“Is there a back door or a trap door or anything, do you know?” I said to Ethan.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I can’t . . .”
He turned his head and vomited.
Maybe it was the power of suggestion, but I felt bile rise in my own throat. I swallowed it back. My head was spinning and my lungs and throat and stomach burned. I was drenched with sweat, and my breaths were coming fast and shallow.
I pulled my wet T-shirt over my face and breathed through it. It didn’t help much.
“We’re gonna die,” mumbled Ethan.
“Nobody’s going to die.” I knelt beside him. “You hear me?”
He didn’t respond. His eyes were closed and his head was slumped on his chest.
I slapped his face. “You’re pissing me off,” I said. I slapped him again. “You are not going to fucking die on me. Got it?”
He blinked and looked up at me. “Okay, Brady. I’m sorry.”
“And stop apologizing all the time.”
He laughed softly. “It’s how I was raised.”
“We’re going to get out of here,” I said. “And you’ve got to help.”
“I just feel shitty. I can’t help it.”
“Stay right there,” I said.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
I wasn’t feeling so perky myself. I went to the front of the shed and looked up at the two rectangular windows. They were about a foot-and-a-half tall and three feet wide, and they were covered with some kind of screening material. They were a couple of feet higher than my head. Evidently their purpose was ventilation.
If I dragged over one of those wooden crates, we could climb up, push out the screen, and get the hell out of there.
Dumb, Coyne. There was a man with a detonator on the other side, and he was watching. If he saw a head pop out of that window, he’d press his button, and that would be that.
I forced my fuzzy brain to think about ventilation. Windows on just one wall wouldn’t ventilate anything. There had to be openings on the opposite wall as well.
In the dim light inside that shed, I could see that the back wall was stacked to the roofline with wooden crates. I went back there, stood beside where Ethan was sitting, and looked up.
Along the top of the crates, directly opposite the windows on the front wall, I could see dim, diffuse light filtering in.
“Move away,” I said to Ethan.
“What’re you doing?”
“Just get out of the way.”
He crawled toward the front of the shed.
The wooden crates were about four feet square, and heavy. I reached up, grabbed one of the top ones by the sides, and pulled. It took all of my rapidly-diminishing strength to edge it forward until it crashed to the floor.
Behind where it had been was a window matching those in the front wall.
I climbed up on the crates, sat on the top one, and kicked out the screen.
When I looked out, I saw that the bottom of the window was just even with the top of a chain-link fence that ran along about a foot from the back of the shed. Beyond the fence was a deep excavation. In the darkness, I couldn’t see to the bottom.
“Ethan,” I hissed. “Come here.”
He didn’t answer.
“Come on, man,” I said. “Make it quick.”
He just groaned.
So I clambered down off the boxes, went to where Ethan was sprawled, and hauled him to his feet. “You’ve got to help me,” I said.
“Right,” he mumbled.
I half-pushed, half-carried him to the pile of crates and boosted him up. “Go out the window and climb down the other side of that fence,” I told him.
I was afraid he wasn’t going to move. But he did, slowly. He crawled out head-first, and he was about halfway out when he just slipped away. A moment later I heard a thud and a grunt. Then nothing.
I pulled myself to the top of the crates and knelt there trying to catch my breath. I was drenched in sweat, suddenly drained of strength. Lights were flashing in my brain. I just wanted to curl up and go to sleep.
Gotta do it, Coyne. That man intends to blow you up. Any minute now.
I stuck my face out the window and took several deep breaths of cool, fresh air. Then I reached over to the top of the fence, and pulled myself out.
For a moment I teetered on top of the chain-link fence, gripping it awkwardly under my stomach, my front half hanging over the excavation, my back half still inside the shed. The sharp prongs on top dug into my hands and belly. My head was spinning, and when I tried to adjust my grip, I lost it, and I found myself falling.
I lost consciousness somewhere along the line, and I don’t know how long I lay there in the mud before I came to. I tried to move and found that it hurt too much.
“Hey,” I whispered. “Ethan. Where are you?”
Ethan didn’t respond.
I lifted my head to look around. There was a shadowy shape off to my left. Maybe it was Ethan—or his body.
I began to hitch myself toward him when the earth seemed to bulge underneath me. Then came a tremendous thumping noise. It felt as if I were inside a bass drum and somebody had whacked it with a baseball bat.
Then the world lit up like a million suns, and the air went out of me, and everything abruptly went black.
There were men’s deep urgent voices and bright moving lights and rough hands on me, lifting me.
Someone wiped my face with a wet rag. Then they strapped an oxygen mask over my nose and mouth, and I felt myself moving . . .
When I opened my eyes, there were red and blue flashing lights and bright flickering yellow lights. There were nervous voices and angry voices and laughing voices. Doors slammed and radios crackled and engines revved and roared, and in the distance a siren wailed.
The lights and the sounds sent darts of pain zipping through my eyes and ears into the center of my brain. I squeezed my eyes shut.
Then I felt a hand gripping my shoulder. I forced myself to crack open my eyes. A blurry face hovered over me. His mouth was moving, making sounds I couldn’t understand.
I narrowed my eyes, tried to focus.
It was Horowitz. He was frowning, asking me something.
I shook my head.
He bent close to me. “How you doin’, bud?” he said. His voice seemed to come from miles away.
I squeezed my eyes shut. I felt wretched.
“Don’t try to talk,” he said. “We’ll do that later.”
I was trying to think. Images ricocheted around in my brain, memory fragments that flashed and then disappeared before I could identify any of them. I knew I needed to share them with Horowitz.
“We got the Duffy boy,” Horowitz was saying. “Thought you’d want to know.”
I nodded. “Good. That’s good.”
Horowitz squeezed my shoulder. “Coyne,” he said. “Open your eyes. I wanna show you something.”
I forced myself to open my eyes. I blinked a couple of times, and they slowly focused.
Horowitz put his arm under my neck and helped me lift my head. “Over there,” he said.
I looked to where he was pointing. Two uniformed police officers had a man by his arms. The man’s wrists were cuffed behind his back, and they were half-dragging him to a cruiser that was parked near the steel shed.
The man had red hair.
I let my head fall back onto the gurney where I was lying. I looked up at Horowitz. “Keeler?” I said.
He nodded. “He blew up that shed. I thought you were inside.”
I think I smiled. Then I closed my eyes.
Something was going “ping-ping” and something else was beeping softly and rhythmically. When I opened my eyes, the lights were dim and the ceiling was gray, and aside from the muted pinging and beeping, the silence was soft and furry and comforting.
My head felt swollen to the size of a beach ball. My body felt as if it had been trampled by all the bulls in Spain.
Something touche
d my arm. I slowly turned my head.
Evie.
“Hi, honey,” I whispered.
She smiled. “Hi.”
“I’m alive, huh?”
She bent over and kissed my forehead. “You’re going to be fine.”
“What hospital is this?”
“Beth Israel.”
I closed my eyes and tried to think. Beth Israel . . .
“You work here, right?” I said. It was a great relief to make that connection. It meant my brain worked.
“Not yet,” she said. “But it looks like I’m gonna.”
“What time is it?”
“About ten.”
I frowned. “Day? Night?”
“Night. It’s Tuesday night, honey. You’ve been here since about three this morning.”
“And you?”
She nodded. “I’ve been here since then, too. Detective Horowitz called me. He thought I should come right away. He said you might . . .”
I saw tears well up in Evie’s eyes.
“I might what?” I said.
“You . . . your lungs and your heart. They didn’t know how seriously they’d been affected by those poisonous fumes. And . . . and they were worried that you might have brain damage.”
“You mean even more than before?” I said.
She smiled through her tears.
“I ache all over,” I said.
“You fell on some rocks,” she said. “Got a nasty concussion. But it was those fumes they were mainly worried about.”
“So how does someone know when their brain has been damaged? My brain feels pretty fuzzy. But it usually does.”
“Who loves you?” she said. “This is a brain test.”
I groped around, and she grabbed my hand and held it tight.
“You do,” I said. “That’s an easy one.”
She lifted my hand to her mouth and kissed my palm. “Then as far as I’m concerned,” she said, “your brain is working perfectly.”
“What about my heart and lungs?”
At that moment a nurse came into the room. “Awake, are we?” she said.
“He just woke up,” said Evie.
The nurse bent over me. “How do we feel, Brady?”
“I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I feel great.”
“Really?”
“Well, aside from my head and my body.”
She smiled. “What else is there?” She looked about fifty. Short steely-gray hair, blue eyes, a spattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, wide friendly smile.
“Okay,” I said, “so I don’t feel so hot.”
The nurse pried up my eyelids and shone a little flashlight into my eyes, one at a time. Then she examined the various bags that were dripping stuff through the IV into the needle in my wrist.
“Well?” I said when she paused to write onto her clipboard.
“You are occupying a bed that some sick person needs,” she said.
“So I can go home?”
The nurse smiled. “You are in Intensive Care. One step at a time, huh?” She turned and said something to Evie.
Evie came to the side of the bed. “I’ve got to go now,” she said.
“Aw . . .”
“Be a good boy,” said the nurse. “She wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place. But she made such a fuss, and that bossy policeman put his two cents in, and since it looks like she’s going to be running this place . . .”
“I know how she is,” I said. “You can’t argue with her.”
Evie kissed me on the lips. “I’ll be back.”
“Wait,” I said. “I left Henry home. He’s probably shitting on my rugs.”
Evie smiled. “Julie picked up Henry this morning. He’s fine.”
After Evie left, the nurse adjusted my pillow and held a plastic glass for me so I could sip some water through a straw.
She said a doctor would be in to see me in the morning, then turned to leave.
“Wait,” I said.
She stopped in the doorway.
“What about Ethan?” I said. “Your patient. Ethan Duffy. He was with me.”
She shook her head. “I don’t believe we have a patient named Ethan Duffy.”
The following morning they moved me to a different bed in a private room and removed all the tubes from my body.
Horowitz came in around noontime. He pulled up a chair next to my bed. “You look like shit,” he said.
“So do you.”
“I’ve been working on this fuckin’ case,” he said. He needed a shave and his hair was rumpled and his eyes were bloodshot and his shirt was wrinkled. It looked like he hadn’t slept for a couple of nights.
“What about Ethan?” I said.
He blew out a breath. “They’ve got him over to Mass General. Touch and go, last I heard.”
“Is he gonna be okay?”
Horowitz shrugged.
“Find out for me, will you?”
Horowitz rolled his eyes. “I got nothing better to do.”
“Please,” I said.
He let out a big sigh, then got up and left my room.
He was back five minutes later. “Pick up your phone,” he said.
The phone was on the rolling table beside my bed. I reached around, lifted the receiver, and said, “Yes? Hello?”
There was a hesitation. “Brady?” It was Ethan’s voice.
“Ethan? How are you? Are you all right?”
“I’m okay.”
“Are you really?”
“Well, I feel pretty crappy. But they say I’m going to be fine. How’re you doing?”
“Me?” I laughed. “Oh, I’m fine.”
“You saved my life,” he said.
I glanced at Horowitz. He was sitting in the chair beside my bed with his arms folded, gazing up at the ceiling, trying to look bored.
“I’m the one who nearly got us killed,” I said to Ethan.
“No,” he said. “I owe you.” He paused. “I got a nurse here wagging her finger at me. Gotta go.”
“You take care,” I said.
“You, too.”
I hung up the phone and looked at Horowitz. “He’s okay.”
He nodded.
“So it was Keeler, huh?” I said.
“Yep.”
“I thought his voice was familiar,” I said. “He tried to disguise it, and I couldn’t pin it down, but even so, I feel stupid that I didn’t . . .”
“It’s all over, bud,” said Horowitz. “Don’t worry about it. Somebody like me should’ve glommed onto Keeler, too.”
“It was him who set all those fires, killed Walt Duffy and Ben Frye, trapped me and Ethan in that shed?”
“Yup. Killed Conrad Henshall, too.”
“That was the third body?” I said. “The one they found in Southie?”
“Right.”
“Why? Why was he killing people?”
“He’s not ashamed of any of it, I can tell you that. He thinks he’s the good guy.” Horowitz cleared his throat. “Seems that Keeler had a daughter who died of leukemia a couple years ago. She was nine, only child. His wife had developed some plumbing problems, couldn’t have more kids. The little girl was sick for years, in and out of hospitals, medical bills up the wazoo. There was other sickness in his neighborhood, too, besides Keeler’s daughter and wife. Him and his neighbors figured it was this fertilizer plant, poisoning their wells. They wanted to get the goods on them, shut them down, recoup their medical expenses. Nail ’em to the wall, you know? So they tried to hire a lawyer. Guess what?”
I nodded. “No lawyer would take on the case.”
“Exactly.”
“It would be a contingency case,” I said. “A few lawyers up against some mighty corporation. Years and years of litigation, millions of dollars to hire experts, take depositions, gather evidence, build the case—if there was a case—with poor odds of ever winning enough to break even. Lawyers aren’t public servants.”
Horo
witz shrugged. “Keeler didn’t care for lawyers to begin with, being a cop. So now he’s grieving over his daughter, worried about his wife, furious at this fertilizer plant, and frustrated by every lawyer he bumps into. It drives him nuts. Pushes him over the edge.”
“So he burns down buildings and finds a lawyer he can antagonize,” I said. “Me.”
“That’s about it. He hooks up with this owl bunch and starts setting fire to buildings similar to that fertilizer place he figures killed his daughter. If he can’t sue ’em, he can burn ’em down. Keeler’s very good at that, being an arson expert. Then when you come on the scene, he’s killing two birds with one stone. Getting back at the polluters and the lawyers at the same time.”
“But what about Walt Duffy and Ben Frye? Why’d he have to kill them?”
“Duffy was the main man of SOLF,” he said. “The organizer. The ringleader. Just like Agent Randall explained to you. The FBI was all set to subpoena him. They’d been conferring with arson people and the local cops, so Keeler was in on it. He got to Duffy first. Killed him to shut him up, took his computer and cell phone. Duffy must’ve said something about those letters before Keeler whacked him on the head.”
“What about the letters?”
“It wasn’t really the letters that Keeler was after,” Horowitz said. “Duffy had slipped a couple pages of computer printouts in with them. The printouts listed the e-mail addresses of what looks to us like every member of the Spotted Owl Liberation Front in the northeast. Including Keeler’s. Duffy had you deliver it to Benjamin Frye, who was sort of his second-in-command, so he could carry on after they nailed Duffy.”
“So Walt must’ve told Keeler what he’d done.”
“According to Keeler, he threatened to go after Duffy’s son, so Duffy spilled the beans to him. Keeler didn’t want that list with his e-mail address on it floating around.”
“So then,” I said, “Keeler went after Ben, but by the time he got to him, he’d given the letters, along with the printouts, back to me. Ben never even knew the printouts were there. That’s when Keeler started haunting me. Calling me on the phone, mugging me in my parking garage, hoping I still had the letters in my briefcase.”
“And when he realized you didn’t,” said Horowitz, “he snatched Ethan Duffy, hooked you up with that cell phone, and sent you on your scavenger hunt. He figured you’d do anything to get Ethan back.”
A Fine Line Page 22