‘There are those who would willingly use even a suspicion of involvement to act against us. What of the detective?’
‘His condition remains critical. Privately, the doctors are suggesting that he won’t survive. Even if he does, he will not be the same man. Perhaps he has no part to play in what is to come after all.’
‘Perhaps not, or it could be that his role has simply changed.’
Laurie, Pryor’s PA, knocked at his office door. He waved her away in irritation. How urgent could it be? If there was a fire, he’d hear the alarm bells.
But she persisted, and her face contorted into a rictus of anxiety.
‘Sir, I may have to get back to you,’ said Pryor.
‘Is there a problem?’
‘I think so.’
He hung up the phone, and Laurie immediately entered.
‘I had asked—’ he began, but she cut him off.
‘Mr Pryor, there are agents from the Economic Crimes Unit downstairs. Security is trying to delay them, but they have warrants.’
The Economic Crimes Unit was the branch of the FBI’s Financial Crimes Section tasked with investigating securities and commodities fraud, among other areas. The Principal Backer’s fears were being realized. The attack on the detective had given their enemies an opening. This might just be a fishing expedition, but through it a message was being sent to them.
We know of you.
We know.
While Garrison Pryor prepared to confront the federal investigators, Angel called Rachel Wolfe. She had just returned to her home in Vermont, having spent a couple of nights in Portland to be close to the father of her child. Her daughter had not stayed with her. Rachel felt that it was important for Sam to continue her routines, and not be engaged in some ongoing deathwatch, but she had been permitted to see him briefly in the ICU. Rachel was worried about exposing Sam to the sight of her father lying broken and dying in a hospital bed, but the child had insisted. Jeff, Rachel’s partner, drove Sam over to Portland, then took her home again. He might not have been particularly enamored of Rachel’s former lover, but he had behaved sensitively since the attack, and she was grateful to him for it. Now Rachel spoke to Angel of tubes and needles, of wounds and dressings. One kidney gone. Shotgun pellets painstakingly removed from his skull and back, including a number perilously close to his spine. Potential nerve damage to one arm. Murmurs of possible brain injury. He remained in a coma. His body appeared to have shut down all but the most essential of systems in order to fight for survival.
‘How did Sam do?’ asked Angel.
‘She didn’t shed a tear,’ said Rachel. ‘Even Jeff looked broken up, and he doesn’t even like Charlie. But Sam, she just whispered something to her father, and wouldn’t tell me what it was. Apparently she was quiet on the ride home, though. She didn’t want to speak. Then, when Jeff looked back at her somewhere around Lebanon, she was fast asleep.’
‘You try talking to her about it since the visit?’
‘I’m a psychologist: all I ever do is talk about things. She seems … fine. You know what she told me? She said she thought her daddy was deciding.’
‘Deciding what?’
‘If he wanted to live or die.’
And Rachel’s voice broke on the last word.
‘And how are you doing?’
He could hear her trying to control herself, trying not to cry.
‘Okay, I guess. It’s complicated. I feel disloyal to him, somehow, like I abandoned him. Does that make any sense?’
‘It’s guilt.’
‘Yes.’
‘For fucking an asshole like Jeff.’
She couldn’t help but splutter with laughter.
‘You’re the asshole, you know that?’
‘I get that a lot.’
‘Jeff’s been good, you dick. And, hey, you know what the weirdest thing about being at that hospital was?’
‘I get the feeling you’re going to tell me.’
‘You bet I am. It was the number of women who kept coming into the place asking about him. It’s like waiting by the bedside of King Solomon. There was a little dark-haired cop, and a woman from that town, Dark Hollow. You remember it? You ought to. There was shooting.’
Angel winced, not so much at the memory of the town itself but at the mention of the woman. Her name was Lorna Jennings, and she was the wife of the chief of police up in Dark Hollow. There was history there, the kind you didn’t want to discuss with the mother of a man’s child, even if they were now separated and he was dying in a hospital bed.
‘Yeah, it rings a bell.’
‘Do you remember her?’
‘Not so much.’
‘Liar. Did he sleep with her?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Come on.’
‘Jesus, I don’t know! I don’t follow him around with a towel and a glass of water.’
‘What about the cop?’
That had to be Sharon Macy. Parker had told Angel about her.
‘No, he didn’t sleep with her. I’m pretty certain of that.’
Angel tried to remember a more awkward conversation that he’d had, but failed.
‘And there’s another woman. She doesn’t stray far from the ICU, and I get the impression that she has police permission to be there, but she’s no cop. She’s a deaf mute, and she carries a gun. I’ve seen how she looks at him.’
‘Liat,’ said Angel. Epstein must have sent her to watch over Parker. She was a curious choice of guardian angel. Effective, but curious.
‘He slept with her, didn’t he? If he didn’t, he should have.’
What the hell, thought Angel.
‘Yeah, he slept with her.’
‘Trust him to sleep with a woman who couldn’t answer back.’
‘It was just once,’ said Angel.
‘What are you, his personal apologist?’
‘You’ve made me his apologist! I only called to see how you were. Now I’m sorry I asked.’
Rachel laughed. It was genuine, and he was happy that he had given her that, at least.
‘Will you come up to see him?’ she asked.
‘Soon,’ he said.
‘You’re looking for them, aren’t you, the ones who did this to him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Nobody ever got this close to him before. Nobody ever hurt him so badly. If he dies …’
‘Don’t say that. Remember what your daughter told you: he’s still deciding, and he has a reason to come back. He loves Sam, and he loves you, even if you are fucking an asshole like Jeff.’
‘Go away,’ said Rachel. ‘Do something useful.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Angel.
He hung up. Louis stood beside him, waiting. He handed Angel a Beretta 21 fitted with a suppressor that was barely longer than the pistol itself. The Beretta could now be fired in a restaurant and would make a sound only slightly louder than a spoon striking against the side of a cup. Louis carried a similar weapon in the pocket of his Belstaff jacket.
They were off to do something useful.
They were going to meet and, if necessary, kill the Collector.
48
Ronald Straydeer sat in the living room of his home near the Scarborough Downs racetrack. He held in his hands a photograph of himself as a younger man in uniform, his left arm encircling the neck of a massive German Shepherd dog. Ronald was smiling in the picture, and he liked to think that Elsa was smiling, too.
He wished that he still smoked pot. He wished that he still drank. It would have been easy to return to doing one or the other, or even both. Under the circumstances, it would not have been surprising or blameworthy. Instead he spoke to the picture, and to the ghost of the dog within it.
He was often asked, by those who did not know any better, why he had not found himself another dog in the intervening years. He knew there were some who said that those who kept dogs had to resign themselves to their eventual loss because of the animals’ relatively short lives. The trick – if trick was the right word – was to learn to love the spirit of the animal, and to recognize that it transferred itself from dog to dog, with each one representing the same life force. Ronald believed that there might be some sense in this, but he felt, too, that men might equally say the same thing about women, and vice versa. He had known plenty of women, and had even loved one or two of them, so he had some experience in the matter. But some men and women lost a partner early in life and never managed to give themselves again to another, and Ronald thought there might have been something of that catastrophic sense of loss to his feelings for his lost dog. He was not a sentimental man – although, again, some mistook his grieving for a dead animal as sentimentality. Ronald Straydeer had simply loved the dog, and Elsa had saved his life and the lives of his brother soldiers on more than one occasion. In the end he was forced to abandon and betray her, and the sight of her, caged and scratching at the wire as she was taken from him, had torn at him every day since then. His only hope was that he might eventually be reunited with his dog in a world beyond this one.