Third Degree

Chapter 19

Danny ripped off the headset and shoved his chair away from the table.

“What was all that stuff about God?” Ray Breen asked from the door. “Did you hear that shit? Sounds like he’s gone atheist or something.”

Sheriff Ellis shook his head. “Dr. Shields is questioning his faith, that’s all. Death is the most difficult test of the spirit, Ray. I’ve seen many a devout man question God in the face of cancer. Especially when it hits children. No, the truth is, I feel for the man.”

“Well, I’m happy to hear it,” Biegler said sarcastically. “But none of that brings us any closer to a resolution. I suppose you noted that we heard nothing whatsoever from Kyle Auster?”

Ellis nodded. “I think Dr. Auster’s dead. Danny?”

“Dead.”

“Well,” said Ray. “What are we waiting for then? Shields ain’t gonna let his little girl out of there. And he sure as hell ain’t gonna let his wife out. I don’t think we got any choice but to go in and get them.”

“We need to know what’s going on inside that house,” said the sheriff.

“Randy’s got the directional mikes on the windows,” Trace said, “but he’s getting a lot of noise. No clear voices. He texted me while Major Danny was talking. He thinks Shields is in the study. The wife and kid aren’t saying anything. Nothing audible, no how. The thermal-image gadgets got here, but they ain’t set up yet.”

“Audio’s enough for what we need,” Ray said. “Let’s get a location on Shields and go.”

Sheriff Ellis still looked reluctant to give the order.

“What else are we gonna do?” Ray said impatiently. “The man’s in hell already. You heard him.”

“The man’s scared to death,” Carl said softly. “That’s what I heard.”

Everyone turned and looked at the sniper.

“We need to focus on Mrs. Shields and her daughter,” said Danny, trying to plumb his own motives even as he spoke. “God knows Dr. Shields is in a bad place, but he poses a serious threat to his family. An imminent threat, if you ask me. There’s no telling what he’ll do if that computer finally tells him who his wife’s been seeing.”

“He’ll kill her,” said Ray. “You tell a guy that crazy who’s been doing his wife, he’s gonna off ’em both. Or the one he can get to, anyway. No question about it.”

“Damn straight,” Trace said from the comm rack. “I would.”

“Maybe,” said Sheriff Ellis. “I want the signal from those directional mikes routed in here.”

“I got it now,” said Trace.

“Well, turn it on!” Ellis snapped. “The worms are eating us up in here, I swear.”

Agent Biegler said, “We need to be ready to go at a second’s notice, Sheriff. Is the rest of your team in position?”

“We?” said the sheriff. “What’s this we stuff? You ain’t got a dog in this hunt, Biegler.”

“I’m part of this operation, whether you like it or not.”

“My men are in position,” Ray said. “The charges are already set on the windows. Sonny Weldon’s on the switch.”

“Good,” said Ellis.

“What’s the chance of flying glass hurting the hostages?” Danny asked.

Ray shrugged. “There’s a thin bead of explosive around each of those big panes. We’re going to cut the glass, basically. It should drop pretty much straight down. With really bad luck, somebody could get hit by small shards, but I don’t think so.”

Shards moving at 12,500 feet per second, Danny thought, making a mental note to text Laurel to stay far from the windows prior to the assault. And to lie on top of Beth, if possible. With this thought came the realization that the men in the room were not watching Sheriff Ellis expectantly, but him. Even Ellis seemed to be waiting for Danny to give some last-minute guidance. Danny figured they must have bought into the plan he’d outlined earlier, whether they’d voiced their agreement or not.

“Let’s put one thermal imager in front of the house and one in back,” Danny said. “Make sure the one in back is at Carl’s position. The operator will serve as his spotter. Carl’s used to working that way. Make sure the fireman who’s read the manual is operating the unit by Carl. He’ll have some idea what he’s looking at.” Danny peered between sweat-soaked uniforms to the sniper’s face. “Sound okay to you, Carl?”

“Best we can do, probably. I had a thermal rifle scope in the Corps when I needed it, but this ought to be good enough for general target acquisition.”

“Let’s pray it is. After Carl has a positive lock on Shields-and I mean positive-I’ll take the chopper up, hover over the backyard, and hit the searchlight. That’ll bring Shields to the windows.” Danny looked at Ray. “Then you blow them out, and Carl takes his shot.”

Danny looked at the sheriff, worried that he’d usurped the man’s authority, but Ellis only nodded in agreement. In this kind of situation, the natural hierarchy asserted itself.

Trace Breen held up his hand for silence. “Listen! I got a mike signal ready. It’s noisy, but just be patient. Your ears’ll sort out the words after a minute or so.”

“Wait a second,” said Ray. “I think it’s time our shooter got into position.”

“Deputy Sims,” said the sheriff, “get to your sniping position.”

Danny was surprised that Ellis had let Carl stay so long. But when he thought about it some more, he understood. Carl Sims was Death. In the command trailer, death was contained. But once they put Carl behind that tree in the backyard-with clearance to shoot-Warren Shields was a dead man. This certainty roiled Danny’s gut in a way few things ever had, and only one thing weighed against the essential wrongness of it. Shields’s cancer.

He’s dead anyway, Danny told himself.

Carl hesitated at the door, looking back to Danny for a final, unspoken authorization. Danny closed his eyes, then gave the slightest of nods, knowing that his gesture carried the weight of a Roman emperor’s thumb in the arena.

While Carl slipped silently out to his position, Laurel struggled like a mangy dog to scratch beneath the duct tape binding her ankles. Her soul might be in free fall, but her body could still drive her mad. Red welts had risen where the tape chafed her skin, and she had already scratched two of them bloody. As soon as she got momentary relief, her mind went back to Warren.

In the past ten minutes, she had seen deeper into her husband’s heart than she had during her entire marriage. The despair he’d revealed to Danny had shattered her so completely that hope seemed only a quaint dream dimly recalled from childhood. Guilt suffused every cell of her being, and yet to dwell on it now was pointless. She had to act.

“Warren?” she said. “Could I speak with you for a minute?”

“What about?” came the disembodied voice from behind the computer monitor. “My tumor?”

“Not only that.”

“Talk.”

“Would you please come over here?”

“I can hear you fine from here.”

This was going to be much harder without eye contact. “I think you know what I’m going to ask you. Why didn’t you tell me about your diagnosis when you first got it?”

“There was no point.”

“No point?”

“It would only have made things worse.”

“Why do you think that?”

He sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I’ve seen it again and again in my practice. People get cancer, and everything in their lives changes. Sometimes it’s not so bad…a thyroid cancer, testicular, some lymphomas, things that are caught early and dealt with. But if you get one of the big ones, the deadly ones, people never look at you the same way again. It’s almost a tribal reaction, or an evolutionary one. People avoid you. You’re tainted by death. Even if the surgeons swear they got it all, people think, ‘Any day now, it could come back. He’s a goner.’ ”

“I don’t think that’s necessarily true anymore.”

His face moved out from behind the monitor. The frankness in it chilled her. “You have a lot of experience with cancer patients?”

“I realize you see more than I-”

“Laurel, I might as well have pancreatic cancer, okay? The worst thing is, people start treating you like you’re dead long before you die. If you’re a salesman, you make customers uncomfortable. Your boss smiles to your face, but he’s already looking for somebody to replace you. People say they support you, but it’s bullshit. Remember that actor who played Spenser: For Hire on TV? Robert Urich? He got synovial sarcoma about ten years ago. He went public and told the world he was going to beat it. What did the network do? Canceled his series. He lived five more years. If you’re a doctor, it’s worse. You scare the hell out of patients. Nobody wants to be reminded of his mortality. They look at a guy like me, midthirties, perfect physical shape…dying of cancer? Patients don’t want to see that. They don’t want to believe it can happen. I don’t blame them. I didn’t want to believe it either. But I did, finally. And I didn’t intend to be treated like a dead man for my last few months of life. I’ll be dead soon enough.”

She tried to imagine herself in his situation, knowing he would soon lose everything, even his children. But Warren was right; there was simply no way she could. “I can understand you keeping it from your patients. Even from Kyle. But why didn’t you tell me at least? Just me? You know I would have kept it secret. I could have helped you with everything. Getting to the treatments…anything you needed.”

His head disappeared again. “I thought about it. But what could you do besides feel sorry for me and worry about the future? I wasn’t going to endure the former, and I intended to spend every minute I had left on earth making sure you never had to do the latter. You see? What’s the point?”

Laurel felt like knotting a piece of cord and whipping herself until she bled.

Warren got up and came around the desk. He stopped in the squared-off arch between the great room and the study. She rarely saw him unshaven, and the dark growth of beard gave him a desperate aura. He looked like a distant cousin of himself, someone she had met once long ago and then forgotten.

“Marriages go through hell when one partner is dying,” he said. “People leave each other during illnesses like this. They get divorced. They have sexual problems, and not in the way you’d think. Sometimes the sick partner wants sex, but the other person just can’t stomach it. They can’t be intimate with this deathlike figure that used to be the person they lusted after. We all have strong feelings of repulsion against death and illness. I didn’t want you thinking about any of that until you absolutely had to.” He squeezed his fingers into fists. “And I meant to keep that day from coming, too.”

“How?”

His gaze was unblinking. “Think about it.”

She felt lost. She hadn’t yet learned the rules of logic for the world where death was both inexorable and imminent. “I don’t know.”

“You asked me why I got the gun.”

Her stomach turned over. “Oh, God. Warren, you wouldn’t.”

“You think I want my son’s last memory of his father to be a hairless skeleton shitting himself in the bed? A shell of a man who can’t talk or remember anything or even feed himself? No, thank you.”

“Don’t talk like that. Please.”

“Why not? You want to pretend it wouldn’t end that way?”

“I can’t believe you’ve been dealing with this alone.”

“Everybody deals with this alone. Sometimes there are just people around, that’s all. Nobody can really help you.”

“I think you’re wrong,” she insisted, hoping her faith wasn’t absurdly naive. “You have to be willing to let someone help you.”

An expression of boyish shyness came over his features. “Well…I’m not that way.”

“I know. But maybe it’s time to change. Just a little.”

“I can’t. I have to deal with this myself.”

“Is that what you’re doing now? Look at me, Warren. This is crazy.”

“No, it’s not. I simply didn’t foresee your betrayal. I should have, I see that now. But I was preoccupied. Isn’t it funny? I’ve been spending my last months on earth trying to provide for someone who stopped loving me a long time ago.”

“That’s not true.”

His eyes found hers again, and they were devoid of all illusion. “Isn’t it?”

“I’ve always loved you, Warren! I just wanted you to really let me in, to let me love you, and you couldn’t. I don’t think it’s your fault. It’s just…I think your father wanted to make you tough, and he did such a good job that you can’t be soft, you can’t be vulnerable at all. And when you armor yourself like that, there’s no way love can get in.”

“Or out. Right?”

She nodded sadly.

“And now?”

She hung her head, searching for words to explain what she felt. “I don’t know. Now we need to pull together to try to beat this thing somehow.”

He laughed as though amazed. “You can’t quit, can you? You can’t stop pretending that the world is different than it is.”

“Where there’s life, there’s hope. Corny maybe, but I believe that. And you’re a fighter, God knows.”

He drew his hand across his throat like a knife. “No one beats this, Laurel. It would take a miracle. And there are people on earth a lot more deserving of miracles than I am. What end would it serve, anyway? You’re in love with someone else.”

She stared back, unable to lie anymore. “I don’t know. I feel like the whole world has been pulled inside out. I didn’t know how things really were.”

“So now that you know I’m dying, you love me again?”

What could she say to that?

Warren cocked his head as though listening to some faint sound beyond her hearing. “It’s too late. I understand that now. For a while, some options remain open, but then they close. If you don’t act while a door is open, it can shut forever. That’s how life is. If you have a dream when you’re young, you’d better act on it then, or the chance will be gone. You’ll never run a world-record sprint at thirty-five. You don’t become a rock star or a pro baseball player at forty-five.”

“We’re not talking about childhood dreams!” she cried, suddenly angry. “We’re talking about a marriage! Two beautiful children!”

“That’s right. We’re talking about family. Trust, remember?”

Even as she watched him with hope in her heart, his face hardened into a mask of merciless judgment.

“You can’t step back into that sacred circle after you’ve left it to fornicate with another man.” He raised his arm and pointed at her like some Puritan judge. “You carried his seed into this house. The house that I built to protect you and our children. You carried that man into this house inside your body. And you reveled in it! Didn’t you?”

“No.”

Warren stepped closer to the sofa, his hand delving into his pocket. “Don’t lie. We’re through with lies. Admit what you did.”

“I didn’t do that.”

“You made him wear a condom?”

“I didn’t cheat on you!”

“Liar!” Another step closer. “You make me sick!”

She glanced past him at Beth’s sleeping form, searching for the strength to keep lying. It could only be a mercy now. “I never betrayed you, Warren. I’ve had a hundred chances, but I never did.”

He raised his hand high as if to strike her. “LIAR! WHORE!”

She shut her eyes and waited for the blow.

“Get up!”

“I can’t. My feet are taped together.”

“Get up, damn you! Get your-”

“Mama? What’s the matter?”

Beth’s tiny voice stopped Warren’s roar the way a toddler running into the street stops a truck. She was standing in the arch between the study and the great room, her little arms folded protectively across her chest. Wild-eyed, Warren whirled and glared down at her, and she began to whimper. Laurel tried to get up, but he reached back and shoved her down again. Then he screamed like a man going mad.

“He’s going to kill her,” said Danny, quickly checking the instruments on the helicopter’s panel. “We can’t wait any longer.”

“Christ!” Sheriff Ellis cried from the left-hand seat. “Take us up!”

“I can’t yet!” Danny waited in near panic, urging the rotors to full rotational speed. The light was gone now, thanks to the storm clouds. For all practical purposes, night had fallen.

“Black Seven, this is Black Leader,” said Ellis, calling Ray Breen. “We’re going airborne in a matter of seconds. A soon as we’re in a hover over the backyard, Major McDavitt will hit the spotlight, and I’ll give the command to go. The command will be ‘Go,’ repeated three times. A no-go order will be ‘Abort,’ but don’t expect to hear that. Acknowledge.”

“Black Seven, ten-four.”

“Black Diamond, are you in position?”

“In position,” Carl Sims replied. “I’m aiming at the target indicated as most likely by the thermal imager.”

“Are you ready and willing to fire?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll acquire the target as the windows go down, and fire on your command.”

No hesitation in that voice, Danny thought. Death was hovering over the Shields house.

“You’re cleared to fire on Dr. Shields as of this moment,” the sheriff said. “As soon as the windows go down, take the soonest available shot.”

“Understood,” said Carl.

“It better be. Everyone else acknowledge by turns that you’re in position.”

The radio started clicking. “Black One, copy that. In position.”

“Two, in position.”

“Three, in position.”

“Black Four, in position.”

On it went, up to fifteen. The Bell’s rotors were churning now, pulling the craft away from the earth. Danny pulled pitch with the collective and put her into a hover, then pushed the cyclic and applied power. The chopper rose into the darkness over Avalon.

Danny swung away from the house, knowing that the noise of the engines would already have drawn Warren’s attention. Do a pedal turn, hover over the backyard, and hit the searchlight. Shields will think the sheriff is trying to see into the great room through those arched windows above the blinds. He’ll probably open one of the blinds a little and peer out, trying to get a fix on the chopper….

Two seconds later he’ll die.

With that thought came a hint of new awareness, but Danny didn’t have time to dwell on it. He was making his turn, then crossing over the house to the backyard at seventy feet. He imagined he could see Carl Sims scoping the glowing windows, waiting for the brightly colored blob on an LCD beside him to become a living man. In that moment Warren Shields would cease being Carl’s parents’ doctor and instead become a warm target consisting of center mass with a head and four limbs attached. Carl’s bullet would arrive like a freight train compressed into a quarter-inch-wide spear of copper-jacketed lead-

“Go lower!” shouted Sheriff Ellis. “Hit the spotlight!”

Danny switched on the thirty-million-candlepower searchlight mounted beneath the chopper’s nose and aimed it at the second story of the Shields house, keeping it away from the lower windows to be sure it didn’t interfere with the thermal imagers. He nudged the cyclic until they were hovering over the center of the backyard, just forty feet off the ground. He’d already sent a text message warning Laurel to keep away from the windows; he only prayed she’d been able to read it in time.

“Black Team,” said Sheriff Ellis, “prepare to go on my order.”

Danny could see the strain Ellis was under in the set of his jaw and the flexed muscles of his big forearms. He reminded Danny of a first-time skydiver preparing to jump-

“Black Leader, this is Black Diamond!” cried Carl. “We’ve got a problem, repeat, a problem at my position.”

“This is Black Leader, what’s happening?”

“I’ve got a kid on the roof of the house!”

Ellis glanced at Danny, his eyes unbelieving. “You’ve got what? Say again!”

“A kid on the roof. A child-on the back roof of the house, south side.”

Danny peered down at the roof, wondering whether Laurel could have gotten Beth up there while Warren was talking to him. He saw no child, though, no movement of any kind.

“Is it the little girl?” Sheriff Ellis asked.

“Negative,” said Carl. “Male child, maybe ten years old. He’s trying to get into the house! Through a dormer window.”

“It’s Grant!” said Danny, sighting the little shape at last. He aimed the searchlight just to the right of the dormer. “See him? There he goes.”

An agile figure vanished into the house with simian speed, then pulled the window shut after him.

“Damn it!” bellowed the sheriff. “Where the hell is Sandra Souther?”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Danny, holding his hover. “What do we do now?”

Ray Breen’s voice crackled from the radio. “Let’s hit Shields before the kid can get downstairs. Right now!”

Sheriff Ellis’s lips parted, but no words emerged. Danny wasn’t sure what the best course was, but he knew one thing: you didn’t learn how to handle this kind of situation on a football field. Ellis was far out of his league.

“What’s happening on the thermal camera?” Ellis asked.

“We lost the kid, but my target is steady,” Carl answered. “Target may even be a little closer to the study window. Can’t tell for sure.”

“Let’s do it!” barked Ray. “This is our chance!”

Ellis’s head bowed in the ghostly glow of the cockpit lights. He’s praying, Danny realized. Oh, Jesus-

“Hold it!” shouted Carl. “Target’s moving laterally now. Toward the kitchen.”

Ellis’s head snapped up, and he squinted uncertainly at the house.

“Abort,” Danny said softly.

As though Danny were speaking through his mouth, Sheriff Ellis cried, “Abort! Abort! This is Black Leader. Abort!”

“Come on, Billy Ray!” pleaded Ray.

“Abort,” Ellis repeated, his voice firm. “Everybody stay in position. Trace, can you route the directional mike signal to the chopper?”

“I think so.”

“I’ve lost my target,” said Carl. “He’s off the thermal. I think he’s in the kitchen.”

“This is Black Six, with the thermal cam in front of the house,” said a new voice. “I have a faint reading in the kitchen area.”

“That’s Shields,” said Ellis.

Ray Breen’s pumped-up voice distorted the headset speakers. “Forget Carl! Let’s do it the old-fashioned way!”

Danny felt a rush of panic, but Ellis only shook his head and said, “Stand down, Ray. Land by the command post, Major.”

“Are you sure?” Ray pressed.

“Goddamn it!” Ellis yelled. “I gave you an order! Do not, repeat not, blow those windows. Acknowledge!”

Two clicks sounded in the headsets. Ray Breen couldn’t bring himself to speak, so angry was he over the aborted assault.

Danny swung the Bell around the house toward the stand of trees that sheltered the trailer. As he flared for the landing, he saw the sheriff’s hands shaking in his lap. Sensing that he was being watched, Ellis quickly rubbed his palms together as though for warmth. Danny hadn’t judged the man a coward for his nerves. He knew that the minute he took his own hands off the controls, they would be shaking, too.