Chapter 25

Harper was standing by "Dilly" Dalrymple, an impossibly fit looking young man dressed all in black. He had enough crap hanging off of his body that it would fill a wheelbarrow. Harper didn't say anything, though. Dilly and his team were good at what they did, and right now Harper was just so much excess baggage. Jim heard Dilly's earpiece crackle and saw the man say something into the microphone clipped to his sleeve. He turned to Harper.

"We're ready," he said simply.

"Let's do it," said Harper, feeling foolish. Dilly was calling the shots here. He was only being polite by telling Harper they were ready to go.

Dilly spoke to his wrist again. Nothing happened at first, that Jim could see, except that Dilly changed positions. Then there was a thump of the ram hitting the door of the building, and suddenly the air was rent by screams and shouts as the entry team utilized a confusion tactic of screaming almost incomprehensible orders to the startled occupants of the building. Dilly cocked his head, obviously listening, and stepped forward. He apparently assumed Harper would follow him.

Harper thought it was over, because Dilly just walked straight for the smashed front door. The black-clad team commander walked forward and then faded to one side, as if he'd planned to do that. Jim was suddenly faced with the figure of a man hurtling toward him, his eyes wide with fear. Dilly simply stuck his foot out and the fugitive sprawled into Harper's body. Instinct made Jim spin, while he grabbed the man to control the impact by letting his inertia keep moving him forward and down.

"FUCK, MAN!" grunted the crackhead as Harper came down on his back, wrenching one wrist behind him. "I didn't DO nuthin'!"

Another officer was suddenly there, dressed in black like Dilly.

"Sorry," he said softly, as he took over and finished cuffing the man on the ground. "Let one get by me."

"Sloppy!" barked Dilly and went in the house.

Harper followed him in, to see chaos in action. People were screaming, some of them still struggling as black-clad men tried to restrain them. Dilly's right foot lashed out and connected with a man's head. The subject dropped, limp, and the entry specialist who had been struggling with him cuffed his wrists.

Dilly looked around and said, "Over there," pointing.

Jimmy Four Fingers was sitting on the stained floor - his arms raised straight up in the air, his glass crack pipe still gripped in one hand - staring at the business end of the rifle pointed at his face. It was only two inches away from his nose, and Jimmy was cross-eyed as he stared at the muzzle.

"We gotta move 'em out!" barked Dilly's second in command. "They're fucking cooking in the kitchen!"

There was no gentleness to the evacuation of the crackhouse. These men specialized in taking down places like this and they knew that breathing the air in a house where crack was being cooked could fuck you up for life. Their intelligence hadn't turned up any information that this place was anything other than an abandoned building, where they'd find fifteen or twenty wretches inhaling the fumes of burning crack cocaine. Cooking meant volatile chemicals, and it wasn't at all unusual for a crack kitchen to blow up spectacularly, as some addict's addled brain caused him ... or her ... to do something stupid.

Once the subjects were huddled in the street near the paddy wagon that had driven up while Harper was inside, things calmed down a little. A designated member of the entry team had stayed inside to deactivate potential sources of ignition, and four others had finished clearing the building before running out.

"You want any of the others?" asked Dilly.

"Just Jimmy," said Harper.

"He's yours," said the lieutenant. "We'll have to hang around until a decon team gets here. Thanks. It was fun."

Harper thought it was quite possibly crazy that someone had thanked him for arranging for them to risk their lives by assaulting a building, in which any number of armed and desperate criminals might be. He'd seen the team member whose job it was to collect evidence picking up handguns off the floor and dropping them into evidence bags. He'd picked up three in the few seconds Jim had watched him. He was amazed at how smoothly everything had gone ... how effortlessly the entry team had made it look. All those guns and not a shot fired.

Harper went to Jimmy and told him to stand up.

"I was just there to deliver a message!" croaked the man.

"You can deliver it to me," said Harper, leading him away.

Lulu looked over her shoulder at Kris and pursed her lips in a silent kiss. He was no longer amazed at how turned on that made him feel. Then she walked around the end of one of the stacks in the library, still looking at books. Ambrose was in the art section, as opposed to the children's section. He was sitting on the floor, with a large coffee table type book open in his lap and was looking at pictures of surrealist paintings.

Kris had been awestruck when they first entered the library. He'd expected something small, maybe only one or two rooms, in a town the size of Pembroke. Apparently the long winters caused people to really cherish their library, though, because it was a two story structure that had to have forty or fifty thousand books in it.

Kris walked along, looking at author names, wishing that something would jump out at him. He didn't even know if he'd actually published anything and, of course, didn't know what section to look for it in, even if one of his books was there. He turned the corner, more or less following Lulu. She was halfway down the aisle. She looked over at him, scanned the area around them, then raised her shirt. The words "I WAS RAISED ON THE STREET" were replaced by her bare breasts. She giggled and pulled the shirt back down, looking behind her again.

"That's not what they do on Sesame Street," whispered Kris. "Not on any episode I ever saw."

"Libraries make me horny," said Lulu, running her hand down and between her legs.

"Let's go home then," suggested Kris.

"I haven't found what I'm looking for," she said.

"What ARE you looking for?"

"I'll know when I see it," she said. "Come stand behind me."

He wondered what she was up to, but did as she asked. She pressed her butt back against the front of his pants and bent over to look at a lower shelf. The Sesame Street shirt fell forward and he knew that, if he bent over too, he could look up it and see her hanging breasts. He moved back and brought his right hand down on the tight fabric covering her butt. The sound was unbelievably loud to Kris.

"HEY!" she yelped, standing up.

She looked both ways and shot him a murderous look.

"You're acting like a slut," he whispered.

"So?" Her face didn't soften. "Maybe I AM a slut ... for you." Her whisper was strident in the calm of the building. "Maybe I WAS a slut for you! You better watch it, mister. Maybe I should STOP being a slut for you!"

"Awww, don't be like that," he said, unable to keep a smile off his lips. He loved it when she got all cocky like this. "It's just that we're in a library. What would someone think if they saw us messing around?"

"We're NOT messing around," she hissed. "I was GOING to let you mess around ... but not anymore. Go find a book!"

"OK, OK. Don't get your panties in a wad," he said, backing up. For the first time he thought she might actually be angry.

"I'm not wearing panties," she said, sticking her tongue out at him.

He went to another row and wandered along. A few minutes later he heard a hiss from above him and looked up to see Lulu on the second floor, crooking her finger at him. He found his way upstairs and saw her at the end of a row that let her look down on the central hall of the building. As he walked toward her, she went down the row toward the wall. He turned the corner, but she'd vanished. He went to the end of the row and looked both ways, still unable to see her.

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For Want of a Memory

Lubrican

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