by John Verdon
There was a prolonged silence in the room, broken by Hardwick. “Could have been even worse, maybe a lot worse,” he growled, coming back to life, “if Dave didn’t stop the little bastard when he did.”
To this observation there were somber nods of agreement.
“Plus,” added Hardwick, “in the middle of all that horrible shit, he managed to solve the Spalter murder case.”
Esti looked startled. “Solved … how?”
“Tell her, Sherlock.”
Gurney ran through the scenario with Carl as the tragic villain who initiated the plot that fatally backfired.
“So his plan was to eliminate his brother, take control of Spalter Realty, liquidate the assets for his own use?”
Gurney nodded. “That’s how I see it.”
Hardwick added his own nod. “Fifty million bucks. Just about right to buy the governor’s mansion.”
“And he figured we’d never get him for the hit? God, what an arrogant bastard!” She glanced curiously at Gurney. “You have a strange look on your face. What’s that about?”
“Just thinking that a hit on his brother could’ve been a major plus in Carl’s campaign. He could’ve positioned it as the mob’s effort to scare him out of politics—their effort to keep a man of integrity from taking over the state government. I wonder if that might have been part of his plan all along—to position his brother’s murder as proof of his own virtue?”
“I like it,” said Hardwick, with a cynical glint in his eyes. “Ride that fucking corpse like a white horse—straight to his inauguration!”
Gurney smiled. He regarded the resurgence of Hardwick’s vulgarity as a positive health indicator.
Esti changed the subject. “So Klemper and Alyssa were just rotten little vultures trying to cash in, after the fact, at Kay’s expense?”
“You could say that,” said Gurney.
“Actually,” added Hardwick with some relish, “more like one rotten little vulture named Alyssa and one idiotic vulture-fucker named Mick the Dick.”
After gazing at him for several long seconds with the pained fondness one might have for a charmingly incorrigible child, Esti took his hand again and squeezed it. “I better get going. I’m supposed to be intercepting and diverting traffic—idiots heading toward the fairgrounds from the interstate.”
“Shoot the bastards,” he suggested helpfully.
There was some more discussion after she left, discussion that drifted into theories of guilt and self-destruction, all of which appeared to be putting Hardwick to sleep.
Kyle brought up something he’d remembered from a college psychology class, Freud’s theory of accidents—the idea that these events may not really be “accidental” at all but have a purpose: to prevent or punish an action about which the person is conflicted. “I wonder, could something like that have been behind Carl’s stumbling the way he did in front of his brother?”
No one seemed inclined to take up the issue.
As if groping for some organizing structure into which he could fit the chaotic events, he raised the subject of karma. “It wasn’t just Carl whose evil actions came flying back at him. I mean, think about it. The same thing happened to Panikos when he was crushed by the Ferris wheel that he blew up. And look what happened to Mick Klemper when he came after Dad. Even Lex Bincher—he kind of went wild with that big ego trip on RAM-TV, claiming credit for the whole investigation, and it got him killed. Man, like, this karma thing is real.”
Kyle sounded so earnest, so excited by this idea, so young—sounding and looking so much like he did in his enthusiastic moments as a teenager—that Gurney felt an urge to hug him. But to act on so spontaneous an impulse, especially in public, wasn’t in his nature.
A short while later two aides came to take Hardwick back to Radiology for some additional scans. As they settled him on the rolling stretcher, he turned to Gurney. “Thanks, Davey. I’m … I’m thinking you might have saved my life … getting me here so quickly.” A rare thing for Hardwick, he said it without any ironic twist.
“Well …” Gurney muttered awkwardly, never comfortable with being thanked, “you’ve got a fast car.”
Hardwick uttered a small laugh—which ended in a stifled yelp at the pain it produced—and they wheeled him out.
Madeleine, Kyle, and Gurney were left in the room, standing around the vacated bed. All perhaps finally on the verge of collapse, all with nothing to say.
The silence was broken by the ringing of a phone, which turned out to be Kyle’s. He glanced at the ID screen. “Jeez,” he said to no one in particular, then looked at his father. “It’s Kim. I told her I’d call her, but with everything …” After a moment of indecision, he added, “I should talk to her.” He stepped out into the corridor and, speaking softly, moved out of sight and hearing.
Madeleine was gazing at Gurney with an expression that was at once full of great relief and great weariness—the same qualities that were in her voice. “You came through it all right,” she said. Then added, “That’s the main thing.”
“Yes.”
“And you figured it all out. Once again.”
“Yes. At least, I think so.”
“Oh, there’s no doubt about it.” On her face was a gentle, indecipherable smile.
A silence fell between them.
In addition to a deep wave of emotional and physical exhaustion, Gurney began to feel a widespread soreness and stiffness setting in—which, after some puzzlement, he attributed to being tackled by the two cops during his efforts to knock the pink cell phone out of Panikos’s hands.
He was suddenly too tired to think, too tired to stand.
For a moment, standing there in the hospital room, Gurney closes his eyes. When he does, he sees Peter Pan—all in black, with his back to him. The little man begins turning. His face is a bilious yellow, his smile blood red. Turning. Turning toward him, raising his arms like the wings of a predatory bird.
The eyes in the bilious face are the eyes of Carl Spalter. Full of horror and hate and despair. The eyes of a man who wished he’d never been born.
Gurney recoils at the vision, tries to focus on Madeleine.
She suggests that he lie down on the hospital bed. She offers to massage his neck and shoulders and back.
He agrees and soon finds himself in a drifting state of consciousness, feeling only the warmth and gentle pressure of her hands.
Her voice, soft and soothing, is the only other reality he is aware of.
In the place between exhaustion and sleep there is a locale of deep disengagement, simplicity, and clarity where he often found a kind of serenity he found nowhere else. He imagined it might be similar to the heroin addict’s rush—a surge of pure, impervious peace.
It normally was a state of isolation from all sensory stimuli—bringing with it a blessed inability to tell where his body ended and the rest of the world began—but tonight it is different. Tonight the sound of Madeleine’s voice and the penetrating warmth of her hands has been incorporated into the cocoon.
She is talking about walking on the coast of Cornwall, about the sloping green fields, the stone walls, the cliffs high above the sea …
Kayaking on a turquoise lake in Canada …
Cycling in Catskill valleys …
Picking blueberries …
Erecting bluebird houses along the border of the high pasture …
Crossing a stile on a footpath through a Scottish Highlands farm …
Her voice is as gentle and warm as the touch of her hands on his shoulders.
He can see her on a bicycle in white sneakers, yellow socks, fuchsia shorts, and a lavender nylon jacket shimmering in the sun.
Her smile is the smile of Malcolm Claret. Her voice and his voice are one.
“There is nothing in life that matters but love. Nothing but love.”
Acknowledgments
The Dave Gurney series continues to benefit enormously from the crucial guidance and support of the best agent i
n the world, Molly Friedrich—along with her remarkable associates Lucy Carson and Nichole LeFebvre, who have done so much to make the series an international success. And I am once again indebted to my great editor, Rick Horgan, whose incisive comments and suggestions make everything I write so much better. Finally, a special thank-you to my good friend Porter Kirkwood for taking the time to read an early outline of this novel and to set me straight on some of the general legal issues involved in the plot. He’s responsible for whatever I managed to get right. Any errors in the final version of the story are mine alone.
