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:

U haf 2 kil hm!

“You have to kill him,” Danny said as though reading the message aloud, but he was speaking to Carl Sims.

“I guess there’s only one thing left to learn,” Warren said. “Who fathered the bastard in her belly.” Keeping his pistol pressed firmly against Laurel’s stomach, he reached down with his left hand, moved his computer mouse, and clicked a button.

“Warren, don’t,” Laurel begged in a voice close to breaking. “Don’t look.”

But he did. He stared at the screen like a man witnessing his own death. “No. Goddamn it…it can’t be.”

Danny expected the gun to swing toward him, but instead Warren clicked frantically at the mouse. “It’s not here! Doesn’t he fucking sign anything?” He swept the monitor off the desk with a crash.

“It’s over, Warren,” Danny said with relief. “You can’t find out what you want to know. Not tonight. Put down the gun, man.”

Shields stared at Danny as though reality had finally sunk in. After hours of insanity, he was no closer to learning the truth than he had been at the beginning. A glimmer of real hope sparked in Danny’s heart-

Then his cell phone began to chirp.

Warren’s eyes dropped to Danny’s pants.

As Danny cursed himself for forgetting to silence his phone, Warren seized Laurel’s neck in the crook of his elbow and dragged her around the desk with his gun jammed into her stomach. When he reached the point where Danny stood between him and the windows, he threw Laurel to the floor.

“Put up your hands!” he said, aiming at Danny’s chest. “I don’t want to kill you, Major, but I need to know what the sheriff’s telling you.”

Danny put up his hands.

Warren patted Danny’s pockets with his left hand. When he found the cell phone in the back pocket, he shoved his pistol hard beneath Danny’s sternum and fished out the phone with his other hand. Then he backed away, taking care to keep Danny between him and the windows, and flipped open the phone.

Warren didn’t yet understand what had happened with the phones, but he would in seconds. Danny prepared to dive onto Laurel, which would clear Carl’s line of fire and shield her from Warren’s revenge.

“Danny?” Warren said softly. “Look at me.”

Danny knew he should dive, but now that it had come to this, he found himself unable to do it. He had betrayed this man. And he couldn’t consign him to the grave without accepting responsibility for what he’d done.

Warren’s gaze cut through him like the eye of God, to the darkest reaches of his soul. Danny sensed no judgment in the gaze, though, only grief. A profound sadness that a man Shields had believed to be noble had turned out to be merely, even terribly, human.

“It was you?” he asked. “All along? It was you?”

Danny nodded once.

Warren flinched as though Danny had shoved a needle into his heart. “Why? Can you tell me that?”

Danny saw no point in speaking anything but the truth. “I love her.”

Shields seemed to take this explanation with equanimity. He looked down at Laurel, who watched him fearfully from the floor. It struck Danny then that there were four of them in the room: the woman; two men; and the unborn child, who might belong to either man. Perhaps the same realization struck Shields. Whatever emotion came to him, he could not endure it. He screamed something unintelligible, then swung the pistol at Danny’s head. Danny leaped out of its path, lost his balance, and rolled onto the floor. He’d planned to cover Laurel with his body, but she was too far away now. He clapped his hands over his ears and tucked into a fetal position, facing away from the windows.

“You coward!” Shields screamed. “You’re supposed to be a hero! Look at him, Laurel…there’s your fucking hero!”

Danny closed his eyes and prayed for death to take the right man.

Carl stared at the thermal imager like a snake watching a transfixed bird. Every atom of his instinct told him that the only red blob still standing represented Warren Shields. A moment ago it had been twice its current size-

“Blow the windows,” he said into his headset.

He put his right eye to the Unertl scope, closed it against the coming flash, and squeezed two pounds of pressure out of the rifle’s three-pound trigger.

The dim rectangles of the study windows flashed white in his left eye, and bright yellow light spilled across the lawn. Carl glassed the study with robotic efficiency, searching for Dr. Shields-

There. The doctor stood alone, aiming a pistol at something below the windowsill. You couldn’t ask for more justification to fire. As Carl applied the last pound of pressure, Laurel Shields lurched into his sight picture and seized her husband’s gun hand. Carl longed to revoke his shot, but his motor cortex had already sent the signal to his trigger finger. Shields and his wife both flew backward-

Dear sweet Jesus, no, please no-

Searing flashes lit up the interior of the Shields house, then detonations like impacting mortar rounds rolled across the lawn.

Carl jumped to his feet and started running.

Even with his hands over his ears, Danny heard the shattering concussions of the grenades. When he felt confident there would be no more, he scrambled over to Laurel, who lay motionless on her back, her eyes closed.

“Laurel! Can you hear me? Are you hit?”

She didn’t respond. Blood was seeping through her top. She’d been hit in at least four places, the wounds widely dispersed. How was that possible? He’d heard only one rifle shot after the windows went down.

Glass, he thought. Shards of window glass.

A man screamed to Danny’s left. Danny turned and saw Warren on his back, gasping for air and waving his pistol as though having a seizure. His shirt, too, was peppered with blood.

Danny got to his feet and stamped on Warren’s wrist, pinning his gun to the floor. He was about to reach down for the weapon when someone screamed, “Get on the floor! Get down!”

Danny turned and saw what appeared to be a creature from outer space. Clad from head to foot in black ballistic nylon and Kevlar body armor, it had enormous insectlike goggles covering its eyes-

Ray Breen.

“Get out of the way!” Breen shouted, brandishing a submachine gun. “Or I’ll drop you where you stand!”

Danny held up both hands. “He can’t fire! I’m standing on his arm! I’m going to take his weapon!”

“Get out of the way, Major!”

Keeping his left hand aloft, Danny bent and tugged the gun from Shields’s unresisting hand, then tossed it away, into the great room.

Two more figures in black appeared behind Breen, but the TRU commander didn’t lower his weapon. Instead, he moved to his right, angling for a clear shot at Shields. Not knowing what else to do, Danny dropped to his knees and shielded the doctor with his own body.

“Somebody stop him!” he shouted, realizing as he did that Ray Breen was the senior officer in the room. “Get Sheriff Ellis!”

“Get off that bastard!” Ray yelled. “This thing ain’t gonna end but one way!”

Breen’s gun was an MP5, Danny saw, capable of firing eight hundred rounds per minute on automatic. If he pulled that trigger, both Danny and Shields would die.

“Go ahead,” Warren rasped from beneath Danny. “Shoot.”

Breen moved closer, trying to fire around Danny-

“Put the gun down, Ray.”

Danny turned and saw the long gray barrel of Carl Sims’s Remington 700 jutting through a shattered study window. Carl held the rifle almost casually, at waist level, but no one in the room doubted that a bullet fired from it would strike its intended target.

“He killed my brother!” Ray shouted in a voice beyond reason.

“I don’t want to shoot you,” Carl said softly. “But I will.”

Breen studied the sniper’s face, then turned back to Shields and aimed his MP5 past Danny, right at the doctor’s head. Carl didn’t raise his rifle an inch, but when he spoke, something was in his voice that had not been there before. Disdain, Danny thought.

“You’re always asking me how many men I killed over in Iraq. The truth is, I don’t know. But I know this: I’ve killed better men than you.”

The gun in Ray Breen’s hand quivered under the stress of the war raging inside him. After several seconds that held eternity within them, he lowered the weapon to his side. As Danny crawled toward Laurel, Ray lunged forward and drove his boot into Shields’s rib cage with a crack.

Then every light in the house went out.