Death at the Wheel (35 page)

I could have slept all day. My body needed the rest but I've never mastered the art. Besides, the smell of bacon was enticing. I staggered to the breakfast table, stiff as a board and limping badly, to find bacon burning in the pan while Rosie and Dom stared riveted at the small kitchen television. They both turned with such alarm I wondered if they'd forgotten I was in the house. "Bacon's burning," I said. I dumped myself into a chair, put my head on my arms, and closed my eyes. I felt awful.

Dom and Rosie silently rescued the bacon. In the unnatural silence, the announcer's voice penetrated the fog of my brain, as he said, in that carefully modulated voice they install at the factory where they make newspeople, "...the standoff, which has now been going on for more than three hours. A police spokesman on the scene expressed concern for a state trooper who traded himself for two civilian hostages, a elderly man and a young child, earlier this morning. The trooper was later wounded by Moreau when police came too close to the house. Negotiators spoke with the gunman by phone minutes ago but were unable to persuade him to release the trooper, who has tentatively been identified as State Police Detective Andre Lemieux."

There was more but I didn't hear it. I'd gone cold all over. An icy, bone-chilling fear. Fear that I'd lived with on the edges of my consciousness as long as I'd known and loved him. The fear of losing him like I'd lost David that had held me back from commitment; that had made me hold loving in reserve until needing him and loving him and the pleasure and comfort of having him around had forced me to open the door, despite my fear of being left alone again. Now here I was with the door standing wide open and a cold wind pouring in.

The camera panned the scene, a jumble of police cars, fire trucks, vans, ambulances, and news vans. Men with rifles crouching behind cars. Men in helmets and protective vests. I jumped up. "I've got to go there. I've got to go now...." I had no idea where "there" was. I had no car, no purse, no credit cards, clothes, or shoes. Nothing but a borrowed nightgown.

They stood holding hands and watching me. Worried parents whose daughter was in trouble. They knew what I meant. Rosie had been a cop's wife almost as long as Dom had been a cop. She'd known those nights of waiting, when the phone finally rings and your heart stops beating; when your hello is as fragile and tentative as a baby's breath. And Dom knew. Dom had made those calls and gotten the call himself; heard the hushed pained voices, had almost lost Rosie.

Dom called in to take an emergency personal day while Rosie and I got me dressed. I'm taller; she's broader. I ended up in a pair of their son's baggy jeans, fashionably short and wide enough for a hippo, cinched at the waist with a belt, a stretched-out blue sweater that Rosie apologized for, and socks. We tried to find shoes but I felt like Cinderella's sisters, trying to find something that fit. Rosie's feet were just too small. "Forget it," she said, "Dom can stop somewhere and get you a pair." She dug in her purse and handed me a fistful of bills. "Take this. I know you don't have any money." I shoved them in my pocket, kissed her, and we were off.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"Chelsea," he said. "Little town near Augusta. How far is that?"

"Three and a half, four, if you drive the speed limit."

"Cops don't drive the speed limit." He reached into the backseat and grabbed a blanket. "Wrap this around you."

"How did you...?"

"Been there. Done that," he said.

"Of course."

"You won't be warm again until you see for yourself that he's all right."

"What if he's not?"

"We will cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, we assume things will turn out okay. It's the only way to function."

We didn't talk much on the way. The rain was hard and steady, with rotten visibility as cars and trucks threw up residual sand left from the winter. My mind kept going back to the what ifs. Things I should have said or done that I might never get to, now. The things Julie Bass and I had talked about last Monday.

Was it just last Monday? It seemed like several lifetimes ago that I'd gone home for Easter dinner, shaken Julie's delicate hand, and been drawn into the situation that had dominated my mind ever since. Would my discoveries over the weekend give her lawyer enough to persuade a judge to let her go free on bail?

I hoped so. A week without their mother was an eternity for Camilla and Emma. And, though no one had asked my opinion, I didn't think her brother Duncan was fit to care for a slug, despite his bull-headed loyalty.

Duncan Donahue. The terror of the north. Julie had said it with such affection. More proof, as if the world needed it, that love is blind. This morning we'd be traveling past the spot where he'd driven me off the road. He'd done it once. Had he done it again last night? Had I noticed anything about the person who bumped me? Could it have been Calvin Bass? He had good reason to hate me for coming in at the last minute and spoiling his neat little scheme for running away with the girl and the goods. Had it been a shiny green Lexus? Or perhaps it was Eliot Ramsay, figuring that if he couldn't get the mortgages, he could at least get me. None of it made any sense. There was no reason for any of them to run me off the road. The person who was most upset with me was my mother, and she'd been too busy giving a party.

I tried to remember what I'd seen but it was hopeless. As I'd said to Dom last night, where the accident was concerned, my mind was a great big pudding. Last night I'd said it was a car but I wasn't sure. For all that I could recall now, it could have been a car, a truck, or a buffalo. There's nothing like a few good knocks on the head to scramble a memory. The mind doesn't like to remember bad times. It's as protective as a doting mother, storing those bad memories away out of sight to keep us from getting upset.

I shifted restlessly, trying to find a comfortable position. There was no comfortable position. I was too beat up and I was so tired of hurting. "Dom, what's the matter with me? Why do I keep getting myself into these messes?"

"You don't mean like what's happening with Andre?"

"No. I mean with Julie Bass... this business that happened last night, all the stuff that's happened in the last week. Other people don't do this kind of thing. Ask the average Joe on the street when was the last time someone held a gun to his head and he'll just give you a funny look."

"Is this rhetorical or do you want an answer?"

"Answer."

"You care more than a lot of people about making the world right. Making it safe. You're the big kid—the big sister—who makes sure the littler kids are okay."

"Can I get over it?"

"You mean, like having a cold? Take some Vitamin C and stop caring?"

"Like with Julie Bass. Let her handle her own problems. Or my mother can do it. This was all her idea!"

"Let me ask you this," he said. "Why didn't you just say no when your mother asked you to help?"

I considered his question. "At first, I did it because Mom asked me to. And because Julie reminded me of Carrie...."

"And you couldn't help Carrie," he suggested.

"You think I'm going to spend my whole life taking care of lame ducks because I couldn't help Carrie?"

"I don't know if this really is about Carrie," he said. "But I know some of it is about your mother."

"We had the worst fight last night. I don't expect she'll ever speak to me again."

"How do you feel about that?"

"You sound like someone's shrink, Florio."

"Sometimes cops are a lot like shrinks. Are you avoiding the question?"

"Watch out!" He swerved to avoid a cardboard box in the center of our lane. It bounced onto the hood, off the windshield, and tumbled away over the roof.

"Hey! It's okay. It's okay," he said, stroking my shoulder gently. I realized I was cowering against the door with my hands over my face. Like the nurse said. I might have a hard time riding in cars for a while.

I dropped my hands and sat up. "So," he said, "this fight you had with your mother. You want to talk about it?"

"Maybe later. Right now I'm choking on my heart. It's stuck in my throat. I feel like I'm about to take the hardest exam of my life and I'm not ready for it."

"You are," he said. I didn't know if he meant taking a hard exam or ready for it and he didn't explain.

I was so tense I'd shatter if anything touched me hard. "Tell me a story, Dom," I said.

"Once upon a time..." he began.

"In Italian."

"Cara mia
," he began, and told me a story. A long, expressive story with different voices and waving of hands, explosive sounds, soft passages. It was very soothing. I don't understand a word of Italian.

We were more than two hours into the trip and well over the speed limit, with the situation reported as unchanged, when a blue light loomed up behind us. Dom slowed down and pulled over, muttering under his breath, still in Italian. I didn't need to know the language to understand what he was saying.

The trooper who appeared at the window was tight-faced and frowning, with a torrent of rain rolling off his wide-brimmed hat. "Sir, do you have any idea how fast you were going?"

"I know exactly how fast I was going, Officer," Dom said. "I'm trying to get someplace in a hurry."

"And where would that be?"

"Chelsea. That trooper the gunman is holding hostage? Andre Lemieux?" Dom pointed at me. "This lady is in love with him. She says she's got to get there. Under the circumstances, I had to agree."

His stiffness relaxed a trifle. "Your license, sir?" Dom handed over the folder with his police ID, badge, and driver's license. "Detective Florio?" Dom nodded. "And the lady's name?"

"Thea Kozak," I said. "You could ask Roland Proffit. Or just about anyone he works with. Only please hurry." It took all my self-control, which I had very little of today, to keep from jumping out the window, grabbing the man, and shaking him until his teeth rattled.

"Wait here," he said, and walked back to his car.

We sat in the rain, the motor idling, the wipers clicking, the clock running. Both staring straight ahead. Neither of us speaking. Time and its possibilities lay heavy on us. Not that there would be anything we could do when we got there, but at least we'd be there. Dom was right. I couldn't get warm. Not with my blanket. Not with the heat on. Not by drinking coffee from the Thermos Rosie had given us. I wouldn't be warm again until I saw Andre.

The trooper appeared at the window and rapped on it sharply. He handed Dom's identification back. "Follow me," he said. We did the rest of the trip with a police escort, blazing along first on high-speed roads, past the scene of my earlier encounter with Dunk Donahue, on into Gardiner, and crossed the Kennebec, until we came to a barrier across the road. The cruiser stopped. We stopped behind it. The trooper and Dom got out. Dom opened the back door, pulled out a yellow raincoat, and shrugged it on, handing a second one to me.

The three of us approached the barrier. "What's happening?" our escort asked.

"Heard a couple shots a minute ago. I don't know if anything—"

I ducked around them and started to run. Running not like the battered wreck I was but like the track star I'd once been, the cherry-red Converse hightops Dom had bought me flashing as I charged through puddles and crunched over sand. I didn't care if seven hundred people were chasing me. I ran past other police cars, past knots of civilians, past the ambulance, still standing ready. I would have run right through the cops and into the house but someone tackled me, grabbed me, and pinned me to the ground. What the hell. I was getting used to lying in the mud.

It was like mud wrestling, as he tried to restrain me and I tried to get away and we would have fought to the death but someone pulled him off, grabbed me, and pulled me roughly to my feet. "Just what the hell is going on here? What do you think you're doing, young lady? If you're another of those goddamned reporters, trying to get yourself killed to get a better story..."

I looked into the angry white face of Andre's boss, Jack Leonard, peering out from under his hat. "Is he alive, Jack?" I said.

"Thea?"

Oblivious to the mud, I gripped his arms and leaned right into his face, violating his personal space. "Is he alive? Do you know if he's alive?" I asked again. I was probably yelling.

He shook his head. "We don't know."

"What were the shots?"

He shrugged. "Moreau just came to the window and let off a few. He's got to be getting tired. It's been six hours...."

Dom came up to us and I introduced them, explaining that Dom had driven me up, and how kind the trooper had been to give us an escort. He was panting and puffing. "I didn't know you could run like that," he said.

"I can't," I said. "Fear gave wings to my feet."

A small, dark man in heavy gear came up and whispered in Jack's ear. "Excuse me," he said, nodding toward the house, "phone call. Stay back behind the van, please. I'll be back as soon as I can." He followed the dark man forward to join a group of men in similar gear clustered behind a smaller van. Someone handed him a phone. His lips moved, stopped, and he listened.

I leaned against the van, pulling my hood back so I could see Dom's face. "This would be a good time to be a smoker." He nodded. "What's all this supposed to accomplish? Andre could be dying in there. He could be—" I couldn't say it.

"It's always better to try and talk them out than to get people killed."

Jack came back, looking grimmer than ever. "He wants something to eat. Gave us his order. Two Quarter Pounders, two supersize fries, and two coffees."

"Sounds like food for two," I said hopefully. "If Andre can eat, he must be okay."

"Could be a ploy,” Jack said. “Could be the scumbag... uh... Moreau... is just very hungry. He's had a long night." He said something to a trooper who whirled around, raced to a cruiser, and roared away, siren blasting, and something to another trooper who went over to the ambulance. Then he pulled out a handkerchief and held it out to me. "You've... uh... got some mud... on your... uh... face." My presence was definitely making his job harder. It wasn't just a cop thing anymore. Now they had family—if I counted as family—looking over their shoulders. "You two want to go sit in a car or something? Get out of the rain? No sense in the two of you freezing. We'll call you the minute anything happens."