John Shirley - Watch Dogs - Dark Clouds

So where had the ambulance taken Aiden Pearce?

That ambulance had come fast, after the shooting. Maybe that was the assassin’s mop up team. Maybe they hadn’t been EMT personnel at all…

Chicago’s Fastest Responders…

Were they dumping Aiden Pearce’s body off a pier right now?

Wolfe walked around the corner, toward the luxury car he’d “borrowed” that morning, electronically hot wiring it from a closed car lot. He’d had to pay a tagger to spray paint the lot’s security camera lenses over, before he’d stolen the car. Sixty bucks to the tagger, and it was worth it… why not swipe a comfortable car?

He looked around, saw no one watching the car, which was parked half a block from the Emergency Room. It seemed there was no APB on it yet; might continue that way all day, with luck, if no one inventoried that car lot.

He used the universal car-door remote he’d rigged up, signaling the car’s locks. It chirped in response, unlocking, and he hurried to it. He got in, triggered start , and drove away, careful not to go too fast or too slow. He didn’t want to attract the cops.

The car had a GPS system, voice activated. “Chicago’s Fastest Responders, nearest office,” he told it.

The GPS responded, informing him that the office was less than a quarter mile away.

He took a right, drove down a boulevard for a couple minutes, and there it was,

CFR: Chicago’s Fast Responders: Ward Office 6.

He parked out behind the sprawling one-story cement block building, and went in. “Not taking any more applications today,” said the ginger-haired, freckle-faced man behind the counter. The man was poking at a smartphone as he spoke.

“Applications?”

The clerk glanced up at him. “You aren’t here for the job?”

“No. Um—a friend of mine was picked up today by CFR. Trouble is—there’s some, uh, miscommunication about what hospital he was taken to.”

The guy sighed and rolled his eyes. “Not my responsibility.”

Wolfe fished a twenty dollar bill from his pants’ pocket, folded the bill and tapped it on the counter. “Just take a minute.”

The twenty vanished. “Whatever. Where was this?”

He told the counter clerk the street corner and gave Pearce’s name—though that might not be the name found on Aiden Pearce, who probably had as many I.D.s as he needed.

The clerk peered into a computer monitor. “Nope. Nobody picked up on the waterfront at all today. Nobody on that corner, nobody on that street. Mostly we’ve had guys picking up gunshot vics over at Washington Park. As usual.”

“Nobody by that name anywhere?”

“Nope.”

Wolfe kept asking questions and kept getting nope, nope, nope and no. CFR denied ever picking up anyone on that corner, at that time or any other time today.

“And we got no employees named Collingswood. Not one.”

“And the ambulance number? One-oh-three?”

“Not in use today. Being serviced.”

“Serviced. Right.”

Wolfe turned and walked silently out.

Aiden Pearce had been shot. Then he had disappeared, as if he had been taken away by a ghostly ambulance, and spirited to a ghostly hospital.

Either that, or those guys had been with the assassin… and Pearce was dead. So maybe he was a real ghost, now, instead of the ghostlike vigilante he’d been. A real ghost—for good.

Wolfe decided he wouldn’t believe that till there was proof.

He walked out to the corner of the building, preparing to go back and borrow the illegally borrowed car one more time before he abandoned it…

And that’s when the dark Crown Victoria pulled up in front of him. Wolfe knew an unmarked cop car when he saw one.

Aiden Pearce was quite alive, but was almost wishing he weren’t.

It was the burning pain in his head. It was the throbbing; it was the nausea. That’s what made him wish he were at least unconscious.

The bullet, he was told, had only nicked his skull. But it had given him a concussion, not a terribly severe one that required hospitalization, but no concussion is good. Scalp wounds appear to bleed a lot of blood, more than they really do, so he’d gushed out impressively.

“Doc” Morrsky, a onetime doctor who’d had his license pulled for selling Oxycodone, had done the diagnosis and stitches, telling Pearce, “Yeah, you’re okay, just a scratch and a concussion.”

He hadn’t offered Pearce any Oxycodone. Right now, Pearce wouldn’t mind a few hundred milligrams.

Pearce was lying on a bed in one of his safehouses, on the South Side. His head ached as if it had been shot a moment ago. One of the EMTs had given him a local anesthetic. It wasn’t quite enough.

He could hear Pussler in the next room, yapping to his girlfriend on a cellphone—Pussler the fake EMT who’d kept Wolfe back, at the site of the attempted murder.

“Hey baby, I got some cash, I got a job today, we can score for sure,” Pussler was saying.

Pearce sighed. Was Pussler, a junkie ex-actor, as much as Morrsky was an ex-doctor, the best he could do?

The other two guys had been the real deal, EM techs from CFR in Pearce’s pay—guys Pearce now owed five grand each. Since Pearce had been skimming cash, through hacking, from a couple of gangsters who had no clue who was doing it, he would be able to pay them off. And goofy on dope or not, Pussler had gotten the job done. He was one of Pearce’s go-betweens on the street; he’d been on call, had gotten the pre-loaded emergency text, and he’d responded quickly. Because Pearce had suspected someone was stalking him, shortly after he set out for the meeting. So he’d told Pussler to get with the ambulance escape team, and stay close for a getaway with good cover, if he needed it—he didn’t expect to be shot.

Stupid, he told himself. Shouldn’t have risked it.

If someone had set him up—who was it? Pussler just didn’t seem that complicated—and for some reason Pearce trusted him. There was Clyde Merwiss—a programmer who worked with Pearce sometimes, had for about four months… But he hadn’t known about the meeting.

So—had Mick Wolfe set him up for the gunman?

If Wolfe had set him up, he was a better actor than Pussler. Mick Wolfe had seemed glad to see him. Had even tried to warn him.

Had, in fact, saved his life. Wolfe’s warning had given Pearce a chance to duck from the line of fire, so he’d only caught one round, and only glancingly.

Luckily the gunman had seen all that blood splash from the scalp wound and thought he’d done better than a graze…

Pearce had done a hack into the cameras on the street, before getting out of his own car and walking down there; he’d checked to see who was meeting him; who it was, exactly, who knew that old code phrase.

The street camera had shown him a vaguely familiar face. He’d used the ctOS facial recognition system, and it confirmed: Mick Wolfe. Colin’s boy, whom Pearce had last seen when Mick was in his early teens…

Pearce took out his smartphone, wiped some dried blood off it, and then went to his ctOS penetration mode…

Time to find out what Mick Wolfe had been up to.

“ What ’d you say your name was, officer? Actually—could I just see that badge again?”

A big pink-faced man with a flattop and a square jaw, the detective growled to himself but reached inside his gray suit jacket and pulled out his gold badge again, held it up in his scarred, beefy pink hands. “ Tranter. Lieutenant Tranter. That enough stalling?”

Wolfe memorized the badge number.

“Sure, detective.”

Tranter put his badge away. “Now fork over your I.D., wise guy.”