“No, she’s observing an op—a gun sale. Well, I say sale. I doubt they’re offering discounts.”
“You have a pair of eyes inside the Park?”
Lamb nodded. “A pair of legs, not so much. But you take what you can get.”
He rescrewed the top on his bottle, and slid it back into his pocket.
Judd said, “I’m leaving now.”
“Yeah, that would be disappointing. You’re supposed to be the saveloy one when it comes to deal making.”
“. . . Saveloy? Are we back on the sausage thing?”
“Savvy. Where’s Standish when I need her? Why we’re doing this without Taverner is, she’s who we’re here to discuss. You because she tried to knock you off your perch last night. And me, well. Trust me. I have reasons.”
“Trust you? Now there’s a big ask.”
“Oh, come on. You know what they say, a friend’s just an enemy you haven’t pissed off yet.”
“I somehow doubt we’re going to be friends, Lamb. And even if we were, you wouldn’t be the kind I’d trust.” He stood. “I’ll find some other way to smooth things out with Diana. Letting her know about Welles’s little side hustle’ll make a good start.”
“Yeah, that kill switch. I should have mentioned, one of the other things hitting it does is, it opens her safe.” Lamb made a clicking noise with his tongue, and mimed a door swinging open. “I mean, I wasn’t there when it happened, but it must have been something like that.”
“I’m not seeing a safe anywhere.”
“Upstairs.”
“And you’ve robbed her?”
“Now, there you’re judging me by your standards. No, I haven’t robbed her. Maybe borrowed something, but don’t worry. I’ll put it back.”
“What are you talking about?”
Again, Lamb’s hand dipped into his overcoat pocket, and this time when he withdrew it, it was holding a gun.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “Is it cake?”
He’d lost the tyre jack.
Actually, when you went granular on his current position—lost, scared, hunted, bruised—might have weed himself a bit—that wasn’t the worst that had happened, but still, losing the tyre jack, that was insult to injury. They didn’t grow on trees.
Sometimes, it didn’t matter who you were, but sometimes, it was all you could do not to kick your feet, punch the air and scream blue nasties loud as you could.
Fucking civilians.
Who had outnumbered him by, like, infinity to one.
When he’d hit the pavement—superhero landing, whatever you might have heard to the contrary—when he’d hit the pavement and was amping up for another leap, the first one having calibrated the precise angle of the swing he’d have to make to disconnect the camera from its working life, Roddy had known he’d made an impact. People would be swivelling on their rods to check him out. Invisible one mo; the next, revealed in all his ripped glory. They’d be thinking Batman! Deadpool! Who was this tabarded crusader?
“Dick,” someone said.
“Did he just—?”
“He was trying to smash that camera, man!”
“Is he a fucking terrorist or what?”
Yeah, no, what, thought Roddy. Terrorist? Me?
He stood, and nearly folded. His ankles hurt, dude.
All around him, life had come to a halt.
What had been groups of people heading in various directions became one amorphous crowd, every element of which wanted to know what Roddy was up to. It was like that giant squid covering half the Pacific floor: It had been lots of different squids, but it just kind of . . . melded. Don’t ask him how: He read the internet, man, he didn’t write it. But meanwhile here he was, and the crowd was melding, and the crowd was getting angry.
“Did you just break that gatepost?”
“Is anyone calling the cops? Because I will.”
“Look,” said Roddy, Mr. Reasonable: Good job he was C-O-O-L-cool, and instantly likeable. Because otherwise he might be in trouble. “Look. This is no big deal, ya feel me? If you all just back away a bit”—because they were starting to crowd him; the crowd was beginning to crowd—“and let me finish up here, then we’re all good.”
“Yeah, I’ve called the cops,” someone said.
“Okay, so maybe I’ll just head off, then.”
“You’re going nowhere, mate.”
Roddy was grabbed by the arm.
He was hampered by his personal ethics. Basically, he was a lethal weapon—trained, honed, buffed and polished—and couldn’t just, like, squeeze his own trigger in a civilian situation. Someone would get hurt, and the Ho Code didn’t allow for that. The Ho Code stated: Christ, he couldn’t remember. This guy had an armlock on him; this was no time for pissing around with the small print. Someone else was poking him in the chest. Where are you from? he was being asked. You speak English? The Code, though. The Ho Code. There was one important element of it had just swum back into mind and it was this: The Code didn’t mention a tyre jack.
He thrust it upwards into the chin of the man with the lock on his arm, and the lock broke.
The crowd folded backwards, Roddy lunged forwards, the tyre jack was gone, and adrenalin, it turned out, was good for the ankles: He felt no pain as he ran through his gears and hit sprint mode, breaking free of the mob. Which, like any mob, didn’t know how to respond to this, and fed off itself while its chief driver, the one who locked arms, roared in pain and thrashed about. This was outside Roddy’s ken, though, because Roddy was all about what was in front of him, not what was behind. There was a corner, and Roddy took it. No shops here: a residential street. Slight incline. He flew up it and reached another corner. He had a car, but fuck knew where it was; he barely knew where his own feet were. He could hear voices still—shouting—baying—but no footsteps, because this was something else mobs did: they remained in place, expressing their anger, looked for whatever was nearest to vent it on.
Another corner, and he took it, realising too late that this was taking him back towards the main drag. He looked behind, and tripped over something—two somethings—his feet—and banged his pretty face on the pavement. He lay panting, expecting hands upon him any moment—to be hauled upright and strung from a streetlight—but none came. There were lights spinning overhead, and when he blinked they spun the other way, and he recognised them as his own Roddylights. He was Roddyspinning, bright bursts of Roddycolour lighting up the sky, as if Roddyworks were being set off. A car went past as he hauled himself upright, and it slowed, or else his perception altered as it reached him, but it kept moving. So did he. This time, back the way he’d come. There were people, but on the other side of the road, and they didn’t appear to care who Roddy was. He put a hand to his head, and it came away wet. Where was he? There were parked cars, and between two of them was enough of a gap that he could lower himself to a crouch and Roddy himself invisible. Just for a while. Just until he was breathing normally, and the hummingbird could fly.
From his pocket he pulled out his phone. Rang the first contact he thought of.
“It’s me, it’s Roddy,” he said. “Help me.”
Then he closed his eyes.
Judd said, “You’re not about to shoot me.”
“I get that a lot,” said Lamb. “People telling me what I’m not about to do. But then, if the people around me knew what they were talking about, they’d have been assigned to a different department. See what I’m saying?”
“I came here in good faith, expecting a reasoned, adult discussion. Now you’re waving a gun about. This is insane.”
“I’d have thought you were used to it by now. Guns being waved about, I mean. Or has last night slipped your mind? It hasn’t mine. On account of one of my joes being shot, and another being stabbed.”