Hostage Zero

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Jonathan stood in the background as Alvin Stewart spent a moment with each of the children, flashing his famous smile and offering up candy treats from the paper bag he held on his lap. Mama Alexander piloted the wheelchair for him, and the room vibrated with the kind of happiness that only comes from learning that a dear friend is going to be okay after all. Jonathan knew that it would be a few months before Mr. Stewart fully recovered, but the doctors said that full recovery was assured.

A shadow fell to his left, and Jonathan turned to see Gail sidling in next to him. “Want to walk me home?” she asked.

It was exactly what he wanted to do. They left the mansion’s great room quietly and headed down the wide front hall for the front door. Outside, the evening air had cooled from its blistering afternoon peak, but humidity still hung like a wet towel. Gail moved gently and slowly, leaning heavily on the railing as she favored her wounded leg.

“Can I help?” Jonathan asked. He stood ready to catch her if she fell.

“Nope, I’ve got it,” Gail grunted. “Stairs are still hard,” she said. She paused and straightened when she stepped onto the walkway. “You’re a piece of work, Digger Grave. I spend the better part of my life in law enforcement, crashing doors and arresting people without a scratch. I’ve got to join the private sector to get shot for the first time.”

Jonathan smiled and shrugged. “Technically, you still haven’t been shot. You’ve been fragged.”

“I stand corrected,” she chuckled.

Halfway down the walkway, JoeDog found them and ran a couple of circles to get attention for the stick she had in her mouth. The bouncy black Lab was as close to a town dog as you could have, but she’d adopted Jonathan as her occasional master. Jonathan didn’t accept the invitation for a game of catch, but the beast’s hopes never dimmed as they continued to walk.

“How are you doing?” Gail asked, giving Jonathan’s shoulder a gentle bump with her own.

Jonathan scowled. “Me? I’m great. The good guys won another one. Did you see Secretary Leger’s perp walk on the news last night?” Irene Rivers had always had a flair for the dramatic, so she’d made sure that ample media were around when she personally arrested the secretary of defense on charges of murder and conspiracy.

Gail shot him a look. “Did I see it? I live on Planet Earth, don’t I? He does remorse pretty well, I thought. And your friend Wolverine is second to none at damage control. Nothing at all about our involvement.”

“Do I hear bitterness?” They were on Church Street now, heading downhill toward the water, taking in one of Jonathan’s favorite vistas. The low-hanging sun behind them bathed the marina in liquid gold.

“You mean about not getting credit?” Gail shook her head. “Not at all. In fact, I think I’m grateful. She was particularly gracious in praising Doug Kramer for saving Jeremy Schuler’s life by hiding him. She’s quite a lady.”

Jonathan gave a wry chuckle. “Maybe Doug will come to agree one day. He’s not keen on accepting credit for something he didn’t do.”

“It’s better than taking blame for something he didn’t do.”

Jonathan nodded. “He gets that. He’s just pissed that I put him in that position. As he has every right to be.”

As they neared the water, JoeDog got a new idea. She ran ahead of them, placed her stick in their path, and then poised herself downrange for the throw, her tail wagging hard enough to unbalance her hindquarters.

“Look at that face,” Gail said.

“She can be hard to ignore,” Jonathan confessed. He stooped and picked up the stick, then carried it for a while. “This makes her crazy,” he said. JoeDog nearly vibrated with anticipation, walking backward and then running forward for the pitch. When they finally reached the bottom of the hill, they turned right. Jonathan checked for cars, just in case, then heaved the sick as far as he could down the sidewalk. The dog became a black streak.

Gail turned her head and watched Jonathan as they walked.

“What?” he said. “Why are you staring at me?”

“I’m waiting for you to answer my question.”

“I didn’t know there was a question on the table.”

“I asked you how you were doing.”

“I answered that one. I said I was fine.”

Gail scowled. “ Fine is not an answer. That’s a dodge.”

“Oh, Lord,” he groaned. “Better people than you have tried to climb into my head, Gail. Do yourself a favor and don’t even try. Really, I’m fine. And I’m really fine because I’m really shallow.”

“So you would have us believe.”

Jonathan felt the leading edge of anger. Sometimes fine was all you had. Bad things happen; you live through them, and you adapt. Dwelling on them was as useless as trying to change the past.

“I was watching you while you were watching Jeremy Schuler’s reunion with his father.”

“Gail, don’t.” JoeDog returned with her stick, but sensed something on the first sniff. Instead of begging for another throw, she just carried it and fell in step on Jonathan’s other side.

“It wasn’t what you were hoping for it to be, was it?”

Jonathan wanted to show annoyance at the question, but Gail was right. Father Dom and Mama Alexander had been the front-row players for that drama, and Jonathan could feel the same pain radiating from them. On the strength of the evidence gathered with Gail’s help, Frank Schuler had been released from death row, and he’d made a beeline to Resurrection House to reunite with his son. All Frank wanted was to give his son a hug, and all Jeremy wanted was to hide. He hung on to Mama Alexander and begged to stay. Where everyone had been hoping for elation, it was a terribly sad reunion.

Jonathan explained his take: “You spend nine of your thirteen years thinking that your father killed your mother, and you’re waiting for the state to kill your father because of it. That’s a high hurdle to jump. In retrospect, I think we should have expected it. Dom’ll stay on top of it.”

He cleared his throat. “On a happier note, I hear that Evan Guinn’s reunion with his father went really well.”

“Witness protection is a hard life,” Gail said.

“No harder than the one he’s lived so far.”

Gail wasn’t so convinced. “Under these circumstances, it’s going to be a particular challenge. The marshals will make it easier for the first couple of years, but then there’s forever to follow.”

Jonathan shrugged. “I do worry about the other kid, Evan’s friend Charlie. Guinn agreed to let him join their family, but there’s a kid who’s got to have issues. I wish he could have come to RezHouse instead. Dom would have been good for him.”

“And what about all the fatalities?” Gail asked. “How are you with those?” It was the point she’d been aiming for from the beginning, and to Jonathan it felt like a cheap shot.

“Let it go, Gail.”

“I know that they wear on you, Dig. They have to.”

He glared. He was not going there.

“I’m not trying to tread where I’m not welcome, Dig. I care for you. Deeply. You can’t just swallow all of that. I know. Trust me, I know. I killed my share in this thing, too. But I didn’t have to deal with dead children.”

They’d arrived at the short flight of stairs that led to the walk to Gail’s house. “You can make it from here to your front door?” Jonathan asked.

Her shoulders sagged. “Dig, please don’t shut me out.”

Jonathan gathered her into his arms. She felt strong yet fragile in his embrace. She smelled of soft soap and fragrant shampoo. She was gentle and kind and tough as nails. Sometimes he thought he loved her. He’d come close to telling her so, but had never wanted to screw things up that way. God knew he loved their time together.

“I’m not shutting you out of anyplace where I haven’t shut out myself,” he whispered. “Those doors are locked on purpose.” He released her and kissed her. From inches away, he said, “Care for me enough not to push too hard.”

With that, he turned and started back toward the firehouse. “Good night,” he said.

As JoeDog walked beside him, a breeze off the river lifted his hair from his forehead and brought the smell of sea salt and fish. It was the aroma of home, the fragrance of a town that had always been a place of contentment. Never his own, of course, but others’. He’d long ago accepted that for some men, contentment would forever be elusive. Some men were born to do the dirty work that allowed society to live with a sense of peace that itself had probably never been more than an illusion.

Such was Jonathan’s lot, and he’d always found solace in the fact that he was very good at what he did. Sometimes bad people got in the way of a righteous mission and they had to be killed. That was the way of his world.

But this mission had been different. Was it possible that saving one child’s life wasn’t worth so high a cost? Could the happy ending be worth so much suffering?

“It doesn’t matter,” he said aloud, drawing a curious look from the dog. What’s done was done. The mission was successful, goddammit. If mistakes were made, he’d make an effort not to repeat them in the future, but stewing over them now made no sense at all. It accomplished nothing. At the end of the day, the losses were many for the bad guys and none for the good guys.

That, sports fans, was the only fact that meant anything in the long run. A crime family would soon be broken, and a murderer had been removed from the president’s cabinet, all because of Jonathan and his team. Not a bad day’s work.

When he arrived at the firehouse, he unlocked the door and let JoeDog rocket past him to assume her seat on the leather sofa in the living room while he wandered to his library, poured a finger of Lagavulin, and settled in to catch up on unread newspapers.

Ten minutes later, he heard the back door open, and Dom’s voice shouted, “It’s me!” Dom always announced himself when he entered, no doubt as a hedge against being shot as an intruder.

“Library!” Jonathan shouted back. When the priest arrived in the doorway, Jonathan toasted him and pointed to the bottle with his forehead. “Help yourself.”

Dom did just that, and then settled into the man-eating sofa along the adjacent wall. “Gail called,” he said.

Jonathan growled.

“What’s wrong, Dig?”

Jonathan gave an impatient scowl.

“Oh, please,” Dom scoffed. “I’m your oldest friend, I’m a psychologist, and I have a direct pipeline to God. I can read you like a book.”

Jonathan stared, wondering whether such a friend was a boon or a curse. Something about Dom erased all Jonathan’s barriers. He held the keys to every fence, vault, and firewall that Jonathan had built to contain his demons. As a priest, Dom knew it all and absolved every sin. As a psychologist he helped Jonathan cope with the burden. But he did his best work as a friend, just being there.

“I enjoyed the killing this time,” Jonathan said, surrendering to the truth. “Worse than that, I enjoyed inflicting the pain.”

“You think that’s unusual among the population of people who mete justice to child abusers?”

“I can’t speak for them. I just know that in my heart I wanted all of them to die, and that that’s exactly what happened in the end.” He paused and took a huge breath. “A lot of them were teenagers. Not that much older than the children we rescued.”

“The age of soldiers everywhere,” Dom said. “They made their choices.”

“From a damned short list. Slave, overseer, or death.”

A moment passed. The two men respected each other enough not to deal in platitudes. “What could you have done differently?” Dom asked, finally.

It was the question Jonathan had asked himself a thousand times, and the answer continued to elude him. “Become an insurance salesman out of college?”

Dom chuckled politely, but didn’t respond. He let the question-and all that it represented-hang in the air.

Jonathan drained his scotch and looked up at the ceiling. “I’m not an assassin, Dom. I don’t want to become one.”

Dom settled more deeply into the sofa and crossed his legs. “Let’s talk about that,” he said.

The conversation went on for hours.