“Stand by, Deck.”
Shit, thought Decker. He’s calling Kittredge. If Kittredge tells him the ID’s no good, he’ll figure it out. He’ll know what I’m doing, and he’ll tell me to stand down. “Shit.” He said it aloud this time. He didn’t want to stand down; didn’t want to wait for backup. Wouldn’t stand down; wouldn’t wait.
Careening down the final curve, he saw the river glittering through the trees on his left, separated from the road by a ribbon of shoreline park. He slung the car around the traffic circle; around the big, lighted fountain with its geyser of glowing water. Then he reached out and switched off the radio, so he would not hear the order that he was about to violate.
CHAPTER 47
Tyler
SLUMPING BACK AGAINST THE streetlight, Tyler pressed two fingertips to his neck and checked his watch: 30 heartbeats in 10 seconds; 180 beats per minute. Not his max, but damn good. So why didn’t he feel better? Normally a run this hard—five fast miles, pounding up Cherokee Boulevard to Kingston Pike and then back along the riverfront—would clear his mind completely, put him into a zenlike state of blissful exhaustion. Tonight, though, all he had was the exhaustion, not the zenlike bliss. Zenlike bliss? What the hell was that? He couldn’t even remember it, let alone feel it.
Shit, he thought, I have to do it. He’d been fighting it, resisting it for three days, even though he knew it was the right thing. He pushed off from the lamppost and found himself jogging—slogging, more like—up a side street, away from the gravel lot at the end of the boulevard where his truck was parked. Away from his truck; toward Dr. B’s house. Sweaty and sticky though he was, he couldn’t put it off any longer; he had to tell Brockton he was quitting. There was no guarantee that quitting the program would make it possible to fix what had gone wrong between him and Roxanne; what was going wrong within himself. But staying in the program—walking through the valley of the shadow of death, again and again—would almost certainly wreck things forever. “You might think it’s hypocritical of me,” Rox had written to him in her last note. “After all, as a doctor, I’ll spend decades keeping company with death. But I’ll be pushing against it—opposing it, not embracing it.”
Tyler had tried to figure out how Dr. B did it: The guy was up to his elbows in death and dismemberment, yet he had one of the sunniest dispositions Tyler had ever seen. How did he do it? How did he keep from being dragged down by the cases, by the oppressive weight of evil? Damned if I know, he thought.
The Brocktons’ house was two blocks off the boulevard, in a pocket of houses that were much smaller and less showy than the mansions along Cherokee. The house was tucked deep in the lot, surrounded by maples and hemlocks. From the curb Tyler wasn’t sure anyone was home—the front windows were dark—so he jogged down the driveway and toward the back, to check for lights in the kitchen, dining room, den, or master bedroom. Tyler had fond memories of the master bedroom—of the seven Edenic days and nights he and Roxanne had spent there, ostensibly keeping an eye on the place, but in reality having eyes only for one another. Lotta water under the bridge since then, he thought—most of it muddy and malevolent, or so it seemed at the moment.
Parked halfway down the darkened driveway was an old Corolla; was that what Dr. B had ended up buying for Jeff, after Tyler refused to sell the truck? Tyler stopped and peered through the driver’s window. A five-speed; good, he thought.
Now that he’d stopped moving again, his legs turned leaden, and a sharp pain began gnawing at the meniscus cartilage on the inside of his left knee. He thought about turning tail, waiting until tomorrow, catching Dr. B in his office first thing. But the prospect of leaving things hanging for another night—another sleepless night—was unbearable, so he turned toward the house again, limping past the garage and up the stairs to the backyard and the patio off the kitchen. Pitiful, he thought. Not just the limp, but the whole sorry mess he’d made of things, first with Roxanne and now with Dr. B.
Golden light poured through the windows of the kitchen and back door, pooling on the flagstones of the patio, and Tyler suddenly felt himself drowning in that pool of light and warmth, drowning with longing and loneliness. A figure—Jeff?—emerged from the stairwell and turned toward the kitchen. He listened for voices, but the sounds inside the house were drowned by the noise of the heat pump, its compressor whooshing in the shrubbery beside him.
A picnic table flanked the near side of the patio, and Tyler sat on one of the benches to compose his thoughts, compose his verbal resignation. He considered and rejected half a dozen different opening lines.
Quit stalling, he berated himself. Just knock, and get it over with.
CHAPTER 48