He laughs. “Justice? He got it already, March. And it was you that dealt the card.”
“You wanna explain yourself?”
“When I say they found him, that’s exactly what I mean: they. Not us, not NOPD. We did our usual perfunctory search and made the obvious conclusion. The athletic young perp had managed to escape the clutches of the wheezing, middle-aged cop-”
“You’re one to talk, you cripple.”
“Hey, I’m with you a hundred percent. So anyway, a couple of days pass and Bourgeois doesn’t turn up. I figured he was back in your neck of the woods by now. But we got a call this morning from one of the caretakers out at the cemetery. Said he’d found something mighty disturbing: one of the bodies wasn’t in its crypt.”
My eye starts to twitch.
“No,” he continues, “Bourgeois never made it out. To me, you seemed like a tortoise out there running, but that boy looked over his shoulder and saw the hound of hell. He poured on the speed, lost his footing, and went on down. Crushed his head open on the edge of a marble step.”
I remember the sound from that night. A distant yelp of pain.
“He was breathing long enough to crawl between two of the crypts, probably trying to hide himself from you, and right there’s where he bled out. Our search must have walked right past him, and nobody shined a light between the gap.”
“He’s dead,” I say.
“As a doornail. You saved us the cost of a trial, and if it was up to me, I’d cut you a check right now out of gratitude. But that’s not how we do things down here. Anyway, I thought you’d get a kick out of that.”
“Right,” I say. “Thanks.”
“Hey, March. .”
“Yeah?”
“The kid did slip, right? You didn’t help him along or anything?”
“Next time I’m in New Orleans,” I say, putting the receiver down, “I’ll be sure to get a hotel room.”
Dead. A snap of the fingers. Just like that. One moment he’s on his feet. He’s actually winning the race. And then he falls and his head cracks open like an egg and he’s down for the count, down forever after. Down, down, and down. No trial or conviction. No sentence to be carried out. A summary execution, a hit carried out by fate.
Evil and suffering. Inflicted on the evil one, on the source of suffering. They don’t mean to him what they mean to us. There are things more important than living. Sometimes the blow falls like lightning from heaven. How are you supposed to argue with that?
And other times a killer, a man with no good reason to live, douses himself in gasoline, lights himself up out of nothing but spite, nothing more than the desire to deny his enemies the satisfaction of taking him. A certain death. Only he’s still breathing. The blow hasn’t fallen, the fatal hand is stayed, and the charred and blistered object of my hunt lies anesthetized in a coma, out of surgery and about to go back in, a victim once more, despite the blood on his hands.
How are you supposed to argue with that, either?
You’re gonna get burned.
One of the keys to a long career in law enforcement is learning how to tell police psychologists what they need to hear without sounding deceptive. The only alternative is good mental health, which to me has always seemed too unrealistic a goal.
My chat with the psychologist goes reasonably well. It doesn’t hurt that at the scene of a suspect’s near fatal injury, an injury which I did not cause and only narrowly avoided myself, I made an involuntary show of remorse and disgust.
Bascombe might worry that I’ve cracked, but the head shrink gives me the impression I might be the last emotionally functioning human in the Homicide Division.
She’s wrong, of course.
“Is there something you want to tell me about last night?”
“Like what?”
“Like Carter waited up and you never came home.”
“Oh,” I say. “Right. There was a development.”
“You could have called.”
“Yes,” I say. “Right. I’m sorry about that.”
“Where were you?”
“I was. . thinking.”
That’s one way to put it. Another way would be sleeping in the reclined driver’s seat of a half-scorched car, nauseous from fumes real and remembered, rolling over occasionally to glance out over the dashboard at the building that used to be the Paragon.
“Roland,” she says. “Are you all right? You don’t sound all right.”
“I have a clean bill of health. It’s official.”
A pause. “I can’t talk to you when you’re being this way.”
“What way? I’m not trying to be a ‘way’ at all. I should have called, I’m sorry. Something strange happened. You’ll hear about it soon enough. The guy who broke into the house? He lit himself on fire. We had him cornered and he decided he wasn’t going quietly.”
“That’s terrible. Is he-?”
“He’s alive,” I say. “Whatever that means under the circumstances. He was unrecognizable afterward. Like melted wax.”
She draws in a breath. “Don’t tell me any more.”
“That’s the reason I couldn’t call. I had to be alone. I had to process.” A good therapeutic word. “I’m not sure it’s so terrible, though. Didn’t he get what he deserved?”
“Roland,” she says. “Are you going to be late again tonight?”
“No. I’m riding the desk. Working the phones. Following up on some loose ends for the ADA. We got a fingerprint match to the table at the scene. We might get more, now that it doesn’t matter. I’ll leave when my shift ends, just like always. Everything back to normal.”
“I’ll be waiting,” she says. “And there’s something else. Remember what Charlie Bodeen told you? About the future of the firm? It’s official. You’ve been so distracted I didn’t want to burden you with anything.”
So I’m not the only one keeping quiet.
She waits for me to say something. I don’t.
“The good news,” she says, a thin coat of cheer on her voice, “the good news is, I’m starting a new job.”
“A new job.”
“I got an offer from one of the big firms.”
“The ‘unsavory BigLaw types’?”
“They’re not that bad,” she says, not realizing I’m quoting her words back to her. “They’ve been shedding associates like so much dead weight, but they still made me an offer.” Pride in her voice. “A good one too, Roland. It would be quite a step up.”
“That’s great,” I say.
“Only I’d have to go into the office. It wouldn’t be the contract work. I wouldn’t be working from home anymore. And there might be some travel involved, too.”
“Good. That’s really good. I’m happy for you.”
“Are you?” She listens to the silence. “Because if you’re not, I don’t have to accept. I just thought. . with you working so much, keeping such crazy hours, you wouldn’t miss me if I had to pop out of town every so often. Or work a late night myself.”
“I’d miss you,” I say. “But it’s good. I approve.”
“I’m glad,” she says. “We can talk about it tonight. I’ve been waiting to tell you, but I couldn’t wait any longer or you’d have heard it from somebody else.”
“I understand.” A thought occurs to me. “There’s one stop I need to make after work. It won’t take long.”
“Okay.” She draws the word out, wondering if I’ll elaborate.
I don’t. “I’ll see you.”
“I love you, too,” she says, hanging up.
I sit at my desk, staring at the computer screen, reflecting on the difference between what I said and what she heard. Like she wasn’t hearing, or was hearing too much.
The man behind the desk is Hedges, the old version, wearing one of the boxy gray suits that disappeared around the time the promotion bug bit him. His bent Aviators hang from the breast pocket like he’s just come in from the field, though it’s so gray outside he might only have forgotten them there from the last time he wore the suit.