The Lincoln Lawyer

FORTY-SIX

The sound was loud and the flash as bright as a camera’s. The impact of the bullet tearing into me was like what I imagine a kick from a horse would feel like. In a split second I went from standing still to moving backwards. I hit the wood floor hard and was propelled into the wall next to the living room fireplace. I tried to reach both hands to the hole in my gut but my right hand was hung up in the pocket of my jacket. I held myself with the left and tried to sit up.

Mary Windsor stepped forward and into the house. I had to look up at her. Through the open door behind her I could see the rain coming down. She raised the weapon and pointed it at my forehead. In a flash moment my daughter’s face came to me and I knew I wasn’t going to let her go.

“You tried to take my son from me!” Windsor shouted. “Did you think I could allow you to do that and just walk away?”

And then I knew. Everything crystallized. I knew she had said similar words to Raul Levin before she had killed him. And I knew that there had been no rape in an empty house in Bel-Air. She was a mother doing what she had to do. Roulet’s words came back to me then. You’re right about one thing. I am a son of a bitch.

And I knew, too, that Raul Levin’s last gesture had not been to make the sign of the devil, but to make the letter M or W, depending on how you looked at it.

Windsor took another step toward me.

“You go to hell,” she said.

She steadied her hand to fire. I raised my right hand, still wrapped in my jacket. She must have thought it was a defensive gesture because she didn’t hurry. She was savoring the moment. I could tell. Until I fired.

Mary Windsor’s body jerked backwards with the impact and she landed on her back in the threshold of the door. Her gun clattered to the floor and I heard her make a high-pitched whining noise. Then I heard the sound of running feet on the steps up to the front deck.

“Police!” a woman shouted. “Put your weapons down!”

I looked through the door and didn’t see anyone.

“Put your weapons down and come out with your hands in full view!”

This time it was a man who had yelled and I recognized the voice.

I pulled the gun out of my jacket pocket and put it on the floor. I slid it away from me.

“The weapon’s down,” I called out, as loud as the hole in my stomach allowed me to. “But I’m shot. I can’t get up. We’re both shot.”

I first saw the barrel of a pistol come into view in the doorway. Then a hand and then a wet black raincoat containing Detective Lankford. He moved into the house and was quickly followed by his partner, Detective Sobel. Lankford kicked the gun away from Windsor as he came in. He kept his own weapon pointed at me.

“Anybody else in the house?” he asked loudly.

“No,” I said. “Listen to me.”

I tried to sit up but pain shot through my body and Lankford yelled.

“Don’t move! Just stay there!”

“Listen to me. My fam -”

Sobel yelled a command into a handheld radio, ordering paramedics and ambulance transport for two people with gunshot wounds.

“One transport,” Lankford corrected. “She’s gone.”

He pointed his gun at Windsor.

Sobel shoved the radio into her raincoat pocket and came to me. She knelt down and pulled my hand away from my wound. She pulled my shirt out of my pants so she could lift it and see the damage. She then pressed my hand back down on the bullet hole.

“Press down as hard as you can. It’s a bleeder. You hear me, hold your hand down tight.”

“Listen to me,” I said again. “My family’s in danger. You have to -”

“Hold on.”

She reached inside her raincoat and pulled a cell phone off her belt. She flipped it open and hit a speed-dial button. Whoever she called answered right away.

“It’s Sobel. You better bring him back in. His mother just tried to hit the lawyer. He got her first.”

She listened for a moment and asked, “Then, where is he?”

She listened some more and then said good-bye. I stared at her as she closed her phone.

“They’ll pick him up. Your daughter is safe.”

“You’re watching him?”

She nodded.

“We piggy-backed on your plan, Haller. We have a lot on him but we were hoping for more. I told you, we want to clear Levin. We were hoping that if we kicked him loose he’d show us his trick, show us how he got to Levin. But the mother sort of just solved that mystery for us.”

I understood. Even with the blood and life running out of the hole in my gut I was able to put it together. Releasing Roulet had been a play. They were hoping that he’d go after me, revealing the method he had used to defeat the GPS ankle bracelet when he had killed Raul Levin. Only he hadn’t killed Raul. His mother had done it for him.

“Maggie?” I asked weakly.

Sobel shook her head.

“She’s fine. She had to play along because we didn’t know if Roulet had a tap on your line or not. She couldn’t tell you that she and Hayley were safe.”

I closed my eyes. I didn’t know whether just to be thankful that they were okay or to be angry that Maggie had used her daughter’s father as bait for a killer.

I tried to sit up.

“I want to call her. She -”

“Don’t move. Just stay still.”

I leaned my head back on the floor. I was cold and on the verge of shaking, yet I also felt as though I were sweating. I could feel myself getting weaker as my breathing grew shallow.

Sobel pulled the radio out of her pocket again and asked dispatch for an ETA on the paramedics. The dispatcher reported back that the medical help was still six minutes away.

“Hang in there,” Sobel said to me. “You’ll be all right. Depending on what the bullet did inside, you should be all right.”

“Gray…”

I meant to say great with full sarcasm attached. But I was fading.

Lankford came up next to Sobel and looked at me. In a gloved hand he held up the gun Mary Windsor had shot me with. I recognized the pearl grips. Mickey Cohen’s gun. My gun. The gun she shot Raul with.

He nodded and I took it as some sort of signal. Maybe that in his eyes I had stepped up, that he knew I had done their work by drawing the killer out. Maybe it was even the offering of a truce and maybe he wouldn’t hate lawyers so much after this.

Probably not. But I nodded back at him and the small movement made me cough. I tasted something in my mouth and knew it was blood.

“Don’t flatline on us now,” Lankford ordered. “If we end up giving a defense lawyer mouth-to-mouth, we’ll never live it down.”

He smiled and I smiled back. Or tried to. Then the blackness started crowding my vision. Pretty soon I was floating in it.

PART THREE. Postcard from Cuba