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
CHAPTER 5
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.
