The Dark

by Valentina Giambanco

  Madison felt the adrenaline tremble through her arms and legs. By now Andrews should have had enough time to get into place. She slid out from behind the bushes, and the van gave her ten strides’ worth of cover. They didn’t see her as she slipped alongside the vehicle, heart slamming in her chest, stopped just before the driver’s window, and peeked through it and through the windshield, the metal of the bodywork cold against her skin.

  Suit lifted the cell phone to his ear, and she made her move.

  A shot in the air from the Glock .40 exploded like cannon fire in the open field, and Madison was out from behind the van.

  “Down on the ground! Down on the ground! Police!”

  Heads spinning toward her and Cameron recognizing her voice. Conway turning his body around fast and putting Cameron between them. One guard twisting to lift the MAC-10 and a shot cracking from the trees hitting him as if he was shoved hard in the back, and he was buckling forward. The other guard backing into the tail of the plane, his gun muzzle coming up, and Madison shooting him twice in the chest. The man sliding backward against the tail and Madison already swinging back. Shots fired from the plane doors shattering the windshield by her side, a tire bursting at the rear of the van, and her cheekbone stinging as she pulled back behind cover. Three quick rounds blasting from the trees toward the plane door, and Conway was on the ground, holding Cameron tightly, putting two rounds into the side of the van and two toward the trees. A bullet grazed Conway’s neck, another hit him in the back, and, behind him, the man in the suit lowered his revolver and crawled to get to Cameron, blindfolded and bound on the ground. The engine of the plane came to life, with Madison shouting above the racket, “Hold your fire! Hold your fire!” Ears ringing, the air around her thick with cordite, she tried to catch her breath.

  The man in the suit stood and dragged Cameron up with him, using his body as a shield between himself and Madison and the sniper. Conway was facedown and bleeding on the ground. Madison wanted to step over and kick the gun away from his hand, but she was locked on the man in the suit.

  “Thanks for this—couldn’t have worked it out better myself,” the man said, and he started toward the plane’s door, pulling Cameron backward.

  “No,” Madison said.

  “Shoot him,” Cameron said. “Just shoot him.”

  “Come on!” someone hollered from inside the plane.

  “Shoot him,” Cameron said.

  The man was calm: his soldiers might be lying dead a few feet away, but this was a much better outcome, since no money had changed hands.

  “We’re leaving,” he said, and Madison knew it would be the last voice Cameron was ever going to hear if she didn’t do the right thing, strapped to a chair or hanging from a ceiling hook somewhere in a locked room. The voice that tells you it’s almost over but not quite.

  Madison’s vision had shrunk to her two-handed grip, three dots aligned in the sights. “I can’t let you leave.”

  “Yes, you can,” the man said, his revolver hard against Cameron’s temple.

  Madison tried to find in herself the last shreds of stillness. The woods creaked around them, and a puff of breeze soothed her burning cheek.

  All the time she would ever have was right now. It wasn’t about gunmetal; it never is. She was frayed with exhaustion and dread, and sanity seemed a lifetime away. It always comes down to the same question, over and over.

  The man lifted his chin, a ferrety version of a human being, and narrowed his eyes for effect. “Time to fly.” There was a long trail of horror behind those words, years of basements and deals and prisoners begging to die.

  Madison drained her voice of all that was good. “Let him go,” she said.

  She sought and found the still core she needed and looked the man in the eye.

  How far are you prepared to go?

  Her voice cracked. “Do you trust me?” shesaid, and in her mind she started the Fibonacci sequence. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 . . .

  “What?” the man said.

  . . . 144, 233, 377 . . .

  “Stand up straight,” Madison said.

  . . . 610, 987, 1597 . . .

  “What?”

  Cameron shifted, and Madison squeezed the trigger. G-64. Her shot slammed into him and almost spun him out of the man’s grasp, blood spreading on his front. Cameron’s limp body was too heavy to hold, and he slid to the ground.

  “He’s no good to you anymore,” Madison said. “He’ll die on the plane.”

  Her Glock against his revolver now: both of them dead or both of them alive.

  “You’re insane,” the man said, glancing at Cameron facedown on the ground and the blood pooling on the dirt.

  Andrews crashed through the undergrowth, trying to get a clear shot, but the plane’s wing was in the way. Under the rumble of its engine, the rotors of the county chopper sliced the air, and sirens wailed somewhere down in the valley, climbing from Maple Falls toward Silver Lake.

  Madison wanted it over, and she didn’t care about who blinked first.

  “Leave. Now,” she said, counting in her mind how many rounds she’d fired and how many she had left.

  Go and let me see to the dying and the dead.

  The man held her in his pale gaze and knew she would manage to get out one fatal shot even if he shot first.

  “Go,” she said.

  The man disappeared inside the plane, and it was rolling before the door was shut, picking up speed as fast as the engine would allow, then lifting up and off the runway and into the purple sky. Her Glock stayed on it until the wheels left the ground.

  “Check on Conway—he might have a backup.” She pointed behind her as Andrews ran across the field.

  Madison dropped to her knees by Cameron’s side and turned him over, hands awkward and not knowing where to touch. She took off his blindfold and cut off the cuffs with her knife. Red was all over the lower right side of his chest, and his eyes were closed. Liver, kidneys, intestines. G-64 was the shooting target with the illustrated human organs and a scoring system for hitting the most vital: Madison had aimed to score 0.

  She pulled up his shirt tails and gently lifted the fabric off the skin. The tear in his side was three inches long and weeping, but her bullet had glanced off him without entering his body.

  She heard Andrews opening the pickup’s door, and a second later the headlights came on; he spoke on his radio, a soft and steady stream of words she couldn’t catch.

  Madison took off her green T-shirt and pressed it as a thick wad on the wound; she lifted Cameron’s hand and laid it against it. His eyes came open.

  “Keep some pressure on it,” she said.

  “Conway,” he replied.

  She nodded and stood up. In the beams of the headlights the bodies of the guards lay where they had fallen. Conway had turned himself over; his breathing was ragged, but his eyes were clear.

  “I’ve taken off him his main, a backup, a knife, and three filled syringes and needles. There’s more in the truck,” Andrews said, and he gave Madison a look. If you want to talk to him, use short words and speak them quickly.

  Conway was wheezing; the shot in the back had done a lot of damage.

  His eyes found her against the sky, and he coughed.

  “Is Jerome McMullen your client?” Madison said.

  His lip curled up. He would gladly row himself into hell rather than tell her.

  Madison got close to him. “You failed; let that be what you take with you from this field.”

  Conway died between breaths, and his eyes didn’t look any different.

  The county chopper landed in a spray of dry grass; the sirens were almost there.

  Madison knelt next to Cameron and took out her cell. He was still conscious. She dialed.

  “Hello,” Nathan Quinn said.

  “We found him,” she said.

  “You have him?”

  “I have him,” she replied, and she passed the cell to Cameron.

 
The entire field was a crime scene, and there were statements to give, weapons to surrender, and evidence to collect, both there and at the cabin.

  John Cameron was airlifted to Bellingham. To Madison’s untrained eye he looked pale and drugged up: she gave the medics Conway’s syringes to test to find out what he’d been given. That concerned her more than the chunk of metal that she had shot at his chest.

  Deputy Andrews knew everybody on the ground and introduced Madison to all of them, including some civilian volunteers who had turned up to help.

  Madison felt numb: she gave a clear and efficient statement, matched by Andrews word for word, but as the adrenaline dropped to nothing, she found herself nearly incapable of speech. One of the bodyguards had died of two gunshot wounds to the chest; Madison had fired those shots. She stood by the dead man as the medics did their job; it felt right that she should know his face. She had never killed a person before.

  A nurse checked her over and cleaned the nick on her cheekbone from the broken glass.

  Madison woke up with a start. She had taken a ten-minute break from going over Conway’s cabin with local officers, sat down with her eyes closed in the pickup’s driver’s seat, and had slept for an hour. The clock on the dashboard said it was almost one in the morning.

  The stars were out in full, and she wondered whether celestial navigation might lead her in the direction of the man who had hired Peter Conway, whether some cosmic residue of a man’s actions might be visible to one of Sorensen’s devices and lead her to him. It was easy to think such thoughts away from the city lights, where it seemed that every single astral body was present and accounted for and there was no black left between the dots of light. Madison shook her head: she was tired, she was hungry, and she was away from home.

  She pulled her gloves back on and returned to the chaos of the cabin. When she looked up from the floor a while later, Spencer and Dunne were standing in the doorway.

  Chapter 64

  Vincent Foley woke up early, and the tips of his fingers caressed the texture of the wall, still so unfamiliar. He saw his work of the past few days all around him and felt sure Ronald would approve of it. He hadn’t seen Ronald for a while. Weeks, it felt like, but he had trouble keeping track of time. When Ronald came to visit him next time, they would find windows like the ones in the Walters Institute, and Ronald would tell him things as he always did.

  Vincent was not sure what it was they talked about, but he felt better afterward, and those nights his fear was not as bad. He reached under the cot and picked up the crayon; it was exactly where he had left it the previous night. He cradled the green crayon in his hand and fell back into sleep.

  A nurse found him three hours later. After a brief and unsuccessful effort to resuscitate him, they called Dr. Eli Peterson to make the necessary arrangements, as he was his next of kin and they needed Vincent’s room cleared as soon as possible.

  Chapter 65

  The main lab of the Crime Scene Unit clicked and whirred like a living thing. Amy Sorensen and her team hustled around the tables and the instruments, analyzing and connecting different items of evidence. In one corner of the room, ignored by all, a monitor showed a three-dimensional perspective of what at first looked like a shapeless lump in varying shades of gray. The algorithm that had created it marked each second with a green tick, and each tick went toward creating an individual fingerprint, separating it from the gray block.

  It was time-consuming, and there were no guarantees of success; nevertheless, one tick at a time, the software was separating the overlapping fingerprints on the scrap of photocopy paper with David Quinn’s school picture. Sorensen lifted her eyes from the piece of glass she was examining and glanced at the monitor: it got on with its job, like every other member of her team, and she couldn’t really ask for more.

  Madison gripped the baseball bat and looked around the room. It was her Friday Harbor bedroom on San Juan Island, the last address she had shared with her father, the last place in this world that held memories of her mother. She caught herself in the mirror: she was not twelve, and she wore a heavy ballistic vest with ceramic plates in it. The moon was high in the window, and she knew her father had stolen her mother’s things. She also knew that she was dreaming, but somehow that did not seem to matter, because her grief was real, and her rage was like a wave about to hit. It was about to break, and she hunkered down, ready for it. The first swing of the bat found her bookshelf, and the second struck the mirror. One part of her mind—the part that recognized she was asleep—was glad that her father was not home, and still, even deep in her dream, Madison was aware that she had shot and killed a human being. She swung the bat, and the shattering glass woke her with a start. She was lying in the back of Spencer’s car; they were crossing the West Seattle Bridge, and the sky was bright in the window.

  Madison stood under the shower for a long time and let the cut on her cheekbone sting in the heat. She had called the hospital in Bellingham twice. The attending doctor in charge of John Cameron would not speak with her at first, and it took a call from the local sheriff to get him to tell her what was going on. Conway had injected Cameron with a number of tranquilizers, and, quite frankly, he said, they didn’t exactly know how he had been able to walk or talk. The syringes had contained Ketamine, which Conway had not yet used. The gunshot wound had been cleaned and bandaged, and if the patient didn’t plan to be lifting elephants anytime soon, he would heal very well. Madison smiled a little. The doctor apologized for not taking her call at first, but they’d had reporters camping outside the hospital. A private ambulance had been booked to fly Cameron back to Seattle in a few hours, once they had washed the drugs out of his system.

  Madison turned off the water when it began to turn cold; she wrapped herself in a towel and sat on the sofa with a cup of coffee. Upcoming attractions in her future included a very long conversation with Seattle’s Office of Professional Accountability regarding the shooting, a standard investigation into the death of the bodyguard and—something she particularly looked forward to—an explanation of how she had deemed it appropriate to shoot the hostage she had been trying to save. Madison sipped her coffee. And the obligatory session with a psych counselor, of course.

  She was trying to think things through and focus on her next step, but she kept going back to the gunshot wounds in the guard’s chest. She called Sorensen for the comfort and the dependability of physical evidence.

  “I heard you shot up Whatcom County,” Sorensen said.

  “Well, it was . . . I don’t know what it was, Amy, except pretty awful. I was wondering if you had any news.”

  Any other day Sorensen would have reminded Madison that she would have called her if she had any, but that day she didn’t. “I’m throwing the odd glance at the monitor, and I swear to you, sometimes I think the computer is moving faster just because I’m watching it. However, the answer is: not yet. We recovered a print that matches Timothy Gilman—which didn’t surprise anybody—and the rest is just waiting.”

  “Thanks, Amy.”

  “Look, I heard you had to shoot one of the felons involved.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “My advice is, talk to someone about it. Soon. Even when you’ve done the best you could and that was the last resort, you’re going to feel all over the place about it. Talk to someone who’s gone through the same thing, someone you trust.”

  “I will. Thanks for that.”

  It wasn’t the right moment to mention that the only other person she knew for sure had killed another human being was the hostage she had been trying to save. And Madison didn’t know exactly where the issue of trust stood between her and John Cameron.

  She finished her coffee and got dressed. One of the consequences of the shooting was that she was now on administrative leave until the investigation of what had happened in Whatcom County had reached its conclusions. Even so, tomorrow Jerome McMullen would have his parole hearing.

  One of the sheriff’s deputi
es had collected her Glock, and Madison wrapped the strap around her empty holster and laid it on her dresser. She cleaned, oiled, and dry-fired her backup .38 and holstered it on her ankle. She had seen Peter Conway die, and yet his presence had saturated the whole case to such a degree that if she hadn’t seen the medical examiner doing his checks and asking her for his time of death, she’d have been left wondering.

  The drive to Seward Park took little time in the midday traffic. It was strange to be back in her Honda after all the miles in the pickup—Dunne had driven it back to Seattle himself—and Madison was suddenly aware of being that much lower on the road and closer to the ground.

  Chapter 66

  Nathan Quinn looked as if he’d had as little sleep as Madison. She wondered if he was still on medication and what effect all this had had on him.

  He showed her in, and she almost smiled: his dining table was an exact replica of hers—notes, clippings, the files Hollis had dug out, everything jostling for space with a large cardboard box.

  He didn’t need to tell her that he’d thought he’d never see Jack Cameron again, and she didn’t need to hear it. They sat at the table, and she told him about the field and the plane. Cameron himself could fill in the rest.

  Quinn’s expression revealed great relief, certainly, and yet behind it was something else, too. It was proof of how much the last weeks had taken out of Quinn that Madison could even glimpse anything behind his officer of the court face.

  “Are you going to be in trouble for shooting him?” he asked.

  “A little trouble, probably, but not much. The SPD cannot be seen giving me a pat on the back for shooting a hostage, but the situation was what it was, and I doubt Cameron will sue me.”

  “Can you identify the man in the suit?”

  “I think so. The DEA, the FBI, and the ATF are all suddenly keen to get to know me and spend time with me. I’ve already made appointments to brief them, and I’m sure they’ll bring lots of pretty pictures for me to look at.”