“Fuck you, asshole,” she snarled, and then—so fast, my conscious mind didn’t even realize what was happening—he raked the end of the barrel across Miranda’s face, the gun sight tearing a ragged furrow up her cheek, over the zygomatic bone, and across her forehead.
I saw her yank away and spin toward him, her “fight” reflex fully engaged. “Miranda, no,” I shouted as Satterfield swung the gun toward her forehead. My arm, seemingly of its own will, with no conscious thought on my part, arced from behind me in a sidearm swing, impelled by terror or rage or some lizard-brain hatred deep in my DNA. I felt the femur slam into Satterfield’s temporal bone with crushing force, the shaft snapping from the stress of the impact. Satterfield’s head seemed to burst, the entire back of his skull erupting in a geyser of blood and brain matter and bone. He began toppling backward, and I heard myself shout “no!” as I lunged—dove—for his hand, in a desperate effort to grab the detonator. But I was too late, and too far away, and as he hit the floor, my hand a maddening eighteen inches from his, I saw his knuckles slam down onto the concrete, saw the fingers clench, even saw the movement of the button and a blinding flash of light.
Then the world itself seemed to explode, with a deafening roar and a force that shook my entire body. I tried reaching out for Miranda. If I could at least hold her hand as I died—and as she died, and as throngs of people above us died, burying us deep beneath the rubble, with the bones of the Arikara—my death would not be utterly devoid of grace or comfort. Pray for us now, and at the hour of our death. The room faded to black.
And then it faded to gray, and green—olive drab—and swirling figures amid the dust. “Doc? Doc. Can you hear me?” I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them, struggling to focus on the figure kneeling beside me. “Talk to me, Doc.”
“Deck? Is that you? Are we alive?”
“It is. We are.”
“But . . . how? The detonator—I saw his fingers push the button when he fell.”
“Didn’t matter,” Decker said. “The detonator was dead. After you called, one of our bomb techs crawled out your window, shinnied across a beam, and broke the circuit—cut the wires connecting the charges. I got the word literally five seconds before things went crazy in here.”
Suddenly I felt a rush of panic. “Miranda—my God, what about Miranda?”
“I’m over here.” Her voice was weak, but it was hers. Unmistakably, miraculously hers. “I’m okay.”
“Oh, thank God.” I pushed myself into a sitting position. Miranda was by the desk, half leaning, half sitting on it, dabbing her face with a bloody paper towel. The gash from the gun sight would require stitches—possibly dozens of stitches—and would probably leave a scar, but at the moment, I had never seen a more beautiful sight than that torn and bleeding face. “Thank God.”
“Actually, I give the credit to mere mortals. Mainly you.” She smiled broadly but briefly, then the smile morphed into a flinch. “Oww,” she said. “It only hurts when I blaspheme.”
I looked down, for the first time, at the motionless form of Satterfield, his shattered skull lying in a puddle of its former contents, the head of the Arikara femur embedded deep in Satterfield’s temporal bone. “Jesus,” I said. “So much for mercy. I guess I went for justice instead. Big time. I don’t even know how I did all that damage.”
“You had a little help,” said Decker. “I was watching y’all through the blinds—good thing the slats are so crooked and busted. When it looked like he was about to shoot Miranda, I said a prayer and squeezed off a round. The Hail Mary pass of gunshots.”
I looked closer, and this time I saw the entry wound, centered in Satterfield’s forehead. The exit wound must have blown off the back of his head. “That was an amazing shot.”
“Mostly lucky,” Decker said. “Really, really lucky. But just in case you were gonna feel bad about killing him, you can take that off your worry list. I killed him. And I won’t lose one second of sleep over it.”
“I appreciate your trying to ease my mind,” I told him. “But the whack I gave him—this temporal fracture? Fatal, for sure.” The bullet and the bone, I realized, must have hit Satterfield at exactly the same instant. “Truth is, we both killed him, Deck. And maybe that’s how it should be.” He stared at me, then nodded slowly.
I looked around the bone lab now—the locus of so much of my life and work; this crossroads of the dusty dead and the miraculously alive; this little world we had created out of bones and study and the quest for justice—and I saw that it was good.
Through the broken blinds—the lifesavingly broken blinds—I saw men in uniform erecting barricades and stretching crime-scene tape to create a wide perimeter around the bone lab. From somewhere above us, a roar of excitement drifted down, and the stadium vibrated, like some vast musical instrument, tuned to the key of gladness, resonating with life.
And again I saw—and I felt—that it was good. Very, very good.
CHAPTER 37