“It just flashed through my mind that ‘Look in Ashton’s pocket’ might have been your last words.”
He started to laugh but immediately cried out from the pain in his chest, then started to laugh again and cried out again. “Oh, God, no, no, don’t make me laugh.” Tears were streaming down his cheeks. His chest ached dreadfully. He was becoming exhausted.
She leaned toward him and wiped his eyes with a crumpled tissue.
“What about Skard?” he asked, his voice hardly audible now.
“Giotto? You made as big a mess of him as he made of you.”
“Stairs?”
“Oh, yes. Probably the first time he’d ever been thrown down a flight of stairs by a man he’d already shot three times.”
There was so much in her voice, so many vying emotions, but he detected in that rich mixture an element of innocent pride. It made him laugh. The tears came again.
“Rest now,” she said. “People are going to be lining up to talk to you. Hardwick told everyone at BCI everything that happened, and everything you discovered about who was who and what was what, and he told them what an incredible hero you were and how many lives you saved, but they’re eager to hear it all from you personally.”
He said nothing for a while, trying to reach out as far as his memory would take him. “When did you talk to them?”
“Exactly two weeks ago today.”
“No, I mean about the… the Skard business, and the fire.”
“Two weeks ago today. The day it happened, the day I got back from New Jersey.”
“Jesus. You mean…?”
“You’ve been a little out of it.” She paused, her eyes filling suddenly with tears, her breath coming in shaky gasps. “I almost lost you,” she said, and as she said it, something wild and desperate swept across her face, something he’d never seen before.
Chapter 80
“Is he asleep?”
“Not really asleep. Just sort of dazed and dozing. They put him on a temporary Dilaudid drip to reduce the pain. If you talk to him, he’ll hear you.”
It was true. He smiled at the truth of it. But the drug did more than reduce the pain. It obliterated it in a wave of… of what? A wave of… okayness. He smiled at the okayness of it.
“I don’t want to disturb him.”
“Just say what you have to say. He’ll hear you perfectly well, and it won’t disturb him.”
He knew the voices. The voices of Val Perry and Madeleine. Beautiful voices.
Val Perry’s beautiful voice: “David? I came to thank you.” There was a long silence. The silence of a distant sailboat crossing a blue horizon. “I guess that’s all I really have to say. I’m leaving an envelope for you. I hope it’s enough. It’s ten times the amount we agreed on. If it’s not enough, let me know.” Another silence. A small sigh. The sigh of a breeze over a field of orange poppies. “Thank you.”
He couldn’t tell where his body ended and the bed began. He couldn’t even tell if he was breathing.
Then he was awake, looking up at Madeleine.
“It’s Jack,” she was saying. “Jack Hardwick from BCI. Can you talk to him? Or shall I tell him to come back tomorrow?”
He looked past her at the figure in the doorway, saw the gray crew cut, the ruddy face, the ice-blue malamute eyes.
“Now is good.” Something about the need to make sense with Hardwick, to focus, began to clear his thought process.
She nodded, stepped aside, as Hardwick came to the bed. “I’m going downstairs for some horrible coffee,” she said. “I’ll be back in a little while.”
“You know,” Hardwick rasped after she left the room, raising a bandaged hand, “one of those fucking bullets went right through you and hit me.”
Gurney looked at the hand, didn’t see much damage. He remembered how Marian Eliot had referred to Hardwick:
“You’re cold, Gurney, very cold.” Hardwick shook his head in mock distress. “You aware that you broke Giotto Skard’s back?”
“When I pushed him down the stairs?”
“You didn’t
“What kind of deal?”
“He gave us the addresses of Karnala’s
“And?”
“And some of the girls we found at those addresses were… still alive.”
“That was the deal?”
“Plus, he had to turn in the rest of the organization. Immediately.”
“He turned in his other two sons?”
“Without a second thought. Giotto Skard is not a sentimental man.”
Gurney smiled at the understatement.
Hardwick went on. “But I got a question for you. Given how… practical… he is about his business affairs, and how crazy Leonardo was, why didn’t Giotto do away with him the first time he heard about those peculiar little beheading requests that Leonardo was inserting into Karnala’s customer transactions?”
“Easy.
“The goose being Leonardo, aka Dr. Scott Ashton?”
“Ashton was big in his field… drawing card at Mapleshade. Kill him, the school might close… cut off a ready supply of sick young women.” Gurney’s eyes drifted shut momentarily. “Not something… not something Giotto would want to happen.”
“Then why kill him at the end?”
“All unraveling… going up in smoke, you might say. No more… golden eggs.”
“You okay, hotshot? You sound a little fuzzy.”
“Never better. Without the golden eggs… the crazy goose… becomes a liability. Risk-reward thing. In the chapel Giotto finally saw Leonardo as all risk, no reward. Scale tipped… Greater benefit in killing him than keeping him alive.”
Hardwick emitted a thoughtful grunt. “A very practical madman.”
“Yes.” After a long silence, Gurney asked, “Giotto turn in anyone else?”
“Saul Steck. We went in with some NYPD boys, found him in that Manhattan brownstone. Unfortunately, he shot himself before we could get to him. Interesting thing about Steck, by the way. Remember I told you about his stint in a psychiatric hospital after his arrest years ago on multiple rape charges? Guess who the consulting psychiatrist was in the hospital’s sex-offender rehabilitation program?”
“Ashton?”
“The very same. Guess he got to know Saul pretty well-decided he had enough potential to make an exception
