Without Mercy

by Jefferson Bass

  “Maybe I’d be dead now if you’d gone low-key,” I countered. “Or maybe he’s dead—for all we know, Satterfield bled to death after Waylon winged him, or choked to death on a chimichanga last night—or he’s in lockup somewhere, busted for DUI. Who knows. Who the hell knows.”

  “Sorry, Doc. It was worth a try, and you were brave to do it.”

  “Thanks. Now get me out of this getup, because by now I really do need to pee.”

  THE BATHROOM WAS DOWN ONE FLIGHT OF STAIRS from my office, positioned halfway down the staircase that descended to the bone lab. As I was about to enter the restroom, I thought I heard footsteps, followed by the rasp of the lab’s steel door scraping across its sill. “Miranda?” I called, “are you here?” There was no answer, and the noise filtering down from the crowd in the stadium made it difficult to know what, if anything, I’d heard at the base of the stairs. I hurried into the restroom, grateful for the chance to pee at last.

  Leaving the restroom, I heard another sound from below, definitely—a forceful thud, and then another. What the hell? I trotted down the stairs, delighted by how easy it was to move, and move quickly, now that I was no longer encased in the bomb suit. I tried the doorknob and was surprised to find it unlocked—surprised because the UT Police required the entire building to be secured and empty during football games. The sole exception, of course, was professors who were being trussed up in body armor and trotted out on stage as live targets for psychopaths to shoot at. Or not.

  Just as I was about to open the lab’s door, I looked outside—out the glass exit door at the base of the stairwell—and paused. Something had caught my eye . . . but what? I looked down at the floor, at my feet, to reset my vision, then quickly looked up again, hoping that whatever had caught my attention subliminally would do it again, but overtly this time. The Homecoming bunting was unusual, of course, as was the “Congratulations Dr. Bill Brockton—U.S. Professor of the Year” banner. But neither of those was the thing that had flipped a switch in my subconscious. The thing that had flipped a switch in my subconscious was smaller and subtler than either of those gaudy decorations. The thing that had flipped a switch in my subconscious was barely noticeable, up there amid the spiderwork of steel I-beams supporting the stadium. The thing that had flipped a switch in my subconscious was . . . a slender, horizontal aluminum angle bracket, attached to a vertical I-beam with what appeared to be a cable tie. Looking left and right, I saw identical brackets. their silvery luster contrasting with the reddish brown of the steel, fastened to the neighboring I-beams as well. Fingers shaking, I grabbed my phone, found Decker’s number, and hit the “call” button. Answer, Deck, I prayed. For God’s sake, answer the damn phone.

  “Doc? What’s taking you so long? Did you get lost, or did you need to download a file, as my kids would say?”

  “Deck, listen. Are you still in my office?”

  “Yeah. I thought you were—”

  “Shut up. Listen. Go to the window and look out.”

  “What?”

  “Go look out my window. At the vertical I-beams. What do you see?”

  “Doc? Are you okay? I don’t quite—”

  “Do it now, Deck—look!”

  “Okay, okay. Don’t get your panties in a twist. I’m at the window. I’m looking out. I see two big ol’ grimy I-beams . . .” The phone went silent.

  “You see them?” I said in an urgent whisper. “Those brackets? Aren’t those demolition charges? Cutting charges?” What was the term I’d learned at the ATF lab a few months before? “LSCs? Linear shaped charges?”

  In my ear, I heard Decker begin to whisper, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

  “Deck, what do we do?”

  “Holy Mary, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

  Christ, I realized, it’s his PTSD again. “Decker, come on, man—get a grip. I need you. We need you. Stop praying and start being a cop.”

  Behind me, I heard the bone lab door rasp open. I turned and saw Miranda’s face leaning around the door frame, her hair rumpled, her eyes wide and wild. “Hey,” I said. “What are you doing here? You know the campus police don’t want us using the building on game days, don’t you?”

  Instead of answering, she took a step forward, and I saw a huge handgun pressed to her head. Then, prodded by the barrel of the gun, she took another step, and I saw one of Decker’s SWAT guys behind her, in olive-drab fatigues and a vest. Only it wasn’t one of Decker’s men; it was Nick Satterfield close behind Miranda, his left hand gripping her upper arm. “Do come in,” Satterfield said. “We didn’t want to start the party without you.”

  Stunned, I walked slowly toward them, my hands up, my fingers spread wide. He was leaning against the door to hold it wide, and as I passed them in the doorway, entering the lab, he shifted the barrel, pressing it hard beneath her ear, causing her to grunt in pain. “We were just about to call you, weren’t we, Miranda? But you saved us the trouble. Very thoughtful of you.”

  “This place is crawling with cops,” I said. I turned to face him, my knees weak, halfway sitting on the table at the center of the lab for support. “If I’m not back in my office in five minutes, they’ll start looking for me.”

  “And I’ll be part of the search party,” he said, a cold, smug smile on his serpent’s face. “In fact, I’m going to be the one who finds you.” On the desk just inside the door sat a matching helmet, and I realized with horror that once he put the helmet on, Satterfield would look exactly like all the other SWAT team officers. “And then I’m going to lead you and your teacher’s pet back onto the field—we’ll have to call a time-out—and we’ll get a microphone. And then you’ll tell all those people that you’re a fraud. That you pose as a good man, but you’re not.”

  There was the sting of truth in his words. I’d gotten Waylon killed, and now I’d led Miranda into deadly peril. And as the implications of what I’d seen through the window continued to sink in, I realized that perhaps I had led thousands of people—no, tens of thousands—to their deaths. If Satterfield had rigged the stadium’s supports with demolition charges, the entire upper deck could come crashing down. “You’ll tell them you’re an evil man, and you’re about to prove it.”

  I snuck a glance at Miranda. She was motionless and silent, but tears coursed down her face, and the sight ripped my heart open. Stall, Brockton, I thought. Keep calm and stall. Get him talking—isn’t that what they do on TV? “And how am I going to prove it?”

  “By pressing this button,” he said, holding up a gizmo that resembled a cell phone or a garage-door opener.

  “And how will pressing that button prove I’m an evil man?”

  “By killing everyone in this stadium, while you watch from center field, untouched by the carnage happening all around you.”

  Do something, Decker, I prayed. “You’re insane,” I said. “You can’t possibly kill everyone in the stadium.”

  “I won’t,” he said. “You will.”

  “Bullshit. I don’t believe you.” I saw Miranda’s eyes flicking back and forth, from me to Satterfield and back again, and my sense of helplessness was maddening.

  “Oh, but you will soon,” he told me. “Seeing is believing. You will see, and you’ll believe, and you’ll wish you were never born.”

  “Can’t be done,” I said. “You can’t kill all those people unless you’ve managed to hide a nuclear weapon in the stadium. And you don’t have the ability to do that.”

  “I don’t need a nuclear weapon. The stadium is my weapon.”

  “You’re bluffing. You aren’t capable of it,” I said, hoping my face didn’t betray the fact that I knew he was.

  “Oh, but I am,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter if you believe me. But I’ll explain it, so you can start dreading it in detail. There are demolition charges—cutting charges—all around the stadium. When you press that button, they’ll slice through every
support, every girder, and the entire stadium will collapse. And there you’ll stand, untouched, like Joshua at the battle of Jericho, as the walls come tumbling down . . . and everybody around you dies.”

  “Why would you do that? You want to kill me—I know that. I even understand it. But why try to kill all those innocent people instead of me?”

  “To make you suffer.” Satterfield practically spat the words. “Killing you isn’t enough. You have to suffer. I can’t make you suffer for thirty years, like I did—not unless I let you live. Maybe I should kill your family—slowly and painfully—but let you live. Cut off your hands and feet, put out your eyes, slice off your dick and make you eat it. That would be perfect. But what is it the business gurus say? ‘The perfect is the enemy of the good’? Perfect revenge isn’t an option. But I think this’ll do. You know why?”

  I didn’t want to hear it; everything that came out of his mouth was like poison spewing into the air, seeping into my soul, but I knew the only hope—for me, and Miranda, and the unsuspecting crowd above us—was to keep him talking. “I’ve thought about you a lot over the years,” Satterfield said. “Who do you love, and what do you care about? Your family, sure. It goes without saying that they’ll be dying very soon, and very painfully. But who else do you love—and what else—as much as your family? More than your family?” He looked around the bone lab, his expression somewhere between a smile and a sneer. “That’s your dirty little secret, isn’t it, Brockton? You love this place—your precious job, your precious university, your precious reputation—even more than you love your family. And so your legacy—the thing you’ll go down in history for—will be wholesale destruction and mass fatalities. Twenty times the death toll of the World Trade Center. And your finger will be the one pushing the button, Dr. Brockton. Doctor of Death. The man who singlehandedly destroyed the University of Tennessee.”

  “I won’t do it,” I said. “So just go ahead and kill me and be done with it.”

  “Oh, I will kill you. But only after you push the button. Only after you commit the massacre. On national television.”

  I shook my head. “I won’t do it,” I repeated. “You can’t make me.”

  “I think I can,” he said. He looked at Miranda, the gun still pressed against her head. Slowly he slid the barrel down her neck, her chest, her belly, her crotch. “I think I can find ways to motivate you. A knife, I think, might be a better motivational tool. Or a scalpel. There must be scalpels in here somewhere.” Miranda was trembling. I could see it, and I knew he could feel it, and the knowledge was bitter beyond all reckoning.

  “You sick bastard,” I said. But I was the one who was on the verge of vomiting and fainting. Dizzy and breathing hard, I put more of my weight on the table behind me, steadying myself with both hands.

  And that’s when I felt it: the shaft of a femur. The femur of a robust male Arikara Indian. The bone was twenty inches long, topped with a hard round knob—the femoral head—measuring a good two inches in diameter. The Holy Family, I thought, in a bizarre flashback to Peggy’s characterization of the Arikara man, woman, and child. Then—another bizarre flashback—I thought of Decker’s whispered, panicked prayer: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. My fingers curled reflexively around the bone, midshaft. The femur felt smooth and strong, solid in my grip, and it was the comforting familiarity of it—a shape I had clasped thousands of times over the decades—that slowly eased my distress and cleared my mind. I remembered my order, my plea, to Decker—“Stop praying and do something”—and I eased my fingers down the shaft toward the distal end, to a point just above the flare of the condyles, before tightening my grip. The bone felt awkwardly thick in my hand—I would rather have gripped it near the proximal end, where it was thinner—but as Satterfield himself had just said, “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” The femur felt ergonomically imperfect but savagely good. Taking care not to scrape the bone on the table, or rattle it against other bones, I began to lift it with one hand, with agonizing slowness, holding the rest of my body motionless, using my torso as a screen, a shield, to conceal what I was doing.

  “Showtime, kids,” said Satterfield, motioning toward the door with the hand that held the detonator. “Let’s go.” Any moment, he would don the helmet and become—to all outward appearances, at least—one of the good guys.

  It’s now or never, Brockton, I thought, my arm tensing. But the gun was pressed against Miranda’s head once more, his right index finger curled around the trigger, his left index finger hovering above the button of the remote control. A flex of either finger would be catastrophic.

  “Don’t make me tell you again,” Satterfield said. “Let’s go.” He gave the gun a push, jabbing it hard against Miranda’s skull.

  “Fuck you, asshole,” she snarled, and then—so fast, my conscious mind didn’t even realize what was happening—he raked the end of the barrel across Miranda’s face, the gun sight tearing a ragged furrow up her cheek, over the zygomatic bone, and across her forehead.

  I saw her yank away and spin toward him, her “fight” reflex fully engaged. “Miranda, no,” I shouted as Satterfield swung the gun toward her forehead. My arm, seemingly of its own will, with no conscious thought on my part, arced from behind me in a sidearm swing, impelled by terror or rage or some lizard-brain hatred deep in my DNA. I felt the femur slam into Satterfield’s temporal bone with crushing force, the shaft snapping from the stress of the impact. Satterfield’s head seemed to burst, the entire back of his skull erupting in a geyser of blood and brain matter and bone. He began toppling backward, and I heard myself shout “no!” as I lunged—dove—for his hand, in a desperate effort to grab the detonator. But I was too late, and too far away, and as he hit the floor, my hand a maddening eighteen inches from his, I saw his knuckles slam down onto the concrete, saw the fingers clench, even saw the movement of the button and a blinding flash of light.

  Then the world itself seemed to explode, with a deafening roar and a force that shook my entire body. I tried reaching out for Miranda. If I could at least hold her hand as I died—and as she died, and as throngs of people above us died, burying us deep beneath the rubble, with the bones of the Arikara—my death would not be utterly devoid of grace or comfort. Pray for us now, and at the hour of our death. The room faded to black.

  And then it faded to gray, and green—olive drab—and swirling figures amid the dust. “Doc? Doc. Can you hear me?” I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them, struggling to focus on the figure kneeling beside me. “Talk to me, Doc.”

  “Deck? Is that you? Are we alive?”

  “It is. We are.”

  “But . . . how? The detonator—I saw his fingers push the button when he fell.”

  “Didn’t matter,” Decker said. “The detonator was dead. After you called, one of our bomb techs crawled out your window, shinnied across a beam, and broke the circuit—cut the wires connecting the charges. I got the word literally five seconds before things went crazy in here.”

  Suddenly I felt a rush of panic. “Miranda—my God, what about Miranda?”

  “I’m over here.” Her voice was weak, but it was hers. Unmistakably, miraculously hers. “I’m okay.”

  “Oh, thank God.” I pushed myself into a sitting position. Miranda was by the desk, half leaning, half sitting on it, dabbing her face with a bloody paper towel. The gash from the gun sight would require stitches—possibly dozens of stitches—and would probably leave a scar, but at the moment, I had never seen a more beautiful sight than that torn and bleeding face. “Thank God.”

  “Actually, I give the credit to mere mortals. Mainly you.” She smiled broadly but briefly, then the smile morphed into a flinch. “Oww,” she said. “It only hurts when I blaspheme.”

  I looked down, for the first time, at the motionless form of Satterfield, his shattered skull lying in a puddle of its former contents, the head of the Arikara femur embedded deep in Satterfield’s temporal bone. “Jesus,” I
said. “So much for mercy. I guess I went for justice instead. Big time. I don’t even know how I did all that damage.”

  “You had a little help,” said Decker. “I was watching y’all through the blinds—good thing the slats are so crooked and busted. When it looked like he was about to shoot Miranda, I said a prayer and squeezed off a round. The Hail Mary pass of gunshots.”

  I looked closer, and this time I saw the entry wound, centered in Satterfield’s forehead. The exit wound must have blown off the back of his head. “That was an amazing shot.”

  “Mostly lucky,” Decker said. “Really, really lucky. But just in case you were gonna feel bad about killing him, you can take that off your worry list. I killed him. And I won’t lose one second of sleep over it.”

  “I appreciate your trying to ease my mind,” I told him. “But the whack I gave him—this temporal fracture? Fatal, for sure.” The bullet and the bone, I realized, must have hit Satterfield at exactly the same instant. “Truth is, we both killed him, Deck. And maybe that’s how it should be.” He stared at me, then nodded slowly.

  I looked around the bone lab now—the locus of so much of my life and work; this crossroads of the dusty dead and the miraculously alive; this little world we had created out of bones and study and the quest for justice—and I saw that it was good.

  Through the broken blinds—the lifesavingly broken blinds—I saw men in uniform erecting barricades and stretching crime-scene tape to create a wide perimeter around the bone lab. From somewhere above us, a roar of excitement drifted down, and the stadium vibrated, like some vast musical instrument, tuned to the key of gladness, resonating with life.

  And again I saw—and I felt—that it was good. Very, very good.

  CHAPTER 37

  IT WAS ONLY WHEN I GLANCED OUT AND SAW A TOWBOAT passing—we were at a big round table flanked by windows overlooking the water—that I realized: This was the very same table where some of us had sat almost twenty-five years before, when Satterfield had entered a guilty plea and been sentenced to life in prison. Jeff and Jenny, seated to my left now along with Tyler and Walker, had been at that lunch, although their teenaged boys—not yet a gleam in their parents’ eyes, way back then—had not, of course. Nor had Miranda, who had been busy coloring, doubtless outside the lines, in elementary school at the time.