Third Degree

Chapter 23

Two seconds after the room went black, something knocked Danny’s legs from under him. His tailbone cracked against the floor, but he forgot the pain when a cold pistol barrel invaded the soft flesh between his jawbone and windpipe. He tried to jerk his head back, but a strong hand grabbed his hair and shoved the gun deeper into his neck.

“Get up,” hissed a voice in his ear. “On your feet, or I’ll pull the trigger.”

Danny obeyed.

Shouts of anger and confusion reverberated through the darkness, but the whispering gunman dragged Danny across the room with total assurance. Danny stumbled on something, but his captor held him erect. Night-vision goggles? he wondered. His shoulder brushed a doorjamb as tactical lights arced through the room, and then he passed into cooler air.

“Move to the right.” A knee drove into his back. “Hurry!”

Danny saw light ahead. He thought of crying out, but the gunman read his mind. “Make a sound, I’ll blow your brains all over the hall.”

It was Warren, Danny realized. Of course it was. Who else could it be? But where were they going? Why didn’t Shields just pull the trigger and be done with it?

“Toward the light!” Warren urged, running him up the hall now.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ve got a date with destiny, you lying piece of shit.”

Grant knew he’d waited too long to pull the circuit breaker. But how could his dad expect him to wait in the pantry while everything was happening somewhere else? He’d waited as long as he could stand it, and then-just after he’d sneaked out to find his father-the whole back of the house had blown up. By the time he got back to the pantry, men were yelling and screaming all over the house. But Grant still did what his dad had told him to do and sent blue sparks flying from beneath his hands.

Now he was running through the dark, making for his father’s study. In the great room he collided with something hard-something that shouldn’t have been there. Two strong hands seized his upper arms, and a face like something out of a video game appeared before him, a black-goggled grasshopper’s face lit by the beam of a spotlight shining through the great room windows.

“Get that kid out of here!” someone shouted.

Grant was hauled off his feet, carried out through the garage, and set down in the driveway. It was still raining. The shouts of panicked grown-ups ricocheted through the night. The masked figure looked down at him for a moment, then raced back inside the house. Desperate to learn what had happened to his parents, Grant ran around to the front yard, the last place he’d heard Mr. Danny’s chopper.

The big helicopter straddled the front sidewalk like a futuristic bird that had somehow landed in the present by mistake. Its rotors were still spinning. Grant moved toward it but kept close to the shrubbery so that no other deputies would see him.

As he neared the chopper, he froze. His father and Mr. Danny were crossing the open space between the front door and the helicopter.

“Dad!” Grant shouted. “Mr. Danny! Wait for me! Wait up!”

When he reached the two men, Grant realized that his father hadn’t heard him. He grabbed his dad’s arm, then jerked back as an almost unrecognizable face whipped around and glared at him.

“Grant?” exclaimed his father, as though he’d never expected to see his son again.

“Get out of here, Grant!” said Mr. Danny. “Run!”

“No way! I want to come with you guys!”

“You can’t,” said his father. “You have to stay here, Son.”

“I’m coming,” Grant insisted. “I’m not staying here by myself.”

His father looked down at him with an expression Grant had never seen on his face before. It made Grant want to cry. Then his father yanked open the chopper door and said, “Get in the back, Son. Hurry. Harness yourself in.”

Grant scrambled into the helicopter, a machine that hummed and shook as if it were more alive than he was. Mr. Danny and his father climbed into the front seats, and then Mr. Danny did something and the whining overhead got louder. Grant could feel the rotor blades trying to pull the ship off the ground. His father turned around to say something, but then the front door of the house opened and two of the black-suited men ran out. Both were waving guns, but Grant knew they wouldn’t run beneath the spinning blades. One of the men leveled his gun and aimed at the front of the helicopter. In the next instant Mr. Danny shouted something and the ship leaped into the air. As Grant tumbled out of his seat, he saw treetops sweep past the window, and then the moon, shining high and white through a break in the clouds. He only wished his mom were there to see it.

Danny had flown in crazy conditions before, but never with a gun jammed into his gut. The pistol wasn’t the same one Shields had aimed at Laurel; this one was a nickel-plated automatic. Trace Breen’s gun? he wondered. Or maybe Kyle Auster’s, if he had one. Shields kept the pistol where his son couldn’t see it, but the range was still point-blank. Close enough for the burning powder to set Danny’s shirt on fire as the bullet ripped through his abdomen from side to side.

The chopper hurtled eastward at fifteen hundred feet, the house already far behind. Danny wondered what kind of response Sheriff Ellis was mounting to this new development. He’d started calling over the radio only seconds after they lifted off, but Shields had shut off everything but the interphone circuit.

“Where are we going?” Danny asked, as casually as he could. “Havana?”

“Upriver,” Warren said tersely. “Thirty miles. Vidalia, Louisiana. Take us up to two thousand feet.”

Danny turned north and started ascending. Vidalia was a town of five thousand mostly working-class people who lived on the floodplain across the river from the great bluff at Natchez. “Why Vidalia?”

Warren tilted his head backward. “We’re dropping Grant off at Laurel’s mother’s house.”

“I see. So this trip’s just for you and me?”

Warren didn’t answer.

Danny had a lot of experience flying at night, but almost always with the aid of night-vision goggles, and in a much more powerful chopper. Flying the Bell 206 through mountains of storm clouds was a completely different thing. He wasn’t afraid, but he was concentrating hard enough that the gun against his side kept surprising him. Blue-white flashes of lightning illuminated the towering cloudscape, and he could hear Grant’s cries of awe despite the fact that the boy wasn’t wearing a headset.

Danny couldn’t see much on the near-lightless land below, but the rivers and lakes he used as landmarks gleamed like black mirrors as the chopper raced over them. The Buffalo River, Lake Mary, the Homochitto River, and then the Mississippi, curving east toward Natchez.

“Did I hear you say we’re going to Gram’s?” Grant yelled, moving forward and setting his chin on the tight seam between Danny’s and Warren’s shoulders.

Warren concealed the gun beneath his bloody shirttail and slid the headset off of his right ear. “That’s right, Son.”

“Where’s Mom?”

“Home.”

Danny kept his face expressionless.

“Is she okay?”

“She’s fine. Those men weren’t there for her. You’ll see her soon. Get back into a seat and fasten your harness.”

“What about you? Your shoulder’s bleeding bad.”

“I’m fine,” Warren said, touching his shirt, which was now matted against his wounded shoulder.

“Wow!” Grant cried. They had crossed over the bluff at Natchez, and the land fell precipitously away. Two hundred feet below the old city, the lights on a long string of barges winked up at them. “Cool,” the boy said. “They have two bridges here.”

“Get into a harness, Son!”

“Okay, okay.” Grant’s head vanished.

“You don’t know Laurel’s okay,” Danny said softly. “You didn’t even check.”

Warren grimaced. “Shut up.”

“What?” asked Grant. “What are y’all saying up there?”

“Nothing, Son. Look for landmarks down there. Can you see the riverboat casinos?”

While Grant searched the broad black river, Warren said, “Laurel’s mother lives just off Carter Street, the main drag. Right behind the levee. Maybe you know that already.”

“No.”

Danny started descending after he passed over the two great bridges spanning the river. There was only one brightly lit road in Vidalia, the highway leading westward across Louisiana. The section that ran through the town was called Carter Street. Danny found it easily, and soon he made out the grassy hump of the levee, running at right angles to the highway.

“That’s it,” said Warren, pointing down at a small house with an older Lincoln Continental parked on the street in front of it.

“Where do you want me to land?”

“Street’s fine. There’s no traffic.”

The neighbors began opening their doors and windows as the chopper dipped under two hundred feet. By the time it landed in the middle of their street, a crowd had gathered in the rain, thinking they were witnessing either a crash or an invasion.

“I see Gram!” Grant shouted. “She’s standing on the porch!”

“Jump out and run to her, Son.”

Grant’s head reappeared above the junction of shoulders. “What about you?”

Warren seemed unable to find his voice. Danny leaned forward and saw tears in the doctor’s eyes. “Major Danny and I have to help the police do something,” Shields croaked. “But Mom will be here soon.”

“Are you sure? What’s wrong, Dad?”

Warren covered his eyes with his left hand, but his right still gripped the gun. Danny wondered if Shields would really shoot him in front of the boy. On balance, Danny figured he would.

“I’ve just got a headache,” Shields said. “I stayed awake too long. You need to go, Son. You take care of your mother, all right?”

Grant stared at his father in confusion. “Till you get back, you mean?”

“That’s right. Go on, now. We’re late already.”

Grant turned to Danny, his eyes dark with foreboding. “Mr. Danny…?”

“Do what your father told you. It’ll be all right.”

“Go!” Warren snapped.

Grant seemed on the verge of tears. Danny’s heart went out to the boy, but then Grant fell back on his loyalty to the man he trusted above all others. He nodded to his father and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of Mom.” Then he climbed out of the chopper and ran toward a small, gray-haired woman standing on the porch of the little house with the Lincoln out front.

“I’m sorry,” Warren said almost inaudibly.

“You owe that boy every second you have on this earth,” Danny said. “I know you hate my guts, but you need to stop this suicide trip and get your family back together.”

People in the crowd were venturing toward the helicopter. Shields stabbed the gun into Danny’s side. “Get us airborne.”

“Where are we going?”

“Heaven. How does that sound?”

“I don’t believe in it. And neither do you.”

Shields’s eyes shone with something like madness. “Valhalla, then. Isn’t that where heroes go when they die?”

“Only if they die in battle.”

An ironic chuckle. “Well, then. That’s where we’re going.”

Danny didn’t know if it was better to die on the ground or in the air. But one thing he did know: in the air, he had a chance to live, because he would have control of the aircraft. A passenger bent on both homicide and suicide complicated matters, but that was better than the bullet he would get for refusing to take off.

He pulled up on the collective, touched the cyclic, and lifted the Bell over the streetlights, swinging gracefully back toward the bridges. There was no real advantage in flying over Natchez, but something was pulling him to the Mississippi side of the river.

“Why don’t we call the sheriff and check on Laurel?” Danny suggested.

Warren lifted the shiny pistol and pressed its barrel against Danny’s left temple. “Why don’t you shut up and fly.”

“Tell me where.”

“Just keep us over the river.”

“How high?”

“Two thousand feet’s fine.”

Danny spiraled upward in a slow climb, wondering how long the gun would stay at his head. It didn’t leave him much maneuvering room. He’d already begun forming the rudiments of a plan. If he could roll the chopper and pull enough g’s, he might be able to open Shields’s harness and dump him out before the doctor shot him. But he couldn’t do that with a gun to his head.

“Are you afraid to die, Major?”

Shields had asked the question in a philosophical tone. Danny shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I should have died long before now.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I don’t want to die.”

The gun barrel entered the shell of Danny’s left ear. “But are you afraid to die?”

Danny thought about it. He felt a lot of things at this moment, but the least of his emotions was fear. “I’ll tell you what I think. It isn’t dying that’s hard. It’s living.”

Shields’s jaws flexed angrily. “What are you trying to say? Are you saying I’m a coward?”

“No. I’m saying life ain’t a bowl of fucking cherries. I’m saying you owe that little boy whatever time you can give him, no matter what shape you’re in. I think he’s tough enough to watch you die. It might not be pretty, but he’ll get over it. A hell of a lot easier than he’ll get over this shit.”

Shields’s jaw was working so hard it looked as if he were trying to grind his teeth away. “You’ve got all the answers, don’t you? Or so my wife seems to think.”

“I don’t have any answers!” Danny snapped, tired of Shields’s paranoia. “I’m just trying to get by, same as the next man. All I’m saying is, it’s living that takes courage. In my experience, the hero who charges the machine-gun nest is sometimes the guy who didn’t have anything to go home to. To me, the real hero is the guy who goes home to face whatever life hands him, no matter how tough it might be.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You’re a lucky son of a bitch. And life handed you my wife.”

Danny put the Bell into a hover above the river. Far below, through sheets of rain, twinkling headlights moved steadily between Louisiana and Mississippi. “I’ve caught the short end a few times. You’ve been dealt a tough hand, I’ll grant you. But I’ve seen guys get a lot worse, with no time to set things right or even say good-bye to the people they loved. In muddy holes, on piles of sand, burned alive in a fucking Humvee. It’s like you said back at the house. It doesn’t make any sense. You want an answer, Warren? You’ve got two kids who love you. Two healthy kids who need everything you can give them, and who’ll give you everything they have in return. That means more than you know. Take it from me.”

Shields lowered the gun back to Danny’s waist. “I killed a cop tonight,” he said in a guilt-ridden voice.

“Well, I’d say he asked for it. He was a mean bastard who would have caught it one way or another down the road.”

“They’d still jail me for it. Or execute me.” Shields began to laugh strangely. “If only I could live all the years it would take them to execute me after sentencing me to death! I’d take that deal, all right.”

Danny wondered if he had any chance of getting back to the ground alive. As they hovered in the dark, he noticed that several cars had stopped along the northern span of the bridge. Then he saw red lights flashing at the Mississippi end.

“Whose baby is Laurel carrying?” Warren asked with sudden intensity.

Danny turned to him. In the cramped cockpit, their faces were as close as lovers’. “I don’t know.”

“Christ! Can’t anybody just tell me the truth?”

“I truly don’t know. But it doesn’t matter anyway.”

Shields closed his eyes. “Do you really think she’s dead?”

For the first time, Danny sensed as opportunity to save himself. But despite Shields’s closed eyes, the gun still pressed into his left hip. If they had been flying without the doors-as Danny sometimes did-or if Shields had neglected to fasten his harness, a high-G maneuver might have set the stage for Danny to dump his hijacker out of the chopper. But that was useless speculation.

Danny looked back at the flashing red lights. They were static now, at the center of the bridge. “I don’t know. All I do know is, Laurel was right. If you really love her, it doesn’t matter who the father is.”

Shields’s eyes popped open. “How can you say that?”

Danny shrugged. “Age, maybe? You’ll get there eventually.”

“No. I won’t.”

It was so easy to forget the man was dying. Danny wondered if Shields forgot it himself sometimes. For the first second or two after he woke up in the mornings, maybe. Danny had a paraplegic friend who’d experienced that. He said there was nothing worse than the crushing weight of remembering that he was paralyzed and couldn’t get out of bed. “I think love means giving up something,” Danny said. “Maybe the thing that means the most to you. Pride, maybe? That’s what she was talking about. That’s what they want us to do, you know? Only then do they truly believe you love them.”

Some of the anger had drained out of Shields’s eyes. “You really love her, don’t you?”

Danny didn’t answer. He’d already confessed once, and he saw no reason to do it again when repetition might buy him a bullet.

Shields raised the gun to Danny’s temple again. “Say it, Major.”

“I love her,” Danny admitted, suddenly aware that all his world-weary talk about death was bullshit. He’d found a woman he wanted to spend every day of his life with, and he had two kids of his own who needed him desperately-maybe even three. The thought that those children might come in harm’s way without their father there to protect them-that scared the hell out of him. It also gave him the resolve he needed to kill Warren Shields if he could.

“You want to kill me, don’t you?” Shields said.

Danny shook his head, but his heart wasn’t in it.

Warren leaned against the left-side door on his side and lazily aimed the gun at Danny’s belly. “I wanted to love her,” he said, looking puzzled. “I just…I guess I knew her too well.”

You didn’t know her at all.

Warren raised the gun until its muzzle touched Danny’s cheek. “If you lived through this night, what would you do?”

“Best I could.”

“Would you take care of them?”

“Them?”

“Laurel. My kids.”

Sensing a route to life, Danny nodded.

A quarter mile behind and below the doctor, more red lights spun and flashed on the bridge.

“It’s not fair,” Shields muttered.

“It never is,” Danny said, amazed that the man could have practiced medicine for years and not learned this lesson. Until his own diagnosis, Shields had actually believed himself immune to the vagaries of fate. Danny knew a lot of pilots like that. “The house always wins, Doc. It’s just a question of when. The way I see it, you’re alive now. Today. Let tomorrow take care of itself. Your family needs you. Let’s take this machine back to Athens Point and find out about your wife.”

“They’ve sent up another chopper!” Shields said, pointing with his arm across Danny’s chest.

Danny turned, scanning the night sky for lights. There was only one other chopper in the county, a JetRanger that belonged to a private businessman. Danny didn’t think they could find a pilot to fly it in this weather, but this was an extraordinary emergency. As he searched the sky, the Bell rose unexpectedly-maybe an updraft off the bluff, he thought. Then he turned to ask Shields what the hell he was talking about and saw that he was alone in the helicopter.

Danny hung suspended in the darkness above the river, as alone and alive as he’d ever been. Shields was probably still alive, too, tumbling down through space. The nickel-plated pistol lay on the empty seat, unnecessary now.

He’s hit by now, Danny thought, looking at the altimeter. They were high enough that Shields would have reached terminal velocity prior to impact. Danny had heard grisly stories from a Vietnam-era CIA pilot, comparative descriptions of what happened when a prisoner was thrown from a chopper and landed in water as opposed to smacking dirt or concrete, or was ripped to shreds in treetops, strung through the canopy like red and pink ribbons. Shields was dead, no doubt about it.

Danny pushed down the collective and dropped toward the river, searching for the body. The two bridges threw off ambient light, but not enough to help him sight Shields. He didn’t really want to see the corpse, but Laurel was certain to ask, not to mention the sheriff. In that moment Danny realized that he believed Laurel was still alive, in spite of her wounds and unconsciousness.

He started to switch on the searchlight, but then he noticed people lining the rail of the bridge above him. There was no way anybody had seen Shields leap from the chopper, but if Danny started searching the water with a light, it wouldn’t be hard to figure out what had happened. God, how Laurel would suffer if that story got out. Her kids, too. Grant Shields would go through life dreading questions about his father. What happened to your real dad? Uh, he died. How? Killed himself. Wow, dude, I’m sorry. Danny didn’t want the boy to suffer through that conversation again and again. And with a little luck…he might not have to.

Danny executed a quick pedal turn, then swept upriver, jinking from side to side like a pilot under duress, but steadily cheating toward the Louisiana bank. The inside of a river bend is the shallow side, since it doesn’t bear the full pressure of the current trying to cut its way into the land. Danny headed into a patch of darkness along the inner shore, not far from a seafood restaurant, a place where he knew there was a sandbar. When he saw the pale line where the water met the sand, he picked up the shiny automatic and fired two shots through the windshield.

Then he rolled back the throttle, shut off the fuel, and pulled his second autorotation of the night.

He wouldn’t have done it if the chopper wasn’t insured-Lusahatcha County couldn’t afford to replace an aircraft-but it was. Had there been no chance of witnesses, he might have done things differently-jettisoned the doors, for one thing, SOP for ditching-but with towns on both sides of the river and the levee close, someone might well witness the “crash.” And the aircraft might be recovered. He needed all the witness statements and physical evidence to bear out a scenario in which two men had fought until the end. That would be the story for the sheriff, anyway. Laurel’s children could be told something more palatable, at least until they were old enough to understand.

As the Bell fell toward the shallows, Danny took his feet off the pedals and let the ship spin beneath her rotors, as she might if her pilot had been ripped away from the controls. After four or five rotations, he felt like puking, but he steadied the craft just in time to flare before impact. As the dark water rushed up to meet him, he made sure he was less than twenty feet from shore, then dropped the Bell into the river.

Helicopters always roll when they fall into water. The rule is to not fight the roll but assist it, but Danny never got the chance. When the first rotor hit the water, the ship was slammed onto its side as though by the hand of God. River water poured through the smashed Plexiglas, and the Bell began to sink. Danny knew he should have taken a big breath before impact, but he hadn’t thought of it. Now he fought to escape his harness with barely enough air to keep his brain alight. The massive power of the Mississippi carried the chopper downstream like a piece of driftwood. A millisecond before fear became panic, Danny’s training asserted itself, the belt disengaged, and he swam through the hole where the door should have been, praying he was still close enough to the bank to swim to safety after he surfaced.

He broke through to the air and into what seemed a ring of flaming islands. Pools of JP-4 floating on the water. By the light of the burning fuel he saw the sandbar. Kicking hard, he fought his way toward the grainy shingle, then crawled high enough on the sand to be safe if anything exploded.

“Be alive,” he said to Laurel. “Just be alive.”

Fifteen minutes later, Danny was led to the backseat of Sheriff Ellis’s cruiser and given a blanket and a hot cup of coffee. He stank of kerosene. He was lucky that he hadn’t caught fire during his swim to shore. A dozen cruisers were parked on the crushed-oystershell lot of the seafood restaurant, some from Lusahatcha County, some from Adams County, and others from Concordia Parish. A crowd of officers stared at the burning wreckage floating downriver. Before long, Ellis heaved his bearlike form into the front seat. He cranked his bulk around, laid his forearm on the seat, and studied Danny, his eyes unreadable.

“They told me Laurel’s in surgery,” Danny said.

Ellis cleared his throat. “Mrs. Shields grabbed her husband’s arm at the instant Carl fired. To save your life, apparently. Carl’s bullet hit Dr. Shields’s gun. Mrs. Shields was struck by shards of glass and fragments of the gun, but also by some fragments of Carl’s bullet.”

Danny steeled himself for the worst. “How bad?”

“She just got into surgery. They stabilized her in the ER.”

“You’re not telling me anything.”

“They don’t know yet, damn it. They don’t know what all got hit, because the wound tracks have to be probed.”

“Any head wounds?”

“No.”

Thank God. “What about her stomach?”

“The verdict’s still out on the baby, according to the ER doc. You rest and get your head clear. You’ve got a lot of questions to answer.”

Danny looked downriver at the burning fuel, fading now as it slid southward toward Athens Point. The lights on the bluff across the water seemed to look down in reproach, but he didn’t care.

“You should have told me about Mrs. Shields,” Ellis said. “You and her, I mean.”

“What would you have done if I had?”

“Probably sent you home.”

“Exactly.”

Ellis grunted. “Well, look what’s happened this way.”

“Shields’s kids are alive. Laurel’s alive, at least for now. It could have ended a lot worse.”

“Trace Breen is dead.”

“Whose fault you figure that is?”

A long and weary sigh seemed to shrink the sheriff.

“Don’t say that around Ray. Not if you want to live another day.”

Danny took a sip of coffee, savoring the heat as it migrated down his to his chest. “Ray has no business leading the Tactical Response Unit. He hasn’t got the temperament for it.”

“I agree with you there.”

“I want to go to the hospital, Sheriff.”

Ellis grunted again, disagreeably this time. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. You don’t want the rumors starting any faster than they have to.”

“I don’t care about rumors.”

“She might.”

“St. Raphael’s, Billy Ray. Come on. Back to Athens Point. Haul ass. I’ve chauffeured you enough times to earn a ride.”

Ellis took a deep breath, then blew out more air than Danny could hold in both lungs. “Don’t spill that coffee.”

He closed his door, started the cruiser, and swung it up over the levee. Soon they were on Louisiana 15, headed north through empty black cotton fields with Ellis’s lights flashing red against the rain, the kind of night run Huey Long had favored in his heyday. This was the fastest route back to Athens Point, since Highway 61, on the Mississippi side, ran southward through Woodville, thirty miles east of the city. As the cruiser roared along the deserted highway at ninety-five miles per hour, Danny went over the sequence of events prior to the assault, when Warren had caught Laurel sending her final text message: U haf 2 kil hm! Danny didn’t understand why she’d risked so much to send that message, for it had seemed only to state the obvious.

“Tell me about those last few seconds in the chopper,” Sheriff Ellis said, breaking Danny’s reverie. “They told me you said you were fighting with Shields, lost control, and crashed in the water by the sandbar.”

“That’s right.”

“And he was ejected through the windshield?”

“The door,” Danny amended. If Shields had gone out through a shattered windshield, his body would show severe lacerations. “His door was knocked off or open. I don’t know which.”

“I heard you said he went through the windshield.”

Danny shook his head. “Door. But he wasn’t wearing his harness, so he hit the instrument panel first. He’s probably broken up pretty bad. I was too busy to see much.”

Ellis drove without speaking for a while. Then he said, “Did you see him drown?”

“No. I was trying to save myself.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What is it?” Danny asked angrily. “Spit it out.”

“Well, Jimmy Doucet’s an Adams County deputy. He was parked on the bridge, and he says he saw somebody fall from the chopper before you dropped down low.”

“That’s bullshit,” Danny said mildly. “He couldn’t see anything from up there. It was pitch-dark and raining.”

“Jimmy’s got good eyes. He says he saw something big fall past your lights.”

“A buzzard, maybe. I was a quarter mile north of that bridge, and two thousand feet above it.”

“That’s what I told him.” Ellis looked back over the seat with an inscrutable expression. Not anger, and not outright suspicion either. It was almost a sly look. “Come on, Danny. You took him out, didn’t you?”

“What?”

“Shields got cute with you up there, and you killed him.”

“How the hell would I kill him? He had the gun.”

“Maybe you took it away from him.”

“You’ll find the body. Halfway to New Orleans maybe, but you’ll find it. And you won’t find any bullet holes, except in his shoulder. Auster shot him.”

“If the gar and the gators don’t eat him first,” Ellis said. “Maybe you pitched him out, then. You could fly a chopper sideways through a keyhole if you wanted to.”

Danny felt himself going pale. “I told you what happened. I’ve got nothing to add.”

Ellis smiled. “Course you did. Better for everybody this way, anyhow. The helicopter’s insured, so what the hell. I’ll have a brand-new one sitting on the pad in two weeks. And I still want you to fly it. We just have to get past whatever bullshit inquiry Ray Breen will try to bring on your head.”

Danny sighed. “I think my flying days are over.”

Ellis looked back again, his disappointment plain. “How come?”

Danny just shook his head.

The sheriff faced forward, the downward angle of his big head radiating disappointment.

Up ahead, the lights of the Athens Point Bridge shone out of the darkness. The cantilevered span had been built during the Stennis era, when Mississippi had expected to get a bigger share of the space program than it ultimately did. Danny still remembered the ferry that the bridge had replaced, and how he’d stand on the thrumming deck with his father while the green hills receded behind them and the Louisiana lowlands slid closer. Some people believed the bridge had kept Athens Point alive during the lean 1980s, when the oil business crashed. Now there was talk of a big new bridge at St. Francisville, just thirty miles down the river. As Danny wondered how that might affect his hometown, he suddenly understood why Laurel had sent that last text message. She wasn’t instructing him to kill her husband. She was giving him permission. She’d realized that after the revelation of Warren’s cancer, Danny might be too mired in guilt to act without mercy. And she’d been right. He had remained on his feet to confess his guilt when he should have been diving to cover her with his body. That mistake might yet cost Laurel her life.

Sheriff Ellis barely slowed down as he crossed the Athens Point Bridge. A minute later, they turned into the parking lot of St. Raphael’s Hospital. As Ellis parked under the admissions bay, Danny leaned forward and squeezed his shoulder. “You did all right, Sheriff. I’ll see you around.”

He got out and walked toward the double doors, the pressure of Ellis’s gaze on his back. Then a voice caught up with him.

“I hope she’s all right, Danny.”

Danny held up his right hand but kept walking.

“I’ve got to ask,” Ellis called. “Is that kid yours or what?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Danny murmured. “That’s the thing.”

He walked into the hospital, ready for anything.