Part 62 (2/2)

Cauldwell used Peter's name. He personalized him. Not just for Reyes. For himself. ”James,” Reyes said. ”Listen to me. Put down the knife. You don't want to hurt Peter. I know you don't.”

Cauldwell s.h.i.+vered. ”n.o.body can protect him. You can't protect him, Stephen Reyes. I've tried. I've tried to save him.”

Todd and Hafidha still had the door. Lau was right behind them. Reyes gritted his teeth, thought about their line of fire, and said, softly, gently: ”The way you couldn't protect Jessica?”

Cauldwell looked into Reyes' eyes, and Reyes feels the reach. The touch, the hard clutch, the black-water calm of the anomaly. And then jungle, sweat, heat, swamp, savagery. The way the knife goes into flesh, the sc.r.a.pe on bone and the suck when you pull it free. The burning children. The trickles of red thin blood left behind when you pry loose the leeches. The young refugee women, so emaciated they look like old men. The hard bulge of a fat tick in your ear, filling the ca.n.a.l, too swollen on blood to pry loose in the field.

You can feel the legs wriggling, sometimes.

”Exorcise it,” Cauldwell says. ”It's okay. Give it voice. Give them voice. Exorcise them. Here. I'll show you. You have to learn, Stephen Reyes. It's for your own good. You can't save anyone.”

He raises the black, glittering, enormous pen, brandishes it with a dramatic flourish. A sheet of white paper spreads, waiting, across his lap, ready to be scribed with red irrevocable words.

”No,” Reyes cries, lunging forward, because of course what the gamma has in his hand isn't a pen- The loudest sound in the world knocked Stephen Reyes to his knees.

The knife rose. Reyes dove, impossibly far. There were still four victims on the floor between him and Cauldwell and the hostage.

Hafidha rolled her finger on the trigger.

Gamma.

She fired once. Twice. Cauldwell's powerful shoulders bulged as he heaved himself up in the chair, lifting the knife. Thrice. A fourth time. He might be dead already, but four bullets would not stop him. Gamma. Hafidha was in front of Lau, and Reyes lunged up into her line of fire. ”Dammit!” Somehow, she stopped the fifth shot. Sent it into the ceiling, upward jerk of her hands. s.h.i.+t. Not gun safety, man. ”REYES!”

Not listening. No, both hands on the gamma's knife wrist, scrambling over the Asian kid, who was rolling on the floor, being kicked, clutching his pen, jabbing through paper, still writing.

Cauldwell might not have any legs from mid-thigh down, but he had inches on Reyes across the shoulders, and the Kevlar wouldn't do much against a stab. The gamma tumbled from his wheelchair, pulled Reyes to the floor, rolled atop him. Matte-finished knives don't glint, but Hafidha swore the thing winked wickedly as Cauldwell reared back, kneeling on his stumps, broke Reyes' grip on his wrist. Cauldwell's blood fountained with every breath.

One shot, Hafidha thought, as Todd stepped up beside her.

She took a hard grip on the b.u.t.t of her pistol, dropped her gaze to the front sight, and pressed off one more as Todd's gun roared on her right.

The gamma jerked. The knife didn't fall.

Follow through. Resight. Press. And again. And again. Todd, too. One more. The gamma's head was a fine red mist now, let's be honest, but once the adrenaline starts pulling the trigger, the trigger gets pulled. She rattled like shaken paper. It was okay.

One more- Cauldwell teetered and the last pair of rounds-hers, and Duke's-caught him square in the chest and knocked him back. The knife in his convulsing hand c.h.i.n.ked off the floor.

Reyes rolled to the side and squirmed out from under, pulling his knees up, grimacing behind a mask of blood. His mouth worked. He wouldn't spit at the crime scene, but Hafidha didn't blame him for wanting to.

She lowered the firearm, but kept it ready, listening to the last hiss of Cauldwell's breath through his ruined face. He looked like the autopsy photos of Bugsy Siegel.

”Blood precautions,” Reyes said. ”How's the kid?”

Todd picked his footing through the room like a stag moving through the woods in autumn. He knelt beside the Asian boy, who curled tight, face to knees, shoulders shaking with panicked breath. Gently, he prised the pen from the young man's fingers.

No response.

”He's stopped writing.” Todd laid the pen back down beside his hand.

This time, Todd was waiting when she came in. Not behind the desk, in the alpha-wolf chair, or in the nappy burnt orange lounger... but seated leaning forward on the ratty sofa beside the door. She didn't see him at first; she expected the visitor to have taken the position of power, and she scanned the far side of the room, her forehead wrinkling. ”Melanie,” he said. Softly, so she didn't jump.

The antipsychotics were probably making her thick-headed anyway, and then there was the schizophrenic suppression of affect. Her eyes were glazed, the blink-rate too slow. But, eventually, she focused on him.

”Sit down?” he said.

She nodded. He expected her to share the couch, but she plunked down on the floor. Oh, no. I wonder where I've seen that before?

He scooted off the couch and landed crosslegged in front of her, corduroy binding his thighs. ”I just came to see how you were doing. I'm-”

”Agent Todd,” she said. ”I remember you. You're one of the FBI guys.”

He nodded.

She said, ”My mom brought me newspaper clippings. She said Jim used drugs to make us see things that weren't real?”

Todd looked down at his hands, at the hangnail on his right thumb. ”We're not exactly sure how it worked.”

”I liked him.” She closed her eyes. ”He was nice to me. Not like-”

Yeah, kid. Todd wanted to reach out and put a hand on her shoulder, but that would be inappropriate. Sorry your surrogate father-figure turned out to be a monster, too. And it wouldn't help her at all for him to tell her it wasn't Cauldwell's fault. Go ahead and hate him for a while. It makes it easier. ”It wasn't your fault,” Todd said. Sometimes, all you can offer is absolution.

She licked cracked lips. Her eyes stayed down. ”The doctor says I'm making progress. But I can still feel-”

The heat. The brush of leaves against your face. The way your foot slips in mud inside a waterlogged boot.

”He broke my life,” she said. ”I want it back. I want it-”

”Hey,” Todd said. ”Melanie. Look at me.”

She lifted her chin.

”It's like a car wreck, okay? It happened. You got hurt. But the war is over, kiddo. You made it through. Everything is going to be okay now.”

”Really?”

And Todd took a breath and smiled, and lied like a fox. She'd figure it out eventually, the lie and the reasons for it, after she didn't need so badly to believe it anymore.

”Really. It just takes time, is all.”

Upon due consideration, Chaz concluded that the real reason Reyes usually didn't bring Hafidha into the field was that they missed her too much during the administrative leave, should she happen to shoot somebody. Todd was out too, of course, also due back today. And Worth, Brady, Falkner, and Lau were on a case in Seattle, leaving Chaz and Reyes to mind the ranch, keep the home fires burning, and wrangle cliches.

Fortunately, so far the field team had been getting by on old fas.h.i.+oned street- pounding, but Chaz had been quietly terrified that the call would come in for some heavy database herding and he'd be the only one available to do it. So when somebody said from the doorway, ”Hey, Platypus, get out of my chair,” he almost crowed with joy.

Instead, he blanked and locked the screens-reflexively: Falkner was a bit of a martinet about it and Hafs was worse-rose awkwardly and said, ”Hey! It's Eliot Ness! There's still six doughnuts in the kitchen.”

She tipped her head and smiled. ”You wrote it on your calendar.”

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