Dead City - 01 by Joe McKinney

it into my gun belt. His address wasn’t far from the station.
    Downstairs, the others were sitting in the break room around a cheap plywood card table. Ken was over by the sink, watching me warily.
    When I walked into the room they all stopped talking and stiffened nervously. I probably looked a little crazy. I’m sure Octavio told them what he had seen upstairs in the shower.
    I didn’t try to change their minds. I put the gun on the table so that one of them could grab it.
    “There’s a gun for you. Una pistola . And here are the keys to your truck. Sus llaves para la troca . You’ve got fourteen bullets for the gun. I don’t know how to say bullets in Spanish. I’m sorry. Lock the door behind me when I leave. Or go somewhere else. I don’t care.”
    With that I walked away. None of them said anything to me. They just watched me walk out the door and into the night.
    Ken followed me out to the parking lot. “Officer Hudson,” he said. His voice sounded winded. “Officer Hudson, wait. Please.”
    I slowed, but kept walking.
    He caught up with me. “Officer Hudson, where are you going?”
    “I told you,” I said. “I’m going to find my family. I’m not staying here.”
    “You can’t leave us.”
    “We’ve already had this conversation,” I said. “You’re as safe here as anywhere.”
    “But the other officer? Did you—”
    “No.”
    “But I heard a shot—”
    “He did it himself.”
    “Oh.”
    I got to the truck and unlocked it. The inside looked like crap. There were empty soda cans and fast food wrappers and packs of cigarettes everywhere. It smelled like stale smoke and sweat. The dashboard was blistered and cracked from years of exposure to the south Texas sun.
    I swept all the trash off the seat and climbed in.
    “Officer,” Ken said. “I don’t want to stay here. I want to keep moving. That’s the best way to stay alive.”
    “I’m not taking you anywhere,” I said. “I’m going to pick up Carlos’s family and then my family. Nowhere else.”
    “That’s fine,” he said. “Just as long as I don’t have to get boxed in somewhere.”
    “Suit yourself,” I said, and waited with the truck in gear for him to climb in.
    He wrinkled his nose at the smell, and had to push his glasses back up.
    “This is the station commander’s truck?”
    “Yep,” I said, and peeled out of the parking lot.
    He held on to the door as we turned onto the road. “You’d think a high-ranking firefighter like a station commander could afford something better than this.”
    He was bouncing all over the seat.
    “It runs,” I said. “That’s all that counts.”
    Carlos’s address was on the near west side. It was pretty close to downtown, but still on the west side of Jewett Street, which serves as the boundary line between the West and Downtown Divisions.
    Most of the neighborhoods west of Jewett were rough, but the families there tried to keep their homes in good shape. They mowed their grass and planted trees and had contracts with termite companies.
    But the people on the east side of Jewett had given up a long time ago.
    In the old days, those streets had been the heroin capital of San Antonio.
    My district was just a couple of miles north of Carlos’s neighborhood, and I used to make calls on both sides of Jewett when the downtown guys were getting hammered with calls. I knew the area well enough, so I was able to stay away from the high-traffic areas and still make pretty good time.
    I rolled the windows down and let the breeze cool my head. Carlos’s death upset me in a way I couldn’t really understand. He and I were never really anything more than passing acquaintances, yet I felt his absence like I was missing someone I had known and cared about for years.
    I couldn’t see any lights, and I found my thoughts mirrored by the uncertain darkness surrounding me. Almost directly overhead, the clouds were backlit with moonlight and shined like wet pewter. On the horizon, the clouds