She froze, Randall’s Colt trained on my chest.
Stalemate.
Beside her, Sonny sank to one knee, a flower of crimson blooming in the center of his chest. “Shit,” he said softly.
Valerie’s gaze flicked to her lover and back to me.
“He get in your way?” I asked. I noticed with an odd sense of detachment that the calf of my jeans was soaked with blood and that it had left a streak of crimson on the tan carpet.
“He’ll be all right,” she said.
“He needs a doctor.” “So do you.”
I couldn’t argue with that. The wound hadn’t begun to hurt yet, but I could tell it was a bad one because of the little pool of blood that was forming on the carpet around my boot. It felt surreal, the two of us chatting, our semi-automatics trained on each other.
“Tell me about Avery,” I said. “How did Calvin get involved with him?”
“Calvin didn’t have anything to do with it,” she said. “Amy introduced them. She said Reverend Avery reminded her of Daddy. Can you believe that?”
“I had the same thought myself.”
“He was nothing like Daddy,” she said sharply. “But she was all, ‘oh, he even has the same voice.’ It was guilt, if you ask me, for testifying against our father.”
I thought of Amy crossing a Wal-Mart parking lot, plucking a pamphlet from beneath her windshield wipers, glancing down at the photo on the front and seeing Avery’s face, so much like her father’s. Seeing a chance to relive the good parts and make up for the bad, to re-create the father she’d both loved and hated.
A dull ache settled inside my rib cage. “She didn’t have anything to feel guilty about,” I said.
“I’d expect that from you, since you helped her kill him.”
“What did Calvin think about all this?”
She gave an angry laugh. “Calvin just liked his message. He would.”
“But you went to his church too.”
She shrugged. “One big happy family. Besides, he let me sing.”
My head felt light. The room slowly listed to one side. Hang in there, I told myself, and shook my head to clear it. My left hand fumbled for my cell phone, which was still clipped to my belt.
“You’re bleeding to death,” Valerie said, calmly.
“Your concern is touching.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. It’s just an observation.”
My fingers found the keys. Punched one of them.
Another wave of dizziness swept over me, and I stumbled back, gun wavering. I steadied it.
“You’re a smart man, lover,” she said. “For a dead man. You have a good story, but you have no evidence. Cal shot himself. The girls were shot with the same gun. There’s nothing to connect either Sonny or myself to their deaths.”
I could barely hear her through the ringing in my ears. “Unless Katrina talks.”
“Katrina is a vegetable.”
“You’ve made mistakes.” My voice sounded hollow, and very far away. “The police already know I didn’t kill anyone. Where do you think they’re going to look next?”
She bit her lip and thought about it.
Sonny slumped against the wall, pressing his wound closed with one hand. Good idea. Maybe I should do that too. I would, if Valerie would put the stupid gun down.
Sonny coughed, cried out again.
“You going to let him die?” I asked.
Something in her expression warned me. A flicker of indecision. The tension in a muscle. I leaped to one side as she fired Randall’s Colt, and my finger, on the trigger, jerked.
The ringing in my ears intensified, and above the ringing, sirens, and finally the sound of my brother’s voice.
THEY’RE RIGHT ABOUT BULLET WOUNDS. I hadn’t even known I’d been hit until I saw the blood, and two hours later, I felt like someone was digging through my calf muscles with a serrated knife.
The doctor gave me two units of blood and plenty of morphine and said I’d probably be up to speed in six or seven weeks.
Randall was waiting outside, and when the doctor left, a grandmotherly nurse with Calvin & Hobbes scrubs let him in.
“You okay?” he asked.
I nodded. “I dreamed you were there at Valerie’s.”
He gave me a quizzical look. “I was at Valerie’s. You called me, remember?”
My fingers, fumbling at the keys. I’d punched three instead of Frank’s less familiar four. Or maybe some part of me had meant to call for Randall all along. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
For ruining your military career. For not salvaging my marriage. For thinking, even for a heartbeat, that Frank might have been right. “I think I lost your Colt,” I said.
“It’s just a gun. I’ll get another one. Besides . . .” He smiled. “Now you owe me.”
I leaned back against my pillow and said, “Randall, I always have.”
“HOW’S EVERYTHING?” I asked Jay.
“You tell me.” He crossed his arms and rested them on my bed rail.
“I meant, how are you feeling, and how are things with Mr. Perfect?”
“Fabulous,” he said. “Couldn’t be better. I don’t have any bullet wounds, unlike some people I know. My T-cell count is holding steady. And Eric is being a regular Prince Charming. Truth to tell, I think he’s too scared not to be.”
“Good,” I said.
“It’s a sad day when men have to be threatened to go out with me.”
“I didn’t threaten him. I merely reminded him of what he was missing.”
“For which I’m eternally grateful. But I do have one more favor to ask.”
“Never satisfied.” I forced a grin. “What’s the favor?”
“Do you think you might get through the next week without getting beaten up or shot at?”
It was a promise I was happy to make.
By the time Frank and Harry came in, I remembered to ask about Valerie.
They exchanged glances, and I read something in their faces that I didn’t want to see.
“Ah, no,” I said.
After an uncomfortable silence, Frank cleared his throat. “Good news is, the D.A. dropped the charges against you.”
“You could come back to work,” Harry said.
Frank nodded. “Now that everybody knows what happened with the Arneau bitch.”
“Maybe someday.”
I missed the force, but it was like that old saying: You can’t go home again. The force was home, but it would never be the same. There would always be the stares and the suspicions, the whispers and the smug, knowing smiles. Maybe one day I wouldn’t care. For now, though, I liked working for myself just fine.
“Just as well, maybe,” Frank said, but he sounded like he didn’t mean it. “Word is, the new chief’s planning to shake things up a lot. You take care, Cowboy.” He tapped two fingers to his forehead and turned to leave.
“Frank?” I stopped him at the door. “How’d you know I didn’t do it?”
“I didn’t know. You had me worried there for a while.”
“Yeah, but then . . . you started to believe me. You had a shitload of evidence, but you still believed me. Why?”
“I know you, Mac. The voice print made me lose sight of it for a while, but you’re not that kind of guy.” He gave me a small smile. “Besides, there was your gun.”
“My gun?”
“You might have forgotten to wipe the prints off the glasses, and you might have gotten carried away and left a message on her machine. But you would have thought to ditch the gun.”
I remembered how close I’d come to doing exactly that. Two points for doing the right thing, I thought. How often does that happen?
I SLEPT, AND WHEN I AWOKE, the room was dark and my leg was throbbing. Moonlight streamed through the slats of the window blinds and made the bed rails and the metal edges of the bedside table shine.
I fumbled for the remote, clicked on the TV, volume on low, and checked th
e time. Nine-thirty. It felt later. A news report came on, and I clicked the TV off again. Thought about how one thing leads to another, about unexpected consequences. Walter Christy fumbles beneath a little girl’s dress, and years later, Valerie aims a pistol at another child’s head.
Confluence.
Events converge. Strands meet, leading to inevitable endings. But at what point do they become inevitable? If you could unravel them at the beginning, could you change the course of fate? I squeezed my eyes closed and remembered.
“My God,” Frank says, pressing Caleb’s rambling letter into my hand. “He’s going to kill her.”
There is no time to wait for SWAT; a paranoid schizophrenic with an arsenal in his basement is holding them at bay in a normally quiet Donelson neighborhood. A sniper will eventually take him down with a single shot to the temple, but not in time for them to save Melody Wilford.
“The hell he is,” I say.
The hunting lodge squats at the end of a rutted gravel road fifteen miles from the city. Caleb’s pickup truck is parked a few feet from the front steps.
Frank climbs from the driver’s seat of his Crown Vic.
“Caleb!” he calls. “Caleb Wilford!”
He prods the front door with two fingers, and it creaks open. Caleb is inside, his daughter clutched to his chest, his hunting knife pressed to her throat.
I slip around the corner and head for the back of the lodge.
Frank says to Caleb, “You don’t have to do this.”
He keeps Caleb talking as I pick the lock on the back door and creep inside, keeps him talking as I tiptoe through the mud room, cross the kitchen, and ease into the great room, where Frank and Caleb face each other across the scuffed hardwood floor.
There is an unstrung bow propped against the hearth, and beside it, a quiver of arrows.
A floorboard creaks beneath my feet, and Caleb turns toward the sound. His blade bites into Melody’s throat, and the child lets out a squeal of fear and pain. A thin red line appears across her neck.
My fault.
Moving fast now. My fingers close around Caleb’s wrist, and I draw the knife away and up, twisting until he cries out. The knife clatters to the floor. With my other hand, I push the girl toward Frank.
My gaze follows the child—is she safe? Did we save her?—and in that split second, Caleb lunges for the quiver, snatches out an arrow, and drives it into my chest.
The pain is blinding. It drops me to my knees, drives all thought from my mind. The titanium tip enters my chest two inches to the left of my heart, tearing flesh and severing the small blood vessels in its path. A gun goes off, and Caleb Wilford and I crumple to the floor in a pool of mingled blood.
Confluence.
I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling. Thought about Melody Wilford and Katrina Hartwell, about the scars, both visible and invisible, they’d wear for the rest of their lives. I thought about Tara.
The kids I’d saved and the one I hadn’t.
I lowered the bed railing and slid my legs over the edge of the bed. A blade of pain sliced through my calf. My teeth snapped together, and a gasp whistled between them. I perched there for a moment, waiting for the pain to ebb. When it had become a dull ache, I eased onto my feet and, IV apparatus in tow, made my way down the hall. The nurse at the desk looked up when I passed. She was wearing pink Snoopy scrubs and a pink barrette in her hair.
“Can I get you something, Mr. McKean?” she asked. “Something for pain?”
“Just needed to move around a little.”
“It’s late.”
“I won’t be long.”
IT SEEMED A LONG WAY TO PEDIATRICS, and by the time I got there, my calf was throbbing. I stepped inside Katrina Hartwell’s room and let the door swing shut behind me, waited a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dimness.
Katrina made a slender lump beneath the thin blanket. Her pale skin glowed in the light from the window slats, and a tangle of wires and tubes stretched between the girl and the machines that monitored her vital signs. They made her look like an abandoned marionette.
A shadow by the window shifted, and a woman emerged from the darkness as if she had been formed from it. A sheet of cornsilk hair fell across her shoulders like Christmas tree icicles.
I had never met her, but I would have known her anywhere. Her daughter wore her face.
“Mrs. Harwell,” I said.
She gave me a wan smile. “Not anymore. Not for a long time. I’m Shirleen Roystan now.”
“Jared McKean.”
“You’re the one who saved her.” She stepped forward, touched my sleeve. “Thank you.”
I didn’t know what to say. Aw, shucks, Ma’am. It was nothing. Nothing seemed quite like enough. Instead, I said, “How is she?”
“Stable. Or so they say. There’s brain damage, but no one can tell me how much.”
“Hard to tell with head injuries sometimes. Sometimes there’s less damage than it seems at first.”
“And sometimes there’s more.” She stepped to the bed and laid a hand on Katrina’s forehead. “I’ve been standing here for hours. Just watching. Thinking about what it would be like to take her home, take care of her.”
“My son has Down syndrome,” I said. “It gets easier with time.”
“I was a terrible mother,” she said. “I’m not proud of that, but it’s true. I was never any good with kids, how am I supposed to handle a handicapped child?”
“You grieve, you go on, that’s all. You love her.”
She went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “And the expense. The medical bills alone would break us.”
“Us?”
“I remarried. He doesn’t want children at all. How am I supposed to plop a brain-damaged child in his lap?”
A sharp pain started in the back of my neck. I thought of Caleb Wilford, knife to his little girl’s throat, and knew there was more than one way to break a child’s heart. “She’s your daughter, for God’s sake.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I just can’t.”
She brushed past me, a sheen of tears on her cheeks. I should have felt sorry for her. Instead, I just felt a leaden sorrow for the daughter she was leaving behind.
I glanced toward Katrina. Her eyes were open, one skewed to the side, the other fixed on the door that was just swinging shut behind her mother.
I sank into the chair beside the bed. “It’s okay, kiddo,” I said. “You’re gonna be all right.”
She lifted one thin hand. In the light from the window, I saw a smear of blood beneath the tape holding the IV needle in place.
Such a small hand. I reached through the bars of the bed rail and slipped my hand beneath her palm. Her fingers closed over mine.
I sat beside her in the dark until her breathing became even and her grip loosened. Then I carefully slipped my hand from hers and limped back to my own room.
THE DAY I WAS RELEASED, Jay helped me hook up the horse trailer, loaded my crutches into the passenger seat, and drove to ValeSong Stables.
An auction had been scheduled for the following week, the proceeds of which would go to Valerie’s estate. Dakota, unbroke and blind in one eye, was probably destined for the killer market. Instead, I left a thousand dollars in an envelope on Valerie’s desk, loaded him into the trailer and hauled him back to Jay’s place.
Some might have called it stealing, despite the thousand bucks, but I figured she owed both of us.
Sonny Vanderhaus survived and was sentenced to life in prison. In his house, the police found the tapes he’d made of his “live” show, as well as the ones he’d used to splice together the message on Amy’s voice mail.
Ashleigh was persona non grata for a while, but nothing came of it. Apparently, she has friends in high places.
My first test came back negative, but I still don’t know for sure if Heather gave me HIV.
I try not to think about the woman I killed, the sudden brilliance of her smile, the warmth of her body, how sh
e fiddled with her braid, how she rolled her lower lip under her teeth.
And I try not to think about the early morning hours when Cal Hartwell was awakened by his sister-in-law and her lover. I wasn’t there, but I can see it in my mind as clearly as if I had been.
This is how it happened.
Sonny, for all his expertise in picking locks, hadn’t needed any of it. Valerie had a key. In his jacket pocket, Sonny had the Beretta and the Browning, and Valerie had a little snub-nosed .22.
Valerie hauled Katrina out of bed at gunpoint, while Sonny went for Tara. Both girls were told in whispers that if they made a sound, their father would be killed. Tears streaming down their cheeks, the girls were led into their father’s room, where Sonny shook Calvin awake, showed him the guns they had pointed at the girls, and ordered him to get up and get dressed.
Hands trembling, Cal complied.
When Cal was dressed and ready, the little group trooped downstairs to the living room, Sonny behind Cal with the Beretta to Tara’s head, Valerie behind Sonny with the .22 at Katrina’s.
“Get on the couch,” Sonny ordered Cal. “Sit there where I can see your hands.”
Unarmed, with guns to both his children’s temples, Cal arranged himself on the couch according to Sonny’s instructions.
“There’s a piece of paper and a pen on the end table. Take it and write what I tell you. Write ‘God forgive me.’ Slowly now. No sudden moves.”
Obediently, Cal wrote, then turned the paper for Sonny to approve.
“Good. You’re doing real well.” Still pressing the barrel of the Beretta to Tara’s temple, Sonny pulled the Browning, fitted with a suppressor and wrapped in a handkerchief, from his jacket pocket and tossed it onto the sofa beside Cal.
“If you think you can kill us both before we blow your babies’ brains out, go ahead and try.” He grinned. “I don’t think you can.”
Cal’s chest hitched with what might have been a sob, but there were no tears in his eyes. He made no move to touch the gun. The girls were silent, except for little gasps and sniffles that told their captors they were choking back tears.
“Good boy,” Sonny said. “Now, I want you to pick it up, very slowly, and place the barrel under your chin.”
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