Third Degree

by Greg Iles

“SOP for a woman who thinks her husband’s about to dump her. You need to get out while you can. Take your chances.”

  Danny was about to reply when his legitimate cell phone rang. He checked the LCD and saw that the call was from the Sheriff’s Department. “Excuse me, I need to take this.”

  Marilyn turned up her Schaefer and drank it off with an unladylike gurgle.

  “Danny McDavitt,” he said.

  “Major McDavitt, this is Dispatch. I’ve been told that the sheriff needs the aerial unit to pick him up at Lake St. John. You know where that is?”

  “I do.” Lake St. John was a popular recreation spot forty miles up the river. “When are we talking about, Carol?”

  “Now, sir.”

  “Now? What’s going on?”

  “Radio silence on this one, Danny. No specifics on cell phones either. You’re the pilot on the board. Jim’s in Las Vegas with his wife for his anniversary. How soon can you get to the airport?”

  “I’m at the airport now.”

  “Good. I called Mr. Markle already. They should be getting the aerial unit ready now.”

  The unit. Danny almost laughed, but something in her voice stopped him. “This is a real emergency?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s the sheriff doing at Lake St. John?”

  “Fishing. I’ll give you his GPS coordinates once you’re airborne.”

  Danny didn’t want to spend his afternoon searching the river for some lost fisherman when Laurel might need him. But there were only two chopper pilots, and if Jim Redmond was out of town, then Danny had no way out of the duty. “Roger that,” he said in a tone of surrender. “Call me back in ten minutes with the coordinates.”

  “What’s the emergency?” asked Marilyn.

  “Our illustrious sheriff wants a chopper ride back from Lake St. John. He’s tired of fishing.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Nah,” said Danny, getting to his feet. “It’s probably somebody lost on the water. Unless one of the sheriff’s campaign contributors sprained an ankle wakeboarding.”

  Marilyn laughed. “That sounds like the Billy Ray Ellis I remember from high school.”

  “You’re not that old, I know.”

  She winked. “I was a ninth-grader when Billy Ray was a senior. He was the cat’s meow back then. Big football star, all the girls after him. Of course, it was mostly white boys then. Different game.”

  “You’d better believe it.”

  “I think it’s safe to say Billy was elected sheriff on his high school rep and his status in the Baptist church,” Marilyn said in an arch tone.

  “Politics. The same everywhere. He’s okay, actually. I’ve known a lot worse in ranking uniforms.”

  The lawyer nodded thoughtfully. “We should do this more.”

  “I agree.”

  “If you’d hire me, we could.”

  Danny’s smile faded. “I’m thinking about it.”

  • • •

  By the time Danny reached the hangar, the mechanics had rolled out the Sheriff’s Department helicopter and prepped her for flight. She was a Bell 206B, eight years old but still in good shape. White with blue and gold stripes, and a big gold star painted on the fuselage. The machines he’d flown in the air force were five times this size and infinitely more sophisticated, but the Bell handled well in the air, a kite compared to the massive predators he once flew. A Pave Low IV could carry twenty-four fully equipped commandos into battle; the Bell 206 had two seats up front and room for one passenger and a stretcher in back. Not much else.

  “How goes it, Danny boy?” called Dick Burleigh, the silver-haired chief mechanic. “Ready to crank and bank?”

  Burleigh had served as crew chief on a Huey with the First Air Cav in Vietnam. After surviving the Ia Drang and A Shau valleys, he’d moved to Baton Rouge and serviced news choppers for thirty years. At sixty-something, Burleigh decided to retire to Athens Point, where he started filling in at the airport for kicks. Pretty soon, he was running the maintenance department. For Danny he was a godsend.

  “You tell me, Dick,” he said. “How’s she running?”

  “Hot as a preacher’s daughter.”

  Danny laughed and shook hands with Burleigh, then nodded to a blond kid in coveralls trailing behind him. “Let’s forget about those beers, huh, guys?”

  Burleigh smiled. “Long as you’re okay to fly, Major.”

  Danny gave the old crew chief a salute. “My inviolable rule is, don’t drink and fly. However, one night in the Caribbean, I had to go up and chase down a Bolivian drug boat with half a bottle of tequila in me. Long story, but we knocked down ninety keys of marching powder that night.”

  “You get to keep any of it?” asked the kid, his eyes twinkling.

  Danny chuckled. “Nah. But there were reports of confiscated reefer weighing in a little light after some of those takedowns. MPs never got to the bottom of it, either.”

  “You take her easy, Major,” said Burleigh, his smile gone. “Wind’s getting up, and you got thunderheads blowing in from the northwest.”

  “That’s the way I’m headed, too.”

  “Maybe the sheriff ought to drive back to town. He could make it in the time it takes you to fly both ways.”

  No, Danny thought, Billy Ray likes the chopper too much for that. “I’m just an old rotorhead, Chief. I live to serve. Have a good one.”

  The mechanic winked and opened the Bell’s door. Danny climbed into the right seat, fastened his harness, cinched it tight, and hit the starter. Then he put on his headset and ran the preflight checklist. He didn’t miss having to put on his helmet, night-vision goggles, body armor, or any of the other gear required to fly the Pave Low. Compared to his military flying, this was like barnstorming in the 1920s.

  When the main rotor system hit 360 rpm, Danny felt the chopper reach neutral buoyancy. He pulled up on the collective, which put the Bell into a low hover. After trimming the ship with his left foot pedal, he lightly touched the cyclic and tilted the rotor disk forward. A few moments later, the bird gained translational lift and launched herself into the sky.

  At that moment, Danny’s cell phone vibrated. He applied friction to the collective and let go long enough to grab the phone from his pocket, assuming that Laurel had finally texted him back. To his surprise, he found himself holding his legitimate phone instead. The Bell drifted a little as he flipped it open. The new message was from the Sheriff’s Department dispatcher. There were only four words in the text box:

  CODE BLACK/THIRD DEGREE.

  Danny’s ass puckered as he stared at the coded message.

  Code Black meant a hostage situation.

  Third Degree meant loss of life.

  With visions of Columbine and Virginia Tech in his head, he twisted the throttle, pushed the chopper to 122 knots, and stormed toward the thunderheads rolling down from the northwest.

  • • •

  Kyle Auster was dead.

  Laurel saw his body lying on the hall floor when she followed Warren down the stairs with Beth in her arms. She buried her daughter’s face between her breasts, then looked over the rail. Kyle lay faceup with his eyes open, as still as a human body could be. His absurd shirt was hiked up to his nipples; Warren must have done that while working on him. How strange, she thought, to shoot a man and then immediately try to save him. Despite Warren’s two shots, she saw only one wound, at the midline, above Auster’s navel but below his heart. Dark blood covered his pale belly, matting the hair that so many gullible women had lain against in adultery.

  “Did you call 911?” she asked from the landing.

  Warren had already reached the ground floor. “No point.”

  “He died before you came upstairs?”

  “No, but he was slipping away fast. I think the bullet hit his spine. He couldn’t move his legs. It must have clipped his descending aorta as well, because he seemed to be bleeding out internally.”

  “What a shot you are,” she s
aid bitterly.

  Warren was looking down at the body. “He shot first. You saw it.”

  “Such a waste. I can’t . . . I guess I can’t really believe it.”

  “Mommy, I can’t breathe,” Beth said.

  Laurel turned her daughter’s head but kept her facing away from the rail. Beth hadn’t spoken since the events on the roof; she only sucked her thumb and lay glassy-eyed against Laurel’s chest.

  “Cover him up with something,” Laurel said.

  “You do it. Let me have Beth.”

  “You’re not touching this child.”

  Warren looked up, his jaw set hard. “Don’t think anything has changed. Kyle is dead because of a choice he made. Every choice has consequences. Yours included.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are? God? Get over yourself! You just shot a man. This insanity is over.”

  “Come downstairs. Into the kitchen.”

  Laurel shielded Beth’s eyes and walked down to the foyer, then followed Warren to the kitchen. Beth was a lot heavier than she’d been only a year ago. Laurel’s back and shoulders were already aching. While Warren stared out the kitchen window, she took a glass down from the cabinet.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, still looking out over the front lawn.

  “Getting her some water. She’s tired out. No, actually she’s not. She’s traumatized by what you did upstairs. Probably scarred permanently. What is wrong with you?”

  “Give her a teaspoon of Benadryl.”

  “Is that your professional advice? Drug our daughter to sleep?”

  Warren rolled his eyes. “This will be a lot less traumatic for her if she sleeps through it.”

  Laurel’s stomach tightened. “What will?”

  “Don’t worry about it. She can sleep in the safe room.”

  Laurel felt as though she were having a conversation with a robot. “Warren, you just killed your business partner. Your office almost burned to the ground. Your employee tried to kill a federal agent. Don’t you realize the police will be here any minute?”

  “That’s why she needs to be in the safe room.”

  Laurel whispered, “You’re not putting our daughter into that room alone. She’d be terrified.”

  “She’d also be safe. Bullets can’t penetrate an inch of steel plate.”

  A bolt of alarm shot through Laurel, despite her fatigue. “Do you seriously intend to hold us hostage inside a ring of armed men?”

  At last Warren’s face betrayed some emotion. “This is our house, Laurel. My house. My land. I expect the police to respect our rights and leave us alone to deal with our own family problems.”

  She closed her eyes, trying to blot out his face long enough to think, but it was impossible. The enormity of what had happened finally sank into her soul, and the floodgates opened. As she cried, she experienced an epiphany that revealed the road to freedom. The password to that road was a lie. But unlike the lies of omission she had been telling for the past year, she was going to have to sell this story. At least Kyle won’t have died for nothing, she thought. In death, he was going to do her a service he could never have done in life.

  She carried Beth to the built-in banquette in the corner of the kitchen. Beth tried to cling to her, but Laurel set her firmly on the seat and rubbed her forehead for half a minute. “Warren,” she said, straightening up and putting her hands on her hips, “I can’t let you put Beth at risk like this. I’m going to tell you what you want to know. But first I’ve got to know that you’ll bring this insanity to an end. I don’t care what you do to me, but you’ve got to let Beth leave the house.”

  Hearing resolve in her voice, he looked away from the window and focused on her. “Do you really think Beth is in danger from me? You’re the one who put our children at risk. If you tell me the truth, the real truth, you might be surprised by how things turn out.”

  Laurel tried to read his meaning, but it was impossible. “Send Beth outside first. As a sign of good faith. Then I’ll tell you.”

  He smiled sadly. “I can’t do that. You haven’t proved yourself worthy of trust. She’s in no danger.” He took a step toward Laurel. “Tell me.”

  She realized then that he wasn’t holding the gun. Was it still in one of his pockets?

  “I’m waiting,” he said.

  She pictured the awful scene upstairs, when he had told the kids she was having an affair. That was sufficient to bring more tears to her eyes. “It was Kyle, okay?” she said softly. “I saw him for almost a year.”

  Warren’s eyes narrowed, and he moved closer. Close enough to hit her. “Kyle. You were having an affair with Kyle?”

  She nodded. “I didn’t love him. But I wanted to hurt you. I knew that would hurt you more than anything else. If I cheapened myself like that.”

  Warren moved closer, close enough to kiss. “You made love with him?”

  “No. I fucked him.”

  Warren flinched. She expected a blow any second.

  “And you knew about the other women? About Vida? The nurses?”

  Laurel nodded. “That was part of it, I think.”

  “Did Kyle love you?”

  She was about to say no, but then she thought of Danny’s letter. “He thought he did. Kyle was crazy. He’d never had anyone like me before. He said he would give up all the others if I would run away with him. But I didn’t want that. I just wanted to make you realize what you were doing to me. How you were ignoring me.”

  Warren tilted his head to the right, like a scientist studying an animal in the midst of some curious act. “You’re lying,” he said at length.

  “You don’t know the truth when you hear it.”

  “If Kyle was the one who wrote that letter, you would have let him shoot me. But you didn’t. You warned me.”

  “Of course I did! I didn’t love Kyle! I love you. Besides, you’re the father of my children.”

  Warren shook his head. “You’re lying now. Kyle could have smashed your laptop while I ran to answer the kitchen phone, but he didn’t. He didn’t care about that Hotmail account at all.”

  “I could have done the same thing.”

  “No, I was watching you. And you did try, once. Kyle never did. He even screamed at you to tell me the password. He didn’t care about your computer, because he knew it was no threat to him.”

  She searched her mind for some rational argument, but there was none.

  “You’re still trying to protect someone,” Warren said, his voice low and dangerous. “Who is it?” He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her violently. “Tell me who he is!”

  “Daddy, stop it!” Beth screeched. “You’re hurting Mama!”

  “Mom’s fine,” Warren said, stopping his assault but not taking his eyes from Laurel’s face. “If you were really having an affair with Kyle, you can answer one simple question for me.”

  Her stomach rolled over.

  “Kyle had a unique feature below the waist. What was it?”

  She lowered her voice. “I’m not going to discuss another man’s genitals with you in front of our daughter.”

  “Let’s go to the great room, then.”

  Laurel closed her eyes as though disgusted, but she was thinking desperately.

  “You don’t know,” Warren whispered. “Because you’ve never seen Kyle’s . . . package.”

  But she had seen it, once. A couple of years ago, at a Halloween party that lasted into the wee hours. A few drunken guests had peeled off their costumes and leaped into their hosts’ heated pool. Naturally one of them was Kyle. He’d been standing behind a plastic cubicle that served as a changing room, out of Warren’s line of sight but well within Laurel’s. After stripping off his pants, he’d turned toward her long enough for her to take in his full nudity; then he’d burst into the open and dived into the steaming water. Laurel had a clear memory of the event, but no matter how hard she focused, she saw nothing but a normal, middle-aged penis of average size.

  “Time’s up,”
Warren said. “You lose.”

  “There’s nothing different about him.”

  Warren’s smile was triumphant. “Kyle had hypospadias. Do you know what that is?”

  Laurel had heard the word, but she couldn’t recall what condition it described.

  “His urethra opens on the underside of his penis, rather than at the tip. It’s fairly common. One in three hundred live births. And if you’d been sleeping with him, you would definitely know about it.”

  She looked away.

  “You can go check his corpse, if you’re curious. No? Then I repeat: tell me who you’re trying to protect. If you don’t—”

  The kitchen phone rang loudly. Warren let go of her, glanced at the caller ID, then walked to the kitchen window. “And awaaay we go. It’s started now.”

  Laurel stood on tiptoe. Over the hedges in front of the window, she saw a Sheriff’s Department cruiser parked at the end of their driveway. One man inside.

  Warren pressed the speakerphone button, then came back to the window. “This is Dr. Shields. Who’s this?”

  “This is Deputy Ray Breen, Doctor.”

  “Afternoon, Ray,” Warren said in a cheerful voice. “What can I do for you?”

  “Well, Doc, I just drove out to check on some things.”

  “Is that right? What things would those be?”

  “Well, your wife and daughter for one. We heard y’all might be having some trouble out this way.”

  Laurel closed her eyes as Breen’s deep drawl echoed through the house. This was why she hadn’t called 911 in the beginning.

  “No trouble,” Warren said. “Nothing serious, anyway.”

  There was a long pause. Then Ray Breen said, “Well, I’m afraid your boy says different. He’s over to the neighbors’ house scared half out of his wits. He says maybe you shot somebody.”

  Warren laughed loudly. “No, no. Kyle Auster and I were cleaning a pistol, and it accidentally discharged. Put a hole in the floor, but other than that, no harm done.”

  This time the pause was longer. “I’m glad to hear it, Doc. But I’d feel a whole lot better if I could just say hey to everybody for a second. One at a time, if you please.”

  Warren’s tense face gave the lie to his nonchalant voice. Maybe Deputy Breen wasn’t so dumb after all. Warren took the phone off speaker, picked up the receiver, covered the mouthpiece with his palm, and whispered to Laurel, “Tell him you’re fine. Everything’s fine.”