“Gee?” Hanson called as he walked through the front door. “Are you here?”
He heard Gina’s voice coming from somewhere in back of the house.
“Watch it, Hanson! He’s—”
Something hit the back of his head with enough force to make his vision dance with white static.
Then pain exploded in his knee. Hanson felt the sickeningly wrong sensation of a leg bending in a way nature never intended. He hit the floor, fighting the urge to vomit.
For a second, he saw Daubs clearly. The chief’s face was pale but for the hectic blotches of color on his cheeks.
He swung the tire thumper again and made contact with Hanson’s left ear.
The thumper clattered to the floor as Daubs fell on top of him. One of Daubs’s knees landed in his groin as his hand fumbled for the gun in Hanson’s shoulder holster.
Hanson grabbed for Daubs’s hand and caught his thumb, twisting it hard enough to make him drop the gun, sending it clattering across the wooden floor, as Daubs’s other hand flew into his face.
Blood burst from Hanson’s nose, into his eyes. He groped blindly, praying to feel the cold steel under his fingers.
Hanson brought his head up sharply into Daubs’s chin. The chief gave a cry of outrage as he reeled backward just enough for Hanson to push his weight off and send him crashing into the coffee table.
Hanson dimly saw the flash of shiny metal as Daubs’s arm cut through the air, then felt the thin, burning sensation of flesh slicing open along the side of his neck and chest.
The blade was inches from Hanson’s face. He grabbed Daubs’s wrist with both hands and brought his good knee up into the chief’s groin.
Hanson was still hanging on to the hand that held the knife with all his strength, pushing it and twisting it. But Daubs wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t stop.
He’s going to kill me. This is how it all ends. He’s going to kill me.
Hanson’s legs thrashed wildly in spite of the agony every movement brought to his shattered knee. He kicked at Daubs’s shins again and again.
Daubs was kicking, too, and when his foot finally connected with Hanson’s busted knee, Hanson screamed in pain. White static danced around the edges of his vision again.
I cannot pass out. I cannot die like this.
The knife came closer and closer, until all that filled Hanson’s vision was the flashing edge of the blade and Daubs’s eyes behind it.
What Hanson saw in the man’s eyes scared the hell out of him. They were enormous and black and bottomless. To see such madness, such consuming hatred, in a face he thought he knew was somehow more terrifying than any physical pain.
Hanson threw his upper body forward and clamped down on Daubs’s hand with his teeth. Even as Hanson felt the sting of the blade against his cheek, he bit down hard.
Hanson tasted copper in his mouth as Daubs shrieked, a high keening sound like an animal. The knife fell with a single hollow
plink
to the floor.
Daubs was on top of him again, this time pressing the bulk of his weight against Hanson’s chest. Hanson fought to draw air into his burning lungs as he bucked and twisted.
Daubs grabbed his ears, pulled his head forward, then slammed it back against the floor.
Hanson’s world was reduced to pain and desperation. His arm reached outward, palm and fingers beating in a frantic search.
The gun! The gun! Gotta find the gun!
Daubs slammed his head down again, and suddenly Hanson felt as if he were falling . . .
Then blackness slid over him and consumed him.
Hanson didn’t know how long he’d lost consciousness, but the sound of wood splintering brought him struggling back up from the depths of pain.
“Open the door!” Daubs was shouting. “This has been coming for a long, long time, and I’m not waiting any longer!”
Another splintering sound, and for a moment Hanson fought the urge to just fall back into the blackness until he realized the sound was coming from the direction of the bathroom.
Gina must have locked herself in. He couldn’t remember: was there a window in there?
Her gun? Where was her gun?
Her gun was in the evidence room at the station.
Shit, shit, shit!
He couldn’t figure out where all the blood was coming from, or why his eyes kept trying to close. He just knew he had to get up.
Gina—
There was a crash, then breaking glass and Gina’s guttural curses.
Gotta get up. Gotta get up . . . He’ll kill her!
Daubs dragged Gina into the room by her hair as she screamed like a wild thing. Her fingers clawed at his arm and he punched her in the face twice, his fist pistoning like a machine.
“Get away from her!” Hanson tried to scream, but his voice came out in a croak. He kept trying to lift his head, but every movement was agony. It was all he could do to hang on to consciousness.
Gina slumped and Daubs let her fall to the floor. When she curled onto her side, he kicked her in the stomach, then stood there looking down at her, breathing heavily.
“Whore,” he said, wiping a trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth. He watched her pull herself across the floor, leaving a bloody smear on the hardwood.
“Come’n, Daubs,” she said in a slurred voice that still carried biting condescension. “This how you get off, issst? Beatin’ up on w’men?”
She raised a foot, but Hanson saw, with a sinking heart, that she was in only panties and a T-shirt, her feet bare. Even if she summoned enough strength, a barefoot kick probably wouldn’t be enough to bring Daubs down.
“First, you make my department look ridiculous.” Daubs reached for the thumper he’d dropped and brought it down on her.
She screamed, and he struck her again.
“Do you have any idea what my father-in-law said to me when they arrested you? Do you have any idea what I have to put up with from that smug, corrupt worm of a man?”
Hanson screamed, too, in rage and frustration.
I will kill him, I will fuckin’ kill him . . .
Blinking blood from his eyes, Hanson spied a glint of metal under the sofa. He tried to sit up, failed, and then began to crawl toward it. He paid for every inch with a sickening dizziness.
So much blood . . . He couldn’t tell how much of it was his anymore. Gina was bleeding; a pool of darkness was spreading from underneath her head, matting her curls.
Daubs literally fell onto Gina, straddling her chest.
“Time to still that vile tongue of yours,” Daubs said. “No more lies or profanity—”
He pulled a pair of pliers from his shirt pocket.
“Fuck ’ou!” she screamed.
Suddenly he howled, a sound full of rage and pain. When he fell over onto his side, Hanson could see that she’d managed to get a grip on either his cock or balls through the loose khaki of his trousers. Daubs kicked at her, but she wouldn’t let go, just kept twisting viciously.
Then Gina was scrambling up onto her feet. Daubs was still holding his crotch with one hand, rocking on the floor, but he grabbed at her ankle.
She went down, and Hanson heard her skull make a horrible crack against the floor.
She didn’t move. He couldn’t even tell if she was breathing.
The gun was so close now . . . Hanson could almost touch it—
Please, God, please . . . Just let me have the gun, let me kill this bastard, and then I’ll die if you want me to . . .
Daubs must have seen Hanson’s movement, for he lunged at Hanson just as his fingers grasped the barrel—
There was no time to fumble the gun around into a firing position. Hanson brought the gun down hard against the side of Daubs’s skull.
Daubs slid sideways and his hand touched his head. When it came back bloody, he simply stared as if surprised he was capable of bleeding.
Hanson scuttled backward, struggling to sit up and holding the gun steady.
“You son of a bitch,” Hanson gasped. “You fuckin’ son of a bitch—”
“You’re a better detective than I gave you credit for,” Daubs panted.
Hanson half-slid, half-crawled to Gina’s still body, feeling for a pulse.
Oh, God, don’t be dead . . . don’t be dead . . .
She had a pulse, but she was bleeding badly.
“You might have gotten away with it, you dumb fuck!” Hanson fumbled for his phone with one clumsy hand. “We even gave you the perfect scapegoat for all of it, but you just couldn’t let Gina slip away, could you?”
“You kept getting in the way!”
“So you stole her day-planner to figure out where she’d be and when—”
“I’ve thought about putting a bullet in her brain since the night she was arrested,” Daubs sneered.
“How were you gonna explain it?” Hanson asked. But suddenly he knew. Daubs had been planning to kill him and Gina both. He would make it look like a murder-suicide, a lover’s quarrel.
Daubs laughed at the expression on Hanson’s face. He started to rise.
“Don’t you fuckin’ move!”
Hanson screamed. The phone slipped from his blood-slick hand and clattered to the floor.
“You’re all
perverts,
” Daubs said, still crouching. “Larsen was the worst—with my
son
! She did all those filthy things with
my son
!”
“I said
sit down
!”
Hanson fired a shot into the wall just behind the chief, and Daubs froze. Hanson, not taking his eyes off him, fumbled for the phone.
“Officer down! This is Detective Tom Hanson, at four-fifty-one Holly Street, I need a bus and backup right away—”
Hanson let the phone drop into his lap. He needed both hands to steady the gun.
Don’t pass out . . . Don’t you dare fuckin’ pass out now . . .
“Roger was your friend, you crazy bastard! All your talk about fraternities and Christmas cards—”
“He was a
pervert
!” Daubs shouted, flecks of blood and spittle flying from his lips. “He seduced my
son
with his lurid lifestyle and had the
gall
to tell me to accept it!
To accept it
!”
“So you killed him?”
Hanson needed to hear him say it.
“I did what
any
father would do to protect his child.”
“How were you protecting Jason when you butchered Robyn Macy?” Hanson demanded. “She was somebody’s child, for Christ’s sake!”
“She was another Jezebel!” He pounded his fist against the wall beside him. “Jason kept running to her for sympathy, hiding from his own father!”
“And Cassandra Lee?”
“She was the lowest form of garbage, manipulating his lust for
money
—”
“Who the fuck are you to be judge and jury?” Hanson leaned back against the edge of the sofa, feeling the room slide dangerously.
“I am a
righteous
man! Like Lot was in the days of Sodom—!”
“You’re fuckin’ nuts, is what you are.”
As Hanson’s speech became slower and thicker, Daubs’s only became more agitated.
“There are
rules
!” Daubs babbled wildly. “People cannot just do whatever they please, spitting in the face of
God
! If God won’t punish them
I will
!”
Hanson couldn’t bear to listen to him any longer. The gun in his hand was so heavy, and his arms so weak. Was he shaking? He wasn’t sure.
“You butchered five people, you sick fuck.” Hanson spit out a mouthful of blood and saw, with an oddly detached sense of wonder, one of his teeth land on the floor.
“Oh, no,” Daubs said, smiling crazily and wagging a finger as if admonishing a naughty child. “Only four. Quinn Lee wasn’t
my
doing, though he certainly
deserved
to be put down like a dog.”
“You killed him. You’ll get Death Row for five just the same as four. Why bother denying it?”
“Because it wouldn’t be true,” Daubs said. “Lying is a sin. Quinn wasn’t mine.”
Hanson looked at the gun in his hand and then back at Daubs as the full impact of the chief’s words hit him.
Daubs just kept smiling.
Hanson lifted the gun, took aim, and shot him in the head.
Chapter 39
God is a dominant sadist. Look at Job, look at Abraham and Isaac, look at what he did to his own son. God is all about making us suffer to prove our devotion and obedience.
—J
ADE
A
DDISON
,
Waiting for God
G
ina’s body was dotted with curling snakes of stitches where the skin had to be sewn back together. She bloomed black and purple in twice as many places, bruised right down to the bone.
Every time he looked at her, he was amazed and grateful that she was alive. Daubs had begun working her over even before Hanson had interrupted them, and she had gotten far worse than he had.
He didn’t want to think about what might have happened if he hadn’t seen that photo of Jason Daubs when he did.
Aside from the bruises, a slight concussion, a dislocated shoulder, a broken arm, and two broken ribs, her most serious injuries were internal. It took two emergency surgeries to find and repair them all.
She’d been in and out of consciousness for two days before Hanson could talk to her. Then he waited another day until he thought she was strong enough to have the conversation they had to have.
“Why didn’t you tell me who Jason was?”
She closed her eyes and sighed.
“I didn’t think it mattered. I swear to God, Hanson, I knew Daubs was a bastard and an abuser, but I never dreamed he was the guy we were looking for.”
“You should have been honest with me, Gee.”
She reached for his hand, and he let her hold on to it.
“I care about Jason. A lot. Not the way I care for you, but he is important to me.”
“So you were trying to protect him?”
“Yes. I didn’t even know that Daubs knew I was Jason’s mistress. I just wanted to keep him out of all this.”
Hanson could understand that now. He had come too close to losing her forever to hold a grudge, and he knew he would do whatever it took to hold on to her.
“We would have caught Daubs sooner if all you people weren’t so damned secretive.”
“Most people feel the world doesn’t give them a choice.” She smiled at him wanly. “And I don’t think you can say ‘you people’ anymore. You’re a pervert, too.”
Daubs had cut him clean through his shirt but had managed to miss anything important. The doctor in the ER told Hanson that another half-inch to the left, and Daubs would have cut his jugular.
His kneecap, he was glad to find out, was not shattered to hell and back—that’s what it had felt like—but only dislocated. Once the headaches from the concussion had faded, and his broken nose had been set, the knee was the most annoying injury Hanson had to deal with. He’d be on crutches for at least a month, and physical therapy for even longer.
“I think my therapist is one of you,” he told Gina after his first visit. “Woman is a freakin’ sadist.”
“Did she make you cry?” Gina grinned from her little nest on the sofa.
“I tried hollering ‘Red,’ but she wouldn’t stop.”
Even with his bad knee, Hanson was up and around before Gina could do more than hobble from the couch to the bathroom. He was back at his desk dealing with the reports, paperwork, and internal affairs crap within a week.
“Shouldn’t you be resting?” Griggs had asked. “Take your ass home and watch the soap operas or something.”
Hanson wasn’t sure if Griggs was angry because he’d missed the chance to arrest Milton Daubs, or because he felt bad about the beating Hanson had taken.
“I shoulda been with you,” was all he said. “Son of a bitch coulda killed you both.”
“I didn’t know you cared.” Hanson grinned.
“I’d have to break in a new partner,” Griggs grunted. “I don’t have time for that shit.”
Instead, he nearly smothered them with his attention. He came over to Gina’s house every day, always bringing something: donuts, DVDs, magazines, Chinese food.
He offered to do laundry, but Gina wouldn’t hear of it.
“He’s just trying to get his hands on my panties,” Gina complained.
Jason’s statement had been enough to get a search warrant for Daubs’s house, and by the time Daubs’s body was at the morgue, Griggs had found a pair of work boots in his garage. They were stained with blood that turned out to belong to Cassandra Lee.
Griggs also found Gina’s day-planner in Daubs’s car, along with photos from a private detective showing Jason with Cassandra Lee, Robyn Macy, and Gina. The duffel bag that the traffic cops had seen was discovered in the garage, too, containing a dark blue jumpsuit, stained with Cassandra Lee’s blood.
It was lucky for all of them that they had a mountain of evidence to confirm Daubs’s guilt.
Daubs’s DNA was found to match traces taken from Roger Banks and Robyn Macy. No semen—even in his murders, Daubs had been a prude—but his blood and sweat were on the bodies, and their DNA on the tire thumper.
It was an ugly, sensational case, all the way around. No one, including Internal Affairs, was happy that Hanson had shot and killed the Chief of Police, but the extent of his and Gina’s injuries proved he’d been fighting for his life.