“We have to stop the bleeding,” Scarpetta said very calmly, kindly, almost as if she was talking to a child. “The bullet must be right under the scalp, and that’s why it’s hurting when we apply pressure. You’re going to be all right. You’re going to be just fine. The ambulance will be here any minute.”
There were furrows around Berger’s wrists, and her hands were bright red and were very stiff and awkward as she opened several large white bath sheets and tucked them around Lucy’s neck and under her legs. Lucy was naked and wet and must have just stepped out of the shower when Morales shot her. Berger got down on the floor next to them, and blood got all over her hands and her blouse as she touched Lucy and told her repeatedly that she would be fine. Everything was going to be fine.
“He’s dead,” Berger told Lucy. “He was about to shoot Marino, to shoot all of us.”
The nerves in Scarpetta’s hands were waking up and angry, a million pins sticking, and she vaguely perceived a small, hard lump at the back of Lucy’s skull, several inches to the left of the midline of it.
“Right here,” she said to Lucy. “Help me, if you can.”
Lucy lifted her hand and helped her find the perforation, and Scarpetta worked the bullet out, and Lucy complained loudly. It was medium- to large-caliber, semi-jacketed, and deformed, and she handed it to Berger and pressed a towel firmly against the wound to stop the bleeding.
Scarpetta’s sweater was soaked with blood, the floor around her slippery with it. She didn’t think the bullet had penetrated the skull. She suspected it had struck at an angle and expended most of its kinetic energy within a relatively small space within milliseconds. There are so many blood vessels close to the surface of the scalp, it bleeds alarmingly, always looks worse than it is. Scarpetta pressed the towel very firmly against the wound, her right hand on Lucy’s forehead, holding her.
Lucy leaned heavily against her and shut her eyes. Scarpetta felt the side of her neck and checked her pulse, and it was rapid but not alarmingly so, and she was breathing fine. She wasn’t restless and didn’t seem confused. There were no signs she was going into shock. Scarpetta held her forehead again, pressing hard against the wound to stop the bleeding.
“Lucy, I need you to open your eyes and stay awake. You listening? Can you tell us what happened?” Scarpetta said. “He ran upstairs and we heard a gunshot. Do you remember what happened?”
“You saved everybody’s life,” Berger said. “You’re going to be fine. All of us are fine.”
She was stroking Lucy’s arm.
“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “I remember being in the shower. Then I was on the floor and my head felt as if someone hit me with an anvil. Like I got hit with a car in the back of my head. For a minute I was blind. I thought I was permanently blind, and suddenly I saw light, and images. I heard him downstairs, and I couldn’t walk. I was dizzy, so I crawled over to the chair, kind of slid myself over the wood to where my coat was and got the gun out of it. And I started to see again.”
The bloody Glock was on the bloody floor near the railing of the gallery, and Scarpetta remembered it was one Marino had given to Lucy for Christmas. It was Lucy’s favorite gun. She’d said it was the nicest thing he’d ever given to her, a pocket-size forty-caliber pistol with a laser sight and boxes of high-velocity hollowpoints to go with it. He knew what she liked. He was the one who’d taught her to shoot when she was a child, when the two of them would disappear in his pickup truck, and later Lucy’s mother—Scarpetta’s sister, Dorothy—would call and curse, usually after several drinks, and scream at Scarpetta for ruining Lucy, threatening to never let Lucy see her again.
Dorothy probably never would have allowed Lucy to visit were it not for the minor problem that she didn’t want a child, because Dorothy was a child who would always want a daddy to take care of her, to dote on her, to adore her the way their father had doted and depended on Scarpetta.
She pushed Lucy’s forehead with one hand and held the cloth against the back of her head with the other, and her hands felt hot and swollen now, her pulse pounding in them. The bleeding had slowed considerably, but she resisted looking. She continued the pressure.
“Looks like a thirty-eight,” Lucy said, shutting her eyes again.
She must have noticed the bullet when Scarpetta had handed it to Berger.
“I want you to keep your eyes open and stay awake,” Scarpetta said. “You’re fine, but let’s just stay awake. I think I hear something. I think the rescue squad’s here. We’re going to the ER and we’ll do all those fun tests you like so much. X-rays. MRI. Tell me how you’re feeling.”
“I hurt like shit. I’m okay. Did you see his gun? I’m wondering what it was. I don’t remember seeing it. I don’t remember him.”
Scarpetta heard the door open downstairs, and the clatter and confusion of tense voices as the squad came in, and Marino hurried them up the stairs, all of them talking loudly. He stepped out of the way, looking at Lucy in her bloody bath sheets, then at the Glock on the floor, and he leaned over and picked it up. He did the one thing you never do at a crime scene. He held it in his bare hands and walked off with it, disappeared into the bathroom with it.
Two paramedics were talking to Lucy and asking her questions, and she was answering as they buckled her into the stretcher, and Scarpetta was so busy with that, she didn’t notice Marino had somehow ended up back downstairs, and was there with three uniformed officers. Other EMTs were lifting Morales’s body onto yet another stretcher, nobody bothering with CPR because he had been dead for a while.
Marino was dropping the magazine out of the Glock—Lucy’s Glock—it seemed, and clearing the chamber while an officer held a paper bag open. Marino was telling them about Berger remotely unlocking the apartment door and letting him in without Morales knowing. Marino was making up a story about him creeping as close as he could, then deliberately making a sound so Morales would look up.
“Giving me just enough chance to get off a round before he shot someone,” Marino lied to the cops. “He was behind the Doc with his revolver pointed at her.”
Berger was with them, and she said, “We were right here on the couch.”
“A hammerless thirty-eight,” Marino said.
He was pointing all this out, taking the blame, not the credit, for killing someone, and Berger was going along with it flawlessly. It seemed her new role in life was keeping Lucy out of trouble.
Legally, Lucy absolutely couldn’t have a handgun in New York City, not even inside a residence, not even for self-defense. Legally, the handgun still belonged to Marino because he’d never gotten around to the paperwork, to transferring his gift over to Lucy’s ownership, because so much had gone on after that Christmas a year ago in Charleston. Nobody had been happy with one another, and then Rose wasn’t herself and no one knew why for a while, and Scarpetta wasn’t capable of fixing their world as it seemed to fly apart, like an old golf ball that’s lost its skin. It had been the beginning of what she’d decided, not all that long ago, was the end of them.
Her bloody hand held Lucy’s bloody hand as the paramedics clattered the stretcher toward the elevator, one of them talking on the radio to the ambulance in front of the building. The doors opened and Benton was stepping out in his pinstripe suit, looking just like he did on CNN when she’d watched him on her BlackBerry as she’d walked to Berger’s apartment.
He took Lucy’s other hand and looked into Scarpetta’s eyes, and the sadness and relief on his face was as deep as anything could possibly be.