The Edge of Ruin (6 page)

The door fell closed behind her, and even the morphine couldn’t calm the sudden flutter deep in my gut that her words elicited.
When he’s one hundred and I’m seventy-five he will still have the power to make me feel five
, I thought, and I wondered if every parent had that power or if it was just my tough-as-nails sire. Then the door opened and what seemed like a torrent of people crowded into the room.

Weber grabbed the ugly green armchair and dragged it over to the bed and sat down. Angela stood on the other side of the bed and busied herself untangling the tubes from the IV drips and checking the monitors. They felt more like guards than concerned friends. Next I looked at who they were guarding me from—my family. Which was a heck of thing when you thought about it.

Pamela, who had carried in a bouquet of flowers, stood at the sink filling a vase and arranging the yellow calla lilies with elaborate care. I was terribly aware of my father standing by the window. Occasionally he parted the blinds and looked out. Disapproval was radiating off him, making the small room seem even smaller. Everyone was studiously not looking at each other.

Angela transfered her fidgeting from the tubes to me. Picking up my wrist, she took my pulse. “Must be a pleasant change from most of your clientele,” I said. It was a feeble joke, and it was totally swallowed by the tension flaring between all of us.

I coughed, trying to clear the obstruction that seemed to have settled in my throat. I looked to Damon, so I didn’t have to look at my angry sister and my expressionless father anymore. “What’s going to happen to me?” I asked my boss.

Pamela spoke up. “Well, hopefully you’ll get fired. Since you didn’t quit like you were supposed to. You told us you were going to quit.” It seemed my sister was taking it as a personal affront.

“The call went out. I was close and I was still a police officer,” I shot back. In all these years I’ve never been able to keep from engaging with her.

Damon shook his head. “No, he’s not going to get fired. I think he’s … you’re going to come out of this okay. And what does she mean he … you were going to quit?” My boss was alternately trying to glare at my sister, smile reassuringly at me, and keep the pronouns straight. He wasn’t notably successful, because I ended up on the receiving end of one ferocious glare that wasn’t meant for me.

Or at least I didn’t think it was meant for me. Maybe Damon really was angry with me. Maybe I should have waited for SWAT. Maybe I should have told him to order Snyder to stay away. Maybe I could have aimed for the leg and not killed Snyder.
No, screw it
,
he deserved to die.

Morphine was making me loopy. “He tried to kill me. If he’d succeeded those kids would have died. I dropped the sword. The father would have gone nuts again. I had to shoot him.”

Damon nodded in enthusiastic agreement. “Yes, yes you did, but here’s another reason you’re going to be fine. You’ve got one hell of a witness in that little girl. She seemed to want to talk more about how the one policeman tried to kill the other policeman, instead of talking about her father.”

“And who can blame her,” said Angela. “I get to autopsy these babies.” Her glance toward my sister and father was challenging. “At least three of them are alive thanks to Richard.” She gave my hand a hard squeeze.

My father’s profile didn’t alter, but Pamela’s back stiffened. Bless Angela for the kindly impulse, but I wished I could have told her that protective justification didn’t play well with my family.

“Any idea why Snyder wanted to kill me?” I asked hurriedly.

“Well, putting aside the hating-your-guts part, I convinced Judge Cole to give me a warrant, and I had a little peek at Snyder’s bank account. On January third he deposited twenty-five thousand dollars,” Weber said.

“A hit.” I tried to wrap my head around the idea. It wasn’t easy with the morphine washing through my system, but once I did the rage returned. “Crap, he did this for
money
?”

“Seems likely,” Damon said.

“Watch your language,” my father said at the same time.

“Now it makes sense what he said. When I drew the sword he said, ‘it’s real.’”

“Implying he knew about the sword,” Angela said. “Which means somebody told him about it. Gee … three guess as to who that might have been,” Angela added and smiled. If it was meant to be an ironic smile it failed, presenting instead like an angry grimace.

I was hoping everyone would assume Angela’s fury related to Rhiana’s betrayal of Kenntnis. I knew it had a whole lot more to do with me. I was suddenly so tired of everyone’s desires and expectations being focused on me.
Why couldn’t Kenntnis have arranged Lumina as an order of warrior monks, or celibate Amazons?

Damon’s hand gripped my shoulder. Wearily I opened my eyes again. Weber smiled down at me. I was momentarily fascinated by the way the light glinted in the graying stubble on his chin. I wondered how he’d look with a beard.

“Hey, we’re wearing you out.”

“It’s okay.” I forced a smile and banished the thoughts that would have jeopardized the friendship we’d barely reestablished.

“Look, you rest now. If I bring by a laptop tomorrow, do you think you could write up a report?”

I forced energy into my voice. “You bet.”

Suddenly my father stirred. The blinds snapped together with a metallic clink. He walked to the door and I realized that he had barely said a word.

He opened the door and looked back at all of us. “I’d like a few words in private with my son.”

I had heard these words too many times in my life not to know what they portended. Bile climbed up the back of my throat. I wanted to beg Angela and Damon to stay. But that wasn’t going to happen. The judge brooks no disobedience. Even Weber, a nineteen-year veteran of the police force, was suddenly in motion out the door. But Angela was made of sterner stuff.

“I think Richard has had enough conversation. He needs to rest,” Angela said. She folded her arms across her chest, shifted her feet as if she planned on taking root in the linoleum floor, and stared defiantly at my father.

“He can tolerate one more,” the judge said, and the level of ice in the words told me that this was a fight even Angela couldn’t win despite her reputation as the World’s Meanest Chicana. She had met her match in the World’s Toughest Man.

“Angela, please, it’ll be okay.”

At my words she deflated. She leaned down and pressed her lips against mine. Again there was that burst of chocolate and coffee and desperate longing. “I’ll be back in the morning. You get some sleep. Don’t stress.”

Angela walked to the door, then looked back at Pamela, who leaned against the wall, arms folded across her breasts, clearly intending to stay. My sister’s face held an odd mix of disapproval, pleasure, and contempt. Angela’s eyes narrowed, and I realized she had decided that while she might not be up to my father’s weight she was definitely up to Pamela’s.

“Either
everyone
or
no one
gets to hang around for the ass kicking,” Angela said.

“This is a family matter,” Pamela flared back.

My father walked to the door and pulled it open. “All of you, out.”

“Papa, I think—” Pamela began.

“Out!” It was the voice that had issued from the bench for sixteen years, and mobsters, drug dealers, and murders had quailed before it.

No wonder I didn’t have a chance.

The door closed, and we regarded each other. Two weeks ago he had come to my rescue. After days of beatings and torture I had been at the end of my strength and bravery. He had run into Grenier’s office and gathered me in his arms. I had never felt that safe before. Now I was hurt again, but there was none of the warmth and love I had seen in Virginia. Once again I’d disappointed him. A faint shivering invaded my gut, and a tightness filled my chest. This was going to be an ugly one.

“This must stop.” Papa removed the hilt from his pocket and laid it on the bed next to my uninjured leg. “
This
is your life now. This and nothing else. Accept that. Because of a fluke of genetics you are the only one who can use this weapon. Had there been a more well ordered manner of selection, I’m sure you would not have been everyone’s first choice …”

I’d lost track of his words.
But I did well in Virginia. I was clever. What could I have done differently? I didn’t break. I took it. I’m not a coward. How could I have done things better, Papa?

“The madness that infected that father is symptomatic of events occurring across the country and around the globe.”

“And because I had the sword I saved those three kids.”

“We have far bigger problems than that. It’s fallen to you to lead the defense of our world. Instead you’re hesitating and regretting and postponing instead of accepting your responsibilities. That has always been your problem, Richard. Always. This weapon”—he gestured at the hilt—“is the only defense we have against these creatures.”

“I don’t know how to save the world. I knew how to save those kids.” I was surprised to discover that the bowel-loosening terror I always felt when he berated me was gone. What I felt was anger.

We were matching stares. I grabbed the control and with a hum raised the top of the bed so I could face him more easily.

“Can you look me in the eye and seriously tell me that I should have done nothing? Just driven on down to headquarters and resigned? Let those children die?”

He didn’t even hesitate. “Yes.”

I stared at him and wondered who he was. At some point every kid secretly suspects they were adopted. In my case I figured I was a stepchild. I knew I was my mother’s child. It was written in my face, and our emotional bond, but I was so different from my older sisters and my father that I figured we couldn’t share any genes. It had been a source of grief for me because I so wanted to be his. Now I was grown, and I knew he was my father. And at this moment I didn’t want to be his son.

“You don’t get the life you wished for, Richard. You get the life you have. Now get on with it.” The words were cold, clipped, and precise. “You will resign from the force immediately.”

I couldn’t look at his face, pinched with anger and disappointment, any longer. I closed my eyes, and suddenly new faces pushed their way forward. Faces of victims as their fear turned to relief at learning of an arrest. The blank surprise and anger that crossed a perp’s face at the moment of capture. That sense of enormous satisfaction I’d felt when my testimony had resulted in a guilty verdict, and taken another animal in human skin off the street.

And the face of every criminal I had arrested held a shadow of the faces of the men who had hurt me, disrupted my life, and led me to attempt suicide. That assault had brought McGowan into my life, and with his help I had regained my strength and the will to live, and found my life’s work. I had been good at police work, very good.

“Have you anything to say?”

I opened my eyes and looked at him. “I’m going to be on leave anyway because I shot a fellow officer and because I’ve been hurt. We don’t have to deal with this right now.” He opened his mouth to continue the argument. I cut him off. “Now, I’d appreciate it if you got me a wheelchair.” I picked up the phone and started dialing.

“What nonsense is this?”

“They hired someone to kill me. I don’t really want to stay in an unsecured hospital. I’ll be safer at Lumina. The limo is big, so I won’t hurt my leg … too much.”

The expression on my father’s face was hard to interpret. “You need medical care.”

“Angela can look out for me.”

“She’s a coroner, for God’s sake. She cuts up dead people.” The words were explosive with fury.

“Yes, and I’m trying to keep from becoming one of her customers.”

E
ven at 3:00
A.M.
Bourbon Street was rocking. Music poured out of the doors of bars and dives—the sob of a saxophone, the husky voice of a blues singer, the clear blare of a Dixieland clarinet, even the rollicking rhythms of a Celtic band. The moisture-laden air reeked of booze, grease, the pungent scent of seafood, humidity, and humanity.

Neon signs blinked and flared, throwing garish multicolored light across the cheap T-shirts that hung in every store window demanding
SHUCK ME, SUCK ME, EAT ME RAW
. Signs screamed out
ALL NAKED, ALL THE TIME!!!
A big-bellied white man, his face beet red and moisture-slick with sweat, shouted at her.

“Come on in, darlin’. You could win a hundred bucks! Mud wrestlin’ contest. You’d be a natural.” Rhiana froze him with a look.

Dazed people brushed past her, clutching brightly colored plastic cups adorned with umbrellas. No doubt they contained New Orleans’s infamous Hurricanes. There was a tingling along her nerve endings, which weren’t entirely human. This was a place where the membranes between the dimensions were tissue thin. Were the branes thin because of voodoo, or had belief in magic taken root here because of the lack of separation?

They had stashed the man at the Inn on Bourbon. She reached the hotel and ran gratefully up the steps and into the air-conditioned lobby. Bellmen, all of them African American, cat-footed past her, looking like officers in an operetta with their red uniforms and gold epaulets. The staff behind the front desk were all white. Rhiana wondered if this was how New Orleans had always been, or if it was a small symptom of what was happening with the opening of the gates.

There was a pressure on her chest as if the city were breathing, focusing on her. It forced her to lean against the wall of the elevator. She stepped off the elevator and got her bearings. Down the hallway to the corner room. A room service tray piled with dirty dishes lay on the floor outside. The door was flung open after only a single knock.

The man was of medium height and whip-thin. He wore only a pair of black jeans. There was the white line of an old knife wound across his ribs; his toenails were long and yellowed. The stink of cigarette smoke hung in his clothes and hair, and he needed a shower. Doug Andresson reared back and raked her with a hot look.