Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 134, No. 5. Whole No. 819, November 2009

Famous Last Words by Doug Allyn

This month, between the same covers, we have EQMM’s two great multiple Readers Award winners: Clark Howard and Doug Allyn. There are some big differences between them: Clark Howard usually writes of prisoners, ex-cons, and others on the fringes of society; Doug Allyn more often focuses on men and women in a line of work, be it construction, the music business, medicine, or, as in this story, teaching. But they share an uncanny ability to make those characters come alive and to lace their stories with just the right amount of action and adventure.

Ever wonder what you’d say? If you knew that the next words you spoke would be your very last?

Would you try to justify your life?

Would you say I love you? Or say a prayer?

Could you even assemble a coherent sentence?

I couldn’t. And I had my chance.

A golden autumn evening, dusk settling on our little college town like a flannel comforter. Linette had picked me up after my last class and we were stopped at a busy intersection, bickering cheerfully about whose turn it was to cook dinner, waiting for the light to change.

It suddenly dawned on me that the headlights in the rearview mirror were growing larger and brighter. Much too quickly.

The large truck coming up behind us wasn’t slowing down at all. Speeding up, if anything. I expected him to pull around us but he didn’t. Just kept coming, straight on. And then it was too late.

Sweet Jesus! He was going to hit us! And I turned to Linette, wide-eyed, and said... “What the hell?”

Famous last words.

Not very profound. But then, I’m not the one who died.

As Linette swiveled around to look, the truck slammed into us. Instantly smashing our world into a whirling, mind-shredding maelstrom of shrieking metal, exploding airbags, and howling rubber. Blasting my boxy little Toyota hybrid out into the flashing steel river of rush-hour traffic, triggering a horrendous chain-reaction accident. Panicked commuters slamming on their brakes, desperately cranking their wheels, swerving to avoid us.

And failing. My new Toyota Prius, with its state-of-the-art hybrid engine, rearview parking camera, and electric cup warmers, was banged around like a ping-pong ball, hammered by at least three other cars before being literally smashed in half by a flatbed truck hauling twenty tons of rolled steel.

Our gas tank ruptured and spewed. And my clever little car exploded like a napalm bomb.

I hope to God Linette was already dead before the flames reached her.

But I don’t know. And maybe that’s best.

I woke slowly in a world of white. White tiled walls and ceilings. Even my pain felt white. My memory, too. A white blank. Empty as an unwritten page.

All I could remember were my last words to Linette. “What the hell?”

“Professor Frazier?”

I swiveled my head slowly. A woman was standing beside my bed. Tall and lanky, sandy hair cropped short as a boy’s. Wearing a black suit and turtleneck. She was holding out an ID folder but I couldn’t focus on it.

“I’m Sergeant Shane Kovacs, Professor,” she said, slipping the badge back inside her jacket. “Do you know where you are?”

“Hospital.” I coughed, dry-mouthed. “University?”

She nodded, scanning my face like a form she had to fill out. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“Somebody... rear-ended us. A truck, I think.”

“What kind of a truck was it?”

“Never saw it clearly. Only the headlights. Not a car or a pickup truck. The lights were too high. That’s... really all I know.”

“What about before the accident? Did you have trouble with anyone? Cut somebody off, blow your horn, flip ‘em the finger? Anything at all?”

I stared at her, trying to make the words compute. “Road rage, you mean? No, there was nothing like that.”

“It doesn’t take much these days, Professor. If—”

“I teach History of Western Civilization at Hancock U., Sergeant. Linette’s a librarian. We don’t... squabble with strangers. Is she all right?”

Kovacs hesitated. “They didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“What was your relationship with Miss Rogers?”

“We... live together,” I managed. “Two years now. Is she—?”

“I’m very sorry, Professor Frazier,” Kovacs said, looking away to avoid my eyes. “Linette Rogers didn’t make it. She was pronounced dead at the scene.”

“God,” somebody said quietly. Me, I suppose.

“Look, I’m sorry to have to push this, Professor Frazier, but a half-dozen other victims were seriously injured in that accident. One of them may not survive the night. Several witnesses saw a gravel truck plow into your Toyota without slowing, so if anything happened earlier that—”

“I told you, there was nothing! Why don’t you ask the guy who hit us?”

“We haven’t located him yet. After ramming into your car, the truck fled the scene. We found it abandoned a few hundred yards down the highway. It was stolen from a public-works site. Maybe a drunk, maybe a joyrider. So if you can think of anything at all that could have triggered this—”

“I have no idea, Sergeant, but it had nothing to do with us. Linette and I were going home for dinner, forgodsake, trying to decide between pasta or Chinese. That’s all I can tell you. End of story.”

But it wasn’t.

I checked myself out of the hospital at noon the following day. My left arm was in a sling, badly sprained, apparently when I was thrown from the car. I was bruised and battered, with a bandage covering an abrasion on my forehead. Beyond that, I was more or less intact. From what Sergeant Kovacs said, I was one of the lucky ones.

I didn’t feel lucky.

I didn’t feel anything. I’m a methodical sort, a scholar by trade and by nature. A bit of a plodder, I suppose. Linette used to tease me about being born with an old soul. Perhaps she was right.

I know students sometimes take my History of Western Civ class to catch up on their sleep. I’m not an inspired lecturer, or even very good at casual conversation.

But now I would have to say them. Famous last words. Linette’s eulogy. The final synopsis of her life. She had no family, so the responsibility would fall to me.

And I wasn’t up to it.

My idea of a fun Friday night is an easy chair by the fire with Xenophon’s Anabasis (circa 400 b.c.e.) and a snifter of Courvoisier.

Linette was the cheerful sparkplug that kept our relationship fresh and active. Drama Club, poetry nights at Barnes & Noble, faculty mixers. Most of our friends were really Linette’s friends. She reveled in people and talk and laughter. And I enjoyed them simply because she did.

But the truth is, I never needed the company of other people much. Linette was my only need. The warm sun at the center of my universe.

How could I hope to sum up her life, her very essence, with a few brief words in a funeral-home chapel? For people I scarcely knew.

It would have been a snap for Linette. She was a poet, a wizard with words. Her verses could flash past like quicksilver or whisper your deepest secrets aloud, in a crowded coffeehouse, soul to soul.

“Scratch a librarian, you’ll find a poet working a day job,” she’d say.

Which gave me an idea. Her poetry. Perhaps I could open her eulogy with one of her poems. Something light and airy and funny. A verse that would evoke her character more clearly than any clumsy words of mine.

I collected a handful of workbooks from her desk, carried them into my study, and began scanning through them, panning for a nugget.

I found a few appropriate verses in the first book but continued on, lost in her language. I had a prescription for painkillers from the hospital, but the relief I really needed was here, at my desk in this quiet room, surrounded by books, savoring the verses of the woman I loved. Hearing her voice echo in every line.

As the afternoon faded, I switched on the desk lamp but kept on reading. With a growing sense of unease that had nothing to do with the gathering dusk.

Halfway through the second workbook, I stopped. And carefully closed the book. Unable to read one more word. Shaken to my core.

I’d found more truth than I’d been looking for. A bitter reality, shimmering just beneath the surface of her poetry. Shrouded in metaphor and allusion. But real, nonetheless. Beyond any doubt.

Linette had been having an affair.

If I’d been shattered by the accident and her death, I was far beyond that now. The hardwood floors of our apartment seemed suddenly insubstantial, as though I might fall through them, tumbling down and down to the fiery core at the center of the earth. To burn.

And I wanted to. To vanish. Cease to be. Anything to ease the searing agony in my heart.

I must have switched off the lamp, because the room was dark when I heard the noise. Someone rapping at the front door. I didn’t answer. Couldn’t.

The rapping grew more insistent and I heard someone calling my name. When the doorknob rattled, I thought they’d go away.

Until a woman in black eased open the door to my study.

“Professor Frazier? Are you all right?”

“No. Not even close, Sergeant Kovacs. How did you get in here?”

She shrugged, stepping into my room, glancing around. “Picked the lock. The security system in these apartments is lousy.”

“I’ll complain to the landlord. What do you want?”

“Why didn’t you answer my knock?”

“I don’t want company.”

“Sorry about that, but you’re not the only victim involved here. Like it or not, I have more questions and I need to show you something. Do you mind?”

Without waiting for a reply, she unsnapped a laptop computer, placed it on my desk, and switched it on. “We pulled this from a surveillance camera at the intersection. It covers the crossroads and the state highway east and west.” Grainy black-and-white images jumped across the screen, the movements herky-jerky from the stop-time photographs.

“I deleted the frames that showed what happened to your car, you wouldn’t want to see them... There. That’s the guy that hit you.” She pointed to a massive gravel truck lumbering east in the right-hand lane. Just before it faded off the screen, the truck jerked to a halt and the driver leapt out. Black T-shirt and jeans, baseball cap pulled low over his face. I leaned in, scanning the image intently.

“Do you recognize him?”

“His own mother couldn’t recognize him from this. Don’t you have anything clearer?”

“Afraid not. Big Brother’s watching, but only at busy intersections. Look again.”

She looped the images, rerunning them in step time, over and over. I stared at them till I thought my eyes would melt. “What’s that mark on his upper arm?”

“A tattoo, I think. Possibly a scar. Can’t see enough of it to tell. Why?”

For a moment, a faint flicker hovered around the outer edge of my memory...

Then vanished. “Sorry, Sergeant, I just can’t see his face clearly enough to identify him.”

“That’s because he never shows it. Notice how he raises his arm to shield his face as he exits the truck? Maybe that’s not a coincidence.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe he’s familiar with the intersection. He could have covered his face to avoid the surveillance camera. Look, he creams your car, then abandons the truck roughly a quarter-mile down the road at the edge of camera range. And just disappears. No one reported seeing him walking or trying to hitch a ride after the accident.”

“Then where did he go?”

“We don’t know. It’s possible he had a vehicle parked further on, but nobody noticed one. I think it’s more likely that he ducked into the woods along the roadside. Twenty yards into the trees, a jogging path runs parallel to the highway for almost half a mile. A trail that circles directly back to the university campus.”

I was staring at her. “You don’t believe he’s a drunk or a joyrider, do you?”

“I don’t know what he is,” she said flatly. “I was hoping you might be able to help.”

“I don’t know either! I already told you that.”

“Okay then, let me tell you what we do know. For openers, nobody steals county gravel trucks. They have zero resale value, too easy to trace. Second, that truck is a serious piece of machinery, difficult to handle. But this driver plowed into you in heavy traffic, peeled off, then had to swerve twice to avoid other cars before bailing out. I doubt a drunk or a joyrider could manage all that. So I think it’s at least possible you were rammed deliberately. The question is, why would anyone do a thing like that to you?”

“They wouldn’t.”

“No? You haven’t flunked anybody lately? Maybe booted ‘em out of class?”

“I teach history, Sergeant. I have trouble enough generating curiosity, let alone violence.”

“History is violence, Professor, preserved in the amber of the written word.”

I stared at her, surprised. “That’s quite good, Sergeant. Sun Tzu, isn’t it?”

“I have no idea, I read a lot. So, no disgruntled students? Can you think of anyone else who’d want to harm you? Or Miss Rogers? Anyone at all?”

I hesitated, reading her face. A good face, actually, fine-boned, squared-off, and direct. Serious eyes, gray and unreadable as winter ice.

“I... think Linette may have been having an affair.”

“You just think so? Do you have any idea who the man is?”

“No. But you don’t seem very surprised, Sergeant. You already knew?”

Kovacs nodded. “A few of her friends hinted as much. They claimed not to know who the man was, either. I gather your girlfriend was... discreet about it. How did you find out?

“I just... she wrote about it in her poetry. But only in metaphor. She doesn’t mention his name. Calls him Apian.”

“Ape — what?”

“Apian.” I spelled it. “A bee. A busy man, I suppose, a take-charge type. My opposite.”

“Does that reference mean anything to you?”

“Not yet, but I’m only halfway through the notebooks. I doubt that it’s important anyway.”

“Right now, we have no idea what might be important,” she sighed, easing down in the chair beside my desk. “We’re just tugging at strings, hoping to God something will unravel.”

“I’d say you’re the one who’s unraveling, Sergeant. Would you like a cup of coffee? It’s already made.”

“What I really need is to zonk out for twenty minutes,” she said, massaging her eyes with her fingertips. “Haven’t been to bed since this thing happened.”

“You’re welcome to crash on my couch—”

“I appreciate the offer, but I haven’t time,” she said, taking a deep breath, pulling herself together. “The first forty-eight hours are critical. I have to get back on the street. Could you even hazard a guess at who this... Apian, might be?”

“No. I didn’t know he existed until a few hours ago. What does it matter? What difference does it make?”

“Violent crime usually involves one of the Big Three: love, drugs, or money. Nobody made any money on this deal and you don’t strike me as the drug-dealer type. Which leaves passion. Love, hate, jealousy, in one form or another.”

“I’m the wrong guy to ask about love. I clearly know very little about it.”

“We’re all amateurs in that game, Professor. I’ve been married twice. To cops, both times. Disasters, both times.”

“Sorry.”

“Why should you be sorry?”

“Because... you’re right. Love’s a marvelous thing when it works. It just doesn’t seem to work out very often.”

“If it did, we’d be bored out of our skulls and all the blues singers would starve,” Kovacs said wryly. “Let’s hope we both have better luck next time. I’ve gotta go.”

The runaway truck was replaying on her laptop again. I watched the driver dismount, concealing his face behind his forearm...

“That’s the second time you’ve done that,” Kovacs said quietly. “What do you see?”

“Nothing. I just... it’s nothing, Sergeant. I wish I could be of more help.”

“I’m the one who should apologize,” she said, snapping the laptop closed, “for barging in at a bad time. I’m sorry as hell for your loss, Professor Frazier. If you think of anything, or if you just need to blow off some steam, call me, okay? Day or night. I keep odd hours.”

And then she was gone. And I was alone. In my arid, empty Brave New World.

I’d never thought of death as a new beginning, but in a way, that’s exactly what it was.

My love, my old life, and most things I’d believed in were gone. Utterly destroyed. By twenty tons of steel and a few lines of poetry. Yet somehow I would still have to cope. To deal with the details of Linette’s death. Her funeral, her eulogy, a burial plot...

But above all, I needed an explanation. A way to make sense of what had happened to us. Some sort of logic. Cause and effect.

Had I failed her somehow? Caused her to stray? Had her affair brought on this tragedy? It seemed unlikely, but it was a place to start. And I’m a scholar, by nature and profession.

So I poured myself a stiff jolt of brandy and sat back down at my desk with Linette’s workbooks. To begin researching a new field of study. Well, new to me, anyway.

Actually, it’s one of the oldest subjects. The Architecture of Infidelity. 101.

Methodology and Procedures.

I opened the third notebook of verses. In it, Linette described her growing attraction, physical and spiritual, to her Apian. And her sadly reluctant withdrawal from her Lute Player. A reference to me, I suppose. I minored in medieval music at State.

Over the period of months spanned in the sonnets, she described the physical raptures of new love and... sweet Jesus. It was very difficult to focus on this. To remain objective.

As I read on, I kept having flashes of my love, naked and passionate, with another man...

Suddenly I lunged to my feet, gasping, gagging on a surge of acid bile in my throat. Swallowing hard, I managed to force it back down.

And then I forced myself back down, to take my seat in that chair again. And somehow go on. If I didn’t wade through this now, ugly and painful as it was, I knew I never would.

And I desperately needed to know. To understand where we’d gone wrong. How we’d gone wrong. And how much of it was my fault.

So I read on. Sipping brandy against the sting of Linette’s poetry. And gradually, the ache began to ease a bit as the affair ran its course. Her wondrous Apian slowly but surely showed himself to be less perfect than she’d believed in that first glow of infatuation. He was human after all.

And flawed. The self-confidence she’d admired so much proved to be simple arrogance. And his decisiveness left no room for dissent. He was more than strong, he was domineering.

Abruptly, her verses took on a darker tone. She met a Gray Lady. Who soon morphed into the Good Gray Wife.

Surprise, surprise. Linette’s Apian was married.

She must have been aware of it, but in the heat of passion she’d brushed it aside. Until she actually met his Good Gray Wife. And liked her. A lot. And the consequences of her betrayal truly began to register.

Then a second jolt. Her Apian was an even greater rogue than she’d thought. He was not only cheating on his wife, he was cheating on Linette as well, with a new lover. And she felt shattered and betrayed—

Closing the book, I massaged my eyes, feeling a pain in my chest so sharp I thought I might be dying. Aching for all that was lost. For Linette and our lost love. And for her pain. And my own.

It’s so unfair that love has such terrible power over us. To bathe our whole world in shimmering light, or plunge it into darkness. Why can’t things just... work the hell out? Lovers stay together—

Because we’d be bored out of our skulls, and all the blues singers would starve.

The thought jolted me like a slap in the face. I could almost hear Kovacs saying it. Joshing me out of a funk as Linette had done a thousand times before.

Women. Their hearts are terra incognita to me. I’ll never understand them at all. Nor will any other man.

So I took a ragged breath, and shook off my self-pity. I felt like a fighter who’s been decked in the eighth round and still has four to go, but I couldn’t quit now. I was nearing the end.

And so was the affair. As I paced the room, scanning the final verses, I realized that Linette’s infatuation with her Apian lover was finally over. She told him she wanted to break it off—

And he hit her!

Damn it! I remembered a bruise on her jaw only a week ago. She said she’d banged into a door at work and like an idiot I’d believed her — but there was more. After calling him the coward he was, she promised to warn his Good Gray Wife... And that was the final verse. I flipped through the rest of the pages, but they were blank. There were no more verses.

I closed the book slowly. Stunned. When Linette tried to break off the affair, her Apian reacted with violence. And then she’d threatened to tell his wife...

And now she was dead. And a lot of people were injured. All because of an affair that had gone terribly wrong?

I didn’t know that, not for sure. And it didn’t matter anyway because I still had no idea who the man was.

But maybe I could find out. I may not be a man of action, but scholars know how to study. And learn.

I didn’t need the verses now. I only needed to concentrate, to think through the situation clearly and objectively. About a woman I adored making love to another man.

It was even tougher than reading the verses.

Pacing my small office, I mulled through the minutiae of betrayal. Several verses had referred to making love in fading or waning light, so they’d probably met in the late afternoon. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Linette’s library shift ended at three-thirty. Two hours before my last class got out. She usually picked me up after... I swallowed. After whatever happened.

She was never late. Nor could I think of many unexplained absences. Which narrowed it down to those two hours, or less, if you counted driving time.

Our apartment was a thirty-minute commute from the campus library, so for the affair to work, they must have been meeting somewhere near the university. Or on it.

Which meant her Apian might well be one of my colleagues. Perhaps even a friend... and for a split second I glimpsed the film fragment of that tattoo again — Damn it! I’d seen it somewhere before. I knew it! But couldn’t place where... Forget it. It would come in its own time. Or not.

Concentrate.

Linette’s lover was probably someone I knew. Which was logical, if not much comfort. Picking up a class schedule from my desk, I scanned through the names and thumbnail photos.

Found myself imagining each of them with Linette... God. Couldn’t handle that. Pushing the images away, I chose a different approach.

I tried to recall any suspicious comments she’d made about my colleagues. It wasn’t difficult. I have an excellent memory, especially where Linette is concerned. But I couldn’t remember anything out of the ordinary, and none of them seemed likely candidates anyway. Most of my colleagues are as bookish as I am.

But I wasn’t looking for a real person, was I? Apian would have to seem larger than life, somehow. An idealized figure. Heroic. And busy as a bee.

I quickly reduced the directory to a short list of active, energetic types, athletic coaches, administrators, board members. Then I scanned through their bios, looking for some connection—

And there it was.

A powerful, very busy man. A self-made man. Who’d worked his way through college on the G.I. Bill after serving in the U.S. Navy during Operation Desert Storm, Gulf War I.

In a construction battalion, or C.B. More commonly known as the Seabees. Where he drove heavy equipment.

The Seabee emblem was an angry bee toting a rivet gun.

A tattoo I’d seen on the muscular bicep of Dean John Mackey. Head of the university Humanities Department.

My boss.

God. How could Linette...? No! Don’t think about that. Focus. Concentrate on the problem at hand.

Dean Mackey was definitely a man I knew, though not very well. Senior administrators seldom mix with lowly profs. But I did know a thing or two about Big John.

We’d played in the same racquetball league last term. I’d even played against him a few times.

And he cheated. He’d deliberately block your path to the ball with a shoulder or even his racquet. Hell, he’d drive you through the wall rather than concede a point.

These were just friendly pickup games, no money, no prestige, not even any spectators. No reason at all to cheat. And yet Mackey did. Regularly. He just couldn’t bear to lose. At anything.

Big John’s bully-boy tactics were an open joke around the locker room. But no one ever called him on it. Petty or not, Mackey was still head of the department.

Which was the second thing I knew about him. His position was political, not academic. His appointment came after a substantial donation to the school by his wife, Doreen. A Dodge Motors heiress.

Dory Mackey was a few years older than John. A good, gray wife. But a proud, wealthy woman, who’d drop her husband like a hot rock if she learned he was cheating.

And Linette had promised to do exactly that. Break off the affair and warn his wife. John Mackey was a powerful man with an ego and temper to match. He would not be discarded. Nor threatened.

So he lashed out. First with his fists, and then...

Sweet Jesus. Big John had been at the wheel of that truck. I knew it now, beyond the shadow of a doubt.

The question was, what could I do about it?

Linette was drawn to Mackey because she saw him as a man of action. And I’m not. She was quite right about that. The little I know about violence generally involves Goths or Tartars, dead a thousand years before I was born.

Now I had to deal with real violence. A brutal killing committed by a man of wealth and influence. Who might well be beyond the reach of the law.

I could almost picture his attorneys scanning Linette’s lyrics. And laughing. Her gossamer verses weren’t proof of anything, and John’s tattoo only confirmed his honorable military service.

If I accused the dean of the Humanities Department of murder on the strength of a few murky poems and a partial tattoo glimpsed on a grainy security-camera playback, I’d be fired and my claims would be dismissed as the ravings of a grief-stricken cuckold.

And yet...

I could not let this pass. God knows, without Linette, I had little enough to live for anyway. Somehow I would have to settle up with Mackey. Or die trying.

Famous last words.

The funeral-home chapel was filled to capacity, standing room only with a train of mourners spilling out onto the steps, a testament to Linette’s vivacious spirit, the joie de vivre she’d shared with so many.

I thought Sergeant Kovacs might be there, but didn’t see her. I did see the man who mattered most, though. Dean John Mackey made an entrance just before the service began, accompanied by his wealthy gray wife.

I half expected some sign of guilt or concern, but there was nothing. Mackey was the picture of solicitude, greeting my colleagues and Linette’s friends like a senior member of our bereaved family. Which he was, I suppose.

But seeing him there, with Linette’s broken body boxed in a coffin awaiting delivery to the flames, it was all I could do to keep from charging into the crowd to get my hands around his bull neck.

But I didn’t. I kept my peace and my place at the edge of the dais, greeting the mourners, accepting condolences, making appropriate responses.

“Thanks for coming, I know how much Linette would appreciate it,” blah, blah, and so on. All the proper platitudes.

And all the time, waiting.

Then suddenly, he was in front of me. Dean John Mackey. Burly and sure of himself in an impeccably tailored dark suit. Offering his sympathy like an old friend. Or trying to.

Without thinking, I locked onto his hand with more force than I knew I owned. And met his eyes. Then leaned in to whisper, “I know what you did, you sonofabitch. Linette kept a diary and your name’s on every page. Once she’s laid to rest, I’m taking it straight to the police. Brace yourself, Big John, Armageddon’s coming!”

Any doubts I had were erased by the mix of shock and murderous rage in his eyes. And he wasn’t the only one. At his shoulder, his wife had gone pale as a ghost. She’d overheard every word.

“John, what on earth—?”

“Shut up!” he snapped. Seizing her arm, he practically dragged Dory past the startled line of mourners and out of the chapel.

Leaving me to deal with the curious stares of the crowd. I didn’t care. Confronting Mackey had been my last duty to Linette. Only the final words remained now. Her eulogy.

I began with one of Linette’s verses, then went on, speaking from my heart. I shared my pain at her terrible loss, but shared my gratitude as well. That I had been lucky enough to know this marvelous woman at all, let alone share her love. Even for a little while.

It was probably the single best address I’ve ever given. And it wasn’t even necessary. When I finished, others rose to express their grief and mourn their fallen friend. Dozens of them. The ceremony continued long past its allotted hour. As powerful and moving a time as I’ve ever known.

But eventually, it drew to an end. The organist played “Amazing Grace,” and everyone sang. And that was it.

Perhaps I was supposed to thank people as they left, but I was too depleted to make nice. I slipped into the minister’s empty office instead, waiting for the chapel to clear out.

Then I sat silent in the chapel’s front row, watching as Linette’s coffin was lowered hydraulically from the dais to the crematorium below, and consigned to the flames.

She’d always been an ethereal spirit. Now she was free to soar at last. A glint of quicksilver across the sky.

And I was free as well. The bitterness over her betrayal was gone. Burned away. Only her memory remained. And the ache of her loss.

Dusk was falling as I finally trudged out to my rental car. Climbing in, I lowered the windows and sat quietly a moment, breathing in deep draughts of cool autumn air, trying to fill the hollow in my heart.

Time to go. Firing up the rental, I headed home to my apartment.

I didn’t make it. At an intersection, I was waiting for the light to change when a utility van suddenly roared out of a side street, screeching to a halt beside my sedan!

Its windows were down, and for a split second I stared into John Mackey’s wild eyes before he raised his shotgun to fire.

I only had a split second, but this time I knew exactly what to say.

“Gun!” I shouted, diving under the dash.

In the backseat, Kovacs threw her blanket aside, and came up with a pistol in her fist, blasting three quick rounds that blew out the van’s side window, ripping into Mackey’s shoulder.

His shotgun went off and something slammed into the side of my head...

For the second time that week, I woke in a hospital. Groggy and aching, but in less pain than before. I had no idea how long I’d been out, or what time it was.

Sergeant Shane Kovacs was slumped in the chair beside my bed, her chin resting on her palm. Sound asleep. I studied her face in the pale light. A good face. Not conventionally pretty, I suppose, but strong and honest. A bit careworn, I thought...

When I woke again, she was watching me.

“We can’t go on meeting like this,” she said, straightening in her chair. “How do you feel?”

“Awful. What happened?”

“Mackey’s shotgun blast shattered your windshield, some of the fragments gave you a pretty good whack in the head. You’ve been out cold for several hours.”

“What about Mackey?”

“His wounds aren’t serious, he’ll live to stand trial. One slug zipped through that Seabee tattoo he was so proud of. I’d call that poetic justice.”

“It all happened so fast. Weren’t you supposed to shout a warning? Stop or I’ll shoot? Something like that?”

“There was no time, his gun was up. Besides, you warned him at the funeral. He had plenty of time to change his mind. But he didn’t.” She leaned forward, intently. “And you knew he wouldn’t. That’s why you asked me to hide in your car. How did you know he’d come after you?”

“Linette described him perfectly, a man of action. When I threatened him, he turned violent, as he did before. Only this time, you were there to nail him.”

“And if I’d been too slow?”

“Even bookworms have to take occasional risks.”

“Well, thanks to you and Linette, Mackey will be arraigned for murder and attempted murder as soon as the hospital cuts him loose. And from the screaming match they had in the emergency room, I don’t think his wife will be bankrolling his defense.”

“He’s always claimed to be a self-made man. He certainly made this disaster on his own.”

“And what about you, Professor? What will you do?”

“I haven’t thought much about it. Take a few days off to pull myself together, I suppose. Then go back to teaching. I’m a scholar. A bit of a drudge, actually. Linette was right about that, too.”

“I’d better get back,” Kovacs said, rising to leave. “Can I offer you some friendly advice, Professor?”

“You saved my life, Sergeant Kovacs, offer away.”

“Fair enough. No disrespect intended, but for a perceptive woman, your girlfriend made some incredibly stupid moves. She idealized Mackey into some kind of conquering hero, and it cost her everything. Don’t make the same mistake. Don’t idealize her memory into some kind of... Apian. She deserves better than that. And so do you.”

I stared at her, surprised. Meeting those intelligent gray eyes. “You’re pretty perceptive yourself, Sergeant. I’ll remember the advice. And you.”

“Sorry if I overstepped.”

“You didn’t. And I’m sorry too.”

“About what?”

“That we met in such terrible circumstances. Given the ways of the world, I probably won’t be seeing you again.”

She hesitated in the doorway, giving me an odd, unreadable look.

“Famous last words,” she said.

Copyright © 2009 by Doug Allyn