The Face

open front passenger’s door, but that was a risk worth taking. An ace-kool wheelman specialized in flight, not fight, and although the guy would be packing heat for use in a cornered-rat situation, he wouldn’t likely draw down on anyone when he had an open street, gas in the tank, and ignition.
        Splashing along the puddled pavement, Hazard reached his sedan. Before he could get around that parked vehicle, into the street, the spinning tires of the getaway car bit blacktop and bolted forward with a bark. Momentum slammed shut the passenger’s door.
        He hadn’t gotten a look at the driver.
        The figure behind the wheel had been little more than a shadow. Hunched, distorted, somehow… wrong.
        To Hazard’s surprise, the ragged fingernails of superstition scratched at the inner hollows of his bones, where usually it lay buried, quiet, forgotten. But he didn’t know what had stirred his fear or why a sense of the uncanny suddenly possessed him.
        As the Mercedes roared away, Hazard didn’t squeeze off a few shots at it, as a movie cop would have done. This was a peaceful residential neighborhood in which people watching reruns of Seinfeld and other people cleaning vegetables for dinner had every right not to expect to be shot dead over their TV remotes and their cutting boards by the stray rounds of a reckless detective.
        [155] He ran after the car, however, because he couldn’t get a clear take on the license number. Exhaust vapors, street spray, falling rain, and the gloom of day’s end conspired to shroud the rear plate.
        He persisted, anyway, glad that he regularly used a treadmill. Although the Mercedes soon pulled away from him, a couple street-lamps and a clearing crosswind revealed the plate number in pieces.
        Most likely the car had been stolen. The driver would dump it. Nevertheless, having the number was better than not having it.
        Giving up the chase, Hazard headed back to the front lawn at the apartment house. He hoped that he’d shot the shooter dead instead of merely wounding him.
        Minutes from now, an Officer Involved Shooting team would be on the scene. Depending on the personal philosophies of team members, they would either vigorously build a defense of Hazard’s actions and strive to exonerate him without any genuine search for the truth, which was fine by him, or they would seek the tiniest of meaningless inconsistencies and screw him to a cross of bogus evidence, haul him into the court of public opinion, and encourage the media to build a fire at his feet and give him the Saint Joan treatment.
        The third possibility was that the OIS team might arrive without preconceptions, might examine the facts analytically, and might come to a dispassionate conclusion based on logic and reason, which would be jake with Hazard because he’d done nothing wrong.
        Of course, he’d never heard of such a thing actually occurring, and he considered it far less likely than being eyewitness to eight flying reindeer and an elf-piloted sleigh three nights hence.
        If the shooter was alive, he might assert that Hazard had killed Reynerd and then tried to frame him for it. Or that he’d been in the neighborhood, collecting donations to Toys for Tots, when he’d been caught in a cross fire, giving the real shooter a chance to escape.
        Whatever he claimed, cop haters and aggressively brainless citizens would believe him.
        More important, the shooter would find an attorney to file suit [156] against the city, eager to feed at the public trough. A settlement would be reached, regardless of the merits of the case, and Hazard would probably be sacrificed as part of the package. Politicians were no more protective of good law-enforcement officers than they were of the young interns whom they regularly abused and sometimes killed.
        The shooter posed far less of a problem dead than alive.
        Hazard could have moseyed back to the scene, giving the perp a chance to bleed out another critical pint, but he ran.
        The killer lay where he’d fallen, face planted in the wet grass. A snail had ascended the back of his neck.
        People were at windows, looking down, expressions blank, like dead sentinels at the gates of Hell. Hazard expected to see Reynerd at one of the panes, black-and-white, too glamorous for his time.
        He turned the shooter faceup. Somebody’s son, somebody’s homey, in his