The Killing Game by J. A. Kerley

left with the two first responders, the youngster named Mailey and his hulking partner, Horse Austin. Austin was in his fifties, old school, a too-large percentage of his collars visiting the emergency room for stitches, Austin claiming resisting arrest as the reason. Austin also loved citing people. If a kid got hit by a car and his mother ran into the street to help, Austin would cite the mother for jaywalking. Harry and I didn’t much care for Austin, nor him for us.
    “What was happening when you got here, Horse?” I asked.
    Austin stifled a yawn, showing huge yellow teeth that could have crowded Secretariat’s jaw. He scratched one of the big canines with a fingernail, flicked something away, and turned to me like an afterthought. “A neighbor came sneaking round the back looking for the mother and saw the kid. Lucky for the vic, since he was all alone here.”
    “Where’s Mama?”
    “At any one of a dozen bars. Or holed up in a crack house. You know the type, Ryder, all the motherly instincts of a clam. Squirt ’em out, collect the welfare.”
    I ignored his jibes, figuring Austin would be retired in two or three years, sitting in his living room watch-ing football and polishing his cirrhosis. I’d seen him sneaking nips from a bagged bottle he kept in his cruiser kit.
    “Why was the kid in the wheelchair?” I asked.
    Austin put his hands in the small of his back, stretched, broke wind. “Hell if I know.”
    “You didn’t think to ask, like maybe it could have been important to the medics?”
    “The neighbor wasn’t making much sense, Ryder, jabbering like a magpie. She wouldn’t know nothing.”
    I looked to Mailey. “You didn’t ask why the vic was in the chair either, Mailey?”
    He shot a glance at Austin, like a kid hoping Daddy would save him. “Don’t look at Horse,” I growled to Mailey. “Look at me. Why was he in the chair?”
    “Didn’t think to ask.”
    “Next time get your head out of your ass. You see a vic has a medical condition, you ask what it is. You got me?”
    Austin was in my face. “Get the fuck away from my partner, Ryder. Save your righteous bullshit for someone who cares.”
    “Detective Ryder?” called a voice from behind me.
    I saw Jim O’Reilly walking up, beside him a rope-skinny middle-aged black woman in a pink housedress. O’Reilly was twenty-eight, one half of what the department called the O Team. “Here’s the woman who found the boy,” O’Reilly said. He headed to the rear of the lot.
    The woman glared at Austin. “That big cop treat me like dirt, tell me to get outta the way.”
    “What brought you back here, ma’am?” I asked.
    “The boy’s mama is bad news, so I come to check a few times a day, make sure Tommy got food in his belly. Tommy a good boy, smart in school. Ain’t no one want to hurt him.”
    “Why is Tommy in a wheelchair?”
    “He got some disease where his body eat on his body. An audamune problem, something like that.”
    “Auto-immune?”
    She nodded. “That’s it.”
    I looked over Austin and Mailey, Austin jutting his equine jaw, Mailey studying the dirt at his feet.
    “How hard was that?” I said.
    I called the info to the hospital as O’Reilly came up from the backyard, a tumble of scraggly bushes. “There’s an alley past the brush,” he pointed. “One-way east to west. The fence is trampled to the ground.”
    I pushed through the brush, finding the windowless sides of warehouses and defunct factories, a tunnel of brick. “All the perp had to do was stop in the alley. Attack and retreat. Get every available uniform out on the street, O’Reilly, door to door, wino to wino. Find out if anyone saw a car back here, or anything suspicious.”
    “On it.” He ran off.
    “Detective Ryder!”
    I turned and a hundred feet distant saw Ron O’Herlihy, the other half of the O Team, waving from the alley’s intersection with the street. I ran his way, finding a horizontal yellow strip strung between a fence and