The Silent Hour

44

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The paramedics found the recorder and gave it to the police. When they listened to that and heard what Joe had to say, it wasn’t hard to piece together what had happened. That was good, because I wasn’t in any condition to talk.

By the time I got out of surgery, the first media report had leaked, and Alvin “Cash” Neloms was being identified as the alleged killer of Joshua Cantrell. Mike London and John Dunbar were called into the investigation. Quinn Graham drove in from Pennsylvania. The tape was solid, but there was no confession. They needed more. It was Graham who suggested they focus on Ken Merriman, the freshest case and the one that had the best potential for evidence. They found a variety of weapons while searching the properties affiliated with Cash and Darius Neloms, including a handgun and ammunition that were probable matches for Ken’s shooting. They would later be proved conclusive matches.

All my concern over Darius Neloms and his unknown path of reentry into the garage turned out to be unnecessary—he’d tried to leave when he saw his nephew fall dead through the door into the office. Dragged his wounded leg along with him and went out and got into his Cadillac and drove away. About two minutes and ten blocks away, he passed out from pain and blood loss and drove up onto the sidewalk and into a telephone pole. They arrested him when he got out of surgery.

By the time the paramedics found me, I was unconscious and in shock. They didn’t get me stabilized until I was at MetroHealth’s trauma center, the same hospital that had saved Joe. In fact, I had the same surgeon, a Dr. Crandall, who was one of the specialists on gunshot wounds. My surgery was about six hours shorter than Joe’s, though. Something he could hold over my head.

Oddly, the chest wound was the lesser of my troubles. Eight inches from being my end—if it goes in on the left side in the same position, you’re dead almost immediately, Dr. Crandall told me—but the bullet took a ludicrously forgiving trajectory and passed through me, leaving behind a broken rib and some minor soft tissue damage. If it had gone in on the left side, it would have blown right through my heart.

The leg wound, which came when Darius fired at me as I fell through the door and into the garage, was much more serious. The bullet did some arterial damage, and the only reason I didn’t bleed out before the EMTs arrived was that I was sitting upright and the wound was on the back of my leg, which offered some level of compression and slowed the bleeding. The crime scene photographs I saw later showed a spray of blood almost six feet from my body that had been released when I leaned onto my side to reach for my phone. If I hadn’t rolled back over, pressing the wound against the concrete floor, I would’ve lost consciousness before I ever got a word out to the 911 operator.

Fall on your ass, save your life. It was a hell of thing to think about.

It turned out there was actually some talk of arresting me, too. I was a civilian, not a cop, and I’d taken a life. We tend to call that murder. The only thing that allowed me to avoid at least preliminary charges was the recording, which supported my story.

I was coherent enough to watch TV on the second day, when I stared through a fog of medication and saw an old booking photo of Cash Neloms fill the screen. He was dead, the anchor explained, but still the focus of several ongoing homicide investigations.

He was dead.

It was over, then. Wasn’t it? I thought it was probably over.

No one heard from Alexandra Cantrell in the aftermath of the shootings.

They held me in the hospital for ten days. During that time I refused to see anyone except Amy, Joe, my sister, and the police. My sister, Jennifer, stayed for five days, the longest visit she’d had since she moved from South Bend to Seattle, and the first time she’d met Amy. The two of them seemed to get along well.

Gena came into town, too, and I was happy to hear that. I didn’t find out she’d been there until the day she left—Joe told me he’d explained to her that I didn’t want a large audience. That rule hadn’t applied to her, but it was just like Joe to quietly respect it, no matter what. It was good to know she’d come when he needed her.

I spent a lot of those days asleep. The right kind of drugs will do that to you. I woke once and heard Amy crying in the chair by my bed, but something told me that I should not open my eyes, should not disrupt her. I listened to her cry, and after a while she stopped and reached out and put her hand on my arm, and then I fell asleep again.

Calls came in constantly, most of them from the media. A few other friends tried to call or stop by, and Amy told me that Parker Harrison had come by on three occasions and been turned away. He was holding a card each time, she said, but he would not leave it with the receptionists or with her.

An insider account of the shootings and the crimes that had led to them was released during my hospital stay. It included significant details but was largely unattributed, most of it laid at the feet of “an unnamed source close to the situation.” Amy was the source. I’d told her that I wanted to get as much of the detail out as possible, and have it done as early as possible. I also didn’t want to give any interviews. That wasn’t the sort of balance that pleases the media, but she leaked the story to the right people, people she trusted, and they did the rest.

Darius Neloms was charged with attempted murder. We heard that his attorney would attempt a counterclaim alleging that I had fired first. Amy was worried about that. I told her we’d deal with it when it came. Then Darius and his attorney listened to the tape, and evidently found it more conclusive than they had hoped. By my fourth day in the hospital they were negotiating with prosecutors, suggesting that Darius could produce evidence proving his nephew was indeed the murderer of Cantrell, Bertoli, Ken Merriman, and others. Blood ties meant a great deal to Darius until he was in jail and his nephew was dead, it seemed.

According to Darius, Salvatore Bertoli had sought Cash out to warn him of Joshua Cantrell’s attempts to get information about the murder of Johnny DiPietro. Bertoli still believed Cash Neloms to be a friend. In exchange for the warning, Cash killed him and then Cantrell. Housekeeping. His was a different world by the time Bertoli got out of prison; he had an empire to protect, and one did not rule an empire with a soft touch.

While all of this was the focus for me, the police and prosecutors were more interested in what Darius had to say about his nephew’s associates. Cash was dead—his network was not. Mike London told me that he was hearing Darius might get a hell of a deal if he rolled on enough people.

I didn’t know how to feel about that.

Joe was around often, but he wasn’t himself. Anytime he spoke, it tended to be to make a joke, things like suggesting he and I be the stars of a TV commercial for MetroHealth’s trauma unit. It was a forced sort of good humor, and while I knew he was worried about my condition, I also sensed something else in the quiet that filled in the spaces between jokes. He was angry.

It wasn’t until the day before my release that he was in the hospital room alone with me. Always before Amy had been around, or my sister, or a cop or a nurse. That afternoon, though, Amy had left for a few hours, my sister was on a plane for Seattle, and the cops and nurses had other concerns. Joe sat in the chair under the window. We talked for a few minutes before he lost that false comedic air.

“This is how you like it, right?” He waved at the bed, at the monitors around me.

I smiled. “Sure. My bed at home doesn’t have any of this stuff.”

He wasn’t smiling. “You’re okay lying in that bed with me in the chair next to it. That’s all right with you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Exactly what I said—it’s fine with you if you’re in the bed and I’m on my feet. Just like you were okay going to see Alvin Neloms alone, nobody aware of what you were doing, because I wasn’t there, Amy wasn’t there, nobody you care about was there.”

“What are you talking about, Joe?”

“You think that if there’s nobody around you, then there’s nothing for you to fear. If nobody gets hurt but you, then who cares, right? You can deal with that. You can’t deal with the other.”

“I have dealt with the other.”

“Not too well,” he said. “Not too well.”

I twisted my head on the pillow, turned away from his gaze.

“You sent me home,” he said, “and then went back over there alone. Why?”

I didn’t answer.

“We could have talked to Darius,” he said. “It’s what we’d gone over there to do. Then you backed off, said it was a bad idea, that we should pass it to Graham. Told me that, went home and said the same thing to Amy, and then loaded your guns and went back alone, without a word to anyone. I’d like you to explain why you did that.”

I reached up and rubbed between my eyes, sucked in a gasp of pain at the movement. It still caught me off guard. I’d spent six days lying here with nothing to think about but the damage the bullets had left behind, and still the pain caught me off guard.

“I guess you’re not going to explain why you did it,” Joe said. “So I’ll go ahead and explain for you. You went down there alone because you’re afraid for everybody around you, and not yourself. It’s so much easier to isolate yourself, right? Nobody to worry about then. Well, there are a handful of people—poor misguided souls like Amy, like me—who would tell you that’s a pretty damn selfish idea.”

“You’ve got a hell of a bedside manner. Should have been a doctor, maybe a chaplain.”

“I’m not worried about my bedside manner,” he said. “You’re fine. Took two bullets. I’ve taken two of them myself. So if you expect me to sit here and sponge off your forehead, forget it. You’ll get better. You’re getting better.”

I turned back to him. “What do you want me to say, Joe? Apologize for not bringing you along to get shot again?”

“I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to understand something.”

“What’s that?”

“What you’re doing to yourself, LP.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Let me ask you this. Why’d you decide to quit the job back in the summer?”

“I told you—I was tired.”

“Tired of what?”

“Everything.”

“No. You gave me the phrase, said it right to my face—collateral damage. Ken Merriman got killed, and it was too much. After what had happened to Amy, what had happened to me, it was too much. I understood that. Amy understood that. So we supported you, didn’t question it, let you quit. I didn’t think it was the right thing for you to do, but I—”

“You had already quit, Joe. Don’t remember that?”

“I’m also sixty-two years old! I did thirty years as a cop; you did five. Don’t see any differences there?”

Neither of us said anything for a few seconds. When he spoke again, his voice was softer.

“I didn’t think it was the right thing, but I didn’t argue because I don’t know that there are many things more deeply wrong than one person telling another how to live. So I let you quit. Now, a few months later, you’re in here because you couldn’t quit.”

“Should be a little easier to make it stick now.”

Now it was his turn not to answer.

“You remember the way Dunbar looked when we went out there and showed him the Neloms connection?” I said. “You remember how he went into his bedroom and found his files, Joe? In his bedroom? A man who has been retired for years? He was obsessed. And wrong.”

“And a different man than you.”

“Yeah? I don’t know about that. Don’t know how different he is from you, either, if you hadn’t forced yourself to disappear, forced yourself to quit this work. He’s what waits at the end of the tunnel.”

“Something you need to understand, Lincoln? There are a lot of tunnels, and you do your own digging.”

Neither of us spoke after that. He stayed in the chair until a nurse came in and gave him an excuse to leave.