Even as he went down, his eyes were focused on Bekker, his hands straining. Sloan had the pistol, was twisting, his thumb under the hammer…
Lucas was aware of weight on his chest, and Sloan, then of Sloan looking away, looking back up at Bekker, who was sliding a bloody path down the plaster walls. Sloan was looking at Bekker's face, and Lucas heard Sloan say, "Oh Christ, ah Christ, ah sweet Jesus…"
The doctor's face was a mask of blood and curling, wounded flesh. Even Druze might have turned away, had he been alive to see it.
In ten minutes, the world was moving again.
Lucas sat on a hard wooden bench in the entry, Sloan next to him.
Del was down the hall, his hands in his pockets. The Intelligence man, two uniforms and the paramedics were with Bekker. When they brought him out, on a gurney, one of the paramedics held a drip bottle above him, the line plugged into one of Bekker's arms. He was conscious. One of his eyes was puffed nearly shut, but the other was open.
He saw Lucas, recognized him, and a noise came through his ruined lips.
"What?" Lucas asked. "Hold it… What'd he say?"
The paramedics stopped and looked down. Bekker, struggling, one eye open, blood running into it, tried to sit up, put the words together…
"You should have…" He lost it for a moment, then came back, a red bubble of blood on his lips.
"What?" Lucas asked. He stooped over and the blood bubble burst.
"You should have…"
"What, what, motherfucker…?" Lucas shouted down at him, Sloan on his arms again.
"… killed me…" Bekker tried to smile. His lips, cut nearly in half, failed him. "Fool."
CHAPTER 32
Lucas sat outside Daniel's office, six feet from the secretary's desk. She had tried talking to him but eventually gave up. When the secretary's intercom beeped, she tipped her head toward the office door and Lucas went inside.
"Come in," Daniel said. His voice was formal, his office was not. Papers were scattered across the top of his desk and an amber cursor blinked on his computer screen, halfway down a column of numbers. A veil of cigar smoke hung in the room. Daniel pointed to the good guest chair. "What a fuckin' week. How are you?"
"Messed up," Lucas said. "I'd only known Cassie for a few days, and I don't think we would have lasted… but shit. She was pulling me up. I was feeling almost human."
"Are you going back over the edge?" Daniel's face was questioning, concerned.
"Christ, I hope not," Lucas said, rubbing his face with his open hands. He was exhausted. After the arrest, he'd gone home and crashed, slept the night and the day through, until he was shaken out of bed by Daniel's call. "Anything but that."
"Hmm." Daniel picked up a dead cigar, rolled it between his fingers. "You've heard about the answering machine."
"No, I've been out of it…"
"One of the crime-scene guys-you know Andre?"
"Yeah…"
"Andre was going through Bekker's office, and a secretary said she'd seen Bekker coming out of the next office down from his. She thought he was just doing some housekeeping for his neighbor, who's off in Europe on a fellowship. Anyway, Andre gets on the phone and calls this guy in Europe, tells him what happened, gets his okay, and they check out his office. There's an answering machine in his desk and it's turned on. Andre pushes the button and the tape just stops; it's been rewound. But when he pushes it again, it starts running, and it's a message from Druze to Bekker, telling him it's done… We went back to the phone company, checked it, and the call came in a half-hour after the woman was killed at Maplewood. There's another fragment of conversation under that, just a few words, but it's Bekker."
"So that ties it," Lucas said.
"Yeah. And there are a couple of other things, coming along."
"What about Loverboy?" Lucas asked.
"I pulled Shearson off the shrink. Shearson thinks he's the one, but we'll never know. Not unless he just comes out and tells us." Daniel rolled the cigar between his palms. He looked more than unhappy.
"What's wrong?" Lucas asked.
"Shit." Daniel backhanded the cigar butt at the wall, where it bounced off the black-and-white face of Robert Kennedy and fell to the floor.
"Let's have it," Lucas said.
Daniel swiveled his chair to look out the window at the street. Spring was definitely coming, the days stretching toward summer. The street was sunlit, although the temperatures hung in the forties. "Lucas… God damn it. You beat up Bekker. His fuckin' face… And remember that pimp, that kid, Whitcomb? His goddamn attorney has been back to Internal Affairs-Whitcomb's family don't believe a word of that pimp story, they think their little boy fell into the hands of a bad cop. They're talking about the courts…"
"We've handled it before…" Lucas suggested.
"Not like this. You've been in fights. These people… Shit, these people didn't have much of a chance."
"Whitcomb is a fucking violence freak," Lucas said, leaning forward. "Has his attorney looked at the girl he worked over?"
"Yeah, yeah. Whitcomb's a criminal-but you're not supposed to be. And now there are rumors about you going into Druze's apartment. Too many people know about it. If you tried to deny it at a hearing, you'd be perjuring yourself. And there's more…"
"Like what?"
"A guy from Channel Eight was talking about making a formal complaint that you gave special privileges to one of the reporters from TV3. That wouldn't be any big deal, normally, except that Barlow picked it up, and decided that you fed her confidential investigatory material."
"You could quash that," Lucas said.
"Yeah. That. Or any one of the others. But the whole bunch…"
"Cut to the action," Lucas said. "What're you telling me?"
Daniel sighed, turned back and leaned over his desk. "I can't fuckin' save you."
"Can't save me?" Lucas said it quietly, almost pensively.
"They're gonna hang your ass," Daniel said. "The shooflies and a couple of guys on the council… And I can't do a fuckin' thing about it. I told them that you'd maybe had some psychological problems, they were straightening out. They said bullshit: If he's nuts, get him off the street. And you've killed a few guys. You see that Pioneer Press editorial? Our own serial killer…"
"Jesus Christ," Lucas said. He levered himself out of the chair and took a turn around the office, looking at all the black-and-white mug shots, the smiling sharks, a lifetime of politicians. He stopped at the color, the Hmong tapestry, the Minnesota weather calendar. "I'm gone?"
"You could fight it, but it'd be pretty bad," Daniel said. "They'd be asking about the break-in, about the fight with Whitcomb and about Bekker's face… I mean, Jesus, you look at a picture of the way Bekker used to be, and his face now. Jesus, he looks like Frankenstein. On top of it all, you haven't gone out of your way to win any popularity contests."
"There are some people in the press…"
"They'll turn on you like rats," Daniel said. "Nothing gives an editorial writer more satisfaction than seeing somebody else booted out of his job."
"I've got friends…"
"Sure. I'm one. I'd testify for you… but like I said-and I'm a politician, I know what I'm talking about-I can't save your ass. As a friend, I tell you this: If you resign, I can turn it all off. I can short-circuit it. You walk away clean. If you decide to fight it, I'll stand with you, but…"
"It wouldn't do any good."
"No."
Lucas stared bleakly at the weather calendar, then nodded and turned to face Daniel. "I knew I was getting close to the end of my string," he said. "Too much shit coming down. I just kind of wish…"