The Twenty-Three 3 (Promise Falls)

by Linwood Barclay

  He was waving around a gun.

  People started screaming. Those who had been standing next to gurneys either dropped to the floor or used their bodies to shield the sick, except for the woman in the hijab, who stood tall and straight and stared directly at her accuser.

  Carlson immediately drew his own gun, and as he pointed it at the man, he shouted, “Police! Drop your weapon!”

  The man did not. He said, “Arrest her!”

  “Sir, you need to lower your weapon right now.”

  “Don’t you see?” he said. “What’s happened today? It’s an attack! First it was the drive-in, and now this.” The man’s eyes were filling with tears. “My mother is dying.”

  Carlson’s voice came down a notch, but remained firm. “Sir, you need to lower your weapon immediately. If what you’re saying is true, then that’s good, that’s good, you bringing it to my attention.”

  The woman glanced at him, anger and fear in her eyes.

  Carlson met them for half a second, then said to the man, “You can be certain a full investigation of your allegations will be made. If you turn out to be right, I wouldn’t be surprised if they want to give you some kind of medal. But so long as you’re waving that gun around, we can’t get started on any of that.”

  “They get off,” the man said. “They always get off.”

  “We’ll have to make sure nothing like that happens.” Carlson moved closer, extended his left hand. “Why don’t you just hand your weapon over to me? Let’s put this behind us. We’re all under tremendous stress today. We’re all on edge.”

  The man’s eyes darted back and forth between Carlson and the woman, but the gun remained trained on the woman.

  And Angus Carlson had his weapon trained on the man.

  “Please, sir. I don’t know how good a shot you are, but if you pull that trigger, there’s a chance you may hit someone else. Maybe someone else’s mother. Or father. A son or daughter. And I have to tell you, if you pull that trigger, I’m going to have to do the same. I’ll have to shoot you. And even though I’ve had training, there’s a good chance I’ll hit someone I’m not supposed to, too.”

  Everyone was frozen. No one in the hall was breathing.

  “Think about your mother. Think about when she gets well. She’s going to need you. And how are you going to help her with her recovery if you’re sitting in jail someplace waiting to go to trial?”

  Arlene said, “He’s right. What would your mother want?”

  Carlson gave her a look that said I don’t need your help.

  But Arlene continued. “If my son shot an unarmed woman, for any reason, I would be ashamed of him.”

  A silence that felt eternal followed. But it didn’t go on for more than five or six seconds.

  At which point the man said, “I don’t care.”

  He raised the gun a quarter of an inch, looked at the woman in the hijab, squinted.

  Carlson fired.

  The shot was deafening, and in its wake came a chorus of simultaneous screams. The bullet caught the man in the upper thigh and blew him back, as though he’d been brought down by an invisible football player. As he fell, the gun slipped from his hand and clattered to the floor.

  Carlson dived for it, scooped it up, then reached into his pocket for a set of plastic cuffs.

  “You shot me!” the man said. “Jesus Christ, you shot me.” The screams lasted only a few seconds, and now some people, at least those who were not on gurneys, had switched to applause. Carlson holstered his own gun, tucked the man’s into the pocket of his sport jacket, then, as blood streamed from the man’s thigh, rolled him onto his side so that he could cinch his wrists together behind his back.

  “The good news is,” Carlson said, “we don’t have to worry about how long it will take to get you to the hospital.”

  A pretty good quip, considering his voice was trembling, and his heart pounding so hard it felt like it would come right out of his chest.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Duckworth

  ONCE the water treatment plant had been evacuated, I put a call in to Rhonda Finderman.

  “If you haven’t already,” I told her, “you need to call the governor. If those Homeland Security guys who were here looking at the drive-in explosion can be called back, send them to the water plant. Tell them to bring their hazmat suits. The state has a spills response program for dealing with hazardous material, which is exactly what it looks like we’ve got here.”

  “Is that the chief?” Randall Finley, who was several steps away from me, was trying to listen in on the conversation. “Because I have a complaint!”

  Finderman said, “Who’s that?”

  “Never mind. Did you get what I said?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And I just got a call from the state environmental unit. They think they may have a handle on what’s in the water.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Sodium azide.”

  “Jesus, yes. How did you know?”

  “It’s spilled all over the floor in the plant, around where the fluoride tanks are.” I lowered my voice. “I’ve been downplaying terrorism with all the shit that’s been going on, but if this isn’t a terrorist act, I don’t know what is. But what the hell is sodium azide?”

  “It’s bad, bad stuff,” Finderman said. “At least, when it’s added to water, it is. They use it in automobile air bags, among other things. When it’s triggered by an electrical charge, it turns into nitrogen gas and blows up.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s not how it’s being used here.”

  “It’s got no odor or taste, and if it’s added to water, it causes all the symptoms we’ve been seeing at the hospital. Convulsions, respiratory failure, dropping heart rate.”

  “What can they do for it?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Say again?”

  “Nothing, Barry. There’s no magic pill, no antidote. You either live or you don’t. Severity of symptoms depends on exposure, or how much is ingested. If what you swallowed didn’t quite kill you, you could end up with permanent lung or brain damage.”

  “Whoever put this into the water killed one of the workers here,” I said.

  “Who?”

  I told her.

  “What’s killing one guy when you’re ultimately planning to kill hundreds, or thousands?” Finderman asked.

  She had a point.

  “What’s the death toll?” I asked her.

  “It’s gone up. It was a hundred and twenty-three, but I just heard we’re revising that up to one hundred and thirty-one.” A pause. “I lost my niece. Esme. She was seventeen. My brother and his wife, they’re beyond devastated.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I want who did this,” Rhonda said. “Whoever he is, or whoever they are, I want them.”

  “There’s more,” I said.

  “More what?”

  I told her about Lorraine Plummer, the murdered student at Thackeray College. “I had to leave the scene,” I said regretfully. “I couldn’t get Wanda or anyone else to get there. We need a crime scene unit there.”

  “We’ve had to bring in coroners from other jurisdictions,” the chief said. “It’s like we’ve had a flood, a hurricane, and locusts all at once. A few years’ worth of bodies in a single morning.”

  “The Thackeray thing, even in light of what else has happened today, is big, Chief.”

  “Go on.”

  “Our guy is back.”

  “What guy? What—no, come on.”

  “Wanda will have to do a full autopsy, but I had a good look at the body. The wounds are the same as on Olivia Fisher and Rosemary Gaynor.”

  “Goddamn it, Barry. When are you going to let this go?”

  “I’d be more than happy to take you to look at the body and let you judge for yourself.”

  There was quiet at the other end. The Fisher and Gaynor murders were evidently still a source of friction between us, but I’d already admitted to myself th
ere was plenty of blame to go around.

  “Duncomb’s dead, and Gaynor’s in jail,” the chief said. “Your two lead suspects.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Shit,” Finderman said. “If you think it’s the same killer . . . I trust your judgment.”

  “There’s nothing I can do here right now,” I told her. “I can’t even have anyone get near Tate Whitehead’s body. The whole area has to be closed off until it’s been given an all clear. I’m going to spend the next few hours working the college homicide.”

  “Just keep in touch,” Rhonda Finderman said.

  Finley, who’d been watching me this whole time, said, “I want to talk to her! I want to talk to her right now!”

  I put away my phone.

  Finley waved a finger at me. “You’re going to be sorry when I’m mayor.”

  “We don’t agree on much, but I think you’re right about that.”

  “I don’t forget.”

  I closed the distance between us, put my face in his. “I don’t forget, either, Randy. I never forget. The other day, when you called me to check out all those dead squirrels, and you hinted around, wondering whether I had anything on anybody, I thought, no, I don’t play that game. I don’t have anything on anybody. Except maybe that’s not true. Maybe I have something on you.”

  He took a step back. “Me? What the hell have you got on me?”

  “I was on the phone a few minutes ago and learned something kind of interesting. Something interesting about you, Randy.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I heard you did your good deed before coming back up here. You set up by the falls and handed out hundreds of cases of bottled water.”

  “Yeah,” he said, puffing himself up. “I did. You should have come by. I’d’ve given you one even if you are a horse’s ass.”

  “It’s kind of amazing how you were ready to go so fast.”

  Randy shrugged. “You do what you have to do when people are in trouble.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “How’d I know what?”

  “How’d you know you were going to need so much bottled water?”

  He was shaking his head. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “You cranked up production this week. Before any of this happened.”

  “Where the hell did you hear that?”

  I’d heard it from David Harwood. A comment just in passing. But it had been bothering me for a while now.

  “Did I hear wrong?” I asked.

  Finley’s mouth opened like he was going to say something, but he hadn’t figured out yet what it was going to be.

  “Yeah, that’s wrong,” he said.

  “So it’d be okay if I started asking around, checked that out. Because if it’s true, it raises a question. Why would Randall Finley, just as he’s on the comeback trail, start bottling more of his famous springwater on the eve of a catastrophic poisoning of the town’s water supply?”

  “You fat fuck,” he said.

  “You want to make life difficult for me?” I asked him. “Go ahead. Meanwhile, I’m going to go whisper in the ear of one of those CNN or New York Times reporters swarming all over town. Then I wouldn’t even have to start nosing around. I’d just let them do it for me. See how long it takes before someone puts a camera in your face and asks if you’d actually be willing to let hundreds of people die to advance your half-assed political career.”

  “You son of a bitch,” he said.

  “I didn’t mind ‘fat fuck.’ I gotta admit, that’s pretty accurate. But now you’re casting aspersions on my mother.”

  “You saying I did this?” he asked, pointing a thumb back at the plant.

  “Did you?”

  I should have been ready. I should have seen it coming. But I’m not as young as I used to be, and I’m the first to admit I could be in better shape. So when Randy charged at me, I didn’t move as quickly as I could. I didn’t take a defensive stance, like shifting my weight forward so he’d have a harder time taking me down.

  But take me down he did.

  He rammed his body into me, put his arms around me, and tackled me to the ground.

  “You fucker!” he said.

  We turned slightly as we fell, which was just as well, because it meant I hit the pavement on my side, my left shoulder taking a lot of the impact. If I’d fallen straight back, I’d have probably cracked my head open. And I’d already hit it on a curb a few days earlier when that Thackeray College professor had gotten the better of me.

  Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this anymore.

  We rolled on the parking lot, a couple of overweight—Randy, less so, I admit—middle-aged guys duking it out. Not the sort of fight you could sell a lot of tickets to.

  I was worried he’d go for my gun, which was holstered and attached to my belt on my left side. It wasn’t that I believed Randall Finley actually wanted to murder me, but in heated moments, sometimes people lose their heads. So I had to deal with this quickly before things spiraled even more out of control.

  He’d lost his grip on me when we went down, so my arms were no longer pinned. I made a fist with my right hand, swung it as fast and as hard as I could, and aimed it where I thought it would do the most good.

  At Randall Finley’s nose.

  Our former mayor’s nose was something of a legend in Promise Falls. It had been punched before—at least two times that I knew of—and both times by his former driver, Jim Cutter. The second time, Cutter had broken it.

  I connected. Not quite dead center, I’m afraid. A little off to one side. And I didn’t hear the crunch of broken cartilage that I was hoping for. But it did the trick.

  Finley yelped in pain, put both hands over his face. Blood trickled out from under them and from between his fingers.

  “Jesus!” he screamed. “Not my nose!”

  “Should be used to it by now,” I said, getting to my knees, and then forcing myself back up onto two feet. Finley lay on the pavement, writhing.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “Did you do it?”

  “You’re crazy, you know that?” he said, taking his hands from his face, looking at the blood as he drew himself up into a sitting position. “Batshit crazy!”

  “You know your way around this water treatment plant,” I said. “Ottman told me. You drop by here regularly.” I dusted myself off. “Is that what you did with Tate Whitehead? Jumped him? Before you went in there and poisoned the water?”

  I didn’t know that I believed what I was saying, but as the words came out of my mouth, I realized the man I was looking at was not just an asshole that I’d had more than enough of.

  He was a suspect.

  “It was for the summer!” Finley said.

  “What was for the summer?”

  “The increase in production! Demand goes up in summer, just when we have people off on holidays! We up production in the spring to be ready, you dumb fuck!”

  “That’s a good story,” I said. “I guess we’ll see how that holds up.”

  I didn’t offer to help him to his feet. And I didn’t have the energy to charge him with assaulting a police officer. I could always do that later. So I left him there on the pavement and headed for my car.

  I was going to take a short break from the Promise Falls water tragedy and go three years into the past.

  It was time to think about Olivia Fisher. It was time to go back to the beginning. I just hoped Walden Fisher, whom I’d last seen in the emergency ward of Promise Falls General, was well enough to talk about what had happened to her.

  THIRTY

  THERESA and Ron Jones were already living in the house next to Samantha Worthington’s when she moved in with her son, Carl. Theresa and Ron had bought their place fifteen years ago, but the owner of the property next door rented it out, so they had seen people come and go over the years. There was a couple about ten years ago Theresa and Ron were pretty sure were
dealing drugs out of the house, and they thanked God when that crew moved out after two years. There was that father and son who lived there for a while, who liked to repair motorcycles in the front yard. They sure weren’t sorry to see them go, either.

  But they had liked Sam and her boy. The most noise they ever heard coming through the shared wall was when Carl and his mother carried on conversations between floors, shouting at each other—not in an angry way, just trying to be heard—or when Carl was playing some war-type video game, explosions and machine-gun fire rattling the dishes in their cupboards.

  Their front doors were not much more than thirty feet apart, so they ended up seeing one another quite often, making small talk, chatting about the weather. But Sam Worthington never revealed much about herself, other than that she was raising her boy on her own, and that she managed a Laundromat. The little they knew about her life before Promise Falls, they had learned from short conversations with Carl.

  The most interesting tidbit being that his dad was in jail back in Boston.

  They also knew the two had been through quite a lot lately. There’d been something on the news about an attempted abduction, and a shoot-out—a shoot-out, for crying out loud!—at her place of work.

  But even after all that, they saw Sam and Carl going in and out of the house, like, hey, life goes on.

  Until two nights ago. Thursday night.

  That was when they saw Samantha Worthington running in and out with three suitcases, jamming them into her car. Carl was lugging a heavy bag made of canvas that looked to Theresa like a rolled-up tent.

  Ron Jones, watching some of this from the upstairs bedroom window, was pretty sure he saw a shotgun among the items Sam slipped into the car. She had tried to disguise it by rolling it up in a blanket, but he saw the tip of what looked like a barrel poking out the end.

  “I’m going to just step outside and see what’s going on,” Theresa said.

  She acted as though she’d forgotten something in the glove compartment of her old Chevy Astro van. She had the passenger door open, was rooting around in the folder that held her ownership and insurance, when Sam came by with another suitcase.