“I don’t care what happens,” Morris said. “Nothing’s worth this. I’m going to tell them what I know. They’ll believe me or they won’t.”
Morris felt something cold and hard touching his temple. He shifted his eyes left and saw that Lewis was holding the barrel of his gun to the attorney general’s temple.
“You think that’ll make it easier, Lewis? Blowing my brains out? You think you’re in a mess now? Think that’ll make your problems go away?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Howard, get his gun.”
Howard reached under Morris’s coat and removed the weapon and handed it to Lewis, who tucked it into the waistband of his pants.
Howard said, “I know this has all been a terrible shock, a hell of a lot to take in. I get that. But you need to think before you do anything rash. The thing is, Morris, while all of this was done to help you, things are kind of turned around now. You have to help us continue to help you, or there won’t be a you anymore.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t cut you loose years ago.”
“You didn’t because I’ve always done my job so well. You know it and I know it. But understand what happens if you don’t play ball. Lewis here will put a bullet through your brain. And then you know what he’s going to have to do?”
Howard tilted his head in the direction of the street. It took Morris a moment to figure out what Howard was getting at.
Then he knew.
“Dear God, for Christ’s sake, no.”
Howard nodded. “Tell him, Lewis.”
“We kill you, then we have to kill Heather,” Lewis said. “Because sooner or later, she’s going to come in here looking for you.”
Howard said, “I’ve been where you are now, Morris. When this all started, when I gave Lewis the okay to take drastic action where Allison Fitch was concerned, I couldn’t believe I was doing it. I’d never taken that kind of step before. Never, believe me. All the things I may have done for you in the past, they’ve never included murder. And then…then it went horribly wrong, and I felt even sicker. But you know what? You reach a point where you realize there’s no going back. You’ve made your decisions and you have to live with them. That’s what you’re going to have to do, Morris. You’re going to have to make a decision and live with it.”
Morris placed an arm against the door, leaned his head into it. “I need a minute.”
“Of course you do.”
“Tell me about that woman,” he said to Lewis, who had taken the barrel away from his temple. “The one you killed.”
“A killer for hire,” Lewis said. “She had it coming. She’s done a lot of bad things, and the worst of all was screwing up, killing Bridget. You have to know, I was never going to let her get away with that.”
Morris felt as though he might collapse. He threw a hand onto Howard’s shoulder for support. The three men stood there that way for a while, Lewis and Howard apparently willing to wait for Morris to come around.
What choice did he have, really?
“I don’t want you to hurt Heather,” he said.
“I can’t believe you haven’t been putting it to her,” Lewis said, trying to break the mood.
“She has two kids,” Morris said. “Two little girls.”
“Yeah, well.”
Howard said some consoling words to Morris, made some of the arguments he’d already made all over again.
Finally, Lewis glanced back toward the curtain and said, “I’ll go check on them.”
Howard said, “This Vachon business, I want to know more about that. Do what you have to do to find out if Ray’s feeding us a line of shit.”
“Vachon?” Morris said.
“Long story,” Howard said. Then, to Lewis, “Once we’re sure we have nothing to worry about there, then, well, I want them dealt with as mercifully as we can.”
“Yeah, yeah. Don’t worry.”
Lewis headed for the back room.
“Howard,” Morris said, “for the love of God, you can’t just—”
“Shit!” It was Lewis. He’d pulled back the curtain, then called to Howard, “We got a problem.”
SIXTY-SEVEN
NICOLE is doing her dismounts from the uneven bars. A double salto backward tucked with full twist. A double salto backward piked. An underswing with a half turn to salto backward, tucked with a full turn.
She can’t get them right.
She keeps landing on her head.
Time after time. Her head plunges like a missile. Pounds into the mat. She feels her will snap. The pain’s tremendous. Her skull throbs.
It gets worse. An ice pick is sticking up through the mat. After her head hits the mat, her body topples over and the pick plunges into her chest.
It keeps happening over and over again. Letting go of the bar, spinning through the air, twisting and turning, but nothing is going as it should. She tells her body to spin one way and it does the opposite.
This is not happening, she tells herself. This cannot be happening.
Nicole was right. It was not happening. Although it was true that her head was injured, that she had taken a blow to the chest.
Realization was slowly returning to her. Before she had opened her eyes, things began to make sense.
Lewis had shot her.