Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

A couple of breaths of that smoke could knock me for six. But I had no choice. I got to my feet, picked up the TV set from off an upturned wooden crate, threw it through the front window. I kicked away the rest of the glass, got to the floor again, breathed. Stood. I picked up the first kid in a fireman’s lift, hoisted him on my shoulder, ran with him to the broken window, tossed him out.

The second kid groaned.

“It’s going to be ok, you little shit,” I said, and picked him up too.

My legs buckled, but I managed to get him across the room. I tossed him out and leaped after him into the garden. The street full of neighbors now. They dragged the boys out of the garden, helped me to my feet and down the path. A couple of them clapped and patted me on the back.

I dry-heaved and spat, someone gave me a water bottle.

I saw Amber. She ran over and threw her arms around me.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” she kept saying, over and over.

Two fire tenders arrived and in a couple of minutes they had the blaze under control and out. An easy one for the fire department, considering the number of wildfires they were increasingly having to deal with in this second summer of drought.

A cop showed up and paramedics took the kids to the hospital. They both had suffered smoke inhalation but would be fine. A paramedic asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital but I said no. He gave me a hit of O 2. I coughed and heaved and he gave me Gatorade instead. Amber helped me up.

“How did you do that, how did you know how to do that?” Amber asked, incredulous.

I knew, but I didn’t tell her. My cop training had taken over. I’d been a cop for six years, not six months. It wasn’t me, it was automatic pilot.

“I don’t know,” I said, “it just seemed like the right thing to do.”

“Are you ok? Are you hurt? Maybe you should go to the hospital? What do you think?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

While I recovered, we sat there on the curb with all the other onlookers. Amber held my hand and give me sips from a water bottle. A couple of minutes later a police officer came over to interview me. Tall, skinny, alert, he looked a little like trouble. I got to my feet. He asked me if I was ok. I said I was. He asked what exactly had happened. I began to tell him as simply as possible. He wrote everything down and in the middle of a sentence he suddenly stopped me.

“I know you,” he said.

“You do?”

“Yeah, I know you from somewhere, I can’t quite place it.”

“Well, I don’t think I know you,” I said, guessing that the cop recognized me from the bloody artist’s-impression wanted posters down at his station house.

“Yeah, it’ll come to me in a minute. What’s your name?”

“Um, it’s Seamus Holmes,” I said.

Amber looked at me, startled, but said nothing.

“Where do you live?”

“Uh, two-oh-eight Broadway, apartment twenty-six,” I said.

“Ok, Seamus, what kind of accent is that?”

“Irish.”

“Irish, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Not Australian, right?”

“No.”

“Hold on a minute,” he said, and walked off.

He went to his car and said something into his police radio. I was getting quite scared now. He walked back slowly. His face expressionless, giving nothing away.

“Just something I had to take care of there,” he said.

“Ok,” I said.

“And what do you do for a living?” the cop asked.

“Uh, I’m a schoolteacher, I coach, uh, soccer,” I said, the first thing that came into my head. Also a stupid thing. If he asked what school I was at, I was sure to blunder.

“What school you at?” he asked.

“Kennedy,” I said.

“Is that near Washington High?” he asked.

“Reasonably near,” I said.

“Yeah, I know it, ok, and you just saw the fire and went barging in?”

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded, was about to ask something else, and then his face lit up.

“Sheeat, I remember now, you play in the Cherry Creek Soccer League, right? I knew I recognized your face from something.”

“I play soccer,” I agreed.

The cop grinned. “I knew I knew you from somewhere.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I better cancel that radio call,” he said to himself.

“What?”

He looked at me. His face much more relaxed.

“Oh, nothing, it was to do with something else. I knew I knew you. Shit. And, hey, man, before the fire department gives you a lecture, which they will, I just want to say you did good getting those kids out of there.”

“Thanks.”

A TV crew from Channel 7 showed up searching for people to interview. They were getting in the way of the fire crew, and the cop looked distracted.

“Officer, is it ok if we leave, it’s getting late?” I asked.

“Hold on,” he said, not looking at me, “I gotta just take care of this and then I can let you go.”

The Channel 7 crew marched right onto the lawn, started to do a live feed. The cop straightened his tie. This was his chance to get on TV. He marched over and chatted to them for a couple of minutes.

And then, to my absolute amazement, who should get out of a red Toyota Camry on the other side of the street but Detective David Redhorse. All five feet of him. Jesus Christ. Now I understood. Redhorse was looking for us. He had stuck up a wanted poster at the cop shop or put the word out asking the police to hold for questioning any young men with Australian-sounding accents. So after Klimmer’s murder, Redhorse had gone to the train station to stake it out. He had seen the pair of us run onto the train and decided to follow. We seemed a little suspicious. But then we’d talked to him and his suspicions had been allayed a little. He thought we were ok. I was even injured, but it wasn’t a gunshot wound and the facts they knew at that stage were that the suspects were Hispanic and (because the cop had fired and seen me fall) that one of them had been hit by a bullet.

Still, something had been nagging at Redhorse, he’d checked out our story and hadn’t liked it and then come looking for us at the Holburn Hotel. Of course we weren’t there. It had clearly worried him. Two Australian boys who perhaps looked a little like the two Spanish boys that had killed Klimmer. John had cut his hair, but there was nothing he could do about his height. Maybe it didn’t mean anything, but it was something that he wanted to follow up.

And Redhorse himself scared me. A digger. A good peeler. His Denver Nuggets cap was on slantwise, his jeans and T-shirt were dirty, like he’d come from dinner or yard work, but appearances were deceiving, I could see that.

Redhorse lit himself a cigarette, took in the scene, and started making his way across to the cop.

“Let’s go,” I said to Amber.

I walked her fast along the street. We hurried down a long alley.

When we turned the street corner, Amber grabbed me. She led me under a big overhang at the entrance to an elementary school. She threw me up against the wall.

“You lied to him,” she said.

“I did.”

“You’re an illegal immigrant. All that stuff on your résumé is fake, isn’t it? Everything except for the address on your paycheck.”

“Not everything was a—”

She kissed me. She thrust her body against me and kissed me hard. Leaning up on her tiptoes, biting my lips. She took my hands and placed them on her breasts and we moved together backward into the shadow of the overhang. Her hands searched under my shirt and she touched my back and chest with her fingernails. She grabbed my ass with her right hand and pulled me closer. With her left she began unbuttoning my jeans.

“Right here,” she said. “Right now.”

“Madness,” I said as I grabbed for the zipper on her black jeans. She stopped me and pulled down her jeans and then her panties. She held me and shoved me inside her. She was dripping wet. I leaned back against the wall and she leaned on me and climbed on me and I fucked her the way only a junkie can. Need and desire and displacement and hunger and concentration and pain.