Third Degree Part 38

s.h.i.+elds's jaw was working so hard it looked as if he were trying to grind his teeth away. "You've got all the answers, don't you? Or so my wife seems to think."

"I don't have any answers!" Danny snapped, tired of s.h.i.+elds's paranoia. "I'm just trying to get by, same as the next man. All I'm saying is, it's living that takes courage. In my experience, the hero who charges the machine-gun nest is sometimes the guy who didn't have anything to go home to. To me, the real hero is the guy who goes home to face whatever life hands him, no matter how tough it might be."

"That's easy for you to say. You're a lucky son of a b.i.t.c.h. And life handed you my wife."

Danny put the Bell into a hover above the river. Far below, through sheets of rain, twinkling headlights moved steadily between Louisiana and Mississippi. "I've caught the short end a few times. You've been dealt a tough hand, I'll grant you. But I've seen guys get a lot worse, with no time to set things right or even say good-bye to the people they loved. In muddy holes, on piles of sand, burned alive in a f.u.c.king Humvee. It's like you said back at the house. It doesn't make any sense. You want an answer, Warren? You've got two kids who love you. Two healthy kids who need everything you can give them, and who'll give you everything they have in return. That means more than you know. Take it from me."

s.h.i.+elds lowered the gun back to Danny's waist. "I killed a cop tonight," he said in a guilt-ridden voice.

"Well, I'd say he asked for it. He was a mean b.a.s.t.a.r.d who would have caught it one way or another down the road."

"They'd still jail me for it. Or execute me." s.h.i.+elds began to laugh strangely. "If only I could live all the years it would take them to execute me after sentencing me to death! I'd take that deal, all right."

Danny wondered if he had any chance of getting back to the ground alive. As they hovered in the dark, he noticed that several cars had stopped along the northern span of the bridge. Then he saw red lights flas.h.i.+ng at the Mississippi end.

"Whose baby is Laurel carrying?" Warren asked with sudden intensity.

Danny turned to him. In the cramped c.o.c.kpit, their faces were as close as lovers'. "I don't know."

"Christ! Can't anybody just tell me the truth?"

"I truly don't know. But it doesn't matter anyway."

s.h.i.+elds closed his eyes. "Do you really think she's dead?"

For the first time, Danny sensed as opportunity to save himself. But despite s.h.i.+elds's closed eyes, the gun still pressed into his left hip. If they had been flying without the doors-as Danny sometimes did-or if s.h.i.+elds had neglected to fasten his harness, a high-G maneuver might have set the stage for Danny to dump his hijacker out of the chopper. But that was useless speculation.

Danny looked back at the flas.h.i.+ng red lights. They were static now, at the center of the bridge. "I don't know. All I do know is, Laurel was right. If you really love her, it doesn't matter who the father is."

s.h.i.+elds's eyes popped open. "How can you say that?"

Danny shrugged. "Age, maybe? You'll get there eventually."

"No. I won't."

It was so easy to forget the man was dying. Danny wondered if s.h.i.+elds forgot it himself sometimes. For the first second or two after he woke up in the mornings, maybe. Danny had a paraplegic friend who'd experienced that. He said there was nothing worse than the crus.h.i.+ng weight of remembering that he was paralyzed and couldn't get out of bed. "I think love means giving up something," Danny said. "Maybe the thing that means the most to you. Pride, maybe? That's what she was talking about. That's what they want us to do, you know? Only then do they truly believe you love them."

Some of the anger had drained out of s.h.i.+elds's eyes. "You really love her, don't you?"

Danny didn't answer. He'd already confessed once, and he saw no reason to do it again when repet.i.tion might buy him a bullet.

s.h.i.+elds raised the gun to Danny's temple again. "Say it, Major."

"I love her," Danny admitted, suddenly aware that all his world-weary talk about death was bulls.h.i.+t. He'd found a woman he wanted to spend every day of his life with, and he had two kids of his own who needed him desperately-maybe even three. The thought that those children might come in harm's way without their father there to protect them-that scared the h.e.l.l out of him. It also gave him the resolve he needed to kill Warren s.h.i.+elds if he could.

"You want to kill me, don't you?" s.h.i.+elds said.

Danny shook his head, but his heart wasn't in it.

Warren leaned against the left-side door on his side and lazily aimed the gun at Danny's belly. "I wanted to love her," he said, looking puzzled. "I just...I guess I knew her too well."

You didn't know her at all.

Warren raised the gun until its muzzle touched Danny's cheek. "If you lived through this night, what would you do?"

"Best I could."

"Would you take care of them?"

"Them?"

"Laurel. My kids."

Sensing a route to life, Danny nodded.

A quarter mile behind and below the doctor, more red lights spun and flashed on the bridge.

"It's not fair," s.h.i.+elds muttered.

"It never is," Danny said, amazed that the man could have practiced medicine for years and not learned this lesson. Until his own diagnosis, s.h.i.+elds had actually believed himself immune to the vagaries of fate. Danny knew a lot of pilots like that. "The house always wins, Doc. It's just a question of when. The way I see it, you're alive now. Today. Let tomorrow take care of itself. Your family needs you. Let's take this machine back to Athens Point and find out about your wife."

"They've sent up another chopper!" s.h.i.+elds said, pointing with his arm across Danny's chest.

Danny turned, scanning the night sky for lights. There was only one other chopper in the county, a JetRanger that belonged to a private businessman. Danny didn't think they could find a pilot to fly it in this weather, but this was an extraordinary emergency. As he searched the sky, the Bell rose unexpectedly-maybe an updraft off the bluff, he thought. Then he turned to ask s.h.i.+elds what the h.e.l.l he was talking about and saw that he was alone in the helicopter.

Danny hung suspended in the darkness above the river, as alone and alive as he'd ever been. s.h.i.+elds was probably still alive, too, tumbling down through s.p.a.ce. The nickel-plated pistol lay on the empty seat, unnecessary now.

He's. .h.i.t by now, Danny thought, looking at the altimeter. They were high enough that s.h.i.+elds would have reached terminal velocity prior to impact. Danny had heard grisly stories from a Vietnam-era CIA pilot, comparative descriptions of what happened when a prisoner was thrown from a chopper and landed in water as opposed to smacking dirt or concrete, or was ripped to shreds in treetops, strung through the canopy like red and pink ribbons. s.h.i.+elds was dead, no doubt about it.

Danny pushed down the collective and dropped toward the river, searching for the body. The two bridges threw off ambient light, but not enough to help him sight s.h.i.+elds. He didn't really want to see the corpse, but Laurel was certain to ask, not to mention the sheriff. In that moment Danny realized that he believed Laurel was still alive, in spite of her wounds and unconsciousness.

He started to switch on the searchlight, but then he noticed people lining the rail of the bridge above him. There was no way anybody had seen s.h.i.+elds leap from the chopper, but if Danny started searching the water with a light, it wouldn't be hard to figure out what had happened. G.o.d, how Laurel would suffer if that story got out. Her kids, too. Grant s.h.i.+elds would go through life dreading questions about his father. What happened to your real dad? Uh, he died. How? Killed himself. Wow, dude, I'm sorry. Danny didn't want the boy to suffer through that conversation again and again. And with a little luck...he might not have to.

Danny executed a quick pedal turn, then swept upriver, jinking from side to side like a pilot under duress, but steadily cheating toward the Louisiana bank. The inside of a river bend is the shallow side, since it doesn't bear the full pressure of the current trying to cut its way into the land. Danny headed into a patch of darkness along the inner sh.o.r.e, not far from a seafood restaurant, a place where he knew there was a sandbar. When he saw the pale line where the water met the sand, he picked up the s.h.i.+ny automatic and fired two shots through the winds.h.i.+eld.

Then he rolled back the throttle, shut off the fuel, and pulled his second autorotation of the night.

He wouldn't have done it if the chopper wasn't insured-Lusahatcha County couldn't afford to replace an aircraft-but it was. Had there been no chance of witnesses, he might have done things differently-jettisoned the doors, for one thing, SOP for ditching-but with towns on both sides of the river and the levee close, someone might well witness the "crash." And the aircraft might be recovered. He needed all the witness statements and physical evidence to bear out a scenario in which two men had fought until the end. That would be the story for the sheriff, anyway. Laurel's children could be told something more palatable, at least until they were old enough to understand.

As the Bell fell toward the shallows, Danny took his feet off the pedals and let the s.h.i.+p spin beneath her rotors, as she might if her pilot had been ripped away from the controls. After four or five rotations, he felt like puking, but he steadied the craft just in time to flare before impact. As the dark water rushed up to meet him, he made sure he was less than twenty feet from sh.o.r.e, then dropped the Bell into the river.

Helicopters always roll when they fall into water. The rule is to not fight the roll but a.s.sist it, but Danny never got the chance. When the first rotor hit the water, the s.h.i.+p was slammed onto its side as though by the hand of G.o.d. River water poured through the smashed Plexiglas, and the Bell began to sink. Danny knew he should have taken a big breath before impact, but he hadn't thought of it. Now he fought to escape his harness with barely enough air to keep his brain alight. The ma.s.sive power of the Mississippi carried the chopper downstream like a piece of driftwood. A millisecond before fear became panic, Danny's training a.s.serted itself, the belt disengaged, and he swam through the hole where the door should have been, praying he was still close enough to the bank to swim to safety after he surfaced.

He broke through to the air and into what seemed a ring of flaming islands. Pools of JP-4 floating on the water. By the light of the burning fuel he saw the sandbar. Kicking hard, he fought his way toward the grainy s.h.i.+ngle, then crawled high enough on the sand to be safe if anything exploded.

"Be alive," he said to Laurel. "Just be alive."

Fifteen minutes later, Danny was led to the backseat of Sheriff Ellis's cruiser and given a blanket and a hot cup of coffee. He stank of kerosene. He was lucky that he hadn't caught fire during his swim to sh.o.r.e. A dozen cruisers were parked on the crushed-oystersh.e.l.l lot of the seafood restaurant, some from Lusahatcha County, some from Adams County, and others from Concordia Parish. A crowd of officers stared at the burning wreckage floating downriver. Before long, Ellis heaved his bearlike form into the front seat. He cranked his bulk around, laid his forearm on the seat, and studied Danny, his eyes unreadable.

"They told me Laurel's in surgery," Danny said.

Ellis cleared his throat. "Mrs. s.h.i.+elds grabbed her husband's arm at the instant Carl fired. To save your life, apparently. Carl's bullet hit Dr. s.h.i.+elds's gun. Mrs. s.h.i.+elds was struck by shards of gla.s.s and fragments of the gun, but also by some fragments of Carl's bullet."

Danny steeled himself for the worst. "How bad?"

"She just got into surgery. They stabilized her in the ER."

"You're not telling me anything."

"They don't know yet, d.a.m.n it. They don't know what all got hit, because the wound tracks have to be probed."

"Any head wounds?"

"No."

Thank G.o.d. "What about her stomach?"

"The verdict's still out on the baby, according to the ER doc. You rest and get your head clear. You've got a lot of questions to answer."

Danny looked downriver at the burning fuel, fading now as it slid southward toward Athens Point. The lights on the bluff across the water seemed to look down in reproach, but he didn't care.

"You should have told me about Mrs. s.h.i.+elds," Ellis said. "You and her, I mean."

"What would you have done if I had?"

"Probably sent you home."

"Exactly."

Ellis grunted. "Well, look what's happened this way."

"s.h.i.+elds's kids are alive. Laurel's alive, at least for now. It could have ended a lot worse."

"Trace Breen is dead."

"Whose fault you figure that is?"

A long and weary sigh seemed to shrink the sheriff.

"Don't say that around Ray. Not if you want to live another day."

Danny took a sip of coffee, savoring the heat as it migrated down his to his chest. "Ray has no business leading the Tactical Response Unit. He hasn't got the temperament for it."

"I agree with you there."

"I want to go to the hospital, Sheriff."

Ellis grunted again, disagreeably this time. "I'm not sure that's a good idea. You don't want the rumors starting any faster than they have to."

"I don't care about rumors."

"She might."

"St. Raphael's, Billy Ray. Come on. Back to Athens Point. Haul a.s.s. I've chauffeured you enough times to earn a ride."

Ellis took a deep breath, then blew out more air than Danny could hold in both lungs. "Don't spill that coffee."

He closed his door, started the cruiser, and swung it up over the levee. Soon they were on Louisiana 15, headed north through empty black cotton fields with Ellis's lights flas.h.i.+ng red against the rain, the kind of night run Huey Long had favored in his heyday. This was the fastest route back to Athens Point, since Highway 61, on the Mississippi side, ran southward through Woodville, thirty miles east of the city. As the cruiser roared along the deserted highway at ninety-five miles per hour, Danny went over the sequence of events prior to the a.s.sault, when Warren had caught Laurel sending her final text message: U haf 2 kil hm! Danny didn't understand why she'd risked so much to send that message, for it had seemed only to state the obvious.

"Tell me about those last few seconds in the chopper," Sheriff Ellis said, breaking Danny's reverie. "They told me you said you were fighting with s.h.i.+elds, lost control, and crashed in the water by the sandbar."

"That's right."

"And he was ejected through the winds.h.i.+eld?"

"The door," Danny amended. If s.h.i.+elds had gone out through a shattered winds.h.i.+eld, his body would show severe lacerations. "His door was knocked off or open. I don't know which."

"I heard you said he went through the winds.h.i.+eld."

Danny shook his head. "Door. But he wasn't wearing his harness, so he hit the instrument panel first. He's probably broken up pretty bad. I was too busy to see much."

Ellis drove without speaking for a while. Then he said, "Did you see him drown?"

"No. I was trying to save myself."

"Uh-huh."

"What is it?" Danny asked angrily. "Spit it out."

"Well, Jimmy Doucet's an Adams County deputy. He was parked on the bridge, and he says he saw somebody fall from the chopper before you dropped down low."

"That's bulls.h.i.+t," Danny said mildly. "He couldn't see anything from up there. It was pitch-dark and raining."

"Jimmy's got good eyes. He says he saw something big fall past your lights."

"A buzzard, maybe. I was a quarter mile north of that bridge, and two thousand feet above it."

"That's what I told him." Ellis looked back over the seat with an inscrutable expression. Not anger, and not outright suspicion either. It was almost a sly look. "Come on, Danny. You took him out, didn't you?"

"What?"

"s.h.i.+elds got cute with you up there, and you killed him."

"How the h.e.l.l would I kill him? He had the gun."

"Maybe you took it away from him."

"You'll find the body. Halfway to New Orleans maybe, but you'll find it. And you won't find any bullet holes, except in his shoulder. Auster shot him."