The Last Day

SEVENTY-NINE

Alice found the garbage bags and rushed to the utility room. In the collection of tools in the cabinet over the washing machine, there was a large roll of gray tape, which she grabbed up and carried from the room.

When she turned the corner she ran headlong into a solid mass holding a gun. It grabbed her with its free hand.

Alice screamed.

From the den, Natasha yelled, “Alice!”

“FBI,” the man yelled.

“Get the fuck out of the way,” Alice hollered, struggling to break away.

The man released her and she ran back to the den, jumping over the body of Evelyn Gismano and handing the bags and tape to Natasha, who had pulled Ward's wet shirt up over his chest. Agent Mayes rushed into the room behind her, then froze in place as he took in the scene. Before he did anything to help, he moved from Evelyn to Louis Gismano, checking each for a pulse. Natasha glanced up and noted his presence with relief.

Taking a plastic bag, Natasha laid it over the open wound and said, “Agent Mayes, grip him under his shoulders and lift him up for me.”

The FBI man put his gun in its holster, and did what Natasha told him to do.

Alice stood back as the man and Natasha raised Ward's torso, and she watched as Natasha pressed his guts into the cavity, placed the trash bag around her husband's stomach, took the roll of tape, and, with difficulty, secured the bag in place.

“There's no cell signal,” Agent Mayes told her. “And the driveway is blocked.”

“We have to get him to the emergency room,” she said. “We can't wait for EMS or he'll bleed out.”

“My car is up the driveway.”

“Can you carry him?” Natasha asked.

Mayes knelt, picked Ward McCarty up from the floor, and carried him. Passing the front door he began to run, with Alice and Natasha at his side. Natasha had the defibrillator case under her arm.

“Stay with us, Ward,” the FBI agent said.

The man put Ward in the rear of his car, then ran around and pulled him completely inside.

Natasha climbed in the backseat and kneeled on the floorboard. The agent slammed the doors and, as Alice Palmer climbed into the passenger seat, he placed a blue light on the dashboard, flipped it on, and roared out in reverse, turning the heavy sedan out onto the road. He jerked the shifter down and peeled rubber heading down the highway. A mile down the road, he picked up his phone and dialed 911 without looking.

“Please hurry,” Natasha commanded.

“I'm hurrying as fast as I can,” he replied, the speedometer passing rapidly through eighty miles an hour.

“Don't you like have a siren?” Alice asked him. And she realized, to her amazement, that she was crying.