Returning from the courthouse, Matthews tried her best not to think about Walker out there watching for her, or the surveillance team assigned to look for him-all of this focus on her-but instead to remain focused on Margaret, and someone else's needs.
Eradicating Walker from her thoughts proved a little like trying to talk oneself into falling asleep. Only the idea of rescuing
Margaret provided the necessary distraction.
It surprised her to spot Boldt's back as he entered a Seattle's Best Coffee just north of Public Safety. She'd been under the impression he'd been down with Bernie Lofgrin looking at the prelim on the underground lair. That meeting was either over, or yet to come, and she decided to go ask which, in case she could join him for it.
She paused, alone at the corner, waiting for the pedestrian light.
"You ... ruined ... my ... life." The deep male voice came from behind her, and the sound of it nearly dropped her to her knees. She saw herself stabbed and bleeding out on the street corner, traffic passing by, oblivious.
She thought of the lavaliere microphone she'd clipped to her bra that same morning, the fact that somewhere, someone had just listened to her appeal to Mahoney for Margaret's rescue. She tried to speak, to raise the alarm, but as he took her shoulders and spun her around, no words came out. She raised her arms defensively, expecting a blow, a wound. She saw the man's face, recognized it even, but it wasn't whom she'd expected, and her brain malfunctioned because of this.
It was the guy who'd stopped to "help" her outside Safeco Field. They'd brought him in for questioning.
"Mr. Hollie," she sputtered. "Take your hands off me!"
But he grabbed her wrist as she reached for her purse, and he bruised her in his grip.
My John Lennon moment, she thought, wondering if a handgun was next, marveling at the irony that her focus for the past several days had been incorrectly on Ferrell Walker.
"What did I ever do to you?"
She heard the emotion in his voice, strangely on the edge of tears, and welcomed it-self-pity was easier to work with than anger-believing she had a decent chance at salvaging the situation.
In the back of her brain a little voice reminded her that
Boldt would by now be hearing over his radio that she was "in need of backup," that he'd be coming out of that coffee shop any moment. Another part of her realized that she'd wanted to be rescued for years, that this was part of the attraction to LaMoia. And then the next thought that rattled through her brain at that moment was that she was in fact attracted to LaMoia, and this dumbfounded her. Her mouth went dry. Her head throbbed. She looked around for help. "This isn't the place," she said dryly. If she could keep him talking, if she could buy time, she might diffuse his purpose, whatever it was. The terror she felt at that moment was the culmination of all the pent-up fear associated with Walker.
"I stopped to help you, you ungrateful bitch!" The change in tone alarmed her.
"You're angry." The absolute wrong thing to say. She knew it the moment it left her lips.
"Angry? Is that what I am? It made the evening news, the morning paper. My name! I lost my job. My neighbors dumped their trash at my door." He stepped back, arms dangling limply at his side. "Angry?"
She tracked his right hand as it moved slowly into the pocket of the trench coat. Then, movement to her right. Boldt, oblivious to traffic, his weapon drawn. A car braked, narrowly avoiding hitting him.
Movement shifted into an eerie slow motion, an awkward street ballet choreographed for a mugging gone south. She knew well enough that no matter how fast one reacts, the blade or the bullet always reaches the victim unexpectedly fast. She also knew that 99 percent of mugging victims reacted defensively and afraid.
Matthews said, "You don't want to do this!" Then she lowered her right shoulder and charged into him, struggling to get her purse open at the same time.
Boldt shouted something about "Hands over your head," though it existed only ephemerally for her-a drone in the buzz behind her. The purse slipped off her shoulder, falling to the sidewalk, its contents lost. From all around her, a convergence of special assignment officers. She felt them running toward her. Heard the chaos over the handheld radios.
She leaned her weight into the center of Hollie's chest, just below his sternum, and drove into the unforgiving stone edifice of Public Safety, knocking the wind out of him. She would not be a victim. She would not succumb to the fear. She screamed with the move, part aggression, part reaction, backed off the pressure, and then slammed into his chest a second time. A bone cracked beneath her effort. Hollie groaned as he gasped and sank to the sidewalk.
She lifted her knee into his crotch as he went down-sharply, like a move in step aerobics. Boldt pulled her away and tackled her, covering her, just as two undercover officers arrived. He lay on top of her, his face filled with rage.
She witnessed Boldt's thought process as he realized she was all right and took appraisal of Hollie. He rolled off her and came to his knees.
Hollie's hand was yanked out of his coat pocket on its way to a handcuff. A piece of paper rose like a bird, fluttered, and returned to earth.
Not a gun, after all, but his eviction notice. The weapon she had feared was nothing but a piece of paper.
Boldt was walking her around to the front of the building when her cell phone rang from within her purse. He'd offered to have her join him at the lab for Lofgrin's report on the Underground, but she didn't feel up to it. She wanted her office. A cup of tea.
Her phone's caller-ID displayed: PAY PHONE #122.
"Hello?" she answered, pressing the phone to her ear.
"I wouldn't have let anything happen to you. You know that, don't you?" Her throat constricted. The voice was too breathy to identify. Purposefully difficult to identify, she thought.
She stopped abruptly and Boldt clearly sensed the dread that washed through her.
"P-a-y p-h-o-n-e ... WALKER?" she mouthed, looking in all directions at once. She mouthed the word "pay phone" again and held up her fingers: one, two, two.
Boldt grabbed for his own phone, speed-dialed a number, and turned away from Matthews so he wouldn't be overheard. "Boldt. I need the location of pay phone one twenty-two, one two-two.
I'll hold."
The breathless voice continued in her ear, "Tell your friend they don't need to worry about you. You're in good hands."
"Who is this?" she asked calmly.
"I won't let anything happen to you." The phone went dead.
She spotted a pair of pay phones down on Third.
But Boldt pointed in the opposite direction, up to the corner of Fourth Avenue. "There!" he said, still waiting for identification from dispatch.
Matthews followed his outstretched arm to where a man hung up a pay phone receiver and stepped away from the open booth.
"Oh my God," Boldt gasped, as the man's face could be seen.