The doctor didn't have to finish the thought. Considering that someone had tried to run them off one of the famous cliffs of Barnacle Bluffs in a vehicle that had no business being driven outside a military engagement, they were lucky to be alive at all. Lucky. He wondered if Karen would use that word. If she'd stayed away from him, none of this would have happened. Story of Gage's life.
A few minutes later, Gage was alone with his guilt in the emergency room's crowded waiting area, surrounded by the coughing and the wheezing and the moaning. A nasty flu going around, the nurse told him. The orange vinyl seats looked like something out of a bad seventies movie. The magazines on the end tables were only slightly newer. He picked up an issue of Time about a school shooting back East and flipped through it without seeing the words. He was still flipping through it when someone sat down next to him. He smelled the cigarettes on the man's breath before he even spoke.
"She gonna be okay?"
It was Chief Quinn. Droplets of water pebbled his trench coat, and his slicked-back gray hair shimmered under the fluorescent lights. Often Gage found Quinn's kindly, Mr. Rogers let's-all-get-along face irritating, but this time he actually found it mildly reassuring.
"A little banged up," Gage said, "but she should pull through all right."
"That's a relief. Want you to know, we found the Hummer abandoned at the cable company a quarter-mile from your accident. It was reported stolen a little while ago. Some tourists staying in a beach house and they didn't know how long it had been missing. They were all in the back in the hot tub and said somebody must have stolen the keys right out of the house. We're combing the Hummer for evidence."
"Okay."
"Now," Quinn said, his tone getting a bit more stern, "you want to tell me exactly why somebody was trying to kill you?"
"You know me well enough by now to answer that question yourself, Chief. It's the effect my winning personality has on people."
"Let's just pretend that's not it. Come on, Gage, you've got some idea who did this. Make my life easier and tell me who it is. Who have you pissed off recently?"
Gage rubbed his chin. "There's just so many ..."
"This is related to Jeremiah Cooper, isn't it? You know the boy confessed. I hope you're not still out there poking at the rattlesnakes. You got some other theory, don't you? Some crackpot theory and you won't let it go. What is it?"
The trouble was, Gage really had no theory. It may have been an aftereffect of his brain getting knocked around in the accident—the world still felt slightly off-kilter—but everything was all jumbled up, faces and names floating in and out of his consciousness. Jeremiah. Connor. Arne. Berry. Provost MacDonald. His first thought was that it was Dan MacDonald, that he got nervous that Gage was getting too close, and he decided to get rid of the threat before it exposed him.
But it didn't add up. They'd already established that DWR_forever couldn't be MacDonald, not unless he had some amazing program that could post messages for him when he wasn't there to do the sending, which was technically possible but seemed far-fetched. But was there something else going on? Maybe MacDonald was involved in something else entirely, something not involving Jeremiah Cooper or Connor Fleicher, and that something was enough to kill over.
For once, Gage decided to play along with Quinn. He wasn't going anywhere until he was sure Karen was all right, not just physically but with what she'd told him in the ambulance, and something about MacDonald screamed guilty. He might not be guilty of this, but he was guilty of something. Maybe if the cops showed up to rattle his cage a little, he'd break.
When Gage was finished explaining to Quinn his encounter earlier that night with MacDonald, including his professional wrestling audition with MacDonald's friend, Thomas, the chief merely shook his head.
"But what made you go there in the first place?" he asked.
"Following a lead. We thought he might have been communicating with Jeremiah and Cooper on the Internet. Through a message board on a science-fiction website."
"About what?"
"Not sure yet."
"They were using their real names?"
"No, they had handles."
"Uh-huh. And why did you think it was MacDonald? Or any of them, for that matter? Was it something they wrote?"
"The IP addresses. They were from the college. And we know this was one of Jeremiah's favorite websites, from what his friends told me." Gage left out that this friend was Zoe. He also wasn't quite ready to tell Quinn about MacDonald's sexual orientation. If none of this panned out, Gage didn't want to be the one to shine a bright light on the man's bedroom, not in a town like Barnacle Bluffs. "Look, can't you just send a car over there? Even if we eliminate him as a suspect, it would be a load off my mind."
Quinn shook his head. "Let me get this straight. You want me to send a car over to the house of the provost of Barnacle Bluffs Community College based on, what, a little voice in the back of your head?"
"You're going to have to trust me on this one."
"Right," Quinn said. "Because that's always worked out so well for me."
"Chief. Percy, listen—"
"Oh, it's Percy now, is it?"
"Listen, someone just tried to kill us," Gage said, and he heard the agitation rising in his voice. "They almost succeeded. Don't you think that buys me just a little bit of leeway? Maybe just this once? All I'm asking is that you send an officer down there to knock on the door. Tell them I was involved in a bad accident and foul play was involved. You're just checking out the people I talked to that day. Find out his alibi. Shake him up a bit. You know as well as I do that sometimes when you shake people up, stuff shakes out."
That got at least a wry smile out of Quinn. "Is that a passage from Detecting for Dummies by Garrison Gage?"
"I think it might have been Yogi Berra who said it first."
Quinn narrowed those grandfatherly eyes, studying Gage for a long time before finally tipping his chin in a slight nod.
"Okay, I'll have someone check them out," he said. "But you have to make me a promise. Nothing comes of it, I want to know everything. No more secrets. I want to know everybody you've talked to lately and everything you've talked about. Any cockamamie theories you've got rattling around in your brain about Connor Fleicher, I want the nitty-gritty details on those too. You got it? That's the deal."
Gage nodded. "I'll tell you everything I can."
"Hmm. Sounds like you're threading a needle again. Gage, no bullshit on this. Either you're straight with me here or forget it. If you got some next move you're about to make and you're not telling me, I'm gonna be pissed as hell."
"Chief, if this doesn't pan out, then I don't even know what my next move is. I'm in the dark."
"Well, that makes two of us at least. All right, fine. We'll check out MacDonald. You planning on going anywhere?"
"I'll be here for a while. I want to finish this article on Princess Diana. Besides, the van might need a few repairs before it's drivable again."
"Gage, pal, that van won't ever be drivable again. I saw it."
"We'll see. People said something similar about me once, too, and here I am."
Quinn stood. He adjusted his trench coat and tightened the belt, regarding Gage with the kind of ruefulness he might have reserved for a dog who'd dropped a load on his carpet. "You know, I am sorry about this. No matter how I feel about all your meddling, you don't deserve this."
"If I was judged by all my past sins," Gage said, "I probably deserve a lot worse."
"Don't we all." He turned to go, taking a few steps away from the orange vinyl seats before turning back to Gage. "Got another theory for you. You remember what I told you about wearing out your welcome in this town?"
"Sure."
"Well, it's possible you've already done it."
With that, Quinn walked toward the glass sliding doors, his cell phone already out of his pocket.
* * *
It was another forty-five minutes before Karen was allowed to ha
ve visitors and another fifteen minutes after that before she opened her eyes and peered at Gage in the dimly lit hospital room. A bandage as big as an oven mitt covered the left side of her face, a face so swollen and bruised he might not have recognized her if he'd only seen her in passing. Her hair, usually wispy, was slicked straight back. The bedspread couldn't have been that heavy, but her body under the covers was hardly even there, just a few bumps and wrinkles in the tan fabric. She may have always been small in stature, but the force of her personality compensated for this; it was hard to think of her as physically tiny after he'd known her a while.
But the eyes, those liquid green eyes, there was nothing different about them. He would have known them anywhere. Even as droopy as she was, there was a fierce vitality to them that few people possessed.
"Hello, beautiful," he said.
"Don't—don't make me smile," she mumbled. "It hurts."
"How about laughing?"
"Even worse."
There was no clock in the room, but the one over the nurse's station outside had showed that it was half past midnight when he walked inside. It may have technically been Sunday, but it was still truly Saturday night, and it was hard to believe all that had happened since Quinn first showed up at his house Thursday morning with news that Connor Fleicher had been murdered. If the following week was anything like the last one, Gage didn't know how he'd survive it. He'd barely survived this one. And Karen, she'd come even closer to having her name printed on a death certificate.
"I think I'm going to have a scar," she said.
"They say it'll be pretty small. Besides, it'll make you look pretty badass, I think. Nobody will mess with you now. When you get back to the FBI, all the other agents will be jealous. You'll probably start a trend. Pretty soon we'll have another public-health scare on our hands, people giving themselves self-inflicted knife wounds on the cheek so they can look like badass Special Agent Karen Pantelli."
This time she did smile, a little, at least until it morphed into a wince. "Ouch," she said.
"Sorry."
"It's all right. I don't think you could not make me laugh if you tried."
"Hmm. I think there might be an insult in there, but I'm too dim-witted to find it."
"It's okay," she said. "I like you for your body, anyway. But you probably shouldn't call me a special agent anymore. I'm not going back to the FBI."
"You never know," he said. "Give it time."
"No. I'm done with that part of my life."
She held his gaze for a beat, then looked away, at the window on the other side of the room—the curtains open, the night deeply dark, a streetlamp casting a soft net of light on the tops of the fir trees that bordered the parking lot. Rain streaked the light. More rain. Always more rain. Gage, seated in the chair next to her, reached across the bedspread and touched her hand. She pulled it away. He reached for it again, clasping it firmly, and this time she let him. Her fingers were warm, burning up.
"About what I told you," she said.
"It was a terrible thing you did," Gage said.
She turned to him sharply, surprise and confusion clouding her face.
"What?" Gage said. "You expected me to say something different? You expected me to say it wasn't your fault? It could have happened to anyone? Or maybe some cheap platitudes, like when the going gets tough, the tough get going? When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade?"
"I don't—I don't understand what—"
"You did a terrible thing. You shot a little girl. It's crappy, and you have to live with it. Sorry, them's the breaks."
Her eyes flashed wide. "Are you deliberately trying to be an asshole?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because that's what you need, Karen. You want me to tell you I'll be there for you? Of course I'll be there for you. You want me to tell you I understand? I can't do that. I don't know what it's like to shoot a little girl."
"I wish you'd stop saying that."
"No, that's just the thing. You have to be okay with saying it. You need to say it more often. You think to yourself, If I just don't talk about it, it'll go away. I can pretend it didn't happen. But that's not the way it works. You don't talk about it, it festers. It eats you up. You have to find some way to grapple with it, and the only way to do that is to go at it head-on. I may not know anything about shooting a little girl, but I do know a thing or two about what guilt can do to a person. My wife died because of me."
"But you didn't—you didn't shoot her," Karen said. "You're not the one who killed her. You're not the one who—"
"Stop."
"But—"
"No, I mean it. Those are all equivocations. Justifications. Rationalizations. Call them whatever you want, but it doesn't change that she died because she was married to me. There might have been a drugged-up Iranian strongman who actually drowned her in the tub, but he wouldn't have been there at all if I hadn't pissed off a Jersey Mafia man named Anthony Bruzzi. No way around that one. Them's the breaks. I have to live with it."
She shook her head and looked away, at the ceiling this time. "It's not the same."
"No, it isn't. That's just the point. Every time guilt rears its ugly head, it shows a different face. All I'm saying is that you have to confront this one instead of running from it. I spent five years running from mine. I buried it in bourbon and crossword puzzles. I lived a half-life, walking through life like a ghost. Anything but facing the cold hard truth that Janet would be alive today if it weren't for me. Then something changed."
"What?"
"I started working," Gage said.
"You started—"
"A dead teenage girl washed up on the beach. I could have let the police handle it, but I didn't. I got back to doing what I'm good at. And you know what it did to all that guilt?"
"What?"
"Absolutely nothing."
"Oh. Then why—?"
"Because when I was focused on something else, I wasn't focused on that. And when I wasn't focused on the guilt, my life slowly started to fill up with other things. Zoe. My pal Alex. A place for love in my life. The guilt is still there. It will always be there. There's no making it go away, so you shouldn't even try. You just have to get on with things. And when you get on with things, those things start to matter again."
He could see that she was close to tears, but she blinked them away. He squeezed her hand. She placed her other hand on top of his and tried to smile.
"It's hard, isn't it?" she said.
"Never really gets easier," he said. "It just gets more familiar. Like that scar you're going to have. At first it will really jump out at you. You'll see it every time you look in the mirror. But eventually, you'll get used to it, and then it will just be part of you. A badass part of you."
The door opened behind them. Gage turned, expecting a nurse or a doctor, and was surprised when Quinn walked through the door. That wasn't the biggest surprise. The biggest surprise was that Quinn wasn't alone. The droopy-faced Brisbane and a young uniformed cop accompanied him. The young cop, who had the body of a linebacker and the face of a twelve-year-old, looked like he wanted to throw up. His hand hovered over his sidearm.
"Chief?" Gage said. "What did you find—"
"Stand up," Quinn said.
"What?"
Brisbane, looking all too pleased with himself, grabbed Gage by his leather jacket and started to yank him to his feet.
"Hey!" Gage protested. "What the hell is going on here?"
"You're under arrest," Quinn said. "That's what's happening here."
"Are you nuts?"
"Get up now or this is going to get a lot more unpleasant for you."
Brisbane's glee at this turn of events—if Brisbane could be said to show anything remotely close to glee—prompted him to be a little too rough, from Gage's point of view. There was a bit of a scuffle. The young cop, his baby face reddening like a shiny ripe tomato, pulled his gun. Quinn stepped in, hands raised, repeating the word who
a like it was some sort of mantra. Gage, still baffled by what was happening, shrugged off Brisbane and climbed to his feet on his own power. His right knee buckled a little, but fortunately it didn't give out completely.
"What's going on?" Karen said.
"Can he put that thing away?" Gage said, nodding toward the cop. "I'd like to know why I'm being arrested before someone shoots me, if that's all right."
Quinn, in the kind of low, soothing voice he might have used to talk to a wounded dog, told the cop to put the gun away. When he did, and Brisbane stepped away, Quinn turned back to Gage.
"You have the right to remain silent," Quinn said.
"Oh Jesus," Gage said.
"Anything you say or do—"
"This can't be happening."
But it was. Not to be deterred, Quinn finished with the Miranda rights, then pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his trench coat. The metal glinted like fine jewelry in the soft glow of the lamps.
"You've got to be joking," Gage said.
"Got to do it, pal. Murder is serious business. Turn around."
"What? Murder who?"
"Turn around!"
"All right, all right! Just give me some kind of clue what's going on here, okay?"
When Gage turned, he was facing Karen. He imagined that his own face must have looked as confused and shocked as hers. It had been a long time since he'd felt the clinch of handcuffs on his wrist—it had happened twice in his New York days—and it was just as unpleasant as he remembered. Right away, he could feel the metal biting into his flesh. Quinn fished around inside Gage's jacket and pulled out the Beretta, handing it to Brisbane. Gage heard the gun drop into an evidence bag.
"Fine," Gage said. "Fine, I'm handcuffed and unarmed. Now do you mind telling me who I supposedly killed?"
"Two people," Quinn said. "Dan MacDonald and Thomas Kelton."
"What? They're dead?"
"Come on, let's go," Quinn said. "You're going down to the station."
"Not until I get some answers!" Gage said.
The Lovely Wicked Rain: An Oregon Coast Mystery (Garrison Gage Series) Page 20
