Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(3)
But most of his attention stayed on his surroundings.
A scrawny teenager with a backpack and beanie studied a bus map. An elderly couple came out of the Tattered Cover Book Store, the woman’s arm laced through her husband’s, his free hand clutching a bag of books. Nearby, two twenty-somethings sat at a table in the bar, their heads tipped back as they laughed. A line cook slipped outside with a pack of cigarettes.
My people, Kane thought. Mine to protect and defend.
He turned away from the octogenarians making their unhurried way across the floor. His right hand skimmed the butt of his gun as his gaze sought the far corners. The National Terrorism Advisory System was comfortably quiet tonight. Nothing had appeared in the bulletins he’d scanned before his shift. His friend in the Department of Homeland Security hadn’t heard so much as a whisper of trouble.
Kane returned to the center of the building and pushed out through the west-side doors beneath the red neon TERMINAL sign. He walked out onto the platform, where six sets of recessed train tracks stretched under banks of silvery-cool LED lights.
Most of the people standing on the platform were waiting for the local commuter trains to take them to clubs or shows. The Saturday-night revelers wore hipster clothes or urban chic or God knew what else, most of them scrolling on their phones or taking selfies. A group of white suburban teenage boys in Thrasher hoodies and Vans high-tops hung out on the south end of the platform. They loped back and forth, sometimes goading each other into dropping to the ground and knocking out twenty push-ups before springing back to their feet with the lightness of gazelles. They reminded Kane of his own privileged upbringing before the war rewired his thinking about self-worth and what one human being owes another.
A mechanized voice announced that the next train was due in seven minutes. Kane looked north along the platform, the overhead lights throwing the tracks into high relief and casting shadows between the support columns. He narrowed his eyes. Maybe twenty yards farther down, a pile of what looked like brown rags twitched against one of the columns. Kane shoved away his immediate, war-honed reaction that a pile of unidentifiable anything meant an IED and pushed through the crowd toward what he was sure would turn out to be a transient, hunkering down for the night. Denver had its share of the homeless, and Union Station was a magnet for many of them—a place to panhandle, to find shelter, to clean up in the public bathrooms, and maybe to score a half-eaten sandwich from one of the trash bins. On bad days, it seemed like half of Kane’s shift was spent rousting vagrants. He hated that part of the job—sending the most desperate people away from a place where they might find something to ease their lives.
Sure enough, as he approached, he caught the stench of days’-old sweat, and then the stinking bundle of rags morphed into a man curled beneath a weight of blankets—a full-on crazy move in the heat. Kane could make out a knot of frizzy dreads at one end of the pile and, at the other, shoeless feet so encrusted with dirt that the white skin looked gray. The rest of the man was invisible.
“Hey, man,” Kane said. “You can’t hang here.”
The rags stirred. A head shot out, and one bleary eye opened.
“Go ’way.” The eye closed.
“Come on, man,” Kane said. “Get moving. Don’t make me write you up.”
More mumbling. The blankets shook as the man hauled himself to his knees, swayed for a moment, then bounced onto his feet with surprising agility, tossing off the blankets. He was compact and wiry, his shoulders bunched, his forearms muscular in a way you didn’t often see in a vagrant. Kane’s hand went to his gun before his mind followed, and he forced his fingers toward the pepper spray instead; the spray was a particularly potent blend intended to be his first line of defense.
“Officer Kane,” the man said in a slurred voice.
He startled, then realized the man was staring at his name tape above his uniform pocket. Kane frowned. “You got some ID?”
The bum shook his head and spat. “Stinking pig,” he said. “You all should die.”
Something coiled in Kane’s gut that was neither fear nor rage. It was more like the disembodied feeling he used to get heading out on patrol, when sometimes trash was just trash and sometimes it was a bomb, and you never knew which card fate would deal that day.
“You’ve got to move along,” he said.
The man turned away and began to gather his belongings, muttering words to the effect that Kane was a son of a bitch and a mother-effing pig.
Kane let it slide.
He backed away a few steps and took his eyes off the guy to make a quick scan. A few people were standing nearby, busy with their phones or their friends. But most had seen the bum and moved farther down the platform. He swept his gaze along the far side of the tracks and stiffened. Standing directly across the tracks was a woman in black slacks and a plain white blouse. Her face was unmade, her haircut simple, her expression flat.
Her eyes met his.
What the hell was she doing here?
Certainty rang through his mind like the lid closing on a coffin. They knew. Somehow, they knew.
Which meant he was a dead man. Still breathing for the moment. But dead, for all that.
“Asshole,” the vagrant muttered, still rattling through his things. A pot clanged on the cement. “Where’m I supposed to go?”
“Hey, it’s okay,” Kane said to the vagrant, not breaking his gaze on the woman. “I’ll give you directions to a shelter.”