Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) (13 page)

6: THE DWARF

W
est across the park and the city—five layers of mountains and the setting sun. A halo over the foothills like an enormous chrysalis. A trap enclosing us in this town, in this state. Forever. We stood on the balcony for an amazed moment—caught in our own theologies of panic, fear, retribution. It was the longest day of the year and it wasn’t to be over for a long time yet. A dozen witnesses in the park. At least two or three had seen the whole thing.

We moved back from the edge of the balcony.

John was stunned, his eyes wide, his face white.

“W-what now?” he asked. “The police?”

“We make a run for it,” I said.

“What?”

“We’ll get twenty years for this,” I said.

“It was an accident.”

“It was goddamn manslaughter, twenty years,” I insisted.

“We won’t get out,” John said.

“We’ll try.”

I grabbed his arm and backed him off the balcony and into the apartment. I found the brandy glasses we’d drunk from, wiped them with a piece of paper towel. Tried to think of any other surfaces I’d touched, wiped them, too.

Police sirens now. John sat down on the chair, dazed.

“Oh, Jesus,” he was saying over and over.

“Get up,” I yelled at him.

He sat there, incredulous. Stunned into catalepsia. And to think I was the heroin user. I grabbed him, pulled him to the door. Wiped the handle, went out, left the apartment, closed the door behind us. Marched him to the fire escape.

“We’ll just walk out,” I said.

He nodded, I don’t think he knew what was going on. John was a peeler and back in Ireland he owned a gun but he’d never bargained on killing anyone. Out of his depth here, this whole scene wasn’t his, this whole story had turned into a bad dream. John had hitched his star to mine in the hope of getting somewhere better. Getting out of rain-swept, war-torn, depressing Ulster for America. And I should have resisted. John, the anchor dragging us down. Going to drown us both.

“Where’s your hat?” I asked.

“My what?”

“Your fucking baseball hat,” I said.

I sprinted back to the apartment.

“Where are you going?” he wailed.

“John, you better snap out of it, we’re in the shit, I’m going back to get your hat.”

“We got to get out of here,” he said, his voice quavering.

“John, shut the fuck up, stay here, I’ll be back.”

I went to the door. Pulled the sleeve of my shirt down, turned the handle, it wouldn’t open. Thoughts raced through my head. The apartment door naturally had a self-locking mechanism. I wouldn’t be able to get in. The cops would find John’s print-encrusted hat that said on it: Belfast Blues Festival. Maybe, if they were really smart, they’d cross-check the recent arrivals at DIA, to see if any had come from Belfast. Well, that would be that. Best-case scenario, we do get away from this building, out of Denver, back to the UK. They’d find our names, put two and two together. Extradite us, try us.

Had to get back into that apartment, get that goddamn hat. I looked down the corridor. Mercifully, no one had come out to see what all the bloody commotion was. A fancy building—most people on this floor probably had fancy jobs that kept them out during the day.

Arms on my back, pulling me.

I turned.

John, wild, gesticulating. Losing it.

“Alex, forget the fucking hat, we have to go.”

“John, if we don’t get the hat, we’re fucked, your prints are on it, so are mine, and since we’re peelers we’re on Interpol’s computer. We have to get back into the apartment to get it. Trust me. We gotta break the door down.”

“Can you take prints off cloth?”

“Aye and take them off the bloody peak,” I said.

“Leave it, we have to get out of here,” he said.

I grabbed his face and made him look at me. His whole body was shaking. He was drenched with sweat. This close to a nervous collapse, I could tell. No point trying to convince him, I grabbed him by the collar, dragged him over to the door.

Again I could hear sirens.

“We gotta go, Alex, they are going to nail us,” John pleaded.

“We’re going to charge the door, shoulder it, break it down,” I said.

The corridor was wide, it would give us a bit of a run at least.

“Alex, we don’t have the time,” John said.

“Now listen, you wanker, if we don’t get that hat, we are fucking going to prison, do you understand?” I said as calm as I could.

“Alex, we have to—” John began, but his voice trailed off, his eyes closed, he didn’t know what he was doing. His body slumped and I could see he was giving over his will to mine, it was the path of least resistance.

We backed up from the door, maybe a good ten paces. I’d never broken a door down before. I had no idea how difficult it would be. Nice strong building, too, the door probably wouldn’t give like they did in cop shows and the movies. We’d try for it, anyway.

“Now,” I said.

We ran at the door and jumped into it with our shoulders. A huge crash. We bounced off, fell, without noticeable effect on the door. Shoulders killing us.

The sirens were louder now too. At least a couple of different vehicles. John looked at me. Desperate.

“We go again,” I said.

We backed up, ran at the door, shouldered it, again bounced off without any noticeable change.

“And again,” I said.

We backed up and this time as we did so, a man came out of his apartment. A very old man, in checked trousers, white shirt, slippers.

“What’s all this noise?” he said.

“We have to take him out,” John said under his breath.

“We’re police, sir,” I said in what I hoped was an American accent, “someone jumped from their balcony, suicide, we think. I’d like you to return to you apartment, we’re going to be questioning everyone.”

“A suicide, where?” the old man asked.

“In the park, the body’s right out there,” I said.

“I gotta see this,” the old geezer said and went back inside.

“Now we have to go,” John said.

“One more try,” I said.

We backed up, charged the door, bounced off.

“One more,” I said, “I felt something give.”

“You said that was the last,” John said.

“One more,” I insisted.

We rammed the door and this time the metal screws holding the lock into the wood popped out and the door gave a little. If I could smash it with something, it would go. I looked down the hall.

“The fire extinguisher,” I said.

I grabbed the fire extinguisher out of the glass case. Thumped it into the door. The lock gave. I shoved the door open.

“John, wipe my prints off the extinguisher and the handle and the case the extinguisher was in, ok?”

He looked blank. I slapped him upside the head.

“Ok?”

He nodded. I ran into the apartment, searched for the hat, saw it on the coffee table, grabbed it, ran out.

“It’s clean,” John said. I nodded. John and I bolted for the fire escape.

“Get that cap down again, real low,” I said.

He pulled down the baseball cap as low as it would go, I pulled mine down too. Not much of an aid in concealing our identities, but it would have to serve.

“When we get out of the building, we walk away calmly, and then when we’re clear, we run, ok?” I said.

“What?”

“John, you eejit, get with the fucking program, just do everything I tell you, ok?”

“Ok,” he said sullenly.

We ran down the concrete corridor of the fire escape. Came out in a side lobby. A few potted plants, green-painted concrete walls, a mirror, a notice about trash, but otherwise empty. We sprinted through a door and outside into the sunlight.

A black guy stood there blocking our way. Tall guy, shorts, sneakers, sweat-stained gray T-shirt with the words “United States Army” printed on the front. He’d been jogging, seen the whole thing, come around to the front of the building to stop the murderers or anyone else getting out.

“Por favor, señor, muy urgente, es tarde,”
I explained, and went to go past him.

“No one’s leaving this building till the cops show up,” he said.

John tried to shove past him, but with a big hand the soldier pushed him to the ground. A clear violation of Posse Comitatus, but this wasn’t the time to mention that. John spun on the ground, knocking the legs from under the soldier. He went down like a ton of bricks and I kicked him in the head, knocking him out, nearly breaking his neck.

Interfering bastard. I pulled John up. We didn’t know which way to go. East into the streets, west into the park. A cop car appeared ten blocks east, heading for the building. It made up our minds. We went across the park. A crowd of about twenty people around the body.

We walked as calmly as we could muster. Got about fifty feet.

“What about those two?” someone called out.

John started to run. I ran after him.

Six years as a copper in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (which has one of the highest death rates in the Western world) and I never once fired a gun in anger and never once had a gun fired at me. My greatest danger there was from my own side, five pay grades above me. No guns. Nothing so blunt. But now…

We were halfway across the park when we heard the peelers shouting:

“Stop. Police. Stop or we’ll shoot.”

The sky swimming-pool blue. The grass a dirty copper color. The temperature 92. My lungs aching. My eyes filled with streaks of white light. The front range all across the horizon to the west. Green foothills, blue mountains behind, and then more behind that. A big one in the middle with a horn peak and a bowl of curved magenta. Beautiful. One even had a trace of snow on it from Victoria Patawasti’s storm.

We cut another fifty yards through pine trees and some kind of open-air theater. It was late afternoon and hot. Few people. A man was jogging in front of us but he had his earphones on, didn’t hear the peelers yelling.

We made it to the edge of the park.

I looked back.

Three coppers in tan uniforms. Guns out. Two fat guys and an older skinny bastard another seventy yards back but bearing down like a greyhound.

John ran up the grass slope out of the park and onto Sixth Street and I ran after him. Sirens everywhere. It registered in a second that they were all coming for us. I slipped in a pool of water from a broken sprinkler and skidded in front of a building and John, turning to see what was happening, ran into an old man with a beard who was carrying a Scottie dog. All three went sprawling. I pulled John up. The dog was biting him.

“Christ,” John screamed, and tried to shake the dog off.

The old man started yelling in Russian.

I grabbed the dog by its hind legs and threw it twenty feet away. The old man ran after it, swearing.

“Come on,” I said to John.

We darted out into the street between massive condominium buildings and a few large private houses with high, ivy-clad walls and iron railings. No way over them.

“Hey, you,” someone shouted behind us.

John turned.

“Run, you bastard,” I said. We sprinted along the sidewalk. A doorman in front of a luxury condominium complex put his arm out, whether to stop us or hail a cab or see if it was bloody raining, I don’t know.

I shouldered him and he went down.

“Fucksake, Alex, never get away from the peelers,” John said.

“Run, you eejit, and save your fucking breath.”

There were more sirens and I knew the cops running across the park would be radioing our position so they’d block our road ahead.

They knew the town, we didn’t. They were acclimatized to altitude, we weren’t. They were on local time, we were jet-lagged. They were in shape, we were a couple of druggies.

Things didn’t look good.

“Down here,” John said, and we turned at an alley.

No people. High walls between condominium complexes. Trash bins. Baking asphalt. Harsh transition from sunlight to shadow.

Cops still on our trail.

“Here,” I said. Another alley, smaller. Heading west again, view of the mountains. Lungs exploding, heart so loud in my ears I couldn’t hear anything else.

A side street: no pedestrians, concrete walls, town houses.

“I hear a helicopter,” John said.

I didn’t look up.

A big alley. North this time. Kids playing catch with huge baseball mitts. A white kid, a black kid, a Spanish kid, all in bright T-shirts, like a scene from bloody
Sesame Street
. We weaved through them and a few seconds later the cops came busting through as well.

Another turn. The alley ahead wide and clear. Houses and garages backing onto smooth tar macadam.

John a good ten feet ahead now. A main road seven or eight blocks ahead that looked like Colfax Avenue. Getting darker, too, and if we could just get to Colfax, where traffic was heavy and there were many people, we might just make it.

Perhaps the peelers felt the same, for at that moment they decided to shoot. They didn’t bother with a warning. Just a loud crack and then four more cracks. Bullets smattered into a trash compactor. The police are allowed to fire their weapons only if the suspect is a potential danger to the public or a potential danger to the arresting officer. I think it was reasonably clear that we were in neither category. These guys just wanted to fucking shoot us. A bullet screamed off the concrete in front of me. The cops firing wildly and the bullets skidding by. Close, though. And they weren’t shooting on the run. They were stopping to shoot, which lengthened the distance between us. I took a look back. They were about two tennis courts behind us. Strangely, not the cops from the park. Two chunky guys in blue-and-green uniforms. Hard to tell with all the sunlight glaring off the concrete walls, but they looked like older men. Maybe out of shape, but they should have known better.

And they were shooting to kill. Only on TV do coppers aim at legs or arms, real cops aim at the torso. I ran on. More bullets.

“Zigzag,” I yelled to John.

“What?”

“Zig, zag,” I said, and started running zigs. If you’re firing at a moving target with a nine-millimeter semiautomatic, you’ll miss if that target changes direction fast and unpredictably.