Last shot

Chapter 37

You're not safe here." Kaitlin followed Walker down the hall, over a dozen or so floor-adhered labels reading CARPIT. She grabbed his arm, spinning him around outside Tess's door, speaking an urgent whisper. "There was a deputy poking around."

She produced a card, and Walker paused to take a look. TIM RACKLEY. DEPUTY U.S. MARSHAL. Vaguely familiar name.

"I'll be fine," he said.

"Yeah, well, bravo, but we won't. You're all over the news. I get an aiding-and-abetting, what happens to Sammy?" She returned his silent stare, her eyes surprisingly pretty in their anger. They'd always been; it was as though the rust flecks around the pupils glowed with the intensity. "He won't be safe until you're…"

"Until I'm what?"

Her gaze dropped; she released his arm. The fire had dissipated as quickly as it had flared. "Gone," she said.

Walker set his mouth, nodded. He turned the corner into Tess's room and began loading up an army knapsack with all the Vector materials he could find. Kaitlin watched him from the doorway, arms crossed. He stopped, hand tapping a bookshelf. "There was another tape. Kid's writing. Where'd it go?"

"I think Sam said the deputy took it. Wait a minute, Walker, don't wake him-"

Walker brushed past her and into Sam's room. Sam scrambled up from the floor, smacked the TV to turn it off, and dove into bed.

Kaitlin's anger shifted, heat-seeking the new target. "You're supposed to have been asleep two hours ago."

"I couldn't. Too itchy."

"There's a tape missing from Tess's room," Walker said. "Did the cop take it?"

"He's a deputy U.S. marshal," Sam said. "That makes him a fed, not a cop."

"Did he take it?"

"Don't spaz. I have another." Sam bugged his eyes at Kaitlin. "Am I allowed to get out of bed now?"

She waved a defeated hand. He dug in the closet, rubber T. rexes, comic books, and orphaned board-game figurines taking flight over his shoulder. He handed Walker a duplicate, except MY NEWS SEGMINT was now rendered in label-print.

Eyes on the tape, Walker headed out swiftly. He heard Sam call after him, "You're welcome."

Walker lowered himself to the living room carpet and plugged the tape into the VCR. That annoying local reporter, Melissa Yueh, led the way to the house in which Walker now sat. A shot of Sam sacrificing army men to an ant hill in the front yard, then a clip from his Vector commercial. All the while, Yueh's honey-sweet voice singsonged on, detailing the magic of gene therapy and Sam's "tragic" condition. Some inserts from the Vector lab featured Dolan answering Yueh's questions awkwardly, until Chase, clearly the more charismatic of the brothers, took over.

Next the segment cut to Tess, the archetypal Troubled Mother, sitting at the tiny Formica-topped table wedged in the corner of the kitchen. She leaned over her coffee, her wrist and hand curled around the mug the way they always did. Despite her evident exhaustion and the widened span of her crow's feet, which had begun incursions on her upper cheeks, she still had that inner life pouring out of her. God only knew the source-it certainly wasn't inherited, and it was more than the sum of her looks. Men homed in on it at a glance, crossing movie theaters, pursuing her at shopping malls; when she used to take him for walks around the park, she'd actually stop cars. Girls were wary-they either steered clear or went submissive like bellied-up dogs. Women hated her, blindly and irrationally. "Spirit," some people called it, though to Walker the word had been worn useless by repetition, like "miracle" or "values." Or "tragic," for that matter. Whatever Tess had, she drew hotshots who wanted to possess it, older men who fed on it, and tough guys who were afraid of it, but she always skipped on, unscathed, until an unplanned pregnancy ensnared her with a wedding band. The sight of her now-her captured aliveness-was disorienting, like a deja vu that retrieves a segment of dream.

"…I got a new job," she was saying, "so we got health insurance in place now. Group coverage, so they had to take preexisting. And I'm-me and Sammy are-so grateful to Vector, which has given us some real hope."

Yueh enumerated Tess and Sam's "struggles" that led them to Vector, adding, "You were at the end of your rope. How many people were ahead of Sam on the transplant list?"

Tess made a popping sound with her lips. "Sixty-seven."

"And how long would that take?"

Tess watched the steam rise from her coffee. "Too long."

Yueh looked on, lips pursed with camera-friendly empathy. "So Xedral is your only hope," she said, in full movie-trailer-voice-over glory.

A scene worthy of a talk show followed, Dolan entering the house as the scientist-savior, appreciation and humility offered up like cheap goods. The usual staged interaction-Dolan playing Dungeons amp; Dragons with Sam-as Yueh v.o.'d "the hopes of an ailing community."

The segment ended with a zoom on Tess. Walker could see her age more clearly now. Sound quality was slightly lacking, the soft crackle of the mike pinned to Tess's lapel lending the moment a genuineness absent from the previous footage. Yueh doled out a classic human-interest-story question, vicious in its kind concern. "If you could wish for anything, what would it be?"

A ripple passed through Tess's face, a sob put down in its infancy, and her toughness reasserted itself over her features. Her voice wavered slightly with conviction. "The only thing I want is for Sammy to be well enough. To live a life. That's all."

Walker rewound the tape and watched her again closely, her face, the tremor, the still-unblemished skin at her left temple. He missed her as he hadn't yet, and it struck him for not the first time that anger gave him access to grief instead of vice versa.

He heard Kaitlin's soft footfall on the carpet behind him. "You want to dig into this, Walk? Well then, you get this mess. The whole mess. The pain and the pager and the wait list. You want it?"

"No."

"That's the problem with you. You never got the 'for better or for worse' stuff." Kaitlin looked as though she'd expected him to fight back; her weight was even forward, like someone who'd swung and missed.

"How much time does he have?" Walker asked.

"If he doesn't get the liver? Months. Weeks. Maybe not even. That's one of the torments of this thing-there's no road map. He just fades and fades, and then all of a sudden there'll be the final downturn." She checked the pager again, a little ritual she must have repeated a hundred times a day, but this time she caught herself. She brought the pager level to her eyes, confronting it on its own terms. "You find yourself hoping for some kind soul to get run over or drop dead." The desperation in her voice made Walker want to cringe, and it called up in him an anger toward her that he didn't understand. "You wait and you watch the pager. I've been doing it since the minute I got him." She laughed, and he noticed that the lines around her mouth, like Tess's, had grown more pronounced. "You get Sammy, you get the pager. That's just how that goes."

"Is he gonna get a liver?" He gestured for the TV. "They say-"

"I know what they say." She covered her mouth, then looked away, and her hair fell across her eyes. A sob creaked out of her. "I can't save him. I can't do anything. Except help him to die." The VCR signaled that the tape had reached its end and clicked over to regular programming, Paul Newman popping eggs into his mouth, one after another. Kaitlin jerked the hair from her eyes. "Why am I bothering? You don't get it. You've never done a goddamned thing for anyone but yourself."

"Then why did you marry me?"

"Because I was stupid and self-destructive."

He laughed, and a moment later a grudging smile replaced her frown. Sweatshirt sleeve pulled over her fist, she swiped at her tears like she was aggravated with them.

"I thought you forgot how to smile," he said.

The thumping of feet as Sam beelined down the hall. "I'm on TV! I'm on TV!" He stopped. Twisted a finger until the knuckle cracked. His commercial ran in the background, the poor-me orphan shot. He drew a rattling breath. "I didn't know you were still here."

If Kaitlin's voice were any more weary, it would have been inaudible. "You're supposed to be asleep."

"I'm sorry." He cocked his head slightly, trying to see her face. "You okay, Kaitlin?"

"Yeah. Just go to your room, kiddo."

His eyes shifted to Walker. "Don't make her cry."

Walker held out his hands: Whatever you say, boss.

"He's not making me cry, Sammy."

"Am I?" Sam asked.

Kaitlin pressed her lips together for a moment to still them. "No. Of course not. Go to your room. I'll come tuck you in."

Sam shuffled off, bouncing his head side to side and murmuring the theme song to one of his video games. Walker extracted the tape from the VCR and stuffed it into his knapsack.

Kaitlin said, "The night Sammy was diagnosed, I came over and sat with Tess. She was furious she was type B. She said if she could've cut out her liver and given it to him, she would have." She studied Walker, no longer angry, though her tone was cool, judgmental. "Do you know what it's like to have that kind of love?"

"Yes."

"Yes? How?"

Walker shouldered the knapsack and turned for the door. "From her."