The Baker's Wife (36 page)

But Ed was a man who saw his plays through. Nine times out of ten, changing course after a plan had been set in motion worked out badly for the team, and of the five hostages in the room, he'd just appointed himself the team leader.

Ed slammed his head backward into Jack's nose, and Jack's hold on his arms broke. Ed was on his feet and shooting out of the pantry while the detective was still howling. He pushed Estrella out of the way and crossed the kitchen in three strides, sliding into the wood bin and kicking it aside to reveal the gun. And then it was in his hands and he was back on his feet, having never stalled, flying into the pantry to find Jack crouching and fumbling with the holster straps. The detective's nose was bloody and dripping on his shoes.

“Leave it!” Ed shouted.

Jack raised his hands away from his backup in time with the very slow breath he drew in through his mouth.

“Leslie, help Dad get Coach out! Do it! Do it! Estrella! Break a window!” Shouting wasn't necessary, and yet he couldn't speak at any other volume. He worried that he wasn't holding the pistol correctly, that he would forget to shoot with both eyes open and his elbow locked. He believed Jack was even now evaluating all Ed's inexperience and deciding how to best him.

Hurry, hurry
.

Leslie and his father dragged Coach out by the armpits, not daring to spend precious seconds trying to stop that pumping artery.

That murderous emotion Ed had felt earlier had been washed away by real opportunity. Ed wasn't at all confident, now standing with the barrel of a gun pointed at a man, with a finger on the trigger, that he could pull it. Surely cowardice was spelled out in neon all over his face, in each nervous inflection of his tone, in his very need to shout.

He heard someone rolling away the bread rack that had blockaded the kitchen and dining room. Seconds later there was a heavy thunking of an object pounding on glass, then the gradual cracking, followed by shouting, the voices of outsiders and authority coming to aid.

Jack lunged for him and Ed jumped away, fired. A box of yeast exploded behind the place where Jack had been standing in a harmless yellow poof.

Whether Jack had meant to merely test Ed, throw him off balance, or escape, he did succeed in somersaulting into the kitchen. Ed spun, leading with the gun, panicked. Without a freshly smashed nose to stun him, Jack probably had all the time he needed to retrieve his revolver.

“Ed!” His father was calling from the dining room.

“Get them out!” Ed called back. He looked at the line he'd have to run through the kitchen. He doubted Jack would go out into that open space himself but feared he had the escape route covered. Did he dare risk it? Risk getting shot from both directions, by Jack and by a sharpshooter who might mistake him for Jack? His skin was clammy and the gun slick in his palms. He thought he might throw up.

It was a one-second-remaining, half-court-shot-to-win-it risk. Ed sprinted for the kitchen-to-café entry. He made it through, saw his father looking toward him from the shattered window while someone in a tactical helmet and bulletproof vest hauled Estrella safely past the daggers of glass. He adjusted his stride to make the necessary leap over the pastry display cases and tossed the gun over to free his hands. The gun hit the floor at the same time that his palms met the cases like they were a gymnast's vault.

Ed felt the flaming pain in his left tricep before he heard the pop of the gunshot, and his joints gave way before he could push off the glass and swing his body over the top. He stumbled and smashed into the sliding door on the back of the case, his jaw taking the hardest hit.

Jack had him by the ankle before he hit the ground it seemed, and Ed smacked his head on the floor as he came down. His T-shirt rode up on his back as Jack dragged him back into the kitchen, exposing his skin while Geoff protested loudly, sounding much farther away than he really was. Jack pulled him all the way to the pantry along the sticky trail left behind by the coach's wound, and it coated Ed's back and hair with morbid warmth.

“I'll say when it's time to go,” Jack said. “It isn't even twelve o'clock yet.” Then he kicked Ed in the face and brought a merciful end to the excruciating pain in his arm.

CHAPTER 35

Ed's T-shirt was sticky with his own blood, still dripping off the ledge of his lips. His nose was broken, which he knew because he'd taken more than one basketball to the face in his lifetime. He felt warm bricks at his back and found his bearings in the kitchen against the foot of the wood-fired stove.

“You will be punished at the hand of God for rape and the death of an unborn child,” Jack said. “A life for a life.”

The pronouncement sent a chill through Ed's skull that shocked his consciousness. He was going to die today, like this, sitting rag-doll-like on the floor of a bakery. His left arm, useless, wilted on the concrete and sent waves of nausea through his belly when he breathed. He focused on the light pouring from the empty storeroom. It took the edge off the unbelievable hurt.

Opposite him, Jack sat with his back against the wall between the sink and the prep table, legs spread out before him in a V, the revolver ready at his thigh. Ed couldn't look directly at it without being overcome by tremors. The kitchen was dusky like twilight, like the premature end of a life.

A foxhole prayer with a flaming torch tied to its tail ran through the trenches of his mind, wordless and frantic.

Jack's dried blood from Ed's head-butt coated his own upper lip, and Ed's scalp recalled the sensation of taking a hit to the man's teeth. The bruise prompted strange associations in Ed's mind about their blood mixing with Coach Henderson's on the slick bakery floor the way Julie Mansfield's had mixed with his mother's when she slipped on the street.

“Your nose is broken too,” Ed said, frightened by the silence. He shifted his aching neck and felt the corners of his eyes like a knife to his sinuses. “We have that in common.”

“It's not much,” Jack said.

Faint noises reached him from outside. A dull hum of human conversation. Radios crackling. Car doors closing. The sounds of Jack's impending punishment.

Jack, Ed thought, heard the sounds of backup and support.

“God forgives sins,” Ed said.

“Not yours.”

“Why not?”

“You think God has some obligation to you?”

Ed started to shake his head, but the stabbing behind his eyes stopped him. “No obligation. Just a promise. Is God going to forgive you?”

Jack shifted the revolver an inch or two. “For what?”

“Anything you want forgiveness for.”

“Don't have anything.”

A few heavy seconds passed. Jack shifted from the V-sit to a crouch. “You're sorry about that, aren't you? You're sorry that my soul isn't black like yours.” Jack moved toward Ed. He stayed out of sight of anyone in the dining room, or of any sharpshooter positioned at the shattered window, and dropped to his knees between Ed's spread-eagled feet. Jack's finger stayed inside the revolver's trigger ring while he talked with hand motions. “You're sorry, because if God had any cause to condemn me, you might think you could claim to be my equal, chosen by the Lord to administer his justice.”

Ed's heartbeat knocked harder against the bullet wound in his arm. There was no reasoning with a lunatic, but silence felt like agreement. “No. I meant—”

“You're not anything like me, boy.”

“We are alike, but not in the way you think!”

“Now you know how I think.”

“I know you want to kill me,” Ed said.

“Yes! Oh, yes! Since the day I learned what you did. But I'm a patient man. I wait for the divinely appointed time. Twelve thirty!”

“So why did you start shooting Coach so early?”

“Nolan Henderson isn't relevant to any discussion about you and me. Are we cut from the same cloth or not?”

“We are!” Ed shouted. “Because I want to kill you too! God help me, I do. It's what's here.” He thumped his heart with his good hand. “And it's no different from the way you feel about me. I know it. But I'm not going to act on it, am I? I'm not going to sit here and make up some story about God wanting you dead so that I can do what I want.”

Jack looked at the gun and smiled with only half of his mouth. “I doubt you have my self-control, Ed, my spiritual discipline.”

“I have more. I have so much more.”

“Let's see about that, why don't we?” Jack pressed the barrel against Ed's forehead. Ed closed his eyes. He took shallow breaths and had no sense of how long Jack stayed this way, the metal mouth imprinting a cold round O in Ed's skin. “No, no,” Jack murmured. “It's just not time, saith the Lord. Your turn!”

Jack lifted Ed's right arm from its supportive position and spun the revolver on his finger, then clapped the weapon into Ed's hand. “Do you know how to hold one of these?” Jack asked. “Not so different from the Glock, and you were good enough with that. Good enough for this purpose anyway.”

The tremors from Ed's fingers moved up his arm and into his neck and into his jaw, which seemed to vibrate as Jack sandwiched Ed's grip with both of his own hands and then leaned into the gun, resting his own brow on the barrel.

“Hold it steady now, or you'll miss.”

“I'm not going to shoot you.”

“Then God will be disappointed in you. Ready? It's all you, boy.” And Jack took his hands away from Ed's and raised his arms out to the sides.

“Why?” Ed whispered.

“Because I have faith that God favors me, and he'll spare my life. But not yours.”

Audrey's head was pounding from the noise of the rotors and from the realization that Julie wouldn't be speaking with Jack. She'd become so hysterical when the medics arrived to transport her that she'd had to be sedated. The other women, wedged in tightly on a bench designed for only two people, didn't speak on the anxious flight back to the hospital.

The cabin was bright with sharp high-noon sunlight. It was 12:15, and within minutes the helicopter left the snow behind. Audrey stared down at the carpet of fog that was breaking up in smoky patches. She began to weep, and the crying was her own this time. The grief belonged to no one else.

Diane took Audrey's hand.

Her tears fell onto the cell phone in her lap. The police had made all the calls, but Audrey hoped for one more chance to reach her men. It was impossible to know what Jack would do now, if he'd believe his own colleagues' word that Julie lived.

Diane picked up the phone and wiped it dry with the cuff of her sleeve. The pressure of her swiping woke the screen and revealed all Audrey's applications. She studied the little icons for a moment. Then she touched one. The screen became a monitor.

“It's a camera?” she mouthed to Audrey.

Audrey nodded. Diane gave her the phone and pointed to Julie. “Show Jack!” she said loudly.

It wouldn't satisfy Jack's demands—at this point, nothing would. A photo of Julie sleeping might be worth little more than a photo of Julie dead. But Audrey snapped a grainy, slightly blurry picture of Julie on her gurney and sent it to Captain Wilson.

The act planted a seed of hope in her mind. She tried to water it for the remaining minutes of the flight.

A police cruiser was waiting at the hospital helipad. Julie was first off, and taken directly indoors. Miralee trailed behind her, head down, without saying good-bye. Diane helped Audrey down and then shielded her from the whipping air as they crouched and met the officers who'd come for them.

They ducked into the backseat and slammed the doors.

“Your husband's out,” the one driving said right away.

Audrey's heart split in two.
Thank God!
“And Ed?”

His hesitation brought a wave of fear over Audrey's head. “Don't lose faith yet,” he told her.

It was going to take much more than a photograph to convince Jack to spare her son's life. Audrey pulled the Hall family's pendant out of her pocket and turned it over in her fingers.