Nick exhaled smoke. “You have someplace to be?”
“As a matter of fact, yes. A person I care about is in the hospital. And I have been stuck up here instead of doing what I should have done and gone to see her.”
Charley rose to his feet, looked me straight in the eyes, and rested one of his oversized hands on my shoulder. “Dani?”
“The last I heard, her temperature was through the roof.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “The Border Patrol can patch you through if you can’t get a signal.”
“Good idea.”
The Fort Kent Fire Department had lowered ropes for the first responders to use climbing up and down the incline. I refused the offer of being pulled up and made my way under my own power to the road above. Between the rollover and the river, my body felt as if it had been pounded between a mortar and a pestle.
I caught sight of Zanadakis standing outside an ambulance, talking to someone seated in the back. It had to be Chasse. The disgraced warden had revived quickly under our care. I was too far away to overhear the conversation, but the detective seemed barely able to contain his rage.
Another ambulance had already taken the son to the hospital for emergency ass surgery.
I glanced around for a familiar face among the Border Patrol guys. My phone showed no bars. The feds always get the best toys, including satellite phones for isolated backwaters like this one.
Then I saw the imposing form of Stanley Kellam, making his way through the scrum. His shoulders were hunched, his hands dug in the pockets of his GoreTex jacket. Despite the fact that he had given up his badge years earlier, not a single law enforcement officer stopped him. The aura of command surrounding the man was that overpowering.
When he caught sight of me, he came to an abrupt halt. We stared at each other through the kaleidoscope of emergency vehicle lights. I remembered Vaneese’s warning. Instinctively, my right hand fell to my side where I had holstered my Beretta.
“Kellam!”
The lieutenant started forward again.
I realized where he was going.
There were cruisers of various kinds now between Kellam and me. Huge metal obstacles with groups of men between them, gabbing as cops do at scenes where there are too many of them assembled and not enough tasks to go around.
“Hey, Kellam!”
Two Border Patrol trucks were parked nose to tail, with less than a foot separating them. I stepped onto the bumper of one of the Tahoes, heard its driver shout an obscenity, then threw myself forward.
Kellam had reached the ambulance. Zanadakis had become aware of him. The detective turned toward the former warden with a questioning look on his face.
“Detective! Stop him!”
Zanadakis heard my voice but didn’t catch my meaning. He stepped clear of the open doors, and I caught a glimpse of Chasse Lamontaine gazing out of the brightly lighted ambulance, handcuffed, and with a blanket around his broad shoulders.
The officers nearby must have thought me a madman. I threw myself at Stanley Kellam as he leaned inside the ambulance, pulling the Heckler & Koch pistol from his jacket. It was a point-blank shot with a .45-caliber bullet.
There was only one reason it missed. The second Kellam’s finger curled around the trigger, I slammed his forehead against the door frame. His hand jerked, and the pistol fired into a defibrillator. The hollow point exploded the glass monitor.
By now, I had one hand on Kellam’s thick wrist, trying to keep him from regaining his aim, while I snaked my other arm around his throat. I pulled with all my strength.
The second shot passed over Lamontaine’s bent shoulders and careened off something metal.
The detective, having regained his wits, stomped on Kellam’s Achilles tendon. The lieutenant staggered as I tightened my arm around his throat, but I wasn’t in position to choke the breath out of him or cut the supply of blood flowing to his brain. The big old man kept fighting.
Zanadakis delivered a punch to the back of Kellam’s thigh, to the nerve bundle between his hamstrings. The lieutenant should have crumpled, but he only dropped to one knee. He fired a third shot, this time into the air.
In the end, it took five officers to disarm Stanley Kellam and bring him to the ground. I was pinned atop him by the weight of bodies. One bonehead even punched me in the kidney by mistake.
The cops, local and federal, finally succeeded in cuffing the retired warden and standing him upright. His face was coated with mud from the roadside. He glared with blazing eyes out of the brown mask, his anger directed now at a single person. Me.
“Why?” he demanded.
“Because Chasse didn’t kill Pellerin,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter!”
Stan Kellam had heard the call go out over the police radio. He had sped here to exact vengeance for his dead investigator. It never occurred to him that the person he really wanted to punish was himself.
46
The Border Patrol patched me through on a sat phone to Dani’s hospital room, where my call was answered by her mother.
Nicole Tate was a widow whose husband, a laid-off mill worker, had died before his fiftieth birthday. She was a hairdresser and cosmetologist by trade, and one of the great sadnesses of her life was that her daughter had turned out to be a tomboy who didn’t own a single tube of lipstick.
“How is she?” I asked.
“Asleep.” Nicole was a kind woman by nature but made no effort to hide her frustration with me. “Her temperature is down. She doesn’t remember how she got here and doesn’t understand how sick she is. She keeps telling everyone she wants to go home.”
“Have they figured out what’s wrong?”
“Encephalitis.”
The word might as well have stabbed me in the eardrum. “What?”
“They think it might have been from the tick that bit her.”
“Dani has the Powassan virus?” Encephalitis was one of the diagnostic symptoms.
“They’re not sure.”
The disease was rare and often fatal, and many of
