The Jury Master (16 page)
“Step up,” he said.
Alex stepped up onto the stump, and he pulled her up behind him.
“So what happened?” she asked.
“What?”
“In
True Grit
—what happened?”
“Just keep your head down and hold on.”
“I knew I wasn’t going to like this.”
He put the rope in his teeth, grabbed the Smith & Wesson with his right hand and the Glock in his left, and kicked the horse hard toward the barn door.
D
IRT CASCADED OVER
the top of Sloane’s head and trickled down the collar of his shirt. He lowered his chin to his chest and closed his eyes, letting the tiny avalanche pass over him. He clung to the side of the cliff, perhaps twenty-five feet from the top. Above him, the man walked the edge.
The pounding surf had chipped away at the sandstone and rock like the mother of all jackhammers, leaving the upper half hanging out like a bad overbite. It and the thick fog became Sloane’s refuge. Even if the man were to lie on his stomach to look out over the edge, he would not be able to see Sloane. Whoever he was, he’d have to assume that Sloane had taken his chances in the icy waters of the Pacific Ocean or evaded him in the dark. The immediate question was how long the man would wait to be certain. Sloane couldn’t hang on forever. His ankle burned with a cold fire, and the muscles in his legs and arms, no longer as strong or durable as they had been when he climbed regularly, were already beginning to twitch—the first sign of muscle fatigue. Failure imminent. He did his best to shift his weight and alternate his grip to give the muscles respite while trying to maintain three points of contact with the wall. Beads of sweat, mixed with the damp salt air, trickled into his eyes, stinging them.
More dirt fell from above.
And even if his arms and legs held out, there was no guarantee the ledge would. The crevices he gripped had the consistency of chalk. With the ocean’s persistent pounding, the sandstone was known to give way suddenly. Winter storms led to dramatic television footage of entire backyards slipping into the Pacific in a matter of seconds.
Sloane counted to himself: keeping track of the minutes, a trick he’d learned to keep his mind focused. When he reached seven minutes he knew it was as long as he could wait and still have enough strength to climb back up. In the dark, with a bad ankle, the wind howling, and his body chilled from the moist cold, the process would be laborious. He had to be certain of each hold before transferring his full weight. The potential consequences of a mistake demanded that he not rush.
He gripped a branch, found a notch for his foot, tested it, and stepped out. The notch gave way—his right foot dangling. He kicked at the wall until feeling another toehold, then took a moment. His chest beat furiously against his rib cage. Below him the rhythmic hush of the ocean inhaled and exhaled with each powerful surge, like a dying man sucking on a respirator.
Sloane shifted his weight, found another hold, and stepped up. His ankle pulsed, but he willed himself to ignore it, concentrating, like a chess player, on two and three moves ahead. Going back was not an option.
After twenty minutes he had reached the edge. If he was wrong and the man remained, he was dead. He paused and reached up, expecting a pair of shoes to step on his fingers and send him falling backward into the foam and fog. When they didn’t, he lifted his head over the side and pulled himself over the edge, keeping low to the ground. He searched the shadows and wind-blown fog for anything out of place. Seeing nothing, he rose to his feet and limped back to the building and through the corridor, emerging in the carport with a view of the gravel parking lot.
The van was gone.
His thoughts turned to Melda.
Why wasn’t she in her apartment? If she had come home from bingo to find her apartment destroyed, she would have gone only to one person. Sloane.
And that was where the man had been.
He leaned on the metal railing, using it like a cane to pull himself up the staircase, and hobbled down the landing. The door to his apartment remained open.
“Melda?”
Her cast-iron skillet lay on the counter.
“Melda?”
She was not in the kitchen or the main room. He hurried into the bedroom, stumbling over debris, and turned on the light. The shoe lay on its side, outside the closed bathroom door. White, soft-soled. Melda’s shoe.
“Melda?”
Sloane never closed the bathroom door. His immediate neighbor was the ocean. With his pulse beating in his ears, he reached for the handle of the door. If there was a God, let the room be empty. He turned the handle, pushed open the door. The wedge of light swept over the linoleum, widening like the sun passing over a sundial, and came to a stop on the figure slumped against the porcelain tub. It was an almost serene image. Then Sloane flipped the switch, and the light brought unspeakable horror. Melda lay in a pool of blood, her head pitched backward, her throat a gaping hole.
Sloane’s feet felt anchored to the floor; his hands twisted with anger, despair, and uncertainty.
“No,” he cried softly. Then the agony burst from his throat in a torrent of rage. “Noooooooo!”
He stumbled forward to his knees, crawling to her, clutching her to his chest.
No. No. No.
“Breathe,” he pleaded. “Please breathe.”
Please. Breathe. Please breathe.
He lowered her to the floor, tilted her head back, and cupped her mouth with his own, blowing, pressing on her chest, all reason now lost and buried.
“One, two, three, four, five.”
One breath, five thrusts.
His breath escaped through her neck like air from a hole in a tire.
“Three, four, five.”
No. God, no . . .
Again. Blow. “Three, four, five.”
Again. Again. The room blurred in white flickering lights.
“Two, three, four . . .”
The voice grew faint.
Darkness enveloped him, pulling on him like a weight tied to his ankles. He sank. The light faded. Pain exploded across his forehead and temples, plunging him further into darkness, alone, the only sound the fading of his own voice, a tape running low on batteries. “One . . . two . . . three . . .”
Then it, too, faded. And he was gone.
H
IS DESIRE TO
punish those who had killed his dogs urged him to steer the horse down the narrow path, guns blazing like Rooster Cogburn—John Wayne—riding across the open field in the climax to
True Grit.
But this was not a movie, and in real life the good guys died. Jenkins turned the horse away from the barn and kicked it hard up the path, using one arm to protect his face from low-hanging branches. Behind him he felt Alex Hart’s head against his back. She kept a tight grip around his waist. The brush cleared at the asphalt road. He stopped in the trees, considering the road for a moment, hoping that their attackers had not anticipated this path of retreat. Then he urged the horse across it, deeper into the darkness on the other side.
After ten minutes of hard riding, with the Arabian snorting white puffs in the cool night air, Jenkins slowed the animal to cross a small creek bed that emptied into the sound a mile downstream. He pushed the horse up a steep hillside, letting it find its footing, and looked down on the cottage, a tepee of fire. Dismounting, he tethered the animal to a tree and eased Alex to the ground, putting her back against a tree. She grimaced when he ripped the sleeve off her blouse to examine her arm.
She’d been lucky. The bullet had ricocheted off the tree and grazed her biceps. She’d have a scar, but she’d live. The wound was already clotting.
He used his teeth to tear strips of cloth. “We need to get you to a doctor,” he said between clenched teeth.
“You going to ride the horse in?”
He ripped another strip and wrapped her arm. “This doesn’t involve you, Alex.”
“It does now.”
He made a knot and applied another strip. “This is a surface wound. These wounds cut a lot deeper and have been bleeding since you were riding your bike in the front yard of your parents’ home.”
She pushed him away and struggled to her feet. “Well, I’m not riding my bike anymore. And I’m not a little girl, Charlie. So why don’t you just let
me
take care of me.”
She was stubborn, like her father. He stood from his crouch. “You make it personal, Alex, and you’ll end up getting killed.”
“What are
you
going to make it?”
He turned, looking down at the farm. From the distance it looked as peaceful as a campfire. “They killed my dogs,” he said, the realization sinking in. “I was willing to let it all go. They took my career, my life, but I was willing to let it go.” He turned his head to look at her, his voice taut with emotion, anger. “They made it personal.”
“We’re both in this now; neither of us has a choice. We need to be smart.”
For a long moment they sat in silence, hearing the stream in the distance and the occasional gust of wind through the trees.
“Where did you go, Charlie? Where did you go back there? You looked up at me like you were a million miles away.”
He didn’t answer her.
“You called me ‘Joe.’”
For the first few years the image of the woman had haunted him every night. Jack Daniels and Southern Comfort helped pass the days. If he got drunk enough he could make it through a night, sometimes a week, but the memories of what had happened, of what he had been a participant in, were always there, as permanent as Mount Rainier on the southern horizon—dormant, but capable of erupting any moment. When the booze no longer helped him to forget, he quit cold turkey. He didn’t need intervention or crisis counseling. He didn’t need AA. He wasn’t an alcoholic. He was just a man trying to forget a nightmare. He didn’t even pour the whiskey down the drain to avoid temptation. It had sat in his cabinet, untouched—until tonight.
“What’s in that file, Charlie?”
He looked at her, then back to the fires burning in the valley below. “A lot of bad memories,” he said. “Too many.”
UCSF Hospital,
San Francisco
T
HE BURST OF LIGHT
blinded him, the door exploding in a shower of needled splinters, shaking the room. The percussive blast propelled him from the bed like a man being tossed from a boat in a storm. Slipping over the side, he clutched at the covers, pulling them over him as he fell into the gap, his body wedged between the wall and the heavy wood frame. He couldn’t move. Smoke tormented his lungs, burned his eyes, blurred his vision. The blast had deadened all sounds but for the ringing in his ears.
The floor beneath him shook again, people running into the room.
She fell to the ground, her face parallel with his own. A spray of blood spattered the dirt floor. He watched, helpless, as she flailed at the arms striking her, as if warding off a swarm of bees, until pain and instinct forced her to a fetal position. When the blows slowed the woman pushed to her knees, gasping, her body convulsing. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth and one nostril. She raised her head, contemplating those who stood over her, then spat at their boots.
The beating began again. They ripped the clothes from her body, leaving her naked and exposed, and forced her onto her back. One after the next they climbed on top of her until she no longer fought them, no longer resisted. A gloved hand pulled her from the floor by a tuft of hair, her body dangling limp as a rag doll, her right eye swollen shut, her lip split. Her left eye shifted, finding him for one brief moment beneath the bed.
The blade arced, catching the flickering light of the moon before it sliced the darkness like a sickle through wheat.
N
O!”
This time no echo rang in his ears. No ghostly wail haunted him. Sloane struggled to sit up, felt pressure across his chest, and realized he could not move his arms or legs. A bright light blinded him, an orb of white. He started to panic, then heard someone calling to him by name.
“Mr. Sloane. Mr. Sloane, can you hear me?”
The light receded, leaving an aura of black and white spots that gave way to blurred images. He sensed someone standing over him, calling to him.
“Mr. Sloane?”
The images came into focus. A woman leaned over him, her face unfamiliar, round and flat, like a puffer fish when provoked, her eyes set behind thick plastic-framed glasses—a strange octagon shape and too large for her face.
“Mr. Sloane?”
The room was foreign, stark white but for a mauve drape that muted light from a window. A chair the color of the drape sat unused in the corner. He looked down at a red nylon strap across his chest. Similar straps bound his wrists. Though he could not see his ankles beneath the thin white sheet, the pressure told him they, too, were bound. A clear plastic tube ran from an IV bag suspended on a metal stand, to a needle in the crook of his right arm.
This was not his apartment . . . not his room.
“You all right?”
Now a different voice, a man’s voice. Sloane turned his head. The images blurred and slid like time-lapse photography, coming to a stop on a black man standing in the room, one hand holding open the door. Fluorescent lights glistened off his shaved pate. He wore a plain tie and a gray suit.
“I thought I heard a scream.”
The woman walked toward him. “I’m fine, Detective. Please wait outside.”
“Is he awake?”
“I’m evaluating him. I’ll advise you when I feel he’s capable of talking.”
“He looks alert to me.”
“Detective Gordon, I’ll be the judge of that.”
The man shrugged, resigned. “I’ll get another cup of coffee,” he said, and let the door shut behind him.
The woman returned to the foot of the bed. “Mr. Sloane? Can you hear me?”
Sloane nodded. Her face shifted up and down until he squeezed his eyes shut and reopened them.
“Are you having trouble with your vision?”
“Blurry.”
“I’m Dr. Brenda Knight. Do you know where you are?”
