Lisa Scottoline - Everywhere That Mary Went

“Mary-”

“Shut up, I said! Shut up!” I look down the barrel at his expression of contempt and disgust. I ease the trigger just a fraction. The hammer, with its corrugated pad, falls back ever so slightly. There’s the loud, metallic click I heard before as the chamber rotates a millimeter. It’s all very mechanical. A very handsome killing machine, precision engineered in the United States of America. If I pull the trigger a fraction of an inch more, Messrs. Smith and Wesson will kill Bitter Man for me. I don’t even have to do it myself.

I raise the gun and get the flag in my sight. And then my hand isn’t shaking anymore.

“Give me one good reason,” I say to him.

That’s when I hear the voice. I recognize it suddenly. I know now who it is.

I thought it was Mike’s voice, but it’s not him at all. And it’s not the devil’s voice, or an angel’s either. It’s my soul’s own voice, gamely trying to climb out of the hole I’ve been digging for it steadily, daily, since the hour of my birth.

It’s me, trying to save my own soul.

Thou shalt not kill.

But I have killed. And I want to now. So much.

Spare him. Redeem yourself.

Redeem yourself. It resonates inside me, at the core.

Redemption.

I can’t change the past, but I can make the future. I know what it cost me to kill before. This time I have a choice. I choose no.

I release the trigger. The hammer snaps forward with a final click.

At the same moment, a terrified Judy appears at the doorway, followed by Berkowitz, Einstein, Golden Rod, and a crowd of appalled judges. In the instant that I look back, Bitter Man hurls himself into my arms. “Give me that gun!” he roars.

His weight sends me crashing back onto my desk. I feel his hands scrambling at my breast for the weapon. Suddenly, the gun goes off, with an earsplitting report. I hear myself scream. The force of the explosion reverberates in my ears and vibrates up my arm. For a minute I’m not sure who’s been hit.

One look at Bitter Man tells me the answer. His face is twisted in pain and surprise. He falls slowly backward, then slumps heavily to the floor. His shirt, in tatters, is black with smoke; his tie is shorn into two ragged halves. A crimson bud appears over his heart, then bursts into full vermillion bloom as he lies, contorted, on the carpet. The air stinks of fire and smoke.

Berkowitz rushes over to Bitter Man, stretched out on the floor, his blood staining the carpet. “Jesus,” Berkowitz says, looking up at me. “He’s dead.”

The judges, all of them assembled, look at me in disbelief. In shock. In revulsion.

I freeze at the judgment in their eyes. I’m stunned, shaking, in shock. I want to explain, but I can’t. All I can do is look back at them. It’s Judgment Day. I knew it was coming. It was just a question of time.

“Jesus, Mary!” Berkowitz cries out. He takes the revolver from me and gathers me up in his arms. I feel an enormous weight in my chest, the wrench of my heart breaking. I start to cry, first in great hiccups, then out of control. I’m not crying for Bitter Man. I’m crying for Mike and for Brent.

That night, after a chastened Lombardo has come and gone, Berkowitz drives me home himself. I feel utterly drained as I sit in the gleaming Mercedes-Benz, with its odor of fine leather and stale cigarettes. Berkowitz opens the car door for me and offers to walk me upstairs, but I turn him down. There’s no need. I’m safe now. No more telephone calls, no more notes. My empty apartment is my own again.

The door closes behind me, and I lean against it in the dark. I stand there for the longest time, thinking of Mike, who brought me from fear into love, using only his patience and his heart. I can’t believe he’s gone; it’s so awful that he died, and in so much pain. I feel newly grief-stricken; it makes me wonder if I ever let myself truly mourn him. Maybe I did the Next Thing too soon.

My thoughts run to Brent, who was so innocent. A wonderful friend, a loving man. His voice coach was right; he was full of joy. He’s gone now, cut down by the same man, mistakenly. Somehow that makes it much worse.

Bitter Man. He was bitter and evil for a reason no one can ever fathom. The devil, truly. Their deaths were his doing. It was his fault, not mine. Now he’s gone too. That much is my doing, that much I’m responsible for. No more.

Soon I’m crying, sobbing hard, and I can’t seem to make it stop. I feel overwhelmed by grief; it brings me to my knees in front of the closed door. I can’t believe that Mike is gone, that Brent is gone. That I’ll never see either of them again.

I wish I could stop crying, but I can’t, and soon I hear a loudboom boom boom against the door. Only it’s not someone else pounding on the door.

It’s my own skull.

FEDERAL ATTRACTION! screams the three-inch headline in the morning edition ofThe Philadelphia Daily News.

FEDERAL JUDGE ATTACKS WOMAN LAWYER: D.A. FINDS SELF-DEFENSE, reads the smaller headline inThe Philadelphia Inquirer, its calmer sister publication.

I don’t read the newspaper accounts, don’t even want to see them. I just want to know if Berkowitz kept my name out of the papers, so I can practice law again in this city. Someday.

“I don’t see it anywhere,” Ned says, skimming the articles at my kitchen table. His tie is tucked carefully into a white oxford shirt. He stopped by on the way to work to see how I was, bearing blueberry muffins. He didn’t try to hug or kiss me. He seemed to sense that I needed the distance.

“Good.”

“You should take your time going back to work, Mary.” The muffins lie crumbled on the plate between us.

“I will, this time.”

“I’ll take care of your desk. Don’t worry about a thing.”

“Thanks. I’ll return the favor.”

Ned smiles mysteriously.

“What?”

“I’m not telling you now. You’ve had enough surprises.” He folds up the newspaper and sets it down on the table.

“Tell me, Ned.”

“Actually, it’s a good surprise. You really want to hear it?” His green eyes shine.

“Sure.”

“I’m leaving the firm. As soon as you come back.”

“What?” It’s so unexpected, it draws me out of myself for a minute.

“There’s no future for me there. I’m not going to make partner.”

“How do you know that?”

“Berkowitz told me.”

Now I’m totally confounded. I sit up in the chair.

“He told me one day in his office, when I went in to ask him how many partners they were making.”

I remember, the conversation he materially omitted at dinner that night.

“Berkowitz told me I wasn’t going to be one of them, no matter how many they made.”

“Why?” I feel hurt for him.

“He said I didn’t have what it takes. The fire in the belly. Thecipollines, I think he meant.” He smiles crookedly.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“No, it’s not. He’s right, Mary. I didn’t realize it until he said it, but he’s right. I don’t have the heart for it. I don’t even like being a lawyer. I was only doing it to prove something to my father.”

I don’t know what to say. Silence comes between us.

“I did talk to him, you know,” he says.

“Your father?”

“Yes. I told you I would. I called you about it, but you weren’t returning my calls.” He winces slightly.

“Ned-”

“That’s okay, you explained it. With the last note, even I would have suspected me. Anyway, my father never had you followed, but he did do a lot of research on you. He searched your name in Lexis and pulled all the cases you worked on.”

“Why?”

“To see what the competition was like. To size up my chances of making partner. That’s why he watched you at your dep.”