In Big Trouble

But Steve was calming down now, taking time to analyze his options.

'Bring me the knife, Emmie. And her knapsack. She has a gun in there.'

Another small mystery solved. 'You were the man Mrs. Nguyen let into my room that day,' Tess said. 'Emmie gave you the photograph from Crow's things.'

'One of the first rules of war is reconnaissance,' he said, stumbling a little over the last word. 'The knapsack, Emmie. Take it off her back and bring it over here. No-don't lift your arms. Let Emmie slide it off, one strap at a time. Keep your hands where I can see them.'

Trancelike, Emmie did as she was told, dragging the knapsack behind her on the floor, holding the knife awkwardly in her right hand. But instead of returning to Steve's side, she suddenly threw herself, weeping, into Clay's arms. 'It's all your fault. None of this would have happened if you hadn't stopped loving me. Why can't you just love me again?'

He put one arm around her and rocked her. 'I do love you, Emmie. I'll probably never love anyone else the way I loved you.'

Her sobs were wild, convulsive spasms, shaking her whole body. 'He's my father, isn't he? He loved Lollie, and she ran away from him when she got pregnant, then made up the story about Horace Morgan. That's why he won't let us be together.'

Clay stroked her hair. 'I wish it were that simple. No, your father really was some stupid El Paso boy who killed himself for love of your mother. But you're right-when they were our age, Gus loved Lollie, and she loved him. Then she stopped, but he couldn't help believing she would start again, even as they married other people, and went on with their lives. He always thought she would come back to him. Then one day, Lollie told him she had fallen in love with Frank Conyers, and he was going to leave Marianna for her. They were going to move up to Austin, open their own restaurant there. Gus thought if something happened to Frank…' Clay looked at Steve over Emmie's head. 'He never meant for Lollie to die, much less Pilar. They weren't suppose to be there.'

'But she did die, didn't she,' Steve said. 'That's all that matters.'

'He made me choose, Emmie,' Clay said, cupping her face with his right hand, his left still clasping his book. 'When he found out we were seeing each other again, he told me everything he had done, and he made me choose. You or him. If I kept seeing you, he was going to turn himself in, confess to everything he had done. I couldn't let him do that. It's a death penalty crime.'

'He was jealous,' Emmie wailed. 'He didn't want us to be happy because he could never be happy.'

'No, he believed we would end up as he and Lollie had, with one of us killing the other. He said it was our legacy, and we could never outrun it. You loved the way he loved, and he knew how that story ended. He saw himself in you. He wasn't far from wrong, was he?'

Tess remembered the look on Gus Sterne's face, the way he stared at Emmie as if he had seen a ghost.

'We could be together,' Emmie insisted to Clay. 'It's not too late.'

An accomplice in two murders, and she still thought her future was as wide open as the window through which she had planned to jump up until five minutes ago.

'Don't let him go through with this, Emmie,' Clay pleaded. 'I'll make Dad tell the truth, face the consequences for what he's done.'

'He won't,' Steve scoffed. 'He told you the truth to bind him to you, to make you do what he wanted. He'll never admit his crimes to anyone who counts.'

'He will do the right thing,' Clay said. He was trying hard not to cry, but a few tears slipped down his cheeks. 'I'll make him. But don't kill my father. He's all I have.'

A huge cheer went up from the street below, and Steve glanced out the window. In the split-second his head was turned, Tess saw Emmie slide the knife along Clay's spine, into the waistband of his khakis.

'Here comes Gus. You're up, Emmie,' Steve said. 'You can jump, or I'll kill you-but not before I kill your cousin. I've got no problem with letting Al Guzman wrangle over a mysterious quadruple murder for the next twenty years.'

'Please,' Clay said. Emmie broke their embrace and backed away from him. 'We'll go to the police. My dad will confess. At the very least, he'll have to tell the grand jury.'

'What grand jury?' Steve asked.

'The one that's convened whenever a cop is killed.'

Clay hurled his book at Steve's face, and the young cop reflexively put up a hand to deflect it. 'What the-' Steve didn't drop the rifle, but with one hand swatting at a book, there was no way he could get a shot off. He was thrown off-balance for no more than a second or two, but that proved to be all the time Clay needed. With a speed that surprised everyone, perhaps himself most of all, Clay pulled the knife from his waistband and ran forward, jamming it through the bullet-proof vest and into Steve's chest with one sure thrust.

Steve Villanueve died surprised.

Surprised that all his reconnaissance had not paid off. Surprised that bullet-proof vests only stop bullets. Surprised that all his careful planning had come to naught. He slumped to the floor, only a few seconds of life left in him, and nothing left to say.

'Clay, get the cell phone from my knapsack and dial 911,' Tess called to him, for he was staring stupidly at the dead man at his feet, and she still had her hand pressed to Crow's midsection. 'I just hope they know how to get an ambulance to us with most of Broadway blocked off.'

Clay took the knapsack from Emmie, dug out the cell phone, and punched in the number. As he turned his back on the window, covering one ear so he could hear over the parade noise, Emmie began moving like a sleepwalker, her blue eyes empty. She stepped around Steve's body as if it weren't there, then clambered to the ledge behind him.

Later, Tess would wonder if she did the right thing. Wasn't Emmie Sterne entitled to her death wish? She was broken, and all the king's horses and men and money couldn't put Emmie together again. Did Emmie even have a life left to save, given that her fate was now a narrow destiny limited to a prison or a psychiatric hospital? But these questions came later, when there was time to think. In the moment, without the luxury of contemplation, she hurled herself across the room and caught Emmie by the knees just before she launched herself into the sky.

If Emmie had weighed a little more, she might have dragged Tess out the window with her. As it was, she kicked and twisted and screamed, begging to die, clawing at Tess's face. Clay dropped the phone, ran forward, and grabbed Tess, and the three fell backward together in a pile, even as a silver Lincoln glided into the intersection below.

They could hear the crowd cheering the benefactor who had brought them this beautiful day, this wonderful parade, all this good food and good music. Of course Gus Sterne waved back, they knew that without looking down. What they couldn't know was if he ever noticed those few spectators who had screamed and pointed upward as Emmie and Tess dangled above him. On Channel 5's early broadcast that night, Mrs. Nguyen would later tell Tess, it was reported that two drunken women had been seen cavorting in a dangerous fashion on a window ledge in the old Sun building. No one was believed to be hurt. It had to be true. Chris Marrou said.

Chapter 30

The emergency room at the county hospital was filled with the usual parade detritus. Children who had fallen on broken bottles, men who had fought over the stupid things that men fight over, pregnant women who had gone into premature labor. Guzman told Tess he could find her a quieter, more private place to wait, but she preferred to stay here, pressing a piece of gauze into her elbow, where a nurse had taken her blood at her insistence. She wasn't sure how these things worked, but Crow was going to need blood, lots of it, and she might as well make the first deposit into his account.

Guzman kept trying to get her to drink a soda, or eat a cookie, but she refused this offer, too. She couldn't imagine anything staying in her stomach, although she was achingly hungry. The last thing she had eaten must have been her breakfast of beans, cold from the can.

'You got a stab wound, this is the emergency room where you want to come,' Guzman said. 'They see a lot of stab wounds here.'