Page 75 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

The gun comes up beside me.

My hand is on the barrel before I’ve decided to move it.

The shot goes off. The sound of it in the enclosed space is enormous, bouncing off every surface, and there’s a grunt from high above, brief and immediately swallowed by the echo, the other SWAT members in the vicinity have instinctively crouched, and I am already talking.

“I’m sorry, I slipped, I’m so sorry, I don’t know what happened…”

The SWAT officer turns on me. In the torchlight, his face is the specific face of a man who could have nearly shot a colleague and is working out where to put that energy.

“What the hell!” he says. Several other words follow that make me realize my vocabulary is not as rich as I thought it was. “You made me misfire. What was that?”

“I tripped. I’m sorry. I reached out and…”

“You’re lucky I didn’t put one in you.” He is shaking slightly, the aftershock of adrenaline, and I stand there and take it because I deserve it and because the shape on the beam is gone and I need to know if there is any blood.

There is blood. Three drops on the concrete below the beam, fresh and dark in the torchlight, and one of the other officers finds it and calls it and the commander is there in thirty seconds and everyone is looking at it and then everyone is looking at me.

“He was up there,” the commander says. Flat. Controlled. “And now he’s not.”

The search takes forty minutes. Every floor. Every exit. Every space large enough to contain a person. Doors that haven’t been opened in years. The roof access that turns out to be a false ceiling with no real space behind it. The ground floor twice, every corner, the service entrance, the loading bay, the fire escapes.

Nothing.

Three drops of blood and nothing else, and the Vigilante is gone.

The commander’s voice hasn’t changed register once during the entire search. It changes now. Not by much, not to anything that anyone who didn’t know what to listen for would catch. But I catch it.

“We lost him,” he says.

Around us, the team begins the secondary sweep, the professional motion of people doing what comes next because doing what comes next is better than standing in the dark thinking about what just happened. Farah appears from the stairwell. She doesn’t say anything. She looks at the blood on the floor, looks at the beam above it, and then she looks at me with the expression I am not going to be able to interpret right now because I don’t have the capacity for it.

We move outside eventually. The commander stands in the car park and says the things commanders say when an operation hasn’t gone the way an operation was supposed to go, and around him the team listens in the specific silence of professionals absorbing a failure. Someone will be writing a report about the gun incident. The commander looks at me when he says this. I look back at him and I say the right things, the things a senior detective says when he’s inadvertently interfered with an armed officer, and somewhere behind the right things my brain is somewhere else entirely.

Three drops of blood.

On the floor of a building in Bethnal Green, under a beam in the dark, and then nothing. No trail. No direction. Just three drops and a grunt and a shape that moved and was gone, and it could be nothing, a graze, a scratch, the kind of injury you walk off and clean up later with no lasting consequence.

It could also be more than that.

This building is already holding one dead man.

Farah is beside me now, not touching, just present in the way she’s been present for eleven years, and I can feel her attention without looking at her, the specific quality of someone who is watching you and deciding how much to say and settling on nothing for now.

Around me people are angry, professional, contained. They’ll debrief. They’ll file reports. Someone will raise the incident with the gun and I will deal with that when I deal with it. There are processes for all of this and I know every one of them.

What I don’t know is where Micah is.

He’s wounded. Somewhere in London, with a phone number I don’t have, bleeding from something I can’t assess the seriousness of. Three drops on a warehouse floor is not a lot of blood and it is also not no blood, and I stand in the cold outside a building I failed to catch anyone in and I am more frightened than I’ve been since this whole thing started.

He’s out there.

Hurt.

Alone.

And I have absolutely no way of reaching him.

Chapter thirty-five