Then he was awake, looking up at Madeleine.
“It’s Jack,” she was saying. “Jack Hardwick from BCI. Can you talk to him? Or shall I tell him to come back tomorrow?”
He looked past her at the figure in the doorway, saw the gray crew cut, the ruddy face, the ice-blue malamute eyes.
“Now is good.” Something about the need to make sense with Hardwick, to focus, began to clear his thought process.
She nodded, stepped aside, as Hardwick came to the bed. “I’m going downstairs for some horrible coffee,” she said. “I’ll be back in a little while.”
“You know,” Hardwick rasped after she left the room, raising a bandaged hand, “one of those fucking bullets went right through you and hit me.”
Gurney looked at the hand, didn’t see much damage. He remembered how Marian Eliot had referred to Hardwick: a smart rhinoceros. He started to laugh. Apparently the Dilaudid drip had been reduced enough that the laugh hurt. “You have any news that I might care about?”
“You’re cold, Gurney, very cold.” Hardwick shook his head in mock distress. “You aware that you broke Giotto Skard’s back?”
“When I pushed him down the stairs?”
“You didn’t push him down the stairs. You rode him down the stairs like he was a fucking sled. Result being that he ended up in that paraplegic wheelchair you’d been threatening him with. And I guess then he started thinking about that other little unpleasantness you mentioned-the possibility of his fellow inmates taking the occasional piss in his face. So, bottom line, cut to the chase, he made a deal with the DA for life without parole with guaranteed medical separation from the general prison population.”
“What kind of deal?”
“He gave us the addresses of Karnala’s special customers. The ones who liked to go all the way.”
“And?”
“And some of the girls we found at those addresses were… still alive.”
“That was the deal?”
“Plus, he had to turn in the rest of the organization. Immediately.”
“He turned in his other two sons?”
“Without a second thought. Giotto Skard is not a sentimental man.”
Gurney smiled at the understatement.
Hardwick went on. “But I got a question for you. Given how… practical… he is about his business affairs, and how crazy Leonardo was, why didn’t Giotto do away with him the first time he heard about those peculiar little beheading requests that Leonardo was inserting into Karnala’s customer transactions?”
“Easy. Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”
“The goose being Leonardo, aka Dr. Scott Ashton?”
“Ashton was big in his field… drawing card at Mapleshade. Kill him, the school might close… cut off a ready supply of sick young women.” Gurney’s eyes drifted shut momentarily. “Not something… not something Giotto would want to happen.”
“Then why kill him at the end?”
“All unraveling… going up in smoke, you might say. No more… golden eggs.”
“You okay, hotshot? You sound a little fuzzy.”
“Never better. Without the golden eggs… the crazy goose… becomes a liability. Risk-reward thing. In the chapel Giotto finally saw Leonardo as all risk, no reward. Scale tipped… Greater benefit in killing him than keeping him alive.”
Hardwick emitted a thoughtful grunt. “A very practical madman.”
“Yes.” After a long silence, Gurney asked, “Giotto turn in anyone else?”
“Saul Steck. We went in with some NYPD boys, found him in that Manhattan brownstone. Unfortunately, he shot himself before we could get to him. Interesting thing about Steck, by the way. Remember I told you about his stint in a psychiatric hospital after his arrest years ago on multiple rape charges? Guess who the consulting psychiatrist was in the hospital’s sex-offender rehabilitation program?”
“Ashton?”
“The very same. Guess he got to know Saul pretty well-decided he had enough potential to make an exception to the Skard family-only rule. When you think about it, the man was a damn good judge of character. Could spot a useful psychopathic scumbag a mile away.”
“You find out who Saul’s ‘daughters’ were?”
“Maybe new Mapleshade grads doing an internship? Who knows? They were gone when we got there, and I’d be damn surprised if they reappeared.”
This sounded to Gurney like some form of reassurance, but even in his gentle Dilaudid haze it didn’t entirely reassure him. The feeling created an awkward silence. Finally Gurney asked, “You find anything of interest on the premises?”
“Of interest? Oh, yeah, definitely. Lots of interesting videos. Young ladies describing their favorite activities in detail. Some sick shit. Very sick shit.”
Gurney nodded. “Anything else?”
Hardwick raised his arms in an exaggerated shrug. “Might have been. Who knows? You do your best to keep track of everything. But sometimes stuff just disappears. Never gets inventoried. Gets accidentally destroyed. You know how it is.”
Neither of them said anything for a few seconds.
Hardwick looked thoughtful, then amused. “You know, Gurney, you’re a more fucked-up guy than most people realize.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“Hell no! Take me, for example. I appear totally fucked up. But inside I’m a rock. A finely tuned, well-balanced machine.”
“If you’re well balanced…” Normally Gurney could have ended the sentence with a smart rebuttal, but the Dilaudid was getting in the way, and his voice just trailed off.
The two men held each other’s gaze for a moment longer, and then Hardwick took a step toward the door. “Well, I’ll be seeing you around, okay?”
“Sure.”
He started to leave, then turned back for a moment. “Relax, Sherlock. Everything’s cool.”
“Thanks, Jack.”
Sometime after Hardwick left, Madeleine returned to the room, carrying a small container of coffee. Wrinkling her nose at it, she laid it on a metal table in the corner.
Gurney smiled. “Not very good?”
She didn’t answer. Instead she came to the side of the bed and took both of his hands in hers and held them tightly.
She stood there next to him, just like that, holding his hands, for a long while.
It could have been a minute or an hour. He couldn’t tell.
All he was truly aware of was her steady, perceptive, loving smile-the smile that was hers alone.
It enveloped him, warmed him, delighted him like nothing else on earth.
He was amazed that anyone who saw everything so clearly, who had all the light of the world in her eyes, saw in him something worthy of such a smile.
It was a smile that could make a man believe that life was good.
Acknowledgments
When I finished my first novel, Think of a Number, I had the extraordinary good fortune to be represented by a remarkable agent, Molly Friedrich-along with her wonderful associates, Paul Cirone and Lucy Carson.
My good fortune was confirmed when the book was acquired by Crown’s Rick Horgan, a marvelous editor.
Today I continue to be blessed by the guidance and support of these honest, smart, and talented people. Their ideal combination of perceptive criticism and heartening enthusiasm made my new novel, Shut Your Eyes Tight, better in every way.
Rick, Molly, Paul, Lucy-thank you!
About the Author
After a successful career in the advertising industry, John Verdon retired with his wife, Naomi, to the rural mountains of upstate New York-an ironically tranquil environment for creating the Dave Gurney series of thrillers.
