Page 74 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

Lennox

We stage outside the building for four minutes while the commander finalizes positions.

Four minutes is a very long time when your brain is doing what my brain is doing.

He’s in there. Micah is in that building right now, in the dark, doing what he came here to do, entirely unaware that there are twelve armed officers about to come in from three separate entry points with instructions to treat the subject as potentially armed. And I am standing on a pavement in Bethnal Green with my hands in my coat pockets and the note still in my coat pocket and I cannot think of a single thing I can do that would help.

I think about shouting.

Not as a serious plan. Just as the thing my brain keeps arriving at when it runs through the options and finds them all closed. If I shouted loudly enough, would he hear it? Would he know? Would shouting, “Micah, leave the building immediately,” before a SWAT operation be the kind of thing that ends my career on the spot or merely the kind of thing that ends my career after a tribunal? I think I’d be willing to do it if I thought it would work. Micah’s freedom for my career feels like a fair trade. At least, my heart is fully convinced it is. My mind is still clinging onto logic.

I think about sneezing.

A truly tremendous sneeze. The kind that echoes. If I sneezed at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right direction, with enough force to carry through brick and steel and thirty years of industrial accumulation, would he hear it as something other than a coincidental noise in a building that probably makes noises all the time? No. Obviously not.

I think about my phone. The number I have for him connects to a phone he probably doesn’t have anymore. Even if he had it and answered, what would I say? Don’t commit murder tonight, the police are here? He’s already in the building. He’s probably already past the point where timing is a variable.

There is nothing.

That’s the conclusion my brain keeps arriving at from every direction. There is nothing I can do that helps, no action available, no intervention possible, and I am standing outside a warehouse in Bethnal Green with twelve armed colleagues and the commander is saying go.

The building swallows us.

That’s the first thing, before anything else. The building just takes us in, three floors of industrial space that hasn’t been used for anything in long enough that it’s become its own ecosystem, columns and catwalks and suspended machinery and the particular dark that comes from a structure that was built for work shifts and artificial light and hasn’t had either in years.

The SWAT commander is on comms immediately. The floorplans on his tablet don’t match what we’re walking into. The west staircase that should be here isn’t here. There’s a mezzanine level nobody planned for. He’s rerouting units, his voice staying level with the deliberate calm of a man whose job is to stay level, and around us the team splits and moves and torchlight cuts through the dark in every direction.

I follow Farah.

She’s moving fast, systematic, the way she’s moved through every difficult scene I’ve ever worked with her, and I stay at her shoulder because staying at her shoulder is the only thing I can do right now that looks like being a detective.

We find the victim on the second floor.

He’s in the far corner of what might have been a supervisor’s office once, the walls still showing the ghost of where furniture was bolted down. He’s on the floor, on his back, and he’s alive, barely, in the way that barely is a cruelty rather than a mercy. Farah is on her knees beside him before I’ve fully processed the scene. Someone behind me is already calling it in.

Stabbed near the heart.

He’s looking at the ceiling with the specific expression of a person who is still here but not for long, and I know this because I know what death looks like, and I look at him and I feel the complicated thing that I’ve been feeling every time I stand over one of these scenes, and the complicated thing has stopped being complicated and become something simpler and sadder than it was.

The Vigilante has made his kill, and this is a good thing.

We got here in time to spook him. In time to prevent the torture and the humiliation. But the maze of a building he knew, and we didn’t, thwarted us. We weren’t quick enough to stop the Vigilante from delivering justice.

This victim, who is not a victim in any way that counts, is not going to make it.

Farah knows it too. She’s doing everything anyway because that’s who she is, and two of the SWAT team are with her, and the commander is already making the assessment I’m making and his voice on the comms hasn’t changed register.

“Increase pace,” he says. “Subject still in the building. All units. Backup requested.”

I follow the nearest unit up the stairs to the third floor.

The third floor is open plan, the full width of the building, catwalks running along the sides and a vaulted roof above with exposed steel beams crossing the space at height. The torches are moving, cutting shapes out of the dark, and below through the gaps in the catwalk floor I can see the light from where Farah is working on a man I know is already gone.

I am walking through an industrial building looking for a man I am not sure I want to find, which makes me the worst kind of detective and the most specific kind of person in love, and I am thinking both of those things at once and neither of them is helping me put one foot in front of the other.

A torch beam swings up.

I see it before the SWAT officer does, or at the same moment, the dark shape moving along the highest beam, twenty feet above us, moving with the careful speed of someone who knows exactly where to put their feet and is trying very hard not to make a sound. It registers to my brain in the wrong order, the shape first, then the understanding of what the shape is, then the sick particular recognition of how someone moves when you’ve watched them enough to know it.