Trait released the switch that freed the warden, leaving him quaking involuntarily before the front counter.
Rebecca carried the empty gun to Grue. He lay on his side, throat gurgling as his lifeblood coughed out of his neck and mouth. He was sagging like a balloon losing air, looking bewildered and small.
She knelt beside him and set the gun down near his wide, staring eyes.
“I don’t want your last words,” she said.
But he could no longer see her or the flame-lit book stacks of the Gilchrist Public Library. Death panic had tricked his mind out to a place in his past. His mother had run a slaughterhouse, and it occurred to Rebecca that he might have returned there to die.
Rebecca used the table to get to her feet, momentarily leaning on it for support.
When she turned around, Luther Trait was standing before the row of bookshelves behind her.
Rebecca reeled back wildly, stumbling into a smaller table set near the far stacks.
Trait was a broken man. His face was ripped apart and swelling and his jaw hung open. He could not summon a full breath. The black feathers of the arrow in his right breast were wet with blood. His head drooped to the side such that he watched her out of his one good eye, the yellow-brown pupil piercing.
He spit out blood in order to speak. “You look different,” he slurred.
“I am different.”
She stood her ground, gripping the table as books tumbled off display stands. One struck her boot and its familiar jacket design distracted her. The prim, satisfied woman behind the writing desk in the author photograph was someone she barely knew. Rebecca was standing against a table of Last Words display copies, arranged for her ill-fated reading.
Trait took one short step toward her, then another, holding his balance. This brought a determined, if lopsided, grin.
“Don’t come any closer,” she warned him.
“You saved me,” he said.
“They’re coming now. Stay where you are.”
But he came forward two more steps. She felt oddly relaxed — out of control and in control at the same time. Suddenly she was glad she had stayed in Gilchrist, if only to defy him.
“Here I am,” she said. “Here’s your prize.”
The rumbling grew tremendous overhead, the rotor hum of the helicopters sweeping near the center of town. Warden James crawled to a sitting position against the front desk, looking up now, hearing them, as did Trait.
Trait pushed ahead. He was dying and yet somehow he kept moving toward her.
“Don’t do this,” Rebecca said.
He was close now, only a few steps away.
Something in his broken face told her he was stronger than he seemed.
“I’m not afraid,” Rebecca said. Her hand went into her pants pocket, closing around the mace. “I won’t be anyone’s victim.”
The warden called to Trait in a worn, tremulous voice, “Luther! Don’t!”
Trait paused, a spark of aggression in his one good eye — then he lunged for Rebecca, one arm raised, groping for her neck.
Rebecca pulled her hand out of her pocket. She maced him as he came.
Trait hit her sputtering, grabbing at her face as they went down, overturning the display table.
He was on top of her, blindly, pulling at her hair, trying to work his other fist free. The mace mist irritated her eyes, and as they rolled Rebecca felt around the floor until her hand gripped something with a familiar heft. As Trait was raising his hand to strike her, Rebecca let out a yell from a long-forgotten self-defense class and brought the Last Words hardcover across his temple.
Trait sagged, dazed. Rebecca shoved him off her and rolled over, gagged by mace, but he would not give her up. He gripped her vest, pawing at her face and hair, and she could not get free of him. Above him now, with both hands she brought the book spine down forcefully against the back of his head. She struck him with it again and again, hammering his head into the floor until the binding cracked and the creased cover boards and bloody endpapers collapsed in her hands, the freed pages fluttering around the room like snow.
Chapter 36
Warden James was received by the arriving government and law-enforcement agencies as a hero on par with the resurrected Christ. A hush came over the heavily armed men as Rebecca walked him out of the library, and they took him from her shoulder like a child pulled from a well.
Stunned FBI agents eagerly questioned him while they waited for the medical helicopter. Foremost on their minds was the whereabouts of Luther Trait. When the battered warden pointed at the brick library, a handful of agents started toward it with guns drawn.
“He’s dead,” Warden James said, stopping them.
“Dead?” said one. “Who did it?” The supervisory agent scanned the destroyed town common. “Who did all this?”
The warden looked at Rebecca, standing outside the ring of men.
“They did,” he said. “Trait’s men. A power struggle. They brought down the town.”
He kept looking at Rebecca as they peppered him with questions, until finally he glanced away.
“Perhaps one of you could do me a favor,” Warden James said. “My wife thinks she is a widow. The sooner I get to a working telephone, the sooner I can correct that.”
The helicopter touched down near the gazebo and he was strapped inside, and Rebecca felt better once he had risen out of Gilchrist and puttered away.
They were all detained as suspected prisoners until positively identified. Rebecca, as the only woman, was the first to be cleared. They told her she was in shock and Rebecca allowed them that assumption because it precluded her answering questions about the blood on her sweater sleeves. Her opinion, and that of the rest, was that they owed the FBI nothing.
She felt wired and out of sorts, sick one minute, sleepy the next. Her throat was still raw from the mace, her muscles tired and tight. The snow had stopped but for a few straggling flakes, the sky brightening with morning as she took in the war-torn town. The smoldering husk of the town hall, the smashed front of the church, the rocket-punched police station. Nothing was fixed anymore. Molecules were being continually rearranged and transformed. It seemed to her now that the snow had not been falling that week so much as she had been rising through it.
The sounds of gunfire in the distance. The barricade cons still putting up a fight.
Mia was returned to the center of town by sled, wrapped in a thick blanket. “You’re okay,” she said, starting to cry when she saw them. “You’re all okay.”
Rebecca thought of Mia as an orphan entrusted into their care, a child they had to protect and carry home. In turn, Mia had carried a part of each of them, something innocent and untouched, from the beginning.
Dr. Rosen, still giddy from the gunshot and the battle, insisted on dressing his own arm wound. When the FBI informed him his wife was waiting at the hospital in Beckett, Dr. Rosen thanked them with tears in his eyes.
Coe’s parents would also be at the hospital, and he joined Mia and Dr. Rosen on the second medical helicopter. Rebecca was relieved not to have to meet Coe’s parents. For some reason she felt responsible for Coe, and that she had failed him. She wished she had been able to shelter him more.
The FBI wanted Rebecca to go with them, but Rebecca was waiting for Kells. “Make sure Mr. Kells comes to see me,” Coe called to her, on his way to the waiting helicopter.
She did not know where Kells was. She assumed he was somewhere being debriefed.
Tom Duggan remained behind, standing with her outside his funeral home. His black overcoat was gone, residual adrenaline keeping him warm in his wrinkled funeral suit. He said he wasn’t sure where Kells was either.