Third Strike

EPILOGUE

A month after we got back from Texas, I sat alone in the lofty apartment in Manhattan, staring at a small white box on the coffee table in front of me. I’d faced loaded guns with less trepidation, but that small white box scared the shit out of me.

I’d gone ten blocks out of my way to visit a pharmacy I’d never been to before on the edge of Chinatown. I loitered at the back of the store until the checkout came free, so I could snatch up my purchase and rush it through, hardly breaking stride. Guilty as a teenage kid buying their first pack of condoms.

The irony of that comparison wasn’t lost on me. I’d already worked out that the only time Sean and I had been too careless—in too much of an all-fired hurry—to think about such basic precautions, had been that time in the hotel in Boston. That one time. But sometimes, I knew, one time was all it took.

I knew I’d been putting off finding out for certain if Vondie had been lying when she’d read out the results of that allencompassing blood test with such sly conviction. That’s the secret of a good interrogator, after all, to inject a writhing, squirming sense of self-doubt into the subject. To catch you off balance and batter you down, and to strike while the soft skin over the jugular is exposed.

She’d stripped away my bravery down to bone-level fear and I’d responded in the only way I knew. I’d killed her.

So, what kind of mother would I make?

I thought of my own parents and, somehow, knowing they’d been in the room next to ours, had heard with mortifying clarity what might turn out to have been the conception of their grandchild, made it all the worse.

Surprisingly, perhaps, I’d been in regular contact with my mother since I’d got back. She seemed to have emerged from the events of the previous month with a kind of serene calm, rediscovering an inner core to herself that had been long buried.

“I just feel lucky to be alive,” she told me frankly, during one of the chatty transatlantic calls I’d grown, strangely, to enjoy. “It’s so easy to waste the time we have, don’t you think?”

I wished my father had responded with the same composure but, as my mother had come out into the light, so he’d withdrawn, like the little figures on an ornamental clock. He’d taken a leave of absence from his surgical work at home, my mother told me, was considering early retirement. I didn’t get my father’s take on it directly. He never seemed available to come to the phone.

The mysterious Mr. Epps, meanwhile—true to his word—had done some considerable cleaning up on our behalf. In return for complete silence on the subject of the whole Storax affair and Collingwood’s involvement in it, Epps had seen to it that Vondie’s death, and what had been done to Collingwood, was swept under the carpet. My only thought was that it must be one huge carpet—with a bloody big lump in the middle of it.

Collingwood, so I was told, had suffered a partial paralysis of his right leg, and other areas of impaired function. I didn’t inquire as to the details. It was not quite enough to put him in a wheelchair, as my father had so eloquently outlined, but it did mean he had to rely heavily on a cane to take the daily half hour of exercise that was all his current incarceration allowed. I doubt I’ll ever know if my father spared him the full cut by chance or choice, but I’m inclined towards the latter.

Epps magicked away the charges arising from my father’s enforced visit to the brothel in Bushwick. The Boston hospital suddenly clammed up on the subject of Jeremy Lee’s accelerated demise. We were not even questioned over the shooting of Don Kaminski during the roadside ambush Vondie had organized just outside Norwood. But, on the downside, Miranda Lee’s death remained officially a suicide.

Storax announced a delay in the launch of their new treatment for osteoporosis. Manufacturing inconsistencies were cited as the main reason.

There wasn’t much even Epps could do about the news reports that had already gone out regarding my father, or the opinions that had been formed from his own damning statement on TV, which I’d seen at the gym with Nick that day. It seemed a long time ago. But without any ongoing charges to propel the story forwards, it was already old news.

Now, too restless to sit, I jumped up, stuffed my hands into my trouser pockets and paced to the window.

It was edging towards November, early evening. A wet day, where a sneaky wind had surfed between the skyscrapers to tug at hats and umbrellas down at street level. It had driven the rain down the back of my bike jacket and penetrated the fingers of my gloves as I’d ridden the Buell home through traffic. And I hadn’t cared.

I loved my job. More than that, it fitted me, gave me a unique sense of place, of belonging. I didn’t have to explain to these people who I was, or excuse what I could do. They already knew and they accepted me in spite or maybe because of it.

I thought back to the conversation I’d had with Madeleine when Sean and I had gone to Cheshire to retrieve my mother, and I realized that I could finally tell her yes, at last, I had the respect for which I’d been searching.

And maybe it was better not to think about the price.

When we’d got back from Houston, Parker had put me straight back into the field without hesitation, even before I’d passed the Stress Under Fire course in Minneapolis. I’d returned from that the week before, to find Sean on assignment in Mexico City. He’d be gone another week, maybe two.

More than long enough to formulate a way to tell him … whatever I needed to.

I turned away from the sliding pattern of rain on the outside of the glass and looked across the room to where that damned white box lay, taunting me. Even buying the bloody pregnancy home testing kit was a form of defeat, I considered. It gave credence to Vondie’s invention. Somewhere in the back of my mind I heard her laughing at me still.

But I was late. Nothing unusual in that. My body clock had always been skewed and the slightest stress or trauma tended to knock it off its stride. Taking a hit from a TASER, an armful of dope, a life—it was enough to put a crimp in anyone’s day. But it meant I could no longer pretend this might not be a real possibility.

I took a deep breath, snatched up the box as I passed the coffee table and locked myself in the bathroom, even though I was on my own in the apartment.

I had to read the instructions three times before they sank in, followed them to the letter, and set the plastic stick on the vanity, next to the Tag watch Sean had given me. The packaging on the kit boasted 99 percent accurate results in less than a minute.

Sixty seconds, and then you’ll know … .

I sat on the edge of the bathtub with my arms wrapped round my body as if to ward off pain, and stared at the second hand as it made its stately sweep.

And, quite unbidden, an image of Ella came into my mind. The little girl whose mother’s life I’d failed to protect in a frozen New Hampshire forest the winter before. Four-year-old Ella had sneaked under my skin and made off with my heart when I wasn’t looking. I’d nearly died trying to save her mother. I’d been fully prepared to do so in order to save the child.

But to do it, I’d had to let the monster out. The cold-blooded monster inside me that could kill without pause or pity. She’d glimpsed it, and been so terrified I’d been ordered to sever all contact with her, permanently. I’d missed her, I realized, more than I’d allowed myself to admit.

And, riding in on the back of that revelation came a bubbling excitement, a dreadful kind of secret joy, that the kind of love I’d felt for that child, and set aside, might be mine again.

Thirty seconds. Come on, come on!

I thought of my father. Would he forgive me, finally, if I presented him with a grandchild—a grandson, to make up for the disappointment of a daughter in the first place? We’d had brief moments of connection along the way, but the greatest of them had been the one that had ultimately driven us furthest apart.

Now, he couldn’t even bring himself to speak to me. Did he look at me and see what he’d become, I wondered. Did he blame me for that?

Forty-five seconds. Did that damn watch stop?

I wavered. The fear drenched me in a cold wash. A child. How the hell could I bring up a child to know right from wrong, when I spent each working day with a gun on my hip and had a body count in double figures? How could I be trusted, if I was tired, sleep-deprived, pushed beyond endurance, not to snap and do something even I would find abominable?

And, disregarding Vondie’s gleefully dismal predictions, how would Sean really react to the news he was going to be a father?

It won’t happen. False alarm. She was lying. It’ll be fine … .

I checked my watch again, to find my minute was up, reached for the plastic stick with hands that were slick and not quite steady. For some time after that, I stared dumbly at the indicator, reread the instructions even though I knew there was no room for doubt about the result. It was indisputably, definitely, positive.

So, Vondie hadn’t been lying after all.