Night Shift (23 page)

“He can’t help you now. No one can. We’re all alone. I’ve waited a long time for us to be alone.”

“Why?” She was beyond fear now. It was Boyd’s blood on the blade, and grief left no room for fear. “Why, Billy?”

“You killed my brother.”

“No. No, I didn’t.” She stepped back, into the booth. Hot hysteria bubbled in her throat. A cold chill sheened her skin. “I didn’t kill John. I hardly knew him.”

“He loved you.” He limped forward, the knife in front of him, his eyes on hers. His feet were bare. He wore only camouflage pants and a dark stocking cap pulled low over his graying hair and brows. Though he had smeared his face and chest and arms with black, she could see the tattoo over his heart. The twin to the one she had seen over John McGillis’s.

“You were going to marry him. He told me.”

“He misunderstood.” She let out a quick gasp as he jabbed with the knife. Her chair toppled with a crash as she fell back against the console.

“Don’t lie to me, you bitch. He told me everything, how you told him you loved him and wanted him.” His voice lowered, wavered, whispered, like the voice over the phone, and had her numbed heart racing. “How you seduced him. He was so young. He didn’t understand about women like you. But I do. I would have protected him. I always protected him. He was good.” Billy wiped his eyes with the hand holding the knife, then drew a gun out of his pocket. “Too good for you.” He fired, ramming a bullet into the board above the controls. Cilla pressed both hands to her mouth to hold back a scream. “He told me how you lied, how you cheated, how you flaunted yourself.”

“I never wanted to hurt John.” She had to stay calm. Boyd wasn’t dead. She wouldn’t believe he was dead. But he was hurt. Somehow she had to get help. Bracing herself on the console, she reached slowly behind her and opened her mike, all the while keeping her eyes on his face. “I swear, Billy, I never wanted to hurt your brother.”

“Liar,” he shouted, lifting the knife to her throat. She arched back, struggling to control her shuddering. “You don’t care about him. You never cared. You just used him. Women like you love to use.”

“I liked him.” She sucked in her breath as the knife nicked her throat. Blood trickled warm along her skin. “He was a nice boy. He—he loved you.”

“I loved him.” The knife trembled in his hand, but he pulled it back an inch. Cilla let out a long, quiet breath. “He was the only person I ever loved, who ever loved me. I took care of him.”

“I know.” She moistened her dry lips. Surely someone would come. Someone was listening. She didn’t dare take her eyes from his to glance around to the phone, where the lights were blinking madly.

“He was only five when they sent me to that house. I would have hated it there, like I’d hated all the other places they’d sent me. But John lived there. He looked up to me. He cared. He needed me. So I stayed until I was eighteen. It was only a year and a half, but we were brothers.”

“Yes.”

“I joined the Army. When I’d have leave he’d sneak out to see me. His pig of a mother didn’t want him to have anything to do with me, ‘cause I’d gotten in some trouble.” He fired again, randomly, and shattered the glass in the top of the door. “But I liked the Army. I liked it fine, and John liked my uniform.”

His eyes glazed over a moment, as he remembered. “They sent us to Nam. Messed up my leg. Messed up my life. When we came back, people wanted to hate us. But not John. He was proud of me. No one else had ever been proud of me.”

“I know.”

“They tried to put him away. Twice.” Again he squeezed the trigger. A bullet plowed into the reel-to-reel six inches from Cilla’s head. Sweaty fear dried to ice on her skin. “They didn’t understand him. I went to California. I was going to find us a nice place there. I just needed to find work. John was going to write poetry. Then he met you.” The glaze melted away from his eyes, burned away by hate. “He didn’t want to come to California anymore. He didn’t want to leave you. He wrote me letters about you, long letters. Once he called. He shouldn’t have spent his money, but he called all the way to California to tell me he was getting married. You wanted to get married at Christmas, so he was going to wait. I was coming back for it, because he wanted me there.”

She could only shake her head. “I never agreed to marry him. Killing me isn’t going to change that,” she said when he leveled the gun at her. “You’re right, he didn’t understand me. And I guess I didn’t understand him. He was young. He imagined I was something I wasn’t, Billy. I’m sorry, terribly sorry, but I didn’t cause his death.”

“You killed him.” He ran the flat of the blade down her cheek. “And you’re going to pay.”

“I can’t stop you. I won’t even try. But please, tell me what you’ve done with Boyd.”

“I killed him.” He smiled a sweet, vacant smile that made the weapons he carried incongruous.

“I don’t believe you.”

“He’s dead.” Still smiling, he held the knife up to the light. “It was easy. Easier than I remembered. I was quick,” he assured her. “I wanted him dead, but I didn’t care if he suffered. Not like you. You’re going to suffer. I told you, remember? I told you what I was going to do.”

“If you’ve killed Boyd,” she whispered, “you’ve already killed me.”

“I want you to beg.” He laid the knife against her throat again. “I want you to beg the way John begged.”

“I don’t care what you do to me.” She couldn’t feel the knife against her flesh. She couldn’t feel anything. From a long way off came the wail of sirens. She heard them without emotion, without hope. They were coming, but they were coming too late. She looked into Billy’s eyes. She understood that kind of pain, she realized. It came when the person who meant the most was taken from you.

“I’m sorry,” she said, prepared to die. “I didn’t love him.”

On a howl of rage, he struck her a stunning blow against the temple with the knife handle. He had planned and waited for weeks. He wouldn’t kill her quickly, mercifully. He wouldn’t. He wanted her on her knees, crying and screaming for her life.

She landed in a heap, driven down by the explosive pain. She would have wept then, with her hands covering her face and her body limp. Not for herself, but for what she had lost.

They both turned as Boyd staggered to the doorway.

Seconds. It took only seconds. Her vision cleared, her heart almost burst. Alive. He was alive.

Her sob of relief turned to a scream of terror as she saw Billy raise the gun. Then she was on her feet, struggling with him. Records crashed to the floor and were crushed underfoot as they rammed into a shelf. His eyes burned into hers. She did beg. She pleaded even as she fought him.

Boyd dropped to his knees. The gun nearly slipped out of his slickened fingers. Through a pale red mist he could see them. He tried to shout at her, but he couldn’t drag his voice through his throat. He could only pray as he struggled to maintain a grip on consciousness and the gun. He saw the knife come up, start its vicious downward sweep. He fired.

She didn’t hear the crashing glass or the clamor of feet. She didn’t even hear the report as the bullet struck home. But she felt the jerk of his body as the knife flew out of his hand. She lost her grip on him as he slammed back into the console.

Wild-eyed, she whirled. She saw Boyd swaying on his knees, the gun held in both hands. Behind him was Althea, her weapon still trained on the figure sprawled on the floor. On a strangled cry, Cilla rushed over as Boyd fell.

“No.” She was weeping as she brushed the hair from his eyes, as she ran a hand down his side and felt the blood. “Please, no.” She covered his body with hers.

“You’ve got to move back.” Althea bit down on panic as she urged Cilla aside.

“He’s bleeding.”

“I know.” And badly, she thought. Very badly. “There’s an ambulance coming.”

Cilla stripped off her shirt to make a pressure bandage. Kneeling in her chemise, she bent over Boyd. “I’m not going to let him die.”

Althea’s eyes met hers. “That makes two of us.”

There had been a sea of faces. They seemed to swim inside Cilla’s head as she paced the hospital waiting room. It was so quiet there, quiet enough to hear the swish of crepe-soled shoes on tile or the whoosh of the elevator doors opening, closing. Yet in her head she could still hear the chaos of sirens, voices, the crackle of static on the police cruisers that had nosed together in the station’s parking lot.

The paramedics had come. Hands had pulled her away from Boyd, pulled her out of the booth and into the cool, fresh night.

Mark, she remembered. It was Mark who had held her back as she’d run the gamut from hysteria to shock. Jackson had been there, steady as a rock, pushing a cup of some hot liquid into her hand. And Nick, white-faced, mumbling assurances and apologies.

There had been strangers, dozens of them, who had heard the confrontation over their radios. They had crowded in until the uniformed police set up a barricade.

Then Deborah had been there, racing across the lot in tears, shoving aside cops, reporters, gawkers, to get to her sister. It was Deborah who had discovered that some of the blood on Cilla was her own.

Now, dully, Cilla looked down at her bandaged hand. She hadn’t felt the knife slice into it during the few frantic seconds she had fought with Billy. The scratch along her throat where the blade had nicked her was more painful. Shallow wounds, she thought. They were only shallow wounds, nothing compared to the deep gash in her heart.

She could still see how Boyd had looked when they had wheeled him out to the ambulance. For one horrible moment, she’d been afraid he was dead. So white, so still.

But he was alive. Althea had told her. He’d lost a lot of blood, but he was alive.

Now he was in surgery, fighting to stay that way. And she could only wait.

Althea watched her pace. For herself, she preferred to sit, to gather her resources and hold steady. She had her own visions to contend with. The jolt when Cilla’s voice had broken into the music. The race from the precinct to the radio station. The sight of her partner kneeling on the floor, struggling to hold his weapon. He had fired only an instant before her.

She’d been too late. She would have to live with that.

Now her partner, her friend, her family, was lying on an operating table. And she was helpless.

Rising, Deborah walked across the room to put an arm around her sister. Cilla stopped pacing long enough to stare out the window.

“Why don’t you lie down?” Deborah suggested.

“No, I can’t.”

“You don’t have to sleep. You could just stretch out on the couch over there.”

Cilla shook her head. “So many things are going through my mind, you know? The way he’d just sit there and grin after he’d gotten me mad. How he’d settle down in the corner of the booth with a book. The calm way he’d boss me around. I spent most of my time trying to push him away, but I didn’t push hard enough. And now he’s—”

“You can’t blame yourself for this.”

“I don’t know who to blame.” She looked up at the clock. How could the minutes go by so slowly? “I can’t really think about that now. The cause isn’t nearly as important as the effect.”

“He wouldn’t want you to take this on, Cilla.”

She nearly smiled. “I haven’t made a habit of doing what he wanted. He saved my life, Deb. How can I stand it if the price of that is his?”

There seemed to be no comfort she could offer. “If you won’t lie down, how about some coffee?”

“Sure. Thanks.”

She crossed to a pot of stale coffee resting on a hot plate. When Althea joined her, Deborah poured a second cup.

“How’s she holding up?” Althea asked.

“By a thread.” Deborah rubbed her gritty eyes before she turned to Althea. “She’s blaming herself.” Studying Althea, she offered the coffee. “Do you blame her, too?”

Althea hesitated, bringing the coffee to her lips first. She’d long since stopped tasting it. She looked over to the woman still standing by the window. Cilla wore baggy jeans and Mark Harrison’s tailored jacket. She wanted to blame Cilla, she realized. She wanted to blame her for involving Boyd past the point of wisdom. She wanted to blame her for being the catalyst that had set an already disturbed mind on the bloody path of revenge.

But she couldn’t. Neither as a cop nor as a woman.

“No,” she said with a sigh. “I don’t blame her. She’s only one of the victims here.”

“Maybe you could tell her that.” Deborah passed the second cup to Althea. “Maybe that’s what she needs to hear.”

It wasn’t easy to approach Cilla. They hadn’t spoken since they had come to the waiting room. In some strange way, Althea realized, they were rivals. They both loved the same man. In different ways, perhaps, and certainly on different levels, but the emotions were deep on both sides. It occurred to her that if there had been no emotion on Cilla’s part, there would have been no resentment on hers. If she had remained an assignment, and only an assignment, Althea would never have felt the need to cast blame.

It seemed Boyd had not been the only one to lose his objectivity.

She stopped beside Cilla, stared at the same view of the dark studded with city lights. “Coffee?”

“Thanks.” Cilla accepted the cup but didn’t drink. “They’re taking a long time.”

“It shouldn’t be much longer.”

Cilla drew in a breath and her courage. “You saw the wound. Do you think he’ll make it?”

I don’t know.
She almost said it. They both knew she’d thought it. “I’m counting on it.”

“You told me once he was a good man. You were right. For a long time I was afraid to see that, but you were right.” She turned to face Althea directly. “I don’t expect you to believe me, but I would have done anything to keep him from being hurt.”

“I do believe you. And you did what you could.” Before Cilla could turn away again, Althea put a hand on her arm. “Opening your mike may have saved his life. I want you to think about that. With a wound as serious as Boyd’s, every second counted. With the broadcast, you gave us a fix on the situation, so there was an ambulance on the scene almost as quickly as we were. If Boyd makes it, it’s partially due to your presence of mind. I want you to think about that.”