I looked into the lieutenant's old, old eyes. “He really was crazy, wasn't he, Garnett?”
Garnett shrugged. He tilted back in the hospital chair and rubbed his stubbled chin. “One thing I can say about your friend Deegan. He knew how to hate. Crazy or not, it takes a lot of fuel to keep burning for fifteen years and longer.”
I was beginning to appreciate how consuming that hate must have been. All the pains he'd taken to keep the scheme in motion. Little things, like closing off the crawl space in Mildred Flagg's cellar. The death that he had prepared for us, the gasoline—Garnett's cops had found the four five-gallon cans that Deegan had had filled at four different stations—the bar and bolts on the cellar door.
Garnett didn't have to tell me how lucky we were to be alive—but he did, anyway. My laundry-truck escape had been traced in a matter of minutes when one of the lieutenant's men noticed that the laundry truck wasn't following the pattern set by other service vehicles. The driver, when the cops nabbed him, was quick to remember that I had mentioned All Saints Hospital. At All Saints some nurse had seen me ride off with Mildred Flagg, and from that point it had been a matter of time.
I said, “So my shooting through the cellar door was all for nothing?”
“Not quite. A neighbor heard it and turned in a complaint about some hotrodders that had been plaguing the neighborhood.”
“While the cops were doing what?” I asked sourly.
He sat for several seconds, staring at my face. “You're alive, aren't you? Maybe in that cellar, time was dragging, but not outside where my boys were trying to track you down and save your hide.”
We talked a while longer, Garnett and I, but most of the important things had been said. Miss Flagg was all right... All right, except for the thing with Deegan, and maybe she would get that straightened out, too, in time. Jeanie had been to see me twice already and the second time I had asked her to marry me. I hadn't done so well shifting for myself. I'd had enough of it. When she said yes, I knew that my own bad dreams were disappearing for good.
Garnett stood up and pulled his hat down hard and square on his bristling head. “Well, I can't say that knowing you has been pleasant, Coyle.” His smile was as bleak as a glacier. “Try to stay out of trouble, will you?”
And without so much as a nod, he tramped out of the room.
I lay for a long while, thinking. Among others, a good cop, Carson, had died because of that one bloody day on the plains of Ubach. “Error in judgment” the Army would have called it. A tragic mistake.
Deegan hadn't been so generous. To him, it had been murder, and all of us had been guilty.
The longer I thought about it, the easier it was to understand why Deegan had done the things he had. Suddenly I knew that if I closed my eyes the past would begin gathering in that room like an assembly of ghosts. I felt of my forehead and it was clammy. I began to sweat, and my stomach shrank to a cold knot the size of a walnut.
Then something strange began to happen. The feeling began to go away. The door to my room opened and Jeanie was standing there. She looked at me and smiled, and I began to feel better. Much better.
Table of Contents
Beginning
Jonathan Gant
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Long Vendetta Page 15