The survivor

Fifty-Seven

Like the previous day, it was early when Striker awoke. The sun had not yet lightened the skies. Outside his bedroom window, the night was black and deep and cold. It was a perfect start to Halloween. Unsettling. There seemed to be something wrong with the world. Then again, maybe it was just his world.

God knows, that was how it felt at times.

He kicked the blankets off his legs. They were damp from the sweat induced by his nightmares. Too many images, all mottled together. Kids screaming, gunmen on the loose, fires and dragons and debate clubs. Amanda dying on him back at the hospital, and of course Courtney was in there somewhere.

She always was.

He got up, walked down the hall, cracked Courtney’s door open and looked inside. She was sprawled out across her sheets. In her flannel PJs, she looked more doll than person.

Striker’s heart pained him.

The previous five years had been hard on her, but the last two had been hell, and their constant fighting didn’t help. Lately, whether she was away at school or right there in the room with him, she felt a hundred miles away. They fought, then they got over it, then they fought again. At times their relationship seemed more bipolar than Amanda had been, and he prayed it was just the teenage years shining through.

The room was cold. Striker snuck inside and pulled the blankets up to Courtney’s chest. She muttered in her sleep, grabbed them and rolled over. He left the room. For a moment he considered going back to bed, but knew sleep would not come. His body might have been tired and depleted, but his mind was going a million miles an hour, and Striker couldn’t help feeling he was missing something.

Something big.

He thought of all the crime scenes he and Felicia had attended — St Patrick’s High, the garage where the stolen Civic had been recovered, the underground bunker where they’d found the body of Raymond Leung, the docks where they’d found Que Wong’s body, the intersection of Gore and Pender where Dr Kieu and the two goons had been found dead in the white van, and lastly the shootout at the Kwan residence.

There were so many.

The Kwan residence bothered him. He’d been so busy rushing Patricia off to St Paul’s Hospital in order to save her life that he had yet to spend any investigative time at the house — and he knew he had to go there or else he would never sleep again. He showered, grabbed a protein bar from the top of the fridge, and left the house.

It was barely five o’clock.

The Kwan house was under police guard.

Normally, Patrol dealt with guard duty for the first twenty-four hours, but due to the abnormal number of crime scenes, management had given the okay for the Road Sergeant to hit the Call-Out list. Striker didn’t know the cop on duty — some redheaded woman with freckles. He said hello, badged her, and went inside.

The first thing he noticed was the foyer wall. Huge white chunks of Gyprock had been torn out from the bullets, giving the entranceway a Swiss-cheese look. Air blew strong from the heating vent. Striker closed it, then walked into the living room.

He stopped in front of the TV, where Patricia Kwan had been lying when he’d first come into the house yesterday. A dark red patch stained the carpet. This section was cut off from the rest of the room by a yellow smear of police tape. To the right of the tape, the front window was cracked and full of holes, and there were jagged pieces of shiny mirror all over the sofa. Plastic numbers had been placed across the floor. Noodles or someone else from Ident had already been here.

Striker bypassed it all and circled back to the master bedroom.

The room was ordinary. Untouched. The bed was made; the dresser drawers were closed, and the closet was shut and blocked off by a hamper full of laundry. Everything smelled of lemon-scented laundry detergent. The furnace air hummed as it blew through the vents.

Striker stepped into the room and looked around. A few things caught his eye — a dresser full of knick-knacks, a pile of folded clothes on a chair and a photograph of Patricia and her daughter, Riku.

It was a grim reminder of their failure. Despite the Amber Alert and the unprecedented manpower, the girl still hadn’t been found. It was distressing because everyone knew the rotten truth: the more time that passed, the less chance of survival.

Striker looked hard at the photo. Mother and daughter were at an outdoor event somewhere. Both looked hot and tired, but were smiling and drinking red punch. Striker felt uneasy while studying the photo. The people in the frame might have been Patricia Kwan and her daughter, but it could just as easily have been him and Courtney.

He tried not to think about it, and approached the dresser.

It was made of dark maple wood. Solid. In the first three drawers he found nothing. Just socks and underwear and belts and shirts — the usual stuff. In the bottom drawer, he found something that made him pause. At first the drawer looked filled with only papers — mostly bills and lawyers’ invoices — and change, but mixed in with the copper pennies and silver dimes was a glinting of dull, rounded brass.

A bullet.

Striker pulled some latex from his pocket, gloved up, then reached into the pile and plucked up the round. He held it up to the light and studied it. Forty calibre, for sure. The casing was dull and scratched, and the head was partly compressed, as if it had been loaded one too many times, which was probably why the round was sitting here in the drawer, unused. Striker looked at the top of the round, studied the inset of the head.

It was a frangible round.

Hollow-tip.

He got on his cell, called the Info channel and got them to run Kwan for an FAC — a Firearms Acquisition Certificate. Within seconds, the reply came back negative. She didn’t have one now, and never did. Which begged the question: why did she have a round in her dresser drawer, and where did it come from?

The thought tugged at his mind, and he rolled the round back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. He looked at the photo again, saw the two women smiling back at him, and something grabbed his attention. The T-shirts they wore were exactly the same — dark grey with a small red and blue crest on the upper left side of the chest. Striker couldn’t make out the numbers in the crest, but he was pretty certain they were 499. Which meant one thing: the Larry Young Run — an annual event funded by the Emergency Response Team. It was the same shirt Meathead had been wearing the other day.

Striker looked at the round in his hand, then back at the shirts both women were wearing. He got back on Info, ran Patricia Kwan all ways, then waited for the response. When he got it, he hung up and called Felicia. She answered on the third ring.

‘Get up,’ he told her.

‘What? It’s barely six.’

‘I’m at the Kwan house.’

This seemed to wake Felicia up. ‘You find the girl?’

‘No.’

‘Then what?’

‘Patricia Kwan,’ he said. ‘She’s a cop.’