Part 50 (1/2)

”Sorry, partner, I don't know who that is. How about your wife? You want me to call your wife for you?”

Anderson let his head sink back into the gurney. He stared up at the ceiling and thought, Ambulance. Holy h.e.l.l, I'm in an ambulance.

”Yeah,” he said. ”Call my wife.”

The next time he awoke, he was in a hospital bed. Margie was standing in the doorway, talking to John. They looked good together, mother and son. They turned and looked at him and he smiled.

”How are you feeling, Keith?”

”I'm good,” he said to Margie. ”I'm good.” He reached over and took John's hand and squeezed it. He smiled at the boy. ”It's been a long time since I've gotten to smile at you. It's nice.”

John said something that Keith didn't catch, though that didn't seem important. All that mattered was that the boy was here. He had missed him so.

”Keith?”

Anderson's vision cleared, and John turned old and fat. Chuck Levy was standing where he had just been.

”I'm here, Chuck.”

”G.o.dd.a.m.n it, Keith. Why didn't you call me? d.a.m.n it. That was the stupidest thing I've ever seen you do.”

Anderson let himself slip under again. It was so much nicer when the boy was talking.

Two weeks later, Anderson, red-eyed and bleary from the pain killers he was taking every two hours or so, sat across the desk from Deputy Chief Allen, waiting for him to finish reading his report on the Morgan Rollins incident. That's what they had started calling it around Headquarters, the Morgan Rollins incident, though the final report Allen was reading now covered far more than that. It included Paul's in-custody death investigation originating from the train yard chase and the murders at the morgue and subsequent disappearance of the bodies and the final confrontation in which he was injured and Rachel Henninger was rescued from her kidnappers. Anderson had never written fiction in his life. And he took a special pride in the fact that he had never once lied, either directly or by omission, in a police report during his long career, though there had been plenty of opportunities, and even a few under the table, politically-motivated requests for him to do so. But the report Allen was reading now was a lie. From the cover sheet to the recommendation for case closure page, the entire thing was a fiction, a bold-faced lie.

He wanted to cross his legs but couldn't. The cut on his leg hadn't gone over to infection, though that had been close. But it still hurt like a son of a b.i.t.c.h. The ribs, too. Those were still tender, even after two weeks, and he felt a momentary wave of annoyance at not being able to heal as quickly as he once had.

Sitting still posed some unexpected problems. He found it was much easier when he sat down to keep the leg out straight and turn onto one side. Doing so made him look like he was slouching-or at best like one of those slapstick fools in the hemorrhoid commercials. But mostly he thought it just made him look lazy, and more than once he found himself gazing down at his body in that pose, the leg stretched out, the rest of him sunk deep into the chair, and thought of John. John had sat that way on the couch on Sunday mornings, his head still buzzing from the partying he'd done the night before. Anderson had been so furious with him back then, his rage never far from the surface. It had been a constant battle. He'd been thinking a lot about the bitterness of those days lately, and torturing himself with regrets.

He realized he had been staring out the window at nothing in particular, and he forced himself to come back to the present. Allen was still reading, stopping occasionally to go back twenty pages and read something a second or a third time. It all matched up. Anderson had been very careful about that. As far as fiction went, it was tightly plotted. Every lie made sense, every glaring lack of evidence was supported with a reasonable enough explanation.

And so what if it was a lie, he thought. There was no way he could have put what really happened in a police report. n.o.body would believe it. They would think he was insane and that would have ended his career. They'd bring in some other detective and he would ask all sorts of questions that couldn't possibly be answered, at least not by anybody who knew the truth, and there was no sense in that. Better to let the dead be with the dead.

”You're still hurting,” Allen said.

”Yes.” He'd drifted off again, his mind staring off into nothingness outside the window. Anderson told himself to focus.

”Well I appreciate you finis.h.i.+ng this up so quickly. You gonna take some time off?”

”I think so,” Anderson said. He thought, And refill my pain meds while I'm at it. ”Margie has some family in upstate New York. Might be nice to go someplace cool.”

”You could visit the Baseball Hall of Fame.”

Anderson smiled. ”I was thinking the same thing.”

A quiet filled the s.p.a.ce between them. Allen was waiting for Anderson to speak, but Anderson just went right on smiling.

Allen sighed and pushed the report to the edge of the leather blotter on his desk.

”Three hundred and twenty pages,” he said. ”That's a lot of work in a very short time.”

”Yes, sir,” Anderson agreed.

”How's Jenny Cantrell?”

”Good. Margie's been with her a lot. You know that, of course. But I think she's good. I've told Margie about what happened, and she's talked to Jenny about it.”

Anderson looked across the desk at Allen, an imposing man dressed in a dark charcoal gray suit, and in that moment he saw in the man's worn down eyes all the stress and sorrow and exhaustion that he too had been experiencing the past two weeks. It was almost behind them now. All Allen had to do was sign the report and they'd be done with it-the business end of it anyway. The emotional wake of this thing would go on a long time into the distance, and no amount of falsified reports would ever change that.

”I wish there were more answers than this,” Allen said.

”I do, too.”

”The Arson guys...they couldn't determine what caused the fire?”

Anderson s.h.i.+fted in his seat and hoped Allen would believe the groan he made was just because of the pain.

”No sir,” he said, and waited.

This was the hard part. One of the hard parts, anyway. Anderson had created an Azazel cult and given them the mission of bringing Paul Henninger into the fold to replace his father. The cult was the cornerstone of Anderson's report, the scapegoat for all the unexplained events he described. But making up a cult meant he had to get rid of it, too. And that was where the fire in the circular chamber came in. They had all perished in the flames, and he and Paul Henninger and his wife Rachel had been lucky enough to escape just moments before the flames went out of control. It was the biggest lie in the whole report, but it beat the truth. If Allen could force himself to swallow this one last improbable detail, they could all move on with their lives.

Come on, Anderson muttered to himself. Sign the d.a.m.n thing. Just sign it.

Allen swiveled his chair towards the window and looked out across the city. Anderson followed his gaze. The west side was s.h.i.+mmering in a whitish haze of dust and smog. It was indistinct and blurred, as if it too had died.

”We look like fools on national TV. You know that, right?”

Anderson said nothing.

”First Child Protective Services gets their faces rubbed in s.h.i.+t with those bigamists, and now it's our turn. You know I got a call from the president of ABC? They want to do a special on this for Twenty-Twenty.”

Just sign it already. Please.

”No thoughts on that, Keith?” Allen said.

”No sir.”

Allen nodded thoughtfully. Then he sat up straight and pulled the report in front of him again and turned to the recommendations page. His pen hovered over the bottom right corner, and Anderson realized he had been holding his breath.

Then he signed.

Anderson thought the noise the pen made scratching against the paper was the finest sound he'd ever heard.

Several days later he was standing in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant down the street from Paul and Rachel's new apartment. Rachel and Paul were holding hands. He looked at them, at their youth, and thought he was pretty sure the two of them were going to make it. There was a certain resilience to the young, both physically and emotionally. What the two of them had was strong. He could see it in the way she curled her arm around his, in the way he smiled when he looked at her.