Carol O’Connell - Crime School

All sensation ceased.

The door closed. The room was dead quiet.

Riker yelled, ‘Yes, you can go faster! You’re with a damn cop!’ Charles pushed the gas pedal to the floor and never flinched at the near miss of a cab and now a truck coming out of a side street. The detour was a long one, twisting round the gridlock traffic of a broken water main on Houston. They were driving ten miles of bad traffic to travel one as the crow flies.

The landlord had disobeyed a direct order to remain downstairs with his wife. He had silently followed Mallory to the top-floor apartment, and now it was too late to threaten the man – and unnecessary. John White quickly backed down to the lower landing when she drew her.357 Smith and Wesson, a cannon among revolvers. She favored it above all others for its drop-dead stopping power.

Pssst.

The door was ajar by the crack of a bare inch. She kicked it dead center, and it flew back with a bang and the sound of plaster crumbling where the knob had crashed into a wall. Fresh wet blood was splattered across the rug, and some of it stained a baseball bat. Mallory only glanced at the body on the floor. Ronald Deluthe had a rope knotted around his neck. She entered the apartment, aiming her gun at every piece of furniture that might give cover to the scarecrow. The bathroom was empty. She kicked open another door – no one there.

Upon returning to the front room, she found John White crouching on the floor and holding the wrist of the fallen detective.

Deluthe’s left arm was twisted in an unnatural attitude. His nose was smashed to one side and still gushing blood, the only sure sign of a beating heart and life.

‘I’ve got a pulse,’ said White, ‘but it’s thready.’

Mallory knelt beside the unconscious man, then put one finger between the rope and his neck. It was a tight fit. His oxygen had been completely cut off, but his lips were not yet blue. The scarecrow could only be a minute away.

John White was also working at the rope, but to a different purpose; he was trying to clear the man’s air passage, saying, ‘I was a volunteer paramedic back in Wisconsin.’

Mallory was not listening, nor did she watch as White performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. She stared at the open closet and its contents for a moment, then reached down and ripped back the lapel of Deluthe’s suit jacket. His shoulder holster was empty.

The scarecrow has a gun.

She was rising, moving quickly toward the door and the inconvenient obstacle of Alice White. Mallory pushed the woman aside, shouting, ‘Call 911!’

‘I did. You told me – ’

‘Call again). Tell them an officer’s down!’

The last staircase at the end of the hall would lead her to the roof, and Mallory was running toward it. She had climbed to the door at the top of the stairs when she heard a scream from the apartment below. Apparently, Alice had noticed the moldy corpse on the floor of the closet.

Riker spoke into his cell phone, ‘Repeat that. An officer down?’

Charles was pulling over to allow an emergency vehicle to pass, when the detective yelled, ‘Follow that ambulance!’

Mallory’s revolver preceded her through the door of a small rooftop shed. Her eyes had not yet adjusted to brilliant sunlight when she took aim at the sound of footsteps. And now, in perfect focus, the profile of a young girl’s head was lined up with the muzzle of the gun. The teenager had not yet seen the detective or the weapon, but she was shaking, and her face was a study in dumb surprise as she bolted for the rooftop door.

Mallory rounded the shed to see the back of a man’s bloodstained shirt and jeans. He used Deluthe’s gun to shade his eyes from the overhead sun. There were scratches on his face, the work of Stella Small. The scarecrow’s right arm hung useless at his side, and she guessed that Deluthe had also done some damage before he was taken down.

Only steps away, a smaller man with carrot-red hair was huddled on the tarpaper ground amid a wash of white linen pulled down from a clothes line, perhaps in the belief that wet sheets could protect him from bullets. On the other side of a low brick wall that separated one roof from the next, an elderly woman tended a coop of carrier pigeons. She was deaf to the whimpers of the little man in the sheets and blind to the one with the gun.

At the sound of a nervous giggle, Mallory glanced back over one shoulder to see the children standing behind her, three boys in staggered sizes, and these television babies showed no fear of either weapon.

The scarecrow was facing her now, dazed and weaving. Blood dripped into one eye from a gash in his brow.

A massive head injury – a bonus.

She could hear the children creeping forward to watch the show. None of them had the sense of sheep to get out of harm’s way. Mallory left her back vulnerable when she whirled around and yelled, ‘Get inside!’ Her gun produced no effect on the boys, but her eyes were promising something nasty if they did not move and right now.

They shrank back behind the shelter of a door made of wood, not fire-code metal. Bullets would rip right through it. The smallest child had been left behind. He was walking between the guns.

Thou shalt not get the sheep killed.

That had been Louis Markowitz’s prime rule and Mallory’s hardest lesson, for it tied into a bizarre concept: when she pinned on the badge, she agreed, if need be, to die for the sheep. This had been a difficult pitch to a child of the streets, who possessed an ungodly instinct for survival.

But a deal was a deal.

The scarecrow’s gun hand extended slowly. Mallory’s finger touched lightly on the trigger. She could drop him any time she liked, but fast as she was, he might get off one round. His every movement told her he was not left-handed. The shot would go wild.

One dead sheep.

All the children were targets, the one in the open and the two behind the door. Or he might blow away the pigeon lady, or the little man under the sheets. Mallory lowered her revolver to end the threat that would make him fire.

His gun slowly drifted toward the shed where the children were hidden but not protected. In sidelong vision, Mallory caught the motion of a wind-whipped flowery dress before she saw a terrified woman creeping toward the lone boy in the line of fire. Mother courage. The woman gathered the little boy into her arms, and the scarecrow paid no attention to her running backward with the child. His eyes were fixed on Mallory. His gun hand was on the rise.

She was faster. In a stunning flash, the muzzle of her revolver pointed at his eyes. ‘You really want this bullet, don’t you?’

The threat was meaningless to him. This was not the cornered animal she had anticipated, but something even more dangerous. Perversely, she raised her revolver high to aim at the noonday sun, and then, pushing perversity to the nth degree, she taunted him, saying, ‘I know more about your mother’s death than you do.’

Magic words.

His gun was lowering, buying her time to reassess his injuries. The right arm was certainly broken. All his weight listed to the right leg, and she knew the left was about to fold. One eye was clotted with blood, and one eye was attentive as he awaited the rest of her story.

Just like the old days -just like a whore.

‘And I even know what you did that night.’

The scarecrow’s one clear eye flickered with surprise. His left leg buckled, but he remained standing. He seemed unaware that he was aiming at the shivering pile of wet laundry. The little man in the sheets ceased to cry and laid his head down in a faint.