Third Degree: A Novel

by Greg Iles

  Laurel was scarcely breathing.

  “Sam fought for maybe a minute after he got to the whirlpool, and then it sucked him down. I was crying and praying he could hold his breath till he shot out the other end of the pipe, but it was a couple of hundred yards, at least. Maybe three hundred. I found him just before dark, down in the creek. Drowned. I’ve thought about him a lot, banging through that long black pipe, trying to fight, struggling to breathe . . . but the pipe was just too long. He never had a chance. That’s how I feel now, Danny. A year ago, the current pulled me into the ditch. I’ve fought like hell to stay afloat, but I’m just about out of gas. And when I found that letter this morning, it just . . . I finally got sucked into the pipe. I can’t breathe . . . I can’t see. And I sure as hell can’t get back to where I started. All I can do is wait to shoot out the other end of the pipe.” Warren’s chair creaked as he leaned backward. “And you know how that story ends.”

  Laurel tasted salt in her mouth. Her face was covered with tears. How could she have been married to a man for twelve years and not heard that story? How could she be the kind of wife that a man would not want to confide his worst nightmare to?

  “You’re in a bad place,” Danny said. “I can hear that. All I’m going to say to you is this. You need to look at this marriage situation as if you weren’t sick. If you weren’t sick, and there was another man in your wife’s life, what would you do? You’d be angry, sure. But in the end, I think you’d have to let her go and be the best father you could be. Show her what a bad mistake she’d made by leaving you. But you show a woman that by being what you already are—a man of honor, not a pissed-off redneck who can’t keep his shit in one sock.”

  Laurel wondered if Danny had gone too far.

  “I think it just comes down to this,” Warren said. “Other people’s problems look simple, but when it’s your own problem, it’s complicated. I’m glad you talked to me, Danny. But in the end, I’m the one who has to decide how to end this thing.”

  The finality in his voice summoned a new kind of fear from Laurel’s soul.

  “Don’t go yet,” Danny said quickly, his voice betraying stress for the first time. “You said a while ago that you were waiting for something. Something on your computer. Are you still waiting?”

  “I am. Laurel caused me some problems there, but I’ve got another computer working on it.”

  “What is it you’re waiting for?”

  “The name, Danny.”

  “The name?”

  “The guy who was screwing my wife. Still is, for all I know.”

  Laurel wondered if Danny was alone, or if other men were watching him right now.

  “She’s got that on a computer in there? The guy’s name?”

  “I’m pretty sure she does. Don’t worry about it. I’ll let you guys know once I have it.”

  “How long is that likely to take?”

  “No way to know. It’s a probability thing. Could be ten minutes, could take ten hours.”

  Danny cleared his throat. “I don’t think we have that kind of time, Warren. Not anything like.”

  “Why not? The sheriff getting antsy out there?”

  “I told you about the manual. Remember? These guys have a list of steps out here. They cross one off, then go to the next one.”

  Warren thought about this. “I see. Well . . . I wouldn’t advise anybody to trespass in this house. The yard’s all right. But a man’s home is his castle. Even the law says that. And as far as I can tell, nobody’s got cause to come into this house uninvited. Uniformed or not. I wouldn’t take kindly to that, Major. Not at all.”

  “I hear you, Doc. I’ll relay that to the sheriff.”

  “You do that. Maybe we’ll talk again.”

  Warren’s hand reached out from behind the computer and switched off the speakerphone. In the silence that followed, Christy’s scratching paws became the dominant sound in the house. It made Laurel think of Warren’s drowning dog.

  “Shouldn’t you let Christy in?” she called. “I know she’s starving by now.”

  Warren didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, “Are you hoping they’ll shoot me when I bend down to unlock the pet door?”

  Laurel closed her eyes and wondered how two human beings who had shared a bed for so long could grow so far apart.

  CHAPTER

  19

  Danny ripped off the headset and shoved his chair away from the table.

  “What was all that stuff about God?” Ray Breen asked from the door. “Did you hear that shit? Sounds like he’s gone atheist or something.”

  Sheriff Ellis shook his head. “Dr. Shields is questioning his faith, that’s all. Death is the most difficult test of the spirit, Ray. I’ve seen many a devout man question God in the face of cancer. Especially when it hits children. No, the truth is, I feel for the man.”

  “Well, I’m happy to hear it,” Biegler said sarcastically. “But none of that brings us any closer to a resolution. I suppose you noted that we heard nothing whatsoever from Kyle Auster?”

  Ellis nodded. “I think Dr. Auster’s dead. Danny?”

  “Dead.”

  “Well,” said Ray. “What are we waiting for then? Shields ain’t gonna let his little girl out of there. And he sure as hell ain’t gonna let his wife out. I don’t think we got any choice but to go in and get them.”

  “We need to know what’s going on inside that house,” said the sheriff.

  “Randy’s got the directional mikes on the windows,” Trace said, “but he’s getting a lot of noise. No clear voices. He texted me while Major Danny was talking. He thinks Shields is in the study. The wife and kid aren’t saying anything. Nothing audible, no how. The thermal-image gadgets got here, but they ain’t set up yet.”

  “Audio’s enough for what we need,” Ray said. “Let’s get a location on Shields and go.”

  Sheriff Ellis still looked reluctant to give the order.

  “What else are we gonna do?” Ray said impatiently. “The man’s in hell already. You heard him.”

  “The man’s scared to death,” Carl said softly. “That’s what I heard.”

  Everyone turned and looked at the sniper.

  “We need to focus on Mrs. Shields and her daughter,” said Danny, trying to plumb his own motives even as he spoke. “God knows Dr. Shields is in a bad place, but he poses a serious threat to his family. An imminent threat, if you ask me. There’s no telling what he’ll do if that computer finally tells him who his wife’s been seeing.”

  “He’ll kill her,” said Ray. “You tell a guy that crazy who’s been doing his wife, he’s gonna off ’em both. Or the one he can get to, anyway. No question about it.”

  “Damn straight,” Trace said from the comm rack. “I would.”

  “Maybe,” said Sheriff Ellis. “I want the signal from those directional mikes routed in here.”

  “I got it now,” said Trace.

  “Well, turn it on!” Ellis snapped. “The worms are eating us up in here, I swear.”

  Agent Biegler said, “We need to be ready to go at a second’s notice, Sheriff. Is the rest of your team in position?”

  “We?” said the sheriff. “What’s this we stuff? You ain’t got a dog in this hunt, Biegler.”

  “I’m part of this operation, whether you like it or not.”

  “My men are in position,” Ray said. “The charges are already set on the windows. Sonny Weldon’s on the switch.”

  “Good,” said Ellis.

  “What’s the chance of flying glass hurting the hostages?” Danny asked.

  Ray shrugged. “There’s a thin bead of explosive around each of those big panes. We’re going to cut the glass, basically. It should drop pretty much straight down. With really bad luck, somebody could get hit by small shards, but I don’t think so.”

  Shards moving at 12,500 feet per second, Danny thought, making a mental note to text Laurel to stay far from the windows prior to the assault. And to lie on top of Beth, if poss
ible. With this thought came the realization that the men in the room were not watching Sheriff Ellis expectantly, but him. Even Ellis seemed to be waiting for Danny to give some last-minute guidance. Danny figured they must have bought into the plan he’d outlined earlier, whether they’d voiced their agreement or not.

  “Let’s put one thermal imager in front of the house and one in back,” Danny said. “Make sure the one in back is at Carl’s position. The operator will serve as his spotter. Carl’s used to working that way. Make sure the fireman who’s read the manual is operating the unit by Carl. He’ll have some idea what he’s looking at.” Danny peered between sweat-soaked uniforms to the sniper’s face. “Sound okay to you, Carl?”

  “Best we can do, probably. I had a thermal rifle scope in the Corps when I needed it, but this ought to be good enough for general target acquisition.”

  “Let’s pray it is. After Carl has a positive lock on Shields—and I mean positive—I’ll take the chopper up, hover over the backyard, and hit the searchlight. That’ll bring Shields to the windows.” Danny looked at Ray. “Then you blow them out, and Carl takes his shot.”

  Danny looked at the sheriff, worried that he’d usurped the man’s authority, but Ellis only nodded in agreement. In this kind of situation, the natural hierarchy asserted itself.

  Trace Breen held up his hand for silence. “Listen! I got a mike signal ready. It’s noisy, but just be patient. Your ears’ll sort out the words after a minute or so.”

  “Wait a second,” said Ray. “I think it’s time our shooter got into position.”

  “Deputy Sims,” said the sheriff, “get to your sniping position.”

  Danny was surprised that Ellis had let Carl stay so long. But when he thought about it some more, he understood. Carl Sims was Death. In the command trailer, death was contained. But once they put Carl behind that tree in the backyard—with clearance to shoot—Warren Shields was a dead man. This certainty roiled Danny’s gut in a way few things ever had, and only one thing weighed against the essential wrongness of it. Shields’s cancer.

  He’s dead anyway, Danny told himself.

  Carl hesitated at the door, looking back to Danny for a final, unspoken authorization. Danny closed his eyes, then gave the slightest of nods, knowing that his gesture carried the weight of a Roman emperor’s thumb in the arena.

  • • •

  While Carl slipped silently out to his position, Laurel struggled like a mangy dog to scratch beneath the duct tape binding her ankles. Her soul might be in free fall, but her body could still drive her mad. Red welts had risen where the tape chafed her skin, and she had already scratched two of them bloody. As soon as she got momentary relief, her mind went back to Warren.

  In the past ten minutes, she had seen deeper into her husband’s heart than she had during her entire marriage. The despair he’d revealed to Danny had shattered her so completely that hope seemed only a quaint dream dimly recalled from childhood. Guilt suffused every cell of her being, and yet to dwell on it now was pointless. She had to act.

  “Warren?” she said. “Could I speak with you for a minute?”

  “What about?” came the disembodied voice from behind the computer monitor. “My tumor?”

  “Not only that.”

  “Talk.”

  “Would you please come over here?”

  “I can hear you fine from here.”

  This was going to be much harder without eye contact. “I think you know what I’m going to ask you. Why didn’t you tell me about your diagnosis when you first got it?”

  “There was no point.”

  “No point?”

  “It would only have made things worse.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  He sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I’ve seen it again and again in my practice. People get cancer, and everything in their lives changes. Sometimes it’s not so bad . . . a thyroid cancer, testicular, some lymphomas, things that are caught early and dealt with. But if you get one of the big ones, the deadly ones, people never look at you the same way again. It’s almost a tribal reaction, or an evolutionary one. People avoid you. You’re tainted by death. Even if the surgeons swear they got it all, people think, ‘Any day now, it could come back. He’s a goner.’ “

  “I don’t think that’s necessarily true anymore.”

  His face moved out from behind the monitor. The frankness in it chilled her. “You have a lot of experience with cancer patients?”

  “I realize you see more than I—”

  “Laurel, I might as well have pancreatic cancer, okay? The worst thing is, people start treating you like you’re dead long before you die. If you’re a salesman, you make customers uncomfortable. Your boss smiles to your face, but he’s already looking for somebody to replace you. People say they support you, but it’s bullshit. Remember that actor who played Spenser: For Hire on TV? Robert Urich? He got synovial sarcoma about ten years ago. He went public and told the world he was going to beat it. What did the network do? Canceled his series. He lived five more years. If you’re a doctor, it’s worse. You scare the hell out of patients. Nobody wants to be reminded of his mortality. They look at a guy like me, midthirties, perfect physical shape . . . dying of cancer? Patients don’t want to see that. They don’t want to believe it can happen. I don’t blame them. I didn’t want to believe it either. But I did, finally. And I didn’t intend to be treated like a dead man for my last few months of life. I’ll be dead soon enough.”

  She tried to imagine herself in his situation, knowing he would soon lose everything, even his children. But Warren was right; there was simply no way she could. “I can understand you keeping it from your patients. Even from Kyle. But why didn’t you tell me at least? Just me? You know I would have kept it secret. I could have helped you with everything. Getting to the treatments . . . anything you needed.”

  His head disappeared again. “I thought about it. But what could you do besides feel sorry for me and worry about the future? I wasn’t going to endure the former, and I intended to spend every minute I had left on earth making sure you never had to do the latter. You see? What’s the point?”

  Laurel felt like knotting a piece of cord and whipping herself until she bled.

  Warren got up and came around the desk. He stopped in the squared-off arch between the great room and the study. She rarely saw him unshaven, and the dark growth of beard gave him a desperate aura. He looked like a distant cousin of himself, someone she had met once long ago and then forgotten.

  “Marriages go through hell when one partner is dying,” he said. “People leave each other during illnesses like this. They get divorced. They have sexual problems, and not in the way you’d think. Sometimes the sick partner wants sex, but the other person just can’t stomach it. They can’t be intimate with this deathlike figure that used to be the person they lusted after. We all have strong feelings of repulsion against death and illness. I didn’t want you thinking about any of that until you absolutely had to.” He squeezed his fingers into fists. “And I meant to keep that day from coming, too.”

  “How?”

  His gaze was unblinking. “Think about it.”

  She felt lost. She hadn’t yet learned the rules of logic for the world where death was both inexorable and imminent. “I don’t know.”

  “You asked me why I got the gun.”

  Her stomach turned over. “Oh, God. Warren, you wouldn’t.”

  “You think I want my son’s last memory of his father to be a hairless skeleton shitting himself in the bed? A shell of a man who can’t talk or remember anything or even feed himself? No, thank you.”

  “Don’t talk like that. Please.”

  “Why not? You want to pretend it wouldn’t end that way?”

  “I can’t believe you’ve been dealing with this alone.”

  “Everybody deals with this alone. Sometimes there are just people around, that’s all. Nobody can really help you.”

  “I think you’re
wrong,” she insisted, hoping her faith wasn’t absurdly naive. “You have to be willing to let someone help you.”

  An expression of boyish shyness came over his features. “Well . . . I’m not that way.”

  “I know. But maybe it’s time to change. Just a little.”

  “I can’t. I have to deal with this myself.”

  “Is that what you’re doing now? Look at me, Warren. This is crazy.”

  “No, it’s not. I simply didn’t foresee your betrayal. I should have, I see that now. But I was preoccupied. Isn’t it funny? I’ve been spending my last months on earth trying to provide for someone who stopped loving me a long time ago.”

  “That’s not true.”

  His eyes found hers again, and they were devoid of all illusion. “Isn’t it?”

  “I’ve always loved you, Warren! I just wanted you to really let me in, to let me love you, and you couldn’t. I don’t think it’s your fault. It’s just . . . I think your father wanted to make you tough, and he did such a good job that you can’t be soft, you can’t be vulnerable at all. And when you armor yourself like that, there’s no way love can get in.”

  “Or out. Right?”

  She nodded sadly.

  “And now?”

  She hung her head, searching for words to explain what she felt. “I don’t know. Now we need to pull together to try to beat this thing somehow.”

  He laughed as though amazed. “You can’t quit, can you? You can’t stop pretending that the world is different than it is.”

  “Where there’s life, there’s hope. Corny maybe, but I believe that. And you’re a fighter, God knows.”

  He drew his hand across his throat like a knife. “No one beats this, Laurel. It would take a miracle. And there are people on earth a lot more deserving of miracles than I am. What end would it serve, anyway? You’re in love with someone else.”

  She stared back, unable to lie anymore. “I don’t know. I feel like the whole world has been pulled inside out. I didn’t know how things really were.”