Mitch Geiger, the narcotics intel guru, arrives in time to catalog everything, speculating that the truck’s contents represent the haul from at least five stash-house heists.
“They couldn’t move this much,” he says, “so they just sat on it for the time being. If you hadn’t shown up, he’d have disappeared with it all.”
When he finishes with me, Bascombe turns to Cavallo for her account of the action. As she’s speaking, he stops her with an exclamation of surprise, then bends over, scratching at her chest. She swats his hand away.
“Just look,” he says, laughing incredulously.
She glances down. There’s a pancaked bullet lodged in her vest. She panics as soon as she sees it, flailing with the Velcro straps. I help her take the Kevlar off, then inspect the damage.
“You didn’t feel that?” I ask.
She presses a hand to her sternum. “I didn’t realize – ”
Bascombe puts an arm over her shoulder, bares his gleaming teeth. “The boss told me March got his luck back. Looks like it rubbed off on you.”
Instead of basking in the sense of relief, Cavallo sits down again, the reality of the situation crashing down on her. “I could’ve been killed.”
“But you weren’t.”
She doesn’t look reassured.
Before we’re released from the scene, I get a call from Wilcox, who’s been camped out at the hospital since the ambulance transported Salazar.
“He’s still in surgery,” he says, “but they’re telling me he’s going to pull through.”
“Good for him.”
“Good for us, March. I was right about what I said before. On the ride over, he kept taking the oxygen mask off and saying one word. Want to take a guess? Immunity. I’ve got a lawyer coming now. I’m pretty sure he’s going to talk.”
When I hang up, part of me wishes I’d aimed better, putting the round through his head instead of his chest. But then I remember Cropper lying dead on the pavement, and figure I’ve got enough blood on my hands for one day. There’s a burden that goes along with killing, even when you’re justified in taking a life. So being spared that is something, even if it means a deal for Salazar, the man who tried to get me killed.
CHAPTER 27
Donna Mayhew reaches her hands out, one toward Cavallo and the other toward me. Without thinking, I clasp the hand, cool and small. She seems smaller since the funeral, diminished, a wan light in her eyes.
“We’re here to talk to Mr. Robb,” I say.
She nods, as if she’d known this already. “He’s upstairs, doing the high school Bible study.”
The double doors leading through to the stairwell are at the end of the hall, but we don’t move. The three of us stand in the office corridor, exchanging no words, no eye contact. After a moment, Hannah’s mother sighs.
“Evey, too,” she says. “And in that terrible place.”
So Robb told her. Of course he did.
“I tried calling her mom, but I couldn’t bring myself to…” She blinks at me, smiles weakly, and folds her arms tight around her frame. “I don’t know this world. I don’t recognize it anymore.”
Cavallo’s arm goes to her shoulder.
“It’s all right. I just, there’s a connection, isn’t there? The two of them, what happened to them. Something was happening and I didn’t see it.”
“You couldn’t have,” Cavallo says.
But Mrs. Mayhew cocks her head toward me, like she’s just noticed something that should have been obvious all along. “You knew, isn’t that right? When you came here that first time, that thing with the Q-tip. You thought – what? That Evey was Hannah?”
“More or less.” My mouth is so dry, the words come out in a whisper. “I got it wrong.”
“Maybe we all did. For a long time now I’ve had this feeling I don’t know my daughter anymore.” Her tear ducts open, her eyes shine with damp. “And now, I can’t really explain it, but it’s like I got her back.”
At the top of the stairs, my leg throbs and I lean against the wall for a breather, grateful to have the bullet wound as an excuse so Cavallo can’t make any cracks about my being an old man. She waits patiently, chin tucked, preoccupied by our encounter with Donna Mayhew.
“Ready?”
I’m not ready, not after that. Mrs. Mayhew has something to work through, a mystery of her own, much deeper than ours. A solitary question that can never be adjudicated, any answers she might find in this life impossible to validate. I know something about that, and what it can do to a person.
So I push on with a nod. This wing of the church is new to me, a long linoleum-lined hallway with classroom doors on either side. It could pass for a high school except for the Bible verses painted on the walls and the framed portraits of robed and bearded men, heroes of the faith presented in a sentimental neo-Victorian soft focus. I glance into a couple of empty classrooms, noting folding tables and stackable chairs, the space flooded by afternoon light.
At the end of the hallway, Cavallo pushes through a set of double doors, holding one open for me. We pass into a larger classroom, where the office-building suspended ceiling has been torn out, the exposed trusses painted black. Past a sea of now-empty couches, a group of thirty or forty teenagers sits in a semicircle around a raised stage. Carter Robb is up there, a tiny book dangling from one hand, a trap set and amplifiers and a couple of guitars on stands behind him.
“Let’s wait back here,” Cavallo whispers, motioning toward one of the couches. Glancing around, I spot a table in back stacked with empty pizza boxes and two-liter bottles of Coke and Sprite. We take our seats, and a couple of kids turn to see who’s come in. Robb gives no sign of noticing us, though we’re hard to miss.
Judging from the tone of his voice, the lingering pauses between the words, the way he makes pointed eye contact with first one student then another, his talk has reached its climactic finale. Robb’s style is very different from, say, Rick Villanueva’s, making up for what it lacks in polish with an extra dose of intensity. But then he’s not coaxing ex-convicts with outstanding warrants into a state of mental paralysis; he’s telling a bunch of slouching, dough-faced teens that all God wants from them is justice, mercy, and humility. Justice must be the greatest of these, because it’s justice Robb lingers on – not only justice for ourselves, he insists, but for the strangers among us, for the outcasts.
“If God, the judge of everything, does what is right, then will he expect anything less from you? Or you?” He points his finger into the audience, then turns it on himself. “Or me? We look out for ourselves, but it’s not enough. We look out for our friends, but that isn’t enough, either. Justice for all, that’s our calling. We can talk about mercy for the undeserving – and we’re all undeserving – but here in the fallen world, living life under the sun, we have to talk about justice for the undeserving, too. And at the end of the day, it has to be more than just talk.”
As I listen, our conversation in the church van comes to mind, the conflict in his head between the safe and the good. If it’s still there, he’s not sharing it with his disciples. If he blames himself for Hannah Mayhew’s fate, or Evangeline Dyer’s, he hasn’t tempered his message as a result.
He ends suddenly, dropping his head, clenching his eyes tight in prayer. Next to me, Cavallo does the same. I shift in my chair, looking around. At the back table, a woman in an apron and baggy jeans starts taking foil off a tray of brownies, cringing at each metallic ripple.
The gravity of the moment ends as soon as the prayer does, with the teens rushing back to the table for dessert, casting a curious glance or two our way. Three or four gather around Robb, who tries to edge toward us while some more wander onstage to pack up instruments. These kids would have known Hannah. They would have known Evey Dyer. Of all people they’d have a right to be shocked by what happened to the girls, to be traumatized. If they are, I see no sign. The resiliency of youth? Maybe. Or it could be that some wounds go too deep to be casually observed. I know something about that, too.