘So maybe they’ll drive around a bit.’

‘Except we know where they’re going.’

‘Maybe.’

‘So we can get there before them.’

‘Big maybe.’

Deacon lopes up the stairs.

‘Big maybe,’ she agrees. ‘I’ve survived worse odds than that.’

Deacon makes me sit in the back seat on the drive across town, which is completely ridiculous as I’m not under arrest and it’s not even a secure cruiser. There’s no mesh, and if I had a mind to, I could probably get at the shotgun cradled under the passenger seat. I don’t have a mind to. Instead I use the short trip to grab a little shut-eye.

Power napping doesn’t usually work for me. If I nod off for ten minutes during sunlight hours, I’m groggy for the rest of the day. But in this instance I have no choice. In spite of the few hours’ sleep in the apartment, I am so exhausted it feels like my eyes are bleeding.