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  All of that, though, was just a typical ER crazy war story. What had just happened was something else. She’d always thought of Charlie Raycroft as a fairly capable cop but his prisoner had gotten loose anyway, fortunately not killing him in the process. The rookie cop, Hanson, had been very, very lucky, one round stopped by his Kevlar vest and the other missing the vest but fracturing his elbow.

  That left Frank, and all she knew so far was that there’d been some kind of shooting outside the hospital as well. Maybe Frank had been involved, maybe not, but there was a growing certainty inside her that he must have been. That was just who he was, and all she could do in the meantime was her job. There was no use at all in talking to Angie until she had something definite to tell her. It was nearly half an hour before she ran into somebody she could trust herself to ask.

  Jimmy Slade was just coming in from outside. He was in a hurry and she could see splashes of blood on his scrubs. She was about to say something but she didn’t have to. He must have seen the expression on her face because he stopped just long enough to gently place a huge, reassuring hand on her arm.

  “He’s okay, Ellen.”

  60

  The only good news so far was that it looked like both Charlie Raycroft and the Hanson kid were going to make it. Cunningham had looked genuinely relieved when Brent had relayed the news, but now he’d apparently put those concerns on the back burner and moved on. So had Brent, for that matter, although the difference was he felt guilty about it.

  “Are you sure about this?” It was the second time Ed Cunningham had asked the same question.

  “Yes, I’m sure.” And that’s the second time, Brent thought, that I’ve given him the same answer. Maybe this time it’ll sink in.

  Cunningham didn’t say anything, kept staring into the mirror and scrubbing his face. He’d long since cleaned away any vestige of blood but he just kept scrubbing and staring into the mirror. They’d commandeered an empty room in the hospital and locked the door, opened it only long enough for Julie to drop off a fresh change of clothes she’d picked up at Ed’s house. Brent had simply taken the clothes from her and closed the door on her questions. Now he looked at his watch.

  “You’re good, Mayor,” Brent told him. Addressing Cunningham by his official title usually got the best results.”If you want to get up there we have to hurry. We haven’t got much time.”

  Cunningham nodded, seemed to snap out of it. He draped the suit jacket on the back of a chair and slid the dress pants off the hangar from under the white dress shirt and tie. One leg at a time, Brent thought as he watched him pull on his pants. Cunningham didn’t have an imposing physical presence but Brent felt somewhat relieved now that he’d off-loaded the problem. The trouble was that the problem itself still seemed insurmountable.

  “Where’s Stallings?” Cunningham asked.

  “Still outside. Randall and Comeau are with him.”

  Something else to worry about. Randall had barely gotten back to the station when the call came in. Comeau was supposed to be off duty but he’d found out anyway. Maybe Lori had called him.

  “Can they hold him?”Cunningham asked.

  “Who?”

  “Stallings,” Cunningham said impatiently. “Can they hold him?”

  Brent just stared at him, flabbergasted. He wasn’t a fan of Frank Stallings but there had to be a limit somewhere.

  “A couple of people in the parking lot saw the whole thing.” Brent said finally. “It’s cut and dried. If Stallings hadn’t been there you’d be dead. Once they’re done talking to him the best thing to do is just let him go.”

  “Then we’d better get up there before he does.”

  Brent hesitated, then took the plunge, “Mayor, this is going to come out. I don’t see what we can do.”

  “What we can do,” Cunningham shrugged into his jacket, “is calm the hell down and find a way to handle this. Angie Lowry is a beautiful young woman who’s been through a terrifying experience. She was understandably hysterical and incoherent when she was brought in. Anybody would be. You got that?”

  Brent nodded, not sure what else to say.

  “I asked you a question.” Cunningham was staring at him.”Have you got that?”

  “Too many people know about this,” Brent said stubbornly. “They’re going to ask questions.”

  “Then we do what everyone else does.” Cunningham reached for the door. “We lie.”

  61

  “Are we done here?” Frank asked, “I’ve got to go check on Angie.”

  Something passed between Kelly Randall and Rich Comeau, perhaps an unspoken decision.

  “Yeah, Frank,” Comeau said finally “We’ll still need you to come in later but we’re done for now.”

  Frank had no intention of walking into the station without a lawyer, but he just nodded and started toward the hospital. He was on the way through the main doors when Kelly fell into step beside him.

  “Keeping an eye on me?” he asked.

  “I know where Angie’s room is, Frank. I don’t think you do.”

  She was right, and even though Frank had spent years witnessing the effects of shock in others he’d been slow to recognize them in himself. It wasn’t the first time.

  The elevator was crowded so there was no chance to say anything else. They both ignored the glances from the people around them and Frank just waited through a couple of floors until Kelly got out on the third, then followed her down the corridor until she pushed through the doors to the ward. He was about to ask her what room Angie was in but then he looked down the hallway and realized he didn’t have to. She’d drawn a crowd.

  “Maybe you should stay out of this,” he said, putting a hand on Kelly’s arm.

  “Maybe I should,” Kelly smiled, “but I won’t.”

  Brent, Ed Cunningham, and Scofield were standing in the hallway just outside Angie’s room. If this was Brent’s idea of protective custody they were doing a piss-poor job of it. Frank was halfway there before they even noticed him. Cunningham said something to Brent and then turned away, headed for the exit at the far end of the corridor.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Frank demanded.

  Scofield finally moved, got in front of him and grabbed a fistful of Frank’s shirt. Frank just reacted, brought his left hand across his chest and grabbed the kid’s massive wrist, yanked it down. Scofield’s hand came free and Frank chopped the knife edge of his hand down hard between his fingers, seized the index and middle fingers and bent them back hard just as he stepped forward and hooked his legs out from under him. Scofield hit the floor on his back and Frank planted his foot on his throat, put just enough weight on it to let him know that trying to move would be a bad idea.

  “Frank!” Brent Williams roared. He still hadn’t moved.

  “This boy here,” Frank said quietly, “is he going to do anything else stupid or is he done for the night?”

  “Scofield!” Brent barked. “Go check on Raycroft.”

  Frank took his foot off the kid’s throat but kept his eyes locked on him. Scofield grimaced, got awkwardly to his feet and tried a face-saving glare at Frank on the way out. Frank looked over at Brent, noticed for the first time that there’d been an audience. An intern and a nurse were standing wide-eyed in the doorway to Angie’s room. Frank wasn’t sure how long they’d been there or when they’d opened the door.

  “I ought to arrest your ass for that, Frank,” Brent said.

  “Go for it.”

  Brent’s face reddened, from rage or embarrassment or both. For a moment Frank thought he might call his bluff. He wasn’t sure what he’d do if Brent tried, and from the look on Brent’s face he wasn’t sure either. He was probably trying to figure out which side the witnesses would come down on, what the optics would be. Frank decided it would be close. Kelly Randall didn’t give them time to find out.

  “Not in here, gentlemen.” Kelly stepped past Frank, put herself between them. “Frank, I don’t think Chief Williams
will object if you go in and assure yourself that Ms. Lowry is all right. Am I correct in that, Chief?”

  It took a moment for Brent to nod his agreement. Frank was already brushing past the people at the door.

  • • •

  “Are you all right?” Angie asked.

  There was blood caked on his shirt and Frank realized he should have made an effort to clean himself up.

  “That’s my line,” he shrugged, “not yours. How are you feeling?”

  “I’m all right. I think they gave me something to help me sleep.”

  “Best thing for you,” Frank said, chiding himself for the banality of it.

  “They said you shot him.”

  “I had to.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “Is he dead?” she asked.

  Suddenly Frank didn’t feel like talking. He could see the drugs were starting to kick in and she wouldn’t remember anything he said anyway. She was fighting to keep her eyes open. He could see the faint glisten of tears.

  “Get some rest,” he told her. “I’ll just sit here for a minute.”

  Frank had gone way past the adrenaline rush. Now he was edging into the painfully familiar shutdown, the time when his nerve endings would blunt themselves against a hard unyielding wall. He was far too accustomed to the feeling and all he wanted to do now was go back to his house and collapse on the couch. It was entirely possible that Brent Williams had other ideas.

  Frank wasn’t sure what was waiting for him outside and decided that at least for now he didn’t care. He didn’t think Brent had the balls to come in after him, so he decided to just sit there in the silence. He didn’t know what the hell Brent and Cunningham had wanted with Angie, but she’d been through enough already. Cunningham was an ambulance chaser by nature, always making a point of showing concern when something happened to one of Strothwood’s eligible voters. If Scofield hadn’t overreacted none of the rest of it would have happened. Frank watched her sleep, found himself wondering if what had happened to her was somehow his fault. He shook off the thought, finally levered himself out of the chair before he dozed off himself. He leaned forward, careful not to wake her, and kissed her lightly on the forehead. In the back of his mind he could hear Wagner laughing at him.Then he went as quietly as he could to the door and stepped out into the corridor, not sure what to expect. No one was there, but Ellen Tanner was on the phone at the nurses’ station. She looked up and saw him coming, said something into the phone and then hung up.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “I work here, remember? I came up to tell your girlfriend you were all right, but I guess you beat me to it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I heard about your little tiff with Williams.”

  “Who told you that? Kelly?”

  “It’s all over the hospital. Kelly got Brent out of here a couple of minutes ago. She did leave you a message, though.”

  “She did?”

  “Yep. She said to go the hell home and stay there or she’ll find you and shoot you herself.”

  62

  He was better than this. Or at least he had been, once.

  Henry Whittaker’s moment of clarity had come very late, and it had been precipitated by a phone call, a thinly veiled warning from Ed Cunningham.

  As usual Cunningham had tried to couch the warning in terms of appealing to Henry’s self-interest, but also as usual it was really about protecting Cunningham. There was a deft balance in it that had worked before, and Henry could see why Cunningham thought it would this time.

  The phone call had brought it all back, and it was too much. He kept replaying things with Karen, over and over, searching for the pivotal moment when he’d lost her, a moment when if he’d done or said something different, declared himself with some foolish romantic gesture, he somehow could have kept her for himself and away from Stromberg and alive. No matter how many times he rewound things the outcome was always the same. All he could think of to do was putting Stromberg away but it would never be enough because Karen would still be dead.

  He hadn’t thought about Tommy Nicholls in years, had done his best to drive the whole sorry episode from his memory. The case had been assigned to him by the court, an indication of how far he’d fallen in the space of only a few months following his divorce. He’d been drinking hard and everyone in the Strothwood legal community knew it. Even Henry had been surprised that he’d been given the case at all. Someone had put in a good word for him somewhere, even though no one in their right mind would have chosen him to defend a traffic ticket. No way the kid could have known that. He was just young and from somewhere else, a deer caught in the headlights. Henry could still see the blind, hopeful expression on the boy’s face the first time Henry walked in with his big-time metal briefcase and rumpled thousand dollar suit and bloodshot eyes.

  Tommy, not Tom and not Thomas. According to the documents in Henry’s briefcase the boy wasn’t a boy at all. Early twenties, old enough to vote and old enough to drink and old enough to get killed several times over in whatever military adventures the government had in mind for his particular generation.

  Henry remembered feeling an unreasonable flash of envy when they met, despite the fact that Tommy was sitting, desperately and justifiably shit-scared, in a barren puke yellow-green interview room in a strange police station in a strange town. Even with all that Henry couldn’t help thinking the kid had everything he didn’t. He was almost startlingly handsome, gifted with the clean, angular features of some kind of soap star and dark hair just long enough to fall away on either side of a part in the middle. Even sitting down the boy looked like he’d be taller than Henry by a couple of inches and the orange jumpsuit couldn’t entirely mask the athletic build of a free safety. He looked like nobody’s idea of the cynical drug pusher the charge said he was.

  Even so it looked like they lights-out had him. Routine stop, more than enough grass in the car to justify the charge. Only months earlier Henry would have looked at it as a challenge, a chance to work one of his patented theatrical miracles in open court, but by this time he’d fallen so far that he’d just tried to get the interview out of the way and maybe work out some kind of deal to minimize the kid’s sentence.

  He hadn’t even been able to do that. Instead he’d gotten himself run over by the tag team of Landers, Cunningham and Harrison, the old established firm, almost literally steamrolled into the ground by a flood of circumstantial evidence and solemn testimony at a trial in which Henry had been little more than a bemused and hungover spectator.

  He hadn’t spent a lot of time with the kid, couldn’t remember much about the case itself, any more than he could remember a lot of things that had happened then. He couldn’t remember Tommy ever mentioning his family and certainly not a brother. Yet here the man was, staring back at him in a years-old prison photograph on his computer screen. He was dead now, only a few hours ago, and Cunningham’s phone call had sounded somehow threatening and hopeful all at the same time, a ludicrously convoluted plan to paper over all the connections between what Tommy’s brother had done and the seminal event that had triggered them. No chance at all, Henry thought.

  The connection would have been made by Brent Williams, nothing more than a routine search for next of kin, and like the dutiful serf he was he would have gotten the warning out to Cunningham. Tommy was long dead now, and Henry felt a wave of shame that in all the time since he’d never given the kid a second thought, never wondered if he’d been paroled and, against all odds for someone with a prison record, actually gotten out and made some kind of life somewhere.

  A lot of things he did remember were shrouded in the kind of alcoholic fog that had marked those few months in Henry’s life, a miasma of jealousy, sadness, and rage that had marked the denouement of his short and disastrous first marriage. Tommy had just blundered into it, and the one person he should have been able to get on his side didn’t have anything resembling his A game. The kid had been set up a
nd Henry had just sleepwalked through the whole thing, blindly helped kick off a serpentine chain of events that had led to Karen’s death.

  Henry had been set up too, nothing more than unwitting window dressing for a Middle America show trial. The only remaining question was what to do about it before he turned out the lights.

  63

  Angie was still trying to process what had happened. It was incredible how quickly everything could change, how close she’d come. As terrifying as the whole episode had been she’d come through virtually unscathed, the exception being an ugly bruise on her upper arm where the man had seized both her arm and the chair to stop her from falling.

  Saving me for something else, she thought. She’d spent almost all of her life being devoured by men’s eyes and she had felt his doing the same thing. He hadn’t raised his voice to her, not once, but there’d been death in it. She wondered now, if Frank hadn’t come for her, how far she would have debased herself to survive. It was a question she didn’t want to answer, but underneath it all she knew it would have been her only chance and she would have taken it. Then he probably would have killed her anyway.

  Now she was back from the brink and back in the real world, and knew that she owed Frank an explanation that he would never hear. The threat was gone, the circumstances had changed, and so had her priorities. It was still about survival, but survival of a different kind, debasement of a different kind, but with the promise of a meaningful outcome.

  Material girl, she scolded herself. She’d almost literally fought her way out of the hospital, first with Ellen Tanner and then with the doctor Ellen had summoned to talk sense to her. He was in his thirties, vaguely Middle Eastern with the inevitable five o’clock shadow and an unpronounceable name, and he had little time for female patients with their own ideas about whether they were ready to be discharged. He’d tried simply ordering her to stay and had looked almost comically surprised when she blew up at him. He finally just muttered something dismissive to Ellen Tanner and then walked out. Angie had instinctively looked at Ellen for some kind of support, perhaps commiseration at how rude the man was, but Ellen had simply left the room and come back moments later with the paperwork.