A Spill of Blood Ch. 05

I noticed a tiny continuity issue between earlier chapters and Chapter 4 after the latter was published. I've submitted an edit to fix it, but edits are low priority in Literotica's queue for posting, so it may take a while. It was minor and if nobody noticed it ... well ... good. If you did, sorry.

If you're thinking of trying to find Icaria on a map, don't bother. I invented the town.

When we last left off, Harry had determined that Larry Beck had the money stolen from Jordan Regan. Beck laid a trap for Harry at the apartment of his mistress, Nikki, but two things went wrong. First, Harry realized it was a trap. Second, the dirty cops who were supposed to kill Harry realized that they had been lied to by Beck and changed the plan. They decided to kill everybody: Harry, Beck, Nikki.

Beck fled the trap. In the ensuing firefight, Harry killed Brady, one of those who had savagely beaten him and tried to kill Sydney. Brady's partner, Santiago, went down when two other police officers, Hopkins and Allen, arrived. Officer Hopkins was then killed by Detective Gibson, the third dirty cop, who also wounded Allen. Harry shattered Detective Gibson's hipbone with a bullet and then used threats of permanently crippling him to extract some information.

—C

I was alone. The twin dots of taillights ahead of me were six, maybe seven blocks up. Nothing was in my rearview mirror. Just me and the city. Its breath exhaled in clouds of vapor up through grates and manhole covers. Its eyes watched from every darkened window I passed. Ears? The city was deaf. Even in the relative silence of two a.m., everything from the half-intelligible ramblings of someone talking to their higher power as they stumbled along, to the furious blare of a cabby's horn went unheeded.

That was fine with me. My mood was black, certainly blacker than a city that never went completely dark. I was fine if it paid no attention to the imprecations of Harry Morgan, human pinball in a game whose bumpers, ramps, and flippers were themselves blacked out so their buffets came unexpectedly out of the darkness.

Some people would say I was ungrateful. They'd wonder why I couldn't appreciate that I was alive. There'd been a cop and his partner after me. Not to arrest me. To kill me because they thought I was too near something they didn't want me near. They'd hired a shooter to do it, and when he failed, they tried themselves. The fact that it was three cops, not two, almost put me in my grave.

It did put a good man in his. And that was part of the mood. Officer Kenneth Hopkins would be buried this week with full police honors. I wouldn't be welcome when the bagpipes played and the flag got folded and handed to a family member. Even though I'd taken down the one who shot him, I was a symbol, too much of a reminder.

For two days, stuck as a guest of the city, I'd seen the looks. I'd killed a cop. A very dirty one, to be sure, but a cop. I'd shattered the hip of another. The third piece of shit had gone down by someone else's hand, but because of me. Even though those giving the looks weren't dirty themselves, there was a wall and I'd breached it.

You should understand, the looks said, you wore the uniform once yourself.

And even those like Detective Murray who didn't believe in that wall, who thought a cop who killed for hire was lower than some mafioso trigger guy and deserved everything coming to them and more ... even the Detective Murrays saw me as a reminder of the good one who went down that afternoon too.

It wasn't just looks. Once, it was blunt.

"You saved my life from Gibson," Alicia Allen said to me. "I got not even a shred of doubt 'bout that. So ... thank you." Her gaze went to the side, staring at something beyond me or at nothing. "And two little words said like that aren't really enough, I know. I really do. Someday, I'll be able to say thank you properly. But right now, I don't want to look at you."

I didn't take offense. The brown eyes that came back to mine were hard, but that hardness was like a crystal's, brittle enough to shatter at a tap. That hardness wasn't what it seemed; it was a dike holding back the tears.

"I'm sorry you lost your partner." Words as inadequate as her thank you had been.

Her lips thinned. She gave a jerk of her chin in acknowledgment and turned to go. She glanced back briefly. "More than that," she said and left.

I didn't know what that meant—friend, protector, confidante, even lover, all of them were possible. It didn't matter. The person I watched walk away wasn't a cop that day. Jeans, a heavy sweater, a black abduction sling cradling where a round had torn into her shoulder. Her dark hair was down rather than drawn back tightly into a knot at her neck. Just a woman with a painful wound, this one not fixable with stitches, and I was part of its cause.

And to that guilt, I added cracked ribs whose only days of respite were when I was sitting in a cell. I had a face that had been beaten by Brady's weighted glove and then beaten again by Santiago's fists. My shoulder reminded me every time I reached upward about a round from my own gun—a round that had my name on it until the last millisecond when that writing got erased and the slug burned a line across my skin instead. Two fingers on my left hand were taped together so that a glove against the cold was impossible, and I didn't own mittens.

Three cops, not two, and nobody could promise me that three wasn't four, or five, or more.

I wasn't feeling grateful because all of that was on them, not me. I'd done nothing to earn any of it except try to keep two women safe. Maybe one was now. Larry Beck's role was exposed even if he wasn't caught, so killing Sydney to keep it a secret no longer mattered. Jess, though ...

Jordan Regan wanted his money. He wanted it in the next forty-eight hours. He wanted me to either get it for him or draw enough fire that his pet sociopath could retrieve it while I took the fall. And because I was stubborn enough to say no and take my chances with that sociopath, he found a lever to use on me: Jess.

And beyond Regan, there was another reason I might not be out of it myself. I'd seen the tip of something larger than the theft of some cryptocurrency. If Gibson was stupid enough to tell Richard Bertram what he'd revealed, then Bertram—maybe Regan, too, I wasn't sure—might decide I needed to be dealt with before I saw the rest of the iceberg. I'd insisted on knowing, and I accepted the risk. Risk to me, though. I wasn't prepared to knock on Jess Savard's door one day and never get an answer. If that day ever came, I wouldn't care about life behind bars ... people would die with me staring into their eyes and to hell with the consequences.

I felt naked. They'd taken my .45 because I'd used it to punch a hole from incisors to brain stem of a cop so dirty he was a Superfund site. They'd taken the .38 I'd inherited from my dad because I'd used it to shatter the hipbone of another cop just as dirty. I didn't need to cough up the .22 used in the death of some hired gun because it wasn't mine and I'd left it at the scene.

The .45 had been a model I liked but just a gun. Another would suit me fine. That .38 Centennial was special to me, though, and I'd already had my legal bulldog filing paperwork about it, making sure it didn't disappear once its role in a shooting was cleared.

But in the meantime, I couldn't walk around naked. I owned one more pistol, but it was currently held by a Tac Mag under Jess's desk in case something went south when I wasn't around. I wasn't going to take that one.

The trouble was, this was New York City. The process for getting another wasn't something done in a day, even for someone with a license to carry. Especially not for someone the police were eyeing askance.

I was sure that, if I asked, Regan would tell Mitchell to give me one of what was undoubtedly a not-small assortment. Mitchell would do it with a genuine smile. The smile would be because, if I ever got caught with it, Mitchell would have made sure it was one that had a history the cops knew about. He'd laugh to himself as I got hauled away.

But one tiny perk of being a former cop and a current investigator was that you knew some shady people. And shady people knew bad people. And bad people knew scumbags. I made a call to a crooked electronics guy I knew. He made whatever call he needed and the thread wound its way out into the dark. By the time the call chain was done, I was meeting one of those scumbags. The two a.m. part was because he was a bartender.

"How do I know you ain't a cop?"

Oh my fucking God. Could this guy be any more cliché?

The patent eyeballing of the surrounding ... and utterly empty ... parking lot, the butt of a Glock "accidentally" exposed as I approached, the black-on-black dress code that declared, "Hi. I'm a badass," all said so, but that question was the icing on the cake.

"Because if I were a cop, you'd already be bent over with cuffs on because you're carrying while agreeing to meet someone who wants to buy a handgun. It's fucking the middle of the night; just tell me what you've got. And no Glocks. I hate the grip angle."

I saw him considering what kind of crack about my face might be hilarious.

"Three of the other guys are dead," I said before he could figure out his witticism, "and the fourth might never walk properly again."

Something in my expression or tone told him just how serious I was about that, and just how not-in-the-mood I was feeling. He didn't get nervous—he had the wrong side-jam if he got nervous easily—but the levity fled.

"Hey, man, it's cool."

The thing this guy had going for him was the chain of vouching that said nothing he sold me had been in a felony. Probably that meant, "other than the felony by which they were acquired." I believed it for one of the .45s he had: a P220 still having some factory packing grease. I was less sure about the tiny P365 he offered me as a backup.

I grew up in a house that used Smith & Wessons, or a Winchester if you needed a long arm. Grandpap would allow as how a Colt was okay because our boys overseas had carried them, and maybe a Remington for the same reason. Everybody else was a Johnny-come-lately or foreigner as far as he was concerned.

He probably rolled over in his grave to see me driving away with two Sigs. "They were one of the ones making what the other guys were carrying," he'd say with a scowl.

Sorry, Grandpap, it's what the man had.

I was a few hundred poorer and a lot less naked-feeling. He'd have understood that last part, at least.

I should have been quieter coming into my apartment, but I didn't have the habit. When I'd overnighted with Lexie, it had been at her place, and Amber was two years ago and a different apartment. My current abode was a studio, so no bedroom door to block sounds of entering. Sydney sat up in bed.

"Hey," she said blearily.

"Hey yourself. Sorry to wake you."

"I don't mind. Come to bed."

The thought had already crossed my mind twice. The first time when I checked the telltales and then unlocked my door. It was pushing three in the morning, long past my normal bedtime. I was surly and tired.

The second was when Sydney sat up and the covers fell. It was her first overnight at my place. She'd worn shorts and a tee for sleeping when she was hiding out in my office. Not now. My eyes dropped from tousled hair to naked breasts, and suddenly, bed seemed like a very good idea and not because it was past my bedtime. All the emotions of the evening morphed and rechanneled in a new direction.

She saw the hunger flare. "Ohhh," she said, dragging it out. She came more awake, and a wanton smile appeared. "Harry wants to fuck."

The dirty talk and the smile were enough to ignite me. She threw gasoline on the flames when she shed the covers fully and lay back. Her body gleamed softly in the light coming through the windows: long legs spread in invitation, one hand straying to the shadow at their apex as if a guidepost for my gaze, the fingers of the other teasing a nipple into erectness I knew was there but couldn't make out in the dim light. My dick responded in kind.

I drew a pistol out of my jacket pocket and set it on the table. I looked over at the slight catch of breath. Her fingers were stilled, her gaze riveted for a long moment and then rose to meet mine. Deliberately, I drew the second one out of the other pocket. Something crept into her expression. I couldn't tell if it was fear or excitement. Maybe both. Guns held a magnetism for her.

Jacket, shoes and socks, shirt, pants ... I took each piece off deliberately, drawing out my anticipation of what was to come. Her fingers resumed their busy-ness. At last, I slid my boxers down over the obstruction of my erection. I straightened and stared at her for one more moment. I could hear my own breathing, and hers.

Then fuck we did. It wasn't tender or gentle. She spoke the only words either of us uttered until it was over.

"No," when I knelt on the bed between her legs, "your ribs. On your back."

It was all lust and hunger. It was transmogrified anger on my part and relief from fear on hers. It was two animals mating, aches ignored in pleasure, long hair hiding her face bent down as she scrubbed her pelvis along mine to complete the job her fingers had started.

I got there first. Some atavistic instinct wanted to grab and pin her immobile while I drove in those last strokes and filled her, a genetic drive to ensure a continuation of my bloodline, but she had different ideas. At the first trembling of incipient climax, she pulled my hands from her hips to her breasts, urging me to clutch, hard if I wanted, leaning in and keeping them pinned in place with her hands over mine.

Her eyes stared into mine, watching me at first, then growing distant as her focus turned inward toward her own sensations. The cliff's edge rushed toward me, and with a groan, I toppled. Her hips never paused, continuing their unvarying rhythm as she milked every moment of that delicious sensitivity that is almost too much. An instant before I thought I couldn't stand another second, her wail broke out, hips froze, nails bit, and her knees clenched inward in a spasm that would have hurt if my body weren't flooded with euphoriants.

Her pent-in breath flooded out in a gasp and her hips resumed: jerky and irregular motion now. A second shock hit and she froze again, briefer and less clutching. She leaned down and rested her forehead against my good shoulder until it passed, then a third, far less intense before she gave a sigh of satisfaction.

"Did I hurt you?" she asked.

"No."

She slid carefully off and tucked in beside me.

"Whew! Since I'm giving up men in general, I'm glad I found a good one in particular to settle with. Lexie's loss and my gain." She leaned back up for a second to meet my eyes. Her words were serious, but the glint of humor told me she wasn't really. "Lexie's loss, right?"

"Yep."

"Good." She settled back in. "Your wife didn't like that? Or was it the other way 'round; she didn't do it for you in the sack?"

I understood that the question she asked wasn't really the question she was asking. She didn't want to know about my sex life with Amber. She wanted to know what happened. We lay there in silence while I tried to decide.

Why the hell not?

"Amber and I—"

"Amber! That sounds like either Hollywood, a runway model, or a stripper's pole."

"Let's go with stripper's pole." Her moment of cattiness and mine tickled the side of me that was nothing but malicious when it came to my ex-wife. I let myself smile for a brief second before fairness and a memory of other Ambers I'd known forced me to say, "No, not a stripper. And of course, if we're going to make fun of people's names, Gia Alessandra ..."

I ignored the nip of teeth on my shoulder. "Okay, fair enough," she said. "I apologize."

"Though, Amber did have the looks for two of those jobs. She was too short to be a model. She had a little of what Sasha has. Not to the same extent, but I always thought of Amber as this cat prowling around the house and office."

"You were partners, Jess said."

"Mm. She joined me after we got married. We had some good years. At least, I think they were good for both of us. She didn't want kids, and I was okay with that. We'd built up a bit of a reputation for certain types of investigation, and the business was doing well. Amber liked to travel, so we'd take time off and go somewhere new a couple of times a year."

The silence dragged as I ordered history in my mind. She waited, content to let me find my own pace.

"We got a case a little out of the ordinary for us. Nothing unheard of, but not our wheelhouse. A friend of my grandfather's called me. His granddaughter was gone. Her new stepfather had taken off, abandoning his wife and stepson behind, but taking the stepdaughter. Could I find the girl? My grandfather had been dead a couple of years, but I knew this guy had been a good friend, so I didn't feel I could say no.

"It took a lot of time. As I said, it wasn't our specialty and we didn't have the contacts that people who do that stuff have. But I called in a few favors to get me started and got going. Amber was all for it at first, but as it dragged on, she began to make comments that we had paying clients. I ignored her and kept looking. Her comments got more pointed."

"You couldn't find the granddaughter, and the fights with Amber got too big because you wouldn't stop?"

"No ... I found her. She was up in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Her stepfather was turning her out in the evenings. During the day, he was enjoying her himself. We found where they were staying, but we had no evidence, see? We couldn't prove the girl was in there against her will. Hell, we couldn't even prove she was in there at all without staking out the place and trying to get pictures. That would mean she spent even more nights being sent out."

I realized I was telling this story to a woman who had spent some time being sent out herself. I looked down and met eyes staring up.

"I made the choice myself. No stepfather in my life," she murmured, answering the question I hadn't asked. I settled back, staring at the ceiling as I went on.

"It's doubtful a judge would've issued a warrant just on some strangers' allegations, and a knock and talk by the police would've just alerted the stepfather to bolt. We went in: Amber and I. Two of our employees waited outside. Don't get the wrong idea. It wasn't some scene out of Silence of the Lambs, nothing like that. But the eyes staring at me told me everything I needed to know.

"We told our employees to get her to a hotel to get them away and clear. We didn't pay them to get arrested as accessories. I was arguing with Amber that she should go too. She was arguing that the stepfather knew she was there, so she was staying. The guy started laughing."

"Amber!" I snapped, every bit of my frustration apparent to the man lying back against the bed. He thought it was funny.

"Listen to her, asshole," he said. "You're both goin' down anyway. She can hold your hand until the cops come. Enjoy it 'cause I don't think you'll get conjugal visits inside."

"They'll be taking you too," I said.

"Maybe, but it won't stick. She's my girlfriend; that's my story. She likes older guys, and I found her hotter than her mother and traded up. She won't say boo to that. I got her too well-trained. In fact, once I get out, I'm gonna drive out there and tell her to get in the car. She'll hop in, and then we'll go to a motel and she'll hop on when I tell her to." He smiled a cynical smile. "It's the way they get after a while. I know."