Watch Dogs (2 page)

It was barely stopped before the medics were out, two burly black Emergency Medical Techs in blue and yellow uniforms—on their shoulders patches read
CFR: Chicago’s Fastest Responders.

A third man jumped out of the back of the ambulance——a lanky white guy in an ill-fitting uniform. The EMT rushed up to Wolfe, a hand outthrust like a football block, making Wolfe step away from Aiden.

“Stay back, sir—”

“He’s been shot, he’s going to need a compress, blood clotter, quick! They fired twice—”

The man was still backing Wolfe up. “Thank you, sir. If you have any more information, give it to the police, they’ll be here pretty soon...”

“Sure, sure. But...”

This medic sure had dirty fingernails for a guy who worked in an ambulance.

There was a name tag on his uniform.
P.
COLLINGSWOOD,
it said.

“What hospital are you taking him to?” Wolfe asked.

“Lakeside Hospital, just a few blocks away, sir.”

Wolfe looked past the EMT and saw the other two already had Pearce on a portable gurney. They were wheeling it toward the back of the ambulance, lifting it in. Pearce was still lying face down. He had a cell phone clutched in his hand. Had he called these guys himself somehow?

Wolfe had seen a lot of medical technicians at work, here and overseas in Delta Force—he’d never seen anybody go about it this fast. They didn’t seem to be following procedure.

The first two Emergency Technicians got in the front of the ambulance; the third EMT was jumping in the back, slamming the door from the inside—and the ambulance was moving away even before the door was completely closed.

Wolfe made a mental note of the number on the side of the CFR vehicle: 103.

The vehicle did a tight, tire-burning U-turn and then drove away, careening down the street at top speed.

He heard another siren—a police siren.

Wolfe stared at the puddle of blood on the sidewalk and thought,
No way I’m staying here to answer police questions.

He had an unregistered gun—and there were a whole lot of questions he didn’t want to answer. He turned and strode away, not too fast, slipping between the nearest buildings at the first opportunity.

He looked around the corner of the buildings, back to the site of the shooting. A cop car was just pulling up. Officers were getting out, gesturing at the blood, then looking around in confusion.

Then an ambulance drove up, and stopped in the street by the patrol cars.

Wolfe watched as an EMT got out, and he could read the body language of the EMT and the two cops pretty clearly.

Puzzlement. They seem surprised to find no one there.

#

“But you’re sure this is the hospital they’d have come to?” Wolfe asked.

“Yes, I’m sure of it,” the Admissions Nurse told him. She was a squat, thick-bodied woman in a pink-white uniform with a lot of dyed blond hair piled up on top of her head. She sniffed a lot as she talked to him. Allergies.

Wolfe glanced nervously around the admissions lobby. “This place is only, like, three blocks from the hospital...why would they take him anywhere else? You’re saying he’s not here at all?”

“That’s what I’m telling you, sir! No gunshot victims have been brought in, no one of that description. No one like that at all...”

I
should get out of here. Fast.

Wolfe knew instinctively that his witnessing the shooting made him a target as well. And this hospital lobby was too exposed.

He turned and walked across the lobby and out the door into a slight drizzle of cold rain. He looked around for that van, for anyone who seemed a threat. And for a moment...
everyone
seemed like a threat. That black mailman who was glancing at him as he walked by; that taxi driver pulling up, probably just waiting for a patient leaving the hospital; that lady walking her dog. They all seemed inexplicably sinister in that moment.

Wolfe chuckled at his own nervousness, going quickly down the steps to the sidewalk. He glanced around again, and saw no one else except an old lady with a walker—and decided he probably didn’t have to worry about her.

Still, he was going to have to watch his back awhile.

He set off down the sidewalk, thinking.

So if Pearce isn’t here...where is he? What the hell is going on?

The EMT had told him that Pearce would be taken here, to this hospital. But no one had been brought here by ambulance for more than half an hour. And last time someone had been brought in, they’d had a broken leg, not a bullet wound. And no one Pearce’s age, or color had come in by ambulance. The lobby admissions nurse had been the fourth hospital worker Wolfe had asked. He’d asked the nurses in the ER, he’d even asked a guy mopping up the ER waiting room.

No one named Pearce—no one fitting Pearce’s description. No gunshot victims at this hospital. Yet the ER routinely got patients in through the CFR ambulance company.

So where had the ambulance taken Aiden Pearce?

That ambulance had come
fast,
after the shooting. Maybe that was the assassin’s mop up team. Maybe they hadn’t been EMT personnel at all...

Chicago’s Fastest Responders...

Were they dumping Aiden Pearce’s body off a pier right now?

Wolfe walked around the corner, toward the luxury car he’d “borrowed” that morning, electronically hot wiring it from a closed car lot. He’d had to pay a tagger to spray paint the lot’s security camera lenses over, before he’d stolen the car. Sixty bucks to the tagger, and it was worth it...why not swipe a comfortable car?

He looked around, saw no one watching the car, which was parked half a block from the Emergency Room. It seemed there was no APB on it yet; might continue that way all day, with luck, if no one inventoried that car lot.

 He used the universal car-door remote he’d rigged up, signaling the car’s locks. It chirped in response, unlocking, and he hurried to it. He got in, triggered
start
, and drove away, careful not to go too fast or too slow. He didn’t want to attract the cops.

The car had a GPS system, voice activated. “Chicago’s Fastest Responders, nearest office,” he told it.

The GPS responded, informing him that the office was less than a quarter mile away.

He took a right, drove down a boulevard for a couple minutes, and there it was,

 
CFR: Chicago’s Fast Responders: Ward Office 6.

He parked out behind the sprawling one-story cement block building, and went in. “Not taking any more applications today,” said the ginger-haired, freckle-faced man behind the counter. The man was poking at a smartphone as he spoke.

“Applications?”

The clerk glanced up at him. “You aren’t here for the job?”

“No. Um—a friend of mine was picked up today by CFR. Trouble is—there’s some, uh, miscommunication about what hospital he was taken to.”

The guy sighed and rolled his eyes. “Not my responsibility.”

Wolfe fished a twenty dollar bill from his pants’ pocket, folded the bill and tapped it on the counter. “Just take a minute.”

The twenty vanished. “Whatever. Where was this?”

 He told the counter clerk the street corner and gave Pearce’s name—though that might not be the name found on Aiden Pearce, who probably had as many I.D.s as he needed.

The clerk peered into a computer monitor. “Nope. Nobody picked up on the waterfront at all today. Nobody on that corner, nobody on that street. Mostly we’ve had guys picking up gunshot vics over at Washington Park. As usual.”

“Nobody by that name anywhere?”

“Nope.”

Wolfe kept asking questions and kept getting nope, nope, nope and no. CFR denied ever picking up anyone on that corner, at that time or any other time today.

“And we got no employees named Collingswood. Not one.”

“And the ambulance number? One-oh-three?”

“Not in use today. Being serviced.”

“Serviced. Right.”

Wolfe turned and walked silently out.

Aiden Pearce had been shot. Then he had disappeared, as if he had been taken away by a ghostly ambulance, and spirited to a ghostly hospital.

Either that, or those guys had been with the assassin...and Pearce was dead. So maybe he was a real ghost, now, instead of the ghostlike vigilante he’d been. A real ghost——for good.

Wolfe decided he wouldn’t believe that till there was proof.

He walked out to the corner of the building, preparing to go back and borrow the illegally borrowed car one more time before he abandoned it...

And that’s when the dark Crown Victoria pulled up in front of him. Wolfe knew an unmarked cop car when he saw one.

#

Aiden Pearce was quite alive, but was almost wishing he weren’t.

It was the burning pain in his head. It was the throbbing; it was the nausea. That’s what made him wish he were at least unconscious.

The bullet, he was told, had only nicked his skull. But it had given him a concussion, not a terribly severe one that required hospitalization, but no concussion is good. Scalp wounds appear to bleed a lot of blood, more than they really do, so he’d gushed out impressively.
“Doc” Morrsky, a onetime doctor who’d had his license pulled for selling Oxycodone, had done the diagnosis and stitches, telling Pearce, “Yeah, you’re okay, just a scratch and a concussion.”

He hadn’t offered Pearce any Oxycodone. Right now, Pearce wouldn’t mind a few hundred milligrams.

Pearce was lying on a bed in one of his safehouses, on the South Side. His head ached as if it had been shot a moment ago. One of the EMTs had given him a local anesthetic. It wasn’t quite enough.

He could hear Pussler in the next room, yapping to his girlfriend on a cellphone——Pussler the fake EMT who’d kept Wolfe back, at the site of the attempted murder.

“Hey baby, I got some cash, I got a job today, we can score for sure,” Pussler was saying.

Pearce sighed. Was Pussler, a junkie ex-actor, as much as Morrsky was an ex-doctor, the best he could do?

The other two guys had been the real deal, EM techs from CFR in Pearce’s pay—guys Pearce now owed five grand each. Since Pearce had been skimming cash, through hacking, from a couple of gangsters who had no clue who was doing it, he would be able to pay them off. And goofy on dope or not, Pussler had gotten the job done. He was one of Pearce’s go-betweens on the street; he’d been on call, had gotten the pre-loaded emergency text, and he’d responded quickly. Because Pearce had suspected someone was stalking him, shortly after he set out for the meeting. So he’d told Pussler to get with the ambulance escape team, and stay close for a getaway with good cover, if he needed it—he didn’t expect to be shot.

Stupid,
he told himself.
Shouldn’t have risked it.

If someone had set him up—who was it? Pussler just didn’t seem that complicated—and for some reason Pearce trusted him. There was Clyde Merwiss——a programmer who worked with Pearce sometimes, had for about four months...But he hadn’t known about the meeting.

So——had Mick Wolfe set him up for the gunman?

If Wolfe had set him up, he was a better actor than Pussler. Mick Wolfe had seemed glad to see him. Had even tried to warn him.

Had, in fact, saved his life. Wolfe’s warning had given Pearce a chance to duck from the line of fire, so he’d only caught one round, and only glancingly.

Luckily the gunman had seen all that blood splash from the scalp wound and thought he’d done better than a graze...

Pearce had done a hack into the cameras on the street, before getting out of his own car and walking down there; he’d checked to see who was meeting him; who it was, exactly, who knew that old code phrase.

The street camera had shown him a vaguely familiar face. He’d used the ctOS facial recognition system, and it confirmed: Mick Wolfe. Colin’s boy, whom Pearce had last seen when Mick was in his early teens...

Pearce took out his smartphone, wiped some dried blood off it, and then went to his ctOS penetration mode...

Time to find out what Mick Wolfe had been up to.

#

“
What
’d you say your name was, officer? Actually——could I just see that badge again?”

A big pink-faced man with a flattop and a square jaw, the detective growled to himself but reached inside his gray suit jacket and pulled out his gold badge again, held it up in his scarred, beefy pink hands. “
Tranter.
Lieutenant Tranter. That enough stalling?”

Wolfe memorized the badge number.

 “Sure, detective.”

Tranter put his badge away. “Now fork over your I.D., wise guy.”

Wolfe only had one set of I.D. so far, besides a driver’s license. But he wasn’t exactly wanted for anything. He pulled out his military I.D., hoping the detective was sentimental about soldiers, and passed it over.