Thrill of the Chase by Danny Coleiro

from the Candlewick Stories

It started, as most storms do, with a single raindrop. By one o’ clock in the afternoon, it had turned into a downpour. And by five, it had developed into a meteorological onslaught of biblical proportion, battering the city of Candlewick with a vengeance that made Noah’s Ark look like the work of a hysterical paranoid schizophrenic. A ceiling of impenetrable black cloud had turned day into night, and the rain would only be called ‘rain’ by the same kind of person who would refer to World War 2 as ‘a spot of bother’. The wind shrieked through the city like a tortured demon, dragging anything that got caught in its wake behind it, and thunder crashed in the sky with all the enthusiasm of a deaf gorilla with a new set of hi-hat cymbals.

Standing on the corner of Kaffeeklatsch Street and McDougal Avenue in the deluge, Detective Inspector Gill Winchime of the CCPD suddenly realized that he was not half as pissed off as he somehow felt he had every right to be. This fact in itself would normally have pissed him off even further, launching him into a ferocious fanfaronade of four-lettered words mainly beginning with letters such as F, C and S, accompanied with a wild pacing up and down from one end to the other of whichever area he was currently occupying and a succession of highly emphatic hand gestures usually exclusive to those of a Mediterranean persuasion. DI Winchime was, by nature, one of those people who seem to be permanently hacked off. The kind of person who, upon being born, hits the doctor back.

And yet, as he watched the ambulance fight its way through the flooded street towards what was left of Balconi’s car, he absent-mindedly patted the pockets of his raincoat until he found a crumpled packet of Camels, extracted a cigarette, and lit it.

Despite the wind, the lighter flame barely flickered. Despite the rain, the cigarette remained dry.

“What tha hell jus’ happened?”

Winchime took a long drag of the cigarette and threw a sidelong glance at his companion. Exhaling slowly, he replied quietly,

“I think we kind of happened to each other”.

Balconi frowned and raised a huge tattooed hand to slowly rub his huge, bald tattooed head as he tried to digest this information. Since Balconi owned the kind of brain that required a depth charge in order to get his solitary neuron to spark, this took a while. Finally, he lowered his huge tattooed arm, looked down at Winchime, and said,

“Huh?”

Winchime ignored him. He watched impassively as the ambulance drew to a halt a few metres from the bright red Fiat Panda. A stream of petrol was trickling steadily out of the bottom before mixing with the rainwater into a shadow of a rainbow. Having, mere minutes earlier, wrapped itself around a deceptively sturdy lamppost, the car seemed to writhe and distort in a purple dance as the revolving beacon atop the ambulance swept over it, making it look somehow ethereal and ghost-like. Winchime knew that this was not the case – he had been standing between the bloody thing and the lamppost when it had hit. And it had hurt like buggery. For a few eternal seconds, anyway.

He flicked away the cigarette, watching it as it neatly faded slowly into thin air before hitting the ground, and looked up at Balconi.

“What kind of moron tries to get away in a Fiat Panda?” he muttered.

Balconi was close to seven feet tall and was built like a brick wall, or would have been, provided that the builder had thrown in a sackful of muscle while in the throes of artistic rebellion and a cocaine high. He was also covered in garishly-coloured tattoos from head to foot - a teenage statement which had grown with him until it had become an obsession. What was odd about these tattoos, however, was that none of them were pictures. Instead, Balconi had opted to label each part of his colossal body accordingly. Hence, the word ‘arse’ was tattooed on his buttocks, and the word ‘left elbow’ was tattooed on his left elbow, presumably so that he wouldn’t confuse the two. And so on. Naked, Balconi looked like a walking, talking anatomical chart, neatly divided into sections by black dotted lines. Perhaps appropriately, the word ‘brain’ was nowhere to be found.

Needless to say, looking the way he did, Balconi was not used to being called a moron. Scowling, he prodded Winchime on the shoulder with a stubby finger, upon which the word ‘index’ had been scarred in green ink.

“I said ‘huh?’”

Winchime noticed, with a lazy feeling of detachment, that Balconi appeared to be slightly transparent. He could see the rain hitting the pavement behind him.

“Don’t you remember anything?” he asked, clamping another cigarette between his lips. He shook the packet, and noticed, with a mild feeling of annoyance, that there were only six left. He tried to imagine an eternity of wandering the earth without a cigarette, and failed. He sighed resignedly, and lit up.

“Course I do”, frowned Balconi, his forehead so creased in concentration that the tattoo there read ‘fred’. “I wuz lying low. Went inta hiding after tha Dellestate job. Waiting for tha heat ta die down. Had bin holed up in Anguila Frito fra coupla mumfs…”

“Mumfs?”

“Yeah. October an’ November. Anyways, figured I’d got away wiv it. Then, tonight, your lot suddenly come kickin’ fru tha door, all guns an’ flashlights…” He paused for a second as a new idea popped into his head. He glared at Winchime. “How’d ya find me, anyways?”

“Destiny”.

Balconi gave him a menacing look.

“Are ya callin’ me stoopid?” he growled.

Winchime paused, cigarette frozen halfway in its arc towards his lips as he replayed the conversation so far, translating into Balconi-thugspeak as he went. Then he groaned.

“Destiny. Not density”.

Balconi blinked as whatever passed for a brain in his skull sorted out the consonant clusters.

“Oh”, he said, eventually. Then he sneered, “I don’ believe in destiny”.

“No… I mean your girlfriend Destiny. She ratted you out”.

“Oh”, said Balconi, then, as an afterthought, added, “tha bitch”.

Winchime’s eyes wandered idly over to the ambulance, where a trio of paramedics had leapt out of the back and were now taking in the scene with the wagging of heads which indicated that the scene they were taking in was of the kind normally described using words such as ‘hopeless’ and ‘holy shit’. He watched as one of them wriggled his torso into the driver’s seat and reached over what had once been Balconi.

Balconi shrugged and continued.

“Anyways, I snuck out the back. Got into tha car and drove outta there as fast as I could. Couldn’ see shit. But neitha could they. Fort I wuz getting’ away”.

Winchime nodded. He wasn’t really listening – he knew the story, and his question had been purely rhetorical. Rather than waste his entire afterlife attempting to explain to Balconi what ‘rhetorical’ meant, he let him go on.

“Next fing I know, you jump out inta tha middle of tha road, pointin’ a gun, yellin’ for me ta stop…”

“I’ve got a pulse!” yelled the paramedic in the car over the roar of the rain. “This one’s still alive!”

Winchime glanced up at Balconi. The guy was fading fast, was barely an outline covered in scribble. Then he looked down at his own hand. Damn. Solid. He obviously belonged on this side of the veil.

“Hey!” Balconi said suddenly, stabbing an accusatory finger in the general direction of Winchime’s face as the memory returned, “you shot me!”

“You didn’t stop”.

“But you shot me!”

“And you rammed me with your car”, Winchime snapped back. “So I guess we’re even”.

But he knew that they weren’t even. As the paramedics splashed their way back to the ambulance with a renewed sense of urgency, undoubtedly in order to retrieve the hydraulic rescue tool known, rather over-dramatically, as the Jaws of Life, Winchime thought bitterly - No Jaws of Life for me. They’ll have to clean up what’s left of me in that mess with a sponge.

Life just wasn’t fair.

Death just wasn’t fair.

He had no idea what he was going to do next. He was going to miss the job. He was going to miss being… being him. It had all come to an end in one swift, bone-crunching crash. And he wasn’t ready for it.

In his twenty-three year career as a law enforcer, Winchime had come up against all kind of criminal – masterminds and maniacs, madmen and murderers, terrorists and traveling salesmen, fanatics, fiends and freaks, – and he had taken them all down, every single one of them, one at a time, using his infamous anger as the fuel which drove him forward. He was famous for it. Now, his anger had deserted him. And he was going to be defeated by… the one who was going to get away… was this absolute pillock with the word ‘beard’ tattooed on his naked chin.

And he only had six fucking cigarettes left.

Balconi had all but disappeared by now. Winchime watched as the soaked paramedics lugged a large Y-shaped contraption out of the back of the ambulance, and sighed.

No doubt, Balconi would recover in hospital and then be whisked off to prison, where he belonged. But sometimes, thought Winchime morosely, sometimes the chase was far more important than the eventual arrest. The thrill of the chase had always made him feel so…

… it had made him feel so alive.

And, suddenly, he grinned.

“Here” he said, holding out his hand. “Hold this a second, would you?”

Balconi reached out and took the cigarette, a puzzled look on his face. Or, at least, a more puzzled look than usual.

“Wh…” he started, and abruptly vanished.

“…at f…” Winchime heard him continue as he regained painful consciousness in the driver’s seat of his mangled Panda.

Just for a sliver of a second, the ghost of a cigarette appeared in his hand.

Just a sliver of a second, but it was long enough. The tip of the cigarette seemed to glow with otherworldly brightness as the supernatural and the natural collided. As it found petrol to play with.

Time froze for a heartbeat.

Then, there was a noise that sounded a little like ‘whumph’ would sound if it had chronic laryngitis. Only much louder. The paramedics scattered as bits of Fiat Panda and Balconi rained down on them.

“… or?” Balconi finished, reappearing at Winchime’s side.

“Welcome back”, said Winchime, plucking the remains of his cigarette from Balconi’s unresisting fingers. “I’ll take that. These things’ll kill you, you know”.

He took a deep drag, and blew a lungful of smoke into Balconi’s face.

“By the way”, he added conversationally, “you’re under arrest”.

Balconi stared at him incredulously for the space of a second, then turned on his heels and galloped off into the darkness.

Winchime watched him go. Carefully, he finished the cigarette and tossed it over his shoulder, where it vanished in mid-air. Then, with a self-satisfied smile on his face and with adrenaline coursing through his ghostly veins, he did what he did best.

Breaking into a leisurely trot, he chased after him.

He had, after all, all the time in the world.