Hardy 05 - Mercy Rule, The (63 page)

Another tumbler fell into place: Blue’s testimony,
before
her nap, the male voice in Sal’s apartment. It had been Giotti after all.

But his wife was going on, the gun still trained on Hardy’s chest. ‘After he got back to his chambers, he called and told me what had just happened. And
still
, he tried to tell me it was all right. Sal was just having a bad day. How could he believe that? How could he not see?’

‘So what did you decide to do?’

‘I didn’t know exactly. Not when I left to go there. Something, though. I was going to stop him. I brought this gun with me, just in case, but then there was the morphine out on the table. So much quieter and cleaner. I knew how to administer injections. One of my children is diabetic — I knew to put it in the vein. There was this heavy whiskey bottle. Sal never felt anything. I just knocked at his door and he let me in and we talked a minute, just like you and me now. And everything was there, laid out for me. As though God wanted me to do it, wanted to help me.’

With a jolt of terror Hardy realized that he’d led her to her moment. God had provided in this case as well: the building empty except for him. The open door. The cover of darkness for her escape.

It would be her second perfect crime.

He thought of a final question. ‘Does your husband know?’

It wasn’t really a laugh. It was too derisive. ‘Mario? How could I tell him? He’s a good man, a judge. He believes in justice. He doesn’t understand that sometimes you have to act, not pass some abstract judgment.’

‘So what does he think happened? That it was just his good luck?’

‘He believes it was Graham. I think you convinced him. For which I thank you.’

This was her closing statement. Hardy could feel it.

The notion came to him — an instinct, far less than a thought or an idea. There was no time to analyze how good it was. In despair, his last effort, trying not to give it away with his upper body, he moved his foot under the desk and kicked a leg of it, producing a wooden thud.

This was going to have to be fast if he was to have a prayer.

‘What was that?’ She had to take her eyes off him for an instant. If he could make her do that…

‘Maybe you forgot to lock the downstairs door behind you too.’

Her head began to turn, and only slightly. It was going to have to be enough. Hardy lunged for his banker’s lamp as she fired. He went rolling with it over, then off, the desk. The lamp crashed to the floor, plunging the room into darkness as the sound of more gunfire exploded in his ears and he knew in the blinding flash of pain, God, he’d been hit. A third shot. Another.

It was his leg, below the knee. Here came another shot. She wasn’t wasting any time. He felt her steps on the floor, the vibrations through it. She was coming toward him as he lay.

The only light now with the lamp broken, and it wasn’t much, came from the dimmers in the hallway outside his door. Fighting the shock and pain, he pulled his back up against the wood and the cover the desk barely provided. When he looked up, her form was there above him. Even in the darkness he could see the arm coming down. He was on his side, his back pressed against the side of the desk.

With no hesitation she fired again. The lick of flame across his belly.

He didn’t want to die like this.

Aiming for a last shot to finish him, she finally made a mistake, coming too close. She was now within his reach, and he grabbed for her near foot, catching her at the ankle, bringing his other hand up around her leg.

He pulled as hard as he could, twisting her foot as he did. She screamed and fell in a heap next to him.

The gun hit the floor and went off again. He couldn’t risk letting go of her leg, even for a second, but began pulling himself up her struggling body, arm over arm. He could feel a weakness spreading in him, but he couldn’t give in to that. He had to manage to hold on to her.

She was pounding her fists on his head and shoulders, screaming at him. ‘No! No! No!’ Rolling over onto something hard, he felt the gun and grabbed for it, getting it into his hand, then rolling away.

‘I’ve got the gun,’ he said. ‘Don’t move. It’s over.’

‘No!’ She kicked out in his direction. It wasn’t over for her. She wasn’t going to let him take her, not alive. The shadow of her came at him with all her strength, hit him full in the chest, knocking him backward again, grabbing for the gun.

His leg, as he tried to kick her off him, wouldn’t do what he asked it to. When he twisted to get at her, his stomach stabbed at him. He screamed involuntarily at the pain, but she was a wild animal over him, scratching at his face, lunging for the weapon in his left hand.

He had no other option, his strength and mobility were ebbing away. He snapped the gun up, feeling it connect with flesh and bone — the side of her head. It stunned her briefly and without any reflection he brought the gun up again, connected with flesh and she collapsed to the floor.

He had to get to a light, a phone, get some distance on her. With all he had left, he pushed her off him.

Then wasn’t sure he could get up at all. His leg wasn’t responding. His stomach prevented any turning of his torso.

But he had to.

Pulling himself up by the corner of the desk, he finally got his dead leg pulled over to his doorway and hit the light switch. Pat Giotti was already moving again, coming to.

‘Don’t. Don’t move!’ he gasped at her.

She was wearing black spandex leggings and a black nylon windbreaker and there was blood — his blood, he realized — all over her. He couldn’t get a breath. Hyperventilating, he kept the gun trained on her as he hobbled his way across to the desk again. Knocking the receiver off, he pushed 911, picked the receiver up again.

‘Stay back!’ It was all he could get out.

But she’d gotten to her knees now, again, less than five feet from where, shakily, he stood.

He had the telephone receiver in one hand, the gun in the other. When the operator answered, Hardy started to say his name. Consciousness was fading. He gasped to try to fill his lungs.

At that moment she leapt at him again, for the gun, over the desk.

He’d been wounded twice and had lost a deal of blood already, and she had only been stunned and now seemed to have regained all of her strength. With the adrenaline driving her, it was considerable.

When she hit him full body across the chest, he collapsed again under her. Both of her hands were on the gun now as she struggled to wrest it from him, twisted it back and got hold of it. She swung it around.

Hardy saw the black hole of the barrel center on his face.

A last, desperate grip, going to her wrist, bringing his other hand up, trying to slap it away, all the way around.

The gun fired and she screamed, her body arching back. ‘You’ve shot me! Oh, God, I’m shot.’

The hand holding the gun went to her shoulder, but she managed to keep hold of it. Falling forward onto Hardy to keep him from moving, she jammed the weapon forward into the flesh under his jaw.

She pulled the trigger.

Click.

Again.
Click
.

An
anguished groan and Pat Giotti’s body, already collapsed on top of him, went limp. Hardy pushed to roll her off him. She’d been hit in the shoulder. She wasn’t going to die from it.

He struggled. Got himself up. To the telephone.

He mumbled something, tried to get out his name and address. It sounded funny, though, indistinct. He tried again.

Shooting.

Fading fast. Darkness closing in.

Hurry.

He blacked out.

40

Sarah stood before Glitsky’s desk, the door closed behind them. She was waiting for the boom to be lowered. Since the verdict on Graham, and then with the attack on Hardy and the resulting rumors and revelations about the Giottis, the Russo case continued to enthrall the public.

The feeding frenzy for the tiniest bits of news surrounding the principals had continued unabated. Over the weekend a television reporter, trying to make the connection between Craig Ising and Graham’s income, had interviewed Ising and stumbled upon the information that Sarah had been with Graham at his softball tournament on the weekend after he’d been indicted. This had made the news last night and her lieutenant had summoned her into his office first thing this morning. The last straw.

‘I don’t have any excuse, sir. I did it. I was there.’ Glitsky sat behind his desk, looking up at her. He didn’t want to hear this. Not only was it grounds for dismissal from the force, but harboring a fugitive was a felony. ‘All I can say is that I was sure Graham hadn’t committed any crime. And I didn’t harbor anyone. I had him turn himself in, didn’t I?’

‘Turn himself in? You had a man wanted for murder and you decided not to arrest him. That’s not your decision to make, Sergeant.’

‘Yes, sir, I realize that. I was wrong.’

‘The grand jury had indicted him.’

‘Yes, sir.’

She didn’t have to go on about the political circus surrounding that indictment; Glitsky knew it as well as she did. Now he opened his desk drawer, thought a minute, slammed it closed. ‘The POA’ — Police Officers Association — ‘doesn’t want you fired, of course. They’re telling me they’ll sue the department. First woman in homicide, all that crap. I hope you realize that if you were a man you’d be out of here.’

Evans stuck out her chin. ‘With all respect, sir, if I were a man, this wouldn’t be news. It would never have come up. It would have gotten buried.’

Glitsky snorted. ‘You really think that?’

‘Yes, sir. No offense. I’ve seen it happen several times.’

The lieutenant took that in. ‘If you wanted to step down on your own, you could save everybody a lot of trouble.’

‘It would make a lot of trouble for me, sir. I’ve worked hard to get here and I deserve to be here.’

Glitsky looked long and hard at the sergeant’s face. She had made a tremendous error in judgment, but she still had the spine, independence, and intelligence that made a great cop. He considered his words with care. ‘You know, Sergeant, this detail — homicide — it’s not heaven. You don’t get here and then stop.’

‘I didn’t say—’

He held up a hand. ‘You said you deserved to be here, you earned it. Well, that’s true, you did. But you don’t just earn it and that’s the end of it. You continue to deserve to be here, every day. Every single day, or you leave. That’s the gig.’

Sarah took the rebuke stoically. ‘He was found innocent, Lieutenant. He didn’t kill anybody. Nothing like this is ever going to happen to me again. Graham didn’t even get disbarred.’ She paused, considering, then added, ‘We’re going to be married.’

Glitsky opened the drawer again, looked down at the scratch he’d prepared and signed off on — the formal charges he’d planned to send to the chief. All at once he realized he wasn’t going to do that.

He pushed the drawer closed and brought his eyes up to hers. ‘I’m happy for you,’ he said.

There were days in the next few weeks, before he finally found out for sure, when Hardy wondered if it had all been worth it. He had had to know what had happened with Sal Russo, and the knowledge had nearly killed him. The gash that the second bullet had traced across his middle was a constant reminder of how close it had been. Another inch and a half and the slug would have ripped through both lungs and his heart.

He knew he still wasn’t finished with the nightmares; the last
click
under his jaw was burned into his psyche. He would jolt awake, as often as not drenched in sweat, and lie there in bed next to Frannie until he finally gathered the strength to rise, to limp through his darkened house. Look in on both children. Rearrange the elephants.

Sit in the chair in his living room in the dark. And still, with everything he’d suffered, he’d been lucky. The leg wound had passed cleanly through his calf muscle. His doctor assured him that he’d be able to jog his four-mile loop again within six months, although his long-jump career was probably effectively over.

Concentration, although improving, was still a problem. He would be sitting with Frannie or the kids and suddenly go blank, seeing the gun leveled at him, the perfect black little
o
.

He saw it now, at nearly noon on a Tuesday in the middle of October, and he jerked his head up. He was in the Solarium trying to follow an article in one of the law journals about some new ‘natural death’ hospice care facilities that were apparently operating within the law in Oregon and Montana and maybe several other states. He was making notes on arguments that might help his doctor clients here in San Francisco, although it was beginning to look as though Dean Powell was going to accept very reasonable nolo pleas — fines and light community service, which Hardy’s clients were doing anyway — for most of them.

Hardy had checked with the licensing board and already had a promise that the doctors would be allowed to continue to practice. Freeman had told him that under the circumstances, Hardy might even do better. ‘Hell,’ he’d said, ‘you could probably get a letter of apology.’

But neither Hardy nor his doctors, some of whom had recently discovered that political grandstanding had consequences in the real world, were willing to push their luck.

Hardy liked to think that the trial of Graham Russo had made the attorney general rethink his hard-line position on assisted suicide. If nothing else, Powell had come to realize that his earlier push for prosecution of these doctors was politically unpopular. And if it wasn’t going to win votes, the AG wasn’t interested in it.

Hardy was sitting up straight with his back against his chair. He told himself that the bandages around his chest were good for his posture. Any slouching was intolerable. There was a comforting and familiar buzz in the lobby behind him — associates coming and going, phones ringing. He looked out through the glass into the enclosed garden area where some pigeons were enjoying the sunshine.

Hardy was going to be all right, except that now his chest was an agony of itching from where they’d shaved him, where the last scabs were falling away. He tensed his calf and felt the familiar stab of pain. It, too, was healing, he supposed, but it wasn’t done yet. He went back to his article.