Tess Gerritsen - The Surgeon

Moore yelled, “Freeze! Police!”

The man kept coming.

Rizzoli dropped to a crouch, weapon poised. The throbbing in her face crescendoed into bursts of agony. All the humiliation she’d endured, the daily snubs, the insults, the never-ending torment dished out by the Darren Crowes of the world, seemed to shrink into a single pinpoint of rage.

This time, bastard, you’re mine. Even as the man suddenly halted before her, even as his arms lifted toward the sky, the decision was irreversible.

She squeezed the trigger.

The man twitched. Staggered backward.

She fired a second time, a third, and each kick of the weapon was a satisfying snap against her palm.

“Rizzoli! Cease fire!”

Moore’s shout finally penetrated the roaring in her ears. She froze, her weapon still aimed, her arms taut and aching.

The perp was down, and he was not moving. She straightened and slowly walked toward the crumpled form. With each step came the mounting horror of what she’d just done.

Moore was already kneeling at the man’s side, checking for a pulse. He looked up at her, and although she could not read his expression on that dark roof, she knew there was accusation in his gaze.

“He’s dead, Rizzoli.”

“He was holding something — in his hand—”

“There was nothing.”

“I saw it. I know I did!”

“His hands were up in the air.”

“Goddamnit, Moore. It was a good shooting! You’ve got to back me up on this!”

Other voices suddenly broke in as cops scrambled onto the roof to join them. Moore and Rizzoli said nothing more to each other.

Crowe shone his flashlight on the man. Rizzoli caught a nightmarish glimpse of open eyes, a shirt black with blood.

“Hey, it’s Pacheco!” said Crowe. “Who brought him down?”

Rizzoli said, tonelessly, “I did.”

Someone gave her a slap on the back. “Girl cop does okay!”

“Shut up,” said Rizzoli. “Just shut up !” She stalked away, clambered down the fire escape, and retreated numbly to her car. There she sat, huddled behind the steering wheel, her pain giving way to nausea. Mentally she kept playing and replaying the scene on the rooftop. What Pacheco had done, what she had done. She saw him running again, just a shadow, flitting toward her. She saw him stop. Yes, stop. She saw him look at her.

A weapon. Jesus, please, let there be a weapon.

But she had seen no weapon. In that split second before she’d fired, the image had been seared into her brain. A man, frozen. A man with hands raised in submission.

Someone knocked on the window. Barry Frost. She rolled down the glass.

“Marquette’s looking for you,” he said.

“Okay.”

“Something wrong? Rizzoli, you feeling okay?”

“I feel like a truck ran over my face.”

Frost leaned in and stared at her swollen cheek. “Wow. That asshole really had it coming.”

That was what Rizzoli wanted to believe, too: that Pacheco deserved to die. Yes, he did, and she was tormenting herself for no reason. Wasn’t the evidence clear on her face? He had attacked her. He was a monster, and by shooting him she had dispensed swift, cheap justice. Elena Ortiz and Nina Peyton and Diana Sterling would surely applaud. No one mourns the scum of the world.

She stepped out of the car, feeling better because of Frost’s sympathy. Stronger. She walked toward the building and saw Marquette standing near the front steps. He was talking to Moore.

Both men turned to face her as she approached. She noticed Moore was not meeting her gaze but was focused elsewhere, avoiding her eyes. He looked sick.

Marquette said, “I need your weapon, Rizzoli.”

“I fired in self-defense. The perp attacked me.”

“I understand that. But you know the drill.”

She looked at Moore. I liked you. I trusted you. She unbuckled her holster and thrust it at Marquette. “Who’s the fucking enemy here?” she said. “Sometimes I wonder.” And she turned and walked back to the car.

Moore stared into Karl Pacheco’s closet and thought: This is all wrong. On the floor were half a dozen pairs of shoes, size 11, extra wide. On the shelf were dusty sweaters, a shoebox of old batteries and loose change, and a stack of Penthouse magazines.

He heard a drawer slide open and turned to look at Frost, whose gloved hands were rifling through Pacheco’s socks drawer.

“Anything?” asked Moore.

“No scalpels, no chloroform. Not even a roll of duct tape.”

“Ding ding ding!” announced Crowe from the bathroom, and he sauntered out waving a Ziploc bag of plastic vials containing a brown liquid. “From sunny Mexico, land of pharmaceutical plenty.”

“Roofies?” asked Frost.

Moore glanced at the label, printed in Spanish. “Gamma hydroxybutyrate. Same effect.”

Crowe shook the bag. “At least a hundred date rapes in here. Pacheco must’ve had a very busy dick.” He laughed.

The sound grated on Moore. He thought of that busy dick and the damage it had done, not just the physical damage, but the spiritual destruction. The souls it had cleaved in two. He remembered what Catherine had told him: that every rape victim’s life was divided into before and after . A sexual assault turns a woman’s world into a bleak and unfamiliar landscape in which every smile, every bright moment, is tainted with despair. Weeks ago he might scarcely have registered Crowe’s laughter. Tonight, he heard it only too well, and he recognized its ugliness.

He went into the living room, where the black man was being questioned by Detective Sleeper.

“I’m telling you, we were just hanging out,” the man said.

“You just hang out with six hundred bucks in your pocket?”

“I like to carry cash, man.”

“What’d you come to buy?”

“Nothin’.”

“How do you know Pacheco?”

“I just do.”

“Oh, a real close friend. What was he selling?”

GHB, thought Moore. The date rape drug. That’s what he’d come to buy. Another busy dick.

He walked out into the night and felt immediately disoriented by the pulsing lights of the cruisers. Rizzoli’s car was gone. He stared at the empty space and the burden of what he’d done, what he’d felt compelled to do, suddenly weighed so heavily on his shoulders that he could not move. Never in his career had he faced such a terrible choice, and even though he knew in his heart he’d made the right decision, he was tormented by it. He tried to reconcile his respect for Rizzoli with what he had seen her do on the rooftop. It wasn’t too late to retract what he’d said to Marquette. It had been dark and confusing on the roof; maybe Rizzoli really thought Pacheco had been holding a weapon. Maybe she had seen some gesture, some movement, that Moore had missed. But try as he might, he could not retrieve any memory that justified her actions. He could not interpret what he’d witnessed as anything but a cold-blooded execution.

When he saw her again, she was hunched at her desk, holding a bag of ice to her cheek. It was after midnight, and he was in no mood for conversation. But she looked up as he walked past and her gaze froze him to the spot.

“What did you tell Marquette?” she asked.

“What he wanted to know. How Pacheco ended up dead. I didn’t lie to him.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“You think I wanted to tell him the truth?”

“You had a choice.”

“So did you, up on that roof. You made the wrong one.”

“And you never make the wrong choice, do you? You never make a mistake.”

“If I do, I own up to it.”

“Oh, yeah. Fucking Saint Thomas.”