Third Degree

helicopter.

Danny hung suspended in the darkness above the river, as alone and alive as he’d ever been. Shields was probably still alive, too, tumbling down through space. The nickel-plated pistol lay on the empty seat, unnecessary now.

He’s hit by now, Danny thought, looking at the altimeter. They were high enough that Shields would have reached terminal velocity prior to impact. Danny had heard grisly stories from a Vietnam- era CIA pilot, comparative descriptions of what happened when a prisoner was thrown from a chopper and landed in water as opposed to smacking dirt or concrete, or was ripped to shreds in treetops, strung through the canopy like red and pink ribbons. Shields was dead, no doubt about it.

Danny pushed down the collective and dropped toward the river, searching for the body. The two bridges threw off ambient light, but not enough to help him sight Shields. He didn’t really want to see the corpse, but Laurel was certain to ask, not to mention the sheriff. In that moment Danny realized that he believed Laurel was still alive, in spite of her wounds and unconsciousness.

He started to switch on the searchlight, but then he noticed people lining the rail of the bridge above him. There was no way anybody had seen Shields leap from the chopper, but if Danny started searching the water with a light, it wouldn’t be hard to figure out what had happened. God, how Laurel would suffer if that story got out. Her kids, too. Grant Shields would go through life dreading questions about his father. What happened to your real dad? Uh, he died. How? Killed himself. Wow, dude, I’m sorry. Danny didn’t want the boy to suffer through that conversation again and again. And with a little luck…he might not have to.

Danny executed a quick pedal turn, then swept upriver, jinking from side to side like a pilot under duress, but steadily cheating toward the Louisiana bank. The inside of a river bend is the shallow side, since it doesn’t bear the full pressure of the current trying to cut its way into the land. Danny headed into a patch of darkness along the inner shore, not far from a seafood restaurant, a place where he knew there was a sandbar. When he saw the pale line where the water met the sand, he picked up the shiny automatic and fired two shots through the windshield.

Then he rolled back the throttle, shut off the fuel, and pulled his second autorotation of the night.

He wouldn’t have done it if the chopper wasn’t insured-Lusahatcha County couldn’t afford to replace an aircraft-but it was. Had there been no chance of witnesses, he might have done things differently-jettisoned the doors, for one thing, SOP for ditching-but with towns on both sides of the river and the levee close, someone might well witness the “crash.” And the aircraft might be recovered. He needed all the witness statements and physical evidence to bear out a scenario in which two men had fought until the end. That would be the story for the sheriff, anyway. Laurel’s children could be told something more palatable, at least until they were old enough to understand.

As the Bell fell toward the shallows, Danny took his feet off the pedals and let the ship spin beneath her rotors, as she might if her pilot had been ripped away from the controls. After four or five rotations, he felt like puking, but he steadied the craft just in time to flare before impact. As the dark water rushed up to meet him, he made sure he was less than twenty feet from shore, then dropped the Bell into the river.

Helicopters always roll when they fall into water. The rule is to not fight the roll but assist it, but Danny never got the chance. When the first rotor hit the water, the ship was slammed onto its side as though by the hand of God. River water poured through the smashed Plexiglas, and the Bell began to sink. Danny knew he should have taken a big breath before impact, but he hadn’t thought of it. Now he fought to escape his harness with barely enough air to keep his brain alight. The massive power of the Mississippi carried the chopper downstream like a piece of driftwood. A millisecond before fear became panic, Danny’s training asserted itself, the belt disengaged, and he swam through the hole where the door should have been, praying he was still close enough to the bank to swim to safety after he surfaced.

He broke through to the air and into what seemed a ring of flaming islands. Pools of JP-4 floating on the water. By the light of the burning fuel he saw the sandbar. Kicking hard, he fought his way toward the grainy shingle, then crawled high enough on the sand to be safe if anything exploded.

“Be alive,” he said to Laurel. “Just be alive.”

Fifteen minutes later, Danny was led to the backseat of Sheriff Ellis’s cruiser and given a blanket and a hot cup of coffee. He stank of kerosene. He was lucky that he hadn’t caught fire during his swim to shore. A dozen cruisers were parked on the crushed-oystershell lot of the seafood restaurant, some from Lusahatcha County, some from Adams County, and others from Concordia Parish. A crowd of officers stared at the burning wreckage floating downriver. Before long, Ellis heaved his bearlike form into the front seat. He cranked his bulk around, laid his forearm on the seat, and studied Danny, his eyes unreadable.

“They told me Laurel’s in surgery,” Danny said.

Ellis cleared his throat. “Mrs. Shields grabbed her husband’s arm at the instant Carl fired. To save your life, apparently. Carl’s bullet hit Dr. Shields’s gun. Mrs. Shields was struck by shards of glass and fragments of the gun, but also by some fragments of Carl’s bullet.”

Danny steeled himself for the worst. “How bad?”

“She just got into surgery. They stabilized her in the ER.”

“You’re not telling me anything.”

“They don’t know yet, damn it. They don’t know what all got hit, because the wound tracks have to be probed.”

“Any head wounds?”

“No.”

Thank God. “What about her stomach?”

“The verdict’s still out on the baby, according to the ER doc. You rest and get your head clear. You’ve got a lot of questions to answer.”

Danny looked downriver at the burning fuel, fading now as it slid southward toward Athens Point. The lights on the bluff across the water seemed to look down in reproach, but he didn’t care.

“You should have told me about Mrs. Shields,” Ellis said. “You and her, I mean.”

“What would you have done if I had?”

“Probably sent you home.”

“Exactly.”

Ellis grunted. “Well, look what’s happened this way.”

“Shields’s kids are alive. Laurel’s alive, at least for now. It could have ended a lot worse.”

“Trace Breen is dead.”

“Whose fault you figure that is?”

A long and weary sigh seemed to shrink the sheriff.

“Don’t say that around Ray. Not if you want to live another day.”

Danny took a sip of coffee, savoring the heat as it migrated down his to his chest. “Ray has no business leading the Tactical Response Unit. He hasn’t got the temperament for it.”

“I agree with you there.”

“I want to go to the hospital, Sheriff.”

Ellis grunted again, disagreeably this time. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. You don’t want the rumors starting any faster than they have to.”

“I don’t care about rumors.”

“She might.”

“St. Raphael’s, Billy Ray. Come on. Back to Athens Point. Haul ass. I’ve chauffeured you enough times to earn a ride.”

Ellis took a deep breath, then blew out more air than Danny could hold in both lungs. “Don’t spill that coffee.”

He closed his door, started the cruiser, and swung it up over the levee. Soon they were on Louisiana 15, headed north through empty black cotton fields with Ellis’s lights flashing red against the rain, the kind of night run Huey Long had favored in his heyday. This was the fastest route back to Athens Point, since Highway 61, on the Mississippi side, ran southward through Woodville, thirty miles east of the city. As the cruiser roared along the deserted highway at ninety-five miles per hour, Danny went over the sequence of events prior to the assault, when