Jeffery Deaver - The Lesson of Her Death

She shouted, "Jamie, stop!"

His opponent's arm was turning blue-gray under Jamie's relentless grip, his legs kicked in despair. The referee's whistle blew shrilly. Jamie didn't let go. He kept driving the boy into the ground and twisting his arm, from which the red marker fluttered like a distress signal.

"Jamie!" she called. "Honey…"

The referee started forward. The sports-coated coaches were on their feet, shouting, red-faced, running toward the mat. The referee dropped to his knees and slapped both hands on Jamie's shoulders. Jamie spun toward him and hit him hard in the chest. Off balance, the referee rolled onto his back.

Diane screamed her son's name.

Jamie rose on one knee. Using all his leverage he bent his opponent's forearm up up up… Thock. Diane heard the noise of the break all the way up in the bleachers. She froze where she stood and raised her hand to her mouth, watching her son standing, smiling and triumphant, over the unconscious figure of his vanquished enemy. Jamie turned on the coaches and they froze. Then the boy held his arm out straight and high then closed his fingers into a fist. Diane saw him glance toward her as he ran out the open double doors to the football field, his arm still lifted in the macabre salute of victory.

Detective Frank Neale was pretty much what Corde expected. Crew cut, blond, beefy, smooth ruddy skin. Too professional to put an If we outlaw guns then only outlaws will have guns sticker on his Fitzberg police cruiser but dollars to doughnuts there'd be one on his (American) 4X4.

But God bless him, he met Corde and Kresge after their frantic two-hour drive with a thermos of the best coffee Corde had ever tasted and four fat roast beef sandwiches. They ate these as they raced through the bleak streets of urban-decaying Fitzberg en route to what Neale described as an MCP in the parking lot across from the Holiday Inn.

"MCP?" Kresge asked.

Neale said, "Mobile command post."

"Oh."

Corde thought it wouldn't be much more than a police car with maybe two radios, which is what an MCP in New Lebanon would have been. But no it was a big air-conditioned Ford van with room for six officers inside. There was a large antenna dish on the roof. Kresge pointed out the bulletproof windows in the front.

"Jesus," Corde whispered. "Maybe they got cannons, too."

No artillery but a rack of laser-sighted M-16s, a gray box containing concussion grenades and rows of radios and computer screens and other imposing electronics. Kresge said, "All this for one perp?"

Standing as straight as the barrel of a goose-gun, Neale said, "A lawbreaker's a lawbreaker, Deputy, and a killer's my least favorite kind."

"Yeessir," said Kresge. "I'll go along with you there."

Corde hoped someday soon he could play the eye-rolling game with Kresge. He said to Neale, "Where's Gilchrist now?"

Neale said, "TacSurv says he's in the room."

Kresge asked, "Tac?…"

"Tactical Surveillance. They say he's in the room but we've got a glitch. He's taken in two innocents with him. A couple prostitutes."

"His profile isn't a lust killing but he's very unstable."

Neale said, "We've got a Sensi-Ear on him. He's paid the ladies already and now they're getting down to fun and games. If he goes rogue on us we'll do a kick-in and nail him but if not it's our policy to wait until we're out of hostage situations. Is he the sort who'd take a hostage?"

"He'd do anything," Corde said emphatically, "to escape."

"Okay," Neale said, "subject to your go-ahead, sir, we wait."

The wind swirls into the low bowl of the cemetery and slips inside Jamie's one-piece wrestling uniform.

The boy shivers and stands up. He carefully walks around the portion of the grave in which Philip's body lies and he leaves the cemetery, walking slowly to the Des Plaines River. Here the water's course is narrow and as close to a rapids as a Midwest farmland river ever gets. Upstream a quarter mile it forks and swirls around a small, narrow island filled with brush and dense trees. You can't wade the water but you can reach the island by a thick fallen birch, which he and Philip crossed hundreds of times to reach the Dimensioncruiser that the island so clearly resembles. Jamie crosses the tree now, looking down into the turbulence of the sudsy phosphate-polluted water and once across walks the familiar path past the cruiser's control room, the engine room, the xaser torpedo tubes, the escape vehicle…

Jamie stops. He sees on the other side of the island a night fisherman, casting leisurely out into the water. Jamie is bitterly betrayed. Furious. This is their private place, his and Philip's. No one else is allowed here. In the days since Philip died Jamie has come here nearly every day to walk the cruiser's decks. He angrily resents this man's invading the island, taking it over like a Honon warrior. The fisherman turns and looks at the boy in surprise then smiles and waves. Jamie ignores him and walks sullenly back through the island.

Jamie stands under pines crowned with dusty illumination from the lights of Higgins. He pitches stones into the water. In the gurgle of the torrent he imagines he hears the chugging rhythms of Geiger – the searing guitar riffs, the screams from the sweating hatter of a lead singer. He suddenly feels two mosquito stings on his arms. After the insects drink for a moment he smashes them viciously, leaving bloody black spots on his forearms. He listens to the roar of the water.

Do. Yourself.

You gotta do yourself.

You. Got. To. Do. Yourself.

The sky, long past blue, is now the gray color of a xaser torpedo before it detonates. The clouds separate for a moment and Jamie sees the first star of the evening. He feels a cloudburst of agony in his soul, the pain gushing through him. He is gripped with coarse panic and runs to the birch bridge. He steps onto the tree.

Do yourself. You gotta do yourself now!

Jamie walks halfway across then stops. He lifts his arms, like Dathar-IV standing on top of the State Governance Building Bridge, a thousand feet above the solar crystals, Honon troops closing in from either side. Jamie Corde stretches his arms high above his head, two eyes closed, balancing on twenty toes, above a single abyss of racing water.

By the power of Your wisdom, by the strength of Your might, guide me, O Guardians, to the Lost Dimension, from darkness to light…

He drops like a meteorite into the dark rage of water. He feels a scraping pain against his ear as the side of his head smacks the tree on his way down, then a cold colder than he's ever felt envelops his body, squeezing every last bit of breath from his lungs.

Jamie Corde looks up, he sees water, he sees blood and he sees in the tunnel of blackness above him a single star, which he knows is the eye of a Guardian, agreeing to lift him away, safely into a new dimension.

A second thermos of coffee appeared. Neale ran his fingers along his buzz-cut hair and told them of the time one of his snipers picked off a perp at eight hundred yards. "God held his breath for that one," Neale said reverently.

On a panel like the dashboard of a 747 a lonely red light began flashing and an electronic beep pulsed. A sergeant picked up a receiver. "MCP One. This is an unsecured landline. Go ahead." He listened for a moment. "Detective Corde, for you."

"Me?" He took the receiver. "Corde here."

"Bill." The hollowness of Diane's whisper cried a hundred different messages to him.

He said, "Honey, what is it? Why are you -"

"Bill."

Corde could hear she'd already cried volumes. He heard noises behind her. Other voices. He hated that sound. They were hospital sounds. He asked, "Sarah?"

"Jamie."

"What happened?"