Touch Of The White Tiger. Julie Beard

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СКАЧАТЬ on my forehead during retribution gigs. It had become my symbol. In Chinese mythology, blue dragons are powerful creatures that live in water. Since one of my great joys as a child was swimming in Lake Michigan, and since I’d learned my best combat techniques from a former Shaolin kung fu monk, the imagery seemed to fit and gave me confidence.

      “What are you doing in this shitty neighborhood?”

      “You called me, remember?” I squeezed his hand hard, willing my life into him. Blood had splattered his white shirt like a panel from a Rorschach test. His abdomen looked like meat ready for a sausage grinder.

      “Shit!” I muttered, momentarily squeezing my eyes tight.

      I jammed my earpiece in place and called for an ambulance and police, then snapped it back on my lapel and took Roy’s pulse. It was too slow. If the ambulance didn’t hurry, he wouldn’t make it.

      “Angel…”

      “Yes, Roy?” I stroked his cheek. “What is it?”

      He looked at me with eyes I had once watched so carefully for approval. With a gray mustache and silver hair, Roy was elegant and smart. He was also wily. He’d been the first man to tell me it was okay to be a little bad for a good cause.

      “Go help the boy,” he croaked.

      “What boy?”

      He raised his right hand and pointed, then dropped it and passed out.

      I checked his pulse again to make sure he was still alive. Then I carefully headed in the direction in which he’d pointed. My stomach surged with vertigo when I spotted a second body, which was so utterly still I knew immediately that “the boy” was dead.

      As I knelt, both fascinated and horrified beside the lifeless form, I thought of Marco’s question to me: do you really know what death is? Trying to take it in as much as I could, I carefully tugged on the shoulder of the young man’s Hawaiian shirt. The weight of his shoulders pulled his still-supple torso toward me, and I winced at the scarlet carnage. I reached down and pulled his head my way so I could look at his face, in case I recognized him.

      Who it was nearly stopped my heart. “Oh, my God!”

      It was Victor Alvarez, the seventeen-year-old son of the Chicago mayor. I’d met Victor briefly when I’d done a top secret retribution job for his father. This was a disaster of monstrous proportions. What the hell had happened here? Had Roy and Victor been in a shoot-out?

      “Angel,” came Roy’s weak cry.

      I ran the thirty feet back to his side and my eyes widened when I saw how white he was. He looked at me with terror shimmering in his eyes.

      “Angel, I’m dying.” He started to convulse, gasping desperately for air.

      I knelt and took him in my arms, but he shook so violently his hand socked me in the temple and I nearly blacked out. When I regained my composure, he was still, his eyes wide open.

      “No!” I shouted and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I fought to keep the cold of death out of my lungs while I stubbornly forced the warmth of life into his, one breath at a time.

      By the time emergency technicians arrived, I was sweating and frantic, pumping at Roy’s chest, willing him to live. Strong hands gripped my upper arms and lifted me away.

      “Hold it, ma’am,” said a brawny EMT, pulling me around. His round, ebony face was serious and soothing. “We have it under control now. You can stop. We’ll take over from here.”

      I took in a hitching breath and nodded, as an EMT took over working on Roy. I looked around and realized the once-empty courtyard was now teaming with detectives, special forces and beat cops. When I looked back at Roy, the technician was pulling a white sheet over him.

      “That’s it?” I shouted. “Why did you stop? Can’t you take him to the hospital?”

      The big guy who had pulled me aside said, “We did a brain scan. There’s no activity.”

      I nodded, finally admitting what I’d known from the beginning. Roy was gone. As devastating as this fact was, I could not cry for him. Not here. I had to know first who killed him. As always, I trusted my own ability to find out more than the cops.

      “Angel Baker?” a voice intoned over my shoulder.

      “That’s me,” I muttered, still staring at the white sheet.

      “My name is Lieutenant William Townsend, director of Q.E.D.”

      I tore my gaze from Roy’s body and focused on a man who towered above me a good six inches. Gray-haired and quietly arrogant, he regarded me assessingly.

      “How did you know who I am?” I asked, refusing to be cowed.

      “Detective Marco briefed me when I arrived,” he answered in an upper-crust British accent. He was apparently a UK immigrant who’d tenaciously clung to his distinguished way of speaking.

      “Marco?” The word was like a bad dream suddenly remembered in the light of day. I glanced over and saw Marco talking to a bevy of crime scene techs and investigators.

      “What time is it?” I hissed.

      Arching one brow in surprise, Lieutenant Townsend replied, “Four-fifty.”

      The proverbial clock had struck midnight. In Marco’s eyes, I was now officially a pumpkin. I’d failed our agreement. I rubbed my eyes with both hands and sighed.

      “I need to see your license,” Townsend said in a clipped manner.

      Without enthusiasm, I handed over my certification card and studied him as he held it by the edges with his uncallused, manicured fingers, as if I had cooties. I’d always been curious about Q.E.D., which was short for the Latin term quad erat demonstrandum, “that which is to be demonstrated.” I’d never met a Q.E.D. officer before but I’d heard the group jokingly referred to as the Quad Squad.

      An elite group, it consisted of about ten cops who had elected to undergo psychosurgery to limit their capacity to feel emotions. After surgery, the officers took the latest bio-meds to spur connections in the logical, left side of the brain, which would then take over functions that had been surgically freed up in the right, or emotional, side of the brain. The idea being that a more logical cop could better solve crimes and would be less inclined to abuse criminals in a fit of anger.

      “Are you carrying a weapon, Ms. Baker?” Townsend inquired, handing me back my ID.

      “A knife and a whip. No gun.”

      He fixed me with cold, gray eyes that fronted a brain working apparently with computer-like precision. In fact, he stared down his aquiline nose at me for so long with so little emotion that I began to wonder if he considered me a suspect.

      “I didn’t do it, Lieutenant. But perhaps I can help you find out who did.”

      “That won’t be necessary.” He gave me a perfunctory smile, perhaps one remembered from presurgery days. He motioned above my head and soon another detective joined us. My skin began to tingle ominously in this new presence and I turned to see who СКАЧАТЬ