and he looked as if he would use it. “What the hell happened to him? What the
Startled, not having seen the DSA agents until now, Ben stared at his old enemy and said, “Same thing that's going to happen to you, Sharp. He did to himself what you'll do to yourself sooner or later, though in a different way.”
“What're you talking about?” Sharp demanded.
Holding Rachael and trying to ease his body between her and Sharp, Ben said, “He didn't like the world the way he found it, so he set out to make it conform to his own twisted expectations. But instead of making a paradise for himself, he made a living hell. It's what you'll make for yourself, given time.”
“Shit,” Anson Sharp said, “you've gone off the deep end, Shadway. Way off the deep end.” To Verdad, he said, “Lieutenant, please put down your revolver.”
Verdad said, “What? What're you talking about? I—”
Sharp shot Verdad, and the detective was flung off the concrete into the mud by the impact of the bullet.
Jerry Peake — a devoted reader of mysteries, given to dreams of legendary achievement — had a habit of thinking in melodramatic terms. Watching Eric Leben's monstrously mutated body burning away to nothing in the empty swimming pool, he was shocked, horrified, and frightened; but he was also thinking at an unusually furious pace for him. First, he made a mental list of the similarities between Eric Leben and Anson Sharp: They loved power, thrived on it; they were cold-blooded and capable of anything; they had a perverse taste for young girls… Then Jerry listened to what Ben Shadway said about how a man could make his own hell on earth, and he thought about that, too. Then he looked down at the smoldering remnants of the mutant Leben, and it seemed to him that he was at a crossroads between his own earthly paradise and hell: He could cooperate with Sharp, let murder be done, and live with the guilt forever, damned in this life as well as in the next;
Sharp ordered Lieutenant Verdad to put down the gun, and Verdad began to question the order, and Sharp shot him, just shot him, with no argument or hesitation.
So Jerry Peake drew his own gun and shot Sharp. The slug hit the deputy director in the shoulder.
Sharp seemed to have sensed the impending betrayal, because he had started to turn toward Jerry even as Jerry shot him. He squeezed off a round of his own, and Jerry took the bullet in the leg, though he fired simultaneously. As he fell, he had the enormous pleasure of seeing Anson Sharp's head explode.
Rachael stripped the jacket and shirt off Lieutenant Verdad and examined the bullet wound in his shoulder.
“I'll live,” he said. “It hurts like the devil, but I'll live.”
In the distance, the mournful sound of sirens arose, drawing rapidly nearer.
“That'll be Reese's doing,” Verdad said. “As soon as he got Gavis to the hospital, he'll have called the locals.”
“There really isn't too much bleeding,” she said, relieved to be able to confirm his own assessment of his condition.
“I told you,” Verdad said. “Heck, I can't die. I intend to stay around long enough to see my partner marry the pink lady.” He laughed at her puzzlement and said, “Don't worry, Mrs. Leben. I'm not out of my head.”
Peake was flat on his back on the concrete decking, his head raised somewhat on the hard pillow of the pool coping.
With a wide strip of his own torn shirt, Ben had fashioned a tourniquet for Peake's leg. The only thing he could find to twist it with was the barrel of Anson Sharp's discarded, silencer-equipped pistol, which was perfect for the job.
“I don't think you really need a tourniquet,” he told Peake as the sirens drew steadily nearer, gradually overwhelming the patter of the rain, “but better safe than sorry. There's a lot of blood, but I didn't see any spurting, no torn artery. Must hurt like the devil, though.”
“Funny,” Peake said, “but it doesn't hurt much at all.”
“Shock,” Ben said worriedly.
“No,” Peake said, shaking his head. “No, I don't think I'm going into shock. I've got none of the symptoms — and I know them. You know what I think maybe it is?”
“What?”
“What I just did — shooting my own boss when he went bad — is going to make me a legend in the agency. Damned if it isn't. I didn't see it that way until he was dead. So, anyway, maybe a legend just doesn't feel pain as much as other people do.” He grinned at Ben.
Ben returned a frown for the grin. “Relax. Just try to relax—”
Jerry Peake laughed. “I'm not delirious, Mr. Shadway. Really, I'm not. Don't you see? Not only am I a legend, but I can still laugh at myself! Which means that maybe I really do have what it takes. I mean, see, maybe I can make a big reputation for myself and not let it go to my head. Isn't that a nice thing to learn about yourself?”
“It's a nice thing,” Ben agreed.
The night was filled with screaming sirens, then the bark of brakes, and then the sirens died as running footsteps sounded on the motel driveway.
Soon there would be questions — thousands of them — from police officers in Las Vegas, Palm Springs, Lake Arrowhead, Santa Ana, Placentia, and other places.
Following that ordeal, the media would have questions of their own. ('How do you
But now, as Jerry Peake and Julio Verdad were loaded into the paramedics' van and as the uniformed Las Vegas officers kept a watch on Sharp's corpse to make certain no one touched it before the police coroner arrived, Rachael and Ben had a moment together, just the two of them. Detective Hagerstrom had reported that Whitney Gavis had made it to the hospital in time and was going to pull through, and now he was getting into the emergency van with Julio Verdad. They were blessedly alone. They stood under the promenade awning, holding each other, neither of them speaking at first. Then they seemed to realize simultaneously that they would not be alone together again for long, frustrating hours, and they both tried to speak at once.
“You first,” he said, holding her almost at arm's length, looking into her eyes.
“No, you. What were you going to say?”
“I was wondering…”
“What?”
“… if you remembered.”
“Ah,” she said because she knew instinctively what he meant.
“When we stopped along the road to Palm Springs,” he said.
“I remember,” she said.
“I proposed.”
“Yes.”
“Marriage.”
“Yes.”
“I've never done that before.”
“I'm glad.”
“It wasn't very romantic, was it?”
“You did just fine,” she said. “Is the offer still open?”
“Yes. Is it still appealing?”
