Prior Bad Acts

62

“I DON’T THINK I can stand up,” Carey said. “I’m tied to some kind of weight.”

Dempsey huffed his impatience, snatched at the gold chenille throw that covered her feet, and tossed the end farther up her legs. He kept the gun in his right hand, and with his left he pulled a hunting knife with a wide, vicious-looking serrated blade from a leather sleeve on his belt. With two flicks of his wrist the cable ties were history. He holstered the knife.

“Now, get up.”

The throw crumpled around Carey as she sat up. But with the fingers of her right hand, she managed to hold on to a piece of it to cover the knife.

“What are you going to do to me?” she asked as she pushed herself up to her knees.

“You’ll have a trial. I’ll pronounce sentence and determine your punishment. Same as I did with that lawyer.”

He sounded perfectly sane as he said it. He had decided that this was his job, and he was going to do it, and that was that.

“Kenny Scott?”

“Yeah, him. He got exactly what he deserved. So will you.”

Carey had no idea what he might have done to Karl Dahl’s attorney, but she didn’t ask. She would find out soon enough, if Stan Dempsey had his way.

“You’re a cop,” she said. “You’re a good cop. You’ve worked your whole life to protect and serve. How can you do this?”

He looked at her as if he couldn’t believe she didn’t know. “Because somebody has to.”

Come on, Sam…

“But you’re breaking the law,” Carey said. “How can you do that and talk about justice?”

“I don’t see it that way,” Dempsey said, the gun still trained on her in an almost casual way.

“You’ll go to prison, Detective,” she said, hoping in vain that using his rank might jar something in his conscience.

“No, I won’t.”

Carey weighed the idea of telling him Kovac was on his way. But she didn’t think the information would change his course of action, except that he might feel compelled to kill her sooner rather than later.

“How long have you been a cop?” she asked. “Twenty years? More? None of it will mean anything if you do this. This is how you’ll be remembered, how you’ll be judged.”

His wide mouth curled in a sneer. “You don’t know anything. You sit up on the bench in your robes,” he said with disdain. “It’s just a big game with the lawyers, and you’re a referee. The victims don’t mean anything to you people.”

“That’s not true.”

“Look how you treated Marlene Haas. She was a decent woman just trying to raise a family. Do you want to know the kind of hell Karl Dahl put her through?”

“I know what he did.”

“Yet you give that son of a bitch every break you can. Maybe you can’t know what it is to be a victim until you are one. Get up.”

Carey couldn’t wait for rescue any longer. When she rose to her feet, Dempsey would make her drop the throw. Either she would have to drop the knife with it, or he would take it away from her.

“Get up,” he said again, angrier.

A rumbling sound rolled over the building. Dempsey turned his head and looked up. Quickly, Carey worked her fingertips down the handle of the knife to the blade, drawing it up under the too-long sleeve of her black shirt inch by inch. She rose as Dempsey turned back to her.

“Storm coming in,” he said, as if she would care.

He motioned her out of the room with the barrel of the gun.

Debris bit into the soles of her bare feet. Carey tried not to make a sound. It would probably make him angrier that she could complain about stepping on rocks and broken glass when Marlene Haas had been forced to endure unimaginable torture.

Stan Dempsey would have no sympathy for her. Justice, sure and swift, was what he had in mind. And Carey feared it would be a terrible brand of justice.

She would have to act soon. If she could do it as they came out of the building…

To even have a thought in her head of pushing a knife into another human being was appalling to her. She’d spent her career fighting against violence. In her entire life, she had never committed a violent act against another human being, or any other form of life, for that matter.

She didn’t know if she could do it. What she held in her hand wasn’t a piece of plastic that would do little damage. It was a boning knife as sharp as a razor. She tried to imagine what it was going to feel like to push the tip of it through someone’s skin, through muscle, into organs. The idea made her feel sick. She was trembling to her very core.

Come on, Sam…

She had no way of knowing how near or far away help might be. If Stan Dempsey put her in a vehicle and started driving…

Carey had prosecuted and presided over enough cases of rape and murder to know that once a woman got into a car with a man bent on violence, she as good as sentenced herself to death.

As they neared the doorway where she and Karl had entered the building, she could see that the brilliant sun that had blinded her when Dahl had opened the trunk hours earlier was gone. Heavy gray clouds had rolled in, their bellies sagging low overhead, giving the light an eerie cast as it struggled to penetrate them.

Another volley of thunder rumbled overhead.

Slowly, Carey began to let the knife slip down through her hand inch by cautious inch.

As they stepped out, Dempsey turned her to the left, and she gasped.

Karl Dahl had been handcuffed to the old iron railing on the stairs and hung limp from the cuffs, unconscious-or dead-his head covered in blood.

“That’s what he had coming to him,” Dempsey said. “And that’s just the start of it.”

“Oh, my God,” Carey whispered.

Dahl’s eyes were half-open, his jaw slack. He wasn’t moving. She couldn’t tell whether or not he was breathing. There was so much blood, it looked as if someone had poured a gallon of red paint over his head.

“Oh, my God.”

This was what Stan Dempsey meant by justice. Her stomach rolled and cramped, and she leaned over, heaving, nothing coming out, her body trying to reject what she had just seen.

“That’s justice!” Dempsey shouted, leaning over her. “That’s justice!”

Now or never…

Carey came up fast, the top of her head cracking hard into Dempsey’s chin. He took a half step back, straightening. Carey twisted toward him, bringing her right hand up into him with as much force as she could. The knife went into his belly so easily it shocked her.

Dempsey folded at the waist and staggered backward, pulling himself off the knife Carey still held in her hand. He looked surprised. This hadn’t been part of his plan.

He put his left hand where the knife had gone into him. Blood ran out over his fingers. In his right hand, he still held the gun, but limply, as if he had forgotten it was there.

“You killed me,” he said in accusation. “I wouldn’t have killed you.”

Carey stood there staring at him, horrified, unable to move.

Without warning, Dempsey lunged at her.

Too slow to react, Carey backpedaled, off balance, then off the landing. Stan Dempsey fell with her, came down on top of her, knocking the wind out of her. She tried to move but couldn’t.

Dempsey groaned and tried to lift himself. Carey could feel his blood, warm and wet, soaking into her shirt.

Hysterical, she scrambled backward like a crab to get out from under him. Dempsey was on his hands and knees. Trying to draw breath, tears blurring her vision, Carey rolled over, got her feet under her, and ran, adrenaline pumping through her like high-octane fuel.

She ran toward the road, feeling out of control, feeling like her body was hurtling forward faster than her mind or her legs could go. Like running down a steep hill.

A gunshot blasted behind her.

She fell as if something caught her ankles from behind and yanked her legs out from under her. She hit the ground hard, bounced twice. Gravel dug into her palms, her elbows, her chin.

She landed in a heap, like a rag doll, and lay there, still.

In the back of her mind it registered very dimly that it had started to rain.