Immortal

4

Keep running. Don’t quit.

Ethan Warner’s heart pounded in his chest and his lungs burned as he ran down the sidewalk, dodging past pedestrians who had already leapt clear of the teenager in the gray hoodie dashing past them on West 27th Street.

Ethan focused on the target, lengthening his stride and trying to control his labored breathing. Several weeks of circuit training had improved his fitness, but he was still nowhere near the level he’d been in the Marine Corps and right now the kid ahead of him was running with the added benefit of fear coursing through his blood. Semper fi, Ethan chanted to himself over and over again as the kid sprinted across St Louis Avenue with casual disregard for incoming traffic.

A distorted voice sounded in his ear.

‘Where you at?’

‘Heading west, 27^th on South Central,’ Ethan wheezed into a Bluetooth earpiece and microphone. ‘Where the hell are you?’

‘Stand by,’ came the affronted response. ‘No need to get yourself agitated.’

Stand by, my ass, Ethan thought as he struck out across South Central Park Avenue, an SUV honking its horn at him as he swerved around the front fender, staggered onto the sidewalk again and almost collided with a woman and two children leaving a convenience store.

The kid ahead of him suddenly turned right, dashing into an alley that cut between rows of buildings and stores lining the streets.

‘He’s off the main, heading north toward West 26th!’ Ethan shouted, hurling himself into the alley in pursuit before seeing the kid standing facing him not twenty yards away.

A gunshot shattered the air in the narrow alley, and Ethan hurled himself down onto the asphalt, rolling sideways and slamming into a large trash can.

‘He’s got a piece!’

‘Copy that.’

Ethan peered round the side of the dumpster and saw the kid was running through puddles toward the end of the alleyway, which was half blocked by an unoccupied black jeep. Ethan leapt up, shouting as he ran.

‘Don’t make me shoot!’ he bellowed, hoping to hell that the kid didn’t look back and see that Ethan wasn’t carrying. ‘Lose the piece!’

The kid ducked sideways to dash past the parked jeep. Ethan accelerated and was about to follow him when the jeep’s door suddenly opened. A deep, solid thump echoed down the alleyway as the kid hit the door at full speed, staggering backwards and toppling to the ground. Ethan slowed as he saw his partner, Nicola Lopez, leap from the jeep and stride toward the disorientated kid who staggered to his feet and whirled, striking out at Lopez with the butt of his pistol. Lopez blocked the blow with a fluid movement of her left arm, batting the pistol aside and following immediately with a roundhouse right that smacked into the kid’s jaw. The boy slammed onto his back as Lopez, drawing a black T-baton tonfa, placed one booted foot on his wrist to prevent him from using his gun and jabbed one end of the baton into his throat.

‘You have the right to remain silent, else I kick your sorry ass further,’ Lopez snarled down at their quarry. ‘Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney the state will appoint one to you who will most likely be goddamn useless. Do you understand?’

A weak voice squealed up at her as Ethan approached.

‘Who the hell are you?’

Lopez flashed a badge at the kid on the ground, a silver shield with ‘Bail Bondsman’ emblazoned beneath it.

‘You jumped bail, Mickey,’ Lopez said as she turned him over, knelt on his back and cuffed him. ‘You’re going back to jail.’

Ethan glanced at the vehicle from which Lopez had leapt.

‘How’d you get into that jeep?’

Lopez flashed him a dazzling smile as she jerked Mickey onto his feet.

‘Door was unlocked,’ she replied with an innocent shrug.

Ethan shook his head as Lopez guided Mickey ‘Knuckles’ Ferranto out onto West 26th Street and along the sidewalk to where she had parked their black SUV. He waited until she’d shoe-horned Mickey into the vehicle and shut the door before speaking.

‘You broke and entered?’ he said in disbelief. ‘Jesus, we’re supposed to be finding criminals, not becoming them.’

‘Got the job done,’ Lopez replied without remorse. ‘I’d left it to you, you’d both be halfway to goddamn Ohio by now.’

‘I was getting there,’ Ethan said defensively. ‘He hotfooted out of the mall the moment he saw me.’

‘The job’s done,’ Lopez said, brushing a strand of black hair out of her eyes. ‘Who cares about the small print?’

Ethan blocked her path as she made her way toward the SUV’s passenger door.

‘The police? The attorney’s office? You can’t keep doing things this way, Lopez. What the hell happened to going by the book?’

‘It got me nowhere in the force.’

‘Yeah, and breaking the rules got your partner killed.’

Lightning flickered behind Lopez’s dark eyes as they locked onto Ethan’s, and he forced himself not to take a step back.

Since they had begun working together, Ethan had found out about what had befallen Nicola Lopez’s former partner in the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington DC the previous year, crumbs of information that had slipped out during conversations. Detective Lucas Tyrell, a long-serving officer, had been shot and killed by his own superior in an apartment way down in Anacostia. To say that Lopez had taken the hit badly was something of an understatement. Now, despite their partnership, Ethan often felt as though he were running a poor second best to Tyrell. Lopez seemed unwilling to share directly with him what had happened, as though she hadn’t quite moved on yet. Her casual disregard for the law was a direct and, for Ethan, somewhat unsettling manifestation of that.

Ethan had since watched Lopez abandon the moral principles with which she had conducted her work as a detective in favor of bagging the perps by whatever means necessary. Lucas Tyrell had been a liability to the Metro PD, but he’d gotten results, and Lopez was emulating her fallen mentor just as closely as she could.

‘Corruption got Lucas killed,’ she shot back. ‘Justice got him revenge. You gonna get out of my way or do I have to put you on your ass too?’

Reluctantly, Ethan took a step back. Lopez had a reputation as a short fuse, but since losing her partner she seemed to have relinquished whatever remaining grip she had on her temper. The last time he’d seen her lose it was when they hunted down a bail-runner to a shabby roadside diner in Battle Creek, Michigan. Three heavyweight bikers from the local chapter of the Devil’s Disciples had taken a liking to the fugitive and were vaguely amused to see Lopez arrive with her badge, nightstick and bad attitude. It wasn’t their deliberate obstruction that had set her off, just their idle dismissal. Two broken noses, a severed knee tendon and one fractured collarbone later, fugitive James Watson sheepishly surrendered and was dragged by Lopez over the groaning bodies of his would-be protectors. It had been over before Ethan had even got through the door.

‘Just looking out for you,’ he said finally, raising his hands and making for the driver’s door. ‘We’re no good to each other if one of us is in jail.’

‘You’re the one with history,’ Lopez remarked as they climbed into the SUV. ‘My record’s pearly clean.’

‘You’s a jailbird?’ Mickey Ferranto muttered from the back seat, looking at Ethan.

‘Can it, Mickey,’ Ethan snapped as he started the engine and looked at Lopez. ‘I’m a reformed character. You’re the one on the slippery slope into shameful lawlessness.’

Lopez shook her head and laughed as they pulled out into their lane.

‘We set ourselves up to catch bail-jumpers and fugitives. They don’t obey the law, we have to bend the rules to pick them up.’

‘That how it is?’ Ethan asked rhetorically.

‘That’s how it is.’

‘That really how it is?’ Mickey Ferranto complained.

‘Shut up,’ Ethan glared over his shoulder. ‘My point is that there’s plenty of competition out there and we can’t afford to get ourselves busted.’

‘We can’t afford much at all,’ Lopez muttered and jabbed her thumb over her shoulder at Ferranto. ‘We’re not bagging enough of these losers to make ends meet.’

‘I ain’t no loser,’ Mickey complained.

‘No?’ Lopez turned round in her seat to look at him. ‘You’re a twenty-three-year-old who’s just cost his mother a couple of thousand bucks jail bond for nothing more than possession of an illegal substance. You’d turned up in court like you were supposed to, you’d have probably been released because you’re not important enough, Mickey; you’re a nobody. Only a loser like you could turn a nothing into a jail sentence.’

Mickey avoided her gaze and looked sulkily out of the window as Ethan turned toward Cook County Jail.

‘Maybe we should spread out more, cover more area,’ Ethan suggested. ‘Maybe even link up with some of the other bondsmen out there.’

‘Maybe,’ Lopez echoed. ‘Or maybe we just need to stop scraping around in the dirt for nobodies like Mickey here and pick up something more lucrative.’

Ethan began to answer when a black sedan pulled out in front of the SUV, passing within inches of his front fender. He was about to remonstrate when another identical car pulled alongside him, boxing the SUV in.

‘What the hell?’ Lopez muttered, instinctively reaching for her pistol before remembering that she was no longer legally allowed to carry one. Her hand rested on her baton instead.

‘Government plates,’ Ethan said, glancing at the rear of the sedan in front of them as it indicated it was turning off the road.

‘You gonna follow?’ Lopez asked.

Ethan shrugged, then turned to follow the sedan.