Dead Letter (21 page)

"My fault," she said in a terrifying voice.

I shook her hard and said, "This is not your
fault. You hear me? Not your fault."

She looked at me ahnost piteously, as if there was
something fundamental that I had failed to comprehend.

"You don’t know," she said in that same
ghastly voice.

"You don’t know. You don’t know."

"Get her out of here! " Lurman shouted
against the wind. "Take them out of here, Sturdevant!"

Sturdevant bounded ahead of us, up the access road.
Sarah continued to stare at me with that same mixture of terror and
pity, then she looked back over her shoulder at the van. I jerked her
forward. Sturdevant had made fifty yards on us and was tramping,
ankle-deep in snow, in the tire tracks that O’Hara’s van had
made.

I saw him look back at us—his hand raised as if he
were about to cry out. And then there was an enormous explosion. A
white hot flash of light that shook Sarah and me like a gust of wind
and sent us tumbling backward into the snow drifts. Hard clods of
dirt rained down on us, sinking into the snow with a quick, sucking
sound and peppering the van roof like hailstones. A thin, feculent
cloud of smoke drifted across the snowy lot. Stunned, I worked my way
to my knees and looked back at the spot where Sturdevant had been
standing. A ragged hole, like the hole left when a tree trunk is
blasted from the ground, had been gashed in the earth.

"What happened?" I said aloud. I could hear
the hysteria in my voice. I looked down at Sarah. She wasn’t
moving. I leaned over and turned her face-up in the snow. There was a
blood-bruise on her forehead and her eyes were rolled back in their
sockets.

"Sarah!" I shouted. "Sarah!"

I ripped off a glove and worked my hand beneath her
coat. My skin was so cold I couldn’t feel a thing. I pulled the
hand back out and rubbed her face with snow. Her lips quivered, as if
she were trying to wet them, and she moved her head slightly from
side to side. "Don’t die on me!" I shouted at her. She
started to speak, but a trickle of blood stopped her voice. I tried
to clear her mouth—to make sure she hadn’t swallowed her tongue
or bitten it in two. But my hands were too numb and clumsy in the
cold. So I wrapped her up in my coat and held her tight until I could
hear sirens screaming down Kellogg. A minute later, a hook-and-ladder
truck turned onto the access road. Thank God, I thought.

As the fire engine started toward us, Lurman bolted
from behind the Dodge and ran,  pigeon-toed, across the lot. He
stopped about five yards from where Sarah and I were lying and
screamed: "Stop! Stop!" The headlights lit the swatch of
ground around Sarah and me and around Lurman, who was prancing in the
snow, as if he could hold the truck back by main force. When the
engine was about a hundred and fifty yards from us, Lurman stopped
waving and dove to the ground.

"Get down!" I heard him yell.

I threw myself on top of Sarah and, head bowed,
watched the fire engine rumble inexorably up the road through the
slow-motion curtain of drifting snow. It was less than a hundred
yards away when I realized what was about to happen..And I screamed,
"Stop!" although I knew the driver wouldn’t hear me.

When one of the massive tires tripped the mines,
there was a second flash and repercussion. The cab and front section
of the fire engine were actually lifted off the roadbed. And for a
second, in midair, the truck looked like a horse rearing on its hind
legs. Then it came down with the sounds of a building being struck
with a demolition ball—a dull, heart-breaking thud, the crinkling
of shattered glass, and the crackle of pipes snapping. The truck
turned on its side; then a second explosion rippled through it. The
oxygen tanks and the gasoline tank went up in a terrific flash that
sent flames towering into the darkness. In the red glow I could see
the body of one of the firemen, hanging like a twisted kite from the
telephone wires.

"My God," I said.

Lurman got slowly to his feet. His glasses had been
snapped and one temple was still dangling from his right ear. "Don’t
move around! " he called out. "The bastard mined the lot.
There may be other charges around us."

"I’ve got to get Sarah to a hospital!" I
shouted back at him.

"I’m telling you he mined the whole fucking
lot!" Lurman yelled. "Didn’t you see what happened to
Sturdevant! Just stay where you are until the police get to you."

I cradled Sarah in my arms. She was still
unconscious; and in the eerie light cast by the blazing truck, she
looked pale as death.
 

18

On the way to the hospital she recovered
consciousness for long enough to look around her with surprise. At
the walls of the ambulance. At the black kid who was holding an
oxygen mask to her mouth and whispering sweetly, "Don’t move,
miss. Don’t move." And finally, at me.
 
I
said, "It’s all right, Sarah. You’re on the way to the
hospital now."

By the time we pulled up in front of the emergency
room door at Christ’s, she was unconscious again. I helped the
paramedics get her out of the rear doors and walked beside them
through the crowd of white-helmeted police into the emergency room,
where a team of doctors took over. I watched them wheel her into a
surgery, then the room expanded and there were dozens of people
around me—young, harried-looking nurses, interns in their blue
hospital playsuits, cops of all kinds and jurisdictions and, behind
them in the waiting room, the throng of concerned relatives and
relations to whom I belonged.

I wandered out to join them, sat down, suddenly
exhausted and vaguely conscious that my clothes were wet and bloody
from Sarah and the red mist that Sturdevant had become. They looked
me over and fell quiet, except for the ones who were crying and the
sleepy children stumbling between the plastic chairs. Someone said,

"He’s one of the men who were trapped in the
explosion." It passed quickly through the room that the bloody
man by the door had been in the explosion on the river. I could see
that a few of them wanted to talk—the ones who were curious without
shame and the ones whose husbands had manned that fire truck. I
ignored them and tried to fight off the lethargy that had come over
me as soon as I sat down. A familiar heaviness in all my limbs, like
the heaviness of sleep but duller and irresistible.

I sat there for what felt like hours, unable to move
or to think. Waiting for someone to tell me what had happened to
Sarah. No one came. After awhile, I got off the chair and walked back
out to the nurses’s station by the door. The pretty young girl
behind the desk eyed me with
alarm.

"Where did you come from, sir?" she said.
"The doctor will be right with you."

"Where’s Sarah Lovingwell? The girl I came in
with?"

"Oh, you’re Mr. Stoner," she said,
looking relieved.

"For a moment I didn’t know who you were."
She was new at her job, I could see that. Just barely out of candy
stripes. A youngster who took her charge seriously.

"Your friend’s still in surgery."

"How long has she been in?" I said with
dull terror. My body was beginning to work again. Not fully, yet. Not
sharply enough to feel the anguish that part of me knew was there
beneath the fatigue.

"Since they brought you in at twelve," she
said weakly.

I tried not to think what that could mean. She was
the wrong one to ask anyway. Telling me that much had wounded her. I
needed one of the old hands. Or one of the residents whose idea of
honesty was a brusque indifference to other people’s pain. I needed
someone who would tell me the truth and not care. I didn’t want to
see anyone grieving.

"Can I get coffee around here?" I asked
her.

"Downstairs," she said. "In the
lounge."

I took the stairs instead of the elevator—to make
my legs move and my heart pound again. With each step I felt stronger
and with each step the anger and fear became harder to contain. I
made myself hold it in, pitting my muscles against my gut, parading
beside the row of vending machines for above ten minutes. Up and
back, sipping coffee that tasted of cardboard and cocoa and telling
myself it was going to be all right.

After a time I walked into the lounge itself. A few
interns were sitting at the tables—big white lily pads sunk into
the concrete iloor. Overhead the fixtures dangled in weird
geometries, like box kites without their paper skins.

Ten minutes went by, then Lurman entered the room and
walked over to the table where I was sitting. "I’ve been over
at General," he said. "After we left, Grimes paid your
apartment a visit. We think he was planning to booby-trap it the way
he booby-trapped the lot."

"What about Lionelli?"

Lurman sat back in his chair and shook his head.

"He’s dead, Harry. Grimes blew him away with a
shotgun. Right out on Burnet Avenue."

"Sweet Jesus," I said.

"Poor bastards. This whole damn thing’s been a
fuck-up from start to finish," Lurman said bitterly. "You
know, in the old days they say agents used to duck out of banks
during robberies, just so they wouldn’t screw up at that kind of
high-paced game." He shook his head again.

"Can you imagine what the Bureau’s going to
say about tonight?"

 
"Can you imagine how little I care?"

He blushed. "I’m sorry. It’s just been a bad
day. How’s Sarah doing?"

"I don’t know," I said. "She’s
been in surgery for two hours."

"It hasn’t been a good day," he said
again.

For a moment there didn’t seem to be anything more
either of us could say. Two of his partners were dead. Sarah was
lying on an operating table somewhere above us. And we had survived
to share the guilts that survivors share. And one thing else—the
corruscating anger that I’d been holding inside since I’d seen
her wheeled into that surgery.

I began to talk to Lurman—to try to explain to him
and, I guess, to myself how it had happened that we were now sitting
there in that deserted lounge. I told him about Lovingwell, that
smooth, eccentric man, about the document that no one had come to
claim, about Claire Lovingwell’s suicide, about Bidwell and Michael
O’Hara. I told him everything except why I was talking in the first
place, everything except for how I felt about the girl.

Lurman perked up when I got to the spy business.

"You don’t see any connection between your
theory and what happened tonight?" he asked me.

I told him, no. "Not unless you want to say that
it all began when he hired me." Which was what I’d been saying
to myself.

"To find a top-secret document," he said,
turning it over with pleasure. "Is that why you wanted me to get
Lovingwell’s security file?"

I nodded.

"It wouldn’t hurt to do a little checking
after all," he said. "I’ll get in touch with Bidwell for
you tomorrow and see what I can find out."

"Good."

"Now, what are we going to do about Grimes?"

"He’s not going to have a lot of friends after
last night," I said.

"You think he’ll skip?"

"He’s too crazy for that. He still wants me.
He won’t leave until it’s finished."

Lurman looked me over with a cold, professional eye.

"You want out, Harry? No one could blame you
after tonight."

"What I want," I said to him, "is for
that girl to recover. Then what I want is to kill Lester Grimes."

Lurman gave me a dark, appreciative smile. "We’ll
get him," he said.

"Not without some help. I’m going to try to
get in touch with Chico Robinson tomorrow. Sarah told me he and Sean
were close. Maybe that butchering job that Grimes did on his buddy
will shake him up."

"After what happened to Sean," Lurman said,
"I wouldn’t think he’d want any part of this."

"The kid’s a Muslim," I said. "He’ll
have plenty of tough friends and plenty of streetwise contacts. All I
want to find out is where Grimes is staying. After that, I’ll
handle the Cowboy."

At three-thirty that morning a surgeon came down to
the waiting room where Lurman and I had migrated and told us that she
was out of immediate danger. Ted made a small grateful noise and I
smiled for the first time that night.

"She’s suffered a skull fracture," the
doctor said.

"There was hematoma and we had to remove the
clot. Something must have struck her when the bombs went off—a
stone, a piece of metal, maybe a piece of bone. Whatever it was, it
was traveling like a bullet when it impacted. Understand, she’s
still in critical condition. Skull injuries are unpredictable. She
may start hemorrhaging again. And there’s no way to tell how much
damage she’s already suffered. Not for a few days, at least."

"Can I see her?" I asked him.

He nodded.

We followed him into an elevator and up to the
Intensive Care unit on the sixth floor. Halfway down the hall a
uniformed cop was seated on a metal stool in front of one of the
doors. McMasters still wasn’t taking any chances.