Read Online Death Benefits by Thomas Perry - Free Book Online

stealing women’s clothes and personal papers . . . and for Christ’s sake, stop looking over your shoulder.”
    “Sorry, I—”
    A weight collided with Walker and spun him around. His back and head hit a brick wall hard, and he felt a wave of nausea. When his eyes tried to focus again they couldn’t seem to find a reference point, because there was a face too close to his in the dark, and a forearm across his chest, a big man leaning against him so that he could barely breathe. The face was full of anger and hatred. The emotion was so unwarranted that the face was a monstrosity more frightening than the pain in his chest.
    “Don’t move, you son of a bitch. LAPD.”
    The instinctive notion that his survival might depend on his doing something melted away. His survival depended on not doing anything. He was going to jail for burglary. He tried to turn his eyes to see what was happening to Stillman, but the man gave his chest a push that felt as though it was cracking his sternum. “Don’t move!” snarled the face. Reports of people being killed struggling with the police floated on the edge of Walker’s consciousness.
    Then his ears were assaulted by a terrible sound. It was a loud, angry shout from Stillman, but the shout was almost instantly augmented by another voice, this one in pain. Both Walker and his captor turned in alarm.
    Stillman’s leg was on its way down from delivering a kick to the other policeman’s groin, and he seemed to have punched him at least twice. The injured man bent over and appeared ready to topple.
    Walker’s eyes shot back to his captor’s face in time to see that the fist was already on its way. Walker was unable to stifle the reflex to flinch. His right forearm jerked up to sweep the cop’s arm away from his chest, while his body turned and his head moved to the side to avoid the punch. The cop’s hand clutched Walker’s coat, so Walker’s sudden dodge kept the cop with him. The blow glanced off the back of Walker’s head, and Walker saw bright red and green blotches explode into his field of vision and then float to the periphery.
    Walker scrambled a few feet on the ground, then turned. Stillman had left his own opponent, and now he was advancing on Walker’s. Walker was at once terrified and amazed. He expected the cop to do what cops did, which was to pull out his gun and kill Stillman.
    Each instant that he didn’t made Walker more frightened, because it meant it was certain to happen in the next. But the cop on the ground stirred, pushing himself to his feet. Maybe he would be the one.
    Walker panicked. He had to stop him from firing. He picked up a fist-sized rock from the ground beside him and hurled it at the cop, then reached for another, sprang to his feet, and threw it at the one who had tried to arrest him.
    Nothing seemed to have the effect he had expected. The two cops ran in different directions, then disappeared into the black spaces between buildings.
    Stillman took Walker’s arm and pulled him down the alley. “No time to hang around here,” he muttered.
    Walker stumbled along with him, slowly regaining his breath and letting his heartbeat slow. He felt a swelling of anger at Stillman. “Why would you do that?” He walked a few paces, faster, then turned. “We’re going to jail.” Then he added, “We’re lucky we’re not dead.”
    “Were you under the impression that those were police officers?” Stillman asked calmly.
    Walker took in a breath to shout “Yes!” but he stopped. There was absolutely nothing about what they had done that any police officer he’d ever heard of would do. He changed his next words to “They scared the hell out of me.”
    Stillman nodded. “You knew you were guilty, so you figured, ‘Sure. Of course they’re cops. I deserve it, so they must be.’ That’s why they pulled that on us.” He looked ahead up the alley. “Now you can compare.”
    “What?”
    The squad car seemed to fill the alley like a train