Neil McMahon - To The Bone

He forbade the shot, clearly, twice. Radio contact was then mysteriously lost from the paramedics' end. When it was reestablished, some eight minutes later, the shot had been administered and the patient was dead.

The senior paramedic then claimed that Monks had ordered the shot. His partner, and the hospital staff who had been there in the ER, seemed uncertain.

The radio tape was hard evidence of what had really happened. But the paramedics were well connected to the sheriff's department – and the tape disappeared en route to the evidence room.

Monks, the Emergency Room, and the hospital had been sued. Then, as now, the hospital's administration had wanted to settle out of court. That would have saved money and bad publicity, but Monks would have been left tagged by the tacit verdict of negligence. He had fought it, and eventually won.

Or at least he had won that aspect of it. In between, he had discovered hard and fast that he had been mistaken about many things, and people, that he had taken for granted. It had precipitated a tail-spin that had been building anyway, with him first giving in to it and then pushing it. When it ended, some four years later, he was no longer employed, no longer married, and largely a stranger to the world he had lived in before.

He finished the drink and poured another one, then walked down to the Bronco. He unlocked the safety-deposit box he had bolted under the driver's seat and took out the pistol he carried there, a Model 82 Beretta, 7.65-millimeter, double action, simple blued steel. He carried it back up to the deck.

The Beretta was a little smaller than his open hand and weighed just over a pound. It had a nine-shot clip, with room for another round in the chamber. That was an important thing to remember about automatics. When a revolver's cylinder was empty, so was the pistol. But even when the clip was out of an automatic, the gun had that one more bullet, hidden, right there in firing position. A lot of people had been killed through failure to recognize that.

The 7.65's weakness was that it did not have much stopping power. The trade-off was that he could slip it in his back pants pocket. He kept a.357 Colt Python in his house safe, which would blow a hole in a car engine, but it was heavy and bulky. There were some higher-caliber automatics available that were not much bigger than the Model 82, and from time to time he thought about moving up to one of those.

But then, he had never fired a weapon at a living thing, and never intended to.

The pistol still had a light sheen of oil from the last time he had cleaned it. That had been more than a year ago, after the last time he had actually carried it and the closest he had ever come to using it, against a pair of junkie muggers deep in the Mission District.

The next dawn was when he and Martine had first become lovers, right here on this deck.

The pistol had a good weight, a feel, and when he chambered a round, there was a satisfying metallic click. Monks could see why guns were so popular. When you had one of these in your hand, you were somebody.

He made sure there were no cats around and aimed at a dead tree about thirty feet away, downhill toward the creek, away from neighbors. In the past, he had been a surprisingly good shot. Larrabee claimed it was the same steady nerves and hands that made him solid in the ER.

The gun cracked with a sharp little sound like the pop of a whip, jerking slightly in his hand. He fired the rest of the clip, then walked down to the tree. He could see that several of the slugs were imbedded in the wood, but probably not all. It was hard to hit anything more than a few yards away with a barrel this short.

The.357, with a six-inch barrel, was a lot more accurate.

He went inside and got it out of the safe. His glass was empty again. He poured another drink on his way back out.

The.357 made a lot more noise than the Beretta, too, a big hollow boom that echoed up and down the canyon through the evening air. Monks squeezed off the rest of the cylinder's six shots, blowing fist-sized chunks of dead wood out of the tree. This time, there was no need to go down there and see if he had hit.

But if you really wanted to get down to business, a 12-gauge shotgun was your man. Monks got out the Remington from its hiding place, behind a panel in the hall closet. He stepped back out onto the deck, raised it to his shoulder, and blasted off the four rounds in the magazine.

When the last echoes died, the tree was cut almost in half and the forest was very still. Monks was breathing hard. He laid the shotgun on a table beside the pistols and drained his glass again. He went inside and poured another.

Dusk was verging on night by now. In the thick woods that stretched down to the creek, moonlight glowed off the sinuous trunks of the smooth-barked madrones. The chorus of tree frogs was rising toward full swing, a soothing singsong pulse that would last until dawn. Monks could hear the rushing wings of bats, welcome because they cleared the air of mosquitoes, although at times they crawled inside the house's walls and talked in whispers that sounded eerily human. Somewhere, a dog barked, a sudden baying of alarm. It was picked up by another dog a quarter mile farther away, and then another, a canine telegraph that might stretch all the way to the Mississippi River, a dogless barrier too wide for sound to cross.

He knew that he had come to that long-gone but so familiar edge, where too much of what lay behind was pain and nothing ahead mattered, where black rage ruled him, and one little step would put him over. The last time he had been there was the night he had almost strangled Alison Chapley with her own scarf. He had never let himself get that close since.

He realized that the phone was ringing. He picked it up and said hello.

"Hello," a woman's voice said. For those first seconds, he assumed it was Martine's. Then she said, "You probably don't remember me. It's Gwen Bricknell."

Monks was more than surprised. He made a hard effort to change realities.

"Indeed I do, Ms. Bricknell," he said.

"Gwen. Please." Her voice had a confiding tone.

"All right. Gwen. I'm Carroll."

"Am I interrupting you?"

"Not at all," Monks said. "Glad to chat. Or is there something I can do for you?"

"Maybe. Maybe I can do something for you, too."

"Oh?"

"I have a soft spot for men in pain."

Monks blinked, taken off balance again.

"Am I in pain?"

"Oh, yes," she said gently.

"How do you know?"

"Sometimes I can just feel things. Sort of like reading minds."

"Really? What am I thinking right now?"

"You're wondering what I'm wearing."

This was not true, but Monks said, "Well? What?"

"Not very much. Let's leave it at that." Several interesting images of the superb Gwen appeared in his mind. "But before, a minute ago – you were thinking something very different," she said. "Dark, dangerous. There was someone in the past, that you had a terrible moment with."

Monks held the phone away and stared at it, trying to be sure he had just heard what he thought he had. Hairs had lifted on his neck.

"Am I right?" she said.

"Yes," he said shakily.

"That's why I called. To help you out of that."

"Thank you."

"I can do more, much more. But there is something I want to ask you."

"Of course," Monks said. He was still trying to get grounded.

She hesitated. "This is confidential, in terms of the clinic."

"I'll do my best with that."

"We got a phone call this afternoon. It was Eden Hale's father. He said you'd come to his house, claiming she'd been murdered."

This time, Monks was not entirely surprised. Tom Hale had called Baird Necker to complain, too. Apparently, he had grabbed the phone and broad-sided his outrage.