Jeff Jacobson - Sleep Tight

Viktor took a deep breath. Sweet relief flooded through his body, leaving him dazed and warm. His eyelids slowly slid shut. His breathing slowed.

Now the woman next to him really didn’t know what to do. She thought he was asleep. The last of the passengers filed out. She hit the button for one of the attendants. Down at the front of the plane, the group looked back at her. When they saw Viktor, the attendant who had kicked him out of the lavatory started up the aisle, shaking her head.

She stopped a few seats away. “Sir. Please, sir. You are to leave now.”

Viktor didn’t move. Neither did the woman next to him.

“Sir. Sir.” A little louder.

The attendant looked back at her group and shrugged.

Viktor gasped and jolted awake. The woman next to him flinched and let out a hushed yip.

The pain was back with a vengeance, drilling into the nerve cells in his stomach and behind his eyes, sparking agony as it burrowed deeper. He scrambled to his feet, spun, and almost fell back into the seat.

He licked his lips and grabbed his bag as tremors shook his limbs. Despite the loss of control, he still managed to hang on to the handle in one hand and pull himself along with the other. The attendants backed away as he staggered down the aisle.

Someone at the far end of the tunnel spoke into a phone. Viktor didn’t like that.

When he got within four feet, he bared his teeth and growled at the flight attendant on the phone.

She flinched and dropped it.

He leaned away and stumbled up the ramp, out into the bright lights of customs, and took three hitching breaths. A bewildering labyrinth of lines that looked like they had been laid out by a couple of drunk government employees waited impatiently, all strung together with fake velvet ropes. Thirty or so passengers stood in line, sneaking glances back at him.

Their eyes crawled across his skin.

One of the pouches squirmed against his left hip and just like that, that furtive itch scrabbled across his back and Viktor couldn’t take it anymore. He finally simply surrendered and let the shrieking in his head blot out everything else.

CHAPTER 2

7:24 PM

December 27

“Those flowers really bring out the color of your eyes,” Sam told his partner.

“Damn. Can’t tell you how touched I am that you noticed,” Ed said. “Keeps me up at night sometimes, worrying if I’m handsome enough.”

Sam tried not to smile and sipped his coffee instead. A snowstorm out over the Rockies had delayed Ed’s girlfriend’s flight, and the coffee had gotten cold and bitter while they waited.

It was late, and O’Hare was quiet. Bleary-eyed travellers trickled down the escalators from customs upstairs. Below, in the baggage claim area, most of the benches were empty; a few people sat along the snaking conveyer belts, waiting impatiently for the airlines to track down missing bags.

Sam looked back through the double set of glass doors at their unmarked Crown Vic. Calling it unmarked was a joke. Everybody in Chicago knew damn well that nobody drove Crown Vics except cops and those poor deluded schmucks who bought them used for God knew what reason at police auctions. Sam had left it parked illegally right in front of the doors on the lower level, where arriving passengers spilled out of O’Hare. It had been out there long enough to collect a halfhearted, thin layer of snow from a minor snow earlier. He wasn’t worried about any tickets though; O’Hare’s security, like everybody else, knew enough to leave it alone.

Technically, they were supposed to be supporting the anti-gang units in one of the pointless sweeps of one of the Chicago Housing Authority’s worst buildings on the South Side. But that was like spraying a wasp’s nest with water. All it did was piss everybody off.

Ed and Sam decided their time was better spent picking up Carolina.

Sam caught sight of his reflection. A wiry guy in his fifties with thinning gray hair glared back at him. The expression on his face caught him off guard. He looked like he might kick a dog for the hell of it. This surprised Sam; he was actually in a decent mood. As decent as his moods could get, anyway.

Ed, a heavyset black man the same age as Sam, waited for his girlfriend with a deep well of patience born of decades of endless stakeouts and too much fast food etched in his crinkled eyes. He held his flowers upright, not upside down, against his leg, like some guys. Not sideways either, held with indifference in crossed arms. Ed stood in a wide, relaxed stance, yet held those flowers as if they were growing out of a northern Illinois meadow at high noon.

Sam checked his watch. 11:47. Carolina’s flight was nearly two hours late. They had been hoping to pick her up, drop her off, and be at the sweep for all the paperwork at the end. He was pouring the coffee into the water fountain and thinking of something to tell Commander Mendoza when he heard gunshots at the top of the escalator.

Ed left the flowers on the floor between the escalators and they stormed up two and three steps at a time. Ed glided into customs, his old .38 Special held with both hands, elbows loose. It carried six hand-loaded .357 caliber shells. Technically, he wasn’t supposed to be carrying anything that powerful, but the big revolver had been grandfathered in when they changed the rules.

Sam, on the other hand, preferred a more modern Glock, with a nine-shot clip. He wasn’t so much concerned with power as quantity. He’d rather spray lead all over the place than chose his shots carefully. If he had to shoot, then chances were he’d empty the clip, and probably the next one too.

Sam popped up a few steps behind and went right as Ed broke left.

They saw a tall, rail-thin male, standing at the far end of the hall, on the other side of the maze of blue rope lines. The man had a semiautomatic pistol jammed into the soft tissue under his chin.

A security guard, bleeding from his hip, crawled slowly away. The rest of the tourists and passengers huddled against the booths and examination tables.

Viktor’s eyes were closed. His shoulders quivered, as if low, vicious jolts of electricity shot along his backbone every few seconds.

It was clear that he had disarmed the guard and fired a few rounds. But that didn’t explain why the tall man was bleeding too. Ed and Sam got closer. He appeared to have ragged slashes across his face and neck. Blood collected in the crotch of his jeans.

The detectives got close enough to see the blood seeping into the industrial carpet as it spilled down his shoe.

Sam said, “Put that fucking gun down.”

A sob burst out of Viktor. A low, guttural cry.

Sam tried again. “Put—”

Underneath the fresh blood, muscles under Viktor’s arm twitched. The pistol started to come down, and the darkness of the muzzle grew larger every second as the detectives came within range.

Ed fired.

Viktor’s left eye disappeared and his head flopped to one shoulder. His long frame sagged and collapsed. One of the passengers uttered a short, sharp scream, but that was all.

Silence bloomed as gun smoke drifted toward the ceiling.

Sam held up his star and addressed the witnesses. “Chicago PD. Everybody relax. It’s over. Now, is anyone else hurt?” He bent to examine the bullet wound in the guard and winced. It looked like the bullet had gone through the bone, only an inch away from the outside of his hip. The man’s face was knotted in pain. Sam patted his shoulder. “Hang in there. Must hurt like a sonofabitch. Didn’t hit any arteries or anything though. You’ll live.”

Ed flipped open his cell phone and began to speak, giving the dispatcher a quick summary of dry, emotionless facts.