The main force arrived two minutes after Locke disappeared into the dark.
George was still standing in the same spot when the first unit came around the corner, then three more behind it, then a SWAT van that pulled up with the particular energy of people who had been scrambling for twenty minutes and had finally arrived at a scene that was already over.
He looked lonely. He knew it.
A Crown Victoria pulled up and Detective Kate Beckett got out, her shield clipped at her hip, taking in the scene with the practiced economy of someone who catalogued crime scenes for a living. She came from the 12th, which was close enough to have caught the call when the chase moved into her precinct's territory.
She walked over to George.
"George."
"Kate."
Her gaze moved past him to the body covered by an officer's jacket - Fox, shot once in the chest, once in the palm, once in the knee. Beckett crouched briefly, took in what she needed, stood back up.
"Where is he?"
"He left."
She looked at George for a moment with the expression she used when she was working out whether to ask the follow-up question. She decided not to, for now. "The blue truck?"
"Driven into the river. Search team's already out there." George paused. "Don't expect much."
Beckett looked at the crash sites, the burning car on the median, the Maserati on its side, the tire tracks, the shell casings. Two news helicopters were still orbiting at a cautious altitude. Live feeds. The Mayor was going to have a long night, and George didn't feel particularly sorry about that.
"Sin Hunter," Beckett said. It wasn't quite a question.
"Yeah."
She straightened her jacket and looked down the street, toward the direction George had been staring when she arrived. "How close did you get?"
"Close enough."
She gave him a measuring look. Then she went to talk to the first officers on scene, and George turned back to face the direction Locke had gone, and thought about the particular quality of what had just happened.
He knew.
That was the part George couldn't set aside. Sin Hunter had known Gwen's interview was tomorrow. He'd known about Helen's pastries. Those were details that weren't in any file, any report, any record, they were things that a person knew because they were in the life, sitting at the table, close enough to matter.
George had been a cop for thirty years. He knew what that meant.
He didn't know what to do with it yet.
But I will find you, he thought. Sin Hunter. I will find you.
Three miles away, in an alley off a side street in the Meatpacking District, Locke was in a borrowed blue sedan that smelled like stale cigarettes and fast food wrappers.
He'd taken it efficiently, two drug dealers who'd been occupying a dark corner with the confident carelessness of people who didn't expect to be bothered, a brief interaction, a System notification confirming the obvious and now he was parked with the tracking card active in his mind, watching the red dot pulse steadily in Brooklyn.
[Achievement Points: 2,300 / Potential Points: 4,300]
He'd run the System check on the road. The mission increments were adding up - slowly, but adding up. The tracking card had cost his last Treasure Refresh Voucher, and the card itself was burning 100 Achievement Points, but it had given him Cross's location in real time and that was worth the spend.
Cross had moved fast. Brooklyn, somewhere in a residential grid, a safe house, had to be. The Raptor had gone into the river, which meant Cross had switched vehicles at some point in the last fifteen minutes. He was organized, he was injured (the arm wound from Ch.16 wouldn't have stopped him but it wasn't nothing), and he had Wesley.
My Fate Is Mine to Command was still open. Wesley unresolved.
Locke pulled up the navigation on his phone and started driving.
The safe house was a third-floor apartment in a quiet block in Carroll Gardens, the kind of neighborhood where the buildings were old enough that nobody paid attention to the occupants, and where the parking situation was bad enough that an unfamiliar car didn't stand out. Cross had chosen well.
Locke parked around the corner, took the stairs, found the door.
Inside, he could hear two voices. One measured, one louder.
He rang the bell.
Cross had been in the middle of what he'd privately categorized as the most important conversation of his life, the one where he explained to his son, who believed Cross had murdered his mentor and was responsible for everything wrong with the last several months, that none of it was true. That Wesley's father was Cross, not Mr. X. That Sloane had been manipulating the Loom for years and Wesley had been trained as a disposable weapon for a single purpose. That there was a way out of all of this that didn't end with Wesley dead in the factory with everyone else.
It was not going smoothly.
"You're working with Peerless," Wesley said. His voice had the flat certainty of someone who had decided on a narrative and was fitting the evidence to it.
"I'm not working with anyone." Cross had been keeping his arm still, the wound wasn't deep, but moving it too much would start bleeding again. "I don't know who Peerless is."
"He was right behind you. You bumped his car."
"I bumped his car because he was between me and you."
Wesley stared at him.
Cross took a breath. He'd run through half a dozen openings for this conversation in the months he'd been circling around it, trying to find a way in that didn't sound insane or desperate. None of them had felt right. This one wasn't feeling right either.
"Wesley." He put his hands flat on the table, palms down, the way you did when you wanted someone to understand you weren't reaching for anything. "I am your father."
The doorbell rang.
They both looked at the door.
Cross was on his feet and moving before the second ring. He positioned himself to the side of the door, weapon in hand, and looked through the peephole.
He went very still.
Then, after a moment, he stepped back from the door and spoke to the ceiling in the tone of a man addressing a situation he hadn't anticipated: "Of course."
"Who is it?" Wesley asked.
Cross looked at his son. Then at the door. Then at the ceiling again.
He opened it.
Locke was standing in the hallway in a jacket, a fresh pair of sunglasses, and the expression of someone who had followed a tracking dot to a third-floor apartment in Carroll Gardens and found it entirely unsurprising that this was where it led.
"Cross Carlos," he said. "We need to talk."
Cross looked at him for a long moment, reading him, the way one professional reads another, the assessment fast and mostly invisible unless you knew what to look for.
"Come in," he said.
Wesley, from his chair, stared at the person who had just walked through the door. He looked approximately sixteen years old, which was the part that didn't make sense.
"You're Peerless?" Wesley said.
Locke glanced at him. "Guilty."
"You're-" Wesley started, then stopped. He looked at Cross. Then back at Locke. Then at Cross again.
"Yeah," Cross said, in the tone of someone who had just had their very complicated situation become more complicated. "That's about right."
Plz Drop Some Power Stones.