Watch Dogs Read Free

office was less than a quarter mile away.
    He took a right, drove down a boulevard for a couple minutes, and there it was,
      CFR: Chicago’s Fast Responders: Ward Office 6.
    He parked out behind the sprawling one-story cement block building, and went in. “Not taking any more applications today,” said the ginger-haired, freckle-faced man behind the counter. The man was poking at a smartphone as he spoke.
    “Applications?”
    The clerk glanced up at him. “You aren’t here for the job?”
    “No. Um—a friend of mine was picked up today by CFR. Trouble is—there’s some, uh, miscommunication about what hospital he was taken to.”
    The guy sighed and rolled his eyes. “Not my responsibility.”
    Wolfe fished a twenty dollar bill from his pants’ pocket, folded the bill and tapped it on the counter. “Just take a minute.”
    The twenty vanished. “Whatever. Where was this?”
     He told the counter clerk the street corner and gave Pearce’s name—though that might not be the name found on Aiden Pearce, who probably had as many I.D.s as he needed.
    The clerk peered into a computer monitor. “Nope. Nobody picked up on the waterfront at all today. Nobody on that corner, nobody on that street. Mostly we’ve had guys picking up gunshot vics over at Washington Park. As usual.”
    “Nobody by that name anywhere?”
    “Nope.”
    Wolfe kept asking questions and kept getting nope, nope, nope and no. CFR denied ever picking up anyone on that corner, at that time or any other time today.
    “And we got no employees named Collingswood. Not one.”
    “And the ambulance number? One-oh-three?”
    “Not in use today. Being serviced.”
    “Serviced. Right.”
    Wolfe turned and walked silently out.
    Aiden Pearce had been shot. Then he had disappeared, as if he had been taken away by a ghostly ambulance, and spirited to a ghostly hospital.
    Either that, or those guys had been with the assassin...and Pearce was dead. So maybe he was a real ghost, now, instead of the ghostlike vigilante he’d been. A real ghost——for good.
    Wolfe decided he wouldn’t believe that till there was proof.
    He walked out to the corner of the building, preparing to go back and borrow the illegally borrowed car one more time before he abandoned it...
    And that’s when the dark Crown Victoria pulled up in front of him. Wolfe knew an unmarked cop car when he saw one.
    #
    Aiden Pearce was quite alive, but was almost wishing he weren’t.
    It was the burning pain in his head. It was the throbbing; it was the nausea. That’s what made him wish he were at least unconscious.
    The bullet, he was told, had only nicked his skull. But it had given him a concussion, not a terribly severe one that required hospitalization, but no concussion is good. Scalp wounds appear to bleed a lot of blood, more than they really do, so he’d gushed out impressively.
“Doc” Morrsky, a onetime doctor who’d had his license pulled for selling Oxycodone, had done the diagnosis and stitches, telling Pearce, “Yeah, you’re okay, just a scratch and a concussion.”
    He hadn’t offered Pearce any Oxycodone. Right now, Pearce wouldn’t mind a few hundred milligrams.
    Pearce was lying on a bed in one of his safehouses, on the South Side. His head ached as if it had been shot a moment ago. One of the EMTs had given him a local anesthetic. It wasn’t quite enough.
    He could hear Pussler in the next room, yapping to his girlfriend on a cellphone——Pussler the fake EMT who’d kept Wolfe back, at the site of the attempted murder.
    “Hey baby, I got some cash, I got a job today, we can score for sure,” Pussler was saying.
    Pearce sighed. Was Pussler, a junkie ex-actor, as much as Morrsky was an ex-doctor, the best he could do?
    The other two guys had been the real deal, EM techs from CFR in Pearce’s pay—guys Pearce now owed five grand each. Since Pearce had been skimming cash, through hacking, from a couple of gangsters who had no clue who was doing it, he would