The Last Rite

Chapter Thirteen: Heads We're Dancing

Chapter Thirteen: Heads We're Dancing

There is nothing worse, thought John Tamblyn, than being humiliated on top of being taken advantage of. The key, wrapped in duct tape to muffle it against the jug, was in his free hand. He couldn’t, even in the midst of his anger and unshaven misery, help but to appreciate Hunt’s joke at his expense.

He had been sitting probably five minutes like this, the key in his palm, the glass of water which had revealed it soaking into the carpet at his feet, considering his next move, now that he was free. Hunt had taken the precaution of dismantling the phone, another delay for Tamblyn. He was in no condition to immediately walk out onto the street jauntily, pick up the phone in the nearest public booth, and call headquarters with a cheery, “I say, Q, got anything special for me? There’s a maniac on the loose who threatens the safety of the free world.”

The image of himself as James Bond almost did him in, as a preemptive burst of bitter laughter cramped him up on the bed. “Only hurts more when I laugh,” he told the empty glass by his feet. “Christ. I’ll kill him.”

He washed at the sink and dressed slowly, and very painfully. His buttocks were especially sore, and his back was a mass of confused muscle, while his head was groggy and slow with the drugs. He was glad Hunt wasn’t quite up to form and had left him his clothing.

There was a flash in his imagination of himself, wrapped only in the scrawny, ragged towel hanging over the radiator in the bathroom, dragged into his own police station for public indecency. “I was just trying to use the phone. . .” and his reputation would never be quite the same again.

There was more than even the usual silence and distance around him when he stalked in the door of police headquarters this time. A bank clock had told him two days had passed, but surely that wasn’t enough time to give him up for dead?

He growled at a small woman with a refreshment tray and she cringed. That bit of frustration-release, he thought, didn’t necessarily help enliven his appearance, as he could tell by the reaction his entrance caused – everyone was looking at him like he was a ghost. Carla wasn’t at her desk, and the strange man looked up blankly.

“Morritz –” Tamblyn was bellowing even before he could see the name on the door. “Morritz!”

He burst in on his superior in the middle of a meeting with a group of other senior officers. For once, the detective wasn’t sure what to say first. In the end, a split second before the shouting began, he decided to go with, “What the hell is going on here? And where’s Szaba?”

Then everyone was yelling at once, and the detective found himself staggering to a chair aided by one of his superiors. His energy was all used up. A cup of coffee was pressing into his hands and he drank slowly, balancing the mug between both palms and feeling how little strength there was in the fingers.

Morritz cleared the room except for Tamblyn and began the explanation. “Carla Szaba is on disciplinary leave. I told her that there was obviously more to the situation than any of us could have known, but she did let him in, and she felt so bad we thought it was a good idea to let her take a couple of days off. I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t end up on her permanent record.”

Weakly, the detective shook his head. “What am I missing here?”

“The Hunter. He came here, trashed your office. We don’t know what he got because we don’t know what you had in there. And with you disappearing at the same time, we’ve had people out combing the ditches.”

“There aren’t any ditches in downtown Toronto.” The detective smirked, every line on his face exhausted. Hunt had his book. That was a certainty. The bastard, the insufferable bastard. But he betrayed nothing of his inner turmoil to Morritz. “Alleys, did you check alleys?”