Child of Fire by Harry Connolly Page A

curb, happy to sit and watch professionals at work. A chubby little guy with too much beard taped plastic over the gunshot wound. Beside him, his lean and hairless partner snipped the finger from a latex glove and then slid a long needle through the fingertip. They rolled Harlan onto his back. The bearded guy covered the exit wound with more plastic while his partner searched Harlan’s ribs for a place to insert the needle.
    I didn’t watch. Weariness washed over me as myadrenaline ebbed. I was tempted to lie back in the street and go to sleep.
    I wondered if I was going to be sleeping in jail to night. I hoped not. It was too soon.
    The older cop with the movie-star hair and the road-house face crouched beside me. “Your, uh, companion there tells me you came out to talk old Harlan out of shooting up the town.”
    “That’s right,” I said. I wanted to stand, but I didn’t want to smear my bloody hands against the street. It was a weird impulse, but it was a day for weird.
    I glanced at the man’s badge. He was the chief of police. The name tag beneath read E. DUBOIS . This was Emmett, I guessed, who hadn’t confiscated all of Harlan’s guns.
    “Hold on there a moment,” the cop said. He stepped over and conferred with the fat cop standing just a few feet away. The fat cop walked away, and the older one came back. “That wasn’t the smartest thing in the world to do,” he said. “Why did you do it?”
    “I didn’t think about it, really,” I lied.
    “Good Samaritan?”
    I didn’t respond to that. The fat cop returned with a plastic squeeze bottle and a wad of paper towels. The bottle was labeled “waterless cleaner.” I thanked him, squeezed the bottle over my hands, and started washing the blood away. The cleaner felt like jelly and smelled like rubbing alcohol.
    “Witnesses said you’d just about talked him down when we showed up.”
    I understood where this was going. He didn’t want people saying that I’d almost handled the situation diplomatically when he’d come in with guns blazing.
    “I hadn’t talked him down from anything,” I said. “I had the impression that he was planning a suicide by cop.”
    “That’s better. Much better than a smart mouth. I didn’t much care for your remark about shooting Harlan again. I didn’t like having to shoot him.”
    I remembered the way he’d smiled at Harlan’s bleeding body and knew he was lying. “Sorry about that,” I told him. “I was all worked up with adrenaline.”
    He smiled that same smile. “Fine,” he said. “That’s just fine.”
    He asked where I was from and why I was in town, but he seemed distracted and his questions were careless. I managed to avoid saying that I’d been in jail that morning. He didn’t seem to care about me, now that I’d apologized.
    I watched the ambulance drive away. “Where are they taking him?”
    The cop eyeballed me, as if trying to decide whether answering my question would undermine his authority.
    “County hospital,” he said. “You planning to visit?”
    “Yep. I’m a Good Samaritan.”
    “Fine. That’s fine.” A brown, rusted Dodge Dart parked at the intersection, a little too close to the police car already there. A fourth cop, this one tall and slender, moved out of the shadows to intercept the driver. As he stepped into the light, I saw bright red hair on the top of his head.
    “That’s our local paperboy,” the cop said. “You better go now if you don’t want to be here all night answering his questions. But stay in Hammer Bay for a couple days, understand?”
    “I intend to.”
    Annalise stood on the sidewalk a few yards away, the broken windows of the diner behind her. Her eyes were hooded and her face expressionless.
    As I approached her, the cook stepped up to me. “You cost me a door,” he said. “Harlan busted my glass doorbecause you wanted to be a hero. What if one of my customers had been shot, huh? What then?”
    “Don’t you pay any attention to him,”