Run the Risk

by Scott Frost

  “Lieutenant.”

  Harrison was on the floor at my feet where he had crawled after the explosion. I knelt down and reached out toward him. He was slumped on his knees like an exhausted marathoner. The right side of his face was covered with blood and small pieces of debris.

  “I need your help,” I said.

  “I can’t hear so good,” he said weakly.

  I reached out until I found one of his hands and I guided it up to the motion detector. His fingers felt lifeless and clumsy for a moment and then they seemed to come alive as they began to gently study the glass of the detector.

  “It’s cracked.”

  I nodded. “Is the wire exposed?”

  He studied it for a minute.

  “Yes.”

  “How much?”

  “Almost entirely.”

  He drew a heavy breath, spitting blood out of his mouth as he exhaled.

  “There’s a tool kit in the squad. You need to find some tape and seal the crack.”

  “I can’t see.”

  Nothing came back for a moment.

  “I’m blind. I can’t go to the squad.”

  He took a labored breath, then another. “We’ll do it another way.”

  I reached up and felt another drip of mercury forming on the detector. “How?”

  The act of forming a plan seemed to draw the last of his strength. “I need you to move right next to me like we’re embracing.”

  His breath caught up short and he rested for a moment.

  “The wire from the detector connects on the inside of the vest. I have to reach it from underneath.”

  I slid over next to him. The blood on the side of his face slid across my cheek. The odor of his singed hair clung to his scalp.

  “Now raise your arms . . .” His voice faltered again. “Put them around my neck so I can reach under the . . .”

  His voice weakened and slipped away.

  “Go on,” he whispered.

  I started to but stopped and shook my head. “I can’t ask you to do this.”

  I started to pull away but he held me with what little strength he had.

  “You’re not asking . . . I am. And I need to do it now or we’re both dead.”

  I started to shake my head and he reached up and gently touched the side of my face.

  “Please, let me do this.”

  I raised my arms and put them around Harrison’s neck. He slipped a hand under the vest and eased it up behind the pocket of explosive until he found what he was looking for.

  “Jesus,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  His head dropped forward for a moment as if in defeat.

  “There’re five wires here, but I can’t follow where they go. There could be a secondary fuse I haven’t found.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “He’s playing with us again.”

  “I’ve got to be certain.”

  “Cut them all,” I whispered.

  Harrison shook his head. “I can’t do that. There could be a sequencer, I cut the wrong lead, I do it in the wrong order.”

  “Give me the clippers. I’ll do it.”

  Harrison took a breath, and I felt the muscles in his shoulders tense. “I’m not letting you do that.”

  I leaned into the side of his face.

  “I don’t have time. It’s not your fault. . . . Let me go.”

  He raised his head slightly and whispered in my ear, “Hold me as tight as you can.”

  “No.”

  I felt his fingers find all five wires and guide them into the clipper blades.

  “It’ll be okay,” he said gently.

  “Don’t,” I pleaded.

  “As tight as you can. Do it now.”

  I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled his face to mine. I felt the stubble of his beard on my cheek, the taste of blood on my lips. I reached up and placed my hand on the back of his neck and closed my eyes.

  “Now,” I whispered.

  He nodded silently and gently exhaled, then I felt the muscles of his hand tighten around the grip of the cutters, and heard the faint metallic click of the wires as the blades sliced through them.

  Like the end of a recurring nightmare, a second passed and then another, expecting it to return, but it didn’t.

  Harrison eased his hand out from under the vest and I heard the clippers fall to the floor. He put his arms around me and we clung to the rhythm of our breathing.

  “Thank you,” I whispered into his damaged ear, but he didn’t hear me.

  His arms began to relax, and then he slumped into unconsciousness in my arms. Outside I heard the sound of the first squad’s siren as it turned onto the block and headed for my house. I opened my eyes and looked into the blurry light filtering through the windows in the kitchen where Chavez lay wounded and a young patrolman was dead.

  It was over. My daughter was safe. A few miles to the south in the heart of Pasadena the parade was moving safely down Colorado Boulevard, just as it had done for 115 years. And around the world two hundred million people would be watching, safe and happy, staring in wonder at the power of the imagination to create such beautiful things.

  “They don’t know,” I whispered.

  27

  “I WANT YOU to tell me what you see,” the doctor said as he began to slip the bandages from my eyes.

  A week had passed since Gabriel had plunged me into darkness. The doctor assured me that the eyes were one of the quickest-healing organs in the body. “Miracles of nature, really,” he called them. But he couldn’t do anything about what they had already witnessed. Would my world ever look the same after Gabriel had walked through it? He’d taken my daughter from me. He had played with me like a cat tossing a mouse around a living room floor. He killed seven people. He nearly killed Traver, Harrison, and Chief Chavez, and then I let him go. I set him free to get my daughter back. I let him walk away. A cop’s worst nightmare.

  “You had a gun to his head.”

  It was the voice that whispered in my ear as I lay blinded in my bed at night. I could have ended it, but I didn’t. Maybe I wasn’t strong enough. Maybe I just wasn’t a good enough cop. Or maybe the part of me that didn’t pull the trigger when I had the chance was the only part that Gabriel had not touched—that hidden querencia of the soul where love exists separate from the rest of daily life and the injuries it inflicts. The part that loves Lacy, and would give everything for her to live. Even Gabriel’s freedom.

  That was his gift to me. I would watch my daughter become a woman. I would have a chance to undo all the missteps I had made as her mother in her first seventeen years of life. I would be better. And in return for this gift, I’ll carry a burning ember in my heart that knows wherever Gabriel goes, whomever he touches, whomever he tortures, he did because I chose it.

  What happened to Gabriel?

  What I knew for certain was that he drove away from my house in the dead officer’s cruiser and parked it three blocks from the parade route on Colorado Boulevard. One witness placed him watching the parade, waving to the passing floats and taking pictures. Another report sighted him at the Long Beach airport. Neither was confirmed. He had vanished.

  The French consulate had no record of one of their citizens entering the country matching his description. No passport record exists. No visa, no work permit, nothing. The partial prints we had of him matched no record on file with the FBI or any state agency in the country. School records across the country were searched. Arrest, military, and birth records, even fishing licenses. Every possible paper trail was studied and they led nowhere.

  He was, as he told us in his journal, the boy in the class photograph whose name and face we’ve all forgotten. And until the last day that he takes a breath on this earth I will never be finished with him. Every time the telephone phone rings with the report of a body, I will wonder. Every time I detect a familiar aftershave passing in a crowd, I will turn. Every ti
me I hear the cries of victims’ families, I will remember.

  I will always be looking for him. And I will always feel his eyes watching, waiting for the moment he whispers a single, terrible word in my ear.

  Tell you what I see? You don’t want to know what I see.

  The doctor gently took hold of the last bandage and lifted it off my face.

  “Now open your eyes,” he said.

  I hesitated for a moment, the bandages’ phantom presence lingering as if they were a permanent part of my anatomy. Then I slowly let the light back into my life. The colors and light were muted as if I were caught halfway between a dream and consciousness. Then gradually the room began to come into focus and I saw my daughter’s face.

  “Mom,” Lacy said.

  I stared at her, examining every feature on her face, looking for the baby I had held in my arms, and the girl I had watched grow, but she was gone. The face I was looking into was that of a young woman. The soft contours of childhood had been drawn tight and carried the burden of her ordeal.

  “I’m here, Mom,” she said.

  I looked into her eyes and saw that Gabriel had not touched everything. Her fierce strength burned as intensely as ever.

  “Fuck him,” she whispered.

  I felt my heart skip a beat and knew instantly that she would be all right, just as I knew that she was no longer the same. For better or worse, this was where we begin our new lives together and leave behind the mother and daughter we had once been.

  “Remember us?” said a voice behind her.

  Traver, my old partner, was leaning over Lacy’s shoulder. Big Dave, my protector. A bandage still covered portions of his head, his face carried dark blue streaks of bruises and swelling, but his great strength and spirit were clearly intact. To his left Chief Chavez sat in a wheelchair, his face red and swollen, his burned hands covered in bandages, an IV taped to his arm. But he was smiling. He would be all right, too.

  I looked over Lacy’s right shoulder and there stood Harrison.

  Our eyes met and I started to say his name but words left me. We were back in my house, my arms wrapped around him as he saved my life. I could feel the steadiness of his hands as they undid Gabriel’s terrible handiwork. No act of love had ever been as intimate or more powerful. I held his eyes for another moment. Who were we to each other now? In saving me was he also saving his young murdered wife, whom he not been able to protect? Or had he just saved his own life, and given himself the future that had until that moment eluded him?

  Was he my partner? Or was he to be more than that? I noticed a subtle spasm of pain in the corners of his eyes and I quickly looked over the rest of his body for signs of injuries. A wound, drawn like a contour on a map, ran from his ear down along the line of his jaw. Another, the shape of a crescent moon, touched the corner of his left eye. He appeared to favor the right side of his body slightly. A faint tremor in the fingers of his right hand gave away the presence of more unseen damage.

  “Alex,” he said gently, using my Christian name for the first time.

  His voice nearly took my breath away and I closed my eyes trying to breathe, but I couldn’t. The doctor slid his chair over in front of me and shined a small light briefly into each of my eyes.

  “Now tell me what you see, Lieutenant.”

  Tears slid out of the corners of my eyes and down my cheeks. I glanced at the three men who had stood by me and risked everything to be there.

  “What do you see?” the doctor repeated.

  I reached out, took hold of Lacy’s hand, and looked into her beautiful face.

  “I see everything,” I said softly.

  THIS WORK would not have been possible without the assistance of a number of people. Kathryn Hall, with her fine ear and sharp pencil. Beth Bohn, Steve Fisher, and Gregg Almquist, with their continued belief and support. Elaine Koster, whom I can simply never thank enough. And David Highfill at Putnam, who took the leap with Delillo.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is

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