Third Degree

Chapter 20

Danny crashed through the door of the command trailer on Sheriff Ellis’s heels. Trace Breen’s head whipped up from his comm gear, a dip of Skoal bulging his bottom lip. Ellis walked to within a foot of him and demanded to know what was happening in the house. Trace shrugged like a crackhead being asked for directions.

“Do you hear the boy?” Ellis asked. “Grant Shields?”

Trace shook his head.

“Any violence?” Danny asked.

“I don’t know. The last thing I heard after Dr. Shields screamed so crazy was the little girl crying and asking for chocolate milk.”

“Chocolate milk?” Ellis echoed.

“Uh-huh. They’re in the kitchen now. The mikes don’t pick up much there, ’cause it’s deeper in the house.”

“Chocolate milk,” the sheriff repeated, grabbing some paper towels to wipe the sweat and rain from his face. “Christ. What about the thermal camera?”

Trace keyed a walkie-talkie. “Black Six, this is base. What do you see on the thermal?”

“I saw three figures turn into two. I think maybe the mother picked up the girl. They’re real faint now. Deeper in.”

“Any sign of a fourth figure?” Ellis asked.

“You see anybody else?”

“I picked up a reading after Carl lost the boy on the back side, just a little green glow, but it’s in and out. Fades almost as soon as I see it.”

“Where at?” Trace asked, before Danny could prompt him.

“Kind of central, I guess, almost like it’s between floors. Stairs, maybe?”

Danny looked at Sheriff Ellis. “The boy might not have let his parents know he’s inside. He might be looking for a way to help his mother. I’ll bet that’s why he went back.”

“This is a Chinese fire drill,” Ellis said. “They’re in there drinking chocolate milk, and two minutes ago we were about to blow the man’s head off.” He tossed the crumpled paper towels onto the blueprints on the table. “Should we just pack up and get the hell out of here? Let these folks solve their own problems?”

Danny was about to say Maybe, when Paul Biegler stepped through the door and said, “You should flush your badge down the toilet if that’s your plan. You didn’t have any idea what this job was about when you stood for election, did you?”

Ellis sniffed and regarded the Medicaid investigator with unconcealed disdain. “I thought it was about catching criminals and protecting the community. Not getting between husbands and wives in domestic disputes.”

“Warren Shields is a criminal,” Biegler asserted. “He may not be in Kyle Auster’s class, but he has committed multiple felonies. Would it ease your conscience if he’d hit an old lady over the head and grabbed her purse instead of committing fraud?”

“Get out of my command post,” Ellis said mildly. “Before I knock you out of it.”

Biegler stepped fearlessly up to the sheriff. “You should have blown the windows and taken him out while you had the chance. Now you’ve got three hostages instead of two.”

Ellis stared back silently, but Danny saw a vein bulging in his neck.

“What do you say, Major?” Biegler asked Danny, his voice edged with mockery. “I say it’s time to get the FBI in here. Past time. Old Billy Ray here just proved he hasn’t got the sand for this job-”

The sheriff hit Biegler so fast that Danny didn’t see his fist cross the space between them, and so hard that the government agent dropped where he stood and lay motionless on the floor.

“I warned him,” Ellis said. “Get him out of here, Trace.”

Trace Breen jumped up from the radio and dragged Biegler out of the trailer by his heels, gulping in awe all the way.

“Lock the door when you come back,” Ellis ordered.

After Trace had locked the door, the sheriff said, “Ray’ll be coming in any second, soon as he calms down. Tell your brother to guard the door and keep Biegler out. I don’t want to see that son of a bitch again tonight.”

“Biegler or Ray?” Trace asked.

“Biegler!”

Trace nodded and went back to his radio.

Sheriff Ellis led Danny to a corner and spoke softly. “I hate to admit it, but I’m about out of ideas. Do we just wait, or what?”

Danny shook his head. Grant Shields’s sudden reappearance had given him a chance he had thought lost moments ago. “Sometimes the best thing is to do nothing, but this isn’t one of those times. If things aren’t getting better, they’re getting worse. You know?”

Ellis nodded. “Agreed.”

“I’ve got one idea, and I want you to seriously consider it.”

“I’m listening.”

“I want to go into the house. Physically go in and talk to Shields face-to-face.”

Ellis stared back in disbelief. “Unarmed, you mean?”

“If I go in with a gun, he’s liable to shoot me.”

As Ellis’s eyes searched his, Danny realized that the sheriff wasn’t the middling-dumb country boy that people like Marilyn Stone thought he was.

“I get the feeling I’m missing something,” Ellis said. “First off, Shields asks to talk to you-not me, not his lawyer, not his pastor-you. Then he talks to you like you are his pastor. And now you want to walk unarmed into a house where a disturbed man who’s probably already murdered one person is holding his family at gun-point. Have I got that right?”

Danny had tried not to think too much about the risks of his plan, but Ellis wasn’t going to let him off that easy. He hadn’t known himself how he felt until a split second before Ray Breen was going to blow the windows-before the 7.62 millimeter bullet in Carl’s rifle would have blasted Warren Shields’s laboring heart into mush. After Carl sighted the boy on the roof and Sheriff Ellis turned to Danny for guidance, Danny could easily have said “Go,” rather than “Abort.” If he had, Shields would be dead now, and Laurel would be a widow. A single woman, free to spend her life with whomever she chose. Danny wanted Laurel more than he’d wanted any woman in his life. But when the power had been given him to possess her-twice now, he realized-he’d been unable to take her. The first time because he wouldn’t give up his son to have her; this time because he couldn’t live the rest of his life with a decent man’s blood on his hands. But something deeper than this had stopped him, something he still couldn’t quite pin down. He was trying to unravel the feeling when five sharp bangs rattled the trailer door.

“Open up, damn it!” roared a muted voice. “It’s me, Ray!”

Trace got up, but the sheriff waved him back to his seat.

“Talk to me, Danny,” Ellis urged. “Time’s short.”

Danny raised his hand to his mouth as though he were about to throw up. The dark epiphany that had begun as he hovered over the backyard had finally revealed itself to him. “Shields wants us to kill him.”

Ellis’s eyes went wide. “What? You mean…like suicide by cop?”

“Exactly.”

“Because of the cancer?”

“I don’t know. Yes and no. Deep down, he’s a John Wayne type. No matter how bad Shields may want to kill himself, he sees suicide as a coward’s way out. I don’t think dying of cancer scares him. The pain of it, I mean. It’s the indignity. He’s too proud for that.”

Ellis’s eyes seemed focused on something beyond Danny. “I can relate to that. My daddy died of lung cancer, and I watched every minute of it. That’s no way to go.”

Ray Breen’s next bovine bellow shook the aluminum skin of the trailer. “I’m soaking wet, goddamn it! Let me in!”

“In a minute!” Ellis roared back. Then his jaw muscles clenched, and he stroked his incipient jowls. “Tell me why I should let you go in that house. What hope have you got?”

“Shields trusts me. I might be able to get close enough to get the gun away from him.”

Ellis snorted. “If that’s your plan, forget it. That’s begging to get killed. Ask any cop.”

Danny almost felt emboldened to confide in the sheriff about Laurel. The man had a grasp of the complexities of life; but how far would a Baptist deacon bend the rules?

“What is it?” Ellis asked. “It’s come-to-Jesus time, Danny.”

Danny almost spoke up, but in the end he decided that revealing the truth meant giving up the only edge he had in the situation-and might result in his being barred from the scene. “I can’t put it into words,” he said lamely. “But Shields respects me. If I can look him in the eye, man-to-man, I might be able to make him see reason.”

“And if you can’t?”

“Maybe I can get his wife and kids out.”

“You’re willing to die for that chance? An outside chance?”

“He won’t kill me.”

“Why not?”

Danny thought about it. “He doesn’t believe he has the right.”

Ellis clucked his tongue three times, then turned to Trace Breen, who was watching them warily. “Have you heard anything?”

“Just mumbles and static. They’re too far from the windows. You want to try moving the mikes around?”

“Try anything that might work.” Ellis turned back to Danny with sudden purpose. “I can’t let you do it. Dr. Shields may not be responsible for his actions. I don’t just mean he’s distraught. That brain tumor may have unhinged the man. He could kill you, no matter what you believe.”

Danny shrugged. “I’ve been in tough spots before.”

“That was different. That was for your country.”

“This is just as important.”

“Not in my view.” Ellis looked at his watch, then gave Danny a long, slow look. “Not unless you know something I don’t.”

“No, sir. You know what I know.”

“Then forget it. You stay with me. Trace, let your brother in.”

Trace got up and went to the door.

“And tell me the second you hear anything on the mikes.”

“You want me to tell Carl to move around front? In case he can get a shot there?”

“Leave Carl where he is.”

Ray almost knocked his brother down as he stormed into the trailer, water cascading off the brim of his Stetson. His eyes burned with outrage.

Before he could vent his anger, Ellis said, “Ray, get your best men up to the front door and the pantry door in the garage. We’re gonna go in the old-fashioned way, soon as you place your people. I want those hostages out of there.”

Breen stared back, the light of satisfaction growing in his eyes. “And Shields?”

“If he poses any threat whatever to your men or to his family, take him out.”

Danny’s pulse began to hammer in his throat. He raised his hand to his neck as if to somehow slow the racing blood.

Ray looked from the sheriff to him. “Y’all still planning to use the chopper as a diversion?”

“I can’t think of a better one,” said Ellis. “Move out, Ray.”

Breen went out, leaving a trail of muddy boot prints behind him.

“I want to monitor the directional mikes from the chopper,” Ellis said. “I want ’em loud and clear, Trace. Make it happen.”

“You got it, Sheriff.”

“And keep a thermal cam on the kitchen windows.” Ellis walked to the door without even looking at Danny. “Let’s go, Major. We’ll listen from the ground, but I want the rotors spinning.”

Ellis disappeared through the door. As Danny moved to follow him, Trace grinned with such malice that Danny stopped. “What is it, Deputy?”

The feral eyes glinted in the dim light. “That fucker’s dead now.”

“Shields?”

“Yep.”

“That pleases you?”

“Damn straight.”

“Why?”

Trace picked up a red paper Coca-Cola cup and spat a brown stream of tobacco juice into it. “Chickens coming home to roost. That’s why.”

“What do you mean by that?”

The yellowish skin above Trace’s chin worked around the plug of snuff in his bottom lip. “What do you care?”

“Sounds like you’ve got a personal problem with Dr. Shields.”

“What if I do? From what I seen tonight, I don’t think I’m the only one.”

The deputy’s eyes flashed with glee. Danny almost crossed the little room and grabbed his scrawny neck, but that would only bring questions he’d have to lie to answer. Instead, he wrapped a Sheriff’s Department poncho around his shoulders and walked out into the rain.

Carl Sims had been staring so hard at the readout of the thermal-imaging camera that his eyeballs felt paralyzed. Even for a sniper accustomed to searching terrain through a rifle scope, this was torture. The LCD monitor displayed a full spectrum of colors as it read the heat differentials in front of its supersensitive sensor system. The coolest areas appeared blue; warmer objects looked green; while the hottest targets transitioned from yellow to orange and finally to bright red. The human beings moving behind the window blinds were faint, amorphous blobs of constantly changing color and intensity, amoebas that pulsed, merged, separated, and then vanished altogether, only to reappear in some other place. The rain didn’t help matters (the camera had already gone on the blink a couple of times; clearly it did not like moisture), but the air-conditioning inside the house did. With the air cooled to below seventy degrees, the thermal camera could detect just enough contrast to reveal the human beings moving within that air-even with the window blinds interposed between the sensor and its targets.

Carl had never been in such a bad shooting situation. He’d thought he had seen it all in Iraq, but he was wrong. He had shot through high winds, blasting sand, rain, automotive glass, and even through the water of a swimming pool; he knew exactly how a bullet would behave in each of those situations. He’d shot during the day and he’d shot at night. He’d shot prone, sitting, standing, and from a moving vehicle. He’d killed nine men from distances greater than a thousand yards. But never had he sat a stone’s throw from a well-lighted house with his vision totally obscured by window blinds, trying to locate his target on a camera before he could even put his eye to his rifle scope. In Iraq, if he needed thermal-imaging capability, he’d simply switched to a thermal-imaging rifle scope, which gave him the equivalent of X-ray vision, zeroed to put a bullet wherever he wanted it. But this…this was a sniper’s nightmare.

He didn’t want the pulsing blobs to return to his side of the house. If they did, according to the sheriff’s new orders, Carl would have to give the order to blow the windows himself, which meant that he would be guessing which blob was Dr. Shields. After the windows dropped, it would take at least a full second to acquire his target in the Unertl scope and pull the trigger. That was if he was right about which blob was Dr. Shields. If he was wrong, it might take two or three seconds to acquire. The shooting was nothing in this case; target acquisition was everything.

This situation was tailor-made for a commando assault, not a sniper shot. Delta, the SEALs, Force Recon, the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team-any of those units would have had the Shields family out of there hours ago, and without a single casualty. But none of those units was here tonight. Tonight it was Ray Breen’s Weekend Warriors. Carl had trained with the guys out there in the black body armor, and though they might look like commandos, they weren’t. Most had the reaction times of an average bowling team, not the Olympic-caliber reflexes of a Delta Force operator. Yet any minute-once Major McDavitt’s helicopter lifted into the air again-they were going to crash into that house with guns blazing. The major’s earlier words played relentlessly in Carl’s head: There’s exactly two professional soldiers here tonight, and they’re both under this tent. If the sheriff reaches the point of ordering an explosive entry, you are the best hope that Mrs. Shields and her daughter have of surviving this crisis. You alone. Carl closed his eyes and prayed the major could find a way to persuade Dr. Shields to surrender peacefully. Failing that he supposed, he should pray that the red blobs would return to his side of the house. Any other outcome was likely to mean disaster.

Laurel stood on the sink side of the kitchen island, exactly opposite Warren and Beth, as Warren had instructed her to do when he cut the duct tape from her wrists and legs. Beth sat on a barstool with both hands wrapped around a mug of Borden chocolate milk that Warren had heated in the microwave. No one had said much since Beth calmed down, a feat accomplished by prodigious lying on Laurel’s part, more fluff about Mommy and Daddy playing a grown-ups’ game.

Warren’s discussions with Danny seemed to have drained him, or perhaps sleep deprivation was finally taking its toll. Laurel couldn’t remember going forty hours without sleep herself, except perhaps during final exams in college, and probably not even then. Warren had done it often as an intern, but that had been years ago. His nerves were stripped bare; the slightest sound made him jump, and he spoke in quick, snappish phrases. She had decided to focus on Beth and to avoid provoking him at any cost.

Earlier, when Danny’s helicopter had cranked up and hovered over the backyard, Laurel had felt sure that rescue was imminent. Yet this belief had not brought her joy. Even before she’d received Danny’s text message warning her to stay away from the windows, she’d become certain that the price of freedom would be Warren’s life. As Warren strode toward one of the great room windows to check out the hovering helicopter, Laurel had steeled herself for the sight of her husband’s head being blown apart like JFK’s in the Zapruder film, her own personal Technicolor nightmare, one that would haunt her till the day she died. In the end, though, nothing had happened. It was as though they had edged up to the brink of disaster, then pulled back.

Beth slid off her stool and walked over to the table where she’d eaten breakfast thirteen hours before. To Laurel, the memory of that meal was like a glimpse of some other universe, one far removed from the absurd one that contained them now. Warren tracked Beth with his eyes as though about to stop her, but he didn’t. Laurel watched her daughter pick up one of Grant’s miniature skateboards-Tech Decks, they were called-and start rolling the two-inch-long board across the glass table. With Beth diverted, Laurel looked across the island at Warren and stared until he had no choice but to make eye contact.

“I’m sorry for everything I’ve done,” she said. “And for everything I haven’t done. I want to make things better. Tell me what I can do.”

He stared back at her like a man who has forgotten how to speak. His bloodshot eyes roamed her face, perhaps searching for some clue to what had brought them to this pass. As he worked his jaw and swallowed with obvious effort, she realized that he was severely dehydrated. He hadn’t used the bathroom for hours, nor had he drunk anything. The left corner of his mouth was red; she thought she saw the budding vesicles of a fever blister, which he only got when he was under extreme stress.

“Let me get you some water,” she offered. “And some ibuprofen, maybe?”

He didn’t respond at first. Then he rubbed his mouth and said, “Ice water.”

As she turned toward the sink, Beth cried, “Christy! Dad, it’s Christy!”

The corgi had disappeared earlier, probably terrified by the thunder of Danny’s helicopter, but now she was back, scratching at the doggy door like a starving beggar.

“Can I let her in, Daddy?”

“Not now, honey.”

“Please?” Beth pleaded. “Please, please, please, please.”

As Laurel filled a tumbler with water from the tap, Warren surprised her by saying, “All right. She probably needs food.”

Laurel heard Beth unlatch the pet door, then Christy’s claws scratching the planks of the hardwood floor.

“She’s got something in her mouth,” Beth said. “It’s a bag, Daddy. I wonder what’s in it.”

“Don’t touch that!” Warren snapped. “It’s dirty.”

Laurel turned from the sink as though moving underwater, certain even before she saw it that Christy had retrieved the Walgreens bag from behind the hedge. Survival instinct drove her toward the dog, but it was already too late to bury this evidence.

“I’ll throw that away!” she said, but by then Warren was taking the bag from Christy’s mouth.

As he opened the bag, an urge to bolt from the house almost overcame Laurel, but she forced herself to stay put. Warren looked into the bag, and his eyes narrowed in puzzlement. “Christy must have knocked over the tall container,” he said. “I didn’t know she could do that.”

Laurel felt like a cartoon character staring helplessly upward as a thousand-pound weight hurtled down from a cliff top. She was every bit as stupid as the Coyote-

“Wash your hands, Beth,” Warren said. Then he walked to the trash compactor, opened it with his foot, and tossed the Walgreens bag inside. “Use the pantry sink.”

“Aww, they’re clean.” Beth stroked Christy’s orange back as the dog ate noisily from her dish.

“Go!”

Beth jumped up and vanished into the pantry.

Laurel stood motionless before the island, recalling an afternoon in college when a bolt of lightning had blasted apart a tree just forty feet away from her on a golf course. The very air had seemed to ignite around her, and she’d stood in the ozone-tinged aftermath like an air-raid survivor, too dazed even to be thankful for her life.

“My water?” Warren said.

She looked down at the tumbler in her hand. “Oh.” She handed him the glass, her hand shaking.

“I guess I’ll get my own ice,” he said, going to the freezer.

“I’m sorry.”

As he shoved the glass into the automatic ice dispenser, Laurel realized that the dog, rather than almost delivering her destruction, might have delivered her salvation instead. Her plan would be risky, but she saw no safe way out of this trap.

“Warren? I have something to tell you.”

He took a thoughtful sip from his glass. “What is it?”

“I wanted to tell you this morning, but you were so upset about the audit-or that’s what I thought, anyway-that I decided to wait. But now that I know about”-she lowered her voice-“your illness…you need to know this. It just might change how you feel about everything.”

He set his glass on the table and folded his arms across his chest. “What are you talking about?”

Laurel suddenly sensed that she was making a mistake. But what other gambit did she have? “I’m pregnant,” she said simply. “I just found out this morning.”

He blinked once, slowly, like a lizard in the sun. Other than that, he gave no sign of having heard her.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“We’ve only had sex twice in the last month.”

She prayed that Danny wasn’t hearing this. “It only takes once, you know. It only took once with Grant.”

Warren looked down at her belly, but of course she wasn’t showing. If anything, she looked thinner than she had a month ago.

“More lies,” he said.

She somehow managed a confident smile. “Open the trash compactor. Look inside that bag Christy brought in.”

He stared at her awhile longer. Then he opened the compactor and fished out the Walgreens bag. Out came the tampon carton.

“Keep going,” she said.

He looked into the empty bag, then opened the tampon box. He stared for several seconds, then drew out the e.p.t box, and his expression changed from irritation to a kind of wonder. Pulling the used test strip out of its little baggie, he studied it for a while, then looked up at her with suspicion.

“When did you take this test?”

“I told you, this morning.”

“Why did you hide it?”

“Because you hadn’t even come to bed the night before, and you were obviously upset. I decided to wait until you’d resolved the audit.”

Warren stared at her like a parent listening to a lying toddler. “If you’re pregnant, the baby’s not mine.”

He seemed so utterly convinced of this fact that Laurel’s smile faded. “Why not?”

“Because I can’t father a child anymore.”

There was a roaring in her ears like the birth of an avalanche. “You…why not?”

“Because of the drugs I’m taking. Massive doses of steroids, plus some experimental compounds Kenneth Doan prescribed for me. He got me into a Genentech trial. I’d be surprised if I have even one viable sperm left.”

“You must have!” she said quickly. “There’s no other explanation.”

“Of course there is.”

“All clean!” Beth announced, bounding into the kitchen with her wet hands held high. She patted Christy on the back, earning a warning growl, then climbed onto a chair and started rolling a Tech Deck across the table.

“Let’s continue this later,” Laurel said, wringing her hands. “Please.”

Warren eyes looked even more reptilian than they had before. “Beth, honey?”

“What?” She twirled the little skateboard in a circle.

“Mommy’s got a surprise for us.”

Beth looked up from the board, her eyes on Laurel. “What is it, Mommy?”

“You’re going to get a new brother or sister soon,” Warren said.

Beth’s mouth and eyes opened wide. “A baby sister?”

“Maybe,” Warren said. “We don’t know yet.”

“I want a baby sister! No more boys!”

Warren set the Walgreens bag gently on the counter. “Do you have any more surprises, Mom?”

“It’s your baby,” she whispered. “There’s no other option but virgin birth, and I’m no virgin.”

“That’s for sure.”

“Where’s Grant?” Beth asked. “I want to tell Grant we’re getting a baby sister!”

“Grant’s spending the night with Gram,” Warren said, his eyes never leaving Laurel’s face. Gram was Laurel’s mother; she lived thirty-five miles up the river in Vidalia, Louisiana.

“I want to stay with Gram, too! No fair!”

“Hush, Elizabeth,” Warren said. “We’ll see about that later.”

“Does Gram know about my baby sister?”

“Quiet!”

Beth’s head snapped down, and she went back to twirling the skateboard.

Warren stepped close enough to Laurel to kiss her. “If this baby was mine, you would have told me as soon as you heard I was sick. After I got off the phone with Danny.”

“Who’s sick?” Beth asked. “Is Daddy sick?”

“Quiet, baby,” Warren said in a silky voice.

“Please don’t do this,” Laurel implored.

“You were trying to give me hope before. You would have told me about it then, if it was true.”

She answered with quiet urgency, trying not to communicate her growing panic to Beth. “I wasn’t sure if it would make things better or worse. I was afraid you’d feel you were missing that much more.”

“A man lives to pass on his genes. You know that.” He lifted his hand and tenderly brushed a strand of hair from her eyes. She shuddered. “There’s only one reason you would have kept this secret from me.”

“You’re wrong.”

He picked up the Walgreens bag and slapped her with it.

Beth screamed.

“Dad, stop it!” shouted a voice from the hallway.

Everyone froze as Grant stepped from the hallway into the kitchen. “Stop yelling at Mom! She hasn’t done anything!”

Warren looked his son from head to toe, and Laurel saw pride in his eyes. “There’s my son,” he said. “It’s written all over him.”

It was true. Grant had Warren’s muscular body and regular facial features; but it was her eyes that looked out of his face.

Warren took three steps toward Grant and held out his right hand. “I knew you’d come back, Son. You had the wrong idea before.”

Grant drew back, but then Warren raised his hand, and Grant slapped it in some kind of high-five ritual. “There’s guys outside with guns,” Grant said. “Lots of them, and some of them are mean. We have to get ready.”

“Yes, we do,” Warren said calmly. “We’re all here now, just as it should be. I want you kids to go into the safe room.”

Laurel shivered at the name.

“Are you and Mom coming?” Grant asked.

“In a minute, yes.”

“I’ll wait until you go, then.”

“Mind me, Son.”

Grant looked back at his father with a combination of disappointment and defiance. “I’m not a little kid anymore, Dad. I want to help. I can do stuff now. Grown-up stuff!”

Warren looked appraisingly at his son, then knelt and beckoned him closer. When Grant came forward, Warren spoke softly into his ear. Grant nodded several times, then hurried past Laurel into the pantry.

“Where’s he going?” Laurel asked.

Warren smiled. “Don’t worry about it.”