He knew the woman he held. He wished he had known her better.
Jimmy Chew put a hand on his shoulder. “Kev,” he said quietly. “They’re coming.”
Parker nodded. He led Diane to the black-and-white and put her in the backseat. Chew handed him a blanket from the trunk of the car, and Parker wrapped it around her and kissed her cheek, and whispered something to her that even he didn’t understand.
As he straightened away from the interior of the car, he turned to Chewalski and said, “Jimmy—uh—can you just see that no one bothers her? I—uh—have to go over there. . . .”
“Sure, Kev.”
Parker nodded and tried to say thank you, but his voice didn’t work. He walked a few steps away, rubbed his hands over his face, took a deep breath, and let it out. He had a job to do. That was the only thing that was going to keep him from falling apart.
He walked away from the black-and-white without looking back, and returned to the plaza, where Metheny knelt on the ground, with Eddie Davis’s head in his big hands.
“Is he alive?” Parker asked.
“So far.”
Metheny pressed a thumb against bullet holes on either side of Davis’s forehead. Diane’s shot had gone in one side and out the other, straight through the frontal lobes. Davis appeared to be surprised, but Parker couldn’t tell if he was actually conscious or not. Still, he was breathing.
Metheny looked up at him. “I feel like the damn little Dutch boy plugging the dike. If I take my thumbs away, this guy’s brains are gonna run out.”
“Eddie. Can you hear me?” Parker asked, leaning down to him. Davis didn’t respond. “Shit.”
“That chick was a wild card, man,” Metheny said. “Did you see that coming?”
“No,” Parker said. “I didn’t.”
“I didn’t get a good look at her. Do you know who she is?”
Parker didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say.
He stepped over Davis and went to Jace Damon. The kid was lying on his back, staring up.
“Knocked the wind out of you?” Parker asked.
The kid nodded.
Parker kneeled down and helped him onto his hands and knees. Jace sat back on his heels and wheezed.
“You shouldn’t have stepped that close to him,” Parker said. “I told you not to get close. I gave you the gun so you’d stay back from him. Of course, it wasn’t loaded. . . .”
Damon turned his head and glared at him, mouthing the word “What?”
“Jesus, I’d never give a loaded gun to a civilian. Get my ass fired,” Parker muttered. “Not that that won’t happen anyway. Metheny had your back.”
The kid finally got his breath. “Who the hell is Metheny?”
Parker nodded in his former partner’s direction. “I didn’t want you to know he was there. I didn’t want you glancing over at him, tipping Davis.”
“Well, thanks for thinking about me,” Jace said. He struggled to get a deep breath. “I think I broke a rib.”
He sat up a little more on his heels and opened his coat, revealing the light-colored Kevlar vest Parker had strapped him into.
“Just sit still and try to relax,” Parker told him as the ambulance came into sight. “We’ll get an EMT to check you out after they take care of your friend here.”
He put a hand on Jace’s shoulder. “That was a really brave thing you did, Jace.”
“For Eta,” Jace said. “Partly anyway.”
Parker nodded. “I know. But it’s not your fault she died. That’s on Davis. His choice.”
“But if I’d turned myself in—”
“How about if Davis and Lowell hadn’t cooked up the blackmail scheme? How about if none of this had happened? How about if we could all fly to Mars and start over? There are a lot of what-ifs on that list before it gets to you.”
The kid nodded, but with his eyes pointed at the ground, the guilt still weighing on him.
“Jace,” Parker said. “You don’t know me. You don’t know I’m not just full of shit. But I’m telling you, you did what you believed you had to do through all of this. Not what was easiest or best for you. You did what you did, and you’re owning it. And I don’t know ten men who would be brave enough to do that.”
“Jace!”
The excited shriek arrived about a nanosecond before Tyler hurled himself at his brother.
Parker leaned over and ruffled the boy’s hair. “Good work, Scout.”
Tyler beamed up at him. “Me and Andi let the air out of the tires on that Lexus!”
Parker turned to Andi, who shrugged and made a face, waiting for him to yell at her. Instead, he took a few steps away from the boys, and rested his hands on his hips.
“Well, this is a hell of a mess,” he said.
Kelly studied his face, sober as a judge. “Who’s down there, Kev? Phillip?”
“Diane Nicholson.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“Yeah, well, that makes two of us,” Parker said. He looked across the plaza as an ambulance arrived and EMTs piled out of it. “It looks like she hired Davis to kill Tricia, and she set up Rob Cole to take the fall.”
“Oh, my God. Diane Nicholson? From the coroner’s office?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He shook his head. He watched the paramedics swarm around Eddie Davis.
“What the hell happened?” one of them asked. “Ice pick? Twin ice picks?”
“Shot,” Metheny said. “Through-and-through.”
The paramedic turned Davis’s head one way, then the other. “The poor man’s lobotomy.”
“He won’t miss it,” Metheny said. “He wasn’t using that part anyway.”
It was something Parker would have said himself, but the black humor every cop he knew used to diffuse the stress wasn’t there for him. Numbness had begun to set in. Thank God.
Kelly touched his hand. “Kev? Are you all right?”
“No,” he whispered. “I’m not.”
And he turned and walked away.
51
Ruiz caught the call to the shooting. She showed up in a white suit and strappy sandals. Parker, sitting back against the hood of a black-and-white, didn’t have the energy to comment.
She walked up to him, shaking her head in frustration. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
“Shut up.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said, shut up,” Parker said calmly. “I don’t need a bunch of crap from you, Ruiz.”
The no-bullshit sharpness of his tone set her back a step.
“You put a civilian in harm’s way,” she said.
“He’s not going to sue the city, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Parker said. “The kid had a stake in this. He wanted to do it for Eta. Despite all recent evidence to the contrary, there are a few people left in the world who know the meaning of honor and duty.”
“Don’t bag on me, Parker,” she bitched. “You could be blackmailing the preppie killer. You could be up to your ass in drug money, for all we know.”
“‘All you know’ doesn’t amount to much, does it?” he said. “Tell me, was Kyle standing right there when you
