He was trapped.
He could pull the trigger, and Morales would pull the trigger. Maybe Morales would be dead, leaving Berger and Marino. But Scarpetta would be dead.
“You got a little problem with proof, Gorilla Man. Anybody ever call you that?” Morales said. “I like that. Gorilla Man.”
Marino couldn’t tell if he was drunk or high. But he was on something.
“Because . . . because”—he sniggered—“you’re the proverbial knuckle dragger, now, aren’t you. Va-nil-la Go-ril-la. How you like that?”
“Marino, don’t drop your gun,” Scarpetta said with amazing steadiness, but her face looked dead. “He can’t shoot everyone at once. Don’t drop your gun.”
“You know, she’s such a hero, ain’t she?” Morales jammed the barrel hard against her skull, and she winced silently. “One brave lady, having all these stiffs for patients who can’t thank her or complain.”
He bent over and touched her ear with his tongue.
“Poor thing. Couldn’t work with living people? That’s what they say about doctors like you. That and you gotta have the air-conditioning on fifty or you can’t sleep. Put the fucking gun down!” he yelled at Marino.
Their eyes locked.
“Okay.” Morales shrugged. He said to Scarpetta, “Sleepy time, and you get to see your precious little Lucy again. Did you tell Marino I blew her brains out upstairs? Say hello to everyone in heaven for me.”
Marino knew he meant it. He knew people meant it when they really didn’t care, and Morales didn’t care. Scarpetta was nothing to him. Nobody was anything to him. He was going to do it.
Marino said, “Don’t shoot. I’m going to put my gun down. Don’t shoot.”
“No!” Scarpetta raised her voice. “No!”
Berger said nothing, because there was nothing she could say that would make a difference. It was better for her to say nothing, and she knew it.
Marino didn’t want to put his gun down. Morales had killed Lucy. He would kill every one of them. Lucy was dead. She must be upstairs. If Marino kept his gun, Morales couldn’t kill all of them. But he’d kill Scarpetta. Marino couldn’t let him do that. Lucy was dead. All of them would be dead.
A tiny red laser dot landed on Morales’s right temple. The little dot flickered and was shaking badly, then slowed and moved just a little, like a ruby-red firefly.
“I’m putting my gun down on the floor,” Marino said, squatting.
He didn’t look up or back. He didn’t let on he saw anything as he set his Glock on the Oriental rug, his eyes never leaving Morales’s.
“Now stand up real slow,” Morales said.
He raised the pistol away from Scarpetta’s head and pointed it at Marino as the red firefly crawled around his ear.
“And say Mommy,” Morales said as the laser dot went perfectly still on his right temple.
The gunshot was a loud spit from the gallery, and Morales dropped. Marino had never actually seen that for real, someone dropping like a puppet with its strings cut, and he bolted around the couch and grabbed the gun off the floor as blood poured out of the side of Morales’s head, spreading across the black marble floor. Marino grabbed the phone and called 911 as he ran into the kitchen for a knife, and changed his mind and grabbed a pair of poultry shears out of the cutlery block, and snapped through the ties around Scarpetta’s and Berger’s wrists.
Scarpetta ran upstairs and couldn’t feel her own hand on the railing.
Lucy was just inside a doorway that led from the gallery into the master bedroom, blood everywhere, great smears of it from where she’d crawled across the bathroom floor, then across hardwood, to where she’d shot Morales with the Glock forty-caliber pistol next to her. She was sitting up, leaning against the wall, and shivering, a towel in her lap. She was so bloody, Scarpetta couldn’t tell exactly where’d she been hit, but it was her head, possibly the back of her head. Her hair was soaked with blood, and blood was running down her neck and her naked back, pooling behind and around her.
Scarpetta struggled out of her winter coat, then her blazer, and got on the floor next to her, and her hands felt dead as she touched the back of Lucy’s head. She pressed her blazer against Lucy’s scalp and Lucy complained loudly.
“It’s going to be all right, Lucy,” Scarpetta said. “What happened? Can you show me where you’ve been shot?”
“Right there. Ow! Jesus Christ! Right there. Fuck! I’m okay. I’m so cold.”
Scarpetta ran her hand down Lucy’s slippery neck and back, couldn’t feel anything, and her hands were beginning to burn and tingle, but her fingers didn’t seem to belong to her.
Berger appeared at the top of the stairs.
“Get towels,” Scarpetta said to her. “Lots of them.”
Berger could see Lucy was alert, she was all right. Berger hurried toward the bathroom.
Scarpetta said to Lucy, “Is any spot tender back here? Tell me where you feel pain.”
“Nothing back there.”
“You sure?” Scarpetta did the best she could, gently palpating with a hand that wasn’t working right. “Making sure you’ve got nothing going on with your spine.”
“It’s not back there. It feels as if my left ear’s gone. I can hardly hear anything.”
She scooted behind Lucy so that she was sitting behind her, her legs stretched out on either side of her, her back against the wall, and she carefully felt the back of Lucy’s heavily bleeding scalp.
“My hand’s pretty numb,” Scarpetta said. “Guide my fingers, Lucy. Show me where it hurts.”
Lucy reached back and took her hand and guided it to a spot.
“Right there. Goddamn that hurts. I think it might be under the skin. Shit that hurts. God, don’t press on it, that hurts!”
Scarpetta didn’t have her reading glasses on and couldn’t see anything but a blur of bloody hair. She pressed her bare hand against the back of Lucy’s head and Lucy yelled.
“We have to stop the bleeding,” Scarpetta said very calmly, kindly, almost as if she was talking to a child. “The bullet must be right under the scalp, and that’s why it’s hurting when we apply pressure. You’re going to be all right. You’re going to be just fine. The ambulance will be here any minute.”
There were furrows around Berger’s wrists, and her hands were bright red and were very stiff and awkward as she opened several large white bath sheets and tucked them around Lucy’s neck and under her legs. Lucy was naked and wet and must have just stepped out of the shower when Morales shot her. Berger got down on the floor next to them, and blood got all over her hands and her blouse as she touched Lucy and told her repeatedly that she would be fine. Everything was going to be fine.
“He’s dead,” Berger told Lucy. “He was about to shoot Marino, to shoot all of us.”
The nerves in Scarpetta’s hands were waking up and angry, a million pins sticking, and she vaguely perceived a small, hard lump at the back of Lucy’s skull, several inches to the left of the midline of it.
“Right here,” she said to Lucy. “Help me, if you can.”
Lucy lifted her hand and helped her find the perforation, and Scarpetta worked the bullet out, and Lucy complained loudly. It was medium- to large-caliber, semi-jacketed, and deformed, and she handed it to Berger and pressed a towel firmly against the wound to stop the bleeding.
Scarpetta’s sweater was soaked with blood, the floor around her slippery with it. She didn’t think the bullet had penetrated the skull. She suspected it had struck at an angle and expended most of its kinetic energy within a relatively small space within milliseconds. There are so many blood vessels close to the surface of the scalp, it bleeds alarmingly, always looks worse than it is. Scarpetta pressed the towel very firmly against the wound, her right hand on Lucy’s forehead, holding her.
Lucy leaned heavily against her and shut her eyes. Scarpetta felt the side of her neck and checked her pulse, and it was rapid but not alarmingly so, and she was breathing fine. She wasn’t restless and didn’t seem confused. There were no signs she was going into shock. Scarpetta held her forehead again, pressing hard against the wound to stop the bleeding.
“Lucy, I need you to open your eyes and stay awake. You listening? Can you tell us what happened?” Scarpetta said. “He ran upstairs and we heard a gunshot. Do you remember what happened?”
“You saved everybody’s life,” Berger said. “You’re going to be fine. All of us are fine.”
