Choose Me

by Tess Gerritsen

  Jack frowned at the scratches on Charlie’s face and the bruise over his left eye. “What happened to you?”

  Charlie made a dismissive shrug. “Slipped in the shower.”

  “Even after we installed those grab bars?”

  “I wasn’t quick enough to catch myself.”

  “Actually, I think I’ll have that drink.” Jack lowered himself onto the barstool.

  Charlie pushed himself to his feet. He hobbled over to the cabinet where he stored the liquor, then crossed to another cabinet near the stove to fetch a glass. Jack tensed as Charlie opened the cabinet door. On the top shelf of that cabinet was where Charlie kept his Smith & Wesson .45. But all Charlie removed was a glass.

  “Ice?”

  Jack allowed himself to breathe. “Straight up is fine.”

  Charlie poured whiskey and set the glass in front of him. “So what’s up?”

  “Have you seen Maggie? She hasn’t been home.”

  “Did you try calling her?”

  “She doesn’t answer.”

  Charlie hobbled back to the counter and refilled his own glass.

  “You’re limping,” Jack observed.

  “I told you. I took a slip in the shower.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Charlie turned to look at Jack. “Why’re you staring at me like that?”

  “You know that Commonwealth student who died last week? Taryn Moore?”

  “Yeah, it’s all over the news. Committed suicide, they say.”

  “The police have changed their minds. They think it might be murder.”

  “That right?” Charlie took another swallow of whiskey. “Based on what?”

  “Based on a text that was sent from my cell phone.”

  “Come again?”

  “The police think I killed Taryn Moore because of a text message sent from my phone. It said I’d meet her at her apartment that night. Funny thing is, I never sent that message. I never went to her place. And I certainly didn’t murder her.”

  He gave Jack an impassive look. “Okay.”

  “But you did. Didn’t you, Charlie?”

  “How the hell do you figure that?”

  “That Friday you were at our house for dinner. When I went downstairs to do your laundry, I left my phone on the windowsill in the dining room. Taryn must have texted me while you were sitting there, right next to my phone. You saw the message. You know my pass code is Maggie’s birth date. You’re the one who texted her back.”

  Charlie took another sip of whiskey, set down his glass, and wiped his mouth. He then gave Jack a look so poisonous that Jack shrank away. “I knew weeks ago that something was going on between you two. When Maggie said a girl came in to see her, I saw the way you reacted when she said the girl’s name. Taryn Moore. I’m not blind. I have an instinct about these things, Jack, and I always have. I hoped I was wrong about you. About her. Then I looked up her Facebook page. I saw her photo.” He shook his head in disgust. “You’re not the first man to let a pretty face ruin his life. But I thought you were a better man than that.”

  “But I’m not the one who murdered her. I’m not the one who sent her that text. You went to her apartment to kill her, Charlie. You threw her off the balcony.”

  “Two out of three.”

  “Two out of three what?”

  “Yes, I sent the text, then deleted it so you wouldn’t know. And yes, I went to her apartment. Didn’t even need to hunt down her address. There it was, right in your contacts. But I didn’t go there to kill her.”

  “You sent that text to frame me.”

  “No. I did it to fix the fucking mess you made! I did it for you, goddamn it. And for my daughter and my grandchild. I did it to save your family. But I most certainly did not go there to kill her.”

  “Then how the hell did she end up dead?”

  “I went to apologize on your behalf. I told her I was sorry for all her problems, blah, blah, blah. Said I was willing to pay for an abortion. She refused.” He stood up, went to the freezer, and dug around through the packages of frozen food. He took out an envelope and slapped it onto the counter where Jack was sitting.

  “What’s this?”

  “Open it.”

  Jack opened the envelope, and a banded brick of cash fell out. He stared at the bundle of fifty-dollar bills lying on the counter.

  “Five thousand dollars,” Charlie said. “I keep it in the freezer for emergencies.”

  “You were going to give this to her? To pay her off?”

  “She told me to go fuck myself. She didn’t want my money. I told her I didn’t know whose baby it was, and I didn’t care. But I’d give her the benefit of the doubt that it was yours. I told her that I loved my daughter and didn’t want your affair to destroy her marriage. Her happiness.” There was nothing in Charlie’s face that suggested he was lying, no involuntary flicker of his eye, no telltale twitch. Just that tired old face full of conviction.

  “And?” Jack asked.

  “The fool girl went ballistic. Said she didn’t want my fucking hush money. That I couldn’t buy her off, not with a million dollars. So I asked her what she wanted, and that’s when she got ugly. She said she wanted to bring you down, to destroy you. And she didn’t give a shit who else got hurt.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “I slapped her. I couldn’t help it. The way she was talking about my Maggie, as if she didn’t matter. As if my grandchild was nothing but a nuisance. I slapped her across the face, and she came at me like a fucking lunatic. I tried to hold her off, but she reached for a statue on her bookshelf and swung at me.”

  “She hit you?”

  “Would have cracked my skull if I hadn’t swung back. She fell, slammed her head on the coffee table. When she didn’t move, I thought she might be dead, but then I saw she was still breathing. Oh, I thought about calling nine-one-one. Then I thought about the consequences if she woke up and told everyone what I did. What you did. Most of all, I thought about Maggie and how that—that cheap piece of trash could destroy Maggie’s happiness. That girl was relentless. She’d never give up, so I had no choice. I had to finish it.

  “I dragged her to the balcony. Figured the fall would mess her up enough to hide the fact she’d already slammed her head on the coffee table. I took care of your problem. And then I cleaned up all the blood.”

  “You really thought the truth wouldn’t come out?”

  “I was a cop, Jack. I know how hard they’re worked. I figured they’d just call it a suicide, close the case, and walk away.”

  But Detective Frances Loomis hadn’t. She was never going to walk away.

  Jack shook his head, stunned by Charlie’s confession. “She was still alive. And you killed her.”

  Charlie took a long wet breath, suddenly looking frail, as if he were standing on the edge of his own grave. “I haven’t got much time left before I step off this bus, and I don’t give a rosy-red shit about what happens to me. But I do care what happens to Maggie. I care about the baby and, by association, you. I had to do something.”

  “But you pinned it on me.”

  “I tried not to. I took her cell phone to hide those text messages. Smashed it so it couldn’t be tracked. I really thought the police wouldn’t bother to look for it.”

  “They got hold of the messages. They think I did it.”

  “Don’t blame me for that. You’re the one who got yourself into this mess.” Those ice-blue eyes pinned Jack to his seat. “Did you love the girl?”

  “No.”

  “Then why? Why risk losing everything just to fuck her?”

  Jack flinched at the question. “It was a mistake,” he said quietly. “If I could turn back the clock . . .”

  “Does Maggie know?”

  “Yes.”

  Charlie took several deep breaths, and Jack could hear the cancer gurgling in his chest. “Well, you made a clean sweep of your life. You fucked up your marriage. You fucked up that girl’s life. And you’ll n
ever see the inside of another classroom. Way to go, Jackie boy.”

  A sound from the other room. The front door opening and closing. Jack jumped to his feet. “Maggie?” he called, relieved that she’d finally arrived.

  But when he stepped into the living room, it wasn’t Maggie standing there. He halted, staring at the intruder who loomed before him, eyes like burning coals in the shadow of the baseball cap.

  “Cody,” Jack said. “Why—”

  “I loved her. And you didn’t.”

  “You shouldn’t have followed me. I’m calling the police.” Jack reached for his cell phone, but it was still powered off. Frantic, he pushed the on switch.

  “Now I’m going to finish it.”

  Only then did Jack focus on what Cody held in his hand: a crowbar. Even as Jack registered what Cody was about to do, even as Cody raised the weapon, Jack could not move, could not speak.

  The crowbar came hurtling at his skull.

  At the last instant, Jack dived to his right, flinging himself behind an armchair, and landed hard on his elbows. He heard wood splinter as the crowbar crashed onto the coffee table.

  Cody pivoted toward him, moving faster than Jack had ever thought he could. Before Jack could scramble to his feet, Cody swung the crowbar like a baseball bat. It slammed against Jack’s ribs, and he sprawled to the floor, stunned. As he lay there, trying to catch his breath, his chest screaming in pain from the blow, he heard Cody’s heavy footsteps moving closer.

  The footsteps halted, and Jack saw the boy’s shoes planted right by his head. In a telescoped moment he saw Cody raise the crowbar like a club over Jack’s skull. And he thought: This is how I die. A fitting finale to all that he’d set in motion from the moment he’d let Taryn Moore enter his life.

  “Drop it, or I’ll blow your fucking head off.” Charlie stood in the doorway, his .45 aimed at Cody.

  Cody froze, still gripping his crowbar.

  “I said drop it!”

  Cody looked down at Jack, then at Charlie.

  Jack dragged himself to his feet and staggered toward Charlie. “Don’t hurt him,” he said. “He’s just a kid.”

  “A kid?” Cody’s voice rose in fury. “That’s what you think, you bastard? That I’m just a kid?”

  Jack’s back was turned to him, but he could feel the force of Cody’s rage rushing toward him, as inescapable as death. He saw Charlie’s gun wavering in the grip of unsteady hands, the barrel trembling toward Jack and away and back toward him.

  The gun blast threw a punch to his chest. Jack stumbled backward against a wall. Looking down, he saw red seep through his shirt in an ever-spreading stain.

  “Oh no,” Charlie wailed. “God, no!”

  In fury, Charlie wrenched the crowbar out of Cody’s hands and whacked him in the back of the knees. The boy screamed and collapsed to the floor, whimpering.

  The lights seemed to be flickering in and out. Jack’s legs slid away beneath him. He heard Charlie’s wet and rattling breaths as he leaned close.

  “You’re going to be okay, Jack,” he muttered. “You have to be okay.”

  Jack tried to say something but could not draw in a breath. How had he ended up on the floor? Why couldn’t he feel his own limbs? A chill spread through him, as if ice water were pumping through his veins.

  In the distance he heard the crash of the door flying open. Haloed by the light was the one face he wanted to see, a face sent from heaven. Maggie.

  “He’s going to be all right!” Charlie insisted.

  Jack heard cloth ripping, then felt Maggie’s warm hands pressing against his chest, trying to hold back the blood that was spilling out of him.

  “Jack, baby, hold on for me,” she pleaded. She turned and yelled, “Detective Loomis! Tell them to have the cardiothoracic team standing by!”

  He wanted to tell her he was sorry. That he loved her. But his voice wouldn’t work. And it was hard, so hard, just to draw in a breath. He looked at Maggie’s bloodstained hand, pressed against his chest, and focused on her diamond ring. The ring he’d placed there twelve years ago. I’d marry you again. Again and again and again.

  If only he could have said the words out loud. If only he could say so many things, but already the room was fading to black. The darkness descended, blotting out the face of the woman he loved.

  CHAPTER 46

  FRANKIE

  Too many things are happening all at once: Cody, red faced and flailing as two officers wrestle him to the ground and handcuff him. Maggie kneeling beside her husband, who lies sprawled and unconscious in a widening pool of blood. The far-off wail of an approaching ambulance. And Maggie’s father, Charlie, standing with his head bowed, his face as gray as a corpse’s. The weapon he has handed to Frankie is still warm, and it carries the acrid stench of gunfire.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt him, Maggie,” the old man moans. “I swear I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

  “Stay with me, Jack,” Maggie begs. “Please, stay with me!” She’s pulled off her scarf, and as she presses it to her husband’s wound, blood instantly transforms the beige cashmere into red. “Towels!” Maggie yells to her father. “I need towels!”

  Charlie is too stunned to move. It’s Mac who runs into the bathroom and comes back holding a bundle of hand towels. Maggie presses them to Jack’s wound, trying to stanch the flow of blood. She is the only person in the room who might be able to save him, but already the battle seems lost. Jack’s breaths, shallow and rapid, have the rattle of drowning lungs. Maggie looks up at Frankie. “I can’t stop the bleeding.”

  “I didn’t mean to shoot him,” Charlie says again. Unsteady, he wobbles toward a chair and sinks down. “All I ever wanted was to make everything right. Make you happy, Maggie,” he moans. No one is listening to him. In the chaos of the room, he is a forgotten old man, lost in his own grief.

  Outside, the ambulance whoops to a stop, and two paramedics sweep into the house, adding yet more bodies to the pandemonium. They rip open bandages, insert IV lines, slap on an oxygen mask. The EKG beeps the frantic rhythm of a heart racing to stay alive. Frankie can only stand back and let other people work. Even Maggie is little more than a shell-shocked bystander. The paramedics are in charge, and she watches, numb and silent, as her husband’s blood dries on her hands.

  “Okay, we’re ready to move him,” the paramedic says.

  “Where?” asks Maggie.

  “Mass General. Trauma team’s already waiting.”

  Maggie grabs her purse. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  “Dr. Dorian, wait,” says Frankie.

  “I’m going to the hospital.”

  “We need you here to—”

  “Fuck that. I need to be with my husband,” Maggie snaps and follows the paramedics out the door.

  Frankie lets her leave. She surveys the detritus the paramedics have left behind: torn packaging and stained gauze and a forgotten tourniquet, coiled like a snake swimming in the pool of blood. The blood of an innocent man.

  A police officer has already led Cody Atwood out to the patrol car, but Maggie’s father is still sitting in his chair, head bowed, shoulders drooping. He looks as frail as a sack of old bones. Maggie told them Charlie is dying of cancer, and Frankie can see it in the man’s wasted temples, can smell it in this house where the air is sour with sickness.

  She pulls over a chair and sits down so they can be face to face. “Mr. Lucas,” she says. “I need to inform you of your rights.”

  “No need to. I know my rights. I was a cop. Cambridge PD.”

  Frankie glances up at Mac, who’s already pulled out the handcuffs, and she shakes her head. The handcuffs can wait. This man is not going to fight them. Everything about him signals defeat, and she thinks they owe him some semblance of respect because, after all, he was once one of them.

  “You killed Taryn Moore. Didn’t you?”

  “I had no choice. She brought it on herself.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “
She attacked my family. She attacked me.” Charlie’s head comes up, and he meets her gaze. As frail as he is, his eyes are coldly defiant. “You and I, we’re both cops. You’ve seen the same things I have, so you understand. You know as well as I do that this world would be a much better place if certain people weren’t in it.”

  “People like Taryn Moore.”

  He nods. “Girls like her, you can’t talk sense to them. You can’t reason with them. They’re like wild animals who need to be reined in. Controlled.”

  Staring into Charlie’s eyes, Frankie realizes he actually believes what he’s just said, that the world would be better off without women like Taryn, women whose turbulent emotions and desperate choices complicate the lives of men. She thinks of her own spirited daughters who so passionately embrace life and sometimes get into trouble for it. She thinks of the tragic heroines whom Taryn wrote about, the Medeas and the Queen Didos—women who loved too deeply and who suffered for it.

  No, thinks Frankie. The world would not be better without such women.

  “That girl had to be stopped,” says Charlie. “My family needed to be protected. I just did what I needed to do.”

  “Now I’m going to do what I need to do.” Frankie takes Mac’s handcuffs and places them over Charlie’s wrists.

  They close with a deeply satisfying snap.

  CHAPTER 47

  FRANKIE

  Maggie Dorian sits at her husband’s bedside, her head bowed as though in prayer. Through the beeping monitors and the whoosh of the ventilator, she doesn’t seem to hear Frankie enter the SICU cubicle. Only when Frankie stands facing her across the bed does Maggie at last look up at her.

  “I can’t believe you’re still here,” Frankie says.

  “Where else would I be?”

  “You should go home and get some sleep.”

  “No, I need to be here when he wakes up.” Maggie reaches out to grasp her husband’s hand and adds, in a whisper: “If he wakes up.”

  Frankie surveys the various tubes snaking into and out of the inert body and focuses on the EKG monitor, where the rhythm is rapid but steady. It is a miracle that he has any heartbeat at all. After all the blood he lost, all the devastation left by Charlie’s bullet, Jack Dorian should be dead, and his wife should be planning his funeral.