Third Degree

Chapter 22

Warren slammed the door and stared at Danny with wild eyes. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Trying to save you!” Danny replied, panting from his exertions.

He saw the gun in Warren’s hand, then Laurel over his shoulder, watching with terror in her eyes. Through her fear Danny saw the glow of gratitude. Warren looked nothing like the man Danny had taught to fly. High on his left shoulder, his shirt was stiff with clotted blood. He had the face of some soldiers Danny had seen, those who had been asked to do too much, or to witness too much, and had somehow found themselves still walking the earth after all their friends were dead.

“Where’s your kids?” Danny asked, trying to orient himself from memory. The kitchen and den were a few yards behind Laurel; the hall to Danny’s right led to a guest room, then to a back door to Warren’s study. Behind Warren was the great room, which opened onto the study and the master suite.

“Beth’s in the safe room,” Laurel answered, after her husband refused to. “I don’t know where Grant is.”

“We need to get Grant in the safe room, too.”

“Grant’s fine where he is,” said Warren.

“No, he’s not. That three-minute deadline was bullshit. They were coming to get you when I set down on your front walk.”

Warren processed this in silence.

“I want to talk to you, but we need to get everybody into the hall first.”

“Why?” Shields asked.

“They have thermal imaging devices out there. They can see through the window blinds. But the hall walls will shield us.”

Warren slowly shook his head.

“It’s twenty feet!” Danny shouted, pointing to his right.

Shields seemed to reconsider. “You go first.”

Danny had hoped the doctor would lead the way, giving him a chance to grab Laurel and try for the front door. But if he’d tried that and failed, whatever trust he now enjoyed would be lost. He backed slowly down the hall, his eyes on Warren’s gun. His left heel slipped on something, then caught. He looked down and saw a dark, tacky stain on the floor. Blood. He’d seen whole slicks of it in the belly of his chopper. He figured the stuff on his shoe belonged to Kyle Auster.

Shields wasn’t following him, he noted, and Laurel was still stuck behind her husband in the foyer. “Warren, if you stay where you are, they’ll blow down that door and toss in a flash-bang grenade. The C-4’s already in place.”

Warren blinked twice, then came toward Danny, motioning for Laurel to follow him. He stopped after the hall walls closed around him. Danny held out his hand and beckoned Laurel forward. He could tell she wanted to run into his arms, but she moved slowly, as though Warren might decide to shoot her at any moment.

“You two stay on opposite sides of me,” Warren said nervously.

Laurel obeyed like a convict worried about a brutal guard.

Warren kept his gun hand on Danny’s side, as though he expected Danny to make a play for the weapon.

“I violated orders to come in here,” Danny said, trying to keep his voice under control. “So I hope you’ll listen to me. There’s a boy out there who shot twenty-seven people in Iraq. And that’s just what they recorded officially. He’s got a bullet chambered with your name on it.”

Warren’s face didn’t change at all.

“That’s welcome news to you, isn’t?” Danny said. “That’s what I realized when I was hovering over your house. That’s how you want to die.”

The doctor’s right cheek twitched.

“Warren?” Laurel said softly. “Is he right?”

“I’m right,” Danny said, not taking his eyes from Warren’s face. “But you’re not going to get that surgical sniper’s bullet. You’re going to get Ray Breen and his weekend commandos blasting in here with grenades and submachine guns. And if anybody gets in the way, like Grant or Beth or Laurel, well, that’s just too bad. Do you hear me, Warren?”

“Yes.”

“Is that how a good father checks out?”

The cheek was twitching steadily now.

“You know it’s not,” Danny pressed. “How a man dies is his own business, but he’s got no right to take anyone else with him.”

“Grant and Beth can leave,” Warren said. “But not her.” he jabbed his pistol toward Laurel. “She stays till the end.”

The end of what? Danny thought. The end of you, or of all of us?

Behind Warren, Laurel put a shaking hand over her eyes. For an instant Danny wondered if she might smack her husband’s head or make a grab for the gun, but she was past that point now. She was barely functioning.

“Let’s get those kids out of here,” Danny said.

“McDavitt’s a goddamn traitor!” Ray Breen shouted over the radio. “He’s telling Shields everything we got out here! Can’t you hear that mike signal? I can’t take any more of this shit!”

Sheriff Ellis said, “Danny’s about to walk out of there with those kids, Ray. Keep this channel clear. I’m giving Danny the time he asked for.”

Carl Sims lay on the wet grass behind his pecan tree and listened to the menagerie of voices on the radio net that linked the members of the Tactical Response Unit. Ray Breen was going to need a straitjacket or a horse sedative if he got any madder. Even if he didn’t, he was exactly the wrong person to send into a hostage situation. Carl had figured the sheriff would pull Ray off the TRU after his brother was shot; it just seemed like common sense. But this wasn’t the Marine Corps, and Carl wasn’t in command.

He didn’t know why Major McDavitt had risked his life to charge into the house alone, but Carl was glad he had. Anything was better than sending Ray and his cowboys in there with grenades. Carl made sure the extra poncho he’d brought was keeping the rain off his rifle, then went back to studying the LCD on the thermal camera. He suspected that the major might have gone in to move Dr. Shields back into his line of fire. If so, Carl didn’t plan on disappointing him. Any doubt about shooting the doctor had vanished. It was simple arithmetic now.

One death was better than five.

“The kids, Doc,” Danny said again. “Where’s Grant?”

Warren was staring at Danny with a strange new intensity. “What are you really doing here?”

A shiver of fear raced along Danny’s shoulders. Warren’s hollow eyes seemed suddenly to hold the very knowledge that Danny would have given anything to keep from him. Had he somehow sensed the truth? Had physical proximity triggered some primitive sensory apparatus that could detect sexual chemistry between people?

“Do you always have to be the hero?” Warren asked.

“I’m no hero. I just care what happens to this family. I don’t want to see your pictures on the front of tomorrow’s Citizen over a story about a terrible tragedy. And I don’t want to listen to every asshole in town saying, ‘It just goes to show, doesn’t it? You never can tell.’ ”

Warren’s mouth smiled but his eyes remained disconnected from the movement.

“So let’s get those kids out of here, huh?”

The dead smile vanished.

“The baby I’m carrying is yours, Warren,” Laurel said, averting her eyes from Danny. “I know it. That’s the one ray of hope in all the darkness you’ve been living with this past year.”

Danny searched her face, but he saw no sign that she was lying. Maybe Shields had fathered the child.

“I told you,” Warren said, “it can’t be mine.”

“You said it was unlikely. Not impossible.”

Shields looked at the floor, then at his gun. Laurel was playing a dangerous game.

“Is it possible?” she asked softly. “Just possible?”

“Maybe,” he whispered. “But if it is…I don’t even know if you could keep it. My cells are so screwed up now from the chemicals and hormones, the risk of birth defects would be so high-”

“I don’t care,” Laurel averred, so firmly that Danny believed her. “If you’re dying, then we have to risk it. You’re going to live to see this baby born!”

Danny didn’t know whether she was speaking from the heart, but her eyes flashed with conviction, and her words rang with truth.

Warren’s face was glistening. Maybe he’s finally breaking down, Danny thought. Maybe the hope of something positive before his death was enough to lift Shields out of the hell he had lived in so long. Danny prayed that Sheriff Ellis was hearing this conversation-and holding Ray Breen on a tight leash.

Warren wiped his eyes, then looked back at his wife. “I want you to get a blood test. Will you do that?”

She nodded, but Danny saw that the idea had scared her.

“A DNA test?” Danny asked, thinking that this alone was proof that Shields saw them both alive in the future.

“No, that takes too long. Mark Randall can come in here and draw some blood, and they can have it typed at the hospital lab in thirty minutes.”

Danny felt dizzy. “You mean now?”

“Why not? Randall lives practically around the corner, on Sagramore Street.”

“Warren…we don’t have that kind of time.”

“Why not?”

“Because the guys outside are about to blow this house apart. You want them to sit around while you perform some kind of in-house paternity test?”

“I don’t see why that’s asking too much. It could resolve everything.”

“How far along is she?” Danny asked. “How could they even get a needle to the fetus without, I don’t know, ultrasound or something?”

Laurel spoke with a feminine power that made both men turn. “If you truly loved me, it wouldn’t matter whose child I’m carrying.”

Warren gaped at her.

Danny wondered why the hell she’d said that. Did she have a death wish? Asking a man to accept another man’s child from the woman he was married to…that was definitely outside the envelope. Wasn’t it?

“You don’t know what love is,” Warren said. “I see that now.”

“On the contrary,” Laurel replied. “It’s you who has no idea what love is.”

Danny was trying to think of a way to get her off this tack when a disembodied voice said, “Merlin has broken the password! It’s MAGIC!”

Danny nearly jumped out of his skin, thinking someone else from the TRU had slipped into the house. When no gunfire erupted, he figured Grant was playing a video game on one of the home computers. But when he saw Laurel’s face, he knew he was wrong. She was terrified.

A triumphant blast of trumpets echoed through the house. Then the voice repeated, “Merlin has broken the password! It’s MAGIC!”

Warren’s face was shining as though all his fatigue had suddenly melted away. “Everybody into the study!” he cried.

Waving his pistol, he herded Danny toward the back door to his study. Danny had little choice but to walk ahead. As he did, some of Warren’s words during their earlier negotiation came back to him:

“I’ve got another computer working on it.”

“What is it you’re waiting for?”

“The name, Danny.”

“What name?”

“The guy who was screwing my wife. Or still is, for all I know.”

Danny stopped in the study door, his heart banging in his chest. My name is about to pop up on his computer screen… “Warren, if we go in here, one or all of us is going to die. They’ll see us on the thermal cam, and they’ll fire this time.”

“At least I’ll die knowing the truth.” Warren pushed past him with Laurel in tow. She brushed against Danny as Warren yanked her down the single step, and the scent of her pierced him to the core.

“You won’t live to read the screen!” Danny yelled.

“You’re free to go, Major. But not Laurel. Everything that’s happened today was leading to this moment.”

Danny couldn’t abandon her. He stepped down into the study, but he made sure that the men outside knew where he was. “If you’re set on committing suicide, all right. But I’m not giving up on you. Maybe they won’t fire if I’m in here with you.”

Seeing that Danny meant to stay, Warren gestured for him to stand on the far side of the desk, opposite the Aeron chair that faced the computer screen. Then Warren stood Laurel to the right of his chair-between himself and the study windows-and sat before his computer. His wife was now a human shield, one that had probably merged their two figures into one on the thermal camera outside. Shields’s ultimate goal might be suicide, but he meant to live long enough to discover who’d been screwing his wife.

“Merlin has broken the password!” the computer announced yet again. “It’s MAGIC!”

Warren laughed like a gleeful twelve-year-old playing a video game. As he began clicking his mouse, Danny flicked his eyes back and forth, working out the geometry of the room. He had to get Carl a shot, fast. If Warren pulled Danny’s name out of Laurel’s Hotmail account, he was a dead man. Shields had already shot a deputy and his medical partner. How hard would it be to shoot the guy who’d impregnated his wife?

Warren had set his pistol in his lap so that he’d have both hands free to work the computer. Laurel stood two feet to his right, with the desk separating her from Danny. Her eyes locked onto his, willing him to do something, anything, to stop her husband from opening her e-mail messages.

What’s Warren looking at now? he wondered. A list of old e-mail from me? Danny never signed his name to casual e-mails-notes about where and when to meet, like that. But the longer ones-those describing his feelings for Laurel-he’d always signed. And being a woman, Laurel had probably chosen to save exactly those for posterity.

“What do you see?” Danny asked, trying to stall.

Shields shook his head in wonder. “I’m reading a message telling my wife to meet her lover at the usual place. Strange, isn’t it?”

That one won’t be signed, Danny thought. But the next one might.

“And I’m waiting to find out who the father of my wife’s child is. This is a real red-letter day, wouldn’t you say?” Warren clicked the mouse again, probably moving to the next e-mail.

Laurel’s face twitched with fear.

Five more seconds could kill us both, Danny realized. Screw the risk, Carl has to shoot- “Warren, you’ve got to stop this! You’ve given Laurel the third degree all day long. They could blow you away right now! Right where you sit. You make an easy target because you’re sitting-”

Warren’s hand flicked out like a striking snake and grabbed Laurel’s right wrist. A split second later he was on his feet, jerking her hand out of her pants pocket.

It’s her phone, Danny realized. He’s seen her phone!

Danny started around the desk, but Warren’s gun snapped up, its black eye staring a hole in Danny’s chest.

“Third degree?” echoed Sheriff Ellis, sitting in the command trailer with Sandra Souther. “Third degree. Jesus, Danny’s telling us to shoot. He’s telling us to kill Shields.” Ellis grabbed a walkie-talkie off the table. “This is Black Leader, we’re going to blow the windows on Carl’s order. Repeat, Black Diamond has tactical command. Carl, the second you have a shot, take it.”

“Understood. I’m looking at the thermal image, but there’s no separation. Either the wife or Major McDavitt is in the line of fire.”

“Danny said Shields is sitting down. If you can’t see him on the thermal, blow the windows and take your chances.”

“Will do. Be cool, everybody…I’ll say when. Scoping now…”

“Damn it, Billy Ray,” cursed Ray Breen. “Let my men take this bastard out. This is exactly what we train for.”

“Negative,” said the sheriff. “Carl has the call. Acknowledge, Ray.”

Ray clicked his radio twice.

Warren held his wife’s Motorola Razr high like a trophy. The silver flip-phone had obviously been open while in her pocket, and Danny was sickeningly sure that this Razr was her clone phone, the one she used exclusively to talk to him.

Warren lowered the phone and looked hungrily at its screen. “You’ve had your hand in your pocket all day. Even when you were taped up. That was one too many times.”

Laurel was wavering on her feet. Danny wished she would faint and give Carl a clear shot.

“Let’s see who you’re trying to call,” Warren said, working at the tiny keys. “Or were you texting somebody?”

As Laurel’s eyes found Danny’s, Warren’s thumb stopped working at the keypad. He looked up at his wife, and a shudder went through him. Then he stuck the barrel of his gun into Laurel’s belly. “I knew that wasn’t my baby.”

“Warren?” Danny said softly. “Buddy?”

Shields laughed strangely, then tossed the cell phone to Danny. Danny caught it and looked down at the screen, which displayed a message beneath SENT MESSAGES. On it were five words written in the pseudo-shorthand of cell phone messaging: