When she hit him full body across the chest, he collapsed again under her. Both of her hands were on the gun now as she struggled to wrest it from him, twisted it back and got hold of it. She swung it around.
Hardy saw the black hole of the barrel center on his face.
A last, desperate grip, going to her wrist, bringing his other hand up, trying to slap it away, all the way around.
The gun fired and she screamed, her body arching back. ‘You’ve shot me! Oh, God, I’m shot.’
The hand holding the gun went to her shoulder, but she managed to keep hold of it. Falling forward onto Hardy to keep him from moving, she jammed the weapon forward into the flesh under his jaw.
She pulled the trigger.
Click.
Again. Click.
An anguished groan and Pat Giotti’s body, already collapsed on top of him, went limp. Hardy pushed to roll her off him. She’d been hit in the shoulder. She wasn’t going to die from it.
He struggled. Got himself up. To the telephone.
He mumbled something, tried to get out his name and address. It sounded funny, though, indistinct. He tried again.
Shooting.
Fading fast. Darkness closing in.
Hurry.
He blacked out.
40
Sarah stood before Glitsky’s desk, the door closed behind them. She was waiting for the boom to be lowered. Since the verdict on Graham, and then with the attack on Hardy and the resulting rumors and revelations about the Giottis, the Russo case continued to enthrall the public.
The feeding frenzy for the tiniest bits of news surrounding the principals had continued unabated. Over the weekend a television reporter, trying to make the connection between Craig Ising and Graham’s income, had interviewed Ising and stumbled upon the information that Sarah had been with Graham at his softball tournament on the weekend after he’d been indicted. This had made the news last night and her lieutenant had summoned her into his office first thing this morning. The last straw.
‘I don’t have any excuse, sir. I did it. I was there.’ Glitsky sat behind his desk, looking up at her. He didn’t want to hear this. Not only was it grounds for dismissal from the force, but harboring a fugitive was a felony. ‘All I can say is that I was sure Graham hadn’t committed any crime. And I didn’t harbor anyone. I had him turn himself in, didn’t I?’
‘Turn himself in? You had a man wanted for murder and you decided not to arrest him. That’s not your decision to make, Sergeant.’
‘Yes, sir, I realize that. I was wrong.’
‘The grand jury had indicted him.’
‘Yes, sir.’
She didn’t have to go on about the political circus surrounding that indictment; Glitsky knew it as well as she did. Now he opened his desk drawer, thought a minute, slammed it closed. ‘The POA’ – Police Officers Association – ‘doesn’t want you fired, of course. They’re telling me they’ll sue the department. First woman in homicide, all that crap. I hope you realize that if you were a man you’d be out of here.’
Evans stuck out her chin. ‘With all respect, sir, if I were a man, this wouldn’t be news. It would never have come up. It would have gotten buried.’
Glitsky snorted. ‘You really think that?’
‘Yes, sir. No offense. I’ve seen it happen several times.’
The lieutenant took that in. ‘If you wanted to step down on your own, you could save everybody a lot of trouble.’
‘It would make a lot of trouble for me, sir. I’ve worked hard to get here and I deserve to be here.’
Glitsky looked long and hard at the sergeant’s face. She had made a tremendous error in judgment, but she still had the spine, independence, and intelligence that made a great cop. He considered his words with care. ‘You know, Sergeant, this detail – homicide – it’s not heaven. You don’t get here and then stop.’
‘I didn’t say-’
He held up a hand. ‘You said you deserved to be here, you earned it. Well, that’s true, you did. But you don’t just earn it and that’s the end of it. You continue to deserve to be here, every day. Every single day, or you leave. That’s the gig.’
Sarah took the rebuke stoically. ‘He was found innocent, Lieutenant. He didn’t kill anybody. Nothing like this is ever going to happen to me again. Graham didn’t even get disbarred.’ She paused, considering, then added, ‘We’re going to be married.’
Glitsky opened the drawer again, looked down at the scratch he’d prepared and signed off on – the formal charges he’d planned to send to the chief. All at once he realized he wasn’t going to do that.
He pushed the drawer closed and brought his eyes up to hers. ‘I’m happy for you,’ he said.
There were days in the next few weeks, before he finally found out for sure, when Hardy wondered if it had all been worth it. He had had to know what had happened with Sal Russo, and the knowledge had nearly killed him. The gash that the second bullet had traced across his middle was a constant reminder of how close it had been. Another inch and a half and the slug would have ripped through both lungs and his heart.
He knew he still wasn’t finished with the nightmares; the last click under his jaw was burned into his psyche. He would jolt awake, as often as not drenched in sweat, and lie there in bed next to Frannie until he finally gathered the strength to rise, to limp through his darkened house. Look in on both children. Rearrange the elephants.
Sit in the chair in his living room in the dark. And still, with everything he’d suffered, he’d been lucky. The leg wound had passed cleanly through his calf muscle. His doctor assured him that he’d be able to jog his four-mile loop again within six months, although his long-jump career was probably effectively over.
Concentration, although improving, was still a problem. He would be sitting with Frannie or the kids and suddenly go blank, seeing the gun leveled at him, the perfect black little o.
He saw it now, at nearly noon on a Tuesday in the middle of October, and he jerked his head up. He was in the Solarium trying to follow an article in one of the law journals about some new ‘natural death’ hospice care facilities that were apparently operating within the law in Oregon and Montana and maybe several other states. He was making notes on arguments that might help his doctor clients here in San Francisco, although it was beginning to look as though Dean Powell was going to accept very reasonable nolo pleas – fines and light community service, which Hardy’s clients were doing anyway – for most of them.
Hardy had checked with the licensing board and already had a promise that the doctors would be allowed to continue to practice. Freeman had told him that under the circumstances, Hardy might even do better. ‘Hell,’ he’d said, ‘you could probably get a letter of apology.’
But neither Hardy nor his doctors, some of whom had recently discovered that political grandstanding had consequences in the real world, were willing to push their luck.
Hardy liked to think that the trial of Graham Russo had made the attorney general rethink his hard-line position on assisted suicide. If nothing else, Powell had come to realize that his earlier push for prosecution of these doctors was politically unpopular. And if it wasn’t going to win votes, the AG wasn’t interested in it.
Hardy was sitting up straight with his back against his chair. He told himself that the bandages around his chest were good for his posture. Any slouching was intolerable. There was a comforting and familiar buzz in the lobby behind him – associates coming and going, phones ringing. He looked out through the glass into the enclosed garden area where some pigeons were enjoying the sunshine.
Hardy was going to be all right, except that now his chest was an agony of itching from where they’d shaved him, where the last scabs were falling away. He tensed his calf and felt the familiar stab of pain. It, too, was healing, he supposed, but it wasn’t done yet. He went back to his article.