Silhouette

XLII

One officer scrapes the wall with a penknife after they round every corner. Rose reckons this wouldn’t be a nice place to be stuck in.

A moment later an officer stops. Hand raised, head turned at an angle. Janet turns, she is bumbling with nervous energy, hair matted to scalp despite the cool damp.

The officer raises a finger to his lips. He shushes them. He says, “Listen.” He points a hand at the vague darkness.

Everyone follows the hand. And they hear it. They break into a run.

***

Bifouma stops laughing. “Do you think God would forgive you for what you have done?”

“No.” Dave considers how fast he’d answered the question and the solid certainty he feels.

Bifouma grins.

Dave feels the gears in his head whirring. Being found was simply an impossibility. He kneels, he pats Bifouma’s pockets. There is a disposable phone in one of them.

"Someone was loitering around, that was taken from him,” says Bifouma. “The game is over, Detective. It seems like your own people are aware of your activities.”

Dave rips the phone apart, smashes it  against the wall. The voices and pounding footsteps are getting closer. “There was a prison warden who could make convicts disappear. For the right price he could break you out of jail and replace your space with some innocent bum in the streets. The heavier your sentence, the heavier the price. I took him after work. Tied him up, not unlike this. We talked for a while, he mostly spewed profanities at me.

"We both knew what he did, what he had done. We both saw the twisted evil in him. I tried hard to understand why he did what he did. There were other ways to earn some extra income than screwing other people’s lives.”

“What did you do to this warden?”

“He couldn’t come up with anything so I shot him in the head. I watched his head snap back then fall on his chest. I tell myself I have justifications. But really? I just… need to.”

Bifouma hollers. “There you have it, Dave. Now you just have to peel away the rest of this covering. You’ll find the canvas beneath.”

“There are few milestones in life that evoke a stronger response than our final act.”

“You and I, Dave. We are the same.”

Dave surges with hate. It rises from deep within his chest, spreads to his shoulders like wings unfurling, it roars up to his head. A fallen angel in Milton’s hell.

Dave meets Bifouma’s eyes. He raises the gun. "No, we are not."

Bifouma jerks against the bonds. He screams.

***

For a while, Rose doesn’t hear anything apart from the pounding of boots. Then there is the unmistakable boom of gunfire. It echoes infinitely.

She prays with all her heart that whoever is holding the gun should be someone other than Dave: a psychopath with a vendetta, a hitman who has taken on too many jobs.

The officers before her round a corner and come to a stop. Rose follows them, places a palm on the cold, hard wall. Takes in the scene before her. A torch upturned on the floor, Bifouma tied to a chair, his head lolled back and blood trickling.

The torch lights up his face, it seems as if there is a halo above his head. Or rather, an artifact kept in a display case lighted up for the visitors of a museum.

“Jesus,” someone mutters.

Rose hears someone walk up behind her. She turns, it is Janet. Their eyes meet. Janet’s eyes are like cold, bare rock. They say nothing at all. Those eyes scare Rose. Janet crouches, picks up pieces of a small, black object. It is a cell phone.

“No one’s here,” says Rose.

Michael turns away from the scene with a distasteful twist of his mouth. He whips out his phone. “Damn it,” he mutters as he returns it to his pocket. He holds Janet’s gaze for a while. He turns. “Touch nothing, let forensics do their job. I want this whole place canvassed, every nook and cranny rendered on paper. Someone pulled the trigger, now he has disappeared and I want him found.”

The officers scurry into action. Michael takes one more look at Bifouma and returns the way they had come. Janet stares at Michael’s receding form then she crouches, steeples her fingers. She watches Bifouma.

Rose hears a pinging in her pocket. There is a message from Jonjo. ‘Dave was on some CI work, he just called.’

Rose regards Janet’s small form. Her calm indifference unnerves her. She goes to stand beside Janet. “Dave’s whereabouts can be accounted for.”

Janet looks up at Rose. She stands. She doesn’t say a word. She starts to walk away.

“Dave isn’t your killer.”

Janet says over her shoulder, “We will see about that.”