A knock came at the door, and I spun around so fast that I almost toppled over. I looked from the door, to the fire escape, then back to the door again for a couple of seconds, before taking a step in the direction of the fire escape.
“Mr. Crewe? Police, open up!”
I shook my head to try and clear it, but only succeeded in sparking a headache that cluttered my thoughts even more. After creeping up to the door, I looked through the peephole, and saw two men in police uniform standing on the other side.
“Oh fuck.”
“Mr. Crewe? Is that you?”
I bolted for the window to the fire escape and heard a solid thump on the door behind me. The second strike splintered the door frame, and I heard footsteps sprinting behind me.
A hand reached through the window, fingers scrabbled at my clothes, and I barely managed to get away, racing down the metal stairs.
“Stop! Don’t move! Police! Fuck! Get down there!”
I didn’t have to look back to know that at least one of them was hot on my trail. Their footsteps clanged on the metal almost as loudly as mine did.
Fiery air burned in my throat, already sensitive from the stomach acid, and I had no fucking idea how I was keeping my balance, let alone achieving such speed down the steps. Yet, however fast I was going, the police officer stayed right behind me, occasionally telling me to “halt” but mostly saving his breath for the chase.
My mind was whirling with complete gibberish, panicked and not making any sense at all. The only thing I could do was run, but after a while it felt less like reality and more like a nightmare, as if the fire escape was no escape at all, it just went on forever.
I was on the verge of losing my mind and simply jumping off the side, when I came to a spring-loaded ladder. I jumped on it and it slid down until the bottom rung was only about eight feet off the ground.
I jumped off the bottom rung, and dropped to the ground. My feet couldn’t have made contact with the concrete for more than a split second before I was hit from behind in a flying tackle that set off an explosion of pain in my back.
Painful pins and needles tingled in my fingers until my knees hit the ground, followed shortly after by my chin, a crushing weight on top of me. I spun around, wincing at the protests from my back, to see that it was the other cop on top of me.
“Stop resisting!”
I launched as solid a punch as I could from my position, catching him in the chin, but without enough power to dislodge him. He retaliated with a punch of his own, and I heard my nose crunch. I saw stars when the back of my head bounced off the concrete.
“Stop resisting!”
The other police officer landed, and between the two of them they managed to flip me back over, get control of my arms and cuff them behind my back, before hauling me to my feet.
“Fuckin’ hell! We came here because we had some bad news,” one of them said, pushing me along the alley towards the front of the building. “Your mother-”
“I saw the fuckin’ news.”
“Yeah, well… once you identify the body, we’re gonna have a big talk. You got something to hide, Mr. Crewe?”
I hung my head and watched the blood dripping from my nose, landing on my shirt. My extremities still felt numb except for a flare of pain in my back that flashed out to my fingertips every few steps.
This was completely fucked. The Acardis would be waiting once the police released me. I’d be in the chains Giovanni had threatened me with. I’d never see Sarina again. My mom was dead and I’d never see Sarina again.
This was all happening so fast that my head was spinning. One cop pressed down on my head as he bundled me into the back of the cruiser.
I looked dazedly out the windows as my stomach cramped again.
The cops got in the car, and the passenger cop turned to glance at me as the two of them pulled at their seatbelts. Before either of them could secure themselves, the sound of an engine from our left came loud and clear, and I stared into its headlights with less than a second to prepare for impact.
The noise of breaking glass and crunching metal was all-consuming. The cop car flipped over on its side at impact, and the three of us bounced around in there like the balls in a lottery.
With my hands cuffed behind my back, I had no chance to brace myself, and it was all happening so fast that I might not have had any chance anyway. The car teetered on its side for a second, then finally lurched over on to its roof.
It was all I could do to groan when I heard doors opening and footsteps approaching rapidly. A man wearing a balaclava opened the front passenger door, looked in, pointed a gun at the cop’s head and shot him five times at point blank range with no hesitation.
Some fucking huge guy, also in a balaclava, reached in the driver’s side door and dragged the other cop out, and I lost sight of him for a second. The next thing I knew, the cop came down on the sidewalk head-first so hard that I could hear the crunch, and he went completely limp.