Page 90 of Lion & Lamb

Cooper spun around to find the tipsy student was talking abouthim.

“You don’t belong here!” the doughy-faced kid in John Lennon glasses shouted. “Get off our campus, pig!”

“Did you see a slender man with a gun run through here?” Cooper asked him and his friends. But they either didn’t hear him or didn’t care to answer. They closed ranks around Cooper, feeling emboldened by the lager or cider or shots in their systems.

“Defund the police!”

“‘I can’t breathe!’”

“Blue lives suck!”

Cooper tried to ignore them as he looked around for any trace of the Quiet One. If the shooter was smart—and clearly he was—he would have slowed down and blended into the crowd. But Cooper would recognize him. Not that he had a description, but he’d spent the past twenty minutes watching the shootermove. He was pretty sure he could identify him by body language.

The students, however, were determined to give him as much grief as possible. They blocked his attempts to look around them and continued shouting slogans at him.

“All cops are bastards!”

“Defund the po-po!”

“I don’t believe this,” Cooper said. “You’ve got a problem with me, but you guys are cool with a professional killer roaming the campus?”

The Quiet One—if indeed that’s who Cooper had been chasing—was nowhere in sight. Cooper had lost him. He holstered his Browning and willed himself to take slow, steady breaths.

A young woman with blue hair practically spat in his face. “When’s the last time you murdered someone,pig?”

“Ask me again in a couple of days,” Cooper replied.

Chapter96

COOPER LAMBtook the long way home.

Not because he wanted to. He would have loved nothing more than to crash for a few hours and allow his stressed body to recharge. But that might be a fatal mistake. The shooter had known exactly where to find Cooper tonight, so he most certainly knew where Cooper lived. Cooper could be stumbling right into an ambush.

Okay, part of him didn’t care—an early death would let him catch up on his sleep. But Cooper needed to see this case through to the end. And, if nothing else, get a little payback after that guy had tried to remodel Cooper’s face with a bullet.

The long way home meant a meandering route up Thirty-Fourth Street to the Philadelphia Zoo (Hello, lions, I’ll say hi to Veena for you), then across the Girard Avenue Bridge and past Girard College, the nearly two-hundred-year-old boarding school originally opened for fatherless boys. This reminded him of Archie Hughes Jr. Strange to think that in another era, he might have ended up here.

From there, he took Corinthian Street down to his own neighborhood, skirting along the east side of the Eastern State Penitentiary. Its guests had included Al Capone and Willie Sutton; today, the former prison catered to history buffs and haunted-building freaks. Cooper liked the place because the Dead Milkmen shot the video for “Punk Rock Girl” inside its walls.

On Green Street, he saw no obvious signs that anyone was watching his brownstone. Still, Cooper hopped a fence and made his way to his backyard—what Veena had dismissed as a glorified alley. Okay, maybe thiswasan alley. The place felt extra-claustrophobic now that he was steeling himself for a possible attack.

Cooper checked all possible entry points in the back of his brownstone, looking for anything out of place. Everything seemed fine except for one detail.

No excited Lupe noises.

Lupe always greeted him eagerly when he arrived home. In fact, whenever Cooper entered through the back, he always saw Lupe’s excited face looking down at him from the bedroom windows.

He wasn’t there now.

Cooper doubled back and made his way around to the front of his building. He slid his key into the lock with surgical-level care and precision to avoid making any noise. He kept his front door well oiled with WD-40 specifically for moments like these. Stealth was everything; some old army habits died hard.

The front door opened into a foyer and long hallway. His Browning was empty, but his possible attackers didn’t know that. If it came to it, he could use it as a distraction while planning his next move.

But if they’d hurt Lupe, there would be no planning needed. Cooper would punish them. Punish thempermanently.

Cooper moved down the length of his hallway, taking care not to step on the floorboards that creaked.

Gun in hand, he slowly opened his bedroom door to find…

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