The Poet (53 page)

Coombs had sweated through his shirt. The knot of his tie, the recipient of all the sweat sliding down his cheeks and neck, was soaked. He looked like someone who had just spent the better part of an hour throwing up. He was sick.

“Gladden, show ‘em something. Let Mr. Coombs go. He doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

The phone rang, and he picked it up and listened without saying anything. Then he softly placed the receiver down on the hook. The phone rang again in a few moments and he answered and quickly pushed the hold button. He punched the key for picking up the other line and put that on hold as well. Now no one could call in.

“You’re fucking up,” I said. “Let them talk to you, they’ll figure something out.”

“Listen, when I want your advice I’ll beat it out of you. Now, shut the fuck up!”

“Okay.”

“I said shut up!”

I raised my hands in an I-give-up gesture.

“You fucking media assholes never know what you’re talking about anyway. You-what’s your name, anyway?”

“Jack McEvoy.”

“You got ID?”

“In my pocket.”

“Throw it over here.”

I slowly pulled my wallet out and slid it across the rug to him. He opened it and looked through the press passes.

“I thought you-Denver? What the fuck you doing in L.A.?”

“I told you. My brother.”

“Yeah, and I told you. I didn’t kill anybody.”

“What about him?”

I nodded toward Thorson’s still insert body. Gladden looked at the body and then back at me.

“He made the play. I finished it. Rules of the game.”

“The guy’s dead. It’s no fucking game.”

Gladden raised the gun and pointed it at my face.

“If I say it’s a game, then it’s a game.”

I said nothing in response.

“Please,” Coombs said. “Please …”

“Please what? Just shut the fuck up. You … uh, paperboy, what are you going to write when this is over? Assuming you can still write.”

I thought for at least a minute and he let me.

“I’ll tell why if you want me to,” I said finally. “It’s always the most interesting question. Why did you do it? I’d tell that. Is it because of that guy in Florida? Beltran?”

He snorted in derision, more in displeasure that I had mentioned the name, not that I knew it.

“This isn’t an interview. And if it is, no fucking comment.”

Gladden looked down at the gun in his hands for what seemed like a long time. I think at that point he felt the futility of the situation pressing down on him. He knew he wasn’t going anywhere and I got the sense that he’d known his trail would eventually end in a scene like this. It seemed he was at a weak point and I tried again.

“You should pick up that phone and tell them you want to speak to Rachel Walling,” I said. “Tell ‘em you’ll talk to her. She’s an agent. You remember her? She came to you at Raiford. She knows all about you, Gladden, and she’d help.”

He shook his head no.

“I had to kill your brother,” he said softly, without looking at me. “I had to do it.”

I waited and that was all he said.

“Why?”

“The only way to save him.”

“Save him from what?”

“Don’t you see?” He looked up at me now, deep pain and anger in his eyes. “From becoming like me. Look at me! From becoming like me!”

I was about to ask another question when there was the sudden sound of shattering glass. I looked toward the front and saw a dark object about the size of a baseball bounce across the room toward the overturned desk near Gladden. I registered what it was and began to roll and bring my arms up to cradle my head and shield my eyes just as there was a tremendous detonation in the showroom, a blast of light that burned through my closed eyes and a following concussion so strong it sent a pounding energy wave through me like a punch to my whole body.

The rest of the windows shattered and as I completed my roll I opened my eyes enough to get a bead on Gladden. He was squirming on the floor, his eyes wide but not focused and his hands held to his ears. But I could tell he had been too late in recognizing what was happening. I had been able to block at least some of the impact of the concussion grenade. He looked as if he had taken the full brunt of it. I saw the gun lying loose on the floor next to his legs. Without pausing to consider my chances, I quickly crawled to it.

Gladden sat up as I got to him and we both lunged for the gun, our hands reaching it at the same time. We fought for control and rolled over each other. My thought was to get to the trigger and just start firing. It didn’t matter if I hit him, as long as I didn’t hit myself. I knew the concussion grenade would be followed by the charge of the agents. If I could empty the gun, it wouldn’t matter who had it. It would be over.

I managed to squeeze my left thumb in behind the trigger guard but the only place my right hand could grasp was the end of the barrel. The gun was between our chests, pointing toward our chins. At the moment I judged-hoped-I was out of the line of fire, I squeezed with my left hand while opening my right hand. The gun discharged and I felt a sharp pain as the bullet clipped the webbing between my thumb and palm and the escaping gases scorched my hand. At the same moment I heard Gladden howl. I looked up to his face and saw blood spreading from his nose. What was left of it. The bullet had ripped off the rim of his left nostril and cut a slashing crease up his forehead.

I felt his grip momentarily weaken and in one burst of strength-possibly my last-I wrenched away control of the gun. I was pulling myself away from him, registering the sound of footsteps in glass and unintelligible yells when Gladden made another lunge for the gun in my hands. My thumb was still caught in the trigger guard, all the way past the joint. It was pressed against the trigger guard and there was no room left for movement. Gladden tried to wrench the gun back and in doing so it discharged once again. Our eyes met at that moment and there was something telling in his. They told me that he had wanted the bullet.

Immediately his grip on the gun relaxed and he fell back away from me. I saw the gaping wound in his chest. His eyes stared at me with the same look of resolve I had seen moments before. Like he knew what was going to happen. He reached to his chest and looked down at the blood pumping into his hand.

Suddenly I was grabbed from behind and pulled away from him. A hand firmly gripped my arm and another carefully removed the gun from my hand. I looked up and saw a man wearing a black helmet and matching black jumpsuit with a large armored vest on the outside. He held some kind of assault weapon and wore a radio headset, a thin black bar curving in front of his mouth. He looked down at me and touched the transmit button at his ear.

“We’re all secure here,” he said. “We’ve got two down and two walking. Come on in.”

43

There was no pain and that surprised him. The blood, gushing through his fingers and over his hands, was warm and comforting. He had a giddy feeling of having just passed some test. He had made it. Whatever that was. The sound and movement around him were all dulled and in slow motion. He looked about and saw the one who had shot him. Denver. For a moment their eyes locked but then someone got in the way. The man in black bent down over him and did something. Gladden looked down and saw the handcuffs on his wrists. He smiled at the stupidity of it. No handcuffs could hold him where he was going now.

Then he saw her. A woman crouching over the one from Denver. She squeezed his hand. Gladden recognized her. She was one of those who had come to him so many years before in prison. He remembered now.

He was getting cold. His shoulders and neck. His legs, they were numb. He wanted a blanket but no one was looking at him. No one cared. The room was getting brighter, like TV cameras. He was slipping away and knew it.

“This is what it is like,” he whispered but no one seemed to hear.

Except the woman. She turned at the sound of his soft words. Their eyes connected and after a moment Gladden thought he saw the slight nod, the knowledge of recognition.

Recognition of what, he wondered. That I’m dying? That there was purpose to my being here? He turned his head toward her and waited for the life to finish flowing from him. He could rest now. Finally.

He looked at her once more but she was looking down at the man again. Gladden studied him, the man who had killed him, and an odd thought pushed its way through the blood. He seemed too old to have had a brother that young. There must be a mistake somewhere.

Gladden died with his eyes open, staring at the man who had killed him.

44

It was a surrealistic scene. People running around the showroom, yelling, huddled over the dead and the dying. My ears ringing, my hand throbbing. It seemed almost to be in slow motion. At least that is the way it is in my memory. And out of all of this Rachel appeared, stepping through the glass like a guardian angel sent to shepherd me away. She reached down and grabbed my uninjured hand and squeezed it. Her touch was like a code-blue paddle shocking me back from a flat line. I suddenly realized what had happened and what I had done, and I was overcome with the joy of simply surviving. Thoughts of justice and vengeance were far away.

I looked over at Thorson. The paramedics were working on him, one of them sitting astride him, putting all her weight behind the heart massage, the other holding the oxygen mask in place. Still another zipping his prone body into a pressure suit. Backus knelt next to his fallen agent, holding his hand and rubbing his wrist, yelling, “Breathe, damnit, breathe! Come on, Gordo, breathe!”

But it was not to be. They couldn’t bring poor Thorson back from the dead. They all knew it but no one stopped. They kept working on him and when the stretcher and gurney were brought in through the blasted-out front window and he was loaded aboard, the paramedic took her spot straddled on top of him again. Her elbows locked, her hands locked together and pushing up and down, up and down, on his chest. They were wheeled out like that.

I watched Rachel watch the procession with not sad but distant eyes, then her stare fell from her former husband’s exit to his killer on the floor next to me.

I looked over at Gladden. He had been cuffed and no one was working on him yet. They were going to let him die. Any thoughts of what they might be able to learn from him went out the window when he drove that knife into Thorson’s throat.

I looked at him and thought, in fact, that he already was dead, his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. But then his mouth moved and he said something I couldn’t hear. Then his head slowly turned toward me. At first, his eyes held on Rachel. It lasted only a moment but I saw their eyes lock and some kind of communication pass between them. Recognition maybe. Perhaps he remembered her. Then he slowly turned his eyes until he stared directly at me again. I was looking at his eyes when the life ran out of them.

After Rachel walked me out of Data Imaging, I was taken in an ambulance to a hospital called Cedars-Sinai. By the time I arrived, Thorson and Gladden had already been there and had been pronounced dead. In an emergency room suite a doctor looked my hand over, irrigated the wound with something that looked like a piece of black soda straw and then sewed it shut. He put some kind of balm on the burns and then wrapped bandages around the whole thing.

“The burns are nothing,” he said as he wrapped. “Don’t worry about them. But the wound’s going to be tough. On the positive, it’s through and through, no bones involved. But on the negative, the bullet chopped through that tendon there and you’re going to have restricted thumb movement if you leave it the way it is. I can put you in touch with a specialist who can probably reattach the tendon or make a new one for you. With the surgery and some exercise it should be okay.”

“What about typing?”

“Not for a while.”

“No, I mean as exercise.”

“Yeah, maybe. You’ll have to ask your doctor.”

He patted my shoulder and left the room. I was alone for ten minutes, sitting on the examination table, before Backus and Rachel came in. Backus had the washed-out look of a man who has seen all his plans turn to shit.

“How’re you doing, Jack?” he asked.

“I’m okay. I’m sorry about Agent Thorson. It was …”

“I know. These things …”

Nobody spoke for a few moments. I looked at Rachel and our eyes held each other’s.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah, fine. I won’t be typing for a while but … I guess I’m the lucky one. What happened to Coombs?”

“He’s still in shock at what happened but he’s all right.”

I looked at Backus.

“Bob, there was nothing I could do. Something happened. It looked like they suddenly knew who each other was. I don’t know. Why didn’t Thorson go ahead with the plan? Why didn’t he just give him the camera instead of going for his gun?”

“Because he wanted to be the hero,” Rachel said. “He wanted the arrest. Or the kill.”

“Rachel, we don’t know that,” Backus said. “We never will. The one question that can be answered, though, is why did you go in there in the first place, Jack? Why?”