“And your wife?”
He smoothed Campbell’s hair against his head and the baby’s eyes remained shut.
“My wife,” he said. “Hmm. I killed her, yeah. Not God. Me. I don’t know what sort of plan God had for the woman, but I definitely fucked them up. I had plans for Brendan’s life, He fucked them up. He probably had plans for Kara Rider’s life, but He’s had to change them, hasn’t He?”
“And Hardiman,” I said, “how did he come into this?”
“Did he tell you about his childhood encounter with bees?”
“Yes.”
“Mmm. It wasn’t bees. Alec likes to embellish. I was there and it was mosquitoes. He disappeared in a cloud of them, and when he came out, I could see the mark of conscience had been removed from him.” He smiled, and I could see the cloud of bugs and the dark lake in his eyes. “So, after that, Alec and I established a mentor-student relationship which later blossomed into so much more.”
“And he—what?—went to jail willingly to protect you?”
Gerry shrugged. “Jail meant nothing to someone like Alec. His freedom is total, Patrick. It’s in his mind. Bars can’t hold it. He’s more free in jail than most people are on the outside.”
“So why punish Diandra Warren for sending him there?”
He frowned. “She reduced Alec. On the stand. She presumed to explain him to a jury of dunces. It was fucking insulting.”
“So, all this”—my arm swept the playground—“is about you and Alec getting back at who exactly?”
“Whom,” he corrected me and his smile returned.
“God?” I said.
“That’s a bit reductive, but if that’s the sort of glib shit you have to feed the media after I’m dead, be my guest, Patrick.”
“You’re going to die, Gerry? When?”
“As soon as you make your move, Patrick. You’ll kill me.” He tilted his head in the direction of the police. “Or they will.”
“What about the hostages, Gerry?”
“One of them dies. Minimum. You can’t save them both, Patrick. There’s no way. Accept that.”
“I have.”
Danielle Rawson searched my face to see if I was joking and I met her eyes long enough for her to see I wasn’t.
“One of them dies,” Gerry said. “We’re agreed on that?”
“Yup.”
I pivoted my left foot to the right and then back and then to the right again. To Gerry, hopefully, it seemed an absent-minded gesture. To Oscar, again hopefully, it was more than that. I couldn’t risk looking at the car again. I’d just have to assume he was there.
“A month ago,” Gerry said, “you would’ve done anything to save both of them. You’d be racking your brain. But not now.”
“Nope. You’ve taught me well, Gerry.”
“How many lives did you shatter to get to me?” he asked.
I thought of Jack and Kevin. Then of Grace and Mae. Phil, of course.
“Enough,” I said.
He laughed. “Good. Good. It’s fun, isn’t it? I mean, okay, you’ve never killed anyone intentionally. Have you? But I’ll tell you, I didn’t exactly plan for it to be my life’s work. After I killed my wife, in pure fury, not premeditated at all, really…after I killed her, I felt awful. I threw up. I had the cold sweats for two weeks. And then one night, I’m driving out on an old stretch of road near Mansfield, no other car for miles. And I pass this guy riding his bike, and I got this impulse—strongest impulse I’d ever had in my life. I’m passing him on the right, I can see the reflectors on his bike, see his face all serious and full of concentration and this voice says to me, ‘Flick the wheel, Gerry. Flick the wheel.’ So I did. I just turned my hand a quarter inch to the left and he went vaulting off into a tree. And I went back to him, he was still barely alive, and I watched him die. And I felt fine. And it just kept getting better. The nigger kid who knew I’d gotten someone else to take the fall for my wife, all the ones after him, Cal Morrison. It just kept feeling better and better. I have no regrets. Sorry, but I don’t. So when you kill me—”
“I’m not going to kill you, Gerry.”
“What?” His head reared back.
“You heard me. Let someone else send you to your blaze of glory. You’re a speck, man. You’re nothing. You’re not worth the bullet or the mark on my soul for taking you out.”
“You trying to piss me off again, Patrick?” He removed Campbell Rawson from his shoulder and held him aloft.
I tilted my wrist so the cylinder dropped into my palm, shrugged. “You’re a joke, Gerry. I’m just calling it like I see it.”
“That so?”
“Absolutely.” I met his hard eyes with my own. “And you’ll be replaced, just like everything else, in maybe a week, tops. Some other dumb, sick shit will come along and kill some people and he’ll be all over the papers, and all over Hard Copy and you’ll be yesterday’s news. Your fifteen minutes are up, Gerry. And they’ve passed without impact.”
He flipped Campbell Rawson upside down in his hand, grasped his ankles again, and his finger depressed the shotgun trigger an eighth of an inch and Danielle closed one eye against the blast she was sure was coming, but kept the other eye on her baby.
“They’ll remember this,” Gerry said. “Believe me.”
He swung his arm back in a softball pitcher’s windup and Campbell slid back into the darkness behind him, the small white body disappearing as if it had gone back to the womb.
But when Gerry swung his arm forward to release the
baby into the air, Campbell was no longer in his hand.
He looked down, confused, and I jumped forward, hit the ice on my knees and slid the index finger of my left hand in between the shotgun trigger and the guard.
Gerry clamped back on the trigger. When he met my finger, he looked at me and then clamped down so hard that my finger broke.
The straight razor appeared in his left hand and I shoved the one-shot into his right palm.
He shrieked even before I pulled the trigger. It was a high-pitched sound, the yip-and-bark of a kennel’s worth of hyenas, and the razor felt like the tip of a lover’s tongue as it sank into my neck, then snagged against my jawbone.
I depressed the trigger on the one-shot and nothing happened.
Gerry shrieked louder, and the razor came out of my flesh, then swung back in immediately, and I clenched my eyes shut and depressed the trigger frantically three times.