Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

We were halfway across the park when we heard the peelers shouting:

“Stop. Police. Stop or we’ll shoot.”

The sky swimming-pool blue. The grass a dirty copper color. The temperature 92. My lungs aching. My eyes filled with streaks of white light. The front range all across the horizon to the west. Green foothills, blue mountains behind, and then more behind that. A big one in the middle with a horn peak and a bowl of curved magenta. Beautiful. One even had a trace of snow on it from Victoria Patawasti’s storm.

We cut another fifty yards through pine trees and some kind of open-air theater. It was late afternoon and hot. Few people. A man was jogging in front of us but he had his earphones on, didn’t hear the peelers yelling.

We made it to the edge of the park.

I looked back.

Three coppers in tan uniforms. Guns out. Two fat guys and an older skinny bastard another seventy yards back but bearing down like a greyhound.

John ran up the grass slope out of the park and onto Sixth Street and I ran after him. Sirens everywhere. It registered in a second that they were all coming for us. I slipped in a pool of water from a broken sprinkler and skidded in front of a building and John, turning to see what was happening, ran into an old man with a beard who was carrying a Scottie dog. All three went sprawling. I pulled John up. The dog was biting him.

“Christ,” John screamed, and tried to shake the dog off.

The old man started yelling in Russian.

I grabbed the dog by its hind legs and threw it twenty feet away. The old man ran after it, swearing.

“Come on,” I said to John.

We darted out into the street between massive condominium buildings and a few large private houses with high, ivy-clad walls and iron railings. No way over them.

“Hey, you,” someone shouted behind us.

John turned.

“Run, you bastard,” I said. We sprinted along the sidewalk. A doorman in front of a luxury condominium complex put his arm out, whether to stop us or hail a cab or see if it was bloody raining, I don’t know.

I shouldered him and he went down.

“Fucksake, Alex, never get away from the peelers,” John said.

“Run, you eejit, and save your fucking breath.”

There were more sirens and I knew the cops running across the park would be radioing our position so they’d block our road ahead.

They knew the town, we didn’t. They were acclimatized to altitude, we weren’t. They were on local time, we were jet-lagged. They were in shape, we were a couple of druggies.

Things didn’t look good.

“Down here,” John said, and we turned at an alley.

No people. High walls between condominium complexes. Trash bins. Baking asphalt. Harsh transition from sunlight to shadow.

Cops still on our trail.

“Here,” I said. Another alley, smaller. Heading west again, view of the mountains. Lungs exploding, heart so loud in my ears I couldn’t hear anything else.

A side street: no pedestrians, concrete walls, town houses.

“I hear a helicopter,” John said.

I didn’t look up.

A big alley. North this time. Kids playing catch with huge baseball mitts. A white kid, a black kid, a Spanish kid, all in bright T-shirts, like a scene from bloody Sesame Street . We weaved through them and a few seconds later the cops came busting through as well.

Another turn. The alley ahead wide and clear. Houses and garages backing onto smooth tar macadam.

John a good ten feet ahead now. A main road seven or eight blocks ahead that looked like Colfax Avenue. Getting darker, too, and if we could just get to Colfax, where traffic was heavy and there were many people, we might just make it.

Perhaps the peelers felt the same, for at that moment they decided to shoot. They didn’t bother with a warning. Just a loud crack and then four more cracks. Bullets smattered into a trash compactor. The police are allowed to fire their weapons only if the suspect is a potential danger to the public or a potential danger to the arresting officer. I think it was reasonably clear that we were in neither category. These guys just wanted to fucking shoot us. A bullet screamed off the concrete in front of me. The cops firing wildly and the bullets skidding by. Close, though. And they weren’t shooting on the run. They were stopping to shoot, which lengthened the distance between us. I took a look back. They were about two tennis courts behind us. Strangely, not the cops from the park. Two chunky guys in blue-and-green uniforms. Hard to tell with all the sunlight glaring off the concrete walls, but they looked like older men. Maybe out of shape, but they should have known better.

And they were shooting to kill. Only on TV do coppers aim at legs or arms, real cops aim at the torso. I ran on. More bullets.

“Zigzag,” I yelled to John.

“What?”

“Zig, zag,” I said, and started running zigs. If you’re firing at a moving target with a nine-millimeter semiautomatic, you’ll miss if that target changes direction fast and unpredictably.

The peelers unloaded nearly a clip each at us. The bullets kicking up fragments of tar and concrete. Echoing horribly off the walls and the condo complexes.

They were yelling at us now, too, but you couldn’t make it out. They started up again. Bloody pigs. The same peelers whose stellar work would be highlighted in the JonBenet Ramsey murder case and the Columbine massacre. They burned off the rest of their clips, bullets tearing down the alley and carrying on for a thousand yards. Then they must have been reloading, since the shooting stopped.

“I’m surrendering,” John said.

“They’ll give you the fucking chair, you asshole.”

“They’re going to kill us.”

“Run, you big shite, they’re reloading, we’ll make it,” I said.

John started running. And the heroin hurt and helped. Crippled my running but eased my mind. Stringing out the ketch from this morning so that I saw myself from way above. Me: calm, in slow motion, fleeing from peeler Pete through wide alleys, in the golden hour, with the sun behind the mountains and the sky crimson and the brilliant white cirrus clouds in lines between the buildings. Almost a moment of transcendence. The two of us running between piles of tires and wooden pallets, cardboard boxes, bins, machinery, car parts, garbage. And shadows across the alley and our reflections back at us off black-glass apartment windows.

“Nearly there,” I said.

One of the cops fired twice more. Bullets flying past us, hitting nothing. Well, hitting many things, but not us. How were they going to explain this in their log? Probably say we were carrying sawed-off shotguns or Armalites or something.

Colfax closer and closer.

And the ketch lets you exist outside of time, outside of place, as if you are a being seeing yourself from above. Can’t get caught up in that. Disembodied. Running.

Hubris, saying they were hitting nothing.

A bullet nicked a soda can, then clattered sideways in front of me, I fell, spun, smashed my shoulder into the ground.

“I’m hit,” I said to John in a panic.

This time it was John who had his shit together. He pulled me up with one arm.

“You’re not hit, you’re ok,” he said.

Quick look at my shoulder. A slice through the sweat-drenched jacket and T-shirt and a nasty cut on my shoulder. But I was ok. I had been lucky. He looked at me for another quarter of a second and then we both gazed back. Only one cop, staring at us, frustrated. We were too near Colfax, he couldn’t risk a shot now. He had that much sense, at least.

“Let’s go,” John said.

We cut down the first alley on our left and dodged back up, running north to Colfax Avenue.

Seven at night. The main strip of Denver, busy, packed. This part of Colfax was like all those main streets in Westerns: wide avenues, big store-fronts, low-rise buildings. But past its peak, run-down, decaying, dirty. Prostitutes everywhere. Scores of them. Same as yesterday. Black and Latina girls in short skirts and tank tops, pimps, men cruising the drag, checking out the talent, looking for regulars. Pushers, users, hangers-on. No cops.