by Roger Johns
A low-hanging branch scratched her forehead above her right eye, and a swell of blood started collecting in her eyebrow. She used the strap to hang the Holland & Holland across her back, then lifted the ladder that lived in the space between the gazebo and the fence. As she did, her hood slipped back a bit.
“The sounds from your phone are different again, Detective,” Don said.
“I opened my window. It’s getting claustrophobic in here, and the AC isn’t helping,” she said, as she laid the ladder gently against the roof.
“Well, roll it up again. How do I know you’re not waving for help, like some lunatic?”
Wallace pulled the hood back into place as she silently climbed the ladder.
The back of the house was in total darkness, just like the front, but Wallace knew to a certainty there were only two places Don could be—one was upstairs and one was down. And, as near as she could remember, the roof of the gazebo was the only spot from which she would have a clear view of both. Depending on how she situated herself, she would have a better shot at one than the other. Don’s statement that he would be reading her license plate when she backed up the driveway gave her a bit of confidence that he would select the downstairs option. Plus, that would keep things simpler when the time came to hustle his hostages from the house to the car.
“Gonna make it on time?” Don asked.
Wallace assumed a prone posture along a spine of the gazebo roof. “I think so,” she said coolly, even though her heart was hammering.
“Remember … if you’re late … I’ll have to thin the herd.”
“Please don’t.” The accumulation of blood in her right eyebrow broke free and the blood tickled as it arced through the crease above her right eyelid.
“You really are such a devoted friend. What does that feel like?” Don asked.
“It hurts,” Wallace replied. “Right now, it hurts.”
“So why do it?” he asked, then resumed his saga.
While the downstairs target had better sight lines, it presented a special challenge—one where Wallace felt her skills fell a bit short. In Stella’s lone concession to authenticity, during the restoration of their house, she had consented to double-paned windows across the back, on the ground floor. During certain times of day in certain seasons, sunlight coming in made the rooms unbearably hot.
“You know, Detective, you and I have got a score to settle,” Don said, switching subjects.
“Yes, I know.”
“I can’t let that go unanswered. All those injuries you inflicted back at the Chapman woman’s shitty little house.”
“I understand,” Wallace said, blotting out Don’s threats to focus on a tricky bit of math. Window glass, like all transparent materials, had a refractive index—an amount by which it bent the light that passed through it. That meant the true location of an object beyond the glass was slightly different from where it appeared to be. The thinner the glass, the smaller the shift, but two panes, with a layer of argon in between, made things complicated. Wallace remembered the rule of thumb one of the department sharpshooters had told her—for every fifty feet between the shooter and the target, each degree of refraction produces a ten-point-five-inch difference between where one sees the target and where it really is. He had also told her that normal window glass threw things off by about a tenth of a degree. Her margin for error would be small under the best of circumstances. Double-pane windows were not the best of circumstances. Nor was gusting wind. Nor was the fact that the average human head was just a little over eight inches wide.
“So, once the Greenbergs have served their purpose, and I’m in the clear, it’s going to be just you and me, kiddo. And it won’t be the tender cooing and billing like we did earlier.”
“I expected as much,” she responded.
“You know, Detective Hartman, despite the occasional pain, this experience has had certain very significant pleasures, but I think our time together is going to top the charts.”
“It’s always good to have something to look forward to.”
“You can be smug now, but you won’t be later.”
He continued taunting her as she adjusted her position. She could just make out the right-most window on the ground floor. The branches of the ancient mimosa that grew between the gazebo and the house were starting to lash around in the gathering wind. Had the lights been on inside the house, she would have gotten fleeting glimpses of the little built-in desk off to the side of the breakfast area. The window was a simple four-pane affair, and Wallace estimated that her target would appear behind the upper-right pane.
“I’m here,” she said.
“Where, exactly?”
“Turning the corner on what would be your left, if you were looking through the living room windows toward the street.” She dragged the back of her hand across her right eyebrow to wipe away the blood that had begun to accumulate again, then she twined her arm through the strap of the rifle to hold it steady against her. The sky had gone black and it was raining again.
“Turn off your headlights when you get close. Leave your running lights on, then back into the driveway, just like I told you.”
“I’m in front, but everything’s dark,” she said, a few seconds later. “With the house dark I’m not sure I’ll be able to back up all that way without crashing into something. Can you turn on the light under the carport for a few seconds, so I can at least get my bearings?”
She brought her right eye to the scope. In the darkness, the crosshairs and their hash marks were only faintly visible. She centered the crosshairs over the upper-right pane.
Her heart beat furiously. The accumulated stress and exhaustion of the last two days were fraying her composure. She summoned that day with her older brother Martin—the day he taught her how to shoot, when she was just a girl. “Think it slow, little sister, and it’ll slow down,” he had told her as her heartbeat galloped, causing the gun to pitch and yaw. She had pestered him for weeks to take her shooting, but when he finally gave in she tried to chicken out. The loud bang would make her deaf. The kick would dislocate her shoulder.
Her memory of that day and Martin’s calm, steady voice slowed the hammering in her chest. The roaring rush of blood in her ears became a faint throb. She could barely feel the rhythmic pulse of her right carotid artery against the smooth cool stock of the rifle. Like a musician falling in behind the drummer, she put a count to the rhythm.
“Pay attention,” Don said. “You get only a couple of seconds, and then the light goes off. Ready?”
“I am.” Her heart rate slipped into automatic, pulling her respiration alongside.
She heard Don speak to someone else—someone in the room with him. Where was the switch for the outside light? he wanted to know.
“It’s there, where you’re sitting, right there on the wall,” Stella said, in the background.
Wallace divided her attention between the whipping branches and her recollection of which part of the interior would be framed by the upper-right pane, praying that she remembered correctly. The bulb in the carport lit up. A faint glow bled back into the kitchen through the side door, revealing Don at the built-in desk. His back was to her, his right hand poised over the light switch, his left holding the handset of Stella’s old rotary dial telephone.
She had guessed wrong. Don was framed by the upper left, not the upper right.
She started to realign, but Don rose from the desk, turning to face in her direction. He was moving out of the frame. She was losing the shot.
Again, she cast her mind back to her first day holding the gun. She felt Martin kneeling beside her, his arms along her arms, his hands on her hands, then she slipped into the magic space where time slows to a crawl. Thought fled. The whipping branches were edited out and the ache in her swollen right hand was noted but not felt. Instinct calculated the speed and line of Don’s movement and accounted for the displacement of the glass. Instinct machined the crosshairs onto the target.
&
nbsp; She squeezed the trigger.
The rifle gave up a sensuous shudder. Don twitched, then dropped from sight. Wallace heard the shell explode. Then she heard the brittle fracture of the window glass, as the sharp scent of burnt gunpowder filled the air.
THIRTY-TWO
It was nearly midnight when the last of the police vehicles cleared out of the Greenbergs’ driveway. For the second time in one night, Wallace was forced to hand over her weapons.
Questions would be raised about the circumstances of Don’s death, but she felt fairly confident she would be able to justify her failure to alert the proper individuals inside the department that a hostage situation existed. She also felt good that she could defend the circumstances that led to her taking the situation entirely into her own hands.
Stella and Colley drove Wallace home. She kept saying she was sorry. Stella kept telling her it wasn’t her fault, there was no way she could have known. Don had ambushed them as they were walking back from visiting their next-door neighbor.
* * *
Mason had lost a lot of blood, but Wallace’s trick with the shoe had saved him. Not only had the main artery that supplied his arm been damaged, but the brachial plexus, the complex network of nerves that controlled the arm was also compromised. Full recovery was possible, but not a sure thing.
Mason spent the next several days in intensive care, drifting in and out of consciousness. On his third day there, Wallace was allowed a short visit. Successive days brought increasing coherence and strength, and longer visits. Occasional words were exchanged, but mostly he slept while Wallace sat next to his bed and worried.
Calls from Washington came in, and she fielded them as best she could, but none of his colleagues came to see him. The sister Mason mentioned the day he arrived in Baton Rouge called to say she and her husband were deeply concerned, and she thanked Wallace for saving Mason’s life. She said she would do her best to make the trek to Baton Rouge, while Mason was in the hospital, but she never came.
Even though Matt Gable’s apparatus was eventually reassembled, it turned out to be useless without some information that Matt had either taken to his grave or had hidden in a place no one knew about. Temperature settings for the heating elements, pressure settings for the pressurized vessels, and the wavelength settings for the light-based catalysts were all unknown. The department’s consulting chemist calculated the combinations of pressure, wavelength, and heat could run into the hundreds of millions, and that it might take decades to reproduce the originals.
Nothing came to light about how Matt had stumbled on his discovery. And Wallace hadn’t felt the least compunction about lying to everyone when they asked her about the item Don must have taken from Matt. The remnants of the strapping tape Matt used to secure it to the small of his back clearly indicated that something had been there and been cut away. Wallace pleaded ignorance.
She recounted the part of the conversation between her and Don in which he had arrived at the conclusion that Wallace had found and was still in possession of the little pouch. She insisted that it was an erroneous conclusion—one she had manipulated him into and had allowed him to labor under all the way to the end. She had needed Don to believe she had something to trade for Colley and Stella, so she would have time to free them. No one disputed that if Don had ever come to believe the whereabouts of the pouch were unknown or beyond Wallace’s reach, he would have immediately killed his hostages and fled.
Now, Gable’s discovery was beyond everyone’s reach. At her first opportunity, Wallace had ferreted out the online hiding places that Don had so scrupulously written down in the back of the little notebook and she deleted all of the files. Once she was confident no trace of the files remained, she fed the notebook itself through her shredder and then burned the shreds. After she erased the flash drives, she pulverized them with a hammer.
* * *
Eight days after he was shot, Mason was moved to a regular room. Wallace slipped in, wearing sandals and a thigh-length sundress.
“Hey, cowboy. How are you feeling?” She gently brushed the hair back from his forehead.
“Everything hurts. A lot.”
“I know. But your prognosis is pretty good.”
“Nice outfit,” he said, looking her over. “I’ve never seen you in anything besides work stuff.”
“I seem to remember showing you my birthday suit, not so long ago. Am I so forgettable?” A low-voltage thrill scampered up her spine as Mason’s cheeks tinted bright red. There was something irresistible about a man who embarrassed so easily. “You really like my dress?” She crossed the room and yanked open the curtains, letting a blaze of sunshine flood into the room. Backlit by the intense light coming through the window, her dress became translucent.
“Now you’re just being cruel,” he said, unable to take his eyes off the outline of her body clearly silhouetted beneath her clothes.
“Am I that transparent?” she asked, laughing at her own joke.
Mason started to laugh too, but the pain from his injuries turned it into a tournament of groans and spasms. When he looked at her again, something changed. A weight came down behind his eyes. She knew what was coming.
“What happened?”
“Maybe this isn’t the best time,” she demurred.
“Just tell me.”
Carefully, Wallace climbed onto the bed and curled up next to him. She laid her head on the pillow next to his uninjured shoulder and took his hand in both of hers. “What’s the last thing you remember?” she asked, staring toward the foot of the bed.
“Walking in through the back door of Carla’s house.”
Mason was visibly relieved when she told him about Carla’s escape. After cutting herself free, Carla had found her way to a nearby highway, where she was picked up by a sheriff’s deputy who had been cruising the area looking for Don. The news about Matt had, at first, devastated her. But, after she learned that Matt’s criminal activities were the cause of her miseries at the hands of Don Brindl, her sorrow had quickly turned to anger and resentment. She had called a few days ago to tell Wallace she was sorry for all the nasty things she’d said during the investigation, and to say that she was moving back home to try and make a new beginning.
Mason’s physical recovery would be long and difficult, but at least he wouldn’t have to contend with guilt over Carla’s death. She remembered how mortified he had been in the car the day they went to Bayou Sara to look for Carla. The day he was so worried his conversation with Don had put her in jeopardy. The day the world had come apart at the seams. Even though he had been terrified at the prospect of what he had done, he had had the courage to let his fear show. Any reservations she had about him started fading that day in the car. Then, after she found the envelope, she saw him in an entirely new light.
“Thank you,” he whispered, his voice husky with emotion.
“For what?”
“For saving my life.”
“Thank you,” she whispered back, her eyes starting to glisten.
“For what?” he asked.
She thought about the mementos in the envelope. The fact that Mason had begun saving things, almost from the moment they met, told Wallace that something had sparked very quickly for him. The fact that he had continued to save things told her he had seen her more clearly than she had realized. She pulled the envelope from one of the deep patch pockets on the front of her dress and held it where he could see it.
“For bringing me back from the dead.”
* * *
Ten days after Medicated Mike Harrison had his unfortunate encounter with Arthur Staples and nine days after Wallace had rescued the Greenbergs and put an end to Don Brindl, she was still on restricted duty, pending the outcome of the Internal Affairs investigation. Restricted duty meant she reported to work and shuffled papers but she didn’t meet the public and she didn’t carry a weapon. It was like being at work and being under house arrest at the same time. The worst part about it was being in such close
proximity to her boss virtually all day, every day. Things were still uncomfortably chilly between her and Chief Burley—a state of affairs she was unwilling to live with.
She expected him to rebuff any attempt to resolve the issues that had arisen between them, but Burley surprised her. When she had taken the bull by the horns and invited him for a clear-the-air meeting at one of the little outdoor restaurants down by the river in Catfish Town, a few blocks from headquarters, she felt sure he would turn her down. But he had accepted. That was a good sign. At three o’clock on a Monday afternoon, the place was practically deserted.
“Have you seen Mike Harrison in the last few days?” Burley asked.
“Yesterday. He was wide awake, but he didn’t seem to be processing at full speed. His wife was there. I’d never met her before. She seems … I don’t know, not what I expected.”
“I knew her before she married Mike. I told her not to do it, but she evidently saw something. I don’t know.” He smiled and shook his head, then he gave her a watcha-gonna-do shrug.
“Do you think he’ll return to active duty?”
“If he asks me, I’ll advise against it. It was ruining his life. He deals with the pressure in too many unhealthy ways. The things everybody thought were character flaws were just bad coping mechanisms.”
Wallace started finger-tracing random figures on the tablecloth. Her eyes followed her fingertip as it moved across the fabric. “I feel really bad for him.”
“You should. We all should,” he said, staring at the tabletop. “He had a bright future at one time. He made some bad decisions and he had absolutely no idea how to get back on track. He had people in his corner, but he couldn’t figure out who to trust. That’s a very lonely, scary place to be—where there’s a cloud of suspicion around everybody in your life.”
Burley had never before been so free with his thinking about the men and women who worked under him. It was throwing Wallace off balance.
