Cain laughed a final time at the irony of it.
48
just as i suspected, walter arrived like a celebrity at a Hollywood bash. There's no show without Punch. He entered the chamber only after the storm troopers had given him the all clear. Medics were in the throes of strapping John to a gurney—belly down, of course—hooking up IV bags and inserting all manner of hypodermic contraptions into his failing system.
Sitting in the dust, clutching at a dressing on my chest, I watched it all with a strange sense of distraction.
Medics fussed over Rink, but I gave them as little notice as I did those working to save John. I was only concerned with Walter. I wasn't worried that any of us would end up buried under the dirt as I once contemplated. Walter was seeing this through the right way. Showing his gratitude. Otherwise, the armed strike force wouldn't have given ground to the medical team; they'd have simply shot us where we sat.
'What kept you?' I asked.
Walter came to stand beside me. He even gave me a fatherly pat on the shoulder. But his eyes were on Cain. We had left him where he'd come to rest, slouched on his knees, hands folded in his lap, head tilted forward on his chest. Apart from the blood dripping on his breast, he looked like a supplicant at prayer.
'I didn't want to step on your toes,' Walter said. 'This was your gig, Hunter.'
I spat phlegm and dust and God knows what else on the floor.
'You could've come sooner. You were monitoring us all along. Why didn't you send in your team before now?'
'And would you have thanked me if I had?'
'No,' I answered truthfully. 'I suppose not.'
'Then all's well that ends well.'
I gripped the dressing a paramedic had placed on my chest wound. Thought about how close Cain had come to finishing me. All's well that ends well? 'Yeah.'
Walter walked away from me then. It wasn't that he didn't care for my well-being, only that Cain held a more immediate fascination for him. He went and stood over Cain, stared down at him for a long time.
'He's dead.'
'As disco,' I said.
'You know,' Walter said, 'there's many a profiler up at Quantico would've given their eyeteeth to speak to him before he died.'
'My heart bleeds for them,' I muttered. In hindsight, considering how close Cain's knife had come to finishing me, they weren't the most appropriate words. Even Walter glanced at me to see if I was serious. I slowly blinked.
Returning his attention to Cain, Walter went on, 'Don't know how he managed to elude us all this time.'
'Maybe you didn't look hard enough.'
Walter nodded. Then, totally out of character for a man who'd ordered plenty of wet work but never gotten his own hands dirty, he gripped Cain's hair and pulled back his head. A shadow crossed Walter's face. He looked to the medics.
'See to this man,' he ordered.
I jerked. Walter stepped in front of me, pressing me down as Cain was loaded onto a gurney. 'Don't worry, Hunter. I'm going to bury him.'
'He
'We don't bury the living,' he pointed out.
That wasn't necessarily true, but I wasn't of a mind to argue. Walter never talked straight.
As Cain was rushed away, Walter and I watched him go. Walter sighed, and I should have guessed what was coming. 'We were looking in the wrong place.'
I squinted at him.
'It's not him.'
'What?'
'It's not him,' Walter repeated.
I experienced a moment's panic. 'What do you mean
'Easy now, son,' Walter said. 'It's Cain all right. No doubt about it.'
'So what the hell are you talking about?'
'It's not Martin Maxwell.'
'What?' I stared into Walter's face. Searching for the lie. Not that it helped. I didn't know Martin Maxwell from Mickey Mouse. Only thing I was sure of was that I'd stopped the Harvestman.
'It's the brother,' Walter explained.
'The brother? You mean . . . ?'