by Gregory Ashe
He grunted.
“Who turned the lights back on?”
“I don’t know. Somebody.”
“What happened?”
“The breakers tripped. All of them.”
“And somebody reset them?”
“Sure, somebody.”
“All of them?”
“Christ’s sake. Yes.”
So why hadn’t the outside lights come back on?
Before Somers could voice the question, Hazard’s phone buzzed. The dark-haired man answered, speaking in a low tone—grim monosyllabics punctured by a single, violent, “What?” After listening for another minute, Hazard threw the phone skidding across the dash.
“What?” Somers said. “Is it my—”
“No. Nothing about your dad, not yet. He’s still in surgery.”
“Then what?” Somers tried to think, but his reactions were dulled by emotion and exhaustion. “Nico?”
“Santa Claus is dead.”
Somers stared at Hazard. “That’s a joke.”
“He was shot while trying to escape arrest.”
HAZARD FLOORED IT, AND THE INTERCEPTOR shot through Wahredua’s slush-choked streets. His hands tightened around the wheel, and the still-healing cut throbbed. It didn’t matter. It hurt like hell, but it didn’t matter. He couldn’t loosen his grip.
When Wahredua Regional came into sight, only a single pair of red-and-blue lights pulsed in the parking lot. There should have been more. The whole place should have been lit up. Instead, Hazard realized as he pulled the Interceptor into the lot and towards the red-and-blue, he and Somers were the first to arrive.
“They’re all at my parents’ house,” Somers said, with his maddening habit of answering Hazard’s thoughts.
Hazard’s partner looked better. Not great; John-Henry Somerset usually looked great, and this was about forty percent of that. The icy blue of the dash lights washed his face, sank deep into the new hollows under his eyes, highlighted lines of fatigue and worry that Hazard had never seen before. His nose was still swollen, with blood crusting the nostrils. But Somers’s eyes were alert. He was talking. And most important, he wasn’t talking about blaming himself for what had happened. God only knew what he was thinking.
When they reached the gray sedan, Lender and Swinney stood silently in the rushing wind and snow. Swinney looked smaller than ever. Wahredua’s only female detective wasn’t, by nature, a retiring woman; she had her reddish-blond hair cut short except for the bangs, and her personality tended to match the fiery color. Tonight, though, she was a huddled figure, her back to the gale.
Albert Lender, her partner, looked like he would have been more at home with a slide rule or a protractor or anything but the revolver he held in one hand. Short and squirrely, he wore enormous eyeglasses with thick frames of yellow plastic. From behind snowmelt-covered lenses, he blinked at Somers and Hazard. More snow glazed his bushy mustache. He didn’t look like a traitor. He didn’t look like a dirty cop. But that hadn’t stopped him from helping Mayor Newton try to kill Hazard and Somers.
The only problem was that Hazard didn’t have any proof. The jagged cut across Hazard’s palm, which he had inflicted on himself by driving a shard of glass into another man’s neck, throbbed in time with Hazard’s pulse. That fight—that brutal, insane fight in a darkened basement, that fight that Hazard had been sure would be his last—that had been because of Lender.
Somers had already moved to a patch of trampled snow. So many tracks crossed here—tracks from different tires and different shoes—that it seemed impossible to pick anything out. Hazard hunkered next to his partner, and Somers pointed. Black snow. Black now, but when Hazard dug a penlight out of his pocket, the congealing slush changed to a dark maroon. Blood.
“You all right?” Somers asked.
Lender was shaking. In the rushing cold, the movement might have been mistaken for shivering. For all Hazard knew, it might have been genuine shivering. But it didn’t look like it. Lender’s face was corpse-pale, almost green in the ambient light, and he looked ready to toss up everything he’d eaten since the Sunday before last.
“Fine,” Swinney said. She unfolded herself slightly, and her hand drifted to her hip where she wore a holstered gun.
“Lender?” Somers asked.
“Fine.”
“You want to tell us what the hell happened?” Hazard said. “How’d you manage to get our prime suspect killed?”
“He tried to escape,” Lender said. The words sounded rote. Mechanical. He was still holding the gun at his side.
“He was cuffed,” Somers said. A tremor ran through his voice. It was small, that tremor, but seismic shifts were happening. Small now, but something big was about to blow. “And naked. Did he get out of the cuffs again? How the hell did he get out of the cuffs?”
“He didn’t.” Lender swallowed. His index finger, resting along the barrel of his gun, twitched. “He knocked me off my feet.”
Another twitch.
The world suddenly seemed very stark: great pools of starchy light from the sodium lamps, and everything else darkness. Everything except for that revolver and Lender’s nervous finger.
Somers’s hand drifted along his hip, moving for the .40 caliber holstered at the small of his back. Hazard’s hand began to rise. The cut across his palm buzzed like a power saw. His thoughts came in clipped observations: Lender would try to shoot first; that much was obvious. Normally, Hazard would have put his money on Somers—or on himself. But Somers was half-crazed with grief, and Hazard’s injured hand would slow him. And what about Swinney? She looked so small, just a crumpled black coat and a damp blur of red. What was she going to do?
Swinney spoke. “He went for my weapon.”
Lender’s finger twitched one last time and went still.
“What?” Hazard said.
“My service weapon. He knocked Lender onto his fat ass. Santa has his back to me, and he got his hand on my service weapon.” Her fingers brushed the leather holster again. “Couldn’t get the damn thing out, though. Couldn’t undo the snap. Lender saw him go for it—”
Too loudly, too abruptly, Lender repeated, “I saw him go for it.”
Something flickered across Swinney’s face, gone almost before Hazard noticed it. Her hands rested on her belt, clutching so that her knuckles shone white. The wind shrieked, piling snow against Hazard’s legs.
“Where is he?” Hazard asked.
“They took him inside to see if they could—” Lender stopped. The snowmelt on his glasses ran like a river. He swallowed. Then he flexed his hand, and the revolver clattered onto the white-dusted asphalt. “Maybe it’s a good thing. No trial.”
None of the others had anything to say. Hazard shook his head. “Let’s go.”
“We’ve got to close this down,” Lender said. “Officer-involved shooting.”
Sirens sang out farther back along the road, and Hazard shook his head again. “Looks like the two of you have everything closed down already. Come on, Somers.”
They walked towards the hospital. A spot at the center of Hazard’s back itched. That’s where he would have put the bullet if he were in Lender’s shoes, and damn, it itched bad.
Snow, with its limestone taste, layered the inside of Hazard’s mouth when he spoke. “Did you see his glasses? There was no way he could see Santa going for Swinney’s gun. What the hell kind of story was that?”
Somers’s voice came out low, still shaking with that seismic upheaval. “He’s a murdering bastard.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s in Newton’s pocket, that’s why.”
“But why would someone want that guy dead?”
“Because Newton paid him to kill my father. Because he’s covering his tracks.”
A sudden pressure came off of Hazard’s chest. He sucked in a lungful of air. Snow, like he had run his tongue through bone dust, the slickness of its melt. “You can’t say that again. Not anyw
here we can be heard.”
“I’m not an idiot.”
Hazard grabbed his shoulder. “You can’t say it again.”
Somers glared at him and shook off Hazard’s hand.
“What about Swinney?”
This time, Somers hesitated. “She was scared.”
“Of us?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was she lying?”
Somers considered this for a moment. “She was backed into a corner. I don’t know.”
“Would she have shot?”
“Christ.” Somers scrubbed at his face and spread his hands.
They made it inside the hospital without another word. In the emergency room lobby, a lone man with his arm in a homemade sling occupied one of the vinyl-covered chairs. Deeper in the hospital, voices mixed with the sound of squeaking metal, doors closing, and footsteps. The clean freshness of the snow was gone, replaced by a sterile, metallic odor.
The woman behind the desk glanced once at Hazard and then looked at Somers. “Detective,” she said. She didn’t look like she practiced smiling, but she looked like she’d give it a try for John-Henry Somerset. “Your father is still in surgery. The waiting room—”
Now, the tremor had gone out of Somer’s voice. It was eerily calm, and Hazard had a vision of the quiet in the last instant before a volcano erupted. “The man who was shot in the parking lot. Where is he?”
“He’s—” the woman paused. “Your father, don’t you—”
“Where is he?” Hazard said.
“They couldn’t do anything for him,” she said, her back stiffening.
“He got nicked in the parking lot.” Hazard layered scorn in his voice. “What? Was there traffic?”
“Nicked? You call being shot in the chest five times a nick? Dr. Osthoff did everything he could. You can’t—”
“Where is he?”
“In the morgue.”
Hazard let out a breath. “I’m going down there. Right now. You stay up here until you hear something about your dad.”
“You can’t go to the morgue—” the nurse began.
Before she could finish, Cravens tromped into the waiting room. Her bun of gray hair sagged, heavy with snow, but her steps carried their familiar, determined energy. Crossing to the desk, she fixed Hazard and Somers with an irritated look.
“I told you two to get over here and take care of Detective Somerset’s mother. What are you doing?”
Hazard opened his mouth, but the bristling nurse spoke first. “They’re trying to get a body out of the morgue.”
“That’s not what I said,” Hazard said.
Cravens gave him a withering look. “Do what I told you, Detective. I’ll take care of this.”
“Detectives Lender and Swinney are involved in this shooting, Chief. They can’t be involved in investigating it.”
“Detective Hazard, do you think I need you to tell me to do my job?”
“No, Chief. But if you’ll let me explain—”
“Unless you’d like to spend the next six months working nights and weekends on our safe parks initiative, you’d better do what I asked you to do, Detective. You’d better do it right now.”
“You’re not listening to me,” Hazard began.
To Hazard’s surprise, Somers gripped his arm and shoved him towards the nearest hallway. Cravens watched them, her face hard and illegible until Somers had steered Hazard out of sight.
“You can’t just shut your mouth,” Somers muttered. “You can’t just do what you’re told.”
“Do you want Lender and Swinney on that case?”
“No, dumbass. But neither does Cravens. If you had kept your mouth shut, you would have figured that out.” Hazard opened his mouth, but he shut it again when Somers squeezed his eyes shut. “I can’t do this right now, Ree. I just can’t.”
He sounded more like the normal Somers. Those tremors had vanished, and his voice had smoothed out. But he didn’t look like Somers. He looked like a man hanging by a frayed rope.
When they reached the waiting room—a glass box with chairs and a humming TV and magazines from six months ago—Grace Elaine Somerset took one look at Hazard and shook her head.
“No.”
“Fine,” Somers said, nudging Hazard back into the hallway.
When the door swung shut, Hazard watched through the glass as Somers spoke to his mother. The two exchanged a flurry of words—furious words, to judge by their expressions, but muted by the closed door—and then Somers shook his head. When he opened the door again, he dragged two chairs out into the hall and collapsed into one of them. Hazard studied Grace Elaine through the glass. If looks could kill, Hazard would have been dead, with a smoking bullet hole right through the heart.
“Will you sit?” Somers said. “She’ll beat you in a staring contest, anyway.”
So Hazard sat. And as the adrenaline seeped out of his body, as exhaustion took over, as the lines of grief on Somers’s face deepened and spread, Hazard felt lost. Polar explorers, he thought he had read somewhere, would have their ships get stuck in the ice. They’d be in the exact same place, trapped, but they’d be lost. And that’s how this felt. Somers’s hand rested on the arm of the chair, brushing Hazard’s. That’s what this was: being lost and being stuck in the same goddamn place. Because right then, they were touching, but they might as well have been at the ends of the earth because Emery Hazard was too much of a coward to hold Somers’s hand. Somers was hurting. He needed something. Someone. Anyone. And that was what decided it: Hazard shifted, ready to take Somers’s fingers in his own.
Somers leaned forward, his hand moving away from Hazard and into a pocket. “I should have called Cora. She’s going to kill me. I’ll be right back—”
A doctor—a surgeon, still dressed in scrubs, a mask hanging loose around his neck, came up the hallway towards them. Hazard had the brief impression of silvery hair and almond-shaped eyes before the man had reached them. Somers had shifted to the edge of his seat, and Grace Elaine stood in the doorway. Her manicured nails gripped the frame as though it were the only solid thing on earth.
“He’s stable.”
There was more, but Hazard didn’t hear it because Somers had turned, burying his face in Hazard’s chest. What Hazard remembered, though, even more than the feel of his arms around Somers, even more than the shaking in Somers’s shoulders, was the unadulterated fury in Grace Elaine’s face.
SOMERS DIDN'T SLEEP. He sat outside the door to his father’s room, the .40 caliber Glock on his lap, his hand on the gun’s butt. At some point in the gray hours—hours that hummed with the constant pulse of machinery inside the hospital—the world slipped into a dreamlike quality. The walls and hallways stretched into vast distances. The brushed-nickel handrails shimmered like ice in sunlight. Above Somers, the flickers in the fluorescent lights became pauses of darkness.
But he didn’t sleep, not exactly. Another day, another case, his mind would have been racing: collating suspects, cordoning off possibilities, drawing up a plan. This night, though, he just sat with his hand on his gun. The gun, the door, the man inside that room: the three coordinates that mattered now. More than once, in those humming hours—God, that noise at the back of his head—he thought he saw Lender at the end of those long, distended hallways, and then Somers would flex his fingers on the Glock and ready himself to shoot.
A hand on his shoulder brought Somers upright in the tubular chair. A second hand caught his wrist.
“It’s me. Hey. Dummy.”
Somers blinked. Hazard stood over him. The big man was, as always, groomed to an irritating degree. His long, dark hair—too long for regulation, even combed and parted, but it looked so damn good—shone in the fluorescent lights.
“I should have known. Cravens promised she wouldn’t let you stay all night.”
“She didn’t.” Somers cracked his jaw and settled back into the seat. “But she put Orear on the do
or. I wasn’t going to leave my father with Orear on the goddamn door.”
“You bullied Orear into going home.”
“I told him I’d take care of it.”
“You forced him.”
“I told him he could either walk out or go with my foot up his ass. He decided to walk.”
Hazard’s face betrayed nothing. The smooth skin, so pale that it was almost blue, was a taut, blank canvas. “Go wash up,” Hazard finally said, releasing Somers’s hand. “You look like hell.”
“They’ve got showers,” Somers said, stretching expansively. “Big enough for two.”
As usual, the comment did what Somers intended: it kindled sparks in Hazard’s cheeks, and Hazard flipped the bird.
Instead of a shower, though, Somers settled for splashing water on his face and running a wet paper towel around his neck and under his arms. His nose was still tender. Nothing for it now, though—and at least it wasn’t broken.
By the time Somers got back to his father’s room, Hazard was speaking in a low voice with Cravens. The chief looked like she had spent the night working: her hair had worked its way free from its bun, and her shirt and jacket were rumpled. Coffee stained one cuff. Her jaw, however, was set in resolve. She looked like she’d still rather put her head through a brick wall than walk around it.
“Moraes and Foley—” she was saying.
“Moraes and Foley couldn’t find their asses in a paper bag,” Hazard hissed. “Not even if you were holding their hands while they did it.” Hazard glanced over his shoulder—a furtive look, as though he had done this before, checking to see if Somers were approaching. When he saw Somers, he straightened and fell silent.
“What’s going on?” Somers asked.
“Nothing,” Cravens said. “I just wanted to see how things were going. It looks like Orear didn’t stay the night.”
“It’s personal, Chief. You know how it is.”
“I also know that I gave you an order to go home and get some rest.” She waved a hand when Somers tried to speak. “I just stopped by to see how your father’s doing.”
“He’s alive. Five shots, and he’s alive. That’s more than the killer wanted.”
