Liberty or Death (42 page)

"Don't! Do not make me laugh. I cannot... could not... stand the pain."

"Sorry. Open wide."

We got through more of the food, and, because he knew me well, there was plenty of it—with a minimum of pain and laughter. Jim Ferret hovered nearby, a bit jealously. Finally he said, "Hey, how come he gets to have all the fun?"

"Fun?" Dom muttered. "You think this is fun? I'm a working man, you know. A working cop who keeps having to take time off from work to come and bail this woman out. I've lived a long time and I've never known anyone who can get into so much trouble." He touched his temple. "Believe it or not, when I met her, my hair was black. I thought we finally had her cured, you know. Last weekend I was even willing to put on an uncomfortable suit and a sober tie to go watch her get married. Settled down. Barefoot and pregnant. And now look where I am."

He cleared his throat with a mock harrumph. "I mean, look at this. It can't be sex, right? She's grimy and disheveled, desperately in need of a bath, and even that rewarding peek at cleavage I might otherwise get is covered with bandages. Besides which, she's in bed with another man." He waved a fork in my face. "Open wide, Princess."

Andre stirred beside me and opened his eyes. Saw the forkful of egg and opened his own mouth. Without batting an eye—cops, after all, are so cool—Dom fed him instead. Forkful after forkful, while I just lay there and watched. "You two!" Dom muttered. "I feel like a bird with chicks."

"I'm no chick," Andre growled.

"Shut up and eat," Dom and I said together. Obediently, Andre opened his mouth. Finally, the food was gone and Dom put down the fork.

"You got coffee?" I asked.

"Loaded with cream and sugar, just the way you like it. Black for him."

"She can't have coffee," Andre said. His voice was weak and weary still, but it was blissful to hear it. "She's pregnant."

This is it,
I thought.
Once again I get to deliver intensely personal news with an audience.
My adventures were giving me a great deal of sympathy for people like queens and presidents who were always surrounded. But when I opened my mouth to explain, the words wouldn't come. The best I could do was take his hand, place it where it had rested so many times while he talked to the baby, and whisper, "Gone."

"No." A single word, so loaded with pain it seemed to have been torn from him.

Now I had to explain. "The doctor said it wasn't anything I did. That these things happen often, especially with first babies. That fear, and anxiety and hard work and too much exercise, none of those things cause miscarriages. They just happen... because there's something wrong with the baby." It didn't sound comforting to me. It just sounded like an excuse. I couldn't make it sound any better because there was nothing better about it. Because there's no way for someone, even a wordsmith like me, to put a good spin on something that's only sad and tragic. It's not a silver lining to parents who've lost a baby that it might have been defective. It's only a reason.

"It was what kept me going," he said. "You and the baby."

"It was what kept me going, too. You and the baby."

"Was it..." He swallowed. "Was it awful... for you?"

"Jack did his best. But yes. It was awful for me. I wanted you. I needed you there so badly. It was so heartbreaking and I felt so out of control. I still feel... I don't know. Hollow. Failed. Less than a woman somehow. That I can't do the important things right, like get married and have children."

He fumbled until he found my hands, and took them both in his. "We'll just have to try again. Think about how..." His voice tripped on the barrier of his sadness, and for a moment, he couldn't speak. "I guess we're just the kind of people who weren't meant to have it easy. I was going to say think about how much fun we'll have trying again."

He kissed me then, a kiss full of promise that reminded me of our very first kiss, in my kitchen, the night my partner Suzanne dropped by unexpectedly to announce her engagement, and Andre dropped by to ask me some questions. Everything was a fluke, really. I felt terribly unlucky just now, because of Claudine, or Oliver, or Mason, and all that had happened. But looked at another way, we were lucky. We were still here. We still had our future before us.

"I can't believe you found me."

"The bungee cord, remember?"

"I hoped. Thinking about you is what kept me from losing my head. I knew I had to be careful."

"Me, too."

"You weren't careful enough," he said. "They shot you."

"You weren't careful enough," I said. "They got you."

"I think," he said thoughtfully, "that we'd better hurry up and get married before anything else happens."

"Not until you shower."

"Not until you wash your hair."

"For better, but not for worse?"

"This is pretty damned close to worst," he suggested. "We have to pull ourselves up a little or there's nowhere to descend to."

"You've got a point."

"Coffee's getting cold," Dom interrupted. We'd forgotten anyone else was in the room.

"Dom, didn't Rosie come with you?"

"Ah," he said, "we're not good enough for you, is that it?" He spoke to an imaginary audience. "Come, let us away. The princess wants her women about her. What about it, Detective? You want a hand getting to the shower?"

"Sure." Dom and Jim went around the bed to help Andre. I watched him slowly swing his legs over the edge of the bed and had to fight an impulse to grab him back, afraid to let him go, even for a second. Because I needed to be touching him. Because I didn't want to be alone.

"Hey," I said. "But what about me?"

"You want us to help you into the shower?" Dom asked with a mock leer.

"The princess wants her women about her."

He checked his watch. "They should be along any minute. There was something about a robe and nightie and suitable undergarments. Shampoo, lotion, a toothbrush, and a hairbrush. You know. Women's things."

"They?"

"Rosie and Suzanne. Oh, were you feeling neglected?"

"Take my prince away," I commanded, waving a few fingers. The lovely, airy full-arm wave that the words required was completely beyond me. "Take him away and bathe him. Or boil him. Or whatever is necessary."

Andre stood beside the bed, as elegant as I in his limp cotton hospital gown. Exhaustion still lay heavily on him. His shoulders were bowed and his face was drawn, but he grinned at me. "You ain't so fresh yourself, honey," he said. As he limped away, leaning heavily on the two of them, he said, "Did you hear what that woman said? Boil him? Was ever a man so fortune-favored in his choice of wives?"

"Right," Jim Ferret observed. "Better she should have stayed at home and knitted blankets." I still had nothing to throw at him. Luckily, at that moment, the door opened and Rosie and Suzanne came in. They brought tears and hugs and love and clothes. They had come to fuss, debrief, nurture and console. The princess had her women about her.

 

 

 

Chapter 31

 

People, except maybe in Vegas, don't normally have weddings on Wednesdays, but we did. My mother, perhaps more prescient, unless it was hopeful, had insisted that they leave the tent up. The beautiful arbor that my father had built for me was still decorated. The rest of it, chairs, piano, food, linens, flowers, band, and guests, had to be reassembled. But Andre insisted that he didn't want to wait until the weekend. Andre, who at first had been rather like a deflated balloon, worn down by hunger and dehydration after a week of deprivation, had perked up quickly as they pumped in the fluids and nutrients. As soon as the doctors had given clearance, he'd been carried off and debriefed and shown to a clamoring press, clean, but not pressed. Trimmed but unshaven. Ravaged, yet handsome and heroic.

Allegedly, the press had been clamoring for me, too, but Jack didn't make me go. No, the truth was, Jack wouldn't let me go. He'd come to the room, given Suzanne and Rosie one of his cool looks, and said, "Could I have a minute alone?" Then, after they'd left, he stood at the foot of the bed, and said, "Just so you'll know. The press wants to talk to you. I'm not letting them near you. I hope you don't mind."

He let me get as far as, "Jack, I don't know..." before he shook his head, slowly and with a gravity and authority he seldom used with me. Mostly he yelled at me.

He surrendered his distance and came and sat on the edge of my bed. "You don't want to do this, Thea. Maybe you think that there are things which need to be said..."

I must have a very transparent face, because he smiled, gently, and shook his head. "Yes. I know. There
are
things that need to be said, about law and order and evil, about whether people matter, about whether children matter. About who has the courage to act. But that's not what will happen today. They're not looking for truth, they're looking for sound bites. They'll swarm all over you, asking how it felt to be shot. Were you scared? Did it hurt? Why you were wearing the vest. Where you got the gun. How you learned to shoot. How it feels to have killed a man. Questions you don't want to answer in public. Things you don't want to revisit in front of strangers."

"I know, Jack, but I..."

"I've tried to stay out of your way, Thea, haven't I? I let you go up there... Goddammit, Thea, I gave you the vest and the gun!" I nodded. The truth was that, for all my bravado about how no one controls me, he probably could have shut me up in Rapunzel's tower, especially since he knew what I was getting into, when I didn't. And while it might have seemed to both of us like the right thing to do, sending a civilian into a lethal situation, and giving her government property—the vest and a gun—wouldn't look particularly good in the press, for either of us. Besides, he wasn't barking at me and he wasn't giving orders. He wasn't trying to intimidate me; he was trying to explain.

"Look, I know you. I know you'll think about this, that these are questions you'll ponder in privacy, by yourself. Discuss with Andre. Maybe with some of us, if you think it will help. I'd like you to talk with our psychiatrist..." He broke off. This was something he thought was important but it was not where he wanted to go right now. "You've done enough. Endured enough. Been hurt and scrutinized enough. You wouldn't let me do it before, but please, Thea, let me protect you now."

"I'm such a lousy judge of character," I said. "I thought Bump Peters was just a sweet old man."

"So did everyone else, Thea. That's how it works. People aren't supposed to suspect those in charge."

"And Roy Belcher. I never got a handle on him. He seemed so evil and yet he seemed like such an idiot. He killed Paulette Harding, you know."

Jack's eyes narrowed. "I know that, but how do you know that?"

"He told me. Matter-of-factly. Said it had to be done. But he didn't tell me why."

"Penance, probably. To make up to the others for having had an affair with her. That's how she learned about the armory job, and when she and Roy had a fight, she called us to rat him out."

"Which is how Pelletier got killed." I still couldn't believe what I'd just heard. "He killed... hacked up... chopped into pieces a woman he was having a relationship with? I always wondered what happened to the man who was involved."

But Jack wasn't finished. "He killed her to show Jimmy McGrath that he was tough and worthy. That he was willing to do violent acts. He was desperate to have McGrath's approval. It was like sixth-grade playground stuff... with a human sacrifice."

"None of it was necessary," I said. "A whole town with its collective head in the sand, letting this stuff happen..."

"Your little red-haired waitress friend didn't sit on her hands."

"Kalyn?"

"She called us after they took you, begged us to help. And she put us in touch with another woman who used to work at the restaurant. Paulette's roommate. Mindy... she'd been hiding her, since the night Paulette was killed. The strain must have been terrible... hiding out... knowing what had happened... doing nothing about it. But you were the tipping point."

"But now she's talked about it? Mindy, I mean?" He nodded.

My mind was veering toward that black place again. "Belcher killed Paulette. And I killed him."

"It's not the same, Thea. Not even close. You shot Belcher to save three lives. Maybe more."

"I shot him."

"I'm being an idiot," he said. "You need to talk with someone. I wouldn't let one of my men go any time at all without counseling after something like this, and I've left you twisting in the wind. I'm sorry, Thea. I'm sorry."

He turned away from me and I lay there, staring at his bent shoulders, thinking that Jack did command and control so well it was easy to forget he was human. This was hard on him, too. Awfully hard. "I'm all right, Jack. I don't need special attention. I just need Dom and Rosie and Suzanne and Andre. The people who love me. Who keep me balanced."

He stood up. Squared his shoulders and looked down at me. Not Jack Leonard, Andre's friend, nor Jack Leonard, Andre's boss, not even the Jack Leonard who moments ago had been trying to take care of me. This was Jack Leonard, my boss. The man whose life involved responsibility for putting other people's lives on the line. "You always think you know, Thea, but you're not always right. You need to talk to somebody. I'll take care of it," he said, and left the room.