Page 36 of Road to Ruin
“No. Why would I do that?”
“Fuck! You guys are fucking incompetent,” Mitch hisses through his teeth. He pushes up from the ground, hopping to his feet, his whole body rigid. “You could learn a thing or two about how to handle prisoners from us, y’know. Damn it, give me your handcuffs. I’ll do it myself.”
The cop on the left laughs. Just once. Then he raises his gun, still in his hand, and shoots Mitch in the leg. The gunshot is like a whip of thunder snapping across the sky; the sound echoes off the houses, repeating once, twice, three times before dying somewhere in the distance. Mitch drops to one knee, a look of unparalleled surprise on his face.
“What the fuck?” he gasps. “You just shot me.”
“He’s smart, this one.” I can see his badge now, reflecting under the streetlights: Officer Friday. The other cop’s badge reads Broussard. Broussard, the guy who crouched down, looks familiar somehow. I make to get up, and Friday holds his hand out to help me. This is about as strange a turn of events as I could have hoped for.
“Glad to see you’re back in the neighborhood, Tommy,” Friday says. “We heard you were gonna be fighting again. We’ve been taking bets down at the precinct.”
“I have a grand riding on you, Tee,” Broussard says, clapping me on the shoulder. “I saw your last fight back in oh-three. Man, that shit got nasty real quick toward the end there. The Bastien girl… That was a crying shame, it really was.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Mitch wails. “He’s a goddamn criminal. You have to arrest him.”
“Sounds to me like you’re the criminal here,” Broussard replies. “Tommy was chasing you down ’cause you’re some sort of sexual predator.”
Mitch laughs nervously, his voice high-pitched, hands jittery as he holds them to the bullet wound in his thigh. “How are you gonna trust his word over mine, man? I work in law enforcement, too. I’m like you. He’s a fucking thug with a rap sheet longer than my right arm.”
Both the cops ignore him. “This woman was a friend of yours?” Friday asks.
“She is,” I reply.
He nods, swapping yet another questioning look with his partner. They appear to come to a decision. “You want us to deal with this for you, then?” Broussard asks.
“What? No. No! You’re just going to shoot me because he says I was going to do something?”
Broussard shrugs. “Like I said. I have a grand riding on him winning his fight at the end of the month. How can he win if he’s locked up? Honestly, though, I’d shoot you simply because he asked me to. You Parish assholes are all the same. You think your shit don’t stink because they gave you a uniform. Let me tell you something, though. You’re all pussy-ass bitches. There aren’t ten of you cunts worth one of us.” Broussard sends me a questioning look. “Can’t really let him go now anyway, can we?”
“Then I guess you know what you have to do,” I say.
“No. No! For fuck’s sake, what are you—” Mitch’s protests are cut short. Friday clocks him with the butt of his police issue weapon, and the man slumps into a boneless heap in the middle of the road. The cop grabs him under the arms and proceeds to drag him to the cruiser. Broussard claps me on the shoulder, grinning. “Win that fight, huh, Tommy? You’ll make me one happy man if you do.”
God, this is seriously fucking surreal. I manage to keep my shit together, though. “Have I ever lost?”
Broussard nods, happy with my answer, then he turns and helps his partner lift Mitch’s body into the back of the cruiser.
I run back to Nikita’s house, completely stunned. When I get there, Nikita is still laid out on the couch, and Barrows is nowhere to be found.
