“What?”
He held the envelope toward me. “The fact that this was hand delivered. So to speak. I’m not liking that.” He looked at the KPD cruiser parked fifty yards away, as if it contained the answer to some question he was pondering. “Wait here,” he said. “I’ve got something for you.” He walked back to the cruiser, opened the driver’s door, and laid the envelope on the passenger seat. Then he reached under the driver’s seat and took out a small bundle of black fabric. He brought it to me, offering it up on both palms.
I took the bundle, surprised by its heft. “What is it?”
“Insurance,” he said.
“Feels like a lot of it.” I unwrapped the cloth—velvet, with a thick, soft nap—which was rolled around the object several times; unspooling it made me think of unwinding a burial shroud. And in a way, it turned out, I was unwrapping death, for swaddled within the soft black fabric was a handgun, its precisely machined surfaces lustrous with a thin coating of oil. I stared at it, then at Decker. “Jesus, Deck. What are you doing? I don’t want this. I’ve never had a gun in my life. I hate guns; they scare me.” I handed it back to him.
“I know,” he said, although I doubted that he knew how deep-rooted my aversion to guns was, how painfully personal: my father had shot himself in the head when I was young, and my mother and I had found him. “But Satterfield scares you, too,” he went on. “And he should. You ask me, that guy’s ten times scarier than this thing. Look how close he came to taking out your whole family—and in a really bad way.” I didn’t need Decker to remind me of that terrible night. “The good news is, he’s behind bars. Solid, well-guarded bars. But if he did manage to get out—or to send somebody else gunning for you, some dark night—wouldn’t the odds be better if you had this beside the bed? Tucked in the drawer of the nightstand?”
“I don’t know, Deck.” It was hard to think rationally; the message from Satterfield—the finger from Satterfield—felt like talons tearing into my belly.
“Look, Doc, I don’t know what he’s up to. And I don’t think he can get out of there. And I’ll go pay him a visit, if you want—discourage him, shall we say, from messing with you. But take this, for now, just in case. If not for your own sake, take it for Kathleen’s.” He hesitated, then plowed ahead, into territory I wished he’d stay the hell out of. “He thinks he’s got unfinished business with you. He started with Kathleen last time, and he’d start with her again if he got a chance. And he’d make you watch it all.”
At that moment—the moment I reached out and took possession of the gun—I wasn’t sure who I hated most: Satterfield, Decker, or myself.
I CHECKED THE TIME AS THE GARAGE DOOR CLATTERED down behind my truck in the basement of my house. I hadn’t quite made it home within the sixty-minute deadline I’d set for myself, but I’d missed it by only seven minutes. As I climbed the steps to the kitchen, I rehearsed what I would tell Kathleen about the skull fracture that had supposedly required my sudden trip to the morgue.
She met me at the top of the stairs, her face strained. “The phone has been ringing like crazy the whole time you’ve been gone. The house phone. Your cell, too—you left it here. You have a bunch of voice mails.” She handed it to me.
“Oh, hell, I’m sorry, honey,” I began. “I didn’t—”
She cut me off with a shake of the head. “I’m not fussing at you. Sounds like you’ve got plenty of other folks ready to do that.”
“What now? Who called?”
“Amanda Whiting, the UT lawyer. And a TV reporter. And the FBI.”
“Damn that Athena Demon-whatever,” I snapped. “Now she’s dragged the FBI into this veterans thing?”
“No, not the Channel Four woman from Nashville,” she said. “This is some smug, self-important guy from San Diego.”
“San Diego?” As I skipped over the general counsel’s message, my mind flashed back to the intrusive San Diego reporter who had arrived at the crash site by helicopter—and later created a stir at the FBI’s press conference. His cocky, challenging words seemed to echo in my mind, and a fraction of a second later—like the delay in a public-address announcement—I heard the same words, in the same voice, coming from the cell phone at my ear: “Mike Malloy, Fox Five News.” As the message continued to play, I felt the blood rising to my face . . . and then I felt it draining.
“Jesus Christ,” I whispered.