The figure behind the wheel had been little more than a shadow. Hunched, distorted, somehow wrong.
To Hazard?s surprise, the ragged fingernails of superstition scratched at the inner hollows of his bones, where usually it lay buried, quiet, forgotten. But he didn?t know what had stirred his fear or why a sense of the uncanny suddenly possessed him.
As the Mercedes roared away, Hazard didn?t squeeze off a few shots at it, as a movie cop would have done. This was a peaceful residential neighborhood in which people watching reruns of Seinfeld and other people cleaning vegetables for dinner had every right not to expect to be shot dead over their TV remotes and their cutting boards by the stray rounds of a reckless detective.
[155] He ran after the car, however, because he couldn?t get a clear take on the license number. Exhaust vapors, street spray, falling rain, and the gloom of day?s end conspired to shroud the rear plate.
He persisted, anyway, glad that he regularly used a treadmill. Although the Mercedes soon pulled away from him, a couple street-lamps and a clearing crosswind revealed the plate number in pieces.
Most likely the car had been stolen. The driver would dump it. Nevertheless, having the number was better than not having it.
Giving up the chase, Hazard headed back to the front lawn at the apartment house. He hoped that he?d shot the shooter dead instead of merely wounding him.
Minutes from now, an Officer Involved Shooting team would be on the scene. Depending on the personal philosophies of team members, they would either vigorously build a defense of Hazard?s actions and strive to exonerate him without any genuine search for the truth, which was fine by him, or they would seek the tiniest of meaningless inconsistencies and screw him to a cross of bogus evidence, haul him into the court of public opinion, and encourage the media to build a fire at his feet and give him the Saint Joan treatment.
The third possibility was that the OIS team might arrive without preconceptions, might examine the facts analytically, and might come to a dispassionate conclusion based on logic and reason, which would be jake with Hazard because he?d done nothing wrong.
Of course, he?d never heard of such a thing actually occurring, and he considered it far less likely than being eyewitness to eight flying reindeer and an elf-piloted sleigh three nights hence.
If the shooter was alive, he might assert that Hazard had killed Reynerd and then tried to frame him for it. Or that he?d been in the neighborhood, collecting donations to Toys for Tots, when he?d been caught in a cross fire, giving the real shooter a chance to escape.
Whatever he claimed, cop haters and aggressively brainless citizens would believe him.
More important, the shooter would find an attorney to file suit [156] against the city, eager to feed at the public trough. A settlement would be reached, regardless of the merits of the case, and Hazard would probably be sacrificed as part of the package. Politicians were no more protective of good law-enforcement officers than they were of the young interns whom they regularly abused and sometimes killed.
The shooter posed far less of a problem dead than alive.
Hazard could have moseyed back to the scene, giving the perp a chance to bleed out another critical pint, but he ran.
The killer lay where he?d fallen, face planted in the wet grass. A snail had ascended the back of his neck.
People were at windows, looking down, expressions blank, like dead sentinels at the gates of Hell. Hazard expected to see Reynerd at one of the panes, black-and-white, too glamorous for his time.
He turned the shooter faceup. Somebody?s son, somebody?s homey, in his early twenties, with a shaved head, wearing a tiny coke spoon for an earring.
Hazard was glad to see the mouth stretched in a death rictus and the eyes full of eternity, but at the same time he was sickened by the sense of relief that flooded through him.
Standing in the storm, swallowing a hard-to-repress sludge of half-digested mamoul that burned in his throat, he used his cell phone to call the division and report the situation.
After making the call, he could have gone inside to watch from the foyer, but he waited in the downpour.
City lights reflected in every storm-glazed surface, yet when night swallowed twilight, darkness swelled in threatening coils, like a well-fed snake.
The rat-feet tap of palm-pelting rain suggested that legions of tree rodents scurried through the masses of arching fronds overhead.
Hazard saw two snails on the dead man?s face. He wanted to flick them off, but he hesitated to do so.
[157] Some onlookers at the windows would suspect him of tampering with evidence. Their sinister assumptions might charm the OIS team.
That scratching in his bones again. That sense of wrongness.
One dead upstairs, one dead here, sirens in the distance.
What the hell is going on? What the hell?
CHAPTER 23
ROWENA, MISTRESS OF THE ROSES, RECALLED Dunny Whistler?s words again, but obviously more for her consideration than for Ethan?s: ?He said you think he?s dead, and that you?re right.?
A rattle of hinges, a faint jingle of shop bells turned Ethan toward the front door. No one had entered.
The vagrant wind, having wandered out of the storm for a while, had here returned, blustering at the entrance to Forever Roses, trembling the door.
Behind the counter, the woman wondered, ?What on earth could he mean by such a bizarre statement??
?Did you ask him??
?He said it after he paid for the roses, on his way out of the shop. I didn?t have a chance to ask. Is it a joke between the two of you??
?Did he smile when he said it??
Rowena considered, shook her head. ?No.?
From the corner of his eye, Ethan glimpsed a figure that had silently appeared. Turning toward it, breath caught in his throat, he discovered that he had been tricked by his own reflection in the glass door of a cooler.
[159] In pails of water, on tiered racks, the chilled roses bloomed so gloriously that you could easily forget they were in fact already dead, and in a few days would be wilted, spotted brown, and rotting.
These coolers, where Death concealed himself in petals bright, reminded Ethan of morgue drawers, in which the deceased lay much as they had looked in life, and in whom Death dwelt but did not yet manifest himself in all the gaudy details of corruption.
Although Rowena was personable and lovely, although this realm of roses ought to have been pleasant, Ethan grew anxious to leave. ?Did my my friend have any other message for me??
?No. That was all of it, I think.?
?Thank you, Rowena. You?ve been helpful.?
?Have I really?? she asked, looking at him strangely, perhaps as puzzled by this odd encounter as by her conversation with Dunny Whistler.
?Yes,? he assured her. ?Yes, you have.?
Wind rattled the door again as Ethan put his hand upon the knob, and behind him Rowena said, ?One more thing.?
When he turned to her, although they were now almost forty feet apart, he saw that his questioning had left her more pensive than she had been when he?d first approached her.
?As your friend was leaving,? she said, ?he stopped in the open doorway, on the threshold there, and said to me, ?God bless you and your roses.? ?
Perhaps this had been a peculiar thing for a man like Dunny to have said, but nothing in those six words seemed to explain why the memory of them clouded Rowena?s face with uneasiness.
She said, ?Just as he finished speaking, the lights pulsed and dimmed, went off-but then came on again. I didn?t think anything about it at the time, not with the storm, but now it somehow seems significant. I don?t know why.?
Years of experience with interrogations told Ethan that Rowena had not finished, and that his patient silence would draw her out more surely and more quickly than anything he could say.
[160] ?When the lights dimmed and went off, your friend laughed. Just a little laugh, not long, not loud. He glanced at the ceiling as the lights flickered, and he laughed, and then he left.?
Ethan waited.
Rowena appeared to be surprised that she had said this much about such a small moment, but then she added, ?There was something terrible about that laugh.?
The beautiful dead roses behind walls of glass.
A beast of wind snuffling at the door.
Rain gnashing at the windows.
Ethan said, ?Terrible??
?I don?t have the words to explain it. No humor in that laugh, but some terrible quality.?
Self-conscious, she brushed at the spotless countertop with one hand, as if she saw dust, debris, a stain.
Clearly, she had said all that she wished to say, or could.
?God bless you and your roses,? Ethan told her, as though he were countering a curse.
He didn?t know what he would have done had the lights flickered, but they burned steadily.
Rowena smiled uncertainly.
Turning to the door again, Ethan encountered his reflection and closed his eyes, perhaps to guard against the sight of an impossible phantom figure sharing the glass with him. He opened the door, then opened his eyes.
In a growl of wind and a jingle of overhead bells, he stepped out of the shop into the cold teeth of the December night, and drew the door shut behind him.
He waited in the entry alcove, between the display windows, as a young couple in raincoats and hoods passed on the sidewalk, led by a golden retriever on a leash.
Relishing the rain and wind, the soaked retriever pranced on webbed paws, snout lifted to savor mysterious scents upon the chilly [161] air. Before it fully passed, it looked up, and its eyes were as wise as they were liquid and dark.