The Guilty

by David Baldacci

  Cradling Tyler against his chest, he managed to pull out his phone and dialed 911. The call did not go through. He glanced at the upper screen.

  No service.

  He heard movement behind him.

  She was coming.

  And as he looked back Robie could see that she had a flashlight.

  He ran to his left, knifed between two trees, and then ran a zigzag route toward where he knew the Pearl River was.

  As a boy and then a teenager, he had sought out the serenity of the water when his father had driven him to near tears.

  Now though, there would be no peace at the Pearl.

  But there might be escape.

  He redoubled his efforts. He had listened for but had not heard a gunshot. He prayed with all his heart that Reel was still alive. He didn’t really have a plan for going back to get her, but he knew that that was the ultimate goal. Yet he and Tyler had to survive first.

  The terrain here had changed over the course of two decades, and he found himself stumbling and nearly falling time and again.

  And then the clouds parted, allowing the full moon to illuminate his surroundings better.

  That was good. And bad.

  Good that he could see.

  Bad that it would be easier for Victoria to find him and Tyler.

  He had not even had time to think about the astonishing fact that his high school sweetheart was now his stepmother. Or that she had been the killer they’d been searching for this whole time.

  Ordinarily, Robie would have simply attacked and killed his opponent.

  But he had no weapon, a useless limb, and a two-year-old in his one good arm.

  And a partner who desperately needed medical attention.

  And an armed serial killer right behind him.

  He cleared the last line of trees and reached the mossy, wet bank of the Pearl.

  He looked left, then right, and then straight ahead. The river here was barely a hundred yards across. But as he stepped closer Robie could make out a pair of eyes just above the surface of the water glinting in the moonlight. As a native Mississippian he knew what that was.

  A gator. Gators could hunt pretty much anytime, but night was when they did their real damage.

  He looked behind him. The steps were growing closer. He could see shafts of her flashlight cutting through the trees.

  When Victoria reached them she was going to just shoot them. He didn’t know which one of them she would kill first, him or Tyler.

  He looked down at the little boy, who was shaking so badly it was like he had been plunged into Arctic waters. Robie had no idea how much emotional trauma all this had caused the two-year-old, but he knew it had to be a lot.

  He took another step toward the water, drawing within a few feet of the bank. The pair of eyes slowly slid out of sight. As they did so he was able to see part of the body, including the tail. The thing was just waiting, and praying—if gators did so—that Robie would step into the water. That battle wouldn’t take long. Even with two good arms and no little boy in tow, Robie would be hard put to fight off what looked to be a full-sized gator on the blood hunt. In his current situation, it would be hopeless.

  The steps behind him were growing closer.

  Her voice called out. “Will, this is just delaying the inevitable. I always sized you up as being brave. Come out now and I’ll kill you first. That way you won’t have to see Ty die. That’s the best deal you’re going to get.”

  Tyler now started shaking so badly that it was all Robie could do to keep hold of him.

  He backed to the edge of the water. There was nowhere else to go, except into the Pearl.

  So how did he want to die?

  By Victoria’s bullet?

  Or a gator’s bite?

  He shifted Tyler to his bad arm. The pain was so awful that Robie had to clench his teeth and fight the waves of nausea that swept over him. He squatted down and picked up a fist-sized rock. Not a terribly potent weapon, but better than nothing. He hefted it in his hand. He had been an accurate passer as a high school quarterback. And though this was more shotput than pigskin he was not going to have to heave it as far.

  He listened to the sounds coming from in front of him.

  And also to the lapping of water behind him.

  The gator apparently had no patience. If Robie would not come into the water, the gator would come onto the land to earn his dinner.

  Tyler squirmed more.

  Robie whispered, “Ty, please hold still. We’ve got one chance with this. Just one.”

  His bad arm was crumpling under the weight of the boy.

  “I need to set you down, Ty, okay?”

  The boy immediately gripped Robie with all his strength. The shock wave of pain hit Robie like a bolt of lightning. He felt a huge swath of scar tissue tear completely away. His shirt became wet as the blood started to flow from where the tear had reached the healthier part of his flesh.

  “Ty, just for a second, son. This is our only chance. Please. Please do this. Trust me. Will you? Trust me.”

  Tyler slowly nodded his head.

  Robie bent down until Ty could reach his feet down and touch the ground.

  “Now get behind me,” said Robie. He looked back. The gator’s eyes were visible again, but he was at least fifty feet from their side of the bank.

  Robie gazed back toward the front. The footsteps were almost there.

  The flash of light broke through the trees.

  The next second there she was.

  Victoria illuminated them with her flashlight.

  “Very disappointing, Will. Very.”

  Robie had hidden the rock behind him. His grip tightened around it.

  He figured they were separated by fifteen yards. Too far.

  She had to come closer.

  “There’s a gator in the water,” he said.

  She took a few steps toward him and smiled.

  “So, your choice. Gator bait now, or he gets you after I shoot you. If I were you I’d take the bullet first.”

  “I’ve told Tyler to run as soon as you fire. You’re too far away to shoot him from that distance. He’s too small.”

  “Well, that’s easily remedied.”

  She took another step forward. And then another.

  Robie figured ten yards now, maybe less. Thirty feet. He had thrown footballs through tire rings at a greater distance than that.

  “Why are you doing this, Laura?”

  “I told you not to call me that!”

  “But that’s your name. It’s not Victoria. It’s Laura. A woman I loved. A woman I wanted to share my life with.”

  “You’re lying. You left me.”

  “I thought you didn’t want me, Laura. If your dreams were shattered, so were mine. I thought we’d be together. I really did.”

  “But your father told me—”

  “He was wrong. He didn’t know what he was saying. He was pissed at me for leaving him. He just took it out on you. He shouldn’t have said what he did.”

  She glared at him, her eyes suddenly glistening with tears, the grip on the gun now shaky.

  “You can kill me if you want, but don’t hurt Tyler. None of this is his fault.”

  “It’s your fault!” she blurted out.

  “That’s right. It is. This is not about him.” He reached out to her and inched forward. “Just give me the gun, Laura. You don’t have to kill anybody else. We’ll get you the help you need.”

  She smiled, and the look on her face was truly paralyzing. “You asked back at the shack how this was going to end, Will. Well, not by my giving you my gun. It’s going to end like this.”

  She drew closer still and her finger went to the trigger guard. This was it.

  Tyler screamed.

  Robie whirled.

  He saw the armored head coming out of the water, barely two feet from them. He had lost track of the gator that could swim faster than any Olympian.

  Yet as Robie eyed the grue
some creature, everything seemed to slow down for him. His heartbeat eased, his blood pressure dropped a few points. His breathing calmed.

  Cold zero.

  His little brother was not going to die in the jaws of a gator.

  Robie took aim, with his naked eye instead of through optics, and threw the stone, not at Victoria but at the gator. His aim was as good as it had been back when he was flinging touchdowns for Cantrell High. The stone hit the gator directly in the eye with great force. Blood spurted out of the socket. The creature’s jaws snapped open but it backed away, and the now-half-blinded reptile slid into the water once more.

  Robie turned to Victoria. She was within six feet of him now, covering the distance in one long stride.

  Two-year-old Tyler could have pulled the trigger and killed him at that range.

  And Robie was out of weapons. And ideas.

  The muzzle was right in his face now.

  He looked at the woman and her smug, triumphant expression.

  “I hope it was worth it,” he said quietly.

  “You’ll never know how much. Who loves you, Will? Surely not me.”

  The shot rang out.

  Robie braced for the impact. He imagined himself falling to the dirt, nothing but blackness for a future.

  He opened his eyes in time to see Victoria still staring at him.

  But the smug expression was gone, replaced with surprise.

  And blood was flowing down the side of her face, reaching her lips and then passing to her chin, like a river following its banks.

  Robie felt something warm on his face. He touched the spot and then pulled his hand back to reveal the blood there.

  Her blood.

  The next instant Victoria toppled sideways and hit the dirt, the gun falling from her dead hand.

  Robie staggered back as Tyler started screaming. He reached the boy and lifted him up, his injured arm surprisingly numb.

  He looked to his left.

  And saw the person.

  The gun was still pointed at where Victoria had been standing a few moments ago.

  Then it slowly lowered.

  “Dad?” said Robie in disbelief. He had thought that it would be Reel, with some Herculean effort, standing there.

  For one long moment Dan and Will Robie stared at each other over the distance of a fatal shot fired. Then Dan dropped his pistol, hurried over, and hugged his sons with the little strength he had left.

  Chapter

  78

  WAKE UP, SLEEPY boy.”

  Robie slowly opened his eyes, the effects of the anesthesia fading as he did so. He hadn’t slept this well in years.

  As his vision focused Sheila Taggert came into view. She was not in uniform.

  “Doc said you came through it just fine,” said Taggert.

  Robie slowly nodded. A lot had happened since his father had appeared at the river’s edge and fired that shot. Part of it was blurry and part of it was crystal clear.

  They had gone back to the shack, gotten Reel, and driven off in the same ambulance that Robie’s father had been loaded into back at the Willows.

  While his father drove with Tyler buckled in the seat next to him, Robie had called Taggert and triaged Reel on the way to the hospital. She had been immediately taken into surgery.

  It was only when Reel was safely away that Robie had collapsed from his own blood loss and what was later determined to be a broken clavicle and a perforated artery in his arm that had come close to rupturing.

  He had been stabilized and then taken by medevac chopper to Jackson for the surgery that had permanently fixed his injuries.

  Robie focused more fully on Taggert. In a croaky voice he said, “Jessica?”

  “She’s going to be fine. She came out of surgery fine, Will.”

  He closed his eyes and let out a long breath. When he reopened them he said, “My dad showed up in an ambulance? How?”

  Taggert drew up a chair and sat down next to him.

  “Well, the way my colleague laid it out to me, your daddy sat up in that ambulance, took the deputy’s weapon, and made everyone get out, and then he drove off in the damn thing.”

  “But how did he know where we were?”

  “I have not been made privy to that information.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “At home. With Ty.”

  Robie slowly nodded again. Though the anesthesia was receding he still felt in a fog. It was disconcerting. He didn’t like it. “Is Ty okay?”

  “Physically, yes. Emotionally? It might take a while. I got briefed a little, but you’re really the one who knows everythin’ that happened. We’re goin’ to need a statement from you when you feel up to it.”

  “I know,” said Robie groggily. “Don’t worry. I won’t be forgetting a single detail. Ever.”

  “So, Laura Barksdale, huh? Who would have ever thought?”

  “Yeah,” said Robie. “Who would’ve thought?”

  * * *

  A week later Robie was brought back to Cantrell and spent several hours with Sheriff Monda and Agent Wurtzburger. Evidence linking the crimes across the various states was compared with forensic evidence taken from Victoria’s body. The results matched, and the case was closed on each of them.

  The woman had indeed been busy.

  He was reunited with Reel the next day.

  She was in a wheelchair, looking pale and tired. The shot fired by Victoria had done more internal damage than was first thought. A full recovery was expected to take at least a few more weeks. Clearly not fast enough for her.

  After Robie filled her in on everything they sat together in a room at the Cantrell police station.

  “Mississippi did not turn out to be so good for us,” said Reel, wincing slightly as she adjusted herself in the wheelchair.

  “No, it didn’t.” Robie fell silent and studied the floor. His arm was back in a sling and would be for a while.

  “What?” she finally asked.

  “I left you behind, Jess. I…”

  “You had no choice, Robie. You were between a rock and a hard place. You took Ty. You saved him from that…monster.”

  “I was going to come back for you.”

  “I had no doubt. I only wished I could have been the one to shoot her.”

  “When I saw my dad I’d never been more stunned in my life.”