Line of Fire (26 page)

41

T
he door opened. It wasn’t Comadoe.

It was Diane. Her intrusion stunned me. In our many years as partners she had never walked into my office uninvited. Not once. My instinct was that it had to be the damn fire. She must have been evacuated yet again.

Diane was not dressed for work. She was wearing grubby chinos and an open shirt over a simple camisole. She had used a spare key—we each had the other’s key for emergencies—to enter my office. I could see the familiar fob poking from the deadbolt.

Something terrible must have happened.
The fire. She must,
I thought,
be in full panic mode.
I worried that her fragile grip on adjustment had failed. I feared she had gone ahead and torched the grasslands adjacent to her home on Lee Hill.

God,
I thought,
not today. Be an arsonist tomorrow, or next week. Damn it, Diane, not today.

Across from me, Lauren had closed her eyes. She couldn’t take any more. She didn’t lean forward to look back toward the door. She didn’t stand.

Lauren’s reaction to the intrusion was an instinctive one for a practiced therapist’s spouse. Lauren had to be presuming, reasonably, that a patient had burst into my office. She knew that if she stayed seated, and anonymous, the person at the door couldn’t see her. She figured that if she maintained anonymity, it would be easier for me to resolve the situation, whatever the situation was.

I was praying that Diane would recognize how inappropriate her intrusion was and head immediately back out of the room. But she did not.

In as compassionate a tone as I could muster in the circumstances, I said, “The fire? I’m so sorry, but this isn’t a good time. Maybe in a little while, we can—”

Before I could finish the sentences, Diane narrowed her eyes and raised her hand. It had been slightly behind her. In it she held a handgun, a blocky semiautomatic that fit her hand like a glove. With no hesitation at all, she fired three shots into the back of the chair five feet in front of her.

She kept pulling the trigger until she had pulled it five times. The last two pulls the gun only clicked.

Gravity began to force Diane’s hand down. She regrouped. She lifted the muzzle back up, toward me.

She said, “This wasn’t how you were supposed to help.”

I thought that’s what she said. My ears were ringing too much to be certain.

• • •

Ba, ba, ba, ba. Ba, ba, ba, ba.

Stayin’ alive.

I listened for breath sounds. I heard gurgles. I felt for a pulse.

I told myself that the second she stopped breathing I would start chest compressions.

I would hum the brothers Gibb’s disco anthem and I would embrace the
ba ba ba ba
beat and I would compress my wife’s chest, over and over, for as long as it took.

I must have called for an ambulance.

The rig must have been parked nearby. EMTs arrived within moments of my first Bee Gees musing.

Only later would I learn that a passel of ambulances was staged six blocks away at Eben Fine Park near the entrance to Boulder Canyon in case the rigs were needed to transport casualties into town from the fire that was blowing up in the canyon.

“Weak and thready” was what a slender, freckled EMT with kind green eyes called my wife’s pulse as she worked to stabilize her on my office floor. I was so grateful that Lauren’s pulse had a description other than absent that I would have laid the deed to my home at the freckled paramedic’s feet in gratitude for her words.

It took no longer than two minutes to get from Walnut Street to Alpine Street. I had no recollection of climbing into the ambulance at the beginning of the trip. The rig must have run with the siren blasting. I never heard its wail.

I was the last to exit. As I jumped down, Lauren’s gurney was disappearing through the ER doors.

The Emergency Department at Community Hospital was crammed with a legion of nursing, medical, and surgical specialists. The hospital’s disaster plan was in effect in response to the fire.

Lauren was the first serious casualty of the day. In seconds, she was surrounded. I tried to stay beside her. The triage nurses would have none of it. They blocked my path. They noted that I was covered in blood. “Where were you hit?” one asked.

My vital signs were truly important to the nurses, an interest I didn’t share. “Where does it hurt, sir?” one nurse kept asking. His clear baritone was so distinctive that I thought I recognized him from an impromptu group bicycle ride up Left Hand early in the summer.
Clayton? Crandall?

“It’s my wife’s blood,” I said to Clayton or Crandall. “All of it.” I kept insisting I wasn’t hurt, that it wasn’t my blood, and that if Lauren had lost this much—my clothes were covered—she must need more.

“Sure,” Clayton or Crandall said, placating me. “We’re on that.”

I finally got one of the nurses to listen to what I had to say. “Listen to me,” I begged. “Please.”

Her ID read, “Marcie.” She leaned toward me, touched the side of my neck with her gloved fingers, and made eye contact. “I am listening,” she said. It was a slightly exasperated “I am listening,” but I was grateful for it.

I said, “I am not hurt. I was not shot.”

“Okay,” she said. She walked away and returned seconds later with clean scrubs. The drawstring on the pants had to be untied before I could put them on. The fisted little knot of cord turned out to be the most impenetrable of puzzles.

Marcie noted that my hands were shaking. She took the pants from me and untied the knot. She pulled my bloody shoes off my feet. My socks were next. One was soaked with blood, the other not so much. Finally, she helped me peel off my bloody trousers.

She wanted to wash the tacky blood from my legs and feet before I pulled on the scrubs. “Later, please,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.” I was grateful that she relented.

As I started to pull the scrub pants over my bloody legs and feet, she said, in a perfectly even voice, “That is an exit wound.”

I assumed she was talking about someone else. I stood to pull the pants up.

“Sit!” Marcie barked. “Your wife is on the way to the OR. So sit!” I thought her change in demeanor felt contrived. I started to lift a leg into the scrubs. “I said sit!”

The rest of the big room quieted for a beat or two in reaction to her yell.

“You going to sit?” she asked. “Or do I need to help you sit?”

I sat. She looked back over her shoulder. In a much calmer voice, she said, “Dr. Jansen? Janelle? Take a look at this guy’s calf. Looks like a GS, entry and exit.”

Dr. Jansen looked up from a computer screen across the room. She said, “Through and through?”

Marcie said, “Appears to be.”

GS? GS?
I’d spent considerable time in ERs in my career. I thought I knew the lingo. That one?
GS?
I was drawing a blank.

A man in a tie with a stethoscope around his neck stood next to Dr. Jansen. He closed his mobile phone and announced in a game-show-host voice that the fire had just jumped a firebreak and was burning in Sunshine Canyon. From the upper floors of the hospital, flames were visible on the ridgetop above Knollwood.

The geography he was describing is familiar to anyone who has lived in Boulder for long. The ridge above Knollwood—a luxury residential enclave on a narrow slice of land at the entrance to Sunshine Canyon—rises only a couple of hundred feet in altitude. That ridge is but a segment in a series of hogbacks and ridges that make up the vertical separation dividing the historical core of Boulder from the Rocky frigging Mountains.

Not far from the ridge above Knollwood the mouth of Sunshine Canyon opens into Boulder. Not into the foothills
near
Boulder. The mouth of Sunshine Canyon protrudes into the city at Fourth
Street. Four blocks
into
Boulder.

Knollwood is on the city side of the ridge. If the wildfire flames consumed the homes in Knollwood, historic Mapleton Hill would be next. If Mapleton Hill burned, downtown, two blocks away, would literally be in the line of fire.

Someone asked, “How are the winds? Are they still from the west?”

Winds from the west would blow the fire into town.

The man with the game-show-host voice said, “Gusty.”

A woman with lovely gray hair climbed on top of the counter at the nursing station. She called for quiet. It took her a while to cut through the chatter and get the attention she was seeking. She instructed all staff to contact their supervisors and to begin to review hospital evacuation protocols. Immediately.

GS,
I finally remembered, meant “gunshot.”

Diane fucking shot my wife, and she shot me.

Through and through.

42

A
quick X-ray confirmed that my bones were undamaged and that my leg was fragment-free. Dr. Jansen began to clean and dress my wound.

I told her I didn’t understand. The gun had never been fired at me.

“Maybe a ricochet,” she said. “It’s not perfectly round, could have been a fragment.” She asked a question about the muscles in my calf. I told her I was a cyclist.

She said she rode, too. She warned me that at some point soon “this thing is going to hurt like the dickens.”

In my head, I repeated
the dickens.
The point she warned about—the hurt-like-the-dickens point—hadn’t arrived.

“A single stitch at each end should do it,” she said. “Maybe two.”

My mind got tangled up rhyming the phrases
maybe two
and
through and through
. I had enough observing ego left to recognize that my focus was not what I needed it to be. I had important things requiring my attention. I needed to be in three places at once, and none of the three included that particular corner of the ER, rhyming inconsequential phrases with Dr. Jansen.

I had to be at Lauren’s side.

I had to be at my kids’ school to meet them, and hold them, and comfort them.

And I had to let Sam know that Lauren knew everything. That she knew all about Frederick. That he was about to be picked up for investigation of murder.

Marcie came back into the treatment room. She told Dr. Jansen that two police detectives were waiting to speak with me about the shooting. Marcie handed me a business card.

One of the detectives was Amal Sengupta. I’d met him once before. Sengupta was a pleasant enough guy, but I had been hoping for Sam or Lucy.

Dr. Jansen asked me if I was ready to speak with the police.

“Can you give me ten or fifteen minutes?” I said. “To gather my thoughts?”

“I’ll try,” she said. She covered my sutured bullet wounds with the same kind of bandages I would use to dress my daughter’s scraped knee.

In the pocket of my bloodied trousers, I found my cell phone. Marcie handed me my wallet. “Better to have this with you than leave it here,” she said.

I scrolled to Cozier Maitlin’s name. On those rare occasions that I needed an attorney with his skill set, Cozy was my lawyer. At six-eight, he was also my first choice for a teammate in pickup basketball games. His assistant put me right through. Cozy had already heard details of that morning’s shooting.

I said, “I don’t want to talk to the police today, Cozy. Can you help me? They’re right outside the door. So it has to be, like, now.”

“I am truly sorry, Alan. But I have been retained to represent the . . . accused.”

I was surprised that my first reaction was relief. I said, “They found Diane, Cozy?” I almost asked how she was doing.

“We were retained by her husband.”

Cozy could have made me guess that information. I was grateful for his indiscretion. He offered to provide names of other attorneys who could help me prior to my interview with Detective Sengupta. I declined. I already had a plan B.

It took me longer to get past Casey Sparrow’s receptionist than it took me to enlist her help. She, too, had heard about the shooting. I decided to postpone telling Casey about Frederick, and about Sam. I did tell her about Cozy’s involvement with Diane. Cozy and Casey knew each other well.

I read her Amal Sengupta’s contact information from his business card.

She said she didn’t know him. She would do what she could.

• • •

When I poked my head outside the treatment room fifteen minutes later, no detectives were in sight.

43

L
auren’s surgeries lasted over four hours. She was in recovery for ninety minutes.

Sam tracked me down in the ICU shortly after Lauren was wheeled into her room. Hearing him say, “Hey,” was the first sign I got that he hadn’t yet been picked up.

He waited outside the door as two nurses completed the process of settling my wife into their care. They made double sure that the monitors were monitoring and the pumps were pumping and the IVs were dripping.

The nurse that I thought was Lauren’s primary appraised Sam suspiciously. He was hovering the way cops hover, something few found reassuring. The nurse said, “No visitors at this hour. You want him here?” I nodded. “I’ll give you five minutes.”

I was sitting by Lauren’s side with her limp hand in mine. Her hand was too cool for my comfort, but not cold enough to spawn any greater panic than I’d been feeling all day. I felt no indication Lauren knew I was by her side. I hoped I was wrong. I kissed her. I whispered, “I love you.”

• • •

With the exception of a wrenching trip across town to pick up the kids at school so I could tell them a PG-13 version of what had happened to their mother, and to arrange for their care for the evening, I had spent the day at the hospital, waiting for any sign that things were not as bad as they seemed.

My optimism, like my wife, was on life support. All afternoon I expected to hear that Lauren had died on the operating table. But she had made it off the operating table. Then I was told that the next twelve hours were crucial.

Those dozen hours were passing with neither speed nor grace.

Whenever I managed to focus beyond the hospital walls, I realized that the Dome Fire loomed above town. Flames were racing through dry grasses, torching pines and spruce, living and dead, while consuming relics of cherished memories without mercy.

Ashes floated into town like funeral confetti.

The smell of it, altogether, was the aroma of dread.

Hundreds had been evacuated. The hospital remained on alert, awaiting the development of some secondary tragedy that would deliver multiple casualties. In the vacuum created by the waiting, rumors of imminent evacuation of the hospital complex raced through the corridors at regular intervals.

A consistent piece of news? The fire had not dropped down the ridge into the mouth of Sunshine Canyon. Knollwood hadn’t fried. Yet. The fire wasn’t in town. Yet.

A subtle wind shift got most of the credit for the good fortune. Valiant firefighters got the rest. I heard a few of the more devout offering thanks to God. For the moment, the devout seemed to be in the minority. Most people were thanking the prevailing winds.

The strangers around me were wary of me but kind. The wariness could have had to do with the fact that I was zombie-ing through the hospital hallways in scrubs stained with dried blood wearing shoes that squished with each step I took.

I wouldn’t have known what to say to me.

• • •

The critical care nurses finished up their duties with Lauren and left the room. I stood to greet Sam. He hugged me, holding the embrace for a long time. “How are you?” he said.

I was determined not to cry. If I started, I feared, I couldn’t control what would come next. More tears, of course. It was the what-else besides the tears that had me worried. I lacked the imagination to predict the manner I would disintegrate.

Sam stepped back. He kept a hand on each of my biceps, as though he suspected I might need to be held up. He said, “I heard about the shooting late morning, but I didn’t know it was . . .”

Lauren.
At first, he didn’t know it was Lauren.

“This fire has the whole town completely . . .”

Whacked.
It was one of Jonas’s words. It seemed to fit.

Boulder, I guessed, had spent the day doing what I’d been doing. Pacing, awaiting tragic developments. Praying for miracles from the same inattentive God who had been careless enough, or callous enough, to permit the figurative or literal match to be struck—and the trigger to be pulled—in the first place.

During one of his frequent philosophical/spiritual forays, my old friend Peter, Jonas’s biological father, had told me that if there was indeed a God responsible for planet Earth, he was certain it was a kid God, an adolescent God, a young, distracted deity who spent most of His time in celestial amusements—playing in a garage band, trying to get laid—that had nothing to do with His more somber God-ish responsibilities.

That meant that we on Earth ended up being the room He didn’t get around to cleaning. The homework He didn’t get done on time. The dog He didn’t get around to feeding.

At intervals all day long, I’d been rehearsing a conversation I wished to have with that kid God of ours. The conversation started with, “Excuse me. God?
God?
Excuse me. What the fuck were you thinking?”

Rumors were that God had a vengeful streak. I was pretty sure my impertinence and profanity would earn me an extended stay in purgatory. I was well beyond caring. My fate, it seemed, included a stint doing time somewhere.

• • •

To Sam, I said, “I know it’s awful out there.”

“I want to hear about Lauren. But first I don’t want you to be surprised if you hear something—I was picked up today.”

My first thought was,
Oh God, here it is.
My second thought?
Then what the hell are you doing here?
I said, “Picked up by whom? For what?”

“IA.”

Internal Affairs.
That made no sense. If Sam was picked up for what happened in Frederick, it would have been his detective colleagues who did the apprehending, not his distant professional relations who made their living investigating police misbehavior.

“What did IA want?”

“There are some allegations.” Sam looked around.

“Come on,” I said. I had no patience to spare. If Sam was feeling parsimonious with details, he could do it with someone else. “I have to talk to you about—”

He stopped me before I could say “Frederick.”

“I know you do. We’ll get there. You need to know this. Okay? IA got an anonymous tip that I had an unregistered handgun and some pilfered drug evidence in my personal vehicle.”

What?

“They asked for permission to search my car. I granted it.”

I couldn’t fit these pieces into the story I knew.
Had Lauren called IA? Had she initiated the search?
I said,
“Sam, wait. You need to—I really need to—”

“I know. I’m almost done. Then I want to hear everything. Remember the break-in of my Cherokee? Right after, I searched the car trying to figure out what had been stolen. Identity? Registration? Anything.

“Nothing was gone but a few dollars in coins. I concluded the guy had been scared off, remember? Then I got to thinking. Couple of nights ago, I couldn’t sleep, got up, went out, turned the car inside out. High in the springs below the driver’s seat, I found that old thirty-two. The one from the intercom in my kitchen.”

I thought I was beyond surprise at that point in my day. I was wrong.

“In the back, duct-taped to the underside of the jack, I found a bag with a couple of ounces of white powder in it. I think it’s meth. Could be coke, but I think it’s meth.

“The gun? Jesus. I was sure it had my prints on it. I mean, it was my gun, right? If IA had found the stuff during their search, I could have, maybe, argued that the drugs were planted during the break-in in the parking lot, but . . . the weapon? That would be hard to explain. How could I convince IA that an asshole had busted into my car and planted a throwdown with my prints on it in my personal vehicle?” He shook his head. “I would have been screwed. Comadoe made a good move.

“But I made a slightly better one. The IA search came up clean.”

Despite the high stakes, Sam’s successful thwarting of Comadoe’s attempt to set him up with IA didn’t feel like it had much to do with my reality. It was kind of like hearing about the outcome of a parliamentary election in Belgium on the BBC.

Sam didn’t know it yet, but he had bigger worries.

Sam could tell I was unmoved. He said, “Thought you needed to know.”

My eyes were full of tears. “Maybe some other time I will appreciate the—”

“Lauren? In the hall earlier?” He sensed it was past time to change the subject. “One of the doctors said that Lauren’s surgery went well. That’s good, right?”

I nodded. To me, it meant that Lauren survived the operations
.
That’s all.

Sam said, “Ophelia has the kids at the DW. She’s frying chicken. It’s good, her chicken—almost like that time I was in Georgia. And her biscuits? Hey, how about I send a car up there to get you a plate. Does that sound good?”

It didn’t. I shook my head. “Simon?” I asked about Sam’s son.

“With a school friend. He’s fine.”

I was grateful for Ophelia’s kindness to my children. The loss-accounting in each of the kids’ lives had reached critical sums. I didn’t know what Lauren’s shooting would do to their fragile holds on adjustment. Jonas was the most vulnerable.
How,
I wondered,
can he survive this day after all the awful days that came before?

I looked at my wife and felt a pain that bored beyond my core. It was at once hollow and sharp. Without looking up, I said, “Lauren knows everything, Sam.”

I thought he grunted. The grunt puzzled me. I turned my head.

It hadn’t been a grunt. Sam had choked. His wide eyes said,
What the f—?

My nod provided the confirmation he feared. He poked his tongue into the side of his cheek while he weighed the consequences. Sam stood. He wrapped the nurse-call device in a spare blanket. He taped a fat round of gauze over the microphone below the speaker panel behind the bed.

It was all déjà-something, for him and for me.

Sam pushed both his open palms down in the direction of the floor. He was the conductor, controlling the volume of his orchestra of one. Me.

As directed, I went pianissimo. “Lauren had a visit at her office from Izza this morning. And Elias Tres. You remember him?” Sam nodded. “Turns out that Tres saw you that night. You parked near his house. He was up because he was waiting for his dead father’s body to come home from Afghanistan. His dad had been killed a few days before in a Taliban ambush. Tres was also up because he’d just heard his drunk grandfather tell Izza the true story of his father’s conception. A story about the rape of Izza’s mother.”

Sam’s mandibles hardened into golf balls.

“The boy drew a picture of the car you were driving that night.” I examined Sam’s face for a twitch, a sign. Nothing. No indication that he realized he’d screwed up.

“Tres has this great . . . memory. Like a savant, people say. He remembered the gym bag you pulled out of the back of the car. A damn Avs bag, Sam. And the cap you were wearing? The Twins, Sam? Jesus. The drawing he did even had two digits and two letters from the license plate.”

Sam’s everyday pink complexion began to fade to hospital-sheet white. He stepped outside the room. He stuffed his hands into his pockets. He gestured to me with his head to join him in the hall. I stepped out. Sam made doubly sure the door was closed.

He had completely lost faith in unconscious people.

He looked toward the nursing station, in the direction of the seated clerk. I had not noticed, but it was Imogen. He leaned in so close to me he could have compared the relative sizes of our heads in a hand mirror. In a barely audible whisper, he said, “It was my understanding that the grandpa wouldn’t let him talk to . . . law enforcement.”

I whispered back, “Turns out there’s a way around that. Because of the rape.”

Sam pondered that news. “Lawyer wizard shit?” he asked.

Sam wasn’t too fond of attorney magic. “Pretty much.”

He stretched his neck back as though he were maximizing the exposure of his flesh in anticipation of his imminent beheading.

I said, “Right after Lauren met with Izza and Tres, she came by my office to tell me that you would be picked up for questioning in Currie’s death. Lauren came to see me out of love, Sam.”

Sam almost emptied his lungs before he said, “Ah Jesus. That’s why she was at your—”

“Yeah. She was there because of what we did in Frederick.”

“What
I
did in Frederick,” he said, correcting me. “Remember that, Alan.”

Sam was feeling the wash of a Gaia breeze. I knew the signs, because I’d been feeling the Gaia blow over me all day long.

The Gaia was, for us, the ill wind that blew no good.

The Gaia effect is an attempt to explain how a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon rain forest can ultimately influence the weather, and events and lives, on the other side of the globe. Say, in a place like Boulder. Lives like Lauren’s, and Sam’s, and mine.

What happened that night in Frederick with Sam and Currie was our Gaia, the wing-flap of the butterfly that Sam and I shared with Lauren and with our kids. The forces put in motion that night had, years later, led Lauren to visit my office, so that she would be sitting in my chair, vulnerable to be shot multiple times in the back.

Take away the distant cause—the flap of the wing that included Sam wrapping his gloved hand around Currie’s trembling hand while they together pointed a revolver into a specific hollow below her chin—and Lauren would not have been in that chair in my office that morning. She would not have been shot.

I would never have known about through and through.

Sam derided most of what New Age believers professed. In fact, when the day came that a Boulder brewer got around to naming a new light ale “Gaia”—it would be a light ale, and the day, I was confident, was coming—Sam would relish the opportunity for ridicule. I had no doubt that were he and I to discuss Gaia, he would belittle any who paid homage. But despite Sam’s derision, and maybe because of it, the reality of the power of the distant influence was smacking him hard right across his pale face.