Gatekeeper (8 page)

By instinct, he reached across and undid his seat belt, realizing only then that he was up to his waist in the brook, which was flowing through one window and out his own.

Shaking his head, smiling from the relief at simply having survived, he opened the door with unexpected ease and swung his feet out onto the stream floor, still feeling as if he were dreaming. Then, yielding to much the same impulse, he cupped his hands in the water before him and splashed it over his hot, sweaty face.

He took in a deep breath, blinked a couple of times to adjust to the darkness, and found himself staring straight at Roger Novelle.

Novelle was hanging halfway out his car's shattered windshield, his face bloody and torn, one arm looking absurdly twisted. But he was alive. And in his good hand, he held a gun.

The two men watched one another for a long couple of seconds. Overhead, the tree branches reflected the blue and white lights of the two cruisers that ground to a halt on the road above. Over the water's rush and the hum in his head, Jordan could barely hear the familiar chatter from the distant two-way radios.

Then a huge, bright flash exploded from the end of Novelle's gun, and Jordan felt the impact of a sledgehammer smash him in midchest. 

Chapter 6

"Hi, Tony. What the hell happened?"

Police Chief Tony Brandt rubbed the side of his nose thoughtfully. Despite the late hour, he was neatly turned out as usual, looking like a slightly bemused college professor on leave from some midwestern ivory tower. A lifelong cop, he'd never managed to affect any of the typical cop trappings, from his manner to his taste in clothes.

"Real mess, Joe. High-speed chase, police shooting, one man dead. Shades of Dodge City."

"The dead man one of yours?" Joe asked, feeling a sudden dread.

Tony waved his hand dismissively. "Henry Jordan caught a round in the vest. He's being kept for observation with a really good-looking bruise. If the shooter had aimed higher—or used a Teflon bullet—we'd be looking at a whole different story."

"Who was the shooter?"

Brandt looked at him curiously. "That's why I called you down here. Sam dropped by this afternoon and asked us to bring the guy in so you could have a chat with him. Apparently, Gail found him hanging out in Laurie Davis's apartment—Roger Novelle?"

Gunther's brow furrowed. He'd tried contacting Gail several times tonight to ask her about that encounter. All he'd gotten was her answering machine, and when he'd driven by her house, none of the lights had been on.

"You call her about this?"

Brandt shook his head. "Didn't have a reason to. After Novelle took his potshot at Jordan, two other officers opened up and killed him. I didn't see what Gail could do for us, not right now, in the middle of the night. The state police will be running the investigation, and I don't doubt they'll want to have a chat—with her and you both, for that matter, given your relationship—but I don't think it's too complicated in any case. We found heroin in Novelle's car, and we've tracked down the user who was buying from him when Jordan surprised them."

Gunther nodded at the sound of the magic word. "Heroin again," he murmured. "Well, I guess that guarantees the cat getting out of the bag."

Tony Brandt gave his ex-chief of detectives a questioning look.

"The headlines will tell you," Gunther partly explained. "The governor's going to try to milk this for all it's worth."

* * *

Gail's house was still dark when Joe pulled up opposite it a second time. Of course, at three in the morning, he wasn't expecting otherwise. He'd called again from the hospital, hadn't bothered leaving a message, and this time was determined to be less delicately self-effacing.

He left his car, crossed the driveway to the kitchen door, igniting the battery of motion detection lights Gail had had installed following her attack, and applied his two keys to the locks she carefully set every night.

He felt odd entering the house, and not just because of the circumstances. He'd once lived here with her, although he'd never felt truly at home. It had been bought with her money and decorated according to her taste, but his lack of comfort had stemmed more from the incentive than from the decor. She had needed him to be nearby, to watch her back emotionally and physically as she struggled to rebuild. He'd been happy to help, of course, had considered it a privilege and a natural extension of his love for her, but he'd also known it wouldn't last, and that despite her protests to the contrary, she'd eventually become firm-footed enough to start longing for her independence of old. His moving out had actually come as somewhat of a relief to both of them.

Still, it felt funny to be "back home," where, as with a long-delayed visit to a grandparent's house, familiar smells and sights commingled and got confused with foreign ones. The pull between feeling like an intruder and standing on safe ground was palpable, and Joe proceeded quickly through the darkness upstairs to Gail's bedroom hoping to end the awkwardness as fast as possible. But he also couldn't lie to himself—by now, he'd become alarmed by her silence.

He paused on the threshold of her room, the moon through the skylight revealing a shape in her bed.

"Gail?"

He half held his breath to better hear some sound from her, watching intently, until the merest hint of a movement finally gave him relief. Only then did he step inside and cross over to the bed.

"Gail. It's Joe."

He sat by her side and gently laid his hand against her head, noticing as he did so the prescription bottle and glass of water on the nightstand.

"Gail," he said, his voice still soft. "Wake up."

With his other hand, he reached behind the phone and hooked a finger around the cord, pulling it free from where it dangled unattached to its nearby outlet. That explained why she hadn't been answering his calls; only the downstairs machine had been picking up.

He leaned over and kissed her cheek. "Come on, sweetheart. It's Joe."

Finally, she stirred, moaning briefly.

He took advantage of that to roll her onto her back, sweeping her hair clear of her face as he did.

"Wake up, Gail."

Her eyes fluttered and opened slightly.

"Joe?" Her voice was groggy and clotted with induced sleep.

"Yeah. It's me. Everything's okay. I had to see if you were all right."

She blinked several times, clearly trying to understand what was going on.

"Everything's okay?"

"I hope so," he told her, kissing her cheek again. "I heard you had a tough time yesterday afternoon at Laurie's place. I'm sorry I wasn't there."

The eyes closed again, hoping to shut out the memory. "He was horrible."

"You don't have to worry about him. We got him. What happened, anyway?"

She had all but surfaced by now, her breathing more rapid, her responses close to normal. He could still sense the effects of the sleeping pills, but his mind was at ease that she'd obviously only taken enough to knock herself out for a while.

She rubbed a hand across her face. "Nothing really. I mean, nothing you could point at. I just had a bad flashback is all. The guy . . . something about him. He was creepy and insinuated what he wanted to have happen, but it was his smell more than anything that brought me back. He never touched me, but I almost felt it had happened all over again. I felt . . . violated. And scared. Humiliated."

She suddenly raised both her arms and encircled Joe's neck, pulling him down to her and sobbing into his chest. "I thought it was behind me. Even when I was with him, I thought maybe I still had it under control. But then all afternoon I got pulled lower and lower."

He let her cry for a while, rubbing her shoulder, his face half buried in her hair and her pillow, breathing her in.

Eventually, she quieted enough that he could straighten slightly and look at her. "I've been worried about you. Called a few times, drove by earlier. Couldn't figure out where you'd gone. Sam said you came by."

"It's not just that, Joe. It's Laurie, too. I can't get what she went through out of my mind. I feel responsible. Of all people, I should have known to watch out for her. I know how things are out there."

Joe was shaking his head. "Gail, you can't do that. We all have our own lives to lead. We can care for each other and try to help when the going gets tough—you did that when you suggested Laurie come up here in the first place. But she came with her own baggage. You're not responsible for that. Don't forget why you made that initial offer. Her life was a mess back home."

"It doesn't help, Joe. I've told myself all that."

"Where are her parents? Right now"

Gail looked at him, startled. "I . . . in Connecticut."

"They're not here? They didn't come up?"

"They will," she said weakly. "They're making plans. They know she's safe . . . that I'm here with her."

He let his long silence speak for him.

"I've got to put things right," she finally murmured.

"You're not seeing her as a victim only, are you?" he asked eventually

"What do you mean?"

"That the Lauries of the world, no matter their backgrounds, do have some responsibility for how they end up."

"I know that," she said, her voice tensing.

"It's not just good and evil," he continued, ignoring the warning. "Most dealers are users, and most users end up as thieves, prostitutes, mules, you name it. It's a mixed-up mess, but it's a mess most of them acknowledge right up to the end. That's why some of them actually beat it and get better—because deep down they know they can. They're the only ones accountable."

She was angry at the condescension she heard in his words—the platitudes that allowed him the distance he needed to function in his job. But she also knew what he was attempting, and so merely placed her hand against his mouth and said, "Stop."

He straightened, caught off guard, and studied her closely.

"I don't care about all that," she explained. "I don't care how people rationalize their way clear. I saw how that works when I was raped and reduced to an unidentified victim in the paper. I see part of me in Laurie, Joe, in ways you'll never understand, and I won't put up with it any more now than I did back then."

Gunther was vaguely confused by parts of what she was saying. He thought about asking her what her plans were, knowing how capable she was of setting almost anything in motion.

But he also finally recognized the anger in her eyes, and with it an extra element he thought might be pure bewilderment. There was a shift going on here he'd never before seen in this woman he thought he knew so well.

He stroked her shoulder instead of responding, and simply informed her, "This probably isn't the right time, but I mentioned that the guy you met in Laurie's room had been caught. He was actually killed in a shoot-out with the PD. I didn't want you to hear that on the news."

"Who was he?"

"Roger Novelle. Meant nothing to me, but Willy knew him. Local bad boy. He was dealing heroin when he was shot."

Gail stared into the darkness of her bedroom for a few seconds before asking, "He was Laurie's supplier?"

"We don't know yet. Sam's talking with Tony Brandt, and VSP is doing the shoot investigation. Right now everyone's playing connect-the-dots. I wouldn't be surprised, though."

Gail laid her head back against the pillow, her expression implying that she'd come to some sort of decision. "Thanks, Joe. And thanks for coming by."

He hesitated and then stood up, hearing the dismissal in her tone. He was anxious about what he'd just witnessed, and a little irritated at being shut out. The only saving grace, if it even qualified, was that he thought she might know less about what was going on inside her than he did.

For the moment, though, he would let things lie. He leaned over, kissed her, and retreated through the dark, empty house the same way he'd arrived.

* * *

Sammie Martens turned on the car's dome light and checked her makeup in the rearview mirror. She hadn't worn the stuff since the last time she'd been undercover, at Tucker Peak, and harbored a neophyte's insecurity about how long, or even if, it would stay put. Not that she was slathered with it—just some eye shadow, a little mascara, a touch of blush, and, of course, lipstick—but it still felt like she was wearing clown paint. She then twisted the mirror to see her hair. That, she was more comfortable with—a simple blond dye job—even if the effect still startled her.

She switched off the light, drove the last eighth of a mile down the road, pulled into the driveway, and cut the engine.

She was beyond Guilford, south of Brattleboro, near the Massachusetts border, parked in front of a historical memento even her parents would have found quaint. It was an old-fashioned, 1930s motor court, the kind that mushroomed all over the country with the new rage of the affordable automobile. A string of separate wooden cabins, now swaybacked, peeling, and looking as if the earth were about to reabsorb them, still reflected the culture of their time, when people in their black Fords pulled off after a grueling day's drive up from the city and set up in their homes-away-from-home, complete with barbecue pits, glider swings, fireplaces for those chilly evenings, and individual front porches from which to socialize with the neighbors.

Once well tended and tidy, the grounds of this place had been left to disintegrate, helped along by a scraggly line of rusting eighteen-wheeler boxes standing guard alongside the road, partially blocking the view and the remnants of the long-dead neon sign advertising the place. Weeds choked what had probably been a neat lawn and colorful flower gardens, and all that was left of the curved gravel driveway was a rutted dirt trail, lumpy with tree roots and rocks, that ran ill defined before the row of cabins.

Sam got out of her car and pulled her tight sweater down over her hips, feeling constrained in a pair of stretch jeans two sizes too small. She'd felt less uncomfortable in a flak jacket, combat boots, and a forty-pound pack.