Private Justice

by Terri Blackstock

  He rode it down, and as the doors opened, he saw her walking out across the lobby.

  “Issie,” he called. She turned around.

  Tears mixed with mascara stained her face, and she wiped them away self-consciously, then dried her hands on the pants of her uniform. She looked at him suspiciously, as though she expected him to lecture her about having the gall to show up here. “I know, I know,” she said. “You don’t have to preach me a sermon, Nick. I know I shouldn’t have come.”

  “No, no,” he said softly. “That’s not why I came after you.”

  “Then why?” she asked.

  She looked up at him, and he searched his mind for a reason. “I just…wondered how I could pray for you.”

  “Pray for me?” She looked at him as if he’d just offered to read her palms. “Why would you pray for me?”

  “Because…I know that you and Mark…well, I mean…I just know that you cared for him, and—”

  “And you want me to think that doesn’t disgust you?” she returned.

  He realized he was digging himself into a deep hole. “Well, no, actually, it does. I care a lot for Mark and Allie, and I want to see them work things out. I don’t think you’ve helped much with that.”

  She nodded while he was speaking, as if she might have expected that exact speech from him.

  “But I also don’t think you set out to break up their marriage. I don’t see you as a malicious person, Issie. I see you in emergencies all the time. You do care about people.”

  She was growing more agitated, and her eyes filled with tears again. “What do you want, Nick?”

  He racked his brain. What did he want? “I don’t know. I guess…I just wanted to tell you that I appreciate what you did up there. It took a lot of courage.”

  She swallowed. “Yeah, well. Nothing ever happened between us, you know. I mean, nothing physical. And before you go putting me on some list for sainthood, I should tell you that it wasn’t because I didn’t want it. But Mark loves Allie. Enough to take a bullet for her.” She wiped the tears spilling over her lashes. “Nobody ever loved me like that.”

  “Oh, yes, they did. Somebody loved you just like that.”

  She looked at him like he was nuts. “Who?”

  “Jesus.”

  She breathed a laugh, shook her head, then looked back up at him. “I should have seen that coming.”

  He grinned. “Yeah, I guess so. But it’s true.” He cocked his head and gazed down at her. “You know, that smile looks pretty good on you. Even when it’s mocking.”

  She couldn’t seem to shake it from her face as she looked up at him. Finally, she reached up and took his wire-rimmed glasses off of his face. The surprisingly personal act made his heart jolt, and he asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Cleaning your glasses,” she said as she wiped them on her shirt. “You’re not seeing clearly.”

  He laughed then, and realized he was, once again, behaving like a teenager instead of a minister. He wondered if she could see the heat climbing his face.

  “You know what Dan said earlier? About you being out of shape?” Issie asked.

  His smile crashed and he made a mental vow to start a diet immediately.

  “You look just fine to me. For a preacher, that is.”

  She reached up and shoved his glasses back on, and he stood stock-still, too pleasantly moved to know how to react. She gave him a wink, then turned and headed out the door.

  Nick stood frozen until she was out of sight. He told himself that he’d better stay as far away from her as he could in the future. It was a bad sign when a preacher reacted to a woman with wet palms and a runaway heartbeat. A real bad sign.

  In the ICU waiting room, Allie saw that her parents were staring at her with shock. Feeling more peace than she’d felt all day, she started back toward them.

  “What was that about?” her mother asked. “What did she want?”

  “Just to see how Mark was doing.” She sat down and looked at Jill and Celia. Both women offered her sweet smiles that told her they admired what they had just witnessed.

  Her mother was livid. “Honey, are you sure you’re okay? You’re not thinking clearly.” She looked at the others. “Has she eaten today?”

  “No, not since she’s been here,” Jill said.

  “That explains it. Her blood sugar is so low that it’s paralyzing her brain cells.”

  Allie almost smiled. “I’ve always had a problem with sluggish brain cells, Mom. It has nothing to do with food.”

  Jill tried to hide her grin. “Allie, do you want to go down to the cafeteria and get a bite?”

  “No,” she said, serious again. “I’m going to fast until I know for sure Mark’s okay.”

  “I’ll join you,” Jill said, and Celia agreed to do so, as well.

  Her father looked at them all as if their neurons had collectively misfired. “Are you crazy? Allie, you have to eat.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because praying and fasting is all I can do for Mark right now, and I’m going to do it. God will honor that.”

  “God doesn’t need you to fast. That’s an Old Testament thing. People don’t do that anymore.”

  “Well, maybe they should.”

  “He could stay unconscious for a week!”

  “Then I’ll go a week without eating.”

  Her mother shifted in her seat and huffed out a sigh. “I’m going to ask the doctor for a sedative for you.”

  “And risk paralyzing more brain cells?” Allie asked with a half-smile. “Mom, I’m glad you’re here, but I really need you to support me, not challenge me at every turn.”

  Her parents shot each other eloquent looks. Finally, her father patted her hand. “How about if we shut up?”

  Allie smiled.

  They all sat quietly, awkwardly, for a while, flipping through magazines, until the receptionist called Allie’s name over the intercom. They sprang to their feet and together headed for the front desk.

  “Yes?” Allie asked.

  “The nurse just called to tell me your husband is awake.” The receptionist smiled warmly as Allie caught her breath. “You can go on back.”

  Without another word, Allie shot for the door.

  She pressed the button that opened the double metal doors leading into ICU, and saw a nurse waiting for her. “He’s awake?” she asked.

  “Yes, and asking for you.”

  Allie laughed softly and hurried to his bedside.

  His eyes were closed, but a nurse stood over him, talking gently. “Mark, your wife is here.”

  His eyes opened as Allie went to his side and took his hand. He squeezed it, and she wilted into tears.

  “Hey, what’s wrong?” he whispered with the slightest hint of a grin.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said, laughing quietly as she wiped her tears. “So what do you mean going and getting shot?”

  He closed his eyes. “Is that what happened?”

  “Yes.”

  He was silent for a moment, and it looked as if he’d drifted back off to sleep. Allie looked up at the nurse. “How is he?”

  “Doing very well,” she said, keeping her voice low. “He had appropriate answers to everything we asked. Knew his birthday, your birthday—but he doesn’t remember what happened to him.”

  “Yes, I do,” he whispered, surprising them both.

  Allie touched his face. “You do?”

  “Most of it,” he said. “I saw the bullet knock the bag out of your hand.” His voice was weak, losing energy with each word.

  “You saved me,” she told him. “You threw me down and covered me, and the next bullet hit you.”

  “Gave me a raging headache,” he said, barely audible, and Allie smiled. He closed his eyes again, but this time, the calm look on his face vanished, and his mouth twisted. She saw the tear rolling from his eye.

  “What is it, Mark?” she asked.

  He squeezed her ha
nd harder. “I’m so glad…you’re all right.”

  “He thought you were dead,” the nurse whispered. “It was his first question.”

  Overcome, Allie rested her face on Mark’s chest. “I’m glad you’re all right, too,” she cried. “I’m so glad.”

  She looked up at him. One slick, wet line went from the corner of his eye into his hair, and she smeared it away.

  “I’m sorry, Allie,” he whispered.

  “For what?”

  “For not being able to protect you now.”

  “I don’t need protection. I’m safe here. They have security at the doors.”

  “No,” he whispered. “You need to go somewhere else. Somewhere that he won’t look for you. You need to—”

  “No, Mark,” she cut in emphatically. “I’m not leaving you. Nick’s here, and your father, and my parents, Jill and Celia, and Stan’s in town and will be back soon.”

  “I want to see him,” he said. “I want to see Stan.”

  “All right,” she told him. “If he’s back at the next visiting hour, I’ll let him come in with me.”

  “No, now,” he said. “I need to see him now.”

  “What for?”

  “Just call him.”

  “Okay,” she said, trying to placate him. “I will.”

  “When’s the doctor coming?” he asked the nurse. “I need to see the doctor.”

  “He’ll be in shortly,” the nurse said. “Why do you need to see him?”

  “Because I need to go home. I have to get out of here. I have to protect my wife.”

  “You can’t get out tonight, Mark,” Allie said. “You’re in ICU. You have to be still. Just relax…”

  “Have to…”

  He was getting weaker but more agitated. Allie stroked his forehead. “Mark, shhhh. You need to rest. Calm down.”

  Her gentle touch and soft words seemed to have the effect she wanted, and his eyes closed again.

  “Shhhh. Get some more sleep, honey. Rest so you can get better.”

  His lips moved again as he tried to speak, but no sound came out. Finally, his breathing settled, and she knew that he was asleep.

  “We’ll be rousing him every hour,” the nurse whispered. “He won’t like it, but we have to do it. But we’d prefer you waited until visiting times to come back. We’ll try to get him good and awake before the next one.”

  “Okay.” Allie knew that was her dismissal, but she wasn’t ready to leave. “Could I have just a minute alone with him before I go?”

  “Sure,” the nurse said. “Just don’t be too long.”

  She watched the nurse leave, then laid Mark’s limp hand on his stomach and set her hand on top of it. Closing her eyes, she thanked God for letting him wake up, for the possibility that she might get that second chance. And she prayed that he would continue to heal Mark—and take divine vengeance on the killer who had done this.

  Feeling as if a million pounds had been lifted off her shoulders, she headed back into the ICU waiting room to tell the others that things were looking up.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  The Homicide Unit at the Kenner Police Department was as depressing as Stan had expected. The huge dry erase board on the wall had columns headed by the names of each of the homicide detectives. Beneath each name, listed in red ink, were all of the active homicide cases he had been assigned, the date of the crime, the name of the victim, the means of death. As the crimes were solved, the ink color was changed to blue—incentive for each detective to solve his crimes as quickly as possible, for those red cases were a source of shame and aggravation.

  For the first hour Stan had been here today, Peter Blanc, the Cajun detective assigned to the airport shooting, had bemoaned the fact that he’d been given a case that wasn’t really a homicide, since Mark Branning wasn’t dead. He didn’t appreciate having another red name on his list. He was quite familiar with the Newpointe killings, and immediately wanted to send someone to interview Hank Keyes in the Bogaloosa jail. Despite Stan’s insistence that Keyes was no longer a suspect, Blanc was intent on proving he could be. He wanted to solve this crime, and soon. He had other cases—cases involving dead bodies, cases that really were in his jurisdiction, cases in red that he needed to change to blue.

  Realizing that he wasn’t going to get far with Peter Blanc, Stan haunted the crime lab for the rest of the afternoon. He learned the bullet that had hit Allie’s bag had been retrieved from the concrete a few yards from where Mark was hit, and from that they had determined that the gun had been a .38—the same caliber used in the other three shootings. The ballistics report, evaluating the angles at which the bullets had struck Allie’s purse and Mark’s head, identified the possible areas from which the gun could have been fired. Kenner P.D. had also collected tape from the security cameras just inside the airport in that area, in the hope that the killer could be seen through the window. Stan viewed all of the tapes during that time, only to find that none of the cameras covered the exact area in question.

  However, Stan noticed in the file that there was a witness—a guy who’d been loading luggage onto the small plane Allie and Mark would have gotten on, who claimed he had seen a man in uniform running down a ladder that led up to an air conditioner unit, and that the man had cut across the tarmac and around the airport terminal. The witness had taken cover behind the plane and peered out from under it to see if he could spot the source of the gunfire. While everyone else was scurrying out of harm’s way, the man in uniform had been running the wrong way.

  Thirty minutes after reading the report, Stan was at the airport interviewing the witness himself. “What kind of uniform was it? Did it belong to a ground crew worker?”

  “Nope,” the man said, spitting on the ground. “Wasn’t a jumpsuit like mine. No, I think it was blue or gray. Might have been a pilot without his coat.”

  “A pilot?”

  “No, come to think of it, the pants weren’t black like a pilot’s. The pants were, like, gray or something. Like a cop or a mailman.”

  A cop or a mailman? Ordinarily, he would have found the comparison amusing. But nothing about this was funny to him.

  He climbed up the ladder to the air conditioner unit that the witness had pointed out. It was a perfect perch from which to fire at someone. Easily accessible, yet inconspicuous. Was the uniform an air conditioner repairman’s uniform? Is that how he had gotten in without being stopped? Or was he, indeed, a cop, which would have kept anyone from asking questions? Or could he actually have been a mailman?

  He went back to the homicide unit, hoping once more to put his head together with one of their detectives, even the cynical, hardened Blanc. To his frustration, none of them took him seriously enough to give him the time. He was, after all, the only detective on a small-town force—a small town which, until last week, averaged zero to one homicides a year. Stan had once taken pride in that, as though it somehow reflected well on him. Now, seeing the contempt and disinterest of the Kenner cops, who each had up to a dozen cases at a time in red, all murders within the last month, he couldn’t help feeling inferior.

  Stan pulled out his case file again, and sat down with a pen and paper to list all of the clues they had. Fibers from the Broussard and Larkin houses, though they had no one to match them to. A generic shoe print that could have matched a million size-ten feet. No fingerprints. No weapon. No motive…

  “Stan Shepherd?” a detective called from across the room. He turned around and scanned the desks and faces of the dozens of people milling around the room.

  “Yeah?”

  “Telephone,” the man yelled out, as if he hated being bothered.

  Stan closed the file and carried it to the man’s desk. “Hurry up, I’ve got work to do,” the man bit out.

  Stan ignored him. “Stan Shepherd,” he said into the phone.

  “Stan, it’s me. Allie.”

  Stan stiffened, bracing himself for news of Mark’s death. A sense of defeat and dread fell over him.
“Allie.”

  “Mark woke up, and he’s asking for you.”

  His heart jolted. “He’s awake? All right!” He looked around for someone to tell, but no one was interested. “He wants me?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He made me promise to tell you that he wants to see you. The next visiting hour is at eleven tonight, and they promised they’d rouse him for it. If you want to go in with me, you can.”

  “I’ll be there. Allie, how is he?”

  “He’s great,” she said, her voice cracking. “He looks like he’s been in a train wreck, but he’s talking and making sense, worrying.”

  “Thank God.”

  “You said it. God was watching over him, Stan. He’s still in ICU. Anything could go wrong, but they’re keeping a close watch on him.”

  “Is Celia okay?”

  “Yeah, she’s right here. Wanna talk to her?”

  “Yeah.” He told his wife he loved her and to stay right there, not to leave the waiting room under any circumstances, and not to allow Allie to. When he hung up, he felt a chill. His wife was so close to a marked target, someone the killer wanted dead. He hoped the security in that hospital had been reminded of the danger. Selfishly, he thought how glad he’d be to take Celia home after he saw Mark tonight.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Because Mark insisted on it, the nurses called Allie for a visit at eight-thirty instead of making her wait until eleven. Since Stan had just arrived, she let him and Nick come in with her.

  The nurse met them at the door. “He’s doing much better than I would have predicted,” she said with a smile. “But remember—let him rest.”

  The two men, shocked by Mark’s appearance, hesitated at the door, but Allie went right to his side and hugged him. He hugged her back weakly, the gesture giving her a world of hope.

  “Did you bring Stan?” he asked.

  She had wondered if, with the concussion and head trauma, he would forget. Apparently he hadn’t. “He’s right here. Nick, too.”

  They came on each side of the bed, and Mark took both of their hands and squeezed them. “Thanks for coming, guys,” he said in a gravelly voice that reminded her of the way he sounded when he woke up in the mornings. She had missed that voice.