Authors: T. Jefferson Parker
• • •
Colesceau heaved himself
toward the trail. He wasn't sure if his hormone-depleted legs could carry him
much further and he knew the jungle would give way to the wide, dry riverbed
soon and when it did he'd be out of cover. Then he'd have to start shooting. He
had the fancy police gun but really no skill with it at all. His shot at the
old bastard was pure luck, but from the
whap
sound of it, he'd hit him
good.
The vest was heavy as
steel around his chest and it pressed tightly against his breasts. But it had
saved him from the ugly Hess. Now he wished he could just shed it and gain a
little speed. He looked back again and saw Merci twisting her way through the
towering bamboo. She was gaining fast and he knew how determined an angry woman
could be. And weren't they always angry about something?
So close, he thought, so
close to getting what I wanted. Another ten seconds and he'd have had that
carotid hooked and out and cut, and the insertion tube in place and the
Porti-Boy churning and Merci Rayborn would be immortal right now. But the
second he heard the car pull up outside, then heard someone trying at the
doors, he knew it was the old man who was her partner. The tank captain. It
made better sense to get on the vest and slaughter Hess than it did to start
the preservation. Then he'd have had almost an hour before Pratt and Lydia and
Garry arrived. Seconds, he thought. Just seconds from giving her all the fluids
necessary for eternity.
He thought of his mother
and how free and light he'd felt when he was done. Why had he waited so long?
He thought of Trudy Powers and how satisfying it was to see her face when Stork
went down. He thought of Lael and Janet and Ronnie and how liberating it was to
be rid of them, their demands, their petty games, their selfish power.
Through the thicket ahead
he could see the sandy expanse of the riverbed and he knew it was time to make
his move. Rounding the next curve in the trail he saw a small pocket of space
in the stalks. He stopped, turned and ran back to it. He got there and backed
in and with both hands raised the big automatic up to his chest.
When he glanced down at the barrel it was like
staring into a big dark pit.
• • •
Merci saw the riverbed
through the bamboo and she went fast into the curve. She looked far up the
trail before her and saw nothing. She looked right out in front of her and saw
an elbow tip protruding from the foliage.
She slid like a base
runner. Feet out in front, plowing her boots into the mulch. Made sure she had
the .32 ready, left arm up to protect her face. The momentum of her body
brought her upright, three feet from the blond man hiding in the stalks.
She fired twice and
he flinched.
My body armor.
He pointed something
at her.
She shot a snap kick,
standard academy issue, not pretty but her boot caught his wrist and the gun
barrel jumped. She ducked, dropped Hess's gun, then came up fast and with both
hands swept the stiletto across the top of the vest. A hiss. Colesceau's eyes
went wide. His head tilted back, and a gap yawning open under his chin. She
changed her grip on the knife and brought it back higher, point first, planting
it hard in his temple. She let go and brought both her fists down on his hands.
The H&K went off with a crack and flew onto the trail. Colesceau sank to
his knees, hands at his neck.
He looked up at her
with eyes that seemed sad. The wig had slid up on his head.
"Tha . . . you,"
he gurgled.
"You're
welcome," she answered. She could barely hear her own voice, though the
world was silent.
Colesceau looked down
toward the H&JC so she kicked him in the forehead and he went over
backward.
She got her gun and
stood over him with the "barrel pointed down.
"Tha...
oo."
"You're welcome."
She pulled the trigger and his face
jerked and his skull lost its shape but his eyes were still on her.
u
Tha..."
She heard the half syllable and she shot him again.
• • •
Hess was sitting on a
bench by the roses when she got back to him. His hat was on his lap and his
head hung comfortably like a man in siesta. She saw the red all over his shirt
and the little shiny puddle of it under the bench. She knelt down in front of
him. He was looking down toward the ground. His expression was hopeful and
gentle and he was seeing nothing. The lines of his face had softened and he
looked like he did that night when he fell asleep in the chair by the window
and she had wanted so badly to touch his hair.
Merci touched his cheek.
Then she saw motion to her left and she stood. A man was coming her way with a
blanket in his arms. She recognized him as the same man she'd run past a few
minutes ago, but then he'd been carrying a flat of flowers.
He stopped when he saw
her, a large woman with blood on her and a big gun in her hand.
"He's a
detective," said the nurseryman. "No one is going to remember him. He
saved three lives."
She looked at him.
"It was four and you don't know squat. Give me that blanket. Please."
In the spring, Merci bundled up the infant and drove to the Wedge. It was late, a cool and blustery night following an unseasonable May storm.
The baby bawled almost the whole way there, but this was no surprise. It was an inconsolable thing, always hungry, miserable or asleep. It wasn't much to look at, either: big and lean, hardly any fat, a head of wispy black hair. Its lungs and voice box seemed unnaturally, unbelievably, strong. It suckled greedily and cried for hours without a comma. All this, delivered in twelve hours of agony she had never imagined possible. When she saw the thing all she could do was weep.
For Merci, the last nine months had been the most miserable of her life. Burying Hess was like losing half of herself, the half she liked. Burying her mother six months later was worse. She hadn't expected it to make her feel so bad, but it made her think of a million things she'd wanted to say but hadn't. Trying to console her father was impossible because he clung to Merci with a desperation she never knew was in him. Had her mother put up with that for forty years? Well, now it was all hers. He was all hers. He was asking to move in.
Merci parked and gathered
up the baby and walked down to the sand. The moon was three-quarters and she
could see the jetty rocks jutting out into the ocean in a straight line. The
waves were no longer high from the storm but she could still see them building
along the rocks until they got in close, then rising in the moonlight and
breaking on the beach.
The ocean at night could
be a frightening thing. Not as frightening as Colesceau hiding in the bamboo
with her H&K in his hands and murder in his eyes.
As she climbed onto the
jetty Merci could feel the power of the waves vibrating into her legs. Good
thing she'd worn the trekking shoes, she thought, the ones with the lug soles
and solid grip.
She looked out at the
black, horizonless night and forced herself to think of all the good things
that had happened these last few months, the worst of her life: the Deputy's
Valorous Conduct award back in January, all sorts of PR about courageously
chasing down the Purse Snatcher, getting bumped up a pay grade in the tank. A
series of private talks with Chuck Brighton, who wanted to leave her in
Homicide. No problem there.
She knew that some of
these good things came in return for dropping the suit. The trade was
understood and unspoken, though clearly engineered by Brighton. It was a time
for healing. For forgetting and moving on. And most of all, for the saving of
face. She was glad to have the lawsuit gone. It wasn't her battle anymore. The
other five plaintiffs were holding tough and Kemp wasn't out of the woods yet.
Fine with her.
There was no mention
in the media of what was for Merci the worst of all that had happened: that her
gun had killed Hess. No mention whose life was laid down to save whose. No
mention that the suspect Sergeant Rayborn had earlier rejected was the very one
who had three corpses stashed in the apartment behind his own, was the very one
who had shot her partner. No. The Grand Jury's criminal justice committee,
investigating the shooting of Colesceau, had gone easy on her.
There was plenty of public
ignorance, but Merci knew how it had gone down, and so did most people in the
department.
She would carry that knowledge to her
grave.
It had not occurred
to her that she had done pretty much the right thing, given the circumstances.
Given the fact that nobody was always right, always smart, always fast. She
felt too bad about Hess to entertain such a notion.
He wouldn't let her.
• • •
She walked further out on the rocks. She could feel
the breeze sharp against her face. It didn't seem that strong back on shore.
She could see the jetty out in front of her, the moon and its silver wobble of
moonlight beyond the rocks, the waves growing higher as they approached, the
infinite black Pacific all around her. Hess's ocean, she thought.
"Here it is,
Tim," she said. "What your father loved."
Odd. Odd to say that name
now, privately, just to herself and her baby. There was something truthful and
unbreakable and sacred in it. It meant something different now, but what it had
meant before was still true.
She stood there and looked
at the dark water. The swells heaved and shifted. She was surprised how big
they were, given that the storm was over. The horizon was impossible to see, as
impossible to see as tomorrow. She looked to her right just as an advancing
mountain of water clipped along the rocks toward her. The big wave passed in
front of the moon, the moonlight caught the water as it lumbered past, then
rode the back of the swell as it went by. It was like nothing she had ever seen
before on earth.
The tears exploded out of
her. For Hess, for herself, for the baby. For Jerry Kirby. For Colesceau's
dead, the Rose Garden Home patients, even for weird, misused LaLonde. For everybody
who was touched by it.
Most of all for Hess,
because she'd felt like he was accusing her from the other side of death's
river every waking moment of every day:
you, you, you.
"Let me go,
Hess."
The waves didn't answer.
Tim had gone quiet and she could see the twinkle in his eyes, a galaxy of two,
deep down in the blanket.
"Just let me go. I
loved you and I lost you and I killed you. I'll never forget 1 killed you. That
what you want? Want me to say it, Hess?
I'm so fucking sorry I killed
you."
She sobbed and looked at the water right
below her.
I could just step off
the rock and get lost in it, she thought: let Hess's ocean take care of
everything.
No, I'm better than that.
I couldn't save your
dad, Tim, she thought. I tried so hard to do everything right. Everything I knew.
And with this thought
something inside her broke away—Hess, perhaps, or what she believed about
Hess—separated and moved from her, out over the water and into the night.
There was sadness in watching it go, and more tears.
Then even those were gone.
• • •
She started back,
choosing her steps carefully, hugging Tim tightly to her body. She could feel
his grip on the collar of her coat.
She wanted to look
again at the waves, Hess's beloved waves, the waves over which something inside
her had just glided away forever.
But the spray turned
her face away so she never saw the thing that pulled her in.
It was like being
grabbed. For the second time in her life, she was taken from behind by a
monster she had not known was there. Merci could think of only one thing: keep
Tim alive.
She knew
she had to reach the surface or he would die quick, but the wave had taken her
upside down and headfirst and with the roar of the water around her and the
ocean pounding her down and down and down and then dragging her one way then
another she couldn't know where she was. No up. No down. And when she willed
her eyes open all she
saw was a
shapeless dull black world and she realized she was almost out of breath. She
thought if she could just be still, she would rise to the surface, back to air,
back to life.
So she called on all her
powers to do this. And in the great calm of will, she rose. She broke the
surface, holding Tim high in both hands. She kicked for their lives. Tim bellowed
for his.