Untold Damage by Robert K. Lewis

out.”
    â€œHow do you know Inspector Kane?” the cop who’d cuffed him asked. The man turned Mallen around, pushed his back into the wall.
    This was it. He wondered if he was still known around the department. Maybe in the four years he’d been gone, they’d forgotten mostly about him. “I know him because I used to work with him sometimes. My name is Mallen. Mark Mallen. My old badge number used to be 0412 . Come on, man, please? Just call him.”
    The two cops looked at each other for a moment. A siren grew in volume. Approached quickly, then cut off. The paramedics had made good time.
    â€œMallen, huh?” the first cop said. “Yeah, I heard about you from my sergeant.” Looked him up and down. Not impressed. “Take this fucker downstairs and put him in the back of the cruiser.”

    He had to sweat it out for about an hour. All that time, he sat in the back of the police cruiser, trying to ignore the looks from the locals and other officers that had arrived. One of them, a plainclothes detective, smirked at him as he passed. His hands were going numb from the cuffs. He kept flexing his fingers, sitting sideways in the backseat to keep the pain to a minimum. It was hot, too. Stuffy. All the windows were up. Partway through his time in the car, he watched Jenna get wheeled out on a gurney and into the back of the ambulance. With a roar of siren and lights, the vehicle tore away up the street. He hoped she was going to be okay.
    He glanced again out the window, trying to not see the stares, glancing constantly around to avoid the eyes trained on him. He felt like a circus act gone wrong. Someone had snapped the high wire. His knives had killed the beautiful assistant.
    And that was when he saw them.
    At first he didn’t recognize the two men standing there in the crowd. And he, or the junk, couldn’t be blamed for that one, as it had been four years and some change since the last time he’d seen them. Had to admit that the last time he’d been around them hadn’t been a fucking heartfelt goodbye party anyway. He’d never been on great terms with either of them. Never liked them, and they’d never liked him. Just a “junkyard dog” thing, he’d figured. And then when he knew for sure, he didn’t want to admit it was really them.
    Jas and Griffin.
    Soldiers he had run with, back when he’d been “under the waterline,” or undercover in the drug world. Guys that he’d seen many times take orders from Franco, the man at the top, to make sure some dope-stealing son of a bitch never stole again. Sometimes it would be an order to stomp a rival that was showing too much attitude. And they’d been good at their trade.
    Very good.
    Jas was just standing there. Staring right at him. Griffin, just as Mallen had remembered, was on guard duty, eyes scanning up and down the street. Like a secret service cat watching over the president. He felt suddenly that he was living a nightmare, that a day this bad just had to be a dream, and all he had to do was just wake the fuck up.
    He looked away, bit his tongue, hoping that it wasn’t real, knowing he was being lame. Looked again into the crowd. Yup, there was Jas. Mallen wondered what Jas was thinking right about now. Mallen had dropped out of that world when he’d been kicked off the force. Would they know now about who his real employer had been? They would wonder, sure. Might do some digging. Hell, he’d made some enemies on the force, too; cops that would be only too happy to give over the truth for some bread. Probably be fuckin’ eager. There was nothing worse or more unsafe than being an undercover man, uncovered.
    If Mallen had been sweating before, he was really sweating now. He worked to keep his eyes level with Jas’s, and it took every bit of the last shreds of his manhood to do it, but he did. He even nodded at the man, trying to be all, “Fuck, man