“Jesus,” said Big Tommy, staring at the blood.
An overload of adrenaline had kept Gurney unaware of the wound. He touched his face and found it surprisingly wet; then he examined his hand and found it surprisingly red.
Acetylene Pat looked at Gurney’s face without emotion. “You want an ambulance here?” she said to Nardo.
“Yeah. Sure. Make the call,” he said without conviction.
“For them, too?” she asked with a quick nod toward the odd couple in the bed. The red glass shoes caught her eye. She squinted as if trying to banish an optical illusion.
After a long pause, he muttered a disgusted, “Yeah.”
“You want the cars called in?” she asked, frowning at the shoes that seemed to be disconcertingly real after all.
“What?” he said after another pause. He was staring at the remains of the smashed lamp and the bullet hole in the drywall behind it.
“We’ve got cars on patrol and guys out there on door-to-door inquiries. You want them called in?”
The decision seemed harder for him than it should have been. Finally he said, “Yeah, call them in.”
“Right,” she said, and strode out of the room.
Big Tommy was observing with evident distaste the damage to Dermott’s temple. The Four Roses bottle had come to rest upside down on the pillow between Dermott and the old woman, whose curly blond wig had shifted in a way that made the top of her head look like it had been unscrewed a quarter of a turn.
As Gurney gazed at the bottle’s floral label, the answer came to him that had eluded him earlier. He remembered what Bruce Wellstone had said. He said that Dermott (aka Mr. Scylla) had claimed he’d seen
A minute later Pat returned, grimly efficient. “Ambulance on the way. Cars recalled. Door-to-doors canceled.” She regarded the bed coldly. The old woman was making sporadic sounds somewhere between keening and humming. Dermott was morbidly still and pale. “You sure he’s alive?” she asked without evident concern.
“I have no idea,” said Nardo. “Maybe you ought to check.”
She pursed her lips as she walked over and probed for a neck pulse.
“Uh-huh, he’s alive. What’s the matter with her?”
“That’s Jimmy Spinks’s wife. You ever hear about Jimmy Spinks?”
She shook her head. “Who’s Jimmy Spinks?”
He considered this for a while. “Forget it.”
She shrugged-as if forgetting things like that were a normal part of the job.
Nardo took a few slow, deep breaths. “I need you and Tommy upstairs to keep the place secured. Now that we know this is the little fucker who killed everyone, the forensics team will have to come back and run the house through a sieve.”
She and Tommy exchanged uneasy looks but left the room with no argument. As Tommy passed Gurney, he said as casually as if he were commenting on a speck of dandruff, “You got a piece of glass sticking out of your head.”
Nardo waited until their footsteps had climbed the stairs and the basement door at the top of the stairs was closed before speaking.
“Back away from the bed.” His voice was a bit jerky.
Gurney knew he was really being told to back away from the weapons-Dermott’s revolver in the now-blasted stuffing of the goose and Nardo’s ankle pistol in Dermott’s pocket and the formidable whiskey bottle on the pillow- but he complied without objection.
“Okay,” said Nardo, struggling, it seemed, to control himself. “I’m giving you a chance to explain.”
“You mind if I sit down?”
“I don’t care if you stand on your fucking head. Talk! Now!”
Gurney sat in the chair by the splintered lamp. “He was about to shoot you. You were two seconds away from a bullet in the throat, or the head, or the heart. There was only one way to stop him.”
“You didn’t tell him to stop. You told him to shoot me.” Nardo’s fists were clenched so tightly that Gurney could see the white spots on the knuckles.
“But he didn’t, did he?”
“But you told him to.”
“Because it was the only way to stop him.”
“The only way to stop… Are you out of your fucking mind?” Nardo was glaring like a killer dog waiting to be loosed.
“The fact is, you’re alive.”
“You’re saying I’m alive because you told him to kill me? What kind of lunatic shit is that?”
“Serial murder is about control. Total control. For crazy Gregory that meant controlling not only the present and the future but also the past. The scene he wanted you to act out was the tragedy that occurred in this house twenty-four years ago-with one crucial difference. Back then little Gregory wasn’t able to stop his father from cutting his mother’s throat. She never really recovered, and neither did he. The grown-up Gregory wanted to rewind the tape and start it over so he could change it. He wanted you to do everything his father did up to the point of raising the bottle. Then he was going to kill you-to get rid of the horrible drunk, to save his mother. That’s what all the other murders were about-attempts to control and kill Jimmy Spinks by controlling and killing other drunks.”
“Gary Sissek wasn’t a drunk.”
“Maybe not. But Gary Sissek was on the force when Jimmy Spinks was, and I bet Gregory recognized him as a friend of his father. Maybe even a casual drinking buddy. And the fact that you were also on the force back then probably in Gregory’s mind made you a perfect stand-in-the perfect way for him to reach back and change history.”
“But you told him to shoot me!” Nardo’s tone was still argumentative, but, to Gurney’s relief, the conviction behind it was weakening.
“I told him to shoot you because the only way to stop a control-freak killer like that when your only weapon is words is to say something that makes him doubt he’s really in control. Part of the control fantasy is that he’s making all the decisions-that he’s the all-powerful one, and no one has power over him. The biggest curveball you can throw at a mind like that is the possibility that he’s doing exactly what you want him to do. Oppose him directly and he’ll kill you. Beg for your life and he’ll kill you. But tell him you want him to do exactly what he’s about to do and it blows the circuit.”
Nardo looked like he was trying hard to find a flaw in the story. “You sounded very… authentic. There was hatred in your voice, like you really wanted me dead.”
“If I hadn’t been convincing, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Nardo switched gears. “What about the shooting in Port Authority?”
“What about it?”
“You shot some bum because he reminded you of your drunk father?”
Gurney smiled.
“What’s funny?”
“Two things. First: I never worked anywhere near Port Authority. Second: In twenty-five years on the job, I never fired my gun, not even once.”
“So that was all bullshit?”
“My father drank too much. It was… a difficult thing. Even when he was there, he wasn’t there. But shooting a stranger wouldn’t have helped much.”
“So what was the point of talking all that shit?”
“The point? The point is what happened.”
“The hell does that mean?”
