by Gayle Wilson
Don't talk. Just shoot.
The words careened through her brain, as her hands and her eyes continued to track her prey. Dan must have said them in a hundred darkened movie theaters through the years. Transfixed by what was occurring on the screen, he would whisper those words, offering his warning to countless heroines tremblingly holding a gun on the bad guy.
Shoot him. Don't talk to him. Just shoot him, you stupid hitch.
That was exactly what Sarah had planned to do. She had even uttered Dan's words over and over, preparing for this moment.
Now, despite what her intellect was telling her— had told her from the moment she had thought of this—she knew that she needed him to know. She needed Tate to understand for which of them he was dying. In some sense, perhaps, what she was doing would be for all of them, but the only way it would ever make any difference to her was if Tate knew her son's name.
"Daniel," she shouted.
The dark, well-groomed head turned, everything happening in slow motion. She had time to watch his eyes meet hers before they fell to the gun. When they lifted again, they were slightly widened, but there was no panic in them. Fastened on hers, they were exactly the same pale, clear blue her son's had been.
"His name was Daniel Patterson," she said, no longer shouting because he was near enough she knew he could hear her. And because she had his full and undivided attention.
His head moved up and down. In agreement? Did that mean he had known Danny's name? Or did it simply mean he understood for which of them he was about to die?
Tate's descent had begun to slow, his gaze still locked on her face. Shoot, don't talk. Now she could. Now she could kill him because she had told Tate Danny's name.
Her finger closed over the trigger, beginning the slow deliberate squeeze. Concentrating fiercely on the man in front of her, she was totally unaware of the one rushing at her from the side.
He reached her before her finger could complete the move it had begun. He wrapped his arms around her, the momentum of his dive carrying them both down the steps.
The gun was jarred out of her hand as they landed. She fell on her left shoulder and hip, hitting the granite with incredible force. They slid down the last few steps, their bodies locked together.
Stunned by the impact of her fall, Sarah wasn't sure at first what had happened. One second she'd been standing on the courthouse steps, pointing Dan's pistol at the man who had murdered their son. The next she was lying on the sidewalk, unable to breathe. Unable to escape the crushing weight of the man who had brought her down.
She turned her head to the side in time to watch Samuel Tate duck into his waiting cab. She was near enough that she could smell the fumes of the exhaust as it pulled away from the curb and disappeared into traffic.
Only when it was gone did she become aware that pandemonium had broken out around her. Someone was screaming. Someone else—and the sound of this was very close—cursed, the words low and intense.
The noises rushed through her head like water over the stones of a brook. Meaningless babble.
She looked up at the sky, the thick winter clouds over her head mottled and gray until they blurred with her tears. Despite the growing cacophony of noise around her. it was Dan's voice that echoed again and again in her head.
Shoot, don't talk. Just shoot him, you stupid hitch.
Two
The woman he'd tackled was so still Mac thought a first she'd been knocked unconscious. Then he pushed up far enough to see her face.
Her lashes rested like fans against her colorless cheeks. Under them, glinting over shadows the color o old bruises, moisture gathered as he watched.
"You hurt?" He continued to push onto his elbows trying to take some of his weight off her.
She opened her eyes then, looking straight into his. The irises were a dark gray-green, lightly flecked with brown. Even viewed through the veil of her tears, the fury in them was obvious. "You bastard."
Patterson. The name that went with this face floated unexpectedly to the surface of Mac's memory. Danny Patterson. Tate's second local victim.
"You can't take the law into your own hands. Mrs Patterson." The hypocrisy sickened him, even as he mouthed the words.
Cops, especially in this town, took the law into their own hands every day. Besides, who the hell was he to try to tell this woman what she should or shouldn't do? It wasn't his kid that butcher had slaughtered.
"He killed my son, and you just let him go. You released him. so he can go out there and kill another child."
It was hard to argue against that logic. They had let him go. That was the way things worked. Mac didn't have to like it, and neither did she, but it was the law.
"He'll be followed. The first time he does anything we can pick him up for—"
She laughed, the sound without amusement. Then she turned her head, looking in the direction in which Tate's cab had disappeared. She was still breathing in small, ragged inhalations.
"Get off me," she demanded without looking at him again. "Just...get the hell off me."
"If you'd killed him, Mrs. Patterson, you'd have been charged with murder."
She looked back at him again. The tears were gone, but the fury was still there. The dark pupils expanded, widening into the rim of color. "Do you think I care? He tortured my son to death. You really think I care what they do to me?"
In the silence that fell after that unanswerable question. Mac became aware of the growing commotion on the courthouse steps. The reporters who had been waiting here on the off-chance that Tate might use the front entrance were clustered around them.
The two of them had now become the show. Not Tate. Tate was gone. He was old news.
Mac glanced up, right into the black eye of a camera. Obviously whoever held it had been shooting the exchange between him and Danny Patterson's mother.
Which meant they'd probably shot the events that had preceded it as well. And if they showed that tape...
Scrambling awkwardly to his feet while trying to avoid a more intimate contact with the Patterson woman. Mac reached out, putting his palm over the lens and pushing the camera away from him. The cameraman never stopped filming.
Ignoring him, Mac held his hand out to the woman he'd tackled, but she was already in the process of getting to her feet, pointedly ignoring him. He realized for the first time that she was far smaller and a lot more fragile than she had appeared standing there with that big pistol in her hand.
The wail of sirens converging on the courthouse reminded Mac that what she had done would be considered a criminal act. Attempted murder? If anybody had the gall to push it.
"I want that tape," he said, turning to hold the hand she'd rejected out to the cameraman, palm up.
The demand was unexpected enough that the guy took his eye off the viewfinder. "You're kidding, right?"
"You can give me the tape or you can give me the camera. I'm not picky."'
"Come on, man. You don't expect me to just hand over—"
Mac's hand closed around the lens. He jerked once, hard enough that he almost succeeded in wrenching the camera from the man's hold. The anchor, the one who'd thrust his microphone into Tate's face, began to argue something about the first amendment. In the background the sirens grew louder, drawing the eyes of the news crew to the street.
Seizing the opportunity, Mac gave another jerk. This time the camera slipped out of the man's hand. As soon as it did. Mac let go. It bounced down a couple of the granite steps before it came to a rolling stop on the sidewalk.
As if dazed, the cameraman watched its journey. When it landed, he turned back to Mac, mouth gaping in shock.
"I want that tape," Mac said again, his voice menacing. To punctuate the message, he flipped open the leather case that contained his badge, holding it under the cameraman's nose. "If I don't get it, you two are gonna have a hell of a time explaining to a judge why you refused to turn over evidence to an officer of the law."
Apparently the
tone, normally reserved for uncooperative suspects, worked on reporters as well. There was a few seconds' hesitation, and then the news team looked at one another, eyes meeting briefly before they skated away. During that exchange, they had either decided he was crazy, and therefore dangerous, or that they weren't perfectly sure of their legal standing. Mac didn't care which it was, as long as it got him the tape.
Reluctantly, the cameraman walked down the remaining few steps and, stooping, retrieved his camera from the sidewalk. He removed the tape cartridge and held it out. "You'll be hearing from the station's management."
Mac controlled the urge to laugh, taking the tape instead. As threats went, that one lacked a certain something. "I'll let you all know when you can have it back"
He turned, looking for Danny Patterson's mother, but she had disappeared. His eyes searched the crowd, whose numbers seemed to have increased exponentially in the few minutes since Tate had ridden off.
Pushing past the reporter, who was still standing belligerently in front of him, Mac took a couple of steps to his left, looking for the weapon he'd knocked out of the woman's hand. It had vanished as well.
Chalk one up for the victims, he thought in satisfaction.
He couldn't be expected to arrest her if she wasn't there. That was going to be his story, at least until somebody challenged it.
He glanced to the top of the stairs where his partner was standing. Sonny gestured down the street with a tilt of his head. Mac turned to look, but if that's where she had headed, there was no sign of her now.
He started climbing the steps, aware of a couple of aches and pains he hadn't noticed before. The result of that off-the-bench tackle. He'd pay a bigger price for that tomorrow, he knew. She would, too, because she'd taken the brunt of their landing.
Maybe that's what had precipitated her tears. That and not the fact he'd stopped her from shooting Tate. He knew that it wasn't true, but the thought was comforting.
"Jesus, man. What the hell were you thinking?" Sonny asked as he approached the top. He had lowered his voice so that the question was audible only to Mac, despite the reporters who trailed him. "You shoulda let her pop him. Save us all a lot of trouble and the taxpayers some money. Besides, if anybody has the right..."
Samuel Tate deserved to be shot down like the rabid dog he was. and. as Sonny said, if anyone had the right, it was the mother of one of his victims. According to the law, however, no one but the state could execute Tate. If she'd killed him. Mrs. Patterson would have been a murderer.
"Seemed like a good idea at the time." Mac brushed past his partner, pushing open the door of the courthouse.
"What're you gonna do with the tape?" Sonny followed him inside.
"What would you do?"
"Lose it. Some place nobody'd ever find it."
"Got a lighter in your desk?" Mac pushed the button that opened up the cartridge.
Sonny was in perpetual "I'm quitting smoking" mode. This week it had been "I've finally done it."
"I could probably find one," Sonny evaded, watching him pull tape out of the case in a long black ribbon. "Or we could stop by a convenience store on our way back to the station. Lighter, little lighter fluid, empty garbage can. Problem solved."
Problem solved. The words reverberated in Mac's head, seeming too glib.
He'd get rid of the tape. They'd keep an eye on Tate.
Now that they knew who he was, that shouldn't be any harder than any other routine surveillance.
Problem solved. Except if it were, Mac couldn't figure out why there was this nagging uneasiness in the back of his mind that none of this was going to be that simple.
"The station's pretty upset about the damage to their camera." Mac's supervisor looked even more sour than he normally did.
It apparently hadn't taken long for the news crew to follow up on their threat. "They should take that up with their cameraman." Mac said. "He's the one who dropped it."
"He says you threw it down the steps."
"I didn't have any reason to do that. I told them I wanted the tape, and they refused to cooperate."
"So you broke their camera."
"I showed them my badge and told them their tape might be evidence."
"Evidence you can't produce."
"I told you. I pitched it after I looked at it. There was nothing on the thing. I don't know. Maybe the guy damaged it taking it out of the camera." Mac added a shrug for effect.
"And maybe." Captain Morel said, "you should think very carefully about what you're saying. Mac. If you tampered with evidence—"
"There was nothing on the tape. Captain. I swear."
"Everybody outside the courthouse yesterday morning saw what happened."
"Sir?" A little sucking up couldn't hurt. Mac decided.
He'd not done enough of that through the years, but playing departmental politics had never been his thing. That's why Morel, who'd joined the force the same year he had. was where he was, and Mac was still a detective.
Not that he wanted to be anything else, he told himself. His normal conviction rang slightly hollow this morning.
"Sarah Patterson tried to kill Tate, and you stopped her."
Sarah. Mac hadn't remembered her first name yesterday, and he hadn't had time since to look it up. Not after the surveillance team lost Tate, throwing the task force into a near panic. The cab had dropped him off at the French Market where he'd disappeared into the crowd of shoppers.
Tate had never returned to his apartment and, although they had it staked out in case he did, it was looking more and more as if he'd had a contingency plan in place in case he was ever arrested.
All of which had put pressure on everyone in the department. They had blown it with Tate, not once but twice, and the public and the media were very unhappy.
Rightly so, Mac acknowledged.
"I thought she had a gun, too," he said aloud. "At least at first."
"You thought!"
"Apparently she just wanted to say something to Tate about her kid. We'd all been afraid someone might try to get to Tate. When I saw Mrs. Patterson approach him, I guess I kind of overreacted."
"So you're saying she didn’t have a gun."
"That's what I'm saying."
Morel's eyes rested on his face a long time. If he was trying to induce some kind of guilt trip for that lie, it wasn't going to work. Sarah Patterson had suffered enough.
"Then why were you so interested in obtaining the tape of the incident?" the captain asked finally.
"I knew her face would be all over the evening news."
"It was," Morel said.
For that matter, Mac's had been, too. Despite the blow of losing Tate, despite whatever Morel was going to do to him, Mac could take satisfaction in the fact that nobody had film showing what had really happened to run alongside those stills. As a result. Danny Patterson's mother wasn't up on a charge of attempted murder this morning.
"The media wants your head." Morel said. "Actually, I think they'd like a collection of heads, but right now, you're at the top of their list."
"They'll get over it."
He had more important things to do than worry about some irate TV station. If that frigging camera really had been damaged, they could damn well afford to have it fixed, given the increased coverage the department's screwup would give them.
"Two weeks." Morel said.
Mac tried to fit the words into the context of the conversation. Two weeks to catch Tate?
"Without pay," the captain added. "That should cover the cost of replacing their camera."
"You're suspending me?"
"Call it administrative leave. Pending an investigation of your actions, of course. With all the department's got going on right now, I figure that will take at least a couple of weeks."
"Captain." Mac protested, only to be cut off.
"I don't like being yelled at. Not by the media. Not by the commissioner. Nobody does. Most of all. I don't like being lied to by my own p
eople. Two weeks should give you enough time to think about using the resources of this department for your personal agenda. Sarah Patterson tried to kill a man yesterday. And because you destroyed evidence, she walks."
"Just like Tate." Mac didn't bother to hide the sarcasm. "We must be playing hell with the D.A.'s conviction rate."
Morel's lips tightened in anger, but he maintained control. "We can't afford to appear to condone vigilante justice here, or we'll have the family of every homicide victim in this city carrying weapons into courtrooms and plotting their own revenge."
"Do you remember what Tate did to her son?"
Morel did, of course. Not that it would make any difference.
"Tate's an innocent man until the courts prove he isn't. That's the way it works. You know that. Mac."
"All I know is that I've forgotten more about Tate than anyone else in this department knows," Mac argued.
He was the N.O.P.D.'s representative on the multi-jurisdictional task force that had been organized when they had finally figured out they had a serial killer on their hands. Something it had taken them way too long to do, in Mac's opinion.
"I need to be out there working this case," he went on. "You need me out there. Suspending me right now is insane, and you know that" he mimicked the captain's last words.
"Three weeks." The red that had started in Morel's neck spread upward to his cheeks. "That should give Internal Affairs time enough to determine whether we should add tampering with evidence to blatant destruction of property."
"Look—"
"Enjoy your time off, Mac. I imagine we'll be able to get a handle on Tate without your expertise." The last was as coldly biting as Morel allowed himself to get.
"I'll pay for the frigging camera." As he said it Mac wondered how much that was going to set him back.
"Yes, you will. And you'll pay for lying to me, too. Starting now."
"You really want to send a woman to prison for trying to shoot the maniac who tortured her kid to death?"