“That's right.”
“Your well-being is my business,” he countered. She looked up into his luminous eyes. “Does that mean you won't let any harm come to me?”
“Never.”
She gritted her teeth. “Then get me the hell out of here.”
“Consider it done.”
TWENTY-NlNE
As they stepped out into the silent corridor, someone shouted, 'There! There they are!” This was followed by a radio signal voice, saying, “They're at the incinerator!”
“This way,” shouted Lucas, tugging at her robes and forcing her along, using his back as a shield for her. He fumbled the now cumbersome skull in his hands, but he held on to it.
They came to a labyrinth of choices, tunnels going off in six directions. Meredyth stopped, stood before the confusing maze, and said, “Which way?”
“Any way, just don't stop!”
They went down the center, located a stairwell that spiraled and coiled about itself. They took this up and up, the noise of their pursuers getting ever nearer. At one point on the stairwell, he grabbed hold of her and stopped Meredyth in her tracks, cautioning silence and no movement.
They could hear the voice of a man speaking into a radio. The killers were in constant contact with one another. He peered over the stairwell and a steel-shafted arrow ruffled his hair, making him leap backwards. They continued their run up the stairs. Their pursuers all wore the heavy robes of the monastery.
Once back on solid ground, they found themselves in back of the altar in the church, where they shrugged off their robes. Lucas threw them across the staging area of the pulpit, hoping their pursuers would see the discarded robes and believe that he and Meredyth had run across the stage toward the opposite side and the exit.
He then pulled Meredyth close and crouched behind some scattered stage props and an ancient piano. They heard the heavy footfalls of the enemy as one, two, three scurried by, one of them calling out, “This way.”
Her body was pressed close to his. She smelled wonderful, even spellbound as she was by fear.
“I don't think I can move from this spot ever again,” she said, trying to catch her breath.
“Now maybe you understand why I'd have preferred to make this little junket on my own?” he chastised her.
“You couldn't've gotten this far without me,” she countered, glaring at him in challenge.
“Then prove your courage. We're getting out of here, now.”
“Now?”
He pointed. 'Through that exit.”
“When?”
“Now,” Lucas whispered, getting to his feet, holding on to the skull like a bowling ball, his fingers looped through the eye sockets, holding on to Meredyth with the other hand.
They raced breathlessly for the nearest exit sign, Lucas kicking out at the bar lock on the door, sending it flying open. Behind them, they could hear the shouts of their pursuers, and Lucas felt the biting clutch of one of the arrows as it dug into his shoulder, sending him careening down to the alley floor with the powerful impact, the stolen skull skittering out ahead of him, Meredyth screaming and instinctively diving alongside him to reduce her vulnerability as a target.
Lucas expected to feel the bite of another bone-hard, ice-cold arrow through his back and through the heart at any moment, lying as he was, helpless on the asphalt, but he dared not let them linger here, so he kept pushing onward, getting to his knees, yanking at her with his one good arm, shouting, “Don't stop! Don't look back! Run.” But before they could get to their knees, and before the doors they had just burst through could close on their hydraulic hinges, an explosion of gunfire rang out.
Lucas, his back and left shoulder bleeding profusely from the arrow lodged there, instinctively draped himself across Meredyth while the barrage of gunfire continued. Lucas guessed that they were so riddled with bullet wounds they felt nothing now, and he guessed that they were lying in the alleyway opposite the soup kitchen side of the church.
When the gunfire ended, Lucas looked ahead to see the rictus of the skull sourly smiling at him. He felt no pain other than the throbbing and the weight where the steel-shafted arrow wavered in his back. He had felt the impact of the thing with such force because it had slammed into bone, fragments now no doubt spider webbing inside the wound. He imagined a hospital stay, if he survived. He felt no bullet wounds.
Then he saw a pair of black leather shoes approach, saw hands reach down and lift the skull, and he heard Phil Lawrence asking, “Now who do you suppose we have here? You got any idea, Stonecoat?”
“Captain Lawrence?”
“Don't worry, Dr. Sanger, Lucas,” he replied, crouching now, turning the skull in his hands. “We took out the hit squad. Now we'll turn this place inside out to see just how widespread Father Aguilar's influence was here. That means mass arrests and a hell of a lot of interrogation.”
“Let me the hell up,” Meredyth complained, and Lucas immediately got off her, sitting Indian fashion now in the middle of the black alleyway. All around them police were shouting for lights, and orders were being bellowed out as uniformed officers raced into the church to begin making arrests.
Staring back over his shoulder, the steel shaft in his back moving back and forth like a pendulum on a metronome, the pain increasing with the sway of the heavy arrow, Lucas saw some five or six cowled brothers, all dead, still bleeding from their wounds, not so much as a moan from any of them, each with a crossbow near his corpse. Among them, his cowl thrown back, his face a mask of horror, was Father Aguilar, a bullet wound through the forehead, blood crisscrossing his face.
“Oh, God, Lucas, you're hurt!” Meredyth shouted in his ear.
'Thanks for letting me in on the secret,” he managed a tortured joke, his voice croaking. “How deep is the head buried?”
“Deep,” she muttered. “It didn't penetrate to the other side?” she asked. He felt his chest. “No… hit bone. Hurts like hell.”
Meredyth and Lucas looked ahead to see the other shadowy gunmen emerge. They first saw big Jim Pardee, followed by the thin, ambling Fred Amelford; then came a stunned Andrew Bryce, Randy Oglesby, and someone Lucas couldn't quite make out until Meredyth said, “It's Conrad.” She held on to Lucas's shoulder, sobbing, “Are you going to be all right?” She dared not tell him how close to the heart the arrow had obviously run.
“Go ahead,” he said in his most nonchalant voice. “Go to him.” He indicated Conrad, her boyfriend.
Randy Oglesby rushed to Lucas, and Lucas, fighting off a fainting spell, heard him explaining that he had gotten a call from Conrad McThuen, and that Oglesby had in turn called Phil Lawrence, who had in turn put together this small squad of commandos familiar with the case.
Phil Lawrence was kneeling over Lucas now, too, saying that the bleeding looked bad. Lucas tried to focus on the moment, to keep control, to not black out. He imagined that Conrad McThuen and Randy Oglesby had hung back beyond the line of fire, and for the first time Lucas got a look at the tall, good-looking boyfriend, who at the moment was utterly shaken, his eyes wide, his mouth agape, trying to do other than ape Meredyth's name as she guided him back to where Lucas remained half up, half down on the asphalt.
Lucas concentrated on his dislike for Conrad. He wore expensive, post-yuppie, L. L. Bean clothes, his glasses alone worth one of Lucas's paychecks. He might be exactly what Meredyth required in a man, Lucas thought but didn't believe.
Beside McThuen now stood a grinning Randy Oglesby, who was praising both Meredyth and Lucas for their courage. He saluted Lucas, as if to say, “Well done!”
Pardee, a heavy man who carried his weight well, rushed past Lucas, as did Fred Amelford, each anxious to have a look at the kill, Pardee repeating the phrase, “We got the bastards… we finally got the bastards.”
Amelford came back to Lucas, kneeled to be eye-to-eye with the Cherokee sleuth. “I want to shake your hand, Stonecoat, and congratulate you and the doctor here on a job well done. You two were on t
he right trail all along. We should have been more cooperative. I regret that now. But you know how damned stubborn detectives can be, right? Right?”
He wanted absolution and forgiveness, Lucas thought. Just like a white man. “You made it in time for the kill.” Lucas returned the smile and handshake. “Why don't you and Pardee go ahead and claim the collar.”
“No, no way. You guys risked your lives inside there. All the glory's yours.”
Meredyth was being held tightly by Conrad now, and Lucas wished it was he instead who was receiving her affections. It looked as though she were comforting Conrad instead of the other way around, Lucas thought.
“You think it might be Mootry's?” asked Captain Lawrence, interrupting Lucas's thoughts, speaking of the skull that Lucas had come away with. It had miraculously remained intact “Get a call in for an ambulance, now!” shouted Commander Andrew Bryce when he came near, seeing how badly Lucas was hit. “Are you a fool, Lawrence?” Bryce asked. “This man could go into shock at any moment.”
“I'm all right, Commander,” countered Lucas, putting forth a great effort just to speak, fighting back the stabbing, burning pain of the arrow lodged in his shoulder blade.
Lucas stared up at the skull which Lawrence now held between his hands, soot and ash still coming off the bone. “It may be Mootry's, yes. Definitely male and definitely missing from someone,” he continued to joke, but his eyes had returned to Father Frank Aguilar's lifeless body. He saw bloodstains all over Aguilar's robe now, coloring it like so many wine spots. Aguilar, like all his henchmen who'd come through the door, had been riddled with bullets, as if they'd run into a firing squad. Aguilar's arms and legs were splayed apart starfish fashion. He'd taken three bullets to the abdomen and two to the chest area, as well as the single shot through the brain. Overkill on overdrive.
Lucas pushed up to a sitting position and remained there momentarily, disobeying Bryce's orders to remain still and in a prone position until medics could get to him. Getting to his feet now, Lucas looked eerily like a dead man walking with the arrow hanging limply from his back.
“Damn it, man!” shouted Bryce, “I'm ordering you to sit down and stop pumping blood through that wound.”
“The blood's stopped,” Lucas countered. “I don't feel any more blood pumping out. I'm okay.” The blood had coagulated around the arrow shaft, adhering to it.
“Just the same,” continued Bryce, “you'll open the wound further if you persist.”
“Do as the commander says, Stonecoat,” cautioned Lawrence. “He's got to know you can follow orders.”
But Lucas remained for a moment, standing over Father Aguilar's body and the scene of destruction.
“Are any of them alive?” he asked tonelessly as he stared on the scene of massacre. All eyes were watching him, fascinated and horrified by the sight of the arrow dangling from him.
“Not a chance,” replied Lawrence, who'd followed along with him like a man prepared to catch whatever fallout might come. Lawrence now placed a fatherly hand on his uninjured shoulder and said, “You and Sanger did a splendid job of detection, Stonecoat. Good work all around, work you can both be proud of. This kind of thing, it could mean a definite promotion in the ranks.”
It sounded like a payoff, Lucas thought. “How did you know we were here?” He wanted to hear Phil's explanation, wanted to study his eyes and body language as he replied.
Lawrence shrugged. “No biggie. Pardee and Amelford had you staked out from the moment you and Meredyth disappeared from the precinct today.”
“What?
“They got wise after you and Dr. Sanger made some connections they missed, so they began tailing you. I got a call from Randy Oglesby saying you were here-
“But you already knew we were here…” It was said as an accusation. Lucas, feeling another fainting spell washing over him, buckled at the knees and went down. This caused a general wave of murmurs among those standing about.
Lawrence went to his knees beside his injured man. “Well, no… not really. Amelford and Pardee were contacted after I learned of your whereabouts from Oglesby,” he continued to explain. “I felt they had a right to be in on any sort of raid we might make, and besides, while I was getting the paperwork, a warrant, I wanted someone to watch the church. Coincidentally, they were already watching the place.”
“You were able to get a warrant to search here, a church, so easily?”
“No, not so easy. In fact, we couldn't arrange it. Not enough probable cause, and I didn't want to tell a judge you and Sanger were trespassing. That's why we had to wait outside to see what popped, if anything.”
He seemed to have an answer for everything, Lucas thought, and it all seemed so damnably pat. Lucas settled into a sitting position, crossing his legs, going into a meditative state to control the pain and the blackness that wanted so much to claim him.
Lawrence seemed in need of repeating himself. “Oglesby called me, but Pardee and Amelford were tailing you for hours. They were already here when I located them. Said they more than half expected you to infiltrate the church tonight when they saw you come out earlier in the day.”
“So, everyone knew about the church, that Meredyth and I were here earlier.”
“Not everyone, no. Bryce and I just learned about it when Oglesby called saying he got a call from Dr. Sanger's friend over there.” He pointed out Conrad McThuen.
“I see. And was it necessary to completely blow Aguilar away?”
“He had you in his sights, Lucas. We were all firing at the crossbows.”
“How did you know we were coming through these doors?”
“What is it with you, Stonecoat?” Lawrence was suddenly aware that Lucas suspected him of some duplicity.
“We just saved your redskin ass from certain death. Matter of fact, when you went down, you went down hard, and we all thought you were dead.”
And that's when you opened fire, he thought. “Look, it's all very much appreciated, but call me curious. Again, how did you know we'd be coming through this particular exit?”
But before Lucas could get an answer, he felt the great black wash over him. He did not feel his body as it slumped into Phil Lawrence, who caught him and laid him out on his stomach.
He didn't hear Meredyth's scream or see her tear away from Conrad's arms to race to him. He didn't hear her cry over him.
When Lucas's eyes opened, he found himself on his back, wrapped in a body bandage, the arrow having been extracted by paramedics. He was on a stretcher, still in the alleyway, looking up into Meredyth's tear-stained, glistening eyes, and she was holding firmly to his hands. Her eyes were red and swollen with sobbing.
“You're going to be all right,” she promised him.
“I know.”
“You think you know everything, don't you?”
“We're a team, like Twain and Kipling,” he replied.
She was confused by the reference. “What?”
'Twain once wrote, 'Kipling knows all that there is to know, and I know the rest.'“
This made her laugh, and it was good to see the smile on her tearful face. He said, “Sorry I blacked out on you.”
She shook her head. “No apologies, and it's called shock, not blackout, so don't worry about a thing.”
He understood, reading between the lines that she would keep his secret.
“You were right about the blood, Stonecoat,” said Bryce, who leaned in, his rugged and grandfatherly features telling Lucas that he'd seen many an officer shot in the line of duty, but seldom, perhaps never, with an arrow. “I have to admire your grit, Lucas Stonecoat. Now, you just take it easy. The medics made you bleed a hell of a lot more while they removed that thing. Had to cut an incision so it wouldn't get hung up from the nasty barbed arrowhead as they brought it out. You're going to be fine, son.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“And I believe Phil has something he wants to tell you.” Bryce pulled Phil Lawrence in closer, and Lawrence was noddi
ng and began exactly where they had left off before Lucas had keeled over.
“Pardee and Amelford had the place bugged, Lucas.”
“The church? How and when?”
“They had Father Aguilar under surveillance from early on, never quite sure of his testimony from day one, but unable to pin anything on him. As to bugging the place, they're quite resourceful.”
“I've seen evidence of their resourcefulness, yes. So, they knew we were inside the church this morning?”
“All right, I confess,” said Phil, his hands up in the air now. “After what occurred in South Dakota, I asked them to be extra watchful of you two fools. By the way, one of the men who attacked you and Dr. Sanger in South Dakota was located.”
“Located?”
“Dead, but located.”
“Dead? Where?”
“In the trunk of a rental at the airport in Rapid City. He had a hole in his head, execution-style killing, but he was also gut-shot. The bullet taken from his abdomen was from a Browning, most likely your slug.”
“No ID, I suppose.”
Lawrence shook his head as if the question were foolish. “We think we'll trace him straight back here to the church. As to knowing when and where you and Meredyth would exit, we couldn't know exactly what exit you'd come out of, so we had every exit covered.”
“And you guys chose door number three and got lucky?”
“I'd say you and Sanger were the lucky ones. Now, I'm going to hand this over to the coroner when he gets here.” Lawrence had held firmly to the skull. “You want to tell me precisely where inside you located it?”
“An incinerator at the lower level.”
“Were there signs of more incriminating evidence?”
“A truckload, sir.”
“Great, then we'll settle this damned business tonight, and one shitload of Cold Room files will have been cleared in one fell swoop, thanks to you, Lucas. It will look great on your record. The chief of division can't overlook results like that.” He indicated Bryce with a flutter of his eyebrows.
Bryce had been asking after Meredyth's condition like a solicitous father. Lawrence followed Lucas's eyes to Meredyth, and Phil added, “Who knows, Stonecoat? Maybe you'll pull detective rank sooner than any of us expected.”
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