The Timer Game (43 page)

She was tired, that was all. She’d just close her eyes.

“Grace. Grace. Can you hear me?” A bullhorn, from the sound of it, faint and coming from the wall where the sinks had been. That’s what the sound had been that she couldn’t place.

It was the sound of a human voice.

“I’m in here.” She half sobbed, half shouted and,
squeeze,
waited, hoping.

Silence met her and she shouted again, afraid now.

From somewhere close came the smell of acrid smoke.

She heard the faint sound of a buzz saw, grinding cement. “Here!” she screamed again. “Something’s on fire.”

“We’re breaking through.”

Flames roared up from some ruptured place, bellowing, ripping air out of the room, and suddenly the gurney moved and Grace pushed it off of them and saw a wall exploding in a haze of debris, outlining the shape of Paul Collins from the crime lab in a Tyvek suit, the power saw etched in red fiery dust.

Grace knelt and scooped up her daughter. Paul dropped the saw and held out his arms as heat rippled through the pallet of towels and sheets. She pushed Katie into his arms as behind her, the wall burst into flames.

Epilogue

Mac had reacted with a split-second instinct that had saved his life. After Grace had warned him about the bomb, he’d hurled himself into the anteroom and the steel door had protected him from the worst of the explosion, but the ceiling had buckled above him and he was pinned under a beam in a pile of rubble.

The bomb for all its ferocity had been planted in a contained space: Warren’s goal was to kill Katie, and Grace, if she intervened. Even though he was leaving the Center, the building itself was too important to Warren’s ego to destroy. So while the Center sustained major electrical damage, structural damage was centered on the research side, leaving the hospital side without power or running water but reasonably intact.

Two people died, one in the transplant unit, the other a prominent bioresearcher.

__

Katie came back to life and remembered nothing from the moment she’d taken a long, faintly bitter, drink of lemonade in the bathroom, until waking up in a hospital bed, her mother at her side.

Grace sat with her arms around Katie, struggling with how fragile it was, the small, slippery moment that darted away, the sweet smell of Katie’s breath, the rhythmic swell of her chest, those early sleepless nights jouncing a howling infant, certain Katie would never sleep and Grace would have to kill her; growing overnight into this child, long-limbed and pale, already leaving, dreaming her own quiet dream.

__

Across town at Scripps, Mac’s arm needed pins and traction that would keep him in the hospital for another week. He looked pale on the bed and new gray threaded his temple. Grace shuttled between Scripps and Sharp, feeling the tug of both places.

With Mac, she did a cautious dance, filling in random bits from their lives, talking about tuna boats and concerts at Humphreys and the peculiar color of gray that hung over San Diego harbor when the water was churning and the wind blew.

Pete and Aaron stopped by, and it gave her a chance to thank them. Mac had text-messaged them at the Center and they’d helped locate where she and Katie must have been. Theo Sullivan, the homicide detective who’d taken her statement and kept her away from Senator Loud, stopped by the hospital room briefly, but he had a sick wife keeping him busy.

The third morning, Grace had just settled next to Mac as Paul Collins wandered in, chewing on a Subway sandwich.

“Marcie was easy to turn, I’m sorry to say. Remember when she replaced you for that CSI that went south when those samples got slopped?”

“
We
never slopped samples,” Grace reminded him tiredly.

“Still got you both investigated.” Paul took a long draw from a Dr Pepper.

“I had to pick up Katie from the sitter. I’d been working straight for twenty-four hours and Jeanne had to go out of town. I didn’t have anybody else.”

Paul nodded. “Yeah, well, Marcie was pissed. Felt you pulled her into something that affected her family, cost her overtime. Her mom was sick and they were building that addition.”

Grace thought back over the good times with her friend and felt a wave of sadness. “It was just the money then.”

“A million bucks is a million bucks. That would have been her cut when the deal went through, so yeah. Nothing personal. Opal made the approach so Warren was one removed. It was supposed to be just a couple of easy things, at least it started that way. The first was to switch the sheets.”

“So it was Marcie who gave Dispatch the wrong sheet?”

Paul nodded. “Yeah, and then her job was to simply turn off Larry’s pager, so they went right to you. Then it got a little dicier, but by then, she was already involved and afraid it would come back on her if she backed out. Plus they’d already given her a hefty down payment.”

“Warren must have loved it when I called her from the road.”

“Oh, yeah. Asking Marcie to find out if I’d ID’d the palm print in the taco van, Warren loved that. It made it easy for him to implicate Mac.”

Grace shot Mac a look of chagrin and he nodded. They’d been over this before.

“Ever find out who the print belonged to?”

“You mean inside the cabinet? A vendor. It wasn’t part of anything. And there weren’t any little handprints from kids, either.”

“God, I was stupid.”

“You were afraid. Your kid had been snatched. This whole thing could have—well, I don’t need to tell you how this whole thing could have gone.”

It woke her up nights, thinking about it.

Mac lifted painfully on his good elbow. “What was Opal doing in the basement room at the halfway house?”

“The one with the lights and bed? Exactly what you thought. Using clients for porn she sold on the Internet. Apparently Warren wasn’t in on that. It was just a side business she ran on her own. I hate to say it, but it’s going to shoot your ratings through the roof when you air it, not that you need help in that department.”

Mac shrugged and grimaced from the pain, and Grace knew he was thinking about news, and the vagaries of his business. He’d had a full production crew on site to tape Hekka’s surgery, a surgery that never took place. Instead, they’d had a ringside seat to a massive hospital evacuation, a bomb explosion, and the death of a prominent bioresearcher who’d been manipulating data and killing kids. They’d taped it all, including the rescue of Grace and Katie, and Grace’s role in saving her daughter’s life. The only thing Mac had kept back was his relationship to Katie, and Grace was grateful to him for that.

Neither of them wanted Katie to find out in the media who her daddy was.

But Mac was thinking about something else. “He got away, didn’t he? Warren.”

Paul chewed on his sandwich and swallowed it down with a Dixie cup of water from Mac’s pitcher. “For now.”

Grace could see Mac was getting tired. She gathered up the lunch wrappers and shooed Paul out. She sat back down and looked at Mac. He reached for her hand. “You think we’ll ever get past this?”

“You mean my trying to kill you?” She tried to make it sound like a joke and failed.

He studied her hand, the small nails. “My
work
almost killed you. That AP story in Guatemala.”

“Warren set it up, remember? Even if you hadn’t have done the story, General Velasquez would have found me.”

“I’ve been thinking about what the general said. That I used you as a cover. That’s not true. I did go there to meet a man who promised to take me into a ring of organ thieves. I also went there to interview you. I had heard about you. And when I met you—I didn’t want you touched by anything I was doing. That was my mistake. Lying to you. About anything. But the piece I ended up writing about you—well, that’s what I do. I go into places and find stories and write about them. Grace, I know how you feel about the work I do. You’ve made that clear.”

“It’s not fair, though.”

“Oh ho,” Mac said. “You’re talking fairness. Okay, can you intellectually override your emotions when it comes to supporting my work?”

Two nurses chatted in undertones as they walked by the room. Mac lowered his voice.

“Because, see, the problem is, even now, knowing how a piece so well-intentioned, so benign, hurt you so badly, even now, I still love my work. It’s what I was called to do. I won’t give it up, Grace. I can’t. It’s a good part of who I am. But there’s a whole other part of who I am I haven’t even explored. The part with Katie. I need time with her.”

Grace had been expecting it. She kept her voice steady. “Tell me when.”

“Not while I’m here. I won’t get out for another week. She doesn’t need to see me here.” This was hard. Impossible. She’d never had to ask this before of anyone. “If it’s all right with you,” she said. “Katie’s getting out tomorrow. I’d like to take her away.”

“Away.”

“Belikond’s underwriting a small trip. Anywhere I want to take her. It’s their way of thanking me for uncovering the fraud. It’s just a week.”

Grace realized that from then on she’d be sharing her time on this earth with this man. It stunned her. “If that’s okay,” she said again.

He nodded and let go of her hand. “The question I asked, about getting past this. It’s an honest one. We have a kid together. A history. Maybe more. What are we going to do?” His tan had faded and in the hospital bed, he looked gaunt.

“It’s complicated. The only work I’ve felt that passionate about, I guess I’ve decided I can never do again. And that makes me sad.” She looked at him steadily. “I don’t begrudge you your work. You’re good at it. Maybe I’m just jealous of the joy you find in it and yeah, it’s tied up with my feeling that I can never again do the work I loved. That’s it’s gone from me. But that’s my problem. And the other part. . .” Her voice trailed.

His eyes were a rich green. He was looking at her with a deep, abiding tenderness. It scared her. It pressed something deep inside, some old wound, and she looked away, past the water pitcher and scattered books and food tray, past the open door and into the quiet hall.

“Is anybody ever happy, ever?” Her voice was low. “Are there ever any little families that work?” She felt close to tears and she got up and walked to the window.

Mac’s room was on the third floor, facing a Hillcrest shopping center and busy street. She stood facing it as she spoke. “Sobriety’s the linchpin for me. I don’t have words for how much your daughter needs you in her life. Your absence is the biggest hole in her heart, and I’m so sorry I did that to her. To you. To all of us.”

She took a moment to compose herself.

“I don’t know, Mac, yet, about us. I need time. To get strong again, if I can. If I ever was. I won’t come to you damaged.”

There was lonely pride in her voice. She turned and faced him. Mac was pulling himself up, reaching out his good hand to her, and she went to him and took it.

“Remember one thing,” he said. “You came back for me. In the scrub room with the bomb. After everything. You came back.”

__

They were on a wide expanse of empty beach in the Bahamas on the island of Eleuthera. The island had a reputation for being a family-oriented vacation spot, but it was the name that had drawn her. It came from the Greek word
eleutheros
, meaning ‘freedom’.

Sailboats dotted the calm sea and small hotels curved along a distant shoreline, but here it was quiet, peaceful. Grace had opted for a family-run bed-and-breakfast; no television, no newspaper, no alarms. Every morning, they climbed into their rented car and went exploring and when they’d found this one, Ben Bay Beach, tucked away down a dirt road past a field of papayas, they took it as their own.

She’d called Jeanne then, and given her explicit directions on where to find it, for what had changed forever was taking any of it for granted. From then on, she would never think of her moments with Katie as anything less than a gift, and there would be times when just the simple sound of Katie shifting in sleep would be enough to bring tears.

Grace had spread out a blanket and arranged the simple meal she’d brought along: bread and cheese and water. Katie ran toward the water, holding a small boat in her hands.

Grace watched her go. Katie ran tentatively toward the waves, slowing as the warm water swirled around her ankles. She looked taller, somehow, since the kidnapping. Leaner. She’d lost weight and her swimsuit bagged in the rump. She waded out until the water was even with her knees. She lifted the boat high. Silhouetted against the cloudless sky, Grace could see teetering in the boat, almost alive, the tiny figure of a deer dancer.

Don Jose had left the carving wordlessly on Grace’s car hood one day at the hospital. Now Katie would send it out to sea, a tribute to the gods in honor of a child who was gone.

Grace felt his presence and she turned and saw him. Mac was pale and gaunt, arm in a sling. They looked at each other silently across the clear turquoise water. Grace instinctively moved to him. Mac crossed the beach and they were close now.

“Jeb’s always up for flying. I realized something that couldn’t wait. Something I needed to say in person.”

“How did you find me?”

“Jeanne told me where you were. She said to tell you, it’s not too late.”

“For what?”

“She didn’t say.”

In the water, Katie squealed and pushed the boat farther out. “I don’t know how to get it right.” Her voice was low.

“Nobody does, Grace. None of us escapes this world undamaged. That’s what I wanted to say, the moment you left. And if that was the criteria for strength, we’d all be alone forever. Leaving is the easy part, Grace. It’s the
staying
that’s hard. So maybe the key is promising when we’re not sure.”

Her eyes filled with unexpected tears. She looked at him.

“Maybe the only sure thing is staying, even if we’re not sure, staying even then. We’re going to hurt each other again, Grace. It’s going to happen, no matter how hard we try.”

Grace stared over the water at Katie. With strong clean movements, Katie shoved the boat away. It rose on a swell of water, the light glinting against the wood.