The Novels of Nora Roberts, Volume 3

by Nora Roberts

  “Back away!” he shouted. “You just toss your gun down and back away. I’ll kill her. You know I will.”

  “I know you will.” He could hear the shouts behind him and the fading music as the band marched on without a clue. There were cars and trucks parked at the curb here, and buildings had side doors that would almost certainly be unlocked.

  He needed to keep Ed’s focus on him, before the man could use his panicked brain enough to think about dragging his hostage into a building.

  “Where are you going to go, Ed?”

  “Don’t you worry about that. You worry about her.” He jerked the woman so that the heels of her jogging shoes bumped the sidewalk. “I’ll put a bullet in her brain.”

  “Like you did Max.”

  “Did what I had to do. That’s how you survive here.”

  “Maybe.” There was sweat on Ed’s face. Nate could see it glinting in the sunlight. “But you won’t walk away from this one. I’ll drop you where you stand. You know I will.”

  “You don’t throw that gun down, you’ll have killed her.” Ed dragged the weeping woman back another three feet. “Just like you killed your partner. You’re a bleeding heart, Burke. You can’t live with that.”

  “I can.” Meg stepped up beside Nate, aimed her gun between Ed’s eyes. “You know me, you bastard. I’ll down you like I would a sick horse, and I wouldn’t lose a wink of sleep over it.”

  “Meg,” Nate warned. “Ease back.”

  “I can kill her and one of you first. If that’s what it takes.”

  “Her probably,” Meg agreed. “But she doesn’t mean anything to me. Go ahead, shoot her. You’ll be dead before she hits the ground.”

  “Ease back, Meg.” Nate lifted his voice now, and his eyes never left Ed’s. “Do what I tell you, and do it now.” Then he heard a chaos of voices, stumbling feet. The crowd was surging forward, Nate knew, with curiosity, fascination and horror outweighing simple fear.

  “Drop the weapon and let her go,” Nate ordered. “Do it now, and you’ve got a chance.” Nate saw Coben come around the back and knew someone was going to die.

  Hell broke loose.

  Ed whirled, fired. In a flash, Nate saw Coben roll for cover and the splatter of blood from the bullet that caught him high on the shoulder. Coben’s service revolver lay on the sidewalk where it had flown out of his hand.

  Nate heard a second bullet thud into the building beside him and the sound of a thousand people screaming.

  They barely penetrated. His blood was ice.

  He shoved Meg back, sent her sprawling to the ground. She cursed him as he stepped forward, his gun steady. “Anyone dies today,” he said coolly, “it’ll be you, Ed.”

  “What are you doing?” Ed shouted as Nate continued to walk toward him. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “My job. My town. Put down the gun, or I’ll take you out like that sick horse.”

  “Go to hell!” With one violent move, he shoved the weeping woman at Nate and dived behind a car.

  Nate let the woman slide bonelessly to the sidewalk. Then he rolled under another car, came up street-side.

  Crouched, he glanced over to check on Meg and saw her soothing the woman whose life she’d claimed didn’t mean anything to her. “Go,” she snapped out. “Get the bastard.”

  Then she began to belly forward toward the injured Coben.

  Ed fired, the bullet exploding a windshield.

  “This ends here. It ends now!” Nate shouted. “Throw out your gun, or I’ll come and take it from you.”

  “You’re nothing!” There was more than panic, more than rage in Ed’s voice. “You don’t even belong here.” There were tears. He broke cover, firing wildly. Glass shattered and flew like lethal stars; metal pinged and rang.

  Nate stood, stepped into the street with his weapon lifted. He felt something sting his arm, like a fat, angry bee. “Drop it, you stupid son of a bitch.”

  On a scream, Ed swung around, aimed.

  And Nate fired.

  He saw Ed clutch his hip, saw him go down. And continued forward at the same steady pace until he’d reached the gun Ed had dropped as he’d fallen.

  “You’re under arrest, you asshole. You coward.” His voice was calm as June as he shoved Ed onto his belly, yanked his arms behind him and cuffed his wrists. Then he crouched, spoke softly while Ed’s pain-glazed eyes flickered. “You shot a police officer.” He glanced without much interest at the thin line of blood just above his own elbow. “Two. You’re done.”

  “We need to get Ken up here?” Hopp’s query was conversational, but when Nate looked up to see her coming toward him, crunching broken glass under her dressy shoes, he saw the tremor in her hands, her shoulders.

  “Couldn’t hurt.” He jerked a chin toward the people who’d jumped over, crawled under or simply shoved barricades aside. “You’re going to need to keep those people back.”

  “That’s your job, chief.” She managed a smile, then it frosted as she stared down at Ed. “You know, that TV crew got damn near all of this on camera. Cameraman must be certifiable. One thing we’re going to make clear in the upcoming interviews on this unholy mess. This one’s the Outsider now. He’s not one of us.”

  She shifted deliberately away from Ed, held out a hand to Nate as if to help him to his feet. “But you are. You sure as hell are, Ignatious, and thank God for it.”

  He took her hand and felt that light tremor in hers as she squeezed his hard. “Anybody back there hurt?”

  “Bumps and bruises.” Tears trembled in her eyes, were willed away. “You took care of us.”

  “Good.” He nodded when he saw Otto and Peter working to move the crowd back.

  Then he looked over, found Meg crouched in a doorway. She met his eyes. There was blood on her hands, but it appeared she’d fashioned an expert field dressing on Coben’s wounded shoulder.

  She brushed a hand absently over her cheek, smearing blood. Then she grinned and blew him a kiss.

  THEY SAID IT WAS FORTUNATE no lives had been lost, and injuries to civilians, while plentiful, were mostly minor—broken bones, concussions, cuts and bruises all caused by falls and panic.

  They said property damage wasn’t extensive, broken windows, windshields, a street light. Jim Mackie, with considerable pride, told the NBC affiliate reporter he was going to leave the bullet holes in his pickup.

  They said, all in all, it was a hell of a climax to Lunacy, Alaska’s May Day Parade.

  They said a lot of things.

  Media coverage turned out to be more extensive than the injuries. The violent and bizarre capture of Edward Woolcott, the alleged killer of Patrick Galloway, the Ice Man of No Name Mountain, was national fodder for weeks.

  Nate didn’t watch the coverage, and settled for reading reports in The Lunatic.

  As May passed, so did the interest from Outside.

  “Long day,” Meg said as she came out on the porch to sit beside him.

  “I like them long.”

  She handed him a beer and watched the sky with him. It was nearly ten and brilliantly light.

  Her garden was planted. Her dahlias, as expected, were spectacular, and the delphiniums speared up, deeply blue, on five-foot stalks.

  They’d reach taller yet, she thought. They had the whole summer, all those long days washed with light.

  The day before, she’d buried her father, at last. The town had come out for it, to a man. So had the media, but it was the town that mattered to Meg.

  Charlene had been calm, she thought. For Charlene, anyway. She hadn’t even played to the cameras but had stood—as dignified as Meg had ever seen her—with her hand gripped in The Professor’s.

  Maybe they’d make it. Maybe they wouldn’t. Life was full of maybes.

  But she knew one sure thing. Saturday next, she would stand out here, in the light of the summer night, with the lake and the mountains in front of her, and marry the man she loved.

  “Tell me,” she said. “Tell m
e what you found out today when you went down to talk to Coben.”

  He knew she’d ask. He knew they’d talk it through. Not just because of her father. But because what he himself did, who he was, mattered to her.

  “Ed switched lawyers. Got a hotshot from Outside. He’s claiming your father was self-defense. That Galloway went crazy, and he feared for his life and panicked. He’s a banker, and he kept banker’s records. He’s saying he won the twelve thousand that suddenly showed up in his account in March of that year, but they’ll have witnesses that say different. So it won’t fly. He says he had nothing to do with the rest of it. Absolutely nothing. That won’t fly either.”

  There was a cloud of mosquitoes near the edge of the woods. They buzzed like a chain saw and made him grateful for the bug dope he’d slathered on before coming outside.

  He turned his head to kiss her cheek. “Sure you want to hear this?”

  “Keep going.”

  “His wife’s turned inside out, so she’s spilled enough to rip his alibis for the time of Max’s death and Yukon’s. Put that in with the yellow spray paint in his tool shed, and Harry stating Ed bought some fresh meat from him the day we had our little encounter with the bear. Weave it all together, you’ve got a tight little net.”

  “Added to all that is the fact that he held a gun to a tourist’s head, shot a state cop and our chief of police.” She gave his biceps a quick kiss. All of which,” she added, “was caught for the record by the NBC cameraman.” She stretched, one, long, sinuous move. “Great TV. Our brave and handsome hero shooting the bastard’s leg out from under him, while he himself was wounded—”

  “Flesh wound.”

  “Standing that bastard down like Cooper in High Noon. I’m no Grace Kelly, but I get hot just thinking about it.”

  “Gosh, ma’am.” He slapped at a sparrow-sized mosquito that got through the dope. “It wasn’t nothing.”

  “And I looked pretty damn good myself, even when you sent me to the damn sidewalk.”

  “You look even better now. The lawyers will try to work it . . . diminished capacity, temporary insanity, but . . .”

  “It won’t fly,” Meg finished.

  “Coben’ll wrap him up—or the DA will. Got their teeth in it now.”

  “If Coben had listened to you, you’d have wrapped him up without all that show.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You could’ve killed him.”

  Nate took a small sip of beer and listened to an eagle cry. “You wanted him alive. I aim to please.”

  “You do please.”

  “You wouldn’t have done it either.”

  Meg stretched out her legs, looked down at the worn toes of her ancient gardening boots. Probably needed new. “Don’t be too sure, Nate.”

  “He’s not the only one who can bait. You were razzing him, Meg. Pushing his buttons so he’d pull the gun off her and try for one of us.”

  “Did you see her eyes?”

  “No, I was looking at his.”

  “I did. I’ve seen that kind of scared before. A rabbit, with its leg caught in a trap.”

  She paused to rub the dogs when they galloped up. “If you tell me, no matter how many fancy Lower 48 lawyers he hires, that he’ll go to jail for a long, long time, I’ll believe you.”

  “He’ll go to jail for a long, long time.”

  “Okay, then. Case closed. Would you like to take a walk down by the lake?”

  He drew her hand to his lips. “I believe I would.”

  “And would you then like to lie down on the bank of the lake and make love until we’re too weak to move?”

  “I believe I would.”

  “The mosquitoes will probably eat us alive.”

  “Some things are worth the risk.”

  He was, she thought. She rose, held out a hand for his. “You know, in a little while, when we have sex, it’ll be all legal. That going to take any of the spark out of it for you?”

  “Not a bit.” He looked up at the sky again. “I like the long days. But I don’t mind the long nights anymore. Because I’ve got the light.” He wrapped his arm around her shoulder to draw her close to his side. “I’ve got the light right here.”

  He watched the sun, so reluctant to set, glimmer on the cool, deep water. And the mountains, so fierce and so white, mirrored their eternal winter on the summer blue.