“You’ll be safe, but I can’t be your protection.”
She stares at him.
“I’ve got to let them investigate this, Monique. I can’t be involved in a deadly-force case and go about my business as if nothing happened.”
“You can and you will.”
“You’re not really expecting me to be your bodyguard…?”
“That would be your fantasy, wouldn’t it,” she says, and she stares at him, something in her eyes he’s never seen before, not from her. “Get me out of here. There must be a basement, a fire exit, something, get me out of here. Doesn’t this goddamn hospital have a rooftop helipad?”
Win calls Sammy on the cell phone, says, “Get one of the choppers in and fly her out of here.”
“To where?” Sammy asks.
Win looks at Lamont, says, “You got some safe place to stay?”
She hesitates, then, “Boston.”
“Where in Boston? I need to know.”
“An apartment.”
“You have an apartment in Boston?” That’s news to him. Why would she have an apartment less than ten miles from her house?
She doesn’t reply, doesn’t owe him any further explanations about her life.
He tells Sammy, “Get an officer to meet her when she lands, escort her to her apartment.”
He gets off the phone, looks at her, has one of his bad feelings, says, “Words aren’t enough, Monique, but I can’t tell you how sorry…”
“You’re right, words aren’t enough.” She gives him the same disconcerting stare.
“I’m out of commission for a few days, starting now,” he says. “It’s the best thing to do.”
Her eyes bore into him as she stands in the small, white room, the white blanket wrapped around her.
“What do you mean, the best thing? I should think I’m the one who decides what the best thing is for me.”
“Maybe this isn’t only about you,” he says.
Her scary eyes don’t leave his.
“Monique, I need a few days to take care of things.”
“Right now, your job is to take care of me,” she says. “We have to do damage control, turn this into something positive. You need me.”
She stands perfectly still, her eyes staring. Behind them is a darkness seething with hatred and rage.
“I’m the only witness,” she states in a flat tone.
“Are you threatening to lie about what happened if I don’t do what you say?”
“I don’t lie. That’s one thing people know about me,” she replies.
“You’re threatening me?” He says it again, and now he’s a cop, now he isn’t the man who saved her life. “Because there are more important witnesses than you. The silent witnesses of forensic science. His body fluids, for example. Unless you’re going to say it was consensual. Then I guess his saliva, his seminal fluid are irrelevant. Then I guess I inadvertently interrupted a tryst, some creative sex scenario. Maybe he thought he was protecting you from me, thought I was the intruder, instead of the other way around. That what you’re going to say, Monique?”
“How dare you.”
“I’m pretty good with scripts. You want a few more?”
“How dare you!”
“No. How dare you. I just saved your goddamn life.”
“You sexist pig. Typical man. Think all of us want it.”
“Stop it.”
“Think all of us have some secret fantasy about being…”
“Stop it!” Then he lowers his voice. “I’ll help you all I can. I didn’t do this to you. You know what happened. He’s dead. He got what he deserved. The best revenge, if you want to look at it that way. You won, made him pay the ultimate price, if you want to look at it that way. Now let’s repair what we can, get things on the right track as best we can. Damage control, as you put it.”
Her eyes clear. Thoughts move in them.
“I need a few days,” Win says. “I need you to refrain from taking this out on me. If you can’t do that, I’ll have no choice but to…”
“Facts,” she interrupts him. “Fingerprints on the gas can. DNA. The pistol — is it stolen? My missing keys, probably a coincidence unless they were on his person, in his residence. If so, why wasn’t he waiting inside my house?”
“Your alarm.”
“Right.” She paces, wrapped in her white blanket like an Indian chief. “How did he get to my house. Does he have a car. Did someone else drive him. His family. Who did he know.”
Past tense. Her attacker is dead and she thinks of him as dead already. It hasn’t even been an hour. Win looks at his watch. He calls Sammy. The chopper’s nine minutes out.
The Bell 430 lifts off from Mount Auburn Hospital’s rooftop helipad, hovers and noses around, flies off toward the Boston skyline. It’s a seven-million-dollar bird. Lamont had a lot to do with making sure the Massachusetts State Police has three of them.
At the moment she doesn’t take much pride in that, doesn’t take much pride in anything, isn’t sure how she feels except heavy, stony. From where she sits in back, she can see frantic journalists on the ground, their cameras pointed in her loud, dramatic direction, and she shuts her eyes and tries to ignore her desperate need for a shower and clean clothing, tries to ignore areas of her body that were invaded and violated, tries to ignore nagging fears about sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy. She tries to concentrate on who and what she is and not on what happened hours earlier.
She takes a deep breath, looks out the window, looks at the rooftops passing below her as the helicopter beats its way toward Massachusetts General Hospital, where the pilots plan to land so some state policeperson can pick her up and transport her to an apartment no one is supposed to know about. She’ll probably pay for that mistake, doesn’t know what else she could have done.
“You all right back there?” A pilot’s voice sounds through her headset.
“Fine.”
“We’ll be landing in four minutes.”
She is sinking. She stares without blinking at the partition that separates the pilots from her, and she feels herself getting heavier, sinking lower. Once when she was an undergraduate at Harvard she got drunk, really drunk, and although she never said a word about it to anyone, she knew that at least one of the men she was partying with had sex with her while she was unconscious. When she came to, the sun was up and the birds were making noise, and she was alone on a couch and it was obvious what had happened, but she didn’t accuse the suspect she had in mind, certainly didn’t consider an examination by a forensic nurse. She remembers how she felt that day — poisoned, dazed. No, not just dazed, maybe dead. That was it, she recalls as she flies into the downtown skyline. She felt dead.
Death can be liberating. There are things you don’t have to care about anymore if you’re dead. People can’t injure or maim parts of you that are dead.
“Ms. Lamont?” A pilot’s voice sounds in her headset again. “When we land, it will take us a minute to shut down and I want you to sit tight. Someone will open the door for you and get you out.”
She imagines Governor Crawley. She imagines his ugly, smirking face when he hears the news. He probably already knows. Of course he does. He’ll be sympathetic, heartbroken, and degrade and destroy her in the election.
“Then what?” she says, pushing the mic close to her lip.
“The state police officer on the ground will tell you….” one of the pilots answers.
“You’re the state police,” she says. “I’m asking you what the plan is. Is the media there?”
“You’ll be briefed, I’m sure, ma’am.”
They are hovering over the hospital’s rooftop helipad now, a blaze-orange windsock whipping around in the rotor wash, some state policewoman in a blue uniform bending her head against the wind. The helicopter sets down, goes into flight idle, and Lamont sits, staring out at the unfamiliar, plain-looking woman officer, someone low on the food chain who’s supposed to get the traumatized and besieged DA to safe asylum. A damn escort, a damn bodyguard, a damn woman to remind Lamont that she’s a woman who has just been violated by a man and therefore most likely doesn’t want to be escorted by a man. She’s damaged. A victim. She imagines Crawley, imagines what he’ll say, what he’s already saying and thinking.