Shadowfires (27 page)

But Benny would not allow that weight to be lifted from him, not even a fraction of it. “That’s why I’m past-focused, I guess. I’ve learned that the worlds I have to live in—the present world and the world to come—aren’t clean, never will be, and give us no choices between black and white. But there’s always at least the illusion that things were a lot different in the past.”

Rachael had always admired his sense of responsibility and his unwavering honesty, but now she saw that those qualities ran far deeper in him than she had realized—perhaps too deep. Even virtues like responsibility and honesty could become obsessions. But, oh, what lovely obsessions compared with those of other men she had known.

At last he looked at her, met her gaze, and his eyes were full of a sorrow—almost a melancholy—that she had never seen in them before. But other emotions were evident in his eyes as well, a special warmth and tenderness, great affection, love.

He said, “Last night and this morning . . . after we made love . . . Well, for the first time since before the war, I saw an important choice that was strictly black and white, no grays whatsoever, and in that choice there’s a sort of . . . a sort of salvation that I thought I’d never find.”

“What choice?” she asked.

“Whether to spend my life with you—or not,” he said. “To spend it with you is the right choice, entirely right, no ambiguities. And to let you slip away is wrong, all wrong; I’ve no doubt about that.”

For weeks, maybe months, Rachael had known she was in love with Benny. But she had reined in her emotions, had not spoken of the depth of her feelings for him, and had not permitted herself to think of a long-term commitment. Her childhood and adolescence had been colored by loneliness and shaped by the terrible perception that she was unloved, and those bleak years had engendered in her a craving for affection. That craving, that
need
to be wanted and loved, was what had made her such easy prey for Eric Leben and had led her into a bad marriage. Eric’s obsession with youth in general and with her youth in particular had seemed like love to Rachael, for she had desperately wanted it to be love. She had spent the next seven years learning and accepting the grim and hurtful truth—that love had nothing to do with it. Now she was cautious, wary of being hurt again.

“I love you, Rachael.”

Heart pounding, wanting to believe that she could be loved by a man as good and sweet as Benny, but afraid to believe it, she tried to look away from his eyes because the longer she stared into them the closer she came to losing the control and cool detachment with which she armored herself. But she could not look away. She tried not to say anything that would make her vulnerable, but with a curious mixture of dismay, delight, and wild exhilaration, she said, “Is this what I think it is?”

“What do you think it is?”

“A proposal.”

“Hardly the time or place for a proposal, is it?” he said.

“Hardly.”

“Yet . . . that’s what it is. I wish the circumstances were more romantic.”

“Well . . .”

“Champagne, candlelight, violins.”

She smiled.

“But,” he said, “when Baresco was holding that revolver on us, and when we were being chased down Palm Canyon Drive last night, the thing that scared me most wasn’t that I might be killed . . . but that I might be killed
before I’d let you know how I felt about you.
So I’m letting you know. I want to be with you always, Rachael, always.”

More easily than she would have believed possible, the words came to her own lips. “I want to spend my life with you, too, Benny.”

He put a hand to her face.

She leaned forward and kissed him lightly.

“I love you,” he said.

“God, I love you.”

“If we get through this alive, you’ll marry me?”

“Yes,” she said, seized by a sudden chill. “But damn it, Benny, why’d you have to bring the
if
part into it?”

“Forget I said it.”

But she could not forget. Earlier in the day, in the motel room in Palm Springs, just after they had made love the second time, she’d experienced a presentiment of death that had shaken her and had filled her with the need to
move,
as if a deadly weight would fall on them if they stayed in the same place any longer. That uncanny feeling returned. The mountain scenery, which had been fresh and alluring, acquired a somber and threatening aspect that chilled her even though she knew it was entirely a subjective change. The trees seemed to stretch into mutant shapes, their limbs bonier, their shadows darker.

“Let’s go,” she said.

He nodded, apparently understanding her thoughts and perceiving the same change of mood that she felt.

He started the car, pulled onto the road. When they had rounded the next bend, they saw another sign: LAKE ARROWHEAD—15 MILES.

 

 

Eric looked over the other tools in the garage, seeking another instrument for his arsenal. He saw nothing useful.

He returned to the house. In the kitchen, he put the ax on the table and pulled open a few drawers until he located a set of knives. He chose two—a butcher’s knife and a smaller, pointier blade.

With an ax and two knives, he was prepared for both arm’s-length combat and close-in fighting. He still wished he had a gun, but at least he was no longer defenseless. If someone came looking for him, he would be able to take care of himself. He would do them serious damage before they brought him down, a prospect that gave him some satisfaction and that, somewhat to his surprise, brought a sudden grin to his face.

Damn. He shook his head.

That crazy thought, like a fragment of a demented nursery rhyme, spun through his mind again, frightening him, and when he tried to focus on it, tried to understand it, his thoughts grew muddy once more, and he simply could not grasp the meaning of the mice.

When he continued to strain for the elusive memory of the mice, a throbbing white pain filled his head from crown to temples and burned across the bridge of his nose, but when he stopped trying to remember and attempted, instead, to put the mice out of his mind, the pain grew even worse, a sledgehammer striking rhythmically behind his eyes. He had to grit his teeth to endure it, broke out in a sweat, and with the sweat came anger duller than the pain but growing even as the pain grew, unfocused anger at first but not for long. He said, “Rachael, Rachael,” and clenched the butcher’s knife. “Rachael . . .”

On arriving at the hospital in Palm Springs, Anson Sharp had done easily what Jerry Peake had been unable to do with mighty striving. In ten minutes, he turned Nurse Alma Dunn’s stonefaced implacability to dust, and he shattered Dr. Werfell’s authoritarian calm, reducing both of them to nervous, uncertain, respectful, cooperative citizens. Theirs was grudging cooperation, but it was cooperation nonetheless, and Peake was deeply impressed. Though Sarah Kiel was still under the influence of the sedatives that she had taken in the middle of the night, Werfell agreed to wake her by whatever means necessary.

As always, Peake watched Sharp closely, trying to learn how the deputy director achieved his effects, much as a young magician might study a master prestidigitator’s every move upon the stage. For one thing, Sharp used his formidable size to intimidate; he stood close, towering over his adversaries, staring down ominously, huge shoulders drawn up, full of pent-up violence, a volatile man. Yet the threat never became overt, and in fact Sharp frequently smiled. Of course, the smile was a weapon, too, for it was too wide, too full of teeth, utterly humorless, and strange.

More important than Sharp’s size was his use of every trick available to a highly placed government agent. Before leaving the Geneplan labs in Riverside, he had employed his Defense Security Agency authority to make several telephone calls to various federal regulatory agencies in Washington, from whose computer files he had obtained what information he could on Desert General Hospital and Dr. Hans Werfell, information that could be used to strong-arm them.

Desert General’s record was virtually spotless. The very highest standards for staff physicians, nurses, and technicians were strictly enforced; nine years had passed since a malpractice suit had been filed against the hospital, and no suit had ever been successful; the patient-recovery rate for every illness and surgical procedure was higher than the normal average. In twenty years, the only stain on Desert General had been the Case of the Purloined Pills. That was what Peake named the affair when Sharp quickly briefed him on arrival, before confronting Dunn and Werfell; it was a name Peake did not share with Sharp, since Sharp was not a reader of mysteries as Peake was and did not have Peake’s sense of adventure. Anyway, just last year, three nurses at Desert General had been caught altering purchase and dispensation records in the pharmacy, and upon investigation it was discovered they had been stealing drugs for years. Out of spite, the three had falsely implicated six of their superiors, including Nurse Dunn, though the police had eventually cleared Dunn and the others. Desert General was put on the Drug Enforcement Agency’s “watch list” of medical institutions, and Alma Dunn, though cleared, was shaken by the experience and still felt her reputation endangered.

Sharp took advantage of that weak spot. In a discreet session with Alma Dunn in the nurses’ lounge, with only Peake as a witness, Sharp subtly threatened the woman with a very public reopening of the original investigation, this time at the federal level, and not only solicited her cooperation but brought her almost to tears, a feat that Peake—who likened Alma Dunn to Agatha Christie’s indomitable Miss Jane Marple—had thought impossible.

At first, it appeared as if Dr. Werfell would be more difficult to crack. His record as a physician was unblemished. He was highly regarded in the medical community, possessed an AMA Physician of the Year Award, contributed six hours a week of his time to a free clinic for the disadvantaged, and from every angle appeared to be a saint. Well . . . from every angle but one: He had been charged with income-tax evasion five years ago and had lost in court on a technicality. He had failed to comply
precisely
with IRS standards of record keeping, and though his failure was unintentional, a simple ignorance of the law, ignorance of the law was not an acceptable defense.

Cornering Werfell in a two-bed room currently unoccupied by patients, Sharp used the threat of a new IRS investigation to bring the doctor to his knees in about five minutes flat. Werfell seemed certain that his records would be found acceptable now and that he would be cleared, but he also knew how expensive and time-consuming it was to defend himself against an IRS probe, and he knew that his reputation would be tarnished even when he was cleared. He looked to Peake for sympathy a few times, knowing he would get none from Sharp, but Peake did his best to imitate Anson Sharp’s air of granite resolution and indifference to others. Being an intelligent man, Werfell quickly determined that the prudent course would be to do as Sharp wished in order to avoid another tax-court nightmare, even if it meant bending his principles in the matter of Sarah Kiel.

“No reason to fault yourself or lose any sleep over a misguided concern about professional ethics, Doctor,” Sharp said, clapping one beefy hand on the physician’s shoulder in a gesture of reassurance, suddenly friendly and empathetic now that Werfell had broken. “The welfare of our country comes before anything else. No one would dispute that or think you’d made the wrong decision.”

Dr. Werfell did not exactly recoil from Sharp’s touch, but he looked sickened by it. His expression did not change when he looked from Sharp to Jerry Peake.

Peake winced.

Werfell led them out of the untenanted room, down the hospital corridor, past the nurses’ station—where Alma Dunn watched them warily while pretending not to look—to the private room where Sarah Kiel remained sedated. As they went, Peake noticed that Werfell, who had previously seemed to resemble Dashiell Hammett and who had looked tremendously imposing, was now somewhat shrunken, diminished. His face was gray, and he seemed older than he had been just a short while ago.

Although Peake admired Anson Sharp’s ability to command and to get things done, he did not see how he could adopt his boss’s methods as his own. Peake wanted not only to be a successful agent but to be a legend, and you could be a legend only if you played fair and
still
got things done. Being infamous was not at all the same as being a legend, and in fact the two could not coexist. If he had learned nothing else from five thousand mystery novels, Peake had at least learned that much.

Sarah Kiel’s room was silent except for her slow and slightly wheezy breathing, dark but for a single softly glowing lamp beside her bed and the few thin beams of bright desert sun that burned through at the edges of the heavy drapes drawn over the lone window.

The three men gathered around the bed, Dr. Werfell and Sharp on one side, Peake on the other.

“Sarah,” Werfell said quietly. “Sarah?” When she didn’t respond, the physician repeated her name and gently shook her shoulder.

She snorted, murmured, but did not wake.

Werfell lifted one of the girl’s eyelids, studied her pupil, then held her wrist and timed her pulse. “She won’t wake naturally for . . . oh, perhaps another hour.”

“Then do what’s necessary to wake her
now,
” Anson Sharp said impatiently. “We’ve already discussed this.”

“I’ll administer an injection to counteract,” Werfell said, heading toward the closed door.

“Stay here,” Sharp said. He indicated the call button on the cord that was tied loosely to one of the bed rails. “Have a nurse bring what you need.”