Last shot

Chapter 13

Boston bounded past Tim over the porch, leapt through the truck's open passenger door, and Bear pulled out from the curb with a wave. Tim entered the house quietly. Dray was out cold on their bed, paperback butterflied on her chest.

She stirred, grinding a hand into her eye. "Your son requests your presence."

Tim checked his watch. "He's not down?"

"Is he ever? He doesn't fall asleep for good until he sees you. We know this."

Tim crossed the hall and saw Tyler's head poke up over the padded guardrail of his bed. Snowball, the aptly named hamster, snoozed on his exercise wheel. Habitually lazy, Snowball had never evolved into the playmate they'd hoped for; he'd just evolved into a larger hamster.

"Fuff pillow."

"It's fuffed. You want me to fluff it again?"

A solemn nod. Tim tapped the pillow on either side then kissed the outsize head. "Sleep tight."

"Elmo funny."

"I love you."

"I want a dog."

Then Tyler was asleep.

Tim sat on the glider rocker and watched him. Most parents he knew remarked that their children looked like angels when they slept. Not Tyler. His chin inexplicably weakened and his lips pressed out like a duck's bill. He wound himself in the sheets, contorted like a head case fighting a straitjacket. Sweat matted his fine blond hair. His head felt to be two hundred degrees-it had taken Tim and Dray months to figure out that he wasn't running a nightly fever, that he just slept hot.

From the time Tyler was a baby, Dray had dealt with him directly and easily-"Sorry, pal, the breastaurant's closed." Tim had been largely responsible for Ginny during her first three weeks of life when post-C-section complications had kept Dray bedbound; from the gates, his relationship with his daughter had felt more natural than his with Tyler. Ginny's murder at the hands of convicted child molester Roger Kindell, Tim worried, had taken away a part of him that he'd yet to recover or replace. But he was also ever more certain that during his and Dray's two-year childless gap, he'd revised Ginny's brief upbringing into something idyllic. He'd forgotten how thin a kid could wear a parent's patience. How irritating it was fighting tiny socks onto uncooperative feet. The exhaustingness of a child, this living machine designed to eat and cry and poop and resist and require, all from within an impenetrable shell of self-absorption.

The first time they'd taken Tyler to the park, Tim had hovered over him, righting him when he stumbled, steering him clear of metal and asphalt. Finally Dray had called him over. "The world doesn't work that way." She gestured at the playground equipment. "It has sharp edges and hard surfaces. He's gonna learn that. The longer he takes, the worse it hurts." Even as she was talking, Tim had scooped Tyler midair from a fall off a slide. Dray's grim silence on the walk home had an air of condescension to it.

Tim had been freed up by Ginny's removal from their lives to take insane-inane-risks. No human had been wholly reliant on him, in his charge. It was a kind of liberty that he'd put to use. And exploited. In the squalling calm of the past two years, he'd wondered whether he was still the deputy he'd been in the void between Ginny and Tyler; there was no doubt, his softening back into affection and concern had dulled his edge. It was just a question of how much.

Tim rose and padded down the hall. He picked up the copies of the TI security tapes from the counter and popped one into the VCR. As it rewound, a commercial was kind enough to inform him of one more pediatric disorder with which he wasn't familiar.

"An estimated one in every two thousand individuals is affected worldwide by alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency," a movie-trailer voice alerted over a slow-pan shot of a particularly pathetic little boy with a stained shirt, frown dimples, and too-big glasses.

Pointing the remote, Tim set the tape in motion. He viewed Boss's stabbing a few more times, looking for intricacies he might have missed, then switched tapes and watched LaRue's scamper across the dining hall. Matching words with image, he played the whispering scene again and again, speaking the words as LaRue did. "The left side." "The left side."

Getting up from the couch, he sat on the carpet before the TV and frame-by-framed Walker's reaction after LaRue delivered the news. Walker's head settled slightly on his neck-a split-second recoil. Tim froze it on-screen. The instant revealed a look on Walker's face Tim hadn't caught previously. A hidden expression, but one Tim recognized immediately. Grief.

Walker's mouth shifted, as if it were still working on the corn, though he'd swallowed seven frames back. Sorrow shifted to rage-an emotional logic with which Tim was intimate. Finally Walker rose and strode off camera, purpose quickening his step.

Dray's voice from behind caught Tim off guard. "How's the Need Monkey?"

Tim kept his eyes on the screen. "Down."

"The Tyrant keeps me up half the night, and now that he's soundly snoozing, I'm wide awake."

"I'll come give you Sleep Hold in ten minutes. Put you out like a stale cigarette."

"I love it when you talk dirty about sleep. Only problem is, a ten-minute estimate when you're working, based on previous findings, really means"-a pause, during which she pretended to crunch numbers-"an hour and fifty-three minutes. And we have to be awake by then."

"Twenty minutes tops."

"Do I hear thirty?"

Tim reversed a few frames, capturing the recoil again. Emotion loosened Walker's features, giving them an almost vulnerable cast. He wore the expression awkwardly; it had barely managed to slip to the surface.

Dray slid down behind Tim on the carpet, her sturdy legs on either side of him. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and chest and gave him a squeeze, then rested her chin on his shoulder and watched Walker's exit from the chow hall.

"I miss it sometimes," she said. "The job. Almost as much as I don't miss it."

"It's always there. You're still your captain's favorite."

"I'd rather partake vicariously. Better hours." She waited through a moment of silence, then turned, lips brushing his cheek. "That was your cue, dummy."

He found himself re-sorting the information as he told it to her, ordering his thoughts. She listened quietly and attentively, her muscular body still enfolding him. In the intense yet comfortable silence that followed his account, he could sense her working over the facts.

"The Palmdale Station covers Littlerock, right?" Tim asked. "You still in touch with Jason Elliott up there?"

"Now and then. You're thinking as a maybe-former sheriff's deputy, I could get a fuller picture of the sister's suicide investigation?"

"More than we'll get out of the crime-scene report and a CYA phone conference."

He switched the tapes-back to the toothbrush through the carotid artery.

Dray watched, rapt, and made a noise at the back of her throat as if she'd just seen Barry Bonds send one into the Bay. "Impressive. No hesitation."

"Former military."

"You know how those boys are." She plucked the remote from Tim's hand and rewound the tape. "Look at that. Not even adrenaline. No anger, no tremor in the hand, nothing."

"He seems to be a dispassionate guy."

She paused the video, inadvertently capturing Boss's grotesquely twisted face as he sailed over the rail. "If you buy the veneer. But in the dining hall footage, your boy's working through some material. Here he's not. He doesn't even slow down to take in Boss's reaction to getting stabbed. Doesn't seem personal to me, as far as murders go."

"That's the problem. No one-not the guards, LaRue, or Freddy-came up with a motive for why Walker would whack Boss."

"Maybe there isn't one."

"There must be. If we can find it, we'll at least be on the right trail."

"Like if you could find out what the mint mouthwash was for?"

Tim shifted, regarding her across his shoulder.

She clicked "play," sending Boss to plummet into darkness. "Helluva spectacle, this murder. Blood spraying. Free fall. This wasn't no quick-and-quiet on the catwalk. Remember, Walker's a strategist. He used decoys in his cell. To sidetrack you."

"So you think he killed Boss to create a diversion?"

"I think you're looking at this backward. There's no need to pitch the guy three floors just to hear the thud. Boss's murder wasn't the reason Walker decided to escape." Dray pointed at the inmates mobbing the screen. "It created the spectacle that allowed him to escape."

Tim felt the range of possibilities crank wider, a sensation that was both exhilarating and alarming. "Okay. But we're still stuck with this one: What's a guy that close to the end of his sentence escape for?"

Dray rose, tugging Tim to his feet and leading him back to the bedroom. "Something that couldn't wait a year and a half."