Creekers (2 page)

He stood near the corner by the window. The sweat on his muscles shined in the moonlight—he looked silver.

He looked like an angel.

Alas, my curse…

Then she noticed the odd shapes again in the corner. What were they? Why were they there?

The door opened quickly. The others came into the room bearing candles, and the meld of voices rushed:

On-prey-bee!

Redeemer
…

Thanks we give you!

Bless us
…

The Reverend stepped forward in his coal-black robe and hood, then knelt before the naked man at the window.

Bless us and sanctify us. Show us your way and keep us whole, we beg of Thee.

Her eyes shined wide in the wavering candlelight as her lover very slowly turned. He seemed to have changed. His radiance—that lovely halo—had darkened to a sour hue, and the beautific muscles turned ruddy now, swollen and coarse. The handsome face shifted into corrupt angles, while deep, lumpen furrows grooved the high forehead.

It can’t be,
she thought.
It must be the darkness.
Of course, the darkness, her blissful fatigue, and the strange way the candlelight tinted the room.

Give us this day our daily flesh…

The others lifted her up. They were carrying her out of the room now, but not before she was able to finally detect the odd shapes in the corner.

They were—

Bodies,
she realized.
Dead…bodies…

On-prey-bee!
rejoiced the twisted voices.
Give-ona-us-beg-thee-wee!

Aloft in the others’ arms, she stared, caught one last glimpse, then fainted dead away, for in the previous moment, her lover—once beautiful, now hideous—had knelt down before the fresh dead bodies and begun to eat.

— | — | —

One

Lt. Philip Straker
double-checked the cylinder of his Smith Model 65.
Paranoid, Phil?
he asked himself.
What, the rounds are going to disappear? The good fairies going to take them when you’re not looking?
The stainless-steel cylinder shined, still full of six Remington +P+ .38s. It snapped shut with an oiled click. At least rank had its privileges; everyone else packed Glocks.

Phil was cooking in his Second Chance Kevlar vest, but a guy’d have to be crazy not to wear one on a narc bust. Red night-vision lights bathed the inside of the tac van—they called them “War Wagons”—one wall lined with commo and DF gear, the other with an array of weapons: AR-15s, a sniper rifle with a night-scope, MP-5s, and enough pistols to start a gun show. Two tac guys from S.O.D. waited with him: Eliot, one of the team leaders, and the “shooter,” some ex-Marine with the unlikely name Cap, who sat stolid as a carved-wood figure, cradling a 15A2. Phil had heard this kid could pick cherries at 800 yards—a grim assurance tonight—because Phil realized full well there’d probably be some shooting. There always was during a lab bust.
The bastards know they’re caught, but they fight anyway. When you shoot at tac men, you die, and the fuckers don’t even seem to care.
It was like a VW Bug playing chicken with a D8 bulldozer. The Bug will always lose…

“Commo check, Bob,” Phil instructed Eliot. “What’s Dignazio doing all this time—”

“Probably spitting on his dick, sir,” Cap, the kid-sniper, suggested. “Or consulting Mr. Johnny Black first.”

“He keeps stalling, I’m gonna miss the Yankees game.”

Eliot pulled a squad communications check. Dignazio’s team was going in first, to block the exits they’d gotten off the building’s blueprints. Then Phil would take his guys in the front and break bad. Dignazio had always ticked him.
Probably stalling on purpose just to make me cook a little more in this vest,
Phil thought.

Phil Straker, at thirty-five, would be up for captain next month; it went without saying that he’d make deputy chief by forty. He had three valor medals, plus a Distinguished Service, not to mention the half-dozen letters of commendation from the mayor. Hard work on a B.A. in Criminology had taken him out of the depressed, redneck burg he’d been born in and gotten him his dream job with a major metro police department. He’d taken it from there, grabbing his Masters at night, using his brain on the street, and moving up the ranks faster than almost anyone in the department’s history. He’d busted his ass for the transfer to District Narcotics, and now he was calling the shots.

Phil hated dope.

Five years driving a beat in District 3 had shown him the truth. Movers and shakers who didn’t give a shit about anything. Street gangs hiring fucking lawyers from the biggest firms in the country. Crack stools hung upside down and gutted like deer for spinning, and distro rings addicting six-year-olds to skag. Phil had never conceived of such evil in his life…

“Roger on the commo check, sir,” Eliot announced from his perch in the red-lit van. “Sergeant Dignazio says five more minutes, then they ram the door.”

“He’s just busting our chops, sir,” offered the kid.

“I know,” Phil said. “It’s because of me. The old bastard’s had a hard-on for me since the day I met him. I guess I’d be a little ticked myself if it took me nineteen years to make sergeant.”

“Word is, sir,” Eliot jumped in, “Dignazio sees it he should’ve gotten your job.”

Phil laughed, reholstering his piece. “Tell me something else I don’t know, like gorillas are hairy.”

He didn’t care. If Dignazio deserved the promo to luey, he’d have gotten it.
I ain’t crying for him, for Christ’s sake, the busted hump. Maybe if he spent less time drinking and more time busting his ass, then I’d be taking the orders from him

“Green light,” Eliot interrupted the thought, and dropped the headphones.

They burst out the van’s back doors. “Technical Services has already cored the lock. We go in quiet and clean,” Phil said, leading his men. “Watch your target acquisition and watch for crossfire. And for Christ’s sake, watch for kids.”

The U-Street Crew, like all the dope gangs, used kids for spotters and dealing because their testimony wasn’t admissible, and they could not be tried as adults. A couple years in juvie and they were right back out on the street again. You had to be careful.

“What if some eleven-year-old points a piece at me?” Cap asked.

“You’re an ex-Marine sniper, Cap, not a creamcake,” Phil said. The question ruffled his feathers. “You scared of kids?”

“No, sir.”

“Then you fire over their heads. Aim for hips and shoulders if you gotta, but don’t be killing any kids while I’m running this team. Shit, Cap, you’re wearing a titanium-plate vest that’ll stop a seven- point-six-deuce,  and you got one-mile kills in the Gulf War. Ain’t no excuse for you to be dropping kids. You gotta problem with that, Cap?”

“No, sir.”

“Good.”

Then Eliot, charging his Heckler-Koch MP-5, said, “These U-Street assholes pack Uzis and MACs and all kinds of other shit. What about adults?”

Phil stared at him. “This is a PCP lab, Bob. These fuckers trash lives faster than Dignazio goes through pint bottles of Scotch. Either of you guys—any adult who even
looks like
he’s gonna point a gun at you, redecorate the wall with his brains.”

Cap nodded. Eliot said, “Gotcha, sir.”

Then they slipped in through the door.

The stench of hydrocarbons kicked Phil in the face. The intelligence boys called this one right.
Unless they got a license to manufacture ether in a closed warehouse,
Phil thought. All the signs were here; this place was a lab.

And darker than all hell.

“Quiet,” Phil whispered. He had his 65 at the ready. “And don’t scuff your feet. We don’t want to ring the doorbell, do we? And, Cap, keep that laser-sight down till we get into the shit.”

It was almost too easy. Down the main corridor, then a left and a right, just like the intel blueprints read. At once, they were on a ten-foot catwalk overlooking the biggest PCP lab Phil had ever seen. About a dozen skell were hard at work below, beneath flanks of fluorescent lights. “Don’t fire if they run,” Phil whispered, “only if they start popping caps at us. Dignazio’s crew is at all the exits.”

Phil’s two tac men nodded in silence, and acquired protected firing positions behind the roof and catwalk props.
Time to grow some balls,
Phil thought. He stood boldly in the middle of the cat, raised his megaphone, and calmly announced: “EVERYBODY FREEZE. MY NAME IS LT. PHILIP STRAKER OF THE METRO POLICE NARCOTICS SQUAD, AND IT TICKLES ME PINK TO INFORM YOU THAT YOU’RE ALL UNDER ARREST. I’VE GOT FIFTY TACTICAL POLICE OFFICERS SURROUNDING THIS BUILDING AND TWO GUYS JUST ITCHING TO KILL SOMEONE AT EVERY EXIT. PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR AND STAND STILL. ANYONE WHO EVEN
THINKS
ABOUT MOVING LEAVES IN A BODY BAG.” And then he thought,
These guys must be getting soft in their old age.
Each and every skell looked up, gaped, and raised their hands. Nobody moved. And not one gun was fired.

It was like a freeze-frame.
I ain’t gonna miss the Yankees after all,
Phil thought. Several seconds later, the tac team moved in, covering the paddy boys. No one moved, and not one gun was grabbed for or even seen.