Page 98 - Hunter - The Vigil

Gabreski glanced over his shoulder to check on Andrea. “Getting any better?” he asked.
Lupe had bandaged Andrea’s shoulder and, after massaging the muscles of her right arm,
they’d managed to bend it enough to put it in a sling. Raimundo’s sister had found a shirt
in her closet that the detective could wear, and Vince had pushed a wad of bills into the
nurse’s hands on the way out the door. Now Taggart sat on the bare fl oor of the van opposite
Raimundo, wrapped in her torn jacket and sipping from Lupe’s bottle of rum.
“I can wiggle my fi ngers a little, and my arm and shoulder are throbbing like a son of
a bitch,” she said grimly, though there was a glimmer of relief in her eyes.
Gabreski nodded. “That’s some good news, at least. Raimundo, what about our friend?”
The gang leader eyed the prone form of the suit. Vince had handcuffed the man and
they’d wrapped him in a threadbare blanket. Raimundo shrugged. “He’s still out, man. Lupe
said he might have a cracked skull. He’ll come around when he comes around, I guess.”
“Here we go,” Jack said, pulling up to the curb in front of Blackfriar’s Café. “You
see your guy in there?”
Vince scanned the café’s tall windows. Blackfriar’s catered mostly to the students up
the street at Temple University, and many of the tables Gabreski could see were occupied.
“Yeah. There he is,” he said, spying a gaunt fi gure hunched in a corner booth. “Get in
there and get us some coffee while I talk to this guy. This won’t take long.”
Gabreski stepped out into the cold, wet air, conscious of the wind seeping through the
tear in his jacket sleeve and freezing his wounded arm. The shirtsleeve beneath was stiff
with dried blood. Out of habit, he straightened his jacket and surreptitiously checked
the seating of the pistol at his hip, then made his way into the café.
Heads turned as Vince stepped in out of the night. A pair of teenagers near the café’s
gas fi replace rose hurriedly and headed for the door, shoulders hunched and avoiding the
detective’s gaze. He ignored the dealers and made his way to the back of the coffee shop.
The reporter was typing fi tfully on a battered-looking laptop, surrounded by a disorderly
pile of papers, books and pages of grainy digital photos. He looked like a day-old corpse
in the pallid glow of the computer screen: gaunt face shadowed with stubble, sunken eyes
and lank, greasy black hair that fell in a tangle to the young man’s shoulders. An unlit
cigarette dangled from the corner of the reporter’s thin lips.
He didn’t look up as Vince approached. For a guy who saw monsters and bizarre
conspiracies around every corner, he was awfully damned oblivious, Gabreski thought.
“Hello, Junior,” Vince growled. The wooden seat creaked as he wedged his bulk into the
small booth. “What’s shakin’?”
The reporter jerked back as though stung. For a moment, it looked as though he was going
to grab his laptop and bolt for the door. “I asked you not to call me that, Detective,”
the young man stammered. “My name is Karl. And I haven’t called you in, like, months. The
restraining order was really specifi c —”
“Yo, Karl, relax,” Vince said, cutting off the reporter’s rapid-fi re chatter with a wave
of his hand. “All’s forgiven.” He pointed at the cigarette. “Those things work better when
you light them, you know.”
Karl eyed the detective bemusedly. “Huh? Oh. Yeah, I was just about to step out and
smoke, but I got an IM from this guy who’s with Network Zero…” His gaze returned to the
screen. Vince watched Karl’s eyes move as he read something, then the reporter’s thin,
nicotine-stained fi ngers tapped out a staccato reply.
The detective grinned. “Network Zero? Is that some kind of cable-access channel?”
“Yeah, something like that,” he said, glaring at Vince over the top of the laptop’s
screen.
Gabreski started to scowl at Karl, but forced himself to relax. He reached over and
picked up one of the digital prints. “What are you working on right now?”
“Disappearances down by the river,” Karl replied absently. He glanced up, saw what
Vince was doing, and with surprising speed he snatched the print from the detective’s
hand. “The victims are homeless people. This is an image from one of the police’s closed-
circuit cameras that shows the perpetrator.”